Books Received in September 2013

These are the books I was privileged to receive from publishers this month.  With the exception of The Hangman's Replacement, which is from Amazon, all synopses are from the Indigo website.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl - The sales rep from Penguin Random House compared it to Ira Levin's work.

On a damp October night, the body of young, beautiful Ashley Cordova is found in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. By all appearances her death is a suicide--but investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. Though much has been written about the dark and unsettling films of Ashley's father, Stanislas Cordova, very little is known about the man himself. As McGrath pieces together the mystery of Ashley's death, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the dark underbelly of New York City and the twisted world of Stanislas Cordova, and he begins to wonder--is he the next victim? In this novel, the dazzlingly inventive writer Marisha Pessl offers a breathtaking mystery that will hold you in suspense until the last page is turned.

More Than This by Patrick Ness - I loved his other books so I'm hoping to make time for this one soon.

A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighborhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What's going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this.

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood - I haven't read the other two books in this series, but now that it's finished, maybe it's time to start.  I've heard good things about these books.

Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, which is being fortified against man and giant Pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasi-human species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. While their reluctant prophet, Jimmy -- Crake's one-time friend -- recovers from a debilitating fever, it's left to Toby to narrate the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator. She must also deal with cultural misunderstandings, terrible coffee, and her jealousy over her lover, Zeb.

Meanwhile, Zeb searches for Adam One, founder of the God's Gardeners, the pacifist green religion from which Zeb broke years ago to lead the MaddAddamites in active resistance against the destructive CorpSeCorps. Now, under threat of an imminent Painballer attack, the MaddAddamites must fight back with the aid of their newfound allies, some of whom have four trotters.

At the centre, is the extraordinary story of Zeb's past, which involves a lost brother, a hidden murder, a bear, and a bizarre act of revenge.

The Hangman's Replacement by Taona Dumisani Chiveneko - Speaking of diverse SFF, science fiction/horror set in Africa?  Oh yeah.  I've started this one and so far it's fantastic.

Zimbabwe’s last hangman retired in 2004. As the nation drifted towards abolition, no determined effort was launched to find a replacement. However, the discovery of carnivorous flame lilies at the Great Zimbabwe monument triggered a spirited search for a new executioner. Those who know why this discovery energized the recruitment effort refused to talk.

The frantic attempts to find a new hangman were impeded by the lack of suitable candidates. Well-placed sources confirmed that the fear of ngozi was a deterrent. According to this traditional belief, the spirit of a murdered person torments the killer and his family for generations. However, this is only half the story. Several promising applicants did come forward. None met the minimum requirements for the job. The selection criteria were designed to exclude the mentally ill, the vindictive, and the sadistic. However, they did not rule out the desperate.

The Sprout of Disruption (Book 1) introduces the universe of characters whose lives have been set alight by the plant which sparked the recruitment effort. It tells the story of the aspiring hangman who was obsessed with securing the job, the sympathizers who fought to protect him from his prize, and the anxious men who believed that emptying death row would end their horror before the meat-eating plants constricted around their necks.

The Lost Prince by Edward Lazellari - The second book in a series I've had my eye on but haven't had time to pick up yet.

In Lazellari's debut fantasy, Awakenings, New York City cop Cal MacDonnell and photographer Seth Raincrest found themselves stalked by otherworldly beings intent on killing them. The two had to accept the aid of a mysterious woman to unlock their hidden pasts, and what they discovered changed their lives.

Everything they knew about their lives was an illusion. They had in fact travelled to our dimension from the medieval reality of Aandor to hide their infant prince from assassins, but upon arriving, a freak mishap wiped their memories. Cal, Seth, and the rest of their party were incapacitated, and the infant prince was lost.
Thirteen years later, that prince, Daniel Hauer, is unaware of his origins--or that he has become the prize in a race between two powerful opposing factions. Cal and Seth's group want to keep Daniel safe. The other wants Daniel dead--by any means necessary.

From the streets of New York City to the back roads of rural North Carolina, the search for the prince sets powerful forces against each other in a do-or-die battle for the rule of the kingdom of Aandor.

