Massive comic book review for 2015

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

Folks, I picked the Best Graphic Story category.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugo Awards 2015: A Consideration of the Sources

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

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

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

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

Best Novel

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

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

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

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

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

Best Graphic Story

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

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

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

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

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

Hugo Awards 2015: What Is To Be Done?

So, the time has come for me to unload on the subject of the Hugo Awards.  If any of my five (that many?) readers don't already know the details of the screaming match that's been unfolding within SF fandom since the Hugo Award shortlist was unveiled in April... well, that's not exactly startling.  It's of minor interest in real terms, as I'll suggest below.

The short version is this: a small cabal - consisting of a fascist troll and his dupes/friends - didn't like the Hugo Award shortlists that were being produced by democratic means, attributed the results to political bias on the part of the nominators and voters, and started a politically biased campaign to force a shortlist that they did like.  They published online two broadly similar slates - that is to say, entire proposed shortlists - to give their supporters something to rally behind.  The slate personally touted online by the fascist included several items published by his own small press and was aggressively pushed as something that his supporters should replicate as part of a concerted political operation.  (Hilariously, he prefaced this demand with the words, "We of the right do not march in lockstep.")  The other slate was presented with a more publicly palatable air of wanting to suggest something that disillusioned right-wing SF fans might want to consider when nominating, and did not include a lot of the small press material.  However, the more extreme wing of the campaign was more successful - roughly two thirds of this year's Hugo Awards shortlist are a dead match for that version of the slate, small press picks and all.

I'll repeat that: two thirds of the Hugo Award shortlist were dictated by a fascist and forced through by his lockstep-marching goons.  Yay, science fiction.

Reasons given in defence of the slate campaign have varied over time as the situation requires, and have all smacked of attempted justification after the fact.  The simple truth about the slate-makers and their motivations can easily be discovered by measuring their rhetorical posturing against their actions: they're full of shit.  Their whole campaign has been built on hypocrisy, delusion and self-importance.

The prime motivation behind this campaign, so far as I can tell, has been a desperate desire for attention, which the slate-making cabal have been receiving in spades.  For that reason, I don't propose to provide names or links here.  Let's face it, anyone who does already know and care about this will already know the names and will probably have seen the relevant blog posts too.  If there's anyone reading this blog who hasn't already given the slate-makers the undeserved attention they crave, good.

So how did a fringe group like this manage to hijack the Hugo Award shortlist?

Part of the problem is that only a couple of thousand SF fans in any given year actually put in nominations for the Hugos.  Participation is sufficiently low that a small organised lobby (estimates vary between 200 and 400 individuals - more meaningful statistics should be released after Worldcon) can influence the shortlist out of all proportion to their actual significance within the broader fandom.  In other words, the Hugos themselves are of active interest to only a minority of fans.  Most fans probably take no interest at all in Worldcon or the Hugo Awards; of those that do, to the extent of actually attending Worldcon or buying a supporting membership (typically in the region of 5,000 people in recent years), most appear willing to vote on what's put in front of them but are not sufficiently motivated to put in nominations.

This isn't a political problem, or an ideological problem, or a "clique" problem.  Everybody's welcome to nominate whatever they like from the previous year's SF output, provided only that they're a member of that year's or the previous year's Worldcon, or a pre-supporting member of the following year's Worldcon.  Nobody's gatekeeping, nobody's vetting the nominators or their nominations - there just isn't the will among fans who've already paid their fees to get up and nominate.  Even this year, before anyone particularly cared about this, the number of fans who were eligible to nominate works for the Hugo Awards must have been many times more than the number that actually nominated.

But this isn't even (well, only partly) an apathy problem.  The real problem, I would say, is one of wealth.  Leaving aside the question of having to pay for Worldcon membership, keeping up with all the latest books and films is a rich person's game.  I'm personally in the habit of waiting for books to become available cheaply, even if that only means waiting a year for paperback editions of new books I already know about and really want; borrowing from friends or the library is financially less punishing, but depends on friends or the library buying those books instead.  As for films, waiting for them to appear (if at all) at the rental store is only marginally a better arrangement than paying cinema prices.  And who has the time to spare for all of this stuff?

Increasing participation at the nomination stage is clearly desirable, but it requires a larger number of fans who are prepared to pay top dollar to consume brand new SF material on a regular basis in the hope of finding something that they're prepared to nominate.  Voting is less burdensome - by that point the entire mass of the previous year's output in any given category has been whittled down to just five items that can either be found in the digital voters' packet or picked up at cheaper year-old prices.  Even so, not many fans bother - last year fewer than 4,000 fans voted, and that was an abnormally high number, with around 2,000 ballots cast in 2013 and typically only as many as 1,000 ballots in previous years.  (This year should see an all-time record number of ballots, but only because of the highly visible shitstorm around this year's awards.)  And beyond that, I would guess that only a trifling minority of people who consider themselves to be SF fans have ever been near a Worldcon or the Hugo Awards, or spend much of their time and money on keeping up to date with this year's eligible material.

If there is a problem with historical nomination patterns in the Hugo Awards, none of the campaigning and reaction around this year's Hugos has come anywhere close to addressing it.

