mrissa | Books of the decade, with approximation

So Tor.com had a vote for best book of the last decade...ish thing. They were counting 2000-2010 inclusive. This is not, by my math, a decade. Is this a problem? Not at all! But if they don't have to do the math for a decade exactly correctly, I can also approximate with my own top ten list in science fiction and fantasy from that period. Ten is on the same order of magnitude as lots of other numbers! One of which is the number I wound up with for my list.

There are authors whose work I adore who don't appear on this list for various reasons. C.J. Cherryh, for example, writes an ongoing series I adore, but I'm not at all convinced that any one of them is jumping out. Nicola Griffith has been doing thrillers that are not the same genre as I'm talking about. And like that.

I put the list in reverse alphabetical order because that's what happened as I was looking through my library file. I'm sure I'm forgetting something I borrowed from a friend or the library, too, since I just used my own file. But here's what I got:

Walter Jon Williams, This Is Not A Game
Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Sherwood Smith, Inda
Karl Schroeder, Sun of Suns
Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
Tim Powers, Declare
Susan Palwick, The Necessary Beggar
Sarah Monette, Corambis
Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, The Fall of the Kings
Gwyneth Jones, Bold As Love
Mary Gentle, Ash
John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories
Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch
Steven Brust, Issola
Marie Brennan, A Star Shall Fall
Elizabeth Bear, By the Mountain Bound
Daniel Abraham, The Price of Spring Edited: Okay,

timprov and

alecaustin have reminded me of enough coolness that I'm changing this one to An Autumn War

I am fascinated by some aspects of this. Clearly not all series books are out, and in some the first one holds the promise of the whole, while in others the culmination was the most satisfying. There are three books on this list that might as well have been written for me, but only one of them has my name on the dedication page. And...I don't know. It was fun to poke at things and come up with a list, and I'm perfectly happy to argue about it. I've been thinking about doing another of these for nonfiction or mystery or non-speculative fiction if anybody thinks it's fun.