Tier 3000

Burning Man Info

2007-08-13T23:28:00.000-07:00

This seems as good a place as any to stash my Burning Man schedule. Updates to follow as needed..

Josie and I will be camping with MathCamp at 7:30 & Intertidal. Here are some events happening there.

I also have a bunch of gigs:

1. Tim Thompson, Craig Latta, and I will be doing two shows as Charm Offensive, playing folk-rock:

-- Center Camp, Saturday, 3am
-- The Duck Pond (Habitat and 9:00), Saturday, 10pm

Here's a glimpse at our material.

2. The same trio will also be forming as fud (substituting for dud, who couldn't make a quorum this year):

-- Mutant Audio Outpost (3:00 Plaza at 11:00), Thursday, 8pm

No demo for this, but it will be experimental electronic music of some sort.

3. Lastly, I'll be subbing on bass for indie-rock band American Winter (warning: MySpace auto-play). UPDATE: The Compound has had to cancel their trip to BM due to a last-minute emergency. We'll be trying to schedule some alternative American Winter gigs. Watch this space.

It's All About Joe Artist

2006-12-13T18:41:00.000-08:00

First came the self-titled album. As far as I know, no painter or writer has ever titled a work with his name, but somehow, this unimaginative and egocentric convention became common among musicians. It would make some sense for a best-of album*, but instead is most commonly used for debut albums--exactly where one would expect the artist to want to make a good impression, rather than seeming incapable of coming up with a real title.

The advantage, one assumes, is that the artist gets a name so nice, you say it twice. That is, he would, except that it turns out that people find referring to "Joe Artist's album Joe Artist" ridiculous, and will go to some lengths to avoid it: "Joe Artist's debut album," "Joe Artist: s/t," "the White Album," etc. What's a poor narcissistic** singer to do?

If you're Peter Gabriel, the answer is "try it three times and see what happens," but a more common strategy is the elaborate self-referential title. Here are my top/bottom five examples.

5 (tie):

Gary Burton: Who Is Gary Burton?
Dan Hartman: Who Is Dan Hartman?
Waldeck: Who Is Waldeck?
Marix: Who Is The Marix
Mike Jones: Who Is Mike Jones?
Mike Eddie: Who The Hell Is Mike Eddie?
Fletcher McTaggart: Who Is Fletcher McTaggart?

Who gives a shit?

Extra loser points to Marix for omitting the question mark, and a shout-out to Marlena Shaw, who shows these guys how it's done with her album Who Is This Bitch, Anyway?

4. Jill Scott: Who Is Jill Scott?: Words And Sounds, Vol. 1

Taking a bad idea to a whole new double-generic level of suck, with bonus implied threat.

3. The Nice: The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack

Presumably something like The Sorrows Of Young Werther, only with less moping and more sticking of knives in Hammond organ keyboards.

2. Arrested Development: Three Years, Five Months and Two Days in the Life of...

These guys expect us not only to care about, but to dutifully recite, the amount of time it took them to get a recording contract. Also, a five-yard penalty for the coy ellipsis.

1. Terence Trent D'Arby: Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby

Nicknamed "The Blowhardline" for obvious reasons, and as a sly reference to one theory about what could give a pretty boy named "Terence Trent D'Arby" the impression that he's a badass.

-----

*Great opportunity for a band with cred but low sales: call your best-of album Pop Flies. Because it's pop, but they're not hits. Get it? OK, never mind.

**This has nothing to do with music, but I have to mention it: when working at a personnel office, I once found the file of a guy named Curtis whose four children were named Curt, Curtis Jr., Curtessa, and Curtessina.

Little Women Thelma And Louise Do The Right Thing

2006-12-12T23:29:00.000-08:00

Occasionally one sees two consecutive movie titles on a marquee that together make a complete sentence. But I don't think I've ever seen three do that.

Until today:

THE HISTORY BOYS
SHUT UP AND SING
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Miss Thing

2006-06-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

After flirting with a couple of library cataloging applications, I've settled on Library Thing. Rather than a desktop application, it's a web application, which means anyone can see my library. From this we can see that I have 2,414 books (although there are still a few hundred I haven't catalogued), which sounds like a lot until you get a load of this guy.

I can also see all the books I've read since the last time I blogged one:

Ken Macleod: Learning The World (see Hugo commentary)
John Varley: Red Lightning (not as good as Red Thunder, but then again that was pretty damn good)
Neil Hanson: The Confident Hope Of A Miracle: The True Story Of The Spanish Armada (fascinating)
Kate Wilhelm: Storyteller (see H.c.)
Michael Moorcock: Between The Wars (Byzantium Endures/The Laughter Of Carthage/Jerusalem Commands/The Vengeance Of Rome) (This long, vexing masterpiece deserves a real essay. Fortunately, John Clute has provided one.)
John Varley: Millennium (very grabby, wild ending)
Harry Partch: Bitter Music (his hobo journal, and many essays; reminds me of The Motion Of Light In Water, and it's almost that good)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (prescient 20s dystopia, beautifully done)
Lin Carter, ed.: Flashing Swords #1 (the Anderson story is excellent, the Vance good, the rest so-so)
Ian Watson: The Embedding (more thriller-y than I remembered, but some good SF aspects as well)
David Deutsch: The Fabric Of Reality (mind-roasting epistemology/science weirdness)
Roger Zelazny: Roadmarks (mid-grade Zelazny; there are worse things to be)
Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker (we are devo!)
Conjunctions #39: The New Wave Fabulists (very nice slipstream anthology, almost every story is good-to-excellent)
Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (his magnum opus; one of the best books ever)

Gernsback a-go-go

2006-06-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Here's the current state of my Hugo opinions, having read all the fiction. See also Nicholas Whyte's overview, which agrees with mine to a fair extent, even though I was careful not to read it until I had made my rankings.

BEST NOVEL

1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Here's what I said on Making Light:

Started Spin last night, finished it this morning. I liked it a lot, but unlike the Washington Post I felt that the "literary novel" half of the marriage didn't quite pull its weight. The characters are well-developed and credible, but Wilson achieves that with too much tell and not enough show for my taste, and he has a habit of summarizing conversations that should be written in dialog, which made me think of those Fifties movies that couldn't afford sync sound. I also think that he didn't give the narrator a distinctive enough voice to justify writing the book in first person.

These aren't serious problems, though, and the SFnal aspects are first-rate; once they kicked into gear about halfway through I put off everything else until I finished it.

2. Learning The World by Ken MacLeod. Quite engaging, but I felt that it needed, for lack of a better word, payoff. Still, a pleasant surprise, as I didn't really like The Cassini Division, the only other book of his I'd read.

3. Accelerando by Charles Stross. Good singularity scenario, if very trendy; it's going to seem dated even five years from now, but maybe that's part of the point. Not much novel to go with the scenario.

4. Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Glib Heinlein homage that wisely avoids most of Heinlein's worst habits, the main exception being the narrator's rather smug quality.

I decided not to read the Martin. Life's too short.

Category notes: it's a solid set, but none of them blew me away, or (except for Spin) gave me that frisson of new strangeness I want from the best SF.

BEST NOVELLA

1. "Magic For Beginners" by Kelly Link. Best in show. With her new collection, Link has gone from excellent to brilliant; I can't recommend it enough. I also can't explain what's so great about it. You just have to read it. This isn't even the best story in the collection (my vote is "Catskin"), and yet it makes everything else on the ballot seem a little ordinary.

2. "Burn" by James Patrick Kelly. Beautiful, exotic, original and morally complex--a very worthy winner if the other Kelly wasn't kicking so much butt. I will definitely be reading more by him.

3. "The Little Goddess" by Ian McDonald. The elements are a bit stock--the life of a young girl chosen for godhead, nanotech smuggling--but the combination is original, and extremely well done.

4. No Award

5. "Inside Job" by Connie Willis. Not disastrous, but thoroughly mediocre; the sort of story where the main character is an expert on a particular subject, which means both that that subject will, quite implausibly, turn out to be very important to the action of the story, and that the author will make sure that you know how much research she did. Connie Willis' popularity continues to mystify me.

6. "Identity Theft" by Robert Sawyer. Mid-seventies Varley given a radical pleasurectomy.

Category notes: Huge gap between the first three--any of which is better than any of the novel nominees--and the last two. I'm going to be somewhat annoyed if Link doesn't win, but I'm going to be extremely annoyed if Willis or Sawyer wins.

