* Imagine my surprise when the Chicago Public Library actually had Cherie Priest's two monster novels, Fathom and Those Who Went Remain There Still, sitting on the shelves like they belonged there. When they so clearly belonged on my shelf, but in lieu of that I checked them both out and read each one in one sitting. Those Who Went Remained There Still took about two and a half hours, or just about the time it took to roast a 7-lb. pork shoulder, and it is a pure and beautiful Kentucky bug hunt of a novel flashing between Daniel Boone vs. the World's Worst Harpy and the feuding descendants of one of his men vs. Well That Would Be Telling. Priest had me at "Daniel Boone," but even those who fancy themselves immune to his frontier charm will likely fall for her "Manly Wade Wellman, Only Scarier, And With Better Narrative Control" tale, a veritable crick-and-holler Beowulf.

Fathom, meanwhile, felt like Tim Powers. There are some writers, Powers towering among them, who can deploy actual history and make it sound like the finest spun fantasy fiction. Despite knowing nothing of Bok Tower Gardens or indeed Edward H. Bok, when he entered the story I somehow immediately knew that Priest hadn't made anything up. Possibly including the earth elemental. That's hard-core fantasy writing, there. The rest of the book becomes a mounting proxy war between said earth elemental and the "water witch" Arahab, who wants to awaken Leviathan. You heard me. The monsters are their proxies: the (fictional?) pirate Jose Gaspar and two cousins captured in Thirties Florida. Priest's hand with setting, meanwhile, is almost as good as her hand with history. Wellman and Powers is a hard enough mix to handle without her stirring Lovecraft into the mix.

Somebody please tell me that her Eden Moore novels aren't quite that good.

* Speaking of elemental proxy wars, my Nobilis campaign is officially off the ground. It's based around the concept supplement I pitched to James Wallis Way Back When, called "American Dreaming." (In my mind, the cover is the same as the Nobilis Big White Book, except the half-face statue is the Statue of Liberty.) The players are the Powers of Entropy (no relation), Hope, Apocalypse, Secret Knowledge, and Texas, under the Imperator Croatoan. Their Chancel? Warehouse 23, of course, just where John Dee and Walter Raleigh built it, on Roanoke Island. It should be fun; if anyone has any really good Nobilis resource Web pages to point me at, I'm happy to look.

* For robin_d_laws and any other interested parties: My Cthulhu 101 chat is finally up at vocalo.org. Forty minutes of excellent talk with Luis, on Cthulhu, iconic modern horrors, and scary movies.

* I also checked out a swath of early Eric Ambler novels, having finally read A Coffin For Dimitrios this summer only to discover the missing link between E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Le Carre.

* Upcoming posts will dissect the new and unsatisfactory Prisoner series, the works of spy novelist Alan Furst (which I'm one book short of finishing), recipes for pork-shoulder-bone-enabled rice and beans and for harissa-enabled North African eggs-in-purgatory (if successful), and the process behind (and lessons ahead of) Tehran: Nest of Spies, my new release for The Day After Ragnarok. So watch this space!

I suppose it was inevitable that something like this should happen. I finished up Avram Davidson's novel Masters of the Maze today, but not before flinching at this paragraph:

He descended level after level, like someone in a bad dream or in a (bad, ex officio) story by Merritt or Lovecraft. The latter, at least, he recalled, had been obsessed with unpleasant odors. And with cold. The former had merely cultivated a large, country garden consisting entirely of poisonous plants. And Lovecraft had also been obsessed with the theme of humans lending themselves or selling themselves to the service of alien creatures. Like Major Flint. In fact, Nate reflected, Lovecraft might have gotten along quite well with Major Flint. Their social views had much in common.

Context: our hero, Nate, is descending into a foul-smelling, freezing cavern full of horrid aliens called the Chulpex who are allied with Major Flint, a schismatic Freemason who wishes to use them to wipe out foreigners and restore American virtu. "Merritt" refers to A. Merritt, author of "The Moon Pool" and other weird tales, which are not as good as Lovecraft but are certainly not "ex officio" bad.

Note, by the way, how very, very excellent that paragraph is. While it tears out my heart and treads on it.

