Asking the Wrong Questions

  Illustration by Morgan Rogers , 2020 'Are these magic cloaks?' asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder. 'I do not know what you mean by that,' answered the leader of the Elves. 'They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lórien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armor; and they will not turn shaft or blade.' As The Fellowship of the Ring winds towards its conclusion, the company prepares to leave the haven of Lothlórien and venture back into the wild on their way south. "Farewell to Lórien" is a fairly uneventful chapter, whose focus is on reiterating yet again the majesty and wonder of the realm and the Lady who protects it, and the sadness of their inevitable diminishment. An awaren...

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...