Review - The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman

Short review: A collection of short tales involving Dream, Death, and the other Endless. One lesson - making deals with the Death is risky.

Haiku
Endless Morpheus
Time has no meaning for him
Inverted stories

Full review: Fables and Reflections is the sixth installment in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and is made up of nine stories that are at best loosely connected to one another, but which serve primarily to comment on the nature of what dreams are and what they mean, as well as emphasizing just how alien and inhuman Dream truly is. One exception is the three part story Song of Orpheus that retells the mythic fable of Orpheus and Eurydice, but roots it in the unique reality of the Sandman universe, interjecting Dream, Death, and the other Endless into the narrative, filling in grey areas from the original story. Another exception is the tetrology of "emperor" stories, each telling the tale of a different ruler, and which speak to how dreams both create and limit the power of those who hold power.

The first story in the volume is Fear of Falling, a brief tale about how dreams can limit us or force us to reach greater heights. Although this story is quite short, it serves as a thematic framework for the stories that follow, showing the palpable power of human dreams to shape our lives. In large part, this book serves to answer the question of why one would focus on Dream, rather than some of the more obvious Endless such as Death, Desire, or Destiny. The answer is made clear in these tales: Because the dominion of Dream is what makes humans what they are, and what makes humans aspire to be more than that.

The hidden power of Fables and Reflections lies in the thematically linked stories concerning how dreams and ambition connect to those who would rule over others. The first three of these stories walk backwards through time, from nineteenth century United States to eighteenth century France and then to first century Rome, before reversing their flow and moving ahead to eighth century Baghdad. This jumping about in time, and at times, telling a story backwards, is a means by which it seems that Gaiman emphasizes the timelessness of Dream. As one of the Endless, Dream is immortal, and as a result, time has little meaning to him, a meaninglessness that is reflected in the story structure. But in addition to this overarching structural message, each story contains it own commentary on the nature of political power.

Arranged in two thematically linked diptychs, the first pairing Three Septembers and January with Thermidor, showing opposing scales of power and morality. Three Septembers centers on Joshua Abraham Norton, an actual historical figure who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Gaiman's story places Norton at the center of a challenge issued by Despair to Dream. Norton had once been wealthy, but lost all of his fortune speculating in Peruvian rice, whereupon the story imagines that he contemplated giving in to despair and committing suicide. Despair needles Dream, suggesting that Dream is powerless to save Norton from her embrace, so Dream gives Norton a crazy and insane dream. Norton obviously has no actual power as the self-proclaimed emperor of the United States, but his version of the world is a better place than the one he actually lives in. He helps Sam Clemens when he has writer's clock. He is kind to Chinese immigrants. He is dignified with tourists, although he does object to the word "Frisco" being used as a designation for his beloved "San Francisco". As an encounter with Pain sent as an emissary from Desire shows, Norton is content with what he has, and as a result, his "proclamations" and actions are inherently unselfish. He wants nothing for himself, because he is satisfied with his own dream, so he uses his "authority" to try to shape the world in a better direction. Dreams, the story says, can save our lives and make us want the world to be a better place, even if they might make us insane as well.

Emperor Norton's story is sharp contrasted by the tale told in Thermidor, set in revolutionary France when the country was under the sway of the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre's vision of a new society. Dream contracts with Johanna Constantine, asking her to recover an object for him. Soon she is in France, transporting a severed head in a bag. An encounter with a couple of loutish soldiers leads to her capture and imprisonment in the Luxembourg, where it becomes clear just how much Robespierre is willing to sacrifice in the name of the revolution. While questioning Johanna on her way to and in prison, St. Just and Robespierre off-handedly reveal how inherently unfair the system has become, and how it has consumed even its most ardent adherents. Thomas Paine makes a brief appearance to be mocked by St. Just and to condemn how the revolution has twisted and mutilated his words. Presaging the story in The Song of Orpheus, Johanna's quarry is the severed head of Orpheus, an artifact of myth and legend that Robespierre wants to destroy so as to better enable him to usher in a new age based entirely on reason. But reason, in this case, is a world without history and without dreams. In contrast to Norton, who has no power and desires nothing more for himself, Robespierre has almost unlimited power and craves nothing but to acquire more. In Norton's dreams, it seems that power is to be used to serve humanity, while in Robespierre's vision, humans are subordinated to the dictates of power. Norton's empire is built on nothing but dreams, while Robespierre wants to extinguish dreaming altogether.

The second set of political stories consist of August set in imperial Rome during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Ramadan set in Baghdad during the suzerainty of and Caliph Haroun al-Rashid. The two tales illustrate the differences between a love for a time and a city, and a hatred for them. In August, the Imperator hires a dwarf named Lycias to help him impersonate a beggar, as he does once a year. The story is mostly a dialogue between Augustus and Lycias, or rather, an interview, as Lycias peppers the off-duty Imperator with questions and Augustus opines upon the nature of power, the gods, history, and the future of the city. It seems that Augustus had found two sets of prophecies, one heralding perpetual glory for Rome, while the other predicting its decay and destruction. Augustus selected the future he wished to come to pass, and had all references to the other destroyed. The story only features Dream for a brief portion of its length, and then only as a guest in Augustus' mind to tell him how to deal with his nightmares. And so Augustus takes one day a year off to pose as a beggar in order to hide from the gods, including divine Julius who Augustus so despises, and make his plans out of their sight. Augustus loathes Rome even as he builds temples to beautify it, because he loathes its architect. The story shows how dreams of vengeance can consume an entire civilization and bring it to its knees, causing its glory to wither and fade to dust.

On the flip side is the story Ramadan, featuring a ruler who loves his city more than anything else. Caliph Haroun al-Rashid also disguises himself to walk the streets of his city, not to plot its demise, but rather to revel in its glories. Like Augustus did, al-Rashid realizes that no city can last forever. Unlike Augustus, al-Rashid fears this coming to pass, because, unlike Augustus, al-Rashid loves Baghdad. So, in the style of Arabian Nights, al-Rashid takes a special key and walks through magical doors leading to and through vaults filled with sometimes fabulous and sometimes oddly mundane treasures until he finds a chip he hopes he can use to bargain in exchange for everlasting fame for his city. After drawing Dream's attention, al-Rashid first tries to blackmail the Endless into doing what he wants, and after that fails, they go to the city market and haggle. al-Rashid realizes that Baghdad is at its height, and worries that it will fade from memory and become nothing but another forgotten relic. Instead, he wants Dream to take the city, or at least its essence, into his realm so that it will remain the stuff of nighttime fantasies forever.

The centerpiece of Fables and Reflections is the story Song of Orpheus, told in three broad strokes, with a sad little epilogue. In the first section we meet Orpheus on his wedding day as he is about to be married to his love Eurydice. Orpheus makes the mistake of bringing his friend the satyr Aristaeus to the nuptials, but before the tragedy plays out we are introduced to Orpheus' aunts and uncles the Endless: Depair, Delerium, Desire, Destruction, Destiny, and of course Death, although the story uses their Greek names. Orpheus, in Gaiman's telling, is Dream's son by the muse Calliope, a shift from mythology to fit the story into the Sandman series. The first hint that there will be trouble at the celebration is when Death reveals that she is not merely in attendance as a guest, but also because she has work to do there. Aristaeus, overcome by drink, attempts to rape Eurydice, and as she flees she is bitten by a viper and dies. The second portion of the story details Orpheus' famous attempt to recover his wife from Hades. He first begs his father to help him, but when Dream refuses, stating that all things come to an end, Orpheus disowns his heritage and rejects Dream as his father. In a development that perhaps Orpheus should have thought more about, his uncle Destruction offers to help him visit his aunt Death to bargain with her for the return of Eurydice. Death makes a bargain with him to allow him to travel to Hades and return alive: She agrees never to take him to the underworld, a bargain that has dire consequences, as all bargains with Death seem to. Following the classic myth, Orpheus travels to the Underworld, charms Hades into allowing Eurydice to leave, and then allows his doubts to condemn her to death again. In the final chapter, Calliope visits her disconsolate son where we learn that he has tried to kill himself in his despair, but because Death had promised never to come for him, he could not. Orpheus is then set upon by the Bacchante and his flesh consumed, leaving only his still living head for Dream to find in the epilogue. The story closes with a conversation between the two that shows just how much Dream cares, but also how cold and inhuman he truly is. But the reader already knew how Orpheus ended up, having been shown his animated severed head earlier in the book, and yet later in time. And we've also seen Calliope before in the series and later in time as well, wrecked by her relationship with Dream. This is the inside-out storytelling that runs through the series, many times showing the effects prior to showing the cause, demonstrating the timelessness of the Endless via the disjointed nature of the narrative.

The remaining three stories range from pure fantasy to merely the intersection of history and fantasy. The Hunt is framed as a story told by a grandfather from the old country to his granddaughter, raised in the new world of television and music videos. While his granddaughter interrupts and complains, he recounts how a young boy named Vassily, one of "the people", encounters a gypsy woman in the forest and acquires a locket with the picture of the Duke's youngest daughter from her. He falls in love with the image of the Duke's daughter, and after he later finds the gypsy woman dead in the forest, he takes her pack of treasures, that she said included the heart of Koschei the Deathless, the cloak of night, and the Drum Inescapable, as well as a book and sets out to win the girl for himself. His journey takes him on a few adventures, but most importantly he crosses paths with a woman of the people and also with Dream's servant Lucien who wants to acquire the book he carries. Vassily demands the girl as his price for the book, which Dream eventually consents to, but once he finds her, Vassily realizes that a woman being the object of your dreams is insufficient, her dreams must also match your dreams.

Soft Places sees the return of Fiddler's Green, a personified place of dreams that a very young Marco Polo meets while he is lost in the Desert of Lop. Also joining them is Rustichello, the man who far in Polo's future, will help cowrite Polo's autobiography while they are sharing a Genoese cell. This juxtaposition of two people from different times continues with the book's theme that the dream world is not bound by ordinary notions of time and space. In the end, Polo is saved by an act of generosity towards a freshly released Dream, which is yet another subtle indication that the ordinary strictures of time and space don't apply to Dream as it was established in Preludes and Nocturnes that the Sandman was released from his captivity in the twentieth century and yet here he is in the dream of a fourteenth century traveler suggesting that he is weak from imprisonment. As the title suggests whole story occurs within one of the "soft places" of the world, where the realms of dream and reality intersect and where history and fantasy interact.

The remaining story, A Parliament of Rooks, is more of a collection of shorter stories than it is a single story. Daniel Hall, the infant son of the previously introduced Hippolyta Hall, wanders into the dream realm and runs across Matthew the Raven and then Eve before being taken to visit with Abel. While Abel is busy getting everyone tea (and getting Matthew a decomposing rat), Cain shows up and everyone begins to tell stories, or in Cain's case, a mystery. The stories told by Eve and Abel are self-referential - Eve's story is about Adam's three wives and Abel's is about how he and Cain came to live in the dream realm (and features Dream and death as children), while Cain's story concerns a gathering of rooks and seems to explain why it is called a "parliament". The mundane nature of Cain's story contrasts with the mythic grandeur of Eve and Abel's, but because it presents such a tantalizing secret it still resonates, at least until Abel spills the beans, leading to Cain's somewhat predictably murderous response. The tale illustrates the cyclical nature of dreaming, these figures in the dream realm are the stuff of legend, both the source of dreams, and then as the subject of dreams. Myths are created by our dreams, but then they influence our dreams, changing the myths, resulting in a perpetual cycle of feedback.

The whole of Fables and Reflections feels like an interlude between larger stories. Each of the short tales says something, whether it is commentary on the nature of political power or discussions of the intersection between family and legend. Given that this is a collection of Sandman stories it should be entirely unsurprising that they focus on how our dreams shape us, and in turn, how we shape the world as a result. And although this volume is more or less just a link between larger stories, what it says about the connection between our myths, or dreams, and our reality. But Gaiman also shows how dreams don't follow our normal understanding of time, giving us glimpses of myths completed before he actually tells the stories of those myths. By frequently telling the stories out of temporal order, and by ignoring the mundane constraints of distance, Gaiman gives the entire series of stories a jumbled dream-like quality that intensifies the moody and atmospheric effect of the stories themselves and the characters who inhabit them resulting in a volume unified by its commentary on the nature of dreams themselves.

Previous book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You
Subsequent book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

Neil Gaiman     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Lasers and Feelings by The Doubleclicks

I'm going to Indianapolis on Wednesday to attend Gen Con. While there, I will be going to two concerts as part of the Con, one to see Five Year Mission perform their Star Trek themed repertoire of songs, and another to see my favorite geeky girl band the Doubleclicks perform their songs celebrating Dungeons & Dragons, apostrophes, velociraptors, and falling in love over modern poetry readings and playing Magic: The Gathering. I love both bands for their wonderful nerdy music, but on the whole, I think I may be looking forward to seeing the Doubleclicks just a tiny bit more.

Lasers and Feelings, like Nothing to Prove, is from the Doubleclicks' latest CD and serves as its title track. The song tells the story of an ordinary person in love with an evil supervillain. In some ways, the story in this song is a somewhat twisted love tale that is more or less the flip side of the twisted love tale told in Jonathan Coulton's Skullcrusher Mountain. As with all of the songs by Angela and Aubrey, Lasers and Feelings is a joyous celebration of nerdity, and the video is a perfect match, especially at the end when it turns out that the terrible villain is actually Angela.

Previous Musical Monday: Fireflies by Owl City

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Mystery's Gone by The Doubleclicks

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Follow Friday - Port 119 Is the Default for Unencrypted NNTP Connections

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 - Wonderland's Reader and Girl in the Woods Reviews.
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: Back to school. Create a reading list for the imaginary English Lit class you’ll be teaching this semester.


I'm going to teach a class that consists of nothing but the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin. Why? Because there needs to be a class that does this. And because I can't think of a better way to spend a semester than teaching the works of one of the best authors of the twentieth century. There are some people (mostly on the troglodyte end of the spectrum) who think that women cannot write good science fiction, and many more people who think that science fiction can't be meaningful literature. Le Guin proves both of those contentions wrong. I have never read a Le Guin story that disappointed me, although I have read many that challenged me. Her stories talk about gender, identity, what it means to be civilized, what it means to be wealthy, what it means to be poor, what it means to be happy, and so many more topics. The course would start with The Dispossessed, move on to the first four books of the Earthsea series, and then tackle Four Ways to Forgiveness, The Compass Rose, The Word for World Is Forest, and The Telling before finishing the semester off with The Lathe of Heaven and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Public Law 111-118 Was the Department of Defense Appropriation for Fiscal Year 2010

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Teutonic Tribes That Invaded England After the Romans Left Referred to the Number 120 as the Long Hundred

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Review - The Kicker of St. John's Wood by Gary Wolf

Short review: In a future United States political correctness runs amuck, the U.N. has teeth, and a band of football players try to save the country.

Haiku
New NFL rules
The U.N. rules the U.S.
Wild-eyed diatribe

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: The Kicker of St. John's Wood is a political diatribe that bashes the reader over the head with the wrongness of political correctness, the evils of the U.N., and the shadowy shibboleth of the evil liberal conspiracy against the Bill of Rights. While the book makes some decent points, it would have been more effective if it had not been so heavy handed with what little message contained in the story and not been so dominated by the almost unhinged paranoid hysterics those points were packaged with.

And the message is delivered with punishing blows: The wrongheaded U.S. President is named Malpomme (literally "bad apple" in French). The evil U.N. agency that is driving the encroachment on liberties is abbreviated UNSAINE. The characters are generally caricatures or straw-men: Jayesh (a British born place kicker of Indian ancestry) is interviewed by a reporter in the initial chapter who turns her story about him into a hack job about how he is denying his third world heritage. His girlfriend Ashley is writing a dissertation about how football is run by patriarchal Christian fundamentalists, but is convinced to give up her feminist views (and Ph.D. dissertation) by Jayesh's arguments and, of course, a healthy dose of his manly penis.

The central plot device of the early portion of the story is the NFL's mandate to have a female player hold for Jayesh in the Super Bowl and the announced mandate to make all professional sports leagues 50% female in five years. The woman turns out to be nice and not very athletic, and of course when she gets into the game she is horribly injured. Why a nonathletic woman is chosen to be the first female NFL player is left as something of a mystery - reality demonstrates that there are plenty of strong, fast, and tough female athletes in the world, many of whom would fit in perfectly well on a football field. But since having such a player show up would ruin Wolf's wild-eyed polemic, we get a woman who would rather be doing her nails thrust into the action. The game was also supposed to be the site of a new announcement from the President and the U.N., but that is disrupted by Sam, a secondary character, who is immediately arrested on charges of "aggravated racism" and deported to France.

Jayesh and another player (the afro wearing Thelonius) try to help, are drawn into political shenanigans and thwarted at every turn by evil and seemingly ubiquitous U.N. agents, until the President announces (in effect) that the U.S. Constitution will be suspended and elections will be conducted in accord with the U.N.'s mandates. Things get worse and worse, with the two players and their girlfriends finally holing up with their coach in his desert ranch until finally a civil war breaks out.

The political commentary is very heavy handed, which makes the insightful points in the narrative less than convincing. The book portrays the U.N. as some sort of super efficient and powerful organization, able to intimidate governments and suppress news it doesn't like. The least believable element of the story was that news outlets served as gatekeepers for information to such an extent that if no one picked up a story it would be forgotten - that's an element that might fly in a book published fifteen or twenty years ago, but now the internet is simply too pervasive, and not accounting for it makes the story just not believable. The news about Sam's railroading would burn up the blogosphere whether or not any actual news organization ran the story. One must assume the author is either not aware of the internet (which seems unlikely), or simply not playing fair with his narrative.

Some of the ideas contained in the book are mildly interesting - the dangers of political correctness run rampant, the sometimes unwise nature of racial and ethnic quotas and so on. But the portrayal of these elements is so over the top that any reader who is not already on the lunatic fringe is likely to collapses into laughter resulting from the unintended comedy. The book is also intentionally humorous at times, and does a decent job at portraying the ineffectiveness of the U.N. at aiding third world nations, although that kind of undercuts the assertion that the U.N. is somehow an incredibly effective organization that has agents everywhere and controls the fates of industrialized nations. On the other hand, consistency is rarely a hallmark of political diatribes from the lunatic fringe, so this sort of internal contradiction is not surprising. Annoyingly, the enemy is mostly faceless and apparently ubiquitous (although Wolf does try to set up one U.N. official as the locus of evil, but he's too much of a "behind the scenes" operator for the reader to fix upon). In the end the text simply attempts to brow beat the reader into agreement, and the harangue wears thin.

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Review - Alternating Worlds by Gary Wolf

Short review: The war between the cultured and the hoi polloi is fierce, and the chosen battleground is artwork and human limbs.

Haiku
Extractionism
Replicating cultures
Amputating limbs

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Alternating Worlds is a science fiction novel with a point. Not a very good point, or a point that is particularly well made, but a point nonetheless. Subtler than The Kicker of St. John's Wood, and a better book, this book sets culture against cultural relativism in a fairly effective and entertaining manner.

The story follows Rohde, an art dealer and expert on the "extractionism" style, starting with his dealings with the isolated and bizarre world of Gladius, the cultural destruction of his home world, and his ultimate attempts to strike back at his enemies. Gladius, it turns out, practices the "alternance cycle" in which all old cultural periods are aped by the populace in order to uncover the ultimate truth - that all truths are equally valid. The trouble is, each cultural period must be replicated perfectly, and in accordance with the calculations of the "Alternance Committee", even if that requires individuals to be maimed, disfigured, diseased, or killed. All individuality is subordinated to the alternance cycle.

As long as they remain on Gladius, the Alternance Committee is odd and annoying. Unfortunately, they don't stay there. First by military conquest, and then by cultural conquest, the Gladians overwhelm their enemies, apparently because they believe the entire region of known space must be made to follow the alternance cycle for it to work. The idea of a cultural takeover is interesting, and the battlefields of the book are the museums, symphonies, and publishing houses of Cyrus, Rohde's home world. The cultural icons of his world are progressively undermined by a populist movement that smears and denigrates the accomplishments of genius in favor of extolling the "unsung heroes" who really did the work - the drunk carpenters who supposedly scribbled the foundations of extractionism, the brutish laborer who was abused by Schulmann, and so on.

The book gets off to a slightly rocky start, with some fairly clunky passages in the first few chapters, but the writing improves as the story gets going. The main problem with the story is that the attraction of the alternance cycle is not really explained. Exactly why the populace of Cyrus jumps into the "denigrate the artist" mode is simply taken as a given, with half-hearted explanations - even those who are supposedly cultured are swept up by the movement to equate industrious but ordinary labor with the products of genius, and to tag the creative geniuses who made those products as deviant and perverted. The novel is clearly intended as a political critique of modern liberalism, but the alternance cycle is so unlike anything that appears in reality that the political commentary falls flat on its face and simply makes the author look just a little bit ridiculous.

As a result, the story is somewhat one-sided, presenting at best a caricature of crticism. We are clearly meant to side with Rohde in his attempts to defend his culture against the relativism espoused by the Gladians, and we do, but there is no real reason given for those lining up opposite Rohde to do so. As a result, the dénouement (which narrowly, and thankfully, avoids a deus ex machina) is fairly obvious - so obvious that one ends up wondering why Rohde and his allies (supposedly the intellectual elite of their planet) didn't think of it sooner.

In addition, like The Kicker of St. John's Wood, the opposition simply comes off as too all pervasive and stifling - every time the protagonist does something, he is foiled, to the extent that for much of the book, he simply gives up. Unstoppable conspiracies may sound interesting, but it turns out, they really are not. Although the position the novel takes on the issue of cultural relativism is one that I sympathize with to a modest extent, and the idea of a war fought by means of cultural annihilation is interesting, the lack of any real explanation of the attraction the protagonist's opposition has for their position prevents this book from rising above the ordinary.

Gary Wolf     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - The SnarfQuest Graphic Novel by Larry Elmore

Short review: Snarf sets out to try to gain riches and fame. He has a collection of adventures and finds both.

Haiku
The zeetvah king dies
Snarf heads for gold and glory
Befriends a robot

Full review: From 1983 to 1989, Larry Elmore wrote a comic strip of Dragon magazine called SnarfQuest, the tale of Snarf, a hapless zeetvah who sets out to finds riches and glory in the name of laziness. Eventually, the demands of producing a completed strip every month, when coupled with his other professional obligations to paint book covers and other artwork, became too much for Elmore to keep up with, and so he stopped drawing and writing the strip in the middle of an ongoing story line. In 2002, Elmore compiled all the existing strips together, and produced The SnarfQuest Graphic Novel, giving fans of the original comic strip the opportunity to read all of Snarf's adventures yet again.

Aside from a very brief one-page introduction by Elmore giving a little bit of background about the original run of the strip, the contents of the book more or less just reprint the original strips, complete with teaser boxes at the end of each "issue". The strips are presented in the same black and white format as they were in the original run, and contain no new panels or other content. If you have a sufficiently large pile of old Dragon magazines that you have the original print run of the strip and you are happy reading them in that format, then this volume is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you missed an issue or two, or you never read the original run, or you just like having all of your SnarfQuest in one handy book, then this is a great compilation to have on your bookshelf.

