Ping: Paul Stevens

Paul, if you're out there, I thought I had your e-mail but I don't. Drop me a line at acwheele at optonline dot net when you have a chance.

The rest of you, just move along with your business. {Jedi hand wave} Nothing to see here.

Manga Friday Totes that Barge and Lifts that Bale

This week's "Manga Friday" feature by yours truly at ComicMix features my bewildered response to a little book called Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1.

And how some people think I'm some sort of manga "expert" in a world with people like the totally awesome Shaenon K. Garrity, I'll never know. (I'll be cribbing from that article for the next six months, I expect.)

But there I am; I may not be an expert, but I hope I'm at least entertaining.

My New Favorite Word

Nick Mamatas anatomizes "fantatwee."

Made me laugh out loud: "Your prize for being picked on in junior high school is a magic wand and a green button that lets you touch boobs."

Made me think:

Unfortunately, fantatwee is all about second-order escapism. Many great stories have elements of escapism, but also a twist of a thematic screw that lets the reader know that not everything is strawberries and cream. Hard choices get made. Misery abides. In the film version of Return of the King, Frodo may have had a big pillowfight with his friends and then moped about the house for a bit. In the book, he was a shattered man, utterly alienated from his communitarian society. That's what you get for saving the world from doom.

Quote of the Week

" 'What ho!' I said.
'What ho' said Motty.
'What ho! What ho!'
'What ho! What ho! What ho!'
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation."
-P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" in My Man Jeeves

Locus Award "Nominees"

Locus has released lists of the top five items in each category of their annual awards -- which could be considered a finalists list, but for the fact that Locus only knows what #s 2-5 are because they've already tallied up the winner.

I'd list them all myself, but they're several dozen other places on the 'net already. (And I threw my back out again this afternoon, so I want to get out of this chair and somewhere more comfortable to watch Hogfather.)

So, no deep commentary from me this time. I did vote for the Locus Awards this year, and this looks like a solid list.

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer

Charles Fort was a one-trick pony, but it was a damn good trick. His four famous books -- The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents -- all collected odd, unusual facts, which Fort arranged in various patterns to poke fun at scientific certainties or to bolster various odd theories.

Steinmeyer, most of the way through this exceptionally engaging biography, makes the point that no leader can choose his followers, and that goes double for Fort. Steinmeyer was referring to Tiffany Thayer -- the puppyish founder of the Fortean Society: always underfoot, overeager, and with a marked tendency for drooling approval -- but it applies equally well to hundreds or thousands of "Forteans" over the past few decades. They might not all be humorless, they might not all be anti-science, but they rarely seem to really understand how equivocal, humorous, and conflicted Charles Fort really was.

To be blunt, most people know Fort as a crank, if at all. But Fort wasn't a crank, or not purely a crank -- his theories were always half-joking. And the main purpose of his work was to unearth spiky facts -- the kind that don't fit the accepted theories -- and see what he could do with them. (Though Steinmeyer also describes what's known about Fort's two lost books, written before The Book of the Damned -- X and Y -- and those sound like more traditional crank books, with potted explanations for everything.)

Steinmeyer draws heavily on the previous major biography of Fort, Damon Knight's Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained, but he's also done some serious original research, particularly in digging into Fort's relationship with Theodore Dreiser. He's a careful and thorough writer, restrained in attributing emotions or actions to Fort that he can't back up; I didn't find a single "he must have," the hallmark of the lazy or sourceless biographical writer.

In fact, there are places where I actively wanted Steinmeyer's speculations. For example, Fort married Anna Filing in 1896, when she was twenty-six. When he died in 1932, he left Anna as a widow...and no children. Steinmeyer resolutely refuses to speculate about their private life, but pure childlessness, in that era, is an anomaly to be at least noted.

If I were a professional book reviewer -- which I am not -- I would have given you a potted life story of Fort, essentially this book in miniature, and avoided talking about Charles Fort as a book entirely. (This is because even professional book reviewers can feel guilt when they come to criticize something they've just been cribbing from.) Instead, I'll just say that if you're interested in Fort's life, Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural is written with life and energy, and is just as long as it needs to be. Go read that book instead of some critic's regurgitation of it; it might take a little longer, but it will be more pleasant and enlightening.

