Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/19

This post essentially covers two weeks; as I noted last Tuesday, the Gods of Publicity were kind to me -- in their own way -- and didn't send packages while I was off on vacation, so I deeply hope none of you are physically addicted to these weekly posts.

As always, I'll start off by reminding you that I haven't read any of these books yet, and so the things I'm about to write about them -- though as accurate as I can make them -- might be deficient in some way that I'm sure know-it-alls will find glee in pointing out in the comments. But these are all books, coming out now or in the near future in the lovely US of A (there's nothing from other shores this time around), and here are some things you might want to know about them:

I have mixed feelings about the first book this week -- Glamour in Glass, the second novel by up-and-coming writer (SFWA vice-president, Campbell Award winner, Hugo winner, Nebula nominee) Mary Robinette Kowal. First, I'm happy to see it, since it's a sequel to her first novel, the excellent Shades of Milk and Honey (see my review for details). But then I'm slightly disappointed because it is a sequel -- I know a career is a fragile thing, and reinforcing strong points early can be crucial, but I also prefer to see writers, especially newer ones, stretching themselves as much as possible -- for commercial as well as literary reasons -- and writing distinctive, different books each time. Glamour does look to have a different tone than Shades did: the first book was unabashedly a porting of Jane Austen into fantasy dress, set in that small, circumscribed society of the uneasy young female minor nobility deep in the provinces, while Glamour promises to take Shades' heroine, Jane, to France with her new husband and embroil both of them in larger events. So I hope it's a sequel that goes to different places than the first book did -- in any case, it's a April 2012 hardcover from Tor (which I'm seeing shockingly early for me, in bound galley), and I do expect to read it as soon as I can.

I'll probably have less to say about Marjorie M. Liu's novel Within the Flames, since I have to admit that I've never read Liu. (There are probably several hundred regularly working writers in the larger world of the fantastic; how many of us are familiar with all of them?) This is the eleventh book in the "Dirk & Steele" series, which I believe focuses on a detective agency -- I suspect, given that this is published as romance, that the first book told the story of Dirk & Steele themselves, and each subsequent book has a new romance concerning at least one agent of the firm -- and the central characters this time are Eddie, a pyromaniac and former car thief, and Lyssa, last of a fire-controlling shape-shifting race, on the run from nefarious forces that want to kill her. Within the Flames is a December mass-market paperback from Avon.

And then there's Rhiannon Frater's Fighting to Survive, billed as "As the World Dies, Book Two." (I suppose we should all be happy that it takes more than one book for the world to die?) This is, as we all suspected, yet another zombie novel. This time, the plucky band of squabbling survivors is slaughtering the risen dead to clear a historic hotel room-by-room -- any resemblance to a video game must be entirely coincidental, I suppose -- and there's no sign that the world is completely dead at the end of this book, so expect further sequels and ever-escalating body counts. (You might have guessed that I'm not particularly thrilled about zombie stories.) This is a Tor trade paperback that published on November 8th.

Next up is the first of two books this week that I'm pretty sure I've seen before: Brandon Sanderson's steampunky "Mistborn" line extension, The Alloy of Law. It's a Tor hardcover, and it was published November 8th.

Also steampunky, and also naggingly familiar, is Hearts of Smoke and Steam, the second book in Andrew P. Mayer's series "The Society of Steam," in which something very much like a superhero team battles evil in an altered 19th century New York. This one is from Pyr, and was published November 15th.

Last this time around is Lightbringer, the first novel by K.D. McEntire. It's a contemporary fantasy novel with echos of an older story: here, a young woman named Wendy can see the Lost (souls of those who died too soon) in the Never, and move them forward into the Light. But then she meets a man named Piotr, the guardian of the Lost, and things get more complicated. Lightbringer is also from Pyr, a hardcover published on November 15th.

Quote of the Week: Volumetrics

"You can take all of the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit-fly, and still have room for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart."
- Fred Allen

Tumbling Head Over Heels

Since Google eliminated shared items in yet another attempt to drag the entire Internet into their purview (and sell ads against it, of course), I've had to find a new method for my micro-blogging.

So, like everyone else, I've been driven to yet another oh-so-Internetty site named with a misspelled word, Tumblr. I expect that Hornswogglets will be mostly the same kind of thing that my shared items previously were, and I think I've already set it up to syndicate to the usual places. (Not to Google+, of course -- they don't want anyone coming in or going out; it's the roach motel of the Internet.)

