2021 in Books
In 2021 I managed 116 books, which is pretty good considering that I had a son this year, started going to the gym, and took up a second job in Deep Rock Galactic. I also started reading a lot more non-fiction, sliding away from my love of speculative fiction towards more pragmatic books about how different aspects of the world work. Which means I need to think about how to categorize them more finely, since there are several deserving books which didn’t make the cut.
Best History
The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Blevins. There were two Cold Wars. The first was an apocalyptic technowar, eyeball-to-eyeball-to-thermonuclear-mushroom-cloud; a war of research and development which thankfully never went hot. And then there was the war that was actually fought, the competition for the loyalties of the Third World, the arc of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where billions of people lived. In this second Cold War, the United States had a secret weapon, one which it deployed repeatedly with great success. No, not rock and roll, Coca-Cola, the transistor radio and color TV. It was mass murder carried out by local anti-Communist death squads with covert support from the CIA, Army Special Forces, and multinational corporations based in the US. Blevins documents how a genocide perfected in Indonesia spread across the world, and how the Pax American we enjoy rests on a foundation of corpses.
Best Science Fiction
Exhalation by Ted Chiang proves that science fiction is still the literature of ideas. In nine stories, he explores themes of predestination, fate, childhood, and the nature of divinity. His stories are gems, perfect miniatures of imagination and the merciless extrapolation of their premise. I particularly liked the creationist story “Omphalos”, where a scientist exploring the evidence of God’s unique act finds a truth she does not care for.
Best Fantasy
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker is a balm to anyone who’s been the only sane person on a complex technical project. Engineer Orhan works for an Empire that’s a lot like the Byzantines, when a surprise attack aimed with shocking strategic insight leaves him in defense of the City, facing off against a massive barbarian horde of ex-conquered people with walls and whatever defenders he can scrounge up. What follows is improvisation after improvisation, leavened with hefty doses of irony and a sardonic authorial voice.
Best Non-Fiction
On the Clock: What Low Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger is an explanation of what real jobs are like for those of us who don’t punch a time clock. Laid off as a journalist, she worked at an Amazon Warehouse, a Convergys call center, and a San Francisco McDonalds. Each of these jobs is it’s own special circle of hell, routines carefully crafted to push her to physical and psychological limits while offering just enough money to make it to the next day. I think almost everything that’s gone wrong in America in the past 50s years can be blamed on jobs like these, on employers which deliberate exhaust and torment their employees to increase shareholder value and break any possibility of labor power. This is how the system works, and it won’t change until we understand it.
Best Roleplaying Game
Neon Black by Michael Elliot is a gem of subtle design. Built on the strong chassis of Blades in the Dark, it’s a love letter to classic cyberpunk like Neuromancer. Your crew of misfits builds a community while dancing along the edge of catastrophe. Having looked at a lot of Blades hacks, Neon Black achieves a singular unity of alignment between fiction and mechanics. The changes are small, but from cyberware to Luck they’re precisely tuned to help you feel like Case and Molly cracking Wintermute. From a GMing perspective, the non-repeating downtime scenes which advance the state of the world, are a genius way to lay out a flexible campaign.
Best Military History
Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Built the Arsenal of Democracy That Won World War II by Arthur Herman gives proof to Napoleon’s adage that amateurs study strategy and professionals study logistics by looking at the production war that enabled the Allied triumph. Bill Knudsen, the General Motors executive who pioneered flexible mass production, and megaprojects contractor Henry Kaiser, serve as the twin focuses of this book on industrial mobilization. Herman is a dyed-in-the-wool American Enterprise Institute conservative, so this book is paean to industry interspersed with swings against FDR and New Deal democrats, but as long as you remember that American citizens paid for the cost +8% contracts and American workers ran the machines, this book shows what it takes to accomplish great things.
Book of the Year
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a tour de force, a popular explanation of new research in anthropology and archeology, which argues that cities and complex society were elements of the human story before agriculture, and especially before the tyranny of kings and bureaucracies. A true understanding of the past shows that humans are inherently noble savages or brutes, but that we have always explored diverse ways to live according to our individual and collective values. Graeber and Wengrow are fascinating, provocative, and leave previous ‘grand human histories’ by Jared Diamond, Yuval Harari, and Steven Pinker trampled in the dust.
