Stop Saying That!

There's an idea about that ebooks do not cause any costs to their publishers. (Every person who works in publishing is now laughing, hollowly.) This is a lie. Here's one manifestation of that lie, but it's common on the Internet.

Creating an individual ebook format -- one of the current suite of them -- costs roughly as much as creating a print-on-paper edition; the costs of the actual paper and ink are vanishingly small in this equation. Some ebook formats, such as the currently fashionable one, have a baroque process of creation that involves multiple transformations and iterations of quality control, which drives up costs further. And the cost per unit is massively higher for ebooks than for printed books -- infinitely so in some cases, since there are plenty of ebook editions that have never sold a single copy.

So: stop saying that ebooks should be cheap to buy because they don't cost the publisher anything. It's not true in the slightest. At the moment, they're a huge money sink, and the only reason publishers do it at all is in the hope that someday they might only cost as much as print editions.

Fake Onion Headlines Post-9/11

I haven't managed to get a real post out today, and I'm hip-deep in writing a review for ComicMix, so I don't think I will get one done, either. So I'll dip into the archives -- I had intended to post this on or soon after the 11th this year, but either forgot or chickened out thought better of it.

Back in the early aughts, I spent a lot of time on the Straight Dope Message Board. One of the more pointed threads there started up about a week after the 9/11 attacks, when the more black-comedic of us tried to predict the headlines for the next issue of The Onion. We were all wrong, of course, but these were my contributions:

9/19/01 1:57 PM

Bush Declares War on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Stan Musial
"Who can keep them straight?" Asks Prez

Socialites Kept From Lavish Waterfront Condos For Eighth Straight Day
Unruly, impeccably-dressed crowd gathers outside Balducci's

Gambino, Castellano Families Rejoice
"Carting" business sees massive profits; law enforcement distracted
"That fuck bin Laden's the best thing that ever happened to us." Jokes John Gotti

Empire State Building Questioned
"I would never hurt Tradey," Says Empire, "They were like little brothers to me."

Point/Counterpoint:
This Would Never Have Happened If I Were President
by Albert Gore

Shut Up, You Loser
by George W. Bush

9/20/01 10:58 AM

India Demands "Dibs" on Pakistan
"Bush can nuke Kabul, but Islamabad is ours, man," Claims Prime Minister, "We've been ready for years to kick their asses."

China Massacres Tibetans, Dissidents, Intellectuals, Foreigners, Livestock
Leaders Call for "Renewed Cultural Revolution"
"Don't waste my time with pissant shit," Says Colin Powell.

Jesus Returns to Earth With Message of Peace for All Mankind, Back in Heaven by Lunchtime
"The time wasn't right," Explains Savior.
Hopes to Reschedule "Second Coming" in New Year

Pate Supplies in Lower Manhattan Dangerously Low
Trucking Delays Taking Huge Toll on Idle Rich
Prices for Helicopter Flights to Hamptons Soar

Brooklyn Reels in Horror
"We haven't been able to see Jersey for 30 years, man, and now it's right in our faces," Weeps One Man

9/21/01 11:50 AM

Missing Terror Victims Unhurt; Were Miraculously Saved by Invisible Flying Saucers
Found Sipping Tea with Elvis, Judge Crater
Will Return to Earth with Honor Guard of Airborne Pigs

FEMA Enforces Strict "No Looting" Policy for Emergency Workers
Ill-Paid EMT Forced to Return Bond Trader's Bulging Wallet

Pentagon Staff Demands Equality of Mourning
"Hey, we were hit by a plane too," Says one anonymous source, "Just because our building was strong enough not to fall down doesn't mean we're worthless."
Rural Pennsylvania Had No Comment

Tajikistan Offers Self as Staging Ground for Attack
Told "Not to Hold Its Breath"

Eminem Claims Hate-Filled Song "Stan" Is Actually About Taliban; Should be Spelled " 'stan"
Scrawny Cretin Is Roundly Mocked

Wall Street Announces 50% Reduction in "Big, Swinging Dicks"
No Layoffs Needed; Reduction in Force Accomplished by Attrition, Fire

9/24/01 11:05 AM

FBI Arrests Last Free Arab-American
Yusuf al-Islam, Greengrocer, Surrenders Peacefully
"Our long national nightmare has finally come to an end." Says FBI Spokesman

Congress Passes Hate-Crime Rider
All Hate Crime Laws Now Say "Except for dirty towel-heads."
Hastert Hopes to Pass Murder Exception in Next Week

Bin Laden Lost In Mountains
Taliban Say They Can't Find Him, "Asked All His Neighbors"
Moved, Left No Forwarding Address

Artist Christo Claims Responsibility for Trade Center Attacks
Environmental Art to Wrap Lower Manhattan in Dust
Threatens Suit Over Destruction of Artwork

Man, 33, Killed at O'Hare Metal Detectors
Reportedly Joked, "I've only Got a Small Bomb, Is That OK?"
Hit Simultaneously by 37 Briefcases, 22 Handbags and 16 Shoes

I'd say that I'm going to hell for this stuff, but I expect it would have happened by now if it was going to. On the other hand. my heart trouble did hit less than six months later...

We Finally Really Did It! You Maniacs!

Today, for ComicMix, I reviewed two cheery and upbeat graphic novels about apocalypse and destruction: Toxic Planet by David Ratte and Ball Peen Hammer by Adam Rapp and George O'Connor.

I wasn't overly impressed, but, then again, I'm like that.
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Listening to: Okkervil River - The War Criminal Rises and Speaks
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/26

It's been another week for mail, and I guess it's time for me to let you know what I've seen. Every Monday, I do a post like this to list everything that arrived in the mail the previous week. They were all sent to me for review but -- given time and other constraints -- it's very unlikely that I'll ever manage to review everything I see. So I try to give a quick advance look at everything as it comes in, to give them all a little bit of attention.

This week's happy surprise was a bound galley of Iorich, Steven Brust's upcoming novel and the twelfth in his "Vlad Taltos" series. (I've been reading that series since it started in 1983, which makes me feel old. I can only imagine Brust feels older, which comforts me slightly.) Iorich will be published in hardcover by Tor in January of 2010, and it presents me with a dilemma. Since I stopped working for the book clubs, I've tried not to read and review books before publication -- partly because there's something unfair in parading a book that most people can't get yet, and partly because, as a book marketer myself, I know I want press for a book to hit when it would do the book some good. But I may not be able to wait that long to read this. (On the other hand, it reminds me that I still need to drop back and read Dzur, which I didn't read when it was published for complicated waiting-to-do-a-omnibus reasons related to the old job.) If I do eventually read this book, and gloat about it, before publication, I apologize in advance.

I'm not sure how to react to the partial bound galley of Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing... -- which declares itself "an exclusive extended preview" on its cover -- particularly on top of my already massive ambivalence about the project to begin with. On the one hand, it's not as if all of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books were good -- the back half of the series, roughly, was at best a curate's egg and was written almost entirely for the money -- so I don't want to claim any high moral standard and demand that no one else sully his great vision. And I haven't read any of Colfer's other books, so I don't have any educated opinion on his work. (Though he has sounded funny and thoughtful in interviews.) But this book just never seemed like a good idea at all -- the strengths of the Hitchhiker books were inherently those of Adams himself, and trying to replicate them with a different author didn't seem like a useful aim to begin with. But now to find out that the bound galleys, being distributed just a few weeks before the publication date (October 12) are incomplete -- it makes me wonder if Hyperion (the publisher) thinks that there's something shocking or newsworthy in the book. I don't see how that could possibly be -- though Colfer hints in that direction in his back-cover letter -- but, if nothing else, it's certainly a decent publicity hook. The good news is that I now have no reason to want to read any of this half-a-book: if it's good, I'd want the rest, and if it's bad, there's no reason to read even this much. But: the book is coming, and half of it is in the hands of various Media People, down to even me. So, if you want to read it, there's not much wait left.

Oh, let's dive into some manga now, shall we? I'll bullet these for a change of pace, which also will serve to attempt to hide how little I have to say about them individually:

• Karakuri Odette, Vol. 1 comes from Tokyopop and is the new series from Julietta Suzuki, creator of Akuma to Dolce (or so it says on the back cover; I've never heard of Suzuki or Akuma, possibly to my eternal shame). It's the story of a gorgeous teen-girl android going to school to learn to be human, and it's publishing in October.
• Chibi Vampire, Vol. 14 is the latest volume in a series that I've never read -- but nevertheless is one of my favorite titles of all time -- by Yuna Kagesaki, and Tokyopop published itin September.
• From Blu -- which I thought was part of a manga publishing company whose name includes a certain very famous city, though this book has no reference to any other entity -- comes the yaoi story Cause of My Teacher by Temari Matsumoto, in which a teenage boy is dating his male teacher. Im not sure if that plot is a better illustration of the difference between Japan and the US, or between fiction and the real world, but it's definitely an eye-opener. This was published back in May.
  
• Tokyopop also published KimiKiss, Vol. 2, which credits art to Taro Shinonome and story to "Entebrain, Inc." -- I've heard of creative types incorporating themselves, but they usually credit their real names! -- which is a school romance story with a focus on soccer. (I also suspect that each volume of this series tells an independent story, but the book doesn't quite say that specifically.) It's coming in October.
• An actual real second volume -- as far as I can tell -- is Samurai Harem: Asu no Yoichi, Vol. 2 by Yu Minamoto, also from Tokyopop in October. It's the source of the anime series of the same name...which I've never seen. But it seems to be a reasonably typical harem/fighting hybrid, though the hero seems to be less of a schlemazl than is usual for the form.
• And last for the bullets of manga is Inukami! Vol 4, by Mari Matsuzawa and Mamizu Arisawa and published September 29th by Tor/Seven Seas. I reviewed the first volume of this series last November for ComicMix.
  

Not quite manga -- which is why it's outside of the bullets -- but primarily of interest to fans of a particular series is the very oddly capitalized RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE: Tsubasa CHARactER GuiDE 2, credited to the manga collective CLAMP (who do the Tsubasa series) and to Weekly Shonen Magazine Editorial Department, whom I suspect did all of the real work in putting the book together. Presumably, you'll only be interested in this if you're a big fan of the series, and also already have the first CHARACTer GuiDE, but, if that describes you, you may be happy to know that this second one will be available October 13th. The rest of us will just look at this and wonder what, exactly, is up with the weirdly capitalized letters.

Things Undone is a new graphic novel by Shane White, which is about a young man who is becoming a zombie -- or maybe just feeling like a zombie -- in his new Seattle job. It's described as a dark comedy, which I usually like, and it will be published by NBM in November. I hope it's a bit more than the usual "I'm young and my life is lousy" story, since I find that I have less and less tolerance for those as I get older and find that my life is not appreciably less lousy than it was when I was the age of those guys -- lousiness is just something that you get in a life.

Also from NBM, but hitting stores a month earlier, is the new book in the "Dungeon" series, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Innocence Lost. This one has a story by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim, as always, and art by Christophe Blain. The Dungeon books have greatly proliferated into a wide variety of sub-series at this point; see my recent review of volumes in two of them for my attempt to make sense of it all.

Marvel just published an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz by Eric Shanower and Scottie Young, which looks really cute. (I remember there being some controversy about Young's art-style -- wasn't there some other project, from another publisher, that looked amazingly like a Scottie Young work coming out at the exact same time? -- but my Google-fu is weak today, and I can't find it.) Anyway, this will probably become fodder for my Realms of Fantasy column.

Drawn & Quarterly publish books that just look great, and Nancy: Volume One is no exception. I'm slightly disappointed that it's John Stanley's Nancy -- the comic-book stories -- rather than the pure Ernie Bushmiller three-rocks Zen comic-strip wonderfulness -- but D&Q is in the middle of a big Stanley reprint project, and I think someone else has recently announced a big Bushmiller series. (Or maybe I'm hallucinating; that happens sometimes.) Nancy came out in September, and now I want to try to review it along with Melvin Monster, another John Stanley reprint for D&Q.

