1.) I hate to admit that I’m looking forward to the final Wheel of Time book… but I’m looking forward to the final Wheel of Time book. Part of it is that, at times, I am something of a Great Fantasy Moments junkie, much like everyone raised on Tolkien. (“And Morgoth came.” Three little words but they make the entire Silmarillion, which is otherwise at best… shall we say an imperfect work.) I have yet to read Patrick Rothfuss, but otherwise among modern fantasy authors, Jordan and George R.R. Martin are the only epicky fantasy authors who can come anywhere near to the amount of fuckyeah Tolkien could drop down to a single sentence, which is, let’s be honest, a large part of their appeal.

I mean, I get it. I get that Jordan’s writing veers sharply between “a little bit sexist” and “whoa lordy that’s sexist.” I get that there are between two and four books in the middle of it where nothing happens, and that number really only varies by how forgiving you are. I get that Jordan’s allegories are so sheerly clever that sometimes they’re just kind of silly. And did I mention the sexism? Because lordy. But the Wheel of Time has had some truly fantastic moments of fuckyeah: the charge of the heroes in book two, the defense of Emond’s Field in book four, the first attack of the Asha’man in book six, pretty much the whole of book eleven. I can forgive a lot for that.

(And yes, I get that Brandon Sanderson deserves lots of credit for finishing the series off, but I don’t like his other stuff that much.)

2.) Does anybody else ever look at a chain of books by a single author on their shelf and then think “why is that it?” Sometimes it’s self-evident, of course: there aren’t any more Flashman novels because George Macdonald Fraser died, and every time I see my Flashman books I think “can’t wait for the next – oh.” (Granted, every time I see my Flashman books I also think “I really need to get my Flashmans all in the same edition so they look pretty,” but then I realize that that is kind of silly and if I want to give my money away there are poor people in need of soup.)

But Christopher Moore. Why is my Christopher Moore broken up? There are at least three Christopher Moore books I don’t have yet, and I love all his books. Why haven’t I gotten around to reading them? I mean, yes, I always have a pile of books that I’ve bought and yet to read. I’m one of those sorts of people who buy books and then forget to read them: it doesn’t help having the flagship store of an excellent and gigantic used bookstore chain just down the street from me, letting me buy quality books for a few bucks a pop. But this isn’t the “not enough time in your life to read everything that’s worth reading” problem that keeps me from finishing all that Dostoyevsky, or that Complete Robert E. Howard Conan collection, or Everything Is Illuminated1. We’re talking here about books by an author I like and I know I actively want to keep reading. What the hell is up with that?

See also: Walter Mosley, Michael Chabon, Mil Millington, Guy Gavriel Kay.234

And then, of course, there’s P.J. O’Rourke, who I stopped reading when he stopped being funny, which was a long time ago. Which is a shame, because P.J.’s early stuff is fantastic.

3.) Does anybody else have a lot of one-offs? Books by authors you really liked and then felt no need to keep reading that person’s stuff? It’s like the literary equivalent of having that one Beta Band single on your iPod. And Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, Run by Douglas E. Winter, Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke – these are all great books and I’m glad they’re on my shelf and I won’t be getting rid of them any time soon, but I’m not gonna check out those authors’ other works either, and I can’t think of a good reason why.

4.) Why the hell do I still have a copy of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young?

5.) I’m overdue for a culling, obviously, which can be so depressing sometimes. I mean, surely someone will get more love and inspiration from All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman, and it’s just gathering dust, but I don’t want to get rid of it. Those Mick Foley memoirs? Print The Legend, that fantastic John Ford biography? Argh. I know I will never read these books again, but they need to make room for new books. I mean, A Memory of Light is gonna be like sixty billion pages. I’d need to ditch six copies of Best Seat in the House, Spike Lee’s entertaining-but-uneven basketball memoir, in order to make room so that I can find out what the hell happens to Rand Al’Thor.5

I also have trouble culling because one of my favorite types of book is the oddball history – things like Joel Glenn Brunner’s The Emperors of Chocolate or Charlatan by Pope Brock or For All The Tea In China by Sarah Rose. I can never get rid of this sort of book, because I always think “well, there are ideas in here and I am building a weird writer’s reference library and suchlike, it is an asset.” Which means they just accumulate, unceasingly. And I must be fine with this.

1. Which I bought either because I really liked the cover or because I saw maybe twenty minutes of the film adaptation and thought “well, I might read the book based on this.” [↩]
2. Kay can also do epic fantasy fuckyeah like nobody’s business, but hasn’t really been interested in doing it for years. Which is a shame, because if you’ve read The Fionovar Tapestry you know Kay can bring the fuckyeah. [↩]
3. The CBC should spend a lot of money on a miniseries adaptation of those books. [↩]
4. Ha! I just suggested that the CBC spend lots of money on something! I’m hilarious! [↩]
5. Well, Perrin and Mat, actually. I don’t really care about Rand. Rand is boring. [↩]

Last week…okay, this week, but it was meant to be last week…I talked a bit about Terry Pratchett’s latest novels, and someone suggested in the comments that I should write a “So You Want To Get Into Discworld” post. This is actually a really good idea; the question of “Where do you start with the Discworld books?” is a pretty common one among fans of the series. Much in the same way as “Doctor Who”, in fact, and much for the same reasons; both series are very long (32 seasons of Doctor Who, 38 Discworld novels), both have very loose continuity that enables you to jump in at different points (lots of Doctor Who fans have started with “Rose”, lots of Discworld fans have started with “The Wee Free Men”) and both have beginnings that aren’t necessarily the best in their series (Doctor Who starts with a relatively-inaccessible black-and-white episode from the infancy of television, while Discworld’s first book was written as a random fantasy parody, and is something of a hodge-podge of ideas.) But as both are tremendously rewarding to the long-term fan, both are worth getting into. So where do you start?

With “The Robots of Death”, a classic Fourth Doctor…no, wait. Sorry. Got a bit mixed up there. You start reading the Discworld novels with the understanding that you really do not need to read them in order. It helps you to understand a few details, such as why the Librarian at the greatest institution of magical learning on the Disc is inconveniently stuck in the form of an orangutan, and why the Thieves’ Guild of Ankh-Morpork is a fully-licensed and authorized body of law enforcement, but it’s not actually necessary. Each book is fully stand-alone, they frequently feature different casts, and Pratchett is one of the best expository writers in the business, so you should be pretty good to go no matter what point you pick to jump in.

