Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 14, 2025

This is slightly a cheat; these four books were birthday presents that I got a week ago Saturday. So not "in the mail" and not "week of June 14," either. But the point of these posts is to list new books, and these are new books, and now is the time I have to make a post, so here I go.

The first two are ones I bought myself and had wrapped so I could open them. I've said it before: one of the great things about being an adult is you can buy the presents you want for your own events and no one will stop you. (The last two came from my brother, who knows me almost as well as I do.)

I bought Alastor, another mid-90s omnibus of Jack Vance novels from Tor; I've been running through Vance over the past few years, hitting the big obvious series that already exist in omnibus editions. (This might be the last one of those; I might have to dive into Lyonesse next.) The Alastor series, as I remember, is three loosely-related novels from the 1970s - but we'll see what I find when I read them this time.

Also from myself: The Worst We Can Find is a history of the MST3K TV show and it's various successors, by TV writer Dale Sherman. I've been watching MST3K episodes with my kids - first back when they were tweens/teens, and again recently as we re-started the tradition of watching a movie together once a week. So I guess, as I do, I'm over-intellectualizing again and want to know more about things that I could just take as they came. (I should really just relax.) This book looked to be the best of the serious/historical/explanatory ones about the show - there's also more that's more academic, and probably others.

Speaking of which, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever is a memoir, of a kind, of the series by Frank Conniff, who was a writer and performer on the show for the first half of its original life and was also the one who did the initial choice of movies for the show. (Which means that he had to watch even more bad movies, including a whole bunch they never did on the show.) This is a slim book of, as it says, twenty-five essays about twenty-five movies.

And last is S. Petersen's Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, an omnibus of the two slim Petersen books from Chaosium from the '80s - as I recall, one was Cthulhu Mythos and the other was Dreamlands. At some point in the past twenty years or so, the two were combined into this one book and republished, which is nice for me since I lost my originals in my 2011 flood. This is probably officially a resource for the the Call of Cthulhu game, but it works just fine outside that context.

Quote of the Week: A Torturer's Musings

Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for; or perhaps it is only the chain  forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.88

Naked City by Eric Drooker

Everyone has story elements that annoy them unreasonably. For me, it's often small factual things that undermine core themes of a book - the ones that make me think, "wait, well if she can do X, then Y can't be true."

So I spent a lot of time while reading Eric Drooker's 2024 graphic novel Naked City trying to square one very minor circle in my head, and failing. You see, the main character is Isabel, a young wannabe singer-songwriter who moves to New York to chase her art. Her mother was Mexican, and was deported when she was young; her father an American who has recently died. One thread of the book is Isabel's worry that she's undocumented - the book never makes it quite clear, but she apparently doesn't have any paperwork of any kind.

Leave aside the fact that she went to school, where the usual  functionaries would have demanded and received all kinds of proof of her existence and residence and medical history and whatnot. But Drooker has Isabel take a quick European tour right in the middle of the worry about her potentially-undocumented status. And I kept asking myself: does Drooker think, or want his audience to think, that anyone can fly off to another continent, and work there for an extended period of time, without a passport? That plot element - which is totally extraneous, by the way; Drooker could have made it a West Coast thing with no change to the narrative at all - proves that she must have documentation, or it couldn't have happened.

This is not important to the book at all. It didn't need to be that way. But it's the kind of element that makes me question every strength of the book, every moody blue panel and every allusive line of dialogue, wondering if they're as randomly rickety in their own ways.

Naked City is somewhat fabulistic, which could be the answer to that question - and the one of why Isabel never even tried to look for that lost mother, or know her mother's name. Fables are focused on telling their specific story, in a particular story-teller way, and details only come up as they support that work.

So Isabel goes to New York, looking to make music and share it with people. She gets a lousy McJob (literally) and busks on the corner, but needs to also do something more remunerative. So she answers an ad to work as an artist's model, for an unnamed painter who is another of our main characters - the fable here is about making art, and he's the other side of that equation.

