Review: Lost in Space, Season 1 at Strange Horizons

This week at Strange Horizons, I review the first season of Netflix's re-reboot of Lost in Space.  Like a lot of people I found the entire notion of remaking a silly little space-pioneering show from 1965 (after a failed reboot movie in 1998) rather bizarre, and I can't say that the show has proved that this was something that needed to happen.  What it does achieve, however, is to demonstrate how you can take an unnecessary concept and execute it with intelligence and sensitivity (something that the makers of, to take a recent example, Solo: A Star Wars Story completely failed to accomplish).  I still don't think we needed a new Lost in Space, but the show we got has interesting characters, good storylines, and does some things that I'd almost given up on seeing in a genre show, such as construct coherent and compelling episode plots.  That said, because this is a reboot that is ultimately an attempt to monetize a familiar IP, the end of the season is a lot less interesting than its beginning, working overtime to get the characters to the canonical Lost in Space form, despite the fact that the new one it had originally presented was a great deal more interesting.

One thing I didn't find space for in the review, but which feels important to note, was my disappointment in the total straightness and cisnormativity of the show.  All of the characters we meet are implicitly straight.  All of the romances presented or suggested on the show are straight.  Though the characters spend a lot of time around other space-bound colonists, who, like them, are divided into family units, none of them have same-sex couples as parents.  All of the children are presumed to be straight and cis, and none suggest that they might be realizing otherwise.  This is particularly disappointing given that Netflix's other big kid-oriented show, A Series of Unfortunate Events, is cheerfully LGBT-friendly, dropping frequent mentions of gay couples into the story, and even featuring a non-binary character.  So it's not a matter of the target audience, but simply the show's creators making no space in their future for queerness, something that we should have long ago moved past.

Review: Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift at Strange Horizons

My latest Strange Horizons review looks at E.J. Swift's time travel novel Paris Adrift.  I've been hearing Swift's name spoken with admiration for several years now, as more and more readers I trust became absorbed by her Osiris Project trilogy (Osiris, 2012; Cataveiro, 2014; Tamaruq, 2015).  As a standalone, Paris Adrift seemed like a perfect opportunity to hop on, but unfortunately what I found was a classic case of what is good is not interesting, and what is interesting is not good.  Paris Adrift is a rather slight story of a lost young person becoming even more lost when she discovers the ability to travel in time--the sort of thing that would probably have worked very well as a novella but is stretched into shapelessness by the novel length--combined with a political story that doesn't really bear much scrutiny.

It's perhaps unsurprising that a novel so rooted in the notion of special people will also filter its politics through the lens of great men and women, whose life or death determine the course of history. I haven't said much about Hallie's adventures in time, but one of them in particular left a bad taste in my mouth. In it, Hallie travels to 1942, and finds herself sharing a crawlspace with a young Jewish woman, Rachel Clouatre, who has just barely evaded the roundup of French Jews by Vichy officials. It's obviously not Swift's fault that the subgenre of "time traveler helps to save a Jew from the Nazis" has been at the forefront of Holocaust fiction's devolution into Holocaust Kitsch, but one might have expected a little more awareness of this fact in 2018.

Paris Adrift clearly thinks of itself as a deeply political novel, but its ideas about politics are simplistic and in some cases genuinely dangerous--a charismatic political leader who urges non-specific niceness and is too good to stand for office is a particularly worrying plot point.  I'm sorry that my first encounter with Swift was so disappointing, and I may yet give her earlier books another shot, but if, like me, you were hoping to discover her with Paris Adrift, I wouldn't recommend it.

A Political History of the Future: Black Panther at Lawyers, Guns & Money

In my latest Political History of the Future column at Lawyers, Guns & Money, I discuss Black Panther, a genuinely remarkable movie that sets a bar that other MCU films are going to struggle to clear.  There's been a lot of fascinating conversation about this movie, not least its importance to African-Americans as both the first MCU movie to star a black man, and a representation of a fictional African nation that is powerful, self-sufficient, and never colonized.  In this essay, I discuss how that act of worldbuilding puts Black Panther squarely in the tradition of utopian SF, and how its utopia is enriched by the film's deep interest in blackness and African heritage.  As I write in the essay, it's interesting to compare Black Panther to Star Trek: Discovery, and find that the movie delivers exactly what I was looking for in that show.

