When Supervillains Meet ConEd

The United Nations, Encapsulated

Dude #1: They have been underestimating my power.
Dude #2: What?
Dude #1: They have been underestimating my power for quite some time now.
Dude #2: What are you, a supervillain? Who's been underestimating your power? The justice league?
Dude #1: No, the electric company. They say I owe them eight hundred dollars.
Dude #2: Dude, you and I were having two totally different conversations.

--Penn Station

Overheard by: 13Atlantic

via Overheard in New York, Jan 14, 2008

Reading Into the Past, Week of 1/13

I'm going to stop explaining, apologizing, and predicting at the tops of these posts, and just do then when I do them. This week the number is 12, so these are the books I was reading this time in 1996:

• G.B. Trudeau, Doonesbury Nation (1/6)
  The then-new Doonesbury collection, back when they were short, square, and devoid of color Sundays. It's also the one with the parody of Woodstock '94 (which implies strips were being reprinted roughly a year later).
• Andy Garcia, Awkward Universe (1/7)
  I'm pretty sure it was comics of one kind or another. Garcia did the excellent Oblivion City series for Slave Labor around that time, and I think this was either a spin-off of that or an unrelated new project. He had some real talent and ability, with a very specific viewpoint, so it's a shame that he's apparently fallen out of the comics world entirely. But it also can't be easy trying to carve an entertainment career out when you have the same name as a movie star.
• Michael Williams, Arkady (1/7)
  I suspect it's another graphic novel, given the company, but I can't remember or Google any information about it at all. All those moments, lost in time...
• Mike Kazaleh, The Collected Adventures of Captain Jack (1/8)
  The first collection of a pleasant anthropomorphic humor/SF comic, which I read way back before it was forgotten. I hope Kazaleh is working in animation or something similar, making big piles of cash drawing cartoons -- he was very good at it, and the direct market world never gave him much love. This series is low-key and a bit underpopulated, but the art was always snappy, and the characterizations were excellent.
• Jim Silke, Rascals in Paradise (1/9)
  Silke is an exceptional artist in the pin-up idiom, and a passable writer when it comes to making up excuses for his female characters to get into those poses. Rascals was a retro jungle adventure, complete with spunky girl hero and lots of action. It was nothing you'd want to put on a "great graphic novels" list, but it did what it set out to do, and wasn't as leering as half of Marvel's 2007 covers.
• Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (1/10)
  Waugh, in his first decade of book-writing, would travel somewhere cheap and knock off a travel book every time he needed money. (In another example of how Then is not Now, such books were guaranteed sellers.) He didn't have a whole lot of respect for those books, and he eventually pulled them from circulation, to be replaced with this "good parts" compilation. (The original texts are now all back in print in the Everyman's Library book Waugh Abroad, which I recommend only slightly less highly than his novels.) In 1996, I'd run through all of Waugh's novels, and this was about the only other thing in print -- I think I dug up Scott-King's Modern Europe a year or so later. When the Going Was Good is a great introduction to Waugh's travel books, and perhaps to Waugh himself. His novels are better, but Going gives you full-bore Waugh, for good or bad. (He was not a pleasant man, and that comes across much more strongly in his travel writings than his novels. But he was always an interestingly unpleasant man.)
• Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1/11)
  I was on a classics tear that week, so I went straight from Waugh into a heaping dose of London. London is exceptionally readable, though -- the only thing that makes him "classic" is that he's a dead guy who wrote great books. Call of the Wild, like most of London's fiction, is an adventure story with depth.
• Jack London, White Fang (1/12)
  Another damn good story about a dog wolf.
• Jack London, Selected Klondike Short Stories (1/14)
  I'm sure "To Build a Fire" was in this; back in those days, the Library of America prided itself on publishing the complete works of notable authors, so their two volumes of London included all of his published fiction.

I was in the middle of reading the Library of America Novels & Stories volume of London's work; I finished The Sea-Wolf on the 15th and the "Selected Short Stories" section on the 16th. And, right after that, I read George Macdonald Fraser's great novel Flashman and began that series. (And then more London, with The People of the Abyss and The Road -- they were from the other Library of America London anthology, Novels & Social Writings. Ah, for the days when I'd think nothing of jumping into two thousand-page books by the same guy, one right after another, and read someone's major works in two weeks.)

