Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/5

It's been another light week at the Hornswoggler compound. If this keeps up, I'll have to go back to writing about the books I get from the library -- and, trust me, nobody wants that. Time to bug some publicists, I guess...

First this week is Psycho Busters: The Novel, Book One. It was written by Yuya Aoki, who is credited as "creator of Get Backers," but who also wrote the manga derived from this novel. Actually, the press release says that this is a "light novel," which means that it's not all that long (169 pages) and has manga-style illustrations (in this case, by Rando Ayamine). I imagine the story isn't terribly different from the first volume of the manga, which I reviewed for ComicMix. Psycho Busters: The Novel is being published by Del Rey as a small trade paperback on April 8th, which means it's probably in most stores already -- or maybe still on the truck on the way to those stores.

Then there's Fantasy Classics, fifteenth in the series of Graphic Classics published by Eureka Productions and edited by Tom Pomplun. I really like the idea of these books -- classic works of literature (usually popular ones -- Mark Twain rather than Henry James) adapted into comics by a wide variety of creators -- even if I find the results a bit wordy sometimes. This volume is anchored by a 47-page adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, plus works by Lovecraft, Hawthorne, Dunsany, and Baum. Fantasy Classics was published in March 2008.

Little Vampire is an omnibus of three stories by Joann Sfar, the first two of which were published individually in English a year or two ago. It contains "Little Vampire Goes to School," "Little Vampire Does Kung Fu," and "Little Vampire and the Canine Defenders Club." First Second will publish it in May of 2008. I think it's officially for kids -- as many of First Second's books are -- but I'm looking forward to reading it myself.

And last this week is a book by Andy Mangels to tie into an upcoming movie: Iron Man: Beneath the Armor. It's a guide to all things Iron Mannish, with a history of the character in great detail (a random poke through it got me to a page about Mike Grell's work on Iron Man in 2003), extensive dossiers of characters from the comics, and, inevitably, a gallery of all of the different armors Tony Stark (and others) have worn over the years. I did mention this once when I saw a bound manuscript, but now I know that Del Rey is publishing it April 8th, so I can mention it again.

The Ol' Battleship

When you have kids, you find yourself doing things you never would have expected.

Case in point: I spent last night in a bunk on the decommissioned Battleship New Jersey (BB-62) last night, in the company of my two sons, much of their Cub Scout pack, and a couple hundred other scouts.

So I'm a bit groggy and out-of-sorts today, since there wasn't all that much "sleeping" going on. (Lights-out at 23:15, scattered giggling and fart noises for half an hour afterward, reveille at 06:00 -- and I don't sleep well in a three foot by six-and-a-half foot by three foot box to begin with.)

I've said to The Wife at least six times that, if this had been a day trip, I would have loved it -- we got a great two-and-a-half hour tour of the ship with an ex-Air Force mechanic docent (thanks, Arlene!), and many parts of the experience were wonderful.

The sleeping arrangements, however, were the exception. (The food wasn't wonderful, either, but who would have expected it to be?)

Anyone expecting coherent thought from me before I get a real night's sleep will be disappointed.


Footnote: This post originally was scheduled to open with a reference to the fact that the two berths above me were filled by the daughters -- twelve or so years old each -- of some guy in our group, but I couldn't manage to make a "I'm so tired because I spent the night under two pubescent girls" joke that was sufficiently funny or shocking to work. But, honestly, who brings two daughters of that age to such an incredibly boyish stag party as a Cub Scout camp-out on a battleship?

It's a Novel, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Since Certain Persons seem to expect this blog to immediately jump on any appearances of the fiend David Itzkoff in a well-known broadsheet published from West 40th Street -- and I am loathe to disappoint anyone -- the following bit is dedicated to you, my dear readers:

Itzkoff reviewed a novel in this week's New York Times Book Review, yclept Blood Kin by Cerwidden Dovey. Don't bother looking it up at Locus; it's not SF or Fantasy. It does seem to have some pomo qualities -- unspecified location, unnamed narrators, written as a "master's thesis in creative writing" -- for those seeking such things.

I haven't read it, or even heard of it before today, so I can't speak to Itzkoff's critical judgment. And only a weaker man than I would note that he wrote 800 words, and got paid for them, for reading a 183-page novel by an unknown. I will also not be so bold as to suggest that he is, once again, shirking his primary job of reviewing SF for The Times.

No, no. Perish the thought.

