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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: HP Lovecraft, much improved in graphic form.

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:50:49 +0000

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a recent graphic novel adaptation of the classic 1928 HP Lovecraft story of the same name, masterfully executed by INJ Culbard.

The dirty secret of the Cthulhu mythos is that their originator, HP Lovecraft, wasn't a very good writer. In addition to his unfortunate tendency to embrace his era's backwards ideas about race and gender, Lovecraft was also fond of elaborate, tedious description that obscured the action and dialog. Which is a pity, because Lovecraft did have one of the great dark imaginations of literature, a positive gift for conjuring up the most unspeakable, unnameable (and often unpronounceable) horrors of the genre, so much so that they persist to this day.

Enter INJ Culbard, whose work adapting various Sherlock Holmes stories into graphic novels for Self-Made Hero press I've reviewed here in the past. Culbard is a fine storyteller and artist, and makes truly excellent use of the medium to deliver a streamlined Lovecraft, one where the protracted, over-elaborated descriptions are converted to dark, angular drawings that manage to capture all the spookiness, without the dreariness.

This is really the best way to enjoy Lovecraft.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Scowler: nightmare-fuel horror novel about a monstrous father

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:02:33 +0000

Daniel Kraus's previous book, Rotters, was an outstandingly gross and delightful young adult novel about a kid who discovers that his dad is a grave-robber, and part of an ancient, mystic fraternity of corpse-stealers. It was full of squishy, spectacularly described scenes of decomposition and decay, taut suspense, and perfect gross-out moments. When I picked up his new book Scowler, I expected the same.

Very quickly, though, I realized that I was reading a book squarely aimed at adults, a book that did all the stuff that Rotters had done, but turned the dial up to 11. Where the horror in Rotters was the delicious, peek-between-your-fingers variety, Scowler is built around scenes of such terrifying grisliness and cruelty that it'll keep you up at night for weeks afterwards -- the kind of nightmare fuel you get in novels like The Wasp Factory, say. But this isn't gross-out horror: the terror comes as much from piano-wire taut tension and spectacular characters as from viscera.

Indeed, it's the two characters at the center of Scowler that give it its punch. The first is Ry, a gangly, awkward farm-boy who lives with his mother and little sister on a dying farm that is on the brink of bankruptcy. The second is Ry's father, Marvin, who has been in prison ever since he nearly murdered Ry, eight years before, when the boy was only 11, in a horrific encounter that has left Ry emotionally and physically scarred. The novel opens with many ticking bombs: an impending meteor shower, the imminent abandonment of the farm, the stretched-to-breaking relationship between Ry and his mother.

Quickly, the novel goes into overdrive. As we learn more about Ry's past, we discover the sort of monster his father was, and before long, there's the threat that the monster might return -- or that Ry might become the monster. Marvin is one of the great monsters of literature, a figure of immense, credible terror and savagery. Ry's own fear that he might become his father is just as credible, and Kraus's masterful raising-of-stakes makes this into the sort of diaster you can't possibly look away from.

Scowler

Update: Random House Audio has produced an audiobook version read by Kirby Heyborne (who also reads the audio edition of Little Brother), and they sell it as a DRM-free CDs direct from their site (a welcome alternative to Audible/iTunes, which requires DRM for audiobooks even when the publisher and writer object).

Warren Ellis reviews Bruce Sterling's "Love is Strange," a paranormal romance

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 21:49:10 +0000

Last month, I blogged the new Bruce Sterling book, Love is Strange, an ebook-only paranormal romance. I haven't had a chance to read it yet (it's in my queue), but Warren Ellis has, and he's written up a review that makes me want to read it RIGHT NOW:

Bruce likes breaking things in his fiction. I often see things his characters love getting ruined somehow. It’s hard to think of anyone else who enjoys the casual harrowing of his characters so much.
It is a romance. Bruce does in fact have fun playing with old romance-fiction tropes. There are points where you can almost hear him cackling as he rattles around a LOVE BOAT port of call and scatters poison romances across the sun-kissed trattorias and streets. There is the paranormal: or, at least, people who think they’re paranormal, and people who call each other paranormal. It’s also, to some extent, about the delusions around these things. The female romantic lead is a loon, the male romantic lead is a Silicon Canal alpha-drone, the supporting cast are grotesques and I’ll be surprised if Mr Sterling is ever again invited to a European futurism conference.

booklist 2013: LOVE IS STRANGE, Bruce Sterling [Warren Ellis]

Love is Strange [Kindle edition]

Law of Superheroes: law-school seen through comic-book heroes' lens

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:27:06 +0000

In the The Law of Superheroes two lawyers called James Daily and Ryan Davidson do a magnificent job overview of the US legal system that manages to be extremely informative and incredibly entertaining, because, as the title implies, they tour the legal system as it would apply to comic-book superheroes.

This is much better than most of those "Physics of Science Fiction"-type books, since the legal hypotheticals that superheroes give rise to, while speculative, are actually just extreme macrocosms for the normal business of the real-world legal system. What better way to illustrate the rules of evidence than to explore whether (and why) things that Professor Xavier read in your mind would be admissible in court and whether Spider Man could testify in his mask? What better way to explore the "functional/informative" split in trademark law than to ask whether Captain America's round shield might be the subject of a trademark, or just the design on its face? What better way to explore corporate law than to explore the sort of legal entity the Fantastic Four and the Justice League of America should look to form in order to minimize liability and streamline their decision-making process?

I've read lots of popular law books, and spent a lot of time hanging around lawyers, and these kinds of hypotheticals are the best way I know of to turn a dry, detail-oriented subject into something fun and engrossing. It helps that the authors are very imaginative and have a seemingly encylopedic knowledge of comics, which leads ask whether Superman's torture at Lex Luthor's hands are assault or cruelty to animals, to investigate the tax implications of immortality, and to find a loophole by which Batman can operate Wayne Enterprise's vehicles in public without compromising his company's ability to file for patents on them (spoiler: he needs to sell them to the military).

This book covers an astonishing amount of ground, but given how long superhero comics have been around, and how many different plotlines they've explored, it's only fitting. From state's rights to torts, from contracts (deals with the devil, anyone?) to what the FAA would have to say about Wonder Woman's Invisible Jet, the authors show real aptitude for legal education and first-rate comics nerdery. It's a delicious combination!

The Law of Superheroes began with the brilliant Law and the Multiverse blog, which I wrote about back in 2010. If you're a fan of the blog, you'll love the book -- and if you love the book, you should really read the blog!

The Law of Superheroes

Nexus: fast technothriller about transhuman drug crackdown

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:21:14 +0000

Ramez Naam's debut novel Nexus is a superbly plotted high-tension technothriller about a War-on-Drugs-style crackdown on brain/computer interfaces. Kaden and his friends are Bay Area grad students who've hacked Nexus 3, a recreational party drug that nano-infests its users brains and makes them weakly telepathic while they dance the night away. What Kaden and his fellow bio-hackers do is build a Turing-complete virtual machine on top of this platform, port a lightweight version of GNU/Linux (or fictional analog) to it, and start running software on their own minds, arranging for strongly telepathic, hive-mind-style linkups.

This turns out to be a completely prohibited activity in the USA, where enforcement of a convention against posthuman and transhuman enhancement has spawned a DHS-on-steroids (heh) that can render its arrestees to internment camps without trial. The enforcement apparatus is nominally aimed at fighting neuroslavery, ghastly human trafficked sexbots, and apocalyptic cults whose followers are infected with god-viruses that make them worship the leaders as messiahs and render them pliant to their will. But the convention doesn't distinguish between hackers who conduct legitimate scientific inquiry and slavers and terrorists. Any advance in this sort of technology represents an existential threat to the human race, and it is not permitted, period.

Nexus tells the story of Kaden's kidnapping and blackmailing by the anti-trafficking enforcement side, who have the power of life and death over his friends and their wider circle of pals/experimental subjects. He is turned into an intelligence asset, charged with militarizing his research, and sent to entrap one of China's leading neuroscientists.

