The Ballad Of Halo Jones. Moore was writing for 2000 A.D., Britain's long-running science fiction adventure comic best known for its Judge Dredd feature. Moore saw that most of England's "IPC girl comics were heading for that last great midnight feast in the dorm," and that 2000 A.D. had a bigger female readership than anyone realized. So he pitched a comic about an ordinary young woman — not "another Tough Bitch With A Disintegrator And An Extra Y Chromosome" — having adventures in space in the far future. The result is one of the most unique space operas of all time, featuring crazy adventures and silly humor and lots and lots of bleakness. (Jones' friends tend to drop dead on her on a regular basis, and in the final volume, she gets involved in a bloody space war.) The whole thing is available as a single hardcover volume from Titan Books.

Captain Britain. Moore started writing for Marvel Comics in the U.K., and took Captain Britain on a tour through alternate universes. This may be the first time that the Marvel Universe's "normal" version of Earth is referred to as Earth 616 in comics, and it also features an evil Prime Minister of England, who wants to round up all the superheroes and put them into concentration camps. I read these comics when they were reprinted as X-Men Archives Featuring Captain Britain a few years ago, and was amazed at how fresh and weird they still seem. They'll probably never be reprinted again, but those reissues can be tracked down, and there's also a collected edition. Also notable: Moore's work on Marvelman, aka Miracleman, which is even harder to find these days (and which I've never actually read!)

The Saga Of Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was a low-selling horror comic when Moore took it over, and he transformed it into a supernatural/weird science epic that still helps to define all of DC's "mature" horror/supernatural comics, including all the Vertigo Comics line. My favorite is still the first volume, in which Swamp Thing discovers that he's not Alec Holland turned into a plant, after all — he's a plant that thinks its Alec Holland, thanks to a weird chemical accident. And he becomes the guardian of The Green, the spirit of all plant life on Earth, which is nearly usurped by the insane Jason Woodrue. All of a sudden the Swamp Thing has, not just pathos, but also a soul and real relationships, especially with the prematurely white-haired Abby.

V For Vendetta. This one, you've probably already read — but if you haven't, you should rush out and track down a copy. It's a dystopian future, and England has collapsed, giving rise to a new fascist regime run by a psychopath who's in love with his computer — literally. So it's up to the Guy Fawkes-masked anarchist vigilante known only as V to help topple the hateful oppressive regime, but his methods — especially his way of recruiting a successor — leave a lot to be desired. Just as much as Watchmen, V4V is a fantastic exploration of whether the ends justify the means, and the individual's relationship with a messed-up society.

Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? Of all Moore's work on DC's main characters, this is my favorite. (Yes, more than "The Killing Joke" or "For The Man Who Has Everything.") DC was winding up its Superman stories, in preparation for John Byrne's classic reboot. So Moore had the opportunity to write the final Superman story, in which he shows how Superman's foes become darker and more horrifying, until finally Superman has to resort to the ultimate sanction. Superman disappears soon afterwards, and is presumed dead, but 10 years later, a reporter investigates. You'll have a hard time viewing other Superman stories the same way after reading this one. Luckily, it's collected in a single volume along with all of Moore's other DC Universe work — including the amazing Green Lantern short story about the aliens that don't have any concept of light or colors.

1963. Moore (with regular collaborators like Steve Bissette, Dave Gibbons and Rick Veitch) put out a six-issue miniseries of pastiches of early 1960s Marvel comics, with titles like Tales From Beyond, Tomorrow Syndicate and Mystery Incorporated. They feature made-up superheroes like Horus, and even though they claim to be stand-alone issues of different comics, they have a continuing storyline of sorts. Plus hilarious fake ads and crazy letters to the editor. It's Moore at his most goofy and fun, and paying homage to superheroes instead of trying to recreate them or drag them into the "real world." (And it's more fun, for my money, than Moore's later Tom Strong's Terrific Tales and Tomorrow Stories anthologies.) There's no collected edition, as far as I know, but I used to see the individual issues in the dime bins at many comic book stores. Amazon now has them all for between $1.00 and $15.00 per issue.

From Hell. Moore and artist Eddie Campbell piece together all the clues about Jack The Ripper, in a huge, sprawling story of Victorian politics and Satanic rituals. The mystery isn't who killed those women — it's why, and as the graphic novel goes on, it peels back layer after layer of Victorian society to reveal more and more twisted reasons for the violence.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you've only seen the horrendous movie, you owe it to yourself to track down the comic. A set of famous literary figures, including Edward Hyde, Mina Harker, Allan Quartermain, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, team up to save the British Empire from a series of otherworldly threats. My absolute favorite is volume two, where our heroes face off against the Martian Tripods from War Of The Worlds... and this time it'll take a bit more than the common cold to put those alien scumbags out of action. As with 1963 and several other Moore works, the fake ads accompanying the comics are worth the price of admission all by themselves, and Moore also includes some amazing text pieces. It's a journey into retrofuturist Victoriana. And thank goodness there's a third full volume coming soon, after the slightly disappointing hardcover oneshot The Black Dossier.

Promethea. Okay, this is blasphemy, I know — but the first 12 issues of Promethea might actually be my favorite Moore work of all time. I'm not saying it's better than Watchmen, just that it holds a special place in my heart. With Promethea, we come full circle to Halo Jones — it's another tale of an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances, except this time around our heroine, Sophie Bangs, is inquisitive and curious. She pieces together the history of Promethea and figures out her own way of turning into the heroine, which requires an individual act of creativity. Promethea's not just your average superhero — she's an avatar of creativity and storytelling, and she may be destined to destroy the world instead of saving it. (In the end, it's actually a lot more complicated, confusing and — yes — rewarding than that binary implies.) The more Sophie discovers about magic and fables, the more powerful she gets and the closer Moore and artist J.H. Williams come to finally taking the comics medium apart altogether. (The first two volumes are my favorites, but the rest of the series is, at the very least, fascinating and memorable.) Oh, and did I mention it's an alternate 1999 with superheroes and weird cyberculture? And an android supervillain called the Painted Doll?

Top 10. Another comic which Moore created for his America's Best Comics imprint was Top 10, the story of a super-powered police squad in a world where pretty much everybody has weird powers. In contrast to Extraordinary Gentleman's literary exploration and Promethea's magical journey, Top 10 is mostly just hilarious wicked weird fun. At times, it really does read like a version of Hill Street Blues set in a world of flying people and superstrong blue men. My favorite character: the exoskeleton-wearing canine police sergeant, Caesar. Moore gave supercop Jeff Smax his own spin-off graphic novel, and later did an amazing prequel called Top 10: The 49ers. It's all pretty addictive stuff. Science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo later did a Top 10 miniseries, which captured the inventiveness of Moore's world pretty well but wasn't quite as magnetic.

