It’s December. You can expect some year end posts. Here’s my list of 10 favorite reads from this past year.

1. The King Must Die by Mary Renault: A historical novel set in ancient Greece retelling the early life of Theseus up to his killing the minotaur and returning to Athens. It walks a fine line between the real and the fantastic because while nothing “magical” happens, the characters believe their world is magical.

2. God’s War by Kameron Hurley: Probably the most recently published book on this list. Some people have a problem with science fantasy. I don’t. This read like a hybrid of China Mieville and Anne McCaffrey. If that doesn’t sound great then I don’t even want to hear it. In a way it recalled the 1970s when genre lines weren’t so fiercely defined. I’ll probably read the sequel Infidel when I’m home next month.

3. The Last Days by Brian Evenson: An absurdly violent detective novel about a cop infiltrating a cult of extreme self-mutilators. This is one of those books that grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. Not for the squeamish.

4. Warlock by Oakley Hall: A western with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon. Hall is one of those “writer’s writers”, I think. He never was popular but he worked in popular genres. (I’ll also track down his Ambrose Bierce detective novels when Stateside.) This reminded me some of Deadwood, but it probed more into the American habit of making heroes of violent men.

5. I Was Looking For A Street by Charles Willeford: Willeford’s memoir of being a freight riding runaway during the Depression. Parts are heart-breaking, but other parts show a compassion for humanity in all our absurdity.

6. Freaks’ Amour by Tom De Haven: Another disturbing and violent book. It read like Sid & Nancy meets Tod Brownings’ Freaks or Philip K. Dick meets punk rock. Take your pick. Mutant entertainers try to survive in a world that despises them. The book’s a weird relic of the 1970s and the Cold War, but oddly relevant. The most likable character is a drug-dealer who sells mutant goldfish eggs.

7. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins: I blathered about this one before.

8. Flanders by Patricia Anthony: A magic realist novel set in the trenches of World War One? Maybe. The Last Temptation of Christ meets Goodbye To All That? An American sniper in World War One slowly begins to crack due to combat stress and the homicidal tendencies of his fellow soldiers. While in No Man’s Land he begins to see visions of the dead and those about to die.

9. The Double Shadow by Frederick Turner: A lost classic of the New Wave? It’s a shame Turner didn’t write more SF. He might have won a name for himself as a peer of M. John Harrison, Samuel R. Delaney, and Gene Wolfe. (Though he did go on to a career as a poet and teacher.) On a terraformed Mars the scions of two royal families engage in a status war fought with aesthetics and style. Even if the book was meant as a critique of an emergent culture of narcissism, it still works as an SF novel. Definitely worth tracking down.

10. Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison: The Spacewoman in question is a communications officer / ambassador / diplomat in a future utopian society.  There’s little in the way of plot and “thrills”, but a lot of wonder as she recounts her experiences from a life time of alien contact.

For those of you kind and intrepid and incredible folk who have been interested in signed copies of Sword of Fire and Sea, here are some answers!

First, you can come to the next signing, which will be July 23, 2011 at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. If you can't make it there, I'll be at Westercon July 2-4, Dragon*Con September 2-5, and World Fantasy Con October 27-30. I may be adding a couple of more trips; when I have them finalized I'll be updating this page with them.

Secondly, you can order signed copies anytime from Mysterious Galaxy! Mysterious Galaxy is a fantastic independent science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror bookstore in San Diego (my hometown!). They've been around since 1993 and have been keeping genre alive and building one of the best genre fiction communities in the country.

I have many memories of peeking into Mysterious Galaxy's windows (there's a Japanese restaurant in the same center that my family has been going to for years), so it was particularly awesome to "launch" Sword of Fire and Sea there officially. And despite it being my first signing, I don't know how you could ask for better support: they advertised the heck out of the event, and Maryelizabeth provided terrific advice over facebook before I came down. Patrick and David were wonderful throughout, making sure everything ran smoothly and providing a convention's worth of stimulating science fiction and fantasy conversation in just a couple of hours.

So there are your answers! Go forth and buy books from a terrific San Diego institution! There are more photos from the signing on the Andovar facebook page (but you're already a member there, right?), and on Flickr.


Kiba, fresh in her summer coat, says: shop from sources who put good things into the world!