What follows is a beautifully plotted thriller, one that is full of delicious, thoughtful moral ambiguity. The power and cost of technology is thoroughly examined, turned over and peered at from every angle, and even the worst bad guys have at least a colorable claim on our sympathy at one moment or another. Naam is a hacker-turned-futurist who's run a nanotech startup, so the nerdly stuff all has the ring of truth. This is combined with excellent spycraft, kick-ass action scenes, and a chilling look at a future cold war over technology and ideology, making a hell of a read.

Nexus

Free Kindle preview of first three chapters

Dark Lord: an evil overlord trapped in a kid's body

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:44:36 +0000

Jamie Thomson's Dark Lord: The Early Years gets right down to business: an unnamed narrator suffers a million agonies, while calling out for his hellion lieutenants to aid him, and we quickly learn that this is the Dark Lord, feared and tyrannical ruler of a distant kingdom, and that he has been transported to a suburban parking lot in our world. And that he's been put in the body of a child. Before you can ponder this conundrum for too long, he's in the custody of child services, in hospital, and is being treated as a delusional car-accident victim whose fantasy of being a mighty and merciless sorcerer/warrior are the desperate gambit of his amnesiac psyche. The well-meaning child psychologists deliberately mishear his name ("Dark Lord") and dub him "Dirk Lloyd," and place him with a foster family while they sort things out. And we're off to the races.

Dark Lord plays out this scenario with perfect deadpan humor (the book just won the Roald Dahl Humour Award). Dirk's foster brother and schoolmates are at first bemused by his insistence on his true identity and his penchant for tenting his fingers and bellowing mwa-ha-ha, but Dirk is a tactical genius who knows how to humiliate bullies with a few well-chosen words, how to make himself a king among jocks with shrewd assessments of kids' weaknesses; how to break teachers' grip on their classes with cutting remarks. His friends play along with his "Dark Lord" game, let themselves be called his "court in exile," but no one really believes that Dirk is really an interdimensional Darth Vader.

But Dirk is (probably) not delusional. At least, the author is very careful not to collapse the possibility one way or another, until just the right moment. This is wickedly funny, brilliantly told stuff, and you'll never have more fun cheering for evil.

Brits may already be familiar with this book -- it was published more than a year ago in the UK under the slightly different title Dark Lord: The Teenage Years (there's also a UK sequel that came out last March called Dark Lord: A Fiend in Need -- presumably a US publication will follow).

Dark Lord: The Early Years

Fairest: the women of Willingham's Fables stories get their own comic

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:40:30 +0000

For many years, I've marvelled at Bill Willingham's ability to plumb the world of fairy-tales to produce his Fables series, the spin-out novel, and various other media. Few other creators combine such consistent skill with such astounding volume.

But Willingham appears to only just be getting started. He's spun out another side-series from the main Fables trunk. This one is called Fairest, and the first collection, Fairest: Wide Awake is now out from Vertigo. Fairest centers around the lives of many of the great women of fabledom: Briar Rose, Sleeping Beauty's fairy godmothers and the frost queen, merging their stories with the tale of Ali Baba (albeit a different Ali Baba than the one you may have encountered in legends). There's also a hard-boiled bonus story about the perilous and tragic existence of the Lamia.

But the main story is about Briar Rose and Ali Baba. It opens with Ali Baba in the wreckage of a city that has been destroyed in a great battle, happening upon a magic bottle. He uncorks it, and out springs a bottle imp, a kind of distant cousin to a djinn, unable to grant wishes, but able nevertheless to tell you things it has no business knowing. It tells Ali Baba -- the prince of thieves -- that there lies nearby a sleeping princess who awaits a true love's kiss from a prince (even a prince of thieves), and that she has been enchanted to be rich forever, and that she might marry and enrich her prince.

But when Ali Baba steals into a goblin camp and finds the princess sleeping on her bier, he discovers two princesses: one red-haired and human, the other made of ice. He kisses them both, and rouses the frost queen, who has been spelled to sleep and who isn't very happy. He and Briar Rose and the bottle imp have to run for their lives.

What follows is a mix of Scheherezade and Sleeping Beauty, brilliantly told, with excellent dramatic and comedic timing. The writing's only half the story, though the artist team, led by Phil Jimenez, creates a stunning series of generous, daring graphic layouts, using nontraditional panel-orders, two-page spreads, and great panoramas to bring the whole thing to life.

By the time I put the book down I was already anticipating the further adventures of the Fairest fables. Willingham's love for these characters is a abundantly clear and palpable on every page. I can only assume he's got a lot more planned for us.

Fairest: Wide Awake

Coding Freedom: an anthropologist understands hacker culture

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 12:35:04 +0000

Biella Coleman is a geek anthropologist, in both senses of the epithet: an anthropologist who studies geeks, and a geek who is an anthropologist. Though she's best known today for her excellent and insightful work on the mechanism and structure underpinning Anonymous and /b/, Coleman is also an expert on the organization, structure, philosophy and struggles of the free software/open source movements. I met Biella while she was doing fieldwork as an intern at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She's also had deep experience with the Debian project and many other hacker/FLOSS subcultures.

Coleman's has published her dissertation, edited and streamlined, under the title of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, which comes out today from Princeton University Press (Quinn Norton, also well known for her Wired reporting on Anonymous and Occupy, had a hand in the editing). Coding Freedom walks the fine line between popular accessibility and scholarly rigor, and does a very good job of expressing complex ideas without (too much) academic jargon.

Coding Freedom is insightful and fascinating, a superbly observed picture of the motives, divisions and history of the free software and software freedom world. As someone embedded in both those worlds, I found myself surprised by connections I'd never made on my own, but which seemed perfectly right and obvious in hindsight. Coleman's work pulls together a million IRC conversations and mailing list threads and wikiwars and gets to their foundations, the deep discussion evolving through the world of free/open source software.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Future Perfect: an optimistic look at the future of networked politics

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:22:48 +0000

I've read and enjoyed innumerable Steven Johnson books; he's one of those great science writers who can gather together disparate phenomena from the technological world and tease out of them a coherent story about what's happening to the world right under our noses.

His latest, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age, is no exception. Johnson proposes that people who believe in the Internet are not techno-utopians, but rather "peer progressives" -- people who believe that progress is possible when peers work together through non-hierarchical, networked systems.

Johnson lays out the case for peer progressivism as being neither of the right nor the left. It shares some of the right's beliefs in markets -- the idea that the distributed intelligence of lots of people produces better outcomes than centralized decision-making. But it shares some of the left's belief in collective, state-driven spending -- the idea that systems like the Internet don't get produced by advantage-seeking commercial firms (which want to make walled gardens), but rather by governments trying to attain some public-interest goals.

Using this lens of public-spirited, state-sponsored development to create market-driven, individual-centered systems, Johnson lays out his case, showing how the Internet has enabled radical shifts in city management, political campaigning, newsgathering, arts funding, and entrepreneurship. Each of these chapters is well-drawn, and Johnson's careful to label his uncertainties when he has them, rather than trying to shoehorn the facts to fit his thesis.

I was particularly struck by the chapter on news-publishing, in which Johnson suggests that the Internet has demonstrated a capacity to produce fine-grained, intelligent, well-thought-through coverage of various subjects. He suggests that tech news -- the most mature news-subject on the net -- is a template for future subjects. The early days of the Web were particularly hard on tech publications, which struggled to remain relevant with monthly publications in the age of up-to-the-minute Internet coverage, and to continue to pay the bills as online new sources expanded the advertising inventory by orders of magnitude. But over time, a kind of stability emerged, an ecosystem of news coverage that beggars anything of the pre-Internet age. Johnson suggests that the net isn't inherently great at covering tech, but that it was just the first of many news niches the net will cover, and that in time, it will be a model for overall networked newsgathering (he also mentions studies showing that newspaper readers are more likely to inhabit an echo chamber of bias-confirming news than online news junkies).