BEST NOVELETTE

1. "The King Of Where-I-Go" by Howard Waldrop. Nothing new here--a fairly standard time-travel plot--but Waldrop gives us well-drawn characters and a strong sense of place.

2. "Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle. Many things to like here, but it's just a touch too sentimental for me to give it the top spot.

3. "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi. I have a bit of a bias against SF stories that seem inspired by current headlines, but this is well enough written that I can't really complain.

4. No Award

5. "I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow. I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to swallow the premise, the plot twists are visible a mile off, and there isn't enough texture to make up for these problems. It's by no means terrible, but I just can't quite give it a vote.

6. "TelePresence" by Michael A. Burstein. Clunky, cliched, and useless.

Category notes: Seems like the novella is where the action is this year.

BEST SHORT STORY

1. No Award. I feel like a big ol' curmudgeon, but I just can't get it up for any of these.

2. "The Clockwork Atom Bomb" by Dominic Green. A decent enough thriller, but he throws in a bit of gratuitous callousness at the end that put me off.

3. "Down Memory Lane" by Mike Resnick. Well-written, but doesn't get away with its dubious premise, and reminds one too much of a very famous, much better story.

4. "Singing My Sister Down" by Margo Lanagan. Given all the praise for this, it's very likely that I'm missing something... but if so, I'm still missing it after reading it twice. For one thing, there's no discernible genre content; that probably wouldn't bother me if it were a better story. Unfortunately, it seems both contrived and gloppily sentimental to me. What's the point of a slice-of-life story that doesn't have credible, or at least compellingly strange, humans in it? More than anything, this reminds me of a story I wrote in seventh grade about the last thoughts of a guy falling into a blast furnace. That's not a good thing.

5. "Tk'tk'tk" by David D. Levine. A story of human-alien miscommunication, very reminiscent of "The Moon Moth." Fatally, Levine lacks Vance's deft touch, and the story just plods.

6. "Seventy-Five Years" by Michael A. Burstein. I have a hard time believing this was even published. Now I know how much "multiple Hugo nominee" means on an author's bio.

Category notes: I can't believe these were the best five short stories of the year. I may have to start paying more attention, and nominating.

BEST RELATED BOOK

The only one I've managed to read is Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm, which was kinda meh, so I won't vote in this category unless I somehow manage to round up a reasonable percentage of the other four.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM

I've only seen two of these--Serenity (good, but not stellar) and Goblet o' Fire (not good). I seem to be immune to the charms of Wallace and Gromit, and Batman for that matter, but I should probably see Narnia before I vote. I'm told that the Harry Potter series gets better again after this one, but I'm not sure I care.

I don't know enough about the rest of the categories to cast a meaningful vote, and probably won't by deadline.

CAMOUFLAGE ambushes the pack

2006-06-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

I see that Joe Haldeman's novel CAMOUFLAGE has won the Nebula. I was surprised. I haven't read the other nominees, but CAMOUFLAGE is not what I think of when I think of Nebula work.

I like Haldeman's work, and I liked this book too, really, for what it is. But it does not seem to me to be the pinnacle of the sf writing craft.

It's a near future thriller, pretty well done and certainly entertaining. Two plot threads alternate at first. In one, a creature that has lived in the ocean for millennia, mimicking various species, but cannot remember how it came to be there, comes ashore and stumbles on a human, and by accident and cleverness begins nearly a century of learning about humans and science in an effort to find out if there are others like it. It can change shape given a bit of time, and also size by consuming or dropping mass. As it studies humans, it gains in skill in passing as human, though it needs none of the same resources to be essentially immortal. Just about all of its adventures are fascinating and well thought out. The other thread: a former admiral hires an oceanography company to work on a secret project to recover and study an apparently alien artifact sunk deep in a Pacific trench. This plot is much more routine for the most part - could be straight out of Crichton. Perhaps you will guess that these plots converge eventually.

The writing is good. Haldeman is a fine craftsman. He was shooting for thriller, and he hit the mark. I was always drawn on to see what happened next. But on the way, one finds Haldeman leaving some gaps unsealed, some potholes raced past and not filled. One must accept right off the bat that all the key players will jump in with both feet on a crazy sounding plan. The artifact reveals immediately that it has a perfect mirror surface – does it make sense then to test it at length with ever more powerful lasers? And why let these tremendously powerful lasers bounce up and into the air where they could hit a helicopter full of reporters and other snoops, which we are told are all over the place? No matter, the plot barrels forward. The climactic scene is tense but far too brief and not visually clear enough to be spectacular. The big problem for me, though, is that much of the behavior of two major characters in the latter parts of the book, critical to the plot, simply struck a clanging false note. Impossible to discuss without spoilers, so details are put farther below. Superb writing could force me to believe it, but although there’s plenty of convincing characterization here, I just never did buy the buildup to the climax, nor thus the climax itself. Not a disaster, given the fun along the way, but if we're judging for the ultimate trophy of writerly accomplishment in sf, points must be deducted, I'd think.

So, a Nebula? Not if I were king. Fun? Sure. Maybe Haldeman's sixth or seventh best novel. But I can't really believe that this was the novel most revered by other sf writers in 2005.

SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW

After a series of shocking events, some quite intimately personal, it seems to me that Russ is far too slow to grow cautious, far too reliant on a single piece of evidence that convinces him that everything is normal in the face of lots of evidence that just about anything could be way weird. His world should be rocked to the foundation. A still bigger flaw is that I just never believed that the alien could love the human. Haldeman after all has done an excellent job imparting to us just how alien it is, and it should be too alien to form an emotional attachment, though we are told mimicking humans so long is rubbing off on it – but how? Is he going all Sturgeon on us in the last 20 pages? Don't forget that the alien itself has had a number of big revelations - isn't it too distracted by those to think about how to include a human in its life?

I give up

2006-04-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

It's just been too long, so I'm not going to even try to do actual reviewlets. Just a list, not even in order.

Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach (re-read)
Steven R. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner: Freakonomics*
John Crowley: The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines
Bernard Wolfe: Logan's Gone
Greg Egan: Schild's Ladder
John Scalzi: Old Man's War
Daniel Dennett: Freedom Evolves (re-read)
Colin Wilson: The Outsider
Poul Anderson: Fantasy
Peter S. Beagle: Tamsin
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Flannery O'Connor: Wise Blood
Philip Pullman: Lyra's Oxford
Robert Charles Wilson: Spin
T.J. Bass: The Godwhale
John Varley: Red Thunder
Pat Cadigan: Tea From An Empty Cup

Currently I'm reading a very long multi-volume work, very slowly. Maybe when I finish that I'll something to say. After that I need to work through the Hugo nominees so I can cast informed votes.

Which brings up an interesting ethical question: do I need to read George R.R. Martin's A Feast For Crows? I've read the first two in the series, and decided not to continue--it's not bad, by any means, but there's way too much of it. Now the fourth doorstop is nominated, which means 2300 pages of reading just to make absolutely sure I don't think it's Hugo-worthy. I'm inclined to take a pass.

*Okay, I do have to mention one thing about Freakonomics: I don't think I've ever read another book where the epigram for each chapter was taken from one co-author's puff piece about the other co-author. That's just embarrassing.

Form Follows Failure

2006-01-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

Henry Petroski, The Evolution Of Useful Things.

Did you know that the can was invented decades before the can opener? Neither did I. Petroski sets out to debunk the maxim "form follows function," and succeeds--although it does seem like a bit of a straw man, as I always understood that maxim to be an aesthetic prescription rather than a theory of technological development. In any case, he paints a vivid picture of generations of inventors getting fed up with the limitations of everyday objects, and fixing them--for a while.

Tell The Bees

2006-01-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

Graham Joyce, The Facts Of Life.

This is very different from The Tooth Fairy, and surprisingly, well, normal. In fact, it verges on chick-lit, with that currently popular whiff of magic realism. There's even a handy book-club primer in the back. It's the story of a large extended working-class family ruled by a canny, benevolent matriarch who talks to ghosts, and while I can't think of another novel with exactly those ingredients off the top of my head, it does seem like well-trodden ground.

That said, it's excellent. The evocation of post-war life (and the Blitz itself) are near-perfect (although a premature Sixties vibe crops up in places), the creepy bits are, as one might expect, quite successful, and the characters are a pleasure to visit. While I wouldn't rate it as high as The Tooth Fairy, I'm glad to see that Joyce is versatile.

Bridge To Terabithia

2006-01-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

Katherine Paterson, Bridge To Terabithia.

