Asking the Wrong Questions

What is Prophet ? Nature writer and essayist Helen Macdonald shocked the publishing world when they announced that their follow-up to books like H is for Hawk would be a science fiction novel co-written with debut author and musician Sin Blaché. In the novel, the titular substance, an accidental byproduct of superconductor research, violates the laws of physics and threatens to undermine reality itself. Prophet induces a state of extreme nostalgia, causing the people exposed to it to manifest objects of a sentimental and kitschy nature—cabbage patch dolls, board games, an entire 50s diner—with which they become entranced. But Prophet may also possess a degree of consciousness and intentionality, altering its behavior in response to the effects it has had, threatening to subsume all of humanity in longing for a past that may never have existed. From that description, and the novel's pedigree, we might assume that Prophet is mainstream SF. The sort of book that reaches primarily fo...

The Marvels is the first movie that makes me think the MCU might actually be over. Not because it's bad—it is, in fact, quite charming and enjoyable, solidly mid-tier Marvel, and near the top of the pack for a post- Endgame movie. And not even because it has been a box office disappointment—though in the conversation surrounding this underperformance, not enough has been said about how it represents less a reaction to the movie itself, and more the accumulated fatigue of an audience burned out by Eternals , Ant-Man 3 , and a slew of underwhelming Disney+ shows. No, the reason I think The Marvels might be the beginning of the end is that, beyond litigating its dismal box office performance, no one is talking about it. And there is, to be clear, a lot to talk about here. As little as five years ago I think this movie would have unleashed the kind of discourse tsunami that we saw in the wake of Winter Soldier , Age of Ultron , Civil War , or the first Captain Marvel . But now, cric...

Stories that deal with our evolving and often dysfunctional relationship with food have been a running thread through science fiction for decades. Isaac Asimov's "Good Taste" imagines a society in which eating natural-grown food is considered grotesque and disgusting. Adam Roberts's By Light Alone invents a technology that allows people to photosynthesize nutrients from the sun, which immediately turns the consumption of food into an elite status marker. In contrast, the elites in Sarah Tolmie's NoFood have undergone a surgical procedure to remove their GI tracts, which makes visiting a restaurant an experience not unlike immersive theater. More recently, Meg Elison's Hugo-nominated story "The Pill" imagines a society which invents a no-fuss cure for fatness, and then insists that everyone should take it. With her second novel, Chana Porter adds to this tradition, but complicates it with a core SFnal setting. The Thick and the Lean is set on an al...

The lives of the Brontës—that brilliant, doomed family whose members struggled with genteel poverty, unrequited love, frustrated ambitions, and (in the case of son Branwell) addiction before succumbing, one by one, to disease—have for some time exerted a pull on artists and audiences. It's a story that has, in some ways, begun to eclipse the novels and poetry they left behind—see, for example, Frances O'Connor's recent film Emily , in which the most mysterious of the Brontë sisters leaves herself only a bit of time to write Wuthering Heights in between tempestuous affairs and drug trips. Other artists, too, have been drawn to dramatizations of the Brontës' lives and deaths—Catherynne Valente's novel The Glass Town Game , Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans's comic DIE , Sally Wainwright's TV movie To Walk Invisible .  Rachel Cantor is therefore wading into a very crowded field with her third novel, but she almost immediately sets it apart by refusing to narrow...

Angered by an unauthorized, inaccurate biography of her late wife, the multi-disciplinary artist, public intellectual, and provocateur known only as X, journalist C.M. Lucca sets out to correct the record by writing her own biography.  Biography of X  is a metafictional exercise that is absolutely committed to the bit, complete with second, internal copyright and About the Author pages, copiously documented (invented) sources for all its quotations, and photographic "evidence" of the events and people it describes. As if that were not enough, the novel takes place in an alternate US, where after the second World War the southern states seceded, forming a dictatorial theocracy which lasted for decades.  This is such a weird and distinctive project, one that touches on so many topics and tropes that I have always been drawn to, that it seemed inevitable that  Biography of X  would be one of my favorite reads of the year. But to my dismay—and despite the obvious ef...

Full disclosure: Niall is a dear friend, frequent debating partner, and someone who has had a tremendous impact on my own development as a reader, writer, and thinker. The odds that I wouldn't like or recommend a collection of his reviews were pretty low even before I turned the first page. Perhaps more importantly, Niall and I are currently in the early stages of assembling a collection of my reviews, to be published by his new micro-press, Briardene Books . So one could certainly argue that I have a vested interest in his book's success. With all that in mind, and with the understanding that I would have told you to buy a copy of All These Worlds even before I read it, here are some thoughts on the collection itself. All These Worlds is a gorgeous volume, setting a high bar for small press publications that speaks to Niall's love for books as objects. It's cleanly arranged and organized, with the fifty reviews collected here—covering novels, individual short storie...

