Wheel of Time Roundtable Discussion at Strange Horizons

It's been quiet here recently, I know. As you may have seen on twitter or some of my recent posts on Lawyers, Guns & Money, I spent most of December and January preparing for and executing a move, and that experience took over my brain to a degree that made it impossible not only to write, but to consume culture with any real critical insight. I've posted a few things at LGM (some thoughts on Adam McKay's Don't Look Up, a list of books I'm looking forward to in 2022), and it's not impossible that I'll still find the time this month to write about some things that have deserved more attention, like The Matrix Resurrections or HBO Max's adaptation of Station Eleven. But for the most part I'm still easing myself back into the critical mindset, reading thoughtfully for the first time in weeks and watching things that demand more out of me than the latest episode of Legends of Tomorrow.

Which is why this Wheel of Time roundtable at Strange Horizons was such a perfect fit for me. I enjoyed the Amazon series, whose eight episodes aired in November and December, without feeling able to articulate much of a critical response to it. So getting to talk about it with the inimitable Gautam Bhatia and Nic Clarke--who, unlike me, are long-time fans of the books--was a great way of exploring what worked for me and what didn't, and to hear their perspectives.

This roundtable is part of a Strange Horizons special issue on SFF criticism, which is worth reading in its entirety. It's no secret that the reviewing ecosphere has changed substantially over the last decade. As the blogosphere has dwindled under concerted efforts by Google and Facebook, and the professionalization of fannish spaces has made the difference between reviewing and marketing harder to discern, we've lost that vibrant space for conversation that encompassed not just a particular work, but the whole field and even the whole culture. Strange Horizons remains one of the few venues still dedicated to serious, in-depth critical writing about genre fiction, so it's only fitting that they would dedicate a whole issue to the question of what reviewing is and what it can accomplish, and to examples of exactly the sort of reviewing we're not seeing enough of these days. Check out the department editors' introduction, an essay by Artur Nowrot about the how the transgender body and experience has been depicted in recent SF work, M.L. Clark on the gap between how mainstream and genre reviewers approach work that straddles that divide, and several other essays and reviews. If nothing else, it's an issue that has reminded me how necessary and enjoyable I've found the work of reviewing, and hopefully that will prove a spur to getting back to it.