I have a new short, accessible summary piece on my current project just out in The Conversation, “Planning smart and sustainable cities should not result in exclusive garden utopias for the rich.”

It covers some of the basic starting points for my current research, and mentions a few key examples of the weird overlap between utopian urban projects –failed, current and imagined– neoliberalism and authoritarianism, expressed in what I call “platform cities.” These include Próspera in Honduras, Telosa in the USA, and NEOM in Saudi Arabia.

I had a previous piece on the troubles of NEOM also in The Conversation, earlier this year.

Paralleling my threads on Twitter and BlueSky, I am going to start sharing more details of some quality, Open Access (OA) journals in the social sciences, who won’t sell your stuff to AI companies, and also don’t charge you fees. The reason I am doing this is because none of the directories (like DOAJ or CrossRef) seem particularly useful at providing me with what I want, and they certainly don’t take account of the ethics of the publishers (for example, DOAJ includes Elsevier open access journals, and RELX, which owns Elsevier is a massively unethical data broker).*

Please DM me or reply with genuine examples. This will be on ongoing post. Generally speaking my interest is in more interdisciplinary examples, and certainly my starting point is a bias towards journals that do stuff on technology, politics and society. But I hope this will grow to include more specialist examples from wider across the social sciences. I’ve also started to list some presses and open access book publishing initiatives below this list…

Radical Open Access Journals in the Social Sciences

1. ACME journal. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme – This journal was a trailblazer. A radical human geography journal that has always been genuinely open access, supportive of others doing the same, and which publishes good stuff in multiple languages.
2. Ephemera journal. https://ephemerajournal.org/what-ephemera – another early example, founded in 2001, Ephemera is a radical organization / organisation studies journal, with an eclectic range. But I am slightly worried that they don’t seem to have yet had an issue in 2024…
3. Surveillance & Society. Yes, I have to include my own transdisciplinary journal, and I add it here because we had the advice of both the ACME and Ephemera editors when we started in 2002. S&S continues to publish 4 quality issues a year. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/
4. Foucault Studies. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/index Stuart Elden reminds me of a journal that is also dear to the hearts of surveillance studies scholars. He writes: “36 issues across 20 years. Initially entirely independent, then edited by Sverre Raffnsøe and the Copenhagen Business School, now moving to University of Pennsylvania Press. But always open access and no author charges.”
5. Kommunikation@Gesellschaft. https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup2/kommges/index. Nils Zurawski writes: “publishing OA since 2000, only German language though, but that may change…”
6. Technology and Regulation, http://techreg.org. Bryce Newell says “…a good OA journal. More law and regulation than social science, but I think they are open to social science work as well.”
7. International Journal of Communication, https://ijoc.org, published by the USC Annenberg School, has been running for 18 volumes and charges no fees for authors or readers.
8. Triple C (Communication, Capitalism, Critique). https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC. One of the originals! A very much marxist and marxist-adjacent journal covering critical perspectives on communication.
9. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/. An Eastern European-based OA journal that’s been going for 20 volumes, although there has been nothing so far in 2024.
10. Media Theory, https://mediatheoryjournal.org. A heavyweight journal in, err.. media theory, which publishes a couple of very high quality issues a year.
11. Limn, https://limn.it, a technology and society journal project, both OA and Print-on-Demand, which straddles academia and wider public accessibility. It was on hiatus, and is apparently now back!
12. Disability Studies Quarterly. https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/index. A longstanding journal, the first in its interdisciplinary field, which is now library-backed and fully free and OA. (h/t Ria Cheyne)
13. Professions & Professionalism. https://journals.oslomet.no/index.php/pp/about. An international and interdisciplinary OA journal producing 3 issues a year, focused on knowledge-based occupations. (h/t T.D. Valland)
14. Language Development Research, https://ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu. This is one is very specialized, but the editors are also commendably vocal about the journal’s commitment to both OA and quality: “we don’t believe in locking articles behind paywalls, in charging taxpayers and universities to publish research they’ve already funded, or in privileging papers that are “exciting” over those committed to scientific rigour.”
15. Journal of Political Ecology, https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/. Operating since 1994, JPE may be one of the oldest online OA journals. It “publishes research into the linkages between political economy and human environmental impacts, across different locations and academic disciplines.”
16. Journal of Social Justice. Based at Brock University in Canada. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/index
17. Computational Culture, computationalculture.net, which covers “inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of the culture of computational objects, practices, processes and structures” and examines “the ways in which software undergirds and formulates contemporary life.” It has published an annual issue since 2011 (with a gap caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022).
18. Journal of Extreme Anthropology, https://journals.uio.no/JEA/index, “an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, open-access and indexed journal (DOAJ) that publishes articles written in the fields of anthropology, social sciences, humanities, philosophy and critical theory focusing in particular on extreme subjects, practices and theory.” Now in its 8th Volume, with usually two issues a year.