I've been thinking about this blog post for a long time, and thinking about the subject for even longer. But as is often the case with such things, a picture gives you the important information faster. :)

And in case that's not clear enough:

I have author copies, they are beautiful, and the book is available on Amazon now, though at the moment there are only 11 5 2! left in stock.

Kiba, as you can see, is quite excited.

Nothing I could say would be even remotely adequate. I have memories of walking through the aisles at Crown Books at ten years old and thinking about how amazing authors were. I remember being midway through a fantasy book once and being suddenly existentially struck by what an amazing thing a book is. That we think of it as a finished object, a thing, but what we don't consciously wrap our minds around while reading is how every word put down is a moment in another person's life, that each page and collection of pages is a chronology of experiences, probably multiple experiences, days and weeks and months of hard work and pure invention.

And now I have one, and, perhaps in part because I work in games I am unusually aware of the number of people that go into this (and yet I'm not as aware as Lou Anders is, who actually works with them all). In Prometheus's case, right around fifty hardworking people who all touch every book at some stage of its production. Which basically multiplies the complex work of the story, refines it, polishes it, makes sure that every moment of your reading experience is a crafted one, carefully considered. They did a hell of a good job.

It's obvious, I think, from my shield-banging about sustainability and organic food and conservation activism that I am a pretty passionate environmentalist. My tax return so attests. And I love technology, and I love what it's doing to the experience of reading. But crafted objects like this, touched by so many people, delivered to you, the reader, are what will keep paper books around, at least for the next while. And though I am biased (ridiculously biased!), this one is a treasure, and I am humbled to have it. If you seek it out (or if I throw it at you -- cough), I hope you enjoy it too. And if you do, or even if you're just interested and haven't taken the plunge yet, I'd love if you'd consider joining the party on the Andovar World Facebook page, where there will be info, links, giveaways, and more. :)

If you want to read more of my thoughts about game design, storytelling, and a bunch of other things, before I was flummoxed by this meteor of awesome, Jeremy Jones was kind enough to interview me for Clarkesworld Magazine. If you take a gander I'd love to know what you think.

Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test is an enthralling read for anyone who is even the slightest bit odd. (And if you're reading this, chances are I mean you.) It's a wild ride, a Philip K. Dickian roller coaster through some of the darkest crevices of human behavior, spiraling out into the macro-levels of societal power structures and human history, and then back into the minutiae of everyday people living lives with the greatest intentions of normalcy. And in its way it is an act of torah, in the universal sense -- a paean of love for humanity, of love that looks closely and does not flinch.

Be warned that if you go in and go deep you will probably go a little crazy. And perhaps the great honesty of the book is that it dives in deep here as well, pushes you to reflect on your own crazy, and the expanded crazy of the greater semi-conscious social system that we live in.

It will make you think about your friends, your enemies, your coworkers, your family. I know people who are capable of violence. Some of them great violence. You know people like this, too -- maybe you even are one. One of the questions at the heart of this work is one asked by dystopians for centuries, and yet one that seems to get sharper with every increase in our civilization and technology: where do you draw the line around what kind of abnormalities should be eliminated from society, by imprisonment, by medication?

To draw that line is to say that we have found the pattern. We want so badly for there to be a decisive list, for there to be labels and boxes, for things to be clean. We are pattern-seekers. Patterns make a chaotic world comprehensible, they lull us into functionality. And so ultimately, we need books like this, the world needs books like this, that peel back the skin of reality and have a good sticky look inside, to challenge the artificiality of the psychological borders that keep us safe. And as all truly well designed things are, it achieves a life of its own by being entertaining, by taking us from Douglas Hofstadter's Strange Loop to Bedlam to Mississippi industrial ghost towns, from Wall Street to the brainstem of psychiatry to mass murderers, from Scientology to DSM IV, from opulent Florida mansions to four-year-old children being treated for bipolar disorder.

In the end, once we have gone through the wormhole of inquiry and emerged onto the far side, changed, the concluding question is: if there were a "normal", truly, would we want to be it? Even considering the consequences of the vast systems around us, their need to contain us, to statistically filter out danger and potential disruption?

Hopefully, the answer remains no. Hell no. My cold dead hand no. God is dead no.

And yet, being the social animals that we are, it is inevitable that we try. And that's okay. And also a little bit crazy.

