Reviews of Online Stories (Jan1-Feb15) at Last Short Story

I'm reviewing stories at Last Short Story now. I've done my first roundup, reviewing the stories from the eight online magazines I'm planning to follow this year, from Jan 1st through Feb 15th.

Here's my favorite:

"Aftermath" by Joy Kennedy-O'Neill (Strange Horizons) - This extremely affecting story features zombies--which you're probably sick of (I am)--but it looks at them through the lends of reconciliation. How do people move on after a civil war, an apartheid, a genocide, a zombie attack--where neighbors kill each other and subsequently have to live side by side? The emotional and character work here is very skillful. I found it hard to read; it made me cry.

Click through to see other cool stories.

On Reviewing, redux

The latest issue of the American Book Review arrived in my mailbox today. The title of the editorial--"Criminal Editors"-- immediately caught my eye, and so I read it first. What, I wondered, could that be about? What it's about is a lawsuit an author is bringing in a French court against the editor of an international scholarly journal for publishing a review that basically characterized the plaintiff's book as meticulous but not going as far as it might have in exploring its subject matter. The ABR editorial refers to the review as "negative" (presumably because that's how the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it in its article NYU Professor Faces Libel Lawsuit in France for Refusing to Purge Negative Book Review. Imagine, if every editor had to work in fear that every review that's not a glowing rave might provoke a lawsuit.

Soon after it appeared, Ms. Calvo-Goller wrote to Mr. Weiler, saying that the review, by Thomas Weigend, director of the Cologne Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law and dean of the faculty of law at the University of Cologne, was defamatory. She asked that the review be removed from the site....

....Mr. Weiler refused to remove the review but offered to publish a response from Ms. Calvo-Goller, "so that anyone reading the review would immediately be able to read her reply," an approach that "would have amply and generously vindicated all possible interests of the author of the book," he wrote in the editorial. "I continue to believe that in all the circumstances of the case ... removing the review by Professor Weigend would have dealt a very serious blow to notions of freedom of speech, free academic exchange, and the very important institution of book reviewing."

Faced with what he notes is "the heavy financial burden of defending such a case — expenses which are in large part not recoverable even if acquitted," Mr. Weiler has appealed for "moral and material assistance" from the academic community and writes that he is optimistic that he will be acquitted at trial. "Any other result will deal a heavy blow to academic freedom and change the landscape of book reviewing in scholarly journals, especially when reviews have a cyber presence as is so common today."

You can read this so-called "libelous" review that the author is claiming "could cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion" here. (As someone who has received a few vitriolic reviews in her time, I have to wonder how she would have reacted to receiving an actual hammering.)

The author, by the way, is a senior lecturer at the Academic Centre of Law and Business in Israel. I find myself wondering if she teach law students. Only yesterday I was reminded of all the potential damage John Yoo could be doing in his role as teacher.

I'm also reminded that I recently came across a news item about a lawyer using the law to bludgeon his opponents-- viz., Juneau County Distrinct Attorney (in Wisconsin), Scott Southworth, who

warned that teaching a student how to properly use contraceptives would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor punishable by up to nine months behind bars and a $10,000 fine. He said it would be promoting sex among minors, who are not legally allowed to have sex in Wisconsin.

This is presumably because Wisconsin State has just passed a law "requiring schools that teach sexual education to adopt a comprehensive approach." In Juneau County, at least, the teachers charged with teaching sex education are caught between a rock and a hard place. (The AP story can be read here.) And I'm also wondering whatever could such a law mean, that minors "are not legally allowed to have sex in Wisconsin"? They have a law prohibiting that? I'm wondering what a "minor" is. Any Wisconsin folks reading this who could clue me in? But to get back to Southworth's campaign and the new law:

Wisconsin schools aren't required to teach sex education. But under the new law, which was backed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, schools that do must teach a range of topics, including the benefits of abstinence, the proper use of contraceptives, how to make responsible decisions, and the criminal penalties for underage sex. Parents can choose to keep their children out of the classes.

Southworth says he is not trying to bolster his reputation as a social conservative for a potential run for higher office, but his stance has proved popular with antiabortion groups.

Matt Sande, the legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, which opposes the new law, said every district attorney in Wisconsin should follow Southworth's lead.

Sex education is contributing to the delinquency of a minor?
A negative review is libel?
Torture is legal and a prerogative of the POTUS?

Using the law to bully people who don't have the resources to defend them has become utterly commonplace. Bet that editor never imagined he'd find himself hauled into court on such a charge.

But do get back to "Criminal Editors," here's Jeffrey R. Di Leo, in his ABR editorial:

If book reviewing is to distance itself from the perception that it is simply a promotional service for the publishing industry, then it needs to engage in legitimate practices....As an editor, I face both positive and negative reviews on a regular basis. The backbone of reviewing rests on reviewers competent to handle the books they have been assigned and level of honesty regarding their responsiveness to the text before them. Reviewers with an ax to grind or a preconceived notion of what they are going to say before they even read the book are to be avoided. However, if a fair assessment of a text results in a negative consequence, then it is the obligation of the reviewer to report it and of the editor to publish it. Anything less compromises the integrity of the review process.

He also notes that reviewers tend to err "on the side of sympathy" when they feel themselves reacting negatively toward a book-- or else simply refuse to write the review.

Justina Robson, by the way, discusses her experience of the costs for reviewers (in the sf field) for writing less than unalloyed praise, in her review of Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes for Strange Horizons this week.

Seducing Gay Celebrities, Two Stories by Tim Jones-Yelvington

College friend Tim Jones-Yelvington has recently published a pair of stories about the fictional seduction of gay celebrities diver Matt Mitcham and singer Adam Lambert.

His narrator is a gay sociologist who keeps a blog record of his seductions, in a contemporary take on the epistolary format. "My research methodology: I have sex with gay celebrities and write about it," his character writes.

I’ve been stimulated by tete-a-tetes with David Hyde Pierce. I’ve appreciated Ian McKellan’s oral generosity. In my crowning achievement, I orchestrated a three-way with The Amazing Race’s Reichen Lehmukl and Queer as Folk’s Robert Gant, the most difficult part of which was getting them in the same room. The rest took care of itself. …who knew their fetishes were so compatible?

Much ink has been spilled on the cult of celebrity. Some say celebrities are role models. We look to them for lessons on how to (or how not to) live. This hero worship, so the story goes, is compounded for Queers, who grow up without examples for how to be ourselves.

But this doesn’t explain why some of us, especially those of us who have long outgrown the need for role models and have recognized gay identity as a cultural construct, a regulatory fiction, are still obsessed with famous gay people. Fascinated with asking “are they or aren’t they,” with wondering what they do and with whom, and with wondering whether they’d do it with us.

What does it mean to be showered with interviews, book deals, speaking engagements on college campuses, to be considered some sort of expert, an authority, to be vested with authority, not only because you call yourself gay, but because people also know you from Adam? What does it mean to be famous and gay?

In his blog, Perverse Adult, Tim explores what it's like to be the gay author of gay-themed fiction about the meaning of gay celebrity. Identities overlap in not entirely predictable ways.

As Tim wrote his story of sexual obsession with Adam Lambert, he writes that he became obsessed himself. "When I say I became obsessed with Adam Lambert as I wrote, I’m not exaggerating. Within about a month, he became the third most played artist on my last.fm profile, a profile I’ve kept for over three years. I really did create an Adam Lambert “mii” on my Wii, and one night a month or two ago, my partner was playing a flight simulator game, and our Wii stuck my Adam Lambert mii in a two-seater airplane with him, and for a moment I was legit jealous… of my partner. I was like, “Bitch, step back from my Adam Lambert mii.” I’ve got all the parts picked out for my Adam Lambert Halloween costume. I actually went online and ordered the same eye liner Adam Lambert says is his favorite. I’m probably incriminating myself more than I really want to here."

Tim's blog features famous photographs of Adam Lambert, paired with photographs of Tim dressed like him, imitating him, mimicking the glimmer in his eyes. Tim identifies with his character in more ways than this -- recently, Tim was banned from Kevin Spacey's twitter account after proposing to meet him in London with chains for a kinky sexual encounter. (Interestingly, Nathan Fillon seems untroubled by similar overtures.)

The stories play with weaving metafiction, too. The main character claims to be writing his blog real-time, reporting on conversations as he's having them, but also altering those conversations so that the reader has little perception of the fictional "reality". When his friend annoys him, he tells her:

“Just for that,” I said, “I’m putting you in my blog. I’ll cast you as your worst nightmare, the sarcastic black best friend who has no life of her own, but exists solely to advance the white protagonist’s dramatic action. And just to ensure you’re as subaltern as possible, I’ll make you a dyke.”

