Hugo winners, 2010

Sometime soon I hope to find enough brain to post something other than news, but in the meantime:

2010 Hugo Award winners announced!

I’m excited to see a Bacigalupi/Miéville tie for best novel, and possibly even more excited to see that Clarkesworld won for best semi-prozine. Also, Moon for best dramatic presentation, long form, over Avatar. (If you’ve ever wanted to hear Kevin Spacey voice a robot that expresses itself using emoticons, go see Moon. Strictly speaking, it’s crummy sci-fi, but as a character study it’s terribly moving. Also, Kevin Spacey.)

– E

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2009 World Fantasy Award nominees announced
Nebulous destiny (2010 Nebula winners)
2010 Hugo nominations

Varied links and sundry

Jeff VanderMeer recently posted an extract from his introduction to Caitlín R. Kiernan’s newest and tantalizingly awesome-sounding collection, The Ammonite Violin, of which a shiny and as-of-yet untouched copy is sitting on my shelf…

“… [Kiernan’s] is a kind of dirty, modern lyricism. Like many of the Decadents, her prose is, yes, lush, but it’s also muscular, allows for psychologically three-dimensional portraits of her characters, and has the flexibility to be blunt, even shocking. Mermaids, selkies, vampires, and fairies all make appearances in this collection. However, the method of description and storytelling creates a sheer physicality and alien quality to the context for these creatures that both humanizes them—in the sense of making them real, if not always understandable—and makes it impossible to see them—so often the case when writers describe “monsters”—as just people in disguise or as caricatures we can dismiss because they exist solely for our passing frisson of unease or terror.”

Let this serve as a reminder to me both to start in on the collection as soon as possible, and to get off my butt and pull together my review of her last collection, A is for Alien, which is one of the most powerful collections I’ve read.

This has probably made its rounds of the Internet numerous times already, but this is the first time I’d thought to look for, and found it: approximate maps of China Miéville’s continent Rohagi, home to Perdido Street Station, The Scar (if only briefly), and Iron Council. Scanned from a mostly-Miéville issue of Dragon Magazine.

More from Jeff VanderMeer – brief interviews with some of this year’s World Fantasy award nominees. (My kneejerk reaction to the gallery of finalist novels’ covers: Yup, still want to cut whoever approved the slutacular cover art for The Red Tree.) Also, some interesting words on the selection process itself, since Kakaner and I had recently been discussing similar topics:

“As a former judge, I can say that it’s a very difficult and thankless task, picking the finalists, and knowing what goes into the process, it’s fair to say that the finalist list should be viewed as a winners list, in a sense. Judges will always be second-guessed, but every jury works very, very hard and reads many thousands and thousands of pages of material. It’s not a job anyone does except because they love fantasy.”

And finally – an interview with Kij Johnson, of “Spar” notoriety (Kakaner’s review):

“Everyone is disturbed by it, which is good. They should be. I certainly was—I had a hard time reading the entire story through when I was doing the revisions. There are probably a bunch of people who hate the story because they see it as a particularly unpleasant sort of porn. Other readers find all sorts of stuff in it: challenges to gender roles; semiotics; Stockholm Syndrome; an exploration of relationship dynamics; the definition of humanity. It’s been really cool, especially when I embedded something in there that people caught, and also cool when they see something I hadn’t verbalized to myself while I was working on it.”

Also has some other interesting bits, including details about her writing process and her thematic interests, as well as what the Internet has done for short-fiction publishing.

Go to:

Kij Johnson
Caitlín R. Kiernan
China Miéville

Book title trends: The [Adjective/s] [Life/Time Period] of [Full Name]

A worthy successor to the [Profession/Status/etc.]’s [Female Relation] trend? Just spotted from Librarything‘s* “Popular this month” list:

  • The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
  • The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Stephanie Meyer
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Pretty good sampling of genres there, too – one literary/historical fiction, one… whatever you want to call Stephanie Meyer, one nonfiction. Any others I’m missing? I feel like I must be, if three out of a list of just ten bestsellers are hits for the trend.

* Mindlessly soothing hobby of the month, while I avoid my numerous laboriously overwritten and therefore still unposted reviews – tweaking and entering dozens of books into my Librarything. Anyone else out there have an account and like to be library-buddies?

– E

The Last Unicorn comic #2, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E

Date read: 8.13.10
Book from: Personal collection, via Conlan Press
Reviewer: Emera

This here’s the manticore. Man’s head, lion’s body, tail of a scorpion. Captured at midnight, eating werewolves to sweeten its breath…

The Last Unicorn comic adaptation #2 (review for #1) arrived at my door last week, and despite being exhausted I had to squeeze it in before falling asleep that night, in part because this is the issue that I can’t help but think of as “Meet Schmendrick,” and what self-respecting fan could resist the tawdry horrors of Mommy Fortuna’s carnival, to boot? In this issue, the unicorn wakes to find herself imprisoned in a two-bit witch’s menagerie of illusory monsters, and her best chances for escape lie with a well-meaning but inept magician named Schmendrick.

