Leviathan, out in a pretty gorgeous hardcover recently, doesn't feel like merely the latest iteration of the slew of "coming of age in dystopia" young-adult novels, even though that description pretty much fits: The book takes place at the start of an alternate-history World War I that looks to be every bit as bloody and horrifying as the real version. Nor does Leviathan feel like the umpteenth vaguely steampunk (or in this case, diesel-punk) book to come down the pike.

There are a few reasons for this. Most notably, Westerfeld leavens his dark wartime tale with a more-than-generous amount of humor and lightness — one character's catchphrase, "Barking spiders!", has already become a daily utterance among people of my acquaintance. But also, Westerfeld throws in enough odd twists to make his own peculiar alt-history seem quite unmistakable.

This seems like a good place to warn that there'll be spoilers in this review.

So as you might already have heard, Leviathan takes place in a very different version of Europe — the Germans and Austrians have fantastical machines, including Walkers (massive diesel-powered stomping machines that wouldn't be out of place among Star Wars' AT-ATs) and weird running machines. Meanwhile, though, Britain and some of its allies have developed a very different technology — in this timeline, Darwin discovered DNA, and now the British are able to recombine DNA strands to engineer new life-forms, including weaponized bats that eat and shit flechettes, and the Leviathan itself, a kind of floating whale kept aloft by the hydrogen created by the creatures in its belly.

So instead of merely being a conflict between two power blocs in Europe, World War I becomes the conflict between Britain's genetically-engineering Darwinists and Austria/Germany's mechanistic Clankers.

Into this odd (and somewhat implausible) alternate timeline, Westerfeld throws in two different young protagonists who are coming of age on opposite sides. Alek is the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sets off the war in the first place, and because Alek could be next in line for the Archduke's throne (if his mother's commoner blood can be overcome) the Germans and Austrians will stop at nothing to destroy him. So his teachers take to the road in a walking machine, trying to stay one step ahead of the assassins who are trying to finish the job with the last family member.

Meanwhile, our other protagonist, Deryn Sharp, is a girl who pretends to be a boy so she can join the armed forces and fly through the skies on one of those dashing genetically engineered creatures. The plucky Deryn, now renamed Dylan, gets swept off to sea on a "Huxley," (a sort of floating jellyfish, I think), and winds up getting rescued by the Leviathan, becoming the newest member of her crew. Despite the constant risk of exposure, Deryn/Dylan never hesitates to throw herself into the midst of danger, scaling the heights of the Leviathan's rigging in the midst of peril at sea, and braving storms and enemy aircraft to do her duty and prove herself the best midshipman aboard. (She's the one who exclaims "Barking spiders!" at opportune moments.)

So both protagonists are guarding secrets with their lives, and they're both on the cusp of discovering first-hand just how ruinous the war the older generation has engineered will become. It's a good recipe for both protagonists to figure out who they really are, aside from the expectations that people have placed on them. Alek and Deryn figure out how to work the machines and organic creatures that they ride inside of, but at the same time we see them learning (by trial and error) to navigate the weird world of adult society, which is bumpier and more fault-prone than a thousand diesel-powered walking machines.

And the machines-vs-monsters war seems to hint at becoming a framework for a larger debate about which is preferable: to surround ourselves with raw technology, or to adapt nature to serve our purposes. The book (which is just the first volume in a new series) hints that the only real answer is a fusion between the two elements.

Leviathan is worth reading just for the larger-than-life adventures against a fascinatingly rendered backdrop of weird machines and weirder creatures — and Keith Thompson's illustrations, some of which we've featured before, add an extra layer of awesomeness to the mix as well. But as a new spin on the theme of young people discovering their place in an insane world, it's a genuinely memorable story.

Pavane was one of the first (and sadly, not the last) books that defeated me. I picked the book as part of a ninth grade reading assignment, and I found it dense, unclear, and just generally too much of a slog to get through. (Also, I was busy doing more important stuff, like procrastinating.) I barely got through 20% of the book but still managed to bluff my way successfully through the final assignment, which I imagine is mostly because my teacher knew nothing about it either. It wouldn't be until a couple years later that I made another attempt at reading it, and once again I found it dense, unclear...and brilliant.

But let me back up. The divergence at the heart of Pavane is compelling, if a bit Anglocentric. In 1588, Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated, and the Spanish Armada goes onto defeat the British fleet. King Philip of Spain senses an opportunity to seize greater power, and swiftly conquers all of northern Europe. The power of the papacy is restored, the Reformation is crushed, and Europe slides back into the Middle Ages. And then, four centuries later, the story begins.

The book takes its name from a courtly medieval dance performed in six parts plus a coda. Similarly, Pavane is divided into six "measures", the loosely connected novellas that move the story along, as well as a closing coda that throws everything that came before it into serious question. Keith Roberts originally wrote five of these stories for Science Fantasy, and then collected them in 1968, along with a sixth story and the coda, to create the book's current incarnation.

The world of Pavane is equal parts rich detail and maddening ambiguity. The dominant vehicles of England in 1968 are steam-powered traction engines, which haul goods from place to place in lieu of railroads and must evade the marauding thieves known as routiers. Messages are transmitted over great distances using semaphore towers, which can relay coded signals over hundreds of miles in a matter of hours. The Inquisition is still in full swing, and now requires artistically inclined monks to serve as court reporters.

But for all those clear pieces of information, there's at least as much that goes only partially explained. Multiple references are made to faeries and old ones and the remarkable abilities such beings have. Are they truly magical, or does Clarke's third law come into play? On multiple occasions, characters encounter bits of seemingly advanced technology, but Roberts refuses to describe them clearly, perhaps on the grounds that none of the characters in Pavane would understand them anyway. The coda in particular seems to push any chance of fully understanding the book out of reach, but that can be part of the fun.

As is to be expected of a story collection, Pavane is somewhat uneven. The opening entry, "The Lady Margaret", is probably the most straightforward, at least in part because it has to give the reader enough exposition to understand what the hell is going on. "The Signaller" starts out in a similar vein, as it traces its protagonist's journey from lowly commoner to signal operator, but it concludes on a mysterious note that sets the tone for the subsequent stories.

"Brother John" and "The White Boat" are two of the most opaque stories, and as such two of the most difficult, but the hints that they do parcel out are crucial to the overall mysteries surrounding the world of Pavane. "Lords and Ladies" and "Corfe Gate" pick up on the family first seen in "The Lady Margaret", and probably represent the greatest narrative successes of the book. "Corfe Gate", in particular, packs a major dramatic wallop, as the long-delayed rebellion finally begins and technology starts to come back into the world.

Pavane is neither a glorification nor vilification of the Catholic Church. Obviously, Roberts's entire premise rests on the assumption that a dominant Church would set back the progress of humanity by centuries, which isn't exactly a positive statement. But, as with most things in the book, there is more going on here, and at least one character articulates a fascinating counterargument, that maybe humanity needs to be protected from itself and its runaway technology every so often. It's a paternalistic argument, to be sure, and one you (or I) won't necessarily agree with, but there's no simple reading of the book's religious politics.

I'm fascinated by the idea of lyrical storytelling - something that doesn't exactly tell a concrete story, but keeps dancing around its point long enough for you to get the idea. This is both the great joy and great frustration of Pavane. It's entirely appropriate for it to take its name from the dance, as it is stately, complex, and somewhat obscure. This is a book to read once, get stuck, return to with a clear head, blast through, and then read again in search of deeper meanings. They are definitely there, and they are definitely worth finding.

Pavane goes in and out of print, but it is readily available from any number of secondhand booksellers, generally for rock bottom prices. That's not a reflection of its quality so much as its forgotten status. It never attained the stature of such other early alternate history works as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. Its more historically obscure divergence point, heavily British subject matter, and dense writing style are three immediately obvious reasons why that might be, but that's no reason to keep ignoring it. If you're looking for a book that's actually worth the challenge of reading it, I'd recommend Pavane. I certainly don't regret coming back to it, even if I'm still not entirely sure what I read.

Makers is written by Cory Doctorow, that cape and goggles-wearing editor of Boing Boing, and author of such novels as Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Little Brother. This latest volume touches on many of the topics Doctorow has become famous for obsessing over: intellectual property rights and open source, the tension between individual and institution, his emotionally complicated relationship with Disney, how technology is gradually changing our culture, transhumanism, and ordinary people who make really cool shit.

The novel is set in that fifteen minutes into the future that is Doctorow's forte, at a time when Silicon Valley has begun to disintegrate more subtly than Detroit, but perhaps as thoroughly. At a press conference, Landon Kettlewell, the CEO of a newly merged Kodak/Duracell (termed "Kodacell" by a snarky tech journo), announces a bold new direction for the company: he plans to scout talented people from all over the country who make cool stuff, fund them, and find a way to quickly monetize their ideas time and time again. Many are skeptical, but business writer Suzanne Church — who once covered the Detroit scene and finds herself increasingly, if unconsciously, disillusioned with the Bay Area — is intrigued by Kodacell's new endeavor. After a few flirtatious interactions with Kettlewell (a maverick of an executive who insists that the people close to him call him by absurd nicknames like "Kettlebelly" and "Kettledrum"), Church finds herself embedded with Kodacell and flies to a depressed Florida suburb to meet Kodacell's first idea tank. There she finds Perry Gibbons and his obese sidekick Lester Banks, a pair of scavenger-artists who design elaborate mechanical art pieces for wealthy collectors: simple difference engines that spew M&Ms, crews of robotic Elmo dolls reprogrammed to drive cars. Perry and Lester are pros at repurposing technology, though they've never had an eye for the practical. They are soon joined by Tjan, a Kodacell moneyman who helps them develop products with mass appeal, rapidly get them to market, and then start the process all over again when imitators flood the market.

The first portion of Makers reads very much like a manifesto. The characters make enough pretty speeches about moral capitalism that I sometimes suspected it was being ghostwritten by an undead, philosophically reformed Ayn Rand. But the gleeful moneymaking of those early chapters isn't about the glory of the high-powered executive or developing a greed-is-good social code; it's about giving people power over their own destinies, giving people the ability to build things, to take pride in their communities (all communities — not just those located in major cities), and the notion that in order to sell things to people, you need to make sure they have the money to buy them. Thanks to Suzanne's vivid chronicles of Perry and Lester's innovations and Kodacell's early success, they all find themselves at the center of a New Work movement. Former cubicle jockeys flee their metropolises for smaller cities and suburbs and get their hands dirty — serving their neighbors and themselves instead of just serving their corporate masters — in an ephemeral golden age of American innovation.

