The GrogMonkey

SF novelist Jim Macdonald has an article, “Fence Your Stolen Content at Amazon.com“. He discusses the threat of e-books as becoming the new breeding-ground fir spammers and search engine scammers:

“With the cost of self-publishing approaching zero thanks to e-publishing, and with content-farms being depreciated by Google, it seems that spammers have taken to e-publishing.”

As someone seeking to start a career with e-publishing as a significant cornerstone in the foundation, this bothers me a lot. As a user of the Internet since around 1995, I’ve seen the war against spam and pernicious Web advertisers get messy. As someone who has worked in IT in some way since 1998, I’ve been on frontlines fighting spam and blocking advertising. And, as a Web designer, I’ve had to fight hard to get sites as high as legitimately possible on search results while competing with unscrupulous content farms.

As someone who has spent his entire adult life, both personally and professionally, fighting with spammers and scammers, the prospect of having to continue the fight as a writer, wearies me greatly.

On the glass-half-full side, I have seen a great deal of improvement in the last 15 years in the war over e-mail spam. There was a time, before client spam filters and ubiquitous e-mail server filters, when I considered giving up e-mail altogether as the ratio of spam to ham in my inbox was 75/25. Now, the amount of spam I get barely annoys me.

The current hated weapon is the content farm. Do a search on Google for nearly anything and many of the hits you’ll get back will be to About.com or Suite101 or similar pages that have simply copy-and-pasted a page of generic info about your desired topic, and then filled it with product links and ads. Sadly, the war against these isn’t going too well.

And that’s the threat Macdonald sees in e-publishing — do a book search on Amazon.com for a particular topic, and find several cheap e-books… that have the same generic, boilerplate content as seen in similar pointless works across the ‘net. The legitimate author becomes a squeak in a sea of static.

Things change, and e-mail spam is a surprising example of things changing for the better. I have hope. Sadly, I don’t think it’ll improve until it gets much worse — and I have the impeccable timing to jump right into the fray.

Now, don’t get me wrong: when I say “perfect,” I don’t mean Sucker Punch is a perfect film in general. On the contrary. It’s a bad film! The script is spare, uninspired, and tedious, and the acting (with the slight exception of supporting actors Oscar Isaac as “Blue” and Carla Gugino as “Dr. Vera,” and the pathos-saturated sad face from lead Emily Browning as “Baby Doll”) is equally tedious and as thin as tissue. Fortunately, this isn’t exactly a review of the film but a critique.

Now, don’t get me wrong. . . again. While I declare the film as bad, I also loved it. I had fun time watching it and would willingly see it again in the theater a couple more times. The action sequences are as amazing audio-visually as they are the epitome of sound and fury signifying nothing. And pardon me if I prevaricate about the shrubbery and mention the 800-pound gorilla only so much as to say I can’t really discuss the 800-pound gorilla. (By which I mean the 800-pound gorilla that’s the object of 15-year-old boys’ dreams dressed up in fetish costumes not lacking in stockings and garters. How’s that for a disturbing image).

I don’t want to discuss the over-saturation of objectified female sexuality in the film (which is difficult as that’s basically what a solid half of this film consists of), because while I count myself as a feminist and constantly aware of the use and effect of the male gaze, I do happen to be a privileged male and the owner of a male gaze. On top of that, while I don’t accept all (or most) of what evolutionary psychology claims, I also don’t dismiss the concept and some of its hypotheses out of hand. So, if I try critiquing the blitzkrieg use of sexuality in the film, I’ll likely get accused of being too sympathetic to its use or unqualified to critique (even to criticize) it since I am a target consumer of the cinematic male gaze. (A criticism I often hear about many subjects and ideologies. Which I, obviously, don’t believe. I think it is indeed possible to critique a thing even while existing within its sphere of effect. If that were true that it weren’t possible, then, for example, since all of western culture operates within the contradictions of postmodern capitalism, any kind of Marxist criticism would have to be impossible. Sorry, Fredric Jameson — you need to find a new career!) So, end of topic right there. (Except to mention this amusing and sadly accurate comic I read just today, by feminist blogger Jen McCreight.)

What I do want to discuss is how Sucker Punch exists as the distilled and purified essence of postmodern production. And to do so, I’m afraid I’m going to need to be spoilery. So, if you’ve not seen the film and want to remain surprised (it would be much too easy to insert a joke there), read this after viewing.