Open Access Presses and Other Radical Publishing Initiatives

1. Public Knowledge Project (PKP), https://pkp.sfu.ca. The grandparent of OA publishing, an open source project which has produced software platforms for online journals (OJS), book publishing (OMP) and now preprints (OPS), also formerly also conferences (OCS), although the last seems to have been discontinued.
2. Radical Open Access Collective, https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org. Supposedly the centre of radical OA activity, although we’ve had no luck getting them to reply to us so far!
3. Open Humanities Press (OHP), https://openhumanitiespress.org. A thriving OA publisher, which unfortunately only touches on / overlaps with social science concerns, but which we need to support!
4. Meatspace Press, https://meatspacepress.com/, a boutique technology and society-focused OA and Print-on-Demand publisher, which pays attention to readability and aesthetics, not just access.
5. Shift+OPEN, https://mitpress.mit.edu/shiftopen/.:”an MIT Press program to flip journals to open access.”
6. Érudit, https://www.erudit.org/ Originally a Quebec-based francophone online and open access platform, which has now expanded into other languages, in collaboration with PKP via Coalition Publica (see below).
7. Coalition Publica, https://www.coalition-publi.ca. A new Canadian initiative between PKP and Érudit, to expand open access publishing.
8. Simon Batterbury’s list of OA journals in Geography, Political Ecology, Anthropology, Area Studies etc., https://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/list-of-decent-open-access-journals/. Occasionally still updated, this is a useful list with different criteria than mine (it does include some journals with APCs, for example; and obviously the subject range is a bit different, although overlapping).

*A note on the big publishers. Of course not all publisher are exactly the same. I have to say that I have more mixed feelings about Sage. Amongst the big academic publishers, they are by far the best in terms of trying to keep their APCs relatively low and also tiered according to income / employment status of authors. Compared to publishers like Springer-Nature (the worst example of APC price-gouging), they are virtually saintly, but they still charge and they still aren’t genuinely or universally open access. But if you are going to go with any of the big general academic journal publishers, Sage would seem to be the best.

My university central administration has basically given up having any kind of a policy on AI and university courses, particularly assessment, before it had even started, and has downloaded all responsibility to individual lecturers. This would not be so bad if all faculty members were fully prepared and understood how LLMs (and Generative AI systems more broadly) work, and what the implications are for their teaching and assessment. But the vast majority are not, and for those who are critical, the only recourse seems to be either the use of AI detectors, which are as problematic as the products they so imperfectly detect, or to “critically engage” with AI, which means basically using the products, with all the attendant harms involved, and then reflecting afterwards.

Instead I want to reaffirm the value of the process of researching and writing as thinking and the development of critical faculties in the face of the increasing automation and commodification of education. No individual lecturer can come up with an ideal response (which is just one of the reasons why I think the attitude of my university’s central administration sucks), but here is what I am putting in my syllabus for this term.

Note 1: This policy is for a 4th Year undergraduate specialism / option in a qualitative transdisciplinary social science field. This may not be an appropriate policy for every other particular course. Because it is course with theoretically smaller numbers –although in practice numbers are increasing, which means up to 50 these days– both full class group writing workshops and group writing tutorials to offer proper guidance away from LLMs, are possible. I will try to do both this term

Note 2: This is on ongoing work-in-progress, and I will continue to update the further readings, and make additions and changes in response to discussion and suggestions. Eagle-eyed readers will note that there is now a split between an outright prohibition of generative AI / LLMs in writing assignments, and and strong discouragement of their use in researching assignments. This is simply because there is not practical way of detecting the use of such tools for research, even if I wanted to pursue that kind of surveillance (which I don’t!).

Fair Use: This policy is made available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license: feel free to use it, share it, adapt it, improve it, but please give me credit if you do, and you share it further, it must be under the same terms. Also, please feel free to criticize it (in the comments or elsewhere),

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

This is different to my general terms for re-use of material on this site (see here).

