The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/18

2013-05-20T08:30:00.000-04:00

I need to cover two weeks this time out -- since last week's books didn't get covered in my frenzy to get ready for my employer's massive off-site meeting, and then I spent four long days at that meeting and the last two getting home and recuperating. Luckily, the current week brought only a short stack, so it's not too much to go through this time.

First up has to be Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, in honor of the most recent Nebula Awards banquet Saturday night in San Jose. This is the latest incarnation of the annual anthology thought up by Damon Knight in the mid '60s to give SFWA a revenue stream, and, as usual, it reprints the Nebula-winning stories of two years ago (2011), along with a few also-rans, and functions something like a belated "Best of the Year." (But, one could argue, this is a crowd-sourced Year's Best, and you couldn't pick a better crowd than the assembled writers of SFWA, could you?) This year's edition is edited/compiled (since I doubt she was allowed to really edit the already award-caliber stories here) by Catherine Asaro, a two-time Nebula winner and former two-term SFWA President. Showcase 2013 is published in trade paperback by Py, and hit stores about a week ago.

I also have a large stack of manga being published by Yen Press this month, so I'll dive into them next:

The first two volumes of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix are out, which reprint Shiro Amano's comics adaptation of the popular fighting-your-way-through-Disney-world-with-a-giant-sword-that-looks-like-a-key games. I am not entirely certain how this series is connected to the earlier Kingdom Hearts manga series -- my guess is that it will reprint everything we've ever seen in the US, and possibly add more than never made it here from Japan, but the book itself doesn't explain what a "Final Mix" is.

Junya Inoue's hard-to-search for series Btooom! (three Os, one bang) is back with a second volume; I read the first one a number of weeks ago but haven't managed to write about it yet. It's a pretty violent recasting of Battle Royale with a video-game overlay; our main character is a master at a competitive online game about blowing up the other players (like a much more specific Team Fortress 2), and then finds himself kidnapped to the obligatory remote island to play a real-world version of that game for no good reason by the usual shadowy forces. If you think that fighting manga have too many guns and not enough bombs, this is exactly the series for you.

Black God, by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, as always, finishes its run with a giant-sized nineteeth volume this month. (See my reviews of volumes two, three, four, and fifteen for a an overview.)

I keep thinking I should read more of Atsushi Ohkubo's shonen demon-fighting saga Soul Eater, which hits a fourteenth volume this month. (Both my sons love it, and have the full set -- so I could easily read them all if I wanted to.) I read and reviewed volumes one and eight, so perhaps I only look at it every seven volumes -- if so, I've only got one more to wait until it's time again.

Also hitting this month is The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Vol. 4, the latest spin-off from the vast Haruhi Suzumiya empire, focusing on one of the minor characters of the main story. (Don't ask me more detail than that; I'm not really up on all things Haruhi.) The art is by Puyo, the story is by Haruhi creator Nagaru Tanigawa, and the original character designs are by Noizi Ito.

Yuuki Kodama's Blood Lad series reaches a third volume this month -- I read the first one, and haven't managed to write about it yet. It's broad and goofy and very stereotypically shonen, about the slacker demon ruler of a piece of Hell, his otaku love for all pieces of Japanese pop culture, and the human girl who accidentally dropped into his realm. It's the kind of book that starts to ignore its supposed premise by about the hundredth page, so it'll probably turn into something very different if it runs long enough.

And the mighty Omamori Himari, by Milan Matra, reaches its tenth volume, with presumably even more panty shots to celebrate. (The book is still in its protective wrapper as I write this, but it's rated "M" for mature, the most restrictive rating of any of the Yen books this month. So anyone hoping for some fanservice should look her first.)

Durarara!! -- always confusingly styled DRRR!! on the covers -- returns with Saika Arc, Vol. 2, from the team of Akiyo Satorigi (art), Suzhito Yasuda (character design), and Ryohgo Narita (creator). Sharp-eyed followers will note that no one is credited with actually writing this story, but who needs writers?

And there's yet another retelling of Alice in Wonderland in manga form -- this must be the fourth or fifth one I've seen, which is just weird -- in the form of Are You Alice? by Ikumi Katagir and Ai Ninomiya (credited as "original story," which looks like a slam on Lewis Carroll to me). Alice this time is a young man, entering the confusing world of Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts is a pretty young man. (This doesn't seem to be turning into yaoi, but it's early days yet.)

I need to get a running start to get all the way through the next title, so here I go... Umineko When They Cry, Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch, Vol. 1. The story is by Ryukishi07, the art by Jiro Suzuki, and it continues to be based on a series of murder-mystery games, much like the vaguely related Higurashi: When They Cry series.

And last from Yen this time out is Thermae Romae, Vol. II by Mari Yamazaki, the amazing story of a time-traveling Roman bath-house designer from the age of Augustus and the modern Japanese bath technology that inspires him. It's a unique idea, and the first volume -- which, again, I read but haven't gotten around to writing about -- was a lot of fun in that very earnest Japanese way.

