Massive comic book review for 2015

So, following this year's ruckus over the Hugo Awards, I resolved to put in some nominations for next year's awards instead of just waiting for the shortlist like I normally would.  Me and everybody else, I suspect.  However, I was determined not to simply fall back on creators whose work I already know and who happened to have done something eligible in 2015, but to sample widely and make some properly informed nominations.  As I've previously remarked, this is a costly undertaking in terms of both time and money.  So I decided to pick one category and focus my efforts on that.

Folks, I picked the Best Graphic Story category.

I realise that as a response to the 2015 Hugos hijack this is completely rubbish, since this was the category the slate-makers showed the least interest in, but you know what, stuff it.  It's a category I'm interested in, which is more than I can say for any of the short fiction categories.  The pool of available material is less dauntingly large than for the other fiction categories, and consequently even at the prices most retailers charge for comic book trade paperbacks (TPBs) I can survey this category more cheaply than Best Novel, and find and acquire the material more easily than I could a lot of short fiction.  (And in fact, thanks to the import mark-up New Zealand retailers put on books, a new TPB typically costs me less than a new novel, which was never true back in the UK.)  It takes me a fraction of the time to read a TPB that it would take me to read a novel or watch a TV series or film.  Basically, I'm better able to assess this category for nomination purposes than any of the others.  That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The Hugo rules specify that a serialised work is eligible for the year in which the final part is made available - in the case of ongoing comic books, this applies to story arcs within the series, and comics creators nowadays tend to tailor their story arcs to about the size of a TPB, which is convenient for all concerned.  I can wait for a couple of months after the completion of a series or story arc within a series and pick up the eligible work in a single, durable volume, which suits me better than wrangling individual comics issues.  (For self-contained graphic novels, of course, it isn't a concern.  Nearly said "issue" there, ho ho.)  In a couple of cases, however, that does mean I haven't yet been able to catch up with a promising work whose final part came out late in the year.  I'm waiting on at least one TPB that isn't due out until the end of January, which I should be able to squeeze in in time to assess it for nomination purposes, but which therefore isn't listed below.

I've made an effort to track down comics with a specifically science fiction or fantasy theme - granted, all superhero comics are arguably fantasy, but beyond that there's a surprising wealth of genre comic books that I think are overshadowed by the multiple flavours of Batman and Spider-Man and the rest that get churned out each month.  I'm not mad fussed about conventional superhero comics anyway, although one or two more unusual items did catch my eye.

Readers may note a preponderance of items published by Image Comics in the list below.  This isn't down to any bias on my part in favour of the publisher, but simply reflects the fact that Image publish a lot of non-superhero SF/F comic books, bless 'em.  Naturally representation of DC and Marvel below is going to be extremely poor because they publish nothing but superhero titles.  Anyway, there it is.  I certainly don't claim that this round-up is definitive.

Finally, I'm not going to list out the (maximum of) five comics I intend to nominate, but I do offer opinions on all of these books.  It's a review post on a personal blog, and there wouldn't be a lot of point in it if I withheld my opinions.  Readers may be able to spot one or two likely candidates for my nomination ballot based on my comments, but that's life.  Readers are urged to support their local library and/or comics shop by tracking down any items that sound interesting to them and to make up their own minds.

Here, then, is the massive write-up of comics I've read that are eligible for the 2016 Hugo Awards.

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Annihilator
Publisher: Legendary Comics
Writer: Grant Morrison - Artist: Frazer Irving
Graphic novel/miniseries originally serialised in 6 parts.
Premise: Ray Spass, a decadent screenwriter struggling with his latest project, is diagnosed with a brain tumour.  Then Max Nomax, the Jerry Cornelius-esque protagonist of his new screenplay, shows up at his house to tell him that the "tumour" is a data packet Nomax fired into Spass' reality in order to escape from his own, but that he needs Spass to keep writing the script to help him remember its contents.
Blather: Fooling around with notions of reality and fiction and characters talking directly to their creators is something Morrison has a lot of experience with, but I don't think this book matches up to his previous work in that area.  None of the characters are particularly likeable or relatable.  The story - at least, Nomax's story - has a kind of pulp mythic feel to it which may appeal.  The artwork is OK, with occasional expressionistic bursts when appropriate to the story.

The Autumnlands vol 1 ("Tooth and Claw")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Kurt Busiek - Artist: Benjamin Dewey
Collects issues 1-6 of an ongoing series.
Premise: A future-fantasy world of Grandvillean animal-people faces social collapse as its reserves of magic start to run out.  Gharta the Seeker, a maverick warthog-headed sorceress, tries to save the day by reaching back through time and retrieving the Champion, the almost mythic figure who supposedly introduced magic into the world in the first place.  What she actually retrieves is Master Sergeant Steven Learoyd, a foul-mouthed human soldier with no obvious magical abilities whatsoever.
Blather: A book with artwork you can really luxuriate in, and you'll have time to, because the pacing of the story is rather leisurely.  A lot of this first volume is spent adding definition to the world of Keneil, the floating city on which Gharta stages her magical feat and which is sent crashing into the heart of bison-headed raider territory when the project backfires.  A lot is spent too on setting up the antagonism between Gharta and Sandorst, a preening owl-headed sorceror who causes the project to blow out by bungling the one small contribution he was asked to make, and who succeeds in shifting blame onto Gharta in order to further his own political ambition.  Meanwhile the Champion and a young dog-headed citizen he befriends try to move the people of Keneil on to safety, but at this early stage they feel secondary to the overall story - in fact, it already feels by the end of issue 6 as though the whole question of somehow getting the Champion to bring magic back to the world has been dropped in order to focus on the smaller scale political bickering instead.  A richly textured but somewhat frustrating volume.

Batman '66 vol 3
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Jeff Parker - Artist: Jonathan Case et al
Collects issues 11-16 of an ongoing series.
Premise: A Batman comic book based specifically on the '60s TV show.  Popular villains return, drawn to resemble the actors who played them (or, where a villain was played by more than one actor, to resemble the one who played the part around the time the particular story is set).  A few other villains, familiar from other comics but who weren't used in the TV series, are introduced and given appropriately goofy origin stories.
Blather: The '60s TV series is my preferred iteration of Batman, so I was at least interested by the idea of this.  My particular interest in vol 3 is that it includes a story in which False-Face tries to discredit Batman in the public eye by running a TV series about his adventures, only here the "real" Batman is the wholesome Adam West version and the TV Batman is transparently meant to be Frank Miller's hypergrim Dark Knight.  So that was a delicious dig at other leading brands of Batman and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Other stories are pretty straightforward riffs on the TV show itself.

Birthright vol 1 ("Homecoming")
Publisher: Image Comics/Skybound
Writer: Joshua Williamson - Artist: Andrei Bressan
Collects issues 1-5 of an ongoing series (unusually, presented here as a single continuous piece without issue breaks).
Premise: A year after his disappearance, little Mikey Rhodes reappears, only he's several years older and armed with dozens of medieval weapons.  He claims he was chosen by destiny to save the magical world of Terrenos from the evil God King Lore, and has returned to Earth in pursuit of five war criminal wizards.  His family and the police have a hard time believing this - in a twist revealed to the reader in the first issue, it turns out Mikey actually is deceiving them, but not in the way they think.
Blather: A good story well told, and nicely drawn.  Flashbacks to Mikey's time in Terrenos are distributed artfully through the story, and the growing disparity between what Mikey tells his family and what those flashbacks reveal is handled well.  I'll be interested to see whether subsequent volumes can live up to the promise of this first one.

Bitch Planet vol 1 ("Extraordinary Machine")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Kelly Sue DeConnick - Artist: Valentine De Landro
Collects issues 1-5 of an ongoing series.
Premise: In a "five minutes into the future" dystopia, any women who fail to conform to the expectations set for them by a patriarchal society are arrested and shipped off to the Auxilliary Compliance Outpost, also familiarly known as Bitch Planet.  A group of inmates are offered the chance to put forward a team to compete in the popular spectator sport known as Megaton - for the authorities, it's a cynical PR exercise, but for the women, it's an opportunity to get out and strike a blow against the Fathers.  This first volume sees them begin to formulate their plan and suffer their first major setback.
Blather: So, y'know, casual readers may perhaps have missed the subtle critique being offered of the ways in which modern society harms women.  The first page offers only a glancing blow, with nearly adjacent panels showing a minor character being spammed by conflicting holographic ads reading "You're Hungry" and "You're Fat"; the rest of the book goes much deeper and much angrier than this.  The creative team make much use of the exploitation film technique of overplaying common cultural tropes in order to subvert them (most obviously here, scenes that expose and sexualise female bodies for the gratification of male viewers, represented here by the voyeuristic wardens).  Issue 3 is stand-out good - the backstory of an unashamedly overweight woman is presented in the grand ol' comic book tradition as a "secret origin", complete with visual pastiche of old four-colour printing techniques in the flashback sequences, thus granting her the status of a hero - although issue 1 with its sucker-punch twist might be my favourite.  Anyway, the overall story looks like it's going somewhere interesting.  More thought-provoking than the average comic, and recommended for readers who enjoy that.

