HELP 8: Retro

The HELP has reached Estleman's 2004 novel about Detroit PI Amos Walker, which means I'm almost caught up -- only two more novels to go.

This is another Ross Macdonald-style plot, mixing a 1949 murder with one in the modern day. (And, of course, the two are very closely linked.) Neither of the murders actually take place in Canada, but there is a strong Canadian connection, which is required in the pure Ross Macdonald special.

Walker is hired by a dying whorehouse madam (retired) to deliver her ashes to her adopted son, who disappeared in the late '60s after getting caught up in an anti-government group and briefly appearing on the FBI's Most Wanted list. She dies, Walker gets the ashes, and the son turns out to be in Canada, not too far away and not too hard to find.

But then, of course, things get complicated: that modern murder I alluded to above happens, and both a county cop and a New York mobster get interested in Walker for different reasons. There's even an old-fashioned gangster's moll, who turns to Walker for help. (But, if you look at that title again, you'll see that Estleman is not unaware of what he's doing.)

The Amos Walker novels from Forge so far are not terribly ambitious, as if Estleman has decided that the audience for such "retro" books is minor and so he needs to conserve his energy. They're still pleasant mysteries, but there's now a self-consciousness in their old-fashionedness, as if Walker isn't really in the modern world at all, but is just pretending. I don't think Estleman needs to give him a wisecracking, computer-savvy sidekick (in fact, I'd strongly argue against it), but I do think Walker himself needs to engage in the modern world.

Walker is a PI much in the mold of Macdonald's Lew Archer: he has no apparent hobbies, family, or friends outside of work. It's not simply that we only see him at work; we see that work is all there is of him. I'm not saying that Estleman needs to completely break away from that paradigm, but...Walker has been around for nearly thirty years and twenty books, so it's high time for him to have something in his life besides the latest murder.

Blogalyization In Progress

This isn't quite a meme, since it supposedly is based on actual facts and numbers, but I got it from Neth Space:

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 16.
This suggests that your writing style is intellectual
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).
Your blog has 11 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by complexity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 58% male and 42% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

One Part Test, One Part Mindless Sheep

First: Blogger recently added a button to embed videos, and I haven't tried it yet.

Second: everyone else in the world is linking to "that Butt-Biting Bug song." So who am I to stand out from the crowd?


(Actually, I'm not even using Blogger's button, since YouTube gives me a nifty bit of code to embed it directly. But it still counts as a test, since I've never put a video up before.)

Quote of the Week

"Life is a lot like baseball. It's boring, takes forever, and, if you're not paying attention, you could get hit in the face with a ball."
- Warren Thomas

Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Weapons & Technology

This is credited as "text by W. Haden Blackman; all new full-color illustrations by Ian Fullwood." It was published in 2004, so it's not all that "new" anymore; it was sitting in my pile for a few years. It's a large-format (about 8 1/2" x 11") guidebook to the weapons, defenses, and other random technological doodads of the Star Wars universe, each generally presented as a two-page spread with a big picture and a lot of in-story technological and historical details.

I generally like fake non-fiction, but this is steeped a bit too much in technobabble for my taste. It also almost seems like an artifact from the Star Wars universe -- which would be good -- but doesn't quite go all the way down that route by adding dates and fake references, which would be better. Or, if it went the other way, having references to the movies, books, comics, etc. in which these items actually appeared would also be useful. Without either kind of reference -- fictional-world or real-world -- it all seems somewhat detached.

Actually, The New Essential Guide reads a bit like a gaming reference manual without the numbers. I should add that it's very detailed and well-researched; this is the gold standard of media tie-in fake non-fiction. I just wish there had been a bit more in the way of specifics and references, and not quite as much bafflegab about blaster gas and power requirements.

This time around, the illustrations are nearly photo-realistic and seem to have been done with Photoshop. I'm afraid I liked the more illustrative look of the earlier versions much better -- these are good illustrations, but they just don't quite do it for me. Can the Uncanny Valley apply to physical objects? Because a lot of this stuff looks like video-game props -- well-rendered, believably solid, but not "real." (My complaints might not be entirely fair; I love schematics and that was the art style of the original edition.)

So, all in all, I found this just a bit disappointing, but it certainly does what it intends to do, comprehensively and seriously.

SFWA's Andrew Burt Shows His Worth Again

If you haven't read the Boing Boing story, go there first. (And then to Toby Buckell's place.)

Is it polite to ask why someone who doesn't seem to have very little (if any) professional writing to steal is so hotted up about piracy?

I do wish SFWA would stop re-arranging the lifeboats with a hatchet and start doing something constructive. They might help individuals, but they seem to be doing only bad things for the field and the reputations of SF/Fantasy people.

Welcome to the Land of Wishing-Makes-It-So

Background: Night Shade Books is launching a new original anthology series, completely unthemed, under the editorship of the fine Jonathan Strahan. Eclipse 1 will be published in October.

And, yes, I am surprised -- the original anthology has been dead as a dodo for a good generation now, despite several attempts to revive it, all of which tanked quickly. Doing something like this in the first place is a brave and quixotic venture in the name of short SFF...which, naturally, means that the response from the peanut gallery will be bizarre, hostile and utterly off-track.

So, then: this is the cover of Eclipse 1.

And this is the response by a certain segment of fandom.

I am gobsmacked by the idiocy shown in some of those comments.

"I thought Maureen F. McHugh and Gwyneth Jones were more likely to help sell a collection than Lucius Shepard or Jeffrey Ford."

No offense meant to any writer, but that is seriously out of touch with reality.

"But I am not going to assume there was definitely sexism involved. There could be many other reasons for chosing those names which might be perfectly innocent."

I hardly know what to say to such a ba-lamb. If a grown person doesn't realize that the point of a book's cover is to sell that book, and not to make the membership of the Eternal Floating Internet Wiscon feel warm and fuzzy, there's nothing I can do to penetrate such a very thick skull.

"I think the logic was probably "put the biggest names on the cover". Whether or not the names chosen are indeed the biggest names, or whether it might have been better to sacrifice one or two of them to avoid leaving half the audience feeling shut out, I leave as an exercise for the reader."

Half points for realizing the point of a book is to sell copies. Said points lost for implicitly assuming that men only read male authors and women only female. Also note that apparently any female author is as good as any other -- Anne McCaffrey or Jane Doakes, a girl is a girl is a girl.

A book is a commercial enterprise; it succeeds or fails based on its ability to get people to give up their own money for it. All authors are not equal, and their gender rarely enters into it. (Danielle Steel trumps most men this side of John Grisham. Matter of fact, the biggest fiction writers have tended to be female for quite some time now.)

"Depends on who I want my market to be. If I am me, I want to appeal to people looking for the cool new women writers, while still pulling in the folks who don't know who they are. So Beagle, Wilce, McHugh, Jones, and Nix."

Translation: it's not my money, and I know nothing about what writers are actually selling books to real people. Also note that Gwyneth Jones (born 1952, first published 1977) and Maureen F. McHugh (born 1959, first published 1989) are "new."

I won't even try to quote from the replies to Jason William's attempt to explain how publishing works -- he knows what he's talking about, and the commentors don't, but they refuse to accept that. There are quite a number of female writers, in this field, who would be better selling points than the names on the cover of Eclipse 1...but they're not in the book, so advertising them would be a Bad Thing.

And so Fan Entitlement raises its ugly head yet again. But it's OK, since the original anthology will die a lingering death yet again, and they can move on to complaining about how all of the important planets are named after men or something.

(Didn't I complain about something much like this before? Oh, yeah.)

I Think I've Just Been Insulted...

This meme I picked up from the rec.arts.sf.written Usenet group, so no direct link:

Mischievous and self-interested, you are happy to take from others whatever matches your cunning interests.

Mind tricks don't work on me. Only money!

Watto is a character in the Star Wars universe. The Star Wars Databank has more information about him.

Movie Log: Puccini for Beginners

The Wife and I saw Puccini for Beginners last night, because it was short, available quickly from Netflix, and a romantic comedy. It's about lesbians in New York, and nothing makes boring suburbanites feel more cosmopolitan than watching movies about interesting quirky urban people (and twice yelling upstairs at the kids to go to bed along the way).

It's a quite short movie (an hour twenty-two, including end credits), and a bit fluffy, like the unacknowledged child of Friends and Kissing Jessica Stein. I can't see anyone getting terribly worked up about it, either for or against, but it's a pleasant film that looks like it cost more than it actually did.

Our main character is Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser), who breaks up with her girlfriend Samantha (Julianne Nicolson) early in the film. Well, it's Sam that does the breaking up, actually, because Allegra has a Problem Committing. (Several other characters, including Allegra's best childhood friend Molly and best ex-girlfriend friend Nina, also comment baldly about this element of Allegra's psychological makeup, in case we missed it.)

Allegra then separately falls into affairs with Philip (Justin Kirk) and Grace (Gretchen Mol), without realizing at first that Philip and Grace were previously a couple. (And there are plenty of things to nitpick about this movie, but the way that Allegra ends up involved with Philip -- a man, need I add? -- seemed quite reasonable to me.)

Allegra eventually learns what she's done, and then it all unravels -- well, we know it all unravels, since the unraveling takes place in the movie's first scene, before it flashes back to the rest of the plot. But, as this is a romantic comedy, all comes out all right in the end.

The main problem with Puccini for Beginners is that Allegra is a bit whiny and self-obsessed; one might wonder what Philip and Grace saw in her. (On the other hand, she's cute and apparently a lot of fun to be with, so it's not implausible while you're watching the movie.) Other than that, this is a fine movie -- the dialogue isn't quite as witty and pointed as it could be, but it's pretty good; and Justin Kirk has an odd manner as Phillip through most of the movie, but he is supposed to be a philosophy professor, so we expect him to be not quite right. As I said, there are things you can nitpick about it, but it's a small-scale, low-budget comedy about realistic urban people, and it does that pretty well. It could have used a little more room to breathe, and perhaps a bit more depth to the secondary characters, but it does what it sets out to do perfectly well.

Three Days of Links

Because I haven't posted nearly enough times today, here's what I've been doing at ComicMix this week:

• Monday Again
• Completely Random
• Happy Birthday, Jack Kirby!

The Players

I know I have plenty of readers in the business, so I hope I'm not the last one to see the Publishers Weekly/Livres Hebdo listing of the biggest publishing companies in the world (posted by Richard Charkin of Macmillan UK).

For those of us maniacally focused on the US trade business, it's interesting to note that Bertelsmann (parent of Random House) is #4.

HELP 7: Poison Blonde

The 2003 Amos Walker novel was the first from Forge, Estleman's current publisher, and sees the HELP project coming into the homestretch.

There are two problems with Poison Blonde from HELP's point of view: the minor one is that it recycles quite a bit of plot set-up from Sweet Women Lie. In Sweet Women, Walker is hired by a washed-up actress for a job that turns out to be a test to see if he can do the real job. And, in Poison Blonde, a sexy blonde Latina pop singer who is most certainly not Shakira (perish the thought) named Gilla Cristobal does the same thing. The plots diverge pretty quickly after that, so it's only a minor complaint.

The major complaint is, however, a huge plot hole. Gilla tells Walker that she has a Deep Dark Secret in her past, and she would be deported to Unnamed Carribean Island Hell-Hole if it comes out, and she would certainly be judicially murdered there.

I'll need to underline these next few points, and their connections:

• She tells him this in Detroit.
• Detroit, which is in sight of, and easy driving distance of, Canada.
• Canada, the nation that would no more give up a beautiful fugitive to a brutal totalitarian regime than it would fail to say "Thanks, eh" to compliments about Tim Horton's donuts.

(And that all assumes that the US government would be eager to ship a rich, popular, successful, gorgeous singer off to a third-world hell-hole to her near-certain death, and that the public wouldn't be outraged. This book is set in February of 2002, so I'll grant Estleman that...but forgetting about Canada is unforgivable.)

Anyway, Poison Blonde (which should have been titled The Lincoln Question, but never mind that) gets tangled up with a new murder and a murder many years ago in a foreign country (Ross Macdonald Disease popping up again), and an old enemy of Walker's turns up as well. I kept expecting spies to pop out of the woodwork (as they did in Sweet Women Lie; another parallel), and I think I shouldn't say whether they do or not.

Other than that one unforgivable hole at the very center of the plot, Poison Blonde is a solid, twisty mystery novel, another strong entry in a consistent series. I've got three more of these to read, and I'm not tired of them yet.

Movie Log: Becoming Jane

My wife is not a big reader, as I might have mentioned. But she's a medium-sized Jane Austen fan, so we had to go see Becoming Jane this weekend. I'm not a big enough Austen fan to explain exactly how this movie was hogwash, but I could detect quite a bit of pig-soaping going on, so I'm sure someone already has done that, somewhere on the Internet.

(For just one thing, I'm pretty sure Austen didn't even start to write Sense & Sensibility until a good decade after this movie was set. And, while I in no way begrudge two hours looking at the radiantly lovely Anne Hathaway, I believe Jane was somewhat plainer and less outgoing.)

It follows exactly the well-trodden Period Movie path you expect it to, stealing widely but not well from Austen's best-known books, like the world's prettiest, best-corseted magpie. Every time it has a chance to make its own, idiosyncratic way, it slips back into doing exactly what you thought it was going to do. Every chance it has to try something interesting is studiously ignored.