Returning to books with only words on their pages, The Planet Thieves is the first novel in a new series by Dan Krokos (author of the previous YA novel False Memory). Planet Thieves may be YA or middle-grade, if that distinction is of burning importance to anyone. It's coming from Tor Starscape this month, and is the SFnal story of a starship on a routine training mission full of young cadets from the Academy when it's attacked and boarded by a vicious alien race that has been at war with humanity for generations. Those cadets -- led by our hero, of course -- must take back their ship and get back to Earth to warn about this new assault.

Rhiannon Held is back with Tarnished, the sequel to her werewolf novel Silver, from Tor in hardcover this week. It's urban fantasy, obviously, but seems to come more from the old hurt/comfort strain of fanfic -- focusing on alpha wolf Andrew, who finds and saves damaged Silver, who can't shift due to torture -- rather than from the more usual "all these supernatural boys love the totally awesome female protagonist" romance-influenced style of contemporary fantasy. This time out, Andrew and Silver are looking to take over the pack he used to belong to, because that's what werewolf novels are about. (And "that" is the outdated simplification of wolf pack hierarchy, because that's more amenable to fiction than the messier actual reality.)

Last is the new Imager novel from the dapper L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Antiagon Fire, coming as a Tor hardcover next week. (I had some Antiagon Fire once, but a quick course of over-the-counter treatments cleared it right up -- ask your pharmacist!) This is the seventh book in the series, and I have to admit that I don't know what's going on -- it's epic fantasy about armies and empire clashing, with magic and skulduggery and all the rest, but that's about as specific as I can get.

2012 Aurealis Award Winners

2013-05-19T18:22:00.001-04:00

It was a busy weekend for SFnal awards -- not just on my side of the globe, but Down Under as well, where the Aurealis Awards were announced at a ceremony in Sydney.

It's a long list, but I haven't detected any space limitation for blogs yet, so here they all are:

Best Children’s Fiction (Told Primarily Through Words): Brotherband: The Hunters by John Flanagan (Random House Australia)

Best Children’s Fiction (Told Primarily Through Pictures): Little Elephants by Graeme Base (Viking Penguin)

Best Young Adult Short Story: "The Wisdom Of The Ants" by Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld)

Best Young Adult Novel (Joint Winners):
Dead, Actually by Kaz Delaney (Allen & Unwin)
Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Best Illustrated Book / Graphic Novel: Blue by Pat Grant (Top Shelf Comix)

Best Collection: That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K. J. Bishop (Self-Published)

Best Anthology: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 6 Edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books)

Best Horror Short Story: "Sky" by Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Horror Novel: Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott (Xoum)

Best Fantasy Short Story: "Bajazzle" by Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Fantasy Novel: Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Best Science Fiction Short Story: "Significant Dust" by Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Rook by Daniel O’Malley (Harper Collins)

Peter Mcnamara Convenors’ Award For Excellence: Kate Eltham

Kris Hembury Encouragement Award: Laura Goodin

Congratulations to all of the winners, particularly to Margo Lanagan, who took a full 25% of the available trophies.

Nebula Award Winners for 2012!

2013-05-19T09:27:00.001-04:00

SFWA's annual gala ceremony happened last night in San Jose, officially installing Gene Wolfe as ~~God-King of All Creation~~ the latest Grand Master and revealing for the first time the following winners:

Novel: 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)

Novelette: “Close Encounters”, Andy Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories)

Short Story: “Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)

Congratulations to all of the winners! And, to the not-quite-winners...well, you till get to say "Nebula Nominee" for the rest of your life, which is not nothing. And there's always next year.

I'm sure certain sectors of the Internet are already grousing about one winner or another, but I had no horses in this particular race, so I'm in the unusual (for me) position of being able to be simply happy for the winners.

(via, as usual, the indispensable Locus Online)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/11

2013-05-13T08:30:00.000-04:00

If there are any Antick Musings Kremlinologists -- and what a sad and odd idea that is -- they will have noticed that this post did not appear early this morning, when it was supposed to.

I do have an explanation, though not a good one: I spent all day Sunday (the day I usually write these posts) getting down to my employer's gala Global Meeting down in Miami, and spent pretty much all day Saturday pre-empting that lost Mother's Day and preparing for the trip.

There is a pile of books I should have written about, and there certainly was enough time on Saturday to write something if I'd really wanted to. But they'll still be there when I get back on Friday, and I'll either update this post then or just roll them into next week's post.

So this is just an "I aten't dead" post. I am, instead of being dead in a ditch somewhere, on the 13th floor of a reasonably posh hotel on the water in a subtropical city, in the middle of four very long days of meetings, schmoozing, and other things that I dislike nearly as much as those. I will be back here, eventually.

Generational Trolling in Our Time

2013-05-11T09:05:00.002-04:00

Certain sectors of the Internet -- those whose ox is being gored this time, mostly -- are complaining about this here Time magazine cover story, which claims that Young People Today are lazy, unmotivated, and entirely unlike the upright older generations who, gol-durn it!, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and Built This Here United States.

