Recombination

[ewx]

Recombination was fun. It's been a while since I'd been to a con.

One of the things it made clear was that I've not been fully keeping up with really good SF and fantasy for some time now. Rather than attempt to remember all things that were mentioned over the weekend, would anyone care to recommend the highlights of the last decade of SF/F writing that they think I might have missed?

(Extruded fantasy product need not be mentioned l-)

Comments

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

!!

Do explain..?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Mm, as a general point I was hoping for specific and detailed recommendations, rather than a bunch of author names...

[satan-pingu.livejournal.com]

That would have been a waste of effort if you already knew of the author/book, hence my question.
I'll give you synopses if you want, but titles:
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
Liz Williams, Darkland (general consensus is that if you like Iain M Banks, you'll like her)
Ian McDonald, River of Gods...

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Ooh, definitely Perdido Street Station.

[lnr]

I told him that when I first read it, but my copy has since moved out making it harder to borrow :-)

[satan-pingu.livejournal.com]

I can't speak authoritatively about it's content, but it's almost certainly going to be the next book I read---it sits on my shelf tormenting me.

The synopsis from amazon reads:
"Take a wonderfully crazed excursion into the demented heart of a tropical paradise - a world of cargo cults, cannibals, mad scientists, ninjas, and talking fruit bats. Our bumbling hero is Tucker Case, a hopeless geek trapped in a cool guy's body, who makes a living as a pilot for the Mary Jean Cosmetics Corporation. But when he demolishes his boss's pink plane during a drunken airborne liaison, Tuck must run for his life from Mary Jean's goons. Now there's only one employment opportunity left for him: piloting shady secret missions for an unscrupulous medical missionary and a sexy blond high priestess on the remotest of Micronesian hells. Here is a brazen, ingenious, irreverent, and wickedly funny novel from a modern master of the outrageous."

Although experience has shown that comments along the lines of "ingenious, irreverent, and wickedly funny novel from a modern master of the outrageous" are in flagrant breach of the trade descriptions act.