A children's book with what is in some ways a very standard story: two outsider kids get together and become best friends. But two things make a big difference:

--It's much better written than usual, without the overdramatization that so often accompanies this trope, and with all characters well-drawn, and

--there's a big surprise. At least, it would have been a big surprise, if it weren't trumpeted on book flap, and even the LoC classification. However, knowing it in advance didn't ruin anything.

First-rate kidlit. I'm not at all surprised that it won a Newberry.

Being-Hit-On-The-Head Lessons

2006-01-08T19:59:00.000-08:00

Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags.

When one's first name is of the wrong gender*, and one's last name is a sound effect, perhaps one inevitably grows up a wee bit misanthropic. But Waugh's curse is our blessing. This is some seriously ballsy satire--not only does he expertly walk the fine line between pitilessness and cruelty, but he savaged the war effort (specifically the "Phony War" period, between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of France) in 1942, with Britain still hard beset. It's hard to believe that some official didn't harrumph and hand him a line about the paper shortage.

This seems to be part of an ongoing series--it begins and ends in medias res--but that was no problem for me. While I'm not sure I'd want to read a lot of this at once, lest I lose my faith in human nature, in a one-book dose it's wonderfully wicked. Recommended.

*Turns out his first wife's name was also "Evelyn." Ye gods.

Logrolling in our time

2005-12-16T22:47:00.000-08:00

For the delectation of our hypothetical readership, I've added a bunch of nifty stuff to the links section of the sidebar. Check 'em out!

Inside-the-park home run

2005-12-16T00:08:00.000-08:00

Michael Chabon, Summerland. Given Chabon's reputation as a non-genre writer, I was somewhat surprised to find that this was a straight-down-the-middle YA fantasy, to the point of predictability. However, it's beautifully done, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Interesting that it's always baseball (and not, say, football or basketball) that gets fantasy novels written about it. I guess it's just too much fun to make the designated hitter rule a step toward Ragnarok.

100.do({ "I will blog books right after I read them".postln })

2005-12-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

David McCullough, John Adams. I didn't know much about John Adams except that he was the second president. Turns out he had an interesting diplomatic career during the Revolutionary War, and had a lot of influence on the Constitution (largely due to writing Massachusetts' earlier constitution, the earliest in the world). The contrast between the Founding Fathers and the current kakistocracy is... instructive.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa's Memoirs. As strange and wonderful as the other Moomin books, with the added benefit of introducing children to the concept of the unreliable narrator.

Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity Of Life. Good subject, good writing, but as such books often are, a little long on discussions of specific critters.

Christopher Priest, The Prestige. Speaking of unreliable narrators, this is one of my favorite examples. A feud between two Victorian magicians is outlined in their competing memoirs. The reader can piece the real story together just well enough that it's fun rather than frustrating, and it was an enjoyable re-read even though I remembered most of it. The final denouement is wonderfully creepy. Highly recommended.

Dan Simmons, Ilium and Olympos. As seems to be Simmons' standard pattern, the first book brings the sensawunda like a Nolan Ryan fastball, with great oversize and audacious (reenacting the Trojan war on Mars?) concepts flung at the reader in rapid succession. Unfortunately, the second book has to slow down and resolve the sixty bazillion complicated plot elements, and that's when the little tics that were minor irritations in the first book start to blossom into genuine annoyances. The characters, one realizes, are all obsessed with our period despite living in 4000 A.D. or so, to the point where they make Star Trek jokes and compliment each other on their knowledge of Lost Age slang--and that's just the robots (excuse me, "moravecs," named after Hans Moravec). Simmons always lays on the literary references, but in this case they're more like obeisances--to the Iliad, of course, but also to Shakespeare (who more than one character thinks is the bee's knees despite having encountered him shortly after learning to read as an adult) and Proust. Now I like Shakespeare, and would probably like Proust if I ever got around to reading him, but I definitely don't like long conversations where all the characters kiss their asses cluttering up my space opera, kapeesh? Also, the second book makes the mistake of shifting to the gods' and heroes' view for several chapters, the problem being that, as one might expect, the gods and heroes are both dim and dull.

Hm. That's a lot of complaints, but Olympos isn't bad. It's just that I feel there's a much better book struggling to get out, and that's not a feeling one wants to maintain for 700+ pages. And given that both Hyperion pairs (duologies?) had very much the same pattern--first book a blast, second book a mess--it's even more frustrating. Recommended, but caveat lector.

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near. The Singularity, as you may recall, is the point where technological development turns an exponential corner and everyone learns to croon with an intensity currently unimaginable. Oh wait, that's the Bingularity.

Ahem.

Is Kurzweil right? Beats the heck out of me. He makes a convincing case, and I don't have any clear refutation to offer, but I can't help but feel that the whole scenario is a little too tidy for real life. It's a lovely daydream, regardless.

Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren. Essays about artificial intelligence and robotics. Very enjoyable, but I'm failing to dredge up any blogworthy insights about it.

Roger Zelazny, Jack Of Shadows. I hadn't read this in a very long time, and had forgotten how much of a bastard Jack is. He Learns Better, though, and it's very strange and enjoyable in that early Zelazny way.

Samuel R. Delany, The Jewels Of Aptor. Another new-wavey science fantasy, in this case Delany's first novel (published at 19!). There are some rookie mistakes (e.g. as you know, Bob infodumps), but the writing and atmosphere hold up very well. Recommended.

James Herriot, All Creatures Great And Small. No wonder this was huge--Herriot is a near-perfect anecdotist, and gives an impression of utter frankness. Certainly the disgusting parts of veterinary medicine, and the embarrassments of courtship, are not glossed over. (Don't worry, though, he gets the girl.)

Samuel R. Delany, The Motion Of Light In Water. The chain of association is clear here: Delany + "frank autobiography." Fearless and brilliant--the only problem is that it stops at 1965. More, please!

James Branch Cabell, Some Of Us: An Essay In Epitaphs. Ten (of course) essays on writers of the Twenties. Strictly for hardcore Cabellians, but, well, I am a hardcore Cabellian.

Richard Powers, Plowing The Dark. Powers, as usual, straddles C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures:" you probably don't have to be able to pick up less-than-explicit references to the Douanier Rousseau and VR theory, but it helps. As usual, though, he never seems to just be showing off or post-modernly cool--his books are unashamedly heartfelt. Plowing The Dark combines two threads: an artist coming into a high-tech research lab to give life to their virtual reality system (while battling her own insecurity about her work) and an English teacher kidnapped by terrorists in Lebanon. The stories seem unrelated, but do come together ambiguously by the end, and perhaps more importantly, complement each other thematically, one being about sensory overload, the other about sensory deprivation. Recommended, but read The Gold Bug Variations or Galatea 2.2 first.

Poul Anderson, Flandry Of Terra. I usually like Anderson's fantasy (including borderline stories like "The Queen Of Air And Darkness") better than his science fiction, and this didn't change my mind. It's not bad, though, just a little dated and repetitive, the three stories being much of a muchness in both description and setup, and to some extent in plot.

John McPhee, Coming Into The Country. An excellent description of Alaska and its people, written in the Seventies. Clearly he loves both, but at times it's hard to tell what's scarier, the grizzly bears or the small-town politics.

Winsor McCay, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. My friend Greta Christina gave me this after we'd had a discussion of newspaper comic strips. I had maintained both that the domain was limited enough to talk meaningfully about a best-ever, and that Calvin & Hobbes was it; she stumped for Winsor McCay, and won by default, since I'd never read him. That omission is now rectified, and I'm very glad of it. I don't put it quite on the C&H level for pure enjoyment, but given that the things that slightly bug me (the strange wordiness and erratic punctuation of the dialog; the strict adherence to the formula) are features of its period, while the art and concept are far ahead of it, I have to say that's a worthy contender for the best-ever title from an objective point of view.

Each strip is a dream which gets progressively stranger and ends with the dreamer waking up and regretting eating Welsh rarebit. What's amazing is (1) the brilliant drawing style and (2) the fact that the dreams are entirely credible. I've had a couple of them myself. Highly recommended, and you can check out some examples online.

World Fantasy Con 2005

2005-11-14T08:13:00.000-08:00

I don't know how I shall summarize in just a few paragraphs, but I thought you might want to hear about it a bit.

Usually I miss WFC, with regret, but this year it was in Madison, WI, so I was able to combine it with visiting relatives and friends thereabouts, and rationalize away the expense a bit more reasonably. It was a wonderful time.

