tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142415392012-01-27T22:37:24.142+02:00Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.comBlogger7041100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-73882327761160718352012-01-23T20:41:00.000+02:002012-01-23T20:41:31.701+02:00

The nominees for this year's BSFA awards have been announced, and I'm very pleased to report that my review of Arslan by M.J. Engh has been nominated for best non-fiction.  I'd like to take this chance to thank the BSFA and the award's administrators, as well as everyone who nominated my review, and to congratulate the other nominees. I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should.  As

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-55943711074384011742012-01-17T22:57:00.001+02:002012-01-18T12:14:55.385+02:00

Two seasons into its run, I'm having trouble deciding whether Sherlock is a brilliant show or a terrible one.  The episodes themselves seem to alternate between the two extremes, with little in the way of middle ground--devastatingly clever updates on Sherlock Holmes tropes alongside plots so full of holes that they barely hold together, gags that make you gasp with laughter alongside lines so

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-20412538518803738072011-12-31T13:27:00.000+02:002011-12-31T13:27:46.923+02:00

I read 59 books in 2011, a bit of a drop from previous years which is mainly due to Strange Horizons and the SF Encyclopedia taking up a lot of my time, but also, as I mentioned yesterday, because commuting by car rather than pubic transport has cut into my reading time.  Probably the most interesting thing about this year's reading is that for the first time since I've been keeping track, I've

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-26262289798228938222011-12-30T17:17:00.001+02:002011-12-30T20:11:27.067+02:00

Whatever the opposite of early adopter is, I'm it.  I tend to stick with what works, and am rarely in a rush to discover how a new gadget might improve my life.  I started this blog in 2005 when the format was already starting to get a bit stale (and am still plugging away at it going into 2012 when it's become positively antiquated).  I've only had a Gmail account for a year.  I got my first

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-82864357066601005622011-12-26T17:25:00.001+02:002011-12-27T11:30:59.656+02:00

A bumper crop of films as the year draws to its close--this write-up doesn't even include The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which I watched only a few weeks ago and already can't remember a thing about.  And there's more to come--the next month sees The Artist, Margin Call, Hugo, and We Need to Talk About Kevin opening in Israeli theaters.  My thoughts at this interim point:

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-52231561677066093252011-12-23T19:10:00.002+02:002011-12-26T21:42:38.679+02:00

It's late December, which for the last few years has been the time for my annual Dexter write-up.  That's not going to happen this year or, I suspect, any year in the future.  If you've watched the last season of Dexter, you know why.  If you haven't, do yourself a favor and avoid it.  Watch Homeland instead!  One of the biggest problems plaguing Dexter's sixth season was that it aired on the

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-6522021471205725722011-12-20T22:49:00.001+02:002011-12-21T11:20:23.345+02:00

It would be both accurate and misleading to describe Neal Stephenson's latest novel Reamde as Cryptonomicon: The Sequel.  Accurate because, like Stephenson's 1999 breakout novel, Reamde is a multi-threaded, globe-spanning technothriller whose SFnal quality is derived not from invention but from a preoccupation with the role that technology plays in its present moment--the dot com boom and World

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-25271618299268999842011-12-03T15:41:00.000+02:002011-12-03T15:41:54.261+02:00

William Mingin kicks off this week's reviews with a look at two collections of Robert E. Howard's non-Conan stories, Conan's Brethren and Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures, concluding that they illustrate the breadth of Howard's interests and his still-potent appeal.  Marina Berlin reviews the art-house SF film Another Earth, and though she finds much to praise she is also disappointed

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-78907959784212773022011-11-27T22:44:00.001+02:002011-11-30T10:59:59.608+02:00

So China Miéville has written a science fiction novel, and it is... well, it is many things, but perhaps we'll start with "Old School."  Miéville is the author who took the top off fantasy ten years ago, and his next to last novel, The City & The City, was so sui generis that it won awards for both science fiction (the British Science Fiction Award, the Clarke) and fantasy (the World Fantasy

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-60702198869834133892011-11-26T10:33:00.000+02:002011-11-26T10:33:24.975+02:00

The week's first review is by Matt Hilliard, who looks at Rob Ziegler's debut novel Seed, a post environmental collapse novel.  Though he questions Ziegler's environmental model, Matt finds much to admire about Seed's depiction of a slowly collapsing world.  Lila Garrott is disappointed with Lisa Goldstein's The Uncertain Places, arguing that it does little that is new or original with its fairy

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-47887578029489956042011-11-19T16:48:00.001+02:002011-11-20T19:57:49.935+02:00

After six years of writing about him, it feels as if I've developed a certain patter where Terry Pratchett, and particularly his Discworld novels, are concerned.  Though I've liked some of his novels better and others worse, my reaction to them in the years since I've been keeping this blog has been a near-uniform mix of fondness and exasperation, the former in recognition of the sheer breadth of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-80448516573315398702011-11-19T16:11:00.000+02:002011-11-19T16:11:40.262+02:00

This week's first review is by T.S. Miller, who takes a look at Future Media, a collection of stories and essays by Rick Wilber examining the ways that media has and is changing.  Tim finds much to enjoy but wonders if Wilber and his contributors might have more to say about the past than the future and the shape that future media might take.  Sarah Frost reviews Infidel, the sequel to God's War

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-38374128944697356042011-11-12T17:56:00.000+02:002011-11-12T17:56:29.004+02:00