This is indeed a stupid argument, but it's not a new stupid argument. Time in particular trots it out every few years -- see the following two examples from 2005 and 1990, grabbed quickly and haphazardly -- but all of the lazy wing of American journalism (which is most of it) likes this "we're better than you people, even though you're young and healthy and pretty and thin and have your whole lives in front of you" story, because they are old and crabbed and grumpy and have their entire failed lives burning behind them.

I'm part of Generation X, which was massively vilified in the media throughout the late '80s and early '90s -- remember "slackers?"; that was us -- even though we were very much like other teens and twenty-somethings before us. Folks older than me can chime in about how the mass media similarly demonized hippies, "juvenile delinquents" in the '50s, and all the way back to the flappers of the '20s.

The point is that this is what the media does. They identify a stupid trend, don't bother to check to see if it bears any relationship to reality -- or if they've filed the exact same story every five years for the last seven decades -- and run with it, hoping for attention and ad revenue. You don't have to let the idiots troll you. Just tell them to piss off, and go on about your life.

And remember: in twenty years, you and your age cohort will be the ones complaining about the new generation of Lena Dunhams and Douglas Couplands and Abbie Hoffmans. So you'll get your chance in the smug asshole chair, don't worry.

(Also, an actual journalist named Elspeth Reeve -- one of the few who checks facts and has a historical sense and more than one functional brain cell -- has debunked this for Atlantic Wire already.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/4

2013-05-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to the weekly post about the stuff I find in my mail -- all of the below books arrived over the past seven days, sent by publishing companies hoping that I will read and love and write about them. That may yet happen, but I haven't read any of these books yet -- but here's what I can tell you about them right now.

John Scalzi's The Human Division is probably the highest profile, most successful serialized novel since Stephen King's The Green Mile more than a decade ago, so there's a good chance that you've already heard about it, if not read it (or parts of it) already. But the thirteen serialized chapters/stories have now been all collected from their original electronic form and published as a hardcover by Tor (and, of course, also as an all-in-one ebook edition as well), hitting stores May 14th. The combined edition contains two extra stories as a bonus to those able to wait. The book itself is a continuation of his main space-opera sequence that began with Old Man's War (and which doesn't seem to have developed a name other than "the Old Man's War universe") I expect to read this one pretty soon, and this time around, I hope not to provoke the author to suggest I should stop reading his work.

Hauntings is a collection of reprint ghost stories, edited by Ellen Datlow and published by Tachyon. The stories range from Pat Cadigan's "Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie," from 1983, through Kelly Link's Two Houses," from last year, with stories from Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Lucius Shepard, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford in between -- two dozen ghost tales in all.

Entirely different is Superman: Peace in the Balance, a "Choose-Your-Fate Adventure Book" which is quite similar to a certain trademarked series of "if you decide to do X, turn to Page 6" books from my youth. This one is written by Michael Teitelbaum, has cover at by Rom Zaime and uncredited generic Superman art (and puzzles!) inside, and is aimed at kids ages 8-12. It's published by Tor's Starscape imprint, and features Clark Kent trying to cover a World Peace Conference while three of his deadliest enemies (those guys on the cover) simultaneously attack Earth.

The Beautiful Land looks to be the first novel by Alan Averill -- it doesn't say so specifically, but it won the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and has other new-author indications -- and is coming from Ace on June 4th. It's an alternate-universe SF novel, in which the shadowy Axon Corporation hires Takashiro O'Leary -- who once was his fictional world's equivalent of Bear Grylls -- to explore alternate timelines. Of course, it gets more complicated than that -- the inventor of the time-travel device has his own plans, and Tak's love, a shell-shocked Iraq war vet, will have no place in the clean new timeline Axon wants to build.

Michael Logan's Apocalypse Cow is also an award winner before US publication -- it landed the inaugural Terry Pratchett Prize when it came out in the UK -- and, as the title implies, it is about the zombie cow apocalypse hitting Britain. I expect it's funny -- cows are always funny in fiction, though much less so in real life -- and the Pratchett imprimatur is pretty nice, too. St. Martin's Press is publishing this as a trade paperback on May 21.

From St. Martin's corporate cousin Tor comes Susan Palwick's new novel Mending the Moon, arriving in hardcover on May 14th. Given Palwick's background, and that Tor publication, I expect there's some fantasy in it, but the description is very mundane: a middle-aged woman is murdered on vacation in Mexico, by another American tourist, a young man. When he takes his own life soon after in Seattle, his mother invites the murdered woman's adopted son and other close friends to a memorial service for the murderer. Somewhere in the middle, the online fandom for a comic-book superhero called Comrade Cosmos is also important.

And last for this week is Jon Steele's Angel City, the middle book in the "Angelus Trilogy" after The Watchers. This looks to be a thriller with supernatural elements rather than a "fantasy novel" -- at least as positioned by Blue Rider Press, which will publish it as a hardcover in June -- in which a tough detective and a high-priced whore with a heart of gold continue their battle against the otherworldly Nephilim.

