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

V Is For Vengeance by Sue Grafton

2012-02-25T11:31:00.000-05:00

Titles don't have to mean anything. They often just function as markers, to indicate that a book is in a particular genre (Space Dragons of the Eternal Flame, for example, is a very soft SF novel, while Detroit DeathCrime is a particularly gritty thriller) or that it's the latest book in a series that a lot of people have been reading for thirty years.

Take V is for Vengeance, for example, which is the 22nd alphabetically-organized mystery from Sue Grafton. It begins with a scene set two years before the main action of the book -- 1986 and 1988, respectively; Grafton began this series with 1982's A is for Alibi, and she's kept her timeline anchored at the beginning, rather than the end like most series -- in which a young man is killed, and the reader settles in to expect a story of vengeance. We expect it to be vengeance for him, but any old vengeance would do, really.

But there's no vengeance to be found in V Is For Vengeance, and a reader may well suspect that Grafton is now just working from a list of Acceptable Mystery Title Words, and writing whatever book she feels like under that title. It's another story in which her series hero Kinsey Milhone wanders around, diligently investigating something, while a barely related plot goes on in scattered chapters from other points of view -- a style she's indulged for several books now, and which is working less and less well the more she works with it. (T is for Trespass -- see my review -- was quiet and mainstream-novel-esque, but still worked pretty well, while U is for Undertow -- my review is here -- had a half-baked twenty-years-ago Ross Macdonaldesque subplot that dragged the whole thing into family saga territory while managing to avoid the strengths of both that and the mystery novel.)

This book actually does have a murder in it -- not just the one in the opening chapter, I mean, but a real murder that Milhone investigates. But she doesn't know it's a murder until late in the book -- though the readers do, robbing ever more potential tension and deductive opportunities from our reading of the book -- and so has no sense of urgency. Grafton also crafts several dialogue scenes, particularly those of Milhone with her client (the man who hired her to investigate that neither-one-of-them-know-it's-a-murder-yet), so that she communicates primarily on an emotional level instead of presenting actual facts, thus allowing the plot to rumble forward blandly yet further.

There is a large criminal enterprise in V Is For Vengeance, but it's doubly disappointing. First, we have a number of chapters from the point of view of its overlord, who we see to be a decent man trying to do at least the sort-of right thing, making him feel like the love interest from a minor contemporary romance. And, from those chapters, we already know the scope of the criminal enterprise, which is bland and severely lacking in any of the thrills one hopes to find in organized crime.

At this point, I have to call Grafton's current style in the alphabet books a failure: she's pushing Milhone out of the center of her stories, losing tension and other core virtues of the mystery novel, and not gaining anything at all but bulk from her additional material. If she really wants to write a Milhone book from her heroine's POV and that of someone else, she really needs to create a villain -- and one that's actually doing something both fiendish and interesting -- and use that character for her third-person chapters the next time out. Using her third-person subplot chapters to delineate a massively sidebar late-in-life romance between a crimelord with a conscience and a bored, cuckolded [1] female socialite is a massive waste of novel space and her reader's time.

There is a character in this book who could be that villain, if she wants to use him the next time out. I hope she does: Grafton may have been stumbling in these last few books, but there's a strong history of excellent, gripping mystery novels behind those books, and she can easily get back to that mode if she wants to.

[1] Is it really "cuckolded" when the person cheated on is female? Or is there some other, more appropriate term, like "wife with a rich husband"?

Quote of the Week: The Attica Archipellago

2012-02-24T08:30:00.001-05:00

"For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid's arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today -- perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system -- in prison, on probation, or on parole -- than there were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America -- more than six million -- then were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and uncontrolled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States."
- Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," pp.72-73 in the January 30, 2012 New Yorker

Holidays in Heck by P.J. O'Rourke

2012-02-23T20:51:00.000-05:00

There are those who say that P.J. O'Rourke isn't the writer he used to be: that he's turned into a flabby, lazy caricature of himself, soured on too much whiskey, too much life, and too much time spent in the company of the grumpy fringe (right-wing division). In fact, I'm one of those people; I was deeply disappointed by his last two books, Don't Vote -- It Just Encourages the Bastards (see my review) and Driving Like Crazy (also see my review), though the former, being almost entirely reheated second-tier laugh lines from Rush Limbaugh, was notably worse than the latter, which both reprinted some work from O'Rourke's younger days and gave him scope to write about something other than how much he hates liberals.

Holidays in Heck, though, somewhat restores my faith in O'Rourke: it's a collection of magazine pieces from the past decade, organized chronologically and unified by the fact that nearly every single one of them sees him go somewhere to do something. (The title clearly nods strongly towards O'Rourke's classic collection Holidays in Hell, though, back in those days, he was a war correspondent, and so every single place he went was a hell-hole. The choices are much nicer and cushier this time around, befitting a man pushing sixty and dragging a substantially younger wife and three small children behind him.)

Perhaps, like my father-in-law -- and like a million other fathers-in-law across this fine nation of ours -- O'Rourke has become one of those men with whom one must never discuss politics. There are a number of references to how Republican O'Rourke is -- making me miss the days when he was proudly a Republican but simultaneously one that one suspected every other Republican in the nation would be slowly backing away from -- but it mostly stays at that level; O'Rourke doesn't engage in sustained political complaining for more than a couple of pages at a time, and those can be skimmed or ignored.

(Parenthetically, I really wish there was some way to get back the O'Rourke of the '70s and '80s, because that guy would have loved Ron Paul, and sending young O'Rourke on tour with Paul would have resulted in some incredibly awesome writing.)

So this book sees O'Rourke go to Hong Kong for a speech -- and drag the family along behind him -- and go to Ohio for the skiing -- and drag the family along behind him -- and go to museums in Chicago, monuments in Washington, DC, and Disneyland with that family still in tow. There's also a long solo trip to China and another fascinating trip alone to Kyrgyzstan (of all places!), both of which make me wish we could pack O'Rourke off to as many of the odder corners of the world as possible (extra points if they're currently or formerly Communist) and let him report back -- he's still as smart and incisive as ever when confronted with people and politics that he doesn't think he already knows all about.

It's not all good, of course: there's also a frankly embarrassing pure endorsement of John McCain, occasioned by a visit to an aircraft carrier and indicating that even O'Rourke can be turned into a chickenhawk by the power of generic Republican pro-war sentimentality. And he does lean on blandly stereotypical characterizations of his family -- his wife is a gun-toting grizzly bear! his daughters are shopping fiends! his young son is too small to be interesting yet! -- rather than actually letting them be real characters in his stories.

But we expect that -- no matter what territory is supposedly being explored, a P.J. O'Rourke book is always about one particular place: the land inside O'Rourke's skull, where nothing else is as important as he is, and his least defined preference is a mandate from on high. And when he's on -- let me quote my favorite line in the book, from a piece on stag hunting in England, "The British manner of cheerfully not complaining can't be maintained when there's nothing to cheerfully not complain about" -- he's as cutting and precise as anyone in the world.

Holidays in Heck is no Holidays in Hell; that book had the virtue of witnessing a unique sequence of moments in history, as the Cold War world collapsed and less-expected things took its place. But it's a strong return to O'Rourke's better form after a decade or more spent saying things that any generic Republican attack dog could have. I certainly don't want O'Rourke to start enjoying things, or looking kindly upon any government, anywhere, but I do want him to complain about things from his point of view, and not that of the bland midwestern Catholic that he could have been if he hadn't run away from that world forty years ago. And Holidays in Heck sees him doing that more regularly than he has for a long time.

