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This was written in 1998 – I’m consolidating book reviews. For a bibliography of Attanasio’s work, see http://prissears.com/aaa/

The third book in AA Attanasio’s fabulous telling of the King Arthor myths, the Wolf and the Crown follows the young king through the first year of his reign. He must prove to his subjects that he is a worthy king, and must prove to himself that he is a good man even though he fell prey to his witchy half sister’s seductions. This book, as all of Attanasio’s, is very different from its predecessors. The chapters are short, perfect two-page cliff hangers that whirl the reader between the various characters and situations. In some ways, this book is much more horrific than the ones that came before, but it is leavened with great humor. It focuses on Arthor’s humanity, but has the elements of the strange and magical we’ve come to expect from Mr. Attanasio. Gods old and new, ghosts, witches, demons, angels, vampires, dwarfs, a monkey, elves, stolen and misplaced souls, the hell that is our present day, the fabulous world tree that is the magnetic field surrounding the earth, the hollow hills above the dragon at the heart of the earth, heroic adventure, and selfless sacrifice, it is all there weaving a tapestry of magic and realism. Attanasio is not bound by any of the old tellings of this myth, he takes the characters and elements and makes them uniquely believable, uniquely his own. As in many of Attanasio’s books, such as his fantastic first novel Radix and the rare The Moon’s Wife, the heroes are flawed by their own humanity and must take on painful journeys of self-discovery and change. Don’t miss this book, I can’t wait for the next ones. I hope he follows the King to Avalon and on, to that far future day of need that is predicted for the King’s return.

Imagine you’ve been deployed to the Middle East, for longer than anyone dreamed would be possible when the war started. You’re finally getting to go home. It’s emergency duty in New York City, but it’s still home. There’s an epidemic. It’s everything the swine flu was feared to be and then some – extremely contagious and up to 5% lethality. There is no vaccine, which is unfortunate as some of the sick experience symptoms much like rabies – dementia, paranoia. They become … dangerous.

That’s the nightmare in which Charlie Company’s Second Platoon find themselves in Craig DiLouie’s 2010 novel Tooth and Nail. It’s a gritty take on the zombie apocalypse, fought on the streets of New York. The military framework is a natural – where else would you want to be during a zombie war than in the best funded military on Earth?

The characters aren’t cookie-cutter cannon fodder or stereotypical power-crazed officers. They react in spectrum of ways – selfish, loyal, craven, implacable. They have to contend with the tension between following orders and the prospect of having to fight other Americans that have been infected by the virus. They also face rapid breakdown in services, lack of supplies and medicine, and a public that is demanding, self-centered, and terrified. And then there are the sick people. The “Mad Dogs,” as they become known.

Zombie stories have a reputation for metaphor, and this one is no exception. It can be seen as an intense take on the morality of combat in a civilian zone, where the line between civilian and non-combatant and soldier, regular or guerrilla, erodes.

The main character is the Army itself – the culture, language, rituals, rules and tools. The individual cast members are embedded in this matrix, to such a degree that sometimes they stand out sharply, but their features sometimes fade and they move as gears in the military machine. DiLouie’s Army is detailed and believable. The reader feels as if she is there with the soldiers, often with grim humor, as they struggle to fulfill their orders amid chaos and panic.

I won’t be surprised when I hear this book has been picked up for a movie. It would be a welcome addition to the genre – an inside view of a powerful army faced with defeat from a foe that fights with tooth and nail.

Recently Facebook has made changes without telling users in advance, changes that leave personal information open without advance warning.

Want to see what Facebook is revealing about you? If your account name is easy to guess, it might be a lot. Did you ‘like’ the restaurant down the street? Did you ‘like’ the local bowling team or your neighborhood gardening crew?

Here’s how to find out some of what Facebook is revealing: Log in to your Facebook account and click your name in the top left column. Look up at the address bar of your browser – there will be a URL. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/#!/pris.sears. My Facebook identifier is pris.sears

Now log out of Facebook.

Go to http://zesty.ca/facebook/ and you will see an empty box you can type into. Put your Facebook identifier in the box. There will be a list of links, check all of them.

