Mistborn: Not Quite Awful

Books, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

Cover Art

So how many aspects of good writing can you hack out of a Big Fat Fantasy and still have something I’m willing to read through—or at least skim through—to the end? Thanks to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, I now know the answer: almost all of them.

By any sane standard Mistborn is ninety percent pabulum. The prose is the written equivalent of an oatmeal-on-wonder-bread sandwich. The dialog is subtly unlike anything any human would actually say, but that’s understandable; the characters aren’t people so much as mannequins pushed around a chessboard by an army of tiny robots. The little narrative details that, in a good novel, give rise to its most memorable and vivid images are too ordinary to recall. There is humor—for a trilogy that builds to a total apocalypse, Mistborn is charmingly unwilling to sink into the kind of unrelieved bleakness that battered me into giving up on George R. R. Martin after four bloated books—but I only know it’s humor because, like a long-lost Wonder Twin, it takes the form of humor. None of it is funny.

Then there’s the underlying worldview, with which I have Issues. Continue reading Mistborn: Not Quite Awful →

The Bryant Collection

Games,

Cover Art

I haven’t reviewed any interactive fiction here in a while, partly because it’s hard to make myself write much of anything, but also because I go through phases where I’m interested in it and phases when I’m not. In recent years the “interested” phases have coincided with the yearly IF competition but recently I played Gregory Weir’s The Bryant Collection.

Gregory Weir released The Bryant Collection on April Fool’s Day, 2009 and regretted it in the morning. A lot of people assumed the game was a joke. (It was a while before I got around to playing it myself. April Fool’s jokes spring from unfunny people concocting a forced semblance of comedy out of a misplaced sense of obligation. I’ve never seen an April Fool’s joke that made me laugh, or feel anything but tired.)

Still, April 1st wasn’t a totally inappropriate release date. The Bryant Collection is the IF equivalent of Stanislaw Lem’s reviews of nonexistent novels or Steve Aylett’s biography of an imaginary SF writer. The conceit is that, at a garage sale, Weir came across the personal effects of Laura Bryant, a distant cousin about whom no one knew much except that she’d spent her career as a middle school English teacher. In her spare time Bryant wrote “story worlds,” pages of notes resembling a role playing game scenario: one person described the situation in the story world, the second described an action, and the first person consulted the notes for a response.

And, hey, darned if the syntax Bryant used for her story worlds wasn’t suspiciously similar to the Inform 7 interactive fiction language! So we have five games in one, supposedly adapted from Bryant’s story worlds: two environments (“Going Home Again” and “The End of the World”), two conversations (“Morning in the Garden” and “Undelivered Love Letter”), and a puzzle (“The Tower of Hanoi,” which is not really a Tower of Hanoi).

Continue reading The Bryant Collection →

Snark

Books,

Illustration from The Hunting of the Snark

For such a short book, David Denby’s Snark is awfully unfocused. Even the normally useless Amazon customer reviews noticed; given the number of Amazon customers willing to hand five star reviews to any book that didn’t make them physically ill, this book has a peculiarly sparse constellation. (Mind you, some reviews seem to be from the right-wingers who slap one-star reviews on any book whose author isn’t politically correct enough for them. “Why won’t Barack Obama apologize for this horrible book Denby has written?” writes one reviewer, who I hope is kidding.)

Denby can’t keep straight what he’s writing about. “Snark,” it is true, has no single definition. This is not a problem for writers who take care to define their terms. Denby could have written a book titled Woozle-Wozzle: Threat or Menace? and as long as he’d told us what a Woozle-Wozzle was, he’d be okay.

But Denby doesn’t know, and maybe doesn’t care about, the definition of snark. Continue reading Snark →

Comics for Health Care!

Comics, News and Politics, , ,

I’ve linked to these in blog comments elsewhere, but haven’t yet done so on my own blog.

First, Kevin Huizenga discovered Superman plugging universal health care in a 1952 issue of The Adventures of Bob Hope. (Isn’t it amazing that there was once a comic called The Adventures of Bob Hope? Today, Bob Hope would be a gritty, morally questionable comedian whose kid sidekick died violently at the hands of Dorothy Lamour, and he’d get killed off by an evil Bob Hope from an alternate universe and be replaced by Bing Crosby and then come back to life as a zombie.)

Second, here’s a pro-health-care Steve Canyon strip from… I can’t quite read the copyright… it looks like 1949. Steve Canyon was cold war propaganda and Milton Caniff wasn’t exactly a hippie. So it’s interesting that, in extolling the virtues of the Free World, Caniff is proudest of exactly the things modern conservatives decry as “socialism.”

British Summertime (and Paul Cornell’s Books in General)

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

The cover of British Summertime.

British Summertime, Paul Cornell’s second entirely original novel, was published in 2002. Since then he’s published short stories but, aside from a novelization of a BBC webcast, no more novels. Lately he’s been writing for television and for Marvel comics. I can’t help feeling he’s come down in the world.

I’d like another book from Cornell. You will not believe that after reading this review. I ask that you take it on faith. Paul Cornell, I’ve come to realize, is one of those writers whose books I enjoy for reasons I cannot fully explain. Ask me why his books are worth my while and I’ll spend half the time on apologetic “okay, admittedlies,” “despites,” and “even thoughs.” I liked British Summertime, mostly, but all I can think to write about are my reservations, which have to do with Cornell’s obsessive sentimentality. His books drip with sentiment. Like Charles Dickens dipped in treacle. It’s both charming and irritating, in at least three ways. (Although as I’ve worked on this review I’ve come to think that “sentiment” isn’t the right word for the latter two. Maybe “unwarranted optimism.”)

