Lunacon in the Rear-view

This was my first year in the dealer's room -- I've found other ways of getting rid of review copies in the past, said ways often including "still having them lying around the basement several years later." Getting them out and into the hands of other people is a much better solution, and having a home base in the middle of a con is a nice thing, as well.

(On the other hand, packing, unpacking and schlepping boxes made this weekend feel very much like certain aspects of my day job, without the consoling feeling of a regular paycheck at the end of it.)

Otherwise, it was a Lunacon; they seem to be continuing to dwindle and sail into the West. I saw hardly any publishing folks, which makes me think they're either all avoiding conventions or avoiding this convention. (And, if the latter, it's awfully damning, since this one is a short train ride away from midtown Manhattan, where all of their offices are.) And Lunacon also doesn't seem to get the crop of major writers and artists that it used to get, either -- the locals show up, more or less, but no one from any distance.

It may be time to venture further afield again; I heard good things about Balticon this weekend, and the one Boskone I made it to was zippy and snazzy. But this was a weekend away with The Wife, which is not nothing -- and was, actually, quite nice.

Quote of the Week: What We Need

I see that I neglected to post this at the usual day & time -- but I intended to, and had the post sitting there as a draft, so I'm invoking the Blogger Prerogative and post-dating it so that it looks like it went up when it was supposed to:

"I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books."
 - p.25

"'Half way,' Glorfindel said, and he didn't mean that I was half dead without her or that she was halfway through or any of that, he meant that I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out.

"There may be stranger reasons for being alive.

"There are books. There's Auntie Teg and Grampar. There's Sam, and Gill. There's interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head. There's the distant hope of a karass sometime in the future. There's Glorfindel who really cares about me as much as a fairy can care about anything."
 - p.89

"If you love books enough, books will love you back."
 - p.300


All from Among Others by Jo Walton, which I would be willing to bet, right this moment, will win her a second World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It's that good, and that true, and that precisely what we fantasy book-lovers will take to heart.

My Lunacon Schedule

If you, like me, will be spending this coming weekend at the lovely and enchanting Escher Hilton in bucolic Rye Brook, New York, you may wish to either seek out or avoid the following locations, where I will most likely be found:

Friday
6:00 The History of the Book
8:00 2010 Ebook Smackdown!
10:00 The Death of Borders and What Does It Mean For Books

(Yes, it does look like I'll be talking about almost exactly the same thing, for three solid hours, with different company and with breaks for other activities.)

Saturday
2:00 The Economy and the Genre

Sunday
10:00 Support Your Fantasy Regime
11:00 To E- or Not to E-
(I'm also scheduled for something at 1:00, but that looks like last year's Art GOH presentation, which is the kind of weird confusion I've come to expect from Lunacon.)

Most of the rest of the time, you can find me in the Huckster's Room, where I'll have a table. If you like "Reviewing the Mail," you'll love my table, since that's most of what I'll have -- that stuff has been threatening to fall over and kill me (both books I've read and those I haven't), and I'm finally trying to get rid of them in a kind of fannish garage sale. Prices are cheap, and I may even respond to haggling -- come over and check it out. This offer is unlikely to ever be repeated; if I don't get rid of this stuff this year, I'll have to find something else to do with it.

(The Huckster's Table also provides a rare occasion to meet The Wife, who will be spending the weekend making fun of SF people in undertone remarks to me and eating lots of ice under the auspices of pretending to help me.)

Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke

It's a sad thing to see the idols of your youth brought low. P.J O'Rourke was once the globe's foremost "trouble tourist," going to the worst places on earth and reporting back. Even before that, he was a fearless writer, pushing his own gonzo brand of libertarian near-anarchism as the token "conservative" for any publication he wrote for. But the last decade has seen his scope drastically shrink; the man who once covered All the Trouble in the World settled in to be The CEO of the Sofa, and his thinking, perhaps finally influenced by a long affiliation with the Cato Institute, bent to blandly standard Republican dogma -- if with slightly fewer dogwhistles than usual -- over the course of the disastrous GW Bush presidency. And now Don't Vote finds O'Rourke high and dry: on the far side of sixty, on the far side of the right wing, landlocked in Libertopian New Hampshire, grumpy and curmudgeonly where he was once insightful and cutting, wanting nothing so much as to order Nancy Pelosi off his lawn.