Even more disturbing: don’t click any Facebook icons on a news site. You might end up showing up on their front page as “liking” the most repellent murder. Don’t think that would happen? I was pretty surprised to see my name and a link to my ‘private’ Facebook page on the front page of the ABC News web site as “Liking” a story about a violent murder.  I’d clicked on the story from friend of mine’s Facebook update, and then clicked a Facebook icon on the ABC site. I was dismayed to see that rather than taking me back to the Facebook site, clicking that icon made my name appear on the front page of the ABC web site, linked as “Liking” this awful story. There is no way to remove the ‘like’ link or, take my name off. I wrote an email to the help address provided on the ABC page asking to be removed, but only got a robo-answer.

How to look like a ghoul in one easy click

After my name had been on the front of the ABC site for a couple of days, I changed my Facebook name. After a couple of tries, the Facebook filters allowed me a new name. “Post Script” is my new name, but my Facebook URL remains the same, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pris.sears. ABC didn’t remove my “like” but it did update automatically update my Facebook name so that now it reads “Post Script” likes the story instead of “Pris Sears.” That might seem like some kind of progress, but I am pretty sure it’s automated and to this point, very few humans have been involved in this incident beyond myself and the thousands of people that have looked at news stories anywhere on ABC’s web site. The fact that my Facebook name is still up six days after I sent an email begging them to take it down doesn’t really make me feel confident about this new cross-pollination between ABC and Facebook.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin’s debut is a fascinating speculative fiction, set in a world in which gods exist, war, fall out of power, and can become enslaved by mortals.

The main character, Yeine, is the nineteen year old leader of her small tribe, a matriarchal culture in which men’s aptitude for glory and bravery is dismissed much like women’s is in contemporary American culture. Daughter of a royal who abdicated her position to marry into the tribe, she is drawn into a deadly competition for a throne and her life changes quickly when she is drawn into the political intrigues of the capital city.

The world Jemisin builds is rich with mythology. The sibling gods of night and day and the goddess of twilight warred against each other, with one dying, another becoming enslaved, and the last used by the royalty to rule the world. The exploration of the fate of the gods as it entwines with Yeine’s is engrossing. This is the first of a trilogy, I am looking forward to the next installations.

The Stranger by Max Frei

The Stranger is a slow-moving, epic dream-work. First published in Russia in 1996, it was finally released in English translation in 2009. The author and narrator, Max Frei, is an underachiever night-owl who dreams of another world.  Near the beginning of the book, he is rewarded for his persistent dreaming and is given a job in the dream world, and instructions on how to get there. Skeptical, he tries – and succeeds in entering Echo, the city he’s been dreaming about. He is given a job working the night shift for “The Department of Absolute Order,” something like a city police investigative bureau. He acquires new friends and responsibilities with his new position, and eventually comes into some very strange powers.

It reminds me in some ways of China Miéville’s books about strange cities. And in some ways it reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork city guard, although the humor is not as broad. But mostly, it’s unique and not easy to describe.  The language is strangely formal,  perhaps an artifact of translation. It has a surreal feel, as appropriate for a novel set in a dream. The ‘authorities’ are strangely unmoved by the murders and mysteries they encounter.

I did not discover two additional delightful features of The Stranger until several weeks after I had finished it. First, the author, Max Frei has written many more books set in this dream world called Echo, and second, Max Frei is actually a pen name of Svetlana Martynchik. The bad news is that only this first volume has been translated into English.

It’s hard to say that I ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ this book. The author is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography. The book’s main character and narrator is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography.  The plot turns on the repellent idea of a writer who is persuaded to create fictional pornography featuring real women and a serial killer, in return for exclusive interviews with the killer. The hard-up writer also pens a vampire-romance series under his dead mother’s name (funny) and has an ongoing sexually tense relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl that he ghost-writes papers for (creepy).

At one point Gordon’s narrator says something about reading that I have never seen articulated this quite this way before. This kind of insight made it impossible to dislike the book entirely, despite the sleaziness.

“Why do we read? In the beginning, as children, why do we love the books we love? For most, I think, it’s travel, a flight into adventure, into a dream that feels like our own. But for a few it is also escape, flight from boredom, unhappiness, loneliness, from where or who we can no longer bear to be. When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me. These are the real readers, the maniacs, the ones who dose themselves with fiction the way junkies get high, the way lovers adore the beloved: beyond reason.”

Reading is lot like that, for me at least.

The narrator goes on to say that “This kind of reading, ironically, precedes all judgment.” Ironically,  because it is just these manic, omnivorous devourers of genre fiction that go on to become book snob academics – or book reviewers.

