weird kitties

Weird Kitties fizzled out, but I had a few spare reviews lying around and Jane’s holiday is going to run one more week, so here they are.

Material, by Ales Kot, Will Tempest, Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller

Reviewed by Sean Dillon, eligible in Best Graphic Story, available on Comixology.

What does 2015 look like? That is a question at the core of Material, an Image comic written by Ales Kot, drawn by Will Tempest, lettered by Clayton Cowles, and designed by Tom Muller. The comic follows four people, living in these turbulent and fragmented times¹.

The first is a Philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the name of Julius Shore. Every issue, save the fourth one, opens with a lecture he is giving, ranging from the incompatibility of Art and Business to a nervous breakdown in the form of wearing Su-Real dynamite on his head while ranting about how he is a failure. His ongoing conversations with an emergent sentient AI, which he dubs as Alien Intelligence, make this comic eligible for a Hugo Award².

The second is an actress in Los Angeles by the name of Nylon Dahlias. She is escaping from the failure of her film career and the death of her mother via Alzheimer’s by doing a lot of drugs. She has just been cast by an up and coming auteur in his new film that’s missing its first 10 pages. Nylon’s story culminates with her running into her producer in the middle of the street having a nervous breakdown, unable to deal with the fragments of the reality around him³.

The third is Franklin, a young man from Chicago who went to a “Black Live Matter” protest. As with many of those protests, the cops showed up and beat everyone to the ground. Franklin woke up hours later in Homan Square where an officer of the police confronted him. Said officer is now blackmailing him to act as a mole in his uncle’s New Black Panther Movement. It is implied, though never directly stated, that other things have been going on between the two of them⁴.

The fourth is Adib, a man who was wrongly put into Guantanamo Bay (for being the wrong person, the wrong skin color, and worshiping the wrong god instead of the humane reasons it is wrong to be locked up in Guantanamo⁵). Now that he’s out, he can’t talk about what had happened to him in his time, not even to his wife. The only person he can relate to about his experiences is his female BDSM partner⁶.

The narrative is an unflinching look at the modern day, covering subjects from the Black Lives Matter movement and how it relates to the progressive movements of the past to the complexity of wanting your life not to be dominated by the cruelties that have happened to the man you are married to. The four issues are told masterfully as Will Tempest conveys a sense of control with the 9 Panel Grid as well as a sense of chaos with sketchy art style used for the characters within it⁷.…

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For obvious reasons one of the categories I find most interesting, and one of those No Award triumphed in, Best Related Work is basically (and was indeed originally simply called) the nonfiction category for books about science fiction. I’ll almost certainly be nominating Alexandra Erin’s John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author And I Myself am Quite Popular, it being one of the funniest things I’ve read this year, and may do Space Helmet for a Cow, which I should probably finish and write a review of.

Speaking of which, as the lack of reviews the last two weeks suggest, those have rather dried up. There’s one or two in my e-mail that I’ve not posted because I’ve been waiting to get to the 3-4 I’ve been doing per post, so if anyone wants to oblige, snowspinner at gmail and whatnot.

Also, I was happy to see that George R.R. Martin’s first Hugo recommendations post included suggesting Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), a work I’m near-certain to have on my ballot, but had been assuming would be an idiosyncratic dark horse. And, more broadly, that Martin is doing Hugo recommendations, this being a conversation I continue to maintain we need to have loudly and in public.

Anyway, here’s the Hugo Wikia’s (incomplete as ever) list of eligible works. What are you planning on nominating?…

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A category in which I know a fair amount, but find myself with relatively few opinions, simply because there’s been an awful lot of smart stuff written about sci-fi this year, albeit not for the happiest of occasions. But many of my picks here are conflicts of interest and long shots anyway, so those with saner taste – inform us what’s good in this category, and we’ll be back later with Zygons. …

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Oh, let’s go ahead and wrap up the big prose fiction categories with Best Novella, the “just shorter than a novel” category, defined as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words. Which is a length I really like, having written two books (both nonfiction, admittedly) that land in it; it’s at a beautiful cusp where you can still get away with a book that’s all suggestion and no conclusion, but where you can have the suggestion be labrynthine in its complexity.

