Lord of the Rings Bumper Stickers!

I haven't managed to post yet today, so, instead, here's some frivolity unearthed from the Straight Dope Message Board; this was my contribution to a thread which was, slightly reworded, exactly the same as my title now:

I'm on my way to [logo] The Gap of Rohan [/logo]

Still not King

Close Air Support Provided by Gwahir

My Other Car is a Fell Beast

Movie Log: Tales from Earthsea

The family saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, and I see -- given that I have an empty post with this title sitting as a "draft" -- that I neglected to write anything about it when it was still fresh in my mind. And Tales from Earthsea is just mediocre enough that it slithers out of the memory, given half a chance.

It's not a bad movie, though it doesn't live up to any of its heritage -- it's from Studio Ghibli, being the first movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro, and of course it's based on Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent novels -- and it doesn't either adapt the original stories well or make a new story of its own to tell. Instead, it mixes and matches elements from three or four of the books in ways that don't really fit together, but still stays with a linear plot so that the word "tales" in the title doesn't make sense.

It looks wonderful, in that usual Ghibli way, and Goro Miyazaki has learned the lesson of stillness from his father -- Tales from Earthsea has a camera that lingers in a way never seen in American animation, or much in any movies these days. But I found myself wishing that I had been watching it in Japanese rather than English, because the story I would have made up while watching it to explain all of the various elements would certainly have held together better, and been a better adaptation of Le Guin, than the actual movie that emerged.

There are probably at least three blogs dedicated entirely to anatomizing exactly what's wrong with this movie; go see them for further details. On the positive side, I will say that it's vastly better than the live-action Earthsea miniseries, and equally better than most of the animated movies I've seen over the last decade. It's not bad at all, as I said. But a Studio Ghibli movie of Le Guin should have been something magnificent, and it isn't, at all. It's a lumpy pudding made from random pieces of Le Guin's Earthsea, and a viewer has to be careful not to crack a tooth on it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/9

As always, here's the listing of what arrived in my mailbox for review last week. Also as always, I haven't read any of it yet -- in fact, these books have piled up next to my computer with only a slight glance so far, so whatever I'm going to tell you about them will be based on my prior knowledge and whatever I can gleam from the packaging. I will tell you one thing: I'll never stoop to retyping someone else's blurb copy...mostly because I see, and do, far too much of that at work already.

First is the book with the best title: Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, a fictionalized memoir in comics form originally published in Japan in 1973 by one of the best-known and most acclaimed creators of manga. (And the fact that there are still major manga creators essentially unknown to English monoglots speaks to the immense depth and breadth of that universe in Japan -- it's like moviemaking; if making a movie was cheap and easy enough for nearly anyone to do it.) Onward is the story of a portion of the Japanese Imperial Army during the late years of WWII, centered on the dictate from the high command that their soldiers must die -- and die well -- if they can't win, and based closely on Mizuki's own wartime experiences. It's being published this month by Drawn & Quarterly, one of North America's greatest comics publisher and a house with a strong line in translated gekiga (manga stories for adults, more or less), from Yoshihiro Tatsumi to Susumu Katsumata.

DAW is publishing three mass-market books in May, and those are:

• Night Mares in the Hamptons, second in a contemporary fantasy series by Celia Jerome, about a graphic novelist (Wilow Tate) who is one of the rare magical Visualizers, able to bring creatures from Faerie into the real world by drawing them. This time out, she needs to save her small Hamptons town from the havoc caused by three rampaging magical mares, with the help of a world-famous horse-whisperer (who, in best urban fantasy fashion, seems to be a hunky cowboy type).
• Spellcast, a novel by Barbara Ashford that combines summer stock theater and fantasy -- in a way the back-cover copy is reticent about specifically describing -- in a small Vermont town.
• Well of Sorrows, by Benjamin Tate, was originally published in hardcover last year, and is an epic-fantasy take on the colonization of America, with young Colin Harten coming to a new continent with his family to escape wars among the nobles of Andover, and finding what seem to be dwarves (dwarren) and elves (Alvitshai) there, along with his own inevitable magical destiny.

Always the Vampire is the third in a light-hearted paranormal romance series about vampire princess Francesca Marinelli (described as "Gidget-esque" in a description of the first book, La Vida Vampire) by Nancy Haddock. This time around, Francesca is preparing to be the maid of honor at her best friend's wedding when a magical construct called the Void (not the most original name, I suppose) puts the kibosh on her boyfriend (whose name is Saber, which is, I have to admit, pretty darn original), and she has to save everyone once again. It's a trade paperback from Berkley, coming May 3rd.

