‘Best SFF of 2022’: the Excellent Unincludeds

Every year The Guardian asks various people to write brief ‘Best Of’ round-up posts of different genres of book. I was asked for my top five SFF novels of 2022, and you can read what I wrote here (my five, in case you can't be bothered to click that link, being: Harry Josephine Giles's Clarke-winning Deep Wheel Orcadia; RF Kuang's Babel; Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility; Paul McAuley's Beyond the Burn Line and Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath).

Some years ago the format was different: we were allowed to choose as many ‘best of’ titles as we could fit into 800 words. Now we are asked to limit ourselves to five titles. It is, of course, an artificial exercise, restricting the production of a whole year’s SF to a number countable on one hand. Nonetheless, I do enjoy compiling the list. Of course it means that no fiction by me can ever make the Guardian's best-of-SF; but I daresay it wouldn't even if somebody else were doing it. So that's no great loss.

How do I go about assembling a list like this? In any given year I read a lot of books: some books I buy, others are sent to me—by publishers, for review, because I’m a prize judge. This last process results in a large influx, actually. A year in which I judge the Kitschies, or the World Fantasy Award, or whatever, will be a year in which I necessarily read a large amount of SFF. I did do some prize-judging in 2022, although for the Orwell Prize, which rewards political fiction. For the first half of 2022 my duties on this panel rather crowded out my other reading, and though some of the books submitted to the judges were SFnal and Fantasy, most weren’t. Still, I love SF and Fantasy and always read a lot of it, classic and contemporary. I generally read the big award shortlists each year, for instance, try to keep up with what's being reviewed, and often just buy a book because I like the sound of it, or am taken by the cover art, or at random. When the commission for the Guardian Best-Of came through in October I already had a sense of what I had liked amongst all that. I then solicited other peoples’ favourite SFF titles on Facebook and elsewhere. Folk were generous with their suggestions, some of which I had read, some not. By this stage in the year my Orwell judging had finished, so I was able to devote some time to tracking down and reading many of these suggestions.

This is not an absolutely comprehensive process, of course. I did not read, and could not have read, literally every SFF title published this year. But by the time I submitted copy (in November) I’d read a pretty good spread.

Of course, there are constraints on my selection, and that’s what I’m blogging about today. Which is to say there were a number of really good SFF novels that came out in 2022 which I could not include on the Guardian list, for reasons of partiality, or conflicts of interest. Justine, the Books' editor, is scrupulous about this, and quite rightly. It’s what Private Eye mocks, year after year: ‘best books of the year’ pieces which plug books by the writer’s friends, spouses, children etc. I can see how this happens, and it needn’t be absolutely venal: when a friend publishes a book, of course you will want to read it and if you have a lot of friends in the worlds of writing and publishing then this kind of reading can occupy a lot of your time, such that when you’re asked for your opinion on the year’s best books your mind will gravitate to these titles. More, it is possible (of course!) that a friend's or spouse’s book just is genuinely good. Still, I take seriously the requirement that I do not turn the Guardian’s ‘Best SF of the Year’ piece into an exercise in mere friend-puffing.

In one sense this is quite hard: the world of SF publishing is a narrow one, and any writer is liable to bump into people in it. If I operated an absolutist policy it would become pinching. For example: I know Paul McAuley a little, though he and I are not close friends (I bought my copy of Beyond the Burn Line with my own money, and read it on my own time; it really is excellent). Or again: I appeared on a panel—virtually, in this covidious age of Zoom—with R F Kuang (it was a session in which previous deliverers of the annual Tolkien lecture at Pembroke assembled for a round-table). But I don’t know her personally, and it would be harsh indeed to Babel, a fascinating novel, to exclude it from my list on such a flimsy acquaintance. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and this is where I draw it: if I actually am friends with an author, or if I have blurbed their book, I can’t in good conscience include it on my list.