And last for this week is a big kahuna, one of the major books of the fall: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. (You know that you're a big deal when your name gets incorporated into the title.) It's the full text of the first book of the Bible, faithfully illustrated by the greatest name in underground cartooning, and W.W. Norton will publish it on October 19th.
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Listening to: +/- [Plus Minus] - You'll Catch Your Death
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Bullets Over Broadway

The Wife wasn't interested in seeing Bullets Over Broadway -- the fact that it was directed by Woody Allen may have turned her off, actually -- so I ended up watching it by myself. And that's often not a good idea, since I distract myself when I'm watching a movie alone, unless it's absolutely gripping. (I've been known to distract myself when watching movies in company as well, but that's a different problem.)

So this was one of the Woodman's periodic returns to comedy; this one for about fifteen years ago. I also found John Cusack -- as the young writer at the center of the movie, i.e., the Woody Allen figure -- didn't do as much of an Allen imitation as many of the actors in similar parts before and since did, which was nice.

But, overall, I didn't pay as much attention to this movie as I probably should have. It was funny in spots, and had some interesting characters, but I suspect I needed to be much more involved in live theater (it's set in the theatrical, and gangster, world of New York in the '20s) than I am to really appreciate it.

So: I saw it, and don't remember it well. On to something else.

Incoming Books: September 27

I'll get to my usual "Reviewing the Mail" post tomorrow morning -- which will cover the things that publishers sent me for review last week -- but I also got one book randomly from a friend (without even a note, though I think I know why he sent it) and the box of stuff I ordered from Top Shelf's recent sale. So I'm breaking those out into a separate post, since they're not "for review" in the same way, and to keep the other post from getting too long.

Anyway, that mysterious book, from someone who can identify himself here if he wants, is The World of P. G. Wodehouse, a look at the life and work of the greatest comic writer of the 20th century from 1971 by Herbert Warren Wind. (And which is a slightly expanded version of a profile from The New Yorker -- it's good to know some things in publishing never change.)

And the rest of these books came from Top Shelf, at ridiculously low prices:

• Lilli Carre's Tales Of Woodsman Pete, stories about a solitary bearded guy in the woods (along with some Paul Bunyan stories as well). I read Carre's The Lagoon during my Eisner frenzy earlier this year, so I wanted to take another look at her work.
• Lone Racer, by Nicolas Mahler -- about a formerly major race-car driver who's been marginalized by time. Again, I read Mahler's Van Helsing's Night Out last year (from the last time Top Shelf had a big sale), and really liked it, so I'm happy to find more of his stuff.
• Trenches is a graphic novel about the first World War by Scott Mills -- I didn't know anything about it or him before I saw it in the Top Shelf sale, but Top Shelf has great taste in their publishing program, so I decided to give it a try.
• Top Shelf Under the Big Top is an anthology from 1999 -- hm, I hadn't realized it was that old. I like to grab comics anthologies every so often to introduce myself to cartoonists that I haven't noticed before, but I'm not sure who I'll discover in a ten-year-old book. (Well, you never know, I guess.)
• And speaking of anthologies, I also got Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions, which is somewhat newer, from 2003.
  

I'll probably have another Top Shelf round-up post once I get through most or all of those; watch this space.
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Listening to: RATATAT - Mirando
via FoxyTunes

Comics About Architecture

On Wednesday, I reviewed David Mazzucchelli's first graphic novel Asterios Polyp for ComicMix. It's a major work...and I'm pretty pleased with my review, too.

I keep hoping to get my ComicMix reviews back on a consistent Mon-Wed-Fri schedule, but life keeps getting in the way -- this week, it was the second Back-to-School Night of the month (for my older son, who's now in middle school). I'll keep plugging away, and see how much I can get done. I do have a frighteningly large pile of books that I've already read and need to review, which I hope will motivate me.

Linking, Demands, and Bookselling

A minor kerfuffle arose yesterday over the news that Barnes & Noble has been asking -- or demanding, or threatening, or cajoling, or whatever, depending on how many levels of gossip the story had run through, and who was telling the story -- authors to link to BN.com as well as other online booksellers, on pain of B&N possibly not carrying that author's books in their stores.

The story broke originally on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books -- which has many good points, but is sadly very prone to hysterical over-reaction and groupthink, as if they're determined to prove all of the cliches about romance readers true -- with a typically high-dudgeon outraged rant. (Don't get me wrong; I enjoy outraged rants, and have perpetrated many of them myself. But I thought this one was severely beside the point, and could be actively harmful to authors who follow that line of thinking.)

I posted some quick comments on the story -- on Twitter, on the GalleyCat story, and replying to some comments on Facebook -- but didn't have a chance to sit down and run through it more carefully until now.

I do appreciate that authors are upset; B&N is a huge chunk of the retail book business in North America, and the possibility of loss of access to that is a frightening prospect. It's also important to note that the story is coming out at fourth-hand: B&N talked to publishers, who talked to authors, some of whom who complained to third parties, some of whom then publicized the story. So there has been plenty of room for nuance and detail to be lost along the way.

I need to tread lightly on this subject; I am a marketing manager for books for a major publishing house, and my colleagues and I have been hearing similar messages from several major accounts for some time now. I'm not going to discuss anything proprietary or specific to my company, just the general outlines of the situation.

But I really don't think this is a big deal. Booksellers are all trying to maximize their reach, and they're continually looking at what they're putting their resources behind and re-justifying those resources. They think like businesspeople, because they are businesspeople. Authors, on the other hand, usually don't think that way, and don't like to consider themselves in business.

But they are. Each author is the proprietor of a small business -- some are larger than others, of course -- and small businesses need to keep an eye on their major customers. For most authors in North America, those major customers are, in vague order of importance: B&N, Amazon, Borders/Walden, Books-A-Million, Indigo/Chapters. (The precise order varies by genre and specific author, but those are the players in their rough sequence.) And if B&N is your most important customer -- and, for a huge number of authors, it is -- you need to pay attention to what that customer wants.

As all small businesspeople know, customers aren't always rational, and their demands/requests not always reasonable. But this request/demand -- that, if an author is linking to booksellers on her website, that she include this bookseller as well -- strikes me as being in everyone's best interest. The author links more widely, and possibly gets more sales. The booksellers are treated equally, and each get a piece of the online sales.

Now, I may be more sanguine about this situation than most; I've been pushing books (through a great group of reps) to various booksellers for two years now, and I think I've had precisely one book that even managed to get to an all-stores level at both B&N and Borders. So I've internalized a lesson that a lot of editors, authors, agents, and other publishing folks don't like to think about: there's no guarantee that any account will take any book. The accounts make the decisions on whether to carry a book or not; we don't. We can pitch, we can sell, we can bounce up and down with enthusiasm, but, in the end, it's their decision. I do a lot of books that go to "top stores" at major accounts, and some that don't even manage that. That does make those books tougher to sell...but not impossible. But if an account tells you that they really want X -- and X is something that's pretty simple for you to do -- you'd have to be a fool, or a martyr, not to do X.

So, authors: if you have web presences, you need to decide about your links. You can link to a wide variety of booksellers, or to none. But linking to one or two is just going to get the others mad at you -- and you want those booksellers to like you, and to want to sell your books. Ask your particular publishers what the concerns are in your case -- all buyers and all accounts are not equal, and some are tougher on this subject than others -- and make a smart decision accordingly. And, most of all, remember that the point is to get more copies of your books into more hands, so more connections and sales outlets is better.

Fireworks: Jingoistic or Not?

I've been very quiet on this blog for the front half of this month -- things have been busy at work, and I've been so tired/lazy at night that I've mostly been playing online games and generally wasting time instead of blogging. (Plus the kinds just went back to school, which means schedules are now both different and busier.) That means I've got a backlog of things I wanted to blog about, which may finally spur me to activity. (We'll see.)

First up is the question of fireworks. The Sunday of Labor Day weekend was Pompton Day -- most of the towns in my area have a street fair-cum-Whitmanian celebration of themselves at some point during the summer, and this was our turn. As usual in the US, a civic holiday in the summer means large explosions once darkness hits, and so there was a fireworks display over the local lake. (The town is Pompton Lakes, after all.)

The choice of music during the pyrotechnics was aggressively Amurrican -- almost entirely rah-rah patriotic, from Kate Smith to those flag-waving country songs that people who drive pick-ups love so much. And that got me to thinking.

I wondered if this is a particularly American phenomenon -- perhaps influenced by our national anthem, which is, after all, about watching "shells bursting in air" as the enemy attacks one of our forts -- or if fireworks displays are just vehicles for nationalism wherever they appear.

And I could have continued to wonder, but I decided I would, instead, ask you folks, in an utterly unscientific poll, how fireworks displays work where you live.

I'm going to try to embed a poll in the body of this blog to ask that question. I'm using an online poll service -- I expect to see a number of comments about how I've chosen the wrong one, and how this one is crashing various people's weird homebrew Linux rigs running on tree bark -- for the first time, and I expect bugs. If all goes well, it'll sit up at the top of this blog for about a week. If all goes wrong...I'll try something else; maybe a Blogger poll in the sidebar.
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Listening to: we are soldiers we have guns - Songs That No One Will Hear
via FoxyTunes

Fireworks Poll

A minor point of clarification: I'm not asking Americans to identify themselves as Red or Blue, but their communities, since I suspect, e.g. Alabama is more likely to have flag-waving in any random civic context than e.g. Vermont. Given that I'm from New Jersey, which is both quite Blue and full of patriotic music during our fireworks, this may not turn out to be the case.

Update: This fancy poll isn't working properly; the "vote now" button leads to the homepage of the poll service. (I guess you get what you pay for with free web apps.) I will tinker with it as much as my (very minor) coding skills allow, but this link goes directly to a page where the poll can actually be taken.

Are the fireworks displays you see typically nationistic in theme?

• I'm an American (God-fearing Red State division) and I say Yes.
• 
  I'm an American (God-fearing Red State division) and I say No.


• I'm an American (tree-hugging Blue State division) and I say Yes.


• I'm an American (tree-hugging Blue State division) and I say No.


• I'm a Canadian (insert your own characterization in comments) and I say Yes.


• I'm a Canadian (insert your own characterization in comments) and I say No.


• I'm British and I say Yes.


• I'm British and I say No.


• I'm from somewhere else in Europe and I say Yes.


• I'm from somewhere else in Europe and I say No.


• I'm Australian and I say Yes.


• I'm Australian and I say No.


• I'm from somewhere you neglected to mention, you fascist enthnocentrist you, and I say Yes.


• I'm from somewhere you neglected to mention, you fascist enthnocentrist you, and I say No.


• I wish to object to this poll on technical grounds, which I will enumerate in tedious detail below in comments.


• I am not satisfied with any of the above answers.


• I just like making trouble.

view results
Free vote poll

Quote of the Week

"Ho do you know if it's time to wash the dishes and clean the house? Look inside your pants. If you find a penis in there, it's not time."
- Jo Brand

Abandoned Books: The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

This is not a review; I only read the first 79 pages of The Sheriff of Yrnameer, and I can't speak at all to the remaining 190 pages. It may become the greatest novel in the history of the universe in that space, for all I know. But I didn't expect it would, so I put it down quietly, and I don't expect to pick it back up again. We all make our choices in life.

Sheriff of Yrnameer is the first novel by a TV writer/producer, and I have to admit that I assumed it would be lousy as soon as I saw that. It's petty and reductive of me, and I regret it, but it's true. It's supposedly satirical as well -- Yrnameer is a corruption of "Your Name Here," and the planet of that name is the fabled Last Unbranded Outpost of Freedom in a Corporately Controlled Galaxy.

