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

In Which I Hurl Invective at a Harmless Quote

2012-01-25T12:51:00.000-05:00

The very first sentence of a link forwarded to me from someone who will remain nameless:

Do you have an effective blogging strategy that guides your blogging and keeps it focused on building your personal brand?

Yes, do you? And are you a complete tool?

Look, "personal brand" is bullshit. It doesn't mean anything. I am not a brand, and neither are you. Nike is a brand. You're a person. The more you try to "focus on building your personal brand," the more you act like a complete asshole online.

Don't do it. Don't be that guy.

If you're working on an actual brand, then by all means keep its brand attributes in mind, and make sure that any communications related to the brand are on-target.

But if you're communicating as a human being, then you have a different set of metrics, the same ones you use in any communication with other humans: Am I being honest? Am I being fair? Am I being respectful?

Never confuse the two. And never confuse yourself with a bundle of focus-tested attributes.

(The advice in the linked article gets better from there -- if still in the freeze-dried marketing-speak mode -- but that opening quote is just killer.)

Recursion

2012-01-25T10:32:00.001-05:00

I thought that my second blog -- Editorial Explanations, visit it daily, your home for the best sarcasm and snark about editorial cartoons for nearly a year now -- was about as meta and recursive as one could safely go, since it exists to comment humorously on an art form that comments humorously on the news, which itself is often pretty humorous.

But I've just learned that the quirky tumblr They Might Be Hipsters -- user-generated content in which lyrics by They Might Be Giants are slapped on top of pictures for usually explicable artistic reasons -- itself has spawned a critical tumblr, They Might Not Be Hipsters, which seems to be primarily obsessed with pointing out that random Internet people are not professional designers.

Now that is meta. And pointless, but, then again, this is the Internet, isn't it?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/21

2012-01-23T08:30:00.024-05:00

It's Monday once again, as it is every seven days, and so it's time for this weekly post again. In case you haven't seen the disclaimer before: these are things that showed up in my mailbox last week, sent by the nice publicists of the publishing business, and are all brand-new or still-upcoming books. I haven't read any of them yet, but, for the past few years, I haven't let that stop me from describing them in what I hope is a usually positive way to whoever is out there reading this.

I'll start with the book with the best title of the week: Nancy Kress's new short novel After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, which is being published by Tachyon in trade paperback in April. It's a post-apocalypse story in which aliens arrived in 2014, destroyed the Earth's environment, and killed all but about two dozen humans. That could have been a rounding error, but they were deliberately saved, stuck in an enclosure called the Shell, and allowed to have children -- the main story begins in 2035, when their six gene-damaged teenage children are beginning to operate a time machine to kidnap genetically strong children from just before the attack. I'm usually violently against novels that kill me and my family -- and I do intend to be alive in 2014, thank you very much -- but maybe, just maybe, I'd give Kress the benefit of the doubt.

Also from Tachyon is a new novel from Charles de Lint, Eyes Like Leaves. Unusually for him, it's an epic fantasy set in a world inspired by Celtic and Norse mythologies, centering on the conflict between two gods, the Summerlord and the Icelord. This one's coming as a trade paperback in February.

My first sequel this week is A.M. Dellamonica's Blue Magic, which follows last year's contemporary fantasy Indigo Springs and continues the story of the underground river of pure magic (Vithagua) and the two people who found it: one of whom wants to rule the world, the other to heal it. This one is a trade paperback from Tor in April.

Also from Tor and also a sequel -- but published last week in hardcover -- is the latest Enderverse novel from Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight. I believe this is the fifth in the side-series following Bean, who was once Ender's right-hand ~~man~~ boy but is now a fourteen-foot twenty-two-year-old, traveling the stars with his super-genius six-year-old triplets, but I will admit that I'm not a huge reader of this series, to put it mildly.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Boneyards is also a sequel: it's the third in the space-archeology series that includes Diving into the Wreck and City of Ruins. This time, series hero Boss is in a new sector of space facing new dangers, and her old friend Squishy (Squishy?) is in danger in the Enterran Empire and in desperate need of being saved. This one is a trade paperback from Pyr, and officially hit stores last week.

And last this time is another third book in a series from Pyr: Mark Hodder's Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon, another adventure of Sir Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Charles Swinburne, secret agents for the British Crown in a steampunky altered 1860s, as they race to find the third of the fabled Eyes of Naga so that Lord Palmerston can manipulate time to avoid a world war. This declares itself to be the finale of the trilogy, so if you've been hoarding The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, now is the time to start reading. This one hit stores on January 10th, so many of you might already have it.

Afterthoughts by Lawrence Block

2012-01-22T12:30:00.000-05:00

Lawrence Block is one of the great mystery writers of our time; this is indisputable -- and "our time" ranges back to about 1960, when Block started his transition from a teenage hack writer of sex novels (at amazing speed) into a writer with wider interests but a usual home in the field of crime fiction. But he's never written explicitly at book length about his career -- though he's obliquely tackled it from several angles, including his books on writing (starting with Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print) and his memoir of racewalking, Step by Step -- though the introduction to this book reveals that he did write 50,000 words towards a general memoir, A Writer Prepares, in the mid-90s, but crashed immediately afterward and hasn't been able to get back to it.

But Afterthoughts is the next best thing: it collects forty-five short afterwords, written over the last decade or so for reissues, in print or electrons, of Block's older books, under his own name and most of his pseudonyms (Jill Emerson, Sheldon Lord, Andrew Shaw, Paul Kavanagh), all of which talk about the writing of those particular books and, to differing levels, what was going on in Block's life at the time.

It's not a memoir, exactly -- but it's not not a memoir, either, and that deeply Blockian ambivalence to the clean, straight, obvious answer makes this a wonderful book for Block fans. He writes more thoroughly and in detail about both his early writing life -- those sex books, those pseudonymous books, the quickie thrillers -- and his personal life at the time than I've ever seen him do before. He doesn't reveal everything, and he doesn't tell it straight through -- but Afterthoughts does become a memoir-in-parts, the way some novels are built up out of disparate short stories: each bit reveals one facet, and then the next reveals another facet, until, in the end, there's a clear view of Block. It's not the view, though: I won't presume to speak for him, but I've always gotten from his best work a feeling that human behavior and even selfhood are terribly contingent -- any man is who he is at that moment, because of what happened a moment ago and ten years ago, and there are many events and actions that can be described, but not entirely explained.

So Block tells us what he can: what he remembers, what he judges worth telling, what doesn't hurt others (he dances around the edges of this; his love-life apparently had some very tabloid-ish chapters), and what is relevant to the backstory of any particular work of fiction. Block's prose is smooth and lovely as any of his mature work: he's a writer whose work is always deeply enjoyable to read, with pleasing sentences mustered carefully into pointed paragraphs that add up to precise essays -- even as he affects an off-hand, here's-what-I'll-tell-you-next tone. Afterthoughts is a fine mosaic memoir of this writer's career, but it's also of interest to anyone who cares about writers' careers in general, about the workings of publishing in the '60s and '70s, or just the varied ways that good stories can come to be.

Denialism by Michael Specter

2012-01-21T22:21:00.000-05:00

These days, I seem to have fallen into attempting to review every single book I read. I don't do an equally good job of them all of course -- I'm sure there are some folks out there grumbling that I usually do an equally bad job, but let's leave that aside -- for all sorts of reasons: pressures of time, my own interests and aptitudes, and plain random chance.

I say this because I suspect that this particular review -- of Michael Specter's book Denialism, a book mostly about how lots of ordinary people misunderstand, distrust, and fear various things in the biological sciences -- is probably going to be one of the stinkers. I read Denialism several months ago, and thought it was decently argued and very close to my own thoughts -- always a strong positive in my book -- but it's slipped from my mind since then, and was more a book of parts than a unified whole, which means serious criticism of it needs to engage with each of the parts strongly and separately, and I simply can't do that at this point.

