What King Canute Did For Me

Since the month is winding down, I decided to glance at my statistics.

(Notice how I'm implying that I don't constantly check the stats? That I'm cool and collected, unconcerned except occasionally with my audience?)

August has my highest page views for the past year (as far back as Sitemeter-for-free goes) and my visits are currently 213 under February 08, which is the high in that category. It's slightly possible that I'll get that many views on a Sunday in the middle of the Labor Day weekend, but I don't expect it.

Still, it seems that picking a fight with seventeen people simultaneously is a good way to build one's traffic. I keep trying not to take those lessons to heart.

Oh, well. The numbers go up and down, and it's not like Antick Musings has any coherent focus in the first place.

The Times When You Wonder If Any Of It Is Worth It

1) You dither for seven weeks, thinking and writing about an interesting but not-completely-successful novel.

2) You finally finish a complicated, seventeen-hundred word review of that novel, highlighting some aspects of the author's style and career that don't seem to have been noted before.

3) One of your readers boils that down to "Andrew Wheeler thinks you're into bondage."

4) Shrug and move on.

Three Minor Books I Just Read

On the one hand, none of these three books really warrant a full-length post. On the other, I've caught up on nearly everything (except the movie The Wife and I saw last night), so there's no other posts I'm working on for today. So here are three minor books I just read, all stuffed together because they were the easy little books from my last book-shopping trip and because they all have extensive art.

First was Scouts in Bondage and Other Violations of Literary Propriety, edited by Michael Bell. This started as a display in the front window of Bell's store, the Cadburn Bookshop of Lewes in the UK. It then turned into a book by the smallish British outfit Aurum Press, was something of a success there, and eventually made its way to this side of the pond for an October 2007 release from Simon & Schuster.

Scouts in Bondage collects photographs of the covers of old books that are now funny, for various reasons -- some deeply British (such as the Spanish travel book Tossa), many prurient (like The Day Amanda Came), some merely odd (Book of Blank Maps, With Instructions), and some where I can't discern where the humor is supposed to be (as with Cookery for the Middle Classes and How to Speak Japanese Correctly).

It's a short book -- ninety-six pages -- and it contains probably about fifty covers. It takes about half an hour to read, if one takes a lot of time examining each cover and laughing heartily. I expect it's mostly sold as a gag gift; it's hard to justify spending money on something this frivolous for oneself. (Although I did.)

I also note that the font used in this book has a truly massive number of obvious ligatures -- the usual ct and st and th, but also is and et and as and at. Especially in its italic form -- as used in displaying titles -- this is a very, very scripty font, and I'm surprised that a book with such an attention-ctching font doesn't have a colophon to explain what that font is.

Next was The Dangerous Alphabet, the third picture book written by Neil Gaiman and the first of his not to be illustrated by Dave McKean. (The previous, Gaiman/McKean, books were The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls.) This one is illustrated by someone billed as Gris Grimly, which smells an awful lot like a pseudonym to me.

Dangerous Alphabet is a shorter and simpler book than Gaiman's previous books for kids; it's appropriate for most ages, though really little kids -- the usual audience for an alphabet book, actually -- probably won't enjoy it. It is an alphabet book, organized into thirteen rhyming couplets that almost follow the usual alphabetical order.

A boy, a girl, and a gazelle set off for no obvious reason, run into trouble, and eventually escape -- that's the plot. Gaiman has some good wordplay in the middle, but it feels like a previously existing piece of poetry that was repurposed as the text for a children's book; the pictures play off the words, but not vice versa.

Grimly's art is grotesquely detailed, and fits precisely with his nom de plume. The book as a whole is just adequate, though, since the art and text don't actually have all that much to do with each other. For fans of Gaiman's previous picture books, this is a disappointment.

Last was the new Pearls Before Swine treasury collection by Stephan Pastis, The Crass Menagerie. It contains what seem to be all of the strips from 1/24/05 to 8/6/06, which also were collected (without color on the Sunday strips) in the smaller collections Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata and The Sopratos.

All of the PBF treasury collections so far have commentary and notes from Pastis on at least some of the strips, which is a feature I really enjoy. (There's still the same number of strips per page -- three dailies or one Sunday -- which means it's purely added content. That appeals to all of us, doesn't it?)

And the strip itself is what it is -- it's still young and energetic enough to be changing a bit, having new characters and new situations coming in and out of it, and I'm still enjoying it. (There are older, more ossified strips that I still enjoy in the paper -- like Dilbert -- but that I've stopped buying the books.) This book sees the introduction of both the Guard Duck and the little Vikings, and the introduction and death (at least for now) of the killer whale. It's a pretty dark comic strip, yes, but life isn't all Family Circus, is it?

MishMosh MangaMix

In this week's "Manga Friday" column for ComicMix, I reviewed three very different manga series: Nightmares For Sale, Sola, and S.S. Astro.

Movie Log: Smart People

Smart People is yet another thoughtful, small movie about a family with problems -- you can each supply two or three other examples of the form.

If I remember right, it sat on the shelf for a while between filming and release, and it does feel a bit lopsided. (I have a sneaking suspicion that it was edited in the wake of Juno and in preparation for Sex and the City by making it focus more on the characters played by Ellen Page and Sarah Jessica Parker.)

Dennis Quaid is Lawrence Wetherhold, a complete asshole of an English professor at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh; he's completely stopped trying to connect with his students or even remember their names some years back. He's the center of the movie, but he's also a complete prick, and that's a problem. Yes, he is a widower, but his assholishness isn't obviously related to the loss of his wife -- which seems to be several years in the past -- and it doesn't feel like anything temporary.

Smart People seems like it's going to be about a six-month period in Lawrence's life; at the beginning of the movie, he ends up in the hospital after a fall and concussion, and is told that he won't be able to drive for six months. So he'll be seeing a lot more of his ne'er-do-well (adopted) brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), and possibly of the head doctor of the ER, Janet (Parker), who was his student at least ten years before.

But Chuck's scenes are mostly with Lawrence's uptight high school senior daughter Vanessa (Page), whom he first tries to teach to lighten up, and then runs away from.

Lawrence does begin a halting, sputtering romance with Dr. Janet, which is difficult to take seriously. Lawrence is a shaggy mess physically, always shuffling around, and I've already mentioned how unattractive he is as a person. It's exceptionally difficult to see what Janet finds attractive about him -- and she's in the position of running back to him several times. Their romance is one of the hardest things to swallow in Smart People.

Chuck and Vanessa's relationship is similarly odd, though Vanessa does confront Chuck about that -- which makes it odd within the movie, and thus acceptable.

Lawrence also has an older son, James (Ashton Holmes), who doesn't get much screen time. James is dating a young woman, Missy (Camille Mana), who is also in at least one of Lawrence's classes and is the student representative on the committee searching for the new head of the department (which Lawrence heads). I suspect at least a couple of scenes of these characters were cut out of the movie; it looks like they should have been more important than they are. (James, in particular, is a cipher; he scowls at his father and squabbles with his sister but hardly anything else.)

Smart People is one of those movies where every scene is at least decent, and all of the acting is well above par, but either the script or the editing failed to bring everything into focus. It's worth seeing if you like this kind of movie, but it's not more than middling for the category.

Quote of the Week

"Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. So Arthur C. Clarke predicted the global satellite network -- so what? He also predicted the widespread use of hovercrafts and the dominance by 2001 of the commercial Earth-Moon space trade by Pan Am Airways (d. 1991). Such prescience, or the obligation to display it, is even more than bad writing, it's the element of a work of sf that most readily dooms it -- regardless of whether the predictions turn out to be right or wrong."
- Michael Chabon, "Introduction: Chaykin and Flagg!" in Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!

Good News for Silverberg Fans

Two of Robert Silverberg's best novels -- no, scratch that, two of the best novels of the twentieth century, which both happen to be science fiction -- are coming back in new editions from two different publishers.

Tor will be publishing a new edition of Dying Inside, which could be the greatest SF novel that the young Philip Roth never wrote, in March of 2009.

And IDW -- a comics company that's expanding more and more into books without pictures -- is bringing back Silverberg's lovely and elegiac Nightwings today.

The books that Bob Silverberg wrote between about 1967 to 1972 -- Thorns, Up The Line, Downward to the Earth, Hawksbill Station, The Man in the Maze, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, The Book of Skulls, and more -- are the greatest sustained burst of excellence for any SFF writer in the history of the field, and nearly unmatched in all of literature. Nearly every book he wrote in that period is as good as anything SF has ever produced, and I'd say that Dying Inside is a book that every student of 20th century literature simply has to read. I'd love to see them all come back into print -- maybe through a few Library of America volumes -- but even these two are a great sign.

And, if you haven't read them yet, what are you waiting for?

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

Charles Stross is one of the most interesting writers in the SF field today, but there are things that we don't go to Stross for -- human warmth and compassion, for example, have been pretty rare in his work so far. Saturn's Children reads like Stross's attempt to stretch his work, and write himself into those areas. As such, it's fascinating but only partially successful.

Stross dedicates Saturn's Children to Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, explicitly making Saturn a homage to their stories. But Stross's choice of materials is oddly idiosyncratic: most writers would want the clarity and thoughtful ideas of early Asimov intersecting with the muscular prose and clean, externally-focused characterization of early Heinlein. But Stross instead chooses Asimov's most nitpicky rules-lawyer logic-chopping and the unbridled kinkiness and emotional prolixity of late Heinlein.

Saturn's Children, on the surface, is a retelling of Heinlein's Friday using more rigorous, Asimovian controls on the robots. It's set in a solar system, a few hundred years hence, populated entirely by a bewildering array of humanly-intelligent "emotional machines" after the human race quietly -- and awfully quickly -- died out. But this immediately runs Stross into consistency issues. His robots are raised like organic beings rather than programmed like machines -- except for the times that he needs hard-wired robotic control over them, when they immediately revert to a more Asimovian command-based system. He tries to have it both ways depending on the needs of a particular scene: his robots have psychological depth and real emotions, except when he needs someone to push a button and make them Asimovian automatons obeying unbreakable laws encoded into their very brains.

Similarly, he resorts to supernaturally effective tech when it helps his plot: there's something called a "slave chip," which works perfectly even when a robot doesn't know she has one installed, and which forces her to completely obey the person who installed that chip in her, even when she doesn't know who that person is. The slave chip clearly does not make the possessor obey everyone, and it doesn't tell the possessor that it exists or who she has to obey -- it just cuts in when the plot-appropriate person makes demands (even if that person might only be posing as the person who installed that chip).

One more related objection: robots are given their orders in plain language, conversationally. These orders are, in best Asimovian fashion, unbreakable...except that they're not clear enough to be unbreakable in the old Asimov style, so the robots must use their own best understanding to interpret and carry out those orders. And yet no robot is ever seen to be working around his orders, like a corrupt butler -- that possibility doesn't seem to even exist in this world. Freedom is an alien concept to the solar system of Saturn, as it often is in Stross's fictional worlds; he's one of our chilliest and most fatalistic writers, writing scenes where only a limited number of (unlikely to be successful) actions are ever possible.

The core issue behind all of those objections is that Stross has incorporated both the Asimovian Three Laws style of robot control and a late-Heinleinian conception of human psychology (with all the attendant requirements for lots of kinky sex of the sorts the author finds most interesting). Having two models of mind in one book is one too many. Either his robots are born and taught like humans -- possibly with some slightly different "robot" or "future" psychology invented by Stross -- or they're programmed like machines. Saturn's Children insists, repeatedly, that both of those are true -- that its characters had to grow up and learn to have their current capacities but also can be easily and quickly programmed via chips and verbal commands. That they have pseudo-human psychological damage caused by vicious traumatic experiences and push-button control of their internal states.

Saturn's Children is the story of Freya Nakamichi-47, the last-born of a line of very humaniform -- pneumatically femme-form, I should specify -- artificial organisms created originally to serve the sexual desires of humans. Sadly, Freya herself wasn't even created until after the human race died out, so her entire life has been one gigantic case of blue balls. (Saturn's Children is Stross's most sex-soaked book, but -- for good or ill -- he hasn't changed his geekier-than-thou diction, so the descriptions of sex are wrapped in elaborate technological jokes and obscure references; no one is likely to become aroused by reading this book, and the careless reader will miss half of the sex scenes entirely.)

Her name is the first, and most blatant, connection to Heinlein's Friday, but Freya's skills are nowhere near Friday's. (Stross is far more interested in incompetence, or rather the impossibility of beating experts, than Heinlein was -- but I'll get back to that later.) Saturn's Children is the story of Freya's inadvertent -- and mostly unwilling -- tour of the solar system. (There's a fascinating comparison to be made of Saturn's Children with John Varley's very similar Rolling Thunder, but this parenthesis is too small to contain it.) Freya begins the book by inadvertently insulting an aristocrat (by her very existence) on Venus, and then has to flee the wrath of her new enemies.

(Stross has the leftist Brit's irrational hatred for aristocrats -- "aristo" is essentially the word for "villain" in this book -- and all evil flows from the inevitable and unstoppable concentration of power in the hands of those nasty and unscrupulous enough to seize it and declare themselves rulers. These "aristos," though, don't seem to be hereditary -- there hasn't been time for generations of these very, very long-lived creatures -- so they're just petty dictators and kleptocrats. But those words don't strike horror into the bones of Stross's expected audience the way "aristo" does. Stross does have an explanation as to how this state of naked Darwinian competition came into existence, but it's just another example of a very familiar Stross expectation -- again, I'll come back to this.)

Freya finds love, of a sort, eventually, but, before that, she finds a series of Penelope-level travails and threats that become ever more pointed at her mental integrity and sense of self. Stross writes all of this with a seriousness of tone, and a tight focus on Freya's own roiling mental state, that keeps the reader from detaching from her torments. We're in her head throughout; what happens to her is happening to us, so it's less amusing to those of us who aren't masochists. We feel for her in the end, as she gets a happy ending that's a tad too conventional (and another Heinlein homage), but we've been wrung out by all that's happened to her before that.