Don't Vote is a rag-bag collection: according to the way O'Rourke describes it, this book was written as a single entity, but out of the detritus of fifteen years of speeches and assorted columns. It doesn't show any evidence of having been assembled to fit any blueprint, or to have any animating central argument other than "O'Rourke has three growing kids who will want to go to college soon -- and no good conservative intellectual can let his kids go to a state school." There's no through-line, other than the fact that O'Rourke is now old and tired, and what little point of view Don't Vote has can be summed up as "things suck." So the book meanders through the usual tired political issues, and treats them all in a purely cartoon manner. (His take on global warming is essentially the same as the idiot Congressman who said it couldn't possibly be happening, since God wouldn't let it -- more damningly, and characteristically, O'Rourke's is an old man's argument, a demand not to ever have to change anything he likes, no matter the consequences. Most of his other arguments here are the same -- and his defense of conservatism is pure special pleading for not wanting anything in the world to ever change again.)

Everything wrong with the world is the fault of Big Government and the Nanny state, of course -- with an occasional feint in the direction of reason, as if the man who saw anarchic Somalia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and both Gulf Wars first hand is still inside there, somewhere -- and conservatives/Republicans are all pure-hearted free-market advocates who only want Americans to be allowed to chose their own prosperity. This seemed slightly more plausible last March, when O'Rourke was finishing this book, and only mildly wrong-headed in October, when Don't Vote was published. Today, though, we can see what those folks really want to do -- eliminate health care, eliminate collective bargaining, eliminate pensions, eliminate family-planning spending, eliminate just about everything the government does that doesn't fire bullets from one end, and let corporations dictate pretty much everything else -- and it doesn't bear much relationship to O'Rourke's lazy man's laissez-faire utopia. Though, come to think of it, O'Rourke concentrates all of his energy on what's wrong with liberals/Democrats rather than explaining what government should do -- and, even there, he relies primarily on heights of rhetoric and random quotes from books Cato friends sent him rather than citing more than a couple of actually damaging policies. (He fulminates against both child car seats and the requirement that children's pajamas now be flame-retardant -- does he expect us to believe that he'd rather that his kids were killed by fire or impact? Many of his complaints are of that nature -- how dare people make the world safer?)

Don't Vote is a windy, whiny, annoying book, even if you want to agree with it. O'Rourke has sadly moved beyond his pandering stage of a few years back -- it's clear that this is the way he really thinks now. He's old and grumpy and the world is awful because of it -- so we should treat him like any other aged curmudgeon: let him sit in a comfortable chair near the fire, fluff his pillow every so often, and resolutely ignore anything he says.

(See my review of O'Rourke's 2009 collection Driving Like Crazy for further details of his slide into tedious grump-dom.)

Long-Dead Memes: What Was On the Cover of Time When You Were Born?

Yet another bit exhumed from the archives of the Straight Dope Message Board, which was the kind of place that bred memes in those days when blogs were rare and the word "meme" wasn't generally used for this kind of thing anyway. This particular thread was from 2005, and I think the topic is adequately explained in my title:

The Supertourist: Temple Fielding. The beginning of the linked article is no help in explaining who the hell this oddly-drawn man is.

Apparently he said "As a member of an escorted tour, you don't even have to know the Matterhorn isn't a tuba." (Thanks, Google!) That seems to be the most (or possibly the only) interesting thing about this schmo.

I smell a metaphor about my own life, and frankly, sir, I don't like it.

Decade Meme

I've probably done a version of this before, but I've seen several people doing it this last week -- the link I can lay my hand on right now is Nick Mamatas, who calls it "UK Census Game" for no reason I'm privy to -- and my life is very hectic right now, so content I don't have to think about and run-on sentences are A-OK for me.

2011: Pompton Lakes, NJ. Head above water (literally), married with two tween kids (now 10 and turning-13-on-Thursday). Working in marketing of serious professional stuff for a big non-fiction publisher, with lots of meetings and lots of transformational digital things going on. Started a second blog because I wasn't busy enough. Baseball season for younger son about to begin.

2001: Pompton Lakes, NJ. Same house, same kids (one of whom had just been born two days after Christmas 2000), same wife. Working as an editor for the SFBC and a club for hunting and fishing, in our Times Square offices. Had real office with a metal door and my own window, which I am not at all bitter about losing. Not blogging yet but writing lots of copy for the clubs, plus poking my head into rec.arts.sf.written nearly daily.

