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.

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.

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?

Book catch-up: May/June

I've let the book reviews slide again, and I probably ought to do something about that before the next block of Who episodes comes along. Here's a quick run-down of books read in May and June.

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Mistress Masham's Repose, TH White
Highly recommended by a fan friend, this book - nominally for children, but written in a pretty high style that I would imagine younger readers would find daunting - concerns a refugee colony of Lilliputians in the grounds of a decrepit stately home. A young girl is heir to the pile but has to contend with the evil schemes of her governess and the vicar, with the help of the kindly old Professor who lives in the porter's lodge. The Lilliputians provide a distraction from her miserable life, then become the object of the governess and vicar's scheming, and end up helping to win the day. Although the plot, reduced to its basic elements, is fairly straight-up kid-lit, the execution is pleasing and White includes some good thought-provoking material around the heroine's interactions with the Lilliputians.

Kraken, China Mieville
Library book. This is pretty close to being Un Lun Dun for adults. There's no parallel city here, just the unseen, magical side of London itself. Someone, somehow, steals a giant squid from the Natural History Museum, and the curator in charge of it finds himself on the run from an assortment of freaky and horrifically violent gangsters; meanwhile all the magical familiars in London are out on strike. A mixture of surreal fantasy and urban grit. A lot of commentators appear not to have liked it much; I found it enjoyable, but I certainly wouldn't rank it in Mieville's top five.

Graphic Classics: Gothic Classics, various
Library book. I'd say Edgar Allan Poe is underrepresented here, but then he does have a Graphic Classics volume all to himself. Not such a great effort, this one - it tries to condense two full novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey, into just a few dozen pages of comic book art, and the stories suffer terribly. Some nice shorter stories, although what the hell the schmaltzy piece about doggy heaven is doing in here is beyond me.

Ghostopolis, Doug TenNapel
Library book. Another wacky TenNapel graphic novel.

Surface Detail, Iain M Banks
Another SFFANZ review book. Summary: all right, but not great.

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Men and Cartoons, Jonathan Lethem
Ex-library book - short stories by an author whose novels I love. It turns out I actually have read these before, and the fact that I'd passed that earlier copy on and forgotten all about the contents should be enough of a review in itself.

Ex Machina, vol. 10, Brian K Vaughan & Tony Harris
Library book. The grand finale - Mitchell Hundred, mayor of New York and retired superhero, confronts a journalist who not only knows about the skeletons in his political closet but is also the new superpowered agent of the transdimensional monsters he has refused to serve. Epic, a worthy finale, a damn sight better than some of the middle volumes of the series, and just a little shocking at the end.

Grandville, Bryan Talbot
Grandville Mon Amour, Bryan Talbot
Library books, graphic novels. Pulp noir with animal heads. Inspired by the chimeric drawings of JJ Grandville (and quite right, too!), Talbot tells the gung-ho tales of a badger-headed police inspector in a Britain that's owned by France, uncovering political corruption and violent crime at the highest levels of government. They're entertaining enough - the brief scenes in Nutwood were good for a chuckle - but I don't feel a powerful urge to buy my own copies.

Lightborn, Tricia Sullivan
A story of adaptation and survival in a world wrecked by a kind of mental programming technology based around modulated pulses of light that turns most of the American population into zombies. In some ways it's similar to Sullivan's previous novel, Sound Mind. I enjoyed it, but not as much as Sullivan's other work - actually found it quite hum-ho in places.

Echo City, Tim Lebbon
An SFFANZ review book. I might add here that this book is about fifteen years late - it'd be a perfect fit for that 1990s wave of British city-themed fantasy I've talked about before. I probably would have been all over it if it had come out back then; as it is, eh, it's all right.

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Looking back over these, I see an awful lot of lukewarm reviews. But fear not, dear reader - I'm going to be a lot more positive about July and August's books.

Dark November brings the fog

I just want it noted that while I've been virtuously turning in at the sort of time normal people turn in, Jo has been pulling insanely late nights. 4am! I ask you! Just wanted that on the record, folks. On with the bookage.

This month's books have all come from Wellington Central Library, of which I am now a member. Moo hoo, ha ha.

New Model Army, Adam Roberts
The narrator of this latest Robertstravaganza is a member of a type of mercenary group known as a New Model Army, a sort of freelance TA. NMA soldiers have a bit of technology installed in their skull that allows them to communicate sort-of-telepathically with their comrades and contribute to the battle wikis; the NMA itself has a wiki-like structure, anarchic but self-policing, with no command hierarchy. The soldiers are responsible for buying and maintaining their own kit - which ensures no complaints about poor equipment - can get whatever training they need online and are able to suggest and take part in campaigns as they see fit. Pay and the NMA's minimal overheads are covered by their employers - in this case, a breakaway Scots Parliament - and by ransoming captured enemy combatants - in this case, members of the British Army. This free-form approach to warfare is presented as the ultimate expression of democracy, as contrasted at some length with what the narrator refers to as the feudal structure of the traditional, national army.
The narrator's NMA has the punning name of PANTEGRAL - cue lots of metaphorical material about giants (Pantagruel). It's an Adam Roberts novel, folks - there'll be a high concept in there somewhere.
I'd say this is one of Roberts' better books. The character of the narrator is well-realised and consistent, not just a conduit for the concepts, which are laid out carefully and explored thoroughly. There does seem to be a bit of plot fumbling to get us to Roberts' preferred ending, but the fumbling doesn't start until quite near the end, and I find it easy to forgive. May be worth getting hold of a copy at some point.

