Belated Clarke Award Nominees Post

Did I forget to do this last week? I think I did...

Well, the bickering has already begun, and, once you see the traditionally odd shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (which I sometimes think is designed to be given to the person least likely to know about it, care about it, or be willing to accept it), you'll understand why.

(Or at least part of why; the other part is that fandom is about bickering.)

Anyway, the nominees for this year do not include Ian McDonald's Brasyl (which, I suppose, means it's too much like regular science fiction), but does include:

• The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua - Snow Books
• The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter - Faber & Faber
• The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall - Faber & Faber
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall - Canongate
• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod - Orbit
• Black Man by Richard Morgan - Gollancz

The only one of those I've read is Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen), which did not overly impress me. I have Execution Channel on the stack, but haven't yet had a mood sunny enough that I needed that book to cut through it. From a quick glance at Amazon UK, the books I wasn't previously familiar with seem to be equally gloomy.

Is the UK determined to reclaim its mantle (from wherever Peter Watts is standing right now) as the home of the most depressive SF on earth, or is something else going on here?

Match It For Pratchett

I've been too depressed by the news to post anything previously, and there's been ample coverage everywhere, but, just in case...

Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's, then donated half a million pounds for research into that disease. Now there's an effort to raise an equivalent amount from Pratchett's fans.

So that's it.

To Meme and Meme Not (Yet)

I've got another meme queued up, probably for me to get to tonight when I have access to my iTunes statistics. (I love statistics, and any meme that allows me to play with them will find a home in Antick Musings.)

But I've just come across another one, which is seducing me with its combination of brazen comment-seeking and the potential to find ever more things to blather on about. So -- what the heck -- I'll do this one, too. I got it from Ben Jeapes:

“Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Repost in your own journal if you are so inclined.”

I promise to respond to (if not necessarily answer) any serious, or semi-serious, requests in this line. (It's early in the week, and I'm feeling energetic.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/15

There's a decent stack this week, so let me get right to it:

A World Too Near is the new novel by Kay Kenyon, and second in her series "The Entire and the Rose." I haven't read the first book in this series, Bright of the Sky; in fact, I've only read one Kay Kenyon novel at all. That was her 2000 novel Tropic of Creation, an intense, Cherryhesque story of cultural conflict and personal transformation on an arid third-rate world with secrets. So I know she can do some good stuff -- though, in my old life, I was mostly unsuccessful in getting people to try Tropic of Creation. I hope Pyr has more luck with this series; they published World on March 11th.

Next is In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, the second book in S.M. Stirling's current old-fashioned solar system series. We learned in the first book, The Sky People, that aliens had terraformed Mars and Venus hundreds of millions of years ago and populated them with Earth-derived life -- and then, in the mid-20th century, the Cold War and Space Race exploded onto two more worlds. Sky People (which I read, liked, and bought for my former job) was set on Venus; Crimson Kings brings us to Mars and what I think is a number of years later. Tor publishes it on Tuesday; it's probably in stock everywhere as I type this. And, for those who care about such things, Crimson Kings opens at the 1962 WorldCon...

I may have mentioned Dark Wraith of Shannara before, but I've now seen a finished copy -- it's a new graphic novel in the bestselling series by Terry Brooks, and credited as "written by Terry Brooks, with illustrations by Edwin David, adapted by Robert Place Napton." (From which I infer -- rightly or wrongly -- that Brooks wrote it as a prose piece, Napton broke it down into pages and panels, and David drew it.) It's an interesting cross-pollination of fantasy and comics, and I'm intrigued to see how well it works. Del Rey publishes it on March 25th.

Flight Explorer, Volume One is something else entirely; a collection of short all-ages comics stories from the creators of the Flight series of anthologies. It's being published by Villard on March 25th.

