Books

Yesterday on Ujima – Reggae History & Short Stories

~ Cheryl

Yesterday was Jamaican Independence Day, which I had planned to celebrate with a little bit of discussion of reggae history. We got off to a slightly rocky start because my first guest, Jonathan Pinnock, had trouble finding the studio. Clearly I need to revisit the instructions I send to people. Huge thanks are due to Judeline and the two young lads who came in and improvised a discussion for the first 15 minutes. Fortunately Jon arrived in time for the next segment.

Jonathan was in the studio to talk about his new book, Take It Cool, which is the story of his search for his namesake, Dennis Pinnock, an early star of the Lovers’ Rock sub-genre of reggae. He also covers this history of the Pinnock family with the founding of Jamaica, which made the discussion especially appropriate for the day.

Also in the studio was Natalie Burns (who is part-Trinidadian) from the Small Stories group who are co-hosting the Ann & Jeff VanderMeer event later this month. Small Stories sounds like a really interesting group, and one I’d like to get involved with. Nat, Jon and I had a good chat about writing, including the value of experience of being an advertising copywriter.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

I had the second hour off as we had turned it over to the Second Steps group who are well used to running their own shows. If you would like to listen to their discussion of health issues, go here.

The playlist for my hour of the show was:

  • My Baby – Dennis Pinnock
  • Crying Eyes – Dennis Pinnock
  • Jamming – Bob Marley & The Wailers
  • Ricochet Man – Horslips

Next week I’ll be talking to Huw Powell (Gareth’s brother) about space pirates.

Leena Krohn – #WITMonth

~ Cheryl

It is back to Finland for today’s Women in Translation post. Leena Krohn is one of Finland’s most respected writers. Like Johanna Sinisalo, she was won the Finlandia Prize (Finland’s equivalent of the Booker) and her career dates back to 1970. I remember that when the VanderMeers came to Finncon Jeff was absolutely ecstatic to get to meet her.

I reviewed Tainaron: Mail from Another City for Emerald City #111 back in 2004, and I’m including that review below. However, the book I’d recommend is Datura, of which Ann & Jeff published an English edition fairly recently. It is a very, very strange book about a young woman who gets a job working for a Fortean-style magazine and, at the same time, accidentally becomes addicted to the psychotropic Datura plant. I think you can imagine how weird that gets. Krohn’s descriptions of the various obsessives who frequent the magazine’s offices are an absolute delight.

Tainaron Review

Leena Krohn is a successful mainstream writer from Finland with a long track record of novel publication stretching back to 1970. Like many European writers, having not grown up in an Anglo culture that suffers from an obsessive desire to distinguish between “good” mimetic fiction and “crap” fantastical works, she is comfortable writing weird stuff. Finally we English speakers are able to sample some of her work, and very interesting it is too.

The book we have on offer is Tainaron: Mail from Another City. It is a short book made up of letters sent by an un-named narrator from the fabled City of Insects. It is very odd, and it reminds me of something that Italo Calvino might have written.

Each letter tells of some encounter between the letter writer and some inhabitant of Tainaron. To begin with these are fairly straightforward, if very strange. Thankfully our guide to Tainaron has the benefit of her long-suffering friend, Longhorn Beetle, to put right her foolish, humanocrentic views before she can cause too much offense. As time goes on, however, Tainaron becomes more and more terrifying. The buildings in which the ants live are for the most part merely alien, but the beach of the ant lions are another matter entirely.

I confess that I am at something of a loss to understand what I am supposed to take away from this book. I don’t think that it is supposed to be merely a tale of creeping horror. But neither is the sort of intricate social satire that you can see in Čapek’s play, The Life of the Insects. It isn’t even clear whether we are supposed to view Tainaron as a real place, because our heroine complains constantly that her friend back in the human world never replies to the letters. Possibly Krohn is simply trying to get us to question some of our cultural norms. Or possibly she is simply playing with an interesting idea for creative writing. All I can say for certain is that this doesn’t appear to be in any way the fault of the translation, which reads very smoothly despite the weirdness of the content. Whatever, Tainaron is a fascinating little book and a welcome introduction to a fine writer whose works have thus far been unavailable to anyone who does not read Finnish.

Vintage Visions

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I got a book in the mail. It doesn’t happen often these days, but one publisher I am always happy to hear from is Wesleyan, who produce some marvelous academic books about science fiction.

