Best of 2018 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
• Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor
• Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin (3 stars)

The Dispossessed is very philosophical sci-fi. Effectively the aliens are just there to explore a large thought experiment about an anarchist utopia, just as left hand of darkness is an expose by contrast of the effect of gender differences we have created in our society.

There's a study guide at the back of the book, which I wish I'd read with each chapter, it would have given me a deeper understanding. One thing it points out is the historical context: following the dystopias popular in the mid 1900s, this novel was one of a few new utopias written in the mid 70s that attempted to be more realistic - not implausibly perfect and unattainable.

So in this novel Le Guin presents Anarres, where an anarchist society has succeeded in a very harsh environment, but is far from perfect. Rather than a government, policy, and military controlling the populace, the job of enforcing social norms and enacting any punishment for deviance from those norms is essentially left to your neighbours and colleagues. The stick they wield is removal of social approval and casting out of those who don't conform.

As well as exploring how an anarchist society could work, Le Guin continues a strong sexual equality discourse that was familiar from left hand. Shevek is shocked at the reactions he gets from people on Urras when discussing how men and women were effectively equal on Anarres:

“Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?” “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines?

Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. “But the loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine self-respect— You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?” 

And there's a fairly profound portrayal of how messed up our way of speaking about sex is:

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. 

Shevek can't comprehend why the women of Urras put up with this situation:

“It seems that everything your society does is done by men. The industry, arts, management, government, decisions. And all your life you bear your father’s name and the husband’s name. The men go to school and you don’t go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and police, and government, aren’t they? Why do you let them control everything? Why don’t you do what you like?” 

It's all very thoughtful, the subject is important, and the premise is well constructed. I can see why it won tons of awards. But honestly I just didn't enjoy reading it so I can't give it a high rating. Too much sitting around philosophizing and reflecting on events, and not enough first-person experiencing of events. There's plenty of passages that feel like reading a philosophy textbook that I just found boring:

Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.” “What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted. “But the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”

3 stars.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (5 stars)

I loved this one, originally published in 1972 it has held up well, sans some uncomfortable sexism. It won all the awards (Hugo, Nebula, and others). It's a fascinating exploration of an unknown alien object.

There's absolutely no character development. It could almost be a scientific journal article, but it's actually a really interesting discovery and exploration story. One of my favourite parts was the attention to detail about travel through the artifact, including mind games played on the explorers by low gravity in an enormous indoor space:

Too much thinking along these lines evoked yet a third image of Rama, which he was anxious to avoid at all costs. This was the viewpoint that regarded it once again as a vertical cylinder, or well—but now he was at the top, not the bottom, like a fly crawling upside down on a domed ceiling, with a fifty-kilometer drop immediately below. Every time he found this image creeping up on him, he needed all his will power not to cling to the ladder in mindless panic.

It's well written, but fairly cold and impersonal, with some rare more poetic moments like this:

Rama is a cosmic egg, being warmed by the fires of the Sun. It may hatch at any moment.” The Chairman of the committee looked at the Ambassador from Mercury in frank astonishment.

Quibbles:

• It seems really unlikely to me that aliens would have similar body geometry to humans, but the explorers don't seem to find this remarkable at all. I was waiting to find out that it's actually a human artifact created by time-travelling humans...
• Space travel is more advanced than present day, but I found the amount of extra equipment lying around unused on a spaceship that wasn't built as an exploration vessel stupidly implausible. There's crates and crates of equipment brought into Rama, spare 20kW electric motors, and even a recreational plane-bike???

And on the sexism, it was sad to see how many times "men" was written in sentences like these, but also not surprising for the 70's:

...at least for men who were trained to face the realities of space. Perhaps no one who had never left Earth, and had never seen the stars all around him, could endure these vistas. But if any men could accept them, Norton told himself with grim determination, it would be the captain and crew of the Endeavour. He looked at his chronometer.

The reviews of the sequels are terrible, so I'll probably stop at this one.

5 stars.