2021 Wrapped

Below is a big list of pretty much everything we published on the Vector site this year (and there’s more on the main BSFA site too).

We’ve decided to mostly give our “Best SFF of the Year” feature a skip this year. Hopefully it will be back next year.

But here’s Wole Talabi on African SFF in 2021. And in lieu of other ‘best of’ features, here are a few links to various roundups on other sites …

• Nina Allan’s books of the year
• Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian
• Adam Roberts in The Guardian
• James Lovegrove in the FT
• Clark, Gennis and Robinson for Polygon
• Alex Brown and others for Tor.com
• Literary Hub’s best reviewed sci-fi, fantasy and horror
• Jack Deighton’s best of year
• Abigail Nussbaum, A Year in Reading
• BSFA’s crowdsourced 2021 publications sheet

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Here’s Nick Hubble, guest editor of the latest Vector, on their 2021.

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What has the Vector site has been up to this year? Quite a bit, it turns out! Most of the reviews were originally published in The BSFA Review ed. Sue Oke, and some of the articles originally appeared in Vector print editions. Going forward, fiction reviews have moved to the BSFA main site.

Interviews and Roundtables

• “Do we want that?” Mackenzie Jorgensen interviews Eli Lee (part one)
• Mackenzie Jorgensen interviews Eli Lee (part two)
• Dan Byrne-Smith in conversation with Gordon Cheung
• History-informed futures: Angela Chan and Beatrice Glow
• Intimate Earthquakes: An interview with Sensory Cartographies
• Maggie Shen King and Chen Qiufan (Stanley Chan) in conversation
• Global Tolkien – A Roundtable

Reviews

• The Tragedy of the Worker: Toward the Proletarocene by The Salvage Collective
• The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
• Radio Life by Derek B. Miller
• Fearless by Allen Stroud
• A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
• Railhead by Philip Reeve
• Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937
• Africanfuturism: An Anthology ed. Wole Talabi
• Ruby by Nina Allan
• Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work by John Danaher
• AfroSF vol. 3 ed. Ivor Hartmann
• Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games by Andrew Reinhard
• Vigil by Angela Slatter
• Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
• The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature by Lisa Garforth
• The Djinn Falls in Love (and other short stories) ed. Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin
• The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard
• Lost Gods by Micha Yongo
• Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill
• Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan
• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• Two collections of Uyghur folklore
• Menace of the Machine: The Rise of AI in Classic Science Fiction edited by Mike Ashley
• The Question Mark by Muriel Jaeger and Wild Harbour by Ian MacPherson
• The End of the World and Other Catastrophes, edited by Mike Ashley
• Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 edited by Melissa Edmondson
• The Silver Wind by Nina Allan
• War of the Maps by Paul McAuley
• Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction, ed. by Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel
• Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction by Nathaniel Isaacson
• The Record Keepers by Agnes Gomillion
• The Man With Six Senses by Muriel Jaeger
• Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson
• Firefly: The Ghost Machine by James Lovegrove
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 by M. John Harrison
• Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction edited by Canavan and Robinson
• The Evidence by Christopher Priest

Articles and Miscellaneous

• The Needle and the Wedge: Digital Games as a Medium for Science Fiction
• Of Monsters, Men and Migration: Control and Identity in Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China
• Vector editors at COP26
• At My Most Beautiful: the Politics of Body Prostheses, Disability, and Replacement in Arryn Diaz’s Dresden Codak
• “The Inheritors” (1942), by the Futurians John B. Michel and Robert A.W. Lowndes, and the Climate Discussion
• FiyahCon 2021 report by Riziki Millanzi
• From Our Archive: Meetings With Remarkable Men by Christopher Priest
• Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
• An Earnest Blackness
• Immediate Pasts and Soon-to-be Futures: Sinofuturism in Review
• Shanghai Fortress and the Sino-future
• From the archives: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
• The Evolution of Nüwa: A Brief “Herstory” of Chinese SF
• Chinese SF industry
• Call for Submissions: Prediction, Innovation, & Futures [now closed]
• 龙马精神* Dragon Horse Vitality Spirit
• Speculative Fiction Studies
• ‘Lies to children’: From folk to formal science in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
• Chen Qiufan: Why did I Write a Science Fiction Novel about E-waste?
• Fission #1 contents
• Iain M. Banks: Some critical resources
• An excerpt from ‘Forceful and Fuzzy Games in the Novels of Iain [M.] Banks’
• When Was Westworld?
• Grass in Its Fist
• Transmedia Worlding in Marine Serre’s FutureWear
• The BSFA Awards 2020 shortlists
• 2020 round-up

ConSpire

Some videos from ConSpire, our online mini-convention with Foundation, coinciding with both organisations’ AGMs, can be found on the main BSFA site.