Lois McMaster Bujold recently wrote that SF novels were "fantasies of political agency," and that idea can be applied to Stross. His novels and stories, almost to a one, are fantasies of bondage, and Saturn's Children is the novel where that tendency comes to its fullest flowering. Stross is a hard science fiction writer at the end of a long and gloomy British tradition, and so is obsessed with limits, with restraints: his novels are more about what can't be done than what can. The godlike Eschaton in his first novels is terrified with its own end, and enforces its loose rule on all humanity to maintain its own existence. The "Merchant Princes" novels are dense with argument, political and economic, about how people behave -- and themselves have darker, more violent object lessons in that same area. In all of Stross's novels, action is difficult and wrapped in turmoil; the inevitable end of everything is always in sight.

There's also been explicit, sexual, bondage in Stross's work as well, most notably in the "Laundry" novels and stories. It's come up in his work enough that one starts to uncomfortably wonder about the author's own proclivities, before starting to whistle and distracting oneself with other things consider it the inevitable extension of Stross's Hard SF obsession with limits; in a Strossian universe, everything will eventually be tied down so that it cannot move, and everything will, as it were, be fucked.

In Saturn's Children, Stross has made the implicit bondage of the laws of physics -- especially those old Cold Equations of space travel -- into the explicit bondage of sex: Frey is used and abused repeatedly, sometimes more consensually than others, sometimes more pleasurably than others. But the linkage is undeniable: to Freya, space travel is always about getting tied down and fucked. Even more so, the entire reason for her existence -- the reason for the existence of the entire series of organisms she is part of -- is to be inextricably bonded, body, mind, and soul, to whatever human being claims her. (All of the "emotional machines" have similar controls, but Freya's Rhea-class siblings are the most blatant: they exist to unconditionally love, and be fucked by, humanity.) Life is bondage; life is getting fucked, or fucked over, by whomever is in control. Since Freya is a sexy femmebot, her fucking is more direct than that of her less humaniform kin, but they're all fucked equally.

It's hard to read Saturn's Children as a fun romp through the solar system with that subtext dragging everything down; even Freya's eternally chipper attitude starts to pall when there's always one more scene of her being trussed, physically and/or emotionally, to suit someone else's needs. But, for readers who have tired of the same old whips-and-chains scenes, Saturn's Children opens up whole new vistas of torment and control.

The title puzzles me, I must admit: the most famous child of Saturn is of course Zeus, who escaped being devoured to kill his father and free his siblings. If the emotional machines are the children of the Titans of humanity, then there was no Zeus; Saturn died of natural causes. These emotional machines -- these children of Saturn -- live, irrevocably, in the shadow of their forbears, building what they all know instinctively know can only be an age of Silver, which will never match the Titans' age of Gold. Perhaps this is yet another example of the Strossian gloom; another height that can never be reached again, as all past energy is permanently lost and the universe tumbles on towards its eventual suffocating death.

In Which I Blog About How Much I've Been Blogging Lately

This is horribly meta, but I just noticed that (prior to this one) I've made 86 posts this month, which is the second highest total for any month in the nearly three years I've been doing Antick Musings. (The highest: June of 2007, when I was trying to avoid thinking about my unemployment by cataloging links as Blog in Exile, and ended up with a record 123 posts in thirty days. I doubt I'll ever beat that.)

I'm not quite sure why August is so bloggy this year -- maybe just because I've been catching up on book and movie posts that I'd gotten behind on -- but it is. So if you've felt like I've been that much more verbose lately, it's not just you.

The third highest month was last September, when I had a lot of energy and enthusiasm from my then-new job.

The lowest months are, in order, October 2005 (when I started the blog), December 2005, and May 2007 (when the axe fell).

This exercise in navel-gaving has been brought to you by the Eagle Hand Laundry. Does your eagle have dirty mitts?

Incoming Books: 28 August

I haven't done one of these posts since April 12th, since I haven't been on a big book-shopping trip since then. (I've been living off the mail and the library for a while, in a so far futile attempt to slow the growth of my to-be-read shelves.)

But I went back to the Montclair Book Center today, finding some of their shelves (especially in the children's section) a little sparser than I expected, but I still managed to buy more books than I'll be able to read in the next month:

I did grab something for each of my two sons -- for the ten-year-old Thing 1, Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School, and for the seven-year-old Thing 2, some random "Henry and Mudge" book.

I forget where I heard about it, but I finally saw a copy of Scouts in Bondage (edited by Michael Bell), and grabbed it. It's a collection of covers from books of yore -- printed large and in color -- that now sound funny. Some examples: The Humour of Germany, How Nell Scored, and 50 Faggots.

I'd vaguely known that Lawrence Block's new novel was Hit and Run, but I hadn't kept track of it -- so I was surprised to see that it was already published. I'm really getting out of the habit of knowing when things are publishing these days.

There was a great panel at Readercon on revisions by editors that turned into a discussion of what Gordon Lish did to the Raymond Carver stories collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and it made me really want to read that book. (I'd hit a couple of Carver stories when I was in college, and we didn't get along well at all. But I think I'll appreciate them more now.)

I finally bought Don DeLillo's 2007 novel about 9/11, Falling Man. (I picked it up and looked at it on every trip to the library for about six months, but never checked it out.) Maybe I'll even read it; I've read all of DeLillo's other fiction.

It's sad to see that George MacDonald Fraser's last book is The Reavers -- not the book itself, which I hope will be excellent, but that there won't be any more from him. But there is one last Fraser novel, and that's something.

Ian Frazier, author of the wonderful Coyote V. Acme, and many other books (both funny and not), has a new book of comic essays, Lamentations of the Father. The cover is more than a little off-putting, but I bought it anyway.

I've been slowly picking up all of the new Penguin editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, with an eye to reading a chunk of them in one big gulp. So this time I got From Russia with Love.

I read two great Stewart O'Nan novels late last year -- Last Night at the Lobster and The Speed Queen -- but I hadn't picked up anything else of his since. The Book Center had one copy of A Prayer for the Dying, which I'd figured I'd read next of his anyway, so I took that as a sign.

I've heard good things about Ed Park's Personal Days -- yet another serio-comic novel of modern business, a niche I'm coming to be very interested in -- so I bought it.

And I accidentally got a second copy of Paul Theroux's The Pillars of Hercules, because I hadn't crossed it off my list. Well, now I have the choice between a hardcover and a trade paperback when I finally get around to it, so it's not that bad.

Neil Gaiman has a new book for kids out, with illustrations by Chris Grimly. It's called The Dangerous Alphabet, and it looks less particular and special than The Wolves in the Walls or The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, but I bought it anyway.

And last was the new treasury-sized collection of Stephan Pastis's Pearls Before Swine strip, The Crass Menagerie. This one has lots of commentary from Pastis, like the first two treasuries, and I'm particularly happy since I managed to avoid the temptation to buy one of the two smaller books that has all of its cartoons doubly reprinted here. (I really like Pearls Before Swine, but I think I can stand just having all of the cartoons in permanent form once.)

Zotting Around the World

HarperCollins' big and impressive trade paperback collection of Scott McCloud's great '80s neo-superhero comic, Zot!, has been published, and I just reviewed it for ComicMix.

The book is Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991, and I urge you to buy it as soon as you can.

(And, if you don't believe my burbling, would you trust Chris Roberson?)

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg

I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for fake non-fiction -- Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, the "Terran Trade Authority" books, Dragons: The Modern Infestation, For Want of a Nail -- so whenever something new in that area comes along, I'm sure to jump right on it. I was a big fan of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases when that came along a few years back, and I jumped right into A Field Guide to Surreal Botany when I heard about it.

It's a slim volume, only seventy-six pages long, with botanical and ecological descriptions of forty-eight plants that, strictly speaking, don't actually exist. The Field Guide is divided first by region, into sections covering the unexpected flora of The Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific, and then dives into plants that are more wide-ranging, in a Worldwide (Unlimited by Region) section.

The last section is where the book comes off the rails, as much as it does: the earlier sections all have plants that are slightly unreal, and mostly ones rooted in the particulars of people and places, of societies and ecologies. The last section has the obviously supernatural plants, the ones that go everywhere and have super-powers, that sometimes read like their author's ego-trips run wild.

But, before that, come the specifically placed botanical specimens, which are all well-crafted and some of which have a real eerie power. (Particularly items such as the Teslated Salishan Evergreen and the Whistle Tree.) Some of the others are quite amusing, in a very dry way, like the Lautokan Ear-blossom Plant.

The Worldwide section does start with the funniest description in the book, that of the Big Yellow Flower of Unnecessarily Obvious Information, but also has embarrassing things like the Library Plum and the nigh-omnipotent Sembla, both of which invoke alternate universes for inadequate purposes.

Chui has also provided a watercolor illustration of every single plant in the book, which accompany the descriptions. They're precisely detailed and excellent as botanical illustrations -- not exciting, of course, and so different from the illustrations we're used to in SFF books -- and add greatly to the air of verisimilitude of the book. (As does the general design, down to the darkened and fly-specked pages.)

The contributors are mostly names I don't recognize -- which could mean that they're mainstays of the small press or that they're entirely new -- with Jay Lake as the only real above-the-title participant. (Though he's credited, the same as everyone else, via a table of all of the entries in the back.) The other people I've heard of, for various reasons, include Vera Nazarian, Livia Llewellyn, and Christopher M. Cevasco. The complete list of contents and contributors is available on the book's website.

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany does contain some entries that I would describe as clunkers, but the book is mostly consistent, and quite good. It's not a normal anthology, and I doubt any of the pieces will turn up anywhere else. So, if this idea intrigues you -- and particularly if you enjoyed the Lambshead Guide to Diseases -- you'll need to either try to track Surreal Botany down at a convention or buy it directly from the publisher. (It's not available at any of the major online booksellers, and it certainly won't be in any brick-and-mortar chain stores.)

Star Wars Melds My Mind

Even after my epic grumpiness last week, the SF Signal guys continue to ask me to participate in their "Mind Meld" features every now and then, which is very broad-minded of them.

Today the question was "Is it time for Star Wars to go on hiatus for a long while, or is there hope the new, live-action TV series will breathe new life into the series?"

And the answers included mine, plus such smart and thoughtful people as Keith R.A. DeCandido, John C. Wright, Lou Anders, and Bruce Bethke.

You can read what we all wrote at SF Signal, and complain vociferously that we Got It All Wrong there if you like.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

I've greatly enjoyed all of Scalzi's novels so far -- devoured them quickly, with great fondness and usually a sly smile on my face the whole time through. But, at the same time, the common universe of most of them -- what I guess we can call the "Old Man's War" universe -- has been annoying me more and more with each book, with implicit assumptions that keep leaping out of the text and slapping me in the face, like some rude halibut, before dropping back into the stream of consciousness.

(My apologies for that horrible metaphor.)

I've written about this universe here several times before: review-ish posts on Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony, and "Ruminations on the Old Man's War"-iverse. Reading those again, I can see my discomfort with the unexamined assumptions of that universe -- or, to be more precisely, with the badly explained bases of that universe -- rising and rising as Scalzi wrote more and more in that setting but didn't deal with what I saw as the gigantic Chekov gun on the mantelpiece.

Zoe's Tale is essentially the other side of The Last Colony; it retells many of the same events, and is set in almost exactly the same time-frame, but focuses instead on Zoe Boutin Perry, the adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan. I might be obsessed with the background of the universe, but the real inherent problem of this book was Zoe -- it's written in her first-person voice, and she's a teenage girl with some major crises in her past (such as the death of her father and every other human she knew when she was very young). If Scalzi hadn't been able to write believably in Zoe's voice, the whole book would have fallen apart.

But he could, and it didn't: Zoe's Tale is just as slick and entertaining as Scalzi's earlier novels, with yet another series of plausible but unlikely events spun out in a master storyteller's voice. It's the thinnest and least of the Old Man's War novels -- and I do hope he keeps his promise to let the setting sit for a while, this time -- but it's still splendid SF entertainment, a story of good people feeling their way in a less-than-good world. (Though I still insist that the world is not nearly as bad as it should be, given Scalzi's premises.)

Again, the plot of this book is very much the same as the plot of The Last Colony, only from Zoe's point of view -- it begins on the new colony world Roanoke, flashes back a bit (earlier, I think, than Last Colony did), provides some more detail on events in Last Colony through Zoe's perspective and experiences -- in particular her deus ex machina alien diplomacy mission -- but ends pretty much where Last Colony did, for the same reasons and with the same people. It doesn't provide any major new information about this universe, though it does flesh out Zoe as a character considerably -- its major reason for existence is as a test bed for Scalzi to demonstrate that he can believably write a teenage girl.

At this point, I would normally be foaming at the mouth and complaining about the plausibility of the solar systems in this book, but I'm not. What helped me make peace with Zoe's Tale is a talk Sarah Monette gave at Readercon this year, in which she laid out a theory of fiction, on a continuum from Realism (stories that aim at a resemblance of the real world) on to Contrarealism (works that are set in worlds that both the author and the reader know are impossible). In between, Monette had two other modes of fiction: Pararealism and Surrealism. Surrealism is hard to define specifically, but we all pretty much know what it is: it thrives on juxtapositions and generally isn't meant to be taken as real in the first place.

Pararealism, though, is Monette's invention, and I think describes a useful strategy in fiction: elements that are not like real life at all, and yet are taken as realistic within the confines of a particular tradition or work. Sitcoms are intensely pararealistic, as is farce in general -- they're filled with things that are broad cartoons or stereotypes of human behavior, exaggerated to an extreme degree for the form, but accepted as real. Musicals are pararealistic, as are pornography and most comedians' stand-up routines.

Science fiction also can be quite pararealistic, despite all of the fannish mania for "hard science" and so on. FTL drives are impossible, as are time machines. Are they "grandfathered" into SF, or is it just that they're useful for telling certain types of stories, so we accept them? As the genre goes on and a body of standard furniture arises, those elements become pararealistic: things that we accept as real for the space of a piece of fiction. And when one reader (such as me) keeps complaining about those elements, it's because he is trying to read Pararealism as Realism. SF is less intrinsically Realist than it likes to pretend it is; even the really hard stuff has a lot of assumptions about human behavior that come right out of the '50s. And what Scalzi is writing isn't Hard SF in any of its flavors, despite a surface sheen (and the tendency of some readers to take any SF books with military hardware in them as Hard ipso facto) -- it's a kind of Space Opera of Manners, drawing heavily from the Galaxy tradition of the '50s (Frederic Brown, Robert Sheckley, and so on) and the continuation of that tradition through writers like Keith Laumer. Scalzi's Colonial Union is no more a working polity than Laumer's CDT was, and to expect it to behave as one is to misread the intentions of the book and the author.

