Random book meme

Yvonne tagged me for a random book meme. I don't often follow up on memes, but since this was a book based one I couldn't resist, so here's how it works:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I'm guessing that to do it properly you have to indeed pick up the nearest book and not go rummaging for something you think will give you a cool quote; I picked up Bryan Talbot's excellent graphic novel Alice in Sunderland and page 123 just happens to be a page executed in a 19th century style of illustration quoting from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

"Beware the jubjub bird and shun the frumious Bandersnatch! He took his vorpal sword in hand: longtime the manxmome foe he sought. So rested he by the Tumtum tree and stood awhile in thought."

And I hereby tag Ariel, Jeff VanderMeer, Padraig, Richard Bruton and George Wakley: let me know in the comments if you decide to follow up on it, geezers. And if any of the rest of you fancy trying it, go ahead!

Arthur C Clarke laid to rest

While I was off the air last week we lost Sir Arthur C Clarke, one of the few authors to cross out of his genre to become a cultural icon recognised by millions, including those who never picked up a science fiction book in their life. Sadly he passed away at the age of 90 just weeks before the annual Arthur C Clarke awards are due to be announced. I've been reading Arthur's books and short tales since before my voice broke; basically I have been picking up books of his for over thirty of my forty years on Planet Earth and apart from some wonderfully imaginative fiction (which still usually remained grounded in some real science) I think the quality I most loved in his work over the decades was the optimism. Here was a man born as the slaughter of the War to End All Wars was being fought and who played his part working in radar in the war that came after that, who saw the many atrocities that marked the last century and yet still his stories had this optimism, this belief not that the future would turn out alright but that we could make it better if we tried, if we really wanted to make it that way, to evolve our minds and our morality both. While darker edged fiction often satisfies me more dramatically I need that does of hope and optimism sometimes.

And like many best writers his books made me want to go and read more books; I'd read the story then need to investigate some of the actual science which was used in the tale (my favourite reading is always the book which makes me want to read more, learn more; good books are like brain cells, they work best when creating more links). Reading his collection of non fiction essays a few years back, Greetings, Carbon-based Lifeforms, was also fascinating - because of the reputation he earned worldwide Arthur met just about everyone, from hanging out with Ginsberg at the Hotel Chelsea to presidents and kings, working with Kubrick of course and even during the animosity of the Cold War he was so respected by both superpowers he was one of the few men who shook hands with both Soviet cosmonauts and NASA astronauts. Its not been the best of recent weeks for book people - we just lost Arthur, Terry Pratchett is facing the spectre of Alzheimer's, Steve Gerber left us... At least we always have the books. Sadly we're all mortal, but the printed word, that magical, alchemical fusion of human imagination, paper, ink and technology is immortal.

Arthur's final interview, recorded for IEEE Spectrum in January from his hospital bed, can be found online here. I leave you with Clarke's Laws:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

You know, of the three I think I am most fond of the second; I like to think the impossible rarely remains impossible forever. Perhaps some of his optimism has rubbed off on my cynical mind over the years... The people of Sri Lanka, where this Somerset-born lad had made his home for decades, showed their respect for their adopted son with a national moment's silence to coincide with the funeral service. His gravestone will read "Here lies Arthur C Clarke. He never grew up and did not stop growing," in line with his own wishes. I've met a lot of brilliant science fiction writers over my career in books (including two of this year's Arthur C Clarke Awards nominees), but I never met Arthur. And yet I feel as if I have known him most of my life and I'm going to miss him, especially that wonderful human quality of hope he always seemed to summon forth.

Continental Comics

While I was in Paris I took the opportunity of browsing in some bookstores and bouquinistes (the rare and second hand booksellers with the lockups by the Seine) for some bandes dessinée (French comics, basically). Unlike the English language book world comics and graphic novels are taken more seriously as culture and art; we cover a tiny bit of the European scene on the FPI blog but what gets translated into English and republished for the UK and US markets is pretty limited compared to what actually gets published in Europe so I decided I would have a look at some BD while I was there, my basic and rusty French not withstanding and ended up writing an article out of it for the FPI blog last weekend, which I'm repeating below:

Apologies to Wim for appropriating his usual title for this post (normal continental correspondent service from Belgium will be resumed shortly), but I’m just back from a terrific break in Paris where, as well as the usual tourist pastimes of marvelling at the motoring madness that is the Circus Maximus around the Arc de Triomphe (the greatest free show in the City of Light) or wondering if it was permissible to push very loud and irritating backpackers off the Eiffel Tower, I managed to have a couple of little browses through some bandes dessinée. Sadly the first dedicated comics shop - Super Hero Libraire - was closed when we passed it (unlike the UK French shops don’t always stick to the regular 9 to 6 sort of hours every day, but many are open into the evening, so its worth checking hours if there is a specific store you want to catch) and it was too far from our hotel to make a return visit feasible.

(French one volume edition of V For Vendetta and a big dollop of Wolverine - did you know Logan spoke French?)

But this is France and unlike Britain you can find BD pretty much wherever books are sold - even the famous bouquinistes with their distinctive green lock-ups along the banks of the Seine often feature both BD albums and old comics issues, although since some of these may be rare rather than simply second hand you have to watch the prices. I came across a multi-volume series collecting V for Vendetta en Français and was quite tempted to pick them up, but at just shy of 20 Euros per volume it was just too pricey.

