Powers, Vol. 7: Forever by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming

This is the seventh collection of the cops-in-a-superhero-world series Powers, always written by Bendis and illustrated by Oeming, and it's the one that reveals a lot of big secrets. Our ex-powers cop, Christian Walker, finally gets his Secret Origin here, which comes complete with a deadly supervillain.

On the other hand, it also comes with hot monkey sex...so this is still quirky, even as it runs ever closer to standard superheroics.

It's one of those let's-cover-the-whole-history-of-the-universe stories, starting with, yes, a bunch of anthropoid apes, and running through Conan-esque ahistorical barbarians, a version of Shangri-La, '30s gangsters, and hot '80s threesomes before it finally gets back to the existing Powers plotline. We learn that Christian Walker is older than the human race, and somehow turned human in between issues (or has been repeatedly reincarnated as exactly the same person with exactly the same abilities -- except for the fact that, at least once, he was a monkey -- which is, for me, even harder to believe). And his great nemesis was also a monkey, and has turned up now and then to mess up Walker's life for no reason either of them can remember. (There's a strong sense of pointlessness to their great rivalry, which I hope Bendis intended; neither of them has done terribly much with multi-thousand-year lives except hit each other every so often.)

This storyline wants to be wicked cool (immortals battling through the ages! superpower-destruction machines! vast spans of time!) and adult (world-weary immortals! the infinite sadness of existence as a god among men!), but it really raises more questions about this world than it's prepared to answer. I thought we just found out, in the last volume, that the Superman-ripoff was the vastly most powerful super in this world, with an origin shrouded in ancient mystery -- but, now, we learn that the rivalry between Red Stripe and White Stripe (Walker) is equally ancient, and they were both equally invulnerable? And many (most?) Powers are effectively immortal? And yet this world has a history the same as our own? (I, frankly, can't buy that -- comic-book-style super-powered immortals, running around for the last few thousand years, would have changed everything.) I also find the apparent unkillability of the major Powers in this storyline hard to square with the carnage among Powers in the earlier collections.

So Bendis has now ripped out by the roots everything that made his Powers universe plausible and special -- the street-level viewpoint, the focus on the modern day, and the ordinariness of his protagonists -- and replaced them with standard-issue superhero-universe furniture. The story here is well-told, but I'm not impressed by the switch. I expect Walker will get some level of powers back -- probably "erratic," so he can't count on them -- in the next book or soon thereafter.

I still like the idea of Powers, and some of the actuality of it, but the more it turns into a Marvel Comics title with the serial numbers filed off, the less I'm interested in it. I'll have to poke through volume 8 (which collected the "re-launch," under a Marvel imprint, a few years back) in a story before I decide if I want to read it.

(I covered Powers, Vol. 6 as part of my list of books read in June, and Vol. 5 had its own entry. Earlier volumes are linked back from those entries, if anyone wants to head backwards that far.)

Things Fall Apart; The Center Cannot Hold

When did the New York Times turn into a toy newspaper? Everything is physically smaller than it used to be, and it feels like an overgrown tabloid rather than a "real" paper. (I think this is the second week at the smaller size, but I'm not quite sure.)

It seems like there are fewer sections with fewer pages, as well -- and I'd expect that there are fewer words on each page. But I bet the price will only go up...

Cleaning Up Saved Posts

I'd saved this Gwenda Bond article to comment on last week; she deplores the use of coffee terms to describe people's skin-tones (for, I think, purely racial reasons -- I guess; it's hard to tell).

Well, if it makes you more politically correct to avoid saying someone's skin is "cafe au lait," more power to you, and I hope you enjoy that warm fuzzy feeling. But I think those descriptions are a bad idea for a completely different reason -- I don't drink coffee, never have, and so don't have a clue what you're saying. (Though I may possibly be alone in the Western world in that, which would ruin my argument somewhat.)

I know "black coffee" is black, and "cream-colored" is white, but anything else just reads like a line of Blackadder dialogue to me. [1] And good writing connects rather than confuses.


[1] "So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen."

What's Confusing Me Today

The boys are watching SpongeBob SquarePants and there was just a flood. Underwater.

Somewhere in this world, there might be a spec-fic guy smart enough to puzzle out the rules of water in the world of SpongeBob, but it ain't me. I just don't get it.

