What's On Your Bookshelf: Why I'm Still Holding Out On Buying an E-Reader

The local Books & Co. had several Nooks on display the other day. I've resisted e-readers for lots of reasons, but mostly because of Amazon's weird "You bought it but we can take it away" thing. If I download a book, I want to download it like a PDF. A file that's mine. No DRM. The idea that Amazon or a publisher can suddenly decide to retract something already given scares the anti-censorship fiend in me.

And yet... and yet.. I have too many books. I'm tired of moving them. And sitting in bed curling up with a 800-1000 page book isn't really cozy. It's awkward. Carting it around on a plane is even less cozy. Reading from a slim e-reader seems so much easier. 

But I'd also like to actually be able to, you know, read it. I love the color Nook, but the backlight kind of bothers me on that version. But I'm not sold on the non-backlight because if I can't read in the dark on an e-reader without and extra light, what's the point? And why am I paying as much for an e-reader as I am for a laptop? At that point, why not just read books on a laptop? And that's just no fun. And why should I pay extra for Wi-fi? 

That said, I realize how much easier life would be if I could fit all my books onto a hard drive... but also how easy they would be to lose. Knowledge is great. But it's also hard to hold onto.

I suspect that I will always buy really good books in print. The kind of books you really love and cherish. The ones you want to have signed by authors. Or the ones with really important information that isn't likely to go out of date soon.

But there are other kinds of books - the popcorn reading, or the 8-book sagas, or the 12-book history compilations - that will just be easier to read and forget about or read and easily access on an e-reader. I love books, but the more junk I get bogged down in, the more I realize just how many of them I can live without. There are only so many books I love at any one time.

When book and movie libraries both move totally digital, I expect to have a couple bookcases of prized books, and that's it. The more times you move, the more you appreciate having a clutter-free life. E-readers help with that. But I don't love the technology enough (and it's not yet cheap enough) to make the switch.

I'm a notoriously late adopter. I resisted getting a cell phone until I live in South Africa, and then I ditched it again for four years in Chicago.  I didn't get a proper one again until 2007?

The e-reader will be the same. All the cool kids will have them, and stare at me wide-eyed when I talk about how much space all my books take up, before I finally find something that really turns me on.

Women, Guns, and Gods: The Horns of Ruin

I found Tim Akers's last book, Heart of Veridon, by accident at the local bookstore. I enjoyed it so much that I eagerly awaited his next book, The Horns of Ruin... until I read the back cover copy.

See, it had all this stuff that annoys the crap out of me. I'm not a fan of sword and sorcery, or stories about gods, or steampunk, so marketing "sword and sorcery meets steampunk" doesn't work for me (your mileage may vary. Being in marketing, I know this is good marketing; I'm just not the target). You should know that right off before I go into my thoughts on the book. This wasn't really a book I should have enjoyed.

But, you know, Tim Akers is a fucking great writer.

And when you're reading great writing, you forgive a lot. 

The Horns of Ruin is about Eva Forge, last paladin of the dead god Morgan. Her cult of Morgan is dying, and the man she's sworn to protect is kidnapped. Great fantasy is about setting as much as the people in it, and the city of Ash is a lovingly detailed, creepy, and arcane city built atop a black lake. There's a whole mythology here, with creepy beings you've never heard of and a huge, detailed history that's spun seamlessly into the story. There's no "pan to the orcs" or "well, you know how elves are." Like VanderMeer's Ambergris, this worldbuilding is done from the ground up.

One of the reasons I was willing to pick this up despite the fact that it dealt with living gods and sword and sorcery is also because Akers did something in Heart of Veridon that was really awesome: he presented the "gods" in that world as really, truly, unknowably alien. Gods became gods because they were creepy things we didn't understand, whose motives could be anything from benign to sinister. You don't know what exactly they are. Or where they came from. Or how you should relate to them. You simply build your faith around them in order to make some kind of sense from the freaky unknowable. When we don't understand something, we kill it or we worship it. Which is especially fitting considering how this particular story goes.

At any rate, I figured that his take on gods would at least be more interesting than your standard fare. And I was not disappointed.

Ash has a very complex magic system based in... well, mythology and history. That is, the mythology and history of *this world,* not our own. The gods were regular guys once, three brothers who quarrelled and fought and backstabbed and won great battles and conquered the city. They were people, once, who amassed their power over time. The idea here is that godhood is something amassed over time. There are many potential gods - the successful ones are those who are able to best gather what may be a finite amount of power around them.

The analogy to real-life politicians/celebrities/robber barons is pretty stark. 

I won't pretend to know how the how system works - it's a reasonably fast read. Suffice to say it felt very original for a sword-and-sorcery package, and it was cool watching power invocations in action. There are spells/invocations for speed and strength and battle moves. You invoke to draw on power. It's spell casting seamlessly woven into the history of a place.

And it's this, to me, that's the real strength of the book. The originality of the magic system/casting, the mythology, the way it all ties together to create a city that's very much Other. And did I mention the writing is really good? That means you get to dig your hands into the guts of this city, and it breathes on the page.

