2011 books
26) George Saunders, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, 2005
Saunders is an acquired taste, but he also penned one of my favourite collections of recent years, Pastoralia. The man has a fertile and often bizarre imagination that doesn't quite fit the label science fiction, yet he often leans heavily in that direction: this novella, a case in point, took Saunders five years to write and was originally a novel that was cut by two-thirds to what Saunders reckoned to be its proper length, telling the story of a society of strange beings (variously part human and part machine) that falls apart from the sudden rise of an opportunist dictator called Phil. Good fables need not be long and, as if to to draw a lesson from an earlier example, Phil is most certainly a direct descendant of Orwell's equally brief satire Animal Farm. This is a darkly funny book - never once did I find myself asking "what's the point of all this?" because that's self-evident, yet Saunders' strange hybrid creatures are what makes this very original, despite the clearly implied homage to Orwell.