Note: I know I'm leaving out his other big ABC series Tom Strong, which I like a lot, but not quite as much as these other series. Feel free to protest and throw sharp objects in comments.

Sinister takes on Japanese movie monsters and his own past as an alcoholic punk-rock misfit with the same fuck-it attitude. Everything is funny, but everything is also fodder for his observations about what it feels like to lose everything and then look for more things to lose. (When not writing poetry, Sinister is a stand-up comic, and he's also written a punk-rock stop-drinking book, Get Up.)

There are two volumes of Bucky Sinister's poetry, Whiskey And Robots and All Blacked Out & Nowhere To Go. Luckily for you, they're both collected in one cheap and still pocket sized volume.

So why do I say he's a science fictional poet? Let's see. He likes to write about comic-book characters as if they were his friends and exes. One of his poems is about the alternate history version of Bruce Wayne, who's not Batman, but instead is a drunk loser. Another poem is about going on a date with Wonder Woman, who's been on a lot of bad dates, and has pictures of her invisible plane everywhere. (They just look like pictures of empty airfields.) You can hear Sinister read the Wonder Woman poem here.

There's also the fantastic "Drowning On God's Urine," where he talks about being the world's crappiest organic robot:

If you are a bad child in Japan
on Christmas day all you get
is a twenty-four inch replica of me
during an alcoholic blackout.

The toy of me
does not run on batteries or solar power
but on lunar power
at night it turns itself on
and won't stop talking.
It knows a lot
but remembers nothing.

The toy of me is
the second least popular robot toy in Japan.
The least popular robot toy
has a name that translates to
"The Low Self Esteemed Robot Turkey
Who Needs Lots Of Hugs
and Whose Feathers Are Made from
Jagged Metal Bits."

And then there's his fantastic, more recent, poem, "elegy to hunt's," which talks about the donut shop whose sign said it was open 25 hours a day. Most of the poem is about how Sinister's heart got stolen, and he refused to buy it back from the guy selling all his stolen property because he knew for a fact it was broken, so he replaced it with a bearclaw from the donut shop instead. But there's a fantastic part where he explains that if you visit the donut shop on the 25th hour of the day, and you look through a donut hole, you can see backwards in time. You can see the G.I.s returning home in the 1940s and the Low-Riders bumping along in the 1970s. And you can see your past self walking down the street, and try to give yourself warnings — which you'll totally ignore of course.

There are others, too, like the one about dead angels and how to steal their halos. It's mostly not science fictional, but there's enough stuff there that I wish other people were writing poetry about speculative themes the way Sinister does.

The novella, also called "Dangerous Space," follows Mars, an impressario whose gender is never specified and who also stars in the story "And Salome Danced." Mars has a dangerous habit of getting too closely involved with the artists he/she works with, and so it is in "Dangerous Space." Mars goes to work for a rock band called Noir, who need some help hitting the big time, and gets involved with the lead singer Duncan Black.

A lot of the novella deals with the relationships between Mars and Duncan, and the young sound tech that Mars schools, and the other bandmembers. Plus the creative process and the stormy personalities that go into a band on the rise. But then Eskridge throws in the cool invention of F-tech:

F-tech was just coming into use around that time in the pharmaceutical industry: feeling technology that allowed researchers a first-hand experience of reactions in subjects testing new drugs — nausea, fatigue, the specific location of headache, all available through an adaptation of augmented cognition technology that mapped limbic brain activity and physiological sensation. It took some bright spark from marketing who didn't give a shit for the purity of science to realize the tech was a better product than any of the drugs it was helping to test. The company began marketing to doctors: instead of relying on the patient to fumble his way through metaphor or vague pointing, just put on the funny wire hat and for those few moments, make his experience your own. Feel your appendix swell inside you; share Alzheimer's dementia; find out what PMS is really like.

It took a second and a half for the adult entertainment industry to get in on the game, and have some fun with the name F-tech, with dramatic results: since it was real-time tech that only worked with real-live peole, porn was out and peep shows were in — and everyone was curious to find out how the other half lived.

Just when the twisted egos and skewed emotions between Duncan, Mars and the rest of the band are at their most treacherous, the band decides to play a show using F-tech to let the audience members "feel" what it's like to be in the band. With fascinating results.

A lot of the other stories in the book deal with feeling and artistry as well: in "Strings," a violinist plays a Stradivarius in a dystopian future where you're not allowed to create or improvise, only play existing music with total precision. "Monitors" watch and grab anyone who makes mistakes or, worse yet, expresses themselves. (It feels more like a metaphor than a plausible future, but it's no potent for that.) In "Salome Danced," Mars gets involved with Jo, a seductive chameleon who seems to switch genders at will, first playing John the Baptist, then Salome, and finally wanting to play Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. In "Alien Jane," Rita gets a new roommate in a mental institution: a woman named Jane who can't feel any physical discomfort, making her an attractive target for doctors wanting to do bizarre inhuman experiments. (Sort of like the comic and TV show Painkiller Jane, except that this Jane's natural anaesthesia turns out to be a bit more complicated.)

Taken as a whole, it's a thrilling look at the vulnerability involved in performance: both in the obvious sense of having to open yourself up in front of an audience, but also in the more subtle sense that artists often wind up having to share a lot of intimacy with their fellow performers and creators, in public. The title story, in particular, is a great primer in how to create a captivating future technology that transforms society — and then use it to help tell a small, personal story. [Amazon]

The New Yorker used to champion science fiction, back in the Tina Brown era, but of late, it's turned up hits long cartoon nose at the genre. So "Lostronaut" is a good way of dipping back into the inky waters of the genre.

It's really worth checking out "Lostronaut" for yourself, but in a nutshell, it's a story of an astronaut, who we learn is female at some point, writing to her lover, Chase, who's back in New York. The astronaut, and five others, are trapped on a space station where everything is slowly breaking down, and the Chinese have put up mines to keep them from escaping for some reason. There are leaf-cutter bees running wild, from the semi-failed hydroponic garden. ("We're all in denial about the bees," Lethem writes at one point.) And then the narrator gets a tumor on her foot, and has to go through chemotherapy in space, before she finally has it amputated.

The thing I love about the story is the juxtaposition of the grinding realities of life in space with the stuff the narrator imagines her lover is doing, back on Earth. There are some really gorgeous passages, Lethem's best prose, like this one:

We’re soaring atoms, Chase, that’s what orbit consists of, the inhuman hastening of infinitesimal specklike bodies through an awesome indifferent void, yet in our cramped homely craft, its rooms named to evoke childhood comforts, with our blobs of toothpaste drifting between our brushes and the mirror, our farts and halitosis filling the chambers with odor, we’ve defaulted to an illusion of substance. Inside Northern Lights, we’ve managed to kid ourselves that we exist, that we’re curvaceous or lumpy or angular, bristling with hair and snot, taking up a certain amount of room, and that space and time have generously accorded a margin in which we’re invited to operate these sizable greedy bodies of ours, a margin in which to dwell, to hang out and live our pale stinky stories.

