Review: The Hatching

I guess I know now what it takes to bring me back to blogging--scathing contempt for a book that I bought at half of half price and still feel like I overpaid for it. It's not exactly the most noble of sentiments, but I'll take it.

'The Hatching' is a book that brings to mind nothing so much as Sarah Hagi's quote, "Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man." The author, 'Ezekiel Boone', is actually Proper Literary Writer Alexi Zentner slumming it in the horror genre under a pen name, and it's blatanly obvious to all concerned--not because this is a Proper Literary Work that just happens to be in the horror genre, but because this is really obviously not the work of a young hungry author who's swinging for the fences in his debut novel. It's a flabby, underplotted little potboiler that does nothing to earn the already-greenlit sequel, hardcover status, and promotional push that it was given because of his proven track record under another name in another genre, and it's no stretch to say that I really want to make him go back and do another couple of drafts to see if he couldn't try a little harder.

As the cover gives away, the book is about a global invasion by a giant colony of murderous spiders (as opposed to a murderous colony of giant spiders) and the book starts off with a little atmosphere as said spiders flood out of the jungles like army ants devouring everything in their path. But then the book jumps to China, and Minneapolis, and India, and Washington, and California, and a different part of California, and Scotland, each time introducing a new set of characters whose reactions to events will no doubt be highly important to the next book 'Skitter' (coming in May, as the ending helpfully reminds you) but many of whom have literally no connection at all to actual events in this book.

Except for the characters in China and India, whose role in the story is to die messily in ways that the American characters can find out about and realize that Something Terrible Is Coming. The more I think about the way that a story that makes a point of having a sprawling cast of characters from around the globe has absolutely no point-of-view characters from two of the countries where the majority of the plot actually happens, the more annoyed with it I get. It's lazy, it's othering, it treats the lives of foreigners as disposable and only of importance to Americans as canaries in the mine when a global crisis hits, and it's utterly inexcusable in a book where so damn little actually happens.

And let's not bury that lede any further--the book is about 300 pages, and the author only decides to stop generating atmosphere and introducing characters on about page 220. The vast majority of the book is "People get increasingly nervous about impending spiders," with the actual spider invasion never getting any further than LA before the author goes, "Ooops! Out of room! Come check out my sequel, 'Skitter' to find out what actually happens in this story!" It is indefensibly slack plotting. It is insulting to one's audience to write a book this lazy, this slapdash, this reliant on regurgitating tropes done better by other writers (I guarantee you that the pitch for this series said, "World War Z, but with spiders") and then not finish it and demand that people pay twenty bucks for a second hardcover to get the story you couldn't be bothered to fit in the first time around. This is the Peter Jackson's Hobbit of killer spider books, basically.

About the nicest thing I can say about it is that the main characters are all written so shallowly that I genuinely couldn't tell for much of the novel who was written in just to be killed by spiders in the next scene.

(Okay, no. I can also say that he has a gay couple in there, at least one half of whom is not written as flaming and stereotypical, and he has a black female character in there who is a Marine from a wealthy family, and the President in the book is a woman as well. So we've got some nods to representation, which is nice. But none of them are given particular depth and the book would be better off narrowing its focus to one of them or expanding its focus out to show what the heck is actually happening in China and India while all the Americans dither and worry.)

I have no doubt that this author can do better. He's going to get the chance to show someone that he can do better in the sequel. But oddly, that's what frustrates me the most. Because a first effort like this should not be automatically rewarded with a second chance.

Review: The Fog

This is not a review of the 1978 film 'The Fog', directed by John Carpenter and starring Adrienne Barbeau and Jamie Lee Curtis. This also isn't a review of the 2005 remake starring Superboy and a bunch of other people who singularly failed to make an impression on my memory, probably because they weren't rocketed from the distant planet of Krypton. No, this is a review of Dennis Etchison's novelization of the '78 movie, which I picked up in a used bookstore because I saw Dennis Etchison's name on the cover and I wanted to see a bit of what he was about.

And look, there's no question that he gives it his all. He cranks up his descriptions of glowing fog to eleven with phrases like "the reptilian swishing of the cloud as it withdrew", and "It gathered in a cold boiling on the ground and grew amoebalike pseudopodia in glutinous chains" and "The fog contracted, strengthening its substance, and expanded again, solidifying an ectoplasmic net". This is a man who has realized that his brief is to make his reader buy into the idea of 'scary fog', and is determined to make the best of it.

The problem is that basically, this isn't a 'scary fog' story, despite the title being 'The Fog' and there being much made of 'scary fog' in pretty much every scene in the first three-quarters of the book. This is a zombie story. It's a zombie story that tries to make its zombies cooler by hiding them in scary fog, and cooler still by making them pirate zombies (well, technically they're independently wealthy leper sailor zombies, but the iconography is all piratical, so hell with it), but still, this is basically a movie where vengeful undead hunt and kill people. All the 'scary fog' stuff is just window dressing for boring old zombies that don't even really do any of the cool stuff that zombies do like eat brains or bring their victims back to life as more zombies.

(Which they could very easily have done! If they were actually pirate zombies instead of merely independently wealthy leper sailor zombies, then they could have a ship of the dead, and anyone they kill is damned to join their crew for all eternity. I mean, it would get a little crowded on board, but it's a spectral ship of the damned, so maybe it's got TARDIS-like insides that can hold a lot of people. Or maybe if you kill enough people to take your place, you're free, so there's constant crew rotation. The point is, the whole "actually really nice people in life who are just miffed about their totally unjustified murder a hundred years ago and are revenging themselves on the descendants of their murderers" thing is really only scary if you happen to be the descendant of a treacherous murderer who used stolen gold to make your family rich. And also that ghostly pirate ships are way cooler than scary fog.)

