Stoker Winners

Locus has reported that the Stoker winners (presented over the weekend at the World Horror Convention in that very spooky place, Salt Lake City) have been made public, and has a list of them.

• Novel: Sarah Langan's The Missing
• First Novel: Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box
• Long Fiction: Gary Braunbeck's "Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway"
• Short Fiction: David Niall Wilson's "The Gentle Brush of Wings"
• Anthology: Gary Braunbeck & Hank Schwaeble's Five Strokes to Midnight
• Collection: (tie) Michael A. Arnzen's Proverbs for Monsters, Peter Straub's 5 Stories
• Nonfiction: Jonathan Maberry & David F. Kramer's The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre
• Poetry: (tie) Linda Addison's Being Full of Light, Insubstantial, Charlee Jacob & Marge B. Simon's Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet

A full list of the nominees is also available.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/29

This week's collection of books to review is all comics, so I'll even throw in a few things I picked up at my comics shop, since they fit the inadvertent theme.

How to Love is a collection of "graphic novellas" from Actus Independent Comics, distributed by Top Shelf Productions in the US. (Actus is an Israeli publisher.) It's in an odd format -- hardcover, 9 1/2" x 7" turned "landscape" -- and features stories by six creators. (That includes the only Israeli cartoonist I previously knew about -- Rutu Modan, of Exit Wounds fame -- which probably only proves I wasn't paying attention.) How to Love will be published in August -- and no on-line bookseller is listing it yet, which may mean it will be very difficult to find. On the other hand, August is some time away, so I expect it will show up eventually.

Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 3 is the third in a manga series by Kyo Shirodaira and Eita Mizuno about a young detective and the mysterious "Blade Children" that he's trying to stop; I reviewed the second volume at ComicMix some weeks ago. This one is being published by Yen Press in April, so it's probably shipping to stores already.

Also from Yen Press is Kieli Vol. 1 by Yukako Kabei and Shiori Teshirogi. From the description on the back cover, it sounds oddly religious -- there's a reference to a race of immortal warriors who were "eradicated in the name of God" and to the title character, who sees ghosts and yet is a budding atheist. I'm not sure whether to expect a mildly Shintoist setup, or the kind of confused take on Christianity that shows up now and then in manga. (I guess I'll find out when I read it.) This is also an April book, so it should be available everywhere pretty quickly.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten is the new graphic novel from Alex (Box Office Poison) Robinson, coming from Top Shelf in July 2008. It's substantially shorter than Robinson's previous work and focuses entirely on one character: Andy Wicks, who accidentally hypnotizes himself back into his geeky, gangly high-school self in 1985.

I've seen a number of things specifically for kids this week -- and they all seem to come from France, for whatever reason. One is Emmanuel Guibert's Sardine in Outer Space 5, subtitled "My Cousin Manga and Other Stories." I haven't read the series before, but anything like this aimed at kids needs to have individually standalone stories, so I'm not worried about confusion. (I might be worried about the fact that "My Cousin Manga," on the cover, seems to have giant marshmallows jammed onto her stick-like legs, but I'm sure there's a good explanation for that.) This one is coming from First Second in June 2008.

Also from First Second, and also for kids, is Lewis Trondheim and Eric Cartier's Kaput and Zosky, about two incompetent alien do-gooders. I recently enjoyed Trondheim's diary comic collection, Little Nothings, so I'm quietly hopeful about this. (And, after I check it out, it will got to my sons for the acid test...whether they pick it up at all.)

Moving on to books I actually paid money for, there's Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1 : Duck Heart (Dungeon), by Joann Sfar and the ubiquitous Lewis Trondheim. I picked this up on Jeff VanderMeer's suggestion, and because I liked Little Nothings so much. This is the first in the series, I think -- there were also books called "The Early Years," "Twilight," and "Parade," so it was hard to tell -- and it's about a giant D&Dish castle, stuffed full of monsters and treasure, that adventurers keep trying to loot. And, apparently, also about this duck who gets mistaken for a barbarian warrior and has to protect the Dungeon. (This one was published in 2004, for those keeping track.)

And then there's Gumby. What can I say about Gumby? Some outfit called Wildcard Ink got Bob Burden to write and Rick Geary to draw all-new comics adventures of Art Clokey's clay character, and they're wonderfully bizarre, if very irregular. (In many senses of that last word.) Now there's been enough of them -- three issues, I think -- to fill up a small trade paperback, and so here it is. Gumby says that it was published in December of 2007, but I think it only made it out into stores last week. Whenever it was, it's Gumby, damnit, and it's utterly indescribable and a hell of a lot of fun. Where else will you find a villain being foiled by the ghost of Johnny Cash?

Last for this week is Michel Rabagliati's new book Paul Goes Fishing, just published by Drawn & Quarterly. I still haven't managed to read Paul Moves Out, but I loved Paul Has A Summer Job when I read that last fall, so I just grabbed this new one when I saw it was already out.

Deja Reviews by Florence King

The specter of infinite recursion is always before me, but never more so when I'm about to review a book of book reviews. If I'm not careful, who knows how tightly I could contort myself? But I'll try to soldier on.

Florence King is one of the modern world's great curmudgeons; her best book is the sublimely grumpy With Kindness Towards None, a history of misanthropy. She's also had an interesting, complicated life -- chronicled in her mostly autobiographical Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and in dribs and drabs in her other books -- but settled into life as a conservative columnist and book reviewer at the beginning of the '90s. (She's also one of many people on the right who had an interesting and complicated sex life when she was young, but would rather ignore the subject entirely now that her ardor has cooled. Luckily, writing for uptight right-wing magazines makes it easy to avoid even thinking about sex for years at a time.)

Deja Reviews collects her book reviews -- some? all? the book doesn't say -- from 1990 through 2001, from The American Spectator and National Review. There's the expected spate of political books, some popular histories, and other assorted and mostly-topical non-fiction.

To be blunt, she's against nearly all of it, from the men's movement to Ayn Rand's followers to Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation. (Though, oddly for a conservative, she seems to quite like Eleanor Roosevelt as a person.) She's not a movement conservative, or one of the religious right. She's probably economically conservative, but mostly because she expects everything to go all to hell at any moment. She doesn't seem to be over-fond of current right-wing politicians and leaders (which failing, and fawning, over personal friends has made two other right-wing writers, Ben Stein and P.J. O'Rourke, only intermittently tolerable in recent years). Really, the main thing holding her to the right side of the political world is a firm belief that the world is bad and getting worse. (Well, that and a dislike of liberals -- but there are plenty of Democrats who hate the kind of liberals that King attacks.)

Collections of book reviews are bad books to read straight through, which is more or less what I did with Deja Reviews. (Over the course of a about a week, yes, but this was the big book I was reading at the time.) And I doubt that there are all that many huge Florence King fans out there, besides me. Serious right-wingers will probably find her unsound on at least one item of doctrine, and the fact that this book ends in June of 2001 will make it seem beside the point to a whole lot of that crowd to begin with. So I'm really not sure who this book is for -- and publishers might have been equally puzzled, because this book came out from that powerhouse of book-making, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Curiouser and Curiouser

The New York Times reported today on the ruling in Los Angeles which said Jerry Siegel's heirs "were entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright to the character" of Superman.

Now, it's possible that my knowledge of intellectual property is more defective than I think, but isn't the character of Superman a trademarked property, and individual Superman stories are copyrighted?

It seems to me that the judge has declared that Siegel retains copyright to the Superman materials in Action Comics #1, but is silent on the status of all later, copyrightable works, and also silent on the ownership of the Superman trademark. So this ruling, if I'm reading the reportage correctly, does not say that Siegel's heirs own anything other than the copyright on a single, seventy-year-old story. (More may come later, but that's what happened in this ruling.)

The Bakers: Babies and Kittens by Kyle Baker

I don't review comics things here as much as I used to, since I do have the ComicMix gig. But this book is short, I don't have much to say about it, and it's by someone who seems to be a personal friend of much of the ComicMix team, so I'll just say something random about it here.

I'd thought this was a collection of previously published work, but it isn't; it's a brand-new, 92-page story about Kyle Baker's terribly cute kids (and his wife and himself, along the way), including the probably-mostly-true story of how they came to get a couple of cats.

It's presented in Baker's full-color style, which is very animation-influenced (and which I think is done by drawing in a computer program). I'm not as fond of it as I am of Baker's traditional pen-work; his panels tend to be boxier and more rigid in the animation style, and some of his pages end up very reminiscent of storyboards. There's also an awful lot of using many panels with similar backgrounds to indicate motion -- again, very much like a storyboard.

The story is cute, the characters are well-defined in their personalities, and Baker is an excellent caricaturist. But I got the feeling that this story was meant to be an animated cartoon, not a graphic novel, and would have worked better in that other form.

Oh, and the story? Kyle is allergic to cats, but the kids want a kitten. And there's a rat in the house, which scares the kids and their mother. So, while Kyle is out (trying to sell a comics story about a giant killer rat), they sort-of accidentally get two kittens. (And then there's a long chase sequence with one of the kittens and the rat near the end.)

As I said, it's cute but a bit slim. And, while reading it, I kept thinking about this Spleenal strip about getting a cat, which is both shorter and funnier. So, for my money, the shorter, b&w "Bakers" strips are better. (Oh, and the end of the back-cover copy, which talks about an "all-out war between the jealous baby and the fuzzy kitten," doesn't have anything to do with this story -- maybe that's the sequel?)

I Randomly Review Manga!

This week, my "Manga Friday" feature at ComicMix reviewed the first volumes of Priest, Sugar Sugar Rune, and Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, simply because they were what I had lying around.

Far Away From Everything Else

Hey! My boss's boss got quoted in a Washington Post article about the Wiley "Manga Shakespeare" series!

See? I'm not as far away from the SFF/comics world as you might think!

Itzkoff Forgets How to Plug a Book

Yesterday, Dave Itzkoff slunk into the New York Times's PaperCuts blog to chat with the man with the best hair in all of theoretical physics, Michio Kaku. Kaku gave Itzkoff some excellent quotes and background about three impossible technologies -- teleportation, time travel, and precognition -- which he carefully categorized into three classes of impossibility.

Itzkoff, since he had to provide only a short introductory paragraph, acquitted himself well. And he did manage to mention Kaku's new book, Physics of the Impossible. But this blog post is about the act same thing as that new book, which Itzkoff doesn't seem to have noticed -- in fact, Kaku's quotes quite likely came from the book itself.

(But it's better than I thought -- on my first, cursory glance, I didn't notice Itzy had mentioned the book at all, which is about what I expected from him.

Quote of the Week

"In this our springtime there is no better, there is no worse.
Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.
Some are long, some are short.
Stay upright. Stay with life."
- Cyril Pedrosa, Three Shadows
(though the first three lines are possibly quoting someone else)

Fear My Dark Wraith!

Today I reviewed a graphic novel called Dark Wraith of Shannara at ComicMix, which was based on a new original story by Terry Brooks.

RFI: Anybody Use Naymz?

I've gotten a request to use yet another social networking system, Naymz. I'm generally inclined to be grumpy and unsociable, but this one claims to be for professionals. On the other hand, it has a silly, misspelled name.

So I'm asking the assembled brainpower of whoever's out there: have any of you used Naymz yet, and is it any good?

Bestelling Genre Books of 2007

Publishers Weekly's current issue is the one with the big round-up of the bestselling books of last year, and I was under the impression that I've been pulling the genre (meaning SF/F/Horror) titles out of that list for my own amusement and the entertainment of whoever might be watching for the last couple of years.

Except that I don't seem to have done that here last year, so maybe it was on rec.arts.sf.written that I did it...

But I'm typing here now, so I'll continue.

(The full PW articles are available online -- hardcover, paperback, children's.)

Hardcovers:
For parallax, the #1 fiction title is Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, at 2,201,865 and the #1 non-fiction book is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne at 4,590,000.

#10 Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year (740,000)
#18 Richard Bachman, Blaze (581,000)
#22 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin (462,000)

J.D. Robb, Creation in Death (395,080)
Terry Goodkind, Confessor (280,644)
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (245,465)
Laurell K. Hamilton, The Harlequin (245,155)
James Rollins, The Judas Strain (200,000)
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, The Wheel of Darkness (197,324)
Sherilyn Kenyon, Devil May Cry (183,257)
Christine Feehan, Dark Possession (175,737)
Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box (175,000)
Christopher Moore, You Suck: A Love Story (175,000)
Laurell K. Hamilton, A Lick of Frost (173,240)
Newt Gingrich & William R. Forstchen, Pearl Harbor (125,440)
William Gibson, Spook Country (118,635)
Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, Sandworms of Dune (116,647)
Jim Butcher, White Night (115,137)
Charlaine Harris, All Together Dead (105,414)
Terry Brooks, The Elves of Cintra (102,891)

According to PW, their list contains all of the fiction books that sold over 100,000 copies in the US last year -- or at least new hardcovers that did so. (There may be some strong-selling backlist, but that's fairly unlikely in the hardcover category.)

