Asking the Wrong Questions

I have a short review of Tade Thompson's The Rosewater Redemption at The Guardian .  This is the concluding book in the Wormwood trilogy, whose first volume, Rosewater , was published as a standalone novel in 2016, then republished in the UK by Orbit last year (it went on to win the Clarke award earlier this year).  The second volume, The Rosewater Insurrection , was also published this year, which is going to cause some issues come award-nominating time.  This is a trilogy that deserves to be recognized by awards, but I'm really not sure which volume I prefer (maybe this is finally a justification for the best series Hugo category). Since I have more space (and fewer limitations on things like spoilers) on my own blog, I'd like to elaborate a little on the review, and particularly the sense I got that the Wormwood trilogy changed as it expanded from a standalone to a series.  When I first read Rosewater (and even more so when I reread it last month, in preparat...

Halfway into its fourth and final season, if there's one thing that fans of The Good Place have learned to expect, it is surprise.  Over the course of its magnificent, exhilarating run, the show has never failed to pull the rug out from under the audience's feet, burning through storylines at a dizzying rate, blowing up its premise and settings, and just generally making people say "what the fork?" a lot.  I think we can agree that only a fool would try to formulate a response to The Good Place 's argument before that argument has been fully laid out, but nevertheless, that's what I'm going to try to do here.  In a little more than a day we'll find out how our heroes' experiment, to demonstrate that humans, when removed from the rigors of the world, can improve simply out of the desire to be better friends and neighbors, played out.  (My guess?  Chidi gained points, but lost them for punching Brent.  John gained points, but lost them for spilling ...

Fall has begun, which once upon a time used to mean a flurry of writing as I scrambled to review all of the networks' new shows.  I haven't done that in a while, because few network shows feel worth talking about these days, or, for that matter, sticking with for a second episode (the one exception so far: the Cobie Smulders-starring Stumptown , which is basically the older-and-sadder-Veronica-Mars show I wanted but didn't get from the actual Veronica Mars ).  That may yet change, but in the meantime, let's talk about some of the (mostly) streaming shows that premiered towards the end of the summer.  They're a weird, ambitious bunch of series that don't always work, but demonstrate a willingness to experiment, and a sense of style, whose absence is only one of the reasons that network TV leaves me so underwhelmed these days.  (Obviously, Good Omens is not a summer show, but I've had this review of it sitting around for a while, so take it as a bonus.) G...

My review of Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac's Dark Constellations (translated by Roy Kesey) appears today at Strange Horizons .  This a strange, challenging novella that pushes the boundaries of what we define as cyberpunk, and I found it difficult to sum up.  Also challenging: figuring out how to cope with the book's extravagantly bad sex scenes.  Most other reviews I've read have either delicately ignored Dark Constellations 's descriptions of sex, which are as bizarre as they are unerotic, or treated them as a flaw in an otherwise fascinating work.  As I write in the review, I think Oloixarac is doing something deliberate with these passages, though this doesn't make them any easier to read. In the world of Dark Constellations , sex has one purpose: the exchange of genetic information. A young Argentinian graduate student on a research trip to Brazil who falls into a passionate affair with a local engineer is described as having "encountered the sourc...

Veronica Mars has got a Veronica Mars problem.  This is the inescapable conclusion one must draw from the multiple attempted--and, for the most part, failed--reinventions the show has undergone since the end of its first, transcendent season in 2005.  In those fourteen years, we've watched the show try to repeat history (the second season, which furnished Veronica with another high-school-set mystery reeking of sexual violence and the entitlement of the rich), switch formats (the third season, which split its storytelling into three multi-episode arcs, each dealing with a different mystery), attempt to switch settings (the "Veronica Mars, FBI agent" sizzle reel Rob Thomas produced in an attempt to earn the show a fourth season), make a time jump (the 2014 movie, which did have a mystery story somewhere in there but was mostly concerned with delivering all the fanservice viewers could stomach), and now, with Hulu's eight-episode revival, seemingly do all of those thin...

For the better part of the last decade, one after another of Hollywood's A-listers have decided to make glossy, prestigious, semi-cerebral space-set science fiction movies.  Matthew McConaughey had Interstellar .  Sandra Bullock had Gravity .  Matt Damon had The Martian .  If you want to make a mini-trend out of the phenomenon, you could throw in Amy Adams in Arrival (if you're willing to extend "space-set" to include a story about aliens coming from space), Ryan Gosling in First Man (if you substitute Apollo program dramatization for science fiction), and Sean Penn in The First (if you extend your field to include television, and also your definition of A-lister to include Sean Penn).  Vague as they were about the film's events, the trailers for James Gray's Ad Astra seemed to suggest that it is now Brad Pitt's turn.  That he too, wanted a star vehicle with lots of gorgeous visuals (and thus opportunities for awed reaction shots) and a plot that riff...

I didn't write any film criticism this summer, because it was a singularly uninteresting summer for blockbuster movies.  I skipped most of the big titles and kept my eyes out for any interesting counter-programming (of which there wasn't a lot).  Which is why this roundup starts with a leftover review from early July, of a film that I imagine most of you have already forgotten.  Otherwise, however, as summer has wound down and film festivals have wound up, some engaging selections have finally shown up at my local movie theaters.  I still don't think 2019 is going to shape up to be a great movie year (and certainly not for genre and blockbuster movies) but this bunch of films is satisfyingly eclectic, and mostly satisfying. Spider-Man: Far From Home - The second outing starring Tom Holland as the MCU's version of Peter Parker picks up eight months after the events of Avengers: Endgame , in a world reeling from the upheavals of the last five years, but still nowhe...