In the end, Etchison more or less manages to cover most of the weaknesses in the basic structure of the movie the same way that Carpenter did with the film version, through copious amounts of atmosphere both literal and figurative (see what I did there?) Honestly, that's probably the reason the 2005 remake made so little impression--without amazing people elevating the material, there's really not much there. Even with Etchison's prose, it's not great. But it's not terrible, it's short and there are worse ways to pass the time.

Review: I Drink For A Reason

Wow, was that bad. I mean, it was really astonishingly terrible. Hacky, smug, lazy, unfunny, frequently cruel, and the kind of thing any comedian should have been ashamed of, let alone someone like David Cross who's genuinely got a claim to being one of the most groundbreaking comedians of his generation. This is so bad that I spent a good portion of the book trying to determine whether this was actually some kind of fourth-dimensional meta-satire of the flaws of terrible pretentious faux-intellectual comedians, but after a while it became clear that no, David Cross just crapped out a book to fulfill a contractual obligation.

The big problem with it...well, the big problem with it is that it's actually woefully unfunny. Large stretches of the book are just Cross suggesting that someone innocuous is actually suffering in some way, as an aside or as part of a portion of a list. If the words, "A Retarded Baby Gets AIDS," free of context or purpose, is inherently funny to you, then you are Cross's target audience and may God have mercy upon your soul. (Only, of course, as Cross never tires of bringing up, God doesn't exist and people who believe in Him are stupid and/or crazy. He doesn't make jokes about that--apparently just saying that religious people are stupid and/or crazy is enough work for one day.)

But the other, bigger problem with it is that it proffers no point of view beyond simply "David Cross is much smarter than everyone else." Cross obviously makes fun of people he thinks are foolish or hypocritical or morally bankrupt, because that's kind of what comedians do and what satire is--you expose the foibles of the pompous. But Cross makes no differentiation between, say, Catholic priests who molested innocent children and the system that shielded them, and the people at Pitchfork.com who gave his latest comedy CD a bad review. His negation is mindless and thoughtless, which makes it worthless.

Because all he does is point to things and say "That's stupid," there's no value to his genuine social commentary. Does he examine why it is that the Catholic Church rallies around its members and uses its institutional power to protect them? Does he find something meaningful to say about the idea that any institution, no matter how noble, eventually comes to be about holding on to its power and authority rather than its initial ideals? Nope. It's because they're religions, and religions are stupid. He doesn't critique things, merely criticize them.

And like all emotional thirteen-year-olds, he's more interested in finding a weakness he can use to attack the people he disagrees with than in holding any kind of an intellectual or moral philosophy of his own. He's perfectly willing to go after Larry the Cable Guy as "homophobic", because he doesn't like Larry the Cable Guy and he knows that homophobia is a charge you can successfully level at someone. But he's also willing to do an extended multiple-page gag about Jim Belushi dressing up as a woman and giving blowjobs in a truckstop restroom, because homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of unless you're using it to humiliate a comedian you find annoying. The book is filled with these little hypocrisies and petty jabs...interspersed, of course, with Cross's insistence that he's not at all bitter about anything in his life, and that anyone who thinks he's bitter or angry about anything just doesn't understand how calmly he takes the endless frustrations of dealing with all the stupid people who aren't him.

Other than that, the book is mostly weak and unfunny nonsensical asides, a few of which land with less than a dull thud than others but none of which can struggle to life under the endless burden of having to co-exist with Cross's angry whinging. If you really like David Cross, do both him and yourself a favor and pretend this book never existed. All it can do is lower your opinion of him.

Review: Prophecy

I'm going to break my habit of curling up into a little ball and waiting for the Presidential election season to be over to review a book I read recently, David Seltzer's 'Prophecy'. It's an adaptation of the screenplay he wrote that was turned into a 1979 movie directed by John Frankenheimer, and it says a lot about both movie and book that the term "prophecy" doesn't refer to anything within the story--Seltzer is saying that the story, itself, is a prophecy of what will happen if we don't stop polluting.

Which is odd, because the primary consequence appears to be "angry deformed 15-foot tall bears will come and kill us all", and I'm reasonably certain he's kind of winging that one.

To be honest, if he'd simply skipped the "deformed bear" angle and come at it as a straight-up ecodrama, it probably would have been a lot more effective. It's about a doctor who works in the inner-city and is frustrated by his inability to make a difference due to the entrenched power structures keeping black people in poverty, and his wife who's dealing with a pregnancy that she knows he won't want but that she also knows she can't get rid of. The husband gets an offer to do an environmental study for the EPA, and decides that maybe he can do something for the environment that he couldn't do for the inhabitants of Washington's slums, and his wife goes along hoping to find a good time to tell him about the baby.

But what he walks into is a powder-keg, as the results of the environmental study will determine whether the local paper mill gets to keep operating in the face of entrenched (and increasingly militant) opposition from the local Native American population. The paper company is doing everything short of bribing him to give a good result, while the Native Americans are distrustful of yet another well-meaning white man who says he's there to help. Meanwhile, people and animals are sickening, dying, and being born horribly deformed due to contamination of the watershed with mercury. (Nothing involving mutant bears is quite as horrifying as seeing the pregnant woman tuck into some freshly-caught fish.)

This is all a bit preachy, and it's all filtered through an oh-so-70s level of racial and environmental consciousness (the Native Americans are referred to as "Indians" and given an overlay of noble savage mentality, the questions about abortion are treated with a lot of patriarchal condescension even though the wife's right to choose is ultimately upheld) but then there's this giant bear lumbering through things. It feels like Seltzer is dangling the bear like a bright shiny object whenever the story gets too boringly didactic, as if to say, "Hey, I know you don't have the attention span for all this boring political stuff, so here's a big deformed bear mauling some people for you!"

