As coverage of 2022 winds down, several Tachyon books managed to make their way onto best reads lists. Naseem Jamnia’s debut novella THE BRUISING OF QILWA continues to rack up best of the year acknowledgements with inclusion in Top Ten Tuesday: 2022 favourites on There’s Always Room for One More. v1717 rates Peter Watt’s THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION as the best read of the year. Brandon Sanderson’s Hugo-awarding novella THE EMPEROR’S SOUL was listed as part of Top five – 2022 by Wet Broken Things. In the Favorite Books Published Before 2022 category, Fantasy Cafe ranks Marjorie Liu’s THE TANGLEROOT PALACE among the favorite books of 2022. The Italian site Entropy Isn’t What it Use to Be cites Joe R. Lansdle’s BORN FOR TROUBLE: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HAP AND LEONARD among the year’s best.

Naseem Jamnia’s novella is a delight, from its lean, flowing prose to its distinctly Middle Eastern world-building and its private, prickly protagonist. I loved the way family – blood and found – was front and centre.

There’s Always Room for One More

This was so fucking good. That’s really all that can be said, it was just so good. Unlike Echopraxia and Blindsight, this was far more accessible, while also being solidly “hard” sci-fi. I loved the concept of the story, I loved the execution, I loved the characters, I loved the action/horror/thriller moments wrapped up within a short 190 pages. I even love how both the cover and the title perfectly summarize the plot of the book. Can’t recommend it enough.

v1717

This is a fantasy book that does what only fantasy can do. It is an extraordinary idea about a beautiful piece of magic, the art of forgery, or altering an object’s past so it can become something different. THE EMPEROR’S SOUL is about a captured woman whose life depends on completing an impossible task: to turn her art to people, and forge a new soul for the Emperor. In this tense thriller filled with exquisite magic, Sanderson makes us think about the nature of art, the nature of our humanity and the importance of cultural curiosity. This is a story that will never leave you.

Wet Broken Things

Technically, I read much of THE TANGLEROOT PALACE in 2021, but it still stands out as a highlight when looking over books I completed in 2022—it is one of the best short story collections I’ve read, after all! These seven tales—six short stories plus one novella—are all quite different from one another since they encompass a variety of subgenres, settings, tones, and styles, but they also have some common threads and seem like they are in conversation with each other in some ways. Marjorie Liu’s introduction says they share “a longing for home, friendship, love—characters often driven by a weary hope in the possibility of something good.” Although I did prefer some stories to others, I appreciated and enjoyed them all and didn’t think there were any that were far better or worse than the rest. I especially loved how Marjorie Liu parceled out details, as I often was unsure about what was going on at first but there was enough of a hook that I wanted to find out—and everything tied together wonderfully in the end.

Fantasy Cafe

Hap and Leonard are in my heart and couldn’t be missing just like Elly Griffiths couldn’t be missing.

Entropy Isn’t What it Use to Be