Paramount/Courtesy Everett Col/REX/Shutterstock
By Rowan Hooper, Stephanie Pain, Victoria Turk, Frank Swain, Julian Richards, Liz Else, Simon Ings, Graham Lawton, Jeff Hecht and Adrian Barnett
Rowan Hooper, managing editor
Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve, UK cinemas
Aliens have landed on Earth, but instead of sending in an action hero to fight them, Arrival dispatches linguist Amy Adams to attempt to communicate with them. The result is a different, more moving and more intriguing film than you might expect from the premise. “Language is the first weapon drawn in a conflict,” we are told. The big question the military want her to ask the aliens: what is their purpose on Earth? The twist in Arrival will leave you pondering for days, but this movie is far more about human understanding, memory, love and fortitude – and linguistics – than it is about alien invasion.
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Stephanie Pain, consultant
Planet Earth II, BBC Natural History Unit, BBC1
Elizabeth White/BBC NHU
There have been plenty of reasons to shout at the TV this year, but I’ve only screamed out loud once. And yes, it was that jaw-dropping footage of snakes versus newly hatched iguanas that set Twitter alight and the tabloid papers spluttering. Every time David Attenborough presents us with a new natural history blockbuster, you think there can’t be any stories he hasn’t already told and the filming can’t get any better – but there are, and it does. The marine iguanas’ race to the sea was just the start. When Komodo dragons clash, we see every shining drop of spittle and every glinting scale; when Nubian ibexes dance their way down sheer cliffs, we see their hooves in action. And thanks to remote camera technology, the snow leopard, elusive for so long, now comes so close you could reach out and touch it. Almost unbelievably magnificent.
Victoria Turk, technology editor
Stranger Things, directed by the Duffer Brothers, Netflix original series
Netflix
A mysterious disappearance, a shady research facility, a girl with telekinetic powers and a monster in the woods. Stranger Things has all the twists you might hope for in a supernatural thriller, brought to __life in a meticulously recreated 1980s setting. Complete with a synth-heavy soundtrack and Winona Ryder in a starring role, the throwback aesthetic makes for a delightful homage to classic science fiction films. But make no mistake: this show isn’t a breezy nostalgia trip – you’ll be on the edge of your seat.
Frank Swain, communities editor
ARQ, directed by Tony Elliott, Netflix original film
In recent years, we’ve seen a crop of films exploring the multiverse, from the literal Another Earth to the hallucinatory Coherence. Taking its place alongside these is ARQ, a cat-and-mouse thriller that adopts the same stuck-in-a-time-loop premise as the Tom Cruise blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow, but throws a chaotic twist into the mix: what if both the cat and the mouse knew they’d been through this all before?
Julian Richards, head of production
Space Gallery, World Museum, Liverpool, UK
Up to the fifth floor, past the cafe. Many of the displays hadn’t changed since I last visited as a child in the 1970s. So what? The huge gleaming cylinder of the Black Knight rocket – from the days when the UK had its own space programme – still hung over my head, frozen in mid-flight. The planetarium is still introducing handfuls of visitors to the constellations. The lighting is still as stark as a chapel. And look, you wouldn’t believe it, but over there, under a plastic covering, those stones are bits of the moon.
Liz Else, associate editor/Culture editor
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the connected world, directed by Werner Herzog, UK cinemas
Magnolia Pictures/REX/Shutterstock
There is nothing like being up a creek without a paddle. And veteran film-maker Werner Herzog knows all about that – think of his Aguirre, The wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo, where everyone goes mad negotiating increasingly hostile environments as they pursue inherently insane quests. So when Herzog tackles the origins and future of the internet, no matter how faux naively, we really do know where he stands. You only have to watch the mournful contribution of space pioneer Elon Musk, or the sharp words of prescient academic Jonathan Zittrain to get the message. I really liked it, despite the sound of distant drums upstream.
Rowan Hooper
Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, volume 3)
Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
Tor Books
As my second choice, I have gone for the final part of Cixin Liu’s trilogy, which was published in English this year. “Epic” is far too small a word for it: I haven’t read many books as ambitious or far-reaching in their scope as this. Based around the first contact with an alien species, presciently located in the Proxima Centauri system only 4 light years away from Earth, Liu has created an extraordinarily imaginative work, full of mind-bending science and science fiction.
Simon Ings, Culture editor
Jasper James/Millennium Images, UK
The Language of Cities
Deyan Sudjic
Allen Lane
This year, I’ve been working a lot from home – on the 33rd floor of a desert-facing block built atop a deserted shopping mall. It’s in Dubai, home to three million residents, of whom only 15 per cent are citizens. Colleagues who look askance at this compact, stripped-down corporate city-state live mostly in London, a much stranger, more amorphous place, whose appetites, if we are to believe Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum, shape the geographies of cities as far apart as Bournemouth and Baghdad. Sudjic’s The Language of Cities tries to make sense of all the world’s cities in 219 pocket-sized pages. It proved to be one of the oddest good books I have ever read – which didn’t surprise me in the least.
Graham Lawton, executive editor
New Scientist: The origin of (almost) everything
John Murray
It may not be the done thing to recommend a book I wrote, but this really is my pick of the year. Every society has stories about where the cosmos and its inhabitants came from. The oldest we know of is the 2700-year-old Enuma Elish from Babylon, but they surely go further back. Their creators did not have much to go on: more often than not they fell back on the supernatural. We can do better because science has supplied us with origin stories galore. In this book I’ve brought together 53 of the most important, unexpected and quirky, from the big bang to belly button fluff via the formation of Earth, the origin of life, the dawn of civilisation and the age of invention. With infographics by Jennifer Daniel and an intro by Stephen Hawking.
Jeff Hecht, consultant
The Lowell Folk Festival, Lowell, Massachusetts, US
The annual Lowell Folk Festival is a weekend that reminds me just how deeply embedded music is in human nature, and how well it can cross boundaries. The wonderfully varied performers included a family of Cajun musicians from Louisiana, an escaped Iraqi political prisoner now living in Arizona, who played the oud (a fretless Arabian lute), and King Sunny Adé from Nigeria playing juju, a hybrid of traditional Yoruba praise music and drums with guitar and keyboard. It made me wonder afresh if our ancestors made music way before they had words.
Adrian Barnett, researcher/writer
Political Animals: How our stone-age brain gets in the way of smart politics
Rick Shenkman
Basic Books
Any book that reminds me of The Naked Ape gets my vote. And Rick Shenkman’s book shows how instinctive responses override rationality on many occasions, so that what we do at society level may make little sense. I greatly enjoyed its insights but didn’t expect it to become quite so blisteringly relevant.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Loving it…”
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