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Recent Reading: Big Time by Jordan Prosser

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There's something almost irresistibly appealing about the musical biopic. It combines melodrama and genuine accomplishment. It conveys profound importance—this is about music, after all, the kind of music that worms its way into people's minds and hearts and becomes part of the set dressing of their psyches—while at the same time being unbelievably trivial and soapy, reveling in the bed-hopping and drug habits of a bunch of self-absorbed people of moderate talent. It was almost inevitable that fiction writers would begin embracing the form, as seen in books-turned-TV-series like Daisy Jones and the Six , but I don't think I expected science fiction to get in on the action. Or, at least, not in the form that Jordan Prosser has done in his debut novel Big Time , which is making its way to UK publishers this year after its Australian publication in 2024. For Prosser, the gargantuan importance of art, and the silliness of the people who make it, are both shades with which he i...
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Reviews: The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, and Moonflow by Bitter Karella, at Locus

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I waited most of September for my review of The End of the World As We Know It to appear on Locus 's website, and now my two other reviews from the August issue have both turned up in quick succession. First up, The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, a Ruritanian fantasy in which a court magician must save a pair of star-crossed young lovers. There's always been a certain "you know it when you see it" quality to YA fiction, and all the more so in the decades since it has become popular for adult readers to consume it alongside its intended audience. Louis Sachar, author of the beloved YA classic Holes (1998) as well as a raft of novels for younger readers, describes The Magician of Tiger Castle as his first novel for adults. Which of course encourages the critic to read the novel with an eye towards identifying those aspects of it that distinguish one reading category from another. Is it simply that Anatole, our narrator, is a man nearing middle age, a self-d...
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Review: The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene, at Locus

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Like a lot of genre fans of my generation—and perhaps several generations before and after—I had a Stephen King phase. The adage that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen might just as easily be applied to the mega-prolific horror-meister, who, besides being a gifted scribe with an eye for both the sentimental and the absurd, is a good entry point for young readers looking to explore darker, more disturbing topics. And, also like a lot of King fans, I reached a point in my early twenties where King's work started delivering diminishing returns, and where other authors—some of them, like Shirley Jackson or Daphne du Maurier, he had originally pointed me towards—turned out to have more to offer. I am—once again—most likely not alone in being encouraged to revisit and reevaluate King by the excellent podcast Just King Things , whose hosts, Michael Lutz and Cameron Kunzelman, are reading and discussing King's works in publication order. It's been interesting to be remi...
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The 2025 Hugo Awards: You Win Some, You Lose Some

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Specifically, at least night's Hugo award ceremony held at the Seattle convention center, my book, Track Changes , did not win the Hugo for Best Related Work, but I did win—for the second time—the Hugo for Best Fan Writer. This last development was a total and delightful surprise, and as I expressed in my speech I had prepared no remarks against what seemed like an impossibly remote eventuality. As a result, I can't recreate my acceptance speech the way I did after winning Best Fan Writer in Helsinki in 2017 (though you can hear what I said in the official Hugo award ceremony stream , around the 40-minute mark). But the general gist of it was: I am grateful to the award's administrators and everyone who voted, deeply appreciative of my fellow nominees, and take this award as recognition of the importance of SFF criticism to the ongoing health and vitality of the field. I was disappointed not to win Best Related Work for a book that I am incredibly proud of, but I think its ...
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Recent Movie: Superman

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James Gunn's Superman begins in its second act. Halfway through that act, in fact, with Superman (David Corenswet), having just been trounced by an opponent, taking a breather to recharge his strength in the Fortress of Solitude, and then rejoining the fray in Metropolis. In quick succession over the next few scenes, we learn: that Superman has been active on Earth for several years; that his triumphant opponent is the representative superhero of Boravia, a cod-post-Soviet nation angry over Superman's unilateral decision to prevent them from invading their neighbor Jarhanpur, a cod-Middle-Eastern nation; that the person actually pulling the strings—literally, he calls out alphanumerically-coded plays to the Boravian superhero (who, it turns out, is not actually Boravian) like an overinvolved football coach—is Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult); that the US government, angry over Superman's interference with their Boravian allies, has given Luthor at least its tacit approval to ta...
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Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh at Strange Horizons

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Readers with an encyclopedia memory of my work may recall that I already wrote about Emily Tesh's second novel, in brief, in a Guardian reviews roundup in May. Strange Horizons were good enough to offer me space to give the novel a more extended view .  In her Hugo-winning novel Some Desperate Glory (2023), Emily Tesh tore through many of the conventions that govern modern, popular SF. Barrelling through a trilogy's worth of plot in a single novel, playing merry hell with time and space, nodding at the familiar structure of the YA novel of self-discovery and self-actualization before thoroughly upending it, the novel seemed determined to confound the reader's expectations at every turn. In one respect, however, Some Desperate Glory hewed closely to the familiar form of a YA adventure. As its heroine, Kyr, uncovered the lies she had been raised on and rebelled against them, the teachers who promulgated those lies inevitably took a background role: sometimes villainous, som...
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Podcast: Talking About Excession by Iain M. Banks on A Meal of Thorns

A Meal of Thorns , from the fanzine Ancillary Review of Books , is one of the most exciting new podcasts of the last few years. A bimonthly critical book club in which host Jake Casella Brookins discusses a work of science fiction, fantasy, or something harder to define with a rotating cast of guests, it's not just an opportunity to go deep into a single work and how it reflects on the genre around it, but an impetus to discover (or rediscover) some great books. In a critical landscape that tends to focus only on the most recent (I'll hold my hand up in that respect), A Meal of Thorns is a great chance to dig into the foundations of the fantastical genres, whether famous or little-known. I was thrilled to be invited to appear on A Meal of Thorns , and after a bit of thought about what I'd like to discuss, realized that it presented a perfect opportunity to revisit a book that I've long felt deserved a second look, Iain M. Banks's Excession . Published in 1996, it r...
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