Asking the Wrong Questions

This long-simmering roundup covers some of my final reads of 2018 and the first ones of 2019.  Some of them have already turned up in my year's best list in December, but they definitely deserve a longer consideration.  In general, this is a strong list of books, even if it does remind me that with all the great books coming down the pike this year, there are so many 2018 books I still haven't gotten around to reading. Transcription by Kate Atkinson - This was the third novel I read in 2018 with the general theme of "little-known aspects of WWII and how they utilized the work and abilities of women", following Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach and Michael Ondaatje's Warlight .  I wasn't crazy about either of those novels, so going back for a third helping in Transcription could be seen as refusing to learn from my mistakes, but happily Atkinson's take on this concept worked a lot better for me.  Like Ondaatje, her focus is on murky wartime espiona...

The Good Place is the best show on television. I don't even see how there could be a debate at this stage. No other show combines such lofty ambitions with such graceful execution, such weighty themes with such a total lack of self-seriousness. It succeeds on every one of the many levels it operates on—as an uproariously funny comedy, as a touching relationship drama, as a thought-provoking philosophical treatise on goodness and self-improvement, and as a gonzo feat of fantastic worldbuilding. It's also a show that—with its typical earnestness—pokes holes in all the hallowed truisms about what a prestigious, "serious" TV show is supposed to look like. Game of Thrones has got everyone convinced that character death is the only way to achieve meaningful drama? On The Good Place , everyone is already dead, and the only serious threat to the characters' wellbeing—that of being tortured for eternity—is so over the top and inconsistent with the show's comedic to...

After seven years, four seasons, eighteen episodes and two specials, the conversation around Black Mirror seems to have settled itself into distinct camps. There are those who see it as a meaningful commentary on the growing role of technology in modern society and the pitfalls of our growing dependence on it. And there are those who decry it as a cynical, reflexively anti-tech exercise in nastiness. I tend to think of myself as falling between the two extremes—there are a lot of ideas in Black Mirror that I find interesting and unique, especially when it comes to the intersection of technology and capitalism; but I often feel as if many of them have happened largely by accident. The show's latest foray, however, the interactive movie "Bandersnatch", written by series creator Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade, has shaken my indulgence. Not only does it revel in some of Black Mirror 's worst excesses, it's also an extremely bad example of interactive fi...

I read 96 books in 2018.  Even allowing for the fact that that number is inflated by quicker reads like graphic novels and standalone novellas, that's an impressive haul, maybe the highest number since I started keeping track on this blog.  Unfortunately, there was a bit of a quantity-over-quality attribute to this year's reading.  A lot of books that I was expecting to enjoy turned out to be only so-so.  In particular, when looking over the year's reading log to prepare for this post, I was struck by how few genre books came close to making the cut.  As you'll see below, there are only two blatantly SFF books on the best books list, and only one of them was published by a genre publisher. I'm not sure if it's related, but this has also been one of the most up-to-date reading years in my life.  Nearly half the books I read in 2018 were published this year, and another third in 2017.  This didn't use to be the case for me, but as ebooks have made imme...

Alfonso Cuarón's Roma has been generating a lot of conversation recently, for reasons that sometimes seem only tangentially connected to the film itself.  First, because it's a serious Oscar contender shot in black and white, with dialogue in Spanish and Mixtec, and starring a complete newcomer.  Second, because it's a Netflix movie that is probably the platform's first genuine masterpiece, which has also led to a side-conversation about whether it's worth watching on a home screen or even a personal device.  (As one of the people lucky enough to have a theatrical release of the film near her, my answer is that Roma definitely benefits from a big screen and a theatrical sound system, but that it's worth watching any way you can.) Along the way, the film itself, which covers a year in the life of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a maid and nanny in the home of an affluent Mexico City family in the early 70s, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle.  Cuarón based the...

My last PHotF column for 2018 discusses Aminder Dhaliwal delightful webcomic Woman World , recently collected in a single volume.  It's a gently humorous post-apocalyptic story about a world where men have died out, and about as different from the likes of Y: The Last Man as that starting position will let you get.  The comic is sweet, irreverent, and most of all, dedicated to letting its characters be people, and live their lives without the undertone of tragedy that we might have expected. This is also an opportunity for me to take a broader look at how SF handles gender, and specifically, the idea that gender roles and even our definition of gender might change.  When you think about it for just a moment, that's a very obvious component of worldbuilding--we don't look at gender the same way that people from only a few decades ago did, so why should people centuries in the future, who live in galaxy-spanning, space-faring societies, have gender roles that so closely...

My latest Political History of the Future column is up at Lawyers, Guns & Money , discussing State Tectonics , the concluding volume of Malka Older's Centennal Cycle .  As I wrote in my review of the first volume in the sequences, Infomocracy , these are not terribly exciting books in terms of plot, but they make up for that with the breadth and richness of their worldbuilding, and more than that, by their willingness to imagine a geopolitical future that is not simply post-democratic.  Older tries to envision how a future democracy that is different, but still suffers from many of the same problems, as ours might look like, and the result is fascinating and thought-provoking. The point of the Centennal Cycle books, as I see it, is not to offer a plausible alternative to our current democratic system, but to encourage us to ask questions about how that system is organized, and whether we could make different choices that could lead to better outcomes. The idea of a no...

Today at Strange Horizons I review  Isaac R. Fellman's The Breath of the Sun , a remarkably assured debut that challenged me to fully capture it.  As I write in my opening paragraph, it's a novel that invites comparisons, but is also very much its own thing: There are any number of neat, one-sentence ways to sum up Isaac R. Fellman's The Breath of the Sun . You could describe it as a cross between Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria (2013), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997). You could sum it up as a fantasy-world fictionalization of the first summit of Everest, in which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are both women, and one of them is a wizard. And you could even make an argument for the book as a Nabokovian meta-narrative, in which both the narrator and her first and only reader try to puzzle out what actually happened, juxtaposing the story with later observations and documentary evidence....

In one of this year's previous movie roundups, I noted what a terrible year 2018 has turned out to be for blockbuster, action-adventure entertainment.  That situation hasn't improved (and seems unlikely to by the end of the year) but as the seasons change and the more sophisticated segment of the year's movie slate starts showing up in theaters, I've found myself pleasantly surprised.  2018's grown-up movies and Oscar hopefuls are an intriguingly diverse bunch, with some genuinely out there entries .  Even the films I haven't been wowed by have felt enough like their own thing to be worth watching.  This roundup covers films from late summer and early fall--it also helps that Israeli film distributors seem to have abandoned their habit of only screening Oscar hopefuls in the weeks right before the ceremony, which means that this year, for once, I can feel like part of the conversation around the award as it develops. BlacKkKlansman - Based on true events, Sp...