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

I got this last Saturday morning and had finished it by the time I went to bed that night. It's a slim volume, but there's more to Born Standing Up than most comedians' books.

Martin isn't trying to immortalize his routine, or hack out something quickly to make a buck, and he comes to Born Standing Up after successful turns writing screenplays (L.A. Story), fiction (Shopgirl), and plays (Picasso at the Lapin Agile). He already knows how to structure prose, so Born Standing Up doesn't have the usual comedian's acknowledgment of "the man who brought order to my chaos" or a similar giveaway -- Martin actually sat down and wrote this book himself, something very few celebrities of his stature are willing or capable of doing.

Born Standing Up is a memoir, and a closely focused one: it's the story of the birth and flourishing of Martin's stand-up routine. As such, it starts with some details -- the pertinent ones, that is -- of his childhood, and then gets into his performance career. He worked at Disneyland from the age of ten, selling program books and then working in a magic shop. Selling magic led to performing magic, which led him to Knott's Berry Farm, and so on. Martin is candid about the strengths and weaknesses of his act in those days -- he admits it was pretty weak -- and only provides a few details about his life outside of performance in those days.

The book covers Martin's performing life from 1955 (that Disneyland opening) through 1980, when Martin quit his stand-up act and jumped into movies with The Jerk. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of his subject, but the book feels absolutely honest and true. Martin's equally impressive in writing about the good side of being a mediocre comedian and the bad side of being a national phenomenon.

Born Standing Up is short, clear, and thoughtful book, from a man looking very far back and not entirely recognizing who he used to be. It's as far above most comedians' books as it's possible to imagine any book being.

Mix and Mix Again

Today at ComicMix: my review of the graphic novel Paris, by Andi Watson and Simon Gane.

Friday: my review of the first two volumes (one, two) of The Guin Saga Manga.

Plagiarism in Romance?

Second in our series about scandals in genre publishing; collect them all!

Galley Cat reported on a string of posts at Smart Bitches about a pile of romances by Cassie Edwards. Now, I haven't read every last bit of the supposedly plagiarized pieces, but they all seem to be factual descriptions of actual Indian rituals, behaviors, beliefs, and so on. And changing the wording substantially, when describing actual real-world things, would tend to make one's description diverge from that thing. The technical term for this is "getting it wrong."

Now, if a writer doesn't do any research, that's bad.

And if a writer does research, and gets things wrong anyway, that's even worse.

But if you do research, and get things right, that's bad, too. Apparently even a romance writer now should footnote her references.

Does anyone else think this is insane?

Edit, a week later: Well, it's now looking like Ms. Edwards has copied nearly everything but her own name in various books, so let me climb down from this increasingly shaky limb. I won't say Edwards is a plagiarist, but the weight of the evidence certainly points that way.

I do still wonder about my original point (though Edwards's case did not turn out to be like this) -- in historical fiction, or works that otherwise draw from specific reportage, how can a writer be both accurate to reality (as depicted in the original sources) and original? You'll recall that Ian McEwan got yelled at last year for using descriptions of medical procedures in Atonement that were "too close" to his (acknowledged) sources.

Copying another writer's invented dialogue or descriptions is clearly wrong, but what about closely following another writer's detailed description of something real? Particularly when dealing with technical language, there may not be any other clear, accurate way to phrase a sentence.

There are more and more of these plagiarism complaints lately, since it's trivial to compare electronic texts. Perhaps someday we'll see a vast database of all English-language text, and any book projected for publication will be required to be compared against the database, and only works with a sufficient percentage of purely new content will be allowed to continue. But what will that threshold be? What with cliched language, standard descriptions, the seven basic plots, and so on, I wonder if most novels would be as much as 5% original.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/12

Assuming I can keep it up (always a problematic assumption), my weekly "Incoming Books" posts will turn into more in-depth "Reviewing the Mail" posts. (I still won't have actually read the stuff in question, since it just came in, but I'll give the books a bit more time and space.)