This is a refreshing, optimistic, level-headed read, and the idea of "peer progressive" is a good one, with the potential to get people thinking outside the Dem/GOP, left/right boxes.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age

Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:34:52 +0000

Fables creator Bill Willingham continues his impossible run of prolific, high-quality, highly varied stories based on the idea that all the fables, myths and stories of the world are secretly true, and that they all live together, hidden among the real, "mundy" world. The hardcover Werewolves tells the back-story of Bibgy Wolf -- his time as a crack Nazi-hunting guerrilla in the dark forests of Germany. This past comes back to haunt him when he discovers a midwestern town populated entirely by werewolves that have been created by a beautiful, ruthless Nazi scientist who isolated a serum from blood that Bigby left behind when he helped foil a Nazi attempt to revive Frankenstein's monster to fight on their side.

Werewolves draws on the likes of EC Comics' Two-Fisted Tales and other hyper-violent war comics, with plenty of gory decapitations, ruthless executions, suicides, immolations, and tough talk. It's just the right kind of story for Bigby, who's one of the best characters from Fables, which has lots of terrific characters to choose from. The book could conceivably stand alone -- it has its own complete storyline -- but it's much richer in the context of the wider Fables universe.

Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland

Tune: Derek Kirk Kim's alien abduction romcom

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:07:13 +0000

Derek Kirk Kim is the insanely productive comics creator whose chronicles the lives of pop-culture obsessed Korean-American slacker Happy Mutant semi-losers in various kinds of peril, from love gone bad to alien abduction.

Today, his online science fictional rom-com comic Tune has been collected in the first of (I hope) many volumes, with Tune: Vanishing Point.

Tune's hero is Andy Go, a lovesick art-school dropout who is obsessed with his former classmate Yumi, finding a job before his terminally disappointed parents kick him out of the house, and keeping his life as orderly and neat as possible. Andy starts the story with an epic hangover in a strange bed, fully clothed and utterly disoriented. It's only once he stumbles into the bathroom for a truly world-beating piss that he realizes the "house" he's in is a cage, with no fourth wall, and there's an audience out there, watching him.

Tune then flashes back to tell the story of how Andy got there, and here Kim does what he does so well: makes us fall in love with a group of genteel, clever, messed up losers who are their own worst enemies. By the time we get back to how Andy ended up in the box, we're totally invested in his story, and wishing that the second volume was in print already.

Tune is Scott Pilgrim played through an alien abduction chord-progression, a delight from start to cliff-hanging finish. If you liked Kim's Good As Lily, Healing Hands and Same Difference, you'll love Tune.

Tune: Vanishing Point

Super Scratch Programming Adventure! an excellent way to get started in Scratch

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:39:28 +0000

Super Scratch Programming Adventure! is No Starch Press's excellent adventure to Scratch, the extremely popular (and absolutely wonderful) kids' programming environment from the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group.

Produced with the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, Super Scratch Programming Adventure! is a graphic novel that walks readers through a series of extremely well-designed game-design projects, each of which introduces a new concept or two to young programmers, providing a gentle learning curve for mastering Scratch's many powerful features.

To get a sense of these projects, have a look at No Starch's project site for the book, which provides downloads of all the sprites, artwork and sound for each one (the book encourages you to use these as starting points, and to modify them or create your own from scratch).

I've been interested in the book since Mark reviewed it in September, and was delighted to get a chance to read it myself. My daughter is too young for this one as yet -- Scratch requires basic literacy in order to really work with it. But reading it, I got very excited about the possibility of working with her on it in a year or two (for example, once she's mastered numbers and letter recognition, I'm sure we could have a lot of fun just taking the existing projects and modifying them with her art and voice).

I fell in love with Logo and BASIC games programming when I was 9, and reading through these projects really brought back the excitement. What's more, it feels like Scratch has all the stuff I wished Logo had built in when started out -- for example, you can create if-then loops for sprites that evaluate whether a sprite is touching a certain color ("If I am touching orange, then..."), something that's used in a maze-navigation game where all the maze-walls are orange.

Scratch feels like the second coming of Hypercard, mixing graphics and drag-and-drop code-blobs, but Scratch is all free/open source software, so there's much less danger of a single vendor killing it off. There's even a nascent project to port Scratch to Android, which would be especially fun.

Super Scratch Programming Adventure!

Sweet Tooth 5: Unnatural Habitats, in which the chimeric apocalypse gets even more engrossing

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:04:21 +0000

I've just finished Unnatural Habitats, the fifth collection of Jeff Lemire's apocalyptic Sweet Tooth comics, and I continue to be absolutely taken by it, on the grimmest of tenterhooks for the next volume.

Sweet Tooth's is set against a mysterious end-of-the-world, a horrific plague that kills most of humanity, and causes pregnant women to give birth to human/animal chimeras. The protagonist, Sweet Tooth, is a deer/boy, raised by his weirdly religious father in the woods, and then thrown into the brutal outside world when his father dies. He is captured by medical experimenters, escapes, and journeys across America with a shifting band of allies who may or may not have Sweet Tooth's best interests at heart.

Volume 5 proves that Lemire knows what he's doing with his storytelling. He whipsaws the pacing with a multi-part flashback to an early twentieth century Arctic expedition that hints at the plague's origin, then jumps back to the present day and a series of interlocking perils that raise the stakes for Sweet Tooth and his companions.

Lemire is a Dickensian master of the cliff hanger. Each monthly episode collected in the Sweet Tooth books leaves you eager for the next one, and each volume leaves you gutted at the thought of having to wait months for a new collection (I could read the singles, but I prefer to get my comics in concentrated, six-at-once doses). The story of Sweet Tooth is a great adventure, great science fiction, and great comics.

Once again, here's the first volume, in case you'd like to grab all five parts at once and consume a deep, deep draught of the story.

Sweet Tooth 5: Unnatural Habitats

Philip Pullman's Grimm's Fairytales

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:00:40 +0000

Philip Pullman -- best know for his Dark Materials series -- has written a new edition of the Brothers Grimm stories, called Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version. It's the 200th anniversary of the Grimm collection, and Pullman's edition includes author's notes and Aarne–Thompson classifications. Pullman has revisited the stories with a light touch, not attempting to modernize them, but rather pulling from lots of different sources and versions to assemble coherent tales that have all of the teeth and blood of the original pieces. Pullman's Grimms are stories stripped to the bone, where every sentence just moves the thing forward, where almost no characters have names, motivations are explicit and stated, and stuff happens fast. It was a fantastic read.

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version

Hilda and the Bird Parade: high adventure kids' comic in the style of Miyazaki & Jansson

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:38:54 +0000

As I mentioned last week, the big news in our household is that Nowbrow press and Luke Pearson have released a new Hilda book, Hilda and the Bird Parade. I couldn't wait to get home and read this with my four-and-a-half year old daughter, who loved the earlier Hilda books when we read them together last January.

Now that I'm back from my tour, I've kid-tested Bird Parade and I'm glad to report that the book is ever bit the triumph that the earlier volume was. The blended styles of Tove Jansson (Moomins) and Hayao Miyazaki (Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro) are still prominent, but in Bird Parade, we're treated to a more urban setting, as Pearson delves into Hilda's backstory -- the circumstances that led to her family's move to the enchanted valley where the first books are set.

In Bird Parade, we follow Hilda on a day's adventures after a move to the big city of Trolberg, situated right in the middle of Troll Valley. It's the weekend, and her mother doesn't want her to go out and play on her own, but she relents when some of the neighbourhood kids come around and invite Hilda out for a playdate. But Hilda quickly finds that the kids' play is too rough and even cruel for her taste, and the final straw is when they throw stones at som roosting birds and knock one out of the tree, injuring it. Hilda goes to tend to the bird, and her erstwhile friends run off.

It turns out that the bird can talk -- and that it has amnesia. The injury has left it flightless and disoriented, not to mention crabby. Hilda resolves to take it home -- and that's when she realizes that without the bad neighbourhood kids, she doesn't know where home is. Lost, she and the bird must roam the streets, trying to find her increasingly distraught mother.

