2014 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette

I am a supporting member of Loncon 3, which is the location of this year's World Science Fiction Convention. Because of this, I was eligible to vote in this year's Hugo Awards. The Best Novelette category had the widest disparity between the best nominee and the weakest nominee, with three very good nominees clustered together at the top of the quality scale, a mediocre entry well behind them, and a really awful entry bringing up the rear. My ballot in this category was as follows:

1. I debated with myself for a long time before picking The Waiting Stars by Aliette de Bodard as my top choice (actual finish, 3^rd), because while it is an excellent story, so are the next two nominees on this list. In the end, however, de Bodard's tale of misguided benevolent imperialism, and the reaction to it, won out over the competition. The story is actually two stories, woven together that eventually dovetail together at the very end. In one, two Dai Vet named Lhan Nen and Cuc seek to recover the mind ship that held their great-aunt's mind, braving the automated defenses of the Galactic Federation's trophy graveyard that all of the destroyed mind ships were cast into after the Dai Vet lost a war to the Galactics. In the other, a young girl named Catherine grows up in an Institution run by the Galactics along with dozens of other Dai Vet children, apparently displaced by the war between their cultures. The story makes clear that the Galactics think they are doing what is best for Catherine and her classmates, but at the same time, the story makes clear that the Galactics are destroying their charges despite their best intentions. As the story comes to a close, it becomes clear that the Galactics not only hid Catherine's past from her by erasing her prior memories, they deprived her of a family, and her place in her own society, and wrapped it in a collection of lies to convince the children, and apparently themselves, that what they were doing was justified. Even to the end, Catherine's boyfriend Jason desperately tried to justify the erasure of her memory by saying it was necessary to save her life, to save her body. And de Bodard pulls no punches here: Despite the fact that Jason clearly loves Catherine and thinks that what was done was the best of a collection of bad options, the magnitude of the monstrosity that Jason is excusing is brutally apparent. And the brilliance of the story is that this sneaks up on the reader - I couldn't even see how the two story lines related to one another for much of the novelette until they forcefully crashed into one another, and then their connection seemed like it should have been obvious all along. The actions of the adults running the Institute seem suspect from the start, but when the duplicity and immorality of their program is finally revealed, it is something of a shock. This is an unsettling story, but it is unsettling in the best possible way.

2. The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal (actual finish 1^st) is a devastating and yet uplifting story that focuses on aging, loss, and hope. Elma York is the titular lady astronaut, long past her glory days who now lives on Mars with her dying, beloved husband Nathaniel. Elma still keeps her name on the astronaut roster despite her advanced age, and thus she needs regular physicals, which puts her in contact with a doctor named Dorothy who Elma had briefly met in Kansas when Dorothy was a young girl living on a farm with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. Dorothy seems to have been inspired to travel to Mars by her meeting with Elma, and the paper eagle Elma gave her. But when the story takes place, both Elma's youthful triumphs and Dorothy's childhood misfortunes are far in the past. Just when Elma has resigned herself to never traveling in space again and it seems as though she will be left with nothing but her memories, she is approached with an opportunity that poses and agonizing choice: Travel in space again on a dangerous but critical mission, or stay with Nathaniel as he slowly withers away. Elma ends up making the choice that everyone, including the reader, knew she would make- pointing herself towards the future rather than the past, heading for new adventures rather than drowning in old memories. At times the interweaving of references to the Wizard of Oz is a bit too precious, but even so The Lady Astronaut of Mars is a sublime story that reminds us that even if we get old, we don't have to give up the things that fuel our dreams.

3. Of all of the stories nominated in this category, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang (actual finish 2^nd) has the most interesting science fiction idea. Or rather, the most interesting long-running idea that we treat as being uniquely a feature of the modern world: How technology changes not only the way we view the world, but us as well. The story is set in a world in which the use of technology similar to the Google glass is nearly ubiquitous and people use it to record the everyday events of their own lives. A new product is being introduced, titled Remem which will allow the user to quickly and easily locate portions of their "lifelog" and replay them. This leads to fears that such technology will allow people to effectively outsource their memories, with presumably bad effects. The main character is a journalist researching for a story about this new technology, and his efforts are interwoven with the story of Jijingi, a Tiv tribesman whose village has welcomed its first European resident, and with the newcomer, the technology of writing. In the first story, our journalist approaches his project with a set of assumptions about what Remem does and what it can be useful for until he runs into something he didn't expect: A recording that directly contradicts what he had thought to be one of his most important memories. In Jijingi's story, Jijingi first resists and then becomes fascinated with writing, eventually trying to use written records to settle a dispute over which side of an argument his tribe should take. Jijingi's efforts are rebuffed, as he is told that the written records might be accurate, but they don't comport with the memory that the tribe considers to be right - an interesting distinction between veracity and correctness. On the other hand, our journalist, faced with the records dredged up by Remem, has to confront the fact that the image of himself that he has constructed doesn't match the reality of his past, and doesn't match the image others around him have. The story delves into the dueling subjects of records and memory and shows how they conflict, and more importantly, how each are necessary to human existence.

4. No Award (actual finish 5^th): For reasons that will become apparent below, if none of the three stories listed above wins the Best Novelette award, then I don't think either of the two remaining nominees should.

5. There's nothing much wrong with The Exchange Officers by Brad R. Torgersen, (actual finish 4^th) but there's nothing particularly memorable or original about it either. The story takes place in a future where NASA has been shut down and the United States' interests in space are protected by a joint program run by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Warrant Officers Dan Jaraczuk and Mavy Stoddard, from the U.S. Army and Marine Corps respectively, are part of an exchange program placing officers from those services into the joint Navy and Air Force space program. The story bounces back and forth between showing Jaraczuk and Stoddard training to operate the robots that they will use to do orbital construction all the while marveling that these sorts of jobs were done by Ph.D.'s when NASA was putting Americans in space, and using those robots to fight off a Chinese attack on a partially completed American orbital installation. Eventually Jaraczuk figures that he and Stoddard cannot win the fight and puts the platform on a collision course with Earth so as to deny the Chinese their prize. The story is competent and reasonably good, but it doesn't have anything that makes it stand out from the dozens of other stories that feature in magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction or Analog Science Fiction and Fact every year. The story essentially amounts to standard issue military characters having standard issue conversations before dealing with a standard issue military situation in a standard issue manner. Torgersen executes the story well, but there really isn't anything here that is substantially different from what authors like Heinlein, Drake, and Pournelle were doing thirty or forty years ago, and they weren't getting nominated for awards for those stories. The upshot of this is that while The Exchange Officers is a decent enough story, it is not a Hugo-worthy one.