Really great, if depressing, stuff. Check it out. [New Yorker, thanks to Heepcak]

Time Snake And Superclown really reads like Vincent King was off some pretty powerful meds when he wrote it in the mid-1970s. It's just sort of a non-stop delusional dream sequence. It starts out following the nameless hero, who's a Watcher from beyond our world, watching over the humans. He's come to despise the human race, because we're not really alive, we're just wraiths. Especially women, whom the hero calls whore-wraiths. The good guy wakes up in bed next to a strange woman whose false eyelashes are coming off, and he's disgusted by how human she is. "The girl whore wraith sat on the bed-edge like naked pork," he writes at one point.

But then he's following another girl, who turns out to be the same girl he just slept with, but he doesn't recognize her at first because she's disguised as an old woman, and she gets the drop on him. The moment she shoots him with a paralyzing ray and starts being violent to him, he falls in love with her and decides she's not a whore wraith after all:

"I'm sorry about what'll happen to you."... She smelled of lemons and she was clean like a beach after.... after a tide. Her hands were strong and she knelt beside me and her thighs were right close to my face. There was no hair on them, not even fuzz, not like that red old man, not like what he had on his face. I was pretty worried. I was so powerless, but I was glad she was like that and not like the girl whore wraith I'd seen in the hotel. She leaned back and pulled the paintbox over across the floor. "Just to ease your mind," she went on. "We didn't do anything last night. As if I could... with you!" She said that and I felt like a worm... low like a snake. Me, with my powers and she made me feel like that. I wasn't angry, I just felt terrible.

Long story short, the girl who smells like lemons uses the hero's synthetic skin ("light skin") to transform his face into a grotesque clown face, with a giant red nose (that makes rude noises), pale skin and weird hair. No matter what he does, he can't change his face back or get rid of the clown paint. Afterwards, he keeps noticing how nice her hair is, over and over.

Then he tries to get back to the Zone outside reality, where his spaceship and gadgets are, but when he travels into the Zone, the girl who smells like lemons cuts out his "strobe," zapping him back to our reality and stranding him here. And then, it gets worse — he realizes she's taken his pants and he hasn't noticed, for about 20 pages now.

My heart went as cold as ice and when I looked down she'd stolen my pants too.

I must have been really bad not to have seen that.

There were little screams and laughter squeals all around me. The people wraiths were moving, pointing at me... little boys stared and girls giggled. I must have appeared there, like a thunder clap, suddenly... that anger... I was angry and shaking with it.

I didn't care about the pants. But the clown face was something else... that and the wraiths laughing... jeering... pointing. I broke and ran. All through the trees that seemed to sway with the laughter across the grass and through the deckchairs and the people sitting up in them to see me go by. All the time my nose was going like a klaxon. People sure sound funny when they're laughing at you.

She must have planned it that way. She must have known I'd escape. She'd painted my face, stolen my trousers and then cut the strobe when I'd get caught the worst. All that struggle, all my effort, and I'd thought I wa so smart and lucky and she'd planned it to humiliate me.

He spends the rest of the novel wandering around our world, and various surreal landscapes outside our reality, while people jeer at his clown face and he mopes about how he's supposed to be a super-powerful Watcher. Eventually, it turns out that there's an alien entity, the Time Snake, trying to enter our world through the Zone, and the Superclown has to stop it. And the girl who smells like lemons has a boyfriend, who keeps making fun of the Superclown for being a clown, and messing up his nice gadgets. Why is everyone so mean to the Superclown, just because he has contempt for anyone who's less powerful than he is? It's sad.

The lemon girl and her boyfriend turn out to be from beyond the Zone, or two jumps removed from our reality, or something. It's kind of confusing. And the Superclown turns out to have been trained since birth to fight the Time Snake, or at least that's what the lemon girl tells him. He has weird memories of his childhood, which turn out to have been images of the Time Snake planted in his mind. Or something. They tell him to go kill the Time Snake and prove he's a man. In the end, the Superclown realizes that the lemon-girl and her mean boyfriend are playing him. The Time Snake is actually nice, and is from the distant future of the human race, and just wants to make friends. It's sympathetic and lovely. But the Superclown kills it anyway, because lemon girl told him to. And then he feels really bad, but at least he's a man now.

I don't know if this novel proves that the drugs were better in the 1970s, or that the anti-psychotic meds were worse. In any case, if you see it for 50 cents in a used bookstore (as I did), it's worth grabbing so you can quote sections of it aloud to your friends and slowly drive them super-mad.

You can now get every book ever published by Small Beer Press — including all of Kelly Link's short story collections, John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, and the genre-bending Interfictions — for $249. That's about half the retail price of their 26-book library, but if you can't stomach shelling out even that much, you'll be glad to know that Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners is now available as a free download. Michael Chabon thinks Magic for Beginners makes the world worth saving, so you can bet it's a fairly good read.

There's a lot of spectacular SF up for grabs right now, and when buying it could also help heal a seriously ailing country, it's almost impossible to resist. Go have fun.

Sale. [Not A Journal]

In William Barton's books, the strong exploit the weak — until someone stronger comes along, and exploits them in turn. And the universe rattles on, uncaring. As a character says in Alpha Centauri by Barton and Capobianco, it's do or die — and even if you do, you'll still die anyway. Oh well.

My favorite William Barton novel is probably When Heaven Fell, where a cybernetic Master Race takes over Earth and kills eight billion humans. The rest become slaves, soldiers, or mercenaries like the novel's hero Athol Morrison. Athol comes back to Earth after twenty years away, and finds that his high school sweetheart is involved in helping to plan an uprising against the alien overlords. Morrison knows the uprising will probably fail, and then the aliens will retaliate, wiping out what's left of the human race. So after much dithering, he rats out the human resistance to the aliens, in exchange for saving his girlfriend's life.

Later, he gets involved with a more sophisticated resistance effort involving a number of subjugated races. But it seems pretty doomed as well, and in the novel's final twist, we learn that the Master Race didn't come to Earth seeking new realms to conquer — they came here fleeing an even stronger, meaner empire from Andromeda. And now the people who kicked the Master Race's ass are coming to our galaxy. The Master Race will be conquered, and humans will probably end up "the slaves of slaves." (He cites the historical precedent of the Huns smashing the Roman Empire, when the Huns were actually fleeing the stronger Chinese.)