Cornell’s books bask in nostalgia for a stereotype of early twentieth-century England (which seems to be the home of many Cornell characters’ speech patterns). It’s gotten worse over the years. In 1995 his Doctor Who novel Human Nature celebrated the death of Victorian values and the beginning of modernity; a dozen years later in Cornell’s television adaptation the hero learned to Do His Duty and die for his country. British Summertime, written in between, features Commander Leyton, an alternate-universe space pilot who talks like a stereotypical World War 2 RAF pilot. (Apparently this is a takoff on Dan Dare.) Leyton’s navigator is the disembodied head of a campy flapper. It’s like they walked out of the Powell and Pressburger production of Bring Me the Head of Zelda Fitzgerald.

What’s interesting is that, just while I’m reading, I’m willing to suspend disbelief in this sceptered-isle, stiff-upper-lip stuff. Continue reading British Summertime (and Paul Cornell’s Books in General) →

Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio

Books, Weirdness, , , , ,

The cover of Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio.

Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio is a great, odd book. It doesn’t quite fit any contemporary category. Some of these stories are folktales or fairy tales; some are the kind of “I swear, this really happened!” supernatural yarns you find in books of “true hauntings;” some are news of the weird. Pu Songling never drew these distinctions; to him, they were all Strange Tales. Penguin’s volume of excerpts from his apparently massive collection of stories mixes them as randomly as he did.

The fairy tales are the most developed as stories but the least interesting. Most involve fox sprits and attractive ghosts, and once you’ve read a few they all seem pretty much the same. Usually a minor scholar or bureaucrat—actually, these were almost the same profession—meets a beautiful ghost (or fox spirit) and has sex with her. Then he meets a beautiful fox spirit (or ghost) and has sex with her, too. In the end the scholar and the fox spirit and the ghost get together in a sort of group marriage. Pu Songling was a minor scholar himself and I think he needed to get out more.

The other stories, though, are weird—and, yes, they’ve been translated from a foreign culture and there are references and allusions I’m not getting, but allowing for that these are still damn strange. In one tale, the ghost of an elderly woman is seen inexplicably hopping around a courtyard, water spraying from her mouth. In another story a man sneezes and small animal falls out of his nose; it runs up his leg and fuses to his belly, and the story ends there, inconclusive and gnomic. To find these uncanny, surreal moments, it’s more than worth skimming through pages of fox spirits helping bureaucrats salve their mid-life crises.

Knights of the Cornerstone

Books, Speculative Fiction, ,

Every so often I think I ought to start writing about the books I read, just to keep my brain in shape. I never seem to keep up with this. I’m going to try it again, but given how long it took me to finish this rather badly written review maybe I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

The Knights of the Cornerstone is about learning to engage with the world. Cal, James Blaylock’s hero, is a thirtysomething guy who lives alone, collects books, draws cartoons, and spends his time standing aside and watching life. As a thirtysomething cartoonist who lives alone, accumulates books—it doesn’t rise to the level of “collecting,” I fear—and doesn’t get out much, I may or may not be this book’s ideal reader. I was distracted by the subconcious expectation that, at any moment, the characters would turn to the reader and ask “Are you getting all this?”

Beyond that, for anyone who’s read Blaylock before this book is not particularly striking. It’s not bad. It’s like… have you seen Spellbound? The Alfred Hitchcock movie? Spellbound is worth seeing. More than once, even. It’s not a great movie; Hitchcock was not pushing himself. It says something that the best part of Spellbound was the work of Salvador Dali. But it is a Hitchcock movie, and it does the things Hitchcock movies do.

Knights of the Cornerstone is a James Blaylock novel, and it does the things James Blaylock novels do. Continue reading Knights of the Cornerstone →

Why the Comics Take So Long

Also at Super Doomed Planet, Art, Comics

I’ve got a webcomic. Lately I’ve been averaging one comics page a week, if that. That’s because creating each page is like dragging myself uphill.

Longer stories–like the one I’ve got going now–start with a pile of scribbled notes from three or four different sketchbooks, which may or may not originally have had anything to do with each other. Eventually I seek them out–or at least the ones I remember–and piece them together chronologically.

This is why I usually have no idea where a story is going until I’m halfway through. (Further details, and illustrations, past the link.) Continue reading Why the Comics Take So Long →

The Secret History

Books, History, Weirdness, , , ,

Emperor Justinian

Procopius was a respected historian back in his day. Upright. Sober. The go-to guy if you wanted to know what was up with Emperor Justinian.

So everybody was kind of surprised when, a few centuries later, somebody dug up The Secret History. Procopius hated Justinian. Hated him. Hated hated hated hated hated him. Not as much as he hated Empress Theodora, but still a lot. It wasn’t that Justinian was stupid. It wasn’t that he was corrupt. He managed to be stupid and successfully corrupt at the same time: “never of his own accord speaking the truth to those with whom he conversed, but having a deceitful and crafty intent behind every word and action, and at the same time exposing himself, an easy prey, to those who wished to deceive him.”

The Secret History was where Procopius vented the bile he couldn’t pack into his official histories without getting executed. He starts out… what do they call it these days? “Shrill?” As the pages go by he gets shriller and shriller until he reads like a steam whistle. Look at the chapter titles from the Penguin edition—I think they were added by the translator, but they give you the flavor. They start with “Belisarius and Antonina,” and progress to “Justinian’s Misgovernment,” and then “The Destruction Wrought by a Demon-Emperor,” and by “Everyone and Everything Sacrificed to the Emperor’s Greed” Procopius’s face is bright red and he’s muttering to himself and steam is jetting out of his ears and you’re sort of afraid he’ll pull out a couple of pistols and shoot up the room like Yosemite Sam. (Then you remember he’s been dead for over fourteen centuries. We’re safe!)

Continue reading The Secret History →