Asking the Wrong Questions

I am thrilled, overjoyed, and genuinely shocked to report that at the Hugo award ceremony held last night in Helsinki, I won the award for Best Fan Writer . This came as a complete surprise to me.  I was certain that Chuck Tingle would carry the award away (and if you look at the voting breakdowns , it was a near thing).  At the same time, I knew that I had a chance, so the days before the award were spent in a state of anxiety.  I'm rather pleased with myself that after all that I managed to make it to the stage and deliver my speech in a semi-coherent manner.  For those of you who weren't there (and who weren't able to watch the live feed, which as I understand it failed early in the ceremony), here is the text of my speech: Thank you very much.  I want to thank the administrators and voters, as well as my fellow nominees. I was first nominated for a Hugo in 2014, as part of a ballot that was celebrated for its diversity.  In the intervening years, ...

Today, July 14th 2015, marks the tenth anniversary of this blog's creation. Just writing that down amazes me.  This is where I'm supposed to say that when I started this blog I had no idea that I'd still be keeping it up a decade later, but the truth is that Asking the Wrong Questions 's longevity, in itself, doesn't surprise me.  I started this blog because I had things to say and nowhere to say them, because I felt unseen and unheard.  It answered, and still answers, a need that I don't ever anticipate being rid of.  What does surprised me is how much this blog has changed my life: the people I've met, on and offline, because of it; the projects that I was given the opportunity to participate in; the greater involvement in genre fandom, culminating in a Hugo nomination; and simply the realization that people from all over the world appreciate and have time for what I have to say. Having said that, ten years is a huge stretch of time, and it's only ...

It seems like only yesterday that I was announcing on this blog my new position as Strange Horizons reviews editor.  That day, however, was nearly four years ago, and in that time I've worked with incredible people and helped bring fantastic, thought-provoking, necessary criticism into the conversation about genre.  It's been a privilege, and an enormously rewarding experience (not least in the form of two Hugo nominations), and I'm extremely grateful for it.  Four years, however, is a long time, and as editor in chief Niall Harrison announced today in an editorial , I will be stepping down from the position of reviews editor at the end of the year. So first, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of the reviewers I've worked with in the last four years, the department's contact managers, Donna Denn, Dan Hartland, and Tim Moore, the Strange Horizons proofreaders, and last but not least the readers and commenters who reminded us every week how vibrant and p...

Well, here I am, back from London and Loncon, with much to tell.  I combined my third foray to Worldcon (and my first as a Hugo nominee) with a family vacation, both of which were delightful if a little tiring--a classic "I need a vacation after this vacation" situation.  The experiences of both convention and city are already swirling in my head, so I'd better get them down while it's still possible to make sense of them. The City - I've been to London many times, but the last time I toured it, rather than simply stopping on my way from one place to another for a bit of shopping or theater, was in 2001.  And this trip was also the first time my family and I had vacationed together since 2008 (longer if you include my aunt, who joined us for the first weekend as an early birthday celebration for her and my mother).  We ended up doing a lot of the tourist standards, many of which have changed substantially since I last visited them--the whole area surrounding th...

The Worldcon program was published today, and just from a quick glance I can already tell that I am going to be a) worn off my feet running from panel to panel, and b) overcome by agonizing choices between conflicting but equally awesome events.  I'm truly looking forward to this convention. My own excellent slate of panels is below.  In addition to these, I will be on hand at the Strange Horizons brunch, on Saturday from 10AM to 12AM, at party tent A. A Reader's Life During Peak Short Fiction Friday 12:00 - 13:30, Capital Suite 10 (ExCeL) There are now more speculative short stories published than any one person can hope to read -- or even find. So how do fans of the short-form navigate this landscape? With so much ground to cover, how does an individual reader find stories they like -- are we more author-driven in our reading habits? Conversely, how and why do particular stories "break out" and become more widely known? To what extent is the greater volume...

My plane from the US landed on Friday afternoon, and yet I'm still not wholly back: piles of papers and books are still where I left them while unpacking, my photographs are uncatalogued, and a stack of emails remains to be answered.  I promised myself, however, that at least the traditional con report would be done before the convention itself was more than a week over (update: well, close enough).  In brief: I enjoyed myself at Chicon 7 very much, but that enjoyment often seemed to come in spite, and not because, of the convention's best efforts.  And now, at greater length: The venue: unlike Montreal, Chicago is a city that I'm quite familiar with, with ties to both sides of my family.  My father got his master's degree there, and my mother's sister and her daughter lived in Chicago for many years, during which my family and I visited them several times.  In the last decade, however, nearly all of my relatives have moved away, and this visit was the first ...