That said, there are better spots to jump in than the first book. It’s interesting, and you’ll want to come back to it sooner or later to catch up on some of the things he’s helpful enough to establish at the beginning, but it’s also very clearly Pratchett’s juvenalia, and Rincewind (the main character of the first couple of books) is probably his least likeable protagonist. Not that he’s unlikeable, but he’s a cynic and a coward and really only has one bona fide moment of true heroism in the roughly seven books he stars in. So we can skip ahead a bit, past the first five books that Pratchett uses to establish the concept in his own mind and figure out what he wants to do with the fictional universe he’s creating as he goes.

Which means that the first book to start with is ‘Wyrd Sisters’. It’s a sharp, funny, easily accessible book that satirizes Shakespeare (the plot is sort of a bizarre remix/mashup of Macbeth, with the witches as heroes and the king as a villain) while establishing a lot of the core concepts and characters that you’ll see recur over the course of the series. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and the kingdom of Lancre all get an excellent introduction for the casual reader (even though Granny Weatherwax has previously appeared.)

From there, you can comfortably read ‘Pyramids’, ‘Guards! Guards!’ (the novel that introduces the City Watch, probably the best-loved characters by fans)…skip ‘Faust Eric’, which is a pretty direct sequel to one of the first five books, but then you can read the next six in a row (‘Moving Pictures’, ‘Reaper Man’, ‘Witches Abroad’, ‘Small Gods’, ‘Lords and Ladies’, ‘Men At Arms’.)

Now go back and read the first five. By this time you’ll be attached enough to the characters that you’ll feel comfortable reading through the first two (slightly sloggy) novels, and by ‘Equal Rites’ Pratchett’s writing skill has evolved to the point where you’re reading perfectly serviceable fantasy novels. ‘Mort’ is excellent (and has sometimes been my advised starting spot), and ‘Sourcery’, while a little rough in places, does answer a lot of questions you might have had about how magic works on the Disc.

Then go back and read the one you skipped, and pick up again with ‘Soul Music’. Not only will you understand pretty quickly why I suggested going back and reading the early books (‘Soul Music’ and ‘Interesting Times’ are fairly direct sequels to the earliest books) but you’ll also be struck by how much Pratchett has evolved as a writer in those first eleven years. He went from being a good writer to being a truly great writer, and as you continue onwards, you’ll be impressed even more. All of them are worth reading, and by the end, you’ll be just as much of a fan as I am.

And at some point, you’ll want to read them all over again from the beginning…

My book buying budget has been tight of late, so I just recently had the chance to sit down with Terry Pratchett’s most recent Discworld books. Before I begin discussing them, let me just say that I do believe Terry Pratchett to be the finest writer I have ever had the privilege of reading. This is no small compliment; I have read great authors from Austen to Hemingway and playwrights from Shakespeare to Miller, and Pratchett is consistently sharp, clever, witty, endlessly readable and re-readable…and more than that, he is filled with a deep and incisive understanding of what makes human beings people. Reading his biting and yet tremendously loving satire has given me, I think, a deeper understanding of human nature, both the good and the bad of it, and I would recommend his works to anyone and everyone.

And perhaps that’s why it has been such a bittersweet experience, reading his latest work. Anyone who cares even a little about Pratchett is already aware of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and it’s hard not to read his latest books (one in the ‘Young Adult’ line of Discworld novels, one in the main line, although honestly Pratchett never writes down to kids and never writes too inaccessibly for adults, meaning that the distinction seems mainly to be where they’re filed in the bookstore) without feeling like Pratchett is all too aware of it as well. Not that it’s affected his writing; I heard one or two people tell me that they felt like ‘Unseen Academicals’ was a little less sharp than his other books, but I didn’t feel that at all when I read it. Lord knows that if the man is feeling the effects of Alzheimer’s in his writing, there are a lot of writers out there (myself included) who should feel tremendously humbled that he still writes circles around us.

But it is clear that Pratchett knows that there won’t be that many Discworld novels. Having written for decades in an open-ended universe of his own creation with no particular destination in mind, it finally feels as if Pratchett is saying, “Time to wrap things up, I think.” That’s not to say he’s planning a ‘last’ Discworld novel; it’s more that he’s keenly aware that each Discworld novel now could be the last, and he’s writing them as though he won’t get to say anything more on the topic.

And so, in ‘Unseen Academicals’, we get something of a summation of the theme he’s been working on for quite some time; overtly, since ‘The Truth’, but on many levels he’s been heading there ever since ‘The Colour of Magic’. This is about the transformation of Ankh-Morpork (and by extension the entire Disc) from a medieval “fantasy kingdom” straight out of the cod-Tolkien Dark Ages that every third goddamned fantasy universe seems to exist in, through to a modern city with rules and laws and what we laughingly refer to as “civilization”. (“Because Ankh-Morpork cares deeply about the right of all oppressed peoples to govern themselves! Oh, it must be the way I tell them.”) Pratchett stopped hitting the “it was all evil magic and the hero has stopped it and things are back to normal” reset button a long time ago, and in ‘Unseen Academicals’, we finally get the ultimate logical extension of his grand theme; who’s to say that even a creature created by dark magic specifically to be evil can’t be good if given the chance? Pratchett finally makes the break with Tolkien clear and clean. Our problems will not be solved with the return of the king, the orcs are not genetically imprinted with the sins of their ancestors, and wizards don’t always know better than everyone else. Your future is what you make it. So make it something worth being proud of when it’s your past.

Over in ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’, meanwhile, he’s summing up the journey of Tiffany Aching from girl to woman and from apprentice to witch. Tiffany long ago took over the role of “principal witch” in the Discworld books, primarily because Granny Weatherwax had become so absurdly powerful and dangerous that she practically had to fade into the background and become a wise old mentor just to keep the book going beyond thirty pages. (Anyone planning to burn Granny Weatherwax as a witch would wind up having the first mob in history that went home after a sharp scolding.) So here we get a novel that could stand quite serviceably as the culmination of that journey, even if we wind up hearing more about her as an adult, and we also get old-home guest appearances from just about every witch to appear in the books before (including one I was very surprised by. Although I admit to wishing Magrat had gotten more to do.)

