See Trumpet, Blow Trumpet

I have sold Bitter Elsie Mae to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Bitter Elsie Mae was my week three Clarion South story, so a big shout out to my class mates and Ellen Datlow for helping me fix it. The story (containing pirates and ghost ships and bad grammar), will be in issue #34, due February 2008.

I have also received word that One Night on Tidal Rig #13, which was originally slated to be released this coming June in one of the Daikaiju! sequels, has been delayed till October. Le sigh. I won't be in the country, alas. Oh well. I've already waited over two years, I can wait a bit longer.

Finally, that fine young lady Deb just announced that she sold a story to POSTSCRIPTS, and that, my friends, is AWESOME with a capital HELL YEAH. Go over and tell her to write the sequel congratulate her.

When our powers combine, we are Captain Planet. No wait, Voltron. Voltron is much cooler.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence 'After The Long Goodbye' - by Masaki Yamada, trans by Yuji Oniki and Carl Custav Horn



ANIME TIE-IN! ANIME TIE-IN!

Summary: Batou lost his dog. Batou looks for his dog.

I picked this up because it was by a different author than this tie-in, the amazon reviews actually sounded interesting, and, er, it was a pretty book. Shuddup.

And this book blindsided me. It's heart-breaking and thought-provoking and well-written, and not at all what I was expecting. The translation was excellent. Everything was good quality. Whe the...?

There was a bit of character suicide going on - Batou is a mopey bastard through the whole thing. He has his emo ON. This is not a happy, chipper, feel good sort of book. It's what you read when you're feeling lonely and miserable, so you can be lonely and miserable with a lonely and miserable book. Part of me wanted to mock him for having his whole life revolve around his dog, but then, pot, kettle, black.

The dog, the absence of dog, is almost incidental to what the book is actually about, which is consciousness. Memories. What it is to be aware. Aware, within a synthetic environment, and everything that is gained and lost. That he can program himself to release endorphins when accessing a certain memory - does that mean the memory makes him happy, or he makes the memory happy? What is happy?

There is a fair whack of giant tanks and super-cyborg gun fight spectacular-a-rama, but such things in no way subtract from the gravitas of the underlying themes.

I was surprised, and lonely and miserable, and this book rang true.

Strange thing, fiction.

Verdict: knowledge of the GIS universe will help, but this remains a startlingly good book regardless.

Snake Agent & The Demon & The City - Liz Williams



This might be cheating, lumping the two books together, but my thoughts on each are pretty much the same.

Williams has created a very tasty work, set in future Singapore Three, in which technology has eased the communication between Hell and Heaven, and people such as Detective Inspector Chen exist to investigate crimes of the celestial sort. It's a textured world, full of flavour, and left me with severe cravings for congee and noodles.

In Snake Agent, Chen is called in to investigate some soul-smuggling, runs into the demon Zhu Izrh (who is terribly easy to crush on), and generally discovers that Terrible Things Are Afoot In Hell, and must save the day.

In The Demon and The City, Zhu Irzh is not requested to investigate the murder of a socialite, but does so anyway, and eventually he and Chen uncover a plot that will shake the earth, Heaven and Hell, and must save the day. Again. Clearly they don't get paid enough.

Both books are brilliant, juicy, cop stories, with characters that I just adore (I have a great fondness for the badger-teakettle), and I can't help feel sorry for everything Singapore gets put through.

That said, I found that both books started as one thing, and transformed greatly, ending as an almost entirely different book. This in itself wasn't a problem, except that I didn't get a feel that the transition was acknowledged, when reading the final pages. What happened to so and so, and what about such and such? Life doesn't tend to tie itself up in neat little packages, but I like some balance in my books.

Also....damn, most beautiful covers EVAH.

There's a third book in the works, and I will most definitely be acquiring it. You know how it is. Find a food you like; eat it.

Verdict: Well worth checking out, especially if you'd like a taste of something different.

(I know these write ups are short and crappy. I am hungover and have a sore throat. Just think of all the whinging I'm NOT doing.)

The Ticking - Reneé French



Just look at how beautiful that book is. Cloth-bound and embossed. I'm a shallow, shallow person, and I admit, I bought it just because it was lovely. I pick it up every now and then, just to hold it, and touch the cover.

This is not a graphic novel.



It's a picture book.

