Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/27/19

Two books came in the mail this week, and I'm going to hit them in order of size of physical book (descending), because that's they way they're stacked right at this second. And that means about as much as you think it does.

First up is a new novel by one of my favorite nutty SF writers, Rudy Rucker. Million Mile Road Trip is not just a brand new Rucker SF novel -- coming on May 7th from Night Shade, which I keep forgetting is part of Skyhorse now -- but the lead-off of a big Rucker reprinting project, which is possibly even better.

So: Million Mile is another odd, probably math-inspired Rucker story, in which three teens open a transdimensional gateway to Mappyworld, an endless plain divided into basin-like worlds by ridges, and of course go on a road trip there in an old station wagon to save the world from carnivorous flying saucers.

And: Night Shade is also reprinting nine earlier Rucker novels at the same time, from classics like The Sex Sphere and White Light and Spacetime Donuts to books I missed the first time around like Turing & Burroughs and Jim and the Flims. Unless you are vastly more of a Rucker-head than I am, some of this will be new to you, and I hope you have fun with it. (I see that I haven't reviewed any of Rucker's novels here -- the only Rucker book I've covered was his autobiography, Nested Scrolls.)

The other book I have is a reprint anthology called, with a certain swagger in its step, The Unicorn Anthology. I suspect there may have been more than one, but this one is edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, and includes 16 stories from such luminaries as Jane Yolen, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Carrie Vaughn, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Springer, Patricia A. McKillip, and Garth Nix. It's a trade paperback from Tachyon Publications, and you can get it right now if you want.

Reviewing the Mail: week of 4/20/19

Two books this week -- one that came in the mail, one that I bought. And they'll run in that order, as usual.

In the mail I got 5 Worlds: The Red Maze, third in the middle-grade graphic novel series by Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun. (The first two write, the rest do the art -- I covered the second book, The Cobalt Prince, last year and I still don't know the breakdown of work any more than that.)  This one is coming May 7th in hardcover from Random House Books for Young Readers, and it looks like just as much fun as the last one.

The book I bought is Brandon Graham's early sex comic Pillow Fight. (As opposed to Brandon Graham's early sex comic Perverts of the Unknown, which I still have not seen. I think that category includes just those two things, plus a random scene in the first volume of Multiple Warheads.) Graham has a fun line and a good way with puns and a loose storytelling sensibility. And he doesn't have all that many comics out, so I'm getting around to his more disreputable stuff sooner than one might expect. (Or maybe not: I can be pretty disreputable myself, I suppose.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/13/19

One book this week -- a book of illustrated stories coming in October from Norton.

It's called The Envious Siblings and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes, it's by Landis Blair, and it's more than a little influenced by Edward Gorey.

(Tangent: why is that a big deal? Well, our artistic culture seems to be just fine with the thousandth genre entry -- write a book about a stableboy who turns out to be the lost prince and see if every review uses the same comparison -- but comes down hard on the second. To my mind, that's backward: the second creator is still trailblazing, turning one person's specific style into something closer to a genre, and making room for more work in that genre. I complained about this a lot when Elizabeth Willey's novels were coming out, since she was the only person who tried to do Amberesque novels other than Roger Zelazny. And I expect Landis Blair will be my new example for the same argument.)

So Envious Siblings has eight stories, all told in rhyming verse underneath full-page illustrations in precise pen-and-ink with more than a little crosshatching, all about nasty and/or tormented young people in scenes that tend to look more Victorian than modern.

I haven't done more than scan it, so I can't say how well Blair's writing handles this style. His art looks nice, carefully posed in that way that implies action but looks static. And I'm always in favor of more grisly dark humor. So I want to like this, and I'm happy to see it has quotes from Emil Ferris and Eddie Campbell. If you've been a bit out of sorts since Gorey died, you'll want to at least glance at Envious Siblings when it hits stores this fall.

Perdy, Vol. 1 by Kickliy

Genres are quirky things -- especially the small ones. I'm pretty sure "French Western comics" is a pretty small genre, but it's hard to say, as a purely Anglophone reader an ocean away.