This week's reviews kick off with disappointment.  First, Phoebe North is unimpressed with Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse, lamenting its dull plot, poor prose, and flat characters.  Maureen Kincaid Speller is no more won over by Mira Grant's Deadline, the sequel to Feed, which she finds suffering from many of its predecessor's flaws, chiefly an unwillingness to examine the dishonesty and

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-30388097614869988412011-11-05T16:55:00.000+02:002011-11-05T16:55:31.793+02:00

Strange Horizons's Halloween review is Farah Mendlesohn's long, detailed look at the essay collection 21st Century Gothic, edited by Danel Olson.  Farah finds the collection extremely variable, containing excellent pieces alongside terrible ones, but her review also acts as an introduction to several titles that one wouldn't necessarily associate with the Gothic descriptor, some of which sound

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-23129462453492567122011-11-02T12:40:00.000+02:002011-11-02T12:40:05.293+02:00

Over at Strange Horizons, I look at two of this year's circus-set fantasies, Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.  These two books take very different approaches to very similar premises, and I found things to like and dislike about each of them--so much so that I think they might work better as a paired reading than on their own. You can also read Niall

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-3079238102151007052011-10-30T20:16:00.000+02:002011-10-30T20:16:46.455+02:00

Isn't it just the way: you go weeks without seeing the inside of a movie theater and then two movies you want to see come out on the same weekend.  That timing proved to be fortuitous, though, as the two films have in common a preoccupation with our world and our present moment, though one of them filters that concern through science fiction while the other makes a virtue out of being mimetic.  

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-27905467733542370862011-10-29T10:28:00.000+02:002011-10-29T10:28:29.976+02:00

The first of this week's reviews is Richard Larson's take on Jesse Bullington's The Enterprise of Death.  Richard is impressed with Enterprise, both as a fantasy and as a piece of historical fiction.  Liz Bourke is similarly impressed with Erin Hoffman's debut fantasy Sword of Fire and Sea, though she notes some problems with the book's characters and plot.  Sofia Samatar is intrigued by Nina

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-42372423890523652432011-10-27T19:38:00.001+02:002011-10-27T20:26:31.961+02:00

As fall draws into winter, the new TV pilots grow less frequent and more prestigious.  By which I mean more expensive and featuring more high concepts, but not, as the following write-ups demonstrate, necessarily better. In fact, it's been a lackluster fall.  2 Broke Girls and Pan Am have disappointed me.  Ringer and Revenge haven't, but my expectations from them were never very high.  There's

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-20780196568815160142011-10-22T17:05:00.001+02:002011-10-23T16:40:27.025+02:00

In the first of this week's reviews, Indrapramit Das dives into Neal Stephenson's latest doorstop, Reamde, and finds novel with definite airport thriller qualities that nevertheless is not only entertaining, but suggests that the present setting of these sorts of novels has become SFnal.  Katherine Farmar reviews the putative next big thing in the YA fantasy circle, Rae Carson's Fire and Thorns (

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-74256364661279875842011-10-15T20:20:00.000+02:002011-10-15T20:20:28.569+02:00

The first of this week's reviews is of the Booker-longlisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, a literary dystopia of reproductive collapse that, per Niall Harrison's take, is a lot more interesting and worthwhile than that (to me, at least) unappetizing description indicates.  Lila Garrott is similarly impressed with Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire, a collection of erotic horror

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-65099603854195717292011-10-14T15:18:00.000+02:002011-10-14T15:18:33.305+02:00

In my recent post about Northanger Abbey, I cited several discussions of art by and about women as examples of the way that femininity can be a double-edged sword for female artists and women in general.  One of them was this article from The Millions by Gabriel Brownstein, wondering why Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, a novel about America in the present moment, was getting so much attention and

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-41777892299086630272011-10-11T20:02:00.000+02:002011-10-11T20:02:19.396+02:00

This has already been widely reported, but for those of you who haven't seen it, the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (to which I have contributed entries on television) went live yesterday.  There are still teething problems, and the text, as some subjects of the encyclopedia's entries have been discovering to their own annoyance, is not yet complete, but it's still an

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-4128020493612465542011-10-09T20:11:00.000+02:002011-10-09T20:11:49.918+02:00

In the chapter dedicated to Northanger Abbey in Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, the titular club's discussion of the book kicks off with Grigg, the club's sole male member, making some comments on The Mysteries of Udolpho, the Gothic novel whose reading so confounds young Catherine Morland that she begins to see dark and murderous plots wherever she goes.  He's stunned to discover

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-74999900158067994622011-10-07T14:20:00.002+02:002011-10-07T21:37:51.995+02:00

Victoria Hoyle kicks off this week's reviews with a review of recent World Fantasy Award nominee Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord.  Though charmed by novel, Victoria is also a little hesitant about it, wondering if it isn't a little too charming, and its resolution a little too neat.  Paul Kincaid follows with a similarly ambivalent review of Chris Adrian's The Great Night, a retelling of A

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-45158278086307319492011-10-01T09:47:00.000+03:002011-10-01T09:47:26.698+03:00

The reviews department rounds out the month with three reviews of odd, slipstream-y books.  First out the gate is Niall Alexander who reviews Christopher Priest's The Islanders, his first novel in nearly a decade and, an almost indescribable work that is, at its most basic level, a travel guide to an archipelago that doesn't exist.  Sofia Samatar follows up with a review of Yellowcake, Margo