GOH was Graham Joyce, who turns out to be very funny, very warm and very sage about what makes books and readers tick. He's a great interview. His tales of his discussions about books and his future with his miner father were right out of Playwriting 101 but he made them very funny. The story of the TOOTH FAIRY movie was again so typical as to be cliche but was riotous when told by Joyce. (After insisting on being able to write the screenplay himself, he found himself conceding right and left - cut the pike and the toe, cut the whole pond, and the scouts, and half the characters - then finally he got a call in middle of the night from a Hollywood idiot who announced in a palsy way "hey, we've figured out what to do, we're going to cut out the tooth fairy.") On the other hand, his comments on the events and symbols in FAIRY were quite interesting. Other tales: because he thought it was how writers write, he quit his job and moved to a remote end of Crete to write his first book. His only neighbors, shepherds, called him Karlos, because Prince Charles was the only Englishman they'd ever heard of before. The story of the phone call from his agent in London to the one phone in the village near his shack is quite amusing if told by the man himself - without the accents and language issues it wouldn't convey. I'm told he has a web site where some of this background appears, and I'll have to check into it.

I had a 21st century experience in that I met a bunch of old friends for the first time. About 8 or 10 of the on-line ghost fiction community were there. I'd met none of them before. It was like meeting a bunch of pen pals. They all turned out to be just as great company as I had expected. Two of them, Barbara and Christopher Roden, who created and run Ash-Tree Press, won the WF Award for Best Anthology (also the International Horror Guild award), and it was fun to help them celebrate.

I don't have the juicy details that one usually must have to blog about a con, but I thought a quick note might be OK. I was certainly reminded of how far apart this particular one is from the run of the mill convention. It's all about books, and perhaps bit of art, and every single person there loves them as much as you do. Perhaps half of them are active in providing us with the elixir we crave. Very hard to return to the daily routine after a week of that.

Big roundup

2005-10-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

Two weeks back from Different Skies, and I still haven't recovered--I threw my neck out and caught a cold. I was hoping to wait until I became compos mentis before doing the catch-up post, but instead you'll have to settle for this.

Roger Zelazny, The Chronicles Of Amber. I hadn't read this from the Seventies, and remembered it as the start of Zelazny's downhill slide, but when I saw it in two volumes for übercheap, I couldn't resist it. It turns out that as five-volume omnipotence fantasies go, it's pretty tight. The beginning is very grabby, and although some of the tension is inevitably lost when Corwin regains his memory, the super-twisty intrigue plot just keeps on coming, with hints from earlier books paying off in later ones. I wouldn't hold it up to Lord Of Light, or even Doorways In The Sand (my favorite "light" Zelazny), but it was well worth spending a day with.

W. S. B. Mathews, A Popular History Of Music. Published in 1891. I was quite intrigued by the Victorian mindset here--Western functional harmony is the goal of all musical striving; modes were correctly abandoned in favor of "true" major and minor; equal temperament is the scientifically correct tuning; etc. Little did Mr. Mathews know what was coming! That said, there was a lot of interesting material here. How accurate it is in light of current scholarship I have no idea.

Harold L. Berger, Science Fiction and the New Dark Age. A Seventies study of dystopian SF. I was surprised to find out how few of the books I'd read.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other Stories. I had never read any of the Professor Challenger stories before; this volume seems to have them all. The Lost World itself is quite enjoyable; Challenger is as funny as he's intended to be, and the adventure aspects hold up well. After that Doyle seems to have lost interest. "The Poison Belt" isn't even a story, exactly; the Earth passes through a section of bad aether, with unlikely effects, while the characters don't do much besides sit in a room. "The Land Of Mist" starts off quite well, but the central mystery is resolved early, after which the story turns into a tedious, didactic tract. The last two stories are short and gimmicky, but OK.

John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel. Fun linguistic anecdotes, supporting the serious point that language is highly fluid.

James P. Blaylock, All The Bells On Earth. Rather similar to The Last Coin and The Paper Grail: an eccentric protagonist and his well-drawn friends confront bizarre, scary magic in contemporary California. Like those books, though, it's very good, and very distinctively Blaylock.

Ursula K. LeGuin, City Of Illusions. For some reason, I had never gotten around to this one. It's minor LeGuin, but that's just fine by me. Books set after the collapse of civilization, with one character setting out to find out what's going on, are a dime a dozen, but this never feels cliched.

Larry Niven, Ringworld. Good clean fun.

John Varley, Steel Beach. The Heinlein influence is more pronounced than ever in this return to the Eight Worlds, a prequel of sorts to The Ophiuchi Hotline (although there's an auctorial warning not to look too closely at continuity). However, unlike Heinlein, Varley's discursiveness doesn't (usually) get annoying. A worthy successor, but read TOH first.

Doris Piserchia, Earthchild. Wow! Very strange, very good. The closest I can come to describing it is Drinking Sapphire Wine crossed with Hothouse... but that's not very close. Suffice it to say that it's a far-future post-human Earth story that defies all expectations. I'll definitely be reading more by her.

Baseball rules redux

2005-09-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

Last night's Red Sox - Blue Jays game featured a play that brought two little-used rules into play. I did not even know that one of them exists. The outcome of the game hinged on what happened, vs. what could have happened.

Down 2, the Sox had Gabe Kapler at first with Tony Graffanino at bat and two out. Graffanino hit a deep fly, and Kapler took off on contact. After he touched second, he realized the ball was out for a homer, and he slowed down, and somehow his achilles tendon snapped in the process. He was off base and unable to move at all, and here comes Graffanino towards second.

Luckily Graffanino was aware of events and stopped at second, thus avoiding passing the trapped Kapler on the basepaths and eliminating the tying run. There he waited to find out what the hell to do, which I would have wondered also.

What I did not know is that there is a rule specifically covering a runner who injures himself, dies, retires, is carried off by giant eagles or what have you, such that he cannot continue around the bases on a homer. His team is allowed to pinch run for him in the middle of the play, and that's what happened. Kapler was carried off to the discard pile, someone touched third and home in his place, and the Sox went on to win. I wonder when the last time this rule came into play was.

Dhalgren and New Orleans

2005-09-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a very good column comparing the two:

http://www.reason.com/hod/bb091305.shtml

New Blumlein

2005-09-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

Somewhat to my surprise, there's a new Michael Blumlein novel out:

http://locusmag.com/2005/Issues/09NewAndNotable.html

Lois McMaster Bujold

2005-09-07T08:31:00.000-07:00

I decided I had to read a Lois McMaster Bujold novel, to see what all the fuss is about. She's won several Hugos for novels in the Vorkosigan series, and her panels at cons are packed with fawning fans. I read THE WARRIOR'S APPRENTICE, and it's space opera in the romantic tradition all the way. Well rendered, no sloppiness even though the plot races headlong and some could be got away with. The characters are memorable in a sort of Errol Flynny way, including many of the lesser ones. Miles Vorkosigan, the son of a general in a militaristic society, handicapped since birth and thus unable to take his intended place in the military academy, uses cleverness and bold bluffing to stumble through a series of hairy escapades and wind up the admiral of a hodgepodge but intensely loyal mercenary force - a crime punishable by death back home. And his father's political enemies are using this to try to bring down their old adversary for good. Oh, and he has to sacrifice his beloved's hand (not literally, this isn't Orson Scott Card) for honor. Speaking of maiming, even though it's here alongside plenty of death, torture and blaster shootouts, plus emotional suffering, the tone somehow seems to remain light and unthreatening. OK but nothing to run out and grab.

Only The Lonely

2005-08-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets. A very enjoyable romp through the history, current state, and prospects of astrobiology, completely with highly informal style (there's even a smiley... I'm not sure how I feel about that), humor that's actually funny (read the footnotes!), refreshing humility (not so hard, I guess, when, as he points out, what we actually know about extraterrestrial life can be expressed in one word: nothing), and a couple of entertainingly iconoclastic theories (he thinks that Venus and Io are more likely to have life than Mars, although he admits that they're all long shots). I'll be checking out his previous book, Venus Revealed.

Like, Radical, Dude

2005-08-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution. A nice little book about the Singularity. He divides the current thinking into three strands, each with its own spokesmen: the Heaven scenario (Ray Kurzweil), the Hell scenario (Bill Joy, Francis Fukuyama), and the Prevail scenario (Jaron Lanier). While he's overtly neutral, he seems to be a bit inclined to the last of these, as am I. Given the number of strands converging on superhumanity (Garreau calls them GRIN technologies, for genetic, robotic, information, and nano technologies) it seems likely, for better or worse, that huge changes are afoot, and fairly soon. But both the Heaven and Hell scenarios seem overhyped to me. I'm not convinced that we really have any good idea how to create sentient computers, even when we have sufficiently powerful hardware; likewise, no one really knows how to make universal nano-assemblers, or whether it's even possible. History would seem to indicate that muddling through is more likely than transcendence or destruction.

