Weasel Words

October 23, 2005

In the mood for some generic epic fantasy, I picked up Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Touched by the Gods . I’ve enormously enjoyed Watt-Evans’ Ethshar books, but wasn’t expecting as much out of this one — part of the charm of Ethshar is that it’s light fantasy not Big Fat Epic stuff, and Touched is explicitly big, fat, and epic. With lowered expectations at the ready, I was thus able to be quite pleasantly surprised.

It’s not a perfect book, to be sure — a lot of the plot rests on the stubborn inaction of its protagonist, and there’s one plot-critical moment that depends on smart people doing something really stupid — but as fantasy epics go, it’s pretty darn good. It has an interesting world with a novel theology; it has characters and politics that are a lot more realistic than those found in most fantasy novels; it’s got solid pacing and plotting; and (for those who just aren’t happy without them) it’s got a big pile o’ zombies.

This isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s well done non-trashy epic fantasy, and that’s not nothing. Plus, from what I’ve heard, his next foray into epic fantasy (Dragon Weather et. seq. — they’re already published; I just haven’t read them) is supposed to be better than this, so there’s something to look forward to.

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October 15, 2005

Two more comic books, and then I’m all caught up for the moment...

First, Ed Brubaker’s Sleeper, vol. 4: The Long Way Home . This continues to be an interesting series, but more importantly, it finishes being one, too. I hadn’t realized it, but this was always intended as a series with an ending — which is good, because all the quintuple-crossing and iocaine powder mindfucks would have gotten tedious and implausible in an ongoing series. This provides just about the right amount of all that, and ties things up in a nice little... well, anyway, it ends. Now that I’ve read the whole series, I can unambiguously recommend it for fans of noir-flavored double-agent superhero comics.

Next, Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina, vol. 2: Tag , which continues the tale of a super-powered mayor of New York City. In the foreword to the book, the Wachowski brothers talk about how they admire the book for doing the forbidden thing and marrying comics and politics. It is admirable to try to expand boundaries, sure, but after reading this volume, I understand why nobody tries it often: One of the big subplots here is about the mayor marrying gay couples, which is just so 2004. I’m sure it was very fresh and ripped-from-the-headlines when it came out, but now it feels stale and embarrassingly too-topical. Still, it’s a decent enough read, and there’s clearly a big story lurking underneath waiting to break out, so I’ll keep reading. But Vaughan should really get a move on, as this thing’s been lurking for way too long now, and could use some time in the sun.

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October 14, 2005

A while back, Trent Goulding said he was bothered by the arbitrary alien-god rules in Expendable; I wasn’t, but in James Alan Gardner’s Radiant , I started to get a bit Gouldingian myself.

The basic setup is this: If you cause someone to die, the League of Peoples will kill you if you try to leave the planet. So, no murdering, obviously; but also no criminal neglect of your safety inspector job, and no appointing an unqualified person to head FEMA. So, of course, the interesting thing is that these are all-powerful aliens, and you can’t exactly use technicalities to get around their godlike judgment, so you have to be awfully damn serious about not letting people die. Up until now, Gardner’s managed to make that a plausible part of the setting, the bit you just accept to get to your puzzle plot. But here, he uses it to drive the action in a really obtrusive, and frankly implausible, way. (This is a bit spoilery, but it really seems to me that dropping what you’re doing, commandeering a spaceship, and rushing off to a planet where you put yourself in enormous personal danger, on the off chance that there might be some survivors to rescue, should really count as “above and beyond” not “minimum necessary to stay alive”.)

Fortunately, he redeems himself a bit, because it turns out that this book takes us closer to exploring the motivation of the god-aliens, what Vinge called “applied theology”. Since the book is still narrated by a human, we don’t end up seeing exactly what the god-aliens are doing, but we catch enough glimpses to get a sense that there’s a larger story underlying Gardner’s sequence of novels, and that it’s beginning to open up a bit. I’m intrigued. And even if I wasn’t, this is still good enough as pure action-adventure SF to let me overlook an obtrusive plot-wheel here and there.

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October 14, 2005

Terry Pratchett’s Thud! is, annoying punctuation and all, the thirtieth Discworld novel. Or possibly the thirty-first. I’ve sort of lost count somewhere along the way. What’s impressive, though, is that after dozens of volumes of Discworld, Pratchett’s still capable of writing something that’s pretty damn good. This is a Vimes and ethnic tension book, with flavors of Uberwald mixed in for good measure, and it’s about what you’d expect from that.

If you’re reading Pratchett, keep on keepin’ on; if you’re not, start, but not with this one.

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October 14, 2005

Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is billed as a sort-of sequel to American Gods, but it really isn’t. I suppose it could be considered to be set in the same world, but it’s just as easy to imagine it set in the same world as Neverwhere or The Sandman — that is, it’s basically our world with magic and old gods. Apart from that setting, though, it has nothing in common with Gaiman’s earlier novel.