I was going to say that I used to know something about this next book, but then I unremembered it. But that would have been a really lousy joke, and dumb as well. So I won't. Peter Orullian's The Unremembered is the first novel -- and the first in a big epic fantasy series -- from a guy with a really striking author's photo and the usual odd resume (marketing for Xbox, touring internationally as a vocalist), and it's being published in hardcover from Tor tomorrow. Orullian has been blogging for Suvudu ahead of the publication of this book -- just the way that book marketers like me are always urging new authors to do, to get out and "get their names known" -- and also has an impressive website. My epic-fantasy taste buds are still regenerating from being burned out over sixteen years at the SFBC, but Unremembered looks like a solid, old-school-style epic, with a forgotten danger to the entire world held back by a crumbling magical barrier and a young man with a destiny he doesn't realize.

S.M. Stirling is in the middle of a straight-up urban fantasy trilogy -- not the first thing I ever would have expected from a usually much more SFnal writer -- with The Council of Shadows, the sequel to A Taint in the Blood. I didn't read the first one, but our hero is Adrian Breze, once of the nicer members of the secret race of Shadowspawn (shapeshifting predators who are probably somewhere in the werewolf sector of UF, not anything to do with Andrew Offutt's swords & sorcery hero), and this time out he's also battling a plot to destroy/conquer/enslave all of mankind. (Fantasy, as always, is full of megalomaniacs.) Council is coming from Roc in hardcover on May 3rd.

The Worst Thing is a thriller from Aaron Elkins -- author of the Edgar Award-winning Gideon Oliver series of mysteries, plus a number of other books -- about a man who was abducted as a small boy, and now, in mid-adulthood, spends his life designing hostage-negotiation programs. Since the book is named The Worst Thing, we can all guess what happens to him: he gets held hostage again, while on a business trip to Iceland, and has to survive his own reactions as well as his captors. Worst Thing is a Berkley Prime Crime hardcover, coming May 3rd.

And last this week is another manga -- which came shrink-wrapped, indicating that it's not at all for younger readers -- Lychee Light Club from Usamaru Furuya. (It's also based on a play by a group called Tokyo Grand Guignol, which may give you another indication of the contents.) It's another story about a club of Japanese students, but this Light Club -- a secret brotherhood that meets in an abandoned factory in their dark, dirty industrial town -- is building a robot fueled by lychee fruits to further their goals of never having to grow up or have contact with girls. Vertical will publish Lychee on April 26th.

Font Update

I've gotten a couple of complaints since my Font Overhaul of a few weeks back, and I noticed myself that the blog was difficult to read on Windows machines -- I work on a Mac at home, and it looks just fine in every browser I can think of on a Mac -- so I've changed the main-text font back to boring old Times New Roman.

It doesn't fit with the rest of the font "family," but it may be something people can actually, physically read, and the latter is definitely more important. Please send any comments about readability to my e-mail (see column to the left for details) or leave them on this post -- I'll get them either way.

Looking for a New Assistant

Updated With Real Link!

This job hasn't been posted yet, but I have gotten all of the approvals signed off, so I can let the world know: I'm looking to hire a new assistant. (I'll update this post with a link to the job, once it has been posted; for now, interested parties could e-mail me directly at the address to the left.)

My previous assistant has moved on and up to a new job within the wonderful world of Wiley -- and please take that as a subtle hint that such fortune could eventually happen to my next assistant as well -- and so I desperately need someone new to sit in a cube just outside my office-icle and do all kinds of complicated publishing-related stuff.

The job reports both to me and to my boss, and supports a group of five marketers (some of us more than others), in a fast-paced, hard-working, fun-loving, adjectivally-hyphenated group we like to call Wiley Global Finance -- google us for more details. (And that "global" isn't simply puffery -- Wiley publishes globally in English, and this position will entail regular contact with colleagues around the world.)

We're looking for someone with 1-3 years of experience, but we're open to various kinds of experience: publishing, digital media, marketing in other areas, or something else related to finance, accounting, and markets. Our group is aggressively moving into digital products of various kinds -- ebooks are the most minor, obvious piece of that -- and we're looking to find someone who will help us continue moving forward. We have openings at the marketing assistant level only rarely; this is not an opportunity that comes very often.

John Wiley & Sons is a strongly growing, rock-solid company (over two hundred years old, and check out the course of our stock price over the last year) that publishes heavily in the less-glamorous ends of the information world -- we're public, so you could easily check to see how we're fared over the past few years and what our leadership team says about the future. And we're located in lovely Hoboken -- not New York, but you can't see New York from New York, either -- which is great for people who live in New Jersey and the southern half of Manhattan.

This is a "book publishing" job, if you want to be excessively reductive about it, but that may not be true in five years -- or two, or even one. Wiley is a company run by smart people with real plans and visions, and I love what our future looks like. Please contact me directly or click here for more details -- and please feel free to let anyone else know about this job.

Quote of the Week: Teen Riot!

"This is a weapon of the American psychological war aimed at infecting part of the population with a new philosophical outlook of inhumanity...in order to prepare for war."
- East German magazine Young World, in 1956, during an attack of the vapors over Elvis Presley

Movie Log: Morning Glory

Several times while The Wife and I were watching Morning Glory, the Blu-Ray quietly skipped ahead a chapter or three, jumping over twenty minutes or so at a clip. Sneakily, it repeatedly tried to do that by jumping between scenes that both featured the young heroine (Rachel McAdams) having a meeting with her boss (Jeff Goldblum). When the movie itself tries to tell you, "You don't really want to watch this," it's not a good sign. Possibly worse, we didn't realize the first jump had happened until the second one hit -- and didn't really miss the twenty minutes in which the movie laboriously explained how McAdams went from a minor producer on a minor early-morning cable show out in the wilds of New Jersey to running the big morning show for what's supposed to be one of the Big Three networks in New York.

Morning Glory for a long time looks like it's going to become yet another story in which a hard-working young person learns to quit and slack off for the greater glory of her soul, but ends up slightly less cliched than that in the end. McAdams is painfully perky, and has the unrealistic klutziness that modern movies use to telegraph that she is the female lead in a romantic comedy, but she does work hard, and she does mean well. Her job, basically, is to drag that morning TV show away from the bottom of the ratings, and her great hope of doing so was to team gruff, grizzled veteran newsman Harrison Ford (playing it by finding the least likable aspects of Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Andy Rooney) with the existing female host of the show, Diane Keaton.

And, in a movie made two or more decades ago, the relationship between Keaton and Ford would be the center of the movie -- it should be the center of the movie. But it's not, because the big face at the middle of any movie poster has to be young and perky, so McAdams is shoehorned into every scene. Oddly, her own relationship -- with the nearly colorless Patrick Wilson, there primarily to be the hunky guy who she clearly deserves and so doesn't need to have any characterization of his own -- is mostly filled in through implication and allusion, as if the movie couldn't be bothered to actually have a romance in its romantic comedy.

So Morning Glory is shiny and obvious and constructed entirely according to formula: it's a Hollywood romantic comedy; we all expected that. Keaton and Ford are good in it -- though they could have been much better if the movie were allowed to be about them, and not the random young klutz wandering through their lives. And -- even though I kept a beady eye on the time-code on my disc player throughout the second hour of the movie -- I kept getting the feeling that I was still missing scenes, and this time they were scenes that didn't make it into the movie at all. In any case, Morning Glory won't thrill anyone but died-in-the-wool Harrison Ford fans, but it won't offend anyone but the most Milquetoast of Dubuque grandmothers, either.

Tonight's Festivities

The Wife and I spent more than a hour this evening chatting with a gentleman from a company that provides sump pumps -- have I mentioned the recent flood and our sleepness night? it's been much on our minds since -- coming to the conclusion that we'll need to move all of my books five feet away from the walls in the basement (where she exiled me and the books when Thing 1 was born) to have this work done.

As you might guess, I have a lot of books, so this idea does not fill me with joy. In fact, I'm utterly dreading it, since I'm pretty sure I have at least a ton of paper that will need to be shifted. (Shifted once, so the men can do their work, and then, eventually, shifted back again, probably to new shelves.)

I should be writing here about some book I've read or movie I've seen, but all I can do is obsess about moving all of those mounds of paper. Maybe tomorrow.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead by Dave Barry

Dave Barry is not a serious writer, or a deep writer, or an important writer. But he's a funny writer, and has been consistently funny for about thirty years now, which is no small thing. (I realize that I actually remember when Barry moved his column to the Miami Herald, back in the late '80s, and that I worried that it might be bad for his Northeastern-guy humor. It wasn't.)