This week brought four books for review:

Black God, Vol. 2 by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, from Yen Press. From the author's names I'm going to guess this is manwha rather than manga. The back-cover copy talks about the protagonist trying to balance a normal life and "an unbreakable pact with a divine being," which could mean anything from Death Note to Oh My Goddess! It's rated for Older Teens, coded LSV for Language, Sex, and Violence. (Though not N for Nudity, for those scoring at home.)

Zombie-Loan, Vol. 2 by Peach-Pit. I know I've heard of this, but I can't recall anything specific. It has another one of those amusing manga premises -- teenage schoolkids working for a loan office as bounty hunters slaying vampires. (I have an image of three giant wheels on the wall of some Tokyo office, and this is where they came up in this case.) I'm presuming that these zombies somehow took out loans, which they're now delinquent on, but that might just be my SF-trained mind trying to make sense of a premise that doesn't work that way. Still, "Zombie-Loan" is an undeniably catchy title, and I always like that. It's also from Yen, and also aimed at Older Teens, with their love for LSV.




Hell Girl, Vol. 1 is by Miyuko Eto, though the book also notes "Original Story by The Jigoku Shoujo Project." (A quick Google doesn't give me much information on said project, though I have a sense that "Jigoku Shoujo" probably means "Hell Girl," and that makes the whole thing very circular and even less clear.) I'll guess that this is a shoujo version of Death Note, since the plot involves a "strange website that appears only at midnight," and typing one's enemy's name into that site sends the Hell Girl to drag that unfortunate off to hell. (However, the person entering the name is also damned -- it looks like a perfect opportunity for "Let's You and Him Fight," to me.) This one's from Del Rey Manga, also aimed at older teens (though Del Rey doesn't break down what aspects of the book might be objectionable).

The Museum Vaults is by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and comes from the Louvre in France via NBM's ComicsLit program. An art expert descends deep beneath the Louvre to "appraise the vast collection of an antonym of the Louvre." It's the second of four graphic novels (by different creators) commissioned by the Louvre and all co-published by NBM -- it's an interestingly quirky idea, and the kind of thing comics needs more of.

I also got the word that the library the next town over (the one I use the most) had a couple of my reserves for me:

Flora Segunda, the Norton-nominated first novel by Ysabeau S. Wilce, with the enticing subtitle "Being the Magical Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House With Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog." I'm a few pages in already, and I'm finding the narrative voice engaging and the world-building distinctive and individual. From the author's note, and my vague memory of Wilce's novella "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire," I believe all of her major work to date is set in the same setting -- if that entices anyone.

Nick Hornby's Slam is also a YA novel -- the author's first for that audience, but obviously not his first entirely.

I guess I'll be reading YA books this week. One of the things I love about YA novels, which both of these books have, is that immediate first-person narration. It's not a requirement for YA, but I find a lot of the best YA are written that way, in the pure voice of a real teenager.

The Speed Queen by Stewart O'Nan

Every so often I make the pledge to only read really good books -- ones that matter, that make you look at the world differently afterward -- but then realize, after hitting one, that a steady diet of that could be dangerous.

The Speed Queen is a great example. After I read Last Night at the Lobster, a few weeks back, I thought I should read some more Stewart O'Nan and see if I agreed with his glowing reputation. On the basis of those two books, I think the critics are justified in their praise -- but he's also practically the American Ian McEwan.

Speed Queen is the first-person narrative of Marjorie Standiford; she's talking into a tape recorder on the night before she's to be executed by the state of Oklahoma. She's the central figure of the three "Sonic Killers," whose deeds shocked a nation. And she claims that she didn't kill anyone -- or, at least, she wasn't the one who directly killed any of them.

Marjorie is answering a set of questions sent to her by "America's King of Horror," who has bought the rights to her story for his next book; she hopes to counter what she calls the lies of a book written by her ex-lover Natalie, who is already out of jail. She tells us a bit about her childhood and lot more about herself and her husband Lamont. She and Lamont start using drugs, and, as using turns to dealing, a number of events fall into place one by one. Marjorie is in a car accident and goes to jail on a possession charge, where she meets Natalie. Once they get out of jail, Natalie moves in with Marjorie and Lamont (and their infant son). And a drug deal goes badly wrong, sending the three "Sonic Killers" out. As Marjorie tells it, none of it is exactly her fault -- but we can see that she could have stopped things in several places.