Thus freed, I 'll be able to fully enjoy Scalzi's future novels without picking their premises apart -- at least I hope so. Sadly, this epiphany happened after I finished reading Zoe's Tale, so I spent much of my reading time with that book making tortured faces and trying to concoct a workable backstory in my head.

I still think The Ghost Brigades is Scalzi's best book, and I'd like to see himself stretch himself more in that area, to lay off the quick-talking smart-ass narrators who always come out on top of the situation and to try writing some people who can't talk their way through everything, and whose moral compasses either aren't absolutely infallible or aren't identical with the default reader's. But Zoe's Tale sees Scalzi doing again what he does well -- a bit too much "again," since it does retell his last novel quite closely -- and is just as engaging and diverting as his previous books.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Arma vriumque cano, sang the poet,
Though Barlow makes it canine.
Singing of men and arms, tooth and claw,
Of red red blood and the men who spill it
And the werewolves of Pasadena.

(I joke: it's always Los Angeles,
Centerless city of cars and men in cars.
Men turning to wolves, wolves wanting to be men.)

Werewolves are real, biting and scratching

Anthony Silvio's just this guy, see?
Needs a job, gets a job, working at the pound
Caring for the lost dogs, the stray dogs
And, unknowing, for the dogs that aren't dogs

Werewolves are real, changing and fighting

Weredogs is better: big bruisers,
Mutts and bulls and retrievers and hounds
Man-sized, running free from heaped clothes

Werewolves are real, in the unreal land of LA

Dogs have packs. Dogs have territory.
Dogs piss around the edges and snarl for show
A pack has one woman, one bitch
Two bitches fight -- no bitches fight
Every pack needs a girl
Sister/mother/whore to love and fuck

There's more than one pack in LA
Going to be a lot of pissing

Lark's got the smart pack, the plan, the way
Growing steady, keeping quiet
Smells two other packs
Not ready for attack, betrayal, murder

Lark survives pack's slaughter
So does the girl -- call her "the girl"
She runs away, meets Silvio:
Just a cute girl
Just a guy at the pound
Just a coupla kids in love

Lark hides in Silver Lake
He's Bonnie's dog Buddy
Can ya believe it?
Plans are good -- "good dog" is better

Then there's this cop, Peabody
Circling outside the dogfight
Not a dog, barely honest
Cop enough to add two and two
Slick enough to slide into trouble

There's three packs in LA
And Mexican druglords
And a girl who came north,
Surfing doggie style in Baja,
Until her pack got killed
By Mexican druglords

There's a lot of killing
The wild ones don't live to be old

Two of Lark's dogs
Playing tournament bridge in Pasadena
They get good, get in deep
With some ol' Mexicans

Add crystal meth, cooked in stinking houses
(Dogs can smell real good)

Shake down to taste, stir well with
Doublecrosses by threes and fours
Semiauto rounds and teeth at the throat

There'll be flowing blood in LA tonight
Bitten and shot and cut and scratched
Enough red to sink the town

It ends in tears and gunshots
As any good noir must
Does Silvio get the girl?
Does he get his own changing skin?
Does anyone come out alive?

Just read it.
How often do you find
A werewolf novel in verse?
Verses much better than mine.
(But if this is doggerel,
What then is wrong with it?)

No Referrals, Please

Someone recently asked, in comments on a post linking to some other publishing person complaining about submissions, if editors were likely to pass on projects to other editors at the same house.

I hemmed and hawed a bit, and said it was possible but not likely.

Editorial Ass, who is a real editor who gets real submissions (unlike Marketing Manager me), explains exactly why this is unlikely, and why she hates when people ask about it.

Another way to put the lesson: if there's "someone else at the house who might like this project more," find out who that is ahead of time and submit it to that person.

The Trouble With Tom by Paul Collins

Most biographies start with their subject's birth, but not The Trouble With Tom. Paul Collins isn't out to tell the story of Thomas Paine's life, but of the posthumous adventures of his body (and works), so Paine kicks off in the middle of the first chapter.

Tom Paine was an unpopular atheist and an embarrassing relic of the extremes of revolution by the time he died on New York's Burrows Street in 1809, so there was no chance of his being buried in consecrated ground in or near New York City. After being mourned by a mere six people, Paine was laid to rest in the corner of a field he had owned in New Rochelle, marked by a stone that the locals immediately started to break apart. Within a decade, the few remnants of Paine's headstone were mortared into a nearby wall -- and his body was dug up and spirited away to England, supposedly to be reburied as part of a grand monument.

The Thomas Paine monument never came to be, and Collins tracks the dispersal of Paine's mortal remains from that point, as a lock of hair goes here, a skull there, and some random bones elsewhere. Collins's focus is on the people rather than the mementos, so The Trouble With Tom never gets grisly; he's more interested in the afterlife of Paine's ideas than with his moldering bones. And the people who come to possess pieces of Paine did so because they cared about his ideas -- most of them were his followers, though a few wanted a token to show that their aristocratic ideas had triumphed over the democratic rabble-rouser.

Collins traveled to all of the locations associated with Paine's posthumous adventures, finding a gay bar here and a chip shop there, digging up a few new facts a hundred and fifty years later but mostly just seeing them for himself. He's also read a ridiculous number of books about Paine -- his "Further Reading" section at the end is nearly forty pages long -- and has informed opinions about them.

The Trouble With Tom is the kind of nonfiction book the world needs more of: detailed and authoritative in its facts, clear and engrossing in its style, uniquely particular in its subject. Let's see fewer biographies of the same old dead people, and fewer dull explications of the same old topics, but many more books as sprightly and informed as The Trouble With Tom.

Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson

I finished reading this a good two months ago and didn't even leave myself any notes here to remind me of what I was going to say about it -- once again, Past Me has screwed over Future Me horribly. Let's see what I can dredge up from memory. (The first person to suggest that I re-read an eight-hundred-plus page book that took me six weeks the first time is going to get such a pinch.)

So: this is the seventh doorstopper book in Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series, which is planned to be ten volumes. (And there's no reason to doubt it will come out that way, unless Erikson steps in front of a bus tomorrow; the ninth book, Dust of Dreams, is scheduled to be published in about seven months, which means it's complete or nearly so.)

Here's what I've written about previous books in the series, in reverse order: The Bonehunters, Midnight Tides, House of Chains, Memories of Ice, Deadhouse Gates, and Gardens of the Moon. (Not all of those are reviews, and not all of them are internal links.)

Epic fantasy has typically been shortchanged by reviewers, because it's a huge challenge to them: the first book in any series is new and relatively easy to cover, and the last book can also be wrestled into shape for review, but those books in the middle start nowhere and end nowhere, with a huge parade of names and concepts that are foreign to people who haven't read the earlier books and tediously familiar to people who have. Writing coherently about later books in ongoing epic fantasy series was one of the great challenges of my former job at the Science Fiction Book Club -- and Erikson's Malazan books were the hardest to boil down. (So hard, in fact, that I had to regularly extensively rewrite the work of a great copywriter to get something that worked, if not write it from scratch myself.)

Reaper's Gale is, as I said, the seventh book in the series overall, but the Malazan books have been severely non-linear. (Each book is essentially a trilogy by itself, at least 250,000 words long.) This one is a direct sequel to Midnight Tides, and is set on the opposite side of the world from most of the series. It's still not a good place to start -- would any seventh book in a fantasy series be a good place to start? -- but it's closer to something like a beginning than the casual reader would expect.

As always with Erikson, there are several major plotlines, set in far-flung corners of the same continent -- though he's been known to write books with pieces on opposite sides of the world, too -- that are loosely related to each other and to the overall plotline of the series. This book's center is the rapidly-expanding Empire of Lether (Erikson's ear for names has gotten better, but it's still somewhat erratic), with various attempts to kill its mad emperor (who keeps being resurrected automatically), skirmishes with its remaining neighbors, and intrigue among the mostly-corrupt and decadent ruling classes.

I won't give any more details than that, since they'd be either confusing or superfluous -- I will say, though, that Midnight Tides is one of the three good places to start reading this series, and you could come to this book immediately afterwards, if you wanted. (The other two best entry points to the Malazan world are Deadhouse Gates and Gardens of the Moon; I'd recommend Deadhouse, myself.)

Erikson's worldview, at least as it comes out in the Malazan books, derives more from Robert E. Howard than from J.R.R. Tolkien: civilization does have its good points, but it inevitably falls into a nasty decadence that feeds on the weak. The Malazan books do have a nearly endless parade of very high-powered folks, from a variety of races and human groups, but Erikson does also remember the powerless, now and then -- though usually just for pathos, as he shows them getting stomped flat.

Erikson isn't a writer for everyone, but he is consistently the most inventive, exciting writer working in epic fantasy today. Erikson distills the thousand disparate strands of today's fantasy, drawing from earlier sword & sorcery and epic fantasy writers as much as from gaming, to brew a dark, thick, rich liquor uniquely his own. The Malazan books are not just epic fantasy; they're to epic fantasy what whiskey is to beer, and they'll knock you backward if you're not prepared for them. There's no other ongoing epic series that I still read, but I couldn't conceive of quitting the Malazan books before the end -- long and complicated and dense as they are, these are the books, more than any others, that show what epic fantasy can really do when pushed to the limits.

Wonder Woman Review at ComicMix

Today for ComicMix, I examined the recent hardcover collection Wonder Woman: Love and Murder, to see if bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult's run on that title makes any sense whatsoever out of context.

Just asking the question that way tell you my answer, doesn't it?

Today's Amazon Deal: A Kindle!

Well, no sooner do I break down and post about one Amazon offer than they send me the details of another one. Since we've already determined that I can be bought, I guess I'll list this one as well.

Amazon and Chase have teamed up for an offer of $100 off the purchase of a new Kindle -- Amazon's proprietary e-book reader -- for people who also sign up for an Amazon Rewards Visa Card, are accepted for same, and use it to buy that Kindle.

I still think $259 is more than I'd want to pay for a gadget to play books on, and I have enough credit cards, but the Amazon card seems like a decent one, with useful rewards, and I have a boss who loves his Kindle.

So: I wouldn't do it myself, but you might feel differently. If so, click here, and check it out for yourself.

Confessions of a Subprime Lender by Richard Bitner

This was published by Wiley -- not in my program, but by a related program run by colleagues and friends -- so don't expect an unbiased opinion.

I read it in part because I think I should be reading some of the books published by my department, and in part because I'm a homeowner who's been paying a mortgage for a good fifteen years now. (The Wife and I have had many discussions, like so many couples and friends have, over the past years about the housing bubble and crash. I do have to wonder: if it seemed obvious to two random homeowners in New Jersey -- where the lending was relatively sedate and old-fashioned -- that houses were getting overpriced and a lot of new homeowners were getting loans that they could barely afford, how come none of the experts could see it? We remembered the late '80s real estate crash, even if we were a bit young to have had it really affect us.)

Bitner isn't a professional writer, which occasionally shows; this is a mildly technical book that could possibly have been a bit smoother in spots. But he was a subprime mortgage lender in Dallas who got out a year before the crash, so he has great credentials to talk about the whole fiasco: he was there as it happened and knows how the system works (both how it was supposed to work and how it actually did work), and was far-sighted enough to know when everything was going too far.

Confessions of a Subprime Lender gets somewhat wonky in spots -- it's written by an insider for a business audience, so he gets into more details than general audiences might expect -- but it's always clear, and Bitner is good at using specific examples from his own loan-making days to illustrate general problems. He runs through all of the players in the industry, both as types and by naming names, and isn't afraid to allocate blame widely. (There's a lot of blame to go around, so Bitner has plenty of it to allocate.) Along the way, he explains how loans get made, and in particular how bad loans get made, and how they lead to more bad loans.

As I said, I'm biased towards this book, but I have to think that if you want a book to explain what went wrong with mortgage lending in the US, Richard Bitner is just the guy to explain it, and Confessions of a Subprime Lender is an eye-opener of a read. It's short (under 200 pages), full of things you won't learn elsewhere, and has a great cover by Michael J. Freeland (a nice guy who lives one town over from me). What more do you want?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/23

This is a weekly post: it goes up early every Monday morning and lists the books that I received the week before for review or notice (and, sometimes, books that I got in other ways, if I want to call attention to them). I haven't reviewed any of these yet, and I won't be able to get to all of them, but everything is worthy of notice and every book will be someone's favorite.

So, book I saw last week included:

Rafael Grampa is a Brazilian comics creator who won the Eisner for Anthology, but has never before published a graphic novel of his own work. AdHouse Books is changing that in November, with Grampa's Mesmo Delivery, a slim volume about a truck driver who takes a job delivering one of those packages that are never to be opened, under any circumstances.

DC's manga arm CMX is responsible for the fourth volume of Nari Kusakawa's The Palette of 12 Secret Colors, coming on September 10th. It seems to be a comedy-adventure series about "color magicians" and the birds that are their familiars, or raw materials, or friends. A story about color seems an odd choice for the black-and-white medium of manga, but this is a strange world we live in.

Best American Fantasy 2008, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, from Prime Books. It's the most literary (or the least "genre," depending on how you want to look at it) of the major "Year's Best" books, and it's back for a second year as a trade paperback this November. Prime hasn't gotten organized enough yet to have it on the major online retailers (or on their web site, or to have a cover shot of it anywhere), but here's an Amazon link to the first volume as a placeholder.

And then there's Afro Samurai, by Takashi Okazaki, published by Tor and Seven Seas. As far as I can tell, this is a spin-off of the animated TV show of the same name, though it's written and illustrated by the TV show's creator, which is not usual for a spin-off. The first volume hits stores in September.

I should also note that John Scalzi's new novel, Zoe's Tale, has just been published in hardcover and should be in stores already. I read in it the popular "advance reading copy" form a few weeks back, and hope to get my review up sometime this week, so it won't be too late.