And sure enough, at this very moment, Sophia is landing Grade A pussy, which she will spend the night devouring with aplomb.

“Toldja so,” I say aloud (I really did. Just now, out loud).

Where's the line between reality and fiction? Where does real life identity intersect with fictional identity? What's the line between the mask of celebrity and the personal life of the individual behind it? Where does the celebrity identity intersect with the personal one? If sex is one of our most personal and private moments, does it slip past the mask of celebrity? But then again, isn't sex also about projection?

These stories ponder what the sex lives of celebrities are like based on their public personas. The narrator wonders whether Matt Mitcham will fuck like a diver: "I imagine Matt Mitcham as a power bottom. I will lie on my back, and he will straddle me, pull me into him as effortlessly as he enters the water, with minimal splash. Then he will make love to me from the inside out, active and open." Adam Lambert, on the other hand, is "an adept engineer of others' responses," so the narrator wonders "So how does one play the player? Perhaps Adam Lambert craves a sparring partner, an opponent equal to his calculations. Or perhaps I'll convince him I've been successfully played, have become, like countless television viewers, putty in his hands. Becoming putty, it occurs to me, might be kind of hot."

In the end, the sex scenes themselves are coy, leaving the stories to center on the concepts of gayness, celebrity, image and projection. These are questions without answers. Or, at least, questions whose answers won't come simply.

The sex scene with Matt Mitcham exemplifies the way that true private identities are never available to the public.

Maybe in bed Matt Mitcham was exactly like I said he would be, a power bottom. Or maybe he spun me around and took me from behind, quick and forceful. Maybe he wanted oral only, or maybe he’s the type of person that gets off on something else entirely, like watching another man spread grapes across the kitchen floor and squash them between his toes. I bet you’d like to know more. I bet you’d like to hear about the size and shape of his anatomy, what he can accomplish with his tongue ring, and what he sounds like when he comes.

Maybe this time, I don’t feel like sharing.

In the end, the sex scene is always offstage. What we see of celebrities is always their public face, by definition. It's the face they're wearing in public.

These stories accomplish more than I've discussed here, including subtle character development of the narrator, despite their brevity and epistolary format. Tim says he'll be writing more. I look forward to more insight into the serious, complicated issues of identity -- sexual and otherwise -- that this series raises. Read Seducing Matt Mitcham and Seducing Adam Lambert.

Review of Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight by Cat Rambo (Paper Golem Press, 2009)

In my blurb for Cat Rambo’s new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like “reading the literature from worlds that don't exist. She writes as that world’s Dickens, its Calvino, its Fredrick Douglass, its E. B. White. Rather than merely relaying the events of other realities, as some fantasy and science fiction writers might, at her best Cat Rambo acts as a literary interpreter. Within these imagined fictions -- sometimes disjunctive and metaphysical, sometimes lucid and deceptively simple -- there are embedded many new ways for looking at the history and social realities of our own world. Dying little girls may not be carried away by winged pigs, but what does it mean that we want so badly to believe that they might be? Cat Rambo's fiction invites these questions, but the ultimate interpretation is left for the reader to ponder, and to answer if she can.”

I attended Clarion West with Cat Rambo in 2005 and have been a devoted fan of her work ever since. I’ve published her work on PodCastle – Magnificent Pigs; Dead Girl’s Wedding March; “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” the Manticore Said; Foam on the Water; In Order to Conserve; and the upcoming Narrative of a Beast’s Life, scheduled for January 19th. Paper Golem Press sent me an ARC of this book so that I could review its contents for possible publication in PodCastle, and so that I could blurb it, both of which I was more than happy to do.

Cat's stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and... everywhere. Once she burst onto the scene as a professional writer after Clarion West, she seemed to appear simultaneously in all magazines at once, as if she were at the center of some sort of physics-defying quantum phenomenon from a Star Trek movie.

Rambo’s collection features twenty fantasy stories, including a number of originals. Publisher's Weekly calls Cat's collection a "two-sided coin," indicating that there are both excellent and weak stories in the collection. The reviewer seems to have taken against Cat's fantasy world, Tabat, which has been developed over the course of stories, role playing games, and as-yet-unpublished novels. The reviewer says that these stories are full of "predictable genre tropes that fall flat." I disagree with Publisher's Weekly on the specifics -- in my opinion, "Narrative of a Beast's Life" is the strongest story in the collection, while "Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish" is one of the weaker ones -- but the reviewer's broader point is supportable. Rambo's collection is sometimes uneven, as is perhaps inevitable in a collection of twenty stories.

It's not that I don't love this collection. When Cat's stories are at their best, they're more than good -- they're emotional, triumphant, beautifully rendered and profound. Her best stories are among the best published anywhere in the industry. This collection is well-worth purchasing for the strength and beauty of stories like "Heart in a Box," “Sugar,” "Rare Pears and Greengages," and "The Dead Girl's Wedding March.”

The best stories in the collection are “’I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,’ the Manticore Said” and “The Narrative of a Beast’s Life,” both set in Cat’s Tabat. “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” originally published at Clarkesworld here, uses its fantasy setting to contemplate issues of personhood, eugenics, and everyday cruelty. The reader watches a sympathetic narrator commit an act that would be (rightly) condemned as evil in today’s society – but which is normal to Tabatians, just as it was normal in our culture for decades.

One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of fantasy and science fiction writers is the ability to place familiar things in an unfamiliar setting and, thereby, force readers to reexamine them. Take this metaphor – I used to live in Santa Cruz, California, where I was constantly surrounded by redwoods. At first, I paid attention to every detail of them – the beauty of the red trunks stretching upward, the light shifting through the needles, the smell of bark and soil. But as I lived among the trees, they became part of the background of my existence. It wasn’t until I left for a while and came back to visit that I rediscovered them – unfamiliarity allowed me to regard each branch and gnarl anew.

Cat’s stories create a similar kind of disjunction when they recast slavery and eugenics in a fantasy setting. Her “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” is a fantasy mirror of the slave narratives which were written and published by escaped slaves before the civil war and then used by abolitionists as tools for converting Northerners to their cause. Much contemporary African American fiction plays on slave narratives in some way – for instance, Jones’s Known World and Morrison’s Beloved have both been described as taking on the project of re-imagining the lost histories of people who could not tell their stories. Rambo’s re-imagining of American slavery adds to this discourse in a different way, by altering the slave narrative subtly to create a new perspective for analyzing the original.

Of course, “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” also brings the slave narrative form to readers who may never have read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which case it has the potential to mirror the purpose of the original work by simply recreating a slave’s eye view of slavery (a thing which, until very recently, was not considered particularly important). Slave narratives are interesting in their own right, as well as being politically and historically invaluable, and Rambo’s homage is well-written and full of lush detail.

The publisher’s weekly reviewer appears to be one of those people who’s never read Douglass. In light of their complaint that the story is "long-winded... without a trace of tension or intrigue" one must wonder what kind of threats would count as tension. Slavery and beating don’t. Neither do castration and lobotomy, apparently. What does?

Many of the strong stories are reprints. For instance, there’s “Heart in a Box” from Strange Horizons, a retelling of The Little Mermaid that concentrates on the oft-forgotten detail that each of the little mermaid’s human steps is incredibly painful. “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March” from Fantasy Magazine is a myth from a high fantasy world, its melancholy mood and slow, dark imagery rendered in beautiful prose. And “The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race” from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show tells the sometimes poignant, sometimes funny story of P.T. Barnum and Jumbo.

However, I was delighted to discover several excellent pieces among the originals as well. “Rare Pears and Greengages” is a moving Victorian fantasy, imagining a Dickensian world where the unfortunate characters include magical creatures as well as humans. “In Order to Conserve” is a witty ramble, posing a world in which concepts, instead of oil, are the non-renewable resource whose scarcity threatens society. Perhaps my favorite was “The Silent Familiar,” a tale about a wizard whose dragon familiar decides to lay an egg, which made me smile with its quirky humor until it snuck up to a surprisingly emotional ending.

The weaker stories come in two broad varieties. The first pair are urban fantasies – “Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish” and “Dew Drop Coffee Lounge” – which suffer from cliché settings, lacking character development, and easy morals. Neither of these stories has a central spark of originality or the redeeming uniqueness of Cat’s usual voice. Both are derivative, as though the eye that observed these stories is someone else’s.