The novel, by the way, is quite good, although not Davidson's best. But it does have a parallel-world-spanning Maze, Ambrose Bierce, schismatic Freemasons, and a hero who writes "men's adventure" articles with titles like ... oh, let Davidson have the last word:

He knew the style, craft, and market. Love-Starved Arabs Raped Me Often. Communist Crocodiles Raped My Wife. Man-Eaters of the Malayan Peninsula. Man-Hating Women Pirates of Polynesia. Women-Eating Arabs of the Crocodile Coast. Get the guy up on the cliff. Leave him up there. Explain how he got there. Then get him off of there. Down off, up off, it made no difference. Rabid Bats Devoured My Wife. Woman-Eating Crocodiles of Wild Bokhara. Rasputin Raped My Aunt.

He had written such pieces a hundred times before, each under a different name (only sometimes he forgot and used some of them over again, so that poor Pierce Tarraval, to name but one, had lost wives to fates worse than death on three different continents), each provided with a pseudonymous affadavit attesting to its authenticity -- and each had sold promptly.

I'd discuss it further, but I have to get back to work on Women-Eating Cultists of Secret Whitechapel. I mean, Book-Hounds of London.

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.

I recently (two months ago, which is how far behind I am in usefully posting here) finished reading every work of science fiction by H. Beam Piper, with two relatively marginal exceptions (Crisis in 2140 and Fuzzies And Other People). This was as close as I can get to a sheer cultural lark these days -- nobody is breathing down my neck for an H. Beam Piper RPG¹, I'm not forced to keep up with the vast panoply of H. Beam Piper fandom, there isn't an upcoming Paratime movie starring Natalie Portman as Dalla Hadron that I need to get up to speed on. I just did it to do it.

Although I'd read a decent chunk of Piper before -- the Paratime series, Little Fuzzy, and "Omnilingual" being the only ones I'm sure of -- reading the whole stretch of it as a (relatively) educated adult instead of an omnivorous 14-year-old made an interesting comparison, not just with other SF authors, but with other acts of reading. My recent memories of re-reading all of HPL last year came back in force; I was seeing things that I'm fairly certain I simply couldn't have noticed as a teenager, or before marrying a contentious English major with an ill-concealed impatience with genre SF, or before reading a whole lot of other stuff besides.

To begin with (although this observation isn't original to me by any means) Piper seems to be doing something more interesting with his future history than Asimov or Heinlein. Asimov's Foundation tells the stories of great men who meet and survive -- even overcome -- historical crises. Heinlein mostly wrote slice-of-life stories set in various future milieux. (Although "If This Goes On..." is crisis fiction to beat the band, and I'm sure other exceptions exist.)

Piper, by contrast, told stories that while set at historical crisis moments almost always openly admit, well, failure. In Space Viking, Lucas can't save the Sword Worlds from becoming hollowed-out caudillo states. The ambassador in Lone Star Planet can't continue representing the Federation. In Uller Uprising, the close patterning of Uller on the Indian Raj tells us that the company's rule (maintained by nuclear genocide) is evanescent, and the solution clearly prefigures the company's eventual fall. "Day of the Moron" is actually a story about inevitable failure. (Outside the future history, nobody ever figures out the answer in "He Walked Around the Horses.") Even the triumphant stories aren't so clear: In "Graveyard of Dreams," the original version of Cosmic Computer, there is no Merlin; in "When in the Course --", the original version of "Gunpowder God" (set in the Federation future history) the planet Freya may have thrown off Styphon, but it gets Terra instead. All future histories, by writing series stories set during different milieux, are at bottom meta-stories about the ineluctable failure of human effort. Piper just foregrounds it, in a way that only Stapledon really did before him, but far more accessibly in the mainstream SF tradition.

This will put many people in the mind of Poul Anderson, especially the Technic/Flandry series, and Anderson's Psychotechnic League stories, though based on a rather different set of political postulates from Flandry, still have a very Piperish feel. Anderson and Piper are a lot alike; both strongly autodidactic historiphiles with that odd American mid-century suspicion of democracy, both fans of the Competent Man, both with medieval streaks miles wide through them. (Both also write compelling, believably motivated villains on occasion; the bad guy in Little Fuzzy even becomes the good guy in Fuzzy Sapiens.) Anderson and Piper go in tandem: Anderson's "Time Patrol" comes 7 years after Piper's "Police Operation"; Space Viking comes 10 years after Anderson's "The Star Plunderer."

