Worldcon came to London in 2014. It’s rare for Britain to host the planet’s most prestigious SF/fantasy convention, and “Loncon” was a great success. Though British fandom rejoiced, hopes for a “the British are coming!” moment in SF were undermined by the lack of Brit winners, or even nominees, in the convention’s annual Hugo awards. This year’s best-novel Hugo went to Ancillary Justice (Orbit), American writer Ann Leckie’s first novel. Indeed, 2014 quickly turned into Leckie’s year. Universally acclaimed, she became the first author to win the Arthur C Clarke, Nebula and Hugo awards all in the same year. Her followup, Ancillary Sword, is out now. It advances the multivolume story with aplomb; and if there is a hint of momentum slipping, that’s an index of the levels of expectation now placed on this writer.

Ann Leckie

Certainly the North Americans know how to hype. William Gibson, godfather of cyberpunk, published his latest novel, The Peripheral (Viking), to great fanfare. It is clotted with tech, terminology and acid observations on the predicaments of modern life; a little slow and underplotted for some, a triumph for others. Andy Weir’s hard SF thriller about a stranded astronaut, The Martian (Ebury), topped bestseller lists around the globe and is currently being filmed by Ridley Scott. Jeff VanderMeer published all three volumes of his Southern Reach trilogy in one year: Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance (Fourth Estate). The novels ring the changes on wilderness writing, making the natural world of Florida hauntingly weird and brilliantly new. These are contemporary masterpieces, and career-defining novels for VanderMeer.

That said, and making all necessary allowances for my national bias, I’d say the year’s best SF and fantasy originated from the other side of the Atlantic. The shame is that it was so often neglected by mainstream arbiters of taste. Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn (Solaris) is set in a future Europe balkanised into a tessellation of new mini-states – this year’s Scottish and Catalonian independence referendums made the book seem especially timely. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time and it’s frustrating it hasn’t received more attention.

Rachel Pollack made a relatively unheralded return to genre with her first novel in 12 years: The Child Eater (Quercus) was an intricately imagined Tarot-themed fantasy. Simon Ings’s grimly powerful Wolves (Gollancz) ought to have set the literary establishment on fire; as should Peter Higgins’s atmospheric and gripping Truth and Fear (Gollancz), set in a version of Russia halfway between ancient magic and Soviet concrete. Clare North garnered more notice for The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Orbit), a book that not only finds a smart new twist on time travel, but is genuinely moving.

Grim has been the flavour of the genre for some years now, and 2014 was no exception. Tania Unsworth’s clever, unsettling Young Adult dystopia The One Safe Place (Orion) was one highlight. Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming (Hodder) was another, juxtaposing the horrors of the Nazi death camps with a splendidly over-the-top gumshoe adventure starring Adolf Hitler as a 1940s London private eye. Joe Abercrombie wrote his first YA novel, an effortlessly readable fantasy called Half a King (Harper Voyager). This year also saw the final volume in Tom Pollock’s superb YA Skyscraper Throne trilogy: Our Lady of the Streets (Quercus) uses fantasy conceits and a tireless capacity for invention to map the dazzle, diversity and menace of London in ways simply unavailable to realist writers.

So much for the Brits and the North Americans. What about the rest of the world? Literary fiction aficionados know that only a small fraction of novels written in other languages ever get translated into English. That fraction is even smaller in SF and fantasy. There are major SF/F imprints on the continent – Bragelonne in France, Heyne in Germany – but too few non-Anglo-phone genre writers make it through the language barrier and into our bookshops. One who has is Emmi Itäranta, whose poetic and melancholy debut Memory of Water (Harper Voyager) was originally published in her native Finnish. Itäranta, now resident in Kent, translated it herself into flawless English. But how many non-Anglophone writers have such polylingual skills?

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