Like a Robot Farting

It's Speak Out With Your Geek Out week, a Net-wide movement intended to bolster representation of and positivity towards all forms of geekiness. A kind of "Reclaim the Information Superhighway", if you will.


I've signed up to this, and it turns out that as part of that - what, you mean I'm expected to make some sort of hard commitment here?! - I have to blog about some aspect of my geek interests.

As luck would have it, there's been a new episode of Doctor Who on New Zealand TV this very night - but no, that'd be too obvious, and besides I'm going to blog about it eventually anyway. So instead, dear reader, I'd like to talk to you about Whovian music. This is the story of me and music, a story that begins and continues even today with the incidental music of Doctor Who. Strange noises, startling confessions and an extremely geeky quantity of facts await your perusal below.

Before we start, I should just thank all the unscrupulous Youtube users who've made it possible for me to link to some audio examples below. Although the albums the tracks appeared on have been commercially unavailable for many a long year now, and the publishers of said albums aren't known for their litigiousness, readers shouldn't be too surprised if the clips at the other end of any of these links are taken down without warning.

My love of electronic music can be traced back to two albums, encountered pretty much simultaneously back in my school days - Revolutions by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Doctor Who - The Music. The discovery of Jarre I owe to that rarest of things, a school friend, but DW - The Music was something I found by accident in the library and borrowed on the basis of my familiarity with the books and TV show. (In fact, it's probable that the TV show itself sowed the first seeds of electronica in my mind.) The impact of these albums on me can't be overstated. They came at a time when I knew nothing about music, when the only cassette tape I owned was The Very Best of Elton John, an album I'd bought solely because my peers owned music and seemed to expect me to, and Elton John was an artist I knew I'd heard on the radio. I was fifteen years old.

The history of incidental music on Doctor Who can be divided into five broad periods.

During the 1960s, the programme makers relied heavily on library music, with the occasional commission - Tristram Cary's score for The Daleks (1964), with its jarring metallic shrieks, is the standout among the commissioned scores. The choice of library music varied depending on the requirements of the story - historicals got straightforward stuff played on conventional instruments, action-heavy monster stories tended to get Martin Slavin and Norman Ramin's Space Adventure, and stories set off-world got experimental music. Really experimental music. These were the days when the first Moog synthesizers were just coming onto the market, and avant garde musicians were more accustomed to playing with musique concrete, tape loops and found sound. Library selections used on DW ranged from the electro-percussive work of Eric Siday to the glass tube stylings of Les Structures Sonores. Most of this material still exists today.

Barring a very few commissions from other artists, the 1970s belonged to Dudley Simpson, a prolific TV composer who typically worked with session groups of four or five musicians. At first Simpson worked closely with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - who provided DW's theme tune and sound effects, and of whom we shall shortly hear a lot more - making heavy use of their resources to electronically treat his compositions. However, the arrangement didn't last and Simpson was soon producing much more conventional TV scores for the show - ordinary, some might say. Even so he's still probably the most popular incidental score composer among Who fans. He's the Murray Gold of his day, if you like. (I should disclose at this point that neither Simpson nor Gold, as wonderful as they both are, is "my" DW composer.) Sadly, very little of Simpson's DW music was kept after transmission.

From the tail end of 1980 to 1985, all the incidental music for DW was produced in-house by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This was a revolutionary (not to mention cost-cutting) move by '80s Who producer John Nathan-Turner and a bold departure for the Workshop. Their work on the theme tunes for DW and a number of other BBC programmes proved they could produce music as well as sound effects, and in fact a couple of earlier stories - 1968's The Wheel in Space and 1972's The Sea Devils - had been scored entirely by the Workshop, but this was the first time they had been asked to score an entire TV series (just beating out the 1981 TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Scoring DW essentially became a full-time job for the Workshop for five years. Thanks to the meticulous archiving of the Workshop's contents after its closure in 1998, all of these scores exist.

By 1986 commercial synthesizers were widespread and relatively inexpensive, and so were freelance electronic composers. Consequently, when DW returned from an 18-month enforced holiday with a reduced budget, John Nathan-Turner found it more cost effective to start commissioning incidental scores from outside the BBC again. The freelance composers employed from 1986 until the original series' cancellation in 1989 tended to keep hold of their work, and only one score from this period - the score for Mindwarp (1986), composed by Richard Hartley, who was also responsible for arranging the music for the latest stage tour of The Rocky Horror Show - is lost.

And then we have the modern era of DW, with John Debney's fully orchestral score for the TV Movie (1996) setting the tone for Murray Gold's work on the series (2005 onwards). But this isn't their story.

This is the story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, you see. DW - The Music was their album. It was originally released in 1983, the year of DW's 20th anniversary, to both showcase the Workshop's efforts and celebrate the show itself. A second album followed in 1985, although I didn't find out about that one until a lot later. The first album mostly consisted of highlights from 1980 to early 1983, plus a couple of earlier pieces. It was a mixture of sound cues and effects taken pretty much straight from the soundtracks (albeit tidied up and presented in shiny stereo), and suites of music arranged from the original scores of certain stories. The suites made the greatest impact on me; a five-minute composition has a much better chance of working as a coherent, sustained bit of music than a one-minute cue. The Workshop seem to have felt the same way, and DW - The Music II was all suites.