What Piper has that Anderson doesn't is a fascination, even an obsession, with escape. "Omnilingual" is about escaping the trap of single-planet culture; Fuzzy Sapiens is about escaping a genetic trap; Kalvan of Otherwhen is about escaping the mundane present into the glorious pseudo-medieval past; Cosmic Computer is about escaping planetary bankruptcy; "Time and Time Again" and "The Edge of the Knife" are both about escaping from history itself.

Escape and failure, then, are the two counterweights in Piper's fiction. The rest is merely postwar American SF at close to its finest.

[1] Although...

* Since I know all you excellent people hurried off to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia" in the ENnie Awards, you can imagine the joy it gives me to say that all votes cast on Monday (and Tuesday until about 8 a.m.) were entirely wasted! Hurrah! So if you were nice enough to vote for me once, imagine the fun you'll have by voting for me again! And remind all your coworkers, family members, spouses, or dogs whom nobody knows on the Internet to do the same, if you'd be so kind.

* And once you've done that, you can go look at this awesome Map Of Venus With Oceans.

* If you're a fan of chadu's sweet supers RPG, Truth & Justice, now's your chance to dig up the horrific past of your campaign -- or to start a new one in the badly color-registered 1940s! Yes, Adventures Into Darkness, the definitive guide to Lovecraftian Golden Age superheroism, is finally available in Truth & Justice format on DriveThruRPG. It's the only place you can see the Fighting Yank engulfed by a shoggoth -- with full T&J stats for both! (And for 32 other heroes, villains, and monsters from Nedor Comics and/or H.P. Lovecraft.)

* But Ken, I hear you say, I've already clicked there! What now? Well, now, you can go vote in the ENnie Awards! While I'm sure you good people were already intending to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and for Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia," don't forget to remind your less-savvy friends, co-workers, family members, and passersby that those are clearly the kinds of audacious, hopeful choices for change that we have been waiting for. Vote early, but don't even joke about voting often, because if we break this award, our parents aren't going to buy us a new one, young man.

* What? You want to click on something that won't benefit me in any way whatsoever? What is wrong with you people? Oh, well, I live to serve. This link is a year old, but it's still just fourteen kinds of awesome: Middle-Earth Mapped Onto Ice Age Europe. You're welcome. Now vote for me.

Recently I accidentally discovered what I believe to be the first work of the "military SF" subgenre, H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising, which among other things takes a remarkably blase view of atomic warfare for a book written in 1952. It's essentially a redress of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, only on the planet Uller, and it's satisfactory, though not Piper's best work.

But I stumbled across it while charting the edges of an interesting (well, interesting to me) lacuna in military SF, the "heroic counterinsurgency" story. There are plenty of stories of military SF commando operations, from the opening chapter of Starship Troopers on down, and Elizabeth Moon and David Weber are only the two latest examples of "naval SF" which by its nature can't really get into counterinsurgency. Most of the rest of the military SF field are "heroic insurgency" tales of one sort or another, or conventional war stories. It's understandable, both from a structural point of view -- an insurgency has a natural narrative thread to it -- and from a historical one, given that America was itself the result of a heroic insurgency, and American SF is in large part "America one world over."

But it's interesting nonetheless that on a somewhat less-than-cursory survey the only other "counterinsurgency SF" (American or not) that I was able to find was Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling's collaborative duology Tell the Spartans and Prince of Mercenaries (and, depending on one's definitions, a few of the earlier Falkenberg stories). Am I just missing a few books somewhere (maybe in French?), or is there really a big old gap there? And if the latter, is it waiting to be filled, or is there some further structural reason I'm not getting why it doesn't exist?

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.

If there's one thing the Imp of the Perverse has taught me, it's that global warming always makes headlines while it's brutally, brutally cold in Chicago. But this is not a post about the Imp of the Perverse, but about his sadly less-active cousin, the Imp of the Totally Fricking Awesome. And it is that Imp who brings us Chris Wayan's Planetocopia, a collection of alternate planetary geographies.

