From the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Among Others, a collection of brilliant reassessments of the classics — and the forgotten gems — of modern fantasy and SF
As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might
guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a
chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site
Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading — about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics,
to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have
consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this
volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short
essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious
series.
Among Walton's many subjects here are the Zones of
Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean
by "mainstream"; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh;
the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science
fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read.
Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated
thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from
one of our best writers.