(For example, Austen's great love -- the young, poor Irish lawyer Thomas LeFroy -- clearly is only interested in seducing her at first, and a cynical viewer like myself has no reason to believe that his protestations of deep and abiding love later on aren't simply another tactic to get her into bed. The real-world Jane Austen would be very familiar with that type, and would have something -- veiled and proper, yes, but cutting -- to say about it. In this movie, we're apparently meant to simply believe that Jane is so amazingly wonderful that his intentions are now purely honorable.)

(And, for another, her other suitor -- whom The Wife and I have taken to calling "Lurch," since we forgot the character's name -- is actually much more interesting, and seems closer to what little I know of the historical Austen's character. But he's not a great talker and doesn't like to dance, which means he's doomed in a Period Movie.)

This is a very pretty movie, and looking at Anne Hathaway for two hours is a very pleasant way to spend time. Serious Janeites will probably hate the liberties the plot has taken, but, for those of us married to people who love Period Movies in all their splendor, this is a decent example of that not-particularly-exalted form.

Wordless Growl of Frustration

All of my phone calls -- today and nearly every other weekday recently -- are bored telemarketers or chipper recordings trying to sell me a new mortgage (with one odd phone survey about wills from a local news organization thrown in for spice). These are not the people I want to call me...

HELP 6: Sinister Heights

And Sinister Heights was the last "Amos Walker" novel from Mysterious Press; I hope he moved on because he got a better offer from the new publisher (Forge), not because Mysterious dumped him. This was the new book for 2002.

The family of Commodore Leland Stutch, the fictional auto and petrochemical magnate whom Walker met (at the age of a hundred-and-something, soon before his death) in Downriver, makes a reappearance here. This time, Stutch's much younger widow hires Walker to find a bastard child of the old Commodore -- from long before her time -- and cut the bastard girl in for a small share of the family fortune. (The widow is doing this, she says, to forestall a potential suit for a large share of the fortune, as that side of the family keeps increasing -- the child has grown up, and has had a daughter who in turn grew up, married, and had a young son.)

Walker finds the bastard daughter without much trouble, but the next generation is a bit trickier to uncover -- and digging them up leads to car crashes, murders, accidental deaths, kidnappings, and a final exciting but unlikely confrontation on the site of an auto plant fortified like a castle.

This is one of the best of the Walker novels, even if the ending gets a bit large-scale for a private-detective story. If anyone out there is looking to try this series, I'd recommend this novel. Walker doesn't insult anyone for no good reason that I can remember, and there are interesting and varied female characters. It's got a great atmospheric cover, and one of the better plots of the series. If this book did get him dumped by Mysterious, that was a damn shame.

No Comment

Reuters on Bertlesmann's Direct Group.

Hopeless Savages by Jen Van Meter, Christine Norrie and Chynna Clugston-Major

Hopless Savages is a graphic novel written by Jen Van Meter, illustrated by Christine Norrie (with some flashback sequences illustrated by Chynna Clugston-Major), with original covers by Andi Watson. I really wanted to like this, partially because I went to college with Van Meter and partially because I want to enjoy the books I read. But it ended up being a bit too "comic-booky" for me in the end.

What do I mean by that? Well, in mainstream American comics, the way to solve a problem -- any problem -- is to hit somebody in the face. Fifty years of the increasing domination of superheroes has ground in the idea "comics = fight scenes" so deeply into our mental fabric that no detergent can get it out. (Forgive me, I'm doing laundry as I type this.) Hopeless Savages started out like a story about people with real lives, and ended up being about punching The Bad Guys in the face to solve all of the protagonists' problems.

Hopeless Savages is the story of the four children of punk superstars turned suburban middle-class homeowners Dirk Hopeless and Nikki Savage. The kids have the names Rat, Arsenal, Twitch, and Skank Zero. (The last engages in made-up pseudo-curses all of the time, as well.) So far, the self-indulgence level is high, but tolerable. But the plot is kicked off by the parents being kidnapped (for what turns out to be an utterly inadequate reason), and so the three younger children have to "re-program" Rat to be A Punk, so that they can go and beat up the people who took Dad and Mum. Oy. The plot is pretty generic "regroup the team and investigate the Deep Dark Secret in the Past that we allude to but never explain," with added punkitude for flavor.

The punk-ness of the protagonists strikes me as entirely being on the level of a pose -- they seem to be serious about their music, don't do drugs or engage in other self-destructive acts, live in what looks like a very comfortable suburban setting, and seem to have no discernible politics. The extent to which they are "punk" is entirely clothing and attitude -- and, yes, attitude does go a long way with punk, but I think this is a bit too far.

The short form: I didn't believe in these characters. They're supposed to be fun caricatures, yes, but they didn't work for me even on that level. And the whole face-punching thing struck me as a bad direction from the beginning, but that's my prejudices speaking. Sorry, Jen; I guess it just wasn't for me.

Movie Log: Cashback

Cashback is a pleasant movie about a young man who is a nearly complete wanker, a film which tries desperately to mask its mildly exploitative softcore heart under soulful narration and seriousness of purpose, and basically succeeds. It also has quite a lot of lovely female nudity in it (all absolutely necessary for the plot, luckily), which The Wife and I both appreciated. And it's the expansion of a short film -- from what IMDB says, the entirety of the short of the same name is embedded in the feature-length Cashback.

Sean Biggerstaff plays Ben Willis, a third-year student at an art college somewhere in the UK, who has just broken up with his girlfriend, Suzy (Michelle Ryan). Although he seems to have been the one behind the break-up, he's taken it badly. Very badly. Hard-to-believe-even-in-a-comedy badly.

He stops sleeping entirely due to his ennui and malaise, and mopes around (narrating intensely) for about two reels. (Luckily, this also includes some pleasant flashbacks and some scenes with Ben's best mate, Sean Higgins (Shaun Evans) -- who is the usual wacky best friend required for every soulful young movie hero -- so it's not unrelieved oh-woe-is-me.) Since Ben needs money, and has an extra eight hours in the day to waste, he takes a job on the night shift of a Sainsbury's supermarket.

There's the expected motley crew of misfits and oddballs working at the market, including the requisite megalomaniacal manager, Mr. Jenkins (Stuart Goodwin). There's also, apparently, only one woman, Sharon Pitntey (Emilia Fox), who is young and pretty and for whom Ben falls as quickly as you'd expect. (Ben should be about twenty or twenty-one in this movie, but he has the emotional maturity and steadiness of a particularly tormented twelve-year-old.)

But I'm getting a bit ahead of the plot (and the point). Ben's narration (which isn't as self-obsessed and moody as it could be, though there is a bit too much of it) points out that each of the night-shift oddballs has a way of dealing with the long stretches of boredom at night, and Ben's is...that he's learned how to stop time, to freeze the world around him. And he uses that ability to undress attractive women in the aisles of the market and sketch them. (So it's creepy, but, compared with all of the other things he could potentially do with that power, it's only mildly creepy. And Ben is such a sad sack that he doesn't come off as a predator.) And this is where the nudity comes in, as you may have guessed. This sequence -- about how everyone deals with their time at work -- is apparently the original short.

The plot of Cashback is a bit thin: Ben loses girl, Ben gets job, Ben discovers power, Ben falls for new girl, Ben eventually gets a girl after travails. Even the "travails" section is pretty standard, with some conflicts with a co-worker, the big (soccer) game against a rival store, and, finally, a big party with all of the characters present. But it's pleasant, and the actors -- none of whom I recognized from anything else -- are all solid.

There's only the one major montage of Ben sketching half-naked shoppers (from the original short), but there's a couple of scenes of strippers, and one of a Swedish exchange student from Ben's ill-spent youth, for those who like such things. (I see the British are still obsessed with the sexual availability of Swedes, for whatever reason.)

I wish the plot had a bit more originality to it, and that perhaps Ben had been allowed to have a more original personality. (Perhaps he could have been not so obviously a "nice guy" -- seeing as how his major leisure activity is taking advantage of unknowing women -- which could have given him scope for more interesting actions.) And the very obvious lesson at the end was unnecessary and corny. The movie is also puffed out by Ben's narration; you can feel that there wasn't quite enough story for a feature, but the filmmakers got around that by having Ben talk everything to death.

Still, this is the first feature-length film from writer/director/producer Sean Ellis, so you have to give him credit: it's an original idea, handled pretty well and turned into an entertaining movie. If he can get better from here, he could do a lot of great work. And this is a pleasant, entertaining romantic comedy with a new angle...and a lot of nudity. It could be a great date movie for the right kind of couple.

HELP 5: A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

2001's Amos Walker mystery was the fourth from Mysterious Press, and the first this century. It also marks the halfway point in HELP; I have five more novels after this one.

Downriver had a backstory involving the 1967 Detroit race riots, but Smile goes further back to the 1943 race riots, and a (I presume fictional) hero cop who emerged then. Walker is hired by a devastatingly sexy female book editor from New York (I fear he's indulging in the most obvious stereotypes here) to find a missing author. Eugene Booth wrote a bunch of pulpy paperback originals in the '40s and '50s, the best of which, Paradise Valley, was a fictionalization of the '43 race riots and which the sexy editor had a contract to republish. Booth apparently changed his mind, and then disappeared.

There's also a reformed Mafia hitman in the book; he turned state's evidence, ratted on his bosses, and is on tour with a book about his life and murders. Walker searches for Booth, finds the hitman, and then things get complicated.

This turns into another Ross Macdonald-esque novel, with a murder from twenty years ago in Canada fifty years back becoming entangled in new deaths. As always, Walker solves the various cases.

I don't know how many different ways I can say it: Estleman is old-fashioned, but in the best ways, like a big 'ol muscle car, all solid steel and gleaming chrome. He doesn't take the hardboiled idiom to the point of parody (like Spillane and his ilk), and doesn't exactly update it to the modern day, but he does set his stories in the real world, among real people committing real crimes, and uses that structure to probe the limits of what people are capable of under pressure. And A Smile on the Face of the Tiger is another darn good Amos Walker novel.

Movie Log: Happy Endings

The Wife and I are on a roll: we got two movies at the beginning of last week, and actually watched them both together! (Of such little triumphs is a life made.)

Wednesday night was Happy Endings time; it's an overly-narrated dramedy that has some good performances but takes itself a bit too seriously. It's aiming, I think, to be the gay version of Crash, with somewhat more humor.

Lisa Kudrow and Steve Coogan play step-siblings, and each anchor one of the three loosely related plotlines of the movie; it starts with a brief, surprising scene in the present day, and then flashes back for a couple of quick scenes in the mid-80s (when they were in their teens), but then returns to the modern day for the rest of the movie. Kudrow's character learns that a blackmailer has information on the son she gave up for adoption back then, and so she and her masseur boyfriend try to scam the blackmailer with a film project about the masseur giving rich women "happy ending" massages.

Meanwhile, Coogan's character, now gay and in a long-term relationship, suspects that a lesbian couple did use his partner's sperm to conceive their young child -- they claim that they tried it, but that it didn't work, so they went on to use anonymous sperm from a sperm bank. As one might expect, poking into such things makes more secrets spill out before long.

And the third plot centers on Maggie Gyllenhaal, a vixen who seduces a young gay virgin after getting a gig as fill-in singer with his band, and then trades her way up to the young man's father (Tom Arnold), a rich and successful businessman. Her story doesn't work out quite the way she'd like, either.

The three stories intersect a little, but not all that much; the movie mostly shuffles among them. This movie also seems to be scared to death of voice-overs; there are extensive explanatory captions on screen throughout the movie that could easily, and more gracefully, have been voice-overs.

Happy Endings isn't a great movie, and it isn't consistently a comedy (as it looks to be), but it has moments of drama and humor, and a large cast of good actors who all have solid material to work with. It's a bit diffuse, and requires more reading than you'd expect of a movie in English set in LA, but it tells its stories well and its worth a rental for people who like character-driven stories.

HELP 4: The Hours of the Virgin

For the second time, I have a scratch: The Witchfinder, Estleman's 1997 book in this series (the second from Mysterious Press), wasn't easily available. So HELP 4 is instead the 1998 novel The Hours of the Virgin.

The title refers to several pages of medieval illuminated manuscript; as usual, there are no real-world virgins to be found in Amos Walker's world. This is also the novel in which, inevitably, Walker has to solve the murder of his partner, twenty years before. (And I think the late '90s was when my colleague Jane Dentinger started to complain that the plot of every other mystery novel involved a twenty-year-old murder, as if they were all mainlining Ross Macdonald at the same time.)

It's a solid mystery that moves well and features colorful, believeable characters; if I hadn't read another two Walker books since I finished it, I'd probably be able to give a better precis of it. It's just as good as all the others; Estleman writes the American hardboiled mystery as if it never went out of style.

Three Days of Links

My recent ComicMix link-posts:

• Play Ball!
• Definitely Not Kansas
• Astro Boy Goes West

Stately, plump G.B.H. Hornswoggler...

