Meanwhile

Things have been a little quiet here at AtWQ, mainly because I spent half of August on vacation.  This doesn't mean I haven't been writing, though--I published several shorter, more conversational pieces at Lawyers, Guns and Money while I was traveling, and during the last week as I was reacclimating to normal life (including recovering from a minor, vacation-related injury).  For good order's sake, I thought I'd link to those posts here.

• My trip included several days in London, where I watched several plays.  One of them, the musical Fun Home (based on the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel) left me feeling rather overwhelmed, and contemplating the way that art affects us emotionally, sometimes against our will.  I wrote a bit about that and opened the floor to thoughts on what people look for in that respect.  (The other plays I saw were King Lear and Hamilton; I wrote a bit about my reaction to both in the comments.)
  
  
• The second week of my trip was spent in the country, reading lots of books.  I'll have some more about most of them in an upcoming Recent Reading Roundup, but I wrote up Richard Powers's The Overstory for LGM, because its themes and preoccupations lined up so strongly with that blog's political focus.  In particular, the novel's depiction of communication failure between environmental and logging interests is one that the writers at LGM have chronicled on many occasions.
  
  
• Crashing back to reality, I read with disappointment that admitted sexual harasser Louis CK had been welcomed with open arms for a brief set at a New York comedy club.  I wrote a little about why this is despicable, and discussed, in particular, the kind of arguments that tend to be trotted out when privileged, famous men who have done little or nothing to make up for their abuses try to get their fame and fortune back.

Infinity Links

Somewhat surprisingly for a film that has so little time (and possibly also inclination) to explore any interesting ideas raised by its premise, Infinity War has resulted in a rather vibrant conversation.  I'll say from the outset that most of the links I've collected proceed from the point of view that the film is at the very least flawed, if not genuinely bad.  This is probably my selection bias speaking, but I really haven't seen any interesting positive discussions of the film--any in-depth engagement with it, it seems to me, must inevitably grapple with the film's myriad, foundational flaws.  Also rooted in my own preoccupations is the fact that a lot of these links end up talking less about the film, and more about how it exposes some uncomfortable truths about how Marvel sees its franchise, its long-term goals, and its audience.

• Of the mainstream reviews--that is, those prohibited on pain of death of discussing the film's ending, AKA the only thing that is really worth talking about--my favorites are probably A.A. Dowd at the AV Club and Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com.  Both manage to address the film's flaws without stepping on a revelation they couldn't address.  First, here's Dowd getting at the heart of the matter:
  

  Infinity War is the closest a movie has come to a true comic-book crossover event, those massive arcs that unfold across multiple titles, forcing cash-strapped readers to shell out for books they don’t normally buy just to get the full scope of the narrative. The dirty secret of these heavily hyped ensemble sagas is that they’re usually pretty underwhelming, and Infinity War inherits plenty of the problems endemic to crossovers: the privileging of quantity over quality, of spectacle over story, and of the shock value of major changes to the status quo over just about everything else.

  And Seitz perfectly capturing the sense of missed opportunity that wafts over the entire film:
  

  If only the film were better modulated, or perhaps longer, or more elegantly shaped, or ... well, it's hard to say exactly what's wrong here. But something's not up to snuff. This is, as many have pointed out, one half of a story broken in two, but it feels like less than half somehow. Until pretty recently, MCU films have suffered from collective curve-grading—each film seemed content to settle for "better than expected," as opposed to being really, truly good—and that feeling returns here, unfortunately. "Infinity War" faced so many challenges, many of them unique to this particular project, that it's a small miracle that it works at all. On some level, it feels ungrateful to ask a movie that already does the impossible to do it with more panache. But what are superhero movies without panache really good for? If there was ever a moment to swing for the fences, it was this one.

  
  
• With a bit more freedom to discuss the disintegrating elephant in the room, Film Crit Hulk masterfully analyzes the way Infinity War--and other Marvel movies before it--try to establish stakes and a sense of urgency.  In "Avengers: Infinity War and Marvel's Endless Endgame", he argues that the film fails at this task long before it gets to its consequence-free ending.
  

  If you’re going to kill half the population in the universe, then kill them. Right now these other tertiary characters are "dead," but dramatically-speaking, they may as well have just been kidnapped. But what else should I have expected? These movies have always been about "the texture of consequences" without any real commitment to them. So now phase one heroes are going to have to rally together or go save phase four heroes, and maybe sacrifice themselves, blah blah blah. It's always been promises and deferment. Which means that the MCU has ultimately belied what was the greatest hope for these movies: to use the unique medium of film to tell full stories, full of big, bold, lasting choices in a way that had become impossible within the cyclical bloat of comics. And that's when it hits you. The simple, obvious answer to what the MCU "is." Because these are definitely not movies. And despite all the arguments, they're definitely not a season of television either…
  
  They finally just became comic books.
  
  After 10 years of unparalleled success they've managed to inherit the same exact problems of critical mass that plague that industry. Endless cycles. Confusing timelines. Continuity issues. Basic bloat. Feints of death. This isn't the infinity war; this is the infinity loop. And the MCU had the opportunity to avoid all that. But thanks to its unparalleled success, they took on the same exact problems of comics instead.

  
  
• Speaking of Thanos's evil plan, this handy website will let you know if you were among its victims.  I, sadly, didn't make it.
  
  
• Darren Mooney does a close read of the film's plot--with side visits to Age of Ultron and Civil War--to discuss how not only is there a great big nothing at its core, but how the team-up MCU movies seem perpetually at work dismantling the films that came before them so as to ensure that no consequences or meaningful changes ever trouble their universe.
  

  Everything in Civil War is very meticulously calculated and engineered in such a way as to avoid anything that might challenge or upset an audience invested in either Tony or Steve. The films are wary of politicising their heroes even slightly, and so Civil War is stripped of any significance or weight. It is impossible to hate either Tony or Steve for any of the decisions that they make within Civil War, because the film bends over backwards to avoid having them make any decisions at all. Even the climactic throwdown is driven by highly-charged emotion and immediately walked back. Even Rhodey is walking by the end.
  
  Unsurprisingly, Infinity War is this "story without meaning" approach extrapolated past its logical extreme. ... Within the narrative of Infinity War, none of the characters make any choice that has any meaning. Tony is reluctant to call Steve for help, which would be a bold character-driven decision. However, he is about to call Steve when he is interrupted by the arrival of Ebony Maw and Black Dwarf in New York. Later, Bruce Banner picks up the phone and makes the call anyway. The two teams created at the end of Civil War are reunited when Captain America takes the team to the New Avengers headquarters. Rhodey has no qualms about working with the people indirectly responsible for crippling him.

  
  To that last observation I would add: It's not just that Rhodey doesn't hold his disability against Steve and company (since after all, it was Vision's fault, for using potentially lethal force in a fight where everyone else was pulling their punches).  It's that at the end of Civil War he proudly tells Tony that his maiming was "worth it" because going against Steve was the right thing to do, but in Infinity War he sneers at General Ross and happily welcomes an unrepentant Steve back to Avengers headquarters.  There are multiple other such issues.  Vision tried to kill Sam in Civil War, and yet Sam has no problems working to protect him, and no comment on the fact that his fellow fugitive Wanda has been having an affair with Vision for two years.  Wanda destroyed Bruce Banner's life--something he once felt so strongly about that he promise to kill her "without even changing color"--and yet now he has no reaction to the fact that she was essentially given his old room.
  