The film exists in three realms or reality: layer one is the “real world” which lands somewhere in the 1950s, best I can tell from the brief view of automobiles, layer two is the fantasy-world brothel inside Baby Doll’s head as she tries to cope with being institutionalized by her abusive stepfather and an impending lobotomy back in the real world, and layer three is the action vignettes that represent the fantasy world of fantasy world’s Baby Doll. Now, I have to give writer/director Zack Snyder a bit of credit here for not trying to trick the audience into thinking layer two or three is the Real World or that layer one is actually layer two and there’s a unrevealed layer one to be pulled out as a shock ending. However, this doesn’t get him off the hook for making layer one just as fantastically impossible as the other layers — and that complete disregard for any semblance of reality within the real is one of the primary reasons for the film being perfect postmodernism.

The movie opens with a slow-motion montage of scenes showing Baby Doll’s mother’s death, funeral, establishing threat of violence from stepfather, accidental death of Baby Doll’s younger sister as she tries to protect the younger sibling from their evil stepfather, and then her being institutionalized. The only sound on top of this establishing background setup, is a cover of The Eurythmic’s “Sweet Dreams” with the lyrics “Some of them want to abuse you” placed like a delicate sledgehammer on top of the scene of stepfather entering the bedroom, like an auditory Lord Privy Seal. And it’s from this opening segment that the dislocation, the crisis of historicity and sincere schizoidness, that mark late postmodern artistic production is established. We, the viewer, are given clues to the setting being some olden day of curvy cars and men wearing hats, but the sound places us in modernity. (Not to mention the fact that the song is a remake which adds yet another layer of separation from any idea of the original, or the authentic.) The film situates us in a simulacrum of an historical moment with no interest in actually representing authentic history. The quasi-1950s setting of the movie essentially becomes nothing more than style — not setting, not placement.

The dizzying, disorienting confusion of time and place only increases from there. In the layer two world, in which we spend most of our time (actually, that may be debatable; the wall-to-wall action scenes of world layer three seem like interruptions, but actually may account for half the film or more), Baby Doll, as the “new girl” trapped in the brothel, is compelled to dance as part of her job to entertain the sleaze the establishment caters to. We never see layer two Baby Doll dance, as that is when she enters her head and we’re transported to various war/fantasy/sci-fi battle sequences, but we do get to hear the music that gets played on the 50-year-old reel-to-real or radio. And that music includes such classics as a souped-up remix of Björk’s “Army of Me,” a remake of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” a hip-hopped mashup-remix of Queen’s “I Want it All” and “We Will Rock You,” and a cover of the Beatle’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” (which, ironically, sounds in its original 1960s form like a 2000s Chemical Brothers’ techo-rave track. Weird, that).

Now, as I admitted already, I’m a wall-of-sound mindless-action-flick fan (to an extent; Jurassic Park 2 was the worst film I’ve ever seen and I have no interest in the current Transformers CGI porn), so a significant part of me really loved the music, it’s grab-your-eardrums-and-feed-them-to-you-with-gunpowder sonic brutality. But the cognitive dissonance of hearing the thumping indie-industrial music of “Army of Me” played by a Slavic-ish choreographer on a reel-to-reel in a mid-20th century dance studio in a brothel-prison, was enough to actually short-circuit my thinking for a moment and leave me literally disoriented. That kind of guerrilla attack on the senses, leaving one’s thinking disconnected and susceptible to better apprehending Lacan’s Real, was an intentional tool of “theatre of cruelty.” (The 60s attempt to use the technique of Artaud and surrealism ended up being just a late modernism parody of surrealism, by the way.) Sucker Punch’s use of sensual-shock-treatment is, I believe, entirely unintentional and without any greater purpose than an exercise in style. Thus, exhibiting, no, embodying, one of the arch-typical qualities of postmodern art — that of pastiche.

