Weasel Words

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it continues to be an excruciatingly well-written and thoroughly interesting work, and even if the history is centuries out of date, it’s well worth reading as an artifact in its own right.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.

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February 29, 2008

And now one last quick hit to finish off the backlog of comics, with those that were definitely not forgettable.

• Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, vol. 2: Lawless is a stand-alone gritty, dark crime story. I don’t like gritty, dark crime stories, but I liked this one, which probably means it’s excellent. Brubaker is a very good writer at his best, and entirely wasted writing stupid fake deaths for superheroes.
• C.B. Cebulski’s X-Men: Fairy Tales and Spider-Man: Fairy Tales take traditional fairy tales and re-tell them with characters from the eponymous superhero books. This seems like it could be cheesy and lame, and indeed it could; but it’s not. The quality of the stories is a little uneven, but it averages out pretty high, and the ones that really hit read more like Gaiman doing Marvel than Gaiman doing Marvel actually did. The art on these is also superb, with wildly different (and appropriate) styles for each story. Highly recommended to fans of alternate takes on superheroes.
• Finally, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1: The Long Way Home is the first volume of Whedon’s official continuation of the show past its televised conclusion. This could have been disastrous, because the end of the show was very much an end, and it’d be very difficult to go back to the sort of stuff that the show was doing. But Whedon is a super-genius for a reason, and he doesn’t even try: He takes the conclusion of the show and runs with it, writing something that’s recognizably Buffy, but radically different from what was on TV. (You get the sense that he’s also reveling in the freedom from budgetary and production constraints, putting in things that would have been completely impossible to do on a TV budget.) Essential reading for any Buffy fan who’s not allergic to comics or change.

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February 29, 2008

So sometimes when I say that a book is forgettable, I’m making a prediction that turns out to be incorrect; it might seem like it’ll be forgettable, but for some reason, it’ll lodge deep in my brain and stick with me for decades. But the benefit of being way behind on my booklogging, is that I am entirely able to declare a certain set of books as being thoroughly and definitively forgettable, because I have already forgotten them. Let us begin.

• Reginald Hudlin’s Black Panther: Four the Hard Way continues his run on the Black Panther. I liked the early volumes, but this one I don’t remember at all. Except that looking on the cover, it shows the Fantastic four and the Marvel Zombies universe, so I’m pretty sure they joined up with them and traveled there. Probably survived, too.
• Dwayne McDuffie’s The New Fantastic Four shows the Fantastic Four on the cover, along with Storm and the Black Panther. So I’m guessing I probably bought this because it crosses over with the Black Panther book? I don’t remember how, though.
• I’d think I’d remember Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Planet Without a Hulk , since I’ve really liked earlier volumes. But I don’t. It’s probably good, though, really. Slott’s She-Hulk work has been quality. Quickly paging through it, it looks like it’s set around the Civil War stuff, which trips a memory in my brain that it was kind of awkward, because the dead-serious Civil War doesn’t combine well with the flip self-referentiality of Slott’s She-Hulk.
• Dan Slott’s Avengers: The Initiative: Basic Training has so thoroughly slipped my memory that I wasn’t even sure I read it, even though it was sitting on my “to be booklogged” pile. After flipping through it, some character names are familiar, so I probably did read it. But I sure as heck didn’t remember it. I think the most I can say is that the artist appears to have colored within the lines throughout.
• J. Michael Straczynski and Peter David’s Spider-Man: Back in Black and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Sean McKeever’s Peter Parker: Spider Man: Back in Black are both eminently forgettable. I remember that Spider-Man dresses up in black for some bullshit in-story reason that clearly boils down to “there was a movie going on at the time where he was in his black costume, so it seemed like a good idea.” Also, I think they’re supposed to be all dark and broody, which is rarely a good tone for Spider-Man. Also, apparently they’re totally irrelevant because they’re busy magically rebooting Spider-Man’s entire fucking continuity, which kind of pisses me off a lot.
• Brian reed’s Ms. Marvel, vol. 3: Operation Lightning Storm is apparently also a Civil War-related book. I’d hoped that the Ms. Marvel book would start to pick up steam at some point, but it doesn’t appear to have happened so far, so it’s looking fairly unlikely at this point.
• Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina, vol. 6: Power Down is the continuation of a series that I’ve liked a goodly bit, but which seemed to be underperforming to its potential. I remember thinking that I wished they’d get on with some of their big reveals and move along the overarching plot. Did they do so in this volume? Fuck if I know.
• I can hardly stop rolling my eyes at the very concept of Jeph Loeb’s Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America and Ed Brubaker’s The Death of Captain America . Stupid stunt deaths of characters who are clearly not going to stay dead are lame, lame, lame. Combine this with the aforementioned Spider-Man magic retcon, and it’s like Marvel is suddenly determined to go back to the bad old days of the ‘90s and throw away their recent artistic and financial success. So, best to forget about this entirely.
• This is cheating, because I just read it recently, but J. Michael Straczynski’s Silver Surfer: Requiem is already on its way to oblivion in my memory. But since it’s still fresh, I remember it being a very weird book. Straczynski kills off the Silver Surfer in a really low-key elegiac way, and it only occurred to me after I was done reading the book that he killed off a forty-year-old character. Is the Surfer really dead? It seems unlikely, but I cared so little while it happened that you never know. It’s not like anyone would really get upset if he weren’t kicking around the Marvel Universe any more, you know?

