Ryan
Amazing.
I've been a fan of Dick's for a long time (ever since a university professor of mine used him to explain what Gnosticism is), and it seems like this short novel manages to sum up all of Dick's attitudes toward religion and spirituality in one nice little 200-page package. It's as much a parable of Gnosticism as it is anything else, but there's some nice visuals along the way as well. Time keeps regressing for our main character Joe Chip - he starts off in the futuristic world of 1992, but after surviving an explosion on the lunar colony, he finds himself and the world around him gradually sliding back in time to 1939. As he's traveling, however, two additional mysteries present themselves - Joe has to discover why his friend and colleague Runciter, who dies in the lunar explosion, is sending him messages, and also the secret of Ubik, a substance that seems to have been around since forever but which no one seems to understand.
Throughout the book, Dick breaks some of what are considered basic rules for how a novel should be structured, but he does it in such an artful way that it leaves you feeling unsettled, rather than disappointed.
Highly recommended for anyone who enjoyed the Matrix films (or their spiritual predecessor, Morrison's Invisibles series).
After a couple of volumes that I didn't quite enjoy as much, Y starts clicking again in this volume. We meet yet another man, Allison's father, who is convinced he is the cause of the plague due to his cloning experiments. His explanation of his guilt involves some fairly outre science concepts, Next volume's the last one - it'll be interesting to see if they can wrap up all the plot threads in time.
Extra star for bringing back Waverly, a grave digger featured in a much earlier story, as we see the larger US society starting to build itself back up again. I wish the series had had more stories like that, looking at other characters and situations in the same world, rather than just focusing on Yorick's tale.
I once had a friend tell me that, when evaluating cookbooks, it's important to not expect every recipe to be of interest to you, and that there can be a cookbook that you love that you ignore half of. As long as there were a few recipes in that cookbook that you would not only use and love, but that you would reuse for years to come, then the whole book was worth getting.
I think that the same logic can be applied, to an extent, to short story collections. The short story, as a format, has undergone a bit of a fall from grace in the past few decades, which is unfortunate, because it's a unique type of story that allows for a lot of variety and experimentalism that you won't necessarily get from novels. I think that, if people approached short story collections the same way they approach cookbooks, they'd enjoy them significantly more.
All that brings us to The Zombie Cookbook, a new short story collection from Damnation Books. As the title might suggest, it's not the most serious of story collections; a lot of the stories here walk the line between horror and comedy. There's a long tradition of that within zombie literature, stretching back to movies like Return of the Living Dead (which was the origin of the “bbbrrraaaaaiiiinnsss” zombie meme) and Dead Alive. For someone who's a long-time fan of zombie literature in print or film, this collection doesn't necessarily break any new ground, but it does provide a solid entry in that tradition.
The theme of the collection, crossing zombie stories with food, is a logical connection, and one that you would think would be fairly restrictive, but there's a surprising amount of variety among the eleven stories and poems included in the collection. I hadn't heard of any of the authors in the collection prior to reading it, but I'll definitely be checking some off these authors out in the future, as there are some who really manage to take the concept and make it their own.
As I said with the recipe book analogy, I didn't enjoy every single story in this collection, but that's okay; not everything in the cookbook has to be to everyone's taste, and even the ones that I didn't particularly enjoy were well-written. I'm sure they'll have a lot of fans in their own right. When the collection hits its hight points, though, in stories like The Right Recipe and My Big Fat Zombie Wedding, you end up discovering some short stories that have a lot of depth and world-building done to them in addition to the puns and slapstick humour that pepper the book.
In addition to the stories, the Zombie Cookbook is also really nicely packaged. The cover and interior artwork are beautiful, and nicely accent the stories that they're interspersed with. A few of the stories even include recipes for zombie cooks, which helps sell the concept of the book as well. If you're a fan of zombie books or horror comedy, it's definitely worth checking out at http://www.zombiecookbook.net. Both e-book and print versions are available.
If there's a common theme to most great, classic monster stories, it's that they're never really about monsters, but are more about using those monsters as a metaphor for something: whether it's Victorian attitudes towards sexuality in Dracula, Japanese filmmakers dealing with the repercussions of the atomic bomb droppings through Godzilla, or zombies being used to illustrate the underside of consumer culture.
Selznick gets that, which is a lot of what makes this chapbook such a good read. Yes, there's a giant monster, and a military determined to stop it, but really it's a story about regret over failed relationships. The monsters are only window dressing. My only complaint was that it was too short! Selznick hints at a much larger universe here, and I'd like to see him do some more with it.
