June 22, 2011

SF/F Commentary

The Haul of Books 2.0: Books Received Vol. 2

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I’ve got more books for you, which is pretty awesome if you are a lover of books.  Me?  I’m a lover of books.  I love books almost as much as I love the sound of my own voice.  Wait… Anywho!  I’ve got one last edition to do after this one, and then I’ll be caught up.  Unless twenty more books show up on my doorstep… *drools* Here goes nothing: Promises to Keep by Charles De Lint (Tachyon) With the help of a mentor and an anonymous benefactor, Jilly Coppercorn has overcome abuse, addiction, and a stint in juvie. Though she still struggles to stay clean, she has found safety and love in a newly formed family that includes her loyal best friend, a lovely artist, and her caseworker. Temptation comes knocking, however, when her best friend from the bad old days rides in on a motorcycle and takes Jilly to a beautiful, mysterious city full of wonderful opportunities. It seems perfect at first, until Jilly discovers that it was a one-way trip—and she still has unfinished business in Newford. At turns playful and serious, this urban fantasy introduces de Lint’s most enduring character and grapples with the realities of life-changing choices. Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Thomas Dunne Books) From the author of the international and New York Times bestseller Let the Right One In (Let Me In) comes this stunning and terrifying book which begins when a man’s six-year-old daughter vanishes.One ordinary winter afternoon on a snowy island, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen channel. While the couple explore the lighthouse, Maja disappears — either into thin air or under thin ice — leaving not even a footprint in the snow. Two years later, alone and more or less permanently drunk, Anders returns to the island to regroup. He slowly realises that people are not telling him all they know; even his own mother, it seems, is keeping secrets. What is happening in Domaro, and what power does the sea have over the town’s inhabitants? As he did with Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead, John Ajvide Lindqvist serves up a blockbuster cocktail of suspense in a narrative that barely pauses for breath. Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes (Pyr) The debut novel from an extraordinarily talented twenty-five-year-old author. Fantasy’s next global star has arrived. Lenk can barely keep control of his mismatched adventurer band at the best of times (Gariath the dragon man sees humans as little more than prey, Kataria the Shict despises most humans, and the humans in the band are little better). When they’re not insulting each other’s religions they’re arguing about pay and conditions. So when the ship they are travelling on is attacked by pirates things don’t go very well. They go a whole lot worse when an invincible demon joins the fray. The demon steals the Tome of the Undergates – a manuscript that contains all you need to open the undergates. And whichever god you believe in you don’t want the undergates open. On the other side are countless more invincible demons, the manifestation of all the evil of the gods, and they want out. Full of razor-sharp wit, characters who leap off the page (and into trouble) and plunging the reader into a vivid world of adventure this is a fantasy that kicks off a series that could dominate the second decade of the century. Embassytown by China Mieville (Del Rey) China Miéville doesn’t follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer—and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field—with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war. In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak. Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language. When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her. The Nebula Awards Showcase:  2011 edited by Kevin J. Anderson (Tor) With this inaugural volume at Tor, the annual Nebula Award collection is reborn as a fiction-only anthology. This collection of nominees for 2010’s Nebula Awards includes all of the prior year’s most celebrated stories, and will be published in time for the 2011 Nebula Awards in May, 2011. 2009’s award winners, announced in May 2010, include Kage Baker’s novella “The Women of Nell Gwynne’s,” Eugie Foster’s novelette “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Kij Johnson’s short story “Spar,” plus Paolo Bacigalupi’s novelette, “The Gambler.” The Plain Man by Steve Englehart (Tor) Magick and reality collide in a new, fast-paced Max August thriller Max August is not invulnerable, but he never ages—a gift he earned while studying under the legendary alchemist Cornelius Agrippa. August, now an alchemist himself, is using his magickal abilities to fight the right-wing conspiracy known as the FRC, which seeks to control all aspects of society. At the top of the FRC is a nine-member cabal, each member of which is a powerful force in one area of society, such as media, politics, finance…and wizardry. When Max learns that two members of the cabal are en route to Wickr, a Burning Man–like festival held in the American Southwest, he stages a plan to gather information from

SF/F Commentary

Get Your Parenting Off My Metaphorical Child (Young Adult Lit B.S.)

