The best speculative fiction that connect amazing world - building with carefully controlled prose style

In the world of Speculative ficiton, it is hard to find a writer skilled in both world building and prose style. Many times one outshines the other. But this is not the case with China Mieville’s The Scar. This is the second book in his delightful and profound Bar-Slag series. Bellis Coldwine has escaped the ruined and changed city of New Crobuzon that her lover Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin has caused. She is a wanted suspect in a crime she had nothing to do with, so she takes a ship and sails across the sea. But her life changes forever when pirates murder her crew and take prisoner the passengers. Welcome to The Scar.

Readers of Meiville’s Perdido Street Station will not be disappointed, for in his sequel Mieville raises the world-building and prose style bar several notches above an already incredibly high standard. Bellis (and the reader) are introduced to a floating city on the sea, a world just as complex and incredible as New Crobuzon. This is a free city, a pirate city, a city that exists on addition and salvage, a city controlled and lead by an enigmatic and creepy couple known only as The Lovers. The Scar, like book one, deftly combines astounding worlds with amusement park prose, both soaring high and then intentionally plummeting the reader into wonder, contemplation, and nail-biting thrills.

As a writer of speculative fiction myself, I have been on a quest to find those writers who are able to not only construct complex and multi-layered worlds, but tell their stories with words so controlled and… well… beautiful that the surprises and delights not only come from the thrill of plot twists, but on the actual sentence level as well. N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, and specifically book one, The Fifth Season, does exactly this. From the very first sentence “You are she. She is you. You are Essun.” We plummet into the chaos and terror of a mother searching for her kidnapped daughter in a world where every “Fifth Season” the world explodes into fire and ravages the planet. It is a quiet book at first, personal, filled with sadness and a mothers hope, but soon we are flashing back and forward in a structure that develops both characterization and plot points so deftly that we understand how completely Jemisin has mastered not only her world-building but the intentionality of how to tell it. This is a novel, a series, that should be on the shelves of all devoted fantasy fans, but more importantly, it should be on the shelves of anyone who appreciates great writing.

Reading great works of speculative fiction (amazing world-building and intentional, controlled prose) has been an adventure in discovery. One of these pearls dropped into my lap quite unexpectedly… the best kind of pearl. I was rummaging through an old used book shop and recognized the title Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. Hmmm. I know I knew the title, but where? Oh, that’s right! It was all the rage in the early 2000s. I picked up the tome, bought it, and settled down for a read. Boom! Susanna Clarke’s world-building and prose style (while very British) had created a master class in speculative fiction. This is an 18th-century Britain re-imagined as a world filled with forgotten magic. Napoleon is invading, the world is at war, and Parliament has asked Mr. Norrel – the last known true Magician to help them. But he actually is not the last one; there is another, one who has come across the power of magic quite innocently, the incredibly powerful Jonathan Strange. Soon, Norrel and Strange are plunged into the terrible and dark world of ancient magic of the mysterious Raven King, a being and spell caster who could change the face of the world forever. This is fantasy, world-building, and stylized prose rarely scene sustained for such a large work. This is a wonder, and it should be on every fantasy enthusiast’s bookshelf.

I am a ferocious reader, always have been, and how I read is as important as what I read. I am a “full scope” reader, a reader who finds an author and begins at the beginning of a career and reads all the way through to the end. And so it is with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It is one of those surprises that one finds after a long day's walk on the beach, something washed up, something that catches the eye, and demands a stoop, a sustained observation… and afterwards – one cannot believe one's fortune. So it is with The Road. You see the reader is this unlike thing, this sparkling gem of something quite unexpected. McCarthy, known for his western novels, sparse prose, dark and bloody worlds, had changed course altogether and wrote a dystopian, world-building tour de force! I could hardly believe it.

A master prose craftsperson dipping his toe into a saturated ocean of apocalyptic worlds. This was either going to be a triumph or such a profound disappointment that I scarcely wanted to read it. I was not disappointed! The Road is a story of a man and his son trying to make it to the coast in a world that has all but ended, and it is one of the best sci-fi novels I have ever read. This is Pulitzer Prize-winning prose meeting the dark world of apocalyptic fiction and never once does it fall from the razor edge ledge into kitsch. It is heart-pounding, heart-wrenching, glorious, and hopeful. I rarely say such things, but at the height of McCarthy’s fame and power he wrote one of the most stirring, magnificent works of art of the 21st century. 

My first introduction to Mantel’s Wolf Hall was from the PBS series of the same name. I always wonder, when something on TV is very good if it was based on a novel. Well, this certainly was, and it is one of those books (actually book one in a trilogy) that makes other writers jealous. Mantel is not a sci-fi fantasy writer, but she absolutely could be, for she constructs a forgotten world, the 16th century of Henry VIII and his court, so magnificently that one believes to be there. Great prose style and world building emerge only when a writer is able to tell a story so compelling and with such control that we do not see the puppeteer’s strings and what we know to be “just another well-known story” becomes… more, an immersive universe where we feel and think, hope and desperately turn the page to find out what happens next. That’s it in a nutshell! We already know what happens to Henry and the fated Anne, but it’s somehow new and fresh and compelling. Mantel creates such marvelous characterization of Thomas Cromwell that I found myself deeply moved as we watch the struggles of the Renaissance Merchant face the terrors and pains and joys of what was everyday life in a world lit only by fire. Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and it is a triumph well deserved.