I have an idea for a very, very giant post, but I won't post that until literally the next year. The idea is from Bruce Sterling, who is certainly someone to look up about this time of year.

( Meme, in an lj-cut, because otherwise it would dominate my page )

Every once in a while, a short story jumps up and surprises you.

Though this entire series is surprising mich with its fun, I thought Barleycorn Brides rather powerful. Brave guys leaving for aventuras and returning to their origin point with treasure, a bug dude and rather hot women crawling out of tulips. Like in BtVS Season 8, watch the people in the panels of crowds and see if you can see who are who. They're half the power.

Because I really hate having a ROWR ROWR anger post at the top of meine journal, I saw this:

Random House auf Deutsch!

Both Spin State and Spin Control are translated in German. I WANT THEM!

Ha, John Robb posted about the book Hollowing Out The Middle, about the Rural Brain Drain in the United States. Because I'm part of the phenomenon, I had found an article about it, and roamed through meine archives. Guess what?

The people who posted this article wrote that book in question. Like I learned in college, the only people who point out the Importance Of Small Towns are the same people, over and over.

Not that I'm interested in talking about such things right now. I'm too busy conducting a war against it. Let small towns fall apart and rot in their hidebound, petrified, terrified graves. We'll all be better for it.

I haven't posted a complete review of the things I'm reading in a horribly long time, and that's for the reason that it takes mich eons to finish anything. Reading 20+ books at the same time usually does that.

Thus, I'll review a complete graphic novel, and the first part of a different book.

First, Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life, a book that I need to chatter about. Der buch ist about Spider Jerusalem, outlaw journalist in an archetypal "City". There are strong hints that it's a specific city, but I think it's quite broadly evocative of the idea of a city. The first volume, Back on the Street really showed mich the sensations of a living, thriving, disturbing city... and showed me precisely where I need to be, as soon as I possibly can.

The second volume was longer, and blew my mind in a slightly different way. This one is a little more straight cyberpunk rage, taunting everyone Spider can get his fingers on. Television, religion, cults, and high technology. So far, the series resembles Scape in a lot of ways, but from an urban perspective rather than space opera - poop jokes like every page, and real genuine emotion under all the snark.

Highlight, a new favorite panel: "Do you want to eat Peyotl and Human Flesh for spiritual fulfillment? Or just for the hell of it? Join the Ancient Cult of Anazasl!"

The second buch en this contrast, Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia is three parts - the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century conflict over British India between the British Empire and Czarist Russia. Spies, beheading, treachery, giant mosques, geopolitical strategy, Russophobia. I've always been fascinated with the Great Game, and obviously, we have a new one.

The primary thing these buchs have in common, as strange as that might appear, is that meine zwei primary subcultural interests, roleplaying and cyberpunk, both have involvement in both of these books.

Transmetropolitan sets up a world full of wild adventures and insane people. It's epic already, and I'm only on the second volume! Many, many people on both RPGnet and the Cyberpunk Review use Spider Jerusalem avatars, and I get why. He's amazingly cool.

I originally saw Hopkirk referred to on RPGnet, and his books are used as references on the Wikipedia. The roleplaying aspects are obvious - a great part of what the spies in the nineteenth century were doing was mapping out the territory, because barely any Europeans had ever seen the middle of Asia.

Spies in the nineteenth century, perhaps du thinketh, what might this have to do with cyberpunk? I personally think it's an ideal cyberpunk land. Think about it. British India had been partitioned into two states - now way more than that - and the Soviet Union fell apart, too. Many of the spies were bilingual, and what's a better historical precedent for looking into the future than people who were exploring an unknown land?

These two books have probably been a couple of the most challenging things I've read in 2009. I know I'm a warrior now, and they're making mich understand what that really is.

I've been leaping pretty deep into Deutsch and Espanol, and I'm also interested in SF and F in other languages. There isn't a coincidence that my default avatar is from a Swedish WoT translation! Anyway, Apex has a thing out called the "Apex Book of World SF", the same topic as their current theme. I haven't got to reading the stories at the moment, but I had found this.

Writing in a Foreign Language

Aliette De Bodard speaks French as her first language, and writes in English. The reasons are fascinating and complicated, and have a new level considering my newfound obsession with genuinely learning others. She also posted it on her livejournal, and gets comments from other people with similar experiences.

