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.

I admit, I'm biased; I've followed and enjoyed Willingham's Fables since the release of the first collection, way back in 2003 so, in one sense, I was a sitting duck for this new 300+ page adventure set in a world where fairy tales live on in present day New York. On the other hand, having been a fan for so long, the idea of Willingham attempting to spin-off the at-times-very-visual comic (with a lot of credit going to the series' main artist, Mark Buckingham) into prose was worrying: What if the book showed that he was more talented at comics than prose? What if the novel tried too hard to overexplain things for new readers and, in the process, alienated old ones like myself? What if, away from the restrictions of the monthly grind, the novel would become an overindulgent, unsatisfying experience, as previous spin-off graphic novel 1001 Nights of Snowfall seemed at times?

As it turns out, I needn't have worried: Despite a somewhat awkward start (Where, yes, Willingham veers close to killing momentum and interest through world-building for people who've just come in) and seemingly rushed climax, Peter & Max distills all of the charm and sly, subtle invention that Willingham has brought to the familiar characters in the series so far into an all-new story that sidesteps the comic's continuity for the most part, offering something that's familiar enough to reassure old faithfuls, but also unencumbered by a past that would scare off newcomers. The Peter and Max of the title are Peter Piper (who, as we all know, picked a peck of pickled peppers) and his brother, and the novel tells parallel stories of the characters' youth (which includes Little Bo Peep, as well as the Black Forest and the fine town of Hamelin, which may need some help with a rat problem) and the lead-in to their modern day reunion, something that Peter isn't particularly looking forward to. Fans of the comics can expect cameos from Bigby, Rose and other familiar characters, but this is a surprisingly self-contained story, even with the additional comic strip epilogue to place everything in context for those who need to know these things.

(The comic strip is illustrated by Steve Leialoha, who also provides spot-illustrations throughout the book. It's worth taking a minute to point out how lovely these illos are; Leialoha doesn't always get the credit he deserves for his comic book work, but these illustrations are beautifully rendered, with a European-influence that makes them curiously old-fashioned and storybooky, appropriately.)

Where Willingham falls down is pacing; as I said above, the end of the book feels oddly rushed, as if Willingham had a set number of pages for the book and realized too late that he had to get everything tied up and off-stage. It's not that the ending is a letdown, or even disappointing, but there's something... off about it, somehow. It's a minor complaint, and not enough to stop me from eagerly recommending the book. For fans of Fables, it's pretty much the novel you want it to be; for everyone else, if you've ever wanted to read a surprisingly epic story of love, loss and old fairy tales reimagined with more than a little self-awareness about the source material, Peter & Max is just what you're looking for.

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel is available in comic stores now, and released in bookstores next week.

Spoilers ahead.

The Sunless Countries is the fourth novel that Schroeder has set in the world of Virga, a network of atmosphere bubbles roughly in orbit around the Vega star system. Built long ago by a group of technologically-advanced humans, these bubbles each contain their own unique ecosystems and cultures. The novels focus on the steampunk-style world of Virga, a blob of Earth atmosphere about 3,000 miles in diameter, filled with several "suns" for light and heat, as well as giant spinning cylinders that provide gravity to people who live on the inner walls. Chunks of earth and blobs of water float through the sphere, providing weather and farmland. Fauna "swim" through the air.

Virga's main sun, Candesce, is also a defensive weapon: It radiates a field that prevents the use of computer technology and "artificial nature. So Virga's inhabitants live by analog alone, zooming around with steam and and battery-powered ships. Some of them live in sunny areas, and others live in "the sunless countries" of the book's title, near the outer skin of the atmosphere bubble in a state of perpetual darkness.

Other books in the series have dealt with rebels who want to build their own suns, and the political machinations of the great nations near the center of Virga. But The Sunless Countries is a standalone adventure that takes place at the periphery of everything: In a history department at a university in the sunless nation of Sere. Specifically, it concerns the strange adventures of a rebellious history researcher named Leal who is caught up in an ideological battle against intellectuals within her own nation - as well as a battle against all of humanity being waged by mysterious creatures from beyond Virga's skin.

The book is also, as Schroeder put it to me in an interview (which I'll post tomorrow!), his attempt to do a version of Bridget Jones' Diary. Which means that Leal has to deal with her young-adult libido on top of everything else.

Leal has just gotten word that an unqualified but acceptably conservative historian has been promoted to professor over her, and she thinks that's her biggest problem. Until the infamous sun-building hero Hayden Griffin arrives in town on a secret mission. Then Leal has a freaky, unexpected encounter when she gets lost in her ship late at night - she hears a huge voice coming out of the darkness, claiming to have a message. Suddenly, her problems in the history department start to seem relatively insignificant. But her historian powers become crucial to Hayden's mission (ah - the handsome, unreachable Hayden). Leal has access to several forbidden books from early in Virga's history that may explain why she heard that voice, and what caused the disappearance of Sere's fleet along with several small cities.

While Leal and Hayden try to solve the mystery of the voice, Leal's nation of Sere undergoes a terrible coup. The "Eternists" take control of government, and burn down huge parts of the university because the professors there have challenged the Eternists' belief that Virga comprises the entire universe and has existed throughout time. The Eternists are also fanatical believers in the wisdom of crowds, and preach that truth can only be discovered when everybody votes on what is true. So every schoolbook and article in the newspaper is accompanied by a poll so people can vote on their "accuracy." People who don't vote are punished.

This whole subplot allows Schroeder to grapple with the dark side of democracy, where "the people" are permitted to govern all wisdom. It also pokes fun at the idea, popular among web pundits, that crowds provide the best answers to all questions. Schroeder's genius here is in speculating about an ideology that crosses something like a conservative Christian viewpoint with Web 2.0 dogma. And it feels like a sly, pointed critique of our own world when his characters, growing tired of the Eternists at last, start to admit that they don't want to vote on everything and that sometimes their opinions shouldn't count.

If there is a flaw in this novel, it's that Schroeder is trying to do too much at once. Leal and Hayden's adventure - where they learn that sometimes creatures who are not conscious make better friends than those who are - winds up feeling tacked-on. We care more about the fate of Sere than we do about this larger conflict over Virga itself. The final section of the novel is clearly leading up to a fifth novel in the Virga series (and indeed, Schroeder is working on that novel already), and it might have worked better to give us more closure on Sere's political battles than to open up an entirely new vista of ideas only to shut it down in media res.

Despite all that, The Sunless Countries is a rollicking good read. It's fun, bookish, and full of insane air battles that take place in a world without land. And the political thought experiments are as good as Schroeder's overarching scientific thought experiment about what it would be like to live in a world where you can have what amounts to a space battle using Newtonian physics.

The Sunless Countries via Borders

The idea of traveling between alternate realities is a common theme in speculative fiction. Multiverse stories are a logical extension of allohistory, and a close relative of that other grand old convention, time travel. The idea is often explained as inspired by the Many-Worlds Interpretation first formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957, but its use in literature and storytelling has been long with us. Jorge Luis Borges used the theme in his 1941 story "The Garden of Forking Paths". There are earlier examples in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World of 1666 (recently revisited by Alan Moore) and in one of the stories in the One Thousand and One Nights. Ancient multiverses can be found in the Hindu cosmology and the nine worlds of the Norse mythos were around long before Jack Kirby.

Right from the start, Banks' Transition has superficial similarities to Michael Moorcock, especially the Jerry Cornelius stories. Both books feature amoral agents with shifting loyalties, flitting between versions of Earth. They party down in exotic locales, averting or causing global calamity — like rock stars trashing an infinity of hotel suites. Victorian airships and super-assassins abound. The theory goes that all of Moorcock's fiction is one big multiverse, from the Sword and Sorcery worlds of Elric of Melniboné or Corum Jhaelen Irsei to the decadent Dancers at the End of Time. All the various characters in these works are aspects or avatars of a stock cast of meta-players often compared to the Commedia dell'Arte theater tradition with its tricksters, oafs, and backstabbers. Jerry Cornelius is a 20th Century face of the slightly mis-named Eternal Champion. He's an anarchist secret-agent, a super-slick antihero whirling in a blaze of intoxicants and ready fuck anything that fucking moves. David Bowie as Doctor Who, turned up to fuckin' twelve! While quite entertaining, it should be no surprise that these quintessential examples of SF's New Wave movement can be a wee bit disorienting. Product of the times.

For a speculative fiction ride of sex, drugs, and rock&roll that's less experimental (ahem, easier to read), I prefer Mick Farren, singer of the proto-punk band The Deviants, White Panther Party member, and Elvis scholar. Out of print, but well worth the hunt, are his multiverse romps in The DNA Cowboys Trilogy and Necrom, some truly weird fun shit. The dimension-tripping demon Yancey Slide from those adventures also turns up in the more recent Kindling and Conflagration He also wrote the Victor Renquist novels, a series of vampire novels that aren't totally lame. 2002's Underland has the CIA, vampires, and Nazis duking it out with flying saucers in the Hollow Earth beneath Antarctica. Yeah. Hell, just track down anything you can by Mick Farren.

Along with Moorcock, two other Monsters of Multiverse Literature ( or "Mul-Lit") are The Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny and the series that inspired that, World of Tiers by Philip José Farmer. They have much more of a fantasy feel than the above, especially because of an overuse of courtly language in the former and centaurs and other classic monsters in the latter. You'll also find plenty of complex machinations by powerful groups or families (Zelazny is notorious for Daddy Issues) and decadent, lusty adventure (more of Farmer's bag in trade, but evident in both). I enjoyed both of these series as a teen, but to be honest that was a long time ago and my impressions are murky at best. I recall the fiveTiers with more fondness, but that might be due to the risqué covers by Boris Vallejo. I can assert with some authority that the reader should stop after the first five Amber books, do not read the second series, do not collect the recent stuff written by John Gregory Betancourt. Sadly, Amber suffers from a terminal case of Herberts' Syndrome.

The quirky standalone Roadmarks by Zelazny could be considered a multiverse book. In it, the space-time continuum is an actual highway accessible to a few. The protagonist tools around the centuries in a dusty old pickup running guns to the Persians at Marathon. Occassionally he passes Hitler, his VW bug parked at the side of the road looking for the weed-choked off road to where he won WWII. I'm going to try and fit in some Amber andTiers, maybe revisit Riverworld too, just for old time's sake.

Now that I'm thoroughly soaked in nostalgia, allow me to wax rhetorical on multiverse comic books I always liked. Yes, they're old, I'm old; get used to it, and get off my urine-covered stoop.

The capes-and-tights set is plagued with multiverses, and they're always having Ultimate Critical Infinity Wars — boooring. A refreshing change from all that was the " Zenith" strip in2000 AD (1987-1992). This was young Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's contribution to the British superhero deconstruction attack of the 1980s. It had battles between multiple Earths, hippie/fascist versions of the same superheroes, the Lloigor from the Cthulhu Mythos, and a hero who was a real asshole. Yeowell's brushy B & W artwork was a sweet counterpoint to the usual 4-color superhero look, too.

For graphical goodies of a more science fictional bent, you cant go wrong with the ligne claire and spacey psychedlia of Jean Giraud better known as Moebius, co-creator of Métal Hurlant magazine. The Airtight Garage is a series of artificial pocket universes built into the asteroid Flower 51. They are the playgrounds/battlefields for the likes of Lady Malvina, Major Gubert, the crew of the spaceship Ciguri, and Jerry Cornelius. Hey, whaaa? Yep, Moorcock allowed other artists, writers, and musicians the use of the character in a sort of Open Source deal. For a while Marvel had a problem with that and the character was renamed Lewis Carnelian for a while. Weird. There are songs about Jerry by Blue Öyster Cult and Hawkwind, but I digress. Moebius returned to the Airtight Garage in '96 with Man from the Ciguri from Dark Horse. All lots of fun.

Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is also often compared to Moorcock, and in many ways improves upon him. Frankly, when you want to read about sexy psychic spies fighting transdimensional evil, it's hard to top the Arkwright stories. I love Talbot's vision of alternate Britains, like the one where Cromwell's Revolution still rages on and the Puritans terrorize the skies from massive airships. The complex plot jumps around jarringly in the original series, before finally coalescing, as you begin to see the multiverse as Luther does. There is also an audio version with the voices of David Tennant and Paul Darrow, I've never heard it — but wow, fangasm. The later 1999 sequel, Heart of Empire from Dark Horse again, follows the story of Luther's daughter in a much more linear fashion, with absolutely gorgeous art and much of that retro-Victorian futurism the kids like.

I have a particular fondness for the idiosyncratic doodles of doom by of Matt Howarth. His anarchic city-world of Bugtown is the home of indestructible assassins, rockstars, giant sharks, and nuclear goddesses; all of whom flit through the most surreal and impossible alternate universes imaginable. The series Those Annoying Post Brothers and Savage Henry are just packed full of crazy. Many experimental underground musicians make regular appearances in Howarth's work. There are adventures featuring Conrad Schnitzler, The Residents, and Micheal Moorcock collaborators, Hawkwind. Geez, that guy gets his beard into everything. Howarth also draws great aliens that look really alien, like cacti crossed with really uncomfortable furniture. Look for the very funny SF Konny & Czu strips.

"So Grey", I hear you say, " how about something less reminiscent of your college-dorm lava-lamp days? Something more, y'know [describes a circle in the air] for the kids?"

Well, the most well known Young Adult books with multiverse themes would probably be Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Chris Roberson should be getting a lot more attention for his time-space tripping adventures of the Bonaventure-Carmody family in novels likeHere, There & Everywhere, Paragea, and End of the Century. Oh and big surprise, Roberson has worked with Michael Moorcock often.

For something different, try Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin. This is a collection of bright and witty capriccios about a woman who discovers how to shift to alternate worlds by being bored and dyspeptic in airport waiting rooms. As usual, LeGuin makes many wry observations about society and class. There's one story about a civilization of flightless avian people and their transcontinentaln migrations...the ending is beautiful. I could mention Dark Tower series by Stephen King or Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes but I'm just not into them, so I won't. Philip K. Dick's doesn't make the cut either: that's really only a duoverse.

I really loved Neal Stephenson's Anathem and it's all about the multiverse, but does it really belong with these other stories? Well of course it does! If for no other reason than it's completely different from the Michael Moorcock imitators. Yes, all the action takes place in one cosmos — going to another world is a one-way trip and requires a big honkin' generation starship. There is the mystery of Fraa Jaad, who appears to be able to move at will between the slightest possibilities. I noticed something odd, even though Stephenson beats us about the head and neck with tons of higher mathematics and metaphysics, he's awfully vague about the actual mechanism for traveling from one reality to another. This is probably the smartest move. Some writers do a lot of handwaving about Quantum and dress it up in blinky lights and an Einstein-Rosen bridge. But usually, it just boils down to closing your eyes and clicking your heels three times. How very apt for a thought experiment.

Multiverse stories are becoming more prevalent on TV these days. That kid from Stand by Me fought Nazi cavemen from Dimension X or whatever in Sliders. The color coded Charlie Jade looked interesting, but I haven't watched it yet. Lost has used the Many Worlds Interpretation, but they will try just about anything these days.

I see Leonard Nimoy is going back and forth in alternate worlds a lot these days (in Fringe and the Star Trek movie.) Glad to see that sort of thing again.

Somebody asked me recently if multiverses were the Next Big Thing in Speculative Fiction? I like the multiverse concept and would like to see different takes on it, that aren't all about decadent ubermensch and their interdimensional power struggles.

And honestly, we don't need Next Big Things. Trendy conventions in writing are a symptom of a lack of originality. Speculative fiction itself should be a glorious sprawling multiverse exploring all manner of settings and styles. Right now, too many of the worlds in the new book section are getting too recognizable, I'm looking at you Contemporary Urban Fantasy! And you with the top hat and goggles, we've talked before about this, you need to seek help.

