• Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey (US | UK | ANZ)
• Deadline, Mira Grant (US | UK | ANZ)
• Rule 34, Charles Stross (UK | ANZ)
• The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie (US)
• The Dragon’s Path, Daniel Abraham (US | UK | ANZ)
• Heartless, Gail Carriger (US | UK | ANZ)
• The Fallen Blade, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (US | UK | ANZ)
• The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (US | UK | ANZ)
• The Hammer, K.J. Parker (US | UK | ANZ)

And, in case you missed them the first time around, keep reading for a round-up of other Best of 2011 lists!

• NPR: The Heroes and Rule 34
• io9: Rule 34
• Kirkus: Rule 34
• Amazon: Leviathan Wakes
• SFF World (Fantasy/Science Fiction): Leviathan Wakes, Deadline, The Heroes, The Dragon’s Path
• SFGate: The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett (US | UK | ANZ)
• Suvudu: Leviathan Wakes
• Forbidden Planet International: The Ascendant Stars, Michael Cobley (UK | ANZ); Germline, T.C. McCarthy (US | UK | ANZ); Echo City, Tim Lebbon (UK | ANZ); Rule 34
• A Dribble of Ink: Leviathan Wakes; Theft of Swords, Michael J. Sullivan (US | UK | ANZ); The Dragon’s Path
• The Ranting Dragon: The Kingdom of Gods; Ghost Story, Jim Butcher (UK); Hexed, Kevin Hearne (UK); Deadline
• Drying Ink: Ghost Story; Theft of Swords; The Return Man, V.M. Zito (US | ANZ)
• The Speculative Scotsman: The Hammer
• Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review: Theft of Swords, Leviathan Wakes, The Dragon’s Path
• Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist: Leviathan Wakes; The Heroes; The Final Evolution, Jeff Somers (US | UK | ANZ); The Edinburgh Dead, Brian Ruckley (US | UK | ANZ); Legacy of Kings, Celia Friedman (UK | ANZ); The White-Luck Warrior, R. Scott Bakker (UK | ANZ)
• The Wertzone: The White-Luck Warrior; The Heroes; The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin (UK | ANZ)

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One of the unacknowledged problems of the 21st century is the explosion in new laws.

We live in a complex society, and complex societies need complex behavioural rules if they’re to run safely. Some of these rules need to be made explicit, because not everyone can be relied on to analyse a situation and do the right thing. To take a trivial example: we now need laws against using a mobile phone or texting while driving, because not everyone realises that this behaviour is dangerous, and earlier iterations of our code for operating vehicles safely were written before we had mobile phones. So the complexity of our legal code grows over time.

The trouble is, it now seems to be growing out of control.

In the period 1997-2010, in the UK, Parliament created an average of one new criminal offence for every day the House of Commons was in session. I asked a couple of legal experts how many actual chargeable offences there were in the English legal system; they couldn’t give an exact answer but suggested somewhere in the range 5,000-20,000. The situation in the USA is much, much worse, with different state and federal legal systems and combinations of felonies; the true number of chargeable felonies may be over a million, and this situation is augmented by a tax code so large that no single human being can be familiar with all of it (but failure to comply is of course illegal).

Now, most of the time most of these laws don’t affect most of us. But there’s a key principle of law, that ignorance is no defence: I’m willing to bet that most human beings are guilty of one or more crimes, be it smoking a joint or speeding or forgetting to declare earnings or failing to file the paperwork for some sort of permit we don’t even know exists. We are all potentially criminals.

Meanwhile we have a rapidly growing surveillance state. And we have a legal system rooted in history, which has grown up around the theory that human beings possess free will, that they commit crimes out of malice, and that the threat or actual delivery of punishment is necessary to keep them in line. And all of these assumptions are invalid to a greater or lesser degree, if what behavioural psychology teaches us is correct. Human beings act on impulse, frequently unconsciously, frequently against their own best interest: the distant threat of punishment is not an effective deterrent: and judicial punishment doesn’t change behavioural patterns reliably or efficiently.

How do you run a complex society that relies on most people staying within agreed behavioural limits most of the time, if your legal system is not merely broken but *can’t be fixed* because it’s based on false assumptions?

