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

Quote of the Week

2009-07-10T08:30:00.000-04:00

"The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they're experts in something we'll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come of it, You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you're not yet too old, you're on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There's no dignity in it."
- Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You, p.274

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Listening to: John Vanderslice - Fetal Horses
via FoxyTunes

The City and The City by China Mieville

2009-07-09T08:30:00.000-04:00

The cliche goes that books are like a conversation -- they speak to each other and to the reader, some telling jokes, others grabbing the lapels and pleading, a few lying languidly back and rolling out unlikely tales. The City and the City, in that company, is that one guy at the party who seems personable and interesting, but keeps returning to some utterly insane pet theory. You want to like that guy -- his stories start wonderfully, and have great touches -- but then every other sentence is about the Trilateral Commission and you find yourself mentally disengaging from even the seemingly-sane parts of the conversation. But, if you stick with it, you just might find that everything that guy says makes sense in the end -- and then you have to decide if that means that he's just gotten you to drink his Kool-Aid.

The City and the City is a police procedural: gritty, street-wise, particular, grounded. But it's also set in a bifurcated city-state that could have come right out of Borges or, more pointedly, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The setting is fabulist, which keeps dragging the narrative, and the reader's attention, away from the specifics of the police investigation -- the reader's mind keeps trying to reconstruct the entire plot as a metaphor or allegory, and that's just not what The City and the City is trying to do. For most of the length of The City and the City, Mieville whipsaws back and forth -- often within the same sentence -- between the grounded, street-level detective work of Inspector Tyador Borlu, and the existential issues of "unseeing" the other city.

The metaphor of the two cities is so strong, and so foregrounded, that it demands thought on nearly every page, but it also frustrates any thoughts running along the same lines as the mystery plot. The intertwined but utterly separate cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma cannot be investigated and questioned in the ways Borlu is tracing his murder case; they demand to be worked out metaphorically, like a fable. We can read Beszel and Ul Qoma as rich and poor, as black and white, as Christian and Muslim, as capitalist and communist, as any dichotomy we like -- it doesn't fit all of those equally well, and it's a deeper, richer metaphor than any one of those, but it inevitably makes the reader think of other commensal rivals, other thoroughly interwoven yin-and-yang partners.

So The City and the City keeps jarring the reader out of the story to think about the world -- as a Science Fiction or Fantasy book often will do. But The City and the City isn't a SFF book; it's meant to be a mystery, a story about a cop in a very real -- only the slightest bit alternate-historical, to allow this city and city to exist -- world. And that's the problem; it's a novel crosshatched as intensely as the most heavily-trafficked square in its fictional world, bouncing itself between mystery and SFF phrases and ideas in every paragraph, humming with motion as it vibrates between two genres, trying to be in both and neither at the same time.

Somewhere in the Balkans, or at least a vaguely defined "Eastern Europe," exists the conjoined twins of city-states: Beszel and Ul Qoma. They occupy the same space, as anyone else in the world would define it. But somehow -- and, apparently, no one in either city now has any idea how this came to be -- they are entirely, utterly separate. So separate that residents of each city must "unsee" events taking place in the other city, must pretend that half of the cars on the streets, and people on the pavements, and buildings in the sky do not exist at all. There are areas of "totality" of one city or the other, but this novel only rarely takes place in them; the reader begins to assume that they are very few and not well-trafficked. Streets, parks, squares, even buildings are "cross-hatched," with parts being totally Beszel and parts totally Ul Qoman -- and every citizen of either city must have a near-perfect mental map of both cities, and a gazetteer of the acceptable clothing, architecture, body languages, and gestures from each culture. Every Beszel, every Ul Qoman must already know what he is seeing to know what he is seeing -- and to know, most importantly, what he is not seeing.

For seeing the other city is "breach," and this is the very worst crime in both cities. So bad, in fact, that it's turned over to an super-secret agency called Breach, which in some ways is a servant of the two city-states' governments and in some ways is their superior. Breach is known by all in both cities to be everywhere, all the time -- all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, and swift to anger, like the Old Testament God. Some technical matters are handed over to Breach by the governments, but the day-to-day cases -- where a man stares at a building in the wrong city, or talks to a person in the other city, or walks down the wrong street -- is handled swiftly and apparently mercilessly by the agents of Breach, who appear from nowhere and whisk the offenders away, usually never to be seen again. No one in either city knows anyone who ever became a Breach agent; Breach has no connection to their normal world -- except that it permeates that world entirely.

This is a fantastic setting for a fabulist story, and it resonates strongly with many real-world cities and urban issues -- from the obvious ones like the question of Jerusalem to more subtle issues like the "unseeing" of urban homeless and blight to the existential question of whether we can ever see something unless we already know what it is. Mieville has created a wondrous pair of cities, utterly suitable for a great fantasy writer, full of wonder and deep mysteries.

But then he used them to tell the story of Inspector Tyador Borlu, of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. And, in a mystery story, what the audience -- and the detective -- have to do is pay attention to everything, to sift out the important from the trivial. But, instead of being able to do that, we get Borlu going on for pages and pages about how this street is full of buildings he doesn't see, and how he's driving even though most of the traffic is cars that he's not officially noticing, and on and on and on. Mieville never lets the mystery plot get any traction; the reader is left thinking not that this is a particularly difficult case, but that policing these cities is utterly impossible, and that they should have collapsed into utter anarchy long before now. (And then the reader smiles at that thought, too, since it mimics what so many have said about so many cities so many times, and wonders if Mieville built that in as well.)

Perhaps everything holds together because of Breach and only because of Breach -- that certainly is Breach's opinion, and seems to be Mieville's. Criminals may be terrified of running away from a crime, for fear of putting one foot wrong and falling into the cold, implacable hands of Breach. It's possible; Mieville spends a lot of time in the first half of the novel building Breach up as an effectively supernatural agency. The characters he has talking about Breach are all cops, and mostly veteran, smart, powerful cops. But they don't complain Breach the way big-city cops complain about the FBI, nor do they have the kind of burning scorn those cops have for Internal Affairs. Borlu and his colleagues find Breach just as ineffable as the regular people of Beszel and Ul Qoma; they talk about Breach in vague platitudes and nonspecific references, showing clearly that even they don't have the slightest clue who Breach really is, how they do what they do, and what the extent of their powers is. They're not cops talking about their rivals or superiors; they're medieval penitents crouching before an angry, unknowable God.

The plot is set in motion by a murder -- a young woman was killed in one city and dumped in the other -- and Borlu investigates, only a bit above the minimum required, since obviously they'll be able to hand it all over to Breach. (And when did a good cop ever think that way? "Oh, just let the FBI/SEC/Internal Affairs/Special Crimes/ATF come in; they'll be sure to find the real culprits.")

That doesn't happen, which shocks and stuns Borlu and his colleagues. So he actually has to investigate this case -- actually has to do his job. (Which is the opposite of the standard police procedural plot, which usually sees obstacles thrown up to the detective at every turn.) But Borlu, partially because of the difficulties of investigating across cities, ends up spending most of his time dealing with more existential matters -- not seeing buildings and people and cars, not talking to suspects, not Getting Off His Ass and Knocking on Doors. It's reminiscent of mysteries set in corrupt and totalitarian societies, where the detective is just going through the motions until his superiors decide who the crime will be pinned on. But that's not going to happen here; if Borlu doesn't clear this murder, no one will.

So the case sees Borlu talking to the same people over and over, mostly about philosophical, existential issues of the two cities -- and, in particular, the semi-crackpot theory, which the dead girl may have believed, that there's a third city named Orciny hidden between Beszel and Ul Qoma. There's very little tracing of physical evidence, and hardly any serious interrogation of potential witnesses -- the murder is less the core of the plot than the Maguffin that Mieville uses to give Borlu an excuse to go first to Ul Quoma and then to more unexpected places.