The books are excellent as always, and of course I recommend them; anyone who’s not reading Terry Pratchett should be, because otherwise you’re missing out on some excellent writing. But these are a little bid sad, I think, because they feel like they could be the last.

Been a busy weekend, but let’s face it, I had to get to this sooner or later. I can’t talk about DC’s greatest heroes winding up at J.K. Rowling’s magical wizard academy without talking about Marvel’s big heroes and where they’d wind up. (I’d discuss the X-Men, but let’s face it, they already are at a school for people with strange and unusual powers run by a manipulative old guy who’s training them to use their powers to fight evil. The only difference is that Dumbledore didn’t generally chuck bowling balls at people’s heads to test their reflexes.) So who would wind up in which house? Who am I picking as an “Avengers” lineup? Let’s find out!

Captain America: An obvious choice for an Avenger, but a less obvious decision over which house he winds up in. On the one hand, you can’t question the courage of the star-spangled Avenger; this is a guy who wanted to join World War II before it even started, because despite the fact that he weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he wanted to go sock Hitler on the jaw. And that’s before you even get into the “standing toe-to-toe with Thanos despite Thanos having the Infinity Gauntlet and Cap having his fighting spirit” thing. But courage, while it is an important trait of Cap, is not his defining trait.

The recent Cap movie actually showed it best, in the scenes between Steve Rogers and Professor Erskine (some of the best scenes in a great movie.) Cap doesn’t join up because he wants to go out and prove his courage fighting Nazis, he joins up because he believes strongly that he should stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves and it never even occurs to him that he’s one of them. He joins out of a sense of duty to protect others, and if that’s not Hufflepuff, I don’t know what is.

Iron Man: Lately, of course, it seems like Tony is a prime candidate for Slytherin; somewhere around the time he conquered his alcoholism, desperate writers have settled on “asshole control freak tries to use technology to control his surroundings and finds out the hard way just how badly that turns out” as his default story arc. (That is, when he’s not being mind controlled to kill lots of people. You begin to understand why they rebooted him three times.) But underlying the whole desire to control is a naive, almost pathetic belief that he can solve all his problems just by inventing cool enough stuff that it will fix everyone’s problems in the whole world. Tony Stark thinks that if he can create a better process, a better system, then he can create a better humanity. This belief that intelligence, properly applied, can solve any problem makes him a perfect Ravenclaw!

Thor: Thor routinely goes out and fights giants. Because he can. You’d just have to wave the Sorting Hat in his general direction to hear “GRYFFINDOR!” shouted out in the Great Hall.

Hawkeye: He’s one of my all-time favorite characters and a staple Avenger (who has, in my personal opinion, been mishandled worse under the Quesada/Bendis era of the series worse than any other character in the entire franchise, and that includes the decision to make Power Man and Iron Fist Avengers.) He’s also a joyously uncomplicated character, a brash manchild who found purpose and meaning to his life by joining the Avengers and adopting their ideals as his own. Arguably, Hawkeye’s turn under the Sorting Hat would involve a long, telepathic argument over whether or not they should just make a fifth house, because it’s downright insulting to stick Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in a bunch of lesser outfits. But eventually, the Sorting Hat would decide that a guy who deliberately forgoes Hank Pym’s growth serum to  battle mad gods and alien armadas armed with a bow and arrows belongs in Gryffindor.

Hank Pym: Okay, maybe Hank Pym was handled worse by Bendis than any other character…let’s call it a toss-up, okay? (Yes, I have issues with Bendis’ handling of the classic Avengers characters. Specifically, I have several hundred issues, and all of them establish clear character beats that Bendis ignores because paying attention to established characterization takes up time he could be using to plot his latest three-issue long halting conversation.) The point is, Hank Pym’s defining character trait isn’t anger or emotional instability. He had a major nervous breakdown at one point that caused him to lash out against his friends and loved ones, but what caused that breakdown was the stress of trying to be a superhero even though he was never really cut out for it. He wanted to be a scientist, helping people through his inventions instead of hitting people, but duty to the people he cared about kept calling him back to it. It’s that sense of dedication to the Avengers that makes the Sorting Hat choose Hufflepuff over Ravenclaw, even though it might take a while to choose.

Wasp: Let’s see. Janet became a superhero because her father died and her new boyfriend suggested she help him avenge that death (two emotional connections early on.) She spent her free time volunteering at a local hospital reading to sick children (duty to the helpless.) She met a bunch of superheroes and immediately suggested they all bond together into a common group (more dedication to community and family.) She eventually wound up becoming the chairwoman of the Avengers–not because she was ambitious, but because a chairwoman was needed and it was time for her to step up and help the team. She eventually sacrificed herself…um, sort of, because Thor did something, or…*sigh* Bendis… *sigh* The point is, when you look at the Wasp’s career, she’s always been about dedication to her large, self-made, extended family. She might never have become a hero if she’d been left to her own devices, but she cares about heroes enough to want to help them out. She’s a Hufflepuff if there ever was one.

Bonus non-Avenger characters! While I will maintain, to my dying day, that the inclusion of Spider-Man and Wolverine into the ranks of the Avengers was a colossal mistake that shows that Bendis not only never understood any of the characters he was writing, he actually never understood the core concept of the book he took over and should not have been allowed near the series with a ten-foot pole, I also know that people probably want to know where they wound up. So for the record, Spidey‘s a classic Hufflepuff (“with great power must come great responsibility”), while Wolverine would be a Gryffindor until he got expelled for sneaking non-butter-beer into the dorms and wound up getting kept by Hagrid as a pet.

Which still leaves a lot of Avengers. Let’s face it, unlike the JLA, the Avengers has a constantly fluctuating line-up; feel free to add your favorite Avengers in the comments!