But it quickly becomes clear that good ideas and wide-eyed idealism alone won't save America, and Makers shifts from manifesto to novel, albeit a novel still very concerned with the social problems plaguing America. The country's obesity problem takes an abrupt term with the development of the so-called "fatkins" treatments, where Russian biotechnology clinics reshape corpulent bodies as generically fit Adonises and tweak their metabolic systems to require metric tons of empty calories. As the treatments catch on, the fatkins become one of the nations' dominant cultures, with their own restaurants, dating styles, and demographic box. There is a great deal of frustration with government intrusion, especially concerning a shantytown of squatters who view their brand of community building as a new frontier. And there's similar frustration with the legal system, the need for intellectual property and formalized institutional structures, though it's coupled with the recognition that foregoing these legal protections carries dangerous consequences.

It's a dense, and always interesting reading experience, even if it has its warts. Subtlety has never been a virtue of Doctorow's novels, and Makers is no exception. The story has its villains, and even when they possess the capacity for redemption, a good deal of mustache-twirling goes on. Suzanne Church has a Dagny Taggert knack for making brilliant men fall in love with her, and though our other heroes are flawed, they seem in many ways the perfect models of idea men and executives.

The most frustrating aspect of Makers, however, may be the most honest. We see the rise and fall of various projects and innovations over the years, and Doctorow fills his world with wondrous technologies and forward-thinking people. But when things fall apart, as they periodically do, it's often because of interpersonal issues, because disagreements get in the way of big, brilliant ventures. It's not a crack at Doctorow as a writer; it's just that he's so adept at raising our spirits and making us believe in these superhuman people that when they fall prey to the ugly foibles of the real world, it's a bit of a letdown. Affection and optimism, even when a bit overblown, is a better look on him, and the most engaging portions of Makers are the ones that harness that.

Still, Makers is a book for the lovers of technology, for the gleeful optimists more than the cynics. It's for the people who love the kooky engineering projects you see on Boing Boing, for the people who believe that, as the poster says, "The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty." It's for the people who can't wait to own a 3D printer, and who believe that while technology has its missteps, it's going to change our lives in wonderful and unexpected ways. It's for the people who hate Disney's corporate tactics, but still get a thrill at the idea of visiting the Magic Kingdom; for the people who believe that, even if they can't change the world, they can at least improve their little corner of it. It's for the people who think that, while the future may not be all jetpacks and hover cars and all the world's people people singing Kumbaya, we as individuals have the power to make it awesome in its own right.

Makers is currently out in hardcover, but you can read the serialized novel for free on Tor.com.

The blend of urban fantasy and detective fiction seems like a sure-fire win. We can seen the modern roots of both in none other than Edgar Allen Poe. There are early examples of the Occult Detective such as Professor Flaxman-Low or the hard to find Victor Iff stories by Aleister Crowley. The type shows up often in TV, comics, and books; the scruffy-looking rugged individualist — a wizard for hire, freelance exorcist, or just a jumped-up London street punk with a pack of Silk Cuts and a noggin full of of Arcane Lore.

I've often been let down by these paranormal investigators in novels. Glenn Cook, Jim Butcher, and Simon R. Green have written very popular series of this type but the appeal is of a the tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top variety. It can be fun, addictive but really just popcorn fare. Only Mike Carey's Felix Castor series has ever made me go, "wow, this is some good writing!" Even with some "surprise" twists that I could see coming in the first third of the book, Carey approaches the story like a hard-boiled thriller of the first water, not a parody. While not yet of this calibre, John Levitt's Dog Days series combines a gritty street sense with a realistic use of magic — for a given value of reality, of course.

As we learned from this year's World Fantasy Con, a world where the supernatural is real and commonplace is going to be very different from the one we know. It's ridiculous to assume that, oh let's say St. Louis, would be recognizable with demons and vampires running around openly. There may be subcultures that think they are underground and hidden (BDSM, Goths, Accordion Players) but the truth is the general population is just trying hard to ignore them. I just don't buy that actual wizards and the like could remain hidden from the rest of society. A common conceit in these contemporary urban fantasy worlds is that all the magical types have agreed to keep their presence hidden from mere mortals. This is because, umm... peasants with pitchforks and torches will tax them out of existence? I'm a bit fuzzy on that part. To keep everybody in line there's usually some ancient organization imaginatively called the Watchers, or The Council of Elders.

In Levitt's series people magical abilities ("practitioners" in North America, the Brits still use the term "sorcerers") have always been around but in very small numbers. They are by and large all loners not big on hierarchical structures and content to remain hidden from view. In each city or region there is always one practitioner with more talent and ambition than the others who enforces the general agreement to not freak out the squares. In San Francisco this self-appointed chief is Victor, supercilious with a vast fortune of mysterious origin. He reminds me a bit like a more generous version of the second eponymous character in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Victor is willing to let the others play magician but ready to destroy anyone who uses magic for personal gain or threatens to reveal the game to the mundane world. To that effect he hires other talented practitioners to sniff out troublemakers and ride herd on the local magic community.

Our protagonist Mason (everyone has just one name because they're cool like that) was one of Victor's enforcer but left to pursue a career in music. Fortunately Mason is a very talented guitarist and makes a comfortable if bohemian living playing in local jazz clubs. Poor but without Victor breathing down his neck, he's glad to tool around in his beat-up old van, drifting in and out of disastrous romances, and hanging out with Lou, his dog, sort of. Lou looks like a miniature Doberman Pinscher with undocked ears and tail. In reality he is an ifrit, magical creature that acts as a familiar for a select lucky few practitioners. Mason and others with ifrits are source of jealousy in their community but no one knows where these creatures come from or why they only choose certain people. Lou may be smarter and stronger than a real dog with preternatural senses but he still has a dog's brain or lack there of. This loveable scamp sniffs butts, burrows through trash cans for the choice meals, and is terribly concerned about the threat squirrels pose to modern society. I am happy to report that the magic dog does not talk. That would have been unbearable.

I find choice of the term Ifrit for Louie and his ilk to be odd. They usually appear as smallish animalsl suitable for perching on laps or shoulders, but have been glimpsed in what may be their true form. Is there a connection between them and the beings "of smokeless fire" from Arabic legend? Other strange creatures occasionally turn up. Some are former practitioners who have become too strong and begin to resembling trolls or werewolves of legend. Japanese hungry ghosts or demons out of medieval grimores can also be summoned for nefarious purposes. There's even a Wendigo that's more Algernon Blackwood than Ojibwa legend and becomes something like a very disturbing Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. Even scholars like Mason's friend and mentor, Eli, cannot explain what these entities really are, manifestations of the practitioners' will clothed in cultural archetypes or visitors from Another Place entirely.

Actually it's odd that as old as the magic practitioner community is, they're fuzzy about where magic comes from and why it even works— the characters address this openly and I can't decide if this is a bug or a feature. Levitt has been dancing around the question of ifrits and other mysteries in the last three books. He might be making it up as he goes along but there seems to be some sort of plan. I always enjoy his writing enough to let him lead me on for another book.

Of course in each book Some Danger will threaten San Francisco's loose-knit practitioner community. Mason with Lou by his side, like a knight errant of old, plunge into the fray to find What the Hell is Going On and save his friends. Despite their differences snooty Victor is happy to use Mason to flush out the danger and refers to shiftless young man as "his investigator". This is not due to Mason's keen analytical mind, he's the first to admit he's not the swiftest on the uptake. What Victor values is the lad's unique expression of magical talent. A gift that appears related to his musical ability – Improvisation.

Even powerful practitioners rely on carefully prepared materials, complicated chants, or herbal concoctions. A small minority follow the Black Arts and use all the sinister drama of pentagrams, black candles, and blood sacrifice. Other than being more dickish than average these Black Practioners seem to be an unfairly maligned bunch. There's something about ritual that makes it easier for practitioners to focus their will and power. Mason doesn't need that, he can borrow what he needs from his immediate surroundings. On the fly he blends the qualities of moonlight, the solidity of a brick wall and an abandoned umbrella to fashion a protective spell. He can borrow flight from a flock of pigeons or the absorbency of a thick carpet for a stealthy approach. This makes Mason a the go-to guy in sudden and unfamiliar circumstances. I think Victor also values Mason as Cannon Fodder but hey, that's what makes a great administrator.

The passages describing this type of magic have a fluid creativity that's a lot harder than it looks. Levitt uses this same grace and authority writing about Mason's music; whether the deep internal process of doing a solo on stage or the serious business of hanging out in bars and jamming. I recognized a lot of familiar scenes setting up gigs, moving gear, and joking with the band (Hey, What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? A drummer!). It should be of no surprise to find that author John Levitt is also an accomplished jazz guitarist who spends part of his year in San Francisco. I've seen him play and he's got some serious chops. I also am very impressed with his descriptions of my hometown. He may possibly write the most authentic modern San Francisco I've ever read in genre fiction. Many others (Sorry, Chris Moore) come close but rely on too many postcard shots. Levitt with economy and an unflinching eye, portrays the look and shifting character of our many different neighborhoods.

So yeah, write what you know. Levitt also knows gritty street scenes and has a keen grasp of the Crime Novel and that is very evident in the Dog Days series . He wrote two thrillers, Carnivores and Ten of Swords, about a decade back as J.R. Levitt. He also served eight years with the Salt Lake City Police Department. Cops have the best stories, every day they meet a wide variety of interesting people having the worst day of their lives. You could see how this would drive many officers crazy or turn to writing. Levitt told me that he feels Urban Fantasy owes more to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler than to J.R.R. Tolkien or E.R. Eddison. He loves this sub genre and is currently at work on the fourth Dog Days book. I'm looking forward to seeing the mysteries about Mason and Lou's magical world answered but I want more from John Levitt. I'd love to see him drop this series and try something with a little more bite. This was a fine read, much more satisfying than the guilty pleasure popcorn of the Dresden Files or the Nightside books but still a bit too... cute. The Crime Thriller and Detective Novel are very well suited for the trapping of the fantastic and I believe readers are hungry for something meatier than the usual fare. Just tossing out a bone here. Fetch!

Unleashed may be purchased here or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to all the magic doggies of San Francisco as Chris Hsiang, he has bacon.

Oh, and here's a spoiler warning, although I'll try not to spoil anything too much.

Eclipse Three should be required reading among anyone who wants to write short stories — or, for that matter, among anybody who still clings to the hope that short fiction can be enriching. The storytelling in this volume is, for the most part, both polished and bumpy — that is, it gives you the assurance from the first sentence that you're in the hands of a storyteller who knows what s/he is doing, but it also contains lots of irregularities and odd surprises. These are almost all stories by people who know how to set up, and subvert, expectations without seeming manipulative or crass.

I had high hopes for Eclipse Three already — the first two volumes from editor Jonathan Strahan were superb (you can read my review of volume two here.) And the list of contributors for the third volume is pretty awe-inspiring, including Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, Maureen McHugh, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Nicola Griffith and Paul Di Filippo. (Not to mention a lovely, previously unpublished cover by the late Richard Powers.)