1991: Wayne, NJ. Living in my mother's house (but paying rent!) one year out of college. Searching for a job after my first one disappeared when the company closed up the NYC office, though I'm just one month out from my first day at the book clubs, so I might have had my first interview right around now. Unmarried, no kids, no car, no serious possessions. In retrospect, the moment when I might have run off and done something crazy/interesting. But I was so not that kind of person. Had just started a reading journal so I would feel like I'm accomplishing something every day.

1981: Wayne, NJ. Same house. Attending George Washington Junior High School, and probably still getting bullied off-and-on. (That stopped in the fall, when I got into three fights within a month.) Tall, gawky, bad hair, ugly glasses -- but it was 1981, and we were all in junior high, so we all pretty much looked bad.

1971: Rochester, NY. Mastering the details of walking and talking, and probably watching a lot of Sesame Street.

1961: Nowhere. My parents wouldn't meet for another several years.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/12

It is ridiculously cold in my stereotypical bloggers' basement as I type this -- with an array of fans blowing across the newly-cleaned (but still damp) carpet and a bunch of windows open -- and the whole family is supposed to decamp before long to visit my in-laws for the first of several gala celebrations for the momentous occasion of my older son, Thing 1, reaching his dreaded teenage years. (That occurs, officially, at 10:45 AM on Thursday.) So this post may turn out shorter and more desultory than usual; if so, I apologize in advance.

As always, this is a listing, with comments and random thoughts, of the books that arrived in my mail last week for review on this very blog. I haven't read any of these books yet, so what I say may, once in a very long while, be slightly at odds from the actual truth -- and I apologize in advance for that as well, if it happens. I try to judge as little as possible, since the book you will love could be very different from my favorite, but I'm an inherently judgmental person, so that rarely comes out well.

Anyway, I'll start with the biggest (happy) surprise of the day: a paperback of Dave Barry's recent book I'll Mature When I'm Dead. It came without a letter, but it's clearly an April release from the fine folks at Berkley Books. And if the fourteen-year-old Andy Wheeler -- who discovered Barry's The Taming of the Screw in a mall Waldenbooks way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, starting a long shelf of Barry books that are still with me today -- knew that someone would once send him the new Dave Barry collection for free, that boy would probably keel over from shock. I realize that I haven't read Barry as much this last decade -- he stopped the newspaper column, and I wasn't a big fan of the novels he's written with Ridley Pearson [1] -- and this is a great excuse to correct that. Thanks, Berkley!

Next comes the best cover this week, from Jon Sullivan on Mark Hodder's The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, the second in his steampunk alternate-history series about Sir Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Winburn, mid-Victorian secret agents and detectives. The plot of this book -- in a wink to those that know -- features a lost heir named Sir Roger Tichborne and the titular automaton. Pyr publishes it this month in trade paperback.

DAW Books is publishing at least three mass-market paperbacks in April -- I know this because I have three of them in front of me right now. The first is S.L. Farrell's A Magic of Dawn, the finale of the "Nessicanto Cycle," which was originally published in hardcover last year. (And great kudos to Farrell for not naming a three-book series a trilogy; resisting temptation like that is impressive.)

Also from DAW in April, and also originally a hardcover, is C.J. Cherryh's Deceiver, the eleventh novel of Bren Cameron and the alien atevi, the middle book of the fourth trilogy in that series. (The finale of that trilogy is either imminent or already out; DAW hasn't sent me hardcovers lately, so I'm not sure which.) I read the first nine or so of these, but I have to admit that I lost track of the series when I fell from grace back in 2007.

And the third of those DAW paperbacks is Alien in the Family, the third in a humorous-romantic-adventurous SF series by Gini Koch with a clear Men in Black influence.

I saw Mark Chadbourn's The Scar-Crow Men -- second in his secret history "Swords of Albion" series, featuring Will Swyfte, spy and agent of Queen Elizabeth (the one who didn't have a "the first" at that point) -- back when it was in advance-proof form, and now I see it again now that it's a finished book. (I have good eyes; I can see things twice sometimes.) It was published by Pyr on March 8th.


