The Carhullan Army (aka Daughters of the North) by Sarah Hall (2007)
And so, the top-rated novel in this poll — by a healthy margin, in the end — is Sarah Hall’s Tiptree Award-winning and Clarke Award-nominated The Carhullan Army. Victoria Hoyle’s review gets at the book’s merits very well, I think:
…the inevitable irony of Carhullan’s insurgency, and of Sister’s membership of its “army,” is that it leads her to repress others against their will, and even to kill in her turn. She becomes party to another administration of terror, and a willing subject of a dictatorial regime. Whether this terror, driven by Jackie’s autocratic paranoia, is necessary or justifiable is left unanswered; the answer being, of course yes and, of course no. It is the embodiment of an essential dilemma, perhaps the most pertinent of our time: is it more courageous to passively follow your principles unto death, or is it your duty to use the tactics of the enemy, however disgusting, to overthrow them? Is it acceptable or reasonable to use the methods of tyranny in the name of restoring or protecting civil freedoms and human rights?
Either way, Hall understands that this dilemma is not an abstraction; it is the central difficulty of Sister’s existence and lies at the very heart of life at Carhullan. In the process of exploring it she makes and destroys and remakes Sister over and over again. Like us all, she is a malleable creature, eager to be inspired, happy to be galvanized to action, begging for a role to play in the world. The novel is an incredibly tender and multi-faceted portrait of her troubled journey, concerned almost entirely with the mechanics of her reasoning and her understanding of her cause. This is why, no doubt, Hall omits to describe the novel’s main scenes of violence and conquest—Sister’s narrative tapes are “corrupted” at all these critical junctures—but instead focuses on the tension of the long road to a short and bloody aftermath.
Other reviews: Colin Greenland in The Guardian, Nic Clarke at Eve’s Alexandria, AI White at Open Letters Monthly, Rachel Hoare in The Independent, Michael Arditti in The Telegraph, Tom Gatti in The Times, Abigail Nussbaum at Strange Horizons; and more critically, Adam Roberts at Punkadidle, Karen Burnham at SF Signal, and Cheryl Morgan.
And as Adam helpfully pointed out yesterday, with impeccable timing Radio 4′s Book Club has just had The Carhullan Army as its subject; you can listen to the programme, which includes an interview with Hall, here, discussed slightly by Dan Hartland here.
All of which leaves us with the following top eleven:
1. The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
2. Maul by Tricia Sullivan
3. Natural History by Justina Robson
4. The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
5= Spirit by Gwyneth Jones
5= The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
7. Life by Gwyneth Jones
8. Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin
9. Farthing by Jo Walton
10= Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones
10= City of Pearl by Karen Traviss
So: Eleven novels; nine writers, four Brits, three Americans, one American-Brit, one Canadian; three novels only published in the US, three novels only published in the UK, five novels published in both; four books published in 2003, the most recent nominee published in 2008; nine novels published as “genre”, two published as “mainstream”; two novels that at least some people think are fantasy. What do you think?
Ranking calculated from 101 responses to a poll run during October, November and December 2010.
December 10, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Seems a very diverse list, and a strong showing for sf by women.
December 10, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Jo Walton is British-Canadian, not just Canadian. Which is why this list looks very British-dominated to me, cumulatively. That feeling is exacerbated by the major recent Willis novels being about London. There is nothing wrong with all this, of course.
It is almost certainly an artifact of this project starting as a discussion of the Clarke Award, in a blog based in Britain, even if there were likely as many votes from elsewhere as from the UK. (It’s still conceivable that Britain just produces the best female science fiction novelists, but that is rather further down my lists of hypotheses.)
In any event, an interesting and though-provoking exercise which has given me lots of good books to look forward to!
December 10, 2010 at 2:21 pm
It seems like a solid list of great books. I’m definitely planning on reading some or all of the ones I’ve missed.
I do find it somewhat surprising that some of the most well-regarded SF books of the decade didn’t make it on — Oryx and Crake, for example, and The Hunger Games. And I have to admit I’m also still surprised to see Lavinia on there as an SF book.
The poll does seem to have something of a UK slant to it, even considering the high number of strong SF writers from that region. (My own submitted list had, I think, 2 UK, 1 Canadian, and 6 U.S. authors on it, which probably reflects my own regional slant.)
December 11, 2010 at 1:58 am
The Hunger Games was right up there until pretty much the last day of voting, when other things overtook it.
The UK presence is not quite as simple as lots of Brits voting for Brits — most votes for Life came from US resisdents, not surprisingly. I don’t know how Jones’ votes would have distributed themselves if all three books had been available equally in both regions, it’s possible they’d have clustered a bit more.
December 12, 2010 at 11:54 am
[...] Cedar Ave, and spent time talking about Jo Walton, her novel Among Others, Niall Harrison’s Top 10 SF Novels by Women, and other stuff. As always, [...]
January 15, 2011 at 7:16 pm
[...] second project is a followup to Niall’s fantastic survey of the best science fiction novels written by women in the last ten years. I will be reading a book a month from that list over the course of the next eleven months, and [...]
January 20, 2011 at 7:46 pm
[...] my projects for this year is to read through the eleven books voted by Torque Control readers as the best science fiction novels written by women between 2001 and 2010. Hopefully, some of you will be joining me in [...]
January 22, 2011 at 1:13 pm
[...] on them. Niall Harrison’s focus week on women in SF came and went and, though I voted in his future classics poll, I didn’t take part in any wider [...]
March 17, 2011 at 2:16 pm
[...] Shana posted at the start of the month, I’ve been reading the second (chronologically) of the Future Classics identified in last year’s poll, Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, and will be putting up some [...]
March 31, 2011 at 11:12 pm
[...] Moon’s Speed of Dark was the second of the poll-topping best science fiction novels written by women in the last ten years that we’ll be discussing here at Torque Control over the course of this year. It was the only [...]
May 4, 2011 at 11:00 pm
[...] book, Natural History, by Justina Robson, was the third in the chronological series of best science fiction novels written by women in the previous decade which we are reading here at Torque Control over the course of 2011. Published in 2003, it is the [...]
July 7, 2011 at 5:13 pm
[...] Tricia Sullivan’s Maul, the last of the 2003 novels from chronological exploration of the best science fiction novels written by women in the previous decade which we are reading here at Torque Control over the course of this calendar year. 2003 really [...]
August 8, 2011 at 1:44 pm
[...] profuse apologies for belatedness, here’s the start of my discussion of the Future Classic for July, Karen Traviss’ first novel City of Pearl. A bit of a curate’s [...]
November 29, 2011 at 9:54 am
[...] of responses, and it’s worth going and reading some of the reviews that Niall Harrison lists here, as well as Nick Hubble’s excellent piece from Vector [...]
December 18, 2011 at 10:45 am
[...] Hall’s The Carhullan Army won the Torque Control Future Classics by women last year. Readers of Torque Control are, naturally, erudite and possess excellent taste; [...]
May 6, 2012 at 3:55 pm
[...] it was shortlisted for the Clarke Award, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Tiptree Award , and came top in the Torque Control readers’ poll of best sf novels by women from 2001-10. It threw me a little at first to discover what an [...]