One of the favorite writers of my youth was Robert Asprin -- I loved the "Thieves' World" series, which he co-conceived and edited, and re-read his novel The Bug Wars more times than I could say. (My younger brother was a huge fan of Asprin's "Myth Adventures" series, which I enjoyed but wasn't as obsessed with.) He dropped off the map for a while, and has been coming back gradually over the past few years. Now Ace is launching a whole new Asprin series with Dragons Wild, the story of a professional gambler who learns that he's a dragon. This is the first book on which Asprin is the sole credited author since about 1993, which may mean that his troubles have ended. (And I can't be too much more definite than "troubles" -- I've heard explanations involving either writer's block or the IRS, and some mixing both with other elements -- since I don't know why he's hasn't written anything solo for ten years or more.) Whatever it was, it's good to see Asprin back again. Dragons Wild is an Ace trade paperback, publishing April 1st.

Adam Stemple's second solo novel is Steward of Song, which I'm somewhat sorry to see is a sequel to his first solo novel, Singer of Souls. Singer was a closely-observed novel about a young junkie musician who had contact with Faerie. It also had a strong, striking, untypical ending that I fear any sequel would unpick -- it's hard to see how any sequel could continue the path Singer followed at the end. I may have to read this one just to see what Stemple did with it. Steward of Song was published March 4th in hardcover by the inescapable Tor.

The trade paperback edition of Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 is being published by Villard on March 25th. (The original hardcover was from Archaia Studios, who also published the individual issues; I read it in the hardcover.) When "small-press" comics companies can sell paperback rights to their projects to Random House imprints and get national bookstore distribution along the way, the stranglehold of the Diamond/comic shop/superhero/Big Two nexus on the neck of the comics medium may finally be loosening. And thank god for that.

The oddest thing I've seen recently is Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim. It was written by Tom Corwin and illustrated by Craig Frazier, and will be published by Flying Dolphin Press (an obscure-to-me imprint of Doubleday) on June 24th as a small gift-size hardcover. Corwin is a musician, and his hero Fooster is "your average fellow...he takes us into a rich and vivid world unlike any we've seen before." (And that means quite a bit to me, since I've seen a lot of quite different worlds in books before.) I'm not sure what it all means, but this is short, so I'm pretty sure I'll read it and report back.

And last for this week is the new novel from Allen Steele, Galaxy Blues. It's set in the same universe as most of his recent work (Spindrift and the various "Coyote" stories), but focuses on a new character in his journeys deeper and deeper into the galaxy. It's a hardcover from Ace, coming the first of April.

Lighting Up the World of Manga

My "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix this week featured a review of the first two volumes of Keiko Tobe's series With the Light, about a mother raising an autistic son.

Movie Log: Dan in Real Life

I enjoyed Dan in Real Life a lot while I was watching it, but, afterward, I'm not sure if the ending quite worked. (It was definitely emotionally successful, but, on a story level and as a piece of drama, there are some problems.)

It's a romantic comedy with a better-than average reason for keeping the yearning lovers apart: Dan (Steve Carell) is a widower with three growing daughters who is attending a reunion of his extended family in the ridiculously large and well-placed ancestral home of his clan, on the shore somewhere in Rhode Island. On the first morning, he heads into town (because his smothering insistence of keeping them infantilized has alienated all three of his daughters), and meets Marie (Juliet Binoche) in a bookstore. They have coffee, they hit it off, but she mentions that she's just started a relationship, and has to drive away.

About an hour later, Dan sees Marie again -- she's the new girlfriend of his younger brother Mitch (Dane Cook). The more Dan sees her, the more he's smitten. But she's also really great for Mitch -- his previous girlfriends have all been shallow, and Marie is a real adult. (Also, in a telling moment, Mitch has been calling her "Annie" -- her full name is "Anne-Marie," and he met her in a situation with a bunch of other women with names starting with M -- but he switches to calling her "Marie" after he realizes she prefers it. She's clearly important to him.) The question Dan in Real Life could have asked, if it had been more fearless, is "who needs Marie more?" [1] It doesn't go that way, since it's a Steve Carrell vehicle -- and that means we know he's going to win Marie in the end. The movie backs off a bit on Mitch's relationship with Marie, at just the time when it should be showing them becoming more connected (or failing to connect, if the filmmakers wanted to make an easy out).

So there's about two more days of Dan trying to avoid Marie, or trying to want to avoid Marie, or just trying to find something, anything, to do with his time that isn't hugely social and organized. (This is a very rough-and-tumble, organized-games-every-minute-of-the-day family.) Since the movie is so tightly focused on Dan, the audience feels for him, but it's not clear for a long time how much Marie reciprocates his feelings.