The City and the City is a deeply frustrating book, one that has the lines of a mystery but continually thwarts all attempts to read it as one. But it's also not much more satisfying as a fantasy -- again, it has elements that read as fantasy, or hint at fantasy, but it collapses those as the book rushes to its conclusion. There are novels that take elements of two genres -- and often those are crime fiction and speculative fiction -- and work within both successfully. The City and the City, though, sets the genre conventions in opposition to each other, and oscillates between them, ending somewhere in the wastelands in between. It does have its strengths, and Mieville's muscular prose and compelling conception of the twinned cities make it a very readable, if ultimately frustrating book.

Book Marketing 101: Co-Op at The Chains

2009-07-08T08:30:00.004-04:00

This is the third in a series of posts about marketing books; the first two covered the various channels that sell books and Amazon.com.

And I'm very lucky in my timing, since the agent Nathan Bransford posted on Monday a great, long essay by a sales assistant named Eric (from one of the major trade houses), which covers in great depth how the national chains actually buy books, how sales reps prepare for and make sales calls, and how co-op works. So a lot of what I might have typed here is already available there -- I suggest any interested parties go there and read that essay, then come back.

I'm going to try to be short this week, and to go into further depth about the parts of the co-op process I find most interesting, or that I think are least understood by readers and authors. As always, comments and questions are very welcome.

More About Co-Op
I was going to start my Co-Op section this week by writing something like this:

Walk into your favorite bookstore. See all those tables up front? And the face-out bookshelves in the same vicinity? And the smaller tables in the large aisles, and the displays on the ends of rows, and the books by the registers? Those are all co-op placements; those books are all in those places because their publishers paid for them.

The process generally starts with the chain -- they create a calendar of promotions for a coming month or season. They do that pretty far out, too; I imagine the buyers and merchandisers at B&N and Borders HQs are doing their plans for the first quarter of 2010 now, if not further out than that. And that calendar is pretty predictable: every month (or as often as the slots rotate; this can be weekly or bi-monthly) there will be a "New & Notable" table up front, and another one for new paperbacks. A third table will be devoted to some seasonal or thematic category -- maybe Dads & Grads in June or Back to School in August.

It's a big calendar, with lots of entries in it. Besides the FOS (front of store) promos, there will also be in-section co-op opportunities -- maybe a big paranormal romance display with a Halloween theme in October, definitely a New Year promo in January with diet and exercise books. Every section will get some promo activity during the year, though obviously not all of them at the same time.

So the chain sends that calendar, with prices attached -- so much (in co-op dollars and minimum purchase units) for a placement in an in-section promo, and several times that for a FOS placement -- to the publishers. And then the publishers decide what they can afford, and what they want to go for.

Backing up for a moment, depending on the house, the sales force generally will find out about books because the editors or marketers have presented those books to them. (Either at monthly meetings, or in a big burst for an entire season.) For those authors who hate pitching and get annoyed that they have to do it, it might slightly mollify you that your pitch is only the first in a long string: authors pitch to agents, who pitch to editors, who pitch to marketers, who pitch to sales reps, who pitch to buyers. (Of course, it's not at all the same pitch at every step -- buyers care about very different things than editors and agents do.)

So: each publishing company, collectively, puts the list of promotions on one side, and the list of their publications for that period on the other, and starts matching things up. Inevitably, they'll run out of money before they run out of books -- not every book can get co-op (count the number of books in a section some time, and then the number of pockets on the end-of-row display), and so they'll prioritize, focusing on the books with the best chance of reaching the largest number of readers.

Eventually, the sales rep will call on the buyer, and, among other things, map out what co-op nominations that publisher wants to make for the period in question. The buyer will generally have to wait until all of the nominations are in from all appropriate publishers before being sure everything is set -- it's entirely possible to have thirty nominations for a table that will hold twenty books. (And the chain may decide to refuse other nominations for other reasons, as well -- the chain always has the final decision, though the publisher with a sure-to-be-in-heavy-demand title has a lot of leverage.)

In other words, co-op is a business negotiation like many others: two parties are each trying to maximize their benefits from the deal, and their interests are parallel but not necessarily identical. (The publisher would love to get a dedicated display space; the chain wants to have the biggest and best books no matter who publishes them. Both want to sell a lot of books, though the chain is generally agnostic as to which particular books.)

For authors, this process is really just FYI; you don't have any direct involvement in it. Obviously, you'll want your books to have the most prominent placement they can possibly get -- but so will every other author published by your company, and every author published by different companies. And you can't all get what you want; most of you will just get a buy to be placed in the appropriate section.

(And, sometimes, you won't even get that -- your book might get skipped.)

What you can do here is what you need to do in general -- write the best book you can, one with a real and sizable audience, get it into the hands of an editor (and maybe an agent, if you're in an end of publishing where that helps or is necessary) who is really enthusiastic about it, and follow their lead about what you can do to help them promote and publicize it.

You probably won't get front-of-store placement; most writers never do. And that's OK.

For readers: those books at the front of the store are there because a lot of people -- at both their publisher and the chain's headquarters -- thought that a large number of readers would want them, and some of those people were willing to pay handsomely based on that assumption.

Another One of Those Reading-Metrics Thingies

2009-07-07T13:19:00.004-04:00

This one comes to us from the wilds of LiveJournal, and it only really works in the wilds of LiveJournal, but luckily I have an avatar who is like a native there:

andrewwheelersf's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12
Average number of words per sentence:	33.40
Average number of syllables per word:	1.51
Total words in sample:	334
Analyze your journal! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

I have the vague feeling that I've scored higher than that in the past -- don't some of these have college-level ranking? -- but that's complicated enough for most purposes.

Wireless by Charles Stross

2009-07-07T08:30:00.004-04:00

Hard Science Fiction used to be all about wonder and amazement, about pushing the limits of knowledge and expectation. But that's been obsolete for some time; the rump Hard SF that we have these days has been formed by two generations of fannish nitpickers, the failure of the US space program, and an abiding sourness about mankind that has no single source I can detect. But that sourness is definitely real -- serious Hard SF is, more often than not these days, about the extinction of the human race, or the triumph of eusociality, or some other dreary outcome next to which "a boot stomping on a human face forever" is a cheery and optimistic ideal. (At least in Orwell, there are human beings, and what they do matters. In modern Hard SF, human beings are utterly pointless and due for extermination as soon as possible.)

Charles Stross didn't originate that mindset -- Greg Bear has been gleefully slaughtering mankind since the '80s, and Stephen Baxter's books are the purest exemplar of all of the myriad ways in which humanity can be snuffed out -- but he's one of the best writers of the New Gloom, and the kind of writer that crystallizes the obsessions of his generation. And so Wireless, his new collection of SF stories, is a catalog of all of the ways the the cold, remorseless universe is working to screw over humanity, as well as a slim pamphlet of the few possibilities available in that endless murky night.

It opens with "Missile Gap," his magnificent novella from the 2005 Gardner Dozois/SFBC anthology One Million A.D., a story that begins with one of the most expansive, possibility-filled premises SF has ever provided -- that the Earth of 1962, or an exact facsimile thereof, was plated onto an immense Alderson disc among hundreds of millions of other similar-sized worlds -- and then inexorably shuts down all of those possibilities, all the while explaining, in remorseless detail, why humanity is utterly, utterly doomed -- on this Earth as well as every other one that can possibly be conceived. It's a powerful, amazing story -- but it's also black as pitch.

The next story, "Rogue Farm," was from a theme anthology -- Lou Anders' Live Without a Net, which postulated contemporary or near-future worlds without an Internet -- and saw Stross postulate another one of SF's periodic conflicts between unmodified humanity and flashier new variants. In this case, a "farm" is a gestalt entity, on its way to Jupiter's orbit (shades of Varley's "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance," though without the isolation), though not without some serious destruction to the local English countryside along the way. The unmodified humans, including Stross's old-fashioned farmer protagonist, are not fond of these "farms." So "Rogue Farm" is another "transform or stagnate" story -- like Simak's "Desertion" -- that comes down, as this generation seems to do most often, on the side of stagnation as preferable to transformation; it's an awfully conservative message for a writer usually as cutting-edge and forward-looking.

"A Colder War" is next, and it's one of the great stories of modern SF, a reimagining of Reagan-era brinkmanship using the Cthulhu Mythos and a deep appreciation for the deep games that governments play. It's also one of the very chilliest stories in all of SF, as cold and inimical to life as the Plateau of Leng.