I was hoping that Rubens would show some small sign that he'd ever read Fredric Brown, or Bob Sheckley, or Fred Pohl -- any of the mid-'50s Galaxy stable, to which Yrnameer owes everything -- or even Douglas Adams. (I was beyond hoping for a reference to John Sladek; that would have been too much hope.) I didn't get any of those...in the first 79 pages, of course.

The pages I read of Yrnameer are set in that terribly familiar circa-1960 default future Milky Way -- full of planets that it's easy to get to, and alien races that are physically bizarre but psychologically just like the carpenters of Levittown. Ron Goulart did versions of that setting -- but he did them funnier than this, he did them three times a year or so, and he did them in paperback about forty years ago.

I have the terrible feeling that Yrnameer is supposed to be funny, as well. Now, humor is famously relative, so you shouldn't necessarily take my word for it, but...it isn't funny. Not a bit. (Well, not at all in those 79 pages. Perhaps the other 190 are sparkling with Coward-ian wit.)

I could go on, but why? Yrnameer has taken the most basic and degraded furniture of SF from fifty years ago and found new bland things to do with it. That's an achievement of a sort, I suppose.

When books like this get published I shudder for humanity. Or at least the part of humanity that toils in publishing companies, as I do. If you want to read a SF novel this year, please at least read one by someone whose read a SF novel from the last four decades? Please?

Other Spaces, Other Times by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg has never before written a formal autobiography, and he's hasn't actually written one now; Other Spaces, Other Times gathers a variety of pre-existing essays with some autobiographical content into a rough organization based on chronology and theme. It doesn't consistently explain where those essays come from -- though a few declare themselves to have come from Amazing Stories in the early '90s, and some others are obvious story notes from Silverberg's 2005 retrospective In the Beginning.

Other Spaces is divided into four main sections, plus a new introduction and a decent bibliography, and is also extensively illustrated with photos of Silverberg in his younger days and the covers of various publications featuring his work. That art, like the prose, is slightly haphazardly chosen and placed, but it's all excellent and worth being in the book somewhere, even if there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for it to be on that particular page. The layout is solidly professional as well -- and that only looks like a small thing when it's done right, particularly where there's so much art for the text to run around.

The first section of the book, "Beginnings," shows Silverberg running through the events of his early life -- primarily those parts of it that took place after he discovered science fiction stories, of course. Since it's made up of about a dozen separate essays, there's some repetition as well as plenty of things that Silverberg never gets around to writing about. But we've all see this kind of thing before, from various writers and fans, so we can always fill in those gaps ourselves.

The second part of Other Spaces is a collection of story head-notes from mostly the early part of his career -- though it does also encompass most of the most renowned and famous stories from the '60s through the early '90s. This section is also repetitious, particularly in the notes on those early stories -- Silverberg essentially traces his development, story by story, for two years, and then speeds up to hit only the high points of the next forty years. This is an artifact of the essays that existed to be collected into this book, obviously, but it would have been nice to see Silverberg talking about his career and writing at greater length and with a more coherent focus.

Next is a section called "Autobiography," the bulk of which is the essay "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal," originally published in Hell's Cartographers, a collection of similar autobiographical essays by SF writers and edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison. (The '70s really was a time when any anthology idea could get published.) That essay covers, again, some of the same years and thoughts and ideas and the previous essays, and it is followed by an update, a year later, and then some more miscellaneous pieces from later in Silverberg's career, mostly focusing on his popular world of Majipoor.

And then last is "Miscellany of a Life," which collects more essays, still mostly on SFnal topics, but not always as close to Silverberg's own career.

I'm generally dubious about books that pretend to be something that they aren't, and Other Spaces, Other Times is very much an essay collection masquerading as autobiography. However, since the veil isn't very thick to begin with, and since Silverberg is a wonderful storyteller collecting interesting stories of a long and fruitful career, I'm prepared to overlook the blot this time. But I do hope that neither Silverberg nor Nonstop Press, which published this book, makes a habit of it.
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Listening to: The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer #1
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: My Neighbors the Yamadas

I'm picking off the last few Studio Ghibli movies that I haven't seen yet, and so the Hornswoggler family recently saw My Neighbors the Yamadas for one of our Friday family movie nights.

It's directed by Isao Takahata, better known for Grave of the Fireflies (which I still haven't seen, since it would be too much for my sons and I don't really have time to see animated movies without them) and for Pom Poko (which might just be the one movie my older son has seen the most; he returns to it every two or three months like clockwork, and like no other movie). Yamadas is a much lighter movie than either of those, though, a pastel-colored cartoony series of loosely interlinked sketches about one Japanese family.

There's no continuing story, just a series of story-like scenes about these five people -- father, mother, grandmother (I didn't quite figure out whose mother she was supposed to be, actually), older brother, and younger sister. There's a mixture of broad comedy -- the characters are all types, though they seem somewhat less like types to those of us from the other side of the world -- and of smaller, quieter haiku-inspired moments. It's all based on a popular series of 4-panel Japanese comics by Hisaichi Ishii, which I don't think have ever been widely available in English translation -- so we're all on our own that way.

If you're willing to accept the idiosyncratic animation -- it doesn't look like any other movie I've ever seen, in its hazy, caricatured, watercolored, half-finished way -- and the lack of an overall plot arc, My Neighbors the Yamadas has a lot of enjoyment to be found in it. It's quite funny, in ways that mostly do translate. It's a bit like a more refined, though still occasionally earthy, Japanese version of the original Simpsons shorts from twenty years ago -- the stories of one family who are definitely not role models, but whom we can sometimes see ourselves in.

Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman has previously written young adult novels -- Coraline and The Graveyard Book -- and picture books -- Crazy Hair and Blueberry Girl -- but Odd and the Frost Giants sees him hitting the land in between those great children's-book empires, with a novel solidly launched at the middle-grade audience.

Odd is a short book, and somewhat obvious; Gaiman tamps down his natural slyness and wit for this younger audience in a way that he never did for their older siblings. Coraline and Graveyard Book, for all their brevity, are two of his best and most biting works, belying the usual idiocy that adult writers "limit themselves" when they writer for a younger audience. But Odd, though clever and engaging, is obviously a more circumscribed story than Gaiman's books for older younger readers.

Odd is a boy of indeterminate years, growing up smart (and lame, after an unfortunate tree-chopping accident partly caused by that cleverness) in a small Nordic village somewhere cold and unspecified, when the men of his land still went as Vikings to get what they wanted -- food, valuables, wives. Odd's own mother was raped away from Scotland by his now-dead father, which Gaiman, unsatisfyingly, mentions once early on in the novel, and then explains, with much more of a tone of juvenality than his voice can sustain, that said father was so in love with that mother that he did carry her off, but didn't touch her until he made her fall in love with him. There are writers who could pull that off -- William Goldman, in full Princess Bride mode, could, and Gaiman could have made a good run at it as well using his full powers -- but it sits their like a Lie-to-Children in this novel, a stumbling block for anyone, young or old, who is not as innocent as Gaiman assumes his reader will be.

Odd detests his stepfather and new stepsiblings, and so spends his time, at what he hopes is the tail end of a far-too-long winter, out in his father's abandoned wood-cutting hut. And there he's met by three animals -- a fox, a bear, and a one-eyed eagle. They turn out to be more than they seem, and soon Odd is off with them to confront the frost giant of the title, across the rainbow bridge Bifrost. (For Gaiman, as is often the case, is classically oriented, and so a fantasy story set among Vikings must mean their cosmology as well.)

Odd's name is in the title, and this is a book for young readers, so the reader can assume it all comes out right in the end. It also doesn't take very long to get to that end; Odd is less than two hundred pages, and those are small pages with large words on them. (Not to mention the dozen or two full-page illustrations by Brett Helquist, which are excellent but do tend to make the reading experience even quicker than one expected.)

Odd and the Frost Giants was originally published in the UK as a special edition for World Book Day -- this imposed certain limitations (of length and, I believe, of audience as well) that made this book what it is. It's a great cause, and there are probably thousands of kids in the UK for whom Odd is the first book they owned for themselves, or read with enjoyment. But, outside of that, it is a quite slim, and rather more juvenile than expected, minor work from Gaiman. I only mention that so that the completists among you don't get your expectations up -- but, if you have a young reader nearby who might appreciate Odd and the Frost Giants, go and find it as quickly as you can.

Death and Other Defining Moments

Yesterday, ComicMix posted my review of Seth's excellent graphic novel George Sprott: 1894-1975, for your reading enjoyment.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I should be writing something else for them right this moment.

Movie Log: Duplicty

Tony Gilroy's second film as both writer and director -- after the tense and satisfying Michael Clayton -- is Duplicity, the same sort of story told sideways and with a lighter heart. It's not as successful as Clayton is, in the end, perhaps because Gilroy plays the industrial espionage straight but, in the end, doesn't want the audience to take it all that seriously.

So Duplicity wants to be both a thriller and not a thriller, to wow us with its tricky double-reversals and repeated dialogue, its complicated stutter-step chronology, and its high-wattage movie stars, while at the same time smiling and telling us not to be so serious, to just take it easy.

It's a movie that rewards focus, and so probably played better on a big screen in a dark room; living rooms are much better for movies that don't require tight attention. I, unfortunately, did see it in a living room, and it may not perhaps have gotten my full attention and understanding because of that.

Those two movie stars are Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, who bounce off each other repeatedly as they cross and double-cross everyone in sight (including each other, themselves, their bosses and partners, and pretty much every other character in the movie). They're smart and stylish and very good at their spycraft; their first meeting takes place with Claire (Roberts) working for the CIA and Ray (Owen) on the side of MI6, but the rest of the movie covers the period when they've gone private, working in tight counter-espionage shops for two big personal-products companies (shampoo, deodorant, etc.).

There's no point in trying to explain all of those feints and parries -- to do so would require a diagram, or the original screenplay -- but Duplicity does work its way through a long sequence of scenes that each make the audience go back and reconsider a lot of what they assumed from those earlier scenes. It felt a bit overlong in my living room, though -- it has to push a big package uphill for a long time before the pieces are all in place and it can start running down through the fun parts at the end.

It is a movie for adults about adult things -- greed, lying, sex, ambition, professional pride -- and that is a thrill to see. It's also done well in an era of dumb "adult" thrillers and tedious teen-oriented junk, so it may well be counter-productive to point out that Duplicity isn't as fun or exciting as it should be. But it's true; this is a decent movie, but it's no Michael Clayton.
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Listening to: Dylan Champagne - Junk Parts
via FoxyTunes

The Hotel Under the Sand by Kage Baker

A girl is caught in a dangerous storm, and torn from everything she knows. She's cast adrift on a strange shore, and has to fend for herself...but she quickly meets a boy of about her own age, and comes to build a new society with him and the others who accumulate around them.

The Hotel Under the Sand is, surprisingly, very similar in premise to Terry Pratchett's 2008 novel Nation, though it goes in a quieter, more old-fashioned direction, and is more suitable for younger readers. Where Nation is a reasonably realistic novel -- though set in a world populated entirely by Pratchett characters, people a bit smarter and more self-conscious and English than is true in the real world -- Hotel is a tale for children, with a tone only slightly removed from the nursery and the classic 19th century stories meant to be read aloud by parents and guardians.

Hotel is the story of a girl named Emma,

a little girl both clever and brave, and destined -- so you might think -- to do well in any adventure that came her way. But the first adventure Emma had was dreadful.

One day a storm came and swept away everything that Emma had, and everything that Emma knew. When it had done all that, it swept Emma away, too.