Beyond its importance as a work of worldbuilding, however, what excites me about Black Panther—and sets it head and shoulders above any other work in the MCU, as far as I’m concerned—is the fact that it’s a story about worldbuilders. "Just because something works doesn’t mean it cannot be improved", T'Challa is informed by his sister, the bright-eyed inventor Shuri (Letitia Wright). And indeed, Black Panther and Wakanda are full of people who, despite living in a seeming paradise, keep asking themselves how they can make it better, and what responsibility they have to help improve the rest of the world.

Introducing A Political History of the Future at Lawyers, Guns & Money

The political blog Lawyers, Guns & Money has been a favorite hangout of mine for years, both for its sharp and often funny discussions of progressive politics, and for its vibrant, intelligent comment section.  As well as being political junkies, many of the bloggers and commenters at LGM are nerds, and the blog has hosted some great pop culture writing, including by Steven Attewell and the late Scott Erik Kaufman.  So I'm pleased and thrilled to announce a new guest series at LGM, A Political History of the Future.

As I write in my introduction, the focus of this series will be on works of science fiction and fantasy that address topical political issues, particularly from a progressive point of view.  I'm also interested in how science fiction imagines future societies and how they order themselves, and particularly those that are not dystopias and post-apocalypses.  I'm not necessarily looking for "optimistic" futures, but I am interested in ones that are functional.

I've already got a list of works that I'm planning to write about, including books, TV series, and movies.  Hopefully I'll find some comics that also touch on these subjects, and maybe even some games.  (In fact, I recently finished playing Night in the Woods, which is a little outside the scope of this series but also extremely political, and unabashed in bringing up issues like the baleful effect of austerity or the importance of unions.)  I hope you'll read along and comment.

New Scientist Column Update

If you're a New Scientist subscriber, you can read my latest SF column, in which I discuss Rivers Solomon's debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, and M. John Harrison's short story collection You Should Come With Me Now.  I'm sorry that the column has been paywalled, because these are both books that deserve more attention, so if you're not a subscriber I'll sum the column up by saying that you should seek both of them out.

The Solomon, in particular, is a book that I hope to see getting more attention in the coming months (I shouldn't make these kind of pronouncements since I've been so wrong in the past, but I'd be very surprised not to see it on next year's Tiptree list).  It's a book that works hard to wrongfoot its audience--a generation ship story in which not only has racial prejudice persisted into the future, but in which the social order on the spaceship Matilda takes the exact form of antebellum plantation slavery.  It very quickly becomes clear, however, that this puzzled reaction is what Solomon is reaching for.  She isn't aiming for verisimilitude (at one point I described the book to some friends as a counterpoint to Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora) but for discomfort, deliberately imagining a future in which not only have humans not moved past racial prejudice, they've moved backwards.  Into this setting she places a genuinely remarkable heroine--a hard-headed, neruoatypical, gender-nonconforming scientist, who is exactly the sort of person we'd expect to find in a science fiction story, except that she's also a slave.  One of the core accomplishments of An Unkindness of Ghosts is to take people, and a situation, that we're used to seeing purely through a historical lens and make it into a science fiction story, not only in order to make their predicament more immediate, but to remind us that even in situations of absolute degradation, people are capable of being bold, inventive, and curious about their world.

This is also my last column for The New Scientist, who have decided to shake up their SF coverage going into 2018.  I'm sorry to see this feature, which I've had a lot of fun with over the last year, come to an end, but I'm grateful for the magazine's interest and support, and hopeful that I'll continue to write for them in the future.