Chew vol 9 ("Chicken Tenders") & vol 10 ("Blood Puddin'")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: John Layman - Artist: Rob Guillory
Collects issues 41-45 (vol 9) & 46-50 (vol 10) of an ongoing series (issue 60 is currently expected to be the last one).
Premise: Detective Tony Chu works for the FDA, which is the most powerful federal agency in America following a food scare involving chickens and an as-yet unexplained plague.  He's also one of a large number of people who have food-based superpowers - in Chu's case, he can tell the history of any organic substance if he puts it in his mouth.  These two TPBs bring to an end the story arc of Chu hunting down the Collector, a serial killer with the same superpower who's been absorbing other people's weird abilities by eating bits of them.  Vol 9 sees a disastrous attempt by several other characters to take down the Collector, and vol 10 is the Collector's final showdown with Chu.
Blather: This is a very silly, very colourful series with a sick sense of humour, and I'm still enjoying it after ten TPBs.  It's not without its problems, but just in terms of the art and all the little throwaway details it packs in, it's refreshingly different from most other comic books.  I've particularly loved seeing Poyo - a vicious cybernetic luchador rooster - grow from being a minor character to nearly taking over the series, and these two volumes are almost as much about him as they are about the Collector.  Vol 9 sees Poyo get a ridiculously indulgent double-page spread in every issue, but vol 10 seems to mark the end of his story.

Copperhead vol 1
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Jay Faerber - Artist: Scott Godlewski
Collects issues 1-5 of an ongoing series.
Premise: Single mother Clara Bronson arrives in the mining town of Copperhead to take up her post as sheriff.  Her first week sees her dealing with the rowdy Sewell clan, the corrupt owner of the mine, a mysterious wandering gunslinger and a group of natives who want to retrieve their stolen religious artefact.  The twist: Copperhead is sited on the frontier planet Jasper, and the majority of the characters - including the natives, the Sewells and Bronson's deputy - are various species of alien.
Blather: So, this is a Western comic in which some of the characters have been drawn as aliens, and only somewhat tenuously a SF comic.  But what the hell?  It's a lively read, the art's good, the writing's good.  Bronson presents a good, solid arsekicking heroine around whom the supporting characters can revolve.  Said supporting characters start out in broad strokes, but by the end of this book there are already nuances starting to show.  The backmatter shows the creative team are completely unashamed about the fact that they're just redressing the cliches of Western fiction, and, well, fair enough I suppose.

Descender vol 1 ("Tin Stars")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Jeff Lemire - Artist: Dustin Nguyen
Collects issues 1-6 of an ongoing series.
Premise: A futuristic multi-species community of nine worlds is ravaged by gigantic robots that the survivors refer to as "the Harvesters".  A destructive backlash against all robots ensues.  It's subsequently discovered that the Harvesters had the same base code as the man-made TIM series of robots, designed to act as child companions for human families.  Ten years after the apocalypse, the robot TIM-21 wakes up on a distant mining outpost; various parties take an interest in his call for help.
Blather: "Perilous journey of the all-important child" is a story Lemire's had some success with before; here's a rather promising space opera variation on that theme.  The plot is painted in broad strokes, but there's a more complex back story unfolding behind it.  I'm strongly reminded of The Metabarons, an association reinforced by the "painted sketch" European style of art Nguyen provides.  A strong first volume in a series that looks like it's going places.

The Divine
Publisher: First Second
Writer: Boaz Lavie - Artists: Asaf Hanuka & Tomer Hanuka
Graphic novel, c.150 pages.
Premise: Two American ex-military explosives experts take on a contract job "lava tube denuding" a mountain in a South East Asian country.  They run up against a group of child soldiers who believe the mountain is the home of the dragon spirit that gives their leader's brother magical powers.
Blather: Contemporary political comment blended with magic and mythology.  Apparently this book was inspired by a photograph of a pair of East Burmese child soldiers, on whose likeness the twin brothers leading the group in this book are clearly based.  The artwork is beautifully done; the story actually feels a bit thin, as if after a well-paced first half it then rushes through to the finish.  Another hundred pages or so might not have gone amiss.

The Infinite Loop
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Pierrick Colinet - Artist: Elsa Charretier
Graphic novel/miniseries originally serialised in 6 parts.
Premise: A story of forbidden love between two women.  Their love is forbidden because one of them is a member of an organisation that polices linear time and eradicates anomalies, and the other is an anomaly.
Blather: This book overplays its equal rights message with sledgehammer force, but it's beautifully drawn.  It actually feels as if it's been translated into English, even though I believe Colinet wrote it in English rather than French - the dialogue has that slight clunkiness to it.  Still and all, the message continues to be relevant and bears repeating.  It's the art that really carries this book, though.

Injection vol 1
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Warren Ellis - Artists: Declan Shalvey & Jordie Bellaire
Collects issues 1-5 of an ongoing series.
Premise: Once upon a time, a think tank of five people with unusual skills and interests created an AI and let it loose on the Internet.  Now they're called in as consultants to investigate a series of weird events that sound a lot like Celtic myths come true.  Is Fairyland breaking through into the real world, or is their AI trying to get their attention?
Blather: Some interesting ideas and Ellis' customary bitchy dialogue here, but the idea of an AI that can warp reality is one that needs more setup and/or elaboration than is allowed in this volume.  Ellis is apparently now in the habit of playing the long game with his readers, drawing out scenarios and withholding explanations in order to sustain intrigue across multiple collected volumes - whether or not this is a good thing will depend on the individual reader.  Given my comics reading habits, I imagine I'm more inclined to put up with this than other readers.

Low vol 1 ("The Delirium of Hope")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Rick Remender - Artist: Greg Tocchini
Collects issues 1-6 of an ongoing series.
Premise: It's the far future and humanity now lives in habitats at the bottom of the ocean, the only place safe from the radiation from a bloated sun.  After millennia, a deep space probe has returned to Earth with possible details of a new world for everyone to escape to, but it's crashed on the deserted surface, and human society on the ocean floor has become so decadent (having long since given up hope of any of those probes returning) that hardly anyone is interested in travelling up to retrieve it.  Only Stel Caine, widow of the last Helmsman, is ready to make the journey, which will also bring her into contact with her estranged daughters and the pirates who stole them.
Blather: Point 1, the art on this is very, very gluggy, to the point that I could often hardly tell what I was looking at, and that's a bad thing.  Point 2, although this is nominally Stel's story I can't help but notice how completely sidelined (and incompletely dressed!) she is while her son does all the heroic business later in the book, so here's a female hero lacking all agency in her own story, and that's another bad thing.  Point 3, they couldn't even bother to write an accurate back cover blurb for this book.  I mean, for crying out loud.  On a positive note, the story (at a high summary level) is interesting, and the relentless godawfulness of Stel's life is an unusual line for Remender to take, but I'm not sticking around to find out if it will pay off in the long term.

Lumberjanes vol 1 & vol 2
Publisher: BOOM! Box
Writers: Noelle Stevenson & Grace Ellis - Artist: Brooke Allen
Collects issues 1-4 (vol 1) & 5-8 (vol 2) of a series originally planned for 8 issues, but subsequently picked up as an ongoing series.
Premise: Five friends at a summer camp for adventurous young women investigate spooky goings-on in the surrounding forest.
Blather: The overall feel and style of this book owes much to the Hanna Barbera cartoons of yore - the writers admit in an afterword that Scooby-Doo was a significant influence.  Readers may find themselves spontaneously humming songs by The Monkees over the action scenes; alternatively, anyone who picks up the hardback omnibus edition (as I did, for sound economic reasons) has the alternative of looking up the suggested playlists at the back of the book.  The script and art are both anarchic, bordering on slapdash; I found this a little jarring at first, but once I made the Hanna Barbera connection it quickly grew on me.  There's a lot of fun and a lot of charm to be found here.

The Multiversity
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Grant Morrison - Artists: Various
Collects all 9 issues of a limited series originally published under several titles.
Premise: It's A Very Grant Morrison Crisis.  Sinister forces from outside normal reality plan to invade all the worlds of the DC multiverse - including yours, dear reader! - using a self-aware comic book called "Ultra Comics" as their bridgehead.  ("Ultra Comics" is, of course, a part of the series and included in this volume.)  The heroes of multiple parallel Earths band together to save reality itself from the invaders.
Blather: Unlike a lot of "Crisis" event/books, this one doesn't seem to have been designed to kill off or reset any of DC's current range of titles, and it doesn't depend on the reader knowing decades of back history (although I imagine it would help).  So that's nice.  But I'm not here for the apocalyptic crossover event stuff, I'm here to see Grant Morrison doing his fiction vs reality schtick, and on that score this book delivers very well.  The "Ultra Comics" issue is possibly the single purest example that Morrison has produced to date, and it's wickedly funny.  The book overall is kind of disjointed - I'm not quite sure what part some of the middle issues play in the larger story, and at times this comes across more as a prospectus of possible ongoing titles Morrison is pitching to DC.  Still, it's all enjoyable.  The artwork is very good but less varied than I would have expected given the large number of artists credited - presumably DC has a particular standard of artwork that they're all used to working to.

The Private Eye
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Brian K Vaughan - Artists: Marcos Martin & Muntsa Vicente
Graphic novel, c.300 pages, originally serialised online at panelsyndicate.com in 10 parts from August 2013 to March 2015.
Premise: A noir detective story set in the 2070s, in a world where the press are responsible for law enforcement, where the Internet was abandoned decades ago after everybody's personal information was leaked and anonymity is so highly valued that everyone wears masks in public.  The hero, an unlicensed detective who trades under the name of P.I., investigates the murder of his latest client and uncovers a world-shaking conspiracy.
Blather: A terrific combination of the form of a noir thriller with a colourful vision of the near future.  The art is bold and stylish, the dialogue sharp, the story solid and engaging.  The print edition is very lovely, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that the whole thing is still available digitally from panelsyndicate.com on an "honesty box" basis, allowing even the cheapest of my readers to sample it for themselves.