There should be a Hornswogglets sidebar to the left -- replacing the old Hornswogglets sidebar -- and that will fill up, I hope, as I find things I want to point at. I may do more tumblr-y things as well, I suppose -- pictures and video and whatnot -- but, for now, it'll probably be primarily a link-driven micro-blog.

If you follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook, you should see that stuff automatically, if you want to or not. If you read this blog via an RSS feed, the feed for Hornswogglets is http://hornswoggler.tumblr.com/rss. And if you read it right here on this page, just look to your left, and you should see it.

And, if you don't want to see anything I've shared or written or blogged, then why on earth have you read this far?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/12

There probably is a pile of mail that arrived this week, waiting for me to write about it. But it's in New Jersey and, at the time this post goes up, I'm still in Florida (though probably at the airport on my way back). So this post will be somewhat delayed this week -- it may be up as early as tonight, or as late as a week from now.

But regular posting here should come back within the next 48 hours, or even faster if anything demanding of comment has been happening. Has it?

Update, late evening of 11/15: I seem to have gotten only one (1) book last week -- and I do have to thank those thoughtful publishers for organizing their lists and publicity mailings so carefully to closely fit my schedule -- so I'm just going to roll that into next week's post.

In other news, I'm back in the saddle. There might be a real post tomorrow, particularly if I have anything specific to natter on about.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/5

I've got something to admit: most of the books I've been writing about here, every Monday morning for the past few years, didn't actually come in "the mail" -- they arrived by various private carriers, from DHL to FedEx to those guys in brown. (Oh, sure, a few of them did come in mail trucks, but that's a small fraction.)

But "Reviewing the Variously-Sourced Packages" just doesn't have the ring to it that I'm looking for, so this post will keep its name, even if that's slightly inaccurate.

Speaking of inaccuracies, what I'm about to tell you concerning these books might not be the absolute truth. Oh, I'm going to try to get it all right, but I haven't read any of these books yet, and it's entirely possible that I'll trip up somehow. If I do, I'm sure someone will gloat loudly in comments, so you have that to look forward to. But you're probably here to find out about new books, so let's have a look at this pile to my immediate left:

Princess Knight, Part One collects the first half of a well-known Osamu Tezuka manga series from the mid-'50s (as revised and re-serialized in the mid-'60s), about a princess born with two hearts -- male and female -- who thus is both an expert fencer and gorgeous. I've never read this one -- and I'm more familiar with Tezuka's later work, aimed more squarely at adult audiences -- but it looks like swashbuckling fun, with a side order of gender comedy. Vertical published this first volume last week -- and the second half of the story will be coming next month.

DAW will publish its usual three mass-market paperbacks in the month of December, and those are:

• Under the Vale, edited by -- who else? -- Mercedes Lackey, with seventeen new stories of those magical talking horsies and their buddies (I kid), from Tanya Huff, Fiona Patton, Rosemary Edghill, Elisabeth Waters, and Lackey herself with Larry Dixon.
• Human for a Day is the monthly Tekno Books anthology -- this time with sixteen original stories (from Jay Lake, Seanan McGuire, Anton Strout, Tanith Lee, Jim C. Hines, and others) about "what it means to be human" -- edited by the late Martin H. Gerrnberg and Jennifer Brozek.
• And then there's Gini Koch's Alien Proliferation, fourth in a romantic-comedy SF series about a CIA agent, her alien now-husband, and various dangerous complications.

Autumn: Disintegration is the third (of four) novels in a zombie series by David Moody; it was originally self-published (along with a slew of other Moody horror books that are coming out really quickly), but is being reprinted by one of those old-fashioned real publishers, Thomas Dunne Books (part of St. Martin's Press), this month. It's a zombie novel, so don't expect me to read it or say anything positive about it.

Stands a Shadow is the second novel by epic fantasy writer Col Buchanan, and, as fate would have it, it is the second book in the series ("The Heart of the World") that began in that first novel, Farlander. It's the kind of book that has a Holy Matriarch, Free Ports, a fortress city called Bar-Khos, and a Roshun assassin named Ash -- if you like that sort of thing, this looks just like the sort of thing that you'll like. It's a Tor hardcover in November.

Also from Tor in hardcover in November, also in a big fantasy series (fourth in "The Imager Portfolio"), but from a writer who's been around slightly longer, is Scholar, the new L.E. Modesitt, Jr. novel. This is the fourth in the series, but it seems to be a distant prequel, set hundreds of years earlier.