Edison Steelhead was born looking like his father, and so his father takes him away to live on an island, where no one can see them. Edison grows up as all children do, curious and questioning, and not entirely accepting of his father's own issues. Their ability and inability to be ashamed, unashamed of their appearance draws them further apart, in this quiet, soft, greylead world.

There is so much space on the pages, each picture a little window surrounded by white, as if I was only getting the slightest, cropped glimpse of the world they inhabit. I couldn't help feeling each picture was being forced to sit in the corner, ashamed of the attention it gained by being present.

All that soft pencil is marvellously printed, to the point I was afraid of brushing my fingers across each page, lest I accidently smudge the art.

I understand Edison. I understand Edison's father too. The story should make you cringe, want to turn away, but you won't.

Verdict: Yes.

Ribofunk - Paul Di Filippo



I have had this sitting on my shelf for years. You see what treasure I have just lying around in my room, and I don't even know it? Who's the ijit? ME.

I chose it as I'm still on this run of "small and easy to carry", which isn't the greatest reason to pick up a book, but didn't fail me this time.

Ribofunk is awesome. AWE-SOME. It isn't cyberpunk, not in the traditional sense. There's a lot more funk, for starters. Oodles more funk. So much funk it's off the funkitude scale.

While there is a sort-of over-arching story to the book, it presents as a collection of short stories, sometimes related, sometimes not. I suppose you could read them at random, but the information presented in one lays the groundwork for the next, so perhaps it would be better to treat them as chapters that aren't closely related. Sort of second-cousins meeting at the family christmas dinner.

Di Filippo has created a world which...

...kinda defies summary.

It's a future in which the focus is less on computers, and more on body manipulation. Tropes and splices, anything can be injected now, from moods to knowledge to horns. I didn't pick up much body horror, but some of the modifications were confronting, to say the least. People chosing to augment their bodies to become more like cockroaches, or cliched chain-mail bikini-clad barbarian women, and splices themselves, part human, part anything else you want DNA. What does it mean to be human? Does it matter?

But Di Filippo doesn't just create a funkified future, or rewrite the syntax of science-fiction (I can't say that without cackling), he makes his own genre and language, and leaves the rest of us staring in puzzlement at his frollicks. I admit, I read the first page about five times before giving up trying to decipher the lingo and just running with it. It's a great, great language. Read it, and learn.

My favourite chapter/story has to be Big Eater, a story told entirely from the point of view of a man who had a broadcasting accident, and when stressed, sick, or having just woken up, can only express himself in rhymes.

The wordbird woke me at seven out of my heaven. Not at all synthetic, just the old deltawave-syncretic. Rem-memories hazed my gaze. Just like a screamcurse, I seemed stuck in my dreamverse. Though it wasn't so bad, maybe even triple-gonad. Something about drifting forever down a river of feathers. On my back, I was catching up on my slack. Coasting along just humming a song. Mighty nice change from my strife-life brain-drain. Which the nerdbird was still harp-harp-hopping on.

You know. The sort of thing that makes me grin because it's silly and awesome.

Verdict: If you're serious about writing, and the techniques of writing, you don't have an excuse not to read this. If you like reading good books, you have even less excuse not to read this. Does not make a good hat. Wrong shape. Great cover though.

Company - Max Barry



Read this a couple of months ago. Yeah, you'd think I'd have learned not to leave it so long by now.

Jennifer Government had me in stitches with it's bleak, absurd and dark humour, and so I had the same expectations of Company. I wasn't disappointed.

This book follows Jones, a graduate just starting a job in Zephyr, and the differences encountered between what is taught in business school, and what actually goes on in the work place, among a myraid of other things. It focuses on the mundane, ordinary, trivial things that nevertheless become great drama in the work place. If you've worked in an office, you know what I mean. I consider my own office pretty tame, and still this book resonated strongly.

Despite being pretty much non-stop giggles, it is a disturbing book, precisely because it resonates. You know, truth, and all that. The potrayal of Senior Management in particular (being representative for all upper echelons of management in every company anywhere) was frighteningly close to the bone, and highlights, quite starkly, the distance between those who make the decisions, and those who do the work.

I would love to go into more detail, as Company provided all sorts of food for pondering, but there are things that I just don't want to spoil.

That said, this book won't be a laugh for everyone. I pushed this on mum, as her office is being 'reorganised', figuring she'd need to laugh at the situation. Unfortunately, her reaction was the opposite; she couldn't read it because it was ridiculous and unfunnily true. Art mirroring life mirroring stupidity.