Amazon Drops a Big Shoe

2012-02-22T12:23:00.000-05:00

We all knew this was coming: Amazon has removed Kindle editions from all books distributed by IPG, after IPG wouldn't renegotiate selling terms (for both e and print products) to change them massively in Amazon's favor.

We have a word for this behavior when ten-year-olds do it: bullying.

And if IPG folds, it'll be a PGW or a medium-rank publisher next, then more, and it'll hit Random, Penguin, and the other big boys by the end of this year. I don't know how other publishers can support IPG -- I mean literally, since any collective action would be evidence of collusion -- but I do know that everyone who works for a publishing company is going to be quietly rooting for them.

(And, at times like this, it's important to remember that Amazon is almost certainly selling both the Kindle devices and most Kindle books published by others at below their cost: they are, once again, trying to directly buy market share and eliminate competition.)

[via Publishers Lunch]

Set to Sea by Drew Weing

2012-02-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

Is a quiet life of contemplation less worth living than a life of action and event? That's the buried question in Drew Weing's first graphic novel, Set to Sea, a small-format hardcover with each panel printed at full-page size.

(And you have to imagine that, in between that paragraph and the next one, I went and found Weing's website, where there are amazing webcomics like this one.)

A large chap -- never named -- is the hero and central character of Set to Sea. We meet him as a young man, poor and knocking around a seaside town in what seems to be the mid 19th century. He wants to be a poet, but finds himself shanghaied onto a ship, set to work, set upon by pirates, and set up as third mate of that ship in the aftermath. Though he never did, strictly speaking, "set to sea" himself -- since that implies an element of choice -- the rest of the book tells the story of his life, in a sequence of mostly silent panels, each showing one moment in that life.

It's a short book, and a small one, but it implies and contains more than itself, with its hints of a changing world (and a man who may have changed along with it), with its implied message of work and experience over contemplation and self-containment, with its Segar-esque grotesque characters and the richly detailed environments they inhabit, and with its refusal to state baldly what it means or is. Set to Sea is a book to read and contemplate on, a book to look at and think about, a book to read slowly and then to read again. It's a lovely graphic novel from a creator I hope to see a lot more from as the years go on, and I hope his own busy life affords him enough leisure and time to continue to make gemlike, poetic stories like this one.

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

2012-02-21T08:30:00.003-05:00

Reporters always overgeneralize; that's what they do. A reporter goes somewhere, talks to a couple of people, and then explains everything based on what he learned -- or conspicuously failed to learn -- there. And so their overgeneralizations will depend heavily on who they talk to -- if those few people are all radical Marxists, or philosophy professors, or paranoid schizophrenics, the resulting reportage will bear very little resemblance to what the reporter should have seen and explained.

Michael Lewis is a reporter -- generally a good one, I should add -- whose tropism is always towards the corridors of wealth and power. (His very first book, Liar's Poker, was the story of his own original failed attempt to enter those corridors of wealth, and, ironically, it was through the success of the account of his failure that he got there after all.) And so, when he declares that his newest book, Boomerang, is about what happened when the people of various countries "were left in a dark room with a giant pile of money," the reader has to make an immediate adjustment: the people weren't left in that room, it was their bankers and politicians. Certainly, some of that bubble-fueled pseudo-wealth seemed to benefit regular people, but the story Lewis consistently avoids is how the general population of several nations found themselves with vastly more debt than they expected, while their bankers and politicians walked away with, yes, giant piles of money. Instead, Lewis has swallowed entirely the right-wing post-mortem analysis of the crisis: that it was caused by letting relatively poor people and their governments have too much access to credit markets, and the only solution is to slash those relatively poor people's assets and support mechanisms.

Boomerang collects five related articles from Vanity Fair, published between mid-2009 and late 2011, about how the bursting bubble of 2007-8 affected Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California. In each place, Lewis has amazing access to major players -- in the last chapter, he goes biking with just-barely-former Governor Schwarzenegger, for example -- and is occasionally very mildly critical of their glib rationalizations. Iceland, though, is seen as a nation of unsophisticated fishermen who decided to transform themselves into investment bankers, got their lunch eaten by the actually smart investment bankers (the ones Lewis hobnobs with in New York), and crashed all three of their banks and much of the rest of Europe along the way. The Greeks have a society almost entirely based on cheating, from the least laborer up to the highest levels of government, and their entry into the Euro was a colossal blunder papered over by an expectation that markets would always rise and the fake Greek budget would, somehow, turn real along the way. Ireland turned itself into a real-estate Ponzi scheme, in which everyone sold property back and forth to each other and poured their GNP into just building more property until that was unsustainable. Germans are the stupidest, most gullible investors in the world -- and, incidentally, obsessed with their own feces -- so the entire crisis is their fault, since their money facilitated the bubble. And the USA, as exemplified by California and doubly exemplified by the city of Vallejo, is just another Ponzi scheme, this time of pensions for retired government workers.

Nowhere in this litany of woe and blame is a second of contemplation for where all of the money -- highly leveraged money, of course, another point that Lewis ignores -- to enable all of these bubbles came from. (Some of it came from the Germans, but they didn't initiate anything -- they just bought packaged crap.) Lewis entirely ignores the big investment banks -- primarily US and British -- that made a mockery of risk management, took leverage to new, dizzying heights, and cobbled together horrible loans into CDOs and other exotic investments that they could pretend were risk-free. He also ignores the rating agencies that took their massive fees from those banks and certified that, yes, you betcha!, those exotic investments were just as iron-clad and gold-bottomed as anyone could possibly hope. And he finally ignores the government regulators of a dozen countries whose job it was to keep an eye on such shenanigans, and who utterly failed to do anything about it.

So Boomerang is a quite entertaining, lively little book. But it's also very much like the story of a rape investigation that spends its entire time detailing the minutia of the victim's clothing and behavior on the night of the crime -- it is entirely beside the point.

Tar Babies

2012-02-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

Today was turning out to be really productive -- several blog entries written, movie & dinner with the family, building shelves and getting the storage end of the basement organized, and even a little bit of video game time -- when I realized that I'd just lost half an hour to reading my own old blog posts.

I don't know how real writers do it: if I'm this enamored of my own blatherings, and you're enough better than me to get paid to do it, I don't know how you manage to anything else all day long....

The Myth of the Comics Creator

2012-02-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

People who write and draw comics -- particularly in the American superhero industry -- are called creators. This is important, and revealing. And we saw that mindset at work behind the scenes of the recent Gary Friedrich kerfuffle.

For those of you that aren't tightly plugged into the comics world, Friedrich was the first writer of the modern-day version of Marvel's Ghost Rider character, back in 1972. Friedrich had previous written for the Western version of Ghost Rider, and it's clear from all accounts that he had at least the general idea for the modern one: a demonically-possessed, motorcycle-riding anti-hero. Friedrich has long claimed that Ghost Rider was entirely his idea, though his editor Roy Thomas (who also wrote the comic in which Ghost Rider first appeared) and original series artist Mike Ploog disagree. (The major point of contention -- and this tells you more about the nature of American corporate comics than anything else -- is who came up with the visual concept of the flaming skull.)