So yeah, this trip down multiverse lane has been fun — but I think it points out a flaw in sub-genre stories. Why do they all start running together? Why so many Shadowy Conspirancies, Power Hungry Libertarian Scensters and Moral Relatavisim in a majority of these alternate reality adventures. The Multiverse must have more possibilities than that.

Special thanks to Alan Beatts and Chris Braak for their helpful ideas.
Top image from Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot, 1999.

Commenter Grey_Area is known on many worlds as Chris Hsiang. He brachiates through the endlessly forking branches of possibility frightening all the turtledoves.

Carol Serling, Rod Serling's widow and a consultant on later Twilight Zone projects, has collected 19 stories for the 50th anniversary anthology. Although the nature of the different medium lends a slightly different tone to the stories — often planting us firmly inside the head of the protagonist — many of them play clear tribute to the television series. By far the clearest of these tributes is the opening story, David Hagberg's "Genesis," a story set in the Philippines during World War II that pays homage not only to individual Twilight Zone episodes, but to Rod Serling himself. A second war story, Jim Defelice's "The Soldier He Needed to Be," is a delightfully straight update of the series, about a flailing soldier in Afghanistan who turns his life around after receiving an iPod he believes to be magical.

Most of the stories are, however, set in that slightly sinister suburbia we see so often in Serling's show, where people trip and fall while chasing down the American Dream. Deborah Chester's "The Street That Time Forgot," one of the anthology's more science fiction entries, is set in one of those anonymous condo complexes that dot the United States. It's only when one of the residents adopts a stray dog and begins to wake from the slumber of his daily grind that he begins to suspect that his condo association may be taking more away from him than his HOA. And in Whitley Strieber's "The Good Neighbor," a middle class man worries about the falling value of his home after insectoid aliens move in next door.

Other standouts include Timothy Zahn's "Vampin' down the Avenue," in which a movie star goes to extreme lengths to foil the paparazzi — a story that's amusing enough even before the satisfying twist at the end — and Mike Resnkick and Lezli Robyn's beautifully sad "Benchwarmer," which takes us into the world of imaginary friends, and introduces us to one friend who simply can't let go of the boy who created him. And for fans who want a peek into Serling's process, Carol Serling has included his previously unpublished treatment for a possible episode, entitled "El Moe."

The stories in this anthology do stick a little bit too close to home; we get none of the space travelers or robots we would see from time to time on the show. But each tale is a quick and fun read where ordinary people are ensnared by the extraordinary, the wicked get what's coming to them, and nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems.

Oh, and there are spoilers in this review, mostly for the first third of the book.

Rosemary And Rue is the first book in the October Daye series, about a half-fairy, half-human detective who solves crimes at the intersection between the magic and mundane. At least, that's what happens in this first book, which involves shape shifters, sea witches, the king of cats, and a gun that shoots iron bullets (which are deadly to fairies.) McGuire's version of San Francisco, with fairie kingdoms hidden all over the Bay area and pixies hiding in Golden Gate Park, is genuinely enchanting, especially when she's bringing out the downsides of magic being everywhere. At one point, our hero, October, visits the court of the Faerie Queen, who transforms her T-shirt and jeans into a ballgown — and then doesn't change them back, forcing October to slog through mud and crime scenes wearing an impractical gown that gets increasingly muddy.

We were talking about noir fantasy a while back, and Rosemary And Rue isn't really that noir — it's more like classic urban fantasy with a murder mystery. It's not quite paranoid, dark or morally gray enough to be noir, and McGuire's characters are mostly fundamentally nice, with a few nasty quirks here and there.

Rosemary And Rue starts out with a bang, one of the best openings to a novel I've read in ages: October "Toby" Daye is working as a private detective on a case for her lead, Sylvester Torquill, whose wife and daughter have been kidnapped. Toby is tailing a suspect, Sylvester's brother Simon, and she calls her human husband and mostly human daughter to let them know she'll be late coming home. And then she follows Simon into a trap — with help from a sinister ally, he turns October into a fish, and traps her in the koi pond in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden. She stays there for the next fourteen years, until the spell finally wears off and she changes back.

Toby's husband and daughter want nothing to do with her because they think she abandoned them. And she's ashamed of her failure, so she can't go back to her friends in Faerie. Instead, she takes a job on the graveyard shift at the Safeway (when her magic can conceal her fairy features most easily) and keeps to herself. Until one of her closest friends in Faerie gets murdered and puts a binding on October — either she finds out who the killer was and brings them to justice, or she'll die too. Solving the murder, of course, means returning to the world of the fae, which is full of dark corners and deadly surprises.

The great strength of Rosemary And Rue is in its worldbuilding: Faerie San Francisco feels like a real city, and it's not hard to imagine that mythical creatures and magical glamours lurk in every alley in SOMA and behind every tree in Golden Gate Park, and super-powerful mystical forces are living in rent-controlled apartments in the Tenderloin. Every relationship in Faerie turns out to be fraught with obligations — everybody owes debts to each other, which are viewed as the worst kinds of encumbrances, and there's a taboo on saying "thank you," lest you inadvertently take on another constricting debt.

The other great thing about Rosemary And Rue is that October is a great fantasy heroine, from her contentious relationship with her cats to her many tormented Loves That Can Never Be. She's caught between her fairie and human heritage, and can never really be at home in either culture. Plus — and this is the closest the novel comes to being noir-tinged — half-blooded fairy hybrids, like October, face discrimination and mistreatment at the hands of a magical world that views them as inferior, or even worse, as a abominations. The novel is full of these cast-off, mistreated and misbegotten "changelings," and October is the biggest underdog of them all — despite having been knighted for past gallantry, that we only dimly hear about.

After exploring McGuire's fairy city for one dark murder mystery, I'm on board for more, and looking forward to seeing how October's tangled web of allegiances and obligations plays out over the course of the next few books.

Now for the bad news: Rosemary And Rue has a couple of serious flaws, on top of occasionally cheesy writing. First of all, it works much better as an urban fantasy tale than as a murder mystery: October is a terrible detective, who mostly stumbles around making a target of herself until the bad guys finally take a shot at her. She doesn't do all that great a job of collecting leads, frequently ignores the most obvious line of investigation, and needs others to point out the obvious to her. And there's really only ever one suspect in the murder who makes sense, so it's not much of a shock when it turns out to be that person.

And the other major problem is that McGuire tries so hard to make Rosemary the first book in a series, it falls a bit flat at times as a stand-alone novel. The book has an enormous, sprawling supporting cast, and October has a lengthy, involved backstory with every single one of them. There were a few moments where I thought I must have missed a page, because the narrator starts talking about a character whom she's got a history with — and then I realized the book hadn't mentioned this character before. Long after you think you've met all of October's old frenemies, the book keeps bringing in new characters who aren't new to October. And this usually means the story has to grind to a halt for a few pages, while October spoonfeeds us more stuff that happened before the book began. At times, this feels like the tenth book in a series, rather than the first. There are almost no characters in the book whom October doesn't already know.

Despite both of those issues — which feel a bit like "first novel" pains — I'm still a huge fan of the universe McGuire has created, and eager to become more acquainted with her city of fairies, rose goblins and kelpies.

Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection, actually written by Don Roff and illustrated by Chris Lane, purports to be the account of Dr. Robert Twombly, a physician who was working in a hospital during the first wave of the zombie outbreak. In addition to chronicling his weeks of improbably survival, Twombly also tries to understand the zombies, keeping careful records of their decay, behavior, and abilities, while trying to figure out what caused the outbreak in the first place.

The back of the book bills Twombly's diary as "a unique record of the time of infection in that its author sought to understand the undead by living among them." It's not entirely true, and it probably would have made for a better book. Twombly could have easily been an obsessive enough researcher that he would be willing to sacrifice his life in the hopes of leaving behind a helpful account of the outbreak.

For the zombie aficionado, the most fascinating parts of Twombly's diary are the most clinical. Twombly describes the symptoms infected people experience before turning, describes the gradual decay of zombies he observes over a period of several days, compares the behavior of zombies he once knew to that of their living selves, and observes anomalies in their behavior such as self-cannibalization. They're fantastic little moments of world-building, and Roff successfully tweaks traditional zombie characteristics enough to make the usually one-note undead mysterious and intriguing. Why do the zombies occasionally eat their own body parts? Why do some zombies group with the same people they knew in life while others follow their own path? And Lane's pencil and watercolor illustrations — which are lovely even when they depict decaying and mutilated bodies — become, in those clinical instances, more than mere corpse porn, and are almost more horrifying than his depictions of zombie attacks.

Unfortunately, much of A Record of the Year of Infection is a survival story, and one that we've seen before. Once Twombly escapes the hospital where he had been making so many wonderful and insightful observations on undead anatomy, he attempts to find safe haven from the brain chewers. We encounter plenty of the stock characters these sorts of apocalypses bring on: the average Joe who thinks his gun will save him, the outdoorsy girl and her dog, the sadistic zombie hunters, the survivalist you prefers the quiet of the undead world to the chattering of people. We never meet any of these folks long enough to get much of a sense of them. They simply slip into Twombly's life until they part ways or end up zombie chow. Despite their abilities to walk, talk, and wield a machete, the living are simply never as interesting as Roff's undead. It's only at the end that we get the hint of something truly intriguing and sinister, and characters with shades of dimension, that we are abruptly cut off, as if at an especially riveting part of a ghost story that hinges on suspense.

Hardcore zombie fans will probably appreciate the occasional in-depth looks into zombie life, as well as Roff's eerily plausible explanation for what caused the zombie plague (it's not your typical rage virus or biological weapon, though corporate greed is certainly involved). But those looking for a novel take on zombie survivalism will find that this ultimately feels more like a supplement to a larger story than a stand-alone work.

Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection hits stores in October. A preview is available at Chronicle Books.

Spoilers ahead.

Transition (Orbit Books) is not part of Banks' beloved Culture series, which take place in a galaxy packed with thousands of alien civilizations. Indeed, Transition wasn't even released as an Iain M. Banks novel in the UK - there he published it under his more literary nym, Iain Banks. But in the U.S., the book is being released as an Iain M. Banks joint, probably because that nym is more well-known here and the plot is science fictional (though one could argue that it's more like fantasy or magic realism).

Transition is a hallucinatory thriller about what happened to Earth - and specifically, Europe - in the time "between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers." In other words, during the feverish years between the demise of the Berlin Wall that marked the end of communism's hold over Europe and the demise of the Twin Towers in New York City that marked the beginning of the "war on terror." When a novel begins with such heavy-handed references, you worry that it's about to become cliched balderdash about How The World Is Changing. Luckily, that is not the case here. Though Transition is an intensely political novel, it is not about party politics or East vs. West or the end of the state or anything that you might read about in the UK Guardian.

Instead, it is about a group of renegade dimension-hoppers who dare to take on a shady, multiverse-manipulating institution called variously the Concern or L'Expedience. In Transition, it turns out our Earth exists in a massive deck of possible other Earths, many of which are accessible to people who are "aware" and have access to a transition-enabling drug called septus. The Concern, which exists on an alternate Earth called Calbefraques, is the sole manufacturer and dispensary of septus. And it trains special agents in the art of "flitting," transitioning between worlds, in order to mold events "for the better" across the multiverse. Sometimes this means saving a physicist from stepping into a building that is about to blow up. Other times it means assassinating people. In our main character Temudjin Oh's case, it means assassinating a lot of people.

Oh is especially talented, which means he's been singled out for recruitment by two women who are vying for control of what the Concern does across the multiverses. Madame D'Ortolan and Mrs. Mulverhill are both intensely powerful, well-connected and politically savvy. They also both have the special power of bringing people with them into another universe by having sex with them - and both want Oh to be their special agent. The problem is that Oh isn't quite sure what either of the women stands for. They ask him to go on missions that are unexplained. D'Ortolan asks on the part of the Concern, which she controls; and Mulverhill asks on behalf of a secret group that opposes her. Maybe killing the guy in his hot tub will save one version of Earth from a future dictator, or maybe it will prevent something good from happening, like world peace or a new scientific breakthrough. Oh isn't sure and mostly he doesn't care. Except when he begins to realize what D'Ortolan is really up to in her secret labs.

Strange and dreamy, the novel is shattered into fragments of perspective: We flit from one person's mind to another and plunge into alternate Earths that are very close to our own. In one, we learn why one man became a torturer for a Muslim-dominated government in a world riddled with Christian terrorists. In another, there is universal healthcare and a mental patient never worries that he'll be kicked out of the hospital where he lives and put on the street. In some worlds, Mandarin is the dominant language. In others, English. Several versions of Earth were destroyed by a gamma ray burst, after a ruler declared her or himself world leader and built a castle inside a bubble on the top of Mount Everest. In other Earths, humans never evolved.

To move from Earth to Earth, the agents must jump into the bodies of people who live in their destination dimension. Which means that Oh is literally jumping from perspective to perspective as he transitions through the stack of possible worlds.

This is all done with Banks' usual crazy, I'm-going-to-do-something-giant panache. In his hands, even the most preposterous battles, mega-objects in space, and (in this novel) bizarre permutations on reality take on a mesmerizing lucidity. Though we know almost nothing about the labs that produce septus, or the way the multiverse works, we believe in it. And we're drawn into the battle between Madame D'Ortolan and Mrs. Mulverhill, which in the end turns out to be something like the battle between Earth and the Culture. Not literally, mind you. There is no Culture here. There are just warring ideologies.

D'Ortolan, who has lived for 200 years by transitioning into younger bodies, represents the raw, libertarian lust for personal gain. And Mulverhill characterizes D'Ortolan's position tartly in this way:

Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.

Whereas Mulverhill promises something akin to what the Culture has - a chaotic do-goodery which attempts to help people in finite ways while acknowledging it is impossible to make the entire universe a perfectly good place.

Unfortunately, D'Ortolan is willing to engage in wanton destruction to get what she wants, while Mulverhill tries to persuade people to be good using reason - along with a little sex and sword-fighting. As Oh comes into his full powers, and shuffles the deck on the multiverse, the action goes trippy and fun.

While some of the philosophizing in Transition comes across as a bit vague and twee, for the most part the novel feels vital and inventive in a way that Banks' last novel Matter didn't. The worldbuilding is deft, funny, and pointed. Banks' overall point is that Earth at every single moment hovers between thousands of possible futures and presents. And this idea is both well-observed and gracefully shown.

Best of all, Transition will make you remember that you don't need to go into outer space to discover another world. Your Earth is only one of billions.

Transition via Amazon

In many ways, Catching Fire is a sequel about sequels. In the first book, Katniss Everdeen not only wins the barbaric Hunger Games that the totalitarian rulers of a future America use to entertain the vassals — she also manages to keep her fellow gladiator, Peeta, alive. She does this by faking an epic love story between Peeta and herself — although it's real for Peeta, and anyone who's ever read a coming-of-age novel will suspect it'll eventually be real for Katniss as well.

In the second book, Collins investigates what happens after you win, and what happens when the "happy ever after" portion of the story has to continue on and on. It's even more meta than the first book, because Katniss has become very aware of being an entertainer, and having a responsibility to project the proper image to her viewers. And we end up going through a lot of the same stuff as in the first book, only with a few new wrinkles and a lot more political awareness.

As you may have heard in the audio excerpt we posted a while back, Katniss' inadvertent act of defiance — saving Peeta when the game-masters decreed he must die — becomes a potent symbol of rebellion to the downtrodden peoples of Panem. Because she managed to beat the game and save not just herself but also her friend, people are now seeing her as the heroine of their new uprising.

This means that President Snow puts Katniss under renewed pressure to perform in the public spotlight — she has to convince everyone that she acted out of love for Peeta, not a desire to rebel against the Capitol. And it also means that Katniss' personal life becomes more intensely political than ever before. The first book in the series obsessed about the ways that celebrity culture and reality television could function in a totalitarian society — not unlike that original Star Trek episode with the Roman gladitorial games broadcast on television — but Catching Fire takes these concerns to a new level.

