Did I mention anywhere that Matt Ruff is a genius? His latest novel, Bad Monkeys, reads like a psychological thriller about a Mission Impossible-style organization staffed by characters out of a Tim Powers novel. If you think that bag ladies should have magical powers and clowns should be assassins, all in the service of hunting down pedophiles and serial killers, then this is the book for you.
Books
Precious Dragon
If I were Liz Williams’ publisher I think I might be wishing that she’d just write a bunch of standard detective novels that can easily be adapted to TV. But Liz is an SF writer at heart, and so the Inspector Chin series has acquired a story arc and a succession of more and more apocalyptic plots. As a reader, I’m not complaining. As with the other two, Precious Dragon is great fun. As long as there will be another book, I’m happy.
Pirate Freedom
The latest Gene Wolfe is almost a case of Wolfe-lite. It is a single, short book, and fairly straightforward. It would be an ideal introduction to Wolfe’s work for anyone who is not excited by the prospect of having to think really hard just to follow the plot. And it is still very enjoyable for us hard-core Wolfe fans.
Of Course There Is
Via Crooked Timber I discover that there is a book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design.
The Season of Wanting
It being that time of year, people keep telling me about things I am going to want. Thankfully neither of these will be very expensive.
Neil Gaiman on Gene Wolfe does Cthulhu.
Joe Gordon on the new Dan Dare.
Maledicte
I’ve been reading a lot of debut fantasy novels of late. There’s not been anything hugely outstanding – nothing of the quality of Ysabel or Shadowbridge (though the latter is a 2008 book, for those of you with awards in mind) – but there have been several promising books and my favorite thus far is Maledicte by Lane Robbins. This is at least in part because it is very different from the usual fantasy fare, the setting being the decadent court of a city state that might exist in roughly 18th Century Europe, but also it has a strong plot, and I’m impressed with how Robbins manages to keep the reader rooting for Maledicte even has (s)he leaves a trail of murders throughout the book. Recommended.
Loud and Queer
So last night I went to a reading in San Francisco. But this was not a science fiction reading. It was a promotion for Word Warriors, an anthology of work by women performance poets. This is not an art form I have followed very closely (though I do have a lingering fondness for John Cooper Clarke), and I guess that many of you will be unfamiliar with it too, but if you can just imagine an entire anthology full of people who have the same boundless energy and room-sized personality as Ellen Klages then you won’t go too far wrong.
Continue reading
Flora Segunda
Overall verdict on this one, disappointed. It is light and fluffy, entertaining, and agreeably soppy in parts, but that’s all. I always thought that the point of YA books was to portray the young characters as heroes in their own right, not to portray them as passionate but bumbling proto-adults who will be so much wiser and cleverer when they grow up. I think it will do very well with the comfort reading crowd, but it isn’t really my sort of book.
Searching for Mr. Baggins
Crooked Timber on the origins of hobbit names, with a passing nod to a very wonderful Andy Duncan story.
Christmas Comes Early
Liz Hand is serializing her very wonderful novella, Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol. I’m not normally one for soppy, sentimental stories, but this one is (IMHO) utterly brilliant.
Shadowbridge Follow-Up
OK, I’ve finished Shadowbridge. Very impressed. As Gary said in Locus, Frost has a lot of explaining to do in the second volume, but if he keeps up this standard then the book is pretty much assured of a World Fantasy nomination, and quite possibly a Hugo nomination as well. Especially recommended to Gene Wolfe fans.
(Half) Here at Last
Now that I’m back in the US I’m getting through some fabulous reading. The latest on the list is Greg Frost’s Shadowbridge (or rather the first part of it – part II will be issued later next year). I’ve been looking forward to this since I reviewed Attack of the Jazz Giants. And of you don’t believe me, here’s a short excerpt from Gary Wolfe’s review in the current Locus:
…it’s not likely that anyone who reads this compelling and original novel will fail to follow it into the second volume. Frost could be on his way toward a masterpiece.
No doubt we’ll see, “A masterpiece” – Locus, on the cover of volume 2. But in this particular case I suspect the hype will be justified.
Official: Literary Fiction Doesn’t Sell
Via The Guardian we learn that UK publishers are planning to abandon the hardback format for works of literary fiction because they sell so badly.
Since 2001, booksellers have doubled the discounts offered on hardback novels and some have sold fewer than 100 copies.
Note that this applies only to “proper literature”. Those crappy genre novels, which the obviously taste-impaired public seem to buy in much larger quantities, may still get hardback editions. Whatever is the world coming to?
A Lost Day
Today has been a complete bust. It is one of those days when you set out to do a small and simple housekeeping task on your computer and 12 hours later it is still unfinished. This is not the sort of thing you should be doing when you have urgent work projects to complete. Except of course that I don’t have all of the data I need right now so I can’t really make a lot of progress anyway. But it does mean that I’m unlikely to make BASFA tonight, and I’m probably looking at canceling any plans I might have had for Thanksgiving weekend.