The story is compelling; Marjorie's voice is mesmerizing. But from the first page, any careful reader knows what's going to happen, and has a sense of how horrible it's going to be. Reading The Speed Queen is like watching an execution in slow motion; it's impossible to look away but it's painful to see.

I've come to believe that the true test of a great book is that it requires work: sometimes intellectual work (though that's more common for a merely good book), and nearly always emotional work. That's why a steady diet of great books can be upsetting: it's poking at the same exposed nerve endings over and over and over again. And so I find that I run from a great book to mediocre ones for a week or two, to build up some scar tissue.

The Speed Queen is a great novel, by a writer I'm coming to believe is one of our great contemporary novelists. But don't start it if you're already emotionally shaky; this is a book that demands a lot from the emotions of its readers.

(Note: I read this in a library hardcover, with a silvery cover featuring a grid of images. I had to return the book before I could scan its cover, and there's no decent-sized version of it online. The image above and below is the current trade paperback.)

Spoiled Rotten America by Larry Miller

Residual affection can go a very long way. Larry Miller is a generally amusing actor who was a fine stand-up comedian -- I remember, in particular, an HBO special he had, fifteen or so years ago, which culminated in what seemed to be a half-hour long bit about a comically horrible ski trip. It probably wasn't as epic as I remember it, but it was very long, very involved, and amazingly funny. Add that to a host of movie and TV appearances, and Miller had built up a great store of goodwill with me.

But I think he's just spent it all.

Let me say up front that Spoiled Rotten America is not a bad book -- not at all. It is bland, derivative, and shows absolutely no original thought or ideas, but Miller's voice is engaging (and very similar to his stand-up voice and the characters he usually plays) and it's pleasant to read.

Miller has been writing columns recently for The Weekly Standard, and this book is probably a fix-up of those columns. (The book itself is slightly coy on the subject.) Perhaps because of the venue, the essays are backward-looking, curmudgeonly, and obsessed with the imagined virtues of past eras. (In Miller's childhood, all men were strong, all women were beautiful, and all children played outside until dark.) His thesis, essentially, is that everything about the modern world sucks. (Once again I must mention the infinitely superior The Trouble With Nowadays, by Cleveland Amory, which had the good sense to know it was a parody of itself.) Miller affects introspection, but his thoughts about anything -- the world, himself, his family -- only descends about a molecule deep. He's exceptionally good at describing the surfaces of things, and talking about image -- he does live in Hollywood, after all -- but never even tries to go further than that.

Miller can still be very funny, and when he's not hitting his cultural talking points, Spoiled Rotten America is great fun. But I found myself skimming more and more as I went on, as the waves of secondhand thought and received wisdom crested higher and higher. If you want conservative cultural criticism, there are fire-breathers like Michael Savage and Bernard Goldberg -- I haven't read them, myself, but from my limited knowledge, Miller seems to be trying to be the Bush 41 to their Reagan. I'm not entirely sure there's a strong need for a book like this, but here it is. If you're a conservative, sentimental boomer who doesn't like actually thinking things through, I highly recommend Spoiled Rotten America.

Award Roundup

Trying to shake off the lassitude that Tom Lutz's book has given me, with a herculean effort the Hornswoggler lists some recent awards news that has been posted many places already:

Imprimis. Christopher Barzak has won this year's Crawford Fantasy Award, for his debut novel One for Sorrow. The Crawford is given to the writer (not the book), but the writer is chosen because of a notable first fantasy book published in the previous eighteen months. It's administered by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, from whose website you can find a list of previous winners and a press release about this year's winner. (Those damn frames prevent direct linking to either.)

Secundus. The finalists for this year's Philip K. Dick Award, for "distinguished science fiction published in paperback form in the United States" have been announced; I got the list from Locus:

Grey, Jon Armstrong (Night Shade)

Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, Minister Faust (Del Rey)

Nova Swing, M. John Harrison (Bantam Spectra)

Gradisil, Adam Roberts (Pyr)

Ally, Karen Traviss (Eos)

Saturn Returns, Sean Williams (Ace)

The winner will be announced at this year's Norwescon, in Seattle.

