Results tagged “books”
Science Fiction Repair Shop: Non SF&F Writing For SF&F Authors
Last updated: 2013/05/06.
I'm surprised by the number of would-be writers I meet who never read outside their comfort zones. If they write SF, they tend to read a lot of it — which isn't bad by itself, just self-limiting. It's never a bad thing to know the parameters of the very field you want to write for, but to be habitually locked inside of it is a formula for self-starvation.
In no way should this list be considered canonical or otherwise absolute. It's simply a series of suggestions from a tour guide, someone who has been over this territory and come away with a few words about the sights. It's a way to know what else is out there, and to have it suggested to you in a way that ought to be appealing. Expect additions to the list over time as well.
Read moreTags: books science fiction Science Fiction Repair Shop writers writing
Mass Market, Crass Market Dept.
In an essay named "Economics Not Culture", my friend Steven Savage asserts that economic processes have replaced cultural ones. I agree, and I believe the problem is even worse than the way he describes it.
I admit this is not a new concept, or a particular profound one. But it has taken on a new and virulent form in the last few years. It is the idea that there is no better way to determine the worth of something culturally by how well it performs in the marketplace — and by that token, the only things worth producing are those which get mobbed on by enough people that no unusual efforts (aside from efforts of scale and scope) have to be made to sell it.
The idea of economics as a cultural force (at least as it is most relevant here) can be traced back to — who else? — Marx. His concern was that capital reduces the individual to an integer in a system that inevitably exploits him. That all had a germ of truth to it, but he missed several other things which severely undermined the predictive power of his work.
Read moreTags: books culture economics marketing movies music
Perfect Forever Dept.
[This post was originally written as a comment in another forum. It appears here with some rewriting and expansion.]
I think one of the reasons we want to think what makes a movie (or book, or anything) good or bad is universal — something unchanging and fixed, apart from any one of us — is because it would be enormously convenient to do so.
If that were true, then we would not need to debate anything ever; we would just need to figure out what those universals are and then we could all quit arguing.
There's three problems with this, though.
Read moreTags: aesthetics Blade Runner books Game of Thrones Hard-Boiled movies
The Bookmakers, All 7 Billion Of Them Dept. (On "The Business of Literature", Pt. 1)
VQR » On the business of literature
Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation — not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian.
Those few sentences are from the tail end of this very long but deeply stimlating article, which is worth reading over a cup of coffee. Many of the ideas in it are points I've stumbled across on my own: that books are actually not low-tech (and for that reason, not in need of special protection from technological advancement); that better publishing technology does not automatically yield better publishing; and that the sheer abundance of books out there is a problem all by itself.
Read moreTags: books bookstores ebooks publishing
Book Reviews: Paradise Kiss Vols. 2-3 (Ai Yazawa)
I’m going to start my discussion of the second and third volumes of Paradise Kiss with the sex scene in volume 2. Actually, there’s a couple of such scenes, but the one that comes most crucially to mind involves heroine Yukari and her lover / antagonist / homme fatale George. I mention it not as a way to denigrate the story, but entirely the opposite: if Paradise Kiss is able to take one of the hoariest, most stock components of any romance — the good-girl heroine losing her virginity to her bad-boy lover — and make it into a complex and nuanced story about whether or not the guy and the girl even deserve each other in the first place, or deserve something better than what they currently amount to.
Read moreTags: Ai Yazawa books Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Good To Be Wrong Dept.
A while back in a blog post for work, I wrote about (among other things) how I feared the prevalence of cheap $1-and-under e-books would cause the market for same to fall through entirely. I'm pleased to report that, as far as I can tell, I was wrong.
For indie publishers, like myself, the proper price point now seems to be around $5-7. Anything more than that puts you smack into competition with the big publishing houses (who are willing to charge as much as $15 or more); anything less than that marks you as too desperate to be serious.
Read moreTags: Amazon.com books Kindle publishing self-publishing
Book Reviews: Epitaph of a Small Winner / The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Machado De Assis)
I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who had died and is now writing.
