For much of 2022, it felt was though I was writing science fiction in a vacuum. Hollywood seemed to have abandoned the genre altogether, apart from Avatar: The Way of Water (a visual treat) right at the year’s end. So there was little (new) external stimulus to stoke my imagination. And TV seems to be leaning heavily into fantasy these days, with predictably mixed results. While House of the Dragon hit the spot, Rings of Power missed it by a shockingly wide mark. All in all,