I've read only one of the Dick-nominated books, and wasn't more than mildly impressed. This of course means nothing. Good luck to everyone, though of course six of the seven will be left broken-hearted and despondent in their loss.

Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz

This book infected me with a particularly virulent (but very pleasant) case of slackerdom.

First, I was planning to read it over the holidays -- I figured it would take three days, maybe more if I wasted more time than I expected. As it happened, I didn't read more than a couple of pages at home, and finished it off while commuting to work.

And then...well, I finished it a good week ago, and I haven't reviewed it -- or any of the books I've read since. So I do need to warn you all up front: this book is catching.

Other than that, it's not all that exciting: it's, as the subtitle declares, "A History of Loafing, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America." Lutz starts off by complaining about his teenage son, who graduated from college directly to Dad's couch, examines his own history of slacking off, and then dives into the meat of the book.

That meat is essentially a literature survey of attitudes towards work, mostly (as the subtitle says) by Americans, but with some side trips to Europe (Samuel Johnson gets the compare-and-contrast treatment with Benjamin Franklin in an early chapter). Lutz is an entertaining writer on the sentence and paragraph level, but, as the book goes on, it becomes more and more clear that he doesn't have any real organizing principle or interesting idea behind the book. Each chapter moves forward in time, covering Walt Whitman, the Beats, and Douglas Coupland in turn. But, again, it's chronological by default, and it all feels somewhat mechanical.

Lutz does take a stab, now and then, at the great dichotomy of worker/slacker attitudes, which also leads him into digressions on union organizing and labor relations in general. And I'll reiterate that all of the pieces of this book are well-researched, engagingly written, and interesting -- but they don't, in the end, quite add up to something singular and substantial.

Doing Nothing is a pleasant read, but it ends up being a lazy stroll through the literature of the last two hundred and fifty years on the subject of avoiding work. It doesn't really build from chapter to chapter, and seemingly forgets things it said was important fifty pages before. There's room for a much better book on the subject...but that one would require a lot of hard work, so I don't seriously expect it will ever be written.

Nebula Preliminary Ballot

Since every SFnal blogger is posting this today, I guess it's now my turn. I got it from Ellen Datlow:

Novels

• Ragamuffin, by Tobias Buckell (Tor, Jun07)
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, May07)
• Species Imperative #3: Regeneration, by Julie E. Czerneda (full PDF on Private Edition)
• (DAW, May06)
• Vellum: The Book of All Hours, by Hal Duncan (Del Rey, Apr06 (Macmillan hardcover Nov05 (UK)))
• The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman (Ace, Aug07)
• The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson (Warner Books, Feb07)
• Mainspring, by Jay Lake (Tor, Jun07)
• Odyssey, by Jack McDevitt (full PDF on Private Edition)(Ace, Nov06)
• The Outback Stars, by Sandra McDonald (Tor, May07)
• Strange Robby, by Selina Rosen (full PDF and hardcopy offer on Private Edition)
• (Meisha Merlin Publishing Jul06)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
• Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer (Analog, Feb07 (serialized in Oct06 through Jan/Feb07 issues; Tor book, Apr07))
• Blindsight, by Peter Watts (free Creative Commons versions)(Tor, Oct06)

I'm thrilled to see the Chabon there, and very happy for the recognition for people I know and like (Buckell, McDevitt, Sawyer, Hopkinson, Lake). And I'm very surprised to see the Rowling, which I'd bet large sums of money will not make the final ballot.

Novellas

• "The Helper and His Hero," by Matt Hughes (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Mar07 (Feb07 & Mar07))
• "Fountain of Age," by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, Jul07)
• "Stars Seen Through Stone," by Lucius Shepard (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Jul07)
• "Kiosk," by Bruce Sterling (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Jan07)
• "Memorare," by Gene Wolfe (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Apr07)

As far as I can tell, I haven't read any of these. So who's going to send me Year's Best books to review this year?

