When Reactor asked me to select a top ten “iconic” books of the twenty-first century so far, titles immediately started coming into my head. I realised immediately that the problem wouldn’t be coming up with ten, it would be cutting it down to ten. This is a question I felt qualified to answer. Of course I haven’t read everything published this century, but I’ve been here and I’ve been reading, and I’ve read quite a bit. Also, I always say that there is no one best, but surely ten is reasonable. Of course everything is a matter of taste, but surely I could make a personal top ten. Ten books from twenty-five years… I started making notes.
Immediately I realized I couldn’t remember exactly when things had been published. To a certain extent I know when I read things, but even that has error bars. I moved to Canada in 2002, and I bought my Kindle in 2012, and I can often remember if I read something on a trip, or during lockdown. But even if I remember when I read it, that means nothing. Right now I am reading books first published in the years 77, 350, 1485, 1839, 1896, 1972, 1979, 1985, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2015, and 2023. Something I read in 2002 might have been published in 1999. For that matter, something I read last week might have been published in 1999.
So I decided to tell Goodreads to rearrange my entire list of books from “date read” to “date published.” Then I sat down and diligently read back through the list of twenty-five years of reading. I only actually started using Goodreads properly in 2012, but I did enter quite a lot of books already on my shelves into it at that point, and added a bunch more as I looked them up there to see what year they came out (usually for columns here). So this was most of my reading. There are some things I read from the library that aren’t on the list, but if I liked them I usually bought and added them eventually. Goodreads tells me I read 1745 books published in the last quarter century, though of course not all of them are genre, and not all of them are good.
I paged backwards through eighty-eight pages of titles and authors and dates. It was unexpectedly interesting looking back chronologically at books I’d read. Some of them I’d read the moment they came out, waiting impatiently for them. Others I’d read years later, when I discovered the author and read rapaciously through their back catalogue. It was cool seeing each K.J. Parker book in the context of the year it came out, when I’d gulped them all down in no particular order over the last couple of years. The same for Sharon Shinn’s Elemental Blessings books, which I’m reading at the moment. I kept marvelling and asking, gosh, did that really come out then, in that context? With that? Before that? It was also odd seeing my own books (of course I have my own books in Goodreads) popping up in their year—Farthing in the same year as The Name of the Wind, Among Others in the same year as A Dance with Dragons and Leviathan Wakes. Looking at things chronologically gave me the same kind of fun juxtapositions that looking at things alphabetically does (Piercy, Piper, Plato, Pournelle) seeing that Too Like the Lightning came out the same month as Love & Gelato and Pagan Virtue in a Christian World.
I discovered another interesting thing as I read backwards through everything I’d read, all neatly arranged by date. Once we got back about ten years, I had a much better sense of what had lasted, what was really lastingly good and not just shiny. I said this when I stopped my 2010 revisiting of the Hugo Awards year by year back in 2000, and it’s interesting to see that I still think this was right. The closer we get to the present the less perspective we have. The final “iconic” list on Reactor is massively weighted towards recent hot books. It’ll be very interesting to see in another ten years which of those more recent things have lasted when the shiny wears off.
For instance, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union came out in 2008. It won quite a number of major awards: the Hugo, Nebula, Locus Best SF, Ignotus, Sidewise, and Xatafi, and was nominated for the BSFA, Campbell Memorial, and Seiun awards. That’s pretty close to the maximum possible awards an American science fiction novel can win. We loved it. I loved it. And it was, and is, a terrific book. But was it going to make it onto my list of best genre books of the twenty-first century? Looking back through time, I didn’t even pause to consider it. While it’s an excellent book, it hasn’t added anything to the conversation. I sometimes think of the project of science fiction as building a tower, where the new books are bricks being set upon courses of bricks that are already there. It’s easiest to explain with the simple furniture of genre. Because we’re all familiar with wormholes and ansibles even if we haven’t read the books that introduced them, new books can assume the concepts and move swiftly on to the interesting thing they want to do. And this is also true of more complex things like the ethics of time travel or cloning. A book will introduce a concept like the Singularity (Vernor Vinge, in Marooned in Realtime, 1986) and soon everyone can assume everyone knows what it is and refer to is casually. (This can sometimes be a problem for the new reader of SF who’s left scratching their head. Singularity? Worm… hole?) But something like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is a superb example of alternate history, but wasn’t doing anything new or revolutionary with the concept—which had already been around for a long time by 2008—doesn’t contribute anything to the ongoing conversation. Nobody has used Yiddish Policemen’s Union to build anything else on. It was dazzling. But that’s all it was. I haven’t mentioned it on a panel or conversation about SF or heard anyone else mention it for years.
