My critique group recently proposed recommending the four best books we’ve read in 2024 as a discussion topic. One member suggested we take it a step further into a skills session by speaking about what we learned as a writer from said recommendations. So here are mine. None of these are unanimous 5-star reviewed, they either connect with the reader or not.
Jeff Noon’s 4 John Nyquist books – standalone but much more when considered as an odyssey. Private investigator John Nyquist unveils bits of his past and present self on his diverse journeys and cases. Book 1, A Man of Shadows takes John and the reader from Dayzone to Nocturna – few choose to live outside of one or the other’s perpetual light or dark. Nyquist is forced to search both and the twilight zone in between. Book 2, The Body Library is an extraordinary journey to a city of ideas, where words cover and infect everything. Book 3, Creeping Jenny, takes Nyquist to a zone where the rules change every day. Book 4, Within Without, strands Nyquist and his protégé in a city where borders and boundaries govern everything.
What did I learn? A bizarre setting and idea is only the first step in creating a complete world. Setting as character but as a very deep and intrinsic level. Character and Idea are formed together.

Beneath the World, A Sea by Chris Beckett; twist on Heart if Darkness (classic tale); an unsympathetic protagonist can gain empathy if not likability through others’ ill-founded reactions and his own vulnerabilities which he can’t control (his memory of evil actions). There is little room to stop and explain the setting’s reason for existence, just what was. This book is a lot to absorb and process. On the surface, a policeman is dispatched to a remote, accessible only by boat, delta in South America where alien-looking beings called duendes are being murdered by the local tribe. The Submundo delta doesn’t make time stand still but it renders it meaningless. It lays bare the mind’s attempts at skewing memory. Echoes of Joseph Conrad, JG Ballard and Wade Davis permeate the landscape, the characters and the internal dialogues. The book deceives though, for it is more about tolerance, intolerance, genocide, displacement, natural resource exploitation and madness. Above all, it is about perception. The resolution is not definitive but the journey is compelling and themes will resonate, like a good movie, long after the end. Writerly take-ways: the bizarre setting/world is never fully explained, the reader discovers it along with the protagonist. The protagonist is unsympathetic and unreliable but that is the key to the subconscious part of his character trying to break down the wall to his external reality. The resolution may be unsatisfying to some readers but embraceable by others – authorial choice.

Titanium Noir – A cross genre homage faithful to sf and noir conventions. Done with honour not condescension. Harkaway has dragged noir kicking and screaming from 1940’s trappings into a mildly divergent, contemporary or near-future dystopic reality. A mystery certainly, whodunit and whydunit with suspects, victims and witnesses consisting of and being threatened by Titans. Titans being superhuman in size, ego, wealth and the appropriate power which comes with being nearly invincible and certainly nasty.
Harkoway drags in many hard-boiled conventions as well, mainly speech and wise-ass comments which could have been penned by Spillane, Chandler, Hammett or their imitators. Even the names, like Floyd Otsby, are pure hard-boiled, drawn from rich sources: Conan Doyle, Chandler.
Cal Sounder, the p.i., is hard-boiled rather than noir in that we believe he’s trying to do the right thing, not the advantageous thing. True to convention, he’s the narrator; but must we believe him?
Cal winds his way through danger, leads, memorable characters and too many clues before finding a solution and reaping an ambiguous reward.


Shockwave Rider by John Brunner – one of the journeyman-writer’s break out books in mid-career (with The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit) If you want a look at what cyberpunk looked like before William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this is it. Brunner creates the world web, viral worms, remote work, illicit government oversight, etc. He extrapolates from more than one source here, as he does in the Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar, from The Club of Rome’s limits to growth, to Marshall McLuhan to Alvin Toffler. More than a synthesis of 1970’s concerns, he presents a grand mystery and compelling tale. Its relevance remains. Why? Because of the fortunate extrapolations? Or that he didn’t stop at scientific extrapolation but integrated it with socio-economic trends? All with a unique interpretation and a protagonist to exploit and suffer from the extremes.
One test of true SF is that the story can’t exist if you take away the science. In these, this is true but also if you take away the setting, the characters cease to exist.