Novelettes

• "The Children's Crusade," by Robin Wayne Bailey (link to Private Edition) (Heroes in Training, Martin H. Greenberg and Jim C. Hines, Ed., DAW, Sep07)
• "A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange," by Beth Bernobich (link to Private Edition) (Asimov's, Jun06)
• "Things That Aren't," by Michael A. Burstein and Robert Greenberger (link to Private Edition) (Analog, Apr07)
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," by Ted Chiang (F&SF, Sep07)
• "Sister of the Hedge," by Jim C. Hines (link to Private Edition) (Realms of Fantasy, Jun06)
• "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change," by Kij Johnson (link to Private Edition) (Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Juvenile, Jul07)
• "The Sun God at Dawn, Rising from a Lotus Blossom," by Andrea Kail (link to Private Edition) (Writers of the Future Volume 23, Algis Budrys, Ed., Galaxy Press, Sep07)
• "Safeguard," by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, Jan07)
• "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders," by Mike Resnick (Asimov's, Jan08)
• "Tonino and the Incubus," by Peg Robinson (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue -- #2))
• "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," by Geoff Ryman (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Nov06)
• "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche," by Delia Sherman (link to Private Edition) (Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Juvenile, Jul07)
• "Not of this Fold," by William Shunn (link to Private Edition) (An Alternate History of the 21st Century, Spilt Milk Press, Sep07)

More stuff I haven't read. (Yet, he added with hope.)

Short Stories

• "Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse," by Andy Duncan (link to Private Edition) (Eclipse 1: New Science Fiction And Fantasy, Jonathan Strahan, Ed., Night Shade Books, Oct07)
• "The Padre, the Rabbi, and the Devil His Own Self," by Melanie Fletcher (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue -- #2))
• "Always," by Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov's, May07 (apr/may07 issue))
• "For Solo Cello, op. 12," by Mary Robinette Kowal (link to Private Edition) (Cosmos, Mar07 (Feb/Mar07))
• "Titanium Mike Saves the Day," by David D. Levine (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Apr07)
• "The Story of Love," by Vera Nazarian (link to Private Edition) (Salt of the Air, Prime Books, Sep06)
• "Captive Girl," by Jennifer Pelland (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue -- #2))

I'm going to root for "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," because I love that title -- even though I haven't read it. (Or even seen the book that it's in.) On the other hand, "Titanium Mike Saves the Day" is a pretty darn awesome title, too.

Scripts

• Children of Men, by Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby (Universal Studios, Dec06)
• Pan's Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro (Time/Warner, Jan07)
• The Discarded, by Harlan Ellison and Josh Olson (script on Private Edition) (Masters of Science Fiction, ABC-TV, Apr07)
• Blink, by Steven Moffat (script on Private Edition) (Doctor Who, BBC/The Sci-Fi Channel, Sep07 (Aired on SciFi Channel 14 Sep07))
• The Prestige, by Christopher Nolan and Jonathon Nolan (Newmarket Films, Oct06 (Oct 20, 2006 -- based on the novel by Christopher Priest))
• V for Vendetta, by Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski (Warner Films, Mar06 (released 3/17/2006 -- Written by the Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd and published by Vertigo/DC Comics))
• World Enough and Time, by Marc Scott Zicree and Michael Reaves (script on Private Edition) (Star Trek: New Voyages, http://www.startreknewvoyages.com, Aug07 (Aired 8/23/07))

I still have no respect for this award, and I never will, until there's a report that SFWAns are actually reading the nominated scripts to decide between them. It's a "Best Dramatic Presentation" award under a false cloak.

Andre Norton Award

• Vintage: A Ghost Story, by Steve Berman (Haworth Positronic Press, Mar07)
• Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst (Penguin Razorbill, Jun07)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
• Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, by Ysabeau S. Wilce(Harcourt, Jan07)

Hooray for Sarah, and I hope to read Flora Segunda soon. (I have a hold on it at the library -- in fact, it may be the book they've just notified me about.)

Quote of the Week

"When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London."
- Bette Midler

Movie Log: Broken English

I'm not entirely sure how Broken English got to the top of my Netflix queue, but it did, and we watched it on New Year's Eve.