The other weak stories are all from Cat’s world of Tabat. Here, again, I find myself in agreement with the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer – these stories are “filled with predictable genre tropes that fall flat.” Cat’s Tabat stories are excellent when they focus on the social conflicts of that world, its intricacies and ambiguities, the places where it deviates from other high fantasy realms. In stories like “Twine of Flame,” “In the Lesser Southern Isles,” and the titular “Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight,” the world of Tabat appears one-dimensional – and, like the urban fantasies, derivative -- just another epic realm that could have been written by any author.

While I greatly enjoyed Cat’s collection, and while I would enthusiastically recommend it to any fantasy reader, I do think the collection would have benefited from some trimming. If Cat were presenting her best twelve fantasy stories – instead of her best twelve fantasy stories and eight lesser fantasy stories – then this collection would have read smoothly and powerfully, transitioning from one “wow” moment to the next. That streamlined collection would rival the best I’ve read.

Luckily, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight is still excellent. It’s available at Amazon and through Paper Golem Press.

Review: Soulless, book one of the Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger (Orbit, 2009)

When I first laid hands on Gail Carriger’s Soulless (Orbit, 2009), I began to wonder if the book had been written specifically to irritate me.

1. To start out, the novel is urban fantasy. Already we’re on bad terms.

2. Also, there are vampires.

3. Too, werewolves.

4. And romance!

5. In case that’s not enough, Carriger mixes in a Victorian setting and a hint of steampunk. Neither of these inherently annoy me, but combined with items 1-4:

6. The novel is heavily weighted down by trendy genre elements.* In my experience, this usually leads to books that are poorly constructed, badly integrated, and the literary equivalent of a chess club stereotype wearing star-shaped sunglasses – trying much too hard to be cool.**

Soulless should be like combining salmon and chocolate while I, in this metaphor, am an ichthyophobe with no sweet tooth. However, it appears that skilled chefs can pair salmon and chocolate. And sometimes a novel that’s full of everything wrong can go terribly, tragically right.

Soulless is the first book of the Parasol Protectorate, with the next book, Changeless, due from Orbit on March 30, 2010. The novel begins when a young Victorian woman, Alexia Tarabotti, finds herself alone in a library with a vampire. For any other unmarried miss, this situation would be frightening. However, Alexia has no soul which means that vampires can’t eat her and, in fact, her touch temporarily turns supernatural creatures into humans.

There are three types of supernatural creatures in Carriger’s universe: werewolves, vampires and ghosts. Werewolves come in packs, and vampires come in hives, but somehow this vampire doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. Alexia gets caught up with the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, or BUR, in helping to investigate this strange appearance as well as a number of strangely coincidental disappearances.

In the interview at the back of the book, Carriger reports having asked herself, “if immortals were mucking about, wouldn’t they have been mucking about for a very long time?” She considers the cultural implications of supernatural interference: “Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functioned on werewolf pack dynamics… [and then I] realized that if Victorians were studying vampires and werewolves (which they would do, if they knew about them)… technology would have evolved differently. Enter a sprinkling of steampunk…” (p. 364)

In my opinion, most traditional urban fantasy fails because it doesn’t consider the long-term, global ramifications of its conceits. This isn’t helped by the fact that a great deal of urban fantasy poses a secret underworld filled with werewolves and vampires (or fairies and elves) who covertly affect the real world. Small-scale stories revolving around this conceit can be fine, but secrets are difficult to keep, and many stories pose so many supernatural events of such import that it strains credibility to believe that magic could remain a secret. Buffy – to take an at-hand example – made a joke of it. But non-humorous texts are out of luck if they want us to believe that people die every night from vampire bites and yet no one ever notices.

Carriger’s world is one in which vampires and werewolves are fully integrated. They interact with and affect politics and society, and in turn are affected by them. For instance, there’s a post specifically designated for a werewolf to advise the Queen, but simultaneously the alpha werewolf is constrained by high society mores.

Soulless also benefits from the fact that Carriger doesn’t seem to have approached the elements of her book as disparate. As she says, Victorians investigating magic lends itself to steampunk; one genre element follows from another, creating the sense of a fully integrated world.