I have seen a stream of things in that genre, though -- first the Blueberry comics by Charlier and Moebius, which I read in the '90s but were mostly older than that. then some other random things, and most recently Perdy, Vol. 1 by an entity credited as Kickliy. [1] And they all have seemed to fall into a basically coherent genre. It's a comics version of Sergio Leone movies more than anything -- not just influenced by the American cinematic Western, but specifically influenced by the late, decadent, European burst of "the American cinematic Western." They definitely have nothing to do with the thin American genre of Western comics, which were another one of those vaguely superhero-esque brand extensions from the Big Two and are now quite thoroughly dead.

Then again, French adventure comics tend to have a distinctive tone or style to begin with: more fatalistic than their American equivalents, depicting worlds in which horrible, irrevocable things happen...and are not afterward wished or retconned out of existence. French comics, from what I've seen, play fair with their audiences: they say clearly "this is real, this story matters, and what happens in it will have consequences."

I appreciate that, as a reader who likes stories and not just narrative shards. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to read Perdy.

(Among the others: it's unabashedly about sex and violence but centered on a woman no longer young, never terribly attractive, built very sturdily, and possessed of the bullheaded will and drive usually reserved for men in popular fiction. Perdy herself is a great obnoxious character, and that came through even before I read the book.)

Perdy is a woman of middle years -- call her somewhere in her forties, since she has a grown daughter. She's been in prison for fifteen years as the story opens, and is just getting released for her unspecified but clearly violent crimes. She has nothing but the rags of her prison garb: not even shoes. But we readers can see immediately that this will not be much impediment to her: Perdy is the kind of person you either quickly get out of the way of or get bowled over by.

There's something cartoony about Perdy, but it's the fun, narrative-enhancing kind of cartoony. A story always moves forward with someone like Perdy in it, and so this one does: she goes to retrieve her gear from the place she hid it, and then sets out to get back to the work of her life: robbing banks.

(Well, and causing trouble, but that's more of a hobby -- the kind of thing she can and does do nearly every moment of every day. She's also quite fond of very vigorous sex, entirely on her own terms, which is also nice to see in a woman like Perdy who is almost entirely not constructed for the male gaze.)

Along the way, she comes back in contact with someone from her old life, though I won't spoil that surprise. There's another female character here who is nearly as overwhelming as Perdy, in her own more conventionally feminine way, though I have to admit the men mostly do not acquit themselves well in the company of either woman. It's understandable: they're clearly overmatched, and know it.

As the Vol. 1 might imply, this is not a complete story. The second book is promised for this fall, though, and what we have here has most of the shape of a story -- there's no ending, but it's a satisfying story that tells us a lot about these people and their world and runs us through a series of entertaining and amusing scenes. I'm cautiously optimistic that we won't be looking for the ending in a Vol. 12 some years down the road...but that's always the danger.

For now, though, this is a fine beginning and a great central character. Perdy kicks ass in several ways, and it's fun to watch her doing it.


[1] A desultory Internet search leads me to believe that Kickliy is a male human being. I can't prove this, so take it as you will. Every entity on the Internet can be assumed to be a dog unless you have compelling evidence otherwise.

Quote of the Week: Yes, I Know

The most characteristic aspect of most any blog is a first few enthusiastic posts, followed by a large gap and a post explaining why the person hasn't posted, and a public intention to post again -- usually followed by silence.

 - Kevin Young, Bunk, p.114

100 Bullshit Jobs...And How to Get Them by Stanley Bing

I may have found the most 2006 book ever. (And I hope someone won't be saying the identical thing about 2019 a decade from now, though I wouldn't bet against it.)

2006, of course, was the height of the last big American boom, driven by the last big delusional Republican American president -- and, at the time, we thought those both were heights that would never be bettered. (Insert hollow laugh here.)

And the mostly humorous business writer "Stanley Bing" -- he has some other name, which I could probably find without too much trouble, under which he has lived a real career as an actual mid-level corporate manager -- summed up all of the highlights of that era in his book 100 Bullshit Jobs...And How to Get Them.

This is indeed a list of 100 jobs, alphabetically, each with a pseudo-scientific and mostly humorous mathematical formula to determine just how bullshit each of them is. Up front is an introduction explaining the formula and the project, but the bulk of the book is running through those hundred jobs and describing what they do in breezy tones, starting (obviously) with pay and running through the skills required, duties, famous folks with that job, how the reader can get into it, and so on.

Bullshit isn't the same as easy, of course. A job can have long, grueling hours and still be entirely bullshit. But there's an essential lack of honesty and centeredness that characterizes the true bullshit job, and many people aspire to that state of not-caring and want to find a way to skate by everything serious and weighty.

Bing begins with Advertising Executive and runs through Yoga Franchiser before hitting #100 with, in the best business-book fashion, You. Because every business book is always about You: how you can win friends and influence people, or move the cheese, or lean in, or whatever piece of bullshit advice that particular writer thinks will sound plausible to you so he can make a fortune.

Bing knows this, and lays on the smarm at the end, with not only the final job being whatever the hell it is You do, but adding a short conclusion entirely on "Transforming your job into a bullshit job," which is of course what we all clearly aspired to in 2006.

Obviously, 100 Bullshit Jobs is a massive exercise in bullshit itself -- that's the point. Any of the jobs listed here can be bullshit, and so can a whole lot of other jobs. (Our current President, for example, is showing that you can make any job a bullshit job -- I hope Bing is proud.) Any job can also not be bullshit: like a crime, making a job bullshit requires motive, means and opportunity -- you have to have the chance to make that job bullshit, and you have to want to do it.

If you do have that desire, know that Bing's book is out there as a roadmap. The world is slightly less friendly to bullshit jobs after the last financial crash than it was in 2006 -- I have a vague, probably-bullshit-theory itself that this has been the case for every crash, and that bullshit builds up afterwards in the fat periods -- but there's still plenty of it out there, and 2006 is close enough to 2019 that the models here still mostly work.

Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

This book was a bestseller and reviewed/talked about a lot -- so there's a very good chance you're not hearing about it for the first time from me. In fact, this paperback edition is already a year old itself.

More importantly, Stephens-Davidowitz's central point -- that there are now large datasets, mostly around Internet usage, which can be used by social scientists and other researchers to get closer to the truth about what people really think and feel about taboo or contentious subjects -- might be news in a lot of circles, but not to anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade or so.

(Admittedly, a lot of people don't pay attention. People are the worst, as we can also learn from this book.)

So. We have the usual punchy, expansive title: Everybody Lies. And the equally usual descriptive subtitle that claims even more territory: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. So far, so much like a million other non-fiction bestsellers and would-be bestsellers since bookselling became a regular racket. We expect a quick, punchy read that makes big claims in a lot of areas, backs up at least some of them at least some of the time, and gives us a few facts which we can use to sound smart at a cocktail party or on the Internet.

Everybody Lies is a bit better than that, actually, but it follows that model pretty closely. Again, if you're in any data-driven field, it won't particularly shocking. (In Chapter 6, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Stephens-Davidowitz spends several pages explaining what A/B tests are -- I, and I hope every other marketing person currently in existence, have been doing A/B tests for probably a decade now. Not as often or as rigorously as I might like, true, but it's not a new concept for that many people, I hope.)

Stephens-Davidowitz (can I call him SSD from here, for short?) starts off with sex, because he is not at all stupid. He doesn't really note that one of the great precursors of this book are the occasional posts by the data scientists of (of all places) PornHub, delving into questions like whether porn viewing dips on Super Bowl Sunday and what the most popular kinds of entertainment are in different nations. But who ever wants to emphasize that other people have been doing the same thing, in more depth and sometimes better?