This is a spare little book. I say that because though the mythology is huge, it's confined to one city. And the cast of characters is small. The plot's very contained. I'm not sure why that felt odd to me - maybe because so much of fantasy fiction is about conquering the world, not making or unmaking a city.

The characters, unfortunately, felt a little spare as well. Eva is cool - guns, swords, massive power through invoking the strength/power of her god - but she doesn't connect with much of anyone along the way. I know she's supposed to care about her Fratriarch but just wasn't sure... why. Because her cult is all she knows? I knew it because it was said, but for some reason, never felt it. It's tough to write a warrior woman you can connect with. Like Del in Sword Dancer, or Monza from Best Served Cold, you have to cut away big pieces of yourself to make it as a woman and a warrior, to be taken seriously, but both of those books were very good at showing the heroine connecting - or failing to connect - or trying and failing and failing again - with people. And that made them not only interesting, but sympathetic.

Eva didn't really try to connect with anybody. She tried to not hit people in the face because they could further her cause, but some bit of humanity was missing from her, and it made her a little flat. I would buy more of the "cold warrior woman" thing if there was any kind of "got to cut part of yourself away to succeed cause of, you know, sexism" thing at work, but... Thing was, in this world, I didn't get that being a woman was an issue. Nobody really commented on it. It's got one of those "assumed equality" things going on, which is always weird in fantasy fiction, since feudal worlds (even those that have moved on to industrial revolution steampunk) are nearly always exploitative. It's cool if they're not, I'm just always interested in why, and that's not often answered in assumed equality world. I couldn't really figure out this world's social structure, since Eva pretty much just pounded in the head of anybody who got in her way (which was highly entertaining, yes, but did get repetitive). So I wasn't sure how much of that stripping-away-of-self she'd really had to do to be taken seriously. Her cult/invocations gave her great power. People respected that. It was far more important which of the gods you worshipped than what your social class was. Thing is, there's more than scholars and priests running a world, and though we saw a few random workers and got some lines from spear carriers, I wasn't really sure how life was for everybody else.

Because Eva is so one-minded, she never connects with anybody, either. And that's... troubling. I need to care about people in my books, and if there's no love (even muffled), or guilt (even rationalized), or remorse (also rationalized), it's harder to connect. Things glance off Eva like a stone skipping over a lake. This may simply be purposeful - she's been raised to be one-minded - but it made it tough to root for her along the way, even though the fight scenes were cool.

For what it's worth, the book does pass the Bechdel test (though barely), despite the small cast. This is primarily because Eva is paired up with a rogue scholar along the way who knows her own way around the city (the reason it's "barely" is because they're generally talking about how to find the Fratriarch, who is, you know, a guy. And the bad guys and gods are, you know, guys. So though your two primary characters are female, your entire supporting cast - including hordes of baddies - are guys).

Overall, this was a fast, entertaining read. I wanted to love it more than I did, and I suspect some of that had to do with not connecting with Eva. The story is so much in her head that it was hard to get perspective - either on her or on events outside what she believed was immediately important. The pacing was pretty breakneck, too - hardly any breathing/character stretching room between fight scenes. Though I was annoyed at some of the more "fan-fictiony" moments in Best Served Cold where the characters nattered on, I realize that what those did for me was make the characters far more endearing. At the end of the book, you feel like they're your friends in the same way you feel about the crew of Serenity. Even if they're your asshole friends who'd cut you as soon as look at you.

I wanted to be friends with Eva and the rogue scholar. But at the end of the day, they were ascending into something else, and leaving their humanity behind. It fits with the book's themes, but was a little disappointing as a reader.

That said, there's an incredible mythology here, great fight scenes, and some really stellar writing. If you want to go somewhere that's actually fantastic for awhile (or if you ever wondered how cool it would be to have a sword with an "articulated sheath") I'd give this one a whirl.

Not everybody needs to go kicking in heads with their friends, I suppose. Kicking in heads with paladins infused with the power of dead gods can be pretty fun too.

Sex, Death, and the End of the World: Thoughts on The Windup Girl

There has been a lot of ink spilled (real and virtually) about Paulo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. A few months back, I decided to see what all the fuss was about and ordered a copy.

This was a dense book, the type you don't see mass marketed very often, in large part because it throws you right into the story and expects you to catch up. There's no popcorn here along the way. No, "As you know, Bob," just "Here's what I'm doing, ha ha figure it out."

I pushed through the first twenty or so pages thinking I was going to end up putting it back down again. The characters aren't particularly likable. There's really nobody to root for. Toward the end of the book, I realized I wasn't terribly invested in who "won" or died.

That said, the characters are interesting, and that makes all the difference. Exiles and outcasts, expatriates and profiteers... they're all here. Bacigalupi is a great evocateur of worlds, and he captures the heat and stink and chaos of this future Bangkok with great force. This is a book that's very much about the world, the re-emergence of colonization after a spectacular collapse, civil war, and above all, exploration of the world after the terrible repercussions from too much genetic meddling with our food stuffs and our environment.

