Recommendation: An interesting conceit for people who play a lot of Minecraft, but which can't decide whether it's for children or youth.
Critique: I lRecommendation: An interesting conceit for people who play a lot of Minecraft, but which can't decide whether it's for children or youth.
Critique: I liked this book, but it could have been a lot better. The author starts with a great conceit - let's tell a Minecraft story from the point of view of an Illager (hostile reavers that raid villages in the Minecraft videogame)! It'll be a sympathetic story showing how he became a master villain! This isn't a new idea, of course, especially in films such as "Cruella" and "Glass," or video games like "Dungeon Keeper" and a thousand others. When I was in the 6th grade, my 11-year-old friend Deane wrote a short story about a villain coming to power and taking on a party of adventurers, which is substantially similar to The Rise of the Arch-Illager. What makes it compelling, for me, is the connection with the Minecraft game: attaching story to a procedurally-generated, totally random landscape that contains common features like villages, spawners, majestic mountains, rivers of lava, witches' huts, and pillager towers. At this point, after twelve years of play, I've spent hundreds of hours in various Minecraft worlds. Getting a coherent narrative built on what is essentially a survival and exploration experience is really exciting!
But the execution is very uneven, for me. The thought processes of the main character, Archie, are very child-like, and the book spends a lot of time in Archie's headspace. As a result, the tone of the book is very juvenile, which is very often at odds with the subject matter: love, abuse, hatred, family, undead apocalypse, mortal enemies, murder, torture, mind control, domination. Here's a glaring example: the book portrays the heroes (that is, the characters controlled by a Minecraft player) as antagonists who revel in mayhem and destruction. They come stomping into a region with swords drawn and hack down everything in their path. But the book is coy about this slaughter, referring to it not as "being killed" (much less "murder") but as "being defeated." This wouldn't be too bad if it was mentioned once or twice, but it comes up again and again, because - and I can't stress this enough - this is a story about an abused outcast raider who pillages villages for a living and then goes on to become an evil arch-mage. Mortal peril is a constant. Every few pages one character or another is "defeating" another. This is a story about violence and how people exposed to violence react to and continue such violence. But that violence is abstracted and sanitized to the point that, for me, it felt like there was no weight to any of the conflict. As a result, Archie (not to mention all the other murderers like the Illagers and the heroes) comes off as petulant and arbitrary.
But the bones of the story - the basic plot of a loser who has been the victim of abuse his whole life being manipulated by an insidious power that promises to give him his just deserts - is pretty solid, and it kept me going even though I found the characters unlikable and the tension absent.
Review: (view spoiler)[A nameless hero - but let's call him Karl - comes into town, massacring monsters left and right. Then a group of Illagers appear, and Karl laughs with delight and slaughters nearly all of them. He spares one runty illager who was trying to talk his comrades out of fighting, choosing to slap him down to the ground instead. Then we follow that illager, Archie, as he gets abused by the other survivor, an evoker named Thord. Thord and Archie return to their leader, Walda, and Thord blames the raid's failure on Archie. Walda doesn't believe Thord, but judges that he's more useful to the tribe than Archie is, so she banishes Archie. Archie wanders and eventually is taken in by a compassionate villager named Yumi, the person who manages the golems that protect the village. The other villagers distrust Archie, but with Yumi's advocacy, they come to grudgingly accept Archie...all except for Salah, another sadistic bully and villager counterpart to Thord. Motivated by bigotry and hatred, Salah invites a group of heroes into the village so they'll "accidentally" stumble across Archie. Yumi prevents Karl from killing Archie, and the other heroes drag him away before he can start murdering the entire village. Salah insists that Archie must leave before the heroes return. Yumi resists, but Archie agrees to leave.
Archie wanders the wilderness, terrified and feeling sorry for himself. Undead hordes appear and chase him across the countryside, into mountains, across a river of lava, and up a cliff to a forbidding door that opens at his touch. Inside is the Orb of Dominance, a fell magic artifact that speaks to Archie in his mind. It promises him power and respect, speaking of his destiny to rule the world. So Archie takes it and becomes mighty. Redstone golems animate at the touch of the Orb and follow him. He levitates rock and shapes metal to form a magnificent fortress for himself in the mountains. The undead attack and he incinerates them. All of them. Then Archie sat on his throne and peered into the Orb, which showed him a vision of his old tribe's raiding party, led by Thord, being attacked and overwhelmed by a wave of undead washing out of a desert temple. Archie rushed off and his golems and the Orb destroyed the undead and their necromancer leader. Archie commanded Thord to bring Walda and the tribe to him at "Highblock Keep."
Archie returns to his base and builds a Fiery Forge for creating more redstone golems. Then the illagers arrive and Walda becomes Archie's lieutenant. He puts the illagers to work constructing more redstone golems. Eager to cement his new position as illager leader, Archie agrees to attack and sack the village. As the restone golems and illagers attacked, Archie slipped off to Yumi's house to get her to safety, but she refused to leave, furious with him. Then Karl appeared and proceeded to slice up the redstone golems. Before the hero could finish off all the golems, though, a huge swarm of undead appeared led by another necromancer. Skeletons began peppering everyone with arrows, including Archie.
Archie woke up on a stretcher being carried into the desert temple. There he met a necromancer who carried another Orb like his. The two of them came to an agreement with the aid of the Orbs, and Archie took over control of a large host of undead creatures. When he returned to Highblock Keep, he found Thord stealing from him. So he killed Thord and then was crowned Arch-illager. The Arch-illager led his three forces (golems, illagers, and undead) to attack the village again. This time they razed it. At the end, the party of heroes prepared to hunt down the Arch-illager. (hide spoiler)]...more
Having misplaced my copy of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I picked up a bunch of comics I'd set aside for just such an occasion. That's OK, because I Having misplaced my copy of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I picked up a bunch of comics I'd set aside for just such an occasion. That's OK, because I was getting pretty tired of Heinlein's social philosophy. "Fables" is the perfect break.
This is the third deluxe edition, which combines books 5 and 6 of the "Fables" graphic novels, which are themselves collections of the monthly comic issues. So this is a spread of issues, something like issue 18 - issue 29. It's hard to say for sure, as both the graphic novels and these deluxe editions switch some of the one-shot stories around a bit, as they don't really advance the main story.
