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Fantasy Author Roundtable
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WHAT
TO GIVE, WHAT TO GET 2001: Begin Your Holiday Shopping With Us
SCI-FI/FANTASY
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AMERICAN GODS
by Neil Gaiman
William Morrow
ISBN: 0380973650
Reading Neil Gaiman can cause you to alter your behavior. Ever since reading Gaiman's classic comic book series, THE SANDMAN --- I can't remember exactly which of the early issues it was, #2 or #4 maybe --- where he took one of DC's really bad comic book bad guys and turned him loose in a diner and...well, I don't sit with my back to the door anymore.
Gaiman has been doing more with novels than with comic books lately, demonstrating along the way that he can pretty well work in any media that he pleases and almost instantly be better than anyone else. He demonstrates this again with AMERICAN GODS.
AMERICAN GODS is going to alter behaviors. It will get people who haven't been reading much lately reading again. It will inspire would-be writers to blow the dust off of those spiral notebooks or open up the laptop and give it a shot; Gaiman makes producing incredible, groundbreaking work look all so easy. At the same time, those of us who have been trying to put something together in bits and pieces will give up after reading AMERICAN GODS; I mean, what's the point? No one will ever come up with anything this good again. AMERICAN GODS, in our own humble age, is a bona fide classic, a book that people will be giving each other in leather-bound editions 20, 30 years from now.
America is the land of second chances. And third, fourth, and fifth chances, too, if you play things right. You can invent and reinvent yourself, more than once or twice. Shadow is about to find this out. Shadow has been doing time in prison, counting the days until he gets out, gets back to his beautiful, too good to be true wife Laura, and back to his old job, which his best friend is holding for him. Everything he is waiting for, however, is swept away in an instant on the eve of his release. On his way home from prison, Shadow meets an enigmatic grifter who calls himself Mr. Wednesday and who seems to know all-too-much about Shadow. When Wednesday offers Shadow a job, he reluctantly accepts; he has nothing left to lose. His employment leads to a wild night's ride that continues for months, a road trip across the heart, land, and soul of America, off the beaten path and into the rough, "behind the curtain," if you will, where the audience never goes and really does not belong.
Shadow learns that everyone, from Wednesday to his wife Laura to himself, has secrets, and that some secrets need to be revealed and others are better buried forever. What is more significant, however, is that Wednesday is leading Shadow into the midst of the ending of a conflict that predates humanity and which may result in an outcome without a winner. Along the way, Shadow --- and the reader --- is shown an America that is readily familiar but at the same time disturbingly alien. This is the America that lurks underneath the billboards for roadside attractions, at the woods edge, at the rest stop, the one at the edge of your visual periphery, more sensed than seen.
Gaiman quite modestly acknowledges other authors who, he says, tackled the themes of AMERICAN GODS before he ever got to them. Gaiman not only tackles the themes --- the unseen seen, the players and movers and shakers behind the curtains --- but brings them down. There are also nods to Gaiman's comic book background: a quick tribute to Frank Miller's RONIN and one of Marvel's most enduring books, and Gaiman's narrative flows so well that I could almost see his tale as sequential art, panel for panel, as it unfolded. And when I finished I was left with the urge, still with me as I write this, to hop into my car and motor west and south, looking for the Rock House and Mr. Wednesday and Easter and Low-Key and hoping that I would not find them. AMERICAN GODS, simply put, is a masterpiece. You're gonna love it and never forget it.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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ANGRY YOUNG SPACEMAN
by Jim Munroe
Four Walls Eight Windows
ISBN: 1568582080
The great thing about science fiction is how it turns a sledgehammer into a scalpel. The most stubborn, crude, hammered-in argument, when transported to an alternate universe, can become subtle and penetrating. If aggressive propaganda makes you want to clap your hands over your ears, a good sci-fi novel with the same message might instead have you slapping your forehead with the obvious rightness of it all. And if that novel is rich and well-written enough to stand on its own, message or no message, that's even better.
Canadian author Jim Munroe has had years of practice hitting readers over the head with unassailably lefty political views. He worked as managing editor at Adbusters before completing his first novel, FLYBOY ACTION FIGURE COMES WITH GASMASK, in 1999. He also has a website, NoMediaKings.org, primarily devoted to subverting the elephantine powers-that-be of the publishing industry. This background makes his second novel, ANGRY YOUNG SPACEMAN, all the more impressive: Munroe so deftly weaves progressive politics into an engrossing story that you barely notice he's doing it.
It helps, of course, that the universe of ANGRY YOUNG SPACEMAN is basically an extrapolated, worst-case-scenario version of our own. Earth has won political ownership of the universe, the English language is spreading like a virus across alien galaxies, and even remote cultures embrace Earth-centric pop songs and human-shaped dolls. It's globalization taken to the extreme. The Earth really is paved; all its species save humans are dead. Toronto is a suburb of New York. Film stars come from the moon colony, where low gravity breeds pale creatures of delicate beauty. Flying saucers are retro. In place of punk rock, there's "pug," a subculture centered on streetfighting.
Sam, the angry young spaceman of the title, is a pug himself; his watch even has a handy "aggrometer" to monitor his hostility levels. But he doesn't want to be a pug forever, and he certainly doesn't want to work for his reprehensibly capitalist/imperialist mother, who "renovates" entire planets over the phone on her lunch breaks. (Planet renovation seems to be the urban renewal of the future.) So he takes an assignment as an English teacher on the distant planet Octavia, where the locals have tentacles and live underwater. Sam --- a smart, self-deprecating, very likable guy --- makes some friends, learns a lot, meets a girl and stumbles through enough awkward culture-shock episodes to keep the book clipping along at a fast pace. In the process, he sneaks in some charmingly matter-of-fact observations on Earth's shortsighted arrogance that are far more convincing than any directly dogmatic argument could be.
