The Search for the Worst Cover Ever Continues!

Orbit is in the middle of a promotion to create the worst SFF cover ever, which I think is a wonderful -- and totally achievable -- goal that reflects very well on them as an organization. I'd mentioned their plan once before, when they were looking for title suggestions for that book.

Their plans have now hit the next level; they have five potential titles -- some of the worst possible titles for SFF books ever -- and are asking readers to vote on which one should be immortalized.

And one of those titles -- Rise of the Fallen, Book Seven, The Pre-Antepenultimate Battle -- was suggested by Your Humble Hornswoggler.

Now, I don't think it would be entirely right if I were to urge you to go to the voting site -- which I've conveniently linked RIGHT HERE -- and vote en masse for that title...so I'm not going to do that.

But I do urge you to vote for whichever title you think would make the best bad cover.

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Listening to: Dish - Zombie Love Song
via FoxyTunes

As My Fiendish Plan Hurtles Towards Completion...

I decided to take an Internet quiz to see what kind of a supervillain I am would be, and learned:

Your result for The Supervillain Archetype Test...

The Megalomaniac

Ambitious, Intelligent, Calculating

The Megalomaniac is the most prestigious of super-villain classes. If anyone is ever going to rule the world, it will probably be you.

Your main goal in life is power and domination, you have the tools to do it, and you know it. Megalomaniacs are intelligent and forceful, and they tend not to let their emotions cloud their judgment. Most of the time. They are usually found, or not found, working at the top of a huge structured organization, though many prefer to work by themselves.

The Megalomaniac has but one flaw, but its an invariably fatal one; arrogance. He knows that he can take over the world, and he isn't afraid to let you know, often elaborately and in great detail. They often do not foresee the fly in their ointment, because they do not want to admit that such a fly could exist.

Sample Megalomaniacs: Dr. Doom, Lex Luthor, Ras al'Ghul, Kang the Conqueror, Emperor Palpatine, Brain

Take The Supervillain Archetype Test at HelloQuizzy

The Other Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison

There's no one else in the world who loves anything as much as Harlan Ellison loves the sound of his own voice. And there's no one as sure of anything as Harlan is of his every last opinion. There's a point, late in this book, where Ellison excoriates a television writing team -- declares that nothing they do can ever be good, and that they are necessarily evil, twisted human beings -- purely on the basis of watching a failed pilot based on their script.

Mind you, this is mere pages after Ellison also ranted at great length about what a different set of pigheaded morons did to one of his scripts, turning it into something lumpen and disgusting. (One never goes to Ellison for consistency; Ellison is for raw energy and pure emotional force, aimed in whatever direction he feels like aiming it at the time. He is hugely Whitmanian in his contradictions.)

The Other Glass Teat is one of the few Ellison books I haven't read before; I made my way through most of his work when it's supposed to be read -- when the reader is young and passionate, and, perhaps, easily led by a strong-voiced writer who knows precisely what is right and wrong, and will expound on it at great length. But this book was out of print, and hard to find; I only just read it through the generosity of a friend.

Ellison wrote about television for about three years at the turn of the '70s for the Los Angeles Free Press; this book reprints the back half of that run, plus two columns from a year later in Rolling Stone (with very little explanation as to the hole in between, and less as to why Ellison had been counting down in his last Free Press columns, but didn't quite reach his intended ending). According to Ellison's introduction, The Other Glass Teat was published much later than its predecessor volume, The Glass Teat, because the then-Vice President of the US, Spiro Agnew, personally asked magazine distributors to scuttle the first book.

Oddly, this scuttling does not seem to have affected any of Ellison's other books from that era, nor did the supposedly evil and Machiavellian Agnew take any other actions to rid himself of Ellison. Curious.

The matter of The Other Glass Teat is the very ephemeral TV scene of the time; there's very little that would be of interest to anyone nearly forty years later. Or rather, there wouldn't be anything of interest, if it hadn't been written by Ellison. The shows may be long-dead and best forgotten, but Ellison's impassioned, hectoring, hair-trigger voice is always a pleasure. (And never more so than when the reader can forget his own prejudices and preferences -- because very few of us will even remember that there was such a show as Nanny and the Professor -- and let the waves of Ellisonian bombast and invective wash over him.)

