It's really great news that M John Harrison won the Booker. I don't really like the modern trend of having news stories appear on billboards and bus stops - it seems vaguely totalitarian - but seeing his photo in an ABC News story on my morning walk up Lane Cove Road was enjoyable and weird.
It's hard to know where to start with recommendations: the Viriconium stories are probably my favourite fantasy series, starting out as one of the finest examples of the Dying Earth subgenre and then gradually undermining their own fantasy in increasingly perplexing, even heartbreaking, ways.
Climbers is neither fantasy nor science fiction, remained unfairly out of print for years and is one of my favourite novels about why men are like that.
The short story collections You Should Come With Me Now and Settling the World are both excellent.
Ove the last month I've been off work with a nasty case of influenza and have been trying not to read too many tech blogs as the discourse around AI is not good for my mental health. One note I kept seeing people strike was the idea that we are living in a science fiction world now: I can see why people are reaching for that as a rhetorical strategy, but there are two big objections to it.
One is that technical developments which seem like they're from science fiction are not new: men landed on the Moon five months before I was born. Almost everything in your daily life, seen through this lens, is science fiction.
The more important, and more Harrisonian, objection, is that the fantasy elements of science fiction are twofold. One of them is the description of wonders, with a gloss of technical vocabulary to enable suspension of disbelief: space travel, artificial intelligence, aliens, and so on.
The second is the wish-fulfilment or power fantasy aspect of the genre, the idea that your side (the good guys, the nerds, the military, pick your flavour) will prevail, that if only the people who know about the technical stuff and are pure of heart get to drive, good will triumph. It's this aspect of the genre which keeps it in the ghetto and which Harrison has been arguing against and subverting for his whole career.
"You live in a science fiction story, better get used to it" is wrong-headed not because science-fiction-y things don't happen, but because you don't live in a story.