Asking the Wrong Questions

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I write about comics rarely, and about media tie-in fiction not at all, so I hope the fact that my latest review at Strange Horizons is of a book that is both of those things will, in itself, be a sign that this is a book worth looking at. Written by Ryan North, with art by Chris Fenoglio, Warp Your Own Way is a story set in the world of the just-concluded, animated Star Trek series Lower Decks . Also, it's a Choose Your Own Adventure-style story. The reader follows series lead Beckett Mariner on her day off, making decision as trivial as what beverage to order from the replicator, and as momentous as how to fight off Borg invaders. Which might sound amusing but slight, but before long Warp Your Own Way begins to hint that there is a meta-narrative at the root of this branching decision tree, and by its end the book reveals itself as a puzzle the reader must solve. I was so excited by Warp Your Own Way 's ingenious use of the CY...

Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, in which a stretch of Florida coastland is transformed into a weird, otherworldly space, leading to repeated attempts to comprehend and control it, is a fascinating instance of mid-career breakout, in which a writer who had seemed like a well-kept secret suddenly became a household name and public intellectual. In the decade since, VanderMeer has gone from strength to strength, and so his decision to return to Area X with a new novel is an additional, unexpected twist in the tale. I review Absolution at the Guardian . Much of what made the original Southern Reach books powerful and disturbing can be found in this new volume. Once again, VanderMeer produces a near-seamless shading between the weirdness and danger of Area X, and the natural environment that preceded it. Old Jim is rattled by a stand of trees left dead by the inland incursion of seawater, seeing in it a hint of the unearthly, while a superintelligent alligator who is the Ro...

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...

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 ).

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...

Cover design by Tom Joyes I'm thrilled to announce that my first collection of reviews, Track Changes , will be published by Briardene Books this summer. Track Changes collects nearly sixty reviews from nearly twenty years of writing, covering novels, short fiction, television, and film in the science fiction and fantasy genres. It is, as the title suggests, a chronicle of shifting tides in genre fiction, in world politics, and in my own understanding of both. I've been working on this book for nearly a year, selecting, evaluating, and re-editing my old material, and the result is something that I am very proud of. Track Changes will be published in paperback (and those of you familiar with Briardene will know that it is going to be a handsome, substantial volume) and ebook versions. Both are available for preorder from the Briardene website, and the ebook will also be available from other vendors. The gorgeous cover design is by Tom Joyes. Track Changes is scheduled for p...

Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is one of my big science fiction lacunae. I've read and enjoyed other Asimov books--his robot stories were my introduction to the genre--but for whatever reason, what's often considered his magnum opus passed me by (and it is, I suspect, a bit late to catch up; my tolerance for wooden prose and cardboard women is a lot lower than it was when I was ten). Which means my perspective on Apple TV+'s adaptation of the books is rather different from that of most of my friends. They've been furiously tracking where the show diverges and converges from the original story (more the former than the latter, by the sound of it) and gnashing their teeth over its failure to convey the books' ideas. I've been more able to take the show on its own terms, which has not always been a good thing--the first season was a tedious slog, full of its own importance but rarely managing to bring it across. The just-concluded second season of Foundation...

One of the nice things about Oppenheimer is that it's spurred so much conversation on so many different topics. It's been a while since we had a movie that, while being a popular entertainment with a very large audience, encouraged people to talk about history, accountability, art, and the limits of biography. On top of my review of the film at Lawyers, Guns & Money , I also posted there about the issue of political criticism , in the context of the conversation that has sprung up around its choice to center the story of the atomic bomb and its first wartime deployment on the (white) man who made it rather than the people it killed and sickened. Fellow LGM blogger Cheryl Rofer, a scientist with roots in the nuclear community who worked with Manhattan Project alumni and is a self-described member of the "cult of Oppenheimer" has also contributed several discussions of the film's historical accuracy (or lack of same) and is, to my knowledge, planning more. A...

I've written already about Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath on this blog , but even after publishing, I wasn't sure that I'd given the novel the full consideration it deserves. The further I get away from it, the more obvious it seemed that Goliath is one of the major science fiction novels of 2022, and that the community as a whole has failed to fully appreciate it. I was thrilled, therefore, to be able to participate in a roundtable about the novel at Strange Horizons , alongside A.S. Lewis, Archita Mittra, and Jonah Sutton-Morse, and with the impeccable guidance of Dan Hartland. This is a long, detailed discussion that gets into how we define science fiction, how "difficult" novels engage us, and how Goliath is in conversation with own genre. Jonah Sutton-Morse: Thanks for gathering us—I'm really looking forward to this. I have, I think, an answer to what the book is "about," and moreso to "where did your focus wind up landing," but I’...

It's a strange thing, but despite being very much a product of the Web 2.0 era, I have never gotten into podcasting. In fact, I wasn't even much of a podcast listener until a few years ago, and my very first podcast appearance happened merely a month ago. Happily, that podcast was Critical Friends , the Strange Horizons reviews department podcast hosted by the inimitable Dan Hartland and Aishwarya Subramanian. They had me on to discuss—what else—negative reviews. We covered a wide range of subjects, from what makes a review negative, to when the negative reaction is justified, to whether the community discourages negative criticism. Dan Hartland: Reviewers need to have the space to call out bad books because sometimes it isn’t just an aesthetic judgment, sometimes it is. So sometimes a book will just be, it might make us cross, but it’s just clumsy or poorly wrought. But sometimes it will be actively malicious, either in intent or more commonly, effect. And there is a real da...