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, edited by Ben Karlin

The trickiest part of any anthology is the one readers most often forget about: picking the contributors in the first place. Of course, it's rare that everyone you invite has the time and inspiration -- ask me about the writers who kept saying "I'd love to, but..." to the original anthologies at my old job someday -- but that initial list molds the project, and determines much of its direction.

I'm going to bet, using my secret Publishing Knowledge, that Things I've Learned From Women Who Dumped Me was a completely closed project -- that everyone in it was invited by editor Ben Karlin, or someone he dealt with at Grand Central Publishing, or suchlike. (Nonfiction anthos are massively less likely to have an "open reading" period than grubby genre fiction to begin with, for one thing.)

And that initial list settled it. This kind of book could have gone in many different ways -- twenty years ago, it probably would have been made up entirely of young novelists, and thirty years ago it probably would have been heavily illustrated by B. Kliban. But the 2008 Things I've Learned From Women Who Dumped Me -- the one that actually exists in our own time and space -- is made up almost entirely of essays from TV writers and ex-Onion hands.

Thus, the emphasis is on quick, facile "lessons," and Things I've Learned is a quick read, but not one that will last long in memory. It's humorous rather than really funny, and only a few of the pieces are more than "eh."

Now, I've read at least two reviews of this book that said exactly that -- in fancier words, sure, and all gussied up in some for-pay publication, but essentially the same thing -- and I still picked the damn thing up myself. It's got a great title, a neat cover, and it looks like it will be a lot of fun. So you may well find yourself reading it as well, like I did. And, if so, you'll then have your chance to write a review like this.

Manga Friday Has a Slight Flaw

(But in not in its character.)

My "Manga Friday" feature at ComicMix this week reviews the first volume of a new* series by Osamu Tezuka, Dororo.

*Well, new on this side of the Pacific, at least.

Another Comment Turned Into a Post

Every so often, I get carried away and write long comments somewhere else, and then feel like I should have something tangible for all that typing. So I copy-and-paste them here.

Today, it's a comment on this Booksquare post, about Bob Miller's new imprint at HarperCollins (for which he left his job as president of Hyperion very abruptly, which nosy Andrew Wheeler wonders might be a more interesting story). The Booksquare blogger, Kassia Krozser, is much more thrilled by "new concepts," "new media," and other buzzwords beginning with "new" than I am...or maybe I'm just an old cynic. She thinks this is something unique and special and wonderful, and I...well, this is what I said:

Let's take those "key points" in order...

#1 -- Not new at all; Miller is re-using the concept of the Perseus imprint Vanguard Books (ably run by a very savvy publisher, Roger Cooper). It's a plausible concept, but let's not pretend it sprung full-formed from the head of Bob Miller.

As you note, the devil will be in the details; Hollywood has spent the last century poisoning the well in this area. It remains to be seen how many writers to be willing to wait for "profits."

#2 -- There have been plenty of "no returns" schemes over the years; some work and some don't. The ones that don't work founder on the shoals of "we need to get lots of copies of this really great book into stores," at which point the stores rightly point out that they won't shoulder all of the risk.

#3 -- From inside the business, this looks an awful lot like "we're only going to publish small, marginal books." Miller will have to fight to change that perception, particularly by spending money on other kinds of promotions.

Paying for placement is ubiquitous in retailing; it's not something special to bookselling. The supermarket world is much more rapacious, as well -- it's fairly common for every planogram slot to be bought and paid for.

Also, this may have been the biggest publishing news of the day, but it's still well below Borders for the year so far...and the year is still early. Comparing it to Gutenberg is silly -- this isn't even in the same class as the Kindle.

The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson

Lloyd is the co-author of The Book of Liff (with the late Douglas Adams; it was a collection of humorous definitions for place-names) and a well-known UK television producer (Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, QI, and so on). Mitchinson is apparently his colleague on QI.

This is yet another book of odd facts and little-known information, organized in the time-honored "you thought X, but the real truth is Y!" format. As you can see from the bookshot to the left, the subtitle is "Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong." (Many of us recognize the thought: in its pithier form, "Everything You Know Is Wrong!" has been the tag-line for a thousand comic book issues and TV episodes over the past several decades.)

The point of reading a book like this is to learn new things, but the only way to evaluate these books is by checking the facts you already know. So a book that tells you entirely things you didn't know before could be absolutely amazing...or utter crap. And a book can be completely accurate, and still useless, if it only tells you the things you already know. General Ignorance only had a few facts that I already knew, thus allowing me to test it, and I don't recall anything in it that I knew was false. So, by that completely personal and idiosyncratic measure, this is a very good collection of little-known facts. But your mileage may vary.

