The Pleasures of Reading: 2021
by Lisa Tuttle
This time last year, I’d been invited to be the new SF/Fantasy reviewer for The Guardian – to write a round-up of from four to six of the best or most interesting works in this ever-growing genre published each month, beginning in February. Previously, I’d usually read between 65 to 70 books annually. This year, with three weeks still to go, I’ve read 99.
Since so much of my reading this year has been devoted to fiction published in 2021, I thought I’d give my suggestions for the Best SF Books of 2021. Anyway, these are the ones I’ve most enjoyed reading. (If you want to read my reviews, they can be found on The Guardian website.)
In no particular order, then: Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley, Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson, Dare to Know by James Kennedy and The Actual Star by Monica Byrne are, to my mind, instant classics of the genre that anyone who loves SF for its questioning and mind-expanding properties should read. They are thought-provoking, well-written, and hugely entertaining. Also, a book that could be considered a “lost classic” – lost, at least, to anglophone readers, since although it was originally published in Poland in the 1970s, the English translation only came out this year: Robot by Adam Wisniewski-Snerg. It’s a fascinating combination of hard science and philosophical speculation bedded in a strange, surreal plot.
Other outstanding novels I loved that might be more properly on a not-specifically or not-only-science fiction list – call them slipstream, cross-genre or simply good fiction: Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, Under the Blue by Oana Aristede, This Eden by Ed O’Loughlan and The Good Neighbours by Nina Allan. (That last one was assigned to the crime/mystery reviewer, appropriately, perhaps, but it has enough supernatural/folkloric elements to count as cross-genre.)
And finally, a genuine hybrid of a book, a combination of science fiction and nonfiction that is one of the most interesting things I read all year: The Love Makers: A Novel and Contributor Essays on the Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics by Aifric Campbell. It begins with a short novel set in the near future: Scarlett and Girl, then follows this with fourteen different essays picking up on various concerns and implications of things dramatized or only hinted at in the novel – as the subtitle reveals. The contributors write about things like the ethics of robotic care for the children or the elderly, human relationships with machines and AI, the impact that the construction, presentation and use of artificial intelligence has on human relationships and our ideas about race, sex and gender. This is all hugely important stuff, presented in a clear and sensible way. Given the difficulties of selling and then marketing books that don’t fit neatly into genre categories, it’s not surprising that this hybrid of science fiction and fact has an academic publisher (Goldsmiths Press), but I hope more readers will seek it out; it’s important to think about these things. I didn’t have the space to list all the contributors in my original very brief notice of this book, so here they are, in alphabetical order: Ronny Bogani, Joanna J. Bryson, Julie Carpenter, Stephen Cave, Anita Chandran, Peter R.N. Childs, Kate Devlin, Kanta Dihal, Mary Flanagan, Margaret Rhee, Amanda Sharkey, Roberto Trotta, E.R. Truitt and Richard Watson.
Lisa Tuttle is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. Her most recent novel is The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross. She has also published nonfiction and more than a dozen books for younger readers. In 1974 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and, in 1987, the BSFA award in the short fiction category. Aqueduct Press published her novella My Death in 2008. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she has made her home in a remote rural region of Scotland for the last twenty years.
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