Hey, it could happen. The DCU is big, it’s got magical, and the Big Two comics companies have a long and stories tradition of incorporating their tie-in comics wholesale into their fictional universe so that they can get the cheap sales hit of crossing over their established heroes with the new corporate icon on the block. (Which is why they can’t reprint Marvel Two-In-One #21 and Power Man and Iron Fist #73, but that’s another long, angry post.) Sure, the money-printing engine that is a comic-book adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s work remains inexplicably absent, but she and her devotion to actually maintaining the integrity of her fictional characters can’t live forever. Someday there’s going to be a JLA/Harry Potter comic. And the question then is, who gets sorted into what house?

Superman, like Harry himself, would be a good choice for more than one house. His steely-hard integrity and devotion to friends like Jimmy and Lois (when he’s not in the Silver Age and “teaching them a lesson” about one thing or another by subjecting them to absurd robot-double based humiliations) could land him in Hufflepuff, while his intellect would also make him a good fit in Ravenclaw. (Although that’s an element of the character that’s been played down post-Byrne reboot…it used to be that Superman used the Fortress of Solitude to do his own elaborate experiments too dangerous or complex to be carried out in labs on inhabited continents, but these days he mostly subcontracts out the “being smart” to STARLabs.) But ultimately, Superman is someone who isn’t afraid of anything. It’s what makes him such an inspirational superhero; he’s what we could be if we were freed of our insecurities and vulnerabilities. And it’s what would make him an excellent Gryffindor!

Batman, of course, has already been covered with devastating accuracy by Chris Sims. I’d recap his logic here, but that’s what links are all about; suffice to say that he’s dead right, and Batman would be in Ravenclaw. (Where he would be joined by Batgirl, Oracle and at least one or two Robins, if the crossover was big enough.)

Wonder Woman is interesting, because while she’s every bit as brave and heroic as Superman, what defines them as different is Wonder Woman’s boundless compassion. She’s always been more interested in reforming villains and showing them a better way to live (anyone remember the Golden Age Paula von Gunther?) It’d be pretty easy to see her and Helga Hufflepuff commiserating on the plight of those poor students scorned by the other three houses and making a commitment to ensure than nobody goes through Hogwarts alone. She understands that “loyalty” and “dedication” are more than just being a tireless worker or a good friend, but being someone anyone can rely on. Which is what makes her the best Hufflepuff!

Green Lantern has, of course, already been through a glorified version of the Sorting when he became Green Lantern. Sure, it was funny-colored aliens instead of battered old hats, but who knows what the Sorting Hat is actually made out of? It looks kinda leathery; maybe somewhere in the mists of time the four founders of Hogwarts skinned themselves a Guardian and made it into a hat, and the tradition just evolved from there. In any event, “fearless” as a requirement for Green Lantern-hood makes it pretty obvious that whether Hal, Kyle, John or Guy, they’d all be Gryffindor!

The Flash…Barry’s the easiest to categorize, but all of the Flashes over the years share a certain reliability and dependability to them. The different Flashes, no matter which one you’re talking about, never had any particular trauma in their past that made them “driven to dispense justice” (except in the TV show, of course…) They just got powers, looked at the world around them, and said, “Hey, I should help out with this.” For Barry, it was an extension of his job, and for Wally, it was an extension of his friendship with Barry. Jay shares the same matter-of-fact approach to heroism, the kind of steady and old-fashioned nature that would make them excellent Hufflepuffs!

Martian Manhunter is another very easy one; he’s classically been seen as the team’s tactician ever since the characters stopped being merely a collection of superheroes that followed a writing formula and started being an actual team that people wrote stories about. (Which was sometime in the 1970s, probably..) We see it clearest in Morrison’s JLA, but it’s usually Martian Manhunter who is coming up with the plan and telling everyone else (with his mind) how to get it done. As such, he’d be right at home with Batman in Ravenclaw! (Anyone who does not want to see a storyline where Batman and Martian Manhunter forge a group of teenage witches and wizards into a merciless, steel-hard magical justice dispensing machine has no poetry in their soul, dammit.)

Aquaman is unique among all the Justice League in that he’s actually more important in his “civilian” identity than in his superheroic one. As King of Atlantis, he is responsible for guiding the destiny of a nation and commanding its people…and while he’s at times a reluctant ruler, and he’s certainly no despot, he is nonetheless accustomed to being the leader of a nation. He has to set an agenda for a whole country, he has at times had to fight challengers to the throne, and even when dealing with his own teammates, you can tell that he expects them to follow his direction…and while you couldn’t say that it’s the only aspect of his character, any more than you could claim that Batman isn’t brave or Wonder Woman isn’t smart, Aquaman is a rare example of a good character whose strongest aspect is ambition. As such, he would be a fine example of something sadly lacking in Rowling’s actual novels…a good Slytherin!

There’s the basic seven; if you have thoughts on other DC characters and their treatment by the Sorting Hat, feel free to leave them in the comments!*

*Yes, it is distinctly possible that I’ve gone completely insane. As it’s the kind of insanity that leads to Batman giving ninja-training to a horde of telepathically-linked Ravenclaws, I make no apologies.

(Warning: mild spoilers for later books in the Song of Ice and Fire series.)

Well, technically I suppose this is also an open letter to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the producers of Game of Thrones. But if I said this was an open letter to them, everybody would just say “huh?” So it’s an open letter to George R. R. Martin instead. After all, he is The Man in this regard, I should think.

So: Game of Thrones. It’s wildly successful, a show that’s both extremely popular and critically acclaimed. HBO greenlit the second season while the first was just really starting to get going, and that’s good. I’ve got high hopes for seeing what you guys do with the big battle in A Clash of Kings, and I’m pleased to see who you’ve cast in the various major players showing up in book two. Really, I have no complaints with the show so far.

But right now, I’m thinking about your third season, when you’re more or less done with A Clash of Kings and have to move on to A Storm of Swords. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, come on. We’re working on season two right now. We don’t even know if there’s going to be a season three. Look what happened to Rome.” And yes, this is true. But I feel that someone has to bring up something about book three well in advance. Just so you can keep it in mind if and when it comes time to start working on season three, you see. It makes sense to start laying the groundwork now.