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February 29, 2008

If you try to think of the saddest muppet of a hero in the Marvel Universe, you probably come up with Ant-Man. Stan Lee felt so bad for the initial Henry Pym Ant-Man that he quickly made him into Giant-Man instead. The later Scott Lang Ant-Man was used as a punchline in Brian Bendis’ Alias, before he got killed off randomly. (And plausibly, because — unlike Captain America — people think that you might just leave Ant-Man dead.)

So it makes sense that in Robert Kirkman’s The Irredeemable Ant-Man, vols. 1 and 2 , we have Ant-Man treated as a selfish, amoral asshole who uses his powers mostly to spy on women undressing. If you somehow get the sense that the new guy is putting the “ant” in “anti-hero”, well, give yourself a gold star.

The thing is, antihero books are hard to do right. If you don’t make the guy convincingly anti enough, he’s just a regular, if slightly dull, hero; if you make him too anti, the reader hates him and wants him to die. Kirkman threads the needle deftly here, and manages to balance precisely on the point where Ant-Man is doing awful things... but things that are, ultimately, able to be forgiven, if it comes down to it. Combine that with actual character development (a rarity for the monthly hero game, but possible here because these two volumes are the complete run of the title and finish the character arc), and you end up with an anti-hero that you end up, despite yourself a little bit, kind of liking.

Beyond the well-done characterization, Kirkman — who’s also the writer of the overrated Invincible, the very well done zombiepocalypse The Walking Dead, and a pile of other books — shows here that he can do humor with the best of them, with some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. This is superhero fare that stands out from the crowd with better characterization, story, and writing, and is recommended to comic fans, particularly those who might have walked past an Ant-Man title.

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February 29, 2008

Max Brooks’ World War Z could have been trite and obvious. Its premise is that it’s a collection of interviews and other oral histories of the Zombie War, the one that nearly wiped out human civilization. Zombies are all the rage of late (not least thanks to Brooks, whose Zombie Survival Guide is an unexpectedly humor-free, practical guide to dealing with zombie outbreaks), and it’d be easy for Brooks to write a cash-in that hits all the expected notes and doesn’t go any deeper than that. But he doesn’t.

His book is written as told from the perspectives of dozens (hundreds, possibly) of people, from all over the world, and talking about different stages of the zombie war, from its beginnings to the most awful moments to the end. The result is that incredibly rare thing: a non-genre-SF book that nevertheless thoroughly extrapolates things to their conclusions in SFnal ways.

For contrast here, let’s talk about Douglas Preston’s Tyrannosaur Canyon, a mainstream thriller that I listened to as an audiobook recently. Preston’s book (which I’m about to spoil thoroughly, so if you actually want to be surprised by it, skip to the next paragraph) is about the discovery of a tyrannosaur fossil which reveals crucial new truth about the extinction of the dinosaurs and proves that there are alien intelligences out there. Oh my god, that’s huge, right? No. For Preston, this is just a macguffin, a reason to have our heroes trying to decode DaVinci-esque clues and run around in canyons being chased by black helicopters and having gunfights in caves and so forth. It doesn’t actually matter in any real sense, not even at the end.

(It belatedly occurs to me that an even better example is those apparently execrable Left Behind books, which the Slacktivist is in the middle of destroying, page by page.)

But Brooks’ zombies fucking well matter. When the zombie outbreaks start, when societies collapse, it all seems thoroughly real, and not just horror-themed window dressing on top of the regular world. This is a genuinely Sfnal apocalyptic novel, one that’s thought through the angles, considered the possibilities, and which seems to be telling not just some possible way that things could have gone, but the way that they must have gone. The deeply convincing world is backed up with convincing people, all of them telling their little fragment of the story, together forming a mosaic of the big picture.

World War Z has the trappings of horror, but underneath that, it’s more genuinely science fictional than most books with spaceships on the cover. Highly recommended to any fan of zombies or apocalypses.

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February 29, 2008

So most of the books that I’ve not booklogged for months range from the weakly bad to the weakly good, but the ones that I feel worst about not mentioning before are the biggest exception to that, Matthew Hughes’ The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, Majestrum, and The Spiral Labyrinth , which are collectively the tales of Henghis Hapthorn.

