Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/28/20

So I think these two books have been in my hands for at least a week and maybe longer. Apologies to the fine publishing companies responsible for them (and for getting them into my hands), but I've been even more busy/distracted than usual the past little while.

(I've said to a couple of people that this pandemic has a severely asymmetrical affect on different people -- a lot of people have nothing to do, but a substantial group have vastly more to do. Obviously, medical personnel are in Category Two, but so are lots of attorneys, tax professionals, and risk-management/compliance folks, all of whom are the folks my company supports. So we're a bit busy, too. If you happen to be in one of those buckets, we have a global COVID-19 resource page with lots of free resources for your profession to help you navigate it for yourself and your business and/or clients. Hope it helps; hope you and your operations make it through this relatively unscathed.)

Anyway: books! They came in the mail!

I haven't looked at them, since I haven't picked up a book to read, um, this year? Maybe longer.

Catch-22 is on the corner of my desk mocking me right now, and the book I thought would be next off to the side and would be mocking me if it weren't under my Vassar alumnae magazine and so decently hidden. Some day I will read books again. These may even be the ones. Anyway, that ritual debasement out of the way, here we go...

The Immortal Conquistador is a standalone short fantasy novel (maybe novella? it's 184 pages in a 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 paperback format with reasonably sized type, so it might sneak it right around 40k words, and I'm not about to do a cast-off on it right now) by Carrie Vaughn, set in the world of her Kitty Norville books. (Which I where I point out I still have four of those -- not even including the last two -- sitting on my shelf to be read, even though the series has been dormant for five years now.)

Conquistador is about the vampire Rick, the five hundred year-old ex-conquistador (hence the title) originally known as Ricardo de Avila. It's not clear if this is his life story -- the whole "who he is and how he came to be!" thing -- or if it's a modern story in which he's the main character. It's available right now, in paperback form, from the fine people at Tachyon Publications. (Whose base in San Francisco I would have called one of the epicenters of the current pandemic in the US a couple of weeks ago, before my much-too-competitive NYC area muscled up to the top of the chart.)

The other book is entirely different: Goldie Vance: The Hotel Whodunit by Lilliam Rivera, which apparently is based on a comics series by Hope Larson and Brittney Williams. Goldie herself is an amateur teen detective, of the kind we've seen so many of over the years, based in the Crossed Palms resort in Florida, where her father is the manager. It's a middle-grade novel, and I suspect the comics series is pitched as the kind of "all-ages" book that kids actually do read, maybe more than the usual comic-shop crowd.

My guess is that Goldie is set in the modern day, but the plot of this novel has a major studio filming a big monster movie on Crossed Palms premises, so it may be a more interesting version of the modern day. This is the first Goldie novel, but I imagine the hope is that there will be many more; middle-grade readers love to fill up a shelf with the same thing and the publishers love to accommodate them. It's from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, and was officially on sale March 17th.

Also: Goldie is biracial and some variety of queer, which will be a positive for a lot of those middle-grade readers (among others), and possibly a negative for people whose reaction will cause the rest of us to judge them. Just so you know, in case you have either of those reactions.

(Note that I'm giving links to that big hegemonic Internet bookstore, since I always do. But, given circumstances in the world, I'd actually recommend going to IndieBound instead and seeing if your local is doing mail-order and/or delivery/pick-up. It's tough out there right now for small business, so support the ones you want to still be around when we stop sheltering in place.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/22/20

Oh, don't even ask.

But I do have a few new books to mention this week!

Two of them came in the mail -- in a mailer heavily battered and repacked by someone claiming the unlikely name of "Nixie Sorter" and admitting there may have been other things, possibly wondrous and valuable things, in that package originally that were now irretrievably lost -- and one more was a book I just bought, perhaps because I still think of myself as someone who actually reads books. (Which I am not, at the moment.)

The two books in the mail both came from the Night Shade arm of Skyhorse, and I have to admit that I have no idea who the editorial staff is there these days, despite once knowing people on both sides of that equation quite well. (Well, I'm pretty sure Tony Lyons is still running Skyhorse, so hi to both him and whoever he hired to edit SFF for him.) Both are advance proofs; both are publishing in June; both will be hardcovers. And the two books are very different in nearly every way, which is nice for the field and for the health of the Night Shade program.