6. While The Exchange Officers is merely mediocre, Opera Vita Aeterna by Theodore Beale (writing as Vox Day) is truly awful (actual finish 6^th, behind "No Award"). Beale manages to combine writing that lurches between clumsy and over the top purple prose and turgid tedium with characters that are little more than bland stereotypes who inhabit about as generic a fantasy world as one can imagine. Not only that, the story is almost nonexistent, serving as little more than an excuse for Beale to fumble about trying to make what I'm sure he considers to be philosophical points. The primary problem is that even (or perhaps especially) when he is putting the words in the mouths of characters who are supposed to be on both sides of a theological debate, Beale can't manage to make the result anything other than incoherent mush. The story, such as it is, involves an elf who shows up at a pseudo-Catholic monastery in a generic fantasy world looking for religious enlightenment. Despite everyone being certain the elf has no soul, he decides to stick around and learn the scriptures of the pseudo-Catholic church by making an illuminated copy of them. After laboring for decades, the elf goes on a short trip to buy some more writing supplies and wine only to discover that the monks have been slaughtered by goblins in his absence. Things then jump forward centuries where a new initiate marvels at the anonymously made illuminated copy and the story ends. It is clear that the author thinks he is making insightful points throughout, but these range from laughably silly to merely uninteresting, in no small part because the characters are so one-dimensional that there's simply no reason to care. To sum up, this story is badly written, has a soap-bubble flimsy plot, and features characters who aspire to be uni-dimensional. This story should have never come within light years of the Hugo Awards, and it rests quite securely at the bottom of my ballot.

2013 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan

2015 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Day the World Turned Upside Down by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (translated by Lia Belt) (reviewed in 2015 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette)

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette

2014 Hugo Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story

I am a supporting member of Loncon 3, which is the location of this year's World Science Fiction Convention. Because of this, I was eligible to vote in this year's Hugo Awards. The nominees in the Best Short Story category were all good, and in my estimation, any one of them would be a worthy winner. That said, on my ballot, they appeared in this order:

1. If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky (actual finish 3^rd) is a brilliantly silly story that is full of sorrow. The story opens in a rather humorous manner, as the narrator imagines what life would be like if their lover was a dinosaur - specifically a human sized Tyrannosaurus Rex with sharp, menacing teeth and pointy claws. The story continues in a somewhat silly vein with the narrator imagining the creation of a second human-sized Tyrannosaur to be her love's mate, which then slowly moves into the bittersweet sadness of seeing someone you love but cannot have for your own be happy. And then the story hits you with the twist, and you realize that this isn't a silly or funny story at all, but is rather the narrator's desperate attempt to deal with grief and loss. It is this juxtaposition of the surreal and whimsical of imagination with the brutal harshness of reality that provides this story with its devastating and heart wrenching emotional punch, and does it with a stark simplicity that places it at the top of my ballot.

2. The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere by John Chu (actual finish 1^st) is a story that was only just barely edged out of first place by a hair's breadth. In it Chu imagines a world in which lying causes water to fall upon the speaker apparently in proportion to the magnitude of the lie. Someone who told a little white lie or stretched the truth a little might only make the air become somewhat noticeably humid, while someone who told a whopper would get drenched by bucketfuls of water. Conversely, telling the truth seems to dry out the surroundings. The main character living in this world is Matt, a gay Asian man with a serious fitness-trainer boyfriend named Gus. After trying to avoid letting Gus know of the intensity of his feelings for him, Matt is forced to come clean and Gus suggests marriage. This proves problematic as Matt has not told his rather traditional family that he is gay, but ends up deciding that his relationship with Gus is worth the pain of coming out to his parents. This difficult task is made more difficult by Matt's somewhat abusive sister Michele, who forbids him to come out to his parents and spends all of her time interposing herself between them and Matt. This stressful brother and sister dance continues until Michele overreaches and gets drenched, leading to his sister throwing him out of her house. While packing, Matt discovers that throughout the visit his parents have told Gus to call them using Chinese terms meaning "husband's father" and "husband's mother". Matt ends the story alone, but realizing that he is loved more than he realized. The story uses the inability of the characters to lie as a means at shearing away the lies, half-truths, and evasions think they need to use to hold a family together and rather optimistically suggests that unvarnished truth might work better, or at least make us happier. Wrapped inside the somewhat odd package of water drenching liars is the idea that people can be better than we think they are, and being forced to tell the truth can even surprise the speaker. As a side note, there are several untranslated Chinese characters interspersed throughout the story. At least I assume from context that they are Chinese characters, but as I don't speak Chinese, I can't be sure. In any event, the story gives no explicit guidance as to what they mean, but for the most part one can figure them out fairly easily from the context in which they are used.

3. Selkie Stories Are for Losers by Sofia Samatar (actual finish 2^nd) comes in third in my balloting, not because it isn't an excellent story - in some years this would have been a strong contender for the award - but because the first two entries are just so very very good. The central character is an unnamed young woman (although the way the story is written, it could be a young man) whose mother vanished years before - putting on a coat found in the attic, getting into the car, and driving away, abandoning her husband and child for another life without them. Now, the narrator works with her best friend Mona (who she is secretly in love with) as a waitress at local restaurant and dreams of moving to Colorado, because it is a land-locked state. Laced throughout the story are the narrator's recollection of other stories that feature selkies, each one recounting how someone fell in love with one of the creatures, managed to steal its seal coat to trap it for a time and hold on to it until the selkie recovered its coat and returned to the sea. In all of the stories the selkie simply doesn't care how much those it left behind ached for it, the sea called, and it returned. The story balances the fairy tale visions of women with seal coats with the adolescent narrator's pain and anger at being abandoned, drawing the obvious parallel, and inverting the usual selkie story's empathy for the trapped fae creature and instead highlighting the loss and rage of those left behind.