The storyline of Bird Parade is in some ways simpler than Midnight Giant, but the mystery at its core is no less satisfying, and while the dreamlike interludes from the earlier volumes are less present in this one, there's a heightened tension as Hilda lives through one of the great childhood traumas -- lost and alone, far from home -- and discovers the underlying truth of both Trolberg and her relationship with her mother.

As with all the Nobrow titles, this is a beautifully made book, and as with all of Pearson's work, it is a beautifully told story. It's for sale right away in the UK, and the US and Canadian distributors will have it next March (impatient trans-Atlantic types can order it right now from Nobrow -- it really is a perfect Christmas gift for a comic-loving kid in your orbit).

Hilda and the Bird Parade

Rookie: Yearbook One - Sassy's second coming

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:07:27 +0000

Rookie: Yearbook One is the first book-length anthology of Rookie magazine, spun out of Style Rookie, a fashion, culture and lifestyle site started by Tavi Gevinson when she was 11 years old. Rookie is a kind of spiritual descendant of the late, lamented Sassy magazine, which tried to do for teen girls' publishing what Ms did for women's periodicals in the 1970s. Gevinson and her co-conspirators are talented and insightful writers with authentic voices, keen eyes and lots to say. Their layouts are daring and fun, the subject matter varied, and the approach runs a gamut from whimsical to deadly serious.

Rookie: Yearbook One is a beautifully produced book, with lots of fun bonuses bound into it (including a flexidisc!). Ira Glass is a kind of mentor to Gevinson, and if you like his work, you'll recognize his influence on her's. But despite all the heavy hitting adults in her orbit, Gevinson's editorial direction is clearly of her own making. This is the kind of magazine I dream of giving to my own daughter some day. The anthology is the perfect gift for the smart young women in your life.

Angelenos can meet Gevinson and friends at a series of events next week, on November 9-10.

Rookie: Yearbook One

Click below for some samples from the book, courtesy of Drawn and Quarterly and Raincoast books.

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312: a novel that hints at what we might someday have (and lose)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:09:37 +0000

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 is an insanely ambitious novel of life three hundreds years hence, set in a solar system where the Earth continues to limp along, half-drowned, terrified, precarious -- and only one of many inhabited places, parent to a handful of planetary and lunar societies; grandparent to thousands of hollow, hurtling, spinning asteroids that have been turned into terraria supporting endangered species, vital crops, bizarre cults, sex-crazed pleasure-cruisers, and everything in between.

The solar system -- set in the future of the Red Mars trilogy -- is fractured. Not only are there multiple, warring, irreconcilable political factions but humanity itself has become strangely varied. Swan, one of the novel's protagonists, has replaced part of her gut-flora with alien bacteria and budded off avian brain tissue in her own brain. Others are "smalls" -- miniature humans adapted for high-gravity worlds where the square-cube law works in their favor -- or "talls." Some of these people are still of the same recognizable species, others seem to belong to a new human race, perhaps one with little to say to humanity.

2312 is an epic story of political intrigue among the many worlds. To call it epic is to do it a disservice. It's the kind of book that makes you realize that the ambition of Red Mars was just a warm-up; that books like Years of Rice and Salt, which reimagined millennia of history, were just a kind of mental exercise for Kim Stanley Robinson. 2312 paints an absolutely credible and astonishingly beautiful picture of the centuries to come, of the sort of schism and war, the art and love, the industry and ethics that might emerge from humanity going to space without conquering it and without solving all its problems.

Robinson's future is a weird mix of the pastoral and the futuristic. His descriptions of the "natural" and geoengineered environments are worthy of Thoreau, filled with an environmental lyricism that is hard to come by. Some of these descriptions are worked right into the text, while others appear in fractured interstitial chapters of fragmentary dialogue, lists, and miscellania, these a kind of poesie that are just as moving as any of the main action.

2312 is, in one sense, a detective novel. It opens with the suspicious death of Swan's aunt on Mercury, and with Swan's growing realization that her aunt was at the center of a systemwide secret cabal that had devoted itself to rooting out rogue "qubes" -- quantum computers that have attained some kind of sentience -- who may be behind her aunt's death. Swan has a qube implanted in her brain, which makes her role in the cabal even more fraught, but it's the least of he complications. Swan, after all, is something of a basket-case. Semi-immortal, hybridized with other animals as well as AIs, a gifted artist and a furious misanthrope, she must somehow win the confidence of her aunt's friends.

But though the murder and the qube conspiracy animate the story, they're far from all of it. Robinson's sweeping panorama of his future is at once hopeful and miserable, saying "Look what we might have" and "Look what we might lose" at the same moment.

I took this book slowly, all 565 pages of it, savoring it over a month. It's not a fast read. But it's not one you'll forget, either.

2312

The best cheap, all-purpose juicer: Omega 8003

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 14:01:27 +0000

During my treatment for breast cancer this year, nutrition was a big challenge. Hell, getting any food down was a challenge during chemo and radiation. That's where juice comes in. Fresh fruit and vegetable juices are a great way to get concentrated nutrition in an easy-to-ingest form. Green juices, root juices like carrot and beet, fruit juices—just as they each yield different colors, they also yield different flavor profiles and nutritional benefits.

I hunted around online for a single, affordable device that could produce a diverse array of juice.

I bought this: the Omega J8003 Nutrition Center Single-Gear Commercial Masticating Juicer. $229 on Amazon (free shipping if you're a Prime member, as I am).

There are far more expensive juicers, and there are more recent (and pricier) versions of this one—but this is a great entry-level, affordable tool. It suits my daily needs just fine, and I have used it regularly for the past 6 months. My friend Brian Lam at Wirecutter first pointed me to it. Three big strong points: Price, ease-of-use, ease of cleaning up.

Let me show you what I mean, with today's batch of what I jokingly referred to as my go-go juice, with apologies to Honey Boo Boo. I drank it every day during radiation, and here I am, alive. So, I suppose it helped me win.

A word about produce: I try to stick to organic (or at least from local farms that don't use synthetic chemical pesticides). That may or may not be your preference, but it's mine. Hitting farmers markets is great, too. But whatever's fresh and readily available and affordable, so you will be encouraged to juice regularly is best.

For the green juice I'm making today, I started with the large bunch of kale shown in the snapshot at left (thanks, @isalara!).

There are many varieties. My favorite is the one known as lacinato ("lacy") or black kale, sometimes called cavalo nero. It's dark and meaty, with rich flavor. But you can use purple, curly, whatever kale is in season and crisp. This giant bunch as big as my head cost me 2 bucks at my local farmers market.

In the photo below, you can see how I smush in the entire leaves of kale; stem and all. Other than washing them and inspecting them for any bugs or dirt, there's really no prep involved with the leafy greens. If they're so huge they jam in the intake, tear them up a little with your hands.

I add an apple or two for sweetness and to balance the intense kale flavor. The mouth of the juicer is too small for the apples to fit in whole, so I cut them into loose chunky slices just small enough to fit in. No need to remove core or skin.

* Update: A commenter points out that apple seeds contain naturally-occuring traces of cyanide. Sounds like you'd have to juice a WHOLE LOT of seeds to poison someone, but you can core your apples if you want to eliminate that question entirely.

I'm adding celery to this juice. 4-5 stalks. Clean them well, make sure to chop off any parts that are damaged or full of dirt. During cancer treatment, I had to be especially careful about dirt or contamination, because of my compromised immune system. You don't have to be quite so paranoid when you're healthy, but it's always good to clean your produce carefully.

To finish this juice, I'm adding a little squeeze of citrus. Today I'm using lime, but orange and lemon are great, too. I don't consume grapefruit because it messes with my cancer meds (if you're reading this post and you're a cancer patient on chemo, radiation, or hormone antagonists, talk to your doc before consuming grapefruit in any form).

For citrus, I use a little hand squeezer . You could also juice citrus in the juicer, but I prefer squeezing it to avoid the oily rind pulp, or the extra labor involved in cutting away the peel.