Normally, in a fable, there would be a strong distinction between the two - one is lazy but successful, the other driven but a failure, that kind of thing. Drooker, though, isn't constructing this explicitly as a fable with a specific moral: both of our central artists are positive, and both become notably successful in their art as the book goes on...though both have to deal with one Business Person, the gatekeeper to success, who isn't as positive and artsy as they are. (Isabel's Business Person, as is typical for the music industry, is vastly worse: predatory and demanding and actively molding her into something she doesn't want to be.)

There are two other main characters. First is Alex, a flighty dancer who "dates" Isabel for a while and dips in and out of the narrative, mostly there (I think) to be the avatar of a certain type of young hedonic artist, living for sensation and totally in the moment. Turning up later in the book is another unnamed man, older, maimed, a former window-washer and probably currently homeless - he's the unexpectedly philosophical voice of experience, stoic and accepting. He's not an artist of any kind, but he used to be a craftsman of a sort, taking pride in doing his work well, and now is almost a nihilist, insisting that life is only about the pursuit of money but (maybe paradoxically) refusing to actually do that himself.

Naked City is the kind of book where characters suddenly launch into detailed explanations of their own motivations and desires; it's about Art and Life and features people who think in those capital-letter terms at great length. Isabel mostly pours it out in her songs, which makes her the most naturalistic character - and that's good, because she's central and gets the most page-time. The Painter engages in the most obvious why-art conversations, with just about every other character; I don't know if Drooker specifically thought of him as an author stand-in, but he tends in that direction. Alex, and the band of similar folks that follow along with him for a few scenes  - because it's no fun being a hedonist alone - are more shallow, entirely about the moment and sensation above all.

It's a fairly long book, over three hundred pages, but mostly leisurely - Isabel and The Painter rise in their respective creative worlds, in their different ways, and then things change, for both of them, and they make other artistic choices. It ends better for one of them than the other: I don't know if Drooker had a moral in mind, but if he did, it doesn't entirely become clear. To be fair, Drooker's comics have typically been more imagistic, and he ends this book in his old silent mode, with a forty-page wordless sequence largely framed by snow.

I tend to think Naked City gets too specific too much for its own good - the talky bits are more specific, and less successful, than the pure-image sections. Isabel's past and parents are a distraction: Drooker wants to show she launched from a specific place, but where she launched from isn't central to this story. The Painter is more iconic, because we know less about him: he's there, he's been painting for years. We know what he wants and cares about and loves: what's important.

But this is the kind of book that will be most loved and clutched to heart by other wanna-be artists, who will see themselves in all of the arguments about art and commerce, selling out and rising up, who will passionately agree with specific speeches - I wouldn't be surprised to see some panels or lines from Naked City turned into tattoos before too long; it's that kind of book. If you're in that bucket, you should take a look at it: it is deep and capacious, and will give you language to talk about things you care about and examples to frame your thinking.

All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

There's no right or wrong way to structure a memoir. But some are more distinctive or evocative than others - some make you think "that's interesting, that's different."

Powerpaola - the working name of a peripatetic South American cartoonist whose first name is indeed Paola - decided to tell stories around the bicycles she's had in her life. Where she was at that time, what she was doing, how each specific bicycle helped her get around the places she was living and what people it connected her to. (The edition I read was translated into English by Andrea Rosenberg,)

The book is All My Bicycles, and it doesn't go in chronological order, either. Powerpaola begins with three random bikes - she gives all of them quirky names throughout, or rather tells us the things she called each of them to differentiate them - that she had between 1996 and 2013, in three different cities on two different continents. She also begins the book by telling us she doesn't know how to end it, as if this first section is the last. From there, she moves backwards and forwards, with chapters on other bikes at other times, from her first as a young teen to a bike she used in Buenos Aires just a few years ago.

Her pages are busy, full of images that fill up their panels, all in a dark wash that's more brown than black, with occasional pops of contrasting colors. There's a lot of the natural world, dark and jungly, and even the cityscapes are busy and full of darkness, crammed with manholes and dark expanses of asphalt and barred windows.

There's no single story here: it's not that kind of memoir. Powerpaola sets up a possible overall narrative, about how she always runs away, in that first section, and that is one thread of the narrative throughout. But only one - she's more interested in specifics and moments and memories than in fitting all of her history into some tight schema to make a book out of it. Bicycles is a book of memories and thoughts, all "I remember that time" and "here's what this person meant to me then." It's not "what bicycles mean" - not to her, or to the world in general - but instead "here's my life, as seen through the lens of the bicycles I rode and the places I rode them through."

