[ahem]

The Veritable Key of Solomon

edited by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine
Llewellyn Publications, 2008, $65
446 pages, hardback, black and white

Opening grimoires at random is probably not the wisest thing one can do, but in this case, the results were worth it:

For games of chance, you could draw the Characters under the auspices of Jupiter, being one of the more fortunate amongst the Planets, as well as the ones under Mercury, because Jupiter governs all sorts of riches.

The design for the Talisman I am giving on the following page will, therefore, be extremely effective for adding luck to games, especially if you work on it under a Constellation of Jupiter not in any Opposition to Mercury and that it is dominant in the Heavens and in a friendly aspect with Venus.

This doesn't mean "roll up your character while the GM is watching, and you'll probably get away with more, but make sure your girlfriend knows where you are all night," although reading it the day after Daylight Savings steals an hour of my sleep, it sort of seemed like that. What does it actually mean? Well, it means: If you want to cast a Luck in Gambling spell, do it at a time auspicious for Jupiter, not crossed by Mercury; Venus will give you a bonus. In short, it's GURPS Cabal. For reals, yo.

This is one of the three Keys of Solomon that Skinner and Rankine have translated, footnoted, and goosed into this single volume -- a veritable Key of Solomon indeed. The Key of Solomon, for those of you who came in late, is probably the single most important grimoire in post-Renaissance European magic, and it's so famous that S.L. MacGregor Mathers picked it to sew together from a slew of manuscripts in the only previous English edition.

As you can tell from the phrase "slew of manuscripts," there were a bunch of different Keys around; one of the great features of Skinner & Rankine's volume is that they provide a lengthy and scholarly introduction discussing the four main families of Keys (and the fifteen separate "text-groups" descended from one or another copy). This volume prints entire mss. of three of those Families; ratmmjess will thrill to the notion that at least one of these three manuscripts almost certainly belonged to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and appears in the novel Zanoni, which is what started the fad for Solomonic grimoires that caused Mathers to hocus together his own version. (In further delightful synchronicity, the Chicago publisher L.W. deLaurence pirated Mathers' edition and inserted ads for his own tie-in merchandise into the spells!) Most of this material doesn't appear in Mathers' Key, although Skinner & Rankine include a few of Mathers' greatest hits ("Of the Experiment of Invisibility," "How to Prepare Extraordinary Experiments and Operations," etc.) as a kind of appendix to their first Key in the volume.

So the Key is famous, and important. What's it good for? Well, assuming you want to conjure up angels and planetary spirits and just a few demons, it's good for that -- or, at least, no worse than any other grimoire is. (Except maybe the limited-edition version of this volume from Golden Hoard, which has color plates instead of black and white ones. If color is important to your conjuring needs. But if you can afford that version, you hardly need to be dickering with spirits for hidden treasure.) Otherwise, it's fascinating inspiration for games -- Lovecraft's six or seven Necronomicons pale in comparison to the 144 (and counting!) versions of the Key that Skinner & Rankine have identified. Each one with slightly different pentacles, recipes, instructions, and invocations -- maybe this one in Czech has the right pentacle, but only the 15th-century Greek version (the oldest one known to exist -- the Key likely entered Italy from the Byzantine Empire, either right after 1453 or right before) has the correct invocation. Imagine trying to assemble one working Necronomicon from a hundred parenthetical, partial, mis-translated, mis-transcribed versions. (Not even including the ones featuring product placements by canny Chicago hucksters.) This, it seems, is how to occult a tradition.

Into this morass, Skinner & Rankine stride swinging. Their footnotes are almost uniformly excellent; I can't vouch for the translation (not speaking French or knowing the original), but it certainly reads properly grimoire-y. The pentacles are plentiful, as they should be, and the editors even include the original illustrations drawn by the scribal copyist, a French scribe from a landed family named Fyot. Msieu. Fyot was apparently sitting and copying demon-calls by hand during the Reign of Terror -- not these specific demon-calls, as these mss. date from 1796, but still. (Said illustrations contain a lot of insects and bugs, by the way. Just saying.) The actual magic is probably way too much of a muchness for games per se, although it can certainly serve as flavor-text and inspiration. Just like some game books, in other words. If you want a grimoire, this is literally the grimoire. You can't do any better than that -- just tell those demons that King Solomon sent you. And, er, keep my name out of it.

I just spent the last four hours reading Gene Wolfe's new Cthulhu Mythos novel An Evil Guest cover to cover. I can think of no higher praise for it than to say that it repeatedly and forcibly reminded me of Robert Heinlein's jawdropping horror pulp thriller The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, which I am almost certainly going to have to reread in the next day or so.¹

The action of An Evil Guest is relatively straightforward, albeit told in staccato bursts of dialogue in service to a plot that is as seemingly twisty and complex, but actually as beautifully designed, as a DNA helix or a big closing musical number. The actress Cassie Casey is recruited by the secret agent-cum-wizard Gideon Chase to get close to the dangerous zillionaire William Reis, who learned the secrets of alchemy and invisibility from the alien world Woldercan, where Reis was the U.S. Ambassador some years ago. In exchange, Chase takes her up to the mountaintop and awakens her magnetic potential -- she becomes the biggest star in the world. Love triangle, spy thriller, showbiz novel, and meditation on reality ensue, complete with tropical islands, (at least) three competing law-enforcement agencies, a werewolf, an offhand mention of Lamont Cranston as historical figure, and ... oh, yes, Great Cthulhu.

I strongly suspect the divergence between the straightforward action and the beautifully prestidigitated writing is part of the point -- Gideon Chase engages in a little stage magic to go with his glamours and other sorceries, just so we know. As is the wild scenery, blending the 1930s and the 2080s, tossed in the air with studied carelessness by Wolfe; when a novel has, as its central "play within a play," a Broadway show called Dating the Volcano God, you can't really complain that you weren't warned. Everyone involved is rather refreshingly competent, although Gideon Chase (who, like Batman, uses his true power -- authorial omniscience -- beautifully) is by far the most interesting and exciting character, and I'm not just saying that because he teaches at Miskatonic University.

I am in the odd position of being a great admirer of Gene Wolfe without actually ever managing to get through a single book of the New Sun cycle. I vastly prefer his "other" books like Free Live Free -- the ones further down in the encyclopedia entry, if you will. If you like the baroque, Mervyn Peaked style of New Sun, this may not be your brand of vodka. This is more for the Fredric Brown, R.A. Lafferty sort of Gene Wolfe fan: the affect of the spare, economical 1930s and 1940s pulp writer joined with a Mozartian ear for character and a Tillinghastly pineal for the off-kilter.

I should note, by way of thanks and appreciation, that you good people indirectly bought me this book. For the last little while, I've been an Amazon Associate, which means that when you click on an Amazon-linked book title in this blog (even if you don't buy it), you're putting a few pennies in my kitty (if you eventually buy something). Or rather, on my bookshelf. Those pennies recently added up to enough to get me this book, which I had rather coveted ever since cosmicdolphin mentioned "Gene Wolfe's Cthulhu novel" to me, but was unlikely to buy due to continued Austerity. So, thanks again for that.

[1] I see by Paul DiFilippo's review of the book that he had the same reaction -- and he also cites Chesterton's even more jawdropping tour de force The Man Who Was Thursday, which is perhaps the most audacious spy thriller ever written, or the most thrilling philosophical dialogue, or both. It is no slam on Wolfe to say that I don't think An Evil Guest reaches that level; but it is no slam on Chesterton to say that DiFilippo's comparison is, in places, quite apt.