SSD was a data scientist for Google, and it seems that the best data he has to work with is still mostly from Google, so that informs what he's been looking at and researching. (Admittedly, I expect Google would be the best Internet data anyone could have to work with in most cases, given their size and ubiquity.) I do wonder what a similar book by a Facebook expert would say -- SSD is mostly looking at individual behavior and attitudes, as seen by searches, and a Facebook-centric (or even just social-media-focused) project would be much more about social maps, how ideas spread, which ideas spread, and the contagiousness of various things. [1]

Everybody Lies starts out with sex and racism -- it is a book by an American, for Americans, after all -- and then moves on to less immediately juicy topics and then to general issues raised by the existence of these tools and research techniques, as it tries to cover everything a general reader might want to know about Big Data and its uses.

I don't want to be flippant, because SSD has a fairly rigorous academic background, and he's clearly brought that to his data-science work and the original research that underpins a lot of this book. A lot of what he's doing here is simplifying complex data-analysis concepts to explain them to a mass audience -- but that's what a mass audience needs. Everybody Lies does a good job of summarizing both what we can know about (mostly American) mass culture and attitudes from Internet data, and at examining some particular examples of that data.

I personally would like a book with even more charts and detail, but that's me. This is probably more chart-heavy than the average reader wants to begin with.


[1] That book might exist -- let me know if anyone out there has read or seen it.

Not Reviewing the Mail

I don't know if you are as annoyed with my stream of "I said I'd do this thing, so here I am to say I have nothing to say" posts as I am, but I'm trying to stop them.

So I'm explicitly saying what might have been implicit: I'm only going to do the things I semi-jokingly refer to as "obligatory" posts when I actually have something to say about the thing the post is supposedly about.

e.g.: when I don't have any new books to write about any given week, I will not have a Reviewing the Mail post.

Inference beyond that point is left to the reader.

Have a nice day.

Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson

Some novels are about story, a narrative that moves forward and goes from Point A to Point B. Those kind of books can range from the most relentless chase thrillers to discursive books like Dickens's and across several dozen other variations. Frankly, that's what most people would think of as "a novel" to begin with.

Steve Erickson doesn't play that game.

Shadowbahn is not his least narrative novel -- I think that's still Amnesiascope -- but it's not a story of things that happen in a certain order. It's a collection of things that did happen, or are happening, or that no one can stop happening, or that we wish happened, or dream that they didn't happen. It's the kind of book that reviewers call a meditation or a fantasia or other fanciful terms: a book loosely about things rather than telling the story of them.

In this case, it's rock 'n roll, Elvis, the Beatles, American music in general, the late twentieth century, and, looming over all of that like some Tolkienian Shadow, 9/11. Erickson will not tell us clearly what the one has to do with the other: he's not a writer to draw straight, crisp lines.

So let me sketch some of the things that happen, or appear, in Shadowbahn. They will be in no particular order.

• Off Highway 44 in the South Dakota badlands, in what seems to be 2021, two matching blocky skyscrapers appear mysteriously. Those two matching blocky skyscrapers, the ones violently destroyed twenty years before.
• Parker and Zima, twentysomething white brother and teen black sister, are driving cross-country, from one side of their family to another, when this happens. Their car is soon the only place in the country where music still plays.
• That music seems to come from Zima herself, and may be entirely from the massive number of playlists compiled by their obsessive father.
• That father, who never appears on-stage in Shadowbahn, is pretty obviously a 
• version or self-insert for Erickson.
• He, and Parker/Zima, have appeared in Erickson's novels before, notably in These Dreams of You.
• Jesse Garon Presley wakes up near the top of one of those towers, somewhere in his middle years -- not young, but not as old as a man born in 1935 should be. He is alone there.
• His twin brother died at birth. We are to presume something has shifted the universe so that we got this Presley rather than another, and probably all of the other changes we see. 
• Presley had a minor career as a male model and hanger-on in Warhol's Factory, then increasingly became obsessed by his dead/non-existent twin, symbolized by one 45 by that twin.
• This Presley cannot sing at all.
• He knows -- and many people around him know -- that he was supposed to die, that the world they live in is the wrong one, and that it is Presley's fault.
• Rock 'n roll basically died out by the early '60s. The Beatles were never famous. We may presume that American popular music either was locked into sever-duller iterations of The Great American Songbook [1] or that music stopped being a serious cultural influence at all, as we choose. The latter seems more likely, given the silence in the Parker/Zima sections. 

