Probably the best sf book I've read in the last year is
Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie. The protagonist is an Al which used to run a interplanetary warship but is now confined to a single human body. Something happened and now the protagonist is seeking revenge, but the protagonist-narrator takes the entire length of the book to little by little give out the details, and the mystery of what was actually going on was riveting to me. The novel is the beginning of a trilogy.
Another interesting aspect is that the language used by the narrator doesn't have gendered pronouns; the English uses she/her to refer to all the characters. Only occasionally does something biological get mentioned to give away a character's sex.
So far, I've liked everything I've read by Vernor Vinge.
It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn't know what he was talking about. -- Paul Krugman
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