Asking the Wrong Questions

Michael Weingrad's "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia" has been the gift that keeps on giving for the genre/Jewish blogosphere for the last month.  Counting just those posts that have linked back to my response to the essay, there have been dozens of discussions sparked by it, reaching as far as blogs at The New York Times , The Atlantic , and The National Review .  Here are a couple of later additions which, I think, have really broadened the conversation. coffeeandink's "Religion != Christiany" is more a discussion of the discussion of Weingrad's article, and touches on subjects that she's talked on with some passion before (some of which were also brought up in the 2009 iteration of RaceFail).  Specifically, the tendency to forget the privilege of being Christian in historically Christian countries, and the different levels of privilege that other, non-Christian religions enjoy (as Micole points out, Judaism currently enjoys a signific...

Some way into Jane Austen's Persuasion , heroine Anne Elliot is deeply distressed when she overhears a conversation between her former fiancé, Captain Wentworth, and the girl he has been flirting with, which makes it clear that Wentworth considers Anne weak-willed, and holds her in disdain for breaking off their engagement eight years ago, when he was a penniless lieutenant with no prospects, on the advice of her mentor Lady Russell.  Mind churning, Anne is glad when the three are joined by the rest of their group, thinking that "Her spirit wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give."  That line seems to me to sum up Anne, and indeed the whole of Persuasion , perfectly.  Anne Elliot is exactly the sort of person who is always most alone in a crowd. Persuasion is an odd entry in Austen's bibliography.  Her last novel, it is the most sober of the six, with very little of the sharp, acidic humor that characterizes most of her writing.  In othe...

With the Hugo nominating deadline only a few days away , Strange Horizons is covering some of 2009's short fiction, with a very fine roundup review by Alavaro Zinos-Amaro (who among other things has made me rethink Kij Johnson's "Spar," a story I found impressive, but not to extent that other short fiction reviewers, who have consistently crowned it one of the best short stories of the year, have) and a slightly less in-depth one by myself which covers some of the stories mentioned in my draft Hugo ballot .

Kit Whitfield's In Great Waters is a novel that has received ecstatic reviews from very nearly everyone who has written about it , including some of my close friends and favorite reviewers .  As you can imagine, this made me both eager and nervous about reading it myself, but I was certainly more the latter than the former after I read Whitfield's first novel, Benighted , a profound disappointment which I found "slow-paced, overlong, rather poorly written, and not doing nearly as much as it should with its excellent premise."  Even assurances by Martin Lewis that In Great Waters represented a huge leap forward for Whitfield didn't allay my concerns, and I nervously left the book for the very end of my Hugo reading.  I needn't have worried.  In Great Waters is not only a very fine novel, it seems to address each and every one of my complaints about Benighted : it is impeccably plotted and paced, very well written, and best of all, fully explores and ...

The deadline for submitting Hugo nominations is still two weeks away, but following in Niall's footsteps I thought I'd put my preliminary choices up as a way of encouraging others to give them a try and maybe nominate them as well, or to try to talk me out of them and into others.  I'm not quite done with my reading yet: there are several novellas I still want to get to, and in the best related book category my reading has been as paltry as usual, though I'm hoping to manage Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.'s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction and Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James's A Short History of Fantasy before the nominating deadline.  For other perspectives, you might want to take a look at ballots by Joe Sherry , Martin Lewis ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), Rich Horton , and Rachel Swirsky ( 1 , 2 , 3 , though as these are Nebula nominations not all of her choices are eligible for the Hugo). Best novel: The City & The City by China Miéville The Windup Girl by ...

My review of Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbar t appears today at Strange Horizons .  Some of you may recall that Grossbart received one of the dishonorable mention slots in my summary of 2009's worst reads , and though I stand by that judgment as it relates to my own reading experience, my review is somewhat more ambivalent--possibly the most ambivalent I've ever written.