Quote of the Week

"Canadian Courts have, so far, not ruled on how the intrinsic characteristics of magical items demonstrate who holds what property in them."
- Omar Ha-Redeye and Jacob Kaufman, Lord of the Rings as Property Law

Greasy Kids's Stuff

My review at ComicMix today is a round-up of four graphic novels for kids: Flight Explorer, Volume One, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart, Kaput and Zosky, and Classics Illustrated #1: Great Expectations.

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Singularity, schmingularity, says the rich, happy society of Walter Jon Williams's very entertaining eighteenth novel. They turned aside from ever-increasing AI power over a thousand years ago, and it's worked out very well for them.

The eleven semi-autonomous AIs they did allow run on individual matrioshka arrays in close solar orbit, providing enough energy and computing power to stabilize wormholes into the forty-eight pocket universes -- most of them Dyson spheres with a small internal sun -- in which much of the human race now lives. (Other groups headed out to the stars hundreds of years ago, but, since physics is taken seriously in this book, they don't impinge directly on the action.)

It's a plausible human society, it's rich and varied without being the moneyless utopia of Iain M. Banks's Culture, and, all in all, it's a place I would be more than happy to live. But, you ask, is there any room for adventure? Of course there is...

We begin with a man named Aristide, walking across a desert landscape on a low-tech world called Midgarth. It was created by an odd alliance of fantasy gamers and medieval reenactors, and is crammed full of orcs, bandits, flashing swords, and loot. (And everyone who dies comes back in a central location -- only having lost his experiences since his last back-up -- after a waiting period.) Aristide is a scholar of the implied spaces, he says: he studies the things that come up inadvertently in the space next to or behind the carefully designed thing. In Midgarth, he's interested in the desert between the cavern-filled mountains and the rich coastal plain -- and in what societies have sprung up.

OK, OK, that's the boring stuff. What you really want to know is that he also wields a sword named Tecmessa that banishes his enemies forever and is accompanied by the talking cat Bitsy, the avatar of the first of the AIs, Endora. Aristide himself is also much older, with much more history, than he first appears. And he soon runs into something unexpected, which will send him back out into the original universe to consult with an old flame and to learn that things are very seriously wrong with at least one of the AIs.

From an opening that reads like epic fantasy through a threat to the human race reminiscent of mid-90s John Barnes, Walter Jon Williams is back with a SF novel as full of adventure and ideas as his Aristoi or Metropolitan. Implied Spaces is a great new novel from one of the best SF writers out there today -- go and read it already!

A Double Shot of ComicMix

I thought I'd have posts four days in a row on ComicMix, but it ended up being two today (and the rest of the week is still to come) --

• a review of Tim Sievert's debut graphic novel, That Salty Air
• and a review of Cyril Pedrosa's amazing Three Shadows.

Look for more by me there later in the week, Ghu willing and the creek don't rise.

Learning a New Term

First, the quote, from this month's Ansible:

Publishers and Sinners. A Games Workshop mole reports sweeping cuts in their publishing arm after a poor Christmas for games sales. Marc Gascoigne, founder of the imprints Solaris (sf/fantasy) and Black Library (game ties), is now on 'gardening leave' with redundancy expected to follow. BL seems safe but the future of Solaris is less certain.

(Credit Where It's Due: I saw the quote first when Rose Fox quoted it.)

I'd never heard of "gardening leave" before, so I had to Google it to see if it was a widely known term -- and it seems that it is. The wikipedia definition sounds a bit more final than Ansible's bit -- "expected to follow" implies that the termination hasn't happened yet, and that there's a chance that it might not happen -- but that may just be Dave Langford being hopeful. (I'd rather be hopeful myself; Marc's a good guy and smart about books, so I'd rather believe he has a chance until it's definitively proved otherwise.)

I do have two points to mull on.

First, it's so damn typical of modern conglomerates to make "sweeping cuts in their publishing arm after a poor Christmas for games sales." (Emphasis mine.) And they never seem to see what idiots they're being when they lay off Peter because Paul had a rotten year.

Second, something very much like "gardening leave" is common in the US, though it tends to happen in cases of layoffs -- not when an individual employee goes to a competitor or is fired for cause. From the references I googled up, it looks like this kind of leave is very common in the UK after all kinds of separations. On this side of the pond, though, it seems to be more a case of common practice than of employment contracts -- since those contracts are pretty rare over here.

Movie Log: Girl From Rio

Girl From Rio is the kind of movie that can give you whiplash, as it bounces from seriousness to farce without any transition. It can also give you brain cramps, if you think seriously about the plot as it's going on. Luckily, it has Vanessa Nunes as the title character, and, once she appears on screen, one can at least look at her and forget everything else.