Reading Ballingrud's first novel—after a long career as a writer of short fiction—one finds oneself collecting references. Charles Portis's True Grit , Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles , and Edgar Rice Burroghs's A Princess of Mars are only a few obvious influences. It's a combination that is at once incredibly enjoyable—both for the thrill of recognition, and for the audacity of mixing together such disparate works—and which threatens to overwhelm the novel itself.  The True Grit aspect is quickly established when our narrator, fourteen-year-old Annabelle Crisp, witnesses a robbery in her father's restaurant and is outraged by both his and the authorities' mealy-mouthed response. The robbers are known to live in the nearby mining colony, but the local sheriff makes only a half-hearted, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to arrest them, while Annabelle's father merely reopens the restaurant as if nothing happened. Despite this quintessentially W...

Twelve years ago, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard released The Cabin in the Woods , a metafictional horror comedy seeking to answer the question of just why photogenic young people on idyllic nature getaways keep encountering eldritch horrors who pick them off one by one. There's a lot in the film that hasn't aged well—the meta gags were getting tired almost as soon as they were made, and more recent work, such as the films of Jordan Peele, has done a much better job of blending horror and humor and exploring the roots of the genre's core tropes. But the basic idea of the film—a shadowy organization who are deliberately sacrificing the vacationers in order to spare humanity from the wrath of the old ones—remains strong, arguably stronger than the comedic wrapping that surrounds it. As I wrote in my review , by the end of the movie you find yourself regretting the time spent leading up to this revelation, and wishing the film had started from it as its premise. M. Night Shyamal...

Every Clarke Award shortlist includes at least one utterly unexpected nominee, a complete wildcard. Think Iain Pears's Arcadia , originally envisioned as an app experience in which readers would choose for themselves the order of the story's chapters. Or Patience Agbabi's middle grade novel The Infinite . It's less common for these nominees to win the whole thing, so Harry Josephine Giles's Deep Wheel Orcadia , a verse novel written in the Orkney dialect (on offshoot of Scots spoken on the Orkney archipelago), was a book that I approached with some interest, having claimed the award over more conventional nominees like Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace , and much bigger names like Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun . While I'm not quite certain that I would have made the same choice (Mercurio D. Rivera's Wergen , and Aliya Whiteley's Skyward Inn , strike me as no less worthy winners), Deep Wheel Orcadia is an exciting winner, one whose ...

Rivera's novel is one of several wildcard nominees on this year's Clarke Award shortlist, though in my non-representative sampling it is the one that has garnered the most commentary—perhaps because people got a glimpse of its appalling cover design , which is bad even by the standards of its publisher, NewCon Press, and felt compelled to react. But to me what truly makes Wergen unusual—in ways both good and bad—is how old school it is. It's such a throwback to the science fiction of the 60s and 70s that it ends up feeling fresh and different. And yet at the same time there are aspects of it that are decidedly old-fashioned, and which end up undercutting its effect. Wergen is a fix-up, with several stories having been published independently in various short fiction venues (and one as a standalone novella) over the course of more than a decade. Here we already have the first tick on the old school checklist—I can't remember the last time I read a fix-up novel, and eve...

[This is an expanded version of a capsule review of The Moonday Letters, which appeared last week in The Guardian] Every now and then you have the pleasure of stumbling on a book that just blows your socks off. Finnish author Itäranta has had her share of plaudits—her first novel, The Memory of Water , was a Clarke nominee, an honor that I very much hope The Moonday Letters will share—but I'd managed to miss her previous work, and picked up her latest in the hopes of jumping on the bandwagon. What I found was excellent beyond any of my expectations. You can feel the influence of several recent works by Kim Stanley Robinson (an author who, for all that he's regularly acknowledged as a major figure in the field, doesn't have a lot of direct successors). But there is also a flavor and an emphasis that are entirely original, combining to create one of the most exciting works of science fiction I've read this year. Lumi is a healer in the 22nd century, traveling across the...

I wouldn't normally have picked up this biography. For one thing, I read hardly any nonfiction, and for another, I don't actually have that much interest in Stan Lee. For as much as I've written and thought about the MCU, my interest in most of its characters and stories started with the movies. And for all that I found Lee's cameos in those movies, and his red carpet appearances, charming, I also couldn't help but feel suspicious towards the displays of reverence towards him. Did this guy actually make an important contribution to 20th century culture, I wondered, or was he just the last man standing when something he was connected to started making a ton of money? The fact that True Believer is Hugo-nominated, and that Riesman and I are twitter friends, is what spurred me to pick up the book. Which was fortunate, because this biography not only goes a long way towards answering my question, the portrait it paints of Lee is absolutely fascinating. He comes off as...