Book-A-Day 2010 # 153 (7/6) -- Nancy, Vol. 1 by John Stanley (and Dan Gormley)

I don't know if we're as passionate and bifurcated as sparkly-vampire readers, but when it comes to Nancy there's definitely Team Bushmiller and Team Stanley. I, of course, am firmly on Team Bushmiller, as all right-thinking comics aficionados must be -- how can comics get any more precise than Bushmiller's line, or more iconic than The Three Rocks, or more highly engineered than his too-simple-not-to-read gags? Bushmiller was the newspaper gag-a-day strip burned down to its essence: austere, immediate, perfect.

And, yes, sure, that guy John Stanley wrote some decent mid-century humor comic books with more-or-less the same characters,too. But the difference between the two is incredibly stark, to my mind: Bushmiller was an auteur in his field, crafting little Zen masterpieces of humor. Stanley was a decent writer of comics for kids, somewhat better than the run of the mill at the time but nowhere near the level of a Carl Barks or a Walt Kelly.

Close to a month ago, I read the two (to date) collections of Stanley's mid-'60s Melvin Monster comic -- my review of those will appear in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy, so I'll say the bare minimum about them here -- and wasn't overly impressed. But Drawn & Quarterly is in the middle of a big series reprinting Stanley's work, so I figured I should give him another chance, and took a look at this first volume reprinting his work on the Nancy comic book in the mid-'50s. (This book contains all of the stories from issues 146-150 of the series, from 1957-58, without covers but with the pages all reproduced age-faded, like we're reading them in Grandma's attic -- in the usual artsy-presentation-of-old-mass-market-material style.)

The stories here are gently humorous, in a typically '50s style -- there are burglars and eerie little girls, but all is tamed and ritualized into the comics equivalent of comfort food. It's all material designed to be inoffensive to Greatest Generation parents but still palatable to their Boomer kids, and it never reaches above that level: pleasant, inoffensive, mildly funny in the way that everything it is, it is mildly.

I still don't see why Stanley is worthy of such fancy, gorgeous reprint collections -- though they're priced very reasonably; this one is only $24.95 -- unless one assumes a serious line in Nancy nostalgia from Boomers. (Or, to be kinder, that Team Stanley have their own arguments for their guy's merits, and I'm blind to those arguments and merits.) If you like Nancy, and you prefer her in longer comic-book stories, this will be an excellent book. But if Bushmiller's Nancy is the one you like best, it won't quite stand up, in comparison.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: A Camp - Here Are Many Wild Animals
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 152 (7/5) -- Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran

Some stories are easy to pick up a little bit at a time -- you can jump in anywhere, get to know what's going on pretty quickly, and move forward immediately. (These are not necessarily inferior works -- it takes a lot of skill to create a story that's both interesting and easily accessible -- but they tend to prioritize simple, obvious characterizations and stock situations. Think of every sitcom or legacy newspaper strip that you detest -- and some of the ones that you like, as well.) More complicated stories need to be approached more carefully -- like a train, there are certain places where you can get on board, and many more places where you'd just stare at it passing you by.

Octopus Pie, a webcomic in (so far) twenty-four chapters, is a story of the second kind -- I'd tried reading it once, from a random link, dropping backward strip by strip, and that was a bad plan: I'd walked into Act 2 of a play, or started reading a mystery as the detective announced "I've called you all together for a reason." I was confused, and then it was time to go back to work, so I filed Octopus Pie mentally under "try again someday."

And that someday just came: Villard has published the first two years of Octopus Pie strips in one trade paperback, under the subtitle "There Are No Stars In Brooklyn." (It also features a brand-new short story, not available anywhere else as far as I can see, about the two main characters when they were very young.) This is a strip that works best if read from the beginning: creator Meredith Gran had a stable, mature art style from the beginning, and hers is also one of the rare periodic comics in any medium with characters that grow and change from the things that happen to them.

Octopus Pie is primarily the story of Eve Ning, a grumpy young woman living in Brookyln and working in a natural-foods market. (Thankfully, it's not about how she's wasting her life, or her vague existential ennui, or any other trendy ailments of the dispossessed twentysomething.) Gran populates the strips with characters who are just a bit broader and funnier than real people -- the most slapsticky is Eve's roommate, Hanna -- and runs them through humorous stories of usually about a dozen double-height strips.