Trade Paperbacks:
#1 is Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, with 4,274,804 copies.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (1,364,722)
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (603,000)
Gregory Maguire, Wicked (281,431)
Kate Mosse, Labyrinth (230,646)
Gregory Maguire, Wicked (143,820) -- PW calls this the tie-in edition, but I think they have it backward
Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide (143,684)
Max Brooks, World War Z (132,549)
Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch (132,030)
Matt Groening, Simpsons Comics Beach Blanket Bongo (125,099)
Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job (125,060)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (125,000)
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (122,000)
Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (116,521)
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (110,000)
Stephen King, editor, The Best American Short Stories 2007 (103,047)

Mass Market Paperbacks:
#1 is Blood Brothers by Nora Roberts, at 2,247,730

Michael Crichton, Next (1,600,000)
J.D. Robb, Born in Death (955,073)
J.D. Robb, Innocent in Death (895,194)
Scott Smith, The Ruins (835,321)
James Rollins, The Black Order (750,000)
Stephen King, Lisey's Story (730,000)
Gregory Maguire, Wicked (650,000)
Catherine Doulter, Wizard's Daughter (640,972)
Sherilyn Kenyon, Dream Hunter (600,000)
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, The Book of the Dead (592,400)
Stephen King, The Mist (560,902)
Christine Feehan, Dark Celebration (545,957)
Christine Feehan, Safe Harbor (540,393)
David Michaels, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Fallout (518,622)
J.D. Robb et. al., Dead of Night (515,194)
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (511,361)

On this list, PW only gets down to the 500,000-copy level before succumbing to ennui.

Children's:
#1 in hardcover frontlist is, of course, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, at 13,114,692.
#2 Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse (1,112,660)
#5 James Patterson, Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports (590,875)
#10 Mary Pope Osborne, Dragon of the Red Dawn (355,521)
#12 Rick Riordan, The Titan's Curse (350,000)
# 18 C.S. Lewis & Robert Sabuda, The Chronicles of Narnia Pop-Up (251,520)
# 19 Matthew Reinhart, Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy (248,918)
#26 Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: The Nixie's Song (210,086)
# 30 Angie Sage, Physik (190,169)
# 31 Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: From Ship to Shore (190,000)
# 38 Sir Thomas Faye, Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: The Secret Files of the East India Trading Co. (175,000)
# 39 Scott Westerfeld, Extras (172,615)
#43 T.T. Sutherland, Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: The Movie Storybook (150,000)
# 45 Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon (150,000)
# 50 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Deluxe Edition (144,742)
#53 D.J. MacHale, Pilgrims of Rayne (137,068)
and several more, but my fingers are getting tired.

Hardcover backlist unsurprisingly leads off with Stephenie Meyer's New Moon at 820,604.

The rest of the list is mostly classic books for little kids, but Sorcerer's Stone is at #14 at 335,931 and Order of the Phoenix at # 15 with 311,040.
#18 Half-Blood Prince (295,339)
#19 Chamber of Secrets (287,543)
#23 Prisoner of Azkaban (265,638)
#24 Goblet of Fire (257,880)
#36 Meyer, Twilight (203,729)
#41 DiTerlizzi & Black, The Field Guide (198,072)
(That's the first book of the Spiderwick Chronicles; the second is at # 72, the third at #115, and the fifth at #116.)

Paperback frontlist is anchored by James Patterson's Maximum Ride: School's Out -- Forever, with 999,753.

From there down, there's some more of Osborne's "Magic Tree House," some Paolini and Pullman, more Pirates of the Caribbean, some Riordan and several of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," Patterson's Maximum Ride, various movie tie-ins (Shrek, Transformers, etc.) on the way down to the 150,000 copy mark at #69. There's a lot of at least mildly fantastic stuff there.

And the paperback backlist chart starts off almost entirely fantasy:
#1 Pullman, The Golden Compass (various editions, 1,337,680)
#2 Meyer, Twilight (879,120)
#3 Half-Blood Prince (825,072)
#4 Order of the Phoenix (778,564)
#5 Sorcerer's Stone (696,188)
#6 Pullman, The Subtle Knife (669,458)
#7 Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (651,149)
(#8 is S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.)
#9 Chamber of Secrets (562,835)
#10 Goblet of Fire (556,799)
#11 Prisoner of Azkaban (548,512)

And going down from there: more Osborne (lots of Osborne), Riordan, Paolini, a couple of Narnia books, Roald Dahl, Westerfeld, Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, and Charlotte's Web (still selling 151,841 copies in a year, even fifty-five years later.)


And those are the bestselling genre books of 2007, at least according to PW's figures.

It's New Weird Wednesday!

The VanderMeers and their publisher, Tachyon Publication, have declared today to be New Weird Wednesday...and who am I to deny them?

• You can visit The New Weird's MySpace page.
• Or you can check out Tachyon's page for The New Weird.
• Or you can see Jeff VanderMeer's celebration of New Weird Wednesday.
• Or you can just go buy The New Weird already.

However you celebrate New Weird Wednesday, be sure to do it responsibly.

An Astonishing Fact

There is a fantasy novel that has sold over two million copies in one trade paperback edition since that edition was published in late 2000. (Not to mention several hundred thousand in a different trade paperback edition, over a hundred thousand in mass market, and tens of thousands in hardcover; pretty much all of those this decade -- and all numbers are purely US sales.)

It is not by J.K. Rowling, and it was published as an adult title. The author is still alive and writing. (And I was just struck by its sales patterns while looking some things up on BookScan this morning.)

I wonder if anyone out there knows what book this is?

More from Publishers Weekly

PW has an article this week about, well, let me just quote it:

Bertelsmann to Exit Club Business in U.S.
"Less than one year after it paid $150 million to Time Warner to acquire complete control of Bookspan, Bertelsmann has put the Bertelsmann Direct North America unit up for sale and is considering selling its entire Direct Group, which houses all of its various club businesses worldwide. The North American group consists of 21 book clubs plus BMG Music Service and Columbia House DVD, under the direction of Stuart Goldfarb. Revenue in 2007 was just under 900 million euros ($1.2 billion), with more than half generated by the book clubs."

(emphasis mine)

"As part of its effort to integrate Bookspan into BMG/Columbia, BDNA eliminated several hundred jobs in the year and incurred substantial impairment (291 million euros) and restructuring (123 million euros) charges in 2007. Excluding those one-time events, the division was marginally profitable last year."

(emphasis still mine)

Connecting any dots will be left to the reader.

SF and Religion

SF Signal has another one of their "Mind Meld" features today, in which they ask a number of SFnal folks the same question and amalgamate the answers into one gigantic post.

This time, the question is "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?" The distinguished panel includes Mike Resnick, Lou Anders (who suggested the question), Ben Bova, Adam Roberts, Larry Niven, Michael A. Burstein, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., John C. Wright, James Morrow, and Yr. Humble Correspondent.

My contribution was as follows:

That's cherry-picking names, though, isn't it? Plenty of the classic SF writers weren't atheists, and even the ones with sanguine views towards organized religion (such as Arthur C. Clarke) believed, or wanted to believe, in some kind of transcendence, even if it wasn't direct experience of some Godhead.

Science Fiction often does think religion will mostly go away, or will settle down quietly - let me mention Clarke again, who in several books has the whole world think better of religion after some major event - but that's just part of the general classic SF tendency to put the world into a neat, easily-defined box. (Psychohistory also comes to mind in this context; classic SF often thought all of human knowledge would eventually be as rigorous and predictive as classical physics - though they were clearly wrong about that.)

The only real, died-in-the-wool atheist of classic SF that I can think of is Asimov, who utterly epitomizes the idea that pure thinking can reduce the world to a set of axioms. Science has since proven - actually, science was already proving, back then, but classic SF didn't pay as much attention to real cutting-edge science as some people like to pretend these days - that the world is much stranger and more complex than the layman thought.

Smart SF writers, the ones who understand how real human beings think and feel, don't discount the effects of religion (and other forms of irrationalism and wishful thinking) on humanity. Clarke may have hoped that we'd outgrow it, and newer writers like Egan (in "Oceanic") may argue that we can and should engineer religiosity out of humanity, but they still take its role in human culture seriously, and know they have to account for it.

SF does have a tendency to explain things away, and religion is one of the biggest targets there - and "those closed-minded religious fanatics" are a common villain type for all kinds of SF - but there are plenty of SF writers who actually believe, to one degree or another. SF isn't necessarily anti-religion...it's just anti-irrationalism. The more rational a religion is, the more likely it is to be treated positively in SF.

Notable Quotables

As always, no comment:

"...a closer look at the reports from B&N and Borders and the book clubs, and several off-the-record conversations with experts show that while revenue growth is sluggish, book sales are up slightly; it's the decline in sales of music CDs that have dragged the numbers down. You may not realize, for example, that while the old Bookspan's revenue last year was down from 2006's, it was still about $700 million."
- Sara Nelson, Publishers Weekly, "Bearing the Bad News"

Much Ado About Nothings

Today, ComicMix posted my review of Lewis Trondheim's diary comics, Little Nothings.

See My Author on TV!

Cynthia Cooper will be on C-SPAN's BookTV this weekend, talking about her book Extraordinary Circumstances and her role as the WorldCom whistleblower, in an event taped at Washington DC's Army/Navy Club. Set your alarm (or Tivo) for 11 PM on Saturday...

I Wonder If Anyone I Know Was Involved in This Conversation

Suit: Why does she have to be a devil? Why can't she be a demon?

375 Hudson Street
New York, New York

Overheard by: Harriet Vane

via Overheard in the Office, Mar 24, 2008

Movie Log: Michael Clayton

All the critics said Michael Clayton was really good, so I saw it. And I think I agree with them, but I don't have much else to say.

Who directed this thing, anyway? He got a lot of good performances -- yes, out of people you'd expect, like Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton, but still -- and I don't remember hearing much about the director.

(looks it up) Tony Gilroy, and apparently this is his first film. Well, good job, Tony -- ex-writers aren't always that good directing actors and moving the camera around and all that jazz.

Michael Clayton is just a good movie, and one that didn't make me obsess about anything in particular -- yes, it's another "gosh, some big business are really, really corrupt" movie, but who's surprised by that message these days? It's true, isn't it? (The only thing people seem to disagree on is whether "some" means "nearly every" or "only a few.")

So this, I guess, is one of my least useful or interesting "Movie Log" posts. It was a movie; I saw it; I have nothing coherent to say. Sorry.

Movie Log: Twelfth Night (again)

On the advice of several people (after I'd seen the Kenneth Branagh version), I decided to see the Trevor Nunn film of Twelfth Night.

My first impression is that this one is much more homoerotic than Branagh's production. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!) And, for once, it's equal opportunity homoeroticism, with both a vaguely swishy Duke of Orsino (Toby Stephens) and some very physical scenes between Olivia (Helena Bonham Carter) and Viola (Imogen Stubbs).

Otherwise, having seen the same story once (in a slightly different selection of scenes from the original, longer play) helped quite a bit, as did not having one actor double two minor characters in the same clothes. (Here's a clues for all dramatic presentations: you do not want the audience spending their time wondering if two people with different names are the same person when all it means is that you're too cheap to pay two actors.) So the plot was clearer the second time around, and actually having backgrounds and furniture was also helpful.

The hugger-mugger of the mistaken identity plot (and the related hurly-burly of the duel) late in the play is still silly and needs to be taken at great speed to be at all plausible. (Again, when a plot hinges on someone not saying "Hang on, my name's not X!", you've got your work as a director cut out for you.) Others have said it before me: Shakespeare is not generally remembered because of his plots -- they're usually not his, to begin with -- but for his speeches.

I'm not sure how I missed Twelfth Night the first time around -- I seem to have spent a big part of the middle '90s in a hole; I was married without kids and not working that much -- but it was a good movie to catch up with. It's probably one of the top 20 movie adaptations of Shakespeare; others may put it even higher.

All You Need Is Planet Love

In my ongoing attempt to get myself organized and review something other than manga at ComicMix, today sees the publication of my review of Doom Patrol: Planet Love, the sixth and last collection of the fabled Grant Morrison-written run of that title from the early '90s.

Look for more later this week...

Yet More Awards

The Australian national SF convention, Swancon, was also held this past weekend, and it gave out awards as well. OZ HorrorScope (or perhaps just HorrorScope) has the full list of Ditmar and Tin Duck winners for this year.

The novel awards are:

Ditmar for Best Novel: Saturn Returns by Sean Williams

Tin Duck for Best Western Australia Professional Long Work: Hal Spacejock: Just Desserts by Simon Haynes

Who Is The New Clarke?

And the man asking that question, in yesterday's New York Times, is...our own Dave Itzkoff!

(Did he think he could hide from us by appearing in a different section of the paper?)

Itzy phoned up a representative handful of current SF writers -- Charles Stross, Walter Jon Williams, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ian McDonald -- and asked them about current scientific trends and SFnal prediction. All said reasonable things, although the backhanded compliment of Bacigaulpi's "In a lot of ways, Clarke was writing honest SF for his time" is awfully close to the perennial radical's lament of how everyone in this history of the universe was less intellectually advanced than the speaker is now. (I've liked several of Bacigalupi's stories a lot, but every time I read his comments about the field I get less and less interested in what seems to be more and more intense axe-grinding.)

The article's premise is on shaky grounds, though -- it's the old saw about SF, and in particular Clarke's work, being primarily about predicting the future. That never was true for any good SF past the very earliest Gernsback era, and it's less true of Clarke than most. Clarke never wrote a future history, and very few of his stories were particularly predictive.

Did Childhood's End "predict" that devil-shaped aliens would transform our children?

Did Rendezvous With Rama "predict" that giant enigmatic alien starships would use our solar system as an interstellar rest stop?

I suppose it's too early to say whether the "predictions" in Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars came true, so we can give him a pass there.

There's no space elevator yet, so I guess that makes The Fountains of Paradise "wrong."

Commentors are encouraged to post their own ideas of what particular Clarke works "predicted" and whether they came true or not.

Really, the predictiveness of a story has nothing to do with whether it's good SF, or good in any other way. It may be what non-SF readers cling onto as "what SF does," but that just proves that they don't know much about SF.

And that nicely returns to my first point -- let me repeat that the author of that article is one Dave Itzkoff.