So, Denialism begins with a journalistic look at Specter's topic: that lots of people are specifically denying tenets of science (as I said, he focuses on the biological, so there's no flat-Eartherism or the free-energy kooks), mostly for reasons of personal dislike (of the implications of real science, of the market forces, such as giant multinational drug companies, that drive the current breakthroughs, or just for the complicated modern world), and these people are not just wrong, but actively dangerous to society, since they tend to drag debate in useless directions and agitate for government actions that would be detrimental to the health and welfare of millions of people.

And then Specter's first chapter -- all of his chapters, by the way, nearly standalone, and I suspect most of them were originally published as magazine articles -- illustrates a situation where "science" was wrong: the pain medicine Vioxx, which turned out to greatly increase the risk of heart attacks and almost certainly contributed to the deaths of millions. Vioxx was approved by the FDA, and any dangers carefully hidden under the rug by its manufacturer, Merck. But Specter's point is that the dangers of Vioxx were discovered by other scientists and doctors -- not by TV talk-show pontificators or lay "activists" -- that the system worked, even in this extreme case, and even if it worked more slowly than we would want it to. But that slowness feeds the wells of denialism, as people who already distrust science ask what other dangers have been covered up and not yet brought to light.

Specter then runs through a litany of stupid ideas: that vaccines cause autism; that "organic" and "natural" mean almost nothing when it comes to food, and that the drive for them could seriously harm our ability to feed the world; that herbal and vitamin supplements are mostly pointless, usually under-researched, and occasionally harmful; that mapping the human genome was an entirely positive thing (this chapter felt shoehorned in more than the rest, I'll admit); and that biological engineering is not just inevitable, but tremendously exciting and promising. As you might notice, the line of his book is not so much to examine various forms of denialism but to start with positions held by denialists in robust areas of the biological sciences, and then head off into cutting-edge work, sketching out where he expects the denialists will set up their attacks any day now.

There's nothing wrong with that; all of the pieces of Denialism are smart and interesting, and a book called Things Stupid People Opposed or Will Oppose in Biology would certainly not have sold as well. But it's not as unified as you might expect, or hope, and if you were entirely committed to the idea of a single narrative thread explicating the face of modern denialism, you will be disappointed. (Other than a few sideswipes, he doesn't even mention evolution denial -- there are plenty of things that are disputed by the ignorant and confused that he doesn't grapple with.) But, as a big crowd-pleasing book strongly defending real science and reason, Denialism is very welcome.

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume One: 1980-1982 by Berkley Breathed

2012-01-18T08:30:00.027-05:00

The erstwhile "Berke" Breathed, who at some point in the last two decades learned what a "berk" was in British slang and decided to extend his professional name, presents one of the most interesting and stark success stories in the history of modern American strip comics: he lept to fame with Bloom County, almost from the moment it launched in 1980. [1] And then he ended that strip in mid-1989 (cementing its role as the quintessentially '80s strip, for anyone with an axe to grind about that decade), partly for creative reasons and partly for overwork issues, to work on a spin-off, Outland, that never had the wide appeal or impact of its parent, even as it got more Bloom County-ish as it went along.

Every other major strip cartoonist before Breathed had a different reaction to success, creative unrest, and pressures of work: they all corporatized, bringing on gagmen and inkers and ghost pencilers to one degree or another, from the light end of G.B. Trudeau's Doonesbury (inked by Don Carlton) to the high end of Jim Davis's Paws, Inc. Garfield empire. But Breathed wanted to do it all all himself, and, if he couldn't, he didn't want anyone else to do do anything. So Bloom County remains entirely a product of the '80s and of Breathed's youth: exuberant, frenzied, full of more ideas and gags than it quite knows what to do with.

Last May, I reviewed the second volume of this reprint series -- there are now five matching volumes, collecting the entire run, all handsome hardcover as part of IDW's excellent Library of American Comics -- and nearly all of what I wrote then applies to Volume 1: 1980-1982, and possibly even more so. This book collects the very early days of the strip, as it was still feeling its way and Breathed was deciding what made it different from his college strip Academia Waltz (and how he could, conversely, continue elements of that strip into something carried in millions of newspapers every morning). Even more importantly -- and as Breathed mentions, bluntly, in some of his too-few marginal comments [2] -- he was figuring out what this strip was about: who were the main characters, what was its tone, what were the major themes and ideas, what of all the possible things to write about would this strip focus on.

So this book sees a strip that begins in a boarding-house, without a penguin to be seen -- though there is a talking dog, appearing briefly -- and its central characters are Milo Bloom (with much of the introspection and neuroses that would soon be sloughed off onto Binkley, once he existed), his grandfather the Major, and a succession of other oddballs, as Breathed casts about for the characters and situations he can build his mature strip on. Over the course of the next two years, Binkley appears and quickly solidifies, as does his father, and then Opus the penguin -- and, along the way so do Bobbi Harlow, Cutter John, Senator Bedfellow, the Meadow animals, and Steve Dallas, each one slotting into a need as Breathed realized they existed. At the same time, Milo is seen less and less at the boarding house (which quietly disappears, or is left unmentioned), and the Major drops into a rare supporting role and Milo shifts from an innocent to a rabble-rouser, relinquishing the center of the strip to Binkley and Opus and their shared neuroses.

I read the first two Bloom County volumes in reverse order by accident, but it's not a bad strategy: knowing where Bloom County would eventually end up makes the early days that much more interesting. And even the quickly discarded ideas and storytelling cul-de-sacs in this volume point the way clearly towards the strip Breathed was building, and that came together by the end of this book, in the fall of 1982. Bloom County is one of the great American comic strips, and its compact size -- one creator, one decade, five volumes -- makes is that much easier to comprehend and encompass.

[1] It felt that way from the outside, at least; from his comments in this book, I'm sure Breathed didn't feel like an immediate success. Does anyone?

[2] Bloom County is intensely entertaining on its own, but it's fun in such a deeply angled, oddball way that the reader -- especially three decades later -- can't help but wonder how Breathed ended up with that very peculiar, and gleefully anarchic, angle of attack of the issues of the day. If there's one thing these books could use more of, it's Breathed's voice and thoughts about how it came about, what worked well (and what didn't), and why he did it the way he did. The strictly factual notes are just fine, and sometimes deeply necessary, but Breathed's insights and thoughts are vastly better.

This Blog Will Continue to Operate for the Duration of the Crisis

2012-01-17T23:10:00.000-05:00

Oh, sure, SOPA and PIPA are horrible bills, full of stupid provisions, and you can read the details of that many places on the Internet.

But I've never been fond of the "I'm taking my ball and bat and going home" kind of snit -- and, possibly more importantly, I don't know how to take my blogs briefly down and put them back up, and I assume that, if I tried to do that, I'd probably delete them entirely.

So: bad law. Semi-yay to all of the people sitting out tomorrow, though the type of protest annoys me. And no Congressfolks read this blog anyway, so my not participating means precisely nil. If you do, though -- get rid of that stupid, stupid bill before you embarrass yourself further.

(I have one post queued up for tomorrow, which is about all that's going on lately anyway.)

Connie Willis is SFWA's 2011 Grand Master

2012-01-17T14:03:00.000-05:00

Taking advantage of the slow three-day weekend to sneak out the news, SFWA announced yesterday that Connie Willis would be renamed Damon Knight at a ceremony to be held in May, and honored her grandness and masterliness.

Wait, let me read that again....

