Book-A-Day #34 (8/20): Star Wars: Tempest by Troy Denning

This is the third in the nine-book "Legacy of the Force" subseries, and it comes out in December. I'll say nothing about the plot, since that can only lead to heartbreak.

I will say that I've been feeling vaguely unsatisfied with Star Wars books recently, for no reason I could articulate. (Despite the fact that some of the very best books to come out of that world have come in the last few years, like Matt Stover's two excellent novels Traitor and Shatterpoint and Sean Stewart's thoughtful Yoda: Dark Rendezvous.) Reading Tempest, I think I've figured it out.

Nearly all of the Star Wars books lately have been Things Get Worse books, and I like my space opera to have happy endings.

The big "New Jedi Order" plotline? Eighteen volumes of unmitigated Things Getting Worse (and then Much Worse, and then Oy! I Can't Even Tell You How Much Worse), and finally an ending in which happiness must be found in the fact that things have briefly stopped getting worse, though they're certainly not all that good, or getting much better. Obviously, in a nineteen-volume story about the same bad guys, they have to keep winning for quite a while, but I did begin to wonder if there would ever be any possibility of joy in this fictional world ever again.

The prequel movies are all Things Get Worse stories, as they had to be, and so the books set in and around that part of the timeline were also about Things Getting Worse.

And the current storyline is also very much in Things Get Worse mode so far. (Though I hope there's some happiness at the end, unless the Star Wars Powers That Be are trying to induce mass suicide.)

On the other hand, the Bantam Books era was set in Things Get Better time: our heroes were mopping up the remnants of the Empire (though, according to the timeline, it took more than a decade to do so), and storylines rarely spread across more than one book. That was more to my temperament; I like happiness in my zippy space adventure.

But I'm not the target audience for Star Wars books to begin with, so nobody needs to listen to me. At least now I know what's been making me grumpy, and I'll stop expecting something that I'm not going to get when I read a Star Wars book.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 8/13

Lo! The dice speak! And they say: twelve years! Twelve years gone by! Cue the cheesy old-fashioned special effect of a calendar's pages ripping off, as we hasten back to 1994!

• Tad Williams, Caliban's Hour (8/6)
  The first Williams book I ever read, and still the best thing of his I've ever seen; a sequel to The Tempest from a different point of view. It's also exceptionally short for a Tad Williams book, so I recommend it to anyone who's ever wondered what the deal was with him but didn't feel like diving right into a multi-volume monster.
  
• William Shatner with Chris Kreski, Star Trek Movie Memories (8/7)
  As I recall, this was not quite as interesting as Star Trek Memories (which seemed to be mostly written by Kreski after a lot of interviews with just about everyone then still alive from the original TV show -- and it didn't whitewash the fact that most of them thought Shatner was at least partly a self-aggrandizing jerk), but still pleasant enough. Ten years later, it's all old news, but it was fun at the time.
  
• John A. Garraty, 1,001 Things Everyone Should Know About American History (8/7)
  A book-long list, which I probably read on the john. I did not keep it, which, as usual, says something.
  
• Jack Vance, Maske: Thaery (8/8)
  I'm afraid I don't remember at all which this one was. I think there are three "Maske" books, all set in the same region of space (is "Maske" a globular cluster, maybe?), but with very separate plots. Anyway, it's a mature Vance novel, so I feel no qualms in recommending it.
  
• Julian Barnes, Talking It Over (8/9)
  Barnes is at his best when his books are organized by an odd Big Idea (like A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, or Flaubert's Parrot), and this book has a more domestic version of that: it's the story of a love triangle as told, in first person, by all three people involved. Barnes is a very readable writer, and exceptionally good at characterization; I think this is one of his better books.
  
• Phil Foglio, et al., The Xxxenophile Big Book O' Fun (8/9)
  A big collection of very joyful smutty comics by a guy who won the Best Fan Artist Hugo two years in a row, way back when. If you have any interest in smutty comics at all (and I doubt anyone will say so in public), you need to read this one. Foglio writes real people who have a lot of fun along with their sex, making this more than just a stroke book.
  
• Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (8/10)
  One of the things I miss the most from the pre-9/11 world is how the "clash of cultures" used to be about which side were bigger whiners. Hughes makes a very good Jeremiah; he thunders with the best of them. Here he basically stakes out a position near the middle of the political spectrum and lays into everyone on either side -- it's high dudgeon as high entertainment, and I thought it was wonderful and true at the time.
  
• Philip K. Dick, Eye In the Sky (8/10)
  A minor early Dick novel, but not a bad one.
  
• Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (8/11)
  Another early novel, though not as minor. (And not by the same person, obviously.) It's one of his funniest books, and ends, as I recall, relatively well for its characters (which is not always to be expected with Waugh).
  