And that's fine as far as it goes--certainly, a lot of sci-fi stories use allegories to sharpen and intensify the emotions surrounding their central concepts. But the problem is that Seltzer uses "deformed bear attacks everyone" as his plot resolution, and you'd be amazed at how many problems a giant mutant bear doesn't solve in this world. The third act is really just a bunch of people running around getting attacked by a bear, and in the end I guess enough people are killed that things are better now but not really but maybe a little? It's all sort of dumped in the lap of the gods (and you'll be so totally surprised that one of the Native American characters thinks the bear is an "Indian legend" come to life to protect the wilderness), and I think that the ending becomes far less effective as a result.

It's weird to say that a monster story would have been more effective without the monster, but it's kind of true here. 'Prophecy' is, at heart, about people willing to leave the planet uninhabitable if it helps them make a few extra dollars. Next to that, even a very big bear isn't that scary.

Review: The United States of Arugula

It's strange--looking back on our nation's history, we can collectively remember a time when TV dinners were new and exciting and frozen food was a miracle and SPAM was something to be lauded and celebrated. But somehow, it's difficult to connect our modern day Instagramming of "food porn", 24-hour food-based TV networks, celebrity chefs and McDonald's arugula salads to the days when the most exciting thing about food was how well it kept and how easy it was to make. What happened to bring us from food as a grim necessity to food as an epicurean delight?

That's not just the question I ask myself every time I walk past a Hungry Man TV dinner and wonder who still eats those, it's the basic premise of David Kamp's book 'The United States of Arugula'. The book starts in the 1950s, the era when fast food and processed food was at its ascendance, and introduces the key characters responsible for transforming our cultural understanding of food. He covers fine dining, cookbooks and cooking shows, and the process of food sourcing and how it changed slowly but surely over the decades.

There's a lot of interesting stories in the book, many of which show how the counter-culture movement of the 60s intertwined with the push for ethically-sourced and healthy cuisine, and he highlights a number of important figures in the history of the culinary arts that might otherwise have gone forgotten. In addition to obvious stars like James Beard and Julia Child, he covers Craig Claiborne, Jeremiah Tower, and a host of other people known primarily to foodies who he feels influenced the development of modern cooking and taste-making.

In a way, this is also probably the book's weakness. Because he wants to cover the breadth of the transformation of food culture as well as the depth of it, there's a lot of jumping around to focus on figures within the industry who play only a minor role, or who are more remembered for their influence on other famous chefs. Towards the end, without the organizing principle of "how did this person's legacy contribute to food culture as we know it?" (because as the book ably shows, it's hard to tell a food fad from a cultural contribution to our national cuisine right away) the book loses focus rather badly. The last few chapters are a dizzying leap from chef to chef to celebrity chef, with no real explanation given as to why some merit consideration within the book's pages and others are a mere footnote.

Still, the overall theme comes out very well despite that--the last fifty years have seen a national conversation about what we eat and how to make it better tasting and healthier. And while that's occasionally descended into faddishness, snobbery, scolding and absurd levels of bacon worship, it's still a conversation worth having. Kamp makes that case very well indeed.

Review: The Tropic of Serpents

After gushing about Marie Brennan's first book about the intrepid Isabella, Lady Trent and her voyages to discover dragons, I felt like I would be remiss if I didn't spend at least a little bit of time talking about the second book in the series. This one focuses on her journeys into the swamps of Mouleen (an ahistorical continent with clear parallels to colonial Africa) to study swamp dragons, during which she gets unavoidably swept up in local politics.

It's the local politics that take up a lot of the book, which is a little disappointing if you come to the novel looking for dragons, dragons and more dragons. On the other hand, Brennan does a good job of conveying, through Isabella's slow realization that her country may not have the finest interests of Mouleen at heart, the contradictory and messy interests that lie at the heart of the colonial mentality. Being something of an outsider in her own homeland due to her decision to pursue a traditionally male career, she's positioned perfectly to notice that the Scirling (read: British) promises of aid and comfort tend to come with a lot of armed men, and not a few concessions to a superior military force. Her decisions regarding that ugly truth behind the "White Man's Burden" myth form the narrative's spine.

There are also further developments in the slightly ominous metaplot that was seeded in the first novel--having discovered that preserved dragonbone is as light as aluminum and durable as steel, Isabella spends no small amount of time in the book attempting to avert a resource war over the rare and endangered dragon species that we already know (since this is presented as her memoirs) has already happened. This book keeps that to the background, but it informs the entire story with the slow drumbeats of impending conflict. There's a lot of very clever metaphor going on here, with dragons standing in for any number of precious and irreplaceable natural resources...plus, they're freaking dragons, which is always cool.

I'd recommend the second book just as strongly as the first. It takes a bit longer to get to the dragons, but the time it develops other themes is time well spent.

Review: Rat Queens Volume One ('Sass and Sorcery')

One of the interesting things about tabletop gaming is the way that it transforms the material that informs it. That is to say, the clear inspiration for fantasy RPGs (lawsuits and denials aside) is 'Lord of the Rings' and its successors. It is intended to create epic fantasies in which noble and stalwart heroes from a curated variety of races quest for the means to defeat a major, world-shattering tyrant in glorious, dramatic fashion...

But in practical terms, this "epic" is being interpreted by regular human beings with puckish imaginations and wild improvisational skills, resulting in battles where the villain is defeated by a horde of zombie chickens or the cave troll is repelled by the newly-researched spell "Bigby's Fist of Forcible Intrusion". Half the fun of gaming is warping and perverting (in the non-sexual sense of the word...usually...) the tropes of high fantasy into something more like what actual people would do in a fantasy world.