I still don't know why SFWA put out the news on a national holiday -- and I abhor the modern tendency to name every last damn thing after a famous dead person or big-money corporation -- but I'm very happy to see that this year's Grand Master Award (oh, OK, Damon Knight Grand Master Award) goes to the perky and perspicacious Connie Willis.

I have a feeling some readers may believe I'm against Willis, since I was not notably fond of her most recent novel (the overstretched, and gravely mishandled, two-decker Blackout/All Clear), but I've been reading her books -- and enjoying greatly pretty much all of the other ones, some of which are as good as anything in the SF field -- for twenty-plus years now. Doomsday Book is excellent, To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of the sunniest and funniest books in the English language, and even Passage, as frustrating and tragically madcap as it is, has an ominous, hard-to-define power. And her short fiction, at its peak, is even better than that -- "All My Darling Daughters" and "In the Late Cretaceous" on the serious side, the incomparably nutty "The Soul Selects Her own Society" on the funny side.

So she's definitely worthy.

I've been grumbling about successive Grandmaster-ships for over a decade, here and on Usenet before here existed, but I think this one will just get a Yay! from me. Congratulations, Connie.

Three Picture Books I Should Have Reviewed Three Years Ago

2012-01-17T08:30:00.026-05:00

Back in mid-2009, I got two picture books [1] for review, and said to myself, "Self, I said, this is a perfect dual review project -- and reading these books will take no time at all, too!"

Soon afterward, a third similar book arrived, to equal rejoicing.

And they all sat, in one of my many books-I-want-to-read-very-soon-now piles, for months upon months. They were saved from the flood, and sat somewhere else for a while. They moved back down into the basement, and onto a shelf for the first time in their eventful lives. And, finally, just this past Sunday, I actually read them, about three years too late to matter to anyone.

So here's what I think of 'em:

Farley Follows His Nose is a sweet brand extension of Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse newspaper strip, featuring her once-popular dog character Farley -- he was featured in the strip from 1984 through 1995,when he died heroically -- rampaging through a suburban neighborhood, in pursuit of ever-more-interesting smells. The book has art by Johnston, with a story credited to Johnston and Beth Cruikshank.

It's a simple tale of an unanthropomorphized dog -- he runs away after a bath, befriends a boy quickly because the boy feeds him, and runs farther afield before finding that boy again and, in the end, getting home. The art is detailed and energetic, but the book is really just a poor cousin to Harry the Dirty Dog, which did the same thing much better more than fifty years ago.

Blueberry Girl is similarly simple in conceit: it's a poem with wishes for a young girl's life, originally written by Neil Gaiman as a present to a pregnant friend of his, and then illustrated by Charles Vess to turn it into a book. (The friend was Tori Amos, which gives it an additional jolt of celebrity -- that shouldn't matter, but kids' books by famous people have practically taken over the field over the past decade, so it may be germane.)

The poem is addressed to various goddesses, who are urged to bestow their blessings on this "blueberry girl." They're very welcome blessings, if they come, and are both thoughtful and quirky -- but I do wonder why this particular baby is a blueberry girl, and if the fruit taxonomy continues across other infants? (My younger son -- now age eleven -- is almost certainly an Apple Boy, but his older brother is more complicated, and might have to be a Pomegranate or a Black Raspberry.)

The Vess art is detailed and intricate, and illustrates possible moments in the life of a possible Blueberry girl rather than trying to detail the requested gifts -- which is all to the good. The book would make a nice gift for a woman expecting her own Blueberry Girl (or possibly even a Boysenberry or Cherry, of either sex), or for a young Blueberry Girl herself.

Then there's the silliest, least uplifting, and most fun book of the trio: Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by the great Adam Rex. (I think I saw this because I'd then recently reviewed Rex's young adult novel The True Meaning of Smekday; there's some Hyperion publicist who won't make that mistake again!)

Parents are always making idle threats to their children; I wrote, here, a couple months ago about how The Wife and I had wanted to make our sons "Amish" as a punishment -- and that actually came up in conversation at dinner last night, oddly enough -- and I'm sure we've made threats of other unlikely and impossible punishments in passing. Billy Twitters's parents' idle threat is to buy their son a blue whale if he doesn't start doing what they ask -- like cleaning his room, or eating his vegetable, or all of the other things that energetic young boys don't want to do.

Billy, of course, doesn't do those things -- and, since this is a picture book, his parents really do buy him a blue whale, the largest mammal on earth, and he has to drag it to school and feed it and do all of the other duties of a responsible pet-owner. But Barnett doesn't feel compelled to teach the life-lesson that Billy Twitters could so easily have fallen into being -- he's much more interested in exploring the possibilities of a boy with a giant whale in tow -- so Billy Twitters feels much more contemporary, quirky, and fun than either of those two books above, which were both in styles that could have been created in any of the last eight decades. It's still primarily a book for grade-schoolers, sure, but it's a zippy book for those kids, with lots of little jokes around the edges (don't miss the printed case, for example -- under the dust-jacket; it's filled with what would be bonus material on a DVD).

So all of these are admirable books for the right audience, and all are pretty and would be fun to read to children -- but Billy Twitters is the one that made me smile the most.

[1] A "picture book," for those of you who haven't had small children recently and/or don't work in publishing, is a usually large-format, usually full-color book, of around 32 or 48 pages, meant to be read to children by their parents or whoever is currently tasked with keeping them quiet. It's the bottom rung of the kids' books ladder, in the sense that picture books are generally read-to books, and so are appropriate for the youngest children. (This is a vast oversimplification, of course; picture books come in various age bands, and many of them need a higher reading level than early readers and some chapter books.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/14

2012-01-16T08:30:00.026-05:00

This week's Reviewing the Mail is brought to you by Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin! Use Crelm toothpaste for 100% protection against international Communism.

As always, these are books that showed up in my mailbox last week -- sent by hardworking publicists and others, usually in the lands of "traditional" publishing, people whose job it is to bring new books to the awareness of folks like you and me. I haven't read any of them yet, and I find that I read far fewer of these books than I intend to. But I can still let you know about them -- even before, or instead of, reading them -- in the hopes that your absolute favorite book of 2012 will be among them.

I'll start with the first novel by someone I've met very briefly, Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, a hardcover coming from DAW on February 7th. It's probably the first Arabian-Nights-themed epic fantasy from a writer with a good personal reason for using that bit of cultural baggage -- I refer you to his totally awesome name yet again; if you have to be named after a long-dead legendary martial leader, Saladin is top-notch -- and it has an exceptionally kick-butt cover from Jason Chan. (Though I do wonder, slightly, at both the swordsman's stance and his sword's double tip.)

Speaking of DAW, I also have in front of me the three mass-market paperbacks that they'll be publishing in February:

Katherine Kerr's Apocalypse to Go, the third of her "Nola O'Grady" contemporary fantasy series, about an investigator in a San Francisco more overrun with the supernatural than we generally expect.
Westward Weird, an original anthology edited by the late Martin H. Greenberg [1] and Kerrie Hughes , with a bakers' dozen new stories -- from folks like Jay Lake, Anton Strout, Seanan McGuire, Brenda Cooper, Jody Lynn Nye, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch -- about various SFF thingys (Elder Gods, aliens, and so forth) in a Wild West setting.
And P.R. Frost's Forest Moon Rising, the fourth novel about filker/fantasy bestseller/secret warrior for supernatural justice Tess Noncoire. (And for those of you who immediately think "Endor" upon hearing that title: I'm pretty sure this is a different forest moon. But you should definitely read it to make sure.)