(one of the windows of the Super Hero Librairie; in the bottom left shelf you can see Chroniques Birmanes which Wim reviewed here last week)

Still, the bouquinistes are something any book lover will want to enjoy, whether you are looking for BD, paperback novels or any other literature; actually on a spring day simply browsing among them as the barges move along the Seine, the simple pleasure of rummaging through used books combined with being outdoors and sightseeing. One stand in particular had an interesting mix of French BD and English language titles, so you’d see second-hand Bilal albums next to a rack of old Daredevil issues. As with second hand and antiquarian bookstore here though, the bouquinistes choose their opening hours according to arcane signs among the stars and from a formula calculated using an ancient equation worked out by Diderot, so it is pure luck which ones will be open or closed when you go past at any time of day or evening, but hey, if you’re there its as good as an excuse as any for a walk long the banks of the Seine without feeling like a total tourist.

(some of the bouquinistes by the Seine, near Notre Dame)

In the bouquiniste stands, the comics stores and the mainstream bookshops it is also common to come across English language titles translated into French - the aforementioned V Pour Vendetta, of course, but quite a diverse selection, even in mainstream bookstores (some of which had graphic novel sections almost half as big as you’d find in specialist comics stores here, and that’s just adult BD, not counting the younger reader’s material). Even in the land where comics are considered the Ninth Art you’re still going to find the ‘underwear perverts’ as Boing Boing refers to superheroes, translated and nestling among the slimmer, hardback BD albums - as with any comics store its hard not to spot some X-Men titles.

Kirkman and Adlard’s excellent, Romero-influenced zombie series The Walking Dead seemed popular too and I spotted several large paperback translated collections cropping up in a number of places. There’s something fascinating about leafing through the pages of something you’ve read but now in another language (and this seems universal - plenty of the many tourists who come to Edinburgh like to pick up Tolkien in bookstores here, for example, to read in English having read it in French, German etc). In one of the many bookstores between the Saint Michel and Latin Quarter areas I also came across a very handsome, thick collection of Eddie Campbell’s early work. You’ll appreciate the irony that if I want to track down most of that work by an acclaimed British artist at home I’d have to go second hand because it’s currently out of print, yet in France I can find a very fine-looking collection in an ordinary bookstore. Then again the French probably appreciate it more; “Monsieur Campbell, sacre bleu, ‘e is a true artiste de BD.” (and of course, they are right). And I noticed quite a few artists familiar to me via their translated works which have come out from Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, NBM, First Second and Fantagraphics over the years, from Trondheim to Zograf.

(just some of the BD on offer in Gibert Jeune in the Saint Michel area of Paris)

Of course while you’re there you want to have a look at some European titles. Now my French is pretty basic and those school lessons seem a long time ago, but one of the advantages the comics form offers is (usually) less actual text to comprehend (or not!) and the visual aide of sequential pictures, so even when your command of French is less than stellar there’s a lot of extra context to give you a hand. It doesn’t make the medium completely accessible and bypass the linguistic barriers (unless it is a ‘silent’ strip), but if you have even a small grasp of the language a comic is going to be a much easier way to try and interact a bit more with another tongue.

That shouldn’t be surprising to us; after all we first encourage the comprehension of written language and structure in children using picture books. And living as I do in Edinburgh, as awash with visitors as Paris, I’ve seen a number of adult tourists deliberately picking up Asterix and Tintin in English to take home because it is a great way to try and get more into another language, so I thought I’d take a similar tact and ended up coming home with some Jodorowsky - Les Technopères, with fabulous science fiction art from Zoran Janjetov which made it worth picking up just to admire - and on spotting a recent collection (just published by Air Libre/Dupuis in January) by this year’s Grand Prix winners at Angoulême, Dupuy and Berberain, Un Peau Avant la Fortune, I thought that would be worth a bash too.

(cover to Dupuy and Berberian’s recently published Un Peau Avant la Fortune, published Air Libre/Dupuis and (c) Dupuy and Berberian)

To be honest I could easily have blown more money picking up several more, but since I don’t know how well I will cope with them it seemed prudent to limit myself (and spend the remaining money on wine). But language aside it is hard to resist when you are faced with shelf upon shelf of BD, everything from the funny books to tales of daring Resistance heroines in wartime Paris (one book I randomly picked up had a scene with the Resistance heroine set on one of the Seine bridges I had just passed over to get to that very bookstore, sadly I can’t remember the title now), science fiction, biographical… Even if you aren’t going to buy yourself some, if you find yourself visiting France its still enjoyable for any comics fan to have a good browse through the BD section; its always good to try something different in your reading, as we’ve said here on more than one occasion (and will doubtless say again, because its true and there is so much out there just waiting to be read).

There is another way for those of us with only a limited grasp of the language to buy into the French BD experience a little more though, and it is much cheaper than buying new hardback albums - the journals. Paris is awash with newsstands and as in any city the railway and metro stations and the airports also have plenty of stores where among the newspapers, movie mags and copies of Elle (I was vaguely disappointed the French version of Elle wasn’t called ‘her’) you are likely to find several magazines and journals dedicated to BD and some specialising in manga. Of course the language barrier is still there, but if you are interested but wary because of the language a mag is a lot cheaper to buy and try than books - it’s also a good way of introducing yourself to different comics creators.

I settled on BoDoï - “explorateur de bandes dessinées” - which has a special edition celebrating 35 years of the Grands Prix at Angoulême. For 7.50 Euros (about five pounds, slightly pricey for a mag, but it does have a lot of colour art) I got a special edition which offered up some 40 artists, with two or three pages each of art and a short bio/interview (in French, naturellement). And just check some of the artists covered here - Robert Crumb, Enki Bilal, Morris, José Muñoz, François Schuiten, Trondheim, Hugo Pratt, Moebius, Will Eisner, Jaques Tardi, Jean-Claude Forest, Jaques Lob, Neal Adams, Max Cabanes, Uderzo… That has to be worth a fiver of any comics fan’s money, surely?

