- J.G. Ballard
- Brian W. Aldiss
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Samuel R. Delany
- Joanna Russ
- Larry Niven
- Michael Moorcock
- R.A. Lafferty
- George Alec Effinger
- Gardner Dozois
- A.J. Budrys
- Terry Carr
- Kate Wilhelm
- Geroge Zebrowski
- Theodore Sturgeon
- Philip K. Dick
- Pamela Sargent
- Robert Sheckley
- Robert Zelazny
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
More New Wavery from Malzberg
Malzberg also made up a list of writers who did not appear in Campbell's Analog from 1960 through his final issue in December 1971:
What I've Been Talking About
Right now I'm reading Barry Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins, a much-updated and expanded version of his 1980 kiss-slap to science fiction, The Engines of the Night -- which, by the way, is fascinating and will likely be the best non-fiction book on SF published this year and a shoo-in as a Best Related Book Hugo nominee -- and finding much to think about.
For example, related to the chats we had here and at rec.arts.sf.written about the New Wave, here's Malzberg, from his 1980 essay, "The Fifties," on the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, in the aftermath of the 1958 breakup of American News Service:
If you were interested in my post on the New Wave, you really should read this book. If you're interested in the history of SF at all, you probably should read this book. (Though I warn you: Malzberg calls it "a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode." Those of you for whom SF is the glorious handmaiden of Technology Triumphant, surging boldly on into the Uncharted Nether Regions, will probably not like his tone.)
For example, related to the chats we had here and at rec.arts.sf.written about the New Wave, here's Malzberg, from his 1980 essay, "The Fifties," on the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, in the aftermath of the 1958 breakup of American News Service:
John W. Campbell at Astounding had wandered from Dianetics to the Hieronymus Machine to the finagle factor and was just beginning to topple into Norman Dean's Drive, meanwhile running stories by a few writers functioning under innumerable pseudonyms, with virtually the same plot, conception, characters, and outcome. Only Rich Raphael (who was gone by 1965) seemed to be able to break into and sell interesting work to ASF in those years; Campbell had no other new writers of any visible promise.
An unhappy, airless time. An end of time for many. So emphatically hopeless that when science fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British New Worlds and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field's "new literary merit," "new relevance," "new excitement," "new standards of contemporaneity" as if nothing innovative has occurred before Ballard or Silverberg.
If you were interested in my post on the New Wave, you really should read this book. If you're interested in the history of SF at all, you probably should read this book. (Though I warn you: Malzberg calls it "a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode." Those of you for whom SF is the glorious handmaiden of Technology Triumphant, surging boldly on into the Uncharted Nether Regions, will probably not like his tone.)
Your "Only In New York" Story for the Day
A seventy-something couple is retiring to Arizona, but didn't want to put their cats in the cargo hold of a plane for the trip out. And, being typical New Yorkers, they don't drive, either. So, what to do?Take a cab.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Just read: Money in the Bank by P.G. Wodehouse
I was in the mood for something frivolous yesterday (since rumors of my employer's takeover had been flying for a week, with no official announcements), so I went to check on my unread Wodehouses. I had four of them, all minor (The Coming of Bill, anyone?), so I picked this one, since it was from 1942 -- Wodehouse's prime period.And it's just about what you'd expect: a pleasant, completely entertaining but lightweight romantic comedy about impostors and jewel thieves, semi-amnesiac lords posing as butlers and raw-foods health faddists, all leading up to the proverbial happy ending.
There are still probably two dozen Wodehouse books I've never read, and I'm sure I'll need each one of them as I get to them. He provided mankind a great service, and I don't think he was ever adequately thanked.
As Evelyn Waugh said, "Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."
Well, exactly. And this isn't even one of the really good ones.
What Are the Great SF Novels of the...Oh, Crap! I'm Out of Decades!
In rec.arts.sf.written, on 3/1/07, I posted the following, as part of my annual tradition of getting the good people there to do my homework for me:
I've already posted this on the SFBC blog, but, since I've asked you folks about essentially the same issue the last few years, I thought I'd also post it here. It's only just barely on topic, for which I apologize.
As you may or may not know, the SFBC has been doing a 50th Anniversary Collection for the past five years -- we started in 2003 (the 50th anniversary of the club's founding in 1953) with a series of eight great books of the 1950s, and have had series each year since then to cover the decades following.
Well, we're running out of history now, since in 2007 we're doing books from the 1990s, and it's a little early to do the best books of the 2000s in 2008. So the series either needs to end or do something different.