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-47101306938548744592011-09-30T15:09:00.000+03:002011-09-30T15:09:59.660+03:00

Happy 5772, everyone!  Let us ring in the new year with more reviews of fall TV pilots!  The second week of the new season has been a bit quieter than the first, with fewer shows that I found something to write about (not listed here are Charlie's Angels, which is atrocious but not even hilariously so, Prime Suspect, which is nicely done but rather pointless given the existence of the original,

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-4232062770763815712011-09-24T10:26:00.000+03:002011-09-24T10:26:13.882+03:00

As well as my own review of Torchwood: Miracle Day, this week sees the publication of Duncan Lawie's review of Dancing With Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus by Michael Swanwick.  Duncan's project is to discover whether the novel, in which Swanwick expands on his short stories featuring the titular pair of con-men and rogues, has more to it than the sense of whimsy that

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-82246747164558595422011-09-23T17:25:00.000+03:002011-09-23T17:25:13.504+03:00

Well, here we are again.  Summer seems to have flown past and now the fall pilots are upon us, this year in a flood of new shows that nevertheless doesn't seem to have yielded too many winners yet.  Even leaving out the genuine turkeys (Whitney, The Playboy Club, Unforgettable), there aren't yet any shows that I'm genuinely excited by, and only a few whose pilots have left me intrigued. Ringer -

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-42696986278133861412011-09-19T17:30:00.000+03:002011-09-19T17:30:05.786+03:00

My review of Torchwood: Miracle Day appears today at Strange Horizons.  Spoiler: I did not like it, but even worse than that, I found it boring.  In my review I try to touch not just on why Miracle Day didn't work, but why Torchwood failed to hold on to the huge leap forward it made with Children of Earth. And a reminder that the Strange Horizons fund drive is still going, and that prizes are

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-3458844997375651672011-09-17T14:58:00.000+03:002011-09-17T14:58:36.672+03:00

Hannah Strom-Martin reviews Welcome to Bordertown: New Stories and Poems of the Borderlands, the latest installment in the shared-world anthology series, this time edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner.  She's pleased by what she finds, but wonders if the anthology's tone is less edgy and confrontational than the Bordertown setting pretends to be.  Michael Levy is impressed with Lavie Tidhar's

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-45905710875600341212011-09-15T19:34:00.001+03:002011-09-20T15:22:54.691+03:00

I've been trying to figure out how to sum up my reaction to Fringe, and after giving the matter some thought what I've concluded is that Fringe is a good show that is also incredibly badly written.  The second part should need little explanation.  "From the writers of the Transformers films and Star Trek, with guest appearances by the writer of Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, and Lost in Space"

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-18642138372710166722011-09-11T08:41:00.000+03:002011-09-11T08:41:22.038+03:00

Niall Harrison and Nic Clarke kick off this week's reviews with two views on the recently-concluded first season of Game of Thrones, Niall from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the books, and Nic as a fan of the series.  Both end up with a mixture of praise and reservations.  This is followed by two reviewer debuts: Nandini Ramachandran looks at M.D. Lachlan's Fenrir, the sequel to

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-66632261495366103342011-09-03T12:13:00.000+03:002011-09-03T12:13:14.968+03:00

This week, Strange Horizons reprints Pat Cadigan's 1991 story "Home by the Sea," with an introduction by Tricia Sullivan and a retrospective article on Cadigan by Tanya Brown.  The reviews department joins in the fun with two pieces: a review of Cadigan's 2000 novel Dervish is Digital, by Nader Elhefnawy, and an essay about several of Cadigan's short stories from the 80s by Matt Cheney.  Kicking

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-33234125419324964652011-08-26T19:10:00.000+03:002011-08-26T19:10:17.561+03:00

Chris Kammerud kicks off this week's reviews with a look at Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes, the story of a young woman stolen by fairies, whose charms Chris admires while wondering whether its conception of fairy tales is too moralistic for his taste.  Phoebe North has the opposite reaction when she reviews A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness's follow-up to the Chaos Walking trilogy, from an idea

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-64862432456424917022011-08-26T18:33:00.000+03:002011-08-26T18:33:25.392+03:00

The timing of The Hour, the BBC's just-concluded prestige series about the early days of British televised news, was always a bit dodgy.  In the wake of the News of the World scandal, how do you tell a story in which journalists are the brave, principled, truth-seeking heroes?  Even if you distinguish between commercial news and publicly-owned organizations like the BBC (which The Hour, set in

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-31791524208806872612011-08-24T22:10:00.000+03:002011-08-24T22:10:15.471+03:00

The end of summer is almost upon us, but before it arrives, let's pause for a moment to acknowledge something truly unexpected: the movies this year have been good.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who's gotten used to checking her brain at the door of the movie theater between May and September, to the extent that Thor, one of the silly season's earliest harbingers, was able to win me over with

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-72644067616787815812011-08-21T21:16:00.002+03:002011-08-22T09:39:49.579+03:00

Well, here we are again.  That day in late summer when SF fandom blearily pries open its sleep-glued eyes after a long and dimly-remembered evening, and looks dizzily about itself to see just how bad the damage is.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Hugo awards. In a brave but probably doomed attempt to wring something positive out Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear having been deemed the best genre

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-75789788321265698062011-08-20T11:16:00.000+03:002011-08-20T11:16:46.641+03:00

