Asking the Wrong Questions

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...

I had no intention of watching HBO Max's Peacemaker . The whole concept seemed to me indicative of the cynicism and blatant manipulation that characterize this most recent chapter in the lifecycle of the superhero-industrial complex. Superheroes are now the leading product of the increasingly consolidated entertainment empires vying for our money, and each of those empires is now promoting its own streaming platform. Ergo, each superhero property has to function as a launching platform for a spin-off show, be it ever so esoteric and hard to justify artistically. Did you think that The Batman 's take on the Penguin was weird and over-emphasized, a waste of Colin Farrell under a distracting fat suit in a role that could have been played by any character actor in Hollywood? Well, just sit tight for The Penguin , coming to HBO Max in 2023! It would be one thing if these shows were bad and easily ignorable. But the same self-correcting mechanism that allows Marvel to keep chugging a...

My overall reaction to this movie is: "fine, I guess". And perhaps that's less a function of the film itself as of the state of the character, who has received five different cinematic takes in thirty years, the last two of which have converged on a sort of a Batman orthodoxy that mandates gloom, brooding, and violence. But even allowing for the tiredness of the material, Matt Reeves's version feels uninspired, stitched together from the pieces of previous attempts, lightly rehashing ideas that have already been thoroughly chewed over, and adding nothing new to the concept or the character. The guiding principle was clearly " The Dark Knight , but more so". The film is structured more as a crime story than a superhero story, with a strong presence for the Gotham police department, an emphasis on organized crime and institutional corruption, and a deranged villain—Paul Dano as the Riddler—who is obsessed with exposing the seedy underbelly of the supposedly re...

[This is an experiment. My recent reading roundup reviews have steadily been expanding past the point where it makes sense to lump them together, and I often leave them sitting unpublished for weeks while I amass enough for a post. This new format, then, is not a full-length review, but still a book that deserves more discussion than just a few paragraphs.] Seamlessly marrying hard-headed climate fiction and magical realism, Bell's third novel is an unusual, thought-provoking entry in the growing subgenre, one whose powerful punch is unfortunately undercut by some of its core assumptions. The novel proceeds in three timelines. In the early days of the European settlement of North America, a faun named John Chapman (the name of the man better known in American folklore as Johnny Appleseed) travels the wilderness just beyond the fledgling New England towns with his human brother Nathaniel, planting apple nurseries which the brothers hope, in time, to sell to the farmers who will com...

It's been quiet here recently, I know. As you may have seen on twitter or some of my recent posts on Lawyers, Guns & Money, I spent most of December and January preparing for and executing a move, and that experience took over my brain to a degree that made it impossible not only to write, but to consume culture with any real critical insight. I've posted a few things at LGM ( some thoughts on Adam McKay's Don't Look Up , a list of books I'm looking forward to in 2022), and it's not impossible that I'll still find the time this month to write about some things that have deserved more attention, like The Matrix Resurrections or HBO Max's adaptation of Station Eleven . But for the most part I'm still easing myself back into the critical mindset, reading thoughtfully for the first time in weeks and watching things that demand more out of me than the latest episode of Legends of Tomorrow . Which is why this Wheel of Time roundtable at Strange Hor...

I read 86 books in 2021, which is about where my reading was last year. I my review of 2020's reading, I talked about feeling as if the books I'd read hadn't leave much of an impact. I'm not sure that things have been much better this year, and I suspect that the ongoing, seemingly interminable global crisis has a lot to do with that. It's easy to anesthetize yourself with entertainment (see also my list of favorite TV shows over at Lawyers, Guns & Money), but a lot harder to give books that attention and though they deserve. So this list feels less substantial than it has in previous years. Still, there are some excellent books here that I feel privileged to have read, and here's hoping that in the coming year I find myself more able to give my full attention to all of my reading. Best Books of the Year: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica I read this book early in the year (it was a contender in the Tournament of Books, though like most genre entr...

An exciting new phase in our ongoing pandemic reality involves the reopening of movie theaters, with the floodgates opening to release last year's delayed blockbusters, awards contenders, and the few hopefuls trying to claim a bit of territory between them. These films represent most of the last two months' moviegoing, and though none of them were exactly to my taste (and one or two are extremely disappointing), it's nice just to be able to go into a theater again. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - The first MCU superhero extravaganza of the fall had a lot riding on it. It's the first MCU film with an Asian lead (and really, an almost entirely Asian cast). The first post- Endgame MCU movie starring a new character, who will presumably be folded into whatever overarching narrative the new generation of the MCU is gearing up towards. And in a lot of ways, it's the first MCU movie that is trying to give us a sense of what phase four is going to be like, as ...

For as long as we've been waiting for Denis Villeneuve's Dune , a period made even longer by the vicissitudes of the pandemic, one question, it seems, has occupied fandom: will they get it right? After two failed adaptations (two and a half if you include Alejandro Jodorowsky's never-realized, and thus never disappointing, vision for the film), would Dune , a novel decreed "unadaptable" by some, finally get the cinematic treatment it deserved? David Lynch's 1984 debacle was star-studded (Kyle MacLachlan! Patrick Stewart! Dean Stockwell! Brad Dourif! Virginia Madsen! Sting!) and visually lush, but also a cursed production that yielded an incomprehensible mess, so much so that the film has two versions, one bearing the infamous Alan Smithee credit because it was recut by the studio without Lynch's input. (For the record, the Lynch version is better, though neither is what you might call "good".) And then there’s the 2000 SyFy/Hallmark miniseries, m...