My favorite is probably Shiveria, an Earth tilted so that both poles are on land, creating gigantic ice-massifs, which lowers the sea-level, which produces a dry, cold Earth -- and an amazing Rift Valley in the Mediterranean Abyss. But most of them are wet, warm Earths, from Shiveria's opposite, Seapole to Jaredia, an Earth with the longest possible temperate land belt, designed to stress-test Guns, Germs, and Steel.

There's also a terrific terraformed Mars, an even better Venus, some more nutty Earths, and some other planets just for fun.

Although the various tilted Earths ignore the likely effects on plate tectonics of a major axial alteration, you can always assume that a rogue comet or some other bumptious Velikovskian intruder changed our axis in geologically recent time -- or even historical time, if you want to get crazy.¹ That said, Wayan is fond of positing alternate evolutionary tracks (and alternate sentiogenesis zones) for intelligence, which implies a tilt at least 7 or 10 million years ago, and probably considerably more than that. But he's relatively candid about how little he knows and how much he guesses -- he shows his work. (But annoyingly, not his sources, for the most part.)

The whole project is hugely inspirational for alternate-historians, SF world-builders, and people with lots and lots of spare time. I can't believe nobody told me about it already.

[1] Perhaps over-influenced by Kamandi and Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, I've always wanted to run a post-axial-tilt game of Savagery, Sorcery, and Super-Science! Maybe I'll write it up as a Startling Tale of Super-Weirdness, if Adventures Into Darkness sells.

Edit! Of course, I meant "Savagery," not "Swords." I don't know what I was thinking.

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.

* As you can tell by the nigh-randomly chosen title of this post, my new "Out of the Box" column is up, although it's not yet linked from the "Out of the Box" page, only from the front page. Highlights include reviews of Burning Empires, Spirit of the Century, and Ultimate Skill, although I'm not sure I quite conveyed the magnitude of Greg's achievement with The Great Pendragon Campaign. It's an eighty-year long campaign, weaving the entire Arthurian epic into gameable setting, fully supporting generational gaming while being accessible in chunks for those who only want to play one era. Everything about it is an achievement, especially the brilliantly reduced scenario format (necessary even in a 400-plus page book). I can't praise this book too highly -- Greg Stafford is still the master.

* Speaking of masterpieces, chadu having awakened my latent fairy tale jones with his Zorcerer of Zo, I re-read John Barnes' One For the Morning Glory, which is a fairy tale about a Prince who loses half his body to a magical childhood mishap, and how he grows up knowing that he's destined to be the hero of a fairy tale. It's the best blending of the ironic, post-structural voice with pure fairy tale magic ever -- and I include The Princess Bride in that, which borrows more from Romance than it does from Fairy Tales.

* That said, I'm re-reading The Princess Bride, now.

* Mostly thanks to the rallying-round of gnosticpi, I haven't slid as far down the evolutionary ladder as I did last year when mollpeartree was out of town for a week. (Though yesterday's deep-frying-and-Avengers rampage was pretty Cro-Magnon.) Having gone to Pilsen to buy machaca, and thus eaten (of course) at Nuevo Leon, I'm now on the trail of a good puerco asado recipe, because only eating puerco asado once every two years or so is unacceptable. My one Bayless book doesn't have one, and nor do my two other Mexican cookbooks, so I'm thrown on the mercy of los Internets.

* Edit! What I'm looking for isn't the Cuban pork roast, but the Mexican skillet thing with poblano and (I suspect) ancho peppers from Zacatecas and (duh) Nuevo Leon states. It's also called asado de boda and asado de cerdo.

* Work on Adventures Into Darkness continues apace -- it promises to be the geekiest thing I've ever written, for those of you scoring at home; it combines Lovecraft nerdiness, comics geekiness, and roleplaying dorkitude into a veritable Perfect Storm. It should be very good indeed, in other words. But seriously, "a Golden Age superhero sourcebook for an alternate history where H.P. Lovecraft survived his cancer and became a comic-book writer" is pretty geeky.