It might have been a storm with black winds, with thunder and lightning and rising waves. It might have been a storm with terrible anger and policemen coming to the door, and strangers, hospitals, courtrooms, and nightmares. It might have been a storm with soldiers, and fire, and hiding in cellars listening to shooting overhead. There are different kinds of storms. (pp.11-12)

Hotel is also dedicated to a girl named Emma, though I have no idea what storms she may or may not have seen. But it's like Alice in Wonderland in that way -- being the fictionalized adventures of a character who shares the name of a person the author knows. In Emma's case, she's thrown, by that storm which Baker never specifies, onto a beach where a century before the Grand Wenlock Hotel was buried irretrievably by the Storm of the Equinox. She's told this by a helpful ghost, Winston, who had been the Bell Captain of that hotel, which was struck by disaster just as it was about to open for the first time.

The hotel -- which had a field that slowed time within its confines -- reappears in another storm, due to (unknowing) actions of Emma, and so she moves into it with Winston as a guide. Before long, a cook (and her dog), an only slightly scruffy pirate, and the runaway great-grandson (and last heir) of the hotel's owner have joined her there, and the hotel has opened for a group of very unlikely clients. (And Hotel's expected readers won't have any clue who any of them are -- and even I have to admit that I found one of the four groups utterly opaque.)

There are a few moments that have a bit of tension, but not much; this is a consolatory fantasy, and not one with sharp teeth. Emma and her friends win through in the end, as we knew they would. Hotel Under the Sand feels like it, like the Hotel Wenlocke, was buried in the sands for a century, kept untouched from the ravages of time -- not so much in the language, which is much like Baker's other work, though slightly simplified for this audience, but in the story-telling, which is in a style that's been out of fashion for children's books for at least four decades. It's a cozy book, for good or bad, and readers who treasure coziness will enjoy it the most.
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Listening to: The Frames - Falling Slowly
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Sunshine Cleaning

I've seen six movies since Sunshine Cleaning -- and that's leaving aside the ways that's its set up as a semi-generic indy movie, with a lot of familiar elements to confuse viewers like me -- so my memories of it are fuzzy.

Amy Adams is ex-cheerleader Rose Lorkowski, and, for once in this history of movies for adults, we're supposed to be on her side. Luckily, her cheerleader-ness isn't particular important to the movie, and her post-high-school history never becomes clear. (Sunshine Cleaning has a lot of vagueness, particularly in its characters' backgrounds, where a more careful screenplay would have had specifics.) She has a son -- who the movie hints, but never quite manages to say, is the result of her long-term and now adulterous relationship with her highschool boyfriend Mac (Steve Zahn) -- and whom is having issues at school that essentially get him kicked out of the public system.

(The Wife and I, who have a special needs child of our own, were annoyed and dumbfounded by this turn of events, particularly since, at this point in the movie, we still thought it took place somewhere in California. When it finally located itself outside Phoenix in neo-Libertopian Arizona, this event became slightly more reasonable, but I really doubt any state is so blunt and old-fashioned as to state that a parent needs to place their child in a private school, since the public system won't accommodate him.)

Anyway, Rose's life is a mess -- she lives at home with her always scheming father Joe (Alan Arkin, proving the most obvious strategem to make this film look like Little Miss Sunshine Redux), sleeps with Mac when she's supposedly taking nightschool courses, and cleans houses for the now-rich girls she went to school with. And so she decides to better herself in the traditional American way: find a job that pays really well, and do it in a half-assed way.

For Rose, that's hazmat cleaning -- crime scenes, suicides, and other dead bodies, mostly. It's dirty, disgusting, and horrible, but it does pay very well. She drags her ne'er-do-well sister Norah (Emily Blunt) into the business, and things go along entertainingly for a while until there's the required Big Problem.

The Big Problem gets a Big Solution, with much hugging, and everyone's self-esteem is restored. Rose even gets what might turn out to be a love interest -- a quirky, damaged character, of course, since this is an indy movie -- who is not married to someone else.

Sunshine Cleaning means well, and it's pleasant to watch, with solid acting and decent dialogue. But it doesn't quite cohere, and it feels like it was made up on the fly from the rag-bag of Random Indy Movie Tropes. If you like seeing movies like this, Sunshine Cleaning is a minor entry, but moderately worth it. If you generally don't like movies about aimless people trying to figure out what to do with their lives, there's no reason to seek out this one.
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Listening to: The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/19

This was one of those weeks dominated by a single big box -- in this case from Dark Horse -- so I'll talk about the other things first and then dive into that. But, first: the explanation! I review books, so I get books to review -- sometimes things I ask for, sometimes not, and always more than I'll be able to manage to read. I do these Monday-morning posts to make sure that I mention everything -- the books I know I'll love, the books I'll read five pages of and quietly drop, the ones that will fall deeper and deeper into a pile until they're finally eaten by a grue.

First this week is a book with the cheery title It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies!, a collection of Christmas carols written by Michael P. Spradlin with an introduction by Christopher Moore. It also has a number of cheery illustrations by Jeff Weigel, full of rotting flesh and juicy brains. It's one of those cute little impulse buys that I expect will sit at the cash-wrap in various bookstores starting in November, when it will be published by Harper. (Given that Spradlin is, by day, a Harper sales rep who lives in Michigan, I hope one particular chain will be particularly enthusiastic about it.)

The fifth and last of the Joe Pitt Casebooks series from Charlie Huston -- about vampires in New York, who act very much like real-life organized criminals and gangs -- is My Dead Body, coming as a trade paperback from Del Rey on October 13th. (I reviewed one of the earlier books, No Dominion, last year, and keep thinking that I need to find time to read the rest of the series. Maybe I will now that it's complete.)

I mentioned Douglas Clegg's new novella-as-a-book Isis when I saw a copy at BEA this summer; it's now turned into a real hardcover (slim and handsome, just a bit too late for a Fashion Week tie-in) from Vanguard Press. It's illustrated, in a great spidery, neo-19th century style, by Glenn Chadbourne, and it will be officially published in October.

I've complained before about graphic novels from major publishers that downplay the work of the artist -- usually with a credit like "illustrated by" or "artwork by," even in cases where that artist was working from a vague script without even panel breakdowns. But I now have an even worse case -- The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks is credited only to Max Brooks on the front cover and title page. The artist, Ibraim Roberson, is merely mentioned on the bottom of the back cover and with a small reference on the copyright page. Three Rivers Press, this is simply unacceptable. A graphic novel is not a work by one writer, and it's stupid to pretend that it is. From that copyright page, it also looks like Recorded Attacks collects comics stories originally published by Avatar, but it doesn't make that connection clear at all. What Recorded Attacks does have, once the reader can figure it out, is a dozen comics stories of between five and twenty pages, all drawn by Roberson and written by Brooks, about attacks by zombies at various points in history. If you like reading about random historical people being eaten by supernatural creatures -- and seeing that depicted in an appropriately detailed, gory style -- Recorded Attacks will be available on October 6th.

And now I get into the Dark Horse box -- everything from here on out is published by Dark Horse, and is available now.

Next is Usagi Yojimbo: Bridge Of Tears, the twenty-third collection of the long-running series by Stan Sakai. I've only looked at Usagi intermittently, but even I know that it's about an anthropomorphic (rabbit) samurai in classical Japan, wandering and having the kind of adventures that honorable ronin have, among a series of other characters who look more individual and less "furry" than is usual for anthropomorphic comics. And now that I have this book in my hands, I guess I should read it and do a more serious review of Usagi.

Indiana Jones Omnibus: The Further Adventures Volume 2 collects the early '80s series from Marvel comics -- remember when big comics companies could have long-running, popular series in the first place, and they're weren't necessarily all long-underwear types? Ah, good times -- written by David Michelinie, with art from a variety of folks like Herbe Trimpe, Jackson Guice, Luke McDonnell, David Mazzucchelli, and even Steve Ditko. This book collects issues 13-24 of the Further Adventures of Indiana Jones series, plus the three-issue adaptation of the movie Temple of Doom, which interrupted it. It looks like typical '80s Marvel adventure comics -- wordy, with occasionally shaky continuity on character's faces, but full of action and forward momentum.

And then there's Kull: The Shadow Kingdom, a graphic novel adapted from Robert E. Howard's story of the same name by Arvid Nelson, with art by Will Conrad and Jose Villarrubia. Dark Horse is doing a lot of Howard-related books recently -- there's their long-standing Conan series, both new work and reprints of the old Marvel stuff, plus this and a Solomon Kane book coming up -- and I thought I'd try to do a big Howard-at-DH review this fall. Now that I've actually said that in public, I hope it will happen.

Speaking of Howard and Dark Horse, I was surprised to see that their reprints of the old long-running Marvel series has hit Volume 18: Isle of the Dead. (I own the first five, but stopped following it closely after that, since I was primarily interested in the Windsor-Smith era.) This one has stories from 1982 and 1983, written by Bruce Jones and Steven Grant, with art from John Buscema (who did Conan, off and on, for a very long time, I note once again), Marc Silvestri, Val Mayerik, Alfredo Alcala, and others.

Speaking of Conan stories from Marvel in the early '80s, Dark Horse also recently published The Savage Sword Of Conan Volume 6, which collects all of the 1981 issues of that Marvel black-and-white magazine in one of those phone-book-looking collections that everyone seems to have forgotten Dave Sim invented. Savage Sword was the older brother of the Marvel Conan comics series, aimed at a somewhat older audience, with more graphic violence, no Comics Code, and even a few hints of sex. These stories are by Roy Thomas, Michael Fleisher, and Bruce Jones, with, again, most of the art by the hard-working John Buscema. Gil Kane shows up for one issues, and Ernie Chan inks Buscema most of the time, and does one issue solo.

And last for this week is Turok, Son of Stone Archives, Volume 2, collecting the second six-pack of the Dell comics series from the '50s. This was well before my time, and it looks a bit crude these days -- particularly in the bland typeset lettering -- but I'm sure there will always be an audience for stories about Indians fighting dinosaurs. At least, I wouldn't want to live in a world where no one cared about Indians fighting dinosaurs!
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Listening to: Rupa & the April Fishes - Une Américaine à Paris
via FoxyTunes

My All-Time Favorite SF Short Stories...As of 2005

Everybody says "it's one of my top ten favorite stories," but doesn't bother to specify the other nine. Well, not me. Back in January of 2005, the Straight Dope Message Board had a thread about the best SF story ever, and I ponied up with the following:

Inconstant Moon [by Larry Niven] is damn good, and would be on my short list.

Others on that list (and which I haven't seen mentioned) are:

• Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester
• The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon
• Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
• Oceanic by Greg Egan
• Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith
• With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson
• The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree, Jr.
• We See Things Differently by Bruce Sterling
• Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams
• Born With the Dead by Robert Silverberg

But if I had to pick one, and only one, very best SF story, I think I'd have to go with By His Bootstraps by Heinlein, which very nearly exhausts its subject and which is still breathtaking today.

Careful readers will note that my list -- never explicitly called "Top Ten," though -- has a good twelve items on it, counting everything. They might also note that I have refused to update the list and say what I think are the best stories as of now.

Dress Up Like a Proper Victorian Lady

I still have hopes to read Gail Carriger's debut novel Soulless -- I got it as a galley at BEA, so I feel like I'm months behind, but it hasn't even published yet -- since it looks like a lot of fun, being a comedy of manners among the supernatural set in Victorian London.

And it can be even more fun now, since Orbit, the publisher of Soulless, has created an online dress-up doll to promote it. I both like frivolous online games and silly promotional vehicles -- I get so bored in my own marketing job, since very little of it could be effectively publicized through online games -- so I'm very much in favor of this.

I've created my own outfit, for a very proper woman (you should see the levels of underwear possible in this!) whom I call Gertrude Two Umbrellas.
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Listening to: Aviary Ghost - Somewhere Else
via FoxyTunes

Top Shelf Comics Sale!

