year in review

It was not one of my more productive writing years (book reviewing in particular seems to have fallen off a cliff), to the point that I resorted to reposting pieces I wrote years earlier. But I still managed to produce a few new pieces in 2019:

I published three essays on Tor.com this year that dealt with fantasy map design: “What Does a Fantasy Map Look Like?,” “Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters,” and “Where Do Fantasy Maps Come From?”: the second of these in particular generated a lot of interest, and pushback, mainly from people who stopped reading after the title.

(More articles along these lines will appear in the new year: they’re proving harder to write than I expected, so they’re slow in coming.)

In terms of science fiction and fantasy criticism, I also published one essay on the newly relaunched AE: “An Exercise in Telling: Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis Files” explored the unusual storytelling structure of the first two books. I also reviewed Farah Mendlesohn’s critical study of Robert Heinlein.

(Technically, the above pieces render me eligible for various Hugo and Aurora awards for fan writing and related works, but I have some sense of perspective about the chances of that.)

In terms of maps, I reviewed two books: John Roman’s Art of Illustrated Maps, which came out in 2015 but is now hard to find, but I needed it for my fantasy maps articles; and Matthew Edney’s academic and argumentative Cartography: The Ideal and Its History.

Other essays were more eclectic in subject. “The Enthusiast’s Blind Spot” was nominally about car reviews, but dealt with the disconnect between reviews by enthusiasts and the desires of the buying public. “The Ones Who Walk Away from America” melded my family history with the increasing crazification of American political discourse. “Canada’s Emergency Alerts Are Broken by Design,” which looked for a structural explanation for the complaints about being woken up by Amber Alerts, should have gotten me yelled at more than it did.

Finally, during last fall’s federal election I committed the sin of punditry, with a trio of essays exploring the parties’ election platform and rhetoric: “Status Quo Ante” looked at the Conservatives’ desire to restore the Harper years, “When Federal Politicians Talk About Provincial Matters, and Vice Versa” at politicians’ inability to resist talking about things that are not in their purview, and “Foreign Affairs” at the dangers of offering opinions on other countries’ politics.

My most popular opinion piece in 2017 was actually something I wrote in late 2016: “Opposition in the Age of Gish Gallops,” in which I argued that the Age of Trump required focused and strategic action from his opponents. A year later, much of what I feared has come to pass: I see a lot of blanket opposition to everything at once and not much focus, while Republican unity seems stronger than I’d hoped.

Over on The Map Room, I tackled a different kind of controversy: the Peters projection. I argued that the debate over the Peters projection was increasingly irrelevant, because wall maps were increasingly irrelevant; the future is online, and the Internet, for better or worse, uses Web Mercator. I also wrote a major piece on fantasy maps, my first in four years: “The Territory Is Not the Map” was partially a book review and partially an observation that when we talk about fantasy maps—when we talk about good maps and bad maps, for example—we’re talking about the geography of imaginary places, not the maps of those places.

In “Are Conventions Necessary?” I took a hard look at the usefulness of science fiction conventions; the piece got a lot of attention, some of it even from people who took the time to read it. (A lot of Twitter critics apparently did not.) It got an order of magnitude more page views than any of my reviews of science fiction or fantasy novels, which says something; meanwhile, my Star Wars essays (“The Lightsaber Black Market,” “The Rebel Alliance Has Terrible OpSec”), while fun to write, sank without a trace.

Speaking of book reviews, I posted nineteen of them this year: fourteen here, five at The Map Room. See this page for links. (I didn’t publish any reviews on AE this year, simply because AE didn’t publish anything at all this year. As far as I know their relaunch is still in the works, and if all goes well I’ll have reviews there in the new year.)

Finally, I wrote two essays of local interest that were widely shared by my neighbours. “J’y suis, j’y reste” was posted on the day we took possession of our house, and traced the path we took en route to becoming permanently ensconced here in Shawville. “The Latecomers” looked at the curious fact that three of the five candidates for warden were recent arrivals—including the winner (and now the Pontiac MRC warden) Jane Toller, who as Jane Pitfield once ran for mayor of Toronto.

I suppose each of us could ask one another how we ended up in this neck of the woods; their stories would probably be as roundabout as mine.