From Hachette's Yen Books imprint -- home of manga, manwha, and other kinds of comics-in-book-form, often but not always from the other side of the world -- comes the tenth volume of Korean creator Sang Eun Lee's 13th Boy, the story of a teenage girl and her romantic troubles. (At least, that's what the first volume was about, when I reviewed it a couple of years back -- long series often change over time, so I don't guarantee it's still the same now.) This one was published in January.

Speaking of comics from the other side of the world, I also have the second (and concluding) volume of manga god Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight, published by Vertical back in December. I still have the first volume of this on my read-it-soon shelves, and I'm not going to pretend that I kept it there on purpose, so I could read the whole thing together. Tezuka's comics, even relatively early and simply-adventurous ones like this, are quirky, fun, and deeply entertaining, and this looks like a great entry into his work for young women in particular. (Boys, I'd expect, would be best served by hitting Astro Boy first.)

Also from Vertical, but coming this month, is the eleventh volume of Kou Taginuma's Twin Spica, a near-future SF story about the (very young) members of the first class of astronauts being trained in Japan after a major space disaster a decade before. It's been praised everywhere I've seen it mentioned, but I've never read it. (And I'm not entirely sure the eleventh volume would be the best place to start.) Have any of you folks been reading it? What do you think?

And, coming from Orbit as a trade paperback this month is John R. Fultz's debut novel, Seven Princes. (Orbit also recently had a week featuring this book on their blog, with a contest, several posts from the author, and other things.) It's the first in an fantasy series, and the entire world seems to be at stake, which would tend to push this over to the "epic" side.

Last for this week is a book that embarrasses me, since I still have the hardcover on my shelf and haven't yet read it: Gene Wolfe's most recent novel, Home Fires, is coming out from Tor in trade paperback on January 17th. (I actually had an advance reading copy of the hardcover, and also have it as an ebook, so this is now my fourth way to read the same book that I already want to find time for. Life is too complicated these days.) Home Fires is The Forever War (or, at least, the first piece of it) rewritten, gender-swapped, and turned into some manner of alien/spy/pirate thriller set on a cruise ship -- and that's such an odd combination of elements that I'd have to read this even if it weren't written by Wolfe, one of our very best (and quirkiest, and most idiosyncratic) writers.

[1] It's probably a publishing-schedules thing; fiction books get turned in long before they're published. On the other hand, even my end of publishing isn't immune: we're just now talking about removing the name of one particular lead author, who died over a decade ago, from an annual that he clearly hasn't worked on for some time.

Quote of the Week: Air Strikes

2012-01-13T08:30:00.000-05:00

"It is not possible...to concentrate enough military planes with military loads over a modern city to destroy that city."
- US colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., November 1937

You Never Get Happy, Uplifting Music From ME!

2012-01-12T21:46:00.000-05:00

But, just this once, I'll make an exception.

I talked about Cloud Cult's Light Chasers record briefly in my Hugo Nominees post -- it's a brilliant, happy, thrilling piece of chamber pop that's both a concept album about a starship journey and an examination of the self, in music that sounds a little bit like what early Yes might have done if they'd all been born thirty years later -- and I realized that I could share a bit of it.

The song "You'll Be Bright," from near the beginning of the record, is available free on the website of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

And, if you don't want to click a link without knowing what you'll get, here's the official video for that song, too:

(But I have to say that the next time I write about music it will probably be another song about committing suicide on New Year's Eve or something equally cheery.)

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley by Floyd Gottfredson

2012-01-12T08:30:00.000-05:00

It's common to make excuses for the past, to assume that people who lived and died before we did are therefore lesser, limited beings, stunted by not having been born in the obvious high point of all civilization. [1] This is, of course, bunk. Human ingenuity is pretty much what it always has been, and old stuff sometimes seems fusty mostly due to the fact that it's old, and was made by people who lived in a different world. So old art -- in almost any medium you can mention -- will have works just as good, or better, than the current peaks.

For example, the "graphic novel" -- if we quickly define that as a book-length work of comics created for original book publication, and brush aside the million objections -- is going through a strong period right now, but comics -- the art form of pictures and words in sequence, telling long stories or short gags or combinations of those things -- has had multiple, overlapping peaks in various areas for the hundred years that it's been a serious, moderately mature art. In particular, the newspaper strip, which was for six or seven decades the commercial pinnacle of that world, started throwing out masterpieces as early as the 1910s or '20s (depending on who you listen to), and had a great decade through the depths of the Great Depression. (I'm a particular fan of E.C. Segar's Popeye strip, which I've been babbling about here for the last year or so, but there are a dozen other examples of the same era.)

And that's a long way around to Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strip -- though I suppose I could have come around the other long way, starting with Carl Barks and damning Gottfredson with the faint praise of "second-best Disney cartoonist" -- but that strip, at least as seen in this book, is an odd artifact of its time, not quite sure of itself and bouncing around among premises, tones, and styles.

That book is called Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, Vol. 1: "Race to Death Valley", and the cover credits it purely to Gottfredson, though the table of contents has much more intricate credits, detailing the story input of Disney himself, and the art contributions of Win Smith, Jack King, Roy Nelson, Hardie Gramatky, Earl Duvall, Ted Thwaites, Al Taliaferro, and even Ub Iwerks. It reprints the first two years of the strip, from January of 1930 through the first days of 1932, sliced up into continuities (not always in chronological order) and separated by what eventually felt like too many text features.

Once you wade through those bits of text -- some about Gottfredson, some about his collaborators, some about the characters, and all of them just a bit too Disney-chipper in tone for a book from Fantagraphics-- you get to the stories themselves. The first story Gottfredson had a hand in is the title piece, "Mickey Mouse in Death Valley," which zigs and zags the most, veering from farce to melodrama and following the over-cranked pace of a cliffhanger movie serial. Once that finally ends, Gottfredson & Co. are on more solid ground, keeping Mickey (and Minnie) mostly in the context of their community (mostly unnamed here, though a scholarly footnote indicates it became "Silo Center" in '32) and friends, with stories about boxing and fire-fighting, circuses and the new character Pluto, Mickey's taxicab business, a picnic, and others. There are two other long melodrama continuities here -- one about a sneaky suitor for Minnie's heiress hand, and another about a sneaky Gypsy tribe also out to get Minnie's money -- but they maintain their pace and tone much better than "Death Valley" (with its many hands) did.

The art is evocative and detailed, still in a very Ub Iwerks-ian rubber-hose style -- and the first continuity of the strip, reprinted in an appendix, is pencilled by Iwerks himself, with the most energy and verve in the book -- giving it the feel of an early Mickey cartoon extended and expanded. (Though that does highlight the lack of music!) The character of Mickey -- and the simple fact that he has a character, and isn't just the waving silent mascot of the last couple of decades of Disney -- will be surprising to most readers, but this mouse was a tough little guy, ready for both adventures and fun at any minute, and he's deeply enjoyable to read about.

[1] Other ages had the opposite reaction, assuming the past was always better in all things. If you're a Rick Santorum supporter, you may be living in one of those other ages right now.

Philip K. Dick Nominees!

2012-01-10T21:31:00.000-05:00

The nominees for this year's Philip K. Dick Awards -- presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction published as a paperback in the US -- have been released; I got this list via the indispensable Locus.

The Company Man, Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
Deadline, Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Other, Matthew Hughes (Underland)
A Soldier’s Duty, Jean Johnson (Ace)
The Postmortal, Drew Magary (Penguin)
After the Apocalypse, Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer)
The Samuel Petrovich Trilogy, Simon Morden (Orbit)

Congratulations to all of the nominees, though I'm going to be rooting for Matt Hughes, whose books I've been boosting for most of the past decade. (The fact that I haven't read any of the other books yet might also have something to do with that.)

The winner will be announced in a gala ceremony at Norwescon 35 on April 6th.