Political Compass Revisited

Because I saw Jay Lake do it today, I thought I'd revisit my own political compass -- I'd graphed myself about a year and a half ago.

Economic Left/Right: -0.63 (changed from -0.38)
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.21 (changed from -4.10)

Now, I still self-identify as a Republican (though of the relatively liberal, out-of-power, good-government, Northeastern branch), but we see that another eighteen months of Bushism has pushed me further to the left and further towards libertarianism. Somehow, I don't think that was the plan -- though I do seem to be somewhat representative of the country as a whole, in this one matter.

You Miss the Point Completely; I Get the Point Exactly

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist had a post this week about "the changing of the guard" in fantasy that I found interesting, in that "heading down the completely wrong road at high speed" kind of way.

(I'm not blaming Patrick for this; this looks like an ongoing conversation that I think is just wrong-headed to begin with, on the order of trying to determine the precise chemical composition of phlogiston.)

First of all, Patrick talks about the idea that there will be a new "changing of the guard," in the sense that

Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind relegated David Eddings and Terry Brooks to the backseat more than a decade past, thus establishing Tor Books as the SFF powerhouse it became in the mid-90s.

Eddings is an interesting case, since it seems that his largest audience really only wanted the Belgariad/Malloreon storyline, and wasn't as interested in following him into other areas. (This effect happens with a lot of series writers, and is particularly noticeable in fantasy and mystery: a writer's major series novels can outsell other books by several hundred percent.) But Brooks, as far as I can tell, is selling about as many copies of a new Shannara book now as he did in the '80s and '90s -- and that's a lot of copies. Jordan and Goodkind move more units per book now, but it took them each a number of books to reach that level.

And the idea that Jordan and Goodkind "replaced" Brooks and Eddings is a fallacy -- Brooks and Eddings are still here, still selling very strongly (Eddings's last four-book series, for Warner, was rumored to have a jaw-dropping advance), and hadn't lost their audience.

What Jordan and Goodkind did was show that the top end potential of epic fantasy was higher than the publishing world previously thought -- that this genre could have legitimate #1 New York Times bestsellers, with all of the attendant money and importance. (The field had already had serious bestsellers, but not consistent #1 Times bestsellers.) And that only happened at about the turn of the century -- when the two writers were solidly in the middle of long, complicated, very popular series.

(Parenthetically, it's my understanding that Jordan is still the very top end of the fantasy field, and that Goodkind's sales are somewhat below him. With an exception that Patrick -- and, I think, everyone else involved in this discussion -- has forgotten, everyone else, including Martin, Brooks, Eddings, Feist, Salvatore, and so on, sells at a level below that.)

I'll also note that no writer who can consistently hit the bestseller lists is in the "backseat." If such a writer's current publisher treats him that way, he'll quickly find a new home.

Then we move on to a discussion of what comes next. Patrick, I think, is assuming that the biggest bestsellers are innovative and new, which is very much not my experience. I may be a cynic, but, to my eye, what hits big in epic fantasy is a solidly-constructed series by a great storyteller (not necessarily a great writer, and definitely not someone who's trying something all-new) that is similar to older, well-loved works in the field but has a new spin. That series needs to have significant marketing support to reach that level, but good marketing won't sell what the audience isn't already looking for.

Patrick thinks the next Jordan and Goodkind are Steve Erikson and Scott Lynch, but...

Unfortunately, the way Erikson is being marketed in the States precludes his rise to stardom. By promoting Jordan and Goodkind so heavily, Tor Books are forgetting about a bunch of gifted writers that are under contract with them. And that's a shame. . . Although not for everyone, I feel that Steven Erikson was never really been given a chance in the USA. With the appropriate marketing, I think that Erikson could sell as many books as authors such as Tad Williams and Robin Hobb. Alas, it's not to be. Those Godawful covers are a disgrace, no question. For Toll the Hounds next year, they should simply forgo the cover art. Instead, just put "WE REFUSE TO PUT ANY THOUGHT WHATSOEVER IN THIS NOVEL'S COVER."It can't be worst than the US cover art for The Bonehunters. . . Little by little, Steven Erikson is becoming more and more popular with each new Malazan installment. Yet by the time it will matter in the USA, the entire series will be out in paperback, thus missing the more lucrative hardcover market.