* I'm back from Omaha, where I drove for my niece's wedding. Hence the dissociation, no doubt; a man doesn't just come out of an Omaha wedding the same kind of man he was going into it. Sure, we've all heard the words, seen the movies, read the comics, until "Omaha wedding" has become just another cliched genre trope, like "alien invasion" or "giant robot." Well, the real thing puts all that in the shade.

* So what cheer? (The name of a town in Iowa. No kidding.) Well, first off, my Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales is now available for purchase direct from Atomic Overmind in either PDF or printed copy form! Far be it from me to urge anyone to go the spendier route, but seriously, righteousfist has produced a fricking gorgeous book.

* And as if an occult hand had orchestrated it, rdansky graciously interviews me on the topic of Lovecraft and the book in the latest Five For Writing segment on his blog.

* While you read me plugging my work, you can also listen to me plug my work, on the latest episode of Brian Isikoff's 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction podcast. This one blasts straight outta ConQuest (aka Pacificon), with special guest star Sean Nittner, who just kills with his description of "My Life With Joker," a My Life With Master event he ran at said con. Plus, I was drinking just a wee bit of absinthe.

* I've recently read two sequels to books I've reviewed in this space: Red Seas Under Red Skies, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora by scott_lynch, and Ha'penny, the sequel to Farthing, by papersky. Rapidly, then:

* Scott Lynch's book is even Ocean's 11-ier than his first "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, only confidence men" novel, since Red Sails Under Red Skies involves a casino heist. And oceans, come to think of it. The voice I loved last time is still there; as is the sense of place and the salutary willingness to push the "plot" handle firmly. That said, the novel is a little more concerned with the relationship between Locke and Jean than it needs to be -- dialing things down to the Leiber level may never happen, but for example, Patrick O'Brian (speaking of oceans) managed to crank out a nice long series featuring two realistic characters without banging them off each other's psyches every five chapters -- and the prologue is just a big cheaty cheaterson. But I'm liking Lynch's world better and better, and speaking of that plot handle, there are some really nice touches in this caper flick considered as a pirate story or vice versa.

* Jo Walton's Ha'penny changes out the roman a clef Cliveden Set of her first book for an even more transparent fictionalization of the infamous Mitford sisters. The novel, a capable Frederick Forsyth-style thriller about an attempt to bomb Hitler at a performance of Hamlet in increasingly-fascist London, moves along at a steady clip, and Walton manages to vary her narrator's voice believably and interestingly: Viola Larkin is not Lucy Kahn from Farthing. (She's not Nancy Mitford, either, which is kind of a relief, actually.) Sadly, this is the installment in which poor, long-suffering Inspector Carmichael (who returns from the first novel) gets his solid gold Idiot Plot with Oak Leaf Cluster moment. It doesn't particularly help that he realizes that he was an idiot; the end result is a rather catastrophic loss of sympathy for Carmichael and of belief in Walton's world. The first is no great wound, but Walton's excellent AH worldbuilding chops deserve better.

Once more, I taunt you with a thrilling tour through the 101 books I acquired at this year's BookExpo. Once yet more, this total does not include the 17 books for mollpeartree, or the one book apiece for gracefuleigh, gnosticpi, and fengshui. Once yet still more, the taunt shall be clumsily modded from a framework lifted from elissa_carey, who is not to be held responsible for either the clumsiness or the tauntiness.

Five Favorite Books:

It would be the act of a churl not to recognize the fine-ness, and the favoriticity, of the Encyclopedia of North American Railroads from Indiana University Press, and I may be many things, but I am no churl. Plus, it's ginormous. It will be a treasured reference for Casey Jones Is Dead, I can already tell.

And this next one will be a treasured reference for Every WWII Project I Ever Write From Now On: Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult by the astonishingly diligent Richard Spence, the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, likewise a lesson to all who would sift the gravel of strangeness.

More multifariously wonderful things glint and beckon from the dusty recesses of Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, by Sharon Waxman. This may be the single most game-able book I picked up, although the book on Blackwater might give it a run for that crown.

It should be plain to the meanest intellect why Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul makes this list, focusing as it does on the Everleigh Club brothel, where Marshall Field II may or may not have been fatally shot. (He was definitely fatally shot. It's the where, and to a slightly lesser extent, the who, that's the big question. God, I love my city.)

New Neal Stephenson novel: Anathem: 'Nuff said.

Favorite Childhood Books:

Don't know how good either is, but I picked up two "parallel world" kid's books: Paraworld Zero by Matthew Peterson, and Ignatius MacFarland: Frequenaut! by Paul Feig. Regardless of anything else, the word "frequenaut" is just perfect, albeit evoking the Tillinghast Ultra-Violet a little more than I suspect the author intends. But we all should probably just think of Earth-Two or something.

Funniest Book:

The John Kessel anthology The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories is likely going to have a wit both dry and brilliant throughout -- the story I read this evening, "Pride and Prometheus," in which Jane Austen's Bennet sisters meet the fictions of another English authoress, was almost unbearably both; for more conventional comic hijinks, the always reliable Christopher Buckley provides Supreme Courtship.

Scariest Book:

Sight unseen, I'd say it's rdansky's second-coming-of-Shirley-Jackson Southern Gothic ghost story Firefly Rain, except that Rich himself assured me that it's the surrealist domestic horror novel fixup The Man on the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem. How to choose? How, indeed? (Apropos of nothing, Rich and I enjoyed a brief Abbott and Costello moment as he tried to assure me that I must read "the new Tems' book" while I tried to elicit from him what, exactly, the book conveyed that was so terrifying about London's river.)

Guilty Pleasure:

Despite a strong fleet of entries from my pals at Adventures Unlimited Press, this year's winner is The Return of Planet-X: Wormwood by Jaysen Q. Rand, and if there is a better authorial name for such a book, I've never encountered it. Hyphen, as one might expect, very much sic. The titular "planet," as one might likewise expect, is a brown dwarf star.

Book Everyone Ought to Read:

Today in the course Books Everyone Ought To Read 101, we cover our Creative Writing unit, with The Last Supper by Charles McCarry, because after that, our students know what a competent spy is supposed to read like as the viewpoint character in a great espionage thriller. What I like best about the hero of these novels, Paul Christopher, is the sense of almost tigerish forward motion to his personality and his actions; a character motion that mirrors the propulsive plot action in ways both overt and subtle.

Comic:

DC was mostly giving out Minx compilations, but I did score an autographed (by Bob Wayne) trade paperback of the "Rip Hunter Vs. The Illuminati" saga Time Masters, which I own in single issues. When I told him this, Bob assured me the Afterword was "all new, mostly." He seemed to have the right attitude. I did get a bunch of comics from other publishers, none of which I know much about, but I'll plug the webcomic Unshelved, because I met the writer in line to get the new scalzi book Zoe's Tale autographed, and he seemed like a really cool guy, and he gave me a copy of their new compilation Frequently Asked Questions, which should probably count as a half-book trophy for mollpeartree.

Many thanks to jnutley, who from the infinite goodness of his heart sent me a copy of A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, compiled by Meric Casaubon in 1659 from Dee's manuscript diaries, and as (slightly more recently) displayed on my Amazon wish list, from whence jnutley plucked it to wend its way to me. (For those interested in such things, it is also available online here, nestled within what seems like a very nice interface. Searchable, too. (EDIT: Or, rather, it is if your Internet access, like mine, is via a University that provides access to the EEBO site. Failing that, there's a (non-searchable) PDF version of the book downloadable here.)