All of which is by way of saying that 'Rat Queens', the comic by Kurtis J. Wiebe, manages to capture the spirit of fantasy as it's practiced on the tables of the world far better than just about any of the fantasy novels that inspire said campaigns. The heroes aren't noble, wise, honorable warriors--they're debauched, selfish, vengeful, and mostly in it for the cash and the glory. They bicker, they plot petty revenge, they pack field rations that are entirely hallucinogenic drugs and candy, and they treat magical healing as a convenience rather than a gift from any god. (One of the best running jokes in the series is that the cleric is an atheist.)

All of this makes it sound like the protagonists of 'Rat Queens' would be unpleasant to spend any length of time with, but Wiebe is smart enough to realize that style and charm make up for morality any day. So Betty, the halfling thief, is loopily adorable, and Hannah the necromancer is smart and sexy, and Dee the cleric presents an interesting and thoughtful analysis of what atheism means in a world where the gods are real and present gifts of power to their worshipers. And Violet, as a dwarf who shaved her beard to present the face that she saw in her mind every time she looked in the mirror, is a welcome and meaningful representation of a group traditionally marginalized in fantasy stories.

Basically, 'Rat Queens' is a gloriously absurd, amoral, glamorous look at fantasy on the sharp end. It's about real people doing not so much the right thing as the thing that seems right at the time, and it's a whole lot of fun. I'll be picking up Volume Two as soon as I can.

Spoiler-Free Review: "Welcome to Night Vale: Ghost Stories"

I had the opportunity to see the newest "Welcome to Night Vale" live show this weekend as it passed through the Twin Cities on its way to parts unknown, and while I naturally don't want to spoil anything for anyone, it was another very excellent live show. I'd put it in some ways above "The Investigators", last year's live performance, in no small part because Cecil Baldwin gets to do some genuinely powerful stuff with this script. Although WtNV generally blends genres from scene to scene and even line to line, it tends to hit one of three predominant notes, funny, scary or moving. This one falls in with the last.

We got some very good guest performances as well--won't spoil who, because for all I know it's different from city to city--and some funny recurring bits that are definitely crowd-pleasers. But it really comes together very well at the end, and if you do have the chance to see it in person, you won't be disappointed. And if you don't have the chance to see it in person, you will almost certainly enjoy it when it comes out as a download.

The Weather was Carrie Elkins and Danny Schmidt, two musicians from Austin, TX (a town near and dear to my heart). They were also quite good and we braved the horrific crowd around their merch table afterwards to buy their CDs. They are also crowdsourcing baby names, so put in your vote for Rowan.

Honestly, the only tiny disappointment I had was that they sold out of t-shirts in my size before the show even started. Other than that, a generally wonderful time was had by all, and I look forward to next year's tour!

Review: A Natural History of Dragons

I can only assume that the reason we haven't seen something as quietly brilliant as Marie Brennan's 'A Natural History of Dragons' long before now is because the fantasy genre has been struggling for decades to dig its way out of the steaming mound of sub-par Tolkien clones that compensated for their lack of originality with an excess of length. Because part of the brilliance of Brennan's concept is that it's so gobsmackingly obvious that as soon as you hear about it, you wonder why nobody has ever thought of it before.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it's a memoir written by "Lady Trent", a scholar and a gentlewoman who's made her life's work the study of dragons in their natural habitat. Brennan takes as her inspiration both classic romantic novels (think Jane Austen) and legendary writings on natural history to turn the entire idea of the dragon on its head. She places it into an ecosystem, treating it like a real animal that has habits, biology and a place in nature, and writes an incredibly moving and fascinating story about a young woman who decides to learn everything she can about these rare and fantastic creatures.

For this to work, everything else has to be absolutely grounded in reality, and Brennan does not disappoint. She writes a pseudo-Victorian fantasy world that feels textured and multi-cultural, sprinkling in details about religion and history and society that makes sense as an actual world and not merely window dressing for the dragons. The plot is also clever, interesting, well thought out and holds tantalizing hints for future volumes (there are at least three more books in the series) but the amazing achievement is the way it feels like a true story written by a real woman in a world that just happens to not technically exist.

In case I'm not making myself clear, I adored this book. It makes its stunning conceit seem effortless in a way that only a genius can, and it's a charming page turner that feels like Jane Austen collaborated with Charles Darwin. It's a wonderful sign for the fantasy genre that we're getting books like this out of it.

Review: The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies

There are really only two problems with the Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies by Peter Normanton. Unfortunately, they're both really huge. (Perhaps they're the Mammoth Problems with the Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies? No? Okay. Please yourself.)

The first isn't so bad--the author includes a number of horror movies like '28 Days Later', 'Living Dead at Manchester Morgue', and 'Night of the Living Dead' that aren't actually slasher movies at all. They're zombie movies. Now, I love a good zombie movie as much as the next person, and probably significantly more than the next person depending on who the next person is. But a guide to slasher movies should be aware of what a slasher movie is. In specific, a slasher movie is one that foregrounds the persona of the killer or killers with an intent to make them distinct or unique in some way. (There are also a number of cannibal movies, which kind of blur the line because usually it's an entire group of people acting as the cannibals, but I can at least forgive those because often the cannibals are recognized as unique and distinct individuals. Zombie movies, though, are about a faceless horde.)

This means that there's less space for analysis, because the book is stuffed full of movies that don't belong in it. It also means that the sequels are footnotes at the end of each entry, which is a shame because frequently the tone of a slasher franchise changed over the course of each entry, and it would be worthwhile to look at the way that (for example) Freddy changed from being a grim and vicious child molester to being a malevolent trickster-god, or the way that the mythos of Michael Myers got progressively stranger with each installment.