Farah Mendlesohn pours out her wrath on Michael Weingrad's article "Why There is No Jewish Narnia" in the inaugural issue of Jewish Review of Books , and its assertion that Weingard "cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little."  Allegedly a review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Hagar Yanai's HaMaim SheBeyn HaOlamot ( The Water Between the Worlds ), the second volume in an Israeli YA fantasy trilogy, Weingard treats only briefly with his two subjects and mostly uses them as a backdrop to his theory of Judaism being a far less hospitable environment than Christianity for the development of a fantastic tradition, of "all the elements necessary for classic fantasy—magic, myth, dualism, demonic forces, strange worlds, and so forth."  Farah responds by listing a dozen Jewish fantasy authors off the ...

I'm actually not a very enthusiastic consumer of movies.  When it comes to filmed fiction, TV does a lot more of what I'm interested in, and months can sometimes pass without me seeing the inside of a movie theater or even sitting down with a DVD.  But somehow, since the beginning of the year Israeli film distributors (and in one case, a local movie channel) have ladled out a whole raft of movies I've wanted to see, and I'm not even done--I'm still hoping to catch An Education , Fish Tank , The White Ribbon , and The Lovely Bones .  Here are my thoughts on 2010's movie-viewing thus far: Bright Star (2009) - The first film I watched in 2010, Bright Star set a very high bar that has yet to be cleared by any other movie.  A slow, meandering sort-of biopic, the film follows the doomed romance between the romantic poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne (a very fine Abbie Cornish).  This is a film that is steeped in the romantic--both the 19th century mode,...

After three episodes, I remain agnostic about the Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica : interested enough to keep watching, but not so interested that the show's by-now all-but-guaranteed cancellation bothers me overmuch.  The one conclusion I have come to, however, is that this series has the very worst opening titles sequence ever aired on television. The images are far too on the nose--Joseph Adama is kneeling before a tombstone (which conveniently bears his name) because he's mourning for his wife and daughter; Sister Clarice hands the symbol of the monotheistic cult to Lacy because she's indoctrinating her--and the Blade Runner -esque visual sensibility (with the zeppelin at the end adding a slight steampunk touch) is entirely at odds with the actual show's look, which can best be described as Naturalism Askew--familiar interiors and exteriors made strange through delicate touches of futuristic technology or unfamiliar design choices.  Most o...

I've been posting these less often because most of my reading has either been for reviews or has ended up in longer posts, but I've finally worked up enough of a backlog to make up a post. Scar Night by Alan Campbell - the first in the Deepgate Codex trilogy (followed by Iron Angel and God of Clocks ), Scar Night is busy, complicated, and unrelenting.  This is quite a bit of fun for a couple hundred pages, as Campbell doles out more and more bits of information about his fantasy city and fantastically complicated premise.  A crumbling empire, Deepgate hangs by ancient, allegedly indestructible chains above a chasm that allegedly contains hell itself, and is ruled by an ancient religious order dedicated to providing the dead, whose bodies are tossed into the chasm, a way of navigating to salvation, in pursuit of which goal it rules the city with an iron fist.  There's a lot of blood, gore and destruction involved--in the wars between Deepgate's rulers and the rebell...

This whole thing started in the summer of 2008, when Neil Clarke reported the results of that year's Locus award poll, as published in the July 2008 issue of the magazine, and noted with alarm a retroactive change to the award's vote counting system.  "Non-subscribers outnumbered subscribers by so much," the magazine's writers explained, "that in an attempt to better reflect the Locus magazine readership, we decided to change the counting system, so now subscriber votes count double."  The new weighting system (which was only disclosed in the print version of the magazine) changed the winners of at least two categories and unleashed a flurry of angry and resentful reactions, both for the system itself and for making the change only after the votes had been cast and the results tabulated. The backlash was not long in coming.  As reported , again, by Clarke, the 2009 Locus poll (which continued the vote-weighting system) saw a dramatic drop in partic...