Top Shelf, one of the better publishers of comics in North America, is having a massive sale to celebrate the imminent release of The Surrogates, a movie based on one of their graphic novels.

Some books are as low as $3, which is frankly a steal for something like That Salty Air (my review is here) or Beach Safari (review) or After the Snooter. Besides the long list of $3 stuff, prices are also cut on The Surrogates, a number of Alan Moore books, Super Spy, Andy Runton's Owly books, and lots more.

I'm over there right now (in another window), working out what I'm going to buy; I recommend you do the same.

Quote of the Week

From p. 306 of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, a novel with excellent writing that finally succumbs to the Oakland Problem:

A moment passed. Humbledrum's ears twitched. It had impossibly cute, round, furry teddy-bear ears.

"Fillory," it said slowly, cautiously. "That is a word I have heard." The giant bear sounded like a kid at the blackboard hedging his bets against what might or might not be a trick question.

"And this is it? We're in Fillory?"

"I think it...may once have been."

"So what do you call it now?" Quentin coaxed.

"No. No. Wait." Humbledrum held up a paw for silence, and Quentin felt a tiny pang of pity. The enormous hairy idiot really was trying to think. "Yes, it is. This is Fillory. Or Loria? Is this Loria?"

"It has to be Fillory," Penny said, leaning over from the other booth. "Loria is the evil country. Across the eastern mountains. It's not like there's no difference. How can you not know where you live?"

The bear was still shaking its heavy muzzle.

"I think Fillory is somewhere else," it said.

"But this definitely isn't Loria," Penny said.

"Look, who's the talking bear here?" Quentin snapped. Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up."

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Listening to: Rollercoaster Project - Hoods Up
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: The End of Bond?

James Bond Daily ends, appropriately, with the end of The Man With The Golden Gun, as 007 ponders recuperating under the care of Miss Mary Goodnight on pp. 181-182:

'And James, it's not far from the Liguanea Club and you can go there and play bridge, and golf when you get better. There'll be plenty of people for you to talk to. And then of course I can cook and sew buttons for you and so on.'

Of all the doom-fraught graffiti a woman can write on the wall, those are the most insidious, the most deadly.

James Bond, in the full possession of his senses, with his eyes wide open, his feet flat on the linoleum floor, stuck his head blithely between the mink-lined jaws of the trap. He said, and meant it, 'Goodnight, You're an angel.'

At the same time, he knew, deep down, that love from Mary Goodnight, or from any woman, was not enough for him. It would be like taking 'a room with a view'. For James Bond, the same view would always pall.

And thus concludes "James Bond Daily." We now return to your regularly scheduled Antick Musings, already in progress.
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Listening to: Kate Tucker & The Sons Of Sweden - In The End
via FoxyTunes

How Many Copies?

The Telegraph reports -- in a completely unsourced article that I've seen referenced several places online already -- that Amazon.com sold more copies of the Kindle edition of Dan Brown's new blockbuster The Lost Symbol yesterday than it did of the regular hardcover edition.

This may be a sign that ebooks -- the Brazil of publishing; they're the future and always will be -- are finally poised to conquer the world...or, as I suspect, it may not.

I don't see any press release from Amazon saying this officially, first of all.

Even if this does come officially from Amazon, it's in line with their other tortured comparisons designed to make Kindles sound incredibly wonderful without actually giving any solid numbers, like the famous "of all of the books that have Kindle editions, the percentage of the total number of copies sold that are Kindle editions have gone up massively since a time when the Kindle was brand new."

There's also the question of what the comparison actually includes, particularly if it includes pre-orders of the hardcover, or if those were shipped early to hit doorsteps on Tuesday.

Amazon: if you want to crow, you'll need to release numbers. Saying how many Kindles have sold to date -- and I have reason to believe it's far below the millions some have claimed -- would be a good first step.

Postscript: I believe the source of that story is this blog post, which noted that the Kindle edition rose above the hardcover on an Amazon bestseller list. Since Amazon's secret bestseller metric is believed to prize velocity, and the Kindle edition of The Lost Symbol had only been available for purchase once the book was published, this obviously makes a big difference. We don't know how many copies Amazon has sold of either edition, and we probably never will. However we do know, from Random House's announcement, that The Lost Symbol sold a million copies yesterday, across all retail channels. I suspect the Kindle sales were more than one order of magnitude lower, and probably at least two.

Update: I've now found a Wall Street Journal article datelined today which quotes an Amazon spokesperson saying that the Kindle edition outsold the hardcover on the day of release, "excluding pre-orders." Given, again, that the hardcover had massive pre-orders and the Kindle edition had none, this is not any kind of reasonable comparison. Once again, Amazon is carefully parsing its words to make the Kindle seem super-successful, which tends to make me believe that it is not living up to their expectations. (Or else they would say broader, more clearly positive things, and actually cite numbers.)

James Bond Daily: For the Love of Gold

Auric Goldfinger waxes rhapsodic about the joys of gold-ownership on pp.183-184 of Goldfinger:

'Mr Bond --' For the first time since Bond had known Goldfinger, the big, bland face, always empty of expression, showed a trace of life. A look almost of rapture illuminated the eyes. The finely chiseled lips pursed into a thin, beatic curve. 'Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft slimness that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup. But, above all, Mr Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner -- the magic of controlling energy, exacting labour, fulfilling one's every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls. Yes, Mr Bond, I have worked all my life for gold and, in return, gold has worked for me and for those enterprises that I have espoused. I ask you,' Goldfinger gazed earnestly at Bond, 'is there any other substance on earth that so rewards its owner?'

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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Golden Age of Radio (live)
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: A Handkerchief Code for Spies?

007 is surprised on p.93 of The Man With The Golden Gun:

Bond cursed himself. This was always happening in his particular trade. You were looking in the dark for a beetle with red wings. Your eyes were focused for that particular pattern on the bark of the tree. You didn't notice the moth with cryptic colouring that crouched quietly near by, itself like a piece of the bark, itself just as important to the collector. The focus of your eyes was too narrow. Your mind was too concentrated. You were using 1 x 100 magnification and your 1 x 10 was not in focus. Bond looked at the man with the recognition that exists between crooks, between homosexuals, between secret agents. It is the look common to men bound by secrecy -- by common trouble.

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Listening to: The Mendoza Line - The Queen of England
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: American Values

A rich American explains to 007 how the world works, from the story "The Hildebrand Rarity" on pp.157-158 of For Your Eyes Only:

Mr Kest slowly shook his head. He said sorrowfully: 'Feller, you sure were born yesterday. Money, that's all it takes. You want a panda? You buy it from some goddam zoo that can't afford central heating for its reptile house or wants to build a new block for its tigers or something. The sea-shell? You find a man that's got one and you offer him so much goddam money that even if he cries for a week he sells it to you. Sometime you have a little trouble with Governments. Some goddam animal is protected or something., All right., Give you an example. I arrive at your island yesterday. I want a black parrot from Paslin Island. I want a giant tortoise from Aldabra. I want the complete range of your local cowries and I want this fish we're after. The first two are protected by law. Last evening I pay a call on your Governor after making certain inquiries in the town. Excellency, I says, I understand you want to build a public swimming-pool to teach the local kids to swim. Okay. The Krest Foundation will put up the money. How much? Five thousand, ten thousand? Okay, so it's ten thousand. Here's my cheque. And I write it out there and then. Just one little thing, Excellency, I says, holding on to the cheque. It happens I want a specimen of this black parrot you have here and one of these Aldabra tortoises. I understand they're protected by law. Mind if I take one of each back to America for the Smithsonian? Well, there's a bit of a palaver, but seeing as it's the Smithsonian and seeing I've still got hold of the cheque, in the end we shake hands on the deal and everyone's happy. Right? Well, on the way back I stop in the town to arrange with your nice Mr Abendana, the merchant feller, to have the parrot and tortoise collected and held for me, and I get talking about the cowries, Well, it so happens that this Mr Abendana has been collecting the dam' things since he was a child. He shows them to me. Beautifully kept -- each one in its bit of cotton wool. Fine condition and several of those Isabella and Mappa ones I was asked particularly to watch out for Sorry, he couldn't think of selling. They mean so much to him and so on. Crap! I just look at Mr Abendana and I say, how much? No no. He couldn't think of it. Crap again! I take out my chequebook and write a cheque for five thousand dollars and push it under his nose. He looks at it. Five thousand dollars! He can't stand it. He folds the cheque and puts it in his pocket and then the dam' sissy breaks down and weeps! Would you believe it?' Mr Krest opened his palms in disbelief. 'Over a few goddam sea-shells. So I just tell him to take it easy, and I pick up the trays of sea-shells and get the hell out of there before the crazy so-and-so shoots himself from remorse.'

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Listening to: The Pharmacy - Adeiu, Adeiu
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/12

In case you've missed this before: every Monday morning, I post a list (with comments) of the books I saw for review the previous week. Since even a minor blogger like me can get a dozen or more books a week, and I can't read a dozen books a week, simple math shows that I'm not going to be able to read every one of those books. (Even if I wanted to, and I don't always.) So I do these "Reviewing the Mail" posts to give a little attention to all of those books, and say whatever I can about them without having read them.

Occasionally, a book I paid for will sneak in, as is the case this week. I'll try to remember to specify which one it is, but, if not, take your best guess in comments.

First up this time is The Mermaid's Madness by Jim C. Hines, the sequel to The Stepsister Scheme in a series that will be at least a trilogy (as promised on the card page). It's another in the long line of Fractured Fairy Tales, this time with a modern feminist spin. (I haven't seen a fairy-tale-esque story without a spunky, and much-too-liberated-for-her-society, heroine for dogs' years.) This one retells the story of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," with the aid of the heroines from the first book, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. Expect a lot of singing Motown into shampoo bottles, or whatever the fantasy-novel equivalent of the "girls bonding montage" is, when The Mermaid's Madness hits stores in the convenient mass-market format on October 6th, published by DAW.

On the same day -- and published out of the same building, this time by Roc -- you'll be able to find Laura E. Reeve's Vigilante, which is "A Major Ariane Kedros Novel." (The first such was Peacekeeper, which also seems to have been Reeve's first novel.) Given the fact that it has a blonde woman in camo pants and a tank top firing a gun with an unfeasibly large barrel on the cover -- though the gun itself is reasonably sized, for once -- I will make the cognitive leap that this is a military SF novel. (Women on MilSF cover occasionally wear their full dress uniforms, if they're receiving medals or something like that, but they invariably go into combat in tank tops. It's probably similar to the reason why fantasy warrior-women always wear "armor" bikinis.) From the back cover, I see that this is also a "we discovered ancient alien artifacts" book, and I always used to love those. (Haven't read a really good one in a while -- anyone have any recent suggestions?)

A week earlier from Roc's corporate sibling Ace, there's Xombies: Apocalypse Blues. (And what's the difference between an ordinary "zombie" and a fancy "xombie," anyway? Are the ones with Xs the fast-moving ones? I find this terribly annoying, particularly since I've finally managed to remember what "zuvembies" are.) It's by Walter Greatshell, and was previously published five years ago as simply Xombies (So all you huge Greatshell fans need to simmer down back there -- though there is a teaser for a sequel, Xombies: Apocalypticon, which is coming next March.) As you might guess from the title, this is yet another the-dead-are-rising-and-eating-people story, which are inexplicably popular these days. This one has an ostensibly SFnal explanation, for those who prefer that -- for myself, I tend to go for the old-school "there's just no more room left in hell" rationale when it comes to shambling corpses.