Blacksad by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido

2012-01-10T08:30:00.001-05:00

You probably had the same reaction I did -- that is, if you've heard of Blacksad at all.

"Oh, a serious funny animal comic, with a tough cat-man private eye?! Snort!"

But I try to read even things I think will be silly -- sometimes, I go out of my way to read things I think will be silly, since I enjoy making fun of silly things online -- so I found myself a copy of this Blacksad book, which collects three European-style album-length stories (originally published in 2000, 2002, and 2005) written by Juan Diaz Canales and drawn by Juanjo Guarnido. And a funny thing happened when I read it: it wasn't funny. Not at all. The funny-animal faces turned into just another way to tell the story -- and gave some interesting twists on old material, especially in the second story, "Arctic Nation" -- and those stories were tough, smart, compelling noir thrillers.

(It's not as if I haven't learned the "funny animals can be serious" lesson before -- books as varied as Little Nothings, Dungeon, and Maus have done it -- but maybe I was expecting these two Spanish creators' take on "grim & gritty" would be as laughable as most recent American efforts along those lines. Whatever the reason, I was wrong.)

So, yes: Jon Blacksad is a panther-man (I guess), in a world very much derived from US B-movies of the '40s and '50s -- this is clearly the US, and equally clearly that time of history, and both of those things should make telling these stories even more difficult for two modern European men, but there's no sign of strain or axe-grinding here. Blacksad has a complicated relationship with the local police -- neither used as an extension of their power nor reflexively kicked aside, but somewhere in between, depending on the case -- and inhabits a world full of many other complications, from racial politics to nuclear dangers to movie-star intrigue, and, of course, the requisite murder and secrets and lust and greed to fuel the plots he gets caught up in.

And these are three damn good mystery stories, with sharp dialogue and an excellent world-weary narration. Even more, Guarnido is a excellent artist, giving these dog-men and cat-women and owl-men a full life, with realistic body language and great facial expressions. There is a whole world inside Blacksad, and I really hope that these aren't the last stories to come from that world.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/7

2012-01-09T08:30:00.016-05:00

This is the first "Reviewing the Mail" post covering books received in 2012, which means precisely nothing to any of us -- including me. Publishing continues, pushing out packets of "content" (sometimes in print form, sometimes in digital; sometimes in the form of stories, real or imaginary, sometimes in the form of manuals or reference works or other kinds of useful information) every single week, and the change of a calendar page doesn't change much.

Anyway, these four were the books that showed up in my mailbox over the past week, sent by publicists and editors and authors and other folks who really want to see them succeed and find their natural loving audiences -- and what I try to do here, as much as possible, is present those books so that, if you're the person who would love them, you realize that. (On the other hand, sometimes I get into a puckish mood and just make fun of things, but I try to keep that to a minimum.) I haven't read any of these books yet, and it might be that I never read some or all of them -- but this is what I can tell you about them, right now:

Red Dot Irreal is, I think, the first collection of stories from Jason Erik Lundberg (who was one of the forces behind a neat book called A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, which I reviewed a few years back). The ten stories here have mostly appeared before -- but in various literary and other journals, mostly in or near Lundberg's home of Singapore, so it's not terribly likely that many readers will have read many of them. (Isn't it annoying when you get a short-story collection and have already read most of it? That shouldn't happen here.) Lundberg has a page for Red Dot Irreal on his website, with links to a wide array of purchase possibilities, including a very inexpensive, un-DRMed ebook edition, and samples of several stories. It was published by Math Paper Press a couple of months ago, and is available in electrons and dead-tree form pretty much world-wide -- though not, at this precise moment, from the world-spanning seller I usually link to here.

Ken Shufeldt's second novel Tribulations comes out from Tor this month in mass-market; I saw it as a galley a couple of months back and mumbled a bit about it then.

I've heard of the Black Butler manga series (by Yana Toboso) but not, as far as I can remember, read any of the books in it. So Volume VIII, in front of me now, is deeply confusing me -- the inside back cover talks about it as a sports drama about "the wild child, Sebastian," who competes in track-and-field activities against the world's best; the back cover has circus imagery and talks about Sebastian as the butler to a nobleman, and protecting a Manor from attack by a circus; and the first few pages have a bunch of young people fighting and killing each other for no reasons I can figure out. So: this is the middle volume of a manga age-banded for older teens, it comes out from Yen Press this month, and I would not recommend jumping in at this point.

And last for this week is Tom Knox's genetic thriller The Lost Goddess, a hardcover from Viking coming February 6th. It somehow links together European prehistoric skeletons, killed by arrows; horrifying genetic experiments in Russia; "mystical mutations" committed by Cambodia's fanatical Communist Khmer Rouge regime; a strange, demonic woman; and a mysterious fortress in Tibet. Knox previously wrote the novels The Genesis Secret and The Marks of Cain, which also seem to be semi-SFnal conspiracy thrillers.

Hugo 2012 Nominations Open

2012-01-08T18:24:00.000-05:00

Yes, indeedy, they are.

Last year, I grumped about forgetting to nominate, and grumped nearly as much about forgetting to urge anyone within the sound of my voice to nominate (preferably things I like, but, what the hell, you can use your nomination power for anything you enjoyed, I suppose).

I will nominate, but, even more, I'm going to list things I'm considering nominating here -- and hope you folks will chime in on the comments. This might keep going up until the March 11th deadline; we'll see.

Locus typically has an exhaustive -- really, it contains pretty much everything that anyone might consider eligible and worthy -- list of Recommended Works every year, but that comes out in the February issue, which is still a couple of weeks away as I write this. I'll add a link, assuming I remember, once that list is up.

Categories are, with what I'm thinking about nominating as of the last time I updated this post:

Best Novel (40,000 words or more)

Among Others by Jo Walton (my review)
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal -- oops, originally published in 2010, so ineligible (my review)
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde (my review)
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
Circle of Enemies by Harry Connolly (my review)
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (my review)

Best Novella (17,500 to 40,000 words)

haven't read any yet

Best Novelette (7,500 to 17,500 words)

haven't read any yet

Best Short Story (up to 7,500 words)

haven't read any yet

Best Related Work

nothing comes to mind at the moment

Best Graphic Story

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch -- Oops again! Another 2010 book. (my review)
E.C. Segar's Popeye, Vol. 5: "Wha's a Jeep?" (my review)
Hera: The Goddess and her Glory by George O'Connor (my review)
Dear Creature by Jonathan Case (my review)

Best Dramatic Presentation "Long Form" (more than 90 minutes)

Geez. Maybe Paul?

Best Dramatic Presentation "Short Form" (less than 90 minutes)

I was going to nominate Cloud Cult's excellent album Light Chasers, which is both SFnal and not a big dumb Hollywood movie (of the kind that usually dominates this category), but I just checked, and it came out in 2010. Wah-wah.
I would like to nominate things, both here and in the "long form" category, that aren't just big famous movies & TV shows, since the original aim of the DP awards was to honor all kinds of dramatic works -- convention speeches, concept albums, radio plays, and so on. It's become a tedious "what's your favorite Doctor Who episode this year?" category purely because of inertia.

Best Editor Short Form

Haven't been reading short stuff this year, so I'll pass for now.

Best Editor Long Form

I hope someone does the "who edited what novels" for 2011, since otherwise this is a tough category for all of us. I'll need to think about it before I nominate.
But let me mention Jeremy Lassen, Editor-in-Chief of Night Shade Books -- I'm not sure (see above) which Night Shade titles are his hands-on books, and which belong to others, but NS has a great, quirky list and I haven't seen Jer called out in this category so far.

