Asking the Wrong Questions

This week on Strange Horizons , we're launching a new reviews department feature: Short Fiction Snapshot, where every other month we'll be dedicating a full-length review to a piece of short fiction.  Here is my editorial explaining my goals and hopes for this project, and here is the first installment, discussing Charlie Jane Anders's "Intestate," from Tor.com.  One of my hopes for this project is that it will become a short fiction discussion club, along the lines of the ones on Torque Control , Locus Online , and Everything is Nice .  So if you're interested, please go and read "Intestate," and add your thoughts in the comments to my review.

The pilots of winter continue to pour in, and I think we can identify a trend: fall is when the respectable doctor and lawyer shows premiere; winter is when TV puts on fancy dress.  This latest bunch of shows includes fantasy, thrillers, science fiction, and lots of weirdness.  Not all of it works, unsurprisingly--in the time between starting this post and publishing it, the most rancid of the shows I've written about has already managed a much-deserved cancellation--but there's a lot that's new and different here alongside the tediously familiar and underworked, and that's something to be grateful for. Do No Harm - I have no idea if this is true, but in my head the thought process that went into greenlighting Do No Harm went something like this: "hey, that other show loosely inspired by Stephen Moffat's 21st century modernization of a 19th century story that has entered the cultural currency, and which we turned into a procedural, is turning out pretty wel...

My review of Angélica Gorodischer's Trafalgar , originally published in 1979 and now published in English by Small Beer Press, appears this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books .  Trafalgar is a strange book, not at all what I was expecting it to be and quite unlike anything else I've ever read.  It's certainly worth a look, though, and has me very curious to read Gorodischer's previously translated work, Kalpa Imperial .

This week marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice , which seemed like the perfect excuse--if any were needed--to reread it.  It also seemed like a good opportunity to write about it, especially since it's the only Austen novel I haven't written about in the course of this blog's existence (well, to be precise, one of the very first Austen-related entries posted to this blog--and the one of its earliest entries of any kind to gain real popularity--was about this book, but "4 Popular Misconceptions About Pride and Prejudice " is, as its title suggests, a response to the way others tend to perceive the book, not an essay about my own reactions to it).  Here I was more hesitant, however.  In fact, when I realized, a few years ago, that my ad hoc essays about Austen's novels were turning into an irregular series, it didn't occur to me that Pride and Prejudice would one day be included in it.  The book felt like too great an edif...

'Tis the season for lots and lots of interesting movies to finally make their way to the movie theater, and for me to glut myself in preparation for the long hot months of box-office friendly summer.  Weirdly, though, almost every film I've watched recently has been a lush, visually adventurous and not entirely successful novel adaptation.  Must be something in the water.  There are some more straightforward films coming up ( Argo , The Silver Linings Playbook , Flight , though also fare like Les Miserables and Holy Motors ), but for the time being here are my thoughts on this strangely similar group of movies. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) - One of the things I most admired about Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was that the films felt less like straight-up adaptation of the book and more like a synthesis of the material into a new form.  I liked some of the choices expressed in that synthesis more than others (and there were others still th...

It's long past the point where new shows are a fall thing--long past the point, in fact, where I ought to have been making this sort of review a quarterly business.  But somehow this winter season seems particularly fecund, possibly as a result of the fall's disappointing crop, possibly because British TV seems to take the end of the year as its time to launch new shows, which means this report covers series from both sides of the pond.  So far, I can't say that the winter crop is making up for the fall's disappointments--the only 2012 show I'm still following is Elementary --but I suppose I watch too much TV anyway. A Young Doctor's Notebook - A funny little project from Sky, this short (four half-hour episodes) series is based (rather loosely, it from what I gather) on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel of the same name (sometimes also translated as A Country Doctor's Notebook ).  In 1934, a successful Moscow doctor (John Hamm) is being investigated for writi...

We live in a world that has been--is still being--profoundly transformed by technology, and yet you'd hardly know that to look at our fiction.  Sure, there's a whole genre devoted to inventing outlandish--albeit, sometimes, plausible and rigorously thought-out--technologies and using them, and their effects on individuals and society, as jumping-off points for stories.  But science fiction rarely turns its eye on the present and on existing technologies, and when it does--usually in the form of outsider SF--the result is rarely to imagine change and transformation, as authors plump for the familiar standards of apocalypse, collapse, and the end of human civilization, if not the human race.  Somewhere in the interstices between these two extremes, however, is a small cluster of novels that make technology their business--novels that look at the present through SFnal eyes, like William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, or Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (and, far less successfu...