This one is primarily the "March of the Wooden Soldiers" plot, in which (view spoiler)['The Adversary' sends an initial invasion of wooden soldiers built by Geppetto to assault Fabletown and The Farm, the two real-world enclaves for fairy-tale characters in New York. (hide spoiler)] I continue to like this series and wish that I'd paid attention to it when it was first published. That was sort of a comics Dark Ages for me, though, so I'm glad that I've at least found this now.
An aside: I've finally been watching the anime Bleach, and I can't help but be struck by the plot similarities between the two. (view spoiler)[In both, there's an awesomely powerful enemy in another dimension. All the protagonists know that the enemy is planning to invade, and live in dread preparation for the day when the invasion happens at last. The difference is that in Bleach, they sort of know that the invasion will use Arrancar, and in "Fables," they don't know what the Adversary will use. So they're surprised when the Pinocchio clones show up to attack. (I liked the artwork, that each 'wooden soldier' actually has Pinocchio's head, implying either that Geppetto is a one-trick pony, or that he misses his son so much that he keeps trying to make him anew out of an obsessive love) (hide spoiler)]
This is not revealing too much to say that, in this story arc, the tale turns a bit darker, with many supporting characters being killed. The invasion has begun!...more
This deluxe edition book combines books 3 and 4 in the Fables series, and continues the entertaining story of the fairy tale characters taking refuge This deluxe edition book combines books 3 and 4 in the Fables series, and continues the entertaining story of the fairy tale characters taking refuge from the multi-dimensional tyrant/conqueror "The Adversary" in New York City.
The story is fine on its own - I really enjoyed it - but writing the above summary, I can't help think it would be hilarious to have a "What If?" crossover with the Fantastic Four...
Anyway, this series inspires people so much they've turned it into a video game ("The Wolf Among Us"), much as has been done with "The Walking Dead." Of the two titles, I prefer "Fables" as a comic: the characters are more developed and, while awful stuff does happen, it has light moments as well.
In books 3 and 4, Bigby Wolf continues to be an important character (book 2 had him taking a back seat to developing many of the other characters), and we find a bit more about his history, (view spoiler)[including the revelation that Snow White has been a big motivation for him to ally with the human Fables since the beginning - her smell is irresistible to him - and that he smokes incessantly to deaden his sense of smell so that he can live so close to others and not tear them apart. (hide spoiler)]
A comic for adults, "Fables" never particularly feels gratuitous to me in foul language, graphic violence, or sex, though all are present in small amounts. This is in stark contrast to many of the other comics for adults I've been reading, such as all the Brian K Vaughan comics I've read in the past few years: "Y: The Last Man," "Saga," and "Ex-Machina" all throw those in apparently using some formula of frequency. Said another way, I find the writing particularly appealing. Willingham's style reminds me of Grant Morrison more than a little....more
A blend of whimsy, melancholy, and dull allegory translated from the French, The Little Prince is probably more interesting for the story of the authoA blend of whimsy, melancholy, and dull allegory translated from the French, The Little Prince is probably more interesting for the story of the author than for its actual content [1]. I've tried reading this book at least a single dozen times (and maybe more dozens) in my lifetime, and had never managed to get through it until now. There are certainly things that stick with you: the narrator's amusing anecdote about drawing a boa constrictor eating an elephant, his petulant analysis of how the inability of adults to understand this childhood drawing kept him from what could have been a glorious career as a painter, the plane crash in the Sahara, the boy who lived on an asteroid a few meters in diameter, and the problem with baobabs.
But what I forget each time - until I try reading it again - is the tedious weird stuff, like the boy falling madly in love with a Scarlett O'Hara-level manipulative and vain talking flower, how he's so miserable in his besotted state that he must leave his home rather than spend another minute not living up to her expectations, and the dopey filler allegorical material as the boy visits various other asteroids and the author indulges himself in ham-handed social criticism. Usually I have set the book down after the first ten pages of the boy dealing with the codependent flower, but other times I've managed to make it to the Greedy Businessman, or perhaps the Drunkard, before putting the book down in despair of finding any enjoyment.
Reading it this time, determined to push through, I realized that I cannot stand obvious allegory in children's books. As distasteful as I found the horrible shrew of a flower, the succession of caricatures that the boy encounters as he travels from "planet" to "planet" really exasperated me. Once the prince finally gets to Earth, however, the story improves again, regaining a focus on universal concepts like what it means to love and how to appreciate what one has rather than clumsy social commentary. It still isn't particularly graceful in this, but at least it's easier to stomach.
Harold and the Purple Crayon also takes a page from The Little Prince (many books seem to either pay tribute to, or are inspired by, this 1942 book), in that the drawings that the narrator makes will become reality, at least in the boy's mind. The narrator engages in a funny couple of pages, trying to draw a satisfactory sheep for the boy, which the boy plans to take back to his planet with him.
(view spoiler)[Beyond love, the book also discusses the metaphysical, with death implied as being the form of travel that the boy employs (if you're like me, the method of travel between planets was a nagging question for most of the book): you could read it that he dies on each planet, so that his spirit can race to his next destination unencumbered...and then somehow incarnates again. Or it could just be that he traveled in some other fashion, and that he chooses death in the end to escape the pain and loneliness. So the book also comes out as pretty positive about suicide. The boy befriends a poisonous sand snake - he can talk to anything - who represents Death, and promises him that "I can carry you farther than any ship could take you." Then, inevitably, the boy chooses to die by poison on the anniversary of his arrival on Earth. This selfish act is presented as noble and glamorized further by the disappearance of the boy's body overnight (could be his method of travel, could be jackals). John Steakley's Armor ends in a similar way, with the narrator wondering "Are you out there, somewhere?"
The book actually steps up the metaphysical even further, after the boy dies, with a meandering Schrödinger's cat-like supposition about the muzzle that the author drew for the boy. Will it be enough to keep the sheep from eating the flower? Due to a failure in the narrator's artistry, the muzzle might fail at any moment, or it might not, so the narrator belabors the point, prompting us readers to consider for ourselves whether the flower is eaten or not, at any particular moment. And it is supposed to be tragic if the flower has been eaten, or just tense with the potential for tragedy if it hasn't...yet. (hide spoiler)]
There's both a lot to like and a lot to dislike in this book. I'm glad I stuck it through and forced myself to slog through it this time, because some of the later material is much improved over the allegorical fluff in the middle, and because I've finally read another entry in the English-language canon.
