Asking the Wrong Questions

Friends, I have a sad confession to make: in 2012, I read all of 31 books.  That's... pretty damn low, for me.  It's roughly half the books I read last year, or the year before.  It's probably the fewest books I've read in any year in the last decade, and certainly since I started keeping track.  There are any number of reasons for this sudden drop: early in the year, the stress of scrambling for mortgages and the other busywork of buying an apartment made mindless, or at least less demanding, entertainment like film and TV a lot more appealing than reading, and moving into my own place has meant that where last year I used public transport infrequently, now I hardly use it at all, which has cut into those dead parts of the day that are just perfect for disappearing into a good book.  But the truth is that reading, like anything else, is a habit, and that once broken--replaced with the kind of activities that take less out of you at the end of a long day, such a...

This time last year, it seemed like Homeland and Dexter couldn't have more different trajectories.  Dexter was coming off a plodding, padded sixth season that had devolved into the butt of a sad joke, full of nonsensical plot twists, increasingly boring subplots involving the show's perennially underserved secondary characters, and an growing sense that no one involved with the show knew what to do with its central character.  Homeland , on the other hand, had just concluded a triumphant, impossibly assured first season that not only established its two lead characters, bipolar CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and POW-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), as complex, nuanced avatars of mingled heroism and villainy, but delivered a fast-paced, pulse-pounding story about terror and anti-terror that nevertheless managed to remain rooted in mundane reality rather than flying off into 24 -style action-adventure fantasy.  And yet, going into their second...

Over at io9, I have a piece about Molly Gloss and her story "The Grinnell Method," published at Strange Horizons in September.  As I write there, Gloss is a writer whose style and preoccupations should make her a perfect fit for fans of, among other authors, Karen Joy Fowler, and "The Grinnell Method" in particular reminds me a great deal of Fowler's "What I Didn't See."  Which is to say that it's an excellent story, and that I hope to see it getting more attention as we move into award season.  Click over to io9 to see why.

Today's Strange Horizons review is a double look at that unlikely collaboration, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth .  Niall Harrison (as a Baxter fan and Pratchett skeptic) and I (as more or less the reverse) take a look at the novel, and both come away with mixed feelings.

Here's how you know it's fall: the movie theaters are waking up.  In the last week there have been two--two!--films I wanted to see (and there's still The Master to go), and though neither of them were quite up to my hopes for them, it does raise hopes that after a disappointing summer blockbuster season, there might finally be more to buy a movie ticket for than big explosion and neat special effects. Skyfall (2012) - In a way, Skyfall is the film I thought Quantum of Solace would be, but it comes one movie too late.  I called Casino Royale , the revamped Bond origin story which is beginning to seem like a blip in the franchise, a serious film about the creation of a ridiculous person, and expected Quatum of Solace to take Bond further into that ridiculousness.  Instead, it carried Casino Royale 's earnestness even further into Bourne territory, establishing a faceless, heartless entity known only as Quantum as Bond's nemesis.  Though a dour, overly convolute...

I think that I need to take out a subscription to the London Review of Books .  I had a year's free subscription up until a few months ago, courtesy of Dan Hartland , but I neglected to renew it.  At the time it didn't feel as if the fact that 95% of the magazine's content is smart, erudite, and well written was quite enough to justify spending the money, especially when there's so much else to read for free, but today I'm reminded of the, perversely enough, more appealing fact that the other 5% of LRB articles are just as smart, just as erudite, and just as well-written, but also batshit insane.  Previous standouts include pieces like Judith Butler's "Who Owns Kafka?" (March 3rd, 2011), in which Butler piles one unconvincing, flawed argument over another for why Israel shouldn't take possession of the papers of Franz Kafka, instead of just coming out and saying that it's because of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Jenny Turn...

For the last month, Strange Horizons has been running its annual fund drive, during which we raise money to keep the magazine running and its contributors paid.  Strange Horizons is run by a volunteer staff (including yours truly), and pays professional rates to its contributors.  With one week to go, the drive is now at just over $5,000 out of an $8,000 goal, though there are also "stretch goals" all the way to $11,000, which will allow us to increase the pay rates for poetry and reviews, and to add weekly podcasts of the magazine's fiction.  The fund drive page--with information about prizes being raffled off to donors, and Kickstarter-style rewards for various donation levels (including, for $100, the option to select a book to be reviewed by the reviews department)--can be found here , and at the Strange Horizons blog editor-in-chief Niall Harrison has been keeping a tally of testimonials about the magazine from authors and reviewers (including Genevieve Valentine...

We're coming near to the end of what has been a singularly unimpressive pilot season.  Progress report on the shows I've stuck with: Revolution has so far failed to ignite and if it doesn't within the next few weeks I'll probably ditch it.  Vegas 's second episode bored me, so it's been dropped.  Elementary , on the other hand, had a strong second episode that deepened the two main characters, but the show still doesn't feel much like Holmes.  Last Resort is maintaining the intensity of its pilot but still not giving the impression that it has an idea of where to take its premise.  There are still a few stragglers left, and they'll be trickling on screen over the next month, but right now I'm willing to pronounce the 2012 fall pilot season a bust.  Better luck next year. The Paradise - The BBC's prospective answer to Downton Abbey draws loosely from the novel Au Bonheur des Dames ( The Ladies' Paradise ) by Émile Zola, moving its actio...

Well, that was a long week and a half of new TV, and with not much to show for it in the end.  These write-ups represent a small minority of the new shows to premiere this fall--I haven't said anything about the season's new comedies, which run the gamut from terrible ( Partners ), to underwhelming ( Ben and Kate , The Mindy Project ), to competent but uninspiring ( Go On , Animal Practice ) , to bizarre Alf retreads ( The Neighbors ).  There are some more new shows premiering later this month, but so far I'm not very enthusiastic about this new crop of shows. Vegas - The premise of this show, which follows the (presumably fictionalized) exploits of legendary Las Vegas Sheriff Ralph Lamb (Dennis Quaid) in the early 60s, marks it as yet another attempt, after the failure of last year's Pan Am and The Playboy Club , to crack the Mad Men code for a network audience (only this time without pesky women running around all over the place--there is only one woman in the ...