In a few hours I'll be getting on a plane, and then several hours after that I'll be getting on another plane, and the end results of this will hopefully be that some time tomorrow I'll be in Chicago for this year's Worldcon.  I haven't written that much about Worldcon or the Hugos this year (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess why, on the latter front), and I'm not participating in any panels or events (though I'll be at the Strange Horizons tea party on Saturday), but I'm very much looking forward to meeting people I haven't seen in a while (or at all) and to the convention itself.  Last time I was at Worldcon I came away very invigorated about my participation in fandom and about the genre in general, which is something I could use right now. I'll have what I suspect will be a long and detailed report some time after my return at the end of next week.  Between now and then, I will most likely see blog comments but not re...

Setting up my new apartment is a lengthy process, involving many cycles of shopping, positioning, evaluating, and making lists of what's still missing.  But possibly the most important part--the one without which I couldn't have felt properly moved in--was moving and arranging the books. The first part took a while to accomplish, spread out over two weeks and several stages, and mostly taking advantage of my brother's limited free time and strong back.  Slowly, The piles of books started accumulating in my new place. I spent most of yesterday sorting, forming teetering, alphabetized piles. With more than 30 Discworld books, the letter P is the big winner of this construction project, though M (Miéville, Mitchel, McEwan, McDonald, Morgan), and C (Crowley, Chabon, Angela Carter) weren't far behind.  I, O, and U had only one representative each ( The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Morality Play by Barry Unswor...

In case you were wondering what the recent dearth of posts was down to.  Of course, now that mere trivialities such as ownership and mortgages have been dealt with, it's time to scale the peaks of renovating, decorating, moving...

The nominees for this year's BSFA awards have been announced, and I'm very pleased to report that my review of Arslan by M.J. Engh has been nominated for best non-fiction.  I'd like to take this chance to thank the BSFA and the award's administrators, as well as everyone who nominated my review, and to congratulate the other nominees. I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should.  As proud as I am of my Arslan review, and as gratified as I've been by the positive response that it has engendered, I can't hold it up against the entire third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , or the SF Mistressworks project, or the other, more "conventional" nominees such as the blog Pornokitsch , the catalogue for the British Library's much-lauded Out of This World exhibition, or the essay collection The Unsilent Library .  The BSFA's nonfiction award casts a wide net and has a history of producing rather esoteric shortlists.  Whi...

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.

The results of the Strange Horizons 2010 readers' poll are in , and, alongside such winners as Theodora Goss (best short story), Marge Simon (best poem), and Orrin Grey (best article), I'm stunned to announce that I was voted best reviewer.  I'm joined in that category by Adam Roberts, Niall Harrison, Matthew Cheney, and Farah Mendlesohn, which is such an august group of reviewers that I can't believe anyone would rank me above them. Thanks a lot to everyone who voted, and congratulations to the other winners. Genevieve Valentine joins Strange Horizons as a columnist this week, and her first column is about reading the film Winter's Bone as a fairy tale.  I saw Winter's Bone just last week, and at the Strange Horizons blog I discuss Genevieve's column and some of my reactions to the film. Actually, the absence of a thing: I've let my series about the Strange Horizons review policy lapse for, quite frankly, lack of time.  I'm hopeful th...

My review of the essay collection With Both Feet in the Clouds , edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch, has been nominated for the 2010 BSFA award in the best non-fiction category.  It joins a ballot made up of two blogging projects (Paul Kincaid's four - part discussion of the 2010 Hugo nominees at the group blog Big Other and Adam Roberts's epic review cycle of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time ), Francis Spufford's Red Plenty , a work of creative nonfiction (which Farah Mendlesohn and Niall Harrison insist is actually a novel), and Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan's Coode Street Podcast .  A slightly crazy and mismatched set, which I think is about right, as it gets at the way that the science fiction community has been using the internet, in its various guises, to proliferate opinions and criticism, while leaving space for traditional publishing.  I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should--as pleased as I am by how the Clouds revi...

July marked AtWQ's fifth anniversary, and in a few months I'll be celebrating my 30th birthday, and these two milestones coming within relatively little time of one another meant that 2010 featured a lot of stock-taking and some serious thought about what the next step in my life, personal and professional, was going to be.  Which is how I ended up involved with ICon 2010 and the SF Encyclopedia , looking for ways to diversify and mix up my experience of fandom and my role within it.  So this summer, when Niall Harrison mentioned that Strange Horizons 's editor-in-chief (and freshly-minted World Fantasy Award winner ) Susan Marie Groppi was stepping down , and that he was thinking of putting in for the position, I found myself thinking about the soon-to-be-vacant reviews editor job.  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the right next step for me to take, and I'm pleased and proud to announce that I've taken it. In my admittedly biased opinion, St...