1 - The author drew upon his own life a great deal for his narrator; he was a lifelong aviator and daredevil, and did at one point in his life crash his plane in the Sahara (during an air race). He was depressed and outraged at the fate of France in World War 2, and traveled to the US to agitate for intervention in the war. It was while in the US that he wrote "The Little Prince" partly as a response to the great success of "Mary Poppins." His health failing, his marriage dissolving, he decided to enlist in the air force late in the war. Even though he was too old and infirm for active duty, the French armed forces couldn't refuse the request of such a national celebrity, and so he was able to fly a bunch of reconnaissance missions before his plane disappeared one day. The French were left dramatically wondering "Are you out there, Antoine? Are you out there?" for decades, until the wreckage of his plane was found 200 miles and 90 degrees removed from his official flight path. The official belief is that he was heroically shot down, but to my mind, it's not hard to imagine that he wanted to end it all....more
Something between Encyclopedia Brown and the movie Brick, The Adventures of Jack Lime presents the first-person case files of a teenager from CalifornSomething between Encyclopedia Brown and the movie Brick, The Adventures of Jack Lime presents the first-person case files of a teenager from California who finds himself shunted off to live with his grandmother in rural Ohio after his parents are both killed. In order to stay sane, he adopts the personality of a wise-cracking film noir detective, and opens shop as a gumshoe for hire at the high school. In the end, it isn't enough, and he develops narcolepsy as well. The book details three of his cases, presented out of chronological order. It's enjoyable for the extremely stylized language which is almost a parody of tough-talking private dicks on the 40s.
"...she had a cute way of talking out of the side of her mouth. I thought I could get hooked on a girl like her if I wasn't careful, and I wasn't planning on being careful."
Not just the language, but the actual sorts of cases and the plot elements hearken back to a lot of classic pulp detective novels from Hammett or Chandler: in every case, Jack gets seriously beat up for sticking his nose into other people's business. Like with "Veronica Mars," there is actually a reasonable back-story for why and how Jack Lime got into the shamus business, though we don't get the whole story until the last case file, (view spoiler)[where he is duped into fixing a swindle by a cabal of privileged white kid cons. He vows that he'll never let anyone else get made into a patsy by these villains, and starts on his career, looking for opportunities to deliver their comeuppance. (hide spoiler)] I enjoyed this, though I definitely feel that it is aimed at high school teens and not children....more
This book is something of a cross between The Call of the Wild and Watership Down, which was refreshing, as I was expecting instead a cat version of RThis book is something of a cross between The Call of the Wild and Watership Down, which was refreshing, as I was expecting instead a cat version of Redwall. That was probably in large part because this series is often described as "feline fantasy," and to me, fantasy evokes sword and sorcery tropes. There isn't any of that, here. The fantasy is purely in the conceit that cats can talk to each other and have complex social interactions within a tribal structure. Aside from that humanizing of the animals, the book is pretty realistic.
As in Jack London's novel, a house pet (here a cat named Rusty barely older than a kitten) finds itself in the wild and must fight for place and acceptance. The difference is appropriate to the subject matter of cats: rather than being abducted by men, Rusty chooses on his own to leave his human family to discover himself, and to explore the wild. Rusty, overcome by curiosity, sneaks into the woods after a wild dream prompts him. There he's found and attacked by a warrior apprentice of ThunderClan. ThunderClan is one of four rival groups of feral cats living in and around a forest composed equally of deciduous and evergreen trees (called "White Hart Woods," according to a map in the front of the book, though the name is never mentioned in the body of the book). ThunderClan's population is dwindling, and the ThunderClan leader decides to offer Rusty the chance to become an apprentice himself, rather than what she would ordinarily do, which is to kill any house cat with the temerity to intrude on their turf. This decision is made for a number of reasons, not least that Rusty may be the one foretold in a prophecy who may save ThunderClan. So the rest of the book is about Rusty's development from a pet kitten into a fierce forest warrior cat.
The book is well-written, and the several characters are distinct enough to keep them straight in one's head, though anyone who hasn't read the book hearing a reader talking about the cast of characters will find the large array of names and relationships bewildering. The only difficult thing, for me, was trying to envision the characters; clearly the cats' appearances are very important to the author, but you have to know cats pretty well to know what the different descriptors mean. Several cats are "tabbies," though they may be golden, brown, grey, black or light tabbies. Other cats are tortoiseshell, ginger and calico. Don't despair if you have no idea what some or all of these are: like most detailed descriptions of characters' appearances you find in novels, these descriptions aren't at all important to knowing or understanding the character. The personalities and relationships between the cats are what's important. Hunter has done a good job here of creating a fairly intricate political plot of changing alliances and suspect motivations, where I was so invested in the outcome that I was groaning when a character made a poor choice that wasn't going to end well. Even though the book is considerably longer than The Call of the Wild, it never bogged down for me. The prose is light and efficient, probably a big part of why this is considered a children's book and neither the London or Adams books are.
I recommend this book to anyone who likes survival stories, tales of tribal initiation, or cats....more
I took a long time getting around to finally reading this. For me, the concept/conceit of a book about the unnamed disposable characters on Star TrekI took a long time getting around to finally reading this. For me, the concept/conceit of a book about the unnamed disposable characters on Star Trek evoked a fair amount of eye-rolling. The book wasn't helped by the fact that it was selected as an alternative read by the "Sword & Laser" book group as a sop for whiny bums in the group who found it so bothersome to read an actual physical book that they not only balked at reading the main selection (which wasn't available in e-book format) but complained about it, objecting to the very idea of reading a real book. That has nothing to do with Redshirts, of course, but it did set my teeth on edge and disincline me from reading this.
