Indeed. Not always perfect, and I’m rather bored with stories where the prevailing attitude is “girls can’t X” even if this one can, but with a sense of fun that’s too often missing from, well, fiction in general, but military fiction in particular.
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I have to preface my recommendation by saying that this doesn’t necessarily mean that I think this was the best book of the last decade or that it is the only book I can/want to recommend. The question asked for 1 and seeing what has already been discussed here, I’ve made my choice:
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. The first book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy.
Why? Because it is a fantastic mind-bending SF adventure with both wonderfully weird science (weird to me I am no mathmatician and had trouble understanding everything especially in the first book), a fascinating society and a protagonist that you just want to root for: this book ticks all my boxes. Oh, before I forget to mention it: it has an incredibly intricate and interesting plot (to quote my own goodreads review).
Normally, I could never stop at just one, so… I am making myself stop because as I thought “how about just two more” I could easily come up with ten 
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Of the handful of books I’ve read that were published in the last 10 years, I’d recommend Blue: A Memoir – Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces by John Sutherland. Reason for recommendation: I found the personal insight into the Metropolitan police really interesting. It’s also a very honest portrait of mental illness. So I was glad I read it. Plus, most of the recommendations here are sci-fi and fantasy, so this offers a bit of variety.
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This was a book aimed squarely at all the things Roger likes to read about. I love it.
The sequels are less so - jolly good in their own right, but not causing me to think “has this author been listening to all the rubbish I say about the things I enjoy in books”.
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Ninefox Gambit
Absolutely loved it.
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In another domain, there are two series of graphic novels that started coming out in the 2010s and that I’m a great fan of:
A Bride’s Story, by Kaoru Mori: The Japanese title Otoyomegatari would be more accurately translated, in this case, as Brides’ Stories. Mori shows a succession of brides in 19th century Central Asia, during the expansion of the Russian Empire; their stories are linked by the presence of Mr. Smith, an English traveller seeking ethnographic details and incidentally gathering information for British intelligence. The original story was about Amir, a 20-year-old nomad woman, and her arranged marriage to Karluk, a 12-year-old town boy. The art is astonishing, both the details of buildings and garments and such and the scenes of animals and wilderness; Mori is highly regarded for the depth of her research. After reading a couple of volumes, I looked at online reviews and was perplexed to find them all saying that the story had no conflict; that was explained to me by an anime fan friend as the readers expecting that any story about an arranged marriage having the woman reject her husband, marriage, and her society, whereas here the conflict is that Amir really likes her husband and is eager for him to consummate the marriage, which he’s not ready to do—plus an external conflict about her kin wanting to break up the marriage and hand her over to a powerful older man who beat his last wife to death. (That ought to be enough conflict for anyone!)
Stand Still Stay Silent, by Minna Sundberg: Postapocalyptic dark fantasy set in the Nordic countries. A plague has swept over the world, killing nearly everyone and turning at least many of them into malevolent supernatural creatures; two or three generations later, some enterprising survivors fund an expedition into the uninhabited areas to salvage things like books. The explorers are a bunch of misfits kind of like a bunch of D&D players (not D&D characters, who would be more robust!), and there are touches of comedy, but also lots of adventure and horror. The art again is amazing, almost like Tolkien’s watercolors, but Sundberg can do physical action and character portraits as well as landscape.
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I’ve been picking up the Carl Barks Library volumes as I’m able and they are released. I finished “The Mines of King Solomon” volume today.
Not the best of Barks’ career but fun. Problematic dated cultural depictions quite visible.
Best bits may be the silent background material featuring Helper in the Gyro Gearloose stand-alones written in order to get better postage rates for mailing out the comics.
The Black Prism was not really clicking for me, so I gave it up in favour of a pending account on my list of to read books: The Night Circus, and so far (I have read 25 pages, give or take) it is not disappointing. I will keep you posted.
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Yes I really enjoyed this!