  The obvious response here is that the characters are dealing with a more pressing crisis.  But there's a vast gulf between putting aside your differences for the greater good and simply not giving a shit about things that were supposedly a matter of life and death just one or two movies ago.  Character interactions in Infinity War overwhelmingly fall on the latter side of the divide.  It couldn't be any clearer that the question we were supposed to find flummoxing and thorny in Civil War is now completely irrelevant, just as Tony's loss of perspective in Age of Ultron ceased to matter by the time we got to Civil War.  Which tells us, I think, all we need to know about how seriously we should be taking anything that happens in Infinity War.
  
  
• In "Thanos is America", Lili Loofbourow finds some odd resonances in how the film depicts Thanos, and wonders if these might not undercut the audience's ability to feel shock at his actions:
  

  America has been Thanos, and it got over the slaughter without much difficulty. America has claimed that killing thousands of people irrespective of their age, occupation, status, or personal storyline was for the greater good. And here is the really eerie part: It's convinced many people that this is a correct assessment. It was a tough choice, sure, and it took a tough man — a great man, even — to make it. (You might say the hardest choices require the strongest wills.) Metaphorically speaking, America has sat in a garden and smiled because the world we bombed into being is (in our view) a better place. People said it was brutal, but America knew better. And got everyone to basically agree, or at least move on.

  
  Not to disagree with this entirely, but I think it's also important to note how much Thanos acts as a necessary boogeyman that validates the kind of violence Loofbourow describes on the part of the Avengers.  Thanos--on his own or through his agents the Chitauri--has been dogging the MCU since Avengers, and in all his guises he has justified the existence of extra-legal, unaccountable violence that just happens to come wrapped in an American flag.  In a universe where beings like Thanos exist, not only are Captain America and Iron Man necessary, but hobbling them with laws and international agreements becomes an act of, at best stupidity, at worst villainy.
  
  
• Following up on this article on twitter, Loofbourow adds an interesting observation on how the film completely misses the real import of the relationship between Thanos and Gamora, reminding us again of how poorly-served Gamora has been by the MCU.
  

  The fact is, Gamora should have been a perfect reader of Thanos. That's literally the only way she could have survived his fatherhood this long. Instead, in every scene they share, their respective archives of knowledge are reversed. He's portrayed as the one who knows her so well that he can tell when she's lying. She, bizarrely, appears to know nothing at all about him. Gamora should have known exactly what Thanos' vision of love is, and how insistently he applied it to her. She's lived with the burden of his love her whole life. She would, accordingly, have instantly realized that she was the beloved thing Thanos needed to kill to get the Soul Stone. Her speech and tactics should have reflected that. Instead, the scene got garbled into incomprehension, with her raving about him nothing him [sic] while he looked on in omniscient self-pity--ahead of her once again.

  
  
• Still on the subject of Thanos, there have been a few articles along these lines, but "Thanos Didn’t Have a Point and Someone Should Tell the Writers", by Kylie on Fandomentals, is the most comprehensive, both in how it spells out the errors in Thanos's overpopulation bugbear (and how they connect to racist policies and worldviews), and in how it expresses the feeling that, rather than depicting a villain who is misguided, Infinity War doesn't seem to realize just how wrong Thanos is.
  

  For Infinity War? The writers seemed unaware that anything needed to be condemned. Overpopulation…it’s obviously a problem! And a universal one at that, in the most literal definition of the word "universal." Otherwise, why would Thanos, this rather mild-speaking individual who experienced horror thanks to an overcrowded planet, be willing to sacrifice the daughter who he abused loved and take on the mantle of this burden? Sure his solution was too much, but there was suffering, and the test-results of randomly wiping out half the people worked great! Why wouldn't he continue pursuing it? Why wouldn't there be anything but great results? Fewer people means everyone gets more things and that's good! There would have been no recovery period with mass panic and devastation or anything.

  
  Also good if you have anyone in your life who think Thanos and Killmonger are the same because "they're both villains with a point".
  
  
• A brief comedic interlude: a botanist answers the hotly-contested question of whether teen Groot is the original Groot or his son.
  
  
• And now, the motherlode: hands-down the best essay about this movie, by, unsurprisingly, Aaron Bady, is "Post-Shawarma: On Avengers: Infinity War" at the LARB.  I'm going to quote a whole chunk because it's really that good, but do read the whole thing.
  

  Infinity War—as Gerry Canavan observed to me—destroys each of these stories completely. It does not develop them, build on them, or bring them to a climax; it simply eats them up. Thor: Ragnarok ended with the remnants of Asgard sailing bravely into the future in a kind of space ark; Infinity War begins with that space Ark having been blasted to hell (and though Thor later says something about how "half" his people were killed, come on). Peter Parker ended his movie by declining to join the Avengers; in this movie, he joins the Avengers almost immediately. Black Panther is about a place where everyone is black, the white guys are not that important, and Wakanda's survival is the most important thing; Infinity War has T'Challa deciding to sacrifice Wakanda in battle without any trace of the prickly and regal insularity that has been the entirety of his character up to that point. Guardians of the Galaxy was about finding a family and staying together; in Infinity War, Thor arrives and they break up the group immediately.
  
  My point is that there's a conflict between the accumulative narrative impulse to see these movies as one continuous story and the sprawling impulse that lets them maintain different styles and themes and even narrative logics. If the MCU has been good because they let different voices tell different types of stories—and to the extent that it is good, it is because of that—Infinity War is bad because it smashes them all into indistinguishable paste. The Collector said that a powerful person "can use the stones to mow down entire civilizations like wheat in a field"; this is a good description of how Infinity War relates to its constituent stories: it harvests them.
  
  Let me put it this way: There's an extractive, exploitative relationship between the Avengers "team up" movies and the standalone single-hero stories, the same relationship we see between the Infinity Stone MacGuffins and the stories that the various Marvel movies have built around them. The Infinity Stones are the real story, the big picture, the driving force behind their master-narratives in the same way that capital always thinks it's the "job creator." But this is exactly backwards, in exactly the way extractive relations of exploitation tend to condition their beneficiaries to misunderstand what is happening: The Infinity Stones and the "team up" movies are spending the currency whose value was built out of the sweat and blood and human labor of the standalone movies. Infinity War is the moment when profits are extracted from the richness and depth of their stories, skimmed off and collected and sold: "Look, we killed Spider-Man, Black Panther, Bucky, Gamora, Loki!" they say; "Look how it makes you feel!"

  
  
• Speaking of Gerry Canavan, he offers his own take: "Why the Marvel Cinematic Universe Can Show Us a Story, But Can't Tell Us a Plot".
  
  
• Tom Holland ad-libbed his "I don't want to go" death scene.  It seems really fitting that the one scene that keeps being held up as an example for how, even though the film's deaths are clearly going to be rolled back, they still have emotional resonance, wasn't even in the script.
  