And I got a short stack of fantasy novels from Ace last week as well, starting off with Chris Marie Green's Break of Dawn, the third book of a trilogy called "Vampire Babylon." Contemporary fantasy has been running more to open-ended series than to defined trilogies, so it's good to see writers doing something different in that area. (Though I see from an afterword in this book that another "Vampire Babylon" trilogy is already scheduled, which means they'll probably go on as long as they sell.) Break of Dawn -- a somewhat ominous title given that the main character's name is Dawn -- is a trade paperback and will be on sale September 2nd.

Another Ace novel is Jeanne C. Stein's Legacy, the fourth book in the "Anna Strong, Vampire" contemporary fantasy series. In this book, she's battling the werewolf widow of the nasty vampire she knocked off in a previous book -- isn't that always the way? Legacy is officially published tomorrow, August 26th, so you could grab it right now.

Also publishing tomorrow from Ace is Wanderlust by Anne Aguirre, which is actually a science fiction novel (and probably the sequel to Grimspace, her first novel, if I know anything about publishing). It's about a young spunky woman who is one of the few who can navigate FTL starships through the particular bafflegab hyperspace used in this series -- every author has his or her own; collect them all! -- but who found herself out of a job after what I suspect were the events of the first novel.

Last this week is Ace's new hardcover, a Patricia A. McKillip novel called The Bell at Sealey Head. Since McKillip has just been named one of the Life Achievement winners of this year's World Fantasy Awards, and since I really liked the book of hers that was published the year I was a World Fantasy judge, and since I've missed so many of her books, I'm moving this novel up high in the pile -- I hope to read it within a few weeks. It sounds like a low-key story of people and atmosphere in a small seaside town, which could be lovely. It's also going to be published on September 2nd.

There's Going to Be a Spleenal Book!

One of my favorite webcomics, Where I Vent My Spleen, is coming to book form in February as Spleenal. Start saving your pennies now!

SFWA Gives This Year's Gold Watch to M.J. Engh

The new SFWA leadership, continuing their streak of getting things done really early, have named M.J. Engh as the Author Emerita at the 2009 Nebula Awards Weekend next April in LA.

Two quick points:

1) the title given to female honorees has changed; last year Ardath Mayhar was an "Emeritus," like the men who preceded her.

2) I still like the idea of the program -- honoring fine writers who are half-forgotten now, and aren't really at the "Grand Master" level, but still did some fine work -- but the name, as always, is ill-chosen.

Things I'm Sad I Missed, For Entirely the Wrong Reasons

Today was National Go Topless Protest Day, where women threw off their confining upper garments and strode free in the light of day, as shirtless as men are allowed to be, to demand equality of chest exposure under the law.

No, I didn't see any. Did you?

Obama Picks A Boring Old White Guy

"Barry" Obama announced his running mate today, and it was a boring older white man who has failed -- miserably and repeatedly -- in his own attempts to become president.

This is a real snoozer, and I don't see how it helps Obama. Biden is from a tiny state that was voting Democratic anyway, and could have easily slotted in at State if it was his foreign-policy expertise that was really important. He's not known as a fiery stump speaker, to say the least.

Obama's choices were pretty stark for VP: pick Hillary, pick another woman (which might not have been politically possible), or pick a boring old white guy. Sadly for those of us who prefer our politics with a bit less boredom, he chose the most boring of the boring old white guys.

Now my only hope is that McCain pulls someone interesting out of the box, like Condi or Lieberman. I don't want to vote for McCain -- not that it matters, since New Jersey will go so heavily for Obama that one very conservative seat might even go to the Democrat's blind rabbi -- but I might just fall asleep and do it by accident if this goes on.

(I'm not even in the district with the blind rabbi, that's how boring this election is -- the next town north is in the 5th, but I'm in the heavily urban and safely Dem 26th, represented by the bland and pandering Bill Pascrell.)

VanderMeer on Political Fiction

Jeff VanderMeer has a new column at the Huffington Post -- or, rather, he did have a new column, more than a week ago, which I've finally looked at today -- about political fiction.

If it's successful enough, in the usual Darwinian HuffPo way, it will turn into an ongoing column, with regular installments. So, if you like it, read it a couple of times, comment and Digg it, and mail it to all your friends.

VanderMeer mentions the Steve Erickson-edited magazine Black Clock, which gives me an opportunity to mention one of my favorite bits of political fiction (even though it's supposedly a piece of reportage), Erickson's own Leap Year, the true story of one man and Sally Hemings during the 1988 elections. If you only read one book about an election in your life, it should be Leap Year.

Outside of My Area of Expertise

The folks making the independent movie Phasma Ex Machina emailed me earlier this week -- well, let's not flatter myself, it was their intern who emailed me -- asking for feedback and advice on what should or shouldn't be in their movie.

What little I know about film production could be put inside a thimble, so I'll have to dodge the advice-giving part. But they also asked me to note their production blog, which I certainly can do.

It starts filming sometime in September, so I imagine any feedback would have to be very speedy if it were to have any effect on the movie. If any of you are as opinionated as I am, and have actual knowledge in this area, feel free to go there and speak up.

In Which I Shill for Blu-Ray

I've tried to be unobtrusive about my Amazon links -- while still having them be available, in case anything I say fills someone with the burning desire to instantly own whatever-it-is -- but, every so often, I might just dump in a steaming lump of pure commerce.

(Like right now, for example.)

Amazon is having a sale on Blu-Ray DVDs -- are they still DVDs if they're Blu-Ray? or does some other noun apply? -- which they'd like people to know about. Some stuff is up to 50% off, which sounds quite nice. The sale runs through midnight (Pacific time) on August 29th, so there's a bit less than a week to take advantage of it. I don't have a Blu-Ray player, so my interest is purely theoretical at this point.

But, if you do own a Blu-Ray player, and want to get things to watch on it at a discount, you might as well click here and see what Amazon has. (From a quick look myself, I see mostly recent movies and some TV shows -- Mad Men, Pirates of the Caribbean, No Country for Old Men -- in the 83 things on sale.)

And does it utterly destroy my credibility as a shill if I say I hate the term "Blu-Ray?" It's difficult to type, it's weirdly affected, and it doesn't seem to mean anything.

Tinkering

I spent a little time this morning doing minor blog-template things, which I hope will make Antick Musings slightly more useful and interesting. I've added the option to have posts emailed (there's a link at the top of the left-hand column), and tossed in a small handful of options under each post, for email or sharing in various forms. Those should show up both on the blog itself and through whatever feed reader that folks use.

If anyone has thought recently "How can you have a blog in this day and age without X!" where X is something I still don't have, let me know. I might have missed it, or I might be against it in principle -- either way, I'd like to hear about it.

Multiple Submissions to the Same House

My colleague Chris Webb is much, much kinder than many people in publishing would be about a project submitted quietly to several editors at the same house.

Agents already know this, but authors may not: within a house, people do talk to each other, and there are some places where a multiple submission like this would mean the house instantly rejects it.

Winged Manga for ComicMix

My "Manga Friday" column this week for ComicMix reviewed three books about protagonists with wings: Koi Cupid, Flock Of Angels, and Two Flowers for the Dragon.

Next week I'm on vacation, which could either mean I have more time to review books...or it could mean I'm on vacation, and so I slack off a lot. We'll see which one it is...

Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

I've never read anything else by McMurtry, which is sad, I know. These days, I am more likely to try new authors -- particularly famous older novelists -- by picking up a minor non-fictional work, particularly if it's related to books or publishing.

Books is McMurtry's memoirs of bookselling, with very occasional sidetrips into other parts of his bookish life. (He's been a novelist since the early '60s and a screenwriter since not long after that, but he seems to see himself essentially as an antiquarian bookseller.) McMurtry has the seasoned novelist's attitude towards research -- it's only for things that he doesn't already know about -- and so this book is his memories as they come, without any attempt to check them against records or other people's memories.

It has 109 chapters, some of which barely make it to the end of the first page and none of which stretch more than five pages. In them, McMurtry tracks backwards and forwards, covering aspects of the same booksale or different encounters with the same rich collector in discrete little bits. It probably is most cohesive and makes the most sense if you're already in Larry McMurtry's head and already know all of this stuff; he doesn't make any particular effort to organize the book or to carefully introduce readers to all of these characters.

McMurtry is getting on in years, and he has the grumpiness of a man from another era about change and new things, particularly electronic media and the Internet. So it's a bit ironic that Books reads a lot like a blog: it's a series of only thematically connected bits of writing, all of which seem dashed off and many of which don't end so much as stop. It doesn't have the same sense of being written in time as a blog does, the connectedness of a piece of prose written in a specific date-stamped time, but that doesn't make Books stronger -- rather the reverse, actually.

Books doesn't go into enough depth to satisfy real fans of old books, and no one who isn't a fan of old books will be terribly interested in Books to begin with. The final product is pleasant enough to read, but there's hardly any meat here; it feels like a book that Simon & Schuster let McMurtry get away with because he promised them that he's working on a big Western novel next. I'd avoid this book unless you're a McMurtry completist.

2 BR, Riv Vu, Cyclopean Ruins

The New York Post reports on H.P. Lovecraft's old apartment, and its current resident -- who thinks that Lovecraft's ghost is haunting her.

Two additional points of oddity: the tenant is 1) Harvey Kurtzman's daughter Nellie, who 2) is a children's book marketer.

Movie Log: Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day

I was feeling grumpy on Wednesday night -- if you recall, that was when I sprayed sarcasm all over a perfectly nice SF Signal "Mind Meld" piece -- so Netflix, in its infinite wisdom, delivered me a light frothy period comedy to ease my trouble soul.

Or so I thought. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day isn't quite as frothy as it seems, though Amy Adams -- as the young would-be starlet Delysia Lafosse -- whips up quite a lot all by herself. (And here's a factoid that will be of interest to no one but myself: The Wife and I saw this movie on Ms. Adams's birthday. Happy birthday, Amy.)

Miss (Guinevere) Pettigrew, as played by Frances McDormand, is a worn-down fortyish nanny, fired precipitously from the last of a long series of ill-fitting jobs as the movie opens. It's 1939 London, and jobs are hard to find to begin with. Pettigrew is penniless, with only the clothes on her back, and hungry as well. The agency that has placed her in the past refuses to give her another chance, so she grabs one herself and tries to poach what she thinks is a nanny job from the agency.

Delysia actually wanted a social secretary, but, when Pettigrew shows up, her most urgent need is to get naked Boyfriend #1 (Phil the young theatrical producer, played by Tom Payne, whom she has just allowed to have his way with her in return for the lead in his new show) out of the bed in the huge expensive apartment in which she is kept by Boyfriend #2 (Nick the nightclub owner, played by Mark Strong) before said Boyfriend #2 makes it over there himself for some morning nookie.

Pettigrew deals with the situation, and stays with Delysia throughout that day, going to a lingerie show in the morning and meeting Boyfriend #3 (Michael, as played by Lee Pace, a poor-but-honest pianist who just got out of prison and wants to make an honest woman of Delysia) in the afternoon. She also gets caught up in the romance of a couple nearer her own age: Edythe the owner of a fashionable shop (Shirley Henderson) and Joe the designer of lingerie (Ciaran Hinds). Pettigrew had seen Edythe cavorting with another man the evening before, but she was at a soup kitchen at the time, so she and Edythe hold each other's secrets uneasily.

Everything comes together in the end, first at a big party at Delysia's place -- where, as my wife put it, "There's a party in the apartment one boyfriend owns, where another boyfriend will play piano while the third boyfriend announces who will get the lead in his show" -- and then during her set at Nick's club later that night.

I'm leaving out several of the additional complications, but they all involve the same few people -- the only one I haven't mentioned yet is Charlotte "the Rabbit" Warren, who is also up for the part in Phil's show, and she only has a few lines. The same people bump into each other, over and over again, all day, and pair off conveniently so that they can have important conversations.

Miss Pettigrew is a nice movie, but it's a quite manipulative one, with a mailed fist of a moral semi-hidden in the velvet glove of Delysia's various vampy outfits. Pettigrew comments, early on, about the scandalousness of Delysia's life, but we expect that in our period movies -- surely this will be the story of Pettigrew learning to loosen up and live a little, like a thousand other movies about people in corsets? Actually, not: Miss Pettigrew is an older style of story; it's about how Pettigrew helps Delysia to grow up. It's not as funny as it looks like it might be, but it's a perfectly serviceable movie about developing a stiff upper lip. (And, given that it's set in London on the eve of WW II, that's quite appropriate.)

Miss Pettigrew is also based on a novel of the same name by Winifred Watson, originally published in 1938. I'd never seen or heard of the book before I heard of the movie, so I can make no comparisons between them.

Sarah Lacy's Five Lessons

Certain sectors of publishing are buzzing over Sarah Lacy's article in Business Week yesterday, in which she laid out five lessons to make book publishing better and more like Web 2.0.

With the caveat that, like everyone else trying to remake publishing, she focuses on the very narrow range of potential bestsellers, mass-marketed fiction and non-fiction -- and this is brutally clear when she says that she thinks $50,000 "for a lesser-known writer" is "less of an advance" -- her ideas generally have merit. But I always have to quibble, don't I?

Make it social.
Lacy wants to see more social networking technology applied to books, which can only help sales. No disagreements here, though in practice it'll have to be the author who does most of this, most of the time.

Take book tours out of the stores
I think she really means "take book tours out of the control of the publisher," since she describes her own efforts at pinpoint targeting of her audience in particular cities around the country. Since the point of book tours is to sell books, having a store attached to it -- whether the event is in the store or off-site -- is very useful to both author and publisher.

Obviously, a book tour has to be accomplishing something: selling books, getting media attention, or otherwise contributing to the success of the book. I suspect book tours have dwindled because a number of them only existed to prove to an author that she was important and that her publisher would spend money on her.

Lacy almost seems to be describing events for people who have already bought her book; if an author has secondary materials (lectures, T-shirts, tote bags, bath soap) to sell that audience, than that model could work. If not, it's just the author spending money to meet her fans, which is fun but not a sustainable business model.

Create stars—don't just exploit existing ones
True, but every publisher tries to do this several times a year. Her specific details, such as publishing contracts requiring that new authors blog, tweet, or what-not, are more likely to have solid results but not palatable to all authors. And I'll repeat that her model of publishing is strongly skewed towards the high end; there simply isn't that much money to throw around for the vast majority of books. Most of this stuff will be done on the cheap, by authors themselves.