Publishing the same time (September 29th) and from the same publisher (Ace) is Ilona Andrews's On the Edge, the first in a new series. (Oddly, the press release says that "Ilona Andrews" is the pen-name of a husband and wife writing team named Andrew and Ilona, but the book is dedicated to "my husband." From that, I begin to suspect one of the team may be doing more of the writing than the other. But I could be wrong.) On the Edge is another Borderlands-style novel, set in the area where faerie (here called the Weird) touches mundane reality and featuring a tough, magical female main character who travels between the two worlds (and, according to the cover, has the head and shoulders of a hunky dude floating above the engine of her pick-up).

Another tough-looking woman -- in a tank top, but carrying some kind of short cattle-prod looking device with electricity sparking all around it -- glares forth from the cover of Ann Aguirre's Doubleblind, the third in the series about Sirantha Jax, a pilot of FTL starships. According to the back cover, Jax is one of those tough-talking, non-nonsense SFnal types -- they used to be all men, and it's nice to see that there are now female versions, minus the cigar-chewing and crew-cuts -- who finds herself running a diplomatic missions to an equally tough alien race. Doubleblind is another Ace mass-market coming on September 29th.

The book I bought -- see, I did remember! -- is the new collection of Roger Langridge's The Muppet Show comics. I've always liked Langridge's work when I've seen it, and I've always intended to seek it out more often, but I generally haven't. But his style is perfect for the Muppets, and I think I can pass this book on to my sons after I read it, and that was enough to push it over the edge. (Also, it was inexpensive -- only ten bucks -- and right on the shelf in a store where I was already buying a couple of things for my sons.) Boom! Studios published The Muppet Show back in July.

I know that William C. Dietz typically writes in duologies -- I did a number of his books back in my book-club days -- but I can't tell from At Empire's Edge whether it's the first half or the second half of a story. (And there's always the possibility that it's a standalone or part of a longer series; writers don't always keep doing the same thing indefinitely.) So, I'll start to use my massive ratiocinative abilities...and then look at the press release, which says in its first line that it's "the first book in an exciting new science fiction duology." So my massive skills were not terribly taxed there. This one is a hardcover from Ace -- and I think they've been Dietz's publisher all the way along, and have had him in hardcover for close to two decades, so that's no surprise -- coming October 6th.

I let out an audible yelp of joy when the next book arrived -- ask my wife, she'll confirm it. It's not an expensive book, and it's not going to be a hard one to find, but I'm still amazingly happy when a book I was perfectly prepared to go out and spend my own money on shows up on my doorstep unasked. This time, it was Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants, the American edition of a short novel for younger readers that Gaiman originally wrote to be published in the UK on World Book Day in 2008. The letter says that it's appropriate for ages 8 and up, so this may just be the first Gaiman book I share with my younger son. (We're currently reading Daniel Pinkwater's excellent middle-grade book Fat Men from Space, and I suspect we may go back to reading together more at bedtime for a while.) Odd will be published by HarperCollins on September 22nd, probably to the joy of a great number of young people (as well as a certain number of the not-so-young like myself).

Hunting Memories is the second book in Barb Hendee's "Vampire Memories" series -- which I presume means it's the memories of a vampire, rather than someone else's memories of the vampires they met ("Ah, yes, I staked that Hungarian bitch back in '47, just after the war -- rather a simple go, I must say, since she couldn't even shapeshift.") -- after last year's Blood Memories. (Hendee is probably best known as half of the writing team on the vampire/epic fantasy mash-up series "The Noble Dead Chronicles." Hunting Memories is a trade paperback from Roc, coming October 6th.

I mentioned Tom Lloyd's The Grave Thief -- third in the "Twilight Reign" series, coming from Pyr as a trade paperback on September 8th -- about two months ago, when I saw it in galley form, and now I'll mention it again, since I have in my hands one of the finished books.

And last for this week is Sharon Shinn's new book Quatrain, which features four originally novellas set in her different fictional worlds. The four stories are called "Flight," "Blood," "Gold," and "Flame," and all have in common the fact that I know very very little about the worlds they're set in. This one is an Ace hardcover, coming October 8th.

James Bond Daily: In Which Fleming Opens a Chapter By Stating the Obvious

Beginning 'Un-Real Estate,' the 7th chapter of The Man With The Golden Gun, on p. 073:

When he arrives at a place on a dark night, particularly in an alien land which he has never seen before -- a strange house, perhaps, or a hotel -- even the most alert man is assailed by the confused sensations of the meanest tourist.

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Listening to: The Deathray Davies - I'm From The Future
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: Time for a Rest Cure

At the beginning (page 003, to be exact) of 1961's Thunderball, a newly health-faddist M reads the doctor's report on 007 prior to sending him off to purge his poisons at Shrublands:

'This officer,' he read, 'remains basically physically sound. Unfortunately his mode of life is not such as is likely to allow him to remain in this happy state. Despite many previous warnings, he admits to smoking sixty cigarettes a day. These are of a Balkan mixture with a higher nicotine content than the cheaper varieties. When not engaged upon strenuous duty, the officer's average daily consumption of alcohol is in the region of half a bottle of spirits of between sixty and seventy proof. On examination, there continues to be little definite sign of deterioration. The tongue is furred. The blood pressure a little raised at 160/90. The liver is not palpable. On the other hand, when pressed, the officer admits to frequent occipital headaches and there is spasm in the trapezius muscles and so-called 'fibrositis' nodules can be felt. I believe these symptoms to be due to this officer's mode of life. He is not responsive to the suggestion that over-indulgence is no remedy for the tensions inherent in his professional calling and can only result in the creation of a toxic state which could finally have the effect of reducing hos fitness as an officer. I recommend that No 007 should take it easy for two to three weeks on a more abstemious regime, when I believe he would make a complete return to his previous exceptionally high state of physical fitness.'

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Listening to: Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous
via FoxyTunes

The Perils of Not Doing Research

This Gary Varvel cartoon would be very funny if...

Rock Band wasn't actually a four-person game with guitar, bass, drum kit and microphone controllers.

Oops.

Mr. Varvel, perhaps a little googling for visual reference will help, next time.

James Bond Daily: Scaramanga Is Hep, You Dig?

A bit of dialogue to a female bartender at a whorehouse after a trick-shot demonstration has just killed her two Jamaican grackles, which the screenwriters didn't try to adapt for Christopher Lee, from p.066 of 1965's The Man With The Golden Gun:

Scaramanga uttered a harsh bark of laughter. He extracted a hundred-dollar bill and threw it on the table. 'No hard feelings, cool cat. You'd be okay if you didn't always keep your legs together. Go buy yourself some more birds with that. I like to have smiling people around me.'

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Listening to: The New Pornographers - Mystery Hours
via FoxyTunes

Quote of the Week

"For people who will like that kind of book, that is the kind of book they will like."
- Abraham Lincoln

James Bond Daily: Gay Panic!

M detours through his own fears while reading a dossier on Paco "Pistols" Scaramanga, killer for hire, on p.33 of The Man With The Golden Gun:

'... In listing his accomplishments, Time notes, but does not comment upon, the fact that this man cannot whistle. Now it may only myth, and it is certainly not medical science, but there is a popular theory that a man who cannot whistle has homosexual tendencies. (At this point, the reader may care to experiment, and, from his self-knowledge, help to prove or disprove this item of folklore! C.C.)' (M hadn't whistled since he was a boy. Unconsciously his mouth pursed and a clear note was emitted. He uttered an impatient 'tchah!' and continued with his reading.)

No mention is made of Bond trying, or failing, to whistle. And, in the cause of full information, I might mention that I myself had great trouble whistling most of my life -- though something seemed to click about a decade back, and now I'm not bad at it.
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Listening to: Hot Springs - Pink Money
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: 007's Thoughts During the Monologue

As Ernst Stavro Blofeld explains his plots and purpose in life to a captive Bond, his prisoner ponders his captor, on pp.192-193 of You Only Live Twice:

Blofeld was a big man, perhaps six foot three, and powerfully built., He placed the tip of the samurai sword, which has almost the blade of the scimitar, between his straddled feet, and rested his sinewy hands on its boss. Looking up at him from across the room, Bond had to admit that there was something larger than life in the looming, imperious figure, in the hypnotically direct stare of the eyes, in the tall white brow, in the cruel downward twist of the white lips. The square-cut, heavily draped kimono, designed to give the illusion of bulk to a race of smallish men, made something huge out of the towering figure, and the golden dragon embroidery, so easily to be derided as a childish fantasy, crawled menacingly across the black silk and seemed to spit real fire from over the left breast. Blofeld had paused in his harangue. Waiting for him to continue, Bond took the measure of his enemy. He knew what would be coming -- justification. It was always so. When they thought they had got you where they wanted you, when they knew they were decisively on top, before the knock-out, even to an audience on the threshold of extinction, it was pleasant, reassuring to the executioner, to deliver the apologia -- purge the sin he was about to commit. Blofeld, his hands relaxed on the boss of his sword, continued. The tone of his voice was reasonable, self-assured, quietly expository.

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Listening to: Blonde Redhead - Misery Is A Butterfly
via FoxyTunes

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair

The event once known as the Literary Guild party will not take place this year.

And I'll wager serious cash that it will never return.

A moment of silence will now be observed.

James Bond Daily: The Plight of the Aging Spy

007 muses about life, on pp.018-019 of You Only Live Twice:

The state of your health, the state of the weather, the wonders of nature -- these are things that rarely occupy the average man's mind until he reaches the middle thirties. It is only on the threshold of middle-age that you don't take them all for granted, just part of an unremarkable background to more urgent, more interesting things.

Until this year, James Bond had been more or less oblivious to all of them. Apart from occasional hangovers, and the mending of physical damage that was merely, for him, the extension of a child falling down and cutting his knee, he had taken good health for granted. The weather? Just a question of whether or not he had to carry a raincoat or put the hood up on his Bentley Convertible. As for birds, bees, and flowers, the wonders of nature, it only mattered whether or not they bit or stung, whether they smelled good or bad. But today, on the last day of August, just eight months, as he reminded himself that morning, since Tracy had died, he sat in Queen Mary's Rose Garden in Regent's Park, and his mind was totally occupied with just these things.

First his health. He felt like hell and knew that he also looked it. For months, without telling anyone, he had tramped Harley Street, Wigmore Street and Wimpole Street looking for any kind of doctor who could make him feel better. He had appealed to specialists, GPs, quacks -- even to a hypnotist. He had told them, 'I feel like hell. I sleep badly. I eat practically nothing. I drink too much and my work has gone to blazes. I'm shot to pieces. Make me better.' And each man had taken his blood pressure, a sample of his urine, listened to his heart and chest, asked him questions he had answered truthfully, and had told him that there was nothing basically wrong with him. Then he had paid five guineas and gone off to John Bell and Croyden to have the new lot of prescriptions -- for tranquillizers, sleeping pills, energizers -- made up. And now he had just come from breaking off relations with the last resort -- the hypnotist, whose basic message had been that he must go out an regain his manhood by having a woman. As if he hadn't tried that! The ones who had asked him to take them to Paris. The ones who had inquired indifferently, 'Feeling better now, dearie?' The hypnotist hadn't been a bad chap. Rather a bore about how he could take away warts and how he was persecuted by the BMA, but Bond had finally had enough of sitting in a chair and listening to the quietly droning voice while, as instructed, he relaxed and gazed at a naked electric light bulb. And now he had thrown up the fifty-guinea course after only half the treatment and had come to sit in this secluded garden before going back to his office ten minutes away across the park.

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Listening to: Bess Rogers - Only One
via FoxyTunes

Lazy and/or Busy Weekend

My immediate excuse for not having the usual Monday-morning "Reviewing the Mail" post up on time is that Blogger was acting up last night as I was writing it -- it was refusing to save, so I just stopped working on it.

Of course, I could easily have written it all up in Word and had it ready for when Blogger was working again...but who wants to do that on a holiday weekend? So it'll be delayed until some time later today.

