Asking the Wrong Questions

Several months ago, around the time that the debate on the viability of the genre short fiction scene was having its semiannual resurgence, I participated in an SF Signal Mind Meld on the subject. Most of the other participants were authors and editors, which left me as the lone representative of readers, from whose perspective, I wrote, the short fiction market seemed not endangered but fragmented, no longer dominated by three magazines but by a whole host of on- and off-line markets and an ever-growing original story anthology scene. As a possible reason for this fragmentation and for the increasing popularity of these anthologies, I suggested that for younger genre fans a magazine subscription isn't an automatic, or even reasonable, choice. People who want more bang for their buck are more likely to plop 12-15$ for an anthology published by a recognizable name, and featuring at least three or four authors they know and like, than they are to pay 50$ for a year's subscript...

The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been picked up for a full second season. Of course, this would be even better news if the show gave any signs of improving, but five episodes into the second season, the flaws that marred it in its first are still going strong: great acting, great character work, great individual scenes, but the plotting, in both individual episodes and the overarching save the world arc, is nonsensical.  The next to last episode aired, "Alison from Palmdale," is a perfect example.  Summer Glau is incredible as three different people in the same body who combine into whatever the hell Cameron is right now, but the notion that Cameron has enough empathy to become Alison--who understands and feels emotions, like fear, grief, and anger, which in the past have left Cameron baffled--is too much to swallow.  We've already got one show about a genocidal war between dirty, sweaty humans and immaculate machines confused by these things we call 'feelings' ...

If I were a particularly cynical person, I'd wonder whether the first, abysmal pilot for the US remake of Life on Mars had been intentionally released online once the decision was made to completely retool the show, as a way of lowering expectations and making the new, actual pilot look good by comparison. Most of the buzz I've been hearing in the last couple of weeks, after all, has tended towards the surprised discovery that the new, new Life on Mars doesn't completely suck, which in today's degraded television market is almost the same as saying that a show is good. (Seriously, is it just me or are things rather dismal on the TV front? The best I can seem to hope for is for shows to hold their ground, which in some cases-- Pushing Daisies , Dexter , How I Met Your Mother --is good, in others-- Sarah Connor , Chuck --is not nearly as good as I'd like, and in other still-- Heroes --is grounds for dropping a show. And when the best new show of the fall season ...

It's fall, which means that it'll be some time before I feel the urge to write a full-length film review again, mainly because I haven't been inside a movie theater since the middle of the summer. Nevertheless, I have been watching films on DVD, and here are some thoughts. Waitress (2007) - An underdone romantic comedy with a somewhat misleading title, as the main character not only waitresses at a diner but also bakes the pies which are its chief draw and whose preparation frequently punctuates the film's action, to mouth-watering effect. Waitress starts out from a rather bleak premise--Keri Russell's Jenna is trapped in a (chillingly portrayed) abusive marriage, a dead-end job, a pregnancy that she is at best ambivalent towards, and, worst of all, a bitterness about her life that rejects any hope that things might get better. Comedies have been built on grimmer foundations than this, but where Waitress falters is its inability to decide just where on the spe...

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve - As the reprinted Martin Lewis review that first got me interested in this book points out, Mortal Engines kicks off with one hell of a first sentence: "It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea." The first in a quartet of YA novels, Mortal Engines takes place in a post-environmental collapse future in which mobile cities roam the blasted landscape, hunting and consuming one another for their resources. It's a great setting (and one that seems to crop up rather regularly in science fiction) which is matched with an equally intriguing premise--London apprentice Tom chases an intruder into the city's bowels after she attacks a prominent citizen, but instead of being hailed as a hero he finds himself banished from the city, forced to partner up with his former prey and to learn the ugly truths underlying the false history he's ...

Happy 5769, and sorry about the prolonged period of silence recently--a combination of work and the holidays is keeping me a little busy.  Today, however, Strange Horizons has my review of Paul McAuley's The Quiet War , and there's some stuff in the pipeline for the near future.

The credit card bill (if not, just yet, the convention itself) confirms that I am a paid-up member of Anticipation , the 2009 WorldCon. This does not quite mean that I will definitely be in Montréal next August, but that is certainly the plan, finances and life events permitting. Long-time AtWQ readers will perhaps have guessed just what kind of bind this puts me in. It's a little difficult, after all, to decry the degraded , provincial tastes of Hugo voters when you are one of them. Not impossible, obviously, but it would be nice, if and when the time comes to complain loudly about next year's Hugo nominees, to have a list of alternative nominees which I had actually cast my vote for. And since I rarely read stories or books in the year of their publication, I find myself, with less than four months left in the year, somewhat overwhelmed by the wealth of material available. So, my question to you is, what genre stories have you read since January that you think are awar...

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of one fine spring afternoon.  Trahearne had been on this wandering binge for nearly three weeks, and the big man, dressed in rumpled khakis, looked like an old soldier after a long campaign, sipping slow beers to wash the taste of death out of his mouth.  The dog slumped on the stool beside him like a tired little buddy, only raising its head occasionally for a taste of beer from a dirty ashtray set on the bar. These are the opening sentences of The Last Good Kiss , still the finest mystery novel I've ever read, though ultimately it is far less concerned with solving a mystery than with cataloguing the sadnesses and disappointments of its characters' lives in a way that makes your heart ache for them (which is one of the reasons why the ecstatic praise for Kate Atkinson'...

One of the effects of a magazine-and-award-oriented short story culture is that I often remember stories but not their authors. I admired John Kessel's writing, therefore, long before I knew his name. His two publication in SciFiction, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" and "It's All True," both made my best of SciFiction lists for their respective years , and "The Invisible Empire," which I read in Conjunctions 39 , has lingered in my mind for several years. Once I put the three stories together with a single author, I knew that I had to give his collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (available under Creative Commons License here ), a look. I wasn't disappointed. Baum Plan is an excellent collection, full of smart, playful stories, which cover every genre, sub-genre, and quasi-genre under the speculative fiction umbrella, but the best of the bunch is undoubtedly the novella "Stories for M...

(Part 1 is here ) "of course, vengeance takes me all over the world. I was in Brazil yesterday. They love their soccer." Jane Espenson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer , "Same Time, Same Place" At a panel at the most recent WorldCon, participants Charles Brown, Karen Burnham, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight and Gary Wolfe were each asked to compose a list of 20 works of science fiction published during the last twenty years which they consider essential. Morgan has a write-up here , and Niall Harrison discusses the results some more here , both noting that the only book to merit a mention all five lists was Ian McDonald's River of Gods . Excellent novel though it is, I don't think River of Gods was singled out for this honor simply because of its quality, but because of the change it seemed to herald in SF's attitude towards non-white, non-Western cultures. Set in Varanasi several decades into the future, River of Gods follows nine characters over a period o...