First up alphabetically (and in the package as repacked by the estimable Nixie) is Neal Asher's The Human, third in his current series "Rise of the Jain." Asher writes zippy, exciting space-opera adventure, and as I recall his super-science is generally on this side of the plausible line. (He's British, you know. No idea if that has anything to do with anything, but don't we colonials usually grant anyone with even the loutiest British Isles accent the benefit of the doubt?)

And then we have a book that's fantasy rather than sf, old rather than new -- The Best of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn, a new collection edited by George Vanderburgh (who also edited Night Shade's previous five-volume collection of the complete de Grandin). Quinn is the great forgotten Weird Tales writer -- if you know the original Weird Tales at all, you think of Lovecraft and Howard first, maybe Clark Ashton Smith next, maybe August Derleth if you're a masochist. Quinn, in those days, was actually more consistently popular than any of those [1], and his work has been occasionally re-discovered since then, only to fall into obscurity again and again. de Grandin is his most famous character, an occult detective based in Harrisonville, NJ, whose stories were told in the Sherlock Holmes manner by his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge. I have to admit that I've never read Quinn, but having a nice new collection of twenty of the best stories of his most famous character definitely moves him up the list. Maybe it would for you as well?

And last is The Eye of Mongombo, the first third of a long-thought-dead comics series by Doug Gray. Eye was originally supposed to be a twelve-issue comics series from Fantagraphics; it started in mid-1989 and ran for seven issues before Gray quietly walked away. Last year, he popped back up with a Kickstarter to finally finish it off -- the project didn't hit its goals but he went forward anyway, and this first volume is now available via Lulu. (If you're reading this in the future, Grey intends to get the book onto the usual bookselling platforms, so you could check there as well. I bought a copy almost as soon as he announced it.) Eye is a wacky adventure comic about a two-fisted Indiana Jones type (Cliff Carlson) who was turned into a duck and thrown headlong into the usual high-adventure chase for a mysterious artifact in South America. I liked it a lot the first time around, and I have an obvious interest in people who were in an interesting creative field, disappeared for a while, and then came back.


[1] Though, frankly, if I had to bet, the most popular creator for Weird Tales was Margaret Brundage...who was not a writer at all.

Metaphorical Love

Here's a song I'm liking a lot recently. I gather from the comments on this YouTube version that the singer/songwriter, Kate Davis, has been playing it different ways for years, but this is the first time I've heard her stuff.

I am a sucker for tricky, sneaky metaphors, and I love that about this song. But she also sings it compellingly, and lets the song do its own thing without getting in its way.

The video is oddly more impactful than just listening to the song -- visuals are pretty simple, but it really leans into the heart of the metaphor.

Anyway, here's "Open Heart" by Kate Davis. I gather it's on her new record, Trophy.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/11/19

Most of this stuff came in last week, but you may have noticed by now that this blog is in extremely low-content mode. (You may also have guessed that I've been neglecting it.) But I did get the following books recently, and I wanted to mention them.

One came in from a publisher -- bless their hearts! I have no idea why I'm still on anyone's publicity lists at this point -- and three were purchases from Fantagraphic's big Cyber Monday sale that were delayed in transit to me for various reasons.

Publicity:

Hilo, Vol. 6: All the Pieces Fit is the latest in the young-readers graphic-novel series by Judd Winick, who probably wishes people like me wouldn't still think of him as "that guy from an early reality show, you know, the one whose gay friend later died". Hilo is the kid with glowy hands on the cover: he's a robot superhero, more or less, and he's been chasing the Big Bad (Razorwark! a very appropriately Big Bad name) for five books now. This is promised to be the big finale. I read the first book a few years back, and buried a quick note about it in a long post covering everything I read for two months. All the Pieces Fit is a hardcover from Random House Books for Young Readers, on sale February 4.

