Tag: Neil Gaiman

Reading 2016: March

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The start of April was so busy, I forgot to ever post this.

  1. Hawkeye vol. 2 by Matt Fraction and David Aja – The conclusion to their run on the title. The deaf issue was really amazing, but it had been too long since I’d read the previous volume to remember some of the identities in Kate’s branch of the story, and I just muddled forward rather than going back to review. Not having ever been a Marvel reader or knowing there was precedent, I was legit surprised when Clint Barton was deafened.
  2. Miracleman: The Golden Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham – My first time reading Gaiman’s contribution to the title. He followed up the mythic grandeur of Moore’s conclusion in probably the only way that would work: by telling a series of small, human stories in a still-fresh utopia. It lets the story take a breath, builds room for new kinds of narrative consequence to form, which we perhaps see only the very beginning of in this volume. I look forward to seeing the arc completed.
  3. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne – The Kickstarted best-of book for A Softer World, which I will miss. Every page made me want to claim the words as my own and pretend to be cleverer than I really am.
  4. Hugo and Nebula Award Winners from Asimov’s Science Fiction edited by Sheila Williams – I picked this out of my parents’ library to read after “The New Mother” was nominated for a Nebula. It has a lot of old favorites, like “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler, “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bisson, and “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress. I think my favorite story here that I hadn’t read before was “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” by Lucious Shepard.
  5. The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott – I’d been looking forward to Elliott’s debut novel ever since I read her debut collection The Wilds last year, and it did not disappoint. It’s a story of artificial intelligence enhancement, in conversation with Flowers for Algernon and Camp Concentration, but with a southern gothic humor and occasional satirical edge that I found delightful. I nominated it for a Hugo award which it will certainly not win because it isn’t well-known enough within the genre. But on merits it deserves that kind of attention.

Reading 2016: February

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  1. This Census-Taker by China Miéville – The first of his books that I’ve read since Embassytown, this short novel is a bit of a departure. It’s a study in voice and character that resists plot resolution in favor of mounting tonal stresses. Somewhat similar to Jeff VanderMeer’s Adaptation in that regard. And like that book, one I found pleasant enough while reading, but didn’t overly impress. I liked seeing a stylistic departure, though, even if it wasn’t my favorite thing of his I’ve read.
  2. Beasts & Children by Amy Parker – Amy is a friend from grad school, and her debut is a collection of linked short stories that look at caretaking as understood by children from their parents, parents toward their children, and humans toward animals. Each of these stories is strong on it’s own, but there’s a delightful momentum as you watch the main characters grow into adults, meet each other, face old problems from new angles with the weight of personal history behind them. The book gets better and better as it goes along.
  3. Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte – Another debut from a grad school friend. Tony’s novel has been getting deservedly glowing reviews all over the place, for its hyperliterate prose, its blistering satirical edge, and its photorealistic capturing of a familiar millennial mood. I read this straight through in less than a day, and then went back and re-read chapters that had lodged especially deeply.
  4. Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman, J. H. Williams III, Dave Stewart – Probably my favorite thing I’ve read by Neil Gaiman since The Graveyard Book, with typically astonishing art from J. H. Williams III. Made me want to go back and reread all of Sandman.
  5. Odd John by Olaf Stapeldon – I’m continually impressed with the breadth of Stapledon’s imagination, and how many of his ideas have since been reinvented and made cliche in ways he could never have anticipated. Odd John is the story of the birth, rearing, and death of a superhuman, perhaps an early member of one of the species of humanity described in Last and First Men. I found this book completely enjoyable right up until chapter 16, where there’s a huge knot of anthropological racism: a superhuman from Africa is characterized in ways that read to the modern eye as buffoonish stereotypes. The volume on such caricatures is turned down thereafter, but never quite goes to zero. It’s a shame, because the book is otherwise wonderful.

Recent Writing by Friends of Mine

Nonfiction:

Fiction:

  • “How to Get Back to the Forest” by Sofia Samatar – A visceral SF short story about the industrialization of education and those people who sometimes flash through your life with a bravery you’ll never match.
  • “History” by Thomas Gebremedhin – Thomas was one of a very few of my Iowa contemporaries with whom I never managed to share a workshop. So it was a delight to finally encounter his fiction in this lonely, lyrical little story.
  • “Stethoscope” by Ben Mauk – Ben I had workshop with many times, and this is one of the most memorable stories I’ve read in draft form. Seriously, it has stuck in my head for three years now. This is a long, free excerpt, with the full text available to subscribers to The Sun.