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

I read Gene Wolfe's most successful series, The Book of the New Sun, what I think of as "recently" - though now I see it was six years ago. (The tempus, it do fugit, don't it?) I'd expected to get to this odd sequel "soon," and I guess this counts.

Book was a four-book series that told one continuous story; it was one work in multiple volumes, and has been reprinted in a single volume more than once since then. The Urth of the New Sun was a single novel, slightly longer than the constituent parts of Book, originally published about five years after the end of Book. But - and here I should point out that there's always something quirky about a Wolfe project, often multiple things - the quirky thing about Urth, or one of them, is that it too tends to fall into four distinct sections.

The narrator and hero of Book, Severian - once an apprentice torturer, now Autarch of the most extensive country on his very far-future Earth - spends Urth in a journey to save his planet, that very old-SF hero's journey. Urth starts on a vast starship - made of wood, with immense solar sails, for maximum Wolfean past-as-future frisson - then moves to the planet Yesod in another universe (or perhaps the universe is named Yesod; Wolfe is rarely interested in being clear) where Severian is tested, and then there's a voyage back on the same ship and a final section on Urth.

There's quite a lot of vaguely described time travel along the way: this unnamed ship voyages in both time and space, so the back half of the novel in particular bounces through multiple time periods of Earth/Urth - and, if you follow Wolfe, also Ushas, the new name of the planet once it is "saved."

To put what Wolfe says vaguely in fantasy-coded language into something more clearly science-fictional: it is very far in the future and the Sun is very old and dim. Other stars are visible during the day; winters get longer and colder almost year-by-year. The Sun's collapse is imminent enough to be plausible within a human timescale. Godlike beings - possibly AI, possibly a bio-engineered race - created by the human-like inhabitants of the previous universe (time-travel, remember, and a Penrosian cyclical universe model) are willing to drop a white hole into the Sun, which would rejuvenate it.

But they will only do so if the leader of Urth comes to their planet and goes through a test - at least one Autarch before Severian has taken that journey and failed. Testing leaders of planets seems to be their major industry; we see, from the air, a vast archipelago of islands, each one devoted to testing the leaders of one particular galaxy. And dropping the "white fountain" into the Sun will massively disrupt the current Urth, killing possibly a majority of the people living there. There's no hint of trying to warn them or create bulwarks against the rising seas, despite the fact that the journey of the white hole into the Sun takes at least centuries. Wolfe, as always, has a devout right-wing Catholic's disdain for mere individual human lives.

As usual in a Wolfe novel, the main character is confused and ill-informed, despite insisting repeatedly that he's super-competent and (in this particular case) that he never forgets anything. There are long conversations about the nature of reality and the SFnal underpinnings of this world, all very carefully phrased in such a way such that that none of it is clear to the reader in terms that reader already knows. That's how Wolfe works: if you're not willing to do most of the work yourself - if you don't think of a SF novel as a combination of a British crossword and an acrostic - Wolfe is not the writer for you.

In this novel in particular, most of the charms and interest are in getting additional details about characters and events from Book - but, again, all couched in Wolfean triple-reverse terms, at best allusive and often just gestures in the direction a solution might, possibly, be deduced if you think about everything in the world exactly the way Wolfe did circa 1986.

It's full of interesting moments and arresting images; for all my snark, this is actually on the accessible side of Wolfe's corpus. It would help if you had read, or even better intensely studied Book of the New Sun very soon before reading Urth, but it's not, strictly speaking, necessary. There is a novel here, with characters and events, and Wolfe, at this point in his career, would connect those events into a consistent plot that could be followed with only a normal amount of attention.

Urth is not the triumph Book was; there are multiple times when it threatens to become even more of a Christian allegory than it already is, and it's inherently a secondary, derivative work to begin with, a book explaining how something we knew would happen did happen. But it's a solid, deeply inventive book by one of the best and most distinctive SF writers of his era, and a return to his best-loved and most popular world.