People doing riffs on the Superman mythos has become something of a genre unto itself, and a lot of the time the stories that result are more interesting than what's actually being published in the Superman books themselves: books like Moore's Miracleman, McDuffie's Icon, and Mayer's Superfolks have all turned Superman on his head to explore the nature of heroism, and here Waid joins those ranks.
Waid's thesis in this series is that the people who become superheroes aren't necessarily emotionally equipped for the job - his Plutonian has fantastical abilities, but still is crippled by insecurity, anger, and hubris, and those feelings help turn him to evil. The plot of the book is split between watching the Plutonian wreak havoc, and an investigation into what events precipitated his fall from grace. It will be interesting to see where this story goes next.
I don't read a lot of crime fiction, which when I think about it is kind of odd. I mean, I love a lot of this stuff when it's presented in movie form - stuff like Tarantino's early work, Guy Ritchie's stuff, and the like. Jack Wakes Up, Seth Harwood's debut novel, is exactly like one of those movies. It tells the story of Jack Palms, a washed-up actor who gets caught up in a drug war between various gangs in San Fransisco. This was a fun, slick read, that had a lot of energy to it and a great narrative voice. If you're a crime fan or someone who's interested in trying the genre out, I'd definitely recommend this title
I think it's a truism that all of the best stories about war ultimately, make a statement about how horrible and awful war is (for example, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Schindler's List, etc). Ender's Game fits nicely in that category, telling the story of a future where humanity is at war with an insectile species of aliens, and a young boy is beaten and mentally & physically abused by the system that he's growing up in so that he can become a hero and end the war by committing genocide. Card makes a powerful statement on the very contradictory nature of war here: military training beats you down to make you strong, and then you attack to defend, show your love of country by hating others, and protect normal society by becoming something that will never comfortably fit inside it. It sounds crazy when you put it out there,
Unfortunately, there were a few things that I found unsatisfying about the novel. The first had to do with the pacing - the majority of the book is Ender at Battle School, getting torn down until he's a shell of a child, and then reforged into a sword that humanity shall use to smite it's enemies. Then, the last 50 pages or so are where the really interesting ideas start getting discussed, about war, and the nature of the alien menace humanity's fighting - and then it ends, in one decisive battle. The book could have been that much more excellent by shortening the training sequences and focusing on the actual war more, I think.
The other issue I had was that there's this really interesting quasi-Marxist idea set up, whereby Ender realizes that the real enemies aren't those in his class, or the outside threat of the aliens, but the teachers at his school, who pit students against one another to keep themselves dominant. It's a fascinating idea, and one that never really goes anywhere - Ender just goes through with his training, becomes the weapon they wanted him to be, and does as he's told. That idea of intergenerational warfare is never really resolved, though, and I really wish it had been.
Crime fiction, as a genre fascinates me, although I don't read a lot of it. Part of it's because it's rather uniquely named; science fiction stories, for example, contain fiction driven by science, and horror stories contain horrific elements, etc. A good Crime story, though, isn't really about crime at all - it's about Justice, and that is clearly the case wit 100 Bullets.
There's an interesting moral question asked in the story, one that parallels Plato's Ring of Gyges myth; if you were given the tools with which to kill someone, without fear of reprisal, would you do it? What about if the person you're asked to kill is someone who also ruined your life, and you know that they'll never face justice under the legal system? When does “street justice” become justified?
That philosophical aspect is really what makes 100 Bullets worth reading; if it was just a bunch of stories where Agent Graves gave people a gun with 100 untraceable bullets, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. I'll definitely be picking up the rest of this series, though, to see what kind of morality tales Azzarello chooses to tell next.
Teaching babies ASL (or other sign languages) is, I think, the kind of thing that is completely revolutionary, but afterwards you think about it and you wonder why it took so long for people to catch on to it. I'm looking forward to hopefully being able to use this with my little one once he's born and old enough.
Three stars for this book just because it seems like it's part of a larger system/kit that the authors want you to buy, so by reading the book you're only really getting half of the story.
I was a little unsure about reading this at first. My wife had read it and loved it, but she was hesitant to recommend it to me – she knows I love time-travel stories, but she thought that the romance elements would turn me off. I was also kind of worried because the central conceit of a time traveler who gets ‘unstuck' in time was a story that I'd known had been done excellently in both text and film (Kilgore Trout in Slaughterhouse Five and Desmond Hume from Lost, respectively). I was worried that this one wouldn't hold up in comparison.
