{"id":299,"date":"2006-06-08T11:58:34","date_gmt":"2006-06-08T11:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/08\/best-novels-of-the-1990s\/"},"modified":"2006-06-08T11:58:34","modified_gmt":"2006-06-08T11:58:34","slug":"best-novels-of-the-1990s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/08\/best-novels-of-the-1990s\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Novels of the 1990&#8217;s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll (SF reviewer and walking True Lab Story) is <a href=\"http:\/\/james-nicoll.livejournal.com\/370607.html\">discussing the best novels of the 1990&#8217;s<\/a>. He doesn&#8217;t have the &#8220;SF&#8221; in there, but it&#8217;s sort of implicit, because that&#8217;s what James does.<\/p>\n<p>Keeping up the literary\/ pop culture bent of the last couple of weeks (there&#8217;ll be science stuff soon, but it&#8217;s the end of the term, and I don&#8217;t even want to think about physics right at the moment&#8211; it reminds me of the grading I should be doing), I&#8217;ll post some suggestions after the cut. The list will mostly be SF, because that&#8217;s the bulk of my reading, but I&#8217;ll mix in a few other things. I&#8217;m really not well-read enough to claim to be able to identify <strong>the<\/strong> best novels of the 1990&#8217;s, so a more accurate term might be &#8220;favorite,&#8221; but here are some thoughts:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>Use of Weapons<\/cite> by Iain M. Banks. Banks&#8217;s best work to date, a dark and twisted non-linear Space Opera.<\/li>\n<li><cite>Thank You for Smoking<\/cite> by Christopher Buckley. Fabulous political satire, now a major motion picture.<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Fortunate Fall<\/cite> by Raphael Carter. I&#8217;m not sure what to call this, because it&#8217;s not really like anything else. Post-cyberpunk, maybe.<\/li>\n<li><cite>Underworld<\/cite> by Don DeLillo. The opening baseball scene alone merits inclusion.<\/li>\n<li><cite>Blackburn<\/cite> by Bradley Denton. A Serial killer you can root for.<\/li>\n<li><cite>Growing Up Weightless<\/cite> by John M. Ford. The Lunar society is realistic enough to be Hard SF, the interactions between parents and children are real enough to be mainstream Literature.<\/li>\n<li><cite>Tigana<\/cite> by Guy Gavriel Kay. Just squeaks in, with a copyright date of 1990 (we&#8217;ll define the decade as 1990-1999). Not his most polished book, but maybe the best of his alternate-world historical fantasies.<\/li>\n<li><cite>A Deepness in the Sky<\/cite> by Vernor Vinge. A sequel of sorts to <cite>A Fire Upon the Deep<\/cite>, but much better, and it probably stands alone.<\/li>\n<li><cite>Infinite Jest<\/cite> by David Foster Wallace. Yeah, it&#8217;s 1000 pages long, and yeah, it has footnotes, but it&#8217;s absolutely brilliant.<\/li>\n<li><cite>What&#8217;s the Worst That Could Happen?<\/cite> by Donald E. Westlake. It&#8217;s not great literature by any stretch, but it&#8217;s the best of the Dortmunder books by far. Too bad nobody has ever made a movie of it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s a fairly idiosyncratic list, and if you asked me to start fresh tomorrow in a different room (it&#8217;s no coincidence that we own all of these in hardcover, and the hardcover shelves are in my office at home&#8230;), you might get a substantially different list. But those are ten of my favorite books from the 1990&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve got a problem with those, you know where the comments are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll (SF reviewer and walking True Lab Story) is discussing the best novels of the 1990&#8217;s. He doesn&#8217;t have the &#8220;SF&#8221; in there, but it&#8217;s sort of implicit, because that&#8217;s what James does. Keeping up the literary\/ pop culture bent of the last couple of weeks (there&#8217;ll be science stuff&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/08\/best-novels-of-the-1990s\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Best Novels of the 1990&#8217;s<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}