Sofia Samatar makes her Strange Horizons debut this week with a fascinating review of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's collection A Life on Paper, a volume that seeks to introduce this much-lauded French author to the English-reading public.  Niall Harrison looks at another literary zombie novel, Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, which he argues is unique for combining the horror of post-apocalyptic

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-27584425867787018792011-08-13T10:11:00.000+03:002011-08-13T10:11:15.668+03:00

This week on Strange Horizons: Matthew Cheney takes a look at Tor's reprint of Melissa Scott's cyberpunk novel Trouble and Her Friends and is underwhelemed, particularly by the way the novel's future has been overtaken.  Marina Berlin has mixed feelings about Paul Kearney's Corvus, which impresses her with its alternate history Roman military setting and battle scenes but disappoints in its

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-77764434694029594662011-08-06T10:11:00.001+03:002011-08-06T10:12:43.467+03:00

Kicking off August's reviews is Dan Hartland's take on God's War by Kameron Hurley, which Dan, with a few reservations, is very impressed by.  Katherine Farmar makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of the Haikasoru book Mardock Scramble, by Tow Ubukata, which she finds rather exhausting, full of great ideas and moments but on the whole a bit of an assault on the senses.  Hallie O'Donovan

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-11341249336357668182011-07-30T09:51:00.001+03:002011-07-30T09:53:13.887+03:00

Rounding out July's reviews are: Erin Horáková, who finds Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless delightful on the micro level, but somewhat shapeless in the macro; Nathaniel Katz and Marie Velazquez, who take two looks at the first volume in Daniel Abraham's new epic fantasy series, The Dragon's Path, Nathaniel wondering when the payoff to the book's buildup will come, and Maria whether Abraham plans

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-13926161094071747652011-07-24T23:46:00.000+03:002011-11-17T13:32:08.528+02:00

After a couple of dry months, reading-wise, I've gotten back on the horse in a big way and with some very fine books.  Here are my thoughts. Kraken by China Miéville - It's taken me a while to get to this book, and having finally read it the question foremost in my mind is: why?  It's strange enough that Miéville is going back to the template of a Londoner who discovers that there's a magical

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-11729265732638943552011-07-22T19:36:00.000+03:002011-07-22T19:36:41.695+03:00

We have two new reviewers this week.  First, Lila Garrott looks at Betrayer, the latest installment in C.J. Cherryh's long-running series, and concludes that though it might lay the seeds for interesting stories later on, as a work in its own right it is a disappointment.  In today's review, Guria King is more pleased by Kate Griffin's The Neon Court, the third Matthew Swift novel, which, though

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-27680888925115682852011-07-20T17:31:00.000+03:002011-07-20T17:31:23.900+03:00

It's been rather quiet around here, I know, and will probably remain that way for a while yet.  In the meantime, some of the movies I've seen recently. Hanna (2010) - What a strange film this is.  The premise makes it sound like The Bourne Identity starring a waifish teenage girl, and that's not an inaccurate description, but what it leaves out is how little the film seems to care about any of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-70463705102869781622011-07-16T13:34:00.000+03:002011-07-16T13:34:07.317+03:00

Paul Graham Raven kicks off this week's reviews with a long, thoughtful look at Gwyneth Jones's collection The Universe of Things, which not only makes the collection seem like essential reading, but doubles as a detailed examination of the themes of Jones's writing.  Raz Greenberg is less pleased with another collection, Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, whose four novellas Raz finds

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-92174673471726251952011-07-09T14:01:00.000+03:002011-07-09T14:01:59.930+03:00

Richard Larson kicks off this week's reviews with a rave for the fourth volume in Jonathan Strahan's anthology series, Eclipse.  Though several of the stories strike him as particularly strong, Richard finds the entire anthology well worth a read.  We also have two new reviewers making their debut this week.  Tori Truslow is intrigued by S.L. Grey's The Mall, which has been championed by Lauren

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-54333626560258476482011-07-05T19:28:00.000+03:002011-07-05T19:28:38.566+03:00

I think I've mentioned that I've been writing entries on television series for the third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford and Graham Sleight.  It's been a lot of fun and I'm pleased with what I've come up with, so I was thrilled, several weeks ago, to hear from Graham the news that he's made public today: in association with British SF publisher

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-90963095366912928962011-07-01T20:37:00.000+03:002011-07-01T20:37:09.991+03:00

Lisa Goldstein kicks off the week's reviews with her take on Patrick Rothfuss The Wise Man's Fear, the sequel to The Name of the Wind, with which Lisa is pleasantly surprised.  Maureen Kincaid Speller is less enamored of Holly Black's White Cat, wondering if this novel about con men doesn't constitute a con on its readers.  Christy Tidwell makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of Kevin

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-18445974691994968512011-06-25T12:57:00.001+03:002011-06-26T09:11:54.377+03:00

I read George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, the first volume in his Song of Ice and Fire sequence, in 2005, and came away feeling that it was rather poor stuff.  The post in which I listed the reasons for my disappointment received a fair share of peeved comments, but the one that's stuck in my mind these six years came from a commenter who wondered how I could say that A Game of Thrones

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-82560452228547505262011-06-24T20:20:00.001+03:002011-06-24T22:32:12.693+03:00

It's alternative steampunk week at the Strange Horizons reviews department.  Brendan Byrne kicks things off with his review of Angry Robot's reprint of Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter, one of the first steampunk novels, which Brendan views as a glimpse of what steampunk might have been without its propensity to view the past through rose-tinted glasses.  Chris Kammerud looks at another reprint,

