Asking the Wrong Questions

It seems strange to say, but until yesterday evening, it had somehow never occurred to me that I would one day live in a world where Patrick Stewart did not exist. It's no surprise when a man well into his eighties dies, and when that death comes , as Stewart's did, as a relief from the degradations of Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia, after a long and productive life and in the company of family and friends, it is not even a tragedy. And still, I find it hard to imagine a world without Patrick Stewart, which is probably another way of saying that I find it hard to imagine a world without Jean-Luc Picard, a character he not only played but put so much of himself into. I was a Star Trek fan before encountering The Next Generation , but Stewart was "my" captain, and he came to define Star Trek for me. More than that, however, he embodied an ideal of intellectualism, humanism, and restraint that, like so many other people of my generation, struck me to my core. A...

"Treebeard" by Tomás Hijo 'Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,' said Treebeard; 'they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future. I do not like worrying about the future. I am not altogether on anybody's side , because nobody is altogether on my side , if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays.' Having escaped their orcish captors and their would-be Rohirrim rescuers, Merry and Pippin make their way into Fangorn forest, a place they have been warned against. Right away there are echoes in this chapter of "The Old Forest" . The atmosphere in the forest is close and oppressive. The sun barely peeks in, leading the hobbits to worry about the feasibility of foraging or hunting. Whole paragraphs are taken up with descriptions of a rocky outcropping that the hobbits climb to get a better view of their surroundings, remind...

"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,...