For a few years, the prestigious scientific journal Nature ran very short science fiction stories (they had to fit on a single page of the magazine) under the heading "Futures." Stross was one of those asked to contribute, and his Nature story was "MAXOs," an extended joke on SETI and the Fermi Paradox which I won't spoil here. It's a decent joke, for what it's worth.

"Down on the Farm" is a return to the milieu of Stross's excellent novels The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue (and a handful of other stories) -- another tale about Bob Howard, who is something in between an IT support geek and a secret agent for the British government, in a world where Lovecraftian horrors lurk just outside the spaces we know, ready to be summoned by the right mathematical conjurations -- and, as we all know, modern computers do math very very quickly. In this story, Bob has to investigate strange doings at the Laundry's captive, super-secret insane asylum. The Laundry stories are cousins to "A Colder War;" they start from many of the same premises but remain within the happy-ending tradition of genre fiction. That's about as hopeful as Stross's stories get -- that the multiverse is full of tentacled horrors that would be very happy to eat mankind's brains as a snack, but that it may be possibly to avoid them, at least for a little while, if we're very smart and lucky.

Stross occasionally collaborates on stories with other writers, and Wireless has one such story: "Unwirer," which he wrote with Cory Doctorow. It feels more like a Doctorow story than a Stross, with a very strong (even didactic) if-this-goes-on setup; it presupposes that the Internet and similar technologies were essentially outlawed in the US in the late '90s, with the usual result of what happens when you outlaw something. For a story only six years old, it struck me as being very much of its time, and already severely dated (besides being both tendentious and obvious to begin with -- it's grand theme is that information wants to be free and that the Internet is nice). Non-Americans regularly write SFnal versions of the US that I can barely recognize as a twisted version of the country I live in; I suspect my countrymen are just as bad writing about other countries. (Stross is British and Doctorow is Canadian.)

"Snowball's Chance" is a short deal-with-the-devil story with an awful lot of Scots dialect in it; it's amusing but very minor, and doesn't wear out its welcome.

For a change of pace, "Trunk and Disorderly" is a comedy, a translation of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster characters into what turned out to be a dry run for Stross's novel Saturn's Children. Stross makes his Bertie Wooster manque substantially more competent than the original, and he's too much of a hard SF writer to get as funny as these kind of characters can be, but the story is amusing and at least an order of magnitude less bleak than the others in this collection. (Though that bleakness is still off in the distance; Stross just doesn't seem to be the kind of writer who can do frivolity.) I didn't find it all that funny, though; Stross kept the tone only marginally less serious than his other works, and the Wodehouse influence came across mostly in speech tics and a vague aristocratic flavor. I don't think Stross has the essential affection for dumb aristocrats to do a really good Wodehousian story; it's a very rare feeling in the modern world.

And last in Wireless is a major new novella, "Palimpsest," a Time War story in the tradition of Asimov's The End of Eternity and Leiber's The Big Time and even Robert Silverberg's Up the Line (plus a thousand more). And is it as bleak as the rest? Well, the first mission of all agents of Stasis Control in Stross's telling is to murder their own grandfathers, and another major milestone in their training is when they murder their own two-seconds-shifted selves, so I have to say that there's not much sweetness and light here, either. In this long, long timeline, humanity repeatedly goes extinct -- generally after reverting to a hunter-gatherer level -- and is only saved by Stasis Control seeding a small population a few thousand years in the future from that particular cataclysm. There's no space travel, no singularity, no triumph of Man -- the height of civilization is barely a century above what we have now, and that is achieved regularly, only to be torn down over and over again. (As is depressingly frequent in stories like this, a current bugaboo is raised to the level of eternal inevitability -- thus, here, a "ubiquitous surveillance society" is declared to be the minimum requirement of a true civilization.) Our hero, Pierce, is one of the agents of Stasis Control, and settles into a happy life in an enlightened era far in our future -- until, of course, something unexpected happens, sending him away from that happy life. And, as required in stories about the time police, there's a shadowy enemy, which I will neither confirm nor deny has moles who are, or is itself entirely made up of, secretly rogue Stasis Control agents. "Palimpsests" is a dizzying, widescreen vision of all of the future of a mankind doubly doomed -- by its own limitations, to self-destruct repeatedly over and over and over, and by those damned Cold Equations of the physical universe, which will slaughter any survivors. It's a fine story, but I'm glad that no sharp blades were close to hand when I finished reading it.

If Hard SF ever has any trouble being gloomy enough, there's always the death of the universe, deep in the bag of tricks, to pull out whenever gravitas and depression are needed. And a writer with a Lovecraftian streak, like Stross, doesn't even need to go that far -- world-devouring horrors are always conveniently available in whatever unnatural angles are closest. Stross is without a doubt one of the most inventive and thoughtful writers in the modern SF idiom, and that makes it doubly unfortunate that his output so consistently takes the tone of battling to ever-so-slightly slow down the inevitable fall of night. Wireless collects some of the very best stories in modern SF, by one of the most important writers in the field -- but, collectively, they form a singularity of depression and bleakness from which no optimism can escape.

Prometheus Awards for 2009: Now With Added Aragorn

2009-07-06T21:08:00.000-04:00

The Prometheus Awards, which are given by the Libertarian Futurist Society and which routinely confuse those of us who think they're supposed to honor books with some connection to modern libertarian thought, have come around again. The 2009 winners -- who will each receive a plaque, to symbolize literary achievement, and a one-ounce gold coin, to symbolize the coming collapse of all governments and the rise of a goldbuggy libertoonian utopia (or something like that) -- are as follows:

Novel: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (my review)
Hall of Fame: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

That's darn impressive. The LFS has honored a lot of works with different political leanings before, but I don't think they've ever come down in favor of the divine right of kings before.

[via Locus Online]

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Listening to: Sinéad O'Connor - Paddy's Lament (live)
via FoxyTunes

Help Make the Worst SFF Cover in the World

2009-07-06T18:52:00.000-04:00

Orbit, the SFF imprint of the Hachette folks, knows that all of us on the Internet like to do nothing more than complain about cover art. But, unlike those other publishers, they're going to do something about it.

They intend to create the worst SFF cover ever.

Sure, the competition is high -- what about this German horror for a Lois Bujold novel? -- but I'm confident that they can do it. They will need your help, though: right now they're still looking for the perfect bad title.

So go to Orbit's blog and enter your suggestions for the worst possible SFF title. You might even find that someone has been there before you, with some titles (he said modestly) that are about as horrible as can be imagined.

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Listening to: Sly and the Family Stone - Everyday People
via FoxyTunes

Penguin UK Sending a Hundred Employees Packing

2009-07-06T18:24:00.000-04:00

The Bookseller has the full story, but here's the gist: they're doing a massive reorganization (after a "consultation," which I still think sounds very weaselly, though I'm prepared to change my mind if someone can point me to an instance where a company consulted and then didn't lay off the massive number they expected to), several very senior people are leaving, and there's a lot of talk about The Future!

They claim that this has nothing to do with the worldwide economic slump, and, if you believe that, I have this lovely bridge on the Thames that you might be interested in.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/4

2009-07-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

This particularly patriotic installment of "Reviewing the Mail" will be short; I only have a handful of books to write about. Every week, I start this off by writing something like "I list all of these books because I know I won't manage to read them all," but, this week, I probably could read all of these books before next week...if I ignore all of the books that have been piling up from previous weeks.

Anyway, hope your 4th was full of fireworks and hot dogs (if you're American), and here's what I saw in the mail:

Amefurash: The Rain Goddess, Vol. 1 by Atsushi Suzumi is the beginning of another manga series, and was published by Del Rey on June 23rd. Suzumi is the creator of the previous series Venus Versus Virus and Haridama: Magic Cram School; I've never heard of the first one, but I did read and review the latter. This story is set in a s mall town, somewhere out in the desert, where the requisite "ordinary boy", Gimmy, meets the local rain goddess, who is the girl on the cover. Wacky hijinks, of course, ensue. (But what kind of name is "Gimmy," anyway?)

