Looking back at 2014, you can sum it up in one word: diversity. The world of science fiction and fantasy saw diversity not only in the voices that found success, definitively turning the page on 2013’s chainmail binkinigate, but also in the means of production. While the metaphysical themes so vital to SF continued their conquest of the mainstream, it was the year when independent digital publishing changed the genre for good.
One book dominated the awards in 2014: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. This debut novel evokes a future world in which gender is unimportant, a transformation Leckie renders by exclusively referring to characters with the pronoun “she”. Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards, a rare and deserved achievement.
Another writer who caught the mood of 2014 was Kameron Hurley, with her award-winning essay We Have Always Fought. In it she argued that women have been written out of stories of conflict, and that this “conscious choice to erase half the world” is a political act.
Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what’s important.
Hurley’s The Mirror Empire is such an accomplished work of epic fantasy that, as reviewer Paul Weimar accurately noted, it seems to better represent the author’s true voice than her debut, God’s War. It sits alongside Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria at the forefront of a new wave of SF/F fiction, asking serious questions through the metaphors of fantastika. But the battle is not yet won, with a protest vote by conservative fans staged at the Hugo awards, and the World Fantasy awards overshadowed by a heated argument over the choice of HP Lovecraft as literary figurehead.
Meanwhile, the popular energy of SF/F flourished in the burgeoning marketplace of independent publishing. Hugh Howey may be the best-known indie sci-fi author, but he is far from alone. AG Riddle’s Departure, Michael Bunker’s Pennsylvania, Sarah Fine’s Marked, Edward W Robertson’s Arawn trilogy – self-published titles in sci-fi and fantasy completely dominated the Amazon bestseller lists in these genres.
Self-publishing is arguably the best route to mainstream success as well, as Andy Weir demostrated with The Martian – a self-published sensation that went on to become the mainstream SF novel of the year. The losers in this revolution seem to be debut writers published through mainstream genre imprints, who face the challenge of finding an audience without the freedom to manoeuvre in marketing and pricing enjoyed by independent authors. New writers come and go every year, but, with very few exceptions, independent authors seem to be the ones sticking around.
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks was just one of the literary novels flavoured with sci-fi in 2014. Look at Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven or Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land – when literary fiction hit the bestseller lists in 2014, it was often led by a sci-fi sensibility.
The rich interplay of sci-fi and mainstream literature produced some of the best novels of 2014. Is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy a work of science fiction or mainstream fiction? The same question can be asked of William Gibson’s The Peripheral or, my personal pick for best debut novel of 2014, Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road. Increasingly, the answer is: it doesn’t matter. Science fiction and fantasy haven’t just entered the mainstream of fiction; in a world dominated by technology and change, they are the mainstream.
