Asking the Wrong Questions

Twelve years ago, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard released The Cabin in the Woods , a metafictional horror comedy seeking to answer the question of just why photogenic young people on idyllic nature getaways keep encountering eldritch horrors who pick them off one by one. There's a lot in the film that hasn't aged well—the meta gags were getting tired almost as soon as they were made, and more recent work, such as the films of Jordan Peele, has done a much better job of blending horror and humor and exploring the roots of the genre's core tropes. But the basic idea of the film—a shadowy organization who are deliberately sacrificing the vacationers in order to spare humanity from the wrath of the old ones—remains strong, arguably stronger than the comedic wrapping that surrounds it. As I wrote in my review , by the end of the movie you find yourself regretting the time spent leading up to this revelation, and wishing the film had started from it as its premise. M. Night Shyamal...

So, friends, what is going on with the MCU? We're now at the end of phase four (I think? I've lost track of that sort of thing entirely) and there's a very palpable sense of the air coming out of the balloon. By which I mean not that the movies have gotten bad—some of them are ( Eternals ) but most are still falling squarely within the same C-minus-to-B-plus range that has characterized this franchise from day one. And yet, without very much having changed, it's clear that something has changed. The MCU used to be something that I—and a lot of other people—enjoyed talking about, and maybe even more than that, arguing with . When it was bad, that was something that felt worth calling out . Now it's just something to shrug at. [1] What I want to do with this post, then, is not so much review the new Ant-Man movie (which is definitely at the C-minus end of the aforementioned scale but still isn't that exciting to talk about) as to try to work out what it can tell ...

I've been waiting a while for Strange Horizons to run my review of Vladimir Sorokin's 2013 novel Telluria (published in English by the indispensable NYRB Classics with a translation by Max Lawton). So long, in fact, the Telluria was already on my list of last year's best books . This review is a chance to elaborate on why I found this novel so exciting, so thought-provoking, and so completely SFnal. Telluria is part of a sequence in which Sorokin imagines a post-post-Soviet future he calls the New Middle Ages. In this novel, he posits a drug that allows its users to hallucinate a world that reflects their deepest wishes and desires, then come back and try to make that world a reality. As I write in the review, this allows Sorokin to consider "how the project of worldbuilding affects the world". To begin with, Telluria 's interest in this question is signalled by its determination to mix subgenres, tropes, and settings at every given opportunity. The openin...

I've written before about the "it's really good" problem—how to review, and direct audiences towards, a work that is simply gangbusters on every level, and seems to offer no access point for the reviewer wishing to praise it. The ecstatic reviews that persuaded me to pick up a copy of Paul B. Rainey's graphic novel Why Don't You Love Me? —the first great 2023 publication I've read this year, and already very likely to make my list of the year's best books—seemed to uniformly suffer from a subset of this problem: how to praise something exceptional without saying too much about it? Guardian reviewer Rachel Cooke wondered : "Will readers stick with [ Why Don't You Love Me? ] long enough to reach the twist that makes the effort of reading its first half worthwhile? I can't be sure that everyone will – and yet, I must not spoil this twist, even in the cause of encouragement."  I demur a little from Cooke's concern. Why Don't You ...

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is, of course, last year's Booker winner, a slightly out-of-nowhere choice for an award that has been getting more adventurous and interesting in recent years. The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises is a collection of Karunatilaka's short fiction, currently slated for publication in the US and UK in the spring, but I was able to snag a copy during a work trip to India earlier this month. Taken together, they not only make for some engrossing and delightful reading, but reveal Karunatilaka as firmly embedded in the SFF tradition. There's an entirely defensible case for Seven Moons as a nominee in the upcoming Hugo awards (or if not that, one of the wider-ranging genre awards like the Crawford or World Fantasy), and my only real complaint about The Birth Lottery is that it doesn't include a publication history, making it impossible to know which of the stories in it are awards-eligible. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida begins with the ...

