niallharrison.bsky.social
reader, critic, fan, he/him
911 posts
1,315 followers
828 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Interzone, Reactor.
comment in response to
post
2026! Don't know how I ended up typing 2022...
comment in response to
post
And also, if Amazon is to be believed, Adam Roberts' Frankenstein Rex is now a 2022 book :-(
comment in response to
post
Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro; What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed; Nonesuch by Francis Spufford; An Empire Above Opera by AI Jiang; and If We Cannot Go At The Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop. What's yours?
comment in response to
post
Solenoid and The Book of Disappearance also look like they have speculative elements. (Solenoid is also 800 pages, oof.)
comment in response to
post
Slacker, I've got five
comment in response to
post
It's terrific, I agree. I was originally thinking of USA authors (Schweblin is Argentinian, I think), but I take the point about the themes.
comment in response to
post
I fear most of those fall foul of the "this decade" criterion...
comment in response to
post
Sort of? ("And at that thought, thinking about it, he began to laugh.") But I feel like what I'm detecting is a sense that the ending determines how the rest of the book is read - that if the ending is happy then it must have been a happy book.
comment in response to
post
I'm trying so hard not to start an argument about the end of PR, but you're not making it easy :-p
comment in response to
post
(although there is one element I found a bit overly cutesy)
comment in response to
post
I have a review in the March Locus of A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-ran in which I deliberately did not get into the "cosy" debate, but it's an interesting test case - I think more than not it manages to convey the importance of small local victories without being dishonest about larger trends.
comment in response to
post
Strikes me that you and @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social have hit on something important by citing endings in response to a question that was not specifically about endings
comment in response to
post
I occasionally think of joy as a suspension-of-disbelief issue, and I think for me it is a harder sell (in fiction), because it's often easier to see how the situation has been rigged to ensure the joy dominates. I'm all for writers trying, though.
comment in response to
post
I mention Gwyneth Jones' Kairos as a point of comparison; way back in 2008 I wrote about that one wp.me/s13Uo-kairos
comment in response to
post
Not Manila, wiki says China
comment in response to
post
A large part of it is on foot through a city, Manila I think? I remember thinking, this is a completely ridiculous bit of writing, but I'm going with it.
comment in response to
post
(this is not a recommendation for Reamde as a whole, but that sequence has definitely stuck in my mind.)
comment in response to
post
I broadly agree, but one that unexpectedly worked for me was Stephenson's Reamde, which has a chase sequence that is the best part of 100 pages long, and yet somehow didn't feel like it at all.
comment in response to
post
In another life I am a bookstagram influencer
comment in response to
post
The man just can't write a boring sentence
comment in response to
post
Advance sympathies for your impending 3am wake-up where it's on the tip of your tongue
comment in response to
post
Surely this is what notes apps on phones are for