Ex Machina, vol. 9, Brian K Vaughan & Tony Harris
Well, that's an improvement and a half over the last volume. A bit of ker-razy meta shennanigans with Mayor Mitchell Hundred interviewing potential writers and artists for his comic book biography, and then some very large revelations about the Mayor's superpowers and a big set-up for the final confrontation in vol 10. What I may need to do at some point is to reread the whole series and fillet out an "essential Ex Machina" that excludes vols 7 and 8, and possibly other middle volumes.

Billy Hazelnuts and the Crazy Bird, Tony Millionaire
More oddball fun.

Cowboy Ninja Viking, vol. 1, AJ Lieberman & Riley Rossmo
Slightly disappointing. The basic idea has huge dramatic and comic potential - a community of assassins with multiple personality disorder - but the execution is off. The artwork is eye-catching, but it's too hard a lot of the time to tell who has what personalities, and there are a few characters who look a bit too similar as well. In story terms, this first volume (the first five issues) jumps around a bit in time, but I don't think Lieberman's actually got a handle on the chronology of it. But it does have a lot of fun lines, and the back cover blurb is a thing of beauty in itself.

Flight, vol. 3, ed Kazu Kibuishi
Apparently there's a seventh one of these out now or soon. Will one of the libraries get it in, or will I have to ask them to?

The Complete Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
For the most part, these are a kind of scientific folk story - your narrator, the eternal Qfwfq, explains how life used to be in the days when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, or what it was like to be part of the first generation to walk on land, or why snails started to grow shells. These tales have a kind of expressionist whimsy about them, although they get more subdued as Calvino gets older. There are only four stories in here that I really didn't care for at all, which originally appeared in the collection Time and the Hunter and which read like dramatised maths problems (if X is heading at a constant speed towards Y...). The stories comprising yer basic Cosmicomics collection are probably the best of the bunch.

Move Under Ground, Nick Mamatas
Jack Kerouac vs Cthulhu! I believe that just about covers it. If you need more persuading, you shouldn't.

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Reza Negarestani
I just had to read this after all the rave reviews it got. China Mieville loved it! Jeff Vandermeer loved it! I trust these fine authors with my grey matter and with the delicate balance of my sanity! And besides, the marketing blurb is sensational stuff, presenting it as a kind of post-modern horror thriller in which Oil, or War, or the Middle East itself is the monster. But the blurb is the most sensational bit of the book. If you like reading other people's science theses, this is the horror story for you; for myself, I found it to be a pretty equal mix of the Unnameable and the Unreadable.
Mieville calls it "post-genre horror"; I think what we actually have here is an attempt to imagine what the Necronomicon would look like if it were written today, informed by the War on Terror and contemporary politics, with Reza Negarestani cast in the role of "the mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred and disappeared scholar Dr Hamid Parsani as his Ibn Schacabao. We start with the old "found manuscript" schtick, which makes me wonder if either Kristen Alvanson (the "finder"), Reza Negarestani (the "author") or both are fictional, although both have a substantial web presence. The text itself examines the notion of infiltration (particularly the infiltration by the Outside from Inside) and presents this in the context of narration sufficiently often that I'm further inclined to suspect authorial shennanigans.
There's actually a lot of thought-provoking material in here, particularly on the subject of monotheistic doctrine. Notions of spiritual openness, of all-consuming communion and of transformation through death are explored in sickly detail in terms of divinity, worship and demonic possession. Reference is made to Lovecraft's fiction, and to John Carpenter's The Thing, both apparently used to give resonance to the suggestion that the Earth itself is an infiltrator plotting against the monomaniacal Sun. But all this stuff is presented as a series of academic papers, and some are so inaccessible that I wonder just how small the book's intended audience is.
This is one of those times when I feel that the rewards just didn't justify the effort involved in reading the book. I kind of wish I could nip back in time a few weeks and give myself the precis version instead.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds
Needed a bit of this after the previous item. It's been a while since I picked up a Reynolds novel - there've been at least three since I last paid attention.
This one follows the clones of Abigail Gentian, originally a thousand in number, now reduced to about fifty, as they try to discover who's had most of them wiped out and why. The Gentians are one of a number of Lines, cloned in the thirty-somethingth century, designed for extreme longevity and dispatched to the furthest corners of the galaxy, now six million years old. They gather and trade in information, sell their services to younger, lesser civilisations (the Gentians' speciality is in containing supernovae behind gigantic "stardams", thus saving nearby species from the lethal radiation), and occasionally throw their weight about in horrifically brutal displays if they don't get their way. Because they're incredibly old, you see, and that gives them the right.
I don't know for sure that we're supposed to find the Lines generally repugnant, although I think so - as with Adam Roberts' narrator, we're shown enough reaction from other characters to form a pretty bad impression, and Reynolds' two lead characters seem to develop a dim view of their own Line during the course of the book (although I'm reading between the lines there, and nothing comes of it in the story). That said, the portrayal of the relationship between the Lines and other civilisations varies quite wildly - at the start of the book, they seem to be meek and benevolent stardam makers, performing a public service and accepting whatever rewards they can negotiate; it's later suggested that the Lines habitually take by force what they can't get by persuasion, and punish species who don't play ball. Civilisation #1 isn't prepared to give our heroes the trade they want, which actually leaves them hugely in the lurch at the start of the story; civilisation #2 shows them the desperate hospitality and false bonhomie of someone who expects their guest to pull a gun on them at any minute. Hmm.
The story itself unfolds well and ties up neatly; the scale, as is usual with Reynolds, is dazzlingly huge. It's an impressive novel. Just something about the characters that doesn't quite convince me.