Libyrinth is a young adult SF novel coming from Tor in hardcover tomorrow. It's credited to Pearl North, though the jacket biography tells us that North has written "a number of science fiction novels for adults" under another name, and that she lives in Royal Oak, Michigan. (So anyone who really wants to figure out who "North" is could do so -- and I also suddenly wonder if the name is a reference to "Andrew North"?) Libyrinth is set far in the future, on an alien world, where human long before built a vast, half-uncharted library. The main character is a young clerk to a Libyrarian, who has a secret talent. And the antagonists appear to be the Eradicants, who want to burn all books. I trust Libryinth isn't as obvious as it looks.

And last for this week is something else again, a book called G.I. Joe vs. Cobra: The Essential Guide, by Pablo Hidalgo. Del Rey is publishing it on July 7th, precisely one month ahead of the big movie in August. It's another one of those four-color, large-format guides to a fictional world, with lots of "dossiers" about the various characters and their guns, cars, and other equipment. And when I opened it to a random page, I found the Dreadnoks, which I suppose is a good sign. For those of you who like this sort of thing, you'll like this very much.

History Laid Bare by Richard Zacks

2009-07-05T08:30:00.002-04:00

The subtitle -- Love, Sex, and Perversity from the Ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding -- describes this book well; it's a collection of historical writings about sex and sexuality from 1400 B.C. to 1921 A.D, edited and with commentary from Zacks. It was published by Harper in 1995; I found my copy in a used bookstore in Charleston last fall, and I've been reading it before bed for the last month or two. (It seems to be out of print at the moment, but nothing is really difficult to find in this Internet era -- not at all like it used to be, the Hornswoggler harrumphed.)

History Laid Bare can be depressing if read straight through; earlier ages were not as enlightened about sex as we like to believe we are, so the selections come, more often than not, from "thou-shalt-not" laws, unpleasant religious leaders and humorless doctors, and are heavily disapproving. (There's a lot of memoirs and letters, as well, which tend to be happier about sex, but there's a lot of negativity in History Laid Bare.) But it is a fine historical survey of an area often neglected, and it collects dozens and dozens of "good parts" from various documents, many of them concerning famous figures. I don't know of any other book that does what History Laid Bare does -- Jack Murninghan's The Naughty Bits has a similar take, but it covers famous fiction -- and it does it well. It's a particularly good book for bathroom or bedside; it's great to dip into now and then.

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Listening to: Elizabeth Willis - One
via FoxyTunes

One of Many Half-Assed Stabs at Defining Science Fiction

2009-07-04T17:25:00.000-04:00

Today is the 4th of July, the national holiday of the USA, and, as such, I'd be unpatriotic if I did anything productive. So, instead, I'm digging into the archives for new Antick Musings content.

Over on the Straight Dope Message Board, in the year Four, there was a thread about Robert Harris's novel Fatherland, centering on the question of whether it was SF -- since it was, first, alternate history, and, second, published outside of the genre. (Though those weren't precisely the terms used.) I jumped in with these thoughts, lightly edited to make them read more smoothly in isolation:

This is a "definition of science fiction" conflict, and so cannot be answered definitively. But it looks like your definition of science fiction has, lurking somewhere in the hinterlands, a caveat that such stories cannot be about "characters." I'm not sure what you'd say that science fiction stories must be about, but my definition absolutely includes stories of character. (Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea," for example, is one of my all-time favorite stories and is purely a character piece.)

I'd say that, if a story's setting is fantastic in some way (alternate past, different present or postulated future), then that story is somewhere in the realm of speculative fiction. The specific type of setting -- a secondary world where magic works, for example, or a hollowed-out asteroid in the near future -- further defines what kind of speculative fiction that story is. A story can, of course, be more than one thing -- you can have a romance western SF tale set among the DNA-altered-cow ranchers of Mars, if you want -- and thus being one thing does not necessarily preclude a story from being something else. But a story set in an alternate history is science fictional because of its setting, no matter what else it might be. It might not be part of the modern commercial publishing genre of "science fiction" and it might not have a little rocketship on its spine in the library, but that's not the same thing as "not being science fiction."

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Listening to: Faith No More - Midlife Crisis (live)
via FoxyTunes

Completely Unfounded Political Speculations

2009-07-03T19:21:00.000-04:00

You thought this would be a slow news day, being the beginning of a three-day weekend? Hah! Sarah Palin, proving once again that she's such a loose cannon that no one can even predict what kind of things she'll be a loose cannon about, has resigned from the governorship of Alaska, giving no reason besides wanting to avoid being a lame duck. That's weird and unexpected, and I always like the weird and unexpected in politics.

And here's my probably biased and only vaguely formed expectations of what Palin will do now:

Run for President in 2012 -- that's the given.
Speak several times a month to adoring crowds at about $50,000 a pop, to get some money to cover her legal expenses and just buy nice stuff.
Hunker down and write her book, so it can come out early next year with the intention of influencing the mid-term elections.
Possibly join a major think tank -- she's not a lawyer, is she? if she was, I'd expect her to become a name partner of some big firm that does a lot of lobbying -- or similar Republican-dominated institution, for a steady salary of probably more than she made as a governor without many demands on her time.
Possibly start up a foundation or other organization dedicated to "making America strong again" or "fighting socialism" or something else red-meat sounding, which will serve to keep her in the news.

I really doubt she'll run for the Senate from Alaska in 2010; it sounds like she's friendly with the Republican incumbent, Lisa Murkowski. And moving to another state to run for the Senate from there wouldn't generally be a good political move, particularly for a politician as associated with her home state as Palin. (Not to say that she won't do that -- what's great about Palin is that she does crazy, self-destructive things like resigning sixteen months before the end of her term -- but that it wouldn't be a good idea for her long-term strategy.)

But what she won't do is hunker down at home quietly with her new baby; this move, if nothing else, is designed to let Palin get down to the Lower Forty-Eight much more often, if not permanently.

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Listening to: Marykate O'Neil - Nothing I Say Or Do
via FoxyTunes

Mapping the Web

2009-07-03T19:06:00.000-04:00

I was poking through my archives yesterday -- for reasons I can no longer remember -- and came across this post, in which I linked to a site that graphs other websites and posted the graph/chart/map of Antick Musings.

Well, that was over three years ago, so I thought it was high time to do an updated map. And here it is. I'm not sure what everything is, but I suspect the big blue-and-yellow puffball is the conglomeration of my posts about books. But I could be completely wrong.

Still: pretty, isn't it? I wonder if all blogs look like this?

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Listening to: Gretchen Phillips - Peola
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Away We Go

2009-07-03T18:45:00.000-04:00

Date Night has been very rare lately at the Hornswoggler house, but on Thursday -- perhaps inspired by the recent example set by Our President -- the children were bundled off to their grandparents for the night, so that The Wife and Your Humble Correspondent could go out to dinner and then a movie. The movie was Away We Go, which struck me as a belated thirtysomething reply to Garden State. (It has very little in common with Juno other than a pregnancy, despite what some marketers would have you believe.)

Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are an unmarried couple, but have been one for a long time. (They went to college together, and are now in their early thirties; they might even have been together that whole time, though the movie never says so explicitly.) Verona is six months pregnant with their first child, which was not precisely planned but is very welcome. And they're living somewhere cold and dreary -- I got a vague New England impression, but that's not important -- because it's close to his parents (hers are long-dead). But then his parents declare that they're moving to Antwerp for two years, and Burt and Verona realize that they can do their jobs (reinsurance broker and medical illustrator, respectively) anywhere.

So, in the grand American tradition, they set out to audition different places to live in -- Phoenix, because Verona's old boss lives there; Madison, WI, because Burt's cousin and a potential new job for him are there; and Montreal, where their best couple friends from college live. Away We Go sees Verona and Burt travel to each of those places in turn, and then to other places as well. Along the way, they learn that some people are really appalling in ways they wouldn't be able to stand, and that other people are not nearly as together and grown-up and organized as they had thought. (The undercurrent of the movie is Verona and Burt's low-key semi-panic about not having the roots and connections that they expect real adults would automatically have.)