(an excerpt from Mister I, (c) Lewis Trondheim)

The art and themes on offer are as varied as the artists - Philippe Vuillemin riffs nicely on the old joke - old jokes seem to be universal, I’m pleased to note - about the young polar bear (I won’t ruin the punchline in case you’ve never heard it), Georges Wolinski offers up a take on psychotherapy which would work in almost any Western culture (especially if you’re a Woody Allen fan), Lewis Trondheim’s Mister I makes a welcome appearance with a wordless tale (so it was only the bio/interview I had to struggle to read!) and we get a quick visit to Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue.

(Rendezvous a Paris by the one and only Enki Bilal)

Personal standouts for me came from Bilal, who I’ve always admired for his beautiful, imaginative science-fiction artwork. In this case it is just a couple of wordless pages, including one spectacular full page splash set above the Eiffel Tower. Jaques Tardi has four pages first created for the magazine L’Aisne set during the carnage of the Great War which are highly effective and moving. Even if you don’t speak word one of French I think you would still grasp the scenes of French infantrymen suffering and the word “boucherie!” repeated, larger and bolder each time until it is screaming “BOUCHERIE!” at the reader while below a smug General Nivelle stands in front of a charnel house of bones of fallen soldiers. Actually looking at a couple of the frames in Tardi’s piece I’m moved to wonder if they influenced the trench scenes in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement.

(two pages from Jaques Tardi’s segment, these are from “la BD du Avril 16? and although very different in style seem to me to be every bit as powerful and moving as the superb art Joe Colquhoun created for Charley’s War; originally published in L’Aisne magazine and (c) Jacque Tardi)

Max Cabanes’ Francis Cabrel, les Beaux Dessins, inspired by a song by Francis Cabrel, showcases some beautiful artwork; again, if you can’t read the language you can just admire the luscious art of two lovers amid the trees. François Schuiten (with Benoît Peeters) has two utterly gorgeous pages, Hommage à Winsor McCay (I think you can translate the meaning of that yourselves!), paying tribute to the immortal Little Nemo (I just keep turning back to those pages and looking at the, superb), while back in the world of black and white there’s a great extract from Superdupont by Jacques Lob with artwork by the great Neal Adams; you just have to love the Superman clone meeting his French counterpart Superdupont in his vest, paunch and beret, a Reagan-esque president and something spooky going on at a vineyard (hence the need for the French hero).

So, if you are lucky enough to be going to France on holiday, keep your eyes open - even if you only have basic French there are still comics delights to be had; as a wise comics character once declared, “there’s treasure everywhere!” There are a number of comics jewels in this special issue and I will try to share some more scans from it over the coming days because they are too good to keep to myself.

Neil's blog is nine

Neil Gaiman's blog celebrated its ninth anniversary yesterday, I notice - that's quite a long time in blogging terms and in terms of author's sites is even more impressive. Many authors and artists and bands these days have their own sites and blogs (some designed and maintained by my good mate Ariel, in fact) but Neil's been doing it longer than most (actually I am trying to think which published author has been blogging publicly the longest now - anyone know?). To celebrate the anniversary he and his web elves are going to make one of his books free to read online for a month - and they are asking fans to pick it out. Neil being Neil he has thought about it and offers up some advice for picking one from the four on offer (the brilliant American Gods, the very funny Anansi Boys, the recent Fragile Things and the far-too-good to be just for kids Coraline):

"What I want you to do is think -- not about which of the books below is your favourite, but if you were giving one away to a friend who had never read anything of mine, what would it be? Where would you want them to start?"



One of the things I like about writers blogging - and Neil's web journal in particular - is the way it allows them to interact with readers and I like the fact this interaction is being celebrated by asking those readers to pick a book of his that might get others to look at his work. Its an interesting move because it will generate a lot of online discussion and linkage for his site and interest in his books, it might introduce new readers to his material in a painlessly free manner and, as Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross and others have proven, putting up free digital version of your work (they have done it under the Creative Commons license), far from harming traditional sales seems to work to boost reader awareness and interest in your work and so help sales.

I'm not sure which of the four on offer I'd choose myself - I think American Gods is a splendid story with some great use of myth, a book which could work for readers who don't normally go for science fiction and fantasy novels in the same way his Sandman series worked for people who normally didn't buy comics (and my signed copy of American Gods is one of the prizes gems of my collection). But it is very long and that might make it hard to read on a screen. Anansi Boys is very funny and a bit shorter while Coraline is deliciously creepy in places and there is the movie version coming up and - oh smeg, I can't decide! But it is still a good idea.

And on a personal note I'm still indebted to Neil as one of the writers who spoke up for me on their blogs back when I was going through the whole Waterstone's firing thing a few years back; he said something like if he had his own bookstore he'd like me working in it, which is one of the nicest compliments a bookseller can get and that I was 'opinionated but in the good way' which seems like a reasonable description. Anyway, happy ninth anniversary to Neil and his web elves.

The last man on Earth

Grabbed some time to go and sit and watch I Am Legend before I go back to work. Now I had already surmised from trailers and articles in Empire that yet again Hollywood had not done the book. Third time a film has been made of Richard Matheson's classic 50s novel of Cold War paranoia and humanity's seemingly endless ability for self-destruction and third time they haven't done the bloody book! Come one, please....

That said the film, although different from the book - relocated to New York, which actually works well during the scene of Will Smith hunting wild game in an overgrown Times Square, main character Robert Neville is now an army doctor working on a cure, the scientifically created vampires are now fast, aggressive zombies (although still photophobic) - it actually works very well in creating a sense of isolation and terror as the last man in the world tries to hold it together in a Manhattan populated only by him, his dog and a legion of the infected.