And if you don't know who Fort is, click on this link below marked The Book of the Damned for the new omnibus edition of his four great books and see for yourself. In some ways, Fort is one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time -- all the more so because what he was writing wasn't fiction.

This Is the Saddest Comic I Know

Today's review at ComicMix: the wrist-slashingly depressing ACME Novelty Library #18.

A word of warning: never read Chris Ware under the influence of alcohol or while operating farm machinery.

Powers Vol. 8: Legends by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming

I'm continuing my saunter (about two years behind everyone else) through the independent superhero/cop drama by two guys who aren't happy with just being called "Mike." Legends feels a lot like a transitional story: it incorporates and integrates the events of the last two books, showing the audience the consequences and setting up the next change in the superhero status quo. There's also a fair bit of fanboy received wisdom in the background of Legends; the credo of tens of thousands of grown men wearing Spider-Man underoos and collecting "action figures" of superheroines in hooker wear.

That's an awfully long-winded way to say that, in the aftermath of volume 6, The Sellouts (the next book, Forever, was a very extended series of flashbacks) superpowers have been outlawed, so...everybody say it with me! "Only outlaws have superpowers!!!!"

And thus "the city" that Powers takes place in is almost a lawless hell-hole, with murders of cops being common and the neighborhoods a battleground for turf wars among three supervillain-led gangs. Deena Pilgrim, one of our two viewpoint characters, has come out of a coma at the beginning of this book, and quickly goes back to work, tracking one particular cop-killer.

At the same time, Retro Girl (the universally beloved superheroine whose murder was the center of the very first Powers storyline) seems to have returned -- at least, someone wearing her costume is flying around "the city" apprehending criminals and doing good. Christian Walker, our other protagonist (who used to be the superhero Diamond until he lost his powers), knows who the new Retro Girl is and tries to help her once he sees that he's not going to be able to get her to stop.

And then Pilgrim gets captured by one of the gangs, and tortured by the powers of one of the leaders, which causes something that I wish I could say was unexpected. But it's not; what happens to her is exactly what does happen in superhero comics. Powers thus continues its movement from being a cop story set in a world of superheroes to yet another superhero story that happens to have cops in it. It's still pretty good, but stories about superheroes are already far too common in comics; we don't need yet another one. We do need stories about cops.

Ah, well: I'm sure I'll still track down the ninth volume to see what happened next.

One Way to Start Fights

...is to title a book Fantasy Classics.

(Shades of "for the fairest," yes?)

But this particular Fantasy Classics is a collection of comics adaptations of stories by Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, L. Frank Baum, and others, edited by Tom Pomplun, from the "Graphic Classics" series. And that might cut down on the screaming and hair-pulling just a bit.

Anyway, I reviewed it at ComicMix today.

Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko

So many SF novels, particularly first novels, seem to be built out of novellas these days that you'd think it was the forties all over again. (And, yes, you can always see the joins, even with the most skillful writers.) Singularity's Ring is one of the more elegant examples, but it can't hide the fact that the first few chapters really are episodes, and nearly separate stories from each other.

Maybe I'm exaggerating -- the characters are the same, the background is the same, and the chapters follow very quickly in time. And maybe I only notice it because the copyright page alerted me that the first two chapters were originally published as the separate stories "Strength Alone" and "Singletons in Love."

But even if the story is somewhat episodic as it gets going, it's compelling, presenting believable characters in an odd but plausible world. (One thing I'm particularly impressed by is Melko's very contingent near-future; so many SF writers present their worlds as "this is what must happen," while Melko's is the product, like real history, of a dozen accidents and specific moments, not all of which his characters know.)

It's a hundred or so years in the future, and most of humanity is gone. One faction -- presumably the highest-tech First World types -- formed an AI-mediated Community, burned through a frighteningly speedy technological growth spurt, built a Ring around the earth complete with a number of skyhooks, and then all keeled over dead, presumably uploaded to the Singularity. Soon after, or at roughly the same time -- and maybe caused by someone falling over in a lab; it's not clear if anyone knows -- the Gene Wars began, and vast numbers of people died in that, as well.