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Imagine for a moment that I am happily married and have a lovely 12-year-old child who likes doing jumps and learning tricks on his BMX bike.  Because we don’t have billions of dollars, we can’t afford to buy our imaginary child the best BMX bikes, but we’re very fortunate to live in a town with an awesome bike library where kids can go to borrow all kinds of bikes.  Tandem bikes.  Normal street bikes.  Bikes with little bells and baseball cards in the spokes.  Pink bikes with little tassels and red bikes with racing stripes.  They also carry BMX bikes.  You know, the kind with the little metal poles on them for grinding and what not.  I may not fully understand BMX bikes or why my child wants to jump off boards leaned up against cement parking stops or grind off rails, and so on (well, I do, because I did similar things as a kid, but let’s pretend otherwise for now), but we’ve talked talked about such things and we’re there for our child when he or she needs us. You’ve got the image in your head now, right?  Happy little kid doing semi-dangerous tricks on a bike, falling and hurting him or herself, talking to mommy and daddy (or daddy and daddy, as is always possible in any analogy) and learning life lessons, as is the domain of parents? Good.  Now I want you to imagine this:  my next door neighbor, who may be a man or a woman, but almost always a very grumpy, controlling person, wanders over and tells my child that they aren’t allowed to ride on BMX bikes, because they are dangerous and inspire dangerous behaviors and what not.  My child, obviously, ignores these people and continues pursuing BMX biking, until those grumpy neighbors show up at Town Hall and try to get BMX bikes banned from the bike library using the same argument.  After all, kids shouldn’t be BMX biking!  It’s dangerous.  They could get hurt or scarred or something, right?  And the grumpy people don’t want their kids exposed to that kind of thing. The rest of us cry “censorship,” while they say “well, it’s just parenting.”  Let’s pretend that the dictionary has nothing to say on this matter. With all that in your mind, what do you think I would say to such people? If you guessed “please, go fuck yourself,” then you would be right. Your job as a parent ends with your child.  You have no right telling my child what he or she can have access to (or say the same to me), nor do you have a right to remove materials from publicly accessible spaces in order to fulfill your narrow moral agenda or to tell me, as a parent, what I am allowed to give my child.  (This does not extend to materials which are illegal, such as child pornography.) So when Ru Freeman (a supporter of Gurdon, who I talk about here) at the Huffington Post says As the parent of three avid readers, I agree with Meghan Cox Gurdon’s point that what is considered “banning” in the book trade is known in the parenting world as doing our job. I have to say:  get your parenting off my metaphorical child and please, go fuck yourself. Parenting is the act of monitoring what your child does and access to.  It does not extend to monitoring my child’s access to materials, whatever those materials may be.  You are certainly allowed to tell me that I cannot molest or rape my child, or sacrifice them for a religious ceremony, lock them in the basement without food, beat them, and so on.  You have that right because those behaviors are detrimental to the well-being of the child.  But reading a book only has detrimental consequences when people who are supposed to be parents fail to act like parents when their children are exposed to things beyond their scope of knowledge.  This is precisely why the furor over Janet Jackson’s semi-nipple slip elicited absurdity.  Parents weren’t really concerned about a boob being on the TV; if they were, they would have been upset with the overt sexual nature of Janet Jackson’s entire set at the Super Bowl.  No, what they were pissed about was the fact that they suddenly could not avoid having to be parents when little Timmy or Jenny wondered what had happened on the screen.  And I have no doubt that this is the same kind of policy of avoidance that governs book bannings. I don’t see much point in going into the substance of Freeman’s post.  Most of her arguments are either anecdotal or contain serious errors of logic.  For example, she frequently sites how young adults who are starving don’t want to read books about starvation (she actually calls them children, which is another issue I’ve railed against).  That may or may not be true.  I don’t know.  But that doesn’t mean that other young adults don’t want to read a book about other young adults battling starvation.  This is a piss poor example precisely because reading such a book might make a young adult more willing to do something about it.  People have been compelled by literature to do less and more, and if something good comes from reading a book on suffering, it doesn’t seem to me that there is much of a problem. But when it comes down to it, what Freeman and Gurdon do is argue by fallacy (reading dark books will destroy young minds, even though I’ve yet to see a study that conclusively supports this assertion), reduce young adults to lesser people (i.e., calling them children), and arguing for censorship by way of claiming that book banning is parenting. And to such people I can only repeat myself:  please, go fuck yourself and keep your parenting within your family. Or if you’ll accept a severe reduction, there’s this comment by Jenni Langlois: Restrictin­g what your children read? Parenting. Restrictin­g what

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