Asking the Wrong Questions

Rounding out July's reviews are: Erin Horáková, who finds Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless delightful on the micro level, but somewhat shapeless in the macro; Nathaniel Katz and Marie Velazquez, who take two looks at the first volume in Daniel Abraham's new epic fantasy series,  The Dragon's Path , Nathaniel wondering when the payoff to the book's buildup will come, and Maria whether Abraham plans to complicate the somewhat simplistic treatment of race in the book; and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, who looks at Times Three , an omnibus edition of three time travel novels by Robert Silverberg, with his usual care and erudition. Also, Strange Horizons is looking for volunteers to help us prepare for the website redesign by checking the existing content for errors.  The details are here . Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

After a couple of dry months, reading-wise, I've gotten back on the horse in a big way and with some very fine books.  Here are my thoughts. Kraken by China Miéville - It's taken me a while to get to this book, and having finally read it the question foremost in my mind is: why?  It's strange enough that Miéville is going back to the template of a Londoner who discovers that there's a magical underworld to the city, is forced into that world, and becomes proffiicient at navigating it and affecting it--a barrel whose bottom he had already rather thoroughly scraped with King Rat and Un Lun Dun , both of which were themselves heavily derivative of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere , and which, in the intervening years, so many other writers have dipped their spoons into.  But to write this sort of story as the follow-up to the breathtakingly original The City and The City , a book that seemed to herald a new stage in Miéville's already genre-changing career, is just baf...

We have two new reviewers this week.  First, Lila Garrott looks at Betrayer , the latest installment in C.J. Cherryh's long-running series, and concludes that though it might lay the seeds for interesting stories later on, as a work in its own right it is a disappointment.  In today's review , Guria King is more pleased by Kate Griffin's The Neon Court , the third Matthew Swift novel, which, though it disappoints Guria in its handling of its main character, pleases her in its interpretation of the term "urban fantasy."  Between the two debuts, Niall Alexander reviews Kaaron Warren's third novel Mistification , a story about and containing stories which Niall finds somewhat less than the sum of its parts--the individual stories are engaging, but the story framing them is less so. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

It's been rather quiet around here, I know, and will probably remain that way for a while yet.  In the meantime, some of the movies I've seen recently. Hanna (2010) - What a strange film this is.  The premise makes it sound like The Bourne Identity starring a waifish teenage girl, and that's not an inaccurate description, but what it leaves out is how little the film seems to care about any of the plot or character beats suggested by this description, and how much emphasis it places on its visuals.  Joe Wright--an unlikely choice for an action director--directs Hanna half as an art-house movie, with long wordless shots that take in the film's frequent changes in scenery (the frozen tundra where Hanna grows up, the Moroccan desert to which she escapes from a CIA rendition facility, the grey gloom of downtown Berlin), and half as a music video, composing the many fight sequences as if they were dances (the Chemical Brothers's fine but often too-present soundtrack...

Paul Graham Raven kicks off this week's reviews with a long, thoughtful look at Gwyneth Jones's collection The Universe of Things , which not only makes the collection seem like essential reading, but doubles as a detailed examination of the themes of Jones's writing.  Raz Greenberg is less pleased with another collection, Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars , whose four novellas Raz finds disappointingly uninterested in delving very deep into the psyches of their murderer protagonists.  Phoebe North makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of Seed Seeker , the conclusion of Pamela Sargent's Seed Trilogy which, Phoebe argues, makes a compelling argument for reading the entire trilogy as the character arc of an AI.

Richard Larson kicks off this week's reviews with a rave for the fourth volume in Jonathan Strahan's anthology series, Eclipse .  Though several of the stories strike him as particularly strong, Richard finds the entire anthology well worth a read.  We also have two new reviewers making their debut this week.  Tori Truslow is intrigued by S.L. Grey's The Mall , which has been championed by Lauren Beukes, but ultimately concludes that its strong parts don't make up an equally strong whole.  Sarah Frost, on the other hand, is very pleased with Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North , which she finds an improvement over the previous book in its series, Oaths of Fealty . Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

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.

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

I read George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones , the first volume in his Song of Ice and Fire sequence, in 2005, and came away feeling that it was rather poor stuff.  The post in which I listed the reasons for my disappointment received a fair share of peeved comments, but the one that's stuck in my mind these six years came from a commenter who wondered how I could say that A Game of Thrones didn't diverge from the conventions of epic fantasy nearly as much as I'd been led to believe.  Wasn't the fact that Martin had killed his main character, Ned Stark, in the first book a huge deviation from those conventions?  I remember feeling baffled at this question.  Far from surprising me, Ned's death had seemed to me both predictable and, by the time it finally happened, long overdue.  It had been signposted early in the novel; the book's YA tone and its emphasis on Ned's young children all but guaranteed that he would be done away with; and it took forever...

It's alternative steampunk week at the Strange Horizons reviews department.  Brendan Byrne kicks things off with his review of Angry Robot's reprint of Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter, one of the first steampunk novels, which Brendan views as a glimpse of what steampunk might have been without its propensity to view the past through rose-tinted glasses.  Chris Kammerud looks at another reprint, Fantagraphics's translation of Jacques Tardi's early graphic novel The Arctic Marauder , a work of "icepunk."  Finally, Adam Roberts reviews Jean-Christophe Valtat's Aurorarama .  Valtat is an author of literary fiction who responded to Charlie Stross's broadside against steampunk soon after it was posted, and Adam finds his approach to the subgenre more palatable than most. UPDATE: I forgot to mention that John Clute's column Scores also appears this week.  This time, John's topics are the Jonathan Strahan-edited anthology Engineering Infinity ...