AI Policy

The use of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) tools has become increasingly common in universities. uOttawa has been unable or unwilling to develop a central policy and has left it up to individual Module Leaders to decide what to do about it. This is my policy for this course.

**The use of “Generative AI” or “Large Language Models” (LLMs), including but not limited to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, & etc. for writing of assignments is strictly prohibited. Written work that is submitted that has obviously used such tools will be given a failing grade. Research using such tools is also strongly discouraged.**

There are several reasons for this policy: 

• First and most importantly, social science education is about thinking and learning to think critically. This includes learning to do your own academic research, developing your own academic writing style, and being able to communicate through writing (and to be sure, in other courses, speaking and visual presentation). Research and writing are thinking. You aren’t thinking and you aren’t learning to think critically if you aren’t doing the research and writing. We will be running group tutorials to help you do this in this course. 
• LLMs are not search engines, databases or indexes. They are systems for generating sequences of words and phrases from a massive corpus of data, that have a statistical probability to appear comprehensible and coherent, given the inputs (prompts). In other words, they produce patterns, which sometimes (increasingly frequently) appear good enough to fool pattern-recognizing brains like our own. Instead, please use the readings provided in the course, and learn to use the library catalogue, its many linked databases, and (academic) search engines. 
• LLMs are not “intelligent.” They have no reasoning capability or understanding. As purely stochastic systems, they are unable to differentiate between facts and falsehoods, reality and unrealities, truth and lies. If their output is factual, real or true, it is by statistical chance. The risk you take in using an LLM to write an essay, is that it could range from, at best, a generic, bland C grade-level piece, not even a good imitation of what you could have done by making some effort yourself, to, at worst, producing straight-up bullshit with nonsensical arguments and made-up references, and if you haven’t done the research and reading, you will have no way of knowing which you are handing in.
• The economic model of Generative AI / LLMs is to make profit for private capitalist corporations from plagiarized and stolen intellectual property and ideas – therefore, I would argue that the use of LLMs is de facto benefitting from academic fraud (see Academic Fraud policy).
• The economic model of Generative AI also involves many exploited, low-paid workers, often in the global south, who do much of the background work, particularly work on data quality, that is supposedly magically done by AI.
• Generative AI / LLMs are contributing in outsize ways to the intensification of the climate crisis through massive drains on energy and resources. 

Further Resources, Reading and Viewing

Jane Rosenzweig – Rules for Writing in the Age of AI: https://writinghacks.substack.com/p/four-rules-for-writing-in-the-age

Eryk Salvaggio – Challenging the Myths of Generative AI: https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

If you want to watch and listen to a critical expert, check out this recent interview with Abeba Birhane (a former Mozilla and Deep Mind fellow): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=416Rve8ZWeY

If you really want to understand this in more depth, you should try to appreciate how LLMs work. This is from Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott: https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with

And if you are interested in AI, thinking and creativity, read this wonderful essay by the great science fiction author, Ted Chiang, who wrote the story that was turned into the film, Arrival: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

For more on the environmental impacts of AI, see here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-climate-impact-goes-beyond-its-emissions/ (h/t to Christabelle Sethna)

Black teens more likely to be accused of cheating using AI in homework: https://www.semafor.com/article/09/17/2024/black-teenagers-twice-as-likely-to-be-falsely-accused-of-using-ai-tools-in-homework

On the enshittification of Google Scholar, https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gpt-fabricated-scientific-papers-on-google-scholar-key-features-spread-and-implications-for-preempting-evidence-manipulation/

The growing shadow economy of fake citations for sale: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01672-7

Although I have known since December last year, I can now officially announced that I have been appointed as the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies at the University of Ottawa, following the Canadian government announcement of new research funding on Friday 14th June 2024.

This 7-year, renewable, position will allow me to pursue some major research projects under the title Platform Cities in an Age of Planetary Surveillance, which you can read about on my Research page, and which I will be writing a lot more about here over the coming years.

I am hoping to work with researchers across the world, and I am currently in the European Union where I am discussing prospective collaboration with a number of institutes and individuals.

English (French below)

UPDATED: Now Open to Canadian Citizens and Permanent Residents (or those who qualify as Canadian domestic students) ONLY.