The host of characters include a scheming expatriate employed by a "Calorie Company" - big ConAgra-like companies that literally control every edible thing that comes on the market. The entire economy is based on calories - fossil fuels have been used up, and energy is measured in literal human calories. Genetically modified animals and people help pick up where fossil fuels let off, but it's been a long climb back into industry.

Part of what seems to have made this book so popular - besides the fact that it's well-written, evocative, and engaging - is that so much of it is so here-and-now newsworthy, which people love. I felt the same thing when I read his take on how big-business-controlled seeds had aided in toppling the world. I'd just finished watching a smattering of documentaries about the monopoly on corn seed and fertilizer of some big companies today, how farmers weren't even allowed to harvest their own corn for planting, because the seeds themselves are patented. Yes, the seeds are patented. They are owned by a corporation.


In the Windup Girl, we get an answer to the question, "What happens when all the seeds are patented, and then there's a blight, and no alternatives around anymore?" We also get an answer to the "What happens if we continue on like we are and the oil runs out" question, too. These are both big concerns. Science fiction has never really been about the future so much as it is about exploring answers to today's questions and concerns. We write our future fiction (and our fantasy fiction) in reaction to what we're experiencing now. The Windup Girl is right there at the forefront.

Big stuff aside, I did want to take a minute to share some thoughts on The Windup Girl herself (the blog's titled Brutal Women, afterall). The whole Asian sex slave robot/genetically tailored pleasure girl slave thing has been done to death. The minute she comes on the scene I was like, "Tra-la, whatever."

But Bacigalupi makes some very interesting choices, here. Though she is created by and owned by men, it's a woman who is her primary on-stage abuser, and the person you hear spewing the most hate at her. As a Windup Girl, she's outcast, hated, feared, and can't walk outside alone without fear of being recycled. Not only that - her flawless skin means she has pores so small that she doesn't regulate heat properly. This is a big problem in sweltering Bangkok at the end of the fossil fuel age, when things like ice and air conditioning are for the super rich... and she's an rich guy's abandoned companion who's been taken up into a petty brothel. That means she's utterly, completely dependent on others. Physically, and genetically. Because she's been bred to be submissive, dependent, with an overwhelming desire to please.

What makes her different that other robo-women? She knows exactly what she's been bred for. She has a painful knowledge of her dependence, even as submitting to her masters' desires fulfills her dog-like need to please, she hates herself for it. She knows it for what it is: bad programming.

And she fights it.

How many times have you done something for somebody that was against your principles? How many times have you done something you were uncomfortable with, or that you didn't really like, but that made somebody else happy? And then afterward you were like, gah, why did I do that?

That's her whole life. It's knowing what free will's like, but never having it.

All that said, she does work hard at rebellion, and in the best of all girl-power stories, she does in fact get weaponized... and the whole place goes to hell. She has been slowly battering against the cage of her genetics for some time, so when she bursts out, it's pretty spectacular, and unpredictably violent (after yesterday's post about women getting weaponized in response to sexual violence, I should have found this more predictable, but the way Bacigalupi sets it up, it's actually not. It felt like an interesting instead of a predictable choice).

everybody's getting stepped on by everybody else.

Overall, this was a good read. If you can get through those first few initial pages without going, "Fuck this, I don't know what the hell is going on!" you'll be fine.  Things pick up. Things make sense. Sometimes they make too much sense. And you start to wonder just how fun the world is going to be in 50 years unless we get some electric cars and high-speed trains and stop corporations from controlling the genetic makeup of our foodstuffs.

Which, of course, is exactly what a good SF novel should be doing... freaking me out about the future.

Why I Don’t Read Much Urban Fantasy

(from here) 

Daniel Abraham had an interesting post up about rape and urban fantasy  that I’ve been chewing on for awhile. To sum it, it’s some thoughts on women and power as they’re portrayed in urban fantasy. Or, “urban fantasy is a genre sitting on top of a great big huge cultural discomfort about women and power.”

True and true.

Much of urban fantasy, he argues, exists to explore and unpack – among other things - women’s fear of sexual violence. So the best way to explore the issue of women and power and sexual violence may be to not state it explicitly. After all, once you state a book’s overall theme out loud, “Why yes, I am immune to sexual violence and find it quite liberating, but I am also interested in how it has re-shaped my life” it loses some of its power.

I thought it was an interesting thesis, and mulled on it for awhile. I was reminded of the Buffy episode – one of the most disturbing for me – when she loses her powers (taken away from her by a guy, her mentor, as a test. Talk about worst nightmare) and walks down the street, small and afraid, as a group of guys leers and heckles her. It was a profoundly unsettling moment, to see the heroine you love so much for her physical strength get demoted to, well… a woman like us. She doesn’t confront her hecklers like she would have done when she had her superpowers. She just does what we’ve all done at one time or another – hunches up her shoulders, doesn’t make eye contact, and scurries quickly away back into her house.