Best Professional Artist

I don't see as many covers as closely as I did in my SFBC days, but I still want to personally nominate in this category based on actual covers published in the calendar year 2011, and urge everyone else to do the same.
John Picacio continues to do great work, such as the cover of Ian McDonald's Planesrunner
Other people who've done some neat stuff this year on the few books I actually have on hand here: Victor Koen, Michael Komarck, Jon Sullivan, Sam Weber, John Harris

Best Semiprozine

I'm not even sure what's eligible, so I think I'm waiting until the more faanish types -- maybe NESFA -- get their rec lists together.

Best Fanzine

I really don't read fanzines, so I probably won't nominate in this category. That's an important point: it's perfectly fine to skip entire categories, or only nominate one or two things. But, if you're eligible to nominate, you really should nominate something -- whatever things you thought were really impressive about the SFnal stuff of 2011.

Best Fan Writer

I'm eligible -- practically anyone who glancingly mentions SF once in a while is eligible, actually -- and I might just be self-centered enough to nominate myself this time around. If I do that, though, I really need to nominate other people as well -- otherwise, that's terribly rude.

Best Fan Artist

I almost certainly will not nominate in this category, unless I think of someone on the webcomics side who should be here (and most of them aren't "fan artists" in the conventional sense).

Best Fancast

Putting them all into orbit would be a good start.
I kid, I kid.
I hate podcasts, so I'm not going to nominate here, either.

John W. Campbell (Not a Hugo!) Award for Best New Writer

This is another category where it's vital to know who is eligible. Luckily, there's a standard reference for that at Writertopia. I'm not familiar with any of those names -- I haven't been reading much short fiction lately -- but it's a great place to check before finalizing your nominations.

I do expect to update this -- assuming I do manage to see/read/think about other Hugo-eligible stuff in the next two months -- but I also hope whoever is reading this will comment here and/or post on their own blogs/social media accounts to talk about the SF/Fantasy stuff from 2011 that they think is worthy of a Hugo.

The more people nominate, the better the process is -- so get to it!

Amulet 4: The Last Council by Kazu Kibuishi

2012-01-08T16:20:00.001-05:00

The fourth book in Kazu Kibuishi's "Amulet" graphic novel series for younger readers, The Last Council, shows Kibuishi still in adding-complications mode; anyone who had hopes that this series would start moving towards its conclusion will be disappointed by this book, which sets up what just might be the other major villain of the series. After the evil, world-conquering elf king, who is entirely offstage in these pages -- Kibuishi's world, like that of many epic fantasists before him, has expanded to such a degree that he can't manage to shoehorn all of his subplots into a single volume.

(I reviewed the previous volume, The Cloud Searchers, just less than a year ago, but, oddly, I don't seem to have written anything here about the first two books.)

This is very much the middle book of an epic fantasy series, which means any serious plot summary would be either a spoiler or superfluous to readers of the series and close to incomprehensible to those who haven't read the previous books. The focus, as usual, is on Emily, a teenage girl from our world who came through a portal to a fantasy world after getting a mysterious and powerful magical talisman, called an amulet, which talks to her telepathically and has its own agenda. Emily came through with her younger brother, Navin, and her mother Karen (who was in a magical coma for the first two books, and acted as the voice of overwhelming caution since then), and has since picked up a group of friends, allies, and companions: the rabbit-shaped robot Miskit, the fox adventurer Leon, grumpy robot Cogsley, airship captain Enzo, and Trellis, the more-or-less good son of the evil elf king.

Those folks are separated for most of this book, getting into their own adventures -- and, in the case of Miskit and Cogsley, discovering Vigo, another stonekeeper -- people who have an amulet, like Emily and Trellis, and, more importantly, anyone with any serious power whatsoever in this world -- who will be a major mentor/helper figure going forward, if I'm any judge.

The major plotline focuses on Emily, of course -- she was led to the flying city of Cielis by the young stonekeeper Max, and they all had thought of Cielis as their one hope of refuge, the strong center of resistance to the forces of the elf king. But, after a disastrous training ritual for young stonekeepers, and certain actions by Max, Emily and her friends find themselves is clearly an even worse position at the end of Last Council, facing ever-longer odds with fewer and fewer potential allies.

The series is still fun and exciting, but it's really settling in to be the graphic-novel equivalent of a middle-rank epic-fantasy series; if does what it needs to do, and is quite thrilling along the way, but it's easy to forget during the time between volumes, and it's not, so far, doing much all that interesting or special with its generic ingredients.

Popular Music Always Sucked: The Meme

2012-01-06T13:39:00.000-05:00

I saw James Nicoll doing it: that's my excuse.

The rules:

1) Find out the song that was #1 the week you were born.
2) Find that song on YouTube.
3) Post that video on your wall without shame.

(For values of "Wall" that may vary depending on your social media platform.)

The source: http://current.com/15jpm4c (for me, at least)

The result:

(Hm. That wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. Chalk it up to dumb luck.)

Quote of the Week: Dylan Sends a Message

2012-01-06T08:30:00.000-05:00

"Message songs, as everybody knows, are a drag. It's only college newspaper editors and single girls under fourteen that could possibly have time for them."
- Bob Dylan, interviewed in 1970

The Meaning of Life...And Other Stuff by Jimmy Gownley

2012-01-05T08:30:00.001-05:00

The Meaning of Life . . . and Other Stuff is the seventh Amelia Rules! graphic novel -- not including A Very Ninja Christmas, which I haven't seen but which seems to be shorter and slighter than the other books -- about a preteen girl and her odd friends in Anytown, Pennsylvania. (Not literally Anytown -- I'm sure it has a real name -- but figuratively, since Amelia moved there from the big bad city of New York in the first book.)

I've written a lot about this series before, starting with the fourth volume, then hitting the first three in one post, and then volume five and volume six in quick succession last year -- so I don't have a whole lot to add this time. Gownley is still telling his story in chapters that sometimes feel as if they could have been individual issues, through they're mostly 32-36 pages long this time, and his characters are still growing up at a pace far slower than real kids, though they are growing up, which is good to see. Gownley also still has a deeply buried cynicism, which only burbles to the surface occasionally -- the principal at (nudge, nudge!) Joe McCarthy Elementary School, a grumpy old idiot who hates Amelia for insufficient reasons, is the best example -- and a deeper sweetness that almost masks the fact that he can craft interesting characters and resonant plots. (Amelia Rules! tends to float along on a half-goofball, half-tween-drama level, so when it drops into the story of the father of one of Amelia's friends, lost in action while serving in the army overseas, it's surprising and almost shocking.)

So this volume is about rebuilding the old clubhouse, about the the travails of the cheerleading squad, and about Amelia's rock-star aunt Tanner, who ran off suddenly in the previous book to go on tour and has been entirely absent since. It's soap-operatic in the good sense -- a long story, filled with characters whose lives you get to know and care about -- but that does mean that it's better to drop back and start at the beginning, even if that end of the story was a bit weaker and sillier.

The Hidden by Richard Sala

2012-01-04T08:30:00.054-05:00

Most artists are collections of their influences and ideas; only a very few are purely themselves, with no admixture of anyone else. Richard Sala, I'd say, is in that select company. Oh, sure, his creepy graphic novels take place in worlds not unlike those of Edward Gorey or Gahan Wilson, but his characters are entirely different -- and Sala seems to have arrived in that neighborhood by entirely different paths.

I've been reading Sala for years, though it seems the only time I've written about his stuff before is a ComicMix review for Cat Burglar Black, a slightly untypical book for Sala -- it was ostensibly for teenagers, and didn't see a dreadful end come to its entire cast -- that came out two years ago.