Another thing I’m in the process of reading, a bit slowly, is Cuvier’s La regne animal, a comprehensive treatise on comparative anatomy and zoological classification, written in the early 19th century. I’ve been fascinated by the history of taxonomy since childhood, and Cuvier was the first zoologist to base his classifications on both external and internal anatomy, and the originator of the concept of a phylum (embranchement in his book). The whole thing is in slightly old-fashioned academic French, which I can get through with the aid of a dictionary—it’s actually easier than colloquial French for me. So far I’m reading his comments on methodology, but in a few more pages I’ll get into his chapter on mammals, where it will start to get more interesting.
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No mention of a Zoological Classification is complete without a nod of the greatest of them all. Taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia*, this is of course the
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
Which divides all animals into the 14 logical groupings of:
- Those belonging to the Emperor
- Embalmed ones
- Trained ones
- Suckling pigs
- Mermaids
- Fabled ones
- Stray dogs
- Those included in this classification
- Those that tremble as if they were mad
- Innumerable ones
- Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
- et cetera
- Those that have just broken the vase
- Those that from afar look like flies
*
ABSOLUTELY NOT made up by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who was making a rather pointed dig at the classification invented by the Institute of Bibliography in Brussels
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Perhaps I should reread Borges sometime. It’s a long time since I’ve read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote.”
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Me too. I had to read some of his work in high school and I wasn’t mature enough to get it, I believe.
I randomly ordered his Book of Imaginary Beings the other day.
I’ve been on a short fiction kick recently.
I’m getting back into Nightshade Books collections of Clark Ashton Smith and Wodehouse’s The Man With Two Left Feet collection.
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I’ve been thinking about short stories quite a lot recently. Partially because my time for actual reading has collapsed and partially because I’m getting a bit sick of trilogies and series - SF writers seem almost incapable of writing a single stand-alone book!
I’ve been trying to think of my favourite short story and to be honest I can’t do it. However ones that I like and which spring to mind include:
- 'The Nine Billion Names of God’ by Arthur C. Clarke - because its packs so much into so little space.
- ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ by William Gibson - because it represents the clash between the future we thought we were getting and the future we actually got. Plus I love the saying ‘Beaer Hed’ in a really bad southern American accent!
- ‘The Night of the Trolls’ by Keith Laumer - It may represent a style of writers voice that no longer exists but who doesn’t like giant tanks!
And for something completely different there are always the Golf stories of PG Wodehouse!
So the question is what is your favourite short story or short story collection?
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I’m not sure I can name one top favorite. But I very much like Fritz Leiber’s “Space-Time for Springers,” which begins
Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I.Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn’t talk. But everybody knows that I.Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided.
In a sense, it’s a Heinlein juvenile, condensed into a fraction of novel length: It has most of the key tropes. And its mastery of emotional tone is amazing. It’s both hilariously funny and heartbreaking.
Another story that evokes Heinlein juveniles, in a rather different way, is also excellent: Samuel Delaney’s “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” about the experiences of young members of a global force working for a better society.
Another story that embodies the common SF writer’s love of cats is Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” to my mind one of the best in the Instrumentality of Mankind future history.
Then there’s a very early SF story, one of the two written by Kipling, “As Easy as A.B.C.,” which puts the reader right into the mindset of an imaginary future society (perhaps the first thing I read that made me grasp emotionally that people in the future might look back in horror, not merely at the things our own society is ashamed of, but even at our ideals), and which shows Kipling’s mastery of prose style. For that matter, there are a lot of Kipling stories I love: “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” “A Church There Was at Antioch,” “Love-o’-Women,” “The Maltese Cat” (a polo match told from the viewpoint of the ponies), the very early “Lispeth.”
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Back in the day, Poul Anderson did some interesting things in short stories, where he took a close look at long established science fiction premises and suggested that they wouldn’t turn out as well as is usually supposed. The two I remember are “Journeys End,” about telepaths, and “The Man Who Came Early,” about time travel. Those were some of his most brilliant writing.
Raymond Chandler’s I’ll be Waiting from the collection The Simple Art of Murder is my favorite short story.
That’s likely my favorite collection of short pieces as well.
I like Wodehouse and Hammett a lot and Chandler seems to hit between the two of them in terms of language.
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This evening I read The Stepford Wives in one sitting and then proceeded to have a two-hour argument with my husband about the central meaning of the book. Now I need a nap…
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