Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/21

Some weeks I have a lot of mail; some weeks I have a little. This is one of the "a lot" weeks, which I hope will make people happier.

The rules are the same as always: these books arrived, mostly unexpectedly, in my mailbox over the last week, sent by the hardworking publicists of the trade book-publishing biz. All of them this week, and nearly all of then most of the time, are from the US, since that's where I live -- though I'd be happy to get books from father away, if anyone's offering. I'm going to tell you what I can about them despite not having read them, and I'm going to try to be positive -- but the book I'm snarky about might turn out to be your favorite of the year, so go after what looks good to you.

(Heck, the book I'm snarky about could be my favorite of the year; that's happened before.)

Since there are a lot of books this week, I might be brief about them -- and my apologies to any author if my "brief" comes off as "dismissive."

I'll lead off with the new novel by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., The One-Eyed Man, mostly because I love the moody John Jude Palencar cover art, and want to stick that up top of this post. This is one of Modesitt's occasional standalone SF novels, set on a colony world that's the only source for important life-extension drugs used across the interstellar Unity. To this ecologically fragile, and only slightly understood, world comes a man from offworld, fleeing personal trouble elsewhere. (And I'm entirely sure that Modesitt knows well and intended the faint echoes of Dune you may detect there.) SF is supposed to be about complicated worlds and societies, and this one looks to be right down that street -- so check it out when it hits stores on September 17th in hardcover from Tor.

Next I have two books that I've mentioned here before, so I'll just hit them each briefly to remind you:

Little Star is the new horror novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of Let the Right One In (which became two movies of similar but slightly different titles, in the US and his native Sweden). Little Star is about a baby girl found in the woods who grows up to become a singing sensation, and it's a St. Martin's trade paperback on October 2nd.

And Jack Campbell's "Lost Stars" military SF epic -- itself a sequel to the prior series "The Lost Fleet" has a second volume in Perilous Shield, an Ace hardcover on October 1.

And now I'll dive into the big box for this week, a collection of books (mostly manga) publishing from Yen Press this month:

Are You Alice?, Vol. 2 continues the latest Wonderland-themed manga (seriously, I've seen four or five of them, for whatever reason) by Ikumi Katagiri and Ai Ninomiya. This time, "Alice" is a boy -- and "Alice" seems to be more of a title than a personal name. There are also more guns than you remember from Lewis Carroll.

Soul Eater, Vol. 16 is the latest in the series -- I think it's popular in the wider world, but I know it's very popular in my own house -- about witch-hunting "Scythemeisters," about their sentient shape-shifting weapons, and about the school they all attend. It's by Atsushi Ohkubo, and I know my sons will find an excuse to grab it from me within a day or two.

Kieli, Vol. 9: The Dead Sleep Eternally in the Wilderness, Part 2 is not a manga, but the finale of Yukako Kabei's light-novel saga about, as the back cover puts it, "a lonely girl" and "an undying soldier," and, at this point, they're "trapped inside the Church's headquarters, which is still surrounded by monsters." So, as usual, book nine is not a good place to begin a story -- we all knew that already, right?

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan, Vol. 7 continues the side-story of the main Haruhi Suzumiya series (which was originally a light novel series before becoming both manga and anime -- and has several other spin-offs as well), in its goofy, chibi style, with art by Puyo and story by Nagaru Tanigawa.

Goong, Vol. 13 is officially manwha rather than manga, since it comes from Korea and reads left-to-right. I believe this series, by Park SoHee, started off about the arranged marriage of the (fictional) Prince of Korea to a commoner girl, but, in this volume, the two main characters have been divorced but come back into contact with each other unexpectedly.

The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Prince continues the manga-esque adaptation of the novel by Cassandra Clare (second in the "Infernal Devices" series, set in a Victorian England-- and no points for guessing what subgenre it fits into), with art by HyekYung Baek.

And then there's The Betrayal Knows My Name, Vol. 6, the manga with the emo-est name possible. It's by Hotaru Odagiri, and the back-cover copy is full of frantic activities by names that will be familiar to readers of the prior volumes (but, sadly, not to me).