I was going to complain about how massively over-the-top that Ellisonian voice is -- it really is too much, too much of the time -- but then I looked back at my own recent review of Goats: Infinite Typewriters. And I realized how much of my own writing style has been influenced by Ellison. It's not just me -- the default tone of the entire Internet is High Outraged Dudgeon, and no one has ever done that better than Harlan Ellison, circa 1970. So I could no more complain about Ellison's writing style in a review on the Internet than I could swallow my own head.

This is a mostly forgotten book, and one that will be little read in future years -- it's little read now, and has been so its entire existence. But Ellison's voice will be read, I hope, and -- though his fiction will always be the core of his appeal and reputation -- even his vituperative, ridiculously angry, bizarrely demanding and inhumanly opinionated columns and reviews will be dug up, now and then, to the surprise and dismay of generations to come.



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Listening to: Jacob Golden - Love You
via FoxyTunes

Is Jack Vance "A Great American Writer"?

The New York Times Magazine was at least willing to consider the question this past Sunday, which is rather nice of them.

Speaking of Sundays and The New York Times, this week marked the 39th week of No Itzkoff. I hope you all celebrated sensibly.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

A week ago, I'd never been to Las Vegas, and I'd never read this book. Since I was going to do the one, I knew I needed to do the other as well.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an artifact from the grand age of magazine journalism -- though I'm sure at the time that the more serious proponents of that art detested Thompson and his demented scribblings -- a reprint of a two-part report for Rolling Stone from the fall of 1971 about nothing so much as what it's like to be inside Hunter S. Thompson's brain, under the influence of an immense laundry list of controlled substances and in the fakest city on Earth.

It's a book that defies synopsis, and is nearly indescribable -- Thompson, and his lawyer, go to Vegas first to cover a motorcycle race in the nearby desert (but wander off before seeing who won), take a lot of drugs, meet several people, and then infiltrate a convention of policemen meeting to discuss the drug threat, but don't spend much time there, either. Throughout, Fear and Loathing is really just a series of Thompson's verbal pyrotechnics, which are themselves just a stand-in for his massively altered states of consciousness.

There's not a whole lot about Las Vegas in Fear and Loathing; it's the frame rather than the picture. And the fakery of Vegas circa 1971 is quite different from the current style. But Thompson's attitude towards Vegas still resonates; it's still the place in America where people go to be that crazy. If you want to take "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" -- Fear and Loathing's subtitle -- it'll be Vegas you head for, even today.

So, even though Fear and Loathing tells you almost nothing about Vegas, and barely anything about the two events Thompson was ostensibly covering, it's still a vital, pulsing, raw nerve of the American psyche. Most of us will never be this crazy, but we don't have to be -- Thompson was that crazy for all of us.



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Listening to: Gladshot - He Was Gone
via FoxyTunes

Amazon Shrewdly Realizes You Have a Computer

Amazon has sent me one of their periodic e-mails, asking me to help them sell some stuff. (Perhaps money is tight this month, and it's either hit me up, or scrounge under the couch cushions in the break room -- and you don't want to go in there after the third-shift telemarketing guys get done with it.)

This time, they've hit on the brilliant scheme of selling computer peripherals. Makes sense, right? If you're reading this, you're almost certainly on some sort of computing device. Sure, your smartphone might not need any of these things yet, but just you wait...

So, here are some of the things that might interest you:

• the Computer Accessories & Supplies homepage, where you can get mice and printer paper and just about anything else for what Golden Age SF writers assumed we would be calling a 'puter by now.
• If you're easily led, you may prefer to just look at the Bestsellers in Electronics page.
• There's also something Amazon calls an "Outlet", which implies but doesn't directly say that the products therein will be at low or discounted prices.
• But if you have a short attention span and demand special pricing, then the Today's Deals page is just what you need.

Finally, I'll just throw in a banner, for the three of you who haven't installed an ad-blocking add-on. It's pretty snoozy, though:


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Listening to: Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is The Move
via FoxyTunes

Mythopoeic Awards

I've gotten out of the habit of posting all of the minor SFF awards, since I haven't been seriously trying to be a portal/links site for close to two years now. But I like the word "Mythopoeic" -- even if I always want to shove a "t" in the middle and make it more "poetic" -- so I'll toss these winners out at you. They were announced this last weekend at Mythcon XL (not sure if that's "40" or "extra-large") in the city of Lost Angels:

• Adult Literature: Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone, Carol Berg (Roc)
• Children's Literature: Graceling, Kristin Cashore (Harcourt Children's)
• Inklings Studies: The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins; Part Two: Return to Bag-end, John Rateliff (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
• Myth and Fantasy Studies: Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, Charles Butler (Children's Literature Association & Scarecrow Press, 2006).