Dan in Real Life has occasional aspirations to be more than just a romantic comedy; it clearly wants to be a movie about family as well. (And ambition, in this case, is no bad thing.) It started with some quick scenes of Dan interacting with his daughters, and swiftly established him as controlling, stubborn, entirely reliant on the "because I said so" method of parenting, and completely unwilling to comprehend that his girls have grown up in the four years since their mother died. (One of the things Dan in Real Life does well is to make that point subtly, without needing any character to yell it at Dan as an attack.) He won't let his oldest daughter practice driving the car, even though she has a license. He goes ballistic at the thought of his middle daughter having any kind of contact with what must be the sweetest, most harmless boy in modern cinema. And even his littlest girl gets a huge dose of condescension on the drive north; he can't believe that she can think for herself.

Is it any wonder that these girls can't stand him? He's a deeply loving father, but he's turning into a very bad father as his girls turn into women. The rest of his family realizes this -- and clearly wants to help him get back on an even keel -- but they don't realize the source of his main tension on this particular weekend. (I get the feeling that Dan is a grumpy loner much of the time, so avoiding people and disrupting the family games is nothing new for him.)

Dan in Real Life wants to contrast Dan's job -- he's a newspaper advice columnist, on the verge of getting nationally syndicated, and several characters remark, apparently honestly, on how wonderful he is at it -- with his shown failures in his personal life. Unfortunately, we don't get a good sense of him as an giver of advice -- this is a movie that could have started earlier, added a reel or two, and even had occasional voiceovers taken from Dan's columns. The audience needs to see and believe that he's good at what he does to really understand how that doesn't follow through to his own life at all. As it is, we're told that he's good at what he does, but we don't see it -- and so, since we can see how rotten he is in day-to-day life, we end up assuming that he's either a complete hypocrite or that his column is really pretty lousy.

Dan in Real Life succeeds as a romantic comedy -- the audience feels for Dan, and comes to think Marie is wonderful and a great match for him -- but it shows hints that it aimed higher than that. Those other elements are dropped, or quickly papered over, to get to the conventional happy ending. But there's a more interesting movie -- one probably at least half an hour longer -- lurking in Dan in Real Life, and I would have like to have seen that one. The actors could have sustained that movie; it's just the script (or, possibly, the editing) that let them down.

[1] Or possibly who deserves her more, or even, to be really radical, who she wants more.

Lunacon Ho!

I'm shutting down the computer in preparation for heading to Lunacon (where I'll have to talk about blogging at 4 this afternoon). I don't know if the Escher Hilton has free Wi-Fi -- if they don't, I'll probably be silent until sometime late on Sunday.

See some of you there, and the rest of you can be spared my voice for a short while...

Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? by Mitchell Symons

This book worked. No matter what else I might say about it, that's first -- it's got a great title, and an eye-catching cover, and that got me to plop down my money for it.

I could claim that I got this book because I knew Symons from his This Book... series of trivia collections -- and that's not actually untrue -- but I think both you and I know that it was primarily prurient interest that led me to pick this up off of the shelf. It looked thrillingly naughty, and it ensnared me.

Unfortunately, it's only mildly naughty (or thrilling, for that matter); Symons is at pains to remind the reader, over and over again, that he's a boring middle-aged married guy who doesn't know anything about any of these questions personally. (And he only seems to have two or three friends he can ask, despite his claims to have a wide and deep knowledge-base to draw from.) There's something quintessentially English about his stance -- he may be writing a book about sex, but, by Jingo!, he's no expert in the subject!

Books on esoteric topics -- and particularly those related to sex -- can easily fall into one of two categories: the expert who knows all the squishy bits about the subject but is a clumsy writer, and the pro writer who loudly makes it clear that this is all (forgive the pun) virgin territory to him. Symons doesn't play the faux-naif quite as strongly as Ayn Carillo-Gailey did in Porn*ol*o*gy, but he does protest far too much. (He signed a contract to write a book all about sex, called up all of his friends to ask them questions about sex, and then claims he isn't all that interested in sex? Pull the other one, Mitchell; it's got bells on it.)