And that's what I wanted to ask you folks about -- what different thing could we do? (Note that suggestions that a reasonable number of people might buy with their own money will be preferred -- yes, it would be nice to have the eight-volume definitive collection of Great SF Poetry, but the SFBC is a commercial enterprise and needs to be able to sell books to continue operations.)
We've thought about going backwards, and doing a series of the great SF books of the '40s -- or maybe just eight books from the period before 1950 (probably only going back to Verne and/or Wells). But I'm sure there are other possibilities.
All suggestions will be considered, though ones along the lines of my Great SF Poetry example may be mocked...
One person suggested an eight-volume collection of the great SF stories:
The budget really wouldn't reach to eight original books (or one, for that matter) -- so, if we did another year, it would need to be of books that already exist.
Good idea, though.
Another person suggested "first use of an idea anthologies":
A series of eight anthologies would be pretty much guaranteed to fail, unfortunately. And, as with Mike's idea, I think it would require creating all-new anthologies, which would be quite expensive. (I might be misunderstanding Dan's suggestion, though.)
One of the ideas we had a few years back for "what to do after the '90s" was a series of the great anthologies of the history of the field -- Adventures in Time and Space, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, stuff like that. But, again, we'd prefer not to be fired over the sales of the series.
Another comment about collections and/or anthologies mentioned that I was "religious" about novels in the first five series of the collection:
Wasn't that religious, actually -- the '50s series has City, the '70s has Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and Deathbird Stories, and the '80s has Schismatrix Plus, which is a novel plus stories.
It's just that, as I've said many times, I have a preference for books that people will actually buy.
And, if we do a series in 2008, we'll need an idea that can generate eight books...although, if we do ten more books, that would bring the grand total up to fifty, which is a nice round (and appropriate) number.
Several suggestions from one person: first a series of "the Best of {insert major current author}":
I'd love for someone to do that, but I'm afraid the club couldn't afford to do it on bookclub sales. Subterranean seems to be working their way into that niche, though -- they did the Vance book, and one on Connie Willis is coming up this year. (Not to mention the giant George R.R. Martin collection a few years back.)
Second, a continuation of the Hugo Winners anthologies:
Well, we missed the last trade-published volume or two in the club anyway (because they had stopped selling decently for us). So this is pretty unlikely. Again, if a trade publisher can't make it profitable, there would be even less money in it for the club.
Third, the books that almost made it into the earlier series:
That's one possibility, but we'd need to think of a better name than "the also-rans," which is how I keep thinking of this. Good idea, though.
Someone else asked about translated SF, which he thought would sell badly:
I'm afraid that's true. We tried to sell Solaris when the movie was out, and even that didn't help.
(For the inevitable follow-up: it doesn't matter how bad a movie made from an existing book is; it always increases the sales of that book. Ask me someday how we sold Starship Troopers and The Postman in the late '90s.)
Great SF of the 19th Century, someone asked?
Could work, but I think we'd want to do the first half of the 20th century first -- otherwise, it would look a bit weird to jump from 2000 right back to Frankenstein.
(And most of those books probably wouldn't sell all that well, since they're all Public Domain and available in many forms already.)
Back to anthologies. Someone thought that doing a whole series of them might be economically unwise for us:
If we did one of those two [Adventures in Time and Space and/or A Treasury of Great Science Fiction], preferably a year after doing any similar book, sales would only be on the low end of medium, yes.
For us, at least, anthologies are a very tough sell right now -- and historical reprint anthologies aren't as popular as they used to be. (I suspect this is because the audience for those books already has them, and newer readers aren't particularly interested in reading a pile of sixty-year-old stories all at once.)
The same person asked about the problems of the rights to old anthologies:
Realistically speaking, if the rights for an anthology are not still assembled in one place by someone, it's no longer publishable in that form. It's vastly easier to just hire a new editor and start from scratch.
And that was pretty much my contributions to that thread. Anyone here have any brilliant ideas? (I must warn you that we're 99% convinced to end the whole thing with the 90s series, which we're half through right now.)
I've already posted this on the SFBC blog, but, since I've asked you folks about essentially the same issue the last few years, I thought I'd also post it here. It's only just barely on topic, for which I apologize.
As you may or may not know, the SFBC has been doing a 50th Anniversary Collection for the past five years -- we started in 2003 (the 50th anniversary of the club's founding in 1953) with a series of eight great books of the 1950s, and have had series each year since then to cover the decades following.
Well, we're running out of history now, since in 2007 we're doing books from the 1990s, and it's a little early to do the best books of the 2000s in 2008. So the series either needs to end or do something different.
And that's what I wanted to ask you folks about -- what different thing could we do? (Note that suggestions that a reasonable number of people might buy with their own money will be preferred -- yes, it would be nice to have the eight-volume definitive collection of Great SF Poetry, but the SFBC is a commercial enterprise and needs to be able to sell books to continue operations.)
