Asking the Wrong Questions

It's 6hrs before the Hugos. I am going to bed, but before that I will make this public prediction: I think the pups are going to be trounced — Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) August 22, 2015 This year's Hugo results are a landmark occasion: they are the closest I've ever come to guessing the entire slate of winners.  In an informal poll last week among friends (which I'm now kicking myself for not putting on twitter) I guessed all but three of the winners, and in two of those categories, Best Novel and Best Novelette, I had the winner as a strong second choice (the only real surprise?  Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.  I was sure that the--inexplicable, to me--love for Doctor Who 's "Listen" would carry the day, and didn't think Orphan Black would even be in the running). I'm mentioning this not so much to brag, but to make the point that this year's results --in which the by-now infamous puppy campaigns were soundly defeated,...

You could probably run an interesting poll among genre fans to see which ones find the elevator-pitch description for Netflix's new show Sense8 --a globe-spanning genre series from the minds of the Wachowski siblings and J. Michael Straczynski--an immediate selling point, and which ones see it as a reason to stay away.  I have to admit that I'm in the latter group. The involvement of the Wachowskis, whose recent work has vacillated between glorious messes ( Cloud Atlas ) and tedious ones ( Jupiter Ascending ) was cause for some concern, if also no small amount of curiosity.  But Straczynski, best-known for the formally innovative but cliché-ridden and self-satisfied Babylon 5 , gave me some genuine pause.  It was some time before I could bring myself to get past my expectation of long-winded speeches and juvenile cod-philosophy and give the show a try.  I can't exactly say that Sense8 defied these lowered expectations.  It is a mess, and it is cliché-ridde...

Today, July 14th 2015, marks the tenth anniversary of this blog's creation. Just writing that down amazes me.  This is where I'm supposed to say that when I started this blog I had no idea that I'd still be keeping it up a decade later, but the truth is that Asking the Wrong Questions 's longevity, in itself, doesn't surprise me.  I started this blog because I had things to say and nowhere to say them, because I felt unseen and unheard.  It answered, and still answers, a need that I don't ever anticipate being rid of.  What does surprised me is how much this blog has changed my life: the people I've met, on and offline, because of it; the projects that I was given the opportunity to participate in; the greater involvement in genre fandom, culminating in a Hugo nomination; and simply the realization that people from all over the world appreciate and have time for what I have to say. Having said that, ten years is a huge stretch of time, and it's only ...

I had originally planned to write this post some time last month, and make it an analogue to the one I made when the Hugo voting period open--more information than commentary.  But then the seemingly impossible happened, and this year's Hugo clusterfuck managed to throw up yet more sound and fury.  I was so angry about this latest iteration that I couldn't really bear to talk about it until I'd cooled down just a little, which brings us to today.  If all you'd like is the facts--including instructions on how to vote for site selection for the 2017 Worldcon--click here to skip my thoughts.  If you'd like nothing better than yet more Hugo bloviating, read on. To put it briefly, what got me so angry last month was that one of the US's largest SF publishers decided to carry water for bigots.  In early May, Tor creative director Irene Gallo posted a comment on her Facebook page calling the Sad and Rabid Puppies "racists and neo-Nazis."  This is, of cour...

Jurassic World is a pretty bad movie.  What's interesting about it, however, is that the reasons for its badness are, for the most part, the reasons it should have been good.  With only a few exceptions, the ideas that went into Jurassic World , the fourquel-slash-reboot of Steven Spielberg's paradigm-defining 1993 blockbuster, are solid and interesting.  The basic premise of the movie--that twenty years on, people have come to take resurrected dinosaurs for granted, forcing the titular park's managers to concoct new, scarier hybrid species--is not only believable, but carries on the entertaining meta-component of the original movie.  In 1993, the embryonic CGI with which Spielberg brought dinosaurs to life was a shocking technological development, but nowadays filmmakers take abilities he couldn't even dream of as a matter of course.   Jurassic World 's executives, then, stand in for every Hollywood producer who thought they could make up for the absence of a ...

Yesterday afternoon, before I'd watched the final episode of Game of Thrones 's fifth season, I read this essay by Aaron Bady about the show, in which he argues that it has overshot its natural ending point, and therefore no longer has anything to say: What has changed, I think, is that tragedy has become pornography. Not literal pornography, of course, because very specific forms of gratuitous sexual titillation have been consistent throughout. Put some boobs on screen is one of the boxes each episode needs to check off, and consistently does. But what is the point of evoking terror and pity by hurting characters like Sansa or Cercei? Watching Ned, Catelyn, and Rob die was horrible not only because they were good people, but because we were watching the patriarchal fantasies of Good Kings dying with them. They represented something, the possibility of a return to the way things should be: the tragedy was coming to realize its impossibility. The Starks were the tragic heroe...

As I wrote earlier this week, my review of The Hydrogen Sonata completes a decade of reading and reviewing Iain M. Banks's science fiction, and it seemed appropriate to put together a master list where all of these reviews can be found in order.  Not all of these are full-length reviews (though most are) and there are several books I might end up revisiting, in which case I'll update this post. The next obvious step, however, is Banks's non-genre writing.  I don't know if I'll be as inspired to write about those books as I was by his SF--I've never gotten the sense that his mainstream writing was as groundbreaking as his work in genre--but time will tell. The Culture Novels Consider Phlebas (published 1987, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - Part of me wants to revisit this novel, which isn't very good but is so very important to setting the tone and preoccupations of the Culture sequence.  The other part of me remembers what a dour slog it was. ...

Over at Strange Horizons , I review Rachel Hartman's Shadow Scale , the sequel to Seraphina , one of my favorite books of 2013 .  One of the things that most impressed me about Seraphina was how it managed to juggle so many characters, plotlines, and worldbuilding details without ever seeming overstuffed or rushed.   Shadow Scale doesn't quite manage that trick--it's longer, more episodic, and less focused than the previous volume.  That said, there's still a lot in it to love--the novel's world, characters, and ideas are as fresh and interesting as they were in Seraphina , and Hartman still combines an exciting fantasy plot with a smart exploration of issues of gender, race, and identity.  She's one of the more interesting writers currently working in YA fantasy, and I look forward to whatever she does next.

Whichever book ended up being the last stop in my meandering progress through the SF novels of Iain M. Banks--a journey that began nearly ten years ago --it was bound to be a bittersweet experience.  That that book has ended up being The Hydrogen Sonata only makes it more so.  Banks could not have known, when he sat down to write this novel, how little time he had left, or that it would turn out to be the last entry in the Culture sequence.  And yet The Hydrogen Sonata is suffused with death, with questions about the meaning of life, of how (and when) to leave it, and with anxiety about what comes after it.  If the book itself is not quite the capstone that the Culture sequence deserved, then the coincidence of its timing and subject matter lends it significance and weight. Like the other recent Culture novels, Matter and Surface Detail , The Hydrogen Sonata is not properly a story about the Culture, which plays a supporting role only.  The focus here is o...