In the coming weeks, if you find something interesting you think everyone should read, drop me a line via the contact form and let me know, or just post it below. Let’s get started:

1) John W. Campbell Memorial Award Finalists: The John W. Campbell Memorial Award nominations have been announced. To be well read in the best SF and fantasy of 2011, pretty much all you need to do is read these 11 novels.

2) British Fantasy Awards: The short list for the British Fantasy Awards has been announced. Some of the nominees are familiar to American audiences, but some works haven’t been published here yet.

3) A Wool Movie?: Fox has acquired the movie rights to Hugh Howey’s breakout indie publisher sensation Wool. Ridley Scott is currently attached to the project, which should make any sci-fi fan sit up and take note.

4) Cthulhu for Everyone!: If you’re a Lovecraft fan, this is especially for you: an exhaustive listing of books that pay homage to the founder of American eldritch literature. Frightening or funny, it’s all on this list.

5) Spooky or Jokey? 10 Favorite YA Fantasies: Here’s a great reading list for teens’ summer reading.

6) Nightmare Magazine Kickstarter: John Joseph Adams and Creeping Hemlock Press team up to kickstart a new Horror magazine.

Gene of Isis by Traci Harding

Traci Harding’s Gene of Isis, the first book in her MYSTIQUE trilogy, is about three related women in three different time periods who have descended from the Grail kings: Ashlee Granville, an independent young woman who is unhappy about being on the “marriage market” in 19^th century England; Dr. Mia Montrose, Ashlee’s 21^st century descendent who is an expert in ancient languages; and Lillet du Lac, a 13^th century priestess who is fighting the Catholic Church. Each woman has clairvoyant talents and is drawn to a mountain that contains ancient mysteries and is the source of these women’s psychic gifts. Read more »

Dust by Arthur Slade

If Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes met Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass in the world of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, you might end up with something like Arthur Slade’s YA novel Dust. Or at least, you might end up with the basic premise, setting, and tone and style. Falling short of these classics is no great fault, but unfortunately I’d say Dust falls a bit short even in less rarefied company. It isn’t a bad book by any stretch — it is in fact quite solid and has some lovely moments — but overall it fell a bit flat for me… Dust has a likable main character and a very intriguing setting, and though the style and plot are a bit mixed, it leans more to the positive side than the negative. It is, however, one of those YA books that is really best read and enjoyed by that YA audience, as opposed to one with more crossover adult appeal. Read the rest.

We recently asked some of your favorite speculative fiction authors to share some news (recent publications, honors, book signings, personal accomplishments, etc.) with us. Here’s what they had to say:

Rachel Aaron: 2012 has been a really exciting year for me! In February, Orbit released an omnibus edition of my first three books with some really fantastic new cover art, and in June, the long awaited fourth ELI MOONPRESS book, The Spirit War comes out! The series will end with the fifth and final book, Spirit’s End, which comes out in November 2012 (and has an amazing cover).

Danielle Ackley-McPhail: I’m happy to announce that after over a decade since the original publication of Yesterday’s Dreams (Book 1 in the ETERNAL CYCLE Series) Dark Quest Books is re-releasing Yesterday’s Dreams and Tomorrow’s Memories (Book 2) leading up to the release of the never-before-published Today’s Promise, the final book in the trilogy. The ETERNAL CYCLE series follows Kara O’Keefe. Twenty-three years old, first-generation Irish-American, and a young prodigy on the violin, Kara has had to set aside her dreams of a musical career to help provide for her family as her father battles cancer for a second time. When she pawns her heirloom violin she discovers her magical heritage as forces both good and evil are drawn to her magical nature. As she struggles with a personal journey of self-discovery events draw her into a battle older than time. Today’s Promise and the entire series will be launching Memorial Day Weekend in Baltimore, at Balticon.