Initial-Guy Number One

2005-08-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

M.R. James, A Warning To The Curious And Other Stories. Very nice, if a bit samey. At first I wasn't sure I liked his intrusive authorial presence--constantly saying, "I'll just skip this bit"--but once I started thinking of it as oral storytelling, it made sense. The similarity of the stories also makes more sense if you think of them as being doled out one at a time at long intervals.

The plots are rather slight--sometimes barely seeming to make a story at all--but that leaves all the more room for atmosphere and character, which he handles very well. Some of the minor characters could come right out of Dickens.

He also has a wicked sense of humor, which I didn't expect (especially in "Wailing Well").

I'm not sure I'm ready to count myself a full-blown devotee of old-school ghost stories, but this is good stuff.

A cool Link

2005-08-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

I have not been able to stop chuckling over this bit in Kelly Link's story "Magic for Beginners" in the September 2005 issue of F&SF: a teenager wears a t-shirt that says "I'm so goth I shit tiny vampires".

If she were my friend, I would have to have a shirt made that said: "Yeah, well I'm so goth that tiny vampires shit me."

It's a nice little story, about a group of teens whose life revolves around a TV show, their parents' quirks, and their own quest for the secret key to life. The TV show appears unannounced on unpredictable channels and times, and no one will admit to producing it or acting in it, so in the teen mind it takes on a certain reality, though it is wildly fantastic. Towards the end, Link obliquely asks the reader to consider for a moment - almost like a commercial break in the story - how much of life we watch, and occasionally dress up like the characters, but do not act as though it is all real. At least, that's what I heard her ask. The tale is told in a focused third-person voice that convincingly mimics a teen's thoughts and yet conveys a knowing nod to the reader as well. Perhaps not her most socks-off-knocking story, but well done.

What is art to a hermit?

2005-08-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Recently I read of a near-hermit who spent as much of his time as he could manage shut away in his home reading classic literature. What I wonder is how someone who does not value nor have much experience with personal relationships could enjoy classic literature so deeply.

Does literature have a payoff for the reader if they do not care at all about human nature and its joys, horrors and conundrums? Is there a raw value to the writer's art and craft, the use of words, the structure of the thing that can be admired regardless of subject? I suppose there must be, but I think that I would not find it enough on its own. Sure, I can read an adventure story and enjoy it even if there's no apparent difference between the heroes and the monkey men, and I love great style for its own sake, occasionally, and I can find interest in Oulipian exercises, but we're talking classics here. How does one appreciate Jane Austen or F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name the merest sample, without caring about human interaction?

Talking Animals

2005-08-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

Time flies when you're frantically preparing for a gig. Also, I've been beta-reading a friend's unpublished novel, which is not to be blogged. But I have snuck in a few books in the last month and two days:

Lloyd Alexander: Time Cat

I suppose that if I had thought about it, I would have guessed that Alexander had written stuff besides the Prydain books. But I never thought about it until I saw this at my neighbor's yard sale. A boy and his cat wander in time, sometimes to places you might expect (Leonardo's childhood), sometimes to less-familiar territory (early Spanish Peru, heavily sanitized). Pleasant enough, but comes off as more of a travelogue than a story; both the boy and the cat remain observers more than participants.

John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman

I read this years ago, and in my recent Fowles excitement decided to revisit it. I'm impressed with how he manages to get away with doing everything a writer isn't supposed to do--whole scenes told not shown, big infodumps, authorial intrusions. In the hands of any writer less deft it would have been lumpy pudding; it's as much an essay on the Victorian age as it is a novel, but never fails to fascinate. I haven't seen the film, but would be very surprised if they managed to capture anything of the book's flavor.

David Nemec: The Rules of Baseball

A breezy anecdotal look at the history of baseball's rules. Interesting, but I often wanted more detail. Also, you get to call a home run a "circuit clout" once per book, tops.

Richard Adams: Watership Down

Some days you just need to grab a beer and a perfect (and perfectly comforting) book and head for the back yard. Adams may be a one-shot author (although that may be selling Shardik a bit short), but what a shot.

Argh

2005-07-01T22:29:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do these properly before leaving for the weekend, but it ain't gonna happen. So I'll just list them, with links to other people's discussions:

Albert Goldbarth, Great Topics Of The World

Colin Bruce, Schrödinger's Rabbits (the whole National Academy of Sciences catalog is now available for free online!)

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Abarat - not a pop group's pet

2005-06-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

A small town teenaged girl runs off into the prairie to get a break from her troubles, and finds some unexpected structures in the middle of nowhere that resemble a dilapidated wooden lighthouse and pier. When she climbs the lighthouse she ends up summoning in the sea from another world, and the adventure is on in a magical oceanic realm where each island is permanently set at one particular hour of the day. The Lord of Midnight is plotting, and our plucky lass will figure in somehow.

Clive Barker is a very visual writer, and this novel, aimed unabashedly at younger readers, is chockablock with marvels, centered on uniquely imaginative and strange creatures and settings. It does not possess the gravitas, nor quite the charm, of the best young-adult fantasies, and the while the tight spots our heroine gets into are tense and interesting, sometimes the way out feels more dxm than clever. Nevertheless there is fun in the parade of imagery, and it is a quick read. The prologue is sententious and portentous and I almost stopped there, but I’m glad I didn’t.

Speaking of Barker’s visual bent, he has done countless paintings which illustrate the hardback. There is one every three pages or so. Some are evocative; overall I’d say they are not bad but do not sweep me away. They do not resemble how I imagined things, in most cases. This raises the question of the merits, on balance, of illustrations in a book. Quite a few others that I have discussed this with prefer not to have illos, because they often clash with their own imaginations, and they prefer to let their minds run free. Others find very few illos to please them, and that they detract from the reading experience by their ugliness or banality. I too find that many either add little or clash with my own images, but I can live with it; they are very seldom a minus for me. Occasionally they are a big plus. Where do you stand?

I presume that Barker also designed the font for the title, which is pretty cool. Reads same upside down as right-side up.

The Matter Of Britain

2005-06-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave/The Hollow Hills/The Last Enchantment/The Wicked Day.

As far as I know, this was the first "realistic" historical-fiction treatment of the Arthur legend, and as far as I know, it's still the best (although I should probably read The Mists Of Avalon before coming to a firm conclusion). Making Merlin the first-person narrator is an ingenious device, and allows Stewart to begin her story completely outside the legend, with Merlin's childhood. Not only does she handle this brilliantly, but it allows her to develop a highly credible post-Roman Britain (complete with beautiful landscape descriptions) against which the events of the legend can be set (and to some extent subverted; although she's no tiresome rationalizer, the story is of a believable seed for the legends rather than a strict recounting thereof).

The Crystal Cave ends where the legend begins, with Uther sneaking into Tintagel to beget Arthur. The Hollow Hills then takes the place of The Sword in the Stone, albeit with Merlin still the focus rather than Arthur; The Last Enchantment takes us to Merlin's final destiny. The Wicked Day then completes the tragedy; it must, perforce, do without Merlin's narration. She substitutes a third-person omniscient viewpoint, which is rather less effective. Also, for some reason, the Grail legend is never dealt with, despite having been set up in TLE. It may be that she wrote TWD more out of obligation than inspiration.

I first read The Crystal Cave when I was 10 or so; I'm pleased to report that I still love it. The next two books have slightly more political intrigue and slightly less wonder, but are still first-rate. The Wicked Day is worthwhile, but not strictly necessary.

Changing Planes

2005-06-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

Ursula K. LeGuin, Changing Planes. A catalog of imaginary places, somewhat in the vein of Calvino's Invisible Cities, but (as you might expect from LeGuin) less archly postmodern and more gently fabulous (in the literal sense). The central conceit is basically a bad pun, but gives her a chance to write wittily about airport waiting rooms. The book is quite slight overall, but LeGuin's deft touch makes it thoroughly enjoyable, even when her fables have a touch of the obvious about them. I certainly prefer this to, say, The Telling.

The Collector

2005-06-13T21:26:00.000-07:00

Let it be noted for archival purposes that I actually finished reading the book or so ago...

