Asking the Wrong Questions

This week's reviews kick off with Matt Cheney's fascinating take on Gary K. Wolfe's essay collection Evaporating Genres , in which Matt discusses his own expectations from reviewing and criticism, and the difficulties those expectations caused him in appreciating Wolfe's book.  Duncan Lawie is pleased with Aliette do Bodard's Harbinger of the Storm , the sequel to Servant of the Underworld , which is set in the same universe as the Hugo-nominated novelette "The Jaguar House, in Shadow."  Nader Elhefnawy considers David Wingrove's Son of Heaven , a prequel volume to the Chung Kuo alternate history sequence, and finds it less exciting than the books that follow it and touched with a vein of Sinophobia that they managed to ameliorate.

If the short story ballot feels like a snapshot of the genre short fiction scene in 2010, the same year's novelette ballot seems deliberately retro.  All but one of its stories are brimming with classic SF tropes--long-haul space voyages, Martian colonization, alien encounters, toolshed astronauts--and even more than that, with nostalgia for a time when those tropes dominated science fiction.  I wish I could say that that nostalgia is leavened by a sophisticated handling of characterization, and an understanding of some of the pernicious assumptions that underpin Golden Age SF, but unfortunately, with only one exception, that's not the case.  The result is a ballot that feels regressive and at time uncomfortably exclusionary. Nebula winner Eric James Stone's "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" is a story that seems of a piece with stories like Michael A. Burstein's "Sanctuary" (Nebula nominee, best novella , 2006) and Mike Resnick's "A...

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.

Tim Miller kicks off this week with a glowing review of Karen Joy Fowler's collection What I Didn't See and Other Stories .  Following him is Michael Froggatt, discussing NYRB Classics's translation of modern Russian fantasist Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy, which Michael finds worthwhile mainly for its middle segment.  Niall Alexander rounds out the week with a review of Subterranean Tales of Dark Fantasy 2 , edited by William Shafer, which after a slow start pleases Niall immensely.

The ballot for this year's short story category functions quite well as a snapshot of 2010's short fiction scene, and the Hugo award's interaction with it.  You've got one of the most popular, and most talked-about, short stories of the last few years.  You've got two of the award's darlings, including one who has had a story on at least one of the short fiction shortlists for four years running.  And you've got a story from a new and much-lauded online short fiction venue.  Unfortunately, the ballot also functions well as a snapshot of the reasons that the Hugos so frequently disappoint me--its stories prioritize sentimentality over quality of writing or ideas; what little fantastic invention there is in them is staid and predictable; even the one deserving piece is derivative, much to its own detriment. Carrie Vaughn's "Amaryllis" and Mary Robinette Kowal's "For Want of a Nail" feel like variations--rather similar ones at that...

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro kicks off this week's reviews with his take on Paul Haines's collection Slice of Life , to which his reaction is a mixture of admiration and reticence towards Haines's use of outrageous, provocative plot elements.  On Wednesday, Michael H. Payne argues that the latest incarnation of the My Little Pony cartoon, Friendship Is Magic , has imbued the old Mattel marketing platform with depth of feeling and character.  In today's review , Jonathan McCalmont is impressed by Claude LaLumière's novella The Door to Lost Pages , a book about book-loving that goes beyond the self-congratulation that such a description conjures.

A few more films before the full force of the summer blockbuster season comes upon us. Winter's Bone (2010) - I was a little nervous going into this film, because the warm critical reception that a film might receive when it's a come-from-behind surprise from a virtually unknown writer and director can seem overblown a year later, when it's a universally lauded Oscar nominee starring one of Hollywood's up-and coming actresses (basically, the reason I was so disappointed by The Kids Are All Right ), and because its description--Applachian teenager Ree Dolly must track down her meth-cooking, bail-jumping father or lose her family's house, and meets with resistance from the local mob--seemed so rife with opportunities for cultural tourism and poverty-chic.  It was this sense that I was being invited to gawp at the quaint customs and funny accents of poor rural folk that soured me on the second season of Justified , whose overarching plot borrows quite heavily from ...

