Five great things about 2020 (they were all books)

The New Year is always seen as a time for new beginnings, and let’s hope that 2021 delivers on that promise. The coronavirus pandemic rages on, but with effective vaccines now being rolled out, an end to this hermetic, screen-bound chapter of existence is at least imaginable; Donald Trump is still our president, but by choice or by escort, the man will be removed from the White House in less than three weeks; the specter of climate change looms large on the horizon, but President-elect Joe Biden has made tackling the planetary crisis a centerpiece of his agenda.

But before we say our final good riddances to this hell year, I wanted to point out one thing that wasn’t awful about 2020: The books. Despite the utter homogenization our daily lives, science fiction and fantasy writers published stories that were diverse, nuanced, and deeply engrossing. To be fair, many of these were finished before the pandemic upended everything, and 2021 will give us a better indication of how this year left its mark on storytelling. Maybe we’ll be truly sick of the zombie apocalypse genre after being forced to treat our friends and neighbors like a deadly threat for months, and the new year will usher in a wave of sunny, utopian fiction. Or perhaps, 2020’s grimdark feel will inspire us to invent even ghastlier monsters.

My hope is that 2021 will bring more books like the five I’ve spotlighted below, and others I’ve written about here and here.