--- Reviewed by Becky Olshen
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DHALGREN
by Samuel R. Delany
Vintage
ISBN: 0375706682
Where to start with DHALGREN? With a history lesson...
DHALGREN was initially published in 1974 by Bantam Books. The science fiction genre was flush with energy for a number of reasons, and Bantam hired Frederik Pohl (who even then was a grand master in the field) to find new and original science fiction novels and publish them under its imprint with the legend "A Frederik Pohl Book," or something like that. A great idea. A couple of these were published; then along came...DHALGREN by Samuel R. Delany.
Sam Delany at that point in time was one of the genre's young lions. He was racking up awards by the wheelbarrow full for brilliant novels like NOVA and THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION and for short stories that bounced around in your brain long after you finished them, novels and stories that combined hard science with social problems that no one even dreamed of but somehow knew were coming. The word was that he was working on a massive new novel that would set the genre on its ear; then along came...DHALGREN.
Several months after DHALGREN was published I attended a science fiction convention that featured a panel discussion consisting of Pohl; Harlan Ellison, at the most prolific and creative high point of his career; and Joe Haldeman, who had published a couple of excellent books at that point and was highly regarded as an up-and-comer. One of the many nebbishes among those assembled asked the panel "What did you think of DHALGREN?" Ellison harped, "I hated it!", Haldeman shrugged and said, "I read it," and Pohl, looking down his nose at those assembled, answered, "I bought it." Whether or not he was sold a bill of goods is still a matter of contention today.
DHALGREN is a novel that is full of contradictions, conundrums, and conflicting emotions. I hated the book the first time I read it, over a quarter-century ago. I kept reading, waiting for something to happen, something to explain what was going on to these strange people who were somehow familiar, living in a city at the brink of chaos at the end of time, where natural laws were quietly being turned on their head. And it never happened. Reading it seemed to have been the biggest waste of time. The effects of reading DHALGREN resonate within my head to this day. I never read another of Delany's books again, after having been a major fan of his for years. And yet...I could still remember passages from the book, almost verbatim, years after reading them once. The book, the narrative, haunted like a nightmare you can't quite remember but is still oddly disturbing. So, about once a decade, I return to DHALGREN.
What is DHALGREN about? William Gibson's introduction to the new Vintage edition is as good and as honest as any I've ever read. Gibson admits that he doesn't understand DHALGREN and that it probably isn't meant to be understood. He describes it as a "prose city" and in so doing pretty much nails the book dead on. DHALGREN takes place in an urban landscape where the laws of nature have broken down and the laws of mankind have as well; there is no way to tell which breakdown preceded the other. It begins in medias res and ends the same way. The characters wander through its mad landscape with no particular effect, with nothing in particular to propel them along, other than the overriding drive to continue existence. Yet...Delany's skills as a wordsmith cannot be denied. The prose in DHALGREN is undeniably wonderful, a feast, an embarrassment of riches.
Taken as an appreciation of the power of language in the hands of a master, DHALGREN has few peers. As a story? Don't expect to understand it. It is simply there, an account, if you will, of a world and lives that may or may not exist, that may happen or may have happened already. At 800 pages, it is worth the time and effort for the beauty of its language.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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THE OTHER WIND
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Harcourt, Inc.
ISBN: 0151006849
With everything that is going on, it is great to have the opportunity to step between the pages of a book and experience a world in which right and wrong are truly defined, in which men and women respect each other, in which evil never wins over good. Welcome to Earthsea, the fictional paradise of Ursula K. Le Guin's formidable series. After five go-rounds, she's back again. "It's been a joy for me to go back to Earthsea and find it still there, entirely familiar, and yet changed and still changing," the author herself has proclaimed. And so will a legion of her fans.
A kiss between the worlds of the living and of the dead draws the dead towards Earthsea. The purveyors of this kiss, the sorcerer Alder and his young wife, who died a tragically early death, have a love that will last forever. However, if Alder, who dreams of this kiss night after night, continues to enjoy his reveries, the dead may be able to enter Earthsea through him, a fate he does not wish to fulfill. Seeking help, he rounds up a strange assembly of associates to combat them --- and the lives of all those in Earthsea fall into his hands.
Once you get past the names, like a checklist of Dostoyevsky-ish confusions, you will recognize mere humanity in the faces of all that inhabit Earthsea. And yet, thanks to Le Guin's brilliantly subversive prose --- messages carried in the simple guise of a well-crafted and proficient story --- the struggles of these peoples will come to represent something very personal to each reader. Such is Le Guin's prolific ability to draw an audience in, keep them there and haunt their waking and dreaming states thereafter. THE OTHER WIND is sure to entertain, provoke and enrich the minds of all who take in its vast history.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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FANTASY OF THE 20TH CENTURY: An Illustrated History
by Randy Broecker
Collectors Press
ISBN: 1888054522
In this beautifully illustrated book, author Broecker reveals the evolution of the fantasy story, from myths and fables to comics and films. The scope of Broecker's history makes this a must for all fantasy and pop culture fans --- and a lovely addition to any library.
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DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES TRILOGY GIFT SET
by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Wizards of the Coast
ISBN: 0786926813
New to the genre of fantasy and don't know where to start? This is the trilogy that spawned the Dragonlance juggernaut and is a must read before you delve into any of Weis and Hickman's other books --- most of which are companions to this series. Have a teen on your list who has outgrown Harry Potter but still wants a fantasy story? Pick up this set.
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Copyright 2001, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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