Categories
Book Review General Blog

Report on Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2024

Every December (or January) I buy the annual Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (BASFF) collection. Every year I suffer a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that the guest editor will swing the pendulum on the selections in an unpredictable direction which may or may not align with my tastes. Some years it has been a real trainwreck (for me; I’m happy for anyone who enjoyed the years I didn’t [even though they’re wrong]). The risk is the point. I want to read stories I wouldn’t read elsewhere or of my own volition. Otherwise, I would just edit my own anthology every year.

This year the guest editor was Hugh Howey, the author of the Silo series. I’ve not read the Silo books or seen the Silo show, but my sister hates the show. My trepidation level was medium. Thankfully, Howey pulls it off. I enjoyed about 75% of the stories in this year’s anthology, which is a very solid run. I’ll restrict myself to mentioning only my very favorites here.

There are some big names here doing stylish bits. In “How It Unfolds”, James S.A. Corey pull off one of the only constructive SF stories about a guy being extremely divorced that I’ve ever read. Ann Leckie does colonization, evolution, and most importantly slug life in “The Long Game”. With “John Hollowback and The Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar delivers an account of restorative justice via witch which proves, for the perpetrator, even more painful than retributive justice aims to be.

There are a couple compelling stories in throwback styles. I deeply enjoyed the pulpy refreshments of Jonathan Louis Duckworth’s “Bruise-Eyed Dusk”, with its swamp witches and ride-able gators and hovering sadness. This is a fantasy that is willing to play and explore and surprise so we can enjoy its strange world. Christopher Rowe’s “The Four Last Things” is an explicit Cordwainer Smith tribute, and that’s a great taste. Wild and literary and straining at the edges of conception and perception, Rowe’s story sets all the brain bits sizzling, hopefully to productive ends.

If there was something to criticize in this year’s BASFF, when the vast majority of the stories were ones I enjoyed, it is that most of the work included is Not That Deep. The themes, the meanings, the feelings elicited are Right There. You get it at the beginning, you get it in the middle, and in the end you Get It. There’s nothing wrong with that; there are lots of things that shouldn’t be veiled or disguised or thematized until they’re hard to see. But after a while the thundering horns of right-thinking get a little hard to distinguish from the thundering horns of wrong-thinking. It’s all just thundering horns.

When I think about the best that speculative fiction – sci-fi and fantasy – is capable of, I think of a shadow play. When you watch shadow puppets, you’re not looking where the light is shining, you’re looking at what appears behind, the shape made by the play between light and object. It’s hard to write about real life, what literally is. It’s even harder to write about the things that are hidden behind real life: the abstract, uncertain, and ineffable. The mysteries. The addition of the blatantly unreal is the bright light producing the shadow of a mystery, which is what allows us to contemplate it.

There weren’t a lot of stories about the shadows in this year’s BASFF. But there were a few. Thomas Ha’s “Window Boy” draws up a unique and weird dystopia to ponder the mechanisms which close people off to the suffering of others, ending in an appropriately ambiguous place. Kel Coleman’s “Disassembling Light” confronts the selfishness of mentors who fail their students, using a wondrous and disgusting fantasy discipline as its canvas. The final two stories included deliver an exceptionally strong and troubling ending to the collection. In “Falling Bodies”, Rebecca Roanhorse pushes the limits of what we might consider agency for the truly alienated with a protagonist pinned between colonizers and manipulators on all sides. Sam J. Miller, a reliably strong contributor, closes up the shop with “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak”, a story that takes the vampire addiction metaphor to a truer and infinitely more painful place as it questions what lengths we ought to go to when imprisoned by poisonous love (and for once, when it comes to vampires, it is specifically familial love). 

It’s these last few stories I’m still thinking about after finishing the anthology. They press at uncertain and uncomfortable places, artfully, and ask something in return for the imagining. That’s the high heights to which sci-fi and fantasy can aspire. And the other stories in BASFF 2024 rest comfortably at the medium heights of sincerely entertaining and compelling and interesting, which is a height to which all of us unpublished writers must aspire 😂

If you read this year’s BASFF and have something to say, comment. I dare you. I will respond. Even if you didn’t read this year’s BASFF, comment-I-dare-you-I-will-respond.