What are the books Richard Morgan's been reading? I've been anxious to know!

Woot!

What do I think of these? Well, one by one:

( Long rambling ahead )

Increased security in Iraq lets soldiers do other things than work. And woot! Things like C S Lewis and the Aeneid, and one John Dorman, learning geometry and calculus. He's pondering becoming a math teacher when he leaves the army.

Ambitious peoples.

I finished William Gibson's Virtual Light and feel a little surprised I hadn't read it a long time ago. It blew my mind quite a bit, but it really would have challenged me had I read it before I enrolled in college. The key quirk to his writing is that he describes the world we're in - but a little surreal, and always a little bit ahead of the game. And he writes it as a bloody good suspense book. So, hmm.

A comment of his on Twitter showed me perhaps one aspect of the reason about this - is that he's a bit of a historian. The comment was that "In the 1980s, the 1960s looked like the 1920s. Now they look like the 1890s." Play with it and you realise that the culture of the 1980s thought the entire world would become a nuclear apocalypse. It didn't, but that's a source of all the desperation and bleakness in the cpunk setting.

This ramble isn't about that, though, but I could ramble about it more. I have certainly thought about that. This ramble is about the 1950s - and that, in a sense, the anime I watched in the late 1980s and 1990s sort of resembles that, for me. I've seen a LOT of anime, and love to harass people with that fact.

Any series that came out in those years I've probably either seen or heard of or seen parts of. TVTropes has a category for that, and Angel Investigations first showed me what the pattern was - the idea of a nakama, a family of friends who aren't your relatives but the people you have chosen as your family.

That's a tangent, too, but one of my favorite themes of all time. Even The Wheel of Time involved it, and I've never seen anyone use it in such a grand, unique way. The only thing that comes close to The Wheel of Time is assuming that all of the anime that involved a nakama literally lived in the same Tokyo. Which some MUSHes play with...

After I've realised that the vast majority of my favorite stories were in a city, even though I haven't seen one and understood one until April of this year, I've been pondering what the bugger all of that time spent on anime meant. Not broodingly, or anything, but sort of figuring out the meaning of it.

Most urban fantasy resembles them, for instance. Try "Mercy Thompson: Homecoming". Groovy read, in which a twentysomething coyote shapeshifter finds her home.

The anime I watched, and at last I say what I'm been intending to say, acted as my 1950s rock and roll. Not Elvis, as he usually annoys me, but Jerry Lee Lewis, and the tougher types. Anime was something I had never seen before, the language, the techno, the culture, the stories. It blew my mind, and the amount of it rivaled cpunk for the various creative people who joined the party.

And those things were built from a world in which almost everyone thought that the world would end in a nuclear apocalypse. It didn't, and many of those people in that world never even saw war affecting them personally.

The cpunks did. And me, on March 20, 2009.

Initially, the Recommended Reading from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline, which is on this page. I've read one of the things, Shadow Cities, which boggled me, and pondered glimpsing The Places We Live.

Apparently Sterling admires Brand, and Brand had the idea of the 0 in front of the year, as in 02009, as a representation of the real length of time. Which is rockin'.

This is why I roam through Sterling's blog, too - he posted to a list of the Most Powerful People in India. Yes, I'm very intrigued, why do you ask? Woot.

I loaned this book, too, but I've been pleasantly entertained by the Frontline anthologies and would have picked it up had the Barnes and Noble in the Mall of America had this volume in supply. They didn't. Oh well. They didn't get that money, that's all there is to it! But, either way, I would give them a little exposure.

The preview for War-Torn gave me the thought of the psychic kid Colin Phash going violently mad, but I was pleasantly surprised when he had hallucinations of a planet being destroyed. It showed more of Hector Sevilla's deeply satisfying art, and the story, about a bounty hunter chasing Colin Phash, set up nicely for the third story by Paul Benjamin and Dave Shramek, Orientation and the Ghost Academy series by Keith DeCandido.

War-Torn also has a small cameo by Kate Lockwell, making me happy. Their idea on what happened in Newsworthy is subtle and well crafted.

The second story, Do Not Harm, presents the first example in my experience of a Terran-Protoss hybrid. He's appropriately bizarre, and the story is better than I had thought. I gots a suspicion that the hybrid might find his way into Starcraft RPGs, because he's rather unusual. Until Starcraft 2, anyway...

