Quote of the Week

"I don't know how much he hurt you, but I'll hurt you more than him...and that's why you keep coming."
- Timothy Bracy of The Mendoza Line, from the song "Morbid Craving"

"She holds a cigar in her right hand
You used to hate smoke but now you understand
How it feels to fight an urge."
- Shannon McArdle of The Mendoza Line, from the song "Something Dark"

It's Manga Friday Again!

And Manga Friday means that I review a pile of things over at ComicMix! This week I looked at Andromeda Stories, Volume 3, The Guin Saga Manga: The Seven Magi, Volume 3, Le Chevalier d'Eon, Volume 2, and Princess Resurrection, Volume 2.

I should also note that I'm no longer the only comics reviewer at ComicMix; I've been joined by the perspicacious Van Jensen and the incomparable Mike Gold. Read us now...or hear about us later!

Song Chart Meme

I've succumbed to yet another meme...some days I just can't help myself.

This is the Song Chart Flickr Pool, and I hope they're mildly entertaining.

Possibly The Nerdiest Thing I Have Ever Posted

This keeps popping back into my mind like a bad penny, even a month later, so I expect that I need to write it down to settle it.

In the movie Juno -- which I blogged about last month -- the title character says "Thundercats Are Go!" when her water breaks.

This of course is a conflation of two entirely separate geeky catchphrases:

• "Thunderbirds Are Go!" from the '60s Gerry Anderson "Supermarionation" show
• "Thundercats Ho!" from the '80s animated show that has driven many of my generation into the horrifying recesses of furrydom

It is unclear whether Juno herself -- far too young to know either of these minor pop-culture icons in their heyday -- made this error, or if it was a slip on the part of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody. (I suppose it could also be a deliberate mistake.) But now the record has been set straight, and I can stop thinking about this very stupid minor point.

Here Come The Judge(s)!

Two major awards have announced their next set of judges recently -- and by "recently," I mean "I learned about them today, but I could be slow."

From SF Awards Watch: the judges for the 2009 Philip K. Dick Awards (reading books from 2008) are Tobias Buckell, M.M.Buckner, Walter Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein and Bill Senior.

Also from SF Awards Watch: the judges for the 2008 World Fantasy Awards (reading gigantic piles of things from 2007) are Peter Coleborn, Robert Hoge, Dennis L. McKiernan, Mark Morris, Steve Pasechnick.

(And I hope someone on last year's WFA judge panel will be able to pass on the Sekret Judges Memo, which I bequeathed to them last year and which the mighty Jeff Ford had handed down to the equally mighty Jeff VanderMeer in my year. Before that, its origins are lost in the mists of time. But it is truly a puissant and learned document.)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

The somewhat-controversial 2007 Caldecott winner was published as a novel, but it really is an overgrown picture book -- the biggest, longest picture book in history -- which makes the Caldecott win more understandable.

It's just under six hundred pages long, but about half of that is art -- and many of the pages with words on them have only a few lines of text. (Hugo Cabret is quite old-fashioned as a picture book; pages -- spreads, actually -- have either words or pictures on them, but not both.) Some people have compared Hugo Cabret to a graphic novel, but the art is more like a picture book -- large drawings, placed to dominate or fill a page -- there's no panel-to-panel transitions on individual pages. I read it in about an hour and a half; I'd expect even a slow reader wouldn't take more than three hours, unless she intensely dawdled over the art.

Hugo is an orphan in Paris in 1931, living in the walls of a train station, keeping the clocks wound, stealing food and clothing, and avoiding the dreaded Station Inspector. His father was killed in a museum fire, but he's trying to complete his father's last project -- the restoration of a man-shaped automaton at a writing table. Unfortunately, to repair the automaton he needs parts, and to get those parts he steals mechanical toys from a handy shop in the station...until, one day, the proprietor catches him.

The proprietor and his adopted daughter Isabelle get caught up in Hugo's story, and, as one might expect, they have a deep and hidden connection to Hugo. All is revealed eventually, and everything wraps up more neatly than I'd prefer, though it is appropriate for a book for younger readers like this. The story ends up being in large part an excuse for Selznick to get into the history of a person he greatly admires, and to go on about automatons, another subject he's very interested in.

Without giving away important plot points, there's not much more I can say about the story. It's nice, but slightly flattened, the way some stories for younger readers are. The art is more cinematic than graphic-novelish, with obvious tracking shots moving across several pages. I think those effects work decently here, but comics have built up a visual language of their own over the last century or so, which can achieve many of the same effects without taking twenty pages to do so. There's nothing wrong with the way Selznick does it -- and his art is very nice -- but there's something odd and old-fashioned about Hugo Cabret, as if it were a book from 1931 instead of just being about that time.

SFWA Gets It Right

I've been picking on SFWA quite a bit lately, it seems, but they've just made one decision that I can wholeheartedly agree with:

Michael Moorcock will be this year's Grand Master.

(I personally would have picked him before Aldiss -- just to compare apples to apples, not mentioning other GMs of the past decade or so -- but, then, I probably would have picked Ballard before either of them. So what do I know?)

Milestones

Sometime today, Antick Musings logged its 100,000th visit. That's "logged" rather than "received" because I didn't sign up for statistics for a few weeks at the beginning, and I also lost about a week when switching to New Blogger because the template wasn't carried over exactly as I thought it would be.

This means absolutely nothing, but it's a nice round number, so it gets a blog post all of its own.

Why Not Holiday in Sunderland This Year?

Today I reviewed Bryan Talbot's interestingly odd graphic novel Alice In Sunderland at ComicMix.

(Also of interest: Niall Harrison's take on it.)

Rumpole Misbehaves by John Mortimer

John Mortimer is quite old -- he'll be 85 in April -- and still writing. That's worth something. Rumpole Misbehaves is light and comic, with sparkling prose and Rumpole himself as irascible as ever. That's pretty good, too.

But the mystery plot of Misbehaves, and its shape as a novel, leave much to be desired. Misbehaves only makes sense if it is set in a world in which every single person other than Rumpole himself (and possibly She Who Must Be Obeyed, his wife) is utterly incompetent, and most of them are also completely corrupt.

Back when Rumpole's adventures were of novelette-length, the plots were streamlined and the time sequence condensed; there wasn't time or space to wonder why the police in Rumpole's world were either incompetent or corrupt (since they invariably arrested innocent people and then tried to frame them). And the judges and prosecutors were generally seen as unpleasant individuals, people with perhaps differing views on the likelihood of innocence than Rumpole himself, but not as fools or bastards. But, now, in the era of Rumpole novels, even the fellow barristers in Rumpole's chambers are nasty, and he alone upholds the standards and ideals of British Jurisprudence.

Luckily, Mortimer still has a deft hand for dialogue and his playwright's instinct for keeping the action moving, so the flaws are not fatal. Rumpole's world is ever more caricatured, and thus his morals are less likely to be projected by the reader back into the real world, but his stories are nearly as pleasant as ever.

In the course of Rumpole Misbehaves, Rumpole attempts to defend both a young Timson (scion of the large and larcenous South London family that has kept him in work for his entire career) from an ASBO -- a particularly Orwellian invention of the panopticon that is modern Britain -- and a young man from a charge of murder.

The ABSO plot does tie in to the murder eventually, but it's mainly there for Mortimer to rail against the very idea of an "anti-social behavior order." I suspect he's stacking the deck horribly in his favor, but I'm inclined to dislike the idea to begin with, so I went along with him.

But even the most cursory of readers of mystery fiction will note that there is absolutely no evidence presented against the supposed murderer: he went to visit a Russian prostitute in London on his lunch hour, found her dead in her room, and was locked in by her maid/procuress until the police arrived. The prostitute was strangled -- was there any matching of her wounds to his hands? (No.) Was there any fingerprint evidence? (No.) Was the time of death determined? (Mortimer tries to bury this, but, no, it wasn't, in yet another example of the amazing incompetence of authority.) And so on; in any world not containing Rumpole, this guy wouldn't even come to trial; there simply isn't enough evidence.

Luckily, Rumpole's voice is still pleasant, and She Who Must Be Obeyed is not nearly as terrible as she used to be. Rumpole Misbehaves is a fine waste of a few hours, but it's not meant to be read with any critical facility engaged. If I'm capable of as much when I'm eighty-four, I'll be more than happy.

Movie Log: Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum is, I venture to say without double-checking, the only British black comedy to prominently feature Patrick Swayze. (And he's actually pretty good in it: the script calls for him to be a lecherous, overly-tanned American stereotype of a golf pro, and he nails that.)

The movie opens forty-three years ago, with Emilia Fox as a young woman on a train who is soon confronted by the authorities about the large quantities of blood seeping out of her trunk. It seems that she has killed and dismembered her husband and his lover, who were about to run away together. So she's packed off to a briefly-glimpsed home for the criminally insane.

Fast-forward to now. Rowan Atkinson is the distracted Rev. Walter Goodfellow; Kristin Scott Thomas is his (still quite attractive) wife Gloria, with whom he has not been intimate in far too long. They have two children: teenage sexpot Holly and bullied schoolboy Petey. And they also have a new housekeeper, Grace Hawkins (Maggie Smith), just about to join their family.

(No points on connecting those dots; the movie doesn't try to conceal it.)

Grace -- and, yes, her name is commented upon by our local vicar -- proceeds to help her new family in ways that bear some similarity to the way she helped herself all those years ago. She also encourages Walter to show more attention to his wife, gets Holly interested in cooking, and helps Petey out with some bullies (without actually dismembering them).

Keeping Mum is a fairly gentle black comedy -- it's a family black comedy, if that categorization makes any sense. The plot does have some holes in it; one, in particular, must be large enough to drive the golf pro's car through. And the ending falls flat -- it's intended to say something humorously cutting about family, but it's staged badly, and events could not have worked that way. But it's a movie that means well, and is easy to believe in most of the way. The actors playing the two children are decent, and the major players all nicely underplay what could have been very broad. If you go into it not expecting greatness, I expect you'll be adequately entertained.

Movie Log: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

As everyone and his Great-Aunt Matilda have already said, the longest book became the shortest movie -- but, even then, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is solidly over two hours, so it's not as if this is some breezy little film.

And this is another movie everyone (and his Great-Aunt Hortense) saw six months ago, so detailed comments on my part would be superfluous. And I watched it with The Wife, so I can't psuedo-liveblog it, as I did with Batman Begins.

Luckily, everyone else (aside from the uber-Potter-fen, for whom no movie could be too long or too slavish in its devotion to the Holy Writ of Rowling) is pretty much right about Order of the Phoenix: it moves quickly, it tells a whole story (even if that is not precisely the same as, or as large as, the story of the book), it's visually stylish and engrossing, and Imelda Staunton makes a great villain.

I can't say whether or not it makes sense to the hypothetical viewer who knows nothing about Harry Potter, but said viewer would have to have been hand-reared in a cage to attain that level of ignorance these days. If you live in an English-speaking country, you know about Potter. And most of the rest of you probably do as well.

So, for part five of a film series, it's remarkably good, especially since the first two were so clunky and dull. The director of Phoenix is already doing movie #6 and has by some reports already signed up to do the one or two movies of book #7, so that's also a good sign. Has there ever been a seven-movie series of reasonable quality? (The initial string of Sean Connery James Bond movies is the first thing that came to mind, but there were only five of those before On Her Majesty's Secret Service.)

Dead to Me by Anton Strout

I've long had a theory that there is a Standard Ace novel, a kind of book that Ace has published again and again over the past twenty or thirty years. The Ace Standard isn't as well known or recognized as the Baen or DAW varieties -- perhaps because the Ace Standard depends more on tone than its more flamboyant competitors -- but there are some clearly defining features. An Ace Standard is a fantasy novel with a first person narrator who is solidly on the side of the angels -- he (and it usually is a he) may do edgy things once in a while, but he knows what good and evil are and he's on the side of good. The Ace Standard is generally set in the contemporary world (like Peter David's original Knight Life), but occasionally ends up in a secondary world (such as Steven Brust's early "Vlad Taltos" books). The danger of an Ace Standard is that of any standard book -- it has a slight tendency to the generic. Series can start in the land of Ace Standard and blossom into more specific worlds; Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" novels (published by Ace's Siamese twin, Roc) did just that.

I don't mean the concept of Ace Standard as a slam; just to note that it's a type, and that examples of the type can be as varied in execution as a Baen MilSF novel or a Terri Windling fairy tale can be.

Anton Strout's debut novel Dead to Me has some strong Ace Standard features: it's set in the modern world, in New York City, featuring a young psychometer (Simon Canderous) working for a secret but legitimate occult government bureau, the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Canderous was formerly a mildly rapacious small-time dealer in collectibles and antiquities, but, after some unspecified Road-to-Damascus moment, he retired his old (and only very, very slightly evil) ways and is now cleaving to the path of Good with the fervor of a new convert.

His employer, the DEA [1], is part of the government of the City of New York, and it has responsibility for dealing with and keeping quiet pretty much everything supernatural in the city. But who the DEA is and what they do, precisely, is not entirely defined in Dead to Me; I don't think Strout has completely mapped out in his own head all of their powers and responsibilities. For example, they sometimes seem to be cops, and sometimes civil servants. If they're cops, they're awfully emotional and undisciplined cops -- not just Simon, who has the excuse that he's new to the DEA, but his partner and mentor Connor Christos, and others.

This also is a common feature of the Ace Standard: the hero is hotheadedly emotional, particularly in having easily-pushed buttons about "evil." The Ace Standard hero is Chandleresque in his chivalry and ideals without being in the least world-weary; he is pricked easily by the slights of the world, and lashes out quickly. At the same time, he is easily tongue-tied when confronting more sophisticated types -- and he's usually in opposition to them. He's prone to long speeches about right and wrong, and may have self-doubt -- let me rephrase: he's prone to acres and acres of self-doubt -- but never doubts the mission.

Canderous is this in spades, and he also has the Ace Standard hero's relationships towards women -- he loves 'em (in a totally modern, completely post-feminist, and entirely aboveboard way), but the fact that these women may be human beings with mixed emotions and motivations (possibly including things that he may call "evil") confuses and vexes him. There are two semi-love-interests for Canderous in Dead to Me -- and that's not even counting the woman he's making out with in the first chapter -- and neither of them is pure snowy white, which causes him some consternation.