Just reading along in it is so much more informative and evocative of the process of skrying angels than mere description; Edward Kelly must have been a master actor to keep all the various voices and speech patterns in his head. I think my personal favorite angel-aethyr-whatever is "Il," who shows up on page 41 in front of a curtain, in ragged apparel but wearing a "white satten" jerkin, and says: "Room for a player. Jesus, who would have thought I should have met you here?" In an earlier seance, Il was even described as looking like "a Vice in a play"; and sure enough on page 42, Il claims "I have business in Denmark." I could troll through the rest of Il's appearances and pull out plenty more like that -- in short, I think I've found the smoking goetic gun for Dee's dramaturgies.

There's also a lot of untapped prophecies in the various angelic and aethyric utterances; the notion of Dee and Kelly as Nostradamian figures has a lot of pernicious potential.

But my favorite bit so far is one that Phil Masters and I stumbled over in Cambridge when we were looking at the microfilm collection there; it's from a seance on May 23, 1584, and from page 156 of Casaubon's edition:

Now appear many Crocodiles, long necked, scaled on the body, with long tales. A great place appeareth, covered about with fire. Many great Serpents appear here of 200 foot. It appeareth very Eastward. No people appear here."

The narrating angel (Nalvage) calls the place Coxlant, and in the tour of the world Nalvage is conducting, it immediately precedes the Garden of Eden. Did Kelly skry up dinosaurs? After all, if he were making things up, wouldn't dragons have made more sense to him?

Fun on every page. Untranslated Latin on many pages, but such is the price one pays for being a dabbler instead of a real scholar.

That said, my Dee dabbling is now well and truly enabled. I've already got the nice Peterson edition of the Mysteriorum, published by Weiser as John Dee's Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic, and a copy of The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee and the Catalogue of His Library of Alchemical Manuscripts, so I'm pretty well fixed for primary Dee activities, and I've already discovered that I can't make heads or tails out of his formal magical-Hermetic texts, so I'm just as happy to depend on Robert Turner's Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus where need be. (That book, by the way, is just impossible to find; I stumbled over a copy for thirty bucks at Fields in San Francisco a few years back and counted myself lucky. I'm not sure what I'd recommend that's actually available. There's probably something out there, though.)

So big thanks again to jnutley for helping a brother out. Over the years, every so often someone has (to my dumfounded amazement) been so nice as to out of the blue send me books they suspect (or know) I want; I've embarrassingly less often been so nice as to thank them publicly. Well, my Leap Weekend Resolution is to thank such people going forward, in a format very like this one.

My much-loved friends snowy_owlet and iamnikchick both just blogged recipes, which reminds me that I had intended to blog Tuesday's dinner, because it worked out really, really well.

But first, a little backstory. Our neighborhood's terrible grocery store, the Hyde Park Co-Op, attempted a monopolistic expansion a few years back, and took over a smaller store, Mr. G's. Our house is about 200 yards from the Mr. G's-Co-Op location, which after a long decline, went out of business last summer. The vastly superior and much smaller Hyde Park Produce store, about a block east, bought the location, and after finding God knows what in the floorboards and paying off God knows how many city officials, finally opened in the old Mr. G's location last week, and used part of their new space to add a small fish section. Which means that this is the first time since I've moved to Chicago that I've had edible fish that I wanted to buy within walking distance.

So I wanted to buy some fish from them as a good positive-feedback "thank you," and I wanted to use my new cast-iron skillet (a Christmas present from gnosticpi), and it all came together as "Marco Polo Salmon" (so named by me because its mysterious flavor country lies halfway between Italy and China) on Tuesday night.

( How, specifically, it came together )

For whatever reason, the mix of flavors just plain works, and it's rich enough that you'll hum quietly to yourself in repletion for the rest of the night.

I built that recipe out of two recipes; the one in my first responder, Marc Bittman's redoubtable How To Cook Everything, for "Pan-Grilled Salmon Fillets With Sesame-Oil Drizzle" and the "Penne With Grilled Salmon, Asparagus, and Lemon Butter" from, believe it or not, 365 Ways to Cook Pasta by Marie Simmons. I find these "365 Ways To Cook X" books, for all that they look kind of low-rent, surprisingly full of good, even sophisticated ideas.

I've had good luck with 365 Ways to Cook Chicken (which I see by my cunning little Amazon widget thing is available from the Z-shops for the unbeatable price of ONE PENNY), and only my practice of not copying published recipes directly into my blog prevents me from crowing about the amazing "Dilled Artichoke Soup With Lemon" that I got out of Georgia Chan Downard and Jane Galton's 365 Great Soups and Stews and made on Epiphany. Downard and Galton, specifically, have never led me astray. The books are apparently staples of yard sales, library sales, and the like everywhere, so keep an eye out. (Or help me out, and hit one of these links and order them used along with a bunch of other stuff from Amazon so that I can buy more salmon with my Associates Rewards money. It's all good.)

I've now read three novels by Christopher Fowler, and in all of them, a torrential downpour or series of them drenches London at a key moment in the plot. This may be a theme, or it just may be like Tim Powers' "hero departs over water" thing, just a trope Fowler likes a lot.

I started off with Rune, thanks to a cite in the excellent Ramsey Campbell-edited anthology Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James, which I heartily recommend. Fowler's Rune is a modernized, expanded version of M.R. James' classic story "Casting the Runes," and it was apparently Fowler's second novel. I got about two-thirds of the way through it, figured out where it was going, and stopped reading.

Months later, my mom came to town and gave me a copy of Fowler's mystery novel The Water Room, saying that she had read it and thought of me. Since it dealt with the history of London's secret rivers, Egyptian gods, and occult art, she had a point. While reading it, I remembered seeing the same detectives, Bryant and May, in Rune, so I went back and finished that one, too. That had a great kick in the tail once the protagonist got exposed to the runes, although I'm not sure I was wrong to dismiss the book itself.

So on the strength of Fowler's and my obviously parallel obsessions, and the fun of The Water Room, I picked up Seventy-Seven Clocks, which is apparently a revised version of a previous, more occult Bryant and May novel, Darkest Day. Even in its current straight-mystery genre form, however, there are plenty of weird things going on, from murky hints about the pre-Raphaelites to ritualistic Victorian evil, plus a whole series of great "weird menace" style murders complete with anonymous Indian assailants. I can't even hint at the awesomeness the title refers to, except to say that it's certainly of a piece with my own aesthetic.

I'm still not over-fond of Fowler's actual writing style -- it can take on a mechanical, tell-not-show quality when he's in transitional mode -- but I have to confess myself a real fan of his plotting and set decoration, which very much matches my own instincts and aesthetics. Plus, he's clearly obsessed with London, and an M.R. James fan, which is all to the good. There are apparently a few more "Bryant & May" novels for me to hunt down, and his first novel, Roofworld, sounds (I kid you not) like an Unknown Armies campaign I've been meaning to run for some time, so I've got to find it, too.

This isn't a post about the return of the warm weather, but about our old friend August Derleth. I'm re-reading his novel The Trail of Cthulhu as I'm writing the more adventure-y bits of Trail of Cthulhu, appositely enough.

