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Track Changes: Selected Reviews
Abigail Nussbaum is a Hugo Award-winning critic and the author of the blog Asking The Wrong Questions. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, New Scientist, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Strange Horizons, among others, and she is a regular contributor to the progressive culture and politics blog, Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Track Changes: Selected Reviews collects Abigail’s best writing about books, films, and TV with a new Introduction. It demonstrates how, in recent years, some of science fiction and fantasy’s core themes – from the exploration of space, to the invention of fantastic worlds, to our fluid understanding of what it means to be human – have been refreshed by a new generation of writers, and in so doing it provides an essential map of the interactions between the fantastic genres, politics, and culture.
Track Changes: Selected Reviews collects Abigail’s best writing about books, films, and TV with a new Introduction. It demonstrates how, in recent years, some of science fiction and fantasy’s core themes – from the exploration of space, to the invention of fantastic worlds, to our fluid understanding of what it means to be human – have been refreshed by a new generation of writers, and in so doing it provides an essential map of the interactions between the fantastic genres, politics, and culture.
448 pages, Paperback
First published August 8, 2024
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53 people want to read
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August 8, 2024Let’s start with the bottom line: if you have a vague interest in genre criticism, you should immediately purchase Track Changes: Selected Review by Abigail Nussbaum. Even if you couldn’t care less, you should buy it anyway to witness a critic at the top of her game.
A bit about the book: it collects around 58 reviews (a tiny fraction of Nussbaum’s output over two decades). The book is separated into five sections: Space, Systems, Places, Bodies and Tales, with the reviews placed in chronological order. Nussbaum covers the gamut of genre work, novels, collections, TV and film; for the most part, her choices – reviews of Interstellar, The Golem and the Jinni, and Severance: Season One, to name three – are those that will appeal to a general audience, not just fandom.
In my Locus review of Track Changes, I point out Nussbaum’s skill in building an argument: meticulous, thoughtful and passionate. Even when I disagreed with her conclusion, I can’t say I wasn’t swayed. But then, Nussbaum’s work isn’t about persuasion; it’s about articulating how genre succeeds or fails to reflect real-world issues, namely class, gender, identity and the environment.
What I didn’t say enough about in my column (due to space) is Nussbaum's artistry in constructing a review. I know this will sound self-serving, but criticism is seen by most people as dispensable (assuming they notice it at all). Criticism only gets attention when someone either pens a hatchet job, or a big-name author attacks some poor schlub on Goodreads for saying something rude about their book, or fuckwits review bomb a book or film because “woke”. Very few point to a piece of criticism and say: “This, this right here, this is extraordinary.” Writing good criticism is fucking hard. It’s taken me four years to get a handle on it, and it’s depressing when the only reviews spoken about are “problematic” or poorly written.
This is why we need to encourage, promote, and applaud those places, like Briardene Press, Strange Horizons and, yes, Locus, that prioritise criticism and give it the space to explore, critique, and deconstruct genre fiction in all its forms. That’s why you should buy Track Changes and keep track of Nussbaum’s criticism on her blog, Asking The Wrong Question. She is one of the best of us, a true artist who inspires critics like me.
A bit about the book: it collects around 58 reviews (a tiny fraction of Nussbaum’s output over two decades). The book is separated into five sections: Space, Systems, Places, Bodies and Tales, with the reviews placed in chronological order. Nussbaum covers the gamut of genre work, novels, collections, TV and film; for the most part, her choices – reviews of Interstellar, The Golem and the Jinni, and Severance: Season One, to name three – are those that will appeal to a general audience, not just fandom.
In my Locus review of Track Changes, I point out Nussbaum’s skill in building an argument: meticulous, thoughtful and passionate. Even when I disagreed with her conclusion, I can’t say I wasn’t swayed. But then, Nussbaum’s work isn’t about persuasion; it’s about articulating how genre succeeds or fails to reflect real-world issues, namely class, gender, identity and the environment.
What I didn’t say enough about in my column (due to space) is Nussbaum's artistry in constructing a review. I know this will sound self-serving, but criticism is seen by most people as dispensable (assuming they notice it at all). Criticism only gets attention when someone either pens a hatchet job, or a big-name author attacks some poor schlub on Goodreads for saying something rude about their book, or fuckwits review bomb a book or film because “woke”. Very few point to a piece of criticism and say: “This, this right here, this is extraordinary.” Writing good criticism is fucking hard. It’s taken me four years to get a handle on it, and it’s depressing when the only reviews spoken about are “problematic” or poorly written.