Instead of an unspecified biological agent from a war (as in the book) the cause here is genetic engineering in an attempt to beat cancer, although even if you knew nothing about the story going in you could guess nothing good would come of a medical breakthrough by a character with a name like Doctor Crippen (a cameo by Emma Thompson). Scenes where Neville heads to the DVD store during daylight to withdraw films and return old ones illustrate how he is trying to use routine to keep himself together, rather than simply grabbing whatever he wants from the store. Populating the shop with store window dummies so it looks occupied and he has someone to 'talk' to adds to that feeling, being both slightly amusing and disturbing at the same time, stirring sympathy for Neville.

(SPOILER WARNING: don't read on if you are going to see it, I won't describe the whole finale, but it might spoil it for you if you are planning to see it)

Which makes it all the more annoying when the final section totally destroys what had been so carefully built up earlier, opting for the big fights with masses of CGI infected, big bangs and adding a redemption arc which clashes with the themes established earlier in the same way the original 'happy ending' forced on Blade Runner on its original release, really annoying the hell out of me, Hollywood managing an interesting, bleak, disturbing film then getting cold feet and going for SF CGI action fest at the end. And the CGI is annoying because the infected are hyped up creatures (why? they are diseased, why do they have amazing superhuman abilities now???), leaping up high buildings and their leader's jaws opening preternaturally wide as he yells - yes, they come right out of the Mummy (except some infected dogs which was copied shamelessly from Resident Evil), which was fine for the Mummy which was daft but fun and knew it, this was serious and bleak and psychological then went all cartoony and bollocksed it up.

And if they had stuck to the bloody book in the first place they might have avoided it. The book is far more effective - each night Neville has to be home and barricaded in his home before sunset. Outside his home many of the infected who have become vampire-like creatures due to the virus are people he knows, friends, neighbours (his next door neighbour bellowing 'Neville!' each night seems worse than simple roaring fiends in the movie, more personal) and in a harrowing flashback we see Neville in the book burying his wife then finding her resurrected by the virus and coming back to try and kill him and feed on him. In the book there are live and dead vampires as the virus mutates living victims but also resurrects the dead, who act differently. None of this comes in the film. In the book Neville hunts them by day as they lie in their comas, staking them and wondering why it is that this method of killing from myths works, all the time becoming more paranoid, more bloody and violent himself, staring into the Neitzchen abyss and having it stare back into him, becoming a monster as he fights monsters.

I won't spoil the ending of the book here, but suffice to say Matheson maintains the bleak atmosphere he established effectively with such commendable economy (the book is very short), a skill he used also as a screenwriter (he would work on many of the Vincent Price-Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe movies), in contrast to the movie which ruins itself at that point. And the title I Am Legend has a very different, darker explanation at the end of Matheson's powerful novel than the film. Film - watchable but be prepared to be suddenly let down at the clunking gear change towards the end (and what a shame, the earlier bits as I said are effective and Smith is allowed to act for once). Book - bloody brilliant, one of my personal top books of the last century, a real insight into the paranoia and fear of the Cold War era which still works perfectly in today's troubled world. You should read it.

Terry Pratchett has bad news

Awful news from Terry Pratchett confirming on Paul Kidby's Discworld News that he is suffering from early on-set Alzheimer's. Terry's not just one of the biggest (and most consistently enjoyable, smart and funny) fantasy authors, he's one of those rare bestsellers who appeals way beyond the genre, making him one of the most popular writers on our wee planet. I've seen lines of fans at Terry's signings stretch round the store, out the doors, down the street and round the block; I've also seen him sit there and sign for each one of those folks and chat to each of them too, occasionally taking a moment to rest his wrist in some iced water then start signing more books. As Cory Doctorow notes in Boing Boing though, Terry is employing his humour, trying to stay positive and encouraging readers to do the same:

" I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke".

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)

PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."

Now that's what I call a rare book

The BBC has details of a book coming up at auction - nothing unusual there, obviously. Except this 1605 book "A True and Perfect Relation of The Whole Proceedings against the Late most barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and his Confederats" is thought to be bound in human skin - specifically the skin of Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest caught up in the Gunpowder Plot (although he was widely held not be an actual part of it, wanting nothing to do with such a violent act). Even more macabre, the wrinkles on the cover allegedly give the impression of a human face, a human face with large eyes, just like Henry was said to possess... Cue Twilight Zone music! Man, I've sold a lot of very specially bound editions over the years in the trade (and have a few myself) but that's taking it a bit too far... I wonder if some anti-aging cosmetic cream companies will consider it for their next beauty books...

"A colossal dick move"

The writer's strike in Hollywood is hitting production in TV and film quite hard, with a number of shows, including Battlestar Galactica and the new Bionic Woman (with the utterly gorgeous Michelle Ryan) now having to shut down because they've filmed episodes and run out of finished scripts, with no more in the pipeline while the strike continues. Family Guy has been hit by it - writer, creator and actor Seth McFarlane is out on sympathy with the writers - three new season episodes are almost finished but not quite and Fox announced they would just finish them without Seth and put them on air. Seth acknowledges they have the legal right to do it but going past him like this is obviously going to damage the relationship between him and the studio and would be, in his own words, "a colossal dick move." I love that and I think that's going to be one of my new phrases for anything spectacularly stupid. On the Family Guy front the special Star Wars episode has to be one of the funniest ones for a while and littered with SF and movie references that makes it Geek Heaven.

Still, it isn't all bad, this strike - the Beeb reports that a prequel to the god-awful Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, has been hit by it and postponed. Thank smeg for that, the world really doesn't need any more of that load of recycled conspiracy cobblers - even having the incredibly delectable Audrey Tautou in it wasn't enough to make it bearable.