And last from Yen this month is A Bride's Story, Vol. 5, continuing Kaoru Mori's acclaimed story of young brides on the 19th century Silk Road. I don't believe each volume is self-contained, but this is more episodic than most manga, focusing on one young bride (or two, in the case of the twins this time out) for just a couple of volumes.

Returning to fiction told purely in words, without pictures, Vicious is the first novel credited to V.E. Schwab (which is the thinnest possible pseudonym for the YA author Victoria Elizabeth Schwab; at this point the point just seems to be having a different permutation to make the bookstore computers happy). It's a SF novel set in a world where scientific accidents can lead to superpowers, although it doesn't seem like there are too many superheroes in this world -- our two main characters are former roommates and best friends, now mortal enemies ten years later. I like modern superpowers novels, so I'm going to try to find time to read this. If you get to it before me, let me know how you like it.

Ghosts Know is not a first novel at all: it's the new book by Ramsey Campbell, and I'm not going to try to count the earlier ones so I can say this is the eleventy-first or eleventy-second. This time out, the master of horror has a story about a talk-radio host who humiliates a famous "psychic" on his show and then finds that psychic has fingered him as the culprit in his next case -- with horribly damning evidence. It's a Tor hardcover, coming October 1st.

Steelheart is billed as Brandon Sanderson's "first young adult series," which I think implies that he's written standalone YAs before, and possibly a series for young readers that was officially middle-grade. (He's pretty prolific, and I have to admit I don't know all of his work.) This is another superpowers-in-the-modern-world book, in which a Calamity about a decade back gave a few people superhuman powers -- and, aparrently, turned all of them into world-dominating supervillains. Steelheart is the local overlord, ruling Chicago. And our hero is a boy that wants to kill him. Steelheart is a September 24th hardcover from Delacorte.

The Incrementalists is a new novel by Steven Brust (whose books I've been reading for close to thirty years) and Skyler White (who has two novels I haven't yet seen), about a secret group of two hundred people with memories and history stretching back forty thousand years, who keep making the world just a tiny bit better every year. But now there's a big break -- caused by the death and rebirth of one of this secret society -- and they must gather in Las Vegas to save their group, and (just maybe) the world. It's a Tor hardcover on September 24th, but they had me at "Steven Brust."

Day One is some kind of apocalyptic thriller about New York City under siege "from a deadly and brilliant enemy that can be anywhere and can occupy anything with a computer chip." So it's not necessarily Wintermute, but that's the way I'm betting. The author is Nate Kenyon, the publisher is St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, and the date is October 1st. This may be one of the few near-future apocalypses you get this year without zombies, so take that into strong consideration.

If you want to break into Big Two corporate comics, you should probably at least take a look at The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics, written by long-time comics scripter Carl Potts and published October 8th by noted art-book house Watson-Guptill. All of the examples are obvious from DC, but it seems to be a reasonably comprehensive look at the writing and art that goes into that particular sausage factory.

Pop Manga will probably be less useful at getting its readers jobs in its target industry, but that's primarily because the world of manga is even tighter than US superhero comics and Americans (this book's expected audience) has a massive disadvantage in not being Japanese. Still, they can draw in a Japanese style, and Camilla D'Errico's book (with Stephen W. Martin) can show how to do that. As far as I can tell, the cover and all of the interior art is by D'Errico, which is a big advantage in a how-to-draw book -- there's one less interpreter in the middle. This is also from Watson-Guptil. available on October 8th.

Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust

In 1984, Ulli Lust was a rebellious seventeen-year-old punk, a dropout from art school living in her sister's Vienna apartment. Like so many other seventeen-year-olds, she wanted to live, not to settle down with a boring job or school program or any of those things her parents (and everyone else's parents) demanded.

So, one day, with a new friend named Edi who'd made the trip before, she snuck across the border into Italy -- this was before Austria fully joined the EU, so there was still strict border control -- and the two teen girls wandered their way south, looking for adventures and to spend the winter in sunny Sicily.

