Asking the Wrong Questions

Welcome back to television, Aaron Sorkin--we've missed you! It's been a lonely three years without you, watching The West Wing teeter and topple (and then right itself, a little, towards the end). I've got quite a few things to say about your new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip --most of them, just to be clear, quite complementary. But I'm going to hold off on any serious discussion for a while, let the show find its voice before I start taking it apart to see what makes it tick. Right now, however, I have one teeny-tiny complaint. We all laughed, some of us less comfortably than others, at the LemonLyman.com subplot on The West Wing a few years back. Sure, you were sticking it to your fans for being so uppity as to have an opinion about your work, but you had the presence of mind to latch on to the caricature of the bossy, tyrannical forum moderator--a stereotype rooted in an all-too painful reality, which most internet users had probably encountered and lam...

It seems impossible to credit, but after more than a year of blogging, I have yet to talk about Edith Wharton, whose two most famous works, The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth , are, in my opinion, two of the finest novels in the English language*. Since reading and falling in love with the latter some two years ago, I've been meaning to make further inroads into Wharton's bibliography. Last week, I finally got around to doing so, first with the novella Ethan Frome --bane of American high school students--and then with The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories , which selects twenty of the 83 short stories published by Wharton over a career that spanned four decades. Ethan Frome is a famously atypical story for Wharton--it is set, not in the opulent New York drawing rooms and sun-drenched meadows of country retreats which make up the scenery of most of her writing, but in rural Massachusetts, and among poor, hardworking farmers. The stories in The Muse's Tragedy , ...

Today's Strange Horizons features my review of Theodora Goss's debut short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting .

Well, by everyone I mean Martin and Alison . At any rate, it's been rather quiet here recently, for which I apologize--September is turning out to be a cultural wasteland. There's some nice stuff lined up for October, though--Neil Gaiman is this year's guest of honor and ICon and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is the Haifa Film Festival's opening film--but for now you'll have to do with my top ten unread books, listed in descending order of the amount of time I've put off reading them: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - has been sitting on my bedside table for several years now. No idea what the block is about, as it is supposedly crazy good. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - see above, although I've found myself strangely reluctant to read classic tragic romances these last few years. I think there might have been a very brief period in which I was old enough to appreciate the complexity of the writing but not too old to be exasperated...

From Amazon UK's description of The Apple : Enjoy more sugar...Take a saunter down Silver Street once more for an early Christmas encounter with the determined heroine of "The Crimson Petal and the White", and find out more of what became of her. In this collection, Michel Faber revisits the world of his bestselling novel, briefly opening doors onto the lives of its characters to give us tantalising glimpses of where they sprang from and what happened to them. I don't even know why I'm so excited. I happen to be one of only eight people on the planet who didn't find the ending of The Crimson Petal and the White rushed and unsatisfactory (I guess once you've got a couple of Neal Stephensons under your belt, Faber's hurriedness doesn't even register). Not to mention that the entire concept puts my back up--going back to the universe of a mega-bestseller to tie up loose ends and tell additional stories? It was a bad idea when Neil Gaiman did it in...

Today sees the premiere of Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance , a ten part webseries that bridges the gap between the second season finale and the upcoming third season premiere. New episodes will go up on the official Sci-Fi site every tuesday and thursday, but here's a torrent for the first ep if, like myself, you keep getting shitty quality off Sci-Fi's streaming video app.

The fall TV season is upon us, and first up for a test ride is 24 / Prison Break clone Vanished . The show revolves around the kidnapping of a senator's wife and the ensuing investigation, which is already turning up deep dark secrets, with hints of vast conspiracies and cryptic puzzles to follow. At the end of the pilot episode, the action shifts away from the story's setting in Atlanta and moves to Boston, where a well-dressed, well-coifed man joins his friend at an upscale club (complaining of being held up at work by "the Lawrence account"), only to catch word of the kidnapping on the news and realize that he knew the kidnapped woman under a different name. In the second episode, we rejoin this character, but we might be forgiven for feeling a little confused. The club has transformed into a working-class bar. The character wears jeans and flannel and, as we later discover, captains a fishing boat. It's by no means uncommon for some fine-tuning to take pl...

