Say What? of the Week

I know thinking of a snappy lede for a review is tough -- I spend a lot of time trying to do it myself, and I'm sure I've committed some real stinkers -- so I don't want to cast too much mud. But I'm wondering what works Bookgasm reviewer Ryun Patterson had in mind when he opened his take on Paul Melko's Singularity's Ring this way:

Big, hardcover science-fiction novels from first-time novelists — which Paul Melko’s Singularity's Ring is — usually get published because a publisher can hang an easy hook on them (with quotes from big-name authors saying “like Neuromancer … on speed!”) and they easily fall into slots in a publisher’s slate. (The Road is really hot right now. We need a post-apocalyptic dystopia stat!”)

(By the way, my own review of Singularity's Ring is here.)

The question at hand is: does Patterson have specific works in mind, or is he just making stuff up? (Reviewers do make things up; I've done it myself on occasion.)

We'll first need to get a pool of "big hardcover science-fiction novels from first-time novelists," which may not be easy. I first took a look at Locus's Recommended Reading list for 2007, which lists 9 titles in the "first novels" section. Sadly, as the Great Cham might have said, the ones that are hardcover are not science fiction, and the ones that are science fiction are not hardcover. (I'll leave off trying to define "big" for the moment.)

OK. Further googling led me to Fantasy Debut, a blog I was unaware of before. That blog tries to announce every major-publisher debut book in speculative fiction. Excellent!

So I'll work backward from their posts and build a list of recent candidates. Most of these were published in 2007, with a few in the prior couple of years:

• Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery
• Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe
• The Genesis Code by Christopher Forrest
• KOP by Warren Hammond
• Crystal Rain by Tobias S. Buckell
• The Outback Stars by Sandra McDonald
• Old Man's War by John Scalzi
• Elom by William H. Drinkard
• Truancy by Isamu Fukui

And that's all I've dug up, which are almost all from Tor. I'm sure other house have been publishing first-time SF writers in hardcover, right?

What other candidates are out there? Remember -- we're talking about "big," hardcover, SF novels. Blind item #1 is "Neuromancer on speed" and blind item #2 is a post-apocalyptic dystopia reminiscent of The Road. What could these books be?

Update: Novels added due to comments follow, and I expect this will be a growing list.

• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
• Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow