Weasel Words

A Book Log

August 28, 2005

Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2 is the best sort of computer book. It doesn’t attempt to just lamely reprint the manual with more pictures and smaller words, it actually tries to explain to you how best to use a program, giving you not only techniques but motivations for those techniques.

In this case, the program that’s thoroughly explained is Photoshop’s Camera Raw “plugin” and the new Bridge file selector — which means, in practical terms, that Fraser covers the part of the digital photography process that occurs after taking the picture, but before opening it in Photoshop. If you weren’t aware there was anything to be done there, this isn’t the book for you (though if you’re shooting with a DSLR and not using RAW format because you’re intimidated by the apparent complexity, maybe it is); if, on the other hand, you’ve been wondering just what all the knobs in Camera Raw do, and how best to use Bridge efficiently, this is a superb book that you simply must own.

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August 28, 2005

The premise of Robert Kirkman’s Fantastic Four: Foes is that we, the reader, get to see villains’ capers from the eyes of the villains before they get thwarted by the Fantastic Four. That could be kind of cool, actually. If it were true. Which it isn’t.

I have no idea why they decided to lie about this on the jacket and in the Amazon book description, but they did. Despite what all the descriptions say, though, this is a straightforward — and not very well done — Fantastic Four storyline. If you’re a big fan of the FF, you’ll probably think this is okay. If not, it offers nothing at all special. (And yet, I still read through it non-stop. There is something about the graphic novel medium that just resonates with me...)

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August 23, 2005

After thoroughly enjoying her The Anvil of the World, I decided to read Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden , the first of the Company books for which she’s best known. It turned out to be not what I expected, at all.

For some reason, I’d had it in my head that the Company was a performing troupe — a circus or stage ensemble, or some such — and that the Company books chronicled the Company’s travels through outer space, and the various planets on which they performed. This turns out to be, um, totally and absolutely wrong, in every respect. In actuality, the Company is a mysterious business entity that makes loads of money off time travel, using immortals that it creates as its agents in the past. Iden is the story (or rather the start of the story: I gather that at least some of the subsequent books have the same protagonist) of one of these immortals, created in 16th century Spain.

The story itself is mostly set in 16th century Europe, too, which makes it feel similar to Rosemary Kirstein’s novels, as a medieval-tech world with smatterings of high tech. (Though here, the protagonists are in on the high-tech, obviously.) Both the SF and the historical elements are done well, causing me to want both a) more stories set in this time period, and b) more stories focusing on the workings of the Company. From what I understand of the sequels, my desire for the latter will be gratified, and my desire for the former frustrated. Ah, well.

Overall, this is very well-done time travel historical SF, like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, but better.

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August 23, 2005

So in my last graphic novel roundup, I mentioned that I didn’t really care for The Hulk. Well, Peter David’s The Incredible Hulk: Tempest Fugit proves that execution trumps premise every time.

David’s Hulk isn’t a mindless brute beast, and his Hulk story isn’t one of inner torment and angst. Here, the Hulk is an adolescent power fantasy, invulnerability and unstoppable power personified, the ultimate backup plan for when things get rough. This is less “mature” than the angsty Hulk stuff, but it’s also a heck of a lot more fun. A Hulk who interrupts a villain’s declamations with a Buffy-esque “Not really caring!” before laying down the proverbial smack is just plain cool.

The story’s a bit on the silly side, and the deep significance isn’t all that deep, but if it’s pulpish power fantasy you’re looking for, here’s a good place to look.

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August 18, 2005

I’m always suspicious of Pratchett’s non-Discworld books. I’ve read Strata and one of the Johnny books, and they were... okay, but not all that great. So even though I’ve owned Terry Pratchett’s Truckers, Diggers, and Wings , comprising The Bromeliad, I’d never quite gotten around to reading them. Now that I have, I can say that they’re... okay, but not all that great.

The books focus on a tribe of nomes, who are little gnome-like people. The first book is about how one group comes from the Outside into The Store, where a city-mouse/country-mouse dynamic comes into play. This is probably the best part of the series, as Pratchett gets to touch on the religious themes he explored well in Small Gods (the Store nomes worship Arnold Bros (est. 1905), and preach his dictate: “If You Do Not See What You Need, Just Ask”). The second book is a sort of Tehanu-style book, following the daily lives of the nomes as the hero of the first book goes off on A Quest; it’s enjoyable for what it’s not — you know how The Quest is going to go, so it’s intersting to see what’s going on back at the ranch. The third book, disappointingly, covers the same period of time as the second, but focuses on the guys on The Quest.

The overall impression is one of pleasant enjoyability. The books are still, fundamentally, Pratchett books, and feel much more Pratchettian than Strata did, but there’s something missing. Maybe it’s just the non-human main characters — ignorant wee folk make for poor protagonists (which is also one of the problem with much children’s literature...). Whatever it is, it means that these books are about on par with weak Discworld books like The Light Fantastic or Moving Pictures.

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August 18, 2005

Probably my least favorite “genre” is ungreat literary fiction. Great literary fiction — The Book of the New Sun, Quicksilver, The Cyberiad — that’s the shit. I love that stuff. But literary fiction without that spark of greatness is ponderous, dull, and sloggy. This isn’t the case for other genres — mediocre adventure fiction can still be fun, mediocre superhero comics are still page-turners, mediocre light fantasy is still enjoyable — which explains why, all things considered, I’d rather read a shitty David Eddings book than Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen .

Oh, Link’s book is unquestionably better than anything Eddings has ever written. She’s obviously a good writer, and her prose is confident and assured (it’s a huge contrast to read these genuinely well-written literary short stories so quickly after reading Gardner’s unsuccessful attempts at writing literary short stories — it makes his output look all the more amateurish in comparison, and totally validates his apparent focus on superb adventure novels). But the spark is missing: Her prose isn’t a joy to read in the way that the best writers can make it; and her stories, for all that they’re technically well-constructed, are strangely empty and unmoving. I found myself slogging through story after story about sex and death, generally written in a mystifying and detached way, without ever really giving any damn at all.

I expect there are people out there who read literary fiction the way that I read superhero comics — really loving the great ones, but still enjoying the bad ones — and those people will quite enjoy Kelly Link. (Based on the ecstatic and glowing cover blurbs, most literary-ish writers fall into this category.) But me? Not so much.

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August 10, 2005

Brian Michael Bendis’ The Pulse, vol. 2: Secret War takes everything good about the first book and... well, actually, it doesn’t take the good stuff from the first book. Instead, it ignores it entirely in favor of being a cheap tie-in to some “Secret War” series-spanning Mega-Event that’s apparently happening in the Marvel Universe. And maybe if you read every book Marvel makes, this provides a valuable contribution to that larger storyline; but if not, it’s totally pointless, without any story at all to speak of.

Pointless and witless. Avoid.

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August 10, 2005

Well, this is awkward! I started reading Charles Stross’ The Family Trade , and I utterly despised it. I hated it deeply and passionately, and I started writing a bile-filled entry giving the following examples (all within the first ten pages) of why it sucks:

Everything is just plain wrong. Wherever he gets a chance to put in some detail, Stross puts in details that ring false, and jolt the reader into saying, “Wait, no, that’s not right!” I very nearly quit reading within that first ten pages, but I decided that I’d keep on, and wait until things got to fantasy-land. After all, most mundane-into-fantasy crossover novels suck during the obligatory “normal life” establishing shot section, and maybe Stross’ fantasy land would be better than his depiction of modern America.

Well, it is. By a lot. In fact, once it gets to the fantasy world, this book becomes downright excellent, and I read through it quickly, and then right through Charles Stross’ The Hidden Family , the sequel/second half of the book (don’t start the first without having some access to the second, as this is one of those split books that are so irritatingly prevalent these days), loving it the whole time. Bizarrely, when the protagonist came back to the real world, things got all wrongly-detailed again (“Chateau Rothschild” is Bordeaux, not champagne. Why mention a specific producer if you’re not even going to look it up?), but for the rest of the time, it was great.

I’ve mostly avoided Stross because I’m so over the whole technogeek singularity thing; while I thought these books were great, and well deserving of their Hugo nomination, I’m oddly reinforced in my prejudices about his pure SF books. I think that his SF would be full of all the stuff I hated about these books, and missing all the compensatory stuff that I loved. (Although I should note that it’s misleading to call these books fantasy. Yes, they’re marketed as fantasy and have certain fantastic elements. They’re not fantasy. They share more in common with Gould’s Wildside than Duncan’s The Seventh Sword, though they thankfully partake more of Duncan’s breezily energetic pacing than Gould’s dull slogging.)

Recommended for readers who don’t mind getting a bit of SF in their fantasy, or vice versa.

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August 7, 2005

I would have expected to like James Alan Gardner’s Gravity Wells , a collection of his short stories, more than I did. I’ve loved (or at least greatly liked) all his novels, and the one short story of his I’d read before, “Three Hearings On The Existence Of Snakes In The Human Bloodstream” (which is collected in this book), was excellent, so things looked good going in.

And in large part, they were pretty good. Many of the stories in the book were quite enjoyable, and “A Young Person’s Guide to the Organism” was superb, so there’s lots of good stuff here. But there’s also a lot of junk — a solid handful of the stories felt more like writing exercises than actual publishable fiction. “Lesser Figures of the Greater Trumps”, for instance, is a series of paragraphs written from the perspective of props on Tarot cards; nice practice if you’re trying to figure out how to write different POVs, but not interesting to read. And “Kent State Descending the Gravity Well” is written from the POV of an SF writer trying, and failing, to write an SF story about the Kent State massacre, with the ultimate emphasis on “failing”.

If you skip the dull bits, the good bits are worthwhile; but if you’re looking for a consistently high-quality collection, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

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August 7, 2005

Despite what this entry is going to make it look like, I’m really not a total fanboy. I would never have bought Christopher Golden and Daniel Brereton’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin or Finding Serenity, edited by Jane Espenson — but once Anne bought them and they were sitting around, well, there’s no reason not to read them, now is there?

The Origin is a comic book version of Whedon’s original script for the horrible Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. I watched the movie a long time ago, so I don’t know how different the actual movie was from this script, but it doesn’t seem way out there; the biggest difference is just how it’s handled, with this treatment being a lot less campy and Valley Girly than the horrible horrible movie. I suspect that even if the movie had been done right, it still wouldn’t’ve been super-great (like the TV show was), but it clearly had room to be much better. All that aside, treating this as a pure comic book, it’s pretty mediocre. This seems to be a very literal adaptation of the screenplay, and thus seems oddly stiff as a comic.

Finding Serenity is a small-press book of essays about Firefly. The contents are pretty uneven, ranging from really tedious “omg i love that show so much!!!” essays to vaguely interesting essays focused on one element of the show (Michelle Sagara West’s contribution, about Zoe and Wash’s relationship, is the highlight of the book). Mostly, it reads like a particularly good bunch of blog posts or Usenet threads. Since I don’t read Firefly fan forums, I’m probably not the ideal audience for this book; if you do, you might be.

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