I remember when found my first Moorcock sighting. It was at the library, and I was fifteen. Even at a distance, that copy of Elric stood out from the books around it. It was the version with the white and red cover, put out by Ace, I believe.
I looked through it, and I remember thinking to myself “This isn’t like the others. It’s different.” I had no idea. After just a few years reading fantasy, I already had in my head what a fantasy novel ‘should’ be. Elric was to teach me that I still had a lot to learn.
One of the oddities of getting into the genre as I did—by way of pure accident, without friends or coaches to guide me toward the best books—was that I got to ‘discover’ many authors for myself that were already famous in the field. I suspect this isn’t uncommon among those of my generation, who didn’t have Amazon suggesting similar books to us or internet forums extolling the best books of the year. (Life got a lot easier for me when I discovered there was a sf/fantasy independent bookstore in town.)
In the comments to my “Series that go downhill” post, Kluelos writes:
When the computer game “Myst:URU” was released, and reviewers were panning it, but giving a grade of “B”, I recall thinking that if this game had any other pedigree than the revered Rand brothers, it would have gotten the “F” it deserved. We do too much of that, forgiving writers for a real stinker because of prior work. And it’s not just SF: Hemingway’s “Across the River...” just bit it but nobody was willing to frankly say so at the time.
We need to be readier to say and think, “but what have you done for me lately?”, to be less forgiving and quicker to evaluate a story on its own merits rather than its ancestry.
I may hear in person, but just about never read a reviewer saying in print, “Don’t read this. It’s a disappointment and worse than a waste of your time, it will spoil the previous one for you”. Reviewers and/or their editors just don’t have the, whatever, to say that in print most of the time.
I was reminded of this recently when reading Catherynne Valente’s review of Adam Roberts Yellow Blue Tibia. And here’s Roberts being snarky about Martin Amis. I was also reminded of David Hines review of John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series. (That link goes directly to Ringo’s response, scroll up for the review.) There is a joy all of its own to seeing something awful getting ripped to shreds—why else would I be glued to Fred Clark’s page by page demolition of the Left Behind books? And of course there’s the inimitable Nick Mamatas, who does occasionally say something about a book other than “this book sucks”, but he’s very entertaining when he hates something. Also, do check out Jim Macdonald’s awesome Red Mike reviews of awful movies. Reviews saying that things suck can be a useful warning, and they can direct people towards something they like and the reviewer hates—I bet than Ringo review helped sales—and they can be extremely entertaining.
There are, however, a whole pile of reasons why reviewers may be reluctant to say “this sucks”.
In this episode...
Waterbender Katara and her wisecracking brother Sokka, two children of the Southern Water Tribe, discover Aang, the last of the air nomads, and his flying bison Appa trapped in an iceberg. After endearing himself to Southern Water Tribe’s village, Aang and Katara explore a long-abandoned Fire Nation ship, where Aang learns that he was encased in the iceberg for 100 years. Though Katara suspects Aang’s true identity, the airbender is hesitant to admit that he is actually the Avatar, a reincarnated superbender capable of wielding all four elements.
At the same time, the Fire Nation’s banished prince Zuko and his uncle Iroh are on the trail of the Avatar. When Aang and Katara set off a booby trap on the abandoned Fire Nation ship, the resulting explosion leads Zuko and Iroh to the Southern Water Tribe’s village.
[A spoilery discussion of episode 101 begins after the cut.]
What does it say when one’s excitement over receiving a crossbow and bolt as a gift places off the Richter scale? Fret not, tranquil readers, as this crossbow—more movie prop than medieval weaponry—manages little armor-piercing power. Verily so, as we took a few practice shots in the office. (Human Resources, I hope you are not reading this.)
But besides pledging to defend Tor from all future orc attacks, I wanted to credit the crossbow to one excellent filmmaker and book video.
Not all book videos are created by actual filmmakers. And not all filmmakers enjoy science fiction and fantasy. Or think mayhap their client would like a crossbow left over from filming. Mayhap.