This time, I got Frank Stockton’s alternate cover art:

The Last Unicorn #2While I love his graphical approach, and particularly liked his cover variant for the first issue, it irks me that his unicorn tends to look kind of witless, and on principle I have trouble condoning the idea of a unicorn having “the hair of a Hollywood starlet.” Also, I really, really loved the de Liz/Dillon cover design for this issue. But life goes on, and Mommy Fortuna’s hand looks awesome here.

Basically, everything that I liked about the first issue I liked just as much, if not more, here: atmospheric color choices, expressive human characters, effective panel layouts, and pretty much pitch-perfect adaptation of the text. Very occasionally I was still bothered by coloring choices, but I found the use of textures much less obtrusive in this issue than in the first, and particularly effective in conveying the murk and grime of Mommy Fortuna’s carnival. There were also a couple of mostly-wordless compressions of action and narration that made me go YESSS, that could not have been done in any medium other than comics.

Continue reading The Last Unicorn comic #2, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E

MW, by Tezuka Osamu (1976-1978) E

Date read: 8.2.10
Book from: Borrowed from a friend
Reviewer: Emera

MW - Tezuka Osamu

Apparently not a single unpixellated version of this image wants to let me find it.

Whyyyy did I read this all in (pretty much) one sitting. Whatever the opposite of feel-good is, MW falls into that category. The whole time I was reading, I got the impression of Tezuka Osamu crowing, “Suffer in an agony of dread while I, the creator of such lovable, family-friendly classics of Japanese animation and comics as Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, manipulate your feelings with this unrelentingly dark thriller about a serial killer and the priest bound to him by guilt and love! Bwa ha ha ha!” Thanks, Tezuka. By the time I hit the last 20 pages, I was so overwrought with fatalistic dread that I had to put the book down for a few hours, before returning to the equally depressing final scenes.

For an illuminating bit of background, Wikipedia provided me with the following context: “This manga series is notable because it can be seen as Tezuka’s response to the gekiga (“dramatic pictures”) artists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s and an attempt to beat them at their own game.The gekiga artists of this period created gritty, adult-oriented works that sharply contrasted the softer, Disney-influenced style that Tezuka was associated with, a style that was seen as being out-of-step with the times.” So I think I’m not entirely wrong in detecting a certain amount of authorial glee in the proceedings.

MW is also a response to the use of chemical weaponry during the Vietnam War. MW‘s resident sociopath, Yuki Michio, the charming, long-lashed scion of a renowned family of kabuki actors, is a sociopath because he was exposed as a child to a neurotoxic weapon – MW – leaked from an island containment facility owned by Nation X (i.e. America). Father Garai, Yuki’s confidante and extremely guilty lover, feels bound to protect Yuki’s identity from the authorities because he, as an erstwhile hoodlum, was holding a nine-year-old Yuki captive at the time. He and Yuki were the only survivors; Garai joined the Church some time thereafter in an attempt to escape both his horror at having witnessed the disaster, and his guilt at his relationship with Yuki. (Yes, do the math there. Tezuka reaches for pretty much every variety of shock value, and even by the standards of anime/manga,  most of it is awful.)

Continue reading MW, by Tezuka Osamu (1976-1978) E

Not a re-read, but close enough

Re-reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in its entirety is one of those things that I’ve wanted to do for a while, but that looks increasingly unlikely to happen soon as the summer winds to a close. (nooooo….)

Luckily, Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus) provides an alternative, in his Sandman Meditations over at heady comic-book blog Gestalt Mash. In each installment, Cheney provides commentary on one issue as he reads through the series for the first time; two installments are out so far. (A similar read-through essay series is also being offered for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, with the added twist of commentary being provided by one new and one re-reader.) Graphic novels are not his expertise, but his background in film studies is obvious, as he pays close attention to details of shape, composition, color, and the flow of panels.

These won’t do much for anyone who hasn’t already read the series, or isn’t in the process of doing so, but they’re a fascinating, if largely technical way to revisit it.

– E

Go to:

Neil Gaiman: bio and works reviewed
Sandman, 10 (and maybe 5) years later

The Last Unicorn comic #1, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E

Date read: 7.26.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

This will be possibly one of the world’s least impartial reviews, in that my love affair with The Last Unicorn started when I was about six, when I first saw the animated movie adaptation, then proceeded to sort-of forget about it in such a way that it became a native feature of my mental landscape. For a really, really long time, I thought it was actually a really amazing, really sad dream that I had once had. For all that it’s typically praised as “whimsical” and “charming,” it’s also a story that’s profoundly concerned with mortality, sacrifice, and loss of wonder and innocence, all of which was both troubling and stirring to me as a child. Attached to my dream/memory of it was both a great yearning for the film’s melancholy, twilight-shaded beauty, and a certain sense of haunted anxiety.

