2010 Hugo Award winners announced!

I’m excited to see a Bacigalupi/Miéville tie for best novel, and possibly even more excited to see that Clarkesworld won for best semi-prozine. Also, Moon for best dramatic presentation, long form, over Avatar. (If you’ve ever wanted to hear Kevin Spacey voice a robot that expresses itself using emoticons, go see Moon. Strictly speaking, it’s crummy sci-fi, but as a character study it’s terribly moving. Also, Kevin Spacey.)

- E

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2009 World Fantasy Award nominees announced
Nebulous destiny (2010 Nebula winners)
2010 Hugo nominations

“… [Kiernan's] is a kind of dirty, modern lyricism. Like many of the Decadents, her prose is, yes, lush, but it’s also muscular, allows for psychologically three-dimensional portraits of her characters, and has the flexibility to be blunt, even shocking. Mermaids, selkies, vampires, and fairies all make appearances in this collection. However, the method of description and storytelling creates a sheer physicality and alien quality to the context for these creatures that both humanizes them—in the sense of making them real, if not always understandable—and makes it impossible to see them—so often the case when writers describe “monsters”—as just people in disguise or as caricatures we can dismiss because they exist solely for our passing frisson of unease or terror.”

Let this serve as a reminder to me both to start in on the collection as soon as possible, and to get off my butt and pull together my review of her last collection, A is for Alien, which is one of the most powerful collections I’ve read.

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This has probably made its rounds of the Internet numerous times already, but this is the first time I’d thought to look for, and found it: approximate maps of China Miéville’s continent Rohagi, home to Perdido Street Station, The Scar (if only briefly), and Iron Council. Scanned from a mostly-Miéville issue of Dragon Magazine.

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More from Jeff VanderMeer – brief interviews with some of this year’s World Fantasy award nominees. (My kneejerk reaction to the gallery of finalist novels’ covers: Yup, still want to cut whoever approved the slutacular cover art for The Red Tree.) Also, some interesting words on the selection process itself, since Kakaner and I had recently been discussing similar topics:

“As a former judge, I can say that it’s a very difficult and thankless task, picking the finalists, and knowing what goes into the process, it’s fair to say that the finalist list should be viewed as a winners list, in a sense. Judges will always be second-guessed, but every jury works very, very hard and reads many thousands and thousands of pages of material. It’s not a job anyone does except because they love fantasy.”

—

And finally – an interview with Kij Johnson, of “Spar” notoriety (Kakaner’s review):

“Everyone is disturbed by it, which is good. They should be. I certainly was—I had a hard time reading the entire story through when I was doing the revisions. There are probably a bunch of people who hate the story because they see it as a particularly unpleasant sort of porn. Other readers find all sorts of stuff in it: challenges to gender roles; semiotics; Stockholm Syndrome; an exploration of relationship dynamics; the definition of humanity. It’s been really cool, especially when I embedded something in there that people caught, and also cool when they see something I hadn’t verbalized to myself while I was working on it.”

Also has some other interesting bits, including details about her writing process and her thematic interests, as well as what the Internet has done for short-fiction publishing.

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Kij Johnson
Caitlín R. Kiernan
China Miéville

Summary

(Shamelessly stolen from Emera’s review– if it ain’t broke, why rewrite it?)
Princess Lissla Lissar lives quietly and invisibly in the shadows of her father and mother, who are worshiped by the people, and whose love for each other is all-consuming. When Lissar’s mother mysteriously wastes away, she forces her husband to swear that he will not remarry unless he finds a woman as beautiful as she was. This promise comes back to haunt the kingdom when Lissar, becoming a woman herself, attracts her father’s attention for the first time. Driven from the kingdom by an unendurable ordeal, Lissar escapes with her only friend, her dog Ash, and struggles to survive and reclaim her sense of self.

Review

The beginning of Deerskin was eye opening. As I started reading McKinley, who I haven’t picked up since Sunshine several years ago, I realized there was so much to her writing and storybuilding that I had not been able to fully appreciate before. Deerskin began with a delicate yet urgent account of Lissar’s childhood leading up to her escape from the kingdom. In my opinion, the gem of the novel was here– the elegant and insightful conveyance of the uncrossable distance that can form between a child and her parents, and the stunningly eerie account of the relationship between Lissar and her father. It has certainly been done before– stories in which royal children are neglected emotionally by the majesties– but none have devoted the same care as McKinley did here. The brilliance was the realization that something so little as lack of acknowledgment combined with an initial reverence for one’s parents can slowly ferment for years until it is replaced by fear. Here, I thought the execution was splendid and something that served to set this retelling apart from others.