The weirdest Barton novel may well be Acts Of Conscience, where the hero (?) Gaetan comes across a planet whose inhabitants include a race called dollies, who happen to be perfectly suited to be sex toys for humans. The Dollies are furry and cute, and look sort of like little girls, but they also secrete hormones that spark arousal in human males. A group of humans want to round up all the Dollies and ship them off to be used by humans, which will wipe out the species in the process. In the most nauseating scene, Gaetan struggles with his conscience (and the nagging voice of his spacesuit) — and then he goes ahead and has sex with a dollie anyway:

Dollie looking up at me out of empty, featureless eyes, as though waiting. I put my hand on its belly, petting soft fur, felt it squirm with what seemed like pleasure, listened to its resumed purr. A cat, they say, does not purr out of pleasure. Humans don't care why it purrs, merely make the assumptions that please them most.

No reason to do this. You're just full of alien pheromones, pheromones tricking your reproductive physiology into thinking... hell. Think of it like a nice drug. Like a masturbation aid. Like the vidnet girls. Just get your dick out and take care of yourself, that's all. No one will know but you and the dollies. Who would they tell? Who would care? ...

The spacesuit whispered, Gaetan.

Shut the fuck up. Go away.

I crawled on top of the dollie and just like that, I was in. Wet. Warm. Sticky like raw egg white. Just like a woman. That's it. In. Out. In. Out. The dollie looked up at my face as I fucked it, eyes like bits of glass, purring steadily away, as if I were still only . . .

And after he's done basically raping an alien life form, he starts to cry. (Although I get the impression the dollie doesn't think of what just happened as sex.) And later he finally decides to save the dollies, and the other intelligent life forms on the planet whom the humans have exploited and killed for entertainment. Even if it dooms the human race (at the hands of a vastly more advanced life form) in the process. The scene where the aliens beg for his help is typically cynical. Writes Barton: "How does it feel to be bargaining with the devil? For that matter, how does it feel to be the devil with whom the downtrodden must bargain?"

Since the 1990s, Barton hasn't published any more novels, but his stories still appear in Asimov's Science Fiction and other magazines. With the explosion of new publishers like Nightshade and Pyr, putting out new books by other neglected greats like Richard Kadrey, I can't help but hope we'll see another searingly bitter Barton epic again soon.

Mattie's creator Loharri has fashioned his automaton out of whalebone, metal, and porcelain, building the corset shape of nineteenth century fashion into the very structure of her body. Instead of sex organs, she has a keyhole in her chest. Her creator has the only key, which he uses to keep her powered up but also to bestow pleasure on her. He's also wired her to be obedient and come to him when she is distressed, and punishes her disobedience by forcing her to overheat or by removing her eyes. So the emancipated Mattie is well-aware that her freedom and even her very life are completely under Loharri's control unless he gives her the key.

While the idea of a man owning the key to Mattie's heart verges on twee, Sedia generally makes good use of the metaphor. This is no simple fairy tale about a woman wanting freedom. It's about a woman who knows she's been molded (literally) for servitude, who knows she cannot ever completely escape her programming, and who therefore throws herself into a vast and complicated alchemy project that might give others the freedom she can never have. Most of the novel is about Mattie's attempt to perfect "the alchemy of stone," a project that will prevent a race of creatures called the Gargoyles from dying of a disease that turns them to stone.

Though Mattie's chemistry experiments are fantastical, they have a kind of hyper-realistic feel to them: There are no incantations, instead there are simply repetitious experiments on stone, testing to see what elements it contains. Sedia is a plant biologist, and it shows: There is plenty of genuine biogeekery here among the spirits and mechanical dolls and mythological creatures.

As Mattie nears a breakthrough on her Gargoyle project, the city's coal miners and other proletarians stage a revolution that leaves huge parts of the city in smoking ruins. As the creation of an upper-class Mechanic, who is part of the ruling Mechanic party, Mattie finds herself in a strange position. She's a non-entity as an automaton, unable to vote and considered mere scrap by most people, and yet she has the education and income of what many of the revolutionaries would consider a bourgeois oppressor. To make matters more complicated, she's fallen in love with a man who turns out to be one of the lead revolutionaries.

Swept up in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary conspiracies, locked into a tragic battle of wills with her creator, Mattie has to figure out where her loyalties lie. And all the while she never knows for sure whether the people she's helping see her as their equal, or just as a very finely-crafted tool. There are a number of brilliant moments when Sedia completely nails Mattie's strange ambivalence, managing to tell a profound story about femininity as well as what it's like to be mechanical. Here Mattie wonders about Sebastian, the revolutionary leader who made love to her:

Was it a fetish of a mechanic enamored with intricate devices and easily prompted to express his affection the moment a device resembled a girl, or was it something else?

While it's action-packed, The Alchemy of Stone is most properly understood as a character study. Mournful and romantic, Mattie is the mechanical, wind-up doll so many gothy teenage girls imagine themselves to be. And her vulnerability haunts many adult women too: We may not have whalebone corsets embedded in our skin, but we all struggle to be perceived as something more than pretty little tools. It's that struggle that makes Mattie such a vivid, memorable, and ultimately human character.

The Alchemy of Stone [Amazon]

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-in-chief of Tor Books, writes in an introductory post that Tor.com is embracing the subculture of scifi and fantasy fans, inviting them to join the conversations that usually only scifi editors get to have:

Much of what has driven Tor.com is our desire to more fully contribute to the great conversation that is the subculture of SF—that river of talk, in person and in print, that has surrounded and informed science fiction and fantasy (and “the universe,” and “related subjects”) since SF fans began cranking out fanzines and organizing meetups in the early 1930s. That conversation has done nothing but expand. It is a major tributary to the modern Internet. Tor.com aspires to be part of that conversation.

Reading Tor.com is like jumping into a room where a lot of my favorite scifi writers and bloggers are chatting. Can't wait for more!

Tor.com [via Tor.com]

The Classics

The Dark Knight Returns: Frank Miller's 1986 reinvention of Batman is still one of his best-known and most well-regarded stories. Sure, a lot of it may not have aged well - all of the Ronald Reagan scenes, for example - but no-one can deny how good it is to see Bruce Wayne come out of retirement to kick some mutant ass and save the world.

Batman: Year One: Going from Batman's retirement to his origins, Miller's follow-up to Dark Knight (illustrated beautifully by David Mazucchelli and Richmond Lewis) provides not only the tone for Batman Begins but also for most Batman comics for about the next two decades. Don't hold that against it, though; melding noir to superheroics with skill and restraint, this may be the best Batman comic ever.

The Killing Joke: The potential secret origin of the Joker, courtesy of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, both at the height of their powers. For the first time since his creation, Batman's most famous nemesis comes over and scary and dangerous, and a million miles away from Cesar Romero... sadly enough for poor Batgirl.