I'm pretty sure I read and enjoyed Yves Menard's first novel in English, The Book of Knights -- it came out in my book-club days, when I had people reading books for me and I read bits of dozens of books a month, so I can be a bit fuzzy sometimes -- so I'm happy to see another one, the multiple-universe fantasy novel Chrysanthe, in which a young woman learns that her entire life is a lie, that she's the true heir to the titular fantasy kingdom, and (of course) heads home to take what is rightfully hers. It's coming from Tor as a hardcover in March.

To change gears entirely, Mush!: Sled Dogs with Issues is a graphic novel about (yes!) sled dogs, who talk to each other and have complicated internal lives and conflicts like any workplace. It's written by Glenn Eichler -- a TV writer whose previous graphic novel was Stuffed! (my review) -- with art from Joe Infurnari, whose name I know, though I'm not sure from what. This is coming from First Second in December, just in time for the big dog-racing season for those of you who live in very snowy places.

Also from First Second is The Silence of Our Friends, which looks much more serious: it's a story of the civil-rights era 1960s, written by two comics-connected friends (who don't seem to have written comics before), Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, with art from the excellent Nate Powell. (Powell's Swallow Me Whole -- see my review -- was one of the very best books of any kind of 2008, and his new Any Empire -- also see my review -- is also quite good.) This one is coming in January.

Last for this week is Jasper Kent's The Third Section, the third novel -- after Twelve and Thirteen Years Later -- in his giant vampires-in-19th-century-Russian-history series. (I have to admit that I haven't read these, but they look really good.) This one brings the story up to 1855 and the Crimean War, and it's a trade paperback from Pyr that was just published at the end of October.

Hiatus

Right now -- through the miracle of scheduled posting -- I am in the air with my family, on our way to a location I keep telling the boys I'm not going to tell them is Walt Disney World.

For the past three years of November vacations, I worked ahead, and had reviews and other posts scheduled to pop up the entire time I was away. This year, I'm busier at work, busier with trying to rebuild my basement, and just discombobulated from having my computer set up on the dining room table. This means that there's nothing in the hopper, and Antick Musings is about to go dark for about a week.

I trust you'll all be able to survive this horrible calamity, and I'll see you all on the other side.

(Oh, there will be a truncated "Reviewing the Mail" on Monday, and there's the slightest possibility that I'll blog something from vacation, but that's about it.)

Realms of Fantasy is Dead Again

My only current paying freelance gig has been shot out from under me yet again; Realms of Fantasy magazine is being shut down for the third (I think) time in as many years.

SF Scope has the full story. Thanks to all of the owners of RoF for pouring money into it, even though that didn't work out the way any of us had hoped, and to everyone else who worked on the magazine. I came in very late in its life, but I'm pretty sure hiring me didn't directly lead to any of its many deaths.

And, if there's anyone out there looking for someone snarky to review books in that vast realm between comics and skiffy, I am your man.

Quote of the Week

"Some research has suggested that it is men, more than women, who yearn for marriage, but this may be merely a case of stated preference. Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them -- not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums."
 - Nick Paumgarten, "Looking for Someone," p. 41 of the 7/4/11 New Yorker

What We Lose, What We Save

My first real job, back in high school, was as a cashier for the discount department store Bradlees. It was a chain, but not a huge one; Bradlees stores covered the Northeast, but that was about it, and it wasn't growing when I worked there. Target and Walmart were still far off on the horizon -- though I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they were regional chains themselves at that point, growing bigger and claiming more territory -- but there were plenty of competitors in New Jersey, from the similarly regional -- and now equally-defunct -- Caldor and Jamesway to the then-major national leader, K-mart.

My default assumptions about retail were formed from working there: that stores are strong only as long as they're growing, and the stagnant ones are dying. Maybe dying slowly, but dying nonetheless. And, of course, the country -- even the world -- is finite, so every chain will hit stagnation before too long, and start dying. And so Jamesway died, which gave Bradlees a little boost. And then, a few years later -- in the late '90s, during that supposedly superheated economy full of dot-com money -- Bradlees ran out of gas itself, and shut down. I was long gone from them at that point -- working as a retail clerk in a low-end store is no way to feed a family -- but my wife managed a Bradlees shoe department almost to the bitter end. Luckily, the shoe department was outsourced, so she worked for a separate company that hadn't yet gone bankrupt -- though it would have it's time, soon enough -- and so she could go out on maternity leave with our first son in early 1998 and just never come back when the chain collapsed later that year.

I think about Bradlees, now and then. Not all that often. But sometimes I'm prompted -- I used to have a tin of box cutters from those days, with razor blades that were still useful, and so I often though of Bradlees when I had to cut up boxes. And, lately, I think about Bradlees when my train approaches Hoboken.

