Weasel Words
A Book Log
May
10,
2008
I read Matthew Hughes’ Template
as an ebook, as he’s giving out copies to anyone who’ll blog or otherwise write about it. This naturally makes my review here suspect, because it’s hard not to feel a sense of obligation to someone who gives you something free, even if you try consciously to avoid such feeling. Fortunately, I’ve already established my bona fides as a Hughes fanboy with my glowing reviews of his Hapthorn and Vesh novels, so saying good things about Template can’t be seen as suspicious. Which is handy, because it’s a great book.
The other Hughes novels I’ve read have taken place on an Old Earth teetering between science and magic, feeling very much like something out of Vance. This one takes place in that same universe, but is wholly separate from the other books in plot and character. I believe it’s set earlier, in a time of pure science; given that, and that its plot involves the character hopping around from planet to planet across the length of the Spray, it feels less like Vance’s Dying Earth and more like... okay, more like Vance’s Demon Princes books.
Which is a good thing. Vance is a great writer, and not a particularly imitated one, so even a pure Vance knock-off would be a useful addition to the field (I mean, how many Tolkien knockoffs are there? Surely Vance deserves at least one); but Hughes isn’t a pure knock-off and has his own distinctive stamp, so even better. This is good stuff, and people who like good things — and particularly people who like Vancian good things — should at least go to Hughes’ site and email him for a copy, as this is a good, standalone place to start reading. Or go read The Gist Hunters, which is also an ideal starting place.
Now, just to establish my independence and credibility here, I’ll end with a negative comment. Hughes considers this to be “[his] best work yet,” and on that point I disagree. I think the Hapthorn books are better, and the Filidor Vesh books just as good. So there you are: It’s not quite as good as one of Hughes’ excellent works, and only on par with one of his other excellent works.
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May
10,
2008
Back in college, my favorite place to study was floor 2M of the Memorial Library, right next to the British fiction section. In practice, what this meant is that I’d spend five minutes reading my textbook, and then grab a book off the shelves and read it. That’s how I read a bunch of Pratchett before it was published in the US, and it’s also how I read an enormous pile of Wodehouse. Since then, I’ve watched the Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie Jeeves and Wooster BBC TV show, so it was a bit odd picking up P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in the Morning
(originally titled Joy in the Morning back when they weren’t worried about branding).
Because the thing is, I’ve read this story before, and it’s exactly as I remembered it, but somehow Wooster now speaks with Hugh Laurie’s voice and Jeeves is a very droll Stephen Fry. I literally cannot read it the way I did before; all the voices, intonation, and timing are completely different. You know how people always worry about movies ruining books and then people go “Well, the book is still there the same as before”? Those people are wrong; once the movie version is out, the book is going to be different for the people who’ve seen the movie version.
Fortunately, the Fry/Laurie version of Jeeves and Wooster is great, and having their voices in my head arguably improves the dialogue in the book. And Wodehouse himself is every bit as charmingly delicious as I remembered. This isn’t the place to start reading Jeeves books (it’s very late in the series, and references stuff that’s happened before), but if you haven’t read them, and possess a sense of humour, you absolutely should.
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May
10,
2008
I’m given to understand that, following on the success of Iron Man and Spider-Man and the X-Men, there’s going to be a Thor movie at some point. This strikes me as the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, because if there’s a superhero who’s wholly unsuited for the big screen, it’s Thor.
I mean, in his classic incarnation, he’s a literal Norse god who comes from a whole Asgardian pantheon and fights crime while wearing a big winged helmet and cape and speaking in a pseudo-medieval “thou”-laden dialect. In the gloriously eclectic and pantheistic world of comic books, this kinda works; on the the big screen, with its realist sensibilities, I can’t see how it would. (And even the Ultimate Thor, who’s highly de-cheesed, doesn’t work. His whole thing is that he’s a Norwegian hippie who might be just an insane superhero or might actually be myffic, and it’s sort of played for uncertainty. You can do that with one character in a cast, so it works in the book; you can’t do it with the lead character of your movie. At least not well.)
So anyway, I see J. Michael Straczynski’s Thor, vol. 1
, and I think to myself, oh okay, they’re giving the franchise to Straczynski to reboot it and make it movie-friendly. It’s a good timing for a reboot, what with Thor being comic-book-dead and all. Bring him back different, right?
So it’s a little surprising that this isn’t what happened. Thor is still a Norse god, he still wears basically the same uniform (it maybe looks a little more medievaly and less spandexy), and there’s still that weird fusion of the mythic and the superheroic. So not very movie-friendly, but how is it as a book?
Pretty good. The plot involves Thor returning from the dead after Ragnarok, and then rebuilding Asgard. On a field next to a small town in Oklahoma. There’s some great humor that comes from the juxtaposition of the mythic and the mundane, and the larger storyline is basically fine (if kind of setup-y); and, as always, Straczynski’s writing is thoroughly competent at worst. This isn’t something that’s going to appeal to non-superhero fans, and it’s useless for movie purposes, but as Thor stories go, it’s solid.
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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
:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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