Ännu mer från Kanada

Mark Davis - Eliminate The Toxins

Vet inte hur det kommmer sig, men det kommer så mycket bra musik från Kanada att det verkar vara mer regel än undantag. Mark Davis tredje skiva är en sån där envis sak som växer vid varje spelning. Bra melodier och ihärdig sång av nästan monoton klang. Christian Kjellvander måste vara en själslig broder, hans och Mark Davis musik har många gemensamma nämnare: Stämningen, soundet, rösten, och fullt av starka låtar.

Mark Davis experimenterar med olika klanger och ljud, i ett par fall har han lagt in några ljud, eller snarre oljud, som inte alls funkar utan bara stör, men i de flesta fall sitter det mitt i prick. Det är tll stor del elektriska gitarrer som dominerar, som i titellåten. Avslutande akustiska "Wounded Wing" är nog en av årets vackraste sånger. 



Länkar:
Mark Davis' hemsida - med både musik att lyssna på, videos och annan information.
Hemifrån - mer att läsa om Mark och om hans musik.

 

It's English, Captain, But Not as We Know It

I play videogames -- several hours today already, in fact.

I read comics.

I even read comics about gaming.

But sometimes -- like today's Ctrl+Alt+Del -- I haven't the slightest idea what the hell anyone is talking about.

(Usually, I call this the "Penny Arcade effect," but this time it's a different trigger.)

Seriously, that comic might as well be written in Latvian -- it's about a game, and the two guys are complaining about some change in that game, but that's about all I can make out. This must be what it feels like to be old and out-of-touch.

A Helpful Note

There seems to be an idea floating about in the ether that my review of John Scalzi's new novel, Redshirts (posted late yesterday) is negative, and that I don't like Scalzi's books.

Both are untrue. Redshirts didn't strike me as laugh-out-loud hilarious, as it has been billed [1], but it's a pleasant, quick entertainment -- and Scalzi is reliably entertaining, which is why I keep grabbing his novels as soon as I see them. None of those books has been perfect, though, so when I've written about them the most interesting (and, I think, useful) tactics have been to poke at the bits that don't work as well. [2] Writing otherwise -- focusing only on the things a book does well -- is certainly enjoyable for the author, but I don't think it's as effective for everyone else in the world.

My reviewing mode tends to be more negative than positive, I know, but you really can tell when I actively dislike a book. Take, for example, my reviews of two of last year's Hugo darlings: Mira Grant's Feed and Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear.

That's what it looks like when I strongly dislike a book. (And, for an example of what it looks like when I keep reading a writer even after I realize I hate his current work, see P.J. O'Rourke's Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.)

Redshirts, on the other hand, I basically liked -- the "codas" at the end, in particular, are really good stuff. If I've driven any readers away from it by not stating that it's the funniest thing since the invention of the seltzer bottle, then I do apologize. You may well find it substantially funnier than I did; at least four SFnal luminaries have already done so.


[1] Which was sad for me; I wanted to read a book as funny as I was told Redshirts was.

[2] Though I have definitely reached the point where noting that Scalzi is not interested in carefully building up his worlds from close readings of Nature and his flying slip-stick is entirely beside the point; he not that kind of writer. Come to think of it, I usually make fun of that kind of writer as well.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/30

This was shaping up to be a quiet week, until a large stack was left on my doorstep Saturday morning by the large burly fellow whom I continue to call the Package Fairy (mostly, now, because it annoys my sons). Books are always a good thing, so let me tell you about these.

But first: the rules of "Reviewing the Mail."

Rule One: This is an exhibition, not a competition. Please, no wagering.

Rule Two: All of these books are courtesy of their respective publishers, who deserve all thanks and praise.

Rule Three: In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion will act as a flotation device.

Rule Four: I have not yet read any of these books, so what I am about to tell you is one part informed general knowledge and one part conjecture. The management of Antick Musings takes no responsibility for books that are more or less entertaining than they may appear here.

Rule Five: Always wear your safety gear.

Rule Six: There is no....Rule Six.

First up this week is Ian Tregillis's novel The Coldest War, the sequel to his intense and engrossing fantasy alternate-history first novel, Bitter Seeds. (See my review of Bitter Seeds; I also named it one of my favorite books of 2010.) Coldest War continues that dark story -- about a WWII where the Nazis had discovered a way to technologically create supermen, only to be stymied in the end by English warlocks calling down unearthly powers at a frightful cost -- into the years after the war, when the Soviet Union has inherited much of the Nazi monster-making apparatus and is attempting to make it work on a more industrial scale. It's coming from Tor as a hardcover on July 17th.