Worse, though, was the decision to file the movies alphabetically with an index at the back showing their chronological progression, rather than filing them chronologically with an index at the back showing how to find them in alphabetical order. This is absolutely gutting, because what analysis there is of the movies focuses on the way the genre developed as different filmmakers explored the motifs and translated the idea of the Italian murder mystery known as the giallo into American horror...and how a new generation took a genre that had become trite and formulaic and began experimenting with that formula.

So you can imagine how the book is impacted disastrously by having hugely influential films like 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' in the back of the book under 'T', while something like 'Hostel' is about a third of the way in. Any attempt to derive meaning or insight gets lost in the random shuffle of movies, and the book becomes a confused recitation of random details without context. I really wanted to like this book--Normanton clearly knows his stuff, and there's a lot of obscure movies in here that clearly illustrate his ideas about how the genre evolved. But the lack of organization turns it into something of a slog. Unless they fix this problem in a revised and updated edition, I wouldn't spend your time or money.

Review: All the Birds in the Sky

If nothing else, 'All the Birds in the Sky' deserves a ton of credit for the way that it more or less vaults over the high-concept obviousness of its premise like Evel Knievel jumping eighteen double-decker buses. (I should probably stop there, because I don't think I'm going to write a better sentence than that, but I'm going to press on.)

What I mean by that is that as soon as you hear that it's a story about a girl who grows up to be a magician and a boy who grows up to be a genius scientist and that they have to team up to save the world, there's a certain degree of ossification of concept that happens immediately. You just know that the magicians don't cotton to rigid hide-bound scientists, and the scientists hate the irrationality of magic, and they don't get along and it's up to these two best friends to find some way to make the two work together, because thesis-antithesis-synthesis is pretty much ingrained into SFF authors as an easy way to get a three-act structure out of their idea.

But Charlie Jane Anders avoids the obvious plot structure, more or less, by taking the audacious approach of ignoring it completely for a good three-quarters of the book. Instead, she focuses primarily on protagonists Laurence and Patricia initially as damaged kids from messed-up families whose friendship is just about the only thing that keeps them alive through their childhood, and later as slightly damaged adults who are recovering from a lifetime of trauma and who wind up becoming friends all over again. And oh yes magic is real and so is weird impossible super-science. It's actually a brilliant approach to the material, and the majority of the book flies by in an immensely readable fashion.

The end does suffer a bit from having to come back to the premise--there's a bit of Idiot Ball plotting as Laurence and Patricia suddenly find themselves on opposite sides and spend a bit of time assuming the worst about each other in an unconvincing manner--and I'll admit to not entirely liking the way that all the romantic sub-plots developed, but I confess that could be due to unfair expectations on my part. I'm a big fan of Charlie Jane Anders, and she's awesomely sex-positive and non-heteronormative, and I kind of thought that would come out more in the book than it did. But I've always felt that one of the cardinal sins of a reviewer is saying, "The author didn't write it the way I would have," so I will freely give her a pass on the latter issue.

Overall, the book is charming, witty, human and moving in a very fresh and modern way. It feels like a novel about people who live in a fantastic universe, rather than a fantasy novel, and I hope Charlie Jane Anders takes that as the compliment it's intended to be. I greatly look forward to her next work.

Review: Gulp

Mary Roach is a goddamn national treasure.

I almost stopped the review right there, but I should probably clarify. She's an immensely talented writer with a number of books ('Stiff', 'Spook', 'Bonk', 'Packing for Mars' and 'Gulp') that take a look at the science surrounding topics normally considered too taboo or too obscure for discussion and distill them down into a collection of facts so fascinating that you'll find that taboo breaking down just a little bit as you read. She discusses orgasms in an MRI machine and composting of human corpses with a slightly horrified thrill that drags you right along with her, and by the end of each of her books you'll feel a little bit smarter.

'Gulp', her latest book (I'm hoping she's due for another soon) is no exception. It's all about the way we process food, from the front--there's a lovely introductory chapter about the way we process flavors--to the back, with a chapter on the cutting edge of fecal bacteria transplants. Along the way, you get to learn about a man with a fistulated stomach who was so valuable to medical science that he had to tell his family to shoot anyone who tried to collect his body, about the science of making pet food palatable, about the tricks and tips for smuggling objects in your stomach, and all about the importance of swallowing to satiety. And how someone found that out the hard way.

It is a little squicky, don't get me wrong. Reading about a guy who had to chew his food and spit out the bolus into a little funnel that went directly into his stomach (due to damage to the esophagus) is actually a bit harder than reading about body disposal. But even if 'Gulp' is a little harder to read than 'Stiff', it's still filled with the amazing and fascinating tidbits that make Mary Roach so readable and entertaining. And even though she freely admits to not being a scientist herself, in many ways that helps her make a better book about science--she is constantly going to scientists and saying, "Could you please distill your work down to a level understandable by a layman?" The results tend to be far more informative than if a scientist had written them.

So yes, you will gulp down 'Gulp', one slightly wince-inducing but absolutely fascinating chapter at a time. Because Mary Roach is a goddamn national treasure.

Maybe They Thought It Was 'GTA: San Andreas'?

I watch the movie 'San Andreas' last night alongside my wife, who is always up for a Big Dumb Disaster Movie. (The irony is that she also loves to read about geology and vulcanology--half her enjoyment is derived from picking apart the terrible science.) This one has a lot of Big and a lot of Dumb, but I think what bothered me most about it was that it also had a lot of Lazy and a big chunk of Uninteresting, served with a side of Creepy.

The plot, for those of you who missed it, is that the Rock is a frankly terrible human being who steals a rescue chopper in the middle of a natural disaster, abandons his responsibilities to thousands of people in desperate need, and goes after his perfectly capable daughter who has already told him at the halfway point of the film that she's safe and looking for a way out of the city. Along the way, he loots a truck, illegally barters it to some perfectly nice elderly couple (leaving them holding the bag for the inevitable grand theft auto charges) for a light plane which he ditches in mid-air to crash God knows where, then jacks someone's boat. This is the hero. This is the sympathetic guy.