New Scientist Column: Maggie Shen King, M.T. Anderson, and Dave Hutchinson

My latest column at The New Scientist has a relationship focus: in Maggie Shen King's debut novel An Excess Male, China's one child policy leads to a population of unmarriageable men who are encouraged to enter into polyandrous arrangements.  There's a definite whiff of The Handmaid's Tale wafting over this novel (which, along with last year's The Power, leads me to wonder if we're seeing a mini-trend of SF that recalls that classic, thirty years on), but what's most interesting about An Excess Male is that it isn't a dystopia, and remains intriguingly open-minded about the possibility of creating a good family in such an awkward situation.

Somewhat less hopeful about the possibility for romance in a futuristically altered world is M.T. Anderson's Landscape With Invisible Hand, his first foray back into YA fiction since the transcendent Octavian Nothing duology.  I describe the story as The Hunger Games meets Black Mirror's "Fifteen Million Merits", which is definitely a compliment.

I was less thrilled by Dave Hutchinson's novella Acadie.  Those looking for more Le Carré-esque spy-and-geopolitics shenanigans in the vein of Hutchinson's Fractured Europe books will find something very different.  One assumes that this was a deliberate choice on Hutchinson's part, but it pays off very few dividends in this case.

New Scientist Column: Yoon Ha Lee, Karin Tidbeck, and Nina Allan

Greetings from Helsinki!  I am briefly emerging from the chaos of Worldcon to link to my latest column in The New Scientist, in which I discuss Yoon Ha Lee's Raven Stratagem, Karin Tidbeck's Amatka, and Nina Allan's The Rift.  It was interesting to see how three novels that seemed so superficially dissimilar ended up being about very similar things, chiefly the way that humans construct their own reality even when it seems rock-solid. 

I was particularly struck by how similar the approach that Lee and Tidbeck took to their stories was, in both cases taking a well-defined genre with extremely familiar tropes--space opera/military SF in Lee's case, highly conformist future dystopia in Tidbeck's--and use the idea of humans' ability to shape their world through agreed-upon concepts to subtly distort their stories' conventions.  In both cases, I think, the authors end up boxed in by their genres, perhaps more than they intended.  But both books (and the Allan) are nevertheless extremely interesting exercises, and fun reads to boot.

And now, back to the convention!  If you're see me around, do come by and say hi.

Review: Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock at Strange Horizons

My review of Anne Charnock's third novel, Dreams Before the Start of Time, is up at Strange Horizons.  I took this review as an opportunity to air some of my frustration at one of the most glaring blind spots of science fiction (and perhaps fiction and public discourse in general), pregnancy and fertility.  A genre that likes to imagine that it will dismantle any commonplace of modern life, and ask how changing it changes humanity, has been deafeningly silent on one of the most basic, common human experiences.  It's as if science fiction writers believe that there's nothing to change or innovate when it comes to how we create children, even as the real-world state of pregnancy undergoes massive upheavals due to public ignorance and indifference.

It's perhaps because of my eagerness for science fiction that engages with fertility that I found Dreams Before the Start of Time a little underwhelming.  Some of what Charnock does in this book, which follows several families over the course of nearly a century, as each generation grapples with how they want to create the next, is very interesting.  But taken as a whole, Dreams is too focused on the personal, on pregnancy as a personal choice that the characters can agonize over--and then be blamed for by their children.  The political and social forces that shape how pregnancy is viewed and experienced, meanwhile, feel muted.  To a certain extent that's me blaming Dreams for not being the book I wanted it to be, but I continue to feel that the book I wanted is essential, and sadly absent.

New Scientist Column: Kim Stanley Robinson and Gwyneth Jones

My latest column at The New Scientist looks at two novels that try to imagine how society will order itself in the wake of environmental and economic collapse.  Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 imagines the titular city as a high-tech Venice, where a quasi-socialist community has arisen in the vacuum left behind when finance retreated, and must now defend itself as the forces of gentrification once again sniff out a profit to be made in the newly hip and livable canalized city.  It's been interesting to watch the reviews for this book pour in: Gerry Canavan at LARB, for example, wonders if it represents the shattering of Robinson's famed optimism, while Joshua Rothman at the New Yorker, and John Clute in Strange Horizons, see the book's vision of a city that survives and even flourishes in the wake of climate change as an inherently hopeful one.  I think that tension is entirely intentional--New York 2140 is a book that isn't entirely certain whether the future it imagines is a good one, and whether the survival it posits is something to celebrate or mourn.