Exactly.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/22

Not a huge pile this week, but a very choice one; I want to read everything here. (Whether I'll manage to do so -- especially since one of these books is guaranteed to take more than a week of reading time all by itself -- is another story, though.)

For most of the past two decades, it was hard to surprise me in the SFF field; I was keeping track of it obsessively for work, and something immediately wonderful and surprising was usually a sign that I'd failed at that job somewhere along the line. But I'm doing something else now, so books I had forgotten were coming can pop up and make me amazingly, unexpectedly happy.

This week, that book is The Born Queen, fourth and last in Greg Keyes's great "Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone" series, which started with The Briar King. I bought the first three of these for my old job, and burbled about them to anyone who would listen -- this is really good secondary-world fantasy, more in the George R.R. Martin vein than traditional plot-coupon epic fantasy, and populated with a wide array of distinctive, memorable characters. I think this is going to be the next big book I read; I'm that excited to see it. It's published by Del Rey, and it's supposed to officially be in stores everywhere tomorrow -- if you haven't read this series before, give Briar King a try.

I've had a galley of Life Sucks for a little while now, but I've held off reviewing it because ComicMix prefers to be useful to readers/buyers and only review things once they're available. (And I'm mostly of that opinion personally, as well -- once in a while, there's a book I can't stand to wait to read, but, in general, pre-pub reviews are just for the industry, and I have hopes that real readers will be interested in what I say.) It still seems to be a ways off -- the letter says that First Second will publish it on May 1st -- but the finished book has arrived, so I'll move it up the pile. Life Sucks is a modern-day vampire graphic novel written by Jessica (La Perdida) Abel and Gabe Soria, with art by Warren Pleece.

Parenthetically, can I complain about how some publishers -- usually ones from the book trade moving into the comics world -- will run credits as "by" the writers and then "illustrated" by the artists? What comics artists do -- even the ones who work from detailed panel-by-panel breakdowns -- is substantially more than "illustrate" a pre-existing story; they provide a huge chunk of the actual story-telling.

Singularity's Ring is a first novel by Paul Melko, which Tor published in early February. It's sounded intriguing from the reviews so far -- especially the fact that the hero is a five-person "pod" with linked minds -- so I've added it to my groaning pile. God knows when I'll get to it, but it looks like the kind of SF I always want to see more of, so I feel obliged to take note of it. I believe I've read his story "The Walls of the Universe," and was impressed by it.

Back to comics with Cyril Pedrosa's Three Shadows, a graphic novel that won the 2008 Prix Essentiel at Angouleme (the massive French convention, which is more like a combination of WorldCon, the National Book Awards, and a small World's Fair than the San Diego con). First Second is publishing it on April 1st, so I should get to this quickly as well. The art is smooth, looking almost dashed-off, but still precise -- it reminds me a bit of Marc Hempel.

Prime Books published Ekaterina Sedia's first novel The Secret History of Moscow some time last year, but they're still promoting it, which is encouraging to see. I just got a copy of it this week, but I've been thinking about it since I saw a review of it by OF Blog of the Fallen. Let's see if I can squeeze this one in somewhere...

I still haven't gotten to Ann & Jeff VanderMeer's wonderful-looking anthology The New Weird, and already they've lapped me -- Tachyon will be publishing another VanderMeer-VanderMeer anthology, Steampunk, in June. Tachyon is really owning the category of smart, well-chosen anthologies that encapsulate various movements and themes in the SFF world, and I'm very glad that they're out there doing that. Now, if everyone would just slow down their publishing schedules so I can catch up...

Not helping at all on that account is Tor, which has been issuing the door-stopping novels of Steven Erikson's massively ambitious "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series as quickly as they could, to catch up with Erikson's British publishers. With Reaper's Gale, they're now less than a year behind and closing -- this is the first one where I couldn't get the UK mass-market paperback (or C-format, to be more precise) to read before the US edition. Reaper's Gale was published in the US in March, and the next book, Toll the Hounds, will see the gap drop to only three months later this year. Given that these books are 800+ pages long each, with casts of thousands, maps that cover entire continents, and complicated, twisty, huge-scale plots, just getting them copyedited is a massive undertaking. I am very fond of this series, but it's not for everyone -- you need to have read piles of epic fantasy (preferably in one's ill-spent youth) and gotten a bit tired with them to be ready to make the leap up to Erikson. (If anyone wants more of my blathering on the subject, here are my reviews for the last two books in the series: The Bonehunters, Midnight Tides.)

A Beagle-O-Rama

Cat Eldridge of Green Man Review pointed me to his "What's New" page today, which collects a lot of Peter S. Beagle-related news. I'll try to boil it all down, but you can just click through for the full deal (and, of course, all of the other new reviews and whatnot at Green Man).

Beagle is publishing more books this year than the first decade of his career (I think) --

• Strange Roads, a collection from DreamHaven Books
• We Never Talk About My Brother, a collection from Tachyon
• I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, a Young Adult novel from Conlan
• Summerlong, a novel from Conlan

On top of all that, Green Man is doing four podcasts of Beagle reading his stories over the course of the year -- they will appear quarterly -- and the first one, "The Stickball Witch" is now available in mp3 form.

2008 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Beagle fans. But what if you don't like Beagles?

Well, then, what do you think about terriers?



Update: See first comment, below, for yet more Beagle publication news and some corrections.

Department of Retarded Software Companies

My laptop doesn't have Word on it, so I wrote two reviews in Microsoft Works this afternoon (while at the in-laws for Easter festivities) and then e-mailed them to my home computer.

Microsoft Word here is utterly befuddled by them, and has no "Microsoft Works" option to open them with. This is a simpler file format, from the same company, for a program with exactly the same functionality. What idiot forgot to make them compatible with each other?

BSFA Awards Announced

This is a big weekend for awards, what with the Hugo nominations and the PK Dick winners, and we're not done yet...

The British SF Awards have just been presented at the big annual UK convention, Eastercon. (This year's Eastercon is Orbital 2008.)

According to Locus, this year's winners are:

• Novel: Brasyl by Ian McDonald
• Short Fiction: "Lighting Out" by Ken MacLeod
• Artwork: "Cracked World" (the cover of disLocations, ed. by Ian Whates) by Andy Bigwood
• Best Novel of 1958: Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss (this is a special category celebrating the BSFA's 50th anniversary)

I really do need to read Brasyl now, don't I?

Philip K. Dick Award Winner

This year's Philip K. Dick Award was presented at Norwescon to M. John Harrison's Nova Swing.

There was also a "Special Citation" given to From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, by the interestingly named Minister Faust.

[via SF Awards Watch]

Telling Fairy Tails

I'm slacking off -- my "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix this week covers just two books -- the first two volumes of Fairy Tail, the new series by Rave Master creator Hiro Mashima.

With any luck, I'll be reading and writing reviews this weekend to lay in some content for next week. Conventions (like Lunacon last weekend) can be fun, but they take up a lot of time that could be used for more productive activities.

Hugo Nominations!

It's an interesting list this year -- and I don't mean that in the Chinese-curse sense, but that the nominators have rallied behind some things cynical Andy Wheeler would not have expected. Further thoughts and sarcasm will be embedded after each category below...


Best Novel

• The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
• Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
• Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor; Analog Oct. 2006-Jan/Feb. 2007)
• The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)
• Halting State by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)

I've actually read four of these -- everything but Brasyl. It would be really interesting to see Chabon win, but I suspect it will be Stross or Scalzi. (And I'd be happy with any of those three.)

Best Novella

• "Fountains of Age" by Nancy Kress (Asimov's July 2007)
• "Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov's Feb. 2007)
• "Stars Seen Through Stone" by Lucius Shepard (F&SF July 2007)
• "All Seated on the Ground" by Connie Willis (Asimov's Dec. 2007; Subterranean Press)
• "Memorare" by Gene Wolfe (F&SF April 2007)

Haven't read a single one of them. (This is the time of year when I'd usually be frantically reading Year's Bests for the old job, but not this year.) I predict...Rusch will win. Why? Why not?

Best Novelette

• "The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham (Logorrhea ed. by John Klima, Bantam)
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang (F&SF Sept. 2007)
• "Dark Integers" by Greg Egan (Asimov's Oct./Nov. 2007)
• "Glory" by Greg Egan (The New Space Opera, ed. by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, HarperCollins/Eos)
• "Finisterra" by David Moles (F&SF Dec. 2007)

Two Greg Egan stories! It's like 1995 all over again! I've only read "Glory," which I don't remember well. I'm going to guess that Chiang will take it.

Best Short Story

• "Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, ed. by George Mann, Solaris Books)
• "Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's June 2007)
• "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken MacLeod (The New Space Opera, ed. by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, HarperCollins/Eos)
• "Distant Replay" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's April/May 2007)
• "A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's April/May 2007; The Dog Said Bow-Wow, Tachyon Publications)

In this category, I've read a whopping two stories. I think I'm pulling for Bear here, because she deserves a rocketship of her own. But the Swanwick story was quite good.

Best Related Book

• The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Glyer; appendix by David Bratman (Kent State University Press)
• Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium by Barry Malzberg (Baen)
• Emshwiller: Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz, intro. by Carol Emshwiller, fwd. by Alex Eisenstien (Nonstop)
• Brave New Words: the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher (Oxford University Press)
• The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)

The Arrival and Breakfast in the Ruins are both killer in their own ways, and Brave New Words seems quite impressive, though I've only just started poking through it. Under my usual expectations for this category -- the book by or about the oldest fan-favorite always wins -- I'm going to assume the Emshwiller retrospective will take it.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Enchanted Written by Bill Kelly, Directed by Kevin Lima (Walt Disney Pictures)
• The Golden Compass Written by Chris Weitz, Based on the novel by Philip Pullman, Directed by Chris Weitz (New Line Cinema)
• Heroes, Season 1, Created by Tim Kring (NBC Universal Television and Tailwind Productions Written by Tim Kring, Jeph Loeb, Bryan Fuller, Michael Green, Natalie Chaidez, Jesse Alexander, Adam Armus, Aron Eli Coleite, Joe Pokaski, Christopher Zatta, Chuck Kim, Directed by David Semel, Allan Arkush, Greg Beeman, Ernest R. Dickerson, Paul Shapiro, Donna Deitch, Paul A. Edwards, John Badham, Terrence O'Hara, Jeannot Szwarc, Roxann Dawson, Kevin Bray, Adam Kane
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Written by Michael Goldenberg, Based on the novel by J.K. Rowling, Directed by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures)
• Stardust Written by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Paramount Pictures)

How does one choose among four movies and one season of a TV show? This category has a serious apples-and-oranges problem this year. (Of course, I don't like the "dramatic" categories in the first place, so I'm not unbiased.) I haven't seen Heroes, so I can't judge it. I suspect Stardust, which was flawed in ways extremely sentimental people (for which read: Americans) will love, will carry the day.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

• Battlestar Galactica "Razor" written by Michael Taylor, directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá and Wayne Rose (Sci Fi Channel) (televised version, not DVD)
• Dr. Who "Blink" written by Stephen Moffat, directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)
• Dr. Who "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" written by Paul Cornell, directed by Charles Palmer (BBC)
• Star Trek New Voyages "World Enough and Time" written by Michael Reaves & Marc Scott Zicree, directed by Marc Scott Zicree (Cawley Entertainment Co. and The Magic Time Co.)
• Torchwood "Captain Jack Harkness" written by Catherine Tregenna, directed by Ashley Way (BBC Wales)

Oh look! It's "Worlds Enough and Time" again! The Hugos have no required "professional" status, so I'll only be mildly dismissive of it as the exceptionally fannish, backwards-looking thing that it is. I haven't seen any of these, and don't ever intend to. I'll expect Torchwood to take it, if only because it's the first show to come to fandom pre-slashed.

Best Professional Editor, Short Form

• Ellen Datlow (The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's), Coyote Road (Viking), Inferno (Tor))
• Stanley Schmidt (Analog)
• Jonathan Strahan (The New Space Opera (Eos/HarperCollins), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 1 (Night Shade), Eclipse One (Night Shade))
• Gordon Van Gelder (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
• Sheila Williams (Asimov's Science Fiction)

As I said last year, if the voters look at the list of nominated stories in the above categories, Sheila Williams is the obvious winner. However, this category seems to be ruled by a complicated calculus of time-in-saddle and how much a particular person is "due," so I suspect Schmidt may finally win this year. In any case, it's nice to see Strahan representing fresh blood in this category.

Best Professional Editor, Long Form

• Lou Anders (Pyr)
• Ginjer Buchanan (Ace/Roc)
• David G. Hartwell (Senior Editor, Tor/Forge)
• Beth Meacham (Tor)
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)

I think this category is being used by Hugo voters to work down the list of "people who should have gotten one a while ago, but didn't" -- at least, I hope that's the case, and that it's not going to settle down to going to the same one or two people ad infinitum like Best Artist and the old Best Editor did. In that case, it's either Buchanan or Meacham, and both are equally deserving. (Actually, they're all equally deserving, but I doubt Anders will get it this year, since Hugo voters have been horribly conservative in the Editor categories.)

But I will note that the last chance for Ellen Asher to win a Hugo has quietly slipped by the wayside. Bad form, Hugo voters.

