Best Twilight Review Ever

From respected fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand, published in the Washington Post. (And thanks to Hal Duncan for posting a link on his blog, where I found it.)

Awesome Video

Dr. Who Meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOuOTOl-3gA

(Since I can't figure out how to embed video, you must go clicky on the link.)

Kenzaburo Oe

I have found a new adorable old-man author for my collection. This is Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese author whose fiction revolves mostly around the Post-WWII years (and especially post-Hiroshima) in Japanese history.

My favorite of his novels is Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. It follows a group of young boys (juvenile delinquents, if their paranoid elders can be trusted) as they are shunted from one village to another, seeking shelter from the elements and the air-raiding armies. They are finally abandoned by their adult supervisors in a mountain village and left to fend for themselves for a few days, only to be punishedfor finding ways to survive when their supervisors return. I won't give away all of the surrounding circumstances or the conclusion, but I can say that I defiantly recommend the novel. It's a short read- I read it in about a day, and it's not even two hundred pages long. It's a bit of a mix between Battle Royale and Lord of the Flies without the campy flavor of the first or the...well, actually it's almost as disturbing as the latter, and it's a good study of the tension, paranoia, and social insecurity caused by war and the mistrust of youth.

I've also got a copy of his Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, which contains four short novels including a semi-autobiographical story about a man coming to grips with having a mentally challenged son (that is the PC term these days, isn't it?) and another story following the dying days of a man with liver cancer (which he's probably imagined).

Latest Fangasm

Guess what?!?!?!?!?! Guess what?!?!?!?!? Guess what?!?!?!?!

Eeek! There are TWO Gundam 00 mangas coming out this year, and those are just the ones that have been announced so far!

Also! Also! There's a lite novel due for release this December! Squee!

And I'll be able to figure out what the difference between these season one box sets is once they've been released this summer...all I can really tell is that they've got different cover art, and I have NO IDEA why one is more expensive than the other...

This show is my new Gundam Wing, and I'm having ISSUES, in case you haven't noticed. I have a feeling I'll be collecting everything 00 related like I do with Wing...and yes, I've definitely been lusting after those Gundam figurines. I have been for years now.

(And Flashback: I've watched the first half on Rurouni Kenshin, season two in the last two days. I'd forgotten how much I freaking love that show, and now I have to hunt down affordable copies of the other seasons.)

Latest Orders

Ummm... I'd do a "Latest Arrivals" post, but other than Gaiman's Mirrormask and Lorca's Selected Letters I can't actually think of anything I've brought home recently. So, instead, I've decided to post a quick list of those books I'm expecting to arrive soon! Also, no pictures this time, because I'm lazy.

First off is The City and the City by China Mieville. A murder mystery novel set in another one of Mieville's imaginative settings, this promises to be a great read on par with his earlier novel, Perdido Street Station.

I also got fed up with waiting for a copy to show up in any local bookstore and finally ordered Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest. I read a short story set in the same world as this novel and (as usual) fell in love with Valente's prose... which broke my will and forced me to bump this up on my reading list.

Another book I just had to have because of a short story- I read M. John Harrison's contribution to The New Weird anthology (edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer) and decided I had to have his novel, Viriconium. The book and the short story are, again, set in the same world. Roman culture meets high tech society. Sweet!

Kelly Link's Trampoline: An Anthology is also on the way. It contains stories by Christopher Barzak (see my blog on his book The Love We Share... here), Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Christopher Rowe, and a number of other people. Link is a top-notch editor and writer, and several of the names in this anthology make me positively drool.

Speaking of Christopher Barzak, I've got his other book One for Sorrow in the mail. This one seems to be worlds away from his story collection, The Love We Share Without Knowing, and actually looks like it may have something in common with Steve Berman's YA gay ghost story, Vintage (which I have another blog on... here).

And... speaking of Steve Berman... Trysts: A Triskaidecollection or Queer and Weird Stories is also on the way. Again, I seem to be developing a fixation on a handful of certain authors. (No Hal Duncan in this week's shipment...Not even a short story. That's a first. Although I'm still stalking his blog.)