Alma Alexander: Lots of news! Newest novel out, Midnight at Spanish Gardens — I will be doing readings and signings for those at the Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park in Seattle on May 19 and at Village Books in Bellingham WA on June 12 so come along to those if you’re nearby. The anthology I edited and am very proud of, with a “map of contents” and not a common or garden table of contents, is out from Dark Quest Books, and is a great collection of stories — check it out. New ebook — now released in the USA for the first time, Embers of Heaven, the follow-up to my Secrets of Jin Shei, with a paperback edition to come soon. And to be re-released as ebooks first and then paperback editions, my YA WORLDWEAVERS trilogy… with a book 4 and 5 to follow VERY SOON (book four is now in the final stages of polishing up…) Also, I have stories in anthologies Absolute Visions and Scheherezade’s Facade, and also in Beyond Grimm, an ebook anthology by Book View Cafe, where my contribution has garnered special mention. ALSO, if you have an e-reader, check out my “Triads” collections — mini-anthologies of three themed short stories per “book” — five currently available in the Amazon Kindle store and at Smashwords (for all other ereader platforms).

Alex Bledsoe: The fourth EDDIE LACROSSE novel, Wake of the Bloody Angel, comes out in July. The second in the series, Burn Me Deadly, just came out in mass market paperback, and the third, Dark Jenny, will be out soon. Both include preview chapters of the new novel. I’ll also be attending (and paneling) at WisCon later this month in Madison, WI.

Blake Charlton: I’m in the final stretch of medical school! Only 4.56 months left to go. (Not that I’m counting… or anything.) Then I’ll have time to finish Spellbreaker, which will be the third and last book of the SPELLWRIGHT trilogy. Because of my unusual schedule through school, I’ll get from September to July completely free of the hospital to write. I’ve also had enough time to start putting the framework together on my fourth novel. But more about that later… possibly much later…

Stephen Deas: The Warlock’s Shadow (sequel to The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice) is coming out in mass-market paperback a month from now. Right now I’m also giving away a lot of books on my website with a new book up for grabs every two or three days. These are some of my own titles and some others off the Gollancz list.

Chris Evans: I’ll be at Balticon in Baltimore, MD on May 25 through 28 doing panels, a signing, and otherwise enjoying the convention. The mass market edition of the third and final book in the IRON ELVES series, Ashes of a Black Frost, comes out in September in North America. The Russian edition of A Darkness Forged in Fire just came out as did the German edition of Ashes.

Justin Gustainis: My novel Evil Dark, the second in the OCCULT CRIME UNIT INVESTIGATIONS series (although I like to call them the HAUNTED SCRANTON books), was released on April 24th, in both paper and digital versions. Stan Markowski, detective on the Scranton Police Department’s Occult Crimes Unit has a lot to worry about these days. Someone has been making “snuff” films in which a demon-possessed person is forced to torture and slaughter an innocent victim. Furthermore, someone in Scranton has been abducting witches and burning them alive. The two cases can’t possibly be connected — or can they?

Kevin Hearne: I’m very grateful that readers have embraced the IRON DRUID series with such enthusiasm. Tricked, my latest book, debuted at #11 on the NY Times Best Seller list.

Jim C. Hines: The goblin books will be coming out in omnibus form in July as The Legend of Jig Dragonslayer, which should be fun. Then in August, my book Libriomancer launches a new series, which follows a librarian from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who can pull things from books. (Including a certain fire-spider from the goblin series.) Also, we’re getting a new kitten named Taz.

Matthew Hughes: I’ve had two books out lately: Costume Not Included, the second in the TO HELL AND BACK urban fantasy series about an autistic actuary who fights crime with the aid of a rum-swilling demon who used to work with Al Capone; and (under my pen name Hugh Matthews) Song of the Serpent, a media tie-in novel set in the Pathfinder Role Playing Game world of Golarion, about a rogue named Krunzle the Quick who is sent on a quest to bring back a tycoon’s runaway daughter. I’ll also have a Dying Earthesque story in the July-August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “Wearaway and Flambeau,” about a thief who gets mixed up in a duel between two wizards. I’ll be at VCon in Vancouver in September, where one of my stories — maybe even “Wearaway and Flambeau” — will be transposed into a radio-style script and performed by the Pallahaxi Players Readers Theatre.