There's some kind of an industrial building, in what's probably Jersey City, up high above the train tracks and off on the other side of the next road. A line of trailers, each one snugged up to a gate in that building, aim their tails at the passing trains, as we slowly make our way through the junctions into the terminal. Some of those trailers move, I think. But the one on the end -- the farthest away from the way in; the one that's been there the longest -- never moves. And it has a big, faded Bradlees logo on its side.

That logo is doubly nostalgic, since it was outdated even when I started working for Bradlees back in 1986 -- the chain had rebranded with '80s colors, dark maroon and white, getting rid of the very '70s brown earth tones of their previous logo. But it's that '70s logo I see every day from my train: a trailer branded not just with a store that's been gone over a decade, but with a look that's been outdated for three.

I've been thinking a lot about unlikely survivals, since the flood that left my basement with six feet of mostly clean water at the end of August. As the waters were rising, I hauled things upstairs: two computers, a TV, the rocking chair I used for both of my infant sons, hundreds of books, videogames and movies from my now-older sons. But much more than that went under those waters; we never expected a flood that bad.

I cleared off the bottom shelf of every bookcase in the basement -- more than a dozen of them -- thinking that, at the very worst, we'd get a foot or so. I was wrong; when we think we can estimate how bad things can get, we're usually badly wrong.

Most of our Christmas ornaments were destroyed, and all of the softer and more electrical Christmas goods. The three totes that held them were up on a shelf about three feet high, but they either floated or were hit by something else floating, and the water got in.

I had about five thousand comics in that basement as well; mostly buried under other boxes and things. I hadn't been in those boxes for five years, at least. But when I got down into the basement, as the pumps were getting the water out and everything else settled into a three-foot deep mess, I saw "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" float by, and I couldn't look at it.

Two bicycles came out of that mess, were mostly cleaned and oiled, and are now in the shed. I think they're OK, or can be made OK. The bow saw we've used to cut Christmas trees for our two sons' entire lives was propped high up on a wall, and is now only as rusty as it was before the flood. Two different stacks of books, stashed up on top of bookshelves because I didn't really want them but also didn't exactly want to get rid of them, came through just fine, while a rare galley of Robert Jordan's last book -- also on top of a bookcase, right next to one of those piles -- fell into the water.

One shelf of one bookcase -- starting in the middle of Charles Stross hardcovers, and running about twenty-five books -- was the only thing entirely spared. Dozens of other shelves -- all of my graphic novels, manga, and whatever else you call books with juxtaposed words and pictures; all my hardcovers deeper in the alphabet than C.S. Lewis; all my trade paperbacks; my few mass-market paperbacks; two big bookcases of classics I kept adding to, and rarely read from, including a nearly-complete set of Anthony Trollope I was going to get back to any year now; and all of my unread books that weren't sent by publishers or bought in the last six months -- were either engulfed by the waters directly or dragged down by falling bookshelves.

When the waters drained, there was a rumpled surface of wet book-pulp, two feet above the ruined carpet, throughout that basement: it had all become dirty, wet, slippery trash, and had to be laboriously hauled out just to be thrown away. Not a single one of those books, or the shelves they sat on, had the slightest hope.

All of my recent CDs -- still in piles on the fronts of shelves on one of those bookcases -- scattered throughout that mess, and were mostly lost. I gathered what I could, but giant messes aren't conducive to careful excavating; they need to be shoveled out of the way before the smell and mold and rot get a foothold. Older CDs -- collected in plastic drawer-boxes, mostly stuck under a table -- were easier to find, and were stacked in the backyard. I spent two days shucking wet CD cases, throwing away the books and digipacks and plastic and washing the CDs in tubs of bleachy, soapy water. One of those drawer-boxes disappeared entirely, I think -- there were mounds of garbage in the front and back yards, giant masses of formerly useful stuff, and those could engulf anything -- but another survived entirely unscathed, having somehow floated free, and stayed above water the entire time. So I now have about 40 CDs that still have their cases -- the most miscellaneous of my boxes, of course -- and hundreds half-organized in a few hastily-bought binders.

Our tax returns and other financial stuff were in ziplocked bags in upper cabinets, five feet off the ground. The water got in; they were just more garbage.

I had a big metal desk -- had had it since the late '80s at my mother's house -- full of paper and trinkets, maps and cables, leather blank books that I'd probably never use and humorous bumper stickers I might one day put on a car. All of that was destroyed; the desk removed by the same trash-hauling firm that got our washer, dryer, and refrigerator. (They couldn't get the couch; that was on the other side of the basement, and a ton or so of wet books had to be removed to even get to it.)

