In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland is joined by the literary reviewer Sneha Pathak and the host of the Going Rogue podcast, Tansy Gardam. They discuss the kinds of text which many don’t find worthy of criticism at all: books or movies or TikTok reels that might be termed popular, populist, or popcorn. What are we doing when we spend time with a text which—perhaps only at first—exhibits few pretensions?

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 15: On Time-Pass

[Musical Intro]

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the literary reviewer Sneha Pathak and the host of the remarkably good film criticism podcast, Going Rogue, Tansy Gardam.

In every episode of Critical Friends, I’m afraid we’ll be discussing SFF, reviewing what it is, why we do it, and how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the kinds of texts which many don’t find worthy of criticism at all. How do we approach so-called ephemera books or movies or TikTok reels that are popular, populist, or popcorn.

We’ll discuss cosy fantasy and country house mysteries, gumshoe detectives and pirates of the Caribbean. We’ll have both Sherlock Holmes and John Wick. And we’ll try to figure out what it is we are doing when we spend time with a text that, perhaps only at first, exhibits few pretensions. We started that conversation, appropriately enough, with pulp fiction.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Sneha, you recently reviewed for Strange Horizons the new anthology from Blaft of Gujarati pulp fiction. And Blaft are doing great work in general in collecting, anthologizing, almost rescuing literatures that have been sort of marginalized or forgotten, whatever else, due to circumstances largely often beyond the actual control or quality of the texts themselves.

But you, in discussing this particular collection of Gujarati pulp fiction, use this phrase that really struck me and I wanted to unpack it more. And that’s this idea of “time-pass literature,” which you say is a very Indian concept, and I’d just be really interested to talk a little bit at first about why you use that phrase in relation to that particular anthology: what it means to you, and this idea that pulp fiction—and obviously pulp itself is an adjective with all kinds of connotations and implications—you connected with this idea of time-pass. What did you mean by that?

Sneha Pathak: So I don’t think that “time-pass literature” as such is a formal term or a formal category even here, but in Indian English “time-pass” is a fairly commonly used word, and that is something we tend to use both as a word as well as a verb and an adjective.

So, for instance, you’re sitting there, you’re doodling, and I come and say, “Hey Dan, what are you doing?” And you simply say, “Uh, time-pass,” and I’ll not ask you anything. Right? There’s no need to go into greater specifics about time-pass. So time-pass in that sense of a word can simply mean something which you are doing to pass the time.

In a more pejorative sense, parents can scold their kids—you know, they are spending so much, it’s time for you to study and what are you doing? Time-pass! Right? Passing the time, right, to while away your good days, not looking for a job or preparing for your exam. So one idea is that of time-pass as a verb.

And another would be I simply, you know, ask Tansy, “Tansy, how was the latest movie you watched, whatever the name was?” And she’ll say, “Uh, time-pass.” And I’m like, “OK!” She need not say anything more about it. I know, OK, it’s not something that I have to watch. So that word in itself is enough to convey a host of, um, let’s say ideas.

So when I was saying “time-pass literature,” that was the concept that I was trying to bring in, and comparing it with, or putting it in front of, “pulp fiction.” That idea came to me because of that one line which the translator had quoted or which she had said in the introduction, where she said that, you know, people asked her why was she wasting time with translating pulp fiction instead of proper literature or real literature? I’m forgetting the exact term.

So that was what sparked that idea and made me write or use the word time-pass literature, because I could imagine a lot of people read it, pulp fiction, especially during train rides or maybe plane rides—not so much today maybe where we have got reels and those YouTube shorts to do to, but before that, that would’ve been a common way of passing the time or time-pass. So it was from there that I used it in front of that literature to make it “time-pass literature.” That was what I was trying to convey.

This is the general understanding of pulp fiction: something which is not weighty, which is also sort of insignificant, good enough to pass the time when you have it. Something you would probably not necessarily recommend to anyone, or probably you would not even like to be seen reading or probably you would not even accept you read in proper social gatherings: “Oh yes, I read James Hadley Chase,” for example. You’d rather say, “Oh yes, I read Murakami.”

Dan Hartland: So, as you were reading it, were you were thinking, “Oh, I’m doing the time-pass thing here!” Was that—because I know some of the stories work for you more than others, and you have some really interesting things to say about particularly how the stories and how the collection approaches gender—but, as you were reading these, were you experiencing them in that way? Or do you think more that these are stories that have been experienced in that way and therefore were at risk prior to Blaft of just sort of disappearing?

Sneha Pathak: Because I was reading them with a certain aim in my mind because I was reading it to review, I was definitely not reading it for time-pass! Because, you know, I had to bring a certain seriousness in my reading.

Dan Hartland: Right, yeah, I’m sorry about that! I apologize!

Sneha Pathak: That’s quite okay! But I think I could actually that how a lot of people are, how the first audience, the original Gujarati audience, would’ve read it—how it is not something that would probably be a very serious occupation for them. That was something I could actually see and understand.

But when I was reading it, of course I was looking at the nuances, whatever I could write about. If I was reading it just for pleasure, maybe at least some of the stories I would’ve been, like, “Yeah.” And if somebody had asked me what are the stories like for some of them, I would’ve definitely said, yeah, “Some are good, others are just … yeah.”