Fantagraphics Sale:

Free Shit is a collection of a minicomic Charles Burns has done for shows and festivals for years -- and maybe just made up to send to friends -- with sketches and little drawings and random stuff. (Doesn't seem to have any story content, as you'd expect from a sketchbook.) This book collects the first twenty-five issues.

Reincarnation Stories is the new graphic novel from Kim Deitch, which means two things: it's going to be largely about some oddball corner of the entertainment world in the early 20th century, and Kim Deitch is going to be a major character in what seems to be a fictional, even fantastical, story. In this case, it's all about how he is -- or may be -- the reincarnation of minor (fictional) Hollywood figure Sid Pincus, and how that's manifested throughout his life. Reviews have been great, and Deitch is a master, so I'm looking forward to it.

And last is Tonta, the latest collection of stories from the current incarnation of Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez. (As opposed to the latest collection of stories from the current incarnation of Love & Rockets by his brother Gilbert, which I'd have to check to figure out which book that was). It's about The Frogmouth's goofy half-sister, the one Jaime draws with the face he previously reserved only for old ladies, though I think she's just supposed to be a not-conventionally-attractive teenager. (Jaime, for all his skill and ability, has not spent much time drawing people who are not conventionally attractive. Like, hardly any time.)

Quote of the Week: Retail Politics

Normally, officeholders in a state like Texas have differed from eminent public servants in the federal government  primarily in the way some social scientists claim that lower-class Americans differ from those Americans who have arrived in the middle class -- an inability to defer reward. A commissioner of an important federal regulatory agency is content to live on his government salary, secure in the knowledge that his next job may be as a highly paid executive or counsel in the industry he has been regulating. Distinguished Washington lawyers who serve as deputy secretaries of one department or another are ordinarily not given large retainers to use their influence until after they resign their posts. In some states, though, it is understood that such patience is too much to ask of a poor frail human being who happens to find himself governor.

 - Calvin Trillin, "Reformer," originally published 1972 in The New Yorker, available in Trillin on Texas, p.174

Favorite Books of 2019

So this is not going to go the way it used to.

Typically, I have a long explanation up front -- see last year for a type specimen -- about how I do this, and why there are twelve books, and then list one top book for each month along with a few other things worth mentioning.

But there are several months in 2019 where I didn't finish a single book: 2019 has been a massive outlier in my reading life (and, I hope, not the new normal). So that style simply won't work.

To be more specific, I only read 44 books in 2019. That's not just down from 2018's record-breaking 433, it's less than a third of the previous low, 2017's 139. I just don't have a regular time or place for reading actual books in my life now, and it shows.

I started typing this thinking that I would end up with a shorter list -- four or five books, maybe -- of recent things I read this year and can recommend. But I also almost completely stopped reading new books as the year went on, instead trying ever-more-powerful re-reads and classics to try to jump-start my reading enthusiasm (current candidate: Catch-22).

So that shorter list would actually be the first three things I read, back in January -- Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, Charles Stross's The Labyrinth Index, and Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn. And that seems more than a little pointless.

In the end, I do not have a list of favorite books that I read in 2019. In fact, I'd like to forget the way I was reading in 2019, along with a lot of other things about 2019, as quickly as possible.

(Also: in past years I would do another first-of-the-year post linking back to the first and last posts of the prior year. Since I've also been posting vastly less often this year, I'm not going to do that at all.)

I have no idea how 2020 will go. I'm coming to think I need some kind of structure in my reading life, as I did in 2018 (when I had basically the same physical set-up and working life as 2019). And "do this every day" clearly works well for me. But the book-a-day metric tends to push me to often-junky graphic novels and manga, which isn't what I want. So I may need to set a page goal: we'll see.

Anyway. I hope 2019 was less frustrating for you (in this way, at least) than it was for me. And best wishes for a better 2020.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/28

Normally, since I missed yesterday for lazy-on-vacation reasons, I'd just roll these books over to next week. But next week is an entirely different year, and I'm also trying to procrastinate slightly less these days.

So enjoy this unprecedented Tuesday edition of Reviewing the Mail!