And before you say, Joe, stop showing your literary snobbery, lots of folks enjoy the book (and movie), leave it alone, yes, fair point, I know they do, but if a lot of people like something it doesn't necessarily mean it is good, just that a lot of people can share the same bloody awful taste; it is the same factor boy bands and reality shows exploit to be popular. What I find even more depressing in the case of tosh like the Luigi Load is the number of brain-dead morons who mutter "I know it's fiction, but I reckon he's onto something here..." NO HE ISN'T!!! Why does the law prevent me from choking people who say that do death by forcing the smegging book down their throat?

Mailer

New today that one of the best known novelist of the last half century, Norman Mailer, has died. In truth I've never been quite sure what to think of Norman - the Naked and the Dead is a powerful read worthy of space on any reader's shelves, but a lot of his other work I find uncomfortable. He belongs to the mid-20th century class where writers were almost the rock stars of their day - long before spoiled musicians would get drunk, stoned and into fights Mailer and his ilk were there, living it all. He even head-butted Gore Vidal once (I'm sure there are others who have wanted to). Thinking about it, it is surprising he lived so long, you'd half expect him to self destruct like Brendan Behan. Most modern writers aren't quite the same - sure many of them enjoy a decent drink (and I've been lucky enough to share a few drinks with a handful of them) - but the excesses of the Mailer type writers is something more confined to musicians these days.

I suppose in a way his behaviour wouldn't have been out of place at one of Byron's parties a century and a half earlier. As I said, I've never been quite sure what to make of Mailer the man - I'm not sure I'd like to have been around him personally and yet at the same time we need colourful characters in literature as elsewhere, acting out what we can't or won't do, almost like a catharsis, and we like reading about it, whether it was Byron and Shelley's antic, Mailer, Werner Herzog or Pete Doherty. Part of us looks on disgusted at their selfish indlulgence and bad behaviour and another envies that they seem to be able to get away with it.

It reminds me a bit of a story I once read of a hotel manager making up the bill for - I could be wrong, my memory is hazy - I think it was the Who or a similar 60s/70s rock band after they did their usual and trashed their rooms. Their tour manager asks why the hotel manager looks so pissed off - after all they will more than pay for the damage. It isn't that, he answers, do you think when I was at school this is what I dreamt I'd be doing for my life, running a hotel? You guys are living the lifestyle the teenage me wanted to do and will never get, I just get to pick up and tidy after you. Tour manager smiles understandingly, tells the hotel manager, go pick a room and smash the living crap out of it to your heart's content and stick it on our bill, mate. Rock'n'roll. Mad, bad and dangerous to know. It has a certain allure and you're often left wondering if they act that way because they are spoiled or if that reckless self-indulgence and belief normal rules don't apply to them is what made them write great poetry, novels or songs? The medium and artists change with the decades but the song remains the same...

Anatomical

Last weekend was the annual Doors Open Day, when buildings not normally open to the public let people into visit. I'm still sorting a stack of photographs I shot as we tramped all round town, from designer make-overs by local architectural practises in old mews buildings to places like the observatory on Calton Hill and the Royal College of Physicians in the New Town. I'll post a few more when I get time to sort them out, but I thought I'd kick off with these few shots taken in their two libraries; these are rare 17th century medical volumes, which the College Fellow on duty in the library was kind enough to let me photograph as long as I obviously refrained from using the flash (in stark contrast to the folks at Scottish Heritage who didn't allow any photography even of the Georgian rooms, which seems extremely backward to me if you are inviting in visitors, especially if you are a public body - bad marks to SH, big thumbs up to the RCP who really made an effort to make visitors welcome and encouraged photo-taking).


(click the pics to see the larger versions on the Woolamaloo Flickr stream)



Apologies for the reflections here, but as the books were under glass there wasn't really anyway round them - it was either reflections of the lights or stand right over it and get my camera in the reflections, but the quality of the draughtmanship here was far too good not to try taking a pic. These books pre-date the Act of Union between Scotland and England.



Just look at the detail in this anatomical study of the human skeleton and musculature; the cross hatching and shading is amazing. More so when you consider this is around three centuries old and an artist created this by hand and another artist would then have laboriously created a negative inscribed into a copper plate for printing. Books like this, being disseminated all over Europe by groups like the Royal College, are physical artefacts of the birth of the modern era, the move from superstition to reason and science, exploring the natural world and our own physiques to find new wonder even the greatest minds of Classical Antiquity could never have dreamed of. They are also gorgeous works of craftsmanship and art. A modern Gray's Anatomy (a standard text for most doing medical degrees) may be more informative and accurate, but it lacks the elegance and beauty of this work.

Atonement

Caught a couple of extremely good movies this weekend; last night Mel and I went to see Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan's 'unfilmable' novel, which means it arrives with the burden of being an adaptation of a highly respected work of literature. It lived up to the challenge exceedingly well, deftly moving from different character's perspectives and times, from the heavy stillness of a warm, summer day in the country to the chaos of the Dunkirk evacuation, yet rarely confusing the audience despite the multi-perspective, non-linear narrative. The use of colour, perspective, music and sound is fascinating right from the start, from the staccato of a typewriters leading into the rhythm of the music to the sound of a bee trapped by a window leading out to a scene which is seen from several viewpoints around a fountain (water motifs repeat throughout). Intriguing story, very good performances (especially Keira Knightly and James McAvoy, Kiera looking at home in those 40s fashions) and a beautifully crafted film which has obviously had a lot of attention and love paid on it.



Also caught a film I have been waiting for, 3:10 to Yuma (a remake of a movie from the Western's heyday in the 50s) with Christian Bale, Russell Crowe and Peter Fonda. I have to confess that like many wee boys who grew up to be big kids I still have a soft spot for a good Western; it's a once all dominating genre which has faded away into the sunset like many of its stars did at the climax of their movies years ago. In the last couple of decades there haven't been many, although we have had a handful from the highly enjoyable like Tombstone (silly but great, especially Kilmer's Doc Holliday) to the superb like Unforgiven (a brilliant distillation of years of Western films into a dark, brooding masterpiece) and the quirky, odd gems like Dead Man and The Proposition.