This week#s loot was a book called Vintage Visions, and subtitled (because academic books always have subtitles) Essays on Early Science Fiction. It has been put together by Arthur B. Evans who is an expert in the work of Jules Verne, but the book covers a wide range of different topics. The essays are all reprints, and some are not that new, but they all sound interesting. Andrea Bell has an essay about a Chilean novel dating from 1878; Rachel Haywood Ferreira surveys the roots of Latin American SF; and a piece by Susan Gubar about C.L. Moore that was a pioneering work in the study of feminist science fiction from 1980. Crunchy.

Juli Zeh – #WITMonth

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The next stop on our European tour is Germany. You probably won’t find Juli Zeh’s books shelved under science fiction, and to be honest Dark Matter is really a book about scientists rather than SF, for all it’s fascination with quantum physics. The Method, on the other hand, is classic near-future dystopianism. They are both fine books, and well worth your attention.

While I’m on the subject, I note that my pals at For Books Sake have done a piece about Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s magnificent There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby. That’s a book by a Russian woman that won a World Fantasy Award in 2010 (tied with Gene Wolfe).

Karin Tidbeck – #WITMonth

~ Cheryl

This official prompt for this week on Women in Translation Month is Northern & Western Europe. I am all over this. And I’m starting with another absolute star of the field.

Being a brilliant writer in one language takes skill. Doing the same thing in two different languages is an amazing achievement. It is one thing to be able to speak two languages. Being good enough to write brilliant fiction is quite another. As an example, Zoran Živković is perfectly capable of creating readable translations of his novels for marketing to agents and publishers, but he knows he isn’t good enough with English to do without a professional translator to make the English language versions really sing.

Karin Tidbeck is the sort of quiet genius who can write brilliant fiction in her native Swedish, and then translate it to English so well that she wins awards for the English versions too. She also has one of the weirdest imaginations I have ever come across. Her collection, Jagannath, was by far the best-selling book in the old e-book store when I was running it. You can find my review here. Just in case you don’t already have a copy, check the book out, it is brilliant.

Accessing the Future

~ Cheryl

Those of you who were on social media over the weekend may have seen the launch of a new crowdfunded anthology. It will be called Accessing the Future, and it is being published by The Future Fire, the same fine people who brought you Outlaw Bodies and We See a Different Frontier. It aims to publish, “speculative fiction stories that interrogate issues of disability—along with the intersecting nodes of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class—in both the imagined physical and virtual spaces of the future.” The book will be edited by TFF’s Djibril al-Ayad, and by Kathryn Allan, a Canadian academic who, rather spectacularly, has been inaugural recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.

Djibril should need no introduction, having the fine track record of the previous anthologies behind him. Kathryn has also produced two works. Her PhD thesis was Bleeding Chrome: Technology and the Vulnerable Body in Feminist Post-Cyberpunk SF, and she is also the editor of Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, which pretty clearly indicates her interest in science fiction about disability issues.

Kathryn’s thesis is particularly dear to me as one of the four books it focuses on is Tricia Sullivan’s Maul, the only book ever to have a quote from Emerald City on the front cover.

More importantly for you folks, one of the higher level rewards (at $75) is an ebook bundle described as follows:

All three Futurefire.net anthologies (Outlaw Bodies, We See a Different Frontier, Accessing the Future), and the five volumes of Lyda Morehouse’s multiple award-winning AngeLINK series from Wizards Tower Press, *plus* a revised version of her short story “The Case of the Missing Devil Child”, set in the same universe (which is not available elsewhere), all in DRM-free e-books, in the format of your choice.

Further up the list at $250 you can find:

Lyda Morehouse (author of the multiple award-winning AngeLINK series) will name a character after you (or a person of your choice) in a forthcoming work set in the AngeLINK universe. You will also receive the Accessing the Future anthology in trade paperback and DRM-free e-book.

So yeah, this is a project that Wizard’s Tower — specifically Lyda and myself — have a vested interest in. It also means that I need to get Resurrection Code and “The Case of the Missing Devil Child” ready for publication. Fortunately that is well in hand.

Also I will be doing a Skype interview with Kathryn on Thursday, which will appear on the Salon Futura feed in due course. So if there are any questions about the anthology that you’d like asked…

Let’s see if we can get this one up to the $7000 stretch goal so that they’ll be able to offer SFWA rates and therefore get top quality professional writers submitting.