Just as Katniss had to manufacture a fake love story in the first book, she now has to manufacture a fake "happily ever after ending" coda in the second. And this time, she's keenly aware of just how loathed the oppressors in the Capitol are everywhere else, and how close the country is to rising up in rebellion.

The book really takes off about halfway through, when Katniss finally decides she's had enough of trying to support the status quo, and starts actively trying to encourage rebellion from her perch as a celebrity in the decadent Panem culture. All of a sudden, her media manipulation has two different purposes: to play the role that's been laid out for her, to the satisfaction of the people in power, but also to signal to the would-be rebels that they're not alone.

And it's not much of a spoiler to say that there's another gladitorial wilderness contest in the second book — except that this time, there are a couple of twists, neither of which you'll probably see coming.

Catching Fire isn't quite as strong a book as The Hunger Games, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the first-person narration that served so well in the first book turns out to be a liability this time around — in the first book, knowing intimately what was going on in Katniss' head while she was pantomiming for the cameras made the story much richer and more layered. But this time around, a lot of the story's most crucial events take place outside of Katniss' presence, and she occasionally gets hints that the peasants are, as they say, revolting. A lot of the story's events lack impact because we hear about them third-hand.

And the other major problem is that you may be hard-pressed to believe in Katniss' sudden ascension to symbol of the rebellion. Sure, she was gutsy and defied the people in charge by threatening to kill herself instead of letting the game-makers kill Peeta — but is that enough to make her the Che Guevara of the rebels? I'm not sure — I've wrestled with this a lot since I finished reading the book the other day, and I'm still not quite on board. On the one hand, I get that this is a culture that's celebrity-obsessed and oppressed, and the winners of the Hunger Games are built up as huge icons. And every detail of their lives is scrutinized. But on the other... it seems like a bit of a leap from "Don't kill my friend or I'll kill myself" to "Smash the state! Burn the factories!"

But if you can get on board with the Katniss-as-rebel-icon thing, then it's a great ride. And Collins is definitely trying to say something profound about symbols, and how both the vapid media imagery and the propaganda of the state can be subverted and appropriated by rebels. The people of Panem have no pop culture except for what the state-supported media gives them, so it makes sense that they take their new state-supported heroine, Katniss, and convert her into their rebel standard. And she does kick a billion different kinds of ass.

In any case, turning Katniss into the symbolic leader of the resistance does allow Collins to open up all sorts of questions about politics and the gap between appearance and reality in any media-saturated society. We learn, more and more, that the Capitol has been manipulating the images that people in the Districts have been seeing. And we find out that a lot of people are willing to make a lot of sacrifices to keep Kat safe, and to help her incite the people of the Districts to rise up.

Bottom line: as a friend of mine was saying, Catching Fire isn't quite as good as The Hunger Games was, but it's still a fascinating extension of the first book's worldbuilding. The themes of fame and survival under an iron dictatorship become deeper and more tangled. Mostly, Catching Fire holds your interest and makes you desperately eager to find out what Collins will do in the third volume of the trilogy — especially since it ends with several shockers. [Amazon or Bookfinder]

In the tradition of politically-minded hard SF writers like Iain M. Banks and Ian McDonald, Bacigalupi follows the interconnected stories of several people caught up in great social shifts. In the case of The Windup Girl, they're all caught in the genome industry's web: We have a covert "calorie man" called Anderson who tries to sniff out uncontaminated genomes for a Monsanto-esque multinational called AgriGen; a "yellow card" Chinese refugee named Hock Seng who is trying to climb to the top of the energy-generator black market in Thailand; Environment Ministry shock troops Jaidee and Kanya, whose job is to protect Thailand from contaminated genomes, foreign imports, and dirty energy; and the mysterious whore Emiko, a genetically-engineered "windup" person abandoned by her former owner in Thailand, where GMO people are illegal.

We follow these characters through every eschelon of Thai society, from backroom meetings between government officials to backroom performances at the strip club where Emiko is fetishistically degraded every night. The action takes place in the weeks leading up to a clash between the Trade Ministry - who want to open Thailand up to business with AgriGen and other multinationals - and the Environment Ministry, which has fought to keep Thailand and its ultra-valuable seed bank isolated from other nations (and ecosystems). The globe is still recovering from a series of diseases that ravaged crops and humans alike, so exposure to foreign people and objects can be deadly. Companies like PurCal and AgriGen have cornered the market on disease-free strains of rice and wheat, selling to countries where "blister rust" and GMO beetles have reduced food supplies to dust.

Thailand's seed bank, a collection of heirloom seeds from long-extinct plant species, has allowed the country to remain independent from the multinationals. The Environment Ministry's "white shirts," led by Jaidee, have burned all the contaminated fields and even recruited shady foreign gene hackers to help synthesize new, disease-resistant crops. But now times are changing. The palace is starting to support Trade, and calorie men like Anderson are secretly offering them lucrative deals to share the seed bank in exchange for military and financial support.

As these major players jockey for genome power, we watch as they miss obvious ways they could make Thailand rich again through other means. Anderson the calorie man has a cover operation to hide his real identity: He runs a factory that is trying to develop extremely efficient kink springs, or green batteries that work like watch springs - wind them up, and as they slowly unwind they release enough energy to power cars, planes, or factories. Anderson thinks the factory is great cover because the new kink springs will never work, and he can churn these useless items out perpetually without drawing attention to himself. Meanwhile his assistant Hock Seng knows the kink springs can work, and that they will revolutionize energy technology. He has plans to steal the kink spring plans and sell them to a local organized crime group to get rich. Little does he know his boss doesn't give a crap about the kink springs, and little does his boss know that he's sitting on a goldmine far more valuable than an AgriGen contract with the Thai government.

As tensions mount, Trade takes violent retribution against Environment. Violence begins bubbling up on all sides. And somehow Anderson meets Emiko, beginning a strange affair with the windup that has an unexpected effect on the future of Thailand.

One of the strengths of The Windup Girl, other than its intriguing characters, is Bacigalupi's world building. You can practically taste this future Thailand he's built, especially when Anderson discovers a newly-engineered fruit in the marketplace and tries to figure out what genes went into its construction. We're given just enough background to understand the economic and environmental factors that created this world, but Bacigalupi doesn't bog us down in endless discussions of ecosystems and fuel consumption.

And there are several moments where the hard SF here merges deftly with a magical realism that compliments it nicely. Thailand is haunted by GMO cats called "cheshires," created as souped-up pets, whose fur is designed to merge chameolon-like into the background. This has made them unstoppable predators, and they've eaten every other creature in their niche. But at certain points, it almost seems as if these creatures are seeping through walls. Which isn't surprising when you consider that Jaidee's ghost is a major character, and that Emiko has been implausibly engineered to have jerky, mechanical movements like a windup doll.

Indeed, Emiko is as much a magical realist creation as Jaidee's ghost. Created in Japan as a secretary, where windups are legal, she is impossibly beautiful and obedient due to a chunk of dog genes in her DNA. Her pores have been made miniscule to give her smooth skin, which means she overheats easily. And her jerky "stutter stop" movements, which mark her as GMO to everyone who beholds her, are pure genomic fantasy. She is half-doll, half-frankenwhore - a fabulation who nevertheless seems perfectly suited to a story set in a country where ghosts play a role in national politics.

While Bacigalupi's blending of hard science and magic realism works beautifully, the novel occasionally sags under its own weight. At a certain point, the subplots feel like tagents that needed cutting. And many of the military action sequences are drawn out far too long: We feel like we're watching an endless battle in slow-motion, which destroys the sense of urgency at the heart of this novel. But this is Bacigalupi's first published novel, and a lot of these problems feel like the narrative thoat-clearing of somebody whose next work will be more polished and well-paced.

Like all science fiction, The Windup Girl is obviously about the geopolitics of the present, where Monsanto tries to supplant local seedstocks with its own, and many governments teeter between the politics of isolationism and global capital. And yet Bacigalupi never slides into moralism or judgement. All his characters have their flaws and heroic moments. Nobody is clean, and there are no heroes who want to save the environment or bad guys who want to destroy it. Ultimately that's what makes this debut novel so exciting. It's rare to find a writer who can create such well-shaded characters while also building a weird new future world.

The Windup Girl (buy it!) comes out this month from Night Shade Books.

Image from the cover of The Windup Girl, by Raphael Lacoste.

The result is The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology, out now from Tachyon Publications. The title pretty much says it all.

This collection starts of with three classics that could be in that perfect season of The Twilight Zone that the ghost of Rod Serling only wishes he produced. There's "Of Time and Third Avenue" by Alfred Bester in which he uses one of his favorite themes, that getting your favorite wish (knowing the future, reading minds, or having your perfect lover) is not the great idea you thought it was. I prefer Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" which appeared in F&SF in 1954. A brilliantly mad thrill ride of imagination; perhaps the old-school hipster jazzbeaux language seemed too dated to make Van Gelder's cut but what a trip, "All reet, all reet!"

Ray Bradbury, meanwhile, takes us to a colony on a perpetually rainy Venus in "All Summer in a Day". Here he once again makes a perfect blend out of the nostalgia and utter suckitude of childhood. Shirley Jackson's "One Ordinary Day With Peanuts" is a perfectly charming slice of urban life and a glimpse of the secret method by which the world might actually work. Jackson could be either howlingly funny or deeply disturbing as in her quintessential ghost story The Haunting of Hill House. She is best known for "The Lottery", which produced furious controversy after its first appearance and is now often included in many school's reading lists.

Another story that even non-readers will remember from class is "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. This is F&SF's most popular story of all time. I dare you to keep from choking up at the brief flowering of a genius, and his tragic end. Too damn sad? You can take a refreshing plunge into goofiness with "A Touch of Strange" by Theodore Sturgeon, about the blossoming of a nerd romance.

There are a lot of old favorites here. I'm so envious of those of you who might be reading some of these for the first time. I was also surprised how fresh and stimulating these stories are, after years of repeated reading. Have I gained new perspective over the decades or is it just Damn Good Writing?

Try and remember where you were when you first encountered Kurt Vonnegut's superman "Harrison Bergeron" and his last stand against a tyranny of the mediocre. Cranky hallucinogenic rambling or poignant universal eulogy? You get both and a whole lot more in "The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison®, dog lover. I read "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. with a greater appreciation than I did as a teen. It starts off as a tropical Hemingway trek that turns into two people's desperate escape from alien beings. This insightful story left me appropriately uncomfortable. That James, what a nutty guy.

Most of these tales reveal an entire self-contained world in a dozen or so pages. Neil Gaiman shows us a glimpse of eternity in just under three with "Other People". Some short stories can be a gateway to an author's larger universe. "Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin is a story of anthropology and family heartbreak on a planet of the Ekumen. This is the same galactic setting as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. When the man in black fled across the desert, Stephen King's "Gunslinger" followed him for the first time across the pages of F&SF. That story is here, as is "Two Hearts", the coda to Peter S. Beagle's beloved The Last Unicorn.

Some Hard SF purists might dismiss many of these stories, and mores the pity. You won't find much detailed technical jargon, or clear-cut heroes and villains who take on the universe as a problem to be solved. There are many stories here that explore the impact of science on society, such as Damon Knight's "I See You". He posits a miraculous technology available to every household that allows anyone to look up anything in history — and which means the loss of privacy forever. Like that could ever happen. In "macs", Terry Bisson presents a gruesome combination of cloning and victims' rights in a documentary fashion. To the unprepared, Bisson's technique of pure unattributed dialogue— without any description of setting or action,— can be a bit jarring, but he does it better than anyone else I've read and produces a very intimate effect. (Look for that internet darling, "They're Made of Meat" or a personal fave of mine, "Press Ann").

Many of these offerings head off to the vaguely-defined zone of Fantasy but not in any predictable elfy-welfy manner. We could toss around terms like Surrealism or Magic Realisim, or just sit back and enjoy the finely-crafted enigmas and wonders. Michael Swanwick presents a society with spaceships and virtual immortality living on "Mother Grasshopper", a planet-sized insect where disease is a precious gift. Plagues also figure in "The Dark" by Karen Joy Fowler, as do the Tunnel Rats of the Vietnam War and reports by campers of mysterious bipeds in the woods.

The final piece in this anthology is by the brilliant Ted Chiang, who will never, ever write enough stories to satisfy me. "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" uses that classic science fiction convention, the time machine, in the nested stories style of Scheherezade's fabled One Thousand and One Nights. Chiang weaves deeply moving threads of shifting fortune, guilt, and repentance in a very clever and rational approach to time-travel all through the lens of Muslim faith. Just beautiful.

This is an ideal collection for someone who wants to start reading more SF, or for us grizzled old bibliophiles who would like to have some favorite stories in one convenient trade paperback. I was repeatedly blown away by the impact such short pieces, some quite familiar to me, still had on me. Half an hour's reading, and I spent the next day or so catching myself staring off into space muttering, "Oh wow."

We've all been discussing the apparent decline in short fiction lately. Recently, at a reading and panel discussion, author Marta Randall decried the lack oh venues for short stories. She noted that so many new writers go directly for the"huge sagging trilogies" rather than learning how to knock our socks off in a dozen pages. The Publishing industry is all about the 600 pp doorstop, and why? Because that's what readers think they want. "I'm not going to fork over US$7.99 for something slim I can finish in an afternoon," we say,"I want more bang for my buck, more meat for my moola!" But are we really getting the best deal? Ms. Randall insists that more craft and talent go into a really good short story than some epic pot-boiler plumped up with needless exposition and obsessive description. They say this is the twilight for the print periodicals like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science. Everyone is very excited by the possibilities this new-fangled "internet" might provide, but no one really seems to have a clear picture yet for a viable model for how writers will be compensated fairly. Yes, writers should get paid for their work, that's why it's called work.

I hope all of you will continue support short story writing. Pick up magazines and anthologies like this one or quarterly independent 'zines such as Electric Velocipede orLady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. The rise of super short "flash fiction", such as that in the upcoming anthology Last Drink Bird Head looks interesting. Strange Horizons is a great site to read new short fiction, poetry and articles every week. I'm still deeply mired in dead tree stuff, so all this is unexplored territory. Please feel free to share with us in the comments your favorite current short story authors and professional venues for this important and vital form of speculative fiction.

Here is the complete Table of Contents of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology.:

Alfred Bester "Of Time and Third Avenue"
Ray Bradbury "All Summer in a Day"
Shirley Jackson "One Ordinary Day With Peanuts"
Theodore Sturgeon "A Touch of Strange
William Tenn "Eastward Ho!"
Daniel Keyes "Flowers for Algernon"
Kurt Vonnegut "Harrison Bergeron"
Roger Zelazny "This Moment of the Storm"
Philip K. Dick "The Electric Ant"
Harlan Ellison® "The Deathbird"
James Tiptree, Jr. "The Women Men Don't See"
Damon Knight "I See You"
Stephen King "The Gunslinger"
Karen Joy Fowler "The Dark"
John Kessel "Buffalo"
Ursula K. Le Guin "Solitude"
Michael Swanwick "Mother Grasshopper"
Terry Bisson "macs"
Jeffery Ford "Creation"
Neil Gaiman "Other People"
Peter S. Beagle "Two Hearts"
M. Rickert "Journey into the Kingdom"
Ted Chiang "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology.
may be purchased here , direct from the publisher, or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to many short fiction authors as Chris Hsiang. He always looks up to tall fiction authors because, well, he has to.

Edgar Allan Poe is usually credited for creating the detective fiction genre but it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that really nailed it with his timeless creation, Sherlock Holmes. The world's first and greatest consulting detective is the model for countless later fictional investigators as disparate as The Batman and television's Dr. Gregory House. And he no doubt inspired as many real-life careers.