The Obscure

Batman: Year One Hundred: Paul Pope takes a jump to 2039 (100 years after Bob Kane invented Batman, hence the title) and shows us how a totalitarian police state deals with a vigilante Pope describes as "someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Nikola Tesla, and the wealth of Howard Hughes, who is pretending to be Nosferatu." Like Blade Runner, but with costumes and punching.

Gotham Central: Unresolved Targets: What happens when the Joker discovers the internet? Why, he starts killing people live on webcam and holds the city hostage to the idea that they might be next, of course. This collection from the sadly short-lived Gotham Central series by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark (all currently to found on Marvel's Daredevil series) shows us the terror from the point of view of Gotham's cops... who aren't exactly Batman's biggest fans.

JLA: New World Order: Anyone who's read Grant Morrison's take on the Justice League of America knows that Batman can do anything if he puts his mind to it. That's a fact demonstrated best in this first collection, where the Dark Knight single-handedly defeats an alien invasion and saves all the super-powered heroes with only his wits and a box of matches. Garishly-colored superheroics the way you need it.

Batman: Dangerous Dames and Demons: An anthology of comics based on the old animated series from the '90s, all written by that show's executive producer Paul Dini and drawn by various artists from the show, including Bruce Timm. Worth it to see Harley Quinn cut loose in Mad Love alone.

The Admittedly Goofy

A Death In The Family: Post-Killing Joke, the regular Batbooks decided to try out this new murderous Joker for themselves, letting fans decide via phone vote whether or not he'd succeed in killing Robin the Boy Wonder. Fans voted in their thousands, and poor Robin was toast... Well, until they brought him back from the dead a few years ago.

Showcase Presents: The Brave And The Bold - The Batman Team-Ups Volume 2: While both Brave and Bold collections are full of enjoyably stupid Batman stories from the late '60s and early '70s, the second volume is by far the greatest, if only for the stories where Batman meets the ghosts of his dead parents and fights the devil. Here's a clue how that one ends up: The devil wins.

All-Star Batman Volume One: It seemed like a no-lose proposition for DC Comics: Pair up your hottest artist, Jim Lee, with Frank Miller returning to the character that made his name. The problem was that the result was a dark-natured parody of the character who's given to saying things like "Are you dense? Are you retarded? I'm the goddamn Batman" to people who ask why he'd dressed in that ridiculous outfit. Completely over-the-top fun.

I enjoyed Slattery's first novel, Spaceman Blues, a lot, despite a slightly all-over-the-place feeling. Liberation is also all over the place, with a sprawling cast of characters and a huge expansive vision, but it has a much stronger core.

The book's full title is Liberation: Being The Adventures Of The Slick Six After The Collapse Of The United States of America. Which pretty much sums the whole thing up. The U.S. doesn't collapse because of ecological disaster or plague, but just economic crappiness. It's pretty much Brad DeLong's worst nightmare: the U.S. dollar becomes worthless, the foreign lenders all pull their money out, the banks all go under, everyone starves. When things reach their worst point, a former gang of super-criminals called the Slick Six reunite to put things right (sort of.)

We hear a lot about the Slick Six in their heyday: their daring heists, their cunning scams, and so on. Which makes it all the more shocking when we find out that two of the Six have sold themselves into slavery. Or not actually sold, just donated. Slavery is what rises from the rubble of the American economy, when there's no money to pay anyone to do anything. Starving people are willing to give away their freedom in exchange for a roof and semi-regular meals. At first the revival of slavery is a slapdash affair, until someone puts some serious money into it.

That's the other interesting thing about Liberation — capitalism doesn't disappear after the American economy, and the dollar, are gone. The book's main villain is a crime lord named the Aardvark (whom I sort of pictured like the Kingpin from the Daredevil comics) who has the vision to realize that slave plantations can be a limitless source of wealth if someone puts the capital into organizing the economies of scale. He borrows fantastic sums from a Japanese businessman, and turns America's "peculiar institution" into a version of globalization for a seriously fucked world. It's capitalism without any government intervention, as he points out once or twice. (Reading this book reminded me of Eugene Genovese's argument that slavery was a "hybrid" system, both capitalist and non-capitalist.)

The greatest member of the Slick Six, and the book's main character, is Marco, the group's assassin/thief. He's studied fighting and killing from some of the greatest masters, all over the world, and the book is full of his ninja-tastic exploits. He's the one who comes up with a plan to reunite the group, and try to make things right again. Through his quest, we travel all over the world, visiting the New Sioux, a revived Indian tribe, as well as neo-hippies, ravers, and the free state of Asheville. Marco's journey is a weird mash-up of Tarantino and Kerouac, an introspective spiritual odyssey with comic-booky touches.

Liberation does have some flaws: Slattery's prose is lovingly crafted and musical, but there's an awful lot of it. And by the seventh or eighth lyrical, flowing description of a party where people pick up instruments and start playing old rhythm and blues songs, I was tempted to start skimming. But it's a book that rewards attention, and you'll find yourself flipping back after you finish it to find the best parts of its off-kilter odyssey and piece together new connections between its huge and memorable cast of characters. It's also a book that gets even better on the second read, as you pick up on stuff and make more of the connections between the characters. Most of all, the book's vision of a post-U.S.A. America will stick with you afterwards, haunting you and maybe thrilling you a little.

(Sorry, I realized after I started writing this review that Liberation doesn't come out until October, but you can pre-order it on Amazon. And you should do it now, lest the economy collapse between now and then.)

Oldies but goodies:

Lord Valentine's Castle, by Robert Silverberg
A terrific quest epic set on a semi-medieval planet with space travel, Lord Valentine's Castle leads you across a several continents of the planet Majipoor toward a huge mountain crowned with several massive cities. Intriguing and carnivalesque, the novel follows our amnesiac hero as searches for his true identity among artisans, spies, aliens, and magicians. Though he believes himself to be a humble circus performer, he has strange dreams of being something else — something far more powerful. Great adventure, with four-armed jugglers and beautiful maidens thrown in for good measure.

There and Back Again, by Pat Murphy
One of Pat Murphy's best novels, There and Back Again is about a regular guy named Bailey who finds a mysterious message pot in orbit around an asteroid. When he notifies its owners that he's found it, his safe little life on his asteroid gets turned upsidown. He finds himself scooped up by galactic adventurer Gitana, who has her own ideas about what to do with the message pot. That's right: She's taking Bailey and heading straight to the center of the galaxy. Get ready for spacetime distortion and a lot of serious swashbuckling.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion, by Ursula Le Guin
A collection of three of Ursula Le Guin's early space-adventure novels, this book takes you on spy missions, dangerous touchdowns on planets populated by mysteriously automaton-like people, and deep into the lives of people in two tribes that live on a planet where seasons last for years. Unlike Le Guin's later work, which grows more complex and philosophical, these novels are smart but light. And they always deliver a dose of the truly strange.

