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Rounding out July's reviews are: Erin Horáková, who finds Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless delightful on the micro level, but somewhat shapeless in the macro; Nathaniel Katz and Marie Velazquez, who take two looks at the first volume in Daniel Abraham's new epic fantasy series, The Dragon's Path, Nathaniel wondering when the payoff to the book's buildup will come, and Maria whether Abraham plans

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We have two new reviewers this week.  First, Lila Garrott looks at Betrayer, the latest installment in C.J. Cherryh's long-running series, and concludes that though it might lay the seeds for interesting stories later on, as a work in its own right it is a disappointment.  In today's review, Guria King is more pleased by Kate Griffin's The Neon Court, the third Matthew Swift novel, which, though

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My latest column has been posted at Strange Horizons: "Old, Weird". I probably should have included links to some songs and materials discussed in it, so here are a few to get you started...

• Some of Greil Marcus's The Old, Weird America can be read at Google Books.
• The Wikipedia page on The Anthology of American Folk Music has some good info and links.
• At the Folkways site, you can hear clips from each track of Harry Smith's Anthology and also download the marvelous liner notes as a PDF.
• You can read some parts of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival on Google Books.
• I wrote a bit about Todd Haynes's I'm Not There when it first came out.
• Tim Lucas posted some interesting quotes about Dylan's song "I'm Not There (1956)" at Video Watchblog (the link to an mp3 of the song still works, at least as of this minute).
• You can hear Henry Thomas's sublime "Honey, Won't You Allow Me One More Chance" on YouTube.
• Some of Charley Patton's recordings are available at The Internet Archive.
• Finally, an interview I did with Brian Francis Slattery just before Liberation was released.

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Richard Larson kicks off this week's reviews with a rave for the fourth volume in Jonathan Strahan's anthology series, Eclipse.  Though several of the stories strike him as particularly strong, Richard finds the entire anthology well worth a read.  We also have two new reviewers making their debut this week.  Tori Truslow is intrigued by S.L. Grey's The Mall, which has been championed by Lauren

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As well as my own review of Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, this week's Strange Horizons sees Niall Harrison discussing The Colony by Jillian Weise, one of the novels selected for this year's Tiptree honor list.  Though Niall is impressed by Weise's treatment of the subject of sexuality, he's dubious about her approach to science.  Rounding out the week is Alexandra Pierce, making her Strange

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This week's reviews kick off with Matt Cheney's fascinating take on Gary K. Wolfe's essay collection Evaporating Genres, in which Matt discusses his own expectations from reviewing and criticism, and the difficulties those expectations caused him in appreciating Wolfe's book.  Duncan Lawie is pleased with Aliette do Bodard's Harbinger of the Storm, the sequel to Guardian of the Underworld, which

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Strange Horizons yesterday posted my review of Gary K. Wolfe's Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature.

That review begins by making a specific distinction between book reviews and a certain type of literary criticism, a distinction that Abigail Nussbaum considers in a blog post about the sorts of things she's looking for as Strange Horizons's reviews editor. I don't particularly disagree with the qualifications and complexities Abigail adds to what I wrote; the distinction I settled on was useful for that review, and seemed worth mentioning because it was absent from Wolfe's own taxonomy of reviews vs. criticism. As with so many things, in reality the distinctions are not hard and fast.

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At long last, my series on defining the Strange Horizons reviews policy has started up again at the magazine's blog.  This time, I try to explain why the reviewing vs. criticism discussion and the question of spoiler warnings are fundamentally about the same thing. Note also that, thanks to the magazine's intrepid webmaster Shane, the blog now displays full posts on the main page and syndicates

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My latest Strange Horizons column was posted at the beginning of the week; the subject this time is Joanna Russ.

One thing I thought about including, but couldn't figure out how to fit in, was that Russ's marvelous story "The Clichés from Outer Space" predicted one of the elements of Bryan Vaughn's comic Y: The Last Man (a series that I must admit I only read the first 3 collections of, its virtues utterly lost on me). In the comic, the Daughters of the Amazon are a bunch of evil, man-hating lesbians who cut off one of their breasts to be able to shoot arrows better or something, which is what some folks have  said the actual Amazons did back in the day (the myths are contradictory). It's possible that this noxious stereotype is ironized and deconstructed later in the series; I didn't stick with it long enough to find out.

