Asking the Wrong Questions

This week on Strange Horizons , we're launching a new reviews department feature: Short Fiction Snapshot, where every other month we'll be dedicating a full-length review to a piece of short fiction.  Here is my editorial explaining my goals and hopes for this project, and here is the first installment, discussing Charlie Jane Anders's "Intestate," from Tor.com.  One of my hopes for this project is that it will become a short fiction discussion club, along the lines of the ones on Torque Control , Locus Online , and Everything is Nice .  So if you're interested, please go and read "Intestate," and add your thoughts in the comments to my review.

The pilots of winter continue to pour in, and I think we can identify a trend: fall is when the respectable doctor and lawyer shows premiere; winter is when TV puts on fancy dress.  This latest bunch of shows includes fantasy, thrillers, science fiction, and lots of weirdness.  Not all of it works, unsurprisingly--in the time between starting this post and publishing it, the most rancid of the shows I've written about has already managed a much-deserved cancellation--but there's a lot that's new and different here alongside the tediously familiar and underworked, and that's something to be grateful for. Do No Harm - I have no idea if this is true, but in my head the thought process that went into greenlighting Do No Harm went something like this: "hey, that other show loosely inspired by Stephen Moffat's 21st century modernization of a 19th century story that has entered the cultural currency, and which we turned into a procedural, is turning out pretty wel...

My review of Angélica Gorodischer's Trafalgar , originally published in 1979 and now published in English by Small Beer Press, appears this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books .  Trafalgar is a strange book, not at all what I was expecting it to be and quite unlike anything else I've ever read.  It's certainly worth a look, though, and has me very curious to read Gorodischer's previously translated work, Kalpa Imperial .

This week marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice , which seemed like the perfect excuse--if any were needed--to reread it.  It also seemed like a good opportunity to write about it, especially since it's the only Austen novel I haven't written about in the course of this blog's existence (well, to be precise, one of the very first Austen-related entries posted to this blog--and the one of its earliest entries of any kind to gain real popularity--was about this book, but "4 Popular Misconceptions About Pride and Prejudice " is, as its title suggests, a response to the way others tend to perceive the book, not an essay about my own reactions to it).  Here I was more hesitant, however.  In fact, when I realized, a few years ago, that my ad hoc essays about Austen's novels were turning into an irregular series, it didn't occur to me that Pride and Prejudice would one day be included in it.  The book felt like too great an edif...