This time out, I have two books that came in the mail, in radically different genres, and four graphic novels that I bought for myself so that The Wife could give them to me for Christmas. (It's not the most surprising way to get gifts, but it can't be beaten for receiving things you actually want.)

From the Mail:

Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor is a collection of "revenge fantasies and essays" by the title character/individual/writer. I think it's just a quirkier take on the standard "fiction writer's random nonfiction works" book, but it could, I suppose, be a themed series of very detailed murder plots against people he hates. (That would be out of character for a Canadian, I suppose. Probably isn't.) From a quick glance at the intro, it looks like these pieces originally appeared on Watts's blog over the past decade and a half or so. And now they're all in this book, which was published by Tachyon in November.

Real Pigeons Fight Crime by Andrew McDonald and Ben Wood is one of those pseudo-graphic-novel thingies -- lots of illustrations on each page, with dynamic art that has some sequential elements but isn't laid out as panels, and typeset text running around and between that art -- for younger readers that are so popular these days. It is, as you might guess, about talking pigeons, and I gather that they do fight crime. It's also the first in a series: Eat Danger and Nest Hard are promised as forthcoming. It's coming from Random House Books for Young Readers in January 7, and it looks like a hoot for a certain kind of younger reader (or maybe a no-longer-younger reader, I won't judge).

Pressies (No, the other kind of pressies!):

Maria M. by Gilbert Hernandez -- the full noir story, originally promised as two volumes but eventually (after the first volume was published, and I bought it, and it sat on my shelf for several years waiting for the end so I could read the whole thing) published as one book this past year. I think this is part of his "fictional movies from the world of Palomar" series, or maybe an even weirder variation on that: it may be the movie Killer made about Maria, or an alternate version of that movie without Killer. I dunno; I'll have to read it.

O Josephine! is the latest collection of comics stories by Jason, the Norwegian cartoonist who is nearly impossible to Google. It has four roughly album-length stories in its hundred and eighty pages, three of which seem to be his usual fiction and one the non-fictional story of a walk he took in Ireland (either a follow-up or warm-up to his book On the Camino).

How I Tried to Be a Good Person is a big fat graphic memoir by Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust, and so basically a sequel to Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, covering a polyamorous love triangle she was involved with some time ago -- the book seems to be vague about exactly when, but I'd guess late '80s or early '90s given that Last Day took in place in 1984, when she was 17.

And last is Glen Ganges in: The River at Night by Kevin Huizenga, which includes the title character's name in the title as if it were a Batman comic when it is in fact about as far from a Batman comic as it is possible to be. (And that is a good thing.) Huizenga is thoughtful and philosophical and grounded and deeply human, and this book has gotten great reviews -- I'm looking forward to it.

Musica, Dein Kannst Lieblich Kunst

No, I don't speak German. (My younger son does, kind of. At least he took it for five years in school.) But my high school Madrigal group -- did I ever mention I was in a madrigal group in high school? I wasn't very good, and am retroactively surprised that they kept me around -- did that song, and it's been stuck in my head ever since.

It emerges randomly for no good reason, and I can't even sing the thing because I 1) don't remember the German well enough b) can't pronounce the German even if I did know the right words, and III) I can't now sing even as well as I did in high school, which (as I noted above) was not that good to begin with.

For instance, right now, when I'm trying to introduce a Spotify playlist of some of my favorite songs of the past decade, instead I'm rambling about a german choral piece that has nothing to do with any of it. One might think I'm doing this deliberately.

One might even be right....

A lot of people do lists like this at the end of a year, but I don't really listen to enough new music in any one year to make a decent list. However, I saw that the estimable John Scalzi (of whom you may have heard) recently did one for the last decade.

And I thought: "Aha, that's a trick worth stealing." And so I did.

Since the calendar is turning over two digits instead of one in about a week, suddenly any list covering 10 years is just as good -- maybe better -- than one covering this current year. (And, frankly, it wouldn't be hard for anything to be better than this current year.) So here I am.

