Locus Awards "Finalists"

Locus magazine has released the top five finishers in each of the categories of their readers' poll, ahead of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Weekend in Seattle in late June, on their website.

Of course, Locus already knows what the winner is, in every category -- this is just the list of the top five finishers reorganized alphabetically -- but it does have the shape of a shortlist, so Locus hopes that we will all treat it as one.

And the awards will go to an already-determined subset of the following works:


Science Fiction Novel

• Surface Detail, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
• Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
• Zero History, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
• The Dervish House, Ian McDonald (Pyr; Gollancz)
• Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

I've reviewed both Cryoburn and the Willis dyptych; I haven't read the others.

Fantasy Novel

• Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay (Penguin Canada; Roc)Kraken
• Kraken, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey)
• Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
• The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
• The Sorcerer's House, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

I've reviewed Kraken, The Fuller Memorandum, and The Sorcerer's House here, and not read the other two.

First Novel

• The Loving Dead, Amelia Beamer (Night Shade)
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
• Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz; Tor)
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu (Pantheon)

I've reviewed Shades of Milk and Honey and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe; I haven't read the others yet -- though The Quantum Thief is only being published in the US this month.

Young Adult Book

• Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
• Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
• Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones (HarperCollins UK; Greenwillow)
• I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; HarperCollins)
• Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

I've reviewed I Shall Wear Midnight and Behemoth here, and I'd missed the publication of Enchanted Glass entirely. (I now have a hold at the library for it.)

Novella

• Bone and Jewel Creatures, Elizabeth Bear (Subterranean)
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
• "The Mystery Knight"', George R.R. Martin (Warriors)
• "Troika", Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines)
• "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window'", Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer '10)

Interesting to see that this category is now dominated by books; I'm not sure what that says about the traditional SF magazines.


Novelette

• "The Fool Jobs", Joe Abercrombie (Swords & Dark Magic)
• "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains", Neil Gaiman (Stories)
• "The Mad Scientist's Daughter", Theodora Goss (Strange Horizons 1/18-1/25/10)
• "Plus or Minus", James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's 12/10)
• "Marya and the Pirate", Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov's 1/10)

I reviewed both Swords & Dark Magic and Stories; I'd agree that the Gaiman was one of the best stories in that book -- and one of the best I'd read last year -- but I would not go as far with the Abercrombie. And the magazines do make a comeback in this category; perhaps current circumstances make it difficult for them to publish novellas? (Or, perhaps, just the highest-profile novellas?)

Short Story

• "Booth's Ghost", Karen Joy Fowler (What I Didn't See and Other Stories)
• "The Thing About Cassandra", Neil Gaiman (Songs of Love and Death)
• "Names for Water", Kij Johnson (Asimov's 10-11/10)
• "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time", Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld 8/10)
• "The Things", Peter Watts (Clarkesworld 1/10)

Clarkesworld has an amazing batting average this year; remember that they only publish two stories a month.

Magazine

• Analog
• Asimov's
• F&SF
• Subterranean
• Tor.com

Tor.com is a magazine? You keep using that word -- I do not think it means what you think it means. Just because something publishes short fiction semi-regularly does not make it a magazine.

Publisher

• Baen
• Night Shade Books
• Orbit
• Subterranean Press
• Tor

If anyone thinks Tor won't win this category, for the umpty-umpth year running, I'd be happy to make a little side wager.

Anthology

• Zombies vs. Unicorns, Holly Black & Justine Larbalestier, eds. (McElderry)
• The Beastly Bride, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Viking)
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St.
• Martin's)
• Warriors, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Tor)
• Swords & Dark Magic, Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders, eds. (HarperCollins)

As previously mentioned, I reviewed Swords & Dark Magic; I haven't read the others.

Collection

• Mirror Kingdoms, Peter S. Beagle (Subterranean)
• What I Didn't See and Other Stories, Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer)
• Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, Fritz Leiber (Night Shade)
• The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson (Night Shade)
• The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Five: Nine Black Doves, Roger Zelazny (NESFA)

Editor

• Ellen Datlow
• Gardner Dozois
• Gordon Van Gelder
• David G. Hartwell
• Jonathan Strahan

Artist

• Bob Eggleton
• Donato Giancola
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan
• Michael Whelan

Once again I have to ask, seriously, what genre art Whelan has done recently? He's an excellent artist, and did piles of great SF/Fantasy book covers, true. But he's been retired from that part of his career for over a decade, and it's time for the fans to get that through their thick heads and start voting for the great artists who still are working in the field.

Non-fiction

• 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler & Debbie Notkin, eds.
• (Aqueduct)
• Conversations with Octavia Butler, Conseula Francis (University Press of Mississippi)
• Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve, William H. Patterson, Jr., (Tor)
• CM Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, Mark Rich (McFarland)
• Bearings: Reviews 1997-2001, Gary K. Wolfe (Beccon)

I'd love to think that something other than the Heinlein book had a chance here, but I'm much too cynical for that.

Art Books

• Bob Eggleton, Dragon's Domain (Impact)
• Spectrum 17, Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)
• Donato Giancola, Middle-Earth: Visions of a Modern Myth (Underwood)
• Shaun Tan, The Bird King and Other Sketches (Windy Hollow)
• Charles Vess & Neil Gaiman, Instructions (Harper)

I note, with mild puzzlement, that the author of the book comes first in this category, unlike all of the others -- and except for the one book edited by non-artists. This is very curious. I resolutely refuse to read anything into that fact, but I do always hope for greater consistency in the future.

The Mistressworks of SF

Yet another big-list-of-books meme, and once again I'm picking it up from James Nicoll. This particular list was an attempt to create a canon of great books by female writers (one book each) of science fiction -- both the "one book per writer" and the "science fiction" have proven to be grounds for interesting discussions elsewhere -- in response to a line of books with a masculine version of the title which turned out to be very boy-centric.

As usual, the rules are: set titles in bold if you've read them and in italics if you own it but haven't read it yet. It is also allowable to bold a series if you've read all of it.

• 1 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
• 2 Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)
• 3 Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928) 
• 4 Lest Ye Die, Cicely Hamilton (1928)
• 5 Swastika Night, Katherine Burdekin (1937) 
• (6 Wrong Side of the Moon, Francis Leslie Ashton (1951), removed because Francis Leslie Ashton is a man)
• 7 The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett (1953)
• 8 Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, Zenna Henderson (1961)
• 9 Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
• 10 Witch World, Andre Norton (1963)
• 11 Sunburst, Phyllis Gotlieb (1964)
• 12 Jirel of Joiry, CL Moore (1969)
• 13 Heroes and Villains, Angela Carter (1969)
• 14 Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, James Tiptree Jr (1973) -- I've read a number of Tiptree stories, though not all of this particular collection
• 15 The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin (1974)
• 16 Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)  
• 17 The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975)
• 18 Missing Man, Katherine MacLean (1975)
• 19 Arslan, MJ Engh (1976)
• 20 Floating Worlds, Cecelia Holland (1976)
• 21 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm (1976)
• 22 Islands, Marta Randall (1976)
• 23 Dreamsnake, Vonda N McIntyre (1978)
• 24 False Dawn, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1978)
• 25 Shikasta [Canopus in Argos: Archives], Doris Lessing (1979)
• 26 Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979)
• 27 Benefits, Zoe Fairbairns (1979)
• 28 The Snow Queen, Joan D Vinge (1980)
• 29 The Silent City, Élisabeth Vonarburg (1981)
• 30 The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (1981)
• 31 The Many-Coloured Land [Saga of the Exiles], Julian May (1981)
• 32 Darkchild [Daughters of the Sunstone], Sydney J van Scyoc (1982)
• 33 The Crystal Singer, Anne McCaffrey (1982) -- I've read probably two dozen McCaffrey books, including most of the Pern series, but not this one
• 34 Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin (1984)
• 35 The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)
• 36 Jerusalem Fire, RM Meluch (1985)
• 37 Children of Anthi, Jay D Blakeney (1985) 
• 38 The Dream Years, Lisa Goldstein (1985)
• 39 Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, Sarah Lefanu & Jen Green (1985)
• 40 Queen of the States, Josephine Saxton (1986)
• 41 The Wave and the Flame [Lear's Daughters], Marjorie Bradley Kellogg (1986)
• 42 The Journal of Nicholas the American, Leigh Kennedy (1986)
• 43 A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski (1986)
• 44 Angel at Apogee, SN Lewitt (1987)
• 45 In Conquest Born, CS Friedman (1987)
• 46 Pennterra, Judith Moffett (1987)
• 47 Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)
• 48 Cyteen, CJ Cherryh (1988)
• 49 Unquenchable Fire, Rachel Pollack (1988) -- This is a wonderful, wonderful book that more people should read. And I imagine many people would say the same about all of the books on this list that I haven't read or considered.
• 50 The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy (1988)
• 51 The Steerswoman [Steerswoman series], Rosemary Kirstein (1989)
• 52 The Third Eagle, RA MacAvoy (1989)
• 53 Grass, Sheri S Tepper (1989)
• 54 Heritage of Flight, Susan Shwartz (1989)
• 55 Falcon, Emma Bull (1989)
• 56 The Archivist, Gill Alderman (1989)
• 57 Winterlong [Winterlong trilogy], Elizabeth Hand (1990)
• 58 A Gift Upon the Shore, MK Wren (1990)
• 59 Red Spider, White Web, Misha (1990) -- I was looking for this book for ages, primarily because SF Age thought it was the greatest cyberpunk novel of all time (they thought that for possibly as long as a year), but never actually got a copy or read it.
• 60 Polar City Blues, Katharine Kerr (1990)
• 61 Body of Glass (AKA He, She and It), Marge Piercy (1991)
• 62 Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler (1991)
• 63 Beggars in Spain [Sleepless trilogy], Nancy Kress (1991) -- I would not recommend reading the whole trilogy, which goes off on a succession of annoying tangents, but the first book is excellent.
• 64 A Woman of the Iron People, Eleanor Arnason (1991)
• 65 Hermetech, Storm Constantine (1991)
• 66 China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh (1992)
• 67 Fools, Pat Cadigan (1992)
• 68 Correspondence, Sue Thomas (1992)
• 69 Lost Futures, Lisa Tuttle (1992)
• 70 Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (1992)
• 71 Ammonite, Nicola Griffith (1993)
• 72 The Holder of the World, Bharati Mukherjee (1993)
• 73 Queen City Jazz, Kathleen Ann Goonan (1994)
• 74 Happy Policeman, Patricia Anthony (1994)
• 75 Shadow Man, Melissa Scott (1995)
• 76 Legacies, Alison Sinclair (1995)
• 77 Primary Inversion [Skolian Saga], Catherine Asaro (1995)
• 78 Alien Influences, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1995)
• 79 The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell (1996)
• 80 Memory [Vorkosigan series], Lois McMaster Bujold (1996)
• 81 Remnant Population, Elizabeth Moon (1996)
• 82 Looking for the Mahdi, N Lee Wood (1996)
• 83 An Exchange of Hostages [Jurisdiction series], Susan R Matthews (1997)
• 84 Fool’s War, Sarah Zettel (1997)
• 85 Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey (1997)
• 86 Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman (1998)
• 87 Vast, Linda Nagata (1998)
• 88 Hand of Prophecy, Severna Park (1998)
• 89 Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson (1998)
• 90 Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan (1999)
• 91 Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle (2000)

As I expected, I'm not as well-read in this area as I'd like to be. (And, these days, I'm tending to read mostly the writers I already like, which doesn't help the matter.) Having a list certainly helps
 so, thanks to Ian Sales for sparking this discussion.

Movie Log: The King's Speech

I'm sure someone, somewhere, has begun a review of this movie by imitating stuttering in print. "I'd like to t-t-t-t-talk ab-b-b-b-b-bout The King's S-s-s-s-speech," perhaps. So, since that slot has already been filled, I don't need to be That Guy, which is a relief. (Because That Guy is a jerk, and not funny, either.)

The King's Speech is a very high-minded, serious, life-affirming movie, of the kind that the English film industry loves to make -- probably because the American public, and the public of many other countries, including their own, eats it up every time -- and it will be deeply familiar and utterly unsurprising to anyone who has seen more than a dozen movies in his life. (Let along being even vaguely familiar with WWII, or the recent history of the British monarchy.)

It's all very nice, full of plummy accents, understated posh surroundings, stiff upper lips, and predictable uplift. Movies like this have been winning piles of Oscar awards for eight or nine decades, and there's no sign that the Academy of 2035 will buck that trend, either. The King's Speech is a movie to make adults feel smart and superior and cultured without having to read subtitles, learn anything substantial, or actually consider any unpleasant things existing in the world, now or ever.

Colin Firth plays the younger brother of a bad father whom he nevertheless utterly loves, in the way that only tortured-in-public-school British aristocrats can love their families. (Which is to say: completely undemonstratively.) And he's going to be King as soon as that bad father dies and as soon as his equally-bad-in-other-ways older brother decides to abdicate in favor of marrying an American divorcee. Of course, Firth's Prince Bertie is both utterly devoted to his duty and scared to death of it, which makes him perfect for audience-identification purposes: speaking in public is the #1 fear, so a story about a really rich and powerful guy with that fear (and for a good reason!) is a guaranteed hit.

And so on and on; Geoffrey Rush is the obligatory oddball guru, whose unusual methods dependably deliver the results that the stuffed-shirt "establishment" types can't. And Helena Bonham Carter is given very little to do as the future Queen Mum, but she does it as stiff-upper-lippy as possible. In fact, the story of The King's Speech is so tailor-made for a big feel-good movie that one has to wonder why it wasn't made twenty or thirty years ago, probably by Merchant-Ivory. But it did eventually become the movie that was destined to exist, and now destiny won't rest until we all see it. It's a perfectly pleasant two hours of exposed celluloid, so you might as well get it over with, if you haven't already.

Quote of the Day

I've never been particularly fond of Joyce Carol Oates's writing, but she hits the nail solidly in this letter about her recent memoir A Widow's Story:

[N]othing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing[.]

Update: My, what a stuck-up little prick I can be if I don't watch out for myself. "I've never been particularly fond," indeed! JCO has been an important, major writer since before I was born. I've only read a few of her short stories, though I do have to admit that I couldn't stand any of them. There may well exist the JCO novel that I would absolutely adore, since she's written approximately 900 of them. But I haven't found it, and I probably won't.

Quote of the Week: Life in Hell

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it tips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
- Matt Groening

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

It's unusual these days to find anyone claiming that something is literally unspeakable; we live in an age that values candor above all, in which all data and thoughts strain to be free. But there are things that are so dark, or so hidden, or so appalling that words can't do them justice.

Michael Chabon's short novel The Final Solution is not about those things, of course. It couldn't possibly be, since it's made of words. But it fits snugly around a void of the unspeakable, and its title hints at all of the things that it doesn't say.

In wartime England, a very old man with a mind that pierces labyrinths keeps bees, off in the countryside, far from the bustle of London, as he has done, quietly and in solitude, for several decades. We know precisely who he is -- or who he was -- but Chabon never says so. And then he gets caught up in the life of a young mute German refugee, after that boy's African gray parrot is mysteriously stolen.

The parrot, various characters note, would recite long strings of numbers -- and that led some to think that the parrot could help crack Nazi codes, since, in Germany, the boy and his parrot had been close to centers of power. But Chabon hints and intimates the true meaning of those numbers, which is of much less use to anyone's war effort.

The old man solves the crime, of course -- that's what he does. But there's a much larger crime out there going on, which he, and all of the people in The Final Solution, are powerless to affect. And Chabon is as interested in that crime -- in all of the things that he can't write about, because they are unspeakable -- as he is in the story of an old man who keeps bees, and what is probably his very last case. As always, Chabon's language is precise but fluid; he's staked out his place exactly between the literary and the genre, so he demands of himself both excellent writing and excellent story. The Final Solution may be a short novel, but it's in no way a small one.


Note: This post was reconstituted, and replaced in close to its proper time, after Blogger decided to go down for a day and wipe all of the posts for the previous day. We are Not Amused, but we carry on nonetheless.

Another Punt

I got home late today -- my company had a "Celebration of Leadership" at the big football stadium in the Meadowlands that nobody has liked quite enough to name it yet, and, no, I can't tell you what, exactly, a "Celebration of Leadership" is -- and then spent some time at Thing 2's baseball game. (The nail-biter of the last inning, in fact, in which his team lost a 15-0 lead but still managed to squeak out their first win of the season at 15-12.)

And then the power went out three times this evening, the last time for about forty minutes.

So clearly the universe does not want me to blog tonight. Regular service will resume tomorrow.

Musings and Meditations by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg is one of the great writers of the SF world, in both senses of the world: he's responsible for some of the best paragraph-by-paragraph writing and most literary stories in the genre, both during his 1967-76 personal Renaissance and (particularly in his short stories) afterward, and he's well-known for being incredibly prolific throughout most of the phases of his career. (According to my count, that '67-76 period saw Silverberg publish twenty-three novels -- admittedly, novels were shorter then, but he was writing plenty of other things as well.)

And, in common with other reams-of-output writers of the field -- his mentor and friend Isaac Asimov, for example -- Silverberg has also written a lot of other things besides SF, from the softcore porn that nearly every writer of his generation dabbled in in the '60s to pay the bills to major nonfictional works on Prester John and the Mound Builders of ancient America. That also led -- since SFnal magazines love dependable copy from name writers -- to a thirty-year writing monthly essays for Galileo, Amazing, and then Asimov's on whatever struck his fancy that month.

The first half of those essays -- speaking roughly -- was collected, over a decade ago, as Reflections and Refractions. (Other pieces, from various places, were recently assembled into the autobiography-in-fragments Other Spaces, Other Times, which I reviewed last year.) And the back fifteen years of those essays -- roughly the Asimov's years -- have now been brought together as Musings and Meditations, by the newish New York small press Nonstop.

Musings is a collection of various random things, of course -- it couldn't help but be, seeing as how it's made up of whatever Silverberg most felt like writing about near his deadline for the last decade and a half -- but Silverberg is engaging and assumes the tone of authority whether he's writing about whale-watching, cuneiform, writing advice, the great dead masters of SF, or the New Wave. I may not agree with him 100% on all of his topics -- for one thing, he generally assumes the rah-rah we're-all-in-this-ghetto-together attitude of the embattled mid-century SF world, which isn't as helpful for evaluating the true worth and best works of that era's writers as it might be -- but he's always pleasant to read, and he is deeply knowledgeable about all of the topics in this book.

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.