But I'm glad I finally settled down and read it. Before this, I'd only read Scalzi's Old Man's War, which was enjoyable despite some pretty glaring character issues. This is so much better. But I digress again from actually reviewing the book. So here goes:
What starts out as a silly somewhat meta conceit well-suited to a humorous short story gradually develops into a tale about people trying to find themselves and meaning in their lives. This (which, when I describe it that way, sounds awfully heavy-handed) is presented with a light touch at an agile pace. That adds a lot of depth to what is, ultimately, a very fun story. A particular highlight for me is the character banter, which other reviewers have likened to Joss Whedon dialog, but could just as easily be compared favorably to Preston Sturges. The madcap comedy of errors that the characters engage in also helped the comedy, a lot of which is light slapstick. The book had me grinning at the absurdity of characters' snappy comebacks as they were grappling with existential issues. The brilliance of such banter is not so much that it is realistic, but that it represents how witty people do sometimes interact with one another, and so we as readers recognize and respect the impulses to make such jokes. We can easily see ourselves having such conversations, even if our words don't sparkle quite as consistently as these.
One section that elicited a grin and chuckle: (view spoiler)[The characters have realized that their life expectancy will be much better if they have a major character with them, so they have to contrive a way for that to happen. In a classic comedy manner, they decide on abduction. Here, one of the characters has attempted to seduce one of the officers so as to slip a mickey into his drink. "How long has he been out?" Dahl asked. "Not even five minutes," Duvall said. "It was completely unbelievable. I tried to get him to have a drink with me first - I put that little pill in his tumbler - but he just wanted to get at it. I could tell you what I had to do to get him to take a drink, but that's more about me than I think you want to know." "I'm trying to imagine what that could even mean and I have to tell you I'm drawing a blank."(hide spoiler)]
Scalzi keeps the book popping along at a breakneck pace appropriate to a TV show, and it ends satisfyingly. But he also provides a number of code at the end that explore different outcomes/effects of the main plot on other characters' lives. These are well-executed, particularly as they differ greatly in tone and he provided them separately from the main story rather than trying to incorporate them. They work great as these appendices.
I highly recommend this, and it has made me actually look forward to reading more Scalzi in future....more
An easy chapter book for older children (the protagonist is in 5th grade), Spaceheadz is fun in large part because it's so...meta. The conceit of the An easy chapter book for older children (the protagonist is in 5th grade), Spaceheadz is fun in large part because it's so...meta. The conceit of the book is that aliens who've been watching TV for decades have come to Earth to take over, and they spout commercial jingles as aphorisms, believing them to be true (Charmin is a natural construction material, because it's "ultra strong," for example). So you have an illustration of how commercial advertising's insidious claims influence more than we know in this book. But the book presents that the way to combat this is for the reader to go to the Spaceheadz web site and register for an account...effectively, a large part of the book is also a commercial advertisement, or at least an elaborate self-promotional gimmick. Which comes first? The book, that is then promoted by the web site, or was the book written to promote the web site? It's a fascinating parody of the subject that itself does not escape that which it's parodying. That's funny to me.
Thankfully, the book is funny, too. It contains a lot of slapstick (as is typical for this kind of story, there's a clueless bumbling adult who, being an adult, is incapable of understanding what's happening and is thus the butt of most of the jokes), as well as some much-appreciated (by me) absurdity. My favorite line is a classic, one that could be used as the punchline to pretty much any set-up: "Pudding is pretty much just pudding." With such absurdity, context hardly matters; that's just funny inserted after just about any story or assertion. Try bringing that up in your next meeting at work to see what I mean: "I think we should out-source them. What do you think, Johnson?" "I think that taking action now might be too precipitous. I think we can give Barrister & McVeigh enough rope to hang themselves if we just leave the situation alone for a while. They're in too deep. I think that's our best move. And I think that pudding is pretty much just pudding." See? comic gold!
So this is a fun story, a quick read, but nothing that's going to stay with your kid for a long time...at least on a conscious level. The advertising mechanism will train the kid for all kinds of future web-based marketing opportunities, like clicking banner ads or engaging in microtransactions to get a few more phony coins a bit faster in a farming game....more
A comics anthology that jumped out at me in the library, Animal Rites is a compilation of the first several "Beasts of Burden" stories, in which neighA comics anthology that jumped out at me in the library, Animal Rites is a compilation of the first several "Beasts of Burden" stories, in which neighborhood pets (mostly dogs) team up to fight supernatural menaces. It's a bit like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," but with pets and no sex. That is to say that it's funny, creepy, and thoroughly enjoyable if you like that combination. In particular, the interplay between Pugs and the Orphan is consistently entertaining. This is definitely not a kids comic, though...I feel I have to say that, because so many animal-protagonist books are aimed at children. This is dark stuff with adult language, for adults...who may also like animals....more
A solid effort from Vaughan demonstrating how the press of ongoing day-to-day issues could distract a person who mysteriously gained superpowers from A solid effort from Vaughan demonstrating how the press of ongoing day-to-day issues could distract a person who mysteriously gained superpowers from working to discover how he got the powers as his first priority.
For most comics heroes, the origin story is one of the most compelling arcs. It's interesting (and a little exasperating) how coy Vaughan remains about revealing any details of "The Machine's" origin. Interesting, because it seems intentional, exasperating because it really beggars belief that the character would be so uninterested in how he came to be what he is...particularly when not knowing the nature or source of his powers is clearly either causing multiple deaths or at least hampering the ability to prevent those deaths. I'd like to see Mitchell Hundred actually making a choice to not pursue this mystery, rather than just forgetting about it for several issues at a time.
Still, the stories are good despite that glaring omission, demonstrating the perils of both politics and superpowers. I'll certainly continue reading....more
Another disaster comic that I've been reading, Y: the Last Man is filled with as much human awfulness as The Walking Dead (and a similar string of calAnother disaster comic that I've been reading, Y: the Last Man is filled with as much human awfulness as The Walking Dead (and a similar string of calamities), but to me it doesn't seem as bleak, somehow. Yes, every male on the planet (but for two) has died and the world is filled with violent psychotics, but unlike the zombie apocalypse story, there are also heroes, people that you can identify as "the good guys." It makes for more interesting reading, for me.
