June 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

SF/F Commentary

Writing Young Adult Fantasy: The Challenge of Darkness

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How dark is too dark for young adult readers?  How dark is too dark for a young adult character?  Not long ago, I responded to a Wall Street Journal post by Meghan Cox Gurdon which argued that YA fiction has become exceedingly dark.  I didn’t agree with the author’s assessment, largely because it was a “conservative” political manipulation of reality rather than anything approaching legitimate criticism of the genre.  In a lot of ways, the thematic shift in the YA literature field to a more active engagement with the things that plague teenagers has been a good thing for me as an author (of YA and other “genres”). When I first began writing The World in the Satin Bag, I intended it to be a quirky fantasy romp a la Leven Thumps, but the deeper I got into the world, the more I found my darker side taking over.  WISB is not fluff.  In a lot of ways, the novel tricks you into think it is just that.  Is there humor?  Absolutely.  Are there quirky creatures and characters?  You bet.  But is it a novel that avoids taking its 13-year-old character through the ringer?  Nope.  WISB is a novel about the limits of young adults.  James, my main character, experiences some of the darkest things imaginable for a child, from murder to child kidnapping to the terror of children as soldiers and the horrors of power.  And, if you’ve been listening, you’ll know that James has to constantly deal with the fact that his very existence in the world of Traea is the catalyst for near-genocidal behaviors in others.  I don’t want to say more than that, because you should listen to the novel (or get the ebook when it comes out).  The point is:  I might be on Gurdon’s list of depraved authors simply because I’ve written a book which puts a poor 13-year-old character through things that no child should experience, and most children probably won’t. But I hold a very different opinion of young adults than Gurdon.  I don’t view them as children in the traditional sense.  Young adult is a category which should be taken literally:  they are young adults.  They may not have the same rights as those of us over the age of 21, and, perhaps, shouldn’t have all those rights for very good reasons (mental growth, etc.), but they are in a long transition phase between childhood and adulthood.  As I mentioned in my response to Gurdon, young adults are already dealing with things many adults want to hide them from.  They treat young adults like they treat little children, which I find grossly offensive. It’s for that reason that I don’t feel a need to hold back when I punish my main character.  The only limits in my story are the limits of James.  That doesn’t mean James can’t die (or that he won’t), but it does mean that I know where the line rests and what will happen to my story if I cross it.  The challenge of darkness isn’t about public morality or, as Gurdon suggests, avoiding reinforcing bad behaviors.  It’s about exploring the limits of the potential of young adults as thinking people.  In my mind, it’s also an issue of respect.  You drag your characters as far as you can imagine your characters going, and you put a foot over the line to test them. With James, that line is his own cowardice (or, more accurately, his disinterest in things that might get him hurt).  But he’s also a character who places extraordinary value on the people who matter to him, and it’s because of this that he has to challenge himself to do something beyond his nature.  His strength and resolve will be tested throughout the book, even beyond his initial leap of courage; in fact, James will have to explore the farthest boundaries of his disinterest and experience the very things he has spent his short life avoiding at an exaggerated level.  I won’t tell you what happens to him, but it’s not “good,” if you get my meaning. For other authors, those lines are very different.  Some authors may want to put a young adult character through the trials of molestation or the scary experience of teen pregnancy.  YA fantasy authors might include these themes in their work because they want to show that even characters who use magic and wander around in mystical worlds experience such things too.  There’s nothing dark or wrong about exploring these issues; in fact, I would argue that exploring the “dark side” of teenage existence is essential for young adult literature, whether fantastic or otherwise. Perhaps a lot of this discussion comes from the fact that I interact with young adults on a regular basis.  As the co-owner (and, more or less, the only “boss”) of Young Writers Online, I talk to a lot of teenagers of all ages.  Many of them are people I would consider my friends, even if I am older than them.  And through my interactions with these folks, it’s become very clear to me what kind of world they live in.  Reading a book like WISB, which does contain a fair deal of blood and violence and, if I’m being honest, downright wicked stuff, won’t destroy their minds.  They might find it a good deal of fun, or they might enjoy the underlying “messages” compelling and find themselves thinking about things they might not have thought about before (or might not have expected someone else to write about). And that’s really the point.  Darkness or not, YA fantasy (and YA literature in general) is an exploratory process, for authors and for young adult (and even adult) readers.

SF/F Commentary

The Haul of Books 2.0: Books Received Vol. 1 (Special Reboot Edition)

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I haven’t done a Haul of Books thing in a long time.  The result?  A pile of books I’ve received for review which I haven’t told you all about, with a smaller pile of things I’ve purchased for myself that I also haven’t told you about.  Well, I can’t let them sit there without at least telling you about them.  So the Haul of Book begins anew! Let’s get to it (descriptions taken from Amazon): Brave New Worlds edited by John Joseph Adams (Night Shade Books) YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.  Your every movement is being tracked, your every word recorded. Your spouse may be an informer, your children may be listening at your door, your best friend may be a member of the secret police. You are alone among thousands, among great crowds of the brainwashed, the well-behaved, the loyal. Productivity has never been higher, the media blares, and the army is ever triumphant. One wrong move, one slip-up, and you may find yourself disappeared — swallowed up by a monstrous bureaucracy, vanished into a shadowy labyrinth of interrogation chambers, show trials, and secret prisons from which no one ever escapes. Welcome to the world of the dystopia, a world of government and society gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong. In his smash-hit anthologies Wastelands and The Living Dead, acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams showed you what happens when society is utterly wiped away. Now he brings you a glimpse into an equally terrifying future — what happens when civilization invades and dictates every aspect of your life? From 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale, from Children of Men to Bioshock, the dystopian imagination has been a vital and gripping cautionary force. Brave New Worlds collects 33 of the best tales of totalitarian menace by some of today’s most visionary writers, including Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula K. Le Guin.  When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state. Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust beneath the boot of tyranny? A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (Bantam) A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. Two great leaders—Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon—who hold sway over an age of enforced peace are dead, victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war. It is a tale in which brother plots against brother and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside. Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory may go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel…and the coldest hearts. For when kings clash, the whole land trembles. A Feast of Crows by George R. R. Martin (Bantam) It seems too good to be true. After centuries of bitter strife and fatal treachery, the seven powers dividing the land have decimated one another into an uneasy truce. Or so it appears. . . . With the death of the monstrous King Joffrey, Cersei is ruling as regent in King’s Landing. Robb Stark’s demise has broken the back of the Northern rebels, and his siblings are scattered throughout the kingdom like seeds on barren soil. Few legitimate claims to the once desperately sought Iron Throne still exist—or they are held in hands too weak or too distant to wield them effectively. The war, which raged out of control for so long, has burned itself out. But as in the aftermath of any climactic struggle, it is not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters start to gather, picking over the bones of the dead and fighting for the spoils of the soon-to-be dead. Now in the Seven Kingdoms, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed, while surprising faces—some familiar, others only just appearing—are seen emerging from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges ahead. It is a time when the wise and the ambitious, the deceitful and the strong will acquire the skills, the power, and the magic to survive the stark and terrible times that lie before them. It is a time for nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages to come together and stake their fortunes . . . and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests—but only a few are the survivors. A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (Bantam) Of the five contenders for power, one is dead, another in disfavor, and still the wars rage as violently as ever, as alliances are made and broken. Joffrey, of House Lannister, sits on the Iron Throne, the uneasy ruler of the land of the Seven Kingdoms. His most bitter rival, Lord Stannis, stands defeated and disgraced, the victim of the jealous sorceress who holds him in her evil thrall. But young Robb, of House Stark, still rules the North from the fortress of Riverrun. Robb plots against his despised Lannister enemies, even as they hold his sister hostage at King’s Landing, the seat of the Iron Throne. Meanwhile, making her way across a blood-drenched continent is the exiled queen, Daenerys, mistress of the only three dragons still left in the world. . . . But as opposing forces maneuver for the final titanic showdown, an army of barbaric wildlings arrives from the outermost line of civilization. In their vanguard is a horde of mythical Others–a supernatural army of the living dead whose animated corpses are unstoppable. As the

SF/F Commentary

Video Found: A History of Pretty Much Everything

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The video below is why Stumbleupon is one of the most amazing things ever. It’s also why the pen will always be mightier than MS Word. I have no idea how the creator came up with the idea, but apparently he used over 2,100 pages to do it. That’s a lot of trees, which I’m strangely okay with. Here’s the video:

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