4. I am placing The Ink Readers of Doi Saket by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (actual finish 4^th) in the fourth slot on my ballot. This should not be taken as a denigration of the story, because it is quite good. In fact, in my opinion there is very little separating the first story in this category from the last. But someone has to be in fourth place, and this story gets the dubious distinction of being the worst story in an excellent field. The story is set in the small village of Doi Saket in Thailand on the banks of the Mae Ping River, the site of annual ritual in which people from upstream send their wishes floating down in paper boats called krathongs to be collected and, they hope, granted. The wishes, written on the krathongs are often smeared by their passage through the water, and monks would swim through the river divining from the inky streaks flowing through it what wishes were intended. The story has numerous character, but the central one is a young man named Tangmoo whose daily tasks include shoring up a listing tree that poses a danger to his parents' home. He becomes curious about where the wishes sent by air, in floating paper lanterns called khom loi, go when they head off to the west and follows them until he meets a Buddhist monk with whom he unknowingly trades some philosophical musings. Tangmoo then returns to his village and unwittingly finds out the greedy secret of the local priests - they steal the valuables sent with the krathongs - and they promptly drown him in the river. But his drowning sets off a chain of events that result in all of the previously named villagers getting their wishes granted after a fashion. The story is interesting, but it is so short and has so many characters that none of them other than Tangmoo are developed much beyond a single personality trait and their wish, which somewhat diminishes the impact of the final story developments. Even so, the way that the interrelationships between the various individuals weave together to fulfill their wishes is humorous, although in many cases darkly so.

2013 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Mono no Aware by Ken Liu

2015 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: No Award

2016 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer (reviewed in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015), 2016 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story, and 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

2013 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story: Immersion by Aliette de Bodard

2015 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story: Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon (reviewed in 2015 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story
List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Short Story

2014 Nebula Award Nominees

2014 Hugo Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

Musical Monday - Now I Am an Arsonist by Jon Coulton and Molly Lewis

I've been reading all of the Hugo nominated works over the last couple of weeks in preparation for voting for the awards, which I will probably do tomorrow or the next day. Today I have read through all of the finalists in the short story and novelette categories, and one thing that struck me is about all of the best stories that were nominated is just how melancholy in tone they are. And so I turn, as usual, to Jon Coulton for a song that reflects the same emotional tone, and pulled out his tale of a downward spiral titled Now I Am an Arsonist.

The original studio album version of this song featured Suzanne Vega as Coulton's duet partner, and she does a beautiful job of singing the part, but I think that Molly Lewis holds up the female half of the song better. I have seen several different interpretations of the lyrics of this piece ranging from a space craft plunging to a fiery end as it hurtles into the Earth's atmosphere, to a patient slowly dying in a hospital. No matter which interpretation is correct, and it may be that none of them or all of them are, the fact remains that the song is drenched in a glorious sadness that fits the best of this year's Hugo nominees perfectly.

Previous Musical Monday: Want You Gone by Jon Coulton

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Ballad of Eddie Prager by Paul & Storm

Jon Coulton     Molly Lewis     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop July 25th - July 31st: The Sum of the Faces, Edges, and Vertices of an Icosahedron Is 62. Roll a d20.

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Elizabeth of Silver's Reviews asks (via Billy): Do you like to read books with a theme such as Halloween, Christmas, etc?

As a general rule, no. I don't dislike holiday themed stories per se, its just that I have already read or seen a number of them such as Halloween Tree, White Christmas, and Connie Willis' almost obligatory annual Christmas-themed science fiction story and in my experience, once you have read stories like those, very few other stories do much more than simply tread through already well-trodden ground. Plus, there is always the danger that a Christmas story will be a cloying piece of maudlin treacle like Zanna's Gift, and that sort of story is simply painful to read.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: "61*" Is a Movie About Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Rule 63 States That for Every Fictional Character, There Is an Opposite Gender Counterpart

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - There Are 168 Hours in a Week

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - bibliophilekid and Loving the Language of Literacy.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What is your favorite television series that you can watch over and over again on Netflix?

I don't know if it is on Netflix, because I don't have Netflix, but whether it is or not, the show that I can watch over and over again is Babylon 5. Or as I call it, the greatest television show ever made. Combining stories focused on interpersonal relationships between well-developed and interesting characters with a sweeping space opera that features not one, not two, not three, but four interstellar wars, and a level of continuity that no show has been able to replicate since, Babylon 5 was simply the best use of televised fiction the world has ever seen. Sure, the fifth season was a little bit disappointing, but that's only because the previous seasons set the bar of quality so high for the show. I could watch this show over and over again. Actually, since I have the entire thing on DVD, I have watched this show over and over again.

Previous Follow Friday: The Galaxy IC-167 Appears to be Interacting With the Galaxy NGC-694

Subsequent Follow Friday: Giliese 169 Is a Star in the Constellation of Taurus

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Spellbound by Larry Correia

Short review: The Grimnoir Knights are framed for attempting to murder Franklin Delano Roosevelt and go on the run before rallying to attack the Office of the Coordinator of Information and fighting magical Godzilla through the streets of Washington D.C.

Haiku
A failed assassin
An OCI frame up job
A giant monster

Full review: The second book in the Grimnoir Chronicles, Spellbound aspires to be as mediocre as Hard Magic (read review), and in many ways it succeeds. The book has many extended fight scenes with detailed descriptions of the weaponry everyone uses and the resulting gory, but almost always nonfatal wounds that result. The book also has a mostly identical array of two-dimensional characters living in the same fairly bland setting as its predecessor all going through the motions of a fairly thin plot. Unfortunately, Spellbound suffers from a problem common to many second books in a series: What little plot there is serves merely as a placeholder, delaying the resolution of any of the larger plot points in the series while adding almost nothing at all.

The book opens with a short interlude that amounts to something of a flashback to a time contemporaneous with the Second Battle of the Somme where an unnamed young French girl finds herself the sole surviving member of her family after a mysterious stranger slaughters them and then hunts for her. She is saved by an equally mysterious set of rescuers, who suffer heavy losses at the hands of the original interloper. As usual for this series, not much useful information is provided here, the flashback to World War I serves as little more than an excuse to have an as yet unexplained fight scene so lacking in context that the reader really has no reason to care about the outcome before the story moves back to the "present" of the 1930s and focus on the "hero" Jake Sullivan and the rest of his Grimnoir buddies.