Twenty-five years later, Lust wrote and drew the story of her younger self as Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, and it was published to acclaim in Berlin, where she's lived for many years. And then, just this year, her graphic story (surely I shouldn't call it a novel, should I?) was translated into English, as one of the last projects of the great editor/translator Kim Thompson.

Lust was very young at the time, but she doesn't judge her younger self at all here -- in an astonishing leap, she tells this story entirely from her younger self's viewpoint, without her later life or thoughts intruding at all. Your Life reads almost precisely like the story that seventeen-year-old girl would have created right then, if she had the energy and skill and distance and fearlessness to do it.

The young Lust had attitude and guts to spare -- she made that whole trip with just the clothes on her back and a borrowed sleeping bag, panhandling for food money and sleeping wherever she could. She also was subject to the attentions of Italian men -- something the "nymphomaniac" Edi didn't mind; Edi was happy, in Lust's retelling years later, to sleep with pretty much anyone who wanted to have her -- in the endless, wearing way of that very traditional Catholic nation at that time, where every foreign woman (especially young, especially traveling alone, especially buxom and shabby, especially poor) was fair game for any man who could grab her. Lust was about as tough as she could be, and she pushed back as hard as she could against that endless, grinding attention and harassment, but she had very little power and Sicily, as she portrays it, cares much more for a man's honor not to be refused than a woman's right to control her own actions.

So Your Life is not all a fun adventure -- Edi is a loose cannon, called "stupid" by other characters and certainly very sensation-seeking and risk-taking, and their other friends, fellow travelers, and would-be lovers are as bad or worse in their own ways -- and Lust finds herself an object and in serious danger, in ways she doesn't even realize at the time. She does get out, of course -- the existence of this book proves it -- but not unscarred, and not the same as the girl who left.

The back cover tries to sell this as "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" -- and all of that certainly is part of Lust's journey -- but Your Life is deeper and more serious than that. Lust tells her own story, but what makes Your Life resonant is what it says about men and women -- about predatory men and the women they victimize -- and that's what will stick with the reader afterward. Lust isn't grinding any axes here: she just tells her story, and shows exactly what those men were like, and leaves her readers to realize for themselves how wrong that world is.

Mouse Under Glass by David Koenig

David Koenig has a steady day-job in the boring world of business publishing -- I'm not knocking it; so do I -- and a thriving hobby/second job writing books about various aspects of the multifarious companies of Disney. He started out with Mouse Tales, a very entertaining look at the behind-the-scenes stories of Disneyland, followed that up with More Mouse Tales (which I still haven't read), and then took on the Orlando outpost of the mouse in Realityland. In between, he wrote Mouse Under Glass, which takes a similar approach to the classic Disney animated movies.

Glass was published in 1997, which informs the arc of its story: Disney started strong, foundered after Walt's death (and meandered more than bit even before that) and found renewed energy and life starting with Little Mermaid and peaking with Lion King. There's not a whisper of Pixar, or of the rise of CGI animation, since that was just starting to happen as Koenig wrote this. Disney's relationship with Studio Ghibli also began just after this book was published, though it probably would have been out of Koenig's scope anyway: Disney just acted as a translator and distributor for those movies (as wonderful as they are).

Glass devotes a chapter to each of the main Disney animated films from Snow White to Hunchback, omitting the jukebox movies of the war years and just after (Saludos Amigos, Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time) and the assemblages (Ichabod & Mr. Toad, Winnie the Pooh) but including a clutch of partially animated movies (Song of the South, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Pete's Dragon, Roger Rabbit). Koenig also drops Black Cauldron almost entirely, mentioning it in an introductory section but not giving it a chapter. Also omitted are odder early-'90s things like DuckTales: The Movie, A Goofy Movie, The Brave Little Toaster, A Nightmare Before Christmas, and James and the Giant Peach, possibly because they were odd, they came out of different Disney divisions, or they'd mess up the story Koenig wanted to tell.

What's left is pretty much the conventional wisdom on Disney as of 1997 -- Koenig has a lot of strengths, particularly as a reporter and researcher, but challenging conventional wisdom has never been one of them -- and Koenig lays out the case for it well in his introductions. Luckily, the chapters have more depth to them, running through the source material for each movie, an account of how Disney changed that into the final movie story (including details of dropped scenes and ideas), and then trivia around bloopers, other problems, hidden images, public reactions, and how those movies turned into theme-park rides.