So. The show. It’s a great show. But, if there is one criticism you can make (other than the fact that Roz, while hot, is really kinda pointless other than being hot), it’s the fact that it’s… well…

…It’s a very white show, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong: I know that there are conventions and expectations of the genre. I know that people, when you tell them this is a show about knights and castles and swords, think that all of that equals white people. I don’t think the fact that your cast is almost entirely white is some kind of sin at all: far from it. Westeros is one culture within the world you’ve created, and it is a culture that is mostly white people. And that’s fine. It’s maybe a little irksome that the one distinctly non-white culture you’ve introduced to us so far is the Dothraki, and the problem of television needing visual shortcuts means you had to cut down a lot of the complexities in Dothraki culture when adapting from book to screen, but it’s understandable. The Dothraki are mostly off to one side now anyway. A Game of Thrones being a white-ass show is perfectly understandable in this context.

But in A Storm of Swords, you introduce Dorne to the world stage. Allow me to quote:

The salty Dornishmen were lithe and dark, with smooth olive skin and long black hair streaming in the wind. The sandy Dornishmen were even darker, their faces burned brown by the hot Dornish sun. They wound long scarfs around their helms to ward off sunstroke. The stony Dornishmen were biggest and fairest, sons of the Andals and the First Men, brown haired or blond, with faces that freckled or burned in the sun instead of browning.

If you took out the names and replaced them appropriately, this would describe the population of Iran well enough. Or most Arabic countries, for that matter, or northern African, or… well, you get the point. I’m sure I didn’t need to make it, G.R.R.M. After all, you wrote it. The point being: the Dornishmen are brown people. You describe Oberyn Martell as “saturnine, with thin arched brows above large eyes as black and shiny as pools of coal oil,” and later explicitly mention that his skin is dark. So that’s the point of this letter: when you’re casting season three, bear in mind that Dornishmen are, for the most part, brown folks. Cast accordingly.

And you might say “well, why do you need to tell me that? After all, I wrote the damn books. I know what Oberyn Martell looks like.” And that’s fair. But Hollywood has a track record in these sorts of affairs, and the track record is not good. Let us remember the debacle that was the live-action adaptation of Avatar, where white kids were hired to play characters that were distinctly not-at-all-white? (Worse, they were white kids of middling to little talent, which was just insulting to anybody who gives a damn about this sort of thing.) It’s common knowledge that nonwhite people other than Will Smith need not apply to be heroic protagonists in Hollywood these days.

And really, asking to let Dorne be Dorne isn’t pushing too hard against those preconceptions. The series is not called A Song of Ice and Dorne. House Martell may be pretty awesome, but they’re minor players in the story and we all know that. I’m just saying that you wisely decided that in your books, some of the noble houses of Westeros would be non-white. It would be a valuable thing, then, to extend that to the HBO series, and let people see that knights can be brown too.

Also, most importantly, it would let this dude be the Red Viper:

Right? Right? Of course I’m right.

The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. First in a seven-book series about young boys growing up in late 19th-century Utah (Catholics rather than Mormons, if you’re wondering), and specifically the adventures of an intelligent, indeed devious young boy and his little brother (who narrates). What is particularly great about these books is that the Great Brain, as he is called, is first and foremost a con artist; he isn’t especially malicious, but like most people he’s self-interested and uses his intelligence to get himself ahead in life, and often in unethical ways. This makes him more realistic than your average Encyclopedia Brown. However, because he’s not a bad person at heart (his cons, like the cons of most con-artist protagonists, are designed to play off the greed of his marks and therefore he can always justify the con to himself), when his adventures inevitably lead to something more threatening than rooking schoolkids out of their stuff, he makes an excellent hero – again, moreso than your average Encyclopedia Brown. The Great Brain books are smartly written and bring the 19th-century Utah setting to life remarkably well, and because of the period setting haven’t aged even slightly.

The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald by Clifford D. Hicks. The Alvin Fernald books have aged slightly (written in the 60s and set contemporaneously), but pair off as a nice comparison with the Great Brain books because both series are about smarter-than-average kids (Alvin frequently refers to his “Magnificent Brain”) who have adventures as a result of their smarts. Alvin is a more conventionally likeable hero than the Great Brain; most of his books feature Alvin getting into a situation by dint of his smarts – becoming mayor for a day, starting up his own TV newscast, and so forth – and then getting into an adventure as a result of that. The Wacky World veers away from that model by being a collection of shorter stories, mostly inspired pranks dreamed up by Alvin, some of which are quite sophisticated (an early instance of identity creation, for example, which seems eerily prescient and relevant now) and serves as a decent entry point for the series as a whole.

The Seventh Princess by Nick Sullivan. A brilliant little pageturner wherein a young girl finds herself transported from her schoolbus to a magical kingdom where she is informed she is now the princess of the kingdom. Except she’s the seventh princess – and nobody seems to want to tell her what happened to the first six. A self-driven female protagonist, some really great writing and a clever plot make this a must-read for any kid so far as I’m concerned. I’ve been told once or twice that this was the first book in a trilogy, but can find no trace of the other two even existing.

Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Snyder (still writing in her eighties) is nowadays best known for The Egypt Game and The Witches of Worm, both of which won her Newbery Awards, but these were always my favorites of her books: her biggest venture into science fiction, a trilogy about a future where humans escaping a war-torn Earth settled a new, low-gravity world with gigantic, enormous trees – and then couldn’t agree on how to proceed. The fallout from that decision seeds the entire story, which is uniquely nonviolent in its handling of conflict. At some point, some enterprising producer (probably Pixar) is going to realize that these three books are a megablockbuster children’s movie waiting to happen, so I advise everyone to get in on the ground floor and read them before that happens so you can get the literary experience first.