On the one hand, it's not as bad as it might be: I am not a very sociable person, and do not have a particularly wide circle of friends; nor am I especially notable or prominent in SF circles. On the other hand this policy affected some of the best books I read in 2022. You might want to argue I’m being over-scrupulous, though I do feel that the world of publishing is already plenty sclerotic with this kind of metaphorical insider-dealing, undeclared interests and influence-, friendship- and nepo-networks, and the least I can do is not add to it.

At any rate I want to use this end-of-year blogpost to mention some of 2022’s very best SF and Fantasy novels, and apologise to their authors for not including them in the Grauniad’s list. To my friends I say: there is plenty of time to shun me in 2023, break-off all contact, bad-mouth me on social media, cancel me etc, and then (assuming the paper ask me again next year) I’ll be able to recommend your new work with a clear conscience. But for now, here, in no particular order, are books that I didn’t feel, despite their excellence, I could include in my roundup. I’m choosing six, to go one-beyond the limit of five under which I previously laboured.

Will Wiles, The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot 2022)

An extraordinary Fantasy novel, by one of the UK’s best contemporary writers. It manages to provide all the satisfactions of a ‘conventional’ or genre Fantasy book whilst also estranging and engaging the mode in wonderful new ways. But Will is a friend, I read the book in MS (and blurbed it) and I couldn’t include it. Here’s an interview I hosted on my Notebook/blog with Will about the novel.

E J Swift, The Coral Bones (Unsung Stories 2022)

This is a beautiful, richly written and superbly alive novel about climate collapse, human love and human endurance, layering three stories past present and future in and around the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve met Swift several times, and whilst she and I are not friends I was lucky enough to be sent this novel in MS, and I blurbed it (you can see what I wrote on the publisher’s website). I expect to see this book widely represented in the coming awards season: it's a stunner.

James Smythe, The Ends (HarperVoyager 2022)

This is the fourth and final volume in Smythe’s Anomaly quartet, and it is extraordinary. I liked but couldn’t altogether love the first volume in this series, but as it has gone on, telling specific stories in each volume that also connect and resonate across all four, the Quartet has grown in my esteem—if it didn’t sound too pretentious, I’d call it a SFnal version of Eliot’s Four Quartets, working-through similar fascinations: memory, belonging, exploring and homecoming. And this final volume, in which the Anomaly finally reaches Earth, is the best of the lot, a marvellous cope-stone to the series. Smythe contrives a gripping story that also brings the themes of the whole into superb constellation. Way to stick the landing, James.

M D Lachlan, Celestial (Gollancz 2022)

A smartly constructed alt-historical moon adventure: in this novel’s 1977 both the Soviets and the Americans are exploring the moon, and the story starts with a mysterious hatch being discovered on the lunar surface. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and read it in one go: propulsive, ingenious, in places period-appropriate pyschedelic, a very good SF novel. But Mark Barrowcliffe (the man behind the pseudonym) is a friend, and I blurbed it. 

Lavie Tidhar, Neom (Tachyon 2022) 

‘Neom’ is in the news at the moment (obviously it’ll never happen; though it makes a brilliant setting for imaginative writing)—and this gorgeous novel, set in Tidhar’s ‘Central Station’ future, is as good as anything he has written: richly imaginative, pin-sharp, a brilliantly deft piece of worldbuilding and storytelling. Tidhar is a powerhouse of contemporary SFF, a major voice; but he’s also a friend of mine. You can see my blurb for the book in the above image, although the publisher has, wisely, replaced it with one by a more famous figure than I for later editions.

Tori Bovalino, Not Good For Maidens (Titan 2022)

The elevator pitch for this book might be: a dark YA fantasy, based on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. The book itself is exactly as rich, atmospheric, Gothily queer and wonderful as that suggests. Rossetti’s poem is one for which I have a particular fondness, which perhaps predisposed me to like this novel; but I am also (or was also: she has now passed her viva) on the supervisory team for Tori’s creative writing PhD at RHUL. She is a brilliant writer of YA, and is going to be huge.