  
• Netflix Breathes Sigh of Relief as Iron Fist Disintegrates During Infinity War Finale
  
  
• Not content to let their work stand (or fall) on its own merits, Infinity War writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have gone on the record that the deaths in the film are real and that fans should "move on to the next stage of grief".  This in total defiance of the fact that Spider-Man 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 are already on the books for 2019 and 2020, and that Marvel has been hard at work trying to get Ryan Coogler back for Black Panther 2.  And look, clearly there's wiggle room here--someone on twitter laboriously tried to explain to me that the deaths are "real" in the current timeline, but when it's rolled back using the Time Stone or whatever they will never have happened.  (I am not a lawyer, but I think I'm on solid ground in saying that if a writer ever offers this sort of excuse to your face, you are legally permitted to kick them in the shin.)  But what I find disturbing here is the brazenness of it.  Markus and McFeely are lying.  We know that they're lying, and they know that we know that they're lying.  And yet they still do it.  Why?  Do they have so little confidence in their writing that they think they need to resort to outright, implausible lies to get butts in seats next year?  And if so, what does that say about them as writers, or about the movie they've written?
  
  It's not surprising that a lot of the reactions to this interview brought up the comics' HydraCap kerfuffle from 2016-17, in which Marvel turned Captain America into a Nazi sleeper agent, solemnly announced that this was not a trick or a fake, and then revealed a few months later that it was a trick and a fake.  Once again, it's not that anyone--and certainly not anyone likely to be reading comics news--believed the original assurances.  But that just makes this behavior worse.  At best, it feels like a bunch of writers who see genuinely smart works like The Good Place or Jane the Virgin pulling off audacious twists (or even just-OK shows like Westworld whose twists aren't great but are at least totally committed-to) and think they have a shortcut to that kind of delighted, exhilarated audience reaction through bald-faced lies.  At worst, it's something far more sinister, Marvel trying to dictate how its stories are to be read, and whether audiences are permitted to bring their own knowledge and experience to bear when they react to those stories.
  
  
• A similar dynamic seems to be on Alex McLevy's mind when he asks "How the hell are we supposed to care about Ant-Man And The Wasp now?" and wonders how we're supposed to take an interest in a light-hearted crime caper when we know that, five minutes after the credits roll (the film is apparently set before Infinity War), half the cast will crumble into dust.
  

  Thanos may be sitting back and watching the sun rise, content in the completion of his genocidal mission, but the rest of us are left here asking how the remaining Avengers are going to save the day. Yes, it’s just another superhero movie, but when you commit to a shared universe and do as good a job as they have at making it all feel of a piece, you also commit to an audience that expects stories that don't just meander about, dropping one narrative and picking up another to wave in our faces, assuming it's all the same. It's not. This was a huge decision, and it’s the only thing people invested in the Marvel universe have on their minds, for obvious reasons. To expect us to go, "Well, sure, nearly everyone we care about just crumbled to dust, but whatever, let’s see what this shiny thing in the corner is!" assumes that we don't actually emotionally invest in these films. It's a betrayal of precisely what movies should do, even ones that are manufactured to be four-quadrant popcorn entertainment.

  
  A lot of people seemed to misread McLevy's argument, assuming that he doesn't understand how light, fluffy stories can coexist with dark ones.  But that's clearly not what he's saying.  If we're to take the ending of Infinity War seriously, then everywhere in the universe has just suffered a calamity that, realistically, will be almost impossible to recover from.  There's no story that can be told within the MCU that doesn't address that fact, unless you're willing to admit that the destruction at the end of Infinity War isn't really supposed to matter.  By which I don't mean that it's going to be rolled back (though clearly it is), but that we're only supposed to take it as seriously as Marvel wants us to, no more and no less.
  
  Once again, this is about Marvel wanting to control not just the narrative, but how we react to that narrative.  We're supposed to be gutted by Infinity War, and pay no attention to the 2019 and 2020 movie slate behind the curtain starring multiple characters who have just been disintegrated.  But not so gutted that we can't buy tickets to Ant-Man and the Wasp and laugh at Scott and Hope and Luis.  To me this is disappointing not only because it reveals, as Aaron notes, the mercenary heart beating beneath the surface of this media juggernaut.  But because until this year, this kind of behavior was something the MCU was above.  They didn't try to rope us into seeing their movies through pavlovian loyalty and the sunk cost fallacy.  They did it by making movies we wanted to see.  I'm really starting to wonder whether that wasn't just a way of getting us in the door.
  
  
• In conclusion:
  

  Does anything so completely encapsulate the brokenness of geek culture as the fact that The Last Jedi has met with concerted fan backlash, while Infinity War hasn't?

  — Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) May 10, 2018

  
  

  I'm not crazy about TLJ, but between it and IW, I know which one embodies habits I'd like to encourage in long-lasting, highly-profitable IPs, and which one treats fans like ATMs who will put with anything for just another hit.

  — Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) May 10, 2018

  
  

A Political History of the Future: The City & The City at Lawyers, Guns & Money

My latest Political History of the Future column takes the opportunity of the BBC having released a miniseries adaptation of it to discuss China Miéville's The City & The City, a novel about two cities that exist side-by-side but have erected a convoluted mechanism of psychological self-deception to "unsee" one another.  When I reread my 2009 review of the book, I was struck by how much it emphasized Miéville's poking at core fantasy tropes over what feels now like a blatantly political premise.  But as both that review and the miniseries have reminded me, that imbalance exists in the book itself.

despite a surface feeling of relevance, the premise of The City & The City doesn’t map to any real-world political situation. Unseeing isn’t a way of ignoring an inconvenient or ugly reality, but a hefty psychic burden that the citizens of the two cities undertake out of ingrained habit and fear of retaliation. And despite multiple attempts to read it as such by reviewers, it is impossible to compare the Besźel/Ul Qoma split to real-world instances of ethnic strife, because that strife doesn’t exist in the book—as, indeed, how could it, given that Besz and Ul Qoman citizens are rarely allowed to acknowledge each other’s existence. The City & The City‘s ability to comment on real instances of political division shading into geography is thus quite limited. More importantly, Miéville’s handling of his setting, once he’s established it, doesn’t push against any of the things we’ve been trained to read as “bad”.

The miniseries seems to miss this fact.  It gestures at relevance--though it has shockingly little to say about Brexit--but is ultimately undone by the fact that the ending of the novel takes the story in a direction that most political readings can't accommodate.  It's a disappointing handling of a novel that is much more complex, but also much less immediate, than most readers assume.

Civil Links

It's been two weeks since Captain America: Civil War opened (a week in the US), and I think it's time to call it: the conversation surrounding this movie has been surprisingly, and disappointingly, muted.  Most reviews seem to have reached a consensus of good-movie-that-handles-its-politics-well, which, even notwithstanding that I only agree with the first part, feels like only scratching the surface (meanwhile, the more character-focused conversation on tumblr has tended to revolve around the kind of arguments that only serve to remind me why this is a good life rule).  Around this time after the comparatively incoherent Age of Ultron, we were practically swimming in thinkpieces and conversations, and while Civil War doesn't have as obvious an outrage hook as awkwardly implying that infertile women are monsters, one would think that people would still be able to find things to say about it.  Perhaps the truth is simply what I suggested in my own review: that the worldbuilding and politics of this movie are built on such a flimsy foundation that any attempt to engage with them inevitably leads to the conclusion that they're not worth talking about.  Nevertheless, here are a few interesting links that I have been able to find--obviously, I'd be interested in any others you could suggest in the comments.