The story itself is just as funny as ever. Snarf is a zeetvah, a snout-nosed creature with huge bat wing-like ears. At the opening of the book, Snarf's tribe's leader has died, and per their traditions, the zeetvahs will select as their new leader the zeetvah who manages to collect the most treasure and performs the most heroic deeds in the following year. Snarf reasons that if he just works hard for one year and becomes king he will be able to kick back and cruise for the rest of his life. With this in mind, our hero sets out to make himself a fortune in the outside world, resulting in a collection of absurd but always hilarious adventures as the fundamentally inept, cowardly, and somewhat dim-witted Snarf heads straight for any situation that promises riches and easily or safely obtained glory, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Though his efforts begin with an inauspicious start - Snarf steals a gemstone from a seemingly friendly passer by by convincing him that Snarf is a crazed killer - he quickly gets into more trouble than he bargained for when he attempts to infiltrate the evil wizard Suthaze's tower. Snarf seems to routinely bite off more than he can chew as his greed and tendency to exaggerate his own prowess lead him to get in over his head, at which point Snarf usually tries to run, fast-talk himself out of the situation, or, if worst comes to worst, actually act heroic. His adventures lead him to tangle not only with Suthaze, but also a dragon that thinks he's a duck (and later doesn't think he's a duck), a giant, and another evil wizard named Gathgor. Along the way Snarf also has to deal with a journey to the perpetual pit, a smitten princess and her prejudiced father, and a condition that makes him believe he is a bee.

As fun as the conflicts are, what makes the story interesting is the bizarre cast of characters that Snarf befriends in his journey, from a human prince transformed into a rat, to a beautiful woodland sorceress, to a dopey mercenary named Dorf, to the displaced robot that Snarf thinks is a weird wizardly knight with odd rituals and who he calls Aveeare because he can't pronounce the robot's real name VR-X9 4 M2 Galactic Probe Government Issue Robot. And there is also the insanely dangerous beast of burden that Snarf purchases named the gagglezoomer and its accompanying control mechanism that turns out to be a death leech. And finally, the beautiful and startlingly immodest Teleri, who Snarf falls in love with (which isn't much of a surprise, as Snarf falls for any pretty girl that he happens across), but who also seems to eventually fall for Snarf. All of these companions are allies after a fashion, and provide Snarf with help in his quest, but more importantly they also provide the story with a lot of humorous misadventures and misunderstandings.

A little more than halfway through the book the original story ends, which probably would have been a good place to end the strip. However, it was wildly popular among readers of Dragon magazine, and Elmore decided to continue Snarf's adventures. First Elmore wrote a short ten page interlude that featured Snarf and Teleri seeking adventure five years after the events of the first part of the book and getting sucked in to the travails of a small village that is plagued by a werewolf. A plan involving forming a rock band goes awry, and a follow-up plan involving making silver bullets for Snarf's pistol also fails, and in the end Teleri saves the day, as usual. The story is funny and silly, which is exactly what one expects from a Snarf story.

After this short side story, Elmore settles in for another long epic, as the pressures of being king get to Snarf and he decides to pass the reins of leadership on to another and join his friends on an adventure to the stars in the rescue ship sent for Aveeare. This second extended adventure transforms the setting from a fairly standard (albeit somewhat zany) fantasy world to a fairly standard (albeit, yet again somewhat zany) science fiction world. Unfortunately, this story line is not nearly as interesting or enjoyable as the first, feeling like something that was simply tacked on out of a sense of obligation. There is some decent development with respect to the relationship between Snarf and Teleri, and there are plenty of silly hi jinks involving bar fights, a hunt for gold, some native creatures who want to eat Snarf's pickup truck, and a race that features the gagglezoomer.

By 1989, the pressure of producing a monthly strip had burned out Elmore, and he decided to cut the story short. As soon as the characters made their way back to Snarf's home village, he inserted himself into the comic and explained that he was cancelling the strip. And just that abruptly, the run of SnarfQuest in Dragon magazine came to an end, and so does this volume. Even though the heroes return to find that a revitalized Suthaze is threatening to conquer the world while assisted by the magically enhanced death leech, that plot is simply left unresolved, and Snarf's adventures were put on hold. Elmore later picked up the series and printed new installments first in Games Unplugged, and then on his own website, and then in Knights of the Dinner Table. But none of these continuation strips are contained in this book, and as a result, the reader is left hanging in the same way fans of the original strip were.

With the exception of the rather unsatisfying inconclusive conclusion, The SnarfQuest Graphic Novel is a fun compilation. There is, after all, a reason that it was one of the most popular regular features that appeared in Dragon during the magazine's heyday. Snarf is, for all his faults, a fundamentally likable character and he, along with his supporting cast of misfits, provide plenty of humorous and entertaining adventure from the story's opening pages right up to the abrupt end.

Larry Elmore     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Fireflies by Owl City

This is a story about my son and the song Fireflies. I'll preface it by saying that I like the song, and a love the video. The collection of old toys that magically come to life is brilliant and fits the song perfectly. But that's not why this is a Musical Monday selection.

The reason is that this song plays a part in a good memory I have of my son, and I don't know when I'll be able to make more good memories that he is involved in. In 2010 we were in Hilton Head, and with my siblings and their families, we went to see Shannon Tanner, a local children's performer who plays mostly goofy songs that appeal to younger audiences while mixing in family friendly humor. He is, for want of a better word, a "safe" entertainer for parents vacationing in Hilton Head to take their children to see.

Tanner has a portion of his show in which he invites kids to come up and sing something or tell a joke. As his core audience tends to range in age from toddlers to preteens, the range of songs and jokes chosen varies wildly, and sometimes the results are something less than desirable. After his sister had gone up to sing a song, my son decided he wanted to take the stage as well. And this was somewhat problematic, as he was at the age where off-color humor was, in his opinion, the funniest thing ever. And, well, he kind of had an established track record of taking song lyrics or jokes and transforming them into something less than family friendly.

So we told him he couldn't go up and sing. But he promised he'd do something up there that wouldn't make everyone in attendance sorry that they were related to him. And he went to the stage and sang Fireflies. And he sang it beautifully. There are times when your children impress you in ways you simply didn't expect. This was one of those times. I don't remember anything else about that night or really anything else about that trip to Hilton Head. But I remember him standing next to Shannon Tanner and singing this song, and I remember being proud of him.

My son is now fifteen, and in addition to the usual adolescent surliness, he is angry with me for a collection of other reasons, most of which are beyond his control. And because of this, he's shut me out of his life. I miss the son who surprised everyone and sang Fireflies and made me proud of him.

Previous Musical Monday: Nothing to Prove by The Doubleclicks

Subsequent Musical Monday: Lasers and Feelings by The Doubleclicks

Owl City     Musical Monday     Home

Random Thought - Changes to My Reading Pattern and Some Notes on Policies

How I Read

This post is more or less apropos of nothing. Mostly it is because I've been getting a little burned out on reading for my blog. Not reading in general, but rather reading for my blog. I think that the problem is that I've been trying to consume all of the review copies that I have sitting on my shelf so that I can post reviews of them as expeditiously as possible. I currently have twenty-three review copies sitting on my shelf waiting to be read and reviewed, and this is a responsibility I take fairly seriously. After all, the author or publisher asked me if I would read and write about their book, and I agreed to do so, so it seems only right that I would actually do what I agreed to do.

But the steady diet of books that I feel obligated to read has drained my enthusiasm for reading, which is bothersome. My reading pace has slowed to a crawl over the last few months, which disappoints me and pushes my ability to satisfy my responsibilities to the authors and publishers who have sent me books further into the future. And it is mentally wearing because it means that I am putting reading the books I really want to read off further and further into the future. All the while I see the projects that I want to get to on this blog receding further into the future, piling up my frustrations. And this creates a feedback loop that will probably wear me down more and more until I simply don't enjoy reading at all and throw my hands up and quit for a while. And I don't want to let it come to that.

So I've decided to change my reading pattern. Instead of trying to read all of the review copies I have first and then read other material, I'm going to start alternating books. Every review copy I read will be alternated with a book I read without feeling any kind of obligational responsibility. In the short run this may put off getting some of those review copies read and reviewed, but I think that in the long run, I will get through the review copies sooner and enjoy them more. So, if you are an author or publisher who sent me a review copy, be assured that your book will be read and reviewed, but it may take a little bit of time to get to it.