Now we have 3:10 to Yuma, with a Jesse James Western starring Brad Pitt on the way in a few months too. I may have to dust off my cowboy boots. The movie itself doesn't try to re-invent the wheel - the Civil War former soldier turned farmer trying to struggle to provide for his family, the corrupt local landowner, the outlaw gang, the contrast between honesty and crime and how they Won the West, all well worn grooves in the genre and Crowe's violent nutter who may - or may not - have a latent streak of decency and Bale playing a troubled hero aren't new either. But damn, it is a good Western. Oh, and it had Alan Tudyk from Joss Whedon's brilliant Firefly/Serenity in it too, never a bad thing.

Happy birthday to the Book Group

I just realised today that this month's meeting of the Edinburgh SF Book Group will mark the fourth birthday. My former colleague Alex and I thought it up back in the summer of 2003 and decided a good start date would be after the busy circus of the Festival left town, so we opted for September. And for our initial discussion it seemed fitting to pick a debut novel, so we opted for one of the best debuts novels of recent SF by one of our favourite writers, Glasgow-based Richard Morgan, the Philip K Dick award-winning Altered Carbon (which also introduced Richard's character Takeshi Kovacs and also made headlines when it was the subject of a large film rights deal via Joel Silver. I remember the Guardian running an article on that and unable to reach Richard who was on holiday at the time they nicely pilfered quotes from our interview on the Alien Online without asking or crediting the site).

The book group has gone on over those four years, surviving the debacle of the Bloggergate nonsense between me and my former employers at the Bookstore Who Shall Not Be Named (where it had driven sales of backlist titles and boosted the company's profile, but no more - that's their loss) and trying to find a new regular venue after that. We've got a good core of different folks who come regularly and we've had more folks join us since then. We take turn about getting to choose books for the month which means we get a good, diverse range of material.

We've taken in graphic novels like the Sandman, classic SF from Alfred Bester and HG Wells, contemporary political SF like Ken MacLeod, horror from James Herbert, fantasy like the Lies of Locke Lamora and also more mainstream material with touches of SF like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or Michel Faber's Under the Skin (which the literati can read, safe in the knowledge that they aren't really part of that 'SF nonsense', they're literature). Ursula le Guin has rubbed shoulders with Margaret Atwood, Charles Burns, Aldous Huxley, James Lovegrove, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeff VanderMeer, Sheri S Tepper, Neal Stephenson and Robert Louis Stevenson among many others. Because each of us gets to take a turn picking a book we get exposed to more diverse material and so more to discuss, more to think about, more to enjoy. One of the few pleasures better than reading a good book is being able to share it with others and talk about it. And if that also means enjoying some trips to the pub too, so much the better (since there is a very welcome social aspect to the group too).

We started with an author who now lives in Glasgow and this fourth anniversary month sees us discussing a recent novel from an Edinburgh-based scribe, Charlie Stross as we discuss his novel Glasshouse. In a lovely bit of coincidence Glasshouse won the Prometheus award (given by the Libertarian SF group) last week just after it was picked for our September meeting, so congrats to Charlie. We normally meet on the last Tuesday of the month in Henderson's on Hanover Street and anyone is welcome to come along - meeting details usually go up on the Book Group blog.

Giant steps are what you take, walking on the Moon...

This afternoon at the Edinburgh Film Festival I caught the UK premiere of the documentary by David Sington, In the Shadow of the Moon, detailing the glories (and the tragedies) of one of the biggest undertakings humans ever launched themselves on, the Apollo programme. As soon as I saw this in the EIFF programme this year I knew I was going to see it. I was born at the height of the Space Race; Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's astonishing, history-making flight to the Moon on Apollo 11 was still a year and a half away. I grew up with an astronaut space suit costume to play in while Gagarin and Armstrong were on posters as my boyhood heroes (they still are, some things you never grow out of); the idea of space exploration has lived inside me my entire life and as I approach the big four-oh birthday on the last day of this year I get a little sad that those promises of holidays in space we were told the future would hold have never materialised and it looks less and less like that boyhood dream will ever come true.

But still it weaves a magical spell on me; as the footage of those enormous Saturn Vs ascending the heavens on a column of fire flickered across the screen I could feel the old excitement rising - the boy in me is never far from the surface and images and ideas like this always bring it out. Much of the footage has never been seen before and is literally out of this world. The story of our first tentative steps out of the cradle of the Earth to our nearest neighbour is told in their own words by many of the NASA astronauts who made those epic journeys, voyages of discovery that stand in a long line of human endeavours such as the explorations of James Cook, Magellan or those unknown Polynesian sailors who crossed vast oceans on small boats made of reeds.

One of those men featured was David Scott, an Apollo commander - a man I actually met a few years back when his publicist came in to my old bookstore to say he was across the road in the Balmoral Hotel doing interviews with the Scottish press and would we like him to come across and sign some copies of the book he had co-authored with his friend the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (the first man to walk in space; his friend Arthur C Clarke would name a spaceship in his honour in the sequel to 2001). An ordinary day at work and then suddenly there I am chatting to a former astronaut and shaking hands with a man who had walked on the Moon; a man who got to live that boyhood dream of mine. Naturally I got one of those signed copies for myself; I've many signed books in my collection but only one signed by an author who has traveled far enough into space to look back and see the entirety of our world hanging in the void. We've all seen the pictures, but it wasn't until the crew of Apollo 8 voyaged around the dark side of the Moon that humans actually saw the entire Earth from space. They took the famous 'Earthrise' photograph, our world rising in the dark above the surface of the Moon, the furthest humans have yet been from our world.