I also love how dry the pulp is is when it comes out. You really get the sense that the device is helping you squeeze the most mileage out of your produce. If you compost, add this stuff to your heap. It breaks down quickly and is full of good stuff for your garden.

I love this kale-apple-celery-lime juice so much. It tastes like a mellow, fruity, freshly-mowed lawn. I didn't strain this batch of juice, but if you want less fiber, there's a little wire mesh strainer included with the juicer parts. I like to add ginger or pineapple to this combo, if they're available and I'm in the mood.

Depending on the ratio of ingredients, you could add a smidge of maple syrup or agave to taste. But I rarely do, even when mixing juice for newbies who are grossed out by anything that isn't super-sweet. The apples add plenty of sweetness. Grapes, pineapple or pear would do the same. For a more savory juice, reduce the ratio of sweet stuff.

Cleanup is one of the biggest plusses of this device. As you can see in the photo here, you twist a dial that connects the macerating unit to the motor. Then, the parts pop out one by one. Just rinse them under the faucet, with a little soap and a sponge, and clean out that little metal grate with an included brush (basically, a toothbrush). Maybe a minute of cleanup work. I love how easy that part is. Juicers that require more cleanup time just tend to be used less frequently. And I didn't buy this thing to beautify the inside of my storage cabinet, I bought it to use every day.

Below: A minute and a little bit of warm water later. Look how tidy that is. It makes my OCD nerves tingle with joy. It's so simple and lazy-person-friendly.

One of the complaints I hear a lot about juicing is that the idea sounds good, but it's so expensive to buy produce, why bother. Maybe that's the case with other machines, but I haven't found this to be true with the Omega unit I bought.

The batch I made here cost about $6.50 in produce, takes maybe 10-15 minutes to prepare including setup and cleanup, and yielded 6 cups of juice. Way too much for one person to drink all in one sitting! Add that up, and it is way less expensive than buying a juice at a juice bar. It's so nutritionally dense, it tastes amazing, and it's just fun. You get into a rhythm of particular juices you like, tweaking them to your taste.

My favorite combinations right now are: this green juice; carrot-orange; beet-carrot; Watermelon-cucumber-lime; virgin mojito (mint-lime-grape over crushed ice and more crushed mint); and a blend that's kind of like V-8: spinach, lettuce, tomato, celery, cucumber, onion, Tabasco, Soy sauce, liquid smoke, and lemon. It's so good, seriously. I don't drink alcohol, but if you do, you cannot possibly find a better Bloody Mary mix.

One thing I'd like to do that I haven't yet is look at before and after blood counts (my blood was tested weekly during my primary cancer treatment, and will be every 90 days or so for the next year). I'd want to compare, say, a month with no daily consumption of juice, compared to a month of daily juicing. More or less the same diet, all other factors being more or less equal. I suspect that certain levels in my blood lab report would be higher with daily juice intake—like folate, for instance. I really prefer getting nutrition from food and juice, less so from pills. But I also just really like the way juice tastes.

TIPS and NOTES:

• This is what's known as a masticating (crushing) juicer. It smushes the juice out of your produce, and kinda poops out the pulp at the other end. Over at Wirecutter, in his review of the Omega line, Brian Lam goes into a lot of detail on how this works differently than centrifugal juicers like the Breville. A little side bonus with the masticating designs: quieter. The centrifugal designs tend to be a lot louder.

• Whatever kind of juice you prepare, it's best consumed right after you make it, for flavor and nutrition. I like to make a day's batch, store it in an airtight glass pitcher, and sip or share as needed. Juice like this that does not contain added stabilizers will separate if you let it sit. If it does, stir or shake. Sometimes I like to dump it in the blender and make it all frothy like a pint of green Guinness.

• There are tons of recipes for juices online. Experiment with them, or just improvise. Don't be afraid to fail. When in doubt, my motto with juicing is to limit the number of ingredients, and see how each addition changes the combined flavor.

• This device can also be used to extrude pasta, make soymilk, and other cooking tasks. I haven't used it for any of those, so I can't speak to its usefulness in those area.

• If all you want to juice is oranges, and absolutely nothing else, there are more efficient tools for that. This one handles citrus just fine, but its value is in its versatility with many different kinds of ingredients: it excels at hard fruits and vegetables (beets, carrots, apples) and leafy greens (wheatgrass, kale, and the like), and also does okay with softer fruits.

• Sometimes it's nice to add fresh herbs and spices, like ginger root, turmeric, mint, basil, or cilantro (the latter are great in tomato-based savory blends). This works best if you add other bulkier ingredients after the herb/spice ingredient, so all the flavor makes it through. Ginger followed by apple, for example. Not ginger at the very end.

• An unexpected bonus: I've noticed that when I drink juice, I tend to crave less coffee and simple carb-y/sugary snacks between meals. This is an anecdote I've heard from other people who got into juicing. I didn't start with the intent of cutting down my coffee or carb-snack intake, but it did end up doing that.

• If you don't want to make trips to the grocery store every day for produce, there are ways to extend the life of your fruits and veggies. Kale lasts days longer for me when I rinse it as soon as I get home, then store it with a damp paper towel in a plastic baggie, or in a salad spinner with some water in the bottom.

• When you're buying produce for juicing, remember that you can often buy uglier, cosmetically less-desirable pickings and save money. For instance, I bought the apples you see in these snapshots at a nearby farmer's market. The farmer had one bin with beautiful huge shiny perfect organic apples for $3/lb., and another bin with smaller, mottled-looking "seconds" for $1.75/lb. The ugly ones taste just as awesome.

• John Kohler's discountjuicers.com review site and YouTube channel are a far more extensive resource for comparison shopping than this blog post could ever hope to be.

Happy drinking!

Amazon: Omega J8003 Nutrition Center Single-Gear Commercial Masticating Juicer.

Bong: "Live At Roadburn 2010" music review

Aquarius — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:03:24 +0000

It wasn't so long ago, that UK heavies Bong were just an amusingly-named band that counted an Aquarius Records customer as a member. It took a while, but eventually we got 'em to send us some records (you can imagine, a band named Bong isn't the most businesslike and efficient bunch, nice folks though they are). And their brand of stoned, psychedelic, Eastern-tinged doomdrone improv proved to be right up our alley, and appropriate to their moniker.

Now, a couple years later, we've sold many, many Bong lps, cds, and cd-rs - and one of us here even got to see 'em live, at the amazing Roadburn festival in Holland. And even though they're not the sort of band to move around much on stage, they weren't boring. In fact, they were TERRIFIC. (Above is footage from their show at this year's Roadburn.) And now, Bong's 2010 performance has been released on Roadburn's in-house label as "Bong: Live At Roadburn 2010"

After some enthused hails from the crowd, the first of two loooooong tracks ("Onwards To Perdonaris", 33:24) starts up, or seeps in, eerie and airy and understated, quite lovely really, not at all heavy, but nicely hypnotic...until a few minutes in when one may be rudely startled (depending on how high you have your volume set) by some deep voiced declamations, dunno what the fellow is on about, but that's ok, 'cause it serves to alert you that right about NOW the band is really gonna get LOUD, everything stepping up a big notch, to accommodate a constant drone backing, yeah now it's heavy, but still keeping the hypnotic lovely thing going too, slow rhythmic pulsations punctuated by an exotic zing of the strings (that's the "Shahi Baaja", an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys that one of the Bong-sters plays), once in a while joined again by more near-throat singing... It's rolling, rumbling, atmospheric, Eastern, with something of the quality of a cult ceremony or religious rite, in part due to the those occasional low monkish vocals. At times, "Onwards..." drifts back down into lulling stretches of spacey warbling electronic FX, and hippy-kraut hand drumming, coming across like a sinister Siloah or doomy Amon Duul. Or imagine the Master Musicians Of Bukkake making an ambient album for Miasmah, maybe.