Barry is probably the last of the great American newspaper humorists, part of a tradition that flourished hugely in the generation just before his -- with Art Buchwald, Mike Royko, Russell Baker, and plenty of others -- but stretches back past Mark Twain to Kin Hubbard and other names forgotten by all but specialists today. Barry is a smartass, as the newspaper humorist so often were, but it was always a soft smartassery, suitable for your hip aunt if not for your disapproving grandmother. And even a decade out of the day-to-day newspaper grind, he still writes short, puffy pieces that avoid the real third-rails of American writing (politics, religion, and privilege) while focusing on superficially transgressive material: fart jokes, booger jokes, "men are stupid" jokes, "women are crazy" jokes, "aren't we suburban people wacky" jokes. And he has the requisite sentimental streak -- American newspapers are as sentimental as the day is long -- winning the Pulitzer in the '80s in large part for a column about the birth of his son and continuing to dive into pathos in between booger jokes.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead is an original collection of Barry essays, possibly the first of its kind. He's written standalone books for decades -- all the way back to his first, The Taming of the Screw -- but they were always about single topics, while the essay collections gathered up a bunch of newspaper columns (and they did pile up, at one or more a week) to give them a more permanent form. So this book is a lot like many other Barry books, miscellaneous and scattershot, jumping from the amusements of his wife's Judaism to riffs on Miami, from a nearly-straight account of why men should get a colonoscopy at age fifty to a (quite good) Twilight parody, from his script for 24 to an examination of why youth sports are being ruined by parents. It's all fairly obvious material; Barry has never been a trail-blazer, and his topics are usually ones that have been well-worked by others. But that's part of the appeal, as well: like a Borscht Belt comedian, Barry tells you the jokes you expect, about the things you already think are funny, and makes you laugh at them every Sunday night (for a two-drink minimum.)

This is a silly book, with very little substance in it. Barry instinctively realizes that no one goes to him for real seriousness, and he relies on faux-seriousness when he comes close to important issues. It's a fine Dave Barry book, entirely suited for reading on an airplane, in the smallest room in the house (though these essays are notably longer than his old newspaper columns, which may fit less well in that milieu), or -- as I read it -- on a train. If you're within two sigma of being a typical American, Dave Barry will make you chuckle out loud at least once with this book.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/2

I tend to assume that you folks know the drill by now -- that I get books from publishers to review because I post reviews here, and that guilt drove me to list those books every week, since I'll never manage to review more than 20% or so of the stuff I see, so these lists are based on a quick glance and common knowledge -- but perhaps that's an unwarranted assumption. If so, please re-read the previous sentence more carefully.

This week, I'll lead off with Reunion, the new graphic novel from Pascal Girard, which is this week's entry in the "I would have bought it anyway" category. Girard is a Francophile Francophone [2] Canadian cartoonist who I discovered with his heartbreaking, amazing Nicolas, a short, spare graphic novel about the childhood death of his kid brother. (And that makes it sound like spinach, I know: but it's a touching, lovely, brilliant book  that is well worth reading.) I reviewed Nicolas for ComicMix, and decided to look out for more books by Girard. This is another autobiographical story, with Girard going to his ten-year high school reunion (platonically) with the girl he had a crush on back then. And Drawn & Quarterly is publishing it, in English, everywhere in North America this month.



Wolfsangel is the first book in a planned historical fantasy series by M.D. Lachlan (pseudonym for a British writer whose real name can be found with a bit of judicious Googling and Wikipedia'ing), published as a trade paperback from Pyr last week (and in the UK last year). It has a brutal Viking king, at least one prophecy, witches who live on a troll wall, and the gods Odin and Loki -- plus a great wolf peering out at you from the cover. How can you resist?

The Rise of the Iron Moon is the third novel in a lose steampunk series from the excitable British writer Stephen Hunt, in which a friendless orphan suddenly finds herself on the run with a foreign vagrant and dealing with the fate of her entire nation. (No point for guessing that she has a Secret Destiny; every genre protagonist is issued a Secret Destiny during the dice-rolling stage of character generation.) Tor published Iron Moon as a hardcover a couple of weeks ago, back in March -- so you should be able to find it everywhere [1] now.

