Asking the Wrong Questions

Today's Strange Horizons review is a double look at that unlikely collaboration, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth .  Niall Harrison (as a Baxter fan and Pratchett skeptic) and I (as more or less the reverse) take a look at the novel, and both come away with mixed feelings.

Here's how you know it's fall: the movie theaters are waking up.  In the last week there have been two--two!--films I wanted to see (and there's still The Master to go), and though neither of them were quite up to my hopes for them, it does raise hopes that after a disappointing summer blockbuster season, there might finally be more to buy a movie ticket for than big explosion and neat special effects. Skyfall (2012) - In a way, Skyfall is the film I thought Quantum of Solace would be, but it comes one movie too late.  I called Casino Royale , the revamped Bond origin story which is beginning to seem like a blip in the franchise, a serious film about the creation of a ridiculous person, and expected Quatum of Solace to take Bond further into that ridiculousness.  Instead, it carried Casino Royale 's earnestness even further into Bourne territory, establishing a faceless, heartless entity known only as Quantum as Bond's nemesis.  Though a dour, overly convolute