Excuses, Updates, Et Cetera

My plan has come to fruition, at last! After building up a minuscule following (and when I say minuscule, I mean minuscule), I successfully threw them off the trail by ceasing all updates whatsoever to the site. Why this may be a desirable outcome may be confusing to most, but trust me, it makes sense.

But rest assured, gentle (ie imaginary) reader, I have not been entirely idle during my absence. I have been reading, though not as quickly as I would like, and preparing reviews in my subconscious for the day that I would make my return. Those reviews, shortened and grouped in bulk for optimum dispensing will be up shortly, but after that the blog will take a slightly different direction.

I will take it from writing reviews of what I'm reading, to simply writing. As I do almost every year, I will be attempting NaNoWriMo. What's different this year, is the fact that I intend to post semi-daily updates as to my progress. Now, the forms these updates will take I am currently uncertain about, be it simply posting whatever I wrote that day, or a word count with my thoughts on how badly it's going, or maybe posting completed chapters every few days or so when they're done. It could be any of these, or all really, so we'll just have to see how it goes and play it by ear.

So, if you have somehow caught whiff of the new posts coming up in the coming days and are really only interested in book reviews, well, sorry? I'll be sure to post a few, as I've said, but in the main those brave enough to actually read will have to suffer through poor writing and even poorer plotting and character building. These posts will be for my own use, mostly, a way of putting my work out in the "public" so as to grant myself a sense of accountability.

Much like this post. Am I expecting anyone to read, or to care even? No, certainly not! But it will be here, for posterity, so that I may look back and laugh at my own foolishness and hubris.

So, there you have it. A patented rambling post only barely coherent that gives you just a taste of what is to come for the month of November!

Now, to just figure out what the hell I'm going to write.

Into the Black: Odyssey One Review

And we're back. Things have been slow, but we forge ahead with another review (and one in the pipeline). For now, let's talk about Into the Black: Odyssey One by Evan C. Currie, shall we?

The book takes place roughly a hundred years in the future (or so, it's never precisely stated). We follow our hero, Captain Eric Weston of the NAC Odyssey on its maiden voyage, a mission that sends humanity outside of our own solar system for the first time. Exploration is the goal, but because of the recent end to the war, they go armed with some of the latest weapons and defenses, and crewed by hardened warriors who had no place in the uneasy peace on Earth.

I must say, I really wasn't expecting much from this. It starts off slow, and almost too cheesily for my tastes. Don't get me wrong, I love cheese. Love it. But if it's not entertaining cheese, then I won't give it the time to grow into something more entertaining.

Fortunately for me, Into the Black became extremely entertaining cheese. I don't want to spoil too much, but I will say that the story continues with the Odyssey discovering an alien race under attack by something that just about every military SF book encounters: bugs. There is a lot of homage going on here, so much that there are a few characters that even point out how it seems like they're in an old SF novel.

Currie completely won me over when the phrase for marines on the move is "on the bounce!", something that none of them know where it orginates, only that it has something to do with the fact that they're wearing powered armor, and supposedly there was a book about powered armor way back when where the soldiers would say that. The Heinlein-homages are plentiful, and welcome.

The book also revels in the "humans are born killers" trope common in military-SF, most notable in the Man-Kzinn Wars books. In Into the Black, humans are less advanced technologically in most aspects. Our laser weapons barely rate above a comm-system compared to the aliens, but in the crucible of several World Wars, we've learned how to use what we have, and use that ability to great effect.

Honestly, I liked this book way, way more than I thought I would. Will it make any top 10 lists for me? Probably not, but I will highly recommend it for some light, fun reading that you can sit back and just soak in.

Rating: 8/10

Audible Edition Rating: 8/10

The Automatic Detective: Review

This is what I've been looking for. Good pulpy detective fiction with a main character who's a robot built to take over the world and his pal a talking Gorilla? How the hell could I not love this?

The Automatic Detective follows the story of our hero, Mack Megaton (again, look at this name! Genius!), an eight-foot tall sapient robot who has developed a glitch in his programming, and instead of taking over the world for his creator, the evil and insane Professor Megalith, he rebelled, and applied for citizenship in the home of the weird, Empire City.

Empire City is every 1950s futurist's dream come to life. Cars are no more, replaced with helo-cars, walking cars, jumping cars, basically you name a method of locomotion that doesn't evolve four-wheeled travel then Empire City uses it. Science reigns supreme, with the Learned Council overseeing the regulation of it and the rest of the laws in the city. Weird science abounds, radiation is so prevalent that mutations are just something you deal with, and robots are a part of everyday life.

