Archive for Speculative Fiction

Strange New Worlds joke

During the final episode of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Kam made a joke that I really enjoyed. So I’ll tell you about it below, but it requires a little context for setup, and the context involves spoilers for the final two episodes of the season, “Subspace Rhapsody” and “Hegemony.” So I’ll […]

TV: _Counterpart_

I apparently haven’t posted here about the TV show Counterpart. I watched the first episode just under a year ago. (I no longer remember how I heard about it.) I liked the first ep quite a bit, so I rewatched it with Kam, and she liked it too, and we ended up watching both 10-episode […]

Althist translation

Some thoughts about a particular alternate-history TV show (that I mostly like, despite my dubiousness here): Imagine an alternate history in which a major event changed the world over 300 years ago, especially changing North America’s subsequent history in a big way. The change was so big that (for example) although the Revolutionary War still […]

R.I.P., Sally Gwylan

I was sad to learn on Saturday that author Sally Gwylan died in October, “after being struck by a car” (quoting Worldcon’s In Memoriam page). We published Sally’s superb novelette “Rapture” in Strange Horizons in 2004, in two parts. (Part 1, Part 2.) In my SH Flashback writeup in 2016, I described it thusly: “A […]

Russ reviews

My pick-a-random-unread-book system recently picked Joanna Russ’s reviews-and-essays collection The Country You Have Never Seen. I’m not normally a big reader of reviews—I don’t hate them, they’re just not something I tend to be super into. But in this case, I laughed out loud half a dozen times in the first couple dozen pages. Partly […]