This is set in a world where the supernatural is still secret, though how this borderline-competent bunch has managed that trick for so long is a valid question. In a way, Dead To Me is a lighter-hearted version of Charles Stross's "Laundry" stories -- the world here isn't being threatened by Lovecraftian horrors from beyond space, but by the kind of villains routinely defeated by The Real Ghostbusters. Not that this world doesn't have its dangers -- one character is killed, off-page, in a transparent attempt to show that things really are dangerous -- but that they're dangers that people like Canderous and his colleagues can handle.

One strangely generic element is the Secret Society of Antagonists -- pardon me, the Sectarian Defense League -- which, we are told repeatedly, is made up of "cultists." Yes, cultists. Not Satanists. Not members of any specific cult -- they don't worship Baal or Astarte or Alfred E. Newman. But cultists, full stop. You know, the kind from '30s pulp stories, who slaver over luscious blondes tied to hideous blood-stained altars while maniacal priests chant runic incantations and prepare to plunge deep the gleaming, razor-sharp sacrificial knife? That kind of cultist. Admittedly, there's some unintended humor when Canderous keeps thinking "But she's a cultist!" about his sweetie, as if he were Biff Jockwell in an only mildly progressive story of the '50s and his love were Jewish. But Strout doesn't seem to mean this as humor -- although the humorous Ace Standard is quite respectable, and Strout has a light touch in a lot of other ways -- so it just floats on, seeming to refer to something but not actually connecting.

The plot of Dead To Me involves the Sectarians, their sexy and mostly-innocent office manager, one of the recently deceased, a supposedly deadly assassin who stays in the background for several days, some background office politics (of the "my division is better than yours" type), and a big finish at a major museum. Canderous's voice is appealing, the plot moves well, and none of my quibbles rise to the level of impediments -- Dead To Me is a solid first novel, not quite as perfectly formed as one might like, but a fully entertaining example of the modern male urban fantasy. Fans of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files should pay particular attention to Dead To Me: Simon Canderous has a lot of the appeal and outlook of Harry Dresden. I hope and expect that future books in this series will add depth and specificity to Canderous's world, but what we have here is pretty good all by itself.


[1] I could be convinced that naming a secretive government agency the "DEA" was a kind of double-blind, or protective coloration, or even a bureaucratic mistake. ("'No, the other DEA,' I said, for about the thousandth time.") But Strout doesn't really follow any of those avenues; it's just a law-enforcement agency that has the same initials as a different law-enforcement agency. This felt like a lost opportunity, though future books could always pick up on it.

Quills Go On Hiatus

PW -- which, being on the auction block itself, probably has other things to worry about -- announced today that its parent company Reed Business Information's support of the much-maligned (by me, if no one else) Quill Awards would cease immediately.

It couldn't happen to a less-beloved award.

Diagram Group Time Again

One of the great joys of the publishing year is the annual voting for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, organized by the British trade magazine The Bookseller. (Another indication of the great differences in trans-Atlantic cultures; can you see PW sponsoring something silly like that?)

This year's nominees are here. Personally, I'm pulling for How to Write a How to Write Book, if only because the success of that will inevitably lead to How to Write a How to Write a How to Write Book.

Voting is open to the general public, go forth and stump for Cheese Problems Solved, if you are so moved.

Something Pointless

At the moment, I am the only human being in Wiley's New York office!

Hurrah for pointless moments!

Conventional Wisdom Check

Is it just me, or does it seem from the Oscar winners this year that the Academy's voters are trying to pick the things they each thought were best in each category, and not engaging in the various strategies and lifetime-award plans that the Oscar-watchers always predict?

(The pre-Oscar predictions always say things like "And Ruby Dee will win because She's Due, and Marion Cotlard has no chance because she's French and this is her first nomination..." and they all seem to have been totally wrong this year.)

Or am I just saying that because "Falling Slowly" is clearly the Best Song of this or any other year?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/23

A fairly light week -- at least from a mail point-of-view -- allows me to also mention that I've grabbed a copy of the Caldecott Award-winning book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which (since it's much, muck shorter than it looks) I expect I'll read really quickly.

And the books other people sent me for review are:

Tonoharu: Part One by Lars Martinson, from Pliant Press; something I was entirely innocent of before it showed up on my doorstep. I'd never heard of the author, the publisher, or the book. But I see that this book recently won the Xeric Award (which helps individual creators to publish exceptional works), which is impressive. It seems to be semi-autobiographical -- Martinson spent three years teaching English in Japan and Tonoharu is about a young man teaching English in Japan. The book design is quite elegant; the pages have a great fine-book smell; and the art has very cartoony figures, strong vertical and horizontal lines, and a rigid four-panel grid. It publishes at the beginning of May, and I look forward to reading it.

Physics of the Impossible is a non-fiction book on science by Michio Kaku, a well-known science popularizer. (I know I've read at least one of his books -- maybe Visions -- but can't recall exactly what or when.) This is a general "how these SFnal ideas could work" book, not tied to any specific fictional world and based in real, if speculative, science. Impossible is divided into three sections -- Impossibilities of Class I, II, and III -- starting with force fields and invisibility and working up to time travel and perpetual motion machines. Doubleday will publish it on March 11 in hardcover.

Iron Man: Beneath the Armor is the first bound manuscript I've received as a reviewer -- and I would have been more impressed before I learned how easy it is for my employer to create them. (The Iron Man book is published by someone else, though -- Ballantine, to be exact -- so perhaps it's more impressive when they do it.) Anyway, this is a guidebook to Iron Man's history in the comics, copiously illustrated with lots of art from forty years of comics, by the very knowledgeable Andy Mangels. I'm sure this is being published now because of the upcoming movie, since Iron Man otherwise has always struck me as an also-ran hero. The materials I have don't say when this book will be published, but I'm going to guess that it will be before the summer, and the movie.

Before They Are Hanged is the second book of "The First Law" by Joe Abercrombie. (Which reminds me of the old story -- I'm not sure if it's true or not -- that Terry Goodkind's first novel was named Wizard's First Rule because he wanted the whole series to follow that title style: Wizard's Second Rule, Wizard's Third Rule, and so on. According to the story, Goodkind was convinced by someone at Tor, his publishing house, that this was not necessarily the best way to create a series identity.) Abercrombie's series looks to derive more from Glen Cook and Steven Erikson than from Goodkind, but he writes big, bloody epic fantasy, so he's in the same ballpark either way. Before They Are Hanged is a trade paperback from Pyr, and will be published March 4th.

Last this week is something that came directly from the author: Polly Frost's Deep Inside. It's a collection of SpecFic erotica stories, and I was amused to note that I know Frost's editor (Paul Stevens of Tor -- hi, Paul!). I have to admit that I'm not all that plugged into the skiffy erotica scene, though I do know that it exists, and have been known to make jokes about Circlet Press. Deep Inside was published by Tor in the summer of 2007 in trade paperback, and it's still available.

Del Rey Manga Reviews

My usual "Manga Friday" feature at ComicMix reviewed three Del Rey Manga titles this week: Minima! , Vol. 1, Yozakura Quartet, Vol. 1, and Dragon Eye, Vol. 2.

AKIFIF: Macintosh OS 10.2 Startup CD?

My wife's computer (a desk-lamp iMac of approximately 2004 vintage, running 10.2.something) has been stuck on the blue screen for a couple of days now.

I suspect it's a problem with the user files, and I think I could fix it without too much trouble if I could boot the damn thing into a normal system from a CD, but the only thing I have are Restore CDs, Software Install CDs, and Upgrade CDs -- I don't have a single disc that's simply a bootable system; they all start some software process I don't want.

Does anyone out there know of a place to download old Mac system software, so I can burn a CD or DVD to run on her computer? I can't make one from the system on this computer, because this is an Intel Mac running 10.5.2, and that's too rich for the other Mac.

This is really annoying; I have this stack of CDs with something like an OS on them, and a long list of things to try to fix from Apple.com, but the first step is "start up from a CD." (Or in "safe mode," which isn't working.)

Update, Monday: Thanks, Brad! Target mode worked: I copied the hard drive on the dodgy iMac to a backup (once I'd lugged it over to where the other computer lived), and then a clean install fixed things.

I feel lucky that I've run Macs for nearly twenty years now, and I've never had to do a clean install before -- and I'll be even happier if it's twenty years until I have to do it again.

(The lurking issue now is that the OS install from the disc I had didn't include Classic...and I do find having Classic on at least one computer to be useful, so I'm trying to get that back.)

On Moving Targets, and On Those Moving Them

The New York Times's Book Review has an "Inside the List" column every week, delving a molecule or two down into some aspect of the bestseller list that the editors find mildly amusing that week. (The Times, being an august, serious Newspaper of Record, is never more enthusiastic than "mildly amused.")

This week's entry is by Dwight Garner, who is also the primary writer for the Times's PaperCuts blog, and could thus be assumed to be slightly less old-fashioned and dry-stickish than his compatriots.

However, Garner takes this space to look back at the bestseller lists of 25 years ago -- February 20th, 1983 -- and look down his nose at them. He notes that the NYTBR invented the "Advice, How-To, & Miscellaneous" lists in early 1984, so this particular list was before that watershed -- and thus "advice bestsellers were placed on the general nonfiction list, where they crowded out almost everything else."

Note carefully that "were placed." The Times is not reporting on the actual sales of books, it is placing those books on its hallowed list.

Garner has drunk the NYTBR Kool-aid; he clearly believes that when a bestseller list contains the books that real people are actually buying in large quantities, those books are "crowding out" "everything else." Yes, Dwight, that's what bestseller lists do: they "crowd out" the books that are not selling as well. Surely someone smart enough to get a job at the Times could realize that.

Garner also reprints the fiction list from that same week, and sniffs that he's "struck by the number of narratives about space and other worlds -- also struck by how few of these books I'd particularly want to imbibe today."

On his first point, the list of ten books includes Michener's Space, Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, Auel's The Valley of Horses (not really germaine to his point, but I thought I should mention it), Asimov's Foundation's Edge, Straub's Floating Dragon, Adams's Life, the Universe, and Everything, and Kotzwinkle's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Storybook (which would be gerrymandered off the main list and into the kids-books ghetto, these days). Seven of the ten bestselling hardcover fiction books that week were at least mildly speculative. The '80s were quite good for SpecFic.

As to the question of what books Mr. Garner particularly wants to imbibe, I doubt that any writer worth her salt tries to write something that will appeal to a middle-level book review functionary a quarter-century in the future. She's writing for the people who buy and read books now. And hitting a major bestseller list is a good sign that she's succeeded.

So, if Mr. Garner's successor in 2033 looks back at 7th Heaven and Sizzle and Burn and Plum Lucky, sniffs in his turn, and mentions that 2008 was during the times when the Times "placed" romances and thrillers on the general fiction list, where they crowded out almost everything else...well, then, it won't come as any surprise, will it?

Lotteries

The multi-state Mega Millions lottery jackpot is up to $270 million for the drawing tonight, which means media outlets have poked their heads up and run their usual lottery stories. There's usually some quick interviews with the guys running the green machine and with gamblers (preferably delusional, or able to be spun as delusional). In print, you also see the requisite call to the local university, so some economists can explain how irrational buying lottery tickets is.

Now, I have seen an article or two with a smarter-than-usual economist, who points out that people must be getting something worth what they pay for the lottery tickets -- if they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it. But, in general, there's a strong whiff of "only poor and stupid people do this."

I won't deny that spending money on the lottery can be stupid -- it should only be money that you can afford to burn -- but it's not necessarily so. And I think those economists aren't thinking about what people actually get out of lotteries.

The first, obvious thing is a shot at a large pile of money. It's a very small shot (about one in 175 million, in this case) at, right now, a very large pile, but someone is going to win that money (soon, if not tonight), and any ticket has about the same odds. Unlike many chances available to Americans, nobody else has a better shot at it; anybody who buys a ticket is equal.

The second thing a lottery ticket buys is pretty obvious, as well: it's the chance to daydream, to build some imaginary castles, to think about what you'd do with all that money. I used to try to buy my lottery tickets as early as possible (when I decided to waste the money, and remembered to do so -- which turned out to not be very often), so I'd have a couple of days of "wouldn't it be great if..." to look forward to. I'm busier now, so that rarely happens, but I still generally don't check my numbers for a day or three. Until you know that you lost -- and, let's be honest, you are going to lose -- you can go on dreaming.

But there's something else a lottery ticket buys, though you might have to be a cynical bastard like me to think of it. A lottery ticket is an insurance policy against the creeping "what-ifs" when some other idiot wins. If there's an umpty-gazillion-dollar jackpot, and you don't play, but your idiot brother-in-law does and he wins...you're gonna be pissed. You might be only slightly less pissed if you did play, and he still won, but at least you did what you could.

That's how I see it, at least. It's a cheap way to say "well, I did what I could." And when this jackpot is split between thirty-seven co-workers in Oshkosh, two elderly sisters in Springfield, and an unemployed welder in Kalamazoo, I'll be saying it again.

On Bookscan

I was writing a comment on this post at The Beat, and got carried away. So I figured that, since it was long enough to be a post, I might as well make it a post. And so it is:

The problem with Bookscan -- and, particularly, with making any big pronouncements based on Bookscan numbers -- is that Bookscan isn't consistently any percentage of retail sales.

For some books and some publishers, it's around 65%, for others, 75%. In some cases, it could be close to 100%, but it can also be 25% or less (especially anything that gets into Wal*Mart, which sells huge numbers of a few books and which doesn't report to Bookscan).

I work for a publishing line of mostly technical, professional books, and recently did an analysis on one particular product that showed that Bookscan registered about 40% of the sales of that product through the channels that Bookscan covers. (Leaving out all of the other ways those books are sold -- directly by the publisher; through organizations, corporations, or governments; by non-book stores; to college students; and so on.) That's an extreme case...but those cases do exist. And there are probably similar cases in the comics world.

So when someone who can see Fantagraphics's real sales figures says that they don't resemble Bookscan numbers, I believe him. Bookscan is best for parallax; if you know what your books are selling (for real and on Bookscan), and you know what the competition is selling on Bookscan, you can work out, roughly, what the competition is really selling. But without real numbers for comparison in the middle there, Bookscan figures alone are dangerous to rely on.

And the idea that indy comics are failures because they don't sell at the level of long-underwear projects is just silly -- in "real" publishing, five thousand copies of a 23-dollar book isn't bad at all for a literary project. Thrillers sell better, yes -- in comics and outside of them. This is news?