L.E. Modesitt Jr: Princeps  –  the fifth book of THE IMAGER PORTFOLIO — will be released on May 22nd, and I’ll be appearing at the Gaithersburg Book Festival [Gaithersburg, MD] on Saturday, May 19th, and then I’ll be the writer Guest of Honor at OASIS in Orlando, FL, May 25-27th.

Janny Wurts: Here’s a new interview with me on The Author’s Connection. I will be a guest at three upcoming conventions this summer: OASIS (Orlando Florida, May 25-27), LibertyCon (Chattanooga TN,  July20-22), DragonCon (Atlanta GA, laborday weekend). I have Contracts just in for: Italian translation of Curse of the Mistwraith, Daughter of the Empire (collaborated with Ray Feist) is going to be translated into Chinese, which makes a total fourteen languages, worldwide. I have signed up for Audible’s program for authors, which means any sale of any one of my audio books (Stormwarden, Keeper of the Keys, Shadowfane) from now till year’s end gives me an author’s bonus of a dollar — this is available to all Audible authors, many have already signed up. Any with Audible titles who have not, check it out!

We’ll be back with more news next week!

The Arm of the Stone by Victoria Strauss

… Originally published in 1998, The Arm of the Stone by Victoria Strauss was re-released in 2011. I was not familiar with her work before but was greatly impressed by this book. Strauss takes a standard heroic quest fantasy but embeds it in a deeply detailed world that is fascinating in its complexity. Strauss manages to write a book that can be read at two levels simultaneously. First, you have an excellent fantasy quest novel… Secondly, this book is a great discussion on the nature of power and its corruptive forces… I highly recommend this book as an example of epic quest fantasy that goes beyond sword slinging and mind magic. Strauss masterfully accomplishes a detailed, thought-provoking work of epic fantasy that has something to offer for everyone. I will be seeking out the second book in this duology to finish the story of Bron, Liliane and Goldwine to see what will happen next in this expertly crafted world. Read the rest.

The World Inside by Robert Silverberg

… The World Inside (1971) is a thoughtful look at what life on Earth might be like if our population ever reaches the level where we need to grow vertically instead of horizontally. I was fascinated by Silverberg’s Urban Monads where everything that’s necessary for life is in one building, and where blocks of floors represent different classes and cultures. But what I liked best about The World Inside was the idea that, because dissidents are sent down the chute, possessiveness, rebellion, jealousy, and other forms of social strife have been selectively bred out of the human population. Perhaps it would be possible for future humans to be happy in an Urban Monad, but 21^st century readers will be horrified by Silverberg’s setting… In the end, the plot didn’t hold together, but I still enjoyed the setting and many of the ideas in The World Inside, so I didn’t feel like it was a waste of my time. The World Inside was nominated for, but didn’t win, the Hugo Award in 1972. I listened to Audible Frontier’s version which is almost eight hours long and is read by Paul Boehmer, who did a great job with the narration. If you’re going to read The World Inside, I recommend the audiobook. Read the rest.

Ajjiit: Dark Dreams of the Ancient Arctic by Sean Tinsley and Rachel Qitsualik

Note: This has been published in Canada, but not the USA.

Ajjiit: Dark Dreams of the Ancient Arctic, by Sean Tinsley and Rachel Qitsualik, is a collection of fantasy short stories based on Inuit myth and culture. It isn’t often I come across wholly unfamiliar fantasy backgrounds, creatures, or images and it really was a pleasure to wander through the utter strangeness of these stories. They took me places I didn’t expect to go: not to the snowy arctic landscape I imagined, but instead deep underground or even, in one story, to the moon for one of the weirder competitions I’ve seen. Read more »

I do not envy the awards panel for the Nebula Awards this year. There are two excellent novellas equally deserving of the award in that category.