Johanna Sinisalo #WITMonth

~ Cheryl

It shouldn’t have taken much guessing to realize that my post today would be about Johanna Sinisalo. What’s not to like: she’s Finnish, she’s feminist, and she’s a damn good writer. Also she has a mask named after her in Mythago Wood, which is about as unique an honor as you can get. I am lucky enough to have just been sent a review copy of her most recently translated novel: Blood of Angels. I’ll be writing about that once I’ve had time to read it.

In advance of that, you can find a review of her Birdbrain, which Sam Jordison wrote for me at Salon Futura, here. And finally, here’s the review that I wrote of her Tiptree-winning novel, Not Before Sundown (Troll in the USA). The review first appeared in Emerald City #102, with a cover date of February 2004.

Last year’s Eurocon was in Finland. Michael Swanwick was a Guest of Honor and he came back enthusing about a book called Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo. Entirely separately I had been recommended the book by a Finnish reader. This sounded very promising, and it was.

Of course the book’s reputation should speak for itself. It is Sinisalo’s first novel, but it won the prestigious Finlandia Prize, which is for the best novel of any type in Finnish (and is worth around €26,000). This is a serious accolade, approximately equivalent to China Miéville winning the Booker Prize. Wouldn’t happen in the UK. Sinisalo also manages to win the Atorox Prize, which is for Finnish SF&F, with almost Langfordian regularity. This suggests that she is seriously good, and it suggests correctly.

The plot of Not Before Sundown revolves around a photographer called Mikael who finds an injured animal near his apartment and takes it in to nurse it. The animal is a troll, a rare Finnish species that may or may not be distantly related to the yeti and sasquatch. It is bipedal, but covered in black fur with a short, tufted tail and much thicker hair around the head. It is a predator. The description rather reminded me of Wolverine in The X-Men.

The book has three separate strands to it. The first is exploration of the idea of trolls as a real species: how and why they might have evolved, and what their lifestyle might be. The second trawls through Finnish folklore for information about trolls, which may be simply mythological but may also give answers to the scientific questions (Sinisalo gives an interesting explanation as to why trolls are said to turn to stone in the sun). And finally we have Mikael’s story, in which the obvious physical reality of the troll meshes with its mythological role as a creature of darkness. It doesn’t help that the troll appears to give off powerful pheromones that drive humans sex-crazy.

His troll’s like a shred of night torn from the landscape and smuggled inside. It’s a sliver of tempestuous darkness, a black angel, a nature spirit.

Can you tame darkness?

Perhaps you can if, to start off, it’s very, very young, helpless enough, in bad shape…

One of night’s small cubs.

In amongst this, Sinisalo weaves an interesting story about gay men. This isn’t exactly an area I know much about, but the sex scenes seem far more convincing to me than those in the Slash-influenced Fall of the Kings. Plus there is a very neat side-plot where Mikael’s imprisonment of the wild troll in his apartment is contrasted with the behavior of one of his neighbors who has purchased a Filipina bride. All in all it is a very complex book that packs a lot into under 250 pages. It also has a rather experimental feel to it that reminded me of Angela Carter and Italo Calvino.

So yeah, score one for Finland. This is a really good book that, with its mix of science and mythology and personal relationships, is right in the middle of the current fashion for genre bending. And it is available in English translation, so you have no excuse for not getting hold of it.

Women in Translation Month #WITMonth

~ Cheryl

So, August is Women in Translation Month. Who knew, eh?

Week, I did, because I ran across it on Twitter a few weeks back. It is being run by a book blog called Biblibio, and you can find an introductory post here.

I’m not going to promise to post every day because I’ll be stupidly busy for much of the month. However, this is an issue very close my my heart involving, as it does, the intersection between two marginalized groups: women writers, and non-Anglophone writers. I shall do my best. You may recall that I’m on a translation panel at Eurocon, and am also doing a GoH interview with a lady who happens to be a translator. I’ll also be reminding you of a few of my favorite translated novels and stories over the coming weeks.

Tomorrow the schedule asks people to blog about their favorite translated women writers. Yesterday I got a review copy of the latest English language book by one of mine, which I’ll be reading as part of the project. Can anyone guess what it is?

Published Author

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Girl at the End of the World, Vol 2
OK, so it isn’t exactly at SFWA rates, but at least it isn’t in a book I’m publishing myself. And I am getting paid for it. Besides, just look at that cover.

So yeah, paperback copies of The Girl at the End of the World, Vol 2, containing my story, “The Dragon’s Maw”, are now available from Amazon UK. They should spread to the US soon, and ebook editions will follow shortly. With any luck they’ll also be available at Nine Worlds, Worldcon and Eurocon.

