Asking the Wrong Questions

Last week I wrote about the dubious pleasure of reading or watching something so hilariously terrible, you have to tell everyone about it. Most bad things aren't like that, though. Usually, when a book or movie or TV show are bad, they're bad in a boring, depressing way that makes you sad for all the energy expended on them. Such is the case with Netflix's film adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion , directed by Carrie Cracknell and with a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow. When the trailer for the film dropped last month, full of pratfalls and fourth-wall-breaking asides to the camera, Austen fans reared back in dismay. Why take Austen's saddest, most mature novel and reimagine it as a Fleabag -esque comedy in which the heroine muses, of the man who got away, "we're worse than exes; we're friends"? The film itself, however, is hardly worthy of all that outrage. It's bad, but doesn't even have the decency to be interestin...

I enjoyed the first volume in Martine's space opera series, A Memory Called Empire , though I fell short of its general acclaim (it went on to win the Hugo, and was nominated for the Nebula and the Clarke). To me it paled beside the other lauded space operas of the last decade, lacking their clarity of purpose and inventive worldbuilding choices. The sequel works better, for various structural and thematic reasons. But it still leaves me wondering what this series adds to the field that justifies the accolades it has received. Memory introduced us to Mahit Dzmare, newly-appointed ambassador from the small, independent space station Lsel to the neighboring Tleixcalaan empire. Like most people on Lsel, Mahit carries the personality imprint of her predecessor in the position, Yskandr Aghavn, whose memories and experience are meant to merge into her own personality. But when she arrives at the imperial court, Mahit discovers that the imprint has been sabotaged, and that the older Yska...

One thing that has happened as I've gotten older and more experienced as a critic is that I tend to write fewer outright pans. Life is too short to spend consuming things that you hate, much less expending the mental energy to explain and illustrate why they should be hated. But every now and then, a work comes along that hits just the right sweet spot, so terrible that there are only bad things to say about it, but in a way that makes it impossible to look away, and which compels you to share your dismay with everyone else. HBO Max's The Time Traveler's Wife , based on the bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger and adapted by TV wunderkind Steven Moffat, is such a work. Over at Strange Horizons , I try to summarize the many ways in which this show fails. More importantly, I try to figure out whether the root of the show's badness lies in the original novel—whose problems have been amply elaborated upon over the last twenty years—or in the no less problematic showrunn...

The author of HHhH returns with another book that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Technically, Civilizations —which imagines a world where the social and economic collapse that had devastated the Inca empire around the time of Columbus's arrival in the Americas doesn't occur, and instead it's the Inca who colonize Europe—is an alternate history, maybe even science fiction. But the narrative's tone is removed, relating its events like a historical lecture—albeit one with a wry, slightly mocking tone—interspersed with journal excerpts, letters, official documents, and even bits of poetry. There are no real characters, just historical figures, more important for their influence on events than for their psychology, and although the narrator occasionally makes personal asides, their identity and reasons for laying out this history remain opaque. I'm much more comfortable describing Civilizations as a work of creative nonfiction than science fiction, but...

My review of the second season of Russian Doll appears today at Strange Horizons . As I write in the review, Russian Doll is almost more interesting for how it reflects the vicissitudes of the streaming era, and Netflix's wavering fortunes over the last few years, than for the story it tells. Its second season joins several other shows that should by all rights have been one-and-done, but which were brought back due to enthusiastic audience response and platforms desperate for content, only to be met by a resounding shrug from audiences who had already moved on. The season itself, meanwhile, lacks the tight plotting and evocative central McGuffin of the first season, but it still has significant charms, even if these often come down getting to spend more time with the characters, and in the situations, that were so delightful last season. Russian Doll 's first season felt almost like a precision instrument (a precision that contrasted nicely with Nadia's chaotic nature),...

[This post first appeared, in slightly different form, at Lawyers, Guns & Money .] The conversation about the parlous state of the romantic comedy has been going on for so long that it has consumed not only buckets of virtual ink, but the real-world variety too. At this stage, it might be time to admit that the genre's heyday in the 80s and 90s was more of a blip than the long fallow period we've been in ever since. And yet, every few years someone comes up with a new killer app to save the romcom. Remember when (500) Days of Summer was going to revitalize the genre? Remember how, in the wake of the success of How I Met Your Mother , someone coined the term rom-sitcom and declared that from now on, all romcoms would be TV shows? Remember when Hulu crowed about screening the world's first Christmas romcom to focus on a lesbian couple, and then we watched with horrified fascination as Mackenzie Davis treated Kristen Stewart worse than any male romcom lead has ever treat...