The Hidden is closer to a standard Sala, an apocalyptic story in which one tough young woman -- this time named Colleen, and darker-skinned and more sensibly-shoed than usual for a Sala heroine -- finds herself in the midst of supernatural horrors, deep secrets, and more than a few up-close-and-nasty deaths. This time, the apocalypse is sudden and all-encompassing: monsters burst forth on the second page, and the explanation (such as it is) doesn't come until nearly the end. But what does it matter why or how the world is ending? The time to worry about that is before it ends, and it's far too late for that in The Hidden.

So Colleen, and her boyfriend Tom -- who wants to be strong, but young men never fare well in Sala's graphic novels -- were lucky enough to be out in the wilderness when the worst happened, and so are still alive and wandering. And they were lucky, or perhaps very unlucky, to run into a wild-looking man who doesn't know his own name. He leads them to a group of other survivors, and Colleen learns the monstrous secrets of their guide -- of the creature he created, long ago, and the race of monsters that creation has patiently made and now released on the world.

The Hidden is even bleaker and more nihilistic than most of Sala's work; his stories usually end with a smaller evil -- a mass-murderer or criminal -- suffering a suitable end as the plucky girl escapes, barefoot. But there's no hope for humanity in The Hidden, and little hope for the few people surviving at the end. That may be a consequence of the fact that The Hidden is quietly a sequel to a famous book by someone else, but I should warn you: this book is dark and bleak even for Sala, and that's dark indeed. There are still hints of his mordant humor, and his precise lines and color washes are as ghoulishly appropriate as always -- but The Hidden out-Salas any of the prior Sala books, which is an unlikely and impressive thing.

What I Hate from A to Z by Roz Chast

2012-01-03T08:30:00.031-05:00

This is an odd little item: if there were picture books for adults (you know, "lap books," or what else you might call them -- books for kids with a few words on each page and big pictures), this would be one. And, come to think of it, there are books like that, every so often -- just not very many, and they don't form any coherent genre. (Go the F**k to Sleep, for example, was a big hit last year, and that explains a lot of the problems with the form -- these are almost always books very much like books for kids, but twisted in a specific way to make them unsuitable for those kids and thus adult.

What I Hate: From A to Z is an alphabet book -- another very common kid of picture book, as Go the F**k was a sleepy-time book -- with, of course, very adult concerns and fears, written and illustrated by the renowned New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. There's a short prose introduction -- set in type, unlike the body of the book, which has Chast's hand-lettering for both the cartoons and the page of short explanation facing each one -- to talk about an exercise she uses to fall asleep by thinking of an example for each letter of the alphabet of something. (Chast suggests rock bands, birds, fruits and vegetables, diseases, movie titles, and similar prosaic categories.) Chast is also -- or at least presents herself as, in best New Yorker-cartoonist fashion -- deeply neurotic, and worried about most of the things in the world.

So this book catalogs one anxiety for each letter of the alphabet, from Alien Abduction to Z (which doesn't really have a specific anxiety -- Chast riffs on endings instead), with crowd-pleasers like Rabies, Heights, Premature Burial, and Kites along the way. It's high on free-floating anxiety, as of course it would be, but doesn't have the punch of a book of individual cartoons, since each page is designed to illustrate a concept rather than to be a funny cartoon on its own. It's not the best example of Chast's work -- if you like New Yorker-style cartoons, she is wonderful, but this sees her specific viewpoint channeled into a particular schema rather than allowed to make jokes wherever it can.

It's amusing, and pretty funny, but it's really more of a gag gift, or possibly for Chast's most devoted fans. And the title is slightly inaccurate -- it's things that make her afraid, or uneasy, or anxious, rather than things she hates. (Hate is such a strong emotion for a New Yorker-style cartoonist; they typically feel things that are more inwardly-directed.)

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

2012-01-02T19:42:00.000-05:00

Science fiction, like most genres, always has a choice: it can be serious or frivolous. If serious, it has a responsibility to present a plausible future [1] and at least hint at how the world got that way. Frivolous SF, on the other hand, has no such need or desire: its worlds must be internally consistent for the length of the story, but that's all. A serious story tries not to damage the known laws of physics too seriously; a frivolous one postulates whatever it needs to in order to keep moving forward.

Serious is not necessary better, or any more worthy, than frivolous; Red Mars is serious, but The Stars My Destination is frivolous. The Foundation Trilogy -- despite being set in a far future -- is deeply serious, while The Martian Chronicles, supposedly a plausible near-future at the time of writing, is entirely frivolous.

And so I'm being entirely descriptive -- though possibly even a little laudatory -- when I describe Hannu Rajaniemi's first SF novel, The Quantum Thief as being a magnificently and intricately frivolous SF story. It's set in a baroque medium-future solar system -- from that limitation, and some of the bafflegab, I believe that Rajaniemi is staying within the bounds of cutting-edge physics as he understands them, though it's far beyond how I understand them -- broken into the usual major inner- and outer-system polities, with humans in various formats from meat-bound traditional through various flavors of biologically and technologically modified up to high-speed post-human downloads. But, even with all that, it's still a caper novel, about the greatest thief of his age being busted out of the most escape-proof prison to return to the scene of one of his greatest crimes to rediscover the pieces of himself he closed off and pull the fabled One Last Heist.

(I'm probably the only one in the world who was reminded of possibly Roger Zelazny's most obscure novel, Bridge of Ashes, which also has a man with anti-social skills needing to unearth the parts of his mind that he tidied away some time ago.)

The thief is Jean le Flambeur; the prison is the Dilemma Prison, an infinite virtual space in which the inmates enact the Prisoner's Dilemma, over and over, out in the coldest depths of the outer system; the agent of his escape is Mieli, a woman with a powerful ship (and equally powerful personal modifications) filled with technology from the Sobornost, a collective of uploaded posthumans; the scene of the crime is a moving city on Mars, the Oubliette, where all citizens control their personal privacy through ubiquitous nanocontrols but are otherwise unmodified, and where Time is the only currency; and what Mieli wants him to steal, primarily, is who Jean was, locked away somehow in that Oubliette.

And, since every Raskolnikov must have a Porfiry, every Valjean a Javert, The Quantum Thief is equally the story of Isidore Beautrelet, a young man of the Oubliette with a talent for investigating crimes and close connections to a secret group of vigilantes with deep suspicions about the Oubliette's supposedly directly democratic governance. Isidore begins by investigating the murder of a chocolatier, but, through his own inquiries and the influence of his girlfriend -- Pixil, the first newly created/born member in centuries of a mildly posthuman zoku clan currently living in the Oubliette after losing a war to the Sobornost in the outer system -- he learns of Jean's arrival, and is hired by a rich man who fears Jean will try to steal from him.

Jean and Isidore's stories twine around each other, usually in alternating chapters, as both pursue their own ends and unravel, separately, the secrets of the Oubliette and its privacy-mad inhabitants. And there is a huge confrontation at the end, as there must be, as those secrets are revealed, a society is rocked to its core, and danger looms for everyone. Rajaniemi keeps up a furious pace throughout Quantum Thief -- this is not a novel for the timid, or for readers who want SF concepts to be explained carefully to them, one at a time -- but still manages to find ever higher gears for that climax.

Lurking mostly quietly in the background throughout The Quantum Thief is the larger question of freedom and independence for all -- or any -- of the minds of the solar system. The Sobornost is huge, ever-more-dominant, and growing -- and it is utterly controlled by the copyclans of the few Founders, with all other minds controlled, ruled, and used as slave labor. The Oubliette is the only place left with physically unmodified humans, and it -- like all of the Martian Moving Cities -- is under constant attack by phoboi, self-replicating machines that want to destroy anything human or human-made. There may be other major posthuman powers in this system -- a solar system is a big place, after all -- but we don't see them in this book; it's just the lurking Sobornost and the small minds that have so far avoided being sucked into it.

