Plot summary: Crazed genius invites several young people into a labyrinth of his own making, in which all but one suffer terrible mutilations. The one who remains is recruited as his successor.
Is this a pitch for
(a) SAW III?
(b) CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY?
I’m starting to get really frustrated with Calibre, so I thought I’d look up how to format an ebook in HTML. This looks dead easy. And Mobipocket has free HTML-Mobipocket conversion tools; it looks like you can do epub conversion just by editing the HTML file.
Has anyone tried digging into this stuff? Honestly, I feel like an idiot for messing around with Calibre to convert from Word and LaTeX when it seems like it should be easy to create a clean HTML version of a book and go from there. I guess the Mobipocket conversion is probably the most important for most people, so if that tool can’t even do good work with clean HTML, maybe Calibre is still the best free tool for the job. I suppose I should try this out in my copious free time. (It also makes me think that maybe I should do my writing in HTML rather than LaTeX. I bet converting HTML to Word is enormously easier than LaTeX to Word. Plus no compiling. Hmm.)
I haven’t read Warren Ellis’ GUN MACHINE, though now that he’s emailed his subscribers about amazon.co.uk selling out, I kind of want a first edition. I’m glad that he got a good review from the NEW YORK TIMES, and almost everything about that review makes me happy and excited to read the book. But I’m going to single out the one thing about it that, not having read GUN MACHINE and having read Ellis’ other work, still nags me like a hangnail:
Mr. Ellis, the British author of one previous thriller, “Crooked Little Vein,” was a well-known and successful writer of comics and graphic novels before turning to prose fiction. (The best known among them is probably “RED,” which was turned into a movie starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren.) There is nothing comic-bookish about his writing, however, which races along in crisp hard-boiled fashion, and the world of the novel is less cartoonish than just odd and pretty grim.
If I read GUN MACHINE, and I will read GUN MACHINE, it’s on the strength of Ellis’ comics—of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, which was my gateway, and then of GLOBAL FREQUENCY, of NEWUNIVERSAL, of NEXTWAVE, of BLACK SUMMER, of the never-to-be-finished FELL and DESOLATION JONES. I have nothing but respect for his turn to prose fiction, as I have nothing but respect for China Mieville’s work on DIAL H; but Ellis’ writing comes from comics, and there is not a shortage of comics writers as good as Ellis. (If you need a list: Carla Speed McNeil, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Matt Fraction, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Brian K. Vaughan; I know I’m forgetting some).
I know what Charles McGrath means when he says “comic-bookish.” But that word doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.
A link to last year’s reading retrospective, if that’s of any interest.
I read 70 books this year (not counting uncollected comics or scientific articles), down from 75 last year, although last year was probably inflated a little bit by the Vlad Taltos push toward the end. Of those, 32 were written and two co-written by women, which is close to parity; women actually constitute half of total authors, 28 out of 57. This surprised me—I thought the book count would overestimate women relative to the author count, because I read a bunch of Julian May in the spring, but it looks like that’s balanced out by multiple readings of Steven Brust, Barry Hughart, John Scalzi, and Gene Wolfe.
Only 21 books were outside the categories of sf, fantasy, and comics. I do want to work on that a bit. I think a half-and-half mix would be pretty good.
I only reread 15 books this year, down from 28 last year. I think I like this year’s number better. I do want to revisit some things next year—notably GRRM, Pat Rothfuss, and Gene Wolfe. But we’ll see. I sort of have ambitions of becoming a Wolfe scholar, but even a Solar Cycle reread would be a big investment, and I still haven’t read most of what he’s written (although with the Solar Cycle, THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, PEACE, and two of the three Soldier books under my belt, I’m starting to feel pretty good).
I’m generally disposed to think of reading as less like “doing something” than like “breathing,” but I’ll make an exception for OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH. I think that thing is about a million words long; Brandon Sanderson is considered a tome-writer at 300,000 words a book, to put it in perspective. I’m proud of having gotten through that, and I would very much like to get way into some more old literature next year. The other Chinese classics, especially the ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, are most immediately relevant to me as I continue writing THE EIGHTH KING, but I’m hoping to make time for some Chaucer and Shakespeare as well. Other aspirational reading includes the John Fowles I have lying around in paperback (DANIEL MARTIN and THE COLLECTOR), as well as Louis Cha’s THE BOOK AND THE SWORD, and a good sampling of the many female crime authors people have recommended to me (Tana French, Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, among others). I should finish Phil Tucker’s THRONE, but I picked up VAMPIRE MIAMI and I’m liking it a bit more, so THRONE may wait a bit. I’m also excited for Warren Ellis’ GUN MACHINE.
I feel like I should have a summary comment on the she-read project, but I don’t, other than I’m glad I did it and I’m very happy to have discovered almost all of the 14 authors that I read for it. Overall, I’d say my big discoveries of the year were Kelly Link, Barry Hughart, and James McPherson; 1Q84, PEACE, and THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS were also amazing, although more expectedly so.
In compiling this list, I discovered that joining Goodreads is actually not a very good substitute for retaining a running list, since I mix in giant bolides of books I read a long time ago with books I’m reading now. But I am on Goodreads, and I like it, if only because it’s a place where I can kid myself that people read the reviews that aren’t well-thought-out enough to post on the blog, and because it’s a place to keep a running list of books I want to read. If that sounds fun to you, go ahead and find me there.
* FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER
* THE PATHS OF THE DEAD
* THE LORD OF CASTLE BLACK
* SETHRA LAVODE, Steven Brust
ALL THE WINDWRACKED STARS, Elizabeth Bear
* BROKEDOWN PALACE, Steven Brust
ZOO CITY, Lauren Beukes
ON WRITERS & WRITING, John Gardner
HALF MAGIC, Edward Eager
FEED, Mira Grant
THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES, Willo Davis Roberts
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
* JACK THE BODILESS, Julian May
* DIAMOND MASK, Julian May
THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, N. K. Jemisin
* MAGNIFICAT, Julian May
* A WRINKLE IN TIME, Madeleine L’Engle
* THE SURVEILLANCE
* THE METACONCERT, Julian May
THE FINDER LIBRARY, VOL. 1, Carla Speed McNeil
THE FINDER LIBRARY, VOL. 2, Carla Speed McNeil
HAVEMERCY, Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
WELCOME TO YOUR CHILD’S BRAIN, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang
THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA, Scott Lynch
AMERICAN STUDIES, Louis Menand
* THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett
SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY, Mary Robinette Kowal
THE FIRST 20 MINUTES, Gretchen Reynolds
* THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, Norton Juster
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM, James McPherson
* CHARLOTTE’S WEB, E.B. White
TOLL THE HOUNDS, Steven Erikson
THE POWER OF HABIT, Charles Duhigg
STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN, Kelly Link
IN THE GARDEN OF IDEN, Kage Baker
THE LONG WALK, Richard Bachman
THE VIEW FROM SATURDAY, E. L. Konigsburg
BRIDGE OF BIRDS, Barry Hughart
MEMORY, Linda Nagata
THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, Robert Heinlein
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO…, Joanna Russ
SABRIEL, Garth Nix
HALF EMPTY, David Rakoff
THE STORY OF THE STONE, Barry Hughart
YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE WHEN YOU TAKE YOUR LAPTOP TO A COFFEE SHOP, John Scalzi
DARK PLACES, Gillian Flynn
WHO FEARS DEATH, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