It's not Derleth's best work, or even his best Mythos work (which is probably "The Thing That Walked On The Wind" or "Ithaqua"), being essentially a Fu Manchu novel in which Nayland Smith has magic powers, and the Innsmouth look replaces epicanthic folds. (The style and voice are the same sort of mulligatawney of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, without the energies of fear and love-hatred that Rohmer brings to his paranoia. Plus chunks of undigested Lovecraftian-style exposition throughout.) Tension is maintained, such as it is, by having Dr. Shrewsbury (the Nayland Smith manque) work through cutouts who might, conceivably, die. But it's a very interesting framework for (theoretical) good adventure stories, and one can see why Sandy Petersen looted so many of Derleth's original magical concepts for Call of Cthulhu back in the day.

But the most interesting thing to come out of it is that Derleth's Cthulhu is actually more cosmic than Lovecraft's. Weird. Lovecraft's Cthulhu is mostly a big psychic alien dinosaur trapped in a cave; Derleth's Cthulhu is a genuinely transdimensional entity that somehow partakes of elemental force. I feel a whole essay series coming on, in which I casuistically defend Derlethian heresy with a close reading of the sacred texts. Fortunately, I have paying writing to concentrate on instead, specifically the fraught question of how one writes a 700-word (or so) summary of the Cthulhu Mythos that is simultaneously as good as, more useful than, and not a sheer plagiarism of John Tynes' 3,000-word (or so) summary of it in d20 Call of Cthulhu. I specifically resent John for coming up with this great line, which is, I think, essentially unbeatable:

In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, a monster is a malicious creature who can kill you. In the world of Call of Cthulhu, a monster is a being so alien and strange that it's like mental plutonium: get too close, and your mind sickens and dies.

Way to ruin it for everybody else, John. Thanks a whole bunch.

Jo Walton's combination country-house "cozy" murder mystery and alternate-history political thriller Farthing tells its tale in alternate chapters, from two viewpoint characters. The first (in first-person) is Lucy Kahn (nee Eversley, and thereby hangs a tale), the estranged daughter of the politically powerful Farthing Set's main patron, who gives us the family story deftly and (in a brilliant solution to the expository problem in such books) in a convincingly scatter-brained "Oh I must tell you about Edna" way. (One flaw that many reviewers have picked in Farthing is that the Jewish character, David Kahn, is portrayed as too perfect. Perhaps such reviewers have missed the fact that he is portrayed almost entirely through the eyes of his besotted wife of eight months. Or perhaps such reviewers are cold, lonely people without love.)

The novel's second viewpoint is that of Inspector Carmichael, the intelligent (but not too much so) and sensitive (but not quite too much so) Scotland Yard man. Carmichael's chapters don't work as well, possibly because the narration is third-person, and possibly because Carmichael is a less developed character. (Admittedly, as the Scotland Yard man in a "cozy," he's true to genre form there.) Carmichael is sent to Hampshire to solve the mystery of the murder, at Farthing House, of the architect of the "heroic peace" with Hitler. I don't want to give anything away, but the transformation of the obvious red herring into state propaganda is almost too arch and acid to be believed, by the reader or anyone else -- but I'm no expert in what the great and good British public will swallow.

Many of the blurbs and comments on the cover and inside papers of Farthing emphasize the book's ability, for those blurbers and commenters at least, to illumine current events in some fashion. Indeed, an author's note at the beginning, comparing the history of fascism to reading about dead dragons only to find a live one over your shoulder, seems to justify and even encourage such a reading. Now, I'm far from an expert on the current British political scene, so I have no real idea about whether Britain is closer or not to fascism "than ever" (whatever that means), and the general apolitical tenor of the Principality of Cairo is such that I will forbear to comment on such matters, but apparently if you enjoy that sort of frisson, Farthing can deliver it to you.

I will note, speaking purely as a former student of political science, that it is a structural mystery to me that Britain hasn't already gone fascist several times, given that the last formal check on the power of the ruling party in the House of Commons fell in 1911. So I certainly can't call the AH -- namely, the slow "Finlandization" of Britain after a Nazi victory on the Continent -- implausible on that level. I'd cavil at making the break-point the Hess Mission in May 1941 (in the novel, Hess apparently succeeded in making effective contact with the Cliveden Set, here renamed and repopulated as the Farthing Set) rather than the near-run putsch against Churchill a year earlier. But Walton needed a "heroic peace," and I certainly won't say, from what I have read of the era, that the snake-pit of British aristocratic-Tory politics in the 1940s couldn't have produced such a turn of events.

Walton is also particularly good at slowly evoking the almost claustrophobic incestuousness of such politics, and her real brilliant tour de force is combining that sensation with the subgenre in which claustrophobia and incestuousness are positive virtues, namely the English country-house mystery. The mystery is actually a rather good one, with enough misdirection and hugger-mugger to delight any fan of Agatha Christie, although the tone is rather more Josephine Tey or Dorothy Sayers (all to the good, in my book). Purely on the level of interleaved genre form, Farthing is a triumph well worth a read. The rest is clotted cream on that wonderful structural scone.

As I do each and every year at about this time, I shall endeavor to pluck out a pithy summary of the 83.5 books and one magazine I acquired at BookExpo America and schlepped back to Burning Wheel Global Super HQ in the scenic Manhattan Tenderloin. And again, I shall perform this pluckery using a handy format ganked from elissa_carey, and again this does not include the 11.5 books snarfed up for mollpeartree, nor the two books for gracefuleigh and one for gnosticpi.

Five Favorite Books:

The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, by Andrew F. Smith. A reduction (heh) of Smith's two-volume Encyclopedia on the same topic, this isn't quite up to Davidsonian standards, but promises to be a delight in its own more restricted idiom.

Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York's Trial of the Century, by Mike Dash. The story of the only NYPD officer ever executed for murder, if it's half as good as Dash's definitive essay on Springheeled Jack, it will be twice as good as it needs to be. The title refers to the vice district of New York at the turn of the century, or so the dust jacket tells me.

The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever, by David M. Friedman. One can only hope that this tale of the real, historical collaboration between the Lone Eagle and the inventor of the heart-lung machine yields up oceans of creepy eugenic Aryan bionic super-immortality juice. Stands to reason, anyhow.

Crusade Against the Grail, by Otto Rahn. Himmler's very own Grail-questing specialist lays it out for you in the book that -- via Vichy occultist collaborators -- inspired an immense wave of increasingly yammerheaded bestsellers. If you ever wanted to know who decided the Cathars were the good guys, well, it was the Nazis. (Okay, originally, it was Jules Michelet. But like Dan Brown and Graham Hancock, the Nazis never did their own research.)

Endless Things, by John Crowley. The final novel in Crowley's Aegypt series, the first of which (Aegypt) isn't the Great American Secret History Novel only because Crowley's Little, Big is the Great American Secret History Novel. If (and I say here, if) Tim Powers isn't the greatest living American fantasy author, John Crowley is. The burn of it is that I can't read this book until the wonderful people at Small Beer Press (who published this book, and even more wonderfully, gave me a copy) bring Love and Sleep, the second volume in the quartet and the only one I'm missing, back into print. Aiiiee. Until then, I shall just have to make do with the almost-as-favorite Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, also from Small Beer, and which I can read right away.

Favorite Childhood Books:

Only one children's book this year; The Name of this Book is Secret, by "pseudonymous bosch." Perhaps we should add a different category to replace this one -- I'll happily take suggestions in comments.

Funniest Book:

Restricting it to books that are funny on purpose (see "Guilty Pleasures," below), probably either Andrew Ferguson's Land of Lincoln, or the Chris Elliott parody of Jon Krakauer-style adventure outdoor books, Into Hot Air.