The weekend has been an interesting mix of frenzy and lethargy -- the family had a lot of things to do yesterday (it was Pompton Day in my hometown, which generated about three activities, plus the end of summer bowling and other things), but I've been very lazy otherwise. I've been sitting in front of this computer a lot, but I'm not even checking my blogs -- just playing online games or otherwise slaughtering time blithely. It would b e wonderful...if I weren't the type of person who feels guilty when I'm not getting things accomplished.

Maybe now, in the latter half of the last day of the three-day weekend, I'll find some energy and get things done. Or perhaps not.

James Bond Daily: The Inscrutable Orient

007 negotiates with Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, and remembers what his handler, the casually obnoxious Australian Richard Lovelace "Dikko" Henderson, has told him about Tanaka in particular and the perfidious Easterner in general, from p.008 of You Only Live Twice:

This kind of joking about their different cultures had become a habit between himself and Tiger, who, with a first in PPE at Trinity before the war, prided himself in the demokorasu of his outlook and the liberality and breadth of his understanding of the West. But Bond, having spoken, caught the sudden glitter in the dark eyes, and he thought of Dikko Henderson's cautionary, 'Now listen, you stupid limey bastard. You're doing all right. But don't press your luck. T.T.'s a civilized kind of a chap -- as Japs go, that is. But don't overdo it. Take a look at that mug. There's Manchu there, and Tartar. And don't forget the so-and-so was a Black Belt at judo before he ever went up to your bloody Oxford. And don't forget he was spying for Japan when he called himself assistant naval attache in their London Embassy before the war and you stupid bastards thought he was okay because he's got a degree at Oxford. And don't forget his war record. Don't forget he ended up as personal aide to Admiral Ohnishi and was training as a kami-kaze when the Americans made loud noises over Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the Rising Sun suddenly took a backward somersault in to the sea. And, if you forget all that, just ask yourself why it's T.T. rather than any other of the ninety million Japanese who happens to hold down the job as head of the Koan-Chosa-Kyoku. Okay, James? Got the photo?'

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Listening to: Camphor - Confidences Shattered
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/5

It's been another week with mail service, and so I saw some books arrive. Since I review books, I get books to review -- but I get more books than I could possibly read and review. That drove me to start this series of posts: every Monday morning, I list what came in the week before, and give some thoughts about those books...but here's the catch...without having read them.

This week, I also stopped in at a comics shop and bought three books; I'll throw them in here and there, and I hope I remember to mention which ones they were. (You might be able to tell, anyway.)

Pride of place this time goes to Paul McAuley's new novel The Quiet War. (It was originally published in the UK last year, but the US trade paperback, from Pyr, will hit on September 15th.) I know that this is related to the series of stories that McAuley has been writing for most of the last decade about a war between the inner and outer system. (And I'm sure many of us can think of the obvious precursors to that idea.) Looking at his bibliography, I'm startled to find that I haven't read a McAuley novel this decade, as far as I can remember -- he's been most doing near-future thrillers and similar books that I haven't been as excited by. But this is a return to the old McAuley, so I'd better find time for it.

Julie Kenner, author of the Buffy-esque "Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom" series, has another urban fantasy series running, and Torn is the second book in that series. (This one is the "Blood Lily Chronicles," which gives me a sense that it will be sexier, with more of a hothouse feeling, than the Soccer Mom books. But I'm purely guessing from the cover art and title.) I'd been intending to read the Soccer Mom books for a possible omnibus back at the Old Job (before other events intervened), but I haven't managed to read anything by Kenner, now that I come to think of it. Torn is a mass-market paperback from Ace in November; the first book in the series, Tainted, is available right now.

First of the things I paid for is Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, the fourth in the series about a young Toronto slacker, his band, his new girlfriend, and her seven evil ex-boyfriends that he has to defeat ('90s videogame style) to keep going out with her. With this book, I'm now only two years behind on the series, so I just might be able to catch up before Vol. 6 comes out.

Del Rey has published several fumetti-style graphic novels based on Cartoon Network properties -- I know I've seen at least one Ben 10 book with that dialogue-over-TV-stills look -- and they just sent me another one of them: The Secret Saturdays, Vol. 1: The Kur Stone. It's -- obviously -- from the TV show of the same name, about a cryptid-hunting family of adventurers. And this slim paperback hit stores on August 25th.

Confessions of a Demon is the first book in a new urban fantasy series about a "kick-butt demon bartender," and is the first book credited to S.L. Wright. However, the copyright is in the name Susan Wright, so I have a suspicion that this may be the same person who wrote Slave Trade and To Serve and Submit. (Or maybe not; "Susan Wright" isn't a terribly uncommon name, and I know from personal experience that there are a lot of folks out there with generic WASPy names like, say, "Andrew Wheeler.") In any case, if you like the work of the earlier Susan Wright, you might want to take a look at Confessions of a Demon, in case it is the same person. Confessions will be a mass-market from Roc in December, and I'd wager a large sum of money that more books will follow it.

Ice Land is a historical novel, set in 1000 AD (in, yes, Iceland), but it sounds like it's a fantasy historical -- the main character's name is Freya, and that must be deliberate -- so perhaps readers of Guy Gavriel Kay and similar writers might be interested in it as well. It's by Betsy Tobin, who was American-born, but who moved to England as an adult and whose publishing career has been so far mostly British-based. It's being published by Plume in trade paperback this month, with one of those classy covers that hints at genre elements but doesn't shove them to the front.

Danica Novgorodoff's second full-length graphic novel -- after last year's Slow Storm, which I reviewed for ComicMix -- is Refresh, Refresh, adapted from a screenplay of the same name by James Ponsoldt which itself was an adaptation of short story (also of the same name) by Benjamin Percy. It's set in a small community in rural Oregon, where most of the fathers have gone off as Marine reservists to the Iraq war, and many of the sons are fighting in a makeshift backyard boxing ring. It sounds awfully sure of its own literary-ness, which is not always a positive, but I'll reserve judgement until I read it.. (Slow Storm was a bit too MFA-ish itself, though it had a lot of good stuff in it.) Refresh, Refresh will be published in trade paperback in October by First Second.

R.A. Salvatore's The Dame is the third in his fantasy series "Saga of the First King," after The Highwayman and The Ancient. And, as we all know, there is nothing like a dame. So it has to be good. Salvatore is quite popular when it comes to sword-slinging fantasy -- though, if I remember, his biggest audience is for the sharecropped Forgotten Realms books, proving that book-readers can be shallow followers of characters just like their funny-book compatriots. The Dame was published in hardcover by Tor on August 18th.

Another one of the books I spent money on is the twelfth collection of the Fables comic -- by, as usual, writer Bill Willingham, artist Mark Buckingham, and a couple of others whom I will omit here out of space considerations -- titled The Dark Ages. It was published by DC (of course), and obviously it's already available, since I bought it out in the real world.

Marvel Comics sent me their two "Ender" related graphic novels -- Ender's Game: Battle School and Ender's Shadow: Battle School -- which have "Orson Scott Card" very large on the covers but seem to be written by, respectively, Christopher Yost and Mike Carey. Both were published in these hardcover editions -- collecting the original five-issue miniseries -- in August. And I hope to do a paired review of them very soon.

And last for this week is the third book I got for myself, and easily the best cover of the week: R. Sikoryak's Masterpiece Comics, collecting his various collisions between high art (Dostoevsky, Bronte, Hawthorne, etc.) and low (comics!). I've seen "Dostoevsky Comics" -- Crime and Punishment in the style of a '50s Batman comic -- before, but not the rest of this book, like the Macbeth-meets-Mary Worth "Mac Worth," or Garfield crossed with Doctor Faustus or the book of Genesis as enacted by the cast of Blondie. From a quick perusal, Sikoryak can ape all of those different styles effortlessly -- this looks like a lot of fun for radical middlebrows like myself. It was published by Drawn & Quarterly, and it's available right now.

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Listening to: Future of the Left - The Hope That House Built
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: 007 Will Gamble on Anything

Remember when Bond called blackjack a children's game? Well, he doesn't necessarily mean that in a derogatory fashion, as you can guess from this even more childish game, played on p.006 of You Only Live Twice with the head of Japan's Secret Service, Tiger Tanaka:

It was the old game of Scissors cut Paper, Paper wraps Stone, Stone blunts Scissors, that is played by children all over the world. The fist is the Stone, two outstretched fingers are the Scissors, and a flat hand is the Paper. The closed fist is hammered twice in the air simultaneously by the two opponents and, at the third downward stroke, the chosen emblem is revealed. The game consists of guessing which emblem the opponent will chose, and of you yourself choosing one that will defeat him. Best of three goes or more. It is a game of bluff.

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Listening to: The Mendoza Line - Tougher Than the Rest
via FoxyTunes

Manga Friday Moseys Onto the Scene Yet Again

My oft-neglected Manga Friday column for ComicMix returned yesterday -- after a long break for summer, and to clear out the cobwebs, since I thought I was saying too much of the same thing about the same kind of books -- with reviews of three books about special teenagers: X-Men: Misfits, Cat Paradise, and Ninja Girls.

I hope to return next week -- which is another way of saying "I have a stack of three books with a theme that I plan to read next week" -- and we'll see how it goes from there.

James Bond Daily: More About Bond's Fast Cars Fetishism

Bond catches the first glimpse of the woman who will become his wife, on pp.012 of On Her Majesty's Secret Service:

It was then, on a ten-mile straight cut through a forest, that it happened. Triple wind-horns screamed their banshee discord in his ear, and a low, white two-seater, a Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder with its hood down, tore past him, cut in cheekily across his bonnet and pulled away, the sexy boom of its twin exhausts echoing back from the border of trees, And it was a girl driving, a girl with a shocking pink scarf tied round her hair, leaving a brief pink tail that the wind blew horizontal behind her.

If there was one thing that set James Bond really moving in life, with the exception of gun-play, it was being passed at speed by a pretty girl; and it was his experience that girls who drove competitively like that were always pretty -- and exciting.

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Listening to: Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins - You Are What You Love
via FoxyTunes

Get Real by Donald E. Westlake

Is there any writer whose last book is his best? Or even among his best? I suppose I have to specifically exclude one-book writers, like Margaret Mitchell or Harper Lee -- and the kind of writer who retires early, like Baudelaire. But have there been solid working writers whose last novel was indisputably major? I don't think so.

Get Real is, unfortunately, Westlake's last novel, since he died very unexpectedly on New Year's Eve, seven months before this book was published. And it's not his best book -- but we all expected that.

It's the latest and last in the series about the hapless New York burglar John Dortumunder and his crew; the thirteenth in all. And, to be honest, the last two or three books in this series weren't quite up to Westlake's peak, either -- they were funny, and they moved well, and they had lots of good business for the various characters, but Westlake wasn't bringing anything new to the series.

Get Real is along those same lines -- a solid, dependably entertaining comic crime caper from one of the most professional writers in the business, with a lot of funny moments, but nothing at all surprising. The caper's a bit thinner in this one than even the last few books -- Dortmunder and his associates get involved with a reality TV producer, and decide to do a secret heist under cover of doing a different heist for his TV cameras -- and the twists and setbacks have a perfunctory feel. There's also a very cliff-like ending -- it's in about the place the ending should have been, but Get Real doesn't end as well as it should.

Get Real makes a fine swan song for those of us who have been reading Dortmunder for a while, but it's not a good introduction to the series, just as you wouldn't start Wodehouse with Sunset at Blandings. If you want a great funny novel about criminals, drop back and read Drowned Hopes or Bank Shot. Get Real is bittersweet, since it's the last new Westlake novel, but there is plenty of sweet in there with the bitter.