• P.G. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning (8/12)
  One of the great Blandings novel; I needed to cleanse my palate after all the curmudgeonliness of Waugh and Hughes, I guess. This is the one where Gallahad is writing his memoirs -- and, of course, the Empress of Blandings gets pig-napped along the way. I don't remember the exact details, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were a imposter as well.
  
• John Varley and Ricia Mainhardt, editors, Superheroes (8/12)
  A very mixed bag of superhero stories: as I recall, most of them were slight and instantly forgettable, but a few were excellent.
  
• Connie Willis, Remake (8/13)
  The second of Willis's three mid-90s novellas-as-books, and possibly the best of them. I'm sure there's a romance plot (there usually is, with Willis), but it's also about changing old movies (and thus, by extensions, any and all works of art) to fit changing audience expectations.
  

Running late as usual; I think I should stop making excuses and just assume I'm going to do this on the next Sunday afternoon...

Itzkoff "Covers" Tiptree

Some puns are just too horrible to resist.

By now, most of you probably know that this week's New York Times Book Review features Julie Phillips's biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon on the cover, in a review written by the Times's top skiffy hand Dave Itzkoff. (Making Light and Paul Levinson have already noted this, and probably others that I haven't seen yet.)

It's nice to see the book taken seriously (and this is a serious, even a bit stodgy, review in the Times's common tell-a-potted-version-of-the-biography-subject's-life rather-than-engaging-with-the-book-directly style), even if Bob Silverberg is fated to have his "ineluctably masculine" comment trotted out every time Tiptree's story is told. I have no problems with Itzkoff's review (other than the fact that he barely mentions the book, or critically engages with it -- again, that is pretty common for Times reviewers anyway).

James Tiptree, Jr. is being reviewed by everyone and his cousin-in-law, so I hope that actually helps the book's sales. (Though, as a cynic, I have to admit that this looks like the kind of book that appeals most strongly to the people who get their books for free -- such as critics, and myself -- and not all that much to the people who actually pay for their books.) And, as a guy who published an edition of Tiptree's Her Smoke Rose Up Forever not all that long ago, I'd also love to see this attention actually turn into some increased sales for her books.

Book-A-Day #33 (8/19): Quality Time by Edward Koren

Another Saturday, another day with hardly any reading time. So I finished off another book of single-panel cartoons, this time of the exceptionally hairy-looking people and creatures of Ed Koren. His stuff will always look very '70s to me (maybe because that was when I first saw it; maybe because his jokes are usually about people getting in touch with their feelings in a very EST, post-hippie, liberal New York way), but it's still generally funny. This book is from 1995, but Koren's cartoons take place in a world where it is forever 1977.

Movie Log: Zoom

I'm beginning to think my boys will always choose crap when given a choice, but I haven't given up all hope yet.

Today they had two choices. The first was whether to watch Howl's Moving Castle at home or go see something in the theater. (They chose the latter, which is very understandable; given a choice, I'd rather see a movie on a big screen than at home on TV.) The second choice was between Monster House and Zoom, and they decided against Monster House for the second time. (And that's too bad, because it really does look like the best of this summer's crop of kids' movies.)

Zoom is a movie fatally undermined by its own casting (or so I surmise; it's possible that it would have had the same problems anyway), a movie that ends up feeling smaller than it should -- though I should say it's pleasant and entertaining, like tea that's sweet enough but too watery. As a movie about a "family" of super-powered folks, it inevitably suffers by comparison with The Incredibles. Unfortunately, it also suffers by comparison with last year's Sky High, another super-powered kids movie with a better-structured plot and a lot of good actors in small roles. Zoom shoves forward its name actors (primarily Tim Allen as the ex-teen superhero Captain Zoom, but also Courteney Cox as the doctor/love interest, a nearly unrecognizable Chevy Chase as the doctor/comic relief, and Rip Torn as the kind of hardass military guy that Torn can play in his sleep by now).

The movie should be about the four kids learning to use their powers and trust each other, but, instead, it's a Tim Allen movie -- he's a washed up superhero who's needed when the only other survivor of his teenage super-team, his brother -- who of course turned evil and killed the rest of the team before being thought killed -- starts heading back to Earth from some other dimension. So Allen's character, Jack, has to train the next generation of heroes to stand up to the new threat. Unfortunately, the movie is about Jack rather than about the kids, and he's the one who ends up saving the day (with each other super-powered person providing a precisely measured dose of help). I wonder if there was a draft of this movie done right before Allen got attached -- one actually about the kids.

