Jenny Saqua

(Halloween 2006-22 September 2009)

We will miss you.

Three things about An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe:

1. More pulp than a glass of orange juice made by cramming an orange into a glass: Wolfe is definitely going for a retro, ’20s-to-‘40s vibe here. Characters dine at Rusterman’s, which is Nero Wolfe’s favorite restaurant. One of the characters has a ring that was given to him by H.P. Lovecraft (well, HPL), and he references the Shadow’s ability to cloud men’s minds. R’lyeh, the underwater city of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is also mentioned, as is one of Lovecraft’s New England cities, Kingsport. The tone and settings are as self-consciously early 20th century as Wolfe can make them. It’s almost like he took a stack of Black Masks and Weird Tales, blended them with a few gallons of decent martinis, and marinated his manuscript in them. It doesn’t make the book fun or interesting — oh, no. But the feel is there.
   
   
2. Chatty Cassie: Guest is choked with dialogue, and none of it is particularly good or memorable. It does feel pulpish, although not in a memorable way. The humor fails. The men are patronizing. The women (OK, the protagonist, actress Cassie Casey) are constantly frightened of injecting emotional content into their words … Nearly everything happens off screen, so everything has to be told through expositionary dialogue. It is, like most of the action, tedious. The dialogue never gets to the point, because every character seems either allergic to the point or easily distract — hey, is that a squirrel on waterskis?
   
   
3. I have no idea what happened: Technically, that’s not true; I know exactly what happened. It’s a pulp detective / horror story told 100 years in our future, with self-consciously retro names given to technology (ships that can essentially teleport are called “hoppers”) and downplaying modern, real technology. But the book isn’t interesting or stylized or outrageous enough to succeed in that vein.
   
   My reaction mirrored Adam Roberts’s; what to make of this book? Personally, I can’t see why it was nominated for so many awards this year. It’s musical theater and conspiracies and pitching very muted woo for 250 pages, and then it rambles off for the final sixth of the book to a South Pacific island where the protagonists decide to fight Cthulhu (who’s operating under a different name, of course). Cassie’s dull, possibly the worst “strong woman” I’ve ever read and … I don’t know what to make of this novel. I’m afraid that the merit of this book is, as Roberts says, in the undercurrents (like Cthulhu himself). If that’s the case, I say leave it there in R’lyeh with him, because I have no desire to try to find it.

Three things about The Eyre Affair, the first book in the Thursday Next series, by Jasper Fforde:

1. I’m not literate enough: It wasn’t until about halfway through the book that I started to realize the ending of Jane Eyre that Fforde described — Jane leaves Rochester and heads to India with St. John Rivers, but without marrying him — might not be the one we’re familiar with. In my defense, it sounds somewhat like the ending to an early Hardy novel. There can be no happy endings!
   
   
2. There’s alternate history, and then there’s pulling stuff out of your ass: An independent (and militant) Wales, a Crimean War that’s been going on for more than 120 years, a literature-mad public … You could put me in that world, and I still wouldn’t believe any of that stuff. And I have no trouble with the time travel in The Eyre Affair.
   
   
3. Oh, so that’s the guy: What I’ll remember about this book when all else is forgotten is Styx Hades. The brother of Acheron Hades, the worst person in the world, Styx amuses himself by calling up people who are trying to sell things through the classified ads, making appointments, and never showing up, snickering to himself as he does it. I’ve always considered that sort of behavior a minor-league evil; fortunately, Fforde agrees with me.

Three things about Dragons of the Hourglass Mage, Book 3 in the Dragonlance: Lost Chronicles trilogy, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman:

1. There are two kinds of Dragonlance books …: … and this isn’t the good kind.
   
   The two kinds are books that feel like they’re part of the main story and those that feel like useless appendages best lopped off. This one is the latter. The previous two in the Lost Chronicles trilogy weren’t; they felt like they were part of the main story Weis and Hickman chose not to tell the first time through. But those useless appendage stories always have useless characters no one cares about (although we’re meant to); in Hourglass, Raistlin goes to the evil city of Neraka and runs into the wacky characters there. Oh, how they’re wacky, scheming and brawling and generally being the low-key annoyances I wish had been edited out — even the resistance cell Raistlin stumbles across in the capital city of evil.
   
   Let me put it this way: kenders are the most annoying characters in the world of Dragonlance. If a Dragonlance book has a kender in it who is not Tasslehoff Burrfoot, it’s probably safe to avoid the book. This one has a kender named Marigold Featherwinkle. I rest my case.
   
   
2. Did anyone really have questions about this part of the story?: The first book in the trilogy, Dragons of the Dwarven Depths, covered a story taking place between the first two books of the original Dragonlance Chronicles; the adventure in the Dwarven kingdom was important to the plot but was simply left out of the trilogy, so I was glad to finally read it. The second book, Dragons of the Highlord Skies, covers another part of the story glossed over: the heroes’ assault on the White Dragon Highlord, Feal-thas. It also has some stuff about Kitiara I wasn’t all that interested in, but that was OK.
   
   And this one describes Raistlin’s rise to … power? after he abandons his companions to die and before he becomes the most powerful wizard evar, making sure to keep his appointments with the parts of the original story he was scheduled to be in. I’ve never been curious about this part of the story. He sells his soul, I thought, and he gets power. That’s not what happens, but what does happen isn’t any more interesting, mainly because his rise to power isn’t the focus of the book. It’s a lot about him moping about and being emo and helping people out for reasons he doesn’t understand.
   
   I don’t want to read about emo Raistlin. Do you?
   
   
3. Someone’s forgotten how to write: Seriously, there are some extremely clumsy passages and a gratuitous overuse of the word “crap.” Information is needlessly repeated. The narration is clunky at times, and there is altogether too much exposition — trust me, there are more than enough people who have read Dragons of Spring Dawning that you don’t need to write for a general audience.
   
