Dick and Clarke Winners

Awards season continues to roll on in the lands of science fiction, with two biggies coming out about a week ago -- just in time for me to run off for a long and busy week of off-site meetings. So, if you were counting on me to give you this news, you're very behind the party. But I still intermittently try to be the skiffy news-and-awardsy blog that I wrote for That Bookclub Company once upon a time, so I still feel compelled to tell you that...

First: The 2011 Philip K. Dick Award, for a distinguished work of science fiction published in paperback in the previous year, went to Mark Hodder's The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack.

(It's in my groaning to-be-read stacks, and now I want even more to get to it -- when I do, exactly, will depend on whether I decide to read all of the Hugo nominees or not.)

Second: The 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award, for the best science fiction novel published in the UK the previous year, went to Lauren Beukes for Zoo City.

(I may have that around somewhere, as well -- I think I got an advance copy at some point.)

Now, two datapoints may be all that's required to define a line, but they define a trend only very bluntly -- but, still, it's interesting to see that these two awards, both given by juries of smart SFnal people (very different ones, in two different countries) both gave awards to newer writers, not part of the  established center of the genre, and both published by smaller, scrappier publishing houses run by smart editors who know the corporate publishing world but got away from it.

It may be a pattern; it may not. There's nothing at all that fits that profile nominated for the Nebula for Best Novel, though The Dervish House half-counts on the Hugo ballot. (It's US publisher is Pyr, the same as Spring Heeled Jack, but it's published by the old, well-established and pretty dominant house Gollancz in the UK.) It will also be interesting to see what the World Fantasy judges -- who, if the trauma of my year in the hot seat has sufficiently worn off to remember how it happened, will be spending this month frantically beavering away at the ever-growing stacks of books showing up daily at their homes in ever-stranger forms of packaging (I wonder if judges are starting to get any of this material in electronic form yet?) while trying to hit an early-summer deadline for their voting -- put on their ballot as well.

In any case -- these are two of the major awards in the field, and we all can either say "Aha! I already read that one!" or make a thoughtful face and pencil a new book or two on the ever-growing list of books we fully intend to read at some point.

Quote of the Week: Asch on Writing

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."
- Sholem Asch

Ways To Know You're In Florida, # 7126

There's a heavily-tanned girl in a bikini, standing up in a boat...

...while that boat is being pulled out of a parking lot on a trailer by a pickup truck.

Memories of an Ill-Spent Youth

I'm still down in Florida, engaging in Sales-Meeting-type behavior, which leaves even less time for blogging than usual. (Though I did just catch up on my editorial cartoons -- there was a bumper crop of Osama-is-dead stuff that I hadn't gotten through yet -- and set a bunch of posts to go up tomorrow at Editorial Explanations.) So, instead of new content, here's something old, about which I now have deeply mixed feeling, since my older son is now 13 and I don't think he knows where my equivalent "dirty bits" are. On the other hand, he has been on the Internet, which is probably much worse. I'll have to ask him about it in, oh, ten or fifteen years.

This is another snippet resurrected from the Straight Dope Message Board; a thread there in 2005 asked the question "What books did you read for the 'dirty bits' when you were young?" I wandered somewhat from the topic, but here's what I wrote then:

My parents had a copy of Guy Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife in a small bookcase out in the den. I discovered it at the age of eleven or so, and it was very informative reading for a young boy. Of course, I then expected life to be like a '60s California wife-swapping ring, but that was a small price to pay.

In the same room there was a larger bookcase, with glass doors. It had a lock, but was nearly always unlocked. On the shelves were the usual '70s and '80s bestsellers -- Arthur Hailey, James Clavell, etc. I didn't pay much attention to it. And then, one day, I realized the books on one shelf sat slightly farther forward than the others. So, when no one else was home, I looked behind those books and found Anais Nin's Delta of Venus. It practically scorched my hands, and I dug it out as often as I possibly could.

Those two might be a bit off the subject for this conversation, since they're nearly all "dirty bits," but they are the books I remember fondly from my youth. (And also learning where my father kept the Playboys, around the same time.)

Reason Why My Wife Is Awesome of the Day

So I'm down in Florida for my company's big Sales Conference -- lots of meetings, over the entire week. And tonight is the big Welcome Dinner, which is universally called "the Prom" by my colleagues, since it's the only time we get dressed up the whole week. (And it used to be vastly more dressy, I've heard, back before my time.)

So I call my wife during a break between meetings today, and tell her my schedule: meetings straight until 4:15, and then running back to my hotel (I got bumped from the HQ hotel this year)to change and get ready for "the Prom."

Her reply?

"Well,just don't get her pregnant."

The Wonders of Technology

I'm down in sunny Florida this week, participating in my employer's massive once-a-year Sales Conference (well, we have two others, more or less, but they're in a hotel the next town over from the office, so they're not off-site for those of us in Hoboken).

And this year I decided to go computer-light -- running with just my iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard. (Which I had anyway; it's the tiny wireless keyboard that came with my new Mac -- I'm never going to use this wretched thing at home, but it's just fine for travel.)

I knew I could handle work e-mails this way -- I've done it before, and even used the iPad's on-screen keyboard to poke out multi-paragraph e-mails when I had to -- but I wasn't sure if it would handle blogging. But I've just created and set to post a Clay Jones cartoon for Editorial Explanations, and, along the way, finally figured out how to do copy-and-paste on an iPad. (It's not nearly as easy and intutive as using a mouse is, but maybe using a mouse didn't seem that easy twenty-five years ago, either.)

So I'm still going to be very busy with real work this week. But if I do have time for blogging, you folks will not be spared my random blatherings. This may be a good or bad thing, depending on your opinion of the worth of Editorial Explanations.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/30

During the last week of April, I got stuff in the mail in the hopes that I would read it and review it here. (I've said it before, but it bears repeating: despite everything, this world does have a decent share of awesomeness.) I haven't read them yet, but here's what I can tell you about them, despite that handicap:

Embassytown is the new novel by China Mieville, coming as a hardcover from Del Rey on May 17th. And it's a science fiction novel -- his first, unless you have a really good argument about The City & The City. In fact, it looks like another angle on the cluster of concerns that motivated City & City -- it's set in a city uneasily shared shared by two groups, on an alien world far in the future. And the action of this novel seems to begin with the arrival of a new group of humans, which will shift the balance of power. Mieville has always been deeply interested in cities -- their governance, communities, their wonders and terrors -- so it will definitely be interesting to see him translate that into a SFnal milieu.

The Chaos Crystal is the fourth and last in Jennifer Fallon's "Tide Lords" series, about one of a group of Immortals who has been trying -- for longer than the human race has been around -- to finally die. I've read some of Fallon's earlier novels (though not this series, sadly), and she's got a great grasp of character and a broad scope -- she writes big fantasy books that aren't just about the same people doing many different things in a row, but of many people doing many things, just like a real world. This one will be published by Tor US in hardcover on May 10th; Fallon is Australian, so it's probably already available at her end of the globe, and might just have hit the rest of the Commonwealth as well. (If you haven't read the series at all, I expect the best place to begin would be the first book, The Immortal Prince.)

Also from Tor in hardcover on the very same day is probably the most anticipated SF debut novel since at least Counting Heads -- Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief. I've been hearing about Rajaniemi and this novel for a few years now, so I hope it lives up to the advance notice. I'm also amused to see that Rajaniemi's day-job is as "director of a think tank that provides business services based on advanced math and artificial intelligence," which runs around and through several of the things I deal with at my own day-job out at the financial end of business publishing. In any case, Quantum Thief looks like a romp through a colorful and distinctive future, with a larger-than-life figure at its center -- exactly the kind of book that SF always needs more of (especially if it is as good as I expect it to be).

