Asking the Wrong Questions

Without really planning it, all of my recent film and TV writing has ended up at Lawyers, Guns & Money , while the book-related writing has ended up here. I'm not entirely sure why that happened—I tend to divide posts between the two blogs based mostly on vibes, so I guess things just broke that way. But because I know that some of these posts will be of interest to AtWQ readers, and out of a general desire to maintain a proper record, here are some of the media posts I made over at that blog in the last few weeks: First up, a review of the National Geographic/Disney+ series A Small Light , a biopic of Miep Gies, one of the people who concealed eight Jews, including the family of Anne Frank, in a secret annex in an Amsterdam warehouse, and who discovered and preserved Anne's diary after the annex was betrayed and its inhabitants taken to the death camps. I found a lot to admire about the show, while also wondering whether it was capable of facing up to the true, awful real...

Apologies for the recent radio silence. I have a few things in the work that will hopefully go up later this month, but in the meantime, here are a few shorter pieces that went up at Lawyers, Guns & Money , after a week that, rather incongruously, suddenly delivered a deluge of interesting (or at least interesting to talk about) film and TV. First up, Mike Flanagan takes a break from the Haunting series for Midnight Mass , his first Netflix miniseries not based on an existing properties (though the influence of Stephen King can, as ever, be strongly felt, and I found myself thinking, in particular, of books like Needful Things and Under the Dome ). That shift is all to the good, as Midnight Mass , despite some typical Flanagan-ish flaws, is his most complete work yet, one that actually seems to have something to say. I was particularly struck by the show's nuanced, thoughtful handling of religion . Almost from the start, Midnight Mass goes very deep into the specifics of Cath...

Things have been a little quiet here at AtWQ, mainly because I spent half of August on vacation.  This doesn't mean I haven't been writing, though--I published several shorter, more conversational pieces at Lawyers, Guns and Money while I was traveling, and during the last week as I was reacclimating to normal life (including recovering from a minor, vacation-related injury ).  For good order's sake, I thought I'd link to those posts here. My trip included several days in London, where I watched several plays.  One of them, the musical Fun Home (based on the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel) left me feeling rather overwhelmed, and contemplating the way that art affects us emotionally, sometimes against our will.  I wrote a bit about that and opened the floor to thoughts on what people look for in that respect.  (The other plays I saw were King Lear and Hamilton ; I wrote a bit about my reaction to both in the comments .) The second week of my trip was s...

Somewhat surprisingly for a film that has so little time (and possibly also inclination) to explore any interesting ideas raised by its premise, Infinity War has resulted in a rather vibrant conversation.  I'll say from the outset that most of the links I've collected proceed from the point of view that the film is at the very least flawed, if not genuinely bad.  This is probably my selection bias speaking, but I really haven't seen any interesting positive discussions of the film--any in-depth engagement with it, it seems to me, must inevitably grapple with the film's myriad, foundational flaws.  Also rooted in my own preoccupations is the fact that a lot of these links end up talking less about the film, and more about how it exposes some uncomfortable truths about how Marvel sees its franchise, its long-term goals, and its audience. Of the mainstream reviews--that is, those prohibited on pain of death of discussing the film's ending, AKA the only thing that i...

My latest Political History of the Future column takes the opportunity of the BBC having released a miniseries adaptation of it to discuss China Miéville's The City & The City , a novel about two cities that exist side-by-side but have erected a convoluted mechanism of psychological self-deception to "unsee" one another.  When I reread my 2009 review of the book, I was struck by how much it emphasized Miéville's poking at core fantasy tropes over what feels now like a blatantly political premise.  But as both that review and the miniseries have reminded me, that imbalance exists in the book itself. despite a surface feeling of relevance, the premise of The City & The City doesn’t map to any real-world political situation. Unseeing isn’t a way of ignoring an inconvenient or ugly reality, but a hefty psychic burden that the citizens of the two cities undertake out of ingrained habit and fear of retaliation. And despite multiple attempts to read it as such by...

It's been two weeks since Captain America: Civil War opened (a week in the US), and I think it's time to call it: the conversation surrounding this movie has been surprisingly, and disappointingly, muted.  Most reviews seem to have reached a consensus of good-movie-that-handles-its-politics-well, which, even notwithstanding that I only agree with the first part, feels like only scratching the surface (meanwhile, the more character-focused conversation on tumblr has tended to revolve around the kind of arguments that only serve to remind me why this is a good life rule).  Around this time after the comparatively incoherent Age of Ultron , we were practically swimming in thinkpieces and conversations, and while Civil War doesn't have as obvious an outrage hook as awkwardly implying that infertile women are monsters, one would think that people would still be able to find things to say about it.  Perhaps the truth is simply what I suggested in my own review : that the wor...