• Probably my favorite straight-up review of the film comes from Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com.  Amid a torrent of reviews that have tended to overpraise the film as both a piece of storytelling and a political statement, Seitz is refreshingly even-handed, finding things to be positive about (as there undoubtedly are) without ignoring some of the fundamental issues in the film's construction.
  

  There's a fair bit of "The Dark Knight" logic, or "logic," to the storytelling. Characters do things to other characters because they know it'll set off a chain reaction that'll eventually lead to a very specific moment at the end; luckily for them, each step goes according to plan, because if it didn't there would be no movie. And, as in the inferior yet thematically similar "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," the hero-versus-hero slugfest only seems to spring from real and deep philosophical differences. It turns out that the real problem is that these characters don't talk to each other when they should.

• Writing in the Washington Post, Henry Farrell (perhaps best known to readers here as one of the bloggers on Crooked Timber) lays out all the ways in which Civil War gets global politics wrong.  This might seem so trivially obvious that it's not worth even spelling out, but I actually found it quite useful to have all these issue laid out in plain language.
  

  "Captain America: Civil War" talks about how superheroes might be perceived as vigilantes. There's an even uglier word for someone who jumps into a political situation, blows things and people up and disappears again — terrorist. When Thomas Barnett writes about "super-empowered individuals" in world politics, he isn't talking about Ant Man and Spider-Man. He’s talking about Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11, 2001, plane hijackers, who acted as individuals to change the shape of global politics. The Avengers have better intentions but the same potential for causing chaos without accountability. Even if they're acting to save the human race, it's unsurprising that governments should be angry and unhappy at their willingness to intervene across the world, regardless of the collateral damage.

• One of the points made by Farrell is that Civil War irretrievably skews its story by focusing so myopically on American concerns and perspectives, even as its heroes seek the freedom and authority to operate all over the world.  Samira Nadkarni expands on this issue in a Storify of her tweets about the movie, in which she argues that "the MCU insists that a bomb in Lagos and even the inclusion of an African subplot is basically all about America and the Global North."  Her arguments touch on the way that Avengrs (which is to say American) interference outside of the US, and chiefly in the Global South, is seen as an American issue; on the problems with Wakanda as an African nation that is explicitly un-African; and on the choice to center the discussion of registration (inasmuch as it exists) on Wanda, a white European, whose terrorist activities would surely not have been so easily swept under the rug if she were a Middle Eastern man.
  
  
• If you haven't done so already, check out Samira's review of the TV series Shadowhunters (based on Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments books) at Strange Horizons.  Though published several weeks before Civil War's release and focusing on a (nominally) different genre, it touches on a lot of problems with the way that superhero stories center white, Western people even as they claim to be about issues that largely concern people of color and the Global South.  The construction "a TV show about moderate racists taking on a vehement racist so they can learn to be slightly less racist" describes so much of the current superhero genre (and gets at why I've grown increasingly bored, not to say suspicious, when stories in this genre trot out cartoon Nazis as their ultimate villains--at this stage, it just feels like a distraction, a way to keep me from noticing the heroes' less overt fascist tendencies).  Samira's segue into her outrage at the way that the trailers for Civil War centered Steve's devotion to Bucky, even as other stories about superhero registration have treated people of color as the villains, feels particular prescient:
  

  In Marvel's TV property Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the character of Jiaying (played by Tibetan-Australian actress Dichen Lachman) fights against registration being enforced by S.H.I.E.L.D., as a result of having lived through this information being misused, leading to torture, organ theft, the death of the majority of her community, and the loss of her child. Her desperate attempt to start a war in response to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s American neo-colonial statement-threat of "we'll leave you in peace if you register" with its consequent policing and control of the Asian-themed city of Afterlife, is framed within the show as terrorism and strongly disavowed. Her story of fighting against forced registration isn't one that matters. The reasoning behind her actions—which also involves tortures of various kinds being a possible likelihood for her people as part of her lived experience—isn't endorsed. But, oh, yes, do tell me more about Bucky Barnes. Divorce this story even further from the people it affects. We've always been the villains of the piece. 

• Brian Phillips, writing at MTV.com, makes a valiant attempt to reconcile Civil War and the world of the MCU (and other superhero movies) with present-day political anxieties, trying to get at why we're seeing so many stories about how (and if) we can reconcile the existence of superpowered individuals with democratic society, and with the post-9/11 penchant for violent global interference.  That he doesn't quite succeed is probably not his fault, given how muddled this genre (and the thinking about these issues in Hollywood) are, but this is nevertheless a well-written, funny essay that articulates some of the core problems with this project:
  

  The other explanation for that focus is an irony that, when you start to lay it out, is kind of gobsmacking, and that gets at an almost Greek-tragic dimension of recent comic-book movies. (Let’s say Norse-tragic, because Thor.) The irony is this: The superheroes in superhero movies are always the only force capable of saving humanity from the threats it faces. But with astounding regularity in post-9/11 comic-book films, the threats mankind has to be saved from were either unleashed by the heroes themselves, came into being simultaneously with the heroes, or both. In other words, the chaos from which the heroes are required to save the world is implicit in the heroes’ being in the world in the first place; even when the protagonists aren’t actually the authors of the crisis they are fighting against — something that, again, happens with startling frequency — they are manifestations of the same fundamental shift. Hark!

• Over at my tumblr, I talk briefly about my favorite Bucky Barnes moment in the film--the one that seems most obviously opposed to the woobification impulse that seems to take over fandom when it discusses not just this character, but all the handsome white men in this universe.  I also mention some of the ways the film could have used Natasha better (which is to say at all).
  
  
• Linda Holmes at NPR does the obvious pop culture thing of linking Civil War with, what else, Hamilton.  Clickbaity as that sounds, Holmes has a valid point--both works are about people who initially try to work out their problems through discussion, but who find themselves, by the end of the story, pointing weapons at people they care about once their disputes have passed the point of no return.
  

  There's a fascinating sequence, perhaps unique among movies of this budget and scale, in which a group of characters who are all known to be decent, known to be moral, known to be noble, and known to be literally both Super and Heroes sit in a group talking through this critical disagreement about acceding or not to outside supervision — to acting only when a group of governments working in concert tell them they can (and must). They find themselves forced to balance legitimately compelling arguments on both sides. They argue back and forth, not in the "fight" sense but in the "argument" sense: Someone offers support for one answer, then someone else offers support for the other. Everyone has a point. They all respect each other. They all know they cannot split the difference and cannot find a choice in the middle. They cannot punch or shoot or zap their way out of it. The choice is binary: They will say yes or they will say no, and despite the breadth of their agreement on the relevant issues, they cannot agree on the answer.

  I'm linking to this piece mainly because I want to disagree with it, or at least to point out that drawing comparisons to Hamilton does Civil War no favors.  Holmes is right that some of the discussion scenes in the first half of the film are exciting precisely because they're not the sort of thing we're used to seeing in this genre, but she ignores the fact that by its second half, Civil War makes it clear that these discussions were never the point--that what it really wanted was to get to the fighting.  This is very different from how Hamilton handles its characters' descent into violence, which is depicted as the act of two stubborn, childish men, and, more importantly, not the way to resolve political disputes.  Hamilton and Burr end up in a duel not because they have fundamental political disagreements, but because of their pride and immaturity.  Meanwhile, political action is still happening through conversation--either in the thrilling "Cabinet Battle"s that are the highlights of the play's second act, or in the "Room Where it Happens," where people sit down and hammer out policy details.
  