Incoming Books: last week of April 2011

Sometime this last week, I got a couple of boxes from a certain online retailer named -- more and more appropriately every day -- after a gigantic river in South America, after I realized last weekend that running around to find a physical store that carried all/most of them was a waste of my time, money and energy. (I'm happy to give my comics/manga/graphic novel business primarily to a comics shop, and even to pay somewhat more for instant gratification, but after hitting one extremely Big Two store and finding a second comics shop had been gone for nearly six months, I was on the verge of buying about half of these from a B&N more than a dozen miles from my house -- without any discounts -- to "buy local." If I was still in Manhattan regularly, there are two excellent stores I'd buy from all the time, but I'm not, so I won't.)

I still like spreading my purchases around various retailers -- I work in the book business, so I instinctively think about being "fair to all accounts" -- but good discounts and fast delivery are definitely difficult to beat.

Anyway, here's what I got:

Adrian Tomine's new wedding favor/book, Scenes from an Impending Marriage, which I hope will be somewhat more positive and life-affirming than his usual work.

Kevin Huizenga's The Wild Kingdom, a sort-of new -- it collects work that has been more-or-less collected twice before in smaller, more comic-book-like packages -- collection of his "Glenn Ganges" stories.

The Downsized, the first graphic novel I've seen in a while from Matt Howarth -- though, apparently, he's been busy online, with a huge list of downloadable graphic novels and other things that he did while I wasn't paying attention. This one looks almost like a Will Eisner kind of story -- an extended family gets back together in trying circumstances -- which is a different choice for the usually gonzo Howarth.


The Complete Peanuts, 1979 to 1980 by Charles M. Schulz -- the strip is solidly into the "feel-good" years by this point, though Schulz was still inventive, particularly in his longer sequences. And there were flashes of the old bleakness in the previous book, so I'm going to keep going with this as long as it stays entertaining, probably through the shaky years right up to the end.

The Muppet Show Comic Book: Muppet Mash, which is the last published collection of Roger Langridge's great work on that series -- though there's reportedly another story arc by Langridge that's in semi-limbo as Disney pulled the license back from Boom!

Daytripper, a new original graphic novel by those fabulous Brazilian twins, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. (They are real, though they sound like characters out of a minor Grant Morrison story.)

And the Dan Clowes book Mister Wonderful, reprinting his strip from The New York Times Sunday Magazine's short-lived "Funny Pages" section. As I recall, it's the depressive side to Wilson's manic; another Clowes middle-aged schlub facing an uncaring world with very little to help or protect him.

Read in April

This is the month every year when we all think we should be happy about new life and rebirth and all that jazz, but actually find ourselves tormented by mudslides and floods and tornadoes and school projects, leaving us tried and cranky. But, if we're lucky, we can read some good books along the way. I did, and these are them:

• Dave Barry, I'll Mature When I'm Dead (4/4)
  
• Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (4/6)
  
• E.C. Segar's Popeye, Vol. 4: "Plunder Island" (4/7)
  
• Steven Brust, Tiassa (4/8)
  
• Robert Silverberg, Musings and Meditations (4/14)
  
• Michael Chabon, The Final Solution (4/16)
  
• Pascal Girard, Reunion (4/18)
  
• John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation (4/19)
  
• Berkeley Breathed, Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume Two: 1982-1984 (4/23)
  
• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (4/24)
  
• Vera Brosgol, Anya's Ghost (4/25)
  Reviewed in my graphic novel column for the August issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine.
  
• Shaun Tan, Lost & Found (4/27)
  Reviewed in my graphic novel column for the August issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine. I also posted a somewhat different review on Amazon, since I got the book, oddly enough, through their Vine program.
  
• John Banville, The Infinities (4/28)
  
• Usamaru Furuya, Lychee Light Club (4/29)

Looks like I've read a number of books -- and, better yet, nearly all of them were notably good in one way or another. (Fuzzy Nation is a softball and a throwback, but that's what Scalzi does, and he does it well here. Reunion was a bit disappointing, too, but I'm still working out why.) So my input is fine, but my output is way down the past few weeks. I can claim pressure of work -- my company's fiscal year ended one minute before this post goes live, so there were certain activities going on these past few weeks -- but that's old and tired and not entirely true. A fuller explanation would include the words "Lego," "Star," and "Wars" and the roman numeral III.  

