Asking the Wrong Questions

Appearing today in Strange Horizons 's reviews department is Dan Hartland's review of Benjamin Rosenbaum's The Ant King and Other Stories . Over at Torque Control , Niall Harrison has posted a discussion he led with Dan, Martin Lewis, and myself about the collection and Rosenbaum's strengths and weaknesses as a writer, plus links to other reviews. And, of course, the collection itself is available as a free download from Small Beer Press.

For the last couple of months, I've been boggling at the positive buzz surrounding Clint Eastwood's The Changeling , for the simple reason that the script is by J. Michael Straczynski. Was it possible, I wondered, that in the decade since Babylon 5 went off the air Straczynski had learned how to write dialogue that didn't make its hearers simultaneously cringe and guffaw? The film's IMDb page would seem to indicate otherwise: Christine Collins: I used to tell Walter, "Never start a fight, but always finish it." I didn't start this fight, but by God I'm going to finish it. That settles it: it's going to be impossible for genre fans to watch this film without laughing inappropriately.

I know, I said I didn't care . But then that's been the arc of my entanglement (it is by now far too long since I could call it fannishness) with Battlestar Galactica since the middle of the second season--I'm annoyed and even disgusted with the show, but I can't seem to break away. SyFy Portal is claiming to have a reliable source about the identity of the final Cylon. They're not revealing who it is, but they have posted a list of five contenders, one of which is, to their knowledge, the real one. I have to say, I hope their carefully worded caveat that this information " could be incorrect, changed, or even part of misinformation " is more to the point than the list itself, because if any of these people turn out to be the final Cylon, I am going to be so disappointed. The revelation that any of these characters are a Cylon would undo so much of the show's character work, not to mention hobble its underlying themes of morality in times of cris...

After many, many hints that this was coming, Pushing Daisies has been cancelled .  (So have Dirty Sexy Mone y and Eli Stone , but I don't watch those shows and therefore don't care.) As so many others have said, the fact that this smart, unusual, gorgeous show has been cancelled while shows like Knight Rider (which I've never watched because every reaction I've seen has been wholly negative) and the new Life on Mars (whose unsubtle hectoring drove me away after two episodes) survive is a travesty, and something that ABC, and the television industry in general, should be ashamed of.  And no, the fact that Daisies creator Bryan Fuller might now be available to return to Heroes (where, in its first season, he wrote the standout episode "Company Man") is no consolation.   Heroes is a critically injured show which has done so much to squander my never-particularly-great affection for it that I doubt it could ever work its way back into my heart.  No show tha...

Obviously, the real movie news of the week is the release of the new Watchmen trailer (beautiful and despite my misgivings, quite promising, though I'm not as in love with the original book as some) and the even newer Star Trek trailer (awful, and looking very much like your run of the mill J.J. Abrams crapfest). Still, here are some looks at the leftover films of summer and fall. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) - My expectations for this film were somewhere in a sub, sub-basement beneath the movie theater, what with my lukewarm reaction to the first film and the even more tepid critical response. Which might go some way towards explaining why I enjoyed it as much as I did. The first Hellboy film couldn't stop undermining itself, inching towards the over the top weirdness of the original comic's universe and then immediately retreating into the standard superhero film template as though afraid that that weirdness would put audiences off. It thus ended up being n...

Excession by Iain M. Banks - In the best 20 science fiction novels of the last twenty years discussion a few months back there was a spirited sub-discussion on the question of which was the best Culture novel, Excession or Use of Weapons . As the latter was already my favorite of his novels, I decided to make Excession my next Banks read. This was not quite a mistake-- Excession is entertaining, funny, and as masterful a combination of SFnal invention, social commentary, and gosh-wow adventure as I've come to expect from Banks--but count me in with the Use of Weapons crowd. Excession reads like a better version of Consider Phlebas , the first Culture novel (with which I was rather di s appointed ). A McGuffin--in this case an alien artifact representing technology far in advance of the Culture or its main rivals and allies--appears in a semi-neutral location, and both the Culture and its less civilized enemies scramble to gain control of it. Unlike Consider Phlebas , E...

Like many Israelis, I hold dual citizenship, and in my case the second is American. People who know this have taken to asking me, in the last few months, whether I was planning to vote in yesterday's election, to which my answer has always been no. I don't approve of expatriates or, as in my case, their children, casting absentee ballots to influence the running of a country they don't live in, whose most direct consequences they won't feel. Still, I think I might have had a harder time justifying this decision if it didn't seem clear that both of the states I might register to vote in (New York and Colorado) were going to go to Barack Obama. Though I don't feel entitled to cast my vote as an American, it's been difficult to tamp down the little voice that says that as an Israeli and as a person who lives on this planet, I ought to have had a say in selecting the single most powerful person on it. In the last eight years, the American president has remad...

According to the author bio in my reprint edition, around the turn of the 20th century the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was an international literary sensation, his plays, novellas, and biographies translated into more than a dozen languages. Nowadays he is known mainly in his native German, but the good people at NYRB have been working hard to rectify this situation. Judging by Beware of Pity , a meaty, intense novel of obsession and psychological manipulation, one of Zweig's latest works and his only full-length novel, this is something to be extremely grateful for. Set in the months leading up to the first world war and in the an out-of-the-way Austrian garrison town, Beware of Pity is told through the reminiscences of Hofmiller, a young cavalry officer stationed at the town. Poor and of an undistinguished family, Hofmiller is ill-at-ease among his fellow officers, most of whom are wealthy and titled, and protective of his reputation and honor. When a friend secures for him a...

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 ...