And then I didn't bother to write about it for nearly two weeks, so the memory is a bit fuzzy. Parker Posey is our lead, a youngish New Yorker named Nora who works as the head of the keeping-rich-assholes-happy department of a boutique hotel. She is Not Happy With Her Life, so we get lots of shots of her drinking. (and drinking, and drinking. I've seen some people try to argue that she's not an alcoholic, but that dog won't hunt.) She's also clingy and unlucky in love, desperate for A Man.

I'm wondering now if the director, Zoe Cassavetes, was a little too specific and "indy" in telling this story -- Posey's character might have worked better if she felt more like an Everywoman, like the representative of a generation. (She doesn't; she's utterly individual, which makes Broken English her story rather than something universal. That's not good or bad, I'll add; but it is.)

Back to the plot: Posey has a helpful friend (Audrey, played by Drea de Matteo), married for a few years and starting to feel that all of the early excitement is gone. She also has an not-quite-as-helpful mother (played by Gena Rowlands). They do their bit to cheer Nora up, and convince her that Being In A Relationship is not necessarily the sole end of life. Nora pretends to listen, but it doesn't really touch her.

In a more Hollywood movie, we'd establish Posey's character a bit, and then go through a "hilarious" montage of her bad dates. Broken English doesn't quite do that, though it does have a few scenes, in quick succession, of Posey dealing badly with various men (potential mates or not). And I was left with the feeling that the standard montage might be a cliche, but it got to be a cliche because its an efficient vehicle for delivering both a mood and a message. Broken English wants essentially the same message and a slightly different mood, but isn't able to create either as quickly and cleanly as the tacky Hollywood product would have.

Eventually, Nora does meet a decent guy, or what the movie wants to be a nice guy. (I found him more than a little stalker-ish: he doesn't leave her side for more than twenty-four hours, doesn't talk much, keeps trying to get physical, and is never seen to tell her his name.) This is a Frenchman named Julien (Melvin Poupaud), and here's an example of where Broken English's complete freedom from cliches is very helpful. In any other movie, a pretty young New York girl meeting a mysterious Frenchman would be the purest schlock, but, here, it's just about these two people, and it works.

The movie meanders on from there -- it's not a plotty film, really. Unfortunately, it's not a deep movie of characterization, either; it hovers outside its characters -- even Nora -- and doesn't let us get into their heads. Nora changes, I guess, or she's said to change, but she still looks to me like the same clingy, alcoholic wreck she was at the beginning. I didn't find the ending entirely convincing, but then I think I had different images of Nora and Julien than the movie wanted me to have. That may be partly my fault, and partly the movie's fault, I guess.

For a small, independent movie about New Yorkers, Broken English is remarkably free of self-indulgence; it does see these people from outside, but it sees them clearly and distinctly. It's not a great movie, but it's a decent one, which is better than you can get a lot of the time.

Spectrum 14 edited by Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner

I "read" this more than two weeks ago now. (Actually, there is a very long, and occasionally tediously political, introduction from co-editor Arnie Fenner, so there is something to "read" here.)

On the egoboo front, there's a great piece from Stephan Martiniere, art-directed by Nicholas Sica (who lost his job from That Company at the same time I did) and for one of the books in the SFBC 50th Anniversary Collection (which I conceived back in 2002 and then acquired and published 40 books over the next five years). Congrats, Nick! (The art is for Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and is on p. 51.)

Also from the old digs is a nice piece by Patrick Arrasmith, on p. 152, art-directed by David Lai. (I never met Lai, which I think just shows how talented, and deep, a bench of art directors that now-gone iteration of the company had. It was full of great creative professionals, doing hard, wonderful work every single day.)

But, besides the stuff I have a tenuous connection to, there's also another two hundred and twenty pages or so of great art from 2006 in this book. I used to get the "Spectrum" books because I was choosing artists and deciding on art styles for SFF books; now I get it just because the art is amazing and inspiring. They're great books, and they only get better year-to-year.

Riders of Gumdrops

Hey, remember the candy Battle of Helm's Deep last year?

Well, the same team decided to recreate The Battle of Pelennor Fields this year.

Some kinds of insanity are good. This is an great example.