The unsympathetic guy is his ex-wife's new husband, who alerts rescue authorities to the daughter's danger instead of freeing her himself, then wanders around the movie for a while looking for something to do before getting squashed like a bug.

Oh, and Paul Giamatti is in the movie, although he's really not so much "in the movie" as he is "generally movie adjacent". He plays a seismologist who warns people about the earthquake, and we're told saves lives because some of the people listened. He does not interact with the protagonists or antagonists at all, and the movie would be absolutely no different if every scene he was in was excised completely. Which I'm sure he lobbied for hard.

The thing that's hard to get away from is the bizarrely solipsistic tone of the film. The massive 9.1 earthquake that devastates Los Angeles and San Francisco is only ever shown in long shots and convenient set pieces involving the main characters. Everyone else, the entire population of both cities, is treated either as a convenient prop for the Rock to rescue, an obstacle to make their lives less convenient, or a faceless and panicky crowd to fill out the background while the Rock poses or Alexandra Daddario flirts with Hugo Johnstone-Burt. (Honestly, that may be the point of the otherwise entirely superfluous Giamatti scenes, to make people feel better about watching all the mass devastation with bland platitudes about people evacuating the city.)

I do think there's an interesting idea behind all this, believe it or not. I think you could make a movie that would be legitimately compelling about a rescue worker whose family is in the city he's helping save, one where he struggles with the moral dilemma of helping his loved ones or saving dozens of lives. But it would have to be a movie where the main character was actually aware such a moral dilemma existed, and the Rock's character is principally there to be steely determined and to Save the Girl.

(Who, again, would have been fine if he'd just told her at the halfway point, "You're doing great, keep right at it and let me know when you get to a refugee checkpoint!" instead of telling her to head directly into the middle of the burning collapsing city so that he could rescue her with the helicopter he stole.)

Watch it for the collapsing buildings, gleefully imagine the Rock being arrested afterward, and you'll feel okay about it all.

Review: I Know I Am, But What Are You?

I've been a huge fan of Samantha Bee's work on the Daily Show for years. She's always had such amazing delivery--she slips the joke in like a dagger, working it into innocuous-seeming conversations in a way that almost leaves you wondering whether she meant to say that, or it just slipped out. She's a brilliant comedian, and so when my wife saw her book in a used bookstore, she grabbed it for me because she knew how much I liked her.

The book was...a little different. It was funny, don't get me wrong, but it straddled that same line between "funny" and "deeply uncomfortable" that made some episodes of 'Fawlty Towers' pretty much impossible to watch. Bee has a chapter about her teenage years, where she was so deeply socially awkward she couldn't even get raped. She has a chapter about her hideous taste in clothes and her ugly hands. She has a chapter about how awful she looks naked. She has a lot of chapters that go well past "self-deprecating" and into "self-loathing". In short, the things she says in this book are generally the sort of thing you only expect people to say about themselves with hordes of angry teenage Communists standing behind them with guns.

(Yes! A little Cultural Revolution humor just to liven things up! It's that bleak of a book.)

Again, I don't want to suggest it wasn't funny, because it really was at times. There's a very amusing explanation of the book's back cover, which features her re-enacting sex acts with her Barbie dolls (her mother had absolutely no fucks to give about propriety and figured the sooner her kid was educated about sex, the easier her life would be) and an extremely funny explanation of how she met her husband (they performed together in a touring Sailor Moon show for kids). It's not without its charms. But this is a bit on the bleak side for me, and I laughed at 'Super'.

In short, read at your own risk and don't be surprised if you simultaneously want to give Samantha Bee a hug afterwards and are too icked out by her to do so. I actually think that was what she was going for.

Review: Fed, White and Blue

As you may already know if you read this blog regularly, I adore 'Cutthroat Kitchen'. One of the regular judges on the show is Simon Majumdar (the vaguely grumpy sounding Brit who's actually not grumpy, just very precise in his notes on food that has been prepared under less than ideal circumstances), and he spent a good portion of the last two seasons generously allowing Alton Brown to plug his new book, 'Fed, White and Blue'.

Guess what I got for Christmas from my wonderful wife?

Actually, it feels very appropriate to get this as a Christmas present from the woman I love, because the book is mostly about a) celebrating things with food, and b) Simon's sudden life changes as a result of marriage. After years of dabbling in Americanism, Simon has gone the whole hog and naturalized himself, and this book is about him flinging himself into all the aspects of American cuisine to try to figure out just what our food says about us.

Which, look. This is not a tremendously complicated read. It's a series of relatively short vignettes in which Simon goes someplace he hasn't been before, meets some tremendously nice people, does something silly and quintessentially American, and eats lots of delicious food. You should not come to this one for a read that really makes you think. (Except for a well-written chapter on food banks and another on factory cattle farming, both of which make some salient points on ways that the American food system sometimes doesn't work like it should.)

But if you're looking for a book that makes you laugh and salivate alternately, instead, then you've come to the right place. The author does an amazing job of describing food in prose, which is an intolerably difficult skill (the only thing I can think of that's equivalently hard is describing music in prose). He also does a wonderful job of evoking the spirit of his experiences, making you feel like you've actually accompanied him on his entertaining and strange trips to Alaskan bear country and Philadelphian eating competitions. And there's plenty of dry wit--I particularly liked his description of the beer he helped brew in one chapter as "dark and a little bitter...so you know I had a hand in the process."

Basically, this is exactly what I expected from a food travelogue, and exactly what I wanted--a light, summery, breezy little read that I could get through in less than a day and find myself mentally refreshed by the experience. As books go, it's something of an appetizer, or perhaps a bit of a palate cleanser between heavy meals, but it's a tasty one for all that.