The equally epic second track, "Wizards Of Krull" (previously recorded for the first side of their self-titled lp debut in 2009), continues in this vein, with more powerful percussion, though. It's 24 minutes of ritualistically pounding drums and crashing cymbals, low drone from bass and voice both, gobs of distortion and spooky psychedelic effects, those Shahi Baaja note clusters chiming in with regularity. "Wizards..." gets (slowly) more and more intense as it goes, really ramping up towards the end with rhythmic urgency. Damn this is good!

Bong bring it, all right, quite recommended, definitely for fans of Om, SUNNO))), Grails, Sylvester Anfang... and of course Bong. And bongs! Most if not all Bong releases thus far have been live, and this one is much less of a lo-fi recording than some of those, making for an essential document of Bong's unique trance-inducing potency.

Bong: Live At Roadburn 2010 LP

Pratchett's Dodger: Dickens by way of Discworld

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:09:20 +0000

Terry Pratchett's latest novel, Dodger, isn't a Discworld book, except, well, it kind of is. Nominally, this is an historical novel, a fictionalized account of the fictionalized person who inspired Mr Charlie Dickens to create his much-beloved character The Artful Dodger. But as the story unfolds, the parallels between the early Victorian London of Dickens (and Mayhew) and the Ankh-Morpork of Pratchett's Discworld novels become sharper and clearer, so that by the end, we're reading a story that really could be set in either one of those fantastical places, and what's more, there's a kind of vividness to Dodger that comes, I think, from its proximity to the origin of Pratchett's inspiration, a cask-strength version of what makes Pratchett so addictive and so loved.

Dodger tells the story of a young street-urchin, a "geezer" who is known throughout the tenements of central London as a dashing and fearless character. Dodger is a "tosher," a young man who scrounges in the sewers of London for coins and jewels and little bits and pieces that wash up, and he worships the Lady, a deity descended from the Roman goddess Cloacina, the patron of the sewers the Romans carved out beneath Londinium. He is fearless, noble, but also lightfingered, with a cheeky propensity for making off with anything that isn't nailed down or buttoned firmly in a gentleman's coat-pocket.

Dodger starts one night in the sewers, when Dodger hears the cries of a woman in distress from above. While in Discworld, this distress might be hinted at and painted in vague, impressionistic strokes, here it is as vivid as Dickens: the woman whose rescue Dodger leaps to is being horribly beaten by a gang of thugs, whom Dodger lashes out at, dealing out fast and furious blows until they run off. As he tends to the woman, he meets Charlie Dickens and Henry Mayhew, the first of two historical personages to make an appearance in the pages of Dodger (others include Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli, and Sweeney Todd).

So begins the story of Dodger's coming of age. He and the woman he rescues fall in love, but the men who hunted her are still chasing after her, driven by a great imperial house of Europe whose king would see her dead. Against this backdrop, Dodger must both beat the assassins and thugs on his trail, and also find his true love's way clear of the deadly intrigue, all the while mixing in the alien environs of high society -- and journalistic circles -- whom he is introduced to by Dickens.

Dodger features some of Pratchett's most engaging characters yet -- which is saying something! -- inasmuch as these people are allowed to experience and react to the mercilessly cruel world of Victorian London, which Pratchett is fearless about describing. This isn't a book for the squeamish, but then, neither is Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which Pratchett describes as the genesis for this novel in an author's afterword.

Which is not to say that Dodger lacks the humor that makes Pratchett so beloved. This is a book that is every bit as funny as any Discworld novel, and includes Pratchett's signature trick of hiding the gravity of the world in absurdity, a very serious pill wrapped up in a fluffy, sweet confection.

What's more, Dodger features the most satisfying climax and denouement of any Pratchett novel of my recollection, a thunderous final chord that lingers and stretches. It's a masterwork from a treasure and hero of a writer, and it will delight you.

Dodger

New York Five: beautifully told coming-of-age comic from Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:22:31 +0000

Back in 2007/8, I was totally taken by DC's Minx imprint, which ran little digest-sized, girl-positive graphic novels aimed at young adults, primarily girls. They were smart, not in the least patronizing, and utterly charming. The best of the very good selection (which included such outstanding titles as Cecil Castellucci's PLAIN Janes/Janes in Love; Derek Kirk Kim's Good as Lily; and Andi Watson's Clubbing) was Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's New York Four, which told the story of four young women who meet as NYU freshmen, and whose lives are complicated by love, family, friendship, and school.

New York Four featured a perfect mix of engaging characters (think of Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets Locas); fantastic, expressively inked characters; and a storyline that was a love-struck hymn to New York City -- echoing Brian Woods's masterwork DMZ. It was also incomplete, ending on a cliffhanger that was left hanging when DC folded up the Minx imprint.

For four years, I've been thinking about the New York Four, and wondering how their stories ended. Now I know. Four years later, DC's Vertigo has published The New York Five, the sequel (and conclusion?) to the original Minx title. I've just finished it and it was worth the wait. The characters from the original story return seasoned by their first semester, wiser and more gunshy, but still filled with the wild, reckless energy that made them so engaging in the first volume. They face more hardship, further cement their bonds, and sometimes dissolve them in moving scenes of betrayal, bravery and love.

It was a long wait, but it was worth it. I hope Vertigo publishes the two volumes between a single set of covers -- they'd make a lovely gift for any young person making sense of the world (and any adult who wanted to revisit the maelstrom of frightful first independence).

The New York Five

Pinkwater's Bushman Lives: absurdist misfit story is an insightful treatise on art

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:27:42 +0000

Daniel Pinkwater's Bushman Lives is another of Pinkwater's marvellous novels for young adults (and adults!) in which a misfit narrator embraces his inner weirdo and finds odd joy. Harold Knishke is a young man in late 1950s Chicago who finds himself with a lot of spare time thanks to weird political patronage at his high-school, which results in him serving as a corrupt hall monitor who can excuse himself from school grounds on his own recognizance. One day, he quits flute lessons, sells his flute to his relieved instructor, and uses the money to take up life-drawing classes at a beatnik art school across the street from a mysterious whitewashed house whose paint is constantly being replenished by mysterious, hissing humanoids all dressed in white wrapping.

Woven into this narrative is the story of Geets Hildebrand, Harold's best friend, who runs away to join the Navy. Geets and Harold share an obsession with Bushman, the Lincoln Park Zoo's storied gorilla, a tragic and dignified figure. Geets is discharged from the Navy and discovers a secret society of rural misfits in a state park who tell him about a hidden castle on a hidden island in the middle of a lake.

Harold's life is one odd thing after another. He meets a young woman training to be a wise-woman who hips him to Willem de Kooning and then gets him a mentor who is obsessed with mural-painting and baking potatoes. He is inducted into an artist's workshop in a mysterious transdimensional building. He learns that there is a folk song about him, but can't make out the lyrics.

But most of all, Harold learns about art -- about the techniques of visual art, about the weird phonies that haunt the art world, but most importantly (and movingly) about the drive to make art and the thing that art does for its audiences.

Daniel Pinkwater and his wife Jill are both visual artists, and Bushman Lives is, more than anything, a book about art, and a very good one. I'd read Pinkwater all day long even if his absurdist fairy tales were nothing more than odd little stories, but as Bushman Lives (and his other works) proves, Pinkwater's absurdism is a delivery system for profound and important insight that stay with you for years and decades.

Bushman Lives was serialized online prior to publication, and really rewards your attention.

Bushman Lives

V/H/S review: The buzz was way more exciting (and likable)

Jamie Frevele — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:25:28 +0000

As a big fan of horror, as well as the found-footage subgenre, I was really excited to see V/H/S, a found-footage horror anthology. After it screened at Sundance, it got a lot of buzz -- people were passing out, leaving the theater, men and women gnashing their teeth, etc. So you can imagine my disappointment when I realized I was glad I'd stayed home and paid about half the price of a theater ticket to get it on demand. Despite a few genuinely scary moments, it was hard to get past the fact that I wanted every single character in V/H/S to die a horrible death so I wouldn't have to watch them anymore.

If you have your heart absolutely set on seeing V/H/S, then by all means, see it. But if you're on the fence or having any doubts, let me share what I didn't like, and maybe you'll share my opinion. (If not, that's also cool.)