I am looking for a top-level almost or recently completed Masters student in surveillance studies / security studies / criminology / sociology / organisation studies / STS / IR / political science etc., to take on a 4-year funded PhD studentship, ‘Hired Hackers and Private Spies,’ which will conduct a global survey and carry out case-studies of transnational private cybersurveillance companies. The most well-known of these, e.g. NSO Group, have received a lot of attention but there is a rapidly expanding world of private cybersurveillance companies out there which is just waiting to be studied –and indeed, controlled and regulated.

The researcher I am looking for must have,

• a clear interest in surveillance and security, demonstrated by their thesis and coursework, and ideally, attendance at relevant conferences and events, or even published work,
  
• a willingness and potential to conduct independent international research with high standards of scholarship and ethics, demonstrated by their reference letters from supervisor(s) and/or lecturers;

and, preferably,

• to be writing, or have written, their Masters thesis on cybersurveillance, cybersecurity or a related topic, in a military, police or private security industry context.

The PhD would be based in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-social-sciences/criminology. The successful candidate would be part of my proposed Critical Surveillance and Security Studies Lab along with a strong group of PhD and MA students and rotating visitors, and potential both the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS),  https://techlaw.uottawa.ca/, and the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS), https://www.cips-cepi.ca/. The project is funded by the Canadian SSHRC ‘Human-Centric Cybersecurity Partnership’ (HC2P), https://www.hc2p.ca/, led by Benoit Dupont at the Université de Montréal, in Quebec. You will also have the opportunity to take part in external events and initiatives connected to this partnership.

Funding

The funding for the project is $25,000 CAD per year for 4 years. The successful student will receive a stipend which starts at just under $20,000 CAD per year, rising by 1.02% each year, and the rest of the project funds will be available as research costs.

*This funding is independent of any TA, scholarship or funding offered by the Department of Criminology or any external scholarship or grant received by the student.

Important Dates:

UPDATED! Inquiry deadline – a brief cover letter, CV and writing sample, to <david.mw@uottawa.ca> : 15th January 2024 

*only open to Canadian-based applicants from this point (because of application deadline)

Application deadline (Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents): 1^st February 2024

PhD start-date (fixed): 1^st September 2024

Admission requirements and dates can be found here:

https://www.uottawa.ca/study/graduate-studies/program-specific-requirements

NB:  the University of Ottawa is a bilingual English / French university, and all English-speaking PhD students must also achieve a basic level of French competence before they can be granted their PhD. If you are already a francophone (with good English), bilingual or have a reasonable standard of French, this is an advantage. As this is an international project, other languages are a bonus!

DMW

Français

MISE À JOUR : Maintenant ouvert aux citoyens canadiens et aux résidents permanents (ou à ceux qui sont admissibles en tant qu’étudiants nationaux canadiens) UNIQUEMENT.

Je recherche un étudiant de haut niveau en maîtrise presque ou récemment terminé, en études de surveillance / études de sécurité / criminologie / sociologie / STS / IR / sciences politiques, etc., pour entreprendre une bourse de doctorat financée sur 4 ans, « Hired Hackers and Private Spies», qui mènera une enquête mondiale et réalisera des études de cas sur des sociétés transnationales privées de cybersurveillance. Les plus connus d’entre eux, par ex. NSO Group a reçu beaucoup d’attention, mais il existe un monde en pleine expansion de sociétés privées de cybersurveillance qui n’attendent que d’être étudiées – et même contrôlées et réglementées.

L’étudiant que je recherche doit avoir,

• un intérêt évident pour la surveillance et la sécurité, démontré par leur mémoire de maîtrise et leurs cours, et idéalement, la participation à des conférences et événements pertinents, ou même à des travaux publiés, 
• une volonté et un potentiel de mener des recherches internationales indépendantes avec des normes élevées en matière d’érudition et d’éthique, démontrées par les lettres de référence de leurs superviseur(s);

et, de préférence,

• rédiger ou avoir rédigé son mémoire de maîtrise sur la cybersurveillance, la cybersécurité ou un sujet connexe, dans un contexte militaire, policier ou de sécurité privée.
  

Le doctorat serait basé au Département de criminologie de l’Université d’Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, https://www.uottawa.ca/faculte-sciences-sociales/criminologie. Le candidat retenu ferait partie de mon projet de laboratoire d’études critiques de surveillance et de sécurité avec un groupe solide d’étudiants en doctorat et en maîtrise et de visiteurs en rotation, et potentiel à la fois au Centre pour le droit, la technologie et la société (CDTS), https://droittech.uottawa.ca/, et au Centre d’études sur les politiques internationales. (CEPI), https://www.cips-cepi.ca/. Le projet est financé par le « Human-Centric Cybersecurity Partnership » (HC2P) du CRSH canadien, https://www.hc2p.ca/, dirigé par Benoit Dupont de l’Université de Montréal, à Québec. Vous aurez également l’opportunité de participer à des événements et initiatives externes liés à ce partenariat.