John Fowles, The Collector. Like every other Fowles book I've read, this is both excellent and quite different from all the others. Apparently this made quite a splash in 1963, and I can see why--I don't think first-person accounts by creepy criminals were anywhere near as common then, and I rather doubt it's been done better since. Our protagonist is a butterfly collector who, having won the football pools, decides to move up to a new level of obsession by kidnapping art student Miranda. He doesn't want to rape or kill her--he just wants have her as his "guest."

It would be telling to reveal what happens, but suffice it to say that (1) the tension is immense; (2) the characters are extremely vivid; (3) the book takes a startling turn, not of events but in the manner of telling, about halfway through; and (4) the ending is exactly right.

I highly recommend it, but try not to read up about it first. This is one where the less you know going in, the better. It's hard to believe that it was his first novel.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Digs It

2005-05-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

Speaking if space opera,

We bought a set of DVDs of one of the seasons of the original Star Trek. Kind of fun to watch, though of course all of the plot holes gape wider than ever before for us, the acting is of its era, and sure enough you can see the puppet strings, and etc. etc. it's not up to today's standards but one forgives, to a point.

What is most fun is watching Tory get turned on to it. Her critical senses are nascent, but she is really interested in the stories, asks a lot of questions about the social issues that sometimes got explored a bit, and mainlines the sensawonder. To my astonishment she predicted the climax of one episode, despite it's hinging on the fairly adult concept of a starship captain sacrificing himself to atone for his earlier fatal misjudgments. This sort of personal crisis does not occur on Doctor Doolittle or The Saddle Club. She's 11, older than I when I caught the Trek bug but not old enough to be cynical about it. I feel like we are initiating her into the secret mysteries. She went with us to Balticon this weekend and the the indoctrination may be too far along now to reverse.

I am surprised by how much I like the soundtracks (-treks?). Although each episode has its own score, they also pretty much had five or six tracks that they pulled out at predictable moments. After a few episodes, you can start humming the right one for the moment even before the music actually kicks in. But it's good stuff. A tad on the melodramatic side, sure, like the show - in fact I submit that if it weren't, it would be lost in the background rather than feeding the moods the show wants to evoke. It's not super-sophisticated or anything, but I find it very effective. No boring washes or low pulses. Instead, unexpected but fitting melodies and cascades of notes. The tense tracks are indeed quite tense. The pleasant social gathering track evokes that mood quite nicely.

I notice that there were several composers involved: Sol Kaplan, Alexander Courage, Gerald Fried. I don't know who did what, but I bet it can be found on the web somewhere. Never heard of any of them myself, but then I'm not a soundtrack enthusiast generally.

I have no idea what the world thinks of this. Perhaps the music is considered as quaint as the show. But I do like it.

Fafhrd and Fritz

2005-05-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

The Second Book Of Fritz Leiber. A bit of an outtakes collection, but well worth it for the essay "Fafhrd And Me", which outlines the history of Leiber's collaboration with Harry Fisher, and throws in all kinds of entertaining stories along the way. There's also a very interesting essay on tides (did you know that there are places on Earth with no tides at all, and some where there's only one tide a day? I sure didn't), and a couple of decent stories (but nowhere near his best).

TFDSFU NFTTBHFT

2005-05-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

Butler & Keeney, Secret Messages. Feather-light, anecdotal history of secret messages (with an emphasis on those that are "hidden in plain sight", like the cues given by members of mentalist acts to each other). Pleasant reading, not much to remark on, except the cover (a clear orange dust jacket which, when removed, reveals a complex of yellow text, including the words "BUY ME").

Brother, Can You Paradigm?

2005-05-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Interesting to finally read this after years of hearing about it. A lot of his detractors seem to be responding to a caricature of his position; there's no discussion here of old fogeys cruelly sabotaging the career of young upstarts, for example. But while he claims not to be a relativist, he admits at one point that he doesn't believe any scientific theories are closer to truth than any others. Here I have to go with his rival Popper. Falsification may not be as tidy as Popper makes it seem, but it nevertheless gives us genuine knowledge.

Too Much Soda

2005-05-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

Charles Stross, Singularity Sky. A disappointment. I enjoyed Toast, his short story collection (thanks, Todd!), and since it felt like a grab bag, I was hoping that his novels would be even better. This one, at least, is not. Stross's good-natured humor is spread quite thin as, along with the smart, sexy cyber-libertarian protagonists, we follow a bunch of straw-man technophobes to their long-foreseen demise. And, aside from some fun surrealistic interludes, that's pretty much it. It's perfectly readable, just kind of meh. John Clute nails it.

Given that I thought Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space flat-out sucked (characters who change arbitrarily to drive the plot, insane amounts of padding), and that Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division was bogged down with tedious and cliched political didactica, I'm only batting .250 on the much bally-hooed Scottish hard-SF renaissance; hence my title for this post. That hit, though, is Iain Add-M-To-Taste Banks, which I would score as a home run.

I believe it's "DUN-suh-nee"

2005-05-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Lord Dunsany, Time And The Gods. This book in the Fantasy Masterworks series corrals six volumes of rather short stories into one fairly massive tome. The result takes a while to work through, but is extremely impressive, and makes a strong case for Dunsany's being the first modern fantasy writer. Compared to Dunsany, Macdonald and Morris seem hopelessly Victorian, much less deft, and much less directly influential. I can see bits of Macdonald in C.S. Lewis, and bits of Morris in Eddison, but I can see bits (and often more than bits) of Dunsany in Cabell, Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Pratt, John Collier, Leiber, and all the descendants of the above. Even Tolkien shows Dunsany's influence, although he eschewed his irony.

Taken all together, the stories do blur a bit; there are many retellings of Ozymandias, many variations on the perversity of Fate, Chance, and the gods, many scoundrels who get just a bit too greedy. But there are also straight heroic tales, or nearly so; many of the often-reprinted stories like "The Sword Of Welleran" and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth" fall into this category.

And man, he can write. Between him and Max Beerbohm, I'm beginning to think that Thomas M. Disch may be right when he claims that the Edwardian period was the high-water mark for English prose. Dunsany manages effortlessly the exotic-but-clear quality that Morris tries much too hard for, and never loses his fresh, slightly cheeky quality.

"The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man." You betcha.

De-Animator

2005-05-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun time waster. Note: each variety will mutilate you in its own distinctive style.

http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu/~lee/deanimator.html

Planet themes

2005-05-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

Following up on a previous thread about solar system travelogue sf, I am copying this in from the Locus site:

Bova, Ben : Mercury(Tor 0-765-30412-0, $24.95, 319pp, hardcover, May 2005, jacket art John Harris) First US edition (UK: Hodder & Stoughton, February 2005)
Latest on Bova's ongoing series about human exploration of the solar system (following novels about Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn), concerning an ambitious scheme to build a staging area on Mercury for lauching ships into deep space, with a love triangle and a revenge plot adding human interest. • The new work page on Bova's site quotes a passage from the book. • Amazon has reviews from PW and from Booklist's Roland Green, who concludes "this superior entry in one of the classic hard-sf sagas going is pretty much a guaranteed crowd-pleaser."

I've never read much Bova, and had not realized he was doing this. One could count on it at least being technically accurate, I would think.

A+

2005-05-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

I was trying to remember something from Lore Sjoberg's Book Of Ratings, so I pulled it off the shelf, and... you can guess the rest. I won't review it, because you can go to the web site and get the full experience. Don't read it at work unless (1) you don't need to get anything done and (2) guffaws coming out of your office are acceptable to your boss and co-workers.

Earthlight Sonata

2005-05-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

I'm coming to the conclusion that the Golden Age writer I feel the most affection for is Arthur C. Clarke. Asimov had the galaxy-spanning vision, but his prose was leaden, his dialog was risible, and he never lost his fundamentally adolescent sensibility. Heinlein started out way ahead--in the early Forties, he had the best ideas and the best chops in SF by a large margin--but developed a fatal addiction to bluster. Van Vogt is, well, Van Vogt. A pretty good thing to be, but would you let him marry your sister?

Clarke wouldn't want to marry your sister, of course, and I wonder if that gave him a slight leg up. Arguably, the worst feature of SF of that period is the way it deals with women--and Clarke simply didn't do it. In fact, all his characters and relationships are mere sketches, but they're good sketches, especially his depiction of scientists at work. The old cliche about SF resembling a Chinese landscape painting, with tiny humans in the foreground for scale, was truest of Clarke, and he made it work. His descriptive prose is genuinely tasty, and his dialog, while never ambitious, is always credible.