Scariest Book:

In honest truth? Planet of Slums, by one of my favorite Communists, Mike Davis, but you're more likely looking for an answer like Rehearsals for Oblivion: Tales of the King in Yellow: Act I from Elder Signs Press.

Guilty Pleasure:

Always a rich harvest of a category, especially when my buddy David Hatcher Childress is in a giving mood. Since there's very little guiltier than the "Nazi super-science" category, let's let the Titular Clumsiness Factor decide things: Henry Stevens' Hitler's Suppressed and Still-Secret Weapons, Science and Technology is pretty great, what with two "and"s and a hyphenated alliteration, but Joseph P. Farrell comes on strong with The SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis' Incredible Secret Technology, featuring not only the Free Upgrade With Subtitle but the unwittingly self-aware use of the word "incredible." I think I'm going to have to give it to Farrell, since his book cover has a spooky bell photo with an SS rune on it.

Book Everyone Ought To Read:

Let's call it Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle, a very fine history of the first two years of the Italian Campaign of WWII. At the very least, it should serve as a corrective for those who believe there is something uniquely bollixed up about the current Iraq War -- the Italian Campaign was misbegotten on every level from the grand strategic down to the grand tactical; in American military history, perhaps only the Peninsular Campaign was a bigger, more comprehensive fiasco.

Comic:

The word seemed to have gone out from DC that the way to get booksellers interested in graphic novels is to give a whole raft of them away at the show. Of the six or seven I walked off with, easily the best is Morrison and Quitely's All-Star Superman Vol. 1. There were also standout collections from Drew Friedman and Edward Sorel.

I should mention up front, by way of full disclosure, that scalzi and I were co-conspirators on the Chicago Maroon and the Breakdown comic book project back in our U. of C. days. Whether that means I'm more likely to logroll his novel, or minimize it just to imagine his squirm, I leave to your judgement. As an additional data point, however, let me note that he was man enough to give me the Maroon's hardcover review copy of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum because I clearly deserved it more than he did. I forget if he ever wrote a review of it.

So anyhow, my old college chum wound up writing Old Man's War, a John-Campbell-Award-winning novel that has been pretty universally compared to Heinlein, and not to the overly logorrheiac later Heinlein, either. In San Ramon, I cashed in a Borders gift card from Christmas and picked it up in mass-market paperback, and cranked it pretty much straight through. So, readable? Very. The comparisons to R.A.H. come not merely because of the relatively clean prose style or even the subject matter -- a man joins the space infantry, discovers a bigger world -- but let's start there. The battles are exciting, but cleaner than Heinlein's battles, and lack the immediacy of, say, David Drake or even Jerry Pournelle. Scalzi's John Perry, meanwhile, is less colorful than, say, Honor Harrington or Alois Hammer. This is neither A-1 SFnal war writing nor A-1 carnography, in other words, although it's less slick (and hence much better) than John Ringo or S.M. Stirling or their ilk.

More interesting is the Heinlein-like brusque exposure-adjustment-expansion structure ("man encounters strange thing; man deals with strange thing; man encounters stranger thing; repeat until novel ends"), and the occasional swing through Heinleinesque didacticism. (To be fair, a habit hardly restricted to Heinlein or Scalzi.) We meet, for example, a former Senator who believes in peace and negotiation, and who dies an improving death because of his naïvete. We learn that fat bigots die, and good riddance. Etc., and it's on to the next chapter and the next strange thing. The universe comes to resemble more David Brin's Uplift cosmos, although not quite turned up so high. And on our hero goes.

Part of this works because unlike the eerily mature and articulate young narrators of many Heinlein novels, our protagonist is 75 years old. He's come by his cynicism and world-weariness honestly, and he volunteers for the Colonial Defense Force, which only wants old soldiers, considering young ones too unskilled and too much trouble. (Except when they don't. I don't want to spoiler anything, and maybe it's dealt with in the sequels, which I haven't read, but ... well, Scalzi elides the premise in a pretty major way later in the novel. Not unskillfully.) Perry goes off Earth, and learns that ... well, we covered that part -- the universe is big, strange, and deadly. There's a minimum of classroom lectures (although a good Heinlein lecture is usually a better read than most people's whole novels) and, as I mentioned before, a cracking plot through which our hero hurtles with aplomb. Perhaps too much aplomb -- even 75-year-olds might not take interstellar warfare in stride, and nobody seems to wash out of the CDF much on psych grounds -- and perhaps too much plot.

One of the things you don't notice at first about Starship Troopers (which, if you're just joining us, is the clear and present model for Old Man's War) is the very ordinariness of Juan Rico. Sure, he survives, and makes officer, but he's not the Audie Murphy of the Bug War, or even the Richard Sharpe. He's just an average, spoiled civilian who becomes a skilled, but not exceptional, Everysoldier. By contrast, John Perry is something special, and -- again, no spoilers -- the laws of chance pass him by not just once but thrice at least. Not a crippling flaw, but it does subtly belie the straightforward prose. Scalzi repeatedly hints at mysteries and questions, and has the guts to leave them unanswered (I don't think it's sloppiness) which again I found more interesting than problematic.

One such mystery, at least to me -- the CDF seems to recruit exclusively from American oldsters. All the CDF troop ships are named after U.S. cities, Perry only meets fellow (former) Americans throughout, and so forth. Where Heinlein's hero was a half-Filipino half-Argentine with a "Finno-Turk" master sergeant, Perry is from Ohio. In the novel, Scalzi mentions the Subcontinental War, in which America apparently won by nuking India (a development far less likely than gengineered super-soldiers, although that's just a nitpick) and states that Americans (except CDF veterans) aren't allowed to colonize the stars. (This is implied as a bit of a punishment for atomic misbehavior, but it predates the nuclear war.) Indians and Pakistanis and (one presumes) other Third Worlders can emigrate to the colonies without joining up; this is also explained as simple "fairness" since America is still prosperous and underpopulated, so the poor huddled masses elsewhere need colonial outlets. But the colonies are also depicted as essentially dominating extrasolar travel -- are they really not interested in highly skilled American engineers, doctors, or biologists? Unless they join the CDF and risk getting all those life skills blown up? Really? Perhaps it's all explained in the sequels, but it's weird that nobody in the novel thinks it's weird -- unlike the other mysteries, like how the CDF builds a beanstalk with no counter-weight, or what some of the spookier aliens are up to.

I don't think the all-American CDF is an extension of, or even a riff on, the "America as world sheriff" theme occasionally prevalent in the more testosterone-scented genres, but I'm at a loss for a sensible explanation from the material available in the book.

That said, Old Man's War is a good, solid pull from the Campbell-Heinlein flask, interestingly cut with some newer caskings. Well worth your $7.99, and your five-to-ten hours.

Speaking of 'mazingly cool things, I've been somewhat delinquent in mentioning the lovely new edition of Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan edited by Timothy "The Mountain Witch" Kleinert, which he sent me an embarrassing number of months ago. (Although he still doesn't have a page set up for it on his website, so who's delinquent now, eh? You can buy it from IPR, though.)