Best Professional Artist

• Bob Eggleton (Covers: To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories (Baen), Ivory (Pyr), & The Taint and Other Stories (Subterranean))
• Phil Foglio (Covers: Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures, Vol. 2 (Meisha Merlin), What's New (Dragon Magazine Aug. 2007), Girl Genius Vol. 6-Agatha Heterodyne & the Golden Trilobite (Airship Entertainment))
• John Harris (Covers: Spindrift (Ace), Horizons (Tor), The Last Colony (Tor))
• Stephan Martiniere (Covers: Brasyl (Pyr), Mainspring (Tor), Dragons of Babel (Tor))
• John Picacio (Covers: Fast Forward 2 (Pyr), Time's Child (HarperCollins/Eos), A Thousand Deaths (Golden Gryphon))
• Shaun Tan

The information above makes it look like the artists are being nominated for those specific works, which may be confusing to voters. But this is a reenergized and interesting category for the first time in ages -- who would have expected Foglio again? Or Shaun Tan? I'll be rooting for Tan, but all of these guys are worthy.

Best Semiprozine

• Ansible edited by David Langford
• Helix edited by William Sanders and Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Interzone edited by Andy Cox
• Locus edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, & Liza Groen Trombi
• The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by Kathryn Cramer, Kristine Dikeman, David Hartwell & Kevin J. Maroney

One e-mail newsletter, one web fictionzine, one print fictionzine, one print newszine, and one print criticalzine. Congratulations! The widest category in the Hugos has managed to cover every possible iteration. And Locus will once again win the award for Best Locus.

Best Fanzine

• Argentus edited by Steven H Silver
• Challenger edited by Guy Lillian III
• Drink Tank edited by Chris Garcia
• File 770 edited by Mike Glyer
• PLOKTA edited by Alison Scott, Steve Davies, & Mike Scott

The fifty people who still read fanzines will vote in ways that I can't predict. Maybe Steve Silver will finally win?

Best Fan Writer

• Chris Garcia
• David Langford
• Cheryl Morgan
• John Scalzi
• Steven H Silver

Langford is always funny, and is a treasure of the SF world. But can't we let someone else -- any of these other deserving people -- win this time?

Best Fan Artist

• Brad Foster
• Teddy Harvia
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Taral Wayne

Is it my imagination, or is this category always basically identical? And, if so, how come I can't remember who usually wins?

After a bit of research, I now believe that, since Frank Wu is now a "dirty pro," Teddy Harvia will start winning this category again.

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer (Not a Hugo, But an Incredible Facsimile of One)

• Joe Abercrombie (2nd year of eligibility)
• Jon Armstrong (1st year of eligibility)
• David Anthony Durham (1st year of eligibility)
• David Louis Edelman (2nd year of eligibility)
• Mary Robinette Kowal (2nd year of eligibility)
• Scott Lynch (2nd year of eligibility)

The quirk here is that only SFF publications count, so an established novelist like Durham is competing with people brand-new to publishing. (Not that he'd get any edge in wooing Campbell voters simply because he wrote some historical novels, but it's an interesting distinction I hadn't noticed before.)

I still think this is Lynch's category to lose, but Abercrombie could surprise me -- as could Edelman, especially if all of the "I only like science fiction" crowd take up his banner. Kowal is a short-fiction writer, and those only win this category when they're immediate superstars bestriding the field. And Armstrong only has one interesting novel from a smaller press to his name, so it's a bit surprising to see him here.

Those are your Hugo nominees for 2008; if you're a member of Denvention 3, now is the time to start reading/watching so that you can vote. (I'm currently not a member, though I realized just this week that I'll finishing up a business trip in Anaheim the day Worldcon starts, so it would be cheaper than I expected. Anyone want to tell me any good reasons to go to Denver?)

Quote of the Week, Webcomics Edition

"Bork is the sound Swedes make when they have anal."
- Renee Engstrom, Anders Loves Maria #122

(Caution: link is not at all safe for work.)

Since content has been light this week, here's a random list of other webcomics I'm enjoying lately:

• American Elf -- James Kochalka draws himself as an elf (sort of; he has buck teeth and pointy ears) and does a daily slice-of-life diary comic. It's usually very mundane, focused on specific moments in his life.
• Basic Instructions -- Scott Adams was discussing this a few months back, so I expect it's pretty well known. In four panels, most days of the week, Scott Meyer has wordy, acted-out, tongue-in-cheek examples of how to do, and not to do, various things. I think he either uses clip art or uses very extensive cut-and-paste, since the art is decent but the same poses are reused constantly.
• Dinosaur Comics -- Designed to explode the heads of the people who complain about Dilbert's drawing style, Dinosaur has the same six lame clip-art panels every single day...with new dialogue. But it's surprisingly smart and funny, with a wider scope of topics than any other comic I've seen.
• F-Minus -- Probably the best of the post-Far Side surreal strips; it's usually one wide panel in the standard comics size, has a more mainstream art style than usual for the type, and its own point of view.
• The Fart Party -- Julia Wertz is a mid-20s cartoonist who drinks too much, has dead-end jobs, and hangs out with cartoonists. Fart Party is a bit like a self-conscious, Millennial-generation version of Hate!, only it's all (more or less) true.
• Garfield minus Garfield -- Someone (or, more likely these days, several someones) carefully Photoshop Garfield out of the Garfield comic, leaving only Jon Arbuckle and his pathetic life. Bizarrely funny, and occasionally even unexpectedly poignant.
• Girls With Slingshots -- A classy, smart traditional gag-a-day strip that tells an ongoing story, only on the web. It's also has a female point of view, which is very rare in any sphere of cartooning. In a better world, this would be in three thousand papers every morning.
• Hark! A Vagrant -- This is not, strictly speaking, a webcomic; it's Kate Beaton's LiveJournal. But she posts strips there irregularly (often in a big burst) -- both funny and unlikely history strips and vignettes based on her own life. Start with the epic post "Twenty History Comics."
• Real Life Comics -- One of the better "my life, only in cartoony, gag-a-day form" strips, with four nice, big, colorful panels most days.
• Sheldon -- Just a classic style newspaper strip done really well, with a cast including a boy billionaire, his grandfather, and a talking duck.
• Sinfest -- Probably the only ongoing strip that's primarily about religion, Sinfest manages to have a great, very illustrative style and a sly sense of humor. The devil and Jesus are major recurring characters, but cartoonist Tatsuya Ishida isn't on the side of either of them (though he does have a slight bias towards his Buddha character). I imagine Sinfest probably does offend some people, but it shouldn't do so for anyone with both brain and wit.
• Shortpacked! -- It's a strip about people who work in a store that bears no resemblance to Toys 'R Us, and only occasionally descends into massive neepery about Transformers. Quite a lot of it is character-based humor, and even the "isn't this media thing silly"" jokes are usually quite funny.
• Where I Vent My Spleen -- A British cartoonist does mostly short strips based (very loosely, I hope) on his own life. He's got a very expressive, cartoony style -- I see hints of Bill Plympton in it, sometimes -- and his characters are also exceptionally distinctive. (This is probably unsafe for most workplaces as well.)

And some comics I would love more if they were (still?) regularly published:

• Alien Loves Predator -- An honest-to-god fumetti strip, with real continuity, that's quite funny a lot of the time. Too bad the creator is too busy to spend much time on it recently.
• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic -- The epitome of the extremely funny, extremely non-work-safe strip. It's over now, but, in its day, Ghastly was the place to learn about the latest perversion (whether you wanted to or not) and laugh at it.
• My Elves Are Different -- Clip-art strips about the SF world; this was updated regularly about timely topics through most of 2007, but it looks like the cartoonist has lost interest in it.
• Spamusement -- As the tag-line says, "poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!" Some of these are incredibly funny, and even the poorly-drawn part is wonderful in context. There's some kind of problem with the site right now, so it might be dead for good -- but, if you can get in, there's a huge list of very funny cartoons

And that's what I've got; I tried to avoid the ones that everyone already knows (PvP, xkcd, Wondermark), and newspaper comics that I read on the web (my mind loves petty distinctions), but I'm sure there are a couple dozen more, equally good.

Two Unrelated Things

1) The Onion's print edition for this week (I can't find the story on their website) has an unexpectedly heartbreaking fake story: "Daddy Put in Bye-Bye Box." (It's on page 3, if you live in one of the five cities that get a print Onion.)

Update: It's on the site now.

2) There are still times, like this morning, when I'm reading a SF novel and really enjoying it, and I shift into thinking about how I'll write the descriptive copy for it for the club. Then I remember that I don't do that anymore.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage by Bill Bryson

Sigh of relief 1: Bryson is back in peak form after the self-indulgent The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

Sigh of relief 2: Bryson, being an intelligent, reasonable man, has no truck with any conspiracy theories regarding the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is part of a series of short biographies of famous dead people, by famous live people, edited by James Atlas and published by HarperCollins. This template works pretty well for ol' Willy S., since -- as Bryson points out in his first chapter -- we don't actually know all that much about his life. (So all of those longer biographies are filled with speculation and theorizing.)

Bryson's book is just shy of 200 pages, and feels neither rushed nor stretched. And that will make this blog post pretty short, because otherwise I'll be summarizing his summary of Shakespeare's life, which is too much like George Carlin's "taking your stuff on vacation" routine for my taste.

Bryson is an energetic and appealing writer, and a good explainer. As far as I can tell, he's very reliable on Shakespeare. So, if you are in the market for a short biography of anybody, this is a decent choice.

Arthur C. Clarke, R.I.P.

The BBC reports that Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. It's a sad thing, but, given his health problems, it's amazing that he survived, and thrived, for so long. I guess Sri Lanka has a lot going for it.

Rest In Peace, Sir Arthur. You deserve it.

News Presented Without Comment

Bertelsmann may be selling its entire Direct Group; Morgan Stanley is trying to broker the sale of US holdings already.

Some may remember that Bertelsmann bought half of the book portion of the US business from Time Warner last year, and laid off 400 people in Pennsylvania and 280 in New York. Forbes, at the time, estimated the sale cost Bertelsmann a sum in "the lower hundreds of millions of US dollars."

A Link and a Digression

First, a small dance of happiness, because Ask Moxie really liked Cynthia Cooper's book Extraordinary Circumstances (which some of you may remember I'm the marketing manager for). Even better, she's a mom in New York who noticed and identified with the woman's story at the heart of Circumstances, which is something that hasn't really come out in the reviews and coverage so far.

(Second, I think I now have a new blog to read.)

And the digression: I see that Moxie's 2-year-old is obsessed with Goodnight Moon. My older son, Thing 1, was similarly obsessed for several years. In fact, for at least a one-year period, I had to read him Goodnight Moon last every night. (At that point, I was reading five books to him every night, thinking that I could make him into a reader by pure volume of prose.)

Goodnight Moon is cute. It's sweet. But there's not all that much to it, so it can get monotonous. So I started reading it in funny voices (which Thing 1 sometimes allowed, and sometimes not). And then I realized I had the thing memorized, so I read it blindfolded for a while. That wasn't enough, so I finally started reading it backwards, which Thing 1 loved. ("Everywhere noises goodnight. Air goodnight. Stars goodnight. Hush whispering lady old the to goodnight.")

And then I got to the point where I had it memorized backwards, so I did it blindfolded that way.

Sometimes, when reading books to kids, you have to do silly things just to keep yourself entertained. (With Thing 2, it's mostly adding the word "official" -- from One Monster After Another -- to almost every noun in a Mercer Mayer book until the boy complains.) Kids like repetition, yes -- but you still have to throw them a curveball now and then, because the rest of life is never going to pitch straight to them. And besides, as Daffy said, it's fun!

Meme by Request, #1

Nadine asked:

Well, i'd like to have explained exactly why NJ pizza is different/inferior to NY pizza, which some of NY-native friends keep telling me..

I don't see any substantial difference between NY and NJ pizza, honestly. To be more precise, the differences between different pizzerias swamp any differences between the two states (even if we're taking "NY" to be just New York City). It's all pretty much thinnish crust rather than deep-dish as the standard (though varying in how thin that is), with a mildly spiced tomato sauce (usually without large chunks of tomato) under cheese.

I mean, Chicago-style is very different. And those things they make in California aren't even really pizza. But the Philly-NJ-NY-CT swath has pretty much a consistent definition of pizza, with individual variations in particular shops.

Pizza shops in that area are usually at least OK -- which means locals can sometimes get really attached to what's only mediocre pizza -- but there are some really good ones. I tend to think that towns with at least two or three competing pizza places get the best, since even the slavish locals can try different places.

(For example, there are at least five pizza places within five minutes driving of where I live. Two of them are quite good, in different ways, and another one used to be wonderful -- and might still be -- but it was very greasy, so I haven't been back in a long time. Another place is a mediocre joint that caters to high school kids with a quick lunch hour. And the bottom-end pizza place when I moved in closed soon after that.)

Another Musical Meme

Here's the meme I threatened promised earlier today, which I found via Keith R.A. DeCandido:

Name your top 10 most played bands/artists on iTunes/FM/music player, etc., then answer the questions.

Hm. As far as I can tell, there's no simple way to count up all of the playcounts of all of a band's individual songs to create one number, so this will have to be the bands that have the highest-ranked songs. That strikes me as unscientific, but I guess it's the best I can do.

1. Fountains of Wayne
2. R.E.M.
3. Modest Mouse
4. Harvey Danger
5. The Judybats
6. They Might Be Giants
7. Aimee Mann
8. U2
9. Camper Van Beethoven
10. Elvis Costello

1. What was the very first song you heard by 6? (They Might Be Giants)

"Don't Let's Start," when they showed up on MTV very late at night soon before their first album was released. (Back in the days when MTV not only played music, and not only played good music, but actually managed to get out in front of things now and then.)

2. What is your favorite album of 2? (R.E.M.)

Reconstruction of the Fables is probably more consistently strong, but I come back to Lifes Rich Pageant more often.