The relevant passage from Russ's story is one I quoted only a sentence of in the column. It's from the section called "The Turnabout Story, or, I Always Knew What They Wanted to Do to Me Because I've Been Doing It to Them for Years, Especially in the Movies":

Four ravaging, man-hating, vicious, hulking, Lesbian, sadistic, fetishistic Women's Libbers motorcycled down the highway to where George was hiding behind a bush. Each was dressed in black leather, spike-heeled boots and carried both a tommygun and a whip, as well as knives between their teeth. Some had cut off their breasts. Their names were Dirty Sandra, Hairy Harriet, Vicious Vivian, and Positively Ruthless Ruth. They dragged George (a little sandy-haired fellow with spectacles but with a keen mind and an iron will) from behind the bush he was hiding in. Then they beat him. Then they reduced him to flinders. Then they squashed the flinders to slime. Then they jumped up and down on the slime.

"Women are better than men!" cried Dirty Sandra.

"Lick my boots!" cried Hairy Harriet.

"Drop your pants; I'm going to rape you!" cried Vicious Vivian in her gravelly bass voice.

Etc. It's great stuff. A first version of the story was published in the April Fool's Day issue of The Witch and the Chameleon in 1975; an expanded version appeared in Women's Studies International Forum in 1984, and then was collected in The Hidden Side of the Moon in 1987. Y: The Last Man began publication in 2002.

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The first Strange Horizons review of May is Adam Roberts's take on Harmony by Project Itoh, a Haikasoru book that Adam finds very impressive, and which launches him into wondering why modern SF has had so little to say about modern medicine and the experience of being in its care.  Niall Alexander is less complimentary to the BBC much-pumped, then quickly-dumped SF TV series Outcasts, whose

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This week's reviews kick off with the third installment of Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's series in which reviews Isaac Asimov's series The Great SF Stories (see also parts 1 and 2).  This time Alvaro takes a look at the stories of 1940.  L. Timmel Duchamp follows with a review of Julia Holmes's Meeks, a novel that Timmi finds frustrating in its refusal to engage the reader with any of the conventions of

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This week's Strange Horizons reviews cover two short story collections and a movie.  Niall Harrison is impressed with the Jonathan Strahan-edited The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, finding that many of the themes he's admired in Robinson's novels are ably expressed in his short fiction.  Anil Menon reviews Beth Bernobich's collection A Handful of Pearls & Other Stories and also likes what he finds

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This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with one of the most talked-about books of the last few months, Jo Walton's Among Others, which charms reviewer Michael Levy by being as much about the experience of being a genre fan as a genre story itself.  Graham Sleight takes a look at the seemingly puzzling combination of Michael Moorcock and Doctor Who tie-in novels in Doctor Who: The Coming of

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My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted, this time a celebration of Fritz Leiber's centennary.

I mentioned last week that I needed to come up with a title for my Strange Horizons columns. Through much of last week I was fighting off the worst illness I've had in years, so perhaps the title is simply the product of fever, but nonetheless, now in a less fevered state, I like it: Lexias. It keeps to the pattern of the other columnists (Scores, Diffractions, Intertitles, etc.) in being a single, plural word. And it seems mostly accurate to my project, if you think of the word as Roland Barthes used it in S/Z: "a series of brief, contiguous fragments ... units of reading" (Richard Miller's translation). (For more on Barthes, by the way, this is an interesting site.)

But for my purposes, "lexias" is fun, too, because it is the term Samuel R. Delany picked up (from Barthes) for The American Shore, which can be described as a book-length study of Thomas Disch's "Angouleme" (as S/Z can be described as a book-length study of Balzac's "Sarrasine" -- and I say "can be described as" because to say either book is that seems to me too reductive -- each book is an awful lot of things).

Which is not to say that I think I belong in league with Barthes or Delany (ha!), any more than anyone who picks up a term belongs in the same league with anyone who has used it before, but that I like having a title that suggests fragmentation, experimentation, close reading, and realms of both subversive (or subverted) literature and thoughtful science fiction.