The first of the novellas I refer to is “The Man Who Ended History:  A Documentary” by Ken Liu.  This story concerns the Pingfang District in China and the infamous Unit 731 maintained there by the Japanese for biological and chemical weapons research before and during World War II. I had never heard of Unit 731 before reading this novella, and was shocked to learn of its existence and the role of the United States in hushing it up after the war in order to profit from the research. It sounds so innocuous to refer to “the research”: in fact, the Japanese used Chinese peasants for their research, including amputating limbs, infecting them with syphilis, and vivisection without anesthesia. But Liu hasn’t written a simple history. His story posits that it is possible to travel through time to see precisely what happened in Unit 731, as documentary evidence is sparse and victims few and old. The mechanism for this time travel involves the way light travels and the nature of Bohm-Kirino particles and quantum entanglement. Understanding the made-up physics isn’t necessary to feel the power of this story, however, because the real subject is how we understand and experience history, and how enmeshed history is with politics and power. Liu’s novella is a fascinating extrapolation about how the world would react to an ability to actually view an historical event, and how easily the world would blend its standard political reactions into the new reality posed by this technology.

The other extraordinarily good novella among this year’s nominees is “With Unclean Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because two weeks ago I said that his short story, “Her Husband’s Hands,” was my pick for the best short story of the year. “With Unclean Hands” is part of a series Castro has been writing about Andrea Cort, a member of humanity’s diplomatic corps in a time when humanity is but one species among many that populate the galaxy. There are numerous species that are technologically advanced far beyond humans, but the Zinn are one of the most, and had previously spanned the galaxy with an empire beyond anything seen before or since. But the Zinn now occupy only a single city on the species’ home world, having retreated as other races grew more numerous and took more territory.  The Zinn, in essence, surrendered their empire without a fight. Murder is unknown among them; war is a horror in which they have never indulged. Now, they seek to acquire a human murderer to study evil up close. This murderer is not intended as a slave, and his quarters on the Zinn home world are far more luxurious than the maximum security prison in which he could expect to spend the rest of his days as a human prisoner.  Andrea Cort’s job is to sign off on the transaction, for in return to turning the murderer over to the Zinn, with his enthusiastic consent, the Zinn will share with humans technology that is a good millennium more advanced than anything the humans presently have. Cort struggles to understand why this transaction so troubles her. The reader figures it out as she does in this gripping story of life, loss and sacrifice. There are other novellas and novels regarding Andrea Cort, but this is the first in her personal chronology. I was so taken with this novella that I’ve gathered the other novellas and purchased the two novels presently available regarding this character. I recommend keeping a close eye on Castro, who strikes me as very much an up and comer.

I wrote about Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Kiss Me Twice” when it was first published in Asimov’s in June 2011.  This accomplished work is a smart science fiction mystery about Metta, an artificial intelligence who works with the Portland, Oregon police department. Her personality is her own, because she is a true artificial intelligence. One particular police officer, Huang, is one of her favorites, and he cares for her, too. The mystery turns on the kidnapping of Metta; that is, according to the cameras in the central station, masked intruders burst in and grab Metta’s chassis. Huang is the only officer who thought to ask Metta to show him a picture of the intruders, but even that is so limited that the best he can testify to is that there were three of them. Huang also quickly comes to the conclusion that Metta has been taken in order to affect one of the investigations going on at the time of the kidnapping — and it becomes clear that it is Huang’s murder investigation that was the target of the intruders. The mystery unwinds from there. Huang is aided in his work by a rebooted Metta — not the original Metta returned, but a sort of new person with a few hours’ less memory, an interesting complication when one considers the nature of true artificial intelligence. “Kiss Me Twice” is thoroughly enjoyable, ranking very high in the ranking of science fictional mysteries. It plays fair with readers and manages to disguise clues without hiding them in high tech. When I first read it, I expected to find it nominated for awards, and I’m glad to see that it is on the Nebula list.