But it's actually better than I'd hoped. Pretty much all I need to say about the quality of the stories in this volume is that the Peter S. Beagle entry does not stand out. By which I mean, it's as rich and clever and epic-feeling as any Peter Beagle short story — but you don't feel as though you've stumbled on the one standout story in the book. A number of the other stories in the book are just as instantly engrossing, and have that "personal but also huge and world-encompassing" feeling that Beagle does so well.

A lot of the best stories in this volume follow a main character who encounters a stranger who opens up a bizarre world. In Beagle's story, it's a magician who meets a woman whose husband and little girl have died, and shows her how to play a trick on death. In Molly Gloss' "The Visited Man," it's a weird (and not very good) painter who befriends a man whose wife and son have also died, forcing the widower to adopt more and more animals and go in search of night ghosts. In Nnedi Okorafor's "On The Road," it's a little boy who shows up at a woman's door in Nigeria, carrying with him some kind of terrible hunger that hollows you out from the inside.

There are also a lot of stories about people's relationships with odd communities, including Fowler's opening piece, where a rebellious teenage girl gets sent to a nightmarish kind of "boot camp" where her spirit is broken (and the camp turns out to have a weird secret). Or Di Filippo's "Yes, We Have No Bananas," in which a guy gets evicted and goes to live on a houseboat in a world that we (and he) gradually realize is an alternate universe. In Pat Cadigan's "Don't Mention Madagascar," a woman gets caught up in a world of travelers who are being forever being shuttled around impossible destinations — is it the spirit world? Alternate universes? — and they form an odd sort of community.

A lot of the stories have to do with creativity and the life of the artist, including Maureen McHugh's "Useless Things," the story of a sculptor who gets robbed and finds herself hardening against the world, and Elizabeth Bear's mermaid-meets-guitarist tale. Most of all, many of these stories deal with loneliness and loss, and the strange discoveries that come to people who've given up on finding themselves in this world.

The best story in the book, though, is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," the jaw-dropping story of freakish biochemistry experiments, venture capital, and a lesbian lapdance that goes much further than anyone expects. It's reminiscent of the thrilling leap-in-the-dark feeling of her novel Slow River, but feels even more intense and weird, maybe because nothing could be weirder than a strip club in Marietta, Georgia.

Though a few stories in the book didn't thrill me quite as much as the rest, and purists may protest that a few of these stories are more literary than speculative, Eclipse Three is almost entirely a great prize. I didn't realize how much my faith in the short stories had dwindled, after reading dozens of unsustaining tales, until I read these stories. It made me want to go back to writing short fiction myself, something I've been neglecting, in the vain hope that I can write something half as engrossing as the tales in this collection. [Borders]

Set in the near future, Year of the Flood is a retelling of Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic classic Oryx and Crake from the perspective of characters who were only marginally involved in the massive act of bioterror unleashed by the previous novel's sociopathic Utopian scientist Glenn (AKA Crake). While Glenn and his damaged, upper-class buddies were cooking up a virus to end the world, the peaceful Green separatist Gardeners lived in squats, tending vast urban rooftop gardens. The Gardeners' leader, who goes by the name Adam One, preaches a kind of new agey Catholic environmentalism, complete with days devoted to saints (like Saint Rachel Carson) and hymns.

We follow two women, the young, credulous Ren and the toughminded Toby, after they join the Gardeners. Slowly they learn the skills necessary to survive the social collapse – the "flood" - that Adam One predicts will come about as the result of rampant genetic engineering and pollution. Circumstances sweep the two women back out into the "exfernal world," and they begin lives as service workers – Ren works at a sex club called Scales and Tails, while Toby takes a job managing a spa called AnooYoo that does biotech beauty treatments on wealthy women.

While Ren is relatively happy dressing like a bird and doing trapeze stripping for her clients, Toy stays in contact with the Gardeners via a secret chat room. She knows vaguely that her former brethren have splintered into two groups: Those who prefer Adam One's peaceful ways, and those who work with Glenn on acts of bioterror. Still, Toby is unprepared for what happens next: Trying to purge the Earth of its greatest threat, Glenn creates a human-targeted supervirus that spreads like wildfire across the globe, literally melting people in their tracks.

Ren and Toby manage to survive, but now they have to deal with fighting off genetically-engineered animals gone wild. The pigs with human brain cells and the half-lion, half-lamb creatures developed by Bible literalists who want lions to lay down with lambs are particularly pernicious. The two women inch towards their inevitable reunion across a landscape heaped with the refuse of scientific innovation gone horribly wrong, though we are never certain that they or any humans will ultimately survive.

Unlike Oryx and Crake, whose main characters come across as irredeemable, Year of the Flood is an oddly hopeful book. The Gardeners' odd survivalist wisdom is exactly the kind of belief system you'd need to survive a global pandemic. Members of the group know how to forage in an urban wasteland, and what to eat in the forest. Equally important, they possess a reverence for the ecosystem that's completely missing from traditional Western religion.

It's clear that Atwood has thought a lot about the kinds of helpful myths she'd implant in human history if she could restart the world: That's why every few chapters we hear a sermon from Adam One, along with a hymn. It's an interesting exercise in speculative worldbuilding. If the Gardeners can survive – and seems as if they might – their beliefs could become the moral lifeblood of a civilization founded on renewable resources rather than environmental exploitation.

For this reason alone, Year of the Flood is an interesting companion piece to Oryx and Crake. In the latter, Atwood investigated what it would take to genetically engineer the perfect posthumans. Glenn and his colleagues secretly build these perfect beings by synthesizing hardy, disease-resistant humanoids who eat nothing but leaves, communicate through healing purrs and birdsong, and experience no sexual shame. Now, with Year of the Flood, she imagines what's required to culturally engineer a new human society out of novel mythologies and social structures created by the Gardeners.

We never know for sure whether the genetic or social experiment will save what's left of humanity, and that's a good thing. Atwood pulls us into the lives of her characters so that we're forced to contemplate the true and deadly precariousness of our future as a species. You may not agree with the way she's framed the problem – the science in this novel is fanciful at best – but it's hard to deny that she's asking the right questions.

Year of the Flood via Borders

The man behind the Perry Bible Fellowship is Nicholas Gurewitch. He produced PBF strips for the Daily Orange, a college newspaper, and for his website for nearly a decade, but the whole strip's run has never been collected in print in one place.

Until, that is, the Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack came out earlier this year. The book collects nearly every strip produced for the Perry Bible Fellowship, including loving homages to famous comic artists, meditations on sex and death, and a healthy dose of science fiction and fantasy strips.

In fact, the science fictiony strips tend to be among the best in the book. Gurewitch is at his best when he's exploring the absurdity of life and death, and there's no better way to explore this absurdity than with a good apocalypse or a story of science gone mad.

For instance, in "Sun Love," seen above, the Sun and the Earth's love affair, coupled with their casual disregard for humanity, amounts to an almost Lovecraftian tale of the horrors of an indifferent universe. But at the same time, it's also pretty cute. And damn funny.

And Gurewitch always has a healthy sense of fun. If a strip calls for it, he isn't afraid of a straight-forward gag, but he also isn't afraid to stretch a premise beyond its obvious conclusion and into something darker and more absurd, all without forgetting that humor is humor, be it dark and biting or light and fun.

An example of the former is "Astronaut Fall." It starts as a horrible, tragic moment during a space walk, but with the simple addition of a joyful child catching a "snowflake" on their tongue, the strip becomes an absurd death with a horrendously squick-inducing punchline.

An example of the latter, called "Super League," uses a super hero team to tell a joke that wouldn't be out of place in a "Dilbert" strip: a company making hiring decisions based on the applicant's ability to provide good coffee, not their skills. It's a pretty straightforward gag, but it's expertly executed and beautifully illustrated.

One caveat: some of the early strips, before the Perry Bible Fellowship found its unique voice, rely a little too heavily on anatomical jokes and innuendo. But no book is perfect, and this collection comes pretty close; as the book progresses, the crude anatomical jokes and innuendo become very clever anatomical jokes and layered innuendo.

And layered innuendo is one of Gurewitche's specialties. In "Zarflax," a hostile alien resorts to drastic means to try to lure in a hapless space adventurer. The result is essentially a space-bound anatomical visual pun.

It's overall a fantastic read, but if the collection has a weakness as a whole, it's that the experience is over way too quickly. The strips are one per page, and even at 256 pages, the hardbound book flies by too quickly. The upside of this is that the book merits multiple readings. Each time through these strips, I see new details that I might have missed in previous readings.

So peruse the strips below, and If you enjoy the strips you see here, the book is worth picking up. It includes bonus sketches, an interview with Gurewitch, and strips no longer available online. Plus, it makes a great conversation starter as a coffee table book. But only if you don't mind your conversations being about sex, death, irony, violence, and utter destruction. And laughter!

Buy The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack at Amazon

The Perry Bible Fellowship online

Chabon talks about how his eldest son startled a British attendant at the Smithsonian with his Dalek T-shirt, and then his other children had to regale the man with tales of their Cybermen and Time Lord shirts, until he understands they're a geek family. And then Chabon talks about how the new Doctor Who series has brought his family together, and sings the show's praises:

And if you aren't watching and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of the Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show's debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especial harsh pity of the geek.

As you might have gathered from its subtitle ("The Pleasures And Regrets Of A Husband, Father, And Son") Manhood For Amateurs is Chabon's collection of essays about being a man, and the various personas he's taken on. But even as he delves into the heart of his own struggles with maleness, Chabon invokes science fiction and comics, exploring topics as diverse as why Big Barda is the greatest superheroine, or why all futurism is now retro-futurism, and we've lost our starry-eyed optimism. Like manhood, these geek avatars gain their meaning from other people, they're public and subject to interpretation. They also change over time, like the Doctor. (Chabon, himself, has gone through incarnations, including being a "little shit" in his twenties, as he makes clear at various points.)

The Doctor Who essay, one of the last in the book, returns to the theme of the book's first essay: the solitary and communal sides of fandom. Chabon grew up, like many of us, as a solitary geek, with nobody to share his obsession with comics and science fiction paperbacks. The first essay talks about how he tried to start a local comic-book fan club, with his mother's help — they even paid $25 to rent a room for the first meeting, and only one other boy showed up, then immediately left before he could get sucked into this "loser's club." The Doctor Who essay is about how the new version of the show has given Chabon's children the gift of each other, and how fandom and families are the same, with their rituals and obsessions.