Another one of those memes everyone is doing -- in my case, I picked it up from James Nicoll:

You're Ulysses!
by James Joyce

Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Itzkoff on Gibson

Our Man Itzkoff returns to the New York Times Book Review this weekend, with a full-page review of William Gibson's new novel Spook Country. I haven't yet read Spook Country -- I still haven't read Pattern Recognition, and Spook is a sequel to that -- so I can't say if I agree with Itzkoff's judgments on it. But Itzkoff doesn't make any laughably sweeping pronouncements along the way, which I guess counts as a win for his side.

And we see once again that having been a SF writer is not necessarily a detriment to one's being seriously reviewed in the pages of the NYTBR, but one should have already given up the dirty genre stuff if one wants to be taken seriously.

A lesson for us all.

Incoming Books, Week of 8/25

There may be a couple here from two weeks ago, but the bulk of this is from a trip into the city on Wednesday, when I hit both the Strand and my usual comics shop. There are also a couple of publicity things that I hope to get to quickly; we'll see how that goes.

• Gregory Frost's new fantasy novel, Shadowbridge, coming in late December from Del Rey -- I don't know Greg well (and I don't think I've read any of his books), but I did have dinner with him once at a Philcon, so I want to get to this one.
  
• The Great Mortality by John Kelly, a history of the Black Death -- I was idly poking through the $1 shelves outside the Strand, ready to head on to my next errand and virtuously not spend two hours shopping inside, when I found this...and it was all over.
  
• Millennium People by J.G. Ballard -- I've been waiting for so long for his latest novel to be published here that I found a remaindered UK trade paperback. That's good enough for me.
  
• The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen -- I haven't read The Corrections (in part because of Oprah), and I'm not sure if I even have a copy of it. But I did read and enjoy Franzen's subsequent essay collection How To Be Alone, so I expect to also enjoy these autobiographical essays.
  
• Chance in Hell, Gilbert Hernandez's new standalone graphic novel. I hope to review it soon.
  
• Monkey Food by Ellen Forney, collecting her "I Was Seven in '75" comic strips. I was six in '75, and this was cheap -- and I've seen it and thought about buying it several times now -- so I finally got it.
  
• The Complete Peanuts, 1965 to 1966 by Charles M. Schulz -- if you don't know about Peanuts by now, there's probably no hope for you.
  
• Bound to Please by Michael Dirda -- a big, big book all about great books. I don't know if I'll be able to sit down and read many classics until my kids get older, but I'm stockpiling books just in case.
  
• Tricked by Alex Robinson -- I've been vaguely thinking about buying this or Box Office Poison for ages, so, when I saw this for half-price at the Strand, I knew I had to try it.
  
• Olive or Twist? by Jack Ziegler -- a collection of cartoons from the New Yorker, all about drinking. I love books of single-panel cartoons, I cannot deny it.
  
• Is Nothing Sacred? by Gahan Wilson -- more single-panel cartoons by one of the all-time greats, featuring one of my very favorite cartoons on the cover. And for three bucks!
  
• James Sturm's America, collecting three previously-published (short) graphic novels.
  
• and Margo Lanagan's Red Spikes, her third short-story collection. I now have all three, so I'd better read at least one of them.

And what I've been reading this week has been a whole lot of Loren D. Estleman. Next week will be mostly the same, though the most recent books are a bit shorter, so I may speed up. After that, I dunno. Maybe back to the fields of SF and Fantasy.

I Can Give It Up Any Time I Want

Snatched from John Klima:

55%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Dating Site

(Though I should admit it could have been higher if I was more honest about the "how many hours a day do you spend reading blogs" question.)

HELP 3: Never Street

Estleman had a big gap between 1990's Sweet Women Lie and 1997's Never Street, so it's appropriate that it took me five days (and a family vacation) to get to the end of Never Street, adding my own gap.

Never Street brought Amos Walker back after Estleman had spent half a decade mostly writing his big Detroit novels, and it began the second stretch of Walker books, of which there have now been nine, at mostly yearly intervals. (Since there were ten novels and a short-story collection in the first burst of Walker books, the series is almost but not quite symmetrical now.)

This is the point in the series where other characters start bluntly pointing out that Walker is an anachronism, and Estleman starts hanging his plots from that assumption. In this book, Walker is hired by the wife of a documentary filmmaker to find her missing husband, who has apparently taken his obsession with '40s film noir way too far, and may have lost his marbles. (Estleman even organizes the novel into four sections, using film terms that don't entirely correspond to the action of the book.)

Never Street is also notably longer than the previous books; it clocks in a bit north of 300 pages. Even given that I read it in mass-market, it's still about 25% longer than the earlier books. (And the narrative shows it; the first plot seemingly peters out at the end of the second section, to be replaced with a second, related case in what might be a homage to The Long Goodbye or might show that Estleman is struggling slightly to get Walker's plots up to the length his publisher wants.)

Walker is still a grumpy bastard, but his dialogue is all conversational at this point; the hardboiled non sequiturs that cropped up occasionally in the earlier books are now gone. (Oh, he's still a fifteen-minute egg -- that hasn't changed -- but he doesn't crack wise for no good reason any more.) And Estleman's plots are still detailed, intricate, and a joy to follow. There even is a strong, relatively positive female character in this one, though it looks like she won't be returning. (And Walker's main contact on the Detroit PD is switching from his old friend John Alderdyce, now an Inspector, to Mary Ann Thaler, his protege and a new Lieutenant -- she doesn't do all that much in this book, but she becomes a more important, and positive, female character in the subsequent books.)

I still would hesitate before recommending this series to female readers, but it's one of the very best traditional hardboiled PI series running in the modern day. And Walker is a real person with a real personality (along certain genre-accepted lives, given) who gets involved in some tricky, well-plotted cases. So I'd better go and keep reading the second half of my stack of Walker novels!

Movie Log: Hot Fuzz

The Wife surprised me by wanting to watch this -- I'd tried to get her to see Shaun of the Dead last year, but she wasn't interested. I guess cops are more mainstream than zombies?

Anyway, we both really liked Hot Fuzz. My only real complaint is that the DVD didn't support subtitles, and we could have used them, given some of the accents. (Also given that we had to keep running the volume down for music montages and up for dialogue scenes, and that we had children trying to get to sleep above our heads.)

The relationship between the characters played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is even more homoerotic than it was in Shaun of the Dead, possibly because (IMBD tells me) the character of a girlfriend for Pegg was eliminated during the script-writing, and her lines mostly given to Frost. But making it that blatant is actually a brilliant move, since these buddy cop movies are all about two guys bonding, pseudo-sexually, over gunfire and explosions.

Oh, right, the plot. If you don't already know, Pegg plays a ridiculously driven cop from London who is bumped up to Sergeant and sent off to a quaint village because he's making the rest of the metropolitan force look bad. The village, and its police force, are a very obvious (and very funny) collection of cliches...up until we discover a slightly different set of secret cliches underlying the whole set-up, just in time for the big ending. Frost is his new partner, the son of the local chief of police, who thinks or wishes that police work was all explosions and diving to the side while firing two guns.

It has exactly the sort of ending you'd expect, given the box cover (and given Frost's character's fascination with Point Break and Bad Boys 2). And that ending is great. The movie leading up to it is a lot of fun, too -- this is easily one of the best comedies I've seen this year. (Though the violence may be too much for some people.) It's the kind of movie with lots and lots of tiny details -- lines of dialogue, background music, shot choice, and so on -- done exactly right, and with lots of good actors in medium-sized roles playing it absolutely straight. I probably missed most of the film references, and I was still laughing out loud every minute or two.

Regular Blog Service Resuming

I spent the entire day yesterday at the Bronx Zoo with the family (the weather was great, and we'd never been there before), and the evening working on something that has a slight chance of getting me a job, so I'm afraid Antick Musings was completely neglected.

More posts will come today, I hope: I'm three books behind in the HELP project (despite the books taking about two days to read, instead of my projected one), and two movies in the hole as well.

Fingers, do your stuff...

The Annoyance of Uncommentable LiveJournals

Poppy Z. Brite misread the news the other day and thinks the recent poll showed that 25% of Americans did read a book last year. (It's the other way around: 25% of Americans didn't read a book, so 75% of us did.)

But she doesn't allow comments, so I couldn't tell her directly. And I doubt she reads this. Oh, well. At least she didn't write the long rant and go all Emily Litella on us.

Quote of the Week

The details of my lack of phone calls are very different, but I've been feeling a bit like this kid lately:

"Oh, son! Son, how many girls called you today? Zero? And how many girls called you yesterday? Lemme guess -- zero? Well, you know what they say, son. Zero plus zero equals fag! Zero times any other number always equals fag! Think about it, ya little mathematician."
- The Kids in the Hall, from the skit "Daddy Drank"

What's Making Me Grind My Teeth Today

Alex Remington in the Huffington Post:

Once upon a time (really just a decade or two ago), it seemed you could buy almost any title with any sort of wide appeal, no matter how hifaluting, no matter how thick, in a format called "mass-market paperback"...Nowadays, however, more and more literary books are foregoing the mass-market format for what's known as a "trade paperback,"

A) Despite what he thinks, 'twas always thus.

2) See "wide appeal," above. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: a mass-market paperback is an implicit contract between the publisher and the reading community. The former agrees to publish a cheap edition; the latter agrees to buy a lot of copies of it quickly. If the latter is unlikely to happen, the former won't, either.

iii) He can't spell "highfaluting," either.

And he goes on:

But this means that the democracy of the least expensive books, once a mix of high and low and the one place where Jonathan Kellerman and John Updike could sit side by side, is fast becoming the exclusive province of genre fiction. High literature now comes exclusively at high prices.

No, genre books come out in trade paper, too. But only the books that will sell well enough to justify the format come out mass-market. If you literary types don't like that, you need to get more people to buy the books you like.

Oh, and then he says this:

In other words, the only universal fiction is non-literary fiction. That is not necessarily a good thing. Nowadays, people of different backgrounds follow different books, different magazines, different websites, different cable news channels; where there is no common experience, there is no shared truth.

Right. Because, in the glorious days of yore, vast numbers of Americans read William Gaddis and liked him. Go and pull the other one; it has bells on it.

Universal fiction is only very rarely "literary" fiction at the time. It may be studied a hundred years later, and become literary fiction, but it wasn't at the time it was universal.

And he goes on from there, whining that $18 novels are out of the budget of poor downtrodden working folks. Since we just learned that the Americans who read books only read about seven a year, we can thus deduce that Mr. Remington thinks $126 a year is far more than those poor souls can afford. And that just over $10 a month is beyond the means of folks that typically spend $3 each morning on coffee drinks.

Do I also need to note that sales of hardcovers and trade paperbacks have increased over the last decade or so? (And that mass-markets have been stable at best?) And that there are plenty of ways to get books cheaply (remainders, used books) or even free (libraries)?

What we have here is a very large amount of whine squeezed out of very few grapes, with little in the way of facts to confuse the issue. I think Mr. Remington is really saying is that the books he wants to buy cost more than he wants to spend. And, for that, I have the world's smallest violin, playing a sad song just for him.

Play the Home Game!

I'm not sure if this is a meme yet -- I got it from Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin.
Get your own Atari game pak at Labelmaker 2600.

The Ol' ComicMix Shuffle

My recent linkposts:

• Today's Hot Comics Links
• Metal Men, Naruto, and Other Unfathomable Things
• Women Spotted at Comics Convention
• The All-New 1982 Show

Reviews:

• LoserPalooza
• "Shenanigans"

Movie Log: Starter for 10

Things I often enjoy in movies: small stories about people, British settings, coming of age stories, romantic comedies. (I'm also, I've noticed recently, quite fond of stories about people living lives very much like my own at the same point in time.) So Starter for 10 was inevitably coming my way.

It's an English romantic comedy, set in 1985, about a young man in his first year at the University of Bristol, trying to get on the University Challenge team and interested in the proverbial two girls (one blonde, one brunette). It's based on a novel I haven't read by David Nicholls, and I'd bet a substantial sum of money that it's at least partially autobiographical. And, as if to completely fill up the stereotype, it takes place almost entirely during that first year of university.

It's amiable but a bit lightweight -- it never gets really funny, or really romantic, or really dramatic, but doesn't try to do so, either. It does evoke its time and place well, from hair-styles and bad fashion choices to a lot of well-chosen (and footnoted on screen, for some odd reason) New Wave music. It's a movie that tries to do a lot of things decently -- with two romances for our lead and the main plot about the University Challenge team, plus sub-plots about coming to terms with his mother's new boyfriend and about his best friend left behind at home -- instead of doing any one thing very well. In the end, it's an appealing comedy with moderate aims and decent, believeable performances. Don't expect anything deep, and you won't be disappointed.

(Side note: the host of the University Challenge TV show has such an unlikely name that I knew it, must be the real thing. But I was slightly surprised to find that, though Bamber Gascoigne -- and, I have to say, only an English family of certain means would ever hang a name like that on an innocent child -- is real, and the long-time host of University Challenge, he was played in this movie by an actor, Mark Gatiss. Why? I dunno. Gascoigne seems to still be kicking around, and was credited on IMDB as appearing in a UC special in 2006.)

Those Whom The Gods Wish To Destroy...

This has not been my summer, and, to add insult to injury, my glasses broke this morning. Luckily, I'm in the middle of getting a new pair anyway, but damn! some supernatural entity seems to have it in for me this year.

