Books of 2016

1. Neal Stephenson - Seveneves - Multitude of characters  travelling through space to escape a catastrophe on Earth, with plot spread across millennia, is what the best space operas are about.

2. Brandon Sanderson - Shadows of Self; The Emperor's Soul; The Way of Kings Part I & II;Words of Radiance - Quickly, go read Sanderson's books, he's a rare fantasy author who writes faster than you can read.

3. Amanda Downum - Dreams of Shreds and Tatters - Sometimes I pick books for their titles. Sometimes it turns out to be a great choice. 

4. William Gibson - The Peripheral - I'll borrow this spot on description from Wikipedia's review "Like many Gibson books, The Peripheral is basically a noirish murder mystery wearing a cyberpunk leather jacket (...)"

5. Ken MacLeod - Descent - There's not many science fiction books set in Scotland, forget trainspottings and such, we need more Scottish sf like this one.

6. Ian Tregillis - The Mechanical; The Rising - French and Dutch empires fighting for domination on American soil, questions about free will and adventures of Clockwork servants. 

7. Jim Butcher - The Aeronaut's Windlass - Humanity living on Spires, miles about mist shrouded ground, monsters, flying ships and air pirates.

8. Nina Allan - The Race - An eerily plausible dystopia set in UK, with genetically improved racing dogs playing a large part.

9. Andrew Greig - Fair Helen - who would have thought that a retelling of the Border Ballad Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea could be so captivating?

10. David Barnett - Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon & Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper - More Steampunk! I seem to be slightly biased towards it - these are books 2 and 3 in the series and you find in them what it says on the cover and much more.

11. Jack Vance - The World-Thinker and Other Stories - Classic American sf. Just read them.

12. China Mieville - Embassytown - Embassytown is a city on an alien planet, where alien Hosts communicate using two mouths and so the only way to speak to them is via pairs of genetically engineered identical twins. And there's much more creative fireworks from a man whose books made 'New Weird' genre popular.