Financement

Le financement du projet est de 25 000$ CAD par année pendant 4 ans. L’étudiant retenu recevra une allocation qui commence à un peu moins de 20 000 $ CAD par an, augmentant de 1,02 % chaque année, et le reste des fonds du projet sera disponible sous forme de frais de recherche. 

*Ce financement est indépendant de toute TA, bourse ou financement offert par le Département de criminologie ou de toute bourse ou subvention externe reçue par l’étudiant.

Dates importants:

Date limite de demande – une brève lettre de motivation, un résumé et un exemple de votre travail écrit, à <david.mw@uottawa.ca> : 15er Janvier 2024

*elle ne sera ouverte qu’aux candidats basés au Canada à partir de ce moment (en raison des dates limites de candidature) 

Date limite de candidature : 1er février 2024

Date de début de thèse (fixe) : 1er septembre 2024

Les conditions d’admission et les dates peuvent être trouvées ici: https://www.uottawa.ca/study/graduate-studies/program-special-requirements

NB : l’Université d’Ottawa est une université bilingue anglais/français, et tous les doctorants anglophones doivent également atteindre un niveau de base de compétence en français avant de pouvoir obtenir leur doctorat. Si vous êtes déjà francophone (avec de bonnes compétences en anglais), bilingue ou si vous avez un niveau raisonnable de français, c’est un avantage. Comme il s’agit d’un projet international, d’autres langues sont un bonus !

DMW

I’ve been encountering more, and more serious and sophisticated, arguments for the robot ‘rights’ recently and I have thoughts.

I am always open to the possibility that I may be missing or misunderstanding something but, it seems to me, that one way academic robot rights advocates think they will succeed is by attacking conventional western ontology. They tend to do this by arguing that a robot is something that blurs the supposed binary of ‘person’ and ‘thing’ and instead start by calling everything a ‘being.’

As a long-time environmental activist, I can’t help but feel partly responsible for this. This is because one of the main foundations for this argument is deep ecology / ecocentric thought, and what Arne Naess called the expansion of “the sphere of moral considerability,” in other words the extension of what we had previously considered to be the exclusive qualities of (white, male, able-bodied etc.) humans to more humans, animals and even ecosystems and things in the environment (mountains, rivers etc.). If a whale or a mountain can have rights, the argument goes, why not a robot? Aren’t they all ‘beings?’

But this is both disingenuous and a straw man, as well simply black-boxing, and thereby denying, the work that has already been done in creating the understanding of the concept of ‘being.’ What I mean by this is that in the discussion of rights, ‘being’ already means something and exists within a network of relations that produces power. For example it folds the notion of ‘living’ into ‘being’ so that the adjective is invisible. If we erase the concept of life here, sure, maybe ‘being’ no longer seems to require that quality. But ‘being’ can’t simply be applied to something else without a justification for that application that takes account of all of that work, the previous translations and movement, the qualities and qualifications and is able to perform a similar labour to some standard of satisfaction that we can recognise as successful.

Instead, rather than being in any way a fundamental reframing, just redefining everything as a ‘being’ reduces this application to a mere rhetorical move, one which just tries to associate all that existing work, and particularly the now invisible and black-boxed, ‘life’, with anything one choses. At the same, the the very existence of the rhetorical move itself is denied in the name of something like ‘deconstruction’ (well, anything will do, really…). It’s a classic power play.

In a materialist analysis, like all tools, robots are not living. They are devices created for extending and supplementing human power. Human power animates them and flows through them, not life. They produce nothing in themselves. It does not matter if a robot is given a cute name, or something that looks like a face, or is programmed to move as if it is dancing, or to use heuristic algorithms that alter its movement or function. It is not alive. It may be a ‘being’ if we accept that being can be redefined to mean anything, but it is not a living being.