   The book has no depth, and there’s no emotional resonance, save what readers bring in from other (better) Dragonlance books. It’s a waste of time, really, and I hope for your sake, not money. The Amazon reviews don’t agree with me, but I don’t think the crowd has the wisdom this time.

I just reached 100,000 words on the first draft of my novel. A hundred thousand is a lot of words. Most of them are badly spelled and haphazardly chosen, but still: a lot of words.

As I (and many others) expected, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman won the 2009 Hugo for best novel. The full list of winners can be found at Locus Magazine.

Anticipation, the convention at which WorldCon is giving out the Hugo awards this year, has begun in Montreal. Borrowing from my Internet betters, here is why each of the nominees for Best Novel will and won’t win:

Why The Graveyard Book will win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it’s written by Neil Gaiman. Because The Graveyard Book just won the Newberry Award. Because it has a solid literary lineage, being inspired in part by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Because Neil Gaiman wrote it. Because it’s filled with charming characters that will upset very few readers. Because it’s gotten the most press of the three YA books nominated for this award, and YA seems to be the most represented category. Because Neil Gaiman.

Why The Graveyard Book will not win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it’s a bit twee. Because it’s more of a book of linked short interludes — almost short stories — than a novel. Because it’s a bit too charming for a book that’s set in a graveyard and all about Death. Because Gaiman is the Guest of Honor at WorldCon this year, and that will cause horrified reactions from some quarters.

Why Anathem will win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it’s new and inventive. Because it’s a big book that plays with ideas and language. Because other than Gaiman, Neal Stephenson has the largest mainstream following of the authors. Because it goes from a monastery to dimension-travelling spaceships, which is pretty much the entirety of the fantasy / sci-fi continuum, so it should appeal to a wide range of speculative fiction fans.

Why Anathem will not win the Best Novel Hugo: Because people hate trying to muddle through Anathem’s invented vocabulary. Because it’s the biggest of the books. Because it drags in the middle. Because Stephenson loooves the infodump and uses it plenty.

Why Little Brother will win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it’s about personal rights and torture and what our views on those say about us as Americans and as technology-using apes. Because it was a book that fit its times very well. Because Doctorow is the most famous internet personality of the nominees who hasn’t won a Best Novel Hugo.

Why Little Brother will not win the Best Novel Hugo: Because torture and personal rights are so last administration. Because Doctorow’s not exactly an effortless prose stylist. Because Gaiman is even more famous on the Internet. Because Doctorow loves the infodump as much as Stephenson and isn’t as good at integrating them into the text.

Why Saturn’s Children will win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it has a lot of Sex!, and that proves it’s mature and for adults, as the best novel should be. Because it tries to tap into the popular anime / manga aesthetic with chibi and superdeformed androids. Because it shows there’s finally a book courageous enough to get rid of those irrelevant humans.

Why Saturn’s Children will not win the Best Novel Hugo: Because Stross says he’s not going to win. Because a lot of that sex is squick-tastic, and frankly, there’s too much robot rape for me. Because it’s hard to get sympathize with characters who can slough identities and appearances as easily as they can fall asleep yet aren’t weird and distant enough to be intriguing.

Why Zoe’s Tale will win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it’s a part of a larger, popular series. Because the narrator has the most distinctive, relatable voice of all the nominees. Because Scalzi is a traditional SF author, and that will appeal to a lot of fans.

Why Zoe’s Tale will not win the Best Novel Hugo: Because it didn’t even have an original plot, making it the least distinctive of the five nominees. Because it’s a middle-aged man writing in the voice of a teenaged girl. Because, really, no one can give you a good reason why it should win.

What will win the Best Novel Hugo: The Graveyard Book, of course. C’mon — it’s Neil Gaiman.

What should win the Best Novel Hugo: Anathem. As Adam Roberts points out, it’s the only one of the nominees that stretches readers, that’s really different.

I meant to mention this before the All-Star Game a week ago, but I forgot — OK, I procrastinated. But this year’s All-Star Game was held in St. Louis, where I have seen more baseball games than in any other city, rooting for the Cardinals. St. Louis hasn’t held an All-Star Game since 1966. Those of you who are sharp at math will realize that’s been 43 years despite there being only 30 teams in the majors. That means some teams have received a second game in the interim, being chosen instead of St. Louis.

I thought the new stadium boom of the ‘90s would be the reason for that. New stadiums get the games, or sometimes old stadiums that are going away, like Old Yankee Stadium last year, will get the honor. And for the most part, that’s the case. But there are a few surprising parts of the distribution of the Midsummer Classic:

Two teams have hosted the All-Star Game three times since St. Louis’s last game, in 1966: Houston (1968, 1986, 2004) and Pittsburgh (1974, 1994, 2006). Every franchise that hosted the All-Star game in the thirteen years following St. Louis’s 1966 game has hosted the game twice — except for Kansas City, where the game was played in 1973 and might again be seen in 2012. So that’s eleven host cities in thirteen years that have hosted another game since (the Senators / Rangers franchise hosted one game in each of their homes). Four teams — Philadelphia, Cincinnati, California / Anaheim, and San Diego — didn’t have to even switch stadiums to get a second game during that time, and Houston and Pittsburgh got to play two in their old stadiums before getting a third in their new digs. (There were also two games in Yankee Stadium, but the switch to New Yankee Stadium was the reason for the second.) The Angels will be getting their third in the same old park next year.

So that’s seven teams that got second bites at the apple at uniformly horrible / boring parks. (Shockingly, Houston got a third game despite moving to a worse park.) New stadia have given three teams two games each between 1981 and the present: Cleveland (1981, 1997), Chicago White Sox (1983, 2003), and San Francisco (1984, 2007). The other major league teams have all hosted the game once since 1966, with four exceptions: Florida, Tampa, and Arizona haven’t had chance yet, although Arizona is getting the 2011 game and Florida and Tampa have crappy home stadiums (that didn’t stop the 1979 game from being in the Kingdome or the ’85 game from being inflicted on fans from the Metrodome, but times change). But if you really want to feel sorry for a fanbase, feel bad for the Mets’: they haven’t hosted a game since 1964. Sure, they’re going to be getting a game soon because of Citi Field, but by the time the game’s actually played, it will have been nearly a half century since the All-Star Game has been played in a National League New York park. And I bet the odds that the Yankees will have had their third All-Star Game before then are 50-50.