  Even more importantly, the way in which Hamilton handles its descent into violence is a direct rebuke to Civil War's glibness towards the same subject.  Holmes is right to highlight Burr's line, immediately before his duel with Hamilton, that "This man will not make an orphan of my daughter!"  Newly-minted Tony nominee Leslie Odom Jr. all but screams the line, going off-key as a way of demonstrating the desperation of Burr's will to live.  That desperation is completely absent from the climactic fight scene in Civil War, which both the film and the characters treat almost as a game, thus robbing the film of most of its emotional weight.  It's also significant that after killing Hamilton, Burr's life was basically ruined.  Even in the early 19th century, there were social consequences to his choice to abandon civility in favor of violence.  No one familiar with the MCU will be able to expect similar consequences for any of Civil War's characters.  On the contrary, the film blatantly leaves an opening for Steve and his fellow renegades to use violence in a socially sanctioned matter, saving the world from Thanos in Infinity War, thus sweeping away all their crimes in this story.
  
  
• Not directly Civil War-related, but of interest to people who want to have a discussion about politics (and particularly progressive politics) in comics and have been disappointed in the dearth of such conversations surrounding this movie.  Since the beginning of the year, blogger Steven Attewell has been writing A People's History of the Marvel Universe, in which he discusses the history of the comics company's heroes and how they intersect, and emerge from, the politics of their day.  A lot of the discussions, as you might expect, center on the X-Men (the last few weeks in particular have focused on the infamous "mutant metaphor"), but Captain America has also featured heavily.  It's a great resource for people, like myself, who know these characters mainly from the movies, and would like to know how they developed, and how their political stances reflect social issues of their era more than ours.  If you're reading along at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where the series is being cross-posted, there's also a lively discussion in the comments.
  
  (Incidentally, it occurs to me that Attewell's series is precisely the sort of thing that the Best Related Work Hugo category should recognize.  I'm not crazy about the recent trend of recognizing individual blog posts in this category, but the People's History series is now approaching book-length, and I for one would love to see it recognized as such next year.)

The Iain M. Banks Master List

As I wrote earlier this week, my review of The Hydrogen Sonata completes a decade of reading and reviewing Iain M. Banks's science fiction, and it seemed appropriate to put together a master list where all of these reviews can be found in order.  Not all of these are full-length reviews (though most are) and there are several books I might end up revisiting, in which case I'll update this post.

The next obvious step, however, is Banks's non-genre writing.  I don't know if I'll be as inspired to write about those books as I was by his SF--I've never gotten the sense that his mainstream writing was as groundbreaking as his work in genre--but time will tell.

The Culture Novels

• Consider Phlebas (published 1987, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - Part of me wants to revisit this novel, which isn't very good but is so very important to setting the tone and preoccupations of the Culture sequence.  The other part of me remembers what a dour slog it was.
  
  
• The Player of Games (published 1988, reviewed 2010, full-length review) - In hindsight I think my review of this book, though generally positive, ends on a more negative note than it deserved.  It's a fantastic novel with a great plot, and a necessary counterpoint to the negativity of some of the other Culture novels.
  
  
• Use of Weapons (published 1990, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - I wrote recently that Use of Weapons is a perfectly-formed novel undermined by a ridiculous final twist.  That's undeniably true, but this is still one of the most important, and best, Culture novels.
  
  
• Excession (published 1996, reviewed 2008, short review) - Of all the Culture novels, this is the one that probably most deserves a second look.  In hindsight its importance to the overall tone of the series (and particularly the later novels) seems obvious, and I'd like to revisit it and maybe give it the consideration it deserves.
  
  
• Inversions (published 1998, reviewed 2014, short review) - This, on the other hand, has probably gotten all the consideration it's going to get.  A stealth Culture novel, it's an interesting experiment but doesn't do much that the other books don't do better.
  
  
• Look to Windward (published 2000, reviewed 2013, full-length review) - It's hard to call this my favorite Culture novel since it is so bleak, but it's definitely one of the best, and this is probably my favorite Banks review.
  
  
• Matter (published 2008, reviewed 2009, full-length review) - The first of the three later, and lesser, Culture novels, and in hindsight the best of the unimpressive bunch.
  
  
• Surface Detail (published 2010, reviewed 2011, full-length review at Strange Horizons) - The only time I've reviewed Banks for an outside publication.  I wish it could have been a review of a better novel, but Surface Detail is baggy and unfocused.
  
  
• The Hydrogen Sonata (published 2012, reviewed 2015, full-length review) - The last of the Culture novels and, sadly, the worst.  There's still a lot here to enjoy but it's not the ending the sequence deserved.
  
  
• The State of the Art (published 1991, reviewed 2016, short review) - Banks's only short story collection, which mainly demonstrates that he wasn't really suited to the short form. Valuable for completists, and for the title novella, but most of the interesting ideas in his work are explored better elsewhere.

Non-Culture Novels

• Against a Dark Background (published 1993, reviewed 2013, short review) - This was the first Banks I read after his death, and that perhaps fueled an overly-negative reaction.  It isn't great--it revels in its bleakness and is much too long--but the knowledge that there were only so many of his books left for me to read made it seem worse than it was.
  
  
• Feersum Endjinn (published 1994, reviewed 2006, very short review) - Like Inversions, this feels like an experiment, and though it's probably a more successful one, there's also not much to say about it.  There's a giant castle.  It's neat.
  
  
• The Algebraist (published 2004, reviewed 2005, full-length review) - Where it all started.  My first Banks, and in hindsight my favorite of the non-Culture novels.  I don't know how well it would stand up today, now that I'm more familiar with the tropes of his writing (in fact looking back I'm not certain why Banks felt the need to create a new universe for this story; perhaps he simply felt the existence of the Culture would make the novel's events impossible).  I might end up revisiting it as well, though that feels less urgent.

SherLinks

One of the good things about the long, two-year gap between Sherlock's second and third seasons (aside from the fact that in it we discovered Elementary, and suddenly Sherlock and its flaws seemed a lot less important) is that in that time the mainstream conversation about the show shifted from a tug-of-war between near-ecstatic praise and near-total denigration to a more universal acceptance of the show's massive flaws--which leaves more space to acknowledge its good qualities.  (This shift, I suspect, has a lot to do with the increasingly fatigued reactions to Stephen Moffat's work on Doctor Who; it's easier to see the same flaws occurring in Sherlock when you've already cataloged them on a show that is more blatantly running out of steam.)  If you're a fan of pop culture criticism, this is a bonanza; fewer people are attacking or defending the show, and more are considering it more deeply, and from different angles.  I've collected a few interesting examples, and my comments, below.

• I linked to this essay already in my own review of the third season, but in case you didn't click through, it is worth taking a look at cesperanza's interpretation of the train scene in "The Empty Hearse" as representing a masochistic (or, to take a dimmer view of it, abusive) relationship between both Sherlock and John and the show and its fans.
  