In the end, they do find the right place, though it's a bit of a cliche. (And more than a little reductive, with an implicit "people should stay in their places" moral that doesn't entirely sit well in a movie about a casually interracial couple.) But it is a nice place, and they do like it, so it'll be just fine for them and their baby.

Away We Go is an episodic movie, with five entirely different small supporting casts, one for each of the places Burt and Verona visit, and it works mostly because all of the major characters are played by solid actors like Catherine O'Hara and Maggie Gylenhaal and Allison Janney, who take their occasionally broad parts and humanize them all. All of the people in this movie feel entirely real; you wouldn't want to be near half of them for very long, but they're very like real-world annoyances. Krasinski and Rudolph hold the whole thing together with a naturalistic grace and solid chemistry; they feel like a real couple, like people who have been together for a long time and know each other well. Away We Go isn't one of the great movies of the year, but it's a thoughtful, funny, touching movie for adults about adults, and there's always room for more of those.

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Listening to: Richard Thompson & Raymond Kane - Time Has Told Me [Live 1981]
via FoxyTunes

One Man's Relationship to His Cat

2009-07-02T15:11:00.000-04:00

There is a cat living in the same house as I do, and her name is Marbles. Now, she's not my cat, since I never wanted a cat and don't particularly like this one. But I have young children, and so a fur-bearing domestic animal eventually became part of the picture; I've kept it to one cat, and I intend to keep it that way.

Marbles, in my mind, belongs to my two sons. But they don't feed her, or change her litter, or even play with her very much -- she's just there, running around the house at random, in much the same way that they do. They do claim to love her.

On the other hand, I don't claim to love her, or even like her. In fact, I tell her quite often that I don't like her, but -- cats having a brain the size of a walnut and only a very limited capacity for understanding human speech -- that doesn't seem to have had any effect on her behavior.

Maybe she's more motivated by actions than words, though -- I am the one who feeds her nearly all of the time. No one else ever seems to notice that her food bowl is empty, or that she needs water. And I am the one who, every night, places the auxiliary food and water bowls in the basement and then entices her downstairs with greenies.

But, again, I don't like her, or give her any affection. And that recently brought me to a realization.

I am my cat's Wire Mother.

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Listening to: Bess Rogers - Travel Back
via FoxyTunes

What Antick Musings Readers Bought From Amazon Last Month

2009-07-02T08:30:00.000-04:00

I do want to thank everyone who buys something through my little Amazon link -- partly because I get a nickel or so out of every purchase, but mostly because I can then find out what you folks bought, and I'm a nosy guy.

I might examine Amazon purchases on a monthly basis from this point...or I might forget. We'll see. I was going to give all of the numbers, until I realized that would highlight just how pitiful those numbers actually are. So, instead, I'll just mention a couple of interesting highlights.

Unsurprisingly, most of the sales are books, and all of them this month were from Amazon itself rather than third-party sellers. Leaving out a few books where I know exactly who bought them and why, most of them are things I mentioned one way or another -- a whole slew of "Dresden Files" books, ten copies (!) of Marjorie Liu's Darkness Calls, P.J. O'Rourke's Driving Like Crazy, Jim Morrow's Shambling Towards Hiroshima. But a couple of you bought books I didn't expect, like the new collection of Terry Moore's Echo comic, or Dragonbreath or C.C. Finlay's Traitor to the Crown.

There was only one DVD this month, but it made up for its solitude by being utterly awesome in its randomness: The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia.

There were a few Kindle editions, but I'm not going to mention them; I noticed that I'm currently getting a 0% referral fee on them, and so even a million of them wouldn't make me a penny. Yet another reason for me to say "Screw e-books."

And there were a few single-track mp3 downloads, though, oddly, none of them had anything to do with anything I'd blogged about. (They were mostly songs from Fame, for whatever reason.)

There was even one hardy soul who bought one of those round shiny discs with music on it -- again, nothing I'd ever mentioned -- but it did have this impressive dude's scowling mug on it.

I have to figure out how to get more of you folks to buy boots -- the one month I got people to buy a couple of those it almost added up to enough to buy lunch with....

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Listening to: Midwest Dilemma - Sioux City
via FoxyTunes

Book Marketing 101: Amazon.com

2009-07-01T08:30:00.010-04:00

This is the second in a series of posts called "Book Marketing 101," about various things marketers like me do to promote books as well as about the things authors (and even other interested parties) can do to promote their own books. The first post in the series focused on the various ways books can be sold, this one looks at Amazon.com (and, to a lesser extent, other online booksellers), and the next one, I think, will be about the brick & mortar bookstore chains. Please feel free to leave comments or questions here, or to send suggestions for further topics to me via e-mail.

I'm just going to say "Amazon" from here on out: most of the things I mention will be essentially the same for .com and .co.uk and .ca, and probably applicable to .jp and .fr, and some of them apply as well to BN.com and Borders.com and Chapters.Indigo.ca. Some terminology and specifics may be different, though: you have been warned.

Amazon has turned into a massive emporium for selling nearly every consumer good imaginable, but it started as a bookstore, and many of us still think of it primarily as a bookstore. I'm going to be talking about it purely as a bookstore here, though I'm sure many of these marketing opportunities are available to other products as well.

Co-Op, or, What Your Publisher Might Be Able to Buy
If you're not in the business, you probably don't know -- or care -- much about co-op, and you have no reason to. Co-Op is short for "Co-Operative," as in advertising. The supposed purpose of co-op is for the retailer and the manufacturer to share the costs of advertising -- and it does work that way, some of the time -- but it's mostly used to refer to in-store placements of books, which (as you might guess) costs the retailer nothing but lost opportunity and can cost the manufacturer quite a lot.

For real-world stores, co-op is pretty straightforward: it buys placement of a particular book on a table at the front of the store, or on an end-of-aisle display, or in other promotions, posters, flyers, brochures, dedicated bays, and so on. Generally, it's money spent by the publisher to put a book in a particular, eye-catching, point in a store.

Online, there are no physical books, but the "eye-catching" aspect still applies. Amazon has a huge array of lists and feature boxes, a subset of which load with every pageview. Now, many of those are clearly driven directly by consumer behavior -- either in aggregate, like their bestseller lists, or individually, like the pieces that keep track of the last few books you looked at -- but some of them are available for purchase.

Co-op programs are big and complicated; your publisher runs them, and they're not likely to accept much input from the author on the subject. (They're also mostly run by the sales department, which is another degree of separation from you.) So please take this as explanation, and not as an invitation to jump in.

But here's the Amazon Books home page as of about 7:45 PM (EDT) on June 30th, 2009:

The red band near the top is a "site stripe," and that's co-op. So are the two boxes in the right-hand column. And the letter from Peter Workman about Workman Publishing is something similar as well (though that might not be quite as bought-and-paid-for as the more obvious advertising pieces).

Co-op is driven by the retailer: in this case, Amazon will tell the appropriate publishers what placements are available for some particular period of time in the future, and what they'll cost. The publishers then look at their lists, and at their budgets, and decide what they'll nominate for those promotions. Amazon gets in all of the nominations from all of the publishers, collates them, decides which ones they'll run (particularly if there are more nominations than slots), and then moves forward with those promotions.

Again, authors will have little or no direct influence here. But if you see your book in an obvious co-op slot, you should thank your marketer.

Data Mining, or, What Amazon Does All By Itself
And here's another Amazon screen shot, with some categories clearly driven by my recent browsing:
All of those sections -- even "Get Yourself a Little Something," which runs off the page and pulled in items from my Wish List -- are clearly dynamic and driven by an individual browser's history. Similar sections are on individual product pages, under headings like "Frequently Bought Together" and "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?" So Amazon's engines will show your book -- we all hope -- even when browsers are looking at something else, as long as previous browsers' behavior links the two.

(Please don't try to game this by clicking back and forth between your new novel and Twilight a dozen times; I suspect it takes a lot of people with a lot of different IP addresses to make a link.)

But the good news here is that Amazon is actively trying to sell more books, and it might well be yours that they'll sell. Later on, I'll tell you some things you can do directly to help Amazon's secret search/display algorithms bring up your book in the appropriate contexts.