Why do some mystery series catch on and others don’t? I’m not really an expert on sales or trends or sales or any aspect of the book market. I suppose I can only speak for myself.

I’ve read a lot of mystery series over the years. I’m not talking about trilogies or quartets with a definite end, like James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, or characters like Sherlock Holmes who were never meant to be a series, per se. No, I mean the ones that are meant to go on until the Trumps of Doom blow or the author dies.

I’ve read all of Sue Grafton’s Alphabet series, even though they have really ceased to surprise me — I suppose I enjoy the protagonist, Kinsey Millhone, too much to quit the series. I devoured all of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books over the summer about five years ago. I finished Tony Hillerman’s Chee / Leaphorn books a little after Hillerman died a few years ago; I don’t think Hillerman was the greatest mystery novelist, but he did manage to get across not only the “exotic” setting but that the Navajo culture truly sees things differently than the average reader. Despite my certainty that I won’t like the next book, I’ll stay with Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa to the bitter end. With Walter Mosely’s Easy Rawlins series apparently at an end, it seems I’ve followed another series to its conclusion — one with easily the most downbeat ending.

Brendan DuBois has written a series, now standing at six books, starring Defense Department survivor Lewis Cole. Cole isn’t a detective or a reporter or even, as far as I can tell, an amateur sleuth. I mean, he is an amateur sleuth, in that he’s the star of a mystery story and he doesn’t get paid to do it, but it’s not like he makes investigation a habit. He just kind of … gets involved. I suppose that’s what amateur sleuths do. It’s not like Cole likes it, though.

I don’t really think it’s that great of a series. If it hadn’t been written by Dubois, who, like Dan Crawford, features prominently in my memories of my childhood subscription to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, I never would have given any of the books in the series a look. But I’ve read the first book in the series, Dead Sand, and I recently finished the most recent, Primary Storm. They’re dour, somewhat violent books that somewhat blithely puts reality to the side and refers to it when it suits DuBois’s purposes. There’s nothing wrong with that; just an observation. Cole gets a regular stipend from the Defense Department for surviving a chemical weapons test while his group of analysts was out on a teambuilding exercise. He was the only survivor; the chances of recurring cancerous tumors is high. To keep up appearances, he writes a monthly column for a regional magazine, but mostly he tries to be a prickly New Englander in a New Hampshire beach town. Of course, trouble finds him.

In Primary Storm, it finds him during the New Hampshire primary. His lover is volunteering for one of the campaigns; his college lover is that candidate’s wife. When an assassination attempt is made against that candidate, Cole is framed as the patsy … which fails when a TV camera films him vomiting outside the convention center as the shots were fired. Cole is drawn into the investigation because the Secret Service seems as interested in investigating the crime as I do in investigating the deep secrets of geometry proofs and the local and state police appear to be solving the disappearance of Nemo Nothing in Nowhere, N.H. Cole uses brute force and ignorance to bull his way to a solution. (Most sleuths do the same. Cole is less reticent about using the brute force than most.) Cole has a ne’er-do-well — a Boston gangster, really — who does his headthumping and bidding, which I like to think of as a nod (or at least parallel) to another New England sleuth: Robert Parker’s Boston-based Spenser, who teams up with the admirably violent thug Hawk in many of his later adventures. DuBois doesn’t deal with the consequences of having a gangster on call, but that’s just part of the set-aside reality.

Entertaining enough. Not distinctive enough to distinguish it from the crowd, but I will probably eventually read the rest of the series.

Some series I gave up, though, even though they’re as well written as Primary Storm. Parker’s Spenser seemed to be trying too hard to be a Renaissance Man, and I didn’t quite buy it. I read the first fifteen or so Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who … books, until I reached my Recommended Lifetime Allowance of quaint and quirky. (The cats who are the featured characters are like adding high-fructose whipped cream to a super-sugar sundae and giving it to a diabetic.) I read the fist ten — really, 10? That many? — Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell, even though the certitude that I loathed the characters (not just Scarpetta, but all of them) grew with each one. I suppose the soap-opera aspects overrode my good sense. I only got through the first three Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane because I’d bought an omnibus with all three; I knew after the first one that Spillane’s writing and Hammer’s attitudes weren’t for me.

I picked up Colin Dexter’s Last Seen Wearing as a mistake — I thought it was Hilary Waugh’s novel of the same name. Still, as Dexter’s second Inspector Morse book, published in 1976, I could have done much worse.

Morse is a chief inspector near Oxford, England. After another investigator dies, he’s supposed to take over that investigator’s final case: a reopened missing person case. A note has arrived, allegedly from the missing girl; Morse needs to find the girl or at least if the note is real. Morse and his supervisor admit the strong possibility the girl is dead. So Morse and his sergeant begin investigating a case that takes them south to London’s seamy side and northwest to rural Wales.

I’d be fooling myself if I let my fondness for DuBois make me think the Lewis Cole series is better than the Inpector Morse series. One book, and I can see which way the wind blows on that one. Morse is conflicted, with interesting hobbies and a fondness for the bottle, and is dedicated to his work without letting it overwhelm the rest of his life. Most interesting is that he’s the fictional detective who’s the most like a mystery reader I’ve ever seen. Morse will jump to outlandish conclusions readers know aren’t outlandish because readers have seen them or solutions very like them in mysteries before. Like a reader, Morse feels that rush of euphoria when he puts the odd pieces together into something logical and is crushed when investigation reveals he’s wrong. And make no mistake, Morse makes more than a few wrong guesses, but he has the sense to investigate before accusing anyone.