Earthlight is a case in point. Although it contains a rare (for Clarke) battle sequence, most of the book tells the story of an accountant drafted as a spy trying to find an information leak at the Lunar Observatory. Not once does he have a gun pulled on him, or engage in any action sequence. Instead, he's the viewpoint for a you-are-there tour of the lunar colony on the brink of war. That should be dull, but it isn't at all; Clarke doesn't need galaxy-spanning action to give you sensawunda. He can do it with a short trip across the Lunar surface, by caterpillar or monorail.

And yes, there's a scene where guys cross between spaceships with no suits. I'm not sure why he was so obsessed with that.

It's not Against the Fall of Night or Childhood's End. But I can now state with confidence that minor Clarke is just fine with me.

Catching Up

2005-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm about 175 pages into Mick Farren's Darklost, the second in a series of vampire novels he's written. I first became aware of Mick Farren back in the early '80s; he used to have a column in Trouser Press magazine, which I remember as being very amusing--and so articulate for a punk rocker! He later published a number of gritty science fiction novels which might loosely be considered "cyberpunk", and continues to record and perform music with a group called The Deviants (I saw them perform at Terrastock West 6 or 7 years ago--beat poetry with loud guitars, more or less).

There's a good deal more humor and satire in his vampire world than in the more popular novels of Anne Rice (whom he parodies as "Charlotte Mayze") and her ilk. These are no suffering Romantic heroes; Farren's nosferatu are closer kin to the Illuminati-esque bloodsuckers of Wesley Snipes' Blade films than to the paradoxically bloodless whiners popularized by Rice, Hamilton, Yarbro, et al.

In short, I'm enjoying it even though there are flaws : the first 50 or so pages read as though they were written by Colonel Exposition, and sometimes Farren's understanding of historical events is defective, but what the hell--it's entertaining. Characters like Brandon Wales, based on Marlon Brando (the surname seems a reference to Brando's expanding waistline) and Marcus De Reske (i.e. Robert de Grimston, of the Process Church of the Final Judgment) just add to the wicked fun.

It certainly beats the hell out of Philip Jose Farmer's Blown, which I read just previous. I had high hopes for this one; The Image of the Beast was a decent enough beginning to what might become an emetic classic of perversity and grossness, but alas, it just doesn't deliver. Farmer seems to have gone through a period of near-psychosis and produced a number of extremely strange books, among them his Tarzan pastiche (which answers the unasked question : what if William S., and not Edgar Rice, Burroughs had been the author of the Tarzan books?). He just doesn't seem to have been as inspired here. Ah well; it was short, anyway.

Messer Marco Polo (Donn Byrne)

2005-05-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

A re-read, although I barely remembered anything about it. And now I know why--there's not a lot to remember. Very little actually happens in this short book--you could summarize the plot in a paragraph without omitting anything important--and there isn't much exploration of character or setting, either.

What there is a lot of is, for lack of a better word, blarney. This is clearly intentional--the story is told orally by an Irishman, and for once a book using that conceit actually seems like a transcription. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. He doesn't shy away from the level of repetition involved in oral storytelling, so I got a bit tired of hearing the characters address each other by name practically every sentence.

More seriously, the characters are quite passive--what little happens, happens to them, rather than happening as a result of their actions. This gives it a fatalistic quality, but unfortunately a rather insubstantial one, and one not really appropriate to an adventure story.

But some of the blarney is quite pleasant, and it's by no means a total loss. I liked it about as much as The Crock Of Gold, so calibrate accordingly.

Capturing Sound (Mark Katz)

2005-05-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Subtitle: "How Technology Has Changed Music." Starts with a certain master-of-the-obvious quality--he describes the idea that recording has "profoundly transformed modern musical life" as "counterintuitive", whereas I would describe it as "no shit, Sherlock"--but when he gets into specifics, things get interesting. We learn, for example, that recording gave rise to modern violin vibrato, and that the instrumentation and style of early jazz changed quite a bit to adapt to acoustic recording technology. There's a very interesting chapter on Grammaphonmusik, an early attempt to use recording in a non-literal way (with a long-lost example by Paul Hindemith on the accompanying CD). Oddly, Katz skips over the development of the modern recording studio entirely, and jumps straight from the 1930s to DJ battles, sampling and MP3s. His description of DJ battles is interesting, and the recording of a championship routine found on the CD is freaking amazing (especially when he breaks down exactly what's going on).

So, there's not much of a coherent thesis, but there's plenty to chew on.

The Tooth Fairy (Graham Joyce)

2005-05-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, this is good.

I love the way that humor and horror are thoroughly mixed, with only the occasional pure moment of either to serve as highlight or shadow.

I love the way that haunting is portrayed as a relationship as complex and ambiguous as any other.

I love the relentless avoidance of cliches, especially at the ending.

I love the characters, setting, and prose.

In short: holy crap, this is good--an instant addition to my must-read list. Thanks, Todd! What's the best of his books to get next?

Sweet Dreams

2005-04-25T22:15:00.000-07:00

Bought Sweet Dreams by Daniel Dennett on impulse at the checkout counter, in hardback yet. I'm a big Dennett fan, but this one isn't really worth bothering with--it's a collection of papers and talks, quite short and with no attempt made to edit out redundancies. There are whole paragraphs that appear near-verbatim in more than one chapter.

The book is meant as an update of Consciousness Explained, but it's basically just a few more go-rounds about qualia. Not Necessary.

Well, I De-clare

2005-04-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

Declare by Tim Powers is neither his best nor his worst. There seem to be several people doing spy/occult crossover these days (I know Charles Stross has something of the sort going), probably more than the conceit can handle.

I was very impressed by the beginning section (set in Paris during WWII), but after that it declines somewhat. The book cuts back and forth between 1963 and various times before that, which would be fine except that most of the earlier events are also explicitly recalled by the protagonist in 1963, so that you end up reading about everything twice (or even more), which gets old after a while. Worse, in a book that is almost entirely told from the protagonist's limited viewpoint (and depends on that for some key effects), he throws in a couple of chapters told from others', just to get some relatively unimportant information across. This seems lazy and sloppy, and particularly weird when Kim Philby (a non-fictional character) is given the mike.

And after a while, one begins to wonder whether secret agents really drink that much--it doesn't seem very wise.

On the other hand, real secret agents presumably don't have to face the supernatural on a regular basis. Powers, as usual, is deft at portraying magic in a credible way, although he doesn't do it quite as well here as in, say, Last Call (which I highly recommend). He explains things that don't really need explaining, possibly because the book is aimed at the mass market.

Despite all that, I have to say that I was turning pages like billy-o. Even middling Powers ain't bad.

One more gripe--this book has a blurb on the spine ("Dazzling. --Dean Koontz"). Criminy dutch.

How does presentation affect flavor?

2005-04-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

I posted this at alt.books.ghost-fiction in March, and I wonder what you think about the subject:

"You raise an interesting issue here: how does the format in which we read a work influence our reaction to it? Although I have not done scientific side-by-side study of this (in fact I can't because a second reading is different from a first anyhow), I think it matters a lot in my reading. I do react to the arrangement of stories within a book, or as a book, as John is talking about, but also these:

I find myself trying to read faster from an imposingly large book than from a smaller one, perhaps because I feel as though I'm not making much progress vs. the pages still to be read.
I can't hold a large book easily in bed, which is where I do 75% of my reading, so all of these books are read in a different environment than most others, and in some way this affects my concentration, mood, something. It seems to matter whether it is bright or dark outside, whether it is raining, whether I'm comfortable or not (say on a bus or subway).

In some way that is hard to describe, I get a different "feel" from stories in books with particularly small or large page margins, books that are heavy and substantial, books with very small or large fonts, books with lots of small illustrations or flourishes that are there just for visual appeal of the page, books with musty odors or new-glue smells. I would even say that the cover art I see every time I pick up the book affects my reading instrument in some small but real way.

None of these factors overwhelm the effect of the work itself, but they all do somehow affect precisely how much I enjoy it or get out of it, even how I interpret it.

Am I crazy? Am I just a poor reader? Is that laughter I'm hearing? Have I gone way off the po-mo deep end?

Assuming there's some such set of effects, how does one be sure that their reaction to a story is fair and appropriate?

- Todd T. "

Montaigne and Marquez

2005-04-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

Reading Paul Graham's tasty and provocative essays reminded me that I'd been meaning to re-read the man himself, Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the form and the most startlingly modern writer of the Renaissance. I don't have anything to say that isn't said better here.

