Seldom if ever have I seen so successful a translation from book to screen as was achieved by the now-ended program, The Expanse. Covering the first six in an excellent nine-book series by James S.A. Corey (pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), who were deeply involved with the program as well, the show stuck pretty close to the books, but never hesitated to make changes when something that worked on paper might not have on screen. (Best of all was the "promotion" of the minor book character Camina Drummer to a major character in the series.)

In any case, the show concluded this week, and I have some preliminary thoughts about it.

There are probably as many reasons to read books about books, as there are reasons we read the books themselves.

For me, it's a combination of wanting complementary thoughts about a book I love and the desire to more deeply understand that which I already care about. But what most interests me is not necessarily what interests others who write about books. I look for insights into the craft of story-telling — plot and character, mostly — not so much symbolism and metaphor. In other words: what about a particular novel or story makes me laugh or cry, how is it that one writer's words come alive for me, while another's lie dead on the page?

Samuel R. Delany's classic 1975 novel, the very long, sexually explicit, racially charged, and very strange Dhalgren — a book I discovered when I was 10 or 11 (or maybe 12) and to which I have returned again and again and again (I lost track somewhere after my 20th re-read) — is one of those novels so rich in language, invention, character, and humour (more about which see below) that I have often thought it should have been the subject of numerous dissertations, of long debates in magazines (and later, online), as well as garnering the sort of fan fiction that Star Trek or Star Wars did and does.

It is a novel that sold over a million copies in the first few years after its release as a paperback original, and one that has (mostly) stayed in print ever since; it is one that a lot of writers seem to esteem highly, but it doesn't seem to have garnered the sort of critical attention it deserves.

The relatively slender collection of essays and reviews edited by Bill Wood (who doubles as Delany's assistant, among other things), On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, is an attempt to rectify that problem — or at least, to gather together what has been written about that novel.

And, despite the fact that the book is not quite the one I had hoped for, it is a good one, though it left me with the strange feeling that I am not the sort of reader Delany might have expected — would take pleasure in his singular novel. Certainly, if this volume's academic essays are anything to go by, the pleasures I have taken from that novel are not the ones that interest literary critics.

Read more ...

Where has C.J. Cherry been all my life?

Where has C.J. Cherryh been all my life? An SFWA Grandmaster since 2016, she has been producing hard science fiction and space operas since 1976, yet — unless some of her short fiction has crossed my path — I am almost certain that none of her novels have until now.

I'm going to blame that reader's omission on the fact she has been published by DAW Books, which for decades was an outfit whose covers somehow read amateurish to me. With very few exceptions, nothing published by DAW ever weighted my shelves.

Pity that, if Cherryh's Foreigner is anything at all to go by.

Read more ...

There are in this world good books, and there are bad books, but especially, there are mediocre books, novels that briefly entertain and which are then discarded by the reader and quickly forgotten. Nothing right or wrong with them, just disposable products — mind-candy, as some have put it.

And sometimes that is what a reader wants: a distraction, light entertainment to wyle away a couple of hours on a train or bus, when sleep is not to be had but one doesn't have the energy to imbibe something of substance.

If I were a more high-fallutin' reader, I suppose I would disdain mere "reads", but I admit it: I sometimes like to simply distract myself with words and story. What rankles, is when mediocrity is trumpeted as greatness, when light entertainment is likened to Art.

Which brings us to one of Neil Gaiman's first solo novel, one whose blurbs liken it variously to the works of George Lucas, Monty Python, John Milton(!), Douglas Adam, Doctor Who and, most eggregiously, Lewis Carrol's Alice In Wonderland. Does Neverwhere deserve such sometimes lofty comparisons? Read more ...

More than 40 years later, this gift is still with me, and still makes me weep.

May 30, 2020 — Some gifts just keep on giving, and this omnibus hard-cover edition of The World of Pooh, which includes A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, is one I have returned to again and again.

I reviewed the book(s) back in 2010 — I see now I posted it on my 45th birthday —, and have re-read the books more than once in the intervening decade, so I can confidently state that I love Milne's masterpiece in my fifties as much as I did in my forties (and thirties, and twenties).

It's not news that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I have a soft spot for space opera; I confess, the big space base (which I initially mistook for a starship of some sort) adorning the cover of Neal Asher's novel, The Departure, helped sell me on it. As it turned out though, The Departure hardly qualifies as space-opera and only squeaks by as science fiction pretty much the way Superman does: on technicalities. Though it's set in the future and some of the action takes place in orbit and on Mars, the book is really just a narrated first-person shooter dressed up in some SF tropes — a corrupt and incompetent world government, artificial intelligence, robotic weapons and a trans-human genesis. But all that is only window-dressing. That spectacular cover is a gateway to lugubrious dialogue, sophomoric libertarian philosophy, hackneyed world-building and, especially, to one pornographic blood-bath after another. The Departure is one of the worst books I have read in a very long time. More boring than Atlas Shrugged (which I reviewed a while back), it drips with just as much contempt for ordinary human beings. Unlike Rand's John Galt though, Asher's superman does much of his killing at first-hand. Does this novel have any redeeming qualities? The short answer is "no". The long answer lives behind this link.

'Well, you know, I just — I was thinkin' that I'd just nip it in the bud. Before it gets worse. 'Cause they were talkin' in health class about how pregnancy can lead to ... an infant.'

It's not giving much away to say that Juno MacGuff does not nip her pregnancy, "in the bud" or otherwise. Instead, after a brief flirtation with abortion, the 16 year-old opts to carry the foetus to term and give the baby up for adoption. Significantly, Juno is not punished for her transgression (except insofar as the pregnancy itself meet be considered a punishment) persons seeking in the entrails of Juno any overt anti-abortion, pro-choice, pro- or anti-sex or other coded messages are in for a serious disappointment. The movie's eponymous title gives the game away. Juno is a story about (nearly) a year in the life of a teenage girl named "Juno". It is not an issue movie, or a cautionary tale, or a call to arms. The fact that Juno is about a pregnant 16 year-old girl does not mean it is "about" teenage pregnancy. At its heart and despite its subject-matter, Juno is a romantic comedy. Where we might once have had Katherine Hepburn as a wise-cracking career-woman in a man's world, we now have Ellen Page as a wise-cracking teenager, who is every bit as independent as Hepburn ever was, if in a very different world. (Spoilers ahead, but not many; this is a movie whose surprises are worth keeping.)

Fʀɪᴅᴀʏ, Aᴘʀɪʟ 17, 2020 — If art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, so too is filth. Back in 2012, I saw Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan's then-current, and ever-so-serious psychological drama film, Chloe, around the same time that I saw Matthew Vaughn's controversial super-hero movie, Kick-Ass. I thought the world of one, and held the other in contempt. Read on to find out which was which.