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-77486185402578208532011-06-23T22:03:00.001+03:002011-06-26T23:05:00.037+03:00

In the last decade the Israeli film industry has experienced a dramatic renaissance.  More films are being made; more tickets are being sold; and, internationally, Israeli films have been acclaimed at prestigious festivals and in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars.  I have to confess that I've let most of this new wave pass me by, mainly because so few of these films piqued my

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-21779079881847688992011-06-18T08:49:00.000+03:002011-06-18T08:49:08.048+03:00

As well as my own review of Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, this week's Strange Horizons sees Niall Harrison discussing The Colony by Jillian Weise, one of the novels selected for this year's Tiptree honor list.  Though Niall is impressed by Weise's treatment of the subject of sexuality, he's dubious about her approach to science.  Rounding out the week is Alexandra Pierce, making her Strange

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-86910216877604875082011-06-13T15:45:00.000+03:002011-06-13T15:45:33.981+03:00

My review of Iain M. Banks's latest Culture novel, Surface Detail, appears today at Strange Horizons.  My reaction to this book is almost the exact opposite of my reaction to X-Men: First Class--if the film frustrated me by suggesting that the desire for vengeance is never justified, the book is so busy decrying what it views as greater evils that it stakes out a positive attitude towards killing

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-51504229149433976552011-06-10T16:19:00.000+03:002011-06-10T16:19:00.371+03:00

Andy Sawyer kicks off this week's reviews with a joint look at the revised edition of The Search for Philip K. Dick, a biography of the author by his first wife Anne, and The King of the Elves, the first volume of Subterranean's new edition of Dick's collected stories.  Though he's impressed, with some reservations, by the biography, Andy is disappointed with the new edition of the stories, which

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-82097467967808787282011-06-06T19:52:00.000+03:002011-06-06T19:52:39.026+03:00

The first installment of the modern film incarnation of the X-Men franchise came out in 2000, and is generally held to have been the harbinger of the following decade's deluge of superhero and comic book films.  I remember going to see the film several weeks after its US release had been greeted by effusive reviews, which praised it for taking the comic book adaptation an enormous step forward,

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-57590730323508152542011-06-04T11:00:00.000+03:002011-06-04T11:00:58.284+03:00

In honor of Carol Emshwiller's recent 90th birthday, this week's Strange Horizons issue is dedicated to Emshwiller's work.  The reviews department kicks off the focus week with L. Timmel Duchamp's review of the recent Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 1, in which she charts the development of Emshwiller's voice and prevailing themes through her short fiction.  Paul Kincaid reviews

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-39363690810629915452011-06-03T14:28:00.000+03:002011-06-03T14:28:43.148+03:00

And now we come to the last of our shortlist reviews.  After the disappointing and even infuriating short story and novelette ballots, it would be nice to report that the Hugo-nominated novellas are an exciting and worthwhile bunch of stories.  Instead, the shortlist (minus Alastair Reynolds's "Troika" which is not online) is solid, by no means a slog to get through and at some points quite good,

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-17614524992253268252011-05-28T17:22:00.001+03:002011-05-29T09:19:01.882+03:00

This week's reviews kick off with Matt Cheney's fascinating take on Gary K. Wolfe's essay collection Evaporating Genres, in which Matt discusses his own expectations from reviewing and criticism, and the difficulties those expectations caused him in appreciating Wolfe's book.  Duncan Lawie is pleased with Aliette do Bodard's Harbinger of the Storm, the sequel to Servant of the Underworld, which

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-412525789501855442011-05-27T13:45:00.001+03:002011-05-29T09:18:37.895+03:00

If the short story ballot feels like a snapshot of the genre short fiction scene in 2010, the same year's novelette ballot seems deliberately retro.  All but one of its stories are brimming with classic SF tropes--long-haul space voyages, Martian colonization, alien encounters, toolshed astronauts--and even more than that, with nostalgia for a time when those tropes dominated science fiction.  I

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-37992611154736213482011-05-23T22:34:00.000+03:002011-05-23T22:34:44.552+03:00

At long last, my series on defining the Strange Horizons reviews policy has started up again at the magazine's blog.  This time, I try to explain why the reviewing vs. criticism discussion and the question of spoiler warnings are fundamentally about the same thing. Note also that, thanks to the magazine's intrepid webmaster Shane, the blog now displays full posts on the main page and syndicates

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-51751405842822254152011-05-20T21:40:00.000+03:002011-05-20T21:40:24.269+03:00

Tim Miller kicks off this week with a glowing review of Karen Joy Fowler's collection What I Didn't See and Other Stories.  Following him is Michael Froggatt, discussing NYRB Classics's translation of modern Russian fantasist Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy, which Michael finds worthwhile mainly for its middle segment.  Niall Alexander rounds out the week with a review of Subterranean Tales of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-47355482620975336922011-05-20T12:30:00.000+03:002011-05-20T12:30:51.314+03:00

The ballot for this year's short story category functions quite well as a snapshot of 2010's short fiction scene, and the Hugo award's interaction with it.  You've got one of the most popular, and most talked-about, short stories of the last few years.  You've got two of the award's darlings, including one who has had a story on at least one of the short fiction shortlists for four years running.