So why do I prefer Lewis Cole to Inpsector Morse? It isn’t the writing; there’s nothing wrong with DuBois, but Dexter’s a better prose stylist. Perhaps it’s merely a cultural difference; Morse is English, Cole an American — and not a crusty New Englander, despite his protestations. DuBois’s intermittent realism isn’t a factor, since the age of Morse’s series makes it seem less real to a modern reader. (It may have been scrupulous for its time, though.) Cole is less constrained by rules and common morality that ties up Morse, even if Morse had an inclination toward vigilantism. But that’s not very appealing to me; it’s the constraints that often gives a story its power, and it seems the secondary villains are artificially more constrained than Cole is.

None of those, I think, is pertinent. It all boils down to this: I had decided I liked DuBois more before I started reading, and Dexter, while better, wasn’t so much better to make me change my mind.

It’s sad that preconceptions have such an effect on my reading habits. But that’s all I can think of that explains it.

In 2004, sportswriter Sam Walker decided to play fantasy baseball for the first time. Not one to dream small, Walker decided to seek entry in Tout Wars, the top fantasy baseball league, which is stocked with fantasy baseball experts — the type who make their living giving fantasy advice. Walker thought it would be an interesting experiment if he pitted his knowledge of the human side of the sport — interviewing players and watching them nightly on the field and in the clubhouse — against the experts’ knowledge of the numbers. He was accepted into the league, and Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe is the result, recounting Walker’s descent into futile obsession.

I don’t care for fantasy sports; the games and players are interesting enough without attaching any extra significance. But Fantasyland does show the various personalities that have popped up around the fantasy baseball industry. For those who play fantasy baseball, I would think that would be the most interesting: getting a first-hand, outsider’s impression of all those people who sit at the top of the heap and make mostly consequenceless pronouncements like a pundit.

Part of the appeal of this kind of book is that outsider view. But another part is that the author, that outsider, is somewhat like the reader — he (or she) lives in something akin to the reader’s situation, or at least within aspiration of the reader’s situation. Walker is a sportswriter, which is a rarified position in that there aren’t many of them and they have access most sports fans find appealing. But we all know that sportwriters, whatever their gifts and access, aren’t exactly rock stars or tycoons. Well, I thought I knew that:

To produce [a scouting report on all major-league players], I’ve spent $7,400 on scouting trips … another $1,800 on computer components and software upgrades, and $895 on books, magazines, encyclopedias, and subscriptions to every Roto Web site that accepted my credit card. Sig’s and Nando’s [Walker’s assistants for the Tout Wars competition] salaries and expenses amount to another $3,000 a month, and considering all the extras … [the scouting report is] worth about $19,500, which is roughly the cost of a nicely equipped Subaru Legacy. (133)

That’s a considerable chunk of change, although one I could almost believe someone could spend on an obsession. But you’d think it would have a near life-wrecking effect on him. The money doesn’t seem to affect Walker, though. And it gets worse:

In the last five months, I have vanished from polite society. I’ve stopped calling friends and lost touch with colleagues. I have skipped four weddings and forgotten to send my brother a birthday card. I have spent sixty days on the road without taking a vacation, much less a day off, and leaned on my wife to manage our household affairs. If I tallied up every last bill, I’ve spent close to $46,000. (286-7; emphasis mine)

There’s a quick way to lose sympathy. Walker spent very nearly $50 grand, but financial problems aren’t evidently part of the problems Tout Wars wreaked on his life. At that point, Rotisserie baseball becomes less a hobby or obsession than you have too much damn money. Screw you; I don’t care what games you play on your f*&king planet.

And now, for the fifth of five nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

The Graveyard Book is the story of Nobody “Bod” Owens, a baby who wanders into a graveyard after his family is assassinated. The graveyard’s dead denizens raise Bod as their own, and through a series of vignettes — short stories? interrelated tales? — we see Bod grow from childhood to an adult.

The Graveyard Book left me more confused and turned around than any of the other nominees, despite the more unconventional and complex plots featured in those books. I was puzzled as to the reason, and I finally decided that it was completely unlike the others on the ballot. The Graveyard Book has already been awarded the Newbery Award, so I know it hasn’t been nominated through a fluke. (It’s Gaiman; a fluke would have been unlikely in any event.) It does seem to be aimed at a younger audience than any of the other nominees, though, and I wondered more than once whether I was too old for it. It is the only fantasy nominated. Gaiman himself is distinctly different; his voice is gentle, his prose so smooth that I got the impression momentous things were passing me without me noticing.

That had to be it: Gaiman was being too subtle for me. How else to explain that I felt I was reading a story Ray Bradbury had done years ago — his Elliott family stories, like “Homecoming” and “Uncle Einar” — and had arguably done better? Gaiman openly admits Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, which I have not read, were an inspiration; obviously I am missing something there. Maybe it’s not age; maybe my prose sensors are tuned wrong. What I feel are stories told with a voice so soft I almost expect the book to be printed in invisible ink is “magical, haunting prose,” according to the American Library Association.

I’m not saying The Graveyard Book isn’t a good book. There are a lot of interesting details: life in the graveyard, Silas and the Honour Guard, the Jacks of All Trades, and Bod’s relationship with Scarlett, which doesn’t turn out like I expected. But they’re not the focus of the story. Bod is. And for some reason, Bod doesn’t interest me. I don’t know why. He’s clever, at times; he’s courageous at times. I wasn’t convinced by his final solution, but that’s not a problem; I didn’t feel The Graveyard Book needed an ending, as it seemed more like a connected set of short stories than a novel.

Maybe that’s it — maybe I was expecting a stronger coherence that I didn’t find in the text, and that threw me off.

No, it’s not.