Dan Hartland: And what were the qualities of the stories, of those stories that kind of counted for you as time-pass—what were the qualities? Because at some point … so one of the stories, for example, you say (I think it’s “The Coils of Fate” you mentioned), is particularly one that reveals the weakness of the genre.

And what I was really interested in was the breadth of genre in these stories, but also how each of the genres kind of emphasizes the adventure form of that. So there’s a science fiction adventure, and there’s an uncanny adventure, and that element of adventure seems key. But yeah, with “The Coils of Fate,” you were like, “Yeah, this one’s really long, which just makes it clear, the weaknesses.” So when you were thinking, “Oh yeah, this one is pretty time-passy,” what was it about them? Or was it something kind of a bit more ineffable?

Sneha Pathak: I think one of the things that probably may make it time-pass is the fact that it fails to grasp your interest as much as a non-time-pass thing would do. Also a sense of predictability in a way or repetitiveness, not necessarily in just that story, but in the general ideas that the story is telling. The way it is telling. So, for example, in “The Coils of Faith,” one of the things was that, because it was serialized and because it was a popular story, it must have been so, it had to—you know, like, in the age of Dickens and all, they had to come up with those plot points to keep on maximizing the number of instalments. In this case, it just happened that it was that the writer struck upon a formula, “OK, this happens, X kills Y, X is having a dream, and every dream is about a murder.”

So that just kept on, it kept on happening. Y gets murdered, Z gets murdered, A gets murdered, B gets murdered. So that sort of became repetitive after a while, and I was like, “OK, yes, I get it. This is what’s happening.” But again and again, it’s the same formula. So I would say the more formulaic the thing becomes, the more time-passing in a way it becomes—especially if it’s not doing something new with that formula. If it’s just a simple copy-paste of something, if it’s something that I’ve seen before, if it’s something I’ve heard before, if it’s something I’ve read before—or in some cases I can think of some movies, which will go unnamed, which seemed to make it worse—then it becomes nothing more than a time-pass.

Dan Hartland: Well, let’s name the movies! So, Tansy—

Tansy Gardam: Speaking of!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, let’s go to the expert of the bad movies! So, Tansy, the reason that you are here—other than the fact that you are in fact the expert on the bad movies—is that you’ve recently published with us a review of Jurassic World: Rebirth, which seems to me to speak to a lot of what Sneha’s just been talking about: predictability, the formulaic-ness of it all.

You frame the review by talking about, if you like, the movie as a commercial product, as being aware of itself as a thing in dialogue with an audience. And I wonder whether that, too, is part of what we’re talking about here. It’s kind of a product to be consumed to some extent, or at least it is more conscious of itself as that thing than as another piece of art.

Tansy Gardam: Yeah, I think Jurassic World is really interesting in that it has this entire meta-text on the Jurassic Park franchise. And the way I would describe Jurassic World is that it is a movie that has one thing to say, and that is: “Fuck you for buying a ticket.” It has a really strong ethos of, “You should have stayed home and watched Jurassic Park. Do you know how sick Jurassic Park is? Jurassic Park is so much better than the movie that you are currently paying to see.”

Jurassic World in particular has this weirdly hostile relationship with its own audience, and so Rebirth—which is the fourth in the Jurassic World franchise, the seventh in the Jurassic Park series—has a softer attitude towards the viewer. It wants to be like, “Hey, thank you for buying a ticket to watch a reminder of how good the movie Jurassic Park is.” But yeah, it’s very formulaic. It absolutely trades on what has come before.

I find it so funny that apparently the director, Gareth Edwards, was essentially told, when he handed in his first cut, that Steven Spielberg’s main note was, “Hey, can you cut all of the Jurassic Park references? Like, there are so many Jurassic Park references in this, dude, can you just chill?” And the number of them that ended up in the final cut really gives you an idea of how many there must have been in that first assembly. But yeah, they are increasingly insubstantial as a series, and that’s sort of what I would go to in that sense of time-pass: You feel like you are watching the same movie over and over.

I think that sort of acceptance of unoriginality in exploiting a popular property really results in a sense of just watching the same thing, churn and churn, throwing new ideas in. The problem with franchises is that they are essentially mining a non-renewable resource, and they can choose to completely change what they’re doing and go after something new, and that might get rid of what remains of their audience, or it might be what helps ’em survive. Something like Fast and Furious is a series that is gorgeous time-pass watch, because you truly don’t know what’s gonna happen next. You watch the first one, they’re lifting DVD players. You watch, I think it’s nine, they go to space! And that has been super successful for them as a series.

But that is also a series that is constantly attempted reinvention. You watch the first four films and they really don’t know what worked. They’re like, “Look, the first one was successful, I guess. Is it Paul Walker? Is it the cars? Is it Vin Diesel? And then finally, before they’re like, oh, it’s Vin Diesel. Huh.”

And yeah, that is entertainment that continues to be entertaining. Whereas once you get to the point of just rinse and repeat, recycle, you are left with something that has diminishing returns.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, there is this tension, isn’t there, between the comfort of formula—we want to watch Jurassic Park again, and, Tansy, I’m thinking of that essay you wrote for the Criticism Special in January, which was all about your relationship with Lord of the Rings and why you cannot recapture that.