Like calling it any tool a ‘being’, using this argument as a foundation for robot rights is an obfuscatatory gesture that is an attempted exercise of power whilst hiding power relations. This argument would have us believe that ultimately destroying a security robot is not fundamentally different from killing a cat or a human being. But cats and human beings are not security devices, they are alive. They are not devices whose only function is security. A security robot is just a security camera that can move and act in some way. it doesn’t acquire a different moral or legal quality because movement might once have been felt to be an exclusive quality of living beings. And destroying a security robot is fundamentally no different than destroying a surveillance camera. The only way the ‘being’ argument would work here is the absurd trajectory that the surveillance camera too has ‘rights,’ or maybe all cameras, or lenses or… no, there are no ‘rights’ at play here at all because there is no life.

What happens here is that robot rights are revealed as a Trojan horse for repression of human rights, not at like the weak sophism of claims that granting of rights to animals or mountains would weaken the purity of human rights, but directly, materially and politically. Robot rights mean we can’t fight back. Robot rights mean we should sit by whilst life itself is made subordinate to capitalist technology. Robot rights are a bad argument and they are bad politics.

My big editing project for the next couple of years is the Handbook of Critical Surveillance Studies, with Rosamunde van Brakel, Fernanda Bruno and Azadeh Akbari, to be published with Edward Elgar in 2025.

I’ll keep a continually updated set of links for editorial and contribution purposes in this post.

There is contributors’ guidance here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/r.a0ee4615b393e07953488efe4722d312

And there is an ongoing thread of FAQs (which will also be added to the pad) here: https://twitter.com/murakamiwood/status/1680995375824396290

I read a lot of fiction this year, as usual, and most of it wasn’t SFF at all! If that’s what you’re interested in, you can skip the first three paragraphs here and scroll straight down…

In more mainstream writing, my favourite thing was undoubtedly The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, consisisting of Childhood, Youth, and Dependency, this is a sparse but evocative, no-holds-barred and banally shocking series of creative non-fiction about growing up poor but with ambitions to be a writer in the 1930s: although it’s memoir, it’s written in highly fictionalized manner, in terms of technique and editing choices. Published in Danish from 1967-71, but only translated into English in 2019, it is brilliant and clearly the precursor to a lot of intimate and exploratory feminist confessional works that have come after.

In crime, I worked my way through the entirety of the mostly very strong, Sicily-set, Montalbano series by the late Andrea Camilieri, and all of Ellis Peters’ atmospheric, mediaeval Cadfael books. But quite the best thing I read this year in this genre was The Stockholm Trilogy (Clinch, Down for the Count, and Slugger) by Martin Holmén. Published in English from 2015 to 2017, this trilogy is one of the most bleak crime series I’ve read. Also set in the 1930s, this is a Stockholm that is as far from contemporary wealthy, socially democratic Sweden as you can imagine, the protagonist Harry Kvist, is a brutal, permanently broke, none-too-bright, could-have-been-a-contender ex-boxer, who makes a living as a second-rate debt collector and accidental, third-rate private eye. He’s also queer and likes it rough. He’s hardly sympathetic, but the only thing in his favour is that most of the people he encounters are worse than him.

My Top 5 favourites in crime, published in 2021, were:

1. Tokyo Redux, by the consistently excellent David Peace. Published this year, this is the long-awaited final book in The Tokyo Trilogy (the first two being Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City) of meandering fictional investigations of real crimes that took place in the aftermath of WW2 in the US-occupied Japanese capital. This is far more than a crime novel, and has nothing to do with any of the usual formulas. The characters are all horribly flawed and the racism and casual brutality of the occupiers, the police and criminal gangs is seedy, sweaty and right in your face. The language is also stunning, making superlative use of repetition, although it is not quite as incantatory and magical as in Occupied City. Now resident in Japan, I think Peace may be one of Britain’s greatest living novelists
2. The Assistant, by Kjell Ola Dahl. Like his previous standalone novel, The Courier, this one is a hisorical crime novel set in 1920s and 30s Oslo (that’s the complete set of Scandanavian capitals in the 1930s!), with the threat of the Nazis hanging over Europe. It’s highly influenced by Raymond Chandler in terms of tone and the convoluted plot, but for once, unlike so many others that stray into pastiche, Chandler’s influence a good thing.
3. Fallen Angels, by Gunnar Staelsen. Varg Veum, Staelsen’s Bergen-based, social worker-turned PI is not always a pleasant character, and in this one, the latest to be translated but actually a late 1980s entry in the series, we get a load of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but of the grimy, small town, provincial kind. As usual it’s also personal, involving an ex-wife and so-called friends from his past, who were all once involved in a ‘legendary’ local band, The Harpers. There are the usual reflective moments when Veum wonders what he was thinking / what he is doing – and it’s these as much as the investigation that makes this series so strong.
4. Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino. Number 4 in the Detective Galileo series, in which DCI Kusanaga of the Tokyo police is leant a hand, once again, by Professor Yukawa (who the media has decided should be called ‘Detective Galileo’, because he’s a physics professor). This one deals with crimes old and new that may or may not be linked and it’s enjoyably twisty with a great cast of characters. However, I really do want Higashino to get back to his Detective Kaga series, which I think I prefer to this one.
5. Walter Mosley’s Blood Grove didn’t quite live up to the very high standards I expect from this author. It is a fun read with plenty of action, and the usual insightful historical-sociological observations, but come the early 70s, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins seems to be increasingly living in some kind of hallucinatory fantasy version of Los Angeles, rather than (just) the real place. Maybe if you can remember it, you weren’t there, man…

