Category Archives: Reviews

I’m travelling tomorrow, and not to Wiscon (alas!) so I thought I’d see if a few of you might have time and wit available to shove a fiery-hot rhetorical poker of feminist logic up the hind ends of the trolls gathering on M.K. Hobson’s blog post about her Bustlepunk Manifesto.

I’ll explain, but in that roundabout fashion I sometimes use, because it has Been. A. Week. I couldn’t come straight at a thought right now unless it was covered in dark chocolate frosting.

Many years ago Canada decided to get a $1 coin, along the lines of the Susan B. Anthony, and they put a lovely bird called a loon on one side. As a result, many people call this coin the loon or, more popularly, the loonie.

This worked out reasonably well for someone (presumably the government and the Royal Canadian Mint) and in time they followed up this sterling bit of governance (yes, pun, hahaha) by deciding to go with a two dollar coin. And hey! Some folks speculated we’d call it the doubloon.

If you were me (or my wife) when that suggestion was floated, you went OMG. COOL. Doubloon, doubloon, doubloon. And could not be shut up about it. You would still use the term to this day, even though nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.

Because the rest of Canada, you see, mistakenly refers to the thing as a toonie. Loonie. Toonie. No! I say! You are wrong! I don’t care if it rhymes, it’s not as elegant! Where’s the historical humor in that?

But I am outvoted. That’s what’s caught the public imagination and until I manage to achieve dominion over you all, toonie it is.

So why am I telling you this?

Some weeks ago I read THE HIDDEN GODDESS by M.K. Hobson for Tor.com, and when time came to write the review, I surfed over to her Bustlepunk Manifesto and refreshed my memory on a few points. Then I wrote the following:

Such books are the softer cousins of steampunk—historic romantic fantasies…

The review occasioned some squeeing over the book in the comments thread (because THE HIDDEN GODDESS rocks!) along with a lot of reaction that boiled down to “Another Punk, oh sigh.”

I’d seen this before. One of the last articles I wrote for Syfy was on the Stitchpunk animated feature 9, and the various other SkiffyPunk terms… what they meant and who was writing them. That article got a lot of the same reaction. Which, in my opinion, boils down to: “Stop calling it punk already! It’s a doubloon.”

We punk stuff in this genre. It happens. If you want it to stop, become cooler than the mutant love child of Doctorow and Scalzi and coin something catchier. That would make good use of the energy you currently spend griping about punk variations. And the weather.

Hobson has posted a thoughtful note today about that line of mine, “softer cousin of steampunk,” by way of mentioning how ‘softer’ in our culture tends to mean ‘girl cooties,’ and how to many a reader ‘girl’ still automatically means ‘lesser’. She wasn’t offended by what I’d said… it was just part of this lovely longer entry about some internet comments discussing the bustlepunk/toonie thing.

Now the comments have become trollage. As far as I can tell, the guys in this comments thread are now lambasting her for her tongue-in-cheek coining of ‘bustlepunk’ and accusing her of … well, of censoring them by letting them comment on her blog, and not politely. And marginalizing herself by acknowledging the feminine stuff in her work. They’ve also kindly letting us know, Dear, that sexism, in the world and in book publishing is so over.

A lot of the comments are entirely missing the point of her initial post, which was thoughtful and laden with good feminist content, stuff that’s well worth thinking about and discussing. Some responses on point would, I’m sure, be very appreciated by Hobson. Or hey–if you’re looking for a Memorial Weekend flamewar, just go with the fiery-hot implements I mentioned.

Like a lot of writers, I often feel I should read more. Which is ridiculous, in a way: I read research books and novels and mountains of student fiction. But there’s always more, and I want to keep up with my friends’ books, and learn all of history evar, except the parts that bore me stiff.

So I review. This makes me responsible to others for the reading, and I’ve always had the good fortune to review for editors who give me a lot of latitude to pick books I expect to like heartily, or even love. (I have no interest in reading bad books or panning same.) I get a deadline and a free copy and a financial carrot for pushing something I’d do anyway to the top of the pile. Ideally, everyone wins.

In recent weeks this strategy has led to my reviewing Lyda Morehouse’s wonderful AngelLINK prequel, Resurrection Code and M.K. Hobson’s delectable bustlepunk romance-romp The Hidden Goddess. Now I’m onto a delightful and surprising mystery, by Wayne Arthurson, Fall from Grace, which among other things evokes the prairies and Edmonton so vividly it’s a miracle I don’t have hives.