The novel’s action-oriented main plot takes place against a Jane-Austen-like background. Alexia, the product of her mother’s first marriage to a – gasp – Italian, is a spinster with a number of unflattering traits, such as her blunt speech and tan complexion, all of which make it clear she’ll never find a proper English husband. Nevertheless, she falls in love with one of the country’s most eligible bachelors, the werewolf alpha Lord Maccon.

No, wait. She doesn’t fall in love with him. She can’t stand him. No, I’m sorry. I mean, he can’t stand her. Wait. He’s in love with her – that’s it. It’s just that he’s strong and manly, but also messy and uncivilized. While she’s proud and intractable, but also busty and tenacious. Wait, are we reading Pride and Prejudice with Werewolves?

Soulless’s treatment of romance in its early chapters is the novel’s only major misstep. The text improves once Lord Maccon and Alexia acknowledge their romantic feelings – although there is one awkward, late-chapter sex scene that occurs in the middle of an action sequence, which could have been dramatically shortened while still serving its purpose as a release valve for romance and humor. But the early romantic sallies are winceably cliché. As soon as a male character gazes upon the heroine with a passage like--

Miss Tarabotti might examine her face in the mirror each morning with a large degree of censure, but there was nothing at all wrong with her figure. He would have to have had far less soul and a good fewer urges not to notice that appetizing fact. Of course, she always went and spoiled the appeal by opening her mouth. In his humble experience, the world had yet to produce a more vexingly verbose female. (p. 8-9)

--we readers know where we’re headed. We don’t need tingling near her abdomen or stirring he can’t explain, interspersed with fury! at his lack of manners and yet--! to guide us along the way. Carriger so facilely avoids other clichés that it’s a shame this one mars the text.

Overall, though, the Austen elements are charming. Carriger’s Victorian voice is sharp and funny. Witty observations provide a plethora of humorous clashes between action sequences and rigid etiquette. The descriptions of Victorian fashion are very nice for those readers with a weakness for bustles and lace, and I suspect I’m not the only one since the book is marketed with a Victorian dress-up doll flash game.

If there’s one weakness the Victorian voice lends itself to, it’s the underdevelopment of Alexia’s mother, step-father and sisters, who play the compliant foils for unconventional Alexia. Their insipidness is fine at the beginning of the book, but grows less convincing as their roles increase near the end. Still, this is a small complaint and easily remedied. Hopefully Carriger will toss them a few lines of character development in one of the sequels.

Other characters are created quite well. Alexia, for instance, is a fun and well-portrayed heroine, full of vigor and flaws. She, her friend Ivy, and their friendship are memorably captured in a few sentences: “Ivy Hisselpenny was the unfortunate victim of circumstances that dictated she be only-just-pretty, only-just-wealthy, and possessed of a terrible propensity for wearing extremely silly hats. This last being the facet of Ivy’s character that Alexia found most difficult to bear.” (p. 33) Lord Maccon and his assistant, Professor Lydell, are good characters as well, although Lord Maccon is at times brushed in with slightly-too-broad romantic strokes and could use a little more development within his archetype. The best character is the vampire Lord Akeldama, an outrageous gossip-monger with a penchant for gaudy attire whose underlying intelligence and immortal weariness are deftly revealed as the novel progresses.

In the end, Soulless is not a profound novel. It imparts no revelations about the human experience. I don’t expect it will change anyone’s life or that I’ll remember the plot intricacies in ten years. But it was a fun, adventurous romp that diverted me for a few hours. I might even read it a second time. I will certainly pick up book two of the Parasol Protectorate and I look forward to meeting Alexia Tarabotti again in 2010.

--

*It seems possible that Carriger began writing with the intent of forecasting what tropes would be popular a few years down the line. If this is the case, kudos to her for guessing correctly.

**It should go without saying that any of these things can be done well. It’s just that while 90% of everything is crap, I find these tropes to suffer from even worse odds. Nevertheless, here are some successful examples: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (vampire), N. K. Jemisin’s “Red Riding Hood’s Child” (werewolf), Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” (urban fantasy), and Paula Guran’s anthologies of romantic fantasy which contain Coates’s “Magic in a Certain Slant of Light,” Parks’s “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge,” and Copley-Woods’s “Desires of Houses” (romance). Michael Swanwick is famous for combining disparate genre elements with strength and grace, and I was recently impressed with new writer Tina Connolly’s “Moon at the Starry Diner” for successfully condensing an epic plotline and several incompatible tropes into a short story.

