![]() ![]() ![]() In SF novels, the year began with one of its highest-profile titles, William Gibson’s Agency, a sort of sequel/prequel to 2014’s The Peripheral and supposedly the middle volume in the Jackpot Trilogy. ![]() My own reading, as always, was largely governed by review deadlines, so I’ll begin with the usual disclaimer that I simply didn’t get to a number of important books, and that omitting them here is in no way a value judgment. But when I spoke with dozens of authors during a long series of daily Coode Street podcasts, I came away with the impression that the most popular COVID-relief reading was Martha Wells’s delightful Murderbot series, which finally added a full-length novel with Network Effect. At least three different projects solicited stories for a new Decameron (since its frame involved hiding out from the plague in Florence), the most relevant to our purposes here involving the redoubtable Jo Walton. People dug out their old college copies of Camus’s The Plague or Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and asked themselves whether rereading Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book was really such a good idea under the circumstances. By the end of the year, Stephen King’s The Stand was back as a TV series even longer than the one back in 1994 like COVID, it’s probably not yet over even as you read this. One of the most widely streamed films during those early months was the decade-old Contagion, which only reminded us of the halcyon days when it was still SF (at least Gwyneth Paltrow died in the first reel, whereas in our timeline she survived to give us Goop, which as I write is hawking a $75 Italian face mask). What had previously been the most boring software to emerge from the corporate app world, Zoom, suddenly became a lifeline for many, especially those without pants, while a simple trip to pick up groceries began to feel like going out on patrol in Predator, or wandering through a crowd of body snatchers who look just like us. Many of the usual distractions seemed to go on hold in the spring, and most of them never came back. It should have been a good year for reading. ![]()
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