I'm shamelessly stealing Scalzi's shtick: only one song per performer, that being my favorite for the past decade (but standing in for a lot of other stuff, obviously), and even using Spotify as my widget of choice, since it's free. My list however, is longer than his, because I'm lazier: my initial list had 56 songs, and after a first cut I had exactly fifty, which was such a nice round number I stopped.

The widget seems to default to the order I put them in, which isn't definitive by any means. And I have no way of knowing if you will share any of my musical tastes: I go for either talky stuff or noisy instrumentals, across a few musical subgenres.

I hope you enjoy this; I was just reminded I wanted to do it by seeing webcomics genius John Allison do his list of forty albums for this year alone. And if you don't enjoy it...oh weell.

After the widget: three songs I would have added, but Spotify didn't have them.



The sadly missing:

Empty Space Orchestra, "Exit Strategy"

Yellow Ostrich, "'Til I Disappear" (the album version is longer, but this is the version I like better)


Harvey Danger, "The Show Must Not Go On" (their break-up song, released online something like a year after they actually broke up)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/14/19

I have a book to write about this week as well: a new SF novel.

Lost Helix is by Scott Coon, and I think it's his first novel. (The materials don't mention any earlier novels, and do mention multiple short fiction publications.) It's coming from Dancing Lemur Press in trade paperback, and will hit on June 2, 2020.

It sounds like general SF adventure: our hero is a young man named DJ, who grew up on an asteroid mining facility but isn't interested in any of the obvious life-paths on offer there. But he gets thrown into intrigue when he learns some things he wasn't supposed to, and is soon on the run from the relentless Agent Coreman. (DJ is also a musician, which looks like it could be important to the book -- he's not just some general slacker, but a specific guy with specific dreams.) This all sounds interplanetary rather than interstellar, but the description doesn't make it clear either way.

You will have to wait a bit for Lost Helix, I'm afraid, so if that sounds intriguing, set your calendar now.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/7/19

I aten't dead.

But this blog only exists in as much as I have something to say here, and I haven't had a lot of that lately. Work has been weird this year, in all sorts of ways, and that's disrupted my reading. And the outside world is even more of a dumpster fire in 2019 than it was before...and I don't want to go directly political here. So I've been quiet.

But I'm still here, and this blog will pick up when and if I have things to write about. If I start reading more, for example. Or if I get shiny new books.

As it happens, I have a shiny new book today: The Deep & Dark Blue, a middle-grade graphic novel by Niki Smith, Lambda-award-winning (well, as part of an anthology; does that count? maybe I should say "nominated" to be more strictly accurate) creator of Crossplay and other comics stories.

(I saw an early galley of the book back in the summer; that copy is still sitting unread on my shelf but will be replaced by the shiny new one in a moment...and I'd like to promise that the shiny new one will get read quickly, but...well, you know.)

This is an adventure story mixed with coming-out; twin tween nobles Hawke and Grayson are forced by a coup to flee and hide as Hanna and Grayce within the Communion of Blue, an all-female magical order whose powers manifest in weaving and other textile work. The coming-out part is that while Hawke seems to think of this as just a disguise, becoming Grayce is much more important, and central, to her. I expect it all ends up super-happy, since that's what middle-grade GNs do these days. (Woe is reserved for prose, and for a slightly older audience.)

The Deep and Dark Blue will be published in hardcover on January 7 by Little. Brown.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/18/19

Three books came in the mail last week -- all things I purchased -- and somehow I neglected to write about them last Sunday.  So here they are:

Very British Problems is the book extension of a multi-media project -- I think it was a Twitter feed first, in that very 21st century way, but there's TV and radio and probably tea-cozies and woolly jumpers and Very British package holidays as well by now. The book is written by Rob Temple, and it's deeply stereotyped, but it's by British people, so that's OK.I am not actually British in any normal sense, but I am emotionally quite British by nature, since northeastern WASPs are their first cousins. Anyway, the book is a collection of small embarrassing, self-effacing moments of the kind that are generally humorous.

