Just to keep track, here’s (most of) the fiction I read in 2015.
- Annhilation by Jeff Vandermeer
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (re-read)
- Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
- Confusion by Neal Stephenson
- Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
- Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- Gun with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (re-read)
- Hawk by Steven Brust
- Lock In by John Scalzi
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
- The Peripheral by William Gibson
- The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill (re-read)
- The Desert and the Blade by S. M. Stirling
- The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
There were some fine novels in here! The Peripheral in particular is amazing – still thinking about it months and months after first reading. I was also lucky enough to hear Gibson read a few chapters live before I started.
I read Aurora and Seveneves around the same time, and perhaps my thinking about both of them is tangled, but both struck me as authors I like taking a swing at very old SF tropes (the generation ship and the planetary disaster). And then making them more realistic (at least in part) and way more depressing.
Lock In and The Martian are both smaller novels, and both lovely examples of how well you can execute realistic, near-future science fiction with a narrow focus. Also, not depressing.
I enjoyed Hawk very much but you definitely need to have read all the seven hundred preceding Vlad Taltos books first.