Most provocatively, in the earlier "Loser's Club" essay, Chabon even suggests that fandom and the artistic drive come from the same impulse, and even hints that fanfic and literature spring from the same well:

This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city — in every cranium — in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makees it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

Manhood For Amateurs isn't just notable for the honestly with which Chabon deals with every aspect of his life, including his insecurities and his relationships with women and his own children — it's also a more revelatory look at fan culture, and science fiction, through the lens of the personal essay. Anyone who's interested in discussing science fiction and its attendent genres for their personal as well as cultural significance should be checking out these essays.

More than ever, Chabon uses superhero comics, Star Wars toys and Doctor Who's Daleks as signposts to the masculine imaginary. He geeks out about these things as if they are the only points of certainty in a shifting, illusory world.

(The book is by no means perfect: At times, his opinion-spouting gets a little overwhelming, and by the time he gets to the section where he talks about women, about two-thirds of the way through, I was starting to wonder if Chabon really did live in some male-dominated enclave — but then a lot of the last third of the book is about women, and he addresses that criticism of his writing head-on. But my criticisms of the book mostly have nothing to do with its discussions of science fiction or geek culture, and they're pretty minor in any case.)

Manhood, Chabon seems to be saying, is improv. You create yourself on the fly, in roles as perplexing and diverse as husband, father, lover and friend, and hope to project an impression of knowing what you're doing. The fact that Chabon deconstructs masculinity while pulling together so many elements of science fiction turns nerd culture into a set of anchor points. You sort of expect Chabon to use comic-book and science-fiction icons to illuminate his inner world, the way in which superhero storytelling in Kavalier And Clay became a kind of emotional atlas. But it goes beyond that: one of the constants in Chabon's essays is the primacy of play, in the midst of all this role confusion. And geeking out is an essential ingredient of that play.

The discussions of play includes a very carefully considered history of Lego toys, and their development from abstract bricks to a world dominated by crudely representational minifigs. (We featured a "quote of the day" a while back, in which Chabon talked about how his kids were remixing these Lego sets and transcending the tyrannical corporate-sanctioned instructions.) He joins the chorus of people lamenting the fact that kids no longer roam free on their bicycles and skateboards. He narrates some bizarrely awesome-sounding games he and other kids played, based on the 1973 Planet Of The Apes TV series (not the movies, weirdly enough). And he talks about stargazing, and discovering our smallness in the cosmos, as well as the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock and how it's making him wonder why we've stopped obsessing about the far future.

All in all, Manhood For Amateurs is a much geekier book than you might have expected from its title, and yet also a much more personal book than most geeky essay collections. If you've suspected that fandom's signs and collections of ill-fitting clues were markers in someone else's inner cosmology, just as they are in yours, then you will definitely bond with this book.

When I first heard about Matt Youngmark's Chooseomatic book, I fully expected I'd get a fairly straightforward (perhaps even perfunctory) take on the zombie apocalypse where the only twist was the multithreaded, Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired storytelling layered over it. It's something we've seen before; last year, a pair of designers released a choose-your-own-ending film, The Outbreak, with a similar premise. But I was pleasantly surprised when the book arrived and I found a pink, chainsaw-wielding bunny on the cover and a note inside warning me to avoid the zombie kitten.

Zombocalypse Now doesn't just feature a pink stuffed rabbit; you are the pink stuffed rabbit, living in a world where stuffed animals walk, talk, and intermarry with the human population. As the book opens, you are waiting on what is sure to be another atrocious online date. And sure enough, when he or she shows up, they're disheveled, glassy-eyed, lacking in hygiene, and mumbling something about brains. You've been on so many bad dates that it takes you a while to figure out that they're undead, but soon enough, you're up to your fuzzy elbows in the walking dead.

From here there are, of course, multiple paths your bunny self could take from here. You could tag along with a renegade cop named Mittens (who, despite the name, is not a stuffed animal). You could visit your conspiracy theorist friend Ernie, who is convinced that the walking dead are powered by fluoride in the water. You could try to strike out on your own and bash in as many zombie brains as you possibly can. You just hope that the choices you make lead to your ultimate survival.

Spoiler alert: you usually end up zombie chow.

To get the full effect of Zombocalypse Now, you have to read through several of the plotlines. Some are, admittedly, stronger than others (there's an oddly rushed one where you go all I Am Legend and start experimenting on the zombies), but taken together, the stories do form a cohesive narrative, and the logic from one plotline still holds true in the others. For example, in several storylines, the zombies are unusually attracted to your car (as in licking the windshields), and in one of threads, we learn exactly why. The chilling and rather amusing cause behind the zombie outbreak is also key; you learn about it in certain storylines, but it plays a significant role in others — including one ending where you mistakenly believe you've survived.

Youngmark packs a lot of strange odds and ends into his zombie adventure, and cherrypicks references from a wide variety of genres: mob movies, cop dramas, the works of Stephen King, and The Postman, to name a few. There's even a moment where you let out the battle cry "Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!" The effect is over-the-top silliness, like someone set a particularly manic children's book in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Sure, it's a bit on the fluffy side, but I found myself eagerly flipping back to try out different plotlines — at first to see if I could survive, then to root out some of the book's more bizarre twists and turns. It's a satisfying way to spend a couple hours here and there, even if you do die most of the time.

And do watch out for that zombie kitten. It's a killer.

Set in the city of Ambergris that VanderMeer invented with his collection City of Saints and Madmen, the novel takes place after the once-oppressed "grey caps" have risen up from their underground ghettos and taken over the city. Mysterious and seemingly magical in previous stories, the grey caps are revealed in this novel - intriguingly - as bioengineers who can convert plants and animals into weapons, surveillance devices, superpowered implants, and even entire buildings. The city that was once run by industrial/colonial mafia-style companies is now entirely run by the grey caps, and our main character Finch has been enlisted to serve in their puppet police force.

VanderMeer is at his best when imagining the vast, alien, and yet strangely recognizable history of Ambergris. Built on the dead bodies of natives, then atop the oppressed grey caps' tunnels, and finally out of the imperial pursuits of warring companies, the city is like a puckered scar of historical traumas. Now its entire architecture is being rewritten by grey cap biotechnology, buildings evaporating into dust or rising up out of weird plants to form spongy, reeking structures. Half the citizens have been transformed by spore infections, converted into souped-up "partials" or simply killed by mushroom toxins.

The novel begins with ambiguous hero Finch investigating the extremely bizarre murder of a human and a grey cap, who appear to have been dropped improbably from a very great height onto a sofa in an apartment. Making matters worse is the fact that this investigation is being watched closely by his grey cap boss, who insists that he carry a spore gun that leaks weird fluids all the time.

Like any noir gumshoe, Finch finds himself drawn into a conspiracy far vaster than anything he'd imagined. With the help of his rebel librarian friend, and his spore-eaten partner, he discovers that the grey caps have a terrifying plan that involves two enormous towers they're building near the harbor. But he also discovers that there are insurgencies within insurgencies whose reach goes far beyond Ambergris' boundaries - possibly into other worlds. Finch's own family history connects him more deeply to the city's deep political structure than he ever realized.

Surreal and at times intoxicating, Finch is ambitious in a way that few genre novels ever are. VanderMeer has tried - and, often, succeeded - in blending fantasy, science fiction, and crime fiction into something delightfully evil and strange. He's converted the traditional hard edges of noir fiction into the foggy, fungal shapes of magical science realism. Especially when Finch is exploring Ambergris' new biotech contours, which inevitably lead into its industrial past, you get a visceral sense of what it means to discover that what you thought was magic was actually just advanced technology. This is a very difficult idea to depict using imagery and mood, but VanderMeer does it brilliantly.

There is a David Cronenberg feel to the universe of Finch, with its gooey guns and spore surveillance devices. But it's also a kind of Lawrence of Arabia story, which is what will keep you reading. You never quite know what sort of weird new narrative path you'll be led down, and that's exciting.

While the experiment of the novel is laudable, it sometimes fails frustratingly. The novel begins agonizingly slowly, which undermines the rapid pace required to tell a successful detective story. As if to make up for this problem, VanderMeer has written the entire novel in noir-esque sentence fragments that begin to grate on the nerves almost immediately. This is particularly tragic because so much of the author's charm lies in his lush prose.

While Finch may be flawed, it's ultimately a rewarding read. Even if you've never read any of VanderMeer's other Ambergris stories, it stands well on its own and is testimony to how mind-boggling and affecting science fiction can be when released from its usual cliches.

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have collected these nineteen stories to explore the supposed divide between mainstream literature and speculative fiction. They've written an eye-opening and informative introduction as well as compiled dozens of quotes by the individual authors on the subject of Sci-Fi vs. Literary Fiction or"Li-Fi"*. Writers and fans in the field have long complained of being marginalized by the general public and even more so by the literary elite. How did this happen and who's to blame? Does it even freakin' matter any more?

Before Hugo Gernsback there was no separate science fiction genre (or "scientificton" as Gernsback called it, Forrest Ackerman popularized the current two-word term). Writers from Mary Shelly, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Twain used themes of the fantastic in their works that are still considered classics of Literature today. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells explored advancements in contemporary science and technology and were lauded by audiences around the globe inspiring millions.

As Gernsback and later, John W. Campbell and others codified early science fiction traditions they were deeply mired in the pulp magazine traditions. Fun stuff to be sure, but the gee-whiz boys' adventure stuff was very lacking in well-rounded characters and well-crafted plotting. It has been pointed out recently that even notable award winners of the 1950s weren't really turning out timeless prose. Let's face it, the SF Ghetto was constructed from the inside out and zealously maintained from within.

Around 1970 followers of the New Wave movement like Moorcock, Aldiss, and Disch tried busting out of the ghetto but could never find a large enough audience. An incursion in the other direction occurred in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was shortlisted for the Nebula for Best Novel. It lost to Rendezvous with Rama which, with all due respect to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, is a novel with some cool science and a great setting where not much actually happens. In a 1998 Village Voice essay Jonathan Lethem called this moment "a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream". Really? Maybe it was just too soon. In the decades since Lethem made that morbid observation popular culture has become very accepting, if not downright starved for science fiction and its fantastical siblings. Granted, much of that is re-hashing Space Opera pastiches from the 50s or teen vampire fluff, but science fiction prose continues to grow, mature, and inspire. Besides, I really can't imagine Pynchon as a Guest of Honor at a big convention. Although he would probably like filking.

To me these concerns over genre distinctions are silly but will probably never go away. Booksellers and librarians will still need some classifications so that they can direct you to the right shelf. There will always be a handful of literary elitists in pooh-poohing our favorite books as escapist drek. And deep within the bowels of SF fandom, grumbles will continue about certain writers abandoning the field for snootier credentials (O hai Mr. Vonnegut & Ms. Atwood!). Or even worse, Outsiders coming in to completely destroy all their precious memories of Astro-King vs. the Bimborgs of Pluto (admit it, a remake of that would totally rock.). The thing to remember is that the distinctions between types of literature are not walls with razorwire to be patrolled. They are shifting vague zones— grey areas, if you will.

