We live in monstrous times. Nevertheless, I sometimes find myself wanting not to escape but to symbolically confront the plagues of cruelty, craziness, and consequences (unintended or otherwise) that the last century (or the last week) has visited upon us. Neal Asher’s confrontations tend to distance and displace the monstrous, to locate it in a future far enough away to have solved most of the problems that bedevil us now. His Polity setting, like Iain M. Banks’s Culture, imagines a material utopia where scarcity is banished and the burden of rational self-governance has been offloaded onto presumably-wiser artificial intelligences. The universe beyond the Polity remains a savage environment, though, as inter-species interstellar war and the irruption of artifacts and survivors of much more ancient conflicts make clear. And even within the bubble of Polity civilization, mankind remains potentially vile. Outside that bubble, all bets are off.
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Coronavirus Edition: In November, the virus continued to affect books sales, with our bookstores surviving with limited to no foot traffic, mail orders, and curbside pick-ups.
On the hardcover list, two new releases leapfrogged to the top, with Brandon Sanderson’s
Rhythm of War (book four of The Stormlight Archive) clinching the top spot, followed by
Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline’s sequel to
Ready Player One. Our new runner-up was
The Fires of Vengeance by Evan Winter (Orbit US), book two of The Burning series. We had 38 nominated titles, up from last month’s 28.
The release of the latest book in The Stormlight Archive seems to have influenced the paperback list as well, with