* Saw For Your Consideration with gracefuleigh, kaynorr, and gnosticpi last weekend -- it's restored the cruelty that A Mighty Wind so conspicuously lacked, but has lost the human interest, for lack of a better phrase, that Guest's other work features. (Except Catherine O'Hara, but that's much more the result of her actual acting skill rather than anything Guest or Levy bring to it.) The result is distance, made worse by Guest's decision to make a relatively conventional narrative film instead of his standard mockumentary approach. We had a big argument afterward about whether it was formally a success -- I said yes, kaynorr said no; we also disagreed on whether the lack of climax was the point of the joke (me) or a mistake (Josh). (I suppose we could both be right.) There are still some great jokes in it, and one or four laugh-out-loud moments, but the whole film is, at base, uncaring. Which you mightn't think is a flaw in comedy, but it definitely is in this one.

The Mad Scientist has gone to a Better Tomorrow.

Although I count Avram Davidson my genre fiction touchstone, people would be more than forgiven for considering me nothing but the cheap nonunion Indonesian gray-market ripoff of John M. Ford. He wrote (among many other things) alternate history horror mashups, Star Trek tie-in material, doggerel, RPG supplements, spy stuff about Christopher Marlowe, urban fantasy set in Chicago, snarky posts on the Pyramid message boards, and roleplaying game reviews.¹ Only his stuff, see, was really, really good. We even shared credit on GURPS Infinite Worlds, which mostly boiled down to me being smart enough not to change John M. Ford's writing.

I only met him once to my certain knowledge, at either Origins or GTS one year, and tried to avoid being a big idiot fanboy at him. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was the right call,² but at the time, I thought I'd see him again, surely. I almost got to hang out with him at another GTS (and use Neil Gaiman's tickets to see Penn & Teller with him, which is kind of a geekgasm of Six Degrees there), but his health didn't allow the trip at the last minute. He emailed me once or twice of his own volition, at which I was awfully chuffed, and he was nice enough to write the foreword (in dog-Kiplingese) to Suppressed Transmissions 2.

I'll miss the rest of John M. Ford's writing, and I'll forever miss the chances I didn't know I missed, to work with him or talk with him or just be a big idiot fanboy.

[1] For Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. One hesitates to say that John M. Ford made me a roleplaying gamer -- but his reviews sure didn't slow the process down any. It sounded so fun!

[2] By contrast, when Poul Anderson died, I was kind of shamefully glad I'd been a big idiot fanboy to him the sole time I met him. After all, what else do I really have to say to Poul Anderson or JMF except something like "I totally love your stuff, pretty much without exception, and I have ever since I figured out how to read an adjective." And it's not like writers don't like hearing that.

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.

It's Napoleonarama here at the Manse, as mollpeartree has been watching our TiVo'd Sharpe from BBC America, and I have been reading Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, in which the Napoleonic Wars are fought per historical reality, except there are dragons.

Yes, it's ridiculous.

But it's a good ridiculous, and Novik does just enough hand-waving to let us all know that she knows it's ridiculous, and if you don't mind, we'd all like to get back to the dragons now, please.

Because there's this evil albino Oriental mastermind dragon (er, mistress-mind, it's a girl dragon) who has joined Napoleon's side to teach him the ancient Chinese art of combined-arms air-land maneuver battle, and things look grim indeed for Our Side at the end of Book Three.

The really annoying thing about this is that, if you're me, you suddenly have about a million great ideas for historical fiction (or game products) with dragons in, and now you can't really use them because you'll look like you're just copying Naomi Novik, which indeed you are.

I hope the books sell in their millions; Novik has truly hit the sweet spot between lame and recondite where All Is Forgiven.

I just got finished literally re-reading my copy of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength to death; it's a 1975 paperback, and somewhere during its many moves, its glue must have just given up. As I was paging through the chapters, pieces of backing snapped or sighed open; the whole last quarter of the book is probably in three- and four-page chunklets now.