Tansy Gardam: And oh boy, there’re gonna be two Hunt For Gollum movies to prove that.

Dan Hartland: Apparently there are, yeah!

Tansy Gardam: Apparently! Yep.

Dan Hartland: So we have this tension in our ourselves, but also more widely in the culture, of: we would love to get that thing that we had back, we want the comfort of the formula; but also at some point we become bored of it if does not do something new.

And I wonder whether … forgive me, Tansy, if I say you have made a career from being a critic of movies that some people feel do not deserve criticism, right? So these popcorn flicks, which actually have so much to say about them—and Going Rogue says it all with such wit and elan—are ignored, though, by large swathes of the critical community. They do not treat them with seriousness.

I wonder whether this sense of unworthiness is linked to this idea of the formula of comfort, of escapism. Were you conscious, are you conscious, of that when you do what you do?

Tansy Gardam: At the risk of sounding like a parody of myself, you have reminded me of the Hays Code and the initial justification for writing the Hays Code, which were these set of restrictions on the content that could be shown in films. And yeah, I’m not even paraphrasing massively to say that they basically say, “The kind of guys who go to movies are not the kind of guys who go to plays, are not the kind of guys who go to operas. They’re more like the guys who go to boxing matches. So because you have a lower class of people watching movies, you need to have stricter moral guidances.”

That was the idea behind the Hays Code—that you could watch a Shakespeare play and because you’re watching Shakespeare, it’s okay if there’s murder and sex and violence and all of those bad things, but in a movie, “Oh God, we can’t show that because these dumb-dumbs are gonna think that they can go out and murder and do violence and, you know, have sex! Whatever they want to do.”

And so I think that there is in many ways a hangover of that attitude. There is this idea that there is good art that can be complicated and can grapple with social issues and can depict those social issues. And there is popcorn entertainment. But if we’re talking pure numbers, popcorn entertainment is being seen by more people. More people are engaging with that. And when you have popcorn entertainment that is going uncriticized and no one’s engaging with the ideas that are within it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not having a huge impact on its audience.

So something like Bridgerton is being watched by a hell of a lot of people. It’s being watched as a guilty pleasure. It’s being watched as a time-pass. But it’s also being absorbed by massive audiences, and that is, for good or bad, the content that they’re consuming. And so, therefore, it does deserve the attention and the discussion of what it is actually saying and what it’s trying to say and whether or not it succeeds in doing that.

And so I guess that’s why I spend all my time talking about movies like John Wick.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: In terms of that pulp fiction anthology, Sneha, is that a tradition that still exists? So, you know, we’ve got the popcorn movie, which feels very much like the inheritor of a certain type of pulp fiction. As you were reading that anthology, are there other means, modes, and genres—and it doesn’t even need to be SF, I don’t think—that do the same thing now? That have that same relationship to the reader and the audience?

Sneha Pathak: A lot of mysteries and thrillers, in some way: mystery and thriller fiction and also romance fiction, because that is taken as something that is … even in the popular fiction genre, there is sort of hierarchy where science fiction and fantasy still ranks slightly higher because you can always go and say and claim that—and rightly so—that, you know, they talk something about the human condition, which is what is considered to be a general parameter for a good fiction. It has to talk about something, it has to tell you something, or, discover something about the human code and the human condition.

So, in fiction also, I think romance fiction and mysteries and thrillers—because I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, I consume them by the dozens really—I always do feel that, there is this … they are often taken as palate cleansers, is what I often come across in my corner of Instagram. I have a book related page on Bookstagram, right? And people who mostly read quote-unquote serious fiction, when they sometimes switch to thrillers industries, they say, “You know, it’s good as a palate cleanser.” Or a guilty pleasure, even, maybe. But yes, I do feel that mysteries and thrillers and romances are seen as something that are slightly—more than slightly—lesser or on a lesser pedestal than other fictions. That is something that I’ve felt.

And I also feel that, you know, as you were talking with Tansy about that feeling of nostalgia—trying to capture that nostalgia, that feeling of comfort zone—that is also something that I feel. I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, especially mysteries, especially those written in that golden era—which they called when Agatha Christie was writing, for example, right? So you have a country house, a manor or a house, and you know you have a limited number of suspects and then a murder happens and there’s a puzzle and you solve that puzzle. So that is the kind of comfort that I look for when I’m reading those books. And in a way, when I read a lot of those books, somehow I do feel like yes, mysteries and thrillers are on a somewhat lesser pedestal, compared to more serious fiction that’s is talking about other things, maybe sadness or pain or whatever it might be talking about.

Tansy Gardam: But I find it super interesting that you sort of highlight that science fiction and fantasy does get the pass of, “Oh, it’s commenting on the human condition.” I don’t think you can write anything that is crime fiction without engaging with the human condition, without engaging what drives people to crime. And it’s so common for the idea of the literary mystery: It’s “I found a body in my bathtub, and this is actually mostly about my relationship with my dad.” It’s such a common thing to hide more serious literature in mystery or ultimately to actually hide a mystery in more serious literature to be like, “Hey, there is a reason to keep reading. I promise you’re gonna find out who did the murder.” And so yeah, that idea that that is the lower rank I find really interesting.

