Asking the Wrong Questions

Chris Kammerud kicks off this week's reviews with a look at Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes , the story of a young woman stolen by fairies, whose charms Chris admires while wondering whether its conception of fairy tales is too moralistic for his taste.  Phoebe North has the opposite reaction when she reviews A Monster Calls , Patrick Ness's follow-up to the Chaos Walking trilogy, from an idea by children's author Siobhan Dowd, which she praises for its avoidance of moralizing in favor of a tone of dark fantasy.  Finally, Indrapramit Das looks at Kris Saksnussemm's Enigmatic Pilot , an alternate history steampunk science fiction Western, and finds it an entertaining mess. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

The timing of The Hour , the BBC's just-concluded prestige series about the early days of British televised news, was always a bit dodgy.  In the wake of the News of the World scandal, how do you tell a story in which journalists are the brave, principled, truth-seeking heroes?  Even if you distinguish between commercial news and publicly-owned organizations like the BBC (which The Hour , set in 1956, would have had trouble doing) and between print and TV journalism (a difference the show never made much of except to note that some of the restrictions on the latter don't apply to the former), the fact remains that to argue against government control of the news only weeks after it was revealed that the present-day UK government is either too scared, too complicit, or too bought to even attempt to prevent the press from committing gross violations of privacy, tormenting the families of murder victims, and, in one particularly memorable case, trying to railroad a suspect in a m...

The end of summer is almost upon us, but before it arrives, let's pause for a moment to acknowledge something truly unexpected: the movies this year have been good.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who's gotten used to checking her brain at the door of the movie theater between May and September, to the extent that Thor , one of the silly season's earliest harbingers, was able to win me over with little more than charismatic actors and a few funny scenes.  Had I known what was coming, I would have been a lot less forgiving.  Sure, we've had our Green Lantern s, our Transformers 3 s, our Cowboys and Aliens es, but alongside those turkeys the summer of 2011 has also delivered a crop of solidly entertaining, well-crafted action flicks that a thinking person can enjoy without hating themselves in the morning.  What makes this whole thing even more surprising is how implausible all of these successes are.  X-Men: First Class is the fifth film in a never-too-great ser...

Well, here we are again.  That day in late summer when SF fandom blearily pries open its sleep-glued eyes after a long and dimly-remembered evening, and looks dizzily about itself to see just how bad the damage is.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Hugo awards . In a brave but probably doomed attempt to wring something positive out Connie Willis's Blackout / All Clear having been deemed the best genre novel of 2010, let me use that victory as a launching point for an intriguing question: is this the very worst best novel decision ever made by the Hugo voters?  You could argue, I suppose, that Willis's victory over what must be admitted was an uninspiring ballot is nothing to her 1993 win (shared with Vernor Vinge for A Fire Upon the Deep ) for Doomsday Book , over both Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang .  On the other hand, Doomsday Book is well-regarded by a lot of people who are not me, whereas Blackout / All Clear has been ...

Sofia Samatar makes her Strange Horizons debut this week with a fascinating review of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's collection A Life on Paper , a volume that seeks to introduce this much-lauded French author to the English-reading public.  Niall Harrison looks at another literary zombie novel, Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, which he argues is unique for combining the horror of post-apocalyptic zombie stories with the rarer strand of zombie romance.  Finally, Matt Hilliard is of two minds about Brent Hayward's The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter , impressed by its technical achievements but wondering about the whole they amount to. This week also sees the latest entry in John Clute's column Scores .  This month, John takes a look at two urban fantasy anthologies in the slim hope of finding stories in them that actually talk about the urban setting.

This week on Strange Horizons: Matthew Cheney takes a look at Tor's reprint of Melissa Scott's cyberpunk novel Trouble and Her Friends and is underwhelemed , particularly by the way the novel's future has been overtaken.  Marina Berlin has mixed feelings about Paul Kearney's Corvus , which impresses her with its alternate history Roman military setting and battle scenes but disappoints in its handling of characters and the more unsavory aspects of its period.  Rhiannon Lassiter looks at The Age of Odin , and finds its Norse gods brought to life characters and little too familiar and down to earth. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Kicking off August's reviews is Dan Hartland's take on God's War by Kameron Hurley, which Dan, with a few reservations, is very impressed by.  Katherine Farmar makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of the Haikasoru book Mardock Scramble , by Tow Ubukata, which she finds rather exhausting, full of great ideas and moments but on the whole a bit of an assault on the senses.  Hallie O'Donovan rounds out the week with a review of Franny Billingsley's Chime , a YA novel which Hallie compares to the work of Diana Wynne Jones and Frances Hardinge. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

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...