Gran has a fine cartoonist's eye for just the right degree of exaggeration, and the matching ability to tell stories that skirt the edge of plausibility but always stay both believable and big enough to matter. So start at the beginning and give Octopus Pie a try -- either on the website, or in this book -- if you enjoy classic newspaper-style cartooning, in a format expansive enough to tell a real story but smart enough to be funny on a regular basis.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Holmes - Not a Political Song
via FoxyTunes

Supersize Your Kindle!

Two days from now, Amazon will release the all-new, super-spiffy, neato-keano, ultra-wonderful and mega-gigantic second generation Kindle DX, as part of its latest salvo in the e-book wars. The new giant-sized Kindle DX comes in at a good hundred dollars cheaper than the launch price of the first edition Kindle DX (though you can grab a 1G DX right now for $359, as Amazon tries to clear out their inventory ahead of the new one [1]).

The new DX comes in a soothing grey, and is still large enough to read a newspaper or magazine on. And its battery life is about as good as you can get from any e-reader -- roughly a week, even with their wireless connectivity on, and longer without it. Amazon is happy to natter on and on about its other wonderful qualities, if you're interested, at the link above -- but I'll stop here. If you want a large-format e-reader, presumably you know that already.

On the other hand, if you're annoyed with slow page turns -- still faster than most human beings turn actual pages, true, but slow as electronic thingies go -- and demand full-color in your large oblong hand-held devices, might I interest you in an iPad?

And, if you're a real curmudgeon -- much like myself -- you may instead want to peruse the selection of old-fashioned print-on-paper books.

But, please, for the love of Mike, buy something. It's so sad to look at my Amazon statistics and see that I've made only 42 cents recently. Remember -- only your frenzied spending can stave off a double-dip recession!


[1] You didn't hear this from me, but, if you really want a 1G Kindle DX cheaply, your best bet is to wait a few days and check out Woot! -- which Amazon just bought -- just after midnight Central time each day. I have no solid knowledge when -- or even if -- it will show up there, but I'd bet money on it.

August Realms of Fantasy Transforms and Rolls Out

Subscribers to Realms of Fantasy -- and I'm not touching that recent kerfuffle, thank you very much, though I do hope that people subscribe to the magazines that they read regularly -- should be seeing their copies of the August issue hitting their mailboxes any day now. (Or maybe it hit already; I'm running a few days behind.)

It's got that airbending kid on the cover, from that movie that's gotten wonderful reviews and praise for its brilliantly race-blind casting -- I've just been skimming the news, so I hope I got that right -- and it, sadly, does not feature my column at the very end of the magazine. Yes, once again, my graphic novel column has been squeezed out because there was just too much good fiction. (No complaints from me; that's what a magazine called Realms of Fantasy is for.)

But you can read my August column -- reviewing Twilight: The Graphic Novel, Vol. 1 by Stephenie Meyer and Young Kim [1], Artichoke Tales by Megan Kelso, and A Home for Mr. Easter by Brooke A. Allen -- on Realms' website, so why don't you just go and do that right now,. I'll wait here for you. No, go ahead. Shoo, shoo.


[1] Not Young Neil, which would be awesome in its own way.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/3

It's been another week of mail here at the secure Hornswoggler compound, which means it's time for me to tell you about it. As always, these are the books that came in the mail last week -- mostly without me even suspecting they were on the way -- and I haven't yet read any of them. But I can tell you some things about those books, from looking at them and thinking very, very hard, and so I shall:

Carrie Vaughn's "Kitty Norville" urban fantasy series -- one of the better entries in that subgenre, well-grounded in the real world and with more sense of consequence than any of the others I've read -- has jumped to Tor with the 8th book, Kitty Goes to War, just published in August. War is a mass-market paperback, like all of the previous books in the series, and I recommend this series highly for anyone who can tolerate reading a book with a tough chick and a peck of wolves on the cover.

