Asking the Wrong Questions

"Merry and Pippin Captured by Orcs" by Inger Edelfeldt Neither Pippin nor Merry remembered much of the later part of the journey. Evil dreams and evil waking were blended into a long tunnel of misery, with hope growing ever fainter behind. They ran, and they ran, striving to keep up the pace set by the Orcs, licked every now and again with a cruel thong cunningly handled. If they halted or stumbled, they were seized and dragged for some distance. At long last, The Two Towers delivers the story that it has been teasing, through found objects and the interpretation of clues in the landscape, for two chapters. Merry and Pippin, carried off by the orcs who slew Boromir, are on their way to Isengard to be interrogated and tortured. But the two groups that make up their captors—the titular Uruk-hai, loyal to Saruman, and the orcs loyal to Mordor—quickly come to blows, and the hobbits are able to take advantage of the situation and escape into Fangorn forest. Like "The Departu...

Illustration by jorahh , 2025 'What do you know of these horsemen, Aragorn?' [Gimli] said. 'Do we sit here waiting for sudden death?' 'I have been among them,' answered Aragorn. 'They are proud and wilfull, but they are true-hearted, generous in thought and deed; bold but not cruel; wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs, after the manner of the children of Men before the Dark Years. But I do not know what has happened here of late, nor in what mind the Rohirrim may now be between the traitor Saruman and the threat of Sauron.' The second chapter of The Two Towers carries forward many of the preoccupations of the first . The three companions' pursuit of the orcs who have captured Merry and Pippin comes down, once again, to questions of logistics—should they stop to sleep in the dead of night, giving the orcs a chance to widen the distance between them, or risk losing sight of the trail in pitch darkness? Aragorn continues to be r...

In my review of this year's Hugo-nominated novels , I noted, while discussing Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption , that I had a review forthcoming of its sequel, A Trade of Blood . That review is now online at Locus . One of the things that shines through in that review, I think, is that this series, in which a detective duo tramp across a fantasy-world empire, investigating crimes that imperil this stratified, militaristic society's ability to fight off dangerous monsters, is that three books in, the Ana and Din mysteries have very consistent strengths and weaknesses. Also in keeping with the previous volumes, the mystery in A Trade of Blood is a bit on the easy side – it does not, for example, seem to occur to a crack crime-solving team like Ana and Din that when the heirs to a vast fortune have all died under mysterious circumstances, there is an obvious sus­pect whom they should focus their investigation on. This is presumably because much of the storytelli...

The first of my three reviews in the August 2026 issue of Locus is now online , and it's of a book that I hope to see getting a lot of attention as the year draws to a close. August Clarke's second novel, The Felicity Complex , is a delightfully disquieting horror/SF mashup about an artificial being recruited to act as hostess in an underground bunker. As I write in the review, this is a fusion of two of the most popular SFnal ideas of the last few years. There is the apocalypse bunker, the idea that the wealthy and powerful can ride out nuclear war, climate catastrophe, or social unrest in a secret, luxuriously appointed underground location. And there is the fembot, an artificial creation made to look like a woman and thus treated like one – often, like the most abject and powerless of women – who must decide how they feel about this. It's surprising that Clarke appears to be the first writer to combine these two premises – the matter of staffing an apocalypse bunker is,...

"The Departure of Boromir" by  Anke Eißmann , 2003 Aragorn hesitated. He desired to go to the high seat himself, hoping to see there something that would guide him in his perplexities; but time was pressing. Suddenly he leaped forward, and ran to the summit, across the great flag-stones, and up the steps. Then sitting on the high seat he looked out. But the sun seemed darkened, and the world dim and remote. He turned from North back again to North, and saw nothing save the distant hills, unless it were that far away he could see again a great bird like an eagle high in the air, descending slowly in wide circles down towards the earth. At the beginning of the third book of The Lord of the Rings , and the first of The Two Towers , J.R.R. Tolkien does two things that remind us, yet again, that he was writing before many of the "rules" of fantasy fiction (and perhaps of popular fiction in general) were codified. First, he switches his point of view to Aragorn. The Lord ...

In the mid-90s, my family went on a road trip in New England. My mother, eager to reinforce her children's only-nominal Americanness, started us off in Boston and plotted a course full of historical points of interest on our way to a Passover seder at my aunt's house in Rochester, NY. Most of the stops on this journey were new to me (or perhaps only vaguely familiar from books such as Johnny Tremaine and The Witch of Blackbird Pond —I told you that my mother tried to make Americans out of us). One stop, however, I may have insisted on making myself. Even from the other side of the planet, I had imbibed, from movies, TV, and general cultural miasma, the notion of Salem, Massachusetts as "Witch City". I was aware of the witch trials, but in no way interested in reconciling the paradox that even respectable Salem tourist attractions, such as the Salem Witch Museum , mostly avoid—the fact that there were no witches in Salem in 1692, and yet the town continues to capitali...