Weasel Words

May 5, 2008

H.P. Lovecraft is one of those guys whose work you don’t need to read to know. You’ve heard about Cthulhu, you know about ancient horrors from beyond space and time that can drive a man insane. It’s part of the general consciousness now, like hobbits and Tarzan and the like. So, with that in mind, here are the things that surprised me about actually reading a short-story collection, H.P. Lovecraft’s Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre :

1. Lovecraft wrote some (presumably early, though no copyright dates are given in the book) stories that have nothing to do with his famous Mythos, and are just straight horror stories. These are unbelievably, ridiculously cheesy. They’re the sort of stories that end with italicized, exclamation-pointed revelations, like “For the blood was dripping from the ceiling!“ or such-like.
2. Lovecraft is very, very regional, in that his stories are all set in a New England that’s not just a generic place. What’s weird to me, though, is that he treats New England as if it’s this remarkably ancient place (the word “ancient” is, in fact, used to refer to colonial-era buildings a lot, which strikes me as a ridiculous misuse of the term, particularly for somebody writing in the early 1900s), with whole centuries of forgotten lore.
3. His Mythos stuff is... well, it’s told in a horror mode, but the actual stories themselves are as much science fiction as they are horror. In some of the cases, you could have given the same plot description to, say, Cordwainer Smith and gotten a pure SF story out of it. “The Shadow Out of Time” is particularly notable this way, as there’s almost no horror in it, and the air of dread that Lovecraft cultivates feels weirdly misplaced.

All in all, the stories, taken as actual stories, aren’t that good. But taken as raw ideastuff, well, this is the sort of thing that can inspire — and clearly has inspired — generations of writers and readers. Lovecraft is one of those guys who got his mind around something deeply interesting and important, even if his writing skills weren’t quite up to the task of realizing his ideas. Worth reading just for general literacy and historical import, if not for the stories themselves.

Comments | :::

May 5, 2008

So a while back, it looked — much to my dismay — as if the Ethshar series was over. But where traditional publishing fails, the internets may find a way. Watt-Evans turned toward a reader-sponsored model, where he’d write a chapter after receiving a certain amount of money from (potential) readers, and with this finance model, he managed to write two more books, Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Spriggan Mirror and The Vondish Ambassador .

The model doesn’t appear to have been wildly lucrative for Watt-Evans, and these books are only in print from small presses (The Vondish Ambassador, in fact, is basically self-published and you have to buy it directly from Watt-Evans for now), which is the sort of thing that makes me wonder at the reading taste of the fantasy-reading public. I mean, here are books set in a deep, rich world, each of which tells a self-contained little puzzle story; there’s almost nothing like them out there and they’re compellingly readable, yet apparently people would rather read Yet Another Turgid Epic than something fun and original like this. What’s with you, fantasy reading public?

Highly recommended to people who enjoy intelligent light fantasy, with a bit of a hard-SF puzzle-solving feel.

Comments | :::

May 5, 2008

So did you ever read Larry Niven’s Known Space books? Ringworld is the most famous (though not, to my mind, the best) of them? If not, you really should, because they’re fun space-opera/hard SF-ish elaborate future history things, with exotic alien races and asteroid miners and all the stuff that made classic SF classic. (Start with Neutron Star, an old-timey short story collection.) If so, and if you liked them, then hey, here’s Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner’s Fleet of Worlds , a story set on the Puppeteer homeworlds and dealing with early Puppeteer/human interactions.

It doesn’t feel quite precisely like classic Known Space stuff — it’s a little slower, a little more sober — but it’s not too far off, and certainly better than the recent direct Ringworld sequels. My prediction is that if you’ve read through and enjoyed a sizable fraction of the Known Space canon, you’ll like this. So go pick up either Neutron Star or this, unless you have a known aversion to Known Space.

Comments | :::

May 5, 2008

In the wake of Civil War, the Avengers split into two groups and Brian Bendis, apparently not writing enough titles, took up authorship on both, giving us simultaneously Brian Bendis’ The New Avengers, vol. 7: The Trust and The Mighty Avengers, vol. 1: The Ultron Initiative .

I’m going to be honest with you: I read these back in March, and I don’t really remember them well right now, so I can’t comment a whole lot on the plot or specifically how they intertwined together. What I do remember is that New Avengers includes the “rebels” (Wolverine, Spider-Man, Luke Cage, etc.) who have a grim, dark storyline, while Mighty Avengers includes the establishment heroes (Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, The Wasp) who have a more lighthearted caper. Both of them work well individually, and they work even better together, as a sort of light/dark contrast thing.