3. What is your favorite lyric that 5 has sung? (The Judybats)

"And I want to be good/but good is being simple/simple is forgetting/I simply can't forget." from "Being Simple"

4. How many times have you seen 4 live? (Harvey Danger)

Never; I haven't seen anyone live in years. I have children.

5. What is your favorite song by 7? (Aimee Mann)

Usually, "It's Not." Except when it's "The Moth."

6. What is a good memory you have involving the music of 10? (Elvis Costello)

Just this evening, on the way home from Red Lobster (where we went to celebrate Thing 1's birthday today), myself and the two boys were singing along to "Peace, Love & Understanding."

Also, "I Want You" played a significant part in my love life at one time, but I can't explain any further...

7. Is there a song of 3 that makes you sad? (Modest Mouse)

Strangely enough, for a band where my favorite songs are called things like "March Into the Sea" and "Satin in a Coffin," nothing of theirs makes me sad.

8. What is your favorite lyric that 2 has sung? (R.E.M.)

All my favorite R.E.M. lyrics make no sense at all, but here's something in between -- not quite one of my absolute favorites, but lovely and actually intelligible:

At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend
I don't care if you're not here with me
'Cause it's so much easier to handle
All my problems if I'm too far out to sea
But something better happen soon
Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back
Don't go back to Rockville
Waste another year

From "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville," of course.

9. How did you get into 3? (Modest Mouse)

I think I just bought a copy of Good News For People Who Like Bad News (cheaply) after hearing "Float On" once or twice, and reading reviews that made it sound like my kind of thing.

10. What was the first song you heard by 1? (Fountains of Wayne)

Probably "Radiation Vibe;" I think that was the first single.

11. What is your favorite song by 4? (Harvey Danger)

"Cream and Bastards Rise," with occasional detours to "Pike St./Park Slope".

12. How many times have you seen 9 live? (Camper Van Beethoven)

Never -- mostly because they broke up before I really got into them. (Plus the whole not-going-to-concerts thing.)

13. What is a good memory you have involving 2? (R.E.M.)

I had a gigantic Chronic Town poster in college -- sure, I was about five years late, but it was as quickly as I could get to college...

14. Is there a song of 8 that makes you sad? (U2)

"All I Want Is You" makes me melancholy, which is not exactly the same thing.

15. What is your favorite album of 5? (The Judybats)

I'll say Pain Makes You Beautiful.

16. What is your favorite lyric that 3 has sung? (Modest Mouse)

You were laying on the carpet
like you're satin in a coffin.
You said, "Do you believe what you're sayin'?"
Yeah right now, but not that often.
Are you dead or are you sleepin'?
Are you dead or are you sleepin'?
Are you dead or are you sleepin'?
God, I sure hope you are dead.

From "Satin in a Coffin."

17. What is your favorite song of 1? (Fountains of Wayne)

Favorite up-tempo song: "Bright Future in Sales." Favorite quiet song: "Prom Theme." Both subject to change without notice.

18. What is your favorite song of 10? (Elvis Costello)

The demo version of "Riot Act" from the Rhino reissue of Get Happy!!

19. How many times have you seen 8 live? (U2)

The repeated questions are getting tiresome. Never.

20. What is your favorite album of 1? (Fountains of Wayne)

Welcome Interstate Managers is the most consistently to my tastes.

21. What is a great memory you have considering 9? (Camper Van Beethoven)

Nothing comes to mind, I'm afraid.

22. What was the first song you heard by 8? (U2)

I'm sure it was "I Will Follow," but I can't remember when that would have been.

23. What is your favorite cover by 2? (R.E.M.)

"Draggin' the Line," from one of the Austin Powers movies, is a lot of fun, but their take on Richard & Linda Thompson's "Wall of Death" is possibly even better than the original.


Man, why do I do these things? This was longer than I expected, and I have the sinking feeling that I did a very similar version, if not exactly the same thing, at least once before.

Belated Clarke Award Nominees Post

Did I forget to do this last week? I think I did...

Well, the bickering has already begun, and, once you see the traditionally odd shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (which I sometimes think is designed to be given to the person least likely to know about it, care about it, or be willing to accept it), you'll understand why.

(Or at least part of why; the other part is that fandom is about bickering.)

Anyway, the nominees for this year do not include Ian McDonald's Brasyl (which, I suppose, means it's too much like regular science fiction), but does include:

• The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua - Snow Books
• The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter - Faber & Faber
• The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall - Faber & Faber
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall - Canongate
• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod - Orbit
• Black Man by Richard Morgan - Gollancz

The only one of those I've read is Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen), which did not overly impress me. I have Execution Channel on the stack, but haven't yet had a mood sunny enough that I needed that book to cut through it. From a quick glance at Amazon UK, the books I wasn't previously familiar with seem to be equally gloomy.

Is the UK determined to reclaim its mantle (from wherever Peter Watts is standing right now) as the home of the most depressive SF on earth, or is something else going on here?

Match It For Pratchett

I've been too depressed by the news to post anything previously, and there's been ample coverage everywhere, but, just in case...

Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's, then donated half a million pounds for research into that disease. Now there's an effort to raise an equivalent amount from Pratchett's fans.

So that's it.

To Meme and Meme Not (Yet)

I've got another meme queued up, probably for me to get to tonight when I have access to my iTunes statistics. (I love statistics, and any meme that allows me to play with them will find a home in Antick Musings.)

But I've just come across another one, which is seducing me with its combination of brazen comment-seeking and the potential to find ever more things to blather on about. So -- what the heck -- I'll do this one, too. I got it from Ben Jeapes:

“Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Repost in your own journal if you are so inclined.”

I promise to respond to (if not necessarily answer) any serious, or semi-serious, requests in this line. (It's early in the week, and I'm feeling energetic.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/15

There's a decent stack this week, so let me get right to it:

A World Too Near is the new novel by Kay Kenyon, and second in her series "The Entire and the Rose." I haven't read the first book in this series, Bright of the Sky; in fact, I've only read one Kay Kenyon novel at all. That was her 2000 novel Tropic of Creation, an intense, Cherryhesque story of cultural conflict and personal transformation on an arid third-rate world with secrets. So I know she can do some good stuff -- though, in my old life, I was mostly unsuccessful in getting people to try Tropic of Creation. I hope Pyr has more luck with this series; they published World on March 11th.

Next is In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, the second book in S.M. Stirling's current old-fashioned solar system series. We learned in the first book, The Sky People, that aliens had terraformed Mars and Venus hundreds of millions of years ago and populated them with Earth-derived life -- and then, in the mid-20th century, the Cold War and Space Race exploded onto two more worlds. Sky People (which I read, liked, and bought for my former job) was set on Venus; Crimson Kings brings us to Mars and what I think is a number of years later. Tor publishes it on Tuesday; it's probably in stock everywhere as I type this. And, for those who care about such things, Crimson Kings opens at the 1962 WorldCon...

I may have mentioned Dark Wraith of Shannara before, but I've now seen a finished copy -- it's a new graphic novel in the bestselling series by Terry Brooks, and credited as "written by Terry Brooks, with illustrations by Edwin David, adapted by Robert Place Napton." (From which I infer -- rightly or wrongly -- that Brooks wrote it as a prose piece, Napton broke it down into pages and panels, and David drew it.) It's an interesting cross-pollination of fantasy and comics, and I'm intrigued to see how well it works. Del Rey publishes it on March 25th.

Flight Explorer, Volume One is something else entirely; a collection of short all-ages comics stories from the creators of the Flight series of anthologies. It's being published by Villard on March 25th.

One of the favorite writers of my youth was Robert Asprin -- I loved the "Thieves' World" series, which he co-conceived and edited, and re-read his novel The Bug Wars more times than I could say. (My younger brother was a huge fan of Asprin's "Myth Adventures" series, which I enjoyed but wasn't as obsessed with.) He dropped off the map for a while, and has been coming back gradually over the past few years. Now Ace is launching a whole new Asprin series with Dragons Wild, the story of a professional gambler who learns that he's a dragon. This is the first book on which Asprin is the sole credited author since about 1993, which may mean that his troubles have ended. (And I can't be too much more definite than "troubles" -- I've heard explanations involving either writer's block or the IRS, and some mixing both with other elements -- since I don't know why he's hasn't written anything solo for ten years or more.) Whatever it was, it's good to see Asprin back again. Dragons Wild is an Ace trade paperback, publishing April 1st.

Adam Stemple's second solo novel is Steward of Song, which I'm somewhat sorry to see is a sequel to his first solo novel, Singer of Souls. Singer was a closely-observed novel about a young junkie musician who had contact with Faerie. It also had a strong, striking, untypical ending that I fear any sequel would unpick -- it's hard to see how any sequel could continue the path Singer followed at the end. I may have to read this one just to see what Stemple did with it. Steward of Song was published March 4th in hardcover by the inescapable Tor.

The trade paperback edition of Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 is being published by Villard on March 25th. (The original hardcover was from Archaia Studios, who also published the individual issues; I read it in the hardcover.) When "small-press" comics companies can sell paperback rights to their projects to Random House imprints and get national bookstore distribution along the way, the stranglehold of the Diamond/comic shop/superhero/Big Two nexus on the neck of the comics medium may finally be loosening. And thank god for that.

The oddest thing I've seen recently is Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim. It was written by Tom Corwin and illustrated by Craig Frazier, and will be published by Flying Dolphin Press (an obscure-to-me imprint of Doubleday) on June 24th as a small gift-size hardcover. Corwin is a musician, and his hero Fooster is "your average fellow...he takes us into a rich and vivid world unlike any we've seen before." (And that means quite a bit to me, since I've seen a lot of quite different worlds in books before.) I'm not sure what it all means, but this is short, so I'm pretty sure I'll read it and report back.

And last for this week is the new novel from Allen Steele, Galaxy Blues. It's set in the same universe as most of his recent work (Spindrift and the various "Coyote" stories), but focuses on a new character in his journeys deeper and deeper into the galaxy. It's a hardcover from Ace, coming the first of April.

Lighting Up the World of Manga

My "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix this week featured a review of the first two volumes of Keiko Tobe's series With the Light, about a mother raising an autistic son.

Movie Log: Dan in Real Life

I enjoyed Dan in Real Life a lot while I was watching it, but, afterward, I'm not sure if the ending quite worked. (It was definitely emotionally successful, but, on a story level and as a piece of drama, there are some problems.)

It's a romantic comedy with a better-than average reason for keeping the yearning lovers apart: Dan (Steve Carell) is a widower with three growing daughters who is attending a reunion of his extended family in the ridiculously large and well-placed ancestral home of his clan, on the shore somewhere in Rhode Island. On the first morning, he heads into town (because his smothering insistence of keeping them infantilized has alienated all three of his daughters), and meets Marie (Juliet Binoche) in a bookstore. They have coffee, they hit it off, but she mentions that she's just started a relationship, and has to drive away.

About an hour later, Dan sees Marie again -- she's the new girlfriend of his younger brother Mitch (Dane Cook). The more Dan sees her, the more he's smitten. But she's also really great for Mitch -- his previous girlfriends have all been shallow, and Marie is a real adult. (Also, in a telling moment, Mitch has been calling her "Annie" -- her full name is "Anne-Marie," and he met her in a situation with a bunch of other women with names starting with M -- but he switches to calling her "Marie" after he realizes she prefers it. She's clearly important to him.) The question Dan in Real Life could have asked, if it had been more fearless, is "who needs Marie more?" [1] It doesn't go that way, since it's a Steve Carrell vehicle -- and that means we know he's going to win Marie in the end. The movie backs off a bit on Mitch's relationship with Marie, at just the time when it should be showing them becoming more connected (or failing to connect, if the filmmakers wanted to make an easy out).

So there's about two more days of Dan trying to avoid Marie, or trying to want to avoid Marie, or just trying to find something, anything, to do with his time that isn't hugely social and organized. (This is a very rough-and-tumble, organized-games-every-minute-of-the-day family.) Since the movie is so tightly focused on Dan, the audience feels for him, but it's not clear for a long time how much Marie reciprocates his feelings.

Dan in Real Life has occasional aspirations to be more than just a romantic comedy; it clearly wants to be a movie about family as well. (And ambition, in this case, is no bad thing.) It started with some quick scenes of Dan interacting with his daughters, and swiftly established him as controlling, stubborn, entirely reliant on the "because I said so" method of parenting, and completely unwilling to comprehend that his girls have grown up in the four years since their mother died. (One of the things Dan in Real Life does well is to make that point subtly, without needing any character to yell it at Dan as an attack.) He won't let his oldest daughter practice driving the car, even though she has a license. He goes ballistic at the thought of his middle daughter having any kind of contact with what must be the sweetest, most harmless boy in modern cinema. And even his littlest girl gets a huge dose of condescension on the drive north; he can't believe that she can think for herself.

Is it any wonder that these girls can't stand him? He's a deeply loving father, but he's turning into a very bad father as his girls turn into women. The rest of his family realizes this -- and clearly wants to help him get back on an even keel -- but they don't realize the source of his main tension on this particular weekend. (I get the feeling that Dan is a grumpy loner much of the time, so avoiding people and disrupting the family games is nothing new for him.)

Dan in Real Life wants to contrast Dan's job -- he's a newspaper advice columnist, on the verge of getting nationally syndicated, and several characters remark, apparently honestly, on how wonderful he is at it -- with his shown failures in his personal life. Unfortunately, we don't get a good sense of him as an giver of advice -- this is a movie that could have started earlier, added a reel or two, and even had occasional voiceovers taken from Dan's columns. The audience needs to see and believe that he's good at what he does to really understand how that doesn't follow through to his own life at all. As it is, we're told that he's good at what he does, but we don't see it -- and so, since we can see how rotten he is in day-to-day life, we end up assuming that he's either a complete hypocrite or that his column is really pretty lousy.

