As we noted on SFAW last week, April will be Dracula month in Dublin as the whole city turns into a giant book club. What I hadn’t quite twigged until I got here is that one of the major sponsors of the event is the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. Of course they are.
Books
The Mainstream Writers Panel – #pcon
I’ve just done a panel on mainstream writers who write science fiction and fantasy. As ever with such things, someone in the audience asked for a list of the books we talked about. Here it is. Everyone else, feel free to add your own recommendations.
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
- Toby Litt, Journey Into Space
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
- Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
- Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days
- David Anthony Durham, Acacia
- Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argos
That’s what I can remember. We didn’t mention Michael Chabon. He has won a Hugo, he has been assimilated.
Atlas? Shrug
At The Guardian‘s Book Blog Sam Jordison reads Ayn Rand and has probably earned the undying enmity of most True American Libertarians.
Saving The Male Reader
Today’s Guardian Book Blog once again takes up the challenge of what to do about male literacy. Apparently research has once again shown that hardly any men read books. (Although, as Farah once had in her email sig, “if men don’t read and women don’t read SF, who on Earth is buying it?”)
Anyway, Jean Hannah Edelstein has some concrete suggestions as to what to do about the problem:
Real change won’t occur until publishers band together and make a concentrated effort to re-masculate reading. One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen’s editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football.
It obviously works too. Ian McDonald put football in his last novel and it got on the Hugo ballot.
#ALD09 – The Third Post
I did promise you three posts, didn’t I? Well, we made it. I’m a bit late for the UK, but it is still Tuesday in California so I think I’m OK.
The third post is my first foray into writing for Flashlight Worthy Books, a web site that specializes in going book lists – short suggestions of “things you might like” organized around a theme. This one is about Classics of Steampunk, and it is dedicated to Ada Lovelace and Mary Shelley. Enjoy.
#ALD09 – Joanna Russ
I wasn’t intending to write about a science fiction writer for Ada Lovelace Day, but when I found myself writing a review of a book all about Joanna Russ it seemed only appropriate to publish it today.
Other women science fiction writers have, of course, been more successful — Anne McCaffrey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Octavia Butler, Carolyn Cherryh and Mary Shelley, to name but a few. However, if you are asking about feminist science fiction then there is one name that is head and shoulders above the rest: Joanna Russ. An excellent academic book about her work has just been published. Here is my review.
The Graveyard Book
Farah happened to have a copy of The Graveyard Book in the house (of course she did, she’s listed in the acknowledgments!) so I decided to take a quick look and get some Hugo reading out of the way. The book doesn’t take long to read. There are already people complaining that YA books can’t be as good as adult books because they are “too simple”, or other such nonsense. I touched briefly on this in my review of The Two Pearls of Wisdom, but here the issues are more complicated. Yes, The Graveyard Book is very simple, but to write that simply, elegantly and evocatively takes an awful lot of skill. And, as with all of the best children’s books, this one has plenty of subtleties that an adult reader will appreciate. It is no accident that this book has rave blurbs from Diana Wynne Jones, Garth Nix and Audrey Niffenegger, or indeed that it won the Newbery Medal. It is absolutely worth its place on the Hugo ballot.
There is one thing, however, that worries me. One chapter of the book features some of my favorite Lovecraftian monsters – Night Gaunts. As every Call of Cthulhu player knows, the defining characteristic of Night Gaunts is that they tickle. And I don’t just mean that they like to do it. Tickling is as intrinsic to Night Gaunts as gamboling is to lambs, or rolling in mud is to hippos. It is in their nature.
Neil’s Night Gaunts do not tickle anyone. And you know, the Wall of Sleep is not very thick at times. Especially when you live in a Gothic mansion. So if you are reading Neil’s Journal and you see him complaining about lack of sleep, you’ll know why.
Saving Books from Burning
The lead in books nonsense in the USA continues to rumble on. Neil Gaiman tweeted about it again today, and that prompted Nick Harkaway to start thinking of ways to rescue endangered books. Given what Nick’s wife does for a living, he probably knows a bit about campaigning. Here’s hoping we manage to save some books.
A Day Out
I spent much of today in London, much of it, in fact, in transit. The easy way to get from Farah’s house to central London is on the Victoria Line, but today it was closed for engineering work, so I had to take buses instead. Have I ever told you how much I hate buses? Especially in London. The Tube can be packed solid as well at times, but it runs on nice flat, straight rails. The buses are forever rolling over bumps, turning sharp corners, accelerating and braking. They go all around the houses, and get stuck in traffic. It is a horrible experience.
