Books, books, books
Yeah, not as enticing as "Girls, girls, girls" -- or really, given my assumed audience, "boys, boys, boys." But I have many more books than boys (and I'm not sharing him). Fantasy and science fiction.
Robin McKinley, Sunshine: When you write a vampire novel, you have to make a bunch of decisions. Are you dealing with a secret world operating underneath the normal world, or an openly vampire-laden society? Are vampires necessarily nasty or tragically romantic, or somewhere in between? Stoker's rules, Whedon's, Rice's, or one from Column A and one from Column B? McKinley's version of the vampire romance is set in a society ravaged by a war with the Dark Others (don't worry, that name is as ridiculously goth as it gets), slowly recovering but still under threat. Rae, commonly known as Sunshine, is a baker who loves nothing more than feeding people cinnamon buns the size of their heads. Then she goes out to the lake one night, and ends up chained to a wall as food for a vampire who is himself being punished by a master vampire. She discovers that her heritage gives her special skills, and ... I can't decide whether this description is unfair or not. McKinley has the talent to make these well-worn elements intriguing; she's done retellings of fairy tales before, and this is just a step into the modern vampire fairy tale. The narrator's practical voice helps a lot, as do several plot points: Vampires aren't nice, or even good-looking, and the romance doesn't quite work the way I thought it would. What it comes down to is that if the explanation for something is going to be "magic," I want there to be rules that are followed and no cheating, but the story of the magic-worker discovering that she has powers that make her extra-special even in a magical world is inherently in conflict with my preference. This is a good vampire book, but I might be happier with a sequel in which Rae knows her limits and has to work within them. (As a side note, it's interesting how much more explicit sexual description is acceptable in standard fantasy today than twenty years ago, or even ten. As a couple of scenes in this book show, Anita Blake isn't the only one who's getting more Letters-to-Penthouse-like over time. I think it's a general social phenomenon, and not just Hamilton's kinks getting more exposure.)
Kate Wilhelm, Cambio Bay: In Cambio Bay on the coast of California, where the spirits have dwelled for a thousand years, there's a guesthouse. A motley array of strangers is drawn to it, including a thirtysomething real estate agent with a bit of a chip on her shoulder, a man who's lost his wife and son under terrible but mysterious circumstances, a nerdy professor, and a young woman and her mute child on the run. Wilhelm creates vivid characters, but here again I was frustrated by the explanation that "magic" brought everyone together and made necessary events happen. Maybe it's that I don't like predestination and want my characters to exhibit free will, as contradictory as that is for fictional constructs. Maybe it's that I want there to be irresistable forces and immovable objects that the characters and the plot have to work around, instead of irresistable forces and immovable objects that put all the characters exactly where they need to be. Two of the characters, the real estate agent and the widower, seem like real adults tossed into a world gone mad, but the others seem too often like puppets going where they're jerked, and unaware of it.
Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population: I liked Moon's The Speed of Dark, about an autistic man in the very near future, faced with a possible cure for autism as well as the ordinary problems of his life, so I picked up this more sf-intensive story. Ofelia is a cranky old woman who refuses to leave Colony 3245.12 with everybody else when the corporation that sponsored the colonization attempt decides to give up. She wants people to stop bothering her. They do, until another colonization party comes down a thousand miles away and is wiped out by natives. Then the natives decide to go exploring, down where Ofelia lives; meanwhile, the human authorities are trying to figure out what to do with a genuine first contact. Moon conveyed Ofelia's annoyance with humanity quite well, and I really liked her initial encounters with the aliens, who were frightening and strange but not quite deadly. The resolution was a bit too neat, and she switched to alien POV too few times to be balanced and too many to be consistent, but anybody who knows a feisty, occasionally annoying old lady should recognize Ofelia, and she's definitely a lot more enjoyable on the printed page, harassing other characters.