Glass is out of date now, but it's a solid look at the movies it does cover, with a lot of interesting details for Hollywood-history buffs or Disney fans. But I'd recommend Koenig's theme-park books first or more highly; there are plenty of books about movies, but Koenig is one of the few who applied serious journalistic skills to the behind-the-scenes world of the Disney parks.

You by Austin Grossman

Grossman's first novel was Soon I Will Be Invincible (see my old ComicMix review), one of the best superhero novels I've seen (up there with Miracle Monday, actually), though the villain half of that book was stronger than the relatively conventional hero half. Six years later, he came back with this second novel, one similarly grounded in geek culture but set in the real world and featuring naturalistic characters leading basically ordinary lives.

You is a oh-god-we're-getting-older novel set in the world of videogames, circa 1997, with a cast mostly just hitting thirty at that point -- pointedly, all about Grossman's age (and close to mine, as well), and the timeline particularly focuses the sense of aging. (Since we all thought we were getting old then, when we turned thirty, but we had no idea what we were in for. And the fifty-, sixty-, and seventy-somethings are smiling wryly at us, thinking we still don't know.)

You is as conventional in its own way as Invincible was: the core characters were a group of teen-age nerds in the mid-80s, who met and started making videogames together in school. There's the brilliant short guy who has no social skills: Simon. And the Jobs-ian glad-hander who's not quite as good at coding but knows all about people: Darren. And the Ally-Sheedy-in-Breakfast-Club token female and obligatory Asperger's case: Lisa.

And, finally, Russell, our first person narrator. He was part of the circle in high school, contributed slightly to the first couple of games before they left school and went pro, but then spent the ten years in between pursuing a series of failed careers: lawyer, writer, this, that, the other. He's finally back in town (just outside Boston), and gets a job at Black Arts Games as the novel opens.

With that set-up, the expectation is that the novel will explore some buried secrets among the four old friends [1], but Grossman isn't interested in that: Simon died four years before (in a dramatically offhand way that feels important for the whole novel, but never leads anywhere), and Darren splits from Black Arts almost as soon as Russell arrives. You quickly turns into Russell's journey through, and into Grossman's love letter to the progress of, videogames from the early '80s to the late '90s -- most of the book is Russell digging through notes and documentation, and playing through all of Black Arts's catalog, to get up to speed on the new job that he's totally unqualified for.

So Russell plays through all of the games -- a series of fantasy adventure, SF adventure, and spy adventure stories with interlinked characters and stories, and a single underlying engine -- while Grossman gets to philosophize about what gaming is and why we like it. You doesn't have a lot of the usual strengths of a novel: the characterizations are thin, the overall plot is simple and linear, and there's little attention given to the world or larger philosophical points.

But, if you've spent any substantial time over the last three decades playing games -- and, if you're around my age, it would be hard not to -- You will be a thoughtful, engrossing look at why we've spent so much time poking buttons and typing "search all" and manipulating controllers and squinting at various screens deep into the night. And Grossman does have an organizing conceit that required You to be fictional -- the games that Black Arts created are not simply other people's famous games thinly disguised -- so there's a clear reason why he didn't just write nonfictionally about the real games of that era.

(Though I do have to admit that I miss Doctor Impossible, and want to see Grossman get back to a voice like that -- strong, self-aware, larger-than-life, driving to do huge things or fail spectacularly in the attempt.)


[1] If you want to read that novel, the best example that comes to mind right now is Walter Jon Williams's This Is Not a Game.

Three Books Going Back to the Library Later Today: An Apology or Explanation

This month, I've found even deeper levels of sloth and book-avoidance -- I may get a post out of what I've been doing instead, but see above about "sloth" before getting your hopes up -- and have read almost nothing. But I do have three books that I've read over the last month or two, and all of them should go back to the library this afternoon. So they'll get less attention than they deserve, but maybe one of them will sound interesting to some of you.

