Even Cracked Is Noticing the Unexamined Assumptions of the Superhero Genre

One of many money quotes in David Wong's The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie:

See, because without [Captain America] to tell them, these professional law enforcement officers would have had no concept of "evacuating civilians away from where violence is occurring." These people have had no training at all for what to do in the case of, say, a terrorist attack. Why would they? They're just cops working in post-9/11 New York, while Captain America is an unfrozen science experiment from 1942.

Remember: only the special people matter. Everyone else is cannon fodder to make the special people sad, or peons to be saved by the amazing powers of the special people.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/18

I need to cover two weeks this time out -- since last week's books didn't get covered in my frenzy to get ready for my employer's massive off-site meeting, and then I spent four long days at that meeting and the last two getting home and recuperating. Luckily, the current week brought only a short stack, so it's not too much to go through this time.

First up has to be Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, in honor of the most recent Nebula Awards banquet Saturday night in San Jose. This is the latest incarnation of the annual anthology thought up by Damon Knight in the mid '60s to give SFWA a revenue stream, and, as usual, it reprints the Nebula-winning stories of two years ago (2011), along with a few also-rans, and functions something like a belated "Best of the Year." (But, one could argue, this is a crowd-sourced Year's Best, and you couldn't pick a better crowd than the assembled writers of SFWA, could you?) This year's edition is edited/compiled (since I doubt she was allowed to really edit the already award-caliber stories here) by Catherine Asaro, a two-time Nebula winner and former two-term SFWA President. Showcase 2013 is published in trade paperback by Py, and hit stores about a week ago.

I also have a large stack of manga being published by Yen Press this month, so I'll dive into them next:

The first two volumes of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix are out, which reprint Shiro Amano's comics adaptation of the popular fighting-your-way-through-Disney-world-with-a-giant-sword-that-looks-like-a-key games. I am not entirely certain how this series is connected to the earlier Kingdom Hearts manga series -- my guess is that it will reprint everything we've ever seen in the US, and possibly add more than never made it here from Japan, but the book itself doesn't explain what a "Final Mix" is.

Junya Inoue's hard-to-search for series Btooom! (three Os, one bang) is back with a second volume; I read the first one a number of weeks ago but haven't managed to write about it yet. It's a pretty violent recasting of Battle Royale with a video-game overlay; our main character is a master at a competitive online game about blowing up the other players (like a much more specific Team Fortress 2), and then finds himself kidnapped to the obligatory remote island to play a real-world version of that game for no good reason by the usual shadowy forces. If you think that fighting manga have too many guns and not enough bombs, this is exactly the series for you.

Black God, by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, as always, finishes its run with a giant-sized nineteeth volume this month. (See my reviews of volumes two, three, four, and fifteen for a an overview.)

I keep thinking I should read more of Atsushi Ohkubo's shonen demon-fighting saga Soul Eater, which hits a fourteenth volume this month. (Both my sons love it, and have the full set -- so I could easily read them all if I wanted to.) I read and reviewed volumes one and eight, so perhaps I only look at it every seven volumes -- if so, I've only got one more to wait until it's time again.

Also hitting this month is The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Vol. 4, the latest spin-off from the vast Haruhi Suzumiya empire, focusing on one of the minor characters of the main story. (Don't ask me more detail than that; I'm not really up on all things Haruhi.) The art is by Puyo, the story is by Haruhi creator Nagaru Tanigawa, and the original character designs are by Noizi Ito.

Yuuki Kodama's Blood Lad series reaches a third volume this month -- I read the first one, and haven't managed to write about it yet. It's broad and goofy and very stereotypically shonen, about the slacker demon ruler of a piece of Hell, his otaku love for all pieces of Japanese pop culture, and the human girl who accidentally dropped into his realm. It's the kind of book that starts to ignore its supposed premise by about the hundredth page, so it'll probably turn into something very different if it runs long enough.

And the mighty Omamori Himari, by Milan Matra, reaches its tenth volume, with presumably even more panty shots to celebrate. (The book is still in its protective wrapper as I write this, but it's rated "M" for mature, the most restrictive rating of any of the Yen books this month. So anyone hoping for some fanservice should look her first.)

Durarara!! -- always confusingly styled DRRR!! on the covers -- returns with Saika Arc, Vol. 2, from the team of Akiyo Satorigi (art), Suzhito Yasuda (character design), and Ryohgo Narita (creator). Sharp-eyed followers will note that no one is credited with actually writing this story, but who needs writers?

And there's yet another retelling of Alice in Wonderland in manga form -- this must be the fourth or fifth one I've seen, which is just weird -- in the form of Are You Alice? by Ikumi Katagir and Ai Ninomiya (credited as "original story," which looks like a slam on Lewis Carroll to me). Alice this time is a young man, entering the confusing world of Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts is a pretty young man. (This doesn't seem to be turning into yaoi, but it's early days yet.)

I need to get a running start to get all the way through the next title, so here I go... Umineko When They Cry, Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch, Vol. 1. The story is by Ryukishi07, the art by Jiro Suzuki, and it continues to be based on a series of murder-mystery games, much like the vaguely related Higurashi: When They Cry series.

And last from Yen this time out is Thermae Romae, Vol. II by Mari Yamazaki, the amazing story of a time-traveling Roman bath-house designer from the age of Augustus and the modern Japanese bath technology that inspires him. It's a unique idea, and the first volume -- which, again, I read but haven't gotten around to writing about -- was a lot of fun in that very earnest Japanese way.

Returning to books with only words on their pages, The Planet Thieves is the first novel in a new series by Dan Krokos (author of the previous YA novel False Memory). Planet Thieves may be YA or middle-grade, if that distinction is of burning importance to anyone. It's coming from Tor Starscape this month, and is the SFnal story of a starship on a routine training mission full of young cadets from the Academy when it's attacked and boarded by a vicious alien race that has been at war with humanity for generations. Those cadets -- led by our hero, of course -- must take back their ship and get back to Earth to warn about this new assault.

Rhiannon Held is back with Tarnished, the sequel to her werewolf novel Silver, from Tor in hardcover this week. It's urban fantasy, obviously, but seems to come more from the old hurt/comfort strain of fanfic -- focusing on alpha wolf Andrew, who finds and saves damaged Silver, who can't shift due to torture -- rather than from the more usual "all these supernatural boys love the totally awesome female protagonist" romance-influenced style of contemporary fantasy. This time out, Andrew and Silver  are looking to take over the pack he used to belong to, because that's what werewolf novels are about. (And "that" is the outdated simplification of wolf pack hierarchy, because that's more amenable to fiction than the messier actual reality.)

Last is the new Imager novel from the dapper L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Antiagon Fire, coming as a Tor hardcover next week. (I had some Antiagon Fire once, but a quick course of over-the-counter treatments cleared it right up -- ask your pharmacist!) This is the seventh book in the series, and I have to admit that I don't know what's going on -- it's epic fantasy about armies and empire clashing, with magic and skulduggery and all the rest, but that's about as specific as I can get.

2012 Aurealis Award Winners

It was a busy weekend for SFnal awards -- not just on my side of the globe, but Down Under as well, where the Aurealis Awards were announced at a ceremony in Sydney.

It's a long list, but I haven't detected any space limitation for blogs yet, so here they all are:

Best Children’s Fiction (Told Primarily Through Words): Brotherband: The Hunters by John Flanagan (Random House Australia)

Best Children’s Fiction (Told Primarily Through Pictures): Little Elephants by Graeme Base (Viking Penguin)

Best Young Adult Short Story: "The Wisdom Of The Ants" by Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld)

Best Young Adult Novel (Joint Winners):
 Dead, Actually by Kaz Delaney (Allen & Unwin)
 Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Best Illustrated Book / Graphic Novel: Blue by Pat Grant (Top Shelf Comix)

Best Collection: That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K. J. Bishop (Self-Published)

Best Anthology: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 6 Edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books)

Best Horror Short Story: "Sky" by Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Horror Novel: Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott (Xoum)

Best Fantasy Short Story: "Bajazzle" by Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Fantasy Novel: Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Best Science Fiction Short Story: "Significant Dust" by Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Rook by Daniel O’Malley (Harper Collins)

Peter Mcnamara Convenors’ Award For Excellence: Kate Eltham

Kris Hembury Encouragement Award: Laura Goodin


Congratulations to all of the winners, particularly to Margo Lanagan, who took a full 25% of the available trophies.

Nebula Award Winners for 2012!

SFWA's annual gala ceremony happened last night in San Jose, officially installing Gene Wolfe as God-King of All Creation the latest Grand Master and revealing for the first time the following winners:

Novel: 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)

Novelette: “Close Encounters”, Andy Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories)

Short Story: “Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)


Congratulations to all of the winners! And, to the not-quite-winners...well, you till get to say "Nebula Nominee" for the rest of your life, which is not nothing. And there's always next year.

I'm sure certain sectors of the Internet are already grousing about one winner or another, but I had no horses in this particular race, so I'm in the unusual (for me) position of being able to be simply happy for the winners.

(via, as usual, the indispensable Locus Online)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/11

If there are any Antick Musings Kremlinologists -- and what a sad and odd idea that is -- they will  have noticed that this post did not appear early this morning, when it was supposed to.

I do have an explanation, though not a good one: I spent all day Sunday (the day I usually write these posts) getting down to my employer's gala Global Meeting down in Miami, and spent pretty much all day Saturday pre-empting that lost Mother's Day and preparing for the trip.

There is a pile of books I should have written about, and there certainly was enough time on Saturday to write something if I'd really wanted to. But they'll still be there when I get back on Friday, and I'll either update this post then or just roll them into next week's post.

So this is just an "I aten't dead" post. I am, instead of being dead in a ditch somewhere, on the 13th floor of a reasonably posh hotel on the water in a subtropical city, in the middle of four very long days of meetings, schmoozing, and other things that I dislike nearly as much as those. I will be back here, eventually.

Generational Trolling in Our Time

Certain sectors of the Internet -- those whose ox is being gored this time, mostly -- are complaining about this here Time magazine cover story, which claims that Young People Today are lazy, unmotivated, and entirely unlike the upright older generations who, gol-durn it!, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and Built This Here United States.

This is indeed a stupid argument, but it's not a new stupid argument. Time in particular trots it out every few years -- see the following two examples from 2005 and 1990, grabbed quickly and haphazardly -- but all of the lazy wing of American journalism (which is most of it) likes this "we're better than you people, even though you're young and healthy and pretty and thin and have your whole lives in front of you" story, because they are old and crabbed and grumpy and have their entire failed lives burning behind them.

I'm part of Generation X, which was massively vilified in the media throughout the late '80s and early '90s -- remember "slackers?"; that was us -- even though we were very much like other teens and twenty-somethings before us. Folks older than me can chime in about how the mass media similarly demonized hippies, "juvenile delinquents" in the '50s, and all the way back to the flappers of the '20s.

The point is that this is what the media does. They identify a stupid trend, don't bother to check to see if it bears any relationship to reality -- or if they've filed the exact same story every five years for the last seven decades -- and run with it, hoping for attention and ad revenue. You don't have to let the idiots troll you. Just tell them to piss off, and go on about your life.

And remember: in twenty years, you and your age cohort will be the ones complaining about the new generation of Lena Dunhams and Douglas Couplands and Abbie Hoffmans. So you'll get your chance in the smug asshole chair, don't worry.

(Also, an actual journalist named Elspeth Reeve -- one of the few who checks facts and has a historical sense and more than one functional brain cell -- has debunked this for Atlantic Wire already.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/4

Welcome back to the weekly post about the stuff I find in my mail -- all of the below books arrived over the past seven days, sent by publishing companies hoping that I will read and love and write about them. That may yet happen, but I haven't read any of these books yet -- but here's what I can tell you about them right now.

John Scalzi's The Human Division is probably the highest profile, most successful serialized novel since Stephen King's The Green Mile more than a decade ago, so there's a good chance that you've already heard about it, if not read it (or parts of it) already. But the thirteen serialized chapters/stories have now been all collected from their original electronic form and published as a hardcover by Tor (and, of course, also as an all-in-one ebook edition as well), hitting stores May 14th. The combined edition contains two extra stories as a bonus to those able to wait. The book itself is a continuation of his main space-opera sequence that began with Old Man's War (and which doesn't seem to have developed a name other than "the Old Man's War universe") I expect to read this one pretty soon, and this time around, I hope not to provoke the author to suggest I should stop reading his work.

Hauntings is a collection of reprint ghost stories, edited by Ellen Datlow and published by Tachyon. The stories range from Pat Cadigan's "Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie," from 1983, through Kelly Link's Two Houses," from last year, with stories from Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Lucius Shepard, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford in between -- two dozen ghost tales in all.

Entirely different is Superman: Peace in the Balance, a "Choose-Your-Fate Adventure Book" which is quite similar to a certain trademarked series of "if you decide to do X, turn to Page 6" books from my youth. This one is written by Michael Teitelbaum, has cover at by Rom Zaime and uncredited generic Superman art (and puzzles!) inside, and is aimed at kids ages 8-12. It's published by Tor's Starscape imprint, and features Clark Kent trying to cover a World Peace Conference while three of his deadliest enemies (those guys on the cover) simultaneously attack Earth.

The Beautiful Land looks to be the first novel by Alan Averill -- it doesn't say so specifically, but it won the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and has other new-author indications -- and is coming from Ace on June 4th. It's an alternate-universe SF novel, in which the shadowy Axon Corporation hires Takashiro O'Leary -- who once was his fictional world's equivalent of Bear Grylls -- to explore alternate timelines. Of course, it gets more complicated than that -- the inventor of the time-travel device has his own plans, and Tak's love, a shell-shocked Iraq war vet, will have no place in the clean new timeline Axon wants to build.

Michael Logan's Apocalypse Cow is also an award winner before US publication -- it landed the inaugural Terry Pratchett Prize when it came out in the UK -- and, as the title implies, it is about the zombie cow apocalypse hitting Britain. I expect it's funny -- cows are always funny in fiction, though much less so in real life -- and the Pratchett imprimatur is pretty nice, too. St. Martin's Press is publishing this as a trade paperback on May 21.

From St. Martin's corporate cousin Tor comes Susan Palwick's new novel Mending the Moon, arriving in hardcover on May 14th. Given Palwick's background, and that Tor publication, I expect there's some fantasy in it, but the description is very mundane: a middle-aged woman is murdered on vacation in Mexico, by another American tourist, a young man. When he takes his own life soon after in Seattle, his mother invites the murdered woman's adopted son and other close friends to a memorial service for the murderer. Somewhere in the middle, the online fandom for a comic-book superhero called Comrade Cosmos is also important.

And last for this week is Jon Steele's Angel City, the middle book in the "Angelus Trilogy" after The Watchers. This looks to be a thriller with supernatural elements rather than a "fantasy novel" -- at least as positioned by Blue Rider Press, which will publish it as a hardcover in June -- in which a tough detective and a high-priced whore with a heart of gold continue their battle against the otherworldly Nephilim.