What it comes down to is I never connected with Bod. The book is rich in atmosphere. I’m not sure I would go as far as “magical” or “haunting,” but Gaiman doesn’t skimp on the feel or the setting. The melancholy, the different kind of life found in a cemetery — Gaiman nails that. It’s not the vivid weirdness readers find in Saturn’s Children or Anathem, but it’s just as unique. It’s a gray uniqueness, and it rubs off on Bod, making him a less vivid character.

And that’s what it was: I wasn’t able to enjoy a protagonist who grew up and lived his life half dead, who was taught not to make much of an impression on the living. I’m living, and Bod didn’t make much of an impression on me. As a matter of fact, while reviewing the book to write this, I was amazed by how much of what Bod did had already faded from memory …

Random flaw: While I finally decided adults can enjoy The Graveyard Book as much as children, anyone with a driver’s license won’t see much mystery in Mr. Frost’s true identity, no matter how coy Gaiman is about it.

Random praise: You don’t often find children’s literature that touches upon the law of unintended consequences, as The Graveyard Book does. Well, I don’t, at least.

Other nominees:

• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
  
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
  
• Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
  
• Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

When I wrote this post on Little Brother and Anathem, I was had no idea I was writing about two of the Best Novel Hugo nominees. (Mostly because the nominations hadn’t come out yet.) They were just two books I read in December. But with those two down, my wife and I decided to read all five of the nominees, just to see which one we considered the best.

The “Zoe” in Zoe’s Tale is a teenage girl who accompanies her adoptive father and mother (plus two alien bodyguards) to colonize a new planet. In Tale, John Scalzi is telling the flipside of The Lost Colony, part of his “Old Man’s War” series of books, with Tale concentrating on Zoe rather than her parents. As he says in his afterword, telling the same story from a different point of view is difficult almost to the point of foolishness — the only successful examples I can think of are Mary Stolz’s A Dog of Barkham Street / The Bully of Barkham Street and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game / Ender’s Shadow, although your mileage may vary on the second one.

Zoe’s story is somewhat disjointed. It starts on the bucolic colony planet of Huckleberry; then she and her family go to settle the planet of Roanoke as the first group from colony planets to settle a new planet. They are lost for a year, then used as bait for an alien battle fleet; while Zoe tries to settle into a teenager’s role on the colony (albeit the daughter of the colony’s leaders, who happens to have frightening alien bodyguards), the colony remains a prime target in the war. Zoe rockets from a somewhat tepid (for a teenager) romance with a fellow adolescent colonist to self-defense classes with her bodyguards to worrying about planetary defenses. Although the disjointed feel fits Zoe’s life — she’s trying to be a normal girl, but she is, in some quarters, a celebrity, and she is actually a provision in a treaty between humanity and her bodyguards’ race — it makes it less enjoyable to read.

Zoe’s sarcastic narration, however, does keep the reader going. Although my wife says the lack of teenage hormones is unrealistic — and I agree, from what I know — Zoe does come across as one of those confident teenage girls who hold all the power because of her intelligence, wit, and gender. Frankly, if I were one of her classmates, I would most likely hate her, and at least a part of that would be jealousy. But as a reader, I enjoyed her voice very much.

Zoe’s Tale reminds me uncomfortably of The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro. I didn’t care for that one either, although it did win the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2001. Both are stories of technologically advanced people in rustic environments, dealing with situations beyond their understanding; however, I didn’t think of those similarities until much later. What came first to mind was in both books, I felt as if I were coming into the middle of a story I didn’t much care about, and after I had patiently listened to that story for most of the novel, the plot zoomed off into space for another story. What I found the most interesting in Scalzi’s afterword was that one of the reasons he wrote Zoe’s Tale was to fill in some of the “holes” / plot shortcomings suggested by The Lost Colony. Ironically, I found Zoe’s Tale no less riddled with those same problems.

Random flaw: The colonists are sent to a planet they call Roanoke, and their settlement is named “Croatoan.” Given that setup, how could they not expect something to go dreadfully wrong?

Random praise: The poetry that Enzo, Zoe’s boyfriend, writes for her is adorable and fits a relationship where being too amorous could get the boyfriend killed by overzealous bodyguards.


While Zoe’s Tale has been partially written (at least in plot) before, Saturn’s Children sits alone in its author’s library. Charles Stross has written a weird story — and that’s good, really.

Children is set in the far future. Humanity is gone, and it’s not all that fondly remembered; their progeny, androids, have colonized the solar system and beyond. The anthropomorphic androids are all built to immediately obey humans, something they resent but also can’t help but enjoy in some way (they’re programmed to enjoy it, after all). Those built after humanity’s downfall don’t resemble humanity — they’re either short and compact, to better deal with the rigors and high costs of getting mass into space, or they’re not built on human lines at all.

Freya, one of the anthropomorphic constructs, is the protagonist. Although she’s never seen a human, she refers to them as her One True Love — she was built as a sexbot. But now she’s doubly redundant: no humans to sex (that doesn’t stop her from copulating with a wide variety of artificial creations) and her human lines too big and bulky for space travel and fashion. After offending one of the powerful android aristocracy — those who were built among human lines but managed to be among the first to buy their own freedom — she’s thrown into an elaborate and bizarre conspiracy. At times utterly confusing as only a conspiracy where faces and identities are a convenient fiction can be, Freya finds herself journeying from Venus to Mercury to Mars and beyond, all while someone is trying to kill her.

Little Brother is a very definite reaction to the Bush era — or, if you’re more charitable toward the Bush administration, 21st century notions of privacy vs. public and corporate interest — but I think Children is every bit as connected to Bush’s reign, albeit in a more subtle way. (My wife disagrees, so you’re not alone — you’re probably in the majority.) Children’s conspiracy involves the attempt to resurrect the human species. This is a dangerous proposition, of course, given that humanity has a god-like hold on most androids, and those androids have a lord-vassal hold on the rest of the artificial population. Those who are resurrecting humanity believe they will have a hold on the first human, making them lords of all. To me, this is reminiscent of the evolving Republican effort to lay claim to God, a God peculiar to them; they have constructed a personal, private God they can control and use to bludgeon their opponents in public discourse, forgetting the real God wouldn’t be anything like the God they envision. He is dangerous (omnipotence is always dangerous) and uncontrollable; if the real God were injected into human life, the results would be cataclysmic for the society we have constructed. But they can’t see that, and since they don’t really expect the re-emergence of God, the danger doesn’t occur to them. The androids bringing back humanity don’t expect any problems either — they just see how it will give them power.

