Sometimes as I lie in bed, more-than-half asleep, I take a step that seems to be toward wakefulness—but I go astray. This feeling reminds me of circling a tree with one big stride. Just for a moment, I guess the dark woods disguise me from myself. When I find myself, I find myself restored: it wouldn’t be surprising if these absences were signs of some specific activity of neurochemical maintenance and repair. I feel sifted, like the leafy canopy sifts the sun into spangles.[1]
Yet such moments are also glitches. They are slippages to do with memory and duration. I am pretty sure this “lostness” has lasted just a second, but … it may have been more like two.[2]
We tend to come to book reviews a-wondering: will this resonate with my current needs and interests? Does it contain signs and portents that might carry me fruitfully through the current fray? Does its existence tell me anything about where others can now be found in their own cultural landscapes, and which of their own needs and interests it might be answering?
Reading Garner is, for some people, like a treasure hunt. But to trace out all those connections is not in itself an act of critical writing; it’s a process of annotation. Criticism is about asking questions—and perhaps answering them, too.
The binary is a complex construct, but for the purposes of this essay the following aspects are important: (1) It is coercive; (2) it is totalizing; (3) it is essentializing.
In this roundtable discussion, Gautam Bhatia, Nic Clarke, and Abigail Nussbaum discuss the Amazon Prime Video adaptation of Robert Jordan's novels, and how to approach both the production—and its relationship to the source—material critically.
Christopher Priest and Paul Kincaid discuss an involvement in fiction and reviewing that dates back to at least the early 1970s, as well as the present and possible futures of SFF criticism.