Quote of the Week

"A train whistle at night was a word that meant the same thing in all languages. It was compounded of loneliness and otherness and the futile desire to be anywhere but here, anybody but one's own wretched self. What made the heart ache at the sound of it was the knowledge that the locomotive was pulling out without you and always would. You were never going to catch that imaginary train that would carry you to the faraway land containing the solutions to all your problems. You were never going to arrive at the impossible city where all the things for which you secretly yearned were given away free in the streets."
- Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel, p.285

More Picking on the Nebulas

Keith R.A. DeCandido dislikes this year's Best Script category for a different reason than I do: it contains a work which is actually ineligible.

C'mon, SFWA, admit it: you want to have a "Media Thing We Looooove" category but you didn't have the guts to say that, so you pretended that you're judging the scripts (which you mostly don't see) and not the finished product.

Admit to your geekiness. Own it. You'll be a better organization for it. Oh, and, while you're at it, get rid of the confusing and credibility-damaging "rolling eligibility" system too.

Final Nebula Nominees List

In typical SFWA fashion, news that this year's Nebula Award nominees have been finalized dribbled out through odd, unofficial channels -- I found out via SF Awards Watch, who found out from John Scalzi, who didn't mention where he got it from. (Gnomes, I assume.)

And those nominees are:

Novels

• Odyssey - McDevitt, Jack (Ace, Nov06)
• The Accidental Time Machine - Haldeman, Joe (Ace, Aug07)
• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union - Chabon, Michael (HarperCollins, May07)
• The New Moon’s Arms - Hopkinson, Nalo (Warner Books, Feb07)
• Ragamuffin - Buckell, Tobias (Tor, Jun07)

Hey, I've actually read three of these! And I want to read both of the others -- I even have a copy of Ragamuffin looking at me balefully from the shelf. I have a feeling it's going to go to either McDevitt or Haldeman, even though (to be honest) their books are entertaining and fun, but not really Nebula-level.

Novellas

• “Kiosk” - Sterling, Bruce (F&SF, Jan07)
• “Memorare” - Wolfe, Gene (F&SF, Apr07)
• “Awakening” - Berman, Judith (Black Gate 10, Spr07)
• “Stars Seen Through Stone” - Shepard, Lucius (F&SF, Jul07)
• “The Helper and His Hero” - Hughes, Matt (F&SF, Feb07 & Mar07)
• “Fountain of Age” - Kress, Nancy (Asimov’s, Jul07)

I've read exactly none of these. Good year for Gordon, though. Based on absolutely nothing, I'm going to predict Wolfe will will.


Novelettes

• “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” - Sherman, Delia (Coyote Road, Trickster Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Juvenile, Jul07)
• “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” - Ryman, Geoff (F&SF, Nov06)
• “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change” - Johnson, Kij (Coyote Road, Trickster Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Juvenile, Jul07)
• “Safeguard” - Kress, Nancy (Asimov’s, Jan07)
• “The Children’s Crusade” - Bailey, Robin Wayne (Heroes in Training, Martin H. Greenberg and Jim C. Hines, Ed., DAW, Sep07)
• “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” - Chiang, Ted (F&SF, Sep07)
• “Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone” - Bramlett, Terry (Jim Baen’s Universe 7, June 2007)

I don't recall ever seeing a story from a Marty Greenberg anthology being Nebula-nominated in the past, so good work to Bailey there. I believe the title of the Ryman story is actually "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)." And, once again, I haven't read any of these. Should I make a prediction? Oh, let's not.

Short Stories

• “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse” - Duncan, Andy (Eclipse 1: New Science Fiction And Fantasy, Jonathan Strahan, Ed., Night Shade Books, Oct07)
• “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” - Levine, David D. (F&SF, Apr07)
• “Captive Girl” - Pelland, Jennifer (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue — #2))
• “Always” - Fowler, Karen Joy (Asimov’s, May07 (Apr/May07 issue))
• “Pride” - Turzillo, Mary (Fast Forward 1, Pyr, February 2007)
• “The Story of Love” - Nazarian, Vera (Salt of the Air, Prime Books, Sep06)

I've only read the Duncan story, so I'll refrain from predictions here as well. Pelland is the only one of the six to have commented on this blog, as far as I can remember, so I'll be rooting for her story.

Scripts

• Children of Men - Cuaron, Alfonso & Sexton, Timothy J. and Arata, David and Fergus, Mark & Ostby, Hawk (Universal Studios, Dec06)
• The Prestige - Nolan, Christopher and Nolan, Jonathon (Newmarket Films, Oct06 (Oct 20, 2006 — based on the novel by Christopher Priest))
• Pan’s Labyrinth - del Toro, Guillermo (Time/Warner, Jan07)
• V for Vendetta - Wachowski, Larry & Wachowski, Andy (Warner Films, Mar06 (released 3/17/2006 — Written by the Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd and published by Vertigo/DC Comics))
• “World Enough and Time” - Zicree, Marc Scott and Reeves, Michael (Star Trek: New Voyages, http://www.startreknewvoyages.com, Aug07 (Aired 8/23/07))
• “Blink” - Moffat, Steven (Doctor Who, BBC/The Sci-Fi Channel, Sep07 (Aired on SciFi Channel 14Sep07))

Have I ever mentioned that I'm not fond of this category?

I'm not fond of this category.

And I really don't care who wins it, either.

Andre Norton Award (not actually a Nebula, by the way)

• The True Meaning of Smek Day - Rex, Adam (Hyperion, Oct07)
• The Lion Hunter - Wein, Elizabeth (Viking Juvenile, Jun07 (The Mark of Solomon, Book 1))
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling, J. K. (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
• The Shadow Speaker - Okorafor-Mbachu, Nnedi (Jump At The Sun, Sep07)
• Into the Wild - Durst, Sarah Beth (Penguin Razorbill, Jun07)
• Vintage: A Ghost Story - Berman, Steve (Haworth Positronic Press, Mar07)
• Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog - Wilce, Ysabeau S. (Harcourt, Jan07)

I've read two of these and bits of another one (which was a bit too YAish for my taste at that particular moment -- no harm, no foul). And I want to read SmekDay. But I have no idea who will win -- except for the sure knowledge that Rowling won't.

Winners will be feted (if they bother to show up) during the gala Nebula banquet, held during the annual Nebula Weekend (less than a convention, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick) at Austin, Texas's Omni Hotel the weekend of April 25th. Sadly, I won't be in attendance this year, since I don't work for someone willing to foot the bill. Oh, well. The expense account is a harsh mistress...

Movie Log: Rocket Science

Rocket Science is a movie about a stammering teenage boy in New Jersey who joins a debate club; the New Jersey connection and the similarity to Thumbsucker were enough to intrigue me and get me to see it.

Rocket Science is aggressively independent; a couple of actors looked vaguely familiar (and Jonah Hill shows up in a very minor role), but it's mostly made up of very high-school-looking unknowns acting naturalistically through a script that strenuously avoids doing anything obvious.

This is another movie that I saw and then didn't bother to write about for a couple of weeks -- mostly because what I have to say boils down to "decent indy dramedy, a low-key story about characters that's worth seeing if you like that sort of thing."

Oh, one other thing: if you like the Violent Femmes (particularly their first album), you need to see Rocket Science, since a couple of songs are used very well here. Of course, that raises the question of when this movie takes place -- it could be anywhere between 1982 or 2006, as far as I can tell -- but that's not terribly important. It did make me wonder, though, and it might confuse or put off current teenagers.

I Am Not the Blabbermouth in Question -- This Time

Over at ComicMix, I just reviewed a new title from Minx/DC Comics, Confessions of a Blabbermouth.

No Dominion by Charlie Huston

No Dominion is second of the three (to date) Joe Pitt mysteries, about a vampire in New York City. Unlike other mysteries with vampires I've seen -- urban fantasy or paranormal romance, or things like P.N. Elrod's historical "Vampire Files" series -- Huston's series is seriously hardboiled, with a brooding antihero and lots of violence. Huston's vampires are organized like gangs, dividing Manhattan into territories and controlled by violent, charismatic leaders. There's not a hint of romance in these vampires; they were turned by the unfortunately-named "Vyrus" and they have no supernatural powers of mesmerism or transformation.

Pitt lives in Alphabet City, which -- along with parts of the Village -- are the stomping grounds of The Society. The Coalition covers most of the island, from 14th street north to the borders of Harlem, where The Hood takes over. Down in the far south are a number of smaller groups who don't take part in this novel. Aside from the fact that they're officially vampires, and can't go out in full sun (sunlight triggers the Vyrus in their blood to set off an epic number of cancers almost immediately), these groups are all basically organized crime families: filled with both intrigue and "family" ties, riddled with agents for other families, and prone to settling disputes with sudden violence. (There's also an even more secretive, and weird, set of essentially vampire warrior Zen monks, but let's leave them aside for now.)

In this book, Pitt -- who isn't part of any vampire group, but is allowed to live in Society territory because he occasionally does jobs for the Society's head, Terry Bird -- becomes caught up in various plots as he tries to track down the source of a new and dangerous drug that many of the young vampires in his area are using. That leads to many of the usual hardboiled novel tropes -- a creepy rich old lady, a violent black crimelord and his dogfighting pit, and the aforementioned vampire pseudo-Shaolin monks. Huston brandishes his cliches with relish, though, making them larger than life and so believeable.

On the less positive side, he also punctuates all dialogue with an initial dash, and refuses to give any speech tags, which is incredibly annoying at the beginning of the novel, but eventually slides into the background. It's an awfully highbrow affectation for a hardboiled vampire novel, though.

Given Huston's publishing history -- he wrote a three-book mystery series before the Joe Pitt books -- it makes sense that this will probably appeal more to the mystery reader than to the vampire fan. (As I said above, these aren't romantic vampires at all.) And I'm impressed at how nasty Huston makes Pitt -- at one point, our hero kills three people just because they're in the room and it's easier to do so.

But I do think I need to warn the usual vampire fan -- Joe Pitt is not a nice guy, he's not on the side of the angels, and he's not even a Chandleresque "tarnished angel." He's a semi-retired mob fixer who's getting dragged back in. He's not going to have long speeches about how his friends are important to him; he's not going to soften because of Twu Wuv. He's a hard bastard, so only jump onto this series if you like reading about hard bastards.

A Conundrum

I'm going to be in New York City on Monday afternoon, since I have a meeting with someone in my company's small office there. The meeting isn't completely settled yet, but it will probably be at two o'clock.

And here's the problem I'm wrestling with. I'm not in NYC much anymore, so this would normally be a great chance to make a lunch date and catch up with someone. But it's short notice, I can't go far from 5th Ave and 28th Street, and I need to get back for my meeting.

And, on the other hand, there's the siren call of Shake Shack, now open in the winter and which I had to leave behind when I was cast out of Paradise Madison Square North.

Decisions, decisions...

Movie Log: Citizen Dog

Citizen Dog is the first movie from Thailand I've ever seen. (It's probably the first movie from Thailand that most people have ever seen, so that doesn't mean much.) It's a romantic comedy that's generally been compared to Amelie, and not without reason. But Citizen Dog isn't a clone of any other movie; it's set firmly in its own culture and place, and has a distinctive tone of its own.

The movies from foreign countries that make it to the US are typically either very serious dramas or the kind of quirky comedies that are vaguely magic-realist and make Americans think "Oh, those wacky foreigners." Citizen Dog is being marketed in the second category, and it fits reasonably well there. This is a movie with motorcycle helmets raining from the sky, at least one undead cab driver, a mountain of plastic bottles, and two men who swap severed fingers.

Citizen Dog marks out it own individual territory, though, starting by being very heavily narrated. (Seriously, the narrator probably has more lines than all of the other characters put together; he's talking for nearly the entire movie. It works, but it's very unlike most Western movies of the past few decades -- and that does help reinforce that Citizen Dog is something different.)

Pod (Mahasamut Boonyaruk) is a young man from the sticks who goes to Bangkok in search of his fortune, or the fast life, or something -- to be honest, it seems more that he's just running away from a bland farm life where nothing changes than running to anything in particular. He takes a series of minor jobs -- in a sardine-packing factory, as a security guard, driving a taxi -- and runs into the love of his life, Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong), who has her own obsessions.

We follow their story mostly through the narrator -- Pod is onscreen for almost the entire movie, but neither he nor anyone else talks all that much. Actually, at this point I should be more specific -- Citizen Dog is both a comedy and a movie with a romance plot, but it's not a "romantic comedy" in any normal American sense of the phrase. (Jin ignores Pod for most of the movie -- and not in the "I'm ignoring you to make you more interested" sense; she's completely caught up in entirely different things.) For me, that was a big plus.

If you can stand quirky, I'd highly recommend Citizen Dog. (And it never feels quirky for the sense of being quirky; just a world in which weird things happen.) And I haven't even said anything about the chain-smoking, talking teddy bear...

Notable Quotable

John Scalzi on the upcoming SFWA struggle for survival election:
"As for Andrew Burt, I think he would be a fine president too, as long as what SFWA members want to do is publicly and enthusiastically cut the organization’s throat."

Supporting in the comments so far: William Schafer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Rosemary Edghill, Susan Shwartz, Paolo Bacigalupi, Charles Coleman Finlay, Amy Sterling Casil, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Elizabeth Moon.

Publicly supporting Andrew Burt....?

The Same Ol' Same Ol'

I really wish people would stop talking about "publishing" as if that only meant "major New York fiction publishing." It's getting very old.

"...authors who will ask 'So tell me again, what can you do for me?'"
Been there, done that. Got another conference call next week. We can do a lot, actually. And we do it.

"Publishers sell books to distributors who sell books to bookstores who sell books to readers."
Maybe some do. I help my company's various sales forces sell books to bookstores, and online book retailers (and that is not just a euphemism for you-know-who), and professional organizations, and corporations, and folks who provide continuing professional education, and distributors, and others I'm forgetting right now. Some of those people sell books to readers, some have already pre-sold those books, some give away those books, and I'd be only mildly surprised if some of them barter books for energy futures. The publishing ecology is deeper and wilder than most people guess.

And, as you know Bob, my current title has the word "Marketing" in it, which means I'm also deeply concerned with making consumers interested in these books. I might not be setting up MySpace pages for Parmenter's Key Performance Indicators, but that doesn't mean I'm not connecting it with readers.