As I may have mentioned here in the past, I've been involved with the planning of ICon TLV, the Israeli science fiction and fantasy convention that will be held at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque over Sukkot week, 25-30 September.  It's been a fun and somewhat exhausting experience, and I've ended up with some interesting events.  If you're in the neighborhood, consider stopping by. All links go to the official ICon website .  All events are in Hebrew unless otherwise noted. Interview with author Lavie Tidhar Sunday, September 26th, 15:00-15:30, at the Tzomet Sfarim booth Jewish Fantasy : A Panel Discussion Based on the internet brouhaha of last winter, an Israeli perspective. Participants: Prof. Ortzion Bartana, Dr. Hagay Dagan, Rabbi Adi Cohen, Shimon Adaf, Abigail Nussbaum (moderator) Sunday, September 26th, 17:00-19:00, at the Cinematheque veranda tent A Guide to Biblical Monsters Paired lectures by Dr. Hagay Dagan and Asaf Asheri, introduced by Abigail Nuss...

At long last I am back in the holy land, after a seven-leg, thirteen hour trip comprising four different kinds of trains (one of which, the London Underground, very nearly scuttled all my plans when the tightest change of the lot became a great deal tighter due to a mechanical failure on the Circle line), two countries, and one rather pleasant flight from Paris. Kudos are due to Niall Harrison and Nic Clarke, for opening both their home and their library to me while I was stranded, and to my airline El Al, for handling my (and, from what I've heard, many other passengers') case with impressive grace and efficiency, and making it their priority to get stranded passengers home, or as close as possible to it.  Less praiseworthy are my phone company Orange, who threatened to disconnect my phone due to irregular usage, and did so just as I was traversing France, cutting me off from the people in England and Israel waiting to hear about my progress.  While it's understandable t...

The plan for today was to land in Tel Aviv at an ungodly hour of the morning, get home, sleep for a bit, and then write a post about my journey in the evening.  Unfortunately, everyone's favorite volcano Eyjafjallajoekull had other plans, and I have joined the ranks of tens of thousands of other stranded travelers all over Europe.  Attempts at securing an alternate route have thus far proved futile--I have a booking for a flight leaving Madrid on Tuesday night, but at present I haven't been able to make train or bus reservations for the London-Madrid leg, and the likelihood that I'll manage to do so grows slimmer by the hour.  Happily, my situation is quite comfortable.  Not only do I have a place to stay, thanks to the kindness of Niall and Nic, but it is stacked to rafters with books, so that if it weren't for the uncertainty of my situation I would quite happily settle in for another reading week.  Plus, if you're going to be stranded in a foreign country, th...

This blog has been quiet enough recently that such an absence might go unnoticed, but for the next two weeks I'm going to be on holiday in the UK.  This weekend I'll be attending Odyssey , the 2010 Eastercon at the Radisson hotel in Heathrow airport, and following that I'll be visiting friends and hopefully charging up on blogging fodder.  I'm participating in a panel, on Sunday the 4th: Writing Meaningful Reviews of TV Shows and Books.   12PM-1PM.  Room 41 .  Too often reviews of TV programmes (or books) are a knee-jerk reaction condemning (or praising) a production while considering just one or two facets. What should a detailed review consider? How can we analyse more deeply? John Clute (mod), Chris Hill, Abigail Nussbaum and Alison Page. Other than that, I'm trying something new by taking my laptop with me, but will endeavor to spend more time offline than on, so though I may pop up on occasion, normal service won't resume until the middle of the month....

I'm back! And a mere 38 hours after walking through my front door (after 37 hours of wakefulness), feeling more or less recovered. Worldcon was, well, you name it--fun, exhausting, weird, illuminating, disorienting and invigorating. I feel very motivated to dive right into writing and talking about genre with a redoubled enthusiasm, and hopefully that feeling will last as I get back into the daily rhythm of work and ordinary life. I have a couple of writing assignments due by the end of the month, but I also hope to get the blog back on track, to which end the gigantic pile of books now threatening to cave my desk in will no doubt be a great help. More thoughts: Montreal: quite lovely, and with a more European flavor than any other North American city I've been to. That presumably has something to do with the fact that the city's bilingualism is mostly an official thing--outside of the con, I heard French almost exclusively, but the Montrealers I interacted with also had e...