Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Short Version: A good, good story told in a fun--often funny--way.

Long Version: In the Author's Note, while Scalzi is describing the long, strange journey this novel took to get to this particular edition, he calls it the "book that won't quit." It took me maybe 50 pages to see why. This is one froody book.

The tone is great, the style is spot on, good satire/commentary on Hollywood's place in the world, everything about the alien race--their language, appearance, spaceship, ways to interact with humans/other creatures...just wonderfully imaginative.

In case you haven't read the blurb--an up and coming Hollywood agent is hired by a (by human standards) ugly, nauseatingly smelly alien race to help their "image" so they can make first contact with humanity. Why an agent, why not a President or something? 'Cuz the aliens know where real power and influence are centered. So, our hero has to balance his Hollywood weirdo clients, the aliens and a nosy journalist who won't leave him alone; while he comes up with a way to sell this species to humanity.

Funny, funny stuff on many levels and in different ways. But the book has a lot of heart, too. Just a pleasure to read.



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Love in the Time of Fridges by Tim Scott

Love in the Time of Fridges by Tim Scott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It's not often that a book leaves me as uncertain as this one does. Parts 1 & 2 were odd, amusing, a bit confusing (but not in a way that really detracted from the experience). Part 3, alas, fell apart, leaving me feeling all sorts of...eh...towards the book.

Scott's prose is light, breezy, charming, incredibly quotable (about 50% of this book is worth memorizing to sprinkle in conversation), with just a hint of profundity, and a touch of sadness.

Other than the protagonist, Huckleberry Lindbergh, the characters are more hints, or sketches, of characters--in a couple of cases, a hint of a sketch--rather than fully-developed characters. Given that this is a thriller (and a fairly satirical one at that), it works, we don't need complete backstories. Fridges is about the plot and the world Scott's imagined, not people.

This is a world where the Nanny State has run amok, drunk on marketing. In part of their benevolent(-ish) efforts to protect the citizenry, they've developed technology to listen to moods, and search, print, and erase 24-hours worth of memory (anything more than that will likely lead to severe damage).

Oh, and there's the whole thing with sentient, verbal, and semi=intelligent appliances and furniture. No idea what that was all about.

The novel was built on a tight inner logic, and was a heckuva ride, until Part 3 where Scott found/created a loophole in that logic and gave his reader a sloppy deus ex Heisenberg uncertainty principle ending. And that's where he lost me. I'm still giving it three stars for the fun leading up to that tho'.



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Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil & Kaja Foglio

Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil Foglio

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've recently discovered--and become a fan of--the Foglios Girl Genius comics, doing so just before the release of the first novelization of the series was a nice bit of fortuitous timing.

There's a part of me that wonders if they've been wasting their time, the Foglios have a wonderful, playful way of using their words. Certain phrases, sentences, and even whole paragraphs are filled with a whimsy that just makes me smile. Little things like:

"Now I am in control!" He followed this statement with a burst of laughter that showed the owner had done a fair share of gloating in his time, and had the basics down pat.

If you've read the comics, you're not going to find a lot new here--they fill out some details here and there, spell out some things that the reader had to assume, that sort of thing. I honestly don't know if someone who hadn't read at least some of the comics could visualize the clanks, airships, Jägermonsters, etc. That's the closest I can come to a negative to point out about this novel.

Full of laughs, romance, adventure, strong (and smart!) female characters, this is one fun read. Bring on the further adventures of Agatha and co.!



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Having "The Talk" with your Kids (not *that* one)

I admit it, and it brings me great shame to do so...I messed up with my older two (despite my good intentions), and am trying to do better with my younger two, but it's so hard when their older brothers have it so messed up...

Parents, don't make the same mistakes I did... talk to them about Star Wars from an early age.



somehow this post feels like it should end with this:

Belgium, Belgium, Belgium! (sorry for the profanity)

Not sure why I've let this layer of dust accumulate over things lately, meant to post a thing or two last week, but things got away from me I guess.

Nothing personal, I assure you--well, most of you anyway.

So what got me riled up enough to break my silence?

This monstrosity:

That's right, author Eoin Colfer has been commissioned to write the sixth volume of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy.

SciFi Wire reports:

And Another Thing..., which will be released Oct. 12 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the series by the late Douglas Adams, is a sequel commissioned by the publisher from Eoin Colfer. Colfer is the author of the best-selling Artemis Fowl series.