There is something that's always been very compelling about an individual of modest birth, who succeeds against every obstacle using naught but pure intellect and a thirst for ever more knowledge. To be sure, Holmes had some major character flaws: he was an utter jerk even to those closest to him, a misanthropic humanist, a recovering drug addict (his cocaine habit was, in later tales, "not dead, but merely sleeping"), and an overly enthusiastic violinist to boot. Still, he uses his immense gifts in aid of a society that he could never quite feel comfortable with. Sherlock Holmes is a Geek God on par with his distant descendant, Mr. Spock.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. " – Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four

A fitting statement indeed for this supreme rationalist. Holmes would only believe what he could observe and prove. This led to some odd quirks in his otherwise encyclopedic knowledge. In the very first Holmes story, the 1887 "A Study in Scarlet", his new acquaintance and faithful chronicler Dr. John H. Watson discovers that Holmes is unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It plays no part in his criminal investigations and so he had never considered it. Despite this he used the most current scientific knowledge to solve cases that plumbed the depths of the human psyche and affected the affairs of mighty nations. It is to Sir Arthur's credit as a writer that he created such an amazing character so at odds with the author's own beliefs. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was hopelessly infatuated with the fads of spiritualism and the supernatural. This was the guy totally bamboozled by two young girls and their hoax of the Cottingley Fairies. Yet he made Holmes, that paragon of logic and analysis feel so real.

Take another gander at the above quote. If the Detective ever encountered a case truly unworldly and improbable that he couldn't Scooby-Doo it apart like the Sussex Vampire or the Baskerville Hounds, his trusty Occam's Razor would allow him to deal with it in the same cool dry reason that he used against pickpockets or philandering spouses. This is the basis behind The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.. The original stories of Sherlock Holmes may not be science fiction, they surely belong on the borderlands and have influenced many a speculative genre writer.

Editor John Joseph Adams oversaw this anthology of twenty-eight tales of the Great Detective, involving hard science, the undead, aliens, allohistory, dinosaurs, pirates, Canadians and other weirdness. Click here for a look at the complete Table of Contents.

Nearly all of them are reprints, but it's pretty cool to have them all in one volume, and there are some you might have missed. Shamefully, I must admit I never read Neil Gaiman's oft-reprinted and deservedly popular "A Study in Emerald" before. It really is a must-read for Lovecraft fans. Squamous and rugose notes of the Mythos can also be felt in Tim Lebbon's "The Horror of Many Faces" and Barbara Hamby's "The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece".

Another story steeped in the supernatural that caught my bibliophilic eye was Barbara Roden's "The Things that Shall Come Upon Them" wherein Holmes teams up with fellow investigator Flaxman Low. Low was a fictional psychic investigator, perhaps the first, the literary creation of Doyle's friend Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Pritchard. The 1957 film Night of the Demon was based on one of his stories. In Ms. Roden's story, the two detectives solve a case using wildly differing methods but arriving at the same conclusion. I got a kick out of Holmes' initial dismissal of Low as a cheap imitator and charlatan. Low, of course, is a total Holmes fanboy.

There are significant appearances by the rest of the Holmesian dramatis personae besides the trusty Watson, who solves a case before his friend in a story by Stephen King. Long-suffering landlady Mrs. Hudson gets her moment in the sun at long last in a piece from Laurie R. King's Mary Russell canon. Rat-faced whipping boy Inspector Lestrade is here of course, as is The Woman — sublime Irene Adler, and the formidable older brother Mycroft Holmes. And what Sherlock Holmes collection would be complete without that Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty and his sinister right-hand man Col. Sebastian Moran. We even get a crossover with another Arthur Conan Doyle character, the quintessential early science fiction boffin, Professor Challenger.

Even more of a treat are the stories where Holmes crosses paths with historical figures. A Young H.G. Wells assists in Stephen Baxter's "The Adventure of the Internal Adjustor" Aan elderly Rev. CharlesDodgson helps investigate the cold case of the untimely demise of a student named Doyle many years ago in Tony Pi's "Dynamics of a Hanging". Arthur Conan Doyle himself appears as a client who summons Holmes and Watson to investigate crop circles and strange lights in the night sky over his estate. "The Adventure of the Field Theorems" by Vonda N. McIntyre is a sharp and very funny look at the differences between Sherlock Holmes and his creator.

In the fifty-six stories and four novels penned by Sir Arthur, he alludes to other cases that Dr. Watson was sworn to never reveal. In The Improbable Adventures, we can finally read the truth(s) behind the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, the criminal Merridew of abominable memory", and others.

Sadly, Mr. Adams did not see fit to include any tales concerning the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Perhaps he felt the world is not yet ready for that tale. For those of you stout of heart, I was always fond of this interpretation of that ghastly case. Okay, it's pretty silly, but I like it. The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen is probably more worthwhile. I also recommend this tragically overlooked film by the great Billy Wilder, it includes midgets, steampunky tech, Christopher Lee as Mycroft, and a certain famous loch.

I should also mention contributions from legends Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess or those stories that explore the Fermi Paradox and Everett's many-worlds interpretation. Suffice it to say, this is a great collection of stories that really only samples a wee bit of the shelves and shelves of works that writers and fans of the Great Detective have written. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a good place to start or rediscover your love for one of the world's greatest literary creations, Sherlock Holmes.

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be out soon. You may purchase it from these bozos
or your local independent bookseller.

Grey_Area is known to the Baker Street Irregulars as Chris Hsiang. He awaits Guy Ritchie's film with cautious optimism.

Sandman Slim follows the adventures of Jimmy, aka Stark, aka Sandman Slim, who was dragged down to Hell as a cocky teenager and somehow survived for eleven years, before busting out. The only person he cared about is dead, and he's out for revenge — and he doesn't really care what he has to break to get it. Along the way, he gets dragged deeper and deeper into the politics of the L.A. magic scene, the ongoing feud between Hell's generals, the schemes of angels, Homeland Security, and the decadent plans of L.A.'s filthy rich magic users.

As someone who's read every novel by Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Richard Stark/Donald Westlake and Ross McDonald at least once, I found the frothiness and nihilism of the novel instantly appealing. Here's one especially Spillane-esque section, from towards the end of the book:

There's only one problem with L.A.

It exists.

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will...

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance camersa and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

In another section, Stark visits a house full of rich magician assholes and scenesters, and describes them using timeless phrases like "They shit cancer."

Another crucial ingredient in the noir formula, a massive cast of corrupt day-players, each with his/her own agenda and hypocrisies, also manifests pretty well in the book. It takes place in a universe that will seem familiar to anyone who's watched Supernatural or read any of a dozen other dark urban fantasy novels set in a vaguely Judeo-Christian universe. Angels are dicks, demons are pretty nasty, and the world is full of monsters of various stripes — including humans, who are usually just out for their own gain.

But Kadrey also laces his novel's set-up with a fair amount of wish-fulfillment: Besides having survived a long stint in Hell and returned to talk about it, Stark is also almost impossible to kill thanks to a Nietzschean "whatever doesn't kill me" type thing. Early on in the book, he gets shot multiple times, and the bullets only cause him a bit of discomfort. He's got a magic knife that can cut anything and start any car, and a magic key that can transport him anywhere, including Heaven or Hell. And a Veritas, a kind of magic eight-ball that answers questions truthfully, but snarkily. Oh, and he knows special Hell magic that nobody else on Earth knows. So he gets to have the perfect heroic combination — he's miserable and filled with self-loathing and bitterness, but he also has a toychest full of awesomeness that most people would kill their extended family for.

In other words, it's the perfect escapist storyline — for some reason, escapism actually works better with a permanently grim and/or depressed hero. Just look at Batman.

Oh, the other thing about Sandman Slim is that it's frequently side-splittingly funny. Stark has sworn to kill all of the people who sent him to Hell and had a hand in killing his girlfriend. But the first co-conspirator he catches up with is Kasabian, who was sort of a pathetic lapdog back then and has now been consigned to running a video store in a crappy neighborhood. Kasabian shoots Stark, who decapitates him in turn. But Kasabian doesn't die (magic knife, remember) and Kasabian's disembodied head sits on a shelf for much of the rest of the novel, commenting on the action and begging for cigarettes. The whole book is like that — gruesome slapstick mixed with down-and-dirty Hammett-esque mayhem and double-dealing.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of a slightly darker, cleverer version of Monster by A. Lee Martinez, the last book about a semi-human monster who defends the world from other monsters that I read. Where Sandman Slim has a jump on Monster is in its hero, who is both more tormented and more sympathetic than Monster's sad-sack protagonist.

Sandman Slim's main drawback is its plot, which doesn't bear much examination — about halfway, or maybe two thirds of the way, through the book, the exposition starts getting thicker and thicker, and various characters pop up to explain stuff, and then other characters jump in to explain those explanations. Soon enough, the simple tale of a horrendously scarred bastard who crawled out of Hell to kill a bunch of people who deserved it gets more and more muddled with a lot of other stuff. It sort of overpowers the fun revenge rampage you've been primed for since the start of the book — but the good news is, there's still plenty of death, destruction and despair to go around, and the book's final big action set pieces are a lot of fun. It's easy to see why people were talking about it at Comic Con.

All in all, Sandman Slim brings a pleasingly loathesome L.A. vibe to its tale of Hell's inmate's progress. As you'd hope for a novel in the "urban fantasy" genre, the city itself is one of the novel's main characters, teeming with crack dealers and Brad Pitt lookalikes and neo-Nazis — oh, and angels and demons and assorted other nasties. If you've been hoping someone would bring the full-strength SoCal toxic waste to the urban fantasy game, then Sandman Slim is your poison.

Allegedly, this book actually came out in June or July, even though my review copy says August. Which is why we only just got around to reviewing it. Anyway, it's out now: [Amazon]

This incredible art comes from G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra: Mission Dossier, newly out from Titan Books. The book follows the "dossier" format pretty closely, including "mission briefings" on all the movie's main characters and — more importantly — detailed designs and discussions for every piece of hardware in the film, from the Panther aircraft to the Liquid Armor to the famous (or infamous) Delta-6 Accelerator Suit. The whole thing is broken up into four mission briefings, corresponding to the four big sequences in the movie: Kyrgyzstan (the hijacking of the nanomite shipment), Egypt (the G.I. Joe base), France (the Eiffel Tower attack), and Arctic (that undersea base attack.)

If you enjoyed the lovely design work in the film, and want an up-close-and-personal look at Cobra Commander's mask, or his nanomite injector, or the ins and outs of the G.I. Joe base, then it's well worth checking out. [Amazon]

Ever since I was four years old, in 1972— before the merger of punk to steam, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. After devouring Verne and Wells, I discovered the Oswald Bastable trilogy by Michael Moorcock. Philip José Farmer further fueled my feverish pubescent imagination with such works as The Wind Whales of Ishmael and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. I discovered there's more to science fiction than spaceships and robots in the future.

K. W. Jeter is usually credited with coining the phrase "steampunk" back in the early 80s. He, along with Tim Powers and James Blaylock, created dark versions of the Victorian Era, stocked with accelerated technology re-dressed in period appropriate materials with occasional supernatural elements. Morlock Nights, The Anubis Gates, and The Digging Leviathan all echoed the literature and feel of 19th Century and commented on society struggling to keep up with rapidly changing technology. With less doom and gloom than than its gleaming, black, low-slung sibling — cyberpunk — these speculations still offered cynical social commentary. The Good Old Days weren't all that great, and throwing a lot of shiny gizmos around will never fix the societal ills that confound us in any era.

I wasn't really aware of this trend in fiction until '91 when William Gibson and Bruce Sterling introduced the wider reading public to steampunk in The Difference Engine. Then, as Snow Crash did to Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson one-upped Messers Gibson and Sterling with The Diamond Age. It's just my humble opinion; this is a smarter and by far more entertaining novel. Stephenson turned the expected convention around, injecting Victorian styles and sensibilities into a future that enjoys nearly miraculous technologies. His novel examines the infamous repressive morality of that era as much as it explores the possibilities of nanotech. Michael Swanwick took a similar route with a far more playful tone in the ripping adventures of Darger and Surplus. I strongly recommend these ribald short stories — there is an excellent recent Swanwick collection from Subterranean Press and another, The Dog Said Bow-Wow, from Tachyon.

Also of note is Paul Di Filippo's weird and wonderful Steampunk Trilogy (1995). The first tale concerns a gentleman inventor and his remarkable amphibian prodigy involved in a royal scandal. "Victoria" fits most preconceptions of what a steampunk story is about: advanced retro-science and aristocratic adventures. The other two are more atypical but I adore Di Filippo's customary pop culture references and mashups at play in the 19th Century. Famed naturalist and racist asshole Louis Aggasiz visits the sleepy little fishing hamlet of Innsmouth? Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman explore the astral plane with Madame Blatavasky — and Allen Ginsberg has a cameo? Zany, clever stuff.

Even though steampunk lit has been around for a few decades now, it's increased rapidly in popularity the past few years. It has inspired other media as well as design and fashion to an eye-rolling degree. There are more steampunk novels than ever, although too many or not enough for some people. Here I'd like to share my thoughts on four of these with you, Gentle Reader.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (Tor, on shelves now)
In 1901, Sir Maurice Newbury and his new assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are employed at the Anthropology department of the British Museum. They also serve as special agents of the Crown, investigating extraordinary threats against the Empire.

Sir Maurice scoffs at spiritualism and superstition, even though some of his c ases have involved the supernatural. He bows before the altar of Rationality and is enthralled by the mighty airships, graceful clockwork androids, and the other mechanical wonders of his age. Miss Hobbes finds her employer's enthusiasm for noisy odoriferous machines childish. She prefers horse-drawn carriages and Georgian architecture to the chaos and ornate fripperies of the current mode. Still she is a thoroughly modern woman championing forward-thinking social causes. Both of them keep shameful secrets and hidden agendas from each other, will their new partnership survive?

Newbury and Hobbes are assisting with Scotland Yard to investigate a series of strangulations in Whitechapel that may have a supernatural cause. Before they can pursue any new leads, Sir Maurice is called away for a special audience with the Queen. She is not amused.

Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria is kept alive by huge wheezing machines (in our world she died in the first month of the 20th Century). The frightening cyborg monarch orders Newbury off all other cases to investigate the fiery crash of an airship that killed all those aboard. The automaton that piloted the craft is missing but, most seriously in her Royal eyes, one of her family, a Dutch prince was aboard. The investigation leads to Chapman & Villiers, Britain's largest airship company and the inventors of the wondrous automatons, which may not be as foolproof or harmless as advertised. .

Oh and by the way, there is also a plague of Revenants (to his credit, Mann does not use the Z-word). A virus, brought by soldiers returning from India, is infecting the neighborhoods of the less fortunate creating shambling cannibals of the classic Romero type. Everyone feels just awful about these and some calculate most of the country's population will be infected. Then again it only appears to occur to the poor, so not much is being done to stop it.

The plot whirrs along with a brisk clockwork (hah!) predictability switching over at times to reveal some of the protagonists' eccentricities and mysterious pasts. The second half shifts into high gear with some truly exciting action scenes. For all their supposed intellectual prowess, Newbury and Hobbes seem to solve most things by hitting them. Most of the puzzle clicks together as expected but some bits are just ejected with the flimsiest explanation. I'm sorry to report this story was steampunk lite, thrills and spills with steam engines in the background. Victorian language and customs have been watered down. There is an obvious message about the loss of our humanity to an increasingly mechanized society and a vague conflict between Science and Superstition. Most of the intimations of magic and the supernatural hint at the direction further Newbury and Hobbes investigations will go. I dearly hope that The Affinity Bridge is not their most interesting case.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (Tor, on shelves now)
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (Tor, on shelves now)
This follow up to last year's excellent The Court of the Air is a riot of twisted imagination and full steam ahead thrills. Hunt's richly textured worldbuilding compares favorably with China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels or Philip Pullman. These authors blend sorcery and science with steampunk trappings and have their own encyclopedia's worth of invented creatures, histories, and societies. Miéville has the more sober tone and keeps a firmer hand on the tiller of plot and pacing, wheras Hunt is just crazy in all the right ways. Sometimes he gets a little at sea: characters will be a bit inconsistent, and his climaxes are just way over the top. He also has similar convoluted wordplay to Miéville but with less purple prose and more groan-worthy puns. There is also dark political satire stretching to bizarre proportions (Marxist thought is not spared this treatment).