So if there's anyone out there with pull in those areas, or a spare goat to be sacrificed to Poseidon, any help would be appreciated.

HELP 2: Sweet Women Lie

Both Silent Thunder (the 1989 Amos Walker novel) and General Murders (a 1988 collection of Walker stories, whose existence I hadn't previously suspected) are scratches; I couldn't get copies of them easily and quickly.

So day 2 of HELP is the 1990 novel Sweet Women Lie, tenth and last in the first sequence of Amos Walker novels by Loren D. Estleman. It continues in Downriver's footsteps, since the plot begins when not-Annette Funicello (ex-'60s beach movie star Gail Hope) hires Walker for a job...that turns out to be an audition for another job...which itself isn't what it seems.

The plot quickly gets complicated and runs away from the initial set-up, so I don't want to go into details (even on a seventeen-year-old novel). But I will say that we rapidly get into a Spy vs. Spy in the streets of Detroit, with various CIA guys (some of whom claim others of whom are rogue, and vice versa) engaging in clandestine meetings, shoot-outs, and other exciting stuff.

It's a bit out of the norm for a PI novel, and I wonder if market pressures to be more "thriller-y" pushed Estleman in that direction. (As I said, this was also the last Walker novel for several years.) The dialogue isn't quite as hardboiled as in Downriver, but Walker still persists in hiding evidence from cops, which never ends well. And as to the female characters...well, let me just point you back at the title.

All in all, it's a solid PI novel of its era -- searching around a bit for a new paradigm, but with a good narrative voice and a twisty, entertaining plot.

HELP 1: Downriver

Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project (hereinafter HELP) kicks off with Estleman's 1988 "Amos Walker" mystery Downriver. Amos Walker is a Detroit PI who first appeared in 1980's Motor City Blue; this was the eighth book in the series. I read it just over a week ago, and have read two-and-a-half more Walker mysteries since then, so let's see if I can untangle them in my head...

This is very much a mid-80s mystery; it's pretty short (just over two hundred pages) and concerns a very DeLorean-esque upstart car-maker. (Down to the gull-wing doors on his first model, in case we don't get the reference.) Walker is hired by a black man named DeVries -- just out of prison after a twenty-year stretch for arson during the '67 riots -- to track down the people who used him as distraction for an armored-car robbery. (Walker somewhat demurs on the second half of the job, which would be to retrieve the money and give it to DeVries -- but he does take the case.)

The white guy that DeVries insists incited his firebombing now works as a top executive for the DeLorean figure, and skulduggery ensues. Estleman is very readable, but he's pretty derivative at this point -- the dialogue is intensely hard-boiled, even when that keeps it from making much sense. Walker in particular is trying to live up to his own (or Estleman's) idea of what a real PI should be, and that's straight out of Raymond Chandler.

But the Chandleresque poses don't always fit the plot -- Chandler's Philip Marlowe dealt with intensely crooked cops; Walker with smart and mostly honest ones. But Walker still cracks wise in the same ways, and hides evidence as Marlowe would. Even for 1988, Walker was exceptionally old-fashioned; Downriver reads like a 1970s mystery. The role of women here make it feel even earlier than that -- I won't say all of the women in the early Walker novels were femmes fatale, but the archetype crops up a lot, and decent human beings who happen to be women are rare.

Still, I really like PI stories -- they've been my favorite kind of mystery since I was a teenager -- and Estleman has a detective who is Chandleresque without being a slavish copy of Marlowe, inhabits a real city with depth and nuance, and navigates his way through interesting, well-crafted plots. The male characters are all pretty well-drawn, and the women are each individually believeable -- it's just in aggregate that you start to wonder if Detroit really is inhabited only by hard-bitten, gold-digging dames. Surely there must be some women, too?

(I read Downriver in the original hardcover from my local library, as seen above. Byron Preiss's ibooks operation republished all of the Walker novels through Downriver before Preiss's fatal accident in 2005, and those editions are probably easier to find -- though ibooks itself is no more. There's not a whole lot of book-to-book continuity in this part of the series, so an interested reader could start anywhere in the first eight, and fill in as he finds the missing ones.)

The Heart of a Goof by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse's second collection of golf stories (after The Clicking of Cuthbert) was originally published in 1926, which puts it just a bit before Wodehouse's best period.

There are nine stories here (naturally!), all of which are golf stories narrated by the Oldest Member. The O.M. is not quite as wonderful a storyteller as Wodehouse's Mr. Mulliner, but he's close. The stories here are all also boy-girl love stories, in which true love wins out in the end through the judicious use of a mashie-niblick, or something like that.

I know nothing about golf, so I can't judge the details as described herein. But the stories are entertaining, and the golf details are mostly in support of the stories being told. (And I suspect that golfing terminology has moved forward from the 1920s, anyway, so even really avid golfers might be as unclear as I was about the difference between a mashie and a niblick.)

Wodehouse has done better than this -- Clicking of Cuthbert, as I recall, is a bit stronger. (And, from Wodehouse's introduction, I suspect Heart of a Goof was rushed out because Cuthbert was successful -- publishing was ever thus.) But he wrote pleasantly breezy and entertaining short stories for a good fifty years, and these are some of them -- they may not be his very best, but they're better than a whole lot of the alternatives. And I very much doubt a more purely entertaining writer ever turned his hand to love stories about golf.

World Fantasy Award Liftetime Achievement Awards

Locus Online has the news that the winners of this year's Lifetime Achievement World Fantasy Awards have been announced early, in a one-time change in procedure.

The winners are Diana Wynne Jones, who will be unable to attend the convention, and Betty Ballantine, who will be there.

Both women are very deserving of the award; I'm slightly surprised that Betty Ballantine hadn't gotten it before now. And I'm particularly glad to see Diana Wynne Jones get this honor; she was on my personal short-list last year when I was a judge.

Movie Log: Underdog

Hey, my title rhymes...and that's very appropriate.

Underdog has gotten bad reviews, mostly because it's a live-action kids movie based on an old, beloved, badly-animated show (which was for kids at the time, but whose target audience is now all grown up and sophisticated). I'll admit, looking at the poster, that creature doesn't much look like the Underdog I know. But, on its own terms, Underdog the movie is fun and even witty.

Patrick Warburton, as Cad, the sidekick (he's prefer to be called "partner") of our villain, Simon Barsinister, continues his streak of being wonderfully funny in any project for kids he's cast in. Sure, he plays essentially the same part every time, but his voice is superb and his facial expressions wonderful. If he's in a movie for kids, you know it can't be that bad. (I also just learned from IMDB that he was born in Paterson, New Jersey, which is just down the road from me and also the birthplace of Lou Costello.)

Also good in this are Peter Dinklage (who I wish would work more, since he's great every time I see him) as Barsinister and Jason Lee as Underdog's voice. Oh, and the kid is decent, as well, though I spent most of the movie wondering "Is that the kid from Ned's Declassified?" (And it is.) Yes, it's got the plot you'd expect, and turning Underdog into live-action was an odd thing to do, and it is definitely designed as a movie for kids...but, on its own terms, it's quite entertaining. There are a lot of references to the TV show (down to "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a frog"), so the people who made this knew what they were doing.

If you're the world's biggest Underdog fan, you'll inevitably be disappointed. If you vaguely remember the TV show fondly, and want to take some kids to a fun summer movie, you'll probably like this. Honestly, given the initial decision to make a live-action Underdog movie, this is probably the best possible movie that could have resulted. (My kids are already saying that they want it on DVD.)

Powers, Vol. 7: Forever by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming

This is the seventh collection of the cops-in-a-superhero-world series Powers, always written by Bendis and illustrated by Oeming, and it's the one that reveals a lot of big secrets. Our ex-powers cop, Christian Walker, finally gets his Secret Origin here, which comes complete with a deadly supervillain.

On the other hand, it also comes with hot monkey sex...so this is still quirky, even as it runs ever closer to standard superheroics.

It's one of those let's-cover-the-whole-history-of-the-universe stories, starting with, yes, a bunch of anthropoid apes, and running through Conan-esque ahistorical barbarians, a version of Shangri-La, '30s gangsters, and hot '80s threesomes before it finally gets back to the existing Powers plotline. We learn that Christian Walker is older than the human race, and somehow turned human in between issues (or has been repeatedly reincarnated as exactly the same person with exactly the same abilities -- except for the fact that, at least once, he was a monkey -- which is, for me, even harder to believe). And his great nemesis was also a monkey, and has turned up now and then to mess up Walker's life for no reason either of them can remember. (There's a strong sense of pointlessness to their great rivalry, which I hope Bendis intended; neither of them has done terribly much with multi-thousand-year lives except hit each other every so often.)

This storyline wants to be wicked cool (immortals battling through the ages! superpower-destruction machines! vast spans of time!) and adult (world-weary immortals! the infinite sadness of existence as a god among men!), but it really raises more questions about this world than it's prepared to answer. I thought we just found out, in the last volume, that the Superman-ripoff was the vastly most powerful super in this world, with an origin shrouded in ancient mystery -- but, now, we learn that the rivalry between Red Stripe and White Stripe (Walker) is equally ancient, and they were both equally invulnerable? And many (most?) Powers are effectively immortal? And yet this world has a history the same as our own? (I, frankly, can't buy that -- comic-book-style super-powered immortals, running around for the last few thousand years, would have changed everything.) I also find the apparent unkillability of the major Powers in this storyline hard to square with the carnage among Powers in the earlier collections.

So Bendis has now ripped out by the roots everything that made his Powers universe plausible and special -- the street-level viewpoint, the focus on the modern day, and the ordinariness of his protagonists -- and replaced them with standard-issue superhero-universe furniture. The story here is well-told, but I'm not impressed by the switch. I expect Walker will get some level of powers back -- probably "erratic," so he can't count on them -- in the next book or soon thereafter.

I still like the idea of Powers, and some of the actuality of it, but the more it turns into a Marvel Comics title with the serial numbers filed off, the less I'm interested in it. I'll have to poke through volume 8 (which collected the "re-launch," under a Marvel imprint, a few years back) in a story before I decide if I want to read it.

(I covered Powers, Vol. 6 as part of my list of books read in June, and Vol. 5 had its own entry. Earlier volumes are linked back from those entries, if anyone wants to head backwards that far.)

Things Fall Apart; The Center Cannot Hold

When did the New York Times turn into a toy newspaper? Everything is physically smaller than it used to be, and it feels like an overgrown tabloid rather than a "real" paper. (I think this is the second week at the smaller size, but I'm not quite sure.)

It seems like there are fewer sections with fewer pages, as well -- and I'd expect that there are fewer words on each page. But I bet the price will only go up...

Cleaning Up Saved Posts

I'd saved this Gwenda Bond article to comment on last week; she deplores the use of coffee terms to describe people's skin-tones (for, I think, purely racial reasons -- I guess; it's hard to tell).

Well, if it makes you more politically correct to avoid saying someone's skin is "cafe au lait," more power to you, and I hope you enjoy that warm fuzzy feeling. But I think those descriptions are a bad idea for a completely different reason -- I don't drink coffee, never have, and so don't have a clue what you're saying. (Though I may possibly be alone in the Western world in that, which would ruin my argument somewhat.)

I know "black coffee" is black, and "cream-colored" is white, but anything else just reads like a line of Blackadder dialogue to me. [1] And good writing connects rather than confuses.


[1] "So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen."

What's Confusing Me Today

The boys are watching SpongeBob SquarePants and there was just a flood. Underwater.

Somewhere in this world, there might be a spec-fic guy smart enough to puzzle out the rules of water in the world of SpongeBob, but it ain't me. I just don't get it.

Political Compass Revisited

Because I saw Jay Lake do it today, I thought I'd revisit my own political compass -- I'd graphed myself about a year and a half ago.

Economic Left/Right: -0.63 (changed from -0.38)
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.21 (changed from -4.10)

Now, I still self-identify as a Republican (though of the relatively liberal, out-of-power, good-government, Northeastern branch), but we see that another eighteen months of Bushism has pushed me further to the left and further towards libertarianism. Somehow, I don't think that was the plan -- though I do seem to be somewhat representative of the country as a whole, in this one matter.

You Miss the Point Completely; I Get the Point Exactly

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist had a post this week about "the changing of the guard" in fantasy that I found interesting, in that "heading down the completely wrong road at high speed" kind of way.

(I'm not blaming Patrick for this; this looks like an ongoing conversation that I think is just wrong-headed to begin with, on the order of trying to determine the precise chemical composition of phlogiston.)

First of all, Patrick talks about the idea that there will be a new "changing of the guard," in the sense that

Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind relegated David Eddings and Terry Brooks to the backseat more than a decade past, thus establishing Tor Books as the SFF powerhouse it became in the mid-90s.

Eddings is an interesting case, since it seems that his largest audience really only wanted the Belgariad/Malloreon storyline, and wasn't as interested in following him into other areas. (This effect happens with a lot of series writers, and is particularly noticeable in fantasy and mystery: a writer's major series novels can outsell other books by several hundred percent.) But Brooks, as far as I can tell, is selling about as many copies of a new Shannara book now as he did in the '80s and '90s -- and that's a lot of copies. Jordan and Goodkind move more units per book now, but it took them each a number of books to reach that level.