Really, the biggest problem with these titles right now is that Marvel isn’t publishing them synced up chronologically; one of them is ahead of the other, and it ends up feeling like you’re reading half of the story late, which is sort of odd. Might be better to stay a volume behind on the fast one, if you’re particularly interested.

Oh, and while I’m here, I might as well tack on Brian Reed’s Ms. Marvel vol. 4: Monster Smash . Every time I review a Ms. Marvel book, I say that it’s somewhere between vaguely competent and forgettable, and so it is here. This series appears to have settled into a rut of mediocrity, yet for some reason I keep reading it in the hope that the next time it’ll be better. There’s potential here, even if it is stubbornly unfulfilled time and again.

Comments | :::

May 5, 2008

Pity poor Joe Straczynski. Here he is, the guy who’s redeemed Spider-Man from the hands of hacks and brought him back to greatness with a phenomenal run on Amazing Spider-Man, the sort of run that people will remember decades from now as a high point of the title. And how does Marvel repay him? By making him do an editorially-mandated reboot-retcon as his final arc.

And not just any editorially-mandated reboot-retcon. No, in J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man: One More Day , Peter Parker chooses to make a deal with the devil to lose his wife in order to give a few more years to his elderly dying aunt. Let me repeat that: A deal with the devil!

This is an untenable premise, absolutely 100% unbuyable by anyone. It is ridiculous and insane and stupid and dumb. And it is a testament to Straczynski that he almost makes it work. He fails, ultimately, but he comes closer than anyone has any right to expect, given the raw stupidity of the material he’s working with. If you handicap for degree of difficulty, this is one of the greatest achievements in comic writing.

What’s really remarkable is that there’s a little Q&A with Joe Quesada at the end of the book where he prattles on and on about how the team really wanted to get Mary Jane away from Peter for a long time, and they finally hit on this “brilliant” way to do it. And it’s just amazing, because Joe Quesada is a guy who’s done a ton of good at Marvel, yet this is one of the stupidest fucking ideas in years. You take a guy like Straczynski, who’s managed to write about a mature, adult — yet still interesting! — relationship between Peter Parker and Mary Jane, and then you just shitcan all his work and start over from scratch? Gah! Maddening.

At any rate, as stupid reboot-retcon deck-clearing shit goes, this is less unreadable than Bendis’ Avengers: Disassembled, and that eventually turned into a really solid New Avengers title. So maybe it’s possible that Straczynski’s successor on the title will take the new Mary Jane-less setting and do something interesting with it.

Odds are it won’t be as good as Straczynski’s run was, though. Go pick up the first one and keep reading from there. There’s some good stuff in there, and it deserved a better “ending” than this. But then, I suppose endings are what monthly superhero comics really suck at, so what are you gonna

Comments | :::

March 14, 2008

So I’m reading Brian Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, vol. 19: Death of a Goblin , and I realize that I really haven’t been giving Bendis enough credit for this title. The thing is, the guy is just so prolific that he inevitably writes some mediocre (or even just plain awful) stuff, and it’s tempting to dismiss him as a hack. But he’s really not. At his best — which he has been consistently through the 117 issues of this series so far — he’s one of the best superhero writers ever.

And in fact, I’m going to go so far as to say that if you evaluate a series by average issue quality over its run, Ultimate Spider-Man may actually be the best superhero title of all time, and that’s nearly certain if you restrict it to titles with more than 100 issues. Everything that comics do wrong, Bendis neatly avoids; everything they do right, he amplifies and expands on to make it even better.

So hats off to Bendis for a remarkable sustained accomplishment. (And oh yeah, there’s also a different artist in this volume, only the second artist of the series’ entire run. He’s fine.)

Comments | :::

March 14, 2008

Matthew Hughes’ Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice are prequels to his Henghis Hapthorn books. Only not really “prequels” because they were written before the Hapthorn books, but I’ve never gotten anyone to give me a word that means the opposite of sequel, so let’s just go with prequel for now. As far as actual reading order goes, either way is fine; if you read these first, the Hapthorn books will illuminate certain facets of the world that were glanced over here; if you read those first, vice versa.

I mentioned in my entries about the Hapthorn books that Hughes was writing in a milieu reminiscent of Vance, and that’s doubly true with these books. Structurally, Fools Errant is basically Eyes of the Overworld , featuring a hapless/clever protagonist gadding about the world and getting into episodic adventures in strange and unusual lands — but where Cugel was amoral and left destruction in his wake, Filidor Vesh is a kind-hearted fellow who leaves improvement and beneficial change in his wake. Different too is that Hughes’ books have more narrative cohesion and character development to them. They’re not just series of episodes, they’re episodes that build up to larger revelations and developments in a way that Vance never quite did.

