TITAA Best of 2024: Books, TV, Games
Annual roundup of the best of the year, in one page.
No rest for my end of the year newsletters! Here’s my annual roundup for the supporters, in case you want the Big List to refer to. These are either the things that I gave 5 stars to (or the mental equivalent), or have kept thinking about. I’ll keep the quotes and style comments for the monthly recs post.
TOC (links on the web page):
Books (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery/Thriller)
TV
Games (plus with VR)
Books
I sprinkled a few stars on my top favs of the year. With a few exceptions, I struggled to find really outstanding SF reads this year (I need to work on that, it’s my fav genre). There was a lot of great fantasy, though, and a couple mystery/thrillers made the cut.
Science Fiction
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf (sf). 13th clone of actress and model Lulabelle Rock, who has decided to have her kill the other clones in order to deflect expected bad press for her upcoming film of Medea. Really amusing.
Engines of God, Jack McDevitt (sf). Exciting exploration on several different planets, trying to figure out if strange relics are related. If you like archaeology in space (I do), he’s super.
The Circumference of the World, by Lavie Tidhar (sf). A cryptic nested koan of a book about a magic book by a maybe crazy golden-era sf writer, who also started a cult. It’s slight, but I like these kinds of puzzley hyperstition plots. (See also Alan Wake 2 in games.)
⭐️ Aurora Rising [the whole series but especially book 1], Alastair Reynolds (sf). Prefect Dreyfus book 1, which is a tour de force of space opera police procedural with some fantastically creepy “alpha” AI characters, plus clever “betas,” which are recordings of dead people’s personalities.