Not quite as horrible, however, as being a French supporter in London today. I saw the game from the comfort of a pub in Covent Garden, and a I have to say that if we hadn’t had the commentary (and known the players) we would all have assumed that the guys in blue were the leaden-footed, unimaginative English while the guys in white were the talented, creative French. There was no there there in the French side today, and England took full advantage of their good fortune.
Meanwhile I did some shopping. I have come back with a pile of books. The book porn posts are all on my Twitter feed if you want to know what I bought. Sadly it seems that Amberville won’t be out over here until August.
Due partly to my own slowness and partly to the slowness of the buses I didn’t have time to do any clothes shopping. I was also disappointed that Neal’s Yard Dairy isn’t open on Sundays. But of course I’m here for another week. I’m thinking of going to see Watchmen at the IMAX on Wednesday. Anyone else interested?
Joe Hill Contest Grows – #loveyourindie
Joe Hill blogs the exciting news that Subterranean Press has donated a whole pile of books to the contest. There are books by Neil Gaiman, Dan Simmons, Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, Philip Jose Farmer, Steve Erickson and Ray Bradbury as well as by Joe. And apparently additional prizes are being negotiated.
Also Joe says entry from outside of the US is OK.
What are you waiting for? Full details here.
Why yes, that was a Twitter tag in the post heading. Thank you for asking.
Joe Hill’s Indie Bookstore Contest
My favorite horror writer, Joe Hill, is doing his bit to help independent bookstores. If you email him a receipt for a purchase of at least $1 from an independent bookstore you’ll be entered into a draw for a signed, slipcase edition of his latest book, Gunpowder, which is from PS Publishing so it is guaranteed to be a beautifully crafted object. Other books may be added later. Joe doesn’t say anything about overseas entry, so maybe you’d better ask if you are not in the US, but otherwise go ye forth and enter. Full details from Joe’s blog.
Ada and Joanna
I’ve started to read the Joanna Russ book, but I have decided not to say too much about it at this point because it occurs to me that I really should post the review on Ada Lovelace Day. I’m going to do another post as well, but it seems like a good day to talk about Russ. Perhaps a few of you could do so too.
By the way, Ada made The Guardian yesterday – there is an interview with Suw Charmin-Anderson on their Tech Weekly podcast.
In the meantime I just want to say how much I like Lisa Yaszek’s work. Young revolutionaries are always contemptuous of their forbears who lived in less liberal times and were not able to be as open about their activism. Russ was no exception. The rediscover of “housewife heroine” SF that Yaszek is doing (including, ironically, some early stories by Russ herself) not only gives belated recognition to some fine early women SF writers but also helps remind us that women and men are not the same, and that just because some types of female behavior have been traditionally derided and undervalued by men that doesn’t mean that they are actually without worth.
Time Isn’t What It Used To Be
Those of you who enjoy reading books on weird cosmological issues by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene will probably enjoy the forthcoming From Eternity to Here: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time by Sean Carroll. Michael Bérubé has a review up at Crooked Timber which is full of lovely stuff like:
Carroll’s larger idea is that ours is one of many not-merely-possible but actually existing universes, that the Big Bang is not the origin of them all, and that in some of them, time may run backwards, forwards, sideways, or not at all.
The post itself appears to have fallen through an event horizon and been partially cloned as a result, but there’s plenty in there to whet the appetite. And if that isn’t enough to get you to buy the book I should add that Mr. Carroll is better known as the “spousal unit” of the very wonderful Jennifer Ouellette so he comes pre-approved, so to speak.
The Postman Cometh
I haz book!
Today’s mail brought a book that I have been looking forward to for some time: On Joanna Russ, a collection of essays about the famous feminist science fiction writer, edited by Farah Mendlesohn. The contributors include Gary Wolfe, Edward James, Lisa Yasek, Sherryl Vint, Andrew M Butler, Graham Sleight and (fanfare) Samuel R Delany. That should exercise my brain for a while. I may do individual posts about some of the essays, but there will probably be a review too eventually.
(By the way, in case anyone is wondering, I have got very bored with Cyteen. Also the type is very small and it hurts my eyes. I will try to get back to it sometime.)
The T in YA
What, two book reviews in under a week? No, this is not a new policy. It just so happens that the last two books I read both contained significant material about gender, and as that’s a research interest of mine I wanted to write about them. I also so happens that yesterday I spent 4 hours on trains and was able to get a lot of reading done quickly.