Threesome is an old Lawrence Block novel, originally published as by Jill Emerson, and it's a sex book. Block wrote a lot of sex books starting in the late '50s and running through the early '70s, and his main professional activity the last few years seem to have been republishing them under his actual name. I'm a huge Block fan, and I have vague ideas about getting all of those books, since even his early semi-lousy books have interesting aspects. I'm definitely going to pick off a few of the ones that seems to be better-written and/or quirkier, like this one -- the story of a menage a trois told by the three participants alternately.

Last is By Night, Vol. 1, the first collection of a new series written by my favorite webcomicer, John Allison. Allison has been doing more floppy comics lately -- probably because those have a more dependable revenue stream, and who can blame him? -- but it's meant that I'm forgetting to keep up with his work, and that's annoying. (For example, shouldn't there be a fourth "Not on the Test Edition" of Giant Days by now? I intend to keep up with that series, but it become difficult if the publisher changes formats and plans randomly in the middle.) This is quite Allisonian, in that it's the story of two (probably headstrong and highly verbal) teen girls who get involved with a supernatural portal in what seems to be a normal small town, and at the same time much less Allisonian, since that small town is in South Dakota rather than the British Midlands.

14th Anniversary Post

I have an excessively tidy mind, but it manifests in pretty idiosyncratic ways.

For example, October 4th was the 14th anniversary of the blog, and on that date every year (except the fifth and tenth, which I missed because...I guess I'm just a normal neurotic human being who undercuts himself) I put up a long post looking back at the prior year.

Doing that post takes a while, so I try to put it into my drafts early, so I can work on it over a period of days, if not weeks.

This year, I did create a dummy post, at least a week early.

And never typed a word into it.

Until today, December 8th, a good two months late.

So this is not that anniversary post. It is, instead, a monument to the fact that apparently I couldn't just delete the empty draft post like a normal person, but instead had to type this.

See you next year, possibly.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

So, I've said this before, and I know it's weird about me: I will frequently read the memoirs or other miscellaneous nonfiction of a writer whose books I'm only vaguely familiar with.

The way this is supposed to work: you like a novelist, so you read all of the novels. Then, maybe, you move on to other things. The odds & sods collections of journalism, the memoirs, the travel puff pieces, and so on.

But I'm more likely to read one or two novels (in this case The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, six years ago), then buy a few other novels (making sure to get the ones in the same trade dress, because I'm also quirky that way), and meander along for a few years without reading any of those other novels until suddenly I pick up the nonfiction book and finish that.

My half-serious explanation is that I'm now a middle-aged man, and middle-aged men have a well-known and nigh-unstoppable tropism for non-fiction. It's just one of those things.

Anyway, that's why I read The Pigeon Tunnel, the 2016 memoirs of the man born David Cornwell and who has written a long series of literary spy thrillers as John Le Carre. It's a book primarily for people who have read those other books, obviously -- not least because it's by the man who spent his adult life writing those books. Cornwell/Le Carre was 85 when this book was published-- and is not dead as I type this; he has a new novel coming out before the end of the year -- but he's a public-school boy of the very old school, a former government employee, and a writer who has been burned by publicity many times. So this is a reticent book, an elliptical one, that has no overall structure or focus and which touches on Cornwell's childhood (the traditional wellspring of writers) hardly at all.

Instead, he has thirty-eight chapters of wildly variable lengths over the course of this book's roughly three hundred pages: some are short anecdotes while others, like the long chapter on his con-man father Ronnie, are full-fledged and well-formed essays. They range through his adult life almost randomly, and touch almost entirely on his professional life -- he does write about his parents (separately), but neither of his wives and nothing about his children. All of those pieces include only what Cornwell wants to tell. Even now, as an old man a generation after the Cold War ended and sixtyish years after he retired from government service, he's clear that he doesn't want to reveal any real secrets.

There are a lot of bits about real-life encounters and how those influenced or were incorporated into his novels: again, this will be most interesting to people who have actually read those novels. And those are mostly his novels of the '80s and '90s -- the Cold War books, the Smiley books in particular, the ones that may have come more out of his own experiences or knowledge, are the ones where he does not have anecdotes to tell us.