Search Engine Optimization
Others have called Amazon a database business with a commerce engine bolted onto the front of it, and that's not far from the truth. Amazon does sell physical objects, but that's only one of their core competencies -- they're also very, very good at the business of the Internet. I routinely tell my authors that, unless they already have a robust web presence, the Amazon page for their book will quickly become their de facto homepage.

I note this not to tell you how to do your own SEO, but just to mention that Amazon has excellent SEO, and your book is tagging along with that. Google your book's name, or your own name, and the Amazon page will almost always be on the first page. (Unless you have the ill luck to be John Smith, and your book is The Thing.)

Tags and Tagging
Let's have another Amazon screenshot, from an individual product page:

(Click that to make it bigger.)

As I said, Amazon's algorithms are secret; no one on the outside knows exactly how they work. But we can observe how Amazon's searches behave, and, from that, it's clear that Amazon's searches are mostly driven by categories of customer behavior: what books customers are buying, what books they're clicking on, what books have the most and best reviews, and what books have the appropriate tags.

And the great thing about tags is that the author -- or agent, or marketer, or publicist, or significant other, or whoever -- can put them in as well. Every book starts out with a selection of potential tags with tick boxes: either tags others have already given this particular product, or tags from other, similar products. I strongly, strongly urge authors to type in as many appropriate tags as Amazon will allow, particularly with nonfiction. (Though, if you've written a fantasy novel with dragons and faeries and unicorns and wizards in it, those would be some darn good tags as well.)

You can also search by tags, look up the most popular tags, and quickly see how many people have given a book with a particular tag. They've very useful, so make sure you use them.

Reviews
I'm not going to give you a screenshot here; you all should know by now that Amazon allows customer reviews -- a reviewer only needs to have bought at least one product from Amazon once in your life, which is not an onerous requirement fifteen years in -- and that those reviews drive star ratings that appear right up at the top of a product page.

It's also clear that reviews drive much of the search algorithms; better-reviewed books do better in search. So it's in an author's best interest to keep an eye on the Amazon reviews.

However, Amazon also takes a very dim look on review fraud, and they try to get rid of it wherever they find it. (And no one can blame them; it's in everyone's interests for the reviews to be honest.) That means, to the author's benefit, that it's sometimes possible to petition Amazon to have egregiously personal or nasty reviews removed. But it also means that authors should not post reviews of their own books, or directly cause good reviews to be posted.

On the other hand, asking people who have already said nice things about your book to post an Amazon review is perfectly OK. What matters is that the reviews are honest, so, if at all possible, try to encourage people who really liked your book to say so, in public.

Categories and Lists
Besides the one big "Amazon Sales Rank" -- which you should all ignore, since it's no better than reading tea-leaves -- Amazon also often lists a book's rank in more specific categories. Those are worth keeping an eye on, since they show how your book is performing against other very similar books. (It's also worth checking out the books outselling yours in those categories and seeing if there any tags you can use, or other ideas you can adapt.)

I don't know if creating "Listmanias" and "So You'd Like To" guides are helpful for a book's sales, but I'm trying to do more of them myself. They certainly can't hurt.

Other Media
If there's an opportunity to put video or audio on your book's page, jump on it. And the more interesting that bit of "content" can be, the better. (Do you want to sit and watch someone read twenty pages from a book on a tiny screen? No? Then think of something more inventive for your book.) This will usually depend on your publisher, and will often be rolled up in "co-op" (above) -- but, if they come asking, it's a good idea to find a way to do it.

Amazon Connect
If I'd written this post three months ago, I probably would have led with Amazon Connect; now, I'm burying it near the end and including it mostly for the sake of completeness. Amazon Connect is a program that allows authors (after a quick sign-up and ID check through their publishers) to post blog-like content directly to Amazon.

That content can include videos, "why I wrote this book" ruminations, lists of upcoming speaking events or tour stops, or just about anything else. It can also be automated through an RSS feed if you already blog somewhere else. It was an amazing, wonderful program, and the posts used to appear on the book's page -- right where all of the traffic went.

Used to, unfortunately.

A few weeks ago, Amazon pulled the Connect blogs from the books' pages, and stuck them only on their new Author Central area. (Posts were previously appearing in both places -- really together authors could have had their Connect blogs appearing on all of their books and on their Author Central page.) Amazon doesn't release traffic figures, but we all have to assume that the Connect blogs are getting far less traffic than they used to. And so the marketers I know are no longer urging authors to sign up for this program. It's still useful, or can be, but it used to be great.

Those are some of the ways you and your publisher can affect book sales on Amazon; any questions or thoughts?

Read in June

2009-07-01T00:01:00.006-04:00

It was just another month, though it's not all that often that I turn 40. And these are the books I was reading when I hit that wall -- as usual, title links go to my reviews (here or at ComicMix) where applicable, or directly to the Evil Empire if there's a paragraph of text immediately below. (All "buy it?" links lead directly to the Evil Empire; there is no escape.)

Miss Lasko-Gross, A Mess of Everything (buy it?) (6/1)
Byun Byung-Jun, Mijeong (buy it?) (6/2)
Sun Jiayu & Guo Guo, The History of the West Wing (buy it?) (6/3)
Lawrence Block, Step by Step (6/3)
Yu Yanshu, Step, Vol. 1: Dynasty Tang (buy it?) (6/4)
Harry Bliss, Death By Laughter (6/5)
Bliss is a fine New Yorker cartoonist who also illustrates children's books -- Diary of a Worm and sequels had his art, for example -- and this was a book of his cartoons, mostly about death and dying, from 2008 and published by Abrams. It wanders away from the theme now and then, with cartoons about drugs, family, animals, and the usual New Yorker man-and-woman stuff, but that's OK -- who really wants to read 123 cartoons in a row about death by the same guy? I like Bliss's work, and so I found most of these to be funny. Others, with different tastes, may find their mileage differs.
Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right (6/6)
Michael Williams, Richard Cahan and Nicholas Osborn, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America (6/7)
The portable, mass-marketed camera is just over a hundred years old; this book is a collection of photos by ordinary Americans, of ordinary things and people and places, from the turn of the 20th century through about 1970. So it's a book of photography as cultural history rather than as high art -- though many of the pictures are very attractive and well-composed. It's most interesting just as a visual record, showing people as they lived and wanted to remember themselves -- posing in their houses, cars, and vacation destinations. I liked it, and it could be a great book for writers -- every picture could be the springboard for a story.
Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 36(6/8)
Continuing the in-between part of Naruto's story -- he's not as young as he was in the first twenty or so volumes, and he's not a young adult as he is in the current stories. And, of course, he's fighting and training, and then training and fighting. And then training while fighting, or maybe the other way around.
Michael Lewis, Home Game (6/8)
Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Andreas, and Stephane Blanquet, Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 2: The Dark Lord (buy it?) (6/9)
Peter Kuper, Stop Forgetting to Remember (buy it?) (6/10)
Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (6/10)
Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Boulet, Dungeon Zenith, Vol. 3: Back in Style (buy it?) (6/11)
Box Brown, Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing (6/12)
Matthew Loux, Salt Water Taffy, Vol. 1: The Legend of Old Salty (buy it?) (6/15)
Matthew Loux, Salt Water Taffy, Vol. 2: A Climb Up Mt. Barnabas (buy it?) (6/16)
Kage Baker, The Empress of Mars (6/16)
Ted Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin and the Prince of Nowhere (buy it?) (6/17)
Mike Dawson, Ace-Face: The Mod With the Metal Arms (buy it?) (6/18)
Lamar Abrams, Remake (buy it?) (6/18)
Bill Keltner & Wayne Shellabarger, Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance (6/18)
Fred Chao, Johnny Hiro (buy it?) (6/19)
JinHo Ko, Jack Frost, Vol. 1 (buy it?) (6/22)
KookHwa Huh & SuJin Kim, Pig Bride, Vol. 1 (buy it?) (6/23)
Svetlana Chmakova, Nightschool: The Weirn Books, Vol. 1 (buy it?) (6/24)
Mary Roach, Stiff (6/24)
NaRae Lee, Maximum Ride, Vol. 1 (buy it?) (6/25)
Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D., Vol. 10: The Warning (buy it?) (6/26)
Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (Vol. 2) (6/29)
OK, this series is just ridiculously enjoyable. Like the first volume, it's modern-day twentysomething slacker life as if it were also a video game. (There's a call-out to River City Ransom on about page twenty that cemented my utter but totally masculine love for Scott Pilgrim.) As before, Pilgrim himself is a very immature but lovable twenty-three year old, playing in a band and apparently having no job, living in Toronto. As he starts this book, he has two girlfriends, but he dumps (not all that well) the high-schooler Knives Chau in favor of Ramona Flowers, who he's sure will be the love of his life. But to keep Ramona, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends, so this book sees #2 -- Jason Lee, an ex-skater/actor -- track down Scott and fight him. The Scott Pilgrim books aren't nearly as age-specific as I thought they were; if you grew up in North America with video games and ever were or knew a slacker, you'll find a lot to grin at here.
Lewis Trondheim, Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome (buy it?) (6/30)

And that was that.

