Asking the Wrong Questions

"Seven years ago I said we'd be watching you, and we have been. Hoping your ape-like race would demonstrate some growth, give some indication that your minds have room for expansion. And what have we seen instead? You spending time worrying about Commander Riker's career. Listening to Counselor Troi's pedantic psychobabble. Indulging Data in his witless explorations of humanity. … It's time to put an end to your trek through the stars, to make room for other, more worthy species." Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation , "All Good Things…" 1994  Reexamining my youthful SF TV loves has been a recurring theme on this blog, with decidedly mixed results. Babylon 5 was a profound disappointment . Deep Space Nine an unexpected delight . I held off on revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation for a long time because I had the sneaking suspicion that it would fall on the former end of the scale, and because my attachment to it runs a lot deeper th...

This week's Strange Horizons reviews cover two short story collections and a movie.  Niall Harrison is impressed with the Jonathan Strahan-edited The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson , finding that many of the themes he's admired in Robinson's novels are ably expressed in his short fiction.  Anil Menon reviews Beth Bernobich's collection A Handful of Pearls & Other Stories and also likes what he finds.  Less positive is Adam Roberts's review of Battle: Los Angeles , a film he likens to "the experience of sitting inside an oil drum for two hours whilst people hit the outside with metal rods and drop firecrackers in at the top."

Over at the Strange Horizons blog, I've published a call for reviewers , and particularly female reviewers.  This is a follow-up to Niall Harrison's recent project to examine how genre review venues break down according to gender.  Click through to read more, and if you're interested in writing for Strange Horizons , by all means drop me a line.

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with one of the most talked-about books of the last few months, Jo Walton's Among Others , which charms reviewer Michael Levy by being as much about the experience of being a genre fan as a genre story itself.  Graham Sleight takes a look at the seemingly puzzling combination of Michael Moorcock and Doctor Who tie-in novels in Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles , and concludes that the groundbreaking author and the classic-but-revitalized TV series have a lot in common.  Today's review is of the anthology Sprawl , edited by Alisa Krasnostein, a collection of fantastic stories by Australian authors from Twelfth Planet Press that deeply impresses its reviewer, Dan Hartland.

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Matthew Jones's take on Caprica , which is a little more negative than mine and, interestingly, more concerned with the technological questions raised by the series's premise, which the show neglected in favor of political and social storylines and, of course, soap opera.  On Wednesday, Hannah Strom-Martin reviews the anthology Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die , which I (and I think Hannah too) had taken as nothing but a gimmick, but which she finds surprisingly thoughtful and worthwhile.  Today, David McWilliam reviews Charles Stross's latest Laundry novel, The Fuller Memorandum , which he thinks is a welcome return to form after the disappointing Jennifer Morgue .

A year ago, when Being Human concluded its second season, I was pretty sure I was done with the show.  Being Human 's first season was a fun but underbaked affair, clearly too charmed by its own premise--a vampire, Mitchell, a werewolf, George, and a ghost, Annie, who move into a house in Bristol--to do very much with it.  The show's second season took that premise and ran with it, and the result was not only a poor piece of storytelling, but morally revolting.  Having rid himself at the end of the first season of his genocidal sire-turned-enemy Herrick and thrown in his lot with humanity, Mitchell discovers that his human girlfriend Lucy is in league with the preacher Kemp, who has sent men to kill Mitchell.  Mitchell takes out his anger over Lucy's betrayal on all of humanity, waylaying a passenger train and slaughtering the twenty people on board, but the season ends by concluding that Lucy and Kemp are the true villains.  "Look at us both, covered in othe...

The results of the Strange Horizons 2010 readers' poll are in , and, alongside such winners as Theodora Goss (best short story), Marge Simon (best poem), and Orrin Grey (best article), I'm stunned to announce that I was voted best reviewer.  I'm joined in that category by Adam Roberts, Niall Harrison, Matthew Cheney, and Farah Mendlesohn, which is such an august group of reviewers that I can't believe anyone would rank me above them. Thanks a lot to everyone who voted, and congratulations to the other winners. Genevieve Valentine joins Strange Horizons as a columnist this week, and her first column is about reading the film Winter's Bone as a fairy tale.  I saw Winter's Bone just last week, and at the Strange Horizons blog I discuss Genevieve's column and some of my reactions to the film. Actually, the absence of a thing: I've let my series about the Strange Horizons review policy lapse for, quite frankly, lack of time.  I'm hopeful th...

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Richard Larson's discussion of one of the most talked-about science fiction novels of the last year, Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe , with Richard joining in the novel's near-unanimous praise.  On Wednesday, Andy Sawyer puzzles over Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game , and the meaning of its twist ending.  Today's review , by Duncan Lawie, is of a debut that we might have called urban fantasy a few years ago when that term had a very different meaning, Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London ( Midnight Riot in the US).

Some of the books I never got around to writing about in the women writing SF project, and a few of the ones I've read since then. Moxyland by Lauren Beukes - I found a lot to be impressed by in Moxyland , one of the most talked-about debuts of the last few years.  What I didn't find was a novel.  The book feels like a demonstration of Beukes's talent--for worldbuilding, for constructing interesting and flawed characters, for bravely taking her story to its dispiriting conclusion--but its pieces don't come together into a greater whole.  Which is not to say that Moxyland isn't worth reading.  The setting--a future South Africa in which corporations and government have become indistinguishable--is a nice blend of cyberpunk tropes, real-world problems taken to the nth degree, and the strangeness of a foreign country with a troubled history.  A lot of the devices Beukes deploys are familiar--cell-phones are necessary for everything from buying food to using pu...