Review: The Sparrow

There's always an odd feeling that comes when you read a book and appreciate it while feeling fairly certain you took away a completely different message than the one the author intended. It's sort of awkward--it seems almost churlish, like you're refusing a gift the writer gave you and instead rooted through their stuff to take home a souvenir. It makes one want to keep silent, for fear of offending fans who no doubt appreciated the book the way it was supposed to be read.

Which brings me to Mary Doria Russell's 'The Sparrow', which was recommended to me by some good friends. And I'm pretty sure it was intended as a science fiction religious parable, a meditation in the spirit of Job on a devout and saintly Jesuit man who believes that divine providence has set him on a path to first contact with an alien race, only to have his faith tested when the mission (in both senses of the word) goes horribly wrong.

What I instead took away was a cautionary tale about the very real need for laws regarding who can initiate first contact with an alien species, because there are definitely some really stupid people out there who will jump in with both feet and mess it up beyond all hope of fixing if we're not careful. Father Sandoz, the main character, is instantly convinced that their trip to Alpha Centauri is divinely ordained because a) he is one of the first people to discover the message that the aliens send, b) his friends all have technical expertise that would come in handy on a mission to Alpha Centauri, and c) he doesn't know enough about what he's contemplating doing to even understand how badly he's about to mess it up.

Seriously, the Jesuit expedition to Rakhat (the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri whose messages Earth receives) is a classic example of Dunning-Kruger in action. They don't even think about the risks of biological contamination--when the first crewmember dies (I'd apologize for spoilers, but most of the book is told in flashback well after it's established that Father Sandoz is the only survivor) they bury his body in the alien soil because, well, they've already breathed the air and eaten the food and defecated onto the ground, so what's the good in preventing a human corpse from rotting in an alien ecosystem? They plant a wide variety of Earth vegetables, all the while patting themselves on the back for using "low-germination" seeds that...you know, probably...won't become an invasive species that overruns a completely alien world and destroys its delicate balance of nature.

You know, probably.

And if their grasp of biological contamination begins and ends with "don't bring along breeding pairs of predatory animals or anything," their grasp of cultural contamination is equally criminal in its naivete. They encounter two sentient alien species in the course of their expedition, and by the end (mild spoilers) they've touched off a civil war and at least one genocide through their interference in an elaborate social structure that they don't even begin to understand. To say nothing of what happens to the expedition and Father Sandoz, which...um, okay, some serious spoilers here, alright? (If you don't want to go any further, assume I recommended the book but really didn't like any of the characters in it.)

The Greatest Mysteries Have No Answers

I was absolutely thrilled the other day to find a copy of 'The Secret Man', Bob Woodward's most recent book on Watergate and the one he wrote after the revelation of Deep Throat's identity. Because even as a kid, the identity of Deep Throat was one of those great historical mysteries, on a par with the true identity of Jack the Ripper and the fate of the passengers of the Marie Celeste. Everyone wanted to know the secret identity of the man who took down the President (even though Woodward and Bernstein were a bit more modest than the movies in suggesting the role he played), and it appeared for the longest time that the truth behind it would stay hidden forever.

And then it came out. And a lot of people looked very smart, and a few people looked very foolish, and Bob Woodward wrote a book about it...and when I read it, I learned just how little we really knew at all. Because Woodward makes it painfully clear in 'The Secret Man' that he didn't really know Mark Felt, the Number Two man at the FBI who provided Woodward and Bernstein with the road map they needed to uncover Watergate. They were casual acquaintances, and after Watergate they didn't even speak for decades. Woodward doesn't have the slightest clue what would make Felt do what he did. Nobody does.

Oh, he has some good guesses. He knew Felt was a Hoover loyalist who believed strongly in the ideals of the FBI, and that it had to have gutted him to watch a political appointee destroy evidence and allow the agency to become a political instrument. He knew Felt was an ambitious man who must have been furious to see himself passed over for promotion not once but twice. (Part of this, of course, was that one of the few people who wasn't fooled by Felt's deceptions was Nixon himself. He knew Felt was Deep Throat all along, but never did anything with the information because he was afraid that Felt would be even more damaging if Nixon forced him to go public.) Woodward knew a lot of things about Felt, but he didn't know the man.

And ultimately, nobody did. Knowing who Deep Throat is, while it certainly satisfies the mundane question of "Who was this person who knew so much about the Nixon conspiracy?", doesn't solve the mystery. The ultimate mystery is in the heart of a solitary, private individual who took his reasons to the grave--as with Jack the Ripper, the identity turns out to be the least important question, and knowing the answer means almost nothing.

It's haunting, realizing that there are things we can never know. Not just in the literal, historical sense--things are lost to history every day, even with the best of efforts from archivists. (18 1/2 minutes worth of things, for example.) I mean in the sense that ultimately, we can never truly understand the great decisions of history. People justify, they misremember, they lie and they obfuscate...or, as in the case of Felt, they simply take their secrets to the grave.

Mark Felt was Deep Throat. But who was Mark Felt?

Review: The Disappearing Spoon

It's been a long time since I read a book as fun as 'The Disappearing Spoon (and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of Elements' by Sam Kean. It's one of those magnificent polymathic books that flits madly from topic to topic, sometimes a history book and sometimes a science text, occasionally taking in a bit of economics and psychology and literature along the way as it covers the way that the elements define us.

Not just literally, although there's certainly some of that--Kean devotes entire chapters to poisons, how they work and how they've been used and how they've shaped our culture and history--but how the struggle to define the periodic table and to understand the elements of our universe is ultimately the human struggle. It incorporates politics--the very names of elements like Berkelium and Californium are at the heart of a Cold War race with the Russians to find the rarest and least stable elements--and art, economics and the biographies of some of our greatest minds. It's filled with amazing triumphs of the human intellect and astonishing depths of the human soul, a quest for understanding the very universe itself by understanding its fundamental building blocks.