Kij Johnson’s “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” is another excellent novella. It is set in a world in which there is a river of mist (presumably with water underneath the mist, but no one has ever seen it) that divides a country neatly in two. Engineering has advanced to a degree that it is now possible to build a bridge over the mist, an undertaking that will bring enormous changes to the country and especially to the two cities on either side of the mist, which were previously open to one another only through an extremely dangerous ferry ride over the mist. This mist isn’t like the mist you and I experience here on Earth; it is thick, burns the skin, and is the home to a sort of fish, ranging in size from (apparently) your average trout to creatures so large that they seem to outdo whales. It isn’t always safe to cross, and the family that traditionally ferries people and goods across the river has a sort of feeling for when it is possible to cross without becoming fish food. The man who arrives to take charge of the bridge project at first finds this ferrying business enormously frustrating, but as the years go by and the bridge grows, he comes to a deep understanding of the dangers of the mist and the height of his accomplishment. It is a quiet, slow story told from the point of view of the bridge builder.  It builds in resonance just as the bridge spans the water over time, ultimately leaving the reader with a sense of awe.

Catherynne M. Valente writes more beautifully than anyone else working in science fiction, fantasy and horror today, with a control over language that makes virtually every sentence a separate work of art.  Her novella, “Silently and Very Fast,” seems like a counterpoint to Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” which was nominated for a Nebula last year. It concerns Elefsis, an artificial life form that came into being when a child inadvertently integrated it with her own brain. The enduring question posed by the story, and, by design, not completely answered, is how this entity is different from the individuals in which it resides over the centuries, whether it has an independent existence, and whether it experiences emotions – an extension of the Turing Test for artificial intelligence. Elefsis is the narrator of the tale, and we learn of his/her/its reasoning by metaphor and how that led to an existence almost completely defined by fairy tales. It is gorgeously told.

The last of the six novellas nominated for the Nebula is Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “The Ice Owl.” This novella is about a teen who is, by some measures, well over a hundred years old, but by more conventional measures still a teenager: she has traveled widely throughout the galaxy, trips taking decades but during which she is in a sort of suspended animation, her molecules diced up and reassembled at the other end of the trip. Her mother is an irresponsible sort, taking up with men for as long as they’ll have her and then moving on to another man, another world, dragging her daughter with her. At the time this story begins, the mother and daughter are living on a planet called Glory to God. A group called the Incorruptibles appears to be attempting to gain control of the planet, and it has some strange ideas; for instance, it appears to be opposed to the education of the young, for it destroys the girl’s school. She seeks out a private teacher, a man who appears to know something about the Gmintan Holocide, which she begins to consider more closely herself. The two form a bond over art and history that culminates in his gift to her of an ice owl, a creature that lives most of its life in frozen suspension – much as the girl seems to live hers. The story is charming and entertaining.

There isn’t a bad choice in this entire lot of novellas. This seems to me to be the strongest of the short fiction categories of Nebula nominees this year, perhaps because the novella is such an ideal length for a science fiction or fantasy tale: long enough to build and populate a world with interesting characters, short enough to have the punch of a single idea fully explored. Still, as good as all of these pieces are, the Liu and the Castro are the stories that rise to the top like cream. The Liu is available online and is linked above; the Castro appeared in the November 2011 issue of Analog, and is worth the cost of the magazine all by itself. Read them!

Mondays are always horrible, but they can be made tolerable by reading some horror fiction.  Hence, “Horrible Monday,” in which Fantasy Literature reviews horror fiction to help you make it through the day. It’s the day that’s terrible, not the fiction!

Until I read Indignities of the Flesh I hadn’t heard of Bentley Little, although he’s been published in magazines like Cemetery Dance, which I used to read. Indignities of the Flesh is an anthology containing ten of Little’s surrealistic horror tales. One, “Valet Parking,” is original to this collection.

Bentley Little provides a paragraph before each story, talking about the inspiration. Not surprisingly, many of his inspirations for horror stories are things that frighten him or creep him out; clowns, for instance, in “Rodeo Clown”; valets in “Valet Parking.” Some, like “Documented Miracles,” sprang from experiences Little had as a journalist.

This anthology is a fast read, because many of the short stories are truly short. Little has mastered the tightrope act of being horrifying and funny at the same time, and these stories demonstrate that. Several are just horrifying, and a couple are downright sweet.

