tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142415392024-03-18T05:00:48.672+02:00Asking the Wrong QuestionsAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.comBlogger1103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-66359551884900497132024-03-12T18:19:00.000+02:002024-03-12T18:19:59.931+02:00Recent Reading Roundup 60The first recent reading roundup of the year reflects the reading preoccupations of the first few months of the year. Which is to say, catching up with all the books I mean to get to last year and either didn't have the time, or the access to. Only one of the books discussed here is a 2024 publication (and even that is a reprint from 1844), and there is still quite a lot published last year that Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-49388105644957744512024-03-06T16:48:00.000+02:002024-03-06T16:48:26.869+02:00Recent Movie: Dune, Part TwoThis is going to be less a review as an I told you so. When I reviewed the first part of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's psychedelic space opera three years ago, I offered praise mingled with skepticism. I admired the film's stark, gargantuan visuals, but also observed how its monochromatic palette felt almost like a panicked reaction to the campy visual excess of David Lynch's Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-38790304133256921082024-03-03T17:14:00.000+02:002024-03-03T17:14:30.825+02:00The 2024 Hugo Awards: My Hugo BallotWe've spent so much of the last six weeks talking about the debacle that was last year's Hugo awards, that it was easy to forget that another awards season was gearing up at the same time. So here we are, with less than a week left to nominate for this year's Hugos, and to be honest it feels a bit strange to make this post. I always love to talk about the things I enjoyed in the fantastic genres Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-84546432629178983762024-02-27T17:59:00.000+02:002024-02-27T17:59:20.152+02:00Recent Reading: In Ascension by Martin MacInnesWhen Paul Lynch won the Booker last year for Prophet Song, a near-future dystopia in which Ireland falls under the sway of a fascist government, there was the predictable hoopla over whether the book could, or should, be read as science fiction. But it seems to me that the SF community missed a trick several months earlier, when it failed to herald the longlisting of Martin MacInnes's In Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-70201183155878818192024-02-20T17:03:00.001+02:002024-02-20T19:54:50.526+02:00The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got WorseThe last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide. Turnover in the few permanent committees thatAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-54775802561999635312024-01-25T18:02:00.000+02:002024-01-25T18:02:01.685+02:00Recent Reading: Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin BlachéWhat is Prophet? Nature writer and essayist Helen Macdonald shocked the publishing world when they announced that their follow-up to books like H is for Hawk would be a science fiction novel co-written with debut author and musician Sin Blaché. In the novel, the titular substance, an accidental byproduct of superconductor research, violates the laws of physics and threatens to undermine reality Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-76160026442408827142024-01-22T21:46:00.001+02:002024-01-22T21:46:40.805+02:00The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an AsteriskIt's been a while since we've had one of these dramas. On Saturday, the nominating stats for the 2023 Hugo awards, which were announced in Chengdu, China in October 2023, were released to the public. There was a great deal of anticipation for these numbers, in no small part because of their much-delayed release. Though the WSFS constitution permits Hugo administrators to wait as long as 90 days Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-91156218779887233152024-01-09T18:22:00.000+02:002024-01-09T18:22:54.470+02:00Recent Reading: HIM by Geoff RymanA new Geoff Ryman novel! Nearly twenty years after his last one, I think we can be forgiven for having assumed that this impossible-to-pin-down author—winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for Air, originator of the Mundane SF manifesto, creator of one of the first hypertext novels with 253, and one of the darkest Wizard of Oz retelling with Was, the man who was once synonymous with The Child Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-60260686046551878732023-12-31T18:39:00.000+02:002023-12-31T18:39:45.497+02:002023, A Year in Reading: Best Books of the YearI read 166 books in 2023. For those of you keeping track, that's easily twice what I read in most years. I have no explanation. There are no major lifestyle changes that suddenly freed up my time, no trick to easy reading that I've discovered. Sometimes you just find yourself in a reading zone for a while, and for me this has lasted an entire year. Maybe it will continue into next year, and maybeAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-20466644318802660632023-12-26T19:12:00.003+02:002023-12-26T19:12:37.072+02:00Recent Reading: The Terraformers by Annalee NewitzIf nothing
else, points for truth in advertising. Newitz's third and most ambitious novel
is, as its title lets on right from the start, an entry in the subgenre that is
perhaps most closely associated with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The
tale of transforming a world, full to the bursting with ideas, stretching into deep time, peopled by nerdy scientists
and engineers earnestly debating Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-3910335008036412082023-11-29T19:22:00.001+02:002023-11-29T19:22:13.008+02:00Recent Movie: The MarvelsThe Marvels is the first movie that makes me think the MCU might actually be over. Not because it's bad—it is, in fact, quite charming and enjoyable, solidly mid-tier Marvel, and near the top of the pack for a post-Endgame movie. And not even because it has been a box office disappointment—though in the conversation surrounding this underperformance, not enough has been said about how it Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-76668862586294080402023-11-20T18:43:00.002+02:002024-03-03T15:17:23.195+02:00Recent Reading Roundup 59As the year approaches its end, I've ensconced myself in my reading nook to avoid thinking too hard about everything happening outside of it. This batch of reviews—once again, comprising mostly 2023 publications, including some of the most intriguing and anticipated books of the year—covers books read over the last few months. Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis - Kevin, a sad-sack aspiringAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-39097137588856780712023-10-31T19:35:00.000+02:002023-10-31T19:35:19.585+02:00Recent Reading: Some Desperate Glory by Emily TeshKyr is humanity's vengeance. A genetically engineered super-soldier with superior strength, speed, and reflexes, raised in Spartan austerity on the isolated, militaristic Gaea station, trained in weapons and combat since childhood, Kyr and her cohort were born after the alien majoda, seeking a decisive conclusion to their war with humanity, destroyed the Earth. Established by a splinter group whoAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-70069666344464975332023-10-02T21:21:00.004+03:002023-10-02T21:21:32.671+03:00Review: Foundation, Season 2 at Strange HorizonsIsaac Asimov's Foundation series is one of my big science fiction lacunae. I've read and enjoyed other Asimov books--his robot stories were my introduction to the genre--but for whatever reason, what's often considered his magnum opus passed me by (and it is, I suspect, a bit late to catch up; my tolerance for wooden prose and cardboard women is a lot lower than it was when I was ten). Which Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-64119456794397219382023-09-28T09:23:00.000+03:002023-09-28T09:23:11.518+03:00Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins[This post previously appeared, in slightly altered form, in Lawyers, Guns & Money.]Terry Pratchett died of complications of Alzheimer's in 2015. His death sent shockwaves through a broad community that had long admired Pratchett for his humor, his inventiveness, his indelible characters, and the deeply-felt humanist philosophy that ran through all his writing. Rob Wilkins, author of A Life Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-22919505074019097282023-09-13T18:55:00.001+03:002023-09-13T18:55:08.604+03:00A Political History of the Future: The Tech Billionaire at Lawyers, Guns & MoneyIt's been a long hiatus for A Political History of the Future, my LGM series about how science fiction depicts shifts in political, social, and economic systems. But the post that I finally got around to publishing today has been in the works for more than a year, and part of the reason that I took so long to put it together is that there kept being new material to incorporate and discuss. My Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-31044709921284331812023-08-28T18:22:00.000+03:002023-08-28T18:22:19.209+03:00Recent Reading: The Thick and the Lean by Chana PorterStories that deal with our evolving and often dysfunctional relationship with food have been a running thread through science fiction for decades. Isaac Asimov's "Good Taste" imagines a society in which eating natural-grown food is considered grotesque and disgusting. Adam Roberts's By Light Alone invents a technology that allows people to photosynthesize nutrients from the sun, which immediatelyAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-62238641218382843342023-08-11T11:20:00.002+03:002023-08-11T11:20:43.010+03:00Podcast: On a Road Called Oppenheimer at Lawyers, Guns & MoneyOne of the nice things about Oppenheimer is that it's spurred so much conversation on so many different topics. It's been a while since we had a movie that, while being a popular entertainment with a very large audience, encouraged people to talk about history, accountability, art, and the limits of biography. On top of my review of the film at Lawyers, Guns & Money, I also posted there aboutAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-89104251986789912132023-08-10T19:09:00.000+03:002023-08-10T19:09:59.589+03:00The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera"The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come." So begins Vajra Chandrasekera's remarkable debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors. It's a good beginning, full of promise. The shock of that sudden violence. The strangeness of the fantastical act. The lurch Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-78647303688248503662023-07-24T11:19:00.000+03:002023-07-24T11:19:23.961+03:00ElsewhereWithout really planning it, all of my recent film and TV writing has ended up at Lawyers, Guns & Money, while the book-related writing has ended up here. I'm not entirely sure why that happened—I tend to divide posts between the two blogs based mostly on vibes, so I guess things just broke that way. But because I know that some of these posts will be of interest to AtWQ readers, and out of a Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-86212942838821186652023-07-19T18:07:00.000+03:002023-07-19T18:07:33.585+03:00Recent Reading: Half-Life of a Stolen Sister by Rachel CantorThe lives of the Brontës—that brilliant, doomed family whose members struggled with genteel poverty, unrequited love, frustrated ambitions, and (in the case of son Branwell) addiction before succumbing, one by one, to disease—have for some time exerted a pull on artists and audiences. It's a story that has, in some ways, begun to eclipse the novels and poetry they left behind—see, for example, Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-20212964095314153902023-06-21T18:01:00.001+03:002023-06-21T18:01:40.960+03:00City of Last Chances by Adrian TchaikovskyAdrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances begins with a game of chaq. In the back room of the Anchorage inn, overlooking the Anchorwood in the city of Ilmar, now in its third year of occupation by the fascistic, autocratic Palleseen, sit a motley crew representing many of the city's dominant forces. Blackmane, a leader among the despised Allorwen minority, themselves refugees from a previous Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-47850919888482485822023-06-19T17:30:00.008+03:002023-06-19T17:30:50.278+03:00Goliath Roundtable at Strange HorizonsI've written already about Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath on this blog, but even after publishing, I wasn't sure that I'd given the novel the full consideration it deserves. The further I get away from it, the more obvious it seemed that Goliath is one of the major science fiction novels of 2022, and that the community as a whole has failed to fully appreciate it. I was thrilled, therefore, to be ableAbigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-45348701159896251582023-06-14T18:00:00.000+03:002023-06-14T18:00:44.341+03:00Recent Reading: Biography of X by Catherine LaceyAngered by an unauthorized, inaccurate biography of her late wife, the multi-disciplinary artist, public intellectual, and provocateur known only as X, journalist C.M. Lucca sets out to correct the record by writing her own biography. Biography of X is a metafictional exercise that is absolutely committed to the bit, complete with second, internal copyright and About the Author pages, Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-22178546026487861332023-06-11T18:53:00.002+03:002023-12-31T17:36:38.902+02:00Recent Reading Roundup 582023 is proving to be a whirlwind reading year—by the end of this month, I will probably have read as many books in six months as I do in most years. One reason for this is that I'm being sent a lot more review copies lately (all but one of the books discussed in this post were read as NetGalley ARCs), which produces an impulse to not only read but discuss, and thus become part of the cutting Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0