After years of toil below the mainstream radar, a more inclusive generation of writers is set for crossover success
After fans fought back at the Hugos, seeing off the Sad Puppies with a host of votes for “no award”, we can look forward to SF becoming a little less old, white and male in 2016. The growing range of authors breaking through to mainstream recognition, often after years of hard work in small presses, means the work is there to chose from. Books like Daniel José Older’s Half Resurrection Blues, NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings have been working to redefine the archetypes of fantasy and sci-fi for a broader audience. With that groundwork in place, you can expect to see some of these writers go on to mainstream recognition and bestseller success in 2016.
The sad passing of Terry Pratchett this year has left British sci-fi a much emptier place. Genevieve Cogman’s The Masked City, sequel to 2014’s The Invisible Library, is a book very much in the humorous and satirical tradition of Discworld, although its fantasy setting is more urban than epic. Europe in Autumn, the opening volume of the spectacular Fractured Europe Sequence by Dave Hutchinson, narrowly missed out on both the BSFA and Clarke awards in 2015. Europe at Midnight deserves to take at least one of those awards, and win the author a much wider readership.
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