Some New Policies

On the large list of things I never thought I'd have to do, creating a guest post policy, a blog tour policy, and an interview policy were prominent. But I have gotten a few solicitations from authors and publishers suggesting that I should do a blog interview of their author, or it would be fantastic if I would let their author write a guest post for the blog, or if I would be interested in participating in a blog tour. So I figure I ought to put together my policies in these areas and make them public. I'll be putting these formally in the links in the sidebar later, but I'm announcing these policies now. As usual, I reserve the right to change them art any time, without notice, and based on nothing more than my personal whims. But until further notice, here they are:

Guest Posts: No. The answer will always be no. This blog is my voice, and mine alone. I write all of the books. I decide how things are formatted. I decide what goes on the blog and what does not. This is almost certainly never going to change.

Interview Posts: I don't do blog interviews. I have no interest in e-mailing you a collection of questions and posting your collection of canned responses. If I do an interview post, it will be because I met the author, sat down with them, and talked to them in person. Part of the reason for this blog is to document my experiences as a lover of science fiction and fantasy, and exchanging a few e-mails ranks well down on the list of things worth documenting. If I meet a living, breathing author, and can record a sit down interview with them, then I'll probably put a post up detailing that. Anything short of that, no.

Blog Tours: I have nothing against blog tours per se, but I tend to shy away from agreeing to participate in them because the scheduling for this blog can be a tad erratic. I don't intend to go for a day or two without posting, and I won't intend to forget to post a review on the day that you carved out for me to post about your promoted book, but my schedule is not entirely my own, and I generally can make no promises about when something will be read, and no promises about when something will be reviewed. Some weeks I can't even post a Musical Monday or Follow Friday post on time (or at all), so other content goes up when I have the time and ability to do so, and not according to any particular schedule. So if you do want me to participate in your blog tour, be warned that I might miss your date and I'm not really going to be sorry if I do.

Random Thoughts     Home

Follow Friday - Public Law 111-118 Was the Department of Defense Appropriation for Fiscal Year 2010

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 - The Mile Long Bookshelf and Hardcore Heroines.
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: How do you handle a book you don’t like? Do you DNF or do you power through?

As I have mentioned in previous posts on this blog, I am something of an obsessive completionist. If I start a book, I'm almost certain to complete it. Much of the time, this proves to have been a quixotic endeavor - the book remains bad to the end and the only real satisfaction I can get out of the process is to write a review talking about the problems I had with the book. In the end, the only enjoyable part of the reading process that involves a bad book is the catharsis of putting into words why no one else should read that particular book.

However, just often enough, a book that I am struggling with breaks through at some point, and turns out that it wasn't a bad book after all. Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is an example of this sort of book. I started Stars in My Pocket three times, got about a hundred pages into it each time, and set the book aside as incomprehensible. But when I went back yet again to try it, and I was able to push past the first hundred or so pages, the elements of the book fell in to place and by the end I was very happy that I had read it. Unfortunately, not every author can have the talent of Samuel R Delany, and so most books that start of as incomprehensible stubbornly remain so to their bitter ends. But there are enough books that seem weak for the first measure of pages turn that out to be worthwhile by the time their conclusions roll around that I keep obstinately grinding through all of the books I start, even if they seem bad at first.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Mystery of Element 117 Is a Science Fiction Story by Milton Smith

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Port 119 Is the Default for Unencrypted NNTP Connections

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Gemini Rising: Ethereal Fury by Jessia O'Gorek

Short review: Mother Earth uses the spirits of humans who damaged her during their lifetimes to attempt to exterminate humanity. Humanity is defended by unpleasant and obnoxious priests. In the middle of this conflict, a spirit falls in love with a teenage girl.

Haiku
Angry Mother Earth
Sends spirits to avenge her
Exterminate us

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Gemini Rising: Ethereal Fury is something of a love story between a magical being called Onyx and a sixteen year old human girl named Violette. The book is set against a backdrop in which the spirit of the Earth itself has turned against humanity for despoiling her surface, sending disembodied spirits called "Gemini" who have been charged with a single purpose: To destroy the human race. Somewhat clumsily opposing them are the men of the cloth, using a combination of church rituals and medical science to foil, trap, and they hope, destroy, the inimical foes that they barely understand.

The first chapter of the book gives a series of vignettes of the life of petroleum engineer and later oil executive Oliver Weldon as he figures out how to cheaply export oil extracted from the Niger River delta, resulting in large volumes of ecological damage. Because pointing out the fact that Weldon has presided over decades of oil spills and fires in Nigeria isn't enough to show the reader he is a villain, we are also told that he is a philandering husband for no real apparent reason. After a lifetime spent doing evil, Weldon has a heart attack and dies, at which point the Earth selects his spirit as a candidate to be resurrected as one of her minions bent on destroying humanity. Weldon is given the new name Onyx and essentially forgets everything about his former life, making selecting Weldon in particular for this purpose somewhat pointless. If the newly minted Gemini are going to have their memories wiped, why pick one dead human's spirit over another? It seems clear that choosing such humans to fill these roles is intended as a form of poetic punishment, but given the complete lack of understanding on the part of those serving and the utter irrelevance of their previous knowledge to their assigned mission, there just doesn't seem to be any purpose. In a sense, this element is like shooting an already dead body because you didn't like the person when they were alive. It is pointless and futile at best, and because one would assume they would work at cross-purposes to Earth's goals if they did become aware of their pasts, counterproductive at worst.

Arrayed against the Earth's disembodied assassins are the clergy, specifically in the case of this story, the clergy of the Catholic church who run a small school for orphaned children in Virginia. One of these children is the waifish and extraordinarily beautiful seventeen year old Violette, who naturally has purple eyes. Also living at the school is the slightly older Slate, who the priest Father Darius considers to be his protégé, and who Violette seems to have something of a crush on. The anti-Gemini organization in the area appears to be run by Bishop Phillips, who turns out to be a fairly unpleasant man. In fact, all of the clergy who show up in the book are fairly unpleasant. And this creates one of the more interesting conflicts in the book: does the reader root for the murderous Gemini who want to exterminate humanity, or does one root for the vain, petty, and vicious clergymen who have secretly undertaken the task of defending humanity against the Gemini? Other than Violette, whose main character trait appears to be that she is naive and innocent, and Slate, who is a moderately nice but mostly passive guy, there are no characters in the book who one wants to side with. Were it not for Violette, one might be tempted to simply say to hell with humanity and hope that the Gemini eliminate us all quickly.

As an aside, I have no idea why the chosen spiritual avengers of the Earth are called the "Gemini". In mythology the Gemini were the twins Castor and Pollux, and the name has become associated with twins ever since. But the Gemini in the book seem to bear no relationship to this meaning, as they certainly don't seem to be twins, and are only siblings in the loosest sense of the word. Perhaps the name is intended to signify that these chosen spirits are now brothers (or sisters) with the Earth, but if so, that wasn't particularly clear from the text. In the end, I am left wondering if there is any reason why they call themselves Gemini other than O'Gorek thought it seemed like an interesting name.

The book focuses on Onyx's assignment to infiltrate Violette and Slate's small religious community and destroy it by murdering every inhabitant, which is merely the next step in a campaign of wanton destruction that the Gemini have been waging against the religious strongholds of the United States. Perhaps it is a measure of the isolation of the inhabitants of the orphanage, but the extent of this campaign comes as a complete surprise to Slate when Bishop Phillips and Father Darius reveal it to him, even though widespread and unexplained murder and arson on the scale described would likely have resulted in screaming headlines plastered across all of the news outlets of the country. The twist in the story is that Onyx is distracted from his mission of vicarious vengeance when he becomes infatuated with Violette for what appear to be fairly weak reasons: She has a pretty singing voice, and she is pretty and innocent looking.