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares
Interesting - I wonder if JG Ballard got much inspiration from this? Wonder if JJ Abrams had this knocking about in his mind when he created Lost, for that matter? A fugitive hides out on an isolated island, which is apparently deserted but on which someone has built a large hall and a couple of other buildings. He descends into the basement of the hall and finds some mysterious machinery; when he re-emerges, he discovers he has suddenly been joined by a party of suave socialites. He hides from them, then discovers that they can't see him anyway, although he can see, hear and even touch them. He initially theorises that the island is a form of purgatory for himself and/or the others, but finally discovers the truth about the experiment that is keeping them on the island, and will keep him there too.
This novella was written in 1940.
It's pretty obvious to a modern reader - or at least it was to this modern reader - what's going on long before the narrator figures it out, but then again readers at the time weren't so familiar with the SF/fantasy ideas that this story anticipates. Casares carelessly scatters these ideas over the 90-ish pages of the story - his focus is more on the psychological state of his narrator, who pines after one of the socialites but can never make his feelings known to her. This is a rich read and an amazing bit of speculative fiction.

June just rains and never stops

Feeling deliciously smug today, having picked up the New Who episode Turn Left on DVD for the pittance of ten bucks. That's definitely less than it would have cost me to buy in the UK, never mind to get it shipped out here, so thanks very much, The Warehouse. Weekly Who blog to follow - here's the monthly book write-up.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Guy Delisle
Autobiographical comic book about the time Delisle spent working with an outsourced animation studio in North Korea. Apparently it's an even scarier place than you might imagine. Some interesting insights and even a laugh or two to be had.

Black Hole, Charles Burns
Set in a parallel '70s America, this graphic novel follows a number of teenagers whose lives are affected by an STD that causes unpredictable physical mutations. Sort of a grungy, non-superhero version of the X-Men, if you will. It's not a bad story, but the style of the artwork is such that it's not easy to tell certain characters apart, to the point that it makes it an effort to follow the story.

The Atlas of Legendary Lands, Judyth A McLeod
Disappointing. This is more of a conventional history of exploration and cartography than the promised atlas of legendary lands, and it's much less lavishly illustrated than one might imagine. It contains surprisingly few maps – at a guess, more than half of the illos are non-cartographic paintings that (sometimes only tangentially) relate to the lands being discussed. The book's problems are several, but the biggest are: illustrations printed dozens of pages away from the text that refers to them; captions for illustrations inconsistently given on preceding or following pages; and two-page textual digressions that turn up right in the middle of the main text, usually in mid-sentence, and sometimes more than one at a time. It's also just a bit of a dull read. Come back, Strange Maps.

Flight, vol 6, ed Kazu Kibuishi
Yes, that's another good one. Now if only the library would get on with repairing their copy of volume 3 so that I can read that one too.

Daisy Kutter: The Last Train, Kazu Kibuishi
Steampunk cowboy graphic by the editor of Flight. Generally good stuff.

Billy Hazelnuts, Sock Monkey vols 3 & 4, Tony Millionaire
There's not much I can say about these comic books except that they're the work of a madman. Billy Hazelnuts concerns a battle of golems between child scientists, and includes the entertaining concept of a landfill for broken planets. Sock Monkey looks like it was probably based on the author's children's toys, but it surely can't have been intended for said children – in this collected double volume, Sock Monkey kills himself and subsequently goes on an armed rampage. Sadly the local libraries don't seem to have any more of Tony Millionaire's work.

Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
I'm tempted to call this the Great Kiwi Graphic Novel, but that's just because it's the only Kiwi graphic novel that I'm aware of. The artistic style is rough, but the story is intelligent and layered. In essence, it champions the comics medium as a form of communication and expression while criticising the never-ending, mass-produced superhero comics that tend to treat the medium more as a business concern. In that sense, it reminds me of Warren Ellis' Planetary, which I think had similar sensibilities, but which addressed them by being a superhero comic itself. Hicksville is smaller and more personal, and I rather like it.