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Listening to: Jacob Golden - Revenge Songs
via FoxyTunes

A Mild Case of Amnesia

2009-06-30T15:23:00.000-04:00

Over at ComicMix, I reviewed Peter Kuper's Stop Forgetting to Remember. Now, you might be saying to yourselves, "Hey! That book is two years old! Is this some kind of re-run?" but the answer is no. It's a brand-new review of a two-year old book, just because.

Movie Log: Waltz With Bashir

2009-06-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

When Waltz With Bashir ended, The Wife said -- off-handedly, but with a slight edge -- "that was neither short nor funny." I pointed out that it was short, because it is, but I had to admit that there's nothing at all funny about it.

Ari Folman is an Israeli documentary filmmaker; like nearly all Israelis, he served in the Army when he was young, and Folman's service was as a combat soldier during the 1982 war with Lebanon. For about twenty years after, that didn't matter to him; he'd forgotten entirely about his war. But then -- in the semi-fictionalized timeline of this movie, in 2006 -- a conversation with a fellow ex-soldier started a series of dreams, or nightmares, or hallucinations, in which he and two other young soldiers rise naked out of the dark sea, walk into a Beirut shattered by shells and illuminated by slow-falling flares, getting dressed as they walk, and then run into a wave of wailing women.

So Folman decided to investigate his own war experiences -- to make a documentary about himself -- and he set off to interview various friends and comrades from that era. And, as he did so, his memories of the war came back -- but not the most important thing. He really wanted to know where he was during the Sabra and Shatila massacre (carried out by Lebanese Christian Phalangist forces under the winking eye of the Israeli army).

Waltz With Bashir is a sequence of talking head scenes, intercut with hallucinations and memories of the 1982 war -- but what makes it striking is how those scenes are presented. Folman animated the whole thing, in a crude web-style limited-animation mostly using Adobe, and gave it a palette that manages to be both washed-out (all grays and blacks) and high contrast (all yellows and blacks). In fact, the striking visuals almost manage to cover the fact that Waltz With Bashir has no real through-line and stops rather than ends, borrowing gravitas from old news footage -- shown as live action, unlike the rest of the movie -- before quietly stepping off-stage.

The title doesn't mean much, thematically -- it's from an interesting scene, near the end, but it doesn't refer to Folmer or his search...or the movie, or the massacre, or anything of real importance to the movie. It's the high point of someone else's life, I guess.

So Waltz With Bashir is an amazing-looking movie that doesn't quite live up to its visuals; Folmer never tells us what he learned about his possible complicity in the massacre, and perhaps he will never know. It's definitely worth seeing, but it tries to bury the fact that it doesn't answer its own question, which is bad form for any movie.

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Listening to: State Shirt - Up Up Up Up Up
via FoxyTunes

All of the Awards I've Neglected to Mention

2009-06-29T19:39:00.000-04:00

It's running into Awards Season, over on the ol' SFF Homestead, and I've been remiss in posting about them here. So I'll now round up all of the ones I can find, to have them in one convenient location, because I love my readers so much. (Or because it's getting near the end of a month, and I'm so obsessed with useless statistics that I'm trying to inflate my post count -- you guess which.)

John W. Campbell Memorial Award: (tie)

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (my review)
Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod

Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award: "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's 2/08)

2009 Locus Awards:

Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor, my review)
Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, my review)
Novella: "Pretty Monsters", Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)
Novelette: "Pump Six", Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)
Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins, my review)
Editor: Ellen Datlow
Artist: Michael Whelan
Magazine: F&SF
Publisher: Tor

David Gemmell Legend Award: Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski (Gollancz)

2008 Bram Stoker Awards:

Novel: Duma Key, Stephen King (Scribner)
First Novel: The Gentling Box, Lisa Mannetti (Dark Hart)
Long Fiction: Miranda, John R. Little (Bad Moon)
Short Fiction: The Lost, Sarah Langan (Cemetery Dance)
Fiction Collection: Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Scribner)
Anthology: Unspeakable Horror, Vince A. Liaguno & Chad Helder, eds. (Dark Scribe)
Non-Fiction: A Hallowe'en Anthology, Lisa Morton, ed. (McFarland)
Poetry: The Nightmare Collection, Bruce Boston (Dark Regions)

2009 Ditmar Awards:
Novel: Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)
(And I'll just link to the rest.)

Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award: Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko (Tor)

And did I ever mention the Clarke Award? (Was I slacking as far back as April?) Oh, what the heck, let's throw it on the pile:

Arthur C. Clarke Award: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod (PS Publishing)

Congratulations to all of the winners, and, to all of the runners-up: you were robbed, mate!
(All via Locus Online, where you would have gotten this news much, much sooner.)

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Listening to: A Camp - Love Has Left the Room
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/27

2009-06-29T08:30:00.003-04:00

This is a listing, with some comments, of books that arrived in La Casa Hornswoggler last week, primarily those mailed to me for review. I know I won't manage to review everything, so I do these lists to give a little attention to all of the books. And, as always, I appreciate comments from anyone who knows more about any of these books than I do.

And I'll start this week with a novel I probably should have read by now, but haven't -- Emma Bull's Bone Dance. It was originally published in early 1991, which means it got into the Science Fiction Book Club just a month or two before I did, and so I never read it professionally. It's subtitled -- at least in this new trade paperback edition from Orb -- "A Fantasy for Technophiles," and it was one of the earliest works to mix the then-just-bubbling-up rush of urban/contemporary fantasy with a neo-cyberpunky near-future. As the back cover notes, it was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, which is not peanuts. And this new edition will be officially available on July 7th.

On the other end of at least one spectrum from Bone Dance is my next book, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a novelization of the upcoming movie by Max Allan Collins. (To clarify: the movie isn't by Collins -- the writing credits alone list five people -- but the novel is.) As I've said before, I really don't know who buys the novels of big summer movies these days, since it'll be on BitTorrent in two hours and home video in two months. But somebody must be buying them, because here's another one. It's a mass-market paperback from Del Rey, and should be available wherever movie tie-in books are sold right about now.

I've also seen the first four issues of a self-published comic called Broken Lines by Tom Pappalardo, which is partly in comics panels and partly in stretches of illustrated prose. I won't try to characterize it further until I actually read it; this looks weird and completely idiosyncratic. These four issues are all currently available; the website for the series is here.