Nudists is a series of questions and answers -- and fairly superficial ones, at that -- about sex and sexuality. A few examples:

• "What's So Big (and Clever) About Bigamy?"
• "Do Gays Talk Like Gays Because They're Gays or Do They Become Gays Because They Talk Like Gays?"
• "Can You Get Pregnant If You Have Sex Standing Up?"
• "What Do They Call a Brazillian Bikini Wax in Brazil?"
• "Has Any Man Ever Gone to a Prostitute and Found Someone He Knew?"

As you can see, they're fairly low-level sex questions, and there's a very British emphasis on propriety and embarrassment. Symons doesn't do a whole lot of research on any of these topics, and gets to the bottom of only about half of them. (The others lead him to throw up his hands, make a vague conclusion, and move on to the next thing.) I would strongly recommend not using this book as any kind of serious reference, but it is a quick, amusing read for those who are fascinated with the subject (like me and Symons).

Quote of the Week

"[In] American comics, the super-hero genre has largely degenerated into fan fiction."

- Noah Berlatsky

Matter by Iain M. Banks

We'll start off with a quick quiz today; one question, with no right or wrong answer.

Q: Does this sound like a "space opera" to you?

In a roughly medieval (but modernizing) society with more developed neighbors, a smart, well-liked, and forward-thinking king has died on the battlefield. The official story is that he died of his wounds after fighting valiantly, but two men witnessed the king's closest advisor kill him with his own hands, and then monologue about how evil he (the advisor) is and how he will take control of the kingdom. One of those two witnesses is the king's eldest surviving son, who flees with a trusted servant to a neighboring country. He's trying to find his sister, who was sent to a more advanced society and is now working with their government. Meanwhile, the youngest prince -- the figurehead for the advisor's regency -- is coming to realize that he is in mortal danger.

OK, pencils down. Space opera or not?

Would you change your answers if I told you that there's really nothing metaphorical in that description? It's a realio-trulio feudal kingdom, with nobles and pageantry and swords and all that, and the True Heir heads off (into space, I'll admit, but not at high speed nor with anyone armed with more than swords chasing him) to find someone to help him depose his father's murderer. There are mile-wide starships -- this is a Banks novel, after all -- but a dismaying lack of coruscating beams of force, or of any conflict not involving either the aforementioned swords or very high-level diplomacy. All in all, Matter has a disconcerting lack of exploding Orbitals, high-speed chases, and games for the fate of empires.

There is an important Ancient Enigmatic Alien Artifact, but the AEAA doesn't show up until quite late in the proceedings. And, actually, the plot I outlined above is completely abandoned once the AEAA appears; its conflicts and issues quickly solved or shoved aside.

Don't get me wrong: Matter is a fine science fiction novel, with well-defined characters, a compelling storyline, and excellent writing. But if it's "space opera" based on the last fifty pages (which take place entirely within a planet, and in which the major death-ray-style combat is kept off-page), then there's hardly any SF novel every written that isn't "space opera." Matter is just SF, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If you're still trying to decide whether to read Matter, some possible tie-breakers:

• it's mostly set within a "Shellworld," comprised of over a dozen concentric shells, each of which is individually habitable (and most are inhabited)
• there are no major Mind characters, though a drone-turned-knife-missile does play a supporting role
• and it has a typically Banksian cheerful and upbeat ending.

I liked Matter, but it also took me more than a week to read; it's overlong and just meanders along for most of its length. (Much like Banks's last SF novel, The Algebraist, in fact. Matter's ending, though, is less abrupt than The Algebraist's.) Those with smaller to-be-read piles than I do won't mind this as much, of course. But with that plot and that cover, I doubt Matter will be the long-hoped-for breakout book by Banks in the US market; it's for those of us who already know and enjoy his writing.

All That Glisters

Today at ComicMix I reviewed the first three volumes of Andi Watson's swell new all-ages series, Glister.

And that's that.

Free Books!

Everyone else has already linked to these announcements, but I may have some readers as curmudgeonly and reclusive as myself, so...