Go electronic from the get-go
What I take from this section is that Lacy's publisher, Gotham Books (a Penguin imprint) is an institutional Luddite. Not all houses are, thankfully. But she is right that no publisher of appreciable size should be so non-electronic in 2008.

Make e-commerce even easier
Lacy does not work for a publishing house, so she didn't instantly think of the gigantic counter-example from earlier this week: Chelsea Green. Her point is that publishers should have instant one-click ordering from anywhere; that will not go over well -- and I'm understating the case immensely -- with the people who currently sell books.

The reason we don't have one-click ordering from anywhere is because we have a number of channels through which books are sold (online, brick-and-mortar) and several competitors in each channel. Now that all of the major brick-and-mortar chains have a real web presence, it's technically possible to build a system that sends sales to all of them, allocated however the publisher decides will work best. But that's still not one-click; one-click would either go only to one preferred vendor (which would make the others angry) or directly to the publisher (which would make all of the booksellers angry).

Some things don't happen even though they seem like good ideas, because even though they are good for some of the interested parties, they're quite bad for other interested parties. This is one of those cases.

A Is For Advance, B Is For Bible (Series)...

Jessica Faust of the literary agency BookEnds has posted a Publishing Dictionary, which will be of particular use to new folks in the business, new writers trying to figure out what their editors are talking about, and the curious of all ages.

She could have gone into more detail on some of the entries -- this is publishing, there's always another nitpicky detail to worry about -- but that's a minor quibble. If I did a similar list, it would be less useful, because I wouldn't be able to stop myself from going into baroque detail about how some people call ARCs "bound galleys" and BEA "ABA," and what those alternate terms reveal about their users.

(I also quibble at her definition of "marketing," which covers only one aspect of the job -- but I didn't have any idea what marketers did before I became one, so I can't blame her.)

So: it's a great introduction, but there's a lot of nuance and depth you can get into once you understand this stuff. Though, if you're not doing this for a living, you probably don't want to know all of the deeper, more complicated details.

[via Editorial Ass]

Plum Pie by P.G. Wodehouse

Plum Pie is a short story collection from late in Wodehouse's career, published in 1966 and containing nine stories written in the previous decade, plus two bits of poetry, an afterword on comedy, and a selection of snippets from the American newspapers of the day (probably originally for some British media outlet, either radio or periodical, though the book doesn't explain them), under the collective title "Our Man in America."

The "Our Man in America" bits -- each about four pages long and containing four to six amusing news stories from the mysterious land of America -- come in between the nine stories.

There's one Jeeves -- which leads off the book, as would be expected -- one Ukridge, one Mr. Mulliner, one Blandings tale and one long novella about Freddie Threepwood (Lord Emsworth's son), and a handful of assorted stories about other Drones, Beans, Crumpets, Gin & Tonics, or what-have-you.

No Oldest Member stories, unfortunately -- I've come to believe that Wodehouse is at his funniest when he's writing about golf -- and the rest are all fairly minor entries in their respective series. None of the stories are bad, though the long Threepwood novella, "Life With Freddie," is a bit bland and overstays its welcome a tad.

But this collection was published when Wodehouse was eighty-five, so, if it's not up to his very highest standard, I think we can make allowances. And even minor late Wodehouse is better than most of what has passed for humorous prose for the last several hundred years.

The edition I read was in the ongoing Collector's Wodehouse series from the Overlook Press, which I recommend highly. They've published at least 52 of Wodehouse's roughly hundred books -- that's how many I have, and I think I've missed the most recent batch -- and each one is a fine little monument to the bookmaker's art. (Not that kind of bookmaker.) If you're going to read Wodehouse -- and I do strongly urge you to -- these are the editions to buy.

Quote of the Week

"I knew a three-year-old boy once -- he looked like a beautiful turtle -- who was taken to a movie when his mother couldn't find a baby-sitter, and he liked it quite well and thought it was the only one in the world. Whenever he was asked if he would like to go to a movie, he would answer gravely, 'No, I've been to the show.'"
- Peter S. Beagle, I See By My Outfit, pp.171-172

You Say It's Your Birthday? Well, It's My Birthday Too, Yeah!

A birthday meme, picked up from Chris Roberson:

Look up your birthday in Wikipedia. Pick 4 events, 3 births, 2 deaths, and 1 holiday.

EVENTS
1584 - Sir Walter Raleigh establishes first English colony on Roanoke Island.
1919 - Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the Constitution (granting suffrage to women) and sends it to the states for ratification.
1989 - Tiananmen Square protests end badly in Bejing

BIRTHS
1738 - King George III of Great Britain
1928 - Dr. Ruth Westheimer
1951 - Wendy Pini

DEATHS
1798 - Giacomo Casanova
1942 - Reinhard Heydrich (assassinated)

HOLIDAY
Tonga - National Day

Update: The meme can be misleading, so let me add that my actual birthday is June 4th. I don't think one is meant to wait until one's actual birthday to do the meme, but I've been wrong before.

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words edited by Erin McKean

I often have a book of words going somewhere in the house; this was the bedside book for the last couple of months. It's an omnibus of the previously published Weird and Wonderful Words and More Weird and Wonderful Words; if you have those two books already, don't bother getting this one, since there's nothing new.

If you don't have either or both of those books, and you like words like poffertje (a small doughnut dusted with sugar), or gilly-gawpus (an awkward or foolish person), or mundation (the act of cleaning), then Totally Weird and Wonderful Words is for you.

It has a number of amusing illustrations by Roz Chast and Danny Shanahan -- separately, not working together -- forewords by Simon Winchester and Richard Lederer that basically say "Gosh! Aren't words fun?!" and mostly conversational (rather than dictionaryesque) definitions and usage suggestions from editor McKean.

I've seen a lot of books of odd words; this is one of the very best, informed by scholarship -- it is a distant cousin of the OED -- but not overwhelmed by it. If you're looking for words to exhume for your next fantasy trilogy, or just a fan of reusing obsolete words, you'll love Totally Weird and Wonderful Words.

Random House UK Wants Morality Clause

I got this from Boing Boing, so it will be all over the tubes by now, but...

Random House UK is currently sending out contracts for children's books that includes a clause declaring:

If you act or behave in a way which damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished, and we may (at our option) take any of the following actions: Delay publication / Renegotiate advance / Terminate the agreement.

The full story is in Teh Grauniad, who got it from the Society of Authors' Children's Writers and Illustrators Group. The Guardian story drags out the usual counter-examples -- they're more recognizable on their side of the pond, but similar cases could be made here -- as to why this is a policy that would be interpreted selectively at best. It's really just an escape clause for Random House; they want to be able to find an excuse to abandon a book after paying for it if they suddenly decide to do so.

Anyone heard of something similar on this side of the pond?

GVG Wonders If SF Wants to Be Free

Gordon Van Gelder, Editor and Grand High Pooh-Bah of the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, is asking for the opinions of readers on several questions about short fiction online.

The central point, on which his essay and questions revolve, is the question of whether people actually will pay to read short stories electronically. So, if you have a strong opinion on the subject, it's a place to be heard.

Younger than Game Boy

Beloit College has issued its eleventh annual Mindset List, designed to give us older folks a sense of the world that incoming college freshmen live in. They can drive, they can go to fight in Iraq, they're going to drink even if they're not supposed to, and they were mostly born in 1990.

I graduated in 1990. I suppose I am now officially Old.

Movie Log: Little Voice

I'm beginning to think that Netflix is deliberately taunting me; this time it described Little Voice as a "musical comedy." Musical, yes -- absolutely. But comedy? Even with my broad definition of the term, I wouldn't think this quite qualifies.

The most important thing about Little Voice is that it was based on a stage play, and that shows through in a hundred little ways and several huge ones. Most importantly, the dialogue is all designed to be declaimed from a position five feet above and somewhat forward from the audience's position -- and, along the same lines, that dialogue is long and intricate and bears very little relationship besides diction and cadence to the ways that real people actually speak. (It also includes a remarkable amount of direct insults and put-downs, the fruit of half a century of British "kitchen sink" dramas.)

The other big adjustment is the scene problem -- in a play, when some characters appear in front of a particular bit of scenery, you know that you're in for "a scene," and that the scenery won't shift until this particular scene is done. But, in a film, cameras can and do move to follow actors, so there's no reason why someone couldn't, or wouldn't, head right upstairs to see what's going on instead of continuing his very stagy argument.

So most of the "why the hell doesn't he..." and "can't they just go..." problems with Little Voice are pure artifacts of the stage; they wouldn't even come to mind while watching a play, but they do come up during a movie, since film has greater freedom.

Anyway, this is the story of Little Voice (Jane Horrocks), who is probably autistic, definitely has some kind of developmental disorder, and lives in some dreary northern England city (British viewers can probably tell which one instantly from the accent and the sweeping shot of the harbor at the beginning of the movie) with her horrible, non-stop-talking, horrible, hot-to-trot, horrible mother Mari (Brenda Blethyn). The first ten minutes of the movie are Blethyn talking non-stop, pausing for air at least once.

Two telephone installers come to Mari and LV's house -- young quiet Billy (Ewan McGregor) and older bluff George (Philip Jackson). Each one sets his eye on a female inhabitant of that house, in his own style.

But the real plot has to do with Mari's most recent boyfriend -- she screwed him in his car the evening before, down by the waterfront in a line with a number of other cars rocking on their springs -- Ray Say (Michael Caine), a very minor show biz agent. Ray is close with the owner of the local nightclub, Mr. Boo (Jim Broadbent).

LV barely speaks and never leaves the house, spending her whole life in her room, listening to the records her dead father left her -- records by the usual array of old-fashioned female singers, from Judy Garland to Shirley Bassey. She, as Ray learns serendipitously, has the amazing ability to mimic those singers -- to replicate those recorded performances down to the note and the phrase of stage patter -- but she only does so alone, in the dark.

Ray, being a monstrous stereotype of an agent, immediately realizes that there's big bucks to be made from an infinitely shy young woman of no great looks, singing songs that were old and forgotten thirty years ago, in a cheap dive in this hard-bitten Yorkshire town. (This is why he is a huge show business success, and I am not. Or perhaps vice versa.)

Things do not go well, as any viewer with two brain cells to rub together could tell. Little Voice has the structure of a tragedy -- despite all of the jokes -- though there are tragic flaws enough to spare for the entire cast.

I might have accepted Little Voice on stage, but it's harder to swallow when translated to film. It's not just that all of the characters do ridiculous things for inadequate reasons, nor that they're clearly acting towards the back wall of an West End house -- it's also that they're all exceptionally stagy characters, starting with the never-seen-anywhere-but-on-a-stage Mari.

It's all entertaining, but The Wife and I didn't find it believable for a moment. Horrocks did all of her own singing, and that's amazing -- but we couldn't quite accept Little Voice as a story of actual human beings living in the real world.

I See By My Outfit by Peter S. Beagle

In 1963, Peter S. Beagle, then a fresh-faced young novelist (this is several years before The Last Unicorn, even), decided to ride motor scooters across country, from New York to San Francisco (or a reasonable facsimile of each) with his good friend Phil Segunick. He wrote up the trip for Holiday magazine, and then rewrote it again for book publication.

This is that book; I See By My Outfit was published in 1965 and quickly became Beagle's rarest and oddest book.

It's really a time capsule now, full of growling, unpleasant cops -- Peter and Phil were "hippies" and looked like vagrants -- cold campsites, and unfiltered '60s idealism. Any trip across the USA today would be very different, even if it were taken by two similar young men on scooters -- the country is frightened of different things, worried about different things, obsessed by different things.

I See By My Outfit is a hard book to summarize in anything but the broadest strokes: they went across the country, they were cold most of the time, their scooters had various chronic mechanical problems, they had an easy and infectiously charming rapport, and they met a whole lot of people along the way. It's a book that takes place mostly in Beagle's head, both on the noisy road and in various rooms and campsites at night.

For all that, he never mentions the underlying reason for the trip -- sure, he often talks about his girlfriend, Enid (and there's another generational marker, one of those names you don't see attached to pretty girls in real life anymore), and how he's going to join her in Menlo Park. But he somehow fails to mention that Enid is the center of a household of two children, or that she's heavily pregnant with his child as well.

I read I See By My Outfit in a battered old Ballantine paperback -- the 1971 printing of that impressionistic cover to the immediate left. It was also reprinted last year by Centro Books, after being out of print in the US for many years -- and that cover is the big, clear one up top that looks like a generic travel narrative.

The title comes from a song -- I haven't been able to track it down, so it could have been written (or translated) by Beagle and/or Segunick -- which goes like this:

first voice: I see by my outfit what I am a cowboy
second voice: I see by my outfit what I am a cowboy, too
both, together: We see by our outfits what we was both cowboys
If you had an outfit, you could be a cowboy, too.

I See By My Outfit is a book for Beagle completests, first of all, and for students of the '60s. But, even more than that, it's a fine book for readers of Americana and general American non-fiction: it gives a portrait of large sections of the country (including what was then a tiny work camp in South Park, Colorado) from a thoughtful outside viewpoint. Even if it weren't be Beagle, it would be an important historical document -- but since it is by Beagle, it's also a great pleasure to read.

King Canute Has a Posse

I really need to stop getting so grumpy about things I read online -- only last week, my cardiologist tsk-tsked at me about my blood pressure -- but it always seems that there's one more thing to be corrected, or complained about.

Today it's the current "Mind Meld" feature from the guys of SF Signal, featuring seventeen replies to the question "If you could change any aspect of the science fiction field itself - publishing, mainstream acceptance, fans, or whatever - what would it be and why?"

The answers range from smart and thoughtful (i.e., things that I agree with -- examples are Colleen Lindsay and Ken MacLeod) to...well, things that I consider strongly wrong-headed and not likely to sway the reality-based community. And I'm afraid I'm now going to get all sarcastic about some of the answers. I know, I know -- it's not to my credit, but I can't help myself.

The Melders were:
Kathleen Ann Goonan, who wants SF to be as respectable as a very respectable thing, and who wants her preferred SF books to be also shelved, with covers she likes, in the literature section. Assuming an infinitely extensible bookshop that carries every book in existence, and no increased costs to create different, competing editions of the same book, this would only be mildly difficult. In reality, every book that's shelved in two sections means one other book -- one midlist book, by a writer like Goonan -- is skipped entirely. Some of us would consider that a problem.

