Asking the Wrong Questions

"Frodo and Gandalf" by Alan Lee [Gandalf] paused, and then said slowly in a deep voice: 'This is the Master-ring, the One Ring to rule them all. This is the One Ring that he lost many ages ago, to the great weakening of his power. He greatly desires it—but he must not get it.' Frodo sat silent and motionless. Fear seemed to stretch out a vast hand, like a dark cloud rising in the East and looming up to engulf him. 'This ring!' he stammered. 'How, how on earth did it come to me?' Hot on the heels of a chapter spent in the hustle and bustle of objectively trivial pursuits, steeped in the mundane concerns of an extremely silly group of people, comes a chapter that forces us—as well as our unwilling and terrified hero—to pay attention to the concerns of the outside world. After an absence of years, during which Frodo has both settled into life as master of Bag End and felt the repeated urge to follow Bilbo on his adventures, Gandalf returns and reveals to...

I read 183 books in 2025, a little less than last year but still in the same ballpark. Despite—or perhaps because—of this breadth of reading, I find that I'm struggling to sum up my year in books. 2025 was a good reading year, with lots of satisfying reads in a variety of genres. But it has not been a year that cohered around any of one of those genres, around a particular series, or around one or even a handful of books. The books that have lingered with me over the course of the year have been esoteric and even unique, especially when it comes to the fantastic genres. A lot of the books in the list below are what I'd consider science fiction or fantasy, but only one of them is a title I expect to see on awards lists in the coming months. The others are too weird, too experimental, and sometimes just published by the wrong people. All of which is to say, to any of the editors who have queried me over the last month for essays or paragraphs about the state of the genre, or even...

"Eleventy-First Birthday" by Nicole Gustafsson He stepped down and vanished. There was a blinding flash of light, and the guests all blinked. When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere to be seen. One hundred and forty-four flabbergasted hobbits sat back speechless. Old Odo Proudfoot removed his feet from the table and stamped. Then there was a dead silence, until suddenly, after several deep breaths, every Baggins, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brockhouse, Goodbody, Hornblower, and Proudfoot began to talk at once. We begin the tale of The Lord of the Rings with a chapter that quite deliberately recalls and reverses the opening events of The Hobbit . Instead of an unexpected party, there is a long-expected one. Instead of Bilbo rushing out of his home towards adventure without even a single handkerchief, there is a minutely-planned and carefully-orchestrated plan of disappearance and departure. And instead of the incursion of weirdn...

One of the unexpected curiosities of growing older is watching the train of "rediscovered" books come back around for a second try. In my teens, I read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men , by a Belgian-Jewish author named Jacqueline Harpman. A gender-based dystopia about a young girl who grows up in an underground bunker with a group of women, it was a dark, elliptical novel (one that many critics have tied to Harpman's experience of fleeing the Nazis as a child). I didn't particularly get on with it, but it has lingered with me for decades. Flash forward an undisclosed number of years, and I Who Have Never Known Men has become a BookTok sensation and a runaway bestseller. Naturally the response by publishers is to see if the rest of Harpman's voluminous catalogue might prove a similar hit. They are now testing the waters by reissuing a novel that was already translated into English in the 90s, Orlanda . Pitched at a very different emotional register than I...

"The Doors of Durin" by J.R.R. Tolkien This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues. It's Hannukah, and for me this has always been a time to revisit The Lord of the Rings . I don't reread it every year, but always when the candles are lit and the days grow darker, I find myself feeling the urge to return to this story....

After I published my effusive review of Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances , I received a comment from Tchaikovsky on twitter noting that he intended to continue writing in the novel's world without continuing directly from its story. This made sense to me, both because the breadth and complexity of the world revealed in City could clearly support many different stories in many different settings, and because the novel that City most reminded me of, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, had similarly spawned standalone sequels in separate settings. Two years later, we are four books deep into what has become known as the Tyrant Philosophers sequence (with a fifth book coming next year), and the project that seems to be emerging from this series feels more complex than what I had originally imagined. While each of the novels in this series stands alone and has a different setting and protagonist to the others, there are progressions that become clear when you r...