Cult of the Ibis by Daria Tessler

I've only read one of Daria Tessler's works before - Salome's Last Dance, which I enjoyed a lot but had to admit I didn't entirely understand. So obviously I would next read a mostly wordless book of hers, about criminals and alchemy and set in a bizarre landscape.

The plot description of Cult of the Ibis does a great job of detailing the important points, so let me just quote it: this book "takes place in a fantasy cityscape loosely inspired by German Expressionist film. [... It] tells a story of an occultist getaway-driver who, after escaping with the loot from a bank robbery gone wrong, orders a build-your-own homunculus kit and goes on the lam."

Those sound like really random elements, but that's exactly what this book is: a collision of crime drama and hermetic mystery in a phantasmagorical city, in which our nameless, meek, yearning hero tries to transform himself, to double himself, through alchemy, perhaps because that kit costs exactly the take from the bank robbery of which he was the only survivor.

Tessler draws this in a busy, detailed, organic style, with imaginative panel layouts and film-inspired transitions. There is dialogue at important moments, but not a lot of it, and no captions. The reader has to imagine what any of these weird things might sound like. The main character, of course, never speaks. He's our Everyman, our viewpoint, our normal ordinary person - everyone and no one.

Oh, and there's a bunch of written text - alchemy explanations from magazines and advertisements - that our hero eagerly reads. We're not sure exactly what he's looking for in alchemy, what kind of transformation or power he wants, but we know he's small and weak: or sees himself that way, and so is that way. We don't know what he did before, how he became the one very different-looking member of this bank-robbery gang, any of the points on the arc of his life. All we see is this crime and the aftermath, along with his clear desire to learn the presumed secrets of the universe.

And that's what this book is about: bank robbery and the secrets of the universe. I doubt you can say that of any other book, so, really, you're now required to read this book someday, just for that. I'm sure you'll thank me for telling you about it.

Better Things: Family Tree

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I don't think I'm ever deliberately obscure. There's stuff I like, and some of it I happened to randomly find - mostly back when I was paying more attention to popular music, or maybe when the ecosystem of popular music was more attuned to the kind of things I like. Some of the songs in this year's series are big and famous: we've already hit "I Don't Like Mondays" and the Dire Straits "Romeo and Juliet."

And some are the songs I loved the most on a record I bought because I heard a different single.

The Odds were an alternative band from western Canada in the '90s - I see from Wikipedia that they re-formed after an initial breakup at the millennium and are still around; good for them. I bought a couple of their records, and had that sense that I loved a couple of songs and didn't always connect with the rest.

But one good song is all you need - one good song is what each post in this series is all about.

So today is for Family Tree, from The Odds' 1991 first record Neopolitan.

I'll be gone before the things that I do now go wrong
Family tree is burning to heat my house a little longer

It's about someone burning down his life - it's all in metaphors, so we don't know what, exactly, he's doing. But we know he's doing it. (For my SFnal peeps: you could argue that "he" is humanity and the family is the Earth. Frankly, that could easily be the intended meaning. The more I come to think about it, the better I like that interpretation, to be honest.)

It's got a great rhythm, starting up with a rattling drum intro and transitioning into a jangly beat that continues throughout the song. The chorus - I just quoted it above - is strong, and gets bigger as the song goes on. It's yet another song that just sounds better the louder your turn it up, especially in your car with the windows open.

Books Read: May 2025

Here's what I read last month; I publish this mostly for myself. If you find it useful, too - hey, that's two of us!

Powerpaola, All My Bicycles (5/2, digital)

Eric Drooker, Naked City (digital, 5/4)

Osamu Tezuka, Shakespeare Manga Theater (digital, 5/9)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead (digital, 5/10)

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (5/10)

Axelle Lenoir, What If We Were...2 (digital, 5/11)

Raymond Chandler, The High Window (in Stories & Early Novels, 5/11)

Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 (digital, 5/17)

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz, War and Peas: Hi, Earth (digital, 5/18)

Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, 5/18)

Noah Van Sciver, Beat It, Rufus (digital, 5/19)

P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It To Psmith (5/19)

Kris, Rob, Matt & Dave, Cyanide & Happiness: Punching Zoo (digital, 5/24)

William Kotzwinkle, The Midnight Examiner (5/24)

Laura Pérez, Ocultos (digital, 5/25)

Grant Snider, Thinking About Thinking (digital, 5/26)

Martin Millar, The Good Fairies of New York (5/26)

Mia Oberlӓnder, Anna (digital, 5/31)

Jack Vance, The Pnume (in Planet of Adventure, 5/31)

Next month I will read more books: that's my promise to you the home viewer.

