Asking the Wrong Questions

A bumper crop of films as the year draws to its close--this write-up doesn't even include The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn , which I watched only a few weeks ago and already can't remember a thing about.  And there's more to come--the next month sees The Artist , Margin Call , Hugo , and We Need to Talk About Kevin opening in Israeli theaters.  My thoughts at this interim point: Moneyball (2011) - For brief moments in this tedious, inert film one gets a sense of the very interesting work it might have been, a darkly cynical anti-sports movie.  The film, which follows baseball manager Billy Beane (a typically good Brad Pitt in a run of the mill performance whose Oscar buzz is utterly baffling) as he tries to use statistics to get out from under the huge budget disparity between his team and the league leaders by identifying cheap but under-appreciated players, works to undermine the romanticism of the form.  Gone are the homilies about teamwork-...

It's late December, which for the last few years has been the time for my annual Dexter write-up.  That's not going to happen this year or, I suspect, any year in the future.  If you've watched the last season of Dexter , you know why.  If you haven't, do yourself a favor and avoid it.  Watch Homeland instead!  One of the biggest problems plaguing Dexter 's sixth season was that it aired on the same channel, and back to back, with what is by now widely acknowledged as the best new show of the fall, if not all of 2011.  The contrast between the two shows only served to highlight the fact that Dexter is over, and Homeland is where it's at. The basic premise--CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) believes that rescued American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) has been turned by his captors and is part of a planned attack on US soil--is fairly well known, but Homeland is nevertheless hard to talk about as a piece of storytelling because it takes its ...

It would be both accurate and misleading to describe Neal Stephenson's latest novel Reamde as Cryptonomicon: The Sequel .  Accurate because, like Stephenson's 1999 breakout novel, Reamde is a multi-threaded, globe-spanning technothriller whose SFnal quality is derived not from invention but from a preoccupation with the role that technology plays in its present moment--the dot com boom and World War II in Cryptonomicon , the Facebook era and the War on Terror in Reamde .  Misleading because where Cryptonomicon was a thrilling, exhilarating reading experiences, whose segues and meanderings were as fun and fascinating as the meat of its plot, Reamde is rather mediocre, its fun moments offset by long stretches of tedium.  What's worse, Reamde is the sort of novel that makes you take a long, hard look at its author's previous output--even the parts of it you loved, like Cryptonomicon --and wonder whether it's Stephenson who has changed, or whether we're just no...

William Mingin kicks off this week's reviews with a look at two collections of Robert E. Howard's non-Conan stories, Conan's Brethren and Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures , concluding that they illustrate the breadth of Howard's interests and his still-potent appeal.  Marina Berlin reviews the art-house SF film Another Earth , and though she finds much to praise she is also disappointed by the film's ultimately glancing treatment of its SFnal premise and character interactions.  Sofia Samatar reviews Egyptian bestseller Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, a bleak vision of that country in the near future, and comes away with mixed reactions, admiring the novel's aim and message but dubious about its use of rape to deliver that message, and of its construction of female characters. Shoutout to Erin Hodges.

So China Miéville has written a science fiction novel, and it is... well, it is many things, but perhaps we'll start with "Old School."  Miéville is the author who took the top off fantasy ten years ago, and his next to last novel, The City & The City, was so sui generis that it won awards for both science fiction (the British Science Fiction Award, the Clarke) and fantasy (the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award for best fantasy novel), despite containing no non-realist elements whatsoever.  But Miéville's latest novel, Embassytown , though in many ways as dazzlingly original as anything he's written, is positively retro.  It's a planetary romance, a far future SF story about a time when humans have spread through the galaxy with the help of vaguely explained FTL technology, a story of contact with winged, eye-stalked aliens.  It is, in short, that increasingly rare, increasingly unfashionable artifact, a core SF story, and its tropes are pure Golden Ag...

The week's first review is by Matt Hilliard, who looks at Rob Ziegler's debut novel Seed , a post environmental collapse novel.  Though he questions Ziegler's environmental model, Matt finds much to admire about Seed's depiction of a slowly collapsing world.  Lila Garrott is disappointed with Lisa Goldstein's The Uncertain Places , arguing that it does little that is new or original with its fairy tale components, and that its characters are unconvincing.  Nathaniel Katz is ambivalent about Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour , a reprinted novel from 1989, and The Hunter From the Woods , a collection of stories starring the same main character.  Though he admires the pizzazz of this character, a werewolf James Bond who kills Nazis, he finds the execution, and particularly the two books' frequent sex scenes, rather tedious. Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

After six years of writing about him, it feels as if I've developed a certain patter where Terry Pratchett, and particularly his Discworld novels, are concerned.  Though I've liked some of his novels better and others worse, my reaction to them in the years since I've been keeping this blog has been a near-uniform mix of fondness and exasperation, the former in recognition of the sheer breadth of accomplishment that is Discworld, and of the inventiveness that still goes into it, and the latter in sad cognizance that the series is growing increasingly stale, and that its inventiveness is, more and more often, watered down with recycled themes, gags, and character arcs.  This has been especially true of the books featuring Sam Vimes, arguably Pratchett's most enduring, most iconic character.  More than any of the other Discworld series, the Vimes novels stick closely to a formula, which sees the erstwhile policeman thrust into unfamiliar settings to investigate murders th...