Sneha Pathak: Yeah, I suppose even there, like you said, literary mysteries: So there’s this genre, the mixed genre where we say “literary mysteries,” there are some who still rank higher because, you know, they’re a literary mystery. You have added that word, that mystical word, magical word, “literary” before it. So it has elevated it somehow. A pure mystery where you’re not necessarily going into the mind of the murderer or not going into, the who and why of the murder is for, let’s say, pure entertainment purposes. That is something which I’m reading not to know what was happening … not the knots of the relationships, the knotty relationship between the characters, but simply to enjoy or to find that solution to the puzzle: Who did it and why did it and how did it.

So they are still considered—I feel that I have experienced that, you know—they’re still considered slightly lower. But yes, if in some way, so for example, Mr. Ripley, because it goes beyond the mere crime being committed, that is still considered to be, you know, a classic of some sort. And I also find it very interesting how some novels and novelists, which must have been or would have been, I feel—or at least should have been—considered more “popular” in their times now tend to find a place in, for example, Penguin Classics or Vintage Classics. So that is something I find very intriguing, how tastes sort of change.

Dan Hartland: As you were talking, Sneha, I was thinking of Agatha Christie—a really good example of a writer who kind of exists in an unusual pocket, certainly in the kind of Anglophone world where— yep, she has the Vintage Classic, she has Penguin Classics, she has sort of canonical reissues, in scare quotes. But also, you know, really as well the literary establishment make it very clear that, well, “Agatha is OK, right? Like, yeah, she, kind of is allowed in, but maybe not too far into the room. Oh, and don’t let her bring anyone else in with her!”

Sneha Pathak: I was attending a lecture, this is a few years back. And the speaker, he somehow in the course of the conversation—now, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but this line stuck with me. He was a professor and he said, “Yeah, and I’ve got people who have read Christie throughout their life and then they come and tell me that, you know, ‘Oh, we have read literature.’” That was something stuck me and me. I was like, “OK, I’m never telling him that I’ve read a lot of Christie”: Bad secret, should stay buried. So there is this, of course, even though we claim that—I think in every Christie book that I’ve read I remember reading in the blurb—only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more copies than her!

Dan Hartland: Yes, in science fiction there are a couple, maybe a couple more, authors who occupy this odd position. I think Ursula Le Guin may have kind of been fully let into the room by now, and rightly so. But people like Philip K. Dick, for example, again: Man in the High Castle, Penguin Classic, Radio Free Albemuth, very much not. There’s just this interesting, as you say, relationship and changing relationship with authors who were quote-unquote popular, but have lasted long enough that we have to accept they have some sort of value.

To revert to this kind of popcorn idea, I wonder whether “popular” is a pejorative. Because you were talking about Bridgerton has a huge audience, right? The MCU had—still has, but you know!—a huge audience, and these things are popular. It becomes very easy to presume that that is a bad thing.

Tansy Gardam: Absolutely. And also, just on that list of writers who sort of have acquired taste or acquired literary ambitions in their time, I’d absolutely throw Terry Pratchett in there, too: Really pulp to begin with, now you can get the nice hard covers. It’s the exact same book on the inside.

I think you often see a backlash of popularity, particularly when it comes to films that are sort of aiming at a higher audience. I think the kind of cyclical reaction to Parasite is really fascinating, in that sort of idea of it breaking through, becoming hugely popular, but also the cultural criticism of the sort of people who were suddenly tweeting about Parasite? More likely to be the Parks in that situation.

Popular is definitely wielded as a pejorative, but like you say, Sneha, Agatha Christie sold more copies than anyone other than God or Shakespeare. There is a reach to popularity, and there is a reason that things become popular, and we can’t just apply this to things that we like. This is as true of Agatha Christie as it is to E. L. James. There is an appeal to the content that they are producing—or rather the books they’re writing, let’s not turn everything into content.

I think there’s a lot, too, in the critical reappraisal of popcorn films from our youth. And some of that is nostalgia, a lot of that is genuinely nostalgia. Some of it is because a lot of those films were better shot than the movies we get now. If you compare the first three Harry Potter films to, I mean, even the last few Harry Potters without bringing Fantastic Beasts into it, you’re talking about a fundamentally different series and one that has a different attitude towards the visuals, towards actually kind of capturing a sense of magic versus—and I know that part of this is tonal—hitting the film with a sledgehammer.

I’m a huge fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. I will defend 2 and 3. I have defended 2 and 3! But 1 in particular is just gorgeous to look at and I can’t really think of any big sort of $150 million adventure films from the past few years, any really big films, that have that beautiful and rich a visual palette. And so there is some value in going back to those things that you’re nostalgic about and being like, why do I like that so much? Why is this a film that I can watch again and again and again?

So much of the streaming business model relies on you wanting to go back and rewatch Friends or wanting to go back and see every single Disney film, whereas a lot of the original content that those streaming platforms are producing are just one and done, out of your brain—like off it like a greased pan, absolutely no imprint on the memory. And so I’ll be really interested in ten, fifteen years, will people who are ten-, fifteen-year-olds now, will they be critically reappraising the things that they watched from this period? Or will they be going back to Pirates of the Caribbean?

