December already. As I predicted in my 2020 year-end roundup, this blog has been very quiet this year, seeing just a few podcast episodes and a lukewarm book review. That’s not to say the year hasn’t been eventful for me, just not in a way that made me run to posting things here.

Within the world of science fiction and fantasy, I was surprised (very pleasantly, mind) but the appearance of khōréō magazine, dedicated to stories from an immigrant perspective. Their about page mission statement reflects some things I’ve written on this blog in the past about the unique compatibility of immigrant identity with imaginative literature. I longed to submit something since before the first issue, but the words didn’t come. Perhaps one day they will.

Here are some other things I found noteworthy this year.

Books

After some effusive enthusiasm from a friend, I took the plunge and bought the 10-volume e-book omnibus of Glen Cook’s Black Company series. I’d heard of it on the edges of fantasy circles, but underestimated its influence; much of the DNA of current fantasy series trace back here. That being said, Cook skirts around the raw cynicism of his acolytes: while the series indulges in shocking violence, it comes as little shock to the characters, who live through what all accounts is an awful period of history in their world and therefore the story doesn’t over-indulge itself in descriptions of misery.

Here we follow the Black Company, a band of mercenaries who plied their trade for centuries, as they are unwittingly drafted into the current Dark Lord’s army and, being bound to honour their contract, do her bidding. Things grow steadily more complicated after this simple but elegant premise. Cook also has a knack for writing about terrible people who nevertheless spark off chaotic situations that makes them fun to tag along with. This is a rare talent for an author, as I find unpleasant characters are easy to make flat, tiresome, or hard to stomach, but Cook will find some core quality that makes them sympathetic in some way. I have just finished the sixth novel and am happy to go on, where so many series in this vein have made me abandon ship with the first book.

I re-read Don Quixote this year, this time the Edith Grossman translation. Miguel de Cervantes, writing in the 17^th century, still manages a depth and warmth that has largely been unmatched. Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza are of course an iconic pair. They attempt to live Chivalric romances in an era where Spain had long since moved on from chivalry, but its in the encounters with everyday life rubbing against a man out of time that the novel shines with an almost transcendent sense of humour.

There’s a theme of great characters this year: Martha Wells’s first Murderbot novel (following a series of novellas), Network Effect, digs a bit deeper into its awakened AI. The Murderbot’s voice is among the strongest to come out of science fiction: puzzled by humans, wanting contact, too awkward to approach the subject. Wells has always been good at banter but the dialogue here felt like a grand achievement. Great fun, but thoughtful too.

Finally, The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk took a few chapters to win me over, but I ended up getting swept into this regency romance with magic. There is a danger of the interplay between nobles feeling trivial, but Polk manages to tease out genuine feeling through character relationships and evokes the suffocating nature of social structures. This eventually brings real stakes to Beatrice’s attempts to became a female magic user in a land that doesn’t want them. The ending is too neatly resolved, perhaps, but it’s hard not to forgive it.

Comics

I stumbled upon a lot of great webcomics this year; Tigress Queen by Allie Shaw was undoubtedly the most delightful. Kizarasunga travels to the enemy nation of Jaez to broker peace, but the tough warlord finds that peace requires her to marry the pampered prince Jintu. Both parties are strongly against this, but as these things go, only at first.

What could be just a gender-swapped version of a setup we’ve seen countless times before ended up consistently overturning my expectations. Instead of letting misunderstandings spin out of control, characters confront each other, effectively short-circuiting the usual motifs. The romance instead becomes built around the growth of mutual trust. The art is just as strong as the writing, showcasing bright colour palettes, fabulous hair, and people who express emotions with their whole bodies. I can’t stop raving about it.

Movies

Somehow I had never seen Goodfellas before this year. I can’t really add anything to the conversations around this Martin Scorsese classic beyond it being downright weird to see Ray Liotta give a great performance in a movie when up to this point, I’d only seen him in, shall we say, lesser works. An incredible bit of cinema.

Denis Villeneuve adapted half of Dune for the screen this year. On social media I largely saw people sniping at it and declaring the superiority of David Lynch’s 1984 version, to which I can only say—I vehemently disagree (largely because I think Dune ‘84 is trash). The approach Villeneuve took is a very deliberate one, choosing not to explain anything not directly related to the story at hand, and instead dropping you into an alien future. Between the production design, music and sound, I was completely absorbed. But as a coherent whole…it isn’t one, not yet, and there is the inherent weakness in adaptation: a novel can be as long as the author wants it to be and present as a single work. A movie is bound to how long an audience member can sit there before having to go pee, and with a story the size of Dune, achieving the thematic effect using this immersive style means a two year wait before these films can encompass a fraction of what the book did.

It’s still a hell of a first half, though.