Puppy Face

National Spelling Bee 2009

So, even though I (somehow) manage to watch the National Spelling Bee almost every year, it never ceases to amaze me how incredibly freaking good these kids are. I'm jealous, really. Even when they don't actually know how to spell a particular word, they know enough about the rules of forming words that they can piece together an almost always accurate spelling. Personally, I'm proud of myself for getting the word origin right on most of the spelling words (I swear they were all French- even the ones that weren't), though that really had no effect on my ability to actually spell them.

This year, the winning word was "laodicean", which is a Greek to Latin word with an English combining form meaning "lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics". My favorite word, however, was "bouguiniste", a word that went from Dutch to French and which means "a dealer in second-hand books". Guess what I'm going to tell people I am from now on?

I can't help but wonder if there'll be another volume of stories like Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. It's a great concept for an anthology, and every one of the writers involved is a powerhouse in his of her own right, so unless they get an equal collection of stories for a sequel volume it may not be a good idea...but if they do, it is.

New Arrivals

Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

The Crimson Labyrinth by Yusuke Kishi

Eidolon by Jonathan Strahan

Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernada Alba by Fredrico Garcia Lorca

The New Weird edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer

50 Hottest SF Women

I don't really agree with the order of this list, but I'm sharing it anyway.

http://www.ugo.com/movies/top-50-hottest-sci-fi-girls/?cur=mikaela-barnes&cmpid=ppc_ggl_ugo_hsg_081508&gclid=CODy2t_D1poCFQghnAodUmL72w

Genre and Literature

To start off with, I want to make this clear that this isn't a scholarly essay of any sort- I'm just blathering about something that's been on my mind lately. For the last month or so I've been coming across various blog posts and web pages discussing the differences between 'genre' fiction (science fiction, mysteries, romances, etc.) and 'literary' fiction (a bit of a redundant term meaning anything that isn't sf/f, mystery, etc.) and why the two are for some reason considered to be antithetical to one another.

Now wait just a damn minute.

While I agree with everything Hal Duncan says on his examination on literary fiction (not all that surprising- I tend to agree with him on most things) I can't help but wonder- why isn't anyone else talking about how literary fiction is, by it's very nature of being fiction, a fantastical genre? That's right, I said it- literary fiction is the same basic thing as that oft-derided 'genre' of fantasy fiction.

Why do I make this claim? Well, it's an argument of semantics, really. Fiction is made-up. You can dress is up as 'contemporary' or 'classic literature', you can call it slipstream or urban literature or whatever-the-fuck-else, but at the end you're still left with fiction. Fiction isn't true. Non-fiction is true (don't get me started on that 'creative non-fiction' crap. That's a separate blog post of fussiness) and can be considered to be in the same realm of literature as, well, literary fiction. However, if you're writing non-fiction... and unless you're writing 'creative non-fiction'... you're writing something that's well researched and created in order to inform or incite, and you're presenting it as truth and usually not as entertainment. There are exceptions to this, of course, in the form of gossipy bio-pics and collections of trivia and humorous tales that have no point other than to amuse. But, I'm wandering. My point is that while non-fiction can be just as literary as, say, Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, fiction in general is a sort of fantasy by virtue of being made-up, no matter if it contains dragons and elves or soccer moms and knitting clubs (which is another trend which pisses me off- but again, different topic).

And do you know what? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. The whole swords-and-sorcery connotation associated with the fantasy 'genre' is off-putting to many readers, I know, but at the heart of every novel, regardless of its literary aspirations, there is an echo of the word 'fantasy'. Hal Duncan mentions the suspension of disbelief being vital to reading fantasy (as we know the genre), but I can't help but ponder about all those slightly odd 'contemporary fiction' novels, those classified as 'strange fiction' or slipstream'. Does 'legitimacy' in the more 'literary' fiction depend on being 'predictible' and 'realistic'? Or can we admit that simply by being fiction, even the most literary novel has a little spark of the fantastic at its core?