All books are not novels. All books are not stories. And the monomaniacal focus of "publishing" blogging on Major Fiction gives me a headache.

Rant over.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/16

Ten books came in the mail this week, which means they can all fit into one post. (I also picked up a few things at the library, but I'll be leaving those out of lists like this from now on -- at least most of the time.)

Ellen Datlow edited The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a publisher that I hope you can figure out yourself. I've been feeling guilty about carrying around the Datlow-edited issue of Subterranean for several months without reading it. (Though don't ask me how far behind I am on The New York Review of Science Fiction!) So I'm inclined to find time to read this -- especially since Datlow's a great editor and I haven't seen the last couple of her books. Del Rey Book is coming in late April, and I'm going to bet right now that it will be one of the major original anthologies of the year.

The Guin Saga Manga: The Seven Magi, Volume 3 completes a sidebar story to a long Japanese novel sequence by Kaoru Kurimoto; the manga are written by Kurimoto with art by Kazuaki Yanagisawa. I suppose the Conan-esque leopard-headed warrior-king Guin beats up the evil magi and saves the day in this book, but I'll have to read it to be sure. (I reviewed the first two volumes of the trilogy for ComicMix about a month ago.) This is being published by Vertical in early March.

Also from Vertical is Andromeda Stories, Volume 3 by Keiko Takemiya, which also ends a trilogy. (I reviewed the second volume of that series at ComicMix back in December.) This one has the final showdown between our hero Prince Jimsa and The Enemy, an aggressively hegemonizing machine race which is in the process of converting his home planet. The finale of Andromeda Stories will also be in stores in early March.

And next is a complicated one: Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, a spin-off novel by Nisioisin based on the Death Note manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. It's about a serial killer in LA and the Japanese-American FBI agent who needs to run him down. (The mysterious super-sleuth L from the manga series is also apparently important in the novel.) Another Note is also a very stylish-looking book, with a white dust wrapper that only covers two-thirds of the book, black cloth binding, and creepy silver stamping on both case and jacket. It's a very attractive-looking little volume, which was published by Viz this month.

I got something frightening-looking from Del Rey Manga: Minima! , Vol. 1 by Machiko Sakurai. According to the back-cover copy -- even though my old boss would remind me "Never hold against the author what the back of the book says" -- this is the story of a teenage girl whose favorite toy comes to life to become her best friend. (No, not that kind of toy -- get your mind out of the gutter. The cute, cuddly, stuffed kind.) It's available right now.

Also already published by Del Rey Manga is the less cute Yozakura Quartet, by Suzuhito Yasuda. This one is about three superpowered girls and their unpowered male friend, who all protect their town from various supernatural threats. Now, I'm pretty sure I've seen a storyline like that before, if only I could remember where...

Marseguro is the first novel by Edward Willett, and I'm afraid I was making fun of its cover over on Jeff VanderMeer's blog a couple of weeks ago. It's an old-fashioned colonists vs. Earth novel, with a world of humans and genetically modified post-humans targeted by the obligatory oppressive religious government of Earth. DAW published it in mass-market paperback at the beginning of February.

Also from DAW is The Hidden City, first in a big fat epic fantasy series by Michelle West (under the series title "The House War"). It's related to her first duology -- Hunter's Oath and Hunter's Death -- but looks like your usual wade-into-the-deep-end high fantasy, with a spunky heroine surviving in the slums by her wits, battling Houses with a capital H, and evil demons lurking in the background to serve as the Big Bad for later in the series. The Hidden City publishes in hardcover on March 4th.

S.L. Farrell's A Magic of Twilight also begins a big epic fantasy series from DAW, called "The Nessantico Cycle." Nessantico is the seat of a mighty empire, and of its equally mighty religion, both of which I expect will be important as the series goes on. This book also has what I fear may turn out to be a spunky young woman as a major character, though it also has a queen in the fiftieth year of her reign to balance things out. As a consumer note, I should say that there are a number of apostrophes in the pages I looked at, but they all seem to be embedded in character names (and at the same place in the name in all cases), so it's a minor infestation.

Last this week is Elric : The Stealer of Souls, first in yet another remixing of Michael Moorcock's most famous series of stories. All of the previous reprintings I know of -- and I was involved in one of them and am a big fan of the massive, Multiverse-spanning uberseries from Millennium in the UK and White Wolf in the US in the early to mid-90s -- tried to put the stories into an internal chronology. Given how tangled and interconnected all of Moorcock's works are, this was close to being futile to begin with. On top of that, the first Elric novel, Stormbringer -- made up of the second major sequence of stories -- is the very end of the series. Del Rey, having had some success with their chronologically-reprinted series of Robert E. Howard Conan stories, have decided to do the same for Moorcock. So this volume is the first that decides to reprint the Elric stories in the original order they appeared: Elric: The Stealer of Souls includes the original collection The Stealer of Souls, plus the best and most essential Elric book, Stormbringer. There's also a small pile of more minor pieces, including a new introduction by Moorcock and a foreword by Alan Moore, the first review of Stormbringer from New Worlds, and several other Moorcock pieces of the same vintage. It was published February 19th, and it makes a great single volume introduction to the first and best doomed hero of modern fantasy.

Stoker Award Nominees

The Horror Writers Association has announced the final ballot for this year's Bram Stoker Awards; they don't seem to have it on their own website, but SF Signal has the full list.

I'm most intrigued that their categories are all named "Superior Achievement in..." rather than "Best" or "Favorite;" I expect there was a big fight somewhere along the line to end up with that.

And the main novel nominees (as opposed to the first novel nominees) are:

• The Guardener's Tale by Bruce Boston
• Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
• The Missing by Sarah Langan
• The Terror by Dan Simmons

I've only read the Joe Hill, and I don't know much about horror (by choice), so I won't make any predictions or give any opinions this time. But good luck to all of the nominees...even though most of them, of course, will lose.

ComicMix Gives Me the Lightest of Edits

Yesterday, I wrote a post for ComicMix called "Manga Friday: Slight Return," with what I thought was an obvious Jimi reference in the title.

It was posted as Manga Friday: A Slight Return, so I guess I'm just too cool for the room. (Or they have reason to assume I regularly get my grammar wrong, I guess.)

I reviewed the second volumes of four Del Rey Manga books that I'd quite liked: Mu Shi Shi, My Heavenly Hockey Club, Alive, and Parasyte.

I Am So Geeky

Today was the annual Blue & Gold Dinner for the local Cub Scouts, among whom are numbered my two sons. Near the end of the festivities, it was time for the awarding of badges and similar swag -- each group of kids came up, with their parents, to get their rank badge, or special-interest belt loops, or various other things.

My younger son, Thing 2, had completed the requirements to be a Tiger Cub, and so he got his Tiger badge.

And I, standing behind him, could be heard to mutter under my breath, "Face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!" I just couldn't help myself.

(Yes, I know it doesn't actually make sense...but he was a Tiger and he got something good, so it seems like it should make sense.)

Quote of the Week

"In the future, every comic book will be about Hentai-Batman's Neverending War on Horniness. Tony Stark is going to be a well-hung dick-girl in 5.8 years; prove me wrong, internet. In the future, Shiwasu No Okina is your new Jim Lee, fanboys. That's my guess anyway. If I were a betting man, I'd bet it all on dick-girls."

- Abhay, The Savage Critics, 9/24/07, commenting on superhero decadence from Alan Moore's "Pictopia" to today

I Am A Font (of Wisdom)

Today is a day of memes in lieu of actual thought, so here's another:

Things You Probably Didn't Need To Know About Me

Yet another gigantic meme! Picked up from Keith R.A. DeCandido as usual!

1. What is in the back seat of your car right now?
Thing 2's booster seat and an atlas in the seat-back pocket.

2. When was the last time you threw up?
A year or two ago, with a really nasty stomach virus that ran through the family. Before that, not since college.

3. What's your favorite curse word?
I try not to swear (kids, you know), so I think I say "Jesus" the most.

4. Name 3 people who made you smile today?
I'm afraid not.

5. What were you doing at 8 am this morning?
Getting off a train.

6. What were you doing 30 minutes ago?
Eating lunch.

7. What will you be doing 3 hours from now?
Getting ready to leave the office for a three-day weekend.

8. Have you ever been to a strip club?
Yes, but not since college.

9. What is the last thing you said aloud?
Something in the "goodbye" vein -- I was on a phone call with a co-worker about changes to a website page.

10. What is the best ice cream flavor?
Goo Goo Cluster.

11. What was the last thing you had to drink?
A can of Sprite. It's not done yet, either.

12. What are you wearing right now?
L.L. Bean greenish khaki pants, Bean yellow striped shirt, battered old-bruise-colored shoes from Big & Tall, and unmentionables.

13. What was the last thing you ate?
A red delicious apple.

14. Have you bought any new clothing items this week?
Yes, a polo shirt with a pocket from L.L. Bean over the net.

15. When was the last time you ran?
Probably to race Thing 2 down the street sometime before winter descended.

16. What's the last sporting event you watched?
I haven't a clue; it was quite a while ago.

What happened to 17?
Steven Brust has it.

18. Who is the last person you emailed?
A co-worker, passing on a direct mail PDF for comments.

19. Ever go camping?
Not since I was 13. Though it's threatened I may have to this summer, since the Things are Cub Scouts.

20. Do you have a tan?
In February in Hoboken? Not that I ever tan much, or try to, but right now it's laughable.

Ok, now what happened to 21, 22 & 23????
The twelve-year-old making up the test couldn't count.

24. Do you drink your soda from a straw?
If it's in a fast-food cup with a lid, yes. Otherwise not.

25. What did your last IM say?
I don't IM. I don't really get the point -- are e-mails too slow now?

26. Are you someone's best friend?
In the words of Roxie Hart, I am my own best friend.

27. What are you doing tomorrow?
Sleeping late, taking the kids to the library, living through the Cub Scout Blue & Gold Dinner.

28. Where is your mom right now?
Probably on the phone with someone about car insurance; she's at work.

29. Look to your left, what do you see?
Well, I'm looking for a man, I'm looking for a sign (I don't want to be the prisoner). But what I actually see isthe far wall of my officeicle.

30. What color is your watch?
Brown leather band, metallic casing, white face.

31. What do you think of when you think of Australia?
"Those are all a bunch of cricketers, Bruce."

32. Would you consider plastic surgery?
No.

33. What is your birthstone?
I have no idea.

34. Do you go in at a fast food place or just hit the drive thru?
It depends. If the kids want to jump around in the play area (though they're growing out of that age now), we'll go in. And there's no eating allowed in my car. So usually it's a take-it-home deal.

35.How many kids do you want?
I think I'll stick with two.

36. Do you have a dog?
No.

37. Last person you talked to on the phone?
Still the co-worker mentioned in answer 9.

38. Have you met anyone famous?
Really famous, or SF-famous? Of the former, not really.

39. Any plans today?
Got a meeting at two, then try to get work done. (On a Friday afternoon?)

40. How many states have you lived in?
New York and New Jersey -- two.

41. Ever go to college?
Yes. I even stuck around for four years to graduate. (Vassar College, 1990)

42. Where are you right now?
My officeicle at work.

43. Biggest annoyance in your life right now?
That a lot of my job still isn't second nature -- I have to figure out what to do before I do it too much of the time.

44. Last song listened to?
According to my iPod, "Dominique" by the Deathray Davies from Midnight at the Black Nail Polish Factory.

46. Are you allergic to anything?
Not that I know of, other than sudden death.

47. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time?
I have size 13 feet; I don't have favorite shoes, just ones that fit.

48. Are you jealous of anyone?
Not that I'd admit.

50. Is anyone jealous of you?
Who wouldn't be?

51. What time is it?
"The clock on the wall says three o'clock. Last call. For alcohol."
Actually, 1:23 in the afternoon, but that's less interesting.

52. Do any of your friends have children?
I have kids, so I'm automatically friends with the parents of the other local kids of the same age.

53. Do you eat healthy?
A healthy has never touched my lips.

54. What do you usually do during the day?
Work. Slack. Plot World Domination. The usual stuff.

55. Do you hate anyone right now?
No.

56. Do you use the word 'hello' daily?
I suppose so.

58. How old will you be turning on your next birthday?
Nine-and-thirty.

59. Have you ever been to Six Flags?
I do believe I'm married today because my then-prom-date and I went to Great Adventure the day after the prom.

60. How did you get one of your scars?
Running my hand along a fence outside the back of my church at age twelve, on the day I was supposed to play the lead in a Christmas play about four hours later. (That's my only notable scar, and it's almost impossible to see now.)

One Thing That's Great About Professional Publishing

Is that we don't have to pretend that we're head-over-heels in love with every last book on our list, the way many trade publishers (particularly of fiction) do.

Oh, sure, if you catch the right editor in the right mood -- say at 2 AM in the bar at World Fantasy -- they'll admit that they bought that rotten fantasy trilogy because they thought it would sell a billion copies, keep the list afloat for three years, and make them finally eligible for the corporate bonus program. But that never comes out in public.

When you publish books for accountants, it's different. I'm never going to say I love Wiley GAAP 2008, but I'm very happy for what it does to my bottom line, and I know it's a damn useful book that makes the jobs of thousands of accountants easier. My sales force is happy knowing that, too, as are the people who sell the book on to the end consumers. No one has to pretend to be in love with anything, and that's nice.

Movie Log: 2 Days in Paris

Julie Delpy wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in, composed music for and sang the end-title theme for 2 Days in Paris. (I didn't realize all of that until I was watching the end credits, so I'll mention it up front.) I guess it could be called a vanity project, but her co-star, Adam Goldberg, arguably is the center of the movie.

They play a couple -- Marion and Jack -- who are stopping in Paris on their way back to New York after a semi-disastrous Italian vacation. He's a Woody Allen-ish interior decorator, though substantially more masculine than that makes him sound. And she's a photographer who's originally from Paris. They've been together two years, and know each other pretty well. But Jack doesn't speak any French, which does not endear him to Marion's parents (who they're staying upstairs from). And they run into more of Marion's ex-lovers than Jack is comfortable with.

The trailer -- and a lifetime of seeing movies -- will lead lead the viewer to expect a very familiar plot, in which Jack becomes insanely jealous for no good reason, and, finally, learns the errors of his ways and embraces the freedom and joie de vie of French culture (or, alternatively, can't manage to change, so Marion is better off without him). This is not what actually happens in 2 Days in Paris; it's a more specific and particular story than that.