And the idea that Jordan and Goodkind "replaced" Brooks and Eddings is a fallacy -- Brooks and Eddings are still here, still selling very strongly (Eddings's last four-book series, for Warner, was rumored to have a jaw-dropping advance), and hadn't lost their audience.

What Jordan and Goodkind did was show that the top end potential of epic fantasy was higher than the publishing world previously thought -- that this genre could have legitimate #1 New York Times bestsellers, with all of the attendant money and importance. (The field had already had serious bestsellers, but not consistent #1 Times bestsellers.) And that only happened at about the turn of the century -- when the two writers were solidly in the middle of long, complicated, very popular series.

(Parenthetically, it's my understanding that Jordan is still the very top end of the fantasy field, and that Goodkind's sales are somewhat below him. With an exception that Patrick -- and, I think, everyone else involved in this discussion -- has forgotten, everyone else, including Martin, Brooks, Eddings, Feist, Salvatore, and so on, sells at a level below that.)

I'll also note that no writer who can consistently hit the bestseller lists is in the "backseat." If such a writer's current publisher treats him that way, he'll quickly find a new home.

Then we move on to a discussion of what comes next. Patrick, I think, is assuming that the biggest bestsellers are innovative and new, which is very much not my experience. I may be a cynic, but, to my eye, what hits big in epic fantasy is a solidly-constructed series by a great storyteller (not necessarily a great writer, and definitely not someone who's trying something all-new) that is similar to older, well-loved works in the field but has a new spin. That series needs to have significant marketing support to reach that level, but good marketing won't sell what the audience isn't already looking for.

Patrick thinks the next Jordan and Goodkind are Steve Erikson and Scott Lynch, but...

Unfortunately, the way Erikson is being marketed in the States precludes his rise to stardom. By promoting Jordan and Goodkind so heavily, Tor Books are forgetting about a bunch of gifted writers that are under contract with them. And that's a shame. . . Although not for everyone, I feel that Steven Erikson was never really been given a chance in the USA. With the appropriate marketing, I think that Erikson could sell as many books as authors such as Tad Williams and Robin Hobb. Alas, it's not to be. Those Godawful covers are a disgrace, no question. For Toll the Hounds next year, they should simply forgo the cover art. Instead, just put "WE REFUSE TO PUT ANY THOUGHT WHATSOEVER IN THIS NOVEL'S COVER."It can't be worst than the US cover art for The Bonehunters. . . Little by little, Steven Erikson is becoming more and more popular with each new Malazan installment. Yet by the time it will matter in the USA, the entire series will be out in paperback, thus missing the more lucrative hardcover market.

I am not Tor Books; I can't speak for Tor in any sense. But I expect their reaction to his paragraph would be a large groan of frustration. Tor has spent quite a lot of time and money promoting Erikson's books, and the cover question...well, bloggers are never satisfied with fantasy covers. I'll leave it at that.

Erikson is writing decadent epic fantasy -- books for people who have been reading big fat series for a couple of decades, are familiar with all of the tropes and ideas, and are ready to see everything they're familiar with twisted into new shapes. You can't start with Erikson; you need to work up to him. Sure, his books could sell better than they do -- nearly anyone's could -- but he'll never be at the level of a Goodkind, and it's foolish to expect that. Goodkind readers may become Erikson readers, over time, but Erikson demands a level of knowledge of and involvement with epic fantasy tropes from the first page that no other epic fantasy writer comes close to.

(Also, the idea that Tor is ignoring everyone else to promote Jordan and Goodkind is simply untrue. No one else gets promoted at that level, because no one else is capable of selling at that level right now.)

Then Patrick moves on to Scott Lynch:

Scott Lynch appears to be in a very good position to "make it big." Imagination, action, good characterization -- The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas under Red Skies have all that. All we need is a more ambitious overall story arc, and Lynch could be on the cusp of stardom. Anne Groell assured me that The Republic of Thieves should demonstrate that The Gentleman Bastard sequence is not just another caper in every volume. And yet, for Scott Lynch to take that step, Bantam Dell will have to market him much more aggressively. Gollancz bent over backward to make TLOLL a hit in the UK, but we haven't seen that kind of push in North America. Scott Lynch is a very popular figure online, but the average fantasy reader is unaware of the author's existence. So I believe that Bantam must put his name out there. . .

Someone from the UK recently posted a comparison of Lynch's sales with those of someone getting much less respect and blogger love (I want to say Brian Ruckley, but I could be mistaken)...and I can't find that right now. But the numbers were not strongly for Lynch.

I like Lynch's books a lot, but, again, I think Patrick is assuming that, since he likes something a lot, it should be hugely successful. This is a trap editors occasionally fall into, but we generally get slapped about by reality soon afterward. Reviewers, luckily or unluckily, never get proven wrong so directly. There also has been quite a lot of promotion for Lynch in the US; commentators often seem to assume that if marketing was not as successful as they wanted it to be, then that marketing must have been non-existent, but that is not the case here.

So, in my possibly-biased opinion, Erikson and Lynch are exciting writers doing good books that could sell better than they do...but I don't think they'd ever sell at Terry Brooks levels, let alone dethrone Robert Jordan. And the idea that there is going to be some "changing of the guard" along those lines is unrealistic.

However, there has been a changing of guard over the past decade, and the folks obsessed with epic fantasy have missed it. Who's the new breed? Laurell K. Hamilton and the several dozen writers following in her footsteps.

She has two bestselling series running now, and has hit #1 on the Times list. Her backlist is already deeper than Jordan's, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's selling more units annually than he is. She also has created a new, very popular subgenre in her wake: the contemporary or urban fantasy. Many of the first-wave writers in that subgenre (Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher) are bestsellers as well, and even some second-wave writers (Patricia Briggs, Rachel Caine) are hitting the lists.

Epic fantasy isn't quite a backwater, but it's not the only game in town anymore, and it's not where the real excitement and splashy successes are happening, either. But urban/contemporary fantasy is mostly written by women, mostly about women main characters, and (presumably) mostly read by women, so it's obviously not important...

Update, two hours later: One of my Confidential Sources, who has access to Bookscan, slipped me the following -- Jordan's books outsold Hamilton's about 2-to-1 in 2003, but, by 2006, the ratio was 1.5-to-1 in Hamilton's favor. And Hamilton is publishing books much more quickly than Jordan is -- make of that what you will.

Quote of the Week

"Poets tell many lies."
- Solon

The Hornswoggler Family Vacation

In a few hours, The Wife and I will be packing up the two boys (Thing 1 and Thing 2) into our obligatory minivan and heading off into the wilds of Pennsylvania for the next couple of days. The main point is to spend a day or so at Hershey Park, but there are other traditions (like stopping at a particular Chuck E. Cheese for lunch along the way) that I don't think we'll be able to avoid along the way.

I may get another post or two in before then, but, after that, you won't hear from me until late on Thursday (at best). I'm behind on posts about Powers Vol. 7: Forever, Wodehouse's The Heart of a Goof, and the first HELP book, Downriver. (I'm thirty-some pages from the end of HELP #2, Sweet Women Lie, which I should have finished yesterday, and I'll be bringing a short stack of Estleman books to continue HELP reading during the trip.) I also just saw a movie called Starter for 10 last night...but I doubt I'll manage to blog about any of that before I go.

Another ComicMix Update

I'm not posting these updates as quickly as I should, but here are my link-posts of the last few days:

• Do I Have To Say It?
• Giant Lego Man: Threat or Menace?
• Misery Loves...Nancy?

(Apparently it's been "Questions Week" for the Hornswoggler at ComicMix. Who knew?)

And I've done two reviews:

• Notes for a War Story
• Laika

More reviews should be coming in the next day or two, so look out for those.

Whee! It's a Random Pointless Milestone!

According to SiteMeter, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler has just limped over 100,000 page views. Now, that doesn't include the first month or so I was blogging (before I learned to sign up with SiteMeter), or the week or so between when I switched over to New Blogger and when I remembered to add the SiteMeter code to the new version. So my actual, unrecorded, Platonic-ideal page views are actually slightly, but not significantly, higher.

This is barely even of interest to me, so I don't expect anyone else will care...but it was fun to watch the odometer roll over on Antick Musings.

World Fantasy Award Nominees Announced

Below is the full list of nominees for all of the categories of the World Fantasy Awards; they were released sometime yesterday. Winners will be announced, as usual, at this year's World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY in early November. (And you'll see me there, as well, as long as I'm not living in a box under an overpass by then.)

My most profound congratulations to all of the nominees, and thanks and congratulations to the judges, who have hit the fun part of a long, grueling (but enjoyable, I hope) process -- now they get to act mysterious and give small smiles when people try to get them to reveal who the winners are. (I was a judge last year, and it was one of the best things I've ever done.) Specifically, those judges this year were Gavin Grant, Ed Greenwood, Jeremy Lassen, Jeff Mariotte, and Carsten Polzin, and their hard work should be recognized.

But the person I want to give the greatest thanks and congratulations to is Ellen Asher, my former boss at that employer I now do not name. Ellen was nominated in the category of Special Award: Professional, for what I think is the first time and what probably will be the last time (she's now retired, and so won't be eligible). It may be parochial of me, but I hope she wins.

I won't say who else I'm rooting for; this looks like a strong list from top to bottom, and all of the nominees would be fine winners. Again, congratulations to all of them.

NOVEL

Lisey's Story, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton)

The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (Bantam Spectra; Small Beer Press)

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (Gollancz; Bantam Spectra)

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)

Soldier of Sidon, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

NOVELLA

"Botch Town", Jeffrey Ford (The Empire of Ice Cream, Golden Gryphon)

"The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train", Kim Newman (The Man from the Diogenes Club, MonkeyBrain)

Dark Harvest, Norman Partridge (Cemetery Dance)

"Map of Dreams", M. Rickert (Map of Dreams, Golden Gryphon)

"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", Ysabeau S. Wilce (F&SF Jul 2006)

SHORT FICTION

"The Way He Does It", Jeffrey Ford (Electric Velocipede #10, Spr 2006)

"Journey Into the Kingdom", M. Rickert (F&SF May 2006)

"A Siege of Cranes", Benjamin Rosenbaum (Twenty Epics, All-Star Stories)

"Another Word for Map is Faith", Christopher Rowe (F&SF Aug 2006)

"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)", Geoff Ryman (F&SF Oct/Nov 2006)

ANTHOLOGY

Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, Scott A. Cupp & Joe R. Lansdale, eds. (MonkeyBrain and the Fandom Association of Central Texas)

Salon Fantastique, Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling, eds. (Thunder's Mouth)

Retro Pulp Tales, Joe R. Lansdale, ed. (Subterranean)

Twenty Epics, David Moles & Susan Marie Groppi, eds. (All-Star Stories)

Firebirds Rising, Sharyn November, ed. (Firebird)

COLLECTION

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)

The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford (Golden Gryphon)

American Morons, Glen Hirshberg (Earthling)

Red Spikes, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin Australia; Knopf)

Map of Dreams, M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon)

ARTIST

Jon Foster

Edward Miller

John Picacio

Shaun Tan

Jill Thompson

SPECIAL AWARD, PROFESSIONAL

Ellen Asher (For work at SFBC)

Mark Finn (for Blood & Thunder: The Life of Robert E. Howard, MonkeyBrain)

Deanna Hoak for copyediting

Greg Ketter for Dreamhaven

Leonard S. Marcus, ed. (for The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, Candlewick)

SPECIAL AWARD, NON-PROFESSIONAL

Leslie Howle (for her work at Clarion West)

Leo Grin (for The Cimmerian)

Susan Marie Groppi (for Strange Horizons)

John Klima (for Electric Velocipede)

Gary K. Wolfe (for reviews and criticism in Locus and elsewhere)

[via Locus Online]

A Drive-By Posting

SF Signal is right: Mundane SF is essentially about shutting up, sitting down, and learning to like eating your vegetables, since vegetables are what adults eat, and it's only going to be vegetables for the rest of eternity.

Traditionally, SF has been about entertaining new ideas and exploring possibilities; Mundane SF is about denigrating ideas and closing off possibilities. Luckily, that will mean that it won't last for very long.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 8/5

If I actually finish and post this, it will make two whole weeks in a row! The excitement is killing me!

(Sorry, I had the sarcasm meter set to "maximum." I've dialed it back down to its usual level, so we can continue.)

This week -- the books I was reading this week in 1993:

• Michael Moorcock, The Distant Suns (7/30)
  A very early, very minor Moorcock SF novel that I read in one of the Millennium omnibuses -- Moorcock had assembled nearly his entire output to date into a series of omnibuses, and I'd bought as many of them as I could find when I was in the UK on my honeymoon earlier that year. (And then I bought the rest of them at exorbitant prices from one of the very few UK-to-US booksellers of the time...only to find them all remaindered, cheaply, in the US the next year. Grrrrrr.)
  
• Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover (7/30)
  An anthology of Darkover stories, whose editor I forgot to note. This may have been my first exposure to Darkover. I don't remember who or what as in it.
  
• Robert Silverberg, Hot Sky at Midnight (7/31)
  SilverBob's cyberpunk novel, set in a horribly polluted near-future world, with the usual skulldiggery and intrigue. As I recall, most of it is set in orbit (in habitats, or something similar), and the main character has no eyes. Bob was a little late to the cyberpunk party, but this is a solid novel; not quite as good as Silverberg's very best, but very readable and entertaining.
  
