In Lowell Thomas, Jr.'s 1959 book The Silent War in Tibet, Tibet’s turbulent history in the 1950s is told with the pressing excitement of a narrator who wants readers to understand the confluence of local, regional, and global forces at work in the People Republic of China's occupation and annexation of Tibet.
Category: Critic / Construct
Critic / Construct is an ongoing series of essays responding to culture, history, and the generic confusions of the imagination.
Reading “The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence” by Martin Meredith
Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence is an unparalleled resource for introducing the major issues, figures, and periods of post-independence African history, but is severely marred by its failure to engage the devastating legacies of colonialism on the continent.
Reading “Here Be Dragons” by Sharon Kay Penman (Welsh Princes 1)
Sharon Kay Penman's Here By Dragon is a classic of historical fiction, offering a rich, complex tapestry of medieval Welsh and Anglo-Norman life, with a unique narrative style that decenters the big moments and focuses on domestic life and character psychology, and has a lot to say about medieval women's lives.
Playing “Venba” (2023)
The 2023 narrative cooking game Venba by new studio Visai Games punches above its weight in art, sound, and soundtrack, and tells an endearing story of a Tamil family and foodways.
Reading “India: A Short History” by Andrew Robinson
Andrew Robinson's India: A Short History is a worthwhile and chronologically balance, but critically flawed, abbreviation of 5,000 years of Indian history that raises questions about how best to tell such a complicated story in such a short span.
Reading “The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales” by Nicholas Jubber
Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers steps into the world of fairy tales that are well-known across the West to recover the stories behind those tales’ tellers, but in doing so obscures the scholarship that made this book possible.
Reading “Black Powder War” by Naomi Novik (Temeraire 3)
Naomi Novik's third book in the Temeraire series, Black Powder War, takes readers to the Ottoman and German empires during the Napoleonic wars, but fails to explore its subject in interesting ways and leans heavily into Orientalist tropes.
The 10 Best (New to Me) Films of 2023
Starting a new tradition to reflect on my annual viewing, I list and review the 10 best (new to me) films I saw in 2023 (out of 159 films total).
What Was “World Science Fiction”?
A very thorough (and probably pedantic) answer to the question of a major Cold War-era science fiction anthology's purported global reach, and whether it could rightfully be called World's Best SF, complete with charts and quantitative data.
Reading “The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters” by Katie Goh
Goh's The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters—a brilliant and fun exploration of (post)apocalyptic narratives across a range of subgenres and political concerns—is academic in rigor, creative in style, journalistic in accessibility, and activist in energy.
Sean Guynes 