Still, I did get to the SF in SF reading last night. Karen Joy Fowler and Molly Gloss were fabulous, and it was good to see a lot of friends.
Meanwhile, back to work.
Home Again
Back in California at last. Too tired to write anything interesting. I can say, however, that Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow is a very fine read. So Moscow is Viriconium, in a very Russian way. Of course it is. Everywhere is Viriconium, and Viriconium is everywhere, if only you are desperate enough to see it.
Under the Radar
OK, so I’m not writing book reviews any more. But every so often I read one that makes me wish I was, because it is a really good book that is getting ignored. One such book is Auralia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet. The author is well known film reviewer whose work appears in places like Christianity Today. He can find his web site here. The novel is not obviously Christian, though I guess later volumes in what I believe is to be a 4-book series might be. If it is Christian, then it is so in the way that The Lord of the Rings is Christian, not in the way that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is Christian. But Auralia’s Colors has come out from a Christian publisher and, save for a rave review in Publishers Weekly, has been pretty much ignored by genre reviewers. This is a shame, because it is a really good book. If you don’t believe me, try Graeme Flory.
Free Stuff
One thing that WFC always does well is give attendees free stuff. I have books by Mark Budz and Margot Lanagan that I’ve been wanting to get. Also a box of very nice chocolate chip cookies. I gather that more free books are on the way.
I Still Call Australia Home
OK, so I am in New York for the first time in my life. What did I do with myself? First of all I had to catch up with La Gringa and find my out to her delightfully book-filled apartment in Astoria. This is near Queens, so I keep thinking to myself that I ought to be eating refried beans, but I had other priorities this evening. I had a party to go to, in the Australian Consulate.
Yes, really; my good pals Trevor and Deb and Jonathan had arranged a splendid bash and invited a whole load of New York literati. There was free Aussie wine. And it was all paid for by the Australian Government, as part of their drive to export fine Aussie speculative fiction to America. Nobody tell John Howard, OK. Although hopefully his days of being able to be outraged and able do something about it are almost over.
It was a good evening. I met lots of good folks, many of whom I already new well, and others for the first time. I discovered that Australia really does have Cultural Attaches. I got to talk to Margot Lanagan. Garth Nix apologized profusely for the failure of the Australian rugby team to beat England. And afterwards I got dragged off to an Italian restaurant by Ellen Datlow, which was very impressive, though even here they don’t do zabaglione. Italian restaurants are not what they were.
Tomorrow I get to play tourist and go shopping in New York. I already have the subway sussed. I have Spidey Sense when it comes to cities.
The Long Tail and the Big Spike
While the SF Community has been engaged in various forms of Doctorow Wars, the wider world has been more interested in the online sale of music. There are good reasons for more attention to being paid to music than books. Music, after all, already works well in digital form, whereas books do not. And the fortunes of retail music stores have been plummeting much faster than the value of the dollar. Big money is at stake, not just a status war between Cory and SFWA.
The latest salvo in the war was provided by Radiohead, who released an album online for free, but asked their fans to donate money for it. Rhodri Marsden, The Independent’s technology expert, has an interesting column on the experiment. Radiohead are apparently very happy, having netted millions of dollars from those voluntary donations, and yet it seems likely that far more people obtained the album for free than paid for it.
That’s a very graphic illustration of something that has been obvious in online retailing for a long time. Only a fraction (the usual rule of thumb is 1%) of people who are asked to pay for an online service will do so voluntarily. So if you happen to be Radiohead and have many millions of fans then you can sell online and make millions of dollars. If you are Cory and have Boing! Boing!, reputedly the world’s most read blog, as a sales vehicle then you might be able to make many thousands of dollars. If I were to try selling anything here I might expect to make about 3c.
The important point here is that we can’t all be Radiohead, or Cory. Online retailing is the ultimate in globalization. With so few barriers in the market, the top sellers can always get their goods to the customer, and everyone else loses out. Do you think that the midlist is getting squeezed now in bookstores? It will be much worse online. Are you upset at the increasing inequality of wealth in Western countries? Online retailing will magnify that significantly.
None of which is to say that those of us out in the long tail can’t sell online. There will always be a market for minority tastes, and online selling makes it much easier for purveyors of the unusual to reach their market, small though it may be. But that market may still not be big enough to make a living from.
Of course there may be other technologies on the horizon that will make things easier. A working micropayment system would make it much easier to make money from online publication. We’ve only just started to find out what this brave new online world is going to mean for us.
Shaun Tan at Amazon
Jeff VanderMeer has an interview with Shaun Tan up on a new blog at Amazon. It contains some interesting material about how The Arrival was developed (and why it took over four years to finish). Jeff says that The Arrival is his favorite book of the year. Obviously it is very different from a conventional novel, which makes it difficult to compare, but I think I’m with Jeff on this one. If there is one book you buy this year, make it The Arrival.