Only a tiny handful of humans have ever seen that sight with their own eyes to this day, all now old men - to look at them in this film you could easily mistake them for someone's favourite uncle of grandfather. But in their prime these men dared death, road on a column of scientific dragon's fire further than anyone in the entire history of the world and in the process changed the way we see our little, beautiful world. It's so sad we've pulled back from those days; I'm not stupid, I'm well aware of my history and understand much of the colossal cost of the space programme was only met because of politics of the Cold War. And yet I can't help but feel we let ourselves become that much smaller as a species when we stopped pushing at the final frontier. Yes, I know we can spend the money on problems right here on Earth, but if we weren't so busy squabbling among ourselves we wouldn't need to waste so much on creating weapons - then we could spend that money on feeding and taking care of people here on Earth and have enough to explore, to go where no-one has gone before.

I still want to go.

Pottermania

No, I'm not talking about dear old Colonel Sherman T Potter from M*A*S*H* but the boy wizard. This morning on the way to work there were already some fans in glasses, lightning bolt and Hogwarts scarves queuing on the pavement outside The Bookstore That Shall Not Be Named (indeed the very branch Evil Boss moved to later on and made the staff there very happy too - not). Man, that is one thing I do not miss, having to do the midnight opening for Harry bloody Potter... To be fair the kids were okay - they were so excited and many were in costume, so that was kind of fun, but some of the older fans, notably the semi-drunk students were a pain in the bloody arse. As was being there to 1 or 2am and still expected to be back in at 8am next morning for the Saturday Potter onslaught. I also laughed out loud at the news that Childline ( a fine charity) needs extra counsellors on duty to deal with young fans if they are traumatised by the widely expected death of a major character. No, I'm not joking. Jeez, kid, get a fecking grip and clear the line for some kid who has a real problem and needs help!

Still, I was thinking, if Harry Potter was killed off it doesn't have to be the end of the series - in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction death is rarely final, after all. So I was thinking we team up a deceased Harry Potter with the recently murdered Captain America to fight evil in the Afterlife. Harry Potter also starts dating X-Statix's Dead Girl and when he and the Cap have saved the Afterlife they earn the right to be returned to the land of the living, where Captain America then adopts Harry as his son so at last he has a dad, while Doctor Strange completes Harry's magical training and shows him how to grow a moustache. They might turn Iron Man into a frog while they're at it. (sorry, that last bit will be meaningless to folks not up on current comics news)

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness."

Mark Twain.

Twain/Sam Clemens has been a favourite author since I was a boy. In the bus to work a few days ago I looked up from my book when it was picking up passengers and saw someone had written this quote on the window of their flat facing out into the street two stories up where only the occasional person in a double decker bus would be high and close enough to read it. How lovely. Of course, I tend to include reading as 'travel' because it is travel for the mind...

Iran outraged shocker!

In a move which surprised many those laid-back lovers of multiple viewpoints and open debate that are the wacky guys in the Iranian government/religious police (hard to tell them apart) have been deeply offended by something. This time not newspaper cartoons from neighbouring Saudi, not the film and comic of 300 (and before that Alexander) or the film and comic of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or... okay you get the point, they are a bunch of whining twonks who declare everything they dislike is deeply offensive to their nation and obviously the Prophet, blessings be upon his name and all of Islam (which naturally they feel entitled to talk on behalf of all). What are the daft smeggers upset about now?

Well Salman Rushdie was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's birthday honours list (sadly there was no such honour for me), which the Iranians claim is a deliberate attempt to insult them and Islam because Rushdie wrote the Satanic Verses several years ago. You may remember good ol'e Krazy Khomeini, that laugh-a-minute mullah with a twinkle in his eye and a song in his heart declaring a fatwah against it and offering a huge reward to any of the Faithful who murdered one of the most respected novelists in the world for insulting Islam in a work of fiction which he hadn't actually read.

Oddly they don't mention how insulting it is to all civilised people to burn books and threaten the life of writers you haven't even bothered to read; as a devout follower of the church of freedom of speech and a disciple of the Tower of Books I find their attitude highly insulting to my beliefs and I declare literary jihad on their infidel arses. Of course, our form of literary fundementalism is more civilised - we don't place death sentences on their heads, we want to capture them, tie them to a chair and force them to read books. That will teach the bastards.

Going down the rabbit hole

We had one of the top talents in Brit comics in the Edinburgh FPI yesterday in the form of Bryan Talbot, creator of Luther Arkwright. Bryan has spent several years researching and working on his new work Alice In Sunderland, a large, hardback graphic novel with Lewis Carroll's Alice books at its core, but going off onto all sorts of related tangents which influenced Carroll and his work, from local history in and around Sunderland, folklore, the family history of Carroll and of Alice Liddell's family and some of Bryan's own personal life. There can't be many creators who can work in Lewis Carroll, the Venerable Bede, smugglers, naval heroes, the Jabberwock, mass murder, cholera, the Civil War, white rabbits and the ghost of Sid James and make it all work.



I've been dying to read Alice in Sunderland since I interviewed Bryan last summer and I haven't been disappointed. Sure I am biased since Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two of my all-time favourite books and have been since I was a boy; as an adult I still adore the sheer dreamlike imagination of them but also came to admire the incredible intellect behind them, Carroll's astonishing use of immensely clever word play (and number play too, for that matter - check the Annotated Alice to see what I mean). No wonder Alice has been such an incredibly influential work, re-interpreted endlessly in more books, films, animations (despite liberties with the books I do like the old Disney version because of the richness of the animation, but my favourite animated version is by Jan Svankmajer - the Prague Alchemist of Film and one of my favourite animators), songs, games and, of course, comics.