And last for this week is a new novel from Grandmaster Frederik Pohl -- over ninety and still writing regularly, as you'd know if you followed his Hugo-winning blog -- All the Lives He Led, a SF story about the 2000th anniversary of the Mount Vesuvius eruption, and one ex-American caught up in the middle of plots and mysterious disappearances ahead of that grand celebration. It's also from Tor, also hardcover, and is officially on-sale on April 12th.


[1] Possibly not including major book retailers fighting through bankruptcy proceedings, of course, and only within the narrow geographical regions in which Tor has license to sell books.

[2] He's probably a Francophile as well, since his books are first published in France. But, as was pointed out to me in email, what I meant to say is that he works in French, and thus is a Francophone.

Blackout & All Clear by Connie Willis

These are not two novels. Blackout and All Clear together are not even one novel, as you may have heard. Instead, Connie Willis's two-decker edifice is a different kind of fiction, a galloping, unruly metaphor for war: big, confusing, frustrating, unwieldy, and, finally, unable to be comprehended as a single thing. At its best, this messy, overlong, and incredibly frustrating object is a screwball tragedy, a contradictory thing that Willis tries to will into existence, and, at its worst, this is the story in which all of Willis's worst tendencies (and a few of her best) take over her work and run it all into the ground. It does have a more-or-less straightforward narrative, told very linearly for a time-travel story, but that story is so overstuffed and sprawling that any attempt to take it as a whole will fail: this is a work of parts, and criticism of it will inevitably fall into parts as well.

Connie Willis is our last surviving Victorian novelist: her books privilege feeling over thought to a degree unusual even in the wilder reaches of genre fantasy, let along the more straitlaced confines of science fiction, and she never tells us something once if she can tell it to us thirty-six times. Her cast here, despite outward differences and though supposedly of all ages and both sexes, really all boil down to a single type: the forgetful, word-stumbling, bumbling, good-natured teetotal spinster, everyone's tedious and least favorite maiden aunt. She also has the 19th century writer's weakness for old-fashioned religion: in her case, it's a only mildly science-fictionized version of predestination, with long explications of what the continuum -- the science-fictional Maguffin, but really Willis's very thinly-veiled stand-in for the God she's sure a SF audience would never accept -- wants, or might want, or what it obviously is trying to make happen. Sometimes Willis's characters are sinners in the hand of an angry god, and sometimes the beloved sheep of a benevolent shepherd, but they never are creatures with their own power to act and their own motives and aims: they're purely observers, historians without a point of view or a theory, mere camera eyes sent to provide yet more eyewitness accounts of things already exhaustively documented.

Blackout begins with a thicket of storylines, from different points of view, but they will all come together eventually, and the reader soon realizes that nothing at all new will be introduced in this story past the first hundred pages: Blackout/All Clear is the extended working out of an initial set of circumstances that Willis has very carefully stage-managed to march her characters through the parts of the WWII Blitz that she finds most interesting, with stops along the way for every one of the note-cards Willis made during her research. Three young -- well, she says they're young, but they act like middle-aged vicars -- researchers from the time-travel research center in 2060 Oxford are all on separate missions to 1939: Polly Churchill, Merope "Eileen" Ward, and Michael Davies. Two minor characters are left back in Oxford: Mr. Dunworthy, the distant but avuncular head of the program, and Colin Templar, a teenager with a crush on Polly. Every other character -- and there are lots of them, in the thousand-plus pages of these two volumes -- are all background figures of 1939, whom our protagonists interact with but always consider as already dead in their "real" time. So only Polly, Eileen, and Michael are "real" -- only their actions matter.

But they're terrified of acting at all -- their entire function is to observe and record, not to touch a single thing, with an odd "Sound of Thunder" hysteria unlikely in a time-travel program that has been running for a generation. [1] They spend their time endlessly remembering what they've done -- or should have done, or could have done, or might yet do -- like a Catholic running the rosary, and equally frantically trying to avoid doing anything that might have an effect on anything. This novel is a blizzard of "what if"s, all constructed by characters who could never conceive of actually doing anything, instead of endlessly ruminating about what other people might have done, or might be doing, or could still yet do in the future, or what the ramifications of the things that they didn't want to do might possibly have, in every possible permutation of probability.

So they all land in 1939, more or less in accordance with their research plans, and then things begin to go bad, in the usual Willis way: everyone is insanely busy, due to their easily-imposed-upon good natures and can-do attitudes, and so they have to procrastinate checking in with 2060. They all discover, before too long, that they are each stuck in 1939, that the time-travel "drops" meant to retrieve them and provide quick communication back to 2060 are failing to open at all. They then each run around frantically -- but quietly, still trying not to affect any butterflies that might kill dinosaurs -- and finally, after endless tedious complications, meet up in London. And then eight hundred more pages of complications -- mostly involving end-of-chapter cliffhangers in which someone seems to be dead, but later turns out to be fine -- ensue.