If you haven't read it recently or (perturbed intake of breath) at all, you owe yourself. It's a brilliantly cast parable, or "modern fairy tale" as Lewis puts it, of the timeless war of Arthur against barbarism -- this time, the barbarism of Modernism. You don't at all have to have read Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra, the first two parables in the "Space Trilogy" series, for the book to work. Think of it as "C.S. Lewis' Scouring of the Shire," with a whole lot more quiet psychological horror up front. If I were forced to put it in a single genre, it would nonetheless be that of the supernatural horror novel -- my poor defunct copy was, as it happens, shelved with the horror paperbacks.

And re-reading it, I once more squirmed as Studdock slowly sells everything for nothing -- the resonance with good old Edmund from the Narnia books was louder for me than usual, no doubt thanks to the movie -- and I enjoyed seeing the book through ever more Tim-Powersy eyes. (The eldil and Macrobes are *perfect* Powersian entities, and I don't doubt that Powers read Lewis back in the day. The spinning room is a dead giveaway.) And I delighted again to see the lightning-flash of Lewis' eye for moral character and his gift for the cutting phrase. (That said, one or two of the more, shall we say, robust pronouncements from Ransom, the Pendragon, may well grate with our delicate breed of modern readership. Suck it up. None of the argument can be dismissed as sloppy, and not much more of it can be dismissed as bad writing.) I've become less Platonist than I apparently was the last time I read it, because I think I jibbed a little more strongly at Lewis' Platonism this time, but there's no denying that it makes a fascinating supernatural element.

In short -- terrific book, like I need to tell you that. If I need to tell you that, well, read it. But try to get a copy less than 30 years old, because you'll definitely want to re-read it again and again.

* And not even the "s" for "smattering," because I don't have a new column to point you at.

* I am returned from Sacramento, where I was the Guest of Honor at the first-ever ConQuest Sacramento, which was a rousing success by all accounts. On Friday, I ran a Call of Cthulhu scenario based equally on the California Water Wars and Yojimbo, which latter I recommend to anyone looking for a plot structure for a con game. On Saturday, I did the panel thing (Alternate Histories, and GM Tips: Worldbuilding, two standards, but always fun to try out on a new audience) and hung around for a bit, and then in company with cynaguan, macklinr, necanthrope, ox_number_10, and the heroic James No-LJ-Known (four of them four of my six players on Friday) I went off to (eventually) a fabulous joint called Elixir, where I was plied with tumblers full of vodka-tonics from the assorted multitude, and Six Million Dollar Man trivia questions from necanthrope. Meanwhile, ox_number_10 drank one of every major spiritous liquor, in sequence, which began to remind me of the inevitable ascension of Enoch, or perhaps of the descent of Inanna, through the Gates of Al-Kohl. (Planetary correspondences for liquors: Sun = Rum, Moon = Gin, Mercury = Bourbon, Venus = Whisky, Mars = Tequila, Jupiter = Brandy, Saturn = Vodka. Discuss.) At any rate, the evening was worthy of Dick Awesome, P.I. On Sunday we held the traditional Nobody Comes To A Sunday Morning Panel in the morning, and then Industry Trends with James Ernest and con impresario Gabriel "Mondo" Vega. ("It's not all doom and gloom, because Doom and Gloom both sell.") And so to bed, and then to Chicago.

* Sara Douglass' Darkwitch Rising, which I read in OKC, is the third book in a series with a high concept of staggering awesomeness, to wit: King Brutus, who as we all learned from Geoffrey of Monmouth was the grandson of Aeneas, rebuilt the Great Labyrinth of Troy in Britain under the city he founded, Troynovaunt, which is to say London. This Labyrinth is the key to the Troy Game,¹ a dance that will make the dancer immortal and invincible. But his wife, jealous, wrecked the Game and threw things off kilter. Now Brutus, his wife, his sorceress girlfriend, his buddy King Cole, and the Minotaur (can't have a Labyrinth without a Minotaur) all reincarnate time and again, dancing the Troy Game in one or another permutation. Each reincarnation takes place in some awesome historical epoch, in which the players of the Game jostle for power over it. And as icing on the cake, Darkwitch Rising takes place during the reign of Charles II, who is (of course) the reincarnated king, and the fun begins. But, but, but. This beautiful high concept is mushed up with a lot of relatively standard issue faeries and goddesses and so forth, and then the actual book winds up in that kind of plummy tone that you get when everyone assures each other of the Land and its Wisdom and yadda yadda yadda, in between bouts of self-righteous posturing argumentation and life-affirming pagan sex. So reading the thing was kind of a slog. The plot did kind of get interesting about two thirds of the way through, if the actions of characters I no longer particularly cared about can be called interesting, and I can imagine that the whole structure of the series (a fourth book is due next month) is pretty formally cool. I'll probably eventually read the first book, Hades' Daughter, which is the story of Brutus & co., to slake my Bronze Age and Matter of Britain joneses. But on the whole, a mixed and mushy bag.

