Weasel Words

January 25, 2004

After the lukewarm review I gave to the first volume, you might wonder why I read Brian Bendis’ Powers: Roleplay and Powers: Little Deaths . The answer is twofold: I’ll gladly keep reading graphic novels that are merely decent; and I’d already ordered a whole set of ‘em from Amazon, and could hardly let them go unread.

The second volume was, if anything, even slighter and less necessary than the first; but Little Deaths was actually reasonably good. Perhaps this is Bendis’s skills evolving as he goes? Since I have a few more trade paperbacks sitting on my shelf to be read, we can hope so.

Two random gripes: First, I had an unusually difficult time following the flow of dialog bubbles. I suspect this is partly because Bendis’s snap-snap banter necessitates far more dialog interplay than usual; but it’s partly because the layout just falls down now and then. Second, the proofreading is terrible. Misspellings, inconsistent spellings of character names, and homonyms (”you’re” for “your”, that sort of thing) pop up far too often. Together, these two problems made the books feel decidedly amateurish. Or, if you’re an optimist, made them feel edgy and indie!

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January 25, 2004

When I want to buy some type of consumer product — a computer, a camera, a car, a TV — I engage in a mad frenzy of Internet research, following links hither and yon, reading reviews and forums and background information, and just generally trying to soak in the accumulated knowledge of the world. I love this process, but it’s time-consuming and requires some skill; fortunately for piano buyers, Larry Fine’s The Piano Book binds that accumulation of knowledge between two covers.

This is technically Anne’s book, as she’s the pianist and future piano-buyer in the household, but I started reading it out of curiosity, and I’m very impressed with it. It starts with a detailed overview of how pianos work, with an emphasis on what bits are really important and sensitive to quality variations (and what you should be looking for, and how you can tell if you’re seeing it). It goes on to talk about the state of the piano marketplace, with ratings (compiled by talking to piano technicians) and overviews for the different brands that are out there (this information, along with list prices for each model made, is updated in a yearly supplement), goes into the history of pianos and what a used piano buyer should look for, and finishes up with talk about what needs to be done to keep a piano in good shape once purchased.

This is what Consumer Reports wants (but lacks the domain-specific expertise) to be; The Piano Book is comprehensive, authoritative, and informative. It’s a must-buy for any prospective piano buyer.

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January 25, 2004

David G. Hartwell’s The Year’s Best SF 2 collects the putatively-best SF (here, narrowly defined to include only science fiction proper and no fantasy) from 1996. Since I don’t remember the state of the SF short fiction world back then, I haven’t the foggiest idea whether Hartwell’s selections are defensible as being really the best. If they are, though, it was a bit of a weak year for the genre, I’m afraid.

It’s not that the stories here are bad; they’re not (possible exception: the pointless Connie Willis tongue bath to Jack Williamson; appropriate for its original appearance in a Williamson tribute volume, but embarrassing out of that context). Every one of them was readable and notably above-average. But that’s about all I could say for them; none of them up and blew me out of my seat in the way that the best short stories do.

Thematically, most of the stories fell into one of two categories: SF history and Internet-related. The Internet ones are understandable, given that 1996 was still in the early breakout years of the Internet, and everyone was thinking about the future of the Internet. The SF history ones are a bit less explicable: There’s a Verne pastiche, a Wells pastiche, and the aforementioned Williamson tribute. The effect of reading all three at once is to wonder why the genre was so intent on looking backward right then. (Or why Hartwell was disproportionately collecting that sort of story for his book.)

It belatedly occurs to me that, contrary to what I wrote in the first paragraph, I do know a bit about the state of the short story market in 1996, and I can say definitively that Hartwell’s selections aren’t the best. The Year’s Best SF 2 is worth reading, but if you’re going to read only one collection of short stories from 1996, you should make it Starlight 1 (which has more than one of those blow-me-away stories) instead.

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January 21, 2004

The third hardcover volume of Brian Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man continues to recapitulate the pre-existing Spider-Man universe by bringing fan-favorite villain Venom into the Ultimate world. I’d never been much of a Venom fan, myself, so I was a bit skeptical at this. Still, I was curious to see how they’d do it — in the original comics, Venom resulted from a whole lot of backstory (including the notorious — but cool, dammit — Secret Wars) that couldn’t possibly exist in the Ultimate storyline.

As in previous volumes, Bendis has done a bang-up job of updating and modernizing the Spider-Man world. There are a few implausible elements, but taken as a whole, the introduction of Venom was handled quite well. Just as importantly, though, there’s starting to be a feeling of deep interlinking to this Ultimate universe — characters from The Ultimates (the updated Avengers) appear here, and storylines from that title are referenced. Also referenced are characters and events from older issues of Ultimate Spider-Man itself.

This feeling of being in an interconnected web of continuity is precisely what the Ultimate line was created to alleviate, but I’m personally quite tickled that it’s popped back up, as it’s always been one of my favorite things about comic books. Increasingly, the Ultimate line is becoming not the outreach comic that Marvel wanted it to be, but a kludge-free reboot of the Marvel Universe for long-time fans.

Strange side note: The back of the book features story-related correspondence between Bendis and much-reviled Marvel executive Bill Jemas. It’s deeply unflattering to Jemas, making him look like a self-important twit who sticks his incompetent fingers into the creative process (but, in this case, seems to have been thankfully overriden by Bendis in almost all respects). Either he’s too clueless to see how bad he comes out in these little excerpts, or he’s self-deprecating enough to let himself look bad so that Bendis can look better. Either way, very odd.

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January 8, 2004

Since I’ve enjoyed his work with Ultimate Spider-Man (and because I heard good things about it), I decided to pick up Brian Michael Bendis’ Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl? . Conclusion: Enh.