Each one will get its own post, as the day goes on -- I think I'll try to space them a bit, just because.

Watch this space for more.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/14

Even when other blogging slows (or essentially stops), I keep posting these weekly: listing whatever came in the prior week, sent by hard-working publicists just trying to get some eyeballs and enthusiasm for the books they're pushing that month. Some weeks I have a lot, some weeks I have just a handful.

This week I have one book. (And, still, the general rule applies: I haven't read it yet.)

Pyr has the highest proportion of books I really want to read of any publisher I can think of, probably because Pyr's head, Lou Anders, is one of the few people in the world who loves sword & sorcery more than I do. And if I only got one book this week, I'm really happy to see that it's a new S&S novel from Pyr -- and, even better, that it's from a writer I'm not familiar with.

The Scroll of Years is the first novel by Chris Willrich, who's been selling short fiction (mostly to Magazine of F&SF) for nearly two decades. And it definitely is S&S, being the first novel about the partners (in most of the sense of the word that just sprung to your mind) Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, a poet/adventurer and near-immortal thief traveling across what looks like an interestingly varied world.

Pyr is publishing this in trade paper on September 24th. I can't promise I'll manage to read it soon, but I want to have already read it, and I'm thrilled to see it. Perhaps you will feel the same.

What Is Currently Making Me Angry With the Heat of a Thousand Firey Suns

I need to update information on a website I control with information about a company in India -- and I was just on their contact page a few minutes ago, which loaded and gave me all the data I needed. However, that page now will not load, and no amount of googling or futzing around has made IE just show the god-damned cached page you had five minutes ago!

Back in the early days of the 'net, it wasn't uncommon to set your browser to "work offline," and poke through the pages you'd loaded before. But that seems impossible now, and of course that's exactly what I need right now.

I really, really hate it when technology removes capabilities.

Update, two minutes later: Before anyone asks, I has a couple of IE windows open at all time at work because our portal site is set up to only authenticate with IE, so most of the systems & resources I have to use only work that way.

Top Shelf Sale

Top Shelf, one of the finest publishers of interesting comics on this or any other continent, is having one of their periodic amazing sales right now, and I urge you to go check it out and buy a few things.

They have comics for a buck, graphic novels for three -- lots of stuff half off or more, and everything I've read from Top Shelf has been...well, top shelf.

I've blogged about their sales before -- they do this in September a lot -- and here's last year's post about the stuff I bought then, as a taster. Look, it's a whole lot of great comics at ridiculously low prices -- if that's not appealing, I don't know how you find the energy to go on living.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/7

This week I have two books to write about, both sent to me unexpectedly by the Great Gods of Publicity. I haven't read either of them as of this precise moment, but either or both of them could turn out to be your favorite book of all time -- so I hope you'll forgive be if I get too flippant (which is my usual failure mode).

First up is Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl, which is I think the first David Barnett novel to be published in the US. It's a steampunk tale, as you might guess from the title, in which a callow young man goes to his world's London (capital of the usual Victorian even-larger-and-more-impressive-empire of steampunk) to find the thrilling adventurer of the cheap press, only to find that his hero does not exactly live up to his billing. It's out from Tor in the US, as a trade paperback on September 10th.

And the other book is The Third Kingdom, the latest from Terry Goodkind. As I understand it, he's essentially continuing the series that used to be called "The Sword of Truth" -- or, at least, telling more stories of that series's main characters -- with 2011's The Omen Machine and this new novel. There's very little supporting material here to judge by -- the front flap copy just has a few paragraphs from the book, in which what I presume will be the Big Bad shows no effects from having several swords run through him; and the back flap is entirely quotes about how awesome Goodkind is. I'm pretty sure Richard Rahl and Kahlan Amnell are in massive danger from said unaffected-by-swords-guy -- they seem to be captives of cannibals on page 1, though that might be an unrelated danger -- but I'm also fairly sure that they will manage to save the world eventually. This is a Tor hardcover, officially publishing in August.

Incoming Books: First Week of September

A few books have arrived here recently, from various directions, and I like writing about books when they reach my hands (shiny, even if not new), and this is my blog, so I do the things I like here.