For one thing, it’s lightly comedic, rather than epic. This turns out to be for the better, I think. Make no mistake: I’m a fan of the epic, and Gaiman’s Sandman series is one of the better epics around; but he’s never been able to successfully transfer his epic-writing skills to prose. American Gods is a very good novel, but it’s got its serious flaws. Anansi Boys probably has its flaws, too, but they’re less obtrusive, and I don’t care as much, because it’s a lot of fun — it reads like a combination of Dave Barry’s novels with Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently stuff, but with Gaiman’s distinctive spin.

This is still just a very good, rather than great, novel; but it’s probably Gaiman’s best, which is a good sign for future output.

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October 14, 2005

Few purchases from Amazon have irritated me as much as Connie Willis’ Inside Job . The first irritation came when I pulled it out of the box. I hadn’t read the Amazon description closely enough, so I thought this was a real book. It’s not. It’s actually a hardcover novelette selling for a criminal $35 — only $25 after Amazon’s 30% discount, but $25 for a hundred-page story is still more than I’d like to pay for anything that’s not incredibly brilliant.

And “incredibly brilliant” is precisely how I’d fail to describe Willis’ little story. Willis’ biggest weakness is her smug preachiness, so you know it’s a bad sign when the main characters work at a skeptic’s magazine, the book focuses on debunking channelers, and every chapter begins with a quote from H.L. Mencken. It’s the perfect setting for a smugfest.

To be fair, Willis doesn’t take the smugness as far as she could — the story’s actually less irritating than I was expecting. But then, I was expecting something pretty damn irritating, so that’s not saying a whole lot. On the whole, this is worth reading, if you happen to come across it in a Year’s Best SF volume or something. But $35? If you don’t have a laminated membership card for the Connie Willis Fan Club, don’t even think about it.

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October 14, 2005

I’m actually way behind on my booklog — about a month or so — so this next bit is going to be difficult.

I know I read Alan Moore’s Top Ten: The Forty Niners and Smax , but I don’t remember much more than that. A quick page-through reminds me that The Forty Niners is a post-WWII novel focusing on the lives of superheroes after they’ve won the war and are now being relocated to a special town; Smax is a spin-off following a detective from Top Ten back to his fantasy homeworld. I remember enjoying reading them, but since I’ve got so little else, I suppose “enjoyable, but forgettable” is about as accurate a description as we’re likely to find anywhere.

I more vividly remember J. Michael Straczynski’s Strange: Beginnings and Endings , though, because it sucked so thoroughly. In principle, it could have been interesting: It’s an updated retelling of Dr. Strange’s origin story, in much the same way that the first volume or two of Ultimate Spider-Man updated and retold Spider-Man’s origin story. The problem is, Straczynski makes a total botch of it. The story is dull, the characters are irritating and arbitrary, and the plot only progresses the way it does because that’s how it has to go. The two-page origin summary you’ll find in some old comic is both more absorbing and better-written.

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October 14, 2005

Some years ago, I bought Frank Miller’s Sin City, vol. 1: The Hard Goodbye (though it was actually then titled simply Sin City; I’ll give the subtitled name so as not to be more confusing than I need to be), but I never read it, because I don’t actually like sordid, bleak stuff. Then I saw the Sin City movie, which was amazingly superbly excellent, and thought, “Dude! I should totally read that comic book!”

So I did. Interestingly, the comic book is practically a storyboard for the movie — it’s almost panel-for-shot identical; and since I liked the nearly-identical movie, it follows that I liked the book, too. (Although, to be fair, not as much as the movie: The movie is a lot more stylistically interesting than the book, even though they’re so similar — there are a number of comic books that look like this, but no movies that look like that.) The key is, the book really isn’t sordid and bleak. Oh, sure, the setting is sordid, and a lot of the characters are in sordid circumstances; but fundamentally, this is the story of a tragic hero engaging in a heroic quest. It happens that the hero is a psychopathic killer, and the quest is less than totally noble, but still: Tragic and heroic, not sordid and bleak.

After I finished that up, I then read straight through the rest (Amazon sells them as a discounted set): Sin City, vol. 2: A Dame to Kill For; Sin City, vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill; Sin City, vol. 4: That Yellow Bastard; Sin City, vol. 5: Family Values; Sin City, vol. 6: Booze, Broads, and Bullets; Sin City, vol. 7: Hell and Back . If you’ve watched the movie, you’ll already have guessed that a few more of these (volumes three and four) were also part of the movie; either way, you’ll find that they’re all similar in tone and style, so if you like one, you’ll probably like the others.

Good stuff, and highly recommended to any graphic novel fan. The movie comes even more highly recommended to anyone who doesn’t mind stylized violence.

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