And the reason Vaughn jumped to Tor is the next book in my stack, Discord's Apple, a contemporary fantasy set in a slightly alternate world that Tor is also publishing in July -- in hardcover, in this case. Vaughn and her previous publisher had a slight disagreement about the shape of her career -- they wanted her to focus on Kitty; she had other things she wanted to do as well -- and I'm glad to see that she landed at a publisher that wanted to see her write the same kind of books that she wanted to write. (And I hope they're both right that her audience will follow her to Discord's Apple, at least in sufficient numbers for that book to be successful.) Discord features a young woman who goes home to comfort her dying father, but discovers that he's the guardian of a magical storeroom containing various mythical and legendary artifacts.

Ursula K. Le Guin's novella The Word for World is Forest has been republished as a slim trade paperback by Tor, in a classy cover that buries the words "science fiction" at the bottom of the back. Word was originally published in Harlan Ellison's 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (which was not itself groundbreaking, but was a quick return to continue bounding the same soil Ellison had broken three years earlier with the first Dangerous Visions anthology) and won the Hugo Award in its category that year. (And a quick glance at the first few pages showed me that Word is still just as subtle and nuanced as it ever was, though the passing years have luckily brought ever higher-powered instruments to detect those qualities.)

Pyr continues its flood of Mark Chadbourn books with The Hounds of Avalon, the third volume of the "Dark Age" trilogy, coming to stores with an official publication date of tomorrow. (And that means that both this trilogy and its predecessor -- the "Dark Age" books -- were published in the US within a 14-month span, which I certainly hope will make very happy the people who complain about slow publication schedules.) This is a series set after a magical apocalypse has transformed our world back into something more legendary, and this particular book has a new ragnarok threatening, which I trust Chadbourn's characters will avert. (That's the job of the viewpoint characters in fantasy-apocalypse novels; if they can't manage to fulfill the basic requirements of their positions, they deserve to be relegated to Mills & Boon.)

Graham Hancock usually writes nonfiction books with titles like Fingerprints of the Gods, The Sign and the Seal, and The Message of the Sphinx -- ones that generally feature a view of history, archaeology, and the past that have more elements of conspiracy theory and unlikely coincidences than most of us would be comfortable with -- which have found the usual large audience worldwide. (Obligatory reference to Von Daniken here.) But he's now written a novel -- a fantasy adventure entitled Entangled in which a modern woman is flung into the past to merge with her Stone Age counterpart, who is battling "an unrelentingly evil master magician named Sulpa." Of course, it's also the first book of a trilogy. Entangled will be published by The Disinformation Company [1] as a trade paperback in October. (Obligatory reference to Whitley Strieber here, who traveled a similar path in the opposite direction, going from The Wolfen to Communion.)

KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(ahem)

Richard Moore's very entertaining contemporary fantasy comics series Boneyard comes to an end -- or at least a temporary halt -- with Volume 7, probably because of the usual diminishing returns of a long-running series that isn't a darling of the comics-shop crowd. It's a shame, because Moore is a reliably entertaining cartoonist, equally adept at story and character, but we can always hope to see something else new and exciting from him. (Oh, and I should link to my ComicMix review of Vol. 6, while I'm at it.) NBM will publish this seventh, and probably concluding, volume in September -- so if there were any of you waiting for the series to end before starting to read it, your alarm has just rung.

And last for this week is another surprise: Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist. It's a large-format hardcover, coming in November from Norton, tracing the artistic growth (from earliest childhood) of the not-yet-30-year-old Sophie Crumb, daughter of noted underground cartoonists Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. From a quick look through, there are short introductions by Robert and Aline, and then a lot of drawings (some comics pages, but mostly sketches and standalone drawings), all captioned but not otherwise put into context. It looks terribly premature to me -- Sophie Crumb is at the point in her career when she should be producing new works, not digging through her childhood archives -- but who am I to judge? Evolution of a Crazy Artist is edited by "S., A. & R. Crumb," and everyone will be able to judge how brilliant or misguided it is in November.