The Vesuvius Club (Graphic Edition), Mark Gatiss & Ian Bass
I don't think it would be too crass to describe this story as James Bond re-imagined by the League of Gentlemen. Contains a dandyish secret agent, missing scientists, zombies, transvestitism and a villainous plot involving a volcano. It's a passably entertaining way to spend an afternoon.

Never the Bride, Something Borrowed, Hell's Belles, Paul Magrs
Actual novels, gasp! Books 1, 2 and 4 in a series revolving around the supernatural adventures of Brenda, formerly the Bride of Frankenstein, who now runs a guest house in Whitby. Never the Bride doesn't mention this on the cover, although there's no big shock reveal of Brenda's identity, which we're allowed to figure out ourselves from the overt references scattered throughout. I find this strange – I'd probably have given the series a try a lot sooner if I'd known what the premise actually was. By book 4 the marketing department have wised up and put it right on the front cover.
So, these are the adventures of Brenda and her antique shop owning neighbour Effie, pensionable defenders of Whitby against the marauding forces of darkness. It's like Buffy, but with a pair of gossipy old women. I actually started with book 2, Something Borrowed (library book), found book 1 second hand and reserved book 4 (library book) while I was about it. It seems that no bugger has book 3. The first two are both narrated in the first person by Brenda (barring a couple of jarring third person moments in book 1) and both quite episodic, but book 2 holds together an overall plot as well and feels a more complete book. Book 1 just kind of drifts between events. The genre references (again, pretty overt) are a large part of the fun in these two volumes.
Book 4, Hell's Belles, sees a complete change in format. Typical chapter length is down from 60 pages to 5 while the total page count has doubled, there's a single plot to last the whole book, and a variety of third person viewpoint characters instead of a narrator. There's also a significant influx of new characters (from Magrs' other books, as I understand). The chatty Northern idiom is still in evidence but it's no longer presented in the context of Brenda's voice, which means that when all manner of extra-Whitbians speak in the same way, it can no longer be put down to Brenda's narrative influence and must instead be pinned squarely on the author.
I think book 2 is the best of them, although there may be an element of diminishing returns in it. I don't rule out reading book 3, if the library or the second hand bookshop should ever get hold of it, but I'm in no hurry.

Farmers fear unkindly May

Funnily enough, June's line would have suited May better, as it's just rained and never stopped.

It may appear to the untrained eye that I've read more books this past month, but don't be fooled! All I've really done is read a bunch of comic books instead of one novel. Once again, Project X and blogging about Who have taken up the spare time I would otherwise put aside for reading. For the record, these are all library books.

Flight, vols 2, 4 & 5, edited by Kazu Kibuishi
A graphic anthology series that I discovered purely by chance in Borders. Lots of superhero-free alternative comic book goodies from artists I hadn't heard of before. Not so surprising as it's hard to find much of their work outside these volumes. Graham Annable is one whose work is quite easy to find (see below). Scott Campbell isn't, but I really love his “Tree-head and Igloo-head” pieces. Kibuishi himself has at least one graphic novel in the Lower Hutt library, which is out on loan at time of writing, so stay tuned. One of these volumes even includes a piece by Doug TenNapel, whose name has appeared before on this blog, and again now:

Earthboy Jacobus, Doug TenNapel
A kind of sci-fi adventure retelling of the legend of Jonah and the whale. A retired police chief finds a young boy inside a whale-like creature on the road one night, and adopts him as his own. It emerges that the boy, Jacobus, has come from one of a series of parallel Earths that have been ravaged by a race of gigantic, devouring, living fortresses. World-saving escapades ensue. A little heavy on the Christian symbolism in places, but nice.

Jack of Fables, vols 2 & 3, Bill Willingham & Matthew Sturges
The Fables spin-off has produced at least six volumes, which are variously available at the library at any given time. We already own volume 1, in which Jack, the hero of several fairy tales, is forced out of the Fables' enclave, kidnapped in the normal world by a secret organisation devoted to removing Fables (and other motive forces of storytelling) from popular consciousness, and finally escapes.
In these two volumes, the series takes a couple of long diversions while Jack and his fellow escapees get to know each other on the road. Volume 2 relates the time when Jack, dallying with the Snow Queen, became Jack Frost, while volume 3 explains the true origins of Jack and another escaped Fable who claims to share some of his memories. Fun, but inconsequential (or seemingly so). Volume 4 looks like it might advance the story somewhat.