James Bond Daily: Honor Among Thieves

From an internal SPECTRE briefing session, on p. 227 of Thunderball:

During the planning stages, months before in Paris, Blofeld had warned Largo that if trouble was caused by any members of his team it was to be expected from the two Russians, the ex-members of SMERSH, No 10 and No 11. 'Conspiracy,' Blofeld had said, 'is their lifeblood. Hand in hand with conspiracy walks suspicion. These two men will always be wondering if they are not the object of some subsidiary plot -- to give them the most dangerous work, to make them fall-guys for the police, to kill them and steal their share of the profits. They will be inclined to inform against their colleagues and always to have reservations about the plans they are agreed upon. For them, the obvious plan, the right way to do a thing, will have been chosen for some ulterior reason which is being kept hidden from them. They will need constant reassurance that nothing is being kept hidden from them, but, once they have accepted their orders, they will carry them out meticulously and without regard for their person safety. Such men, apart from their special talents, are worth having. But you will please remember what I have said, and should there be trouble, should they try and sow mistrust within the team, you must act quickly and with utter ruthlessness. The maggots of mistrust and disloyalty must not be allowed to get a hold in your team., They are the enemies within that can destroy even the most meticulous planning.'

Immediately afterward, coming out of from this flashback, one of the Russians does try to sow mistrust, and Largo goes act with utter ruthlessness.
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Listening to: R.E.M. - Body Count (live)
via FoxyTunes

Quotes of the Week

"I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars."
- Fred Allen

"When I want to read a novel I write one."
- Benjamin Disraeli

James Bond Daily: Octopussy and The Living Daylights

And then we came to the end.

Octopussy and the Living Daylights was originally published a good two years after Fleming's death, and then collected the two novelette-length stories in the title. Since then, it's accumulated two other, shorter stories, the last stray pieces of the Bond corpus. The resulting book, even in its four-story expanded incarnation, is barely half the length of even the shortest novels of the series; it's very much an afterthought. So Penguin's recent book Quantum of Solace, which collects these stories along with the ones in For Your Eyes Only to make a Complete Shorter James Bond, is probably a better bet for the casual reader.

And those four stories are:

"Octopussy," originally serialized in the March and April 1966 issues of Playboy -- It's from the point of view of a gone-to-seed British colonial (in Jamaica, of course) whose sordid wartime past comes back to confront him in the person of 007. Along with The Spy Who Loved Me, it's one of Fleming's very few stories that show Bond from another point of view. And the "Octopussy" here is an actual octopus, much like the Pus-feller of Doctor No.

"The Property of a Lady," from a 1963 Sotheby's annual (and reprinted a year later in Playboy, which would take any Bond it could get) -- Bond uses a known Soviet mole's payoff -- a fabulously valuable Faberge globe -- to find and target for diplomatic expulsion the KGB's local Resident Director at a Sotheby's auction. It's probably the most bloodless Bond story, and one whose plot doesn't entirely make sense -- if the KGB doesn't have a good sense of the value of this object, how could they possibly be able to bid it up at the auction without risking being the winning bidder?

"The Living Daylights," from a 1962 color section of The London Sunday Times and reprinted in the US in Argosy (which I'm always surprised to find survived as late as 1962) -- Bond acts as a sniper in Berlin to stop a KGB sniper and allow a British agent to get across the border. This is the only Fleming Bond story to take place in Berlin, the heart of the Cold War, and it's one of the great contradictions of the series that such a Cold Warrior spent most of his time so far away from the serious battlefields. Also notable for being another example of how the literary Bond does not find it easy to kill, particularly when he has an extra reason to leave a target alive.

"007 in New York," a vignette added to the first US edition of Fleming's Thrilling Cities (as a consolation prize to soften the nasty things he said about real NYC) after first appearing in the New York Herald Tribune -- Bond muses about the splendors of New York and about his mission to tip off an ex-colleague that her boyfriend is a Soviet agent upon whom the American net will very shortly fall. Not really a story at all; the action happens entirely offstage, and there's little of that. If it were funny, it would be a shaggy dog story -- what's the equivalent for a thriller?

And that ends the Bond stories. I still have a pile of interesting quotes, which will keep "James Bond Daily" running for another ten days or so. (Unless someone has a copy of Colonel Sun lying about that they'd be willing to lend me?)

James Bond Daily: A Drink Fit for a Man

Bond drinks a lot of different things, but he's often fond of something much like this drink, from p.157 of Doctor No:

'And I would like a medium Vodka dry Martini -- with a slice of lemon peel. Shaken and not stirred, please. I would prefer Russian or Polish vodka.'

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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Man Burning
via FoxyTunes

A Recently Read Meme

I picked it up here, because of a Tweet from Knopf:

Using only books you have read this year (2009), cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title.

Describe Yourself: I Killed Adolph Hitler

How do you feel: Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Describe where you currently live: Who Needs Donuts?

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: An Ideal World

Your favorite form of transport: Step by Step

Your best friend is: Every Person on the Planet

You and your friends are: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

What’s the weather like: Wetlands

Favourite time of day: Nocturnal Conspiracies

If your life was a: Disappearance Diary

What is life to you: Live and Let Die

Your fear: A Mess of Everything

What is the best advice you have to give: This Is Not a Game

Thought for the Day: Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

How I would like to die: Only in Books

My soul’s present condition: One! Hundred! Demons!
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Listening to: Okkervil River - Lost Coastlines
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: The Man With The Golden Gun

This is the last Bond novel by Fleming; he didn't consider it finished when he died in 1964, and the question of just who made it publishable (and how much work went into that effort) has been hotly debated since then by the kind of people who care about such things. It's one of the thinnest of the Bond novels -- about the same length as Casino Royale, the first novel, and only slightly longer than the overgrown novelette The Spy Who Loved Me.

Golden Gun is somewhat programmatic as well, running quickly through its plot without the customary asides and thoughts that Fleming incorporated into the earlier novels -- leading me to assume that writing those was part of Fleming's revision process, that the first draft was to get the plot down and correct, and afterwards was to bring the book up to the necessary polish. (I may be wrong; I clearly haven't made a serious study of the subject.)

It begins a year after You Only Live Twice; Bond has been missing and presumed dead since then. But a man claiming to be Bond -- and knowing more than most of those who have claimed to be Bond -- has contacted the Secret Service and asked to be put through to see M. This man -- who is Bond, of course -- does get in to see M, but it turns out that he came home via the Soviet Union, and had been brainwashed into an assassination plot.

But this is still the early '60s, so brains can always be washed and re-washed. Bond is captured, sent off for the rest cure, and -- more quickly here than I assume Fleming would have wanted it to be in the final draft -- propped back up in his suit and license to kill, and sent off on a mission. If he succeeds, then he's back in grace. If not...well, he'll have died in harness, which is what everyone expected.

The job is to kill Paco "Pistols" Scaramanga, a killer for hire working for the Castro government in Cuba (still fairly young, and assumed to be shaky, at this point), who is also the point man for a consortium of organized crime cartels investing in a Jamaican casino. (Once again, Fleming's own connections to Jamaica drag Bond there, out of all of the places in the world -- for a superspy in the height of the Cold War, he spent an awful lot of time in the topical heat, and most of it before the Cuban revolution at that.)

The plot is pure Fleming, and there are many of his usual touches along the way -- in the final confrontation between Bond and Scaramanga, on a train and off it, and in the return of Bond's CIA friend Felix Leiter -- but Golden Gun feels as unfinished as the shell of a hotel that hosts the gathering of mobsters at the center of its plot.

Read in August

This was the month of Bond; I started Casino Royale (and my run straight through all of the Fleming Bond books) on July 20th, but only got through the first three books before the end of July. All of the rest of them came in August, taking up most of my reading time this month.

• Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever (8/3)
  
• Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love (8/6)
  
• Jules Feiffer, Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966) (8/11)
  Here's an uncomfortable fact for the anti-blogging, journalism-is-exalted forces that insist that professionals always get paid: Jules Feiffer wrote and drew the weekly strips collected here, his iconic work for The Village Voice, the works that made his name and brought him fame and contracts, for seven long years without being paid a cent. Eventually, the Voice had to start paying him, yes. But, still: seven years of free content. Think about that. Explainers collects the first eleven years of Feiffer's great strip for the Village Voice -- I generally knew it as just "Feiffer," but it was originally "Sick Sick Sick" and had other titles over the course of nearly forty years. Feiffer starts this book almost fully formed -- some of the early strips look like they're drawn by a Kurtzman clone, but that's about all that's not pure Feiffer -- with his trademark wordy, witty strips, mostly with two people talking around some relationship or other. (The rest have one person, talking nakedly to the reader.) And those words are cutting, from the very first page. Whether he's writing about mothers and sons, lovers, politics, or the work rat-race, Feiffer's characters talk about precisely the things that no one really talks about, in the words we either wish we could say or the words that we would never want to say, because they're too true. This is a great, monumental book, some of the best cartooning of the 20th century by one of its masters, and I hope that Fantagraphics will continue and collect the rest of Feiffer's Village Voice strips.
  
• Ian Fleming, Doctor No (8/12)
  
• Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (8/14)
  
• Kazu Kibuishi, editor, Flight Volume Six (8/16)
  Reviewed in my column in the December issue of Realms of Fantasy -- look for it at the end of October.
  
• Patricia Briggs, et. al., Mercy Thompson: Homecoming (8/17)
  Reviewed in my column in the December issue of Realms of Fantasy -- look for it at the end of October.
  
• Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (8/18)
  
• Ian Fleming, Thunderball (8/20)
  
• Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (8/21)
  
• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (8/23)
  It's the third in the series, and all of the hip folks read it in 2006, when it was published. O'Malley includes a chart of the characters' relationships in the backmatter, which is helpful even for someone like me who read the second book last month. Our hero, young Toronto slacker Pilgrim, is trying to succeed with his band, Sex Bob-omb, and to stay together with his new girlfriend, Ramona Flowers. But he must first defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends, and this book sees #3, Todd Ingram, show up. Even worse, Ingram not only has vegan superpowers, he's both dating and in a very successful band with one of Pilgrim's exes, Envy Adams, who hijacked his first band, broke his heart, and became the girl he could never forget. It's just as distinctive a mix of 8-bit video gaming and slacker culture as the first two books, and that mix still works much much better that it has any right to.
  
• Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter (8/25)
  
• Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (8/25)
  
• Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1971-1972 (8/25)
  One of the things that kept Peanuts vital for so long -- and this book collects strips from a full twenty-two years into the series, and it's still excellent work -- is that Schulz built himself a large cast, and never stopped adding characters. Sure, eventually his ideas for what would work faltered -- Rerun Van Pelt, who would become just a smaller Linus, and then a vaguely different Linus exactly the same size, is born in this book, and he's probably the beginning of that trend -- but Woodstock and Peppermint Patty, both great characters, are still pretty new at this point, and the even newer Marcie is coming into her own as well. As long as Schulz kept creating new characters and situations -- these years also see two of the great camp sequences -- Peanuts was the vital beating heart of the American comics page. This series hasn't yet hit the first strips that I would have seen in the paper directly -- I was born in 1969, and started reading around Christmas of 1971 -- but I expect those will come in another book or two. And, for those around my age, the strips of this era are immediately familiar from the stacks of Peanuts reprint volumes of the '70s and '80s -- I can still see the display unit they had in my library then. Eventually, Peanuts started to hollow out, and wasn't as consistently strong as it was before. But, even in 1971 and '72, it was still a strip about loneliness and depression as often as not, with even Snoopy's Joe Cool reduced to hanging around the Student Union on a fall Sunday afternoon.
  
• Brendan Burford, editor, Syncopated (8/26)
  
• Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice (8/27)
  
• Ian Fleming, The Man With the Golden Gun (8/28)
  
• Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman, and Anzu, X-Men: Misfits, Vol. 1 (8/31)
  
• Ian Fleming, Octopussy and The Living Daylights (8/31)

And that's the end of the month. I expect to read more next time out, now that I'm done with Bond, but I often expect things that don't happen.