Categories
General Blog Year in Review 2024

Artistic Consolations of 2024, Part III: Ludic

What an awful year, was 2024. What a terrible, rotting, degenerated compost heap of a year, particularly when it came to games and the game industry. I can’t name the last time a major US game studio released a game I was excited about. Pentiment? I think it was Pentiment.

That being said, in other parts of the world they still make games that are good. And in the indie scene they still make games that are good. Pretty soon they’ll have fired everybody out there, and we’ll be left all alone with Product 4: The Contenting – Revenge of IP. Until then, however, let this love carry us.

I have no categories by which to organize the games I’m about to describe. Some may wonder why I am deploying the fewest rhetorical-organizational tools here on games, the subject about which I am theoretically most qualified to speak. What they don’t see is that I have studied games the most vehemently because they are the most mysterious. Allow the games to retain that mystery and we will learn more from them.

I played A Little to the Left for the first time near the end of the year, and it haunts me to this day. I suspect I’ll write a more extended analysis of its apophenic ordering of household goods, but until then think of this game as a metaphorical account of the endless war between God and Satan. You play as God, your cat is Satan, and the teeming masses of men’s souls are the unordered heaps of silverware in your drawer. Riveting.

Another lovely puzzle game this year was Tactical Breach Wizards, undercover as a turn-based tactics game. The brevity of each level, the clarity of each character’s powerset, and the charm of each character’s style and personality come together to make for a game that is fun, exciting, and well-told. More and more as I grow old, I also grow exhausted of the games that are endless timesucks, not only demanding 60+ hours of total play, but 3 or more hours per session to even get fun. Good god. I’m only working part-time and I’m still too busy for that. That’s what I enjoyed most about Tactical Breach Wizards: it’s a game you can boot up and play for however much time is available. In that brief period, you’ll have objectives to complete, actions to take, and amusing character interactions. You’ll have fun.

Rise of the Golden Idol dropped this year. Yippee! I resisted playing the original Case of the Golden Idol game for a while because of the rather grotesque caricature art style, but when it finally caught me, I was caught forever. The mad perverse mystery, the devious puzzles, and the spiraling delicious central narrative imprinted themselves indelibly upon my mind, so I was of course delighted to meet the sequel. Rise is more ambitious structurally and mechanically, with the basic Golden Idol puzzle finding numerous reinventions. The narrative is not quite as compelling, its final revelations not achieving the same thematically rich and terrifying heights of Case, but that would be a startling achievement. Rise is more of the pleasures of Case without being entirely more-of-the-same. That’s also an achievement, and probably a more sustainable one.

Embarrassingly, I also loved Cyberpunk 2077 in 2024. I didn’t play it when it came out, and I didn’t play it while CDProjekt Red flailed about trying to fix their exceptional mess. But then in February 2024 some friends of mine who had played convinced me to try it, claiming the bugs were largely fixed (on PC, where we play). Not only did I have a low-bug experience, I also had a very powerful one, mixing delight and sorrow and beauty in various measures. I’ve spoken at length about this one via other media, so I will say only that the horrific airless feeling of young V watching all the doors of their life close in front of them hurt gloriously. It hurt like the truth. We were fellow travelers on the cold night highway of this killing world. We did not give in.

The best game of 2024 was 20 Small Mazes. I’m not doing a bit here, it was 20 Small Mazes. This is a free game that contains exactly what it claims: twenty small mazes. Each maze is an experiment, an exploration of what a maze is and could be in a digital context. Each maze is a tiny revelation about how to navigate an unknown space. The mazes all live together in a heap on the screen. It’s up to the player to arrange them, adjust them, sort through them, and confront them in whatever order makes sense. The game isn’t long. The game isn’t flashy. But its curiosities and significances and satisfactions are undeniable. It is graceful and humble. It is something that could not be made by the game industry at large. It’s just 20 Small Mazes. Why try to be something else?

That’s 2024. In a time of bombastic spectacle and overwhelming horror, it is no surprise that much of the redeeming came from small, quiet things (and my motorcycle in Cyberpunk). Now it’s 2025; we are in the labyrinth, there’s no way out except through. There will be more consolations. My next post will be a book review. Wait for it.