Dan Hartland: I think you’re hitting on something there, which is perhaps worth unpacking further. Sneha mentioned—we’ve all mentioned—this kind of separation between art or literature and all the other stuff, right? But what strikes me is that if one of these kind of time-pass escapist pieces of literature or film or whatever else—interpretive dance—does its job, it is because it has mastered some technical basics, and in some cases more than basics, to enable us to escape on its eddies. If it were a bad piece of work, it would not be effective.

And again, in the pulp fiction anthology, Sneha, you read stuff that you’re like, “Nah.” And then you read other stuff, like there’s a story I think called “Hello,” which you think, “Yeah, this is great.” They only succeed if they are technically proficient at what they are attempting to achieve. I suppose there’s an interesting question here about not the difference between—not art and technical proficiency, because I’m not sure there is a line on that spectrum where we could usefully put a marker—but more on what it is that these things are doing. And one of the words that we often use is escapism, right?

The canonical critical statement on escapism is inevitably from Tolkien, and he said: “Escape is one of the main functions of fairy stories, and since I do not disapprove of them”—fairy stories—“it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘escape’ is now so often used, the tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all.” Right? This idea that escape is often quite a good thing. Like, if you’re trying to escape from something, you probably need to—for whatever reason, material, spiritual. And we accept that outside of literary criticism, but somehow the artwork that enables us to do this within literary criticism is demeaned.

Sneha Pathak: The funny thing is, for me, literature has always been a way of escapism in a way. Take it negatively or take it positively. There it is. And when I was growing up in the nineties, the internet was, you know, you did not have the internet! At least not in the way it is ubiquitously present these days. So we had, I had, very few books. You did not have that many books. You did not even know there were so many writers with so many books. So the first books that I read in English were those abridged editions—not the first books, but I’ll say I was ten, maybe, or eleven.

So those first novels that I read were quote-unquote abridged edition. And back then I had no idea what abridged mean, the word was not in my vocabulary, nobody told me. So I was reading novels! And I was reading abridged editions of say Oliver Twist or, uh, you know, Pride and Prejudice maybe. And I was reading them for escape. They were pure means of escapism for me. And they are classics, they are literary classics, right? But they offered me the same thing! You know, reading them was like, you have a cloak of invisibility all around you. There’s this warmth and you are there in a cocoon. And it sort of creates … you are untouched by the world around you as long as you have opened the pages of that book.

So it’s really funny how even serious literature can be escapist at times, depending on the reader. It’ll also, I suppose, vary from reader to reader, what sort of quote-unquote helps you escape. And even those of us who enjoy reading escapist fiction—let’s call it that—even we don’t like reading all the genres! I, for example, am not a fan of fantasy. I have tried reading fantasy, but I find that I’m unable to read fantasy novels. I can read mysteries and thrillers, yes. A little bit of science fiction, which is not very hardcore, yes. But give me hardcore science fiction or give me fantasy and I’m like, “OK, give me a … I mean, no! That’s not something that I can do.” So escape is also something that is different for different of us. It’s not a one size fits all sort of thing.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: I would like to talk a little bit about all the various kind of mediums that we can use now. Becase you mentioned we can time-pass on TikTok now, and there are other—other than three-hour dinosaur films … Actually, it’s not a three-hour film. I’m being unfair.

Tansy Gardam: It’s bang on two.

Dan Hartland: That’s right! Other than two-hour dinosaur films or big anthologies of pulp fiction from Blaft, there are other things that we could be spending our time with—and I just wonder whether we would like to admit, just among the three of us, what the things are that we find ourselves passing time with.

Tansy Gardam: I’m terrible for audio books. I’ve really gotten into … I’m not sure if everyone has this option, but there is an app in Australia that’s attached to local libraries, and has a huge selection of audio books through that. So I’m able to do that without using Audible or anything like that. But yeah, free audio books, constantly got one on the go. And because I’m a craft person—I love making a little thing, I love doing a little task—and I feel like I’m multitasking if I’m listening to an audio book while I’m sewing or something like that.

What I’m actually doing is not properly absorbing the audiobook. I’ve done most of The Locked Tomb. I could not tell you much of what happens in that series, but, oh boy, have I listened to most of it. And yeah, I’d be interested to know, Sneha, whether you consider that, like … would time-pass on TikTok be eroding the concept? Would it be kind of a lesser version thereof? Or is it just a new mutation?

Sneha Pathak: Oh, I suppose it would be a new mutation, but to my mind, if there is a hierarchy of time-passing then time-passing on TikTok would be far lower than reading!

And the time before, when books were not so easily available, I’m sure everybody time-passed. Even then, maybe they chatted with their friends. Maybe they simply doodled. Maybe they simply stared into space and built air castles! But everybody did something which has probably morphed into something different. But I think, yeah, it’s, it’s just technology helping us time pass.

Dan Hartland: If I’m going to admit to time-passing on anything, it would be—and I’m afraid to say it, given that hopefully people are listening to this—it’s podcasts. My partner Anna is constantly saying, “Why are you … why do you have to have your earbuds in all the time?!” And it’s very similar to Tansy, I’m like, “Oh, well, I’m … I’m getting information in!”