As always, though, I'm going to ignore the evidence of the past and claim that I plan to do better this month.

Favorite Editions

I'm still mining the content I wrote for other places -- in my case, mostly Usenet and bulletin boards -- in the last decade or so, and dragging it over here so that Antick Musings will be the Grand Unified Depository of all thing Andrew Wheelerish. This little squib, which most people would consider a bit of string too small to save, was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 11/1/00, and was part of a longer discussion about the topic clearly stated in the title:


The big one for me was the late '70s Avon editions of Zelazny's books (especially the Amber series) with those mostly-black covers and the great small illustrations by Ron Walotsky. There was something that just said to me: this is what a Zelazny book looks like.

I actually imprinted so hard that, years later, when I was doing a one-volume edition of "The First Chronicles of Amber," I made my art director use Walotsky for the cover and replicate that same look as much as possible. Hey, it may not be the reason most people go into publishing, but...

Quote of the Week: Family

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
- George Burns

Hey, You Know I'm Posting Several Times a Day Over at Editorial Explanations, Right?

Sure, it's usually about the twisted collision of American politics and cartooning, which is not necessarily everyone's cup of tea. (Note that I'm engaging in massive understatement once again.) But I find myself feeling guilty about the relative lack of content here -- not to mention the stack of books to be reviewed, which is now ten high -- and I keep telling myself that I am blogging over there (450 posts this month alone!)

Anyway, just in case you think I'm slacking off, it's not true: I'm just doing other things than Antick Musings. Funny things. Short things! (All my Twittering and Google shared-items-ing has finally gotten me to write short.) Sideways sarcastic complaints about current events! Things no one asked for!

Just in case you didn't get that link before: Editorial Explanations. Message: I care.

Are You Aware?

So yesterday I entirely intended to post about TMBG Awareness Day, but I didn't. But why should awareness be limited to a single day, I ask you? Be aware today, be aware tomorrow -- hell, you can even be aware a week from next Tuesday if you want!

(For myself, I've been a TMBG fan since I saw them on the dark early days of MTV, before their first record came out. I'm enough of a long-time fan to have scars from the transition to "full band" in the early '90s. I'm damn old, man.)

Anyway, be Aware. America needs more Wares. And there's some new TMBG music, for those who like such things, on Amazon and iTunes (and probably other places) as a teaser for a new record coming Real Soon Now.

And have this, the video for their first single, also from those lazy days of 1986:

Titles That Were Not Used for Star Wars III

Back in 2002, Star Wars movie-watchers were in a state of shell-shock. We'd seen two very lousy movies recently, and were contemplating ways that the third movie of that trilogy could manage to be even worse. And so a thread arose on the Straight Dope Message Board, in which various people made up funny titles for then then still-forthcoming third movie. These were mine:

Star Wars (R): Episode III A Plague of Darths

Star Wars (R): Episode III Darth Darth Baby

Star Wars (R): Episode III Ewok Mania!

Star Wars (R): Episode III Why Should We care About These Annoying, Stuck-Up Jedi Knights, Anyway?

Star Wars (R): Episode III Eat the Happy Meal, Buy The Toy

Star Wars (R): Episode III Lots of Things Blow Up

Star Wars (R): Episode III Hi, My Name Is George Lucas, and You'll See Any Damn Thing I Put Out, No Matter How Stupid, Won't You?

Star Wars (R): Episode III Jar Jar -- Jedi!

Star Wars (R): Episode III Democracy Is Over-rated; Let's Let Some Robed Zen Idiots Rule the Universe

and, my personal hope:

Star Wars (R): Episode III Mace Windu, Funky Jedi

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/23

And a Happy Monday to you all; hope you all got through whatever holiday festivities that may have bedeviled you over the last few days. This is my usual Monday-morning post, listing all of the books that arrived the previous week in my mailbox. As always, I haven't read any of them yet, though I do hope and intend to read (and then review) several of them -- but we all know where pavement made from intentions leads.