Anyway, the review of Alison Goodman’s The Two Pearls of Wisdom (aka Eon) is now up. I’m delighted to see that Melbourne is still producing interesting SF&F writers. Time to go back and pay a visit, I think.
Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant
I really enjoyed the new Gwyneth Jones. So much so that I ended up writing a review. You can read it here.
Wheeler on Coraline Variants
Andrew Wheeler has a blog post up reviewing a number of graphic novels, including the Coraline adaptation. He has some interesting points to make about how different mediums work:
That’s the great gulf between a novel and a movie, of course: a movie can only show what’s happening on the outside, though it can hint and imply mental states, while a novel can dive right into a stream of consciousness and make the reader know exactly why a character did something. Graphic novels, at their best, hybridize the two forms — they can’t be quite as visually exciting as movies, since they don’t move, but they can come very close. And they can show the inner life of a character just as fully and in as much detail as a novel can.
This is good stuff, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that. During the post-gig party in Dublin Neil was talking about Coraline, and about his discussions with Neil Jordan over The Graveyard Book. He made the point that when he creates something scary in a novel he can often leave much of its nature up to the imagination of the reader. He just has to hint at something awful being there. In a movie, however, the monster has to appear, if only partially, at some point. That’s a problem that a skilled director has to worry about.
It is also a more general problem. I remember, for example, people saying how disappointed they were when the Cloverfield monster finally put in an appearance. I wonder how one could ever film that non-Euclidian geometry that drives men crazy, or how one might go about filming House of Leaves. Prose, comics and movies are all different mediums, and in translating between them you have to make changes.
I am sure this will be lost on many of the people who write about Watchmen over the next few weeks.
Mind Melded Again
The very wonderful Karen Burnham has been asked to edit some Mind Meld columns for SF Signal and her first effort has just gone online. It is about non-SF&F books you would recommend to SF&F readers. I’m pleased to say that I’m in it, and that Karen has assembled a truly awesome bunch of contributors, headed by Gary K Wolfe.
On a quick read through I think Patrick O’Brien gets the most recommendations, but I’m astounded that I’m the only person to mention Dorothy Dunnett (though this may be because all of the other contributors are men).
Of some small comfort to Jacques, following the sail episode, may the the fact that I managed to mangle the spelling of Alexandre Dumas’s name, primarily because I’m so used to translating from British to American in my head. Of course no one noticed, so I decline to take all of the blame.
25 Years On At Last
Over at the Guardian Book Blog David Barnett lets us all know that the 25th anniversary edition of John Crowley’s Little Big will eventually see print. This is going to be an awesome book, thanks in no small part to the design talents of John D Berry and the awesome prints of Peter Milton. More details about the book here. I hope it is read in time for World Fantasy.
John the Revelator
To recap, when I went to Dublin last month Neil Gaiman kindly put me on the guest list for the Amanda Palmer gig, and one of the other guests was a chap called Peter Murphy. Neil told me that Peter was a really great writer, and his first novel had just been published. The following evening was spent in a bookstore. I did what comes naturally.
Which is how I came to be reading what is actually pretty much a mainstream novel. Literary, even, as the book deals primarily with the coming of age of a young man, and with escape from a small country town. These things are fairly common fare in the literary world. There is a certain amount of what you might call magic realism to the narrative, but it is very liminal and the book is not one that most genre readers would describe as fantasy.
Given that this is not the sort of book I normally read, I was delighted at how quickly and easily I got through it. I am reminded of the first time I visited Dublin, and discovered that the Guinness over there is so smooth and deceptive that you can consume several pints before you are aware of what you are doing. Thankfully, consuming John the Revelator in a couple of quick sittings did not result in anywhere near the unfortunate side-effects of over-indulgence in alcohol. Quite the opposite, in fact. Instead I found myself in awe of just how effortless the reading process had been. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Neil was dead right: Peter Murphy is a very good writer.
Should you be interested in trying the book, but are confused about the title, please note that it is not full of religious imagery and apocalyptic prophecy. As far as I can make out, the title simply refers to the fact that the John who is the central character in the book is fairly passive throughout, save for having some rather odd dreams, but does get to find out quite a lot about other people. Peter is a music journalist, and the title was apparently inspired by the famous American folk song (not the songs of the same name by the Dave Matthews Band and Depeche Mode). If you’d like to know more, there is an interview with Peter here and article about him here.
For some reason I am absurdly pleased that Peter credits Godspeed You Black Emperor! for inspiring part of the book, though of course I have to credit Marc Gascoigne here, from whom all of my best music discoveries spring.
There will be a US edition of the book, but it is not due out until August.