I've been sitting on this awhile, though some of you know this already, or have kindly pointed it out to me. ;)

First point of order, though, is introducing Kiba, also known as Kiba The Wonder Pup, seen here and in my icon. She is a "goldendoodle" (Golden Retriever + Poodle) and comes to us from Dee Gerrish in North Carolina. Mac has always loved other dogs, and we'd been making do with him getting his buddy fix at EveryDog Day Care, but now he has a puppy of his very own. She is unbearably cute and has therefore been appointed my new Chief Marketing Officer.



Following that, Kiba instructs me to say: In case you didn't know from copious posting on other forums (fb, twitter, the usual), my first fantasy novel (!), SWORD OF FIRE AND SEA, was picked up by Pyr Books in May and will be published in June 2011. As you can see from the tweet, Editorial Director Lou Anders (of much fame this year and others) describes it as "Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion meets Avatar: The Last Airbender", and more recently has been throwing in a dash of Final Fantasy, which suits me swell.

And now its gorgeous cover is viewable by all, courtesy the heroic efforts of Lou and Prometheus design staff (would love to use specific names but don't yet know if they like being publicly credited!). It's been amazing watching this come together and I'm beyond thrilled to be able to share it. The artist is Dehong He, a digital artist from Singapore who works by day on MMORPGs. He was perfect for a bunch of reasons, first of course being his phenomenal talent (you can see more of his artwork here). Beyond that, I've always loved the vibrant style of Asian MMO art, as well as the unique way they show humans -- faces, costumes, everything. Being multiethnic myself, to me their art is distinctly international in a way much western art is not. I've also always been an anime fan, and know that there are many anime fans who also read fantasy, so have wondered if a cover that "speaks" to anime fans with its art style would recognize that crossover more.

Needless to say I am entirely biased, but assume my current "omg" level to be in the gazillions, so if you scale that down for bias this is still really awesome. Here is the link to the Amazon page (where you can zoom in and see a larger version), and without further ado:

If I have anything to do with it I'm sure you'll be seeing it everywhere soon... ;)

Fritz Leiber would have been 100 years old today, and I'd like to think that somewhere people are gathered in a ChiChis celebrating. Not likely since it’s Christmas Eve but I can hope.

I'm sure no one argues with Leiber's place in genre history, but I'll be honest and say that he wasn’t an author I took to from the first. Sure I'd played enough D&D to be familiar with the name, settings, and characters from the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, but when I first read them they left me less than engaged. Yeah, I dug "Thieves' House" and "Claws from the Night", but even the good bits were over my head and the prose lacked what I can only describe as the purple quality I craved.

Leiber was unlike any Fantasy fiction I had encountered before. He was something else, something weirder, and more than a bit dangerous, like sneaking a shot of whiskey from my parents liquor cabinet. I'd tried it and thought it wasn't for me, going my way without realizing how much my tastes would change six or seven years later.

When I was in my 20s and living in Jersey City, I bought one of those slim paperbacks that had the word "sword" in the title. One story had the two heroes go on a fishing trip and engage in dubious philosophy, another told what happened when they decided to live together and the misadventure that resulted. The stories showed real life writ as adventure fiction. I got where Leiber was coming from, and every now and then, say waiting for a bus in Chinatown, I'd look at the weather-aged buildings of lower Manhattan, and, if I squinted, I'd see Lankhmar. (It's likely for reasons like this that M. John Harrison wrote "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" and "What It Would Be Like to Live in Viriconium". Get treatment, indeed.)

Something similar happened with the comic book Love and Rockets.

I’d been to enough specialty comic shops growing up to recognize the Hernandez Bothers' work, but it wasn't until college when a friend sat me down with a stack and told me to "Read!” that I got hooked.

Now if you've never read Love and Rockets, I'm not about to try and describe the series to you. To the point of this post, the Hernandez Brothers in Love and Rockets mix life and genre in such a way that you're never quite certain where one ends and the other begins. They'll take real life and recast it as superhero comics (or they 'll take superhero comics and recast it in the mold of real life -- I'm not sure it matters). It's a bit hard to describe, but you know how everyone in your family approaches a mythic archetype in your mind? It's a bit like that. The Palomar stories or the misadventures of Penny Century, and how life happens to Maggie and Hopey, all these things sweep you along and somewhere there you see yourself and where you came from and the people you know.

That's what I was also getting from Leiber.

In “The Life of the Mind” Hannah Arendt says “there is nothing in an ordinary life that cannot become food for thought”, and I’d say that’s the quality that links Leiber and the Hernandez Brothers. They’re exploring ordinary life in their work.