When everything settled back down after the die-offs -- this is yet another vaguely Utopian medium future that we can only get to by killing off 90% of the human race, and it's depressing that we're still getting those after the glut in the '90s -- the world was left as a number of insular communities, either deliberately denying modern technology or isolated enough never to have gotten it, and one dominant faction that had been genetically engineering humans into "pods." Melko never explains how or why this happened, but the appeal of pods -- each a group of two to five humans who function as a unit, tempering each others decisions and always seeking consensus -- is obvious in a world destroyed by war and sudden death. A pod is a radical form of personal democracy, the person as polity, linked by pheromones and a shared history into the legal person of this new society.

Pods started out with duos, then trios. When Singularity's Ring opens, quints are cutting-edge technology, with only a few "prototypes" growing towards maturity. One such quint is Apollo Papadopolous -- Strom, Meda, Quant, Manuel, and Moira -- training in a Rocky Mountain location and competing with several similar groups to be the captain of their society's first starship, the Consensus. Perhaps they'll even be the whole crew; Singularity's Ring occasionally takes note of the fact that its "people" take up more space, need more resources, and can do more jobs simultaneously than current individuals, but only in passing -- that people have two to five very different bodies is normal in this world, so the accommodations to that fact aren't remarked on.

The first five chapters of Singularity's Ring are each narrated in first person by one of the members of the pod, so we get to know them as individuals as well as pieces of Apollo. A pod isn't really a hive-mind; it's the combination of all five working together -- it doesn't have thoughts separate or "above" its components, but is formed by all of them thinking together. The core of the pod philosophy, as we see many times in Singularity's Ring, is that word "consensus." I can't be sure that pods were created to avoid rash, runaway decisions like the ones that sent the Community off into wherever-they-went, but it certainly seems that way.

So we get to know Apollo, in all of his/her facets, and we get to slowly know his world. (I had big questions about this world that weren't answered until late in the book; I mention that in case you, too, read it and start wondering about some big things early on.) The book doesn't go in the way the flap copy would lead you to expect, though the title is a big clue. As often happens in near-future SF, Singularity's Ring is finally about How We Got There, and our protagonists end up being a very, very important person indeed. There's danger and intrigue, and even something like a love story -- those of you who have read "Singletons in Love" will know that my "something like" is meant very loosely -- as the parts of Apollo learn the deep dark secrets behind their world.

I still think the world of Singularity's Ring is weird and only vaguely plausible, but Melko doesn't present it as something perfect and shiny, or as the only possible future, which makes it that much more believable. His writing is compelling, and his viewpoint characters subtly different from each other. I do wish that SF novels didn't feel compelled to answer all of the questions of their settings -- spy novels usually don't devolve into geopolitical explication -- but mine may be a minority taste. Singularity's Ring is a fine SF novel, substantially better than most first novels, and I'm looking forward to what Melko does next.

Call In the G-Men!

My review today at ComicMix: Rick Geary's recent comics biography of J. Edgar Hoover.

For reals, homes. The publishing world is not only stranger than we imagine; it's stranger than we can imagine. And that fact always comforts me.

A Springy Musical Meme

Instructions via Keith R.A. DeCandido, and, before him, the great Internet hivemind:

Music meme: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your LJ along with your 7 songs.

1. The Dollyrots, "Because I'm Awesome" -- A pop-punk gem with great attitude; just the song to sing along to in those first days when you have the windows rolled down.

2. Harley Poe, "Corrupting My Better Half" -- Through some sort of space-time warp, this song fell out of the Violent Femmes's first album and landed in 2006. I haven't heard anything else from Harley Poe yet, but I will.

3. Rachel Smith, "Juanita" -- I have an odd weakness for quiet songs driven by a concertina, and I've heard several of them lately. This is the best of that lot, a lovely song from a woman with an almost-conversational voice.

4. We Are Soldiers We Have Guns, "Songs That No One Will Hear" -- A gem of a song, with a female singer whose voice is almost too sweet and fragile...but never too much so.

5. Blaggards, "Drunken Sailor" -- On the other side, here's an old sea shanty. The Blaggards sound like the Pogues after ten years as the house band for some Austin honkey-tonk.

6. The Shondes, "Let's Go" -- Another tough song with unconventional instrumentation -- fiddles are another sound I love to find in unexpected places -- from a Brooklyn band with attitude and chops to burn.