That said, I did have some problems with this volume and with the story itself. First of all, the graphic novel format is a wonderful one, and I appreciate getting a complete story arc that takes place over several issues, rather than having to gather together the more episodic issues one by one. However, the format is really intended to tell a complete story arc, and it falls apart when it erases the beat between the end of one story and the beginning of the next which is provided by the month-long gap between issues. It's a bit like how watching the TV show "24" is ruined on DVD, because the in-show clock is thrown off by the removal of the commercial breaks. With this volume, we end the astronaut story arc that was started at the end of volume 1, but it is ended in the middle of the volume. From there, we go immediately into a standalone story that takes place some time and place far removed from the previous page. It's more than a little jarring, not having space or time to process what has happened. Sure, I could have realized that a new story was starting - by counting the number of pages, I could probably have figured out when one "issue" ended and the next was beginning - and just decided to set the book aside there for a while. But there were no visual clues, no "Ten days later" to clue me in, and since the book had been moment-to-moment until then, the break was jarring for me. Not a big deal, but it did strike me as a vulnerability in the individual-issues-to-graphic novel translation.
I also am finding it more and more unbelievable how easily characters move from one continent to another. What we've seen from the main characters' journey is that society is falling apart, and insular tribes are forming. Each tribe may or may not want to maintain the semblance of their past lives, but what doesn't make sense in this setting is that transoceanic travel is still easy enough that ninjas, soldiers, assassins and so on are all able to cross into North America with apparent ease. What? Who is maintaining shipping and international commerce, when the mass reduction of population would make the need for continuing such practices more trouble than they're worth? It's weird to me.
Still, I enjoyed this volume and will likely continue, even though the last standalone story (about an acting troupe writing a play about a hypothetical last man on Earth) was pretty silly and gratuitous....more
Months ago, I was looking for more books in the Herbert's Wormhole series for my son, and a quick search at the library brought up this as one result.Months ago, I was looking for more books in the Herbert's Wormhole series for my son, and a quick search at the library brought up this as one result. I couldn't resist the title, and a scan of the first few pages struck me favorably as a blend of "Harvey" and Woody Allen. So I checked it out and started to read it.
I quickly found it tough going, though. The protagonist, Paul, can understand and talk with dogs, starting with his aging golden retriever, Stella. There's the potential for a lot of humor with the canine interactions - the title is something Stella says, obviously - and the parts with Stella are very funny. But her dialogue in the book is pretty limited, though her presence looms large over everything. Most of the book is taken up with Paul's disastrously bad choices in his relationships. The writing really engaged me, but liking the characters made it even harder to bear the awful things that they'd do. When Paul stole the accounts numbers and PIN codes for all of his brother's financial accounts and then ripped the 8.5" x 11" page containing this information "into twelve pieces" and put them in a public wastepaper basket, I couldn't stand it any more and put the book down for at least two months. Twelve pieces? Twelve pieces? How does one even tear a piece of paper into twelve pieces? It seems like it takes lots of planning to so carefully fake destroy a piece of paper that will be so easily reassembled by any of the lowlifes who watched him do it (after talking loudly and publicly about what the piece of paper was). It's like a horrible Damoclean sword hanging over his head, that he put there.
Making the book even harder to read are awfully coincidental things that happened in my life after I started reading it. My mom died, which made my reading a book with "Dead" in the title a lot less desirable, and then my dad had a stroke, which also happens to Paul's dad in the book. When I continued reading the book the last couple of days, determined to finish it, I was laughing and weeping because of all the baggage I brought to the text.
I was hoping for a more comic story, but instead I got a lot of soul-searching with a little bit of humor and an eventually hopeful resolution, despite all the awful stuff that happens to Paul and the awful stuff he does to himself. I ended up liking the book well enough, but it was a long hard road getting there....more
I read the first "Supreme" book years ago, and was delighted to find that there was a sequel. This is a fun series of riffs on golden and silver age sI read the first "Supreme" book years ago, and was delighted to find that there was a sequel. This is a fun series of riffs on golden and silver age superhero comics, with particular parody of Superman/Superboy/Legion of Super Heroes. It's also a lampoon of how long-standing comics characters get revised, re-revised, and re-imagined over the decades, from "reboots" and "what ifs" and various other authorial fiat actions. Like often happens with the second story in a trilogy, the book apparently is a set-up for the third story. We find that the evil arch nemesis Dax has ended up in an alternative dimension populated by all the versions of himself that have been killed, forgotten, revised, or otherwise written out of the Supreme stories over the decades. He begins to plan how to draw upon the combined malevolent power of his alternative selves so as to get his final revenge.
This funny conceit is carried out in the illustrations, as every few pages the characters either time travel, dimension travel, or engage in flashbacks that set them in the art and dialogue styles of golden age or silver age comics. There are also nods to the twisted, overly psychological stories of the 80s. While Dax is discovering his alternative dimension, Supreme and his female sidekick discover similar alternative dimensions, and she sees that many of her alternates are long-standing love interests of Supreme's.
The book is a cute combination of nostalgia and parody....more
This is a mildly enjoyable Christian allegorical fantasy book that is uneven in its execution. The author has developed an interesting fantasy world, This is a mildly enjoyable Christian allegorical fantasy book that is uneven in its execution. The author has developed an interesting fantasy world, but uses a weird mechanism to introduce that world to the reader that didn't work for me. Wulder (God) has created the world, and formed a number of interesting fantastical sentient races to populate it. What's nice about this is that the races are not all analogous to typical fantasy tropes...there are giants and fairies (urohm and kimen, respectively), but there are also several other races that one has to take at face value, because they don't fit as easily into such labels from other fantasy. Paladin (Jesus) works Wulder's will on Earth, and various people in the story come to serve Paladin over the course of the narrative. The primary character is an orphan, Kale, who has been raised as a slave (think Roman house servant, rather than plantation chattel) by members of a different race. She's never known others of her kind, but as the story begins, she is sent away to serve Paladin at The Hall in the capital city. She never gets there, but is instead waylaid by a number of ogrish attackers and rescued by other heroes. I really like this kind of introduction, in that it is different from most such stories where we have an "access character" who must receive lots of exposition explaining everything in the setting. But Paul fails to follow through with this, and kind of treats Kale as an access character anyway...everyone is constantly explaining stuff to her, which gets old and interferes with the narrative a LOT. There is some good stuff here - I particularly liked the erratic wizard Fenworth, who rivals Fizban and Belgarath both for his hilarious monologues.