Dan in Real Life succeeds as a romantic comedy -- the audience feels for Dan, and comes to think Marie is wonderful and a great match for him -- but it shows hints that it aimed higher than that. Those other elements are dropped, or quickly papered over, to get to the conventional happy ending. But there's a more interesting movie -- one probably at least half an hour longer -- lurking in Dan in Real Life, and I would have like to have seen that one. The actors could have sustained that movie; it's just the script (or, possibly, the editing) that let them down.

[1] Or possibly who deserves her more, or even, to be really radical, who she wants more.

Lunacon Ho!

I'm shutting down the computer in preparation for heading to Lunacon (where I'll have to talk about blogging at 4 this afternoon). I don't know if the Escher Hilton has free Wi-Fi -- if they don't, I'll probably be silent until sometime late on Sunday.

See some of you there, and the rest of you can be spared my voice for a short while...

Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? by Mitchell Symons

This book worked. No matter what else I might say about it, that's first -- it's got a great title, and an eye-catching cover, and that got me to plop down my money for it.

I could claim that I got this book because I knew Symons from his This Book... series of trivia collections -- and that's not actually untrue -- but I think both you and I know that it was primarily prurient interest that led me to pick this up off of the shelf. It looked thrillingly naughty, and it ensnared me.

Unfortunately, it's only mildly naughty (or thrilling, for that matter); Symons is at pains to remind the reader, over and over again, that he's a boring middle-aged married guy who doesn't know anything about any of these questions personally. (And he only seems to have two or three friends he can ask, despite his claims to have a wide and deep knowledge-base to draw from.) There's something quintessentially English about his stance -- he may be writing a book about sex, but, by Jingo!, he's no expert in the subject!

Books on esoteric topics -- and particularly those related to sex -- can easily fall into one of two categories: the expert who knows all the squishy bits about the subject but is a clumsy writer, and the pro writer who loudly makes it clear that this is all (forgive the pun) virgin territory to him. Symons doesn't play the faux-naif quite as strongly as Ayn Carillo-Gailey did in Porn*ol*o*gy, but he does protest far too much. (He signed a contract to write a book all about sex, called up all of his friends to ask them questions about sex, and then claims he isn't all that interested in sex? Pull the other one, Mitchell; it's got bells on it.)

Nudists is a series of questions and answers -- and fairly superficial ones, at that -- about sex and sexuality. A few examples:

• "What's So Big (and Clever) About Bigamy?"
• "Do Gays Talk Like Gays Because They're Gays or Do They Become Gays Because They Talk Like Gays?"
• "Can You Get Pregnant If You Have Sex Standing Up?"
• "What Do They Call a Brazillian Bikini Wax in Brazil?"
• "Has Any Man Ever Gone to a Prostitute and Found Someone He Knew?"

As you can see, they're fairly low-level sex questions, and there's a very British emphasis on propriety and embarrassment. Symons doesn't do a whole lot of research on any of these topics, and gets to the bottom of only about half of them. (The others lead him to throw up his hands, make a vague conclusion, and move on to the next thing.) I would strongly recommend not using this book as any kind of serious reference, but it is a quick, amusing read for those who are fascinated with the subject (like me and Symons).

Quote of the Week

"[In] American comics, the super-hero genre has largely degenerated into fan fiction."

- Noah Berlatsky

Matter by Iain M. Banks

We'll start off with a quick quiz today; one question, with no right or wrong answer.

Q: Does this sound like a "space opera" to you?

In a roughly medieval (but modernizing) society with more developed neighbors, a smart, well-liked, and forward-thinking king has died on the battlefield. The official story is that he died of his wounds after fighting valiantly, but two men witnessed the king's closest advisor kill him with his own hands, and then monologue about how evil he (the advisor) is and how he will take control of the kingdom. One of those two witnesses is the king's eldest surviving son, who flees with a trusted servant to a neighboring country. He's trying to find his sister, who was sent to a more advanced society and is now working with their government. Meanwhile, the youngest prince -- the figurehead for the advisor's regency -- is coming to realize that he is in mortal danger.

OK, pencils down. Space opera or not?

Would you change your answers if I told you that there's really nothing metaphorical in that description? It's a realio-trulio feudal kingdom, with nobles and pageantry and swords and all that, and the True Heir heads off (into space, I'll admit, but not at high speed nor with anyone armed with more than swords chasing him) to find someone to help him depose his father's murderer. There are mile-wide starships -- this is a Banks novel, after all -- but a dismaying lack of coruscating beams of force, or of any conflict not involving either the aforementioned swords or very high-level diplomacy. All in all, Matter has a disconcerting lack of exploding Orbitals, high-speed chases, and games for the fate of empires.

There is an important Ancient Enigmatic Alien Artifact, but the AEAA doesn't show up until quite late in the proceedings. And, actually, the plot I outlined above is completely abandoned once the AEAA appears; its conflicts and issues quickly solved or shoved aside.

Don't get me wrong: Matter is a fine science fiction novel, with well-defined characters, a compelling storyline, and excellent writing. But if it's "space opera" based on the last fifty pages (which take place entirely within a planet, and in which the major death-ray-style combat is kept off-page), then there's hardly any SF novel every written that isn't "space opera." Matter is just SF, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If you're still trying to decide whether to read Matter, some possible tie-breakers:

• it's mostly set within a "Shellworld," comprised of over a dozen concentric shells, each of which is individually habitable (and most are inhabited)
• there are no major Mind characters, though a drone-turned-knife-missile does play a supporting role
• and it has a typically Banksian cheerful and upbeat ending.

I liked Matter, but it also took me more than a week to read; it's overlong and just meanders along for most of its length. (Much like Banks's last SF novel, The Algebraist, in fact. Matter's ending, though, is less abrupt than The Algebraist's.) Those with smaller to-be-read piles than I do won't mind this as much, of course. But with that plot and that cover, I doubt Matter will be the long-hoped-for breakout book by Banks in the US market; it's for those of us who already know and enjoy his writing.

All That Glisters

Today at ComicMix I reviewed the first three volumes of Andi Watson's swell new all-ages series, Glister.

And that's that.

Free Books!

Everyone else has already linked to these announcements, but I may have some readers as curmudgeonly and reclusive as myself, so...

1) Jeff VanderMeer's book The Situation was made available as a free download via Wired -- and can also be found in an infinitely snazzier collection of paper, boards, and glue from PS Publishing.

2) Night Shade Books has put up Richard Kadrey's novel Butcher Bird, also completely for free. (It's on this page, with a couple of other free things.) Butcher Bird is also published using the more traditional "you pay money and get a handsome trade paperback" methodology.

3) The mad geniuses at Tor Books have been giving away e-books for a couple of weeks now, as part of a plot (revealed recently) to get fans to sign up for what promises to be a really snazzy new homepage/community/blog/what-have-you.

So go read something, won't you?

The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick

When The Dragons of Babel arrived on my doorstep, I said that I was sure that it would be one of the best fantasy novels of 2007. But I'll have to back off that claim slightly, now that I've read it. The Dragons of Babel is a fine fantasy book, and quite possibly one of the best of the year, but it's clearly a fix-up rather than a novel -- the preexisting stories have been run together and disguised by being arranged into many chapters, but Dragons makes, at best, a very picaresque and episodic novel.

The episodes are generally excellent -- both "King Dragon" and "Lord Weary's Empire" are fabulous novellas, and they each have just as much power as two-and-a-half chapters in the middle of Babel as they did when they stood alone -- but they clearly are episodes, and the plot bounces from one discrete adventure to another without a strong central plot.

Will is a young guy -- I can't say "man," since he's half-human and half-fay -- in a bucolic village somewhere in the hinterlands of Faerie. But his simple life ends when the ongoing war between two distant powers leads to a war-dragon (essentially a living fighter plane) crash-landing in his town's central square. The dragon is half-dead and immobile, but still powerful and malicious enough to take over the town. And when the dragon discovers that it needs a strong lieutenant to enforce its rule, Will's half-blood immunity to cold iron makes him a natural for the job.

Will eventually gets away from the dragon's control -- doing his village a good turn along the way -- but he has to leave town permanently, and a piece of the dragon's consciousness and power is permanently resident in him. On his way to the city of Babel and the destiny he doesn't know he has (and wouldn't particularly have wanted), he finds himself in a refugee camp, with a band of squatters deep beneath the city of Babel, learning the trade of a mildly corrupt city government official high in the spires of Babel, and making a dishonest living as a con man.

Each episode is well-told and compelling, but they are each separate episodes, not stages in a single plotline. Readers who demand a single continuous narrative might be disappointed with The Dragons of Babel, but, then again, so would those who demand that every book have a conventional romance plot. Life is full of disappointments for the inflexible. For the rest of us, here's The Dragons of Babel, a great work of modern fantasy from one of the treasures of American letters.

Context Is For the Weak

"Yet another social problem easily solved through the judicious application of anal sex."
- Nick Mamatas

Utterly Unsurprising

It was time for another meme (this one via Gwenda Bond), and I learned what I already knew:

Your Score: Eeyore

You scored 15 Ego, 17 Anxiety, and 10 Agency!

"Do you know what A means, little Piglet?"

"No, Eeyore, I don't."

"It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That's what A means."

"Oh," said Piglet again. "I mean, does it?" he explained quickly.

"I'm telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, 'It's only Eeyore, so it doesn't count.' They walk to and fro saying 'Ha ha!' But do they know anything about A? They don't. It's just three sticks to them. But to the Educated--mark this, little Piglet--to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it's a great and glorious A.

You scored as Eeyore!

ABOUT EEYORE: Eeyore lives in his own thistley corner of the forest and wonders why people don't come to visit him more often. He is master of the Guilt Trip, and is always gently forgiving his visitors for neglecting him. Eeyore considers himself to be smarter than the other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood, and is often exasperated by their habit of having adventures and general merriment.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are an anxious person, and you tend to expect the worst. Your friends find you somewhat cynical at times, because you have found that it is best to expect disappointment. You often feel unappreciated by the people you work with, but you rarely actually try and do anything to change that fact.

Your close friends admire you more than you think they do. They wish that you would learn to stop worrying so much and actually start trying to fix what is bothering you. If something is making you unhappy... change it!

Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/8

Another week; another pile of books. I should mention that a couple of these things are ones I spent my own money on during a recent comic-shop trip, but all of the rest arrived in the mail for review. (And, as always, I hope to get to many of them, either here or at ComicMix, but I've learned that my hopes often exceed my abilities.)

Del Rey Manga is publishing the first two volumes of a new series called Fairy Tail at once on March 25th, and they sent copies of both to me. The manga-ka behind this project is Hiro Mashima, who created Rave Master. (And my older son loves Rave Master, so maybe I should ask him what he thinks of this series.) It's rated T-for-teen, and looks like another one in the long line of boys' adventure stories.

The newest volume of Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima's Path of the Assassin manga series is volume 9, Battle for Power. It's published by Dark Horse, it's available now, and you'd really have to start with the first volume to have any idea what's going on. I like these but, as I've mentioned a couple of times, I'm never quite sure if I'm really getting them.

I know The Bakers: Babies And Kittens has been out for a few weeks now, since the comics shop almost let me buy it the last time I was there. Unfortunately for me, it was a Tuesday, and, after Clerk 1 had already rung me up and I'd finished paying, Clerk 2 noticed The Bakers and said sternly that it wasn't available until the next day. So they had to put it back in my hold box and process a refund. (Yet another example of the bizarre business practices of the modern comics shop: everything has an unbreakable street date. The Direct Market is like a newsstand run by a guy with OCD.) The book itself is by the mighty Kyle Baker and published by Image; it collects some of his recent comics about his family -- and, in particular, his cute young children.

Marvel has brought out the fifth collection of Walt Simonson's great run on Thor under the title Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson, Vol. 5. Of course, the actual cover implies the title is Marvel Visionaries: Walter Simonson: The Mighty Thor and has no number on it, but that's par for the course for the confusing world of Marvel branding. (On the inside front cover, we can see that the first and fourth volumes were "Visionaries," but the second and third were officially Thor Legends (with a cover treatment implying their titles were actually Marvel Legends: yadda yadda yadda). Someday Marvel will grow up into a real publishing company and realize its own name is not the most important part of the packaging...or maybe not, actually, since that strategy has served them awfully well for the last couple of decades. (Another point to note: even though the book is now published, none of the online sellers have the actual cover, just the piece of art Marvel sent at the time of Diamond's solicitation. It's clear where their priorities are.) Whatever the new book is called, it's by Simonson and collects one of the great superhero runs of the '80s. It's available now.

New mass-market paperback lines are nearly as rare as hens' teeth, and the conventional wisdom has been that the format is in a deep slump, if not totally doomed. But, as always, Night Shade Books laughs at the conventional wisdom; they launched a brand new line in mass market last year. And this year they're bringing out Liz William's fine "Detective Inspector Chen" novels in that format -- Snake Agent was published in January and The Demon and the City in February, with Precious Dragon to follow this month. It's an engrossing detective series set in a supernatural near future -- and yet manages to be utterly unlike all of the "urban fantasies" that are so common these days, in large part by using real Chinese mythology (including an impressively bureaucratic Hell). Everyone who has not tried the series because the books are "too expensive" or because "my shelves are purpose-built for mass-markets" are now officially on notice -- you have no excuse now, and I expect you to buy, read, and enjoy these books. That is all.