Don't get me wrong: Allen's acting is fine, and he carries this movie, such as it is. (He has to; it was built to be carried by Tim Allen.) But having him, a "movie star," in the movie kept it from being the story it should have been and made it a Tim Allen vehicle.

Since it's a Tim Allen movie, he needs a love interest, so Cox's screen time is increased over the real plot function of her character. And Chase does a mild, aged version of the schtick that we used to love thirty years ago. (To his credit, it's only embarrassing once, when an "outdoor simulator" sends his character into ethnic-stereotype dialogue for no obvious reason.)

Let's see; what else is wrong here? Allen's super-suit, revealed at the end, is uninspiring, and the kids' graduation jumpsuits (in bland white) are actually less appealing than their yellow training uniforms. The big end fight is too small, and has too many scenes of soldiers falling down because a special effect is in their neighborhood.

All in all, Zoom seems to have spent its money on Allen and Cox and Chase. I wish they had hired instead people like Mark Hamill and Sandra Oh and William H. Macy, and spent the $5 million or so saved there on a better script, a decent costume designer, and a bit more special effects (not a lot; just enough to make it feel more important) at the end.

(Oh, and the aging-superhero-coming-out-of-retirement gag was done first and best by The Return of Captain Invincible, an incredibly uneven but fascinating 1983 movie with Alan Arkin and Christopher Lee, with great songs by Richard "Rocky Horror Picture Show" O'Brien.)

If you absolutely loved Sky High, or are the world's biggest Tim Allen fan, go see this movie. If you have kids who really want to see it, go with them and be mildly entertained. Otherwise, if you think you want to see a story like this, rent Sky High or track down The Tomorrow People.

Book-A-Day #32 (8/18): Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey

This is a short, supposedly non-fictional book about a novelist's trip to Japan with his twelve-year-old son (though I recall some reviews saying that liberties had been taken with the truth -- as one would expect from a novelist). Carey's son, Charley, had just become fascinated with some anime and manga stories (mostly Gundam Wing and related stuff), and Carey leveraged that into a father-son trip to Japan in which Carey would interview some people related to anime and manga (for, presumably, this very book).

I see from looking this book up at Amazon that it has a lot of one-star reviews from people who claim to know a lot more about anime and manga than Carey does, and knocking this book as a poor introduction to those areas. These reviews would have a bit more weight if that was anything like what this book is trying to do, but of course it isn't. Carey doesn't claim to be even the expert his son is; he's an interested layman, and a careful reader/viewer who's just started to work out all of the subtleties and cultural assumptions of these works.

It's a slim book, and doesn't really come to any conclusions -- Carey is trying to get closer to his son through the trip to Japan and a series of interviews with creators of things that Charley likes, but Charley spends most of the book either quietly sullen or just plain quiet. Carey did invent a fictional young man, Takashi, who acts a bit like their guide, but he doesn't give Takashi very much to do, and the conflicts that were reportedly the reason he invented Takashi don't actually add up to much.

But the writing is superb and the tone is thoughtful. Wrong About Japan might not be a great guidebook to Japan, or to the world of anime and manga, but it's a fine meditation on fathers and sons, and different kinds of cultural estrangement. While reading it, I came to regret recent time spent reading bad novels, or minor, light non-fiction. Carey is a writer who doesn't settle for OK, and he makes me want to be equally demanding as a reader. I've only read one of Carey's novels so far (Jack Maggs), but I want to read more of them now, and I want to read better books in general, instead of settling for literary junk food. So this was well worth reading.

Quote of the Week

"He took me to his library and showed me his books, of which he had a complete set."
- Ring Lardner

Book-A-Day #31 1/2 (8/17): Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey

This is the book I ran out at lunchtime to buy for my boys -- I read it to Thing 2 at bedtime over the past three nights, and Thing 1 has read it himself at least twice by now.

This is the eighth book in the series, so telling you that George and Harold accidentally use a time machine to travel to an alternate dimension where everything is opposite, and then have to battle Captain Blunderpants...it's probably not all that helpful. And, if you're a normal adult, you probably don't have much interest in a silly kids' book.

But if you have any contact with elementary-school-aged boys, especially ones who are "reluctant readers" (my boys mostly aren't, though Thing 1 would mostly rather read comics than books with just words these days -- hey, who wouldn't?), the Captain Underpants book are what you need. They'll love you for it.

The author has a neat-o website as well, with lots more inappropriate humor and fun.

Movie Log: Bottle Rocket

Bottle Rocket is the movie that introduced the world to director Wes Anderson and to the acting brothers of Luke and Owen Wilson. I never bothered to see it until last night, because I missed a whole lot of movies in the mid-to-late '90s.

