On Monday, I heralded the Season of Lists and the return of my “Avid Reader” guest series (although this year we have an “avid viewer”, too 🙂 ) which proved very popular last year.

As noted on Monday, the brief was books read in 2016, not necessarily published this year.

Paul Weimer, book reviewer, podcaster, photographer and in his own words, “ubiquitous genre enthusiast” has kindly agreed to get the ball rolling, so here without further ado is his Top 5 from 2016 — including a few reasons why each book has not only spun his wheels but hit his reading sweet spot.

—

Paul Weimer’s Top 5 Reads Of 2016

2016 has been a rather interesting year for me, reading wise. I consumed more books by audiobooks than ever, consumed a fair amount of classics, particularly Philip K Dick. So threading through the labyrinth of books I read in 2016, I come up with this set. As it so happened, none of the books on the list were on the list of books that I had looked forward to for 2016. I love being so surprised.

Cloudbound by Fran Wilde

New Weird Fantasy

I loved Updraft (it was on my 2015 list of Top Five Reads) and I wondered just how and what was Wilde going to do with a followup, and nervous that she couldn’t live up to the original (a reason why I didn’t put it on my looking forward list for 2016). Reader, I was wrong. Cloudbound is the Empire Strikes Back to the Star Wars of Updraft, with a new main character, new ideas, and a completely different central problem: once you have the revolution complete, how do you build and rebuild society afterwards? Plus, there are amazing revelations about the world of Updraft that to breathe a word further would spoil the discovery. I think you can read Cloudbound without reading Updraft…but you really would not want to do so.

An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Portal Fantasy

Longtime readers can remember the days when Portal fantasies were all the rage in the 80’s and 90’s. Protagonists, often young, thrust into another world, dealing with magic, dangers and often a chosen destiny, but always coming back in time for lunch without so much as a skinned knee for the trouble. Meadows’ book deconstructs this old trope and updates it for a modern sensibility, giving us a protagonist whose accidental travel to another world has real life consequences to herself, to her life back on Earth, and to the world she visits. It’s a Portal Fantasy for the 21st century and it fantastically refreshes an old, often stale subgenre.

MJ-12: Inception by Mike Martinez.

SF Thriller

Known for his genre mixing Daedalus books, Martinez comes up with a Cold War espionage thriller with the addition of mutant superpowered individuals in this first in a new series. After incidents at the end of the Second World War, a government division moves to find individuals who have manifested super powers and recruit them, willing or no, into an outfit designed to be on the front lines of the Cold War with the Soviets. Of course, the Soviets have done the same thing. Interesting characters meet explorations of cultural and social mores meets excellent action beats in a novel that winningly answers the question of what would you get if you mashed up James Bond with the X-Men.

The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds

Science Fiction

How do you follow up on a classic Arthur C Clarke story? Baxter and Reynolds explore the further adventures and lifetime of Howard Falcon, who was the first human to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter in A Meeting with Medusa. In The Medusa Chronicles, Falcon’s cyborg existence continues on an epic time scale, as he watches and intervenes in the rise and fall of polities and powers in the solar system over the following centuries. The elegiac patient passing of time, as Falcon moves further and further into that strange future, isolated from all he knew,  is touching and moving. The novel’s amazing set-piece of Falcon’s deepest-ever dive into Jupiter shows off the absolute sense of wonder of a human viewpoint exploring an environment almost beyond imagination. Baxter and Reynolds bring it to life.

Infomocracy by Malka Older

Political SF

What would politics look like if contemporary nations fragmented into micro democratic states, connected by ideology and not by distance? A future world where information, through a powerful search engine company devoted to its fair dissemination is the greatest power and resource? A world where attempts to control that information and also disinformation are especially important given that the loose worldwide system of government set up is set to have another election? Malka Older’s debut novel Infomocracy shows us a world of flying cars, tiny governments, advanced computer technologies and people striving to build a better world through politics. And, oh yes, no small level of intrigue, action and adventure with a global canvas on which its all set. In the wake of political events in November, the novel is even more important and poignant than it was when I first read it last summer.

—

About Paul Weimer: 

Paul Weimer is a writer, gamer, blogger, podcaster, photographer, and ubiquitous genre enthusiast. At venues ranging from Skiffy and Fanty to SFF Audio and beyond, he can be found exploring the world of science fiction and fantasy. He can be found on his own website http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin, on twitter @princejvstin, and many other places on the internet.