Each chapter is fine, taken alone; Willis may have a limited set of characters that she can write about believably, but she sticks entirely within her comfort zone here, so all of her people are, individually, understandable. But as chapter piles upon chapter like brick upon brick, and the reader keeps checking to see how much more of this there will be, the lurking realization that this is all the plot Willis is going to provide gets stronger and stronger. Blackout and All Clear are an epic of historical minutia, in which the finest details of which buildings were bombed on which days, and which bombs were incendiaries and which were HE are the only topics of conversation and internal monologue for tens of pages at a time. Her characters don't grow, they only change in the slightest, most basic ways suitable to a pull-up-your-socks propaganda film from the actual 1940s, and they never stop thinking about the same boring details over and over and over. It's like spending 1,132 pages in the company of a provincial minister's wife who won't stop wondering if she turned the gas over off or not.

Willis has never been an erotic writer, or one whose characters exhibit much sensation below the belly-button, but here she takes the old saying "No sex please, we're British" to a new height, as a small group of young people marooned in the middle of a huge war never even think about sex, as if the thousand-plus pages of these two volumes was a single long letter home to Mother, filled with teas with vicars and charity jumble sales. There are love interests, in a very distant manner, but no one in either of these volumes ever seems to have even heard a rumor that such a thing as sex ever existed. Readers may differ on the believability of particular reactions to danger, but it is remarkable that all of Willis's characters behave identically in this matter.

Willis's characters are so well-meaning and good-hearted, like so many overeager puppies, that it takes a while for the reader to sour on them. (Some readers may make it all the way to the end of All Clear without reaching the point of sourness; those are the lucky ones.) But, once that sourness sets in, it is all-encroaching -- Willis's people are so relentlessly Willisian, so limited and befuddled and lost, that they provide no moment of rest from their puppyish caprices. And that essential confusion and befuddlement can make the reader furious when her characters finally become actually befuddled, by bomb-blast or trauma or all of the other shocks that flesh in wartime is heir to, as one realizes that Willis has vast new heights of incomprehension and panic available that she's barely touched in the previous seven hundred pages.

Perhaps because of my day-job, I also found myself wondering about -- well, let me be more honest: complaining bitterly and repeatedly about -- the internal governance and organizational control of this unnamed "Oxford" time-travel organization. It's clearly not ISO 9000 compliant, nor is it compliant with any type of internal-control scheme, hitherto invented or yet to be born: it's an utter mess, run by one man out of his own head with no backups, no written procedures, no organization, and not a lick of sense. There are start-ups run by thirteen-year-olds and their dogs in a garage in San Mateo that have a clearer governance structure and lines of communication than Willis's supposedly world-class research and technology facility. That speaks to the screwball end of the screwball tragedy: Willis has spent the last two decades mostly writing about frenzied people, at their wits' end and working just as quickly as they can, sinking slowly beneath the weight of their (usually comical) problems. (Her last novel, Passage, tried to turn this into more serious territory, with similar problems with tone and scope as in these books.) This time, Willis wants to muster the weight and majesty of tragedy to stand behind that farce -- to have a more Shakespearean undertone to her characters' many frantic actions, to have their scatterbrained-ness be sad rather than funny. But she writes in the same tone, with the same cadence, and the same style as her many comedies -- the screwball is entirely there, but the essential tragic tone is not. (And, as I hinted above, the Victorian novelist in Willis isn't happy with tragedy for more central reasons.)

Blackout and All Clear are frustrating books because of their good parts. If they were merely tedious and overlong, a reader could easily give up on them, but they're not. Willis is a master storyteller, and, even when she only gives herself these scraps of narrative to run out to epic proportions, she makes her sentences and pages and scenes full of brilliant moments, thoughtful ruminations, and flashing insights. This two-volumed object is a massive disappointment as a sequel to Willis's excellent Doomsday Book, but perhaps this is the story we should have expected after the similarly overlong and frantic Passage. Willis is a slow writer, and doesn't have many more novels in her, but I'm sure she has several that are much better than this mess, and possibly even one better than Doomsday Book, if she can only curb her own worst instincts, learn to write about different kinds of people, and save the screwball for comedies.


