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Sweded movies and the end of Hollywood as we know it: You have to spot author Ben Walters the omission of other fan cultures and the apocalyptic rhetoric; there’s still some interesting stuff here.
Really good essay on The Dark Knight: “Also, let’s not forget that calling Batman ‘fascist’ is a little like accusing the Pope of being catholic, or hinting darkly that a particular bear may have, at some point in its life, shit in the woods.”
I … don’t actually trust an email from Joe Biden that says “trust me—you’ll have fun.”
Ilona Andrews, Magic Dreams: Novella featuring a nearsighted weretiger and her struggle to save a hot guy from her pack from a soul-sucking monster. Decent paranormal, though you have to take on faith that they both love each other lots.
Steven Harper, Dreamer: A Novel of the Silent Empire: In a universe linked by the instantaneous communications of the Silent, who can even possess the bodies of other Silent in order to deliver messages, a new kind of Silent arises: a boy who can possess the non-Silent, threatening to trigger a new wave of violence against the Silent, who are already often enslaved. Against the background of contending empires, a few Children of Irfan (a group of Silent who serve a particular empire) try to save the boy—or at least use him for their own purposes. Pros: complicated worldbuilding where everybody’s got a point of view; sexual, racial, and ideological diversity. Cons: slavery is a big part of the worldbuilding, not being fought by anybody in the novel, and while that was plausible under their circumstances and it was not “yay slavery” in any way, I found it really depressing to read.
George R.R. Martin, Dreamsongs, Vol. 1: Hunh, that’s a lot of dream books in a row. This collection begins with some juvenilia, which includes the opening lines “Darkness. Everywhere there was darkness. Grim, foreboding, omnipresent; it hung over the plain like a great stifling mantle.” And it keeps on in precisely that vein, eldritch horrors and everything! Also, a head explodes “like a watermelon hit by a battering ram.” I kid, but even then Martin knew how to commit. You definitely can see him getting better, though—learning to use the word-torrents for his own purposes; this collection has Sandkings, for example. Also, I liked finding out that, like me, he became a sf fan through Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan, Team Human: Mel lives in a vampire town in Maine. Okay, only half vampire, but she’s not a big fan of them, and when her best friend gets hot and heavy with the new vamp in high school and announces her intention to turn, despite a not insignificant risk of death or zombification, Mel knows she needs to act. If only Kit, the cute boy raised by vampires, were more help in her project. Also, her other best friend’s father left her principal mother for a vampire, and now the principal seems terrified of something … Enjoyable YA; I don’t have much to say about it.
Wen Spencer, Tinker: This is the second time I’ve tried a Spencer book with a premise I find really attractive and an execution I hate. Tinker is a teenaged supergenius living in Pittsburgh, which has accidentally been transported into the elven realms and only reconnects with the human world every couple of months. Windwolf, an elven noble, takes an interest in her, which means that others do too. I stopped halfway, after Windwolf had sex with her (consensually) and transformed her physically (nonconsensually), which led immediately thereafter to the “nice guy” who’d been courting her to sexually assault her. She had almost no internal/psychological reaction to the transformation before I stopped reading. I can actually find all of this behavior and lack of immediate reaction plausible for humans, especially teenaged ones, but I didn’t trust Spencer to tell this story. The promo copy mentions Buffy several times, but that’s not a flattering comparison: Buffy integrated emotion into the fantasy plot in a way that enriched both.
Really good essay on The Dark Knight: “Also, let’s not forget that calling Batman ‘fascist’ is a little like accusing the Pope of being catholic, or hinting darkly that a particular bear may have, at some point in its life, shit in the woods.”
I … don’t actually trust an email from Joe Biden that says “trust me—you’ll have fun.”
Ilona Andrews, Magic Dreams: Novella featuring a nearsighted weretiger and her struggle to save a hot guy from her pack from a soul-sucking monster. Decent paranormal, though you have to take on faith that they both love each other lots.
Steven Harper, Dreamer: A Novel of the Silent Empire: In a universe linked by the instantaneous communications of the Silent, who can even possess the bodies of other Silent in order to deliver messages, a new kind of Silent arises: a boy who can possess the non-Silent, threatening to trigger a new wave of violence against the Silent, who are already often enslaved. Against the background of contending empires, a few Children of Irfan (a group of Silent who serve a particular empire) try to save the boy—or at least use him for their own purposes. Pros: complicated worldbuilding where everybody’s got a point of view; sexual, racial, and ideological diversity. Cons: slavery is a big part of the worldbuilding, not being fought by anybody in the novel, and while that was plausible under their circumstances and it was not “yay slavery” in any way, I found it really depressing to read.
George R.R. Martin, Dreamsongs, Vol. 1: Hunh, that’s a lot of dream books in a row. This collection begins with some juvenilia, which includes the opening lines “Darkness. Everywhere there was darkness. Grim, foreboding, omnipresent; it hung over the plain like a great stifling mantle.” And it keeps on in precisely that vein, eldritch horrors and everything! Also, a head explodes “like a watermelon hit by a battering ram.” I kid, but even then Martin knew how to commit. You definitely can see him getting better, though—learning to use the word-torrents for his own purposes; this collection has Sandkings, for example. Also, I liked finding out that, like me, he became a sf fan through Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan, Team Human: Mel lives in a vampire town in Maine. Okay, only half vampire, but she’s not a big fan of them, and when her best friend gets hot and heavy with the new vamp in high school and announces her intention to turn, despite a not insignificant risk of death or zombification, Mel knows she needs to act. If only Kit, the cute boy raised by vampires, were more help in her project. Also, her other best friend’s father left her principal mother for a vampire, and now the principal seems terrified of something … Enjoyable YA; I don’t have much to say about it.
Wen Spencer, Tinker: This is the second time I’ve tried a Spencer book with a premise I find really attractive and an execution I hate. Tinker is a teenaged supergenius living in Pittsburgh, which has accidentally been transported into the elven realms and only reconnects with the human world every couple of months. Windwolf, an elven noble, takes an interest in her, which means that others do too. I stopped halfway, after Windwolf had sex with her (consensually) and transformed her physically (nonconsensually), which led immediately thereafter to the “nice guy” who’d been courting her to sexually assault her. She had almost no internal/psychological reaction to the transformation before I stopped reading. I can actually find all of this behavior and lack of immediate reaction plausible for humans, especially teenaged ones, but I didn’t trust Spencer to tell this story. The promo copy mentions Buffy several times, but that’s not a flattering comparison: Buffy integrated emotion into the fantasy plot in a way that enriched both.