What Abraham came to realize over the course of the dialogue that ensued after the post went up was that, actually, urban fantasy and its predecessors (i.e. the warrior woman books of yore – which I have a much firmer grasp on, and will talk about more than UF here) pretty much all explicitly use rape and/or sexual violence in the narrative more than you might think. It’s a big old honkin’ cliché that in order to give your heroine an “excuse” to be violent, you have to give her a good, violent reason – like a past rape or intense fear of sexual violence.

There is a long history of literally weaponizing your heroine in response to attack. It happens to guy characters all the time, too (you know, the ones whose wives and daughters are raped and killed in order to spur him on to revenge. Once again: we all get weaponized in response to rape, which is THE WORSE THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN!!).  So on the one hand, powerful female characters are weaponized because their guy counterparts were. The thing is, they’re just more likely to have personally felt the violence themselves in addition to acting out violently in retaliation against violence done to others. We made weaponized women heroes who were also victims. The first couple times you read it, it’s interesting. And then it’s not. 

I’m re-reading Jennifer Roberson’s Sword Dancer series right now, which I read back when I was 14 or 16, and there it is right there: the ass-kicking female heroine was raped and her family was killed, which spurs the entire arc of her narrative. She becomes cold and hard and goes on a blood rampage after the guy who raped her and killed her family. Red Sonja gets her powers from rape, too. Ash gets raped. Hell, even Veronica Mars gets raped (yes, yes, I’m mixing my media – stories are stories. I am also reminded of “That was the end of Grogan... the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!”).

In Tamora’s Peirce’s Alanna books, she said she created the character with the explicit intention of NOT having her become a warrior based on past experiences with rape or violence. It was just so incredibly overdone, in her reading experience, that she wanted to do something different. She wanted to create a heroine who wanted to be powerful because it felt right and made her feel powerful, not because of what someone had done to her

One commenter in particular took issue with Abraham’s post, and I followed the dialogue with interest. I didn’t find anything he’d said particularly offensive (not loving UF all that much, myself), though the more I thought about the “books about women and power don’t talk about sexual violence” thing the more it seemed weird to me.  

Why’s it weird. Well, because UF exists in a version of this world. Even if you can defend yourself from a rape… you are still going to fear rape. Why? Because, you know, you’re a woman. And our society pretty well grinds it into you from day one that rape is THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN TO YOU. Worse than dying, even. You see it much more explicitly in other cultures where women are literally stoned to death or hang themselves after being raped, but you still see it here a lot too. There’s a lot of cultural baggage around rape, which is yet another reason women don’t like to report it. If you report it, you’re presumed guilty in one way or another. Even if you didn’t wear a short skirt, and you fought back, and you weren’t walking “somewhere” alone, or going to your car without pepper spray, or whatever reason people make up so they can make it your fault that somebody attacked you, just being raped still carries the stigma of taint. Of badness. Of brokenness. Dishonor.

So, you know: you are going to carry a lot of internalized stigma around about being raped, even if, you know, on some level, your new shiny powers protect you from it.

After much back-and-forth, Abraham’s anonymous commenter got there, too. She said it much more pointedly than I did, tho:

“As a privileged male, you have the unique opportunity to throw yourself into a situation where your power is taken from you. You feel safe, secure. You don’t think of yourself as a victim. You don’t have a cultural script running through your head about how you should act, dress, talk in the same fashion as a real life woman does. In all probability you’ve created a female protag who mimics more of your real life privilege than a real life female.”

I don’t read much urban fantasy, as stated (the heroines have all started to blur together for me), but I’ve suggested Abraham’s MLN books to others, and I had a few people say that it sounded like it was written by a guy – folks who didn’t know who the pseudonym was for. When people say things like this, I always wonder what they mean. Nobody could really articulate it. But I suspect it has something to do with the above. Because even if you’re Superwoman… you’re still a woman. And the world you live in makes certain that you remember it - superpowers be damned.

Urban fantasy is, indeed, about women and power. Learning to wield it. Negotiate it. Have meaningful relationships while wielding it. In a world where women are starting to make as much or more money than men (in some areas), and are pushing ahead in terms of formal education, this weird power sharing is something we’re all trying to negotiate in real life, too.

Why are guys so intimidated by strong women? Not even Mad Men knows.  But urban fantasy books are interested in exploring those themes, too.

The thing is, even with all this perceived power, we still have a lot of cultural baggage trying to push us back down. Outdated ideas about virgins and whores, continued hysteria over what women do with their uteruses, sexual violence and the stigma around it (still primarily for women – when was the last time you heard the epithet “rapist” used against a guy in a negative way?), tricky power negotiations, social baggage around pregnancy and taking time off to be with your kids, stigma around being a stay-at-home mom and stigma about being a working mom (basically, if you’re a woman, you must be doing SOMETHING wrong), and etc.

Having superpowers doesn’t peel away all the social baggage. In fact, it actually HIGHLIGHTS the social baggage so it stands out starkly and ridiculously for what it is. Superpowers say, “Hey, I’m buff and tough, so… why do I still think all these made-up rules apply to me? Why do I still care so much about being skinny and having a boyfriend?”

It’s a lot easier to critique society when you obviously no longer fit within its confines. It’s also easier to talk about how lonely you are in it because you don’t fit in it.