Roche Limit vol 1 ("Anomalous")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Michael Moreci - Artist: Vic Malhotra
Collects issues 1-5 of an ongoing series.
Premise: Two people investigate the disappearance of a young woman in Roche Limit, a decaying human colony built inside the distant planet Dispater.  The disappearance may be connected to a drug called Recall whose production process is a closely guarded secret, to an apocalyptic phenomenon known as the Black Sun, or to a trio of husk-like figures haunting the colony.
Blather: A kind of noir space opera.  I found the artwork in this book to be rough, bordering on just plain bad, and the story didn't entirely grab me.  The writing's pulpy, which I suppose is a fit for the noir aesthetic.  Still, there's going to be a second (post-apocalyptic) volume, so clearly somebody liked it.

The Sculptor
Publisher: SelfMadeHero Books
Writer/Artist: Scott McCloud
Graphic novel, c.500 pages.
Premise: Struggling sculptor David makes a deal with Death - he gains the fantastic ability to shape any material however he wants using just his bare hands, but he only has 200 days to use it, after which he's going to die.  Then he falls in love.
Blather: A beautiful rumination on art, love, death and all that big human stuff.  McCloud is every bit as good at walking the walk as he was at talking the talk in his famous non-fiction book Understanding Comics.  A couple of experimental moments, but by and large the art is used conventionally in service to the story, and very nice art it is too.  The fantastic premise provides some visual spectacle in its own right, as well as driving a story that's more heavily focused on the characters and the relationships between them.  A satisfying read that packs a solid emotional punch.

Sex Criminals vol 2 ("Two Worlds, One Cop")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Matt Fraction - Artist: Chip Zdarsky
Collects issues 6-10 of an ongoing series.
Premise: Jon and Suzie independently discover that when they orgasm, time freezes around them and only unfreezes when they're "ready for round two".  They meet each other, realise they share this bizarre superpower and decide to use it to rob the bank Jon works at so that they can bail out the library Suzie works at.  It's at that point that they learn there are others with similar abilities who've formed a kind of "sex police" to stop people like them drawing attention by doing things like robbing banks.  And that was vol 1.  Vol 2 sees Jon and Suzie finding out more about the "sex police", being victimised by them and trying to build a resistance movement among their fellow sex criminals, as well as developing their relationship past the honeymoon period.
Blather: This second book continues to do the interesting things with subjective presentation and comical background details that I liked in vol 1 (although it'll be hard for Fraction and Zdarsky to equal the "Fat Bottomed Girls" scene in vol 1, and I don't think they do in vol 2).  The story itself continues to be funny, honest, smirkingly filthy and, well, charming in a way that I probably wouldn't have expected a sexually explicit comic book to be if you'd asked me hypothetically about it 2 years ago.

Star Trek/Planet of the Apes: The Primate Directive
Publisher: IDW Publishing/BOOM! Studios
Writers: Scott Tipton & David Tipton - Artist: Rachael Stott
Graphic novel/miniseries originally serialised in 5 parts.
Premise: Don't the words "Star Trek/Planet of the Apes crossover" cover it?  Well...  The Klingons, led by the one who was played on TV by John Colicos, are looking to expand their empire into parallel universes since their treaty with the Federation prevents them from conquering worlds in their own universe.  The Enterprise follows a Klingon ship through their dimensional portal and discovers an old enemy selling machine guns to the gorillas on the Planet of the Apes.
Blather: I bought this book expecting some big dumb fun, and I would have been happy enough with that.  In fact it goes a little further in using the crossover to retcon a couple of the otherwise mysterious developments between the first three Apes films - the shift in power towards the gorilla Ursus in film #2 and the appearance out of nowhere of a chimpanzee space program in film #3.  The writers do a good job of mixing all this together, and the artist provides convincing likenesses of all the major characters, so I guess that's mission accomplished.  Throwing together the optimistic Trek and pessimistic Apes universes could have provided some interesting philosophical material, but that clearly isn't a direction the writers were interested in and it isn't dwelt on.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
Publisher: Penguin Books
Writer/Artist: Sydney Padua
Collects several items previously published online at http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/, all of them redrawn and/or expanded to some extent, as well as a large quantity of new material.
Premise: Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage succeed in building a working analytical engine, and the two of them go on to have a succession of comical misadventures.
Blather: The proportion of new to pre-existing material alone would make this volume eligible for the 2016 Hugo Awards, but I was pleasantly surprised to note that Padua has given the old material a makeover too.  It's all meticulously annotated, and even the endnotes are a delight.  Fun is the focus of this volume, which the author even "justifies" with an origin story for her comic book parallel universe and a faux-scientific explanation of how it works.  The old material can still be found at http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/, so interested readers should go there first for a taste.

Trees vol 1 ("In Shadow")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Warren Ellis - Artist: Jason Howard
Collects issues 1-8 of an ongoing series (by cracky, you get your money's worth by weight with this one).
Premise: One day, without fanfare, a number of oil-rig-like tripodal edifices appear around the world.  They stand there and do nothing, beyond occasionally spilling horribly corrosive goo down their legs and all over any human settlements nearby.  People dub them "Trees".  Ten years after their materialisation, they've become just a part of the scenery, something that people live with, like the weather.  By the end of this book, a research team on a remote Norwegian island will have discovered that the apparently inert Trees are doing something alarming to the ecosystem...
Blather: ...but stone me, it takes a long time to get there.  Warren Ellis is a remarkable comics writer and I feel I ought to trust that he's taking all of this somewhere, but he's being extremely leisurely about the set-up.  Vol 1 is spread across half a dozen different sets of characters, most of which are just concerned with going about their lives in the shadow of a Tree, so that's a valid comment on the way in which people normalise things that they probably shouldn't normalise, but it doesn't really seem to contribute much to the ongoing story.  Doesn't make for a lively read, either.  It's interesting, but I imagine it'll look better in retrospect when the rest of the series is out and it can be considered as a complete story.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 1 ("Squirrel Power")
Publisher: Marvel
Writer: Ryan North - Artist: Erica Henderson
Collects issues 1-4 of an ongoing series, plus the 1990 issue of Marvel Super-Heroes that first introduced the character of Squirrel Girl.
Premise: Squirrel Girl, formerly of the parody super-team the Great Lakes Avengers, goes to college and gets her own title.  She has "the proportional speed and strength of a squirrel" and commands an army of actual squirrels, but is more likely to defeat villains by finding out what they want and talking them round.  This first story arc pits her against Galactus, the well-known devourer of worlds.
Blather: The cartoonish art and perky tone make this an obvious choice of entry-level superhero comic for young readers, but it has broad appeal beyond that.  The analysis of Galactus' modus operandi is well-observed and very funny, as is much of this series' take on superhero storytelling.  Readers with extremely good eyesight will also be able to enjoy the tiny comments at the bottom of each page.  The shamelessly over-the-top choice of Galactus as the antagonist for the first story arc suggests the creative team are getting all of the usual superheroic stuff out of the way now so that they can take future story arcs in different directions, which bodes well for this title in the long term.

Wayward vol 1 ("String Theory")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Jim Zub - Artist: Steve Cummings et al
Collects issues 1-5 of an ongoing series.
Premise: Half-Irish teenager Rori migrates to Tokyo to move in with her Japanese mother.  She discovers a previously latent ability to perceive magic, falls in with a small team of assorted magical beings and runs up against the unpleasant yokai her mother was working for.
Blather: Notable for the fact that line artist Cummings actually lives in Japan, and Zub certainly knows his yokai, so the Japanese fantasy on display here is probably as authentic as it can be without actually being created by Japanese writers/artists.  I suppose if Studio Ghibli branched out into American-style comics, the result might look a bit like this ("Japanese Buffy" seems to be another popular verdict).  Hard to judge the quality of the story as this first volume is largely set-up for the series, but the art is pretty.

The Wicked + The Divine vol 2 ("Fandemonium")
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Kieron Gillen - Artist: Jamie McKelvie
Collects issues 6-11 of an ongoing series.
Premise: Every 90 years a dozen teenagers are gifted the powers and identities of classical gods.  They get two years of divinity, to use as they see fit, then they all die - at least, those of them who haven't already been killed.  This happens in the present day, and naturally the new gods all choose to become celebrities - spoofing pop culture is a part of what this book is about, but not the whole story.  Laura is a fan who gets invited to one of the gods' after-show parties, gets close to several of them and discovers that there's a shadowy figure behind them (the manager?) who may be manipulating them for some other purpose.
Blather: YES.  MORE, PLEASE.  It's hip, it's beautiful and it does innovative things with its presentation and layout.  Although vol 1 is copyrighted 2015, the final issue of that volume appeared in 2014, so only vol 2 is eligible, but that's fine by me.  Vol 2 includes issue 8, a rave centred around the first appearance of Dionysus, "the dancefloor that walks like a man", possibly the single best comics issue I've read this year for both style and content.

Hugo Awards 2015: A Consideration of the Sources

And so to a consideration of some of the Hugo nominees themselves.  This more or less amounts to a "Books read in May/June" post, which I've deliberately held onto until now because it didn't seem quite right to comment on my own voting choices until after voting on the Hugo Awards closed last month.  But I wanted to get this in before the results are announced next week at Worldcon.  I'll be interested to see the voting statistics when they're made available, hopefully not too long after Worldcon.

