Asking the Wrong Questions

When I wrote about Westworld 's first season eighteen months ago, it was with profound annoyance at the show's reliance on twists and revelations, to the detriment of some of the interesting ideas about personhood and consciousness that the season tooled around with but never really explored.  I wasn't alone in making this criticism, and creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have subsequently backed off some of their more elaborate (and unsatisfying) structural choices.  But the result hasn't been all we could have hoped for.  In 2016, I was annoyed by Westworld .  In 2018, I was bored by it.  Removing the show's central gimmick, it turned out, only revealed a sad truth: that despite its sumptuous production values, gorgeous shooting locations, and amazing cast, what you find at the center of Westworld 's maze is a great big blank.  That after producing twenty-three or -four hours of material, this show still isn't any closer to articulating what it's ac...

Summer is properly here, and with it all the TV shows deemed too weird or too niche to make it in more prestigious weather.  I admit that I've noped out of several shows whose flimsiness felt appropriate to the season but not really to my taste, like the virtual reality procedural Reverie or the Castle -in-reverse detective show Take Two .  And on the other hand, some more serious fare, like FX's Pose , felt a little more earnest and heartfelt than I can take right now in the sweltering heat.  But here are a few shows that hit the exact sweet-spot between shlocky and highbrow, and helped me greet the summer (in my air-conditioned living room) with appropriate flair. A Very English Scandal - I'm a little surprised that this BBC miniseries hasn't received more attention from people in my various feeds, since it seems to tick so many boxes of stuff people like.  Hugh Grant, in full Paddington 2 smarm mode, plays Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the British Liberal part...

My latest Political History of the Future column discusses Catherynne M. Valente's new novel Space Opera .  As I discuss in the essay, this is seemingly an odd choice--Valente's Hitchhiker's Guide -inspired comedy about a galaxy where species prove their right to exist among civilized nations by competing in space-Eurovision is pretty far outside the boundaries I had previously defined, of works that engage with concrete political and social issues. To which the answer is, because talking about Space Opera gives me an opportunity to point out a glaring lacuna in almost all the works we’ve discussed so far—the way that nearly every one of them leaves out the centrality of culture, and particularly popular culture, in shaping a society and reflecting its preoccupations. ... Even as it strives to create fully-realized worlds, art—high and low, functional and abstract, popular and obscure, ridiculous and serious—tends to be absent from them. So are artists—try to remember t...

This week at Strange Horizons , I review the first season of Netflix's re-reboot of Lost in Space .  Like a lot of people I found the entire notion of remaking a silly little space-pioneering show from 1965 (after a failed reboot movie in 1998) rather bizarre, and I can't say that the show has proved that this was something that needed to happen.  What it does achieve, however, is to demonstrate how you can take an unnecessary concept and execute it with intelligence and sensitivity (something that the makers of, to take a recent example, Solo: A Star Wars Story completely failed to accomplish).  I still don't think we needed a new Lost in Space , but the show we got has interesting characters, good storylines, and does some things that I'd almost given up on seeing in a genre show, such as construct coherent and compelling episode plots.  That said, because this is a reboot that is ultimately an attempt to monetize a familiar IP, the end of the season is a lot les...

Somewhat surprisingly for a film that has so little time (and possibly also inclination) to explore any interesting ideas raised by its premise, Infinity War has resulted in a rather vibrant conversation.  I'll say from the outset that most of the links I've collected proceed from the point of view that the film is at the very least flawed, if not genuinely bad.  This is probably my selection bias speaking, but I really haven't seen any interesting positive discussions of the film--any in-depth engagement with it, it seems to me, must inevitably grapple with the film's myriad, foundational flaws.  Also rooted in my own preoccupations is the fact that a lot of these links end up talking less about the film, and more about how it exposes some uncomfortable truths about how Marvel sees its franchise, its long-term goals, and its audience. Of the mainstream reviews--that is, those prohibited on pain of death of discussing the film's ending, AKA the only thing that i...

My latest Strange Horizons review looks at E.J. Swift's time travel novel Paris Adrift .  I've been hearing Swift's name spoken with admiration for several years now, as more and more readers I trust became absorbed by her Osiris Project trilogy ( Osiris , 2012; Cataveiro , 2014; Tamaruq , 2015).  As a standalone, Paris Adrift seemed like a perfect opportunity to hop on, but unfortunately what I found was a classic case of what is good is not interesting, and what is interesting is not good.   Paris Adrift is a rather slight story of a lost young person becoming even more lost when she discovers the ability to travel in time--the sort of thing that would probably have worked very well as a novella but is stretched into shapelessness by the novel length--combined with a political story that doesn't really bear much scrutiny. It's perhaps unsurprising that a novel so rooted in the notion of special people will also filter its politics through the lens of great m...

My latest Political History of the Future column takes the opportunity of the BBC having released a miniseries adaptation of it to discuss China Miéville's The City & The City , a novel about two cities that exist side-by-side but have erected a convoluted mechanism of psychological self-deception to "unsee" one another.  When I reread my 2009 review of the book, I was struck by how much it emphasized Miéville's poking at core fantasy tropes over what feels now like a blatantly political premise.  But as both that review and the miniseries have reminded me, that imbalance exists in the book itself. despite a surface feeling of relevance, the premise of The City & The City doesn’t map to any real-world political situation. Unseeing isn’t a way of ignoring an inconvenient or ugly reality, but a hefty psychic burden that the citizens of the two cities undertake out of ingrained habit and fear of retaliation. And despite multiple attempts to read it as such by...

#AvengersInfinityWar is the DC superhero movie of the MCU. — Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) April 28, 2018 For the last ten years, Marvel Studios has been doing the impossible.  Just look at the list of decisions they've made on the road to total dominance of the movie box office, Hollywood's action-adventure machine, and sizable chunks of the cultural conversation.  Every one of them, at the time it was made, elicited loud cries of "why?", and more importantly, "how?"  How can Marvel create a movie universe without the rights to tentpole heroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men?  How can they launch their new franchise with C-list weirdos like Iron Man and Thor?  How can they create a successful team-up movie combining the heroes of five previous films?  How can they incorporate genuinely out-there concepts like the Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, and Ant-Man into their burgeoning cinematic universe?  How can they re-incorporate Spider-...

Avengers: Infinity War is just around the corner, which in some way feels like the true beginning of 2018's movie year.  We've mostly wrapped up last year's Oscar hopefuls, and the more experimental action-adventure fare of the year's early months, and now it's time to get down to business.  I'm not feeling terribly hopeful about Marvel's fourth attempt to wring a coherent dramatic work out of mashing all of their characters together (on twitter, I did the traditional thing and ranked all the MCU movies, and the team-up movies all ended up in the bottom half of the list) but I do think it offers a useful opportunity to sum up the last few weeks' movie-watching.  This is probably the last batch of "grown-up" movies to reach my part of the world for several months, so this is also an opportunity to look fondly back before world-destroying mayhem takes over our screens. I, Tonya - A semi-mockumentary about the rise and fall of competitive fig...