Side one of DW - The Music ended with Peter Howell's suite from The Leisure Hive (1980). It's a little bit Holst's Mars, a little bit Ravel's Bolero, a spot of synth noodling in the middle - it's a fine piece of electronica. This was and is my favourite track of the whole album, which given the personal significance of the album to me makes it an extremely influential piece of music as far as I'm concerned. Peter Howell contributed the greatest number of radiophonic scores to DW - eight and three quarters (and a bit), and it's a long story - as well as arranging the theme tune for the first half of the '80s, and for my money he's the most versatile and most listenable of the radiophonic composers.

At either end of the album were suites of music by Malcolm Clarke - The Sea Devils (1972) and Earthshock (1982). The Sea Devils score was the result of Clarke's experimentation with the Workshop's brand spanking new EMS Synthi 100 analogue synthesizer, and it's been variously described as the sound of Clarke fighting with the machine, a nervous breakdown in musical form, and a number of things less printable. Here's another one to add to the pile: it's a wall of noise, and it's collapsing on your head. Believe it or not, I actually used to drift off to sleep to this one. If the Leisure Hive suite marks the start of my relationship with melodic electronica, the Sea Devils score must mark the start of my fondness for the sort of music that my best man once described (admiringly, mind you - he likes that kind of thing too) as "the sound of a robot farting". The Earthshock music is far more regimented, which is fitting for a Cyberman story. Clarke did well to stuff this piece with metallic hammering sounds.

Also present was Delia Derbyshire's original arrangement of the famous theme tune, and I can't not mention Delia in a blog post about the Workshop. If producer Verity Lambert was the Iron Lady of DW, Dame Delia/Darth Derbyshire was the Queen of Air and Darkness, her realisation of Ron Grainer's composition the beating heart of the show captured in a sampled bass guitar string and a dozen oscillators. A entire generation of British electronic artists points to her as an influence. She, fellow Workshopper Brian Hodgson and another musician by the name of David Vorhaus went on to produce the landmark electronic album An Electric Storm, which comes across more as an all-out psychic assault than a slice of synthesizer psychedelia, and is one of the most unsettling things your humble blogger has ever listened to.

More DW music has been released over the years, officially and unofficially. Paddy Kingsland, strangely absent from both DW - The Music albums and the composer behind the Hitchhiker's TV series score, apparently touted tapes of his scores from Tom Baker's last story and Peter Davison's first story at DW conventions. Keff McCulloch, the arranger of the 1987-89 version of the theme tune and scorer of fully half of Sylvester McCoy's stories, released a selection of his work alongside a full collection of DW theme arrangements in association with the Workshop to mark the show's 25th anniversary. Mark Ayres, who ultimately compiled the Workshop's archive after its demise, released all three of his freelance DW soundtracks in full on CD.

And now we have the DVDs. Many of these include the option of listening to the incidental music in isolation, and the wonders of modern technology make it possible for yours truly to record that music onto the computer desktop and... arrange it into five-minute suites. This is one of the large projects I've set myself, because all that free time was just cluttering up my evenings and weekends - to compose suites in the manner of DW - The Music for as many of the DW scores or parts thereof as I can lay hold of. Strictly for personal use, you understand.

That will improve our cultural relations

How to raise awareness of non-US/UK concerns in SF:

1. The right way.
2. The wrong way.

This week's not entirely startling newsflash: SF Fandom Erupts In Outrage! Coffee and popcorn recommended.

A quick final farewell to 2009. Above all else, this was the year we emigrated to New Zealand, and so far it all seems to be going well. Our stuff finally arrived last week, which helps. 2009 was also the year in which I came third in the Fan Artist category of the annual Nova Awards - Yeah! Third place! Woo-ha!

Keeping a full record of my reading over the year certainly has helped me to remember it all - best fiction read, probably The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt, best non-fiction How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. It's also something I plan to continue to do this year, mainly because it forces me to blog on a fairly regular basis. The only film I blogged about in 2009 was Watchmen, and the only other one I could immediately remember seeing was Coraline; Jo has also reminded me about Moon and District 9. We didn't go to the cinema all that much last year. Of those four, I think Moon might be the best film watched last year.

Just to round the year off, here's the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's take on the big Doctor Who finale:

And you did what they told you

So, hordes of music fans have organised themselves and made Killing In The Name Of this year's Christmas #1 as a protest against TV talent show hit singles. When they said "Download", you said "How many times?" It's been I-don't-know-how-many years since I bought a chart single or album, and I wouldn't say it bothers me enormously what's at #1 in any given week, but still, I quite like this bit of news. I'd rather have had Slade in there again, but I suppose you can't infer the same pithy comment on the talent show lovin' mob from the lyrics of Merry Christmas Everybody. (And you can't infer a similar comment on the activities of the backlash mob, nyuk nyuk...)