Fiction is about what's impossible, but not what's implausible. It is impossible that a man would tell us his autobiography in the form of a novel after his own death. It is not implausible that he would use such a story to ruthlessly burst apart the hypocrisy of others, and himself as well. A dead man worries nothing about his reputation or his standing in the eyes of others — except maybe posthumously, and even then why should he, in limbo, worry? — and so who but someone like him would be best suited to showing up the living for the fools they are?
Epitaph of a Small Winner — also known as The Posthumous Memoirs of Braz Cubas — is one of those miracles of literature that seems to have barely any right to exist in the first place. Its pessimism and bitter irony seem decades, if not centuries, out of phase from the 1880 in which it was written — more the child of a Luigi Pirandello or even a Louis-Ferdinand Céline (although without that author's repugnancy). Wipe away the topical details of life in late 19th century Brazil, and you have a story that not only hasn't dated but seems immune to irrelevancy.
Read moreTags: books fiction Machado De Assis review writing
Busted Brain Trust Dept.
A piece about why book-recommendation services may always fall short:
A Failure of Imagination | New Republic
Read moreData is entirely a collection of externalities; it can collect and sort millions of user preferences and similarities, but it can never move beyond the what to the why. Data has no imagination. When it comes to book recommendations, attempts to sort or streamline or mathematize them necessarily dehumanize the process. The very nature of the endeavor, much like digesting Ulysses, requires an infinitely more complex machine: the human brain.
Tags: artificial intelligence books bookstores mathematics sociology technology
Flight of the Vajra: Infectious Propaganda Pt. 2 Dept.
After some consultation, a revised IPS logo:
IPS logo draft 2.
The slogan was a revision based on a friend's suggestion: "Amidst Them All" implies they are more part of the situation they're patrolling, rather than merely standing "between" others. I also thickened up the stroke width on the logo itself.
I also have a rough draft of the insignia for the Old Way, the belief system that plays a prominent role in the story:
Old Way logo draft 1.
Tags: artwork books Flight of the Vajra marketing viral marketing writing
Flight of the Vajra: Infectious Propaganda Dept.
A little something visual I'm working on as viral marketing for Flight of the Vajra:
IPS logo draft 1.
(Design subject to change, but that's the basic idea: it's the insignia worn by the officers who amount to the closest thing the universe in the book has to a shared police force.)
Read moreTags: artwork books Flight of the Vajra marketing viral marketing writing
Science Fiction Repair Shop: Non SF&F Writing For SF&F Authors
Last updated: 2013/05/06.
I'm surprised by the number of would-be writers I meet who never read outside their comfort zones. If they write SF, they tend to read a lot of it — which isn't bad by itself, just self-limiting. It's never a bad thing to know the parameters of the very field you want to write for, but to be habitually locked inside of it is a formula for self-starvation.
In no way should this list be considered canonical or otherwise absolute. It's simply a series of suggestions from a tour guide, someone who has been over this territory and come away with a few words about the sights. It's a way to know what else is out there, and to have it suggested to you in a way that ought to be appealing. Expect additions to the list over time as well.
Read moreTags: books science fiction Science Fiction Repair Shop writers writing
Off the Page Dept.
Most of the reading I've been doing this year has been to rediscover a number of classics that are now back in print via new translations that are far better than the fusty ones I read in college. Much of Dostoevsky, for instance; Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago, The Three Musketeers, many others.
One thing that stood out time and again as I read — although the new translations had little to do directly with this — was something I've mentioned before, but which was brought home far more completely this time: There was a time when a book was not written to be anything but a book — or, at the very least, the idea that it could be something other than a book was a tertiary concern.
Read moreTags: adaptation books movies writing
Book Reviews: Flowers of Evil, Vol. 3 (Shuzo Oshimi)
Third installment in this symphony of adolescent emotional brutality pits hapless would-be seeker of transgression Kasuga against his (female) mentor in perversity Nakamura, with his would-be sweetheart Nanako caught between them. After Kasuga and Nakamura enjoy — not sure that's really the word, actually — an orgy of destruction in their school homeroom, Nanako's forced to see what Nakamura wants her to think the "pervert" Kasuga is really made of ... except that Nanako is even more pure-hearted than anyone banked on her being. Where the story goes from here ought to be a real challenge; let's see if they branch out even further and more daringly, or simply repeat the same beats as per a goofy sitcom where nobody ever learns. My money's on the former.