So, women and sexual violence. A lot more of it in your woman-power fantasies than you might think. Because, women with superpowers are still women.

Which, if you think about it, is also a really good sum up of women’s places now: We can make our own money, get great high-power jobs, take boxing classes, mouth off, have sex outside of marriage (and even enjoy it!) and take on all the trappings of power… but… well… at the end of the day, we are still women – and being called “Women” means we get to deal with all that that means to our culture. And there are still men (and other women) who go to great pains to remind us of this, and who try and use those reminders to strip away our power.

Now, all that said, and understanding Anon’s issues with a guy boldly stating that his heroine just wasn’t going to worry about rape because she was just never going to get raped cause of her powers… I have to say that I’ve got a pretty similar stance in my fiction - though I've had to take my heroines off this planet in order to do it in a way that I feel is believable, sadly. 

I have that stance in direct reaction against the “strong woman got raped and now she’s allowed to be violent!” cliché. I prefer working in worlds where rape carries no stigma. Or carries some other stigma (preferably a horrifically negative one for, you know, the person perpetrating the crime as opposed to the victim). I want worlds where rape makes no sense. Where it’s not a weapon of war or control. It’s a violent thing, certainly, but not socially acceptable as it is in this society (yes, it is. I just skimmed some recent rom-com where the heroine turns down our hero half a dozen times – he shows up at her work, her apartment, and calls her a lot. She turns him down every time. Then, at time number eight, changes her mind and they hook up. What message is this kind of story sending to guys? Mass media still markets “passion” and “romance” to guys as “not giving up when she says no.” And then we all wonder why there’s a disconnect).

Committing sexual violence - which is a particular type of violence that goes out of its way to remind women that they’re women, and Other – has ridden off into the world of cliché for me. No doubt that, as Anon says, these books are helpful for survivors of abuse, which is still 1 in 4 in this country. They help us realize that yes, in fact, life does go on, and we can grieve, and go forward.  

But I'm tired of reading about abused women. My master's thesis looked at how the African National Congress recruited female fighters during the war against apartheid. I have stacks and stacks of real-life stories about violence perpetrated against women in every country. I'm a feminist blogger, and read the stats and facts and figures every day. I get images of women being abused all the time. Yes, it's real life. Yes, terrible things happen. 

But that's not all there is to life. And I feel that seeing only negative images of women - of women abused, hurt, scared, exploited, harrassed - every day all the time is only going to make you hate being a woman even more. 

Think about that. If all you ever saw about, say, an imaginary country called Valynna were sad, unhappy people, would you want to become a citizen of Valynna? What if you already were a citizen? Would you feel better or worse about being a member of that country if all you saw all the time was the worst of what could happen to you?

I made a conscious choice in my work on this blog waaaay back in 2004 that I wasn't going to post images of women being abused. I was going to post images of happy women, strong women, powerful women, successful women. Yes, I would talk about the unique challenges we have, the abuses, the power struggles, the objectification, but I carefully chose those sidebar images to portray strong, vibrant, happy women. I am tired to see suffering women all the time. Because though it may be *a* truth, it is not *the* truth, any more than any one experience stands in for all experiences.

When I look for heroines, I look for heroines who choose violence as a tool because it works for them, not because it’s thrust upon them. I want heroines who are powerful for power’s sake. Who are honestly, truly, really, scary. Not sexy-scary. Not girl-next-door-scary. But genuinely someone who you’d be terrified to bump into in a dark alley. Because they are so good and unapologetic about what they do.

And I just don’t find that in any believable character in UF. Not anybody who's got an interesting setting, at any rate. Because the setting... our world, even Changed... is still our world. With all the same bullshit.

Joanna Russ once said that the reason she started writing science fiction was because it was the genre where you were allowed to imagine how “things can be really different.”

UF lets us address issues of power and sex and violence as women in a changing world. Our changing world. I deal with that every day. I’m not so interested in writing it or reading it.  

What I’m interested in is what makes us women. And who we’d be… with the same parts… but somewhere else. I want to pull off all the baggage and put on some different loads and see how people interact. I am tired of rape and leering and cat calls and expectations to have kids or not, or get married or not, or whatever.

I want to imagine how things could be really different.

My turnoff with UF is pretty much the exact opposite of what Abraham argued as being not there (or what shouldn't be there): women in these books are still bound by the cultural rules of being women, including the threat of sexual violence. They are merely exceptions when people know about their powers. If they don’t know about their powers, they are still going to be treated like women. And though there is endless delight in watching them combat people’s stereotypes, there are still far too many of those moments when the heroine creeps away into the night, hunching her shoulders, leery of cat-calls.

It’s a not-fun world. An uncomfortable world. A world we’re certainly working on making a better place.

But not the world I'm primarily interested in writing my spec fiction in.

Because it's the world I have to live in and write non-fiction about every day.

I am tired of seeing women getting beat up and crapped on. I want to imagine something different.

Defenders of shows like Dollhouse would say that you have to show all the bad stuff before you show the rebellion against it. I respect that.