I was pleasantly surprised to find this an absolutely amazingly written, powerful tragedy of a story. Henry and Clare are two souls, travelling alone through their lives, connecting for what seem to be all-too brief moments in time. And yet, they soldier on through those difficulties, knowing that the moments of togetherness are worth the moments of loneliness. I tend to dislike a lot of ‘romance' stories, because I don't think they really understand what mature, long-term love is, but this. one. gets. it.
So, vol. 5 of Y ended with Ampersand being stolen and taken to Japan; in this one, 355, Yorick, and Dr. Mann decide to travel to Japan to get the monkey back. This is an incredibly stupid idea, and actively puts Yorick into a situation that will most likely kill him. Dr. Mann argues that being away from Ampersand might equally kill Yorick, but there's no way of knowing if it will. So they put him on a boat in an ocean full of pirates, a possibly-rouge Australian navy, and various sharks and other deadly creatures beneath the sea. Not the best idea anyone's ever had.
It was frustrating reading this, because I know the series is capable of being much better.
75 issues is a big milestone for a Vertigo series. Sandman, Lucifer, and Preacher all ended at 75 issues, and with Fables reaching their 75th issue in this collection, it's fair to say they're continuing that tradition, ending ‘volume 1' of the Fables story.
To recap the story so far: All of the characters from fable and myth are real. They've been driven out of their homelands by a figure originally known only as The Adversary, and have settled new homes in New York City and Baghdad, but with plans to eventually retake those homelands.
War and Pieces is the story of the retaking of the Homelands. I've read some reviews where readers have complained that the war goes too easily, and that there's little true conflict as a result. I can see where those people are coming from, but I have to disagree; I think a lot of people were seeing this volume as the climax of the Fables story, but I think that the actual climax was the Fables coming together and turning themselves from a bunch of people living together to a true Community - War and Pieces is actually the denouement of the story, wrapping up all of the pieces so that volume 2 can start nicely in issue 76.
I think this may be Fables' finest hour. It is the story of the Frog Prince, and his transformation from a humble janitor named Flycatcher to King Ambrose of Haven.
Willingham has really accomplished something great here. Over the past nine volumes, he's been quietly establishing Flycatcher's personality traits, and here brings them to the fore, creating a transition for Ambrose that happens quickly but is still fully believable. With a supporting cast as varied as Lancelot, Bluebeard, and Shere Khan, Ambrose's tale is written as a traditional fable, but still fully within the Fable world.
I really enjoyed the presentation of a “third option” in the war between Fabletown and the Adversary, as well: while the conflict between the two of them does create for an interesting drama, it's good to know that there are characters who don't want to get involved with that, but would rather create a peaceful life for themselves. It helps make the Fables world, as well as the main conflict of the series, much more believable.
Amazing. 12 short stories, none of them connected but all spun off of the central idea of teenagers having superpowers. The end result is like if they let Irvine Welsh or Chuck Palahniuk write the X-Men.
The idea of superpowers as a metaphor isn't a new one, but this is a really good application of the idea, and Wood has a really good grasp of how it would feel to be a teen with those kinds of powers and abilities. You might be able to read minds or heal from any injury, but you'll still have the same family squabbles and insecurities that any other person had at that age.
This is the first book in a trilogy, and it follows two stories: one of an chimpanzee who can create representational art, and the other a blind teenager who is given an operation that might allow her to see. At the same time, the internet itself has begun to evolve consciousness.
It took me awhile to warm to this. Caitlin, the visually-impaired teenager, seemed in some ways to be a stereotypical Sawyer protagonist: incredibly bright and witty, with some sort of medical condition, who is a bit of an outsider in their community but at the same time is okay with that. Also, the “internet gains consciousness” plot seems a little hokey at first glance.
Then I got to the scene where Caitlin's able to see for the first time, and damnit, he sucked me in. Sawyer's ability to craft an emotionally-charged phrase and have it draw you in is just amazing. I've seen him do it before - most of his recent novels have a point like that in them - and every time he does it you still never really see it coming.
This isn't Sawyer's best work - if you're new to him, I would recommend anything from the period between Calculating God and Mindscan as a better starting point - but if you like his work, this is a good read. I'm interested to see where the rest of the story goes.
Road trip stories are always interesting ones, because they never really seem to end up being about the road trip themselves; they're more about the characters learning more about themselves and their relationships with each other, and this one isn't really any different in that regard.
That being said, it's a REALLY funny, really heartfelt story about Colin and Hassan, and this girl named Lindsay that they meet in the town of Gutshot, Tennessee. Colin's a child prodigy who fears he's, at 17, in danger of becoming washed-up, and who's been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine. He figures that the best way to overcome this washupedness is to develop a unified Katherine Theorem, which will be able to explain the course of any romantic relationship.