Diana Wynne Jones, Drowned Ammet: This is the second book in the Dalemark Quartet, about a land divided by bad government. Mitt wants to fight the "tyrannical earl Hadd," as the back of the book says, but first he has to figure out who's really on his side, and it might not be who he thinks. Unlike too many YA novels, this one features adults who really, truly want to take care of their children and have good reasons for their oppressive-seeming actions, as well as irresponsible and treacherous adults who also operate on perfectly understandable motives. In other words, there are real people here, in all their pettiness and grace. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series (which is published; I'm just slow to read mass paperbacks because they're harder to carry to the gym).
F. Paul Wilson, Conspiracies: Repairman Jack fixes things, things other people won't or can't fix, like abusive husbands. He's had brushes with the paranormal before, but he doesn't like to think about that now that he's got a steady girlfriend with a beautiful young daughter. When a distraught husband comes to him seeking help finding his missing wife, he plunges into her world of conspiracy theorists, believers in alien abductions, unmarked helicopters, and world domination by Masons. But there's something more going on at the nutcase convention, something that harkens back to his days fighting the supernatural. I wasn't that interested in the plot, which seemed more like a setup, allowing Jack to find out some details of the vast darkness he's presumably going to confront later on, than like a completely independent story. On the other hand, Jack gives good hard-boiled snark, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon: Breaking news! Genre fiction can be respectable! So respectable that McSweeney's will do a special book for stories in which stuff actually happens, instead of stories about the bittersweet pain of divorce and epiphanies in the grocery aisle. For those of us who already knew that genre fiction could be worthwhile, the most amazing thing is that Chabon manages to avoid deadly condescension in his introduction. Nick Hornby has a great story about the VCR of the gods (or maybe the VCR of Satan), and Harlan Ellison delivers an absolutely characteristic tale about a guy who finds out the Meaning of Life - and I mean that as a compliment, in case it's unclear. Stephen King tells another Gunslinger story, which will be the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing; Elmore Leonard has a jazzy little cops-and-robbers bit; Laurie King finds danger in the narrator's own back yard, and manages to make it both exciting and homey; and Karen Joy Fowler tells a mummy story that's not quite the usual version of the curse. Otherwise, I was either unmoved (Neil Gaiman) or affirmatively unimpressed (Dave Eggers, Sherman Alexie) by writers whose other works I've sometimes enjoyed. I just don't get Kelly Link. I think she's the fantasist liked by those more condescending than Chabon. Her story here has all the trappings of fairy tales -- almost literally given all the cat-skinning that goes on -- and none of the resonance. And where was David Foster Wallace? Isn't he part of that whole McSweeney's crew?
Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon: What do you expect from the dollar racks at the Strand? This fantasy starts with old myths of the Great Mother/Moon/Crone/Destroyer, and the male principle that wants to control her, and plays them out among various professors and students at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, a made-up school in Washington, DC. Hand & I started off badly because her Washington is nothing like my Washington, though I did eventually recognize Capitol Hill in its humidity-sodden summer glory. The narrative has the form: Weird stuff happens (but little did I, the narrator, know what was to come ...); weird stuff happens (more ominous mutterings from the narrator); two decades later, more weird stuff happens; there's love in the ruins and a final bout of weird, ending with the restoration of order. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn’t interesting, either.
Gathering the Bones, edited by Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell & Jack Dann: Okay, this one impressed me. Just the more memorable stories: Robert Devereaux's "Li'l Miss Ultrasound" is a creepy variant of the "If this goes on..." story about the intersection of fetal monitoring technology and beauty pageants. Kim Newman's "The Intervention" is a serenely Kafkaesque story about a man who has done something terrible - if only they'd tell him what it is. Janeen Webb's "Blake's Angel" is about angels who are muses, but only if they're kept enslaved. Gahan Wilson's "The Big Green Grin" could be a Twilight Zone episode played out in the mind of a young boy. Gary Fry's "Both And" does a great job with the horror of ordinary existence, the horror of things that don't happen. Michael Marshall Smith's "The Right Men" is a clockwork construction in which all the gears are driven by revenge. Fruma Klass's "Jennifer's Turn" is another "If this goes on ..." about the costs of health care and of human indifference. Adam L.G. Nevill's "Mother's Milk" is the first story that's ever made me retch just from the descriptions; it is not, not, not for the faint of heart (or stomach), though it's not at all gory - all the scary stuff is white, not red. Tim Waggoner's "Picking Up Courtney" has the dreamy horror of a parent's nightmare. Melanie Tem's "Gardens," by contrast, is a child's nightmare of failure to separate, a cycle of misery rolling down the generations. There are a bunch of other stories, and most are fairly short, like a flurry of punches.
Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon: I read Ender's Game in novel form, and thought it was fine. But what happens to weapons when the war is over? You can put a sword in a sheath, but where do you put an eleven-year-old military genius? Ender has left Earth for the stars, while a number of his fellow Battle School alumni try to adjust to being children - or at least, being treated like children - while governments plot the best way to use their military talents. Meanwhile, Ender's brother Peter, the bitter genius who wasn't quite good enough, is trying to consolidate his own power. This is a clever setup. Unfortunately, it's populated by automatons. I don't recognize these kids as *people*, much less children. There's a lot of talk, including talk about how smart the protagonists are, but not much in the way of demonstrations.
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others: I mentioned this a while ago, but I'm talking about it again so that you all are reminded to go read it. For me, the best sf is about ideas about people, and that's what Chiang has. Z. thought that Chiang had too many ideas and too few people, but I was blown away. "Division by Zero" has a mathematical plot, and reminds me of the David Berlinski quote: "The concept of a limit is simple. It is the definition that is complex. The concept involves nothing more obscure than the idea of getting closer and closer to something. It suggests the attempt by one human being to approach another, and the inexpungeable thing in love as in mathematics is that however the distance decreases, it often remains what it always was, which is to say, hopelessly poignant because hopelessly infinite."
"Seventy-Two Letters" investigates what would happen if medieval theories about homunculi in sperm were true and Kabbalistic invocations of golems worked. "Hell Is the Absence of God" takes place in a world where fundamentalist visions of heaven and hell are true, and living people can watch as the ground opens up and sucks people into hell or as angels descend and take others to heaven. What would the book of Job look like in such a world? The story is something of an answer. The final story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary" left me in awe with its multiple perspectives on beauty, commercialism, discrimination, and growing up.
Robin McKinley, Sunshine: When you write a vampire novel, you have to make a bunch of decisions. Are you dealing with a secret world operating underneath the normal world, or an openly vampire-laden society? Are vampires necessarily nasty or tragically romantic, or somewhere in between? Stoker's rules, Whedon's, Rice's, or one from Column A and one from Column B? McKinley's version of the vampire romance is set in a society ravaged by a war with the Dark Others (don't worry, that name is as ridiculously goth as it gets), slowly recovering but still under threat. Rae, commonly known as Sunshine, is a baker who loves nothing more than feeding people cinnamon buns the size of their heads. Then she goes out to the lake one night, and ends up chained to a wall as food for a vampire who is himself being punished by a master vampire. She discovers that her heritage gives her special skills, and ... I can't decide whether this description is unfair or not. McKinley has the talent to make these well-worn elements intriguing; she's done retellings of fairy tales before, and this is just a step into the modern vampire fairy tale. The narrator's practical voice helps a lot, as do several plot points: Vampires aren't nice, or even good-looking, and the romance doesn't quite work the way I thought it would. What it comes down to is that if the explanation for something is going to be "magic," I want there to be rules that are followed and no cheating, but the story of the magic-worker discovering that she has powers that make her extra-special even in a magical world is inherently in conflict with my preference. This is a good vampire book, but I might be happier with a sequel in which Rae knows her limits and has to work within them. (As a side note, it's interesting how much more explicit sexual description is acceptable in standard fantasy today than twenty years ago, or even ten. As a couple of scenes in this book show, Anita Blake isn't the only one who's getting more Letters-to-Penthouse-like over time. I think it's a general social phenomenon, and not just Hamilton's kinks getting more exposure.)