In the last decade the Israeli film industry has experienced a dramatic renaissance.  More films are being made; more tickets are being sold; and, internationally, Israeli films have been acclaimed at prestigious festivals and in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars.  I have to confess that I've let most of this new wave pass me by, mainly because so few of these films piqued my interest with their premise or subject matter.  Israeli filmmaking often seems to be cleanly divided between family dramas and examinations of the Arab-Israeli conflict in its many forms, to the extent that the recent film Rabies billed itself--quite correctly, from what I've gathered--as the first Israeli horror film.  What excited me about Footnote , Joseph Cedar's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Beaufort , when I first heard about it, was that it seemed like such a departure from this narrow range of subjects, and the film itself has more than lived up to that expectatio...

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

My review of Iain M. Banks's latest Culture novel, Surface Detail , appears today at Strange Horizons .  My reaction to this book is almost the exact opposite of my reaction to X-Men: First Class --if the film frustrated me by suggesting that the desire for vengeance is never justified, the book is so busy decrying what it views as greater evils that it stakes out a positive attitude towards killing for revenge that I ultimately found quite disturbing. If you're interested in my other reviews of Banks novels, they can be found here .

Andy Sawyer kicks off this week's reviews with a joint look at the revised edition of The Search for Philip K. Dick , a biography of the author by his first wife Anne, and The King of the Elves , the first volume of Subterranean's new edition of Dick's collected stories.  Though he's impressed, with some reservations, by the biography, Andy is disappointed with the new edition of the stories, which offers little additional to justify its price.  Martin Lewis is more pleased with Frances Hardinge's Twilight Robbery , the sequel to Fly by Night , though he finds flaws in the novel that are, perhaps, inevitable given its YA focus.  Chris Kammerud rounds out the week with a review of Karen Russell's Swamplandia! , a literary fabulist novel that Chris is very impressed by.

The first installment of the modern film incarnation of the X-Men franchise came out in 2000, and is generally held to have been the harbinger of the following decade's deluge of superhero and comic book films.  I remember going to see the film several weeks after its US release had been greeted by effusive reviews, which praised it for taking the comic book adaptation an enormous step forward, and wondering what all the fuss was about.  Even knowing next to nothing about the comics, it was clear to me that here was a complex setting that had been shoehorned into the standard Hollywood template of a single hero backed by a team.  The creakiness of that process's result was only exacerbated by a dull story, thin characterization, and lackluster action sequences.  I liked X-Men 2 a little better, but the third film was terrible, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was even worse.  The franchise, which never seemed to have much life in it to start with, was clearly on i...

In honor of Carol Emshwiller's recent 90th birthday, this week's Strange Horizons issue is dedicated to Emshwiller's work.  The reviews department kicks off the focus week with L. Timmel Duchamp's review of the recent Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 1 , in which she charts the development of Emshwiller's voice and prevailing themes through her short fiction.  Paul Kincaid reviews Emshwiller's first novel, Carmen Dog , a work of feminist SF, and Maureen Kincaid Speller reviews the novels Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill , Emshwiller's forays into the Western genre.

And now we come to the last of our shortlist reviews.  After the disappointing and even infuriating short story and novelette ballots, it would be nice to report that the Hugo-nominated novellas are an exciting and worthwhile bunch of stories.  Instead, the shortlist (minus Alastair Reynolds's "Troika" which is not online) is solid, by no means a slog to get through and at some points quite good, but hardly enough to save this year's short fiction nominations from the condemnation that should be heaped upon them. On the other hand, there's only one stinker on this ballot. Geoffrey A. Landis's "The Sultan of the Clouds,"  (PDF) a pulpy wannabe adventure whose narrator, David Tinkerman, travels with his employer, the brilliant terraforming scientist Leah Hamakawa, to Venus at the invitation of the title character, the heir to a vast fortune.  "Sultan" is one of those stories that puts most of its eggs in the worldbuilding basket, so it s...

This week's reviews kick off with Matt Cheney's fascinating take on Gary K. Wolfe's essay collection Evaporating Genres , in which Matt discusses his own expectations from reviewing and criticism, and the difficulties those expectations caused him in appreciating Wolfe's book.  Duncan Lawie is pleased with Aliette do Bodard's Harbinger of the Storm , the sequel to Servant of the Underworld , which is set in the same universe as the Hugo-nominated novelette "The Jaguar House, in Shadow."  Nader Elhefnawy considers David Wingrove's Son of Heaven , a prequel volume to the Chung Kuo alternate history sequence, and finds it less exciting than the books that follow it and touched with a vein of Sinophobia that they managed to ameliorate.

If the short story ballot feels like a snapshot of the genre short fiction scene in 2010, the same year's novelette ballot seems deliberately retro.  All but one of its stories are brimming with classic SF tropes--long-haul space voyages, Martian colonization, alien encounters, toolshed astronauts--and even more than that, with nostalgia for a time when those tropes dominated science fiction.  I wish I could say that that nostalgia is leavened by a sophisticated handling of characterization, and an understanding of some of the pernicious assumptions that underpin Golden Age SF, but unfortunately, with only one exception, that's not the case.  The result is a ballot that feels regressive and at time uncomfortably exclusionary. Nebula winner Eric James Stone's "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" is a story that seems of a piece with stories like Michael A. Burstein's "Sanctuary" (Nebula nominee, best novella , 2006) and Mike Resnick's "A...