Tansy Gardam: And if you don’t have your earbuds in, then the thoughts get heard.

Dan Hartland: [laughs] That’s right. That’s exactly right.

I’m making bread and I’m doing the podcast thing and I’m … and really what you’re doing is, is time-passing and podcasts seemed to me particularly well-suited to this because so few of them provide …

Tansy Gardam: Some are quality experiences, they give all sorts of critical experiences!

Dan Hartland: I believe, I do think that I derive value from that podcast habit! Yet I’m also conscious that I’m not paying the attention to some of the podcasts that I listen to in the same way that I would if I was sitting down with a book. Is that escapism? It’s certainly time-passes, but if I’m not really paying full attention, if I’m not giving my all to that text, I can’t really escape with it, right?

Tansy Gardam: There are plenty of books I’ve read that I couldn’t tell you what happens in them. There are some audio books where I could almost do them from memory. Now, it really depends on the time and attention that you are giving something and I think that’s where escapism does kind of deviate from time-pass.

Because escapism, I would say, is that you have been drawn away, that you are engaging actively with the text, whatever. Whatever that text happens to be, it is escape as opposed to passage.

Sneha Pathak: Yeah, I think I’ll agree with Tansy on this, because if something has provided me really good escape, I’m bound to, you know, tell at least one person or read that. But if something is just time-pass, I’m not going to, I’m probably not going to, recommend it to anyone—unless they specifically ask me something, what is a good time-pass or something, you know. Just for time-pass!

Dan Hartland: I was reading an article on Word on Fire by Holly Ordway the other day, and her position was really interesting on all of this. She was like, “Well, you know, like”—actually similar to what Sneha was saying about science fiction being seen as about the human condition, even if it’s got spaceships in it—she says, “if fantasy and science fiction really did encourage a flight from reality, maybe that would be a bad thing … but it totally doesn’t!” This escapism thing is in fact a full-on engagement.

It’s the opposite of just kind of whiling time away or doing something without value. And I wonder whether we are conscious, when we’re reading these texts as critics of them, of doing them justice. Like, if they do have this kind of value—the texts that we are talking about aren’t conscious of themselves as serious things in that sense, but they nevertheless have value—and so, as critics of them, how do we advocate for that? How do we approach them in a way that gives them the seriousness while not pretending that they are necessarily all the time serious?

Tansy Gardam: I have to use this opportunity to talk about of one of Australia’s greatest critics of all time passed away this week, David Stratton. He was known to most Australians as Margaret and David: There was a weekly show, which was him and Margaret going through that week’s releases. It was a half hour, it was on fairly prime time, incredibly wide-ranging audience. And every week they would talk about pretty much every release coming out that week.

And it was in many ways a product of its time. I cannot see a show like that getting greenlit today, but it meant that they would be talking about Fast and Furious 2 alongside Ken Park, and the questions of censorship in the country, and they would give them, if not necessarily equal weight, they would approach them on their own terms.

Margaret never gave a Fast and Furious movie under three-and-a-half stars, ’cause she just liked them. She enjoyed them and she acknowledged them for what they were. She also nearly got arrested for hosting an illegal screening of Ken Park. Almost all of this is from a show that was on at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this year, Refused Classification—you can’t see it anywhere else, but it was spectacular, I promise.

But yeah, there is a way to approach works on their own terms, you need to go in not expecting Ken Park to be Too Fast, Too Furious, and vice versa. You need to address them where they are, and I think that you do get a lot of bad faith criticism that doesn’t address things as they are, that approaches Too Fast, Too Furious, as if it is Parasite or vice versa. So I think it is really for us as critics and also as audiences to go to something knowing what it is.

Sneha Pathak: Definitely. I agree with Tansy on this one, that we need to have a different, as critics, we need to go with a different yardstick. We cannot really say that, “OK, I’m going to measure an escapist fiction with the same criteria that I use for, let’s say a literary novel.” That would be doing a disservice to both of them, I believe. And I think another thing is we need to be unapologetic about reading, as well as reviewing and watching, popcorn cinema or popcorn fiction, right? Let’s not be apologetic that, “Yeah, OK, of course I read that—also, I read this as well.”

So, if we are critiquing something, I’m assuming that we are going to be, to some extent, well-versed with what is good and what is bad in that particular genre. What are its limitations? What is the best that we have read, and what is the worst that we have read? And we probably use those to measure the current work against those things, rather than measuring it against some sort of generalized literary criteria.

Whatever I review, most of it’s … a lot of it’s serious, let me say, or literary fiction as well. So when I’m reviewing a literary novel or a novel which is not an escape, which would not be termed “popular” or “escapist,” then of course I’m using a different criteria for reading it as well as looking at it. But when I’m reviewing something that is pure escapism or purely popular, I’m not going to bring in that yardstick here. I think that does a great disservice to both the genres.

Not as a critic, but I think that a recent term which I have seen, with respect to the marketing, that a lot of books these days they market as a murder mystery or a mystery, probably because they sell, probably where the mystery is just a part of the entire book and the entire book is actually dedicated to something else. It might be more of a literary exploration of something else with a murder thrown in, but that gets marketed as a murder mystery. And then, you know, I suppose that kind of marketing also creates sort of bad faith among readers—and also makes you give the book a lesser rating because you go in with a different set of expectations, which you would not have had you not read the blurb, which claimed it was something different than what it was.