First up is The Elwell Enigma, which is not a new book in Rick Geary's "Treasury of XXth Century Murder," even though it's another closely-examined murder case of a century ago -- in this case, of bridge expert Joseph B. Elwell in New York City in 1920. No, this is an unrelated side book, self-published by Geary, and I have no idea what the backstory is that led to it existing that way. But this was the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, which I backed, and the time has now come for the real book to arrive. It's got both the pluses of the small-press/crowdfunded world -- it came with a bookmark, signed postcard, signed bookplate, and the book itself was signed to me as well -- as well as the minuses, such as the fact that the spine is completely blank. (New presses often forget there's a piece of book between the front and back.) I have no idea if this is now available to non-backers, or if it will ever be -- but I have one, and that makes me happy.

I also got two stray books from my recent order from HamiltonBook.com (which I will continue to plug as a great source for remainders and random books):

The 2011 Harper trade paperback edition of Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides, since I need to rebuild my Powers shelf. (And my fantasy-reading second son might be ready for Powers in another few years, though I'll probably give him Anubis Gates first when the time comes.)

And Men of Tomorrow, the now nearly-decade-old history of the early days of comic books by Gerard Jones, who has written more than a few comics in his day. (I was particularly fond of The Trouble With Girls, which he wrote with Will Jacobs around twenty years ago.) This is well-respected, and I've been vaguely thinking about reading it for a while -- and having a copy makes that slightly more likely.

(Normally I would include Amazon links in a post like this -- but Elwell isn't available anywhere but directly from Geary, and the other two are remainders best acquired through those channels. So I'll leave them off -- even if I included them, I'd have recommended that you not use them to purchase.)

Ideal Jobs

I've seen several people whose job title includes "Evangelist," implying that what they get paid to do is be enthusiastic about things.

That sounded like a cushy job, but I'm really not that good at enthusiasm -- my talents lie much more in the other direction.

So I'm wondering now if there's any company who wants to hire an Anti-Evangelist, a guy who explains why every new idea is horrible and won't work -- I'd be great at it!

(If this were 2000 years ago, I could get the gig to tell Julius "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." That would be right up my alley.)

2013 Hugo Award Winners!

In past years, I've engaged a lot more with the Hugos -- posted annotated lists of the nominees, posted what I did or would have nominated, tried to read and evaluate everything, (badly) predicted the winners, argued with the results -- but these year I've been much less engaged. (To the point of not even bothering to post the nominees, I see.)

Still, the Hugos are the premier SFnal awards, and they were announced yesterday at the usual gala ceremony at the annual Worldcon (this year in San Antonio, Texas). And even when we don't agree with the winners -- which is pretty regularly, since that's how popularly-voted awards work -- it's worth celebrating those winners and the fans that made the Hugos happen every year.

And this year's winners are:

BEST NOVEL: Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)

Other people clearly like that book much better than I do, so I merely shrug.

BEST NOVELLA: The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon)
BEST NOVELETTE: "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi", Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)
BEST SHORT STORY: "Mono no Aware", Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese)

I haven't read these or any of their fellow nominees, so I can be purely happy for Sanderson, Cadigan, and Liu.

BEST RELATED WORK: Writing Excuses, Season Seven, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler & Jordan Sanderson

This is a podcast, and I can't stand having people talking at me (talk radio, audiobooks, podcasts -- it's all the same to me), so it would not be my choice for that idiosyncratic reason. I also note that the "Chicks Dig" series -- which won a Hugo for their first Dr. Who book a couple of years back -- either is slipping in popularity or digging into less-popular areas of fandom, since they had two nominees.

BEST GRAPHIC STORY: Saga, Volume One, Brian K. Vaughn, art by Fiona Staples (Image)

I have it, and intend to read it. This category is looking healthier -- Talbot's Grandville and Tayler's Schlock Mercenary are repeat nominees, but the rest are new and well-regarded.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – LONG: The Avengers

As if it would have been anything else. (So sorry, Peter Jackson -- you should have reconsidered the plan of turning a short zippy book into an SFX-laden bloated trilogy.)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – SHORT: Game of Thrones: ‘‘Blackwater’’

And the home of sexposition has now officially lapped Dr. Who as the default favorite in the category.