The Divine Comedy, Cantica III: Paradise, Dante (trans Dorothy L Sayers & Barbara Reynolds)
Hooray, that's one and a half major reading ambitions taken care of in a year! (The half being the time I almost so nearly persevered through an entire volume of Darwin.) Having being handed over from Virgil to Beatrice, his old flame, after his journey through Hell and Purgatory, Dante now ascends through the nesting crystal spheres that comprised the medieval cosmos. On each planet (including the Sun) he meets souls who exemplify the qualities traditionally attributed to those planets. He also spends a surprising amount of time gazing into Beatrice's eyes.
I think on balance I like this volume best of the three. Hell's almost like a straight travelogue, with too much ground to cover and the souls Dante talks to not communicative enough to offer much opportunity for waxing lyrical; Purgatory has some similar elements, and the philosophical dialogues it mixes in are frankly a bit trying. Here the balance shifts from philosophy to science (not such a leap in those days), and inevitably (with me doing the reading) there are overtones of ye olde pre-SF science fiction. It's also just very beautiful, Dante conveying a great sense of baffling, ethereal wonder as he flits between the planets. Finally, as he is allowed to look God directly in the eye, Dante spends pretty much his entire final canto explaining to us that it made perfect sense to him at the time, but there's really no way he could hope to describe it to us. This is both cheeky and legitimate, and the way he writes it, it's still a fantastically uplifting ending.
As an interesting footnote, after Dante's death the last thirteen cantos of Paradise couldn't be found with the rest of the manuscript, and after a sleepless night his sons were very glad to find the stray pages stuffed away in a nook in his home. At least, that's Dorothy L Sayers' story. By a remarkable coincidence, Sayers died before she could translate the last thirteen cantos of Paradise. Barbara Reynolds stepped in to finish the job and provide the introduction and commentary; although she's much less strident than Sayers, she also has a tendency towards the banal and the obvious that made me skip the notes quite a bit more than in the previous two volumes. But her translation of the final verses is a good fit for the rest of the trilogy, so thumbs up there.

Strange Maps, ed Frank Jacobs
A kind of sampler of fringe cartography. The contents include some of the more outre old world maps, various concepts illustrated in the Harry Beck style (including a lovely meta-Underground map that links all the cities in the world that have metro transit systems), and those quite well-known maps that depict countries as animals or people. The map chosen for the front cover is an amusing piece that inverts the world's water and land masses. Fun and informative. Just out from the library and making an appearance in next month's book blog is another item in a similar vein, The Atlas of Legendary Lands. There'll have to be a comparison of the two.

Stickleback and Further Grickle, Graham Annable; Hickee, ed Graham Annable
Following on from Annable's contributions to the Flight series. On reflection, I think he's better as a hit-and-run artist. Stickleback is a single long story, and Further Grickle is a mixture of pieces. They'd all be in keeping with Flight, but the short ones tend to have more of a punch to them. Hickee, on the other hand, is almost entirely juvenile humour, mainly fart gags, although there are a couple of jolly Scott Campbell pieces in there.

Welcome March with wint'ry wind

The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
Picked up cheap second-hand, as was The Inimitable Jeeves (further down). Having gone through the PG Wodehouse phase along with the Agatha Christie phase at school and then sold all the books on, I've since decided that I'd quite like to own some Wodehouse again, but only a choice few titles. It is (gasp, whisper it) possible to have too much PGW – he did tend to recycle plots with minimal re-dressing and (mostly) new gags, and if you're not careful fatigue can set in. The themed short story collections are buggers for this. Better to pick out representative examples, I think.
The Code of the Woosters is surely the finest, tippingest-toppingest specimen of the Jeeves novel. It's worth noting that the characters and setting introduced here made several repeat appearances. Roderick Spode and Sir Watkyn Bassett are a terrific pair of villains – the would-be Fascist dictator with an unusual secret and the devious, underhand retired magistrate – and by the end of the story one can well believe, as Bertie seems to, that Totleigh Towers is a farcical latter-day House of Usher. Great stuff.

The Club of Queer Trades, GK Chesterton
Six short stories featuring a detective but perhaps better described simply as “mysteries”, all revolving around the titular Club. Rupert Grant, an enthusiastic would-be detective, attempts to fathom such conundrums as why Major Brown's life has descended into melodrama, or why Professor Chadd dances all the time and refuses to talk to anyone; the answers are revealed to him by his intuitive brother Basil, an eccentric ex-judge. Chesterton's rich humour is much in evidence – definitely planning to read more of his work – and like the Club itself, this book “makes a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world”.
However, two words against the Wordsworth Classics edition: the introduction manages in a single page to give away all the endings, and the word “matter” is misprinted throughout as “maker”. Worth finding a better edition.

Zazie in the Metro, Raymond Queneau (trans. Barbara Wright)
Queneau's most famous work, the story of a foul-mouthed country teenager's visit to Paris and her drag actor uncle's efforts to keep her in line. It's probably more famous as a film than as a book, but the book's most notable feature is its original rendering of contemporary slang and tourist talk (“Paris baille naïte”). It's everything most calculated to annoy the Académie Française, which is just one of the book's good points. This is the first time I've read the English translation.
Not all of the slangy phrases of the original have translated well. I think this is the fault of the English language itself rather than the translator – at least, the words that can most dramatically be slurred and blurred together in French aren't the same as in (saymzin) English. There's no easy equivalent for the original's showy opener, “Doukipudonktan” (literally, “Why do they stink so much though?”). The overall entertaining tone of the book is there, though. Snot bad.