I initially met Hugo Perez of M30A Films through a colleague and and possess fond early memories of him consuming SF novels at slightly alarming speeds. He then worked on a few book videos for Tor, beginning with teen author-turned-college student Isamu Fukui’s dystopian YA novel Truancy and F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack YA novel Jack: Secret Histories.
The most recent video teaser, below, is for Alexey Pehov’s Shadow Prowler, a Russian bestselling sensation translated into English by Andrew Bromfield (Night Watch). In this case, Hugo coordinated with another filmmaker in Russia to include some gorgeous on-location footage.
[Click here for an interview with Hugo and the crossbow as the new NYC fashion accessory.]
The People vs. George Lucas director Alexandre Philippe joins us to talk about the film and the love/hate relationship between Star Wars fans and its creator. Dave and John discuss their opinions of all six films and the expanded universe.
[Now witness the firepower of these fully armed and operational SHOW NOTES!]
Bite Me: A Love Story, the third book in Christopher Moore’s vampire cycle is just over a week away. If you have been paying attention, you celebrated Valentine’s Day by reading or rereading the first installment, Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. If you haven’t, do it now.
The next holiday after Valentine’s Day comes next week. So, on St. Patrick’s Day, it is time to suck down a green beer while laughing through the pages of the second novel, You Suck: A Love Story. Be sure you are wearing green: folks have been known to spill. Then you will be totally prepared to welcome the first flowers of spring with Bite Me.
Runaway: Another brilliantly comic movie from Cordell Barker. “Happy passengers are having a great time on a crowded train, oblivious to the unknown fate that awaits them around the bend. The ensuing crisis leads to a class struggle that is as amusing as it is merciless. Naturally there are victims, but in the end everyone is equal.” (9:10 minutes)
My Friend is a Cloud: A sweet and lonely dreamscape of pianos, puppies, and robots on a floating city. (4:30 minutes)
Adriana shrugged. “They’re all beautiful, right?”
“We’ll need specifications.”
“I don’t have specifications.”
The salesman frowned anxiously. He shifted his weight as if it could help him regain his metaphorical footing. Adriana took pity. She dug through her purse.
“There,” she said, placing a snapshot of her father on one of the display tables. “Make it look nothing like him.”
This week’s story is from our archives, and it’s the questing love story “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky.
Promo: Harvey by Phil Rossi
José Gregorio Hernández, a pious Venezuelan physician, often provided the poor with medical treatment free of charge. After his death, miracles were attributed to him and 60 or so years after his death the Vatican conferred the title of Venerable upon him. He may someday be declared a saint. While not well known outside Venezuela, he’s widely honored there, a saint in all but title.
A Venezuelan icon artist created idealized statuettes of Dr. Hernández, in an all-white suit (though based on a photo of the doctor in a dark suit). Mark Pahlow, owner of Archie McPhee and long-time aficionado of odd objects, often finds unusual items overstocked outside the United States and sells them repackaged here. He bought a ton of these statues. According to Pahlow, “Since he was mostly unknown to people outside Venezuela, we reinvented him as a mysterious looming figure with a conspiratorial past and a glow in the dark suit” (Who Would Buy This? P. 38). And so Señor Misterioso was born.
What ho, WOTians! I bring you a Wheel of Time Re-read, in which we re-read the Wheel of Time.
Today’s entry covers Chapters 26 and 27 of A Crown of Swords, in which the 26th and 27th chapters of A Crown of Swords are covered.
(It’s tautolarious!)
Previous re-read entries are here. The Wheel of Time Master Index is here, in which you can find links to news, reviews, and all manner of information regarding the newest release, The Gathering Storm, and for WOT-related stuff in general.
This re-read post contains spoilers for all currently published Wheel of Time novels, up to and including Book 12, The Gathering Storm. If you haven’t read, read at your own risk.
Please insert witty statement here, and then a backwards reiteration of said witty statement, in keeping with the theme that I randomly made up for this intro, because I am nothing if not symmetrical.