I know what you're thinking: "Ken, I already have the Dover Books edition of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, so why would I want Tim's no doubt estimable version?" Well, first and foremost, Kleinert has included five more stories, from Hearn's Ghostly Japan, as well as some "Goblin Poetry" from Hearn's The Romance of the Milky Way. (It's missing, however, the story "Ubazakura" and the wonderfully eccentric essays on "Insect Studies" included with the Dover version.) Secondly, like The Mountain Witch, this book is a triumph of Joshua Newman's design, which somehow manages to combine occasional bold-face, sidebar/footnotes, and ragged-right margins into a clean, evocative look that is appropriately "Japanese" without being Orientalist or fey. Finally, Kleinert's critical material (his Foreword, and the footnotes he has found or added to supplement Hearn's) is sounder, and far more useful for getting a handle on the material, than that in the Dover edition. Kleinert has rotated -- I don't want to say shaped, or even tuned -- Kwaidan into an "inspirational supplement" for Japanese folk-horror gaming, rather than just a hella good book of Japanese ghost stories.

Which it also is. Specifically, "Mujina" may be the scariest two pages ever written in English.

The two latest additions to my c.v. both deal significantly with questions of form and structure, although not entirely to the exclusion of content and style. I tend to do that a lot (Nightmares of Mine, ST:TNG Narrator's Screen), and (when I do it well) people seem to respond to it as the hart longs for the cooling stream, although I'm not sure why.

• My chapter in Greg Stolze and Dennis Detwiller's One-Roll-Engine supers RPG Wild Talents (now shipping; I got mine mid-January) is entitled "Changing the Course of Mighty Rivers," and it's an attempt to drill down to the "hyperfoundations" of a superhero universe. I map said universe along four axes: Historical Inertia (Red), Character Inertia (Gold), Strangeness (Blue), and Moral Clarity (Black). The "high end" of those four axes is -- ta daa -- the "four-color" comic book universe. In addition, I offer a few thoughts on the fundamental structural questions of a super-setting: How many supers are there, what does their power distribution look like, and what does their geographical distribution look like? And then I close it out with a tour through history looking for change points (mostly thematic ones before 1860; mostly specific ones afterward, though selected for their thematic illustration) for a super-AH. All with crazy-tasty Christopher Shy art throughout, and an awesome, awesome chapter by Dennis extending the timeline of the GODLIKE universe to 1992.

• And just yesterday, despite the bone-chilling cold, I ventured to my box to pick up my contributor's copies of Second Person, which if you click that link, or even mouse over it, you'll note is from the veddy veddy highfalutin MIT Press. (This means Noam Chomsky and I now share a publisher, although I note that both of us place our more disreputable work with other imprints.) My piece is a pretty basic grad-student analysis of "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu,"¹ but the pieces by John Tynes (in which he argues for an 'engagist' gaming rather than 'escapist' gaming), James Wallis (on the structural requirements for "story-making games" -- although James' analysis of Bacchanal is sorely missed here), and Will Hindmarch (on the nature of storytelling as an in-game process) are all fairly hefty and interesting, theory-wise. Plus Rebecca Borgstrom and Paul Czege both provide some hard-core structural-functional analyses of their own works (Exalted: Fair Folk and My Life With Master), plus there's some war-stories about various other games' creation (including the "Howard Dean in Iowa" computer game), plus George R.R. Martin on the origin of the Wild Cards universe. Plus a whole 'nother section on computer games, which I haven't even dipped into, plus reprints of three experimental RPGs: Tynes' Puppetland, Costikyan's Bestial Acts, and Wallis' Baron Munchausen. Many-plus good, in other words.

[1] I do note, with some asperity, that whatever orangutan MIT Press uses as a copy-editor seems to believe that "data" is a singular noun, with the unhappy result that my footnotes in that piece now read as if they were written by a sixth-grader. I assure you that, like all my work, they were composed at a faultless tenth-grade level.

Purely on the metrics of it, 2007 is shaping up to be the year I start getting into things everybody else already knew about.

* On a whim (probably instilled by my entire flist gleefully bragging about getting/giving Season 1 of The Venture Brothers for Saturnalia Variously Observed) I TiVo'd up what turned out to be the Venture Brothers Christmas Marathon. So far, amusing and involved -- it's possibly the pinnacle of Frankenstein media.

* luckymarty decided that enough was enough, already, and gave me two books by R.A. Lafferty. I'd previously only read "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," and somehow in my head I kept confusing him with J.G. Ballard, which is the kind of ludicrous amateur mistake that embarrasses me greatly. Well, I've just finished Fourth Mansions, which is The Shorter Illuminatus! Trilogy, If Written By A Drunken Committee of G.K. Chesterton, Avram Davidson, C.S. Lewis, And Will Rogers. It's got the same freight (but a much higher density) of barely-investigated-brilliant-ideas-thrown-away-in-a-paragraph as Vernor Vinge at his best, except these are crazy ideas. I'm going down in the basement and bringing up the short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, the second book from luckymarty, to jump the queue.

* Every single person I have ever met who pretends to any interest whatsoever in the espionage genre has recommended the British TV series The Sandbaggers to me. I finally got around to mentioning it to mollpeartree and she put it in her Netflix queue, and we watched the first two episodes during the New Years' Day Layabout. We'll be Netflixing the rest, methinks. For those of you who read comics, it's essentially Greg Rucka's template for Queen and Country, except it's even more centered on the Director of Ops than on Minder (né Sandbagger) One.

* I'm going to make my first pot roast (Pot Roast a la Ashbless) some time in the next month or so.

If there's anything else I'm missing out on that everybody else already knew about, feel free to let me know.

By far the coolest fact I learned from Mickelthwait and Wooldridge's The Right Nation may not, in fact, be true. M. and W. note, passim, that Galileo was invited to become a professor at Harvard. The dates fit -- Harvard was founded in 1636, Galileo dies in 1642. But by 1636, he was already under house arrest, and besides, as a Catholic, would he really have gotten an invitation from the godly Puritan fathers of Harvard? I couldn't find anything while Googling around on it, except a note that the Bohemian philosopher Jan Comenius was, as it happens, invited to become the first President of Harvard. Which would also have been cool, although not as cool as Galileo establishing the Harvard College Observatory would have been. If any of my Cantabrigian-American flisters would like to let me know if M. and W.'s tale is, in fact, true, I'd love to hear it.

(The book, btw, is a well-written compendium of things I mostly already knew, so the really valuable part of it for me is the fact that it's written from a foreigner's viewpoint. But it's well worth reading if, unlike me, you didn't grow up reading National Review. No doubt there are some nits to pick with the seeming inevitability of their theme, given the degringolade in 2006, but look how much the 1946 election changed the large-scale momentum of American politics. Oh, right, not much.)

From John R. Swanton's Indian Tribes of North America I learned, however, that the name of the Potawatomi tribe, who occupied Chicago when the French came through, means "people of the place of the fire." Given the non-trivial role played by fire in Chicago, that's just plain cool. (Yes, I know that the original place of the fire was probably somewhere in Michigan. Pff.)

(This book is a kind of reference summa, circa 1930, of the North American Indian tribes' geographical and linguistic dispersal. Swanton takes 1650 as his base date, which seems fair, although individual entries go as far back as he can and (of course) down to his present. Individual books on individual nations have no doubt surpassed it, but I haven't found anything superior on the whole continent since. What I love most about it is that Swanton makes sure to list every possible name for a given tribe, with derivations where known. Reading these lists, I came to my general conclusion that every Indian tribe called itself "the people," called the tribe uphill that picked on it "the snake people," and the tribe downhill that they picked on "the dirt people.")

mollpeartree also gave me the Library of America edition of Lovecraft's Tales, from which I learn nothing, having already known all about HPL, his tales, and the awesomeness of mollpeartree.