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-42005342731773630072011-05-13T21:16:00.000+03:002011-05-13T21:16:51.756+03:00

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro kicks off this week's reviews with his take on Paul Haines's collection Slice of Life, to which his reaction is a mixture of admiration and reticence towards Haines's use of outrageous, provocative plot elements.  On Wednesday, Michael H. Payne argues that the latest incarnation of the My Little Pony cartoon, Friendship Is Magic, has imbued the old Mattel marketing platform

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-7535588817678064142011-05-11T20:24:00.000+03:002011-05-11T20:24:21.870+03:00

A few more films before the full force of the summer blockbuster season comes upon us. Winter's Bone (2010) - I was a little nervous going into this film, because the warm critical reception that a film might receive when it's a come-from-behind surprise from a virtually unknown writer and director can seem overblown a year later, when it's a universally lauded Oscar nominee starring one of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-57787200182775433202011-05-06T22:21:00.000+03:002011-05-06T22:21:41.469+03:00

The first Strange Horizons review of May is Adam Roberts's take on Harmony by Project Itoh, a Haikasoru book that Adam finds very impressive, and which launches him into wondering why modern SF has had so little to say about modern medicine and the experience of being in its care.  Niall Alexander is less complimentary to the BBC much-pumped, then quickly-dumped SF TV series Outcasts, whose

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-26094425366987623712011-05-01T18:54:00.000+03:002011-05-01T18:54:11.284+03:00

Late March and early April were very bad reading periods for me.  A combination of busyness, stress, and a rather dull book that I nevertheless insisted on finishing meant that I spent several weeks struggling with unenjoyable reads, picking books up and putting them back down after fifty pages, usually through no fault of their own, eying my enormous TBR stack with distaste, and in general

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-40835872530127392942011-04-29T12:24:00.000+03:002011-04-29T12:24:07.076+03:00

As well as the two halves of Dan Hartland's review of the 2011 Clarke award shortlist (the award has since been won by Lauren Beukes's Zoo City--see Niall Harrison's thoughts at the Strange Horizons blog) the reviews department rounds out April with Lisa Goldstein's review of Helen Lowe's The Heir of Night, the first in a new fantasy series, which Lisa finds a little by the numbers, telling a

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-69109361156807987442011-04-27T12:45:00.000+03:002011-04-27T12:45:38.620+03:00

The Arthur C. Clarke shortlist review is a tradition of long standing, first at the now-defunct Infinity Plus, and in the last few years at Strange Horizons.  For the second year running, Dan Hartland has reviewed the year's shortlist, and parts 1 and 2 of his review are now up.  See also comments on the shortlist from Niall Harrison, David Hebblethwaite, and Maureen Kincaid Speller. Another

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-16170966915991847262011-04-25T02:14:00.000+03:002011-04-25T02:14:36.269+03:00

The list of nominations was announced two hours ago and is by now all over the internet--for example.  Some comments. The pleasure of seeing four women on the best novel ballot (to match the female-dominated, yet hardly overlapping, Nebula ballot) is undercut by how thoroughly unappetizing I find the actual ballot.  I was looking forward to reading Ian McDonald's The Dervish House (which just

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-44880439069300963922011-04-22T20:07:00.000+03:002011-04-22T20:07:21.734+03:00

This week's reviews kick off with Nic Clarke's look at the first two volumes in Juliet E. McKenna's new trilogy, Blood in the Water and Banners in the Wind, in which Nic finds an interesting counterpoint to the much-discussed reactionary tendency of epic fantasy, as the novels describe a popular rebellion against a restrictive aristocratic class in a fantasy kingdom.  Matt Hilliard makes his

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-65810488166210010522011-04-16T10:32:00.000+03:002011-04-16T10:32:07.257+03:00

For your convenience, a link post for my series revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation. Introduction To Boldly Stay - How The Next Generation changes its focus from exploration to politics "Optimism, Captain!" - On Star Trek's most contentious quality Keep Flying - The tragedy of Picard Odds & Ends - A few more thoughts on the characters and the actors who played them

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-70055209626887991572011-04-15T14:51:00.000+03:002011-04-15T14:51:33.966+03:00

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Martin Lewis's take on Source Code, which is decidedly less positive than mine (see also the discussion in the comments).  Maureen Kincaid Speller reviews the first two volumes in Alaya Dawn Johnson's YA fantasy trilogy, Racing the Dark and The Burning City, and is disappointed in their handling of the main character.  Finally, Nathaniel Katz

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-33215574810562472062011-04-14T12:36:00.000+03:002011-04-14T12:36:42.122+03:00

Over at Ferretbrain, Daniel Hemmens has a very long, very detailed, and very negative review of Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear, the long-awaited sequel to The Name of the Wind.  The whole review is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by this observation: What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-78714960841379353872011-04-13T09:40:00.000+03:002011-04-13T09:40:54.352+03:00

Some thoughts about actors and characters. As I wrote in the previous entry, one of the pleasures of returning to The Next Generation as an adult was rediscovering, and learning to fully appreciate, Patrick Stewart's performance as Picard.  The rest of the cast, however, proved a less pleasant surprise.  Whether it's because the show was considered a bad employment risk when it first started

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-18244508972686019032011-04-11T10:26:00.000+03:002011-04-11T10:26:20.054+03:00

"I should have done this a long time ago." Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "All Good Things…", 1994 I think it's safe to say that if it hadn't been for Patrick Stewart, there would be no modern Trek, and we would still think of the franchise as a cult TV series from decades ago that spawned a couple of movies and, in the late 80s, a short-lived spin-off.  In The Next Generation's first