I can’t decide how I feel about Children. It races back and forth from thriller to pure prurience to thought provoking to pure confusing. In the end, though, it’s exciting and imaginative while making the reader think a little. That has to be good.

Not-so-random flaw: I do not need to know exactly how robots simulate human responses to arousal and sex. Unfortunately, now I do.

Random praise: To gain their freedom, the androids must declare themselves corporations and keep paying their corporate taxes. Neat twist; since a corporation is legally a person who never dies, androids fit that definition neatly.

When I was in junior high, my parents got me a subscription to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I had been introduced to the digest magazine when my father brought one home from the printing plant where he worked — November ’87, the cover indelibly engraved into my mind despite it being relatively lackluster. My parents thought I didn’t like it, so I didn’t get the subscription until the October 1988 issue. I still have it — still have both of them, actually. I don’t remember much about the stories, except for the cover story from the ’87 issue by Brendan DuBois and “Blowup” by Dick Stodghill in ’88. Still; it was 20 years ago.

But the one story I thought was better than all the rest — better, at least, than all the other ones from the first year of my subscription — was “The Dark, Shining Street” by Dan Crawford in the second issue, November ‘88. It is, in retrospect, an odd story: a combination of private eye yarn, dystopic future, and absurdity, as it’s capped off with a lycanthropic robot. The change is brought on by a program — virus, really — causing a sudden transformation of temperament and shape (and size and mass).

But I thought it was great at the time; I’m sure the combination of sci-fi and mystery hit a nerve with an impact all out of proportion to its quality. Perhaps it was the first glimmer of sci-fi I had seen, since my parents don’t care for the genre and had controlled my entertainment options. (Well, that’s not true; I had been blazing through Ray Bradbury and Douglas Adams by then, but I certainly hadn’t read much sci-fi.) I even, for a few seconds, decided to list my favorite stories from the magazine and give them the “Ajax Awards,” which were named after one of the characters from “Street.” I still have a fondness for the name Ajax that I can’t quite explain to this day.

I recently re-read “Street.” It held up probably as well as it would have to any adult reading it. It’s still a good story, despite its flight of fancy. I wouldn’t name any awards after the characters, sci-fi and noir detectives mashed together is a nice combo. And the sequel to the story, “On the Street Again” (April 1989), was an acceptable revisiting of the setting without being overly memorable (although the mention of sex bots did stick in my adolescent mind).

According to my memory, Crawford published stories in just about every issue. Obviously, according to this list, that isn’t close to true: he published nine stories over the two years I had a subscription. In my mind, he published so much I had considered whether “Dan Crawford” was a house name for AHMM. I don’t know why my memory did this to me and why it didn’t ascribe the same level of prolificness to other authors I admired, like DuBois, Stodghill, or Stephen Wasylyk.

When I re-started subscribing in 2006, I decided to look up those authors and see whether they had published any novels or collections. DuBois is the best known of the group; he’s published eleven novels and two short story collections. Surprisingly, Stodghill and Wasylyk have virtually no books to their names. Crawford falls somewhere in between, having a fantasy / mystery series that lasted three books, and they’re considered more fantasy than mystery. But Crawford was always straddling the line between mystery and speculative fiction; I have a feeling the mystery market was the one more willing to publish him, although I was pleased to find he had published a story in the August 1992 Dragon Magazine.

The series features a giant, muscular black female bodyguard named Nimnestl, who guards a boy king from threats, and a young girl from the slums named Polijn. I had read stories featuring Polijn from AHMM before: “Late and Soon, Getting and Spending” (June 1990), “Cargo” (August 1990), “Emeralds? Oh, Those Emeralds” (March 2007), and “The Last of the Magic” (May 2007). The last is Crawford’s most recent publication. Those four stories (I can’t find a list of the complete Polijn, sadly) reflect Polijn’s life a decade or more after the novels, with her an accomplished but wandering minstrel seeking to eke out a living. The world Polijn lives in is low magic, high superstition, and the tone is one of gentle moralization and cleverness, with just enough danger to keep the story going.

In the first of the “Cat and Mouse” novels, The Sure Death of a Mouse (published after the second novel, for some reason), none of that is evident. Danger is everywhere, with multiple murderers littering a castle with bodies and intrigue, the morals are gray, and the detectives are about as clever as a brain-damaged sheep. It is one of those odd mystery stories in which the murderers are caught, for the most part, because they run out of people to kill, and therefore are the only ones left to arrest. (See I, the Jury, the first Mike Hammer story, for a similar example. Mike wasn’t too bright, and neither is Nimnestl.) It doesn’t help that Crawford tosses out names like beads at Mardi Gras, and his fantasy names are almost as bad as my wife complains some of mine are. I quickly lost track of who was dead, who was in the story, and who was just being referenced.

There are some nice points, of course. Crawford indulges an arch sense of humor that isn’t in his Polijn stories and is disguised behind noir narration in some of his detective stories. Nimnestl is part of a short list of black female fantasy protagonists, and she is certainly one of the very few whose physical power is feared by her white and male peers. I liked the wizard regent, who was not afraid to show how much he disdained everyone besides Nimnestl without being portrayed as evil.

Eventually, I’ll get to the other two stories, Rouse a Sleeping Cat and A Wild Dog and Lone. Neither is at the top of my priorities.