My problems with V/H/S started within the first ten minutes of the first segment, "Tape 56." For one thing, and maybe I'm just an old pearl-clutching biddy, the twentysomething dudes who are trashing things for the sake of trashing things -- I'm sorry, but they're in their twenties, and this is all they can find to do? -- and using the word "fuck" as a prefix and suffix for every word they say are not going to curry favor with me. Ten minutes in, I want them all to be viciously murdered, just so I don't have to hear the word "fuck" anymore. And I love the word "fuck"! But I don't like to hear it abused like this, thrown around wantonly, its glorious impact and value discarded like spit. The hazards of being unscripted.

I also don't particularly enjoy watching delinquent ne'er-do-wells breaking the law for fun. ("Oh god -- youths!") I had the same problem with Attack the Block -- why should I care about characters who are giving me no reason to like them? In Attack the Block, this issue is resolved. In V/H/S, it's not. In fact, on top of being remorseless brats, the first characters we meet (who are also the glue that binds the movie together between segments) are amateur "reality pornographers." Joe Francis wannabes (BARF), assaulting an unsuspecting woman in a parking garage and forcefully pinning her arms behind her back while exposing her breasts for the camera. And then saying "We should be doing up-skirt shots, you guys." Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!

In the midst of so much character-hate, there is one redeeming instance in the second segment, "Amateur Night," when a drunken male douche chooses not to rape a drunken female douche who has passed out, although he has to be reminded by his fellow douches not to do it. (When traveling in packs, drunken douches often follow the lead of the alpha douche.) Of course, he then takes it upon himself to have sex with the other female in the room, who (spoiler) turns into a succubus and rips him to shreds. So, that was a relief. Watching terrible characters meeting a horrific fate can be fun, for sure, but usually there's someone else around to like. Not in V/H/S.

Then there's the whole "crazy bitches being crazy" thing. While there is definitely a fair share of horrible male characters in V/H/S (i.e., all of them), the way the women are portrayed was problematic for me. At times, it felt like this movie was conceived by a frustrated 15-year-old boy with a camcorder and a pirated copy of Final Draft. If the girls weren't there to be sexual objects, they were the monsters ruining everything for everybody. The one exception was the horribly titled segment, "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger." While Emily was a victim, she was a victim of terrifying weirdness, which is perfectly acceptable in a movie about terrifying weirdness. I'd even give a pass to the end of that segment, when she is beaten by the boyfriend who did the terrifying weirdness to her, in an attempt to cover up said weirdness, because the gender roles could have easily been reversed. But she did have to show her boobs on Skype first.

I will say that V/H/S definitely has very cool, creepy scenes in it. The stories, when discounting the characters, were actually interesting. "The Sick Thing" was good, reminiscent of The X-Files. But my favorite was "10/31/98," about four guys in Halloween costumes in a house of horrors. (One of them was the Unabomber! Oh, 1998!) The found-footage style served this segment really well. What I like about found-footage is that when something scary starts happening, and it's not cinematically shot, it looks less like a special effect and more like a supernatural thing happening in a natural setting. (See: Paranormal Activity.) That's what we got in that segment (and in "Amateur Night"), and I dug that. I was also a fan of the killer in "Tuesday the 17th." Very creepy and effective, and, of course, I was happy to see all those idiots die.

And that is the crux of my V/H/S criticism -- decent horror stories in a fun format, ruined by astoundingly unlikable characters. If you want to see it for yourself, don't let me stop you. In fact, here is a positive review for a counterpoint. However, take advantage of being able to stay home and spend less money to see it on demand. Personally, I've always preferred watching found-footage movies at home, late at night, when there is no "walk to the parking lot, drive home" buffer, and I can really freak myself out. V/H/S didn't accomplish that for me, but it might for you.

Photo credit: V/H/S Official Site

Supergod: Warren Ellis's horrific arms-race endtimes

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:12:59 +0000

Warren Ellis and Garrie Gastonny's Supergod is a magnificently grim and horrifying superhero comic, in which a British government scientist narrates the sequence of events that killed the planet Earth, in whose rubble he sits. Supergod is the story of a secret arms-race, in which the major powers of the world all conspired to produce superhuman, godlike beings who were meant to act as their national saviors. Instead, each of these gods becomes a force of ineffable and unstoppable terror, killing and laying waste in unfathomable acts of horrific violence.

The story is pure Ellis. It's both cynical and charming, and pushes out a vision of end-times that goes further over the weirdness frontier than anyone has any right to go. The supergods here are grotesque monsters who are nevertheless lovely and even sometimes sweet (for example, the three British astronauts who are sent into space to be mutated into a godlike state return as a composite fungal hybrid being called Morrigan Lugas, whose spores cause the scientists around it to worship it like a god while masturbating uncontrollably).

Warren Ellis is a strong tonic, and he burns going down, and it's hard to get a good night's sleep if you consume too much before bed, but the burning is a good one, and even a necessary one.

Supergod

Sailor Twain: don't fall in love with the mermaid of the Hudson valley

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:20:56 +0000

I wrote about Sailor Twain, Mark Siegel's beautiful, haunting serialized graphic novel when it began. Since then, the story of a New York steamship captain who is haunted by his love for a mermaid has run its course, and today it has been published in a single, handsome hardcover volume from FirstSecond.

Sailor Twain tells the story of Captain Twain of the Lorelei, which plies its trade up and down the Hudson valley, while the ship's owner, a dissolute Frenchman, seduces the wives of the gentry in the owner's cabin. Captain Twain's own beloved wife is wasting with some unspecified disease on land, and he works to raise money to send her to specialists. He's a good man, beset with tragedy, and he has forgotten how to write the poetry he once loved.

And then comes the day when he spies a mermaid clinging to the deck of the Lorelei, gravely wounded. He pulls her from the sea and into his cabin, and everything changes for Sailor Twain. The poetry comes back, and at his request, she never sings for him, never puts him under her siren spell. But still, he is hers.

Out spills a mystery, a story about seduction and duty, mythology and gender, dreams lost and dreams forgotten, and the lure of magic and wonder. Siegel's illustrations are charcoal drawings that fearlessly mix highly detailed, realistic depictions with cartoons, impressionistic smears, and caricature, and they are moody and grey and dreamlike, the perfect match for the story.

This is a stupendous work, a beautiful and sad and lovely thing. If you don't believe me, go read it online for free and see for yourself.

Sailor Twain

eBook review: Blue Skies, Atopia Chronicles

Jason Weisberger — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:47:35 +0000

Blue Skies is a great start to Matthew Mather's Atopia Chronicles. In just a few pages he introduces you to believable future and a character I immediately identified with.

Olympia is an advertising exec run out of steam, but she can't admit it. She is past the edge of a nervous breakdown and needs to find some control. She doesn't like to use drugs but agrees to test a new technology, nanobots embed 'smaticles' into her nervous system and give complete control over the reality she perceives -- bots aren't drugs! With the help of her new poly-synthetic sensory interface, or "pssi," Olympia learns one of those "be careful what you wish for" lessons.

Blue Skies, Atopia Chronicles Book 1, by Matthew Mather

or consider the entire collection:

The Complete Atopia Chronicles by Matthew Mather

A Wrinkle in Time, worthy graphic novel adaptation

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:00:17 +0000

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle's justly loved young adult novel about children who must rescue a dimension-hopping physicist who has been trapped by a malignant intelligence bent on bringing conformity to the universe.

Hill and Wang's A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel is Hope Larson's really wonderful and worthy adaptation of the original. Larson is very faithful to the original text, and the graphic form really suits the story, as it allows for direct illustration of some of the more abstract concepts (such as the notion of folding space in higher dimensions to attain faster-than-light transpositions of matter).

But Larson does more than capture the abstract with her graphics. L'Engle's charm and gift was in her ability to marry the abstract with the numinous -- to infuse stories about math and physics with so much heart, heartbreak, bravery, sorrow and joy that they changed everyone who read them. Larson does a brilliant job of capturing this crucial element of L'Engle's style.