And then I have a few manga from Yen Press, coming in July and August:

Cat Paradise, Vol. 1 (July), by Yuji Iwahara, about a girl who has just arrived at a fancy private school to learn that she and her talking cat will be battling a nasty cat-demon as part of a generations-old curse. (For those of you playing Manga Bingo at home, be sure to mark the "private highschool," "ancient curse," "talking cat," and "spunky heroine" boxes.)
Tena on S-String, Vol. 1 (August) by Sesuna Mikabe, which is less likely to help your bingo card: a young music teacher was hit by a car, and comes out of his coma able to hear music everywhere and see notes surrounding people. So he's then accosted by "a haughty young girl decked out in frilly Gothic Lolita clothing," who demands that he serve her -- though she will, eventually explain the whole seeing-music thing. And I just bet that they go on to help various people with the troubles in their lives, as expressed in their musical accompaniment, like some odd Rock Band/A-Team mash-up.
Dystopia: Love at Last Sight (August) is that most unusual of manga: a stand-alone single story. This one is from Judith Park, who I believe is an ethnically Korean creator who lives in Germany and does comics in the Japanese style. This one has an awfully doom-laden title for a teenage love story -- the main character is a seventeen-year-old girl whose best friend is in love with her older brother. I expect there will be drama, but I'm not sure how it will add up to "Dystopia."
Cirque Du Freak, Vol. 2 (July) continues the adaptation of the first novel in the young-adult series by "Darren Shan" (the name of the main character). As with the first volume -- which I reviewed -- the story is credited to Shan and the art is by Takahiro Arai. And the subtitle of this volume, "The Vampire's Assistant," might give you a clue as to what young Master Shan is up to in this series.
One Thousand and One Nights, Vol. 8 (August) by Han SeungHee and Jeon JinSeok is...a series I've never read, and don't know much about. It has a vaguely Arabian Night feel and some manner of baroque love triangle in it; I know that much.

And then there's Wicked City: Black Guard, the first in a ten-volume supernatural horror series by Hideyuki Kikuchi, source of a classic anime movie and of an American remake currently in pre-production. (Kikuchi is also the creator behind Vampire Hunter D.) From a quick glance through, it looks like there's a lot of sex and violence in it -- and violent sex, and sexy violence, plus supernatural transformations and probably the inevitably naughty tentacles -- for those of you who like such things. It's coming from Tor/Seven Seas as a trade paperback in October.

I also have a neat-looking picture book here (you know, for kids!) called Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem. It was sent to me because the author, Mac Barnett, has connections to the McSweeney's empire, and they'd heard of me when I reviewed Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends (an absolutely gorgeous book, by the way, one well worth owning even if it didn't have a bunch of thoughtful essays inside it). But I'm also happy to see Billy Twitters because the art is by Adam Rex, writer-illustrator of the poetic picture book Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and the young-readers novel The True Meaning of Smekday. And this book? Well, let me quote the flap copy -- "A blue whale is longer than thirty dogs lined up nose to tail. It's tongue weighs as much as four hundred cats. Blue whalkes make terrible, horrible pets. Just ask Billy Twitters." It was published this month by Hyperion, and it looks like a lot of fun.

In March, I saw the first two books of Mark Chadbourn's "Age of Misrule" trilogy -- World's End and Darkest Hour -- and now I've just seen the third book, Always Forever. All three have really snazzy John Picacio covers, and they've been attracting fans of contemporary dark fantasy in the UK for the last decade, so why should this side of the Atlantic be immune to their appeal? Always Forever will be published in trade paperback by Pyr on July 7th.

And last for this week is a blad -- remember blads? they're pre-publication book-shaped pamphlets, eight or sixteen pages long, with sample pages from an upcoming book -- of The Book of Genesis, as adapted and illustrated by R. Crumb. The actual book will be published in October as a hardcover by W.W. Norton, and I imagine you'll all hear a lot more about it then. But, in the meantime, a few of us publishing insiders have the cover and ten random story pages to look at, so you must grovel before us.

Incoming Books: Comic Shop(s) Trip

2009-06-28T21:01:00.000-04:00

I hadn't been to my usual comics shop in close to two months, so I decided to hit it on Friday -- but, first, I checked out their competition -- Jim Hanley's Universe, on 33rd Street across from the Empire State Building. (I think Hanley's might be a better store for me in a perfect world -- it's organized as aisles of shelves, with books and comics mostly in alphabetical order by title, instead of having The Wall of new comics and everything else being secondary -- but it took me a while to figure out how it was organized or to find anything. It's a store desperately crying out for some signage.)

I went to Hanley's because there were a number of things -- three of which are listed below -- that I'd neglected to pre-order at my usual shop (Midtown Comics) and which I never ever saw there. So I finally got tired of waiting, and bought them at Hanley's. As life must always be ironic, though, there were a couple of books that I saw at Hanley's -- notably The Fart Party, Vol. 2, second collection of Julia Wertz's very funny webcomics -- that I didn't buy there, because I decided to let Midtown have my business on those...and then they weren't there, either. (You just can't win.)

Anyway, I went to two comic book stores within an hour, buying a pile of stuff for my sons and these things for myself:

Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, the second in the series by Bryan Lee O'Malley -- I liked the first one, so I figure I might as well catch up with it.

The Complete Peanuts 1971-1972 by Charles Schulz, of course. How could I quit now? This is one of the ones I've been waiting to find at Midtown -- I've even asked about it once or twice, but I'd never actually seen it in person.

Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome by Lewis Trondheim. Again, I really liked the first volume of this series -- this collects diary comics by the French comics creator, originally published (in French) on the web and then collected (in France) and then eventually translated for us monoglots. Again, I never saw it at Midtown despite looking a couple of times.

I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason -- after reading Low Moon in the New York Times Magazine and The Last Musketeer during Eisner deliberations, I thought it was about time I read some more Jason. And this is supposed to be his best book, so why not? I suspect I'm going to have trouble swallowing the background -- it's a world in which murder-for-hire is as common and legal as plumbing-for-hire, which strikes me as something that only really works in satire -- but I like Jason's deadpan wit, so I'll give him an advance on suspension of disbelief.

First Time written by Sibylline with art by various folks -- arty European comics about sex. I'm going to pretend that I'm a massive Dave McKean completest, and so I bought this for his story at the end of this book. Everyone else in the book seems to be identified only by first names, so either they want to distance themselves from this work or Euro-cartooning is utterly overrun by creators (like Jason, above) who have dispensed with the need for a surname. I wonder which it is?

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Listening to: Rilo Kiley - Accidental Deth
via FoxyTunes

Buy Windows 7 Now and Avoid the Rush

2009-06-28T18:01:00.000-04:00

I'm hoping that Windows 7 will be more successful than Vista, partly because I assume I'll be using Windows 7 at some point and partly for professional reasons I can't go into quite yet. Early reports are pretty good, so I'm quietly hopeful.

And it looks like the shipping date has stuck and will remain firm, which is usually a good sign. So, all in all, I think everyone reading this blog should click on the below banner and buy some expensive software that does exactly what their computers are already doing, only somehow nebulously "better." (Except for those of you, like me, on Macs -- Windows 7 is pointless to us.)

But here's that banner anyway, just in case:

Go buy it, or not, as you please. It looks like it's cheaper now, as a preorder, than it will be later, which may help you make a decision.

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Listening to: Sinéad O'Connor - I'll Tell Me Ma
via FoxyTunes

Stiff by Mary Roach

2009-06-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

Stiff was Roach's first book; she's since written Spook and Bonk, settling into a career as a writer of science books about odd things (after a previous career as a travel writer for magazines). Spook was about the afterlife, Bonk about sex, and Stiff investigates the various things that can happen to a human body after death -- in all cases, for primarily scientific purposes.

Roach has a jokey tone throughout, whether she's writing about the forty decapitated heads for a plastic surgery refresher seminar or the phenomenon of "beating-heart cadavers," brain-dead bodies kept alive so that their transplantable organs can be removed and implanted into other bodies. Cadavers, and pieces of cadavers, get shot, smashed in car wrecks, dissected by med students, burned, buried, treated to a "water reduction process," crucified, and even eaten as Stiff runs through its fairly comprehensive list of scientifically-useful things that can happen to a dead body. (Along with a few that are less scientific, along the way.)

I wouldn't suggest Stiff for anyone of a nervous disposition, or with a weak stomach. Roach doesn't traffic in gross-outs, but this is a three-hundred page book about dead bodies, and all of the consumers of cadavers she writes about here use cadavers because one can do various traumatic things to a dead body without killing it. So, strictly speaking, there's very little gore -- since blood is drained from these bodies, as Roach explains in an early chapter -- but a lot of blunt-force trauma, careful incisions, and examinations of the innards of a large number of the formerly living. Roach is a lively writer who can whistle past the graveyard for her country, and she does so here -- you may be disconcerted or made uneasy by parts of Stiff, but you'll never be bored.

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Listening to: Oingo Boingo - Fill The Void
via FoxyTunes