The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
My chosen representative collection of Jeeves short stories. Includes such all-time greats as “Pearls Mean Tears” (in which Bertie actually gets the upper hand over his Aunt Agatha), “The Purity of the Turf” (Bertie and several racecourse-starved chums bet on the results of a school sports day) and the ongoing saga of romantic fiction writer Rosie M Banks (no relation to Iain?).

Ex Machina, vol. 8, Brian K Vaughan
I'm starting to worry a little over where this series is going. Six solid volumes (barring the occasional lull) of meaty political action, then the pulled punch of vol 7, and now this. An odd story left hanging in which Mayor Mitchell Hundred starts to see a pantomime witch-doctor superimposed over his black deputy; a very pat piece about free speech involving a Ku Klux Klan rally; and between them, the main story in this volume, the saga of Mayor Hundred's stalker. She starts out as a costumed daredevil apparently bent on disrupting a Republican GOP conference in New York – an honest-to-goodness nemesis for the Mayor – but it turns out that she saw him in action in his amateur superhero days, developed a crush on him, and actually has no mission except to get him alone. And, as it happens, keep him away from the complex and potentially interesting storyline involving the Republican GOP (cf the Pope in vol 7). Mayor Hundred resolves the situation by chinning her. Really starting to worry.

Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde
New and non-metafictional novel from His Jasperity. It's more SF-biased than his previous works, and what's more I can't recall the central conceit having been done before. It's set some time in the future, after an unspecified calamity (Nebulous fans may like to think of it as “the Withering”) has caused the UK (and possibly the world?) to regress to a state of civilisation something akin to public school. Now people can only see certain colours, and the social hierarchy is arranged accordingly – those who can see Blue or Violet are the upper crust, while at the other end of the spectrum are the hard-working salt-of-the-earth Reds. There's a huge national industry based around creating and distributing synthetically coloured paints and dyes so that everyone can see “green” grass, for example. Real colours, on the other hand, can affect people in particular ways – certain shades of dark green, for those who can't see them naturally, are shown to have strong narcotic effects, while several other shades are used by Swatchmen such as the hero's father to treat medical complaints.
I'm not sure that Fforde has worked through the intricacies and implications of this idea with absolute scientific rigour, but he presents it convincingly enough, and naturally where there are jokes to be had he finds them. The story itself is the usual mix of adventure and romance, as young Eddie Russett journeys to the old abandoned town of High Saffron in search of scrap colour, the truth about the society he lives in and the heart of the surprisingly violent Jane Grey. There are some good twists and enough questions left unanswered for the promised second and third volumes to wrap up. So far it's this and The Rise of the Iron Moon in the running for best read of 2010.

The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford
More short stories from Jeffrey Ford, the usual assortment of quasi-autobiographical musings and quirky fantasy tales. Top tale and new addition to my list of favourite short stories is “The Night Whiskey”, which starts with a young man being trained in the art of harvesting drunks from the low branches of trees, and develops into the story of the strange black berry that, when fermented, allows the denizens of the young man's town to speak to the dead.

City of the Iron Fish, Simon Ings
Borrowed from a friend. At last, the extremely rare Ings novel! This book starts to develop exciting fantasy tendencies towards the end, but you have to read through some doughy material and some pretty horrible material to get to it. Essentially it's the narrator's descent into nihilism and self-destruction as he tries to come to terms with the limitations of his world. And it is very limited – existence simply ceases just a few days' travel beyond the boundaries of the eponymous city. There's a nice section as the narrator and his friend journey through an outlying quasi-Mediterranean village on their way towards the edge. There aren't many nice sections.
Interestingly, there was a spate of fantasy novels of this type – the “mysterious city” novel – in the '90s, all given print runs of about two thousand and allowed to slip quietly into the remainder shops. This novel seems to be the earliest of them. I'd say they were all ahead of their time, except that it obviously was their time and the memo just hadn't reached the marketing departments of the big SF publishing houses. To think, just a decade or so later China Miéville would make this sub-genre hot and saleable.

The Divine Comedy, Cantica 1: Hell, Dante (trans Dorothy L Sayers)
Library book. I've been meaning to read this for a while, and as luck would have it the library has all three volumes of Dorothy L Sayers' translation. Joy, she's kept the verse structure of the original! Of course, I only have her word for it that she's retained the sense of the original, but she goes into enough detail in the introduction and endnotes that I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt – and as she says, if I wanted to really read the original, I'd have to learn slightly archaic Italian. Ultimately I just have to trust that this is the nearest available equivalent experience.
It's very readable, thanks to Sayers' deft choice of words as well as the driving rhythm of the terza rima. The chatty (and presumably Italian-like) interjections of “Then I to him”, “Then he to me” are just begging for a contemporary reworking: “Then this is me”, “Then he's all like”... Nice how the punishments in the different regions of Hell are fitted to the relevant sins – as Sayers points out, they're the same sins exposed for what they really are – and how the character of Dante changes in response to the sinners he talks to. Next month, Purgatory.
A sidenote: it's amusing to see how whoever wrote the biographical notes for the inside front of the book has bent over backwards to avoid mentioning what Sayers is actually world famous for. They big up her poetry, they mention her religious plays, but they only name one of her fourteen Lord Peter Wimsey volumes – The Nine Tailors – which they hilariously describe as “a fascinating novel about campanology”. Because we wouldn't want the whiff of nasty, vulgar detective fiction to sully this epic fantasy trilogy classic work of literature. Chiz, and again I say chiz.