The story proper opens several months after the end of Hard Magic, with Francis Stuyvesant and Heinrich Koenig foiling a magical assassination attempt against President Franklin Roosevelt, and Faye being grilled by the elders of the Grimnoir Society concerning her claim to have killed the Chairman at the end of the previous book. Meanwhile, Sullivan has taken up haunting libraries trying to figure out the secrets of magic. His studies in the New York City Library are interrupted by an attractive woman who he rebuffs, but later comes across outside in an alleyway where she is being menaced by a gang of robbers. Sullivan reluctantly decides to step in to help the mysterious woman out of her predicament, at which point any pretense of his being anything resembling a heroic character is tossed out of the window. It becomes quickly and readily apparent that this gang of small time toughs pose no actual threat whatsoever to Sullivan, and yet he makes sure to go out of his way to maim them - breaking bones, damaging internal organs, and so on. It seems quite obvious that Correia thinks that this is what one should be justified in doing when confronted by criminals, but what it actually seems like is as if a fully grown and perfectly healthy adult were "threatened" by a couple of eight year old children, and the adult's reaction was to pull out a knife and repeatedly stab the kids. Through the main plot of the book, the government takes some rather heavy-handed steps to regulate those imbued with magic powers, and Sullivan's vicious and thuggish behavior in this scene gives good cause as to why. This viciousness on Sullivan's part is only compounded by the fact that Pemberly Hammer, the menaced woman, essentially set up her would-be assailants as patsies in order to figure out if Sullivan was the man she was looking for on behalf of the OCI.

The primary plot of Spellbound revolves around this shadowy organization which is given the name the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which is one of the most clumsily named government agencies ever to be resurrected for the purposes of fiction, and which is also known as the "OCI". Despite the fact that the OCI seems to have tentacles of influence that extend across the country, the agency seems to have only three categories of employees: (a) the Coordinator Doctor Bradford Carr, who is also somewhat oddly described as a Senator, (b) the mentally unbalanced summoner known as Crow who can possess demonic creatures, and (c) faceless mooks who appear to exist solely to stumble around ineffectually until the Grimnoir Knights can kill them. This doesn't seem to be much of a foundation upon which to build an agency intended to rival J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation. The apparently sparse nature of the OCI's personnel isn't the only thing that seems underdeveloped about the agency - essentially Correia appears to not really know how government agencies work, and doesn't seem to have bothered to inform himself. Carr is referred to at points as a Senator, but if he is heading up an executive agency, he can't be a Senator, he can only be a former Senator as members of the legislative branch cannot also serve in the executive branch. Early in the book Crow shows up at a police station where Francis is being held due to his proximity to the attempt on President Roosevelt's life, apparently flashing the badge of the then almost entirely unknown OCI to get in to interrogate the  playboy turned industrialist. But simply throwing out an unknown badge isn't going to give anyone access to a prisoner being held by state police, let alone allow you to have a solo interrogation of them. And so on. There are a myriad of implausible events related to the OCI that simply drain the book's credibility away. And if you are structuring the main plot of your book around the bureaucratic maneuverings of your mangled federal agency appearing almost a decade too early with a fabricated mission and nonsensical organization, these are details that you should at least try to get right, because if you don't, and Correia didn't, then your book becomes unintentionally humorous.

In any event, the plot of the book can be split into three broad categories. In one vein, the Knights of the Grimnoir society are on the run, accused as conspiring to kill the President and hounded throughout the book by the mysterious and nefarious OCI. There is a lot of motion in this plot, with Faye Vierra driving cross-country through Oklahoma with a collection of new characters who seem to have been mostly introduced so they could get killed: Ian, Whisper, and Bolander, who is the first black character of real note introduced into the story. Their travels are interrupted when Crow shows up and tries to capture them all, slowly assuming a massive demonic form before Bolander drives Crow off just before he seizes Faye and at the same time kills himself with one mighty blast of electrical energy that coincidentally cures the magical blight that had caused the dust bowl. Someone who was cynical might note that the singularly notable black character introduced into the story becomes an example of the "beneficent magical black man who saves the white folk" trope, and couple this realization with the rather pronounced "yellow peril" themes contained in the story to perhaps find the whole tenor of the book somewhat off-putting. It doesn't really help matters that the reader is given little reason to care about Bolander before he dies, as he is basically a genial black man who accepts segregation with equanimity and can throw lightning bolts. As this story progresses, it becomes clear that Whisper has an ulterior motive for traveling with Faye: She had been sent to determine if Faye had somehow become the new "Spellbound", and if so, to kill her.

In the second story line, Jake Sullivan is lured from New York to New Jersey into a secret government facility where he receives a phone call from a dead man on an invention ascribed to Edison. One has to wonder why Tokugawa insists on only talking to Sullivan; after all, Sullivan had almost no role in Tokugawa's death, and only survived his fight with Madi because Madi kept having Sullivan brought back from the brink of death so Madi could beat him up some more. No matter the reason, Tokugawa informs Sullivan that the "Pathfinder" of the predator hunting the power that creates magic is on its way and that Sullivan has to warn the Iron Guard of the Imperium of the impending threat. Of course, no sequence in Spellbound is complete without gun play, so immediately afterwards government agents try to kill Sullivan, equipped with some sort of device that nullifies Sullivan's magic, although that proves to be only a modest impediment to his escape. After evading the government officers, Sullivan links up with his friends from the first book Dan, Jane, and Lance, and they head over to the Imperial embassy to try to pass on the warning. Things go about as well as one would expect, and they end up lobbing mortar shells at the embassy after Toru, an out of favor Iron Guard and second in command at the embassy, gets orders from a man who appears to be Chairman Tokugawa to kill the ambassador and the Grimnoir Knights. Oddly, even after Toru is given all of the ambassador's memories and knows that the Chairman is an impostor, he kills the ambassador anyway, and then sneaks away to join the Grimnoir Knights to help them against the Pathfinder.

In the final story line, Francis has turned his considerable financial resources to locating the manufacturer of the anti-magic device that both he and Sullivan encountered earlier in the book, eventually purchasing a company run by Buckminster Fuller, who is such a powerful "cog" that he can literally see magical geometry. The device Fuller has created, which he calls a "Dymaxion nullifier" turns out to be essentially a hand-waved device that reveals that the magic system integral to the book is basically nonsensical. Francis attempts to get Fuller to explain how the device works, and Fuller responds with a couple of paragraphs of magic-sounding meaningless arcanobabble. And soon it becomes clear that Fuller isn't going to utter any statements that are anything other than arcanobabble because Correia is not only too lazy to do any research, he's too lazy to come up with anything but gobbledegook as a framework for the magical structure that his entire book series is built upon. This sort of careless hand-waving and confusion runs throughout the book. Somehow the "Spellbound" curse got transferred from its previous holder to Faye, even though she was on an entirely different continent and had no magical powers of her own, but the exact nature of how this happened is hand-waved. Carr has apparently figured out how to drastically enhance the magical potential of people with a magical pattern imprinted on their skin, but exactly how this was figured out, and how it works is hand-waved (not to mention that none of the Grimnoir seem to think that maybe they should look into this sort of enhancement). Industrialists are depicted as both being willing to sell out the United States for a handful of gold, and at the same time portrayed as a potentially staunch and patriotic bulwark against government tyranny. This sort of sloppy, hand-waving and confusion is endemic in the story, probably because for the most part, it is fairly obvious that to the extent there is either a plot or world-building in the book, it is just to have a frame upon which to hang the bone-crunching fight scenes complete with loving descriptions of firearms and detailed accounts of how the protagonists have killed those who oppose them.