Hate me if you want to, but at this point, I'm actually relieved that Deadwood has been cancelled. Those of you who read my pre-season wish list might feel that I'm being a tad ungrateful, perhaps even hypocritical. After all, I did wrap up that essay by concluding that if I have a wish list for Deadwood's third season, it is that its main characters return to form--that Bullock become again a player in the town's politics, that Al demonstrate the capacity and the willingness to hurt even those who might not deserve it, that Cy be marginalized, and that Hearst prove a more interesting, more believable character than Wolcott. Which, by and large, is what the third season has delivered. Cy was indeed marginalized--not only in terms of the character's screen time but within the story itself. Much as I would have preferred to see Cy unceremoniously dumped from the show, there was a certain gratification to be found in watching him realize how incidental to the running...

Locus Online has the Hugo results, and the short fiction category winners are nothing short of dispiriting. OK, so I called Peter S. Beagle's "Two Hearts" winning the novelette category (and anyway there was no other story on the shortlist that desperately deserved to win), and I can hardly say that I'm surprised that Connie Willis' "Inside Job" triumphed over stronger, more interesting, and better written work by Kelly Link and Ian McDonald, because that pretty much sums up her entire award-winning history (I'm still baffled by Doomsday Book 's double whammy). But how is it possible that Margo Lanagan, with one of the strongest short stories I've read in ages, lost out on both the Nebula and Hugo? Oh well, I suppose I should just be grateful that it wasn't Mike Resnick or Michael A. Burstein that took the trophy. UPDATE: The vote breakdowns are now available online . Here's a helpful primer on what all those numbers mean.

Well, if two links can be called a linkdump. Rian Johnson, writer and director of the awesome Brick , has made the film's shooting script (plus annotations) and the original novella on which the film is based available on his website. ( Via ) Hot off the season two DVD (on sale starting today), the Veronica Mars gag reel . Trust me, you haven't lived until you've watched Joss Whedon, in character as the uptight rental car guy in "Rat Saw God", compare himself to "the minstrels of old." ( Via )

Making the rounds of news sites and blogs yesterday was the report that, following a complaint by a viewer (or, presumably, the parent of a viewer) a UK channel had decided to excise positive depictions of smoking from Tom & Jerry cartoons. Which is obviously the cue for all right-thinking lovers of liberty to break out their emergency stores of derision and lament the takeover of our airways and public media channels by a hand-wringing horde of politically correct yahoos imploring us all to please, for the love of God, think of the children. Under other circumstances, I might have joined in the collective eye-rolling, but in this case I'm not convinced that the decision is unwarranted, and I suspect that it may do more good than harm. The thing is, cigarettes are evil. They're the worst of the legal drugs--by all accounts, far worse than at least some of the illegal ones. By a bizarre confluence of common sense and ruthless self-interest on the part of cigarette manufact...

In the acknowledgments page for Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land , John Crowley refers to his ninth novel as an impertinence. He's referring, one assumes, to his own audacity in putting words--an entire novel's worth of them--in the mouth of the romantic poet Lord Byron, most famous for, well, being infamous--mad, bad, and dangerous to know (in her review of Crowley's novel, Elizabeth Hand cleverly points out that more people are familiar with this piece of wittiness--by Byron's former lover Caroline Lamb--than are acquainted with a line of his poetry). But the word, its with airy, frivolous connotations, seems also to capture the novel's tone--an atypical one, in Crowley's bibliography. His novels usually have a palpable heft--even his early forays into science fiction , svelte volumes clocking in at barely 200 pages, made for meaty, substantial reads. Lord Byron's Novel , in contrast, is positively lightweight. The titular novel--composed, accordi...

It's been three days since either the main site, the forums, or my user site responded at all, and I think it's time to admit that my beloved StatCounter is dead, dead, dead. Which leaves me in need of a new stat-gathering service, and so far they've all been depressingly awful. I gave Google Analytics the old college try, but it's clearly oriented towards business users and drowns me with useless information while ignoring or burying the data I need. For example, it only lists referrring sites by the root directory, which might make sense if you're running a business, but when trying to engage in a coversation, there's a huge difference between a person clicking through from anybody.livejournal.com and someone coming from anybody.livejournal.com/friends, or between a person who clicks through from a blog entry posted six months ago or this afternoon. So, does anyone out there have a good (free) website statistics service to recommend? I'm looking for somet...