Most of Hunt's protagonists hail from the Kingdom of Jackals which resembles Great Britain. Centuries ago, the Jackals' version of the Cromwell's Civil War assured that Parliament would have the upper hand in the nation's affairs. The royal family are kept in breeding houses and the arms of each King or Queen get amputated upon coronation, so no more waving from the balcony. Parliament members make and pass laws the in traditional manner: bashing each other with stout "debating sticks" in ritual duels. This green and pleasant land of shopkeepers and shepherds enjoys stability through its monopoly of the celgas that keeps its aerostat navy aloft as well as the Court of the Air, the secret police that uses a combination of total aerial surveillance and leyline magic.

Jackal's enemies abroad include Quatérshift, in the throes of an Eternal Revolution bloodier than Robbespierre, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined. Even more frightening is the desert Caliphate of Cassarabia where the biomages breed all manner of monstrous creatures from the wombs of human slaves. They all share the planet (Earth in a far-flung future?) with people that resemble crustaceans or winged lizards. There are also the steammen, a race of mostly gentle clockwork robots with a religion that has elements of Santería and Zen.

There are also Plucky orphans, fey-blooded super-soldiers, science-pirates akin to Nemo, vigilantes with mystic weapons, lost cities, shouty dinosaurs, and an entire jungle ecology with a hive mind. Petroleum — like the controllable "electricity" — is long gone, Much industry is powered by steam or clockwork. "Expansion engines" (and firearms) run on the volatile sap of the Blow-Barrel tree. I've just given you a sliver of Hunt's creation, and hope this has piqued your interest. Look beyond all the fascinating and fantastical elements, and Hunt's work is about the pursuit of dreams in a world of clashing ideals and conquest. You can probably read Kingdom without reading The Court of the Air first, but I think you'll be hooked either way. Join the expedition of Professor Amelia Harsh (who literally has the arms of a gorilla) and her quest for The Kingdom Beyond the Waves.

Soulless by Gail Carriger (Orbit, Late Sept. 2009)
This comedy of manners and monsters is the first of the Parasol Protectorate series. I was a tad embarassed that I enjoyed this silly and original story so much. I mean, let us now judge the book by its cover – hmm, photo of a slinky young lady in period costume...oookaaay, her bumbershoot has arbitrary gears and a length of rubber hose attached to it for no discernible purpose, and the cover blurb speaks of vampires and werewolves, uh huh – Oh Sweet Buffy Sainte-Marie, this is a steampunk paranormal romance! Well yes, there are dirigibles over another Victorian London and our sassy heroine does have some decidedly racy scenes, when not facing the forces of darkness. Ms. Carriger has imbued this book with a delightful sense of humour and some very fresh changes. Her heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, is a very original creation quite separate from all those crossbow-wielding tattooed tarts one sees writhing on so many paperback covers these days. She also understands the Importance of Tea, and the problem of Silly Little Hats.

Alexia Tarabotti seems doomed to spend her life as a spinster. She is far too willful and too old (well into her third decade) and has a father who is both Italian and dead. He left her with an unfashionable complexion, an abundance of all manner of curious books, and very little social prospects. Unbeknown to her mother and other boring people, Alexia lacks something else— a soul. Oh she laughs and cries as the rest of us do, appreciates the arts, and I suspect could bust out in a funky gavotte. She just has no immortal soul. Supernaturals; ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the like have a surplus of soul, thus accounting for the extra life and unkillability they enjoy. The extemely rare preternaturals are born without a soul. Upon the slightest physical contact with Miss Tarabotti, a supernatural becomes a mere mortal, the fangs retract, fur sheds, and death or injury become very real prospects. This can be a very handy talent should the local vampire forget his manners and attempt to dine without an invitation.

In this capacity, Alexia occasionally assists the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, that Branch of Her Majesty's Civil Service that polices vampires and werewolves. Supernaturals revealed them selves to the world at large during the Civil War. They had grown weary of skulking in the shadows, fleeing the inevitable torches and pitchforks. Now they are integrated into high-society and have helped build the British Empire and no longer threaten innocent mortals. Still, there are little misunderstandings, and that's where the BUR comes in. It is led by the very dashing Scottish peer and Alpha of London's werewolf pack, Lord Conall Maccon. Miss Tarabotti is often offended by his brusque, crude manner, no doubt stemming from his exotic and savage nature. Oh, and he turns into a wolf once a month. How bothersome, and yet the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Lord Conall and Miss Tarabotti must investigate the sudden appearance of unregistered vampires and the appearance of known supernatural citizens. They employ cutting-edge science and the most scathing banter they can muster. Gail Carriger has employed some very original thinking to the alternate-history-with-monsters game. She also lampoons the vicious world of Victorian society where an arch remark or fumbled introduction could reduce one to a state akin to walking death. Soulless is a character-driven romp with great worldbuilding and delicious rapier wit that recalls Austen and P.G. Wodehouse. Mystery and bloodshed abound, tea will be served,and there will be treacle tart!

Not Less Than Gods by Kage Baker
(Deluxe Hardcover, Subterranean Press, Dec. 2009 Trade Hardcover, Tor, March 2010)
I am a big Kage Baker fan and have raved about her books before. This one won't be coming out until after Kwaanza, and I'll do a more in-depth review then. I'll just say it involves the early life and career of that Victorian superspy, Edward Alton Bell-Faifax, whom some of you may know from The Company novels. Bell-Fairfax is a Hero in the most Classic sense, fated for greatness and all the tragedy that entails. There's globe-trotting espionage and scads of amazing secret gadgetry: novelty-hat cameras, radio transmitters, a kung-fu robot, radar-equipped speedboats, a rifle that shoots ice bullets, bullet-proof carriges with "internal-combustion engines", and so much more! "But wait, will there be goggles? We want the goggles, Grey!" Do you? Well how about telescopic infrared goggles? For Everybody! GOGGLES YAY!!

Do please pardon me. The important thing to remember is that Kage Baker really brings 1849 alive with a wealth of details and pitch perfect dialogue. This woman truly understands language in a way only someone deeply involved in the Theater can. She often works as a professional historical reenactor and has taught Elizabethean English as a Second Language. She takes a rather dim view of people who show up at RenFaire dressed as their WoW character and ask where the frozen yogurt stand is.

I have a similar problem with these Josiah-come-latelys who glue-gun clock parts to their bolo ties and spout things like, "I say, old bean, zeppelins are absolutely smashing!" in a bad Cockney accent. I spoke to one gentleman deeply committed to the Steampunk Lifestyle and he admitted that he never read any of the novels I discussed in the top half of this post. For him it all began and ended with that TV series starring Robert Conrad, which admittedly predates those novels. When asked why he found steampunk so fulfilling he rhapsodized about the DIY aesthetique his community enjoys,"I stitched this waistcoat and suit myself!" and the sense of boundless optimisim the psuedo-era held (holds?). To paraphrase; "People could become whatever they wanted despite their gender, race, or class!". This is stunningly ironic from someone emulating a period known for a rigid social hierarchy and the beginning of mass-produced consumer goods. Of course it's all fantasy, there never were clockwork automatons or airship fleets ushering in a Utopia of muttonchops and bustles. I just wish some of these fashion victims put a little more depth and research in to their statement. Read a damn book already.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the Gentlemen's Speculative Society as Christopher Hsiang, Esq. He is very much looking forward to the 20th Century again.

Steamy Photograph by Kyle Cassidy, Models: Liza James and Jared Axelrod

Released earlier this summer, Norse Code has gotten some rave reviews. And it definitely doesn't scrimp on crowd-pleasing battles and showdowns.

The Norse armageddon known as Ragnarok is creeping up on Earth – already, the planet has suffered through three years of winter. That's why shady entrepreneur/goddess Ragrid is building up an army of valkyries to fight on the side of right in the battle that's to come. Ragrid runs the NorseCODE genomics project in Boston, allegedly for the purposes of research, but in fact designed to locate people who are the direct descendants of Odin. Now NorseCODE employs murdered business student Kathy, who found herself yanked off the road to Helheim and pressed into service as the valkyrie Mist ("It sounds like stripper name," she notes sourly).

Mist's job is to locate and kill Odin's genetic kin, turning them into Einherjar, soldiers in the war to stop the bad guys behind Ragnarok. Except possibly the good guys aren't who you think they are. And maybe Mist wants to do other things with her undead valkyrie time than serve the interests of a biotech shill with supernatural powers.

Early in the novel, Mist decides to deviate from her boss' plan. Instead of killing potential Einherjar, she goes to Helheim to rescue her sister, murdered in the same attack she was killed in. Along for the ride is her Einherjar protector Grimnir, a homeless god from Los Angeles called Hermod, and a cute dog called Winston. As they wander deeper into the territory of Norse mythology, van Eekhout is clearly having fun with smashing together the contemporary world with Scandinavian lore. We meet a sybil in a baseball cap, and the road to Hel is literally lined with strip malls.

Eventually our heroes discover that Ragnarok has been jump-started too early by a group of conspirators – but who are they? And why would they possibly want to destroy Earth, along with every other world connected to it? The blend of corporate conspiracy tale with myth has already invited apt comparisons between van Eekhout's work and Neil Gaiman's.

While Norse Code succeeds as a fantasy-adventure, I think it ultimately fails to do what Gaiman has done masterfully in so many novels: Give us myth and reality in equally compelling doses. It often feels like van Eekhout is trying so hard to sandwich all his Norse mythology into the book that he loses sight of the contemporary plot developments that make his novel so original.

After the first chapter or so, for example, we never return to the intrigue of the NorseCODE genomics project, surely one of the most intriguing corporate entities I've encountered in the genre. I love the idea of a Boston biotech company which is secretly combing the human genome for traces of godliness. And Mist and her sister Lilly's previous human lives – as a business student and radical political activist respectively - become running gags that never really go anywhere.

Still there are enough mega-battles with armies of the undead (one memorably in a Costco parking lot), magical swords, and weird gods to please anyone in this novel. It's the sort of book that deserves to become a sweet summer movie. Especially if you are a fan of mythology, Norse Code will feel like an awesome rock show - even if it never goes much beyond that.

Read the first chapter of Norse Code at Tor.com.

Oh, and there will be vague, mostly nondescript spoilers here.

Federations aims to be an anthology of short stories about interstellar civilizations — think Star Trek, Star Wars, or Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. But really, most of the stories in this collection are just classic space opera, with only a little discussion of the challenges and joys of multi-planetary collaboration. There's quite a lot of space war, a fair bit of first contact, and a dash of deep-space exploration. And that turns out to be a more thrilling experience, in many ways, than a more tightly thematic collection of stories about deep-space alliances might have been.

For one thing, along with that wider range of stories, the anthology spans a wider variety of time periods, from our present day to a distant future. Some stories contain the merest glimmer of hope that humans will form alliances at some point in the future with other worlds.

For example, one of the best of the book's many space-war stories is Lois McMaster Bujold's lovely, melancholy "Aftermaths," in which a woman and her assistant collect the dead bodies from a deep-space war with the Barrayarans. And the woman, MedTech Boni, insists on collecting the enemy dead bodies as well as the friendly dead, treating them both with the same compassion and respect, even though we discover she's lost something closer to home in this particular war.

But still, my favorite stories in the collection are the ones which engage directly with the theme of federations. The ones which show different planets (and in most cases different intelligent species) colliding, either in war or in diplomacy, and trying to understand each other. The ones which take apart the idea of a confederacy of greatly different interstellar cultures, and what kind of shape it would take. Those are the stories which are most likely to stick in your mind after you're done reading the whole thing.

For example, there's Genevieve Valentine's "Carthago Delenda Est," about a ship full of humans, in a rendezvous point with a bunch of alien ships, all waiting hundreds of years for a super-advanced ambassador from a distant planet called Carthage to arrive – and while the gathering of different species sits in one place and waits, they create a kind of incidental peace, punctuated with bickering, cooperation and even a bit of interspecies nookie, and you sense they're creating the first tentative links in what could become a real alliance.

There are also a few delightfully snarky stories which deconstruct, and in some cases satirize outright, the idea of a civilization made up of civilizations, and these are among the book's standout stories. Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Culture Archivist" mashes up Star Trek's Federation and Borg into a single civilization that's cybernetically enhanced via nanotech and goes around trying to assimilate other cultures into its rapacious capitalist sameness. K. Tempest Bradford's "Different Day" imagines the Earth being contacted by not just one, but three different alien races within the same interstellar group, each with its own agenda. And James Alan Gardner's "The One With The Interstellar Group Consciousness" recasts all of the romantic-comedy cliches into a story of a vast interstellar society trying to find another interstellar society or federation to "mate" (i.e., join) with.

The most upbeat story, and one of the most amusing, is probably Alan Dean Foster's "Pardon Our Conquest," in which a petty alien dictator finds out what happens when you tangle with the vastly more advanced galactic Commonwealth — the Commonwealth is incredibly nice to you and showers you with kindness, until you have no choice but to give in.

And then there are the stories that look at interstellar commuincation from a more idiosyncratic, and hence more fascinating, vantage point — like S.L. Gilbow's "Terra-Exulta," which talks about the linguistic challenges involved in terraforming alien planets — and shows, in a very Orwellian way, how you can justify genocide against countless alien species if you just create the right terminology for it. (Like "Ecoviscerate." Or "retoration," which means "the removal of all life from a planet in order to repopulate it with other life forms to create a more balanced ecology.") And then Catherynne M. Valente's "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War Elegy" reflects a whole swath of interstellar history through the lens of a wine glass, by walking us through the different vintages that an illicit winery on an alien planet created.

Federations is definitely one of those anthologies that offers something for everyone, including some more traditional space-war stories, and a few rollicking space adventure tales, like "Warship" by George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, and Harry Turtledove's mildly amusing "Someone Is Stealing The Great Throne Rooms Of The Galaxy." If (like me) you harbor nostalgia for Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, then you'll be happy to revisit Helva in "The Ship Who Returned."

Whether they're taking us to deep-space battles, showing us uneasy collaboration between vastly different races, or satirizing the very idea of a benign interplanetary alliance, the stories in Federations mostly keep a very human perspective on the hugeness and strangeness of a galaxy teeming with life. And that's reason enough to sign on to its galactic charter. [Amazon]

A few months ago, Wood Ingham joined with authors Will Hindmarch and Chuck Wendig, to form an on-line writer's collective known as Jet-Pack. Although initially connected by their work for RPG publisher White Wolf, the three authors' flash fiction and short stories revealed a series of off-kilter realities and glossy dystopian futures. Ingham's Memory Sticks originally appeared on Jet-Pack as a serialized story about a young woman, named Sarah whose transient memories seem largely dictated by the implanted computer that sometimes controls her brain. Collected into novella form, it becomes a meditation on the line between technology and humanity, and what happens when the line becomes far too blurred.

The story takes place in a near-future that is plausibly two or three decades away. Though not central to the plot, it is apparent that some highly advanced neurosurgery involving nanobots is required for brain implanted computers to work properly. These aren't just computers inside someone's brain, though — the procedure makes the brain into a computer, giving the system access to memory and personality.

Sarah is a young woman who underwent implantation for her job as a reporter and editor. She has a hard time remembering her real name, since she almost always goes by her callsign, ALIS. ALIS can compose, edit and upload articles just by thinking about it; she works while riding the train, while eating breakfast, and while having sex. She never sleeps, just drops into "passive mode."