As Ty Templeton pointed out in his cartoon commenting on the current Friedrich dispute -- I'll get to that in a moment -- Ghost Rider was a minor character in the '70s and '80s, and only surged into popularity in the height of the Image-fueled grim 'n gritty '90s, long after Friedrich had anything to do with the character. Still, one could argue that Friedrich's contribution was still essential -- particularly, as hair-splitting fanboys on the Internet would hammer hard on, if that flaming skull was really his idea, since that was the most totally cool thing about Ghost Rider.

So, Friedrich wrote Ghost Rider for a while, and moved on. Marvel, as was the scummy practice in those days, claimed all rights to the character (and story, and plot, and would have wanted rights to the air Friedrich breathed if they could have found a way to get away with it), stamping contacts on the back of checks and forcing creators to sign agreements later on if they wanted any more work. Ghost Rider eventually got more popular, and then turned into a moderately successful movie. (And it's important to note here that this "moderately successful movie" probably generated more cash than every previous comic featuring every incarnation of Ghost Rider combined.) Friedrich wanted his piece of that pie, since he "created" Ghost Rider -- he was even credited as the creator on early issues of the series. Marvel disagreed. Friedrich sued Marvel. Marvel countersued, as giant rapacious corporations do.

And the ruling came down a few weeks ago: Friedrich lost. He not only lost, but he had to pay Marvel $17,000 in repayment of his sales of Ghost Rider-themed art at conventions. And that's what really got the world angry: evil rapacious comics corporations have always demanded to own all publishing and exploitation rights, and rarely passed on a few pennies to the people that actually did the work, but they haven't before actually reached into the pockets of their former freelancers and rummaged around for any loose change they could find. (That $17,000 is pretty much Friedrich's only current income; he's aged and practically destitute. Marvel is literally kicking a man when he's down, and adding injury to insult.)

Marvel is clearly wrong, morally -- but when have we ever been able to expect a corporation to act morally? The law is shakier; Friedrich did have good precedents to stand on, but he's not as famous and deep-pocketed as Peggy Lee (who sued Disney over a song from Lady and the Tramp at the dawn of home video, and won), and judges tend to listen to money at least as much as they listen to the law. Friedrich is now yet another old man wrecked on the shoals of comics, worked as hard as possible as cheaply as possible for as long as possible, and then cast off without a pension, a 401(k) or even the rights to the things that he made. When it comes to the intellectual property mines, comics is arguably even worse than the music business -- in comics, there's hardly even the chance to get rich before you get screwed over.

But there's still that deeper question of the "Creator" -- that figure out of comics myth that makes an instantly recognizable, amazingly popular thing, which will be exploited for generations to come. Perhaps the least expected result of DC's shabby treatment of Siegel and Shuster over Superman -- where those two men really did come into a publishing company with material that they wanted to license, and eventually found themselves on the outside of a wall of lawyers and shady businessmen, while their material was still snugly on the inside, making money for other people -- is the reinforcement of that myth. Siegel and Shuster were robbed, but that trickster god Bob Kane was able to cajole his way onto the side of the lawyers and shady businessmen, screwing over in his own turn Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff, and others. And then twenty years later Stan and Jack created the Marvel Universe -- or perhaps a slightly different pantheon did, depending on your orthodoxy -- and Stan stayed inside while Jack ended up outside. The myth among comics fans is about the power of the creator, but the lesson from the real world seems very different: be the guy on the inside.

The myth of the creator implies that comics characters are static and perfect from the moment they're conceived: that everything important about them is there, explicitly or implicitly, in their first appearance, and everything else is just elaboration. If this is true, then it is a sad thing to be a comics creator: what you create has no life or energy and will never go anywhere new or exciting.

That's clearly untrue, as well. Think of Swamp Thing. Who created him? Is he really Len Wein's original concept, or Alan Moore's radical revision? Can "creation" hinge on the question of whose idea it was to give Ghost Rider a burning skull for a head? Is that what's really important?

Of course, superhero comics fans have to rely on the idea of the "creator," because their favorite characters are owned by those giant rapacious corporations, and not the folks that actually did the work over the years. Outside of corporate American comics, though, there's no real arguments over who "created" something: Charles Schulz and his heirs own Peanuts, Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto, Herge and his heirs own Tintin, in the same way that J.R. Rowling owns Harry Potter and James Patterson owns Alex Cross. Superhero writers and artists are left scrabbling for the moral high ground, since the economics have been biased against them since the field started.

And that feeds into the tendency for corporate superhero comics to be static and bland: they're full of characters "created" by someone-or-other, and intended to stay exactly that way -- or, at least, to radically and surprisingly change for the span of a summer crossover and then to go back to exactly what they always were -- because the entire industry is invested in this image of themselves and their creations. Superheroes are icons, you see: they're modern gods, they're the mythology of our modern world. They're everything except living stories about real people, because they're definitely not that.

What superhero comics needs is fewer "creators" and more "owners." It needs fewer icons and more stories -- fewer new beginnings and more actual endings. It needs, more than anything else, to grow up and act like a field populated by grownups telling stories for grownups.

[Art at the top is by Mike Ploog from the original days of Ghost Rider; dialogue from this panel, originally by Friedrich, was removed by other hands before I saw it. I thought that was ironically appropriate.]

Nebula Second Thought

2012-02-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

...and the SF community continues its streak of putting out major award news on holidays and weekends.

Is there not a single competent publicist in all of SF?

2011 Nebula Nominees

2012-02-20T10:03:00.000-05:00

The Oscars of Science Fiction writing, SFWA's Nebula Awards, announced their nominees this morning, and those are:

Novel

Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)
Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
God's War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella

“Kiss Me Twice,” Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011)
“Silently and Very Fast,” Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)
“The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November/December 2011)
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2011)
“The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)
“With Unclean Hands,” Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)

Novelette

“Fields of Gold,” Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books)
“Ray of Light,” Brad R. Torgersen (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011)
“Sauerkraut Station,” Ferrett Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus, November 2011)
“Six Months, Three Days,” Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)
“The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus, July 2011)
“The Old Equations,” Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine, July 2011)
“What We Found,” Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011)

Short Story

“Her Husband’s Hands,” Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011)
“Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son,” Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011)
“Movement,” Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2011)
“Shipbirth,” Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2011)
“The Axiom of Choice,” David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011)
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2011)
“The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems)
Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount)
Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)
Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount)
Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony)
Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit)
The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)
Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)
Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder & Stoughton)
Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)
Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Books)

Winners will be announced at the gala Nebula Awards Weekend in late May in darkest Arlington, Virginia. At the climactic banquet of that weekend, Connie Willis will also be invested with all of the powers and responsibilities of the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master.

There are many more nominees this year then there used to be -- six each in the Novel and Novella categories and seven in all of the others (except the Norton, with a surprising eight) -- which either implies lots and lots of ties (and thus secondarily implies a low voting turnout) or implies that SFWA generously decided to allow more nominees in all categories recently, in the spirit of "everybody gets a medal." Neither of those sound like good things to me, so I'm hoping my suppositions are wrong.

(I also note that it's still difficult to get SFWA members to read short fiction that isn't in traditional periodical dead-tree form, though they are slowly moving to periodical zippy-electrons form.)

Good luck to all of the nominees, and, if you happen to be a member of SFWA, you really do need to vote.

A Quick Comics Thought

2012-02-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

I've got a longer comics-related post coming later today, but, to whet your appetite, here's a short one:

DC's "Before Watchmen" project proves what a lot of us have been saying for years: the Big Two don't understand what a "story" is.