Nowhere Near Milkwood, Rhys Hughes
An assortment of short pieces of surreal fantasy from one of the contributing authors of the Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. It's split into three sections – stories based around Disability Bill, a freakish and failed musician; stories set and/or told in the Tall Story bar (by far the largest section); and stories set in a future in which Titian Grundy, Prefect of Police, goes to extreme lengths to enforce the President's legislative whims.
There are good gags to be found throughout, although the quality of the story-telling is highly variable – I found it got better as the book went on. This isn't Hughes' first book and there's no suggestion that these stories have been previously published, so I have no idea whether this is a case of an author improving with age or just trying on different narrative voices. I just know that I didn't go for the Disability Bill stories – a tendency to overexplain the jokes – but that I rate the Titian Grundy stories alongside the likes of RA Lafferty. Readers of this blog may not have heard the last of Rhys Hughes.

Books read in November

The district around Lower Hutt's main rail and bus interchange is, amusingly, called Waterloo. On one side of the tracks is a full complement of local shops (and this, no word of a lie, is Trafalgar Square). On the other, just a couple of minutes' walk up the road from the railway station and well supplied by a brace of corner shops, is the semi-detached bungalow we now call home. It has all the space we need, pleasant neighbours, gardens front and back and a (small) greenhouse. It's far enough back from the road that we can barely hear any sound from the railway track. Fifteen minutes' walk up the road is the local shopping precinct, and five minutes beyond that is the central library. Colourful Deco architecture in all directions. Twenty minutes away down the track is central Wellington, and the trains run frequently and late into the night. There's even a quality second-hand bookshop just the other side of the station. All we need are jobs.

Latest update on our worldly goods is that they have literally only just been shipped, seven weeks after a removal company that shall for the moment remain nameless took them off our hands, so we're not getting the rest of our books back until January. Now we're glad we brought a few with us.

Cobralingus, Jeff Noon
A very poetic book, in which Noon takes a selection of texts and transforms them through various stages, the conceit being that these transformations are the work of a piece of language remixing software called Cobralingus. It may give some insight into Noon's working practices, or it may not, but some of the results are fantastically imaginative and strangely beautiful.

The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Bramah
Chinoiserie is a kind of faux Chinese-ness, in artistic or literary terms, that was popular in early twentieth century Britain. Apparently there was a lot of it about. One example that has lasted over the intervening years is Ernest Bramah's canon of Kai Lung stories, which take the form of folk tales either about or told by the itinerant storyteller Kai Lung. Convoluted and evasive dialogue is the order of the day, so that characters give each other the most delicate back-handed compliments, or struggle to outdo each other in self-abasement. Dominating this particular volume is the novella The Transmutation of Ling, in which a captain of bowmen drinks a potion that causes any dead part of him (cut nails, trimmed hair, etc) to turn to gold – ingenious twists and turns and a satire on the futures stock market ensue.

We then moved into the bungalow and became members of Lower Hutt War Memorial Library. There followed a predictable frenzy of borrowing.

Quite a lot of Lower Hutt Library's graphic novel section
Titles borrowed include Mr Punch by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, the story of a boy's childhood seen through the distorting mirror of the Punch and Judy show; Edgar Allan Poe Graphic Classics, a compendium of Poe stories and poems either illustrated or fully cartooned by various artists; and Iron West and Creature Tech by Doug TenNapel, creator of Earthworm Jim and a thorough lunatic.

The Gentle Art of Advertising, W Heath Robinson
Ex-library book, now mine for the pittance of two dollars. A collection of cartoons illustrating industrial practices in the early twentieth century. They're all absolutely, completely true, so there.

Wodehouse at the Wicket, edited by Murray Hedgcock
Library book. Fifty pages of introduction, detailing PG Wodehouse's own cricketing exploits as well as examples of the sport in his writings, followed by a hundred and fifty of selected extracts, short stories and poems. A notable curiosity is a journalistic piece on fast bowling that Wodehouse ghost-wrote for NA Knox.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard
Library book. This struck a definite chord. With impeccable reasoning, Bayard shows that, because of the way we skim books, forget the details of books we once read and assimilate other people's opinions into our own perception of books, it's disingenuous for us to claim that we know a book at all, at least in the overwhelming majority of cases. He then goes on to explain why this isn't necessarily a bad thing, why it might even be of benefit to us and to the book, and how we should confidently approach discussions of books we haven't read. The tone is playful – whenever Bayard names a book, he uses a system of annotation to show whether he's heard about it, read it but forgotten it, only skimmed it or never heard it of at all, and what his opinion of the book is in each case, and you start to wonder how sincere he is when he annotates his own titles (forgotten about it, low opinion) and titles that exist only fictionally in other books (never heard of, excellent opinion). Before I forget about it or hear any other opinions of it that might influence me, I'd better record that it's an excellent book.