My favorite was “Looney Tune,” which is based on a southern California urban legend. A boy and his parents are on the run from a well-funded group of animators—yes, animators. The boy’s father has been blacklisted as an animator, but he still draws. The family moves from town to town, state to state, carrying with them a strange metal cylinder the boy calls “Heaven.” The ending is not much of a twist for people who know a little bit about Anaheim, California, and the history of American animation, but the characters are strange and well-developed in a short space and the loyalty of the family, not to mention some rather strange personal customs, makes this wonderfully surreal.

“Documented Miracles” is a strange and powerful story about faith, skepticism and cynicism –and the difference between those last two. Gregory has reluctantly followed his wife on a tour to South America, to meet with a “psychic surgeon.” I thought I knew where this one was going. I was wrong.

“Happy Birthday, Dear Tama” was the least successful story in the collection for me. I have to say, though, that once you’ve opened a horror story with dead puppies, you’ve set the bar pretty high. The mystery of Tama’s brother, or the monster in the attic, gets lost in the antics of Tama’s zany family. The story is supposed to be creepy, horrifying fun, but Little just tries too hard. I was more entertained by Little’s explanation of the genesis of this story.

“Valet Parking” didn’t really work for me either.  An interesting exercise doesn’t always make a successful story, and that’s the case here.

Many of the stories involve children, who feel helpless in the face of evil that adults either can’t recognize or won’t fight. In “Black Ladies,” Little explores a generational curse and its impact on a family. “Pinata” and “Gingerbread” both follow children who are confronted with the uncanny in their own homes. In “Pinata,” the question is whether the surviving family members can pull together in the face of evil; while “Gingerbread” explores the feelings of loss a young man experiences when his grandmother dies. Of course, it’s not that simple.

“Rodeo Clown” is the most straightforward story in the book. The suspense is not whether there is evil, only when it will act, and whether Patty, the wife of a rodeo-rider, will be able to withstand it. What separates this from other run-of-the-mill evil monster stories is the small and perfect details Little gives us about bull-riding.

The most intriguing story was “Brushing,” an exploration of how an obsession can bind a stalker and his victim in a fatal entanglement:

“On Friday, she went to Sav-On and then to Walgreen’s, looking at toothbrushes. There were so many to choose from! Blue ones and green ones and yellow ones and red ones. Brushes with long handles and curved handles and tapered handles, with hard bristles or soft bristles or bristles of different lengths and colors. She had never noticed before how beautiful and finely designed most toothbrushes were, a perfect marriage of form and function.”

“Even the Dead” is a sad, sweet tale of two friends, one of whom isn’t alive.  There is no trick or twist ending, just the inevitable progression of a situation. It’s done well.

This sampler of stories is a good way to spend a few hours, if you like horror, and, for me, a fine introduction to a horror writer I hadn’t read previously.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, published in 1884, is Edwin A. Abbott’s social satire and Christian apologetic. As a Cambridge mathematician, theologian, and schoolmaster, Abbott had a lot to say about his Victorian society and about being open-minded to the supernatural. He does this from the point of view of a humble square that lives in Flatland, a world of only two dimensions.

For the first half of the book (“This World”), the square explains the demography of Flatland, all the while offering hilarious social satire. He begins at the lowest social stratum (women, who are straight lines) and ends with the king, who has so many sides that he’s indistinguishable from a circle. Low-class men, such as soldiers, are isosceles triangles with sharp acute angles. Since the brain is the size of the smallest angle, these men are stupid, but their sharp angles provide offensive weapons. Anyone who has an angle under 60° is a serf. Women, of course, have no angles, which means they are brainless and irrational (and Abbot provides plenty of tongue-in-cheek evidence for this fact). But women have a mouth on one end, and it can effectively be used as a dagger. When viewed from the back, a woman is hard to notice since she is seen only as a point, thus she must sway her bottom back and forth to alert others of her dangerous presence. Read more »

The Gathering Storm by Robin Bridges

The Gathering Storm is the first in the KATERINA TRILOGY by Robin Bridges. The trilogy blends historical fiction with the paranormal, and is set in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the late 19^th century.

Bridges immerses us in an evocative setting. The pageantry of the Russian court is combined with that hard-to-describe fairy tale mood. Even though we see through the eyes of a heroine who doesn’t really like all the pageantry, we are swept away into a world that is elegant but filled with dark secrets.

