List: british-fantasy-award-nominees

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard is a nie short scifi novella in a world where different sorts of teas can have a profound impact on how the human brain works, there is deep space that behaves entirely different from normal space, and we have sentient ships.

Wow, this book was … a lot to take in. I liked it very much. Getting thrown into an Ankh-Morporkesque city, discovering alien races, and characters, and social structures was awesome. I noted with thanks that there was very little of a conventional story arch, so that the overall direction of the story only grew really clear when reaching 50-65% of the story. The very clear-cut and very different characters were relatable and realistic, and the final twists were all the better for the fact that they were not positive.

The Scar is the second volume of Chine Miéville's Bas-Lag series, and it's as impressive as the first one. Only very loosely connected, we now explore the wider Bas-Lag world instead of New Crobuzon. Again, China Miéville excells with implicit worldbuilding, forcing the reader to think along and ahead (though there's less culture shock included than in Perdido Street Station).

Among Others worked super well for me, especially considering that there is little-to-no plot and the whole book is a well-dressed bibliography. But the protagonist's (diary author) voice is super strong and realistic, and … okay, let's be honest here: I felt very pandered to in the best way. This book is in some way a modern equivalent to Gaudy Night, intellectual+atmospheric pandering to an in-group, and I'm in the in-group, and that's all there is to it.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik was a perfect fantasy story/fairytale. It's got all the right parts (dark magic, regular magic, unimpressed heroine, ambivalent wizard, etc), but isn't terribly predictable, and forms real characters instead of shadows of well-known archetypes. By following the easy-to-like first-person narrator Agnieszka, and seeing her relate to the Dragon, her best friend Kasia, and all the others, painted a vivid and realistic picture of the world. We even get a surprising amount of moral ambivalence, considering the genre. A very good book. I may start to read Naomi Novik's fantasy series if Uprooted is any indicator for that series' quality.

Very much a Neil Gaiman book. I think both Spider and the green fedora are going to stay with me for a long time.

I liked Binti a lot more than Akata Witch, which I enjoyed very much. Binti was impressive and creative scifi, and the tha fast pace (du to the <100 pages) was refreshing and very well executed. Binti is a wonderful protagonist, and the culture and belief system sketched out in the book made me hungry for more. (Also: living ships?! Living ships!)

A really, really good end to the series. Wow.

World-building at the detriment of plot and character development is usually a prerogative of sci-fi, but this book proves that fantasy can do it, too. The world is awesome: it's a naval world, where most of the world is covered in water, which is inhabitated by very aggressive animals, and states consist of island chains. Barker's worldbuilding is actually stunning: a coherent vision of society, customs and history down to fabrics used, gender roles, food chain logistics, magic, and social mobility. All told nicely within the story with barely and info dumps.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is a hard book for me to rate. In the beginning it was lackluster, because it felt like very system-heavy Fantasy: Fantasy where the author cares more about the magic system than about the characters, or the worldbuilding, or anything else. After about a third of the book, it came close to hitting its stride, drawing me in and letting me feel with the thief-protagonist and her life and quandries. But then, towards the end, the book seemed to turn into a very heavy-handed metaphor on the dangers of artificial intelligence (and, to a lesser degree, computer science in general).

Coming-of-age stories are possibly just not for me anymore. The book-driven portal fantasy is nice enough, and the helping of "remember how bad turn-of-the-century racism is" is not bad if a bit forced, but … I just didn't care about the predictable story. If only there had been a bigger focus on the portals, or the portal writing, or the portal worlds … I can appreciate why this book is popular, but it felt more generic than it should have to me.