Most of her co-workers have no idea who she is because they spend all day tranced out and connected to the network. Social interaction is almost all via text message or network update. Every conversation is like the disjointed hell of an Internet chatroom. Her only real relationship is a sham. The true horror of ALIS' semi-artificial existence is revealed by the reaction of the "normal" humans who encounter her: a mix of revulsion and fascination that leaves her at one point crying out to herself, "I'm not a robot!"

Ingham's prose is tight and plain, presenting even the most emotional scenes in a raw, unadorned manner that only emphasizes their true impact. The somewhat experimental style of ALIS/Sarah's conversations effectively conveys the weirdness of her constant internal and external dialogue. It's a heavy story, bright yet bleak, about artificiality, corporate slavery and human memory. It's also about nostalgia for who we were and regret over what we've had to become to make our way through the world.

Memory Sticks is available in both pdf and print, and Wood Ingham will be promoting it via a small book launch at the Crunch in Swansea, Wales on August 20th if you happen to be in the area.

Way before the advent of comic books or paperback novels, our geeky forebears got their fill of escapist exploits from those descendants of the penny dreadful, the cheaply printed, but oh so delectable pulp magazines. Starting with Argosy in 1896 and peaking in the 20s and 30s, the pulps or dime novels were a fecund morass which nurtured the genres of Science Fiction, Westerns, Crime Drama, Historical Romance, Mystery, and Horror as well as the Science Heroes that developed into the Superheroes we see conquering the box-offices of today.

I was born at least a generation and a half too late too experience the pulps when they came out, but they do figure in my memories as a very young reader. Visiting my Great-Aunt Vicky and Great-Uncle Bob at their used bookstore in Maine I would beg to spend the night in the attic. With a flickering Coleman lantern I'd wile away the hours devouring Pogo comics, the Heinlein juveniles, and the adventures of none other than The Shadow. My favorite lullaby was a pair of pearl-handled .45s blazing into the night. Even now Lamont Cranston/Kent Allard's terrifying laughter echoes through my fondest memories. But I digress, constantly.

This anthology of all previously unpublished work tears out of the gate with Joe Lansdale's "The Crawling Sky" The Reverend Jebediah Mercer from the novel Dead in the West is once again Hell-bent for leather hunting down eldritch horror in the East Texas badlands. Here the Rev gives an accounting for himself:

I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I'm a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I'm the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God's man who sets things right. Or at least as right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.
...It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.

Oh. Yeah.
How's that for a cover letter? Try reciting that over a few belts of whiskey at your local watering hole in your best approximation of a Nacogdoches drawl. The results can be quite efficacious. I need more Rev. Mercer stories.

The Weird West feel is also strong in "Quiet Bullets" by Christopher Golden, but owing more to Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury than H.P. Lovecraft. Golden takes us back to those simple innocent times of being ten years old and all the fear and confusion that entails mixed with the cozy chills a really good ghost story can deliver. The creepiness continues as we discover something terribly wrong with William F. Nonaln's "Perfect Nanny" and pull back the lid of what we think we know in Cherie Priest's "Catastrophe Box". Ms. Priest was inspired by a case of real-life psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) but her conclusion goes way past mere table-rapping at séances or wimpy cold spots.

The wild times to be found in the pulps didn't have to rely on fantastic elements. Plenty of gritty two-fisted tales were inspired the the greed and savagery to be found in the all too real mean streets. "A Gunfight" is David J. Schow's homage to Donald Westlake, a breathless blow by bloody blow report of a hardened criminal's desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the Mob. FPS games are rarely this exciting. Tim Truman, the artist who collaborated with Lansdale on the infamous Jonah Hex comic books in the late 90s and did the cover illustration for Son of Retro Pulp Tales also has a story here. Turning away from the rotten core of the Big Apple, "Pretty Green Eyes" is a piece of hard-boiled nastiness of moonshiners and corrupt strike-breakers in the old West Virginia backwoods of Truman's own family history. Although this is his first published all-prose fiction, no one familiar with his work will be surprised to find he hits every crime pulp note square in the jaw. "Border Town" also draws from it's author's roots. James Grady presents a snowbound Montana train station in 1938 with a woman on the run and rat-bastard Nazi spies.

Speaking of fascist monsters, we veer back towards the bizarre for Matt Venne's "The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.". I'll just let the over-the-top title speak for itself adding only that the final paragraph was surprisingly stirring. Plunging even deeper into the lurid ridiculous potential of pulp are "The Forgotten Kingdom" "The Lizard Men of Blood River" by Mike Resnick and Stephen Mertz respectively. Both these adventures of Lost Cities and Nearly Nekkid Native Princesses have tongue thrust full through cheek. Resnick's hysterical pun-spewing rogue, the Right Reverend Lucifer Jones was probably the class clown at the same seminary Reverend Mercer went to. It seems in this day and age we can't take the Great White Hunters or Jungle Explorers seriously any more — somehow I feel Shia LaBeouf is all to blame. I wonder if a serious reinterpretation of Allan Quatermain or the like can still be done. Maybe he's as off-limits as another favorite of mine, the sinister Fu Manchu. It seems a shame really.

There's only one story here with Rocketships and Bug-Eyed Monsters and that's this one humble offering from Harlan Ellison. Yeah, you read that right, Harlan Muthafuckin' Ellison!. If his story intro is to be believed, "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" was originally penned in 1991 for a Bantam Books project that never saw the light of day. It's a wild take on the old fairy tale set in a seedy Mars colony with exploited native labor and an ancient artifact men and martians would kill for. A dark reflection of 1940s cosmic dreams that would not be out of place along side some of the "New" Space Opera of today. But what it really reminded me was the kick-ass thrills I got when I first read Deathbird Stories. This is pure balls out Ellison. I don't know if I'd want to be stuck in an elevator with him, but he writes a damn good story.

With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read. I wish Subterranean would come out with more affordable trade paperback editions, but that's just how they roll. In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.

Son of Retro Pulp Tales will be available any day now directly from Subterranean Press,
or from the Usual Clowns.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the agents of Shadowskeedeeboomboom as Chris Hsiang. He has the power to cloud his own mind and as yet lacks a boon companion. What a surprise.

"Haikasoru" translates as "High Castle" and is meant as a riff on Philip K. Dick's classic allohistory Man In the High Castle where the Axis won WWII and Japan controls what was the Western United States. Helmed by editor Nick Mamatas, Viz Media's new publishing imprint Haikasoru is attempting a second invasion of Speculative Fiction from the Land of the Rising Sun.

I haven't read many Japanese novels other than those of Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami. These two very short debut novels from Haikasoru are interesting but not as world-shaking as I would have liked. They both share some common themes: total war against an implacable alien foe, with a healthy dash of time travel. Apart from that, these are two very different stories that may be worthy of your attention.

First up we have All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and translated by Alexander O. Smith. Nearly all the action takes place in two days (sort of) at a multinational military base in Japan. The Earth has been fighting a desperate war for decades, against alien invaders called the Mimics. They'r organic constructs, vaguely resembling giant bloated frogs but structurally akin to echinoderms like sea cucumbers or sea urchins,. They are bent on xenoforming our planet, eating soil and excreting it in a form that Terran plants cannot grow. Diplomacy or even basic communication is impossible, because the Mimics slaughter anything that gets in their way.

"Nuke the site from orbit" is not a viable solution, so the remainder of Earth's armed forces elects to fight them mainly in close combat in powered-armor called Jackets. Even the heaviest ordinance bounces off the Mimics' stony hides, and their incredibly dense bodies can withstand explosion and fire. Jackets have on-board rocket launchers and FAE grenades with servos that magnify speed and strength. All too often, the soldiers end up face to "face," and have to rely on the "pile driver," a 20-shot bolt gun that fires tungsten carbide spikes against organic javelins the mimics expel with the force of artillery shells. SpaceAge warfare boils down to throwing sticks at each other? Yeah, it's a stretch but; POWERED-ARMOR — that's always cool, right?

The novel starts out hip-deep in action as Pvt. Keiji Kiriya faces certain death in his very first battle against the Mimics. Severely wounded and out of ammo he is spared a death blow when a blazing crimson angel rushes to his side and slices the alien in half. It's the legendary Rita Vrataski, US Special Forces, also known as Mad Wargarita or The Full Metal Bitch. Since she has more kills than any other soldier the brass has indulged her eccentricities. She bunks alone, away from the barracks, and her Jacket is a bright metallic red, not camouflage. She has also rejected the standard-issue pile driver for a custom-made 200 kilogram battleaxe. I applaud this logic; as any seasoned zombie slayer will tell you, "a machete never needs reloading." This frightening valkyrie tries to comfort the mortally wounded Kiriya, distracting him with small talk and urging him to hang on, not to die. But he dies anyway.

Then Kiriya awakes in his barracks with the book he was reading before on the same page listening to the way too familiar inane chatter of of his squad mates. It is hours before his very first battle against the Mimics. The alert is sounded, they suit up and charge the enemy. The battle is different than Kiriya remembers, but with the same result— he dies again. And again. And again... "Okaaay", I'm thinking, "This is like Mecha Groundhog Day or something. I hope this isn't some lame Jim Shooter Special. If it all turns out to be a dream or— ugh— a VR training simulation, I will start throwing kittens at old people!" Well fear not, the local feline and senior population remains unmolested.. Kiriya is in fact reliving the same day over and over again. The mechanism behind this loop is quite an original solution. As Kiriya tries to understand this horrible existence, he rediscovers a bit of his heritage. He finds if not comfort, at least some meaning by applying the warrior philosophy of Bushido as he walks into certain deaths; perhaps forever.

Sakurazaka consciously constructed All You Need Is Kill like a great video game. In this he is mostly successful. The reader will feel immersed into Kiriya's dilemma, not just through the all the action but also through his internal struggle to keep from giving up, to puzzle out what the hell is happening. The glimpses of the outer world as an Earth besieged are grim and well imagined, but some of premises are just hanging by a threat. Most of the characters are very colorful but only there to fill certain slots; the Bully, the Gruff Sergeant w/ Heart of Gold, the Shy Techno Geek. Sakurazaka tries for a grim, gung-ho military sensibility but really only achieves an otaku snarkiness. I would like to stop using "like a video game" in a pejorative sense; there is a great deal of creativity and sophistication going into the storytelling of modern games, nearly as much as there is in the graphics. This sincere tribute to a favorite pastime comes off as a smart and exciting but ultimately juvenile novel. Any hard-core gamers who get their calloused thumbs on a copy are certain get a kick out of All You Need Is Kill. But they know there's better Military SF out there to read.

In a side note, the cover illustration was done by Yoshitoshi Abe who did some art for anime such as Serial Experiments Lain and Welcome to the NHK!.

I was far more pleased by Issui Ogawa's The Lords of the Sands of Time (translated by Jim Hubbert). Although it too might still be considered a YA novel, Ogawa's piece is far broader is scope and has a more mature voice. In just 200 pages we get a rich, moving adventure that spans time and space. At the end of the 26th Century, Humanity has been fighting a losing war against a ruthless group of alien self-replicating machines called the ETs. Once standing for "extraterrestrials", ET now has come to mean Evil Things. Unlike Sakurazaka's xenoforming Mimics, these ETs have no agenda other than "Destroy All Humans", something they accomplish with terrible efficiency. Life on Earth, Mars, terraformed Venus and other colonies has been wiped out leaving only a final stronghold on Saturn's moon, Triton. The front line of defense has been entrusted to the Messengers, wholly artificial cyborgs emerging from the vat fully formed with all necessary knowledge. One of these Messenger, Orville (or later, just "O") seeks to understand this Humanity he was born knowing he must serve. Through his intimate relationship with a natural-born human friend he comes to accept that his personal duty is to protect all of humanity. Not just every man, woman, and child that still survives, but every person who was ever born or might have ever existed. Whoa, no pressure there.

Just when it seems the war has taken a turn in our favor, the controlling AIs (yeah, those guys) break the bad news. A bunch of ETs (cribbing notes from the Borg and that loveable loser, Skynet) have expended 37 kathrillion tetrajoules of energy and escaped back into time to wipe out all us bald apes before we even figure out the ability for space flight or changing the channel without getting up. But good news everybody: the Ais have duplicated the technology to follow them back in time and stop them. Oh, but less than good news; nobody from our future, downstream, has come back to help out the 26th Century so it can be assumed that humans are about to be wiped out in Orville's present timeline, not that he would ever be able to return anyway. So it's forward into the past to try and preserve a reality where humans and their AI pals will survive.

This is a blue-hot Temporal War with not just continents or eras as battlefields, but entire timelines. Orville and his fellow Messengers must recruit whole civilizations as cannon fodder, racing to upgrade their technology and stripping whatever resources they can against the tireless onslaught of the ET machines. When things look doomed, the Messengers have to kiss an entire world good-bye and set off for another multiversal beachhead to start the whole process over. Through warped versions of pre-fuedal Japan, the American Civil War, and a Mid-20th Century that Harry Turtledove would be proud of, Orville keeps fighting the good fight. As his sorrow and guilt over what has been lost mounts, his sense of duty and desperate drive for final victory grows even stronger threatening to turn him into the machine he evolved from.

Although it really doesn't match his anti-war feeling, I got a Joe Haldeman vibe from this novel. O is a soldier who hates what he becomes but is driven go ever further because that's the only hope for anyone. For such a short novel (200pages) working on a very broad stage, there's a great deal of passion to be found in The Lords of the Sands of Time. More of a tease than a spoiler— there's a stirring speech to the troops in the penultimate act that has the same punch as Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day Speech. Yeah that's right, I just referenced The Forever War and Henry V for a Japanese YA novel, deal with it.

Like I said before, these aren't word-shakers but I'm glad to see more foreign-language Speculative Fiction made available to us English-language readers. Hopefully we'll see a growing range of works from Haikasoru. They'll be putting out a collection of horror stories by Otsuichi and a hard SF novel from Housuke Nojiri. I'm looking forward to next year's release of The Sixth Continent a novel about the colonization of the Moon by Lords author Ogawa.

All You Need Is Kill and The Lords of the Sands of Time are available through your local independent bookseller or these guys.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the cybertengu as Chris Hsiang. He stole the phrase "Jim Shooter Special" from Alan Beatts.

When the novel opens, Ted and Laura are still trying to get over a trauma they shared ten years ago in college. During freshman year, they discovered that a local sorority was actually a den of vampires, and nerdy folklore student Ted had to slay them all (including his roommate). While Ted had to chop up a house full of monsters, Laura had to deal with the fact that the one girl she was finally going to have sex with was actually a throat-chomping minion of evil.

Over the years they've dealt with this horrifying experience by sticking together as best friends, partly because this defining moment in both their lives is something nobody else would believe. Laura has become an ultra-competent FBI agent who is bored with investigating ATM fraud. And Ted has become an ultra-competent latte-maker for a Starbucks-esque chain. But when a group of Cthulhu cultists shoot up Ted's coffee shop, they discover that there's nothing like awakening the Old Ones and destroying the world to really wipe that boredom away.

Their quest for the cultists leads them to a Providence mall, and into a den of white supremacists who are hoping the Old Ones will cleanse the world of people that Lovecraft famously called "mongrel races." This whole bit is both funny and canny: author Cooper knows his Lovecraft, and there is some great quippage about Lovecraft's infamous racism and why his stories appeal to white supremacists who fear that their once-great race is on the wane. Lovecraft himself imagined that Cthulhu and his spawn would consort with "mongrels" out to destroy white people. But in the twenty-first century (as Ted explains), perhaps white supremacists are so disturbed by the mixed-race future that they're even willing to turn to Cthulhu - at least the great tentacled monster will destroy a world the racists feel has been lost already.

Cooper's writing is more like knockoff Joss Whedon than H.P. Lovecraft, and often the book feels like a graphic novel lacking the pictures that would really give it punch. What I mean is that there are no moments of literary brilliance - or pulpy weirdness - but there is a strong, fun adventure story and a lot of good jokes. Especially if you are a Lovecraft nerd like I am.