The Lovely Jo has been diligently keeping her blog up to date with our personal activities, which takes the pressure off me doing the same - I can just point to the link over on the right. Ah, expediency. To recap, as things currently stand we've been in New Zealand for about a month and a half now, and we're still looking for jobs. It isn't really so damning to still be job-hunting after a month and a half, particularly in the run up to Christmas. It's a bit annoying, because we're restraining our spending until at least one of us gets work, and dammit, I want professionally made coffee. Coffee and sushi. And more wild book-buying. Among the many things I want... I'll come in again.

We've already settled in well in Lower Hutt, thus continuing a trend of swift adjustment that began with having no jet lag at all and not feeling disoriented by the warm winter weather. The facilities are good, we've built up a promising relationship with our second-hand bookseller, we're beginning to feel more comfortable about the whole business of keeping an eye out for our elderly neighbour, and just lately someone's moved into the area with a friendly cat. We've found an orchestra, although they take the whole of December and January off, so we're not actually going to get to know them until February. Things, outside of the job situation, are going well.

But will we stay here? It seems that most of the Wellington SF group live in the Johnsonville/Newlands area, which is in the next valley along, and transport links between the valleys are pretty well limited to the bay road and central Wellington. We may be getting by now with a mixture of public transport and cadging lifts from some far too obliging fellow SF fans, but pretty soon we'll have to look at either getting a car, or relocating. It has to be said that Newlands doesn't offer much in the way of jolly Deco architecture, and what we've seen of the weather (admittedly one evening of it) was entirely mist and rain, probably more of it concentrated into a few hours than we've seen in six weeks in balmy Lower Hutt. What the facilities are like, we couldn't say. A reconnaissance trip to Johnsonville may be in order. MetLink may be of help here, since on Christmas Day all train travel in the two valleys is free! That's right, free train travel! Chew on that, First Great Western! Of course, it could chuck it down on Christmas Day, so we're playing it by ear. But what with the weather, environs and orchestra in Lower Hutt, it'd take a lot for us to move out. A car's the more likely solution.

And so onward to Christmas, New Year and probably another two weeks of no job news. Fingers crossed for January. More blogging in a week or so, when it'll be the usual monthly book blog again.

And a Merry Solstice to all of you at home.

Love and Monsters

Eat your heart out, Stephanie Meyer!
(An idea for the next book/film deal, perhaps?)

She tried, but could not forget his lustrous beak or the wild, alien stare of his gigantic eyes. Where had they come from, these strange new sensations that seized her, seized her with sudden force like his powerful tentacles? She tried to keep her head above the water of her feelings, but knew she was drowning. This driving urge, this reckless desire, this... need to wreak carnage on the shipping lanes of the Atlantic. She heard the sound of racing blood in her ears, and it sounded like the crash of the sea.

(Sample paragraph from Beneath the Surface, a heart-warming tale of love and giant sea monsters. "Kraken Cheese, Gromit" was the back-up title I had in mind.)

His face was desiccated and decayed, but his bandages were soft, like smooth skin against hers. There was something in his eyes older than the Pyramids; she dared to hope that it was love, and not just ageless soul-devouring evil. She heard him call her name with each broken, sepulchral groan that rumbled out of his throat. Those once-muscular arms that Time had ravaged still had power - the power to thrill her.

(Sample paragraph from Cursed Love, vol 1: Wrapped in Your Arms. You know, this just gets easier and easier. I think I'm tapping into my inner slashfic writer.)

She was starting to wish she'd never come on this monster hunt. Lou was such a chump. It had been easy at first to love his bewildered spluttering and comical double-takes, but his clean-cut image soon palled and boy, was she tired of his "Who's On Top?" routine! Alas, poor dumb Lou thought he'd worked out who was his rival for her affections, but it wasn't the Invisible Man she'd fallen for - it was all-too-visible Bud.

(Sample paragraph from Abbot and Costello Meet an Impressionable Young Woman.)

More may yet follow, unless fifty thousand in used notes is deposited at this address...

(...is "skittery" the right word? Hmm...)

Who watches the watchmen?

Who fires the firemen?

Who bins the binmen?

Who milks the milkmen?

Who walks the walkmen?

Who stays the stamen?

Who frenches the Frenchmen?

Who marks the marksmen?

Who airs the airmen?

Who heads the headsmen?

Who anchors the anchormen?

Who hies the hymen?

Who bonds the bondsmen?

Who moons the Moon-men?

Who cycles the cyclamen?

Who lays the laymen?

Who owes the omen?

Who sees the semen?

Well, Bill Clinton's dry cleaner, obviously. I'll get me coat...

What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words.

Having previously done the top 1000 "must hear" albums and the top 1000 "must see" films, the Guardian have now produced their list of 1000 novels "everyone must read".

Yes, they couldn't bring themselves to dare to say "best books" in the thing itself, but note that the words are embedded in the URL. Hmm. Meanwhile a capstone article from the series editor protests that they didn't want to produce a "best books" list, merely a list of 1000 really important novels. Hmm. Have a browse round the pages while you're there, by the way, if you have the time - it is worth reading through the full articles.

