Reading Into the Past: Week of February 15, 2003

As usual when I do a "Reading Into the Past" post, I run the random number, type it in here, and then look things up in my old reading notebooks to see if I can remember the books I was reading then.

This time out, the old RNG gives me 2003, and these are the books I was reading this equivalent week eighteen years ago:

Greg Rucka, et. al., Queen & Country: Operation: Morningstar (2/8)

I see I hadn't yet become enlightened about comics credits: I was still running on the book-world assumption of the writer being the most important person (or maybe the only important person). Let me say for the record that is wrong; artists bring at least half of the storytelling to the table in comics. This was the second collection of the Queen & Country comic; art was primarily by Brian Burtt. Q&C was a gritty spy comic, focused on wetwork and similar ops, with lots of blood and gore and horrible things, done to and by the main characters, in various locations around the world -- as the title implies, our spies worked for the UK. I don't remember details at this late date, but I liked the series for a long time, though I thought it got bogged down in its own misery- and trauma-drenched backstory as it went on. I think Rucka has a tropism for damaged characters, and he's honest enough not to magically fix the damage, so they just keep getting worse and worse, which can lead to diminishing returns in a long series.

Mike Mignola, et. al., Mike Mignola's B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth and Other Stories (2/9)

Ditto: this was written by Mignola with Christopher Golden and Tom Sniegowsi and drawn by Ryan Sook with some inks by Curtis Arnold. It was the first B.P.R.D. book, the moment where Hellboy left the team and Mignola or his editors realized they could do comics about both sides of that split, and so did. A lot of mythology spun out of the B.P.R.D. stories starting here, with multiple achieved or only slightly averted apocalypses, and there probably was diminishing returns there, too. But a lot of it was really good, and this is still a decent entry point, if people are still looking to enter the Mignolaverse.

Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark (2/10)

I see this is now billed as the second book of "The Inhibitor Trilogy," but I thought of it as a standalone at the time -- sure, Al has a common universe, and some elements come back in multiple books, but each book is an individual novel. My memory of the Reynolds books of that era are that Revelation Space was a hugely impressive first novel, Chasm City was even better, and this one was a bit of a plateau. Reynolds is still in my head as one of the better current Hard SF writers, but I haven't gotten to one of his books for a decade or more -- I have several on the shelf, and want to read them, but haven't pulled one down recently. Maybe I should check to see if he has any recent novellas-as-books; his novellas are always awesome (Diamond Dogs, Galactic North, "Troika," "Slow Bullets"), and I get to short books much more quickly these days. Anyway: read this, read something by Al Reynolds. I should do that, too. He's damn good.

P. Craig Russell, Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories, 1977-1997 (2/11)

I have no memory of this as a thing that ever existed in the world. According to what I can google, it's what the title says it is: a big collection of his collected works, from the first twenty years of his career (he's had another twenty since then, obviously). Looks like it's split between mostly early personal work, which is odd and spiky, and later mostly adaptations, which are individual and show his exquisite taste. All of it is in Russell's marvelous art, obviously, though some of the early pieces might be more oviously early. But, again, even the cover doesn't look familiar once I found it, so this has dropped out of my memory entirely.

Dave Barry, Tricky Business (2/12)

Barry was a longtime humor columnist for various US newspapers (syndicated, so probably most of them at his peak) who retired from that a decade or so ago and kept writing the same kind of books that used to collect his columns, only at a slower pace. He also wrote three humorous novels along the way: this was the second one. (Big Trouble was the first, and it could be the best Carl Hiaasen novel ever written by anyone else. Insane City is the third, and it's still on my to-be-read shelf.) As I recall, this was not quite as strong as Big Trouble, but still damn good -- though it clearly took more time and effort than Barry's usual collection-of-columns books. (And that may be why there were three of these in about a decade, and then no more: we all do the things that are easier and more profitable for us.) This is good, but read Big Trouble first if you haven't.

"Tucker Coe" (Donald E. Westlake), Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (2/13)

Westlake was a very prolific writer of mysteries and related books -- how do you genre-type Kahawa or Smoke? -- nearly all of which were good in one way or another, and a large number of which were sublimely wonderful. He was both the author of the incredibly funny Dortmunder series of crime capers and the incredibly taut Parker series of crime capers (as Richard Stark), and at least a half-dozen great one-off novels, of which I'll point to The Ax as possibly the best. He also wrote under a lot of pseudonyms: Tucker Coe was one of them, with a five-book hardboiled series about a former cop turned PI in the early '70s. (Some people confused this series for Larry Block's Matt Scudder series at the time, since the two series do have elements in common, but Scudder pulled away over time.) Kinds of Love was the first one, and I think this is as far as I got. This series has not been consistently reprinted, and old Westlake books are expensive -- I see a paperback of this now runs about $900. So I intend to read the whole thing, but I'd need to start over at this point.

 Sean Williams and Shane Dix, Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic I: Remnant (2/14)

See below.

Chuck Dixon, et. al., Robin: Year One (2/15)

Yeah, I was still neglecting to list artist: bad 2003 Andy. Art was by Scott Beatty and Javier Pulido. I don't remember this well at all, though I do remember the impulse to do lots of "Year One" and "Year Zero" and "Year Two" stories, so all of the third-generation artists could fix the stories of their youth and do them all the right way. Or maybe just to insert more stuff into continuity, since we all love that about superhero comics. I am substantially more cynical about superhero comics than I was eighteen years ago, and I was already reasonably cynical then. So my opinion on this is probably not a unbiased one, or useful for most purposes. Plus I barely remember it.

Sean Williams and Shane Dix, Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic II: Refugee (2/16)

Oh. Shucks. I thought this was a two-book series -- my memory is that "New Jedi Order" had a lot of two-book series within it, from various writers -- but it is actually a three-book series. (I did read the third one, Reunion, a little later, finishing it on March 3rd.) So I stretched this week in "Reading into the Past" to include Refugee for no good reason. Because I don't remember this series terribly well, and I don't want to say much about the depths of the Extended Universe at this point anyway. It's all out of continuity, so the excesses and odd storytelling choices -- which were myriad and sometimes baffling -- are all beside the point now. The only reason to come to this would be if you wanted to read the whole bizarre Yuuzhan Vong saga, and frankly there are much better things you could do with your time. There are some gems within that mass of books, but the ones that still stick in the mind almost twenty years later are by Matthew Woodring Stover. Williams and Dix did a couple of non-sharecropped trilogies before this -- both good, both worth digging out -- and Williams has gone on to a longer career afterward.