* Second Person, by contrast, is an anthology of academic essays about roleplaying games, both tabletop and computerized. I bring it up because it includes an article by me ("Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu"), and because MIT Press now has its sell sheet up. For a full table of contents, see co-editor Noah Wardrip-Fruin's post at Grand Text Auto. Note the awesome company of which I am a part -- Greg Costikyan, Rebecca Borgstrom, Jonathan Tweet, James Wallis, Keith Herber, and the list goes on and on.

* Slither was pretty good -- call it a B-minus -- but it was no Tremors. mollpeartree thinks the problem was too much self-awareness, too many winks at the audience. I think she's absolutely right; a movie like this has to be played remorselessly straight to work as a good joke, to say nothing of a good horror movie. But alien worms and Mal, so something for everyone.

* The project that it looks like Phil Reed and I will be working on doesn't involve an "S", unless "secret" and "shards" count. Hopefully more details Soon.

[1] A real medieval term for a maze or maze-like dance, as it happens. And don't think you've heard the last of it, Suppressed Transmission fans.

Fuller details on the DunDraCon experience in the next "Out of the Box," but I can reveal that Darren Watts remains one of the finest men on two legs, despite (or perhaps because of) his taking me for four or five bucks in dime-quarter poker Friday night.

Thursday was Fields, already discussed in this space, and dinner at Absinthe, an intriguing "haute Americaine" brasserie where I had the entirely unexpected thrill of eating an oyster (precise provenance unremembered by me, sadly) with a swig of excellent Oregon pinot noir chasing it. Two great tastes I never would have thought to try together, but their strange fusion was the highlight of my gustatory night.

Saturday was a spot of RuneQuest talk with Greg Stafford, who had heard that I was developing the latest Mongoose draft of that classic, and lunch with xomec at our usual stand, the Whole Foods in the adjacent shopping center, where once more we procured and devoured a fifth-pound wedge of Stilton. I also chatted with a very nice fan named Andy who, having come to a few of my seminars, decided I was the guy to tell him about his upcoming San Francisco-based Unknown Armies game. In the course of our discussion, it emerged that Andy hadn't yet read Fritz Leiber's wonderful urban dark fantasy Our Lady of Darkness, so we wandered over to Borders to see if they had it in stock. Sadly, they didn't, but he got The Crying of Lot 49 so the day wasn't wasted, and in an access of Pynchonian madness no doubt, Andy offered to buy me a book. I picked up the coda to Harry Turtledove's Worldwar/Colonization series, Homeward Bound, which aptly recapitulates all the Campbellian strengths and windy weaknesses of said series. Then, his other plan having fallen through, xomec and I went off in quest of Indian food. In short, a day that could only have been improved if xomec's boyfriend Christopher could have joined us.

Sunday's highlight was a ripping game of Dogs in the Vineyard helmed by that true child of the King of Life, Carl Rigney; my brethren were Hero-ites Steve Long, Jason Walters, and the enigmatic 'Bulldozer,' who out-sociopathed us all in a stirring evocation of eyebeams' heretical theory of the Western. I was gratified to see that my review of Dogs is entirely accurate; the game is brilliant, and I fully grok the mechanics now to boot.

Monday, luagha and I tried fruitlessly to communicate with stjeromes and wound up going to see Hoodwinked (fun stuff), eating at a Korean tofu house, and hitting a used bookstore in Palo Alto. We completed the day with absolutely flawless toro nigiri at Fuki-Sushi, and off I scampered to Las Vegas on Tuesday.

I had forgotten that BART trains announce their arrival with the first two notes of "Tainted Love."

This is very long. You have been warned.

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