Free Comic Book Day and Other Incoming Books

2013-05-04T21:13:00.001-04:00

I've been lazy about writing about, well, just about everything lately. (It's mostly because slow-on-the-uptake Andy realized a year to eighteen months ago that his Underpants-Gnomes style plan to get back into the SF field -- Part One: blog so that everyone can see how brilliant and special you are. Part Two: ??? Part Three: Profit! -- was fatally flawed and that I likely will spend the rest of my life selling stuff to accountants. Not the happiest realization one can make.)

But every day is a new day, and this day was Free Comic Book Day, so I drove my two sons (who are now huge and remarkably mature at 15 and 12) to Joker's Child, the shop with the best FCBD shindig close by. Besides the free stuff, I also bought a few books, since I do like to throw money to people who provide free stuff. And, as long as I'm telling you about those books, I'll also mention two other bundles of comics-related book-shaped goodies that I bought over the past few weeks, all thrown together:

Matt Wagner's Grendel Omnibus Vol. 2: The Legacy reprints the first dozen-plus issues of the major Comico run of Wagner's Grendel in the '80s -- the Pander Brothers-drawn Christine Spar storyline, the short followup with Bernie Mireault art, and the quick single-issue stories that Wagner drew himself -- plus the more recent Diana Schutz-Tim Sale miniseries about Stacy Palumbo (adopted daughter of the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, and mother of Christine Spar). Putting all of the Grendel stories into internal-chronology order makes sense, but I worry that it tends to leach the power out of the best of those stories -- the original short Hunter Rose story, now almost an afterthought in the first omnibus, and the visually exciting Spar story here (which, at least, dominates the volume with its length). However, I'm happy to have a way to get new copies of these stories that I lost in the flood, and doubly so that they're in big, attractive omnibuses. (So I can only quibble so much.)

B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth: Vol. 3: Russia is credited to series creator Mike Mignola (co-script), John Arcudi (the other half of the script for many years on B.P.R.D.), Tyler Crook (art), and Dave Stewart (colors). I'm two Hell on Earth volumes behind on reading this -- and there are, I think two more volumes out or almost out as well. (That's because, I think, my comics-reading life slammed to a halt with Hurricane Irene, and still hasn't come back -- but I still think and hope and buy books like it will.)

Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3 was the new book from The Hernandez Brothers three years ago, and contains the devastating Jaime story "Browntown." I'm still slowly re-gathering the complete Love & Rockets for a re-read, though it's taking longer than expected. (And I reviewed this back when it was published.)

Nemo: Heart of Ice is the latest "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" story by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, spinning off from the main story to follow Captain Nemo's daughter and her time captaining the giant sub and its piratical crew.

Julio's Day is a brand new graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez, related to his Palomar stories (as I understand it), but not closely.

There finally was a big fat Marshal Law collection -- subtitled The Deluxe Edition -- collecting all of the late '80s - early '90s stories by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, the nastiest and most vicious of the revisionist superheroes of that first era of revisionism. (We've since seen some writers that I won't name try to write stories with characters like Sleepman as the heroes, but you can't blame Mills and O'Neill for that -- they just pointed out the disease; they can't cure those who want to stay sick.)

Awkward Universe is an obscure book by Andy Garcia (who's probably pretty obscure now himself, unfortunately). I loved his Oblivion City comic in the mid-90s, and this was a spin-off; his books are ones that I want to replace post-flood, unlike a lot of superhero drivel that can stay in the landfill.

Similarly, I got the second collection of Scott Saavedra's wacky series, Dr. Radium And The Gizmos Of Boola Boola! Saavedra seems to have left comics -- I suspect it was actually the other way around, which happens a lot -- but he did some great stuff when comics had space for the nutty and weird.

And speaking of nutty and weird, I also got the sixth trade paperback of Bob Burden's indescribable Flaming Carrot Comics, published by Image in 2006. This one reprints a later series of stories, not the series's brain-twisting original run, but I also need to rebuild my Bob Burden shelf entirely.

The Legend Of GrimJack, Vol. 8, by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, which I got for the same reason. (As an aside, was the ninth volume ever published? I see there was an ISBN, but I don't see any used copies floating around, which usually means a book that never saw the light.)

And last is the big Ambush Bug showcase volume, with stories mostly by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Bob Oskner. (I reviewed it for ComicMix when it was originally published.) I still wish there was a color reprint, but, again, I'll take what I can get.

How My Mind Works

2013-05-03T13:27:00.002-04:00

I wonder if I'm the only who reads things like this amusing anecdote from Not Always Right and immediately tries to figure out what the unnamed "special effects show, experienced in the form of a walking, guided tour" in a theme park in Orlando could be.

Surely there must be other people who immediately want to know, right?

(And it's got to be Poseidon's Fury, right?)

Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

2013-05-03T08:44:00.001-04:00

...is only a Free Comic Book Day away.

How will you celebrate this geekiest of holidays?

It's Walker!

2013-05-01T16:03:00.002-04:00

"It’s almost as if a law enforcement system based on vague fears of an immortal ghost who lurks in the jungle isn’t particularly effective in getting at the root causes of crime."
-The Comics Curmudgeon is wise

What Becomes of All the Little Monsters Who Run Away From Home?