Every Clarke Award shortlist includes at least one utterly unexpected nominee, a complete wildcard. Think Iain Pears's Arcadia , originally envisioned as an app experience in which readers would choose for themselves the order of the story's chapters. Or Patience Agbabi's middle grade novel The Infinite . It's less common for these nominees to win the whole thing, so Harry Josephine Giles's Deep Wheel Orcadia , a verse novel written in the Orkney dialect (on offshoot of Scots spoken on the Orkney archipelago), was a book that I approached with some interest, having claimed the award over more conventional nominees like Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace , and much bigger names like Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun . While I'm not quite certain that I would have made the same choice (Mercurio D. Rivera's Wergen , and Aliya Whiteley's Skyward Inn , strike me as no less worthy winners), Deep Wheel Orcadia is an exciting winner, one whose ...

I read 97 books in 2022. A large number by anyone's standards, but particularly impressive to me when I consider that for the first two months of the year, I barely had the energy to read anything. A house move sapped my ability to concentrate on the written word. In January, for example, while preoccupied with packing, moving trucks, and endless bureaucracy, and inspired by the recently-released movie , I read only the first two Dune sequels. Which might have occasioned some glaring looks from my TBR pile, except that it was all in boxes. Packing my books, in fact, was an occasion to think about my reading habits. Nothing makes you wonder whether the time reading it was well-spent so much as looking at a book and realizing that you're not willing to expend box space on it. And even in my new home (with a bit more space to spread out) I've found myself hesitant to bring more physical books into it. With every paper book I purchase, I wonder whether I will really be able to...

At the beginning of this year, I participated in a Strange Horizons roundtable on the unexpectedly entertaining first season of Amazon's adaptation of the Wheel of Time books. In that discussion, I was present as the token non-book reader, the person who enjoyed the show but had no idea what greater significance its events, setting, and characters foretold. Now at the close of the year, I'm taking the opposite position on another roundtable about another Amazon show, the Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power . The other participants are author and reviewer Will Shaw, Strange Horizons coordinating editor Gautam Bhatia, and reviews co-editor Aishwarya Subramanian. The discussion was ably organized, led, and edited by reviews co-editor Dan Hartland. Abigail Nussbaum: I’d say my main issue with the show is its bifurcated approach to its storytelling, and especially how it filled in the source material. Yes, sometimes it felt incredibly imaginative and creative....

Look, I was not expecting this. Two years and more than a dozen shows into the Disney+ experiment, I think we've all developed a decent enough sense of what to expect from the television incarnations of the two biggest entertainment franchises on the planet. And for the most part, these shows have been  fine . Some fun moments. Some actors who are better than their material. Maybe a hint of a political idea. There was no reason for Andor —a prequel to a prequel whose original premise was already quite dodgy—to be any better. And then it turned out to be good. Not just good for Star Wars , but just plain good. Best TV of the year good. I have to admit that I went a bit Kübler-Ross about this. First there was Anger—this show is too good to be Star Wars . No way does a story this smart, this thoughtful about the compromises of life under fascism, and the costs of rising up to resist it, exist only as a lead-in to a floppy-haired teenager doing an amusement park ride. Then a bit of...

There's something about filmmaking that lends itself very easily to cooking metaphors. Cooking and filmmaking are, after all, very similar. They're both the act of combining many different ingredients—some with chains of supply and production that stretch far beyond any one artist's ability to influence or even perceive—into a whole that should, if successful, feel entirely of a single piece. They're both the work of many pairs of hands that ends up being ascribed to a single mastermind—whose role, in reality, is often more in the realm of administration and logistics than artistry. And they both produce a range of results that can suit different palates at different times. An unassuming dish made with care and precision. A challenging, avant-garde experiment. A dazzling bit of cleverness. A junk orgy, full of fat and carbs, that leaves you entirely satisfied but with a looming stomachache. Or, you know, maybe that's just nonsense. Shortly into The Menu , Mark Mylod...