The ensuing creepy and odd romance, which is clearly intended to be the core of the book, was, for me, by far the weakest part of the book. O'Gorek sets up a strange love triangle involving Violette, Onyx, and Slate, made unusual by the fact that the only way Onyx can really interact with Violette as anything other than a disembodied smoky apparition is to possess Slate. Consequently, for much of the "courtship" between Violette and Onyx, she thinks that he is actually Slate expressing interest and falling in love with her. The romantic story line isn't particularly helped by the fact that there appears to be almost no reason for Onyx to become infatuated with Violette. She's pretty, and plays with her hair a lot, and we are told she is able to sing beautifully. And that seems to be about all that she is. She's fairly shallow, and doesn't seem to have much personality, which isn't particularly surprising given that she's a teenage girl who has been raised in what amounts to a cloistered environment. But even though her blandness is explainable, it doesn't leave any particularly compelling reason for Onyx to fall for her. One might say that her innocence and vulnerability would make Onyx want to protect her, but one could say the same thing of numerous characters that Onyx is dead-set on killing.

It is probably a sign indicating how good a paranormal romance novel is that one can be unconvinced by and uninterested in the flagship romance in the book and still find it enjoyable to read. And that's where Gemini Rising sits for me. The problem with the book boils down to the undeveloped character of Violette which made Onyx's risky infatuation with her simply inexplicable. I could understand why Slate would be interested in Violette - for him she was more or less the only available girl around - but for Onyx it just seemed implausible. If Violette had some content to her character more substantial than a singing voice attached to long hair and purple eyes then Onyx becoming smitten with her would have rung true. She could have been committed to living in harmony with the Earth, or shown some inherent good trait of humanity, or some other attribute that challenged Onyx's accepted truth that humanity is a plague that needs to be destroyed. But she isn't. She's just a pretty face attached to an empty brain that turned Onyx's head and nothing more. And that is simply disappointing.

But what makes the book interesting is not the romance between a teenager and the disembodied spirit of a middle-aged oil tycoon reincarnated as an angel of death. The real meat of the book is in the questions that it raises: Can humanity find a way to prevent the Gemini from killing the entire race? Can the Earth just keep creating new Gemini to replace the ones imprisoned or destroyed making human resistance pointless? Can a nonviolent resolution to the conflict be found? Is there a particular reason why all of humanity's defenders seem to be bullies and jerks? Why does the Earth like fish but hate humans? And so on. But the book doesn't resolve any of these questions, or even the high school romance that it focuses on, choosing instead to end more or less in media res. What story there is in Gemini Rising is good, but the plot lines all just stop mid-stream, leaving this book feeling not so much like a complete story, but rather like little more than a well-written prologue to the real story which will come in later books in the series.

Jessica O'Gorek     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn

Short review: Martians live among us, observing, and waiting for humanity to ethically grow enough to accept them. But can one observe without being changed in return?

Haiku
A kind invasion
To observe and not meddle
Observer altered

Full review: The classic fairy story involves the protagonist leaving his home, journeying to the fairy realm where he encounters strange denizens, overcomes an obstacle, learns something about himself, grows a little, and then returns home. In many ways Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers, the 1955 winner of the International Fantasy Award for Best Fiction Book, follows this fairy story formula, but the exotic and dangerous fairy realm that the protagonist goes to is our world, the obstacle he must overcome is one of his own kind, and the strange denizens that help him learn about himself are us. Elmis, the central character of the book, does not intend to change himself, instead intending merely to observe, but he discovers the fundamental truth that the mere act of observation irrevocably changes both those that are observed, and more radically, those who do the observing.

In A Mirror for Observers Earth has been invaded by Martians who were fleeing their dying planet. It was something of a gentle invasion: No humans noticed it happen when it took place thirty thousand years ago. Now the Martians live sequestered in their hidden cities around the world bound by their strong sense of ethics to avoid interfering in humanity's affairs until humanity evolves its own sufficiently advanced ethical framework that would permit the Martians to reveal themselves and live openly among the Earthlings. Or at least most of Martians adhere to this view, and form a faction called the "Observers". A small handful of Martians called the "Abdicators" reject this, believing that humanity has proven itself to be irredeemably savage, and seek to tip the balance of human ethics in such a way that humanity destroys itself, clearing the way for the Martians to assume ownership of the planet.

The story of the book involved Elmis, an Observer, and Namir, an Abdicator, and their shared but competing interest in the development of a single twelve year boy named Angelo Pontevecchio who lives in the small and somewhat sleepy town of Latimer, Massachusetts. The two Martians focus their attentions on this boy because they believe that he has the correct intellectual capability and inclination to develop the kind of ethical system that the hidden invaders have been hoping for through the centuries. The problem is that while Elmis yearns for such a development to come to fruition, Namir wants to derail Angelo's education and set the stage for humanity to commit racial suicide. In the story, Angelo quickly demonstrates his precocious nature, already immersing himself in the writings of Socrates and Plato, but also displays the carelessness of youth, as he flirts with becoming involved with a gang of local ruffians in order to prove his manliness. And it is in this struggle, between the path of learning and accomplishment, and the path of macho posturing, that Elmis and Namir enter Angelo's life and begin trying to pull him one way or the other. Or rather, that Namir enters Angelo's life and attempts to set him on the road to juvenile delinquency while Elmis, for the most part, is constrained by his ethical beliefs to merely observe.

And this is the first point at which the real point of the book comes into play. The book is not actually about the conflict between Elmis and Namir, or about the development of a superior ethical system, or about Angelo. It is about how Elmir is changed by his contact with humanity, and how, perhaps, the allegedly advanced ethical system of the Martians may in fact be somewhat wanting. Because by doing nothing other than observing, Elmis leaves Angelo to be preyed upon by Namir. By refusing to take a side in this conflict, Elmis actually is taking a side and conceding Angelo's future to his ideological opponent. Noninterference in the cultural development of others is usually seen as a virtue, but in his slow, almost dream-like way, Pangborn quietly calls that belief into question, and poses a severe dilemma for Elmis, even though Elmis himself is mostly oblivious to the danger Namir truly poses. Ultimately, the denouement of this portion of the story is sad, tragic, and devastating, as Namir proves to be even more wily and ruthless in pursuit of his goals than Elmis could imagine.

Intertwined with the story of Angelo coming to grips with being a precocious yet somewhat undersized and fatherless boy while being led astray by an inimical agent, is the story of Angelo's relationship with Sharon, a young girl his age, and both of their relationship with music. Pangborn himself had been something of a musical prodigy in his youth, and for unexplained reasons gave up his musical career to the extent that people who knew him later in life didn't even know he could play an instrument. But in A Mirror for Observers, the artistry of music takes center stage. One human achievement that Elmis and most other Martians admire is music - Elmis himself plays the piano, although he is hampered somewhat by the fact that his alien hands had to be surgically altered to sport five fingers. For Angelo's part, he is also described as being a quite capable musician, but the true musical talent is Sharon, who Elmis immediately identifies as being prodigiously gifted.

And by focusing on music, Pangborn suggests that what makes a society "advanced" may not have anything to do with technology, but rather the art they produce, whether they appreciate the art, how they treat the artists, and ultimately how they treat each other. While Elmis is overwhelmed by the beauty of Sharon's musical gift, Namir pays them no mind at all. And even though Elmis is mostly content to sit on the sidelines and watch Angelo founder on his own with nothing more than a handful of conversations, the Martian is so moved by Sharon's music that he makes arrangements for her to receive proper instruction in her art. Art, it seems, is what makes a society worth having, but at the same time, it lifts us up to make us worth saving. Namir, whose life is entirely lacking in art, has become bitter and cruel as a result; a pattern that is repeated more than once in the book, as those who lack an appreciation for art end up full of hatred and self-loathing.

