Asking the Wrong Questions

So China Miéville has written a science fiction novel, and it is... well, it is many things, but perhaps we'll start with "Old School."  Miéville is the author who took the top off fantasy ten years ago, and his next to last novel, The City & The City, was so sui generis that it won awards for both science fiction (the British Science Fiction Award, the Clarke) and fantasy (the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award for best fantasy novel), despite containing no non-realist elements whatsoever.  But Miéville's latest novel, Embassytown , though in many ways as dazzlingly original as anything he's written, is positively retro.  It's a planetary romance, a far future SF story about a time when humans have spread through the galaxy with the help of vaguely explained FTL technology, a story of contact with winged, eye-stalked aliens.  It is, in short, that increasingly rare, increasingly unfashionable artifact, a core SF story, and its tropes are pure Golden Ag...

The week's first review is by Matt Hilliard, who looks at Rob Ziegler's debut novel Seed , a post environmental collapse novel.  Though he questions Ziegler's environmental model, Matt finds much to admire about Seed's depiction of a slowly collapsing world.  Lila Garrott is disappointed with Lisa Goldstein's The Uncertain Places , arguing that it does little that is new or original with its fairy tale components, and that its characters are unconvincing.  Nathaniel Katz is ambivalent about Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour , a reprinted novel from 1989, and The Hunter From the Woods , a collection of stories starring the same main character.  Though he admires the pizzazz of this character, a werewolf James Bond who kills Nazis, he finds the execution, and particularly the two books' frequent sex scenes, rather tedious. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

After six years of writing about him, it feels as if I've developed a certain patter where Terry Pratchett, and particularly his Discworld novels, are concerned.  Though I've liked some of his novels better and others worse, my reaction to them in the years since I've been keeping this blog has been a near-uniform mix of fondness and exasperation, the former in recognition of the sheer breadth of accomplishment that is Discworld, and of the inventiveness that still goes into it, and the latter in sad cognizance that the series is growing increasingly stale, and that its inventiveness is, more and more often, watered down with recycled themes, gags, and character arcs.  This has been especially true of the books featuring Sam Vimes, arguably Pratchett's most enduring, most iconic character.  More than any of the other Discworld series, the Vimes novels stick closely to a formula, which sees the erstwhile policeman thrust into unfamiliar settings to investigate murders th...

This week's first review is by T.S. Miller, who takes a look at Future Media , a collection of stories and essays by Rick Wilber examining the ways that media has and is changing.  Tim finds much to enjoy but wonders if Wilber and his contributors might have more to say about the past than the future and the shape that future media might take.  Sarah Frost reviews Infidel , the sequel to God's War by Kameron Hurley, and like Dan Hartland with War , is impressed with what she finds.  Rhiannon Lassiter reviews two books by Philip Palmer, last year's Version 43 and this year's Hellship , and, though she expresses admiration for Palmer in general, is more enamored of the first than the second. This month also sees the latest installment of John Clute's column Scores.  This time John's subjects are Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, the sequel to Spin and Axis , and Daryl Gregory's latest novel, Raising Stony Mayhall . Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

This week's reviews kick off with disappointment.  First, Phoebe North is unimpressed with Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse , lamenting its dull plot, poor prose, and flat characters.  Maureen Kincaid Speller is no more won over by Mira Grant's Deadline , the sequel to Feed , which she finds suffering from many of its predecessor's flaws, chiefly an unwillingness to examine the dishonesty and narcissism of its supposedly brave, truth-seeking blogger protagonists.  Shaun Duke's Friday review of Leon Jenner's Bricks , meanwhile, is more ambivalent.  A history of the Roman conquest of Britain told from the point of view of a seemingly immortal Druid, Shaun finds Bricks promising and difficult, but ultimately a bit of a letdown.  Nevertheless, he finds much to recommend about it. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Strange Horizons 's Halloween review is Farah Mendlesohn's long, detailed look at the essay collection 21st Century Gothic , edited by Danel Olson.  Farah finds the collection extremely variable, containing excellent pieces alongside terrible ones, but her review also acts as an introduction to several titles that one wouldn't necessarily associate with the Gothic descriptor, some of which sound very enticing.  My own review of Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus appeared on Wednesday.  Friday's review is by Erin Horáková, who takes a look at Tansy Rayner Roberts's collection of linked stories Love and Romanpunk and is quite disappointed by what she finds, wondering if Roberts has prioritized Girl Power over a more thoughtful type of feminism. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Over at Strange Horizons , I look at two of this year's circus-set fantasies, Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus .  These two books take very different approaches to very similar premises, and I found things to like and dislike about each of them--so much so that I think they might work better as a paired reading than on their own. You can also read Niall Harrison's thoughts on The Night Circus at the Strange Horizons blog.

