So, what's good to read in SF lately?

I just had the occasion to review my wish list over on Amazon.com and notice something...peculiar. Excluding non-fiction, my book list is exclusively fantasy -- no, I'm wrong. Surely Palimpsest is science fiction. So, the Overwhelming Majority of my fictional wants is fantasy.

I can't help but think that there's something wrong with this. Back before I uttered the Fateful Phrase, "I can do better than this!" and so embarked upon my career as a writer, I was pretty much reading science fiction, having gotten there via a crooked path through mystery, classics, romance, and general literature. Granted, because I'm a natural mimic, I tend to stay away from reading SF when I'm writing SF, but I'm not even buying SF anymore (another exception -- the new Bren Cameron novel hit the mailbox this week). I have here in my TBR pile:

New Amsterdam, E. Bear (fantasy)
The Last Days of the Incas, K. MacQuarrie (non-fiction)
Nine Years Among the Indians, H. Lehmann (autobiography)
A Song in Stone, W. Hunt (fantasy)
The Animal Dialogues, C. Childs (non-fiction)
Thirteenth Child, P. Wrede (fantasy)
Conspirator, CJ Cherryh (sf)
The Source of the Nile, R. Burton (non-fiction)
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru,Till, Warkentyne, Patt (non-fiction)

...and I'm currently reading Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by G. Wood (which by the way is fascinating) -- nonfiction.

I remember hitting a thick patch with SF a couple of years back, where I was reading books that people whose taste I trusted raved about -- and finding them (choose all that apply): (1) dull (2) incomprehensible (3) Inflated with a sense of their own Importance (4) lack sympathetic characters -- and I guess I found that my itch for exciting! character driven! stories! got scratched better elsewhere. But, surely, there's SF that's worth reading out there. Right?

What're you reading that's good in SF? And! Special Bonus Question: What makes it good?


edited to fix spelling

Words, we has them

Reminder to the folks who don't have LJ accounts: I love your comments, but do remember to sign your posts! It unsettles me to not know who I'm talking to. Thanks!

Still soliciting suggestions for good, new SF over here, and being amused by the interesting ideas about What Is Science Fiction and What Is Fantasy.

Not that we're helping any, I know. Writers like to mashup genres.

We do have a question down in that thread that I'm throwing open to the Group Mind, since I have embarrassingly not read either Escapement,The Difference Engine or enough Steampunk literature to have formed an opinion. The question from Lauretta at Constellation Books:

Watching this thread and thinking about this, I must ask - What do you consider steampunk? Fantasy or Science Fiction?

PS Steampunk as defined as The Difference Engine, Larklight (YA - very good), most of Jay Lake's work, etc.


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