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This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Matthew Jones's take on Caprica, which is a little more negative than mine and, interestingly, more concerned with the technological questions raised by the series's premise, which the show neglected in favor of political and social storylines and, of course, soap opera.  On Wednesday, Hannah Strom-Martin reviews the anthology Machine of Death: A

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The results of the Strange Horizons 2010 readers' poll are in, and, alongside such winners as Theodora Goss (best short story), Marge Simon (best poem), and Orrin Grey (best article), I'm stunned to announce that I was voted best reviewer.  I'm joined in that category by Adam Roberts, Niall Harrison, Matthew Cheney, and Farah Mendlesohn, which is such an august group of reviewers that I can't

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I've been writing columns for Strange Horizons for some time now, chronicling whatever happened to be obsessing me at the moment when the column was due, for better or ill. It's a good challenge. Various other columnists have come and gone during that time, with Karen Healey and John Clute being the most recent regulars, offering diverse and fascinating stuff.

Now, two more folks have joined the roster, and they're both people I've at least been acquainted with for a while, people who I have great fondness and respect for: Vandana Singh and Genevieve Valentine. Vandana's first column appeared last week, Genevieve's this week. Great, great stuff.

We've also been asked to provide names for our columns in addition to the individual column titles. Clute's got Scores, Vandana is Diffractions, and Genevieve is Intertitles. I envy them all. (Being in such hallowed company, I'm tempted to call mine Excrement, but I'll probably come up with something slightly less accurate by Friday, when I need to settle on it...)

Also, the Reader's Award Poll results are in -- congratulations to all the winners: Theodora Goss (fiction), Marge Simon (poetry), Orrin Grey (nonfiction), and Abigail Nussbaum (reviewing). I was startled to discover I came in fourth in the reviewer category, despite publishing only two reviews last year, I'm grateful to all of you who held your noses and put my name on your ballots! I'm biased, of course, but I think SH has the best stable of reviewers in the SF world, and it's humbling to be included among them.

And here, because I expect you probably need it, is Frank O'Hara's poem "Autobiographia Literaria".

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Before I get to the week's reviews, I'd like to mention that the Strange Horizons readers' poll, where you can vote for your favorite stories, poems, articles and reviewers, is open until March 6th.  Vote early and vote often (though only your last ballot will count). Now the reviews: the week kicks off with Jonathan McCalmont (who has just joined Strange Horizons's staff as junior articles

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This wasn't a conscious plan on my part, but it seems rather appropriate that on Valentine's Day, Strange Horizons should have run T.S. Miller's review of Robert Silverberg's The Last Song of Orpheus, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Miller finds Silverberg's retelling oddly cold, but his review is as much a discussion of the myth itself, of earlier, including medieval, versions

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The last Strange Horizons review of January is Edward James's take on Kate Elliott's Cold Magic, which is actually a reflection on the two fantasy sequences Elliott has already written, to which the trilogy that Cold Magic begins is a continuation.  On Wednesday, Graham Sleight reviews Susan Hill's ghost story The Small Hand, which he finds a little old-fashioned in its willingness to tie up all

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As well as my own review of The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman, these week Strange Horizons features Matthew Jones's review of the film Monsters, which makes me all the more eager to see it.  There's also an interesting discussion in the comments.  Today also marks the Strange Horizons debut of Aishwarya Subramanian, who reviews Karl Alexander's sequel to his 1979 novel Time After Time, Jaclyn

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This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with something a little different: Karen Burnham's review of Mary Roach's popular science book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, which Karen finds funny and fascination.  On Wednesday, Shaun Duke (in his reviews department debut) makes an argument in favor of Tron: Legacy and its worldbuilding, though the discussion in the

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In the second post in my series about reviewing at the Strange Horizons blog, I discuss the question that occurs long before the editor gets down to editing: which books (and films and TV shows) to commission reviews of? As seems to happen quite often in discussions of genre or reviewing, the question of what to review boils down to a choice between prescriptive and descriptive. Is a reviews

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This week's Strange Horizons reviews begin with Paul Kincaid's take on 80! a festschrift published for Ursula K. Le Guin's 80th birthday last year and now being made publicly available.  On Wednesday, Chris Kammerud take his first look at Philip José Farmer's writing in Up the Bright River, a collection of Farmer's short fiction, and finds Farmer more interesting and more varied than he expected.

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My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted. It's about one of my favorite books of nonfiction, Ann Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body.

I first tried to write it as a straightforward appreciation, but for reasons that will become obvious from the column, I couldn't do that right now. So I broke the voices in my head into two configurations, X and Y, and had them talk to each other -- they're neither and both "me", and that proved to be just the distancing effect I needed.

Here's a sample:

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