Quote of the Week: In the Stratosphere

In the Onondaga Coffee Room, I had observed the members of the Fort Wayne Pistons having breakfast. They twined their long legs around the table legs or doubled them back under the chairs. It occurred to me that life must be very difficult for a traveling collection of men who are from six feet six to nearly seven feet tall. They might have special long beds at home, but they could scarcely carry them with them, and they must either bend or step back several paces to look in a shaving mirror. An awareness of their altitude seemed to oppress them - I could imagine how many times they had been asked how the weather was up there - and their heads, at the ends of such long necks, looked small, like guinea hens'. I was rapidly becoming depressed myself, until I thought of what a liberation it must be for a man of that height to get into the company of others who could see eye to eye with him. Instead of feeling set apart, he probably begins to think of anyone under six feet five as subnormal,. He goes back to his home town a giant refreshed.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.192 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Witty Comebacks compiled by Tim Glynne-Jones

I do posts here for all the books I read, but not all of the posts are equal. Some are mostly notifications, for Future Me, for the moments when I think "what was that book of random quotes I read a few years back? Was it as slight as I remember?"

Future Me, that book was Witty Comebacks, with a subtitle of "Great responses and sassy remarks." It was published by Arcturus's Sirius imprint in 2000, with a London address but a price in US dollars printed on the book. The introduction was credited to Tim Glynne-Jones as the compiler, though online bookstores list other names as editor.

I got it as a remainder a couple of years ago, but it wasn't expensive to begin with ($12.99), though it is a small thing (roughly six inches by five and just north of two hundred pages). The pages are nicely designed, with splashes of color - each chapter is a separate color, so I think the whole thing could be a two-color job in aggregate.

And, yes, it is a book of quotes. Thirteen thematic chapters, each one twenty pages or so, with one quote and supporting text on each page. The quotes are all in the zinger mode, as the title implies - these are all responses to questions, rude or honest or whatever. You've probably heard a lot of these quotes already, which is the nature of books like this: they're one of the ways culture reminds itself of the things it already knows.

It's pretty slight, but any book like this would be slight. It's not any slighter than any similar book, and it's a nice-looking, pleasant to read collection of exactly what it says it will be. Would that every book were that true to itself.

Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.

Everyone's life is different. Some people have relatively easy lives, some don't. We can forget how wide that spectrum is: there are a lot of people on the "relatively easy" side who don't realize where they actually sit. So seeing something from the far opposite end can be bracing, or frightening, or saddening, or centering, or all of those things at once.

Kayla E. is a cartoonist who had a horrifically bad childhood. She's been turning stories of that childhood into comics under the overall title Precious Rubbish for a few years now, and the book of that name - just published this spring - collects almost two hundred pages of those strips and related material, to tell something like the full story of that childhood.

This is a mosaic rather than a narrative; there's no clear organizing principle of the book Precious Rubbish. We're thrown into the world of young Kayla as, I suppose, she was herself, growing up this way.

I was going to start with a list of young Kayla's troubles, but I worried that could come across as dismissive, or questioning, or mocking. But it is so central, that a catalog - blunt as that may be - is important, so readers understand just how much was going on, how interlocked it all was, how far to the bad side this one childhood was.

Young Kayla had at least four things that could easily be the basis of a "I had a horrible childhood" memoir.

Before any of the actual trauma, she was poor and half-Mexican in Texas, a state not notably generous or full of supports for the poor. Her parents divorced when she was three, in the early 1990s. She had one brother, a few years older. Her father claimed her mother was unfit, and got custody of the brother - but didn't try to get custody of young Kayla. So she lived with that mother, with weekends and other visits to the father. Her father remarried for a few years, and young Kayla's stepmother seems to have been mildly cruel and annoying - though, in retrospect, she's the most normal and reasonable adult in the book.