Kate Wilhelm, Cambio Bay: In Cambio Bay on the coast of California, where the spirits have dwelled for a thousand years, there's a guesthouse. A motley array of strangers is drawn to it, including a thirtysomething real estate agent with a bit of a chip on her shoulder, a man who's lost his wife and son under terrible but mysterious circumstances, a nerdy professor, and a young woman and her mute child on the run. Wilhelm creates vivid characters, but here again I was frustrated by the explanation that "magic" brought everyone together and made necessary events happen. Maybe it's that I don't like predestination and want my characters to exhibit free will, as contradictory as that is for fictional constructs. Maybe it's that I want there to be irresistable forces and immovable objects that the characters and the plot have to work around, instead of irresistable forces and immovable objects that put all the characters exactly where they need to be. Two of the characters, the real estate agent and the widower, seem like real adults tossed into a world gone mad, but the others seem too often like puppets going where they're jerked, and unaware of it.
Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population: I liked Moon's The Speed of Dark, about an autistic man in the very near future, faced with a possible cure for autism as well as the ordinary problems of his life, so I picked up this more sf-intensive story. Ofelia is a cranky old woman who refuses to leave Colony 3245.12 with everybody else when the corporation that sponsored the colonization attempt decides to give up. She wants people to stop bothering her. They do, until another colonization party comes down a thousand miles away and is wiped out by natives. Then the natives decide to go exploring, down where Ofelia lives; meanwhile, the human authorities are trying to figure out what to do with a genuine first contact. Moon conveyed Ofelia's annoyance with humanity quite well, and I really liked her initial encounters with the aliens, who were frightening and strange but not quite deadly. The resolution was a bit too neat, and she switched to alien POV too few times to be balanced and too many to be consistent, but anybody who knows a feisty, occasionally annoying old lady should recognize Ofelia, and she's definitely a lot more enjoyable on the printed page, harassing other characters.
Diana Wynne Jones, Drowned Ammet: This is the second book in the Dalemark Quartet, about a land divided by bad government. Mitt wants to fight the "tyrannical earl Hadd," as the back of the book says, but first he has to figure out who's really on his side, and it might not be who he thinks. Unlike too many YA novels, this one features adults who really, truly want to take care of their children and have good reasons for their oppressive-seeming actions, as well as irresponsible and treacherous adults who also operate on perfectly understandable motives. In other words, there are real people here, in all their pettiness and grace. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series (which is published; I'm just slow to read mass paperbacks because they're harder to carry to the gym).
F. Paul Wilson, Conspiracies: Repairman Jack fixes things, things other people won't or can't fix, like abusive husbands. He's had brushes with the paranormal before, but he doesn't like to think about that now that he's got a steady girlfriend with a beautiful young daughter. When a distraught husband comes to him seeking help finding his missing wife, he plunges into her world of conspiracy theorists, believers in alien abductions, unmarked helicopters, and world domination by Masons. But there's something more going on at the nutcase convention, something that harkens back to his days fighting the supernatural. I wasn't that interested in the plot, which seemed more like a setup, allowing Jack to find out some details of the vast darkness he's presumably going to confront later on, than like a completely independent story. On the other hand, Jack gives good hard-boiled snark, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon: Breaking news! Genre fiction can be respectable! So respectable that McSweeney's will do a special book for stories in which stuff actually happens, instead of stories about the bittersweet pain of divorce and epiphanies in the grocery aisle. For those of us who already knew that genre fiction could be worthwhile, the most amazing thing is that Chabon manages to avoid deadly condescension in his introduction. Nick Hornby has a great story about the VCR of the gods (or maybe the VCR of Satan), and Harlan Ellison delivers an absolutely characteristic tale about a guy who finds out the Meaning of Life - and I mean that as a compliment, in case it's unclear. Stephen King tells another Gunslinger story, which will be the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing; Elmore Leonard has a jazzy little cops-and-robbers bit; Laurie King finds danger in the narrator's own back yard, and manages to make it both exciting and homey; and Karen Joy Fowler tells a mummy story that's not quite the usual version of the curse. Otherwise, I was either unmoved (Neil Gaiman) or affirmatively unimpressed (Dave Eggers, Sherman Alexie) by writers whose other works I've sometimes enjoyed. I just don't get Kelly Link. I think she's the fantasist liked by those more condescending than Chabon. Her story here has all the trappings of fairy tales -- almost literally given all the cat-skinning that goes on -- and none of the resonance. And where was David Foster Wallace? Isn't he part of that whole McSweeney's crew?
Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon: What do you expect from the dollar racks at the Strand? This fantasy starts with old myths of the Great Mother/Moon/Crone/Destroyer, and the male principle that wants to control her, and plays them out among various professors and students at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, a made-up school in Washington, DC. Hand & I started off badly because her Washington is nothing like my Washington, though I did eventually recognize Capitol Hill in its humidity-sodden summer glory. The narrative has the form: Weird stuff happens (but little did I, the narrator, know what was to come ...); weird stuff happens (more ominous mutterings from the narrator); two decades later, more weird stuff happens; there's love in the ruins and a final bout of weird, ending with the restoration of order. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn’t interesting, either.
Gathering the Bones, edited by Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell & Jack Dann: Okay, this one impressed me. Just the more memorable stories: Robert Devereaux's "Li'l Miss Ultrasound" is a creepy variant of the "If this goes on..." story about the intersection of fetal monitoring technology and beauty pageants. Kim Newman's "The Intervention" is a serenely Kafkaesque story about a man who has done something terrible - if only they'd tell him what it is. Janeen Webb's "Blake's Angel" is about angels who are muses, but only if they're kept enslaved. Gahan Wilson's "The Big Green Grin" could be a Twilight Zone episode played out in the mind of a young boy. Gary Fry's "Both And" does a great job with the horror of ordinary existence, the horror of things that don't happen. Michael Marshall Smith's "The Right Men" is a clockwork construction in which all the gears are driven by revenge. Fruma Klass's "Jennifer's Turn" is another "If this goes on ..." about the costs of health care and of human indifference. Adam L.G. Nevill's "Mother's Milk" is the first story that's ever made me retch just from the descriptions; it is not, not, not for the faint of heart (or stomach), though it's not at all gory - all the scary stuff is white, not red. Tim Waggoner's "Picking Up Courtney" has the dreamy horror of a parent's nightmare. Melanie Tem's "Gardens," by contrast, is a child's nightmare of failure to separate, a cycle of misery rolling down the generations. There are a bunch of other stories, and most are fairly short, like a flurry of punches.
Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon: I read Ender's Game in novel form, and thought it was fine. But what happens to weapons when the war is over? You can put a sword in a sheath, but where do you put an eleven-year-old military genius? Ender has left Earth for the stars, while a number of his fellow Battle School alumni try to adjust to being children - or at least, being treated like children - while governments plot the best way to use their military talents. Meanwhile, Ender's brother Peter, the bitter genius who wasn't quite good enough, is trying to consolidate his own power. This is a clever setup. Unfortunately, it's populated by automatons. I don't recognize these kids as *people*, much less children. There's a lot of talk, including talk about how smart the protagonists are, but not much in the way of demonstrations.
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others: I mentioned this a while ago, but I'm talking about it again so that you all are reminded to go read it. For me, the best sf is about ideas about people, and that's what Chiang has. Z. thought that Chiang had too many ideas and too few people, but I was blown away. "Division by Zero" has a mathematical plot, and reminds me of the David Berlinski quote: "The concept of a limit is simple. It is the definition that is complex. The concept involves nothing more obscure than the idea of getting closer and closer to something. It suggests the attempt by one human being to approach another, and the inexpungeable thing in love as in mathematics is that however the distance decreases, it often remains what it always was, which is to say, hopelessly poignant because hopelessly infinite."
"Seventy-Two Letters" investigates what would happen if medieval theories about homunculi in sperm were true and Kabbalistic invocations of golems worked. "Hell Is the Absence of God" takes place in a world where fundamentalist visions of heaven and hell are true, and living people can watch as the ground opens up and sucks people into hell or as angels descend and take others to heaven. What would the book of Job look like in such a world? The story is something of an answer. The final story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary" left me in awe with its multiple perspectives on beauty, commercialism, discrimination, and growing up.