Culture You’ve got tales

Ai Weiwei writes a graphic novel on his life; AI retells George Orwell’s Animal Farm; there’s Questlove on hip-hop; a robot on the run... all in books with a twist to watch out for this year

There’s a reason stories survive. They remain the only way to honestly look at ourselves and each other, and preserve — or alter — what we see. Is there a story you are hoping will be told this year? A story you hope to see unfold in the world? We would love to hear from you.

Meanwhile, here is our list of stories that are out there, or soon will be, that surprise, that matter, that experiment with medium or intent in new ways.

A life in art

Ai Weiwei — a challenging and provocative artist, an architect of Chinese modernism — has lived in Beijing, Berlin, Cambridge and Lisbon. Spent time with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in New York. In Zodiac (Penguin Random House; January), a graphic novel on his life, created in collaboration with Italian political cartoonist Gianluca Costantini, Ai blends these real-life experiences with imagined confrontations (including a debate with Chinese President Xi Jinping) and fairy-tale fantasy, to craft a mystical manifesto for freedom and kindness.

Written largely as stories told to his son, the book is anchored in legends about the animals in the Chinese Zodiac.

Are you being served?

The new novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky, best known for his Hugo Award-winning Children of Time series (about humanity’s struggle to avoid extinction in an uncaring galaxy), is about murder, mayhem and robots gone rogue.

Humanity is slowly dying out, in Service Model (Tordotcom; June). People have become dependent on the labour of bots. In this world, a domesticated robot suddenly discovers that it has murdered its owner. It flees the home, into a world entirely unknown, and encounters other robots searching for new purpose.

Expect dark humour and sharp insight. Whose feelings count as feelings, why, and who gets to decide?

Time and time again

For her debut novel, Kaliane Bradley couldn’t decide between a spy thriller, a timetravel romance and a historical fantasy, so she decided to fuse the three genres.

Set in the near future, The Ministry of

Time (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster; May) follows a civil servant working on a secret government project that has drawn “expats” from across history into 21st century London, to observe what time travel does to humans, and to the fabric of space-time.

Tasked with assisting and monitoring Victorian naval officer and polar explorer Lieutenant Graham Gore (based on a real-life figure), the civil servant falls in love with her charge. With its nuanced views on colonialism, power and bureaucracy, The Ministry of Time is thought-provoking and darkly funny.

New highs

Why was LSD created? American historian Benjamin Breen takes the reader to the start of our most common manufactured psychedelics, with a special focus on this drug. In Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Hachette; January), Breen explores the academic partnership and fractured romance of pioneering anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and the utopian ambitions of researchers like them, who were studying the potential uses of psychedelic drugs in the postWorld War 2 years.

In the early throes of the Cold War, their ideas were put in use in missions with dystopian ends, such as the CIA’s experiments with mind control. Moving from the jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, Tripping on Utopia crafts a riveting origin story.

Off the hook

A year after hip-hop nominally turned 50, comes a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the cultural movement’s history, told through the eyes of one of its icons. In Hip-hop is History (Auwa Books; June), Questlove, drummer and joint frontman of The Roots, offers a front-and-centre view of things he read, heard and witnessed in the early years of this subculture.

New to the farm

Publishing company Legible is in the midst of re-releasing classics as AI-powered “living ebook” versions. First up is Animal Farm by George Orwell. The Legible Living Book version, released in January, introduces two new characters, hens named Sonia and Daisy. Readers can interact with them to dig deeper into the narrative, through interactive dialogue.

A computer program revising his tale… we at Wknd have been wondering what Orwell would have made of that.