While Penguin will publish the latest book, Pan Macmillan, which was Adams' paperback publisher, will repackage his backlist, adding new introductions to the books, which will be released monthly leading up to the release of the new title.

Why, oh why, is this being done? Was the world begging for a follow-up to Mostly Harmless? Did another story just need to be told? NO!

Did Adams' leave notes, instructions for another? No.

Does Arthur Dent really need to get kicked around some more? No.

Wouldn't it be easier to insult the Douglas Adams' memory by digging up his bones and throwing rocks at them? Or you could just put out the recent movie on Blu-Ray, that'd do it, too.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A travesty. A disgrace. A literary crime.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'll be there on 10/21, cash in hand, just waiting for the book--probably with baited breath. Just hope it'll be slightly better than a collection of poetry by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England.

Superpowers: A Novel by David J. Schwartz

If one's going to write about superheroes there's really only so much you can do--A. Write a prose equivalent of a comic book or B. Go out of your way to make sure that no once can describe your work as an example of "A." Typically, the "A" books are shoddy, and wouldn't be accepted as a script by a decent comic publisher; and the "B" books are so caught up in not being "A"s that they lose something--they might do well exploring the nature of "heroes" or satirizing/politicizing the genre or whatever, but they don't work as novels.

I've had my fill of the "B"s lately, and think I've finished only one out of the handful I've started in the last couple of years--Tom De Haven's It's Superman, which really did work as a novel. Schwartz' Superpowers: A Novel, stands as an example of how to do an "A" right.

Superpowers is the origin story of a super-hero team from Madison, Wisconsin, of all places. A group of college students one day find themselves with superpowers (super-strenghth/invulnerability; super-speed; invisibility; telepathy; and power of flight), and it doesn't take too long before they decide to don costumes and fight crime as the All-Stars, despite the very clear absence of any super villainy. A solid, "A" start--and if Schwartz kept at it at this level, I'd probably really have enjoyed the read.

He did a great job of focusing on each of the five heroes in turn, never focusing on one for too long, essential to any good team book (unlike the Justice League, which all to0 frequently turns into Superman and some other guys (or Batman and...;or Wonder Woman and...; or...). The early chapters are told with a solid amount of humor--think the early parts of the Spider-Man movie, where Peter's learning about his powers. And like I said, if he'd kept it there, Schwartz would've produced a fun read.

But he didn't, and he made it a better read.

There's a cost to these powers for each character--personal, vocational, mental, physical, familial and/or academic. Each one had a full life before tacking on crime-fighting. And life keeps going on--new changes, challenges, and developments--it's possible that a decent story could've been told about these five and their associates without the powers. So they're having to grow as people, as well as nascent heroes.

Then a few short months after receiving their powers, well--don't want to give it away, but something happens hundreds of miles away from them that their powers can't help. The public as a whole isn't sure what to make of anyone being a super-hero (particularly the police). This is worsened when they make a couple of mistakes that wreak havoc on civilians.

The book is really about how people react to these powers, the costs, and the events surrounding them. The plot doesn't depend on a super villain or three for conflict--conflict and drama come from living--lLaughter, love, anger, pain, ambition, parent-child relationships (of varying degrees of health/disfunction), hatred, fear, revenge...

These are not paragons of virtue, Schwartz depicts them as people. That's what makes the book worth the time. While I was reading it, I kept saying to myself "If Robert Kirkman or Brian Michael Bendis wrote a novel, it would read like this." Come to think of it, for my comic reading friends, that's probably all I had to say in this post (a much more economical way to say everything I just did). If you're not one of my comic-reading friends, and you want to be--read this book, and if you like it, go pick up the trade paperbacks of Ultimate Spider-Man and Invincible.

You can thank me later.

Hasn't the Poor Man Suffered Enough?

Poor, poor William Gibson.

It apparently wasn't enough for Hollywood to take his groundbreaking short story, "Johnny Mnemonic," and turn it into 1995's Keanu Reeves' nightmare. Nope.

Today's SciFi Wire reports:

Hayden Christensen (Jumper) may star in a proposed film based on William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

Citing an anonymous source, the site reported that Christensen would play Case,the hacker at the center of the story.

Christensen--that automaton that made people think, "You know, that Jake Lloyd wasn't such a bad little actor..."--playing Case??!? It's just wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Next thing I'll be reading that Larry the Cable Guy has been cast as Ender Wiggin...