(Kayla E. doesn't name her other family members at all - they're just "brother," "mother," "father." And she has since entirely separated from all of them, quite reasonably.)

OK. So here's Number One: that mother has some kind of untreated mental illness. Maybe narcissism, maybe something else similar. She's massively selfish, obsessive, mercurial, demanding, flighty, suicidal. Young Kayla was parenting her mother from a very young age. (The mother, and maybe the father as well, was also some variety of reactionary loony Christian, but I've already said she grew up in Texas.)

Number Two: her father seemingly never related to young Kayla as a human being or as his own daughter, but just a female body - comparing her curves to adult women, complaining she was too fat in puberty, putting her on fad diets. Young Kayla was mistaken for his wife on multiple occasions, I think starting when she was shockingly young for that assumption. 

Number Three: her brother molested her regularly, on those visits to the father's house, for years, starting pre-puberty. She seems to have told both her parents, who shrugged and told her that these things happen: either it was just normal or it was her fault.

Coming through all of that, she started to steal drinks, and was a full-blown alcoholic by puberty. That's Number Four.

They're not separate things - the father's disdain and brother's creeping meant visiting their house was even worse than life with her mother, which pushed her deeper into parenting her parent, and into spiraling into alcoholism. They all interlock, all three members of her closest family deeply horrible in different ways.

Precious Rubbish is not the story of how young Kayla got out or got better. There's too much material for that. Kayla E. may get to that story at some point, but this is all still on the level of processing the pain. The strips mostly depict young Kayla: she draws herself as ugly, since they all told her she was ugly.

There are some longer strips here, multi-pagers - usually with two levels of narrative, to mirror the dissociation young Kayla was later diagnosed with - that explain in more depth what happened. But it's mostly moments, either symbolic or realistic, all in a crisp, clean-line mid-century art style reminiscent of Peanuts or Little Lulu or similar sixty-year-old Dell comics. And the reader doesn't quite connect all of those dots for a while. It's clear this was a bad childhood, but it was bad in so many different dimensions simultaneously that it takes Kayla E. a while, in this circling, mosaic fashion, to get to all of them and show what they did to her younger self.

Precious Rubbish has powerful moments, and is full of arresting pages of comics. It is inventive and fearless, taking risks with style and layout, including pages of word games and "text features" reminiscent of those old kids' comics. And it does have a core central truth, that it circles and tells from every side. But it's not quite a single coherent book; it remains a collection of "Precious Rubbish" pieces rather than transforming them into something unified. Perhaps Kayla E. didn't want to do that in the first place: this is a book about brokenness, dissociation, damage. It's only right that a book like that not be a single unbroken thing. It is powerful and steadfast, in all its multifariousness, a shattered image of a childhood no one would wish on any child.

Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 by Greg and Fake

The single-name thing seems to have leapt from Eurocomics and landed on North American shores - well, we've always had it in other fields, like music (Cher! Madonna!), but comics-makers are embracing it as well. I may be concerned that our Strategic Name Reserve is in danger of being depleted - there aren't that many regular forenames, though if we allow variants and standard nouns, we're in much better shape - but I am still not, despite all my demands, the High Lord of All English Usage, so all I can do is Canute it up here.

I don't know what arbitration mechanism is available if there's, say, a Belgian who goes by "Greg" and a North American who does the same - it seems like the kind of thing that could easily happen - but, again, I have not been granted the awesome power I keep asking for, so I guess it's not my problem.

In any case, Belgians, the name Greg has officially been claimed (by a guy from Chicago, as I understand it), so you snoozed and I suppose you lost. The name Fake has also been claimed (by a guy from Manzanillo, Mexico), but that's probably less in-demand. And they have teamed up, like Hawk and Animal of the Legion of Doom, over the past few years to make a comic called Santos Sisters.

The first collection of that comic was published a couple of months ago, under the fairly obvious title Santos Sisters, Vol. 1. From online descriptions - not the book itself - I learn that Fake is the writer and Greg is the artist. The book collects the first five issues of the series, plus a few odds and ends, though not the covers of those five issues, which seems like an odd and unusual choice. The back cover also gives, for what might be the first time: their fabulous superhero origin. (They found medallions on the beach that granted them superpowers from a goddess, Madame Sosostris.)