I am not Tor Books; I can't speak for Tor in any sense. But I expect their reaction to his paragraph would be a large groan of frustration. Tor has spent quite a lot of time and money promoting Erikson's books, and the cover question...well, bloggers are never satisfied with fantasy covers. I'll leave it at that.

Erikson is writing decadent epic fantasy -- books for people who have been reading big fat series for a couple of decades, are familiar with all of the tropes and ideas, and are ready to see everything they're familiar with twisted into new shapes. You can't start with Erikson; you need to work up to him. Sure, his books could sell better than they do -- nearly anyone's could -- but he'll never be at the level of a Goodkind, and it's foolish to expect that. Goodkind readers may become Erikson readers, over time, but Erikson demands a level of knowledge of and involvement with epic fantasy tropes from the first page that no other epic fantasy writer comes close to.

(Also, the idea that Tor is ignoring everyone else to promote Jordan and Goodkind is simply untrue. No one else gets promoted at that level, because no one else is capable of selling at that level right now.)

Then Patrick moves on to Scott Lynch:

Scott Lynch appears to be in a very good position to "make it big." Imagination, action, good characterization -- The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas under Red Skies have all that. All we need is a more ambitious overall story arc, and Lynch could be on the cusp of stardom. Anne Groell assured me that The Republic of Thieves should demonstrate that The Gentleman Bastard sequence is not just another caper in every volume. And yet, for Scott Lynch to take that step, Bantam Dell will have to market him much more aggressively. Gollancz bent over backward to make TLOLL a hit in the UK, but we haven't seen that kind of push in North America. Scott Lynch is a very popular figure online, but the average fantasy reader is unaware of the author's existence. So I believe that Bantam must put his name out there. . .

Someone from the UK recently posted a comparison of Lynch's sales with those of someone getting much less respect and blogger love (I want to say Brian Ruckley, but I could be mistaken)...and I can't find that right now. But the numbers were not strongly for Lynch.

I like Lynch's books a lot, but, again, I think Patrick is assuming that, since he likes something a lot, it should be hugely successful. This is a trap editors occasionally fall into, but we generally get slapped about by reality soon afterward. Reviewers, luckily or unluckily, never get proven wrong so directly. There also has been quite a lot of promotion for Lynch in the US; commentators often seem to assume that if marketing was not as successful as they wanted it to be, then that marketing must have been non-existent, but that is not the case here.

So, in my possibly-biased opinion, Erikson and Lynch are exciting writers doing good books that could sell better than they do...but I don't think they'd ever sell at Terry Brooks levels, let alone dethrone Robert Jordan. And the idea that there is going to be some "changing of the guard" along those lines is unrealistic.

However, there has been a changing of guard over the past decade, and the folks obsessed with epic fantasy have missed it. Who's the new breed? Laurell K. Hamilton and the several dozen writers following in her footsteps.

She has two bestselling series running now, and has hit #1 on the Times list. Her backlist is already deeper than Jordan's, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's selling more units annually than he is. She also has created a new, very popular subgenre in her wake: the contemporary or urban fantasy. Many of the first-wave writers in that subgenre (Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher) are bestsellers as well, and even some second-wave writers (Patricia Briggs, Rachel Caine) are hitting the lists.

Epic fantasy isn't quite a backwater, but it's not the only game in town anymore, and it's not where the real excitement and splashy successes are happening, either. But urban/contemporary fantasy is mostly written by women, mostly about women main characters, and (presumably) mostly read by women, so it's obviously not important...

Update, two hours later: One of my Confidential Sources, who has access to Bookscan, slipped me the following -- Jordan's books outsold Hamilton's about 2-to-1 in 2003, but, by 2006, the ratio was 1.5-to-1 in Hamilton's favor. And Hamilton is publishing books much more quickly than Jordan is -- make of that what you will.

Quote of the Week

"Poets tell many lies."
- Solon

The Hornswoggler Family Vacation

In a few hours, The Wife and I will be packing up the two boys (Thing 1 and Thing 2) into our obligatory minivan and heading off into the wilds of Pennsylvania for the next couple of days. The main point is to spend a day or so at Hershey Park, but there are other traditions (like stopping at a particular Chuck E. Cheese for lunch along the way) that I don't think we'll be able to avoid along the way.