Also from Night Shade, and also in the "I'm so glad" category, is Walter Jon Williams's new novel, Implied Spaces. Williams is probably the least-known best writer in the SF field, or maybe the writer who had the worst run of luck in the '90s, with great novels as various as Aristoi, Days of Atonement, and Metropolitan, and enough great stories to fill two big collections. But various publishing stuff has kept him from getting the audience he deserves -- and the audience that will really, really love his books, too -- until, I hope, now. Implied Spaces looks like a medium-future post-scarcity book, with pocket universes, massively powerful AIs, and flashing swords. I expect to love it, and I fervently home I'm not the only one. It's coming April 1st in hardcover.

Movie Log: Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral came along to my mailbox, only a day or two after I'd expected it, so The Wife and I watched it immediately and sent it back into the Netflix machine, to pop up in someone else's mailbox.

It's a pleasant comedy, dark grey rather than actually black, about the members of a British family who gather when one of the older generation (father to the most important character, Matthew Macfayden's David) dies. David and his wife Jane (Kelly Hawes) have been living with David's mother (Sandra, played by Jane Asher) for an undisclosed amount of time, and what they do for a living is also left vague. (David has written a novel, but that's all we know.) And yet they may have trouble now paying for an apartment of their own, which would normally make me think they're horribly bad at managing money -- but the movie's not about that, so I accepted it as background.

Other important characters include David's younger brother, the successful novelist Robert (Rupert Graves); Howard (Andy Nyman), who seems to be a friend of the family; cousin Martha (Daisy Donovan) and her soon-to-be-fiance Simon (Alan Tudyk); and Martha's ne'er-do-well younger brother Troy (Kris Marshall), who is training to be a pharmacist.

With that many folks jockeying about (and I haven't even gotten to Martha's father or the character played by Peter Dinklage, who had an unexpected connection to the dead man), Funeral doesn't have time for sensitive depictions of characters -- and that's not what it's there for. It's a slightly tonier, British version of the kind of adult comedy that Americans used to be able to make through the '70s and '80s. ("Adult" here meaning "for grown-ups," and not "involving bodily fluids.") It's not a doors-slamming farce, but there are a couple of plotlines, and most of them get slapstick and broad at least once. The actors are solid enough to make it work; it never gets too silly for its own good.

Frank Oz is the director, and he brings his usual classy but unspectacular competence to the proceedings. There's nothing here to greatly advance the course of cinema, but it's a very entertaining comedy. And there's a great unexpectedly hilarious moment near the end that was set up perfectly and put aside, like a palmed card by a magician.

Movie Log: The Darjeeling Limited

The Wife and I had hoped that Netflix would send us Death at a Funeral last week, but I guess it was slightly more popular than we rated, so we got our next choice, The Darjeeling Limited, instead. And we finally watched it Monday night.

It's about three brothers -- you can probably read the names of the actors who play them on the CD case to the left -- who are traveling through India for a reason only one of them knows. (And that's because he hasn't told the other two -- it's not quite clear what he did tell them, to get them to come along, but they all seem to be rich enough to run around the world at a moment's notice, and the organizing brother did recently have a near-fatal motorcycle accident.)

Things move on from there, but rarely in an linear way -- the movie, though, is totally honest about itself, since it starts off with five minutes of Bill Murray racing to catch a train and then shifts focus away from him for good. The Darjeeling Limited starts off by telling the audience "I'm going to show you some things, and not all of them will be relevant, and many of them may well be pointless tangents. But I'll get somewhere in the end. Are you with me?"

If you can say yes to that, The Darjeeling Limited is for you. If you prefer a movie that will make more regular stops according to its timetable -- if you've got somewhere else to be, unlike these three pampered rich dudes -- you should find another movie.

I don't have much more to say, other than to stand back and point in amazement at what's possibly the single most blatant bit of symbolism I've ever seen in a movie. You see, near the end, the three brothers have to throw away their father's baggage to catch their train together. I laughed out loud at the audacity of it. It's a moment when you can hear the director, Wes Anderson, mumbling "They'll get it if I have to beat their heads in with it!" We get it, Wes, we get it. But you might dial it back a bit next time.

ComicMix Deals in Yen

My "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix this week reviewed the second volumes of three titles from Yen Press: Black God, Alice on Deadlines, and Zombie-Loan.

Movie Log: Beowulf

So I'm watching Beowulf tonight, just to see if it lives up to its reputation. And, so far, it does -- it's melodramatic in all of the worst ways, full of the most blatant dick jokes, intensely silly, and the best object lesson in the Uncanny Valley I've ever seen.

I've got posts on two other movies half-way finished, but I see no reason to waste valuable time thinking about this movie. So I'll type a bit as the movie goes on, and post this once it's done.

The physics is rotten in this film; the gold coins fly like leaves and have no weight. The bodies are worse, if that's possible.

There might have been one or two believable figures in the entire movie, but I can't think of who they might have been. Beowulf is like a million animated Real Dolls, bouncing in variable gravity and bending in unlikely ways.

And did I mention the dick jokes?

Every character seems to have a completely different accent. Beowulf is a South London gangster and Grendel's mother is some decayed Eastern European baroness. Most of the rest have random Irish or Scottish accents; no one at all sounds at all Danish.

The subtitles can't manage to spell "Heorot" correctly.

The whole thing looks like the world's longest cut-scene from a second-rate videogame. My fingers kept itching for a controller so I could finally fight Grendel myself.

Oh, sure a horse is going to gallop over a burning, collapsing bridge and then jump a thirty-foot chasm.

I've heard the phrase "my heart was in my throat" so many times, but I guess I just never visualized it before.

And, inevitably, there's a bad pop song playing under the end credits -- I don't want to check, but I bet it's called "The Ballad of Beowulf."

I'm outta here.

In Which I Point and Laugh

Now James Cawley, the producer of "Worlds Enough & Time," is stating strongly (nearly at the bottom the page) that it is not a professional production, and implies -- as I suspected and have said several times -- that it isn't authorized by Paramount in any way, and exists on sufferance as an "amateur" project that Paramount doesn't choose to crush as long as it stays that way.

Can I say "told ya so!" now?

[via Den of Geek out of SF Awards Watch]

A Meme! A Meme! I Do Confess't!

I'm mostly doing this one because I'm picking it up from someone entirely different: Barbarienne.

1. You have 50 dollars in your pocket. What do you do with it?

Yes, I do. Most of the time. It's most likely to buy food for me and the family, in one way or another.

2. What is your most guilty pleasure?

Far too guilty to mention.

3. Have you ever had anyone close to you die?

No closer than grandparents, though a friend from high school died while I was in college.

4. Are you confused as to what lies ahead of you?

A computer is immediately ahead of me, as it is for most people answering this meme. Is it common to be confused about that?

5. What was the last movie you saw, for pleasure, and would you recommend it?

Death at a Funeral, last night. It's a bit obvious, but a lot of fun.

6. Superman or Batman?

Flaming Carrot.

7. If the person you like does not accept you, would you continue to wait for them to change their feelings?

Oh my, are the questions for twelve year old starting already? "Ohmygod! I so totally like whoosiz!" Let me translate that question out of teenagerese: "If you are romantically interested in someone who doesn't reciprocate your interest, are you the kind of idiot who hangs around in the desperate hope that your life will turn into a bad romantic comedy?"

Even if I weren't married, the answer would be Hell No.

8. If the person you secretly like is already attached, what would you do?

Oooh! I secretly like someone! Pshaw.

What I do is mention it to my wife, actually, and she says something like "You think she's pretty?" and the conversation goes on from there to places you don't need to know about.

9. Is there anything that has made you unhappy recently?

Things make me unhappy every day; life is like that. Nothing big, though.

10. If you could have chosen at birth whether to be a boy or a girl, which would you be?

I'm well over six feet tall, with straight oily hair on my head (and too much of it other places), big feet, anti-social tendencies, and a general clumsiness. As a man, I'm only mildly notable.

And how do you know I didn't choose?

11. Which of the 7 Deadly Sins do you think you relate to the most & why?

That's a tough one -- they're all so much fun. I don't get nearly enough Wrath in my life. Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust are all old friends. Greed, Ency, Pride -- it's all good.

12. If you find out that your best friend is going out with your boyfriend/girlfriend, how would you react?

My "best friend" is my wife, and if I somehow had a separate person who was my "girlfriend" whom my wife was "going out" with...I'd have woken up in an episode of Red Shoe Diaries, so I'd break out the popcorn.

13. Who is currently the most important person to you?

You ask me to choose between my children? Whichever one has been less annoying lately, so Thing 1 right at the moment.

14. Would you rather be a really good person or a really interesting person?

If "really rich" and "really powerful" are off the table, I suppose interesting is a good consolation prize.

15. Do you believe in some form of life after death?

I don't habitually lie to myself, no.

16. Which fictional character could you most see yourself marrying?

What a bizarrely random question. I don't think of collections of words that way, thank you very much.

17. Would you give your all in a relationship?

Sometimes I give my All. But I'm using Tide at the moment.

18. Do you have a motto? If yes which one?

"Don't you start!"

19. What type of friends do you have?

Invisible alien ninja elves. Who come bearing custard.

20. What place most speaks to you?

The kind of place that is human-shaped and has a mouth.


Whee! I'm done. That was dumber than I expected.

Another Trip to the Uncanny Valley

I have no idea what this is all about. But it's weird, and Ben Jeapes linked to it. So now it's my turn.

The Obligatory "My Life As a Gamer" Post

E. Gary Gygax, the man who launched a million nerds, died earlier this week, and so the world's blogs are filled with remembrances of everyone's mis-spent youth. And, since I missed posting anything at all yesterday, who am I to pass up an opportunity to indulge myself horribly?

My geek credentials are a bit worn and outdated, but I think still quite serviceable. For, you see, I was a co-founder of the D&D club of my junior high! This is way back in 1980 or 1981 -- I can't remember if it was 7th or 8th grade -- and the club limped along, having adventures at a half-an-hour a meeting, once a week, until the initial members moved on to high school and the whole thing died. I'm sure we also played at other times, but we were all about 12, so nobody could drive or stay out late. (We also played a bit of Gamma World in those days, and were generally in the thrall of anything and everything emanating from Lake Geneva.) I might have even DM'd a bit in those days, but I was mostly a player, albeit one who always bought the game and read all of the secret rules.

But I dropped AD&D as a system almost entirely on going to high school -- when I look at the TSR history timeline, I recognize owning just about everything published from 1977-1981, but anything from mid-1982 on is foreign to me. D&D was for kids -- now we were ready for some serious role-playing.

I'd fallen in with a group of gamers that played two very different campaigns. One, run by a guy named Harry Smith, was pure house rules, the most free-wheeling RPG I've ever heard of. Characters were a mish-mosh of every media and literary source the players could think of -- we could claim "media rights" to things if we were the first to think of them; I grabbed Doc Savage, among others -- and, as far as I could tell, there was no specific published rule system behind it all. (Though, of course, we did still have to roll dice a lot.) I think this campaign had a name, but I don't remember what that was anymore. It was a very weird, high-energy experience, and the characters were practically gods very quickly -- looking back, it might have been more an excuse to hang out together, swear too loudly for Harry's grandparents' liking, and drink cheap supermarket cola. It was always fun, but generally incoherent, and calling it a "campaign" is probably stretching the point.

The other DM was a little younger than the rest of us, and was intensely serious. I can't remember his name anymore, unfortunately, but he was more of the typical DM: obsessive, organized, secretive. He also liked to run what we thought of as certain-death campaigns; we spent a lot of time making up new characters, and then having all of them die. I think we started off with a brief, ill-fated Twilight 2000 adventure, in which we all died horribly in Poland. This adventure was also notable for the day when I tried to strangle the DM (whose name I still can't remember). It probably wasn't the first instance of that gamer cliche, but we were pretty early, and I feel good about my place in history.

But then the nameless DM dragged out another game system, and this one clicked. It was what we called "MERP" -- Middle-earth Role Playing. It was just as deadly as the previous campaign, but, being Tolkienesque, we accepted it. It was set, unlike vanilla MERP, during the era when "the Necromancer" was still active in Mirkwood...and one of our first adventures was trying to infiltrate his tower. We died a lot, but it was a great world, and a great system, so we had fun doing it. (MERP was the source of my single favorite RPG item, the Ram-Butt-Bash-Knock-Down-Slug-Attack-Table, which I always say in one breath.)

And then there was our friend who loved RuneQuest, but we mostly tried to ignore him.

I also spent a lot of money in both junior high and high school buying RPG materials that I never really did anything with. I bought Call of Cthulhu and some '30s pulp adventure RPG I can't remember the name of, various adventures for all sorts of things, and whatever I could get my hands on. But I just read them -- never even seriously tried to play any of that stuff.

And then I threw it all out, either sometime when I was in college or when I moved out to get married. After I graduated high school in 1986, I never gamed at all. And I don't really miss it -- I miss those people, but not the pretending-to-kill-monsters part. Gaming is a way of socializing; it's something to do while you're all around a table together. And I've found other ways to socialize since then -- not that I like doing it all that much to begin with.

The World Is Tiny

First, an amusing anecdote: last, I met Rose Fox for lunch at the Shake Shack. As we were waiting for food -- and this is in the middle of winter, mind you, with only about five other people nearby, not the usual teeming hordes -- John Douglas wandered up, and we all said hello for a few minutes. Proving, once again, that if two people in any sub-group are present anywhere, a third will soon appear.

I was reminded of that moment this morning when I read Michael Swanwick's blog post about Janet Kagan's recent death. Now, I don't think I'd ever met Kagan, since she'd been ill for quite a while. I did read Mirabile, and liked it, and was among the many people in SF who hoped that she'd write more. But I just realized that she lived (and died) in Lincoln Park, New Jersey -- two towns over from me, the place where I catch a train to work every morning.