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-77919737587184979042011-04-09T11:05:00.000+03:002011-04-09T11:05:11.099+03:00

The trailers and promos for Duncan Jones's second film Source Code seemed to suggest a very familiar narrative.  Not for the film, that is, but for Jones's career.  First, an arty, idiosyncratic film to establish his credentials among critics and science fiction fans alike.  Then, a bankable, formulaic action flick with SFnal touches to prove to the Hollywood money people that Jones could be

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-54109613498496039402011-04-08T13:29:00.000+03:002011-04-08T13:29:59.568+03:00

This week's reviews kick off with the third installment of Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's series in which reviews Isaac Asimov's series The Great SF Stories (see also parts 1 and 2).  This time Alvaro takes a look at the stories of 1940.  L. Timmel Duchamp follows with a review of Julia Holmes's Meeks, a novel that Timmi finds frustrating in its refusal to engage the reader with any of the conventions of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-57050931508199474572011-04-07T10:55:00.000+03:002011-04-07T10:55:25.022+03:00

Picard: In my century, we don't succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility. Lily: Bullshit! Star Trek: First Contact, 1996 My first forays onto the internet coincided with the height of my Star Trek fannishness, and one of the first websites I can recall checking regularly was a cache of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine reviews by Tim Lynch, who was writing weekly recaps +

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-68398206749809553442011-04-05T14:23:00.000+03:002011-04-05T14:23:16.627+03:00

"Anyone remember when we used to be explorers?" Picard, Star Trek: Insurrection, 1998 The first season of The Next Generation is probably best thought of as the fourth season of original Star Trek, except set decades later and with an entirely different cast. To a certain extent, this was probably inevitable--any spin-off feels the gravitational pull of its original, and the twenty five years

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-18073779411760935322011-04-03T10:36:00.000+03:002011-04-03T10:36:18.565+03:00

"Seven years ago I said we'd be watching you, and we have been. Hoping your ape-like race would demonstrate some growth, give some indication that your minds have room for expansion. And what have we seen instead? You spending time worrying about Commander Riker's career. Listening to Counselor Troi's pedantic psychobabble. Indulging Data in his witless explorations of humanity. … It's time

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-55769582032292921962011-04-01T15:01:00.000+03:002011-04-01T15:01:51.304+03:00

This week's Strange Horizons reviews cover two short story collections and a movie.  Niall Harrison is impressed with the Jonathan Strahan-edited The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, finding that many of the themes he's admired in Robinson's novels are ably expressed in his short fiction.  Anil Menon reviews Beth Bernobich's collection A Handful of Pearls & Other Stories and also likes what he finds

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-46405742920454383302011-03-31T19:24:00.000+02:002011-03-31T19:24:42.812+02:00

Over at the Strange Horizons blog, I've published a call for reviewers, and particularly female reviewers.  This is a follow-up to Niall Harrison's recent project to examine how genre review venues break down according to gender.  Click through to read more, and if you're interested in writing for Strange Horizons, by all means drop me a line.

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-89323933266457326032011-03-25T12:35:00.001+02:002011-03-25T12:36:32.976+02:00

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with one of the most talked-about books of the last few months, Jo Walton's Among Others, which charms reviewer Michael Levy by being as much about the experience of being a genre fan as a genre story itself.  Graham Sleight takes a look at the seemingly puzzling combination of Michael Moorcock and Doctor Who tie-in novels in Doctor Who: The Coming of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-69272676047117563172011-03-18T18:02:00.000+02:002011-03-18T18:02:22.057+02:00

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Matthew Jones's take on Caprica, which is a little more negative than mine and, interestingly, more concerned with the technological questions raised by the series's premise, which the show neglected in favor of political and social storylines and, of course, soap opera.  On Wednesday, Hannah Strom-Martin reviews the anthology Machine of Death: A

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-58617766644546361492011-03-17T16:58:00.000+02:002011-03-17T16:58:04.956+02:00

A year ago, when Being Human concluded its second season, I was pretty sure I was done with the show.  Being Human's first season was a fun but underbaked affair, clearly too charmed by its own premise--a vampire, Mitchell, a werewolf, George, and a ghost, Annie, who move into a house in Bristol--to do very much with it.  The show's second season took that premise and ran with it, and the result

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-3056392837248618902011-03-15T12:09:00.000+02:002011-03-15T12:09:01.650+02:00

The results of the Strange Horizons 2010 readers' poll are in, and, alongside such winners as Theodora Goss (best short story), Marge Simon (best poem), and Orrin Grey (best article), I'm stunned to announce that I was voted best reviewer.  I'm joined in that category by Adam Roberts, Niall Harrison, Matthew Cheney, and Farah Mendlesohn, which is such an august group of reviewers that I can't

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-1689954153186735512011-03-11T16:35:00.000+02:002011-03-11T16:35:45.721+02:00

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Richard Larson's discussion of one of the most talked-about science fiction novels of the last year, Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, with Richard joining in the novel's near-unanimous praise.  On Wednesday, Andy Sawyer puzzles over Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game, and the meaning of its twist ending.  Today's

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-58833914101201851072011-03-07T17:43:00.001+02:002011-11-17T13:32:31.520+02:00

Some of the books I never got around to writing about in the women writing SF project, and a few of the ones I've read since then. Moxyland by Lauren Beukes - I found a lot to be impressed by in Moxyland, one of the most talked-about debuts of the last few years.  What I didn't find was a novel.  The book feels like a demonstration of Beukes's talent--for worldbuilding, for constructing

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-79040414269228611522011-03-04T12:13:00.000+02:002011-03-04T12:13:32.232+02:00

This week on Strange Horizons, Nader Elhefnawy rounds off February with his review of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Empress of Eternity, which Nader thinks has its strong points, but is ultimately a disappointing execution of an interesting premise.  Dan Hartland kicks off March on a more positive note, with a glowing review of Zoran Živković's short novel The Ghostwriter.  Continuing the trend, C.B.

