Asking the Wrong Questions

Oh, how the tables have turned. Now it is the reviewer who is reviewed! Happily, the reviews for Track Changes so far have been very positive, and perhaps none more so than Ian Mond's in the August issue of Locus . I mentioned this review already in my appearance on the most recent episode of Critical Friends , and I'm glad to be able to share it in full online . In her introduction, Nussbaum explains that the title, Track Changes, captures the book's intent – to not only "track changes in the world – in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, [but also] my own growth as a writer and critic." To achieve this, the book is structured into five sections – "Space", "Systems", "Places", "Bodies", and "Tales" – with the reviews in each section placed in chronological order. I want to say that I saw significant shifts in Nussbaum's style and concerns across the decade and a half these pieces cover. But the realit...

Most recent reading roundup are a grab-bag without much of a unifying theme. This batch of novels, on the other hand, seem to share a certain sense of the unheimlich. They are stories about apocalypse, war, environmental collapse, or just people who are struggling to find their place in a hostile world. I suppose there are conclusions to be drawn from that—about the kinds of books I'm reading, or the kinds of books that inspire me to write about them. Either way, this means that alongside my recommendations—and this is a particularly strong group of books—I also have to issue a warning. If you're particularly worried about the state of the world right now, these might not be the books for you; if you're looking for something weird and disturbing, however, you might find your next read here. The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham - For most of its length, Ham's debut novel keeps you guessing about its genre. Is it a horror story, or a naturalistic one? Another way of puttin...

After staking out such a staunch position in favor of negative reviews on my last appearance , it's perhaps a little surprising that Dan Hartland and Aishwarya Subramanian decided to invite me back for a guest stint on the Strange Horizons reviews department's podcast, Critical Friends . This time around, our conversation took a more positive approach. We talked about the role of critics in the fannish conversation, the process of putting together my book, Track Changes , and the process of "canon-building", especially in the context of the New York Times's recent project to compile a list of the best books published in the 21st century . The podcast can be found on all podcasting platforms as well as the Strange Horizons site , where you will also find a transcript. Track Changes can be purchased at the Briardene Books shop , or on Amazon ( US , UK ).

I wrote this on a train on my way to London, and am posting it from home. My Worldcon adventure has decisively concluded. This was my sixth time attending a Worldcon (the first was Montreal in 2009), and as ever I find that they are dizzying, overwhelming experiences, incredibly intense and yet seemingly over in a minute. I thought I'd round up some thoughts on the con, my events, and of course, the Hugos. First up, Glasgow 2024 hosted the launch of my book , Track Changes: Selected Reviews . This was my first opportunity to see the book as a completed object (Briardene Books publisher Niall Harrison trucked boxes and boxes of it from his home in Newcastle) and I can confirm that, even beyond the satisfaction of seeing a work you've labored over for more than a year take physical form, it is a beautiful object. We held a launch event for the book on Friday, and despite the fact that nearly everyone I spoke to about it seemed to have another event to go to (more on that in a mom...

Hello from Worldcon at Glasgow, where I have a copy of my review collection Track Changes in my hands, and where it can now be purchased both from dealers at the convention, and online from the Briardene Books website or from Amazon ( US , UK ). In honor of the day, I have a short reflection on John Scalzi's series The Big Idea , discussing the process of reviewing nearly twenty years of criticism and selecting from it what is worth collecting and preserving. Going back to your old work can be painful. Your writing isn’t as good. Your ideas aren’t as developed. There is sometimes a shocking naïveté. But you also get to watch yourself get better, figure out the tools of the trade. How to construct an argument and back it up with evidence. How to keep from getting lost in the weeds of a digression. How to turn your back on the seductive freedom of an online format that lets you go on for thousands of words, and do the same work more effectively at a shorter length (well, relatively...

The first season of Interview With the Vampire , based on the famed (and already-adapted) novel by Anne Rice, was something that I approached with a bit of trepidation, and quickly fell head over heels for. I'm not a fan of Rice's novels or the book's previous adaptation, and yet this new version of Louis, Lestat, Armand, and their endlessly convoluted and tortured relationships quickly won me over with smart writing, great performances, and sharp humor. In its second season, which aired earlier this summer, the show shot past its previous high performance and quickly became one of the best shows on TV. As I discuss in my review of the second season in Strange Horizons , a big part of that achievement comes down to the fascinating games it plays with faithfulness to its source material. Published in 1976, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—...

The 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland is now only a week away, and today the convention programme has been published. It is, unsurprisingly, chock full of fascinating stuff that has already got me gritting my teeth and wishing I could be in two or three places at once. The excellence of the programme is also the reason I found myself unable to say no to any of the events I was offered, which is why my Glasgow programme is the busiest I've ever had. First up, my book Track Changes: Selected Reviews will go on sale on August 8th (eagle-eyed blog visitors may have noticed the dedicated book page on the blog title bar). We will be having a launch event for the book at Worldcon on Friday the 9th. If you're around, I'd love to see you there. Friday, August 9th, 11:30           Book Launch: Track Changes by Abigail Nussbaum Argyll 3, In Person Abigail Nussbaum is a Hugo Award-winning critic and author of the blog Asking the Wrong Questions -- and now, author ...

After another long hiatus, my series A Political History of the Future returns at Lawyers, Guns & Money with a discussion of how science fiction has depicted artificial life in general, and AI in particular. This is a companion piece to a post that ran at LGM last month, in which I discussed not only my skepticism towards the growing technological field of "AI", but my dismay at the way that science fiction has been used to launder a technology that cannot do what it claims to do.  In today's article, I look at the long tradition in science fiction of imagining artificial life as a way of working through anxieties about scientific progress. As our understanding of what computers can and can't do has changed, science fiction came up with the AI, a supposedly all-powerful being onto which we project our needs, fears, and anxieties. An AI is something we make, but it's supposed to be better and wiser than us—in War Games (1983), it is the computer, not the hum...

Owen (Ian Foreman) is a lonely, withdrawn tween in an anonymous American suburb in the mid-90s. A chance encounter with older girl Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) introduces Owen to the long-running supernatural adventure series The Pink Opaque , in which teens Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan) use their psychic connection to battle monsters dispatched by the evil Mr. Melancholy. Supplied with past episodes on VHS tapes by Maddy, Owen quickly becomes entranced by the show's tangled mythology, evocative fusion of fantastical and everyday elements, and the close bond between its heroines. But as Maddy becomes more invested in the show, her dissatisfaction with her real life grows, and she eventually disappears. Years later, Owen (now played by Justice Smith) is shocked when Maddy returns, insisting that she has realized their world isn't real. She and Owen, she claims, are Tara and Isabel, who have been captured by Mr. Melancholy, dosed with poison, and buried alive. ...

In the near-future of Bradley's debut novel, the British government has developed a form of time travel. The newly-formed, titular ministry decides to test the technology (and discover any nasty side effects it might have) by reaching into the past and plucking from it several people who were on the verge of death—a near-victim of the great plague of London, a woman about to be sent to the guillotine in 1793. When these "expats" fail to immediately expire, the ministry establishes a program to slowly acclimate them to their new era by matching each one with a "bridge", with whom they will live for a year. The nameless narrator, a British-Cambodian woman, is assigned to Commander Graham Gore, a member of Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.  As Bradley writes in her foreword to my ARC copy, the inspiration for The Ministry of Time came from being locked down during the pandemic and binge-watching AMC's adaptation of The Te...

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...