Asking the Wrong Questions

Gautam Bhatia might best be known to science fiction and fantasy fans as the editor in chief of Strange Horizons , and as the author of the intriguing, Ursula K. Le Guin-meets-China Miéville novels The Wall and The Horizon . In his everyday life, however, Bhatia is a lawyer and a scholar of the Indian constitution. These specialties come to the fore in his third novel, The Sentence , which takes the surprisingly rare step of examining how laws, constitutions, and trials play a role in fantastic worldbuilding. Set in a city that emerged from a bloody civil war with a tentative, shaky arrangement held in place by an order of lawyers, The Sentence examines how a single legal action might end up impacting on a whole society. My review, which appeared in last month's Locus, is now online . Nila – and her trusty roommate and sidekick Maru – discuss both the facts of the case and the merits of their legal strategy. Should she try to impugn long-accepted testimony, or take a purely proce...

At the beginning of this year, I participated in a Strange Horizons roundtable on the unexpectedly entertaining first season of Amazon's adaptation of the Wheel of Time books. In that discussion, I was present as the token non-book reader, the person who enjoyed the show but had no idea what greater significance its events, setting, and characters foretold. Now at the close of the year, I'm taking the opposite position on another roundtable about another Amazon show, the Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power . The other participants are author and reviewer Will Shaw, Strange Horizons coordinating editor Gautam Bhatia, and reviews co-editor Aishwarya Subramanian. The discussion was ably organized, led, and edited by reviews co-editor Dan Hartland. Abigail Nussbaum: I’d say my main issue with the show is its bifurcated approach to its storytelling, and especially how it filled in the source material. Yes, sometimes it felt incredibly imaginative and creative....

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 Hor...

The end of the year will soon be upon us, which means it's almost time to sum up the year's reading. Before I do that, though, here are some reviews of books I read in the second half of the year. Also book-related: over at Lawyers, Guns & Money , I wrote about the miniseries The Good Lord Bird , and since I was able to track down a copy of the James McBride novel on which it was based at a used bookstore shortly before the miniseries ended, I added some comments about the book as well. Short version: both are recommended, though mainly for the window they offer on the fascinating, contradictory figure of John Brown. Chosen Spirits by Samit Basu - In his afterword to this novel, Basu describes it as an "anti-dystopia". That's a bit of hard pill to swallow if you've just finished reading Chosen Spirits , which opens with its heroine, twenty-five-year-old Joey, frantically trying to keep her middle-aged parents from thoughtlessly handing out their data to ...