All three story lines eventually merge together, climaxing in the Grimnoir Knights launching a night-time assault on the OCI headquarters on Mason Island that ultimately results in the destruction of the entire island and the unleashing of a massive Godzilla-sized demonic creature upon the city of Washington D.C. As an aside, Mason Island is, in our world, now named Theodore Roosevelt Island, and is the site of a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. Given the little regard Correia seems to hold for Franklin Roosevelt (and his apparent glee at casting FDR as a villainous figure), I suspect that the selection of Roosevelt Island as the site for the OCI headquarters was intended as something of an oblique insult directed at the Roosevelts as the island is magically annihilated as a result of the fracas. This also seems like a case in which Correia didn't bother to do much research, as there is a reason why no one has built an office building on the island - it is essentially little more than a frequently flooded pile of mud and sand anchored by some large rocks, and would likely be a disastrous site for any substantial construction. In any event, Sullivan and several other Grimnoir storm the island and kill off a bunch of faceless OCI guards before Crow shows up, his kind of magic being one of the few that is unaffected by the large Dymaxion the OCI uses to protect its installation. Meanwhile, Francis and Heinrich, having been captured and imprisoned earlier in the book by the OCI, manage to escape when Sullivan's team manages to knock out said Dymaxion, but not before Francis manages to inscribe a magical rune on the floor of his cell that seems to eat reality. Once the Dymaxion is knocked out, the Grimnoir gain the upper hand in the plodding and tedious fight: Capturing Coordinator Carr, seizing incriminating documents, freeing the faceless magically inclined people the OCI was holding as prisoners to experiment upon, and destroying the magical robot-men OCI had purchased as additional guardians.

But an overlong and incredibly detailed firefight involving an assault against a secret government agency and the destruction of an entire island in the Potomac River was apparently not dramatic enough for Correia's tastes, so Crow attempts to possess the most powerful demon he had ever encountered, and is mentally overwhelmed by the creature, who then proceeds to stomp around Washington D.C. like a giant Toho movie monster. This sequence adds almost nothing to the book, but does give the author opportunities to describe all of the weaponry futilely deployed against the monster. In the end, Whisper kills herself to provide additional power for Faye's abilities, telling Faye that the modest amount of additional power she was deriving from the hundreds of non-magically inclined people killed in the giant demon's rampages were simply not enough to give Faye the power needed to defeat the creature. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, as with Bolander, the reader really has no reason to care about Whisper's sacrifice, because through the book her character was developed no further than "the pretty French lady with fire powers", although the reader is given a taste of Whisper's apparent vanity in her suicide when she reconsiders shooting herself in the head and instead shoots herself in the chest so that she will look good at her funeral. Second, as far as it is explained, Faye, as the Spellbound, gets the magical power of any person who dies in proximity to her. But how is simply transferring Whisper's power to Faye supposed to improve the situation? Unless the Spellbound somehow multiplies the power (and if it does this, why not skip the step where people have to die), then this seems to be a zero-sum transaction that gains nothing. Finally, Faye's chosen solution - to transport a bomb intended by OCI to be used to kill the members of an anti-Active demonstration into the giant demon - seems like it would be less effective than the massive amount of military ordinance that had been deployed against the monster already.

In the end, the giant demon monster is blown up, but not before the reader must slog through pages and pages of tedious gun-porn in which the guns are, ironically, woefully ineffective at actually doing anything useful. Despite all of the sound and the fury in the book, the only developments of any real importance contained in its pages are Sullivan's conversation with Tokugawa, and the revelation that Faye is the Spellbound. And those are almost trivial footnotes in the book's story - despite Tokugawa's warning, almost no progress of any kind is made towards finding and stopping the Pathfinder, and not only is Faye only revealed to be the Spellbound near the end of the book, the reader isn't even told what the Spellbound is or what their significance is until a similarly late portion of the story. Everything else in Spellbound is little more than pointless wailing and gnashing of teeth that serves mostly as filler to justify having a middle book in the trilogy. As with Hard Magic, if following the exploits of a collection of characters who are less well-developed than the guns they carry through a paper thin plot set in a standard-issue fantasy world seems enticing to you, then Spellbound is a book you will enjoy. Otherwise, there's not much here worth bothering with.

Previous book in the series: Hard Magic
Subsequent book in the series: Warbound

Larry Correia     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Want You Gone by Jonathan Coulton

Is there an award for "Most Video Game Closing Credit Songs Written from the Perspective of a Homicidal Computer"? Because if there is, I think Jon Coulton has that category locked up forever. Actually, I think with two such songs - Still Alive from Portal and Want You Gone from Portal 2 - he may be his only competition.

This performance by Jon singing the song he wrote is a rare event - the original recording for the Portal 2 closing credits was done by Ellen McLain, the voice of GLaDOS - and Jon doesn't seem to perform it very often because he doesn't really sound like GLaDOS. On the other hand, even Ellen McLain's recording of this song from the Portal 2 end credits isn't really reproducible by her, because for the video game her voice was electronically distorted so that she would sound like the murderously insane computer. With that said, having heard both GLaDOS sing the song and Jon sing the song, I like Jon's version better, but then again, I favor Jon's version of a lot of songs that he sings.

Previous Musical Monday: Still Alive by Jon Coulton and Felicia Day

Subsequent Musical Monday: Now I Am an Arsonist by Jon Coulton and Molly Lewis

Jon Coulton     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop July 18th - July 24th: "61*" Is a Movie About Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Elizabeth of Silver's Reviews asks (via Billy): Do covers pull you in?