I mainly read Mouse to indulge my curiosity about Crawford. I know nothing about the man, other than some of his output. This seems bizarre to me; how does a man write three novels and more than 60 stories for the two biggest mystery magazines over 20 years and not leave a larger trace? You can find everything on the Internet, but you can’t find much on Crawford. Why? It doesn’t seem right — and I don’t mean it doesn’t sound fair, but it just doesn’t seem likely or plausible. Someone, somewhere out there, should have an affection for the man’s works that rivals my own, and that someone should have put together something on the man. It’s just odd, I tell you. Perhaps I overestimate what fame is, though.

I haven’t seen anything from Crawford in the last two years, which leaves me a little worried. Is he still writing? Is he still alive? I don’t know. “The Last of the Magic” seems like the kind of a story a man write as his own epitaph, the story of a wizard dividing his possessions to help his neighbors as he prepares to die.

It would be an exaggeration — a lie, really — to say Crawford inspired me to become a writer, but it would also be a lie — exaggeration, perhaps — to say he didn’t leave an impression on me. The similarity in genres is a bit suspicious, to say the least. I hope there’s at least one more story from Crawford — hope there’s many more, actually.

OK, here’s the deal: You can’t use Stan Lee or the Fantastic Four as a guide for your plotting and expect the results to make any sense.

You see, in Fantastic Four #1, a story written back in 1961 by Lee for children, super-smart scientist Reed Richards decides to steal “his” rocket, which the government had grounded, and blast into space. He would go on the space flight, of course; he’d also picked his college roommate, Ben Grimm, to go along. That was all right, because, hey, Grimm had flown in the war, and he was a top pilot. If you’re going to have to choose someone to fly your rocket from the non-NASA population, he’s a good choice.

But Reed needs more people to man the rocket. So he chooses his girlfriend, Sue Storm, and her half-wit brother, Johnny, to round out the crew. It’s debatable which is the dumber choice: Johnny would certainly qualify now, but Lee was not ahead of the times when it came to characterizations of females, so Sue often comes across as a “Don’t-ask-me-I’m-a-girl” type. Johnny at least was a gearhead. So it’s a wash, except to show Reed probably isn’t that smart after all, and that doesn’t even get into the lack of shielding that allowed cosmic rays to mutate the crew.

Now, we move on to The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. At the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, an astronomer hears music from an alien civilization. He invites his friends — a Jesuit priest, a computer programmer, and a pair of 60-year-olds, a doctor and an engineer — to listen before making the discovery public. The priest moots the point of the five of them journeying to the planet where the music is coming from.

And the Jesuits actually spend millions — tens of millions? Hundreds? — to put that crew and a few others on its way to that planet. (The Jesuits don’t do much better choosing the three other crew members, to be fair.) Somewhere, Reed Richards is listening, shaking his head sadly. That trick never works.

Not to spoil anything, because it’s given away in the first chapter, but the mission does fail spectacularly. Russell doesn’t explicitly say it’s because the mission was manned by a group of friends instead of, you know, experts, but when things are falling apart, you have to think a better crew roster might have helped. Russell was trying to show how good intentions can go horribly awry in The Sparrow, but instead her book showed how the Jesuits can look like idiots, even in the future.

Last week the Hugo Award nominees were announced. And after being surprised by some of the categories (Best Semiprozine? Wait, I’ve submitted to most of those; Best Fan Writer? Fan Artist?), I was shocked to realize I’ve already read read two of the Best Novel nominees.

(I was also surprised to discover I had seen four of the five nominees in both the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form; I was really surprised when I thought for a second and realized one of the Short Form nominees, Doctor Who’s “Silence in the Library / “Forest of the Dead,” is only a couple of minutes shorter than Wall-E, a Long Form nominee. And METAtropolis, another Long Form nominee, appears to be an audiobook anthology.)

In any event, the thought of having read all five Best Novel nominees before the awards ceremony in August (and by extension being able to say I’ve read this year’s winner) was too good a chance to pass up. My wife agreed. So for the next few months, we will be reading the nominees, starting with Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. And we will see if the Hugo voters make the right choice. (Or just a different choice.)

I don’t blog about topics just after I think of an idea. I usually like to let the idea simmer. (This is sad but true, even for my smallest posts.) This time, however, I have to make an exception.

Via Mark Evanier’s blog, I found a Los Angeles Times map of the city that gives firm boundaries of where the city’s neighborhoods truly lie. As Evanier notes, these boundaries aren’t perfect, and many people object to them. But they probably make a good starting point for a discussion to the true boundaries. Interestingly, if you click on a neighborhood, the the Times has a commenting function that not only allows users to write what they think of their outline but also lets the commenter draw his own borders.

When I was first writing full time, I looked all around for information like this. Many resources, like the one I used — Los Angeles A to Z : An Encyclopedia of the City and County by Leonard and Dale Pitt — gave rough boundaries, outlining the general streets. But they didn’t actually have maps, just street names and intersections (or worse yet, landmarks). At the time, I had trouble finding maps granular enough to pin down these nebulous markers, but now I can see where a neighborhood is and what its neighbors are. Resources such as Wikipedia can give me a rough idea of each neighborhood’s reputation and demographic breakdown.

And then there’s Google Street View, which puts a cherry on top of the Awesome Reference Sundae.

A few weeks ago, I finished Austin Grossman’s remarkable Soon I Will Be Invincible. It’s an outstanding book, one I recommend to anyone who enjoys superhero stories, even if those stories are superhero movies and you don’t think you actually enjoy superheroes.

Invincible follows two characters: Fatale, an unassuming young woman who was horrifically injured in an accident and turned into a cyborg, and Dr. Impossible, who is a mad genius. The story is Dr. Impossible’s, without a doubt, although Fatale gets almost enough time to tell her story. Well, not her story, exactly, but what it’s like being a cyborg and learning about the history of the group she joins, the Champions.