The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore (“A heart-warming tale of Christmas terror”)
Library book. A child witnesses the apparent murder of Santa Claus; a passing angel overhears his wish that Santa be brought back to life; zombie terror results. Well, it does after the first couple of hundred pages. Mostly, this book is just a comical portrait of small-town America. Has a few excellent one-liners, but overall it's not very memorable.

(At least some of) Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R Hofstadter
Library book. In the author's eyes, and I assume in the eyes of his many fans as well, this is a profound meditation on the nature of consciousness, taking as its main theme the self-referentiality in the work of the three named illustrious persons. In my eyes, it's a maths textbook (or at least a cognitive science textbook) masquerading as something more, with illustrative examples from the worlds of literature, music and art at regular intervals. The author's anniversary edition preface lays out his ultimate goal and the route he plans to take to get to it in abundant detail – then the book proper starts, and with it the logic formulae and the programming language.
Had I simply read the preface and left it there, I might have walked away with a positively glowing opinion of this book (and though it be an unworthy thought, how many of the book's fans have done just that? - see two items above). In the event, lured on by the promise of the preface, I waded through the first 250 or so pages before deciding that enough was enough, and started skimming to see if the ratio of promised insights to maths improved at all. As far as I can see, it didn't. It's obviously a significant achievement qua book, but I don't think it's quite what it claims to be, and I doubt I'd pick it up again or recommend it to anyone who didn't have a degree in a maths-related subject.

Can You Speak Venusian?, Patrick Moore
Picked up cheap in second-hand bookshop. Now, this is more my speed. Patrick Moore, astronomer-broadcaster and writer of a modest assortment of science fiction and popular science books, examines some of the more eccentric theories that were in circulation at the turn of the 1970s. Many of them were formulated or adapted by people he knows personally, or had sat alongside on TV discussion programmes, so open mockery is out of the question. In fact, although there's a fair amount of thinly concealed mockery, Moore's handling of the subject matter is very even-handed. As he reminds us, Sir Isaac Newton was an astrologer and alchemist by vocation, but we don't think of him in those terms because modern science has given astrology and alchemy the pip – we remember him as a mathematician and the originator of the theory of gravity, because his work in those areas has been borne out by centuries of study and experiment. (And I like to believe that we'd think of Dr John Dee as the originator of the theory of gravity, if he hadn't blotted his copybook with all that stuff about taking dictation from the angels.) Posterity decides who's a genius and who's a nutter, and it's not necessarily easy to tell the difference at the time. If NASA had discovered that the interior of the Sun is balmy and habitable, we'd think of William Herschel as a visionary 200 years ahead of his time and not just as the discoverer of Uranus.
Basically, keeping an open mind is the essence of the true scientific thinker – Moore profiles some of those who've simply kept their minds more open than most. Oh, all right, it's about wackos. It's about wackos and their loony theories. Most of the subject matter is astronomical in nature, although there's a certain amount of overlap with mythology – yes, Atlantis pops up once or twice. A warm and witty wander through some of science's less well-lit back alleys.

Le ton beau de Marot, Douglas R Hofstadter
Library book. The other big (in both senses) book by Hofstadter, this one examines the many aspects of translation. Although there's some overlap with GEB, and a couple of chapters drift into the realm of cognitive science, it's a lot more readable. I actually wish I could “unread” GEB and have read this one first. Obviously I'm biased by the subject matter – it's quite possible non-linguists would consider the book best left to linguists in a mirroring of my opinions. But anyway.
Hofstadter's authorial voice still irks me in places, and although I heartily agree with him that Vladimir Nabokov, while an admirable writer, was a complete dick in other areas – my opinion of Nabokov has taken a pronounced nosedive – I wish he hadn't banged on about it for quite so long. It also bothers me somewhat when he admits to not having read a book in the original language (La disparition, Evgeni Onegin) and then holds forth at length on how his preferred translation has captured the spirit of the original, or gives a flavour of the original. He's at liberty to say that it's more readable than other translations, but this is going a bit far.
But where this book scores highly with me is in its rich value as a reference book – he's chosen some absolutely fantastic examples to illustrate his various points, several of which I'd never heard of before, and I wouldn't be averse to picking this up again if the library should ever decommission it. Most of the illustrative content is poetry, one major theme of the book being that it's difficult for a number of reasons to translate poetry well, but it's always worth making the effort, something I'd agree with. Most notably, the backbone of the book is a 28-line novelty item by 16th century French poet Clement Marot, or rather it's a selection of 88 varied translations of it. All of this material is a joy to read, and large sections of the discussion around it are also thought-provoking and satisfying. So while I'm still not a Hofstadter fan, I am at least glad to have read this one.