Over at the Guardian Book Blog David Barnett has hit on the ideal literary subject for the UK: a pub crawl. The idea is simple. All you have to do is add a comment mentioning a pub from one of your favorite books. The White Hart, the Green Dragon at Bywater and the Vulgar Unicorn have already been listed by Barnett.
Books
Banned Books Week
Neil Gaiman reminds us that it is Banned Books Week. I too was impressed to see Mark Twain listed as #3 in the list of most-challenged authors. However, before all of you lefties go laughing at the fundies, go check out the most-challenged books list. Huckleberry Finn does not get challenged because of bad language or any other of Huck’s high jinks, but because it is deemed racist.
Booker Update
As you may have heard, Salman Rushdie’s fantasy novel, The Enchantress of Florence, did not make the short list for this year’s Booker Prize. Apparently the judges didn’t think it was very good. Thankfully they refrained from making any comments about “fantasy rubbish”. But there is another book on the short list that is of interest because it is written a past winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award. Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea Of Poppies is described as follows:
Beginning in 1838, among the poppy fields of India during the build up to the first opium war, this is a historical novel of the old school. There are pirates, exotic landscapes, palaces, prisons, swash and buckle galore, while reams of information about nineteenth-century conditions give a patina of authenticity to an otherwise enjoyably unlikely narrative.
That sounds sort of Neal Stephenson-ish. The description came from Sam Jordison’s review in today’s Guardian Book Blog. Sadly for Ghosh, that’s about as good as it got. Sam was distinctly underwhelmed. Read the whole review to see why.
Unhappy Endings
Today’s literary news includes the revelation (in The Guardian via the Globe & Mail) that LM Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables, committed suicide. Montgomery died in 1942, but the cause of death was given out as heart failure because in those days suicide, and even suffering from depression, were regarded as shameful. Montgomery’s granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, made the revelation as part of the publicity surrounding the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. Butler wrote:
I have come to feel very strongly that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us – and most certainly not to our heroes and icons.
[…]
We realize now that secrecy is not the way to deal with the reality of depression and other mental-health issues.
That’s an attitude that I wholeheartedly support. It would be nice to say that we are beyond that now, but with the news coming so soon after the loss of Tom Disch and David Foster Wallce I suspect that we still have a long way to go.
Pandemonium
I’ve been struggling to find something to say about Pandemonium beyond “I really enjoyed it” that doesn’t involve too much in the way of spoilers. Probably the best I can do is point you to Mike Berry’s review in the Chronicle and add that Gregory definitely has his finger on the pulse of the genre world. The idea of having demons based on popular culture archetypes such as Casey Jones, Dennis the Menace and Captain America is just too delicious. And then there’s the sequence set in the demon fan convention featuring Phil Dick (who is possessed by a demon called VALIS) and Tim and Serena Powers. Lovely stuff.
Welcome, Angry Robot
While I was in the air a secret I have been keeping for many weeks went public. My good friend Marc Gascoigne has a new job, launching an SF imprint for Harper Collins. Andrew Wheeler and Lou Anders have posts about it. I’m sure that Marco will do a wonderful job.
The Anathem Launch
Well, that was a bit of a bust. The instructions said that they’d be opening the doors between 6:15 and 6:30, but it was nearer 6:45 before they did so. I suspect that they also had no idea how long it would take them to load the auditorium, though at least they had the sense to drop the requirement for photo ID to get people in more quickly.
Not that any of this mattered, because at around 7:50 they announced that they were still having tech problems and brought the chant people out to entertain us.
Given that Kevin and I had not had time for dinner beforehand, had to get back to Fremont after the event, and needed to be up really early this morning, we decided to bail at 8:00pm. We did have the signed book, and it is not as if we haven’t seen Neal read before. Besides, Charlie and Annalee from io9 were they, so they’ll doubtless be reporting on the event.
There are, I suppose, all sorts of jokes that could be made about the Long Now folks measuring time in millennia and therefore not quite understanding that we normal humans measure time in minutes, but they were trying hard and appeared genuinely distressed that we had to leave so I’m not going to be snarky. It does occur to me, however, that if a fan group had run the event and been even 15 minutes late starting everyone would be going on about what a bunch of flakes fans are and how they can’t be trusted to get anything right.
Meanwhile I have this 900+ page book staring balefully at me. Somehow I don’t think I’ll finish it any time soon.
Cycler Review
One of the good things about YA books is that you can generally read them very quickly. So I have a Cycler review online. And I’m pleased to report that Mr. Moles was right – I like what Lauren McLaughlin has done.
The Hidden World
Paul Park’s Roumania series has finally reached an end with far less fanfare than with which it began. Along the way it has slowly transformed from an ingenious fantasy in which our world was merely a fantasy conjured by a sorceress from the real world, to an alternate world fantasy which is not that different to a fantasy set in our world. The Hidden World is still a great book, but I can’t help thinking that Park lost his way somewhere in the process. Which is a shame, because A Princess of Roumania was magnificent, and Nicola Ceausescu is one of my all time favorite villains. I think that fantasy tends to trip over itself if it becomes too accepting of its own weirdness. Sometimes Park gets it right. Clara Brancoveanu’s confusion over what is happening to her daughter is entirely believable, and Miranda grows into her power very nicely. But the relaxed manner in which everyone seems to accept that Lt. Prochenko and Andromeda Bailey are the same person and are a werewolf seemed to stretch things for me. On the other hand, I still enjoyed the book, and I’d still prefer it to any number of formula fantasy series, so I shouldn’t complain.
Oh Dear
At the Washington Post Michael Dirda reviews Anathem. He’s not overjoyed.
I shall get my copy on Tuesday when I go to the launch party.