This is why we need to encourage, promote, and applaud those places, like Briardene Press, Strange Horizons and, yes, Locus, that prioritise criticism and give it the space to explore, critique, and deconstruct genre fiction in all its forms. That’s why you should buy Track Changes and keep track of Nussbaum’s criticism on her blog, Asking The Wrong Question. She is one of the best of us, a true artist who inspires critics like me.
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August 31, 2024Nussbaum has been my favourite literary critic for years now, so I’m really pleased that a printed collection of her work is finally out in the world. For nearly twenty years, she’s been Asking the Wrong Questions (the title of her blog)—actually, they all seem like the right questions to me—and periodically publishing reviews in other places like Strange Horizons, i09, Lawyers, Guns & Money, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Mostly she reviews genre (sff&h) novels and novellas, television, and film, but she’s interested in how our ideas about genre are formed, and many of her most penetrating reviews are the ones where she illuminates something about the way a piece works through its genre conventions. The collection is divided into sections, going from macro to micro—Space, Systems, Places, Bodies, Tales— and its aim is to literally “track changes” in how authors have considered and dealt with things like gender, technology, racial identity and racism, politics, and economics, in the first twenty-odd years of this century. From 2005 to 2024, the changes have been many, but Nussbaum’s insightfulness, and her willingness to note in retrospect those moments in which her optimism (or pessimism) has been misplaced (as in, for example, her review of The Last Jedi, to which she adds an endnote in the light of the way that trilogy of films ended) is impressive and humbling. You should read her if you haven’t already. Source: ebook, bought new from publisher
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August 17, 2025Here's the author at Scalzi's: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/08/0...
Excerpt: "I’m proud of how this book has turned out. Its topics are a combination of the mainstream and the obscure, the white hot center of the genre and its weird fringes."
Kindle is <$7. Good reviews: https://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/p... (OK, her site).
Excerpt: "I’m proud of how this book has turned out. Its topics are a combination of the mainstream and the obscure, the white hot center of the genre and its weird fringes."
Kindle is <$7. Good reviews: https://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/p... (OK, her site).
June 1, 2025
I was unfamiliar with Nussbaum's work before this year (I am reading this book due to its Hugo Award nomination in 2025). It's a collection of 57 reviews, two-thirds of them for books and short stories, with the rest for film and television. As best as I can tell, I had read or watched about a quarter of the works in question, so it was interesting to compare my own experience with those reviews. I ended up appreciating her thoughts on a lot of this--it was nice to see some criticism of Star Wars: The Last Jedi that wasn't tied up in the nonsense that flooded the internet at the time of release, and her criticisms of WandaVision highlighted some of my issues with the MCU (which I've "boycotted" entirely since 2019 after Endgame). Even in works I liked, she was good at pointing out flaws I hadn't always noticed. However, reading reviews of things I had no interest in was often a tough sell.
I have to admit that I don't usually read review-collections, so my opinion here is easy to ignore!
I have to admit that I don't usually read review-collections, so my opinion here is easy to ignore!
August 31, 2024
This book is for serious readers of science fiction and fantasy. It's one of the most consistently coherent books of SF&F criticism I've read.
The author wrote many critical essays over the past twenty years, mainly published online. Mostly books, but some short stories, and occasional movies or TV series. All genre.
She does what a critic is supposed to do: Not tell you if a book or movie is good or bad (well, except for 'Batman vs. Superman', which I guess everyone thinks was bad), but tell you what worked, what didn't work, and how it is placed in context with other work by other creators. The purpose is not to make you agree or disagree with her, but to examine your own experience of a work and bring a little more analysis to why something worked for you or didn't.
She has some favorite authors but can poke holes in the things they do as well, which gives her greater credibility for analyzing the authors she's not so familiar with.
Criticism is not negative, per se. Good criticism will tell you if a work seemed to accomplish what it set out to do, how it did that, and to what extent it succeeded or failed. That's what Nussbaum does in these reviews. Of all the critics I've read, I imagine Nussbaum's analysis could be the most helpful to an author who wants to improve their writing.
It's a long book (500 pages), but you can skip around as you wish. I skipped some of the media that I never expect to see, especially movies and TV series. Oh, and skimmed the review of 'Batman vs. Superman'. I've never seen it, but it's reputation is so horrid (and lambasted by Nussbaum) that at this point in my life I don't want to spend a couple of hours watching something that I know is guaranteed to disappoint or annoy me.