  A reaction I'm seeing a lot, to both "The Empty Hearse" and that scene in particular, is that it makes the Sherlock/John relationship (in whatever guise you choose to interpret it) seem untenable--it's no longer clear what John gets out of the relationship or why he would continue as Sherlock's friend.  cesperanza's conclusion is that he either enjoys the mistreatment or is being genuinely pathological; "His Last Vow" makes the only slightly more palatable claim that he craves the excitement and is willing to put up with the abuse in order to get it.  What both of these interpretations are ignoring is that by the time the third season ends, Sherlock and John are, for better or worse, no longer the show's central relationship.  In fact it's arguable that the relationship never fully recovers from Sherlock's departure and abrupt return, and instead becomes something completely one-sided.  Sherlock spends the season either doing things to John (surprising him at the restaurant and tricking him into believing that he's about to die in "The Empty Hearse") or for John (making sure his wedding day goes perfectly in "The Sign of Three"; murdering Magnussen so that he and Mary can live in peace in "His Last Vow").  But John himself is focused on Mary--even the former partners' last hurrah as an investigative duo happens at her instigation.  I wonder how much of this is deliberate--despite Freeman being wonderful in the role, Sherlock has always been more comfortable envisioning its hero as a lone, Doctor-ish superhero rather than part of a duo, and it may prefer to keep John as merely one of the people in Sherlock's orbit.
  
  
• Some reviews: Dan Hartland wonders if the third season represents the show realigning itself and its idea of what it wants to be.  Emily Nussbaum discusses Sherlock's relationship with its fans in the season's first two episodes.  Genevieve Valentine is reviewing the show for the AV Club: her long and detailed look at "The Empty Hearse" is a sharp examination of its many problems.
  
  
• My recollections of "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" begin with Holmes's famous line about finding Milverton more odious than many murderers (which has been cropping up regularly in discussions since Sherlock's emergence, as a counterpoint to the argument that the show's take on Holmes as a sociopath is in line with canon; perhaps as a response, Moffat has Sherlock quote the line in "His Last Vow," but the character's general indifference to anyone not closely connected to him means that it falls flat), and ends with the plot point in which Holmes seduces a maid in Milverton's house in order to gain access to his blackmail material (which "His Last Vow" handles rather more convincingly).  Which is why I needed several other venues to point out that Sherlock has done it again: take a story written in the 19th century and update it in the 21st in a way that actually makes it more sexist, and gives the women in it less agency and power than they originally had.  In the original story, it isn't Holmes who kills Milverton but a woman who breaks into his house at the same time Holmes and Watson do, but in an interview about the episode Moffat and Gatiss have said that they take this as a cover for the more "believable" interpretation, that Holmes did the deed himself.  "His Last Vow" parallels the original story up until the discovery that Mary is about to kill Magnussen while Sherlock and John are trying to retrieve the client's letters, but as The Daily Dot points out, there's no real justification for her failure to carry out that plan, and for her passivity during the rest of the episode.
  

  This means that Mary, much like Gatiss and Moffat’s interpretation of the lady from "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Magnussen," has effectively been written out of her own story. Supposedly a deadly assassin, she doesn’t get to confront her blackmailer, and instead is drugged by Sherlock so he and John can have a proper showdown with Magnussen. A dramatic scene that allows Sherlock to seem more badass and morally ambiguous than before, while a heavily pregnant Mary gets to wake up from her drug-induced slumber to discover that she's now free to go back to being Mrs. Watson once again.

• Paul Kincaid watched the third season shortly after watching both versions of Danny Boyle's production of Frankenstein, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Elementary's Johnny Lee Miller alternated the roles of Frankenstein and the creature.  In this post at Big Other, he discusses Cumberbatch's and Miller's different approaches to the two roles, and how he sees those approaches reflected in their versions of Holmes:
  

  In a show as frenetic as Sherlock, in which the camera is in constant motion, scenes flicker across the screen almost before we can take them in, unreadable captions bloom and fade at high speed, the only choice is stillness. And this suits Cumberbatch, who is particularly fine at showing there is a mind working rapidly if invisibly behind that sharply chiselled face. His Holmes is also his Victor Frankenstein, a man so in love with his own thought processes that he has virtually no awareness of their consequences. (This Sherlock is not a sociopath, no matter how much Moffatt loves to tell us that he is.) When there is action (and every episode features a scene where he is running, just so we can relish the texture of that long coat), he becomes like the Creature, jerky, somewhat uncoordinated.

• Matt Cheney, meanwhile, has been watching Sherlock in conjunction with Hannibal.  Like pretty much everyone who isn't me, he's quite taken with the latter show, finding in it a level of tension and character complexity that I could never connect to.  His comparison between the two shows, however, in which he contrasts Sherlock with both Hannibal and Will Graham, gives Matt the chance to examine how both shows manipulate their audience and source material, and the way they both approach central characters who are abnormal, and more observant than the rest of us:
  

  The Sherlock Holmes stories have always thrived because audiences love stories that fit a certain post-Enlightenment, pre-Modernism rationality. ... Hannibal is more pre-Enlightenment and post-Modernist. The world does not add up; its forces and flows can only be glimpsed, and those glimpses often redirect what they glimpse, and shards of reality are all that can be perceived. Compare Will to Sherlock — both have extraordinary powers of figuring out why particular events happen, but Sherlock knows how he does it and Will does not. For Will, it's simply a mysterious and torturous talent; for Sherlock, it is a skill. Will's ability to reconstruct murder scenes is mystical; Sherlock's ability to "deduce" all the details of a person's life is sold to us as rational. But from the days of Conan Doyle to now, most of Sherlock's deductions have been fanciful, even quite obviously ridiculous, because the world of the Sherlock Holmes stories is a world where reason rules and human behavior is, like the emotional behavior of the dedicated Sherlock fan, patterned, predictable, determined, scrutable.

• Carrying on from that last point, this tumblr post by Ami Angelwings isn't strictly about Sherlock, but its observations about the seductive but dangerous appeal of applying Holmes-style deduction to real life feel germane to discussions of the show:
  

  But somebody could just pick that out.  HEY LOOK AT THIS.  DOES THIS SOUND LIKE SOMEBODY WHO HAD JUST BEEN ASSAULTED?  And later on she did XYZ, does that sound like the behaviour of somebody who was assaulted?  And look at this picture of her, she doesn’t appear to have any wounds on her… and etc etc… I got a degree of this from some ex-friends who read the big long detailed write up of what I wrote, that I didn’t fight back, that he didn’t hurt me enough, that I should have done this, or that, that according to what I wrote it sounds like he could have just not known, or the layout of the room from what they pieced together was…, or whatever… the point is they were Holmes and they decided from their internet detectiving that I must be a liar and look how smart they are.  And this is how people SHOULD behave, and you didn’t, so, liar.

  At its most basic level, this feels like a good excuse to trot out a Terry Pratchett quote that should probably come up in every discussion of Sherlock Holmes:
  

  he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience! 

  But more seriously, what this post made me think about is that a completely unexamined assumption of the Holmes character type is that he has total empathy.  That, in essence, his intellect and observation skills negate the effects of privilege.  Women, LGBT people, and people of color are used to having to explain the basic facts of their world to the privileged, often being met with the response that "you must be wrong; I've never seen what you're talking about, therefore it must not exist."  Holmes is a straight, white, cisgendered, upper class man who nevertheless has total understanding of everyone he meets, no matter how different from him.  In theory, this could be fantastic--Holmes could use his privileged position to put his famously rationalist stamp of approval on the experiences of people who are used to having their take on the world discounted.  In practice, however, the game is rigged.  As Pratchett and Cheney both note, in order to support Holmes's powers of deduction, the rich and chaotic variety of human experience has to be whittled down to very specific, clearly-defined types of behavior, any deviation from which can be declared irrational (if it exists at all).  And of course, those types of behavior are the kind that our privileged, male protagonist--and his privileged, male writers--can understand and sympathize with.  The result is that Sherlock's world (and, in fairness, Elementary's as well) is all but bereft of people whose life experiences are foreign to the great detective.