Katerina has an innate talent for necromancy, and is sought after by a family of evil witches and vampires who want to use her ability for their own ends. In addition, she’s a debutante of noble blood and is supposed to be looking for a husband in the social whirl of the court. She also has an interest in medicine and dreams of becoming a doctor — something unusual but no longer unheard of in her time. Any one of these plot threads could make a good novel. Any two of them could make an interestingly complex novel. All three of them start to feel a little “kitchen sink.” There simply isn’t enough page space to do justice to all three of these ideas at once. Read more »

Another week in May.

Bill: Sorry ’bout not responding lately–been crazy few weeks with big final projects and then big final papers (plus staying home with a sick ten-year-old).  But I just turned grades in yesterday so let the reading rompus (sigh) begin!

John: I finished reading Black-Winged Tuesday by Alicia Ryan and I really don’t know what to read next…  Work has been hectic so keeping up with reading has been….difficult!

Kat: As usual, I got a lot of audio reading done this past week including the novellas (or is that novellae?) Stonefather by Orson Scott Card, Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, and The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber. I also read the first novel in Karl Schroeder’s VIRGA series, Sun of Suns. The best of these was Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions which was written in 1884 and is both a hilarious Victorian social satire and a brilliantly prophetic treatise on dimensionality.

Marion: I finished Prince of Ayodhya, by Ashok Banker, for the challenge list. This is a retelling of the Ramayana, and I love mythology, so I’m still working out exactly why this version didn’t work for me. This quarter’s Latham’s Quarterly  is titled” Means of Communication.” I’m having fun dipping into that, and I’m enjoying Diana Wynne Jones‘s classic Howl’s Moving Castle.

Terry: I spent this week reading all six of the novellas nominated for the Hugo Award this year. Because that amounts to reading a short novel every day, I’ve done little other reading. I did manage, though, to finish Joe McKinney‘s Flesh Eaters, which won the Stoker this year for reasons that completely escape me (it’s written competently, but there’s nothing new or especially admirable or exciting here). And I’m still trotting through Seanan McGuire‘s Discount Armageddon, which is fun — and I say that as one who does not normally care for SF intended to be amusing.

Tim: This week I read over an annotated copy of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. I’m told by affectionately despairing family members that I really should be able to cite the book chapter and verse at this point, but I did find some of the observations and supporting material interesting.  Also, I did finally see The Avengers. Wow. Hulk smash indeed.

Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor

… Although it’s been a while since Kelly reviewed Lips Touch: Three Times, her enthusiasm for it obviously made an impact, for whilst I was browsing through the YA section of my local library, I saw a familiar-looking face staring up at me. It was the cover art for Laini Taylor’s book, an image which had clearly been stored away somewhere in the back of my mind, waiting for me to recognize it in the real world. And so, a few years later, I settle down to take Kelly’s recommendation. I’ve ended up with the same bouncy enjoyment, and can’t wait to track down more of Laini Taylor’s work… Read the rest.

The Deep by John Crowley

In a world very different from ours, two powerful factions fight for the throne. Alliances are made and shattered. Vows are sworn and broken. Brothers betray brothers; fathers betray sons; kings are imprisoned and queens make war. No, it’s not A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. It’s The Deep, by John Crowley, published in 1975. The Deep is Crowley’s first novel. It is unlike his other works, although certain themes come back into play in the AEGYPT QUARTET. At first it seems like it is based on the Wars of the Roses, but Crowley has said in interviews that he was inspired by the short reign of King Edward II. Read the rest.

Reading Comics: An Introduction for the Skeptical, Part 4:
Mind the Gutter

by Dr. Brad K. Hawley

We could proceed to talk about the way comics use words to tell stories, but in many ways, they share much in common with all fictional narrative. A book on interpreting literature, then, is helpful for reading comics, and it should come as no surprise that I’ve found English majors well-prepared to analyze the way comic books communicate meaning.