The novel's setting in a world of malls and chain stores and deranged white people works quite well, too. Of course a twenty-first century Cthulhu city would erupt into life in the middle of a mall, raised by white guys chanting from stuff written on their laptops. This is the geek version of militant white terrorism, so of course it can only be stopped by a daring duo comprised of a well-read geek and a kickass lesbian. And an underfunded branch of the FBI that deals with the paranormal, of course.

We never go much below the surface of our characters, but if you're looking for brooding introspection this is the wrong novel. If, however, you're looking for a good, monstery time, Mall of Cthulhu won't disappoint.

Mall of Cthulhu via Amazon

We were lucky enough to get a copy of Max Allan Collins' novelization of G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA. And we had not fully appreciated the dementia of this storyline, which really is all about nanotech and how it'll eat the world.

In the G.I. Joe universe, nanotech can do almost anything — turn regular people into super-soldiers, control your mind, devour the Eiffel Tower. I wouldn't be surprised if this movie's script was actually written by nanobots, which sliced up a million other action-movie scripts and mashed them up into a wonderfully incoherent mess. There are undigested scraps of Sho Kosugi movies and bad war movies floating around this gray goo of a story, and it's nice to watch them sail past.

This might actually be the most prominent nanotech action movie ever — I'm straining to think of another movie where nanotechnology is so central to the plot.

The central villain of the movie, of course, is the Scottish James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), an arms merchant who secretly hungers for power. In a flashback, his ancestor gets tortured by the French by being fitted with a searing-hot metal mask, and so McCullen has a special hatred for French people. When we meet the present-day McCullen, he's selling the NATO brass on his latest weapon — nanomites, which are basically nanomachines that eat anything metal, until you hit their "Kill Switch" and turn them off. They can disarm an opponent without the need for bloodshed, and so one NATO suit jokes that McCullen may be the first arms merchant to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

But McCullen, of course, has other plans — after he delivers the nanomites to NATO, he launches an attack of his Neo-Vipers to steal them back. The Neo-Vipers are supersoldiers who have been enhanced by nanotechnology — which also controls their minds. At one point, McCullen gloats that his troops still have their own thoughts, but they're incapable of doing anything but obey his orders. The convoy escorting the nanomites is led by Conrad "Duke" Hauser and Wallace "Ripcord" Weems, and they're the only ones who are prepared when the Neo-Vipers attack.

The convoy gets wiped out, but luckily the G.I. JOE squad shows up — an international team of super-experts who don't officially exist, but appear as if by magic when they're needed. There's Heavy Duty, who's heavy and does his duty. There's Scarlett, who has red hair. There's Cover Girl, who's blonde. There's Breaker, who... uh, breaks things. And there's Snake Eyes, a ninja who's taken a vow of silence. And then their leader, General Hawk. The JOEs save the day, but Duke is loath to hand over his hard-won nanomite cargo to them, so they take him and Ripcord back to their secret base. And of course, Duke and Ripcord wind up joining the team, to the sound of people shouting "Yo JOE!" (That's their rallying cry.)

Meanwhile, McCullen has his own colorful squad. There's Zartan, a fiendishly exotic killer who can impersonate anyone. The Baroness, who turns out to be Duke's ex-fiancee — but now she's married to a Baron, who's not allowed to touch her, or a ninja will kill him. (Seriously, it's a running subplot: if her husband so much as kisses her, the always-watchful ninja will kill him. Try bringing THAT up in marriage counseling.) There's the ninja, Storm Shadow, who's taken a vow of nastiness towards Snake Eyes. And finally, the Doctor, the fiendish nanotechnology genius with a crazy mask who makes the whole wacky operation possible.

When Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes finally face off, Storm Shadow hisses in Japanese, "You took a vow of silence... Now you will die without a word." Sho Kosugi, eat your heart out.

There's also this great bit, towards the end:

Heavy Duty told them: "You know the mission: Find Duke..."

"...grab the warheads," Rip said.

"And kill all the bad guys," Scarlett said.

"Roger that," Heavy D said.

Snake Eyes, of course, said nothing.

But they all knew that when it came to killing bad guys, he was the man.

Snake Eyes can't talk, but he can send text messages, which is kind of cute.

Eventually, we learn that the reason why Duke and the Baroness are no longer together is because Duke got the Baroness' brother killed on a mission. Except that there's a shocking twist, and if you can't see it coming a mile off, I have no hope for you.

Last year's summer movies were all about the relentless advances of weapons technology, and what they cost us. Iron Man was about a remorseful weapons maker, Incredible Hulk was about a remorseful military experiment, and The Dark Knight bemoaned the fact that all of Bruce Wayne's fancy armaments only spurred on the homicidal maniacs. This year, though, it's gung-ho militarism season, spearheaded by toy movies — literally, movies based on toys.

The advantage that G.I. Joe has over this summer's other Hasbro movie, Transformers 2, is that its human characters are action figures. In Transformers, the robots were toys but the people were just standard movie characters — almost every movie nowadays has an Italian Jewish male stripper who blogs about killer robots, after all. But in G.I. Joe, every single character feels like an action figure walking around — reading the novelization is like watching a five-year-old play with figurines, while a middle-aged guy narrates portentously. In other words, it's probably the most perfect action-adventure novel ever.

So because this is all about toys, there are lots and lots of loving descriptions of military hardware, from flying drones to fighter jets to a stealth van called the Scarab. You've already seen the ridiculous Iron Man-esque power suits which Duke and Ripcord wear in one crucial Paris sequence, but the story is loaded with insane hardware. Scarlett gets to wear a special combat suit, which renders her totally invisible.

At one point, Collins refers to Heavy Duty as wielding a massive "machine-gun-cum-grenade-launcher," which put a mental image in my mind that I don't think he intended.

When the Vipers attack the convoy, they arrive in a super-armored stealth ship called a Typhoon, shooting pulse lasers that fling the dead bodies of Duke's Special Forces squad "like discarded refuse." And then there's this great description of the Baroness, who shows up on the scene:

The neckline of the body armor exposed the upper part of her swelling bosom, an exposure of flesh that arrogantly dared bullets to try for her, as if she could walk blithely across the battlescape.

Even amidst an army of plastic characters and silly dialogue, the biggest problem is probably Ripcord, who's played by Marlon Wayans in the movie and is exactly as emasculated as you might have feared. Towards the beginning, when the convoy is attacked, Ripcord gets startled by a shape coming up behind him, and squeals "like a Girl Scout whose cookies had been snatched from her" — before he realizes it's just a stray cow. Later, in the big Paris chase scene, Ripcord runs through a lingerie store and winds up with a bra on his powersuit helmet. He's the one who spouts the jokes about "kung-fu grip," and he's the dumb one who needs everything explained to him. He's constantly saying things like "I'm livin' a brother's dream, man." To be fair, though, he does get to save the day in the end, and he has a quasi-romance with Scarlett.

Here's my favorite passage in the whole book, after the JOE squad gets back to their base:

In his stateroom, General Hawk was in the office area, at his desk, humming a jaunty military tune.

He was going over the paperwork regarding the new JOEs, Hauser and Weems, when a crisp knock came at the door. He rose, answered it, and found his lovely blonde aide, with the smart tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other.

"Sorry to disturb you, sir."

"Not at all, Cover Girl."

"I just need you to sign here, here, and here..."

He did so.

Then she said, "And here, and here."

This he also did.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"No, sir, just this..." She gave him a rare, unguarded smile. "And another thirty-six pages."

He grinned at her. "Maybe you should step inside."

She hugged the smart tablet to her, and began to say something, but it never got said, because the tip of a Katar dagger thrust through the tablet, having taken a path through Cover Girl's back.

As she fell to her knees, eyes large with the shock of dying, the figure of Zartan in camo-cap and jacket revealed the source of the blade.

Her name is Cover Girl... but she gets stabbed in the back. Get it? Get it??

A lot of the violence is amazingly sexualized, actually — there are several scenes between Duke and Baroness where they're so close they can feel each other's breath, as they grapple or wield guns at each other, and it's the nearest and hottest they've been since they used to make love. When the Baroness and Scarlett have their inevitable girl fight, Collins describes the two women as being "locked in a violent embrace." There's a flashback where the young Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes train together and vie for the approval of their teacher, the Hard Master.

Oh, and I should mention that Max Allan Collins is one of my fave writers, and he does a great job with an incredibly silly story. His Ms. Tree is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I love his work on Batman. Here, he occasionally manages to channel the great Mickey Spillane, his idol with whom he collaborated on the underrated Mike Danger series, with some very loopy prose and action-packed jaw-gritting.

It all explodes into a James Bond villain-esque climax where McCullen plans to wipe out three major cities and do something unspeakable to the U.S. president. (And it ends on a genuinely lunatic cliffhanger, which I won't spoil.) The nanotech threatens to devour everything, unless our heroes can hit the kill switches, or unless Ripcord can shoot down the nanotech warheads in mid-air. And as you've probably heard, James McCullen's face gets hideously scarred, and he winds up with a new mask made out of nanotech. A mask made out of nanotech! Sadly, it doesn't reshape itself into new forms or create emoticons or anything.

In the end, that's the thing that still gives me hope for G.I. Joe — with Christopher Eccleston playing McCullen/Destro and Joseph Gordon Levitt playing The Doctor/Cobra Commander, all of this over-the-top growling about using nanotech warheads to blow up the world may actually cure our recent villain ennui. Like so much else about this film, it really depends on whether flesh-and-blood actors can fully embody the plastic miens and jerky-limbed heroism of the toys of your youth. If not, you can always buy the newest line of toys and zoom them around your bed while you read Collins' musky prose.

It's fitting that Hylozoic came out this summer, while so many people are taking part in the "infiinte summer" event, trying to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in one summer. Infinite Jest, of course, is one of the best books about addiction, and the different ways in which addictions can warp your life, ever written. Hylozoic picks up that theme of addiction and compulsive behavior, and carries it in a typically transrealistic, surreal direction.

Hylozoic isn't entirely about addiction, of course — you'd be hard pressed to pin down one thing the book is "about" — but addiction does seem to be a major running theme. The book follows newlyweds JayJay and Thuy, who were major characters in the first book, as they struggle with different types of addictions and compulsions. In the first book, JayJay was addicted to the "BigPig," a sort of worldwide artificial mind that gains processing power from all the people connected to it. As one mind inside the Big Pig, you get to help solve huge world-shattering math and physics problems, and the loss of individuality and selfhood becomes a kind of joyous release. But at the end of the first book, JayJay and Thuy succeeded in opening up a kind of higher dimension called the "Lazy Eight," and as a result everything in the world is sentient in some fashion, and there's a kind of world-mind called Gaia, which is like an evolved version of the Big Pig.

So now JayJay is struggling against an addiction to connecting with Gaia, and it's a serious problem — people who spend too much time connected to Gaia tend to vanish utterly. His addiction winds up leading to him turning into the puppet of evil alien birds who want to invade Earth and turn it into alien condominiums, while enslaving humans and siphoning off all the "gnarl" (the randomness, sort of) from everything. JayJay becomes the helpless slave of the alien invaders. And then, later, once he escapes to a higher dimension where it's still the 15th century, he has other addiction issues involving wine and some kind of hallucinogenic mold in the bread.

Oh, and here's a video where Rudy Rucker explains what "gnarl" is:

Thuy, meanwhile, falls afoul of a second group of aliens with questionable motives, who visit Earth. The Hrull are sort of flying manta rays, and they need to harness the mental energy of humans and other intelligent mammals to propell their bodies through deep space. To do this, they give their mammalian workers a weird addictive gel that induces euphoria and sexual compulsiveness — and makes them utterly dependent on the Hrull. Thuy fights to avoid becoming addicted to this Hrull gel, (and she has a scene, involving this gel, halfway through the book which may squick a lot of readers, and could actually make it difficult to finish the book because it's so upsetting.)

As in the first book, everyone is able to see everyone else at all times, so there's no privacy. Added to which, Thuy and JayJay are part of the "cast" of a weird reality TV show, Founders, including all the people who helped usher in the Singularity. Advertisements sort of pop up around them and bob around, depending on how many people are watching them.

The other major theme of Hylozoic seems to be an extension of Postsingular's main idea: that the alternative to a kind of benign, all-embracing singularity is a singularity where most people end up being vassals and tools of the man. This time around, instead of nano-machines trying to eat everything on Earth and port all the humans to a virtual world, it's aliens who have been attracted by our new expanded consciousness and want to use it for their own ends. (And there are echoes of Postsingular, in that the bird aliens wind up gaining the support of president Dick Too Dibbs, who nearly gave away the store to the nanomachines last time. The bird aliens, the Peng, also win over a lot of right-wing Christian groups through subterfuge, in a somewhat cartoony sequence.)

As with all of Rucker's recent work, there's nothing naturalistic about Hylozoic, and yet it does feature little odd touches like a family barbecue or friends getting a burrito together. His characters talk in an unfiltered yet disjointed way, saying exactly what's on their minds with no editing, and in odd cadences. It's like they're speaking to us from their subconscious at times. Add to that the fact that two major characters in the book are a pitchfork named Groovy and his lover/opposite, a harp named Lovva, and it all starts to feel a bit like an acid-induced R. Crumb cartoon. Groovy the pitchfork is able to roam around causing mischief because he's been "Aktualized" — he's actually an alien from another world and/or dimension, and he's just chosen to appear in the form of a pitchfork. Oh, and did I mention that Thuy and JayJay hang out with Hieronymous Bosch when they travel to the 15th century dimension? They do.

The whole thing gets more and more demented, until it almost feels like you need a post-singularity brain to understand all of the eigth-dimensional drama and weirdness. But just when you think Rucker's layered on too much weirdness and nonsense for one book, it reveals itself, once again, to be the story of JayJay and Thuy's marriage, and of their battle to stay married in the face of alien birds, addictive manta-ray gel, and a personality-eating world mind. It's a fitting sequel to Postsingular, and anyone who enjoyed the earlier book will definitely find the follow-up just as fascinating and jarring. Oh, and Rucker will be reading (hopefully from this book) at Writers With Drinks, the reading series I organize and host, this Saturday in San Francisco. That's at the Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. street, from 7:30 to 9:30 on Saturday.

For those familiar with some of Chaykin's other work, there are definitely echoes to be found in Flagg - the corny puns, the stocking-and-heels combo fetish, the square-jawed hero out of his depth but somehow still irresistible to all women and able to save the day (despite his complaints) when the situation demands it. But there's enough elsewhere to distract from the Chaykin Formula and turn you into a believer.

In concept, Flagg is very much a product of its times - You can see echoes of the media-led futures of Blade Runner and Max Headroom in here, as well as a Cold War paranoia/parody that wouldn't be imagined today - but the execution is amazing and, at times (specifically in the first storyline, "Hard Times"), almost faultless.

The set-up for the series is that, in the not-so-far future, the US Government and various corporations have fled Earth for Mars, leaving a power vacuum cemented by the fall of the Soviet Union and only partially filled by "The Plex," a new body made up of US officials, corporate heads and former Russian scientists who run things in America from afar. The police force of this new America are called Plexus Rangers (Told you about the puns), and one such Ranger is Rueben Flagg, a former television star replaced by his own CGI stunt double and drafted into service on Chicago's mean streets.

Of course, none of that really explains what the series is actually about, which is a heady mix of political and social satire (Not for nothing is one character called Medea Blitz), old-school action adventure and Chaykin living out his sexual fantasies through his lead character. The intentionally-absurd quality to the stories manages to work, surprisingly - everything happens with a kind of hyper-reality, amped-up and unbelievable but enjoyably so - that leaves the reader breathless by continually pummeling them more and more information to take in.

Helping out considerably with that pummeling is the look of the book. It's not just the artwork, although this is Chaykin at his best and most daring, before he fell into the (admittedly pretty) rut that he's in now of tight close-ups and familiar layouts - His linework, as ever, is crisp and attractive, a distinctive collection of influences from fine art, design and comics blended together to come up with something that seems timeless even now - but the look of the book. As much as Chaykin, Flagg's aesthetic is defined by the stunning lettering of Ken Bruzenak, which goes so far beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles and sound effects that it becomes one of the most memorable things about the book, a visual hook that explains the chaos of the future in a way that seems as much musical as anything else.

