Let’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.