Verdict: Terribly funny stuff. If you are in a management position of any sort, you should read this. It will make your staff like you more. Also, it makes a good hat.

When I woke up half-way through the afternoon, I was crying. I can't remember the dream, but I know it wasn't the cause.

NIGHTSHIFT.

JUST SAY NO.

Aiiiiyaaaah. If you're going to leave narky comments, at least have the decency to wear your name. Don't be ashamed of your narkiness, revel in it! Be grown-up about being a bitch! It's too fucking early in the morning for me not to get my nark on. Get me some fucking orange juice.

Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow



I read this cover to cover. Got terrible involved in it. I can tell you what happens, but I can't tell you what it's about.

What happens is a couple of guys start up free wireless for the community/the son of a mountain and a washing machine has some serious family issues, and deals with them. Somewhere between those two plot lines is what this book is about, and I haven't quite pinned it down yet.

It is something, my gut has decided, to do with freedom. Not necessarily freedom of speech, with all the politics the phrase is loaded with. Possibly just the freedom to be what and who you are, which is something you can only decide for yourself.

Which of course can only be done after you've finished your family feud in a violent and bloody manner, but oh well.

But that doesn't seem quite satisfactory, and I think I'll have to muddle this book over some more before I come to a conclusion that I am happy with.

It is about peculiar people. They're called 'monsters' at various points in the narrative, but that's just a word to mean 'other'. They're not human in the biological sense of the word, but they have minds and hearts that seem perfect capable of fucking things up like the rest of us. They are not, or feel they are not, free to say what they think.

Mimi, part-time heroin of the story, sporting a very fetching set of functional bat wings, is perhaps the most sympathetic of this motely cast. Her thought process and her emotional reactions are nothing but raw human, and her wings a physical manifestation of that wall we all carry within us. That which renders us incapable of expressing ourselves to others, that which disconnects us from the world around us. Her moment of battered house wife syndrome cut me, and her decision to run elevated me. I've read too many family violence reports where that last decision never happens.

Adam, Alan, Andy, the main protagonist, is an odd bird. Human, and passing for human, and going so human he's popped out the otherside into oddness. His carefully moulded house, full of the trophies that signify what it is to be human, the book he never writes, his endless fascination with other people...and his family.

The war between his brothers fuels the larger part of the story, and I admit I haven't sorted it out in my head yet. There was a twist at the end that I didn't see, and while it didn't throw me, it hasn't settled comfortably either. Families are strange creatures. Strange, strange creatures. I think it might be better if I accepted, without attempting to understand. Somethings aren't meant to be understood; family is one of them.

(Especially given the conversation I just had with my brother.)

It's also a really nice book to hold. I nabbed the hardcover at worldcon, and it's just a nice size, with nice heft, and nice paper, and a really nice cover. Ahh. Purdy.

A strange book that curls and meanders and drinks too much coffee and geeks out and gets brutal and bloody. A book that you will have to chew over and take what you choose from it, because it won't tell you want to think.

Verdict: Challenging, bizarrely so. Dangerous for trains.

I am a migraine.

Fucking WARPATH

Someone just tried to get into our backyard.

My brother heard the gate open. All I heard was him thumping around as he turned on all the outside lights, threw open the back door and grabbed his cricket bat. Then he came and got me and we both went tearing out the front door, torch and bat in hand. If we had hackles they'd be all the way up.

I've processed too many police reports to tolerate some lowlife lazy fucker on MY territory.

Excuse me while I go prowl around in a seething miasma of pissed-off-ed-ness.

XD


Guys, guys, okay, guys, ready? Guys, okay? Guys. Okay. Total moment of Dumb.

I missed my stop.

I was reading (my inner ear is behaving itself again), and you know how it is when you get to the end of the book, and everything's getting really intense, and I kinda missed three stops and when I looked up there were bushes. Me, I was "the hell? What bushes? Oh. OH!" And yes, I couldn't even just wait for the next train going in the other direction, because there was no next train, being after midnight.

I got the giggles so bad.

To top it off, while loitering around suspiciously waiting for my brother to pick me up, the cops drove past, and drove past again, and pulled up right by me to make sure I was okay. Which gave me bigger giggles.

So, Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is NOT fit for train-travelling consumption.

I'm going to finish it RIGHT NOW so the same thing doesn't happen tomorrow.

Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett

It's Terry Pratchett. You've already made up your minds.