We've thought about going backwards, and doing a series of the great SF books of the '40s -- or maybe just eight books from the period before 1950 (probably only going back to Verne and/or Wells). But I'm sure there are other possibilities.
All suggestions will be considered, though ones along the lines of my Great SF Poetry example may be mocked...
One person suggested an eight-volume collection of the great SF stories:
The budget really wouldn't reach to eight original books (or one, for that matter) -- so, if we did another year, it would need to be of books that already exist.
Good idea, though.
Another person suggested "first use of an idea anthologies":
A series of eight anthologies would be pretty much guaranteed to fail, unfortunately. And, as with Mike's idea, I think it would require creating all-new anthologies, which would be quite expensive. (I might be misunderstanding Dan's suggestion, though.)
One of the ideas we had a few years back for "what to do after the '90s" was a series of the great anthologies of the history of the field -- Adventures in Time and Space, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, stuff like that. But, again, we'd prefer not to be fired over the sales of the series.
Another comment about collections and/or anthologies mentioned that I was "religious" about novels in the first five series of the collection:
Wasn't that religious, actually -- the '50s series has City, the '70s has Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and Deathbird Stories, and the '80s has Schismatrix Plus, which is a novel plus stories.
It's just that, as I've said many times, I have a preference for books that people will actually buy.
And, if we do a series in 2008, we'll need an idea that can generate eight books...although, if we do ten more books, that would bring the grand total up to fifty, which is a nice round (and appropriate) number.
Several suggestions from one person: first a series of "the Best of {insert major current author}":
I'd love for someone to do that, but I'm afraid the club couldn't afford to do it on bookclub sales. Subterranean seems to be working their way into that niche, though -- they did the Vance book, and one on Connie Willis is coming up this year. (Not to mention the giant George R.R. Martin collection a few years back.)
Second, a continuation of the Hugo Winners anthologies:
Well, we missed the last trade-published volume or two in the club anyway (because they had stopped selling decently for us). So this is pretty unlikely. Again, if a trade publisher can't make it profitable, there would be even less money in it for the club.
Third, the books that almost made it into the earlier series:
That's one possibility, but we'd need to think of a better name than "the also-rans," which is how I keep thinking of this. Good idea, though.
Someone else asked about translated SF, which he thought would sell badly:
I'm afraid that's true. We tried to sell Solaris when the movie was out, and even that didn't help.
(For the inevitable follow-up: it doesn't matter how bad a movie made from an existing book is; it always increases the sales of that book. Ask me someday how we sold Starship Troopers and The Postman in the late '90s.)
Great SF of the 19th Century, someone asked?
Could work, but I think we'd want to do the first half of the 20th century first -- otherwise, it would look a bit weird to jump from 2000 right back to Frankenstein.
(And most of those books probably wouldn't sell all that well, since they're all Public Domain and available in many forms already.)
Back to anthologies. Someone thought that doing a whole series of them might be economically unwise for us:
If we did one of those two [Adventures in Time and Space and/or A Treasury of Great Science Fiction], preferably a year after doing any similar book, sales would only be on the low end of medium, yes.
For us, at least, anthologies are a very tough sell right now -- and historical reprint anthologies aren't as popular as they used to be. (I suspect this is because the audience for those books already has them, and newer readers aren't particularly interested in reading a pile of sixty-year-old stories all at once.)
The same person asked about the problems of the rights to old anthologies:
Realistically speaking, if the rights for an anthology are not still assembled in one place by someone, it's no longer publishable in that form. It's vastly easier to just hire a new editor and start from scratch.
And that was pretty much my contributions to that thread. Anyone here have any brilliant ideas? (I must warn you that we're 99% convinced to end the whole thing with the 90s series, which we're half through right now.)
The Current Upheaval
Some of you may have heard that one of the co-owners of my employer has sold out to the other co-owner; it became public today. We are apparently going to be merged with BMG Columbia House, and we'll find out later today what that means. (I may or may not be able to talk about it.)
If you remember just about a year ago, when Time Warner sold off its book-publishing group to Hachette, I posted to explain that wasn't me that time. Well, this time it is.
Update, later: Well, we had a meeting to meet the new CEO, who looks like a media guy rather than "a suit," and who went out of his way to talk about how much he reads. We won't have a corporate name for a few weeks, since this all happened so quickly, but I think this is going to be no worse than our other recent mergers and upheavals.
If you remember just about a year ago, when Time Warner sold off its book-publishing group to Hachette, I posted to explain that wasn't me that time. Well, this time it is.
