Asking the Wrong Questions

Worldcon is nearly upon us, and I will be attending this year's convention in Dublin.  With the final program now published, here are the events I'll be participating in.  If you're planning to attend, I hope to see you at some of these, or just around. ( UPDATE: There has been a change to my schedule. I am off the national identity panel on Sunday, and on a panel on the work of Jordan Peele around the same time.) Narrative and the Dollar: Understanding Contemporary TV 17 Aug 2019, Saturday 12:00 - 12:50, Liffey Hall-2 (CCD) TV has always been at the mercy of commercial imperatives. On network TV, the "best" episodes air during "sweeps" weeks, and plot structured around ad breaks. On streaming services, shows experiment with new structures, but with mixed results. How should viewers adjust their expectations? What is "good TV" today? Will "TV novels" come to dominate? Is there still a role for the anthology show? Mr Adam Wh...

My review of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Moon appears today at Strange Horizons .  I was excited to finally get a chance to write at length about Robinson, whose recent writing has plugged into ideas about economics, government, and our response to climate change in a way that almost no other writer in the genre is doing.  New York 2140 , for example, felt to me like an utterly vital novel, combining fury and optimism in its depiction of a damaged, post-climate-catastrophe future in which humans nevertheless manage to build a new, perhaps better way of life in the ruins of the old world. It was a disappointment, then, to find Red Moon so comparatively muddled and unconvincing.  The novel, which starts on the moon but then slingshots back to Earth to discuss a future China and its role in creating a more equitable role for all people, juggles too many ideas and isn't terribly persuasive about any of them (at one point it's suggested that the problems with unrepresentat...