Part Deux. Our Books of 2024. With Wine Pairings. (Fiction and Future).
Complex. Light & bright. Bold. Dry. Sweet. Chewy. Fizzy. We got you covered.
If you’re just tuning in, we recommend starting with Part Une:1
Right. You’ve come back? Well it’s the season for miracles I guess.
Despite not yet putting out our justification, some of our choices for fiction caused some….reactions. For entirely understandable reasons.
Lookit. These (seem like) they’re more subjective.2
Let me make two (very) concise arguments for fiction in this context, rather than the usual “climate/tech books”:
Pace Amitav Ghosh - or Lawrence Wright re 9/11 - some of the worst fuckups in human history are down to a collective failure of imagination. Spend time with people who manage to entertain while thinking the unthinkable. Also, they tend to be better fun than many!
Fiction - particularly scifi - and engineering have had a productive, but usually ignored (and, with some X-shaped exceptions, beneficial) relationship. Like, I dunno, AI and its perils, comms satellites, mobile phones, deepwater subs, rockets to the moon?3 Think some neurodivergent kid didn’t encount…
