Asking the Wrong Questions

To get the boring stuff out of the way first: The Huger Games is a good movie.  Tense, fast-paced, and riveting, its nearly two and a half hour running time passes effortlessly and with a white-knuckle intensity that leaves one feeling almost breathless when the credits roll.  Jennifer Lawrence is excellent as Katniss Everdeen, the girl forced to compete for her life in a gladiatorial contest with twenty three other children, including one who is in love with her, crafting a character who is both heroic and overwhelmed, savvy and naive.  The film's world, a future America called Panem in which a hedonistic, wealthy capitol lords over the dirt poor districts that produce its food, goods, and energy, is a perfect blend of the familiar, the futuristic, and the backwards--Katniss's home, district 12, looks and feels in many ways like a Depression-era mining town, but with enough touches or modernity to make it believable as a backwater of a futuristic empire, and the ca...

Like, I suspect, a lot of people of my generation, my first introduction to George Méliès's 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon came from the Smashing Pumpkins' 1996 music video "Tonight, Tonight."   At the time, I had no idea who Méliès was or even that the video was an homage--it was simply a gorgeous, halucinatory short film set to beautiful music.  It was another homage to A Trip to the Moon that introduced me to Méliès's name and his importance in the history of filmmaking--the final episode of the 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon , titled "Le Voyage dans la Lune," cuts between the preparations for the final Apollo mission and an interview with one of Méliès's assistants (played by producer Tom Hanks), who describes the film's production.  Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated, rapturously received film Hugo (based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick) also has Méliès and A Trip to the Moon at its heart,...

I'm not sure that I've mentioned it here before, but I'm a member of Chicon 7 , the 2012 Worldcon that will be held at the end of August in Chicago.  It's a bit up in the air yet whether I'll actually be able to attend, but for the time being I'm a member, which gives me nominating rights for the Hugo awards.  The deadline for submitting nominations is fast approaching--March 11th--and I'm afraid my progress through the ranks of prospective nominees has been poor.  If in previous years I made a point of reading through the year's entire output of short fiction magazines, online and off, and sought out books that might be likely nominees, this year I just haven't had the time.  In the short fiction categories, I've settled for relying on others to thin the herd--the Locus Recommended Reading List (as previously mentioned, Liz has a post linking to those stories on the list that are available online), Rachel Swirsky's recommendation posts ( s...

The films of 2011 are coming in hard and fast this February, a deluge before the pre-spring effects films of 2012 show up.  There are still a few of last year's films yet to come, but here are my thoughts on the most recent batch. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - I gulped down Lionel Shriver's bestselling novel a few years ago, but for all that I couldn't put the book down, I also couldn't get around my core difficulty with it--that a story purporting to discuss the difficulties of motherhood and the way that women feel pressured into it oversimplified itself by deciding that the title character was born evil.  Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Shriver's novel addresses and defuses this difficulty by leaning into it, suggesting at almost every turn that Kevin, who just before his sixteenth birthday shot half a dozen students at his school, and his mother Eva (a magnificent Tilda Swinton), who narrates the novel and is the film's main character, are inhuman...

My review of the found footage superhero film Chronicle appears today at Strange Horizons .  I was initially dubious about mashing together two such tired concepts, but despite some weaknesses on the character front Chronicle revitalizes a subgenre I'd long since thought had lost its sense of immediacy.  Definitely worth a look.

The 2011 Locus poll is open , and for the fourth year running Locus is giving non-subscribers half a vote for every subscriber vote (actually it's for the fifth year running, but in 2008 the change was made retroactively, after the votes had been received and tallied).  I wrote about this at greater length in 2010 and 2011 , so I'll just be brief this year: I don't plan to vote for an award whose organizers think I'm only worth half a vote, and if you're not a Locus subscriber, I don't think you should vote in the poll either. I should also say that I've been considering purchasing a Locus subscription for my Kindle, but that much like last year, the fact that this miserable voting system hasn't yet been rolled back leaves me utterly disinclined to give Locus my money. In happier, but still Locus -related news, Liz has a great list of links to the stories on the Locus recommended reading list that are available online.

The nominees for this year's BSFA awards have been announced, and I'm very pleased to report that my review of Arslan by M.J. Engh has been nominated for best non-fiction.  I'd like to take this chance to thank the BSFA and the award's administrators, as well as everyone who nominated my review, and to congratulate the other nominees. I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should.  As proud as I am of my Arslan review, and as gratified as I've been by the positive response that it has engendered, I can't hold it up against the entire third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , or the SF Mistressworks project, or the other, more "conventional" nominees such as the blog Pornokitsch , the catalogue for the British Library's much-lauded Out of This World exhibition, or the essay collection The Unsilent Library .  The BSFA's nonfiction award casts a wide net and has a history of producing rather esoteric shortlists.  Whi...

Two seasons into its run, I'm having trouble deciding whether Sherlock is a brilliant show or a terrible one.  The episodes themselves seem to alternate between the two extremes, with little in the way of middle ground--devastatingly clever updates on Sherlock Holmes tropes alongside plots so full of holes that they barely hold together, gags that make you gasp with laughter alongside lines so leaden and overwrought that you hardly know where to look, characters you fall in love with in a single scene alongside one-dimensional harpies.  My reaction to these episodes is similarly bi-polar--sometimes the credits roll on what seems like a perfect story, but thirty seconds later the whole thing has collapsed into a pile of contradictions, implausibilities, and contrivances; other times, you switch off an execrable story and the only thing that sticks in your mind is that one hilarious scene.  When writing about Sherlock , I invariably find myself making laundry lists of its ...

I read 59 books in 2011, a bit of a drop from previous years which is mainly due to Strange Horizons and the SF Encyclopedia taking up a lot of my time, but also, as I mentioned yesterday , because commuting by car rather than pubic transport has cut into my reading time.  Probably the most interesting thing about this year's reading is that for the first time since I've been keeping track, I've read more books by women than men.  This is mainly due to my Women Writing SF project from early in the year (though a reread of the entire Harry Potter series in August, inspired by the release of the last movie, also helped).  If you look at the gender breakdown of best and worst books, there's a clear indication that I should strive to maintain, and even increase, this preference for women writers. All told, 2011 was a good reading year but not a remarkable one.  I read many books I enjoyed, if few that I loved unreservedly, and not many that I hated.  Most of a...

Whatever the opposite of early adopter is, I'm it.  I tend to stick with what works, and am rarely in a rush to discover how a new gadget might improve my life.  I started this blog in 2005 when the format was already starting to get a bit stale (and am still plugging away at it going into 2012 when it's become positively antiquated).  I've only had a Gmail account for a year.  I got my first smartphone last week (and by "got," I mean that my mother, who is an early adopter extraordinaire, was first in line when the iPhone 4S became available in Israel and bequeathed me her old iPhone 3G).  Accordingly, it took a while for me to wrap my mind around the notion of an electronic reader as a viable alternative to paper books, and as something that I might enjoy and get a lot of use out of, and it wasn't until Amazon announced the Kindle 3, at a price point that seemed reasonable for what still felt, at the time, like a dubious endeavor, that I decided to take the ...