The Westing Game and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin. Speaking of film, The Westing Game has been adapted into a film – and disappointed, which is a shame because a good adaptation of it would be simply cracking. Both of these books are mysteries as well, but epic mysteries. Westing features a large cast, most of whom are the heirs of a murdered tycoon, trying to solve the mystery of who murdered him in order to claim his estate. Leon (Noel) is a quest-mystery as the heroine searches for her missing husband – whom she has never met – over the course of many years. Both novels play expertly with language and words, both to stimulate a young mind and to teach it about language. and both are entertaining; Leon (Noel) is a comedic farce and Westing a more serious thriller, but neither one anything less than engaging at every moment.1

The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel. The original cover of the book does it a terrible injustice, making it look like some dreadfully boring bog-standard kidslit. This is not that book; this is a deeply weird and highly dystopic novel about a literal war between teachers and kids, with actual battles and everything. An Orwellian vibe permeates the whole novel, and Kiesel ramps the absurdity up to twelve (eleven is for pussies) with each new chapter, as a gorilla-like sixth-grade girl jousts against the ultimate evil gym teacher in the climax of the book. And then Kiesel gets truly brave and has the kids lose. A sequel, Skinny Malinky and the War for Kidness, eventually got written in order to provide the requisite happy ending, and it’s good too, but I almost prefer the tiger-ending of the first book, as the hero learns what’s happened to his closest friends. Dark, dark, dark. And wonderful.

I Want To Go Home! and No Coins, Please by Gordon Korman. Both of these were written before Korman was out of high school, which should make you deeply jealous of Korman’s abilities. Korman’s early kidslit tends to be wildly farcical, but these two of his books are his most engaging because the farce emerges in each case from a wildly competent non-POV character, which for me makes the point that if Batman were to really exist he would bring us high comedy all the time. In I Want To Go Home!, the Batman kid is so good at absolutely everything camp-related that the only thing at camp that gives him any pleasure is escaping it repeatedly; in No Coins, Please the Batman kid is a wildly brilliant entrepreneur with a talent for bending laws, so that he ends a junior-kids auto-tour about a million dollars ahead of where he started. Korman has a gift for writing slapstick and making it resonate on the page, and for making ludicrous situations seem plausible; these are valuable talents given his plots.

Bone by Jeff Smith. Christ, how many times do I have to tell you people to read Bone before you do it already?

1. Raskin also had a fondness for footnotes that was positively Pratchettian, and my love of footnotes in fiction stems from her rather than Sir Terry. [↩]

Have you ever read one of those novels that makes you angry? I mean, angry in the sense of decrying the utter waste involved; the waste of a good idea at the hands of an inept author, the waste of a publisher’s time and effort in cultivating such a novel through to publication (to say nothing of the opportunity wasted by selecting this novel for publication instead of another), the waste of trees and fuel used to print the novel and cart it to bookstores, and last but not least, the waste of your time in reading a novel like Ravenous, by Ray Garton.

The sad part, I think, is the way the good idea at the core of the novel is utterly wasted. There is a good novel to be written with the idea of lycanthropy as a sexually-transmitted disease, and its spread through a small California town. The subtext of the hypocrisy and deceit involved in people’s sex lives, combined with the potent symbolism of the werewolf as the unrestrained id, has the potential to make for a good novel in the hands of a good author. But Garton can’t think of anything, anything at all interesting to do with the idea. His werewolves are mindless raping/killing machines, lumbering through the endlessly repetitive novel with as much interest as a boulder rolling down a hill. Anything that gets in their way is in trouble, characters either escape them or don’t, but they have no personality to speak of.

They share this trait, unfortunately, with the human characters in the novel, who seem to have one of three roles: 1) Get eaten, 2) become a werewolf, or 3) some combination of 1 & 2. The author is clearly trying to do a novel along the lines of “Salem’s Lot with werewolves” (and sadly, I suspect that was exactly what he sold to the publisher as his outline) but reading Ravenous illustrates why Stephen King is a multi-millionaire best-selling critically-acclaimed author, while Ray Garton will be forever trapped in mid-list horror potboiler hell: This shit be hard. Creating an interesting small town, investing its population with life and personality and conveying that to the reader, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of insight into human nature, and a genuine sympathy for the characters you’re writing about, even the unpleasant and unlikeable ones. As opposed to a mindset of, “‘Werewolves come into town and rape and kill everybody’ is about 64,991 words too short for a paperback novel. I need to pad this out a little.”

That’s really the worst thing about Garton’s characterization. As you might have noticed from my frequent use of the word “rape” in this review, there’s plenty of rape involved in the novel. I’d be tempted to call it misogynist, but I really believe that it’s more an example of the rote, stimulus/response approach to characterization in the book. Garton doesn’t have the skill, or more relevantly the energy to invest his werewolf chow with real personalities. So he relies on the short-hand manipulation of brutality; the character with an abusive husband has to be sympathetic, because she gets beat up. The husband, by contrast, has to be unsympathetic, because he’s a rapist. As far as Garton seems to be concerned, the question is settled; why bother giving them personalities after that? The world of Ravenous is divided up into victims and monsters, and that’s about as much effort as the author puts into it.

The novel does develop a bit of momentum around the middle, as the author finishes with the dull “slice of life” section and you begin to suspect that there might be a plot waiting in the wings, preparing to make its appearance, but ultimately this is a novel in which the red herring is the idea that something might happen other than the obvious. As you’re reading it, various ideas might occur to you for the direction the plot might take, but I guarantee you, you’re putting too much effort into it. Just think of the most predictable conclusion to a novel that’s nothing more than an exercise in pointless sadism, and you’ll have it right there.

Um, in case I’m not clear here, I’m not recommending the book.

Mitchell Hundred: The above article was written a while ago about fantasy novels, but a similar trend could also be identified in many forms of contemporary art (increasing gritty realism, morally ambiguous narrative, graphic description of unpleasant events, etc.). What do you make of the accusation made in the above article (that these pieces demean the genre and art as a whole)?

It’s wank, pure and simple. (I know, wank at Big Hollywood? Goodness gracious me!) Just for the sake of argument, let’s rattle off the bestselling fantasy authors of the past decade: Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Christopher Paolini, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin… are we seeing a trend here? The overwhelming trend in fantasy isn’t what the writer describes; it’s a push towards moral clarity to appeal to a young-adult audience. (And, in the case of Jordan, braid-tugging.) Even Martin, who’s probably the closest to what the author complains about, has very strongly moral characters in his books: Jon Snow, most of the Starks, many of the Night’s Watch, Davos, Daenerys… you can even make a case for Jaime Lannister.