Since the 1970s Peter Straub has been known as the “literate” horror writer, kind of a modern-day Henry James. Stephen King, Straub’s sometimes collaborator (The Talisman and Black House), has compared himself to a burger and fries. Using the same type of allusion, we might refer to Straub as filet mignon and a baked potato with chives. Maybe the combination of the authors’ styles is what makes their two novels so successful and deliciously frightening. King goes for your jugular; Straub goes for your brain.
Straub’s 16th solo novel reinforces his reputation, but it is also, at times, more visceral in description than most of the author’s recent works. However, between the few scenes of a college student being torn limb from limb by a disgusting-smelling demon, rather than scream-in-the-night scary, A Dark Matter is pit-of-the-stomach disturbing, a novel that readers will carry with them like a gladstone loaded with bricks.
It also takes Straub far less time to make his point than his buddy Steve. While the 397 pages of A Dark Matter is far from spare, compared with the 1074 pages of Under the Dome, Peter’s book feels more like a tightly-packed short story.
John Varley is a writer who has astonishingly brilliant at writing on the micro level. He writes great sentences, and he writes great characters-in-situations. He explores ideas, and the way science fictional ideas intersect with human psychology, as well as anyone has ever done. He’s one of the most compelling writers in the field.
In the seventies, near the beginning of his career, he came out with a brilliant series of stories and one novel set in the “Eight Worlds” universe. The background to these stories is that Earth has been conquered by mysterious aliens, and humanity is clinging on to a very comfortable relaxed post-scarcity existence in the rest of the solar system. Gender is easily casually switchable. Little things like skin colour, height, and weight have become aesthetic preferences. People live everywhere in the solar system but Earth and Jupiter, which the aliens have claimed. There are religious fanatics painting one of Saturn’s rings red, and others trying to stop them. There are messages from the stars, from a different set of aliens. All children grow up with an individual teacher, an adult who puts themselves into a seven year old body and grows up again with the kid. There’s an inflexible law that only one person with a particular genome can exist at one time, because otherwise, with cloning and recording memories so easy, things would get out of hand. In The Ophiuchi Hotline we find out more about the solar system, the aliens and what’s been going on. If you take the novel together with the stories, collected (with a lot of other brilliant stories) in The John Varley Reader, you build up a mosaic picture of a society that is in some ways very comfortable and in others teetering on a very dangerous edge. Many of the stories are about the characters of the novel, set before the novel, explaining how the characters came to be where they are.
“Up a goddamn mountain: So that ignorant, thick-lipped evil whorehopping editor phones me up and says, ‘Does the word contract mean anything to you, Jerusalem?’”
The first page gives you a pretty clear indication of what sort of story is about to follow. It’s going to be about writing. It’s going to be about a man who went up a mountain to get away from writing. It’s going to be a little, or a lot, crazy. And that’s only the text: check out the art, provided by master Darick Robertson. Just that first page. Spider’s wild hair, wilder tattoos, the disarray of his living space (there is a stack of cans, presumably beer, ascending to somewhere off-panel in the right corner), and of course the nudity. Judging by the bottle clutched in the hand not holding the phone, Spider isn’t just naked in a filthy mountain cabin, he’s also been drinking.
Yeah. The first page. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, friends.
Welcome back to another installment of our weekly round table discussion featuring bloggers Bridget McGovern, Theresa DeLucci, and Rajan Khanna. Be warned: spoilers AND Shakespeare references await you past the jump. Let’s discuss...
Tor Books is making available 200 copies of Cory Doctorow’s new YA novel, For the Win (an awesome chronicle of youth labour organizing within online gaming sites; I liked it even better than Makers!) to under-19-years-old gamers who would like to review the book for their blog or school paper. From Cory’s post on BoingBoing:
We did this with Little Brother a couple years back, on the grounds that books for young people should be available for young reviewers to write about, rather than just adult reviewers who try to figure out whether young people will enjoy them. It was a real success and I'm happy to be repeating it.