Shuzo Oshimi's Baudelaire-influenced (and also reportedly semi-autobiographical) manga series The Flowers of Evil continues with a second volume, coming from Vertical this month. (I've still got the first one on the to-be-read shelf.)

Also from Vertical this month is the latest volume in Toru Fujisawa's side-story to his very popular Great Teacher Onizuka manga series -- GTO: 14 Days in Shonan, Volume 4, in which Onizuka goers to his old home town for rest and relaxation but finds nothing of the sort.

Also also from Vertical this month is a fat standalone manga book, 5 Centimeters per Second, written by Makoto Shinkai with art by Yukiko Seike. It adapts the animated movie of the same name -- directed by Shinkai and released in 2007 -- which is a low-key three-part story of young love and modern life.

The fourth book in Alex Bledsoe's fantasy/mystery series starring "freelance sword jockey" Eddie LaCrosse is Wake of the Bloody Angel, coming tomorrow as a trade paperback from Tor. This series has sounded right up my alley since the first, The Sword-Edged Blonde, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't read any of them yet. (Several are on the shelf, but time and other duties have conspired against them.) This time, Eddie is tracking down the pirate captain who stole the heart of his now-landlady twenty years ago -- I suppose that's the fantasy-mystery equivalent of the Ross Macdonald-ish standard PI novel's "a generation ago in Canada" trope.

Dan Wells -- author of a wonderful trilogy of novels about a young trying-to-do-right psychopath: I Am Not A Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You (see my review of the three novels) -- is back with another first-person story about a man who is not neurotypical and the bodies that suspiciously pile up near him: The Hollow City. This time, Wells's hero is paranoid schizophrenic Michael Shipman, who suffers from hallucinations, delusions of persecution, and unstoppable fantasies -- and he's coming to wonder if not all of the monsters he sees are entirely in his head. The Hollow City is a Tor hardcover, hitting bookstores tomorrow.

Energized is a near-future thriller about alternative energy in the traditional Big SF style: massive grids and power satellites in near-Earth orbit, built by tough men with government-contractor jobs, who fight their own bureaucracy as well as the Shadowy Powers (which here seem to be mostly Nasty Foreigners, though there may be some Lefty Eco-Loonies in the mix as well) to bring the world (and especially the U!S!A!) kicking and screaming into their Space Future. It comes from Edward M. Lerner, who has the great advantage of a thirty-year career in the high-tech business sector (and the additional advantage of a decade of prior SF novels under his belt). It's coming from Tor as a hardcover on July 17.

Multiple World Fantasy Award-winner Graham Joyce -- another writer I have to admit I am shamefully ill-read in -- returns with Some Kind of Fairy Tale, another one of his novels on the border of fantasy and horror. In this Fairy Tale, a teenaged girl disappeared into a dark, dangerous forest in central England twenty years ago -- leaving no clues, but putting her boyfriend under intense suspicion. And now she's returned, looking no older and claiming she can't tell them the full story of what happened. Some Kind of Fairy Tale will be published by Doubleday in hardcover on July 10th.

And last for this week is Ripper, the seventh in the "Event Group" series by David Golemon. The Event Group is the obligatory supersecret US government agency that investigates beasties and weirdies and things that go bump in the night, and Golemon (from what I can see) writes fast-paced, straightforward supernatural thrillers in the James Rollins/Douglas Preston vein. This one is from Thomas Dunne Books, and will be available in hardcover July 17th.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

It is simply impossible to declare a novel "not funny." Humor is so personal that all any person can really do is declare whether he laughed or not.

And so I'll say this: John Scalzi's new novel, Redshirts, has four quotes on the back cover (from luminaries Melinda Snodgrass, Joe Hill, Lev Grossman, and Patrick Rothfuss), all of which make a point to note how funny this book is. On the other hand, I didn't laugh or smirk before page 120 out of 230 pages of the novel proper [1], and, even after that point, there were only a couple of wan smiles and some light chuckles. This reader must then humbly submit that Redshirts did not strike him as funny as it did the blurbers, and that will inevitably color the rest of this review. Please set your expectations accordingly.