The third story is more from Grace Randolph. Last Call reads like a spy story and a 01950s horror movie. Any description other than "a lounge sister gets caught up in intrigue on a mining outpost" would be a spoiler, and thanks to a Starcraft fan site, I did get spoiled. But it didn't bother me, and in fact, I might have to reread this one and find how the intrigues really worked.

Randolph obtains a YES! point from me for using a completely understated part of the Starcraft setting to fuel this story. I want more of your work, Ms Randolph!

The fourth story in the anthology, Twilight Archon describes precisely the thing someone would expect if they know the units in Starcraft 2... and I do, because I'm, for the fact that I'm writing this review, a little neurotic and obsessed about this setting. The art, from Noel Rodriguez, gets most of the love, with a wild, flowing ocean of imagery.

This story is one I would recommend to a new Warder, and I can imagine it being powerful for a specific type of pairing.

So, that's the third volume of Frontline. The fourth volume has a story by Chris Metzen, the Grand Leader of the Craft settings, which should be bizarre. The primary thing I'm adoring about these Frontlines is that they're with unestablished characters, and building on new parts of the world.

Nonetheless, pick them up for your Starcraft obsessed friends. Then you can use them and point people toward other books... like Twilight Archon has some things in common with Revelation Space.

You know, about now, I wonder, how did I become addicted to writing book reviews? I certainly didn't like doing that in the Spur... maybe because I can write them however I want and talktalktalk? Yeah.

This article describes small towns as "ghost towns", precisely the same thing I've been thinking. And, which should appear obvious if you've read the archives, I'm desperately seeking to become one of the people who escapes and never looks back.

The best and brightest leaving for the city. Not that I think I'm one of the best, but at least I'm conducting a war.

Sounds like a chance for a ramble. A while ago, someone mentioned that, in despair, remember your roots and you'll never be completely lost. I've been perusing them, and finding them reinvigorating. My physical roots might be in west Minneapolis, a wasteland of ghost towns and fundamentalism, but my soul's never been here.

My roots? Mythic fantasy, cyberpunk and the internet. I've been rereading the Wheel of Time, and finding it a delight. I have a stack of books from Gibson and Sterling, anxiously but patiently working on reading every book from them, and they're boggling my mind. And the internet? Well, I have the Cyberpunk Review.

The Hobbit, LotR, and Neuromancer are in the keeper book box, though I probably won't reread them before I move. As with the 9/11 Report and scratching old wounds, I want to keep some mysteries intact before another change.

"2000 letters, and innumerable phone calls and emails."

With a 32 to 17 vote, the library obtained the money it required. Not nearly enough votes for the yes, but at least they got it. Hey, I have to post some good news sometimes. I'm not all Doom All The Time, really.

Whoever you are in Philadelphia, if you contributed, you get a drink of your choice if I meet you. I sent a letter to the Save Farscape campaign and joined the effort to swarm the SciFi Channel's mailbox, but this is a library.

Philadelphia Library Saved from BoingBoing.

Apparently the econocalypse has really harassed Philadelphia, because they're shutting down their public library.

Doesn't require much imagination to imagine that happening in my location, perhaps my literal location, and I like to think I would do two things: check out as many books as I can, and don't bring them back, and move into the abandoned building.

How else can you fight against something like this?

Philadelphia Free Library system is broke and shutting down. from BoingBoing

The summer's about finished as is, even if I have more events set up than the usual. Nonetheless, I found a link to a book list, and thought I should follow with some of what I've been reading. I've mentioned probably all, or the majority, of these elsewhere on this journal.

But, anyway.

First, Revelation Space, and the sequel Redemption Ark, by Alastair Reynolds. I have the other parts of the series around the place for me, but the series is so intense and Gothic that too much at one time would be very mindblowing.

Second, and the reason that it feels as though I haven't been reading very much, anything that Greg Rucka's written, particularly Batman: No Man's Land, the Q&C comics, and the Atticus Kodiak series. I've read one volume of Checkmate and had to temporarily stop reading him, because I would simply get too familiar with him. He's very much like Jim Butcher, and finding a better compliment would be thoroughly difficult.

Third, Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Freelancer Manual, on the Internet. She posted it because she thought that a series of people would be freelancers, in the Rabid Economy, whether they would like to or not. I knew some parts of this, and before I entered college, I think I was a freelancer, but one with no idea at all what I would need to achieve.