Steven Gould is back with his first new standalone novel since 2000's Blind Waves in 7th Sigma, a July hardcover from Tor. (I assume the title has a purpose other than confusing and amusing those of us far-too-deeply stuck in the performance-management world, but I expect I'll have to read the book to find out that purpose.) It's a near-future novel, set in the desert Southwest where unexplained self-replicating (and metal-eating) machines showed up about fifty years before, with a hero who may be seven sigmas from the norm -- on what graph, precisely, the copy on 7th Sigma doesn't say.

Alex Bledsoe has been writing hybrid secondary-world fantasy/hard-boiled mysteries for a few years now, with the first two books about his detective Eddie LaCrosse: The Sword-Edged Blonde and Burn Me Deadly. And now Eddie is back with a third adventure: Dark Jenny. The cover is a bit odd -- it looks like a classy historical romance, or possibly a Tudors spin-off -- which may be because this book is set entirely in one castle, full of intrigue and murder accusations. Dark Jenny will be published by Tor in trade paperback on March 29th.

Cory Doctorow, ready as ever to experiment with distribution and always looking for a new audience. , is publishing his next short-story collection, With a Little Help, himself, under the Sweet Home Grindstone Press imprint. And he's casting his publicity net very widely, since he even sent me a copy. With a Little Help collects twelve Doctorow stories, mostly from 2007-2010, along with a Jonathan Coulton foreword and an afterword by Doctorow's agent, Russell Galen. It will be available as a print-on-demand paperback -- updated with typo fixes in near-real-time, and under one of four covers -- as an ultra-limited-edition hardcover with fancy extras, as an audiobook read by various interesting people (Mary Robinette Kowal, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and some poor others with only two names like Wil Wheaton), and as DRM-free name-your-price electronic editions. So, if you want to read Cory Doctorow stories at all, you really can't complain about lack of choice. All those things are available now, since the book launched in December 2010 -- well, the ultra-limited edition is probably impossible to find now, but that's what happens when you snooze.

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson are taking some time out from their string of Dune prequels to start a new adventure-SF series with a big fat book called Hellhole. It was published by Tor on March 15th, and, presumably, the title wasn't chosen to make us all think of this:

And last for this week is the twentieth (!) book in the "Graphic Classics" series edited by Tom Pomplun -- celebrating more than a decade of adapting great stories into graphic form -- in Western Classics. This time around, stories by Zane Grey, Robert E. Howard, Bret Harte, Willa Cather, and others are adapted and illustrated by folks like Trina Robbins, Arnold Arre, Rod Lott, Dan Spiegle, George Sellas, and Pomplun himself.


[1] Though Barry's first two solo novels, Big Trouble and Tricky Business, are wonderful: Carl Hiaasen-style Florida caper novels with Barry's inimitable light touch and without Hiaasen's underlying pessimism. They're great, and the movie made from the first one is a lot of fun, as well.

Movie Log: A Life Less Ordinary

This is a weird movie from just over a decade ago, mostly forgotten (and justifiably so). It's one of the answers to the question "So what did Danny Boyle do in between Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire?" (Another answer to that question is Millions, a much better movie I saw a few years ago.)

But A Life Less Ordinary was the movie Boyle did right after Trainspotting, a buddy-heist drama meets romantic comedy in which a befuddled Ewan McGregor kidnaps and then supposedly romances a steely Cameron Diaz. (And both of them look ridiculously young now, since the movie is from 1997.) And I haven't gotten into the weird part yet: the whole McGregor-Diaz plot is run by two angels (the great Holly Hunter, whose voice makes any movie she's in a joy, and the almost as great Delroy Lindo) who have been exiled to earth in penance for a recent huge slump in the numbers of marriages breaking up under their care. (Yes, these are true love angels.) The movie begins in Heaven -- the usual white-on-white treatment, though I saw at least one woman with a skirt I wouldn't expect would pass Upstairs approval -- with Hunter and Lindo being bawled out by their boss and kicked downstairs for the requisite One Last Chance.

And, since True Love is often forged by shared danger and privation, these two angels maneuver McGregor, a recently-fired janitor, into kidnapping Diaz, the spoiled daughter of the tycoon whose company just canned him. And then the angels get themselves hired as bounty hunters by Diaz's nasty father (Ian Holm), so they can increase the danger and fire up that necessary True Love.