(I think he's worn himself a deep grove with the Discworld books, and now that he knows how to write a Discworld story, he can't not write it that way. I've read this before. It's still a good book, and Tiffany Aching brings all sorts of New and Refreshing to the witches. Me & sensible 13 year old witches = <3)

The Devil in Amber - Mark Gatiss



Yes! That dashing artist/secret agent is back! Lucifer Box!

Alas...this story just doesn't hold a candle to The Vesuvius Club, which is a right shame. The first book was a great big wad of ridiculous fun. This book is in that murky region of ridiculous where it isn't quite good ridiculous, but very close to lame ridiculous.

Times are hard for Box; he's getting old, there are younger and nastier agents trying to usurp his position as The Best, and now his own agency is out to get him! What's a poor secret agent to do? Why, get the girl, uncover the secret devil-worshipping society, and save the world, of course.

Except it's not just devil worship. There's actual devil. Actual and active devil pouncing through the plot and inserting all sorts of infernal intervention when Box requires a Get Out Of Jail Free card, which shat me to tears. That's cheating. Chea. Ting. Having the devil as the great world-threatening menace also felt like cheating. No, it felt cheap.

This isn't to say the book wasn't fun. It was great rollicking promiscuous fun. It was just a bit dumb too.

Verdict: The first book is better. This one, not so better. Regardless, I won't hesitate to snap up the next when it comes. Lucifer Box is just good like that.

Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones



I've been meaning to read this ever since the movie came out and made me fall in love with it. It's not particularly common in mainstream Aussie bookstores, which surprised me. I eventually bought it from Minotaur, because Dymocks just refused to stock it.

It is as full of love as the movie, so I fell in love with it too.

There are significant plot depatures between the two, and while the movie cut a lot out, I believe it remained true to the story (which for all you book purists out there who go one about how the last two Harry Potter films were crap because they didn't stick word by word to the books, is MORE IMPORTANT, my goodness, they're two different mediums, they work stories differently! Ahem).

Sophie is possibly an even better pushy old lady than she was in the film, which made me all sorts of delighted. Marcl being Michael, who wasn't a boy but a sensible young man, took very little to adjust to. The dog, being not the dog, was a tad transparent, but a lot of fun. And Wales. Wales! That threw me, I admit, but not for long. There's something very tongue in cheek about a someone from a magical kingdom escaping to this world. Usually it's the otherway around.

What I loved most was how this book is unashamedly happy. It's joy and delight and sunshine, and totally unrepentant about it. It doesn't feint sour endings, not in the least. You know there's a happy ending, and there damn well will be one!

Here I thought most young adult stuff was gritty and hard hitting. Boy, was I wrong. How come the young adults get all the fun?

I'm not too old for happy endings. I don't think anyone is.

Verdict: It'll warm you up on the inside. I can see this being a great comfort book. I love. You love. We all love! NOW GO BUY.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - The Lost Memory, Volume 1 - by Junichi Fujisaku, trans Camellia Nieh



Cheap. Easy. REALLY REALLY REALLY SMALL. You're sensing a pattern, right?

Recently finished watching the for SAC series, and it worked for me. I know tie ins generally suck, but eh. My inner rabid fangirl fails to give a rats.

According to the bio, the writer is one of the episode writers from the anime series, so he knows his material. He's not writing fanfiction because what he writes is canon. Yep. This turns out to be the books undoing, as it reads not just like an episode, but like a tv script. There's the big print at the beginning (a laborous description of the physical setting), character placement (exactly what it says), and then dialogue. And monologue. All those voice overs. It would work just fine on a screen, but in dead tree format, it reads like a dead, dead, dead fish.

It particularly suffers from telling, given that information cannot be shown as easily as on a screen, and even though it's only 210 really small double spaced pages, it took a long time for me to read it. Bleeeeah.

Respect the mediums you work in, and the ones you don't, please.

Verdict: It's a tie-in. You get what you expect.

Chain Mail: Addicted to You - by Hiroshi Ishizaki, trans Richard Kim, adapt Rachel Manija Brown



After the last book, I had a hissy fit, and went and read all the Harry Potter books, which you don't need to hear about. Then I had another hissy fit, got mad at books at general, and didn't read anything for a month. When I finally got over that, the memory of lugging around those Harry Potter books was still raw (those lumps are heavy), and so I picked this up because a) it was cheap, b) a really light read, and c) REALLY REALLY REALLY SMALL.