What Zack Snyder intended by the title, Sucker Punch, can only be guessed at. The film implies that Baby Doll’s dancing, unseen by the film’s audience, leaves all who view it stunned and bewildered — sucker punched by a performance only they are exposed to. Though, that might be too subtle for Snyder. Maybe he’s referring to the beatdown the various baddies in the layer three fantasy worlds get (giant samurai, steampunk Nazis, orcs ripped right from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, terrorist robots…). Perhaps he’s being meta-aware enough to be commenting, tongue in cheek, on what the movie delivers to the audience: The mismatched and cobbled elements that make this Frankenstein’s monster of a film hits the viewer from beginning to end with a relentless barrage of simulacrum, washing over the viewer and pulling them into a riptide of hyperreality. At best, maybe he is self-aware enough to consider that he’s hitting the audience with an audio-visual shock to the senses — after all, the poster tagline is “You will be unprepared.” But this only supports the contention that Snyder’s only goal with this film is to have no goal, only to affect. Only to create sensation disconnected from anything concrete, anything with a veneer of tangibility. Snyder wants to blind-side pummel the audience and then disappear without a trace before the viewer knows what hit them. When your only interest is in stylized effect, there’s no reason not to use re-makes of music without connection to the setting, which is itself a carnival mirror reflection of an attempted setting, punctuated by completely unreal collages of literally pointless action (albeit exciting and expertly crafted) appropriating and blending elements from across multiple genre.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I sat for the ending credits, how much of any of this analysis could apply or appeal to the younger members of the audience. I wonder if filmgoers who don’t know what a reel-to-reel is, couldn’t tell a 1950s car from a 1920s from a 1980s, feel an iota of the disorientation I felt watching it. Do younger viewers, who have entirely grown up in a culture inherently of pastiche and ahistoricity, feel the least bit of anxiety when exposed to cultural production which seeks to simulate, blithely unironically, a reality that doesn’t exist? Does the obvious fantastical elements counteract the fact that the movie, apart from the fantasy, exists in crisis? Or does all of it exist to the viewer on the same plane of blatant unreality? I compare this film to last year’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That movie was skillful on many levels and entirely fun while managing to have a solid storyline and characters one can feel something for. But from the beginning of that film, which is solidly set in contemporary Toronto-area, the viewer is asked to accept that the world of the film exists in a different reality from our own as videogame elements co-exist with the presumed real. What makes Scott Pilgrim simply a postmodern production while Sucker Punch is postmodernism itself? I think it comes down to how while both films attempt to anchor time and place to our own reality, we can recognize reality in Scott Pilgrim even though it’s superseded by the impossible. Sucker Punch presents us, from the opening seconds, with a lie. It promises to be rooted, at least on one layer, in reality, and it (the gestalt of the filmakers) may even believe it’s sincere in doing so — but the fact that the reality it believes it’s anchored to is as fantastical as the 40-foot, machine gun-totin’ samurai it presents, we’re fed the very antithesis of what science fiction provides: discognitive estrangement. And this mirrors the very condition we live in, in late postmodern cultural logic.

Freedom(tm) is the sequel to Daniel Suarez’s brilliant Daemon. It’s going to be impossible for me to review Freedom(tm) without spoilering Daemon to some degree. Daemon told the story of a genius online game designer who over years set up a hidden system within the Internet to awaken upon news of his death. That’s where Daemon begins, upon the activation of this servant process, or, computer daemon. In Freedom(tm), the daemon has won the first stage of its plan, it has started a revolution.

The novel takes place in today’s world, and in today’s reality. Everything that happens, every technology that’s used, is either currently in use and available as consumer electronics, or is military. Some examples include sonic placement which allows for a voice to sound as though it is coming from a specific point in space, even one’s own head (this is currently being used by advertisers), suits that bend light around it so as to render the wearer near-invisible (military development), aerial drones that can be tagged with a target’s cell phone GPS and send deadly darts to rain upon them from 10,000 feet (guess who uses that), power systems that can pull fuel-use hydrogen from the rock while creating water as a byproduct (in use currently where the oil industry doesn’t kill it), vehicles that can be equipped with sensor arrays which allow it to drive by itself following road lines and signs, FMRI machines that can virtually read minds if the subject can be asked a series of questions like a polygraph, etc.

Although, the one negative about the book, as that a lot of this technology gets used by the revolutionaries in quantities that strain believability. Even in the system of commerce and trade that is set up for the revolution to use, it’s difficult for me to believe that they can be equipped in such a short amount of time with mass quantities of wireless “augmented reality” glasses, power station-building equipment, invisibility suits, etc. But, fortunately, it’s written in such a way to to be forgiven.