What the author is complaining about is that the sort of sword-and-sorcery fantasy he likes (which he tokens to become all fantasy writing period) is getting gritty and unpleasant now, to which I respond “where were you when Stephen R. Donaldson started writing books in the late Seventies?” Hell, has he read any old Conan stories? Conan is not a nice person!

Nicodemus: Have you ever read the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher?

No. It’s one of my “get around to it” things. That list just keeps getting longer.

FistFullofFists: On a scale of sad to depressed, how sad are you to see stargate universe canceled?

Not at all. I mean, I’m sorry people who liked Stargate: Whatever lost out on a show, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like The Bachelor where the existence of the show is actively offensive. But I watched the movie and then I watched a few episodes of the first season of SG-1 and then I said, “well, that’s enough for me.”

Skemono: I think everyone would benefit from an essay on why Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.

Some people think Hawkman sucks because all he does is fly. This is erroneous. There are plenty of superheroes who “just fly,” and many of them are quite nifty, because flying is honestly pretty cool all by itself, and because it’s a natural progression for flying heroes who just fly to be more skillful fliers (Angel of the X-Men, for example, or Dawnstar in the LSH – yes, I know she has tracking powers too, but big deal) which gives them an additional niche. Hawkman, however, does not do this. What Hawkman does instead is be a dickhead: he’s the Token Conservative to Green Arrow’s Token Liberal (and Green Arrow is just as annoying as fucking Hawkman is) and it’s become his character thing to be a pompous, annoying douche.

On top of that, there are the melee weapons. In a setting where people can blow you up with eye lasers, melee weapons are stupid. More importantly, though, is that because they are stupid, writers have come up with justifications as to why they are not stupid which make them even stupider. I believe this reached its apex in Cry for Justice, wherein it was explained that Hawkman was “unpredictable” and a “berserker” and therefore Prometheus was worried about him for some reason, as if for some reason Prometheus could not just, like, shoot him.

And then there’s his origin story. Hawkman’s origin story has been so mangled that it is beyond belief, mostly because people wanted to “reconcile” Egyptian Hawkman and Space Hawkman into one character, which is stupid because it’s not like there’s some special ability you need to let you put on a flying belt and wings.

So basically everything about Hawkman sucks.

drasnianfrank: What are the best Dr. Strange issues to read (or issues that have Dr. Strange in them)?

Anything from the original Lee/Ditko run is good, but my soft spot is Roy Thomas’s run on the line; just gorgeous cosmic stuff, as you would expect from Thomas. “The Montesi Formula” story is truly excellent writing with mediocre art (and available in trade). Warren Ellis’ brief run on the character towards the end of Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme is well worth reading, as is Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s The Oath.

Just go with the Essentials, really: the B&W art actually, I think, improves the comics, since the lack of “hey look we’re otherworldly” colouring makes the book far more readable.

scarecrowprophet: I realised the original text for the first 30 ISWTLegion posts isn’t up, just the pictures and later commentary. Could you post the original text?

The original text largely isn’t worth reproducing. Remember, ISWTL started out as a series of joke posts; only towards the end did I start doing what I did with them later, exploring plot hooks and the like.

Cookie McCool: But then, I had a huge crush on Aquaman back then, too, so what the fuck did I know?

Hey, Aquaman is pretty cool when he’s done right. Which isn’t often (WHERE IS HIS BEARD, DAMMIT? HE LOOKS TEN THOUSAND TIMES MORE AWESOME WITH A BEARD), but hey.

JL: What’s the status of that Novella? I really liked what I read and the hook was golden.

Novel, not novella; it’s on hold while I try to get a lot of other things done. I’m hoping to finish it by the end of the year, but then again I said that last year. (I have a lot of sympathy for George R.R. Martin.)

Once upon a time, there was a book series called “Doctor Who”. (You might have heard me mention it from time to time.) It was based on the then-defunct TV series, and took the show in some fairly strange new directions. Specifically, and I know this is going to sound a little bit crazy, it featured the Eighth Doctor finding out that at some point in his own personal future, Gallifrey was going to wind up going to war with a mysterious unnamed Enemy…a war that future Gallifrey was losing. Different Time Lord factions reacted to this in different ways; the Celestis, for example, planned to flee space-time altogether and exist as beings of pure intellect outside the universe as we know it (something that should sound more than a little familiar to viewers of “The End of Time”) while Faction Paradox…

Faction Paradox was a strange creation. Invented by Lawrence Miles, they were a group of counter-culture Time Lords who revered the two things that immortal guardians of space and time would naturally fear: Death and paradox. They dressed up in skull masks, practiced a peculiar form of voodoo (okay, three things–the technophiliac Time Lords were freaked out by the seeming magic of the Faction) and reveled in creating “safe” temporal disruptions. They weren’t exactly enemies, but they didn’t have much love for the Time Lords, either.

Fast forward a few years, and the TV series comes back. The book line pretty much dies out, becoming a vague, inoffensive adjunct to the show, but due to the vagaries of British copyright law, Lawrence Miles remains full owner of the Faction Paradox concept. He launches a spin-off line of books, set in the Doctor Who universe with the serial numbers filed off (the Time Lords become the “Homeworld”, but the Enemy stays the Enemy because Miles insists he never intended them to be the Daleks.) Surprisingly, these books are quite good. This is the story of the best of them.

“Warlords of Utopia”, by Lance Parkin, is perhaps the highest of all “high concept” science fiction stories; it starts in an alternate reality where Rome never fell, but in this novel, the inhabitants (with the help of Faction Paradox) discover another reality where Rome never fell. Then another, then another, until they have a vast cross-time Roman Empire ruled by a Council of Emperors.

Then they discover all the universes where the Nazis won World War II…

The concept, and the ensuing war, is one of the cleverest ideas I’ve seen explored in science-fiction in a long time. (Full disclosure: I’ve been on a few mailing lists with Lance Parkin over the years, and am on a first-name basis with him, even if we’re never going to see eye to eye on Buffy or the Star Wars prequels.) The book genuinely feels like an idea that someone needed to write a book about, and Lance was just the person to write it. I recommend it to anyone who’s seen the two relevant tropes more time than they can count.