Next, I apprehensively followed Lissar as she fled her kingdom and sought a bitter refuge in the wilderness, waiting to be impressed by Lissar’s independence, resourcefulness, and elegance in the face of hardships (as is to be expected of fairy-tale-retelling-heroines). This was the case, more or less, but as the story progressed, I was assaulted with pages of visions, repetitive daily monotony, more suffering than one reader can handle, ellipsis abuse e10, and a blind race to the resolution.

And may I interject here, did the climax really happen?  [not-really-spoiler-alert] Did she really honestly just pour forth a fountain of blood from her vagina, leaving a stain in the wood that was to be studied and used as an oracle for generations thereafter? I entirely understand what McKinley was striving for, and yes even though Deerskin is regarded as the Moonwoman, there are other ways to tie together “moon” and “woman” and “dark” and “fantasy”. I would expect a male author to commit such a transgression.

To be fair, I could chalk up my dissatisfaction with the second half to the fact that I simply have much more in common with a shy, black-haired, independent, voracious reader of a child than a lady who traipses through winterlands with a large dog in tow. Despite everything, Deerskin was still one of the most exciting fantasy novels I’ve read in a long time, and it is a dark fantasy novel that places great care in maintaining and exploring the different forms of love in all relationships.

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Deerskin (1993)   [E]

Robin McKinley

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
• The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Stephanie Meyer
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Pretty good sampling of genres there, too – one literary/historical fiction, one… whatever you want to call Stephanie Meyer, one nonfiction. Any others I’m missing? I feel like I must be, if three out of a list of just ten bestsellers are hits for the trend.

* Mindlessly soothing hobby of the month, while I avoid my numerous laboriously overwritten and therefore still unposted reviews – tweaking and entering dozens of books into my Librarything. Anyone else out there have an account and like to be library-buddies?

- E

Review

I recently made the perilous trek through Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: The Black Dossier, which was a constant reminder that I should reread some Jules Verne. There have also just been a smattering of references here and there so I thought I’d pick up my middle school favorite, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

My experience reading it the second time around was so appallingly different from my middle school read that I couldn’t believe it was the same book. Right before I cracked the cover, I excitedly recalled the dashing, dark, mysterious, yet loveable Captain Nemo, a brave man-gang shaking their fists (harpoons and electric wands too) at giant sea squid, the hulking science-defying metal warmachine of the Nautilus,  a whirlwind of action, climax and resolution under the sea, and what I found were… dry characters and lots and lots of taxonomy. So much that I’m pretty sure there was more science in that one itsy book than in my high school biology textbook. On the one hand, I greatly appreciated the, um, education, but on the other, it was frustrating to move along in the story only to screech to a halt and have to plod through terribly strained dialogue for setting up long monologues of classification. I felt like my brain was being taxed to its limit having to conjure up all these detailed mental images of fish.

This is not to say that I think 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea lacks imagination. I still fully understand why I loved it so much, proceeded to read all of Verne’s books I could find, and cited him as a favorite author whenever prompted. The concept, story, and scarily accurate scientific predictions were still impressive the second time around, but it would have taken a miracle for the book to have held up to the expectations I built for it.

But no, Monsieur Arronax was not quite the adventurous and fresh man of science I had always envisioned him to be, Conseil was basically a non-character, and Ned was indeed a rather infuriating spoil sport. I’m afraid I must admit that I defeatedly returned my little used copy back to its place on the shelf and called Jules Verne up to end our little affair. However, The Mysterious Island remains on my reread list because I still vividly remember it being a league above the rest of the books and I owe it to Captain Nemo to give him a second chance.

Go To:

Jules Verne

As usual, I’ve read a depressingly minute fraction of the list, but it does include a good chunk of Black Letters favorites – notably, Caitlín Kiernan’s The Red Tree (my review here), one of our favorite reads of 2009.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

- E

This here’s the manticore. Man’s head, lion’s body, tail of a scorpion. Captured at midnight, eating werewolves to sweeten its breath…

The Last Unicorn comic adaptation #2 (review for #1) arrived at my door last week, and despite being exhausted I had to squeeze it in before falling asleep that night, in part because this is the issue that I can’t help but think of as “Meet Schmendrick;” and what self-respecting fan could resist the tawdry horrors of Mommy Fortuna’s carnival? In this issue, the unicorn wakes to find herself imprisoned in a two-bit witch’s menagerie of illusory monsters, and her best chances for escape lie with a well-meaning but inept magician named Schmendrick.