Powers is a gritty (think Watchmen) look at superheroes, from the point-of-view of cops (think Top 10), with a noir style. In this volume, the first collection of the series, the cops try to solve the murder of Retro Girl. Will their investigation take them into dark corners and turn up amazing surprises?

Not really. The plot is entirely unremarkable and wholly free of surprise. Combine that with stereotyped (or, if you’re being generous, archetyped) characters and a too-obviously-sourced background, and you’ve got a big pile of just-okay. Nothing really wrong with the book, it just doesn’t add anything to the already burgeoning pomo superhero revisionist genre. Read Watchmen, Astro City, and Top 10; if your’e in the mood for more, go ahead and read this.

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January 5, 2004

I didn’t get around to doing any end-of-year wrap-up on 2002, and I know many of you are still feeling a vague sense of incompleteness; fortunately, you’ll have no such lack of closure on 2003. Herewith, a randomly categorized list of bests and worsts from 2003. As always (for values of “always” that don’t require me to have done this before), I’m talking about the books I read in 2003, not the ones that were actually published in 2003.

But first, a bit of summary data. I read 61 books last year, which is fairly typical for me — I generally read about one book a week, though not anything like evenly. The biggest illusory trend of the year was the increasing prominence of graphic novels — “illusory” because, while it felt like they made up a huge amount of my reading, I only actually read eight graphic novels in 2003, down from ten a year earlier. Go figure. Now, then, the awards:

Best Series: A basic requirement for this one is that I must have read most of the series in 2003, so (for instance) Discworld is ineligible. Despite that narrowing, this is still a tough category. I read about a billion of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Ethshar books in 2003, and very much liked them all, so they’d appear to have the early edge. But I’m going for quality over quantity, so instead the winner is Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman novels, which are actively superb (Trent’s mild dissent notwithstanding).

Best Book: If you read only one of the books I read last year, you should make it this one. This is a surprisingly easy decision, with little competition. Jack Vance’s Demon Princes books are out, because you should read The Dying Earth instead; Jonathan Carroll is likewise bested by his own other work; Brust is out, because they’re all series books, and reading just one won’t give you the standalone impact I’m looking for here; and Kirstein already got her award. In fact, the runner-up for this category isn’t even fiction, it’s Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. But while that probably wins if your finances are in disarray, it’s much less necessary otherwise. And besides, Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver is just plain great. There’s been a significant backlash against Quicksilver lately — apparently some people are bothered that it doesn’t appear to have an actual plot, as such — but I don’t care. It still wins.

Worst Book: The competition here is between two lousy books. On the one hand, we have Tad Williams’ Caliban’s Hour , which manages to make 200 large-print pages feel more padded and sloggy than should be physically possible. On the other is Eric Frank Russell’s Next of Kin , which takes painful non-humor to depths of sucking surpassed only by Craig Shaw Gardner. It’s a difficult decision, so I’ll abdicate and declare it a tie. Avoid them both.

Most Disappointing Book: Hands down, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Endless Nights . This looked so fucking cool, and it was actually so incredibly mediocre. The nice thing is, if you haven’t read it yet, you can’t possibly experience the same disappointment I did, because reading this will enable you to properly manage your expectations.

Best Graphic Novel: Well, if I’m going to have an illusory trend, I’d better dedicate a category to it. But there’s only one problem: None of the comic books I read in 2003 were outstanding enough that I’d really hurl them at someone. So, having arbitrarily created this category, I’ll arbitrarily give the trophy to No Award. An illusory award befits an illusory trend, I suppose.

Best Publishing Trend: The trend toward free books started by Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is hard to beat; but beat it is, by the rise of small publishers, and the near-elimination of out of print books. Small publishers are what allowed me to read the Ethshar books, R.A. Lafferty, and (to cheat a little bit) Shadow. Just as importantly, it lets me recommend books to people that would otherwise be unavailable (like Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word series).

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January 5, 2004

Whenever you go back and read an author’s earlier works — particularly when those works are out-of-print — you run a serious risk of catching them before they fully developed their virtues; and what might seem to be promising output from a young new writer will seem to be disappointingly flawed work from a writer you know can do better. So it was with appropriate amounts of trepidation and expectation-management that I picked up Dave Duncan’s Shadow .

My trepidation, it turns out, was entirely misplaced. This book is good. Not just “good, considering,” not even “good, but average for Duncan.” (I remind readers here that Dave Duncan is one of my favorite authors.) Shadow is well above average, even for Duncan.

Oh, there are signs that this is a relatively early work: The characterizations are a bit sketchier than in his later books, and the writing isn’t quite as polished; but both are entirely adequate to the task. And beside, any shortcomings are more than made up for by the story, which is unpredictable and goes off in exciting directions.

The book starts in conventional fantasy territory. Our protagonist is a young skyman, who rides giant eagles between rocky quasi-medieval holds. It feels very Pern-y, even more so when it becomes clear that this is a devolved colony on a foreign planet. But Duncan lacks McCaffrey’s soppy sentimentality: His eagles aren’t telepathic soul mates, they’re vicious animals that’ll snap your head off if you’re not careful.

That’s not Duncan’s only twist. In most quest fantasy, you have a pretty decent idea of where things are going to end up (good guys: triumphant; bad guys: fucked), and it’s just a matter of details. Not here. Every time I thought I knew how the story was going to go, Duncan would toss in a twist that would derail that potential plotline. The actual plot was both unexpected and deeply science fictional.

This is classic Duncan: Novel setting, interesting characters, turn-the-page writing, and great plotting. The biggest weakness to the book is the sloppy copy-editing and ugly cover that inevitably go along with the print-on-demand publishing. Highly recommended.

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