Asking the Wrong Questions

Once again, this is my brother's doing. He's the one who, in the spring, suggested a return to yet another staple of our youthful TV watching, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . And it's partly the fault of the WGA, too. It's because of their still-ongoing strike that I had no new TV to watch, and so the last weeks of 2007 became dedicated to making my way through all seven seasons and 176 episodes of what is largely considered to be the best entry in the Star Trek franchise. Not that this return to Bajor, to Cardassia, to the Celestial Temple and the Dominion War turned out to be a chore. I was a bit nervous when I first embarked on this journey. Some of you may recall what happened the last time I revisited an SFnal staple of my teenage years, and my memories of Deep Space Nine weren't quite as rosy as the ones I had of Babylon 5 . I remembered the plasticity of performance, dialogue, and humor, the over-reliance on technobabble and episode-ending reset buttons...

Alright, so that's not really the point of the exercise, but it's what I'm choosing to focus on.  The preliminary Nebula ballot is up, and Fantasy & Science Fiction have already made their nominated stories available online (as are the stories from the webzine Helix ).  Which is a nice change--usually the big three wait until the final ballot is compiled before making the nominated stories available.  So kudos to F&SF. I'm obviously planning to read all the available stories (especially in the novella category, in which there aren't enough stories to whittle down), but the one that excites me is Ted Chiang's "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate."  Chiang, if you haven't read him already, is currently the gold standard for making a name for yourself based solely on SFnal short stories, and deservedly so.  He is, however, far from prolific, and a new story, especially one that has received so much positive attention , is a cause for...

You may recall that Mark Budz's novel Till Human Voices Wake Us came second in my ranking of the year's worst reading experiences.  If you'd like to find out why, head on over to Strange Horizons and read my review .  

I swiped this idea from Niall Harrison (who appears to be getting a Baroque Cycle reading group together for the spring and summer; some of you might want to get in on that)--in what ways would I like to direct my reading over the next year? Like all such lists, this one is over-ambitious and unrealistic, but it is nice to put my goals in black and white (the corresponding list of of ways in which I'd like to direct my writing over the next year, meanwhile, is depressingly vague). The old standards. Read more. Make a sizable dent in my to-be-read stack. Buy less books than I read (though every time the dollar takes a plunge I have to suppress the urge to make an Amazon order). The big guns. Almost inexplicably, I managed to make it all the way through 2007 without reading either Ian McDonald's Brasyl or William Gibson's Spook Country . If I hadn't managed to squeeze in The Yiddish Policemen's Union I might have had to turn in my geek credentials. But wh...

And now, finally, something that I really think more bloggers and newspapers should do: the year's least worthy reads. To be honest, this year's list is paltry, both in its length and in the awfulness of its members. With the exception of the year's biggest turkey, none of these books approach the awfulness of some of stinkers I've read in recent years. Perhaps I'm developing a better radar for awfulness. Unlike the previous two lists, this list is presented in ascending order of suckitude: The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley I'm not entirely convinced that this book is objectively bad so much as that I am the absolutely worst possible reader for it. Parts of it are not much more than a thinly disguised travel narrative, in which the narrator, his aunt, and an eccentric priest, tromp around Turkey in the fifties--but I don't like travel writing. Those parts of it that have more than a thin dusting of plot are concerned with one of three issues: th...

I read 64 books in 2007, which is once again a drop from the previous year. Given, however, that in 2007 I started working full-time for the first time, I think the drop was to be expected, and that it is a great deal smaller than it might have been. More importantly, if 2006 was a disappointing reading year, with barely any remarkable reads to report, 2007 has been, on the whole, a great improvement. Most of the books I read this year were worthwhile--not always exceptional, but almost always worth the time and energy I had invested in them. In last year's best books post I sadly reported the many occasions on which I'd turned the last page in a book and put it aside without sparing it another thought. That was a less common occurrence this year, which pleases me immensely. I'd like to read more books in 2008, but I'll settle for reading just as many worthy ones. And so, the year's best reads, in alphabetical order of the author's name: The Astonishing L...

Earlier this year I read Annie Proulx's third short story collection, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 . Most of the pieces in it were appealing but underbaked--too long or too short, too detailed or not detailed enough. None of them had the power of the story that still has me fascinated with Proulx as a writer, "Brokeback Mountain." Reading Bad Dirt made me realize that it is possible for a writer to peak with a work only a few pages long, and I think it's worth recognizing accomplishments on that level even when the collections or anthologies they were plucked from aren't worthy of the same notice. Though many of these stories were originally published in magazines, I read them almost exclusively in collected form. Which means that almost none of them were published in 2007 (and that this list is therefore useless as far as Hugo or Nebula nominations go). My rules, however, are the same ones I use for my lists of best and worst novels of the year: I have to ha...