The fourth book she gave me I haven't read yet, so we'll have to pick this theme up after I do.

On the way to and from Oakland to discuss tiny tanks and their need for print discussion, I finished Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and probably everything you need to know about it can be summed up in the fact that I started reading it in Vegas last month.

It's a nested narrative of three generations of scholars and their search for the tomb of Vlad III Tepes -- you know, Dracula -- who (as it turns out) became a vampire and still stalks those scholars with fell intent. Put that way, it sounds pretty good, and it's undeniable that there's a good solid core of book in there -- it hurtles about Europe chasing vampire archives, after all. Dracula is depicted appropriately, as toxic evil with a nice (if not totally believable) twist -- rather than romance or conquest or revenge on Turkey, he craves control of history via the control of historians. (This does explain -- though not entirely convincingly -- why Dracula keeps leaving clues around instead of just killing everyone who goes looking for his tomb.) His appearances are almost always effective, and in one or two cases brilliantly so. (I won't spoil anything, but the sidewalk artist in Venice. Brrr.)

But the novel's epistolary framework is simply not believable -- nobody writing desperate letters to their daughter to bring her up to speed on the hunt for Dracula's tomb puts so much padded Fodor's Balkans description into them -- and the repeated intercutting of narratives doesn't so much build parallelism as drain tension. The main narrative is set in the 1960s, with flashbacks to the 1950s and 1930s (and the 1470s, in the form of a Bulgarian chronicle), which occasions yet more distancing, especially since the whole thing is presented as assembled by the surviving present-day narrator. There's a strong element of auctorial fiat in the final showdown, and it has the occasional Da Vinci Code problem that the allegedly impenetrable clue-tangles are actually pretty obvious. Last and probably least, Kostova hasn't mastered the Powers touch of using real facts and coding fictional ones -- she has too many spurious details (such as "Dracole" appearing in a piece of Shakespearean apocrypha) when verisimilitude should be all.

If you want a great archival detective story, read A.S. Byatt's Possession, and if you want a great Dracula novel, re-read Stoker's masterpiece. But if you don't mind prolix under-delivery, I don't actually condemn The Historian. Its heart is in the right place, namely, on the floor of a crypt with a silver stake through it.

* This is not a smattering, as instead of writing an "Out of the Box," I attended the iHobby show in scenic Rosemont, Illinois. (Motto: "Not Quite The End of the Blue Line.") I was working it for a consortium that is importing the awesome Takara World Tank Museum line of tiny (1/144 scale) plastic tanks into the States, with an eye toward the gaming and hobby markets. Yes, there will be a game. Eventually, many games. Possibly books. I will be somehow involved. Money will change hands. That is pretty much all I know right now.

* Except that, as a proportion of the general hobby-show attendee population, a surprising number of Boy Scouts are thieves. I was never a real Boy Scout myself, having lost interest somewhere around Webelos, but I seem to recall "honest" being in the Oath somewhere. A less surprising number of Chicago Bears fans are thieves, too.

* The gifted and energetic simonjrogers has set up a survey for those interested in shaping the direction of our Call of Cthulhu GUMSHOE project here, should you be one of those. So far, a plurality of people seem to play 5th edition or older, a group that includes myself, as it happens, since I consider the 5th edition rulebook a triumph of organizational clarity, or at least rather better than 6th. A majority play long-running campaigns, and a supermajority are GMs. One assumes players don't fill out surveys so much, and to be fair, the survey is a bit GM-focused.

* While on the Blue Line and the CTA in general back and forth for both the CIFF and the iHobby show, I read two paperbacks, John Fowles' The Magus and Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. The latter, which I had unjustifiably postponed reading because I was under the mistaken impression that it had anything to do with American Gods (as opposed to the mistaken impression that Neil was under, that American Gods had anything to do with American gods), is a perfectly fine attempt at supernatural screwball comedy by way of How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Not perfect by any stretch, but it kept me reading and had some very good Gaiman turns of phrase in it while he attempted to channel P.G. Wodehouse.

* The Magus, on the other hand, was a terrific novel. (I see by Wikipedia that Fowles released a revision in 1977. I read a copy of his 1965 first version.) It's a kind of blend of Situationism, initiatory mysticism, and postwar Angry Young Man Novel into a whole very much larger than the sum of its parts. It's the kind of novel I'm perversely glad that I read at 40(ish) rather than 25, because I've gained a kind of necessary distance from the main character's attitude of entitlement that makes it rather safer to read now. However, I suspect that had I read it at age 25, I would have been blown away.

* Also, I ate three and a half dozen oysters while attending the final night of the Roister With The Oyster fest, alongside gracefuleigh and kaynorr, who also partnered up with me the next night to see The Prestige, which bloody well ruled. All hail Christopher Nolan, who adapted Christopher Priest's (also excellent) novel with flair and showmanship. The college girls sitting next to me enjoyed it as well, especially Hugh Jackman, who is apparently just "amazing" among other, less immediately excerptable, sentiments. So, fun for all.

* This by way of contrast with The Illusionist, which I saw a couple weeks ago as an appetizer for The Prestige, and which functioned adequately thereby. A nice little period grift movie with a colorful line of sepia magic patter and a blithe disregard for history -- Austria-Hungary as the new Ruritania. Ed Norton did his customary excellent job, as did Paul Giamatti, trying out a new, less adenoidal, voice for the role. Ironically, at this show, gracefuleigh overheard college girls discussing Paul Giamatti's general dreaminess, which is the sort of news I could have used back in the day, being more balding and petulant than tall and Wolverinish. But such is life. Or at least my weekend.

Under the impetus of Greg Stafford's amazing Great Pendragon Campaign, and with the speculative new freedom offered me by the prospect of PDF stuff, I've begun toying again with the notion of a generational horror RPG, specifically a Gothic horror RPG. Lots of tainted lineages and looming manors with one light at the turret and incest and blasted heaths and such.

Which means I should read some more Gothics.

And so I finally got around to reading Wuthering Heights, which if you can manage it, you really should read in the Norton Critical Third Edition, because then you get to read Q.D. Leavis' "A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights," which aside from being entirely wrong about the novel's supernatural component is a terrific piece of criticism. Leavis' essay fully awakens you to the levels upon levels that Emily Brontë placed in the work -- which is pretty amazing, given that it was a first novel.

Me, I purposely read it as a supernatural novel, and I don't think I was importing anything that Emily didn't mean to include. So rather than a Romantic reading, in which Heathcliff and Catherine share a love too large and wild to be subject to society's rules, I get a Cosmic reading, in which humanity (in the shape of Nelly Dean, mostly) looks on uncomprehending, seeing only through the slits of our conventional, sane tunnel vision as something inhuman acts out a vast ritual. That reading has the advantage of not privileging Heathcliff and Catherine's ridiculous behavior, too.

So what do I think is going on? I think Wuthering Heights is a story of how a Demon awakens, and is ultimately destroyed -- or perhaps absorbed -- by, a Genius Locus. Imagine if the Colour Out of Space landed in Machen's Wales.

All that said, I'm pretty sure that Emily intended the Romantic reading, Byron fan that she was. But that's the difference between literature and not-literature, ennit?

So I loved Ropecon. Loved it, loved it. Wouldn't have missed it for worlds.

And yet, as though to bolster my innate sense that They have it in for me, going to Finland did mean missing not only three days (at least) of John Tynes but the delivery date of my pre-ordered copy of Three Days to Never. That, for those who somehow missed out, is Tim Powers' new novel. The agony of New Powers Novel I Haven't Read was at times palpable.