Trouble is, people get lost a lot in the bad stuff, and they forget why it was it was bad in the first place. Instead of being "bad" it just becomes the "norm."

Finch: The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of

Finch's gun is awesome.

I’ve been a Jeff VanderMeer fan ever since I read the novella Dradin, In Love. It had so many of the things I love: a mad, unreliable narrator; weird setting; lush worldbuilding; and a perfect, simple, brutally honest reveal that told you mountains about the narrator and what he really wanted out of life.

There were some fun stories in City of Saints and Madmen, but I didn’t love any of them the same way I did Dradin. After Dradin, I loved Veniss, Underground best. More twisted scenery, broken narrators, piles of bodies and darkness and did I mention the broken people? The Situation was another delightful read for me, which took all the weird worldbuilding and set it on top of a workplace satire that any desk jockey could relate to.

The thing with much of VanderMeer’s fiction is that most of the narrators are not likable. You don’t read VanderMeer if you want to read about heroes (his most heroic character is probably Shadrach from Veniss, Underground. Probably, again, one of the most honest heroes I’ve encountered in fiction in awhile. Heroism is about doing what you know is right, not doing something because you believe you’ll get something out of it – whether it’s fame or riches or, in this case, the girl). 

And that brings us to Finch. 

Finch isn’t a hero. He was so much of a non-hero that I found myself, at best, ambivalent about him. Even when we find out his prior identity, it’s really not terribly interesting.

What Finch has is an incredible, amazing, nightmare-inducing world the likes of which I haven’t experienced since Veniss, Underground. The book would literally give me weird dreams when I read it before bed. Only reading Lovecraft has ever given me those same dark, slippery sorts of nightmares. The ones that crawl around in your head and whisper crazy things that leave you feeling a bit dirty and confused come morning.

Finch is a strong book, and probably one of the best plotted I’ve seen from VanderMeer. If you can get past the unlikeable main character, there’s a whole hideous new world here to sink your teeth into. It’s not pretty. It’s not heroic. It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s what makes it so scary.

VanderMeer’s venomous mushroom folk are true aliens, the kind whose powers and technology and motives you realize you’ll never be certain of (they actually lose a little of their scariness toward the end when we get too much telling about their motives, but I’m not sure how tension could have been sustained without knowing something about what they were doing). I love their slimy memory holes, their leaky organic guns, the edible bullets (edible bullets!!), the addictive mushroom fumes, the contaminated areas.

This book is fantasy worldbuilding at its best.

I had some issues with the narrative – particularly how the protagonist seemed to be pushed and pulled and used by other forces, which, again, made him so much less heroic (being a used object is always less heroic than being an active agent), but that’s a personal preference in my heroes. This hero was purposely non-heroic, and he stayed that way the whole way through. It reminded me a little of Hobb’s title character in the Assassin books – it’s a story about the catalyst for change, not about the heroes.

I was also pleased to see a big leap here in the quality of VanderMeer’s heroines. Ya’ll might not have noticed this, but it was something I took issue with very early on (and was what sparked my initial correspondence with VanderMeer).

Shriek had a female narrator, but, alas, she was just so dislikable for me that I was never able to finish the book. Finch was, to me, a stronger and more engaging book, and I ate it up like candy. It also had some really engaging female supporting characters. The possibly-turncoat-lover – who made the leap from “Yawn, it’s the woman who exists to have sex with the hero” stereotype to full-blown character with one particularly cutting line toward the end (very a much a “The women men don’t see” type of line), the bookish information gatherer with her own secrets, and the rebel queen, of course (every good book needs a rebel queen).  All three were strong, complex people that really stood out for me along the way, and, I think, greatly contributed to my enjoyment of the book (rebel queeeeeeeeen!).

That said, this isn’t a book for everybody. It’s weird. It’s grotesque. It will, likely, give you nightmares. And Finch, the character, is kind of boring.

But.

Ambergris is not boring. It's amazing. And the civil war, mushroom war, and life-in-alien-occupied-Ambergris-slice-of-life is so incredibly worth reading if you’re a lover of intense worldbuilding that I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Of course there are also some plot holes, a little over-explaining at the end, and some dues-ex-machina-ing (also at the end), and a few too many nods to Shriek (which, as noted, I didn’t finish), and there’s that protagonist thing....

But if you love the type of fantasy that takes you somewhere else… with something else, Finch is a very fine romp.

Dangerous Thoughts!

There Will Come Soft Rains

Short animation based on the Ray Bradbury story of the same name.

Booklife

So, I'm, like, a writer fighting to get my first book into stores. At least into Kindles? Published would be great. It's been languishing, but hopefully that'll change soonish.

Anyway, I'm also an introvert. I write books. I don't market them. I'm an introvert by nature... it's one of the reasons I became a writer. One of the toughest things for introverted writers to negotiate has always been the marketing of their books, and with the rise of ever more "social" and viral ways to market books, the landscape has gotten tougher to manage. Most of the time, I feel little overwhelmed.