Gary Gibson writes books about spaceships blowing up, and apparently has realized that audiences like books about spaceships blowing up, but wishes that there were no covers of spaceships blowing up (but that, somehow, the people who like those things would keep buying his books). Can we just declare it a publishing truism that authors hate the iconic looks of their genre, and move on from that? Everyone wants to be the category-breaking massive bestseller with the glamorous Chip Kidd cover, but that's like wanting to be thin and rich and model-beautiful, and about as likely.

Blake Charlton really really wishes he could force-feed young readers science fiction stories, and at the same time keep them from loathing it, as they usually do things that they have been force-fed. He also thinks short fiction has been in a decline for "the past decade," which is true if "the past decade" extends back to 1945.

Colleen Lindsay, writing from a perspective deep in the confines of evil, old-fashioned publishing -- please note that I'm getting even more sarcastic than usual, since I agree with her -- wishes that publishers would stop betting most of their money on long-shot non-genre horses, and that publishers would continue to wise up about modern communication methods. The only complaint I have is that her suggestions don't require magical changes to human behavior or massive expenses, which -- given most of the other answers -- seems to have been a requirement.

Jason Sizemore wishes that editors would stop getting fired because they've gotten too senior (and expensive) for cost-cutting companies. You and me both, brother, you and me both.

James Van Pelt has a few, not particularly likely, suggestions to stop the magazine death-spiral. I don't want to pick on him too much, but I doubt his ideas would be successful. (E.g., the kid opening a new video game -- and I speak as an overgrown version of that kid -- is not likely to even read the game's manual if he doesn't have to, let alone spend hours on some unrelated fiction.)

Jeremiah Tolbert's response seems reasonable (until one tries to do a workup of its costs), but it deserves a point-by-point scoffing, with translations into Hornswoggler-ese:

At one time, the defunct magazine SF Age had nearly 175,000 in sales of a single issue. The largest circulation of any magazine is barely over 20,000 today and has been falling for nearly a decade. There is no doubt that there is a larger audience out there for the SF short fiction magazines, but because those magazines have a marketing budget of zero, they don't seem to be connecting with their audience as well as they could.

There may be some connection between "circulation...barely over 20,000" and "marketing budget of zero." Just saying. Also, circulation has been dropping for far longer than a decade -- OMNI had a far higher circulation than SF Age, in its own heyday. Tolbert also assumes that the people who used to buy those magazines are still out there and just unconnected.

Tolbert's plan -- presumably to be funded by a massive influx of cash from Bill Gates or some other geeky sucker:

1.Stock the SF magazines in the SF books section. The digests are too small to stand out on the magazine racks at the big stores. Keep hammering on the big chains until they do this. The costs will equal the gains in acquiring new, young readers. Admittedly, the magazines are attempting this. But if they can't get the chains to do it, then ask the dedicated readers to move them.

To recap: a minor, marginal product, which has been dropped by many stores, should demand better, free placement in a different section. "Hammering" by minor publishing companies will achieve this end, and not lead to the magazines being dropped entirely. Tolbert also, I suspect, does not know how much co-op advertising costs. And the problem of not having enough readers can be fixed by having those few readers constantly moving stock in every bookstore in the country.

2. Failing the above, change the format to match Weird Tales and Interzone in size so they are easier to find on the newsstand.

Because Weird Tales and Interzone have such excellent newsstand distribution and circulation. And there are vast hordes of readers eagerly searching the newsstand, missing the digests merely because they are too small to be seen. Any drops in circulation, advertising pages, or profitability in the wider magazine market can be safely ignored, since we in our ghetto only look at ourselves and (yearningly) at the idealised image of the literary mainstream that we have constructed.

3. Improve the cover art across the board. Too many covers today do not appeal to young readers and have a very archaic art style. The design of the magazines as well are a little dusty. Magazines like Interzone and Weird Tales once again are ahead in this area. If they can afford modern, hip art, so can the others.

Spend more money for art Tolbert likes. Perhaps Gary Gibson can consult here as well, so that we can have utterly classy covers. Once again, the way to increase circulation is to mimic magazines with lower circulations.

4. Improve the magazine web presences. Some of the magazines have websites that have not updated their design in the time that I have been active in the field. They're difficult to use and frankly, ugly. My generation judges a company by their website quite often.

Spend more money for a website Tolbert likes, which will magically attract the vast hordes of SF readers roaming the Internet.

5. Video game cross promotion. Most of my friends who would be reading these magazines play video games instead. Advertise short fiction venues in video game magazines. Consider running video game tie-in fiction even. Ask Microsoft to let you run some Halo short stories. Give those World of Warcraft gamers something to read while they wait for a raid to come together.

Spend lots of money on other things Tolbert likes, because gamers would really prefer to read SF short stories if they knew they had the choice -- they just play Halo because they don't realize they'd like something else better.

6. Create a YA-oriented SF/F magazine and get it into schools any way possible. Beg and/or bribe JK Rowling to write a story for your first issue. How you bribe someone with a net worth larger than the Queen is an exercise I leave to the reader.

Do something that no amount of money can buy, which is an increase over the cost of even the previous items. Magically keep the kids from disliking required reading in this particular case. Even Tolbert admits this is a pie-in-the-sky idea.

I'm in sympathy with Tolbert's aims, but nothing he suggests is even the slightest bit plausible. If he'd just said that he was using his wish to create a world where SF short-fiction magazines routinely sell in the millions of copies, it would have been just as likely.

David Langford wants to stop, via time-travel, Forry Ackerman from having invented the term "sci-fi." Even if we could, I bet there would have been some other term of opprobrium. People always do attach disdain to the words about things they dislike. But here I'm being dour and serious about something light-hearted, like some hob-nailed goblin stomping a butterfly.

Nnedi Okrafor-Mbachu, who has gotten along pretty well without the SF field so far, wishes SF was less cold, sterile, Western, and masculine. I have nothing sarcastic to say about that.

Ken MacLeod wishes SF had a future it believed strongly in -- a future that it actually wanted. That would be nice.

Paul Kincaid bemoans the existence of the very genre of science fiction, without which the world would have been flooded with SFnal ideas and concepts through all channels, bringing us all to Utopia. (Or something like that.) He seems to think that something external stops readers from picking up books from other sections of the bookstore, and not that reader behavior constrains the limits of available books. His is a sweet, yearning wish, but a SF genre that wasn't a genre and didn't form around a community of writers, readers, and magazines wouldn't actually exist, and so it's hard to claim that would be preferable to what we have.

Mark Budz is saddened by the existing of marketing categories, which don't exist anywhere but science fiction and bear no relation to the observed reading habits of people. He also comes thisclose to calling for the publication of lots more SF novels that people don't actually want to read -- that's what "less commercial" means -- which is a bit odd to me. He should also look up the sales of a midlist "literary" novel for a dash of cold water; I believe, even with the current slump in SF, he's still doing much better than his trendy-program-MFA equivalent. And his mass-market numbers, while true, are not limited to SF; it's like that all over. As I've said a thousand times before, a lot of SF writers seem to want to escape to the Land of Lit'rachur, but things in general are much tougher there than they are here -- from the Land of Skiffy, though, it's easier to see the mountains than the valleys.

Daryl Gregory sez that ebooks should be cheap and DRM-less, which is mostly a good idea, but he also repeats the old (wrong) saw that ebooks have "almost zero production and distribution costs." Shipping isn't that expensive, and neither is PP&B (paper printing and binding) -- "production" includes a lot of things that ebooks need just as much as paper books.

Edward Willet opines that the grass is much, much greener over there, and those darn literary kids keep stealing our ideas. He also thinks that the average mainstream novel sells better than the average SFF novel, which is not true.

Mindy Klasky shouts that the walls need to come down -- all of them, right now! -- in the skiffy section. I wasn't aware that there were barriers of the kind she describes -- writers write more or less what they want, editors commission books they think will sell, readers buy what they want, and reviewers try to put each book into context. I suspect she's had at least one proposal nixed recently for being too far from her core audience.

John Joseph Adams asserts that editors should be tougher, and thinks that the general quality of stories used to be better. (He might want to read a year or so of Astounding/Analog -- of almost any era of Campbell's editing -- to see how much crap was mixed in with the good stories we remember.) He also thinks that the mainstream audiences who liked books with vaguely SFnal premises, like The Road and The Time-Traveler's Wife, can be turned into regular SF readers -- I'm more pessimistic, because I think those audiences found different things in those stories than their SFnal virtues (whatever those are).

Jay Lake also wishes that lazy journalists would stop reflexively dumping on SF, and that literary lights would stop defending their turf. I'll add a wish for world peace, free and complete health care for everyone on Earth, and non-fattening ice cream to the wish list, as long as we're shooting the moon. People live by stereotypes -- and ours is "geeks." Ask blonde girls how the battle of changing public perception is going...


I am grumpy today. Good thing SF Signal didn't ask me to be part of this one, or I'd probably have done something unforgivable. Of course this question was broad and led to "if I ran the zoo"-style answers, so my complaining about the answers really isn't fair.

Oh, well. Add me to the giant stack of things that aren't fair. I can live with it.

ComicMix Elegy

Today at ComicMix I reviewed Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy, a tremendously influential manga from 1971 that has never appeared in English before.

Today at work I had meetings from 11:30 straight through to 3, but it included a good lunch of Chicken/Sausage Jambalaya at Oddfellows Rest, so I was happy.

And today at...sorry, I don't have a third thing to complete the triptych.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Murakami has been a devotee of Raymond Carver and an equally devoted long-distance runner since he began his career as a novelist, which explains both the title of this slim non-fiction book and its subject matter.

It was written, as a series of nine loosely-connected essays, mostly in the summer of 2005, with more roadwork done in 2006 and words both fore and after from August of 2007.

Murakami started running seriously after his first two novels were published and he decided to quit his previous job -- running a jazz club he owned in Tokyo -- to devote himself full-time to writing. The first essay explains that, along with Murakami's general history both as a novelist and a runner.

He's run a marathon nearly every year since 1983, and has run an ultramarathon once and triathlons several times -- he's clearly very devoted to running, and has made it a central part of his life. Still, he describes it as something he does to keep himself healthy to write novels, and mentions pulling back on his training regiment several times when it was threatening to take too much time from his real work. He's not obsessed, just devoted.

And so What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a series of meditations on novel-writing and long-distance running, particularly on their similarities. Along the way, Murakami gives the reader some bits of memoir, but really only those bits that relate to his running life. It's a book, as other reviewers have said, of interest only to fans of Murakami's fiction and to dedicated runners -- and, particularly, to that small subset of people who are both. Those few are likely to clash this book to heart and never let it go; the rest of us find it pleasant but not nearly as compelling as Murakami's other books.

Movie Log: Big Dreams, Little Tokyo

Big Dreams, Little Tokyo is set in San Jose, but the movie itself won't tell you that -- and Netflix is confused enough to think that it's set in real Tokyo.

Boyd Wilson (writer/director Dave Boyle) is a young businessman, CEO of a large array of Japanese language-related businesses (translation services, publisher of his how-to-learn-English book, and so on), and seemingly obsessed with Japanese-ness. One character accuses him of wanting to be Japanese, but that doesn't seem to be what he really wants: he has clearly internalized the idea of the Japanese salaryman, and is trying to be one in a different land. His main activity is going up to people who look Japanese and asking if they need English lessons -- this is not nearly as successful as it might be, seeing that he is in Northern California.

His roommate, the half-Japanese Jerome (Jayson Watabe), is on an equally Quixotic journey: he wants to be a sumo wrestler. So Jerome spends his time eating obsessively, and Boyd tries to sell his book or teaching services to everyone he sees. But one day, after a heart-attack scare at a Japanese restaurant, Jerome is rushed to the hospital and Boyd meets and immediately falls for the Japanese-American nurse Mai (Rachel Morihiro).

Their romance is mostly subtext; Boyd doesn't ask her on dates, but does ask her if she wants more language lessons (which she is paying for). Their relationship is cute and underplayed, and within the realm of naturalistic -- for a quirky independent movie, if not for real life.

Big Dreams is mostly about Boyd, and it takes him seriously -- so the viewer has to also be able to take him seriously. It's a film for those of us who like small comedies about people finding their place in the world, and for those people worried that they're too obsessed with Japanese things. It's not a great movie, but it holds its own, and it's well worth watching.

What I Tell You Three Times Is False by "Samuel Holt"

Samuel Holt is the main character and narrator of this book -- the third of four in the series, all published in the '80s -- but Donald E. Westlake is the man behind Holt.

Holt is an actor who lucked into the kind of role that both makes and destroys a career: he played a two-fisted TV detective named Jack Packard (in the Magnum, P.I. mode) long enough to make enough money to last him for the rest of his life -- and long enough that he was thoroughly typecast so that he fears he'll never get another acting job. He splits his time between the coasts (and two girlfriends); keeps trying, in a low-key way, to get acting work; and stumbles into murders every so often.

Three Times is more of a cozy than the first two novels in the series were, which is appropriate, since it's a homage or retelling of that Agatha Christie novel that has to change its name every generation because another word is unusable in polite company. (That's the book now called ...And Then There Were None; I expect "none" will become a hideous slur against something any day now, just to keep the streak going.)

Holt was called to a remote Caribbean island to take part in a short film for a cancer charity; he's portray Packard, while other typecast actors play Charlie Chan, Miss Marple, and Sherlock Holmes. And, of course, as soon as he gets there, a massive hurricane cuts the fortress-like house off from the outside world for an indeterminate time...and the deaths start occurring.

The whole house is a locked room, and the murders each have their own idiosyncrasies and particularities, so there's a lot of talking about suspects and possibilities, in the best old cozy tradition. This isn't a kind of book I've ever read much, or wanted to read much, but I can enjoy it when a writer I like is making fun of it. (Though Westlake-as-Holt here is taking the formula almost completely seriously; this is a light mystery, but not a funny one.)

I'm reading this series because I'm a big Westlake fan and I'm getting down to his more obscure, minor, or hard-to-find books; I'd strongly recommend it only to people in a similar situation. For the rest of you, there are piles of newer books along the same lines that are at least as good and which your friends might actually have heard of.