I feel a little happy dance coming on. This looks suitably apocalyptic.

America, Meet Tigerman

~ Cheryl

Nick Harkaway’s brilliant novel, Tigerman, launches in the USA today. Nick talks about it on John Scalzi’s Big Idea here. And if you want to know more you can listen to the interview I did with Nick for Ujima Radio.

Nick and I touch on a number of issues, including fatherhood, comics, geopolitics, men being daft, famous fathers and why writers never grow up.

A Brief Booker Comment

~ Cheryl

The Longlist for the 2014 Booker Prize has been announced. This year the prize has been opened up to inhabitants of the rebellious former colonies of North America, as well as citizens of the Commonwealth, presumably as an act of forgiveness by the Booker people for the treasonous behavior of their forebears. The British literary establishment is in something of a tizzy over this, predicting the Death of the Novel, Barbarians at the Gates and the End of Civilization As We Know It. “Whatever next,” said well known critic J.M., “will they be letting in science fiction? Or the French?”

However, one effect of this change to the Booker rules has been the presence of Karen Joy Fowler’s wonderful We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on the Longlist. You can read my review here, and listen to my interview with Karen here.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is also on the list, despite the fact that it won’t be published until September. I must try to get a copy before his appearance at Mr. B’s.

Today on Ujima: WWI, Music Courses & Fair Trade

~ Cheryl

I’m online at the Ujima studios because I have a meeting this evening and won’t be home until late. Getting some blogging done is a much better use of my time than going shopping.

Today’s show began with my friend Eugene Byrne talking about his new book about Bristol during World War I. Eugene has collected a lot of great stories. The book, Bravo Bristol!, is available on Amazon around the world, but if you want to get a preview of the material there is a website and a free app (which includes suggested walking tours).

The next half hour featured some people from the Trinity Centre who are running music courses for young people. As luck would have it, I had a studio full of teenagers on a National Citizenship Scheme course. They didn’t have a lot of interest in WWI, but once we mentioned music they all lit up and basically took over the show. One of them was even texting his mates getting questions to ask.

You can listen to the first hour here.

The second hour of the show was all about the Fair Trade movement, featuring our good friend Jenny Foster whom I have had on the show before. With her was Lucy Gatward from the Better Food Company. It was an interesting and wide-ranging conversation. Also I got to explain who Thor really is. Because it is radio you did not see me playing air guitar in the studio.

You can listen to the second hour here.

The playlist for today’s show was:

  • My Heart Belongs to Daddy – Ella Fitzgerald
  • It’s Too Darn Hot – Billie Holiday
  • Hot Stuff – Donna Summer
  • Boogie Nights – Heatwave
  • It’s Raining Men – The Weather Girls
  • Purple Rain – Prince
  • Higher Love – Denise Pearson
  • Dr. Meaker – Dr. Meaker

The final two tracks were recorded live on the main stage at Bristol Pride and appear courtesy of Shout Out Radio.

Beth Gwinn Photo Kickstarter

~ Cheryl

Neil Gaiman

My friend Beth Gwinn, who has been the main photographer for Locus for as long as I can remember, has a Kickstarter campaign going to fund production of a book of her photographs of science fiction and fantasy writers. The above photo of Neil Gaiman is a sample of her work. I used that photo because one of the rewards available is that Neil will be signing 3 copies of a previously un-published print of him. Beth is a great photographer. I do hope this gets off the ground. More more information, see the Kickstarter page.

The Finncon LGBT Reading Lists

~ Cheryl

As promised, I have posted the LGBT Reading Lists that Suzanne Van Rooyen and I produced for the panel at Finncon. You can find them here.

My apologies to everyone I have left out. I’m sure that there are lots of other fine books and authors we could have recommended.

Yesterday on Ujima – The Green Power Show

~ Cheryl

What I should have been doing yesterday was sleeping. What I actually did was host a 2-hour radio show on climate change and green power issues.

We started out with a pre-recorded interview with Tobias Buckell whose new novel, Hurricane Fever, is just out (and is a lot of fun). I have a longer version of the interview that I’ll be posting on Salon Futura in due course. The reason I had Tobias on the show was that his latest books talk a lot about the effect of climate change on the planet, and in particular on the Caribbean.

Next up were Tasha & Tin from the Avon Coalition Against Big Biofuels. This was mainly a discussion about how all biomass is not equal. Chopping down rain forests in South-East Asia and transporting the wood to the UK to be burned is not, by any stretch of the imagination, green.