2013-04-29T18:19:00.000-04:00

The Internet is, as we keep learning over and over again, so big that anything you can think of already exists on it.

For example, someone has already made two videos lipsynching Cookie Monster to Tom Waits songs, and here's the new one, Hell Broke Luce." (If salty language offends you, don't click. For that matter, if gravelly-voiced singers offend you, ditto.)

Oscar the Grouch would seem to be the natural Muppet soulmate for Waits, but there's clearly a strong case to be made for the CM here.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/27

2013-04-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Below I've listed the books that arrived in my mail over the last week. Publicists sent me these books, to review, thinking you readers are a large enough audience to try to reach.

(Which tells you, as much as anything can, what the Internet has done to media. God help us all, I am a media outlet.)

I've been doing these lists weekly since January of 2008. I started out of guilt and uneasiness: if people send me things for free, I must owe something back. I can't possibly review every book I see. Lately, I don't seem to be able to even review the books I read, and I'm reading fewer books, too. (But we must remember that life is pain -- if anyone tells you otherwise, they're trying to sell something.)

Some bloggers take pictures of the stack of books, which is quick and easy. Some copy the descriptions from the books, which can be long and tedious (if they're retyping) or nearly as quick (if they find those descriptions online). I write a paragraph or so on each book, trying to be objective and positive, because I am obsessed with doing things the right way, and because I have the usual obsessive's idiosyncratic definition of "right."

So: this is not precisely what their publishers wanted to say about these books, but it is, I hope, both moderately accurate and moderately entertaining.

First up is Two Serpents Rise, the second novel by Max Gladstone. It looks to be a secondary-world fantasy, without an obvious quest or Maguffin to drive the plot -- and that's a very big plus in my book. It's also set in the same world as Gladstone's first novel, Three Parts Dead (link is to my review), without being a direct sequel, which is a massive plus in my book. If you ever complaint about the proliferation of closely-tied series, consider buying this book purely pour encourager les autres. Two Serpents is a Tor hardcover in July, and it's the story of a risk manager in a fantasy world, on a job to clean a city reservoir of shadow demons. (And the combination of "secondary-world fantasy" and "risk management" makes me love this book even more.)

Somehow, I simultaneously got two copies of New Moon: The Graphic Novel, Vol. 1, in which Young Kim adapts the first part of Stephenie Meyer's second "Twilight" novel. This is sad, because I'm really not a great audience for even one copy of it -- but the fans do seem to like Kim's manga-esque take on this very popular story (even though her versions of the characters don't really look anything like Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, etc.). If you're either a huge Meyer fan or the odd person who thinks a comics adaptation is the best way to first encounter this story (and, who knows? it just might be), Yen Press published this earlier this month in hardcover: go forth and find it.

A Private Little War is the first novel from Jason Sheehan (who is well-known in other writing circles: he's a James Beard-award-winning food critic and food editor for Philadelphia magazine), coming in trade paper from Amazon's SF imprint 47North in June. It's a military SF story, in the subset about pacifying an alien planet inhabited by low-tech natives, and so likely falls somewhere into the territory marked by The Word for World Is Forest and Avatar.

Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 2 continues Tsutomu Nihei's manga saga of a rag-tag band of hardy human survivors, racing across deep space in search of a safe place and battling nasty aliens in gigantic battle robots. (So this one is something like Macross's bastard child out of Battlestar Galactica.) I read the first one, but haven't managed to review it yet -- it's dark, and pitched at a serious level, without the lazy genre fripperies that US readers are used to seeing in popular manga. Vertical published this on April 16th.

From Yen Press, earlier this month, comes Bunny Drop, Vol. 8, a slice-of-life-ish manga by Yumi Unita focusing on a bachelor raising a young girl quirkily related to him (she was his grandfather's very late-in-life illegitimate daughter). The series is also apparently complicated by a big Funky Winkerbean-ish time jump in the middle, as the girl went from being a toddler to a teen between stories. This volume, from Yen Press, continues the post-time jump story, as romances develop for both father and adopted daughter.

And last for this week is Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night, sequel to the bestselling A Discovery of Witches and a bestseller in its own right, which possibly marks the beginning of the next big fantasy wave, as witches follow zombies, sparkly vampires, and emo werewolves. Shadow of Night is hitting paperback (from Penguin) in late May, but I have to admit that I haven't read either of them.

Because I Haven't Done a Silly Quiz Meme in a Long Time

2013-04-25T13:54:00.000-04:00

And via James Nicoll:

I Am A: True Neutral Human Bard (5th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-12

Dexterity-12

Constitution-14

Intelligence-17

Wisdom-14

Charisma-13

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Bards often serve as negotiators, messengers, scouts, and spies. They love to accompany heroes (and villains) to witness heroic (or villainous) deeds firsthand, since a bard who can tell a story from personal experience earns renown among his fellows. A bard casts arcane spells without any advance preparation, much like a sorcerer. Bards also share some specialized skills with rogues, and their knowledge of item lore is nearly unmatched. A high Charisma score allows a bard to cast high-level spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus

From the full report, I'm only very slightly more a Bard than any other class, and most of the fighting ones are hugely negative. I think the game needs a Businessman class, honestly. I was thisclose to being a dwarf, though.