Hapthorn is a discriminator (translate as, loosely, private investigator) in the far, far future, on an Earth so long from now that our time is distant legend. What’s more, it’s an Earth that’s beginning the transition from an age of science, when rationality and reason and technology rule the universe, to an age of magic, when belief and will and intuition are supreme. The pretty obvious inspiration here is Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, but Hughes isn’t writing pastiche any more than Gene Wolfe was in The Book of the New Sun; this is a fully realized creation on its own.

In The Gist Hunters, a half dozen Hapthorn stories are collected, and they seem at first like conventional SF mysteries, but as they progress, the characters and the world change and develop in ways that are unusual for a genre that thrives on stasis. That change, and that unpredictability, continue throughout the two novels; each of them tells a complete story, but they’re clearly building up a larger story of the world changing and Hapthorn trying to find a place in the new world (a story which is as yet incomplete; there’s at least one more book coming out soon, and hopefully others past that).

Hughes is a great writer, capable of writing SF on the grand scale, but also of light touches of dry humor; Hapthorn is a great character, pompous and self-regarding and brilliant; and the far-future Earth is a great setting, soaring and glorious and ancient and magical. If you enjoy mystery-tinged SF, humor-tinged SF, fantasy-tinged SF, or even just exceedingly well-written SF, you should go buy at least The Gist Hunters.

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February 29, 2008

You know who pisses me off? Warren Ellis, that’s who. The thing is, the guy clearly has talent, and when he’s writing something good, it can be excellent. But for some reason, he has this inexplicable attraction to the sleazy, to the unpleasant, to the nasty and dirty and grimy and feces-smeared. And even then, he still writes well enough that sometimes stuff shines through the muck, so I can’t just ignore him completely.

Take Ellis’ Fell: Feral City , for instance. It’s about a cop who works in a run-down, but not entirely mundane, city — full of crime and magic and secret rituals and monsters and drugs and squalor. There’s depth to the character and the setting, and moments of quiet grace that stand out from amidst a catalog of the most awful filth imaginable. It’s deeply unpleasant in a lot of ways, but unquestionably a very good work and worth reading, which is the best you can hope for from Ellis a lot of the time.

Then there’s bad Ellis, as in Thunderbolts: Faith in Monsters , a book set in the Marvel Universe, featuring a team of superheroes who are all supervillains, and who are horrible and reprehensible and combine to make a distasteful and unpleasant book with little redeeming merit. It’s basically a generic superhero book with a ladle of soul-killing sauce poured generously over the top. I can’t recommend it to anyone.

If Ellis could get over his fixation on unpleasant sleaze and filth, he could be great. As it is, he’s at best a cautious recommendation, and at worst a strong avoid.

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February 29, 2008

Okay, I’m a bit behind on the booklogging. Believe it or not, I really did read some stuff in November, December, and January, all of which I will proceed to discuss in a hopefully rapid series of posts that will let me drain the to-be-logged pile on my nightstand.

So let’s talk about Mike Carey.

Carey first came to my attention with the explicitly Gaiman-esque Lucifer series of graphic novels, which are a spin-off of the Sandman universe. So it makes sense that the first prose novel he wrote (or at least the first one I’m aware of, which may not be at all the same thing) is, at least in broad outline, also Gaiman-esque: British, supernatural, a bit creepy, and pretty darn good.

The premise of Mike Carey’s The Devil You Know is that the dead have come back to, well, undeath if not exactly life; ghosts, zombies, and other spirits are now a commonplace hazard of the modern world. Our protagonist is an exorcist, who gets rid of the more troublesome manifestations. It’s usually an uneventful job, but nobody writes novels about uneventful jobs, right? Right. So. Good solid horror-tinged fantasy noir, this is what Stephan Zielinski’s Bad Magic was trying to do, but about a zillion times more successful.

But Carey’s not just writing in Gaiman’s footsteps with urban mythological fantasy. He’s also writing mainstream superhero comics, like the fairly okay Ultimate Vision (with Mark Millar) or the characteristically solid Ultimate Fantastic Four, vol. 9: Silver Surfer . Good stuff, if not revolutionary.

Perhaps more interesting on the comics front — at least to non-superhero fans — is Carey’s Crossing Midnight, vol. 1: Cut Here , which is a modern urban fantasy noir where the fantasy in question is Japanese myth and folklore. It’s not like anything else out there, and it’s very good. When I started writing this, I was eagerly awaiting the next volume, but it just came from Amazon, so I guess now I just need to get around to reading it.

Long story short, hey, this Carey guy can write, and is writing a lot. He seems to be toiling in midlist obscurity now, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to stay that way for long.

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