Jack is more than a bit of an ass, but Marion has her own flaws -- and Jack may have reason to be suspicious. (There's one scene, at a party, where Marion's reaction is either real and frightening or amazingly calculated to hide infidelity -- and there's no easy way to tell which is true.) I found 2 Days in Paris to be very successful, and surprisingly assured for a nearly one-woman show. Delpy's Marion is neither a perfect saint nor a histrionic award-bait role, and, from her credits on 2 Days, you'd expect one or the other. Goldberg's Jack starts off more of a one-note character, and stays in annoyed American mode most of the way through (not not without reason -- a lot of the movie takes place as people rudely talk around him in French) -- but he, too, has some depth.

Since it doesn't go where you'd expect it to, 2 Days sometimes feels off-balance, but, all in all, it's worth seeing if you like films about relationships.

An E-mail From My Wife, Reposted Verbatim

Quoth La Contessa:

OK,
Our kids just blew by me in the hallway to run upstairs.
I asked where they were going so fast.
"upstairs to read, so we can earn extra recess at school"
those are your genes, not mine.

The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

It's much harder for to review books that I want to say nice things about than ones that I feel like picking at. After all, what is a novel but a long piece of prose with something wrong with it? And so I've been staring at this screen, trying to put into words the squee! feeling that The Somnambulist gave me.

It's not perfect, by any means. If I felt like complaining, I'm sure I could think of things to complain about. But Jonathan Barnes's debut novel is just so much gosh-darn fun that complaining about it would be like kicking an orphan.

It's the turn of the last century, in London. Edward Moon is a stage magician, midway through a long slide out of fashion. He also is an accomplished consulting detective, of the Sherlock Holmes school -- the kind to whom the police come, wringing their hats in their hands, when they have a particularly baffling case. And he has a mysterious sidekick: the gigantic, silent figure known only as The Somnambulist, who never bleeds, who drinks only milk, whose origins are completely unknown.

(Despite the title, the book isn't really about The Somnambulist, though he is the most colorful blossom in The Somnambulist's bouquet. And don't expect to fully undertsand him by the end. But there I go, quibbling. )

Moon is bored, and has the feeling that the best part of his life is over. But then he's called in to consult on a particularly bizarre death, and a very baroque case begins. The case itself is a bit contrived, both within the fictional world and on Barnes's part, but that's entirely right -- this is a mannered story, heavily narrated, and very much a story being told.

I'm not sure what Barnes has been reading; I found The Somnambulist to be reminiscent of novels like The Lies of Locke Lamora, Perdido Street Station, and Scar Night -- but less wildly inventive than those books, perhaps damped down to fit into our real world. Not that such inventiveness is impossible in an Edwardian story -- witness the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But there I go again...

Let me be honest: The Somnambulist does have problems, and some of them are quite large. However -- and this is the important part -- it's also got style to spare, and an insinuating, sneaky narrative voice that drags the reader along. It's narrated by a character who remains secret at the beginning but declares himself by the end -- and it's not the character I thought it might be.

Let me quote the first paragraph -- as a thousand other reviews will; it's that kind of grand, catchy opening -- to show you what I mean:

Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.

A book with that kind of style, an author with the guts to start that way -- we can forgive a lot when it comes packaged that way. And The Somnambulist doesn't require much forgiveness; just a willingness to dive headlong into an old-fashioned adventure story.

One last note: The Somnambulist is a historical thriller with some fantasy elements, rather than being a historical fantasy. Its roots are more outside of modern fantasy than within them, which readers should take into account when diving in. In other words: don't expect world-building, don't expect extrapolation. Expect a damn good trip through a never-was version of Edwardian London that you could recommend to your Aunt Hilda without second thoughts.

Because Everyone Else Is Jumping Off That Bridge

I will, as well.

John Scalzi had a long, detailed post about the financial truths of the writing life yesterday. If you have any thoughts about being a writer -- particularly a full-time writer of fiction -- you owe it to yourself to line up and let Scalzi bop you with the Cluestick.

Notable among the hordes linking to the Scalz-meister are Justine Larbalestier and Keith R.A. DeCandido, both of whom make the point that New York City isn't necessarily as expensive as he thinks it is (and that it has other advantages). Others have also mentioned that while many writers have been lucky enough to have understanding spouses with stable jobs to support them, planning to snag such a person is not so simple.

Good News, Bad News

Colleen Lindsay has a new job! (She's an agent for FinePrint Literary Management.) Random House will never be able to fire her again...and they'll soon realize who they let get away.

Steve Gerber is dead -- and he was only 60. I don't know how his Howard the Duck reads today, but it was brilliant, and there will never be another comic like it.

Six-Word Lives

Aparrently, there's a thing going on about people writing their lives in exactly six words. (Pedigree: Hemingway's famous "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." via the new book Not Quite What I Was Planning, with a side stop at this PW humor piece.)

Since I'm sure everyone is going to be doing it in six hours or so, I figured I'd beat the rush.

Six: too many, or few? Feh.

Hugo Nomination Deadline Is Coming Up

Those of you who either were members of last year's worldcon or are members of this year's worldcon are entitled to nominate for the Hugo Awards -- though, if history is any judge, most of you won't bother. (And I mean no moral judgment by that statement -- this year, I dithered about buying a Supporting Membership for too long, and missed the deadline for being able to nominate. So I won't be nominating or voting myself, I'm afraid.)

Anyway, if you're more organized or decisive than I am, go here and nominate. If you think that you might want to complain loudly about the results -- and you already have a membership -- you might as well do it now, since it will allow you to "ha-HA" loudly in the faces of people who attempt to stymie you with the "but did you nominate?!" argument.

I also note with amusement that John Klima is nominating me for a Hugo for Best Fan Writer. Hey, tell you what: I'll make a solemn vow. If I'm on the final ballot, I will be at Denvention 3 for the Hugos. (That's a safe promise, since there's no way I could be nominated.)

Giving Awards to Everything

I see from Locus Online that the rest of the categories of winners of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards were recently announced. On the one hand, diversity is nice, and I don't want to be telling any group or organization how to run their awards.

But...and you knew a "but" was coming...both the Best Short Fiction and Best Other Work categories have a three-way tie for the "winner," which is really much too much. On top of that, each category has a quite long "short list" of other nominees (eight in one case, thirteen in the other).

Again, it's not for me to tell them what to do with their awards, but -- no one is going to take seriously an award that goes to three things, and gives an honorable mention to more than a dozen others. It's spreading what little prestige they might have too far, until it's meaningless.

(But I'm a bit torn, since one of the many winners is David Gerrold's story "In the Quake Zone," from Mike Resnick's anthology Down These Dark Spaceways -- which my old boss Ellen Asher acquired and published back at the old place. So that's kind of like seeing a child -- OK, a stepchild -- grow up and make good.)

Perhaps the thing to do might be to create a "Gaylactic Recommended" reading list each year, of stories that they think are really excellent and promote diversity. That would allow them to put out a long list that doesn't look like a mistake. But an award should go to one thing -- or, in rare cases, two -- not to a laundry list. Any award that wants to be taken seriously needs to keeps its final lists tight -- I'd say no more than six, maybe seven nominees, and one winner.

We don't live in Lake Wobegon, and saying that we're all equally tall, handsome, and smart does no one any good.

Also? As long as I'm already complaining? The "Other Work" category includes a poem, an entire series of one TV show, two episodes of another TV show, yet a third TV show in its entirety, several movies, both American and Japanese flavors of comics, and some anthologies. That's not a category; it's a random list of stuff.

The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards could have the importance in the genre of the Tiptrees, and help to focus debate and thoughts about the genre the way the Tiptrees have. But that will only be if they first focus themselves.

Reviewing the Mail 2/11: Comics

And the third of today's "Reviewing the Mail" posts covers graphic novels and similar things that arrived in the last week or so.

(This is probably a good place to say: anyone out there publishing books or comics in in any of the areas I cover -- which are very wide -- should know that I'd be very happy to list even more books every week, if only I saw them. Many things also will get reviewed here, and comics and books related to comics also can get reviewed at ComicMix. E-mail me at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net for full contact details; I'd love to see much more than I do, especially in the comics field.)

Path Of The Assassin Volume 8: Shinobi With Extending Fists sounds like the description of an action figure, but it's the latest in the historical epic by Lone Wolf & Cub's Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima about the young adulthood of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. It's brand-new, from Dark Horse.

Also from Dark Horse is B.P.R.D. Volume 7: Garden of Souls, the latest in the tangled history of Hellboy and his world, from writers Mike Mignola and John Arcudi and artist Guy Davis. Davis is doing this pretty much full-time these days, isn't he? I don't think about his work much when I'm not looking right at it, but he's been doing great work -- quietly, in support of the stories he's helping to tell -- for a long time now, without any fanfare and very little recognition.

From the vaults comes DC's final collection of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol -- Vol. 6: Planet Love, with art mostly by Richard Case and Stan Woch. If you didn't catch it back in 1992 -- 1992?! I'm too young to feel that old! -- here it is again, in all its reality-warping brilliance, for a new generation.

And last this week is Queen & Country Volume 8: Operation: Red Panda, from Greg Rucka and Chris Samnee and published by Oni Press. Queen & Country is a relatively realistic espionage comic, focused equally on bureaucracy and wetwork. And I haven't paid enough attention to be absolutely sure, but I think every story arc has been by a different artist.

Reviewing The Mail 2/11: Mass-Markets

This second of three posts today will list and comment on the mass-market paperbacks I received last week. With all of the doom and gloom surrounding this format, I'm thrilled to say that there is a nice-sized pile of them; I might not be able to get all of the covers in. Most of them are from the Penguin empire, but that's just the luck of the boxes this week.

(And I expect I'll have less to say about most of this stuff, but let's see.)

Unquiet Dreams is the second book in an urban fantasy series by Mark Del Franco, who was very polite and well-spoken just about a year ago, when Elizabeth Bear and I kept talking and talking on a Boskone panel about urban fantasy. (We did let him get a word in edgewise, now and then, but he had to work hard for it.) It's set in Boston, it's the sequel to Unshapely Things and the hero (Connor Grey) is what appears to be a consulting druid. (Nice work if you can get it.) It's from Ace, and it's already published.

Garden of Darkness is by Anne Frasier, and is the sequel to Pale Immortal. It's set in Wisconsin -- and sounds like it has at least one vampire in it -- but it looks and sounds a lot like a Southern Gothic. So, if anyone out there is looking for a Northern Gothic, this just might be it. This one is from the Onyx imprint, which is down the hall from Ace (or maybe on a different floor -- I don't know 375 Hudson street as well as I could).

The Watcher is the third in an urban fantasy series -- "Anna Strong, Vampire" is the name on the box -- by Jeanne C. Stein, continuing Ace's domination of that area. Anna is a new vampire, a former bounty hunter, and a supernatural enforcer. From the back-cover copy, she only has one boyfriend, which makes her positively grandmotherly for this genre.

Airs and Graces has a cover with a woman in pseudo-Victorian clothes (but with split skirts) holding the reins of a horse with wings. I predict it will sell a bajillion copies. It's the second in a series about a wild country girl who accidentally bonded with a winged foal to become one of the best students at the Academy of the Air. Oh, yes -- make that two bajillion copies; I can see a lot of people really liking this. It's by Toby Bishop, also published by Ace, and has a quote from BookLoons on the front cover. Really, folks, I can't make these things up.

From Berkley -- Ace's older stepsister -- is Yasmine Galenorn's Darkling, which proclaims itself to be paranormal romance. (And what's the difference between "urban fantasy" and "paranormal romance?" Either nothing or everything, depending on who you ask -- and you'd better back up from the ones who say "everything," since they'll probably start gesturing wildly.) This one is the third in a series, and its cover features a bit of cleavage, but otherwise gets across the desired "tough chick" attitude without any of the usual markers (back to the camera, tattoos, leather, whips, and so on) -- good work from Tony Mauro there.

You may have heard of Patricia Briggs's Iron Kissed already -- it was a #1 bestseller for much of the past month -- and I hope my former compatriots at That Place are paying attention. This one is the third book in a series about a werewolf mechanic, and it's also from Ace.

Moving away from the shores of girls in tight leather and the vampires that love them, The Lost Fleet: Courageous is the third in a Military SF series by Jack Campbell. (And I seem to remember that "Jack Campbell" was someone else, once upon a time, but I forget who. And if you have to choose a pseudonym for your fighting-in-space books, "Campbell" is a great choice.) This is also from Ace, and it's also already published.

Keeping in the MilSF line (though not from Ace) is Robert Buettner's Orphan's Journey, third in his space adventure series. (It's been a few years since the first two -- which I thought were great, fast-paced fun -- but the card page of this book lists two more future titles, so I hope that means Buettner has been busy in the meantime.) Orbit publishes Orphan's Journey in April.

Also from Orbit is a bugcrusher of a paperback, Karen Miller's Empress. It's the first in the "Godspeaker" trilogy, with which she's following up the surprising (to me, at least -- I'm surprised by a lot of things) success of her first books, the "Kingmaker, Kingbreaker" duology. This is also coming in April. I see from the About the Author page that Miller lives in Australia, which explains much -- there's been a flood of female fantasy writers from Down Under over the past decade, from Sara Douglas and Jennifer Fallon to Margo Lanagan and Elizabeth Knox.

And last for this batch is yet another Ace book, Anton Strout's Dead To Me. It's urban fantasy, male protagonist subdivision, featuring a psychometer who works with the NYPD. The back cover doesn't mention any romantic entanglements, but those usually take longer to develop in male-protagonist UF than the ones with the leather-clad chicks. (And I'm sure a theory on that subject would be good for an MA somewhere moderately reputable.) This seems to be Strout's first novel, and it's publishing at the end of this month.

Reviewing the Mail 2/11: Trade SFF

There has been a surge of books into the Hornswoggler mailbox this past week, so "Reviewing the Mail" has been divided, like Gaul, into three parts. (This may be a persistent change, or not, depending on whether the flood continues.) This first post will focus on new or upcoming Science Fiction and Fantasy books in hardcover and trade paperback; the following posts will look at mass-market books and comics.