I wish I'd known that before she died -- not that it would have made much difference, since I didn't know her. But still.

Lunacon, Sweet Lunacon

Even though I was bodily kicked out of SF publishing last year, the people programming Lunacon were distracted enough to allow me to be on programming again this year. So, if you happen to find yourself in the Rye Town Hilton the weekend of March 14th, and want to see me bloviate in person, these are your best opportunities:

Jane Austen's Blogging Adventure
Remember when letter writing was dead and no one sent thank you notes? Nowadays, people write more letters than they have since Jane Austen's day. And with the advent of blogging, there's been a noticeable improvement in student writing, as people become accustomed to writing arguments that will be challenged by others. A look at how the communications revolution has affected the way we write and, well... communicate.
(Mianus River, 03/14/2008 4:00:00 PM)
Participants: Kathleen O'Shea David, Leigh Grossman, Andrew Wheeler[M]

Literary Spinoffs
Jane Austen's novels have been revisited by a number of authors in the past few years, from stories of the heroines' children to choose your own adventure novels that blend all of her books. Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" have also had quite popular spinoffs. What other great novels of of the past do you predict will be next?
(Odelle, 03/15/2008 10:00:00 AM)
Participants: Greg Feeley, Esther Friesner, Peter Heck[M], Andrew Wheeler

10 Best and Worst Moments in Comics
Panelists select and discuss the best and worst moments in comic history.
(Poplar, 03/15/2008 5:00:00 PM)
Participants: James Chambers, Lynn E. Cohen Koehler, Andrew Wheeler, Alex Wittenberg

The Year in Science Fiction
How did 2007 treat the world of Science Fiction? What not-to-miss books came out and what books should we avoid? A discussion of the genre over the past year.
(Grand Center, 03/16/2008 1:00:00 PM)
Participants: Mike Flynn, Nathan Lilly, Chuck Rothman, Andrew Wheeler

Don't ask me why there's a sudden surge of panels on Jane Austen. And I have no idea yet what I'm going to say about any of those things. Hope something comes to mind in the next two weeks....

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/1

It's all comics this week -- guess the SFF publicists are ignoring me at the moment -- so let's dive right into it:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (not the well-known Dutch author) was adapted into comics by Rick Geary in 1990 for the excellent but short-lived series of Classics Illustrated from First comics. It's been dusted off and is being reissued as the first volume in the new series of Classics Illustrated from Papercutz. It will be released in April. I remember this as one of the best books in a quite impressive line, so I'm happy to see it coming back into print. (And, possibly, saving thousands of kids from failing their tests when they can't quite manage to finish the real book.)

Papercutz's older brother NBM sent the new edition of Boneyard , Vol. 3 by Richard Moore. NBM has been reissuing the early collections of the Boneyard series in color at a slightly smaller (presumably "backpack-friendly") trim size. Actually, I'm not entirely sure if the new trim size means anything -- this series is a bit racy to be aimed at young teenagers. And the plotline probably moves a bit slowly if you're reading it in individual issues. But if you start now with the collections, there are three color volumes (and three more not in color yet) ahead of you, which neatly solves that problem. The color edition of Boneyard, Vol. 3 is publishing in March, which means it should hit comics shops and bookstores near you in the next week or three.

Also from NBM, under the ComicsLit imprint, is Lewis Trondheim's Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella. Trondheim, as I understand it, is one of the major cartoonists working today in France, but I've never read him. With any luck, Little Nothings will break that streak. It's also being published in March, and so should also be available everywhere very quickly.
Alice on Deadlines, Vol. 2 came from Yen Press, and is by Shiro Ihara. It's the second in a manga series about a teenage girl who ended up in the body of a skeleton when a n incompetent shingami (minor demon who collects the dead) took over her body accidentally. The bureaucracy of the supernatural is working to fix the situation, but...it's a bureaucracy, so it will take a long time. Meanwhile, poor Alice is trying to protect her body from both Lapan (the shingami) and Ume (another supernatural being, obsessed with Lapan and now manifested as another attractive young girl in their household). In this book, apparently, they deal with yet another supernatural creature that steals underwear while it's still being worn. I enjoyed the first volume, which probably proves there is no hope for me. This second volume is also publishing in March.

Also from Yen was the second volume of With the Light Vol. 2: Raising an Autistic Child by Keiko Tobe. I've heard great things about the first book, and I have to admit to an interest in the subject -- one of my sons has a much milder developmental issue in the same spectrum. This is yet another book coming in March.

And last for this week was First Second's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, a book about creating comics from Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. From a quick glance, it looks like a book for aspiring comics creators -- about how to go about writing and drawing for comic books. The subtitle specifies "manga, graphic novels, and beyond," which implies an orientation away from traditional American monthly superhero comics...but that might be there more because "manga" and "graphic novels" are hot topics right now. In any case, Drawing Words will be published in May, and I might review it then -- if looking at it doesn't make me feel too completely incompetent to judge the subject matter.

Probably The Last Thing I'll Ever Say About "Worlds Enough and Time"

SFWA has decreed that it is indeed eligible for the Nebula Award it was nominated for, and the director/writer, Marc Scott Zicree, has written a long, Hollywood-style account of how wonderful and special and professional the experience was.

OK, fine. I'll stop grumping about it in comments on SF Awards Watch.

Maybe it is authorized ...but, still, reading Zicree's essay, I'm struck that there's still absolutely no hint of a legal relationship between "Star Trek: New Voyages" (or whatever they're calling it this week) and Viacom, the corporation that actually owns all of the trademarks and copyrights pertaining to Star Trek. I see a whole lot of "these creative folks think it's awesome" and a helping of "Paramount knows about it and hasn't sued us," but no "and they didn't even ask for any changes!" Zicree also states that this project doesn't violate their copyright...when, obviously, it's the trademark rights in characters like Kirk, McCoy, Spock and so on that are most important. Maybe I'm just a cynic, always looking for the worst side of things; that happens a lot.

And maybe saying, "well, some people were paid, some of the time" is enough to make something professional in Hollywood.

And maybe SFWA collectively does want to honor Star Trek and similar skiffy things...but only when they're big and flashy and on TV, never when they're written down on paper (which is, of course, what most of them do in the field the vast majority of the time -- write things on paper meant to be read on paper). It's certainly their prerogative to make those distinctions.

But, as I keep thinking about what I don't like about the situation, I've come to think that the most dangerous aspect here is how backwards-looking SFWA (and much of the American SF-writing establishment in general) has become. The "Worlds Enough and Time" project is deeply, deeply fannish in both the best and worst ways -- the best, because it shows a large number of people working together to do something they love, and do it well; and the worst, because it's an obsessive attempt to replicate a vision of the future from forty years ago, as if, with enough willpower and dedication, they could change actual history and get the world they thought they wanted as young fen.

Folks, I was born in 1969, the year "Worlds Enough and Time" tries to pretend it was created in. (Matter of fact, in a nicely ironic note, I see that the very last episode of original Trek aired the day before I was born.) I'm nearly forty. And the US median age is less than that -- more than half the population wasn't even born when the old, hammy Trek went off the air. It's ancient re-runs for most of us.

Dream some new dreams, why don't you? This one is way past its sell-by date. SFWA needs some of tomorrow's tomorrows; it's had far too many of yesterday's already.

Read in February

Here's the full list of what I read last month, posted more out of my vague obsessiveness than for any attempt at transparency. Several of these things didn't get full reviews, though, so there will be a bit of content in the trackless waste of links.

Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 3 (2/2)
The library that I find myself at nearly every Saturday has a full set of Naruto (I think), but most of them are out most of the time. (Actually, I think they have multiple copies of most volumes, and the shelf is still usually half-empty.) I claim to be reading this as a way to keep up with Thing 1, but it's actually an engrossing ninja-action comic. I don't know if I can manage to catch up with it -- there are 28 volumes now! -- but I'll keep reading until I've had enough.

Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace: 1957-1958 (Volume Four) (2/2)
Ketcham's art in the early days of Dennis was the epitome of the slick '50s magazine illustration style: precise lines that seemed effortless, a strong sense of design, and a great eye for very specific, particular characters. It's too bad that the writing, and the whole point of Dennis, was just as dull and obvious back then as it is now. Dennis was more of a terror in his salad days than he is today, but the strip in 1957 was still a parade of cute-hellion cliches. (Admittedly, some of them may have only become cliches after Ketcham beat them into the ground for forty years.) Old Dennis cartoons are much more of interest to aspiring illustrators than to writers -- unless, of course, you're a writer who needs a boost of self-confidence, and wants to see just how low the bar to mega-success can sometimes be set.

• Sue Grafton, T Is For Trespass (2/3)
• Shin Midorikawa, Aventura, Vol. 1 (2/4)
• Ryotaro Iwanaga, Pumpkin Scissors, Vol. 1 (2/5)
• Reiji Saiga & Sora Inoue, Samurai Girl Real Bout High School, Vol. 1 (2/6)
• Tohru Fujisawa, GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka, Vol. 1 (2/7)
• Jonathan Strahan, editor, Eclipse One (2/7)
• Yuki Urushibara, Mu Shi Shi, Vol. 2 (2/11)
• Ai Morinaga, My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 2 (2/12)
• Charlie Huston, No Dominion (2/12)
• Tadashi Kawashima & Adachitoka, Alive, Vol. 2 (2/13)
• Hitoshi Iwaaki, Parasyte, Vol. 2 (2/14)
• Anton Strout, Dead to Me (2/15)
• Stephan Pastis, Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata (2/16)
  All of the Pearls Before Swine strips from late January of 2005 through the day before Halloween of that same year, in one handy book. I see that there's another Treasury edition coming out next month, with all of the cartoons in this and The Sopratos, plus color, plus commentary. I like me my Pearls Before Swine in any format, but -- if that's the way this series is going to be packaged -- I think I need to remember not to buy the smaller books, and just to wait for the treasuries. (My shelves would thank me as well.)
  
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assasin, Vol. 8: Shinobi With Extending Fists (2/17)
  More sex and violence in war-torn Japan. More sex than violence, actually, which is very uncommon for the manga I've seen. (Are there other series being translated that have adult relationships, including sex, like Path of the Assassin? I've seen teenage sex comedies, and there's always the bizarre reaches of manga porn, but nothing else on this level. Hey, if you publish it, and you're out there, drop me an e-mail and I'll review your books at ComicMix!) The politics still often confuse me, as does the philosophy (as far as I can separate the two, which isn't always very far). I don't think I'm just reading this series for the sex and violence, but sometimes it feels that way. I do like it, though.
• Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (2/18)
• Jane & Michael Stern, Roadfood (2/18)
  This was the book I've been reading upstairs -- in the bedrooms of the two Things, in odd moments -- for the last I-don't-want-to-say-how-long. (Though this is the 2002 edition, and there's been a 2005 edition since then, and another new edition coming this year -- so something like that long.) It's a state-by-state guide to good eats, with an emphasis on "real" places, not fancy "fine" restaurants. It was a great book to poke through, and it's going into my car now, in hopes that I can drag it out on long driving trips somewhere. (I don't know how much of that I'll be doing, but I expect to be driving this car for the next eight years, so I've got time.)
• Machiko Sakurai, Minima!, Vol. 1 (2/19)
• Suzuhito Yasuda, Kozakura Quartet, Vol. 1 (2/20)
• Kairi Fujiyama, Dragon Eye, Vol. 2 (2/21)
• Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel (2/21)
• Renee French, The Ticking (2/21)
  I read French's Micrographica, reviewed it at ComicMix, and liked it, so I'd been looking out for this larger graphic novel by her since then. (And my library had it all along -- go figure.) It's the story of Edison Steelhead, who is born on the first page: he has his father Calvin's big, deformed head, and his birth kills his mother. So his dad takes him to a remote island to grow up, and later introduces a monkey in a dress to the family as his "sister," Patrice. Once Edison grows up, he decides not to have plastic surgery, moves to the mainland, and lives quietly as an artist. All this is narrated quietly, mostly in captions, mostly with only one or two centered, soft-pencil panels to a page. It's quiet and atmospheric, but I can't help feeling that I missed something important along the way. This is a book that feels like it's about something other than its events, and I didn't figure out what that was.
• Charles Addams, Drawn and Quartered (2/23)
  Addams's first cartoon collection, originally published in 1941 and still available on the shelf at my usual library. There are some minor cartoons here, and some more that aren't as sharp as they could be -- partially because of the reproduction, and partially because Addams hadn't learned all of his tricks at that point. But it's Addams, and even when he's not at his best, he's still pretty darn good.
• John Mortimer, Rumpole Misbehaves (2/24)
• Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Cancer Vixen (2/24)
  Marchetto is a New Yorker cartoonist who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, just as she was about to marry the man of her dreams (the proprietor of a chic downtown restaurant who was crazy about her). This is her story, in comics form. Her art gets a bit manic for my tastes at times, and she's very much the New York fashionista woman -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- but this is a touching and very personal story.
• Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2/25)
• Keiko Takemiya, Andromeda Stories, Vol. 3 (2/25)
• Kaoru Kurimoto & Kazuaki Yanagisawa, The Guin Saga Manga: The Seven Magi, Vol. 3 (2/26)
• Chip Kidd, The Learners (2/27)
• Tou Ubukata & Kiriko Yumeji, Le Chevalier d'Eon, Vol. 2 (2/27)
• Yasunori Mitsunaga, Princess Resurrection, Vol. 2 (2/28)
• Andi Watson, Glister, Vols. 1-3 (2/29)

And that's it.