This is more-or-less my last blogging day of 2021 (I may sneak a post or two in before the New Year, but I might not), so it’s time for my annual roundup of my book reviews from the year gone by. I’ve sorted this year’s books by genre (sf/f, other novels, graphic novels, YA, nonfic) and summarized the reviews with links to the full review. Here’s last year’s installment:
As ever, casting my eye over the year’s reading fills me with delight (at how much I enjoyed these books) and shame (at all the excellent books I was sent or recommended that I did
not get a chance to read). 2021 was a hard year for all of us and I’m no exception. I ended up whiffing on
so many astonishingly great and highly desirable books this year and I feel awful about it, to be honest.
I know what it’s like to launch a book in a pandemic (I had
four books out in 2020, ugh), and I so want to get those writers’ and publishers’ books into your hands. I might actually start an aspirational “books I wish I was reading” monthly or quarterly list for 2022.
On the subject of book publishing a pandemic: last year saw the publication of the paperback of my novel
Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book:
There’s still signed stock at Dark Delicacies, and depending on the postal service, it’s possible that if you order one (or the other signed books of mine they have on hand) that you’ll get it in time for the Christmas break.
And speaking of 2022, I’ll be publishing the first of
seven planned books for 2022/¾ in September: “Culture Heist: The Rise of Chokepoint Capitalism and How Workers Can Defeat It,” comes out from Beacon Press in September. It’s a book on monopoly and creative labor exploitation that I co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin and it’s
excellent.
Now, onto the reviews!
Science fiction/fantasy novels
I.
Situation Normal, by Leonard Richardson
Technically, I reviewed this in 2020, but it came out *after* last year’s roundup. Richardson’s second novel is a droll, weird, fast-moving space-opera with a gigantic cast, myriad subplots, and fascinating premises – a novel so brilliantly conceived that it runs like precision clockwork.
Miles’ debut novel is a taut, conspiratorial thriller with overtones of PK Dick by way of Qanon and Dark City, a supernatural tale that illuminates the thrill and terror of ARG-like groups.
A magic realist novel of New York City that is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his ilk.
A tense dystopian thriller about the unraveling of a paranoid hermit kingdom established as a final redoubt against humanity’s ascent to the cloud. Sharpson’s debut is a claustrophobic nightmare of transhuman refusal and authoritarianism.
The final Sandman Slim novel was more than a decade in the making, and it is a triumphant capstone to a supernatural noir series that transcended the tropes of both noir and the supernatural with a tale of personal transformation, redemption, revenge and sacrifice.
This debut novel is fantastic, funny, furious and fucking amazing. It is a profound and moving story about justice wrapped up in a gag about superheroes, sneaky and sharp.
The sequel to Eggers’ 2013 techno-dystopian satire “The Circle,” and it’s a deeply discomfiting, darkly hilarious, keen-edged tale of paternalism and its discontents.
Gus Moreno’s debut novel, “This Thing Between Us,” is a genuinely creepy supernatural horror novel, a book that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and prompted me to turn on the nightlight at bedtime.
“LaserWriter II” is Tamara Shopsin’s fictionalized history of Tekserve, NYC’s legendary Apple computer repair store. It’s a vivid, loving, heartfelt portrait of an heroic moment in the history of personal computing: a moment when computers transformed lives and captured the hearts of people in every field of endeavor.
STREAMLINER is the story of a secret outlaw jalopy hotrod race that plays out with so much fucking noir it’s practically vantablack, in a way that makes it clear why STREAMLINER and its creator Fane are great heroes of the French comics scene.
An alternate world in which another race of hominids – cylcopes with one eye and one breast – have existed alongside us “two-eyes.” Their relations are presented as a series of lighthearted gags, many of which made my literally cry with laughter. It’s an incredibly, admirably sneaky way to tell a profound story about race and gender and class.
Bubble is a comedy/sf story about a distant outpost on a hostile planet where human colonists live under armored domes that keep out the hostile, overpowered critters that live on the surface. It’s a wildly improbable artifact – a graphic novel adaptation of that turns podcasting into a visual medium.
I. Permanent Record, the Young Readers Adaptation, by Edward Snowden
Snowden’s sprightly prose, his deep technical knowledge, his superb knack for explaining complex matters, his ability to articulate principled action all come together in a book that is, if anything, better than the adult version. Books for teens cast a long shadow. They can alter the course of a person’s life. I was permanently affected by the books I read as an adolescent.
In “The Halloween Moon,” Welcome to Nightvale co-creator Joseph Fink brings his superb, unmatchable gift for balancing the weird and the real to a spooky middle-grades novel that echoes such classics as Neil Gaimans Coraline.
III.
Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders
Anders’ debut YA novel is superb – an exciting, engrossing book that captures everything great about young adult tropes while deftly subverting the problems those tropes present, without ever losing sight of the reason we love YA and space-opera: majesty and sweep, good and evil, bravery and sacrifice, treachery and danger.
This should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH STATISTICS - it goes beyond debunking bad stats and instead shows how stats can be part of how we discover truth. It presents a 10-part method for avoiding statistical pitfalls *and* doing *good* statistical analysis.
II.
Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air, by Sarah Bridle
Bridle’s clear, nonthreatening, technical language, brilliant data visualizations, and examples grounded in our daily experience make this a powerful read. It comes to a devastating conclusion: our species’ survival depends on eating more plants, with more centrally (and efficiently) prepared meals.
III.
Competition is Killing Us, by Michelle Meagher
Both an account of how Meagher rebuilt her understanding of markets, law and economics, and a smartly argued, fast-moving history of the neutering of monopoly law, a plot hatched and executed by the Chicago School of neoliberal economists. The Chicago School put competition enforcement in chains. Meagher’s book shatters them. It’s proof that this world is neither inevitable nor immutable, but rather, something that we can and must transform.
Dayen weaves explainers and personal stories together, unpicking snarled knots of bullshit and laying them straight to reveal them for the turds they are; then showing how we’re personally drowning in crap. From pharma to aviation, airlines to newspapers, Big Tech to Big Funeral, Dayen connects the scams that picks our pockets, robs us of dignity and life chances, and laugh in our faces.
More than a celebration of the hidden woman heroes of the computing revolution – also an epitaph for all the people whose talent, aptitude, dreams and contributions were squandered by a system based on mass exclusion. It’s proof that the differences between fields are socially – not biologically -determined.
A for-real version of those neo-neolithic Youtubers who show how to bootstrap advanced tooling from raw materials; a physical version of the beloved first-person accounts of daring feats recounted in the pages of 2600. This is true adversarial interoperability – treating the environment as a puzzle and a challenge, to be deconstructed and reconfigured, overcoming user-hostile designs and armed enforcers.
A pitiless – but empathic – look at the lives of the (mostly) American super-rich: the transactional relationships, the paranoia and fear, the greed, the lavish goods, the rootless pingponging from one home to another, the feuding, ruined offspring, the constant preoccuptation with accumulation… It’s ghastly. Legitimately horrible.
VIII.
Mutual Aid, by Peter Kropotkin, David Graeber, and others
Painstaking researched and beautifully argued, MUTUAL AID reveals the scientific fraud of “social Darwinism,” and its claims that hierarchy and exploitation are evolutionary inevitabilities baked into our very nature. This is a gorgeous illustrated edition with a new introduction by David Graeber.
Come for graphic sexual content, stay for thoughtful and well-thought-through philosophy. Savage’s latest is an illustrated, alphabetical tour through the concepts and tropes of his decades-long corpus of sexual wisdom, humor and learning.