Michael Swanwick is one of the great fantasy writers of our time, and The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of his best novels -- inasmuch as one can compare books like Jack Faust, Stations of the Tide, and Vacuum Flowers to each other. So I was really excited to hear that he was returning to the world of Iron Dragon, and now I have The Dragons of Babel in my hands. Even more exciting personally, Babel grew out of Swanwick's great novella "King Dragon," originally written for Marvin Kaye's anthology The Dragon Quintet and published by a certain operation to which I used to be attached. It has a gorgeous Stephan Martiniere cover, it was published about three weeks ago, and it's almost certainly one of the great fantasy novels of 2008 -- so go get it, already. (And, if you don't believe me, the back-cover quotes are from Gene Wolfe, Kage Baker, Jane Yolen, and Vernor Vinge -- who know whereof they speak.)

I've only read a couple of Dave Duncan's books, but he's always impressed me with his deep humanity, sometimes expressed in humor and sometimes expressed in drama. The Alchemist's Code is the second in a series that appears to lean towards the witty side -- it's set in an alternate Venice and the hero is the celebrated clairyvoyant Filippo Nostradamu. This one is publishing March 4th in trade paperback, so you've got a little time to save your shekels and start bugging your local book-purveyor.

The Queen's Bastard is a book a know less about: it's by C.E. Murphy and may be that author's first fantasy novel. C.E. is described as the author of the Walker Papers series, which I don't know. I was going to guess that "C.E." hid a male writer -- since Queen's Bastard is about a young woman in a medieval secondary-world -- but a quick Google proved me wrong.

The Unnatural Inquirer is the eighth book in the "Nightside" series, which means that it's almost time for a certain Special Fabulous Book Club to try to do a third omnibus (memo to any members of the current regime who may be lurking here). My ex-boss, the irreplaceable Ellen Asher, was a big fan of these books, which take the usual urban fantasy mixture (a little supernatural, a little mystery, usually more than a little romance), remix it for a male protagonist and set it all on the "Nightside" of London. (China Mieville's recent novel Un Lun Dun has a similar premise, probably conceived independently.) In the Nightside books, John Taylor is a PI mostly working the supernatural side of London, and, in this book, he's looking for supposed proof of the Afterlife for a supernatural scandal sheet. (Which I wish Green had called The Moon, though that might have been too subtle for most Americans.) The Unnatural Inquirer is already in stores, and was published by Ace.

Navigator is the third in Stephen Baxter's series Time's Tapestry, which, from what I've seen, is the very least alternate history I know of. This one covers the Norman Conquest through 1492, with rebellion in England and clashes between Islam and Christendom the major themes. Has anyone out there read this series closely enough to explain what keeps these from being historical novels? (I often like historical novels; I'm just wondering.) Ace published Navigator in January in hardcover.

Debatable Space is a first novel, a space opera, and a book with space pirates in it. From a quick glance through it, Debatable Space also has more than its share of typographical tricks. So I think it's clear that Philip Palmer (whose novel this is) does not plan to swim with the current and write something just like everybody else. I find that exceptionally encouraging. Orbit published Debatable Space (on this side of the pond) in trade paperback in January.

Bloodheir is also from Orbit, though it's not published yet -- it's coming in June in trade paperback. Bloodheir is the sequel to Winterbirth, which means -- for those of you who have been keeping track of such things -- that it's by Brian Ruckley. It looks like bloody, pseudo-Viking epic fantasy of the George Martin variety, but it's only just over 500 pages, and so will cause less damage to reader's wrists.

Last for this post is Iain M. Banks's eagerly awaited new Culture novel, Matter. The cover is striking, but I still doubt if it will be any help to bring in SF readers who don't already know Banks. And, given his track record in the States over the years, assuming everyone already knows Banks is a dangerous strategy. Of course, I only care because Banks should be more widely read here: he writes smart, literate space opera and has the knack of writing stories about people that illuminate larger issues. He's precisely the kind of writer the Mundane SF types think shouldn't exist -- unabashedly science fictional, and able to keep his politics behind the fiction, instead of tediously up front. Matter is also Banks's fattest book in a while, so all those of you who buy books by weight -- and I have to again admit that I don't understand you at all -- should be very happy. Matter is also published by Orbit (in the US and UK), and the official date is February. You can probably find it now, in fact.

Thumbnail Thoughts on The Etched City and Here, There, and Everywhere

I don't have a real post today (though there are at least three for tomorrow morning, and those three are pretty long), so I'll pull one of the last things I had stuck away in the icebox. This was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 3/28/05:

The Etched City is very well written, and has a lot of the writerly virtues of China Mieville without being obsessed with bodily fluids the way Perdido Street Station was. On the other hand, it felt very thin to me, as if I'd read the plot a thousand times before. I suspect Bishop is influenced heavily by Moorcock, for one thing (or maybe I've just read way too much Moorcock). My general feeling is that the plot doesn't live up to the promise of the writing, but that Bishop is going to be an important writer very soon (and that she's already a damn good one). I'm certainly going to be keeping a beady eye out for her next novel.

Here, There and Everywhere is a soufflé topped with meringue, spun out in zero-gee and very artfully set free to float around beautifully. I enjoyed every second of reading it, but there wasn't an instant of tension in the entire book, nor did I ever doubt even briefly the shape
of the story to come. It's sort-of a female version of The Man Who Folded Himself, but Gerrold's book (as old and creaky as it is) still beats it solidly on all the SFnal virtues save pure command of prose.

Ask About My Mime Policy

Because I felt like a quiz today, I discovered that I am well-suited to rule a rapidly modernizing city with a Damascus-steel fist.

Which Discworld Character are you like (with pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Lord Havelock Vetinari You are Lord Vetinari! Supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork! Cool, calculated, and always in control. You graduated from the assassins guild, but failed a course on stealth and camouflage, because the professor never saw you there (even though you attended every class). You always seem to know what everyone is thinking, and after a conversation with you, people feel that they have just escaped certain death. Lord Havelock Vetinari 81% Esmerelda (Granny) Weatherwax 75% The Librarian 63% Carrot Ironfounderson 63% Rincewind 50% Gytha (Nanny) Ogg 44% Greebo 38% Commander Samuel Vimes 31% Death 31% Cohen The Barbarian 25%

Whiny Trekkies Want To Go To Space

So you're a Trekkie -- you've wasted many of the best years of your life being a fan of a (to put it charitably) series of mixed artistic success, and you not only haven't gotten into space, you don't even have a flying car.

What do you do?

Yell at Paramount, and threaten to hold your breath and pout if they don't donate some of their money for space exploration.

This is exactly why I make fun of space enthusiasts. Please note that they're not even threatening not to see the new Trek movie; the most they can promise is that they won't see it on opening weekend. I bet that Monday will see a lot of middle-aged loners with Spock ears slinking into theaters nationwide.

There's a word for people like this, and it's "loser."

[via Pat's Fantasy Hotlist]

Eclipse One edited by Jonathan Strahan

The only original anthology that sounds like a space mission (Eclipse One is go for lift-off!) comes from editor Jonathan Strahan and the mad geniuses at Night Shade Books.

There are fifteen stories in here, and I'm going to write something about all of them. (Probably cranky, unfair things, since that seems to be the way I'm reviewing this month -- please accept my apologies up front, and my hopes that I'll start saying nicer things sometime in March.) So I'll keep the introductory notes brief -- Jonathan Strahan is trying to jump-start the long-dead market for original anthology series (along with Lou Anders at Pyr), and good luck to him.

"Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse" by Andy Duncan

In a time which doesn't seem contemporary but isn't otherwise specified, a Catholic priest deals with a young girl and her hypnotized, backwards-walking chicken. Much later, he thinks about it.

It struck me as pointless, I'm sorry to say. It's essentially a literary shaggy dog story leading up to the Paul Harvey-ish "...and that person became...Famous Writer X!" ending. I like the way Duncan writes, but "Unique Chicken" seems to rely entirely on knowing Famous Writer X (and maybe knowing more about X than just existence, which is bad for me, since I don't).

"Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex" by Garth Nix

A young man who has just accidentally caused the death of his witch-queen grandmother realizes that he has been cursed, though escaping the consequences of grandma's death is of more immediate importance. Eventually, a new witch-queen is chosen, and everything settles down.

This is not a deep or profound story, but it's very enetertaining and does exactly what it needs to do. My only quibble is of the Chekov's Gun variety: it's just not done to mention vampire sex in the title and then relegate it to an off-hand backstory mention.

"The Last and Only or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French" by Peter S. Beagle

A typical American man suddenly and inexplicably starts turning French.

I don't know if it's fair or not, but I get the feeling that Beagle can write this sort of wry, winding story in his sleep after all these years. It's probably actually much harder than that, but "The Last and Only" feels just like the ur-Peter Beagle story: a wry, detached tone, an atmosphere right out of the middle of the American Century, inexplicable happenings

"The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large" by Maureen F. McHugh

In the near future, a teenage boy went into a fugue state after a dirty bomb in Baltimore. Several years later, he's reunited with his mother. The story is told as if it were a newspaper column.

This is very flat and prosy. This kind of newspaper style works best for really large, unbelieveable events; the events of this story are already banal and everyday, so flattening them out even more doesn't help it. I imagine it was meant to be something like "a newspaper story from the near future," but it's a dull one from a dull, '70s-style future.

"The Drowned Life" by Jeffrey Ford

A man whose life is getting too much to handle "stops bailing" and falls into a drowned city. Everything is very metaphoric, as the story admits. His family tries to save him.

This story absolutely should not work; it's much too blatant on the one hand and non-specific on the other. And yet it does; it's easily the most moving story in Eclipse One. I have no explanations.

"Toother" by Terry Dowling

A really nasty horror story about a possibly-supernatural entity kidnapping women, extracting their teeth, and killing them. Some series characters of Dowling's solve the mystery, and catch the killer. (Or the current killer, possibly.)

Very effective, very creepy. For my money, this is the heart of Eclipse One: this story and Jeff Ford's.

"Up the Fire Road" by Eileen Gunn

Either now or very soon from now, two dumb losers get lost during an ill-thought-out ski trip, and meet a pan-sexual, multi-gendered sasquatch, which they both have sex with over an extended period of time. Eventually, they go back to civilization, where several people are pregnant, and other silly things happen.

I might have missed the point of this story entirely; the two protagonist's voices were done well, but I hated both of them. I didn't see the appeal of the sasquatch to either of them -- it felt like a story in which things were asserted, rather than shown, and I didn't believe any of the assertions. Technically solid, but not a story I liked.

"In the Forest of the Queen" by Gwyneth Jones

Another couple runs into trouble in a wilderness -- this time, they're yuppies in a French forest, and they fall afoul of what seems to be an unlicensed Mythago Wood rip-off.

I believed the characters in this one, though they are horrible stereotypes, but I didn't see how the ending had anything to do with them, or with anything. Tree-hugging nonsense, if you ask me.

"Quartermaster Returns" by Ysabeau S. Wilce

In another of Wilce's Califa stories, a small Army outpost in what seems to be Alternate-World Death Valley resurrects the recently flash-flood drowned quartermaster to find out what happened to their missing payroll. A folkloric contest ensues.

Pleasant and colorful, though it could have gone for more of a tall-tale flavor, maybe. (On the other hand, I don't know if that tone has any place in Wilce's fantasy world.)

"Electric Rains" by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Terrorists stike the mid-Atlantic again, hitting Washington, DC with some kind of nanotech device in the backstory. Now heavy rains bring mind-altering nano, which leads the wet affectees into the Metro to have their brains downloaded. One young woman drags her just-died adoptive grandmother through the changed landscape to Arlington National Cemetery.

What's the deal with destroying the Balti-Wash corridor? Dreary, quiet, and not to my taste. It's one of those character-does-something-but-it's-really-about-her-inner-journey stories, which I think are terribly overdone in SF these days. We need to get some outer journeys going.

"She-Creatures" by Margo Lanagan

In Lanagan's typical vaguely-like-Australia-but-not-anywhere-in-particular, three men are doing some kind of smuggling by night, when a group of five witches find them and perform a weird sexualized ritual on one of the men. It's all very life-changing and frightening.

The scene where the witches do...whatever...to the guy is genuinely powerful. But Lanagan refuses to explain it or have it lead anywhere, so it just floats above the story. We don't know who these guys were before, or what they were doing. We don't know who the witches are, or what they did, or what they have to do with anything. So it's one strong scene embedded in a few thousand words of not enough scene-setting, like a fan dancer whose thin, wispy fans don't actually cover anything.

"The Transformation of Targ" by Paul Brandon and Jack Dann

An evil overlord goes to a therapist to get his mojo back, but ends up switching careers.

Pleasant enough, but it's very slight -- it reads like something out of a Marty Greenberg anthology. (Fantastic Shrinks, anyone?)

"Mrs. Zeno's Paradox" by Ellen Klages

Two women divide a brownie far too many times.

Clearly based on someone or other in real life, and short enough not to overstay its welcome.

"The Lustration" by Bruce Sterling

Two hundred million or more years in the future, on a world in a system outside the Galaxy, an engineer in a civilization of "humans" (probably uplifted bears) discovers the secrets of the possibly-conscious vast network of wood that covers his planet.

Very traditional SF, in which Sterling has his characters get down to talking about ideas for most of the story after he maneuvers them together. A story very much like this could have been sold to Campbell in 1940 -- but that's not a complaint. I'm not entirely sure the ending actually has the mood it affects to have, or has earned that mood, but the story as a whole is pretty good.

"Larissa Miusov" by Lucius Shepard

A wannabe screenwriter in LA falls in with a gorgeous Russian woman who has no capacity for love (so she says). Things end badly, as usual for Shepard.

One would have to be quite generous to call this fantasy, and so it possibly doesn't precisely belong in this anthology. It's also not a great Shepard story. But even a pretty good Shepard story is something to be prized, so I won't complain.


As a whole, Eclipse One has an air of quiet competence. If only a couple of the stories (Ford and Dowling) are really good, none of them are less than professional, and even the misfires are all respectable. It's a good first outing for a new original anthology series, and I look forward to many Eclipses in years to come.

I Am Never Happy

On the one hand, in the new job, I have access to Bookscan, so I can get a (somewhat inaccurate) idea of what any book is selling in the US. But it's only updated once a week!

