Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/7

Usually, I start off these weekly posts by emphasizing that I haven't read any of these books yet (since they just arrived in the mail over the last six days, since I have a life outside reading books, and so on), and thus disclaim any responsibility for getting any details horrendously wrong. But, this time, I actually have read one of these books -- because I got a copy of it in another form, earlier, so I'll lead off with that.

(The usual disclaimers, though, still apply to everything that follows.)

Fuzzy Nation is the first new novel from SFWA President John Scalzi since 2008's Zoe's Tale, and the first standalone (not set in the Old Man's War-iverse) since 2006's The Android's Dream. Of course, it's only a standalone within Scalzi's oeuvre, since it's a reworking of H. Beam Piper's 1962 novel Little Fuzzy, which had two sequels by Piper and two further sequels by other hands. I've grumbled about the increasing tendency of mainline SF to look backwards (alternate history, steampunk, deliberately retro futures) -- and I'm certainly not the only one, or even near the first, to do so -- but I'll save those grumblings for an actual review of Fuzzy Nation. The book is a pleasant old-fashioned skiffy adventure story, lightly updated to modern mores, and is suitable both for current SF readers (as long as they don't demand adventurousness) and those who drifted away from the genre before the New Wave. Fuzzy Nation is a Tor hardcover with an official on-sale date of May 10th -- but I doubt it's a "day-and-date" book, so you could buy it right now, if you want.

Next is a book that makes me feel old -- no offense to the book, of course, since, as time goes on, more and more books do that. The Golden Key was a three way collaboration between three female fantasy writers -- a concept that inexplicably was reasonably common, and popular, for several years -- which I remember well from my time at the bookclubs, but was surprised to re-discover was originally published in 1996. The three authors are Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott, and Golden Key -- a novel about a family of painters with a secret magical power in a Renaissance-esque world -- was very well-received at the time, and was even nominated for the World Fantasy Award. (Which doesn't happen a whole lot with multi-author books.) There's a new mass-market paperback edition of Golden Key coming from DAW in June, though, sadly, they've cropped the great Michael Whelan cover art so that Whelan's cheeky self-portrait can't be seen.

Also from DAW in June (and also in mass-market) is Thistle Down, a contemporary fantasy by Irene Radford set in small-town Oregon. (Though I hasten to note that it doesn't seem to have any sparkly vampires in it. No buff shirtless werewolves, either, as far as I can tell.) This particular town, though -- called Skene Falls -- has a wood outside it filled with pixies, and the pixies are now threatened by the imminent destruction of the woods. Add one normal woman -- who never quite gave up on the pixies she saw as a child -- plus one pixie woman exiled to live as a mortal, and I expect they'll make up a plan to save the woods that's So Crazy It Just Might Work.

DAW's third mass-market book for June is its usual anthology from Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books operation: Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance, edited by Jean Rabe and Greenberg. It has sixteen stories by mostly the usual Tekno anthology crowd -- Michael A. Stackpole, Jody Lynn Nye, Elizabeth A. Vaughan, C.J. Henderson -- all about love amid corsets and cogs, goggles and gauges, and all the usual steampunk furniture.

Charles de Lint's short novel Promises to Keep -- about the early history of Jilly Coppercorn, one of the central characters of his fictional city of Newford -- was originally published in 2007 as an expensive hardcover from Subterranean. In June, though, it will finally be re-released, as a reasonably priced trade paperback from the fine San Francisco publishers Tachyon.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Shadows of the Apt" epic fantasy series continues to roll on, much faster than most of us would expect. The US publisher Pyr put out the first book, Empire in Black and Gold, last March, and already they've got the fifth book, The Scarab Path, in a matching trade paperback this month. (Tchaikovsky seems to be a quick writer, but he's not that quick -- Pyr is catching up with Tor UK. Tchaikovsky's home publisher, who started the series in 2008. But the UK is still one book ahead, with The Sea Watch hitting stores there in February.)

Shoko Tendo was born to an uneasy privilege, the daughter of a Japanese yakuza mob boss. But his power waned as she grew up, and her teens and twenties saw her becoming addicted to drugs, caught up in the world of gangs, and trapped in one abusive relationship after another. Eventually, she broke free, got sober, and told her story in a memoir, Yakuza Moon, which was translated into fourteen languages. It also has just been translated into a graphic novel, called Yakuza Moon: The Manga Edition (even though it reads left-to-right and was adapted from the English-language version of Tendo's memoir), adapted by Sean Michael Wilson and illustrated by Michiru Morikawa. Kodansha USA is publishing Yakuza Moon: The Manga Edition in July as a trade paperback.

And last for this week is another new book in the ever-proliferating Dungeon series -- Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 4: Night of the Ladykiller. As usual, the American editions of Dungeon books each collect two albums of the French Donjon series -- in this case, "Night of the Ladykiller" and "Ruckus at the Brewery" -- and, as always, the series is written by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. (The continuity of Dungeon is detailed -- though not all that complicated -- so let me just aim any interested parties at the handy Wikipedia page.) These two stories have art by Jean-Emmanuel Vermot-Desroches and Yoann, respectively, and actually were published earlier than the stories collected in the last volume of Dungeon Monstres. (Heartbreaker, which I reviewed last fall.) I won't try to convince you that this particular book is utterly awesome -- at least, not until I've read it -- but the Dungeon series as a whole is a deep, thoughtful, complicated, shocking, amazing and utterly vital series of comics, among the very best available in that form. And, if you don't believe me on the subject, how about Jeff VanderMeer? Night of the Ladykiller is coming in June from NBM; if Dungeon sounds like something you'd like to try, I''d recommend dipping into Duck Heart, the first book in the central "Zenith" subseries.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Some years ago, I had an idea for a novel, which I never wrote because, among other reasons, I'm not actually a novelist. But I wanted to tell a story in stories, where a minor character in the first story is the protagonist of the second, and so forth, until, finally, the last story looped back around to the first. (I also had vague plans for this all to be fantasy, but leave that aside for now.) It's not a new idea, of course -- so few worthwhile ideas are -- but it's a shape for a story that hasn't been overused, so it's an appealing, novel shape, both as a would-be writer and as a reader. (Of course, the reason that shape hasn't been used much is because it's fiendishly difficult to write a series of stories like that and actually have them hang together as a novel.)

Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize, just a few weeks ago, for A Visit From the Goon Squad, a novel that bears a very close resemblance to the one I thought I wanted to write. It doesn't charge outward quite as far as I thought I wanted to, staying mostly in the circle of people who know and/or work with record executive Bennie Salazar and his longtime personal assistant Sasha, starting with Sasha in the early '00s, moving on to Bennie only a few years later before ranging widely from the late '70s through much later years. Each of the viewpoint characters only get spotlighted once -- no matter how much the reader wants to get back inside that head, to find out what else happened, to continue that life -- but Egan effortlessly juggles her large cast, keeping each of them razor-distinct and tossing out offhand explanations of the rest of everyone's lives, before or after the events she narrates directly.
 
Goon Squad has been called a sweeping novel, which is an odd adjective for a book not even three hundred pages long. But that's absolutely an accurate description -- Goon Squad does sweep, across decades and around the world, and is much larger and more capacious than it appears. It's a difficult novel to write about, since each chapter is a separate, precise short story that continues the story of the previous chapter like -- well, not like pearls on a strand, since Egan jumps and obscures much more than that, but perhaps like individual trail markers on a long, winding walk around a particularly impressive piece of scenery. And all of those people, all of those protagonists, come along, dive into your ear and make a home in your brain, and then are gone almost as soon as they came, leaving you to wish they'd return. But they don't; Goon Squad is like life in that it leaves you wishing there was so much more of it, and in that people just leave, and you never see them again.

Some books have titles that just click -- you're reading along, enjoying the book, having forgotten entirely that you weren't sure what the book's name actually meant, when you stumble over a phrase and stop dead: that's what it means; that's what this book is about; that's what life is. A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of those flash-of-lightning books; I won't tell you what the title means, or how it's meaningful, but I will say: it does mean something; it means a hell of a lot. Goon Squad is probably not as "experimental" as it's been described -- for good or bad, whether you seek out or avoid books like that -- even though it does have a single chapter, late in the novel, written in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. And it does, as I saw Colleen Lindsay tweet when it won the Pulitzer, "count as a genre win" -- in a way I won't explain.

There are books that just feel like the real world -- big, complicated, connected in unexpected ways, thrilling and frightening and wonderful -- and A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of the best of those; I'm amazed that anyone could construct it so carefully and so perfectly, and I now need to read more Jennifer Egan.

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.