Steampunk, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
This collection of steampunk short stories just came out this month, and it's already become something of a legend. Packed with crazy, smart, diverting stories by Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang, Mary Gentle, Michael Chabon, and Jay Lake, you won't be able to put it down. Expect zeppelins, mechanical oddities, plans to rebeautify the moon, steam-powered robot armies, and general anachronistic anarchy.

Court of the Air, by Stephen Hunt
Another steampunk winner, Stephen Hunt's Court of the Air is a tale of two adventuring orphans in a world full of pneumatic buildings, brass cyborgs, and wondrous airships. Helped along by mysterious aliens/other-dimensional beings and secret agents, fleeing the authorities and trying to figure out which side is right, our heroes Molly and Oliver go on an astounding adventure. Making this book all the more pleasing are Hunt's satirical, Dickensian moments where he makes fun of pompous politicos and greedy entrepreneurs.

Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder
A tale of pirates trying to steal an artificial sun to light a rebel colony that lives on a bunch of rocks and giant spinning cylinders inside a planet-sized bag of gas floating in the middle of space? The answer to that strange question is, of course, yes. This is the first of a trilogy, so if you can't get enough of the crazy world-building and rebellious pirates and airships with canons, you can always get more.

Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey
We've recently told you how great the sixth book is in the Kushiel series, but this is the brilliant and bizarre adventure that started it all. It's the tale of a prostitute-spy whose superpower is that pain gives her intense sexual pleasure. Sent on a mission to save her country from imminent invasion, she's accompanied only by a mysterious, celibate monk who is as good with his knives as she is with her mind (and her, um, other parts). Can you have an alternate history, naughty sex romance that's also an awesome spy thriller? Yes you can!

Komarr, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold's most beloved character, the disabled but badass Miles Vorkosigan, returns in the first novel of a new trilogy about his entanglement in the politics of the planet Komarr. Dispatched there to investigate an accident, Miles is sucked into a plot involving terraforming, weapons of mass destruction, and even the liberation of an abused wife. There's a lot of amazing world-building and detective work, plus a little romance too. The sequel to Komarr, A Civil Campaign, is also great, though a bit more romancey.

Coming out in July and August:

The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
The tale of a clockwork woman named Mattie whose heart is literally kept locked up by her maker, The Alchemy of Stone is set in a spy-ridden world of intrigue and class warfare. As a scientific revolution sweeps through the city of Ayona, Mattie discovers a secret that could help her lead a coup. If only she could figure out who to trust, and regain the key to her own heart. Written by the author of The Secret History of Moscow, this novel is beautifully strange.

Incandescence, by Greg Egan
You want to take a ride to the freaky heart of the galaxy, to the mysterious "bulge" where a strange species of creatures lurk, refusing all contact and yet harboring amazing secret knowledge? Hell yes you do. And that's what you'll get in Egan's latest novel, about a man who gets the chance to visit that bulge and meet the creatures within it. What he discovers are members of a lost race, searching for scientific enlightenment that might save their world. Expect galaxy-spanning coolness.

Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross
A sexbot on a spy mission? Sounds like Kushiel's Dart, except it's by Charles "Halting State" Stross and it's set in a post-human solar system where homo sapiens has gone extinct and bots rule the day. Femmebot Freya's clientele have all gone the way of the Dodo, so she takes a dangerous courier job — she's got to get a small package from Mercury to Mars, and she can't let those dangerous humanoids who are tracking her get to it first.

Sly Mongoose, by Tobias Buckell
Nothing like floating cities, gas giant storms, and vast alien intelligences to make a damn fine adventure. Set on a planet packed with all three, Sly Mongoose is the tale of Timas, an unlikely hero whose life goes sproing when a man crash-lands in his airborne city. Timas must help avert an interstellar war by plunging deep into the high-pressure mega-storms of his planet in search of alien secrets. Great world-building and fast action make this an excellent book to keep you diverted — but also to make you think too.

It's always a delight to come back to Carey's elaborately-conceived alternate world. Most European and Mediterranean countries are pagan, while France (here called Terre D'Ange) took up a form of polytheistic, pseudo-Christianity founded by Elua, the bastard child of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Our heroes hail from Terre D'Ange, a land where prostitutes are revered and holy scripture bids everyone to "love as thou wilt." The politics are crisp and intriguing, and every adventure is packed with cool battle strategies and entertaining cultural details.

The spawn of super-dominatrix and supervillain Melisande, Imriel spends the first two books in his series overcoming his unhappy, pre-Phedre childhood and proving his loyalty to the kingdom his mother betrayed. Here, as in the previous novel, we find Imriel pining for Sidonie, the princess of Terre D'Ange and the one woman he's forbidden to love. Sidonie returns his passion, but nobody in the kingdom can deal with the idea of her marrying a man whose mother many years ago tried to stage a coup and sell the country out to Skaldia (Germany). The Imriel/Sidonie romance remains lukewarm — I never liked it in previous novels, and it just feels too stagey for words (falling in love with a princess? am I in fourth grade?). Luckily, their romance is merely a motivating force but not center stage for most of the novel.

Instead, the novel is a meditation on the madness of war and conquest. Carthage, which wants to secure an alliance with Terre D'Ange in order to conquer Aragnoia (Spain), manages to generate a kind of mass hallucination in the capital city of Terre D'Ange which convinces the leaders of the country to make that alliance. And Sidonie is convinced to marry the leader of Carthage, despite her love for Imriel. Most of the novel is about Imriel's quest to restore sanity to the kingdom, and to rescue Sidonie from her delusion. It's a tidy way for Carey to make her characters behave in a way that is profoundly out of character, and to give Imriel and Sidonie a chance to fall in love again (slightly more believably this time).

I say it's tidy, but the story actually works. Partly that's because Imriel is forced to turn to his villainous mother for aid, which gives Carey a chance to suggest that even the most foul of people might be able to redeem themselves given a chance. Pleasing also is Carey's exploration of madness in this novel. So many key characters go crazy — and some crazy characters at last come to their senses — that there's a genuine sense of development that felt lacking in the first two Imriel books. As Imriel ventures across Aragonia and the native-held lands of Euskerria bordering it, he realizes that heroism is itself a kind of madness. Especially in a world where heroes are all forged in bloody, horrifying wars that leave royalty relatively safe while destroying whole generations of common folk.

I think the biggest problem in Kushiel's Mercy, aside from the still-blah romance between golden-haired princess Sidonie and brooding Imriel, is Carey's attempt to maintain the sexual spice of the first three novels in the Kushiel series. Part of what made those novels so popular was Carey's ability to mix transgressive sex with compelling spy stories — and that made perfect sense in the Phedre books. Phedre is, after all, a prostitute: She is required to have sex for her job, and her adoptive father trains her in the "arts of covertcy" so that she can use her sexuality to ferret out secrets from her powerful patrons in the royal court. Plus, her superpower is that she is aroused by pain, no matter who causes it or why. So again, this makes sexuality central to her character, especially since she's always being kidnapped and tortured during her super-spying adventures.

