The Restoration Game, by Ken MacLeod. I didn’t have a chance to read as much science-fiction in 2012 as I usually do; but this was one of my favorites, an unexpectedly complex day-after-tomorrow tale that builds some wonderfully speculative details onto highly original “ripped from the headlines” issues. Largely set in the fictional “Krassnia,” located roughly where the Crimean War was fought in eastern Europe, it’s the tale of an immigrant computer programmer now living in Scotland, who’s been contracted to build an MMO virtual-reality game that may or may not be a gift from the CIA to the revolutionaries in Krassnia, as a safe place online to plot their actions, and which may or may not be being done by the CIA because of a magical secret buried in a local mountain that the Nazis actually tried going after in World War Two, which may or may not be accidentally revealed in the programmer’s mother’s old out-of-date Lord of the Rings-inspired ‘60s guide to Krassnian mythology, which the programmer used to create the main map of the virtual-reality game. IS YOUR MIND BLOWN YET? That gets you to page ten! HOW ABOUT NOW?
Spurious, by Lars Iyer. Hey, so speaking of obscure ‘50s philosophers with curiously mainstream followings, this “sequel” to Dogma by the contemporary British philosopher is obviously influenced with much love by classic absurdist Samuel Beckett; for this is barely a three-act story at all, but rather a series of ridiculous conversations between the author’s doppleganger and a fellow philosopher who’s much more popular, quickly taking side turns every few pages to delve into all kinds of issues of pure thought and wacky humor. Inexplicably popular for how challenging it actually is (“I thought I’d be the only person in the world to love this book,” starts hundreds of glowing reviews at Goodreads.com), this will be the densest yet most delightful read that you’ve taken on in quite some time.
Watch the Doors As They Close, by Karen Lillis. For the sake of disclosure, let me confess that author Karen Lillis has participated in past CCLaP virtual book tours, in her role as another popular litblogger and book reviewer online; but even with the bias, I have to say that her latest as a creative writer was simply one of my favorites of the year, which almost earned a Guilty Pleasure Award because its premise is just so stereotypically the kind of stuff I usually find intolerable. Mostly a deep character study that uses just the slightest of actual plot, it’s essentially a sophisticated look at one of those moocher hipster-douchebag failed artist types that young girls are always seeming to fall for; and not only that, but a lot of it takes place along Paris’s West Bank in modern times, when the only “artists” left are entitled Americans seeking a bohemia that hasn’t existed there in half a century. But despite all this, I found the book a real page-turning delight, because Lillis has such an earnest and beautiful voice, one of the only academes out there writing specifically academic literature who I really adore; and if you have a similarly low tolerance for such work, this is a great title to be the proverbial “one book of this type this year to read, if you read only one book of this type this year.”
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