[1] I am incapable of making this up. Hancock's previous (nonfictional) books, though, were published by different, and generally larger, houses.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 151 (7/4) -- First Time by Sibylline and various artists

Reviewing actual porn is very straightforward: a piece either achieves its purpose or it doesn't, so a quick thumbs up or thumbs down is easy. (Though I may be using "thumb" as a euphemism here.) It gets more tricky if a work wants to be both artsy and arousing, and a reviewer has to apply multiple overlapping frames of reference simultaneously. And comics always look smuttier and less artsy than the same story told in prose: words may be dirty, but pictures are always more so.

First Time is a collection of ten short stories about sex, all written by a woman calling herself Sibylline and all about someone doing something sexual for the first time, from a virgin in the first story to a couple having sex in front of a porn video in the last. Each story is exactly nine pages (plus a title page) and by a different European artist -- from Alfred (of Why I Killed Peter) to Cyril Pedrosa (of Three Shadows) to Dave McKean (the only artist mentioned in the back-cover copy, thus clearly the big draw). It was written in French -- and published in France -- before being translated by Joe Johnson for this American edition.

I was originally holding this book to do a paired review with the new edition of Guido Crepax's The Story of O: both were from NBM's Eurotica imprint, and were published in a large hardcover format within a few months of each other. But time slipped away, and now those "new" books are a year old each, and so they'll instead become fodder for the endlessly gluttonous Book-A-Day machine.

One reason I was going to review First Time with another book is that I suspected there wouldn't be much to say about it all by itself, and that's true -- the art is all good, and well varied; the sex is well-depicted, and (to my eye) mostly sexy rather than bluntly anatomical; the characters have at least one dimension besides the fact that they're having sex; and nothing about it is particularly embarrassing or grating. But it's still ten stories on pretty much the same theme, with a lot of sex lovingly depicted, and any reader's reaction to it will depend pretty heavily on the enjoyment of seeing those particular sex acts drawn well on the page. (Well, McKean's wordless and very impressionistic story is artistically interesting on its own, but it's something of an experiment to begin with.)

This is a classy book of smutty comics, and those smutty comics are themselves about as classy as such things ever are. First Time is about as good at doing what it sets out to do as anyone could expect, but you'll still want to hide it when the in-laws come over.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: The Swell Season (Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová) - Love That Conquers
via FoxyTunes

Shop Indie Bookstores

Book-A-Day 2010 # 150 (7/3) -- Monkey Food by Ellen Forney

For a year or so in the late '90s, cartoonist Ellen Forney had a regular strip called "I Was Seven in '75" in a number of alternative weekly papers, primarily Seattle's The Stranger. Fantagraphics published a collection of those strips in 1999 as Monkey Food, I found that book in 2007, and finally read it the other day. The strip, as you can guess from the title, was made of of Forney's memories of her youth, focusing mostly on the mid-to-late '70s, and particularly the most "70s" aspects of that life. (So this is a ten-year-old book about events about thirty-five years old, which I've had for three years -- it's well-aged in every possible way.)

I myself was only six in '75, and my parents were much straighter and less interesting than Forney's -- no nudist camps or pot-smoking -- but we both grew up in New Jersey, which I decree gives me a better standing to review Monkey Food than anyone whose childhood was spent in one of the other forty-nine states. "I Was Seven in '75" is one of that wave of alternative-weekly comics that now seem so far away in time, the child of "Ernie Pook's Comeek" and "Life in Hell" -- like both of them, it's full of narration and text, alternating between comics panels and layouts that look more like an illustrated book, allowing more space for Forney's explanations.

Children's lives are broadly very similar across time -- friends, bullies, getting older incrementally and learning about the world as you go, the rhythms of the calendar and school year -- but radically different in the details, of what a particular generation was thinking and doing and watching and experiencing when they were a specific age. Of course, that might just be a specific case of something more general: that we're all human (and so recognize the similarities) but had different experiences. So Forney's stories, like all good stories of a specific childhood, will veer from seeming exactly like a reader's experience in the same era to seeming very different and unlikely -- and which details fall into each category will vary by the reader.

But Forney is specific here, as well as great at remembering the small details of her own life -- from Judy Blume books to hand-clap games, with dogs and church and microwaves and nicknames and the weird time-wasters children think up in between. It's a great book about being a specific kid in a specific era that will remind many readers of strange details of their own childhoods, whenever and wherever that was. (And the precise line and mobile expressions of her art help out a lot as well.)

This is a book about being a kid that most adults probably wouldn't want their own kids to read -- there's too much about nudity and drugs and wondering about sex in it, and parents always want to pretend that their kids know much less about all of that than they did at the same age -- but it's wonderful for those of us who were kids in the mid-'70s, and probably equally wonderful for those post-kids who came along earlier or later.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Okkervil River - You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 149 (7/2) -- Spectrum 16 edited by Cathy & Arnie Fenner

Annuals are difficult books to critique -- either a critic has to first establish a baseline from previous books in the series (and risk diving too far into minutia and losing any less-than-completely-devoted readers), or has to go in completely the opposite direction, and act as if the book in hand is the only thing that matters (which has its own problems). Art annuals add an additional layer of complexity -- what we might call the dancing-about-architecture issue -- in that what's most important and vital about any piece of art can't be translated into words in the first place.

For more than a dozen years, I didn't worry about the Spectrum annuals -- as always, collecting the best in "fantastic" art (a deliberately broad term, left to be interpreted widely by entrants and judges) of the previous year, curated by Cathy and Arnie Fenner and judged by a new panel each year -- but just bought them for my then-employer, the SF Book Club, and let our staff copywriters figure out the proper words to describe just how swell they were. (And, even there, the copy tended to be short, full of adjectives and names of artists -- since we could actually show art, which does a better job of selling an art book than any number of words can.) More recently, I've been an ordinary schmo, and buy them for my own shelves.

Last year, I said most of what could be said about Spectrum 15, and nearly all of that applies to this year's book as well. It's, as always, the best look at what's going on in all of the pieces of the fantastic-art world, from advertising to magazines to book covers to comics to statues to even less likely things. (There were a bunch of great opera posters about five or seven years ago, for example.) If you like imaginative art, this is the book to get every year; it's just that simple.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Ann Vriend - St Paul
via FoxyTunes

Quotes of the Week: Last Words

Some of these may be more or less apocryphal, but I certainly can't ask the people quoted now, can I?

"I wish I had spent more time in the office."
- Henry Royce

"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
- Pancho Villa

"I just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's a record."
- Dylan Thomas

"I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis."
- Humphrey Bogart

"Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him."
- John Barrymore

"How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?"
- P.T. Barnum

"Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark."
- O. Henry

"Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
- Oscar Wilde

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...."
- General John Segdwick

Book-A-Day 2010 # 148 (7/1) -- Gogo Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto

Reality can be a slippery, tricky thing -- particularly in fiction. Sometimes the consensus world is not all there is, but, other times, the world is as it seems, and the dreamers who imagine or see an alternative must fall in line with the actual world or be crushed by it. In Gogo Monster, though, Taiyo Matsumoto doesn't entirely commit to either view -- there is a real world, and it will be very painful for anyone who insists on talking about another world and its inhabitants...but that world might just exist as well.

Yuki Tachibana is the oddball of his third grade class at Asahi Elementary School; he sneaks up to the roof to commune with the unseen monsters from the other world, and his classmates pick on him when they bother to pay attention to him. His only real friend is the aged groundskeeper, Mr. Gantz, who has seen many boys like Yuki -- though he's never seen or felt the other world that they describe -- and is willing to listen to them in turn. Yuki is worried that he's growing up and losing his connection with that other world; he's hearing from it less and less often, and thinks he may be "rotting" into becoming an adult.

There are two boys who become something like friends to Yuki over the course of one school year in Gogo Monster: Makoto Suzuki, a transfer student from a school that rumor says was closed due to the principal's suicide, and IQ, a very intelligent but emotionally disturbed fifth grader who always keeps a box on his head and is even more focused than Yuki on his obsessions. (They're transparently the two biggest options for Yuki: giving his attention entirely to this world or the other one.)

Gogo Monster is a real graphic novel, one unified story; it takes about four hundred and fifty pages to tell the story of this one school year, and it's broken into large sections by season, not small serialized chapters. Matsumoto uses that space to slow down his action, showing the small repetitions of school life and the sweep of the seasons. He also has the great manga-ka's eye for a wordless sequence of panels, to transition from one mood to another or to hint at the things he won't say explicitly. It's also a very subtle book: the reader never sees the otherworld directly, or any direct effect it has. Yuki could be absolutely correct -- that his friend, the powerful monster called Super Star, keeps the other minor creatures in line, but that a group of more malicious monsters have started stirring up more trouble, which spills over into the human world -- or he could be just another delusionary boy, living in his own head and making up his own rituals rather than facing the world as it is.