She mentioned that freelancers, unlike many people in the world, need to take risks, I'm feeling like I have a big risk in front of me. I've diminished my amount of things to what I really need, and a vague feeling what the risk is. It's an eerie sensation.

I have, thanks to getting things from other places, many books that I'm partly into and not finished reading yet. So I won't mention them!

Like I said, let's see if I can't keep up with this. Maybe I might shut up and get to work on that which I need to do.

Here's some of the current books on the pile, which I might be finished with reading after I grab them from the library again:

IPCC Report 2007
With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
Ignition: How You Can Stop Global Warming and Spark a Revolution

Any other climate change books to suggest? I need more.

Huh. I have no idea what this thing is going to resemble when I reply.

But JesterJoker is the two halves of the hyper side of me. Either I don't think of anything seriously at all, or I like to think I can be a noir bastard. 8)

My current /email/, kirimachinni, is where the WoT references come in, because I met a particularly fascinating person through the books... and a roleplaying game... and uh, this could get really long. Some people have a Bond; me and the Traveler share a Machin bond. 8)

EDIT: What the bog? This thing was a post on MY journal? Huh? Whoa, there's Cyrillic on the list!

A little bit ago, I read "Dream Makers: Science Fiction Interviews", by Charles Platt, and the small interviews, each about seven to thirteen pages, fascinated me. Surprisingly, Platt is also a science fiction author. He was certainly a fan, and that fervor showed up in every one of the conversations.

Originally, I picked up the book for thoughts on John Brunner, one of the most accurate SF writers I've ever heard. Stand on Zanzibar is right now, and the man wrote The Shockwave Rider, genuinely cyberpunk minus Japan. The interview said that he liked being in a small village and watching the world from a distance... something that I'm trapped doing at the moment, and, with the threat of being a whiny blogger, hating with every part of myself.

Perhaps a fourth of them I hadn't heard of, like Salzberg and Bryant. But they're especially strong examples, because they were way different than anyone I know. Salzberg was presented as a man 'who completely hates his life' and is proud of his lack of winning. Bwuh? Bryant, when interviewed, was existing purely with quirky jobs and credit cards. And maxing both of them out.

Some of the people reading this probably get Bryant's situation, and my reaction might weird out those people. I don't even OWN a credit card.

I learned some other things from it, too, writers who I don't want to be.

( Bah, all right, the list, the ones I remember the strongest. Remember, this book was published in 1980. These people have probably changed. Pohl freaking blogs! )

Fascinating book. Fascinating people. Delightful to learn about the insane, thriving and unusual history of the genre.

Searching any information I can find about the BosWash / Northeast Corridor, I found this, and others.

Planet of Slums

I'm posting this because of this quote:

"Chinese discussions over whether the ancient income-and-development chasm between city and countryside is now being replaced by an equally fundamental gap between small cities and the coastal giants."

Very, very true. Connected with Detroit and Pittsburgh's falls? The other frightening thing is thinking of this with the changes of the climate on the coasts. As the population moves to the coasts, they get rammed? Hmm.

With the topic of slums, I also found The Places We Live, about civilians in slums. I glanced at the Latin America section, but there's Africa and India. Affecting many of my obsessions! And there was much rejoicing. Yay.

Batman: No Man's Land, author Greg Rucka, in which Gotham is separated from the country
VS
The World Crisis: Vol 6, author Sir Winston Churchill, in which I learn more about Germany Vs Austria Vs Russia in the Great War

Which one is the victor? They're both really good reads, though they both have parts that didn't interest me.

The first half of the Batman book (strictly words) is its strongest part, as it focuses on the Gotham Police, before the superheroes rush onto the scene and rule the story. It concludes in an annoying fashion, reminding me that, yes, Batman is a franchise hero. Some parts are amazing, like how Rucka includes such things as jumplines and costumes and makes them work in prose. And Two-Face's final showdown. And Bruce Wayne.

I think I liked this book more than The Dark Knight. Two-Face was much more interesting, and, starkly differently than the movie, fascinating.

The World Crisis Vol 6 is... much different. Sir Churchill described how all three of the noble houses in the East fell, and that, if we ignore the Western Front, the East was the greatest war in history. He finishes the tale when the Czar topples, and the Communists party it up on the Russians. Much, much to ponder.