With such a mixture of local history and literature and folklore I think Alice in Sunderland is one of those graphic novels which can easily crossover into the mainstream - if you don't normally read anything in comics form and assume it is pretty much all capes and tights, ignore your preconceptions and have a look at Alice; there are many different and wandering routes through the rabbit hole and this is one of the more scenic ways. I posted some pictures from the signing on the FPI Flickr stream and also tried shooting a couple of very brief video clips as an experiment to see how it came out:

New reviews site

I've changed the blog, Joe's Reviews, which lists links to a bunch of reviews and interviews I've posted over the years and switched it to Word Press - it has easier categorisation, so it should be simpler to find relevant links, sorted out into book reviews for SF, Fantasy, Horror, Younger Readers, Graphic Novels, Movie and DVD reviews and a section covering author interviews and other features from the last few years.

The Eisner Awards 2007

Jeff VanderMeer let me know that the Eisner Awards shortlist was going up this week (Jeff was a judge on the awards this year); I've posted the full list of nominees and the press release up on the FPI blog (if you aren't familiar with it, the Eisners are one of the major comics awards, mostly to the North American published material but with some other works from other countries too). I have that warm feeling booksellers get inside when they see several good books they have been recommending for the last few months turning up on awards shortlists, including the excellent Shooting War for the online comics (hopefully the forthcoming print version will turn up on next year's awards when it comes out this autumn). If you are looking for some decent graphic novels to read you could do much worse than have a browse through some of the nominees.

Neil writes

Nice post on Neil Gaiman's journal showing the rather lovely notebooks he writes some of his stories in by hand after taking himself off to a quiet location.

Bye-bye Kurt

Dammit, we lost a brilliant writer this week when Kurt Vonnegut slipped away, exchanging mortal body for immortal words. Of the many good writers we've been lucky to have it is given to only a select few of them to become that rare thing, the immortal, a writer who has books which are read and re-read across the years by a whole range of people, from the SF fan to the purveyor of 'serious' literature (here's a shock, those two can often be the same). As long as people are reading they will still be picking up books like Slaughterhouse Five; they'll still be teaching it in schools and college students will still be doing papers on it. Very few writers achieve that level of cultural penetration. Kurt took something awful, the fire bombing of Dresden which he saw as a POW during WWII, and took something of those fires within himself to fuel his writing (Slaughterhouse remains one of those books you should read. I know I've said that about a lot of books, but it is; there's a good reason it comes up as one of the most important novels of the 20th century).

Just the other year at 83 Kurt stirred himself out of retirement (does a writer ever really retire? I doubt the urge to put words together to express yourself ever truly dies) with a short story collection A Man Without A Country, driven by anger at Bush and the dire effects on America and the world that odious chimp has had. I hope I'm still feeling the urge to stick it to the man when I reach that age (although it would be preferable if by then we all learned to be nice to one another and I didn't have anything to have a go at; gladly would I hang up my sarcastic barbs for that to happen). In an interview I found on In These Times he express his disgust with Bush's policies: “I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been.” Cool and clever to the end. By curious coincidence some of the folks in the book group were just talking a few days ago about how we should cover one of Kurt's books; he is one of those writers that a lot of people think that about - why not just do it? Pick yourself up a copy of Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five, sit down, read it. Then pass it on and spread the words.

On a related not Ariel and I were discussing how odd Kurt would die from 'brain injuries' a few weeks after an accident which came after this respected elder statesman of American letters (and a veteran who actually served unlike the current chimp-in-chief) so publically attacked Bush's government. Natural causes or a sinister, shadowy conspiracy... Okay, probably not, but I'm sure somewhere right now it is being written up as such on some conspiracy blogs.

Diagram prize

Each year the Bookseller run the Diagram prize, one of the more unusual literary awards; while many mainstream literary prizes can, if we're honest, be a bit up their own arse, the Diagram accepts nominations from booksellers and librarians for the daftest genuine title. This year's shortlist is out and comprises of (and bear in mind this is not me off on a mad make-up-something-silly jag, these are real books):

How Green were the Nazis? by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

Banning words

Some librarians in the US have decided to ban a new kid's book despite the fact that the book - The Higher Power of Lucky - has just won the prestigious Newberry Medal. Why? Well because of one word in the book - 'scrotum'. Yup, that's a good reason for librarians to censor what books are available... Bad enough numpties demand books be pulled from libraries because stories of wizards might lead their kids into Satanism (it won't, that's we have good old rock'n'roll for) or that schools should ban Fahrenheit 451, but it is incredibly sad to me to hear about fellow book professionals indulging in this, they should hand in their cardigans in shame.

Charlie Huston interview

I've just posted up an interview with Charlie Huston on the FPI blog, already an established author in the US for his Henry Thompson crime novels and now moving into a new vampire-noir-crime series featuring a character called Joe Pitt. The second book has just come out in the last few weeks in the States while my friends at Orbit are set to release the first one, Already Dead, in the UK in February - if you like vampire novels and want something a bit different I highly recommend it.



Charlie also made his comics debut in 2006 with the revamped Moon Knight for Marvel, with the first arc recently issued in a hardback collection, winning his quite a few plaudits. And I loved his answer when I asked him how he saw his interpretation of Marc Spector:

"He was always a visceral character to me, and I wanted to try and share that feeling with other readers. Violence, drug abuse, mental illness, moon copters, these are all visceral elements. I wanted Marc Spector to be a shambling mess of a human being who only comes alive, who only understands the world when he puts on a cowl and a cape and jumps out of a helicopter and lands knuckles first in someone’s fucking face."

Ah, superheroes, they are so noble...