This week on Strange Horizons , Nader Elhefnawy rounds off February with his review of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Empress of Eternity , which Nader thinks has its strong points, but is ultimately a disappointing execution of an interesting premise.  Dan Hartland kicks off March on a more positive note, with a glowing review of Zoran Živković's short novel The Ghostwriter .  Continuing the trend, C.B. Harvey is also quite pleased with Col Buchanan's debut fantasy, Farlander .  John Clute is less cheerful in the latest installment of his column Scores , in which he is decidedly unimpressed by three recent novellas, Tobias Buckell's The Executioness , Paolo Bacigalupi's The Alchemist , and Elizabeth Bear's The White City .

My movie-watching slowed way down in the second half of 2010--the posts tagged 'film' from that period cover nearly all of the films I watched--but with winter the interchangeable action films and rage-inducing romantic comedies give way to more interesting stuff, and I've found myself at the movie theater again. The Kids Are All Right (2010) - It's easy to imagine how this gentle, well-made but unexciting film somehow managed to make its way to such universal, but mostly overblown, acclaim.  There are the modest beginnings as an indie flick (with, admittedly, a top-drawer cast) that might incline reviewers to over-emphasize their praise.  There is the heartening subject matter, the marriage of Jules (Annette Bening) and Nic (Julianne Moore), which is rocked when their children make contact with Paul, the sperm donor who fathered them (Mark Ruffalo), and invite him into their lives.  There is the film's depiction of gay marriage and gay families as entirely norma...

Before I get to the week's reviews, I'd like to mention that the Strange Horizons readers' poll, where you can vote for your favorite stories, poems, articles and reviewers, is open until March 6th.  Vote early and vote often (though only your last ballot will count). Now the reviews: the week kicks off with Jonathan McCalmont (who has just joined Strange Horizons 's staff as junior articles editor and a contributor to the blog--welcome aboard, Jonathan!) writing about Mira Grant's Feed , which he argues is a vicious satire of the state of contemporary journalism.  William Mingin discusses Harry Connolly's Game of Cages , a dark fantasy detective story and the second in the Twenty Palaces series featuring Ray Lilly.  We end the week with some nonfiction in Raz Greenberg's review of Douglas E. Cowan's Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television , which Raz concludes is more about transcendence than SF film and...

In my recent post about M.J. Engh's Arslan , I noted how much of its time--the mid-70s--the novel seemed, most particularly in its conviction that America, still reeling from the cultural clashes of the 60s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, was on the verge of collapse.  A few days later, Keith Phipps, writing for the AV Club, made the same observation about Stephen King's The Stand .  Even defaced by King's ill-considered 1990 expansion of the novel, which moved its setting from 1980 to 1990, Phipps writes, The Stand is unmistakably "a product of the '70s," suffused with that decade's sense of disintegration and impending doom. I enjoyed The Stand from start to finish, but never as much as in its first third, when the fast-acting "superflu" known as Captain Trips destroys an America that was already destroying itself. The government—the same one that recently lied to the American people about Watergate and the origins and scale of the w...

This wasn't a conscious plan on my part, but it seems rather appropriate that on Valentine's Day, Strange Horizons should have run T.S. Miller's review of Robert Silverberg's The Last Song of Orpheus , a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Miller finds Silverberg's retelling oddly cold, but his review is as much a discussion of the myth itself, of earlier, including medieval, versions of it, and of other retellings of myths by genre writers.  Hannah Strom-Martin is a great deal more positive about David Moles's alternate history novella Seven Cities of Gold , whose only flaw, she concludes, is that it may be too clever, too layered, and too sophisticated for its own good.  Kelly Jennings, on the other hand, is disappointed by Lois McMaster Bujold's Cryoburn , which, she concludes, teeters on the edge of engaging with issues of economic inequality and exploitation, but veers away in order to tell a fun, consequence-free adventure story.

There are a few more books in my reading project that I haven't written about, but as I have less to say about them I'll probably leave them for my next recent reading roundup.  In the meantime I've gone back to my TBR stack with a slight feeling of letdown--there are a lot of books there I'd like to read, but I've enjoyed this project and the new vistas it's opened to me.  For the rest of the year, then, here are some more science fiction books by female writers that I hope to get to (besides, that is, more of the four I've   written about ). Tricia Sullivan - If either Sullivan's Maul (which came second in Niall's best of the decade poll) or her most recent, and very well-received, Lightborn , had been available for the Kindle I would have added them to the reading project.  As it is I hope to get my hands on copies, electronic or physical, in the near future. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - Beukes's debut Moxyland was one of the books I ...

This week on Strange Horizons, Roz Kaveney discusses the suddenly very topical Deep State by Walter Jon Williams, a novel about a popular revolution in the Middle East powered by the internet.  Sara Polsky is impressed by the Kate Bernheimer-edited My Mother She Ate Me, My Father He Killed Me: Forty New Fairy Tales , in which authors from the literary and genre ends of the scale retell fairy tales.  Finally, Niall Alexander raves about Joe Abercrombie's latest The Heroes , which he calls a return to form after the disappointment of Best Served Cold , and an expression of Abercrombie's fondness for gore and unsavory characters.

The first time I tried to read Arslan I was seventeen or eighteen.  The book came to me via Amazon's recommendation engine, which in those days, before I found an online community of readers, was my main source of new and unfamiliar titles.  I recall not knowing much about the book before buying or reading it--just that it was well-regarded, and that it told the story of the invasion and conquest of the United States by the titular general.  The book began calmly enough--narrated by Franklin L. Bond, the principal of a middle school in Kraftsville, Illinois, on the day that Arslan's forces roll into town, its opening scenes follow Bond as he steadfastly tries to calm his staff and students and to prevent any bloodshed.  Then came the chapter's climax, a celebratory dinner held by Arslan for his forces in the school gymnasium.  At the end of the dinner, Arslan brings out two students, a boy and a girl, and, before his appreciative men and the horror-struck staff...