It's taken a little while to get here but now Claude Lalumière has chosen his best SF, Fantasy and Horror of 2006 for Locus Magazine.
His choice for best sf novel of the year: Passarola Rising by Azhar Abidi, which he describes as follows: "For his debut novel, Azhar Abidi combines two archetypal SF subgenres, the alternate history and the fantastic voyage. The premise: what if, in eighteenth-century Portugal, Bartolomeu Lourenço had been permitted to build and fly the airship he had designed? Abidi concocts a rousing adventure novel in which the eighteenth century comes alive as a truly alien world and in which the profound bond between two brothers (Lourenço's brother Alexandre narrates the tale) is explored with depth and
sensitivity."
