Asking the Wrong Questions

Today at Strange Horizons , I review Zen Cho's Crawford-winning short story collection Spirits Abroad .  This is something of a milestone for me--the first review I've had published in Strange Horizons since stepping down as a reviews editor.  It's also a welcome return to writing full-length book reviews, and for both of those occasions I couldn't have chosen a better subject with which to mark them than Cho's vibrant, funny, brilliantly-written collection.  The stories in Spirits Abroad are remarkable for how they capture their worlds--be they Malaysian villages, ex-pat communities in the UK, or fantastical worlds--in a few well-chosen sentences, and for the equal weight that Cho gives to folklore and more hard-nosed worldbuilding elements such as politics and history.  Cho uses fantasy to shed a light on her stories' worlds, and on the relationships that drive her plots, but her fantasies are also coherent and engaging in themselves.  Spirits Abroad is ea...

With just under a day and a half left to nominate for the 2015 Hugo awards, I have an embarrassing confession to make: I don't actually have any best novel nominations.  I don't tend to keep up to date with my reading, and in 2014 I fell seriously behind--there are more than a dozen Hugo-eligible books that I hoped to get to before the nominating deadline, but that is clearly not going to happen. Which is a particular shame because 2014 seems to have been a very good year for genre novels, with a large number of interesting-looking books that I'd very much like to see on this year's ballots, and whose public reception makes a nomination not at all unlikely.  Books like Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (in theory, the entire Southern Reach trilogy could be nominated as a single work, but I'm fundamentally opposed to such an approach; if a book was published as a single volume, it should be judged as a single volume when it comes time to nominate it for awards), St...

Last year when I wrote about this group of categories, I noted that it consisted of two categories in which I didn't feel that my vote mattered much, and two in which I didn't feel knowledgeable enough to nominate well in.  That hasn't changed much this year--in the case of the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category, in fact, my vote feels even more useless than usual.  2014 was full of so many high profile, well liked genre films that the final ballot feels predictable from here (for the record: Interstellar , Guardians of the Galaxy , The Lego Movie , Snowpiercer , and either Mockingjay Part 1 or Edge of Tomorrow ) and just as unexciting.  On the other hand, other categories in this group, like Best Graphic Story, feel as if they're coming into their own.  After several years of feeling as if the category was being voted on exclusively by a small and cliquish group while the rest of the membership looked on with indifference, there's been a growing consensus i...

With only a week left to the nominating deadline, let's continue swiftly to the publishing and fan categories.  As I did last year, I'm going to be skipping the best editor categories, because I don't feel that I have enough of a sense of what each editor does to know which one of them deserves an award.  I also don't listen to podcasts, so I'll be leaving the best fancast category blank as well.  Unlike the short fiction categories, I have several blank spaces here, especially in the best fanzine category.  So if you have recommendations, I'll be happy to hear them. Speaking of recommendations, a very good source is the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom , a crowdsourced recommendation document that anyone can read and edit.  I found a lot of ideas for the artist categories there, for example. Previous entries in this series: The Short Fiction Categories Best Semiprozine: Strange Horizons - This is the last year that nominating this magazine counts as voting f...

With only ten days left before the Hugo nominating deadline, I'm cutting these posts a little close.  And the truth is, I could have done with another two weeks to round out my Hugo reading this year, which between the absence of free time and a two week vacation in the middle of February that didn't leave me much time for reading, has not been as comprehensive as I would have liked.  Even as I sat down to make the final lists from which I would cull the selections for this post, I kept remembering stories I'd wanted to get to, venues I'd wanted to at least skim.  But here we are on March 1st, the deadline I set myself, and it's time to admit that I've seen as much of the vast field of last year's genre short fiction as I am going to, and to get to the work of picking out my favorite reads. As it was last year, my reading was concentrated in online venues, of which there is an ever-increasing amount that ranges in style and focus.  It was a particular deli...

It's been less than a year since Tasha Robinson coined the phrase "Trinity syndrome," and yet it's already become one of the most useful terms in pop culture criticism.  Named for the female lead in Lana and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix , Trinity syndrome refers to a movie in which a female character is depicted as cool, competent, and badass, but always and inexplicably in the service of a much blander male lead (for whom she is usually the love interest).  She often loses her motivation (if she ever had one) and her ability to affect the plot in the film's final act, just in time for the lead to take center stage, and often needs to be rescued by him.  As Hollywood blockbusters become more conservative in their structures and plots, the roles they give women become more constrained, and Trinity syndrome has become a useful way of examining how the appearance of agency can obscure its absence.   Jupiter Ascending , the Wachowskis' most recent film and th...

It's been two days since I saw Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman and I'm still feeling exhilarated.  On the most basic level, this film is like nothing else I've seen in a movie theater in a long time, possibly forever, and I urge you to see it simply for the experience (and ideally in a movie theater, since this is a work worth being immersed in).  It's also a hard movie to write about, with multiple layers and themes, and a frenetic approach to plot that makes the format of a straightforward review feel inappropriate.  So I'm highlighting a few points that feel interesting in a film about which I could probably say a great deal more. The first coherent thought I had about Birdman , even as I was still watching it, was that its overarching goal, the one thing it wanted to accomplish more than anything else, was to replicate the experience of watching a play through the experience of watching a movie.  That's not an unusual desire, of course, but us...

The second stop in my short trip through 2014's lesser-known genre filmmaking is James Ward Byrkit's Coherence .  Which turned out to be fortuitous, as the comparison between Coherence and The One I Love revealed some interesting similarities, as well as telling differences.  On the surface level, the two films feel very different-- The One I Love is intimate and tightly focused, while Coherence is chaotic and occasionally rambling.  Coherence has a more overtly SFnal subject matter, which it expresses through the more obvious tropes of horror filmmaking, such as jump scares and dark shadows, a stark contrast to how The One I Love conceals its horror story under a sunny, comedic tone.  And perhaps most importantly, Coherence is a micro-budget production (IMDb claims it was made for $50K, which if accurate is very impressive indeed) next to which even the small-budget, independent The One I Love looks polished and well-funded. Dig a little deeper, though, an...

I wrote some half dozen full-length film reviews in 2014, and looking back, almost every one of them revolves around the theme of how difficult it is to find genuinely intelligent, thoughtful SF movies.  "Intelligent," in this context, means a willingness to engage with the SFnal tropes that drive a story, to explore their implications on the film's characters or even its world, instead of plumping for the familiar story beats of a superhero movie or a family drama without asking what the existence of the SFnal does to change them.  As I get to catching up with the 2014 culture that I wanted to get to (and in preparation for Hugo nominating, open until March 10th ), I've been exploring the year's smaller-budget genre efforts, and finding a much greater willingness to explore the limits of the genre than in the studio fare. The first of these forays, The One I Love , is not precisely the elusive beast I've been looking for.  Rather, it takes a fantastic eleme...

After a profoundly lackluster fall pilot season, the networks and cable channels seem to be pulling out all the stops for the midseason.  Just about every odd, high-concept, genre-ish series on the roster seems to have been held back for January, and if the resulting shows aren't always good, they're at least interesting to think and write about.  Not covered at length in this post, but still interesting, are Empire (whose concept I respect but whose episodes have a weird habit of collapsing into incoherent messes around the 20-minute mark), new comedies Togetherness (low concept but extremely well made), Man Seeks Woman (high concept that doesn't quite work but is funny enough to be worth a second chance), and Schitt's Creek (horrible title; surprisingly clever writing and some stellar acting from a great cast; too much reliance on cringe humor for my tastes), teen-oriented shows Hindsight and Eye Candy (sometimes YA shows work for adults; this is not one of thos...