If you do check out the little write-ups of each book in the articles, you'll notice that an absurdly large and frankly unrealistic proportion of the 1000 novels "everyone must read" is made up of obscure Victorian novels you'll never have heard of. (Well, I say that - the one and only person I know who's even halfway likely to have read some of the really obscure ones is the august Dr Pittard, and I doubt even he'll have read all of them. I'd be interested to know if they really belong on the list, though, Dr P.) The series editor claims in his afterword that they didn't want to put together a populist list of best-sellers (naturally), but neither did they want to produce a list full of wilfully obscure books for the sake of looking highbrow, so they chose a middle path. And yet the list is still stuffed with what I, in my middlebrow ignorance, can only describe as wilfully obscure books. Smells like filler. I would have thought that a valid third way would have been simply to pick 1000 f*cking good novels, but then that's why I'm not an editor, isn't it?

Naturally it's not The Definitive List, nor would they have intended it to be - I would assume its chief purpose is to start a debate, to get the literate masses talking, and it's certainly done that. There are comments a-plenty on the Guardian's website. Personally I'd rather just rant right here. I see problems with the list, and the obvious one to point out first is that it's restricted to novels. No Marlowe or Chaucer, no Shakespeare if that bothers you, although my first thought on the matter was that the SF/fantasy section could have benefited from the inclusion of Edgar Allan Poe and Clark Ashton Smith. But naturally widening the criteria out like that from "best books" to "best authors" would have made compiling the list a lot more complicated and more time-consuming for the editors. Then again, it would have saved them the time of picking specific novels.

The use of genre-like sub-sections poses its own problems. They're a pretty odd selection in themselves - grouping together stories about war and stories about travel? Trying to categorise all the non-genre-specific novels as either "Family and self" or "State of the nation"? Yes, it breaks it all up into small, manageable (and importantly, publishable) sections, but perhaps it might have been fairer to the books simply to class them all as "Fiction". There's also some very odd placing of titles within sub-sections. Some of these are arguable cases where a book could reasonably be put into more than one category, and to space them out a bit more the editors have simply opted for the less obvious choice - Kafka's The Castle could just about be classed as comedy, in an existential kind of way, and of course Nineteen Eighty-Four does really belong in SF, although non-fans might prefer to see it under "State of the nation". But some of them are just plain wrong. Does Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men belong under the heading of "Crime"? By what definition are the purely psychological tales Fight Club and (so The Lovely Jo tells me) Beloved SF or fantasy? As much as I enjoyed The Man Who Was Thursday, I wouldn't stretch to calling that SF either. And pray tell, which of "War and travel" does Black Beauty qualify as?

The editors have also made some odd decisions about allowing authors more than one entry. You might not baulk at finding more than one Joseph Conrad or John Wyndham on the list, although six PG Wodehouses and six Evelyn Waughs under "Comedy" must be stretching it a bit, surely. And six Jane Austens under "Love"? All of them - her entire oeuvre of completed novels? Really? Even the ones even ITV won't touch? It seems more like they just couldn't make up their minds. (Or they somehow, unbelievably, just couldn't find 1000 worthy novels and needed some filler. But then they had all those obscure Victorian novels for that...) Compare and contrast with the way Terry Pratchett's entire Discworld series is listed as one item - I'm sure even people like Jo and myself, untrained as we are in the gentle arts of editing, could pick out two or three stand-out representatives. And isn't it cheating to include the 2000 Molesworth omnibus rather than an individual book or books?

Where the editors have restricted themselves to one representative novel for an author, they've made some odd choices. That's a natural reaction, of course - we're all going to disagree on which novel is an author's best (or most significant, assuming those are two different things). But even so... The one that leaps out at me here is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks under SF - surely the correct choice is his second novel, The Bridge, because:
a) it's much, much better,
b) if you're looking for his most "significant" work rather than his "best", The Bridge was far more a breakthrough novel than The Wasp Factory, and more to the point
c) it actually has some fantasy content that would justify including it in that sub-section.
Similarly Consider Phlebas to represent his "M" output - I found it a disjointed trudge-fest, and I think even Banks fans who did enjoy it would agree that either The Player of Games or Use of Weapons would be a better choice. There are other examples, and here I'll stick to the SF section because it's familiar territory: Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss (Hothouse? The Helliconia trilogy?), Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (why not the award-winning stand-alone Chasm City?), Under the Skin by Michel Faber (um, someone else's book. Seriously, what is this turgid thing doing on the list? That space could have been taken up by Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog, or Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, or Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia... Christ, anything). Meanwhile they've stuck Russian fantasist Victor Pelevin under "Comedy", and which novel have they chosen to represent him? The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Come ooooon! I've only just read that one, and it's poor! Damn poor! For god's sake, why didn't you pick Omon Ra - that's the seminal Pelevin novel!

Finally, I'd also question the inclusion of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The contributor who wrote that one up claimed that it had to be included because it's "so influential", by which she merely means that everybody else keeps talking about it. It did occur to me that this year sees the 60th birthday of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and that consequently MiniLit might have made the words "influential" and "derivative" interchangeable, but ultimately I think it's just one of those things. If you're looking for influential, the ur-fantasy series (The Lord of the Rings, of course) is also on the list, but I'm sure they could have found another one to take this spot. The Lovely Jo suggested George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and so did at least one comment-poster on the Guardian's website, and I'm happy to go with that.