Behold Apple’s new wireless mouse. The “magic” mouse. The exceedingly expensive at $69 mouse. Looks cool, sleek. Neat features – the scroll wheel/ball is replaced by a completely smooth, touch sensitive surface – you pet it to scroll up and down. It can use “gestures” like the iPod touch. When I saw one at a Mac expo, I played with it for a few seconds and decided I had to have one.

And? After the first day of using it, I hated it. It’s yet another one-button mouse. Why, Apple? Why sell a lovely yet useless product? (Also see, “Why sell me a beautiful laptop with one big honkin’ mouse button under the track pad?”) It’s impossible to play games. Even after changing the default settings so that you can “right click”, you still can’t hold down two mouse buttons at once, so you can’t run, pan up and down, etcetera.

I figured at least I could use it at work, but after a couple of days I have reluctantly concluded that it’s not even good for basic tasks like web design or word processing. “Accidental” input on the touch sensitive surface makes for random crazy scrolling up and down, sudden inexplicable selection of big chunks of text, the view zooming in and out. It’s driving me crazy. What a disappointment. Now I have this fancy Mac and plugged into it is a $10 PC mouse with 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. I get to feel like a sucker, and the devil-mouse gets to sit in its fancy little pouch, in a drawer.

Chuck Palahniuk. Love him? Hate him? Wish you could escape the Horror genre tag and claim your space on the General Popular Fiction shelves  as  seemingly effortlessly?

His latest book, Pygmy, escalates an output already far out on the edge. After the excesses of Rant, I’ve been curious – what comes next? I appreciated Rant as a response to the popular obsession with Fight Club. How do you respond to hearing that men are punching each other in Mexico City, inspired by a movie based on your book? You give your loving public a character who gains his charisma from rabid rodents. A charmer who demonstrates his love by infecting his lovers with rabies. “Emulate this, suckers!”

So, Pygmy. It’s in dialect. A entire-book-sustained first person, English-second-language, sometimes punny, always awkward, voice. Our narrator, an exchange student from an unnamed Communist country, probably China, takes advantage of the bleeding-heart American academic exchange program to infiltrate a typical American family, with a mandate to impregnate as many girls as possible before instigating mass destruction.

I confess, after the male-on-male rape scene in the first 30 pages, I had to take a break. I read two Jim Thompson novels and then came back and finished Pygmy. It was disturbing. Some of it was funny. None of it seemed like a movie Brad Pitt could be in.

The rape scene was particularly disturbing. It wasn’t  completely gratuitous like the traditional male-on-female rape scene. It impacted the rest of the story. It was described with great detail. It could be instructional for that all-too-common young man that describes his losses at Halo as being “raped,” although the chances of such a fellow reading this book are probably slim.

I can’t say I like this book. The metaphors never fall in to focus, the narrator is yet another murderous pervert. There is a strong female character, and there might be some redemption to be found in the end. Is it worth the journey? You’ll have to decide for yourself.

The WBC are failed lawyers and consummate con artists that have been perfecting their game for almost 20 years. Their con is worthy of a Chuck Palahniuk novel – they go from town to town, antagonizing the residents as best they can, with hateful, homosexuality-obsessed posters that insult beloved community members that have been murdered or died in war.

Their con is viciously clever – they use the “right to free speech” to force their way in to a community, and their victims have to pay the police that have to protect the con artists.  Then they pray for someone to punch them in the noses so they can sue them and continue to fund their crazed lifestyle. It doesn’t matter if they believe what they say or not – their real goal is to find another sucker to sue. If they leave a town without a new lawsuit, that town wins – they didn’t fall for the con.

Their shtick would be a lot funnier if they didn’t bring their single-digit-aged children along and make them hold up signs, too.

Some people seem upset that there was a big turnout in Blacksburg last week to protest against them, since the WBC was quoted in the local media as liking having all the attention. But, they will always spin events to make it seem like a victory for them. If lots of people show up, they claim to be thrilled. If nobody shows up, they claim to be vindicated in their beliefs because nobody cares enough to protest them.

I think it’s great that when they came to Blacksburg, many people showed up and were colorful and silly and happy and peaceful. That’s the best antidote for hate. And the haters had to leave empty-handed, with “LET’S GO HOKIES” echoing in their ears.

Lest you think I have not been reading lately, here’s a bundle of short reviews of the latest works to stain my brain.

