September
30,
2008
So I was both excited and nervous about Neal Stephenson’s Anathem
, and both because of The Baroque Cycle, which was incredibly brilliant and superb. My hope was that he could write another novel at that level, and my fear was that he’d write a disappointingly minor book, like Vinge’s Rainbows End. To give the conclusion away up front, he didn’t quite manage to match the Baroque Cycle, but there’s no possible way to describe Anathem as disappointing or minor. This is a big book in every sense of the word.
It’s also rather uncharacteristically solemn for a Stephenson novel. Snow Crash was just pure energy, Cryptonomicon was extended smartassery, and even The Baroque Cycle had a sort of manic character to it. But Anathem is slow and contemplative, evoking a sense of deep time and slow tides of history. The most thoroughly successful part of the book is the time spent in the concent (a monastery-like setting), where various scholars perform their rituals and debate philosophy. It may be slow, plot-wise, but it’s incredibly immersive and atmospheric, and it sets the sense that when the peace of that concent is disturbed, that means something.
I won’t speak any more than that about the plot (and you shouldn’t read the book jacket, which is no more spoily than any book jacket, but a book like this doesn’t deserve spoilers) other than to say that it gets a bit woo-woo in the middle and I was afraid it was going to go all Diamond Age on me, but Stephenson pulled it out in the end, to continue his recent trend of solid endings.
This isn’t a fast book to read, at nearly 1000 pages of ritual and philosophical dialogue, but... well, there are books worth getting immersed in, and this is one of them. I feel that I haven’t conveyed this adequately above, but I really pretty much loved this book, and even though I can’t recommend it to everyone (if you didn’t finish the Baroque Cycle, you’re alien enough to me on this axis that I have no idea if you’d like this, though I’m inclined to doubt it), to the people I do recommend it, I do so highly.
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September
30,
2008
It doesn’t take much for me to consider a fantasy original. Base your fantasy world off of Eastern cultures? Original! Hell, even use Romans like the Codex Alera books? Reasonably original! Pretty much anything that doesn’t involve generic medieval kings and orders of wizards counts.
And then there’s Stephen Hunt’s The Court of the Air
, which is sort of steampunk mixed with a Fairie story crossed with Lovecraft seasoned with pulp fiction trappings and maybe even a hint of Jack Vance. It’s the sort of story where an Amazonian archaeologist and a crab-girl can come swooping in on a zeppelin to rescue an orphan and a robot from a debonair assassin in a vast underground city, and that’s not the awesomest thing to happen.
The overall feeling you get from the book is that Hunt heard about Brust’s Cool Theory of Literature (”the object is to put as much cool stuff in the book as you can”) and went all-out cramming in as much cool stuff as he possibly could. And fuck if that doesn’t just turn out to work pretty well, because this is an insanely fun book, even though — or perhaps because — it’s got about three ingredients more than would be strictly necessary.
Highly recommended to people who like their fantasy fun but different, and very very cool.
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September
30,
2008
So right before I took an unintentional blog hiatus, I was plowing through Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series with the same speed and voracious hunger that I did with the Dresden books. I had to wait a bit to get the fourth volume of the series, Jim Butcher’s Captain’s Fury
, but once I got my hands on it, I downed it with the same quickness.
This is insanely addictive writing; I don’t know what it is that Butcher is doing, but clearly I’m a sucker for it. Highly recommended, and I’m irritated at the wait for the next volume. (Well, actually I’m not that irritated now, because with a month of perspective, my hands aren’t shaking in withdrawal and I’m able to enjoy the many other excellent books I have available to me. But you can believe I was pretty damn irritated when I finished this.)
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September
30,
2008
So, here we are on Bob Gale and Zeb Wells’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day, vol. 2
, and I feel like I’m almost over being cheesed at how much Marvel fucked up Straczynski’s great run with that stupid stupid retcon. Almost.
But leaving that aside, what we have here is some rather uneven Spider-Man stories. Bob Gale’s story — classic Lizard-inspired villain of the week stuff — is essentially okay, and works fine with this retro-inspired take on Spider-Man. But Zeb Wells’ more mystical storyline is substantially better (though it feels a bit like watered-down Straczynski).
Leaving the content of the stories — and that horrible, horrible retcon — aside, I do have to say that I’m very much in favor of their new publishing strategy with Spider-Man. Instead of having three or four titles featuring the same main character but with totally different storylines and feels (and everyone knowing that Amazing is the “real” one and the others are just fluff), they decided to unify on a single title published more frequently and split up among different writers. So they’ve got a solid format, they’ve got competent writers (and at least one, Slott, who’s more than just competent), and as soon as I can forgive them for that stupid, stupid retcon, I’ll probably be pleased with the result.
Maybe next volume, right?
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September
29,
2008
It ought to be pretty obvious by now that I love superhero comics. But really, it’s more accurate to say that I love Marvel superhero comics. DC superheroes (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the whole Justice League crew) do nothing for me, for the very simple reason that I never read those books as a kid, and I don’t have any connection to them. I mean, I know their stories, but they don’t mean anything to me.
So I get it when people who didn’t read superhero books as kids can’t get into them as adults, because all the touchstones that anchor the stories into a deep shared history are just so much gobbledygook to them, and all the resonances that the writers and the audience of people like me feel are completely missing to them. And you can’t really get into it late, because the over-the-top Stan Lee writing that seems so great to a twelve year old can’t possibly mean the same thing to an adult. And that’s a damn shame.
Because in the Marvel Universe (and presumably in the DC one as well) we have a fictional universe whose real-life history spans forty years (or more, if you count the pre-Silver Age stuff, which you sort of should), written by hundreds of writers and spanning hundreds of thousands of pages; a universe that contains heroes, villains, gods, demons, aliens, monsters, unknowable entities cosmic and mystic, alternate dimensions and timelines, epic stories and light vignettes, tragedy and comedy and history. It is a fabulous sub-creation of almost unmatched depth and richness.
And it’s too late for you to get into it.
Enter Kurt Busiek and Astro City. Astro City is a superhero setting like the Marvel Universe, but created fresh — there are no decades of backstory, no vast bible of existing texts. But, and this is the amazing part, it doesn’t feel like it. If you read the Astro City books, you can be forgiven for thinking that there’s more there than you’re getting, that Busiek is building his stories on top of that same enormous shared infrastructure.
But he’s not. These are books that you can pick up as an adult and read for the first time, and get at least some sense of what it is that comic book fans get out of their comic books. And as a non-incidental point, Busiek’s writing is excellent, his stories full of significance and meaning both human and superhuman, teetering nicely on the boundary between literary and fun. If you read one superhero comic, it should be Astro City. (Or, well, maybe Watchmen, but then you should read Astro City to see Busiek put back together what Moore took apart.)
Anyway, all of that is a long intro to saying that I read Kurt Busiek’s Astro City: The Dark Age, Part 1: Brothers and Other Strangers
, a story about the ‘70s, about fallen heroes, and about two brothers growing up. It’s good stuff, and definitely worth reading for people who’ve been reading. If you’re just starting out, pick up Life in the Big City.
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