The Third Kingdom by Terry Goodkind - I have to admit I didn't like the first book enough to read all the ones I'd need to in order to properly enjoy this one.

The bloodthirsty Jit is dead, and against all odds Richard and Kahlan have survived. But a new menace has attacked them in the Dark Lands. Infected with the essence of death itself, robbed of his power as a war wizard, Richard must race against time to uncover and stop the infernal conspiracy assembling itself behind the wall far to the north. His friends and allies are already captives of this fell combination, and Kahlan, also touched by death''s power, will die completely if Richard fails. Bereft of magic, Richard has only his sword, his wits, his capacity for insight -- and an extraordinary companion, the young Samantha, a healer just coming into her powers.

The Broken Hearted by Amelia Kahaney - This one sounds pretty interesting.

Some kinds of Heartbreak aren't temporary.

High in her tower above Bedlam City, prima ballerina Anthem Fleet has lived her whole life by her parents' strict rules, never leaving the sparkling, pristine North Side. Until she meets Gavin. An artist from the dangerous South Side of town, Gavin is like no one Anthem has ever met-and she falls for him suddenly and completely.

But Gavin's world is as dangerous as it is intoxicating, and their romance crashes down around them one terrible night when they are attacked on the South Side and Gavin is kidnapped. When she wakes in a dark, blood-soaked lab, Anthem has a jagged scar down her chest . . . and an experimental bionic heart ticking inside her. 

As Anthem will soon realize, her new mechanical heart didn't just save her life-it left her with a strange and terrifying new strength. A strength that she''s going to need if she has any chance of rescuing Gavin and mending the scattered pieces of her broken heart.

Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman

"I bought the milk," said my father. "I walked out of the corner shop, and heard a noise like this: T h u m m t h u m m. I looked up and saw a huge silver disc hovering in the air above Marshall Road."

"Hullo," I said to myself. "That's not something you see every day. And then something odd happened."

Find out just how odd things get in this hilarious story of time travel and breakfast cereal.

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Joshua Bilmes

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Joshua Bilmes. Joshua is the president of JABberwocky Literary Agency, which he founded in 1994. He has been a literary agent for over 27 years, having made his professional debut at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in 1986. His client list includes a large number of SFF authors including Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson, Elizabeth Moon, and Jim C. Hines.  He also blogs about the business, movies, tennis and more.

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Here are three authors off of the JABberwocky list with a book or books that I would consider to be under-appreciated at the moment.

1. Since I'm doing this for a Canadian-based blog, I want to start off by talking about Tanya Huff's The Silvered.  Tanya's written a lot of novels, but this is one of her very, very best, and even more than that, it's something that's fresh and distinct in a genre that often can't be called either.  It's got werewolves, but not like what we're used to.  This isn't a horror novel with a few werewolves threatening human society.  It's not even a werewolf novel set amidst a group of werewolves within the world as we know it.  Those would be too easy!  And when I say it's set in an entire werewolf culture created by Tanya herself, that doesn't mean what you'd think it means from all the other werewolf novels you've read.  It's a world where men are from werewolf warrior genes and women are from magery, the men and the women both powerful in their own right and yet mutually dependent on one another.  Within that world, the plot itself has lots of things that will be familiar and welcoming to fantasy readers.  The ruler of the neighboring kingdom is trying to fulfill a prophecy.  The perilous journey that Mirian and Tomas embark on in the novel hearkens back to other work, including the male/female interplay of Sing the Four Quarters (another of Tanya's very best books) or of the classic quest journey of The Fire's Stone.  At no point can the familiar ingredients be entirely separated from the overall freshness and imaginative conceptualization of the world itself.  This is a story that could only be taking place in this book at this time.  If you like fantasy, you ought to be reading this novel.  If you're reading this novel, you'll be recommending it.  It almost suffers from "just" being one of the very best novels from an author who's written so many really good ones.
   