A gaggle of shorter pieces of writing published elsewhere on the internet over the last couple of days. First, at the magazine ArtReview , I have a short piece about multiverses and how they're used by franchises like the MCU as well as smaller films like Everything Everywhere All at Once : This kind of appeal to recognition can serve as a pleasant garnish. One of the earliest on-screen multiverse stories, the Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019-2020), took a great deal of pleasure in bringing together previous inhabitants of DC characters from projects old (Burt Ward from the original Batman TV series, 1966-1968), failed (Ashley Scott from the short-lived Birds of Prey , 2002-2003) and wildly successful (Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman from the beloved animated series, 1992-1995). At its worst, however, it feels like a kind of anti-story. As Tony Soprano once put it, "remember when" is the lowest form of conversation. When John Krasinski appears in the latest Doctor Str...

There's a problem I've talked about before on this blog, of trying to review something really good and not knowing what to say about it beyond "it's really good, guys". When a work is bad, or even just flawed, you have an access point. When something works on all levels, though, it can be hard to tease out the threads that makes that success happen, to find the specific selling point that might attract an audience to it. That problem is compounded in the case of A24's sci-fi extravaganza Everything Everywhere All at Once —a film that, in my reckoning, is currently in the running for the best movie of 2022. True to its name, this is a film that is doing, and about, so much at any given moment that to focus on any specific aspect of it runs the risk of getting pulled down a rabbit hole, bogged down in specifics while losing sight of the whole. See, for example, how much there is to say just in summing up the film's plot. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a harried...

There's a moment early in the new Doctor Strange movie that seems to promise something genuinely dark. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is attending the wedding of his ex-girlfriend Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams). He ends up seated next to Nic (Michael Stuhlbarg), a former colleague from his days as a surgeon, who informs Strange that during the five year interregnum when they were both reduced to dust by Thanos, his brother died. Was there, Nic asks, really no other way to defat Thanos than the one Strange chose? And for a moment, you feel it. The sheer existential terror, the crippling despair, of existing in a universe in which the very fabric of your reality is subject to the whims—or even the considered decisions—of not just cosmic beings like Thanos, but ordinary people like Strange. The sort of people you might end up chatting to at a wedding, while having to swallow the knowledge that they have determined the course of your life—often without even knowing that you...

By a total coincidence, Byrne's second novel resonates with both of this year's previous Recent Reading reviews. Like Matt Bell's Appleseed , it's a climate novel that proceeds in three timelines, past, present, and future, connecting to and echoing one another. And like Benjamin Rosenbaum's The Unravelling , it depicts a far-future, anti-capitalist society where post-human people can sculpt their bodies and choose their social milieu with incredible freedom, but which turns out to be more repressive, and in need of revolution, than it first seems. Obviously,  Byrne strikes her own path, and among her most distinctive choices is the one to construct the novel around the culture and worldview of the ancient Maya, who are depicted here, in all the complexity of their rituals and beliefs, with an acceptance and lack of judgment that can take a while to get used to. In the past storyline, set in 1012 South America, twins Ajul and Ixul are preparing to accede to the thro...

My review of Shelley Parker-Chan's debut novel She Who Became the Sun —recently nominated for a Hugo award (the first time ever, apparently, for an Australian author), with Parker-Chan also appearing on the Astounding ballot—appears today at Strange Horizons . I enjoyed this novel a great deal, and particularly the way in which it combined a non-Western historical fantasy of the type we've seen so much of in the last decade or so with some really interesting ideas about gender. It's a story about how societies are weakened by rigid gender roles, and about how specific individuals, by queering those roles, can achieve power. Right at the beginning, then, Parker-Chan establishes that the rigid gender roles that govern the novel's society aren't simply a matter of one gender having more power and freedom than the other, but of separate spheres of knowledge—and that the men in the novel, by convincing themselves that women's knowledge is both useless and out of rea...

My series at Lawyers, Guns & Money about how science fiction constructs its social, political, and economic futures, A Political History of the Future, has been dormant for several years (you can find an archive of previous posts here ). So I should probably thank the producers of Apple TV+'s Severance for inspiring me to pick it up again . The show, in which a group of office workers undergo a procedure that severs their personality in two, creating completely distinct lives for their work and outside selves, does a lot of interesting things with its construction of a sort of high-tech company town, a place where employees who have never known the outside world are emotionally and psychologically conditioned in ways that, one suspects, companies in the real world would love to do. But it's also a show with some profound blind spots, ones that are perhaps inevitable for a series produced by a streaming service that is aiming for an upscale, affluent audience. There's a...

The long-awaited—nearly twenty years!—first novel by Rosenbaum is part teenage coming of age novel, part posthuman, far-future extravaganza, a combination that is often delightful but occasionally leaves you wanting more. Set hundreds of thousands of years in the future, on a planet so far distant from Earth that it (and the history of human colonization of the stars) are but a distant memory, The Unraveling appears, at first, to be positing a society of Banks-ian liberty and freedom of expression. The humans on the unnamed planet can change their appearance at will, up to and including their genitals and secondary sexual characteristics (which come in a much wider variety than we're used to). Their society is, if not quite post-scarcity, then aimed at avoiding the accumulation of wealth and property—there is, in fact, no ownership of property, only use-right, which is allocated according to social approval metrics, which also determine access to most goods and services. There doe...