(Is that sexist? My apologies...but my wife completely agrees with me, for what that's worth.)

Raymond (Hugh Laurie) is a clerk at a London bank who loves to samba, but the rest of his life isn't working out too well -- he learns that he's not getting a promotion just before Christmas, his wife barely tolerates him, and even the rain seems to fall heavier on his head than on anyone else's. (His wife is also -- in a fine example of how Girl From Rio never does anything by half, even when it would have been a good idea -- having an affair with Raymond's boss, and is in fact jetting off for the Christmas holidays in the Canary Islands with said boss.)

So, Raymond's had all he could take. What does he do? He steals as much money as will fit in two large black garbage bags, as he locks up the bank for the holidays, and jets off to Rio to try to meet a famous samba dancer (Orlinda, played by the very fetching Nunes in a fascinating sequence of exceptionally short, tight skirts).

And there things begin to get odd. Raymond hails a cab at the airport, and gets Paulo (Santiago Segura) for a cabbie. Segura doesn't quite mug to the camera, but he clearly thinks he's in a broad comedy. Paulo is also somehow beholden to some kind of local crimelord, played by Nelson Xavier -- I think, since I never caught that guy's name. (Since he was dubbed in a high, nasal voice, like a minor Looney Tunes character, I took to calling him "Marvin the Crimelord.") On the way to the hotel, Marvin's goons hijack Paulo, kick out Raymond in a road tunnel, and take back Paulo's nice taxi. Why? It's not clear. Raymond walks out of the tunnel by himself, and is met by Paulo in an older, crappier taxi, and the movie continues as if that didn't really happen.

Paulo sets up Raymond in a fancy sea-side hotel, takes him shopping, and so on. Raymond declares he wants only to find the fair Orlinda, and Paulo acts weird and shifty. (More than usual, I mean.) There may have been a scene that explained this shiftiness -- I kept expecting to find out Orlinda was his sister, or something -- but, if so, it was left on the cutting room floor.

Anyway, Paulo introduces Raymond to Orlinda.

I have to pause here for a second to say that Orlinda talks a lot (when she isn't dancing), and that her accent, while beautiful and charming, is just enough so that half of what she says isn't quite comprehensible. So maybe she was explaining the plot of the back half of the movie -- but I doubt it.

Back to Raymond and Orlinda: they dance, they go back to his hotel, nudge nudge wink wink. In the morning, Raymond wakes to find Orlinda has stolen absolutely everything he owns. (Down to his dirty clothes, apparently -- another thing that made very little sense.) Raymond finds Paulo and sets out to 1) get the "them" who robbed him and 2) save Orlinda from "their" grasp. (He really is quite remarkably stupid when the plot requires it.)

Meanwhile, Orlinda goes on a shopping spree, until Marvin the Crimelord finds her and takes all her money.

Um.

Let me expostulate upon Marvin briefly. We don't see him running whores, or taking bets, or selling drugs. We don't see any sign that he provides protection, or has politicians in his pocket, or controls local businesses. He's just a guy with a funny voice (and a Chihuahua on his lap) who drives around in big cars with a couple of thugs. I'm calling him a crimelord, since the movie seems to view him that way, but all he ever does is grab large sums of money from locals. Perhaps that is a lucrative criminal niche in Rio?

(I'm not even going to get into what he does with the money, which makes far less sense than anything so far.)

Things go on from there, getting even less likely, if that's possible. I'm afraid that Girl From Rio, which started off solidly (if in a very cliched way) in London, turns into a big mess in Rio. It does have the requisite happy ending, but it takes quite a while, and goes through some very odd turnings, to get to that ending. I can't really recommend Girl From Rio; I got it because I like British comedies, and I like Laurie (particularly when he walks straight and has his proper accent), but it really doesn't work.

On the other hand: Vanessa Nunes. Yum.