The two collections dip in quality towards the end - Chaykin's writing becomes emptier, and other artists take over on the last couple of chapters - but it never becomes dull or a chore to read; when American Flagg is at its best, it's a classic piece of science fiction satire that stands up there with Robocop and Brazil, but even at its worst, it's an enjoyable piece of eye-catching comics that offers a future at once recognizable and distant.

American Flagg is available now and published in the UK by Titan Books and in the US by Dynamite Entertainment.

As if Nature was finally fed up with those meddlesome bald apes, a plague of plagues sweeps across the globe. Ebola, Marburg, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Panda Flu, Siberian Tarantella, and Restless Spine Syndrome*; a simultaneous outbreak of every deadly disease wipes out nearly every human being in a matter of weeks. Five survivors, strangers to each other, have found shelter in a stately manor home just outside a Welsh city. They gather all the food they can and avail themselves to the Manor's extensive cellar of fine wines and ales. It's a wake for the whole world as they toast the past, try to make sense of their continued existence, and figure out what the hell to do next. All the while the five keep a certain distance from each other and avoid looking to the horizon where dark and uncanny shapes flap and circle in the beautiful blue new sky of an emptied world.

Six blurry months later the sound of a motorcycle tears through the silence. Astride it is a Mysterious Stranger who asks to be called Michael. With trepidation, the five welcome him to the manor and share with him a meal from their sumptuous if dwindling larder. That midnight Michael visits each of them individually, warning that things are just going to get worse. He urges that they trek down south to Cornwall and seek refuge with other survivors at a place called Bar None, the last pub on Earth. By dawn's break the enigmatic weirdo is gone and the five reluctantly agree to seek this possible sanctuary. After all, it's not like they have any better plans and besides, they are running out of booze.

Packing up all their supplies in two Range Rovers and Michael's abandoned bike they set off across a twisted landscape in search of...well, anything other than what they had. The Blighty they travel through is more unsettling than they ever imagined. Nature has been reclaiming its own as well, but not like they thought. Wolves, bears, and eagles seem to have returned to the Sceptered Isle. Trees are sprouting everywhere with an accelerated growth and in unrecognizable forms. There are other survivors, of a sort, as well. Here Lebbon plays with with certain tropes of the End of the World as We Know It. There's the Steely-Eyed Survivalists, Mohawked Cannibal Hordes, and of course those lovable Mutants – but all with a just enough of a twist. Of all post-apocalyptic fare, Bar None really reminded me of J.G. Ballard, especially works like The Drowned World or The Crystal World. The world is changing into something fierce and wonderful and it no longer has any room for folks like you or me.

All of this is told from the viewpoint of one of the five from the Manor, whose name we never know. His narrative is regularly interspersed with memories of his beloved wife Ashley, lost to the plagues. These scenes are entwined with reminisces of his other love, fine British ales like Greene King Abbot Ale, Marston's Old Empire, or Redruth Cornish Rebellion. Here, try a sip of this:

Theakston's Old Peculier, deep and dark and heavy, a smooth roasty beer with a hint of chocolate and an unmistakable vinous aftertaste, a complex beer, rich and powerful and as familiar to my tongue as the taste of Ashley's skin, the hint of her breath, the the tang of sweat on her neck as we made love.

A heady brew indeed. After one of these waxy rhapsodies our narrator rails against poncey wine aficionados and their overblown language. I guffawed at this Pot/Kettle hypocrisy but then had to stop in mid eye-roll. I am a whiskey lover. Although I consider myself egalitarian in my choice of rotgut , I must admit to snorting derisively when someone orders Jack Daniels. and have also known to utter nonsense like, "clear notes of maple and vanilla with a broad yet subtle fiery finish". Who am I to put down another's geekery, especially when lovingly crafted in prose. It is quite touching the way Lebbon weaves together all the senses into precious memorials of days and worlds gone forever.

Bar None is a very short novel, perfect for a lazy summer weekend with a "few" pints. As always, Lebbon's writing is lyrical, introspective and quite literary. The pacing is a bit languid, more Riddley Walker or The Quiet Earth than Mad Max. Don't fret, there is just enough action and some truly freaky horror to pique the interest of any genre lover, this ain't The Road by a long stretch. The premise is quirky and bizarre, but Lebbon never plays for cheap laughs. In the end this is a deeply sentimental and intimate look at memory, loss, and those perfect days barbecuing and tossing a few back with good friends. And flesh-eating monsters.

You can purchase Bar None now from Amazon,
or support your local independent bookseller.

*Okay, I made those last three diseases up.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the last drunks on Earth as Chris Hsiang. He enjoys a nice rye, neat with a water back.

The first project for DC's Vertigo imprint by Lemire, known for his indie series Tales From Essex County, The Nobody brings a quieter, less cynical sensibility to the line. This is the comic equivalent to a Bright Eyes record, with all the beauty and annoyance that that comparison suggests; there's a wonderful willingness to recognize stillness and melancholy at play in this book, but that's almost rendered toothless at times by what seems, at times, like a willful refusal to do the same to the darker side of human nature in anything beyond cartoony strokes that lack convinction... For all the danger hinted at throughout, moments that should come across as terrifying and alien instead seem weightless and dishonest.

(The plot of the book, although this isn't necessarily the most plot-driven book, is that Griffen, a man covered head to toe in bandages, arrives in the small town of Large Mouth and keeps himself to himself, much to the consternation of the townsfolk. When a series of crimes occur after his arrival, he becomes the main suspect, which leads to a confrontation with the failed experiments in his past as well as the local authorities.)

There's a lot to recommend in The Nobody; Lemire manages to perfectly conjure a feeling of bleak disconnection that perfectly matches his lead character's sensibility, transcending the intentionally-pulp nature of the plot (reinforced by the chapter breaks, which use pulp magazine and comic cover cliches to illustrate the story about to unfold). The ambiguous nature of the ending adds to this, allowing for both a straight-forward and an allegorical reading depending on the reader's taste, and bringing a greater weight to something that otherwise would be in danger of disappearing through its own introverted nature (Again, something that fits with the lead).

Lemire's art, scratchy and awkward in the best ways, may be the star of the book. It's simple enough to keep the reader's attention but detailed in all the right ways, especially the flashback/inkwash sequences and the evocative way he portrays the characters' environment (It's all about the negative space, especially the way Lemire shows the town of Large Mouth in the winter). There's something in particular about his characters - skew-wiff, imperfect and familiar - that keeps you engaged even when the writing threatens to lose itself in its own preciousness.

This is science fiction almost by accident; it's really a story about people after the science fiction, about what happens once the credits have rolled and everyone's left the theater. Whether it's a success in doing so, I'm still not sure. The Nobody is definitely an interesting book, and one worth reading, but days later, I'm still conflicted about whether or not it was actually a good one.

The Nobody is released July 8th in comic stores.

Titan Books, which published the book version of Terminator Salvation, kindly sent out a half dozen copies to some of io9's writers as well as some of our most prolific commenters and occasional posters. So how did the story of Marcus Wright's cyborg angst and John Connor's struggle with tourettes translate into book form? Here's what they thought.

The participants:

Annalee Newitz, io9 editor

Chris Hsiang aka Grey Area, frequent commenter and regular book reviewer.

Hank Hu aka CrashedPC, regular commenter.

Josh Wimmer aka Moff, regular commenter and "Jive Tarkin" columnist

Alexis Brown aka EvlSushi, regular commenter, current intern and regular poster.

Charlie Jane Anders, io9 news editor and occasional leaver of the house.

So in order to maximize the value to you, the readers, we'll try and divide this review up into a few sections.

Does the novel make sense?

It definitely makes more sense than the movie, is the consensus. Maybe because Foster was working from a script that included a lot of scenes that were cut, or trimmed, for the final movie, there's a lot more explanation of what the heck is going on.

As in the movie, it's 2018, and the self-aware computer system Skynet has all but wiped out the human race. John Connor leads the last remnants of humanity in the fight against the machines, while struggling to save his own father, Kyle Reese. And meanwhile, a man named Marcus Wright wakes up years after being executed, and begins to suspect that he may no longer be human.

Says Hank, "The novel, even while reading like a grade-school primer for action movies, had a modicrum of sense. Being able to read someone's internal thought process is extremely satisfying. Connor is not a shouty loud madman like what I've heard about the movie, but he's just too damn emo at times."

The novel includes a lot more conversations between John Connor and his wife, Kate, about how the timeline may have changed. Connor has actual smart discussions about the supposed "off switch" and whether it's likely that Skynet would really have left such an easy backdoor in its systems. And the Connors talk a lot more about Kate's pregnancy and John's doubts about his ability to save people in this new altered timeline.

As Chris points out, Foster spends a lot of time explaining how Skynet's stronghold in San Francisco is so poorly guarded. "Foster tried to fill in as many plot holes as he could. His explanations for why there was very little security in San Francisco and why the HKs didn't bother Connor's base almost work."

And after the Connors encounter Marcus, there's a much more in-depth discussion of exactly who he might be, and what he represents. At one point, Kate explains exactly how that cyborg infrastructure works, and how it's all wired. This is a huge improvement over the movie, where they just sort of look at Marcus and grunt.

And yet, there are still some plot holes.

Grey Area observes:

The batshit insane sequence where Connor hacks a moto-terminator and rides it to San Francisco across the ruined Golden Gate Bridge was kinda cool but totally batshit insane. That wasn't actually in the movie was it?

Hank wonders:

I still don't understand why Marcus is like, the most advanced 'bot of them all. From what I can tell, he donated his body to science after being punished, capitally. If his brain is still the original organic one, why is he the most advanced one? Shouldn't he be like the beta stage prototype garbage bot that can barely formulate sentences. Instead he's the Incredible Hulk that can formulate complex sentences, albeit broody ones.

Adds Alexis:

And why is John Connor so flippin' special anyway? We have yet to see him do much of anything to justify how important he is to the timeline. The machines seeme to have ultimate control of everything, right? And humans are scattered and living like rats. So, how is this a war and not a complete massacre?

Josh zeroes in on the ultimate plot hole:

And why is saving Kyle Reese so important? So that John Connor can send him back in time so that he gets born? Is he going to disappear Back to the Future–style if Kyle dies? Because I wasn't feeling the impending doom.

At the end of the book, there's no heart transplant. Instead, the characters just escape intact. (You can read the adaptation of the movie's actual ending on the Titan books website.) And then Foster throws in a weird hint that Star, the cute little orphan with the funny hat — may actually be a Terminator. Her eye glints redly... or is it just a trick of the light? We may never know.

How about the characters? Are they more fleshed out?

Definitely. Marcus Wright, in particular, benefits from the novel's ability to flesh out his inner life and give him a stronger story arc. As Alexis points out, the early scene where Marcus meets Serena Kogan and agrees to donate his body to her experiments is much stronger. The kiss between the two of them is described lovingly, although it's made clear it's not a loving kiss — it's a last act of violence from a violent man. And we get an running monologue summarizing Marcus' thoughts and his final struggles as the lethal injection wipes him out. His last thought is about the kiss with Serena, and how he could have done it better. As Alexis says, it's nice stuff.

Grey Area liked the way the novel reveals

the humanity of Marcus, and the whole deterministic fate thingy. A vicious thug becomes more human and sympathetic after becoming cyborged. It's as if Skynet, that notorious softie with its keen insight into human emotion, re-programs Marcus with a better soul. Neat idea, but as I stated before I cannot buy that the cold emotionless Skynet is occasionally Dr. Phil.

Adds Hank,

Honestly, I thought Marcus Wright was pretty cool. Never mind the fact that he knew himself that he was executed and now he's walking around, shrugging off attacks and saving children. He was much more of a sympathetic character than most of the Resistance. Or even surviving nomads. Perhaps he was meant to be the real star of the show?

Even more, Grey Area approves of the way the novel gives us

Connor's realization that he is as programmed as the machines he fights.He's been told since birth that he will become this great leader. He really has no choice and doesn't even seem to have any actual leadership qualities. Hell, his people follow him just because they've been told to.

Hank notes:

One part I did like in particular: Marcus escaping the silo. The Resistance fighters just acted so dense, so naively, that I felt no sympathy for them. It does them no favors when Marcus was described so heroically and positively prior, and then now Barnes is taking potshots at him when he's strung up. I know they hate the machines and all, but jeez, it's like they didn't even bother trying to figure out how such a perfect melding of human and machine came about. "IT'S A TRAP" is essentially all they kept shrieking.

On the minus side, everybody hates Star the cute orphan, in the book as much as in the movie. And one character who gets fleshed out to ill effect is Virginia, the white-haired lady who takes Star under her wing in the movie. In the book, we learn way more about Virginia than we ever wanted, as she tells Star bedtime stories and sings lullabies to her.

How tongue-in-cheek is it?

The novel features some of the purplest, silliest prose Alan Dean Foster has ever committed to paper. You can't help but wonder if Foster, who's a great writer when he wants to be, wasn't mocking the whole story, or at least trying to lighten up the intentionally humorless film.

Grey Area picks out the following choice lines:

pg. 16 "Wright rose from the cot. Standing, he looked a lot taller, a lot bigger."

pg 35 " 'Jericho, come in!', Olsen's fingers tightened on his communicator.
Jericho didn't come in. The communicator's locked frequency was as silent as the grave. A bad simile, the general thought, especially considering his present subterranean location."

pg. 139 "She did not really know him yet, and she did not want him to see the unbridled gratitude that she knew must be suffusing her face."

And, from the very ending:

"How long?"
She tried to shrug but was unable to lift her shoulder.
"Any moment. His heart can't take it." Her eyes met the sergeant's, and she continued. "The Terminators have beat him up and history has worn him down."
Barnes tried to think of something to say. Of the right thing to say.
"It's going to be okay."

Hank's favorite line:

This resulted in even more bits and pieces flying off of the machine. This resulted in a termination of the pursuit.

Annalee picks out a few choice lines as well:

* * * When Dr. Serena Kogan (later to be the Face Of Skynet) first meets Marcus before he's killed, and turns into Bill Cosby:

"How are you?" she finally murmured.

In the troglodytic confines of the cell the query was at least as funny as the paramount punchline of a highly paid stand-up comedian.

* * * When Williams fights off would-be rapists, right before Marcus steps in to help:

That was just enough time for Williams to dart forward and slam the knucles of her closed fist into his throat . . . He dropped like the sack of shit he was.

* * * After Marcus escapes from the resistance camp, John Connor shows off his powers of perception:

He had barely made back into the woods when shapes rose sharply from bush to confront him and he found himself staring down the barrels of three rifles.

"Halt and identify yourself!" the noncom in charge barked.

"John Connor." What a pity, he mused halfheartedly, that he could not be someone else.

But he knew he was John Connor.

* * Marcus hooks up with Skynet in the machine complex - and we do mean "hooks up."

Revealed to his probing gaze was an intricate maze of glowing wiring, silent chips, and busy processing units. He stared at the lambent display, memorizing all that he could.

Finally he gave up and shoved his hands deeply into the electronic wonderland.

The initial contact caused him to spasm . . .

After reading through all these quotes, I can't help but feel that Foster was trying to lighten the tone a bit. And maybe sending up the story, just a tad.

The bottom line:

The consensus seems to be: The novel is held back by having to be an adaptation of such a nonsensical movie, but it's clear Alan Dean Foster was having fun writing it. And as a result, it's a pretty fun read. And if you've been sitting around wrestling with all the dozens of things that didn't make sense in the movie — and wondering exactly what was going through these people's heads as they were running around from action sequence to mopey slow-mo — then this novel may be of great value to you.

Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization [Amazon.com]