This is the first of four posts looking back at 2011 in science fiction and fantasy audiobooks. I’m going to start with my year in listening, continue with a look into what I missed, and then gripe at the world with my list of the most missing audiobooks of the year – those books I wanted to listen to but for which there was no audiobook. Lastly, I’ll lay out my picks for the year’s best in science fiction and fantasy audiobooks. But first! My year in listening.

I have never read as much as I have this year. (But still, I didn’t come anywhere close to The Guilded Earlobe’s 165 audiobooks, even if you count the dozen or so print books I “really” read!) Anyway, categorized by how I “read” them, are the 68 70 audiobooks I have taken in this year, nestled between Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman – which I bought in CD audiobook format at Fry’s Electronics in Houston, TX, and listened to December 2010, if you were curious – and Stellarnet Rebel by J.L. Hilton, which is what I’ll be listening to first thing to start the New Year, as soon as I finish listening to Natania Barron’s Pilgrim of the Sky, which I hope is here in time for the holidays:

DIGITAL AUDIOBOOK FROM AUDIBLE.COM: (44)

OTHER DIGITAL AUDIOBOOK: (2)

An Occupation of Angels (2011) by Lavie Tidhar – Iambik Audio – more from Tidhar, please! Weaponized angels over Europe. Nuff said?

YA: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow – OverDrive/Sync – again (like Mira Grant's Feed) a little too YA for me, but (again, like Feed) there’s enough “there” there – I’m looking forward to For the Win when I free up some listening time

DIGITAL AUDIOBOOK PODCAST: (2)

Burn by James Patrick Kelly, read by the author – I loved Kelly’s voice for the High Gregory, and there’s a reason the “pocket novel” / novella won the Nebula Award – it’s an interesting tale of a purposefully Luddite society in the midst of a galaxy-spanning far future civilization

Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente – Clarkesworld Magazine podcast (part 3 of 3 is still to come) – taking the latter half of the same quote for which Ken Liu named his excellent short story “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer”, Valente dials up the mythology level in an excellent AI-based science fiction story

PHYSICAL AUDIOBOOK PURCHASE: (2)

With a Little Help by Cory Doctorow – collection, bought in late 2010 from Lulu.com – the quality of narrations and recordings is all over the map, but you can hear the fun and love and friendship which went into making each track, and the stories (which also are a bit up and down, YMMV, etc.) have some real gems among them as well

Missing Persons by Lewis Shiner – short collection – all 3 of the stories here were enjoyable, but Stefan Rudnicki’s narration of “Perfidia” was one of my favorite listens of the year

PHYSICAL AUDIOBOOK BORROWED FROM THE PUBLIC LIBRARY: (15)

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, read by Peter Ganim – this classic is perhaps most easily read as an alternate history for us in the 21st century where spaceflight would still have difficulty matching orbit and engaging the eponymous Big Alien Artifact Ship, but Clarke’s style here actually has aged quite nicely IMHO; we get a realistic and fairly rigorously checked scientific/military expedition into the interior of a star-spanning alien spacecraft – “works as advertised”

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer – OK. It’s not as bad as some say. For what it is – a first-person narrative from an incredibly naive and foolish teenage girl in love with a sparkly ethical vampire – it actually does more things right than wrong, which is, of course, why it’s a huge huge freaking bestseller

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, read by Tom Stechschulte – hello, heartbreak in this raw, bleak novel of post-apocalypse father-and-son survival amidst cannibalism, ash, starvation, and cold

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood – first off yes, this book is a work of science fiction, and second, it’s excellent and you should read it

Anansi Boys, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book by Neal Gaiman – I’ve not read all of Gaiman yet, but I’m getting there; the narration on Anasi Boys is top notch (Gaiman agrees!) and though I enjoyed Odd and the Frost Giants (which I listened to last year, and more than once a month with my kids every month since!) a bit more than either Coraline or The Graveyard Book they were both well worth the storytelling time