[via Locus Online]

One Last Novel From Donald Westlake

Thanks to Westlake's friend Lawrence Block and Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai, the novel Memory -- which Westlake wrote in the early '60s but which his then-agent said couldn't be sold -- will be coming early next year. It's not as good as Westlake still being alive and writing new books, but it's better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.

[via Galley Cat and Sarah Weinman]

How Did That Book Get Published?

Editorial Anonymous, who by day is secretly a high-powered editor of books for younger readers, has blasted away the walls of secrecy surrounding publishing with an incendiary blog post entitled...

The Publishometer: How to tell whether a manuscript will be acquired

Well, I may be exaggerating slightly. But it's a very good look at the factors editors have to weigh in their acquisition decisions, if (inevitably) most closely describing the children's publishing world. But if you've ever wondered how that horrible book by {insert famous person here} ever got published, it will Explain All.

Some Days You're the Hero, and Some Days...

I've been absent from ComicMix for more days than I want to tally up, due to various busyness and laziness reasons, but today I roared back with an exceptionally long and meandering review of the new webcomic collection Goats: Infinite Typewriters by Jonathan Rosenberg.

I'm not making any promises, but there may be more later in the week.

Another Place You'll Soon Be Seeing My Ugly Mug

Since it was announced by Nonfiction Editor Douglas Cohen earlier today, I can pass on the news that I'll be the new Graphic Novels columnist for Realms of Fantasy magazine, following the estimable (but somewhat overworked) Jeff VanderMeer.

Given the nature of print-publication deadlines, you won't be reading my words in Realms for several months. But be warned: I'm coming, and now not even magazines are safe from my rantings.

James Bond Daily: Bond on Women

As I've threatened for some time, I'm now reading straight through all of Ian Fleming's James Bond books, and hope to comment on them quickly. The original plan was to read a book every day and write about it that night, but I doubt that will actually happen -- it looks more like each book will take two days.

But perhaps I can find other things to throw in on the off-days to keep up the Bondian theme, such as this quote, from p.27 of Casino Royale, the first novel:

Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.

And I'll also note that I read Casino Royale only a few years ago, in the middle of Book-A-Day, and before seeing the recent movie.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/18

Well, here it is Monday again, so it's time for a list of what came in the mail last week. I'll end up reviewing some of these books, but -- if the past is any guide -- certainly not all of them. But I do want to give at least a little spotlight to each of them -- every book has a reader, and that may be you -- so here's a quick look at the eight books that hit my mailbox in the last seven days.

First up is a new edition of Ian McDonald's 1998 debut novel, Desolation Road, which I'm pretty sure is the best novel ever written about trains on Mars. This attractive new edition is a trade paperback from Pyr, and it should be in bookstores everywhere next week.

DAW has turned two linked novels by S. Andrew Swann -- Dragons of the Cuyahoga and The Dwarves of Whiskey Island -- into a new omnibus under the fairly obvious title Dragons & Dwarves. (In fact, I'm pretty sure I played Dragons & Dwarves at some point in the '80s.) It's an urban fantasy, deviating from the norm in having the main character be male (reporter Kline Maxwell), and looking back to the first wave of urban fantasy with its Bordertown-ish setup: Cleveland now has a magical Portal, through which all sorts of creatures and people have migrated. Dragons & Dwarves is an August mass-market paperback.

The Grave Thief is the third book in Tom Lloyd's "Twilight Reign" epic fantasy series, though not the end. (Do any of us expect big fantasy series to end at three books these days? I'd think that the publishers have thoroughly trained us out of that assumption over the past decade.) It follows The Stormcaller and The Twilight Herald, neither of which I've read, so, for this book, I can say little more than that it's more adventures of those same people, but that the world has not yet been saved. Grave Thief is coming from Pyr in September.

Also from Pyr is the new fantasy novel by James Barclay, Nightchild, the third book in the "Chronicles of the Raven." As I recall, The Raven is "four men and an elf," which always strikes me as the beginning of a joke told in a bar. This was originally published in the UK in 2001, which may make it faintly familiar to some of you. But this American edition of Nightchild is coming in November.