• Connie Willis, Impossible Things (8/2)
  Her second short story collection, with "The Last of the Winnebagos," "Even the Queen," "In the Late Cretaceous," and "Jack," among others. I believe the only hardcover edition is the one I did for my former employer. And, interestingly enough, right now I'm slowly reading The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, the giant collection of Connie's best stories, which has big chunks of Impossible Things in it.
  
• Dave Wolverton, Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia (8/3)
  This and The Truce at Bakura were the titles that certain people, including me, used to debate about. One or the other of them is the nadir of the Star Wars literary efflorescence, but it's hard to say which one.
  
• Robert Rankin, They Came and Ate Us: Armageddon II: The B-Movie (8/3)
  I read a number of Rankin books over the years, even though I found his sense of humor and general (intensely, parochially, British) atmosphere mostly alien and uninvolving. (I used to read things in the belief that I would get them, eventually -- I don't do that much now.)
  
• Florence King, Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye (8/4)
  A collection of essays on various topics by one of my favorite writers. She's a huge misanthrope, in case I need to say that.
  
• John M. Ford, How Much for Just the Planet? (8/7)
  The canonical "great funny Star Trek novel," which I don't remember all that well. I never was as crazy about Mike Ford as I think I was supposed to be, but I did enjoy this at the time.
  

Oh, wait a minute, I can't leave without listing the books I read on the 8th:

• Claire Bell, The Jaguar Princess
• Joe Queenan, Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle in America and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else
• Simon Mayo and Martin Wroe, Snogging: a Beginner's Guide to the Art of Kissing
• Paul Auster, City of Glass
• Monty Python, The Life of Brian/Scrapbook

The 8th was a Sunday, which was occasionally a heavy reading day, but I have no way to account for that massive reading spree. Sure, City of Glass is a short novel, and I bet Snogging was a little, gift-y humor book, and the Monty Python is a script plus captioned photos, and Imperial Caddy is a quick, breezy read...but all of them on top of a real novel? (I must have read most of Jaguar Princess the day before, and spent that Sunday knocking off short books for whatever reason.)

Incoming Books, Week of 8/11

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I visited some publishing friends this week, and this stack of books is the immediate result:

• Nicotine Kiss and American Detective, by Loren D. Estleman -- inspiration for Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, which starts today (I'm a few pages into Downriver)
  
• The Devil You Know by Mike Carey
  
• The Game by Diana Wynne Jones
  
• Epic by Conor Kostick
  
• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
  
• Wild Girls by Pat Murphy
  
• The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
  
• Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka -- from the nice publicity folks at Bantam; I hope to review it at ComicMix when I get a chance
  
• Ha'penny by Jo Walton

And most of those books have to wait until I get through a dozen "Amos Walker" mysteries, so I'd better get going...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Yes, I finished this a good two weeks after everyone else in North America. What can I say? I'm completely incapable of reading a book at the same time as everyone else -- so I'd better not join any book groups, I suppose.

I've said many of the things I was going to put here in my post this morning on Christopher Hitchens's Deathly Hallows review in the Times, so this "review" will just be a few leftover, scattered thoughts. I'll probably inadvertently spoil things, but, what the hell, everyone else has either already read it or doesn't care.

1) I read the Canadian edition, to have the British text (though I've heard that they're not being Americanized anymore), and to keep my books matching. Besides, the British and Canadian editions are set decently, not puffed out like the US version. (759 pages vs. 607) This explains why the big bookshot (the book I read) doesn't match the one in the Amazon box (the American edition, for anyone who suddenly decides, three weeks later, that a Hornswoggler review will get them to read this book).

2) My god, the middle of this book sags. And I find it hard to believe that they're really camping, setting up in a different place every night, conjuring clean clothes and all, for what amounts to eight months straight. If Rowling were not of the stature she is, perhaps an editor could have told her that was ridiculously excessive. If she needed that much time to pass, Harry needed to leave England and go into hiding somewhere else, or do something with his time. Unfortunately, I gather she's uneditable at this point -- and this novel desperately needed help on the conceptual and plotting levels. Deathly Hallows has about three hundred pages of plot, at the beginning and end, surrounding another three hundred pages of adolescent mopery and dopery.

3) Speaking of vast, Hamlet-like delays, Harry Potter is still amazingly passive for the titular hero of the bestselling series of our times. Even when he does have an idea of what to do -- which is rare; see below -- it takes him months to talk his two best friends around to agreeing with him. Harry has all of the leadership abilities of a half-brick. When people actually attack him, and he has to respond, he's physically courageous enough, but he seems to have spent not one second of the past six years making any plans or having any ideas of his own. (And to the inevitable naysayers: "I need to find several things -- I'm not entirely sure what they are, and I don't know where they are -- and destroy them, though I don't really know how to do that, either" is not a plan. And "Well, maybe instead I should go get these other two things, wherever they are, that will let me master Death" is even less of a plan.)

4) Harry Potter is as thick as two short planks. I'm sorry, but it's true. I've known dogs that are substantially more intelligent than he is -- come to think of it, he'd make a great dog; he's loyal, trustworthy, physically brave and used to sleeping out-of-doors. (Even Hermione comes across as mildly stupid in Deathly Hallows; no one in this novel is capable of making or executing the simplest plan.)

5) No one in the modern literary world better showcases the difference between storytelling and fine writing than Rowling. Her characterization is often thin and always derivative; her world-building is inconsistent and occasionally laughable; her dialogue comes with extra scenery pre-digested within it; her plotting includes lacunae through which zeppelins could happily cavort...and, yet, none of that matters during the reading. She has the gift of dragging readers headlong through her stories, and that's worth a lot.

6) Walter Jon Williams was right: Gryffindor's job is to train up Tommy Atkinses. This would be a very different series if the heroes were in a house whose defining characteristic isn't blind courage.

7) The epilogue is very clearly Rowling's way of saying "It's over, OK? I said there wouldn't be any more books, and I mean it. Now check out what will happen in 2017..."

8) It will be very, very interesting to see her next book. It'll be a sales disappointment no matter what -- anything would be. But I hope she picks a story closer to herself: I'd like to see her write about a woman, a grown-up, who actually has sex and interacts with the opposite sex as an adult. (Hm. Am I suggesting she should write...chick-lit?)

TimesWatch: Hitchens on Potter

The cover review of this week's New York Times Book Review is Christopher Hitchens's piece on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I'm not sure if this means that Itzkoff's remit is considered by the Times to exclude fantasy, or books for younger readers (or both); it's not that he's inadequate for the cover, since he reviewed Julie Phillips's biography James Tiptree, Jr. on page 1 some months back.

(And, of course, it's typical of my take on the NYTBR that my first thought is about how this relates to Itzkoff.)

Hitchens is best known these days for his loud and forceful opinions on various topics; he's gotten a lot of ink over the past few years for his pontifications on the Iraqi War, terrorism in general, and, most recently, the non-existence of God. So one has to suspect that the Times assigned him Deathly Hallows in the hopes that he would loathe it and everything it stands for in a few thousand carefully-chosen inflammatory words.

If that was their hope, the Times editors have to be disappointed today; Hitchens is mildly positive. He does ding Deathly Hallows for its obvious faults, particularly its horrible slump in the middle and the incredible number of unlikely last-second escapes, but he shows appreciation for Rowling's real strengths in language and in creating icons.

There's only one point I'd quibble with Hitchens on, and it's something that speaks to the vast difference between fantasy fans and the rest of the reading world. I was fascinated that he wrote

...Rowling also keeps forgetting that things are magical or they are not: Hermione's family surely can't be any safer from the Dark Lord by moving to Australia, and Hagrid's corporeal bulk cannot make any difference to his ability, or otherwise, to mount a broomstick.

Hitchens clearly has an image of fantasy as the realm not just where anything is possible, but where anything must be possible. Fantasy can no more have rules and restrictions to Hitchens than a proper world could have a Supreme Being.

Voldemort, to Hitchens, cannot merely be nasty and powerful and a nascent English magical-fascist dictator (which is Rowling's actual characterization); he must encompass the entire world with his evil. But a closer reading of the series than Hitchens's would show how intensely English it is. Harry Potter's society is a very 19th century one in many ways, and none so than in the sense that only England matters. (For the post-modern, multi-cultural-friendly Rowling, I should probably say "the UK," but I won't.) Perhaps Voldemort would try to extend his rule to the entire world, eventually, but, for the wizards of Potter's society, that would only happen after the Apocalypse -- after England, the real and true England, had already been destroyed.

So Australia probably would be safe; and the United States -- if Rowling deigned to allow it to exist in her world, which she evidently doesn't -- would be even more so.

Similarly, a fantasy reader wouldn't see anything wrong with broomsticks with weight limitations -- even in a fantasy world, we expect rules and explanations. But Hitchens isn't coming out of our tradition; he's one of those readers for whom "it's fantasy" is an explanation complete in itself, and one which shuts off all debate. (That kind of reader is often impatient with fantasy for exactly this reason; they're bored by the explanations they consider superfluous, and they also find every new fantasy element faintly childish and disreputable.)

I think Hitchens is reading Rowling in the wrong way, but he's not completely off-base. Rowling's novels don't come out of genre fantasy, but from the older English tradition of the school story. The fantasy elements, exciting and crowd-pleasing though they have been, are closer to set-dressing than to the essentials of the story. She isn't writing a fantasy about magic, but a school story, a coming-of-age story set in a fantasy world. And there is a strong sense that the magical setup of her novels is arbitrary, built mostly of off-the-shelf parts that she remembered from her own reading, and never consistently constructed or rationalized. That's one reason why the reaction to Rowling in genre fantasy is often "Yes, but...": she's using things as furniture that many of us consider more interesting and important than that.

So I think Hitchens missed one of the most important points here -- the divide between genre fantasy and what Rowling is doing -- but I don't think he has the reading background to properly map that divide.

I do wonder why the Times gave Deathly Hallows the cover; given the necessary delay, the Deathly Hallows hysteria is long over now, and the daily Times ran a review of Deathly Hallows (by staffer Michiko Kakutani) over three weeks ago. There's an inevitable feeling of yesterday's news about the cover, of a million Times readers stroking their chins and saying, "Harry Potter? Oh, right -- I cared about that in mid-July..." Perhaps this is another piece of evidence that they expected Hitchens to get out his knives and really go to town on Rowling. In any case, it's here, and I suppose the Times has bookended this book -- they had the first major review, and what they expect to be the last major review. As usual with the Times, they'd prefer to leave nothing for anyone else to say.

Quote of the Week

Something very frivolous this time, in honor of the boys sitting on a couch in front of me...

"To protect the world from devastation...
To unite all people within our nation...
To denounce the evils of truth and love...
To extend our reach to the stars above!
Jessie! James!
Team Rocket blasting off at the speed of light!
Surrender now or prepare to fight!"
- Pokemon, just about every episode of the last ten-plus years

Excuses and Explanations

I haven't been blogging much this week; I was in the city (New York, of course) most of the day Monday and today, meeting people and doing the networking thing [1].

Yesterday was a big trip with the whole family to the Liberty Science Center, where I learned two things:

1. Don't drive on Route 78 the day of a major rainstorm that flooded nearly every other through road in the area (it took us nearly three hours to get there).
2. The LSC doesn't require more than three hours or so to see it, and the school groups clear out in the early afternoon...so trying to get there in the morning is severely contra-indicated.

It eventually was fun, but The Wife was getting seriously stressed on the drive over. We did the Skyscraper exhibit (right inside the front door) last, which I would also recommend: it's popular (and excellent), so try to leave it until after a lot of other people have left. Some of the exhibits upstairs are fun, but many of them are more "educational," and we saw them all in a mass of other people.

Oh, and one more tale of my hyper-competitive son Thing 2. In the Skyscraper exhibit, there's a place where museum patrons can put on a harness and walk along some I-beams a story or two above the floor. Thing 2 thought it was cool, and did it easily. (The Wife then lent Thing 2's sneakers to another boy who had inappropriate footwear.) Thing 1 then decided he wanted to do it -- he's much less of a daredevil -- and he very slowly shuffled his feet all the way around. By this time Thing 2 was ready for a second go-round. (My personal theory about his motivation: anything his older brother can do once, he can do twice and faster.) After he had the harness on, he asked the woman running it what the fastest time was. "22 seconds," she said. "Time me," he said, and was off like a shot. His support got stuck on the first corner, so it took him a whole 34 seconds, which made him deeply grumpy...until the woman pointed out that the record-holder was four or five times his age, and that 34 seconds is awfully good for a six-year-old. (I dread the day Thing 2 starts getting letter grades. He'd better turn out to be really smart, or dial down his competitiveness, or we're going to have some serious drama in years to come.)

So those are my excuses for skipping blogging this week. I'm two books behind on things read for here, and three behind on reviews for ComicMix -- I hope to get to at least some of that tomorrow (after I take the boys to see Underdog; sure, it looks deeply cheesy, and it's a new, for-kids live-action remake of an old cartoon, but it has Jason Lee's voice and Peter Dinklage as Simon Bar Sinister, so I have to check it out).