Rule 34 gives the reader a whiplash tour of the shape of crimes to come, as seen by the criminals who’re trying to make a quick euro, and the confused and over-worked cops who’re trying to figure out what, if anything, to charge them with. But lurking behind the action there are some difficult questions: in particular, is it possible to have a crime if there’s no human perpetrator …?

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The only trouble is, it doesn’t make sense.

Not only is SF as a field full of assumed impossibilities (time machines, faster than light space travel, extraterrestrial intelligences): it’s also crammed with clichés that are superficially plausible but which don’t hang together when you look at them too closely. Take flying cars, for example: yes, we’d all love to have one — right up until we pause to consider what happens when the neighbour’s 16 year old son goes joy riding to impress his girlfriend. Not only is flying fuel-intensive, it’s difficult, and the failure mode is extremely unforgiving. Which is why we don’t have flying cars. (We have flying buses instead, but that’s another matter.) Food pills out-lived their welcome: I think they were an idea that only made sense in the gastronomic wasteland of post-war austerity English cuisine. I submit that AI is a similar pipe dream.

This is not to say that we’re never going to know what the basis of consciousness is, or that it’s going to turn out to be non-computable. If anything, the prospects for scientists working to discover just how our own brains work to generate this strange phenomenon are very promising. While the initial direction of research in artificial intelligence (from the 1960s to the 1980s) turned out to be frustratingly inapplicable — consciousness does not, it appears, run on easily encoded symbolic logic — we’ve developed a lot of useful techniques along the way. Indeed, computer scientists joke that if we know how to do something it isn’t artificial intelligence any more. The world’s best chess player is a computer program; likewise the champion of the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Meanwhile, neurobiologists are mapping and decoding the deep structure of our brains using a variety of non-invasive imaging techniques, and our understanding of how brains are put together at the neural level is deepening rapidly.

But knowing how to build a flying car is not the same thing as making a business case for mass producing them. And knowing how human minds work isn’t the same as making a case for deploying synthetic minds in software.

For one thing, there are huge ethical problems associated with attempting to simulate a human brain, or building a piece of software that could become self-aware. If you terminate a conscious program, are you committing murder? Quite possibly. Worse: if you use genetic algorithms to evolve a conscious AI, iteratively spawning hopeful mutants and then reaping them to converge on a final goal, are you committing genocide? (Australian SF author Greg Egan reluctantly came to this conclusion a couple of years ago: I can’t fault his logic.) And if you create an AI solely for the purpose of doing some kind of cognitive function, does this amount to slavery?

These questions ought to give advanced researchers pause for concern — and a swift referral to the nearest academic ethics committee. But leaving aside ethics — positing for the time being that any use we make of a software intelligence is no more morally questionable than using a spreadsheet — there are further problems. Consciousness appears to be an emergent property of a bunch of converging non-conscious processes within the brain. And it’s not a primary actor — rather, it’s a monitoring and coordinating function. It comes with a whole bunch of undesirable characteristics. Conscious minds experience boredom and emotional upsets (and it appears emotions play a fairly significant role in generating consciousness). They are self-motivated and go off on wild goose chases. If we ever could produce a true artificial intelligence in a box, we’d probably find it utterly useless for any productive purpose — more inclined to watch Reality TV all day, troll the internet, or invent crankish new religions than to open the pod bay doors on demand.

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Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (UK | ANZ) is many amazing things. It’s a fast-paced Edinburgh-based crime novel set a few years into the future. It also displays lashings of Charles Stross’s wry humour and I enjoyed more than a few winces and chuckle-out-loud moments. Another aspect I really enjoyed was Stross’s extrapolation of our current technology, where our usual gadgets have been moved on a step or three.  The BBC’s Click technology programme covered augmented reality just last month, but in Rule 34 it’s a useful, fully-fledged reality.

But perhaps most importantly, I found myself completely caught up in the colourful characters (a detective inspector, a young scalleywag called Anwar and a master criminal showing signs of psychosis known as the Toymaker). There’s not the space here to revel in the bizarre crimes DI Liz Kavanaugh has to investigate (domestic appliances in unlikely places …), or talk about the highly suspicious Eastern European bread-mix young Anwar is peddling. But you can sample for yourselves by reading this plot summary or by enjoying chapter one here.