Not really. I'm sure they have some effect on me. I'm not foolish enough to think that the efforts of those who dedicate their careers to marketing (and let's be honest, book covers are a marketing tool) are incapable of having any effect on me. But for the most part, I don't spend much time looking at a book's cover, and don't really think much about them when making a decision as to whether or not to get a book. I suspect that the root cause of my indifference to book covers may have something to do with the terrible track record that science fiction and fantasy publishers have concerning putting truly terrible or embarrassing covers on books that are often much better on the inside than they are on the outside.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: The Babylonian Number System Was Base 60

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Sum of the Faces, Edges, and Vertices of an Icosahedron Is 62. Roll a d20.

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - The Galaxy IC-167 Appears to be Interacting With the Galaxy NGC-694

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Bookish Things & More and Good Choice Reading.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Share a funny YouTube video.

Because I'm either an overachiever or merely indecisive, I'm picking two funny videos. The first is an old clip from Saturday Night Live, back when it was working on the edge of what was acceptable and also consistently funny. The clip features the terribly underrated Garrett Morris and guest host Julian Bond as they discuss IQ tests and race.


The second clip is from the movie A Bridge Too Far, which is not a particularly funny movie, although it has this funny scene. The movie is based upon the Cornelius Ryan book about Operation Market Garden - Field Marshal Montgomery's attempt to secure a way into Germany during World War II by using massed paratrooper drops to secure the bridges through the Netherlands at Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and most importantly, Arnhem. The nearly nine thousand strong British First Airborne Division was to secure the bridge at Arnhem, but with a drop zone nearly eight miles away from the bridge, and unexpectedly heavy German resistance, only a single battalion under Colonel Frost (played in the movie by Anthony Hopkins) made it to the bridge, where they were confronted by the entire II SS-Panzerkorps, who repeatedly attacked in near overwhelming strength. In the scene, the German commander Field Marshal Model has sent an emissary to the British paratroopers to discuss terms of their surrender. The British response isn't exactly what he expected:


As a historical note: Market Garden failed. The rest of the First Airborne Division was unable to break through to aid Frost and his men, who suffered tremendous casualties while holding the bridge for four days. Eventually, Frost and the remnants of his command were taken prisoner by the Germans.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The USS Alcedo SP-166 Was the First American Vessel Lost in World War I

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: There Are 168 Hours in a Week

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Hard Magic by Larry Correia

Short review: Jake Sullivan is a magically augmented war hero ex-con private eye beholden to the Bureau of Investigation who shoots people a lot. Then he joins up with a magic secret society and shoots more people.

Haiku
Magic and mobsters
Scratch the mobsters, add in knights
Guns not characters

Full review: Hard Magic is a work that is stunning in its overall mediocrity. Taking the idea that magical powers began manifesting themselves among humans in the 1850s and setting his story in the Prohibition-era United States, Correia manages to produce a book that is full of action-packed magically augmented gunfights and is tediously boring at the same time. Full of cardboard cut-out tough guys, two-dimensional damsels in distress, and mustache twirling wooden villains (who often seem to be awful racial stereotypes to boot), Hard Magic desperately wishes it could be a cross between The Maltese Falcon, X-Men, and The Lord of the Rings, but ultimately it amounts to nothing more than a series of combat scenes linked together by a limp and unconvincing plot.

The central conceit of the story is that along about the middle of the Nineteenth century people began to manifest magical powers. Those who do have access to magic seem to have just one power - some people can control fire, others can possess and control animals, others gain superior strength, a few can heal injuries, and still others can teleport. Some people have very weak or limited powers, such a "torch", who can control fire, but only enough to create or douse a flame the size of a pocket lighter. People with usable magical powers are called "Actives", and pretty much just about every character of any note in the book is one.

Oddly, while the presence of magically augmented humans has wrought some political changes, it doesn't seem to have changed the world in many ways otherwise. World War I happened right on schedule with the only substantive changes being that there was a Second Battle of the Somme involving lots of magically inclined combatants and Berlin ends up turned into a walled city of undead creatures. But the Tunguska Event takes place, as does the Oklahoma dust bowl, although in Correia's alternate world both were caused by the use of magic. The book also makes clear that Prohibition is in effect in the U.S. and the Great Depression has laid the world economy low. J. Edgar Hoover is the head of the Bureau of Investigation, and the Bonus Army marched on Washington only to be driven out by U.S. Army troops serving under MacArthur. On the technological front, despite the existence of humans with preternatural affinity for invention called "cogs", the only real change that is notable seems to be the prevalence of dirigibles in the place of aircraft, serving both as passenger and freight transports as well as warships. It doesn't seem clear why the existence of magically augmented humans somehow makes wildly impractical aircraft like dirigibles and zeppelins into practical and ubiquitous ships of the sky, but nevertheless, they are and appear several times in the book.

Politically, the biggest change seems to be the expansion of power for Japan, which has taken over China, much of what in our world was the eastern Soviet Union, and pretty much all of southeast Asia. Though technically ruled by an Emperor, all actual power is held by the Chairman, a figure who is described as being so magically powerful that he is personally undefeatable and who is served by the fearsome "Iron Guard" of magically powerful warriors and the "Shadow Guard" of magically augmented ninjas. The Imperium is, according to various characters in the book, a fairly hellish place, with "Actives" powerful enough to be useful impressed into service, and those who aren't herded into camps to be experimented upon with the hope of discovering how to enhance the power of those with magical abilities. Everything about the Imperium is essentially a racist caricature with the worst kind of "yellow peril" overtones throughout.

Jake Sullivan, the hero of the story, is the most hard boiled of hard boiled private detectives and a magically augmented "gravity spiker" to boot. He is a hardened ex-con with a heart of gold, a decorated war hero of the Second Battle of the Somme sent to prison for saving a young black Active from a racist sheriff in the deep South who spent his time in Rockingham prison mulling over and experimenting with his magical gifts before being set free on a work release agreement where he signed up to help the Bureau of Investigation capture a set number of particularly dangerous magical criminals. His story begins with the attempted arrest of Delilah, an attractive "brute" that he has something of a romantic past with. But she's wanted by the BI, so Sullivan is there to help bring her in. The only trouble is that Delilah has some friends who also have magical powers, and the attempted arrest turns into a long fight sequence that eventually results in Sullivan getting tossed out of an airborne blimp.