This is being launched in honor of the American Library Association’s Teen Tech Week, and is open to Canadians and Americans. I'm working on a similar offer for the UK edition, for Britons, Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis, and will post about it as soon as I have details.
If you’re interested, send an email with your snail mail address to torpublicity@tor.com; put “FTW” in the subject line, and include the name of your blog or school paper. For fun, also share a game you enjoyed recently and why.
Pablo Defendini was a political agitator for the left in a past life. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
“Friday’s Child”
Written by D.C. Fontana
Directed by Joseph Pevney
Season 2, Episode 11
Production episode: 2x03
Original air date: December 1, 1967
Star date: 3497.2
Mission summary
The Enterprise arrives at Capella IV to negotiate for mining rights to a rare mineral called topaline, which is essential to colonial life-support systems. Doctor McCoy has spent some time on the planet, so he briefs the senior crew on the Capellan culture: they are a large, warlike people who believe “only the strong should survive” and have a lot of taboos. Sound like anyone we know? Worried about showing force by bringing an armed security team, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down with a lone red shirt, and a “young and inexperienced” one at that. Grant is also excitable; when they discover a Klingon hanging out on the planet, he draws his phaser and is instantly killed by a kligat, a knife the Capellans can throw up to a hundred yards. Too bad Kirk failed to warn him that Klingons were in the area...
[I suspect that a lot of people die with the famous last words, “A Klingon!”]
We may not be in Kansas anymore, but still it can be challenging to add that tasty international flavor to a teen fantasy reading menu. It seems that most contemporary fantasy novels for young people are rooted securely in the Western European folklore tradition. Not surprisingly, English-language writers rely heavily on British, Celtic, Norse, and classical Greek mythology to populate their worlds. Contemporary urban fantasy authors have spread the net wider, including vampires and werewolves among their casts. Others go off the map altogether, creating brand-new creatures and mythologies (Monster Blood Tattoo-man, I’m looking at you!).
Trolling around the internet to assemble a list of current YA novels published in the U.S. but set far from these shores, I was surprised to see it so short!
As always, recommendations most welcome.
The Sorcerer’s House is exactly the sort of thing you would expect from Gene Wolfe if you had for some reason been expecting him to write a disturbing urban fantasy set in a cryptomunicipality called Medicine Man, populated with the sort of quirky characters you might expect to find in a cozy mystery. Which is to say, it’s clever, intentionally obscure, deeply ambiguous, and above all gorgeously written. 
When I say “urban fantasy,” I mean “urban fantasy” in its original sense. Which is to say, there are no leather-pantsed werewolf hunters in this novel, although there is a werewolf. Or twelve. This is more in the mold of Little, Big: or, The Fairies’ Parliament–a dreamy, ineradicable sort of a book that does not worry itself overmuch with explanations.
Ken Grimwood’s Replay (1986) is the story of a man who dies in 1988 and finds himself back in his youthful body and dorm room of 1963—over and over and over again. He knows the future, he can change the world, but no matter what he changes he’s going to live through twenty-five years and die on that day and start again. And just when you think you know where the book is going, it starts to get really interesting.
The book isn’t just the one gimmick. Grimwood explores the idea in a proper science fictional way, ringing a lot of variations on it. It’s also brilliantly written—tense, taut, fascinating. It’s a quiet almost pastoral character study as much as anything, but when I’m reading it, I can’t put it down. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about it that wasn’t on the lines of: "If that happened to me, I’d...” The idea of re-living your own life while relieved from the burden of money worries and uncertainty is very appealing, and this is part of what makes the book so seductive.
It won the World Fantasy Award and was shortlisted for the Clarke Award, while not coming near any of the others—if anyone wants an example of the usefulness of juried awards for finding brilliant things nobody else is paying attention to, this is a good one. But while the replaying isn’t ever scientifically explained, and therefore could be considered fantasy at a stretch, this is not like a fantasy novel. It’s absolutely SF in look and feel.
Absolute Editions: Geek Heaven? by Brit Mandelo
Fantasy and the need to remake our origin stories by Jo Walton