You can listen to the first hour here.

At 1:00pm we were joined by Steve Norman who is part of a group protesting about existing activities at Avonmouth. Any wonder what happened to your household refuse? If you happen to live in the South-West of England much of it got baled up and stored at Avonmouth docks waiting to be shipped to Scandinavia for incineration. The local seagulls got rather excited about this, and once the bales had been pecked open the local flies took an interest and started breeding. It got so unpleasant event the Prime Minister was moved to comment. And as there are not enough incinerators in the UK to cope, the stuff is now going into landfill again.

This is, of course, a complicated issue. Ideally we’d throw away less refuse, but recycling facilities in the UK are dreadful and the amount of packaging on things we buy keeps going up. Incineration is better than landfill, but incinerating safely is challenging and companies are tempted to cut corners. Also the ash left after incineration is nasty stuff. So we end up exporting refuse to countries who are prepared to pay for proper incineration, or whose inhabitants don’t protest incinerators as loudly.

My final guest was Harriet from the Centre for Sustainable Energy because I wanted to end by talking about what we can do to help with the energy issue. The CSE does a lot of good work helping people reduce their energy use, and even generate their own. I was particularly interested in Harriet’s comments that people are much less likely to protest green power schemes (such as wind and solar farms) if they are community-owned, and supply power direct to the community, as is generally the case in Germany and Scotland, rather than being owned by multi-national corporations and feeding into the Grid, as is the case in England.

You can listen to the second half of the show here.

The music for the show was chosen by the guests, mostly by Tin. The songs were:

  • Breathing Underwater – Metric
  • 007, A Fantasy Bond Theme – Barray Adamson
  • Green Garden – Laura Mvula
  • Appletree – Erykah Badu
  • Everyday Life Has Become a Health Risk – Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
  • Electioneering – Exit Music feat. Morgan Heritage
  • Sleeping In – Postal Service
  • The First Cut is the Deepest – I-Roy

And here, just for you, Tobias, is Barray Adamson once again.

Finncon – Day 2

~ Cheryl

This morning it was back to the academic conference. Who would have thought that a discussion about biological determinism would arise from a close reading of the Narnia books?

Most importantly for you folks, it has been confirmed that there will be an academic track at Archipelacon next year. A Call for Papers will be issued in due course.

After lunch we opened the convention with the traditional Hugo Panel. I ducked out this year because I haven’t had time to read much of the ballot as yet (and frankly don’t want to have to read all of it). Also I needed to do some preparation for the other panel of the day in which I had to interview Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch and Hannu Rajaniemi about writing. That seemed to go rather well.

Talking of Hannu, the fine folks at Rosebud books have managed to acquire advance copies of The Causal Angel (which is not out in the UK until Tuesday or so). I have bought one. I could be reading it rather than blogging. Good night.

24 Hours, 3 Book Launches

~ Cheryl

It has been a bit busy in Bristol.

Last night I was at Foyles for the launch of tqwo books by Rebecca Lloyd: Mercy, and The View from Endless Street. I’ve talked a bit about these already, as I had Becca on the radio show, so all I’ll add is to say that Becca read a lovely story from Mercy in which no one tried to kill anyone. Well, some of the bears might have tried to kill some one of the humans, but it is so hard to tell with bears. They might just have been being friendly.

At lunch time today Joe Abercrombie was in Waterstones with his first YA novel, Half a King. It wasn’t much of an event: just Joe sat at a table signing books for a long queue of people. Then again, he’s on tour. Two stores a day is not unusual these days. Touring is no fun. Still, Joe did pose for me to take this picture of him with Pat Hawkes-Reed who, as is her wont, had brought him cake. Somehow this is all Sarah Pinborough’s fault.

Joe Abercrombie and Pat Hawkes-Reed

Finally Gareth L. Powell’s younger brother, Huw, had a launch event back at Foyles. This was for Spacejackers, which is a middle grade novel about space pirates. From the bits that he read, it is a bit breathless, but that’s what kids of that age like. Huw has been busy working with schools and reading promotion charities. I’ll try to get him on the show in August to tell us more.

One of the women in the audience challenged Huw over whether his book was only marketed at boys. He noted two prominent female characters — one a sidekick of the hero and one a starship captain. That’s good to know given that Waterstones’ science fiction promotion table currently doesn’t have a single book by a woman on it, out of 35 different books. Gareth’s daughters seemed to be keen to read the book.