It's only their personal preference for the extraordinary that makes their work into genre.

(Yeah, I know there's a lot more to Leiber than the sword & sorcery stories. Folks interested in his stuff should check out his horror fiction. In particular Our Lady of Darkness is a favorite, though it's hard to pick one especially when set beside Conjure Wife and The Sinful Ones.)

Remember last year when I was watching all those samurai/sword-fu/chanbara (in case you're a geek like that) movies?

The Directory of World Cinema: Japan is now available for pre-order at Amazon. Intellect editor John Berra really did a nice job on the book. It looks great and has lots of photos. For the curious, I contributed an essay and about two dozen film reviews.

Another volume is in the works, and the whole series looks like it'd be a welcome addition to any film-geek's library.

Written while B was on death row for plotting against King Theodoric, The Consolation of Philosophy was the self-help book of the Dark Ages, although reading it according to ecclesiastical authorities might make you into a pagan.

Here’s how it goes:

In this world Fortune reigns supreme, and no man should call himself truly happy who puts too much stock in the acquisition of material wealth and the accumulation of externals. Everything is in flux, and the happy man of today may find himself the bankrupted man of sorrow tomorrow. However, this mutability is both our tragedy and our hope, because nothing lasts forever and our conditions are always changing. So look to your soul (for it is eternal and therefore can be trusted) and read books (of “pagan” philosophy, but I doubt Boethius would mind if you occasionally slipped in an issue or two of The Green Lama), because before you know it King Theodoric’s men will drag you from your cell, tie your limbs to horses, and have you pulled to pieces because you made chit-chat with the Byzantines.

The End.

The Dark Ages: even their Chicken Soup for the Soul was hardcore.

For those of you who require audio-visual summaries here’s Christopher Eccelston's version from 24 Hour Party People:

I finished another Charles Willeford novel. It was an accident really. I bought it Wednesday and didn't plan on reading it until next decade, but then I started it and... well, I couldn't stop.

It's the fourth "Hoke Moseley" novel, The Way We Die Now. (I've only read one other.) Hoke is a forty-somethingish Homicide detective who works cold cases. He's divorced and lives with his two teenage daughters and his former partner and her infant son. There's nothing going on between his former partner and he, but she serves as a mother/older sister for the daughters. Hoke's a bit of a mess, and much of the pleasure comes from Willeford sneaking up to the tough guy cop genre hero and pulling a knife out and puncturing his tires.


The plot goes like this: Heinous Crime is committed in first chapter. Call this plot A. Meanwhile, Hoke is enmeshed in subplots X, Y, Z. One is a cold case he is working on. One is a recent smoking ban in the police station, and one is a new neighbor who moves in across the street from his house. None of these subplots are related to Heinous Crime, but each slowly escalates. No mention is made of Heinous Crime for a hundred pages. Then Hoke is sent to investigate Heinous Crime. This investigation builds tension quickly and then resolves itself just as quickly with a bout of explosive violence. Then it's over. Subplots X, Y, and Z return, and each of their resolutions is in some way affected by the investigation of the Heinous Crime.

I don't know whether this is a bait and switch plot, or simply the classic show the fuse lit in the first chapter and wait for the explosion method. What's great is how much of the novel felt inconsequential but absolutely vital to the overall structure. You have to read it to see what I'm talking about.

The other great thing is how many times Willeford describes his characters eating. The most succinct piece of writing advice I ever got was to always, always, always show your characters eating. It's the best way of showing relationships between them, without too much contrivance.

This along with the Spaghetti Western secret of "Costume is character" keep churning around in my head as the greatest pieces of writing advice I've ever heard.

Of course, YMMV.

- New Tor.com post up about vespertilio-homo, the lunar man-bat, and Matthew Goodman's The Sun and The Moon: the Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. .

- My parents got my email, but they are still trying to figure out how to reply. Email is a whole new world to them. No use rushing them on this one.

- The Homelessmoon Chapbook is now available for free and easy download. 5 stories, 80 pages. My story, "Signature Days", is all new weird and depressing with copious amounts of OCD thrown in for giggles. It's also quite short.

- My wife makes aesthetic decisions when she chops onions.

- I received my contributor's copy of CinemaSpec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy. The Edgar A. Poe stamp was a nice touch.

- Ack Ack Ack Ack