This time, I got Frank Stockton’s alternate cover art:

While I love his graphic approach, and particularly liked his cover variant for the first issue, it irks me that his unicorn tends to look kind of witless, and on principle I have trouble condoning the idea of a unicorn having “the hair of a Hollywood starlet.” Also, I really, really loved the de Liz/Dillon cover design for this issue. But life goes on, and Mommy Fortuna’s hand looks awesome here.

Basically, everything that I liked about the first issue I liked just as much, if not more, here: atmospheric color choices, expressive human characters, effective panel layouts, and pretty much pitch-perfect adaptation of the text. Very occasionally I was still bothered by coloring choices, but I found the use of textures much less obtrusive in this issue than in the first, and particularly effective in conveying the murk and grime of Mommy Fortuna’s carnival. There were also a couple of mostly-wordless compressions of action and narration that made me go YESSS, that could not have been done in any medium other than comics.

Character interpretations! De Liz’s Mommy Fortuna is actually borderline terrifying, with deepset eyes (one of them glaring and cataracted), chubby beringed fingers, a leer that reminds me (appropriately) of Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, and purplish, spongy-looking flesh. Somehow she manages to make me much more uncomfortable than the animated version did. I think it’s the spongy, spotty decrepitude that gets to me. Movie-version Mommy is really kind of badass, but comic-version looks like she’s just completely let herself go, and is reaping every ounce of ghoulish pleasure from looking as awful as she possibly can – which makes perfect sense for her character.

And – the big moment for me, since I’ve come to love this character in his absurdity and vulnerability more and more with time – Schmendrick. I know Molly Grue is the big one for most people (or at least that’s my assumption), but Molly is fearless and strong in a way that I’m not, so that while I love and admire her character, I end up identifying with Schmendrick.

For reference, here’s Schmendrick the first two times he’s described in the novel:

…the other was a tall, thin man with an air of resolute bewilderment. He wore an old black cloak, and his eyes were green.

…

He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man – untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom.

And here’s movie-Schmendrick:

He’s woeful and lovable in a potato-nosed, Precious-Moments-head-stuck-on-a-beanpole-body kind of way.

And here’s our first good look at comic-Schmendrick:

My heart may or may not have skipped a beat when I first saw this panel. De Liz’s Schmendrick looks like he could be anywhere between sixteen and twenty-six; he has large, frequently furrowed brows; he has long fingers with knobby knuckles; he’s given to flashing grins that you suspect he doesn’t really feel, and making grandiose gestures that read as half habitual self-parody, and half the last refuge for an utterly battered ego and self-doubting soul. Basically, he’s perfect, and I couldn’t be more grateful to see such a loving, sensitive rendering of his character.

Reading this issue made me realize how much I love to see the unicorn and Schmendrick in action together, because the mixing of their respective registers heightens both: the unicorn’s immovable calm (even when she’s in distress, she’s elegant) is the perfect foil to Schmendrick’s tragicomic bluster and endlessly flickering emotions.

Just wanted to end with my favorite panel of Schmendrick from the issue, which is also possibly my favorite panel period. This is when Schmendrick has entirely failed to free the unicorn by magic, and finds himself reduced to humbler means:

“You deserve the services of a great wizard,” he said to the unicorn, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.” [...] Schmendrick was already fitting a key into the snickering lock. At his first attempt, which failed, the lock fell silent, but when he tried another key it cried out loudly, “Ho-ho, some magician! Some magician!” It had Mommy Fortuna’s voice.

I love everything about this panel, from lighting to – most of all – expression.

Can’t wait for the next issue now.

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Peter S. Beagle
The Last Unicorn comic #1, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E
Comixology previews of The Last Unicorn #1 and 2
The Innkeeper’s Song, by Peter S. Beagle (1993) E

Apparently not a single unpixellated version of this image wants to let me find it.

Whyyyy did I read this all in (pretty much) one sitting. Whatever the opposite of feel-good is, MW falls into that category. The whole time I was reading, I got the impression of Tezuka Osamu crowing, “Suffer in an agony of dread while I, the creator of such lovable, family-friendly classics of Japanese animation and comics as Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, manipulate your feelings with this unrelentingly dark thriller about a serial killer and the priest bound to him by guilt and love! Bwa ha ha ha!” Thanks, Tezuka. By the time I hit the last 20 pages, I was so overwrought with fatalistic dread that I had to put the book down for a few hours, before returning to the equally depressing final scenes.