The Hugo Award categories that have been most heavily affected by the slate campaigns are all the shorter fiction categories (Novella, Novelette and Short Story), Best Related Work, both Best Editor categories and Best Fan Writer.  The Best Novel and the two Best Dramatic Presentation categories were less heavily affected by the slate campaigns (it's roughly half and half).  Hardly affected at all, probably because the slate-makers didn't take much of an interest in it, is the Best Graphic Story category.  I'll pass over the Dramatic Presentation categories and the esoterica and talk a bit more about the print categories.

Now, I'll admit that I don't read a lot of short fiction and tend not to pay a lot of attention to those categories, so as much as their hijack irks me on principle, in all honesty it doesn't make a lot of difference to me as a reader.  It's nice to be able to read a good shorter piece while considering the Hugo nominees, and it's a shame that there really weren't any good shorter pieces this year - even the small handful of non-slate nominees were a disappointment - but I'll get over it.  I put down No Award for all three categories.

The write-off of the Best Related Work category is much more disappointing, because I do love a good bit of lit. crit. and analysis around SF.  The best item on offer this year was a short article advising writers of military SF to take thermodynamics into account when writing their action scenes, which just looks like 101 stuff to me.  The rest of the nominees were vacuous dreck, and two of them weren't even related to SF, so why the hell they weren't removed from the shortlist on eligibility grounds is beyond me.  I put down No Award for this category too.

Best Novel

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
Sequel to the previous year's winner of every award available, Ancillary Justice.  Another extremely good novel in my opinion.  It's more straightforward, playing out in one continuous narrative whereas Justice switched between "present" and "past" narratives to reveal its story.  It starts out looking like another slice of grand space opera, but partway in it becomes clear that it's actually going to be a small-scale character piece; the larger scale does creep back in right at the end.  My vote: 1st place.

The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J Anderson
First in a series that ties in with a previous, very long series of space opera novels.  I could say that this book met all my generic, uninspired Star Wars knock-off needs for the year, but that would be unfair.  It exceeded them.  My vote: 4th place.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
One of those novels that subverts epic fantasy.  I'm in favour of this as a concept, but haven't found many examples that I like, probably mainly because I don't much like epic fantasy itself.  This is a perfectly good example, but I felt that it dragged heavily.  The cod archaic speech patterns didn't help much.  My vote: 3rd place.

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (trans. Ken Liu)
First of a trilogy written by one of China's top SF writers, and thus the only novel nominee this year to go any way at all to putting the "world" into "Worldcon".  Starts out as an intriguing mystery with an engaging backdrop of Maoist China, but lurches into a generic alien invasion runaround about two thirds in.  My vote: 2nd place.

Skin Game, Jim Butcher
Book #5,000,001 in the Dresden Files series.  Competently written pap.  Butcher's obviously found a formula that works for him - again and again and again - and I'm very happy for him.  I just don't see any artistic or literary merit in it.  My vote: unranked.

Best Graphic Story

Ms Marvel, vol 1: No Normal, G Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona & Jake wyatt
As a teenage superhero origin story, fairly ordinary.  Making the heroine the Muslim American daughter of Pakistani immigrants is a bit different, and certainly a welcome bit of diversity in a largely white, Anglo-American and predominantly male subgenre.  The art looks kind of fluffy, but at least it's a change from the usual photo-reference style of superhero art.  My vote: 3rd place.

Rat Queens, vol 1: Sass and Sorcery, Kurtis J Weibe & Roc Upchurch
A grungy comedy D&D-style fantasy story with an all-female cast.  Nice art, some smart dialogue.  I'd be prepared to seek out vol 2.  My vote: 2nd place.

Saga, vol 3, Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples
This is of course still terrific, but in judging it as a book in its own right - as opposed to a middle volume of an ongoing story - I find it relies too heavily on the reader's awareness of vols 1 and 2 to stand on it own.  My vote: 4th place.

Sex Criminals, vol 1: One Weird Trick, Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky
The only one of this year's nominees to do anything of significant interest with narrative form, character subjectivity and artistic presentation (notwithstanding Kamala Khan's mystic vision in issue 1 of Ms Marvel).  Also the only one that has something unusual to say, being a consideration of the ways in which we learn and talk about sex.  Heartfelt, honest, filthy and sniggeringly funny in equal measure; all this, and a SF action story too!  My vote: 1st place.

The Zombie Nation, vol 2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate, Carter Reid
Apparently a print collection of a webcomic, but widespread reports suggest that nobody has actually seen the print version.  The webcomic itself is easily found, and is nothing in any way outstanding or interesting.  There are hundreds of webcomics just like this, and dozens of much better ones.  My vote: unranked.

The very, very long-delayed book post

Why, look at this - someone's left a blog lying around unattended.  I'm sure it won't be missed.  Ahem.

At this point, attempting to catch up with all my unblogged reading is not even worth considering.  Here, however, are a few notable items to bring things up to date.

The last month or so has been pretty much taken up with Hugo Award nominees, but I think I'll hold off on writing any of those up until after voting closes at the end of July.  Readers may or may not be aware of The Shit That Has Befallen The Hugo Awards This Year, and if not, it's a rant best left for another time, but let's just say reading the nominees has been more of a chore than a pleasure this year.  Sneak preview: *ech*.

Assorted crime novels, Gladys Mitchell
Back in the midst of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction (the '30s, more or less), Gladys Mitchell was considered one of the Queens of Crime alongside Sayers and Christie.  Today, she's all but forgotten.  A little while back, however, there was a TV series based around Mitchell's detective, Mrs Bradley, which starred Diana Rigg; according to reviews that mentioned the books at all, the resemblance was close to non-existent.  I determined to track down those books and see for myself, which proved to be no easy task - most of Mitchell's novels have spent decades out of print.  Fortunately, a lot of them are now available as ebooks (some of them legitimately!).
Mrs Bradley is a wizened crone - generally described as resembling a crocodile, occasionally a vulture - as well as a qualified psychologist and never, ever an entrant in Diana Rigg Lookalike contests.  She makes her debut in Speedy Death (also adapted as the first episode of the TV series), which must have been a hell of a racy book at the time it was published - young buck discovered, dead in the bath, as a female cross-dresser, and her frustrated suitor overcome with a murderous rage that is explicitly described as sexually motivated.  No particular secret is made of the killer's identity, with the bulk of the plot taken up in trying to contain her and explain her actions.  I've seen it suggested, quite believably, that this and others of Mitchell's works were intended as spoofs of the cosy detective novel.
The blatantly obvious murderer, with emphasis on motive rather than mystery, crops up again as a feature in subsequent books - Mitchell herself was a psychologist, and I imagine the pseudish shenanigans of Hercule Poirot and his "little grey cells" in Christie's novels must have driven her to take this approach by way of rebuttal.  Even if she doesn't come right out and name the murderer early on, Mitchell does often telegraph them pretty clearly; more rarely, she plays with the reader's expectations and provides a last-minute twist.  The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (blatant genre parody throughout) and The Saltmarsh Murders are good examples of the former category, while Death at the Opera is a stand-out example of the latter.
Having read 8 of these in succession, I thought it best to take a break - finally got Mitchell fatigue a couple of chapters into The Rising of the Moon, which is widely recommended and probably deserves my more focussed attention.

SFFANZ review books:
Bird Box, Josh Malerman
It's OK.
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, Neil Gaiman
It's good, but probably overpriced.
The Chimes, Anna Smaill
Good but difficult.  Suited my tastes, but probably more artsy than most readers would like.

Ack-Ack Macaque, Gareth L Powell
Hive Monkey, Gareth L Powell
First two volumes in a series of cyberpunkish adventures starring a technologically uplifted monkey who was created to provide the brain of the chief non-player character in an online game set in a parallel WWII, but who breaks out of captivity and goes on the warpath against the corporation that made him.  Let's face it, given this set-up, Ack-Ack Macaque is clearly and absolutely the correct name for the protagonist.  Well played, Gareth L Powell, well played indeed.  Come for the wacky knockabout concept, stay for the surprisingly well handled characters and action adventure.

Doctor Who and Race, ed Lindy Orthia
A collection of essays concerning racial issues in DW.  We all know those issues are there, and sometimes it does us good to stare them in the eye.  Uniformly well-written and thought-provoking.

Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Louis Niebur
An extremely thorough biography of the BBC department that, for some four decades, was tasked with coaxing SF soundtracks out of junk and cheap electronics.  At some point I'll go back through the DW music blog and add in details from this damn fine book.  (Just... not right now.)

Dial H, vol 2: Exchange, China Mieville, Alberto Ponticelli & Dan Green
Alas, this series was cancelled after a scant 16 issues - this bumper volume completes the set.  At least Mieville was given warning and was able to wrap up his story in the few issues that remained.  (Actually, it might even have been a blessing - things start to drag around the middle issues, with a definite picking up of pace in the last few.)
Here the concept of the H-dials becomes an allegory for copyright infringement, with the creators of the dials essentially exposed as entertainment pirates.  There's a suggestion that our heroes are morally in the clear since the original templates for most of their stolen superhero identities are either dead or freely available generic types, although it's not absolutely clear cut.  Conceptually a very rich series.