The narrative bounces from Parker/Zima to Presley and back, looping around that car trip, Presley in the tower, and Presley in the '60s and '70s. Again, Erickson is not telling a story here. Maybe he's constructing a mosaic, or painting a picture, of an America without something central and foundational -- showing us a society shattered at its center, broken and jagged with pain in the broken places. That's Shadowbahn.

As always, Erickson writes compellingly. He's a masterful prose stylist, with sentences that sing and characters that appear full-formed immediately. This book is structured into single-page pseudo-chapters (or vignettes), each one with a "title" that is often just the first words of the first sentence, rolling up into several large sections that mostly focus on either Parker/Zima or Presley.

Most readers don't want a novel like Shadowbahn. That's fine. But one sign I have that we don't live in a broken, shattered world -- maybe one of the few, these days -- is that Erickson is out there, writing novels like this.

[1] Amusingly, this could connect to another one of my obsessions: the Fallout video game series. Those are set in a world without rock 'n roll, a world devastated by a massive nuclear war in the late 21st century, a world crueler and nastier than our own. Shadowbahn, if you squint, could almost be a prequel to those games.

Quote of the Week

He doesn't like police, and on the relatively rare occasion that he crosses paths with them, he has come to realize -- with a stumble into that old mischief maker called greater maturity -- that he talks himself into trouble. He almost got into it with the cop at the border a few hours back, before downshifting into deference, when the officer stared at him long and hard before waving him into West Texas. Parker's father was the same when he was younger, with no respect for any authority that was arbitrary, naively figuring that if he was in the right, he was untouchable. "You need to get over that notion," he later informed his son.

 - Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson, p.82

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

The thing about the end of the world is that worlds end every day. And not just in the teenage-drama sense, either: every death is the end of the world for at least one person. Usually more than that.

So Charles Stross's "Laundry Files" series continues in The Labyrinth Index, the ninth novel, even though its world -- at least as much as the series started out as a secret history -- has definitely ended. The Lovecraftian Singularity is continuing, with an avatar of Nyarlathotep as the Prime Minister of the UK and other players assembling around the world.

But humans are still around and mostly unchanged -- the PM in particular has a soft spot for them, though perhaps primarily because he wants masses to worship him -- and so human stories go on, after the end of what used to be their world.

Mhari Murphy is arguably not a human anymore, but she looks like one, so let's give her the benefit of the doubt. She's a vampire, which is to say the carrier of a nasty but beneficial supernatural parasite: as long as she keeps it fed through a blood-link with other minds it can eat, it won't eat her mind. She's also, because of that fairly recent state and a history with the Laundry, now the Baroness Karnstein, a member of the House of Lords, and head of that house's Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs -- which is to say she's responsible for ensuring the rest of Britain's useful vampires continue to be fed from the blood of unfortunate others so that they can continue to do the work the PM and Laundry need them to do.

(If you're lost -- and you easily could well be with the ninth book in even a loose, mostly new-reader-friendly series like this one -- you could see what I wrote about the previous book, The Delirium Brief, and from there follow links further back for as much more depth as you feel inclined to chase.)

But Mhari is about to get a more difficult job, from that creepy, vastly-less-human PM. You see, the UK's traditional closest ally has been acting strange and distant recently -- even more so than usual. The PM thinks that country has been captured by its own Laundry-style agency, which has thrown in its lot with a much nastier and more dangerous Elder God than himself.

(Those comparatives of "dangerous" and "nasty" here are being used in a way pretty far beyond human norms, I admit.)

And so Mhari has to assemble a team quickly, entirely from a list that PM gives her, infiltrate a foreign country as secretly as possible, so she can find and extract the missing President of the USA. Although, when her team arrives in the States, they find that no American can even remember that they ever had a President....

The Laundry series has always had a whistling-past-the-graveyard appeal, but that's been sharpening with the last couple of books, as the real world has itself gone traipsing through some more boring graveyards. Stross's twisted mirror of our own world has become even more shattered as we've all seen just how horrible, stupid and dysfunctional our governments really can be. And it's culminated here: where the Deep State is not only a real thing, but actually in the thrall of the dread lord Cthulhu.