Read more…

Well, I’m on a roll now, I just finished Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon this week, making it two books in a month! *sigh* Yeah, I’m not impressed either. Back in the good ol’ days of jr. and high school and undergrad, it was nothing for me to read three novels every two weeks. I guess I shouldn’t feel completely lame; the last few years of grad school I was reading non-fiction maybe four a month, or two and three plus handfuls of articles. No, I still feel lame.

Anyway, enough pity, the first month of my New Year’s Resolution to read more fiction, on a daily basis, is going well! After all, Altered Carbon is a rather longish novel. And a good one to boot! Though… somewhat flawed. Well, let’s get to it!

(As usual, I’ll try to keep it non-spoilery to begin with, and then if I have to talk about spoilery things, I’ll keep that for the end and with decent warning.)

I don’t like to recap novels, you can go read what it’s about somewhere else. But the short of it is it’s a noir mystery novel set a few hundred years in the future, and told by the protagonist “detective,” Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a reconditioned ex-special forces-esque soldier with a shadowy past, skeletons in closets, grudges tightly held, and a pencahant for losing his temper and killing people. But that’s OK, sorta, because in the future, death is rarely permanent. Most everyone has a “stack,” a computer chip in the brain that holds their identity, memory, personailty, and should you die (and not be a Catholic), you can be re-sleeved in a new body. (So long as your stack remains undamaged. However, Kovacs ocassionally finds the need to damage stacks.) He’s been given an offer he can’t refuse, literally, to solve the suicide of a wealthy “Meth,” or a Methuselah – a person who’s been around for a couple hundred years or so. Hired, of course, by the victim who doesn’t believe his own death was a suicide.

And so begins Kovacs’ tale of pavement-beating detective work while being gunned for by crazy assassins, tortured by people he gets in the way of, and involved in love affairs (or just pheromone-enhanced sexcapades) with girlfriends of the man whose body he’s wearing and wives (singular, actually) of clients (also, singular). Yeah, it gets pretty crazy, plot-wise. But one of the great things about Altered Carbon is how it keeps the twists and turns well-organized, easy to follow (with some furrowed eyebrows), and more or less within the realm of internal consistency. Very impressive for a first novel, by the way!

Read more…

One of my English Masters program classmates posted on Facebook that he recently bought an electric typewriter, and posted pictures. My initial knee-jerk reaction was, “Heh, cool.”

Then my first reasoned mental response was, “Wait, what the heck is a typewriter for? Why in the world have a typewriter? Would he actually use it? Do they still make ribbon??”

But in the back of my mind that “Heh, cool” was still echo around. There’s just something romantic, to a writer, about a typewriter — the tactile sensation of physical objects (keys, be they on swinging arms, daisy-wheels, or IBM character balls), changing the physical world (ink on paper with the barest impression of the letter pressed into the surface of the paper). Much in the same way guns are romantic and carry a mystique, being able to physically affect the world from a distance with an object commanded by your hand. (OK, does the gun metaphor make sense to only me?) Anyway, to someone who all but worships at the alter of the written word, having a machine that manipulates reality to force words into the material world is powerful, heady, and visceral.

Needless to say, I really like this typewriter idea.

It’s not the same with a computer. Sure, you press buttons and words appear on a screen, and that’s powerful in its own way. And knowing that those words, heck, these words, can instantly be seen by someone mrs away or even by millions of people (heh, ok, not these words by millions, but you get my point), is awesome and sublimely powerful! But in a very abstract way. A higher-order way that requires a certain amount of sophisticated thought to really appreciate the power of kinetic force translated into 1s and 0s and retranslated into understandable language by a remote viewer. The typewriter affects a more immediate, primal connection in the mid-brain, in the right-brain, and in the “gut.”

OK, enough babbling — typewriters to a writer is just freakin’ cool!

Naturally, I’ve started looking for one. eBay, of course, has many for very cheap prices! Craig’s List has a few listed, for a little more ($50 to $100), but has the benefit of locality so I can see and try before I buy. I’ve looked, and people still make ribbon for a great many machines, and cheaply priced, too!

