The Year in Review 2023 by Tim Pratt

Ten for 2023 by Tim Pratt

I wasn’t on any award juries in 2023, so I’m even less of a completist than usual when it comes to SF and fantasy in 2023. (When reading purely for my own enjoyment I tend to mix a lot of crime, comics, romances, and old stuff I missed the first time around with my shiny new speculative fiction.) Looking over the list of new things I did read, though, I found I could easily pick ten excellent tales to highlight, so here they are.

My favorite book of the year was a novella: OK Psyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro. I’ve been a huge fan of DeNiro’s intricate, sometimes challenging writing for many years. This is the story of a trans woman making her way in a strange and often hostile world while attempting to reconnect with her young son. The world of the story is a sur­real one, twisted about thirty degrees away from our own baseline reality, and that weirdness enriches the sense of disloca­tion and estrangement the narrator experiences. It’s beautiful, moving, strange, and true, and made my queer little heart leap and skip beats.

The most fun I had was with The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis. This is Willis in her romantic comedy mode (as opposed to ‘‘stomp a mudhole in your heart’’ mode, as in Lincoln’s Dreams and Doomsday Book), and it’s a rollick­ing romp of a road trip, about a woman named Francie who goes to alien-abduction-enthusiast central, Roswell, New Mexico, for a friend’s wed­ding, only to find herself abducted by an alien… but not the sort of extraterrestrial Roswell is known for, and she’s kidnapped by car rather than space­ship. Francie has to figure out what the inscrutable alien wants – and also figure out what she wants from life. It provided a light and refreshing palate cleanser for my beleaguered brain.

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz is a far-future novel about colonialism, resistance, com­munity, indentured servitude, and what it means to be human – but it deals with all that stuff in the form of a multigenerational saga that features as­sorted posthumans and flying, sapient moose. The novel is full of wildly inventive ideas, as we’ve come to expect from Newitz, and the sprawling-through-time narrative serves their themes well (and make sense in story terms; you can’t terraform a planet overnight, after all).

I love stories about the multiverse, so I was excited to pick up Bridge by Lauren Beukes, a multiversal thriller about a woman named Bridget who discovers a way to swap her consciousness with other versions of herself in alternate reali­ties – and uses that power to search for a world where her recently deceased mother is still alive. Of course, there are shadowy forces that don’t want Bridget meddling with the multiverse, and the mind-swapping experience is no picnic for her alternate selves, who have their own agendas and desires. I found it gripping, and especially loved Bridget’s best friend Dom, who tended to steal all the scenes they appeared in.

Ann Leckie is one of the best SF authors to emerge in the past decade (honestly, in the 21st century), and Translation State is awesome. It’s set in the same world as her Imperial Radch books, but it’s a stand­alone, following three different characters whose paths intersect among the space stations and habitats of that future empire. My favorite character, and the enigma at the center of the book, is Reet, a human adoptee who experiences some… unusual antisocial urges, let’s say, and goes on a quest to discover his true nature. It’s a twisty delight with lots to say about nature, nurture, and the dream of a common language.

Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway is a weird delight, a science fiction noir set in a world where the wealthy can extend their lives and cure almost any illness or injury through a process that also makes them larger and stronger – the privileged can literally become quasi-immortal giants. The protagonist is a detective, of sorts, who has connections to the Titan community despite being a baseline human. When he’s called in to investigate the mysterious death of a Titan scientist, things get complicated (and dangerous) fast. The novel has an enthrall­ing narrative voice, and features a couple of the best, most inventive, and most brutal fight scenes I’ve ever read. I love Harkaway’s work, because you never know what you’re going to get from him next.

I’ve been a fan of all things Jonathan Carroll since reading ‘‘Friend’s Best Man’’ when I was 12 or 13, and his latest novel, Mr. Breakfast, is one I’ve anticipated for years: It was published in Polish way back in 2019, but didn’t appear in his native language until 2023. The novel is a totally bizarre wonder, about a man who gets a tattoo that lets him experience alternate versions of his own life. (Shades of Bridge, discussed above, but that’s an SF thriller, and this is more of a metaphysical and philosophical brain-twister.) I read this in a state of awe and surprise, because Carroll constantly subverts reader expectations, leading you down one path only to shock you with a sudden swerve. Like the best of his work, Mr. Breakfast is de­lightfully unpredictable, and full of peculiar and enthralling details. Readers who like their magic systems to operate under predictable sets of rules – the engineering-table school of fantasy – will want to run the other way. (I guess the magic in Mr. Breakfast probably does have rules – it cer­tainly has limits – but the people experiencing the magic don’t understand those rules, and can’t ever reasonably hope to, which, for me, is a lot more interesting and fun.)

Kelly Link is my favorite author of fantasy fic­tion, and any new collection from her is a treat. White Cat, Black Dog is no exception, featuring stories inspired by and playing with fairy tales (to say ‘‘based on’’ fairy tales is way too simplistic for what she’s up to here). It’s no surprise that she’s great at this kind of stuff – this is the author of the modern classic ‘‘Travels with the Snow Queen’’, after all, though it’s not reprinted here, and in fact all the stories are previously uncollected. As a fan of contemporary fantasy, I especially loved the book’s original, ‘‘Prince Hat Underground’’, her decidedly nonderivative take on ‘‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’’, and ‘‘Skinder’s Veil’’, about a grad student who stumbles into ‘‘Snow White and Rose Red’’ territory. Her science-fictional take on ‘‘Hansel and Gretel’’ is great too – the title, ‘‘The Game of Smash and Recovery’’, nods toward Cordwainer Smith, and is as gloriously un­expected as his best stories could be. Link is a national treasure, and I can’t wait until this time next year, when I’ll get to sing the praises of her soon-to-debut novel, The Book of Love.

Under the Hollywood Sign is a beautiful ret­rospective volume from Subterranean Press col­lecting the short fiction by Tom Reamy, one of my favorite writers, who died way too young in 1977. I have his groundbreaking collection San Diego Lightfoot Sue, of course, and this book repro­duces the contents of that one, and adds a couple of pieces from fanzines… plus a long, previously unseen story: ‘‘Potiphee, Petey and Me’’. That story was purchased decades ago by Harlan Ellison forthe never-yet-published Last Dangerous Visions anthology, and languished in a filing cabinet until being rescued for this book. The story is weird, poignant, ribald, horny, funny, and sad, about gender and social pressure (and slapstick, and dick jokes, and hijinks). It’s beautifully constructed, and it’s one of those science fiction stories where the reader understands things the characters don’t, which lends an element of emotional devastation to an otherwise madcap tale. It was worth the (very) long wait.

I didn’t read many new anthologies this year, but just this week (the end of December 2023, that is), I read Out There Screaming, the anthology of original Black horror edited by filmmaker Jordan Peele and veteran editor John Joseph Adams. Wow! It’s a fantastic and often wrenching array of stories by authors including Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cadwell Turnbull, and other major and emerging voices in the field. With luck, Peele’s well-deserved fame will help it sell a zillion copies and introduce a whole new crowd of readers to these voices.

That’s it for me for 2023. I hope winter treats you well, and wish you happy reading for 2024!