Still. I should read more, dammitall. And when I’m reading fiction I think I should be reading research stuff, and when I’m deep in a history book I think about how I write novels and should read them. And someone gave me that book out of the goodness of their heart, and I asked for that one as a birthday present… oh, I know it’s ridiculous. Shut up, inner voice, and all that.

But this month I’ve taken that fortune-cookie advice I mentioned awhile ago, by way of a discussion of characterization and revision, to heart. (It’s the one that goes, roughly: “if you want something you’ve never had, you have to try something you’ve never done.”)

I’ve never ever been one to read more than one book at a time. I’ve always been a serially monogamous reader; I’ve met people who claim to have three, four, even five books on the go and goggled at those individuals like wondrous marvels of nature, like chameleons or sperm whales or Venus flytraps. Now I’m making an effort to go poly: to have one novel and one non-fiction book happening at once. So, along with the Arthurson, I’m poking my way through American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, by Howard Blum.

Normally when I catch myself shoulding, I do try to go for more of a “Shut up, inner voice!” type of strategy. But fictional and factual texts satisfy related but different parts of my brain. I feel not only happier but healthier when I’m reading history or science or political theory, just as I do when I eat a delicious and thoroughly wholesome meal: I feel smarter, sharper, enriched by the experience. A fine novel, on the other hand, adds to happiness too, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel dumb. But the experience falls more in line with a hot bath, a good massage… there’s something sensual about it. Both are recreational and both are work, but non-fiction is meat and an invigorating hike, I think, while fiction is tropical fruit and sun on a beach.

My hope is that by reading a little of both, on an almost daily basis, my overall intake of books will go up. Since I track my reading so closely, I’ll be able to tell you how it goes, once January is here.

A few weeks ago a tweet led me to Amazon’s list of the Top 100 Books of 2010.

Which led me to buy Bloody Crimes, which tells the story of the final days of two presidencies: the abrupt death and long funeral of Abraham Lincoln, and the flight from Richmond of Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America.

This is a pop history of a certain type: it takes the train journey of Lincoln’s coffin as it wound through the eastern U.S. to Springfield Illinois and highlights the similarities and differences with Davis’s stop-and-start journey southward as the Confederacy collapsed around him.

I know just enough Walt Whitman to have known Lincoln’s train had borne his body westward,but the sheer scale of the hoopla was new to me, and there’s always something delicious in that kind of reading: Holy Cow! Really? How much bunting did they drape on NYC?. The thematic tying together of the two journeys worked nicely, but when I think of examples of this kind of intertwined yet parallel story, I think of Eric Larsen’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. This, though it’s good, isn’t quite as compelling as that. (It’s an unfair comparison, perhaps, because Larsen is so very good, and his subject matter in that book so deliciously dramatic and improbable.)

Final verdict: Bloody Crimes is a good and quick read for those with an already-fixed interest in its subject matter.

In addition to buying Bloody Crimes, I used the Amazon List to generate my usual end of the year monster pile of requests from the local public library. The first thing I chose to read from the borrowed stack was Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes.

Most of my Vietnam War reading is nonfiction, but a lot of it has the same ambience as this novel: accounts by people who fought in the jungle, detailed descriptions of the miserable conditions and various stupidities of war. But fiction lets one turn the screws on the drama that much higher, letting one create a more seamless effect without having to account for drama-disrupting truths or weird inconsistencies.

Matterhorn has this quality of artistic wholeness. It paints an unforgettable and grim picture. Its prose is functional and transparent, its characters convincing, its story inevitable and heartbreaking.

Novels and movies about war tend to also have a lot of soul-searching. Characters plumb their navels, looking at big picture questions: why do humans do this? And the small stuff, too: how did I end up here? What will be lost if I die? This is a story element that is most likely to strike a false note with me–Thin Red Line, for example, made me gag. But Matterhorn is very consistent about being in the heads of young men. There’s no mature philosophizing here: these are teen boys, groping with things that are far beyond them.

I don’t have a lot of people in my immediate circle who’d be drawn to either of the above books, but if U.S. military history is your kind of thing at all, Matterhorn is especially well done.