Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Seven books for those who think they hate speculative fiction

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well. One of Somers's top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, as shared at the B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

This dreamy, bleakly fascinating story takes a long time to bring its sci-fi concepts to the fore, and until it does, it’s a beautifully, character-based story about young friends developing relationships and jealousies and exploring the larger world. Even after it’s revealed that they are (spolier alert!) actually clones being raised solely to “donate” organs to their genetic originals, it remains laser-focused on the three young leads as they struggle with the challenges of growing up, facing their mortality, and understanding their own feelings. If you revised the book to exclude the dystopian elements, you’d still have a gorgeous, universally affecting story about doomed relationships and a longing for the past.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue