What a Pile of Books Demanding to Be Reviewed Looks Like

My plan to reduce the stack of read but unreviewed books by reviewing one a day has fallen sadly afoul of events -- and the particular "event" in this case was the fact that Thing 2 (my younger son, now 11) and I have been playing a lot of Lego Indiana Jones 2 the last week or so.

(It's not new, but all of the Lego games - except for Harry Potter, which has over-complicated game mechanics -- are so much fun that it's great just to pick them up and run around smashing things and jumping your little man around randomly; they're the kind of games that make you happy just to look at on the shelf and even more so to pull them back down and play.)

In other, unrelated news, my iPod Touch has been acting up for the past couple of weeks, and finally succumbed to the Ubiquitous White Screen of Death over the last few days. Even the so-called "genius bar" -- I've been a user of Apple products for a long time now, and I greatly preferred it when they were scrappy underdogs and not arrogant SOBs -- was no help, and so I ended up having to get a new one earlier today.

So far, it doesn't seem all that different -- it supposedly has the super neat-o keen-o "retina display" and a faster processor, but it basically seems like the same device to me. Except. This new one has a camera in it, a cheap crappy phone-style camera, so I can now take cheap crappy pictures of random things when I remember to. And so, this afternoon, instead of actually writing a review for one (or more!) of the books in that big stack, I played some more Lego Indiana Jones 2 with my son, took a picture of the stack of books, and wrote the above.

I'm not proud, mind you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/19

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one person to receive more free books in the mail than his fellows and has assumed among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitles him, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that he should declare the nature and type of those books that he hath received.

And who am I to deny that?

So, here, as I've done every Monday for several years, is an annotated list of the books that came into my mailbox last week -- books I have not yet read, I must add, so my opinions on them may be even more suspect than usual.

This week's four books divide neatly into two groups: books I've seen before (and haven't read), and books I'm seeing for the first time (and really haven't read). The first group comprises:

• Chris Roberson's new novel Further: Beyond the Threshold, coming as a trade paperback from Amazon's new SF imprint 47North on May 22nd, which I looked at in my 4/28 post
• and Paul Melko's novel The Broken Universe (sequel to The Walls of the Universe), coming as a Tor hardcover on June 5th, which I looked at in my 3/31 post

First of the books I'm seeing for the first time is L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Princeps, the sequel to Scholar in Modesitt's larger "Imager Portfolio" series (I believe the first three books were a trilogy, and these newer two are prequels. Princeps sees the hero of Scholar with new responsibilities (and the problems that go along with them), and hits stores as a To hardcover on May 22nd.

And last this time is Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's second textbook about creating comics, Mastering Comics, the follow-up to their acclaimed Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. This is from First Second, and appears to be available right now -- so, if any of you want to make comics, you'll want this book.

Incoming Books: May 19th

I got back to the Montclair Book Center yesterday, during a busy day of errands and frivolity (The Wife and I were celebrating our 19th wedding anniversary -- the actual day is the 22nd -- by offloading our two sons and having some time alone), because they had another special order for me.

While I was there, I had to get other books, because that's what a bookstore is for.

So, I grabbed two fantasy novels for Thing 2 -- Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men and Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero, to give him choices for his next series. (If I haven't mentioned lately how wonderful it is that I have a son who really enjoys reading fantasy books and telling me about them, let me mention it: it's wonderful.)

The special order was Richard Stark's The Black Ice Score, getting me that much closer to starting a reading project of that entire series.

And then I found some books I used to have (before the flood) and needed to own again:

• Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy, collecting his first three books (mostly written in the '70s) about eating in America, which are vital for anyone who likes eating, America, and wonderfully funny, engaging writing.
• Evan Dorkin's Dork, Vol. 1: Who's Laughing Now?, an excellent collection from a grumpy and feeding-hand-biting cartoonist, one of my favorite creators from the '90s (and since then, when he has new work out).
• And David Boswell's Reid Fleming: Worlds Toughest Milkman, Vol. I, which I reviewed here a couple of years ago, and which I buy again in hopes that it will help, in the tiniest way, spur Boswell to finishing up the stories for Vol. II.

On the same set of errands, I also stopped in a comics/games shop -- actually, to buy plastic trading-card sleeves (the 9-to-a-page kind, three-hole punched to fit into a ring binder), since The Wife uses those to organize coupons -- and happened across two more books.

Snarked!, Vol. 1: Forks and Hope is the first collection of Roger Langridge's new all-ages comics series from Boom!, and I've been on a Langridge kick the last couple of years. (Driven by his great Muppet Show comics; see my review of Family Reunion for more details.)

And Chester Brown's The Little Man, since I keep thinking I should dip into Brown's work, and I really don't want to spend much time on his newest, why-I-only-sleep-with-whores book.

2011 Nebula Winners!

Last night, in a gala ceremony somewhere in the depths of Arlington, Virginia, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) presented their 2011 Nebula Awards, and these were the winners:

• Novel: Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
• Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 10-11/11)
• Novelette: "What We Found", Geoff Ryman (F&SF 9-10/11)
• Short Story: “The Paper Menagerie”, Ken Liu (F&SF 3-4/11)
• Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife”
• Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)

Congratulations to all of the winners, and particularly to Jo Walton for the magnificent and moving Among Others, which I personally would have voted for if I were SFWA-eligible.

(via Locus Online)

Patently Silly by Daniel Wright

Everyone thinks they have at least one good idea in them. Most of those people are wrong, of course -- their "good idea" is something like an Air Filled Brassiere or a Wind-Assisted Bicycle, or even Toothpick Jewelry. Those are actually bad ideas.

Patently Silly is a catalog of such bad ideas -- at least, as seen by author Daniel Wright, though a few things in here might cause different opinions among a very few people -- as evidenced by their patent papers, which Wright has researched and boiled down into quick, humorous descriptions. Like so many other funny ideas these days, it was a website first, at patentlysilly.com, and then turned into a book.
This book has a very specific place in any home -- on the tank in the smallest room of the house. And it serves its function there (in a way that a website really can't) very well: it's amusing, copiously illustrated (with the diagrams from the inventors' own patent applications), and made up of short pieces so that reading it can take precisely as long as desired. It may not be a perfect book -- what is? -- but it's very nearly perfect for its chosen niche, and that's vastly better than most books.

One Soul by Ray Fawkes

Every art form has stories that can only be told this way: novels that can't be turned into movies, operas that must be seen in person, movies that could only be flickering pictures in the dark. Comics is still a new art, and only has a few examples so far.

But Ray Fawkes's 2011 graphic novel One Soul is one of them: it's a story that couldn't be anything but comics, a multi-threaded examination of what it is to be alive...and not. Using the famous nine-panel grid, and sticking to it strictly, Fawkes tells eighteen life stories -- one for each panel on the two facing pages, and tells one single story at the same time.

Eighteen babies are born, in all times and places, in splendor and in squalor, in wealth and in poverty. They grow up, they live their individual lives -- long or short, as it happens -- they make their ways in the world and think about what they want and need and feel. And the flow of their lives, of all of their lives, is the story of One Soul.

This is a book that will make the entire outside world disappear; it has at least a whole world inside it, and it will take all of your attention and all of your emotions. Fawkes never has to name any of his characters -- we know them from their places and their faces, and come to care for them all, good and bad, kind and cruel, lovers and fighters, happy and sad. One Soul is one of those works of art that are huge in ambition and scope, that try to encompass the entire world, all of human experience, inside itself. And it succeeds: One Soul is magnificent and lovely and frightening and compelling and sorrowful and wonderful and, in the end, utterly, utterly transcendent.

I Love Kawaii, Selected by Charuca

This is not the kind of book that lends itself to a detailed, in-depth review, but that's just fine: it's about what I need on a night when I want to keep up a string of daily review posts but feel too lethargic for overly energetic thinking and typing. (I was up at 5:15 for the bi-weekly global 8 AM meeting, so it's already been a long day.)

Charuca is a character illustrator and designer from Barcelona; kawaii is a Japanese word for a very Japanese term -- a super-"cute" style of art, all rounded lines, neotenic features, and massively anthropomorphized everything; and I Love Kawaii is a collection of art from kawaii artists from all over the world, each with four to eight pages of their art, contact and website information, and a short descriptive paragraph by Charuca.

No one ever says so explicitly, but kawaii looks like a style driven almost entirely by female artists. (There may be some seminal men lurking in the background, but I hope not; I want the women to have this movement for their own, just because.) It's usually bright, full of saturated colors and crisp vector graphics, though there are some artists here who mix goth or folk art of classic childrens-book illustration styles into their kawaii, which gives I Love Kawaii more variety and visual interest than it otherwise would have.

The artists profiled here work in animation, in licensed-character design, in the production of vinyl figures -- in short, in just about every niche of illustration you can think of other than "fine art" -- since kawaii is a style meant to be produced, either mass or in small batches, and sent out into the world in waves. Their work is lovely and fun and bouncy and energetic and lovely and occasionally (just occasionally!) so sweet that it will rot all of the teeth out of your head in a second.

Ethics: Not Always Profitable

A new Harvard Business Review study reports that male professionals with high ethical character earn 3.4% less than those with lower character.

Actually, both of those metrics are self-reported, so it may be that the people reporting high ethical character are stuck-up prigs whose careers have stagnated, or those who report low ethical character are just more likely to lie about their salary. All we can really know for sure is that men who say they have high ethical character also say they make less money.

Patents, Patents Everywhere

How bad is the over-patenting problem? There were 40,000 software patents alone granted last year, vastly more than any but the very largest companies could even keep abreast of.

Big Questions by Anders Nilsen

If you're plugged into the comics field at all, you've probably already heard of this: it's the gigantic out-of-left-field book that all of the cool kids have been talking about for the last six months (call it 2011's Bottomless Belly Button). Of course, the really cool kids have known about it for a while: Nilsen has been serializing Big Questions as a series of smaller comics for close to a decade now.

In a wide, open landscape -- there's a stand of trees by a river, and a single farmhouse, and even some caves underground, but what we see most of all is widely scattered single trees -- live a flock of small birds, who are collectively our main characters. They're fascinated by "the giant," which they think is a massive metal bird, by the metal egg that it drops one day, and, later, after that egg is no more, by the grounded giant itself, and the man that comes out of it. That single farmhouse is also the home of an old woman and the idiot grandson she takes care of, but the humans in Big Questions are all seen from outside, like the other non-bird dangers, like the Owl and the Snake.

The birds question their lives, their cosmology, the purpose and ends of the world around them -- these are the questions of the title. And they, despite their best attempts, don't really understand what's going on with the giant, the egg and the pilot, or with the grandmother and the idiot. Nilsen tells his story from the point of view of a dozen unreliable narrators, but has the clarity and precision of his drawings to show us both what's really there and what the birds think is there.

Big Questions is a magnificent achievement: sweeping, even epic in its scope, with a heartbreaking sense of mortality and loss while maintaining a sense of mystery and spookiness. But it all begins with a few birds -- drawn more simply than the style Nilsen developed later in this story -- wondering about the purpose of their lives. It might not answer those big questions, since no book could, but it asks them well, and thinks about them deeply, and tells a worthy story around them.

Even More Awards You Probably Know About Already

Once again, those few benighted souls relying on Antick Musings for their skiffy-world news have been poorly served, but here's the most recent clutch of awards given out in our realms:

Robert A. Heinlein Award

This is both a fairly new award -- barely a decade old -- and one given for a body of work, rather than a specific piece of fiction, which means it has gone to pretty much exactly who we all would have predicted it would, in pretty much the same order. The award is given, officially, for "outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space" -- NASA propaganda, essentially.

This year's winner is Stanley Schmidt, long-time editor of Analog, and, in best Heinlein fashion, the award itself is a whopping great medallion that Schmidt will be expected to wear as much as he can -- or, at least, the matching lapel pins for when the medallion "is impractical."

Arthur C. Clarke Award

This is the one that Christopher Priest made such a fuss about a few weeks back -- it's one of the major UK "Best SF Novel" awards, given to "the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom" as decided by a panel of judges from the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the SCI-LONDON Film Festival. (Because who better to judge the merits of a novel than people who both organize a film festival and can't afford a shift key?)

This year, the award went to the only work Priest found barely tolerable, Jane Rogers's The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which may, perhaps, fill Priest's heart [1] with something vaguely like happiness.

John W. Campbell Memorial Award

This one is a US "Best SF Novel" award, given -- at least, this is how it's seemed to most outsiders for the past thirty-plus years -- to the good SF novel that the late Campbell would have hated the most. (The tone was set early, with with the very first winner, Barry Malzberg's grim Beyond Apollo, a novel about sex-crazed and just plain old crazed astronauts.)

This year's slate of nominees has just been announced, and they are:

• Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (Crown)
• Kathleen Ann Goonan, This Shared Dream (Tor Books)
• Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse (Night Shade Books)
• China Miéville, Embassytown (Ballantine Books/Del Rey)
• Christopher Priest, The Islanders (Gollancz)
• Joan Slonczewski, The Highest Frontier (Tor Books)
• Michael Swanwick, Dancing with Bears (Night Shade Books)
• Lavie Tidhar, Osama (PS Publishing)
• Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse (Simon & Schuster)
• Gene Wolfe, Home Fires (Tor Books)
• Rob Ziegler, Seed (Night Shade Books)

I haven't read several of these books, so my judgement may be off, but I expect that Osama will be hard to beat: I can feel Campbell already spinning in his grave just because of the nomination. Congratulations to all of the nominees.


I could have sworn there were more than that, but I seem to be at the end of the list for now. Congrats to those who have already won, and good luck for those jostling their way on the very long Campbell list -- remember, most of you have already lost!


[1] I originally typed "hard" here -- my fingers sometimes have better jokes than I do.

You've Probably Seen This Already

But it doesn't make it any less true:

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/12

It's a short stack this week, which is good because this is Mother's Day weekend -- and you don't know how much Mother's Day you can have until you're married (adding in the mother-in-law) to the mother of children (making her Mother #3, and the one you need to spend the most time & attention on). So, before I rush off to a gala luncheon with the MIL (and after running out for the obligatory breakfast-in-bed for The Wife, and while doing the laundry I'd usually have all day to complete), here's the scoop:

These four books all arrived in my mail last week, sent by publishers eager to have them better known to the world. Since my day job often is little more than a long series of depressing phone calls with my colleague the publicist, learning that no one responded to our most recent media mailing, I'm eager to do what little I can for these books, even though I haven't read them yet.

So first up is SecondWorld, a novel that can't even afford a single space for its title. It's an apocalyptic thriller -- the kind that has SF in its genes, but dares not speak the name -- in which resurgent Nazis use some sort of red-rain-causing, atmospheric-oxygen-destroying doomsday machine to threaten the entire world. But not if One! Tough! Man! With! A! Manlier-Than-Thou! Name! (ex-SEAL Lincoln Miller) has anything to say about it. Your author is Jeremy Robinson, your publisher is Thomas Dunne Books, and the hardcover has a QR code right on the front cover. How can you resist this when it hits stores on May 22nd?

To switch gears entirely, how about the first volume of a manga series about disaffected teens that's also inspired by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire? That would be Flowers of Evil, Volume 1, by Shuzo Oshimi (who previously created the series Drifting Net Cafe), coming from Vertical any day now.

Also from Vertical this month is Toru Fujisawa's GTO: The Early Years, Vol. 12, collecting the original Japanese stories that came before his GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka series, detailing Onizuka's exploits as a member of a biker gang looking for women.

And last is Ian C. Esslemont's Orb Sceptre Throne, his fourth fantasy novel set in the Malazan Empire world he created with Steven Erikson, coming as a trade paperback from Tor on May 22nd.