2. Switching gears a bit, the next book I'll recommend is a nuts-and-bolts piece of science fiction called Infoquake and the other novels in the Jump 225 trilogy by David Louis Edelman. Back before Apple came up with the idea of an app store for the iPhone, David Louis Edelman came up with the idea of an app store for the human mind.  Buy enhancements for your eyesight or other intriguing things and plug 'em in!  A lot of the things that came along with the Apple app store were also anticipated by Edelman.  The eye focuses on the best-selling apps, so it's very important to become a best-seller or to be first out with a particular something.  Against that backdrop, somebody's playing around with a very powerful new app, both for what it can do and for the computing power it requires.  It's called Multi-Real, and it's an app that can run through versions of the future like a chess computer looking at the different outcomes of different moves, and find its way to the future.  A lot of people want to own the app, in both senses of the word -- as buying it for themselves or being the one it has to be purchased from.  People in both business and government.  There isn't a full appreciation of the impact of having this much processing power going to run through so many versions of the future for so many people at the same time.  Hence, whomever owns the app has the power to do a lot of danger.  These novels are full of action, ideas, political intrigue, and much much more.  When Infoquake came out, it got a lot of attention and made a lot of Best-of-Year lists and award ballots.  But in the half dozen years since all of that, the series has kind of fallen off the radar, and it shouldn't.  These are books as eerily predictive of technological advancement as William Gibson's Neuromancer.  You should be reading these books now, and people ought to still be reading the Jump 225 trilogy another dozen years from now.
   
3. Finally, if it's possible to consider an international best-selling author to be under-appreciated, I'd make that case for Peter V. Brett. And it all has to do with his covers.  In fact, if you're ever wondering if covers make a difference, if covers sell books, Peter V. Brett and his Demon Cycle series answer that question.  His last book was #3 on the British bestseller lists, #5 on the German lists, and "only" #19 on the US lists, and it's because of the cover.
   
   
   
   Peter wrote this great first novel called The Warded Man (Painted Man in the UK). As a rule, people who pick up the book like it a lot, and they eagerly wait for the author's next book, and they tell all their friends, and it's the kind of thing from which bestsellers are made as they've been here.  But the biggest job a publisher might have is to get people to pick up the book in the first place.  In the UK and Germany, the publishers did a really good job of that.  If you look at the original hardcover cover for the Del Rey edition in the US, not so much.  It was a cover by committee, with a realization that it wasn't a great fantasy cover, so fantasy ingredients kept being added in, but it never quite worked.  Ultimately, the publisher realized this and switched to the better UK covers and/or UK cover artist for the next books in the series, and sales in the US started to pick up a lot when they did so.  Strange, isn't it?  The same book, but with a different cover it all of a sudden starts selling like it's got different words inside! So I don't have a time machine to go back and put a great cover on the first US edition of The Warded Man.  I can't do that, but I figured I'd use my soap box here to try and make up for it!

But I don't want to just be talking about a great first novel from commercial terms.  And creatively, what makes Peter's Demon Cycle work?  To go full circle some, it's not dissimilar to what makes Tanya Huff's The Silvered work so well.  He's got a lot of ingredients from other great fantasy series.  Good magic system and kick-ass good fight scenes and epic scope and rich world-building.  But a lot of fantasy writers who usually have that are doing it within the very familiar same-old same-old fantasy worlds that we've been in.  The demon magic in Peter's universe isn't that same-old.  More important, the magic has real implications for how people act in the world itself, so when you're spending time in the world you know you're spending time in Peter's world, and not in Tolkien's.  Pretty much all of these things could be said of Tanya Huff's The Silvered as well.  Tanya and Peter are very different authors.  Tanya's a little more the romanticist as you think of it in a romance novel, while Peter is maybe a little more the capital "R" Romanticist.  What both share is the ability to deliver the things readers want in unexpected, fresh and inspiring ways.  The Silvered should be talked about as much as Peter V. Brett.

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Stay tuned for the next post where we learn whom Violette Malan thinks we should be reading more of!