7. Bodies of Water, "I Guess I'll Forget the Sound, I Guess, I Guess" -- This is what '70s art rock would have sounded like if it had been made by ex-madrigal singers rather than ex-art college kids -- a big song with sharp highs and lows and wonderful harmonies that builds and builds to a magnificent finish.

8. Creature, "Bridgette Bardot" -- A brand-new song that sounds like one of the more bizarre manifestations of '80s Euro-disco; a call-and-response song about Bardot, more or less, that almost manages to make me want to dance.

9. Elis Paprika, "No Me Vas a Callar" -- Well, it's mostly in Spanish, so I have no idea what it's all about. But it fucking rocks, and that's all that matters.

(Sorry, I got carried away. And I also avoided the songs I listed in "Fingertips" back in December, even though I'm still listening to a lot of those a lot of the time. Links on songs are either to legal free download pages or to official YouTube videos. Hope you find something you like, or are inspired to do something similar on your own blog/LJ.)

In Which I Fail To Get It

A couple of days ago (I was lackadaisical about keeping up with my feeds this weekend), Jay Lake wrote the below paragraph, in linking to a news story about that West Texas polygamist sect that is completely different from every other religious group, because they are evil, and everyone else is good:

"Girls in the west Texas polygamous sect enter into underage marriages without resistance because they are ruthlessly indoctrinated from birth to believe disobedience will lead to their damnation[.]" How is this different from any other religion? That's a serious question, not snark. The followers of virtually all religions raise their children within their religious framework, and impose the moral and behavioral rules of their faith on their children. Why is this different? If you're going to give social approval to religious upbringing, where does the line fall in picking-and-choosing? From my atheistic point of view, it's all indoctrination, after all.

Various people immediately jumped on Lake for being nasty and anti-religion and mean to cuddly little bunnies and unappreciative of their personal soulful connection to Invisible Pink Unicorns and Lake, being a polite man, backed off and apologized.

I, however, am not polite. This was also the weekend in which an old man, selected by a bunch of other old men (of which he was then one) to be head of a huge organization, came to my area to insist that everybody just shut up, stop thinking for themselves, and do what he says. (Or else they'll be tortured for all eternity by an all-loving supernatural being who created everyone and knows everything.)

In other words, he taught that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

All other Christian denominations that I know of also teach that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

The Muslim sects that I'm familiar with teach that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

Judaism is built on a vast interlocking set of detailed rules, and "disobedience will lead to damnation."

So is the problem merely that Lake is pointing at the most egregious example, and nobody likes to see their own ox being gored? Because it certainly looks to me as if every major religious tradition comes down to "these are the rules you have to follow, and if you don't you'll be tormented for all eternity." And that's exactly what the crazy Texas polygamists are saying, only with their own specific set of rules...but every group has a slightly different set of rules.

The responses all seem to be "well, all the people I know would never play the eternal damnation card...oh, sure, it's there, hidden in the religion somewhere, but only Republicans would actually mention it to the darling little children." Which is hogwash. All Catholics get a solid diet of hell, and so do Muslims. It varies by Protestant denomination, but, unless you get way out to Unitarian Universalists, there's some hell in the mix. Hell is part of the religious equation.

Look, I won the Bible Olympics two years running at my Church in my mis-spent youth; I know what a happy, positive, non-Hell-centric religion looks like. But Hell is still there; damnation is one of the underlying themes. If you don't like that, perhaps you need to reconsider your allegiance to a Supreme Being that insists on it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/19

Another impressive stack this week, so I'll dive right into it without tormenting any publicists first:

The book that made me happiest when I opened its package this week was Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Good-Bye, third in the series from Drawn & Quarterly reprinting his Japanese comics from the early '70s. Tatsumi was in the forefront of the gegika movement, pushing manga in the direction of more realistic, downbeat stories about modern people's actual lives. The first two books of Tatsumi's from D&Q -- The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo -- were among my favorite books of the past two years, and I wasn't expecting to see this book for review. D&Q will publish it in July; start saving your pennies now.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best, from First Second, will be published in August. This looks like its essentially Campbell's follow-up to The Black Diamond Detective Agency; he did all of the art, and Best is credited as the co-writer. It's the story of a famous acrobat, creator of (and namesake of) the leotard, and I expect that it's at least based on true stories, if not precisely non-fictional itself.

