Because we really need our pop culture franchise to be dominated by an increasingly limited number of visions, Deadline and other outlets are reporting that J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars Episode VII:
Star Trek director J.J. Abrams will be helming the next Star Wars movie. “It’s done deal with J.J.,” a source with knowledge of the situation told Deadline today. Argo director Ben Affleck was also up for the gig, the source says. Michael Arndt is writing the script for the first installment of the relaunch of George Lucas’ franchise by Disney.
There are two issues here: how well-suited Abrams is for Star Wars in particular, and the consolidation of big franchises under a very limited number of perspectives (especially since the perspectives are those of white dudes).
On the question of Abrams as a fit for Star Wars, I’m deeply ambivalent. I think the franchise has been at its weakest when it’s delving too deeply into the details of its mythology. In the initial trilogy George Lucas and his collaborators had the wisdom to retain the emotional power of the Force as a cinematic device by leaving it relatively mysterious. Once the movies started delving into midichlorians and the manifestations thereof, the Force started to seem clunky and silly, no longer something those of us at home could dream of accessing. Abrams and his collaborators have a weakness for focusing on mysteries and exploring them to death, be they Smoke Monsters, strings of numbers, or aliens rampaging around New York City. I do think there’s an extent to which Abrams will be protected from this tendency by Arndt’s script, and the larger plans of Disney, which will presumably will be thinking about projects like television shows and Zack Snyder’s rumored stand-alone Star Wars movie. But I do think that Abrams’ interests in mysteries are actually a relatively a poor match for the greatest strength of the Star Wars movies: using a mysterious concept to open up a larger world, rather than focusing obsessively on the mystery itself.
But really, the profound disappointment I felt on hearing this news is less about my specific feelings about Abrams as a director. It’s more that franchises like The Avengers, Star Trek, Justice League, and Star Wars are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence, and to accrue the kind of capital and credibility that can become enormous springboards for their more personal projects. The Avengers, for example, gave Joss Whedon an opportunity to bring his unique spin on female characters to Black Widow, who’d been poorly served in Iron Man 2. And its success won him a long-running and one assumes extraordinarily lucrative position overseeing the franchise: his ideas about superheroism will play a major role in American moviegoing for as much as a decade to come, and the money he makes from it gives him the opportunity to pursue more passion projects like his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. That is an extraordinarily precious thing, and it makes me terribly sad to see that power concentrated in one person, rather than spread out to a number of people with different interests and perspectives on the kinds of questions raised by our biggest franchises.
Read more

I was out of the town for the critics’ screenings of The Hobbit, which I’ll try to catch over the Christmas break. But I really
I’ve been feeling like I need a bit of a shakeup in the fantasy that I read, so over the weekend, I finished Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, her rich novel about sorcery and sexual violence in a post-apocalyptic Sudan. It’s not a perfect book—it’s not always clear what’s going on in the interlocking plots, and some of the characters come across a bit flat. But Okorafor’s central innovation is a brilliant one, both for the purposes of the novel, and for conversations around her main subject: she treats misogynistic violence as a strain of magic, something that deeply permeates the world in which her main character, Onyesonwu, conceived in a rape that is part of a campaign of genocide, lives and learns sorcery, emerging in unpredictable ways, and governing deeply-held ideas about what is natural.
I got an early birthday present today with the publication of
Over the last two television seasons, both Fox and NBC have both tried to make science fiction and fantasy shows work, focusing heavily on the visuals rather than the conceptual and emotional architecture underneath them. Both Terra Nova and Revolution look good. Fox spent money to make sure its dinosaurs didn’t look like an embarrassment. In its pilot, Revolution’s abandoned shells of airplanes and overgrown Major League baseball stadiums have a handsome air of decay. But watching both those shows and the finale of SyFy’s Lost Girl in recent days, it’s striking the extent to which shows seem to be able to pull off either the look or the ideas, but rarely both.
It says a lot about the military that it apparently didn’t occur to anyone that men’s body armor, which female soldiers wear too (they can choose from a range of sizes), might not actually be optimized for women’s bodies or the way women move in combat. The Christian Science Monitor
My favorite novel of the summer is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, which follows the adventures of adventures of Alif, a young hacktivist in a repressive Emirate, who finds himself in trouble after the state censor, known as the Hand of God, appropriates a computer program he wrote and starts tracking down dissidents, and with a broken heart after the upper-class girl he’s in love with becomes betrothed to someone else. Alif flees his home one step ahead of the state security forces, with Dina, his neighbor, only to find that he’s stumbled into a version of his city where djinns exist, and where computer code and Arabic text have taken on unprecedented power. I spoke with Wilson, herself a convert to Islam, about the power of text, writing Arabic characters as a white author, and imagining the Arab Spring before it even took place. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I’ve eased up on the book club because I think it’s hard for a critical mass of folks to keep up—we all have a lot on our pop culture agendas. But some people have been asking me what I’m reading or what I’m looking forward to this summer. So here are five books that are either coming out, or are relatively new releases that I think are worth making time for if you’re escaping to the beach somewhere.
Saladin Ahmed wrote my all-time favorite essay about race and Game of Thrones, so I was terrifically excited to read 