The Secret History of Science Fiction is all about authors mixing it up, exploring, Boldly Going where they like and never sacrificing quality. These stories are good enough to make The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley pop his cartoon monocle. You'll get profound and often disturbing looks at the human psyche and what we do to each other. The effects of science and technology upon society are also explored in this volume by writers who really know science fiction, not just slumming. Instead of quick summaries of these worthy reads I'm going to close with a few quotes by the authors about this whole imaginary divide of imaginations.

Gene Wolfe:

What we now normally consider the mainstream – so called realistic fiction – is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived.... It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. F you ga back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist.

Connie Willis:

The thing I have always liked best about science fiction is that it defies definition.
It keeps constantly reinventing itself – and just when you thought stories about robots or time travel or first contact had been done to death, it thinks of some brand-new story to tell.

T.C. Boyle:

I've thought about the domination of the literary arts by theory over the last 25 years — which I detest – and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level – moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

It seems to me that SF is standing, these days, in a doorway. The door is open, wide open. Are we just going to stand there, waiting for the applause of the multitudes? It won't come; we haven't earned it yet. Are we going to cringe back into the safe old ghetto room and pretend that there isn't any big bad multitude out there? If so, our good writers will leave us in despair, and there will not be another generation of them. Or are we going to walk through that doorway and join the rest of the city? I hope so. I know we can and I hope we do, because we have a great deal to offer – to art, which needs new forms like ours, and to critics who are sick of chewing over the same old works and above all to readers of books, who want and deserve better novels than they mostly get. But it will still take not only courage for SF to join the community of literature, but strength, self-respect, the will not to settle for the second rate. It will take genuine self-criticism. And it will include genuine praise.

Here is the complete Table of Contents:

Introduction by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
"Angouleme" Thomas M. Disch
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" Ursula K. Le Guin
"Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" Kate Wlihelm
"Descent of Man" T.C. Boyle
"Human Moments of World War III" Don DeLillo
"Homelanding" Margaret Atwood
"The Nine Billion Names of God" Carter Scholz
"Interlocking Pieces" Molly Gloss
"Salvador" Lucius Shepard
"Schwarzchild Radius" Connie Willis
"Buddha Nostril Bird" John Kessel
"The Ziggurat" Gene Wolfe
"The Hardened Criminals" Jonathan Lethem
"Standing Room Only" Karen Joy Fowler
"10^16 to 1" James Patrick Kelly
"93990" George Saunders
"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" Michael Chabon
"Frankenstein's Daughter" Maureen F. McHugh
"The Wizard of West Orange" Steven Millhauser

*That latter term was coined by that merry prankster Orson Scott Card. Say what you will about the guy, "Li-Fi" is pretty Goddamned fucking funny.

The Secret History of Science Fiction may be purchased here, here, or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Real Literary Critics as Chris Hsiang. He will not get off their lawns.

In the early years of the Cheney administration, my neighbor's house burned to the ground; and in her grieving give-aways, I inherited an unscathed copy of John Shirley's Really Really Really Really Weird Stories. I hadn't known my neighbor well, and I had obviously never been a huge reader of whatever exactly it was that Shirley was writing. So, it wasn't for another six months that I cracked the first page of the book, a story collection so creatively explosive, trembling with unashamed poetic license, that it become almost a talisman to me, a Yes from the Cosmos, a direction to an aspiring story-teller.

The most remarkable thing about that collection, perhaps, was that each of its four sections, did, as promised, get progressively weirder. And the first story, in which a street-walker in San Francisco answers a marriage ad from a Mexican B-actor who bills himself as the world's smallest man, was already weird enough. Charlie Manson only wishes he had the mental powers of the trailer park psychotics that lash out at Shirley's cold doctors and stuffy bureaucrats. The Virgin Mary only wishes that she could be revivified from the homely rubber of an ordinary beach ball.

Though his stories are grittier, more carnal, and far more menacing, Shirley's collection brought to mind a master from a different time. Shirley works with his post-punk urban decay, the aftermath of Reaganomics, in much the same way that Alfred Bester had worked with his epochally charged up-scale Madison Avenue of the 1950s, namely, picking it up like a snow globe with a city inside, shaking it up a few times, and letting it settle into his brilliant space-stories. Like Alfred Bester, Shirley struck me as a literary southpaw, a natural born story-teller, whose strong imagination defied the myriad rules of thumb that burden other authors. Faithful only to the caged beast that wants to burst out of each story, their work unfolds exactly the way you'd want it to unfold, passionate, unpredictable, uncannily true, and often funny enough that you stupidly try to retell the story at parties.

Much of what I've always loved about John Shirley pours out of his new novel, Bleak History.

In hero Gabriel Bleak, Shirley draws a fine portrait of a scruffy outsider who earns his living on the margins of society, as a bounty hunter, and of a young man whose psychic wounds go much deeper than his gory bad memories as a reluctant soldier in Afghanistan.

The hunter himself, we soon learn, is being hunted by a splinter group of American intelligence. In mercenary fashion, the CCA would like to "contain" Bleak's talents, and use them in a secret war against the nebulous Enemy. They've been watching him since birth, and in some ways, know more than Bleak about the source of his psychic gifts, which include the knowledge of when he is being observed, an ability to speak with ghosts, and the power to condense the energy of "the Hidden" into fireballs and ladders.

Shirley is ever the master of twining plots, each with their own energy, that come at each other with the inevitability of runaway trains.

In Bleak History, we are treated to a parapolitical story of the CCA, whose methods of keeping America safe go as far as kidnapping "talented" children, including Bleak's own brother, and keeping them in an adolescent (and emotionally larval) state. Halfway through the book, this plot line rams right into the compelling story of Troy Gulcher, a scuzzy crook who calls upon an old dark entity called Moloch. These two stories then intersect with a fictional piece of historical metaphysics, in which Sir Isaac Newton and a group of luminaries attempt to spare the world from another grueling Dark Age with the help of an extremely ancient bit of technology left deep inside the ice at the Magnetic North Pole. Into this mix, Shirley threads the story of the mystically perfect love which has, so far, skirted Gabriel Bleak, and a plot line in which Moloch, through the use of his human puppets, prepares to take over the world.

As these various plots thicken, each of the Faustian puppet masters find themselves the unwitting puppets. One by one, Gulcher and the others experience reversals of fate, until even the power mad general Forsythe, who is using the CCA, and these magical entities, lies in the dirt, babbling, impotently bemoaning what he's done.

What is so enjoyable about Bleak History, however, more than its head-strong plotting, more than all the spectacular and baroque metaphysics, is the way the author depicts the levels of human cruelty. I suppose the same could be said of Dante Alighieri. In any case, both authors show a loving touch in their canny portraits of morally repulsive men and women of their times. And both lay out a very pleasant variety of the faces one finds within every rotting institution, with its colorful monsters and gentleman failures.

While I consider this novel, in many ways, a work of genius, I did get a sense, at times, that the author himself was not exactly aware of where his unique strength lies. In many places, Bleak History moves on the page a bit like an action movie, where one can see every kick and grimace and plume of dust. Don't get me wrong. I heartily enjoy the exquisite shadenfreude that only Shirley evokes. But for me, the visceral effect was diluted by what came across as a readying of the story for another medium. Bleak History was strongest in those places, mostly in the little details, where the author gives himself to the madness of the story, and perhaps, to madness itself, and manages to bypass the kind of pre-thinking that can be harmful to the unscrupulous lifeblood of art.

What I love so much about Shirley's characters, at their best, is how they come off as such hilariously chipped tea cup specimens of humanity, so American, so horrible, so believable, and so very John Shirley. But in this book, I didn't detect that strong heartbeat. One can see what the characters in Bleak History are pointing towards. But I didn't feel them fully materialize, each as a world unto herself. Instead, the more authentically geisty dregs of humanity take a backseat, in this book, to a more accessible kind of oddball, who only really represents an oddball to that vast majority of normals. I feel as though it was well within John Shirley's reach, when he painted his gang of misfits (the so-called ShadowComm, who reluctantly accompany Gabriel Bleak) to add those few brushstrokes which would render them as something worthy of A Confederacy of Dunces, or A Feast of Snakes. It almost seems that some dark entity was exerting a force on the brilliant wordsmith, all along, so that his creations would instead come out as a better drawn bunch of X-Men.

On the other hand, perhaps the organic vitality of the characters suffers precisely because the book does so much. Bleak History takes the reader on a heady tour of demonology, love, crime, war, an intricate and homespun system of mysticism, the psychic surveillance state, unique variations on the Stockholm syndrome, the sorrows of every eternal misfit, and an apt critique of institutional thinking. There are plenty of thought-provoking tropes in the book, including self-enclosed realities the author calls pocket worlds, an autistic oracle, various ways a person might reach into another mind, and scientific explanations for Magic and the Occult. And like so much of Shirley's work, beneath the twisted story, the reader is treated to a Matryoshka series of dolls within lying, paranoid dolls.

The storyline for Death Troopers is pretty simple, really — an Imperial prison barge, during the years right before the original Star Wars movie, runs into some engine trouble. Good thing they find a Star Destroyer in the middle of nowhere, which they can cannibalize for parts. Unfortunately, the Star Destroyer has some kind of weird virus on board, which kills everyone it comes into contact with... and the people who die don't stay dead. And that's about it. The survivors from the prison barge have to run a gauntlet of Imperial zombies and try to escape in one piece, while facing their own personal traumas and uncovering a sinister biological weapons program that comes straight from Lord Vader himself.

Among others, we meet a sadistic prison guard, Sartoris, an idealistic prison doctor, Cody, and the Longo brothers, the two sons of Trig Longo, a smuggler whom Sartoris murdered. Everybody gets a nice story arc in between (and during) zombie attacks.

It's a quick read, and there's a lot of chasing around dark corridors and crawlspaces and the holds of abandoned spaceships. But the good news is Joe Schreiber, a horror veteran, finds enough twists and turns in the narrative to keep it thrilling. There are enough subplots and surprising nasties (like former officers aboard the Star Destroyer who've resorted to cannibalism and are as bad as the zombies) to keep things interesting. And a couple of characters you've actually met before do turn up, so you're not just stuck with a cast of newbies.

And Schreiber writes in a pleasingly intense, thriller style, managing to find new ways to convey terror and desperation. Like this bit, which I liked:

But there is nothing to worry about, Sartoris told himself, dropping the thought like a pebble into the deep well of his subconscious and waiting to hear some sort of telltale plink of reassurance. The silence that came back wasn't particularly reassuring.