This week, I'll begin with graphic novels and with urban fantasy -- though I'll loop back to non-graphic novel urban fantasy at the end, for that oh-so-chic circular literary structure that we critics adore -- to show off the nice cover for Blood Work. It's an original graphic novel set in the world of Kim Harrison's "The Hollows" series, written by Harrison and illustrated by Pedro Maia and Gemma Magno. As often happens with graphic extensions of series, this is a prequel, telling the story of the first meeting between Harrison's series heroine Rachel Morgan and the vampire Ivy Tamwood. Blood Work will be published by Del Rey in hardcover on July 11th.

Anya's Ghost is the first book by Russian-born cartoonist Vera Brosgol, and it comes with impressive advance quotes -- Neil Gaiman calls it "a masterpiece," and Scott McCloud wrote that "Brosgol is the kind of cartoonist I want to be when I grow up." Anya is a girl with enough problems -- she's self-conscious about her body, embarrassed by her Russian family, and having trouble fitting in at school -- when she accidentally falls down a well and makes an unexpected (and unshakable) new friend: the ghost of a girl who died a century before. Anya's Ghost will be published by First Second in June.

Also from First Second is Level Up, a graphic novel written by Gene Luen Yang and drawn by Thien Pham. It's another story about growing up Asian-American, with pushy immigrant parents demanding their son become a doctor -- in this case, Dennis Ouyang is supposed to become a gastroenterologist. Dennis, of course, would rather slack off and play video games. But perhaps he's destined to become a gastroenterologist, and perhaps there are forces that will make that happen, no matter what he wants. Level Up is also coming in June.

Peter S. Beagle has a new collection of stories, Sleight of Hand, published by Tachyon in March, and it's almost entirely stories originally published since his 2009 collection, We Never Talk About My Brother. If I need to tell you who Peter Beagle is (author of A Fine and Private Place and The Last Unicorn and "Lila the Werewolf," etc.), I think you're reading the wrong blog.

Tachyon has also just published a new anthology of horror stories edited by Joe R. Lansdale, Crucified Dreams. It contains nineteen reprint stories about nasty things -- some of them supernatural, but some of them not -- taking place in cities, from Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" to Lucius Shepard's "Beast of the Heartland," including work from Joe Haldeman, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Shea, Octavia E. Butler, Michael Bishop, Jeffrey Ford, and Lansdale himself.

I said I'd get back to urban fantasy, didn't I? And so I will, with Central Park Knight, the second in a new series by C.J. Henderson (after Brooklyn Knight) about Professor Piers Knight, the Brooklyn Museum's own Indiana Jones. (You know how it is -- first the Natural History Museum got an Indiana Jones, and then the Met had to get one, and now everyone down to the Museum of the Moving Image has a request on Bloomberg's desk.) This time out, all of the dragons have returned -- they were sleeping until unexpectedly woken in the first book -- and are both battling each other with nuclear weapons and (one of them, at least) bent on conquering the world, including humanity. Professor Knight, clearly, would prefer for that not to happen, and Tor will be happy to sell you the trade paperback of Central Park Knight, explaining how he saves the world, on May 10th.

Also in the urban fantasy vein is Kitty's Greatest Hits, a collection of stories by Carrie Vaughn, all set in the world of her popular series character Kitty Norville. (Not all of the stories, of course, are directly about Kitty, or in her voice -- that's why someone writes sidebar stories in the world of a first person series; to get to other pieces of that world and other perspectives that the series heroine can't reach.) I'm unabashedly a fan of this series, and I don't mind saying so...though I also have to admit that I've found myself three books behind due to Vaughn's admirable work ethic. Greatest Hits will be a trade paperback from Tor in August.

And last for this week is another book by Vaughn, though this one is completely unrelated to Kitty Norville. After the Golden Age is a superhero novel, about the forensic accountant daughter of the two greatest heroes of her world, who herself is utterly powerless and an often-nabbed hostage. Vaughn can write great stories, and she's been doing superheroes for a few years now via Wild Cards, so she knows the genre. And I have an interest in forensic accounting from my day job -- so I think I'll be reading this just-published Tor hardcover sooner rather than later.