Now, I fully expect that Rajaniemi has worked out how our world gets to the state of play in The Quantum Thief -- Jean seems to be from our era, as are the Founders of the Sobornost, who he used to know -- but that backstory is covered with a few evocative terms, like Collapse and Spike, and Earth is notable primarily by its absence from the novel. Perhaps the promised latter two-thirds of this trilogy will flesh out that history, and I'll be forced to move Quantum Thief, retroactively, into the realm of serious SF. But I hope not. It's so much fun that it deserves to be frivolous.

Quantum Thief is a fast-moving, flashy, excitement machine, crammed full of shiny SFnal ideas and turbo-charged by prose that pauses only briefly to illuminate but never stops to fully explain. Rajaniemi is a tremendously confident writer, from the evidence here: he has a million ideas, and throws them as quickly as he can, assuming that his reader will be able to catch them equally well. If you're willing to get up to the speed required, and can hang on for the ride, Quantum Thief is well worth the time, and Rajaniemi well launched as a major new SF writer.

[1] Or alternate present, or alternate past, if you, like me, accept stories like that as "science fiction."

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/31

2012-01-02T08:30:00.055-05:00

I expect many of you will not actually be reading this on Monday -- it's a holiday where I live, and I hope many other places as well -- but this post goes up every Monday as long as I have any say about it, and so here it is. As usual, these are the books that arrived in my mailbox over the past week -- sent by various publishers hoping for reviews, publicity, and (most importantly) lots of readers who will spend money on these book-shaped objects -- and I haven't read any of these since they arrived.

One might think the week between Christmas and New Year's would be a very quiet one for the book-mailing business, but the last week of the month tends to be the busiest, so there's a decent stack to talk about. And so I'll get right to it:

Michael Flynn's new SF novel, In the Lion's Mouth, continues the space opera series -- written in prose vaguely skaldic, and reminiscent of medieval chronicles -- of Up Jim River and The January Dancer. It's an odd concept for a SF series, though I wouldn't at all be surprised to know Poul Anderson did something similar at least once (at a longer stretch than "Uncleftish Beholding," I mean). I have to admit that I haven't read any of these books, but Flynn's late '90s near-future series starting with Firestar was excellent (though, I'm sure, entirely alternate history at this point) and his standalone The Wreck of the River of Stars is a magnificent SFnal tragedy -- so he's definitely got the chops to do this right, if anyone does. Lion's Mouth is a hardcover from Tor, coming January 17th.

And then I have the January-publishing titles from Yen Press -- a fine manga-manwha-and-some-similar-graphic-novelisitic publisher associated with the mighty Hachette empire through the fiefdom of Orbit. Since they're stacked up, I'll tackle them in order of volume number and physical size:

First is a book that seems to be called DRRR!!, but, on closer inspection, is actually Durarara!!, Vol. 1, and is credited to creator Ryohgo Narita, character design Suzuhito Yasudo, and art Akiyo Satorigi. Some quick googling tells me that this property was originally a series of light novels (nine so far, by Narita) but then expanded, as popular Japanese properties always do, into this manga, an anime series, and even a radio show. What I have in my hands is the first volume of the manga, which presents itself as a "bunch of wacky characters" story, set in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district -- and I think the main character is that staple of manga, the quiet boy from the provinces who came up to Tokyo to go to a well-known school and is thrown entirely out of his depth.

Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 5 is a later volume in the series -- for those doing their own googling, let me note that the anime uses the two-word style "High School" and the manga collapses that into the single word "Highschool" -- about, as far as I can tell, mostly nubile and pneumatic young women fleeing from (and/or being eaten by, I suppose) zombies. It's rated M for mature -- and, as I type this, I haven't broken the shrinkwrapping -- and was written by Daisuke Sato with art by Shouji Sato.

Pandora Hearts -- Jun Mochizuki's very loose retelling of Alice in Wonderland -- has reached its eighth volume, which means it's probably pretty different from the first volume, which I reviewed for ComicMix about two years ago. (And which I described then as "messy and loud and disheveled, like a sorority girl at 3 AM on a Friday," a phrase I'm still proud of.)

Pre-teen boys probably don't need to be introduced to Cirque du Freak -- a series of vampire novels about a boy named Darren Shan, and credited as written by that very same Darren Shan -- but the rest of us aren't as likely to have heard of the series. The novels have also been adapted into a manga series -- by Takahiro Arai -- and that series ends this month with its twelfth volume, Sons of Destiny, which is not-so-coincidentally the name of the twelfth and final novel in the series as well. (I reviewed the first volume back in early 2009, and gave some more details about the background then.)

The Zombie-Loan series, by the manga collective known as Peach-Pit, ends with a lucky thirteenth volume this month. (I reviewed books two, three, and four, and described the heroine then as "the mousy girl with glasses – you know her, you find her bland and slightly tedious, and she infests manga like dengue fever: something non-fatal and a bit obscure, but painful, lingering, and annoying." I clearly was in full Chandleresque odd-similes mode when I wrote for ComicMix, wasn't I?)

Black God, on the other hand -- a series by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, but done Japanese-style for Japanese publishers, despite the creators' Korean names -- is still roaring along with a fifteenth volume this month. (I reviewed volumes two, three, and four at exactly the same times as Zombie-Loan -- which makes me vaguely wonder how Black God managed to get two volumes ahead, if they're still publishing at the same time -- but will give you new links here, just because I'm feeling that servicey today.) The series seems to still be about a young jerk of a manga creator and the supernatural hottie he's permanently bonded to -- she saved his life by trading limbs with him -- and the overpowered supernatural battles they get into with other similar (but vastly more evil) folks.

Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel is the fourth book in a light novel series by Mizuki Nomura about a a book-eating goblin who is also the president of her school's literary club. (Consuming Japanese pop-cultural products goes much more smoothly once you accept that everything takes place in a highschool, and revolves around club activities.)

I'm slightly confused by the presence of 13th Boy, Vol. 1 by Sang Eun-Lee in my Yen package this month: it was originally published in 2009, and I reviewed it then. This seems to be exactly the same book I saw then, including -- to quote myself one more time, "[t]he title page of 13th Boy – actually a two-page spread – ... two boys with contrasting hair colors, three-foot necks, pointy little chins, tousled windblown hair, and eyes the size of truck tires staring out at the reader like four Twilight Zones of soulfulness." It's not a new edition, but it might be a reissue or new printing -- though the copyright page doesn't indicate that. Whatever reason, 13th Boy is heading back into stores for a second chance, so, if you like manwha stories about love triangles among teenagers with gigantic eyes, this is precisely the book you need.

That's the end of Yen for January, but there still some books to mention. For example, Greg Bear has written a second novel in a trilogy set in the world of the Halo videogames, Halo: Primordium. (The first was Cryptum, and the trilogy is known as the "Forerunner Saga" -- with, I deeply hope, a wink in the direction of a certain Miss Alice Mary Norton -- for those of you taking notes for your own shopping expeditions. I haven't played any of the Halo games or read any of the Halo books, so you're on your own with this one. It's officially published tomorrow, on January 3d.

And last this week is Sisterhood of Dune, the eleventh Dune novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson -- which means that Herbert fils and Anderson have now written more than twice as many Dune novels in a dozen years as Dune creator Frank Herbert managed in twenty years. This particular book -- coming from Tor as a hardcover, and officially published tomorrow -- follows up their "Legends of Dune" trilogy, about the Butlerian Jihad, by beginning a new trilogy about the origins of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and, presumably, many of the other important institutions of the Dune-iverse.