This book has ‘cult hit' written all over it. A lot of the humour requires a certain appreciation for math, footnotes, and language (including foreign language and anagramming), but if you have an interest in those things, and don't mind YA books, you just might love it.
If I could give this book seven stars, I fugging would.
I had a feeling I would like this book, because I'm a big fan of 80s X-Men comics (including the New Mutants stuff), as well as 80s teen movies, and from what I was reading about it online before I read it, it seemed like this would be in kind of the same vein.
It was, which was good, but at the same time, every time I thought one thing was going to happen in the novel, Selznick went in a completely different direction, one that was often more satisfying than what I'd been expecting.
So on the surface this was the story of Nate Charters, a teen living in the early 1980s who just may have superpowers - and, since a man named William Donner has just announced the existence of superpowers and declared that those that have them are Sovereign individuals in whatever nations they live in.
So, that's big news, right? For Nate it is, at least, and it changes everything - the bullies at school react to him differently, some weird science guys starting asking after him, and his relationship with his mother changes fundamentally. But, at the same time, his girlfriend is still really into him, and his friends are still the same people they were before the Donner Declaration, so everything should still be cool.
That's the thing about this (podio)book. It's not really about superheroes at all - it's about a kid meeting a girl and falling in love, and learning about who he is as an individual in relation to his parents. The superhero stuff happens, but it's in no way what the story's ABOUT.
I realized only in the middle of this that, while it's part 1 of a trilogy, it's also really book 7 of a 9 book set. So I was a little lost for a bit, but was eventually after to figure out exactly what was going on.
What Turtledove's done with this series is set up an alternate history of the United States; one in which the Confederate States of America won the US Civil War, and were able to establish themselves as a significant political and economic force.
This series, specifically, starts a little over 50 years after the end of the Civil War; The USA and the German Empire have just been victorious in World War I, winning a decisive victory over Quadruple Alliance of Russia, England, France, and the CSA. As a result of the war, the USA is occupying Canada, and is demanding reparations from the CSA.
If you're a student of history, you can kind of guess where this is going: hyperinflation, chronic unemployment, and bitterness about the outcome of the war result in a large group of people in the country becoming increasingly angry and leaning towards violence, which certain political forces manipulate by placing the blame on aristocrats in government and minority groups present in the country. Turtledove has the CSA parallel fate of the Weimar Republic in our reality, and seeing those parallels is one of the main sources of tension in the book.
The main problem I had with the book was that it relies too heavily on that knowledge of history to drive your interest in the story. The main dramatic tension comes from knowing your history between the two world wars, rather than from the characters; at times they seem almost like set-pieces being moved around in order to move the historical story from A to B. Still, the idea is interesting enough that I'll make sure to read the next two books in the trilogy.
There are two principle story arcs in this volume. The first, Safeword, deals with the issue of Yorick's survivor's guilt over being the only survivor of the plague. He does this only after Agent 355 drops him off with another Culper Ring agent, who breaks him down psychologically in order to have him face his issues. It's not the type of psychology that would work in the real world, but desperate times and all that.
The second story deals with an encounter with a militia group, and really highlights a theme that Vaughn has been working with throughout the series: that a lot of the differences between males and females are the result of cultural and social factors, rather than inherent sexual differences. Of course, he tends to do this by showing that women are capable of being just as pig-headed, violent, and selfish as men are, but there are moments in here where he does so by placing them in more noble circumstances as well.
The premise of Y is that a plague of unknown origin has killed all the men on Earth, except for Yorick Brown and his helper monkey, Ampersand. In this volume, they really play with the concept of “last man on Earth”, as a Soyuz capsule with three astronauts on it, including two males, comes down to Earth. At the same time, a group of Israeli commandos makes a play to kidnap Yorick.
Vaughn kind of steps back a bit in this one, and gives us a bit of a wider view at what's going on outside of the US as a result of the gender plague. I really appreciate that, as most disaster genre stories tend to focus only on what's going on inside one country.
If you've read anything by Irvine Welsh (or seen the film Trainspotting), you should know what you're getting here: drugs and alcohol, working-class and chavvy Edinburghians., football, and a healthy dose of punk rock attitude. What Welsh also shows here, though, is a sharp, wicked sense of humour.
This collection of short stories definitely isn't for everyone (especially due to the language issue – Welsh writes half the time in a working-class Scots dialect, and uses a lot of four-letter words when doing so), but some of the stories in here are just excellent, especially The Sexual Disaster Quartet, Granny's Old Junk, The Two Philosophers, and Disnae Matter.