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR LONG FORM: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

It's his third win in the six years this has been a category, which could be a sign for the future (given Hugo voters' long-term inclinations to grab a favorite and cling tight for decades at a time). Or it may be an indication that he's well-known as Scalzi's editor, and this is a big year for Scalzi. Or maybe sunspots -- you can never discount the power of the sun, especially in Texas.

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR SHORT FORM: Stanley Schmidt

Nominated thirty-three years in a row in this and the predecessor category; only won after he retired. It's hard to avoid seeing it as a Lifetime Achievement Award, which the Hugos aren't supposed to be -- but Stan certainly deserved at least one Hugo for his work over the past 34 years at Analog.

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: John Picacio

Well-deserved. He's only the 17th person to win one of these in the 58 years this category has existed -- the average winner has nearly three and a half of them. (An average driven up by Michael Whelan's 13 and Frank Kelly Freas's 10 -- not to mention Bob Eggleton's 8.) It would be nice, he said delicately, to see this category not get stuck in such a rut so often.

I will note that no previous winners were nominated this year, so the voters had to pick a new one -- and they had a bunch of great artists to choose from.

Edit: Cheryl (see comments) pointed out that Picacio won last year, so he is a previous winner. This is completely true, and implies that Picacio will be the default winner of this category for the next few years, if Hugo voters continue their past patterns. It also makes my comments immediately above wrong, not to put a too-fine point on it.

BEST SEMIPROZINE: Clarkesworld

Congrats to my NJ compatriot Neil Clarke and his crew. The reconfiguration of this category has driven out the criticalzines, which may have been the purpose -- it's now all fiction publications.

BEST FANZINE: SF Signal

I'm sure there's grumbling in certain sectors of SMOFdom today, since SF Signal is "not a fanzine" to many of them -- it doesn't have staples or the smell of mimeo about it. But I'm an occasional contributor (they ask me more often, and I've punted a couple of things due to press of day job work), and they're more-or-less the hometown boys at this Worldcon, so it's great to see them win.

BEST FANCAST: SF Squeecast

Again, I can't stand spoken-word audio, so I can't judge this category. Very fannish name though, which I like to see.

BEST FAN WRITER: Tansy Rayner Roberts
BEST FAN ARTIST: Galen Dara

Not familiar with the work of either of them, and I think they're both new nominees in their categories. Since these are usually the least-nominated and least-voted categories, it's great to see new names and new energy here.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER [NOT A HUGO AWARD]: Mur Lafferty

Please -- never refer to the Campbell as a Hugo! Whatever corporate entity that currently publishes Asimov's and Analog would never forgive you.


And congratulations to all of the winners (and nominees), despite any snark above -- winning or being nominated for a Hugo is a huge deal, and should be celebrated.

(via Locus Online)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/31

My US readers will be celebrating Labor Day when this goes live, and those of you in the rest of the world will have to console yourselves (assuming that you're working that day) with the knowledge that nearly all of you get more generous time off, medical care, and other benefits than we don't-need-no-guv'mint! American types have.

There's no mail delivery today, but there was mail and packages last week, which left me the following interesting items. I might make fun of them here -- I'll try not to, but the spirit is week, and every piece of art has something that's easy to parody -- but that doesn't mean that they might not be your favorite book of the year. And, in any case, I haven't read any of these -- so please assume that any fact you don't like is just me getting it wrong.

I'll start off with two standalone manga volumes -- yes, they do exist! -- both from Vertical this month.

Tropic of The Sea is an older manga than we usually see; Satoshi Kon's story was originally serialized in Young Magazine in 1990. A small seaside town has a tradition -- their local shrine holds a "mermaid's egg," a large pearl-like ball, changing its sea water every week and returning it to the sea after sixty years of gestation, to get a new egg soon after. And, of course, old traditions that come in conflict with an energetic modern society -- this is Japan in 1990, remember, before the crash and the lost decade; a society on the crest of a wave that looked to make it the most powerful economy in the world -- are likely to get crushed by the forces of modernity.Caught in the middle is the family that runs the shrine: the old traditionalist grandfather, the middle-aged modern father, and the teenage son who must choose a direction.