At the old shop, we had no Bookscan -- only our proprietary, in-house numbers. But we sold directly, so those numbers were our real sales figures, and they were updated at least daily. (Some books would have noticeable sales from the beginning to the end of lunch.) I really miss that, when I keep wondering how Extraordinary Circumstances is selling right now. But I won't know how it's selling now until next Wednesday -- is that any way to run a railroad?

Quote of the Week

"Tell her you love her before it's too late. You never know when it's going to start raining helmets again."
- Citizen Dog (about the forty-minute mark)

T Is for Trespass by Sue Grafton

T Is for Trespass is a slower, quieter book than most detective novels -- it's even slow and deliberate by Grafton's Alphabet Mystery standard, and she's been keeping the pace controlled and the focus on characterization for many years now. After a few books touching on Grafton's heroine Kinsey Milhone's long-lost relatives and the workings of the fictional California town of Santa Theresa, this time Grafton moves closer to home.

Trespass, like many mysteries before it, follows two plotlines. Also as per tradition, one of these is a case that the detective is investigating, and one is focused on events in the detective's own life. But unlike most mysteries, neither of the plots in Trespass are set off by a murder. Kinsey Milhone is investigating a fender-bender for the insurance company of the young woman driver judged to be at fault (but who swears that the van that hit her was slowing down for a turn when she pulled out -- and then sped up to hit her). And the personal plot has an even lower-key start: Kinsey's neighbor, the irascible octogenarian Gus Vronsky, has a fall and suddenly needs care on a daily basis. His only relative, a great-grandniece, does visit from New York to set up his care and see that he's recovering, but she can't take care of him herself. So she hires a nurse, and then asks Kinsey to look into the background of the woman calling herself Solana Rojas. Kinsey's initial background check shows that "Solana Rojas" is a fine nurse and a devoted worker, so she gets the job.

The reader already knows Solana is not what she seems; in a break from the usual format of the Milhone series, Grafton opened with a chapter in the third person from "Solana's" point of view. So we know Solana is a sociopath with no normal human emotions, that she has taken the identity of another nurse, and that she has cared for a number of old people over the past decade or so. Once she moves into Gus's house, she moves to isolate him and make him dependent on her -- which both Kinsey and her landlord Henry notice and are worried by. And things then escalate as they try to see Gus more often, and Kinsey digs into Solana's background.

Solana's chapters continue irregularly throughout Trespass -- every fifty pages or so, we get dropped back into her head, to learn things about her life and actions that Kinsey doesn't know yet. These chapters do their job to keep the reader informed, and to add some tension to what would otherwise be a very quiet book, but they don't recurr often enough to really provide a counterpoint with Kinsey's chapters. There's no cat-and-mouse going on here, and, despite some of Kinsey's ominous warnings, things never really get that bad.

So the pleasures and strengths of Trespass are more those of a novel of character than of a thriller: it follows Kinsey through an ordinary investigation, one that leads to secrets and interesting characters, but not to murders or other large-scale crimes. The simmering confrontation with Solana only really flares in the last third of the novel, and, even there, it's more like a spat between neighbors. There is, of course, the usual helping of danger and mayhem at the climax, but even that happens quickly and ends abruptly.

The timescale of Trespass is a bit vague; it begins in December of 1987 and covers at least several months -- how many, exactly, wasn't clear to me. It could have used a bit more placement in time, for my taste. Without the focusing lens of a mystery plot, some elements wander away from Grafton -- such as the conclusion to the car-accident plot, which fizzles out rather than snaps. But Grafton is still a fine writer, and even a novel like Trespass, which is about as far from the typical genre mystery as any series writer can go, is a muscular novel full of activity and careful depiction of character.

Ardath Mayhar Gets the SFWA Gold Watch

Attention, publishers! If you happen to see any proposals from Ardath Mayhar, ignore them -- she has been declared by SFWA to be this year's Author Emeritus, and, like all other Emeriti the world over, she is officially retired.

Well, maybe not -- I have no personal knowledge of Ms. Mayhar's writing plans -- but that's what I think every year when I see the announcement. And how can an organization of writers be so clueless about words?

In other news, Joe Lansdale, hisownself, will be Toastmaster at this year's Nebula Awards.

No Grandmaster has been announced, which may mean there won't be one this year...or may mean that it just hasn't been announced yet.

[via SF Scope]

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Bad Monkeys is probably not the novel for me that it was for Matt Ruff. For me, Bad Monkeys was a "Turn of the Screw"-style story in which the reader wasn't sure if Jane Charlotte's story was completely, literally true or if she was simply insane. I thought Ruff was maintaining that tension, but the last chapter goes off in a completely different direction, so I now have to assume that was never his intent.

Who is Jane Charlotte, you ask? Well, she's being interrogated by a psychiatrist in a white room attached to a prison mental hospital in Nevada, after having murdered at least one person. She claims to be an operative for a gigantic, super-secret operation, which is itself unnamed but has divisions with "clever" codenames. Jane herself was one of the Bad Monkeys, an agent of the division that terminates people who don't deserve to live.

Jane tells the story of her life in several long chapters, separated by shorter "white room" chapters, in which she talks directly to the psychiatrist (who can rebut some of her assertions). She first came into contact with the Bad Monkeys during her mis-spent adolescence, when she met a man she thought was a serial killer. Her story is unlikely at best, unbelievable at worst, and the psychiatrist points out good reasons to believe she's misremembering, delusional, or lying.

This secret organization has abilities that are, frankly, unbelieveable -- they can keep the entire world under surveilance all of the time, get in and out of any location without leaving a trace, fabricate any evidence for or against anything almost immediately. In other words, they sound precisely like the kind of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would dream up to explain her actions. And, as long as that tension persists, Bad Monkeys is a gripping novel. I thought the powers of this secret organization became really too much to believe in a contemporary setting, but, in general, I was along for the ride, and enjoying it.

But the last chapter collapses that tension in a way I couldn't quite believe. Worse, Bad Monkeys kept reminding me of Stewart O'Nan's mesmerizing, horrifying novel The Speed Queen, about another young murderess explaining her actions via first-person narration. It's never fair to compare books that have such different aims -- Speed Queen is deadly serious; Bad Monkeys a modern version of a PhilDickian reality freakout -- but the two books resonate strongly in my head, and not to Bad Monkeys's benefit.

There's nothing at all wrong with Bad Monkeys -- it does what it sets out to do stylishly and with energy to spare -- but it's a cartoonish book that occasionally dabbles in the sources of evil. And as long there are magnificent books about evil, like The Speed Queen, out there, Bad Monkeys will seem minor and trivial by comparison.

Mixing the Wind

Today at ComicMix, I reviewed Michel Plessix's wonderful comics adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's novel Wind in the Willows.

9tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

I have no idea why Jon Courtenay Grimwood insists on being a science fiction writer; from where I sit, his talents lie in another direction. He made his name with a series of alternate history detective stories in which the alternate aspects of the history seemed to have been chosen by whim. And 9tail Fox is another detective story, this one set in the indefinitely-near future and focusing on a dead policeman solving his own murder -- and either Grimwood or his publishers insist on branding 9tail Fox as SF. It's curious. There is a SFnal maguffin at the heart of 9tail Fox, but there is also an unexplained, unSFnal aspect of that maguffin -- with a bit of tweaking, the plot would have worked just as well with a fantastic explanation.

9tail Fox or 9Tail Fox -- Grimwood's acknowledgements have the former and the copyright page the latter -- is set in either 2009 or 2015, due to a bit of what I'm coming to see as Grimwood's essential sloppiness unspecificity. He's an engaging writer on the sentence level, but as paragraphs turn into pages, details are forgotten and consequences float unmoored from events. Grimwood at times seems to be visualizing the screenplay version of 9tail Fox, as scenes smash-cut into each other without warning.

The Night Shade edition of 9tail Fox also has an occasional problem punctuating dialogue -- when the same character speaks in two consecutive paragraphs, the rule is that second paragraph gets an open-quote but the first does not get a close-quote. I'll offer a horrible demonstration:

"I am talking," Johnny said, "because I am the one holding the gun. In a moment, I will point the gun at you and you will talk.

"Do you understand?" Johnny barked.

Perhaps Night Shade's compositor was confused because in these cases Grimwood nearly always includes a speech tag in both paragraphs; someone is not confident of his ability to make things clear.

As the book opens, Bobby Zha is a homicide detective in a San Francisco so very slightly alternate that it makes no real difference. (Does Grimwood use these incessant alternate histories to avoid being caught out on mistakes?) It's also, as noted above, in the mildly near future, though nothing about day-to-day life is even slightly new or different. Bobby is depicted as a good cop in a department rife with corruption. (Is Grimwood using old Dirty Harry movies as primary research? San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the US, and not generally noted as particularly scummy.) Bobby is having some vague trouble with his wife Ellen, and some possibly-related strife with his teenage daughter, Kris, neither of which ever becomes completely clear. (Also, the daughter is described on p. 122 as having been born in 1992, which is either another piece of data that 9tail Fox is set in 2009, or another bit of confusion.) His pattern for dealing with problems, in the opening of the book, is to simply avoid them -- that could have set up an interesting tension for the latter parts of 9tail Fox, if that had led anywhere, but it didn't.

Very quickly, the event given away by the cover blurb happens, and Bobby is dead in a warehouse. His new partner, Pete Sanchez, abandoned him at the scene, as far as the reader can tell -- Grimwood has a hard-boiled laconic style that shades over into confused secrecy, particularly when scenes end suddenly and the narrative picks up somewhere else without a line break or any other sign that the point of view has shifted.

Bobby wakes up elsewhere, in another body. (There will be a SFnal explanation for this at the end -- not necessarily a great one, since the mad scientist doctor involved never appears in the book, and my memory of the timeline is that he was dead before Bobby got whacked.) Bobby also sees a 9-tailed fox, which speaks in the voice of his dead grandfather, and this will not get any explanation whatsoever. The reader may assume that Bobby is delusional, or that he's connected to the collective unconscious, or that 9-tail foxes actually exist, but the text will not help him determine the truth.) Luckily for him, Bobby's new body is vastly rich and unencumbered by family or job or life, so he's free to jet back to San Francisco to investigate his own death.

This he does by impersonating a federal agent, insinuating himself back into his old department, sleeping with two different gorgeous women practically as soon as they meet him, and poking around at other things that he thinks might be related. At no time does he actually try to investigate the murder of Detective Bobby Zha. He acts, to be honest, like a movie detective -- running around and fixating on whatever is most colorful and shiny at the moment, to see if anything comes out of it. Since the narrative is on his side, things do come out of it -- at first, the two gorgeous women, and then more and more. As the book goes on, we learn that Bobby was on the take (which, in the pre-death portion of the book, was specifically denied), that his partner was having an affair with his wife, and several other things that seem equally random and equally unlikely. This reader wondered, at least once, if there was a big wheel of character traits in Grimwood's office, which he spun once a chapter to add another quirk to the otherwise mostly colorless Bobby Zha.

It all comes together, more or less, in the end, with a major confrontation in a secret lair with the mysterious person behind all of these events. And we've met some colorful characters along the way -- though, notably, Bobby is not one of them; he's a mild flavor of "good cop trying to clear his name," and all our time in his head doesn't make him terribly individual.

9tail Fox is a little confused, in what I'm coming to believe is Grimwood's singular style -- if you don't explain details, than you can't be called to task on them later in the book -- and both plot and motivations seem to wander a bit. As I was reading it, I thought it could make a great Hollywood movie -- it would only have to be simplified a bit. Maybe that was Grimwood's intention; he certainly does write readable thrillers (with occasional SFnal content to let them fit into the genre).

I do wonder why he bothers with the SF stuff at all, though -- it doesn't seem central at all to what he writes, and the potentials for a writer like him outside the genre are much larger than within. I hasten to add that I'm not trying to kick him out by any means; just wondering what he sees in this old neighborhood.

9tail Fox is a decent entertainment, but I advise against reading it slowly and carefully; this is a book to be hurtled through, damning everything but speed.

Various and Sundry

I don't do serious link-lists anymore, but here are a few things of interest:

• Jeff VanderMeer, of Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, recently interviewed both Brandon Sanderson and Gregory Frost (who talks about that recent ill-tempered John Clute review).
• Someone called squidflakes (oh, those wacky LiveJournallers!) posts a long, funny, multi-part tale of tech support in Dubai as comments in Ellen Kushner's LJ.
• Andrew Burt surveys the e-book marketplace and finds that vastly more books are available illegally than legally. He makes the obvious conclusion, which is not what I'd expected from him.
• Set your clocks to 1993: Marvel is in talks for a Venom solo movie. Can Lobo be far behind?
• Oh, and your least safe-for-work video of the day: Sarah Silverman is fucking Matt Damon. (Consumer Warning: no actual fucking of Matt Damon occurs in the video.)
  
• And congratulations to Cory Doctorow on the birth of his daughter, who has so many silly names she'll be an honorary Zappa.

Locus Recommends You Start Reading

Locus has posted the Recommended Reading list from their February issue, and, as usual, it contains neverly everything even remotely worth reading from the previous year.

There are 24 SF novels (including what I thought was a fantasy trilogy), 18 Fantasy novels, 10 First novels, 11 Young Adult novels, 20 Collections, 26 Anthologies, 11 Non-Fiction books, and 10 Art books. Not counting the short fiction -- which would add up to several more book-length works -- that's one hundred and thirty books.

Now, I'm a pretty quick reader, but even I only get through about a hundred to a hundred and twenty "real" books a year -- so just keeping up with the Locus list every year is a full-time job. In fact, it's too much for most people, especially anyone who wants to read a book that isn't SF, Fantasy, or Horror -- I know even expressing such a desire is heresy, but I stand by it.

And, even with all the reading I do in the field, I've only read 29 of these books so far (though I do have another 18 of them already, so I could read them immediately, given time). Even if I read all of that, it's still less than half of the list.

I'm not sure if the lesson here is "we're living in times of abundant Good Stuff" or that "Locus's list is too long and unfocused to be helpful." But it's somewhere in between those two, I bet.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/2

Following last week's lead, I'm going to stop obsessively listing the ways I got each book -- in future, they'll all be listed together, and some will be review copies, some will be things I bought myself, and some will be from the library. (And maybe some will be books other people lent to me, or books I found on the street, or books that appeared before me in a blinding halo of light; anything is possible in an ainfinitely expanding universe.) This week I'm also listing a few things I got some time back, before I was going into this much detail on new books.