Chew, vols 1 thru 9, John Layman & Rob Guillory
Image Comics are my new favourite comics publisher.  They're bringing out a lot of quirky non-superhero titles right now, and this one was the first of the current batch to catch my eye.  It's set in the near future after a food scare has led to the outlawing of chicken as a foodstuff; the human population has clearly taken a hit of some sort, but there's a strong suggestion that the food scare was a cover-up and that something else is going on with the chickens.  In any event, the Food and Drug Administration is now America's most powerful law enforcement agency, and investigating crimes relating to food and/or poultry is their top priority.
Oh, and several of the characters have weird food-related abilities.  Just thought I'd mention that as casually as possible.
The protagonist is Detective Tony Chu, who has the ability to psychometrically "read" the history of any object, provided that object a) is, or has been, living matter, and b) is in his mouth.  He works on homicide cases and has a boss who hates him, so of course cannibalistic shenanigans ensue.  It's all played for laughs, folks - it's macabre, but it's a good kind of macabre.
Story arcs still unresolved at the end of book 9 include: Tony's cat-and-mouse pursuit of a serial killer with the same freaky ability as himself; the appearance in the sky of fiery alien glyphs, how this ties in with the booming trade in "gallsaberries" and whether it means the world is going to end; and just what that chicken ban was really all about.
The art style is cartoonish and Guillory loves to pepper the pages with tiny comedic details (and big comedic details!) so even in a low-incident issue there's plenty to enjoy.  The runaway star of the series, though, is a bionic luchador rooster called Poyo, who has gone from being a plot detail to making surprise return appearances to having his own spin-off one-shots; it's got to the point now where the main action in every issue will pause while someone speculates on what Poyo might be doing, just so that we can indulge in a double-page splash of Poyo's latest outlandish adventure.  He's one bad-ass *-*ing bird.

Books for May/June

The NZ national SF convention has been and gone, the Sir Julius Vogel Awards have been presented.  Despite my best efforts, I didn't manage to get all the nominated works read ahead of time, although that's more down to not being able to lay my hands on them quickly enough than to lack of time on my part.  Readers can clearly see below that I managed to read plenty of other books during May and June.

So basically the key learning for future years is that I needn't expect to be able to read the entire shortlist before voting, and I may as well allow myself to be led by other people's recommendations, by what's available to me at the time, and by my own desire to read other stuff.

To my continuing surprise, the Best Novel award went to what I'd pegged as the worst of the six nominees.  On the other hand, just look at who they gave the Best Fan Writing award to - honestly, they'll let anyone in these days.  Here endeth the self-promotion.

For reasons of brevity, the list below doesn't include SJV nominees that I started but gave up on, of which there were at least three.  For reasons of simplicity, I've just lumped both months' books in together, more or less in order of reading, and then split the SJV books out and put them all up front.

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Growing Disenchantments, KD Berry
Comic fantasy, off-the-shelf material but competently used.  Various familiar character types try to get their hands on a painting of a powerful old wizard; the painting, of course, has its own plans.  Unusual inclusion of a time-travelling character, although it's explained in context.  Of the Best Novel shortlistees, I would have said this ought to rank somewhere in the middle.

Don't Be a Hero, Chris Strange
Superhero story set in a world where Auckland was devastated by a nuclear bomb during the tail end of superpowered World War II.  The wealthy live in shiny, futuristic Neo-Auckland, while NZ's superheroes, aggressively regulated by international accords, inhabit the decrepit slums of the old city.  Two of the good 'uns struggle in spite of this to save NZ from the machinations of a mysterious new villain.  This was a fantastic story, great characters, author quite willing to kill off favourites if the story required it, good writing.  One tiny niggling problematic area if I really wanted to be picky, around the use of a transvestite villain character, but it's arguable.  Moreover, this was the only Best Novel nominee that actually related to NZ in any way at all - granted, that's not a requirement for the SJVs, but it's just nice to see.  I really thought this one was head and shoulders above the other nominees, but the voting public at large disagreed.

The Enchanted Flute, James Norcliffe
Nominated in the Best Youth Novel category.  Nominally set in NZ, but could as easily have been written/set in the UK.  Talented girl from not very wealthy family finds a cheap flute in a pawn shop, only to discover that it magically possesses her fingers and will only allow her to play one tune - Debussy's "Syrinx".  (A clue, a clue!)  Despite lack of real connection between turn-of-the-20th-century French composer and ancient Graeco-Roman myth, the heroine soon finds herself transported to Fantasyland and reliving the story of Pan and Syrinx, herself cast in the role that doesn't come with horns or goat feet.  Good modern youth fantasy, with some surprises.






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Celestial Battle, Book One: Dark Serpent, Kylie Chan
Review book, and here's the review.  I'm not entirely sure why I asked for this book - it looked kind of interesting in synopsis, but I really should have clocked the warning signs.  This is absolutely, positively the last time I put myself in the position of reviewing a genre-flavoured romantic doorstop written by/for excitable middle-aged women.

The Spiral Labyrinth, Matthew Hughes
Hespira, Matthew Hughes
Books 2 and 3 in the series that began with Majestrum.  Henghis Hapthorn, rational science detective in a universe tilting towards the resurgence of magic, finds himself (and his other self) dealing with megalomaniacal super-sorcerous fungus and a mysterious amnesiac woman.  Once again, tip-top stuff.

Dial H, vol 1: Into You, China Mieville & Mateus Santolouco
So DC have streamlined their monthly output to a sleek dozen or so different flavours of Superman, ditto Batman, half as much Justice League and a handful of other titles.  As part of this spring clean, they've got China Mieville in to write (and Mateus Santolouco to draw) a relaunch of freaky '60s title Dial H for Hero.  This is probably the smartest thing they've done in years; it's kind of a shame they couldn't have taken a punt on a few other unusual writer/title combos while they were about it.  I suppose the world needs its multiple monthly Superman titles, tsk.  Being the politically minded chap he is, Mieville isn't content merely to play with the surreal trappings of the premise - magic dial allows its bearer to temporarily become a superhero, but with no foreknowledge of what the hero's identity/powers will be - but wants to explore the possibilities and ask probing questions.  Does the male protagonist actually need the dial to be a hero?  Is it a big deal if he dials up a female super-identity?  Can he, should he go out and save the day if his super-identity is offensive (example used: grotesquely stereotyped Red Indian hero that actually appeared in the '60s comic)?  Just where do those identities come from?  New favourite comic book title.

Scud the Disposable Assassin: The Whole Shebang, Rob Schrab
Finally, I get to read the rest of the Scud story!  Surreal, fast-paced ("hyperkinetic" is the word usually used) indie comic about a vending machine robot assassin that spots the "will explode after killing target" disclaimer on his back in a mirror and decides to only maim his target, survive and go freelance.  Ran for many, many years with long gaps in publication, and for various reasons I only ever managed to get hold of collected vols 2 and 3 - roughly the middle part of the story.  For that reason I'd previously only been exposed to the wonderful surrealism of Scud, and not the highly problematic gender attitudes that emerge in later issues.  (Schrab went through two breakups during the course of working on the series, which undoubtedly fed through into the story.)  The back end of the book collects four more recent issues that wrap everything up, perhaps a bit too neatly.  I'm glad to have read it all at last, but I'm not sure if I'm better off than I was before.

Diversifications, James Lovegrove
Shelve this alongside Jeff Noon's latest.  Lovegrove is another author whose earlier books I loved - he's got a good eye for wit and wordplay - but where Noon went underground for a decade between books, Lovegrove diverted his efforts to writing serial genre fantasies for younger readers.  Here, for older readers, is a collection of short stories that spans pretty much his entire career - there ought to be more stuff in here that I like, and yet I'm underwhelmed.  It's possible that all the best stories went into Imagined Slights, leaving the second best for this volume.  Or I could just be getting prematurely old and grumpy.

The String Diaries, Stephen Lloyd Jones
Review book.  Short version: I liked it.  A well-crafted character-driven horror story.

Books for March/April

Time for another bi-monthly book round-up.  Since the last update, the shortlist for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards has been released; reading as much of the shortlisted work as possible before the convention in mid-July now becomes a priority, or at least, it did as of mid-April.


The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, Kim Newman
Characters familiar from The Man from the Diogenes Club and from Newman's Anno Dracula books pop up in this collection of loosely-linked stories that start in the Victorian era and run through to the 1970s setting familiar from the previous volume.  As usual with Newman, much entertainment ensues.

The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, ed Sean Wallace
Now available in a conveniently un-mammoth pocket paperback format.  A large, varied and extremely good collection of reprinted short stories that could arguably be called steampunk.  A couple I'd seen before, a pleasing and surprisingly large number written by authors I hadn't tried before and whose work I ought to investigate further.  Sadly, not many of those have had books published, which would make it easier to follow them up.  Catherynne M Valente is one I probably should have checked out before now.  Aliette de Bodard's Aztec detective novels were an obvious purchase, and they're first on the to-read list as soon as I get past review books, SJV nominees and borrowed items.  Margo Lanagan has had several anthologies published, but it looks as though further research is needed before I can decide which of them to start with.

Majestrum, Matthew Hughes
Borrowed on recommendation.  Hard to sum up briefly: it's set in the very far future, at a time when the universe is about to make one of its many cyclical transitions from physical laws to magical laws; the protagonist, Henghis Hapthorn, is the known cosmos' most famous detective, but he's had an early and life-complicating taste of the magical age to come thanks to a previous case that involved him being pulled through a dimensional portal, as a result of which his intuitive side has become a distinct persona inside his head and his personal organiser has been transformed from a machine to an ape-cat-hybrid familiar creature with an addiction to expensive fruits; he's hired by the Archon, the ultimate ruler of all humanity, to investigate the theft of several museum pieces that date from an earlier age of magic and whose disappearance may signal the return of a powerful tyrant.  It's very, very good, and two follow-up novels have been borrowed and are in the stack.

