Asking the Wrong Questions

In a little more than a day, the winners of this year's Hugo awards will be announced in Los Angeles . I've toned down my discussion of the Hugo nominees in recent years—not coincidentally, a period in which the award, especially in the Best Novel category, has become more inward-looking and fun-seeking. Compare, for example, this year's Hugo shortlist with the one for the Arthur C. Clarke Award , which includes climate fiction (a subgenre whose existence the Hugo seems determined to ignore) and near-future political dystopia. So it was a bit to my surprise when I found myself with things to say about each of this year's Best Novel nominees. This is not a great shortlist, but it is, I think, a representative snapshot of a certain subset of the fantastic genres, and as such is worth talking about. First up on the ballot is Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption , the sequel to 2024's The Tainted Cup , which won the Best Novel award last year. Both books—a...

Cover design for Unfinished Tales (1980) by J.R.R. Tolkien The problems that confront one given responsibility for the writings of a dead author are hard to resolve. Some persons in this position may elect to make no material whatsoever available for publication, save perhaps for work that was in a virtually finished state at the time of the author's death. In the case of the unpublished writings of J.R.R. Tolkien this might seem at first sight the proper course, since he himself, peculiarly critical and exacting of his own work, would not have dreamt of allowing even the more completed narratives in this book to appear without much further refinement. There comes a point in the lifecycle of every sufficiently successful story in which it becomes an IP. At that point, there are two stories rather than one: there is the story itself, and the story about how it became that story. The fruitful collaborations, necessary compromises, backstage drama, and financial shenanigans that all c...

There are tropes that have been around for so long, and become so codified within pop culture, that they hardly feel like science fiction anymore. Within that group, the time loop surely has pride of place. Its original popularizer, 1993's Groundhog Day , resonated more with Buddhist philosophy than any specific genre writers, and in the intervening decades the time loop has showed up in everything from cop shows to romantic comedies. So when I heard that a time loop story had been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize , I was surprised but not flabbergasted. There's already so much slippage between science fiction and mainstream fiction these days—so much that we're inventing terms like "imprint SF" to try to articulate how different publishers and training paths affect the materials being published—that the real surprise was not a mainstream-published time loop story, but the fact that it was considered sufficiently literary to attract the Booker's ...

"Argonath" by Naci Caba 'Begging your pardon,' said Sam. 'I don't think you understand my master at all. He isn't hesitating about which way to go. Of course not! What's the good of Minas Tirith anyway? To him, I mean ... he knows he's got to find the Cracks of Doom, if he can. But he's afraid. Now it's come to the point, he's just plain terrified.' At long last, we have arrived at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring . And indeed, the end of the fellowship. As the travelers make their way down the river Anduin, the question of their next steps looms ever more urgently. Should they return with Boromir to Minas Tirith, to either regroup before the journey to Mordor or remain there for the duration of the war? Or should they proceed directly into Mordor, and attempt to seek out Mount Doom? Before we get to this question, there is yet another phase change in the landscape the story moves through. Up until now, our heroes have traveled...

It seems that my life recently has been revolving around literary awards. The deadline to vote for the Hugo is in a few hours, I wrote a very scathing review of this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I've been named as a juror for next year's Otherwise Award. It's only fitting, therefore, that I guest on this week's episode of Critical Friends , the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, to talk about the purpose, effect, and nature of literary awards. Host Dan Hartland invited myself, in the wake of my review of Daniel Kraus's Angel Down , and Amritesh Mukherjee, whose review of Tashan Mehta's Mad Sisters of Esi just preceded the book being named on the shortlist of the Ursula K. Le Guin Award, to discuss the thorny subject. Dan Hartland: Yeah, and of course there have been quite a number of award-based controversies in recent years. And it's interesting to wonder how much of that is an increasing democratization of who's...