The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist. 

I remember being intrigued by the title and the glassine cover of this doorstop when it was first released.  When I saw it some time later in a used bookstore, I decided to take a chance.  And after reading a couple of chapters, promptly let it sit on my bookshelf.  As the start of 2009 rolled around, I decided to give it another shot.  The plot seemed very Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell meetsThe Somnambulist - a mysterious cult of the elite, obsessed with ritualistic sex and strange mechanisms of blue glass - what's not to like? 

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence  by John Kessel.  I was lucky enough to recently snag an ARC of John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and other tales, courtesy of Library Thing's Early Reviewer's program. The back cover copy promises witty intersections with classic literature like Pride and Prejudice, The Wizard of Oz, and A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Subversive literary mash-ups seem to be all the rage today, and Oz doubly so.  The last few years have seen the release of a manga, Alan Moore's pornographic Lost Girls, the excellent science fiction Dorothy of Oz comic, and the lackluster SciFi channel's Tin Man.  The title story (Baum as in L. Frank) is unfortunately rather middle of the road, as such things go.  Dot, a liberated gal of the mid twentieth, takes our narrator on an underground ride to a strange dream space where wealth is theirs for the taking.  It's rather unfortunate that "Baum Plan," like many of the other mash-ups, has a rather indecisive ending.  Kessel has a knack for the entertaining, and the pages kept turning, whether I was reading about a time-travelling Orson Wells or Victor Frankenstein doing the dance of manners with the cast of Pride and Prejudice.  I was particularly impressed an amused by the ultra-short "The Red Phone," which surpasses Nicholson Baker's Vox in humor and sexiness.


The high point of the collection by far is Kessel's linked shorts about life on a moon colony.  The world-building is excellent enough to be nearly invisible, and his stories about men in a matriarchal society are compelling enough that I literally couldn't put it down once I started the cycle.
With this collection, Small Beer press further confirms its reputation for producing excellence in the science fiction short form.  I'll eagerly look for more as Kessel as an author, and continue to seek out new releases from this charmingly otherworldly imprint.

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis.  

Comics fans will be familiar with Ellis' irreverent and often filthy sense of humor. Crooked Little Vein is a quicker textual dose of the same, and despite the lack of images, no less graphic. A down and out detective with $3 and change to his name is one afternoon approached by powerful government figures and charged with recovering the Secret Constitution of the United States. (This is a document bound in the skin of an alien beaten to death by Benjamin Franklin, and traded by Nixon for the services of an asian prostitute.) Given the proverbial carte blanche, Mike hooks up with a polyamorous indie chick doing her thesis on the sexual underworld, and begins his journey across the US in search of the current owner of the book. At it's heart, this is a dirty road trip novel as only Ellis could write it – the outsider's perspective on the sometimes bizarre mix of morality and filth that the American landscape provides. The only drawback to this is that Ellis does seem to write analogs of himself fairly often, and Mike is no exception; this would be a problem if they weren't so damned funny.

  The Somnambulist.  I snagged an early review copy of this via LibraryThing's fantastic signup feature, liking the description of Victorian intrigue and the comparison to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  While it shares similarities of magic and setting with Susanna Clarke's masterpiece, it's a shorter and much less inspired lark, whose second half falls flat for want of more plot.

The Traveller by John Twelve Hawkes  Yet another book either influenced by or riding on the coattails of such "simulacra/simulation" media as The Matrix. A book-of-the-month club selection, much is made of the author's obscurity - there's no bio, only a note that he "lives off the grid," suggesting that his books are a loosely veiled fiction of his own life. All this aside, Traveller is a pretty decent vaguely sfnal adventure novel that takes itself a wee bit too seriously. I was also irked by the fact that this is the first book in a projected series (though not advertised as such), so it contains no real resolution. Whatever the pros and cons of the Matrix series as series, the first film was a self-contained unit; there's no reason why this couldn't be as well.

The Man With the Golden Torc.  

by Simon R. Green. Green first caught my eye with Shadows Fall, and his Nightside books, a sort of paranormal noir. I was surprised and amused to see this title show up on library shelves recently – like it sounds, it's a sort of magical James Bond parody. The main character's street name is Shamus Bond, but he's really known to those with power as Edwin Drood, a member of the mysterious cabal who rule the world. On the outs with his family, he must team up with the gorgeous anarchist witch Molly in order to clear his name and discover the dark secret surrounding his powerful ancestry. It's very tongue-in-cheek and an awful lot of fun – there are Q and M analogs, as well as sight-gags and nods to other classic sf and spy genre greats. It looks like Green's planning a series, if the last page of this is any indication. The next title is to be called (wait for it) Daemons are Forever. Great fun.

(I'm sorry to report that the UK audience once again got what I feel is a more appropriate cover.  Click through for comparison)

Spook Country by William Gibson. A William Gibson novel is one that I pick up these days with the intent to savor, and take a deliberately long time consuming in order to maximize my enjoyment of his language and commentary on consumerism. Spook Country, his latest, is a direct successor to Pattern Recognition (not to be confused with a sequel), but it is also the least sfnal of any Gibson book yet. This is less indicative of the mainstreaming of science fiction authors, than the fact that we've finally caught up with the imagined capitalist wonderhorrors; we've lost the fear of Japanese takeovers and the oil crisis that fueled the cyberpunk movement of the 80s. We are living in the future, and the future is William Gibsonland.

Selling Out by Justina Robson.  

This second entry in Robson's Quantum Gravity series is less a discrete unit than the first, but no less fun. After the events of Keeping It Real, cyberheroine Lila Black journeys to Demonia, a land where Hell is ever-present, and excess has been elevated to high art. Robson introduces several new characters, and gives a bit of insight into Zal's transformation as he undergoes his own dark odyssey. My only complaint is that the book, like many second series novels, doesn't stand alone as a complete story. It's no great pain to read the first, but when something like this ends so abruptly, I can only hope the next book is quickly forthcoming.

As some of you might know from the sort of craft books I sometimes review, I'm a knitter and longtime crafter, and I'm always looking for something to do while knitting to maximize the effective use of my time. Sometimes this takes the form of visual entertainment like television and movies, but as a huge reader, I also occasionally want something to satisfy my reading fix. For awhile I listened to audiobooks, but most readings even of relatively short novels can translate to many more hours than I'd have spent on silent reading. Audiobooks also don't give you as much of an opportunity to pause and switch to something else without sacrificing a break in the story. Enter short fiction. I'd been told more than once about Escape Pod, an audio podcast market a member of my writing group had garnered successful sales from.

(hit 'read more')

But What of Earth?  by Piers Anthony.  

This is a strange and interesting cultural artefact, and it begs the question of whether something like this could happen in the bloggy web 2.0 internet age. See, this is a Piers Anthony novel where at least half of the book's content is Anthony railing at the publishing industry and slamming his copyeditors for their perceived failings. The book's broken up into three sections – an introduction, to explain what the hell is going on with the presentation, the text of the novel itself (a Heinleinian back to nature free-Earth screed), and a 'Notes' section where he comments rather snarkily against his copyeditors and the unnecessary cuts.