Dan Hartland: I’m really glad you brought the marketing idea in, because I think it is actually really super important for how both books and movies are framed. Certainly, there are pretty difficult science fiction novels that have not been marketed in that way and have been marketed with a big spaceship on the front. And the reception of those novels is therefore—maybe they sell a lot of units!—but the people who buy them, you know, kind of feel a little short-changed. And I am confident, Tansy, that you have examples of movie trailers that have done similarly!

But the thing that I pick up from this idea of approaching these texts in a different way is, of course we should, but also there may be grounds on which—and, Sneha, in the pulp fiction review and, Tansy, in your Rebirth review, you both do it—there are still ways that we can criticize these texts safely. So from a perspective which isn’t this kind of sniffy, “well this is nonsense” perspective, but from the perspective of “it was trying to do this and it didn’t.”

I’m thinking that recently there’s been a turn in fantasy towards kind of cosy fantasy. Perhaps the canonical cosy fantasy is Legends and Lattes, which I think we’ve mentioned, or I’ve mentioned, before on this podcast. Wesley Osam has done a fantastic … take-down is the only word for it … of that novel, where he takes it on its own terms. He’s like, “OK, this is what this thing is trying to do,” but finds a range of choices that that book has made which kind of undermine even its own project.

So I guess as critics, we need to be open to that, too: That these books are capable still of failure.

Tansy Gardam: Yeah, and definitely I think when we bring marketing into it, there is a real question, as well, not just in terms of how a book is marketed, but also how it’s initially sold to a publisher. Like you mentioned, these novels that have a mystery in them that are sold as murder mystery, but they really have a lot more going on: There’s a decent chance that they were written without that murder mystery and that the writer, upon finishing it was like, “Oh. Shit. How do I actually get a publisher to look at this? They’re looking for mysteries. I’ll chuck one in there. How hard is it to put a dead body in a pool?” And you do get that I feel with the cosy genres and other kind of buzzword ideas—you just bring a little bit of that in. It’s easy to put it on the cover.

And we are talking about judging books by their covers, but there’s an entire art to it to—cover design rather. And you end up with these things that are sort of … that show the thumbprints of where they tried to be molded into something more marketable. And you get it with films, you get it with television series, you get it with all sorts of media. The attempts to chase a trend. And I think that that is one that does need to be called out critically.

Like, this evening I saw Fight or Flight, which is yet another John Wick imitator. In my opinion, it’s one of the more successful John Wick imitators. (I would absolutely love to know why it was produced by the two John Wick producers, but it was not done by their production company.) But yeah, that’s something where you know what it’s trying to be. You also accept it as what it is, and that’s where you are critically engaging with something and it is chasing a trend. It’s doing it pretty well, but sometimes it can absolutely crash out. And so I think having that awareness as well as a reader is part of the reason that it’s so uncomfortable when you have people who are outside of a particular genre coming into that for criticism.

I feel like earlier this year in Strange Horizons, there was a metacriticism of critiques of Klara and the Sun that approached it as a lot of people who’d read other Ishiguros, or who were literary critics, coming in and saying, “Oh, Ishiguro is just really elevating this entire genre, this whole idea. It’s so new, it’s so original!” And it’s like: He’s playing with an idea that  is so set in the genre that it’s a cliche—and he does it beautifully, but to approach it like he has somehow deemed to go into science fiction and just make the place a bit more classy is just revisionist almost. And that’s where you need people who are actually engaging with a genre or a form to be the ones who are critiquing it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think you were talking about M. L. Clark’s “Who’s Afraid of the SFF Novel” essay. Maggie was a guest on last episode, which was about hard times, and writing in them. And I feel like we’re talking here about reading in them, and what might make us feel slightly better during them!

So we started this conversation by talking about formula, right? In particular about the Blaft anthology. But then we’ve exploded it outwards. And it feels to me like we’re returning to this idea of formula—which, as Tansy comments on, maybe sometimes a given text has something injected into it to fit a certain trend or fit a certain mode which at that time is what people are using to time-pass. The example that jumps out to me is the recent plagiarism and romantasy thing in the New Yorker, which of course was its whole sort of own social media drama. But this idea that romantasy has become this thing with a set of tropes that almost every book in the genre or the mode or whatever you want call it—

Tansy Gardam: And every tag on AO3.

Dan Hartland: Yes! So it, so the romantasy books have to have these tropes, but also a lot of the romantasy texts have come from somewhere completely different again. And they’re having … I won’t say the serial numbers filed off, but they are being remodelled for a different model of publication. And this perhaps will cause trouble for romantasy. Currently it’s dominant, but we started this conversation by saying that ultimately formula exhausts itself. So do we see that as … is romantasy, cosy fantasy, what other elements of what we’re consuming right now, do we think may wind up in that way in kind of the next five, ten years? Where will we be not passing our time any longer that we are currently?