And so on. There was a lot of stuff in that basement -- some of it things only used for a short time each year (like our fourth air conditioner, or snow pants), some of it warehoused and half-forgotten (like those comics, and the magazines in boxes next to them), some of it used every day (like the food in that fridge), some of it picked over and looked at and moved about now and then (like all of my books), and a lot of it was things that we only realize we lost bit by bit, day by day, as we look for it and realize.

We have this conversation every day: "Have you seen that thing?" "Oh, it was in the basement."

It was in the basement. That's all that needs to be said. There's hardly anything in the basement now. We know where it all went.

But my family is still here, and we're rebuilding. Eventually -- if my wife doesn't stop me bodily, or we don't move before then -- I'll probably have five thousand books in that basement again. And, if the waters come again, we should be better prepared. But things still get destroyed, all of the time. Everything has an end; every person or house or book or trinket, no matter how much anyone loves and cherishes it, will eventually be gone. But sometimes you can get a good run before that.

So I think about that Bradlees trailer, still serving someone all these years later. And I hope it can hold on, and keep being useful, for as long as possible. Because, if it can do that, maybe there's a chance for me as well.

2011 World Fantasy Awards

They were announced this past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention (where else?), held this year in beautiful, sunny San Diego.

Since I've been a judge for this award (a few years back now; the scars have completely healed), I've got a higher regard for the winners, and now I really need to track down a copy of Who Fears Death.

Congratulations to all of the winners. And, to the judges: you can relax now, and read something you want to, for a change.

Novel: Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Novella: "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: "Fossil-Figures" by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
Collection: What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement: Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer

Read in October

Life got more-or-less back to normal in October -- we got a furnace in the middle of the month, and that was the last piece needed to get our house's systems back to basic functioning -- but I personally am still squatting (along with my computer) in the kitchen, as the renovations of the now-dry but still very empty basement grind forward slowly.

Along the way, of course, I read some books, and these are they:

• George McManus's Bringing Up Father (10/1)
  
• Lawrence Block, Getting Off (10/6)
  
• Dan Wells, I Don't Want to Kill You (10/7)
  
• Bob Sehlinger & Liliane J. Opsomer with Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World with Kids 2011 (10/10) (link is to brand-new 2012 edition)
  I've written about the "Unofficial Guides" at great length before -- this post here is probably the longest and most detailed -- and I've been a big fan of them even before I came to work at Wiley, the house that publishes them. So of course I dug through a few of those books this year to prepare for this year's big family trip -- even if that trip is to the same place as it's been for the past three years. This particular volume is a shortened and focused version of the "big book," aimed at families. I'd still recommend the big one first, but this has some useful original stuff, particularly for those with younger rugrats than mine.
  
• Editors of McSweeney's, The McSweeney Joke Book of Book Jokes (10/11)
  
• The Imagineers, The Imagineering Field Guide to Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World (10/11)
  A slim little book written by the gestalt mind of everyone who had ever worked on building that particular park -- I joke slightly, since it did credit, in very small type hidden on the copyright page, the actual writer who did all of the work and tracked down the engineers, designers, and other folks who put the place together -- full of mostly-interesting information about the rides, designs, and other trivia of the Magic Kingdom. It was a bit too small and little, actually, since it had a lot of photos that weren't as clear and large as one might have wanted. As a pocket guide for things to look for in the park, though, it would be excellent. But it is primarily for either hardcore Disney geeks or folks who are really interested in industrial design.
  
• Steven M. Barrett, The Hassle-Free Walt Disney World Vacation 2011 (10/19)
  I also read other guides to the places I'm vacationing, because reading travel guides is one of the great minor pleasures of life -- particularly to those of us who love to plan, and imagine, and mull over everything before we do any of it. (Last year I had five Book-A-Day posts about the books I read for that year's vacation -- one, two, three, four, five -- which is vaguely justifiable because I was reviewing a book a day.) This one was OK, but didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know -- difficult at this point, I'll admit -- and was made up in large part with touring plans that are not as well-laid out, nor as useful, nor (I suspect) as scientifically tested as those in the "Unofficial Guides." It's pretty good, but the things it does are things I find the Unofficial books do much better.
  
• George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (10/27)
  I doubt I'll do a serious review of this -- it's too damn big, and has been thoroughly chewed over by people much more devoted than me already -- but I'll be damned if I read one book for most of a month and not get a post out of it, so something will be forthcoming. Edit: No, it isn't.
  
• Richard Sala, The Hidden (10/31)
  

And then I was done. November will see that trip I hinted about above, and probably thus even fewer books read than this month.