Asking the Wrong Questions

Violet Allen has been on my radar for years, since I read her transcendent short story "The Venus Effect" in Lightspeed Magazine . She's also a fun follow on BlueSky , which is where I learned that she was hard at work on her first novel. I've reviewed that novel , Plastic, Prism, Void , for Locus , and what I found in it more than delivers on the promise of that long-ago short story. Like "The Venus Effect", Plastic, Prism, Void is insouciant with a core of seriousness, experimental but also plotty. It follows a trans woman who may also be a witch, and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a trans man who may also be a mech warrior, as they negotiate their relationship while saving (or is it destroying?) the world. It's also a novel that cheerfully demolishes every stylistic convention in existence, deploying multiple fonts, copious footnotes, and fourth-wall breaking interludes in a way that is delightful, but also invites readers to question the very f...

"Caras Galadhon" by Ray Shield , 2025 'I know what it was that you last saw,' she said; 'for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!' Let's talk about women in The Lord of the Rings , now that we've met one. OK, that's an exaggeration. There have been four (4) female characters so far in The Fellowship of the Ring : Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Mrs. Maggot the farmer's wife, Goldberry, and Arwen. Two of them even spoke! But Galadriel—lady of Lothlórien, princess of the Ñoldor, convener of the White Council, bearer of the great ring Nenya—is, obviously, of a different ...

Earlier this year, the literary and genre fiction communities were startled by the announcement that Daniel Kraus's Angel Down , a fantasy-horror novel in which a squad of WWI soldiers discover an angel on the killing fields of 1918 France, had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This is not the first time that a novel in the fantastical genres had won this award—it is preceded by books like The Underground Railroad , A Visit from the Goon Squad , and The Road —but as I write at the beginning of my review of the book, published today at Strange Horizons , there are different kind of genre fiction, just as there are different kinds of literary fiction. I was surprised that the Pulitzer jury had the kind of genre fiction that Kraus writes on their radar, and even more surprised that the Pulitzer board, when offered a choice between Angel Down and more traditional nominees like Katie Kitamura' Audition and Torrey Peters's Stag Dance , would choose to recognize Kraus's n...

"Flame of Udûn" by Weirling , 2025 The last thing that Pippin saw, as sleep took him, was a dark glimpse of the old wizard huddled on the floor, shielding a glowing chip in his gnarled hands between his knees. The flicker for a moment showed his sharp nose, and the puff of smoke. After failing to cross the mountains that separate them from Mordor, the fellowship of the Ring decide to go underground, through the lost dwarf city of Moria. Things do not go well. The discovery of the entrance to Moria, its dangerous traversal, the attack on the company by a large contingent of orcs and eventually a balrog, and the death ("death"? let's say loss) of Gandalf are the climax of The Fellowship of the Ring , and one of the most exciting, memorable sequences in the whole novel. There's much to talk about here, and as we've done in the past, we will divide our discussion into several topics. *** There's a commonplace about Tolkien that I first read on Teresa Nie...

Sometimes I make very odd reading decisions. For example, in late March of this year, a time when I was regularly running for shelter ahead of Iranian missiles, I made the inexplicable choice to read Francis Spufford's latest novel Nonesuch , which takes place during the London Blitz. But although there were moments during my reading when I found myself wondering why I'd done this to myself, for the most part I found the experience of reading Nonesuch cathartic. There was something reassuring about the insight, sympathy, and yes, humor with which Spufford wrote about the experiences of his heroine, stock exchange clerk by day, good time girl by night Iris Hawkins, as she found her footing in a world where a bomb might kill you, but if it doesn't, there's still work to do in the morning. Iris's already complicated life is complicated further when she learns that a secret occult society associated with the British Union of Fascists is trying to use magic hidden in Lo...

"The Fellowship" by Robin Robinson , 2024 'We cannot go further tonight,' said Boromir. 'Let those call it the wind who will; there are fell voices on the air; and these stones are aimed at us.' 'I do call it the wind,' said Aragorn. 'But that does not make what you say untrue. There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in this world longer than he.' Fourteen chapters into the book titled The Fellowship of the Ring , the fellowship of the Ring is formed, and sets out on its mission. We are now once again in journeying mode, with all that Book One of Fellowship had taught us to expect from that type of storytelling: detailed, granular nature writing, challenging landscapes, and a wilderness that quickly proves more stubborn than expected. So far in this journey, we have had wrong turns, short cut...