5) Take Back Plenty, by Colin Greenland
I realised to my embarrassment last week that I was moderating not one but two P-Con panels with Colin Greenland as a participant, and I had read perhaps one short story of his from the Moonshots anthology. Well, I had the opportunity to get the three “Plenty” novels during the con and he was kind enough to sign them.
This first book is pretty good (as you would hope for a book that won both the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards). Well above-average space opera, feisty female protagonist, solar system where humanity is vying for space and influence with various alien species (like Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee sequence but less depressing). Mild rewriting of history to allow us Mars as desert planet with breathable atmosphere and Venus as tropical hell. Generally good fun. Will probably read the other two.
I’m… actually a bit disappointed by the repetition of author names
Here are the votes from the poll summed by author, for all authors who got 100 or more votes. (There’s still a bit of repetition, because Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson appear together as well as apart.)
(So it’s Brandon Sanderson who’s the most popular author of the decade! Not bad for an author whose first novel was published in 2005. Doesn’t tempt me to read any of his books, though: I learned my lesson after I tried playing Final Fantasy X—it turns out that 10 million Japanese can be wrong.)