Tansy Gardam: I think you’re bang on that romantasy has a shelf life—possibly when all of the BookTok people discover that AO3 is free. But yeah, I think it’s become really common, partly because of the way that television is now made, that every series is eight episodes. There’s years between the seasons. There’s really no time to attach yourself to the characters, and there’s been a lot of pushback and people talking about going back to older series, the comfort of a lot of episodes.

That is, again, a case of formula. But the fact is you don’t really attach to characters in a sitcom if you’ve only got eight half-hours with them. You attach over twenty-two when they’ve had to fill an episode that is shot just on one existing set because they’ve run out of budget for the rest of the season. Those are the sort of things that people get really attached to and I can see that coming back into fashion in the next couple of years, that idea of a really long-running work—which is really time-pass, it’s about spending time with those characters, and I think that romantasy and just the absolute length of those books is kind of trading on that as well. It is the time spent in those worlds. And so I can see, almost counter to the TikTokification and the shortening attention spans, a return of longer-running stories. Or at least I’d like to!

Sneha Pathak: I think one trope that, or one formula, one trope that I think has been overdone—or done to death in my opinion, especially when it comes to those gritty mysteries and novels and even their adaptations and stuff that—is the figure of the detective, detached and with a storm going on in his personal life. Smoking, I don’t know, some sort of cigarettes or drinking himself to death. The figure of that solitary, I don’t know, very manly maybe? Does he come across as man?

Tansy Gardam: Oh, it’s always a man.

Sneha Pathak: Right? That kind of detective, troubled with the marriage on the rocks or probably something nasty in the past: I think that is something that has been hacked to death and that is something, probably, which is also coming to sort of a closure, although there are a lot of adaptations in which we see, or even original series, in which these kind of detective figures are—you know, that brooding atmosphere.

And on the other hand, are those which are making a comeback even in mysteries: I feel a lot of cosies set in cafes or you know, or cooking—

Tansy Gardam: Old people’s homes …

Sneha Pathak: Yeah. Even old people mysteries, I think there are cases where the mystery becomes sort of secondary in a way. And the relationship with characters and how they are doing that becomes primary. That is another thing that is coming up or has been coming up for the past few years, so setting in cafes or the detective, the amateur detective, is a bookshop owner or maybe, you know, they have got a bakery or there’s a lot of cooking going on.

And I wonder how long these are going to last, even the cosy ones, because after time, I’m sure boredom will set in if we get more and more of such characters. Because how many coffee shops or how many bookshop owners or how many, you know?

Tansy Gardam: By the fourth body in the bookshop, you’re like, “Baby, I think you might be killing these people.”

Sneha Pathak: Yeah. And how many … you know, there even are those cosies with some sort of magical element in them. I remember seeing a cover or something, which is a cat on it. The cat helps catch the criminal! So you know, there’s that genre!

Dan Hartland: The detective with the all the problems, I mean, has been such a persistent … like just, you know, I mean arguably even Sherlock Holmes fits that. So it is just a thing that you can’t get rid of.

Tansy Gardam: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which is a movie from the seventies that is about how that character is twenty years out of date already. You’ve got Elliot Gould wandering around like he’s from the fifties in the seventies, and he’s a man out of time. He’s just completely incongruous with the world. And that’s a movie that was made about fifty years ago.

Dan Hartland: And you have Rebus in the nineties, and then you just keep on going. You can’t escape. What is interesting is that you can see a parallel in fantasy with grimdark. Grimdark is very persistent, and Adam Roberts in his recent History of Fantasy says, “Look, why are we doing this? It’s not realism!” Like, you know, grimdark is a kind of reaction against, and perhaps the kind of tortured detective is an attempt to striate, the sort of silliness of the mystery, of the genre, with an appearance of realism or grittiness. But these things are so in themselves exaggerated that they, they’re just as fantastic.

Tansy Gardam: It’s, it’s Zack Snyder. It’s that idea of, you know, if this is dark and gritty and sad enough, then people will forget that this is man who dresses up like a bat to fight crime.

Dan Hartland: It’s an interesting seesaw between—as you say, Sneha—this tortured detective character, but also these cosy mysteries, and they are always in tension with each other, right? Because we kind of … yeah, we want both.

Sneha Pathak: Because we find readers for, and viewers for, both of them. So, you know, there is an audience for all of them—and probably, maybe sometimes even the same audiences consuming all of them! That is something which I find really fascinating.

[Musical outro begins]

Tansy Gardam: I am so sorry. My cat is about to knock my laptop off the table. Just one second … Um, observe the criminal.

Dan Hartland: Wheeee! Sorry. That’s not how you’re meant to greet great villains, is it? Sorry.

Tansy Gardam: [laughter] I’m so sorry! I can go back from the start …

[Musical outro continues]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. Listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

A few pick-ups from our last episode on writing in Hard Times: Friend of the podcast, Niall Harrison, noted on Bluesky that any baseline for fiction, whether the optimism of the golden Age as we discussed or whatever we’re struggling with now, can be a problem. He cited Jonathan Strahan’s call for less fear of the future in SF. That’d be really nice.

On that note, kudos to Andrea Hairston, who at Worldcon seems to have inspired some of this. Kameron Hurley for one has said that, after Hairston’s Writing Is Resistance workshop in Seattle, she’s “done with sad defeatism.”

So: onwards! See you next time.