To compare it to other series, I'd say this is a great deal less well-crafted than Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, maybe slightly better than Peretti's fantasy stuff, and a fair sight better than Paolini's Eragon. I had a hard time getting into the book through much of the middle, but the last 150 pages or so moved much quicker and I enjoyed them far better once the unnecessary exposition was largely out of the way....more
I loved the central conceit to this book: it's almost an opposite to Asimov's Robots series. In this, humans created robots with artificial processorsI loved the central conceit to this book: it's almost an opposite to Asimov's Robots series. In this, humans created robots with artificial processors modeled on human brains (Stross never quite calls it a positronic brain, but...) and installed the Three Laws of Robotics as every good science fiction author seems to have them do. But in this, the humans then died off because they no longer had to work for anything. In the hundreds of years since, the robots have continued maintaining and building human society, at the same time desperately longing for (because it's programmed into every fiber of their beings) and absolutely terrified by the eventual return of their merciless human overlords. Though I wouldn't call this cyberpunk, it does have some similarities: the big villains are corporations and conglomerates, which because of our stupid human laws are essentially entities in themselves. As such, they can own property. The robots running the corporations can then own other robots, enslaving them nearly as effectively as the disgusting biological Creators (the robots commonly refer to animal and plant life as "pink goo" and "green goo," respectively).
It's a compelling conceit, but I found it astonishingly, tremendously hard to read. This book really did not grab my attention...in fact, it almost repelled it. I would start reading, and then invariably I would either set it aside to find something else to do, or fall asleep. The really weird thing is that I don't know why I had this reaction! There's a lot to take objection to, certainly, but my visceral reaction was on a subconscious level that seems more than the sum of the problems with the book, most of which are minor niggles.
First of all, the full book title is Saturn's Children: A Space Opera. Take heed: this has nothing to do with the conventional definition of space opera (which is plot-oriented space fantasy filled with action and aliens) and is, instead, more of an opera, set in space. With robots! That is to say, the book involves a lot of overdramatic monologues, lots of introspection, a largely incomprehensible plot, betrayals, sex and death. The only thing missing is the music.
The book is about a particular android named Freya, nth in a mass-produced line of robots based on the template of Rhea, a female robot designed to please her human's every sexual whim. Freya is habitually depressed, because she was created about seventy years after the last human died, so her purpose in life is essentially meaningless. She's also hopelessly out of vogue, as a machine designed to resemble a human. Considering suicide at a party on Venus, she is accosted by a bunch of corporate slave-owning midget robots and she disassembles one of them in self-defense. He swears revenge, and thus begins a long run from planet to planet across much of the solar system (though never, strangely, to Saturn, rendering the book's title even more meaningless, or at least terribly obscure [1]). As she flees from place to place, she makes a series of alliances with different groups. Another problem I had with this story is that it is written in a style that felt as if it was trying to be a noir mystery, aping Hammett. As a conceit, that actually appeals to me ("A hard boiled robot thriller? Count me in!"), but it really didn't gel for me. A big part of the problem is that the plot got very, very convoluted. There were two elements that contributed to this: first, most of the robots [2] store and use the "soul chips" of their predecessor incarnations, so that they can integrate and learn from the experiences of the ones that came before them. This means that a large part of the book jumps around between different incarnations in time and place, as Freya relives their experiences. You can see how this would be disorienting for the robot; it's written intentionally to be disorienting for the reader, as well. You often can't tell which character's point of view you're following. The second element that makes the plot exceedingly convoluted is a corollary to the one I just mentioned: most of the characters have several incarnations in the story, and for many of them, they are all in the story simultaneously, each working to different ends. Sometimes Freya, our narrator, uses a pet name for the characters, and sometimes she uses their common template name. So in addition to the difficulty in knowing where and when you are in the story, it's also difficult to keep track of which character is doing what at any given time. It's just a mess.
The book's cover art I found particularly disturbing, but I'm not sure if that's genius, just annoying, or perhaps both. It's ridiculous cheesecake, first of all, but in a way that's appropriate to the character of Freya. To add insult to injury, it's really badly done Lawnmower Man-era CGI cheesecake. For much of the two weeks (TWO WEEKS!) I was struggling through the reading of this book, I was offended at the thought that they couldn't be bothered to come up with good artwork for the cover. This, too, is consistent with the character: she's supposed to look almost human: artificial, but clearly close enough to human that her manufacturers imagined that people would use her as a sex toy. It's creepy, and I found myself profoundly embarrassed to be reading a book with such a cover. I imagine that some women reading romance novels with lurid covers would have similar issues.
In many ways, the book feels like it was written without an outline, as the pacing is very languid throughout most of the novel, and then very abrupt at the end. The last twenty pages contain a lot of fundamental information about the characters that would have, in another book, been introductory information provided early on and then recalled at the end. So there's a bunch of "astonishing" reveals at the end (which I feel would have all been better as character background), and the plot goes plop. The end.
I've read many books that were far worse than this one, and Saturn's Children: a Space Opera has a lot of good things going for it. But it really didn't work well for me. I didn't hate it or even dislike it. I found elements fascinating, and others irritating. Overall, it was OK.
1 - One of Saturn's moons is called Rhea, which was the original sex robot on which Freya was modeled. So in that sense, you could say that Freya was a child of Saturn, IF you can think of the moon Rhea as being one of Saturn's "children" first. Rhea was the name of a Titan (Uranus' children) in Greek mythology, while Saturn was one of the first Roman gods. Much of Saturn's story was lifted from the Greek precursor, Cronus, Rhea's brother and husband. So, bear with me: in Ancient Grecian tradition, Rhea was with Cronus and bore many children - most of the Greek Gods, with the exception of Aphrodite. Saturn was a Roman god largely based on Cronus. The sex robot Freya was built off a template of the robot called Rhea. So if you can follow all that logic to understand "Saturn's Children," then you're ready for the rest of the book, as it involves a lot of convolutions similar to that one.