The problem is, of course, besides the unnecessary cost when I could spend that money on a week’s groceries, is space — we have no space in the house for unnecessary luxuries like that. And it is an unnecessary luxury, sadly. After all, after I typed a story on it, I’d still scan it in to an OCR program so I could edit it on the PC; no way I’m retyping something line that. I hate retyping stuff! With a passion. But, that experience of putting thought and imagination, fresh from the brain and never before exposed to the light of day, tattooed into the surface of the page, is a cathartic, almost shamanistic experience! Well worth the time to scan the result, page by page, into a doc file.

I didn’t always have this feeling about typewriters, back when I had no choice but to use them, in high school. Ugh! Writing on them was miserable! I always wrote everything, both fiction and school papers, longhand (something my pasty and soft hands actually can’t do for more than a minute any more). I’d erase and edit and erase and edit, and then have my proficient mother type the school papers for me. The fiction tended to stay in many lost notebooks.

I had a HS typing class, which I was miserable at. Miserable both in skill and mood. Much to my current chagrin! Twenty years later of obsessive computer use both for business and pleasure, I can type more than 60 w.p.m., and with little error, but in such a way that would make a touch-typist roll with laughter.

Perhaps the years of being disconnected from the physicality of creating words has turned my hate for the machine into a nostalgic adoration. Truly, Baudrillard-ian nostalgia for a thing that never existed. But, I feel it none the less. And I do hope I can find the space and money to get my own typewriter so I can feel that connection and embody that stereotype of the classic 20th century portrait of the earnest writer. But I think I owe my wife a scrapbooking table first….

I recently read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Finally. Pynchon is a paragon of postmodern fiction, often named in the same breath as Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, and Don DeLillo. In fact, reading ‘Lot 49, I was heavily reminded of Breakfast of Champions (which I read back during High School, so the memory may be tenuous).

This brief review — more like simply a response — will be minorly spoilery, but I’ll have more spoiler content toward the end, preceded by a warning.

In short, it’s about educated, bored, and possibly a little delusional to begin with, housewife, Oedipa Maas, who gets pulled into a conspiracy involving secret organizations and rival postal services. As I read it, I also was heavily reminded of Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. In fact, I’m convinced ‘Lot 49, as much as The Principia Discordia, was primary inspiration and influence. In both books you have a protagonist who accidentally stumbles upon conspiracies and shadow organizations that begun centuries ago. The clues about the conspiracies are revealed in lost versions of literature (a play, in ‘Lot 49), and can be found as signs and signifiers all over the place in the most incongruous locations and ways.

And like Illuminatus!, the evidence for the conspiracy itself being a conspiracy to fake a conspiracy, is also evident. So by the end of the novel, you’re just as confused about what is real and what may be a giant ruse, as the protagonist is.

Ironically, while I love postmodern and surreal conspiracy novels, what makes them so compelling is also what frustrates me to no end. The conclusion, such as it is, of ‘Lot 49, left me incredibly unfulfilled. The buildup of events and clues and danger Pynchon crafts hits a brick wall and leaves the reader standing on the side of the road, while the story continues you in such a way as it’s certain much will be revealed and explained if only the book held four more pages.

This is what separates the good, early postmodern surreal conspiracy novels like ‘Lot 49, from the banal, late postmodern realism conspiracy novels like Dan Brown’s The daVinci Code. Pynchon is writing fully aware of how he’s toying with, manipulating, side-swiping the reader. He does it without maliciousness, perhaps, but he’s forcing the reader to look away from the details and instead focus on the Big Picture — not just in the story, but in the socio-cultural conditions in which a story like this can even take place (and its audience can live in). Pynchon, like Ballard and Vonnegut and DeLillo, and Philip K. Dick (who was a pre-postmodern master at crafting the uncomfortable conspiracy tale), is using his story to get the reader to start paying attention not to the ephemera of material existence where details have no significance outside themselves, but to look at the way they themselves, like the protagonist in the story, are manipulated and deceived by the “conspiracy” of capitalism and the culture of commodities. How nothing today has inherent significance because we no longer have any awareness of an object’s history, its creation, its conditions of creation, its provenance.

This last is pointed up in ‘Lot 49 by the theme of the stamps. Actual postage stamps in which, with the help of an expert philatelist, Oedipa learns about the lost importance of provenance (a theme heavily interlaced in P.K. Dick’s amazing The Man in the High Castle. Pynchon is commenting on the banality of modern culture.