Sure, they understand "characters," and they definitely get "universe." "Synergy" is clearly in their wheelhouse, along with "brand extension" and "exploitation." But, even after eighty years, they still don't realize what a story is, and they probably never will.

(Here's a hint: a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes even in that order!)

The number of actual stories published by the Big Two has never been large -- and most of those were creator-owned and/or -controlled projects, like Watchmen or Ronin, to begin with -- and it may even be shrinking now, as they mine things that previously stood as stories to turn them into more "universes" with "synergy."

And, as long as the general comics audience prefers characters to story, this will never change. The fan reaction to "Before Watchmen" shows that preference is still solidly in place, so I don't have much hope. We're living in a box created by the taste preferences of four generations of eight-year-olds, and the Wednesday Crowd that the last generation solidified into. Luckily, the "comics industry" is not the whole world of comics -- and, despite what it thinks, it's an ever-shrinking and less relevant piece of that world.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/18

2012-02-20T08:30:00.108-05:00

It's another Monday holiday -- at least here in the States; any foreign visitors may well be at work right now, and cursing their luck not to be born in the self-proclaimed greatest nation on earth -- which means I still do this post on time, but I also assume that many people won't see it for another day.

Anyway, these are the books that arrived in my mailbox last week, sent by their publishers. I haven't read any of them yet, but here's what I can tell you about them:

Time Snatchers is the first novel by Richard Ungar -- he's written and painted picture books before, including the acclaimed "Rachel" series, but this is the first time he's done a book divided into chapters and without pictures -- and is aimed straight at the avid young adult audience for dystopian SF and fantasy. (I might pass it on to my younger son, who's been on a fantasy tear this year -- he's so far run through Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Incarceron and its sequel, and probably several things I can't remember, and is finishing up Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy right now.) I'm not sure how dystopian its future is -- it appears to be a China-dominated 2061, and I suspect our new inscrutable overlords have a heavy hand -- but our hero's situation is certainly dangerous: Caleb is a "time snatcher," one of a group of young teens "adopted" by the Faginesque Uncle and sent back on quick trips into the past to steal priceless objects. Time Snatchers will be published in hardcover by G.P. Putnam's Sons in March.

Thomas Dunne Books is much more optimistic than I am: they keep sending me David Moody's zombie novels even as I make childish faces at them and keep failing to read them. The latest is Autumn: Aftermath, fifth in a series in which 99% of the human race died three months ago, and immediately came back to feast on the flesh of the living, yadda yadda yadda. This one sees a conflict between two groups of survivors -- because if zombie stories are about anything, it's that humans are inescapably horrible and should be eaten -- and I would not bet on the possibility of a happy ending. It'll be published March 13th, for those of you who don't get enough depression and sadness from the news.

I read Gail Carriger's novel Soulless when it came out -- and mostly enjoyed it, though I groused ungraciously that I would have preferred if had been an entirely different book -- so I'm interested and surprised to see that it's now been turned into a graphic novel (or "manga," since this is from Yen Press and it's aimed at a younger and more female audience than buys American-style comics these days), also called Soulless. (I'm vastly more surprised to see that the art and adaptation is credited to "REM," without explanation, though I'm 99% sure Michael Stipe has not turned to drawing shojo steampunk at this point in his career.) See my review of the novel for more details of the plot; the graphic novel version will arrive in March.

Speaking of graphic novel adaptations of existing novels, I also have here Uglies: Shay's Story, which was written by Scott Westerfeld and Devin Grayson and then drawn by Steven Cummings. (The book credits Cummings as "Illustrations," perhaps to hide the fact that this is comics, but I will have none of that.) It is, of course, a sidestory to Westerfeld's popular "Uglies" series, set in a near-future dystopia where everyone gets surgery at age sixteen to make them perfectly "Pretty" (and if you believe that surgery only affects outward appearance, I have a long lesson in modern YA publishing to give you). Shay, the heroine of the graphic novel, is apparently the best friend of Tally, the heroine of the main sequence of novels, but it's not clear how much of Shay's Story is a retelling of Uglies from another point of view. This one is from Del Rey, and will be in stores on March 6th.

I mentioned Melanie Rawn's Touchstone -- first in a new theatrically-themed secondary-world fantasy series, coming from Tor in hardcover on the 28th of this month -- a few months back, when the bound galley reached my desk, and so now I'll mention it again, since I have a finished book in hand.

And last for this week is the new novel from Tobias S. Buckell, Arctic Rising. It's a near-future SF thriller set in a rapidly warming -- and now essentially ice-free -- Arctic Ocean, with both conventional nuclear weapons and a mysterious global-cooling terraforming "superweapon" in play, a shadowy cabal with dark aims, and the one airship pilot thrown into the middle of it all. Tor will publish Arctic Rising in hardcover on the 28th.

American Vampire, Vol. 2 by Snyder, Albuquerque, and Santolouco

2012-02-19T20:02:00.001-05:00

Comics collections usually try to sell each brand-spanking new volume as something exciting, special and unique -- and not simply as a piece of a larger story -- so I'm surprised to see that this second installment of the DC/Vertigo American Vampire series is credited simply as Volume Two. (For vague details of the events of Volume One, see my review from last year.)

It's doubly odd to see that, since American Vampire is clearly "written for the trade" -- the practice generally disliked by the every-Wednesday-at-the-comics-shop audience -- with this book reprinting two discrete stories, one three issues long and the other one only two. (A more novelistic telling would avoid such things, treating every issue as something like a chapter -- here, the essential story-telling unit is, ironically, neither the single issue nor the collection, but pieces in between them in size.)

Both of those stories -- "Devil in the Sand," in which Las Vegas police chief Cash McCogan deals with vampires, series central character Skinner Sweet, FBI anti-vampire agents, and the in-process Boulder Dam in 1936; and "The Way Out," in which the past begins to catch up with Pearl Jones, slightly later that same year -- are written by series creator Scott Snyder. (As expected, Stephen King just scripted his piece of the first story and then went back to his own work.) Rafael Albuquerque, who drew the first storyline, comes back for "Devil," and Mateus Santolouco draws "Way Out" in a very similar style. (They're both basically in the modern-horror tradition defined by Guy Davis on B.P.R.D. over the past decade -- slightly smearier than a precise realism, but with a careful eye for markers of time and place and a willingness to go almost Paul Pope-ishly expressive in action sequences.)

Both of those stories are engrossing enough while they're going on, but they end up being entire middle in retrospect -- "Devil" sets up Cash (and his FBI pals) as potentially important characters for later stories, but doesn't do much with Sweet, and "Way Out" is entirely an extended fake-out, serving only to show what Jones has been doing for the past decade and getting her moving again. Again, if American Vampire were just telling a longer story to begin with, this wouldn't be a problem, but it tries to pretend that these are two individual stories, when they really aren't: they're both prologues to things Snyder will (one hopes) get to sometime later.

American Vampire is stylish and professional, in the usual Vertigo style -- lots of nudity, blood, danger, explosions and moral conundrums, to make it all as "adult" in the HBO vein as possible. But this is the rare trade that might actually read better as individual issues: if you're just getting a piece of the story anyway, it might be better to get those pieces more regularly.

