Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the problems with reviewing for a venue like Locus , which has a relatively long lag time, is that months can pass between my reading a book and finally getting to talk to a wide audience about. Such is the case with Silvia Park's debut novel Luminous , a book I've wanted to rave about since reading it at the beginning of the year. Set in a unified future Korea in which robots are ubiquitous and increasingly human-like, it feels like a direct follow-up to classics of the genre like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Not to mention, an early contender for one of the best science fiction novels of 2025 . The more we learn about Luminous's world, however, the more this distinction between robot and human feels more like a social convention than a concrete fact. Jun himself is a case in point: Catastrophically injured during his military service, he is now mostly robotic ("They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic")...

The British Science Fiction Association has announced the shortlists for its annual award, which will be handed out at Eastercon in Belfast next month. My collection Track Changes: Selected Reviews is nominated in the category for long non-fiction. As pleased as I am by this nomination, I am even more flattered, and humbled, by my fellow nominees, an absolute murderer's row of the some of the most interesting non-fiction published in the fields of science fiction and fantasy last year. I will be on hand for the BSFA Award ceremony, and the rest of Eastercon, next month, where Briardene Books will also be launching its next publication, Paul Kincaid's Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction . Paul is one of my fellow nominees for the BSFA, for his book Keith Roberts's Pavane: A Critical Companion . It really feels like we're in a moment of tremendous flowering for critical writing about the fantastic genres, and I'm thrilled that my book gets to b...

Around the mid-point of Flow , the independent, micro-budget Latvian movie that won the Oscar for best animated film earlier this week, there is an image that continues to haunt me. Floating through a flooded, woodland landscape, a ragged sailing boat carrying a small black cat and a capybara fetches up against a manmade tower. The tower is in ruins—one wall open to the elements, upper floors missing, a flight of stairs leading up to nowhere. But it is also a rare instance of intentional order rearing its head in this film, only to slip below the water's surface. All over the tower's floor, and up those pointless stairs, colorful glass bottles and jars have been carefully arranged. A lone lemur is walking around the arrangement, selecting some of the items to go in a woven basket. Did the lemur arrange the bottles? Did some missing human place them, and then disappear? Where did all this glassware even come from, and what is it for? Like so much else in Flow , these are questio...