He does tell a few stories of his time in government service, though -- mostly escorting West German dignitaries through London in the years around 1960, acting as their translator to UK prime ministers or whorehouse madams. And he of course tells a few stories about the movies and TV shows made from his work: the usual stories of frantic activity that turns into nothing in the end, and some appreciations of Sir Alec Guinness.

I enjoyed reading The Pigeon Tunnel, but Cornwell is a reticent man at his core, and a reader should bring a lot more knowledge and experience to this book than I was able to in order to get the most out of it. It really is primarily for the Le Carre obsessed, I think.

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville

In 1933, a group of French Surrealists described various "irrational embellishments" of Paris, in their journal Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. Eighty years later, China Mieville decided to use it as the setting for a short novel.

That's reductive and probably not entirely true...but it's pretty close. Mieville was influenced by a lot more of Surrealism than just that one magazine issue, but it's clear that particular transformation was the seed of the book.

The Last Days of New Paris is a 2016 novella about a city transformed by a Surrealist-powered bomb: we see it mostly in 1950, through the eyes of Thibault, a young Surrealist/partisan, with shorter interspersed chapters of the 1941 events leading up to the blast. This Paris has been invaded three times: by the Nazis, who are still around (even, apparently, outside the city, where WWII seems to be still chugging along in 1950); by the Nazi's demonic allies (about whom we don't learn nearly as much as this reader would have liked); and by the manifestations ("manifs," in the words of the locals) of Surrealism called up by that bomb.

And, yes, the Nazi demons do rather seem to have migrated from a slightly different alternate-WWII book, though they are necessary for parts of the plot. Mieville is as usual not interested in simple dichotomies, so there's no sense of Surrealism vs. Hell here: both are bizarre eruptions that Parisians must deal with, both are problematic, neither are as bad as actual Nazis. (In this Mieville is absolutely correct.)

Mieville does not concentrate on the details of the city: at time, it felt like his characters were racing through nature (a wood, perhaps, or overgrown meadows) and not down the streets of a major city. Perhaps they are; that would be very Surrealist, I suppose. But he very much does not have them ducking into and out of buildings, or climbing staircases to get a better view, or traipsing across rooftops, or using any of the other things one traditionally associates with cities. They are instead running through open ground, as if the vast majority of Paris has been leveled -- which is possible, I suppose, but makes it not particularly Paris.

He does have a lot of Surrealist imagery brought to awful life in his city, and there are more than twenty pages of endnotes (after a book barely 170 pages) to explain where they all came from and to bask in the glow of how clever he is.

Thibault's group, the Main a plume, claims to be both Surrealist and an anti-Nazi partisan force, but they are pretty much all dead by the time Last Days begins, and the various partisan groups in Paris come across more as scattered street gangs or tribes, the violence-oriented sector of the few people left alive in New Paris. (Frankly, I was a little surprised anyone could be alive after nine years in a city both entirely cordoned off from the outside world and overrun by Nazi soldiers, demons, and freakish Surrealist creations. There's no sign any of these people are growing food, for one thing.)

So Thibault runs around, to not much effect, and sees a lot of things that Mieville carefully annotates in the backmatter. He soon runs into Sam, a female American photographer who is obviously more than the disaster tourist she seems to be, though she's not the kind of more Thibault thinks she is. They learn some deep secrets of their world, gather a manif of their own -- it follows Thibault due to a leash made by Nazi manif-control science -- and, in the end, save the world, more or less.

The plot is hurried and consists mostly of running around for what never seems like adequate reasons. The world is potentially big and interesting, but Mieville presents it in staccato images, as if he's trying to fit all of his favorite Surrealist ideas into the shortest possible number of pages. The characters are few to begin with, and even the major ones are cyphers: Thibault is an Everyman as much as he's anything, and he's not much of that.

This is a thin book, even thinner than it looks at first, and the very definition of self-indulgent. It will be of primary interest to huge fans of Mieville or Surrealism, or (preferably) both.

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

The really impressive creators are the ones who seem to be able to do anything -- who jump from genre to genre semi-randomly, going wherever their latest ideas take them.