As I visited various editorial folk today and Monday, I glommed a bunch of books, which I'll probably list on Saturday, as is my wont. (And one came in the mail, which I might review on ComicMix if I get to it quickly enough.) But two of them sparked a new reading project, which I will now explain.

Today I finished up the last comic sitting around (for the second time in a month, actually). So I decided to raise the bar. I grabbed the two most recent "Amos Walker" detective novels by Loren D. Estleman today, and that inspired me to drag out the other five novels I have but haven't read in the series. (There are four more that I both don't have and haven't read; I hope to get at least three of them out of libraries in the next day or two.)

Sometime tomorrow, I'll finish the book I'm currently reading (The Heart of a Goof, golfing stories by P.G. Wodehouse), and then embark upon...

Hornswoggler's Estleman, Loren Project (aka HELP)

The plan: to read one Amos Walker novel a day until I get through my backlog. (So that would be between seven and eleven days of Detroit detecting, depending on how many of the missing ones I can score.) I liked this series before, but I'm nearly two decades slow in reading it, so it's time to catch up -- and catch up quickly. (Yes, that time period will include the big family trip to Hershey Park in the middle of next week -- but I think I can cram some reading in then, as well.)

So look for a series of HELP posts -- roughly once a day starting Sunday, I hope -- as I push the pedal to the metal through the works of the Motor City Mystery-Man. (My god, that's a hideous sentence.)

Why HELP? Well, it's a tortured acronym, which is always a good thing in my mind. I thought about other possibilities, such as the Loren Estleman Amos Project (LEAP) or Amos Walker Experience (AWE), or even Land of Amos Walker (LAW), but none of them were sufficiently tortured.

So: this is not a book review, and I'm not linking to any of my book reviews anywhere else. But I'm promising a series of reviews, over the next two weeks, of a series of detective novels I remember fondly. And, with any luck, I'll catch up on my other backlogged posts tomorrow.


[1] The networking thing is supposed to result in a job, but it was described to me as a process not unlike the thinking of the underwear gnomes:

• Step 1: Network with everyone you know.
• Step 2.
• Step 3: Profit!

So we shall see what the actual result is. Still, I'm reconnecting with some great people, which is nice in and of itself.

Mid-Week ComicMix

My link-lists over there have been:

• Gaiman to conquer all media
• The Sensational Character Find of 2007!
• Ambush Bug Lives!

And there's one review (I wrote three yesterday, but the other two need to sit until October, when the books are published):

• Screw Heaven, When I Die I'm Going to Mars

British Fantasy Award Nominees

This year's nominees for the British Fantasy Awards (voted on by the memberships of the British Fantasy Society and its annual convention, Fantasycon) have just been released.

Novel: The August Derleth Award

• Chaz Brenchley, BRIDGE OF DREAMS, Ace Books
• Mike Carey, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, Orbit Books
• Mark Chadbourn, JACK OF RAVENS: KINGDOM OF THE SERPENT BOOK 1, Gollancz
• M. John Harrison, NOVA SWING, Gollancz
• Tim Lebbon, DUSK, Spectra
• Scott Lynch, THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA, Gollancz
• Sarah Pinborough, BREEDING GROUND, Leisure Books
• Mark Samuels, THE FACE OF TWILIGHT, PS Publishing
• Conrad Williams, THE UNBLEMISHED, Earthling Publications

Novella

• Eric Brown, THE MEMORY OF JOY, Choices, Pendragon Press
• Simon Clark, SHE LOVES MONSTERS, Necessary Evil Press
• Paul Finch, KID, Choices, Pendragon Press
• Ian McDonald, THE DJINN’S WIFE, Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2006
• Gary McMahon, ROUGH CUT, Rough Cut, Pendragon Press

Short Fiction

• Marion Arnott, THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY, Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music, Elastic Press
• Mark Chadbourn, WHISPER LANE, BFS: A Celebration, British Fantasy Society
• Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis, PUCA MUC, Shrouded By Darkness, Telos Publishing
• Sarah Singleton, THE DISAPPEARED, Time Pieces, NewCon Press
• Stephen Volk, 31/10, Dark Corners, Gray Friar Press
• Conrad Williams, THE VETERAN, Postscripts #6, PS Publishing

Collection

• Neil Gaiman, FRAGILE THINGS, Headline
• Joel Lane, THE LOST DISTRICT AND OTHER STORIES, Night Shade Books
• Kim Newman, THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB, Monkeybrain
• Mike O’Driscoll, UNBECOMING AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR, Elastic Press
• Neil Williamson, THE EPHEMERA, Elastic Press

Anthology

• Gary Couzens, EXTENDED PLAY: THE ELASTIC BOOK OF MUSIC, Elastic Press
• Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY & HORROR: 19TH ANNUAL COLLECTION, St. Martin’s Press
• Alison L. R. Davies, SHROUDED BY DARKNESS: TALES OF TERROR, Telos Publishing
• Stephen Jones, THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR 17, Robinson Publishing
• Christopher Teague, CHOICES, Pendragon Press

Small Press

• Andy Cox, TTA PRESS,
• Peter Crowther, PS PUBLISHING,
• Andrew Hook, ELASTIC PRESS,
• David J. Howe & Stephen James Walker, TELOS PUBLISHING,
• Christopher Teague, PENDRAGON PRESS
  

Artist

• Vincent Chong
• Les Edwards
• Dean Harkness
• Edward Miller
• John Picacio

Non-Fiction

• Allen Ashley, THE DAYS OF THE DODO, Dodo Press
• Paul Kane, THE HELLRAISER FILMS AND THEIR LEGACY, Macfarland & Co.
• Mark Morris, CINEMA MACABRE, PS Publishing
• Andy Murray, INTO THE UNKNOWN: THE FANTASTIC LIFE OF NIGEL KNEALE, Headpress
• Julie Phillips, JAMES TIPTREE JR: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALICE B. SHELDON, St. Martin’s Press

The awards will be presented at Fantasycon in late September, including the Karl Edward Wagner Special Award (selected by the BFS committee) and the new Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award (selected by a panel of judges).

[via Locus Online]

Today's Pointless Holiday

Today is National Underwear Day. Please celebrate by actually wearing some. Thank you.

(Tomorrow you can go commando, if that's what you want.)

Movie Log: Miss Potter

I'm required, by an obscure provision of my vow as a book-blogger, to see as many movies based on writer's lives as possible and blog about them. And, so, Miss Potter came into my life this week.

(Actually, I thought it was a movie The Wife would like to see, and I wouldn't mind much -- and it had been a while since we'd seen something together.)

It's a nice-looking but disappointing movie, which shoehorns Beatrix Potter's life into a very conventional Hollywood love-story with the usual costume-drama Victorian trappings. (The story may in fact be absolutely true -- that Beatrix fell in love with her editor, the ne'er-do-well youngest brother of the family that ran the Frederick Warne publishing house, that her family forbade her to marry him, that he died of some unspecified lung ailment while she was away on holiday, that she bought a farm to get away from her family, and that she eventually married a country solicitor she'd known from childhood -- but Miss Potter makes it so templated and derivative that I could hardly believe any of it.)

There are moments of whimsy and fantasy in this movie, which could have been moving or disturbing in better hands -- Beatrix sees her watercolors move, and her characters are real to her -- but the effect is to make Beatrix seem mentally unstable, if not completely insane. It certainly didn't make me think that she was someone who should be allowed to have control of her own life...or sharp objects, for that matter.

Renee Zellweger does a decent job as Beatrix, though she seems to spend nearly the entire movie squinting -- perhaps someone couldn't quite get her keylight correct? She does allow herself to look rather plain -- not movie-star gorgeous, by any means -- for most of the movie, which was an excellent choice.

Miss Potter has only a bit of the usual author-movie wheeze, where the author's real life is shown to have amazingly detailed parallels to her work (and turning the author from an interestingly creative writer into a mere scribe of real events); but I think this is because even the makers of this movie couldn't quite stomach making the stories of Miss Tiggy-Winkle and Benjamin Bunny real.

I suspect fanatical Potter fans will enjoy this movie better than I did; for me it was a pleasant costume drama that claimed to be true, though I had some trouble swallowing that.

A ComicMix Weekend

Two Link-posts:

• Things That Make Your Eyeballs Go Huh?
• Link-a-dink-a-doo

One Review:

• A Pair of Minxes

Things I need to review over there (if I can get my brain to work while the boys are playing Paper Mario six feet from my head) include Nick Abadzis's graphic novel Laika, about the first dog in space; Shannon Wheeler's new collection Screw Heaven, When I Die I'm Going to Mars; the new Get Fuzzy treasury, Loserpalooza; and two things that don't publish until October. And, for here, I need to write about the movie Miss Potter and some book about a kid named Potter. With any luck, tomorrow will be a busy blogging day...

Things You Didn't Know About Me: The Meme

I haven't done one of these LJ-esque, "tell everyone about yourself" memes in a while, so I'm up for this one, which I saw at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist:

Your full name: Graham Brian Herbert Hornswoggler Andrew Colin Wheeler

Sex: Eschewing all joke answers -- Male

Your age: 38

Nationality: American

Languages you speak: American English (I can get around in British English and Australian English as well)

Education: B.A., Vassar College

Where do you live?: The lovely but flood-prone town of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you settle?: Probably somewhere in this same general area, but a slightly ritzier town. (Though a place in London would be nice, too.)

What's currently on top of your "to do" list?: Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip, Mum mum mum mum mum mum, Get a job.

Name five places you'd love to return to:

1. London
2. Edinburgh
3. Disney World
4. Paris
5. an office in midtown Manhattan

Name five future places where you'll travel: I have no current plans, but I hope I'll be in Calgary next year (for World Fantasy) and Montreal in 2009 (for Worldcon). After that, maybe Australia in 2010, and who knows where else.

Quirky fact about you: I was born in a lighthouse; my mother was the sea. I crawled to school each morning when it occurred to me that life's just a mood ring we're not allowed to see.

Your most unusual traveling experience: I was in Paris for less than 48 hours once, and spent most of the time in a basement staring at a computer screen. Two work friends and I took a mad dash around the city the second night, so we could at least see a bit of it.

Favorite type of music: Sarcastic pop music (They Might Be Giants, Fountains of Wayne, early Oingo Boingo, Harvey Danger, Cracker), shading into smart rock songwriting more generally (Richard Thompson, Aimee Mann, Rilo Kiley, Nick Cave, the Kinks from '65 to '74).

What song are you listening to right now?: Nothing; the kids were in the room, so they had the TV on. Now it's blissfully quiet.

Favorite movies: Love, Actually; Much Ado About Nothing; The Princess Bride; The Incredibles; the "Wallace & Gromit" shorts

Favorite books: I don't re-read much, so it's a hard question-- I'll say Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, P.G. Wodehouse's Joy in the Morning, and Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies.

Who would you like to meet?: Chip Kidd and Stephan Pastis

First thing you notice about the opposite sex?: Whether or not she's a redhead. Then, height. Then, general curvature in the important areas.

Are you in love?: I've been married fourteen years and have two kids, a mortgage, two minivans, an inflatable pool and a life with my wife. If that's not love, what is? (He said, channeling Fiddler on the Roof.)

Do you like the person that sent you this?: No one sent it, but Pat seems like a nice guy. (I only know him on-line.)

Your fave drink?: When I'm seriously drinking alcohol, it's bourbon-and-Coke. When I'm sipping, it's a whiskey sour. The other 99% of the time, it's water or sometimes a Sprite.

Favorite sport?: I used to watch baseball, but I drifted away. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

What's the worst advice you ever got: Nothing springs to mind; I don't pay attention to advice a lot of the time.

Will you tag anyone to do this?: Nope. But go ahead and grab it, if it amused you.

Success vs. Acclaim

Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 3/4/00, obviously in response to someone else who I felt was not nearly as brilliant and witty and charming as I am (though probably more modest):

I believe that you are conflating two very different lines of argument:

• that commercial success necessarily destroys or subverts the virtues of a particular author/work/genre (and)
• that great art is only/more easily created in the absence of a critical apparatus

I don't exactly agree with either of those arguments (though there certainly are points to be made in the favor of both), but they are entirely separate arguments.

Literary acclaim is not commercial success. Some SF writers have had one, some have had the other. The list of those who have achieved both to any appreciable degree is quite short (I can think of William Gibson, off the top of my head, but that's all). Merely becoming renowned never got anybody six figure book deals; mostly it was six-figure book sales that did the trick. Of course, becoming renowned can bring with it its own temptations and pitfalls, but they are generally quite distinct from the temptations on offer to the very popular writer.

Either of these arguments is interesting and worthy of being hashed out at greater length, but I did want to point out that combining the two only clouds the picture.

Dave Truesdale is Looking for Market Data

And I'll just copy & paste his message, which you may be seeing other places today. Contact him directly about his request, of course.

"If I have already contacted you, please disregard this request.

For all others (and please spread the word), I am conducting a major SF/F/H survey for all U.S. original short fiction markets (anything less than novel length) paying at least 1c/wd. Magazines, chapbooks, small press, book publishers, and ezines originating in the U.S., are all to be included.

I need to know three things:

1) Payrate (to verify the 1c/wd. requirement only).