The first Strange Horizons review of May is Adam Roberts's take on Harmony by Project Itoh, a Haikasoru book that Adam finds very impressive, and which launches him into wondering why modern SF has had so little to say about modern medicine and the experience of being in its care.  Niall Alexander is less complimentary to the BBC much-pumped, then quickly-dumped SF TV series Outcasts , whose failures Niall finds uniquely British.  Rounding out the week is Karen Burnham with a review of the Gordon Van Gelder-edited anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse , a collection of stories about climate change that Karen finds disappointingly wary of the unique qualities of that subject, more often plumping for pulp or for garden variety apocalypse.

Late March and early April were very bad reading periods for me.  A combination of busyness, stress, and a rather dull book that I nevertheless insisted on finishing meant that I spent several weeks struggling with unenjoyable reads, picking books up and putting them back down after fifty pages, usually through no fault of their own, eying my enormous TBR stack with distaste, and in general feeling that reading had become a struggle.  The solution, I decided, was a YA binge.  Not so much because YA books are easier reads than novels aimed at adults, though a lot of the time they are, as because they work harder to hook the reader.  Books for young readers tend to be more purposeful, more obvious about their destination and their determination to reach it, than adult fiction, and when it comes to carrying the reader along with the story, they do more of the heavy lifting.  That seemed like exactly what the doctor ordered, so I've spent the second half of April ru...

As well as the two halves of Dan Hartland's review of the 2011 Clarke award shortlist (the award has since been won by Lauren Beukes's Zoo City --see Niall Harrison's thoughts at the Strange Horizons blog) the reviews department rounds out April with Lisa Goldstein's review of Helen Lowe's The Heir of Night , the first in a new fantasy series, which Lisa finds a little by the numbers, telling a rather predictable story of a young person who discovers that they are the chosen one.  John Clute's column Scores also appears this week, and his topics are China Miéville's Embassytown and Joan Aiken's collection The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories .

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 ...

The list of nominations was announced two hours ago and is by now all over the internet-- for example .  Some comments. The pleasure of seeing four women on the best novel ballot (to match the female-dominated, yet hardly overlapping, Nebula ballot ) is undercut by how thoroughly unappetizing I find the actual ballot.  I was looking forward to reading Ian McDonald's The Dervish House (which just yesterday won the BSFA award, and is strongly tipped to win the Clarke award later this week) and N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , but even fans of Lois McMaster Bujold and Connie Willis seem to consider Cryoburn and Blackout / All Clear lesser works (and in the latter case I've already expressed my objection on principle to the two volumes being nominated as a single work) and nothing I've heard about Feed excites me particularly.  In light of this, I'm not planning to become an associate member of Renovation, but I will be resuming my short fiction Hug...

This week's reviews kick off with Nic Clarke's look at the first two volumes in Juliet E. McKenna's new trilogy, Blood in the Water and Banners in the Wind , in which Nic finds an interesting counterpoint to the much-discussed reactionary tendency of epic fantasy, as the novels describe a popular rebellion against a restrictive aristocratic class in a fantasy kingdom.  Matt Hilliard makes his Strange Horizons debut with a review of Gene Wolfe's Home Fires , a novel about a couple reconnecting in the wake of war and time dilation, which Matt finds more accessible and more successful than much of Wolfe's recent work.  Less positive is Paul Kincaid in his review of Fredrik Pohl's All the Lives He Led , which Paul finds muddled, especially in its handling of the subject of terrorism.

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

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Martin Lewis's take on Source Code , which is decidedly less positive than mine (see also the discussion in the comments).  Maureen Kincaid Speller reviews the first two volumes in Alaya Dawn Johnson's YA fantasy trilogy, Racing the Dark and The Burning City , and is disappointed in their handling of the main character.  Finally, Nathaniel Katz finds Mark Charan Newton's City of Ruin an improvement over the previous volume in its series, Nights of Villjamur , but still somewhat lacking.