(I do hope to become at least a bit more comprehensive, with the help of some contacts at various publishing houses, but we'll have to see how that works.)

This week, I'll talk about:

That Salty Air, a graphic novel by Tim Sievert, coming from Top Shelf in April. It's Sievert's book-length debut -- and I don't know if he's published anything at shorter lengths, either -- and is the tale of an obsessed fisherman, which the publisher compares to Moby-Dick. That's a big comparison, to be sure, but I'm more likely to believe it from people who know to put the hyphen in the middle of Melville's title. Also in the positive column: Top Shelf has had excellent taste so far, so I'm more likely to believe them when they compare a new book to Melville than I am to believe certain other publishers whose every project will "change everything forever."

No Dominion by Charlie Huston is the middle volume of the three (to date) "Joe Pitt" detective mysteries. I'm not sure why I've missed this series so far -- though I don't think I saw the first two at my old job -- but it sounds right up my alley; dark modern noirish stories with a conflicted "hero." I will admit that the idea of a vampire detective sounds ancient and worn-out, even if I can't think of many examples. (There's P.N. Elrod's "Vampire Files" books, which are historical, and some of the books in Saberhagen's long, complicated "Dracula" series might count as detective stories -- what else?)

The Lou Anders-edited Fast Forward 1 was one of the two major original anthologies of last year, as far as I can see -- along with Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse One, which I already have a bookmark in. Anders makes the point in his introduction that the Fast Forward series will be entirely science fiction, while Strahan takes a broader genre scope in his book -- I wonder if I'll agree with either of them about the classifications of all the stories? (Pronouncements that a particular story is one genre or other can often fuel months-long fan-feuds, especially in this Internet age.) Whether or not, I look forward to reading the stories in both volumes.

Mainspring has a quote on the back about how impressive this debut novel of Jay Lake's is; I find it even more impressive that Lake has now managed to publish three debut novels -- this one, from Tor, in 2007; Trial of Flowers, from Night Shade, in 2006; and Rocket Science, from Fairwood, in 2005. A man who can debut three times is a power to be reckoned with, and I now have all three debut Jay Lake novels lined up on a shelf -- perhaps I should read them all in quick succession? Mainspring has the most audacious concept of the three: it's set in a literally clockwork solar system, in which brass gears circle the Equator and some supernatural entity is clearly keeping everything running. So this one may get read first -- I do feel like I should read more of Lake than I have so far, since he's interesting on-line and is quite likely to be one of the major writers of the current generation.

Dragon Harper is the latest Pern novel, by Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd McCaffrey, and was published by Del Rey just about a month ago. I believe this series is still one of the best-selling and popular properties in the SF world, but you don't hear much about Pern these days; the kind of people who populate Internet boards don't like it and the people who read McCaffrey (probably a bit older and more female than those Internet fans) aren't hip in the least. And, of course, long-running series mostly stymie critics and juried awards. (I hope I can say the latter without it looking like an attack; it was an issue the other judges and I grappled with when I was a World Fantasy judge a couple of years back -- it's unlikely that any set of judges will have intimate knowledge of all major ongoing series, even collectively, and series books often have different structures and payoffs than solo novels.)

Victory Conditions is the new, and final, Vatta's War novel from Elizabeth Moon; I have to admit here that I haven't read any of the previous books in the series. (At the old shop, my boss had been a major Moon fan for years, and she grabbed the series as soon as it started.) It's from Del Rey, and will hit bookstores in about two weeks. One interesting thing about Moon is that her series have so far all been closed-ended; she writes a few novels in one particular world, closes off that series, and then moves on. In a world where most series run for as long as an author can keep getting new contracts, it's a striking statement in favor of stories having a definite shape, and a permanent end.

And last this week is the big anthology canonizing The New Weird, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. (Parenthetically, I wonder how many references to that book will unthinkingly credit it to "Jeff & Ann VanderMeer"?) It's publishing in March from Tachyon, who are making a habit of concretizing SFnal movements; last year they published the James Patrick Kelly-John Kessel anthology Rewired, which brought together the best "post-cyberpunk" stories. And I'm not late in reading this one yet, so I still have hope of getting to it before it officially comes out!

Double Shot of the Times

There are two articles in the august New York Times this weekend that I wanted to comment on, so I'll just shove them together into one post:

First, Rachel Donadio had the back-page essay in the Book Review this week, writing about why books take so long to be published. It's reasonable as far as it goes, but it's also utterly blindered by its own preconceptions. To be blunt, it's not an essay about books being published, but about major "literary" fiction from big New York houses. (Some of the points also apply to similar non-fiction, but not to genre publishing in fiction or non-fiction. It's about "big books" aimed at bestseller lists.) It doesn't take a year to publish a book; not at all. If you want everyone up to the executive suite to be behind this particular book, and to pour huge sums of money into it, and to be aiming at Oprah and The Daily Show and major literary prizes, then, yes, it does take that long. But 95% of books published aren't like that; a majority of the books published by the houses whose representatives are quoted in this essay aren't published like that. Assuming my employer is typical, right now books from September are being presented to sales reps all across publishing. (In some categories, like the one I mostly work in, it's a shorter lead-time, so we're talking about June books.) My house's fall list just closed this past week, and a few stragglers will probably drop into that season -- August through November -- in the next few weeks.

Donadio's general point would seem to be that it takes longer to publish a book than it does to print it -- which is absolutely true, and is what a lot of people outside the publishing industry don't understand -- but she's taking the extreme case to be the norm. It takes a while to publish a book, but six to nine months is reasonable in a lot of cases. (Faster than that is generally a "crash," for which there needs to be a compelling reason.) Over a year's delay, though, and my cynical heart expects that means we're talking about a "wonderful" book -- one that people at the house love, but have no idea how to sell.

And then there's Charles McGrath in today's paper, commenting on the Joan Brady case (in which a British writer received a 150,000 pound out-of-court settlement for, essentially, an environmental condition that she claimed made her too dumb to write her previous literary novels and reduced her to thrillers). I haven't seen much about that case yet online, though it's a very striking claim -- that writing genre fiction is inherently less difficult and taxing on the brain than literature is. McGrath examines the history of the literary/genre divide and has a very even-handed end -- though he quotes Updike to the effect that genre works are "formulaic." (Updike has written a number of genre works, not always well, and I find his thinking on the subject equally mixed.)

(Parenthetically, the Times's online search engine stinks -- I wasn't able to find either of these by author's name, and had to go into the specific section and poke around until I could find it. Typical of the Times to be so old-school.)

A Momentous Occasion

Rejoice! For we now know of another category of books on which Dave Itzkoff will pontificate without any real knowledge!

This week's New York Times Book Review sees the belated return of Itzkoff's "Across the Universe Column" -- last seen in the December 16th issue with a puff piece about presidential candidates -- with his first actual review in that space since July 24th. And what has he been doing with his reading time since then? Surely he's embarked on some major project -- perhaps reading the entire "Wheel of Time" saga or preparing to weigh in on the recent reissue of Dhalgren? No, sadly, this is not the case.

Itzkoff has read two short and breezy Young Adult novels, both of which were actually published before he filed that July 24th column. (Un Lun Dun, China Mievile's flawed but interesting first YA novel, was published in February of 2007 and has just been released in paperback, and InterWorld, a basically generic entertainment by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, was published in late June.)

But wait! Not content to read YA books, Itzkoff feels the need to trash the entire idea of writing for young readers in his first paragraph:

As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an “Evil Dead” movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book — not the “Necronomicon,” but “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and — finally — genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

I'm sure one of the many fine writers of books for people not yet adult -- perhaps Justine Larbalestier or Tamora Pierce, to name only two who are also bloggers -- will heap the appropriate load of scorn on Itzkoff's utterly wrong and bizarre premise, so I'm content just to point and laugh. Look at the funny monkey! He thinks he has a clue what he's talking about! Caper, funny little monkey!

It's disappointing, after such a promising start, to find that Itzkoff's actual critical points are thinner and less incendiary. He liked Un Lun Dun, as I did, and so gives it mild praise. (Along the way, he's completely forgotten his lede, because he approvingly mentions Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl -- two fine writers now entirely remembered for their great books for young readers. Typical of Itzkoff to overlook the fact that he slagged them, and their entire field of literature, at the top of his review.)

He's less positive towards Interworld, which is a lesser book. (It was originally planned as a screenplay, and that origin is apparent -- it's an entertaining adventure story for boys with some subtext about identity, but not much more.)

Perhaps the problem is that Itzkoff has a whole page to fill, and, given that he's only read two fairly short books in six months, he doesn't have much actual content to fill that space with. So once again I will suggest a tightening of Itzkoff's assigned space. One word every decade would about do it.

A Random Tangent

Charles Stross today had a post about what today's British eighteen-year-olds know and believe about the world, and one entry took me aback -- but not for the reason expected.

He wrote:

Nobody they know who is under 36 and not already a home-owner expects to ever be rich enough to buy a house. The average house costs as much as a helicopter or a
high-ticket Ferrari.

According to Edmund's, a high-end Ferrari costs around $260,000 in the USA in 2008. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median selling price for a home in the USA in 2006 (the last date available) was $221,900, which is in spitting distance of the car price. And in my area -- New York Metro -- the median price was $469,300, which is almost enough to buy two Ferraris. (And that's not even near the highest area -- San Francisco is well over $700,000.)

So I don't want to hear any whining from the UK kids about how expensive their four-hundred-year-old ivy-covered housing stock is. They can do like Americans do, and move somewhere cheaper. (What's the EU equivalent of Phoenix, anyway?) And haven't the British ever heard of mortgages?

Update, later in the day: For comparison, the average British house, according to the BBC, costs 230,474 pounds. (Note that is a higher number than the US number, even though pounds are more valuable -- like many things, houses have a similar price tag in the UK and US, making the UK real price much higher.) Looking for a UK individual income number, I found some household statistics (which aren't comparable to the US numbers), and also found this BBC page from 2003 comparing income to house prices. I assume things have gotten worse in the UK, as they've gotten worse in the US, over the past four years, and those are also household numbers.

Why can't there be a single repository of all worldwide statistics on the Internet, so that we can always settle things like this?

I also found this Forbes article on various housing markets in the US, which I think speaks to my main point: there is an area at least the size of the UK within the US where housing prices are as high (relative to incomes) as the UK, if not worse. (For simplicity, we could call it "California," but other parts are as bad.) And there are other areas -- the Czech Republics and Polands of North America, as it were -- where prices are not as high.

Read in January

The month started slow -- probably because we got a Wii for Christmas -- but I've been catching up at the end.

• Cathy & Arnie Fenner, editors, Spectrum 14 (1/1)
• Koji Aihara & Tentaro Takekuma, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, Vol. 1 (1/2)
• Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing (1/4)
• Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (1/5)
• Stewart O'Nan, The Speed Queen (1/7)
• Larry Miller, Spoiled Rotten America (1/9)
• Kaoru Kurimoto & Kazuaki Yanagisawa, The Guin Saga Manga: The Seven Magi, Vol 1 (1/10)
• Kaoru Kurimoto & Kazuaki Yanagisawa, The Guin Saga Manga: The Seven Magi, Vol 2 (1/10)
• Richard Rhodes, Making Love (1/12)
• Andi Watons & Simon Gane, Paris (1/12)
• Marc-Antoine Mathieu, The Museum Vaults (1/13)
• Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora Segunda (1/15)
• Kazuto Okata, Sundome, Vol. 1 (1/15)
• Nick Hornby, Slam (1/16)
• Cynthia Cooper, Extraordinary Circumstances (1/19)
• Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys (1/23)
• Judith Park, Y Square, Vol. 1 (1/23)
• Miyuki Eto, Hell Girl, Vol. 1 (1/24)
• Mike & Louise Carey and Aaron Alexovich, Confessions of a Blabbermouth (1/25)
• Tom Pomplun, editor, Graphic Classics: Mark Twain (1/26)
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, 9tail Fox (1/26)
• Kenneth Grahame, adapted by Michel Plessix, The Wind in the Willows (1/27)
• Akimine Kamijyo, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Vol. 1 (1/28)
• Yoshinori Natsume, Togari, Vol. 1 (1/29)
• Jonathan Barnes, The Somnambulist (1/30)
• Nobuhiro Watsuki, Buso Renkin, Vol. 1 (1/30)
• Norihiro Yagi, Claymore, Vol. 1 (1/31)

That's six novels and five book-length works of non-fiction, for eleven "real" books plus sixteen comics and similar things. Pretty good, but I think I can do better next month.

Blogger Question

Anyone else out there using Blogger and finding that the "Check Spelling" button isn't working?

I thought it might be an IE or Windows issue, but the same thing is happening here at home, on Firefox on a Mac.

It's a small thing, but, as long as the button's not working, my psots mya loko sloppppier...

I Hate It When Editors Step On My Jokes

My most recent "Manga Friday" post is now up at ComicMix, and I should say up front that they have always had a very, very light hand on the editing.

(Perhaps that's why I see each edit as if it were a flashing red light right in front of my eyes -- or maybe I'm just impossible to please. Either could be true.)

I've been using the style Manga Fridays: Insert Joke Here for some time, but, last week, they changed that to make the subtitle "Manga Friday #13" and the jokey part the main headline. OK, fine, I thought -- numering a regular post does make sense, so I followed that format this week...for a post which, when edited and posted, has the title Manga Friday: Is That a Giant Sword in Your Pocket, Or...

No big deal. I try to follow the current style, but I can roll with changes. Not keeping track of the number will be easier, anyway.

But whoever edited it also flattened out a joke.

As I wrote it:

So, to sum up: He's a bloodthirsty doomed soul! He's a tight-ass minor demon! Together, they fight crime!

As posted:

So, to sum up: Tobei's a bloodthirsty doomed soul and Osa is a tight-ass minor demon. Together, they fight crime!

It may be a small thing, but 'tis mine own. And I do think that it both worked better my way and that the names aren't necessary.

And, luckily, I'm not an editor myself anymore, so now I can complain about editors all I want!

(I should also mention that post reviews the first volumes of the very boyish adventure series Togari, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Claymore, and Buso Renkin. I didn't love any of them, but they may be more to others' tastes.)

Quote of the Week

"What an odd organ. Having a penis is like owning a cat."
-Richard Rhodes, Making Love (p.113)