Asking the Wrong Questions

My latest Political History of the Future column is up at Lawyers, Guns & Money , discussing State Tectonics , the concluding volume of Malka Older's Centennal Cycle .  As I wrote in my review of the first volume in the sequences, Infomocracy , these are not terribly exciting books in terms of plot, but they make up for that with the breadth and richness of their worldbuilding, and more than that, by their willingness to imagine a geopolitical future that is not simply post-democratic.  Older tries to envision how a future democracy that is different, but still suffers from many of the same problems, as ours might look like, and the result is fascinating and thought-provoking. The point of the Centennal Cycle books, as I see it, is not to offer a plausible alternative to our current democratic system, but to encourage us to ask questions about how that system is organized, and whether we could make different choices that could lead to better outcomes. The idea of a no...

Today at Strange Horizons I review  Isaac R. Fellman's The Breath of the Sun , a remarkably assured debut that challenged me to fully capture it.  As I write in my opening paragraph, it's a novel that invites comparisons, but is also very much its own thing: There are any number of neat, one-sentence ways to sum up Isaac R. Fellman's The Breath of the Sun . You could describe it as a cross between Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria (2013), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997). You could sum it up as a fantasy-world fictionalization of the first summit of Everest, in which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are both women, and one of them is a wizard. And you could even make an argument for the book as a Nabokovian meta-narrative, in which both the narrator and her first and only reader try to puzzle out what actually happened, juxtaposing the story with later observations and documentary evidence....

In one of this year's previous movie roundups, I noted what a terrible year 2018 has turned out to be for blockbuster, action-adventure entertainment.  That situation hasn't improved (and seems unlikely to by the end of the year) but as the seasons change and the more sophisticated segment of the year's movie slate starts showing up in theaters, I've found myself pleasantly surprised.  2018's grown-up movies and Oscar hopefuls are an intriguingly diverse bunch, with some genuinely out there entries .  Even the films I haven't been wowed by have felt enough like their own thing to be worth watching.  This roundup covers films from late summer and early fall--it also helps that Israeli film distributors seem to have abandoned their habit of only screening Oscar hopefuls in the weeks right before the ceremony, which means that this year, for once, I can feel like part of the conversation around the award as it develops. BlacKkKlansman - Based on true events, Sp...

A few weeks ago I noted that this year's fall network TV crop has been singularly unimpressive, so much so that I didn't even bother to review any of them.  At this point, there aren't any new shows that I'm following (I briefly hate-watched A Million Little Things , a This Is Us clone about suicide and depression that is just as risible as that description suggests; but life is too short to subject yourself to that kind of tripe for too long). And for whatever reason, the cable networks haven't kicked off any of their prestige shows yet (we'll be getting The Little Drummer Girl and My Brilliant Friend in a few weeks, though).  Never fear: the streaming networks are here to fill the gap.  I didn't love any of these shows, but at least they offer more to talk about than their network counterparts, as well as suggesting some new directions that TV in general could move in. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina - Netflix's stylish, spooky remake of the chee...

If you're anything like me, you've probably been hearing great things about Sorry to Bother You since it premiered to rapturous reception in this year's Sundance Festival.  If you're a lot like me, you probably follow many film industry people and reviewers on twitter, and have spent several months watching them go nuts over this film, while also advising you to learn as little as possible about it so as not to be spoiled for its mind-bending plot twists.  If you're really like me, you probably live in one of the many non-US countries where Sorry to Bother You , despite its tremendous reception, hasn't been able to find a distributor , and had reconciled yourself to not being able to see it legally.  And if you actually are me, you were probably overjoyed to learn that a local film festival had purchased the film for a special, one-night-only showing, and hurried as fast as you could to buy tickets. You see where I'm going with this, right?  It's pre...

My review of Netflix's miniseries adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is up at Strange Horizons today.  I ended up feeling deeply conflicted about the show.  Like many Jackson fans, I was initially dismayed by its decision to rip out the original novel's story and replace it with something in which only a few character names and details are recognizable.  Then I was won over by the excellence of this substitute story, and the way it combined supernatural haunting with thoroughly mundane family drama and the effects that unacknowledged tragedy can have on families.  And then, as the series's storytelling started groaning as it approached its conclusion, I started to notice how its deviation from the novel reaches much further than changing the plot, to a complete misunderstanding of what Jackson was trying to do with her story, particularly when it comes to gender.  The Netflix version of Haunting prioritizes male characters and treats ...

[A version of this post appeared yesterday at Lawyers, Guns & Money] So, here's something you may not know about me: I love stories about solar system space exploration. I love fictionalizations of the mid-century space race like Apollo 13 and the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon . I love hokey disaster movies in space like Gravity and The Martian . I have even voluntary sat down and watched absolute garbage like Defying Gravity , Ascension , and The First , simply because they were about the slow, complicated process of getting into space. Hell, I'm one of the few people who does not think Interstellar is completely worthless, mainly because the middle segment, set on a spaceship and focused on the characters having to overcome so many practical and technical challenges, checks every one of my favorite tropes. Why do I love space stories so much? I love them because they satisfy my craving for competent, thoughtful protagonists. I love them because their heroe...

Usually when I write these roundups, it's to review the new network shows that premiere in the fall.  But as we all know, there hasn't been a season for TV for some time now, as evidenced by the fact that the various streaming services delivered several new, high-profile projects in September, just when you'd expect everyone's focus to be on the networks.  I might still write about the network shows, though right now none of them have grabbed me enough to seem worthy of discussion.  But in the meantime, here are a few of the shows I've watched as the fall has started.  None of them are amazing, but a few hold promise, and together they form an interesting snapshot of what TV is becoming, for better and worse. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 social novel, about the travails and adventures of hard-hearted social climber Becky Sharpe, has gotten fewer bites at the adaptation apple than other 19th century favorites like the novels of Jane Austen ...

My latest Political History of the Future column discusses Revenant Gun , the final volume in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy.  More broadly, it talks about the way the entire trilogy constructs its world, and how the central metaphor of a space empire that powers its technologies, its weapons, and its internal policing apparatus by enforcing a particular calendar gives Lee a rich and versatile tool for exploring the way that oppression and totalitarianism perpetuate themselves. It's a slippery concept at first, but once you wrap your mind around it, it becomes clear just what a brilliant metaphor this is. Imposing a timekeeping method, a common tool of cultural imperialism, becomes a weapon of plain old ordinary imperialism. The Hexarchate propagates itself by literally winning over hearts and minds, forcing people to live according to its calendar (or risk being suppressed by one of the many arms of its doctrine-enforcing police force), which gives it the powe...

The theme of this recent reading roundup is awards lists.  Specifically, mainstream literary award shortlists like the Booker and the Women's Prize.  That's not an area of literature I tend to frequent, since the books nominated for those awards often strike me as flat and narrowly-focused.  But there are certainly enough exceptions to make these awards worth the occasional look--this year's Booker longlist , for example, is full of enough off-the-wall choices to almost make me reevaluate the entire award (I wrote elsewhere about Richard Powers's The Overstory , which challenges commonly held notions of what a novel is and what its focus should be; nor is it the only book on the longlist of which this could be said).  I didn't love all the books I write about here--and some sadly conformed to my prejudices about award-nominated litfic--but there are definitely reads here that were more than worth the effort. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James - I...