According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,694 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2017, down 6 percent from 2,858 titles in 2016. New titles were down 7 percent to 1,820 from 2016’s 1,957, while reprints dropped 3 percent to 874 titles from 2016’s 910. Hardcovers dropped by 5 percent to 883 titles from 2016’s record high of 856. Trade paperbacks dropped to 1,433 titles, down 7 percent from 2016’s 1,539. Mass-market paperbacks, the format facing the most competition from ebooks, continued to drop for the ninth year in a row, down 2 percent to 378 titles from 2016’s 385. The number of new SF novels was down 7 percent to 396 titles from 2016’s 425 titles. The number of new fantasy novels was down 6 percent to 694 titles from 2016’s 737, which climbed up 8 percent from 2015’s 682 titles, with 246 of those titles being YA fantasy novels. Horror novels were down 10 percent to 154 from 2016’s 171 titles. Paranormal romances rose to 122 titles from 2016’s 107, still down considerably from 2011’s 416 titles at the height of the paranormal romance boom.
It’s legitimate to say that 2017 saw a drop across all novel categories—but those drops were minor. Yet 2,694 books “of interest to the SF field” is still an enormous number of books, probably more than some small-town libraries contain of books in general. Even if you consider only the 396 new SF titles, that’s still a lot of books, more than 2009’s total of 232 titles, and considerably larger than the total number of SF novels published in prior decades—probably more than most people are going to have time to read (or the desire to read, either). And these totals don’t count many ebooks, media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, print-on-demand books, or self-published novels—all of which would swell the overall total by hundreds if counted.
As usual, busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning those novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2017.
Luna: Wolf Moon, by Ian McDonald (Tor); Austral, by Paul McAuley (Gollancz); New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit); The House of Binding Thorns, by Aliette de Bodard (Ace); The Moon and the Other, by John Kessel (Saga); Tomorrow’s Kin, by Nancy Kress (Tor); Persepolis Rising (Orbit), by James S. A. Corey; Convergence, by C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga), by John Crowley; The Corporation Wars: Emergence (Orbit), by Ken MacLeod; Guomon (Heinemann), by Nick Harkaway; The Wrong Stars (Angry Robot), by Tim Pratt; The Stone in the Skull, by Elizabeth Bear (Tor); Akata Warrior, by Nndi Okorafor (Viking); Tool of War, by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown); The Real-Town Murders, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz); Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit); Quillifer, by Walter Jon Williams (Saga); The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit); Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris); The Uploaded, by Ferrett Steinmetz (Angry Robot); Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory (Knopf); Bannerless, by Carrie Vaughn (John Joseph Adams); The Masacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz); The Man in the Tree, by Sage Walker (Tor); The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor); Cold Welcome, by Elizabeth Moon (Del Rey); Assassin’s Fate, by Robin Hobb (Del Ray); Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow (Tor); and Empire Games (Tor), by Charles Stross.