1) Jeff VanderMeer's book The Situation was made available as a free download via Wired -- and can also be found in an infinitely snazzier collection of paper, boards, and glue from PS Publishing.

2) Night Shade Books has put up Richard Kadrey's novel Butcher Bird, also completely for free. (It's on this page, with a couple of other free things.) Butcher Bird is also published using the more traditional "you pay money and get a handsome trade paperback" methodology.

3) The mad geniuses at Tor Books have been giving away e-books for a couple of weeks now, as part of a plot (revealed recently) to get fans to sign up for what promises to be a really snazzy new homepage/community/blog/what-have-you.

So go read something, won't you?

The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick

When The Dragons of Babel arrived on my doorstep, I said that I was sure that it would be one of the best fantasy novels of 2007. But I'll have to back off that claim slightly, now that I've read it. The Dragons of Babel is a fine fantasy book, and quite possibly one of the best of the year, but it's clearly a fix-up rather than a novel -- the preexisting stories have been run together and disguised by being arranged into many chapters, but Dragons makes, at best, a very picaresque and episodic novel.

The episodes are generally excellent -- both "King Dragon" and "Lord Weary's Empire" are fabulous novellas, and they each have just as much power as two-and-a-half chapters in the middle of Babel as they did when they stood alone -- but they clearly are episodes, and the plot bounces from one discrete adventure to another without a strong central plot.

Will is a young guy -- I can't say "man," since he's half-human and half-fay -- in a bucolic village somewhere in the hinterlands of Faerie. But his simple life ends when the ongoing war between two distant powers leads to a war-dragon (essentially a living fighter plane) crash-landing in his town's central square. The dragon is half-dead and immobile, but still powerful and malicious enough to take over the town. And when the dragon discovers that it needs a strong lieutenant to enforce its rule, Will's half-blood immunity to cold iron makes him a natural for the job.

Will eventually gets away from the dragon's control -- doing his village a good turn along the way -- but he has to leave town permanently, and a piece of the dragon's consciousness and power is permanently resident in him. On his way to the city of Babel and the destiny he doesn't know he has (and wouldn't particularly have wanted), he finds himself in a refugee camp, with a band of squatters deep beneath the city of Babel, learning the trade of a mildly corrupt city government official high in the spires of Babel, and making a dishonest living as a con man.

Each episode is well-told and compelling, but they are each separate episodes, not stages in a single plotline. Readers who demand a single continuous narrative might be disappointed with The Dragons of Babel, but, then again, so would those who demand that every book have a conventional romance plot. Life is full of disappointments for the inflexible. For the rest of us, here's The Dragons of Babel, a great work of modern fantasy from one of the treasures of American letters.

Context Is For the Weak

"Yet another social problem easily solved through the judicious application of anal sex."
- Nick Mamatas

Utterly Unsurprising

It was time for another meme (this one via Gwenda Bond), and I learned what I already knew:

Your Score: Eeyore

You scored 15 Ego, 17 Anxiety, and 10 Agency!

"Do you know what A means, little Piglet?"

"No, Eeyore, I don't."

"It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That's what A means."

"Oh," said Piglet again. "I mean, does it?" he explained quickly.

"I'm telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, 'It's only Eeyore, so it doesn't count.' They walk to and fro saying 'Ha ha!' But do they know anything about A? They don't. It's just three sticks to them. But to the Educated--mark this, little Piglet--to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it's a great and glorious A.

You scored as Eeyore!

ABOUT EEYORE: Eeyore lives in his own thistley corner of the forest and wonders why people don't come to visit him more often. He is master of the Guilt Trip, and is always gently forgiving his visitors for neglecting him. Eeyore considers himself to be smarter than the other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood, and is often exasperated by their habit of having adventures and general merriment.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are an anxious person, and you tend to expect the worst. Your friends find you somewhat cynical at times, because you have found that it is best to expect disappointment. You often feel unappreciated by the people you work with, but you rarely actually try and do anything to change that fact.

Your close friends admire you more than you think they do. They wish that you would learn to stop worrying so much and actually start trying to fix what is bothering you. If something is making you unhappy... change it!

Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test