With Dr. Impossible, Grossman achieves the enviable — the same trick John Milton pulls with Satan in Paradise Lost. Dr. Impossible seems more sympathetic than the Champions. He’s active, he’s dynamic, he’s more clever, he’s … more sympathetic. He’s more fun than the neurotic Champions, who are always reacting to his plans. Dr. Impossible has faced drubbings from superteams in the past and has always returned, undaunted. He’s the underdog who’s about to win, or at least he thinks he is. I rooted for him, hoping that this time, he’d come out on top … Of course people would suffer, but that’s just because they were resisting him. Dr. Impossible doesn’t want to kill people; he just wants to be given his due.

And being a villain just seems more fun than being a hero. It does, in some ways, in the comics as well, if you give it some thought. Heroes stand to lose everything, every time there’s a fight. And there are so, so many fights. Villains steadily build, off panel, gaining victories and luxuries until there’s a fight. They always lose, but losing is rarely fatal, and they can come back again later. The villains always come back. It’s a rule in superhero universes, more inviolate than gravity or the law of conservation of energy. (Because those get broken all the time.)

It’s extremely fun without being flippant, and frankly, I’d love a sequel. But that would be hard to do without overexposing Dr. Impossible — his villainous point of view is not unique, but it is refreshingly rare — or creating a new viewpoint character who might not be as interesting. Still, I would enjoy seeing Grossman take the chance.

After returning from seeing Coraline (in 3-D!) on Saturday, I found my author’s copy of Leading Edge #56 in my mailbox. There was no note, no personal letter — not that I expected one or was entitled to one — just the issue in a small envelope. Yesterday, the same was repeated with my promised second author’s copy.

I’m sitting here, looking at it right now. My story, “All This, and Brains Too” is one of five short stories in the issue. I have not read the other stories. I’ll get around to it some day. In the meantime, I’m having trouble understanding the significance. And not just because the cover date is December 2008, and I got my copy in February 2009.

I keep asking, What does this mean? Somehow, I think it should have my name and “Success!” emblazoned on the cover. Oddly, it does not. It’s another issue of a biannual periodical that’s been coming out for more than a quarter century. For the editors, it probably was nothing special. I have been reading the English language for almost three decades, and that ability does nothing to help me figure out what it all means.

Like most of the English language that has been used by its speakers, it probably means nothing.

For those of you who would like to read the story, Leading Edge has an order form at http://leadingedgemagazine.com/pdf/orderForm.pdf. They haven’t added #56 to the form yet, but I’m sure they’d figure it out if you penciled the issue number in. (Or perhaps the issue hasn’t been sent to the general public yet, in which case they’re probably not ready for orders yet.) The price is $5.95, and that includes shipping and handling. Quite reasonable.

I just returned a copy of Moonlighting, Seasons 1 & 2, to my local library after watching the first four discs. Why only four of the six discs? Because the library decided to divide the set into v. 1 and 2, secreting the last two discs into a second volume I didn’t realize existed until a few days ago.

Three things occur to me after watching the fifteen episodes:

1. The theme song to Moonlighting is one of the worst earworms I have ever heard. I usually skip the theme song on DVDs to save time. I skipped the Moonlighting theme out of self preservation. For the same reason, I beg you not to click the above link.
   
   
2. They like to put the soft focus on Cybil Shepherd an awful lot. I thought my TV’s focus was going out by the end of the third disc.
   
   
3. There is a five-minute-or-so sequence at the beginning of Season 2 — the second series premiere, as a matter of fact: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” — that is a near-perfect distillation of the ’80s. The episode starts with a cocaine deal that turns into a botched drug bust, which immediately segues into a white yuppie doing a bad rap with two unemployed black breakdancers doing backing vocals. I’m sure there could be a way to make it perfect, but I can’t quite figure it out.
   
   

Oh, sure. All those hopemongers out there are going to tell you everything’s going to be fine and dandy now that President Obama has taken over. The economy will get back on track, civil liberties will be restored, war will end, and tiny angels will clean your toilets and take the dog for a walk on cold winter days. Sure, fine, if prosperity and peace and personal freedom and human / canine hygiene are what you care about. Great. But for the rest of us, here’s what we have to fear in the next four (or God forbid, eight) years:



Nontraditional families of Spider-Men infiltrating our neighborhoods.

Oh, great, I hear you saying. Let them lead their lives, we’ll live ours, everything will be OK. But do you really want them moving in next door, with their filthy arachnid-based ways? Leaving piles of web in your yard? Attracting supervillains day and night with their blatant, disgusting hero lifestyle? And what are they really trying to hide with all that black fabric? It’s something worse than ketchup stains, I can tell you that. (Hint: Arugula smuggling.)

Don’t think this will happen? It’s just a matter of time, friends. Just a matter of time. We all know how liberals (and by association, all Democrats) love the homosexuals. They’d probably subsidize it if they could, handing out cash to gays to pay for their sex. (Although former Sen. Larry Craig, R-ID, has already beat them to the punch. Preemptive strike!) But when you consider President Obama’s fascination with the “Spider-Man lifestyle,” it’s just a matter of time.

First, it will be a “family” of them buying a home in your neighborhood. Admittedly, they will be buying a home, but that’s not the point, and how did they get the money to buy a home, anyway? Isn’t that suspicious? Then, their flagrant and outrageous ways will attract more of them, and your area will get a reputation. Normal people won’t want to live there, and your normal neighbors — you know, the ones with decent American lifestyles revolving around Hummel-figurine or Internet-porn addictions — will all move away. Soon, you'll be surrounded by an infestation of Filthy Neighborhood Spider-Men.

Oh, sure. It seems farfetched now. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re paying an exterminator $10,000 to get rid of your symbiote infestations just before you hear the scream of pumpkin bombs from Norman Osborn’s glider as he carpet bombs the neighborhood.

It’s cruel but just. Sometimes to save a neighborhood, you have to destroy it and its overly friendly Spider-Men.