It's a deep and subtle story, and one I'm not at all sure I completely understood while reading it -- it's clearly the kind of book, unlike so many comics from all countries, that rewards close attention and re-reading.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: The Octopus Project - I Saw The Bright Shinnies
via FoxyTunes

Read in June

Once again, here's what I was reading during the past month, in a handy list form. It's primarily an index, particularly during Book-A-Day stretches (like now), when there are only links. And I bury this in the middle of the night because I assume no one else will care.

• Renee Lott, Festering Romance (6/1)
  
• Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt, Scarlett Takes Manhattan (6/2)
  
• Jonny Porkpie, The Corpse Wore Pasties (6/2)
  
• Roger Langridge with Shelli Paroline, The Muppet Show Comic Book: On the Road (6/3)
  
• Matt Kindt, Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers (6/4)
  
• Shannon & Dean Hale and Nathan Hale, Calamity Jack (6/5)
  
• Tom Pomplun, editor, Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe (6/6)
  Look for my review in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• John Stanley, Melvin Monster, Vol. 1 (6/7)
  Look for my review in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• The Best of Helmut Newton (6/8)
  
• John Stanley, Melvin Monster, Vol. 2 (6/9)
  Look for my review in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• Bruno Poinsard, Tropical Blend (6/9)
  
• John Ostrander & Tim Truman, GrimJack: The Manx Cat (6/10)
  
• Jean Shepherd, The Ferrari in the Bedroom (6/10)
  
• Matthew Sturges, Bill Willingham, & Luca Rossi, House of Mystery, Vol. 1: Room & Boredom (6/11)
  
• Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1969 to 1970 (6/13)
  
• Daniel Clowes, Wilson (6/14)
  
• Bill Willingham, Peter & Max (6/14)
  
• Gilbert Hernandez, High Soft Lisp (6/15)
  
• Jonathan Rosenberg, Goats: Showcase Showdown (6/16)
  
• Marc Hansen, Doctor Gorpon (6/17)
  
• Grady Klein, The Lost Colony, Book 3: Last Rights (6/18)
  
• Ian McEwan, Solar (6/18)
  
• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Lost at Sea (6/21)
  
• Murray Browne, The Book Shopper (6/21)
  
• Raymond Briggs, Gentleman Jim (6/21)
  
• Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 11: Secret Identity (6/23)
  
• John Scalzi, The God Engines (6/24)
  
• Taiyo Matsumoto, Gogo Monster (6/25)
  
• Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, editors, Spectrum 16: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (6/26)
  
• Ellen Forney, Monkey Food (6/27)
  
• Sibylline & various artists, First Time (6/28)
  
• Meredith Gran, Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars in Brooklyn (6/29)
• John Stanley & Dan Gormley, Nancy, Vol. 1 (6/30)
  

And that was June. In just over eight hours, the first review for July will post, as Book-A-Day rolls on....

Book-A-Day 2010 # 147 (6/30) -- The God Engines by John Scalzi

Everybody knows that, in any field of creative endeavor, if you want to be taken seriously you have to go Dark. Sure, the audiences always prefer the fluffy stuff -- the stories with happy endings, adventurous settings, and danger in measured amounts -- but the critics reserve their best praises for the stories of hopelessness and pain, the ones where everything is going to go to hell no matter what anyone does. So every creative person goes Dark at least once -- hell, even fantasy's resident lord of the bad pun, Piers Anthony, dug up that singularly unpleasant story "In the Barn" thirty-some years ago, as if knowing he'd be needed as a horrible example eventually.

The God Engines is John Scalzi -- SF's current master of the optimistic, can-do spirit, Hugo and Campbell Award winner, and relentless blogger -- Going Dark. And it's very, very Dark indeed.