The 2009 Hugo Best Novel Shortlist

It’s an incredibly strong year for the best novel Hugo.  The nominees are Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children. I’ve now read four of these five, and though I don’t know if I will be buying an Anticipation membership and actually voting, I think I know what this part of my ballot would look like.

A caveat: I haven’t read Zoe’s Tale.  I’ve read Old Man’s War, the first book set in the series.  Zoe’s Tale is supposed to be able to stand on it’s own, but I understand that it covers the same period of time as the previous book set in this universe, The Last Colony, which makes reluctant to jump straight to it.  I enjoyed Old Man’s War well enough that I will probably read the rest of the series, but I found it to be solidly in the light entertainment, read-it-in-a-day category.  Combine that with my current attempt to read books I already have rather than buying more new books, and I might not get to it before the convention.  While I love Scalzi’s blogging, the fiction of his I’ve read makes me suspect that his contribution would be at the bottom of my ballot in this absurdly strong year.  But I could be wrong.  If I manage to get to Zoe’s Tale any time soon, I’ll update this.

The ones I’ve read, in ascending order of how I would vote:

4) Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.  Stross’s work has so far been hit-and-miss for me, but when it misses it’s a near miss and the hits are incredibly solid.  I found Accelerando and Glasshouse absorbing, but I put down Singularity Sky after about 100 pages, and I’m honestly unlikely to ever return to it.  (Can anyone tell me if Iron Sunrise stands alone?)  Halting State also failed to grab me, though I think I will give it another chance at some point.  The books that worked for me are hard, big idea SF carried out with astonishing verisimilitude, and Saturn’s Children follows in this mode.  In addition, it continues Stross’s trend of incorporating alternative sexuality and kink–especially BDSM–in a way that is neither judgmental nor sensationalistic.  So I loved Saturn’s Children, and the only thing that keeps me from putting it higher on this list is that there were several plot reveals crucial to the climax, and I saw all of them coming well in advance of where I thought I was supposed to.  I found it a brilliant but unfortunately predictable book, in a way that neither Accelerando nor Glasshouse were.  Almost any other year this would probably be higher.

3) Anathem by Neal Stephenson.  This was the hardest one for me to settle on a place for.  On the one hand there are few books that I’ve spent more time thinking about after I closed the cover.  On the other hand, there is no way for me to think of this book where it doesn’t seem to have a flaw right at its heart.  A big problem for me is that, for all of the interesting philosophy, Stephenson just gets the physics wrong.  He conflates multiversity and many-world QM in a way that, the more you follow through the implications, undermines nearly every scientific conceit in the story.  (Briefly: he’s internally inconsistent in his handling of the interactions between atoms from different universes.  It’s a big problem.)  My conception of Anathem is as a book that essentially fails to hit it’s target–but at the same time, the target itself is so grand that even coming close makes for an impressive work.  And I continue to just lap up Stephenson’s prose; I tore through this 1000 page novel in a matter of days.

2) The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman.  A gem, and my favorite of his works since American Gods.  If Anathem seemed to somehow miss its target, then The Graveyard Book is a milimeter-precision bullseye.  It is beautiful and sad and funny, and it’s lessons about bravery and self-sufficiency and how to make mistakes and respond to having made them are timeless.  And it is this timeless quality–which made it a supremely worthy winner of the Newberry award–that has me placing it second on the Hugo ballot rather than first.

1) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.  My top two books this year are both YA, both engrossing, and both made me want to find the nearest precocious young person and put it immediately into their hands.  I think, and this is not hyperbole, that these are two books that have the potential to change people’s lives.  The Graveyard Book is perhaps the slightly more polished of the two.  But while the lessons of The Graveyard Book are timeless, Little Brother sets out to educate us about our own immediate, onrushing future.  That’s a task to which science fiction is uniquely suited, and the Hugo is science fiction award.  All other things being largely equal, it is this quality of Little Brother being more essentially SFnal that makes me think it the worthiest winner of the Hugo this year.

Clarion Teachers Everywhere

Last night Neil Gaiman was on The Colbert Report discussing The Graveyard Book:


The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

And tonight on the BBC World Service, Geoff Ryman was brought on to discuss the propriety of the United Nations holding a panel discussion about Battlestar Galactica.  I haven’t been able to find a link to that segment, but my favorite part was the host asking, essentially, “might it not be considered irresponsible for the UN to look to a work of fiction for insight into real world events?” and Geoff answering, “Well, that depends on if you think of fiction as a lie or you think of fiction as a way of telling the truth.”