As I wrote earlier this week, my review of The Hydrogen Sonata completes a decade of reading and reviewing Iain M. Banks's science fiction, and it seemed appropriate to put together a master list where all of these reviews can be found in order.  Not all of these are full-length reviews (though most are) and there are several books I might end up revisiting, in which case I'll update this post. The next obvious step, however, is Banks's non-genre writing.  I don't know if I'll be as inspired to write about those books as I was by his SF--I've never gotten the sense that his mainstream writing was as groundbreaking as his work in genre--but time will tell. The Culture Novels Consider Phlebas (published 1987, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - Part of me wants to revisit this novel, which isn't very good but is so very important to setting the tone and preoccupations of the Culture sequence.  The other part of me remembers what a dour slog it was. ...

One of the good things about the long, two-year gap between Sherlock 's second and third seasons (aside from the fact that in it we discovered Elementary , and suddenly Sherlock and its flaws seemed a lot less important) is that in that time the mainstream conversation about the show shifted from a tug-of-war between near-ecstatic praise and near-total denigration to a more universal acceptance of the show's massive flaws--which leaves more space to acknowledge its good qualities.  (This shift, I suspect, has a lot to do with the increasingly fatigued reactions to Stephen Moffat's work on Doctor Who ; it's easier to see the same flaws occurring in Sherlock when you've already cataloged them on a show that is more blatantly running out of steam.)  If you're a fan of pop culture criticism, this is a bonanza; fewer people are attacking or defending the show, and more are considering it more deeply, and from different angles.  I've collected a few interesting ...

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.

A bit surprised that this hasn't had more play: in an interview with Empire last week, Neil Marshall--who directed the penultimate episode of the second season of Game of Thrones , "Blackwater"--has this to say on the subject of the show's use of nudity: The weirdest part was when you have one of the exec producers leaning over your shoulder, going, "You can go full frontal, you know. This is television, you can do whatever you want! And do it! I urge you to do it!" So I was like, "Okay, well, you're the boss." This particular exec took me to one side and said, "Look, I represent the pervert side of the audience, okay? Everybody else is the serious drama side. I represent the perv side of the audience, and I'm saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene." So you go ahead and do it. (The original quote is in a podcast.  Here are two text reports, both of which seem quite cheerful about HBO courting the pervert demograp...

This has already been widely reported, but for those of you who haven't seen it, the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (to which I have contributed entries on television) went live yesterday.  There are still teething problems, and the text, as some subjects of the encyclopedia's entries have been discovering to their own annoyance , is not yet complete, but it's still an enormous, fascinating resource well worth losing several hours to. The Encyclopedia's launch comes in conjunction with Gollancz's SF Gateway , an ebook imprint that has begun to publish selections from Gollancz's massive catalogue of classic SF and fantasy.  There's a large selection already available, with more authors to come.

I think I've mentioned that I've been writing entries on television series for the third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , edited by John Clute, David Langford and Graham Sleight.  It's been a lot of fun and I'm pleased with what I've come up with, so I was thrilled, several weeks ago, to hear from Graham the news that he's made public today: in association with British SF publisher Gollancz, the third edition of the encyclopedia is going to be made available online, free of charge. The official website is here , though right now it's just a placeholder where you can read the press release (PDF), follow the SFE on Twitter  and Facebook , and subscribe to receive announcements.  A beta version of the encyclopedia will go online later this summer to coincide with Gollancz's 50th anniversary celebrations, and the plan is for the text to be completed by the end of 2012.

At long last, my series on defining the Strange Horizons reviews policy has started up again at the magazine's blog.   This time , I try to explain why the reviewing vs. criticism discussion and the question of spoiler warnings are fundamentally about the same thing. Note also that, thanks to the magazine's intrepid webmaster Shane, the blog now displays full posts on the main page and syndicates full posts.  It's like living in the future.

The Arthur C. Clarke shortlist review is a tradition of long standing, first at the now-defunct Infinity Plus , and in the last few years at Strange Horizons .  For the second year running, Dan Hartland has reviewed the year's shortlist, and parts 1 and 2 of his review are now up.  See also comments on the shortlist from Niall Harrison , David Hebblethwaite , and Maureen Kincaid Speller . Another Clarke tradition is roundup of reviews of the nominated novels that Niall used to post on Torque Control .  That seems to have lapsed this year, so--with only a few hours until the award is given out this evening--here are some of the reviews I've been able to find. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes Reviewed by Niall Alexander at The Speculative Scotsman Reviewed by Saxon Bullock at SFX Reviewed by Maya Chhabra at Ideomancer Reviewed by Nic Clarke at Eve's Alexandria Reviewed by John Clute at Strange Horizons Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite at Follow the Thread ...

For your convenience, a link post for my series revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation . Introduction To Boldly Stay  - How The Next Generation changes its focus from exploration to politics "Optimism, Captain!" - On Star Trek's most contentious quality Keep Flying - The tragedy of Picard Odds & Ends - A few more thoughts on the characters and the actors who played them

Over at Ferretbrain, Daniel Hemmens has a very long, very detailed, and very negative review of Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear , the long-awaited sequel to The Name of the Wind .  The whole review is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by this observation: What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, ...