James Patterson Is Unhappy

2013-04-25T08:37:00.001-04:00

So the book business is all aflutter about a recent advertisement by ex-ad man James Patterson, in which he demanded that someone (unspecified) do something (unspecified) about the horrible problems in publishing (unspecified). The ad is histrionic, hectoring, and utterly vague.

(If this is emblematic of the keen sensibility and razor prose that Patterson commands, I feel better for never having read one of his books.)

I don't seem to be the only one confused about his aims; Patterson spoke to Slate yesterday to insist that he has no plans and can't really articulate exactly what the problem with "books, bookstores and libraries" is, but he definitely wants someone to do something to maintain the industry that pays him millions of dollars a year.

On the very unlikely chance Patterson sees this, let me make some suggestions:

If the problem is that libraries are underfunded, then the solution is to find stronger and more stable streams of funding. Libraries in the US are traditionally maintained and funded on the local level, but a federal program or private foundation could certainly step in to add broad financial support to the entire sector. Such a foundation could be set up relatively quickly by an individual or group of individuals with high personal wealth, and would enjoy broad support in the publishing industry and among the general public.
If the problem is that bookstores are closing, then the solution is to get more people to buy books in bookstores -- this is a capitalist economy, so demand rules. If that doesn't happen, the next most plausible option would be some kind of non-profit status or preferential tax treatment for physical locations for selling printed matter, to help make those businesses more viable. But, as Yogi Berra said, if nobody wants to come, you can't stop them. And Patterson seems to have missed that large swaths of middle-class retail -- from JCPenney to Best Buy to Staples -- are also in trouble; this is likely a big-box retail problem rather than a book problem.
If the problem is that big publishers -- primarily among them, the major competitors to Patterson's longtime publishing company -- are merging to better negotiate terms with ever-larger partners and retailers (e.g., Amazon and Apple), then someone first needs to articulate exactly how that is damaging and to whom. There are a lot of medium and small publishing companies; there has not been a notable flood of bankruptcies in that sector recently. If Hachette becomes somewhat less powerful in an industry dominated by Random Penguin on the one hand and Amazon on the other, that may be less than pleasant to Patterson, but it's difficult to see why the rest of us should care.

In short, Patterson needs to first define the problem. There can be no solution if we don't know what we're trying to fix. "Things are changing" is not a problem; it's a description of the world.

What Is the Deal With LeaderShift?

2013-04-24T17:30:00.000-04:00

It's some kind of business parable that suddenly sold lots of copies last week -- and the Amazon comments on the one low-ranking review imply that there's an astroturf campaign in place to give it lots of good reviews quickly. (Not that that's anything new or notable.)

There's a weird stew of "take our country back" and multi-level marketing here, and the book itself clearly has some political slant, but it's hiding that slant behind code words. (Or perhaps the word I mean is dog-whistles.)

One author, Orrin Woodward, is head of a current major multi-level marketing scheme called LIFE, and seems to have been a bigwig in another one called MonaVie. His co-author, Oliver DeMille, has a long Wikipedia page that doesn't say much, and which claims his politics are "independent" while listing a bunch of Republican codewords.

Best of all, the book is a "parable" -- which is what business books call themselves when they're fictional. (Business readers are serious, serious folks, with no time to waste on stories, so you need to pretend that you're Aesop if you want to sell fiction to them.)

Anyone seen this book in real life yet? It looks like something very, very special.

A Useful Op-Ed Strategy

2013-04-24T08:17:00.003-04:00

Whenever reading an opinion column or signed editorial, it's always wise to consider what benefit the writer could get from the course of action he's suggesting.

For example, just this morning, here's the head of a company that provides bomb-detecting equipment insisting that the federal Office of Bombing Prevention needs to have a major increase in funding.

Hmm. I wonder where that money would go? Perhaps to buy more of Mr. Liscouski's wares?

That's only one very blatant example; in our modern, commoditized "news" economy, there are a thousand more subtle expressions of the same idea: we must do this very urgent thing...which will benefit me.

Today's Political Thought

2013-04-23T19:22:00.002-04:00

Say, aren't bombs just as much military weapons as guns are? Even more so, in fact.

So if the Second Amendment is really meant to allow ordinary Americans to have military-grade armament, why on earth wouldn't it cover bombs as well?

It's a shame that ordinary patriotic Americans have to make their own bombs crudely by hand, simply because a fascist repressive government won't let them buy grenades and fuses. I'm sure the Republican leadership in Congress will get right on correcting that horrible imposition on the rightful liberty of patriots.

An Excellent Example of the Misleading Statistic

2013-04-22T10:46:00.003-04:00

I came across this graphic today, at an ExxonMobil blog designed to showcase how nice and wonderful they are:

And it's a lovely piece of misdirection, as is the post it's embedded in.