So hooray, an entire month of really good books!

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Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse, General Jack Seely
Birthday present.  An interesting item - actually a recent reprint of a book originally published in the 1930s, all about a horse that survived four years of action in the First World War, went on to win races and generally lived a life other horses can only envy.  The title should probably have been Spawny Get: The Jammy Story of the Luckiest Horse Ever; Warrior charges to glory in some of the thickest battles of WWI, storming German machine-gun emplacements and receiving nary a scratch, yet with uncanny foresight he manages to get sent back to HQ with a turned ankle the day before anything really unavoidable goes wrong.  "Gosh," thinks Gen Seely as another horse is blown up underneath him, "what a lucky thing dear old Warrior stumbled over that flint yesterday."  The book is littered with such instances.  Overall a good read, and although the writer of the foreword to the current edition felt the need to apologise in advance for outdated material, no such apology was really needed.

Empire State, Adam Christopher
SJV nominee.  A tale of detectives and superheroes in a strange parallel version of Prohibition-era New York.  This one was serviceable but not spectacular, a passable first novel.  Certainly the front runner of the Best Novel nominees I've read so far.

Tropic of Skorpeo, Michael Morrissey
SJV nominee.  Gonzo pulp stuff.  I got 80 pages in, just over a third of the way through, and had to give up.  The first few chapters were kind of enjoyable, then it all got bogged down in prurient scenes of fantasy erotica that just got too damn wearing.  Was this written by a schoolboy or what?  And yet I'd still probably rate it above Queen of Iron Years.

Books for Jan/Feb 2013

Who is the Doctor, Graeme Burk & Robert Smith?
Reference/critical book that covers the 21st century series of Doctor Who, from the 2005 relaunch all the way up to the end of the 2011 series.  I'd say these guys have got the drop on Mad Norwegian Press' About Time series (tardy, Mad Norwegian, very tardy), but in truth the analysis here isn't nearly as deep as I'm hoping it will be in the very long-awaited AT volume 7.  No thought-provoking side essays, for a start.  Certainly enjoyable and well-argued - I even found myself agreeing with a lot of it.

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
Highly acclaimed SF debut that I completely failed to get along with.  Several write-ups have pointed out that the book doesn't compromise on info-dumping and expects the reader to work out for themselves much of what's going on - this is true, and it's not at all the problem I have with the book.  It's purely a character thing.  Bluntly, I like novels to have them.  Got 100 pages in, didn't feel that I knew or cared who anyone was or why they were carrying out their post-human space-opera heist, gave up.

The Aviator, Gareth Renowden
NZ publication, apparently self-published, borrowed and read because it was SJV Award nominable.  Damnedest thing, I got 100 pages in and gave up again.  The protagonist is a zeppelin chauffeur and housekeeper for a multinational capitalist; in the wake of global eco-collapse and his boss' disappearance, he's also heir apparent to the zeppelin, the NZ bolthole, and the rest of the whizzy AI-governed empire.  He globe-trots in search of his master before giving him up as lost and taking up a new job running trade between isolated pockets of civilisation.  There were some ideas in here, some of them interesting, but no sense of any kind of peril.  Stuff would happen, stuff would un-happen, the protagonist would continue on his way, tra-la-la.  The author seemed more interested in presenting a travelogue of his post-crisis world than in telling a story within it.  Life's too short to finish reading books like this.

Channel Sk1n, Jeff Noon
New and extremely long-awaited novel from one of my favourite authors.  I love Noon's zingy, poetic prose and his quirky ideas, which made reading this book a really disheartening experience.  Forced myself not to give up on a third book in succession, especially with it being a Jeff Noon and all.  Gone is the poetry, and I saw near enough the same ideas handled better ten years ago in a Doctor Who spin-off novel.  It's basically a sceptical examination of celebrity culture; that's far too basic a premise for a novel by the author of Vurt and Automated Alice.  I don't know what's happened to the mighty Jeff.  All the va-va-voom seems to have gone out of him.

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Future Lovecraft, ed Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R Stiles
Collection of short stories and poems that combine Lovecraftian horror with contemporary and SF sensibilities.  A mixed bag of course, but several very good pieces here.

Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron, Kim Newman
Literary team-up novel with vampires and set in World War I.  Dracula, in exile from what was recently his British Empire following the events of the original Anno Dracula, has hooked up with Kaiser Bill and established a new base of operations on the European mainland; Biggles and chums, the secret agents of the Diogenes Club and sundry others must uncover and defeat Dracula's pet project, a cadre of super-vampires based at Schloss Adler and led by Baron von Richthoven.  These aces need no aircraft - they simply transform into flying monsters that you can hang machine guns on.  A highly entertaining adventure ensues.

Queen of Iron Years, Lyn McConchie & Sharman Horwood
Another novel borrowed and read because of its SJV nominability.  A pre-op trans woman travels back in time to Celtic Britain in order to help the Iceni chieftainess Boudicca defeat the Romans in battle, a change to the timelines that will apparently cause the premature collapse of the Roman Empire and make the modern world a better place for the transgendered in some vaguely suggested way.  It's not as good as I'm making it sound.
There are two sets of chapters, one near-future and one in the early 60s AD; I'm assuming that each writer was responsible for one of these sets, and I'm further assuming that McConchie was responsible for the latter set because a) that was the readable set, and she has a good reputation as an author, and b) the Celtic past setting isn't far removed from the kind of rustic fantasy setting in which she has past form.  But even there, it's not good news: the protagonist is an outrageous Mary-Sue, a computer programmer who somehow has learned to speak fluent Britonnic Celtic, a language for which there is no extant source text, as well as a passable Roman Latin; knows enough medicine to become understudy to the Iceni's tribal healer in no time; and is able to give Boudicca the lessons in military strategy that she needs to trounce the Roman governor's army.
The misconceptions and factual errors about Imperial Roman society don't help, although they're a relatively small part of the book.  One item repeated several times is the claim that Roman women were barred from inheriting or owning property, which certainly wasn't true in 60 AD and hadn't been for a few centuries - I can't help wondering if one or both authors had some sort of agenda that required them to dress Rome up in misogynist clothing.  It's difficult to talk about errors in the portrayal of the Iceni and their campaign of destruction and indiscriminate slaughter across Roman Britain, since we only have one source for that - Tacitus' Annals, and naturally he had an agenda - but I'm extremely sceptical of the version given here.  In brief, this is a bad book.
Edit: I'm baffled to announce that it's now been shortlisted for the SJVs in the Best Novel category.  Another of life's little mysteries.

The Man from the Diogenes Club, Kim Newman
Short stories based around the activities of the Diogenes Club, mentioned in a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories and presumed to be a branch of British Intelligence, but here transplanted to the 1970s.  It's a lot like The Avengers (Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, not Captain America and co).  A mixture of supernatural, comedic and horror stories - highly enjoyable.

Announcement, and books for Nov/Dec

I've started a new blog - what the hell was I thinking?!  It isn't a replacement for this blog, it's a 52-week side project that I thought might be fun, and also of practical use in improving my writing habits.  But anyway, there it is - please go and have a look if you like Doctor Who, or if you like electronic music, or if you like me (flutters eyelashes), or... well, see if you like it.

Updates here will continue, although they might be a little more rough 'n' ready than usual.  Case in point: the book write-ups for the last two months...

November

The Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare
Supernatural romance by the author of the Lord of the Rings "Very Secret Diaries".  Well, actually a Victorian era prequel to supernatural romance etc etc.  Not exactly steampunk, although doubtless many would disagree.  Bought for $3 because, well, why not at that price?  Much better than I was expecting, and even has some of the flavour of a period romantic novel.  Fantasy elements are satisfactory and there's no "vampire porn" - at least, not yet, although I can't speak for later volumes in the series.

Whispers Underground, Ben Aaronovitch
Third in series of fantasy police procedurals, following Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho.  Completely excellent, as expected.  Looks like we're about due for an arc-heavy fourth volume now.

Aristoi, Walter Jon Williams
Read mainly because the author was going to be in town for a booze-up, and I wanted to be able to look him in the eye.  Space opera with profound moral elements - the future nobility (Aristoi) are each responsible for the development of worlds under their care as well as the overall welfare of the galaxy; protagonist Aristos discovers that a fellow Aristos is secretly raising worlds in barbaric, primitive conditions.  Does either side have the right?  Fascinating read, not least for the parallel columns that allow for internal and external character dialogues to unfold at the same time.

Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the d'Urbervilles, Kim Newman
Borrowed from a friend.  Brilliant, brilliant parody of Conan Doyle and other contemporary writers.  Colonel Sebastian Moran becomes the narrator for a series of lewder and nastier versions of famous stories including Riders of the Purple Sage, The War of the Worlds, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (obviously) and of course, The Final Problem.


December

Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, EW Hornung
Read as a follow-up to Moriarty because I had it lying around and felt that this was a good time for it.  Turns out I hate Raffles.  He's a smug, unprincipled shit and a bit of a prat, and no amount of lovestruck fawning by the narrator can redeem him.