Up the library steps, up the library steps

Now there's a two-parter thoroughly rescued by its second part - at last, the first high 9/borderline 10 of the season. Those plot details were a little easy to work out after all (mmm, smuggy-smug-smug) but the execution was first rate. Particularly good was the sub-story around Donna's virtual world, which could have carried an episode on its own.

Amusingly, this side of the episode seemed to be all about television - amusingly, because of it being set in a library. The open acknowledgement of the cuts from scene to scene, of course, and the computer girl being pressed into a secondary role as a parody of the younger viewers, not to mention the direct address to the viewer from inside the virtual world at the end. This does slightly emphasise, if not actually raise, the question of why none of the episode was about books. Or at least, about reading. A library would seem to be the obvious setting in which to explore that theme.

Even this, the last mysterious thing about the two-parter, is kind of addressed by the explanation of why the Vashta Nerada have turned predatory. It's their vengeance for the destruction of their habitat - the pulping of enough trees to layer an entire planet with books. So this part of the episode is about books, only here they're not "the best weapons you can have" (qv Tooth and Claw) - not books as a means of transmitting knowledge - but rather books as objects, as things made out of wood pulp. And to rub it in, they're completely surplus to requirements because the Library computer has the whole lot stored electronically, with the added advantage that anyone who doesn't mind being reduced to digital information can experience them all directly. (And you'd assume there'd be some way in the 51st century of achieving the same effect with a headset and a comfy chair. Make the mainframe a bit bigger, replace the planetwide reading rooms with a modest-sized building filled with comfy chairs and you'd be able to have the tourist attraction and the forest.)

So there's actually a crafty eco-message hiding underneath the surface of this story, although it's not dwelt on at all and one assumes the junior members of the audience will have been too preoccupied with the zombie spacemen and Miss Evangelista's freaky distorted face to have spotted it anyway. Possibly just as well - thought-provoking it may be, but is "books = bad" (or even "books = irrelevant when you've got films") really a message you want to send to the nation's kids when literacy is such a hot issue in the tabloids?

(There is a whole other level of philosophical debate lurking behind this, whereby we see characters being uploaded into the Library mainframe's virtual environment and equate them with the books the mainframe was designed to deal with - i.e. "flesh = irrelevant when you've got mind" - but that'd probably be even less palatable to the general audience.)

Other considerations. Colin Salmon was just fantastic as Dr Moon ("...and then you forgot!") - it'd be nice to think he might pop up again in Who in another role. (Come to think of it, he'd make a great Eleventh Doctor, but then again I assume that, based on RTD's casting of Dr Eccles and David Tennant, the smart money would be on the Grand Moff casting someone he's worked with before - Jack Davenport or James Nesbitt would seem the obvious front-runners. But I massively digress.)

Quite surprising that Lux's blatantly symbolic surname didn't play any part in the story at all, not even as a side joke.

I know what I said last week about it being too early to spot patterns in the way Moffat writes, but oh look - our heroes escape the monsters by blasting a neat square hole in a side wall, and at the end "just this once" (again) everybody lives. Even if they died (so Moffat can do the obvious thing of killing off River Song and bring her back).

Which brings us onto the plot hole (I think there was only the one) - how did Miss Evangelista (and the other victims, at the end) get inside the mainframe? I don't recall any suggestion that the Library was scanning her the whole time, or reading the neural relay in her collar, or that anyone loaded her into the mainframe (as if anyone would have had the chance).

And I can't not mention the whole issue of the Doctor's relationship with River Song, which was delightful and has the potential for a lot of very interesting development further down the line. Always assuming Alex Kingston is up for a few repeat appearances, of course. (And so continues Steven Moffat's "Get Over Rose" agenda! First Madame de Pompadour...)

Next week seems to be another take on disaster movies. I just want to tell you both: Good luck, we're all counting on you.

Also this week: life continues to punish us for owning a car, with the new Toyota fresh from one expensive servicing and straight back in for a week and a half to have its head gasket replaced (there's probably a crafty eco-message hidden in there somewhere too); and congratulations to The Lovely Jo who won two bronze medals at a taekwon-do competition on Saturday, and who's just celebrated her birthday.

"SMAAAAACK!"

The Skoda has taken to jumping around as though it were demonically possessed over the last couple of weeks. We half expect it at any minute to turn its radiator grille through 180 degrees and spew split pea anti-freeze all over us (possibly while growling "Your Toyota sucks cogs in hell!"). It's kind of on-off, but no fix has lasted more than a few days, and we're getting tired of spending money on it. To be honest, we're probably more tired of the car bucking, rattling and pulling sharply to the left.

Today the garage got their top bod to cast his eye over it - their Kwikfit Haderach, if you will - and using his oracular powers he identified at least three expensive components that could be at the root of the problem. The car shall get the full dismantling it richly deserves on Monday, and then hopefully we'll find out what the real problem is and exactly how expensive it would be to fix it. But it's looking very much like we'd be better off scrapping it and trying again. Our third car in less than a year.

On to the subject of last weekend's Comics Expo. We had a bit of a flying visit this year, owing to landlady shennanigans that required our attention in the afternoon, but we got up early enough to get the freebie bags again.