2) How many original short stories will be published in 2007.

3) The total word count for same.

Magazines, original collections, reprint single author collections including any new material, chapbooks of less than novel length. All are included, as well as original short fiction published as media tie-ins, as well as any original short fiction collections from the small press.

Feel free to copy this request where you see fit. I can be reached at:

dtruesdale@netzero.com, or dtruesdale@netzero.net

Your help in this major project is greatly appreciated.

Best,
Dave Truesdale
Publisher/Editor, Tangent Online"

Would'ja like to take a survey?

Quote of the Week

"You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner."
- Aristophanes, from Knights

Mixing Things Up, Comically

First, I should say that the current plan is for me to do one longer link round-up a day at ComicMix, with something of an emphasis on comics. (I'm so incredibly tired of chasing down every last interview and review of SF/Fantasy stuff I could find -- which I've been doing for a year or so now, at several different blogs, with the flood increasing nearly every week -- so this is happy news for me.) I may be ranging further afield now, since I'm starting with comics, wandering off into SF/Fantasy realms, and then moseying on to whatever else is amusing and/or interesting that day.

As always, comment here or at ComicMix if you agree, disagree, love, hate, or whatever about anything. My e-mail is also in the profile to your left, if you want to contact me directly about something. I am also reviewing comics at ComicMix as often as I can (and other kinds of books, mostly with just words in them, here), and am actively looking for more things to review -- again, use my e-mail if interested.

Recent link-lists at ComicMix:

• All This Stuff Happened
• News of the World
• Hot Comics Linkage
• Comics News & Links: San Diego Sunset Edition

Recent reviews at ComicMix:

• The Professor's Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert
• Spent by Joe Matt

National Ice Cream Sandwich Day

The Amazon Blog claims (on no evidence that I can see) that today, August 2nd, is National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. I've decided I don't care how they discovered or determined this; the world needs an official Ice Cream Sandwich day, and we'll take a national one if that's all we can get. (I'm assuming the nation in question is the USA; if anyone has better information, please let me know.)

It may be too late to run out to your local frozen-foods supplier to get an ice cream sandwich tonight, but, if so, you all have my official permission to celebrate National Ice Cream Sandwich Day tomorrow, or on the day of your choosing.

How to celebrate? Why, just eat an ice cream sandwich, of course.

Read in July

I spent a lot of sitting time by one pool or another this month, but watching to make sure the children don't drown (on their own, or deliberately drowning each other) doesn't always leave as much time for reading as one might like. Still, I soldiered on. (On the other hand, I also spent way too much time chasing random links for blogging -- and I'm going to cut back severely on that particular time-sink in future.)

• Matt Wagner, Grendel Archives (7/1)
  
• Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, & others, The Pulse, Vol. 1: Thin Air (7/2)
  
• Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, & others, Fables, Vol. 9: Sons of Empire (7/3)
  
• Mark Beyer, Amy + Jordan (7/4)
  
• Gilbert Hernandez, Luba: Three Daughters (7/5)
  
• Ben Schott, Schott's Almanac 2007 (7/6)
  This was my bathroom reading for nearly half of this year; it was a very dense book, full of little snippets of interesting stuff. Since that's probably its intended reading venue, I'll have to count it as a fine success.
  
• Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow (7/6)
  
• Will Eisner, New York: The Big City (7/7)
  
• P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith, Journalist (7/7)
  
• Will Eisner, The Building (7/8)
  
• Will Eisner, City People Notebook (7/9)
  
• Will Eisner, Invisible People (7/10)
  
• Will Jacobs, Gerard Jones, & Tim Hamilton, The Trouble With Girls, Vol. 2 (7/11)
  
• Osamu Tezuka, Apollo's Song (7/12)
  
• Mike Carey & various artists, Lucifer, Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway (7/13)
  
• Gene Wolfe, Pirate Freedom (7/14)
  
• Tim Truman, Scout, Vol. 1 (7/15)
  
• Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I (7/16)
  
• Art Spiegelman & Chip Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits! (7/17)
  
• Max Barry, Company (7/17)
  
• Mike Baron & Andie Tong, The Architect (7/18)
  
• Frank Miller & Lynn Varley, 300 (7/19)
  
• Mike Baron & Steve Rude, Nexus Archives, Volume One (7/20)
  
• Jim Krueger, Alex Ross, & Doug Braithwaite, Justice, Vol. 1 (7/21)
  
• Will Eisner, The Plot (7/22)
• Howard Zimmerman, editor, The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel (7/23)
  
• J. David Spurlock, compiler, The Thrilling Comic Book Cover Art of Alex Schomburg (7/24)
  
• Charlie LeDuff, Work and Other Sins (7/25)
  
• George Sullivan, In the Wake of Battle: the Civil War Images of Matthew Brady (7/26)
  
• Robert Mash, How To Keep Dinosaurs (7/28)
  
• Joe Matt, Spent (7/29)
  
• Mike Carey, Sonny Liew, & Marc Hempel, Re-Gifters (7/30)
  review tk
• Joann Sfar & Emmanuel Guibert, The Professor's Daughter (7/31)
  review tk

And that's what I read: not as many "real books" as I'd have liked, but I did get rid of the backlog of comics/graphic novels. (Although I then announced myself to various comics companies as a reviewer for ComicMix, so I'm starting to get review copies to build the pile back up. I must admit that I am powerless to control my to-be-read pile and turn it over to a Higher Power...)

Handicapping the Hugos

I wrote this on March 29th, soon after the list of nominees were released. But I held off posting it until after the voting deadline, for much the same reason I didn't do a post like this last year. (And I slightly edited it on April 2nd, after Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest popped out of "Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form" and Pan's Labyrinth popped in.) A lot has happened since then, but here's what I wrote four months ago:

I'm not a member of Nippon 2007, so I can't vote this year. Instead, I'll give my thoughts on what will win. (Not what I think should win, or what I'd vote for if I could -- just what I think will win.) Last year I intended to do this, but forgot, and ended up doing a post-mortem instead.

(I might also be comparing this list with what I nominated, especially if it affords me opportunities to complain about things. I like complaining; it soothes me.)

I don't intend to insult anyone, so, if I say something stupid, it's probably by accident (as usual).

Oh, and I'm applying my usual Hugo-voter heuristics (which I may explain, or not, as I go along). Since this year's Worldcon is being held in Japan, the voters may be somewhat different this year, which may make all of my predictions wildly inaccurate. (Though the nominees list looks pretty much the way I'd expect it to, so the Japan Effect hasn't hit yet.) My method of predicting award winners has very little to do with the intrinsic worth of nominees, and actually works better the less I know about specific nominees. (It's also only half-serious.)

Novel

• Michael F. Flynn, Eifelheim (Tor)
• Naomi Novik, His Majesty’s Dragon (Del Rey)
• Charles Stross, Glasshouse (Ace)
• Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (Tor)
• Peter Watts, Blindsight (Tor)

This is a race between Stross and Vinge, and I think Stross will pull ahead by the end. I do wish Farthing had made it on, but...oh, well. The Stross and Watts novels were on my list of nominees.

Novella

• Robert Reed, “A Billion Eves”
• Paul Melko, “The Walls of the Universe”
• William Shunn, “Inclination”
• Michael Swanwick, “Lord Weary’s Empire”
• Robert Charles Wilson, “Julian”

I nominated the Swanwick and Wilson stories; though I thought Stross's "Missile Gap" was easily the best novella of the year. Four of the stories are from Asimov's (two -- the Melko and Shunn -- from the April/May issue), which I think says something about the people voting this year. It's between Reed and Swanwick, I think, and I bet Reed will win (mostly because his story is SF, and Swanwick's is Fantasy), though I prefer the Swanwick story personally.

Novelette

• Paolo Bacigalupi, “Yellow Card Man”
• Michael F. Flynn, “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth”
• Ian McDonald, “The Djinn’s Wife”
• Mike Resnick, “All the Things You Are”
• Geoff Ryman, “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”

I nominated the Flynn, and I'd be voting for it if I were voting this year, but I think McDonald will narrowly take it, over Resnick. (The Resnick story is from Jim Baen's Universe, which is web-only, and I think the short-fiction voters are just old-fashioned enough that that will matter this year.)

Short Story

• Neil Gaiman, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”
• Bruce McAllister, “Kin”
• Tim Pratt, “Impossible Dreams”
• Robert Reed, “Eight Episodes”
• Benjamin Rosenbaum, “The House Beyond the Sky”

I nominated the Gaiman story. Three more from Asimov's, plus the Gaiman from a collection and the Rosenbaum from Strange Horizons. I'm betting this one goes to Gaiman, mostly because he's Neil Gaiman (though I also thought the story was good enough to nominate it myself).

Related Book

• Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews
• Joseph T. Major, Heinlein’s Children: The Juveniles
• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon
• John Picacio, Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio
• Mike Resnick & Joe Siclari, eds., Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches

This is always a hard category to handicap; my rule of thumb generally is that the book by or about the oldest SF writer wins; which is often (but not always) the most fannish book. This year, the Resnick/Siclari is the most fannish, the Major is about the oldest dead guy, and the Phillips is the obvious critical front-runner. (I nominated James Tiptree, Jr. and Cover Story.) My prediction: James Tiptree, Jr., not because it's the best book (I haven't read them all), but because it is about an old dead writer, because it's good, and because more people have read it.

Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Children of Men
• Pan's Labyrinth
  
• The Prestige
• A Scanner Darkly
• V for Vendetta

I nominated Pirates and V, and would have nominated Prestige (and Stranger Than Fiction, for that matter) if I'd seen it in time. This category usually goes to the biggest crowd-pleaser, but I suspect Pirates is too much middle to win. If that's true, then I think it will go to V.

Edit: I don't think Pan's Labyrinth will win, since it obviously had the fewest nominations. I'm still expecting V to take it.

Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

• Battlestar Galactica, “Downloaded”
• Doctor Who, “Army of Ghosts” and “Doomsday”
• Doctor Who, “Girl in the Fireplace”
• Doctor Who, “School Reunion”

I have no clue. My gut instinct is that Galactica will squeak through, since the Who voters will all have different favorites, and many of them will place the Galactica episode above some of the Who episodes on their ballots. But that's just a wild guess. (And, honestly, I don't care about this category in the slightest.)

Editor, Short Form

• Gardner Dozois
• David G. Hartwell
• Stanley Schmidt
• Gordon Van Gelder
• Sheila Williams

If all of the Asimov's stories on the ballot are any indication, it should be Sheila Williams's year. However, I think the voters are extremely conservative and backward-looking in this category, so I actually think Van Gelder will win in recognition for the last decade. (And this is exactly the line-up I nominated...and probably the line-up nearly everyone nominated.)

Editor, Long Form

• Lou Anders
• James Patrick Baen
• Ginjer Buchanan
• David G. Hartwell
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden

The clash of the Titans! Hartwell is one of only two book editors to have ever won an editorial Hugo while still alive, but Baen died tragically (and young). Since Baen won't be coming up in future years, I think he'll get it. But I do hope that, as this category goes on, it honors living editors for their current work, and doesn't become a default lifetime achievement award.

Professional Artist

• Bob Eggleton
• Donato Giancola
• Stephan Martiniere
• John Jude Palencar
• John Picacio

I nominated Giancola and Martiniere. This is another extremely conservative category, so I think it's between Eggleton and Giancola. And my gut says that Eggleton will get one or two more before it switches over to Giancola for the next decade.

Semiprozine

• Ansible
• Interzone
• Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
• Locus
• The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Award for Best Locus will go to Locus. Interesting to see LCRW there, though -- if the mix of voters is different than it used to be, maybe it will surprise me.

Fanzine

• Banana Wings
• Challenger
• The Drink Tank
• Plokta
• Science-Fiction Five-Yearly

I really don't know, so I'll say Plokta. I can remember that name most easily, mostly because I always want to misspell it.

Fan Writer

• Chris Garcia
• John Hertz
• Dave Langford
• John Scalzi
• Steven H. Silver

This one is assumed to be a battle between Scalzi and Langford, and I think that's right. I also think Scalzi's profile (and name recognition among people who don't usually vote in this category) will pull him ahead.

Fan Artist

• Brad W. Foster
• Teddy Harvia
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Frank Wu

Another category I'm horribly unqualified to comment on. I'm going to say Sue Mason, since I don't think she has one, and I'm sure she deserves it.

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

• Scott Lynch
• Sarah Monette
• Naomi Novik
• Brandon Sanderson
• Lawrence M. Schoen

Lynch and Novik are the two obvious heavyweights, and I think Novik will take it easily -- she has three books out in mass-market in the US, which means (I think) that many more of the voters will have read her books than anyone else's. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if Lynch wins this next year.

Congratulations to Nicholas Sica!

Nicholas Sica, the Art Director for the Science Fiction Book Club for the last several years, was nominated for a Chelsey Award this year in the "Best Art Director" category. And a painting he art-directed, Todd Lockwood's stunning wraparound cover for the Naomi Novik's Temeraire: In the Service of the King, was also nominated for a Chesley in the Hardcover category.

John Picacio has the full list of nominees, which includes a lot of other great work.

But I give particular congratulations to Nick for all of his great, hard work (in an area that often doesn't get a lot of recognition) and wish him the best of luck in whatever comes next.