A Life Less Ordinary isn't a bad movie: it's full of good actors doing good work, speaking lines that all make sense at the time. But it's bizarre in conception and execution and never finds the tone that will make all of its oddities seem obvious and right. Less importantly, the title has nothing at all to do with the actual plot -- neither McGregor nor Diaz is seeking a particular kind of life, and they're both being very strongly manipulated by the two angels anyway. This is a movie that was at least one major rewrite away from being ready to film -- but it went ahead anyway, and the result was an interesting mess.

The Creek Did Rise

The Wife and I had a tiring night last night, baling water out of our basement as fast as it could wick up through the floor -- and that was pretty darn quick, some of the time -- but we kept it contained, and there should be only minor damage. (So I'm doing nothing like complaining -- there are hundreds of people two and three streets away who got several feet of water for the second time in a week.) We finally decided it was oozing slowly enough to put towels down and go to sleep about 4:30, and which point we were both pretty punchy.

That did mean that I didn't have any blogging time yesterday, particularly since the working day was busy and eventful, with a visit to an undisclosed location on Long Island to pick up data for a product none of you will care about -- but which will nevertheless eat the lunch right out of the hands of our competitors. I ended up with a bare two hours in the office to get everything necessary done -- which I did, of course; I'm a superstar like that-- and that led to a certain frantic air. And transportation has been interesting for the last several days, what with rising rivers and so on.

What I should be doing now is writing reviews of Connie Willis's double-decker doorstop Blackout/All Clear and Mary Robinette Kowal's Nebula-nominated Regency fantasy Shades of Milk and Honey, but I don't think I have the brain cells for those today. Maybe I can catch up on my editorial cartoons for Editorial Explanations (plug plug), but that's about the limit of my ratiocinative abilities right now.

Hope that the weather is treating you better than that. (Not that my weather stacks up compared to the Japanese earthquake/tsunami, which I'm trying not to look at.)

This Is Not a Blog Post

So I had a 4-7 meeting today, complete with dinner -- there are some issues you just don't have the time to hash out during the working day, and it actually was a great meeting that accomplished what it needed to.

Unfortunately, coming out of it, I looked at the train schedule that isn't effective until Sunday, and tried to catch the 7:17 train. Which, since it wasn't Sunday yet, was actually a 7:00 train today, and had already left.

Now, the next train was at 8:56.

• A normal man would have slipped into the bar at the Hoboken terminal to while away a few hours.
• A workaholic man would have gone back to the office to get things done.
• A smart man would have taken the PATH into New York, and caught an express bus out from there.

But this man got on a train at 7:32 that went part of the way, caught a transfer, and ended up, two stops shy of my car, at about 8:30. On a platform without any real shelter. In the pouring rain. Until 9:39, when that next train finally arrived.

Thus there will be no blogging tonight. Tomorrow, regular service will resume, God willing and the creek don't rise.

(And that last is not a metaphor; we're under a flood watch and may well be evacuated in the next 24 hours. Ah, the wonders of living in riverine country!)

Crippled God Hits NY Times Bestseller List

There's a particular kind of celebration that you only experience if you work at a publishing company -- it comes in the middle of a week, when you hear from the New York Times (or, back in the day, Publishers Weekly) that a book you published has just hit their list.

Tor Books had that celebration earlier today, when they learned that The Crippled God, tenth and last in Steven Erikson's massive decadent-epic fantasy series "The Malazan Book of the Fallen," would be #12 on this weekend's fiction bestseller list in the Times. Tor sent out a press release to continue the celebration, and they mentioned the hard work of editor Eric Raab, who shepherded that massive series for Tor for most of the past decade. But its success relied on the hard work of a few dozen other people, too -- Justin Golenbock, Tor's Senior Publicist, Tom Doherty, their Publisher and founder, and a host of sales reps, marketers, and others.

(And I'm personally happy to see Erikson's series hit that peak of success; I bought the first four in the series for the SF Book Club, and I've long been an admirer of the work Erikson is doing.)

But the person I'd like to honor is the editor who first brought Erikson to the US -- after years when every New York publishing house said he was "too British" and "too big" and "too convoluted" -- the editor who read the whole series to date quickly, fell in love with it, and succeeded in an editor's most central job: making his enthusiasm contagious until an entire publishing house goes along with him.