Categories
General Blog Year in Review 2024

Artistic Consolations of 2024, Part II: Cinematic

I didn’t spend that much time with fresh cinema in 2024. I went to the theater a decent number of times and most of the movies I saw there were also decent. Except Gladiator II, which was awful. Most of the movies I loved were not from this year, and that’s okay. I am a single point in the rolling river of moving picture history; I let all that has come before wash over me. Soon I will be ground into a nub.

I propose four categories for the cinema viewing I conducted: Films Most to Laugh With, Films Most to be Disturbed By, Films Most to be Moved By, and Films Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart. I did not see any of these films before this year (except probably Muppet Christmas Carol, which I’m sure I did see as a baby). They are fresh to me, if not to the world.

Most to Laugh With

Though I am a goofy bastard, I’m not much of a comedy connoisseur. I watched two outstandingly funny films this year: Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer Fait Tousser) and Hundreds of Beavers. A French film by noted wacko cinema crafteur Quentin Dupieux, Smoking Causes Coughing is about Tobacco Force, a team of French superheroes themed around the poisonous chemicals in cigarettes. They work for a disgusting rat man puppet named Chef Didier. He drools green slime constantly, and decides to send the heroes on a team-building retreat in a futuristic country cabin. There they tell each other weird, disturbing stories until their nemesis, Lézardin, threatens the Earth. I think there’s a talking fish at one point. A dude gets chewed up in a woodchipper but he’s still alive and conscious in a bucket of blood (until…). It’s wacked out.

Hundreds of Beavers is also wacked out, though more narratologically straightforward. It’s about a disgraced applejack brewer who becomes a fur trapper to win the hand of a beautiful girl dwelling deep within the forests of the Upper Great Lakes. Also, all the animals are played by people in mascot suits. The filmmakers use their absolutely shoestring budget to deliver maximum hilarity in the form of completely surreal open-world-game-esque stunts. It’s a true Midwest original; you can detect the fingerprints of Winter Madness upon every frame. If you like your entertainment to be extremely goofy and a bit provocative in its weirdness, you can’t go wrong with either of these.

Most to Be Disturbed By

It was a good year for discomfort and uncertainty. The first 2024 film I’ll mention here brought both, plus a certain amount of uneasy humor. That film is A Different Man, about a man who cures his extreme facial difference, only to discover that maybe it wasn’t the only problem with his life. The movie has a surreal, retro moodiness that places you in the unsettled, self-loathing mindset of Edward (played with indelible awkwardness by Sebastian Stan; thankfully he has been liberated from the textureless prison of Earth-616). Renate Reinsve as Edward’s beautifully thoughtless neighbor and Adam Pearson as Oswald, a man with Edward’s same disability but none of his dismalism, deliver stellar performances as well. This is also probably the least disturbing of the most disturbing films of 2024. It’s still fairly unsettling, but in a relatable way (if you hate yourself).

More unsettling is Fright Night, the 1980s vampire movie starring Prince Humperdinck from The Princess Bride. It is the most sexual vampire movie I’ve seen since Coppola’s Dracula, and to be honest Coppola’s Dracula is more horny than sexual. Those are two different things. Horniness can exist rupturously and uproariously without mutual consummation. But the sexual is completed, engaged, multi-actor. You can be horny all alone, with no one to see you. But you can’t be sexual without being seen. The Dracula in Fright Night gets it, and you can see why. I saw the new Nosferatu movie and in it you see Nosferatu’s Nosferenis, and it was still less sexual than Fright Night. I don’t know why everybody is not always talking about Fright Night. It is moist with repressed desires and thirsty in the blood and non-blood sense. You will be uncomfortable. It is essential viewing if you are interested in Draculas in any sense.

Also disturbing in the sexual sense is Communion, a 1989 film starring Christopher Walken. He gets abducted by aliens. He has a mental breakdown. He threatens his family with firearms. He returns to the aliens. They sodomize him (what?). Afterwards, he reconciles with his family and realizes he is now closer to God (what?). The aliens are played by funny little dancing puppets. Either you want to see that or you don’t. It was still not the most disturbing film I watched this year. That was Judgment at Nuremberg.

You might be thinking, “Why not The Zone of Interest, a new movie also about the Nazis and their dumbshit sicko ideology?” Everybody’s already said what they need to about The Zone of Interest. Ask a real critic and they can give you some thoughts on The Zone of Interest. And while the stylistic choices made in that movie are powerful and disturbing, it provides a fairly clear takeaway: don’t be the commandant of Auschwitz. Judgment at Nuremberg goes somewhere more existentially disconcerting and equally relevant – what is the madness which has possessed us to surrender our destiny to fascism? What will we do with the regular people who all just go along with it? No answers, only darkness. That’s the theme for 2024: no answers, only darkness.