I'm often caught in this weird place where people tell me I share too much, or too little, or don't engage enough, or engage too much. And you know, all I want to do is write. I can write here or plunk away in cool silence in this big 1890s house, but at some point, if you want anybody to read anything you write, you need to crawl out of the house and back into the world.

Booklife came to me at just the right time. I'd sold a book, had it get caught in limbo, and was happily cocooning in my real life. Trouble is there are two big parts to The Writing Life. There's the writing, and there's the marketing. There's the interacting with the world, and there's creating worlds. Today, it often feels like I can do one or the other but not both at once. And... well, let's say that interacting with the world makes me tired. I'm in marketing at the day job, and that means people and politics and social media all day. It's the last thing I want to do when I come home.

I enjoyed Booklife because I got to see how another writer negotiated the writing vs. marketing portions of life. Because let me tell you - it often feels like they're directly opposing forces. He gives some great strategies on how to move from writing to marketing mode and leverage social media tools. Yes, the tools he talks about may be obsolete soon, but the rules of social media (thus far) are pretty portable across mediums.

For me, it was the right book at the right time. How do you interact with the world without exhausting yourself? How do you withdraw enough that you can be creative but not lose momentum with your social media audience? It's a tough negotiation that I'm right smack in the middle of right now, and seeing how VanderMeer is negotiating his own booklife was... comforting? I want to know it can be done. That I can build a writing career and still have some part of my life that's still mine. I need enough left to create something.

Because I've spent a year being battered around by publishing woes, and I'm far too young and unpublished to become a bitter midlister just yet.

Gods and Monsters and Valkyries Oh My!

I picked up NorseCode based primarily on the strength of the back cover copy and first chapter, which is usually a good sign (Not always. See The Electric Church for first chapter readings that went wrong). Turns out this is the sort of book that makes me second guess my aversion for books clothed in urban fantasy covers (cause c’mon, you know this is how God’s War is going to look).

I’ve known Greg via shared friends/colleagues for some time, but it’s actually rare that I enjoy a book written by somebody I know. It’s just statistics: of all the books being written by all the folks in the SF/F community, I’m only going to like a certain fraction. The folks I know in the SF/F community represent a fraction of that fraction.

So anyways, this is an end-of-the-world-comes-to-California novel, made better by flawed gods and rogue Valkyries with swords. Overall, it’s good eats: totally epic battles and a whirlwind tour of Hel. There are just enough POV shifts, interesting characters, and great settings. It’s a good beach book.

And, of course, it helps that the female characters don’t suck. Who doesn’t want to read about a Valkyrie who’s good with a sword, really?

A couple of personal annoyances: our heroine and her sister had very similar voices. Totally different characters with very different views on life, but when I was in one head as opposed to the other, I couldn’t really tell much difference. They acted/reacted in very similar ways, and had similar thought processes. I actually wondered, for awhile, if they were twins and this was supposed to show how alike they were. In fact, they’re at least a couple of years apart, which is hard to tell based on voice and their interactions.

And, you know, the pan-to-the-lamp “romance” between the Valkyrie and one of the gods was, eh, so-so, and I was reeeeeally glad it was just a “pan to the lamp” romance. I liked that she was the active initiator of the relationship (gods rape human women so much in myth that seeing a human woman initiate was a nice change), but it felt a little strained. I had no idea what they saw in each other, except that they were a man and a woman at the end of the world. Maybe that’s enough.

In any case, this was a fun read. I was pleased to see eight copies on the shelf at the big bookstore in Newport, KY that J. and I visited on our way to see a far less entertaining bit of media...

Good Reads

J. was out and about today, so I asked him to pick up a copy of Norse Code on the way home:



I'm already clipping through this one pretty quickly. I get the sense that it'll be inevitably (and favorably) compared to Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

Don't let the cover fool you. It's real urban fantasy, not vampire porn at all! Huzzah!!

Jane Austin & Zombies Has Arrived

I bought a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for J., secretly knowing that I could steal it from him when he wasn't looking. Then Steph called dibs on it when we all went out to dinner, and now I'm 3rd in line. Still, I've been sneaking peeks, and I can say this much:

Reader, it's awesome.

These are the stories - and heroines! - I wanted to read about 20 years ago.

Why I Wrote God's War

I'm on page 92 of The Electric Church. I picked this one up because it's about a Gunner, an assassin, who gets hired by the government, puts together a team, and goes after a religious organization. This should sound a tad familiar to those who've been following God's War. The main character is snarky and poor and uneducated but good at what he does. Huzzah! Good times.

So now, as said, I'm on page 92 and our wise-cracking white male hero just put together his team for the job.

And, you'll never guess it!!

His team?

Our wise-cracking white male hero's team?

Wait for it....

It's full of wise-cracking white male heroes!!

No, I'm serious. I'm on page 92 and the only woman in here with a first and last name paired with any kind of power or authority (or, you know, action) is the one he "accidently" killed at the beginning of the book.

I think, at one point, there were some people described as yellow. And some people from Ireland. I think there was a (male) Hispanic sounding character named at one point.

This is the sum total of cultural diversity in NYC 2050!

