Over the last few months, I've been reading some recent science fiction; recent in this case meaning published in the last five years. A few days ago, Elizabeth Bear published a newsletter post in which she talks about modern science fiction now being part of "The Rainbow Age" of SF.
At worldcon, I was arguing (in the rhetorical barcon sense, not the having a fight sense) with a friend about the Rainbow Age of Science Fiction, which I still maintain is the best descriptor of the current moment in genre. We have the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the New Wave, the Cyberpunks, the Grimdark Era… but what’s happening currently (and has been for about ten years) is a flowering of technicolor diversity such as publishing has never seen. It’s glorious, if you ask me.
Not just ethnic diversity (thought that too and wonderfully so), but diversity of experience and identity and abledness are blossoming like a wild garden at the height of June, and I love it.
I think she's got a good point here and all of the books discussed below fit comfortably into that paradigm.
Arkady Martine is an American historian whose first two novels, A Memory of Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, which make up what she calls the Teixcalaan cycle, both won the Hugo Award for best novel. They're hard books to categorize, having elements of classic space opera, first-contact SF, political intrigue, and social speculation. Long and complex, they feature a not-always-predictable plot and characters that feel like real people, despite the often strange society that they're a part of. My favourite things were the imago memory implant technology and the very well-developed and strange aliens. I found my attention flagging in the second book, which made me wonder if they could have been edited down somewhat (an issue common to quite a few books I've read in the past several years).
One book that doesn't need to be edited down is John Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society. It's short, fast paced, and very entertaining, more of a dessert than a full meal. Scalzi manages to make the idea of kaiju believable in a way that the movies based on them don't and his descriptions of startup companies and their management is dead-on. I read most of it on the long drive back from the Sault after burying my mother and it was the perfect choice for the time.
As I get older I feel less of a compunction to finish a book that I'm not enjoying and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone was one of those books. It was a popular book, which won both the Nebula and Hugo best novella awards, but it failed to engage me, and I stopped reading about a third of the way through. It is very well written and I can still remember some of the settings quite vividly but the story relied too much on far-future technology that pushed Clarke's Law to its limit.
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz is a time-travel story that jumps around between our current time (but not timeline), an alternate California in 1992, Chicago in the 1890s (also another timeline), and the far past. The time travel technology is described but never really explained and it has limitations that help to keep the plot from degenerating into a wish-fulfillment fantasy. The book deals with many social issues, mostly around women's rights and the viewpoint characters are all female. That might put off some readers used to more traditional SF, but it shouldn't; the characters are solid and believable, and the story kept me reading until the end. I enjoyed how she worked historical characters into her story. (You might consider reading her afterword first, unless you are completely averse to spoilers).
All in all, it was an interesting group of books that fit comfortably into Bear's idea of the Rainbow Age. Even the most traditional of the five, Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society, belongs there.
I'm taking a short break from novels to catch up on some best-of-the-year anthologies. After that, perhaps Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever will be next.