Tags: books Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Heroman Vol. 1 (Tamon Ohta)
Vertical has been attempting to snag a bigger slice of the mainstream manga pie in various ways now. This latest attempt is the adaptation of the Stan Lee + BONES anime which I liked for being an interesting Japan-POV take on the American kids'-comics mythos: kid has his robot toy struck by lightning and it turns into a giant fighting companion (see: Johnny Sokko, et al.), one which comes in great handy when fending off a burgeoning alien invasion. Emphasis here is not on the gimmick but on little Joey Jones's growing accustomed to the idea of being anybody's hero, especially when he's spent the better part of his young life being everyone else's kickball. Bad points: amateurish art by Tamon Ohta, and a translation that seems way below par for the typically meticulous Vertical folks.
Tags: books manga review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Paradise Kiss, Part One (Ai Yazawa)
It’s been said that genres are reading instructions. A book bearing the label science fiction earns certain exemptions of tone and content right out of the gate that a book labeled fantasy or romance or literary fiction does not. Romance is a label we associate freely with broad brushstrokes of emotion (e.g., hate-that-is-actually-love), coincidence, and a great many other things we’d only tolerate in small doses, if at all, in something not sporting that label.
In other words, a genre is a label for a specific kind of suspension of disbelief, and that may explain why many people turn their nose up at certain genres. Some people find the suspension of disbelief re: human behavior or motivation required for a romance to be far more absurd than the suspension of disbelief re: physical reality required for a fantasy, SF, or four-color comic story. I don’t believe this mechanism underlies all instances of why people snub a romance for something else, but it sure explains why many people never try out certain genres at all. They have evolved a certain discipline for their suspension of disbelief. They do not let themselves play outside of those strongly-painted lines.
It’s a shame, because within any genre there is always the possibility for happy accidents and lively discovery. Shojo manga, the whole subdivision of manga nominally intended for girls, has many titles with plenty of crossover appeal. Having a mainstream breakthrough experience with one of them doesn’t much increase the odds of the others following suit — the Dark Knight Trilogy hasn’t caused mainstream moviegoers to pick up too many Batman comics — but it can at the very least expose the reader to new territory. The very best of shojo manga has included some territory I might never have discovered on my own: Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra, for instance, or Moto Hagio’s remarkable work that freely crossed between labels: romance here, fantasy there, science fiction at times, all of it remarkable. Read more
Tags: Ai Yazawa books Japan manga review romance shojo Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Silence (John Cage)
There are two ways to experience John Cage at this point in time: through his work, and through his writing. I had plenty of grounding in the first by way of Indeterminacy and Variations IV and so on by the time I encountered Silence, but even if I had none of those formative experiences I think Silence would have still cracked a good deal of the pavement under my feet.
It has been nearly twenty years since I first read Silence, and I keep it in the small cubby of books next to my desk that is reserved for a few select things I pull out and read whenever I need a moment to see things more clearly. It is the closest thing Cage ever created that amounted to a manifesto, even though he published it in 1961 and spent the next thirty or so years still evolving and mutating. It is the right of any artist, and any human being period, to re-invent himself continuously, but much if not all of what Cage put into Silence serves as an encapsulation of most everything he identified himself with throughout his career.
I am not sure Cage would have appreciated that. He was fondest of the living event, not the artifact that signified it. A recording of music was not for him music, but a recording — it was no more the music than the photo of the Grand Canyon was the place itself. Likewise, his words on paper were nothing more than photos, but all the same there are enough such photos in this book, and from such a diversity of angles, that it’s hard to read it and not feel a first-hand engagement with his way of seeing things. Silence has much of the experience of a performance of his work (bested only by actually attending one, that is), which means that it can be every bit as boring as the real thing — although as Cage once said, do something long enough and you’ll eventually find it’s not boring at all but very interesting. Read more
Tags: books John Cage music review Zen
Book Reviews: Limit Vol. 1 (Keiko Suenobu)
In my first years of reading about Japan I learned quickly to separate the sociological wheat from the pop-psychology chaff. Most anything I encountered originally in English about “conformity in Japanese society” was potted pop-psychology churned out in the 1980s, when fear of Japan buying out America rode high and books that purported to explain those inscrutable Japanese were being hustled out into airport bookstalls. (The big airport-reading trend now is neuroscience for businesspeople, which manages to be even more insulting to the intelligence of everyone involved than Yellow Panic For Dummies.)