Oh man.

See, this is why I HAD to write books.

At some point they have to have a token woman character as the love interest, right? RIGHT?? And maybe she'll be Hispanic or something, right? RIGHT???

Oh well.

Another Wicked-Cool Cover

Here's to hoping that the God's War cover will be this awesome:

My Kind of Jane Austen

I never really got the whole Jane Austen thing. They were amusing books, sure, and well written, but I could take or leave them.

I admit that I'd heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies several weeks ago. I thought it was a stupid joke. Then I thought it sounded silly. I mean, come on, what is that, a mashup of Jane Austen and Zombies? What the hell does that mean?

Today I found a sample of what it means, and I have to say it:

This is my kind of Jane Austen.

Urban Fantasy Vs. Brutal Women

Though often annoyed, I've been trying to resolve myself to getting a sex kitten urban fantasy cover for God's War (complete with moon, over the shoulder glance, and back tattoo). I wasn't sure how to sell "Brutal ass kicking woman" on the cover who isn't all sex-kittened up. They all want to draw a sex kitten.

Then, this morning, I saw this:



And I went, "Oh hells yes!"

I like what this cover does. It's gritty and dark and the main character isn't looking off to the side or over her shoulder in that stupidly flirty, useless way you see on the urban fantasy covers. You're not being invited to oogle her. She's not being presented as an object. She's staring straight at you, just the way somebody who can fuck some shit up would. Add in the blood with that full on stance and oh yeah... this isn't a half bad portrayal of a brutal woman.

Granted, I'd prefer my heroine a little more physically imposing, and less pretty (she's got the face and body of a runway model, not a warrior).

This is how I prefer my book heroines. I don't want her in skin tight clothes (they did go with leather here - you can't win em all), I don't want her to flirt with me. I have no interest in seeing her half-clothed and "vulnerable" to "make up" for her supposed toughness. I'm sorry, but showing a half-clothed woman on your cover doesn't convince me you've got a strong, complex heroine. I want her to be SCARY. I want to believe she's going to fuck shit up. Those are the heroines I'm interested in (and interested in writing).

If I see one more vampire fucking novel cover, I might die. I really have no interest in reading another novel about the protagonist's deep personal angst about whether she should go to bed with the vampire, the werewolf, or both.

I want higher stakes, more complex characters, and heroines that don't all read the same. And I want that reflected on book covers. Because let me tell you, there's a half ton of books out there on the SF/F shelves I'm just not picking up... based entirely on the cover. So sad.

For discussions about what led them to finally pick this cover (and oh yeah is this the best of the bunch), go here.

From the Trenches: $6!

From the Trenches, an anthology of SF war stories that includes my short story, "Wonder Maul Doll," is now on sale for $6 from Carnifex Press.

These are the last of the copies (the publisher is going out of business), so if you want one, snag it now.

Bloodsong

There's this scene in the book where the kid goes to kill the mutant "dragon" (who turns out to be less and more of a monster than he suspects), and he ends up tearing and clawing his way into the guts of this creature that won't die, clawing and swimming up through its guts and tearing out its hearts while the creature tears into its own body even as the flesh tries to knit back together, trying to claw the kid out of its own flesh.

And at the end of this scene, I found myself a little stunned at breathless and was like, "Wow."

I still think Bloodtide will turn out to be the better book, but man, I love these books. I need to read more Burgess.

Took a long time for him to come onto my radar, mainly because he's marketed as a "young adult" writer.

Ummmm?

Whatever sells the books, I guess.

Highly recommended if you love some post-apocalyptic shenanigans. Mutants and nuclear fallout and fantastical fantasy tropes with SFish rationalizations and kingdoms and family feuds and in-your-face prose oh my!

Celebrating Banned Books

I think this is an uber-kewl and terribly creative idea.



(thanks, Tyim!)

Bookery: It's a Small World

Was browsing the bookstore with my date last night and saw a copy of David Schwartz's Superpowers. I had been picking up and talking about books and authors for sometime as we browsed the shelves, but when I picked this one up, the date said, "I think I've heard of this."

He works at a comic book store, so this didn't surprise me.

I babbled about Dave Schwartz for a bit and my date said, "You know what, I think I heard him on NPR. He seemed like a really nice guy."

Man, bookery gets around. "Actually, yeah, you probably did," I said. "He had a spot on there, I remember. He's a total sweetheart of a guy. It's about kids in Madison with superpowers. I think you'll get a kick out of it."

My date bought the book. Note that it generally takes 3-4 brain taps about a book before you buy it, which was why it was interesting to watch the power of media and personal recommendations play out right there. He'd heard of the book on NPR and also listed somewhere online, and then I pimped it. Third time's the charm.

This made me terribly happy, because there are far too many people I know who write books that aren't up my alley, and then I never read them. And then I feel like a Bad Writer.

But hey, I've learned that just because it may not be my kind of book doesn't mean I can't pimp it. And, knowing my date, I think he'll really dig this book, the little comic-book nerd, Terry Pratchett-reading, Dresdan loving little goof that he is.

Sweet beans.