Did you catch the slight-of-hand? Exxon only counts their profits, but they're comparing that to the revenue going to US government entities. They of course aren't explaining how those profits are determined (or even which piece of the multi-company ExxonMobil entity those profits are attributed to -- there could be a quadruple Double Irish Dutch Sandwich in there, with a couple of trips to the Caymans and Luxembourg to boot), but just holding their hands out, pleading poverty and saying that they only make seven cents in profit on a single gallon of gas.

Note that the US consumed 134 billion gallons of gas in 2011, and ExxonMobil has roughly a 6.8% share of that market -- figures from California, which releases those publicly; it looks like most state-by-state figures are figured by consultants and sold to industry. So that's only about $638 million dollars in profit, for what may be only the retail consumer-sales operations of ExxonMobil.

Must be nice to be in the "awl bidness".

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/20

2013-04-22T08:30:00.000-04:00

Considering this post has a "4/20" date in the title, I could do some really embarrassing pseudo-stoner intro here, but I'll rise above the temptation. Instead, I'll just leap right into the explanation: since I review books online (though I'm far behind right at the moment), publicists send me books to review, and I want to make sure I give all of those books at least some attention. (I'm grumpy and misanthropic and hate lots of things that you might like a lot.) These are the books that arrived over the past week, with as much detail as I can work up from a cursory websearch and a fervent wish that at least one of them will turn out to be a good that you, personally, will read and really enjoy.

I'll start out this week with the book I'm most thrilled to see: Necessary Evil, the third book in Ian Tregillis's "Milkweed Tryptych." (The first two are Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War -- links go to my reviews -- and if you enjoy Charles Stross's "Laundry Files" books or Tim Powers's Declare, you should check out Tregillis.) Necessary Evil is a Tor hardcover, hitting stores on April 30th, and it finishes up Tregillis's exceptionally dark and utterly compelling tale of a darker, colder WWII and the unearthly forces it unleashed.

I have somehow gotten onto the mailing list for the mighty Ace/Roc list -- I'm not sure what happened, but it's welcome, since I've been a fan of Ace since I was a wee lad in the early '80s -- and so I have their May mass-market paperbacks here to mention:

Steven Harper's The Havoc Machine (Roc) is the fourth in the "Clockwork Empire" series, which, as you may have guessed, is steampunk. (I remember back when "steampunk" meant two odd novels by K.W. Jeter and a scattering of minor Blaylock/Powers projects; I am now officially old.) This is somewhat of a reboot for the series with a new central character, but it's the same old high-tech (clockwork-style) 1860, a hundred years after a mysterious plague created millions of zombies and a few mad geniuses (briefly).

Also in the steampunk wheelhouse is A.A. Aguirre's Bronze Gods (Ace), which apparently launches the series "Apparatus Infernus," about two police investigators in a steamy city. (The prologue also seems to promise elves, of a kind.)

Generation V (Roc) is a slacker vampire novel by M.L. Brennan, about a guy named Fortitude (what you get for being born into an old vampire family, I guess) who lives the twenty-something life (useless degree, low-paying service job, and probably a lousy apartment in the outer boroughs of Wherever) until a a new, nasty vampire shows up in his territory, and he has to do something about it.

And The Mist-Torn Witches (Roc) begins a new series from Barb Hendee, co-author of the long-running Noble Dead series -- which these new books are connected to. The heroines are two sisters from a small village in what seems to be another cod-medieval world (full of warlords, castles, and swords), who must use their witchy powers to save themselves and their new home from a serial killer of young women.

Roc is also publishing Tales of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg as a trade paperback on May 7th. Now, don't confuse this new book with Majipoor Chronicles, as I almost did -- Chronicles is the middle book of the loose original trilogy, beteen Lord Valentine's Castle and Valentine Pontifex, but Tales is a new collection, collecting seven stories published between 1998 and 2011. Silverberg seem to have retired from writing novels now -- and he's got ever right to, since he's already written about two dozen of the best the 20th century has to offer -- so it's wonderful to see a book of basically new material with his name on it.

And last for this week is a hardcover from Roc in May: S.M. Stirling's Shadows of Falling Night. It's the finale of his "Shadowspawn" contemporary fantasy trilogy, following A Taint in the Blood and The Council of Shadows. There's a secret shape-shifting, blood-drinking race that rules the world -- in this series, I mean, not any real-world conspiracy-theory stuff -- and our Stalwart Hero is a nearly fullblood member of that race who turned against his own kind for the love a good human woman and the cause of righteousness. This time out, I suppose, he finally fixes everything and saves the world for good (Or until Stirling gets another idea for a sequel.)

