best of the best: top Fantasy books of 2010

Some of these books have not strictly been released in 2010 (read: were definitely not released in 2010 – Fantasy Book News, I’m looking at you with Brian Sanderson’s 2005 Elantris on the list), but I don’t make the rules so these are – loosely – what a (random) selection of SFF sites and bloggers have listed as their top five books of 2010 (regardless of whether they have actually been released in 2010). Following in the spirit of things (i.e. disregarding the publication date entirely), I have added my own ‘best science fiction and fantasy books of 2010 (not necessarily released in 2010)’ to the list. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the data to fit nicely into a chart (preferably pie), but here it is in startling boring tabular form. I’ve highlighted recurring books in the same colour, although none occur in the same position in more than one list, so as an experiment this probably failed. So here’s what we learn from an exercise that took a startling long time to carry out: favourite books are relative, Tor dominate USA-side, Orbit and Gollancz are pretty much equal (in a small selection of unrelated best-of lists, one of which I realised after is purely a nominee list but I decided to keep it in anyway for data analysis/padding), I’d like to read Stephen Donaldson’s Against All Things Ending by Gollancz as it looks fabulous and if you are going to colour code a table in order to highlight recurring themes it’s probably best not to do this in a table that already has colours in it. Enjoy!

Websites used: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Fantasy Book Critic, Publishers’ Weekly, Good Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Fantasy Book News, SFGate, Fantasy Faction and me.

Website	1	2	3	4	5
Amazon.co.uk	Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time) by Robert Jordan (Orbit)	Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)	Against All Things Ending by Stephen Donaldson (Gollancz)	The Ambassador's Mission by Trudi Canavan (Orbit)	The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton (MacMillan)
Amazon.com	Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris (Ace Books)	Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time) by Robert Jordan (Tor)	Changes by Jim Butcher (Roc)	Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs (Ace)	Bullet by Laurell K. Hamilton (Berkley)
Fantasy Book Critic	Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)	The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking)	The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)	The Folding Knife by K. J. Parker (Orbit)	Aurorarama Jean-Christophe Valtat (Melville House Publishing)
Publishers' Weekly	The Bone Palace by Amanda Downum (Orbit)	Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)	The Hundred-Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit)	Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (Daw)	A Special Place: The Heart of a Dark Matter by Peter Straub (Pegasus Books)
Good Reads (Nominees - winners announced soon)	The Way of Kings by Brian Sanderson (Gollancz)	Kraken by China Miéville (Pan)	The Black Prism by Brent Weeks (Orbit)	The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman	The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett (Harper Voyager)
Kirkus Reviews	The Bird of the River by Kage Baker (Tor)	Bearers of the Black Staff by Terry Brooks (Orbit)	Side Jobs by Jim Butcher (Orbit)	The Palace of Impossible Dreams by Jennifer Fallon (Tor)	Shadows in the Cave by Caleb Fox (Tor)
Fantasy Book News	Lamentation by Ken Scholes (Tor)	The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz/ Orbit USA)	Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)	Daemon by Daniel Suarez (Quercus)	Elantris by Brian Sanderson (Tor)
SFGate.com	Not Less Than Gods by Kage Baker (Tor)	The Passage by Justin Cronin (Orion UK)	Planetary: Spacetime Archaeology by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (DC Comics)	Horns by Joe Hill (Gollancz)	Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
Fantasyfaction.com	The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett (Harper Voyager)	The Way of Kings by Brian Sanderson (Gollancz)	Spellwright by Blake Charlton (HarperVoyager)	The Black Prism by Brent Weeks (Orbit)	Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz/ Orbit USA)
Me	Changes by Jim Butcher (Orbit)	Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot Books)	Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett (Corgi)	The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobbs (HarperVoyager)	The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Orbit)

bite me: the week in bite-sized chunks

Angry Robot Books: during the days running up to Christmas, advent, if you will, Angry Robot have been gifting readers through their digital advent calendar with anything from writer Dan Abnett’s secret family bread sauce recipe (awww) to Christmas horror short, The Holiday Man by J Robert King. I think this is a great idea – it’s for the fans, it whets appetites for authors, it brings a sort of warm glowy feeling often associated with Christmas and being given free things, and it fosters a community spirit amongst its readers, also known, rather fuzzily, as ‘brand loyalty’.

self-publishing: a success story: this weekend it was reported that self-published Fantasy author Brian S. Pratt has been earning thousands of dollars from the 17 eBooks he’s publishing on eBook platform for ‘independent writers’, Smashwords. I hesitate to say ‘perhaps this is the way forward’ because I’m an old-fashioned snob at heart when it comes to publishing. Still, authors have complete pricing control over their work, the eBooks are available in all formats and they’ve published over 25,000 authors since they opened for business back in May 2008. Perhaps this IS the way ... no sorry, I just can’t.

Penguin USA: Penguin Daw author Gini Koch has been guest posting on The Author’s Desk blog this week and has some interesting theories about why readers might be put off by Science Fiction (because it’s viewed as ‘hard or scary or boring’). Koch’s titles are the Sci Fi equivalent of the Paranormal Romance. The Alien Series, beginning with her debut novel Touched by an Alien (a title not as misleading as the TV series about angels), centres on marketing manager Katherine ‘Kitty’ Katt who kills a man after he turns into a monster. She’s whisked away by secret agents who reveal to her that this man was mutated by an alien parasite, and that they too are aliens from Alpha Centauri. But, more importantly, they’re sexy aliens. One such agent, Jeff Martini (another case of the Ford Prefect misjudged moniker?), begins stalking Kitty, which she, of course, finds sexy and alluring. It was one of Booklist’s Top Ten adult Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2010, so there is obviously something to all this sexy alien malarkey. Interestingly, Koch writes in one guest post about how the majority of her readers are not Sci Fi fans originally. Perhaps this ‘non-threatening science fiction’ as Koch dubs it would be my perfect way in to the genre, although it’s more soft-focused than soft.

Orbit: more festive frolics from publishers. I love a good visualisation. Orbit have put together a lovely visual graphic to examine the difference between the Christmas elf, and the Fantasy elf. Enjoy! They’re also giving away ‘Christmas loot’ regularly in the run up to Christmas, although more excitingly, they’ve changed their logo to reflect the season. Maybe this is only exciting to me.