Imriel, however, is not a prostitute nor does he have a sexual superpower. He's just a son of privilege with royal blood who happens to like a little kinky sex once in a while. Liking kinky sex is not a superpower, especially when anybody in our current timeline can shop at Hot Topic and Babeland. Carey dutifully throws in some slightly racy sex scenes between Imriel and Sidonie (ohhh, he rips her shirt and uses a quirt on her back! ohhh, he ties her up with silken bonds!), but these scenes feel like something her editor requested to retain the flavor of the earlier series rather than something necessary to advance the plot. I mean, if Carey had really wanted to continue in the sex-centric universe of the Phedre novels, she could have given Imriel a superpower like the ability to make people get aroused while experiencing pain. I mean, why not? That's no more preposterous than Phedre's power, and Imriel is the son of the most skillful dominatrix in Terre D'Ange.

But obviously Carey didn't want to do that — she had other plans for Imriel. And at last, in this novel, those plans come to startling fruition. Imriel's superpower is that he is a great protector of women, like his adoptive father Joscelin, the monk-ninja who guards and then becomes consort to Phedre. In the Phedre novels, we never fully understand what motivates a celibate monk to fall in love with a prostitute. But in Kushiel's Mercy we begin to understand, as Imriel slowly discovers what his real role will be in Sidonie's life and the life of the kingdom he serves. He knows he won't be a great ruler (that's Sidonie's job), and he won't be a great scholar (though his adoptive mother Phedre is one of the greatest thinkers in the land). Instead, he will be the guardian of a great woman, the man behind the throne. Master in the bedroom, he is merely an attendant upon power in public life. Watching Imriel learn this, and what it means to him, is what kept me reading Kushiel's Mercy and got me excited about what Carey has in store for us next.

[Kushiel's Mercy via Amazon]

HOPE happens July 18-20, but even if you can't be there, you can pre-order the book online. Here's what the publisher says about it:

Since its introduction in January of 1984, 2600 has been a unique source of information for readers with a strong sense of curiosity and an affinity for technology. The articles in 2600 have been consistently fascinating and frequently controversial. Over the past couple of decades the magazine has evolved from three sheets of loose-leaf paper stuffed into an envelope (readers "subscribed" by responding to a notice on a popular BBS frequented by hackers and sending in a SASE) to a professionally produced quarterly magazine. At the same time, the creators' anticipated audience of "a few dozen people tied together in a closely knit circle of conspiracy and mischief" grew to a global audience of tens of thousands of subscribers.

In The Best of 2600, Emmanuel Goldstein collects some of the strongest, most interesting, and often controversial articles, chronicling milestone events and technology changes that have occurred during the last 24 years - all from the hacker perspective. Examples:

* The creation of the infamous tone dialer "red box" that drove Radio Shack and the phone companies crazy. It was in the pages of 2600 that this simple conversion was first brought to light. By modifying an inexpensive Radio Shack touch tone dialer with a readily available crystal, free phone calls could easily be made from all of the nation’s payphones.
* An historical chronology of events in the hacker world that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
* A close looks at the insecurity of modern locks through an article entitled "An Illusion of Security" that debunked the value of Simplex pushbutton locks, used on everything from schools to homes to FedEx boxes.
* The stories of famed hackers Kevin Mitnick, Bernie S., and Phiber Optik as they unfolded. Through 2600, the world heard these controversial tales despite the efforts of authorities and the mass media.

Oh man, I loved 2600 when I discovered it as a little script kiddie weenie in high school. It made me realize that there were other smart, technical, disobedient people in the world. As a grown-up I've spoken at HOPE a couple of times, and can guarantee it is one of the best hacker conferences in the U.S. Better than DefCon, you bitches. Seriously.

The Best of 2600 [Amazon via BoingBoing]

The Rolling Stones, by Robert Heinlein. (1952)

One of Heinlein's early Juveniles, The Rolling Stones is about a zany family of Loonies (moon-dwellers) who go on a weird family trip through the inner solar system, picking up a fast-breeding, Tribble-esque "flat cat" along the way. They also visit the crazy "wild west" mining areas around the asteroid belt and get into silly adventures on Mars and Saturn. The troublemaking, anarchic family of Stones show up in some of his other novels too. The Rolling Stones is more fun than Heinlein's groundbreaking first Juvenile, Rocket Ship Galileo (which, like Harry Potter, proved there was a market for YA scifi), and has a lot of the freewheeling, libertarian-hippie flavor for which the author later became known.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)

Meg and Charles Wallace are a brother and sister who discover late one night that their mother's strange visitors are actually extra-dimensional beings who have come to ask their help. The kids' father has been missing for a while, and it turns out his experiments with "tesseracts," FTL technologies that involve folding space, have landed him on a dangerous planet controlled by a psychic computer called IT. Traveling through a harrowing galactic and psychic landscape, the children must deal with everything from bizarre physics experiments to the nature of identity and evil. Beautiful and haunting, this is still one of the most mind-blowing novels a kid could ever read.

The White Mountains, by John Christopher (1967)

Set in a post-apocalyptic England 100 years after aliens called "Tripods" (much like those in War of the Worlds) have taken over, the novel focuses on two kids who are starting to question the values of their society. Every person over the age of 14 is fitted with a mind-controlling "cap" by the Tripods, and afterward loses all ambition or creativity. The humans' culture remains stuck in a kind of perpetual middle ages. A year away from being capped, our heroes decide to strike out on their own and look for a mysterious place in the "white mountains" where humans live uncapped.

Sweetwater, by Laurence Yep (1973)

For slightly younger readers, Sweetwater is a the tale of a kid who lives on a planet full of seamonsters and unknown threats. Rising waters threaten his small town, but even more threatening is the main character's growing relationship with a native of the planet. His own family is part of a colonizing group that has always distrusted the natives. And now our hero must unite the planet's peoples, as well as stop the eco-disaster that's consuming the town.

Star Ka'at, by Andre Norton (1976)

I've raved about this novel before, but I can't say enough good things about it. Like Sweetwater, this one is for slightly younger readers. Psychic cats called Ka'ats from another planet arrive on Earth to gather up their brethren before humans destroy themselves with atomics. Two of the Ka'ats meet up with two very realistic human kids — a nearly-homeless little girl and an orphan boy in a foster home — and befriend them. Not only does the novel deliver a nice dose of psychic kitty, which is pretty much equal to awesome in a kids' book, but it's also full of fairly grownup commentary on race relations and poverty without ever getting preachy or boring.

Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater (1979)

For any nerdy kid who wishes he had psychic powers and could travel between dimensions, this weird novel by NPR commentator Daniel Pinkwater is pretty much the best there is. After Leonard moves to a new school, he's picked on by everybody until he teams up with another dorky kid named Alan — and the two of them embark on a book-fueled journey through consciousness and space. Helped along by a bookstore owner who loans them books on mind-control and interdimensional travel, the two learn to fight the mean kids at their school using their brains. Later, of course, they manage to save an entire other dimension from slavery. Wackier and leftier than a Heinlein novel, but with the same sense of anarchic fun, Alan Mendelsohn should be on any outsider kid's list of must-reads.

McHugh, who won accolades for her novel China Mountain Zhang, has written a funny, thoughtful story about what would happen if the middleware you ran on your giant UNIX network achieved a form of consciousness on the level of a shark. How would you debug it when it started behaving in a shark-like manner and randomly messing with your data? Would it be unethical to revert the system?

And Duchamp, whose Marq'ssan Cycle earned praise from Samuel Delaney, writes about the first man to be fitted with a wearable artificial womb that feeds nutrients to his baby via a placenta-like filter that siphons his blood into the baby's body. It's a really weird story, in part because it deals mostly with how this fairly manly guy deals with being pregnant — and with his wife's ambivalence about having children at all. This is not at all your usual gender-role-switching story. Highly recommended.

Plugged In [via Aqueduct Press]

Here's the quick description of the book:

Madison, Wisconsin: In the summer of 2001, five college juniors wake up with . . . not just a hangover, but superpowers. . . .

Jack Robinson: Grew up on a farm, works in a chem lab, and brews his own beer. Age: 19. Superpower: SPEED.

Caroline Bloom: Has a flair for fashion design and a mother who’s completely out of touch. Works as a waitress for a lunatic boss.
Age: 20. Superpower: FLIGHT.

Harriet Bishop: Studied violin, guitar, and piano . . . and was terrible at them all. Now writes about music for the campus paper.
Age: 20. Superpower: ­INVISIBILITY.

Mary Beth Layton: Is managing a 3.8, but feels like she’s working three times as hard as the people around her.
Age: 20. Superpower: STRENGTH.

Charlie Frost: Has an anxious way about him, and always looks like he’s on day 101 of his most recent haircut.
Age: 20. Superpower: TELEPATHY.

But how do you adjust to an extraordinary ability when you’re an ordinary person? What if you’re not ready for the responsibility that comes with great power?

The novel also takes place in the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks in the United States, which gives Schwartz's undertaking a geopolitical sheen I find ingriguing. The book comes out next week from Three Rivers Press, and simultaneously as an e-book from Random House.

Superpowers [via Amazon and Random House]

I'm a huge sucker for novels that take place after an alien invasion of Earth has already succeeded. (Actually, the only other novel along those lines I can think of is the criminally neglected When Heaven Fell by William Barton.) In Meyer's novel, a race of parasites/symbionts has succeeded in taking over almost every human on Earth. (They're sort of like the Trill from Star Trek, or the parasites from the recent Nicole Kidman vehicle Invasion. Just like the Body Snatchers, The Host's "souls" took over via subterfuge, until they were unstoppable.

And in line with some other mind-controlling parasite stories, the "souls" are much more peaceful than humans. They abhor violence and are incapable of lying. After the souls take over, murder and rape become unknown and child molesters line up to turn themselves in. (In a hilarious sequence towards the end of the book, we learn the souls' television programs are completely dull, and even The Brady Bunch turned out to be too violent for them to watch.)

What makes the "souls" (and yes, the names are among the cheese-markers in Meyer's novel) so interesting is that they don't always take over their host bodies completely. Older hosts, who are aware of the alien invaders, can resist even after the parasites are implanted. The novel's main character, Wanderer, gets implanted into the body of one of the few human resistance fighters, Melanie. And then Wanderer and Melanie have to struggle for control over Melanie's body, before becoming uneasy friends.

And even when the "souls" manage to eradicate all trace of the consciousness of their bodies' original owners, they still cling to old habits. The newly "ensouled" bodies live in the same houses as before, stay married to the same people (also occupied by "souls") and often keep the same jobs. It's like that Roald Dahl story about the birds that switch places with the people, living in the people's houses and carrying on their routines while the people watch, helpless, from the trees.

One of my problems with The Host was the fact that it made the transition from "struggling for control" to "uneasy friends" way, way too quickly. Wanderer soon becomes obsessed with Melanie's boyfriend and kid brother, both of whom are still parasite-free and hiding out in some caves with a group of resisters. Wanderer relives Melanie's memories and falls in love with Jared, the man Melanie loves. Instead of accessing Melanie's mind to help the "souls" track down the human resisters, Wanderer starts identifying with them.

As I said, Meyer rushes over Wanderer's change of heart, because Meyer is much, much more interested in what happens when Wanderer/Melanie manages to join the human resistance fighters. (Where Wanderer is in constant danger of being killed, and does get roughed up pretty horribly a few times.)

Will Jared, the man both Wanderer and Melanie love, ever accept the parasite in the body of his girlfriend? Is it really Melanie's body, and not either of her warring consciousnesses, that really responds to Jared, because of pheromones and chemical attractions? When Jared finally does show affection to Melanie's body, will Melanie be able to get over her jealousy of Wanderer receiving some of that attention?

Yes, as the book-jacket copy puts it, this is the first ever love triangle involving only two bodies. And weirdly, a trashy romance turns out to be the perfect vehicle for exploring issues of bodies and identity. Do we exist beyond our physical selves? Are our desires just our bodies? How can Wanderer convince the suspicious humans that she still has Melanie's consciousness alive within her? Is it fair for Wanderer to have sex using Melanie's body, while Melanie watches powerlessly? (Melanie only rarely manages to control her own body after Wanderer takes over.)

The book's silly romance subpot winds up politicizing Wanderer, turning her into a race traitor who helps the humans to rescue others from the parasites' mental occupation. We're told, over and over, that what makes humans special is that we have such strong emotions, as compared with the mostly bland-sounding dolphins, bats and cacti that the parasites have occupied before. It's hinted that raw emotion may eventually save the human race from being erased forever (maybe in the inevitable sequel.)

Without giving away The Host's ending, I will mention that it's a bit disappointing. A threat that's been looming since the start of the book gets resolved way too easily, so that Meyer can get back to the romance that actually interests her. And then Wanderer faces a dilemma whose solution is obvious, but which nobody discovers for a few dozen pages. But even if raw plot isn't exactly Meyer's strong suit, the novel's soapy storyline will have you arguing with your friends about the mind/body dichotomy and colonial occupations for days.