We have the opposite problem with a book that does innovate and looks excitingly innovative when it’s new and which becomes assimilated into the genre so fast that a new reader can’t understand what’s important about it. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008) did philosophy as science fiction! It’s really hard to see how mind-blowing it felt, when this has now been so totally assimilated that I’ve done it myself. So my major criterion when selecting was “am I still talking about this?” Does this come to mind as an example? How often do I think about it? But I did add Geoff Ryman’s Air, from 2004. It’s almost impossible for a modern reader of the book to see what impressed me about it so much when it was a new book, because everyone is doing it now, so it’s old hat. “The future of the whole planet,” I called it at the time: books set in specific places that make up the majority of the world and not in anglophone countries or about anglophone visitors to those countries as exotic locations. Ryman is Canadian and white, but he had lived in Cambodia and he wrote about the future coming to an old woman in a village in Southeast Asia in a way we just hadn’t seen before. I was not even imagining the wonderful multiplicity of voices we have now, but I could see a trend beginning and I liked it. And even though the other books building on it have gone so much further that it is almost invisible now under them, it helped set the direction of the stack, helped make it possible for those books to be written and published and bought. And I’m still thinking about it.
The brief I was given for the article said best books in genre, SF, fantasy, horror, YA, including novels, short works, anything. When I finally wound Goodreads back to 2000 I had a list of outstanding things as long as my arm—longer. I had to triage, and the first thing I did was get rid of anything that wasn’t a novel. The novella has always been where some of the absolute best and most exciting work of the genre has always been, but ten is a very small number, and novels are what people read most. But since I have room here, I thought I’d share my personal top ten novellas of the first quarter of the 21st century, after managing to winnow it down by removing Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine” and Theodora Goss’ “Snow White Learns Witchcraft” on the grounds that they were novelettes. I’m posting my lists in alphabetical order, not rank order, because getting down to ten is hard enough.
What a terrific list! What a thought-provoking range of subjects and speculations. I love this list. I commend all of these to your attention. Buying the collections or anthologies where they appear just for these stories would be worth it, and also you’d have the bonus of getting to read other great things. And that Baoshu story is just so powerful and amazing, and I am so happy to have read it. People have been writing science fiction in English for a century now, and a lot of it has been translated into other languages, and people have written responses to the conversation in their own languages, and published them, but they mostly didn’t get translated back into English. The Three-Body Problem, translated by the excellent Ken Liu, is one the first responses to come back to us. Its Hugo win heralded a wave of enthusiasm from people all over the world, and much more work in translation now that publishers could believe we like it and will buy it. So this is a huge win on the “more excellent stuff to read” front. I was delighted to see a list of “in translation” works in the main post.
After cutting things down to only novels, my list was still way too long. So I decided to make it only adult novels. I don’t read all that much YA, and I didn’t have all that much on my list, but what I did have was terrific and I didn’t want to cut it. So here’s my top ten list of YA novels, 2001-2024:
After looking at that, I got rid of multiple books by one author. To stay on the list, it needed to be just one book per author, and it had to be not necessarily the best but the most genre-building book. This was really hard, because some people write multiple different phenomenal things. But with a heroic effort, I did it. Choosing just one Kim Stanley Robinson book was especially difficult. In the end I went with Forty Signs of Rain, which I don’t even like, over books of his I love, for three reasons. It was prescient, it was influential, and despite not liking it I keep mentioning it in conversation.