Update, later: Well, we had a meeting to meet the new CEO, who looks like a media guy rather than "a suit," and who went out of his way to talk about how much he reads. We won't have a corporate name for a few weeks, since this all happened so quickly, but I think this is going to be no worse than our other recent mergers and upheavals.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Movie Log: Children of Men
So The Wife and I saw Children of Men on Friday night. The short version: it's a very impressive movie, but it has huge holes as science fiction and as a plan old story.I'll grant "Britain stands alone" as premise (or, more likely, as propaganda), and even wave off the fact that, after twenty years, nobody in the world seems to have any idea why no children have been born. (I'll also note that this is set in a slightly alternate world where no human ova -- fertilized or not -- have been successfully kept alive outside a human body.) Swallow, swallow, swallow. I'm doing my best: I'm trying to swallow everything this movie throws at me.
Massive numbers of refugees, kept in cages at tube stations? (OK, I don't get it, but swallow again.) Said refugees gathered up onto buses to go to Heinlein-esque Coventries, unless they're pulled off those buses to be put back into cages at different tube stations? I'll accept random brutality, and the general All Police Are Fascist Bastards feeling, but the system needs to make a little sense. Two sets of ubercompetent violence experts who just can't quite manage to get things done in the end? Minor characters who disappear and reappear to fit plot needs? ("Oh, hi! You were crouching in that arch, waiting for me, the whole time? As if this was our plan, even though we can't communicate? Great!") Sorry, now I'm choking.
I'm being too negative, right? Let's talk about this as a movie -- those two amazing long shots (one near the middle of the movie, one almost at the end), when a single camera follows the action, without cuts, for a good five minutes one time and probably at least ten the second time. Those are mesmerizing once you realize what's happening. And all of the performances are good; the script is clean and brutal, with a number of excellent, cutting lines ("Show Syd the fugee face. Sad fugee face."), and only one or two moments of windy pontificating (the speech about "the sound of the playgrounds fading"); and it's generally a great looking movie (yes, it's another "Twenty years from now, it will be next Tuesday" future, but they've got a worldwide societal collapse to explain that).
But all that can't hide the fact that Children of Men is shamelessly manipulative and silly, with plot points happening precisely and very conveniently to hit the screenwriter's Big Messages. And, even then, they chickened out on the ending -- there's a perfect moment of existential despair that would have been just the right ending, but then the movie goes on a bit longer.
All in all, it's well worth seeing as a movie, but turn off the SF-reading side of your brain when you do (to save it the inevitable damage from rough handling). And it would be a travesty if this wins the Hugo.
Just Read: He by Florence King
I read this mostly on Friday (appropriately, as I was writing my post about how men think about sex), and enjoyed it, but I doubt anyone reading this will ever pick this book up.I'm a Florence King fan, as I think I've mentioned -- I started with her great With Charity Toward None (a wonderful history of misanthropy) over a decade ago, and have been wandering through the rest of her books ever since. King is one of the world's great curmudgeons, and her most typical books are the ones she wrote in the '80s and '90s. If what I say here interests anyone, find either Charity or The Florence King Reader (a great overview of her work, from St. Martin's around 1997 or so).
This one dates from 1978, and is a bit different than her later work; it's partially King's sexual autobiography and partially her look at the various types of men in her world at the time of writing. The big difference, I think, from her later stuff, is that this one dates from the days before King went through menopause. I get the feeling she always disliked most women, and this book clearly shows that she didn't like men all that much, either. So I believe that, once the one thing she wanted from men was no longer important to her, she could easily turn against the whole human race. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; I'm a curmudgeon myself.)
King was born, I deduce from internal evidence, about 1935, and the early chapters are about her upbringing (mostly by her Southern grandmother and a black maid of the same age and outlook) and about her college years. (She was, by her own accounts, tremendously hot to trot, but had to spend a long time working through the Byzantine '50s social code to even figure out what it was she wanted. This chapter is particularly good on what was allowed while dating then -- the short form, for those of us from later generations, is a hell of a lot more than we've been led to expect, but only in very specific ways at very specific times.)
After that, she spends most of the book anatomizing the different types of men she sees in the mid-'70s (not a good time for any Americans, I'm afraid), and quoting a lot of forgettable popular novels of the previous thirty years for their attitudes on men and women. The review of the literature is the weakest part of the book; aside from James Jones and one or two others, nobody reads any of those writers anymore, so refuting them (or just holding them up to opprobrium) is now pointless.
I should warn contemporary audiences that King is not a feminist, though she herself points out that she always lived alone and supported herself. She's a conservative (of the "every change since I was born has been a bad one" type) and was associated with the magazine National Review, but she doesn't have the stereotyped views of any side.