On the plane back from NAB, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the story of a murder that nobody, including the killers, wants to happen. Unfortunately, the town is fatally passive, and fingers don't get lifted. The depiction of the same sort of passivity got to be a bit much in One Hundred Years Of Solitude, but in this much shorter work is quite effective. Possibly it's a metaphor for Colombian life in general.

Fox in Stockings

2005-04-16T06:15:00.000-07:00

Finished LADY INTO FOX this morning. I have to agree with Tim that it is just right. It's a fine book. I enjoyed the writing, and sympathized (might say remembered) the twists back and forth between extremes in the protagonist's emotions as he struggles to deal. If there is any flaw in the book at all, I think it is that the final sentence only rings true in the metaphorical sense, and not as part of the story on its face. I can't quite believe that this guy, who has been through what he's been through and become what he is, would experience that fate, but I can certainly buy into it in the sense of how people eventually come out of such passages in real life. Exceedingly minor cavil. (Is "minor cavil" redundant?) Great story, thanks for the gift, Tim.

I found it amusing that there is a blurb on the back that I dare say pants for more, from Virginia Woolf. Forget it, Ginnie, ladies turn into foxes, but it's MAN INTO WOLF, and TEENAGER INTO WOLF, etc.

I looked at the list of other McSweeney's/Collins books advertised in the back, and reminded that I have heard good things about ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE. Apparently truly funny. Any exposure to that one?

Choice Joyce

2005-04-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

No, not James.

I am a fan of Graham Joyce, increasingly so with each book I read. The last one I read was DARK SISTER. Lisa read it and did not care for it, so I had to find out why and whether I agreed. Frankly, I do not. With no aspersion meant towards her at all, I think the book is more complex than most that she likes.

It's about witches, modern and otherwise. There is no easy way to synopsize it without spoiling just about every development. I think the theme is the difficulty older people have in passing on their wisdom to the young, and in understanding when that wisdom must bend to the times. I say 'I think' because I can see other readings, and Joyce does not bludgeon us with Message at all. The emotions evoked by the last quarter of the book are complex, and the theme is underlined by symbology that some may not interpret as I did. I am a parent, and a person who harbors serious regrets about not learning more from people who are now gone. Whether this book would hit people who do not share those traits as hard as it did me, I couldn't say.
Although I have never participated in anything witchy and don't know what I think about whether wicca has anything going for it, I did feel that if it works, this must be how it feels to work it. I felt verisimilitude in the way the spells and senses of the witches were portrayed.

While I found the communications difficulties of the protagonist couple quite believable, there were a few clumsy moments right at the start that were probably meant to support that character situation but rang false. But this is my only cavil. It's not THE TOOTH FAIRY, which is still my favorite Joyce and is I feel a tour de force, but it's good stuff.

Fools Errant

2005-04-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm reading LADY INTO FOX by David Garnett - despite its being only 80 pages long, I keep going to bed at midnight and falling asleep within seconds, so I am not done reading it after three nights, through no fault of the book. It is very slow to develop incident for a novella. That can be good or not so good; I'll report back.

The book I finished most recently is Matt Hughes's Vance pastiche FOOLS ERRANT, the first of a trilogy or maybe more. Here are my notes for it:

An on-target Vance pastiche. Filidor is an aimless hedonist but also nephew to the Archon, and thus in line to become leader of all. His uncle’s agent takes him on a series of adventures all about the land, through which he learns much, including
...SPOILER snipped here - the text is down below...
(I guessed this early in the book, but no harm done). The adventures are Vancian and mostly quite enjoyable. Filidor at the start is very much Cugel, arrogant and imperceptive and impulsive. By the end he has grown. Fun and although not quite there with Vance and Shea, very close and in many ways spot on.

DOWN TO THE SPOILER

AND DOWN

AND DOWN

SPOILER: that the agent is the uncle/Archon

Krank & Crankier

2005-04-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

Finished Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos on Sunday. Greene wants to have a breezy style, but doesn't quite pull it off--he uses the Simpsons in most of his examples for no very good reason, and is forever putting really important words in italics, sometimes with exclamation points! That said, there's a lot of good info here, and I feel much more up-to-date on my physics now. Count on me dropping mention of the "Higgs boson" into casual conversation.

Stayed home sick as the proverbial hound yesterday, and read Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett and State Of The Art by Iain M. Banks in between naps. Pratchett, like Wodehouse, is always the same, but always delivers the yuks. Most of non-Culture stories in the Banks collection are fairly slight, but by no means unpleasant, and while I don't think the Culture stories are quite up to the level of his novels--Banks is nothing if not a wide-canvas man--they're certainly worthwhile addenda. Both deal with Culture citizens who have dropped out to live with barbarians (i.e. us), something we don't really see in the novels.

Aha!

2005-04-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

Invitation via AAR went through, and so here I am.

Of course, I have nothing to say, but here I am.

Collapse (Jared Diamond)

2005-04-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

Stone blocks spin
Earth turns
It whirls, it
Hurls these men
Aside
They know no longer
Which way's which
Nor where to turn.

Supports collapse
All things once bound
Are isolate
All things once still
Are agitate
Supports give way
The world turns upside down.

--"Collapse" (Art Bears)

All About Venus

2005-04-02T20:32:00.000-08:00

Aldiss anthology with scientific and pre-scientific speculations about Venus; excerpts from Stapledon, Burroughs, and Lewis; and stories by Anderson and Clarke. OK, but nothing special--you'd think there'd be more for Aldiss to play with, as he did so well with Space Opera and Galactic Empires, but apparently Venus just isn't as popular a setting as Mars.

An entry without parentheses! I knew I could do it.

House Of Leaves

2005-03-31T20:47:00.000-08:00

I've been busy with music and such, so it took me quite a while to read Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves (a Christmas present from Todd). It's famous as a typographical tour de force, with some justice. Interestingly, it's done almost entirely in the most generic (and ugly) possible fonts--Times for the main text (a critical analysis of a clearly fictional film) and Courier for the fictional executor's footnotes (which tell a parallel story to that of the film). I assume that Times was chosen to reflect the (explicitly stated) resemblance of the main text to a freshman paper (and Courier, of course, recalls a typewriter), but I found myself wondering if the real reason was that people would recognize the names, which are also mentioned explicitly.

So, um, oh yeah... the book. It's a bit first-novelish in places--there are some mawkish and/or cliched descriptions, and I found it hard to believe that the footnoter would have the vocabulary he did and still type "alot" and "should of"--but the horror stor(ies) are gripping, and the typographical tricks and metafictional aspects don't feel tacked on. Not quite Pale Fire, but very enjoyable. And my lunch waitress caught a look at the inside and said "What the heck is that?"

Plenty of opinions and speculations about the book at houseofleaves.com.

Titan, Wizard, Demon

2005-03-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

I finished Carmen Dog on Friday. I still think Emshwiller is better at stories than novels, but that's praising with faint damns, since her stories are damn near perfect (and Small Beer Press, if you're listening, I hope a reprint of The Start of the End of It All will come soon). CD has a few perspective changes I found jarring, but other than that it's funny, deft, assuredly absurd, and absurdly assured. Highly recommended.

I had a very busy week, and when I came home Friday night I was fried to a crisp. Time for the three esses--space opera, space music, and scotch. Titan is still a highly enjoyable adventure, and the other two aren't as far below it as I remembered (especially Demon; here I may be influenced by Matt Austern's interpretation that it reflects Varley's tribulations with Hollywood). Satire isn't really Varley's forte, but I remembered Demon as being nearly unreadable, and that's not the case at all.

And I liked this bit of snark from the first few pages of Titan:

Few people gave a damn about the space program. They felt the money could be better spent on Earth, on Luna, and at the L5 colonies. Why pour money down the rat-hole of exploration when there was so much benefit to be derived from things that were established on a businesslike basis, like Earth-orbital manufacturing?

The space music was Grow by the Joint Intelligence Committee and One and Two by Touchxtone, all quite tasty and by folks I met at Different Skies 2004. The scotch was a 17-year-old Bowmore, quite tasty as well. Thanks, Chris!

Carmen Dog

2005-03-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

Started yesterday: Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

Finished Sunday: M. John Harrison, A Storm Of Wings (re-read). What once seemed spellbindingly weird to me now seems to be trying a little too hard, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Read recently: Jack Vance, the Demon Princes series (fun, but would have been better spread out more); Ray Vuckevich, Meet Me In The Moon Room (outstanding surreal short stories); Curtis Roads, The Computer Music Tutorial (not much here I didn't know, but it sparked a few ideas); Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (re-read, still rocks).