While on the other hand, books like Dan Brown’s have fully embraced the banality and are inseparable, both in form an content, from postmodern commodification. The tropes and elements of conspiracy and shadow organizations are not used, like Pynchon, to illustrate cultural conditions with tongue firmly in cheek, but rather embraces the elements with an attempt to represent them as part of the “real” in earnest sincerity. The daVinci Code truly takes pastiche and becomes unaware parody; The Crying of Lot 49 is self-aware from beginning to end.

Spoilery from here on:
Is the conspiracy real or not? Did Oedipa’s deceased former uber-rich boyfriend set the whole thing up as an elaborate practical joke? The answer is it doesn’t matter, Pynchon himself probably doesn’t know, and that’s what make the themes of the book more effective, but at the same time, the abrupt end more unfulfilling to the mind that’s used to and expecting resolution and denouement. The rich boyfriend manipulating people, exploiting labor, setting up the conditions of what people accept as “reality,” literally crafting the dominant culture from buildings to artwork all around the protagonist — if this isn’t a comment on modern capitalism and its cultural logic, I (nor Fredric Jameson) don’t know what is! Whether the conspiracies are real or a joke, either way, the absolute constant underlying everything that happens in the story is the effect that those who own the capital control what people do and believe, sometimes overtly, usually with the subtlety of a shadow organization.

When Metzger, the lawyer hired to co-execute the millionaire’s will, tells Oedipa at the beginning of the novel (after they’d had sex), that her dead former boyfriend told him she “wouldn’t be easy,” naturally we assume he’s talking about getting her in bed. But by the end of the story, when we’re left to wonder what’s real and what’s scam and what’s the result of pure paranoia and delusion, that line at the beginning of the novel carries more meaning. Was it a comment on her ability to be fooled or not?

Questions like this, the reader’s search for clues and meaning in the same way the characters are, should reveal to us that there’s only three choices — we’re surrounded by conspiracy so deep it’s endemic in the culture around us, we’re surrounded by conspiracy that turns the mundane into unintended signifiers, or we’re paranoid and delusional.

(Lacanian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek would surely say the “truth” is all three.)

Hooray for books! Hooray for holiday gift cards!

Thanks to family members’ generosity with Barnes & Noble gift cards, I recently acquired a stack of books I’ve been pining for for months, and in some cases, years. Every once in a while I’d visit them on my Amazon Wish List and coo, “one day, my pretties, one day.” Now, I gots ‘em! And, thanks to my continued adherence to my New Year’s Resolution (which, in part, includes mandatory reading of a new short story or novel chapter daily), it looks good that I’ll be able to actually read them.

Without further ado, I present, the new residents in my library which I shall soon get to know better:

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I’ve heard of this book for some time, and has the endorsement of my brother. (But then, he also like The Wheel of Time series, so, pfft! *wink*) Published in 2002, it catches the post-cyberpunk wave and is considered a groundbreaker in the current wave of post-/transhuman fiction. All qualities which appeal both to my entertainment and my scholarly research interests.

Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez
The sequel to Suarez’s outstanding page-turner, Daemon. That’s the story of a computer genius and online game mogul who programmed a massive network of computer systems and programs to start the process of taking over the world the moment his obituary is detected. The scary-cool thing is that nearly 100% of all the tech and processes that are used in the book, are real and available to the consumer.

The Wee Free Men: The Beginning by Terry Pratchett
Big fan of Sir Terry Pratchett (what SF/fantasy fan isn’t!?) But I’ve only read a few of his books. He has so many, and so many refer to each other and are part of mini-series within series, that I generally have no idea where to really dive in. Well, is latest book, I Shall Wear Midnight came out not long ago, and it’s gotten huge raves on many of the SF podcasts I listen to and blogs I read. It’s the fourth and I believe final book of the “Tiffany Aching series” of his. It’s a part of his Discworld . . . world, but it’s a stand-alone series, described as a funnier (and occasionally, better) Harry Potter with a female protagonist. Intended as a “young adult” series (just like Harry Potter), but adults are loving them.