Proof of Concept is a great deal less ambivalent about its future, in which most of humanity lives in cramped, heavily-policed enclaves while the rest of the planet is a polluted wasteland.  A group of scientists enter enforced isolation, supposedly to study a potential form of faster-than-light travel, but also as a form of reality TV that is a primary form of entertainment in a world that loves dreaming about an "escape ticket".  As you'd expect with Jones, everything is a lot weirder than even that premise might suggest, with the novella juggling so many balls that one could easily imagine it being fleshed out into a full-length novel.  It's amazing to think that we haven't had a new work from Jones in nearly a decade, and I hope that Proof of Concept is a sign of things to come, though as a work in its own right it feels incomplete (Paul Kincaid comes to similar conclusions at Strange Horizons).

SF Column at The New Scientist

I've been sitting on this news for a while, and now it can be told: I'm writing a bi-monthly recent SF column for The New Scientist.  The first column is up here.  It discusses three recent and very different space operas: Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion, Joe M. McDermott's The Fortress at the End of Time, and Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: Home.

Writing in this style is going to be a bit of a challenge for me--I'm used to having space to spread out and indulge myself, and it's complicated to try to get at the essence of a book under more severe length restrictions.  Nevertheless, I've been inspired by several reviewers working in this format--N.K. Jemisin's column for the New York Times has, in particular, been a great example of how to use limited space to achieve a great deal--and I'm hoping to be able to emulate them.

Review: The Power by Naomi Alderman, at Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons has published my review of Naomi Alderman's The Power, a twisty, thought-provoking tale about a world in which women suddenly develop the ability to shoot bolts of lightning out of their bodies.  As I say at the beginning of the review, it's the sort of premise that seems designed to get SF fans' motors revving, and I think that it could easily have overwhelmed a lot of authors--in the rush to cover all the possible stories that could emerge out of a premise like this, it would be easy to lose sight of the one you want to write.  Alderman teeters on the verge of this failure mode, but in the end her idea of what she want to say with The Power is too strong.  The result is one of the most satisfying, but also disquieting, books I've read in some time. 

There's a lot I would have liked to say about The Power that didn't make it into my review.  Alderman's use of Jewish scripture (including one of my favorite Bible passages, which she uses as an epigraph) was a refreshing change of pace from the Christian focus of most anglophone literature.  And while discussing the review with editor Aishwarya Subramanian, we had an interesting conversation about the way the book uses white and non-white, Western and non-Western cultures as emblems of different attitudes towards women, that I didn't really have the space (or, really, the expertise) to discuss in my review.  I hope there ends up being more discussion of The Power--most of the reviews I've seen have been, while positive, a little surface-y, not scratching much beyond the book's "revelation" that women can be just as violent and power-hungry as men, though this is far from the point that Alderman is trying to make. 

I do think that discussion is forthcoming, though.  I'd be very surprised not to see The Power on this year's Clarke shortlist--even leaving aside the obvious debt the book owes to The Handmaid's Tale, the Clarke's first winner and, in many ways, its mascot, this is one the most Clarke-ish books I've ever read, seemingly tailor-made for the award's interests and concerns.  Even if it doesn't make the shortlist, however, several of the participants in the Clarke Shadow Jury have selected The Power for their shortlists, and I'm very interested to see what they make of it.

By the way, once you're done reading my review, be sure to check out Dexter Palmer's long review/essay on Alan Moore's Jerusalem, a master-class in how to grapple with a book that is seemingly too big and too complicated to be encompassed in a something as mundane as a review.

Essay: The Stealth Futurism of Person of Interest

As I've mentioned already, I spent much of the summer working on a large writing project, which is now online.  Over at PopMatters, you can read my essay "This is the Next World": The Stealth Futurism of Person of Interest, in which I discuss how an initially inauspicious high-concept procedural transformed, over the course of five seasons, into one of the most explicitly SFnal shows on TV, one that tackled core SF concepts like AI, and explored the ways in which an artificial life might see the world, and how its existence would challenge our ideas of personhood and free will.