All of which is great in and of itself, but Kean brings those stories to life in vivid, elegant prose. Every chapter is filled with tiny, brilliantly-linked anecdotes that are entertaining and informative in their own right, but which combine to fascinate the reader for hours. The sheer variety and profusion of cleverness on display is magnificent--there are pieces on the cold fusion debacle, on Japanese pollution crises, on Australian gold rushes and the life-cycles of stars, with none of them seeming out of place. The story of the elements is the story of everything, after all. There's nothing it can't encompass.

In case I'm not making myself clear, this is a wonderful diversion of a book. It teaches without boring, it entertains without being a mindless diversion, and it's well-written on every level. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

Review: Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals

I am always up for a bit of pop science. Well-written, accessible books conveying interesting scientific topics to the layperson are right up there with gripping historical non-fiction in my list of good books to curl up with, and when I saw 'Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals' by Becky Crew, I thought it had some potential along those lines. It's a series of essays on various animals with strange habits or odd biology, from the naked mole rat to the killifish (the titular "astronaut fish") to the great tit (the titular "zombie bird").

The problem is that Crew sells the book as a sort of humorous-yet-informative collection of essays, but the line of demarcation between "humorous" and "informative" is a lot thicker than it perhaps needed to be. Instead of trying to find interesting and funny ways to describe the unusual animals, she includes either a preface or a postscript that imagines the animal's behavior in human civilization. To be honest, these generally come off as somewhat strained ("Imagine if this frog jumped off of tall platforms...in a job interview!") and repetitive, but the bigger problem is that the essays they bracket tend to be dry recitations of fact.

The facts are extremely solid, though. The book is drier than what I was expecting, but it's an extremely well-researched collection of facts about obscure animals and the way that new techniques have illuminated more and more details about the animal kingdom. From details about the way that a fossil's eye sockets can tell us what time of day a dinosaur hunted to descriptions of animals only found miles below the ocean surface, Crew does a magnificent job of showing the way that we are peeling back the mysteries of the natural world.

So although I could wish for a bit more of the book that was described on the back cover, I do have to say that in all fairness it's a sound science book. Just a bit less "pop science" than I was hoping for.

What I'm Enjoying: The Quest

I found out that "The Quest", the reality TV single-season wonder from the producers of 'The Amazing Race', is now on Netflix. This thrills me to no end, as I saw the first episode during its original run and missed the entire subsequent event, and it really is one of those things you have to see in order.

For those who never saw it, it's basically a big-budget LARP. The producers have rented out a castle, hired experts in practical special effects, make-up and stagecraft, and gotten a bunch of actors to portray the inhabitants of the mythical kingdom of Everealm. Then they got a dozen genuine fantasy enthusiasts and brought to Everealm to spend a whole season competing for the right to save it.

See, Everealm has a problem. As with all mythical kingdoms, Everealm is under attack by Verlox, who goes by the nickname of "The Darkness", and only a heroic paladin bearing the legendary Sunspear can defeat him. But each of the twelve heroes from our Earth has just one piece of the Sunspear...and over the course of a season of mock-combat, tests of nerve and skill, and good old-fashioned Survivor-style voting, the false heroes are winnowed out leaving only the destined savior of Everealm to assemble the Sunspear and defeat Verlox!

(I will confess, due to a habit of slight mispronunciation on the part of pretty much everyone who isn't the closed captions, I keep hearing it as "Sunsphere". Which is a problem, because I keep hearing Bart Simpson say, "Remember, everyone. We're parked under the Sunsphere.")

I won't lie. This is cheesy as hell. But it's cheesy in all the right ways. It hits that sweet spot of SCA/LARP and low-budget fantasy movie, where all the professional actors are speaking in Fantasy Trope-ese and all of the paladins are reacting to it with genuine, sincere enthusiasm. They're living their dream--someone has actually constructed a fully immersive, days-long live-action D&D campaign just for them with Hollywood production values and they get to play it for FREE! That child-like excitement transcends the cliched nature of the storyline and turns any amateurishness into a virtue rather than a fault. It's at a strange crossroads between obvious fraud and vivid reality, and somehow both enhance the other.

The paladins were apparently not competing for a prize (hopefully they were compensated in some form, but the winner's only reward was in defeating Verlox and bringing peace to the Twelve Kingdoms). In a way, I think this was the smartest decision they could have made--if they'd been playing for money, it would have encouraged the worst Survivor-style backstabbing and conniving, which would have utterly broken the immersion of the heroes as paladins attempting to find their inner hero and save the day. There's still a little of that, of course; human nature being what it is, not all the paladins are equally noble. But that too is part of the fantasy charm--it wouldn't have much tension if all of the heroes were bland ciphers of nobility, would it?

(On a side note, there's a pleasingly large amount of race and gender diversity among the paladins. In fact, it's a lot better than most genre work in that aspect; frankly, I'd be a lot more likely to read a generic "Earth person is transported to fantasy realm and must defeat magical evil" if the hero was Shondo Blades, an African-American mixed-martial arts fighter who spoke almost exclusively in sports motivation cliches. Because he's freaking awesome.)

I know that there's currently a fan campaign to get a second season, but honestly I feel that it kind of stands perfectly as a single story. A second season would invariably have contestants who'd seen the original, forcing them to either rework the story in possibly-unsatisfying ways or deal with knowing, ironic contestants rather than the charmingly innocent folks they got. The Quest feels like lightning in a bottle to me, the kind of thing that you can only do well once. A sequel would suffer badly from diminishing returns, whereas this feels, in its own quirky way, just perfect.