Thanksgiving Weekend Book Review: House of Cards by David Ellis Dickerson

When Hallmark lured David Ellis Dickerson to a Kansas City interview, they offered him a potential starting salary of $27,000. After interviewing him in person, they upped their offer to $32,000. “To this day,” writes Dickerson, “I am convinced that in person, I am $5,000 more charming than I am on paper.” (p 49)

I suspect this motivates the choice to promote Dickerson’s new book, House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions (Riverhead Books, 2009), with a series of videos called Greeting Card Emergency. Dickerson’s audience provides him with a decidedly un-Hallmark-like greeting card scenario, such as breaking a friend’s toilet or letting your snake eat someone else’s hamster. Dickerson then documents the process of creating a suitable card.

This promotion seems to be working. I’ve seen Greeting Card Emergencies reposted on a number of well-trafficked blogs and the videos inspired me to purchase Dickerson’s book.

House of Cards is a memoir of Dickerson’s experience with the Hallmark card company, documenting the period of time between when Dickerson first hears about nearby Hallmark interviews through the time when he decides to leave Hallmark for the presumably greener, warmer, and more licentious pastures of a Ph.D. program in Florida. Along the way, the book also documents Dickerson’s journey from fundamentalism to atheism.

There are three major reasons to recommend this book:

1) David Ellis Dickerson may be more charming in person, but he’s charming on paper, too. The memoir’s light, easy writing style makes for a fast and fun read.

2) The memoir provides an intriguing (if not wholly satisfying) case study about how a fundamentalist upbringing affects a twenty-something who has lost his faith. At the beginning of the memoir, twenty-seven-year-old Dickerson has already converted to Catholicism, become liberal, and started supporting feminism and gay rights. However, he still feels that he and his fiancée must avoid sex until marriage, a conviction that shifts during the course of the book until, after the pair break up, twenty-eight-year-old Dickerson is left trying to lose his virginity approximately a decade after most of his peers.

3)It’s a great deal of fun to read about Dickerson’s work process and word play. The memoir is peppered with his silly poetry, including a love poem about free popcorn:

The popcorn that thou givest unto me
Bringeth emotions I can scarcely utter.
For thou art like this popcorn that I see:
Lively and fresh, though thou contain’st less butter.
And in the carbonated beverage, too,
Which, like the popcorn, thou bestow’st for free,
Though it consist of Brown Dye Number Two,
In it, I see thy hair, and think on thee.
My Pepsi tab would founder many banks.
I can’t repay you; please accept my thanks.

(p 18)

In chapter nine (How to Write a Card), Dickerson details the process of taking a Hallmark card category, brainstorming ideas for it, and proposing a suitable card (which editors subsequently reject or accept). He explains common card types, including cards that come with attachments like paper clips and golf tees, and cards that include pop-ups. This witty, informational sequence gives what the reader has been craving throughout the book.

The memoir suffers some flaws. The first three chapters read like an unnecessarily long build-up: It’s unclear why the book begins before Dickerson even interviews with Hallmark instead of with his Kansas City interview or his first day as a new-hire. The book is called House of Cards; we’re here to read about Hallmark.

Even at Hallmark, the text lacks focus. It gives too little information about work process and too much about petty work woes. It’s not that the latter can’t be interesting grist for a memoir, but here they’re often rendered in long narrative sequences that could be summed up faster. Work events begin to feel repetitive. Worse, they take up space that might have been devoted to Dickerson’s evolving spirituality. After all, there’s more to the journey away from fundamentalism than sex.

From a feminist perspective, the text is mixed. There’s a lovely rant on page 135 defending female humorists, but in the same chapter Dickerson theorizes that women leave Hallmark’s humor department because they can’t handle the boss’s relative masculinity. It’s possible that Dickerson has evidence for this theory which didn’t make it into the text; however, given the available information, Dickerson comes across as condescending. Perhaps women leave because being the only female in that work environment is intolerable. Perhaps they leave because the boss acts sexist in ways that aren’t apparent when there are only male coworkers. Perhaps Dickerson should just ask the women involved?