The freebie bag was a bit of a letdown this year after last year's impressive package. No full size books, no plastic figurines of Hellboy or of anyone else, and neither Marvel nor DC contributed anything. In fact, once you filleted out the spammage, most of the bag was taken up by sample issues from a small comics press called Markosia. Hurrah to Markosia for stumping up the goodies. The actual content of the samples varied wildly, in quality and in the issue numbers provided:

• Scatterbrain (issue 4, plus a few sample pages in one of the other titles) is presented entirely in one colour, a sort of dried blood russet, and the artwork is a scribbled mess that makes it impossible to tell how many characters there are and what they're doing to each other. Without some expository dialogue towards the end of the issue, we'd have no idea what's going on. In fact, even with it we're not sure.
• Carnival of Souls (issues 1 and 3, several times, but no issue 2) is a lot better visually, and moderately entertaining, but not something we'd actively look for.
• Midnight Kiss (between us we had issues 1, 2 and 3, remarkably) is in the next league up - we would actively look for this one, and hope to see a collected TPB some day. It's another one of those stories that plays games with fiction, which puts it in an increasingly crowded arena, but it's hard not to love what the writer's done with the world of Oz. Takes until issue 2 to really get going, so we're glad we had that one.

There was also some mock Japanese thing called Dark Mists (issue 4), but I found it too bland to describe. The only other thing of note in the bag was Hellboy: The Mole (Dark Horse Comics), a trio of short stories actually put together for Free Comic Book Day the previous weekend, but nice of them to include it for those of us who weren't able to get to a comics shop that day.

Fortunately the bag was easily supplemented by blagging freebies from the stalls inside Brunel's shed. These included:

• apparently limitless supplies of a manga sampler book;
• equally numerous supplies of Hellboy: The Mole (I'd already picked up a copy in the registration queue, so the copy in the freebie bag came as a bit of a surprise);
• free Gnasher badges from the Beano stand (ahh, the nostalgia);
• two entire books of something called The Hunter (Dare Comics, USA) that looks high quality and quite entertaining (aw, they even have flashbacks in the old four-colour style);
• and the prize of my freebie haul, The Shiznit (issue 4).

This last item is a free (ad sponsored) mini-comic distributed in Ireland by Bob Byrne, and behind its cover (inauspiciously decked with a cutesy teddy bear and the words "Hewwo fwends!") is a satisfying mixture of furious ranting and silent cartoons. Further investigation reveals that Mr Byrne has a whole website full of this stuff, with much downloadable material, over here. He also has a full-length silent cartoon book called Mr Amperduke that I've felt obliged to order. Thoughts on this will undoubtedly follow in due course.

Naturally there was some Comic Book Mayhem. Let's see, what am I prepared to admit to buying?

Crossing Midnight, vol 2 (DC Vertigo).
Second collected volume of the story of two kids with supernatural powers in modern Japan. They were born either side of midnight after their father made a pact with the kami of all swords, and when the kami kidnaps one of them as his price, the other goes in pursuit. Much fairy-tale adventure ensues. It's all good.

Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game (Dark Horse).
High adventure sequels to The War of the Worlds, set in a world where the British Empire is given a new lease of life through cannibalised Martian technology. I'd been considering buying these for some time.
The first starts as a murder mystery and ends up exposing the dark heart of the new Empire. The second takes the story to Mars, where the Imperial army has been waging war on the Martians for forty years in an effort to protect itself from another invasion. This is the more fun of the two books, because of the wealth of cheeky references hidden throughout, but after building up the mystery of what's really happening on Mars over most of its length, it ends very abruptly. A third book exploring the journalist heroine's discoveries and their ramifications would have been very welcome, but presumably the creators didn't want to risk not being commissioned for another book.

Macbeth and Henry V (Classical Comics).
Oh yes, comic book versions of Shakespeare's plays. We're talking the full text, scene by scene, lovingly animated with added sound effects ("SMAAAAACK!").
At least part of the intention here, as we understood it from the people running the Classical Comics stand, is to make required school texts more accessible for pupils. I can appreciate this where Shakespeare's concerned - the best way to really understand his work is to see it performed, but how many kids will get that chance? This must be the next best thing, bar films, but the obvious advantage is that this needn't take up two to three hours of school time.
We bought the versions with the full original text, but they also do versions in modern English for kids who'd have difficulty with Middle English (which I expect would be most of them), and yet a third "quick" version with the text reduced down by about half for the kids with really short attention spans. The website even offers schools specific downloadable scenes from other required works of the Bard as study aids. A worthy cause in my estimation.
But more exciting for us is the prospect of some of their non-Bardic forthcoming titles: Frankenstein! A Christmas Carol! Um, Jane Eyre! Come on, Jane Eyre with sound effects!

The Lovely Jo was also able to buy - at last! - our own copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as illustrated by Hunt Emerson. Recently reprinted in an attractive, durable hardback, hurrah! The in-laws have a copy of this, but we despaired of ever finding our own. And a punned-up slapstick reimagining is just what that gloomy drug fiend Coleridge needed, heheh.