Remember all of those caper movies that came out after Reservoir Dogs? (Another movie I've never seen, and one I don't plan to, either.) This looked to the untrained eye like one of those, but it really was more like the current independent-movie scene, mostly about characters trying to figure out what the hell is going on with their lives (cf. Sideways, Garden State, Lost in Translation, etc.). Anthony (Luke Wilson) has just been released from a mental hospital, and his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson) tries to recruit him into a life of crime.

The crime thing doesn't work out all that well, but not in the mid-90s caper-movie ways you'd expect; things fall apart in small ways, mostly, and nothing goes quite according to plan. But Anthony does find love, in what seems to be a digression but turns into the real backbone of the movie.

It was a pleasant, meandering movie, and it actually made me like Owen Wilson (who always looks like a smirking jerk, so I've generally avoided movies with him in them). But it was most interesting -- to me, at least -- as the great indy-film link between Pulp Fiction and Ghost World.

Book-A-Day #31 (8/17): Life's Little Annoyances by Ian Urbina

Yes, I am clearing out all of the little, quickly-read books that accumulated while I was neck-deep in 2005 fantasy earlier this year. I think I'll jump into longer things after Worldcon (maybe even during Worldcon, since I usually like to take at least one big fat classic with a ribbon marker to big conventions), but, for now, it's nice to keep tossin' 'em up and knockin' 'em out of the park.

This is a silly little book; I don't think it actually was a website first, but it feels like it should have been. (That might have helped collect more -- and better -- stories.) It's all about the annoyances of everyday life (rude cell-phone people, telemarketers, bad drivers -- anything that Andy Rooney could get a good snit worked up about), and specifically about how various people have "fought back."

Urbina has a lurking sense of humor -- he often writes about people annoyed by things each other do in quick succession -- but he's also primarily a reporter, so his voice is mostly a rah-rah cheerleader style, rather than drawing any parallels.

I got this book at work for free, and it only took about two hours of my life. That's about what it was worth to me, so it was a decent trade.

Blogging About Blogging

The blogroll is still increasing in size; I just added Mark Chadbourn's Jack of Ravens after he e-mailed me about it. (And it's very weird to think that this little lark I started ten months ago to practice for my "real" blog is now something anyone would bother asking to be linked from.)

The "Authors (etc.)" now contains all of the SF/F/Horrorish people who have a blog that I've remembered to add to the list, plus a few people who write other things, just because. It will probably keep growing, as more writers get blogs (or as I remember to add them).

The other sections keep growing similarly. I have been intending to write a "Link Pimpage" post, pointing out some of the more interesting stuff in that vast sea of links, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Maybe this weekend...

John Hodgman Has a Blog

I haven't had a chance to check it yet, but I'm sure it will be awesome. (Frantically busy this morning trying to do a little work and post a lot of news on the SFBC blog.)

That is all.

Book-A-Day #30 (8/16): The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

I talked about Sarah Vowell before, but I'd only found a copy of this (her other book of essays, after Take the Cannoli) during WFA-frenzy time, so I didn't have a chance to read it immediately.

I see I said most of the things I would say now the last time I talked about Vowell's writing, so I won't repeat myself. This collection is more specifically about political life -- not about specific day-to-day partisan politics or policies, but about being connected to and worrying about your nation and how it's governed. I'm sure I'd disagree with her quite a bit if she was talking about specific policies (though probably not all of the time), but I find I completely agree with her on the more important stuff: that loving and caring about your country is vital, but you also have to be careful not to let that blind you.

She's a good essayist, and I wish more people would read "political" books like this instead of the usual run of All The People I Hate Are Making The Country Suck by T.V. Blowhard.

Who I Look Like, Part Two

Well, I got curious, and found out that Zbigniew Preisner is a composer (of classical-ish stuff, I think) and that Valdas Adamkus is the current President of Lithuania.

I'll have to listen to some of Zbiggy's stuff, to see if he's worthy of looking like me. But Valdas sounds like a cool guy and a tough cookie (not to mention in charge of the armed forces of at least a small nation -- and since the Grand Duchy of Fenwick debacle I'm not counting any country out), so I'm not going to be making fun of him.

I do suspect, in most of the cases below, I "look like" those guys because we have similar facial hair.

(Oh, and one last thing: John Dolmayan is a drummer, not a serial killer. I was a bit worried about him for a moment.)

Hey, Like-A-Look!

Another day, another meme -- and, as usual, I noticed Keith DeCandido doing it first. (Really, I'm not stalking you, Keith -- you just do all of these things and are early in the alphabet.)

From the evidence below, I look most like someone I've never heard of -- but he's supposedly famous, so it must be my fault.

But I don't look all that much like any of them. So that means either I am unique and special, or that I have the kind of face that does not become famous.