The author wrote many critical essays over the past twenty years, mainly published online. Mostly books, but some short stories, and occasional movies or TV series. All genre.
She does what a critic is supposed to do: Not tell you if a book or movie is good or bad (well, except for 'Batman vs. Superman', which I guess everyone thinks was bad), but tell you what worked, what didn't work, and how it is placed in context with other work by other creators. The purpose is not to make you agree or disagree with her, but to examine your own experience of a work and bring a little more analysis to why something worked for you or didn't.
She has some favorite authors but can poke holes in the things they do as well, which gives her greater credibility for analyzing the authors she's not so familiar with.
Criticism is not negative, per se. Good criticism will tell you if a work seemed to accomplish what it set out to do, how it did that, and to what extent it succeeded or failed. That's what Nussbaum does in these reviews. Of all the critics I've read, I imagine Nussbaum's analysis could be the most helpful to an author who wants to improve their writing.
It's a long book (500 pages), but you can skip around as you wish. I skipped some of the media that I never expect to see, especially movies and TV series. Oh, and skimmed the review of 'Batman vs. Superman'. I've never seen it, but it's reputation is so horrid (and lambasted by Nussbaum) that at this point in my life I don't want to spend a couple of hours watching something that I know is guaranteed to disappoint or annoy me.
June 24, 2025
Nussbaum writes reviews for genre magazines, non-genres magazines, and newspapers, as well as her blog…like me 😊. However, she is much more skilled at the art of reviewing than I. She has many comparisons to other works, including non-genre. Her reviews read much more like English papers, something I was never very good at (dangling preposition). This book collects her reviews of genre books, stories, and even films, gathering them into categories, like Space, Body, and Tales. I did not finish this book as I find just reading a lot of reviews to become rather tedious. Even when I read reviews online, I can only read a couple at a time, especially when they are as brilliantly written and analyzed as these are. So I skipped around a lot, finding reviews of books I’ve read and others I want to read. I’m ranking this rather low on the list for that reason.
Come visit my blog for a post about all the 2025 nominees for the Best Related Work Hugo...
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
Come visit my blog for a post about all the 2025 nominees for the Best Related Work Hugo...
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
October 28, 2024
I've been reading this since I bought it at Worldcon in August, as it's a book to nibble at, savour, and
sip.
As thoughtful, perceptive and interesting as you would expect if you have been following Abigail Nussbaum's reviews. As one would hope, it sends you back to re-read or re-watch, and often to read/watch for the first time.
The book is full of goodies, but I particularly liked the reviews of some titles I disliked* which helped me understand why I disliked them, and the review of Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun makes me want to give the book another go.
It will be on my nomination lists this year.
*Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union; Patrick Ness, The Knife of Letting Go; Helen Wecker, The Golem and Jinni.
sip.
As thoughtful, perceptive and interesting as you would expect if you have been following Abigail Nussbaum's reviews. As one would hope, it sends you back to re-read or re-watch, and often to read/watch for the first time.
The book is full of goodies, but I particularly liked the reviews of some titles I disliked* which helped me understand why I disliked them, and the review of Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun makes me want to give the book another go.
It will be on my nomination lists this year.
*Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union; Patrick Ness, The Knife of Letting Go; Helen Wecker, The Golem and Jinni.
November 3, 2025
The sheer volume and the depth of the reviews in this book are really impressive. I was worried at first that discussions of race would fall short and feel tangential, but they become more fully integrated and developed as the book progresses. The reviews of Interstellar, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Severance, and Simon Jimenez’s books in particular are representatively astute. Overall, demonstrates incredible breadth and depth of knowledge of genre across medium.
May 28, 2025
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hugo-best-related-work-2025/
Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm.
Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm.
August 20, 2025
Thought provoking collection.
November 18, 2025
I really enjoyed these essays by someone who takes fiction seriously and expects things from it.
April 27, 2025
Now a winner of the British Science Fiction Association's Best Long Non-Fiction Award!
If you have interest in fantasy and sci-fi media from a critical perspective this is a must-read. Abigail's critical writings on top of giving me lots of new media to pursue have shown me how to better consider and interpret experiencing stories full stop.
If you have interest in fantasy and sci-fi media from a critical perspective this is a must-read. Abigail's critical writings on top of giving me lots of new media to pursue have shown me how to better consider and interpret experiencing stories full stop.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews