February's recommendation: Celestial Matters, by Richard Garfinkle.
Oh my god this book is full of awesome.
I can encapsulate the source of the awesome by quoting from Harry Turtledove's blurb: "This is hard science fiction with a difference, the difference being that the hard sciences are Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian physics and biology."
In other words, imagine that Alexander and Aristotle kicked joint ass for decades and that nine hundred years later, you've got futuristic science fiction in a world where Ptolemy and Aristotle were right. The Delian League of Athens and Sparta is at war with the Middle Kingdom (the two realms essentially controlling the entire world at this point), but that war may be about to come to an end at last: the three Prometheus Projects of Forethought, Manmaker, and Sunthief may overthrow the Middlers at last. Aias, the scientific commander of Sunthief, is preparing to sail a hunk of moon rock through the heavenly spheres to the sun, where they will rope and tow back a piece of celestial fire, then throw it at the Middler capital of 'AngXou.
Garfinkle does a stupendous job of building everything, not just the astronomy, on a classical Greek base (where he isn't building it on a Taoist Chinese one; the mutual confusion of Middlers and Delians is a delight to behold). Medicine involves injecting people with the appropriate humour or having them breathe rarified air. Armies are supplied by spontaneous-generation farms that grow cows out of manure. They have guns, of a sort; evac tubes powered by fire-gold shoot tetrahedronal missles at the enemy. Kleon, the celestial navigator, works out his equations with Pythagorean math and a lute.
But you know what? That isn't the part that fascinates me the most. I'm a fantasy person at heart, and what I love is that Garfinkle doesn't try to make his Greeks shed their philosophy and religion on their way to a technological future. Statues of the gods stand on the moon fragment that is Aias' ship, and before setting forth on their journey, the crew gathers to sacrifice lambs and bulls to them. Inspiration, determination, and other key psychological moments are described as a matter of a particular god or goddess temporarily touching or bestowing their mantle on one of the mortal characters. And Garfinkle doesn't cheat by making this clearly a metaphor; there's no hint, when Athena gifts Aias with wisdom, that anything's happening other than a goddess really and truly granting him favor. I haven't gotten around yet to making my post about what I thnk hard fantasy is, but this book is a perfect example of the similarity I see between it and hard SF: if anything, I'd just call this hard speculative fiction, and not worry about which side of that divide it's supposed to fall into.
I also admire Garfinkle's deft touch at multiculturalism. In addition to the mutually incomprehensible philosophies of the Delians and the Middlers, he also gives us characters who are Persians, Romans, Aethiopians, Gauls, Tibetan Buddhists, Atlanteans (can you guess where that is?), and one supremely awesome Xeroki (Cherokee) woman that is the hardest Spartan warrior you could ever aspire to be, since "Spartan," at this point, means someone trained in their elite college of war, and they'll take anybody elite enough to make it in.
And along the way, Garfinkle manages to put in some interesting thoughts about the relationship of science and war, the role of history in guiding the future, the meaning of Prometheus' story, and that classically Greek flaw known as hubris. Small wonder this thing won an award for Best First Novel. (Oh yeah -- the bugger was brand new when he did this, too.) Like I said: full of awesome.