Inclusive HIstory and SFF + a New Series Idea

I have a BA in Medieval Studies.  That 3 year degree taught me a lot about several hundred years of European history.  But over the past year or so I've started to realize just how little I know about history, even a period of history I studied in some depth.

I'm also discovering how biased my studies were, through some fault of my own, but also due to how history is taught and the heavily western centred system we have.

For example, I recently read a book about how regular Egyptians lived in ancient times.  One of the things that came out in the book was that the word 'Pharaoh' is Greek.  When you think about it, it makes sense that we don't use an Egyptian word, since ancient Egyptian wasn't understood until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (rediscovered in 1799), by which point historians had already appropriated language from the only primary sources they could find, primarily that of the Greeks.  But why am I only discovering this now?  Why haven't some of the native words replaced the Greek words?  Why did I discover that ancient Egypt was called Kemet (or, as Wikipedia corrects it: kem.t) from the history book I'm currently reading?  (Here I'll acknowledge that while it's possible I was taught this at some point, the fact that it's not in common use - the book on ancient Egypt didn't mention it once, for example - is surprising.)

I've been following Medieval POC (people of colour) on tumbler, and the author's made me question so many things I thought I knew.  Easy things, that once you think about them for 2 minutes are so clear.  Like the fact that the Roman army, which conquered parts of Africa, would have had black soldiers.  Then consider that Rome also conquered most of England.  What's the likelihood that no black soldiers made up the conquering army?  How did I get through university believing England was a land of white people?  And that ignores trade, travel and other factors that mixed societies and races.

Look at a map, Africa and the Middle East are right there.  Right across the sea from Europe.  They're so close it's ridiculous to believe they had no contact or intermixing.  I've also discovered that Asian invaded and occupied Eastern Europe for decades.  More to research, more to learn!

So I'm trying to learn more about history - accurate, inclusive history.  Going outside the Eurocentric education I got.  I'm questioning the things I've never thought to question before about the past. 

The more I learn about history, the more I want multicultural fantasy and science fiction.  I've been keeping my eyes out for translations and different points of view.  It's why I read and reviewed The World of the End so quickly.  Science fiction translated from Yiddish?  Yes, please!

Of course, that doesn't make every story of interest.  Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria had a nice cover, so I put it on display at the store, but the synopsis doesn't interest me at this time (I'm still burned out on fantasy, and have been pushing myself to read the fantastic Throne of the Crescent Moon.  I'm almost done and should have a review up soon).  I've been focusing more on science fiction lately, but maybe when I'm more interested in fantasy again I'll pick this one up.

Whenever things like race fail and diversity in SFF come up the question is always, "What can I do about it?  I'm just one person after all."  What we forget is that change starts with us.  With each individual that makes up the whole.  If we educate ourselves, if we share stories with more diverse characters and storylines, if we are the change we want to see in the world, then over time the world will change.  We educate the generation coming behind us.  Do we want them to have the same issues with SFF that we have?  Do we want them to have the same lack of diversity when it comes to race, sexuality, etc.?  

A few months ago I started asking publishing professionals, predominantly authors, for book recommendations for a column on SF Signal.  The first people on my list were ones I know / have had contact with in the past.  Now that the series is going, I'm hoping to branch out more, to find authors who are lesser known.  Authors largely neglected by the SFF community.  (Is it just me or do N.K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler seem to be the only women of colour (WOC) most people know?  They're great writers and deserve to be on those lists, but there are quite a number of other WOC writing SFF who never seem to get mentioned.)

One of the things I do at the store is note down books by people from different backgrounds.  These notes help with recommending books and doing my displays (which become reading lists on my blog).  I've developed a decent list of POC SFF authors.  A few minutes spent googling them - and reading some of their blog posts - has increased those lists.  The internet is such an amazing tool and so woefully underused.  One of my new goals has become to actively look for novels by people different from me - even ones I'm not sure I'll like, for whatever reason, and review them.  Publishers won't publish books they don't think there's a market for, so let's give these books a market!