And I'll have to give her the last word, about her own Southern upbringing: "No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Movie Log: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades is the third movie based on the classic Kazuo Koike-Goseki Kojima manga series (I've seen the first two recently). It's more samurai action with an existential overlay, and I liked this one much better than the second.The Peckinpah-ish streams of blood are toned down in this one, which is good -- they might be realistic, but they don't look realistic. And the scenery and cinematography are stunning this time out.
Again, I don't feel like looking up which manga stories this was based on, but there's at least one that I remember (where Ogami Itto and his baby-cart face down an army of gunmen and archers at the end), and this movie, like the others, seems to have been adapted by Koike directly from his scripts.
I'm no expert on samurai movies, so it's easily possible that there are better ones than these. But these are pretty good, and should be of interest to anyone who's read the collections. I do intend to watch the last three myself, if that means anything.
Reading Into the Past: Week of 4/1
This time our magic number is ten, and here are the books I was reading at the end of March 1997:
- Linda Obst, Hello, He Lied (3/24)
One of those Hollywood memoirs that proliferated in the mid-90s (with the rise of the independent production companies, I bet). Obst may have written a more famous book before this one (or I may be thinking of someone else), but this is the one I read. It has not stuck in the mind, but I still like that title. - Brian Aldiss, Remembrance Day (3/26)
A contemporary novel, I believe -- and I think there was some terrorism in it. I wonder how it compares to this year's new novel, HARM? - Les Daniels, DC Comics (3/26)
A big fat coffee table book with lots of comic panels blown up a bit too large. I believe Daniels did a Marvel book first, which was a hit, and so I was looking at this follow-up for the SFBC. I can't remember if we offered it or not, or much about the book itself. - The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe (3/26)
Another art book from the man behind Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials and the much later Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy. He always had a naturalist's eye, which made him a great painter of aliens and other interesting creatures -- I believe this book was loosely themed around those strengths. I haven't seen anything from Barlowe in ages; I wonder what he's doing these days? - John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, The Mask (3/27)
First comics series about the character; one of the movies was probably coming up at this point (I am too lazy to investigate right now), and I was thinking about them for the club. Decent early-'90s over-energetic comics, but I doubt they've aged well. - John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, The Mask Returns (3/27)
See above. - Masamune Shirow, Appleseed Book One: The Promethean Challenge (3/27)
I imagine I was reading this for the SFBC as well. I recall mostly liking it --the characterization was pretty good, and Shirow has an art style that's interesting, if a bit busy -- but I've never been a big giant-robot fan, so I didn't seek out any more of the series. - Walter Jon Williams, Days of Atonement (3/28)
I finally caught up to this novel a few years late; It was published around 1990. This is probably Williams's least skiffy novel, being a near-future police procedural, and I enjoyed it, as I've liked all of his novels. - James White, Final Diagnosis (3/29)
It's not actually the last "Sector General" novel -- there was one more, a few years later -- though it sounds like it should be. I wish there were more books like these: fun but not flyweight, serious but not dour, adventurous but not violent. - Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (3/31)
First of two novels in an ugly brown-paper Modern Library edition; I'm afraid all I remember is that they're about upper-crusty English types in the middle of the last century, and that I was supposed to figure out a lot of scandalous real-life details, since it's a roman a clef. (Mitford was one of a slew of daughters from an aristocratic family, and they all keep popping up in the oddest places in 20th century English history -- one married Oswald Mosely, and one ended up writing The American Way of Death.) I felt as if I needed to read five or six good history books to properly appreciate this novel, so a lot of it just went past me. - Scott Adams, Casual Day Has Gone Too Far (3/31)
A Dilbert collection. 'Nuff said. - Nancy Mitford, Love In a Cold Climate (4/2)
The other novel in that ugly Modern Library omnibus, which I think was a sequel to Pursuit, and left me equally cold.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Just Read: The Unbinding by Walter Kirn
This is a short novel, originally serialized on Slate and written while it was being published. I've read Kirn's earlier novels Thumbsucker and Up In the Air (though I avoided his last novel, Mission To America, about a bunch of Mormon missionaries), and I loved this cover -- and the book was very short, always a good thing -- so I gave him another try.It's something of a noble failure, since it doesn't quite work the way it should. There are great sentences, paragraphs and even chapters, but the whole thing fizzles a bit by the end.
It feels slightly SFnal, though it's set in the present day -- it's told entirely in electronic communications (blog posts, tape-recorded reports, intercepts, and so on) from three points of view. Two of them are to become a fairly conventional boy-girl couple, but the third is a federal agent surveilling both of them for some ill-defined purposes.
