This book features 16 stories of magic, passion, horror, and wonder, all set in and around Slatter's richly-imagined cathedral-city of Lodellan. Characters and events from one tale reappear or are referenced in the next, and while each of these fairy tale-like stories can stand on its own merit, the whole collection when read together forms a sort of mosaic novel that is beautifully realized and compellingly written.

This novel explores a mind-altering technology gone awry. The shine is beamed directly into the brain, and the recipient benefits from the best in self-improvement plus amazingly cool entertainment. Los Sombres is a city, now under quarantine, in which a renegade shine negatively affects only the adult population, driving them mad. Xavier is a Los Sombres youth who must find a drug to delay puberty until the shine can be shut down, or a cure can be found.

This is a post-human novel, in which Nathi, a brilliant and talented brain doctor who died and uploaded his mind five centuries ago, is now tasked with saving a comatose girl with extensive damage to her brain. In mapping his own mind onto the damaged brain of this young girl, Nathi discovers a trap awaiting him -- the girl's brain harbor's a Wish Fairy, which is designed to kill the Wish that has enslaved all post-human minds, including Nathi's...

Zoo City is a festering slum of Beukes' re-imagined Johannesburg. Here the criminal underclass and their animal familiars rule the streets. Zinzi is a resident of Zoo City looking for a ticket out. She has a knack for finding things, including people -- even if they're doing everything possible to remain hidden. Zinzi is hired to find a pop starlet, and this could be her big chance to make it out of the slum. But only if she can stay alive long enough to outwit criminals and their magic, and get the job done.

The latest from Daniel Suarez is a direct sequel to his first novel, Daemon (Penguin, 2008 / Dutton/Quercus, 2009). The Daemon is now in control of world commerce and has plans in motion to use real-world darknet operatives to tear down civilization and build it from the ground up. Former detective Pete Sebeck is the Daemon's most powerful -- and possibly most reluctant -- operative, and he must lead a band of enlightened humans to protect the new world order, all in the face of a brutal civil war.

Second in the Spellcrackers series, in which Genny Taylor works for Spellcrackers.com, an organization of witches specializing in cleaning up magical messes. Ghosts, witches, vampires, grumpy neighbours, and sexual harassment at work are all facts of life for Genny. But when when one of her friends is magically murdered, she feels an obligation to track down the killer. Unfortunately, she herself appears to be the prime suspect...

Previously published separately as The Way of the Shadows (Orbit, October 2008), Shadow's Edge (Orbit, November 2008), and Beyond the Shadows (Orbit, December 2008). Azoth has one objective: to become the most accomplished assassin the city has ever known. He studies under the legendary assassin Durzo Blint in an effort to become the perfect killer. Did I say one objective? Ok, two: he also aims to survive. Neither of these goals will be easy to accomplish.

This book was #2 on the Readers' Choice Top 10. For Billy Harrow, a curator at the British Museum, his pride and joy is a 40-foot specimen of a giant squid which the public loves to gawk at. Until one day it is mysteriously, impossibly gone. Then a human corpse is found folded and preserved in a smaller version of the squid's bottle. London is a far stranger place than Billy every realized, and someone or something is willing to kill in order to liberate the Squid God, or keep it hidden.

This novel was chosen by the SF Site Readers' as their favourite book of 2010. It begins with a suicide bomber on a crowded Istanbul tram, and follows the lives of 6 very different people whose lives are all affected by this incident, and whose paths intersect. One witness to the bombing thereafter begins to see djinni and saints; a young invalid witnesses the event through the eyes of a BitBot monkey, and witnesses someone else also spying remotely; this boy shares his concerns with a disgruntled professor who has been forced into retirement; another woman is delayed by the blast in her effort to get to a job interview and consequently takes a job that involves her in a nanoware company; an antique dealer is set on a quest to find a legendary object -- while her boyfriend is planning a stock-market scheme of unprecedented proportions.

So the book the SF Site Reviewers and Contributors chose as the best of 2010 was the latest from William Gibson. It concludes the overarching story established in Pattern Recognition (2003) and continued in Spook Country (2007). Hollis Henry and Milgrim return in this final book to do more work for Hubertus Bigend -- no matter how badly they may want nothing more to do with him. Bigend's current scheme has them investigating the new trend for blending streetwear and military combat-wear. "The culture of the military has trickled down to the street -- Bigend knows that, and he'll find a way to take a cut. What surprises him though is that someone else seems to be on top of that situation in a way that Bigend associates only with himself. Bigend loves staring into the abyss of the global market; he's just not used to it staring back."