It's Andrew Rilstone, discussing a Silver Age Superman story which, apparently, manages to treat the 'Superman as Jesus' analogy with a great deal more wit and delicacy than the recent film. For anyone who grew up with Stan Lee's melodramatic over-writing, this 1950s Superman is astonishingly simplistic; even naive. There is hardly one word of what you could call dialogue in the whole story: everyone talks in pure exposition and the "Alice in Wonderland" line made me cringe with embarrassment even when I was 10. However, like many superficially naive children's stories, it actually has considerable complexity and emotional depth. We have a character whose literal darkness is the outward representation of an inner darkness – she has no father, her mother is poor,she thinks that there is nothing nice about the world -- all summed up in her disbelief in Superman. Superman heals her, restores her inner light, her family, and makes her see things she never saw...

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers - I don't imagine that I'm the first reader to pick up the next-to-last novel in Sayers's Peter Wimsey detective series, Gaudy Night , and then move backwards through her bibliography to the origin of Wimsey's relationship with Gaudy protagonist Harriet Vane. As was the case with Gaudy , I found Strong Poison compulsively readable and a great deal of fun. It was also, in spite of the rather grim plot, which sees Harriet accused of murdering her former fiancé and facing the gallows, surprisingly funny, although Sayers does on occasion stray too far into farce, and on other occasions (especially when delving under the surface of Wimsey's over-the-top persona) into melodrama. In her first appearance, Harriet is only very faintly sketched, and a little too perfect to be believed--I certainly see how Sayers fans might jokingly (and sometimes not so jokingly) accuse her of having written Vane as a self-insertion character. Her i...

The Internet Review of Science Fiction 's August issue contains my review of Mark Z. Danielewski's--best known for the trippy, experimental ghost story House of Leaves --new novel, the even more trippy and experimental Only Revolutions . Like all IROSF articles, the review is behind a subscription shield, but registration is free.

It's Doctor Who week at Strange Horizons ! The reviews section is dedicated to contemplations of the show's second season, kicking off today with Iain Clark's Doctor Who and the Nostalgia Factor , which discusses "School Reunion" and companions past and present. Tomorrow, Tim Phipps will be chiming in with his take on "Love & Monsters" and the fannish mindset, and on Wednesday it'll my turn to offer some observations on the season finale. Graham Sleight will review the season as a whole on Thursday. New reviews will go live every day at SH's reviews page --enjoy.

Speaking in New York this week, J.K. Rowling put an end to several burning fandom discussions (is Dumbledore really dead, is Snape really evil, a broad hint about whether Harry is going to survive the series--click through at your own risk). I'm not remotely surprised by any of her responses, but I am surprised that the usually close-lipped Rowling has suddenly decided to spill the beans on so many contentious issues. To be perfectly honest, I wish she'd kept mum. It's one thing to feel certain that a story will unfold in a certain way, and another to know that it will because the author told you. The former allows the reader to maintain a frisson of suspense, whereas the latter takes something away from the reading experience. On the other hand, maybe Rowling is just as tired as I am of some of the more inane Potter -related speculation that's been floating around lately (Rowling should kill Harry because children need to learn about death is a recent personal f...

There honestly aren't enough words to describe how awesome this picture is. ( Via . And according to Boing Boing , this is a photoshopped image, not an actual costume.)

Over a certain age, people who grew up and went to school in Western countries can be conveniently divided into two groups: those who read The Catcher in the Rye and found it whiny, pretentious, and self-involved, and those who read The Catcher in the Rye and found it meaningful, revolutionary, and life-altering, only to realize later, once the really scary hormones got washed out their system, that it is in fact whiny, pretentious, and self-involved. Frank Portman's debut novel, King Dork , will appeal to both groups. It is, at one and the same time, a scathing critique of Salinger's timeless yet tedious masterpiece, a hilarious parody of it, and a loving homage to it. It's also the funniest book I've read in quite some time. King Dork is the self-inflicted, private nickname of fourteen-year-old Tom Henderson, who in real life has far worse nicknames to contend with. At his high school, Tom is very nearly at the bottom of the food chain--only the kid who has to wear...