(The whole book is about surveillance and electronically mediated communication, in somewhat superficial and not clearly thought-out ways.)
The back cover copy focuses the story on one of the viewpoint characters, a young man who works for a company that's something like OnStar, though covering one's entire life. He and the surveillance guy (who calls himself "Rob,"practically announcing it as an alias) have interesting stories, and could have used a bit more space. The young woman in the middle, unfortunately, gets squeezed out of the book by them, and never really develops -- she stays "the love interest" even in her own side of the story.
Again, this doesn't quite come together, but it's interesting. One can clearly gather than Kirn does not like the Patriot Act. (Does anyone in the literary world?) It might be worth reading for people interested in the ideas, but I'm not completely sure it's worth paying for -- especially when it's still available on Slate for free.
A Comparison
I was reading The New York Times Book Review this morning, and I came across this "Crime" column by Marilyn Stasio, in which she reviews four books.
And that got me thinking.
Now, this is completely unfair -- I admit that freely -- but Stasio has had two columns (the other was in the March 11th issue) since Dave Itzkoff's last "Across the Universe" column (also in the March 11th issue). And Stasio (each column half the length of that epic Itzkoff exploration into SETI) has managed to thoughtfully review 11 books in roughly the same space as Itzkoff took to review...well, none.
So, here's my question: is there any chance we can trade? I have no reason to believe Ms. Stasio knows anything about SF, but that doesn't seem to be a NYTBR requirement to begin with. And she certainly knows how to review books, which would be a nice change.
And that got me thinking.
Now, this is completely unfair -- I admit that freely -- but Stasio has had two columns (the other was in the March 11th issue) since Dave Itzkoff's last "Across the Universe" column (also in the March 11th issue). And Stasio (each column half the length of that epic Itzkoff exploration into SETI) has managed to thoughtfully review 11 books in roughly the same space as Itzkoff took to review...well, none.
So, here's my question: is there any chance we can trade? I have no reason to believe Ms. Stasio knows anything about SF, but that doesn't seem to be a NYTBR requirement to begin with. And she certainly knows how to review books, which would be a nice change.
Friday, April 06, 2007
A Meme I Will Make No Comment On
Andrew -- [adjective]: Sexually stunning 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com |
Overpraising
Sometimes you see a quote that makes you go "hm." Today, it's The Onion's A/V Club on Patrick Rothfuss's debut novel, The Name of the Wind:
But "quite simply the best fantasy novel of the past 10 years?" Better than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, than The Lies of Locke Lamora, than Anansi Boys, than The Years of Rice and Salt, than Perdido Street Station and The Scar, than The Wizard Knight, than "His Dark Materials," than Declare, than a dozen Terry Pratchett novels and nearly as many by Patricia A. McKillip, than Perfect Circle and Mockingbird, than Vellum, than the "Bartimaeus Trilogy?"
Really?
Some praise is just too over-the-top, and it sounds silly. This, I think, is one of those cases. But, still, read The Name of the Wind. It might not be the greatest novel ever written by the hand of man, but it's still awfully damn good. (I'm just hoping this doesn't turn into another one of those Strange Horizons vs. The Lies of Locke Lamora cases.)
Um. Now, I really like Rothfuss's book -- I read it in galleys, and bought it as a Main Selection for the SFBC, and wrote here that I thought it was "it's a major debut fantasy novel, and a joy to read." So it's not like I don't think this book is really really good or anything -- it is, and I want a lot of people to read it. Let me underline that: it's one of the best debut fantasy novels I've read, and one of the better fantasy books of this year.The Name of the Wind is quite simply the best fantasy novel of the past 10 years, although attaching a genre qualification threatens to damn it with faint praise. Say instead that The Name of the Wind is one of the best stories told in any medium in a decade..
But "quite simply the best fantasy novel of the past 10 years?" Better than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, than The Lies of Locke Lamora, than Anansi Boys, than The Years of Rice and Salt, than Perdido Street Station and The Scar, than The Wizard Knight, than "His Dark Materials," than Declare, than a dozen Terry Pratchett novels and nearly as many by Patricia A. McKillip, than Perfect Circle and Mockingbird, than Vellum, than the "Bartimaeus Trilogy?"
Really?
Some praise is just too over-the-top, and it sounds silly. This, I think, is one of those cases. But, still, read The Name of the Wind. It might not be the greatest novel ever written by the hand of man, but it's still awfully damn good. (I'm just hoping this doesn't turn into another one of those Strange Horizons vs. The Lies of Locke Lamora cases.)