I may get another post or two in before then, but, after that, you won't hear from me until late on Thursday (at best). I'm behind on posts about Powers Vol. 7: Forever, Wodehouse's The Heart of a Goof, and the first HELP book, Downriver. (I'm thirty-some pages from the end of HELP #2, Sweet Women Lie, which I should have finished yesterday, and I'll be bringing a short stack of Estleman books to continue HELP reading during the trip.) I also just saw a movie called Starter for 10 last night...but I doubt I'll manage to blog about any of that before I go.

Another ComicMix Update

I'm not posting these updates as quickly as I should, but here are my link-posts of the last few days:

• Do I Have To Say It?
• Giant Lego Man: Threat or Menace?
• Misery Loves...Nancy?

(Apparently it's been "Questions Week" for the Hornswoggler at ComicMix. Who knew?)

And I've done two reviews:

• Notes for a War Story
• Laika

More reviews should be coming in the next day or two, so look out for those.

Whee! It's a Random Pointless Milestone!

According to SiteMeter, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler has just limped over 100,000 page views. Now, that doesn't include the first month or so I was blogging (before I learned to sign up with SiteMeter), or the week or so between when I switched over to New Blogger and when I remembered to add the SiteMeter code to the new version. So my actual, unrecorded, Platonic-ideal page views are actually slightly, but not significantly, higher.

This is barely even of interest to me, so I don't expect anyone else will care...but it was fun to watch the odometer roll over on Antick Musings.

World Fantasy Award Nominees Announced

Below is the full list of nominees for all of the categories of the World Fantasy Awards; they were released sometime yesterday. Winners will be announced, as usual, at this year's World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY in early November. (And you'll see me there, as well, as long as I'm not living in a box under an overpass by then.)

My most profound congratulations to all of the nominees, and thanks and congratulations to the judges, who have hit the fun part of a long, grueling (but enjoyable, I hope) process -- now they get to act mysterious and give small smiles when people try to get them to reveal who the winners are. (I was a judge last year, and it was one of the best things I've ever done.) Specifically, those judges this year were Gavin Grant, Ed Greenwood, Jeremy Lassen, Jeff Mariotte, and Carsten Polzin, and their hard work should be recognized.

But the person I want to give the greatest thanks and congratulations to is Ellen Asher, my former boss at that employer I now do not name. Ellen was nominated in the category of Special Award: Professional, for what I think is the first time and what probably will be the last time (she's now retired, and so won't be eligible). It may be parochial of me, but I hope she wins.

I won't say who else I'm rooting for; this looks like a strong list from top to bottom, and all of the nominees would be fine winners. Again, congratulations to all of them.

NOVEL

Lisey's Story, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton)

The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (Bantam Spectra; Small Beer Press)

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (Gollancz; Bantam Spectra)

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)

Soldier of Sidon, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

NOVELLA

"Botch Town", Jeffrey Ford (The Empire of Ice Cream, Golden Gryphon)

"The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train", Kim Newman (The Man from the Diogenes Club, MonkeyBrain)

Dark Harvest, Norman Partridge (Cemetery Dance)

"Map of Dreams", M. Rickert (Map of Dreams, Golden Gryphon)

"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", Ysabeau S. Wilce (F&SF Jul 2006)

SHORT FICTION

"The Way He Does It", Jeffrey Ford (Electric Velocipede #10, Spr 2006)

"Journey Into the Kingdom", M. Rickert (F&SF May 2006)

"A Siege of Cranes", Benjamin Rosenbaum (Twenty Epics, All-Star Stories)

"Another Word for Map is Faith", Christopher Rowe (F&SF Aug 2006)

"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)", Geoff Ryman (F&SF Oct/Nov 2006)

ANTHOLOGY

Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, Scott A. Cupp & Joe R. Lansdale, eds. (MonkeyBrain and the Fandom Association of Central Texas)

Salon Fantastique, Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling, eds. (Thunder's Mouth)

Retro Pulp Tales, Joe R. Lansdale, ed. (Subterranean)

Twenty Epics, David Moles & Susan Marie Groppi, eds. (All-Star Stories)

Firebirds Rising, Sharyn November, ed. (Firebird)

COLLECTION

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)

The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford (Golden Gryphon)

American Morons, Glen Hirshberg (Earthling)

Red Spikes, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin Australia; Knopf)

Map of Dreams, M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon)

ARTIST

Jon Foster

Edward Miller

John Picacio

Shaun Tan

Jill Thompson

SPECIAL AWARD, PROFESSIONAL

Ellen Asher (For work at SFBC)