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

2012-02-18T10:44:00.000-05:00

By my own lights, I'm still reading Peter Ackroyd's gigantic mosaic history London -- I have a bookmark in it and everything -- although I haven't touched that book for several years, so my "reading" it is mostly theoretical at this point. But his companion book, London Under, was so short -- and, even more importantly, compact, so it could easily ride with me on the train to and from work -- that I was done with it almost before I started.

London Under is as broad and as loosely organized as the larger London is, but the breadth that is an advantage in a big, sprawling book doesn't work as well in a shorter book, which should be more focused and precise. Ackroyd shovels in all of the anecdotes and references he can find into London Under's thirteen chapters, but they don't always flow all that well, and the book itself has no obvious organizing principle. Even the chapters of London Under have a tendency to wander from archaeology to geology to various types of engineering (water, sewer, railroad, electrical) to spelunking to the biology of various pests, with lots of patented Ackroyd Deep Thinking and conspicuously fine writing as mortar to stick it all together.

So London Under is much more "Ackroyd meditates on the stuff beneath the ground of a great city" and much less "here's what's actually there, and how it interacts with the surface world and the other systems". To be blunt, London Under will greatly disappoint and frustrate any reader wanting a more Henry Petroski-style look at what undergirds London. But, if you find sewers, underground trains, and hidden caverns romantic and poetic, Ackroyd is exactly your man.

Quote of the Week: Time, Please!

2012-02-17T08:30:00.001-05:00

"But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, p.102

Names, Names, Names

2012-02-14T12:23:00.000-05:00

Just saw an ad box in today's Publishers Weekly e-mail:

Kendra Hilferty has been a witch for 300 years....

Kendra? Kendra is the name your witchy-girl got in 1712 or so? I very much do not think so....

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/11

2012-02-13T08:30:00.098-05:00

There's only so many ways a man can call attention to the return of Monday, and I often feel like I've hit my limit. But, as long as we don't die -- and I think we'd all consider that the preferred outcome -- Mondays will accumulate, and return every seven days, whether we're ready for them or not.

One of the good things about Mondays is that they bring my "Reviewing the Mail" posts. Well, it's good for me, in that I have a usually-substantial post. And I hope it's good for you, since you find out about books you might want to seek our (or avoid, though I hope the former is more common). This, as you've probably guessed by now -- my readers are tremendously good at reading headlines and understanding them, which you don't necessarily share with the wider Internet audience -- is another one of those posts.

This week I have seven books to blather at you about. As of this very moment, I haven't read any of them, but I can tell you some things -- most of them almost certainly true -- about those books based on my keen powers of observation and a deep knowledge of other books that I will pretend is relevant in this situation. Everything this week came by itself, so those of you who are allergic to bullet points can relax.

Osamu Dazai's classic novel of self-obsession and damage, No Longer Human -- it looks to be the Sorrows of Young Werther of interwar Japan -- was adapted into a three-part manga series by Usamaru Furuya, and the third part is being published by Vertical at the end of February. I haven't read the first two volumes, but now, perhaps, I could run through the whole thing together, which would presumably be preferable.

Sometimes books can be more complicated than they at first appear to be. Take Higurashi When They Cry: Atonement Arc, Vol. 3, with story by Ryukishi07 and art by Karin Suzuragi. Would you be surprised to know that this is actually the penultimate volume of an eighteen-book storyline? I doubt Yen Press -- which publishes this book this month -- actually trying to hide that, but it's difficult to figure out which arc of Higurashi to start with. (And don't get me started on trying to work out exactly when it is they cry! Or who "they" are, come to think of it.) For those interested in finding the beginning of this story, I covered it when I looked at the early issues of Yen Plus magazine back in 2008, and I believe the first grouping is the "Abducted by Demons Arc."

I got a copy of Catherynne M. Valente's most recent novel Deathless last year -- by the way, I have to keep admitting that I'm desperately ill-read in Valente, despite my best intentions; I've only read her wonderful YA novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making so far -- and didn't manage to get to it. But now Deathless is in a more compact (and cheaper!) trade paperback form, giving me -- and many of you, I'm sure -- another chance to read this Russian-inflected fantasy novel retelling the story of Koschei the Deathless against Russia's very eventful twentieth century history.

And then back to the realm of words-and-pictures together with the graphic novel The Advance Team, written by Will Pfeifer with art by German Torres, coming from Tor in March. It's just your average everyday story: a twentysomething pizza delivery guy stumbles onto a vast alien conspiracy and has to turn celebrity stalker, killing his childhood idols one by one. Pfeifer's been writing comics for about a decade now, and has gotten a solid reputation as one of the better hand on the superhero ranch, so it will be interesting to see what he's done here when given free rein.

I believe Thief's Covenant -- the first in a projected medievalesque fantasy series about Widdershins, an orphan turned rich girl turned again into a top-rank thief -- is meant as a Young Adult book, given its price point ($16.95, nowhere on the actual book for mysterious reasons), the young age of its protagonist, and its length (shy of 300 pages). Author Ari Marmell has toiled in the content mines of D&D and World of Darkness -- forging novels as well as game material -- and has written an independent fantasy duology as well. This one officially hits stores tomorrow.

C.J. Cherryh's "Foreigner" series -- about the single ambassador from a small crash-landed human settlement on a far alien world, populated with tall humanoids with very different emotions and social structures -- continues with Intruder, the thirteenth novel. This is possibly a decent starting point -- Cherryh has written the series, at least as far as I've read in it, as semi-independent trilogies -- but dropping back to Foreigner itself is probably the best bet. This time out, Bren Cameron (that ambassador) is in even more trouble than ever before, once again torn between battling factions and trying to find a solution that will satisfy everyone and keep him alive. Intruder is coming from DAW in hardcover on March 6th.

And last for this week is one more graphic novel: an adaptation of Jonathan Kellerman's fourth "Alex Delaware" novel, Silent Partner. (I have no idea why they didn't begin with the beginning of the series, When the Bough Breaks.) The adaptation is by Ande Parks, and the art from Michael Gaydos. The Delaware books -- psychological thrillers set in LA with a forensic psychologist hero -- have been massive bestsellers for over twenty years, so you may have heard of them. The graphic novel of Silent Partner will be published by Villard on February 28th.

Goliath by Scot Westerfeld

2012-02-12T17:52:00.000-05:00

There are two reasons I expect this review of Scott Westerfeld's new novel, Goliath, will be short and desultory:

1) I've already reviewed the first two books in this series -- Leviathan (Book-A-Day #107) and Behemoth (Book-A-Day #326) -- which means that I've already written a thousand words or so about the series.

2) My younger son -- the frighteningly large eleven-year-old I call Thing 2 here -- is midway through Behemoth right now, and will want to jump into Goliath as soon as he's done.

So you Gentle Readers can jump back to those earlier posts, if you haven't been reading the series. And, if you have been reading the series, then you probably know that this book came out nearly six months ago, and there's a fair chance that you've already read it yourselves.

But, for those still unconvinced: Goliath continues the story of Deryn "Dylan" Sharp, a young woman posing as a young man to serve aboard His Majesty's airwhale Leviathan, and Prince Aleksandar von Hohenberg, secret heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, as they make their way through a steampunky alternate World War I, where the Allies are "Darwinists," using gene-altered animals, and the Central powers are "Clankers," with gigantic steam-powered mechanical war machines. It's 1914, and those augmented armies are tearing at each other offstage, in what it probably an even bloodier first year of the war than in our timeline.