If There's One Thing You Can Say About Mankind, There's Nothing Kind About Man
I saved this post from the Bookslut blog from yesterday, because I wanted to respond to it, but I was afraid I'd do the same thing I think Jessa Crispin is doing in that post: viscerally, and vehemently, reacting to something instead of thinking about it.
It's a day later, so maybe I can untangle it now.
Crispin is responding primarily to this Nerve article about a new novel, The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen. (Please note: this is a novel. Its main character has no name, but that does not mean that he is Kultgen, or that the novel is a record of real activities or anyone's actual thoughts. Fiction is not fact.) Her post really is a drive-by, so I feel guilty writing this long post in reaction to her, but I think hers will be a common reaction, particularly among educated, feminist women, so maybe I'm not really hunting a grape with an elephant gun.
I don't think Crispin has read The Average American Male. I'll admit I haven't, and I don't know if I particularly want to -- oh, sure, I do sometimes like books with a lot of sex in them, but Average sounds dull, tawdry, and repetitious, which aren't things I generally look for in a novel. So my reactions will be, as I assume Crispin's were, based on the review and what Kultgen says about it in the Nerve article. In other words, I'm no expert on Average...but neither was Crispin.
On the other hand, I am an American male, which Crispin isn't. And I think she's both conflating Kultgen with his character, and taking Kultgen's statements about men as evidence of his own personal feelings and desires. To put it more bluntly, she's forgetting that Average is a novel and assuming that Kultgen is untypical.
According to that article, and to Amazon, Average is a first-person "lad lit" novel about an unnamed young man in LA who likes to have a lot of sex but doesn't really understand women -- and, apparently, doesn't want to understand women. The plot seems pretty straightforward: a dude bounces between two girls, and eventually ends up with the "better" one (so this is a gender-swapped version of Bridget Jones's Diary, and of about a million romances). Oh, and this guy thinks about sex all the time, and dreams up pornographic scenarios involving just about every woman he sees. (Apparently -- and this would be the fictional part -- he also has sex with a lot of these random women.)
There seem to be two issues that some people...OK, mostly women.. have with this book: 1) that this guy thinks about sex all of the time, which is unrealistic, and 2) that his relationships with women are shallow.
To deal with #2 first: now, I haven't read the book, but it seems like that is the premise of the novel. Perhaps I'm missing something, but that's more of an observation than a criticism, like "Gosh, that Sun sure does give off a lot of light" or "Gee, this water certainly is wet."
On to #1. Crispin writes, about Kultgen (not the main character in his novel):
Crispin doesn't engage with Kultgen's thesis: that men think about sex all the time, and that has nothing to do with specific women, or their own childhoods, or anything external. It's how men are. Crispin assumes that this can't possibly be true without even pausing to consider it. But she's wrong; that is what men -- particularly young men -- are like.
Now, I can't speak for all men at all times, and I'm sure there are some men (old, dead, gay, or just sadly deficient) who don't think about women in sexual ways far too often, but...yeah, the snippets on Amazon and in the article seem reasonable to me.
The main character of Average may be a little extreme, perhaps somewhat exaggerated for effect, and he's clearly still in his 20s (men gain some ability to think about other things for whole minutes at a time somewhere between 30 and 35), but I have had streams of consciousness not unlike that, many times.
For example: while walking to work this morning, I saw an attractive woman yawning widely, and thought about blowjobs. (That's the highly sanitized version of my thought process, and I won't explain any further.) Men are nodding right now. Women perhaps are confused.
I suspect part of the problem is that a novel has to be written in words, and real stream of consciousness is largely non-verbal (at least mine is). A man doesn't think "I'd really like to fuck her. Wonder what she tastes like?" and so on; he imagines that he's already doing it, or fantasizes about how something would feel, or works through a sequence of events in his head. Putting that into words perhaps makes it seem worse than it actually is...or maybe women just think that it would be horrible, since they don't realize the other half of the population really does think like that a lot of the time.
So women, the answer is yes: men do think about sex, about having sex with random people (specifically "women they find attractive" in the case of most heterosexual men) all of the time. Men who find you attractive think about having sex with you. You'd probably be appalled if you knew some of the things they'd thought.
But then, wouldn't we all be appalled if we really knew what was in other people's heads?
(Side note: this is why some straight men are uneasy around gay men -- those guys think they know what the gay men are thinking, and they don't like it at all. Those kind of men are also usually the ones who think they're far more attractive then they actually are.)
Now that I've written all this crap, it feels horribly obvious. Don't women already know this? How can you live around men and not realize the way we think?
It's a day later, so maybe I can untangle it now.