But I’ve demonstrated that the ability to interpret a novel is not enough when reading comics. The use of images turns comics into something neither less than nor more than a novel — comics are clearly something else. But they do resemble another art: Movies. And I’ve found students who have taken courses in film studies are also good at discussing comics. They can see how camera angles and perspectives in film are similar to the visual vocabulary of comic books. The careful placement of objects and shifts in visual points-of-view are just as important in comics as in film.

However, unlike movies, or cartoons let’s say, which really seem to resemble the comic, comic books don’t provide fluid motion and require a kind of active participation that is not a part of movies and comics (though they have their own types of audience participation). The lack of fluidity is a product of the gutter, a key component of comics which separates comics from all other arts. As many critics of comics have pointed out, the gutter is the visual key to comics. The gutter is the place where nothing — and yet everything — happens.

The gutter is the blank space between panels in a comic book; it’s the chasm our minds attempt to cross. At times the crossing may be easy, and at times it may be difficult, but it’s never a completely passive experience on the part of the comic reader. Studying the gutter helps us understand how much a comic book requires mental engagement on the part of the audience. The way the artist forces our minds to connect the panels will lead to different types of interpretations than others, some more obvious than others.

Scott McCloud, in his insightful, seminal comic book on comic books —Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art — identifies six different types of panel-to-panel transitions. The first — going from moment-to-moment — can show the blink of an eye. And the last — the non-sequitor — is the most open to interpretation because it forces the reader to guess the connection between two panels. The other four — action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, and aspect-to-aspect — fall between these two types.

At the moment, trying to memorize, or even fully understand, each one is not that important. What is important as you start appreciating your first comic books is being aware that the jumps in space, time, and concept may be minor or they may be major; simple, or downright baffling. But either way, you should notice that if you have three panels of the same size in a row, for example, you could see the blink of an eye from panel one to panel two, but from panel two to panel three, a character could have moved to another country, aged forty years, lost or gained a fortune, and changed her philosophy on life. Each artist will make his own demands on you.

The truth is that comics are a demanding art, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what goes into comics: We could discuss more detailed aspects of the use of color, the use of different artistic techniques, the influence of Manga, and other worthwhile subjects concerning contemporary comics. But we can see that comics are an art form for adults worth studying, respecting, and, most importantly, enjoying. There continue to be comic books made for young kids, but if you walk into a comic shop and flip through the pages of most comic books, you’ll soon realize that many young teenagers aren’t mature enough to deal with the content of contemporary comics, much less able to intellectually grasp the complex story-telling techniques and the rich thematic tapestry that is woven together by the best artistic teams year-in-and-year-out in some consistently impressive story-lines. Ed Brubaker, my favorite comic book writer, for example is able to impress me issue after issue with his Captain America title, a character I couldn’t care less about if it weren’t written by Brubaker.

There’s a rich history of comic books, and even the ones you think you might not be interested in, if they’re written by the best writers, are crafted with both reverence and irony, a strange combination, but one that can be understood if you think of the last time you made fun of an older, quirky relative while still loving and respecting him. This loving, but ironic stance defines the current approach of the best writers to the superheroes you think you don’t want to read about. And if you still don’t want to read about superheroes, you don’t have to. You could fill an entire library with trade collections of non-superhero comic books.

Just remember this: You don’t dislike comics, and you never will dislike them: You just haven’t found the ones you like yet. In the next part of this essay, I will offer reading suggestions cutting across multiple genres, with an emphasis on accessible, contemporary comics for the adult reader.

Next time: Reading suggestions

Author’s note: I want to thank the readers of early drafts of this essay, all of whom made useful comments reflected in the final version of this essay: Ellen Attorri, Chelsea Cariker, Abby Weisberger, and Chris Ziegler (four excellent students in my Crime Fiction course at Oxford College of Emory University); Sean Lind and Ellen Neufeld (two Oxford College librarians who allow me to work with them as they develop a substantial comic book and graphic novel collection for the college); Andy Tegethoff (my long-time friend and comic-book expert who has helped me not only with this essay, but who also has taught me much of what I know about comics); and finally Dr. Adriane Ivey (my wife and colleague, who has not only read this essay several times, but has made room in our house for yet one more obsessive collection).