In the tradition of such my-college-admissions-essay novels as Daniel Pinkwater's The Education of Robert Nifkin (and probably a dozen more famous books that I'm forgetting for the moment) comes a first novel by E. Van Lowe called Never Never Slow Dance with a Zombie. It's a first-person novel for teens in which our heroine/essayist Margot must deal with her junior year at a school where most of the the other students have suddenly been transformed into flesh-eating zombies. (And, if that doesn't turn into a mild allegory, I'll eat my hat.) Never Slow Dance With a Zombie is a Tor Teen trade paperback, coming in September.

I mentioned The Sheriff of Yrnameer once before, when I saw the bound galleys, but I'll mention it again, since I now have the very green (and oddly textured) final hardcover in my hands. It's a humorous SF novel -- heavily in the Hitchhikers school, from what I can see -- by the television writer Michael Rubens, whom I'm sure is a fine writer and human being despite his TV background. Pantheon is publishing Sheriff in August.

The Birthing House is a horror novel in a ghost-story style, about a couple who buy an old house -- once a haven for unwed mothers -- and come to be haunted by it. (In horror novels, nothing old is ever any good for you -- the only solution is to buy brand-new things, with no history or connections to anyone who might ever have died. If you suspect you are living in a horror novel, take that advice to heart.) Birthing House is written by Christopher Ransom, who is credited as "International Bestseller" on the cover, though he's American and Birthing House is billed as his first novel. So it's not entirely clear what he's sold best, internationally. But Birthing House has a panoply of laudatory quotes, from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal through Michael Marshall Smith and Jacquelyn Mitchard to my old colleague Jane Dentinger of the Mystery Guild, which strongly implies that it's a very good novel of its kind. If you like modern horror -- Joe Hill, say -- then you might want to find you way to a bookstore in August, when St. Martin's Press will publish Birthing House.

And last for this week is Stephen Hunt's new novel, the steampunk fantasy The Kingdom Beyond the Waves. It's set in the same world as The Court of the Air -- which might make excessively tidy minds wonder if Earth or Fire will be next. Tor is publishing Kingdom in hardcover this very week -- it should be in stores everywhere as of tomorrow.

This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

It's very difficult to read contemporary novels without bringing along masses of personal baggage and history; I know I tend to enjoy and seek out books about people much like myself...even while I make snarky comments when other people do the same thing. So the fact that I greatly enjoyed reading Jonathan Tropper's new novel This Is Where I Leave You may be very much because it's about a man near my age, in my part of the world, who is even more confused and troubled than I am.

Judd Foxman is a Westchester radio producer in his early thirties, and had thought that he was successful, with a good life. But then, a few weeks before the novel opened, he walked in on his gorgeous wife, Jen, having sex with his boss, a roadshow Limbaugh named Wade Boulanger. Somehow -- Tropper never narrates the specifics -- this led to Judd moving out of his house and into a crummy basement apartment, and Jen (whose job, if any, Tropper never mentions) keeping the house. Judd also found himself out of a job, though he wasn't exactly fired and didn't precisely quit. (Though he does get a sitcom-worthy storming-out-of-the-office scene.)

That's backstory; on the first page of This Is Where I Leave You, Judd learns that his father has died. And the old man's last wish was that his widow Hillary and four children -- Judd, married-to-a-self-absorbed-venture-capitalist Wendy, damaged ex-jock Paul, and ne'er-do-well baby brother Philip -- would sit shiva for him, though none of them have been more than nominally Jewish for decades, if ever. But it's hard to deny a dying wish, so the whole family descends on the typically spacious ancestral home, which is even, far too symbolically, at the end of a cul-de-sac.

And then there are the second rank of supporting characters, who deserve to be bullet-pointed:

• Penny, an old girlfriend of Judd's who is, amazingly, completely unattached
• their rabbi, and Judd's old school friend, Charles "Boner" Grodner
• mother Hillary's bestselling parenting book Cradle and All, which comes up several times but remains a free-floating metaphor or explanation
  
• next-door neighbor Linda Callen, who has a very special connection to mother Hillary
• Linda's seizure-damaged son Horry, whose injury neither quite resonates with Paul's similar story nor comes into its own; it's just another damned thing
• Wendy's one-dimensional husband Barry, and their three kids, who are underfoot but uncharacterized
• Paul's wife Alice, who desperately wants children and hasn't gotten any after years of trying -- and she was also Judd's first girlfriend
• and Tracy, Philip's fifteen-years-older therapist and girlfriend

All this, and the subsequent events involving all of those characters, read very smoothly -- Judd's voice is crisp and clear, with a justified undertone of self-loathing and despair but an essential openness and honesty -- but it's a novel that starts to seem more contrived the more time and energy one puts into thinking about it. A more cynical reader might even consider it written primarily as Hollywood bait; it has a slew of quirky parts, and could easily be pitched as a Djareeling Express-meets-Rachel Getting Married-style indy comedy-drama.