[1] And these are, frankly, lousy historians: the time-travel program seems to be given over entirely to Oxford graduate students, who have thin theses (if any) and whose mission appears to be merely to add to the already-huge bulk of eyewitness accounts of famous events without providing any insight or interpretation to bald facts. If one compares this to how access to expensive scientific machinery is doled out in the real world -- mostly in accordance with hierarchies of importance, or of the importance of a person's research, with a strong tropism towards the important and powerful -- one realizes how utterly ridiculous the premise is. (And that's not even mentioning the fact that Oxford -- the time-travel research facility doesn't seem to actually have a name of its own -- runs itself like a fire department staffed by the Three Stooges.)

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell has found a shtik that works for her -- snarky recountings of parts of American history that reflect badly on us as a people and particularly on the people involved -- and she continues in the established vein of her last book, The Wordy Shipmates, with this year's Unfamiliar Fishes. She's shifted focus from Wordy's New England Pilgrims to Unfamiliar's Hawaiian missionaries, but she's still fascinated by religious loonies coming in by ship to oppress the local people and expand the world of their dour, constricting Protestantism.

(I've previously covered Wordy Shipmates, Vowell's essay collection The Partly Cloudy Patriot, and her first book-length essay, Assassination Vacation, which I'd still recommend as the best place to start with Vowell.)

Vowell is clearly a writer who loves doing her research -- Unfamiliar is full of references to time spent in musty archives, and even more full of notes that she'd only find in those archives -- but all of that research is used to bolster the conclusions that she's already arrived at: that history is a pure record of horrors and bad acts, which can be lightened through humor but from which no one comes out looking good. (If she's in any school of history, it's the pessimistic one.) And so Unfamiliar is the record of how white people, primarily Americans, came to the Hawaiian islands, caused the death of a great majority of the inhabitants [1], imposed their exceptionally strict and starchy brand of evangelical Christianity on whoever was left, took all the good land and manipulated the government to get all of the businesses, and then stole the country away entirely as soon as they had the chance.

I like reading Vowell, I really do -- she's got a fun, zippy voice, and her casual command of endless facts is thrilling -- but I always come out of a Vowell volume thinking that I'm supposed to be depressed and remorseful for being a horrible, world-destroying white guy. (But that then might send me down the typical path for remorseful white guys -- to become deeply religious and devoted to saving the world, which would make me even more one of the people she dislikes but feels compelled to write about.)

And she really needs to start structuring her books; they're still just overgrown essays, in which she wanders around her topic until she has enough pages for a book. A little rigor and spine would be an excellent thing to add to the next Vowell production -- which, from the evidence, will likely be about white people coming to some other American land and causing trouble for the locals -- I predict it will be a history of Texas.


[1] Mostly inadvertently, which makes this a reasonably light-hearted book for Vowell; no one was passing out smallpox-laded blankets at Diamond Head.

Today's Top News

As usual, the first of April is the date for a blizzard of surprising news, with a vast panoply of unexpected and odd happenings. Antick Musings will strive to list as many of these unusual news stories as possible, as we have in past years. But we do caution readers to always look at their calendars when evaluating the fact content of any new piece of information.

(Past installments of this annual round-up include 2010's A Most Auspicious Day, 2009's Greetings of the Day, and 2008's April's Fools. Prior to that, they were held on the now-defunct blog I wrote for my then-employer, who shall remain nameless here.)

• Today's issue of Shelf Awareness, the independent booksellers' newsletter, includes articles on Len Riggio firing himself, Jeff Bezos's response to being pulled over for speeding, Borders's new plans to save itself, news of a new distributor for Miskatonic University Press, and more.
• Tor.com has an excerpt from John Scalzi's upcoming book The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. Update: Scalzi himself also writes about his new project.
• All-Friday, all-the-time at Funny Or Die!
• ComicMix has the news of a new team on Wonder Woman: Dave Sim will handle the main feature, with Scott Adams contributing a backup strip about her non-superhero life.
• ComicMix also reports a rumor that a fan-favorite actor is jumping into the current Zack Snyder-directed movie Superman: Man of Steel.
• From the other side of my life comes word that the IRS will offer a discount for cash on this year's returns.
• YouTube has the top viral images of 1911.
• Spike from Peanuts shares his favorite joke of the day.