And Leviathan, after partially fomenting a successful revolution in Istanbul -- and consequently turning the Ottoman Empire from a neutral leaning towards entering the war on the Clanker side (as its equivalent did in our world) to a neutral favorably disposed towards England and her Darwinist allies -- is headed to the Far East, ostensibly to show the flag and aid allies Russia and Japan against local German colonist forces, but actually to make a secret rendezvous and pick up a very important Clanker scientist at a secret base deep in Siberia.

Because Nicola Tesla -- genius scientist, and, as a Serbian living in the US, a Clanker congenitally opposed to the German cause -- has created a massive death ray cannon called Goliath, which he claims can strike anywhere in the world. And so Leviathan picks him and his crew up near the Tunguska River, where, six years ago -- during a test of Goliath on the other side of the world -- something unexpected, and massively destructive, happened.

So the geopolitical questions of Goliath revolve around that event: did Goliath cause the Tunguska Event in this world? And will Tesla's plan to, essentially, blackmail the Clanker powers into peace by threatening their capital cities actually work?

But the more important questions concern our heroine and hero: will Deryn tell Alex who she really is? (After all, he told her his equivalent secret some time ago.) And can they help to make a world in which they can be safe...and, just possibly, together?

Westerfeld ends the trilogy as well as he started it, full of adventure and danger both high in the air on Leviathan and in the face-to-face confrontations among his diverse cast, all of whom have their own agendas and plans. (There's one point when a minor character offers what could have been a deus ex machina to Deryn -- but it's deeply contingent on the current situation, which is already falling apart.) It is written specifically for younger readers -- there's nothing I wouldn't want my eleven-year-old son to read, and I mean that utterly literally, since he will read it in a couple of days -- but that's no more of a limitation than writing in any other genre or style. Goliath ends this series excellently.

Although...I still think that a series like this should have a book called Juggernaut, set in India -- come on, wouldn't that be perfect? -- and so I can always hope Westerfeld will eventually decide that he's not quite done with this world.

Realityland by David Koenig

2012-02-11T12:18:00.001-05:00

The world needs enthusiastic amateurs; there aren't enough professional anythings to get everything done. (Or, more importantly, there's never enough money to pay enough people professionally to get everything done.) David Koenig is incredibly enthusiastic, and I'd characterize him as an amateur historian -- though I don't know if he'd agree with either half of that characterization, since he's a professional journalist by day, and he might see his histories as growing out of that -- and he's contributed greatly to the body of unofficial knowledge surrounding Walt Disney and the companies bearing Walt's name over the past two decades.

Koenig is from Southern California, and apparently has the local's love for Disneyland; his book-writing career began with Mouse Tales (which I reviewed here four years ago), a generally positive behind-the-scenes look at the origin and day-to-day operations of that park, with an emphasis on quirky castmember stories and wacky hijinks. He followed that up with More Mouse Tales (more stories from Disneyland) and Mouse Under Glass (comparisons of source material and final films for the first 30 animated Disney movies, with other details on those films), and then finally moved on to what would have seemed to me (if I'd been his editor at the small California house Bonaventure Press that has published all of these books to date) to be the obvious second book: a look behind the scenes at the biggest Disney agglomeration of theme parks: Walt Disney World.

Realityland takes about a third of its three-hundred page length to get to opening day of The Magic Kingdom (the first park down there in Florida; the one that's a semi-copy of Disneyland), with details of the land deals, construction headaches, staffing problems, and other big-business concerns of a major construction project. Koenig is a journalist, and he's good at the shoe-leather stuff: he's clearly interviewed everyone he could track down that's still alive from those early days, and got great quotes and details of that troubled construction -- the stuff that Disney kept carefully out of its press materials.

The rest of the book mostly alternates between themed operational chapters -- about cast members, security, safety, competition, and so on -- and chapters that move the story forward in time, covering the construction of EPCOT and then Disney-MGM Studios and the various boardroom conflicts and shakeups along the way. This portion of the book is less well organized than the straightforwardly chronological beginning, and Koenig could have used a stronger editor (or another draft or two) to really pull this all into clearer focus -- he does drop some threads entirely, or for chapters at a time. Still, Koenig had a lot of material to organize: just that security chapter, for example, seems to cover in some detail every single death, major injury, and mishap that took place during the first thirty years of Walt Disney World. And he does keep it all lively and comprehensive at the same time.

Realityland also rushes through the last decade or so that it covers -- it was originally published in 2007 -- so there's not as much detail on the fourth Disney Florida park, Animal Kingdom, and the end of the Eisner years. (I suspect this has to do with the fact that the people involved with those decisions are mostly still in the middle of their careers, and many of them still at Disney: it's difficult to write corporate history while it's still happening, even if you're willing to take things off the record.) So it might have been better if Realityland covered just the first twenty years of WDW, running to the early '90s and leaving room for a second book, but I don't expect Koenig is done with Disney in any case, so there may yet be another book of more WDW stories, or maybe even one about those exotic foreign parks.

Realityland is both more amateur (in the sense of being enthusiastic, engaged, and connected) and more ground-level than a a more "serious" corporate history book like James Stewart's DisneyWar (which I read six months before this blog began, and so did not review), which are both strengths and weaknesses: Koenig has a partisan's interest not just in Disney as a corporation, but in a certain conception of Disney as an organization with a purpose, and that colors every bit of his reporting, but it also drives his interest in the details of park-level employees' jobs and the day-to-day operations of the parks, which can sound like minutia but directly affect the experiences of the millions of people who crowd those gates every year.

So this is primarily a book for Disney fans, for people interested in those theme parks in particular, rather than in general business readers wanting a story of success despite setbacks that they can underline and highlight for insights that they'll pretend to apply to their own careers. And if I think that we're the more authentic and meaningful audience, that may just mean that I'm another enthusiastic amateur myself!

Quote of the Week: Creative Destruction

2012-02-10T08:30:00.003-05:00

"[P]rivate-equity firms are increasingly able to profit even if the companies they run go under -- an outcome made much likelier by all the extra borrowing -- and many companies have been getting picked clean. In 2004, for instance, Wasserstein & Company bought the thriving mail-order fruit retailer Harry and David. The following year, Wasserstein and other investors took out more than a hundred million in dividends, paid for with borrowed money -- covering their original investment plus a twenty-three per cent profit -- and charged Harry and David millions in "management fees." Last year, Harry and David defaulted on its debt and dumped its pension obligations. In other words, Wasserstein failed to improve the company's performance, failed to meet its obligations to creditors, screwed its workers, and still made a profit. That's not how capitalism is supposed to work."
- James Surowiecki, "Private Inequity," p.21 of the January 30, 2012 New Yorker

5 Very Good Reasons To Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (and Other Useful Guides) by "The Oatmeal"

2012-02-09T20:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know what deep trauma would make a man want to appear in public under the name "The Oatmeal" -- particularly when he already has a perfectly good name, like Matthew Inman -- but it's probably enough to just note that such trauma must exist, quietly hope that he's healing comfortably, and move on.

Inman has been making comics, and things that aren't exactly comics but certainly aren't prose, either, on the Internet since mid-2009, and is now reasonably famous for doing so. (That makes me feel terribly, terribly old, but never mind that for now.) And so, like all things of reasonable popularity on the Internet [1], the comics of The Oatmeal have been collected into a bound sheaf of thin slices of dead trees, under the name 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (And Other Useful Guides).