Anyway, The Wee Free Men: The Beginning is the first two books in the series. Interestingly, the Amazon reviews for those first two books, Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, both rank 4.5 out of 5 stars, but this compilation only has 2.5 stars. When you read the reviews, you find it’s entirely because people bought the book thinking it was a new book in the series. Idiots. Sorry, but c’mon. It’s your dumbarse mistake you bought the book thinking it was something it wasn’t not even bothering to, I dunno, read the description of it where it says “Contains the complete text of Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky,” and you give the book a bad review for that? As if it’s the book’s fault? Idiots.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
This one has universal praise from those SF podcasts and blogs as a great epic fantasy. I also heard about this one about a year ago and stuck it on my Wishlist, this at the end of the year the bloggers and podcasters started up singing its praises again.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
And finally, this near-future dystopian, and extremely realistic, vision of a world where peak oil has been passed and calories are used like money. Also heard of this one nearly two years ago, recommended by Cory Doctorow. Since then it’s won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and now finally I can read it!

So I was reading back in my oh so many blog posts this year</sarcasm>, and recalled this one: io9 suggested reading list. My best laid plans of reading this year. And I realized, this year was a really, really bad year. Aside from finally jumping through the right hoops to get my English Masters Degree, this year was full of fail.

I have new best laid plans, now, though. For a full accounting, check out my general blog’s entry, CelticBear: Be it resolved…. In it I discuss the drek that was 2010, and what I plan to do about it in regards to writing and readjusting my life in the right direction.

Then, if all goes well, I should have some more blog posts over here more often.

Happy New Year.

(See the bottom for a very important update.)

So, Moon City Review 2010 has been out for a few weeks now; I received my contributor’s copy yesterday. Yeah, I’m pretty excited and pleased. It’s the literary anthology put out by Moon City Press in conjunction with Missouri State University, and printed by the University of Arkansas Press. (I had a story published in last year’s, 2009 edition.) It’s available from UARK (linked above), the MSU bookstore, Border’s (at least in Springfield, MO for now), and Amazon and B&N (once they get either enough orders or their supply of copies).

I can’t help but enjoy the fact that my article in 2010 is the first item in the book, after the editor’s introduction. But, to be honest, that’s nothing to do with quality but rather because my essay introduces the theme of the anthology — a tribute to professor Dr. William J. Burling and his science fiction scholarship. Once I’ve read the whole anthology I’ll post a review; but so far, I’m pretty impressed! Aside from a couple of really lame poems I’ve read, the articles and stories I’ve sampled so far are entertaining and well-written. But until I get to the point that I can comment on the general content, I want to spend some time blathering about something stuck in my craw.

My essay, naturally, went through an editing process with an advisor of mine and the anthology’s editor. Fortunately, not much needed to be changed from my original drafts; some cleaning, tightening, but pretty much all of my content itself remained. My advisor suggested a couple of great improvements that I agree really helped out. But what bothers me is that my essay was changed between the final draft I approved and print! No matter how much I agree with and accept the editing process, that’s not kosher. Even if the change (which I’ll address in a moment) is warranted, changing it without informing the author, saying nothing and letting them discover it in the final product, just seems unethical. Even if one is going to make the change regardless, it just seems like a courtesy to e-mail the author and say, “Hey, just a note: We changed a couple of lines in your essay before sending it to print. Have a nice day.”

Anyway, as I re-read my original, and decided I understood why it was changed and agreed with it (at first), my only beef was that not being told issue. But then, as I read the rest of the article to see if anything else was changed, (nothing that I could tell), I discovered a reason why I now dislike the change itself and really wish I had an opportunity to defend the original.

Here’s the original introduction:

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io9.com recently (well, OK, a month several months ago — I’m a little lot late) published their “20 Best Science Fiction Books Of The Decade” list. This really is a compelling list of SF over the last ten years, much of it dealing with issues of late postmodern culture and our sense of rootlessness and lack of historical perspective (The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson; Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson; Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger are primary examples, although nearly all of them have living in postmodern times as an underlying theme). Some of it dealing with posthumanism and the way technology is not just “helping” humanity, but changing it at very fundamental levels–or exploring changing perceptions of what it means to have gender or racial, or even species identification (Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge; Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville; Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow).

The following is their list and my status, as of this moment, on that book — whether I’ve read it, have it and plan to read it, don’t plan on reading it, etc. I’d like to read most on this list by the end of the year (eep! half over already!). Updates may come… now and then.

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