Wherever you are, Jim Minz, take a bow: you were right. And it only took seven years.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

The subtitle here is "Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks," which explains the proceedings a bit better than the expansive title does. Author Goldacre was a doctor before he was a writer -- or is a writer primarily about things that bother him as a doctor -- and so this book isn't about bad science in general, but a very particular kind of bad science. If it were completely accurate, it would have been named Bad Medicine, but, sadly, Bon Jovi got there first. Goldacre is also British, so the things that annoy and incense him are the idiocies of the great British public -- other countries have their own, distinctive idiocies -- particularly homeopathy and the great vaccination-causes-autism scare.

To go along with his quite British targets -- Goldacre is also grumpy about multinational pharmaceutical companies, though he tries to maintain a consistent clear-eyed-and-resigned tone throughout, and tends to downplay their sins, since they're not nearly as idiotic as the other nutters he writes about -- Bad Science has a deeply British tone: aggrieved, but assuming that the world will always aggravate him; casually cutting and full of wit, though not "witty;" off-handedly authoritative; and a sense that things will always be pretty bad, but that we'll muddle through nevertheless. So Bad Science begins with the clearly demented tenets of homeopathy, and works its way up the ladder of medical misconceptions through biased tests and shelved results -- again, he's complaining more about "Complementary and Alternative Medicine," that latest euphemism for snake oil, but he also explains along the way how more conventionally scientific data is tweaked and twisted and tarted out to show whatever unscrupulous researchers want it to show.

There is no physics in Bad Science, and the chemistry and biology here are exclusively concerned with the health of the human body. There are vast, uncharted fields of horrible science that Goldacre doesn't come anywhere near explicating. But, what it does -- carefully pointing out the major ways that the UK is misled, and misleads itself, about its health and the care thereof -- it does well.

Awards & Judges Round-Up: Dick, WFA, Clarke, Stoker

It's been a busy week or two in skiffy-land, with shortlists and judge announcements, and I have neglected to mention most of them as they happened. But that doesn't mean I can't try to catch up, and so I shall:


1) The judges for the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award -- given annually to a distinguished SF work published in paperback in the USA -- have just been announced, and I saw the list of them at the indispensable Locus. Those judges are: Scott Baker, Mark Budz, Roby James, Darrell Schweitzer, and Alice K. Turner. (Locus has their mailing addresses, if you happen to be a publisher keen to submit an eligible work.)


2) The judges for the World Fantasy Awards -- also given annually, to works and individuals in a wide range of categories -- have also been named, and once again Locus has a list of them. (Relieving me of the need to go anywhere else, which is deeply appreciated.) They are: Andrew Hook, Sacha Mamczak, Mark Rich, Sean Wallace, and Kim Wilkins. Being a judge for the WFAs means two things: one, you get some of the best mail in the world, and, two, you get to argue about literature and art for months on end with a bunch of really smart and committed people -- and have it all be meaningful and important. So I hope this year's crew has a lot of fun with it, and digs as deeply as they can to bring out the odd and unexpected nominees that always set heads to scratching.


3) The shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award has also been announced -- it's currently at the top of that linked page, though there's no sign that it has a dedicated URL and, presumably, future news will push it down. The Clarke is given to SF novels when first published in the UK, which partly explains why a ten-year-old book that I'd call fantasy (Declare) [1] is on this list:

• Zoo City – Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot) 
• The Dervish House – Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
• Monsters of Men – Patrick Ness (Walker Books)  
• Generosity – Richard Powers (Atlantic Books) 
• Declare – Tim Powers (Corvus)
• Lightborn – Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)

The list has two men named Powers, two women, four American-born writers, one South African, and a self-admitted YA novel. And they have talent! [2]


4) And, for completeness's sake, I should also mention that the Stoker Award nominations were recently announced...as a post on somebody's Facebook page. (In my day job, I'm always urging my authors to use social media in smart and compelling ways, but that's not exactly what I mean.) I learned that the nominees had been set free into the world by Nick Mamatas, and that butterfly-free list is here at Ellen Datlow's place.

Even when I was more assiduously keeping up with SFF than I am these days, I was very spotty on horror -- I don't like most of it, as I keep saying -- so I have nothing meaningful to say about this list, now or in the future. But congratulations to all of the nominees.


[1] But also call absolutely brilliant, and one of the best novels in the SFF field however defined. And it certainly was never eligible before this year, since it was never published in the UK before. But I'd like to see the argument that it's SF, since I don't really see how that argument would be constructed.