Labryinth Index will be a slightly odd read for most Americans, since it's inherently about the USA from an outside viewpoint. That viewpoint is generally admiring -- well, as much as you can admire your friend who has become captured by a Cthulhu death-cult -- but it is definitely distanced, and the America in Labyrinth Index is a foreign land not just for Mhari and her band of oddball agents, but for the few beleaguered Americans who remember what a President was.

I wouldn't start the series with this book: they generally stand alone, but too much has gone before, and we're deep into the apocalypse at this point. But it's a great series, full of compelling voices, written straight down the middle of that dark no-man's-land among SF, fantasy, and horror. If any of the above sounds intriguing, find yourself a copy of The Atrocity Archives and start there.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/9/19

To get it out of the way first: nope. No new books, and I haven't managed to finish the one book I'm slowly reading. (Kevin Young's big, interesting Bunk.)

I did, though, finish up two book-review posts, which will roll out over over the next couple of weeks. So content will still be scattered, but maybe slightly less so.

I do need to figure out a time and place to read: that's what I'm missing in my life right now. And the many shelves of books behind me are mocking me for it.

It'll happen eventually. If it doesn't happen right now, while I have one son about to graduate college, another about to graduate high school, and I'm figuring out a very different new job...well, that's not surprising, is it?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/2/19

The drought has lifted, at least for this week; I have two brand-new books to tell you about. Both are trade paperbacks from the fine folks at Tachyon Publications.

First up is The Last Tsar's Dragons by Jane Yolen and  Adam Stemple, a short novel of historical fantasy. (Yes Tsar Nicholas, yes the Russian Revolution, yes actual fire-breathing dragons.) It's coming on June 19th, and I wonder how much Game of Thrones backstory contributed to the idea -- I can see a reaction like "you think that's an evil king? I could name five worse examples from Russia alone" possibly sparking the idea. Anyway: it looks interesting, and it starts with a compelling, grumpy voice -- always a plus for me.

Available now from Tachyon is The Very Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, a collection of twenty stories originally published between 2003 and 2017. (I suspect it collects the expensive small-press hardcovers Two Worlds and in Between and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, but the copy doesn't quite say that.) Kiernan writes fine, creepy stories, which tend to appear in expensive limited editions, so it's nice to have a big book of her work widely available like this. I hope it lands in a lot of libraries, in particular.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/23/19

This is how it starts, you know. A blog -- or any kind of ongoing content hole, a comic strip or syndicated column or what-have-you -- first misses an installment. Then it starts repurposing old content on the way to turning into a zombie version of itself, if there's any money in it, or just petering out, if there isn't.

Yes, I did miss last week! Completely forgot about it. There were no books then to jog my mind.

No books this week, either, and I've been "reading" the same book for three weeks now without actually, y'know, actually picking it up and opening it.

Why?

Well, I typed several long paragraphs about the various permutations of my work life...but, considering I lost the best job of my life ten years ago (and got left outside of SF and book publishing evermore, apparently) over one word I typed here...well, I think it would be better to be discreet. I'll just say Stuff Has Been Interesting.

I have been commuting much less, working from home much more, and that's meant that my formerly dedicated time for reading (an hour on the train each way each weekday) is basically gone. I should still have that time in my day, but, somehow, I don't end up using it to read.

This is where I insist that I will get back to reading...and that might even be true.

Anyway, there may be more content here one of these days. I do have four posts about books half written -- and two of those are genre novels of one kind or another. They'll probably land here...one of these days.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/9/19

Really, there will be more content here eventually. But I got back from a big trip late last night, and if there are any book-shaped packages in the house, I haven't managed to find them yet.

So I'm pretty sure there are no new books from this past week...but I will reserve the right to revise that opinion if new evidence comes to light.

I do now have three books I've read to write about -- again, that's way down from my pace from 2018, but they're all "real" books (not comics-format), if that makes it sound more impressive. That may happen this week, if I get energetic. We'll all have to see.