I note that Huw had some of the best looking cake I have seen at a book launch in a long time. Apparently his wife, Beata, made this. I am seriously impressed.

Spacejackers cake

Becca Lloyd, M.P. Wright, Outset & Bristol Pride

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s radio all went very smoothly, thanks in no small part to Seth, my engineer, being available again. It is so much easier presenting the show if you don’t have to be constantly thinking about running the desk as well.

We began with an interview with Becca Lloyd, a local writer of strange and macabre tales. Becca and I talked about obsessive people with odd ways of seeing the world, and a penchant for killing people. We also discussed how the peculiar reticence of the English might contribute to such behaviors. Becca’s latest books: Mercy (from my good friends at Tartarus Press) and The View from Endless Street are newly available and are having a little party at Foyles tomorrow night.

Next up was the interview with Mark Wright about Heartman, which I have been trailing for the past few days. It is well worth a listen. Mark talks intelligently and respectfully about the difficulties of a white Englishman writing a book featuring mainly black characters. It would be great if someone like Tobias Buckell could get the same sort of deal that Mark did, but the world doesn’t (yet) work that way. Indeed, as Mark noted, the publishing industry wasn’t that keen on him to begin with (which is why his book is being published by a small press from Edinburgh). It wasn’t until the TV people started sniffing around the rights that the book started getting noticed. Right now, of course, all Mark has is payment for an option. But if that does turn into a J.T. Ellington TV show I see no way it can be whitewashed, given that almost all of the major characters in the book are black. I’m less sanguine about it getting filmed in Bristol, but we can hope.

One thing I forgot to mention on the show is that the book does include quite a few murders of women. That generally requires a content warning. However, I was discussing this with another woman who has read the book at the launch party, and we agreed that this isn’t a misogynist book. Guys, we can tell when you are salivating over the deaths of pretty women.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

The third half hour was given over to Outset, a Bristol organization that helps people from disadvantaged groups set up their own businesses. This is a fine thing to be doing, and I note that it is jointly financed by Bristol City Council (George, unsurprisingly, is a fan) and the EU. Yes folks, the European Union is subsidizing business creation in Bristol. Take that, UKIP.

Finally Jayne Graham-Cummings from Bristol Pride came in to preview next week’s events. On air we mainly talked about what people could go and see, because that’s what most people would be interested in. Off air Jayne and I were chatting about how we could keep Bristol Pride fully trans-inclusive and methods of keeping a political edge to the event.

You can listen to the second half of the show here.

The Violent Century at Mr. B’s Book Club

~ Cheryl

The SF book club at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights met last night. The book under discussion was The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar. It is a book I have been meaning to read for some time, so I’m pleased the club kicked me into doing it.

The general opinion of the club was that it was an interesting read, but perhaps not in the same class as Osama, and not quite up to Kim Newman standard when it came to alternate history. I found it interesting that people seemed to get a lot more out of the book if they didn’t know too much WWII history than if they were steeped in it.

Of course you also got a lot more out of the book if you picked up on all of the comics in-jokes. I guess it is hard for people not to recognize nods to the X-Men given all of the movie coverage they have got, but some people definitely needed the afterword in which some of the characters are explained.

Personally I think I still prefer From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain and Turbulence when it comes to superhero novels, but this was a fine contribution to the sub-genre from Lavie.

Weekend Events

~ Cheryl

For those of you who are in or around Bristol, here are a few things happening this weekend.

On Friday night at Foyles Rebecca Lloyd will be launching Mercy and the View from Endless Street. Becca and I talked about the books yesterday on the radio. I’ll post the Listen Again links to that shortly. If you are into deeply creepy short fiction, Becca’s work will be right up your street.

On Saturday there are two events at bookstores in the city. First up Lord Grimdark (aka Joe Abercrombie) will begin his campaign to terrorize the youth of the world with his first YA novel, Half a King. He will be in Waterstones in The Galleries from 1:30pm.

Not long after, at 3:00pm, Gareth L. Powell’s brother, Huw, has a book launch at Foyles. While Gareth is busily forging a name for himself as a writer of adult SF, Huw is looking to take over the kids’ market. Spacejackers looks like a lot of fun.

Finally Saturday is the date of the St. Paul’s Carnival. Ujima Radio will, of course, be out in force all day. We are also running an after party at the Malcolm X Centre. I can’t see me making that, because it doesn’t start until midnight I am leaving for Finland on Monday (flying out Tuesday morning).