2 - In the beginning of the novel, Stross writes about this storing and reliving old memories as if it's something unique or unusual to the Rhea line, but as the book progresses, it becomes clear that every single major character in the book is doing the same thing, making it seem as if every robot does it....more
This was tremendously entertaining, with some added amusement that was unintended by the author. The book involves the investigation of an orchestra bThis was tremendously entertaining, with some added amusement that was unintended by the author. The book involves the investigation of an orchestra by a detective who is trying to discover why "the composer is dead." It contains a lot of funny digs at different orchestral stereotypes, including a number of veiled inside jokes and puns, as the detective interviews each section of the orchestra as suspects in the murder case. What makes it really shine, though, is that it is also an audiobook: each copy of the book comes with a CD containing two sets of audio tracks: one is the full audiobook, with a great reader performing both the interrogating inspector and the shifty sections while an orchestra performs the score accompanying the dialog; and the other is just the orchestral score, for those who wish to add their own dramatic flair reading the text aloud. It's a wonderful performance piece.
The unintended entertainment was from watching and hearing my kids as they listened to the score for the first time. It starts off wonderfully: "The composer...is dead." There's a three-second caesura, and then the score begins, with a tremendous basso brass blatt reminiscent of "Night on Bald Mountain." My kids started laughing hysterically each time this happened, and soon it became clear that, to them, the sound was evocative not of the grave, but of tremendous flatulence. They absolutely loved it, and were completely entranced....more
Some time ago, browsing Goodreads, I stumbled across a female actor I know of, and I followed her reviews. Celebrities who read! I thought, How cool!Some time ago, browsing Goodreads, I stumbled across a female actor I know of, and I followed her reviews. Celebrities who read! I thought, How cool! It's been just about a total success, too, as through this actor's posts I discovered many of her new projects, including a wonderful thing called "Written by a Kid" (currently my favorite web series). From that, I found the "Sword & Laser" web series, which happily led back here to Goodreads. Following one of the hosts of that show, I checked out something I'd seen the actor mention in one of her posts - that she was considering creating a new label for a subset of "urban fantasy" she was going to call "vaginal fantasy" - which was now a group here on Goodreads. Randomly browsing one day, I stumbled across the discussion of this book, Eternal Pleasure, which sounded so hilariously off-the-wall bad that it could be nothing but fun to read...sort of like watching an Ed Wood movie. Happily, I discovered that the book was available from one of my local libraries. Looking for some light-hearted escapism (and humor!), I set aside a number of books that were coming due to the library sooner so that I could read this.
Eternal Pleasure is simultaneously as bad as expected, worse than expected, and not bad enough to be really funny! Yes, it really is about Vampires, Fairies, Werewolves, Space Aliens, Dinosaur-morphing Hunks and the Women who Can't Help but Love Them. Yes, it does have side-splitting scenes where the heroine's knees go weak, thinking of the intense gaze of the powerful dinosaur she longs to mate with...again. The book is filled with wonderful silliness like that. But I think it wasn't random enough to feel really consistently absurd to me. Part of my reaction may stem from the fact that I was alternating time spent reading this with time in my car, running errands and going to work, while listening to And Another Thing... which does the absurdity so much better. And I don't know if Bangs was trying to be super-funny, either. No, this really felt like some other books I've read that I couldn't really relate to at all, because the character motivations were so alien and the plot seems to jump randomly from place to place with astonishingly little effort given to resolution. In particular, I'm thinking of Twilight and Grimspace, both of which were interesting to me only so far as they provided glimpses into another, very alien, viewpoint. It's a truism that guys are focused on plot and women are focused on relationships, but I think Eternal Pleasure is a book very much written with that truism in mind. Important character and plot details are only mentioned right before they become important, as if told by kids on the playground: "I'm Jimmy the Invulnerable!" "I shoot you with big bullets!" "They bounce off, because I'm invulnerable!" "Save me from this burning plane, Jimmy!" "I grab you and protect you while the plane crashes. CCRRRRASSSSHHH! You're OK because I'm invulnerable!" "Now the plane explodes, too! KA-BOOOOOM! ...I sure am glad your invulnerability protected me there, too!" "You're welcome." "Oooh, ooh, ooh! I know! You're invulnerable to everything except pastrami! Pastrami makes you lose all your powers!" "Okayyy..." "Pastrami attack!" "Aaarggh!" This is funny on the playground, with the short attention span of schoolchildren with only a 10-minute recess, but I found it grating in a novel. An actual example? Protagonist Kelly has worked at a zoo her whole life, so she's naturally comfortable around wild animals...particularly the big predators, which she has often fantasized about meeting up close and personal (yeah, I kid you not). Then, more than half-way through the book, she says "Oh, except for snakes. I've always been afraid of snakes." Within a page of this revelation, BAM! She's confronted with a snake!
When I first got the book from the library, I was surprised and somewhat aghast that the librarians had catalogued this bizarro science fiction book as "romance," but in the end I guess I have to admit that that is at least as good a label for Eternal Pleasure as any. I think I was spoiled by all the reviews, too: so many people spoke and wrote about how hilariously bad this book is that I was expecting to be tremendously entertained...and so I wasn't. If I'd gone in with little to no expectation, I think I would have found it much funnier! As it was, this book was an arduous slog for me to read: it took me more than a week to finish!