I ended up rewatching Person of Interest in preparation for writing this essay, and though some aspects of the show remained unimpressive throughout--the standalone plots start out halting and overwrought and, almost impossibly, get worse as the show draws on--what struck me at the end of that rewatch was how much I had to say.  My essay is quite long, and yet it leaves so much out that I could have talked about.  I say almost nothing about Carter or Fusco, two of my favorite characters who mostly got left out of the show's SFnal storytelling.  I don't really discuss the problems with the show's War on Terror-focused premise, and the way that it implicitly validates simplistic ideas about geopolitics and terrorism; or, for that matter, the show's frustrating tendency to corral black characters into crime-focused storylines.  I don't mention the romance between Root and Shaw, which I found alternately problematic and inspiring.  Hell, I don't even bring up Bear, the crime-fighting dog, which I would have thought impossible before sitting down to write this piece.  My take on Person of Interest in this essay is very much the Finch, Root, and Machine show.

Nevertheless, that show is worth watching for, especially if you, like myself, initially dismissed Person of Interest as science fiction-lite.  Creator Jonathan Nolan is currently the producer of HBO's Westworld, and if I have any hope that that show will tie itself together into a genuinely interesting, SFnal story, it is mostly on the strength of Person of Interest.  If you enjoyed the show, I hope my essay sheds light on how it built its ideas about AI.  If you haven't watched it yet, I hope you'll be inspired to check it out.

UPDATE: If you're interested in picking up the series, but daunted by its reputation as an indifferent procedural, I've got a primer on my tumblr listing the episodes that I think are essential to the development of the show's SFnal storylines, and skipping (hopefully) most of the dross.

Review: The 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist, part 2

The second part of my review of this year's Clarke shortlist is now online at Strange Horizons, covering Arcadia by Iain Pears, Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson, and The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor.  You can find it here, and in case you haven't already read part 1, that's here.  The actual winner will be announced in London in a few hours, but as I write in the conclusion to the review, I tend to see that announcement as less of a triumph for any particular book, and more a data point that will help to clarify--at least a little--what the judges were aiming for with this year's bland and conventional shortlist.  The book that wins will tell us a great deal about how this year's judges saw the Clarke, and their task as its jury.  But I'm hopeful that next year the jury will make more interesting, more challenging choices.

Martin Petto has updated his collection of links to discussion of the shortlist, including this essay by Megan of the (new to me) blog From Couch to Moon.  It's very much worth reading, including some interesting reflections on both the Clarke and this year's nominated books.  To me, it also clarified many of my problems with this shortlist.  Megan and I largely agree about the ranking of the six nominated books, and our thoughts about the ones that, I suspect, we'd both happily knock off the shortlist are largely in line.  But when it comes to the two books that I think we'd both class as good--Europe at Midnight and The Book of Phoenix--our opinions diverge widely.  Megan sees Europe as much more self-contained and self-sustaining than I do (to me it feels like a pendant to the previous volume in this trilogy, Europe in Autumn, whereas Megan calls it superior to that book).  And though we both agree that The Book of Phoenix is the most likely winner of this year's Clarke, it's clear that we took very different things away from the book, and read it quite differently.

And that, not to keep repeating myself, is how the Clarke should work.  The books it highlights should be the ones that people disagree about, even if they're broadly in agreement about their quality and literary merits.  I want the Clarke shortlist to be full of books that I could write 3,000 words about, and then go and read someone else's 3,000 words and discover a whole host of ideas I'd never considered.  I hope I won't have to wait too long before getting a shortlist like that again.

Review: The 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist, part 1

The first part of my mega-review of this year's Clarke Award-nominated novels appears today at Strange Horizons.  This is the fourth time that I've reviewed the entire shortlist, a tradition begun by Adam Roberts at Infinity Plus and carried on by Strange Horizons with rotating reviewers.  I'm sad to say that this was by far the least fun I've had reviewing the Clarke shortlist, not so much because the nominated books are bad--though a few definitely are--but because there ended up being so much less to say about them than I'm used to.