More news will certainly appear throughout the day; this post will be updated as they are found. Antick Musings welcomes any links to pieces of April-specific news; please place them in comments or e-mail the proprietor using the address to the left of this very post.

Update 1: A Dribble of Ink quotes George R.R. Martin's UK editor about the imminent splitting of A Dance With Dragons into two books. Coming soon: A Menagerie of Midgets!

Update 1-A: GRRM himself refutes this rumor: Dance With Dragons is being split into five books!

Update 2: Charles Stross' popular blog, Charlie's Diary, has been acquired by Cheezburger, and it was yummy.

Update 3: Google has a flood of exciting new products and services this year, with Gmail Motion -- a Kinect-style way of interfacing with your cloud-based e-mail --  already in beta, and a version for Google Docs in development. Google Voice has introduced the Voice-alyzer, which allows users to set up filters to prevent drunk dialing. Google is also looking to expand its team of Autocompleters. It's also a good idea to google "helvetica" today.

Update 4: The webcomic The New Adventures of Queen Victoria has been seized by Homeland Security.

Readercon has announced their "book club" selections for this year.

Jay Lake is ditching his current life to become a monk.

The great report on the 1957 spaghetti harvest is available on YouTube.

The Huffington Post has erected a paywall -- which only applies to New York Times employees.

Starbucks has found a way to be even more ubiquitous.

Google's display ads are going old-school.

Speaking of retro, Hulu is all about the mid-90s.

DC Comics will crack down on tattooed representations of their trademarked properties.

PLAYMOBIL has a new Apple Store playset, for hipster children.

Two words: lightsaber popsicles.

My younger son would appreciate the Minecraft USB Desktop Nether Portal.

Update 5: DC Comics's next big crossover, Disarmed, brings new meaning to the phrase "right to bear arms."

Locus magazine, the newspaper of the SF world, has its usual April news shockers:

• Shaun Tan will join Dancing with the Stars.
• SFWA is suing just about everyone for the fact that the real world is copying SF.
• Paolo Bacigalupi and Peter Watts, not content to be individually depressing, are teaming up to edit an anthology of the world's most wrist-slashing stories.

Update 6: The long and storied history of Tor Books.

Update 7 and final (a day later): Pixar will be creating a 3D CGI American version of Hayao Miyazaki's beloved My Neighbor Totoro.

The ebook publisher Smashwords bought Amazon.

Google launched an Android app that translates what animals are saying.

The British government imposed quotas for foreign authors in UK bookshops.

Quote of the Week: Aristotelian Genetics

"And if, in the act of copulation, the woman look earnestly on the man, and fix her mind on him, the child will resemble its father. Nay, if a woman, even in unlawful copulation, fix her mind upon her husband, the child will resemble him even if he did not beget it."
- Aristotle, The Masterpiece, 4th century BC, preparing the ground for a legion of men seeking to avoid paying child support

Books Read in March

I was completely free of the Book-A-Day shackles this month for the first time since January 2010, which meant that 1) I only read a few books this month, but didn't hop around to finish up short books all the time and 2) that there's a stack on top of my printer, waiting for me to write about them. I still expect these posts to come, so excuse the lack of links....

• Connie Willis, All Clear (3/1)
  
• Joe Daly, Dungeon Quest, Book Two (3/1)
  Look for my review in the April issue of the unkillable Realms of Fantasy
  
• Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (3/3)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 48 (3/6)
  
• R. Crumb, The Book of Mr. Natural (3/6)
  
• Barry Deutsch, Hereville (3/7)
  
• Mary Robinette Kowal, Shades of Milk and Honey (3/8)
  
• Jo Walton, Among Others (3/14)
  
• P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards (3/16)
  
• Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, & George Kalogerakis, Spy: The Funny Years (3/20)
  
• Patrick Rothfus, The Wise Man's Fear (3/29)
  
• Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes (3/31)
  

And that's that. Looking at what I said last month that I wanted to read, Tiassa and Home Fires and One of Our Thursdays Is Missing are still on the unread stack, and have been joined by Fuzzy Nation and 7th Sigma. But I did get through The Wise Man's Fear, which I wasn't expecting to jump into so quickly, and that sucker is big. This was also mostly a library month, with Bad Science, Unfamiliar Fishes, Shades of Milk and Honey, and the big fat Rothfuss brick all coming in shiny plastic covers -- I find that library books always shove their way up to the top of the unread stack by virtue of the deadline, so getting library books is an admission that you'll read them before other things.