A Different Kind of Out-of-Context Problem

I don't mean to pick on this guy, because I always want to encourage people to read more books, and to talk about what they read.

But man! is this discussion of "old school sci-fi" and "new school sci-fi" utterly untethered from anything resembling knowledge of the genre and its history. His "old school" seems to be the Campbellian stuff, more or less, but "new school" is...Ender's Game?

It makes me want to subscribe to his newsletter, just to see what comes next...

What Nature Abhors

This doesn't seem to be a meme yet, but I picked it up from SF Signal, and it might well turn into one:


Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating

Movie Log: Space Chimps

A week ago, my family had most of a day free and wanted to do something together. It wasn't quite warm enough to go to the waterpark at Land of Make-Believe, which would have been our first preference, so we went to lunch at a Dave & Busters and then saw Space Chimps.

Space Chimps, I'm surprised to be able to say, is not nearly as bad as you would expect. Oh, the plot is silly and old-fashioned, the kind of thing that seemed old and laughable when I was seven. And the aliens have some of the silliest, oddest designs that I've ever seen -- their world is a cross between Standard Star Trek Alien Desert and Teletubbies Garish Primary. And the ostensible villain isn't frightening, or plausible, or anything more than pathetic -- he's literally the mean old man who lives on the edge of town.

But the script was surprisingly witty, full of jokes that we (and the rest of the audience) laughed honestly at. Most of those jokes were even based in the actual characters. Oh, sure, they were barely two-dimensional characters -- I'm not claiming any more than that -- but the jokes flowed out of their generic sitcom tics and foibles, instead of being shoved in wherever they fit.

Space Chimps felt like nothing so much as an old Filmation script, found in the back of a drawer when someone's office got cleaned out, that then had its dialogue punched up by a top-rank contemporary sitcom writer and was animated, on a middling but acceptable budget, by two entirely different teams: solid veterans on the chimps and humans, and a crew of game but inexperienced folks speaking an entirely different language for the alien world and its inhabitants.

Space Chimps is not good, in any sense of the word. But it's quite funny, and unexpectedly entertaining. Given the dire state of family animation -- I'm afraid I'll be seeing Fly Me To the Moon sooner than I'd prefer (which would be never) -- it counts as a bloop single.

Shenzhen by Guy Delisle

Delisle is also the author of Pyongyang, and he's got a book on Burma coming up this fall -- comics is now a big enough world that it has a niche for "cartoonist who travels to oppressive Asian countries and then does a book about his experiences." (I'm not sure if that's a good thing, and I hope Delisle does expand his repertoire.)

Shenzhen was published in 2006, but it depicts a trip to the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in December of 1997 -- so I think that this trip took place before the Pyongyang trip, but was turned into comics later.

(One thing Delisle doesn't mention, oddly, is that he was in the close vicinity of Hong Kong -- and made at least one trip there -- less than six months after the handover to China in the summer of 1997. I would have thought that time would have led to a lot of discussion about the future of China, Hong Kong, and the world in general.)

When Delisle went to Shenzhen, it was as an animation supervisor for a French TV company -- he stayed for three months to oversee the production of a TV series there. (From what he shows, it was mostly his job to reject really bad drawings and try to get the finished product up to minimum quality.) The Shenzhen trip was his second extended stay in China; he'd also been in Nanjing for similar work earlier. But Shenzhen doesn't closely compare the two experiences, or mention the Nanjing trip again after the first few pages.

Shenzhen isn't as immediately engaging or interesting as Pyongyang was, mostly because of external circumstances. In Shenzhen, Delisle didn't link up with an expatriate community, was working with large numbers of people who spoke essentially no English or French, and was in an altogether blander and more Westernized city. Pyongyang is a unique place, filled with bizarre and unlikely things, so any provincial city would be less interesting -- but Shezhen feels bland even for a minor city. Delisle depicts some mildly totalitarian moments, such as the extreme security surrounding Hong Kong, but China comes across as just another country, full of people working hard to get ahead, and Shenzhen as the Chinese equivalent of a more vertical Silicon Valley: the place where high-achievers go to spend all of their time working. The Chinese people also befuddle Delisle, as they have generations of foreigners before him: they don't react as he expects, and don't (or can't) explain how their viewpoints differ from his. He doesn't fall into the old "wily Oriental" stereotype, but he clearly didn't connect with the Chinese people he met as he did with North Koreans.

What's most memorable about Shenzhen are the moments Delisle spends alone, exploring and thinking about China: he comments on the relentless dirt and grime and has an animator's eye for telling details and the way things move. Shenzhen is a quieter, less exciting book than Pyongyang was, with fewer obvious opportunities for Delisle to shine. Shenzhen is inwardly focused: these are the things Delisle learned and thought while he was in China, rather than what he saw or did. It's not Pyongyang, but it's a fine book itself.

Noun Phrases

My current favorite book at work -- purely because of its title; I like others based on their actual content -- is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Handbook.

Nothing but noun modifiers as far as the eye can see...

Flying for the Fifth Time

Today I reviewed the new Flight anthology (edited, as always, by Kazu Kibuishi) for ComicMix: Volume Five.

Movie Log: The Band's Visit

We all get lost once in a while, and the stories of getting lost are often the most interesting. The Band's Visit is one of them; a small movie from Israel about a small Egyptian police orchestra visiting Israel to celebrate the opening of an Arabic Cultural Center.

Unfortunately, they end up in the wrong small Israeli town -- a place the local cafe owner describes as "No Arab culture. No Israeli culture. No culture period."

From there, the movie tells three stories, each about one of the members of the Egyptian band, as they spend the night in this unexpected place. The head of the band, Tewfiq, spends time with the cafe owner, Dina, who tries -- very nicely and subtly -- to seduce him.

The young hothead of the band, Haled, goes off with some of the local young people, but doesn't find much excitement (out there, at least).

And another band member, a failed composer, has an uncomfortable dinner with his Israeli hosts, but perhaps discovers a way to finish his long-abandoned concerto.

The Band's Visit isn't trying to be anything more than it is: a small movie of particular characters. It does have some slight allegorical overtones -- or, perhaps, it's just that allegory can be read into every story of Israelis and their neighbors -- but they're entirely positive without being maudlin. Audiences who think either Israelis or Arabs should be driven into the sea and murdered will be deeply unhappy with this movie; those of us with normal human compassion will find it a nice but unspectacular independent movie.

Rolling Thunder by John Varley

I'm about the last person to complain about the science in a SF novel -- in fact, I've been known to make fun of such people -- but one element of Rolling Thunder actually sent me to my own (metaphoric) flying slip-stick. One of the gloomy background elements of this novel is that a series of interstellar colonization starships went out, roughly a generation ago (Varley doesn't give an exact date), and none of them have come back yet. Without knowing the precise details, I can't complain too much, but given the acceleration specified for a similar vehicle near the end of the book, and the handy Relativistic Star Ship Calculator, it would take a little over thirty-six years to go to Alpha Centauri and immediately return. Other stars are, of course, further away, and so a round trip to any of them would take longer. Leaving aside the assumption that a colonization ship would return quickly (or at all), it's not at all clear that there's been enough time for any of these ships to have made it back to our solar system in the first place.

I may be maligning Varley; it's possible that he means his main character to be dumber than she seems. But I don't think so.

Rolling Thunder is a minor Varley book, the most recent, and possibly even the most minor, of the minor books he's been writing this decade. It may be selfish and petty of me, but I prefer a decade with two great Varley novels, like Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, to one with four tepid ones. This decade has been good for people who like to read books with the words "John Varley" printed on them at regular intervals, but not nearly so good for Varley fans.

Varley used to be a highly individual writer, who wrote books only he could have. But the current stretch of books -- Red Thunder and Red Lightning, in this series, and the time-travel snugglebunny Mammoth -- have seen him attempt to turn himself into a slavish Heinlein imitator, which is to no one's benefit.

Rolling Thunder is the first-person story of Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond, who is terribly, terribly spunky but still can't quite live up to that septuple-barrelled name. She is, as you've probably guessed, a young Marswoman with a younger brother (though he doesn't come into the story much). Her voice is clear and distinct and deeply enjoyable, and its virtues nearly hide the fact that nothing of any consequence happens in this novel for the first hundred and fifty pages.

Poddy -- of course she goes by Podkayne; did you have any doubt? -- starts Rolling Thunder as the sole employee of a minor Martian consulate in southern California, in the middle of her Israeli-esque mandatory government service. But she's soon catapulted back to Mars and then off to the outer system -- via a series of developments that reminded me of Charles Stross's similarly flawed but generally better Saturn's Children -- for her version of the Grand Tour.

Varley used to be able to write great female protagonists -- think of Anna-Louise Bach, or Fox from "The Phantom of Kansas" -- but he's been infected by late-Heinlein-ism here, and has fallen in love with his heroine, who can do no wrong nor be less than loved by anyone. Poddy is smart, cute, dependable, thriftybravecleanreverent...and an excellent musician and singer of old-fashioned lounge music (of the kind that I'm afraid Varley loves himself). She's sent on a USO-ish tour of the outer system, where she is greeted by massive success, adoring fans, and enigmatic alien doohickeys.

That last item finally kick-starts the plot out of "Poddy sees the solar system" mode, and the shit hits the fan spectacularly. (Red Lightning similarly had a long, leisurely opening before the big event that focused the rest of the book.) Once the fan has been metaphorically cleared, Poddy is vastly more beloved and special even than she was before, although the metaphoric fecal matter has done some unpleasant things to large chunks of humanity.

The story settles back down again after that -- there's only really that one big flurry of events for those looking for adventure or a conventional SF plot -- to Poddy's new life, which proceeds along lines that are unlikely and only barely made plausible by all of Varley's skill. Since many of you won't have read the end of Rolling Thunder, I won't explain further, but her personal life gets a big upheaval, and it smacks of (to be kind, and at the very least) Varley snipping off all of the loose ends in this world and tying it up in a bow.

The very last chapter has a cascade of Heinlein titles, shoved into sentences with a crowbar so that even the dimmest reader will realize that this book had something to do with Heinlein. That chapter also reads like Varley, through Poddy, is tap-dancing as fast as he can to sell his end status quo and make us believe it. Out of deference to my great respect for Varley's work, and for Poddy's undeniable vim and perkiness, I'll say that I found it believable.

Rolling Thunder is the third and least novel in Varley's least ambitious series, and seems to exist primarily to showcase how much Varley liked Heinlein. I liked Heinlein, too, but, to be perfectly blunt, I liked top-rank Varley better. And I sincerely hope that he's gotten the Heinlein homages out of his system, and can go back to Irontown Blues -- or on to something new and exciting and worthy of his immense talent.

The 21st Century Is Clean and Shiny...And Flushes!

In the category of Things You Didn't Know You'd Needed Until They Existed, Immodium, makers of an anti-diarrheal product, have created a map-based Bathroom Finder covering the USA.

For years, the secret knowledge of NYC bathrooms was closely guarded by a few learned masters -- but now, those secrets, and the secrets of every publicly available gas-station, library, town-hall, and hotel bathroom in the country can be yours with a single click.

Ain't life grand?

[via Mark Evanier]

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/16

Once again, I'm listing the books -- usually brand-new -- that I saw the previous week for review or notice or whatever, sent by the various friendly and hardworking publicists of the publishing business.

Here's what I saw:

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany is an attractive little book from Two Cranes Press, along the lines of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. It's edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg, with illustrations by Janet Chui. I've got a finished book, and the cover letter says that they expect most sales to be through their website, so I think this is officially published at this point. Contributors are mostly people I don't recognize -- which doesn't mean much -- but include Jay Lake, Vera Nazarian, Christopher M. Cevasco, and my co-worker Livia Llewellyn. (After a quick check, I found that it's not available at either Amazon or BN.com, which is unfortunate -- I hope it at least gets into the hands of some convention dealers.)

The Scourge of God is the second book in the second trilogy of S.M. Stirling's contemporary "Change" series, in which all technology that interfered with his plot suddenly stopped working so that his characters could batter each other with outdated weaponry. This is precisely the kind of book I avoid reading to protect my blood pressure -- my entire side of the continent is marked on the internal map as "Eastern Death Zone," and I've previously mentioned how I feel about writers who slaughter my family fictionally to allow their neo-barbarians to rape and pillage. So I won't be reading this one, to avoid turning into a spittle-flecked screaming lunatic. But, for those of you who do like this stuff, Roc will publish Scourge of God September 2nd.

The folks at Aurora sent me four more adults-only yaoi manga from their Deux line, neatly sealed up in shrinkwrap that I'm not sure if I'll ever open:

• Ruff Love by Tamaki Krishima, the story of a dog who comes back as a man (with dog ears and tail) to fall in love with his former owner's grandson
• Heavenly Body by Takashi Kanzaki, in which a schoolboy (at boarding school, I think) has his body fought over by boyish representatives of Heaven and Hell
• Hisami Shimada's Maid in Heaven, about a boy who has to replace his grandmother as a maid for a rich young man
• and Two of Hearts by Kano Miyamoto, which might be less high-concept -- the back cover copy talks about a magazine writer who meets a "shy, troubled young man undressing on the beach"

The manga publisher Broccoli also sent me some books, the first time I've looked closely at their output. All were the beginnings of series -- that's probably assumed when it comes to manga, but I'll say it anyway. First was Koi Cupid, an all-ages series by Mia Ikumi. It's about three cute little girls -- Koi, Ai, and Ren -- who are cupids-in-training, and who get into all sorts of trouble. The first volume was published in April, and a second will be out in December.

Also from Broccoli is Sola, a series for teenagers with (in the order of the credits on the book) art by Chaco Abeno, story by Naoki Hisaya, and character design by Naru Nanao. A high school boy whose hobby is taking pictures of the sky meets a girl who can't go out in the sun, and, before long, supernatural stuff and a guy with a sword pop up to make trouble. The first volume of Sola was published in June.

And last of the three from Broccoli is E'S by Satol Yuiga, originally published in January of 2007. (This series has four volumes out already, with four more anticipated before the end of the year.) It looks to my eye like a manga take on the X-Men concept, set in a world where people with psychic powers are persecuted and focusing on Kai Kudou, who is part of an organization to save and protect psychics.