And yet. There were films to be moved by, and a man who can weep for their fellows might still be redeemed.

Most to Be Moved By

There are many reasons to be moved by the cinema, at least if you are addicted to the cinema like myself. I was moved by the sheer artistry of Andrew Scott’s performance in the National Theater production of Vanya. That’s only barely a film, but it is on Letterboxd and it is a one-man show and it is the greatest acting I’ve seen in my entire life. And I regularly attend live theater by choice. I was moved by the verisimilitude and richness of super-indie film Hannah Ha Ha, which so lovingly portrayed a kind of person who rarely appears in mainstream cinema living a kind of life which receives an extraordinary lack of respect in so much of mainstream discourse. I was moved by the terrible endurance of Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) in Dark Waters, a film which testifies to the cost of faith as well as its power. I was moved by the kindness and the justice of the eponymous princess in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and by the enduring beauty of her world despite its harshness. And I was moved most profoundly, most achingly, and most painfully by The Muppet Christmas Carol. It was too much kindness, too much generosity, too much hope. I was not well again for days. In the darkest times, love is painful, too painful! But it was love also which moved me in and through each of these films, and it remains the good in in the world as well.

Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart

To love the cinema is part of my life’s work, and that includes its most indelicate and malformed iterations. Thus, Films Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart. An easy, obvious answer at the top is Megalopolis. This movie is terrible and I did see it twice in the theaters. I’ve delivered an extended discourse on this film in another venue; I shan’t repeat myself except to say that it is a greater artistic triumph by far to swing and miss so utterly, than to never do much more than bunt (here’s looking at you, Mid-ley Scott). Let’s get more obscure.

The Man From Earth is an ultra-ultra-indie film from 2007 based a script by an erstwhile Star Trek writer. It’s about a guy named John Oldman who reveals to his friends he’s 14,000 years old (John. Old. Man.). They get really upset. I’m pretty sure Tony Todd had to drive his own car for this movie, because I doubt they could afford a single prop. You have to use your stupidest brain and your smartest brain at the same time to follow the exceptional nonsense which comprises this film’s plot. It doesn’t get any better than this, if you can agree that better here means “dumber than The Twilight Zone“.

Last and so most, a film to which I will only link. I don’t want to speak the name of this movie because the director seems like the kind of person to have a Google alert on his name and then go and harass people who review the film poorly. But I have to talk about it because it and the prior installment in the franchise are some of the most significant crashouts of modern cinema. Everything doesn’t work, and it must be seen to believed. And by the end of the film, despite his dopey-ness, his cringe-inducing ideology, and his disastrous directorial decisions, you will love the director’s crooked heart. There’s no art without artlessness, and I am glad for that.

That’s the cinema, for your crooked heart. Next time, games.

Postscript

Consolation of another kind – we do not yet know what our actions today will change tomorrow. That’s what science fiction is for.

Categories
General Blog Year in Review 2024

The Artistic Consolations of 2024, Part I: Literary

Where to begin the eternal struggle of man vs. blog? This is not my first attempt at building a regular blogging practice, but perhaps it will be my first successful one. My last blog fell into darkness with the rest of Cohost, but my posts remain preserved. Some may yet be resurrected and expanded for this new crusade. What do I intend to blog about? Whatever I feel like, mainly. But what I feel like is almost always related to gaming, cinema, and genre fiction. What are my qualifications to speak on these subjects? Enthusiasm, education, and most of all a relentless holding of opinions. I will not be silenced.

I’m launching this iteration of bloggage with a multi-part lookback on the most interesting material to cross my desk during 2024 (no requirement to have debuted this year, even though I’m calling this my “Year in Review” in the obnoxious little SEO widget I stupidly added to my WordPress). ‘Tis the season for retrospection, whether or not one’s body of posts from the previous year has survived.

I read decently this year, averaging about 2 books a month. This was my second year recording my reading on Storygraph. I appreciate the motivation provided by the dopamine hit of logging, as well as the ability to opt out of all perverse social media-like engagements on this particular app. In categorizing my literary experiences for 2024, I propose three awards categories: Most Page-to-Page Thrills, Most to Consider, and Best Author.