And just look at this fine crop of well-deserved reviews for the book. If you like your reads on the dark side, you’ve a real treat in store:

Cracking near-future crime laced with humour that’s exquisitely wrong”
Chris Brookmyre

“A savvy, funny, viciously inventive science fiction novel that combines police procedure with the dark side of nerd culture to produce a grotesque and gripping page-turner”
Cory Doctorow

“Charles Stross is a grandmaster of that most difficult science-fictional era, the near future. His novel, Rule 34, is a seamlessly transformation of our near-term everyday world into serious strangeness”
Vernor Vinge, Hugo Award-winning author

“Another detective joins the celebrated ranks of Edinburgh’s finest, this one with Stross’ distinctive science-fictional twist … Dazzling, chilling and brilliant”
Kirkus Book Reviews

“Presenting a gritty near-future filled with Big Brother technology and backstreet fabricators of just about anything the average perv could desire, Stross’ latest foray is not for the faint of heart”
RT Book Reviews (top pick!)

“Hugo winner Stross blends plausible near-future SF and crime … each section builds on the others, making the whole more than the sum of its parts”
Publishers Weekly

“The plot, with its all-too-likely extrapolation of cybercrime, is both a good read and a warning”
Booklist

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Cracking near-future crime laced with humour that’s exquisitely wrong’ Chris Brookmyre

‘A savvy, funny, viciously inventive science fiction novel that combines police procedure with the dark side of nerd culture to produce a grotesque and gripping page-turner’ Cory Doctorow

‘Charles Stross is a grandmaster of that most difficult science-fictional era, the near future. His novel, Rule 34, is a seamlessly transformation of our near-term everyday world into serious strangeness’
Vernor Vinge

‘Dazzling, chilling and brilliant’ Kirkus

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Here’s just a snapshot of the great things that have been said about Charles Stross’s work:

As keenly observant of our emergent society as it is of our emergent technologies …one extremely smart species of fun” William Gibson
“Not only edgy and smart but grounded in human concerns” Wired
“Stretches the limits of narrative to make us see how wonderful ideas can be”
Time Out
“Stross is an author who anyone interested in SF should read and relish” SFX
“The cutting edge of modern science fiction” SFSite.com

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So, point your iTunes, web browser or enslaved artificial intelligence at Escape Pod, and enjoy some free Strosstime: ‘Rogue Farm’, recorded at Balticon 43.

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Saturn’s Children is Charlie’s homage to the late Robert Heinlein, as the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted from this post’s title. It also gives Charlie a sixth consecutive Hugo shortlisting for Best Novel, which is a remarkable achievement – even the great Robert Silverberg only managed four.  Audaciously told without a single human character, it is nonetheless replete with humanity as well as Charlie’s trademark dark humour, clever plotting and 100-mile-an-hour ideas.

Wireless, is a new collection of short fiction, including Locus Award-winning novella ‘Missile Gap’, Bob Howard story ‘Down on the Farm’ (read an extract here), ‘Unwirer’, a collaboration with fellow Prometheus Award-winner Cory Doctorow and the hitherto unpublished novella ‘Palimpsest’. Running the full gamut of Charlie’s incredible imagination, which, as everyone knows, goes up to eleven, Wireless is a snapshot of a writer at the height of his powers and a wonderful introduction to an essential voice in modern science fiction.

As multi-award-winning editor and anthologist Gardner Dozois says ‘Where Charles Stross goes today, the rests of science fiction will follow tomorrow.’

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As if having a book shortlisted for the premier award in the SF world isn’t enough, the unfeasibly talented Mr Stross becomes the first author to have a novel on the Hugo shortlist in six consecutive years!

Trying to predict the future is fraught with peril, but I feel quite confident in saying that it will be quite some time before that amazing achievement is matched or bettered. Even the great Robert Silverberg only managed four-in-a-row.

Many congratulations to Charlie from all at Orbit, and if you are eligible to vote for the Hugos, remember:

Vote early
Vote often*
Vote Stross!

*Actually, maybe you shouldn’t vote often. That would probably be bad.

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Oh, and I’ve read his forthcoming space opera, Saturn’s Children – don’t bet against it being six-in-a-row, this time next year . . .

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