Skip to main content

Almost Half of the 2020 GoodReads Choice Awards Winners Are SF/F

A werewolf in a profile position with a full moon in the background.
Credit: Pixabay

To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page! 

We’re well into the Holiday Season and the end of the year is coming. Although this year has been one of the most uncertain and scariest ever, the Holidays always bring hope of some sort. Besides, there’s never such a thing as a totally bad year. All years and eras have something good in them. And one of those good things are the best of something of the year. In this case, many blogs and publications over the internet will bring you a list of the best movies of the year or the best books of the year. On December 8th the book recommendation website, GoodReads, brought us the latter through its annual Choice Awards. The best books of 2020 were selected across 20 categories which ranged from general fiction to general non-fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to memoir and biography. Nearly half of these 20 books were speculative fiction or at least related to it. 

So, yours truly has listed below the eight books that were speculative in some sense. There was a ninth book that could be considered science fiction but I didn’t list it because it was mostly a humour comic. As much as I’ve been a big reader of comic books since I was five, with few exceptions this blog mostly discusses prose speculative fiction and its movie and TV adaptations. I did list one book of poetry because, for one, the author of it is a big name in science fiction. For another--you’ll find out when you get to it in the list below. 

I myself have not read any of these books but many look really good and I’m going to try to read them over the course of the upcoming year. Although all of the books listed below can be considered speculative in genre--science fiction, fantasy or horror--a few were nominated in other genre categories such as general fiction and romance. So along with the book titles and authors, I’m listing the categories the books were nominated in. You’ll find a synopsis for each book at its link.


8 Speculative Fiction Books From the 2020 GoodReads Awards 


Coming Soon

A special Holiday post and Book-To-Movie review are on their way in about the next week or two. Also, I will be offering sign-ups for an email list that I’m trying to get together for a monthly newsletter. Look out for it here at the Fantastic Site or at my Facebook page.  

Have you read any of the above books or to?

Until next time . . . 





Labels:

Comments

  1. Alex J. CavanaughDecember 13, 2020 at 9:22 AM

    I haven't read any of those either. Obviously people were reading to escape reality this year.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Steven Arellano Rose Jr.December 14, 2020 at 7:22 AM

      It's nice to see that more people are reading speculative. I can't blame them for wanting to escape the reality of this year.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Andromeda Strain’

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   It’s time for our monthly Book-To-Movie ! For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Today we are reviewing another book and film relevant to today’s pandemic: Michael Crichton’s novel, “The Andromeda Strain” and its 1971 movie adaptation. Crichton  is the writer of suspenseful science fiction, what would commonly be called today, science fiction thriller. “The Andromeda Strain” is exactly that. However, as good as this novel is, the suspense in the movie adaptation plays out better.  The Book In “The Andromeda Strain”, published in 1969, a NASA satellite returns to Earth carrying an alien virus. It lands in a small Arizona town by the name of Piedmont where the virus infects and kills everyone except an old man and an infant. A team of four scientists go to a top secret lab in Nevad...
2 comments
Read more

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Lawnmower Man’

Credit: Pixabay Warning: This review may contain spoilers. In past Book-To-Movies, we’ve reviewed several movie adaptations of books and short stories by famous science fiction and horror authors. All those films have stuck to the plot of the original work to at least some recognizable degree. But this week’s Book-To-Movie will be the first to review a film that does a poor job of staying faithful to the original plot. The film is 1992’s “The Lawnmower Man” which is based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name. Even so, the movie is a really good one. So then what’s the problem? The problem is that it’s hardly an adaptation and so more its own story simply with the title of King’s short work slapped onto it.  ‘The Lawnmower Man’: The Short Story Stephen King’s “The Lawnmower Man” originally appeared in “Cavalier” magazine in 1975 and was then collected into his book of short fiction, “Night Shift” the following year. The story’s protagonist is a middle-aged husband and dad ...
4 comments
Read more

4 Space Opera Books That’s Heroes Will Remind You of Han Solo

Credit: Pixabay.com No doubt that there’s been some big Star Wars news this week! Friday was the 41st anniversary of the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope , and so the birthday of the entire franchise. The day before, Solo: A Star Wars Story released in theatres. I haven’t seen this new Star Wars film yet but plan to tomorrow. But in celebration of the new movie I thought it would be neat to list four of my favourite space opera books that’s central characters share the same swashbuckling, rogue archetype as the Han Solo character does. Han Solo’s archetype, or primal character-type, combines traits of the cowboy, the pirate and the wandering adventurer. Characters who have these traits are often loners of a sort, are daring and don’t let the law stop them from doing what they feel they have to. Often the legal system that they defy is one that is set up by a corrupt establishment and, in the case of space operas, that establishment is often an empire. Even tho...
Post a Comment
Read more