Strange Itineraries, Tim Powers
Short stories by an excellent novelist.  Nuff said?

The Deep of the Dark, Stephen Hunt
More steampunky adventure mash-up.  This week: submarines!  I enjoyed it, as usual - better than the previous volume - but can't help wondering when Hunt is going to try something else.

Jack Glass, Adam Roberts
Library book.  Incredibly, after my last couple of experiences with him, a really great book by Adam Roberts.  Just when I was about to give up hope!  This one doesn't even lose a wheel in the final act, but sees it through right to the end.  Title character is a peerless murderer in a totalitarian future Solar System; the reasons for his murders turn out to affect all humanity.  This book's surely a keeper - now I just have to get hold of a copy that I can keep.

Books read in October

Railsea, China Mieville
Borrowed from a friend.  I wasn't quite sure about the blurb, which suggested a land-based fantasy version of Moby Dick (we've already seen one of those, thank you very much), but I needn't have worried.  This is in fact another cracking novel from Mieville.  Influenced by, but not a retread of Melville's famous sedative.  The protagonists live in a world in which soil, not water, stretches out between patches of habitable land, and gigantic burrowing animals frolic in its depths.  Traders drive their various types of train over a network of rails whose origin is a mystery, and whose maintenance is carried out by fearsome mechanical "angels".  The hero is a young apprentice on a whaler-equivalent train whose captain is obsessed with a vast pale-furred mole called Mocker-Jack.  He and his crewmates get caught up in somebody else's quest to find a line that leads out of the railsea and off the edge of the charted world.  Great stuff.

Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve
Spotted in the high street at a bargain price.  First in a series of four young adult books set in a future world of scarce resources.  In the name of Municipal Darwinism, the cities of Europe have been mounted on gigantic wheeled platforms and now go charging about the dried-up continent hunting villages, towns and each other to absorb their population and melt down their precious materials.  A boy is thrown out of London by the head of his guild because he's seen something he shouldn't; he and a girl who wants to assassinate his guild master must trudge across Europe in the hope of catching up with London before it does something terrible.  Variable in tone - is it written for young adults, or children? - but fun.

Shadowfell, Juliet Marillier
Recommended by a friend, on the grounds that it's eligible for next year's SJV awards.  Decidedly average off-the-shelf fantasy product.  Mechanically, the prose is good, in that it's engaging and moves along at a fair clip.  Stylistically, however, highly cliched, and the same could be said of the story itself.  It appears to be the set-up for a hoary old coming-of-age magical faerie quest series - I'm told it's to be a trilogy, although this feels like the opener to a more leisurely series than that, given the size of the to-do list the heroine has been presented with.  The repeated use of cod Scots accents for arche-speech and faerie characters also got right on my tits.  Admittedly I'm not part of the likely target readership (young teenage girls, at a guess), but even so.

The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M Banks
SFFANZ review book.  That's two Banksies in a row they've stumped up for me.  Thanks, SFFANZ!  Verdict: positive.

Book round-up: August & September 2012

Although the current half-series of Doctor Who has already appeared on NZ television (fifth episode to screen this coming Thursday), we don't have any kind of TV reception and are reliant as before on friends slipping us naughty copies of the episodes.  So far we've seen the first two.  Thoughts on these are forthcoming, but first, I have a couple of months of reading to write up.

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August books

Ptolemy's Gate, Jonathan Stroud
Yes indeed, a fine third volume in the Bartimaeus trilogy, with a surprising ending. Somebody really ought to make it into multiple blockbuster films.

There then followed a month of reading through old SF books picked up second hand in a friend-of-a-friend's clearing out sale.  These aren't all of them.  There are many more lurking in the dark corners of the shelf of books to be read.

10,000 Light-Years from Home, James Tiptree Jr
Ah, James Tiptree Jr.  He learned the game from his uncle James, now he's heir to the name.  Oh no, wait a minute -  that's James Bond Jr.
A variable collection of short stories.  I'm glad to have read it, because Tiptree - aka CIA spook and part-time author Alice Sheldon - was one of the significant gaps in my SF reading, but I'm unlikely to read more.  The first couple of stories were pretty good, the next couple kind of limp, and it seemed to alternate from there.  A lot of the material is just plain dated.  Most notable feature is Tiptree's penchant for over-ornate titles, and when the titles are more memorable than the stories, it could be said that there's something awry.

Alternating Currents, Frederick Pohl
Now, I do like a bit of Fred Pohl.  Previously read by the same author: Pohlstars, another collection of short stories, and that was it.  It was about time I read some more of his work.  Pohl has a talent for taking an idea and turning it completely on its side, and that's a definite virtue in genre material when you're reading it decades after publication.  Put simply, this stuff stands up well.

Time Transfer, Arthur Sellings
According to the back cover blurb, this is an author who's "often compared with Ray Bradbury".  Implicit in that would be the word "unfavourably".  A collection of utterly unremarkable stories, not one of which has a decent ending.  I could even have gone for an indecent ending, but no, sadly not.  Total blah.

Machines and Men, Keith Roberts
Short stories by the author of Pavane.  It's about half and half - and they're even grouped that way in the book - between stories of weird stuff entering the lives of everyman characters in present-day England, and tales of the near future.  The very last story is pretty much exactly what I'd expect to happen if Jeremy Clarkson ever wrote a SF story (a nightmarish dystopia ruled by traffic wardens, you say?).  Apart from that parting clanger, a pretty good collection.

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September books

Make Room! Make Room!, Harry Harrison
Novel about a policeman pursuing a murder enquiry in an overpopulated near-future (at time of writing) New York.  However, there's no great mystery about it, the enquiry proves to be pointless (and is obviously so to the reader quite early on), and the policeman does himself no favours by seeing it through to the end, even though he's been ordered to drop it.  It'd be a "mean streets" story except that none of the sinister powerful characters in the story can be bothered to make his life difficult.  It's really more of a mood piece, a background in which a more interesting story might happen, and now I can understand how the film Soylent Green came about.  It's also been overtaken by reality, with its warnings of an overcrowded world that hasn't quite come to pass (yet).
I probably ought to stick to the funny Harrisons.

The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov
Asimov's famous robot detective novels - or at least, the first two.  It turns out there were another two I hadn't spotted, plus all the other novels to tie the robot books into the Foundation books; however, I've been advised to pretend those don't exist and to get out while I still have positive memories of these two.
These are indeed fine SF novels, for a 1950s value of fine.  (Requires allowances for outdated social attitudes, most notably where the female characters are concerned.)  The Caves of Steel presents a world in which intelligent robots are taking jobs from humans - it looks for a fair while as though it might sidestep into a political consideration of industrialised production, but this aspect of the story isn't developed.  I suppose post-war America wouldn't have liked it if it had been.  Protagonist Elijah Baley, plainclothesman, is faced with the prospect of robot detectives that can do his job better than him, which puts him under more than the usual pressure when he's partnered with Robot Daneel Olivaw to investigate an impossible murder.  The murder's impossible because no human could have committed it (because they'd have had to leave the confines of the City, and the whole of humanity is agoraphobic; it's a kind of inverted "good" version of Harrison's overcrowded future, and bugger knows where it gets its resources from) and no robot could have committed it (because the Three Laws of Robotics prevent them from harming humans).  Baley and Olivaw team up again in The Naked Sun to investigate another seemingly impossible murder, this time committed on a colony world whose human inhabitants have a pathological aversion to being in the same room as each other.  Worth a week of anyone's time.

The Music Instinct, Philip Ball
And this took up the rest of the month: a pop science book about how we perceive music.  The title seems to be a direct reference to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct; in the introduction, Ball takes issue with Pinker's claim (in one of his other books) that music is a non-essential quirk of human society.  In fact, Ball spends a fair bit of the book taking issue with other academics' assertions about music (generally with good cause, in my opinion).  Like a lot of pop science books, it's very interesting but could have been briefer.

July books round-up

The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman
23-year-old award-winning novel expanded from a 100-page novella.  I'd previously read the novella part of it, but hadn't managed to work my way through the further 300 pages.  Turns out I had the right idea the last time.
The set-up is that someone discovers a cure for cancer which, as an unavoidable side-effect, throws out the body's natural aging processes such that people simply drop dead in their mid-thirties.  Unfortunately the cure goes viral and everybody gets it.  The workaround for this involves more viruses - at six months, children are inoculated with a full encyclopaedia's worth of information, as well as a variety of other helpful smart apps, so that they can bypass the childhood learning experience and get straight on with contributing to society etc etc.  (What could possibly go wrong?!)  However, the government of the day (nominally socialist with Orwellian tendencies) takes the opportunity to program in other things, like "acceptable" social behaviours - in other words, dissent, originality and non-normative inclinations are effectively trampled out.  (The novella was published right around the time the British government was looking at ways to limit literary discussion of homosexuality, particularly in school libraries; Section 28 was law by the time the novel was published; Ryman, an openly gay writer, naturally had an interest.)  Milena, the book's protagonist, has a natural resistance to some of these smart viruses, and consequently has grown up gay in a world where gayness has been made impossible.  This causes problems for her, but also puts her in a position to resolve a new crisis that the governmental hive mind is unable to think its way around.
The novella largely concerns itself with the problems, while the expanded novel introduces the crisis.  In the novella, Milena meets and falls in love with Rolfa, a member of an Antarctic mining community who has an unusual talent for musical composition.  Rolfa's community don't have the viruses, but they also don't have a use for her operatic setting of Dante's Divine Comedy.  In order to stage the opera, Rolfa has to be integrated into the Consensus and given the viruses - she can either express herself or be herself, but not both.  Milena tries to do right by her, but clearly it's not going to end well either way.  This story is moving, well-structured and well-told.
The rest of the novel sees Milena continuing to try to get Rolfa's opera staged against a backdrop of social disintegration as the viruses go increasingly wrong.  This part of the book is just too damn cluttered.  The problem isn't that it jumps around in time, as some readers claim - it's clearly stated up front that Milena is remembering these fragments of her life during her long-delayed integration into the Consensus, and it honestly isn't hard to follow.  The problem is that Ryman seems determined to make it harder by throwing in every spare idea he had, apparently just for the sake of upping the weird quotient.  Oh yes, this was when people couldn't speak unless they sang the words.  Oh yes, this was when trees started growing out of people's backs.  Oh yes, this was the day humans and animals randomly swapped consciousnesses (although apparently for no other reason and with no other result than giving Milena a human companion that thinks he's a dog).  These ideas are cast to the wind, rarely if at all followed up.  There's just not enough focus, and the prose in these 300 pages is remarkably stodgy, too.  So, worth another look at the novella, but I'm unlikely to bother reading past that point again.