Okay, so here is the SFF list that most of you will have been waiting for! I read a lot of older SF this year: interesting finds included D.G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, in which a dying woman in a world that largely does not know death, is placed under continuous surveillance for public entertainment. It did drag for a while but picked up in the final sequences: it is an essential surveillance novel. I also (re-)read several Robert Silverberg novels, and I enjoyed Poul Anderson’s time-travel classic, There Will Be Time, although I found the treatment of young female characters a bit creepy.

This is my Top 10 best SFF books of the year. Bear in mind that there are still many things I haven’t read yet, so if there’s something not here that you think should be, chances are I just haven’t got around to it yet

1. The Actual Star by Monica Byrne. In many ways, I felt the spirit of Ursula Le Guin hovering over many of the things I read this year, this one included. Weaving together three stories set in 1012, 2012 and 3012 (in the western calendar), this superb novel deals with themes of environmental collapse, gender and sexuality, utopia, and indigeneity, amongst other things, with the stories united by Mayan cosmology and characters, and the significance of a small area of Belize (which I happen to have visited a long time ago).
2. Notes from a Burning Age by Claire North. Another post-environmental collapse novel, this one by the pseudononymous author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (which I loved). This deals with the challenges that any stable, post-climate change society will inevitably face from fascists and expansionists who have chosen to forget why there are limits. The main character is a spy who gets incredibly badly-treated for most of the novel and it can be hard-going at times, although it is also redemptive.
3. Like her earlier work, Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor’s typically powerful Remote Control can also be hard-going, not for the writing which is as skillful as ever, or the setting in a alt / near-future Nigeria, but simply for the difficulty of being in the skin / head of the protaganist, a young girl who has, through an encounter with some kind of alien technology, acquired the power of death. Her journey is marked, as a result, by almost continuous destruction and suffering, which even when it is ‘deserved’ is deeply troubling. Okorafor never lets you turn away and this is an unflinching short novel that should make you think a lot about technology, capitalism and colonialism, and which will haunt you long after you have finished it.
4. Jeff Noon continued on his idiosyncratic way this year with Within Without. The latest of his existential SF detective series featuring John Nyquist takes place in the city of Delerium, which is fractured by a thousand borders, all of which have to be traversed in different ways and whose thousands of micro-states all have different qualities and rules. It is somewhat reminscent of China Miéville’s The City and The City, but like Creeping Jenny, the previous novel in the Nyquist series, this one has a retro-British feel. Howecer, rather than Wicker Man-type rural horror, this one has the specifically tired, postwar ambience of 1950s London, centred around the lost (sentient!) image of rock’n’roll star, Vince Craven, and the gritty world of popular entertainment.
5. Klara and the Sun, by (we have to say this now) the Nobel-Prize-winning, Kazuo Ishiguro, is about robots. Klara, Ishiguro’s robot, is also sentient, but in the limited way of a prodigious 5-year-old child. ‘She’ is bought by a family to be a companion to their daughter, who grows up with her then away from her. Klara’s consciousness is centred around a solar mythology, a useful mythology because she is powered by the sun. Like many of Ishiguro’s works, this book is suffused by sadness and things are never quite as the protagonists’ believe. It’s not his best, but that’s relative!
6. A Master of Djinn by P. Djélì Clark is a rip-roaring steampunk-meets-Arabic mythology adventure, the first full length novel (after two excellent novellas) featuring the estimable, Fatma el-Sha’award, investigator for the Cairo division of Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, lover of finely tailored suits, and fine women. It’s this latter quality plus the defiant anti-colonialism of the plot which presumably caused one dim reviewer to claim the book was ruined by “woke virtue signalling” – ha ha! Well, if you like your “woke virtue signalling” with added angels, djinn, secret societies, over-elaborate weapons and threats to the world as we (don’t) know it, then you’ll love this. I did.
7. Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild Built, is also about robots, the first of a new series (Monk and Robot), and is SF balm for the soul. It is a beautiful, meandering, throughtful novel which follows an errant monk in a utopian world, where robots long ago disappeared into the wilderness promising to ‘check in’ some time, who discovers his new mission in an encounter with a ‘wild-built’ robot. Nothing much happens, but it happens wonderfully (but see also my Disappointments of the Year, below).
8. Tade Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven is a really strong locked room murder-mystery set on a supposedly infallible AI-driven spaceship. Among other things, it features a selfish tech multi-billionaire (take your pick of who they could be modelled on…), a troubled investigator, a Nigerian-run space-station… oh, and a wolf. I couldn’t help comparing this to Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, and it stands the comparison very well, although perhaps it isn’t such a virtuoso effort as Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy (Rosewater et al.). But, if you will go setting such high standards…
9. Finally, two sequels. The first was Invisible Sun, by Charles Stross, which wrapped up his dimension-skipping Merchant Princes sequence nicely (for now), but with maybe a little too much backgrounding / info-dumping for my tastes. Still, I liked this recent trilogy enough that I went back and read the whole sequence from the start, and it hangs together like almost no other decades-spanning project in SFF. As a complete work, it is an amazing achievement.
10. Finally, there was Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis. Nicky Drayden appears to be a bit of niche author, but she should be much more widely read. This novel tied up the themes developed in Escaping Exodus very well, with a satisfying resolution to the question of whether our protagonists can live sustainably, and without cruelty and destruction, inside the gigantic spacefaring beetles which they have colonized / infested. The parallels with our dilemmas on Earth are obvious, are here we back with same themes as Monica Byrne and Claire North (and Le Guin) in all ways, with fluid gender and sexual identities and the difficulties of building utopia.