Hughes may not have quite the stylistic verve and rampant originality of Vance, but who does? Setting aside that imposing and unfair comparison, Hughes is a great stylist and incredibly original. If you’re looking for a light, witty adventure story, a guilty pleasure without the guilt, you’ll want to track these books down. (They’re out of print, but not hard to find; there’s also a book club omnibus version, entitled Gullible’s Travels.)

Comments | :::

March 14, 2008

Jo Walton’s Ha’Penny is the sequel to her WW2 alternate history English countryside murder mystery, Farthing . I didn’t say a lot about that book in my booklog entry for it, because it’s the sort of book whose impact can be dulled even by knowing the general shape and tenor of the story, where even talking about what genre it’s in can tell you more than you should really know.

(And man, talking in circumlocution is difficult. Just go read it and make life easier for me already. I miss my proper nouns.)

Anyway, Ha’Penny. In a lot of ways, it really is Farthing II: The Revenge; it’s a very direct sequel (happening nearly immediately afterward), it features some characters from the first book and some other characters who are reminiscent of the characters in the first book, and it has similar concerns and themes. But it is ultimately a different book entirely. The genre is alternate history crossed with intrigue thriller, rather than the alternate history crossed with countryside murder mystery of the first novel; the new characters are, despite superficial similarities, different from those of the first; and the shape and feel of the story is very middle-bookish. Farthing felt like a stand-alone novel, but this one feels incomplete without both that first book and the upcoming third.

Ultimately, “middle book of a great trilogy” is an accurate (if optimistically forward-looking) description of this book. If you’ve read and liked Farthing, I can’t imagine a reason not to read this; if you haven’t, you should.

Comments | :::

March 1, 2008

As much as comic books and superheroes are historically tightly associated, comic books sans superhero pop up all the time these days. But what you don’t see very often is superhero sans comic book, which makes Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible a bit of a novelty.

The book tells the tale of a super-villain who breaks out of jail and tries to take over the world via an elaborate and cunning plan, and the team of superheroes who try to stop him. It’s a first-person narration, split between the supervillain himself, and a second-tier hero who’s recently made the big time and joined the team. I expected the book to be self-aware, wink-and-nudge metafiction, and there was certainly a solid amount of that; but what’s remarkable is that, along with all the meta stuff, Grossman ultimately is telling a straight-up story about a super-villain trying to take over the world. That’s unexpectedly nifty.

That said, I can’t bring myself to rave about the book. It’s apparently Grossman’s first novel, and it shows. There are some awkward patches of dialogue where it’s not clear who’s saying what; there’s a lot of meandering and repetitive reflection that throws off the pacing and gives the impression of an incomplete revision; and some of the thematic stuff just doesn’t quite work, all setup and no payoff.

Ultimately, my verdict is that if you loved Watchmen, you’ll like this. It’s doing a lot of the same stuff Moore did, but not as well (though admittedly with more comedic verve, which is never really Moore’s strong point). Good, but not great.

Comments | :::

February 29, 2008

Back about five years ago, I booklogged my progress in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , at which point I was in the middle of what I called the second volume, but think was actually what I’m now calling the third.

(Explanation: The edition I have has three physical volumes, each of which is divided into two logical volumes, so that it’s a six-volume edition in three physical volumes. It makes more sense to me at this point to refer to logical volumes than physical ones.)

Anyway, the point is, I did finish up the third volume, which makes me officially halfway through Gibbon’s enormous history, and I’m starting to feel like the thing is mistitled, because at this point, the Roman Empire has collapsed and fallen, and we’ve even traced the rise of Frankish kingdoms in Gaul. Decline? Check. Fall? Check. And yet, there are some 1500 pages to go before it’s all over. I suppose much of it will be Byzantine history, which I guess is technically Roman, sort of, but this definitely makes a good stopping point for now.

Oh, and it continues to be an excruciatingly well-written and thoroughly interesting work, and even if the history is centuries out of date, it’s well worth reading as an artifact in its own right. (And besides, my experience is that it’s easier to learn the modern version of history if you know the stuff that the modern scholars are reacting against first. Reading a book on the Renaissance without being familiar with Burckhardt, say, ends up feeling like you’re reading somebody pushing against a wall you don’t see.) Recommended to classical history fans, or people who enjoy erudite diatribes against monks.

Comments | :::