DEMONS, Fyodor Dostoevsky
IMMORTAL LYCANTHROPES, Hal Johnson
EIGHT SKILLED GENTLEMEN, Barry Hughart
THE HIGHEST FRONTIER, Joan Slonczewski
OLD MAN’S WAR, John Scalzi
PARENTONOMICS, Joshua Gans
THE GHOST BRIGADES, John Scalzi
* HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, J. K. Rowling
THE WATER MARGIN, Shi Nai’an
DEATHLESS, Catherynne M. Valente
PICNIC ON PARADISE, Joanna Russ
HOOFPRINT OF THE OX, Master Shengyan
THE IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER, Michael Swanwick
THE HAPPIEST TODDLER ON THE BLOCK, Harvey Karp
BLACK WATER, Joyce Carol Oates
ROSEMARY AND RUE, Seanan McGuire
AMONG OTHERS, Jo Walton
HALF THE SKY, Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn
APE: AUTHOR, PUBLISHER, ENTREPRENEUR, Guy Kawasaki
SAGA, VOLUME 1, Brian K. Vaughan
PEACE, Gene Wolfe
MRS. DALLOWAY, Virginia Woolf
THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, Gene Wolfe
My brother is putting together a proposal for a course titled “Wizardry and Wild Romance,” self-consciously stolen from Michael Moorcock’s indispensable book of the same name. The idea, as I reconstruct it, is to examine contemporary epic fantasy and its classic antecedents in their mutual light, which means mining a literature of criticism on contemporary fantasy that isn’t especially familiar to either of us. We shot around ideas about it for a while, and it occurred to me in the course of the conversation that I’ve consumed a lot more relevant and semi-relevant online material than I’d realized. So I compiled the sources I can remember (plus a few I only just stumbled on) and sent them to him in an email, which I’ve only just now realized might be of general interest. So here it is.
China Mieville on why Tolkien rocks: http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/06/there-and-back-again-five-reasons-tolkien-rocks.html (worth reading if only to savor the phrase “the remorseless sylvan bonheur of Tom Bombadil.” Remember, in French, happiness is le bonheur.)
A collection of neat essays on China Mieville at Crooked Timber, including a longish response by Mieville: http://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar/
Jeff VanderMeer interviewing CM on weird tales is probably irrelevant, but looks fun: http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/16/god-thats-a-merciless-question-china-mievilles-interview-from-weird-tales/
Jonathan McCalmont complaining about the critical apparatus of sf vs. film studies: http://ruthlessculture.com/2012/11/28/annoyed-with-the-history-of-science-fiction/ (the more recent post on Adam Roberts looks like it could be interesting, though I haven’t finished it, in part because I’m not familiar with Adam Roberts; however, it’s possible neither is relevant to epic fantasy)
As unfortunate counterpoint, SALON’s Andrew Leonard writing a while ago on the Malazan Book of the Fallen: http://www.salon.com/2004/06/21/erikson/ — I’m conceiving this as sort of an object lesson to hammer home the value of a more educated critical approach, because otherwise you get crap like:
“Give me, instead, the evocation of a rich, complex and yet ultimately unknowable other world, with a compelling suggestion of intricate history and mythology and lore. Give me mystery amid the grand narrative. There’s no need to spell it all out; no prefaces, please, elucidating the history of Middle Earth as if to students in a lecture hall. Instead, give me a world in which every sea hides a crumbled Atlantis, every ruin has a tale to tell, every mattock blade is a silent legacy of struggles unknown.”
… when Steven Brust at least has been doing exactly this since 1980 (and still isn’t done!), Martin and Rothfuss do it, Gene Wolfe does it, Gaiman does it, &c. These goals and approaches are really not that uncommon. Leonard gives GRRM crap for spending “page after page describing the household sigils of this noble family or that, or what the knights were wearing just before they ran off to joust,” which maybe I don’t remember because I’m inured to it from a misspent youth, but Martin’s approach to the First Men, the Doom of Valyria and the Targaryen conquest, and all this stuff is exactly what Leonard is asking for. Argh. Anyway. (Expanded thoughts on this matter here.)
The New York Review of Science Fiction has Steven Erikson taking on the idea that Tolkien has dominated fantasy; his review is in the May 2012 issue, and I can’t find it online, but there’s a quote on the Malazan Book of the Fallen Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen#cite_ref-Not_14-0
This New Yorker article by Arthur Krystal and its linked predecessor may be interesting (as might the Lev Grossman article in Time, also linked), although Krystal is pretty obnoxious: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/its-genre-fiction-not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-it.html
Having looked a little bit more closely at some of the material, I heartily recommend the Mieville/Vandermeer interview and the McCalmont essay, and regret to say that “obnoxious” is a generous descriptor of Krystal. I need to check back in my copies of Le Guin’s THE WAVE IN THE MIND and Delany’s SEVEN ESSAYS, FOUR LETTERS & FIVE INTERVIEWS ABOUT WRITING to see if there’s anything relevant. If anyone can find Erikson’s NYRSF article, please send me a copy!
Yeah, you should read this book.
It hits a lot of formal sweet spots: It’s shelved as fantasy, which I appreciate, but it’s effectively a YA book, and although I’m glad for me that it wasn’t categorized that way (because I would probably have passed it over), I’m a little sad for the YA readers who won’t be reading it—and a little bit for Walton, because I think it could have been a bunker-buster. It’s also a proper British boarding school story in the vein of “Such, Such Were the Joys” or BOY or STAND BEFORE YOUR GOD (if it’s fair to call an essay and two memoirs the same thing as a novel), which I appreciate largely in comparison to Harry Potter, not that Harry Potter doesn’t do a decent job. And it’s a coming-of-age novel in a quiet way, and a love letter to classic sf, and also a Lupine puzzle where the things a common-or-garden fantasy author would have lavished thousands of words of hard-sweated description on are instead offscreen, in the past. So there’s a lot to like in its various approaches. And Mori Phelps is a great character—damaged and vulnerable in some ways, but also smart and opinionated; doesn’t suffer fools but sociable with her people. Plus great taste in sf, can see fairies.
On first reading, I’d say it’s not perfect for my taste; a bit too much is left to wonder about Mori’s mother, her twin, and the nature of the fairies, and the basic issue of the “reality” of magic is left totally unresolved. But I wouldn’t trust either of those judgments. First, because they’re both solidly de gustibus, and second, because I’m not sure they’re even right. If Gene Wolfe had written this, in fact, I’d be confident that they were wrong. And I think I’m willing to trust Walton as much as Wolfe. So I think I’ll be reading this again in due course, with a magnifying glass, paying close attention. And I think I’ll be giving it to my daughter in a decade and change, or sooner if I can.
In Yaichka, they say a child draws her first breath through her ears, her second through her eyes, and her third through her mouth. This is why it sometimes takes a moment for a baby to cry The first breath is for the mother, the second breath is for God, and the third breath is for the father. The breath through the mouth brings the most pleasure, and we forget immediately that we ever knew how to breathe any other way. When a child in Yaichka cries, his mother will pick him up and hoist him on her hip and laugh and say, Look at my little bearlet, breathing through his eyes again! And the child stops his crying because he likes to be called a bearlet.
Look, if that doesn’t get your blood up to do some reading, I can’t help you. I realize the right thing to do is furnish clever enumerations of Valente’s juxtapositions of the fantastic and the geopolitical, talk about the language and the imagery, then say how it’s really all about the characters. So that’s done. But be reasonable, at least—the muse can write a blank check for all the language and imagery and high-wire conceptual combination in the world and still not budget for that little twist of craft. But that’s where the magic happens, comrades.
“Yaichka” is from the Russian яйца, “egg.” If you don’t know why this is important, read the book.
I have given the Writing Excuses crew some shit in the past, so it seems only meet to notify my vast readership that their recent brainstorming episode is dead brilliant, especially Howard’s contributions. Here’s the setup:
Dan needs to write a military thriller. It’s just a short story, but still, it’s a bit outside his area of expertise, and he needs help. So in this episode Brandon, Mary, and Howard will endeavor to help him.