Crispin is responding primarily to this Nerve article about a new novel, The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen. (Please note: this is a novel. Its main character has no name, but that does not mean that he is Kultgen, or that the novel is a record of real activities or anyone's actual thoughts. Fiction is not fact.) Her post really is a drive-by, so I feel guilty writing this long post in reaction to her, but I think hers will be a common reaction, particularly among educated, feminist women, so maybe I'm not really hunting a grape with an elephant gun.
I don't think Crispin has read The Average American Male. I'll admit I haven't, and I don't know if I particularly want to -- oh, sure, I do sometimes like books with a lot of sex in them, but Average sounds dull, tawdry, and repetitious, which aren't things I generally look for in a novel. So my reactions will be, as I assume Crispin's were, based on the review and what Kultgen says about it in the Nerve article. In other words, I'm no expert on Average...but neither was Crispin.
On the other hand, I am an American male, which Crispin isn't. And I think she's both conflating Kultgen with his character, and taking Kultgen's statements about men as evidence of his own personal feelings and desires. To put it more bluntly, she's forgetting that Average is a novel and assuming that Kultgen is untypical.
According to that article, and to Amazon, Average is a first-person "lad lit" novel about an unnamed young man in LA who likes to have a lot of sex but doesn't really understand women -- and, apparently, doesn't want to understand women. The plot seems pretty straightforward: a dude bounces between two girls, and eventually ends up with the "better" one (so this is a gender-swapped version of Bridget Jones's Diary, and of about a million romances). Oh, and this guy thinks about sex all the time, and dreams up pornographic scenarios involving just about every woman he sees. (Apparently -- and this would be the fictional part -- he also has sex with a lot of these random women.)
There seem to be two issues that some people...OK, mostly women.. have with this book: 1) that this guy thinks about sex all of the time, which is unrealistic, and 2) that his relationships with women are shallow.
To deal with #2 first: now, I haven't read the book, but it seems like that is the premise of the novel. Perhaps I'm missing something, but that's more of an observation than a criticism, like "Gosh, that Sun sure does give off a lot of light" or "Gee, this water certainly is wet."
On to #1. Crispin writes, about Kultgen (not the main character in his novel):
He's not all testosteroned out, beating his chest about his need for anal sex and blow jobs from multiple women a day. He's just scribbled on the wall and realized when mommy (or Oprah) gets home, she'll be disappointed in him. We should start a collection for his therapy bills now, get a head start.Again, she seems to have entirely conflated the nameless protagonist and the author. (I'll admit that Kultgen doesn't help: he's in puppyish-new-writer mode in the Nerve article, ready to talk about the book as if it were the pure expression of his real life. He'll get burned by the press soon enough, and learn to emphasize that he's writing novels, not sociology.)
Crispin doesn't engage with Kultgen's thesis: that men think about sex all the time, and that has nothing to do with specific women, or their own childhoods, or anything external. It's how men are. Crispin assumes that this can't possibly be true without even pausing to consider it. But she's wrong; that is what men -- particularly young men -- are like.
Now, I can't speak for all men at all times, and I'm sure there are some men (old, dead, gay, or just sadly deficient) who don't think about women in sexual ways far too often, but...yeah, the snippets on Amazon and in the article seem reasonable to me.
The main character of Average may be a little extreme, perhaps somewhat exaggerated for effect, and he's clearly still in his 20s (men gain some ability to think about other things for whole minutes at a time somewhere between 30 and 35), but I have had streams of consciousness not unlike that, many times.
For example: while walking to work this morning, I saw an attractive woman yawning widely, and thought about blowjobs. (That's the highly sanitized version of my thought process, and I won't explain any further.) Men are nodding right now. Women perhaps are confused.
I suspect part of the problem is that a novel has to be written in words, and real stream of consciousness is largely non-verbal (at least mine is). A man doesn't think "I'd really like to fuck her. Wonder what she tastes like?" and so on; he imagines that he's already doing it, or fantasizes about how something would feel, or works through a sequence of events in his head. Putting that into words perhaps makes it seem worse than it actually is...or maybe women just think that it would be horrible, since they don't realize the other half of the population really does think like that a lot of the time.
So women, the answer is yes: men do think about sex, about having sex with random people (specifically "women they find attractive" in the case of most heterosexual men) all of the time. Men who find you attractive think about having sex with you. You'd probably be appalled if you knew some of the things they'd thought.
But then, wouldn't we all be appalled if we really knew what was in other people's heads?
(Side note: this is why some straight men are uneasy around gay men -- those guys think they know what the gay men are thinking, and they don't like it at all. Those kind of men are also usually the ones who think they're far more attractive then they actually are.)
Now that I've written all this crap, it feels horribly obvious. Don't women already know this? How can you live around men and not realize the way we think?
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