It actually is more useful than the standard book of cartoons, since Inman's standard operating procedure is to research something (punctuation, coffee, obscure and frightening animals) and then write up actual facts about that thing, in humorous form, almost half of the time. The other half, as required by Internet Law, is made up of things like "the 10 Types of Crappy Interviewees," "7 Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine," and "The 8 Phases of Flying." [2] The result is usually crude, almost always crass, typically profane, and often very funny for people (like much of the traditional Internet) who either prefer or can tolerate those first three traits.

There's a lot of cute animals doing horrible things, and creepy/frightening animals doing silly things here, plus the grammar lessons. You actually are at risk of learning something from an Oatmeal cartoon, which is not the case for most webcomics. (Although, just today, I did learn that Restless Leg Syndrome is a STD in one particular fictional universe.)

Inman's site isn't well designed for browsing; it's much more of a traditional '90s-style personal site than a blog or webcomic, making this book, oddly, a more user-friendly experience. (His minimalist RSS feed is also annoying, as long as I'm already being persnickety about tiny points about my medium.) So this is a swell book to leave on your coffee table to poke through or to read (as I did) during quiet moments in the smallest room in the house.

[1] I've said this a thousand times before, but it bears repeating: this is not a new effect. Before the Internet, there was still a flood of silly little humor books, but they had to be based on magazine articles and vague unformed concepts and the so-called "sense of humor" of people in big leather chairs at New York publishing companies. Nowadays, the Internet serves as a farm team for such silliness, so, presumably, the books picked up from blogs are more likely to be successful, and that actually does look like progress if you squint at it correctly.

[2] Note a pattern? Inman is no dummy; lists of all kinds are more frequently shared than other kinds of content. The Oatmeal is actually very well designed for Internet popularity, whether deliberately or just because Inman's interests resonate with the general audience.

The Complete Peanuts, 1981 to 1982 by Charles Schulz

2012-02-07T20:40:00.001-05:00

I've come to believe, recently, that having each book I read have its own post here is the most efficient and convenient thing. I mean, it's definitely efficient and convenient for me, and my fervent hope is that it also helps the audience by making things easier to find (and for me to link to, later on).

Thus, the latest volume of Fantagraphics's wonderful reprinting of Charles Schulz's Peanuts strip -- The Complete Peanuts, 1981 to 1982, ask for it by name at your favorite purveyor of bound printed matter -- gets a post all to itself here, even though I have hardly anything to say about it. I've reviewed most of the other volumes, over the years -- 1957-1958, 1959-1960, 1961-1962, 1963-1964, 1965-1966, 1967-1968, 1969-1970, 1971-1972, 1973-1974, 1975-1976, 1977-1978, and 1979-1980 -- and the reprint project is now solidly into Schulz's later, less interesting years.

Peanuts was funny and entertaining at this point, of course -- amusing and laugh-out-loud and wry by turns -- but it hadn't been surprising for nearly a decade, and most of its characters had first hardened into caricatures, and then into a collection of standard mannerisms. The Peanuts of 1981 was an utterly professional entertainment machine, and still the pure product of Charles Schulz's own pen and mind. But its pleasures in the '80s were like those of watching a late-season baseball game between two teams out of contention: it doesn't mean anything, and won't have any real effect on anything, but it's a quite agreeable way to spend a few hours.

If Schulz had been born later, or had a different temperament -- well, let's say it straight: if the world had been substantially different than it actually was -- then, maybe, he could have hung up the Peanuts hat, walked away from the massive pot of money Snoopy generated every year, and moved on to some new creation. No, honestly, that never would have happened; not in any plausible version of the past century. And even if it had, would whatever new thing the 58-year-old Schulz made been as interesting and fresh as what the 28-year-old Schulz had done? So that's just windy talk, and not worth pursuing.

What Schulz did was Peanuts, and he did it for a hair shy of fifty years. Not all of them are works of genius -- not all of anything by anyone is. And there are only occasional flashes of that genius here -- Sally's beanbag camp, a few moments with Peppermint Pattie -- but this is still an important part of the larger work that is Peanuts, and I'm happy to have it on my shelf.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/4

2012-02-06T08:30:00.002-05:00

It's difficult to find a new and fresh way to introduce these posts every week -- particularly since I've been doing them for more years than I want to count, and since I don't want to just copy-and-paste a block of Standard Disclaimer [1] -- so I should warn you that I might descend, any week now, into the realms of movie parodies and other bottom-scrapings.

But that day is not this day! This day we fight!

Oops, sorry, there. Anyway, where was I?

Right -- the point of "Reviewing the Mail." This weekly post lists the books that arrived in my mail the previous week, annotated with whatever I know or can quickly dig up about those books, with the aim of connecting them with you (the readers), so that you can find new, presumably entertaining works that you will buy and love and clamp to your bosoms for ever after. I have not yet read any of these particular books, and I may not read any specific one of them -- but that doesn't stop me from letting you know about them.

Most of the mail this week falls into clumps, so I'll start off with two manga collections coming from Vertical, beginning with the 8th volume of Chi's Sweet Home by Konami Kanata. Vol. 7 showed up in my house a couple of months back, and my two sons immediately glommed it, which I'll take as a recommendation. The series is a semi-realistic -- the title cat "speaks" to the audience, but lives an extremely cat-like life, unlike a Garfield -- full-color look at the life of a Japanese kitten, suitable for, as far as I can tell, kids down to too young to actually read the words. This volume will hit stores at the end of the month.

Already out from Vertical is the first volume of Toru Fujisawa's GTO: 14 Days in Shonan, the sequel series to the original Great Teacher Onizuka. This series takes place in the middle of the main GTO, during a fortnight when the main character was supposedly recuperating from being shot -- but actually had run off to the "surfer's paradise" Shonan. And, of course, a series hero always ends up doing the thing he's famous for -- so I'm sure this series sees Onizuka teaching.

I also have DAW's three mass market paperbacks for March:

Seanan McGuire launches a new series, "InCryptid," with Discount Armageddon, in which Buffy Jr. there on the cover (Verity Price, runaway scion of a clan that's been hunting/studying mythological monsters for generations, but who would prefer to be a professional ballroom dancer [2]) is dragged back into her family's business and, I am morally certain, begins the usual love-hate relationship with her opposite number (Dominic De Luca, of the Covenant of St. George, whom I will predict is haughty, self-centered, devastatingly handsome, and utterly infuriating in the usual panty-melting urban fantasy manner).
The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity is the latest anthology from the Tekno Books factory, edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray and featuring fourteen stories about secret elves in the modern world. Contributors include Elizabeth Bear, Jim C. Hines, Anton Strout, S.C. Butler, Kristine Smith, Juliet E. McKenna, and the ubiquitous Seanan McGuire.
And the twelfth book in C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series, Betrayer, is also hitting paperback. I liked the first nine or so of this series, but lost touch with it when I left the clubs -- they're generally very good clenched-teeth cultural-conflict-with-aliens books, in the inimitable Cherryh manner.