I wish I could say it answers the universal question (“Where do you get your ideas?”). It is more likely to make you ask it again in an admiring tone, which is not so bad. I wouldn’t go with every single choice that the WE crew made for Dan’s story, but if I were offered a spot in a military sf anthology and the choice between doing what Brandon, Howard, and Mary came up with versus doing nothing…
… OK, I would probably do the ethical thing and write my own story. But it probably wouldn’t be as good.
Also, Dan’s description of REDSHIRTS has also bumped up my desire to read it, although it is still behind finishing DEMONS and THE CHRONICLES OF MASTER LI AND NUMBER TEN OX, to say nothing of my signed copy of IMMORTAL LYCANTHROPES, and by that time I may be due to start in on THE ALCHEMY OF STONE. But I’ll probably manage it in due course. Maybe when the holds come off the library copies.
Pat Rothfuss: Why I love my editor…
Penelope Trunk: How I got a big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway
OK, they’re really only “contradictory” inasmuch as Rothfuss is impressed by and grateful to his publishing overlords, whereas Trunk is full of mockery and scorn. And of course they emphasize different things; Rothfuss basically lived in poverty and squalor until he hit the big time, whereas Trunk has been super-successful in a few industries and spends her life thinking about how businesses succeed and fail. You might not necessarily expect a fantasist who lived on ramen for most of his life to have the same priorities as a kick-ass entrepreneur. (I worry that I’m painting Rothfuss as a schlub or a failure here; that’s not my goal. Penelope Trunk is not likely to write anything, ever, that hits my heart as squarely as THE NAME OF THE WIND. Which, by the way, is not except possibly in the broadest sense “what people [were] looking for.” I think people are most affected by things they didn’t know they wanted until they had them. I would never have sought out a contemporary British comedy of manners, but MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND is one of the ten best books I’ve read in the last ten years. And I’ve read a lot of really good books in the last ten years.)
I don’t think I’ve ever read a traditionally published author say anything but (apparently sincere, and quite warm) good things about their publishers. But fiction authors probably don’t know as much as Trunk about marketing, and they’re probably happy not to know; it isn’t professionally useful for them. There are at least some genre authors who could use their blog as a sales platform the way Trunk is doing it, but most of them owe that capability to traditional publishing. (Exceptions: John Scalzi, Amanda Hocking, E. L. James, Howard Tayler, presumably others.) I do still wonder why no one’s run the numbers and jumped ship, though. Maybe because they figure there’s no going back? But how can that be right? Maybe DAW wouldn’t take Pat Rothfuss back if he scorned them, but someone would. That’s not true for a midlist writer, obviously, and then I guess the interesting question is whether a midlist writer has less or more to gain from jumping ship.
I wonder if it’s down to the view of the craft. Penelope Trunk doesn’t need to spend all her time writing to produce a good book — in fact, she’d better not; she has to demonstrate success in and leverage insights from some non-writing field to give her books any credibility. But, for a fiction writer, any time not spent writing is time not spent honing a craft that is at least mythologized to be incredibly exacting and time-consuming. (I sometimes wonder about this. Then I realize how crappy I was five years ago, when I started writing THE DANDELION KNIGHT, and how much better I am now, and how good I’m still not.) And, for fiction writers, writing is all they’re selling; it’s not a summary of insights from some other accomplishment, it’s just itself. Anything Penelope Trunk learns about marketing, or accomplishes in marketing, is both useful for itself (in part because she already knows a lot about marketing) and potential book material. Anything Pat Rothfuss learns about marketing is maybe useful for itself, except that he already has the services of specialists who know more about it than he does, but he can’t use it in the book — unless the last Kingkiller installment takes a seriously sharp left.
I sure would like to hear more on Norman Spinrad’s self-publishing experiments. But I worry that no news is bad news there.