Foolproof, a novel by several authors, Barbara D’Amato, Jeanne M. Dams and, Mark Richard Zubro. It’s a NYC-based mystery novel, which starts out very strongly with an affecting portrait of 9/11 seen through the eyes of two Twin Towers survivors that were late for work that day. It eventually deteriorates into silliness – the main characters become 007-esque anti-terrorism globetrotters. A Bill Gates analog blackmails the president to further his scheme to take over all the oil in the world. Entertaining but doesn’t really live up to those first chapters.

Vengeance Child by Simon Clark. A nicely done horror story about a child that accompanies bad fortune. I enjoyed the dilemma the main characters found themselves in – the child is a sometimes-reluctant harbinger (or is it instigator?) of violence and death. What would you do if confronted with such a child? Is it ever right to torture or kill a child?

The Gates (of Hell are about to open/”want to peek?” or “mind the gap”) by John Connolly. I really wanted to like this book. It fits my penchant for books about heaven and hell, and it features the Hadron Super Collider. The narration is in a chatty, directly-addressing-the-reader, copiously footnoted style reminiscent of Terry Pratchett, and the episodic adventures of a young main character were evocative of L. Frank Baum. I even appreciated the production quality, the cover art, text fonts and such are quite attractive. But (you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you?), I fell out of love with it on footnote number 12. “It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark.” Etcetera. This big spoonful of gender essentialism, topped with a cherry of “women are some strange species that is not human” put me off. Already feeling like this book didn’t like me, I wasn’t as ready to suspend my disbelief of the stereotypes, gender insults, and general derivative nature of the story.

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker. A gothic horror masquerading as a “women’s” book. I appreciated the bluntness of the harsh story, the painful explication of a woman who has to marry her rapist, without ever directly naming it for what it is, and how the fallout from this affected an entire town. But, the first-person omniscient narration made me sea-sick. As the narrator described events and thoughts she couldn’t possibly have witnessed, I couldn’t decide if she was supposed to be making things up, or magic, or what.  The fascinating narrator was a woman with some form of giantism, and the cover made me wonder what the sociological images blog would make of it. You can have a look at their post on women’s body types as depicted on book covers  here, but the general gist of it is that even if a book is about a “large” woman, the woman pictured on the book cover will be thin. In this case, the book cover features a heavy looking mannequin.  I know the author probably had little to no input on the cover image, but still find it fascinating that the publishing house would opt for a headless mannequin rather than actually depict a large woman. Regardless of the cover art, I will be looking forward to Baker’s future books.

“Where are all the women SF writers?” you might hear someone ask. Even though you might think there are few based on our numbers receiving Nebula and Hugo awards (see this post for more on this issue), there are actually many! Here is a totally non-exhaustive list, please add to it! (“SF” in this case is the broader category of “Speculative Fiction” than strictly “Science Fiction:)

Eleanor Arnason
Margaret Atwood
Elizabeth Bear
Alison Bechdel
Leigh Brackett
Libba Bray
Lois McMaster Bujold
Emma Bull
Octavia Butler
Pat Cadigan
Angela Carter
Suzy McKee Charnas
C. J. Cherryh
Jo Clayton
Storm Constantine
L Timmel Duchamp
Suzette Elgin
Carol Emshwiller
Karen Joy Fowler
C. S. Friedman
Lisa Goldstein
Nicola Griffith
Sarah Hall
Barbara Hambly
Zenna Henderson
P.C. Hodgell
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Nalo Hopkinson
Tanya Huff
Shirley Jackson
N. K. Jemisin
Gwyneth Jones
Nancy Kress
Mercedes Lackey
Tanith Lee
Madeline L’Engle
Ursala K. LeGuin
Kelly Link
Laurie Marks
Maureen McHugh
Vonda N. McIntyre
Judith Merril
Naomi Mitchison
Elizabeth Moon
C.L. Moore
Lyda Morehouse
Pat Murphy
Andre Norton
Rebecca Ore
Tamora Pierce
Marge Piercy
Page Rockwell
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Joanna Russ
Pamela Sargent
Melissa Scott
Nisi Shawl
Racoona Sheldon
Mary Shelly
Joan Slonczewski
Tricia Sullivan
Cecilia Tan
Sheri S. Teppe
James Tiptree Jr.
Catherynne M. Valente
Joan D. Vinge
Michelle M Welch
Kit Whitfield
Kate Wilhem
Liz Williams
Connie Willis
Jeanette Winterson

For specific titles, may I recommend the “Mindblowing SF by women and people-of-color” list.