Asking the Wrong Questions

"The Departure of Boromir" by  Anke Eißmann , 2003 Aragorn hesitated. He desired to go to the high seat himself, hoping to see there something that would guide him in his perplexities; but time was pressing. Suddenly he leaped forward, and ran to the summit, across the great flag-stones, and up the steps. Then sitting on the high seat he looked out. But the sun seemed darkened, and the world dim and remote. He turned from North back again to North, and saw nothing save the distant hills, unless it were that far away he could see again a great bird like an eagle high in the air, descending slowly in wide circles down towards the earth. At the beginning of the third book of The Lord of the Rings , and the first of The Two Towers , J.R.R. Tolkien does two things that remind us, yet again, that he was writing before many of the "rules" of fantasy fiction (and perhaps of popular fiction in general) were codified. First, he switches his point of view to Aragorn. The Lord ...

In the mid-90s, my family went on a road trip in New England. My mother, eager to reinforce her children's only-nominal Americanness, started us off in Boston and plotted a course full of historical points of interest on our way to a Passover seder at my aunt's house in Rochester, NY. Most of the stops on this journey were new to me (or perhaps only vaguely familiar from books such as Johnny Tremaine and The Witch of Blackbird Pond —I told you that my mother tried to make Americans out of us). One stop, however, I may have insisted on making myself. Even from the other side of the planet, I had imbibed, from movies, TV, and general cultural miasma, the notion of Salem, Massachusetts as "Witch City". I was aware of the witch trials, but in no way interested in reconciling the paradox that even respectable Salem tourist attractions, such as the Salem Witch Museum , mostly avoid—the fact that there were no witches in Salem in 1692, and yet the town continues to capitali...

In a little more than a day, the winners of this year's Hugo awards will be announced in Los Angeles . I've toned down my discussion of the Hugo nominees in recent years—not coincidentally, a period in which the award, especially in the Best Novel category, has become more inward-looking and fun-seeking. Compare, for example, this year's Hugo shortlist with the one for the Arthur C. Clarke Award , which includes climate fiction (a subgenre whose existence the Hugo seems determined to ignore) and near-future political dystopia. So it was a bit to my surprise when I found myself with things to say about each of this year's Best Novel nominees. This is not a great shortlist, but it is, I think, a representative snapshot of a certain subset of the fantastic genres, and as such is worth talking about. First up on the ballot is Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption , the sequel to 2024's The Tainted Cup , which won the Best Novel award last year. Both books—a...

Cover design for Unfinished Tales (1980) by J.R.R. Tolkien The problems that confront one given responsibility for the writings of a dead author are hard to resolve. Some persons in this position may elect to make no material whatsoever available for publication, save perhaps for work that was in a virtually finished state at the time of the author's death. In the case of the unpublished writings of J.R.R. Tolkien this might seem at first sight the proper course, since he himself, peculiarly critical and exacting of his own work, would not have dreamt of allowing even the more completed narratives in this book to appear without much further refinement. There comes a point in the lifecycle of every sufficiently successful story in which it becomes an IP. At that point, there are two stories rather than one: there is the story itself, and the story about how it became that story. The fruitful collaborations, necessary compromises, backstage drama, and financial shenanigans that all c...

There are tropes that have been around for so long, and become so codified within pop culture, that they hardly feel like science fiction anymore. Within that group, the time loop surely has pride of place. Its original popularizer, 1993's Groundhog Day , resonated more with Buddhist philosophy than any specific genre writers, and in the intervening decades the time loop has showed up in everything from cop shows to romantic comedies. So when I heard that a time loop story had been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize , I was surprised but not flabbergasted. There's already so much slippage between science fiction and mainstream fiction these days—so much that we're inventing terms like "imprint SF" to try to articulate how different publishers and training paths affect the materials being published—that the real surprise was not a mainstream-published time loop story, but the fact that it was considered sufficiently literary to attract the Booker's ...

"Argonath" by Naci Caba 'Begging your pardon,' said Sam. 'I don't think you understand my master at all. He isn't hesitating about which way to go. Of course not! What's the good of Minas Tirith anyway? To him, I mean ... he knows he's got to find the Cracks of Doom, if he can. But he's afraid. Now it's come to the point, he's just plain terrified.' At long last, we have arrived at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring . And indeed, the end of the fellowship. As the travelers make their way down the river Anduin, the question of their next steps looms ever more urgently. Should they return with Boromir to Minas Tirith, to either regroup before the journey to Mordor or remain there for the duration of the war? Or should they proceed directly into Mordor, and attempt to seek out Mount Doom? Before we get to this question, there is yet another phase change in the landscape the story moves through. Up until now, our heroes have traveled...