Mark Finn (for Blood & Thunder: The Life of Robert E. Howard, MonkeyBrain)

Deanna Hoak for copyediting

Greg Ketter for Dreamhaven

Leonard S. Marcus, ed. (for The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, Candlewick)

SPECIAL AWARD, NON-PROFESSIONAL

Leslie Howle (for her work at Clarion West)

Leo Grin (for The Cimmerian)

Susan Marie Groppi (for Strange Horizons)

John Klima (for Electric Velocipede)

Gary K. Wolfe (for reviews and criticism in Locus and elsewhere)

[via Locus Online]

A Drive-By Posting

SF Signal is right: Mundane SF is essentially about shutting up, sitting down, and learning to like eating your vegetables, since vegetables are what adults eat, and it's only going to be vegetables for the rest of eternity.

Traditionally, SF has been about entertaining new ideas and exploring possibilities; Mundane SF is about denigrating ideas and closing off possibilities. Luckily, that will mean that it won't last for very long.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 8/5

If I actually finish and post this, it will make two whole weeks in a row! The excitement is killing me!

(Sorry, I had the sarcasm meter set to "maximum." I've dialed it back down to its usual level, so we can continue.)

This week -- the books I was reading this week in 1993:

• Michael Moorcock, The Distant Suns (7/30)
  A very early, very minor Moorcock SF novel that I read in one of the Millennium omnibuses -- Moorcock had assembled nearly his entire output to date into a series of omnibuses, and I'd bought as many of them as I could find when I was in the UK on my honeymoon earlier that year. (And then I bought the rest of them at exorbitant prices from one of the very few UK-to-US booksellers of the time...only to find them all remaindered, cheaply, in the US the next year. Grrrrrr.)
  
• Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover (7/30)
  An anthology of Darkover stories, whose editor I forgot to note. This may have been my first exposure to Darkover. I don't remember who or what as in it.
  
• Robert Silverberg, Hot Sky at Midnight (7/31)
  SilverBob's cyberpunk novel, set in a horribly polluted near-future world, with the usual skulldiggery and intrigue. As I recall, most of it is set in orbit (in habitats, or something similar), and the main character has no eyes. Bob was a little late to the cyberpunk party, but this is a solid novel; not quite as good as Silverberg's very best, but very readable and entertaining.
  
• Connie Willis, Impossible Things (8/2)
  Her second short story collection, with "The Last of the Winnebagos," "Even the Queen," "In the Late Cretaceous," and "Jack," among others. I believe the only hardcover edition is the one I did for my former employer. And, interestingly enough, right now I'm slowly reading The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, the giant collection of Connie's best stories, which has big chunks of Impossible Things in it.
  
• Dave Wolverton, Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia (8/3)
  This and The Truce at Bakura were the titles that certain people, including me, used to debate about. One or the other of them is the nadir of the Star Wars literary efflorescence, but it's hard to say which one.
  
• Robert Rankin, They Came and Ate Us: Armageddon II: The B-Movie (8/3)
  I read a number of Rankin books over the years, even though I found his sense of humor and general (intensely, parochially, British) atmosphere mostly alien and uninvolving. (I used to read things in the belief that I would get them, eventually -- I don't do that much now.)
  
• Florence King, Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye (8/4)
  A collection of essays on various topics by one of my favorite writers. She's a huge misanthrope, in case I need to say that.
  
• John M. Ford, How Much for Just the Planet? (8/7)
  The canonical "great funny Star Trek novel," which I don't remember all that well. I never was as crazy about Mike Ford as I think I was supposed to be, but I did enjoy this at the time.
  

Oh, wait a minute, I can't leave without listing the books I read on the 8th:

• Claire Bell, The Jaguar Princess
• Joe Queenan, Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle in America and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else
• Simon Mayo and Martin Wroe, Snogging: a Beginner's Guide to the Art of Kissing
• Paul Auster, City of Glass
• Monty Python, The Life of Brian/Scrapbook

The 8th was a Sunday, which was occasionally a heavy reading day, but I have no way to account for that massive reading spree. Sure, City of Glass is a short novel, and I bet Snogging was a little, gift-y humor book, and the Monty Python is a script plus captioned photos, and Imperial Caddy is a quick, breezy read...but all of them on top of a real novel? (I must have read most of Jaguar Princess the day before, and spent that Sunday knocking off short books for whatever reason.)