Santos Sisters is basically a mash-up of vaguely '90s superhero elements - more early-Image than anything else, big bulky guns and all - with Archie-style storytelling, all in a mildly mocking tone that regularly spells things incorrectly in dialogue, I think deliberately. Alana and Ambar are sisters - we can call their last name Santos, but that's probably not right - who are probably in their early 20s, since they seem to live in an apartment, but they get up to Archie-ish teen hijinks with boyfriends and dates.

Alana is the serious one, Betty-coded, with lighter skin, smaller breasts and the blue outfit. Ambar is the party girl in red, Veronica-coded and always ready for action of whatever type. They fight crime in the Southern California city of Las Brisas, the kind of place that has a vibrant downtown and a beach and is close enough to ski slopes for a day trip - a location designed for comics stories.

Their stories are short, in that Archie style. Sometimes about battling some supervillain threatening Las Brisas, but as often watching "Boozy Bees" on TV, or squabbling about dating two guys at once, or going camping in the mountains, or aiding Don Quixote (?!) who has randomly arrived in town (??!?). The word "random" is appropos much of the time, as are "quirky" and "slightly silly." Again, it's all starting from the premise "what if these Archie-style girls were Image-esque superheroines?"

Their powers are not deeply defined: they have costumes, of course, which manifest when they call on the goddess. They're probably resistant to harm, since that's pretty standard, and they do seem to glow when in costume. They definitely fly, and manifest big guns (most of the time) or big swords (once in a while, I suppose for a change of pace) with which to battle their enemies. But it's not like Alana channels the power of ice and Ambar fire, or one of them turns into an armadillo and the other an ocelot, or their necklaces generate pulsing colorful forcefields in the shape of household objects, or anything like that. They just chase bad guys, squabble among themselves, and shoot their guns to mow down the henchmen. (Major villains get fisticuffs, or talked down, or some other less-lethal activity, so they can return in later stories.)

It's a fun premise, and hasn't worn out its welcome yet. It probably will, since it's not a hugely durable or extensible premise, but a hundred and fifty pages doesn't get us there. Greg draws it all in that Archie look, and is good at both the heavy-lidded women and the dim-bulb men. Fake's stories are varied and goofy in interesting ways - there are twenty-two different stories here, and none of them are repetitive or rely on the same ideas. Again, I'm sure that will come: the premise isn't that deep. But I'd expect probably another book this size of similar stories, then maybe one big all-the-villains-team-up epic, before it hits the wall of ennui.

The Dirdir by Jack Vance

The Dirdir is the third of the four "Tschai" novels [1], telling the continuous story of an Earthman named Adam Reith who landed on that planet, the sole survivor of an exploration vessel, and his attempts to get  off it and tell his superiors back home about this big world filled with hostile aliens.

I say "hostile," but they're not actually hostile to Earth. As far as Reith and the reader knows, they don't even know Earth exists. And they're only intermittently - albeit intermittently over the past several thousand years, which shows some serious stubbornness - hostile to each other. But the three intelligent alien races that successively invaded this planet, long ago - the Chasch, the Wankh, and the Dirdir - all have enslaved or indoctrinated then selectively bred humans to serve them, so one or more of them did have contact with Earth, some time in the dim past. And the three races from off-planet presumably still exist in their original spacefaring polities, somewhere out there, too.

This is all set in the medium future, probably early in the expansion of Vance's Oikumene or Gaean Reach universe - I believe there are arguments that those are, or are not, in the same timeline, and I take no position on the matter here - in the usual mid-century SF future, full of strong men in metal phalluses proudly thrusting into the void with minimal computational power and maximum gumption. Vance, as always, has a more sophisticated and complex version of that concept, but this series is still towards the basic-adventure level, all about This One Guy, the adventures of his smart brain and mighty thews, and how he wins out for Earthmen in the end. (And it is all "men," it's that era of SF so the word "human" is used rarely if ever and women are furniture or plot tokens or background details most of the time.)

The first two books were City of the Chasch, in which Reith recuperated from the crash, gathered a couple of unlikely allies, and made his first attempt to get a spaceship; and Servants of the Wankh, in which he and those allies ventured to the other side of the world to return a "princess" in hopes her people would help with the spaceship, and then instead tried to steal a ship from another alien race.