After finishing my read-through of the nominated novels, I started reading a few of the books that were submitted for consideration, and the difference is striking.  It's not so much that the books left off the Clarke shortlist are masterpieces--on the contrary, I would have had serious reservations about most of them if I'd had to review them for this project.  But that's precisely the point.  I would have had so much more to say about, for example, Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, a book I struggled with but found utterly fascinating, than just about any of the choices this year's Clarke judges made.  What makes the Clarke special, to me, is that not so much that it makes consistently good choices, as that it makes consistently interesting choices.  It failed at that task this year.

The first half of my review--which discusses Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, J.P. Smythe's Way Down Dark, and Becky Chambers's A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet--is here.  At his blog, Martin Petto has been collecting other reviews of the shortlisted novels, and thoughts on the shortlist as a whole (on the latter front, be sure to read Nina Allan's meditation on the shortlist and the Clarke as a whole).  The second half of my review will be published on Wednesday, and later that evening the Clarke winner will be announced.

Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream, adapted by Russell T. Davies

Today at Strange Horizons, I write about Russell T. Davies's adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the BBC.  It was a bit of a surprise to me that this film even existed--whatever promotion there was for it seems to have been swallowed up by the media blitz for the second season of The Hollow Crown.  And as I write in the review, this turns out to have been massively unfair, because whereas this year's Hollow Crown sequence was an uninspired slog enlivened, here and there, by a few fine performances, Davies's Dream is witty, fun, and most of all very smart in its approach to the play and its problems.  To be clear, this is still a Russell T. Davies production, with all the good and bad things that implies (the Murray Gold soundtrack is quite a hurdle, for example).  But ultimately, he and the play turn out to have been a perfect match, and the result is one of the most rewarding Shakespeare adaptations I've seen in some time.

My positive reaction to the movie is also rooted in the timing of my watching it--a few hours after I finished it, the news started pouring in about the horrible shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  On that day, Davies's approach to his material--in which diversity of race and sexuality is directly opposed to the forces of fascism and brutality--felt not just entertaining, but necessary.  But the review is being published on the same day that Britain wakes up to a new, post-EU reality, and suddenly the optimism of Davies's vision feels insufficient.  In a world in which the right wing has an even stronger grip on UK politics, is anyone going to let artists like Davies create follies like a TV movies of a Shakespeare play (which, among other things, bring supposedly "high" culture into the living rooms of anyone with a TV, not just those with the money and means to go to the theater)?  Will artists who want their work to be explicitly pro-diversity, pro-LGBT, and anti-fascist be able to find a platform?  So I find myself feeling a lot less hopeful about this work than I did when I watched it and wrote the review, but maybe, for people feeling hopeless today, Davies's Dream is exactly what they need.

Review: The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar

Even as we reel from yesterday's Hugo nominees and impatiently await tonight's Clarke nominees, Strange Horizons has published my review of Sofia Samatar's second novel The Winged Histories.  I wrote about Samatar's first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, a few years ago, and was blown away by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its worldbuilding, and the nuanced view it took of the epic fantasy genre. 

The Winged Histories, which is a sort of companion volume to A Stranger in Olondria, is very different from it, though no less excellent.  It is, in some ways, a more conventional novel, focusing on the main events of a civil war within a fantasy empire, where Stranger took place on the fringes of that war and featured a protagonist who just wanted to get away from it.  But like Stranger, Histories is an examination of its genre, of storytelling, and of the very project of imposing narrative on one's life.  It touches on issues like colonialism, empire, race, and gender, and features four wonderful heroines, each very different from the others, and all immediately fascinating and lovable.  Together and separately, The Winged Histories and A Stranger in Olondria are a major work of modern fantasy, one that deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Review: The Liminal War and The Entropy of Bones by Ayize Jama-Everett