Little Brother
I can see why people have been getting excited about Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Philosophically I found it spot on. People everywhere, not just in America, need to take their countries back from the despots who think that they can get away with anything in the name of “security”. How well it will succeed is another matter. Deciding to target it at the YA market is, I think, a stroke of genius, but whether it will actually appeal to that market is another matter. I have no idea whether Cory’s portrayal of youth culture is accurate or embarrassing; nor do I know how the YA market will take to the masses of geeky infodump that the book contains. Older readers may find the book lightweight and predictable. I know I found myself skimming much of it. But it is definitely worth a read, and I would not be too surprised to see it on the Hugo ballot next year.
Me, Elsewhere
I got asked to write a post for The Bilerico Project about transgender themes in science fiction. There’s a lot you have to leave out when given only 1000 words, but hopefully it will spark some interest and sell a few books. You can read it here.
Yes, We Want Covers
Over at Boing!Boing! Cory is being very sensible. It would indeed be very useful if publishers made JPGs of all of their book covers easily available on their web sites. Somehow, however, I doubt that it will happen. When I was doing Emerald City I spent a bit of time trying to get publishers to create RSS feeds of their forthcoming titles. Everyone I spoke to said that it was impossible because they couldn’t get their IT people to do anything.
Fortune Cookie
Kevin and I have just been out for some pan-Asian cuisine. My fortune cookie read as follows:
The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
Now of course that’s silly. A man who can’t read cannot understand road signs, legal contracts, email, subtitles on Hong Kong movies, and many other aspects of modern life. But I love the sentiment.
Babylon AD Update
Kim Newman has posted a review of Babylon AD on Facebook (which I probably can’t link to, sorry). Two things of note from the review. Firstly Charlotte Rampling looks that good at her age because of what Kim calls “cgi botox”. Not that she isn’t still amazing, but I feel less envious now. Also the short version of Kim’s review would be “it sucks”. That’s a shame, but I’m not surprised as Babylon Babies is a long and complex novel and therefore not well suited to movie adaption.
Roleplaying Dragon Adventurers
The inimitable Marcus Rowland has produced a version of his Forgotten Futures role-playing game that allows players to role-play characters from Jo Walton’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel, Tooth and Claw. The game includes art by Sue Mason and a long excerpt from an as-yet unpublished sequel to the novel from Jo. You can download the game here.
Steel Beach
I have finally got to the end of Steel Beach. I don’t have much to say about it beyond the fact that anyone who thinks that this book says anything worthwhile about the transgender experience probably doesn’t know many transgender people. I was particularly struck by Varley’s assertion that what is important in humans is not sexual preference but sexual orientation: that is, if you are sexually attracted to men as a woman then if you change sex to become a man you will immediately become sexually attracted to women, because what is important is your heterosexuality. Equally a lesbian who changed sex to become a man would immediately become sexually attracted to men in order to stay homosexual. There may indeed be people like that, but I don’t think I’d expound it as a rule.
As for the concept that the ideal human form would be to have a woman’s body but still have a penis, I don’t think I need comment further.
An Interesting Big Idea
Today’s installment of John Scalzi’s “The Big Idea”, in which he gives fellow authors a chance to talk about their new books, features Lauren McLaughlin talking about her debut novel, Cycler. Scalzi describes the plot as follows:
Jill McTeague discovers that during her time, her body goes through entirely different changes than most girls — specifically, four days a month, she becomes Jack, right down to all the appropriate plumbing.
And here’s what McLaughlin has to say about it:
Gender is a prison. That was the Big Idea behind Cycler. I actually wrote it in sharpie on a piece of white paper and taped it above my desk as I worked. I wanted this story, about a girl who turns into a boy four days out of every month, to be an examination of gender as a cultural construct. I wanted to explore the ways in which gender identity constrains us, shapes us, limits is.
My first impression reading Scalzi’s post is that McLaughlin doesn’t have much understanding of gender identity – she is assuming gender is entirely socially imposed. On the other hand, she does say:
But one thing I wanted to avoid in Cycler, was replacing one Theory of Gender with another.
So maybe there’s hope. And it is definitely a book that belongs on my “to read” pile.
Revolution Advances
Remember that new online money service that I blogged about a while back? Yep, Revolution, that’s them. Well they have just sent me a card. No, not a credit card solicitation. A debit card for use with my account. Clearly they have noticed that people online are not taking taking payment from them, so they have cut a deal with various retailers instead. One of them happens to be Barnes & Noble. And I have money in my account (mostly free money thanks to you folks signing up for accounts through me). Can you say “free books”?
Judge
Karen Traviss’s Wess’har Wars series has finally reached a conclusion with Judge. Without giving away too much, I think it reasonable to say that it doesn’t end the way you might expect it to, and that’s probably a good thing, even though it might make Judge the weakest book in the series. I’m still not sure whether I like the ending, but that’s another matter entirely.
Meanwhile Karen can’t resist having a go at the state of modern journalism. Here’s the view from Eddie:
As he concentrated on the green rally, he watched a reporter doing a vox pop in the crowd. Whatever a reporter was these days, he had no idea: some wannabe twat gagging to do the job for free or even pay for the privilege, just to get some reassurance that they existed by seeing themselves permanently recorded in some news archive, so they’d be somebody. Next week, they’d be back serving donuts. When did reporting get to be about the reporter? In his day, it had still been about the story, outward-looking, inquiring; now it was a karaoke night.
Eddie, of course, is a 20th Century journalist. Times move on. I must admit that I was rather impressed by Karen’s idea that in the future news channels won’t bother making news themselves, they will just upload whatever “citizen journalists” send them, and then have the audience vote as to which stories they think are true. In the future, the Weekly World News will be recognized for the ground-breaking pioneer of new journalism that it actually was.