Reith is still trying to get a spaceship, and, this time around, he figures he can more or less buy one, at the Dirdir shipyards in their city of Hei. This is, of course, back in the other hemisphere - but far south - so Reith and team have to undertake a long journey, though it doesn't take as much time in this book as the similar trip did in Wankh. Reith plans a high-risk but ironically satisfying way of amassing the funds to cover ship construction, then heads to the Dirdirman city near Hei and enlists a shady businessman to do the actual (probably illegal) construction. That does not go to plan, for mostly shady-businessman reasons, but Reith does end the novel in possession of both a half-built ship and that shady businessman to complete it.

Don't read this book as a standalone; it would probably work that way - Vance is crisp and descriptive, and the plot is not overly complex - but you would be coming in very much in the middle. All four novels are short and zippy, in that mid-century adventure-SF style, enlivened by Vance's clear-eyed descriptions and wry thoughts along the way. This is Vance in mostly restrained, straightforward mode, so the series as a whole is a decent introduction to Vance for anyone who likes SF adventure. 

[1] All four are available in the omnibus Planet of Adventure, which is how I'm reading them. I recommend it.

Better Things: In the Splinters

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

Nicole Atkins almost made it into last year's list - she might have been the artist I dropped last, getting down to the final 52 (since it was one song for each week of the year).

I don't know if this is my favorite song of hers: she's done so much, in so many styles, that it's gauche to pick just one.

But I love the honky-tonk piano here, and Atkins is in top vocal form on this song, and it's from what I think is still her most recent record of all-new songs. So let me give you In the Splinters.

Any other night,
But not this one!
Any other night,
I’d wish the world would end!

It's another song from a singer knocked around - maybe by love, though the song doesn't specify - talking directly to the person responsible, and saying "not this time."

Atkins has a great set of pipes, and she belts this song out with the best of them. It's not her most subtle song - she has a lot of more nuanced stuff, too - but for a potential bar-room singalong, I can think of nothing better.

This one goes out to anyone in the splinters right now - I don't know if that's an actual saying, but I think you know pretty much what it means, just hearing it once, and that's what matters - who need to get that bucking up of but not this one!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 31, 2025

 A few new books arrived this week - three in a box from the fine folks at Tachyon, and one from the library. As always, books from actual publishers come first, especially since I vaguely want to read all three of them:

The Adventures of Mary Darling is the new novel from Pat Murphy, which seems to be her first since The Wild Girls in 2007. I have a bound galley, but publication date was May 5th, so I think you could get your own copy immediately. It's a retelling of Peter Pan, at least to some degree, focusing on their mother (Mary), who consults with Sherlock Holmes about their disappearance but then has to chase off around the world to gather allies and clear her name and (presumably) save her children. It's not clear if there are any fantasy elements, but Murphy has been a SFF writer from the beginning, so I'd expect something.

I read Josh Rountree's first book The Legend of Charlie Fish, a particularly weird Western, and liked it a lot. So I'm happy to see he's back with The Unkillable Frank Lightning, another story in the same style. There's this married couple - he's a soldier, she's an occultist. In 1879, he was killed in the line of duty, and she resurrected him, but he came back without his soul. The novel takes place primarily twenty-five years later, when they meet again. For this one, I have a finished book, but it apparently doesn't publish until early July.

And the third book from Tachyon is If Wishes Were Retail, a novel by Auston Habershaw. It's a humorous fantasy, I think of the subset where the world already has magic on an everyday level. Alex is a teen, who wants to get out of her dead-end town - but even more than that, she needs a job, to get some income, to have any chances. So she's interviewing for a job at the dying local mall, working for Mr. Jinn and selling wishes at a kiosk. Good news is she gets the job. And I assume the less-good news is what happens next.

The library book, which I will read even more quickly, because library, is Thor, the second in George O'Connor's Asgardians series. The first one was Odin, which I saw a couple of months ago, and, before that, O'Connor did a twelve-book series about the Greek pantheon, which was quite impressive. This one, I presume, retells the legends about Thor, as the title implies.