For an illuminating bit of background, Wikipedia provided me with the following context: “This manga series is notable because it can be seen as Tezuka’s response to the gekiga (”dramatic pictures”) artists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s and an attempt to beat them at their own game. The gekiga artists of this period created gritty, adult-oriented works that sharply contrasted the softer, Disney-influenced style that Tezuka was associated with, a style that was seen as being out-of-step with the times.” So I think I’m not entirely wrong in detecting a certain amount of authorial glee in the proceedings.

MW is also a response to the use of chemical weaponry during the Vietnam War. MW’s resident sociopath, Yuki Michio, the charming, long-lashed scion of a renowned family of kabuki actors, is a sociopath because he was exposed as a child to a neurotoxic weapon – MW – leaked from an island containment facility owned by Nation X (which is pretty blatantly America). Father Garai, Yuki’s confidante and extremely guilty lover, feels bound to protect Yuki’s identity from the authorities because he, as an erstwhile hoodlum, was holding a nine-year-old Yuki captive at the time. He and Yuki were the only survivors; Garai joined the Church some time thereafter in an attempt to escape both his horror at having witnessed the disaster, and his guilt at his relationship with Yuki. (Yes, do the math there. Tezuka reaches for pretty much every variety of shock value, and even by the standards of anime/manga,  most of it is awful.)

Over the course of the manga, Father Garai is repeatedly guilted and blackmailed into aiding Yuki in his course of destruction. Garai at first believes that Yuki seeks to expose and bring down those responsible for the MW leak and its subsequent cover-up, but eventually learns that Yuki perpetrates his varied murders and extensive political manipulations with worse and wider goals in mind.

Yuki and Father Garai’s first exchange in the manga.

Tezuka’s elastic, broadly expressive art makes for a really bizarre contrast with the manga’s subject matter. At times the cartooniness undercuts the drama and emotional impact of some of the scenes that should be genuinely moving or frightening; at other times, it’s an unnerving counterpoint. Having read only one other Tezuka manga (Black Jack), and that a number of years ago, it was a pleasure to see classic manga style in action again. Every scene is finally detailed, and mostly in ink, without the reliance of contemporary manga on screentones for shading. It’s also really, really nice to actually be able to tell characters apart by things other than their hairstyles. (Facial features? What are those?) Also also, there’s one spread in which every panel is modeled after Aubrey Beardsley’s work, which first made me go “whut,” and then be pleased, if still lingeringly nonplussed.

As a story, MW is exceedingly tightly plotted, and if many of its twists are predictable, at least they’re dramatically compelling. A lot of the police procedural work that goes on is laughable – I was particularly bothered by how stupidly easy it would have been to avert the final twist – but at a certain point I just shrugged and sat back to enjoy (not the right word) the spectacle. All in all, I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but its nonstop intensity is addictive, and many of its characters are complex and believable in their flaws.

Tezuka’s treatment of Garai’s homosexuality is also unabashedly sympathetic, and yields a few surprisingly tender scenes. Possibly my favorite sequence in the entire series was one in which a newspaper editor refuses to run incriminating photos taken of Father Garai in a gay club; later, she goes home to her lover, who’s revealed to also be a woman, exclaiming, “You wouldn’t believe the good deed I did today!” It’s an unexpected touch of genuine sweetness in a series otherwise ruled at best by black humor and at worst by hatred for humanity.

I would tentatively recommend the manga for fans of Urasawa Naoki’s Monster, as I found it hard not to draw thematic and plot comparisons between the two while reading, though MW, with its theatricality (I allllmost want to call it camp), fails to be as moving.

Kudos to publisher Vertical Inc., finally, for publishing MW as one hardcover volume. It’s both more attractive and easier to read than the usual tightly-bound softcover manga volume, not to mention cheaper than an equivalent set of separate volumes would have been. Also, though I disliked pretty much all of the font choices, the translation was uniformly excellent, so kudos again on that point.

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Tezuka Osamu

Luckily, Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus) provides an alternative, in his Sandman Meditations over at heady comic-book blog Gestalt Mash. In each installment, Cheney provides commentary on one issue as he reads through the series for the first time; two installments are out so far. (A similar read-through essay series is also being offered for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, with the added twist of commentary being provided by one new and one re-reader.) Graphic novels are not his expertise, but his background in film studies is obvious, as he pays close attention to details of shape, composition, color, and the flow of panels.

These won’t do much for anyone who hasn’t already read the series, or isn’t in the process of doing so, but they’re a fascinating, if largely technical way to revisit it.