The other book from Vertical is a bit newer: Kyoko Okazaki's Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly was serialized from 1995 to 1996 and published in book from in 2003 -- delayed by the author's serious injury (according to Wikipedia, she was hit by a drunk driver while walking) and subsequent long recovery. Helter Skelter is a fashion manga -- drawn in a quick, impressionistic style like classic fashion illustration -- about a top model who underwent years of rigorous treatments and surgery to be perfect...and is now sliding down the other side of that height.

Switching gears, I have a bound galley of Jack Campell's upcoming space opera, The Lost Stars: Perilous Shield. (It's the second book in a spin-off from Campbell's Lost Fleet series, after Tarnished Knight -- looking at Campbell's list of previous books, he has so many lost things that he might want to invest in some of those little Bluetooth dongles and attach them to all of his fleets and stars.) The villains of this series seem to be evil spacefaring CEOs, which is a bit out of the ordinary for military SF -- that sub-genre is more likely to go the other way and focus on blowing up nasty alien collectivists. (There do also seem to be mysterious aliens lurking in the background of this series -- or sending huge battle fleets in to help with the endings of each book, more likely -- so those might end up being the evil collectivists that force the honor-bound space navy heroes and the rapacious space capitalists to work together to save each other. Perilous Shield is an Ace hardcover, and hits stores at the beginning of October.

The Lost Prince is the second in a contemporary fantasy series by Edward Lazellari, after Awakenings. It's a Tor hardcover that published on August 20, and, unlike the standard urban fantasy, it's not about a single main character. (Old habits die hard; I looked at the cover and was mentally composing a sentence along the lines of "XX is not just an NYPD cop, but also a paladin/werewolf/vampire/faerie/boggart/demon/angel/troll" -- but that's not what's going on here.) This series is actually a reverse portal fantasy: a group of protectors came through a gate from a fantasy world, Aandor, thirteen years ago, to protect an infant prince against the usual evil forces that wanted to kill him. But things went wrong, and the supposed protectors were scattered with no memories of their mission. So if any of you are looking for portal fantasies, derring-do, large casts, lost princes, and stakes involving the fates of multiple worlds, The Lost Prince is looking back at you, pointing at itself.

Last for this week is Stephen Hunt by Jack Cloudie -- I'm sorry, Jack Cloudie by Stephen Hunt. (I do hope there's an author out there named Jack Cloudie to complete the Nick Lowe/David Bowie echo.) This is the fifth novel in Hunt's loosely-linked steampunk world centered on the Kingdom of Jackals, in which a young not-British man is impressed into Somebody's Majesty's Steam-ship Navy, and travels to "Cassarabia," where a religious sect has been outlawed and a the true villains are "the sickness at the heart of the caliph's court: the mysterious cult that hides the deadly secret to the origins of the gas being used to float Cassarabia's new aerial navy?" I'm sure there's no parallels to any modern wars in this book, no sir. This also is a Tor hardcover, and is available now.

Read in August

Well, it'll soon be clear that my attention wasn't on reading books this month -- but the books I did get through were pretty enjoyable anyway.

Francoise Mouly, editor, The Best American Comics 2012 (8/1)

Joe Sacco, Journalism (8/2)

A.J. Wolfe, The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World Dining 2013 (PDF, 8/7)

Tim Kreider, Twilight of the Assholes (8/8)

Daniel Pinkwater, The Afterlife Diet (8/16)

Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014 (8/27)


And that was my August.

I'll probably have a reading project to take up all of October that will get me reading (and blogging) a lot more, but details on that will follow in a couple of weeks.

September, the month in between, might just see me continue this slow desultory meander through just a few books a month -- I'd prefer to read more books more quickly, but it seems I need some structure (provided by work or otherwise) to make me do that. As always, if there's anyone out there who wants me to write for them, just drop me a line -- I work vastly better with deadlines than without them.