Isn't it just the way: you go weeks without seeing the inside of a movie theater and then two movies you want to see come out on the same weekend.  That timing proved to be fortuitous, though, as the two films have in common a preoccupation with our world and our present moment, though one of them filters that concern through science fiction while the other makes a virtue out of being mimetic.  Only one of these approaches works, and it wasn't the one I was expecting. Contagion  - Steven Soderbergh's latest is a smart, effective, utterly engrossing movie that gets a lot of things right, but nevertheless I have trouble calling it a good film.  To get to the good stuff first, at its most basic level the film is gratifying simply for the things that it isn't.  There's very little hysteria here as a new strain of flu spreads quickly and lethally all over the planet, and very little emphasis on emotional dramas as a window on the epidemic--though the film features ...

The first of this week's reviews is Richard Larson's take on Jesse Bullington's The Enterprise of Death .  Richard is impressed with Enterprise , both as a fantasy and as a piece of historical fiction.  Liz Bourke is similarly impressed with Erin Hoffman's debut fantasy Sword of Fire and Sea , though she notes some problems with the book's characters and plot.  Sofia Samatar is intrigued by Nina Allan's collection of linked stories, The Silver Wind , though she wonders if the cumulative effect of the book, in which the same characters appear in different situations and with different backgrounds, as if they were alternate versions of each other, isn't ultimately more alienating than engaging.  See also Niall Harrison's thoughts on The Silver Wind at the Strange Horizons blog. As part of the project to redesign the Strange Horizons website, we're holding a design competition for a new logo.  Details about the competition, its rules and prizes...

As fall draws into winter, the new TV pilots grow less frequent and more prestigious.  By which I mean more expensive and featuring more high concepts, but not, as the following write-ups demonstrate, necessarily better. In fact, it's been a lackluster fall.  2 Broke Girls and Pan Am have disappointed me.  Ringer and Revenge haven't, but my expectations from them were never very high.  There's only one new show this fall that is genuinely good (see below), and though that's hardly a tragedy--my TV dance card is too full already--it's depressing that this is the best the medium can come up with. Homeland - For various reasons, I ended up banking the first three episodes of Homeland until my holiday last week, and then real-life events caught up with me in a way that made watching the show without preconceptions and emotional baggage utterly impossible.  Homeland is based on an Israeli series, Chatufim ( Prisoners of War ), which addressed the national t...

In the first of this week's reviews, Indrapramit Das dives into Neal Stephenson's latest doorstop, Reamde , and finds novel with definite airport thriller qualities that nevertheless is not only entertaining, but suggests that the present setting of these sorts of novels has become SFnal.  Katherine Farmar reviews the putative next big thing in the YA fantasy circle, Rae Carson's Fire and Thorns ( The Girl of Fire and Thorns in the US) and likes what she finds, though she wishes for a more complex handling of the story's religious aspects.  Finally, Chris Kammerud reviews the latest literary zombie novel, Colson Whitehead's Zone One , which takes a slightly different approach to the topic by setting its story some time after the struggle for survival has ended and with its characters desultorily cleaning up a ravaged world in anticipation of civilization's return, and wondering if that's a good thing. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

The first of this week's reviews is of the Booker-longlisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, a literary dystopia of reproductive collapse that, per Niall Harrison's take , is a lot more interesting and worthwhile than that (to me, at least) unappetizing description indicates.  Lila Garrott is similarly impressed with Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire , a collection of erotic horror stories whose use of sex and the human body, Lila concludes, is intended to elicit more horror than eroticism.  Finally, Martin Lewis is equally impressed and nonplussed by Margaret Atwood's essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination , finding within it both a perplexing attitude towards her subject and a brilliantly idiosyncratic point of view. The Strange Horizons fund drive concluded on Sunday, having reached and exceeded its goal.  A huge thanks to anyone who contributed or helped to publicize the drive.

In my recent post about Northanger Abbey , I cited several discussions of art by and about women as examples of the way that femininity can be a double-edged sword for female artists and women in general.  One of them was this article from The Millions by Gabriel Brownstein, wondering why Jonathan Franzen's Freedom , a novel about America in the present moment, was getting so much attention and hype, while Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector , a novel about America in the recent past, had received so little.  Was it because of Goodman's gender, of the novel's girly title, and its central focus on two sisters, Brownstein wondered?  I haven't read Freedom so I can't say whether, like Brownstein, I think it and The Cookbook Collector are in the same league in terms of quality and relevance (though as Goodman is one of my favorite authors of literary fiction, and I found Franzen's The Corrections utterly forgettable, I'm perfectly willing to belie...

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.

In the chapter dedicated to Northanger Abbey in Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club , the titular club's discussion of the book kicks off with Grigg, the club's sole male member, making some comments on The Mysteries of Udolpho , the Gothic novel whose reading so confounds young Catherine Morland that she begins to see dark and murderous plots wherever she goes.  He's stunned to discover that none of the other members of the club have read Udolpho --"Black veils and Laurentina's skeleton? ... Didn't you think it sounded good?"  They, on the other hand, are equally stunned that anyone would have sought it out; "We'd thought it sounded overheated, overdone, old-fashionedly lurid.  We'd thought it sounded ridiculous.  Actually it hadn't occurred to any of us to read it."  In my one and only reading of Northanger Abbey my reaction to Udolpho was very much of the latter kind.  Once Fowler, through Grigg, raised the issue, h...