Which seems redundant .  But then, so is saying "I'm William Shatner, and I'm a shaman."

Following up on previous reports to the contrary, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are back onboard for the Hobbit movie. Two things in that press release that trouble me: A Hobbit sequel is in the works as well. Jackson and Walsh are acting as executive producers. There's no word on whether they're going to adapt the book as they did for The Lord of the Rings , or whether Jackson is going to direct the films. To be honest, I don't care that much about The Hobbit and whether it gets a decent film treatment, but I'd hate to see Jackson and Walsh wasting their time. One King Kong was bad enough. (On a personal note, I realize it's been quiet around these parts. That may not change until the end of the month--though obviously the end-of-year roundups will appear on schedule--but I have lots of good stuff planned for January.)

First a bit of background for non-Israelis: YES is an Israeli satellite TV carrier known for their elaborate, lavish commercials. Two years ago, I thought these had hit an ethical nadir with the following (the commercial is mostly in English, which is something else I tend to grumble about): Impossible though it may seem to top a commercial set in a Vietnamese torture camp for crassness and insensitivity, I believe this one, for YES's upcoming HD transmissions, ably manages the task: (This one might need a bit of explaining for non-Hebrew speakers: the ultra orthodox characters have condemned HDTV as an abomination, and are singing about how it's against the Torah--because all the Shiksah women look so great--and we'll all go to hell because of it.) Now, at first glance it may seem that a commercial mocking Orthodox Jews' tendency to exclude and denounce anything new and unfamiliar is a great deal less offensive than a commercial in which POWs sing and dance with thei...

My review of the Battlestar Galactica TV movie "Razor" appears in today's Strange Horizons . If you've clicked through from there, you might be interested in some of my other posts about the show, or at least in the odd effect of the reverse chronological order they're presented in--you can watch me get less and less bitter, and finally enthusiastic, about the series.

Last fall, I watched the pilot for Showtime's new series, Dexter , pronounced it impeccably well-made and impressively acted, and promptly decided not to keep watching the series. Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay*, Dexter is the tale of Dexter Morgan, adopted son of legendary Miami police detective Harry Morgan. As a young boy, Dexter began exhibiting the classic signs of sociopathic behavior, and Harry, instead of carting the boy off to psychiatrists and institutions, started training him instead--first, to avoid detection and incarceration, and later to channel his murderous urges in socially beneficial ways. In the present day, Dexter is a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police department, where he works alongside his sister Deb, Harry's biological daughter. By night, he stalks and kills victims carefully selected according to a by-now deceased Harry's criteria--serial killers like Dexter himself, whom the law is either unaware of or he...

Slate reviews Beowulf in verse: Far had he fallen with Polar Express, An animated washout whose technique Obscured its content, thanks to CGI. The Z-man's new technique, performance capture, Looked creepy in those days. The critics snarled. But brave Zemeckis takes them on again With Beowulf, a 3-D spectacle Like none before. The Anglo-Saxon poem, Dreaded by school kids since the world was young, His manly grip reshapes to graphic novel. It's a good review, but no matter how many of them this film garners, and in spite of Neil Gaiman's presence as adapter, which at the very least means that someone in the vicinity of the production gets what the poem is about, I have absolutely no desire to see it. It looks like the unholy love child of The Polar Express and 300 , and my lack of desire to see it is equal or greater than the sum total of my lack of desire to see either of these films.

The pile o'books I brought back with me from the States is getting steadily smaller, and thus far performing quite well. As per recent discussion, this list includes several short story collections. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Warner's slim 1925 feminist fable was a lucky find in the Strand's $1 rack. The novel's first half describes the title character's early life in the late Victorian period. With brisk, efficient prose, Warner takes us through Lolly's remote family history and her relationships with her more immediate family, particularly her doting father, in an enjoyable narrative flow that is never less than wry and often quite funny. Upon her father's death, a compliant Lolly goes to live with her brother's family, where she acts in the capacity of unpaid nurse, companion, and governess. With near-Austenish coolness, Warner describes the mindset that leads an intelligent, strong young woman of independent means to immure her...