My list was, as you’ve probably guessed, still way too long. So I compressed series down to one book, because it felt like cheating to have fifty books on a list supposedly of ten. But then I thought, well, series are their own special thing, and deserve consideration as such. Also, if I took them off my novel list, it made more room there. The Hugo category for Best Series should be changed, in my opinion, to best completed series. (This would encourage people to finish things, and allow whole long things to be considered as long things. The problem the award was supposed to solve was the difficulty of evaluating one chunk of a whole thing—a series is as different from a novel as a novel is from a short story. But an unfinished series is still a chunk of a whole thing, and can’t really be evaluated without seeing it complete. The problem with knowing whether a series is finished or not could be easily solved by asking the author—or if the author is dead, assuming it is complete. If an author wrote more after saying it was complete, then their pants are on fire, and the extra stuff would be ineligible.) But in the end I decided to go with both finished and unfinished series, the way the Hugo does. I made a list of top ten series of the first quarter century of the third millennium:
David Mitchell’s series doesn’t have a name, so I gave it a name myself. Considered as a series it’s only peripherally genre, but individual books like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Utopia Avenue are amazing, and definitely genre, and deserve to be on any “best” list. The weakest book of the series, Cloud Atlas is on the main Reactor list, doubtless because it was made into a movie. Don’t read that first, read Thousand Autumns. The Expanse doesn’t make it because I already have the Long Price books and I like them more. I unilaterally decided that series that began in the twentieth century like Cherryh’s Foreigner, Brust’s Taltos, and Kirstein’s Steerswoman were ineligible despite being ongoing and having had incredible volumes in this century. But gosh it was hard getting down to just ten. And those ten are all really brilliant. I especially love Terra Ignota which is doing so many things, and doing them so well, and opening up such wonderful spaces of possibility.
After removing series came the point where I bit the bullet and got rid of fantasy. I did this with great reluctance. I love fantasy. I write fantasy. And there’s been some wonderful innovative fantasy recently. But science fiction is what I really care about. When it comes down to it, I always pick the Plutonian over the elf, so out the fantasy went. But if I could have made a twenty-first century fantasy list too, it would have looked like this:
(Hate to lose Piranesi, but Jonathan Strange has had time to be more influential.) And my top two runners-up here were K.J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and Kit Whitfield’s In Great Waters. These are ten (twelve, I cheated) wonderful books all doing different things within genre, and if you read them all you could say, look, twenty-first-century fantasy, isn’t it great! And even more important, isn’t it doing things different from twentieth-century fantasy? Aren’t those exciting books doing new interesting things!
I was left with a list of sixteen out of ten innovative SF novels, and cutting every one of those was anguish. But I did it—I got it down, with a lot of wincing and whining, to the list I handed in of top ten SF novels of the 21st century so far:
The last two I could hardly bear to cut were Jon Evans’ Exadelic (2023) and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire (2019) and I cut them because it feels as if it’s too soon to tell if we’re just dazzled by them or whether they’ll last. I also decided that the year 2000 was in the twentieth century, so I could legitimately cut Molly Gloss’s Wild Life, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, and Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep.
And yes, I know Perhaps the Stars is volume 4 of a series I already listed above in best series, and you definitely want to start with Too Like the Lightning, but Perhaps the Stars is just that good. I always say there isn’t one best, and the range of things is one of the things that makes SF so great, but if I had to pick one best book of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, that would be my personal choice.
And then, with a sigh of satisfaction, I told Goodreads to put my settings back to “date read” so I could do my August reading post. And the list got compiled, and the only one of my picks to make it is Three-Body Problem. Because everyone uses different criteria and reads different books. For instance, I haven’t read The Hunger Games or Gideon the Ninth. And that’s why I wanted to write this post, because one person’s choices are one person’s choices, and when you aggregate them you tend towards the popular and recent and splashy.
People sometimes jokingly tell me that I’m terrible for their “to be read” lists, and this post is no exception. But trust me, these are books and stories that will make you think and widen the horizons of the possible. It would indeed take you a little while to read all of them, but you don’t live under a rock, you’ve probably read some of them already. Maybe you’ll hate some of them and want to argue with me. But even that will be fun. We’re living in a great golden age of genre fiction where amazing writers are producing wonderful work, and it’s a privilege to even make silly lists of what I like when the works I’m putting on the lists are just so good.
A thing that science fiction can do that’s really valuable is show us other ways the world can be, other possibilities for ways to live. It can open doors that show us that there are other choices, other problems and other ways to solve them. All these books do that. Not one of them is feel-good escapism, but all of them make me feel better by giving me new ways to think, and new angles on the world we live in and the possible futures we can build starting from here.
I’ll be back with another roundup of the top ten works of the first half of the twenty-first century in 2049, and won’t it be intriguing to see which of these things will still be on it, and what wonderful unimaginable things will be added to them! But what’ll be really great is looking at the twenty-first century as a whole in 2100, not to mention the whole millennium in 3000. Imagine trying to whittle that down to ten books! What an amazing time to be alive.