I'll be starting a new series called Reading Unbound, where I go over some of these authors on my blog.  I'd love to hear author suggestions and what information you'd like to get out of the series.

LucasFilm Wants to Eliminate Movie Post-Production Process

I saw this posted on facebook yesterday.  What is it?

LucasFilm told attendees at Technology Strategy Board event in London last week that video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining over the next decade to eliminate the movie post-production process.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this becoming reality.  On the one hand, it would be an amazing technological advance, to do film post-production work during the actual filming.  And what they do in this video just looks awesome.  On the other hand, too much CGI makes films look fake, and if you're doing CGI costumes and make-up in addition to the backdrops, etc., why use actors at all?

You can read more about the test at the Inquirer.

Book Review: The Crimson Labyrinth by Yusuke Kishi

Translated by Masami Isetani and Camellia Nieh

Pros: creepy premise, interesting characters

Cons: introduced to too many characters at once making them hard to remember

When Yoshihiko Fujiki wakes up in a red stone canyon in the rain, he has no idea where he is or what's happened to him.  All he has are a few basic supplies and a handheld game system welcoming him to the Mars Labyrinth.  Before he has the chance to follow the directions to the first checkpoint he runs into another player, Ai Otomo.  Her game system is broken, so they team up to face... whatever comes next.

This is a novel that starts slowly - with Fujiki trying to figure out what's going on - but quickly builds momentum.  Like the characters, you're horrified by the turns the 'game' takes, as some of the players become less and less human.  And though Fujiki has some ideas of what's happening behind the scenes, figuring that out isn't as important as staying alive.

Try not to read the book's back cover synopsis as the first paragraph contains a spoiler that will colour how you read the novel.

The premise of the book is pretty creepy.  It starts off as a survival game with everyone in the wilderness.  As time goes on and a trap set by those running the game is activated, things shift and it becomes a different kind of survival game. 

The protagonists are pretty interesting, with down on their luck backgrounds.  Fujiki took a while to grow on me, but I liked his tenacity and cleverness.  While Ai gives good advice at times, she mainly stays in the background, letting Fujiki make most of the decisions.  The other players all have unique personalities, though you don't see much of them.

Fujiki and Ai encounter the other players at the first checkpoint and you're given a quick introduction of all of them.  It's too many people, too fast, several of whom have similar names.  I found that later in the book, when the pair met up with them again, I couldn't remember who was who.

I'd recommend this to people who would like a less violent Battle Royale.  It's got a bit of mystery, a bit of survivalistic writing, a tiny bit of romance and several violent, though not too graphic, deaths.

New Author Spotlight: Tom King

New Author Spotlight is a series designed to introduce authors with up to 3 books in the different SF/F subgenres.

Today's spotlight shines on Tom King! His debut novel is A Once Crowded Sky.

Here's the cover copy:

The superheroes of Arcadia City fight a wonderful war and play a wonderful game, forever saving yet another day. However, after sacrificing both their powers and Ultimate, the greatest hero of them all, to defeat the latest apocalypse, these comic book characters are transformed from the marvelous into the mundane.

After too many battles won and too many friends lost, The Soldier of Freedom was fine letting all that glory go. But when a new threat blasts through his city, Soldier, as ever, accepts his duty and reenlists in this next war. Without his once amazing abilities, he's forced to seek the help of the one man who walked away, the sole hero who refused to make the sacrifice--PenUltimate, the sidekick of Ultimate, who through his own rejection of the game has become the most powerful man in the world, the only one left who might still, once again, save the day.

If you like superhero novels (and 1 graphic novel), here are some you might want to check out:

Trance by Kelly Meding (Pocket Books)
Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines (Crown Publishing)
Leaving Megalopolis by Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore (Kickstarter Project I supported, which I assume will be on sale once the delayed kickstarter copies have been printed and sent out.)

Parody: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

While S.H.I.E.L.D looks like fun, you have to admit this parody by Fortress of Attitude has a good point:

Coming to ABC this Fall, the new show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. brings you everything you love about Marvel...except for the superheroes. That's the only thing it doesn't have.