After documenting Namir's manipulation derail Angelo's life, the story leaps forward by about a decade and moves to New York. Elmis comes to the city because he believes that he will find Angelo there after searching for the boy for years. First, however, he runs across Sharon, who has matured into an accomplished concert pianist who performs in front of large and appreciative audiences. But her music is the one bright note in a dreary and desolate world. The Russians and the Chinese are at war. The Organic Unity Party, which is headquartered in New York, preaches a vicious form of exclusionary nationalism and is only opposed by the tepid Federalist Party. Elmis believes, based upon the scanty evidence of seeing a former youth gang member from Latimer in a photograph with the leader of the organic Unity Party, that Angelo has gotten himself involved in some way with this repugnant organization. This supposition turns out to be correct to a certain extent, and Elmis sets about subtly trying to convince Angelo to disentangle himself from his circumstances. Angelo, now calling himself Abe Brown, feels obligated to the disguised Namir and his prot&eactue;gés for the "help" they have given him - help that seems to have mostly been aimed as ensnaring Angelo into their sphere of influence and diverting his interests away from ethics.

Even though Angelo is the focus of Elmis' efforts, Angelo himself, and even his hoped for development of a superior ethical system, is merely a vehicle to tell the story of Elmis' own journey. As Elmis sheds his Martian ethic of noninterference and becomes more involved in persuading Angelo to take particular actions and pushing Angelo and Sharon together, he becomes less of an observer and more of a participant. Eventually the world enters into a crisis when , despite not actually intending to, the Organic Unity Party unleashes a worldwide epidemic of proportions akin to the 1918 influenza pandemic (which Pangborn himself would have lived through when he was a similar age to Angelo in the first portion of the book). Faced with this human catastrophe, Elmis discards any pretense of merely being an observer and becomes an active participant in events, working in a hospital to provide aid and comfort to the sick and dying. Symbolically, Sharon is struck down by the epidemic and loses her hearing, and in the chaos, Angelo finally does break from Namir's influence.

But all of this is a sideshow. The real story is in Elmis' own transformation. By observing, he is changed. Even though he starts the book with what he believes to be his own superior Martian ethic, the events of the book play out in such a manner that his assumptions are called into question. Through observing, Elmis is changed as much as he changes the characters by his own actions, even if he didn't necessarily realize that he was changing those he came into contact with. In many ways, A Mirror for Observers is about unintended consequences, both those unintended consequences that inure to the instigator and those unintended consequences that redound back upon the original actor. Elmis intends only to observe Angelo, but by his very presence he alters the course of events, affecting not only the lives of Angelo and Sharon, but also his own.

In the end Angelo ends up living in a small town living a small town life with Sharon. Whether or not Angelo ever actually develops the humane ethic that the Martians desperately yearn for him to create is not a question that is ever answered in the book, and is a question that is more or less beside the point. The discovery in the book is that the Martian vigil may have been an exercise in vanity rather than a display of ethical forbearance. And while much of the novel seems to have a dream-like quality, at the end, it feels like Elmis, and possibly the entire Martian race, may be emerging from a self-imposed sleep to become ready to join or ultimately completely eschew the world they have secluded themselves from for so long. Overall, Pangborn's novel about how even our most innocuous actions change the world and ourselves is a fascinating read, and one that should be on every science fiction fan's reading list.

1954 International Fantasy Winner: More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

1957 International Fantasy Winner: The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) by J.R.R. Tolkien

What are the International Fantasy Awards?

International Fantasy Best Fiction Book Winner Reviews

Book Award Reviews     Edgar Pangborn     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Nothing to Prove by The Doubleclicks

Sometimes a songwriter writes a song that says exactly the right thing in exactly the right way, and the result is almost magical in its perfection. The Doubleclicks' anthem for geek girls Nothing to Prove is one of those songs. And unless the video existed, one would not have believed that the song could be made even better than it already was. But then the Doubleclicks collaborated with Josh Cagan, hundreds of proud geek girls, and a few geek guys, and made a video that transformed a defiantly beautiful song into something transcendent.

To make the video, Angela and Aubrey sent out a call for geeky women to send in videos of themselves with signs about the geeky things they love, or documenting the flak they have received for having the temerity to be a girl interested in geeky things, or any message they wanted to put out there with their geek flag raised high. The response appears to have been overwhelming. Hundreds of women sent in their declarations of geekiness, their stories of discrimination, and their hopes for future generations of geek girls. About a hundred and fifty submissions were used in the Nothing to Prove video, and to showcase the remainder a Tumblr was created named Geek Girls Have Nothing to Prove. The clips included in the video are all amazing, and the ones that speak of the discrimination faced by these women are heartbreaking. There are also appearances by several supportive famous geeky men John Scalzi, Adam Savage, Paul & Storm, Wil Wheaton, and Josh Cagan, but only a couple of appearances by famous geek women like Kelly Sue DeConnick and Amy Berg.

And this last point, to me, highlights everything that is wrong with the pernicious "fake geek girl" meme: It drives women away from the things that they love, pushing women out of geeky hobbies for no reason other than misogyny. Yes, I know that the purveyors of the meme, the self-appointed "gatekeepers" of geekdom, rationalize their obnoxious grilling of women to "prove" their bona fides with a collection of excuses, but the reality is that there is nothing more to their queries than a hatred for women. And these "gatekeepers", rather than "saving" the geek world from encroachment, do nothing more than damage the hobbies that they profess to love. They clearly damage women, by trying to exclude them and drive them away from having nerdy interests. But they also damage men, by creating an environment that drives women away from the things we love. Would comic books be better off without Kelly Sue DeConnick? I don't think so. But even if someone like DeConnick sticks through the horde of "gatekeepers" to run the gauntlet to writing comics, one has to wonder how many other women decided that the price they would have to pay to write comics was simply too high to bother with. How many great stories has everyone been deprived of because a collection of misogynistic jerks are offended by the idea that women may love the same things they love and as a result go out of their way to make the lives of women miserable?

I can hear the protests from the jerks already - they don't hate women, they just don't want "fake" geek girls to sully their hobbies. But one only has to consider what the "win" condition would be for the "gatekeeper jerks" even if everything they say about the fakeness of some geek girls is true. Suppose some woman with no interest in comics, or fantasy, or science fiction spent the time to make herself a Wonder Woman or Arwen or Uhura costume, paid the registration fee for a nerdy convention, spent the time and money to travel to that convention and gave up a weekend she could have used to do something she actually likes so she could walk around said convention in costume. I suppose that one could imagine that she would do this for the adulation from convention goers, but why would she want that? If she's a "fake" geek girl like the gatekeepers claim, we can establish that she doesn't like nerdy things, so why would she want adulation from nerdy convention goers? I suppose she could go back to her friends at home and crow about how she pulled the wool over the eyes of those nerds by pretending to like what they like. But then she's going to have to admit to her presumably non-nerdy friends that she invested large amounts of time, money, and effort into going to and dressing for a geeky convention, which makes it seem like she wouldn't have much to boast about.

When you break down the best case scenario for the "gatekeepers" it becomes clear what a hollow victory it would be for them if they did expose one of the mythical "fake" geek girls as actually being a fake. As I've said before, the only women who will care if you accuse them of being a fake geek girl are actual geek girls. And it becomes crystal clear that it isn't a desire to keep geekdom safe from "fake" geek girls that motivates the "gatekeepers". It is a desire to exclude women from geeky interests. It is pure and unadulterated misogyny. As Cagan says in the video, there are no fake geek girls, just real jerks. As Savage says, if someone has to prove they are geeky enough to be around you, you are the problem, not them. You "gatekeepers"? You, yes you, are the problem. Either drop the attacks on geek girls, or get the hell out of the geek world. I'm tired of your shit.

Previous Musical Monday: Titanium by David Guetta (featuring Sia Furler)

Subsequent Musical Monday: Fireflies by Owl City

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Follow Friday - The Mystery of Element 117 Is a Science Fiction Story by Milton Smith

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 - ParaDays and Once Upon a Coffin.
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 do you do with your books after you’re done reading them?

After I have read them, my books first go into a pile by my computer to wait until they get reviewed. I currently have a small stack of books by my left arm waiting to be reviewed, notably Jessica O'Gorek's Gemini Rising: Ethereal Fury and Larry Elmore's Snarfquest.