Alastair Reynolds's new novel is The Prefect, coming from Ace in June. I've had a copy of the British edition for close to a year, and haven't managed to read it yet -- I hope I can get it in before it publishes here. This novel returns to the universe of the Revelation Space trilogy, in Yellowstone's system before the Melding Plague hit. The title character is Tom Dreyfus, a cop who discovers that his current investigation is part of something much larger and more dangerous than he expected.

From Glen Cook's "Garrett Files" series -- Cruel Zinc Melodies, from Roc in May. This is the twelfth in that long-running series about a tough hard-boiled PI in a fantasy world; I read one of them, many years ago, and it didn't quite take.

Omega Sol is a new SF novel from Scott Mackay, which Roc will publish in May. It's about one of those great Hard SF staples, the Enigmatic Alien Artifact -- in this case, towers on the Moon that are turning our sun into a red giant much more quickly than it should be.

And also from Roc in May is Thomas E. Sniegoski's A Kiss Before the Apocalypse. (Oddly, I remember him best for the Bone side-story he wrote, Stupid Stupid Rat-Tails, which is one of the purest comedic romps in comics form that I've ever seen.) This book looks much more serious; it begins yet another urban fantasy, about a Boston PI who is actually the angel Remiel.

Algonquin Books published Jack O'Connell's novel The Resurrectionist earlier in April. It's a literary fantasy novel, but it's hard to say much more about it without reading it. (The materials about it -- back of the galley, publicity letter -- have lots of details and specifics that don't sound like anything in particular; that's the trouble with writing a book that isn't in any existing genre, so there's no shorthand to explain what it is.)

Publishing at the end of April is the first volume of Osamu Tezuka's series Dororo, which I've already reviewed for ComicMix (through the magic of PDF and wide Internet pipes). It's published by Vertical. I liked it, though not as much as some of Vertical's other Tezuka books, and I thought it would be a good introduction to Tezuka's quirkier side to readers of more popular manga.

The Martian General's Daughter is the new novel by Theodore Judson, whose first novel Fitzpatrick's War got great reviews a few years ago (and which, shockingly, I've yet to read). This new book was published by Pyr at the beginning of April. I doubt very much that it's a traditional Military SF book, though it does seem to have a lot of war and fighting in it.

Kate Elliott's new novel is Shadow Gate, second in the "Crossroads" series after Spirit Gate. Tor published it on April 15th. It also has a magnificent Michael Kaluta cover, which is almost worth the cost of admission all by itself.

Orson Scott Card's massive new collection of short stories, Keeper of Dreams, was also published by Tor on April 15th. It contains twenty-two stories from the past decade, including a story that had been accepted for Harlan Ellison's long-delayed The Last Dangerous Visions anthology.

The renowned Science Fiction Book Club has just published an original anthology called Galactic Empires, edited by the possibly-even-more-renowned Gardner Dozois. I'm particularly pleased to see this not only because the program of original anthologies was a source of particular pride in my days at the club, but because Gardner dedicated this book to Ellen Asher (the once and forever Editor-in-Chief of the SFBC and eternal uncrowned queen of all science fiction) and myself. Thanks, Gardner. Having my name associated with a book containing new novellas by Peter F. Hamilton, Neal Asher, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, and Ian McDonald is a great honor.

Last this week is a book that's #2 on The New York Times's bestseller lists as I type this. (At least, it is for now -- who knows when the whims of the Times will decide that fantasy is unworthy of the list and stop tracking it, as they already do with religious books, computer books, and several other categories?) That book is Jim Butcher's Small Favor, the tenth in the "Dresden Files" contemporary fantasy series. It's published by Roc, and, obviously, is already available everywhere. And I started reading it almost as soon as it came in the door.

ComicMix Rundown

More of my ComicMix posts that I've neglected to link to so far:

On Thursday, I reviewed three books for kids: Gumby Collected #1 by Burden and Geary (which you won't be able to find at Amazon, so no link -- try asking at your local comics shop), Guibert's Sardine in Outer Space 5: My Cousin Manga and Other Stories, and Sfar's Little Vampire.

On Friday, my "Manga Friday" feature covered the first installment of a series called Kaze No Hana, the first volume of the new Tales from the Crypt, and the third volume of My Heavenly Hockey Club.