Finally, I have to say there were some disappointments this year. In crime, I had been really looking forward to Andrea Camilleri’s Riccardino, the final Montalbano novel. But it turned out that it wasn’t really the final novel sequentially, it was a manuscript from a while back that Camilleri had written, it seems, as a bit of an experiment and to express some frustrations, and then put aside. Now published post-mortem, it uses the gimmick which Camilleri had already played with in a short-story of having the detective realise he’s in a story and able to communicate with the author. This is just tiresome and undermines the story, which itself isn’t up to much anyway and is mostly a kind of broad religious farce, far more like Camilleri’s historical writing than the rest of the sequence. This isn’t the only bad Montalbano novel, but it is a unworthy memorial to a fine writer.

In SFF, I was highly recommded to read S.B. Divya’s Machinehood. The author is someone I admire as an editor and the themes seemed interesting, but I just couldn’t get very far into it due to the unengaging writing and what seemed to be a story that consisted mostly of people running and shooting. This isn’t any kind of definitive view because I not only did I not finish it (very unusual for me), I barely started it, so maybe I’ll try again sometime.

And then there was Becky Chambers. She’s on my Top 10 (see above), but she also wrote another novel, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, which is set in the Wayfarers universe and to which I had a very different reaction. I have loved all of the previous novels in this sequence, but here Chambers seems to be pushing the envelope of her general inclination to produce ‘nice’, positive, relationship-centred SF, with a novel that has no plot of speak of, characters who have quirks rather than qualities, and where everything is solved by cake (no, I mean this quite literally). It’s so sugar-sweet that it should come with a health warning, and so twee that it makes me cringe just thinking about it. Nothing much happens, but you really start to wish for a comet to come, or an intergalactic war, or even just some mild peril. It’s one thing to want to provide a counterbalance to all that dark and dystopian SF, but utopianism still needs intelligence and interest and, not to mention, drama: see Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, or yes, Becky Chambers’ other work. There’s a line somewhere between the optimistic and wholesome vibe of the rest of the Wayfarers sequence, or indeed the gentle thoughtfulness of A Psalm for the Wild Built, and the relentless, insufferable kitsch of The Galaxy and the Ground Within. No more cake for me, thank-you.