On my own, I represent a new trend that publishers should consider - I don't want more book for my money. I want you to drop the prices of books and make them not nearly as heavy as they are. My wrists can't take this crap.

End tangent.

The story is very straight foward; four high school girls, all unknown to each other, get involved in a little message board online role-playing, and of course the fictional world and the real world start to reflect each other, and weird scary stuff starts to happen, and oooh, who knows how it will end?

I do! Because it's very straight forward. So straight forward, I'd assumed the writer would have known this and made an attempt to obscure the ending or provide a new and interesting twist, but they didn't. Oh well.

Despite the predictability, this is a decent read. The fact that there's a translator and an english adaptor indicates to me that they didn't leave it all to the translator to actually write the story, and gave that task to someone with the know how. It reads smoothly, if simply. The role-play sections themselves possess distinct voices, which most real online RP fails at.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that everyone wants friends. And will be weird, creepy, and stalkery to get some.

Verdict: This book doesn't do anything new, but at least it doesn't do anything new badly. A quick and easy way to kill half a day.

The Voyage of Sable Keech - Neal Asher

Because the last book I'd read was unbelievably awesome and still had its claws in me, I picked this book up next specifically because it was totally different.

Which means it sucked.

I know Asher gets a lot of love, and I'm sure somewhere out there are works of his that deserve it, but this isn't it. If you're first time to Asher's universe, like I was, stay away from this one. It's a bit of an in-crowd thing.

The story is about....hell, I don't know. A bunch of stuff happens, and I was waiting for a point to be made, but there wasn't one. Just stuff. A lot of characters feature, all of whom appear to have length backgrounds and significant history in other books, which I haven't read and don't know about, and the right information wasn't given at the right time so in the end I didn't care either, and it feels like all these characters are brought together because Asher likes them, and can't leave them alone, and they must all have last hurrahs. "Here, your beloved friends return again, isn't that awesome?" From my point of view, no. Not to mention that all the characters seemed to possess the same voice, with the same amout of smartarsery which got annoying after a while.

I mean, was there a point to the whole giant whelk thing? Giant whelks are cool, but unless they serve a purpose other than being big and squishing things for the convenience of the plot, I don't want them.

There wasn't even a something about the dead not being dead and la di da.

So much telling, not much showing.

So much technobabble.

In a weird way, I saw this book as a warning to myself, as all the flaws I see in it, I'm guilty of. Plenty of cool shit and cool stuff for no point whatsoever. If I write like that, with that many pages involved, stop me, please.

Very glad I read this after my giant crab story was picked up. There's even a character called Thirteen. I know, I know!

Verdict: If you like Asher's stuff and want more, here's more. If you don't know Asher's stuff, go start at the beginning. If you want. No pressure.

Bold as Love - Gwyneth Jones



There are many reasons that I am a bad, bad person. One of them is the fact that I read this in September, and it's taken me this long to get off my arse and write about it. It deserves better attention than that. I'm a bad person. Ai.

I mean, I can barely remember what I was going to say about it. Other than "OMG, THIS IS TEH ROXOR!!11!!"

It was one of my targets for worldcon, and is a dangerous book to take to work. Far too addictive. I kept taking little nips, every couple of minutes, because I couldn't let it go. It was almost a relief to finish it.

A sort of near-future modern-world apocalypse turning post-apocalyptic world, the events of which are set in the UK, and seen through the perspective of rockstars. It's a brilliant piece of work, strange and familiar and new and true all at once. I couldn't tell you what the message is, and I don't think that it's necessary to know. I don't need to know.

I had a moment of idiot though, upon finishing and seeing 'to be continued in doodidoodidoo' and then waiting patiently for Nightshade to announce this new title, only to discovere that about six books in the series have been released under various other publishers and are actually available in normal bookshops here. Not that I've seen book 2 on the shelves yet. Don't make the same idiot moment I did.

I found it particularly interesting to dissect as a buddy story. Although world-breaking events happen, the story is mostly about the Trio of Ultimate Cool, and how these events bleed into their lives, or how they don't. There's time for that special close and stupid chatter between really close friends, all the time, and I got a kick out of seeing the balance at work.

I'm all for slash. *cough*

Anyway, I know this write up sucks, and I'm very sorry, because this book deserves much better treatment. It received a lot of hype a couple of years back, and you should believe it. It's fresh and full of awesome.

Verdict: This book is fantastic. I am not.

Strange places can be familiar places, and familiar places can be entirely unknown.