Category: Reading

Futureshocks by Lou Anders

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The book fulfills part of its mission. The introductory essay is called “The Business of Lying,” and Anders quotes U.K. LeGuin who writes, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive….Prediction is the business of phophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.”

The collection definitely succeeds in being descriptive. Each writer’s prose gives me a clear picture of the world of each story. I was disappointed that most of this clarity came by way of exposition and in more than one case, shameless infodumping–2-3 pages worth.

But that’s not its worst failing.

The central question, emblazoned at the top of the cover, is “What Terror Does Tomorrow Hold?” My question was “Terror for whom?” To be sure, I wouldn’t want to live in some of the tomorrows presented in this anthology. But when I ask myself what terror tomorrow holds for ME, with respect to this anthology, I’d answer: very little, provided I don’t make the mistakes or manage to avoid the situations in which a lot of the characters of these stories find themselves.

That is, with one exception. “Absalom’s Mother” by Louise Marley stands out head and shoulders above the rest of the stories! It’s the only story where I cared about the characters. I was afraid for them and afraid of their world. Their emotions connected me to that world in a way that I wasn’t to any of the other worlds presented. If the rest of the stories in the anthology did that, I might truly be afraid of tomorrow.

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X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl TPB by Peter Milligan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I didn’t get as much of a kick out of this as I did Milligan’s original X-Force/X-Statix run. Dead Girl didn’t stick to its premise, which was to take shots at the trope of comics characters dying and come back. Milligan took shots at every trope as it came up–Dr. Strange’s quirks, his servant’s, the supervillain getting repeatedly beaten, etc.–and even threw in some self-referential X-Statix stuff.

It’s good for a single read but in the end, it felt like I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League by Giffen and DeMatteis, a phoned-in return to the good ol’ days.

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Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I gave it the same rating as Bender’s previous collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt even though I did like that one a little better. I seem to remember it being a little more playful than this collection.

This collection had its playful moments, but I sensed a little more pain in these characters. I’ll have to reread Flammable Skirt again to be sure. The characters are definitely the best part of each story. A lot of them were odd or fantastic, but still relatable, with more or less the same sorts of problems as mundane folk.

Aside from attempting to channel Lydia Davis at times (e.g. “The Meeting), the prose is really well-done, to boot.

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Local by Brian Wood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book deserves all the hype it’s gotten. The total package, from start to finish, is an evolution in every sense of the word–the evolution of the character, the writing, the art, even the series concept. And I could tell that even before I read as much in the backmatter.

The main character, Megan, sums up her story and the point of the book (not just as a whole, but in each of the interconnected stories in each issue) thus:

You need to do what’s best for you, even if it means leaving some people behind, burning some bridges, severing some ties. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t. You only get one shot. Take it when you can, and don’t blow it.

This sort of advice can only be given by someone who did just that, and who took shots and actually did blow them sometimes. Most writers fall back into the grosser antisocial behaviors–alcholism, drug use, and other Raymond Carver-type stuff–to illustrate dirty and gritty. Here, Wood & Kelly show that the pain of just making mistakes and learning from them can be just as dramatic.

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Fell Volume 1: Feral City by Warren Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Why the hell did I put off buying this for so long? I’ve read about it for years, Ellis’s experimental 9-panel 16 pg comic with art by Ben Templesmith.

Fans of Ellis’s writing will find a lot to love, here: a flawed hero who wins some and loses some, odd and sometimes disturbing facts seamlessly woven into the story, and not too much of, as another reviewer said, the usual ranting.

Two nits: The style of Fell’s dialogue sometimes blends into that of the minor characters, which is to say into Warren Ellis speak. Consider my favorite line, a bit from a narration box by Detective Richard Fell:

Grab a death coffee from Mr. Yang, the food pervert. He melts a Hershey bar into a pot of filter coffee, pours a 1602 and then drops a depth-charge of espersso on it. And maybe crystal meth. I don’t know anymore what feels worse: Having one death coffee a day, or skipping it. I can already feel my internal organs going into crisis mode. At the end of my shift, the world’s going to fall out of my butt.

As much as I’d love this coffee, the writing is the same stuff I read daily on Ellis’s blog.

Second nit is that, like Desolation Jones, I’m left hanging, waiting for more adventures. The last issue published was #9, which I bought awhile ago. I didn’t realize that I now have the entire series! 🙁

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The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: And Other Stories by John Kessel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Genre-blending,” to me, usually means”genre+literary” (whatever “literary” means). But a lot of the blending in this collection is “genre + genre,” as in the historical-crime/fantasy story “Every Angel is Terrifying,” or the future-crime/sci-fi first movement of the Lunar Quartet, “The Juniper Tree.”

Kessel’s historical/literary mash-ups were brilliant, too: Orson Welles in a sci-fi story (“It’s All True”)–who’d have thought? The name and spirit of Tyler Durden carrying on in a lunar colony in the second movement of the Lunar Quartet, “Stories for Men.” “Pride and Prometheus” is a Nebula award winner for good reason!

My favorite thing, from a technical standpoint, is the near-flawless worldbuilding in each story, done such that the story’s obvious themes are never heavy-handed or preachy.

What made it one star short of five was the third movement of The Lunar Cycle. The cycle is comprised of 4 stories, one of them almost 80 pages long–and we all know how I feel about stories that go on longer than the average story by Etgar Keret or Lydia Davis. Oddly enough, I loved the longest story (“Stories for Men”). It was the significantly shorter story immediately after it, “Under the Lunchbox Tree.” It’s obviously supposed to be more low-key, but it still seems anticlimactic.

You can download the collection for free, from Small Beer Press, in multiple formats. I did, and I immediately knew I had to have the TPB.

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Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow, if I’d taken a precious few different turns in life, I might have ended up exactly like the protagonist of this story, Ben. Definitely hit close to home.

This may be the first time, though, that I’ve come across a protagonist I didn’t like. And I’ve read lots and lots of Carver (with whose work Tomine’s is often compared). Yes, the ending of Ben’s story is open to interpretation, but to me it’s pretty clear. Based on what I read, what Ben sees at the end is what he has and maybe all he’ll ever have.

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[Note to self: How come I’ve never used this feature from goodreads before???]

The newest edition to my all-time favorite books list is We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle, which is surprising given how long a lot of these pieces are. Remember all the Etgar Keret and Lydia Davis I’d read recently. But the pieces kept me engaged.

The reviews are everywhere. If you’re a goodreads member, you can read some of my story-by-story status updates/reviews.

Not that I didn’t read. I just didn’t read much; was busy writing!! So, please excuse these truncated, unvarnished reviews…

• Carol Emshwiller, “Modillion” (3/5)
• By Etgar Keret…
  • “An Exclusive” (How the hell does he cram that story into 9 pages??–5/5)
  • “Painting” (4/5)
  • “Yordan” (I want to write like this!–5/5)
  • “Vacuum Seal” (Like a literary/magical-realist version of Full Metal Jacket–5/5)