God Engines is either fantasy in light SFnal dress or a story with essentially SFnal underpinnings that are never explained in those terms -- each reader can choose which way to consider it, depending on which stories she likes best. (I've seen too many people say about border cases, "This is fantasy, and I know that because I hate fantasy!" to be dogmatic on either side.) It's set in a starfaring civilization that could be in our distant future but doesn't need to be -- there are many planets inhabited by human beings, and, as far as we see, no other similar sapient races around.

There is, or was, a superior sapient race, or group, though -- the gods. Scalzi never stops to explain all of the details -- this is a novella, and telling the story is more important than detailed backstory [1] -- but there were once, thousands of years ago, a lot of gods of around the same, limited power level, and now there is one god with a large empire, a few scattered smaller gods outside that empire (fighting with each other and the Big God), and a number of captured gods bound into the service of the Big God. (Scalzi never names any of the gods -- the one that rules the empire is referred to as "our lord" by his human worshippers, and of course he intends the echo of current usage there.)

The captured gods serve as power supplies for "our lord's" starships, where they are bound and controlled but not always cowed. The particular god of most importance in God Engines is the one powering the starship Righteous, commanded by Captain Ean Tephe. (He has a name, or once had one, but it's the usual too-long-to-pronounce alien name, and it's alluded to but never enters the narrative.) The god engine of the Righteous has not lost all hope; he still schemes and rebels and has fugitive worshippers, out in the empire. (The gods, in Scalzi's conception, follow the usual scientific-fantasy model: each individual worshipper gives a god a certain quantum of power, thus the gods with the most worshippers have the most power. Scalzi adds some further details about the quality of those worshippers, but it's still essentially a numbers game.)

Captain Tephe has to keep his god engine running, and to do the usual job of a captain -- work around his drunken and broken political officer priest, wrestle with his feelings for the currently fashionable Ship's Whores (Scalzi doesn't call them this, but it's what they are), and so forth. It's a hard and lonely life, being a captain -- you know the drill. Tephe certainly does.

But then, as often happens in a story like this, Tephe learns that things are worse that he knew, and is chosen for a dangerous mission. Things get worse from there, of course -- Scalzi is going Full Dark here, pulling out all the stops to show that he can be as bleak and depressing as anyone -- and the story ends as a Dark story must. Tephe is the center of God Engines, and his actions do motivate most of its plot, but he's almost entirely an agent of greater powers, lied to and manipulated and jerked around by beings that even he calls gods. He's not precisely on rails during the course of The God Engines -- he could have done things differently that changed the outcome -- but, to continue the video-game metaphor, those changes would likely only have led to nasty alternative deaths.

Given Scalzi's clearly stated antipathy to authoritarian organized religion, one could easily work up a allegorical reading of God Engines -- but it strikes me as more of a traditional SF thought experiment (what if starships used gods for power?), so I think a reading of that kind would be a mistake. In the end, God Engines doesn't have any clear moral, other than, perhaps "sucks to be you." Or maybe "stay far away when gods are fighting." It's a short and well-told story, but it does have the airless nastiness of so many "serious" SF novellas of the past couple of decades, which makes it less enjoyable than most of Scalzi's fiction. I hope he's gotten Dark out of his system now -- at least for a while.


[1] I can think of half-a-dozen writers who should have this phrase tattooed on the inside of their eyeballs.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Jaymay - One May Die So Lonely
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 146 (6/29) -- Powers: Secret Identity by Bendis and Oeming

The Powers series continues to get flabbier and flabbier, more and more obvious, and to drift ever further away from everything that made it interesting and special in this eleventh collection -- see my extended lament about volume ten from a couple of months ago for the details of what was good about Powers, once upon a time.

Even the writer -- Brian Michael Bendis, as always, though now finding time for Powers in between writing giant crossovers for the "real" superheroes for the big companies -- doesn't seem to believe in his story, having a villain at one point tell the hero, Christian Walker, "you're as old as the world and now you're an intergalactic space cowboy." And that's exactly right -- and exactly what's wrong with Powers. It started off as the story of two cops, trying to do a good job in a world of superheroes. By this point, they're both superpowered, and the fact that neither of them are very good cops anymore -- which should be the core of the series -- keeps getting pushed aside for more eyeball kicks and punch-fests.