And this sets the tone for the entire novel, which amounts to little more than detailed fight scene after fight scene interrupted by just enough plot to allow them to be strung together. Before long, one realizes that neither the plot or the characters matter much. What is important in the book is what kind of powers everyone has, and what kind of lovingly described firearm they carry. Unless they carry a sword, because even though the bullets fly fast and free in the fights, they are remarkably ineffective, with characters absorbing massive quantities of lead with limited ill-effects. After Sullivan's fight with Delilah and her allies, Sullivan turns to his underworld contacts to try to find out where she got her help from. His mobster "friends" then send people to try to kill Sullivan but they are interrupted by members of Delilah's group and a member of the Imperium's "Iron Guard", leading to a long fight sequence. We are introduced to the magical "traveler" Faye Vierra, and given just enough of her background before a group of men show up to kill her adoptive grandfather in another fight sequence. Faye goes to San Francisco and promptly finds herself in the crossfire of another fight scene. The bulk of the book is basically nothing more than preparations for a fight, a description of a fight, or the aftermath of a fight.

At the very least the fight sequences are reasonably creative, although for the most part they have a tendency to be overlong and tedious. But the writing in the book is somewhat weak and frequently repetitive - for example, when Faye Vierra first reaches San Francisco, there is an extended two page description as the country girl marvels at the sights of the railroad station and adjoining city street. This wouldn't be particularly noteworthy except that Corriea uses the word "astounding" to describe the sights no fewer than three times in these two pages. The series this book starts off is called the "Grimnoir Chronicles", clearly an attempt by Correia to evoke the "film noir" style of cinema, which is reasonable enough, but he feels compelled to clumsily try to put a lampshade upon his made-up word not once, but twice, and the end result is to highlight just how silly the neologism is. The whole book is pretty much written this way, with bland prose punctuated with adoring descriptions of weaponry and detailed accounts of the multiple grievous gunshot wounds suffered by the various combatants, although these wounds seem to almost never be fatal.

The plot, to the extent there is one among all of the superpowered characters futilely blasting away at one another, is the conflict between the secret "Grimnoir Society" and the Imperium as they contest ownership of Nicholas Tesla's "Geo-Tel", a MacGuffin that seems to be similar to a nuclear weapon in effect. Years before the events of Hard Magic, the Grimnoir Knights foiled an attempt to use the Geo-Tel to destroy New York City, and instead of destroying it, they broke it into several pieces and had members take them and scatter across the world and seclude themselves. Now, it turns out, someone is tracking them down, killing them, and claiming the parts. The Grimnoir Society quickly figures out that the Imperium is trying to assemble the weapon so they can take over the world, but before they can act, Madi the leader of the Iron Guards (who coincidentally just happens to be Sullivan's estranged brother) launches an attack upon their hideout in San Francisco before melting a chunk of the city with the local "Peace Ray" installation Imperium agents had taken over with a ninja assault. Madi kidnaps Jane, the Grimnoir Society's healer, and then heads off to deliver the Geo-Tel to the Chairman. After all of the Grimnoir are healed up, they set about chasing after Madi while Sullivan goes to find the last piece of the device. Then the huge "twist" in the story is revealed, which only works because the supposedly incredibly crafty and intelligent Chairman acts like an idiot. And of course there is a huge, extended, tedious gunfight and a showdown between Madi and Sullivan that only concludes in Sullivan's favor because both Madi and the Chairman act like idiots. Also, swords are apparently much more damaging to people than getting shot multiple times with rounds of either .30-06 or .45 caliber ammunition.

In the end, both Madi and the Chairman are vanquished, their plots for world domination foiled, and almost all of the heroes return home alive despite being repeatedly shot, stabbed, burned, blown up, and otherwise eviscerated. The lone exception is Delilah, who Sullivan establishes a romantic relationship with, and must therefore be sacrificed so that Sullivan can have some tragic character development. And this is really the root of the bland and flavorless mediocrity that pervades Hard Magic: To the extent that there is anything other than descriptions of people mangling one another, it is all worn out cliches and tired tropes. Even the premise - introducing magic into the modern world and creating an alternate history - isn't particularly original or even that interesting. Unless you are intrigued by nearly endless fight scenes and don't mind a paint-by-numbers plot in a standard-issue fantasy world populated by cardboard characters, there's really not much reason to bother reading this book.

Subsequent book in the series: Spellbound

Larry Correia     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Still Alive by Jon Coulton and Felicia Day

So, the redhead started playing through Portal again. Actually, she started playing through Portal 2 again, since our copy of Portal is currently on loan to a friend of ours. And, well, I got sucked into playing Portal 2 as well. So to commemorate this occasion, I'm featuring a song that doesn't appear in the game I'm playing, but rather in the previous game in the series. Of course this doesn't make sense, but I've been spending my time with Wheatley, so nonsensical things seem normal right now.

Also, even though she is singing the song, Felicia Day is not GLaDOS. At least not to my knowledge. I don't think she's killed hundreds of test subjects and then been murdered before being revived and placed in a potato. Probably. Maybe. I don't know. She is a little bit scary sometimes.

Previous Musical Monday: Really Big Chickens by The Doubleclicks

Subsequent Musical Monday: Want You Gone by Jon Coulton

Jon Coulton     Felicia Day     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop July 11th - July 17th: The Babylonian Number System Was Base 60

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Emma of Words and Peace asks (via Billy): Do you read books in translation? What are the last 3 books in translation you read?


I have read a fair amount of translated fiction, possibly due to spending several years of my youth outside of the United States. My earliest experience with reading translated fiction was probably when I read the classic science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem such as The Cyberiad and Solaris, although I may have read some of the Tintin books by Hergé before that.

No matter which was first, the most recent were, as far as I can tell, White Raven: The Sword of the Northern Ancestors (read review) by Irina Lopatina, Tintin and the Picaros (read review) by Hergé, and Flight 714 (read review) also by Hergé. I suppose that I should note that this wasn't the first time I had read the Tintin books, only the most recent.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: The Roman Emperor Nero Had His Mother Killed in 59 A.D.

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: "61*" Is a Movie About Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - The USS Alcedo SP-166 Was the First American Vessel Lost in World War I

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Whimsical Mama and Casual Readers.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: If you had a time machine (i.e. a TARDIS), where would you go?

I have two alternative answers to this question. My first choice would be to go to my own past and find myself, and tell me to make some different decisions. I think most people have made decisions that they look back upon and regret. I know that I certainly have. If given the opportunity, I would go back to the window of time between when I was about 16 and when I was about 24 and get my younger, stupider self to make some different decisions. Obviously, changing one's own history is fraught with hazards, the most obvious being that a different decision does not necessarily mean a better decision, so there's always the risk that I'd make things worse for myself, but I'd like to think that the wisdom gained over the past several years would help minimize that possibility.