Similarly, I've got a bunch of manga all being published by Yen Press in February, all later volumes in series -- so I apologize in advance if my impressions of them are mistaken:

The sixth volume of Milan Matra's Omamori Himari, a harem manga with a plethora of panty shots (giving this a mature rating, though I didn't see anything worse than panty shots inside this volume) and a "typical high school student" hero who is also the heir to a demon-fighting family -- the harem is made up of several human and transformed-creature (cats, teacups [?!], who knows what else) girls.
The eighth volume of Soul Eater, by Atsuhi Ohkubo continues the story of the minions of the death-god and their quests to collect the souls of the evil. (I reviewed the first book back in early 2010, but lost track of the series since then.)
The ninth volume of Nabari No Ou by Yuhki Kamatami, which I think is about secret ninja societies in the modern world -- the back cover copy, which talks about Grey Wolves and "the world of shinobi," tends to agree with that memory.
The eleventh volume of the very popular The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya -- art by Gaku Tsugano, story by Nagaru Tanigawa, and characters by Noizi Ito -- continues the story, though it seems to have moved pretty far from what I remember as the premise (uberperky Haruhi gathers a group of secretly paranormal teens -- all still secret from her -- to investigate paranormal things exactly like them), since a cast that seems to be more harem-like (one boy and three busty girls who keep falling over him) is here trapped in a mountain resort by a storm possibly created by a supernatural entity. I will admit to being more than slightly confused.
And then there's the eleventh volume of Sumomomo, Momomo, by Shinobu Ohtaka. I loved the first volume of this two years ago, and liked the second volume quite a bit (though I was worried that it was slipping inexorably towards being yet another diffident high-school-boy-and-his-quirky-harem story), but, once again, lost track of it. At this point, the entire cast seems to have relocated into the middle of a jungle, for what I trust were good and sufficient reasons. I believe I'll have to read this soon, to see what's become of it.

If you're tired of novels that are only novels, Zack Parsons's Liminal States may be what you're looking for: the book itself doesn't publish until April (in trade paperback from Kensington), but alternate reality games related to the book started to come out last October, and the book itself is "part of a revolutionary multimedia project, which includes video, music, and artwork, as well as blogs and personal web pages of the characters from the world of the novel, including links to external sites." So: very post-modern and cutting edge. Parsons wrote the nonfiction look-at-what-these-stupid-generals-did book My Tank Is Fight! and the exploration of Internet subcultures Your Next Door Neighbor Is a Dragon, but this appears to be his first work of fiction. I suppose I should note that this particular blog has an independent existence, and is not merely part of the Liminal States hype-rsphere.

And last for this week is a graphic novel for younger readers -- and probably for some of us no longer young; I asked for it myself, for instance -- Giants Beware!, by Rafael Rosado (who has written for a lot of popular children's TV shows, says his bio from the publisher, though it's coy about which ones) and Jorge Aguirre (storyboard artist for Warner, Disney, and Cartoon Network). It's about a girl who wants to fight giants, her best friend (who wants to be a princess) and her brother (who wants to be a pasty chef). And First Second will publish it in paperback on April 10th.

[1] The marketer in me knows that would be horrible SEO, and the perfectionist in me is horrified at the thought of not hand-crafting any particular blog post.

[2] In case the whole existence-of-monsters thing didn't convince you this was an entirely fictional world...

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers

2012-02-04T11:37:00.001-05:00

Tim Powers is not the most prolific of writers, which makes it slightly odd to note that The Bible Repairman and Other Stories is his third collection in barely a decade (following the complete lack of collections in his first two-and-a-half decades of writing). But it's not really as odd as it may seem: Night Moves and Other Stories started it off in early 2001, pulling together six stories from the '80s and '90s, and then 2005's Strange Itineraries expanded Night Moves, adding three more stories Powers had published in the intervening years.

Still, Bible Repairman came along only six years later, and contains six stories written since Strange Itineraries -- and, as far as I can tell, Powers has never written six stories in six years before this. I could quibble and say that I want more novels from Powers, but, the truth is, Powers is one of our very best and most exacting fantasy writers, and I'll take whatever he wants to write. [1]

As is common with story collections by major writers these days, several of the stories in Bible Repairman first appeared as expensive limited editions -- the title story and "A Soul in a Bottle" from Subterranean, and "A Time to Cast Away Stones" from Charnel House -- and one of the remaining three stories, "A Journey of Only Two Paces," only appeared in shorter form in the program book for the British national SF convention. So most readers, except for the most well-heeled and attentive Powers fans, will only have had the opportunity to see, at most, two of these stories.

And so, to those stories:

"The Bible Repairman" begins in deeply Powersian territory: the darker, low-rent side of Los Angeles, with a premise that is equally Powersian in its religious magic: a middle-aged man, Torrez, has spent his life editing out difficult passages from personal bibles (prohibitions on divorce, or adultery, or demands for charity) for his clients and losing pieces of his soul, bit by bit, selling them to ransom ghosts back for other clients. And then the ghost of his own daughter comes back into his life, and he has to make a decision on one more ransom -- the one that might take enough of his soul to destroy him.

"A Soul in a Bottle" is another LA story -- much of his short work, and several of his novels, stay close to home -- with another ghost, two sisters who are both writers and rivals, a mysterious death forty years before, and a man who survives by scrounging rare books.

"The Hour of Babel" might be science fiction or fantasy -- depending on how you squint at it -- with time travel and a uniquely shattering experience in a bar, thirty years before.

I'd read "Parallel Lines" before -- it was in the Stories anthology a few years back, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio -- and greatly enjoyed it again. I can't improve on what I wrote then: "An aged woman learns that her recently dead twin sister is still trying to control her life, but takes steps to finally correct this."

"A Journey of Only Two Paces" is another Powersian story about death, redemption, and (most importantly) the kind of people who cannot accept death (the original sin of so many Powers antagonists). It also has cats in it, and a quirky building in the LA area that Powers insists actually exists in his short afterword.

Last is the longest, strongest, and most major story, a novella named "A Time to Cast Away Stones." In a way, it's the link between The Stress of Her Regard and the upcoming Hide Me Among the Graves, telling the story of Stress's minor character (and actual historical personage, and massively interesting romanticizer of his own life) Edward John Trelawney, and his eventful encounter with the siliconari in Greece in 1825, soon after the death of Byron. As with most of Power's best work, it intertwines real, documented events -- Trelawney was in Greece fighting with a warlord at the time, and was shot by another Englishman on Mount Parnassus -- with his own carefully constructed mythology, producing that uniquely Powersian frisson: the story that is clearly fantastic but also fits with all known history.

I wouldn't recommend that new readers begin Powers here -- his slow accretion of detail and attention to nuance is best displayed in his novels, so any of the ones I mentioned below, plus the didn't-really-inspire-the-Disney-movie-more-than-glancingly On Stranger Tides, would be better choices -- but this is a fine collection of deeply Tim Powers stories, and just saying that should be enough for the knowledgeable.

[1] Speaking of novels, I have high hopes for his upcoming book, Hide Me Among the Graves, for very Powersian superstitious reasons: his first novels for the previous decades have been 1983's The Anubis Gates (a Philip K. Dick Award winner), 1992's Last Call (a World Fantasy Award winner), and 2000's Declare (a World Fantasy Award winner), which I'd call three of his four best novels -- and the fourth novel I'd put in their company is The Stress of Her Regard, to which Hide Me is a distant sequel. No pressure, Tim, but all indications show that you're going to hit this one out of the park.

Quote of the Week: Inherently Broken

2012-02-03T08:30:00.002-05:00

"This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don't."
- Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," pp.75 in the January 30, 2012 New Yorker