I find the whole discussion of Japanese social conformity to be at least partly a red herring, because society is by definition a conformist enterprise. Most of us are conformist if only in that we do not kill the other guy because we know that if we do most everything we ourselves could draw on runs the risk of spontaneously collapsing. The idea that Japan puts greater pressure on people to fit in and work together seems borne less of perspective on the very tangible historical conditions that shaped such things, and more out of a need to contrast their straightlaced ways with more allegedly freewheeling ones elsewhere. It’s not that conformity doesn’t exist in Japan; it’s that most of how non-Japanese talk about the subject is unenlightening, sanctimonious b.s. designed to make anyone not Japanese feel like they dodged a sociological bullet.
This may seem like a loaded lead-in for a review of a manga — Keiko Suenobu’s Limit — but I cite it here as a lead-in for a story that, in its own pop-culture way, attempts to look at conformity in Japan from the perspective of a type most vulnerable to it: the schoolgirl. Limit’s main schoolgirl character is Konno, and in the opening pages she makes it clear that the ability to conform, to merge with the current and just drift along, is not something you do because you like it. It is simply a fact of life, a survival trait you either acquire and use to your advantage, or ignore at your own peril.
Read moreTags: books Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Sakura: Blossoms Wild (Moyoco Anno)
A while back I reviewed Sakuran, the motion picture, and I called it “the antidote to Memoirs of a Geisha”: funny, sassy, bold, and bitter, where Geisha was just wistful, sodden, and romanticized in all the wrong ways. The same good things could be said for the manga that was the source for Sakuran, now out in English thanks to — who else? — Vertical Inc., who are increasingly becoming to manga what Criterion or perhaps Kino International have been to film.
Read moreTags: books Japan manga Moyoco Anno review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Rebel Buddha (Dzogchen Ponlop)
We are, I think, finally beginning to see the full flowering of a literature of true native Western Buddhism. By this I mean works written by Buddhists who are Westerners first and foremost, and whose understanding of both Western life and Buddhism complement each other. Brad Warner was one such writer: it was hard for an Akron, Ohio-born punk rocker turned ordained Soto Zen Buddhist not to have both his Buddhism and his Western-ism speak to each other. His books document all of that in a fun, accessible way for beginners, and perhaps also for experts who have gotten lost along the way.
Rebel Buddha is another well-written general introduction to Buddhism, by way of Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and for that reason alone is worth checking out for beginners. What makes it doubly interesting is how it attempts to approach Buddhism as something that is inherently transplanted from one culture to another. Buddhism has migrated from India to China, Korea, Japan, the rest of Asia, and into Europe and the United States, and along each step of the way has found ways to become a living part of the culture that accepted it. Read more
Tags: books Buddhism dharma review
Ignorance, Bliss, You Know The Drill Dept.
There's little that's more embarrassing than a intelligent person saying "I've never experienced X for myself, but I'm going to tell you why it's no good." Look no further than Time columnist Joel Stein shaking his head at the proliferation of teen-lit in the hands of adults, and sticking both feet in his mouth for an encore. Right, because as we all know, books for children have absolutely no intellectual substance.
The last time this happened was when Harold Bloom weighed in on Harry Potter, which he was proud to have remained uncontaminated by when he slammed it as well.
I cannot for the life of me understand how people can say things like this with a straight face. I know I've done it myself, before, a number of times, but I learn fast. I haven't read The Hunger Games, but I'll put a "yet" after that, too. It's not something I consider to be beneath me on principle. Given all the manga I read and take pretty seriously, I rather owe it to myself to have that attitude.
Tags: books fiction writing young-adult fiction