Other scenes are similarly fraught. For instance, Dickerson’s fiancée is depicted as sex-averse, but this is never satisfactorily explored. From the details in the text, the fiancée appears to be suffering from some sort of sexual trauma*, but the narrative ignores that in order to focus on how angry Dickerson feels when she refuses to fulfill his romantic fantasies, such as a shared bath by candlelight. Perhaps Dickerson decided not to explore his fiancée’s perspective in more depth because he didn’t want to violate her privacy. This is a respectable reason, but the text still feels incomplete.

Of the many scenes discussing Dickerson’s sexuality, the most compelling is a flashback to his early twenties when he was still convinced masturbation was sinful. He discovered that voyeurism gave him an excuse to see women’s bodies “by accident” and thus without guilt. For this feminist reader, at least, the scene was extremely powerful because one identifies with Dickerson’s need to navigate his sexuality within his repressive culture. At the same time, one recognizes that this is an example of how otherwise reasonable, pro-feminist men contribute to the rape culture.

Despite its flaws, House of Cards is an entertaining, engaging read full of whimsical word play. Dickerson’s memoir may not meet every possible literary expectation – what does? – but it’s fun to listen to the man talk, even on paper.

--

*I might have read her as asexual except for a scene in which she reacted defensively to Dickerson’s attempts to touch her shoulders while she washed dishes. This read to me as a post-traumatic reaction; others’ interpretations may differ. In any case, the absence of any attempt on the part of the text to understand her sex-averse behavior – whatever its cause – was a noticeable lack.

Feminist Collections

(As Timmi is off on a plane again, I get to do my own bragging* rather than modestly sitting back and letting her post it...)

I recently put my hand up to review a number of books relating to feminist sf for the journal
Feminist Collections: A Quarterly Of Women's Studies Resources, which “reviews the latest print, electronic, and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies”. Like many other wonderful things, the journal comes out of Madison, the University of Wisconsin System to be precise.

My review is the lead article in the Winter 2009 issue, entitled “What's a Bright Feminist Like You Doing in a Genre Like This? Reading Women's Science Fiction”. It was a lot of fun to write, and I got to mention a few Aqueductians - if nothing else I think I convinced the editor to go off and read some sf, so that’s a good sign!

ETA: *edited word here in the interests of harmonious US-Aus relations (as detailed in the comments!)

Newspaper Reviews of F/SF

As you may have noticed, when newspapers aren't disappearing altogether, their book review sections more often than not are. To discuss this, Nisi Shawl, Michael Berry and other newspaper reviewers participated in A Book Reviewer Roundtable on "The Future of Newspapers and Book Coverage." Among the questions considered: What do readers lose when book coverage is cut? What does the newspaper lose? Is there anything gained? The participants are also asked to name "one of the most memorable science fiction/fantasy books reviewed during your career." Oh, and a couple of the comments on the roundtable are interesting, too.

On Reviewing, Redux

Check out the conversation Anna Tambour and Niall Harrison have been having in the comments following Jonathan McCalmont's review of Ellen Datlow's Poe anthology.

The delights of snark

Snark often irritates me. But every now and then a moment of snark delivers ineffable delight in the midst of teeth-grinding vexation. Such a moment is especially satisfying when the snark is in response to snark I don't find in the least amusing.

The new issue of the American Book Review has a review of Stanley Fish's new book, Save the World on Your Own Time. A snarky title if I've ever heard one. Jeffrey R. Di Leo first very properly reviews the book on its own, rather narrow terms. Having done that, he lets in the world. And finally, he offers his appropriate judicious conclusion that although Save the World on Your Own Time contains "many entertaining provocations from one of academe's most outspoken members," following the book's imperatives "may worsen rather than improve the problems of higher education." Yes, yes, of course, I'm thinking as I read this, my annoyance with Fish's snark not abated a jot. But then comes the review's last sentence:

If you must read this book, do it on university time, not your own.

Touche, Mr. Fish. And now I can move on from the review of your snarky title with a smile on my face and my eyebrows at peace.

Review of Feminist Philosophy And Science Fiction: Utopias And Dystopias Up on SF Revu

My review of Judith Little's Feminist Philosophy And Science Fiction: Utopias And Dystopias is now up on SF Revu. As the review makes clear, I was very disappointed in this book. It plows no new ground -- the newest story in the anthology was published in 1996 and most date from the 1970s -- and the supporting materials are uninspired.