I read this book aloud to my four year old daughter over a couple weeks' worth of bedtimes. There were plenty of times when I was sure that the nuances of the story were going over her head (she didn't come out of the experience with any sense of what a tesseract is!) but her interest never, ever wavered. That's because Larson's illustrations do such a fine job of showing the emotional arc of L'Engle's characters that even a small child could not help but be drawn into the drama. In fact, reading this book turned out to be both a treat and a chore, because every night's session ended with her demanding that I read more. And when we finished the book and closed the cover, she took it from my hands, turned it over, handed it back to me and said, "Again."

Hard to argue with that.

Hill and Wang were kind enough to give us exclusive access to chapter two, which you'll find below, past the jump!

A Wrinkle in Time

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:33:27 +0000

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There is the long-awaited sequel to Cat Valente's debut novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and it delivers on all the promise of that book, which is one of the strongest fantasy novels for young readers I've had the pleasure of getting lost in.

September, the young heroine of Circumnavigated, is back in the mundane world when she chases a green wind across the Nebraska prairie and returns to her beloved Fairyland. But it's not Fairyland as she remembered it: her shadow -- lost on a previous adventure -- has become the Hollow Queen of the Underworld, and is using her minion, the terrible Alleyman, to steal all of Fairyland's shadows and with them, Fairyland's magic. Equipped with a magic ration-book and a few scant adventurer's supplies, September runs to the Underworld for a series of Adventures, in an attempt to foil her shadow's evil and restore the natural order to Fairyland above.

But this is a Valente novel, so nothing is at seems. There's as much Phantom Tollbooth here as there is Narnia, a disorienting but familiar sense of story-ness as September travels slantwise through the underworld, shot through with menace and heroism. You never know what's coming next in Fell Beneath, and the most roundabout and whimsical turns always come back around to the main story and its payoff.

As masterful as the first novel, and with a reprise of Ana Juan's illustrations, this is a most worthy sequel. I'm also excited to note that there's an unabridged, DRM-free MP3CD audiobook edition, because this is one of those fairytales, like Gaiman's Stardust, that you want to have read aloud to you.

If your fancy is tickled by this, don't miss Deathless, Valente's fantasy for adults about the Siege of Leningrad.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

eBook Review: Warm Moonlight

Jason Weisberger — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 14:26:30 +0000

Warm Moonlight is the second Kindle Single I've read by Joseph Wurtenbaugh. I really like his style!

Warm Moonlight reveals a former 20's gun moll turned grandmother, sharing a supernatural story of their family past with her granddaughter. While the story isn't the most original and you've heard it before, Wurtenbaugh does a wonderful job of drawing you in. Do not, however, expect a repeat of Old Soul, which was told from the pov of a microscopic parasite/symbiote, this story is very different.

Joseph Wurtenbaugh's Warm Moonlight

A Medieval Bestiary: When a book breaks your heart

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:05:30 +0000

This review is cross-posted on DownloadTheUniverse, a group blog that reviews science-related ebooks and discusses the future of the written word.

An illustration from the The Royal Bestiary, depicting a unicorn laying its head on the lap of a lady. Presumably, the illustrator had never seen a unicorn, nor (one suspects) a lady.

A Medeival Bestiary is just not that into me.

We should have gone so well together. It was a scanned copy of The Royal Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript stored in the British Library, enhanced for the iPad with text and audio interpretation on every page. I was a giant nerd. Clearly, a match made in heaven.

But I don't think it's going to work out.

It's not that the book is terrible. In fact, parts of it are, objectively, pretty damn cool. We are, after all, talking about an opportunity to virtually thumb through the pages of a very old book. And the scans are excellent. You can see stains on the vellum, and the margin lines drawn by the scribe or illustrator to make certain that text and images were put into just the right place on every page. You can zoom in on the beautiful, colored and gilded drawings of bees and eagles, lions and centuars. On every page, there is, indeed, a little tab that you can tap to learn more about the animals you see in the pictures – especially helpful for the book's many imaginary animals, such as the leucrota. Leucrotas, you may be interested to know, happen when a male hyena mates with a female lion. The result of that partnership looks, for some reason, rather like a horse, but with a forked tail and a creepy, Jack Nicholson smile. The Medieval Bestiary assures me that the leucrota's "teeth" are actually a single piece of sharp bone, curved into a U shape. If I tap the "Listen" button, this information will be read to me by a soothing, female, British voice.

In short, A Medieval Bestiary does everything it promised to do. In fact, I'm sure this book could make somebody very happy. (Maybe an art student?) Just not me. That's because, while it does do everything it promised, A Medieval Bestiary does only that. And not a bit more. I, unfortunately, need the bit more.

The truth is that some of this is my fault. I read the description and then set my expectations rather higher than I should have. I can't really blame A Medieval Bestiary for being the book it is (and said it was) rather than the book I want to be. And yet. And yet.

A book like this needs context. I need to know about the genre of bestiaries, in general. Did the authors make up the clearly made-up animals (and the clearly made-up information about real animals)? Or were they writing down longstanding traditions? What was the point of the book? Am I supposed to be studying the natural world, or exploring my own morality? Do books like bestiaries have a role in the development of true taxonomy and biology, the same way that alchemy had a role in the development of chemistry and physics? I have no idea. Because A Medieval Bestiary doesn't tell me. In fact, I had to run a couple Google searches to even figure out the book's real name. This is the full extent of context it offers on itself:

A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can extend to plants and even rocks. It combines description of the physical nature and habits of animals with elaboration on the moral or spiritual significance of these characteristics.

This amazing book was produced in the first decade of the 13th century, and is one of the earliest bestiaries to feature vivid paintings of animals. They are set on gold grounds and in colourful frames, supplanting the line-drawn renderings that populated earlier bestiaries. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce, and so it is likely that it was produced for an aristocratic, or even royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.

Even more frustrating was the interpretation within the book. A Medieval Bestiary is in Latin (and written in that sort of fancy medieval font that makes it difficult to read even if you do know Latin). But there is no translation of the actual text. The interpretation merely describes the illustrations. In some cases (but not all) that includes a summary of the text around the image, but even then that's almost worse, because what you get are stunted plot points of a story that probably would have been a lot more interesting to read for itself.

Basically, I look at A Medieval Bestiary and think of all that it could be, but isn't. Particularly with the iPad book format, there's such an opportunity here to add lots of context: History, philosphy, quotes and links to other works. Done right, a reader could come away from this understanding more about medieval society as a whole and the development of science from magical/religious art to rational tool. Instead, A Medieval Bestiary just wants to tell you what's going on in the pictures. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm too old and too wise to waste much time thinking I can change a book into something it's not.

Besides, in the course of breaking up with it, I discovered that A Medieval Bestiary had been kind of misleading me all along. I paid the equivalent of $8 for this book (I was offered a free review code, but couldn't figure out where to apply it during the ordering process). But, turns out, this isn't exactly unique content. In fact, the whole thing is available as free PDFs on the website of the Royal Library. Some of the scanned pages there even come with the exact same interpretation as is offered in the iPad version. Which just kind of serves to make the shortcomings of the iPad book that much more apparent. I don't mind paying $8 for something really cool. I mind paying $8 for an iPad version of something I can get for free as a PDF. If the publishers – eBook Treasures – were going to convert A Medieval Bestiary to iPad, why not take advantage of that and do some stuff that you couldn't do with PDFs?

Sadly, I think it's time this book and I went our separate ways. Hopefully, we can still be friends. And, who knows, maybe in the future, when A Medieval Bestiary has had some time to grow, we can rekindle the relationship.

eBook Treasures: A Medieval Bestiary

The British Library: Books of Beasts in the British Library: the Medieval Bestiary and its context (the book published on iPad as A Medieval Bestiary is listed here as Royal 12 C. xix)

Explore and learn more about medieval bestiaries as a genre at The Medieval Bestiary website (not affiliated with eBook Treasures or the iPad version of The Royal Bestiary)