But when I got back last week I scampered down to the mailbox, and wrenched it from the hands of Not Me, and read it in two nights.

The basic story: During the Harmonic Convergence, Frank Marrity's grandmother dies. She, it turns out, was Einstein's illegitimate daughter, and had access to his other discoveries, involving the kabbalah and time-travel. Now both the sorcerous op team within Mossad (who very much recall the sorcerous op team in MI-6 in Declare) and the American agents of a vaguely Gnostic secret society (who seem more like Powers' villains from the Last Call cycle) are after those discoveries, and hence, after Frank and his twelve-year-old daughter Daphne. Increasingly occult hijinks ensue.

Now, there's a lot of good stuff in here. Oren Lepidopt's curse is one of the most haunting and astonishing consequences of "stepping off the sidewalk" in all of Powers' fiction. The sense of vast alien forces, so well conveyed in Declare and Stress of Her Regard, is here in precisely right amounts. The Shakespeare influence in this case is from The Tempest, which I think is my second favorite of the plays. I love, and will always love, the way Powers writes his villains -- they're often flawed, with blind spots and short tempers when things inevitably Go Wrong -- and he writes a good one here in Rascasse. Charlotte, the blind remote viewer, is even better, at least at first, when her distance from humanity is being stressed. And who doesn't love a mystical back-story involving Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein?

But said mystical back-story is conveyed in a seance that might as well have been an invocation of the loa St.-Exposition. Charlotte goes through a screeching personality change that makes Nardie Dinh in Last Call look positively serene. And the whole book -- with the exception of Lepidopt's curse, and the general high-concept brilliance of the plot itself -- has been done better, specifically by Tim Powers. Powers' books often scintillate by hinting at another world of stories just over the horizon, but the main action is (usually) what compels you. In this book, I found myself wanting to read the Powers book about Lepidopt's unit in the Six-Day War, or the Powers book about Charlie Chaplin's attempts at magic, rather than this relatively conventional thriller. Perhaps the book it's closest to is Expiration Date, which likewise concerned a pre-adolescent protagonist caught up in a shadowy occult underground backstopped by (perhaps more interesting) high historical weirdness. And like Expiration Date, my first reading found me, perhaps unfairly, disappointed.

Admittedly, both Expiration Date and Three Days to Never followed absolute masterpieces -- Last Call and Declare, specifically. There's going to be a letdown -- I'm sure that fans going to see Romeo and Juliet in 1595 found it likewise disappointingly conventional, coming as it did right after A Midsummer Night's Dream. And also, upon re-reading Expiration Date, I found much, much more there than I had at first, which makes unfair comparisons to this book particularly unfair. So take my ambivalence in this case cum salus granis, or words to that effect.

And even Okay Powers is vastly better than almost anyone else. Buy this book, read it, enjoy it, mine it for games. Just don't feel bad about going to Finland first.

At CONvergence, I was on the "Writing Craft: World" panel with a number of successful, published novelists, which seems to happen with some regularity on such panels. (My favorite instance was at Origins last year, when I found myself moderating a panel on writing characters that featured Harry Turtledove, Mike Stackpole, Erik Mona, and Rob Schwalb.) This is always kind of hilarious given that, until Secrets of the Ruined Temple came out,¹ my longest published fiction was 750 words in one of the chapter-head vignettes in GURPS Infinite Worlds.

One of the more successful, as it turned out, of my CONvergence co-panelists was scott_lynch, who said all manner of implausible nice things about my own work and asked if I'd allow him to sign a copy of his first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, as a gift to me. Little did Ser Lynch know of my consuming fondness for free books, although I suspect he may have guessed (being a writer himself) my consuming fondness for ego-boosting. It's been sitting on my table since, and I've really been hoping that it would be good, so I could write a review of it that would make him feel positively about his very generous gesture.

Well, it is good.

At the panel, I got a good bit of mileage out of my insistence that fantasy novelists should use Earth as their setting -- it's better researched, more interesting, and more dangerously weird than anywhere else. (Seriously, if you're not Tolkein or Leiber, I really don't want to read about your world. Honest. And you're not. Double honest.) Messer Lynch, giddily, spent much of the panel writhing about in mock agony at my pronouncement, knowing full well that his novel was set in the canal-riven, corrupt, quattrocento-feeling city state of "Camorra," but could just as easily have been set in Venice. Well, "just as easily," if Scott Lynch were Avram Davidson, but within Lynch's powers, if not exactly easily. Maybe with a dateline -- "Venice. Not Our Venice, Exactly. The Quattrocento, Likewise." Some research, sure, a bit of re-drafting here and there. Saints in for gods, that sort of thing. Or maybe not. Just leave the Roman gods in place and forge forward. It's been a thousand years, who knows what Hecate's cult would get up to? Heck, you could even leave the Elderglass (a nifty eldritch Precursor artifact underlying Camorra) in a particularly strange Venice. As it is, he's not fooling anyone. Even the cover artist knows it's Venice -- the cover depicts the Piazza of St. Mark.

It is a very great credit to Scott Lynch that my brain stopped screaming "Venice!" in my ear long about page 120-ish, and had resigned itself to the occasional interested "Now, here's how I'd have moved it around if this were Venice" by page 250-ish, and was simply zooming around with its finger in its mouth, meeping in excitement by the last thunderous climax.

Anyhow, if you don't share my particular hangup about fantasy settings, then I can't really imagine anything to robustly dislike about this book at all.² Camorra is actually a pretty neat fantasy setting, if you like that kind of thing. Lynch manages to discuss the cuisine, history, religion, magic, urban landscape, and (some) sexual mores of his city without making it bloody obvious or boring. (That said, he is remarkably and frustratingly quiet about any architecture that isn't a Brutally Imposing Ducal Fortress, or built of Elderglass.) The braided narratives are a little clunky, reading like "The Origin of Locke Lamora" interspersed with the actual novel, and occasionally like "The Desperately Needed Set-Up for the Actual Novel's Plan for Locke Lamora," which is a pity, but hardly a crime. An uncharitable reader could, I suppose, see Locke Lamora and his big, badass buddy Jean Tannen as Yet Another Grey-Mouser-and-Fafhrd, although Locke and Jean are con artists, not thieves per se, and I think that's a plenty original twist, especially in fantasy, which depends more than most genres on unoriginality for its success.

But the voice -- the voice is really, really good, reminiscent in a way of the early Vlad Taltos books, but without too much of the "invulnerable GM's Pet NPC" feel to them that Brust has at times. Let me put it this way -- you just know, somehow, that when Scott Lynch describes a character as Absolutely Exhaustively Untouchable By Mortal Plot Device, that character will end up in the soup, in a gratifying (or at least salutary) fashion. (And Lynch is not afraid to murder his darlings. Or anyone else's. Fair warning.) For that voice, and a story that's actually not afraid to drive a plot all the way forward to the (gratifying and salutary) end, while setting up a natural curiosity about "what happens next," I'll forgive a flinch or two at the Bridge of Sighs.

[1] Why yes, "Ring Around the Sun," the introductory fiction in that fine Mage book, is indeed my work, as is the first, non-fictional, chapter. How kind of you to ask. No, I didn't typeset it.

[2] Well, there are dirty words in it. And whores, although we're carefully told in one of the few unlikely and obvious bits of setting-caulk that they run themselves just like in Sin City so it's only sort of nasty, but you can't really have Lankhmar without whores. Or Venice, for that matter.