All of those many parts are juicy enough to attract the usual actorly types, and all of the women are gorgeous to an unlikely degree. (The men are not described in terms of their physical beauty quite as much, but the reader gets the impression that they are all rugged, sturdy types and each has an emotional arc that, if played right, would bring the Academy to tears.)

The problem with This Is Where I Leave You is that it's too full of characters, and that they all are too much "characters" for a relatively serious novel and not funny enough for a farce. Judd's story is compelling -- at least to men in their middle years, who suddenly poke their heads up, look around, and wonder how the hell they ever got here and if it really was anything they wanted -- but it becomes only one story in a broth of them, and, in the end, the novel is happy to revel in the trivial and the standard rather than blazing its own trail.

This Is Where I Leave You is quite entertaining, in a sub-Tom Perotta way, but it doesn't earn any of the deep emotions it wants to evoke. Judd goes through his week of shiva, and the readers meet all of the members of his crazy family -- but he doesn't really learn anything important, about them or himself, and that family is not nearly as crazy as Judd seems to think. Every family is crazy. It's what you do with the craziness that matters, and, at the end of This Is Where I Leave You, Judd still doesn't know what he can, or should, or will do with that craziness. But that's where Tropper leaves us: happy, entertained, but essentially unsatisfied.

A Pretty Face by Rafael Reig

On the evening of the Fourth of July, I was lying on a blanket behind a local highschool -- neither mine nor the one my sons will go to -- waiting for the sun to go down and reading a novel translated from the Spanish and narrated by a dead woman. Not as patriotic as I could be, I guess.

That novel is Rafael Reig's A Pretty Face, which was published as if it were a noir, or a mystery novel, by the British press Serpent's Tail. It does feature a murder -- of Maria Dolores Eguibar, our narrator and main character, on page two -- but it's not about low-lifes or detection. A Pretty Face is short but diffuse, so it's difficult to give a phrase to sum exactly what it is about, but it's a novel more concerned with the messy lives of the living -- and with the messes that the dead leave behind -- than it is with justice and righteousness for the dead.

Maria, after her unexpected death, finds herself invisible and intangible, able to witness and comment on the living world, but completely unable to affect it. Her only companion is Benito Viruta, the Eyeball Kid, preteen hero of a series of novels for young readers that Maria wrote under the name Lola Lios. Maria tells us that Benito is crass and crude, but Reig doesn't really show that -- the novel is driven entirely by Maria's contradictory, changing voice and memories, and all of the other characters are seen only darkly through the eyes of the dead woman.

Benito is also just the first of a long series of elements that Reig throws into A Pretty Face without adequately explaining them; he shows up long before Reig mentions the novels. Her husband's career, and that of her father also figure in the novel, as does a half-explained alternate history in which the USA conquered Spain and outlawed the Spanish language after a coup in the wake of Franco's death. So the reader gets a confused, jumbled view of Maria's life, driven by flashbacks and her memories, as she follows her body to the morgue and then pieces of the investigation of her death. We learn that she's estranged from her brilliant scientist husband, Fernando -- famous head of the psychiatric clinic previously run by Maria's equally famous father, working on a neuroprotein that can "cheat death" -- and that she spent the night before her death with a lumpish English ex-patient of that clinic. And one or both of those men -- and that neuroprotein -- were responsible for Maria's death.

But Maria isn't really interested in finding out who killed her and why -- in fact, it's hard to say what she is interested in. She floats along on the stream of her own consciousness, and either the translation or the original cultural referents leave the result murky and opaque to North American readers. There are events -- a few within the timeline of the novel, after Maria's death, and more that are shown in flashback -- but their greater significance never quite comes clear.

A Pretty Face is short, and it contains many interesting scenes and lines. But it doesn't entirely make sense, or cohere as a novel. And the significance of the title -- Maria was fat in life, though slim as a spirit, and so the standard complement for her was that title -- also escaped me. I read this book entirely because of a good review I read -- I believe in Publishers Weekly -- but I can't really pass on that favor. It is an afterlife fantasy, so readers who particularly love those may want to seek it out.