Here's what happens: (view spoiler)[Kelly Maloy is a bookish girl who lives in Houston, having worked for years at her parents' zoo. She's broke and doesn't want her parents to bail her out again, so she responds to a want ad for a driver for some missionaries visiting from overseas. What she doesn't realize is that Space Aliens from Another Dimension (think Great Old Ones) have incarnated on Earth after waiting to do so for the last sixty million years or so. You know, like they do. The missionary she is to drive is actually the reincarnated spirit of a warrior whose soul was put on hold at the end of the Aliens' last visit, determined that this time the Aliens will Not Win. His name is Ty, he is magnificently handsome, confident, manly and pheromone exuding, and days ago (by his reckoning), he was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. So, naturally, thinking like a Tyrant Lizard King would, he wants to mate with the first mammalian female he sees. He imagines it pretty graphically, in fact, though for some reason his imaginings don't involve cloacae, or eggs. He and Kelly are instantly attracted to each other. His leader, a spiritual hottie named Fin, informs Ty and the nine other spirit warriors who were reincarnated after being whisked out of giant reptile bodies (all of them have assumed names that are abbreviations of reptilian scientific names, like Gig, Spin, and Lio) about the Space Aliens (which he calls "the Nine") and how one of them, Nine, has set up shop here in Houston, working to sow chaos by recruiting legions of undead, changelings and other magical creatures to attack the dominant species, humankind (because these Aliens are somehow restricted from harming the dominant species themselves). Their job is to find Nine and drive him into the open so that Fin can banish him from Earth for another sixty million years or so. There follows a bunch of essentially random events, during which Kelly and Ty tease each other by almost mating several times, Kelly and Ty get hot and heavy, Kelly and Ty finally mate (still no eggs, sadly), Kelly's counterpart Neva is abducted and turned into a werewolf, the dinomen posture a lot, they save Neva, a "good" werewolf sets up a meeting with Kelly, the protagonists make an alliance with "good" vampires (it is more than halfway through the book that we visit the vampire night club "Eternal Pleasure" for which the book is named, and then we never see it again), Neva is treated like a friendly dog for several chapters, Kelly and Ty resist mating for a while, Neva is taken to the "good" werewolves (where she immediately becomes the alpha's bitch), Neva is abducted again, Fin reveals that Kelly is destined to play music on her flute to banish Nine, the vampires, werewolves and dinomen all save Neva, Kelly is abducted, and they all come together again to save Kelly with the help of a demonlord whose only motivation for scuttling Nine's plan is because he likes to defy expectations. Kelly sings a song ("don't worry that it's not good enough, for anyone else to hear, just sing...sing a song...") and banishes Nine to the Outer Reaches once more. Fin causes an earthquake to vaporize the Houston Astrodome utterly. Kelly and Ty marry and commit to continuing the hunt for the rest of the Aliens elsewhere in the world. The end. (hide spoiler)]
As in Twilight, the main character (in this case, Kelly) is initially described as short and unprepossessing, but everyone else in the book is incredibly, unfailingly hot, and they all can't take their eyes off of her, lusting and fighting for her attention. Really, there isn't a single character who'd even just mildly attractive. Every single male that Kelly lays eyes on makes her gasp in admiration, her pulse fluttering and her skin warming with desire. OK, I take that back: the body that Nine has constructed for itself is normal-looking, which after all the collected male gorgeousness actually makes him look like a troll. You know he's a complete and utter monster, because he's not a perfect embodiment of female desire (we don't even get a description of his musculature, which is surely a bad sign).
If more attention had been paid to the plot, this could have been a pretty good book for me. If, on the other hand, the plot was dispensed with entirely in a kind of mad dash from one absurdity to another, then it could have been a "Lost Skeleton of Cadavra"-style romp that I could very much have enjoyed. But it was in between the two, with a huge dollop of romance novel tropes, to boot. I can't say it was terrible, but it's not good. Not good at all. Having said that, though, I have to admit that I was entertained by this book somewhat - it's not terrible, it's just not actually very good. With some different choices, it could have been much more enjoyable to me.
While I was reading this, I had a conversation with a friend, who was reading another book that had some explicit sex in it. He had clearly wrestled with this, and in the end decided that the sex made sense given the plot. At the same time, I know women who devoured all the 50 Shades of Grey books, which as I understand it consist largely of explicit sex. It's a question of expectation, which is informed by the target audience, and whether a given book is the kind of book you like to read. A common kind of fantasy story that many men like is the "acquiring massive power" story, while it seems a common kind of fantasy story that many women like is the "exploring the tension of forbidden attraction up to consummation" story. For many men, relationships in stories must serve the plot, while for many women, plot must serve the relationships. Neither is better than the other, but if you don't prefer a particular kind of story, then instances of that kind of story are going to leave you dissatisfied. Thus it was with me, here....more
Having seen this book everywhere for the last twenty years, it had somehow seeped into my awareness that it was some kind of classic mid-century literHaving seen this book everywhere for the last twenty years, it had somehow seeped into my awareness that it was some kind of classic mid-century literature, like Catch-22, Night (invariably called "Elie Wiesel's "Night"), The Little Prince, 1984, The Phantom Tollbooth, or A Wrinkle in Time. So I finally broke down and read this, which I felt was part of the canon.
First of all, imagine my surprise to learn that it was written so recently! That's a really heavy amount of hype for a book that was written less than a drinking adult ago! But I tried to set aside my astonishment and incredulity to just experience it for itself. Aside from the ubiquity in every single "Best of" list ever composed, I knew nothing about the book, so that part was pretty easy.
The book is competently written in terms of sentence structure, but what really makes it shine is the gradual reveal of its conceit. In many ways, this book reminded me of The Book of Ember, as it involves describing an attempt at an isolated utopian society. But we don't realize that at first. The great thing about the book, for me, was that it very slowly reveals the weirdness of this fundamentally, horrifically different society. So at first the narrator just seems a little stilted, which for an American reader just makes it seem like any story out of the UK. But gradually we find that the families get together for encounter meetings every morning, to process their feelings...which is a little creepy, but not outside the realm of people who've gone too far into therapy. During this, we see the protagonist, a child who is approaching his last year of school (when he's somewhere between 11 and 13), apparently develop some kind of shape-changing powers, in what appears to be the Blossoming of a mutant power. But then we find that there is a limit to discord in the community: it never progresses beyond simple squabbling, which makes the people seem fairly robotic. Meanwhile the social structure of school is being developed, which resembles work study programs much more than our public schools and during which the kids are alarmingly closely monitored for interests and aptitude. Birthdays and holidays are not celebrated, except on New Year's Day (though it is called something else), when everyone is recognized as being a year older. That far, it could be something written by Asimov. But then it gets really weird, revealing only nearly halfway through the book that all of the people have been intensely, fundamentally modified to alter their perceptions in an astounding way. So what appeared at first to be the emergence of a vast mental mutant power is actually someone exhibiting normality...at least that's how it seems at first. But then we come to discover it is both normality AND a vast, frighteningly powerful mutant ability.
The book draws to a very Brazil-like ending, which is just as satisfying as the ending to that movie. If you liked the ambiguity of that film, you'll love the ending of The Giver. If you didn't, you'll find no satisfaction here.
I loved it, and my wife read it, too. The multiple ways of interpreting the ending led to long and animated discussion, which is always a good thing....more