Later on, he has neat bits about people running so hard, they have lactic acid in their joints and stuff. The visuals of deformed faces behind Stormtrooper helmets, and pits full of undead, howling Imperial officers, are vivid enough to make you cringe a bit, and the story's revelations hint at an evil greater than anything we've seen in Star Wars before: an unstoppable contagion that uses "quorum sensing" to lie in wait until it has enough numbers to overwhelm you completely.

The main problem with the novel is a slightly convenient, almost Deus Ex Machina ending. Apart from that, though, it's pretty much exactly what you want from a Star Wars zombie novel: monstrous evil, unspeakable horror, the grinding cruelty of the Empire, and a handful of petty criminals and rogues who discover their inner nobility at the exact last second. What else could you hope for? [Death Troopers at Borders.com]

Pop Apocalypse shares some kinship in its ideas with Dani and Eytan Kollin's The Unincorporated Man and Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. But the cultural phenomenon it most clearly evokes is The Hills. Yes, the quasi-reality show in which vapid twenty-somethings gallivant through Los Angeles. But it's not that Konstantinou is celebrating all things bleach blond and Hollywood. Quite the contrary, he sets forth the frightening proposition that The Hills might be our future.

Eliot R. Vanderthorpe Jr. is our Lauren Conrad. A failed academic (he never did finish his applied philosophy thesis on Elvis impersonators), Vanderthorpe is also a minor, sometimes unwilling, celebrity. Eliot's billionaire father, Eliot Sr., developed Omni, an advanced human recognition software that can identify any human on Earth from any photo or video. While being able to spot suspected terrorists and fugitives from the law is all well and good, most people use Omni as part of the celebrity machine. With tabloids and news outlets paying big bucks for celebrity footage, soon everyone becomes a member of the paparazzi, filming everyone and everything all the time in hopes of a big payoff. And, in a world where everyone's every move is being recorded, anyone can end up a celebrity.

This new celebrity culture has two drastic results. First, a person's name and reputation become a commodity, a thing that can be bought and sold. Depending on one's popularity and recent actions, footage of them can fetch a certain price from media outlets. It's sort of like a cynical, hypercapitalistic form of whuffie. At the same time, individuals can decide to "go public," selling shares of their reputation on a special stock exchange. Shareholders even get a vote in the workings of the reputation they own. This suits the evangelical Eliot Sr. quite nicely, as he all but analogizes the invisible hand of the free market with the invisible hand of God.

The second result is that celebrity culture has overrun every aspect of modern life. Cultural studies has become a popular major at universities, not to scrutinize the effect of pop culture on our society, but so they can become reputation managers and sell coming-of-age shows to Disney. Entire academic conferences are devoted to celebrities like Eliot, and scholars write papers analyzing his decision to change his major or cheat on his girlfriend. The Middle East is largely ruled by a pop singer, and whether his lyrics could be construed as a denial of the Holocaust could determine whether war breaks out with Israel. The world is rapidly falling into decay — rioting, terrorism — and there is excited talk among evangelical Christians that the apocalypse is coming.

Pop Apocalypse is at its best when it explores how Omni and this new celebrity culture has affected daily life in America. Eliot Jr., just returned as the prodigal son after a period of mindless debauchery, tries to navigate his celebrity status while maintaining something of a private life. The Hills isn't reality, and neither is Eliot's public face. His clothes, his personal wit and wisdom, his questions to adoring inflight magazines, all are carefully maintained and scripted by the family reputation manger, named (what else?) Karl. At the same, he's forced to make genuine, heartfelt statements to his on-and-off girlfriend in front of the cameras, and his every stumble and faux-pas is analyzed by hundreds of armchair scholars. It's all complicated enough before Eliot discovers he has a doppelganger, one the Omni mistakes for him.

The looming apocalypse, on the other hand, feels more like a gimmick, something to make you pick up the book and read a much more interesting story about surveillance technology and celebrity culture run amok. Konstantinou tries valiantly to connect his multithreaded satires. He proposes that we're so desensitized, so relentlessly marketed to, that when the apocalypse comes, we'll be talking about its strength as a brand identity instead of trying to save the world. But his geopolitical ideas aren't as detailed as his technological and cultural ones, and never quite gel.

The book certainly belongs to the family of zany, self-consciously hip books that have come out in the last decade or so, which is fine since Konstantinou has plenty of interesting ideas to convey. But he does take a few swipes at some low-hanging fruit. His Christian capitalists are a bit cartoony, San Francisco hasn't changed except that its stubborn, collectivist hipsters are getting older, and Disney has put out a feel-good musical called The Mongol Hordes. Sometimes, it feels like the book needs a few good shoves into more ludicrous territory to get away with its own jokes.

But Pop Apocalypse is a genuinely frightening book, not for its apocalyptic prophesies, but for its peek five minutes into the future. It's suggestion that photo-tagging software could someday turn all of existence into the ultimate reality television show isn't far-fetched in the least. One character comments that when you see how sausage gets made, you'll want to become a vegetarian. And in Pop Apocalypse, we're the sausage, and the whole world sees how we're being made all the time.

Written in 20 year increments, The Next 100 Years by George Friedman looks out over our coming century, with an eye towards geopolitics and international power. In the next twenty years, Friedman predicts that the global war on terror, which he terms the US-Jihadist war, will be winding down, a smaller conflict that will have little consequence after all is said and done.

Instead, numerous problems will crop up in the former Soviet bloc as Russia works to regain its former power by reclaiming older territories through economic growth and outright bullying. To an extent, this has already been hapepning, especially if you look at the short-lived war last year in Georgia, as well as the outcry in Poland more recently as the United States decided to pull its missiles out of the country in favor of settling Russian concerns and more mobile missile platforms. However, Friedman views this growth as short-lived, and predicts that Russia, while growing over the next decade or so, will run out of stream due to a decreasing population and declining economy.

Friedman blames declining birth rates for the declining fortunes of a number of nations — and this is a sort of side-effect of an industrial nation. Pre-industrial countries required higher birthrates in order to counter-balance a higher infant mortality rate. With people entering the workforce at a later age, with increases in medicine and the lowered need of numerous contributors in a household, Friedman argues that there's little need for larger families.

Thus, a major point of conflict in the next century, especially in the next fifty years as populations begin to drop, won't be over immigrants illegally entering countries, it will be over which countries can lure in the most new workers to help prop up their own economies and lagging workforces.

While the major powers around the world such as the United States and Russia will have economic slowdowns during this stretch, smaller nations will use this opportunity to rise on their own. Friedman notes that the larger nations won't be down and out for the count, and will thus be powers to be reckoned with - conflict will arise between the United States, which, in his view, will remain the most powerful nation on the planet, and these new players. Friedman singles out three countries, in particular, that will become the next major powers during the 21st century: Turkey, Japan and Poland, with other nations, such as Mexico, becoming far more powerful in their respective regions.

Why these three? All of them currently have advantages that will help them in the coming decades. Japan's economy is slowly growing again. Friedman believes that China will fragment under its rapid economic growth and growing internal troubles, which will further allow Japan to become a leader in the region. Friedman looks to past examples of Japan managing to take over Southeast Asia, at various points in the region's history, as further evidence of this.

As for Turkey, this country sandwiched between Europe and the Middle East will become more and more important strategically, and will become a more vital ally to the United States as Russia first expands and then collapses. In th midst of the Middle East's chaos, Turkey will be able to resist Russia and grow its own economy — and Turkey has traditionally been the leader in that part of the world for much of its history, when it was known as the Ottoman Empire.

Finally, Poland is singled out because it is essentially between two hard places - Germany and Russia. Fearing both, it will seek to expand its influence as Russia consolidates its power back towards its center. Because of its location, Poland has been overrun numerous times by both countries, and would likewise receive US support as Russia grows, because it represents a strategic location. It's entirely possible that those missile systems will be installed after all.

At this point in time, Friedman turns to an inevitable development for many countries - space travel, and how that relates to a country's strategic needs. The United States, he argues, is able to maintain a dominant position over the rest of the planet, because of its armed forces and economic power. A major tool in the U.S. arsenal is the ability to monitor and view every inch of the planet, mainly through the development over the last half century in satellite and surveillance technology. Other nations will inevitably (if they haven't already) develop their own space programs for this very purpose, and look into ways of disrupting the ability of the United States to do the same. At the same time, the US will seek to construct better methods of doing this, including larger crewed systems that could very well be operated by crews that number in the hundreds. At some point in the 2020s-2040s, numerous countries will be utilizing the Moon for scientific and defensive purposes, both overtly and covertly.

This shift in global power, Friedman predicts, will make conflict inevitable, between the United States and these three rising powers, who will loosely band together into a coallition. In order to disrupt the United State's orbital systems, Japan, (on Thanksgiving day, around 2050) will attempt to destroy one of these orbiting platforms from lunar initiated strikes, to maximize the shock value and surprise, in a move reminiscent of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, propelling the countries into war. The United States, faced with destruction of a key military asset, will go to war, as it has done with Pearl Harbor, the Maine and the World Trade Center. The US will retaliate with reserve forces that will eliminate enemy satellites, while soldiers on US lunar bases will attack their Japanese counterparts. By around this time, the US will also have the ablility to field armored infantrymen, straight out of the numerous SF novels and films that have come before.

Essentially, the world will be at war, with Turkey and Poland (Turkey fighting for control over Europe), and Japan fighting to maintain a hold over Asia, with the United States emmeshed in both sides of the conflict. This warfare will be characterized by air forces, robotic forces and enhanced soldiers, and will rely in electrical power grids and other resources as soldiers fight across new battlefields in Europe and Asia. Space will be a vital element, as it allows for communications and the ability to watch a battlefield from a better birds eye view. Friedman theorizes that there will likely be breakthroughs in technology that will allow for microwave and solar energy to be directly utilizied on the battlefield, which might further change how warfare is fought in the future.

Friedman believes this war will last for around two years, through to 2052, when the coalition powers (Turkey and Japan) would be pushed so far as to begin to threaten nuclear retaliation. By this point, the United States will be seeking to push their enemies to sue for peace, rather than destroy them with nuclear weapons. The end result will be a shifting of powers in both the Middle East and Asia, with new nations created in a peace conference. The United States will have better control over space, and will have an expanded economy as a result of the war. America and its allies will prosper in the aftermath of the war. With war as a catalyst to essentially force the evolution of military capabilities and technology, Friedman believes that a war such as this will help to encourage space technology, which in turn will help inform civilian technology. Along with it, he notes, there will be a resurgence in American culture that begin to spread out over the globe, much as what happened during the 1950s-1970s.