Over at Strange Horizons, I review the second and third books in Ayize Jama-Everett's Liminal People series.  This was one of those cases where a book comes to you just when you need it the most.  As they've slowly taken over popular culture, I've found myself growing increasingly impatient with superhero stories, and with how the ones that show up on our screens choose to handle politics (see, for example, this series of tweets from last night in which I try to sum up my frustrations with the seemingly endless barrage of superhero shows and their messed-up politics).  It's been particularly frustrating watching what is, by now, the dominant genre in pop culture carefully and studiously avoid anything like a real engagement with issues of social justice.  For all that they claim otherwise, superheroes are about preserving the status quo, and that usually means siding with those in power, not those whom they oppress.

So Jama-Everett's books, in which opposing--and trying to dismantle--the status quo lies at the core of most of his superhero characters' stories, were just what the doctor ordered.  And as if that were not enough, most of the superhero characters in these books are people of color, and people whose ethnic and cultural heritage is central to their identity and to how they see the world, which is also something that mainstream superhero stories don't do enough of.  I might not have like these books as much if I'd read them five years ago, but I'm extremely glad that they exist now, and if you're like me and are finding the glut of reactionary superhero stories oppressive, I heartily recommend these books as an antidote.

Review: Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Rachel Hartman's Shadow Scale, the sequel to Seraphina, one of my favorite books of 2013.  One of the things that most impressed me about Seraphina was how it managed to juggle so many characters, plotlines, and worldbuilding details without ever seeming overstuffed or rushed.  Shadow Scale doesn't quite manage that trick--it's longer, more episodic, and less focused than the previous volume.  That said, there's still a lot in it to love--the novel's world, characters, and ideas are as fresh and interesting as they were in Seraphina, and Hartman still combines an exciting fantasy plot with a smart exploration of issues of gender, race, and identity.  She's one of the more interesting writers currently working in YA fantasy, and I look forward to whatever she does next.

Review: Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho at Strange Horizons

Today at Strange Horizons, I review Zen Cho's Crawford-winning short story collection Spirits Abroad.  This is something of a milestone for me--the first review I've had published in Strange Horizons since stepping down as a reviews editor.  It's also a welcome return to writing full-length book reviews, and for both of those occasions I couldn't have chosen a better subject with which to mark them than Cho's vibrant, funny, brilliantly-written collection.  The stories in Spirits Abroad are remarkable for how they capture their worlds--be they Malaysian villages, ex-pat communities in the UK, or fantastical worlds--in a few well-chosen sentences, and for the equal weight that Cho gives to folklore and more hard-nosed worldbuilding elements such as politics and history.  Cho uses fantasy to shed a light on her stories' worlds, and on the relationships that drive her plots, but her fantasies are also coherent and engaging in themselves.  Spirits Abroad is easily one of the best short story collections of the last few years, and hopefully promises a bright future for Cho's career.

Review: Edge of Tomorrow

Over at Strange Horizons, I review the Tom Cruise time travel movie Edge of Tomorrow, a film that I thought was just terrible but which seems to be getting good reviews from all other quarters, which I honestly find quite baffling.  It's starting to feel a little like being the only reviewer not blown away by Looper, but where Looper had some genuine strong points (not least, recognizing that just because the male lead wants Emily Blunt to save him doesn't mean that's all she's got going on in her life, a fact of which Edge of Tomorrow remains sadly ignorant), Edge of Tomorrow is merely a competently made action film that squanders everything potentially interesting or thought-provoking about its premise and characters.

Incidentally, between watching the film and writing my review I decided to read the original novel, All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, just to get a sense of how big the gap between the two is (answer: not great in general but pretty huge in certain points).  It's not a great book by any stretch, but it's a quick read, and a hell of a lot more interesting than the movie in its handling of its premise, its world, and its characters (in particular, the relationship between the male and female leads is a lot more equitable, though the other female characters are often problematic).  If anything good comes out of Edge of Tomorrow it will be to call attention to Haikasoru and its project to bring Japanese SF to Anglophone audiences, and All You Need Is Kill is a good place to start.

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