The Last Mimzy (aka The Best of Henry Kuttner), Henry Kuttner
1975 anthology rejacketed and retitled to tie in with a recent film that completely passed me by.  The back cover bills this as the work of a writer ahead of his time, and I'd have to agree.  Kuttner died in 1958, and most of these tales were first published in the 40s and 50s, but some of them wouldn't look out of place alongside the New Wave tales of the 60s and 70s.  Some of them would, mind you, but there it is - Kuttner's a writer with a very broad range.  There's a general tone of dry humour that I like.  I'm glad I picked this one up.

Mansfield with Monsters, Katherine Mansfield with Matt and Debbie Cowens
In a similar vein to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but with three unique selling points: for the Kiwi readership, it's based around the work of a New Zealand author; it's comprised of several short stories rather than a novel, so the ideas don't outstay their welcome and you're not left with a single gag stretched out for a couple of hundred pages; and the supernatural additions have generally been tailored to each story, rather than just being incongruous elements bolted on.  Basically, it's the art mash-up.
I should admit that I hadn't previously read any Mansfield, but went and read several of the original pieces on Project Gutenberg in order to compare and contrast.  What I found was that the originals suited the mash-up treatment extremely well, because they contained enough ambiguities and gaps to be able to accomodate the new elements (just what was drawing all those people up that hill in "Bank Holiday"?), as well as the occasional macabre feature already in place.  And the additions are such good imitations of Mansfield's own style, I was hard pressed to spot where the joins were in some cases.  Highly impressed with this book.

Rare Unsigned Copy, Simon Petrie
Tragically, signed.  Collection of short (and very short) stories by an Antipodean writer.  Some of these are full short stories, both SF in earnest and frivolous pieces about farming mile-long carrots and murders in space elevator cabins; some are 100-word vignettes, or even throwaway jokes ("Sudoku for Psychics" being a brilliant hit-and-run gag).  Petrie has a deep-seated love of excruciating puns, the results of which vary.  By and large, this was a good and entertaining collection.

The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud
The Golem's Eye, Jonathan Stroud
Borrowed from a friend.  First two volumes in a trilogy about Nathaniel, a boy apprenticed to a lowly civil servant in a parallel Britain ruled by magicians, and Bartimaeus, a djinni unwillingly pressed into his service.  Book 1 introduces and book 2 develops the character of Kitty, a commoner who wants to end the magicians' decadent and oppressive rule but is forced to collaborate with Bartimaeus and Nathaniel in book 2 to save London from the titular golem.
My impression of these books is that they're Harry Potter done properly.  (Quick check of the publication years... they may even have been written as a reaction to HP, who knows?)  No whimsical boarding school bollocks or secret magical ministries here.  Stroud's whole approach to the world of magic is more cynical, but far more believable, and a lot more politically flavoured, which won't do the young adult readership any harm.  The magicians have control over the djinn and use it to retain feudal control over the masses - revolt is inevitable (pending the build-up of enough magical resistance within the commoners), but the magicians have enough problems avoiding the back-stabbing of their colleagues and uncovering the endless conspiracies of ambitious junior ministers.  It falls to your narrator, the resourceful and quick-witted (and modest!) Bartimaeus, to save the day, although that swine Nathaniel will end up taking all the credit for it.  Absolutely cracking reads, both of them, and book 3 is shaping up to be a fine end to the trilogy.

June books round-up

Comeback Tour, Jack Yeovil (aka Kim Newman)
Elvis Presley tries to prevent the end of the world.  Set in a parallel reality in which Elvis, discouraged from his musical career by a series of violent anti-rock'n'roll protests in the 1960s, rejoins the Army, gets the best pharmaceuticals Uncle Sam's money can buy and ends up as a mercenary in a nightmarish near-future Deep South.  A light read - highly entertaining, with a few full-bodied chuckles along the way.

Planetary, vols 3 & 4, Warren Ellis & John Cassaday
Library books.  I gave up on this series back in the day, because there was a three year hiatus between issues at one point, and because it became clear that Ellis wasn't going to stop at the 24th issue as planned (he ultimately stopped at 27).  Now at last I've read the back half of the story, and it's a shame I didn't catch up sooner.  The series is a patchwork of (mostly good) pastiches of different types of adventure story (mostly pulp magazine), with a secret history storyline woven in that looks like a cheeky parody of the mainstream comics industry.  Vol 4 also contains one of the most brilliant theories about superheroes ever devised.  It was worth pushing through vols 1-3 to get to that.  Now I have to consider whether or not to rebuy the trade paperbacks, if I can find them.

Doktor Sleepless, vol 1, Warren Ellis & Ivan Rodriguez
Library book.  What Warren Did Next.  A new sciffyish anti-heroic finite series in a similar vein to Transmetropolitan.  Looks like the old trouble's rearing its head, though - there's already talk of a years-long hiatus after production of the issues due to comprise vol 2.  Tra la la.  The story revolves around a scientific genius who saw his parents swallowed up by Lovecraftian abominations when he was a child and who is apparently trying to bring about the end of the world.  His motives for doing so remain ambiguous.  There's a lot of promise here, and I'd love to be able to pull the rest of the series out of the library, but that may not be possible for quite a while yet.

Apparat: The Singles Collection, Warren Ellis & various artists
Library book.  Four single issue stories that try to imagine what comic books today might look like if superheroes hadn't taken the market away from the old pulp comics.  There's the SF anthology story, the detective story, the uncostumed Shadow-style vigilante story, and rather strangely an aviator story.  I think the SF story is probably the best (well, Ellis has form in the genre - it's basically Transmet plus about another 20 years' worth of future shock), but it's a little nasty for Sir's tastes, and I kind of prefer the detective story.

The Red Star: Collected Edition, Christian Gossett & Bradley Kayl
Library book.  I tried the first third of this book (aka the original Red Star, vol 1) when it first came out, but couldn't get along with it.  It's a kind of industrial fantasy story set in the United Republics of the Red Star, a Soviet-style power bloc ruled with magic.  I was expecting a lightly skewed Soviet Union, or at least something written with more resonance with (dare I say awareness of?) Soviet culture, and was disappointed.  The old Roman-letters-backwards-look-a-bit-Russian schtick didn't help matters.  Second impressions this time round... not much different from the first impressions back then.  At least I can better see what the comic's creators are doing, but it still doesn't do a lot for me.

The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy, vol 2 (1997), ed Jonathan Strahan & Jeremy Byrne
A couple of stories I'd read in other collections (a Greg Egan, a Lucy Sussex), a couple of other good stories, and a lot of mediocre stuff.  Looks like there was a strange outbreak in Australia in 1997 of stories about teratology (or "pointing at freaks" if you want to call a spade a flat diggy thing).

The Drawing of the Dark, Tim Powers
Ah, Tim Powers, where have your books been all my life?  I suspect that this is another in the aborted series of novels about King Arthur's returns through the ages (see also Morlock Night by Powers' old mate KW Jeter, published the same year).  A mercenary in the sixteenth century finds himself in Vienna just ahead of the siege of the city by Suleiman's Turkish army; his special job, it turns out, is going to be to guard a pub built over an old monastery, where a dark beer with mystic properties is brewed.  If the pub cannot be defended until the beer is ready for the Fisher King to drink, the West will fall to Suleiman.  Just to be on the safe side, the Fisher King has summoned forth the reincarnated King Arthur.  Considering how early in his career Powers wrote this, it's an extremely accomplished bit of writing, and a pleasure to read.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller
Classic tale (well, three tales stitched together) of Catholicism keeping the flame of human knowledge alive in the aftermath of a nuclear war.  It's funny, you can actually see Miller getting more Catholic as the years pass.  Not that this damages the book at all - the rough, brutish Catholicism at the start fits the rough, brutish post-holocaust world, and the more confident, sophisticated Catholicism in the final part of the book fits the high-tech world in that part.  Somewhat of its time - an author might not get away with the cod African American massa-talk or the inclusion of the Wandering Jew in this day and age - but the ideas of cyclical history and whether or not human development is teleological are still worth a look.  It's a pretty good read.
I couldn't help wondering whether similar stories might be playing out in non-American parts of Miller's world - An Adhan for Abdullah? A Koan for Tensing?