At Strange Horizons: Introducing Short Fiction Snapshot

This week on Strange Horizons, we're launching a new reviews department feature: Short Fiction Snapshot, where every other month we'll be dedicating a full-length review to a piece of short fiction.  Here is my editorial explaining my goals and hopes for this project, and here is the first installment, discussing Charlie Jane Anders's "Intestate," from Tor.com. 

One of my hopes for this project is that it will become a short fiction discussion club, along the lines of the ones on Torque Control, Locus Online, and Everything is Nice.  So if you're interested, please go and read "Intestate," and add your thoughts in the comments to my review.

From the Horse's Mouth

A bit surprised that this hasn't had more play: in an interview with Empire last week, Neil Marshall--who directed the penultimate episode of the second season of Game of Thrones, "Blackwater"--has this to say on the subject of the show's use of nudity:

The weirdest part was when you have one of the exec producers leaning over your shoulder, going, "You can go full frontal, you know. This is television, you can do whatever you want! And do it! I urge you to do it!" So I was like, "Okay, well, you're the boss."

This particular exec took me to one side and said, "Look, I represent the pervert side of the audience, okay? Everybody else is the serious drama side. I represent the perv side of the audience, and I'm saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene." So you go ahead and do it.

(The original quote is in a podcast.  Here are two text reports, both of which seem quite cheerful about HBO courting the pervert demographic.)

Of course, this isn't really a surprise.  No one who watches Game of Thrones can have imagined that titillation was not at least a partial motivation for its copious scenes of nudity and sex.  And given the unattributed quote from a one-time director, a grain of salt might not be entirely out of order as well.  But it is something to have people involved with the show saying this--that young women are being asked to strip naked and simulate sex for the benefit of perverts.  If someone could explain the difference between that and soft-core porn, I would be very grateful.

Science Fiction Encyclopedia is Up and Running

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 enormous, fascinating resource well worth losing several hours to.

The Encyclopedia's launch comes in conjunction with Gollancz's SF Gateway, an ebook imprint that has begun to publish selections from Gollancz's massive catalogue of classic SF and fantasy.  There's a large selection already available, with more authors to come.

A Long-Awaited Announcement

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 Gollancz, the third edition of the encyclopedia is going to be made available online, free of charge.

The official website is here, though right now it's just a placeholder where you can read the press release (PDF), follow the SFE on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to receive announcements.  A beta version of the encyclopedia will go online later this summer to coincide with Gollancz's 50th anniversary celebrations, and the plan is for the text to be completed by the end of 2012.

At the Strange Horizons Blog: Defining the Audience

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 full posts.  It's like living in the future.

Clarke Day

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 Clarke tradition is roundup of reviews of the nominated novels that Niall used to post on Torque Control.  That seems to have lapsed this year, so--with only a few hours until the award is given out this evening--here are some of the reviews I've been able to find.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Reviewed by Niall Alexander at The Speculative Scotsman

Reviewed by Saxon Bullock at SFX

Reviewed by Maya Chhabra at Ideomancer

Reviewed by Nic Clarke at Eve's Alexandria

Reviewed by John Clute at Strange Horizons

Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite at Follow the Thread

Reviewed by Patrick Hudson at Pointless Philosophical Asides

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Reviewed by Nic Clarke at Strange Horizons

Reviewed by Dan Hartland at @Number71

Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite at The Zone

Reviewed by Roz Kaveney at The Independent

Reviewed by Paul Kincaid at SF Site

Reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont at Ruthless Culture

Reviewed by Adam Roberts at Punkadiddle

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness

Reviewed by Amanda Craig at The Sunday Times

Reviewed by Martin Lewis at Strange Horizons

Reviewed by Sam Ruddock at Vulpes Libris

Generosity by Richard Powers

Reviewed by Tim Adams at The Observer

Reviewed by Helen Brown at The Telegraph

Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite at Follow the Thread

Reviewed by Paul Kincaid at Strange Horizons

Reviewed by Jay McInerney at The New York Times

Reviewed by Christopher Taylor at The Guardian

Reviewed by James Wood at The New Yorker

Declare by Tim Powers

Reviewed by Nick Gevers at SF Site

Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite at Follow the Thread

Reviewed by Philip Raines at Infinity Plus

Reviewed by Adam Roberts at Punkadiddle

Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan

Reviewed by Niall Alexander at The Speculative Scotsman

Reviewed by Nic Clarke at SFX

Reviewed by Farah Mendlesohn at Strange Horizons

Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller at Paper Knife

Discussion between Nic Clarke, Niall Harrison, David Hebblethwaite and Nick Hubble at Torque Control

Let's See What's Out There: Table of Contents

For your convenience, a link post for my series revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation.

1. Introduction


2. To Boldly Stay - How The Next Generation changes its focus from exploration to politics


3. "Optimism, Captain!" - On Star Trek's most contentious quality


4. Keep Flying - The tragedy of Picard


5. Odds & Ends - A few more thoughts on the characters and the actors who played them

Something to Ponder

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 seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

I haven't read either of Rothfuss's novels so I don't know whether the comparison to Twilight and other novels of girlish wish-fulfillment is apt, but it certainly seems that Hemmens has raised a fair question that deserves a little more discussion.  In particular, his observation puts Penny Arcade's recent praise of the book, in the same post in which it is said, of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, that "I think I would have liked this book if I was a girl. I’m not a girl though and so it just made me mad," in a very interesting context.

At Strange Horizons: Two Things

1. 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 believe anyone would rank me above them. Thanks a lot to everyone who voted, and congratulations to the other winners.


2. Genevieve Valentine joins Strange Horizons as a columnist this week, and her first column is about reading the film Winter's Bone as a fairy tale.  I saw Winter's Bone just last week, and at the Strange Horizons blog I discuss Genevieve's column and some of my reactions to the film.


3. Actually, the absence of a thing: I've let my series about the Strange Horizons review policy lapse for, quite frankly, lack of time.  I'm hopeful that I'll be able to revive it before the end of the month.

Today's Happy Thing

My review of the essay collection With Both Feet in the Clouds, edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch, has been nominated for the 2010 BSFA award in the best non-fiction category.  It joins a ballot made up of two blogging projects (Paul Kincaid's four-part discussion of the 2010 Hugo nominees at the group blog Big Other and Adam Roberts's epic review cycle of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time), Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, a work of creative nonfiction (which Farah Mendlesohn and Niall Harrison insist is actually a novel), and Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan's Coode Street Podcast.  A slightly crazy and mismatched set, which I think is about right, as it gets at the way that the science fiction community has been using the internet, in its various guises, to proliferate opinions and criticism, while leaving space for traditional publishing.  I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should--as pleased as I am by how the Clouds review came out, I don't think that it can stand up to the breadth of material represented by the other nominees--but the nomination put a big smile on my face.  So thank you, everyone who nominated, and have fun voting!