By the 2080s, the United States will remain an economic and cultural powerhouse. However, Friedman believes that Mexico will be have been growing while all of this has been happening, and that it will become a dominant rival power in North America. In particular, this sort of rise will be problematic for the United States, because of a large ethnic group that will strongly identify with Mexico, one that has easy access to their homeland.

Rises in robotic technology will displace work forces from unskilled to skilled worked, and thus, unemployment will rise, which will cause problems domestically. Friedman cites a number of reasons, such as oil production and possible shifts in industry from legalized drug trades as a possible method for Mexico to increase its GDP. As Mexico rises, so too will tensions, domestically and internationally, rise between the US and its southern neighbor. Conflict will break out in the Southwest United States as a result of this, although it will be fairly low-key, and last for the rest of the century.

Now, obviously, there are issues with this future, as might be expected with any sort of look to the coming years. While Friedman notes that to look at the future, one must expect a sort of larger view that can gradually bring in vastly different environments from the present, some of his claims seem very outlandish, especially around the specifics. Additionally, he seems to disregard things such as the current 'US-Jihadist' war, which will likely last much longer - the issues in the middle east are long-standing, and neither side seems ready to give up or change to end the conflict.

Secondly, there seems to be a heavy reliance on the actions of the past that will inform the future. While Europe is a fantastic example of history repeating itself when it comes to warfare - German, Russian aggression, etc - the rest of the world generally doesn't seem to function in much the same way. The English, despite their long history as a maritime power, lost that status with the rise of the United States during the two World Wars, while European powers have not demonstrated any real interest in reclaiming influence in Africa, South America or Asia. Looking at the past is not a reliable method of looking at the future. While there are certainly examples (and some that are justly there) of this, it isn't the general rule of thumb that Friedman comes to rely on.

The main strength of this book is one of examination of the world as it is right now, and how that will inform the next two decades, and how those years will possibly inform the next. The years closest to the present are much easier to look at with a higher degree of certainty than decades from now. Friedman imparts some very good advice by pulling the perspective of the years out to a much larger view - as someone who studied geology and history in college, I can attest that looking at history in decades, centuries, millennia and eons will bring about much different perspectives on world affairs than what one might gain by only reading the newspaper or listening to the radio for current events.

The future that Friedman presents does seem very far fetched, but at the same time, somewhat plausible. Will Japan attack the United States in 2050 on Thanksgiving Day? Unlikely, but the important lesson here is the chain of events, brought together by a chain of geopolitical actions, will happen, either with that result, or with very different outcomes. The future will likely bring new conflict, war and problems — and along with them, large-scale shifts in how the world works.

In a way, Friedman presents a far different future than most of the older science fiction predictions, and more in line with some of the newer ones. (Charles Stross and Paolo Bacigalupi come to mind for modern-day examples of this.) What is certain, however, is that the actions of today will inform that of tomorrow. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to begin reading up on some of the more unlikely countries around the world. I'll be learning all there is to know about Croatia - it could be handy in my lifetime.

Hammer was a UK studio whose mid-twentieth century reimaginings of popular monsters like Dracula reinvigorated the horror genre. Horror and monster movies were wildly popular in the 1930s and 40s with US-based Universal churning out franchises devoted to Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and others. But in the 1950s, horror merged with science fiction when "atomic monsters" were all the rage - and the old monsters fell by the wayside.

Hammer Studios genius was in merging the early-1960s Playboy sensibility with stock horror characters, sexing up Dracula and converting old-school into something campy that gothy flower children could enjoy. They brought back Dracula as a hot, magnetic emohunk played by Christopher Lee, and gave his brides some pinup sex appeal. While vampires were a Hammer staple, the studio also produced science fiction classics like Quatermass and One Million Years B.C. With sexy titles like Vampire Lovers, Slave Girls, Satanic Rites of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, the studio continued to dominate the horror genre well into the 1970s.

The Hammer actresses whose naughty, terrifying eroticism is captured in Hammer Glamour are still part of pop culture horror styles. And of course, sexy horror featuring vampires continues to smolder at the box office today.

Marcus Hearn put together this compendium of images from the Hammer archives, organized by actress. Each section features a full page pinup, plus biographical information and behind-the-scenes gems about celebs from Ursula Andress to Nastassja Kinski. Other popular actresses of the era, like Raquel Welch, got their start in Hammer movies too.

Hammer Glamour via Borders

Yutte Stensgaard, star of several vampire movies, with a skull, some tassels (?), a tiki item, and many other silly objects on that velvety bed.

Raquel Welch, in her iconic role as a cavewoman in One Million Years BC.

Martine Beswicke, also from One Million Years BC. She also starred in the cunningly-titled Slave Girls as well as the superlative Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

Ingrid Pitt (l) and the ever-popular Madeline Smith (r) in The Vampire Lovers.

Pauline Peart in The Satanic Rites of Dracula.

Diana Dors

Madeline Smith graces the cover of the book.

Jane Scott

Melissa Stribling with popular Hammer leading man Christopher Lee, who turned Dracula into a sexed-up Englishman.

Valerie Gaunt

So, you've been bitten by a werewolf. What now? Do you run wildly through the hills three nights a month, gleefully slaughtering whatever comes into your path? Do you nobly sacrifice your life before the full moon can transform you into a rabid beast? Hardly. The Werewolf's Guide to Life, by Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers, advocates safe, responsible lycanthropy and offers a thorough guide to keeping yourself, your loved ones, and the neighbors' pets safe during your hairy times of the month.

You see, being a werewolf is a lot of work.

Duncan and Powers take you through all the basics in obsessive detail, from surviving your first transformation (a moving truck and several dozen pounds of drugged raw meat will do in a pinch) to setting up your safe room (S&M experts are great at building custom rigs and not asking too many questions). They also delve into the long-term lifestyle changes that come with your new condition. Should you tell your spouse? Can you still maintain your religious faith (Remember, werewolves can't keep Kosher)? What kinds of jobs are ideal for werewolves? What do you do if you accidentally get loose and kill someone?

The Werewolf's Guide to Life is likely a must-have for fans of fur and fangs, but you don't need to be obsessed with werewolves to be charmed by its impressive thoroughness and oddball humor. It charts out the "Wolf Moons," the three days each month when werewolves transform and assigns dietary points to various foodstuffs (dog food, raw steaks, live cattle) to ensure you get enough calories and don't try to break free. There are strange little sidetrips into werewolf lore, complete with margin notes on famous werewolves (Did you know Rosa Parks became a werewolf at the end of her life?). And that's all before we get to dealing with "Fur Chasers," people who want to be attacked by werewolves in hopes of becoming werewolves themselves. The humor is usually droll, and a bit macabre (at one point, you're advised to check your stool for the remains of any potential victims), but sometimes slides into silly (a chapter on dealing with vampires bears the subtitle "Navigating Your Interactions with the Smug, Effeminate Undead).

The Werewolf's Guide to Life is a worthy successor to fantastical manuals like The Zombie Survival Guide and How to Survive a Robot Uprising. And hey, if you know someone who has recently been bitten by a large animal during a full moon, you might want to slip them a copy, too. It could just save their life.

Boneshaker takes place in an alternate Washington territory, where the Klondike gold rush ramped up decades earlier, making the Seattle of 1860 a bustling metropolis of 40,000 residents. To more efficiently extract gold from the ice, a Russian mining company contracts Seattle inventor Leviticus Blue to create the ultimate mining machine, Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. But during the device's first test run, it malfunctions, leveling the city's banking district and tearing open an enormous crack in the earth. The destruction was bad enough, but what pours out of that crack in the ground is far worse: Blight gas, a deadly, invisible substance that kills the lucky and transforms the less fortunate into "rotters," undead creatures who hunger for living flesh. Blue and his Boneshaker vanish, Seattle is abandoned, and a high wall is built around the city to hold in the rotters and the Blight.

Fifteen years later, Briar Wilkes lives on the Outskirts of Seattle with her teenaged son Zeke, working at a factory that cleans Blight from the drinking water. Briar labors under a strange pair of legacies: she's not only the widow of Leviticus Blue, she's also the daughter of Maynard Wilkes, a lawman who became something of a folk hero after the first days of the Blight. Briar would rather forget the men of her past (if anyone on the Outskirts would let her) and focus on creating some semblance of a life for her son. But Zeke is curious about the father he never knew, and wonders if there is more to Leviticus than his reputation would suggest. So, one day while Briar is at work, Zeke ventures into the walled city to visit the home his parents shared before the Blight. When Briar learns, to her horror, where Zeke has gone, she does the unthinkable and follows him behind the wall.

Granted, there are moments when Boneshaker reads like an exercise in finding legitimate reasons to include elements of steampunk (special goggles let you see the Blight, airships fly over the Seattle wall, and there are gas masks aplenty). On top of that, there's a healthy dose of alternate history. Not only did Priest bump up the timetable for the Klondike gold, Stonewall Jackson fails to die as a result of his injuries at Chancellorsville, a turn of events that has left the Civil War raging back East some fifteen years. And it seems Priest never met a pulp character she didn't like; the supporting cast includes a one-armed bartender, an aged Native American princess, a deck hand whose tongue was cut out, and air pirates.

Ultimately, though, Boneshaker shares more kinship with the post-apocalyptic genre, even though the Blight didn't destroy the world — or even, for that matter, Seattle. As it turns out, people are still living in the wasted city, going about their daily lives thanks to a network of tunnels, a series of pumps that bring in fresh air, and a few novel technologies for dealing with the gas and the rotters. The residents of Blighted Seattle view themselves as sort of frontiersmen (and women) of the apocalypse. With the Blight still leeching into the air, it could someday overtake all of Washington, and perhaps even the world. They live a hard and strange life, but one not devoid of pleasures. There is a sort of freedom in living where the law and most polite society won't travel, and necessity has bred technological wonders that don't exist in the outside world. Progress is slow, but it happens, and it lets them carve out a gradually improving home for themselves. It's a version of the American Dream that exists in sharp contrast to the big payoff the gold rushers and Leviticus Blue chased after.

But even hard labor and ingenuity weren't quite enough to buy a habitable Seattle. The residents were forced to turn to the unscrupulous Dr. Minnericht — a sort of wannabe Bond villain with a dash of Darth Vader thrown in for good measure. In the early days of the Blight, Minnericht helped the residents obtain supplies and fashion new technologies, and now has set himself up as the king of Seattle. No one knows Minnericht's true identity and few have seen his face. But his way with gadgets and his questionable morals remind many of the residents of Leviticus Blue, and they've begun to chafe under his rule. And the sudden appearance of Blue's widow and son threaten to bring years of resentment to a head.