- E

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Neil Gaiman
Sandman, 10 (and maybe 5) years later

This will be possibly one of the world’s least impartial reviews, in that my love affair with The Last Unicorn started when I was about six, when I first saw the animated movie adaptation, then proceeded to sort-of forget about it in such a way that it became a native feature of my mental landscape. For a really, really long time, I thought it was actually a really amazing, really sad dream that I had once had. For all that it’s typically praised as “whimsical” and “charming,” it’s also a story that’s profoundly concerned with mortality, sacrifice, and loss of wonder and innocence, all of which was both troubling and stirring to me as a child. Attached to my dream/memory of it was both a great yearning for the film’s melancholy, twilight-shaded beauty, and a certain sense of haunted anxiety.

Like many other fans, I didn’t rediscover the movie till years later, after which I proceeded to re-watch it an egregious number of times, attempt (unsuccessfully) to foist it on friends, and finally, very belatedly discover that it was based on Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel. Said novel, read at twelve or thirteen, went on to become part of what I think of as my core canon; I’m often hard-pressed to find the words to explain how much it means to me.

Given all this, I was a bit leery but mostly excited to see the news this spring that IDW would be releasing a six-part comic adaptation of the novel, under Beagle’s supervision, adapted by comics writer Peter B. Gillis,with art by wife-and-husband team Renae De Liz (pencils) and Ray Dillon (ink and color). Being the sucker I am, I immediately sprung for the signed preorders (hey, signed and inscribed copies ship for free, so it’s like I saved money… right?) available via Conlan Press, Beagle’s affiliated publisher. Recently I got around to sitting down with the first installment. A blow-by-blow review follows, with quotes here and there from the original novel – which, for those who have not encountered it in one form or another, is the story of a unicorn who learns one day that she is the last of her kind in the world, and leaves her wood in order to seek out her imprisoned kin.

First reaction: augh @ awkward author/title placement for a composition that was obviously supposed to have a vertically centered title. Also a little disappointed that De Liz’s unicorn looks pretty distinctly horsey, when Beagle is very strong in his insistence that unicorns look not-much like horses:

She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in a dancing mockery. Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight.

That aside, it is a pretty gorgeous cover, and one I’d rather like to see as a poster.

My personal preference artwise would have been for a more old-fashioned illustrative style (think Charles Vess, Michael Zulli, Michael Kaluta), but maybe that’s too obvious and literal, anyway. And any time I start feeling too picky, I flip back to the first page:

What can I say – it’s so lushly beautiful, and my heart did a little jump when it saw the first, classic line of the novel. So simple, but effective; and I mean both the prose and the layout. (Check out Comixology for 5-page previews of issues 1 and 2 of the comic, by the way.)

Just about every page of the comic is similarly lovely to look at, with well-rendered environments, evocative paneling, and a rich, sunset-y color palette. I’m generally not fond of most digital coloring jobs done for comics, and Dillon’s work does occasionally hit the combination of superglowy soft-edged airbrush + obviously applied textures that sets my teeth on edge, but I quite like the atmosphere he creates with his color choices. In particular, I liked that he chose to always ink the unicorn with paler colors, which evokes both her radiance and her dreamlike superposition on the harder edges of the real world.

Unfortunately, though De Liz’s human characters are expressive and realistically worn – I’m horribly excited to see her Schmendrick, Molly Grue, and Prince Lír – I still wasn’t really sold on her unicorn, which is both anatomically shaky and perhaps a little too indebted to the animated unicorn’s aesthetic. Hard to blame the artist for it, since she’s also apparently a fan-since-childhood of the movie, but it would have been nice to see a fresher interpretation.

Reading the comic is a strange experience – I can simultaneously hear the animated characters’ voices (not to mention the soundtrack), and sense the tiny gaps where phrases from the novel have been cut. Gillis’ adaptation of the text is flawless, though. Without letting the text overwhelm the flow of the images, he preserves many of the most beautiful passages of Beagle’s prose. I haven’t re-read the novel in at least six years, so it was both surprising and a great pleasure to be reminded of its wisdom, and to encounter it in a new form. To quote the lines that follow the first, which are also some of my favorites:

She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

Perfection.

All in all, despite my reservations, I’m greatly looking forward to the upcoming issues. The comic promises to be a thoughtful, atmosphere-rich adaptation, and one that I hope helps to introduce a new generation of readers to Beagle’s work. In addition, the last few pages of the issue feature the first segment of a meaty and entertaining interview with Beagle himself, which covers his earliest years of writing and traveling in proto-hippie America.

Go to:
Peter S. Beagle
Comixology previews of The Last Unicorn #1 and 2
The Last Unicorn comic #2, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E
The Innkeeper’s Song, by Peter S. Beagle (1993) E