I've been waiting a while for Strange Horizons to run my review of Vladimir Sorokin's 2013 novel Telluria (published in English by the indispensable NYRB Classics with a translation by Max Lawton). So long, in fact, the Telluria was already on my list of last year's best books . This review is a chance to elaborate on why I found this novel so exciting, so thought-provoking, and so completely SFnal. Telluria is part of a sequence in which Sorokin imagines a post-post-Soviet future he calls the New Middle Ages. In this novel, he posits a drug that allows its users to hallucinate a world that reflects their deepest wishes and desires, then come back and try to make that world a reality. As I write in the review, this allows Sorokin to consider "how the project of worldbuilding affects the world". To begin with, Telluria 's interest in this question is signalled by its determination to mix subgenres, tropes, and settings at every given opportunity. The openin...

At the beginning of this year, I participated in a Strange Horizons roundtable on the unexpectedly entertaining first season of Amazon's adaptation of the Wheel of Time books. In that discussion, I was present as the token non-book reader, the person who enjoyed the show but had no idea what greater significance its events, setting, and characters foretold. Now at the close of the year, I'm taking the opposite position on another roundtable about another Amazon show, the Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power . The other participants are author and reviewer Will Shaw, Strange Horizons coordinating editor Gautam Bhatia, and reviews co-editor Aishwarya Subramanian. The discussion was ably organized, led, and edited by reviews co-editor Dan Hartland. Abigail Nussbaum: I’d say my main issue with the show is its bifurcated approach to its storytelling, and especially how it filled in the source material. Yes, sometimes it felt incredibly imaginative and creative....

Strange Horizons have published my review of Katherine Addison's The Grief of Stones , the sequel to last year's The Witness for the Dead , which was itself a spin-off of Addison's beloved 2014 fantasy of manners The Goblin Emperor . Unlike Goblin 's court intrigue, the Witness novels are detective stories, starring the priest-necromancer Thara Celehar. It's interesting that Addison chose such an oblique follow-up to what was after all a popular and well-loved novel, but as I note in my review, both The Goblin Emperor and now this new series seem to draw on inspirations from outside the fantasy genre, while constructing a thought-out, down-to-earth fantasy world. The books I found myself comparing it to are Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody detective novels (2004-2019). As in that series, the detective takes on an array of cases, some trivial—a bakery desperate to find a suddenly-deceased partner’s scone recipe—and some tragic—a newly-bereaved husband who needs Cele...

I was invited to cover for the Guardian 's regular SFF columnist, Lisa Tuttle, this month, and my reviews are up today. I was a bit nervous about the experience—five books is a big commitment of time and energy, and readers of this blog know that I'm not accustomed to summing up my thoughts on anything in 200 words or less. But I ended up having a lot of fun, mainly because the books discussed were a varied bunch, several of which weren't even on my radar before the column's editor, Justine Jordan, suggested them. The column discusses The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, a twist on the vampire story that has more than a little of The Handmaid's Tale in its DNA. The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay, a horror author whom I've been hearing good things about for years, so it was great to have an opportunity to sample his stuff. Extinction by Bradley Somer, part of the rising tide of climate fiction we've been seeing in recent years, but with a very interesting ...

One thing that has happened as I've gotten older and more experienced as a critic is that I tend to write fewer outright pans. Life is too short to spend consuming things that you hate, much less expending the mental energy to explain and illustrate why they should be hated. But every now and then, a work comes along that hits just the right sweet spot, so terrible that there are only bad things to say about it, but in a way that makes it impossible to look away, and which compels you to share your dismay with everyone else. HBO Max's The Time Traveler's Wife , based on the bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger and adapted by TV wunderkind Steven Moffat, is such a work. Over at Strange Horizons , I try to summarize the many ways in which this show fails. More importantly, I try to figure out whether the root of the show's badness lies in the original novel—whose problems have been amply elaborated upon over the last twenty years—or in the no less problematic showrunn...

My review of the second season of Russian Doll appears today at Strange Horizons . As I write in the review, Russian Doll is almost more interesting for how it reflects the vicissitudes of the streaming era, and Netflix's wavering fortunes over the last few years, than for the story it tells. Its second season joins several other shows that should by all rights have been one-and-done, but which were brought back due to enthusiastic audience response and platforms desperate for content, only to be met by a resounding shrug from audiences who had already moved on. The season itself, meanwhile, lacks the tight plotting and evocative central McGuffin of the first season, but it still has significant charms, even if these often come down getting to spend more time with the characters, and in the situations, that were so delightful last season. Russian Doll 's first season felt almost like a precision instrument (a precision that contrasted nicely with Nadia's chaotic nature),...

A gaggle of shorter pieces of writing published elsewhere on the internet over the last couple of days. First, at the magazine ArtReview , I have a short piece about multiverses and how they're used by franchises like the MCU as well as smaller films like Everything Everywhere All at Once : This kind of appeal to recognition can serve as a pleasant garnish. One of the earliest on-screen multiverse stories, the Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019-2020), took a great deal of pleasure in bringing together previous inhabitants of DC characters from projects old (Burt Ward from the original Batman TV series, 1966-1968), failed (Ashley Scott from the short-lived Birds of Prey , 2002-2003) and wildly successful (Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman from the beloved animated series, 1992-1995). At its worst, however, it feels like a kind of anti-story. As Tony Soprano once put it, "remember when" is the lowest form of conversation. When John Krasinski appears in the latest Doctor Str...