Unfortunately, much as I love the category, I’ve not read anything in it this year. Here’s the Hugo Wikia’s list, which I do note has Paul Cornell’s latest, Witches of Lychford. How was that? How were other things?

Still need reviews for Sunday, by the way. snowspinner at gmail. Perhaps a review of Witches of Lychford? The Martian? Seveneves? …

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The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
Reviewed by Daibhid Ceannaideach

Eligable for Best Novel and available for purchase here.

The Shepherd’s Crown is the fifth and last Tiffany Aching book, the forty-first and last Discworld novel, and the fifty-seventh  and last novel by Terry Pratchett.  It also opens with a major event which many reviews have been criticised for spoiling. But you can’t really discuss the book without spoiling it; it’s like reviewing Raising Steam without mentioning it involves a train.

So here goes: Granny Weatherwax, most respected of the leaders witches don’t have and part time force of nature, is no more. This happens in the second chapter, and the rest of the book is about a world with a Granny Weatherwax shaped hole in it.

In a way, this is almost too appropriate for the last Discworld book, coming a mere six months after fans found themselves in a world with a Terry Pratchett shaped hole in it. Some people who heard the spoiler were grateful that they now knew they weren’t ready to read the book. Granny Weatherwax was the character Sir Terry used as an example when discussing how popular characters are immortal, she’d been around since the third book, of course Discworld ends as she does.

No other character would work here; Rincewind has been around for longer, but was always a much broader comic character;  a novel centred around his death would be like seriously considering the funeral of Daffy Duck. There could certainly have been a novel about the Watch dealing with the death of Vimes, but Vimes’s death would probably be messier, and dealing with it would involve bringing those responsible to justice. Granny dies peacefully in her sleep, just like Terry did.

And, of course, we’re reading too much into it already. The last five books have all “obviously” been Terry’s final novel where he says farewell to his characters. It’s pretty clear he never thought that way, and the afterword by Rob Willkins reveals there were at least four ideas he was working on that we will now never see. There was never going to be a “final Discworld novel”, there was just going to be a point where they stopped.

But this is nonetheless a book that works as a final Discworld novel. It also works as the last Tiffany Aching novel, which probably was intentional; Tiffany comes into her own as the new major witch, as we always knew she could, and has to face the elves, just as she did aged nine in The Wee Free Men. The way she does this involves a decision it is hard to imagine Granny Weatherwax making, but is very Tiffany Aching, showing that, while she learned from the best, what she learned was how to be herself.

But the echoes of past witches novels stretch further than that. Pretty much all the witches appear in it and most of them get a moment to shine (even Mrs Earwig). Geoffrey, the young man who wants to be a witch, is paralleled to Eskarina Smith, the young woman who wants to be a wizard in Equal Rites, thereby highlighting that there are two edges to why fixed gender roles are wrong, and that while one is more obviously discriminatory, the other is no better for being insidious.…

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Ah, Best Novelette. The form that only the Hugos actually recognize, occupying the space between short story and short novel. Long story, as it were. Or, in technical terms, anything between 7,500 and 17,500 words long, because obviously people know the word length of things they read.

Here’s the Hugo Wikia’s list of eligible works, of which the only one I’ve read is Elektrograd: Rusted Blood, which I certainly wouldn’t mind putting on my ballot, but which I hope the field is good enough that it isn’t a shoo-in either. But I don’t know. What should I read, dear readers?

We’ll be back tomorrow with reviews, including Jack Graham on China Miéville’s “The Dusty Hat,” which, fun fact, is 7,549 words long.…

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Or, as I really do think of the category, “all the stuff that’s probably going to lose to Star Wars,” a film I would be shocked to find on my ballot given my dislike for both the franchise and the director. Call me cynical.