TV

The first season of Foundation is just barely an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s original fix-up novel. Yet I also don’t see how it could have been faithful and worked as seasonal TV; the individual stories that make up the Foundation trilogy span large breadths of time and mostly aren’t of inherent interest in of themselves, with their interchangeable shuffle of characters moving about marionette-like in service of an absurdly ambitious, centuries-spanning story.

The best parts of Foundation don’t have anything to Asimov at all. Lee Pace as 1/3 of the galactic tripartite emperor has a lot of screen time for good reason: he exudes an aura that demands attention, and it would have been a waste not to use him. Most of the acting, in fact, is very good, and it was easy to latch onto the cast…but once again, besides Hari Seldon, almost none of these characters are in the source material. The scope and the attention to detail in the production design are what carry over. I did not particularly want an adaptation of these books, but they did a great job here.

An unexpected hit for 2021 was Arcane, which few people seemed to have high expectations for before its release. While taking place in the setting of the video game League of Legends, it succeeds by not adapting any story out of that game but instead playing around in that world on its own terms. The striking animation style certainly helps, and the angry women punching each other part of the plot really captured me.

Unfortunately, there’s a whole other strand to the story that isn’t executed so well: a political council-members-jockeying-for-power element that falters along and features characters who make decisions for the sake of connecting dots instead of anything you could trace to their own personalities. The story, too, can feel dragged down by its setting, which is just a hodgepodge of cool looking stuff without much rhyme or reason behind it. The show is pulled in too many directions, I feel; the parts I liked are very strong and managed to more or less keep things centred, but I don’t know if I’m confident in future seasons maintaining the same amount of drive.

Computer games

Role-playing games are time commitments, Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) even more so with their focus on long, intricate (some would say over-stuffed) plots. I never played a game in the Tales series before and most sources indicate Tales of Berseria was the wrong place to start, only for dedicated fans of JRPGs. But it was on sale, and I remembered seeing the trailer once and finding it intriguing, so I took the plunge, and had a grand old time. The conceit here is that you play a character who would normally be a villain: she’s hell-bent to take revenge on the heroes of the world for their founder murdering her brother so he could attain the power needed to fight a demonic invasion, and she proceeds to do terrible things to achieve her goal. On the way, she gathers a merry band of misfits, which are the real draw of the game—their personalities play off each other very well, and the game rewards you with extensive conversations between the main cast of strong personalities and superb voice acting. While the story is a meandering collection of adventures where the “heroes” eventually end up saving the world despite everyone hating them, I found I got really attached to my party. There are several elements that will be definite turn-offs for a lot of people, the clothing choices and wild shifts in tone being a couple of them, but I ended up sinking a lot of hours into this one.

I am also now about halfway through Tales of Symphonia, which is overall a better game but much more standard in its characters and overall tone.

I finally played Portal II this year. I played the first Portal when I was still in university. Portal II isn’t as elegant as the first game, but does a lot of things right for a sequel, and I found myself having a bit more fun. Clever puzzles now pair with a much twistier narrative diving into the backstory of Aperture Science and offering up a couple of more characters from the sparse cast of the original. The jokes mostly land, the portal gun is still an excellent concept to build a game around, and the ending song is just as catchy as the first one. All in all, a fantastic experience.

Notable, but perhaps not praiseworthy

I guess I’m the one Millennial who did not wholeheartedly fall in love with Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The writing is, in fact, painfully Millennial in nature, but Muir manages to largely balance the raw juxtaposition of an operatic space necromancer setting with a mid-2000s teen soap opera for maximum effect. I enjoyed myself until the last 100 pages of this 400-some page book, when the plot asserts and injects itself when up to that point there wasn’t much of one. Asking for emotional investment in the narrative after 300 pages of (admittedly amusing) faffing about was a step too far for me. 

I am still reading the comic Monstress, mostly thanks to getting access to the Hoopla app through my public library. The art by Sana Takeda remains spectacular, but the writing by Marjorie Liu grows steadily worse. By The Vow (vol. 6) it appears that the narrative will never meaningfully challenge Maika Halfwolf’s attitude or actions, even after she threatens to slaughter civilians on her own side in volume 5. Strong artwork can’t save everything else.

Both of the above works have something to recommend about them. Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters really doesn’t, and falls into the “books I regret ever finishing” bin. This novel about an America where slavery never ended, centring on an escaped slave who now works to catch escaped slaves, is remarkably tone-deaf. It’s written exclusively by and for a white middle class audience. I’ve concluded that Winters has a talent for cranking out TV pilot pitches which he then strains through bland, formulaic plots, and this one only stands out by how unsuited the author was to handle this material.    

Final

Sorry for ending on a downer note, but it’s only to signal for brighter things to come. That’s it for 2021. Happy New Year when it comes, and I wish you a wonderful 2022.