Incoming Books, Week of 8/11

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I visited some publishing friends this week, and this stack of books is the immediate result:

• Nicotine Kiss and American Detective, by Loren D. Estleman -- inspiration for Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project, which starts today (I'm a few pages into Downriver)
  
• The Devil You Know by Mike Carey
  
• The Game by Diana Wynne Jones
  
• Epic by Conor Kostick
  
• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
  
• Wild Girls by Pat Murphy
  
• The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
  
• Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka -- from the nice publicity folks at Bantam; I hope to review it at ComicMix when I get a chance
  
• Ha'penny by Jo Walton

And most of those books have to wait until I get through a dozen "Amos Walker" mysteries, so I'd better get going...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Yes, I finished this a good two weeks after everyone else in North America. What can I say? I'm completely incapable of reading a book at the same time as everyone else -- so I'd better not join any book groups, I suppose.

I've said many of the things I was going to put here in my post this morning on Christopher Hitchens's Deathly Hallows review in the Times, so this "review" will just be a few leftover, scattered thoughts. I'll probably inadvertently spoil things, but, what the hell, everyone else has either already read it or doesn't care.

1) I read the Canadian edition, to have the British text (though I've heard that they're not being Americanized anymore), and to keep my books matching. Besides, the British and Canadian editions are set decently, not puffed out like the US version. (759 pages vs. 607) This explains why the big bookshot (the book I read) doesn't match the one in the Amazon box (the American edition, for anyone who suddenly decides, three weeks later, that a Hornswoggler review will get them to read this book).

2) My god, the middle of this book sags. And I find it hard to believe that they're really camping, setting up in a different place every night, conjuring clean clothes and all, for what amounts to eight months straight. If Rowling were not of the stature she is, perhaps an editor could have told her that was ridiculously excessive. If she needed that much time to pass, Harry needed to leave England and go into hiding somewhere else, or do something with his time. Unfortunately, I gather she's uneditable at this point -- and this novel desperately needed help on the conceptual and plotting levels. Deathly Hallows has about three hundred pages of plot, at the beginning and end, surrounding another three hundred pages of adolescent mopery and dopery.

3) Speaking of vast, Hamlet-like delays, Harry Potter is still amazingly passive for the titular hero of the bestselling series of our times. Even when he does have an idea of what to do -- which is rare; see below -- it takes him months to talk his two best friends around to agreeing with him. Harry has all of the leadership abilities of a half-brick. When people actually attack him, and he has to respond, he's physically courageous enough, but he seems to have spent not one second of the past six years making any plans or having any ideas of his own. (And to the inevitable naysayers: "I need to find several things -- I'm not entirely sure what they are, and I don't know where they are -- and destroy them, though I don't really know how to do that, either" is not a plan. And "Well, maybe instead I should go get these other two things, wherever they are, that will let me master Death" is even less of a plan.)

4) Harry Potter is as thick as two short planks. I'm sorry, but it's true. I've known dogs that are substantially more intelligent than he is -- come to think of it, he'd make a great dog; he's loyal, trustworthy, physically brave and used to sleeping out-of-doors. (Even Hermione comes across as mildly stupid in Deathly Hallows; no one in this novel is capable of making or executing the simplest plan.)

5) No one in the modern literary world better showcases the difference between storytelling and fine writing than Rowling. Her characterization is often thin and always derivative; her world-building is inconsistent and occasionally laughable; her dialogue comes with extra scenery pre-digested within it; her plotting includes lacunae through which zeppelins could happily cavort...and, yet, none of that matters during the reading. She has the gift of dragging readers headlong through her stories, and that's worth a lot.

6) Walter Jon Williams was right: Gryffindor's job is to train up Tommy Atkinses. This would be a very different series if the heroes were in a house whose defining characteristic isn't blind courage.

7) The epilogue is very clearly Rowling's way of saying "It's over, OK? I said there wouldn't be any more books, and I mean it. Now check out what will happen in 2017..."

8) It will be very, very interesting to see her next book. It'll be a sales disappointment no matter what -- anything would be. But I hope she picks a story closer to herself: I'd like to see her write about a woman, a grown-up, who actually has sex and interacts with the opposite sex as an adult. (Hm. Am I suggesting she should write...chick-lit?)