Favorite fiction of my 2024
Shape rotation, cat decapitation, cracks in the Simulation: transcendence any which way
FICTION BOOKS, WHICH AS IT HAPPENS ARE ALL ALSO BOOKS ABOUT FICTION, THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS THESE DAYS OKAY
1. Mircea Cărtărescu: Solenoid (tr. Sean Cotter)
I finished this and In Search of Lost Time (after twelve years) this summer, and while I think Proust is the best novel I completed this year, I’m not entirely sure. Somewhat shorter, Solenoid is in some ways the culmination of a century of Kafkaesques, or maybe a century and a half of Dostoevskyesques. It asks if there might be a way out of the void if you’re as good at visualizing four-dimensional shapes as Alicia Boole Stott plus you can get something out of the Voynich manuscript. And the answer might even be yes, though it depends on which universe you’re in. What? Oh great, do I have to go longform? Ah, good, this (by someone who got so into Cărtărescu that he taught himself to read Romanian) does a good job, thank fuck.
2. Kelly Link: White Cat, Black Dog
Link’s still a cut above most other narrative-centric short spec fic writers, excepting Martha Wells and Cat Valente on a decent day. She doesn’t just twist things enough to get a subversion mention on TV Tropes; that’s merely the starting point. There’s pleasure in the details, whether she’s getting satirical on some but not all members of a billionaire family or doing an Iain M. Banks pastiche on AI and aliens. And endings with all combinations of happy, sad, and ambiguous are on the table.
3. Percival Everett: Assumption/Erasure
I wanted to ease in to Everett before I got around to James (that’ll happen in 2025). At first Assumption seemed too easy: I could see him chipping away at the assumptions of the American detective story for 90% of the book and questioned whether he was doing enough of that. After the ending: yes, he definitely did enough of that. I moved on to Erasure (without having seen American Fiction) under the, ahem, assumption it was a comedy, and whatever the hell it was, it wasn’t a comedy, though it was very funny.
4. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: The Most Secret Memory of Men (tr. Lara Vergnaud)
More bristling against the pigeonholes the publishing biz forces Black authors into, but this time, it’s from France! Starting with an epigraph from The Savage Detectives, it begins like it’s a straight rip-off but ahhhh it’s going to be about plagiarism. We head to Senegal and the book heads in its own direction, though Bolaño is always hovering as close as Ousmane Sembène in its mix of hello-modernity and what-is-literature-anyway. A major work that's too good to leave to the French.
5. Emily St. John Mandel: Sea of Tranquility
One of the very rare books that’s excellent science fiction and excellent literary fiction, in large part because it jettisons anything superfluous to those two goals, e.g. any originality in the plot. The combination lets Mandel deepen her analogies: she has real life, fictional life, and The Simulation to compare—that’s three pairings! Those disinterested in anthropic reasoning and Robbe-Grillet references can just enjoy a timey-wimey novel with actually good sentences. Could also be a great movie, but instead it’s gonna be a prestige TV series, so yeah, you’ll have to read it.
6. Justin Torres: Blackouts
More erasure, this time taking Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns (1941) and crossing out the boring bits, a la A Humument. This gets crossed with the story of one Juan Gay (not to be confused with sex researcher Jan Gay, and there’s a Zhenya Gay in there somewhere as well); there’s also a long debrief and an abecedary with Saint Sebastian as X. One of the rare English-language novels that’s doing something definitively new, which means it’s going to take me years to work out how good it is.
SHORT FICTION NOT BY KELLY LINK
Ai Jiang: I Am AI (Shortwave)
P.A. Cornell: Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont
Nnedi Okorafor: Stones
Naomi Kritzer: Better Living Through Algorithms
Uchechukwu Nwaka: The Rainbow Bank
Han Song: Answerless Journey (tr. Alex Woodend, in Adventures in Space)
Nicole D. Sconiers: A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree (in Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror)
Previously in books of my 2024: manga, Western comics, and not-fiction.
Solenoid has been on my tbr for awhile, 700 pages is intimidating but will probably bite the bullet on it soon. Have you read Martyr! or the Bee Sting? Those I’m hopping between and loving, favourites from the last couple years along with James.