Things Tom Waits Has Taught Me

2013-04-20T21:37:00.000-04:00

"Don't you know there ain't no Devil; that's just God when he's drunk."
- "Heartattack & Vine"

"There's a lot of things in this world that you're gonna have no use for. And when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothin' like a campfire and a can of beans!"
- "Lucky Day"

"The women all control the men with razors and with wrists."
- "In the Colosseum"

"If you want money in your pocket and a top hat on your head, a hot meal on your table and a blanket on your bed, well, today is grey skies, tomorrow is tears. You'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here."
- "Yesterday Is Here"

"All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me."
- "Misery Is the River of the World"

"So what's become of the little boys who run away from home? The world just keeps gettin' bigger, once you get out on your own."
- "On the Nickel"

"Uncle Biltmore and Uncle William made a million during World War Two. But they're tightwads, and they're cheapskates, and they'll never give a dime to you."
- "Cemetary Polka"

"And all the rooms they smell like diesel and you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here. ... And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear -- "One for every year he's away," she said. Such a crumbling beauty, ah there's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix."
- "9th & Hennepin"

"They're alive, they're awake while the rest of the world is asleep. Below the mine shaft roads it will all unfold. There's a world going on underground."
- "Underground"

And, most importantly:

"Nothin' else matters in this whole wide world when you're in love with a Jersey girl."

All Too True

2013-04-20T20:10:00.001-04:00

God help me, this is my life.

(comic source: Sheldon, which is always funny and smart but rarely anatomizes me so precisely)

Free Music I Like and Think You Will Too

2013-04-18T19:23:00.000-04:00

NoiseTrade offers a lot of free music -- usually samplers or live EPs -- but occasionally there's a full album up there. Now is one of those times.

The entire debut album of Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden -- quiet, melodic depressing music, the kind I love -- is available, along with two tracks from their upcoming new album and two live cuts, all in a single package and all utterly without costs (unless you feel like tipping).

Need I repeat this is all free? All you need is an e-mail address, and it's yours. There's no deal better than that.

A Sad Realization

2013-04-18T14:54:00.002-04:00

I am not, by temperament, an "idea person."

What I am, if I'm not careful about it, is the person who tells you exactly why your idea sucks.

This is not quite as useful as you might think in a corporate setting.

W T F

2013-04-17T11:54:00.001-04:00

It's WTF month over at DC Comics -- well, now it isn't, exactly, since everyone made fun of them when they announced it, but it was going to be, and it sort of is, so go with me -- and Bully, the greatest Little Stuffed Bull on these here Internets, has made a shocking discovery.

Well, a whole bunch of shocking discoveries, since every WTF cover has one. But this particular shocking discovery is that all of the shocking discoveries are interchangeable -- they work even better when slapped onto the "wrong" comic.

For example:

I trust this meta-shocking discovery, and its implications for all marketers everywhere, will be treated with just as much grace and nuance and good taste as DC has done with these covers.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/13

2013-04-15T08:30:00.000-04:00

It's a small batch this week -- two books and one promotional thingy for a book -- which means I should have more space and time for tomfoolery up here in the intro. But, unfortunately, I don't have any particular tomfoolery in mind this week, so instead you get the facts:

Fact the First: Publishers send books out to various people (usually considered to be influential in some way) to raise interest and awareness, so that in the end the larger public will know about that book and buy lots of copies.

Fact the Second: I am one of those people, for very minor values of "influential."

Fact the Third: This is what I got over the past seven days.

Fact the Fourth: I haven't read any of 'em yet.

I'll start with the thingy, which is what we in the biz call a "blad" -- a small promotional pamphlet for an upcoming book, sent because the book itself is heavily illustrated or otherwise specially printed and the usual bound galleys/ARCs/whatever the jargon is this week wouldn't really reflect the way the book will look. This particular blad is for an October 2013 hardcover from Norton for a book called How Are You Feeling? by David Shrigley, author of the similarly odd book What the Hell Are You Doing? It's a pseudo-self-help book, or perhaps a parody of a pseudo-self-help book (or, perhaps even more likely, a pseudo-parody of a self-help book), with hand-lettered text and big blocky crude illustrations on brightly colored pages. Individual pages make this thing look weird, but I expect it has a stronger impact when read straight through; I don't think this format presents it in its best light. But it is a weird thing that will soon exist, and that's particularly nice for those of us who like weird things.

Next up is something called Witch & Wizard: The Manga, Vol. 3, an adaptation of the James Patterson novel of the same name (credited to Patterson with Jill Dembowski, with art by Svetlana Chmakova). There's an interesting media-studies thesis for someone in why it's valuable for an American-published right-to-left graphic novel by a mostly American team (Chmakova is Russian-Canadian) is called "manga," but that's not me today. We're far enough into the story in this volume that the back-cover copy doesn't make much sense to a new reader like me -- I can understand that "Whit and Misty's magic and their control of it have matured," but it's less clear what "helpless to prevent the one who is the one from destroying everyone and everything they hold dear" means at all. But: this is near-future YA dystopian fantasy from a bigfoot writer, so there's already a lot of people who are fans of it and him, and they'll be happy to see this paperback, which Yen Press published in March.

Last for this week is a new book from Vertical: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 1- Activation, the first publication in English of the recent manga version of the classic anime series of the same name. Since this is a thirty-year-old property, the credits are complex: the manga is by Yoshikazu Yashuiko, the original story was by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yataka, and mechanical designs are by Kunio Okawara. If you like your space adventure with giant robots fighting each other, you'll want to check this out.