Which is why Mack wants to make an honest go of it. So the Council gives him the benefit of the doubt, and he is put on close watch until he demonstrates that he's not going to go crazy and try to bring mankind to its knees. So he gets a job to pay for his electric bill as a taxi driver, and every day he goes next door to his neighbor's apartment so they can tie his bowtie for him (which is apparently something he wasn't really designed for).

Which is when things get messy. The family is kidnapped, and he's taken it upon himself to find them no matter the cost.

This book is pretty fantastic. It has all the conventions of classic noir-detective stories, with a femme fatale, mouthy sidekick, and hero-detective with a devil may care attitude and nothing left to lose. Martinez even nails the style:

She had long legs that went on forever, circling the curve of space and meeting themselves back at the end of eternity. And her face: it belonged in movies. Monster movies. The kind where some thing with six eyes and a lamprey mouth sucks teenagers' brains.

A. Lee Martinez did a really great job with the story, crafting a mystery that kept you wondering but was also fast paced and filled with robot-pounding-action, The Automatic Detective is an instant recommendation for anyone who thinks that Dashiell Hammet, Terry Pratchett and Isaac Asimov could combine to form some sort of Voltron-esque story of pulpy fun and just pure awesomeness.

My only complaint with the book is that it's perfectly set up for a sequel, or even a series, but so far there has been no word of any. Please, Mr. Martinez, please return to the world of Mac Megaton and Empire City and show us what happens next. I'd be forever in your debt.

Rating: 9/10

Marvel Infinite Comics: First Impression

I am a longtime comics fan, and over the years I've amassed a relatively large collection of singles that I am still putting off organizing and cataloguing. It used to be that there wasn't a week that you wouldn't find me in my local comics shop with a literal arm-full of comics ready to go.

Sadly, those days are passed. Days when I lived with my parents and didn't need money for anything other than my own entertainment. Now I apparently need to pay rent and other somewhat more grown-up things, and can't support the Habit any longer. Happily though, I wasn't forced to go completely cold turkey, thanks to my iPad. With it, I was able to download the occasional Annual Event and read it without having to buy another pallet to haul the things on. Even so, reading on the tablet was sometimes a pain. Yes, the colors were always gorgeous, but there was always the annoyance of having to switch between horizontal and vertical orientations, and whenever there was a gorgeous two-page spread you could only see half of it at a time.

But now Marvel is trying to change that. Infinite Comics is Marvel's latest attempt at doing something new and innovative in the publishing world. The concept is that they are enabling their own writers and artists to create comics specifically with the tablet reader in mind, allowing them to do things that would be impossible in a traditional paper comic.

The potential for this is astounding, and incredibly exciting in my mind. Not only will the art be drawn with the tablet size in mind, eliminating the constant flipping and panning and zooming that is necessitated by so many comics now (especially anything written by Brian Michael Bendis), but they can actually unveil word balloons, panels, character expressions, and much more at the pacing that the story requires. No longer will you be going back and forth between word balloons trying to figure out the order of the dialogue, or trying to look past the dialogue clutter to the art beneath it, this will all be done for you.

Now, it remains to be seen how necessary or even whether this is actually a good thing, but as a concept I love it. So far, they have only released one pilot issue for the line, Avengers v X-Men #1 Infinite, a story that runs concurrently with the non-Infinite issue. I read it last night, and I must say I enjoyed it thoroughly. The art was absolutely gorgeous, with colors that popped and space used in such a way that it was just a pleasure to look at. Stuart Immonen really did a fantastic job with the art, while Marte Garcia outdid himself with the coloring.

The story itself is very good, andthey really did a great job using the tools available to them. While I'm writing this I've been flipping through the issue again, not really reading anything but just looking at the transitions and the art itself, and I've noticed something. More than once, they actually unveil the panels in a non-sequential reading order. What I mean by that is that instead of simply reading from left to right as we traditionally do, they actually unveil panel 1 in the left, panel 2 on the right, and panel 3 in the center, overlapping panels 1 and 2.

Later, as Nova loses consciousness the screen goes to black, and as you page forward things slowly come into focus as he begins to awaken. This is a great example of something that, while technically possible in a more traditional format, is not nearly as effective if you are simply looking at different pictures one page after another that slowly gain focus.

Is this actually some "revolutionary" new step in the medium? That's harder to say, and while this first foray doesn't quite peg it as such, it does point the way towards something that could indeed be the future of the industry. I eagerly look forward to the next issue in the line, and I actually can't believe I'm saying this, but...

Good job Quesada. Oh man, I think I ripped something when I said that.