I’ll almost certainly be nominating Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road and, as the image suggests, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in its entirety (as I think it’s better-suited to this category than short form, where one would have to pick an episode). I’ve kind of got a slot pencilled in for The Martian, but I also probably won’t actually get around to seeing it in theaters to make sure of this. (I’d love to hear opinions of it.) 

Past that, I’m keeping my last slot open. The Force Awakens. Right now neither of the Marvel movies are making my list. I’m tempted to look at Daredevil, which I feel is better-suited due to the “all at once” release model of Netflix, but I’m also loathe to put too much television here. Jessica Jones is also a much more likely pick if I go that route. It Follows is also distinctly possible.

Also, as usual, more reviews for tomorrow are needed. I’ve got a couple of people who have suggested they might get me something, but nobody who has, so the cupboard may end up being bare, unless I get an Ex Machina review together or something, which I might do I suppose. …

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The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.

I had some reservations about The Three-Body Problem, although they’re as much sour grapes as genuine objections, and its merits were considerable. This, I think, is a stronger novel, and a strong candidate for my ballot. Liu constructs an interesting conceptual structure; an alien fleet is 450 years away from Earth and bent on destroying it. A MacGuffin exists whereby Earth is under constant and total surveilance by the aliens and unable to produce any scientific advancements in theoretical physics, thus more or less locking technology more or less into variations of what’s on contemporary Earth (with a few exceptions when it furthers the plot such as cryonics). 

The novel follows a couple of cunning plans unfolding over about 250 years of future history, the main one of which also unfolds along a novel explanation of the Fermi paradox that doubles as a theory of interstellar relations. This is not to say it’s a theory original to Liu - I’ve no idea there – but it’s not one that’s been overdone in stories about aliens. And that’s the basic and real appeal of this, I think. Throughout it, there’s just a genuine feeling of innovation. There’s a fresh feeling to even the hoariest of old sci-fi tropes here. It feels fresh like one imagines Asimov and Clarke did in their days. One suspects – though it’s outside my area of expertise to conclude – that a fair part of this is that we haven’t really seen a Chinese perspective on these genre conventions before, but whatever the reason, it works well.

The book’s heftier than it’s predecessor, and probably doesn’t work well if you haven’t read it, but it’s a solid and interesting science fiction novel in the grand and classical sense, which is a nice thing to see. It never drags in its length, and Liu comes up with a fresh idea often enough to keep things moving. I ended up wolfing the bulk of it down in a nice autumn evening under the blankets with a few pots fof tea and absolutely loving it, and can’t wait for the last book of the set in January. 

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Nobody expected Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years to be a fantasy novel, but it is – complete with dragons, ogres, pixies, and spells. The novel is set in a mythic version of the British past, during an uneasy truce between Britons and Saxons, a few decades after the death of King Arthur. The setting and style both rely as much uponThe Sword in the Stone as on Chaucer or Geoffrey of Monmouth.

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So I admit, this is a category I know basically nothing about. I mean, I assume it doesn’t generally go to comic artists, and so my instinct to nominate J.H. Williams III and Jamie McKelvie, though not unreasonable from any aesthetic perspective, is still out of keeping with social norms. Still, here’s the second most mindblowing moment of one of the best comics of the year, and a fantastic costume design to boot, and people can tell me what’s normal to nominate here. 

Looking at the people listed in the 2016 Hugo Wikia, I see Stephanie Hans, who’s doing the next issue of WicDiv, is there, so I can’t be too wrong-headed. Stephan Martinière’s work on the Three-Body Problem trilogy is pretty impressive too. Scanning quickly through the others, though, I’m finding this is a hard category for me. So yes, please someone have useful opinions.

Speaking of useful opinions, we could still use one or two more reviews for tomorrow. snowspinner at gmail. …

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