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Feast for Crows (read by John Lee) by George R.R. Martin, the others read by Roy Dotrice – I was tired of changing CDs and just went with Audible.com for the other two books in the series – A Game of Thrones is a real game changer, but books 2 and 4 were among the slower and lower points of the series; I though Lee did a quite capable job standing in for Dotrice on Feast, though Random House has just released a new recording of the book with Dotrice for those who crave a consistent voice for the series (but don’t look too hard; for book 5, some voices dramatically change…)

YR: Fantastic Mr. Fox written and read by Roald Dahl for Harper Children’s Audio – I probably shouldn’t include a 1-hour children’s book, but… why not? I enjoyed it, I listen to it about once a month with my kids, and it’s wonderful, wonderful to hear Dahl reading it

Fantastic Mr. Fox written and read by Roald Dahl for Harper Children’s Audio – I probably shouldn’t include a 1-hour children’s book, but… why not? I enjoyed it, I listen to it about once a month with my kids, and it’s wonderful, wonderful to hear Dahl reading it Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey – this series truly belonged to my older sister; it was her world and hers alone, amidst all the ones we’ve shared over the years. I tried to pick it up this year, and after a couple of tries, it will have to wait for another year, still. I think I just got myself fantasy’d out after all of the above, and since so much of the above is influenced by McCaffrey in one way or another sometimes you need to step away to be able to come back to the source, you know?

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, read by Stefan Rudnicki, Harlan Ellison, and others – I think some (Prof. Kessel, I love you, but I’m looking at you) read a little too much into what is, in essence, a book for young readers that (other than being a bit optimistic about the power of BBS communication!) really does still work, that is fun to read, that (while it stacks the deck to achieve it) creates a truly reluctant hero in Ender

Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem, read by Nick Sullivan – I see where they were going by casting Sullivan, but overall it didn’t work for me very well

The Passage by Justin Cronin, read by Scott Brick – WHO AM I WHO AM I WHO AM I WHO AM I – while I have my quibbles with this one, it’s quite a book; I eagerly await reviews of book 2 in the series which comes out in 2012 to see where Cronin takes the world he’s built

PHYSICAL AUDIOBOOK BORROWED FROM A FRIEND: (1)

Perfume by Patrick Suskind, read by Sean Barrett for Penguin Audio UK – thanks again, Zack, for recommending and then lending this to me; it’s a strange one, a portrait of a disturbed savant of scent in France in the time of Kings – if nothing else, I take away that I should look for more books read by Barrett, as his performance was phenomenal

PHYSICAL AUDIOBOOK REVIEW COPY: (4)

The Alloy of Law (2011) by Brandon Sanderson, read by Michael Kramer for Macmillan Audio – the original trilogy is absolutely not required reading for this interesting mix of allomancy and ferruchemy (metal-based magic) and guns and steam

Both Wild Cards I (2011) and Wild Cards II: Aces High (2011) edited by George R.R. Martin, narrated by Luke Daniels for Brilliance Audio – in my quest for more Lewis Shiner I churned through these shared-world anthologies; the first is more socially prescient, evoking both the race, political, and homophobia focused government persecutions of the last half of the 20th century, as well as (in an almost eerily promontory scene) the eviction of Occupy protests from parks, using sticks and pepper spray; the second is a more overall tied-together “novel” like thing, with an over-arcing Menace against which our superheroes must struggle; both were enjoyable and I hope Brilliance produces the third book as well

The Thirteen Hallows (2011) by Michael Scott and Colette Freedman, narrated by Kate Reading for Macmillan Audio – setting up a larger series, an introductory (but certainly self-contained) story into a modern world of dark demonic power

So, what did I miss? A lot. An awful, awful lot. But that’s a list for part 2, next time.

Update: statistics wise, that’s only 13.5 books authored by women. My listening in the previous year was maybe a little more balanced (Valente, Kowal, and Okorafor having new books helped, and listening to Mur Lafferty’s and Natania Barron’s audiobook podcasts) but I’m not yet sure what it says about what books I chose. Hopefully I can figure out why I picked what I picked and skipped what I skipped in part two.