April's Fools

I may add to this, as the day goes on and I discover more amusement out there, but, to start the morning, here are some links to unbelievable stories of the day:

• Locus reports on a new Heinlein novel, multiple Moorcocks, Top Writer, and more
• Shelf Awareness has Book Sense buying Borders, Rowling demanding control of the words "Harry" and "Potter," and more
• Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen has the news on two exciting books: Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings and a novelization of the movie Suburban Commando
• SF Scope teases us about a Good Morning, America appearance today by Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein
• Google is teaming up with Virgin to colonize Mars
• Ann & Jeff VanderMeer to edit yet another theme anthology: Squidpunk!
• The BBC reports that President Bush and ex-Prime Minister Blair have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
• Jay Lake goes corporate
• Cheryl Morgan adopts a post-human AI
• ComicMix to publish Superman stories
• All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder takes over Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin
• R. Stevens hand-drew the web Diesel Sweeties strip today
• George R.R. Martin crosses over with himself
• From Writer Beware: PublishAmerica buys Disney!
• Jed Hartman rounds up some great new Google features, including searching tomorrow's web

Read in March

Yes, we're all another month older and closer to death. But let's not dwell on that...let's obsess about books instead!

Here's what obsessed me this past month:
Michael Maslin, The More the Merrier (3/1)
A mid-80s collection by a New Yorker cartoonist, which I grabbed and read because it was on the shelf at my local library. (Decent libraries all have the same list of central, important books, but they also each have their own idiosyncratic other stuff in and around those books, like this -- why would they have this collection, by this artist?) It's all very New Yorker-y, with lots of couples in living rooms and talking about the relationship (sometimes both at the same time). But much of it was amusing, and Maslin has, or had, a loose, energetic style that contrasted well with the buttoned-up subject matter.

• Grant Morrison & various artists, Doom Patrol, Vol. 6: Planet Love (3/2)
• Dall-Young Lim & Sung-Woo Park, Black God, Vol. 2 (3/3)
• Shiro Ihara, Alice on Deadlines, Vol. 2 (3/4)
• Peach-Pit, Zombie-Loan, Vol. 2 (3/5)
• Iain M. Banks, Matter (3/6)
• Nicole Hollander, Skip Morrow, & Ron Wolin, editors, Drawn Together (3/8)
  Wolin was head of the Cartoonist Guild, for which this seemed to be a fund-raiser. (And it wasn't entirely clear if he had any other connection to this book, besides his introduction.) Hollander and Morrow seem to have done most of the heavy lifting for this 1983 anthology, which has a very wide array of recent and older cartoons about relationships. (Mostly of the boyfriend-girlfriend type, though the book opened up towards the end. The take is very '70s -- just past the first flush of feminism and the sexual revolution, and not entirely sure where things would go from there.
• Mitchell Symons, Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? (3/9)
• Keiko Tobe, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vol. 1 (3/10)
• Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World As Stage (3/11)
• Keiko Tobe, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vol. 2 (3/12)
• Kyle Baker, The Bakers: Babies and Kittens (3/14)
• Lewis Trondheim, Little Nothings, Vol. 1: The Curse of the Umbrella (3/15)
• Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 1 (3/17)
• Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 2 (3/18)
• Florence King, Deja Reviews (3/20)
• Terry Brooks, et. al., Dark Wraith of Shannara (3/20)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 4 (3/22)
  The library finally had the next volume while I was there, so I read two of these quickly. I'm still twenty-five books behind, but I can catch up quickly once I get out of the first half-dozen, which are never on the library shelf.
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 5 (3/23)
  And so I read two of these in two days; Kishimoto is really quite good at action scenes and has a spiky style I like. (And he's managed to keep the character of Naruto himself an interesting mix of bombastic teenager and all-thumbs failure, though I expect he'll become superpowerful eventually, since all boys' manga heroes have to.)
• Min-Woo Hyung, Priest, Vol. 1 (3/24)
• Moyoco Anno, Sugar Sugar Rune, Vol. 1 (3/25)
• Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces (3/25)
• Kazu Kibuishi, editor, Flight Explorer, Vol. 1 (3/25)
• Masatsugu Iwase, et. al., Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, Vol. 1 (3/26)
• John Lloyd & John Mitchinson, The Book of General Ignorance (3/27)
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 9: Battle for Power, Part One (3/27)
  More sex, violence and political maneuvering in feudal Japan; the civil war is about to heat up again, so the names are flying more quickly than I can keep track of them. Reading this series is a bit like wading through a big Russian novel: there's a lot of good stuff, but you have to admit that you don't really know precisely who a lot of the secondary characters are.
• Cyril Pedrosa, Three Shadows (3/28)
• Tim Sievert, That Salty Air (3/29)
• Ben Karlin, ed., Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me (3/29)
• Lars Martinson, Tonoharu (3/30)
• Joann Sfar & Lewis Trondheim, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart (3/31)

And that was the month of March -- thirty-one books in thirty-one days; which, happily, is what I usually shoot for. So now I can only be unhappy about the fact that so many of them were comics, so I didn't get through as many "real" books as I wanted to...