I’ve been reading some zombie novels lately; among others, I’ve read ‘Dead City’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘Day By Day Armageddon’…and I have to say, at the risk of offending authors who have some online presence (and plenty of online fans), most of them are really not that good. The current crop of zombie books tend to regurgitate Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, with a dash of “28 Days Later” for that bioweapon flavor and a generous helping of Mary-Sue-ism to boot. (One exception is David Wellington’s “Monster Island” and its sequels, which do some eye-poppingly clever things with the zombie apocalypse concept.)

And yet, the whole reason I picked them up is that I love zombie movies…and I gotta say, I love the cheesy ones just as much as the brilliant ones. “Nightmare City”, “Hell of the Living Dead”, “The Dead Next Door”, “Feeding the Masses” (which actually had a brilliant script, let down by sub-pornographic actors)…bad or good, I cheerfully watch them from beginning to end. Sometimes, the worse they are the better they are. “Diary of the Dead” is never going to match up to Romero’s earlier masterpieces, but I guarantee you, you will never find a movie with a more bad-ass Amish farmer or drama teacher.

So what’s the difference? Why do I love a bad zombie movie, but grow furious at the lack of ambition and drive behind the majority of most zombie novels? The answer, and I think a lot of readers will find it obvious, is the level of investment needed to finish a movie versus a book. A ninety minute movie lasts ninety minutes, and then it’s over. Whether that ninety minutes is filled with “Shaun of the Dead”, or “Shadow: Dead Riot”, they’re both done when the credits roll.

But a good 300-page book and a bad 300-page book…the former flies by almost on its own, as your mind pictures the story so vividly that you don’t even notice turning the pages. Whereas the latter crawls past at a snail’s pace, as your brain rebels at the thought of reading even one more sentence. You find yourself easily distracted, making excuses to put the book down…and yet, when you work up the nerve to get back to it, the book is right there waiting for you exactly where you left off. It’s like a movie that pauses itself whenever it thinks you’ve stopped paying attention.

And a horror movie can descend to the level of “so bad it’s good.” Inept comedy is merely excruciatingly dull, while inept horror can sometimes become brilliant comedy (which is why the movie “The Mad”, with Billy Zane, failed so badly. But I digress.) But the failings of prose are different than the failings of film, and what can inspire you to watch a bad movie again and again merely inspires you to throw a book at the wall so hard it makes a dent.

It’s a curious difference, the way that engaging with a work of bad art can produce such different effects in different media. The bad zombie movie only attains its true potential as entertainment when the audience engages with it, refusing to passively accept it and instead dealing with it on their own terms. But with bad zombie books, the more you engage with it, the worse it becomes. The only way to succeed is not to get involved at all. (Especially ‘City of the Dead’. Sorry, Brian Keene, but it was a mistake to try to get a sequel out of ‘The Rising’.)

A good outing this time around from Pratchett, and although the Tiffany Aching novels are marketed as “young adult” fiction, frankly you could fool me: this one has quite a bit of brutal violence in it, albeit almost all of it offscreen. (Then again Nation had as a set piece the protagonist having to bury his entire village and then nearly committing suicide, so needless to say Pratchett’s idea of what constitutes “young adult” differs markedly from, for example, The Baby-Sitters Club.)

The question of “so what is this Discworld book about” is always raised when a new one comes out. Generally the Tiffany Aching stories don’t aim for larger motifs; Unseen Academicals is about sport and its place in society, for example, and Making Money is about the necessity of (responsible) modern finance, but The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith, while certainly not simple stories, are still more or less straight-up non-ironic fantasy adventures that just happen to be set in the Discworld.

I Shall Wear Midnight breaks from that mold because Pratchett for the first time is using Tiffany to talk about something wider. It’s still a bit vague – Pratchett still wants Tiffany to be his “just a story” character, obviously – but there are enough allusions to The Crucible to let you know that this is, first and foremost, a story about justice. The villain of the story, while certainly evil, is too impersonal to ever really be striking; by the end he’s just a bog-standard evil spirit. All of the best oh-my bits happen in the middle and are only obliquely about the villain.

That having been said – an enjoyable read and as always chock-full of brilliant snatches of writing. But definitely a bit uneven, as a story.

We can all agree that the movie version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” failed, right? I mean, it was terrible. It wasted the talents of some very good actors like Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell (I am literally traumatized to the point where I can’t watch “Moon”, because I can’t believe that the man who gave that performance as Zaphod Beeblebrox is actually capable of acting) and spent a lot of its time cutting away brilliant dialogue and clever narration to focus on action sequences and set-pieces that should never be the focus of a comedy to begin with. It made back its money, it didn’t get totally shredded by the critics, but I think it’s safe to say that history has not been kind to it.

And we can all agree that while it was better-acted and better-scripted, the original TV adaptation of “Hitch-Hiker’s” had some serious problems with its production values, right? I mean, trying to do a story on the scope of Douglas Adams’ novels, one that starts with the destruction of the entire planet and moves on to the building of a whole new one, taking in two-headed aliens and vast varieties of epic visuals along the way, on a BBC budget in the 80s…let’s just call it over-ambitious and leave it at that.

But there is a version of “Hitch-Hiker’s” that’s already very well-acted and perfectly-scripted. It’s the original audio play that aired on BBC Radio, the one that Adams adapted into his novel. And there is a medium where budget doesn’t matter and anything that the mind can conceive, the screen can portray. It’s animation. And with the advances in computer animation, it’s easier than ever for the average computer user to make professional-quality animation.

So this is what this leads me to: What if you took the BBC Radio play as the soundtrack for an animated adaptation? Sure, it’d be a copyright violation, and doing the whole thing would probably be out of the financial reach of most hobbyist animators…but if you broke it up into five minute chunks, say, and had each person just animate their five minutes, you’d wind up with a fascinating range of visual styles and a potentially high-quality adaptation of what has famously been seen as one of the great unadaptable sci-fi stories. And as long as nobody made money off it and nobody sued, who’d complain?

Call me crazy, but I actually think this is a good idea.