Once a book has been read and reviewed, it goes onto my book shelves. I keep books that I like because I like them, and may want to reread them or use them as a reference in the future. I keep books that I didn't like in order to sequester them away from the world so that they won't inflict themselves upon other readers. I shelve most of my books in alphabetical order by author name, separating the mass market paperbacks from the trade paperbacks and hardbacks. I keep a few categories of books separate - my law books, my Time-Life series books, my language dictionaries, and my game books all have their own sections for easy access.

But the important point for answering the question posed is that after I read a book, it stays with me, on my shelves.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Hundred Years War Was Actually One-Hundred and Sixteen Years Long

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Public Law 111-118 Was the Department of Defense Appropriation for Fiscal Year 2010

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Review - Progenitor: Palak and the Sky Gods by Patrick T. German

Short review: Two technologically advanced races battle in the Contest to decide disputes between them. Palak lives on a primitive planet ignorant of the forces around him, until one day he is pulled into the conflict.

Haiku
After the contest
Time to strip mine Medias
Let's get to fighting!

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Progenitor: Palak and the Sky Gods is a science fiction novel that has everything except for individually differentiated characters. Set on the primitive planet Medias that coveted by the technologically advanced Sucobers and Plamanics (albeit for different reasons), the story follows several native Median creatures as they deal with the changes to their world. The story is vast in scope, as the Sucobers and Plamanics both have galaxy-spanning interests, and at the same time extremely intimate in flavor, as Palak struggles to deal with the difficulties of feeding and defending his stone age extended family. Mixed in with these stories are interludes involving the genetically altered fauna of Medias, and frequent incidents of bloody, bone crushing violence.

The basic framework of the story is simple. Both the Plamanics and the Sucobers have star-spanning societies but very different ideas about how to use the resources of the galaxy. Rather than engaging in mutually destructive interstellar warfare to resolve disputes, the two races have agreed to settle their differences by means of trials by combat. To this end, they use one particular small featureless moon to deposit their chosen champions who have to fight to the death in unarmed hand to hand combat. The selection of the featureless moon, we are told, was in part to prevent any particular combatant from gaining an advantage in the ensuing combat, but as anyone who is reasonably astute will note, this merely results in the combat conditions giving in an advantage to combatants who thrive in a situation in which there are no obstacles, nowhere to hide, and no strategy other than punch harder and faster than your opponent.

Given that the Plamanics are half the size of the Sucobers, they cleverly inserted a provision into the agreement to mediate disputes via trial by combat that allowed the two races to select members of other species to represent them in these battles. Unfortunately, the Sucobers seem to have done a better job at recruiting and have won all of the recent combats on the strength of a creature named "the Captain". In the opening pages of the book, the Captain secures yet another win for the Sucobers giving them control of the planet Medias which the Sucobers want so they can strip mine it into oblivion and use the resulting resources to prop up their ravenous society. They turn the planet over to Lozerick, an individual who is apparently considered rapacious and unsavory even by Sucober standards, and for no real apparent reason give him the Captain and a collection of clones to help out.

The story then shifts to Medias where it introduces us to a collection of its inhabitants, including a tribe of "brunts", which are more or less like the neanderthals of our past, and interestingly, a collection of animals, including the bear-like brogar, the wolf-like hunz, and the lion-like linex. And this is the point where the novel seems to fall down just a little bit, because as the viewpoint shifts between this collection of diverse creatures, they all seem to think alike, and in most ways, behave alike. Being able to write characters each with their own voice is one of the more difficult things a writer has to do - some authors aren't even able to find their own voice when they write - but it is one of the most important. If the reader can't differentiate between the characters on the page, then there aren't really individual characters in the book. And once the various characters in Progenitor start making their appearances, the reader notices that not only do Lozerick and the Captain seem to think in exactly the same way, all of the inhabitants of Medias think almost the same way, and reason, evaluate, and react in more of less the same way too. They think about different things, because they are confronted with different situations, but they all seem to think about the things they encounter in the same way.

As the reader gets deeper in the book, and Euphenix the Plamanic shows up, the similarity in reasoning displayed by the featured inhabitants of Medias becomes explicable to a certain extent, but to the extent they have such similarities one would think the Euphenix's goal would be foiled. Euphenix, it turns out, had secretly visited Medias many years before and made changes to certain inhabitants in a effort to determine if any could be still further modified into a capable champion for the Plamanic race in the periodic trials by combat against the Sucobers. But Euphenix's program of modifying all of the various species that he has adjusted in more or less the same way seems to be kind of self-defeating, because what he ends up with are a collection of creatures that all seem to think in very similar ways, and are differentiated only by their anatomical characteristics (although all share similar looking eyes). But after making these changes, Euphenix had left them on Medias, subject to the vagaries of its untamed wilds, and of course, the possibility that his chosen incubator would be assigned to a Sucober mining operation that would strip mine the planet's core until the entire world was destroyed.

But both Lozerick's operation and Euphenix's experiments seem oddly slapdash. Lozerick, for his part, plays the role of god to overawe the Leeni tribe on Medias and get them to assist in his operation. But this seems like a poor choice, since he brought along fifty presumably much more technologically proficient clones to help him run his mine, and further, the mining work, to the extent the reader sees it, seems to be more or less completely automated. Why Lozerick needs the assistance of primitive tribesmen is unclear throughout the book. Lozerick also seems to go out of his way to needlessly waste the resources he brought, jettisoning all of the clones into space to make more space for cargo. One would think that he would have been better off using the clones on the planet for whatever he needed the Leeni for, and then abandoning them there when the planet inevitably broke up from the stress of having so much of its core extracted. Instead, Lozerick goes through a complicated charade with the Leeni, annoys "the Captain" for no apparent reason, and then kills off the crew he brought across the light years.

For his part, Euphenix's attempts to find a potential Plamanic champion seem to be haphazard at best. Given that he's already monkeyed with the genetics of the various creatures, one wonders why Euphenix simply leaves these presumably valuable test subjects on an uncharted and dangerous planet. Presumably the idea is to let the hazards of the wilderness challenge the chosen creatures, but one would think that the project would be far more successful (and far less politically dangerous) if Euphenix simply took the chosen subjects to a controlled environment and proceeded to test various options on them. Euphenix's testing process becomes especially perplexing when one realizes that the only true challenges for the genetically altered test subjects are the other genetically altered test subjects, calling into question the utility of leaving the subjects to be hardened by exposure to the harsh wilds of Medias.

In a certain sense, all of these elements: character, setting, and plot, are just a framework designed to support a collection of hand-to-hand combats. Every couple of pages, the plot stops so a couple of creatures can square off against one another in almost every conceivable combination, confrontations that are described in extended and lovingly bloody detail. Palak runs about bashing animals on the head while hunting. The brogar grabs animals and people for lunch. The hunz asserts his dominance over a pack of other unmodified hunz. The linex kills in pursuit of females to mate with, an effort that goes spectacularly awry. Eventually the creatures come into contact with each other and with the Captain. The brogar fights the Captain. The Captain fights Palak's unmodified adoptive father Urlak. The brogar fights the linex. Palak fights the brogar. And finally, Palak fights the Captain. If you are looking for a book that has a collection of people and animals clawing, bashing, and biting one another then this book will deliver exactly what you want contained within just enough plot to make the fights not entirely gratuitous.

In many ways Progenitor is a book that is smarter than it aspires to be. The focus of the book is clearly the bone crunching skinned-knuckles action that permeates the entire story. On the other hand, there are a collection of plot points that, if explored, would have presented interesting issues. One has to wonder why a valuable individual like the Captain was sent on an expedition with a fairly obviously untrustworthy individual like Lozerick. The Sucober method of mining planets, which is horribly destructive for story purposes, raises several questions, including the question of why mine planets like Medias at all given that it would be much easier to loot the needed resources from asteroids and other locations that would be easier to access than deep inside of a gravity well. But these questions are skimmed over in favor of creatures clubbing one another over the head. There is potentially more to the story than that, but to the extent this is true, it is not well-developed in this volume. Simply put, if you are looking for a collection of cage match style combats on a primitive world with somewhat interested technologically advanced observers, then this book is exactly what you have been waiting for.

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