My go-to example of that for the last couple of decades has been Neil Gaiman, whose first six book-sized objects were each honestly described as his first something. But I'm thinking that I might be able to freshen up that example if Tillie Walden continues the way she's been going.

Walden is young -- still on the uphill side of her twenties -- and burst into wide notice with her 2017 memoir in comics form, Spinning. Before that, she did a few shorter books, which I haven't seen yet. (I believe they're mostly in the vein of realistic fiction, but I'm starting to think that belief underestimates Walden.) Spinning was, more or less, the story of Walden's teen years: her life in competitive figure skating, her coming out, her realizing who she wanted to be. Her big follow-up to Spinning is this book: On a Sunbeam.

Now, if you come into the publishing world through the memoir door, there's a certain pressure and expectation to do that again the next time. Or, at least, to tell a fictional story about someone who could be you, in a world like the ones you know well.

Walden was having none of that.

On a Sunbeam is a soft-SF story, set in a wide universe sometime in the medium future, with weird technology that feels semi-biological and which Walden presents as thoroughly lived in. She never stoops to an infodump; this universe exists and the people in it do, too -- she may have figured out the details in her head (or maybe not; it's not necessary), but there's no look-at-how-clever-I-was-to-make-all-of-this-up gloating. She just has a story to tell, about a young woman named Mia who maybe has a little problem with impulse control.

We first see Mia at about nineteen. She's just joined the crew of a ship -- whose name we don't learn for a long time, so I won't mention it here -- run by a small team that rehabilitate ruined buildings on assignment. (I don't want to say that On a Sunbeam's world doesn't make sense, because that's not the right way to put it. It does feel like we're in a very odd, quirky corner of that world, though -- the cultural equivalent of something like artisinal bread-making or microbrewing, a haven for oddballs and weirdos.) She's just out of school, and almost equal parts quietly confused and excitedly racing.

But we also see a younger Mia, about five years before,when she was still at her fancy private school Cleary's. (The school may fly around space on its own: this isn't entirely clear.) She was not a terribly good student, and she was not a terribly diligent student, but she did OK. She desperately wanted to play Lux, the weirdo sport that involves racing small fish-shaped flying spaceships through convoluted tunnels in the dark, and she was even more impulsive than she would be at nineteen, but the Cleary's plot -- despite at first seeming that way -- isn't the story of how she just barely avoided being expelled or worse.

No, it's the story of her first love: Grace, who showed up unexpectedly the middle of that year, quiet and self-contained and sure she was going to become a writer.

The two stories do intersect, and combine, before the end, as they must: that's how a book set in two time-periods works (particularly if they're so close in time as this one). Grace is from a particularly strange and dangerous part of this universe, and Mia's new crew has to go to that place before On a Sunbeam is over.

Walden does subvert the expected teen-love-conquers-all tropes looming over it all: more than once, actually. Mia and Grace are nothing like Romeo and Juliet, and nobody's going to die for love if any of the characters can help it.

They might die for other reasons: the planet called The Staircase can be pretty deadly.

There's one further quirky thing about this universe -- well, only quirky if you're not familiar with a long strand of SF, from Sheri Tepper on back through Joanna Russ all the way to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They're all women. [1] This is not mentioned or remarked on, the same way they never point out that they eat food to stay alive or that clothes are worn on the outside of the body. It's just the way this society is: men do not exist.

(I'll forgive Walden for erasing my entire gender, since it was in service of the story. As long as erasing huge swaths of humanity doesn't become a habit.)

On a Sunbeam has a lovely loose line, moody colors, an often over-enthusiastic young cast, a big weird universe to wander around, and a lovely (and completely non cloying) first love story to recommend it. So I do. And I expect the next Tillie Walden book will be something else both completely different and deeply familiar: some other young woman finding her way in a complex, messy world.


[1] One character, Elliott, is called non-binary, and "uses they/them pronouns". Both of those things seem entirely the wrong terms for this fictional world, frankly, and show a failure of Walden to think through what she's created. You can't be non-binary if everyone else is unitary.