Boneshaker's greatest strength is that Priest doesn't overly fetishize the subgenres she plays with, never overwhelming the fairly straightforward stories of mother and son, and giving her clockwork machinations and zombie encounters more impact when they do appear. Though zombies and Blight certainly color the lives of Seattle residents, they aren't obsessed with either; they simply accept that their routines occur in a deadly world. And Zeke and Briar may live in a world filled to the brim with elements of science fiction and pulp, but those are just the things and people they must navigate to reunite and survive. The only real downside is that, throughout the book, we visit too briefly with so many intriguing characters and concepts in favor of the novel's core adventure. Fortunately, Priest is already setting a second novel in her strange and blemished world, so we will hopefully see a fuller, richer picture of what goes on inside.

Oh, and this is a completely spoiler-free review, apart from one quote from the book which doesn't reveal anything.

This will also be a fairly short book review, because I don't have much to say about And Another Thing... The publisher, Hyperion, gave us a copy of the first half of the book at Comic Con. I sort of expected we'd get a copy of the whole book in the mail at some point, but it never showed up. In any case, I've read the first half of And Another Thing... twice, not because it was so brilliant — but because I could not remember anything about it, when I sat down to write this review the other day. It was a total blank.

And Another Thing... is the continuation of Douglas Adams' indispensible Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series by Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl books I haven't read but have heard great things about. When we met Colfer at Comic Con, he seemed aware of what a tremendous undertaking he'd taken on, and said he'd only agreed to do it because Adams' wife and daughter had both asked him to. And he's definitely put his all into trying to conclude the saga of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian. The book "feels" like a Hitchhiker's book, with the periodic interjections from the Guide, and there are a few genuinely clever bits, most of them revolving around Zaphod.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with And Another Thing... If you want to revisit the universe Douglas Adams created, this book will give you more of the same. It definitely subscribes to the "more of the same" view of sequels. All of the characters are recognizably themselves, and all of the tropes are there, from Vogon poetry to the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive.

The main problem with Colfer's cover version of Adams is the humor: it falls incredibly flat, at least to me. Humor is incredibly subjective, so your opinion may vary. But Colfer's jokes feel simultaneously as though they're trying much too hard and also not quite trying hard enough. Where Adams' humor was subversive and weird and kept you constantly off balance with its cleverness, Colfer's feels labored and a bit too dependent on puns and sharp-elbowed nudges.

Here's a random entry from one of the book's Hitchhiker's Guide segments (not spoilery at all, but bear in mind I have an unfinished proof and the book may have been tweaked slightly before publication):

Guide Note: The notion that religions can be useful tools for keeping the rich rich and the poor abject has been around since shortly after the dawn of time, when a recently evolved bipedal frogget managed to convince all the other froggets in the marsh that their fates were governed by the almighty Lily Pad who would only agree to watch over their pond and keep it safe from gunner pike if an offering of flies and small reptiles was heaped upon it every second Friday. This worked for almost two years, until one of the reptile offerings proved to be slightly less than dead and proceeded to eat the gluttonized bipedal frogget followed by the almighty Lily Pad. The frogget community celebrated their freedom from the yoke of religion with an all-night rave party and hallucinogenic dock leaves. Unfortunately they celebrated a little loudly and were massacred by a gunner pike who for some reason hadn't noticed this little pond before.

The irony is so thick, you could... get bogged down in it, I guess.

After re-reading the first half of And Another Thing... and still being left with a very vague sense of empty calories, I started to wonder if I was viewing the original through a haze of nostalgia — was Adams really that much funnier? I flipped to a random page in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it was actually sharper and more subversive than I'd remembered. Honestly, if you're jonesing to visit the Hitchhiker's universe again, you're way better off rereading Adams' first couple of novels, when he was at the top of his game.

Madness of Flowers starts off right on the heels of the action in 2006's Trial of Flowers. I can describe some of the events and characters, but that cannot prepare you for the hallucinogenic weirdness to be found here. The City Imperishable was once the capital of a mighty empire, and remains a center of commerce and industry. Steam engines and primitive telephony exist alongside spooky noumenal powers. These supernatural phenomena are deeply intertwined with the eternal rhythms of life, barely comprehended and even less easily controlled.

A thousand years ago the Empire's last ruler, aptly named the Imperator Terminus, marched out the City gates to the North with an army. He rode not to conquer but to remove an eldritch threat from within. He was never seen again, but The City Imperishable continued. In the last volume, power-hungry politicians sought to restore the lost Empire, awakening Old Gods that nearly destroyed them all. The central protagonists of the Trial of Flowers sacrificed themselves to retake the City. In the end the day was won but at the price of some gruesome transformations. At least one of them was killed, and this still depresses him terribly.

Now the new Lord Mayor Imago, recovering from radical elective surgery, must rebuild. He immediately faces threats to his new administration. The nomadic desert Tokhari warriors, led by their shaman Sandwalkers, were Imago's tenuous allies in the recent unpleasantness. Now many of them are still encamped outside the city walls idly polishing weapons. A company of foreign mercenaries called The Winter Boys keeps peace on the streets dressed in jesters' motley riding battle-trained giraffes. Their leader, the roguish Captain Enero, seems friendly enough, but he has other allegiances and the civic coffers can buy his service for only so long. Imago's political rivals are already busy building a coalition to take his Chain of Office.

At the mouth of the River Saltus, a pirate fleet has seized Port Defiance, blockading all maritime traffic to The City Imperishable. The Mayor's agent, the Slashed Dwarf Oneisphorous-former progressive agitator, was already on assignment in the moss-shrouded town to convince his fellow expatriate Dwarfs to return upriver. Now he must organize a resistance movement. Most of the locals aren't interested, but perhaps he can find help among the native minority, the Angoulême. The traders and jade miners of the Port dismiss these simple swamp people as backward savages, but Oneisphorous is told that they are the remnants of a long forgotten civilization with powerful Gods, or Loa, who still direct their lives and posess their bodies.

Meanwhile back in The City a new diversion is setting the streets abuzz with curiosity. A mysterious woman mountebank and her giant dancing ice bear have been enthralling the citizenry with songs and stories of the Imperator Terminus. She claims to have found the lost emperor's final resting place in the frozen North. If his sarcophagus and treasures are brought back home The City Imperishable will be restored to its former glory. What the Hells? They barely survive the last time something like this was tried, the ruins are still smouldering! But too late, the mob has spoken and Imago is pressured to send an expedition to the far North, the literal edge of reality. To give them an edge, he sends Bijaz, conservative Sewn Dwarf and major pervert. He recently became a conduit for divine powers he barely controls or understands. Gems, flowers, and ice generate spontaneously from his stubby hands. He derisively refers to himself as "farting butterflies". If the name Bijaz sounds familiar, it was used for dwarf characters in both Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah and the Viriconium stories of New Wave pioneer and New Weird influence, M. John Harrison.

The Dwarfs are perhaps Lake's most memorable inhabitants of The City Imperishable. They are normal human beings, not a separate species or race into swinging axes, big beards, and songs about gold. Dwarf children are raised in confining metal Boxes that stunt the growth of their limbs. Years creak by, spent in constant pain, while they're trained to excel in feats of calculation and memory like truncated Mentats. Upon matriculation a dwarf submits to having his or her lips sewn partially shut. They don the traditional muslin wraps and serve The City as civil servants and commercial clerks. In recent generations some Dwarfs have rejected this cruel caste tradition whose origins are largely forgotten. They have Slashed their stitches and speak out for equality, some of the more radical among them even suggesting the abolition of the Boxing. Sewn Dwarfs like Bijaz consider the Slashed to be dangerous blasphemers but lately the two sides have begun to work together. Bijaz is not completely comfortable with his own upbringing. His suppressed frustration and self-hatred has manifested in deviant sexual appetites that completely ignore the idea of informed consent. The phrase "twisted little fuck" leaps to mind, and he's one of the good guys — for a given value of good. Although he now resists these darker impulses, Bijaz continues to get his freak on in this novel as do other characters. It gets pretty kinky at times, but I see the sex as a rituals to gain some sense of control or strength in a world that makes no sense at all, so no different than here, really.

A Dwarf of more heroic stature is Saltfingers the dunny diver, "stranger than a hen with three beaks", and the most knowledgeable and bravest of The City's sewer workers. These brave underground heroes patrol the unimaginably ancient tunnels keeping shit going. Armed with guns that socket into steam lines they battle cthonic horrors and placate sleeping forgotten gods. The dunny divers are minor but memorable players, made me think of Thomas Pynchon. Also of interest is the Tribade, a matriarchal society that combines elements of the Girl Scouts, the Mafia, and the Bene Gesserit run by the woman known as Biggest Sister. These are just a few of the people in the neighborhoods of The City Imperishable, the people that you meet each day.

Madness of Flowers is an excellent example of Fritz Leiber's concept of megapolisomancy, the shaping or generation of supernatural forces by a city. Imagine its humble origins, perhaps a collection of a few crude huts. Every day a goatherd drives his flock to cross a stream at the same shallow point. This daily action becomes ritual, the well-worn path becomes a road; first dirt then cobblestones and later tarmac. The stream has long since been buried and only a handful of historians care about the meaning of the name Gotford Street but The City remembers. The patterns of commerce and information combine with the web of water works and streets. From the Hermetic rites of Ancient Greece to the Mississippi Delta of Robert Johnson, we have known a deal with the Other Side can be made at the crossroads. What happens to a grid of hundreds of crossroads? All the actions of the population are part of the spell, from a muttered prayer for a parking space to a spontaneous street riot. The gods or paramentals are just pieces of the whole, as are the shopkeepers, buskers and pigeons. The magic in this sort of system is just as wild and unpredictable as the frenzy of the Maenads of being ridden by the Loas.

This is my kind of Urban Fantasy. Putting mythic traditions in a contemporary city is fine, there are great examples from Crowley to DeLint and Gaiman. But I enjoy Jay Lake's wild world-building from the bedrock up, which is so much more imaginative. It's a bit like getting walloped with a pillowcase filled with lasagna, a shocking but tasty experience that will certainly make a lasting impression. He is on par with New Weird fantasists Miéville, Swainston, and VanderMeer, and also two of my favorites: Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.

Trial of Flowers and Madness of Flowers are similar to Lake's last novel Green. The two series and the many attendant short stories may be in the same world although given its infinite scale (more plane than planet) I think Green's stomping grounds of Copper Downs are probably an astronomical distance from The City Imperishable. These books also differ from Green with a much broader scope using multiple storylines and viewpoints. You get the feeling that all the different characters are just part the massive complex organisim that is The City Imperishable. They can never hope to harness all its power, only adapt and survive. As their municipal motto goes, no matter what happens — Civitas Est — The City Is.

Madness of Flowers is available in stores now or can be ordered here, here, or at Borders.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to all Dwarfs, Slashed and Sewn alike, as Chris Hsiang. Little man, you've had a busy day.