So, the Fforde Ffiesta is behind us. An entire bank holiday weekend of fannishness and unstrenuous activity dedicated to the work of Jasper Fforde. The Lovely Jo has now blogged about this, but I might yet be able to add something on the subject.

We had in fact done this once before, in 2005, but back then it was called the Fforde Ffestival and it only lasted one day. It felt similar in some ways and yet overall, quite different. The Goddard Arms Hotel is gone now, so I feel I can safely describe its grandeur as "seedy". (The Swindon De Vere, on the other hand, proved a large and comfortable venue for our hundred or so punters, and served a very nice breakfast too. Probably the nicest of the year so far, just edging out the breakfasts of the B&Bs around Loch Lomond by virtue of sheer merciless quantity. And mushrooms. Many, many lovely button mushrooms. Sir achieved true fungal breakfast nirvana that weekend. But sir digresses.)

The director of the committee made it quite clear, and continues to make it clear today, that he didn't view this as a convention. "Convention", after all, has connotations in the chip-shop press that any event organiser would consider undesirable. (Although I hasten to point out that the coverage we got from Swindon's local press, including interview and photos, was favourable, genuine and accurate. There's a lesson there for Exeter's local press.) I've consequently come to think of the two Fforde happenings as "fan events", which is a nice, vague, catch-all term. Nonetheless, even though The Lovely Jo and I were the only members of the Ffestival committee ever to have even seen another convention, and even though we only brought one other convention-goer into the Ffiesta committee, we soon recognised the outward signs of conventionishness. Perhaps inevitable in any event designed to bring together fans of a genre-ambiguous author and present them with silly things to do.

We got one very shitty write-up from a guy who sent his thoughts to Ansible, the SF fandom newsletter, and his beef seemed mainly to be that we weren't a well-oiled autograph queue machine with parallel programme tracks and a dealers' room. In other words, that we were a fledgling fan event catering for a small and uncertain fanbase, and that we weren't a miniature version of Eastercon. Fair enough, we'd advertised in Ansible on the assumption that some Jasper Fforde fans must also be SF fans, so it could be claimed that we were presenting ourselves to con-goers as a convention, but even so. Had The Lovely Jo and I then known and properly understood the word "relaxacon", we might perhaps have tried touting it as one of those, and I believe we'd have gotten away with it. However, in the intervening years between Ffestival and Ffiesta the world has seen The Year Of The Teledu, an entire convention of chaos programming. A con so utterly chaos-based that when it started soliciting subscriptions at Eastercon 2006, it didn't have a venue or even a date. I like to think that the author of the write-up - if indeed that is his real name, which I doubt - went to Teledu and suffered a chronic explosion of the brain. In a post-Teledu world I imagine we'd have got away with it all even more easily. But what the hell, everybody else enjoyed it and the Ffestival made money, so a follow-up was planned.

For a number of complicated reasons that follow-up happened two and a half years later. In that time, we were able to apply the lessons learned from the first event, rejig and rebrand, and make the whole thing look even more like a convention (knowingly in some cases, unknowingly in others). And yet it all started to look a bit shaky. Like George W Bush on a tiny scale, we spent our reserves and soon ran up a deficit - perhaps not a huge deficit by event organising standards, but big enough, and more significantly one that we would personally have to shoulder if it didn't go well. And none of us particularly wanted that. Ticket sales were sluggish - we could easily put this down to the large hiatus between events, but what if that one bad write-up had had an effect as well? Then just a few months before the Ffiesta we had word that Jasper's partner Mari was due to give birth soon, and it all went quiet. I stopped looking forward to the event and started to worry. We were facing potential ruin, and the committee director's assurances that it'd all turn out all right weren't winning me over.

Perhaps I should point out here that the Fforde events are linked in some part of the back of my brain with car-related stress. The journey down to the Ffestival saw the bonnet of the Punto flip right back while we were driving along the M4, causing us several minutes of brown-trousered terror on the motorway and the largest repair bill the Punto ever incurred in its eight years of service, not to mention having to leave the car in a Swindon garage for two weeks. Our weekend committee meetings for the Ffiesta had seen a string of hiccups and minor malfunctions in the Toyota and, latterly, the Skoda (which is still misbehaving at time of writing), such that as we drove down to Swindon two weekends ago I fully expected a repeat performance. Basically I was more than prepared to believe that this event had personally wreaked this havoc on our cars and would take a more terrible toll yet.

Fortunately the committee director was right and I was wrong. What I had forgotten, and he had remembered, was the tremendous goodwill and camaraderie that can build up around events like this. We made what preparations we could, but ultimately it all hung on the auction, and here all our wildest hopes were exceeded. From our initial position of debt we suddenly found ourselves with enough funds to donate a fat wad to Alzheimer's research and lay the groundwork for another Ffiesta next autumn. (Although The Lovely Jo and I won't be on the committee for that one, owing to the possibility that we could be in New Zealand by then.) And yet again Jasper put in a tremendous amount of time and energy helping to keep the event bouncing along, even while he was taking his turn to nurse baby Tabitha. In short, it was a tremendous success, and we have every single person involved to thank for that. Much relief and handing over of bank account to other committee members.