A colorful pie chart on a black background. The pie chart is split between different moods assigned to books the blogger read in 2024. The biggest section of pie is labelled "Adventurous". Above the chart is text listing that the blogger read 26 books and 9,521 pages in 2024, averaging about 11 days at a time to finish them.
My many literary moods, according to Storygraph

Most Page-to-Page Thrills ironically goes to the two most lengthily brick-like paperbacks I read this year: Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The torment of Storygraph is that every time I think I’ve read a zippily-paced adventure book, I head to the app to log it and discover everyone else in the world rated it SLOW. So too with these. Nonetheless, I found them both lively and engaging genre fiction thrill-rides. Kushiel’s Dart artfully accomplishes the significant task of unifying the genres of fictional autobiography, porno, and alt history fantasy. A Fire Upon the Deep does the same with far-future space opera, medieval-hive-mind-dog succession drama, and mind-bending alt-consciousness dive. The proof is in the soup, as far as I’m concerned. I happily returned to both of these books chapter-after-chapter, day-after-day, ready to discover the next wild torment to befall their hapless heroes. Recommended to anyone who likes a lot of bang (sexual or spaceship-explosive) for their used paperback buck.

A pie chart on a black background. This pie chart is split into three sections. The smallest section is labelled "Fast, 23%". Two much larger sections, equal in size, are labelled "Slow, 38%" and "Medium, 38%".
Storygraph, demonstrating how relentlessly I press the so-called fun out of reading

Most to Consider takes us to the realm of the ideas book, which often hovers on the edge of disappearing into its own ass. But the best ideas books I read in 2024 maintained a delicate, somewhat distanced relationship with their own fundaments. Edward Pangborn’s Davy and Kelly Link’s The Book of Love leverage genre flourishes to ask poignant questions about why we suffer ourselves to live, when it hurts so terribly. The Book of Love, as a highly anticipated 2024 release, has had its share of press, so I won’t belabour my own reaction, but simply say that the deft way with which Link has handled magic and mystery in her short fiction persists in this novel, layered now with a density of viewpoints and feelings that endeavor to capture the emotional life of a whole town (or close to it). The wonder and horror of Link’s otherworld are matched only by the wonder and horror of this one. And the wonder and horror of Davy’s world, though Pangborn’s story is science fictional rather than fantastical. For anyone who has found themselves lamenting the lack of tragic horniness in post-apocalyptic fiction, look no further than Davy. Unjustly forgotten by much of the SF mainstream (except Joachim Boaz, whose glowing review is the one that pointed me Pangborn-ward), the picaresque adventures of Davy through a post-nuclear, quasi-medieval, post-pants New England accrete into more than the sum of their parts. Davy’s life and his account of it return us again and again to the most urgent concerns of our time: what is the legacy our lives of material prosperity will leave? What suffering or succor will remain for future generations in our detritus? Clear-eyed and without cruelty, Pangborn reminds us how we have failed, and will fail again.

Best Author is a no-contest because this is also the author whose work I read the most this year: John M. Ford. I first encountered Ford’s work during an intensive study of the nature of the Klingon in Star Trek, reading his beloved licensed novel and FASA RPG sourcebooks about the Klingons. This material proving shockingly good, I picked up his much-acclaimed alt history fantasy The Dragon Waiting in January and proceeded to have my wig blown clean off. I read The Dragon Waiting twice back-to-back. I read the Draco Concordans website end-to-end. I felt such awe and inspiration and terrible jealousy that I became twice as motivated to work on my own writing. I caught up with How Much for Just the Planet?, Ford’s other Star Trek novel. I fortuitously discovered Ford’s tragically unfinished half-a-masterpiece Aspects in my local used bookstore, and proceeded to lose what remained of my wig. There is so much more to say about Aspects, probably in a whole other entire blog post. For now, all this is to say, John M. Ford was a wonderful writer who was taken from us too soon, and the work from him we do possess is a small but persistent consolation in the wake of that loss. He has left us somewhere to go, even if sadly we have to go without him.

2024, as a year, was rather ass, both for myself and world-historically. But it had its delights and consolations nonetheless. Next time, the cinema, in four categories.