I've read all of Scalzi's novels to date, and grumbled about all of them, which proves something, I suppose. (Probably about me, and probably nothing good, either.) I've come to realize that I'm engaging in the common but fruitless effort of wishing that Scalzi was a different writer -- or that he were interested in writing different kinds of books -- than is actually the case. He clearly has it in him to write "serious" SF of weight and rigor -- the mostly-successful novella The God Engines (see my review) shows that, as does his best novel, The Ghost Brigades (which I covered in a more cursory manner) -- but it's also becoming clear that he doesn't want to be a "serious SF writer," that he's more in the vein of Keith Laumer, James H. Schmitz or H. Beam Piper, writing zippy novels set in mildly generic universes with wisecracking heroes who always win out in the end. (I didn't review his first novel, Agent to the Stars, but I did also cover Old Man's War, The Last Colony -- and then a follow-up on the Old Man's War-iverse in general -- The Android's Dream, Zoe's Tale, and then last year's Fuzzy Nation, so the really devoted reader can trace my history of looking for things in Scalzi novels that I should not expect to find there.) Thus, Redshirts -- a novel set in a deliberately generic medium-future setting, with plenty of elbows to the reader's ribs and references to SF media properties that we are all already familiar with [2], that almost but not quite turns into a giant fuzzy-dog story along the way -- is exactly the novel we should have expected from Scalzi, and the reaction to that novel (it's already hit the New York Times bestseller list) bears that out.

Which is all a long way around saying that Scalzi's work is deeply resistant to criticism (if not entirely invulnerable to it) and that I, personally, am not well-placed as a critic to do justice to Redshirts in the manner it deserves. (Which would either be an excoriating attack on its flabby second-handedness -- though that would also be entirely missing the point; it's second-handed on purpose -- or a loving appreciation written either entirely in Klingon or in quotes from famous TV sci-fi shows, a la Jonathan Lethem's "The Anxiety of Influence.")

Redshirts is a slobbery sheepdog of a novel, eager to show off its good nature -- it's a quick, easy read, full of snappy dialogue delivered by characters without too many attributes to confuse the reader and delivered, for the most part, in little-described interior spaces, so as to keep the narrative from being cluttered up by action or description. It's set in a very Star Trek-y future -- very original series Trek, to be precise, for maximum audience identification with the premise and the least amount of friction for Scalzi's few twists in the tale.

The year is 2456, and the Federation Universal Union has just assigned young Ensign Andrew Dahl to the flagship, Enterprise Intrepid, where he soon learns that junior and low-ranked crew members -- whom we know as "Redshirts," though Dahl doesn't -- die at an unusual rate, and because of exceedingly unlikely events, during "Away Missions." Dahl, and his fellow not-terribly-well-characterized Ensigns [3], do not want to die, and so they try to figure out why this is, eventually turning to the creepy loner Jenkins (who lives, alone and hidden, in the Jeffries tubes cargo tunnels deep within Intrepid), who has a theory So Crazy that it just might be true.

That theory is amusing, and would be even more amusing at about 2 AM in some convention party, anytime in the past forty years. But it doesn't lead -- in my opinion, of course -- to anything really funny afterward, just another succession of scenes of not-well-characterized people shooting mildly-witty dialogue at each other in some more undescribed rooms for another hundred pages until the novel ends. The first half of Redshirts isn't frightening or ominous enough -- and God Engines is proof that Scalzi can do really ominous danger-on-a-starship, when he wants to -- and the second half isn't as big or funny as it should be, either. (It resembles, more than anything else, a rewrite of one particular Star Trek story.)

Redshirts is content to be amusing and pleasant, rather than digging any deeper. It is not a failure in any possible sense of the term, but it may leave some readers wanting more, particularly if they're long-time SF readers who have seen Redshirt's Phildickian premises used more evocatively and subtly by other writers. If you just wondered what a Trek redshirt might have thought about his predicament, and aren't expecting much, you will enjoy Redshirts. If you hoped for a more complicated, interesting answer to the predicament of high-casualty crewmen, I'd suggest instead looking for the excellent (and mostly ignored) novel Expendable by James Alan Gardner.



[1] There are also three "codas" -- related short stories -- which add another 90ish pages to the book. They're in different modes, though, and none of them are funny -- none of them seem to aim at being funny, either. They're the best writing Scalzi does in this book, and that plus the example of God Engines implies that Scalzi is deliberately tuning his novelistic output to a particular market.

[2] My reaction to the use of these as "jokes" is approximated by this T-shirt.

[3] Scalzi eventually has a clever in-universe explanation for this; Redshirts is quite cleverly designed to be precisely the way it is, though one must wonder if spending that much energy emulating mediocrity is really worthwhile.

Addendum, a day later: This post, not unlike Redshirts itself, now has a coda.