I'm Ahead and Behind at the Same Time!

After a busy day of blogging and laundry, I now have nine posts scheduled to go up later this week -- the usual "Reviewing the Mail," a weekly quote for Friday, and reviews of four books and three movies. (Plus the two book reviews I posted today -- well, the early-morning one I wrote last night.)

I've also written one review for ComicMix and have been poking away at another one, plus mapping out this week's Manga Friday theme.

(On the laundry side, I now have clothes to wear for the week -- plus clean things for the rest of the family -- and clean towels for the whole house!)

And yet, I'm still seven book reviews behind, including Reaper's Gale, which I finished reading back in mid-June. So it's hard to feel like I'm "really" ahead of anything.

But, still -- I could be hit by a bus ten minutes from now, and still be posting for the next five days. That's something to point to, uncomfortably, as a token of borderline-obsessive behavior.

Time for the Naughty Bits

This week's "Manga Friday" post for ComicMix was entitled "Naughty Bits," and it saw me review three comics full of sex and lurve: Manga Sutra, Vol. 1, Pretty Poison, and Yakuza In Love, Vol. 1.

As always, if you publish comics and are indignant that I'm not reviewing them, get in touch with me, send me something, and I'll probably be able to find something to say. If you're indignant that I am reviewing your stuff, well, then you probably already know what to do.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules for Writing

On July 16, 2001, The New York Times published -- on the op-ed page, if I remember correctly -- an essay by Leonard entitled "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle." About six and a half years later, William Morrow published that essay as a book, under the title that everyone had used to describe it anyway.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is a short and small book -- even shorter than it looks, since there's only text on the right-hand pages (and not much of that). Plus, this book is printed on some kind of cardstock, notably thicker than even the bulkiest regular book paper. There also are illustrations by Joe Ciardiello, which are either an added value or a detriment, depending on how you feel about pictures in your books. (I like 'em, but I like pictures in general.)

Leonard's rules are well-known and widely disseminated now; they weren't radical even when he wrote them. But writing is one of those fields where the simple, obvious things need to be repeated over and over again: like sex, it's a field that enthusiastic amateurs jump into every day. His tenth rules sums them all up pretty well: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

His rules are really aimed at writers of popular fiction; they'll be somewhat useful to journalists and other folks who do popular non-fiction, but less applicable to professional and "literary" writing. (Leonard says up front that his rules aren't for writers who "have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you" -- which probably describes the way every would-be writer sees herself.) In fact, the entire essay is utterly focused on fiction; writing that isn't a "story" might as well not exist.

Since the whole essay is still available online in the Time's archives -- here it is, for you curious souls -- the only reason to buy the book is as a gift or for the illustrations. The publisher is pushing it as a gift, but I'd be a little wary of that -- the implied message is "you're a really bad writer, but maybe Leonard can help you." I'd suggest that curious souls either just read it online or check it out in their local library, as I did. More daring souls could try just reading it cover-to-cover in the bookstore; that shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes.

Con Man by J.R. "Yellow Kid" Weil with W.T. Brannon

Joseph Weil was once considered the quintessential American con man; I've not kept up to date with the scholarly study of confidence games, so I can't say whether he's been lapped by some more recent trickster. But in his heyday -- roughly 1895 to 1945 -- he was the king of the swindlers, raking in an estimated eight million dollars during his career bilking the rich and gullible.

Con Man is his professional autobiography, originally published in 1948 and co-written by the novelist and journalist W.T. Brannon. ("Co-written" may be the usual exaggeration; Con Man is in Weil's voice, but that doesn't mean he did anything more than talk while Brannon took notes or ran a tape recorder.) Weil was old and out of the con game at that point -- he was born in 1875 -- but he lived for quite a while afterward, in quiet, law-abiding retirement (or so he said), only dying in 1976 at the age of a hundred.

This is a breezy book, full of colorful names and intricate schemes -- most of them connected with racehorses in one way or another -- but notably light on dates and sequence. It seems to be weighted most heavily towards the early years of Weil's career, before he went to jail for the first time -- say, up until the Great War. It's a pleasant book, but won't be of much direct use to rubes these days; long cons may always be similar in structure, but they're very different in set-up and execution in the 21st century. (And the legal atmosphere, as Weil mentions several times, was vastly different by the time he wrote the book -- bilking a rich Chicagoan around the turn of the last century wasn't even illegal in most cases, since only a bumpkin from the sticks was expected to be dumb enough to fall for such things, and so only the bumpkin had to be protected.) It's heavily anecdotal, as Weil runs through one scheme after another, in a series that the reader assumes is chronological without much evidence. Weil isn't particularly bragging in Con Man -- he's telling stories, in the fine old American style -- but of course he comes out well in nearly all of his stories. (He does tend to skim on the details of the times he was sent up the river.)

Con Man was published as part of a short series called the Broadway Library of Larceny, which comprised at least five books (all reprints, as far as I know) in around 2005 curated and edited by Luc Sante. Sante also dug up a profile piece on Weil from 1956 from The Reporter to serve as an Afterword to this edition, which would be of only mild interest except for the fact that it was written by Saul Bellow.

I've got two of the other Library of Larceny books buried in my to-read stacks -- I can't say that Con Man makes me eager to dive right into them, but it was an pleasant, if lightweight, look at a time and a society that are now long gone.

What the Left Hand Knows

Recently I realized that my to-be-read shelves are so large and capacious that I have entire shelves of things, mostly buried in back and behind, that I've completely forgotten about.

For example: a few weeks ago I was digging through the shelves, trying to pick books for the trip to Anaheim. (This is always complicated, particularly when I have a long plane flight, since some conferences mean a lot of time for reading -- especially if the hall gets dead during sessions, but I'm stuck, alone, in the booth -- and some don't.) I discovered, among other things that were surprises to me, that I had copies of the first "Richard Aleas" novel, Little Girl Lost, and bound galleys of two of the battling Douglas Adams biographies of about five years ago.

I'm so far behind at this point that I could probably stop buying books immediately, read only from my unread stacks, live to a hundred, and still not finish everything. And yet I grabbed six books for myself at the library just this afternoon, including two more volumes of Naruto and new nonfiction by Haruki Murakami and Larry McMurtry.

I'm not sure if that's optimism or insanity...

Follow-Through Can Be a Bitch

I love seeing irony in the wild, and this was today's example:

1) a sign pugnaciously reading "These colors don't run," surrounding an American flag, in the back window of a van.

2) completely washed out and faded by months, if not years, of sunlight.

It might not be "running," precisely, but I don't think that sign is saying what its owner wants it to say.

That also made me wonder about that phrase, and I realized that I don't quite get it. Clearly, it's not just a claim that our nation possesses color-fast dyes, so our flags will maintain their color wash after wash. I guess it could be a coded "never surrender" idea, with a mild pun on "run." But I actually think it belongs the the very large category of bellicose but mildly stupid expressions of blind patriotism -- saying "this is my flag, the best fucking thing in the world because it's my flag."

Watchmen In-Print Update

Remember how it was big news that Watchmen had an additional 300,000 copies rushed into print after the movie trailer debuted with that movie about the flying rodent? (I blogged about it myself.)

Well, the New York Times quietly noted on Wednesday that the actual total number of new copies of Watchmen in print since mid-July is 900,000.

(Sell-through update: after the week when it was up 244% over prior week, and then the week it was up 75% over that, it hit another hugely up week, at 141% -- though the last week, ending 8/10, was down 10%. It's still selling four times what it was just three weeks ago and well over ten times what it was selling per week in mid-June. And, once again, let's remember that Watchmen was a solid backlist book, moving 100,000 units a year consistently. Also, I should add that the numbers I see are for the book trade; they don't include the comics direct market.)

[via The Beat]

Lazy Blog Post, Coming Right Up!

Colleen Lindsay found a fun Australian Mad Libs-esque site that generates Lazy Bloggers Posts, so I just had to try it out myself:

F*** me dead I just climbed out from under my rock and realised I have not updated this since long before Shakespeare wast a boy... You would not believe how heavy that rock really is. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones!

I am flat out like a lizard drinking with an awfully big adventure, learning to speak Japanese, just generally being a nuisance to society in general, my day is a nightmare I would like to wake up from the second I am woken by murderous Teletubbies to 11pm at which point I fall asleep on the couch. I am avoiding recapture. my kids think I don't make sense any more.

I swear on the bones of my ancestors I will update you with my nefarious activities as soon as I get a chance. Seriously! Assuming I don't get distracted by counting my chest hairs..

The choices of things to say can get a bit Aussie-centric, but it's still a great time-saver for lazy bloggers around the world.

It's Bulwer-Lytton Time Again

The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were released for today's news cycle -- coincidentally as I'd just finished reading the 1982-2005 winners in a book of random stuff last night.

As usual, there is a grand prize winner, some runners-up, and individual category winners. The contest, for those of you who haven't heard of it before, is to create the horrible opening sentence to an imaginary novel, and its name (dis)honors the once-popular Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, author of the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night."

This year's winner was:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

The website has many, many more entries from this year, including this winner in the Romance category:

Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner.

(After reading the past winners, I was feeling inspired and thinking about entering myself -- though I now see that I have quite some time to hone an entry for the next year's competition.)

I Am Lucky in Minor, Backhanded Ways

I've noted this privately before, but generally not brought it up in public, since it would look like bragging. But events generally tend to break my way, when bad things happen.

I just thought of it again today, with the news of Netflix's mailing troubles. I just got a Netflix envelope at home yesterday; I was one of the people they did manage to mail to on Wednesday. (The big glitch delayed me a day; another DVD looks to be on its way today.)

My major bit of unlikely luck, though, was getting laid off last year -- I was out before the economy started to go south, and landed in a nice stable company (check out our annual report for lots of boring statistics about how solid we are), just as my old company went through its latest round of gyrations.

(And I know how conservative and risk-averse I am: I would never have left that job under my own power, no matter how bad things got.)

When I had heart trouble a few years back, it wasn't the heart attack I thought I was having, but something less exciting and easier to deal with.

All in all, whenever something unpleasant happens to me, it's generally not as big as it could have been, and it usually leads to things getting better.

This is my superpower: I am All-for-the-best Lad! It is a small thing, but mine own.

Quote of the Week

"In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency."
- Lois McMaster Bujold, in her Denvention 3 Guest of Honor speech,
as quoted by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Tracking, Tracking

The meme I did yesterday -- originated by another Andrew Wheeler, the one who is English and writes about food -- is spreading, and it amuses me that I seem to be the main vector for its spread.

How can I tell? Well, most of the blogs doing it today have the phrase "the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler" in them, which is from that post of mine. (And I only used that phrase to differentiate the meme-originating AW from myself -- it's difficult when one is only a single part of a vast array of Andrew Wheelers.)

And now I'm thinking that every Andrew Wheeler should have a unique identifying adjective. But what would mine be? The SFnal Andrew Wheeler?

Pay Me, Damnit! Pay Me!

At the risk of beating a dead horse, a bit of follow-up. (I'll try to be brief.)

Gabe Chouinard recently lamented (at great length) the fact that the SF field doesn't do what he wants it to...but fails to actually say what he wants.

He starts off by complaining that I'm emblematic of a "reluctance to embrace anything new." He then rambles off into other areas I won't touch -- otherwise we'd be here all day -- but he's misunderstood this particular argument. (I accept that this is likely because I expressed myself badly the first time around.) Let me put it in the form of two basic laws of reviewing.

Law 1: Writing a review for any media outlet, and being paid by that media outlet, is a good thing.

Law 2: A reviewer, like a judge, should always strive to not only be impartial, but to appear impartial.

So: writing for Strange Horizons, getting paid by Strange Horizons is good. Writing for Strange Horizons, getting paid by Pyr...is bad.

This is an essential matter of journalistic ethics, and has nothing to do with "moving forward" or any visions of the future. If you accept pay from the people you cover, you might be financially better off, but you lose the appearance of impartiality, and, sooner or later, you lose the reality of it as well. And hitting the people you cover up for money, even if it's not officially money for reviews, looks like a protection racket, and will be seen as corrupt.

Gabe, I was a corporate blogger, for just about a year -- I was the sole blogger for the SFBC Blog. (Google for it; I think it's still up, cobwebbed and dark.)

I also review books, online, for pay, regularly.

Respectfully, you're trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. You missed the point completely.

Eating Everything

How could I avoid a meme created by another Andrew Wheeler? The Omnivore's Hundred is a list of foods the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives.

The rules of the meme: bold those you have tried, strikethrough those you wouldn't eat on a bet. Links were provided for the more obscure items.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Looks like I've got some eating to do...

More ComicMix Goodies

Once again, I'm behind. Here's what I've been up to over there:

• today I reviewed the second reprint volume of Tim Truman's '80s series Scout
• yesterday I reviewed the first collection of Julia Wertz's webcomic The Fart Party
• Friday had the usual "Manga Friday" post (despite my spending that week in Anaheim, trying to keep professors from walking away with my books), which reviewed: #1, nothing; #2, Kaze No Hana; #3, Alice on Deadlines; and #4, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning.

This week will see its own Manga Friday, and possibly something else, if I find more spare time than I expect to. And next week I hope things go back to normal. (My company's current Sales Meeting will be over by then.)

How to Be Nice to Publicists

If we're all over our snit about wanting to get paid to review books on blogs -- and we are over that, right? -- wouldn't it be nice if we knew the most effective and pleasant ways to get in touch with publicists and get those books?

The Book Publicity Blog explains it all. If you've ever asked for books, you should read that post. (It's quite friendly, along with being very useful.)

The Name Game

In one of the quickest fire sales in recent memory, the hand-off of Bertelsmann's US-based direct-to-consumer businesses to the mysterious Najafi Companies is reported (by Publishers Lunch) to be completed.

That means that the company that used to be Bookspan, before it split into a holding company for Doubleday Entertainment and YES Solutions, and which before that was briefly "the Entity" after being formed from Book-of-the-Month Inc. and Doubleday Direct Inc. (which itself was previously Doubleday Book & Music Clubs Inc.), has been both Bertelsmann Direct and Direct Group North America before, finally, turning into the deeply bland Direct Brands Inc.

Is that clear?