However, since we are talking about a TARDIS, and the Doctor is always talking about how the laws of time prevent a time traveler from interfering in his own time line, going back to tell myself to do things differently might be an option that is prohibited. So, my alternative choice would be to travel to the future. How far? Far enough forward that humans have colonized the Moon and Mars. By the time I was four there had been six Lunar landings. Since then, humans haven't left low-Earth orbit. For a time when I was younger, our retraction to doodling about in low-Earth orbit with things like the Apollo-Soyuz missions and Skylab while we sent robotic missions to Mars, Venus, and the outer planets seemed like a temporary situation - possibly even a way to test out technologies that would lead to manned deep space exploration in the future. Even the Space Shuttle was originally billed in part as a way to get material into space near Earth to support long-range manned missions or attempts to place a permanent presence on the Moon.

But that's all gone now. The U.S. doesn't even have the ability to put humans into orbit any more. The Russians have converted their space program to a mercenary operation, launching space tourists as often as they send working astronauts into orbit. And this situation doesn't look like it will get better any time soon. Sure, NASA says they are working on a new orbital booster system, but every political cycle politicians compete to see who can most quickly toss science funding, and specifically space exploration funding, over the side. I have no doubt that most of the employees at NASA are toiling in good faith to put humans back into space and would like more than anyone for us to send a manned mission to Mars, but the depressing reality is that our space exploration capabilities have been steadily eroding over the last couple of decades, and there doesn't seem to be the political will to reverse this trend. So I would go far enough into the future that humanity had overcome this malaise and once again had the will to reach for other worlds.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Blériot-165 Was a Biplane Airliner

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Galaxy IC-167 Appears to be Interacting With the Galaxy NGC-694

Follow Friday     Home

2014 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Location: World Fantasy Convention, Washington, D.C.

Comments: I really should try to go to the World Fantasy Convention this year. After all, it is going to be held in Washington D.C., less than twenty-five miles away from where I live, so I wouldn't have to incur travel or hotel costs to attend. And yet, even though the convention is basically being held in my backyard, it is still too expensive for me to be able to justify the cost as it would still set me back $400 just to get me and the redhead in the door. Further, the convention is at its "maximum" membership of 950 attendees, and will only be accepting applications to be placed on the wait list starting in about a week or two. I have to wonder how healthy it is to have one of the flagship conventions of the genre be both so very overpriced and limited in attendance. Obviously, as they have all the attendees they want, the World Fantasy Convention is not hurting for money, and are obviously under no obligation to listen to me, but by comparison the 2013 CapClave had nearly 800 attendees, cost about a quarter as much to attend, and managed to have George R.R. Martin as their guest of honor. If the only thing your convention really has going for it over a local con is an inflated price tag, then maybe you need to rethink whether you actually are worthy of being called a "World" convention.

Best Novel

Winner:
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

Other Nominees:
Dust Devil on a Quiet Street by Richard Bowes
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
The Land Across by Gene Wolfe
A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Best Novella

Winner:

Wakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages

Other Nominees:
Black Helicopters by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Burning Girls by Veronica Schanoes
Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
The Sun and I by K.J. Parker

Best Short Fiction

Winner:
The Prayer of Ninety Cats by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Other Nominees:
Effigy Nights by Yoon Ha Lee

If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

The Ink Readers of Doi Saket by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

Selkie Stories Are for Losers by Sofia Samatar (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

Best Anthology

Winner:

Dangerous Women edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Other Nominees:
End of the Road: An Anthology of Original Short Stories edited by Jonathan Oliver
Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy edited by Jonathan Strahan

Flotsam Fantastique: The Souvenir Book of World Fantasy Convention 2013 edited by Stephen Jones

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths edited by Kate Bernheimer

Best Collection

Winner:

The Ape's Wife and Other Stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Other Nominees:
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories by Laird Barron
Flowers of the Sea by Reggie Oliver

How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future by Rachel Swirsky

North American Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud

Lifetime Achievement

Winner:
Ellen Datlow
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Other Nominees:
None

Best Artist

Winner:
Charles Vess

Other Nominees:
Galen Dara
Zelda Devon
Julie Dillon
John Picacio

Special Award, Professional

Winner:
(tie) Irene Gallo
(tie) William K. Schafer

Other Nominees:
John Joseph Adams
Ginjer Buchanan
Jeff VanderMeer and Jeremy Zerfoss

Special Award, Non-Professional

Winner:
Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, and Sean Wallace

Other Nominees:
Scott H. Andrews
Marc Aplin
Leslie Howle
Jerad Walters

Go to previous year's nominees: 2013
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2015

Book Award Reviews     Home

Musical Monday - Really Big Chickens by The Doubleclicks

Starting with Clever Girl, their ode to velociraptors, the Doubleclicks have been the go-to band for songs about dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures. After all, they have both a song and an entire album titled Dimetrodon, although to be precise, dimetrodons were not dinosaurs, but rather synapsids and died out about forty million years before dinosaurs appeared. Dimetrodons were also "mammal-like" reptiles, although they have no currently living descendants. The Doubleclicks also released a reworked version of their song Godzilla on their Dimetrodon album, and Godzilla is, depending on which origin story you're using, some sort of mutated dinosaur-like creature. Who doesn't look like any actual dinosaur that ever exited. And breathes atomic fire. But those are just details.

But they have outdone themselves with Really Big Chickens, a song about all dinosaurs, not just one kind. And they are right, dinosaurs are just really big chickens. Or since dinosaurs came first, should chickens be regarded as just being really small dinosaurs? I don't know. Are dinosaurs and chickens subject to the commutative property? There's some pretty smart stuff in the song about growing up too.

Previous Musical Monday: Gypsy by Fleetwood Mac

Subsequent Musical Monday: Still Alive by Jon Coulton and Felicia Day

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Follow Friday - The Blériot-165 Was a Biplane Airliner

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - A Writer's Dark Corner and Natalie Hearts Books.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What are some of your favorite picture books – either current ones or ones from your childhood?

I loved the Harry the dog books when I was a kid, and still do. My first dog was named Harry, after the dog who starred in this series of books, even though he didn't look anything like him. My dog harry turned out to be just as mischievous and just as lovable as the fictional dog.


I am also a big fan of Richard Scarry's books, with their anthropomorphic animal characters, cluttered panoramic scenes, and helpful labels on almost everything. And Lowly Worm, Officer Flossie, and Goldbug.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Romans Abandoned the Antonine Wall in 164 A.D.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The USS Alcedo SP-166 Was the First American Vessel Lost in World War I

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