[2] Fifty quatloos for the first person to Name. That. Reference!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/5

I'm typing this at speed, since there's Family Stuff going on most of today (Sunday) and tomorrow (Monday) that will keep me away from this computer and possibly completing this. So if this post stops abruptly mid-thought, know that I'll be back sometime later on Monday to finish it up.

And, of course, this is the usual list of books that came in my mail last week -- of which I have read exactly none. All possible caveats thus apply to my descriptions of these books, which are uniformly much more awesome than I am describing them as.

(I just deleted a paragraph about a book I didn't get this week -- you can guess which one; it's the gigantic brick-shaped object that was released on Tuesday -- because it was off-topic and probably contained more than the USDA recommended amount of whining.)

And why should I whine, anyway? Look what I did get: John Scalzi's new novel, Fuzzy Nation, the unexpected reimagining of H.Beam Piper's classic Little Fuzzy. (And I am old enough to have grown up reading Piper, thank you very much -- I read the Fuzzy books back before the lost third book was rediscovered!) I will say that it's weird to see a Fuzzy book being published by anyone but Ace -- this one will be a Tor hardcover on May 10th -- but that's just thirteen-year-old Andy rearing his uncomprehending head. Scalzi is something like our decade's version of Piper to begin with: a smart writer who specializes in very entertaining, incredibly popular books solidly in a tradition midway between Military SF and that ill-defined thing "Hard SF." So I'm expecting his version of Jack Halloway and Little Fuzzy to be entirely awesome.

And then I have three fantasy novels for not-quite adults, all by writers I don't know, all from various pieces of the vast Penguin Empire. (Penguins secretly rule much of the Atlantic seaboard, you know.) First is Catherine Fisher's The Dark City, the first in a four-book "Relic Master" series coming out this summer from Dial Books -- as in, all four books will be out this summer, to best capture the short attention spans of teenagers and other fantasy readers. Dark City is thus coming in May, with the other three novels following through the end of the summer. (I see that Fisher is the author of Incarceron, which I have heard of, so I take back my claim not to know who any of these authors are -- there are so many good writers in the world that it's hard to keep track of them all.) "Relic Master" is the story of Anara, "a world mysteriously crumbling to devastation, where nothing is what it seems: ancient relics emit technologically advanced powers, members of the old Older are revered by the people but hunted by the governing Watch, and the great energy that connects all seems to also be destroying all." So it sounds much closer to conventional adult epic fantasy than most YA fantasy is these days: secondary world, fate of the universe, secret powers, all of those exciting things. Fisher is a past New York Times bestseller, and probably will be again: you could read this yourself, or wait until some sassy seventeen-year-old rolls her eyes when you haven't....

Next is Franny Billingsley's Chime, also from Dial Books, but publishing this very month. This one looks more like what we think of as YA fantasy: focused on one young woman, Briony, whose secret "killed her stepmother, destroyed her sister Rose's mind, and threatens all the children in the Swampsea." That secret has something to do with magic -- she's a witch or faerie, something not-quite-human and despised -- and so she must keep it totally to herself or be hung. And there's also a gorgeous young man, "Eldric with his golden mane and lion eyes and electric energy," who fires up the romance part of the plot.

And the third book from the Empire of Penguins is Eona by Alison Goodman, sequel to last year's Eon. It will be published by Viking on April 19th, and it finishes up the saga of the Empire of the Celestial Dragons, Eona, and her new-found dragon. And who can resist the story of a strong young woman and her kick-ass dragon? None of you, I'm sure.

Something entirely different is Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, a book about art and the creative process by one of today's smartest and most self-conscious comics creators. It's being published in paperback by Yale University Press -- and so you know it will be both Smart and Important -- on March 29th.

And last for this week is Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future, a book I'm sure a thousand SF writers are already poring over to mine plot ideas for their next six novels. Kaku is the real deal -- renowned teaching professor, co-founder of string theory, author of a number of books explaining real cutting-edge science to a lay audience, and possessor of an impressive head of hair -- so this will be both Good Science and Stuff You Can Understand, which are not always found together. Physics of the Future looks at what life might be like for the average person in 2100, based on Kaku's interviews with hundreds of current working scientists. And Doubleday will put it into your hot little hands, if you'd like, on the 15th of this very month.