Powers has become a generic superhero comic, with slightly more violence and sex, and the characters who once were interesting are now parodies of themselves. Bendis amps up the violence level to cartoonish in this volume, like a junkie increasing the dosage again and again in a useless attempt to get a new rush, and it works with Powers about as well as it works with heroin.

All in all, I think I'm done here. There's a twelfth volume out, but I'll just leaf through that at a store, if anything. There's no reason at all to read Powers now -- it's just the same thing that Bendis is doing in his other books, and those have the advantage of being about the "real" characters -- the ones the fans care about instinctively.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Vague Angels - The Vague Angels of Vagary
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 145 (6/28) -- Gentleman Jim by Raymond Briggs

Seth muses in his introduction to Gentleman Jim as to why Briggs never has gotten the recognition Seth knows he deserves as a pioneer of the graphic novel, and comes down on the fact that Briggs's work has nearly always been published for younger readers. That's certainly part of it, but Briggs's usual tone of light whimsy -- no bad thing, I hasten to add, especially when it enlivens a book that otherwise could be deadly, like When the Wind Blows -- has at least as much to do with it. It's not exactly that Briggs's book are read by kids, in other words, as the fact that they so often look like they should be for kids, even when they weren't intended that way.

Gentleman Jim, for example, was originally published for adults -- and has been reprinted recently by Drawn & Quarterly, also for adults -- but Briggs's characters are as loosely formed (in their mental conceptions of themselves and their doughy, soft physical appearance) as his famous snowman, and the things that happen to them have a fabulist feel, almost like a cautionary tale or some other moralistic story told to children.

Jim, the "hero" of this story, is a middle-aged dreamer, a direct descendant of Walter Mitty, who cleans a London public toilet but wants to do something more adventurous. In the typical Mitty way, Jim doesn't particularly care what more adventurous thing he does, as long as he can do the things he likes to read about in books. But where Mitty is used by James Thurber to satirize that dreamy impulse -- and set it in contrast with Mitty's hard-headed wife -- Briggs has matched Jim with an equally dreamy wife, Hilda. Gentleman Jim sees Jim working his way through several unrealistic fantasies -- gorgeously painted by Briggs along the way; his art is lovely and the primary appeal of Gentleman Jim -- which sink him deeper and deeper into trouble in the real world. But Jim's innocence is impregnable; he ends the book as sweet and untouched as he began it, no matter what has happened or will happen to him.

Gentleman Jim is the story of a man who's unhappy in the most mild, lightweight way possible, and who is also completely unshakable in his sweetness, so the reader can't expect him to change or learn much of anything. It's lovely to look at, particularly Brigg's humorously detailed looks at Jim's fantasies, but readers who like characters that interact with the real world will find themselves disappointed.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/26

Just like every week, I got mail this week, and now I'm going to tell you about it. I haven't read either of these books yet, but I can tell that they're both just spiffy and that a significant fraction of you would love one or the other (or both!) of them.

First up is George Mann's steampunk mystery The Affinity Bridge -- now in a more affordable trade paperback edition, published by Tor on April 27th -- purely because it's the book whose cover I could find online. George is a great guy, and this is a mystery novel set in a clanking 1901 London that even has an airship on the cover -- how can you not love it?

The other book this time out is Beth Bernobich's debut novel Passion Play. Tor will publish Passion Play as a hardcover in October, so it's a little early for the cover art to be all over the web. (I tried to scan it from the galley, but there's a prominent "contact me for more information" sticker with the publicist's e-mail address and phone number, and I don't think I should be spreading that across the Internets.) This is a secondary world fantasy, with back cover copy that hints heavily at sex without actually saying anything gauche (it's all "every pleasure has a price" and "the other half of her heart" and "intrigue, seduction, and treachery"), treading -- as far as I can tell -- in the sexy fantasy footsteps of Jacqueline Carey, among others. It also features a fantasy kingdom named Melnek, which may or may not be on the continent of the Lower East Side. If you like your fantasy to come with heaving bosoms -- and why wouldn't you? -- it looks like Passion Play would be a great read.
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Listening to: B. Fleischmann - 24.12.
via FoxyTunes