Like many other fans, I didn’t rediscover the movie till years later, after which I proceeded to re-watch it an egregious number of times, attempt (unsuccessfully) to foist it on friends, and finally, very belatedly discover that it was based on Peter S. Beagle‘s 1968 novel. Said novel, read at twelve or thirteen, went on to become part of what I think of as my core canon; I’m often hard-pressed to find the words to explain how much it means to me.

Given all this, I was a bit leery but mostly excited to see the news this spring that IDW would be releasing a six-part comic adaptation of the novel, under Beagle’s supervision, adapted by comics writer Peter B. Gillis,with art by wife-and-husband team Renae De Liz (pencils) and Ray Dillon (ink and color). Being the sucker I am, I immediately sprung for the signed preorders (hey, signed and inscribed copies ship for free, so it’s like I saved money… right?) available via Conlan Press, Beagle’s affiliated publisher. Recently I got around to sitting down with the first installment. A blow-by-blow review follows, with quotes here and there from the original novel – which, for those who have not encountered it in one form or another, is the story of a unicorn who learns one day that she is the last of her kind in the world, and leaves her wood in order to seek out her imprisoned kin.

The Last Unicorn: Issue #1First reaction: augh @ awkward author/title placement for a composition that was obviously supposed to have a vertically centered title. Also a little disappointed that De Liz’s unicorn looks pretty distinctly horsey, when Beagle is very strong in his insistence that unicorns look not-much like horses:

She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in a dancing mockery. Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight.

That aside, it is a pretty gorgeous cover, and one I’d like to see as a poster.

My personal preference artwise would have been for a more old-fashioned illustrative style (think Charles Vess, Michael Zulli, Michael Kaluta), but maybe that’s too obvious and literal, anyway. And any time I start feeling too picky, I flip back to the first page:

Continue reading The Last Unicorn comic #1, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E

Favorites from the stash: Orlando

Mentioning Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in the Argosy Books post made me remember that I had taken a couple of photos this past winter to show off my copy, just after I’d finished reading it. Of course I meant to review it, too, but my mind was so thoroughly blown that I still haven’t been able to take on the task of putting together anything coherent and less than thirteen pages long. (I think one of the only concrete things I said about it to Kakaner after I finished it was OH MY GOD LITERARYGASM. Textuality, sexuality, creation of artistic/sexual/romantic identity over time, creation of history, individual experience of time, all delivered with outrageous style and wit… It’s the kind of book I wish I could take a course or three on, but I loved equally what I understood of it, and what I didn’t.)

So, have some pictures of the book in the  meantime. Maybe they’ll go partway towards communicating the extent to which I love this book.

It’s not an outstandingly pretty edition, but there are so many little things I love about it: the size (it’s about the same height as but an inch or two wider than a modern mass-market paperback), the worn teal binding, the fact that it’s still printed in letterpress, the unmistakable dry sweetish old-book smell. Also, it was one of the few things that I bought at the archetypal local bookstore-that-was-independent before the owners sold it in 2007.

Also, the brief and mysterious inscription on the endpapers:

Anyone out there who can read Sanskrit…?

Just two more photos under the jump.

Continue reading Favorites from the stash: Orlando

Miéville and Moore in the New York Times

Sending me into fangirl ecstasies, the New York Times featured two substantial pieces on speculative-fiction luminaries, this week and the last:

In “Making  Squid The Meat of the Story,” China Miéville talks about his preferences in cephalopods; his newest novel, Kraken (speaking of which, I covergasmed recently over the art for Subterranean Press’ limited edition); why he found Star Trek horrifying as a child; and more.

“At a certain stage some people end up not trusting their own imagination,” Mr. Miéville said. “You get this kind of baleful set of voices in your head that tell you, ‘That’s silly; you’re being silly.’

“But I think most people have more ideas in their heads than they think they do. It’s just that those of us in the fantastic fields — either we don’t listen to our own filters, or we have a much higher ridiculousness threshold.”

And in “Hero of Comic-Book World Gets Real,” Alan Moore discusses his current work-in-progress, “a lengthy spoken-word recording accompanied by an atmospheric musical soundtrack and a book of photographs” about Steve Moore, the comics writer and early mover and shaker within British comics. (Sorry if this is completely not-news within the realm of Moorephilia; I’m behind on news about pretty much everything imaginable.)

Also made my week to see continued confirmation that Moore will be continuing work on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one of my most-beloved series, despite his plans to otherwise leave behind the world of graphic novels.

– E

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/books/24mieville.html?hpw

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China Miéville