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-64590901703362387262011-02-27T19:38:00.000+02:002011-02-27T19:38:05.682+02:00

My movie-watching slowed way down in the second half of 2010--the posts tagged 'film' from that period cover nearly all of the films I watched--but with winter the interchangeable action films and rage-inducing romantic comedies give way to more interesting stuff, and I've found myself at the movie theater again. The Kids Are All Right (2010) - It's easy to imagine how this gentle, well-made but

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-60981728427546578702011-02-25T10:43:00.000+02:002011-02-25T10:43:49.588+02:00

Before I get to the week's reviews, I'd like to mention that the Strange Horizons readers' poll, where you can vote for your favorite stories, poems, articles and reviewers, is open until March 6th.  Vote early and vote often (though only your last ballot will count). Now the reviews: the week kicks off with Jonathan McCalmont (who has just joined Strange Horizons's staff as junior articles

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-77197649221877777542011-02-23T20:00:00.000+02:002011-02-23T20:00:58.179+02:00

In my recent post about M.J. Engh's Arslan, I noted how much of its time--the mid-70s--the novel seemed, most particularly in its conviction that America, still reeling from the cultural clashes of the 60s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, was on the verge of collapse.  A few days later, Keith Phipps, writing for the AV Club, made the same observation about Stephen King's The Stand.  Even defaced

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-69510180916429221392011-02-18T13:57:00.000+02:002011-02-18T13:57:56.988+02:00

This wasn't a conscious plan on my part, but it seems rather appropriate that on Valentine's Day, Strange Horizons should have run T.S. Miller's review of Robert Silverberg's The Last Song of Orpheus, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Miller finds Silverberg's retelling oddly cold, but his review is as much a discussion of the myth itself, of earlier, including medieval, versions

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-60185533683134807562011-02-15T20:01:00.000+02:002011-04-16T10:38:34.305+03:00

There are a few more books in my reading project that I haven't written about, but as I have less to say about them I'll probably leave them for my next recent reading roundup.  In the meantime I've gone back to my TBR stack with a slight feeling of letdown--there are a lot of books there I'd like to read, but I've enjoyed this project and the new vistas it's opened to me.  For the rest of the

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-38673496695788127282011-02-12T10:38:00.000+02:002011-02-12T10:38:03.213+02:00

This week on Strange Horizons, Roz Kaveney discusses the suddenly very topical Deep State by Walter Jon Williams, a novel about a popular revolution in the Middle East powered by the internet.  Sara Polsky is impressed by the Kate Bernheimer-edited My Mother She Ate Me, My Father He Killed Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, in which authors from the literary and genre ends of the scale retell fairy tales

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-83092058011279464062011-02-10T11:39:00.000+02:002011-04-16T10:38:53.025+03:00

The first time I tried to read Arslan I was seventeen or eighteen.  The book came to me via Amazon's recommendation engine, which in those days, before I found an online community of readers, was my main source of new and unfamiliar titles.  I recall not knowing much about the book before buying or reading it--just that it was well-regarded, and that it told the story of the invasion and conquest

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-70742011604658709972011-02-05T10:47:00.000+02:002011-02-05T10:47:21.586+02:00

The last Strange Horizons review of January is Edward James's take on Kate Elliott's Cold Magic, which is actually a reflection on the two fantasy sequences Elliott has already written, to which the trilogy that Cold Magic begins is a continuation.  On Wednesday, Graham Sleight reviews Susan Hill's ghost story The Small Hand, which he finds a little old-fashioned in its willingness to tie up all

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-30897608763964521042011-02-04T10:48:00.000+02:002011-02-04T10:48:53.963+02:00

The voting form for the Locus Award is online, and for the second year running, Locus continues in its policy of giving its subscribers a full vote, while non-subscribers' votes count for half (the policy was actually introduced three years ago, but in the 2008 awards it was decided upon only after the votes were counted).  I wrote last year about why I think this is wrong, but just to recap

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-28215970722055368632011-02-02T21:44:00.001+02:002011-02-02T21:51:30.560+02:00

The story thus far: On January 28th, Bitch Magazine posted a list of "100 YA Novels for the Feminist Reader."  The list is affiliated with Bitch Magazine's lending library, and was posted by Ashley McAllister, who is listed on Bitch's staff page as library coordinator.  Predictably, commenters began suggesting additions to the list and, in smaller numbers, objecting to the books on it.  On

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14241539.post-49781749694359431422011-02-01T18:52:00.000+02:002011-04-16T10:38:53.027+03:00

Mary Gentle's name came up several times, in several contexts, in the discussion that sparked Niall's women in SF project--as an example of a female writer of science fiction who moved to the greener, more inviting pastures of fantasy, and as an example of a female author whose work is overshadowed by men doing similar work--I haven't read Gentle's Ash, but Adam Roberts argued that it did many of

Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.com1