At the Strange Horizons Blog: What to Review

In the second post in my series about reviewing at the Strange Horizons blog, I discuss the question that occurs long before the editor gets down to editing: which books (and films and TV shows) to commission reviews of?

As seems to happen quite often in discussions of genre or reviewing, the question of what to review boils down to a choice between prescriptive and descriptive. Is a reviews department a paper of record, reporting on the state of the genre and on the important names at its core, or is it a partisan platform, evangelizing for little-known writers and works and reflecting an inevitable editorial bias? Is its purpose to report on tastes, or to make them?

Follow the link and add your thoughts.

At the Strange Horizons Blog: On Reviewing

I've been the Strange Horizons reviews editor for just over two months, and in that time two things have become crystal clear.  One, the zombie novel thing has gotten completely out of hand, and two, I need to articulate what I want from the department's reviews, and what I think a review should or shouldn't do.  As I say in my post at the Strange Horizons blog:

It's easy, when you're writing your own stuff, to get by on gut instinct—something feels right or it doesn't, and if you've got a good editor (like Niall) they can often help you articulate what isn't working, what you're trying to accomplish, and how to fix it. ... since I've started editing other people's writing, I've found myself struggling for words, for the tools with which to explain what I want for the review department, and how specific reviews are failing to bring their point across, or sometimes just muddling it.  I've felt a keen awareness of the need for some sort of guidelines—for myself, as much as for the reviewers I edit.

Today's post is the beginning of what I hope will be an irregular series through which I can formulate these guidelines, so if you're interested please click through and add your thoughts.

But seriously, enough with the zombie novels.

Away, Away

This blog has been quiet enough recently that such an absence might go unnoticed, but for the next two weeks I'm going to be on holiday in the UK.  This weekend I'll be attending Odyssey, the 2010 Eastercon at the Radisson hotel in Heathrow airport, and following that I'll be visiting friends and hopefully charging up on blogging fodder.  I'm participating in a panel, on Sunday the 4th:

Writing Meaningful Reviews of TV Shows and Books.  12PM-1PM.  Room 41.  Too often reviews of TV programmes (or books) are a knee-jerk reaction condemning (or praising) a production while considering just one or two facets. What should a detailed review consider? How can we analyse more deeply? John Clute (mod), Chris Hill, Abigail Nussbaum and Alison Page.

Other than that, I'm trying something new by taking my laptop with me, but will endeavor to spend more time offline than on, so though I may pop up on occasion, normal service won't resume until the middle of the month.  I leave you, in the meantime, with the following links:

• The shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced yesterday.  Niall has a roundup of reviews, and of reactions.  I agree with the general consensus, that what's controversial about this year's shortlist is how uncontroversial it is, and confess a preference for the slightly out there choices of previous years.  That said, the solidity of the list can't be argued with, and the three nominees I haven't read (the Robinson, Theroux, and Wooding) all look appealing.  This weekend will also see the announcement of the 2010 Hugo nominees at Eastercon.


• It started with the Tournament of Books a few years ago, and by now March on the internet is wall to wall zany tournaments.  This year's ToB has proved something of a disappointment, due to two rather pointless judgments in its third round, one from a judge who spent more time discussing the contestants' physical appearance than he did their contents, and the other from someone who did not actually appear to care about books in general nor to have read his contestants in particular.  Together, they crossed the line from the irreverence and idiosyncrasy that makes the ToB fun to a seeming randomness that renders it pointless.  Happily, Jezebel has been running a cake vs. pie tournament, which though featuring some baffling decisions (red velvet cake--a cake whose distinction derives from food coloring--has made it to the quarter finals) offers, in the passionate and devoted comments of its participants, some of the best comedy to be found online this month.


• At the group blog Big Other, A.D. Jameson has been writing a multi-part retrospective of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, now up to its fourth installment (1, 2, 3, 4).  I'm not a big fan of comics in general, and when I read it a few years ago I admired The Dark Knight Returns, and realized how important it was to superhero comics and the development of the Batman character, without becoming particularly attached to it, but Jameson's series is nevertheless fascinating.  He discusses the state of comics, both from a storytelling and technical perspective, at the time Miller envisioned the series, and analyzes the physical arrangement of the comic's pages to reveal the ways that Miller took full advantage of his medium's abilities.  It's a fascinating, in-depth reading.

Jewish Fantasy, The Conversation

Michael Weingrad's "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia" has been the gift that keeps on giving for the genre/Jewish blogosphere for the last month.  Counting just those posts that have linked back to my response to the essay, there have been dozens of discussions sparked by it, reaching as far as blogs at The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The National Review.  Here are a couple of later additions which, I think, have really broadened the conversation.

• coffeeandink's "Religion != Christiany" is more a discussion of the discussion of Weingrad's article, and touches on subjects that she's talked on with some passion before (some of which were also brought up in the 2009 iteration of RaceFail).  Specifically, the tendency to forget the privilege of being Christian in historically Christian countries, and the different levels of privilege that other, non-Christian religions enjoy (as Micole points out, Judaism currently enjoys a significantly more privileged status than Islam).  She also touches on gradations of privilege within Judaism--between white and non-white Jews, assimilated and non-assimilated ones.
  
  My response to this article is very much an outsider's.  I've grown up utterly disconnected from this experience of Judaism as a minority culture.  As an Israeli, I have Jewish privilege (we will leave aside for the moment the enormously complicated question of inter-Jewish strife, and the way that politics and culture in Israel tends to favor certain streams of Judaism over others), and articles like Micole's invariably cause me to feel incredible gratitude for that fact, for everything from not being bombarded by Christmas carols in November (or December, for that matter) to the fact that this Monday and Tuesday--Passover night and day--are national holidays here.  On the other hand, they also remind me that that privilege (or, more accurately, the ethnic and racial privilege attached to it) continues to make life difficult for non-Jews in my country.


• Janni Lee Simner writes about the expression of Judaism within literature, and specifically fantasy literature, and raises an interesting point.
  
  

  Mostly, though, I found myself thinking about the fact that the author strikes me as looking for "Jewish fantasy" in the wrong place: in the trappings of the worldbuilding. I've only written two clearly Jewish stories ... But of course all my stories are Jewish. It informs my worldview. ... in the draft I just turned in, which is now sitting on my editor's desk, I went around with issues of forgiveness--I have characters who played a direct role in the War that destroyed their world, and who are still living with what they've done almost 20 years later, and those characters also are speaking up a little bit more in this book than in the first book I wrote set in that world.

  So. I'm aware that, in Jewish theology, prayer is a way of repenting for wrongs done against God, but that harm done to another person can only be made right by directly making amends to the person who was hurt--only the individual who was harmed can grant forgiveness for that harm. ...  I became more and more aware, as I wrote this book, how much that influenced how my characters who played a role in the War dealt with the fact, as well as which responses both they and I had sympathy for.

  Which to my mind makes this book about faeries, with little religion on stage, a Jewish book.

• Finally, a response from Weingrad himself (whose last name, it transpires, I consistently misspelled in my response to his original article.  Gah), again in Jewish Review of Books.  I don't come away from this second article with any clearer a notion of what Weingrad is looking for when he asks for Jewish fantasy, but it does provide a more detailed discussion of some of the more famous Jewish writers of fantasy who had been left out of the original article, including Neil Gaiman and Guy Gavriel Kay.