8) Eurotemps, edited by Alec Stewart, devised by Alec Stewart and Neil Gaiman

A collection of stories setting the UK government's Department of Paranormal Resources in a European context which I picked up at Octocon, apparently a sequel to an earlier collection; a British, more bureaucratic version of the Wild Cards stories. Interesting to realise that back in 1992 there was far less Europhobia around in British culture - compare the mild mocking of Brussels here with the irresponsible paranoia of Andrew Roberts. Most of the stories are fairly standard stuff given the scenario; it starts with a rather good one by David Langford which I hadn't previously read, and I really enjoyed the second last, by rozk, whose fiction I don't think I have otherwise encountered.

10) Stardust, by Neil Gaiman

A very enjoyable fairy tale by Gaiman. As ever I find myself spotting similarities with Sandman (in this case, the supernatural siblings, and the half-human heir), but I felt he had rung the changes here rather effectively, and the story combines lovely incidental detail with a good sound (if traditional) plot. Great fun. (Wonder if I will get to see the film.)

39) Albion, by Alan Moore, Leah Moore and John Reppion

Having known Leah and John for a year or so, I thought I should actually read what they have been writing! Albion is a British riff on the resurrection of old superheroes in today's world, being busted out of the Scottish castle in which they have been imprisoned since their original comics were cancelled the government turned against them. It's generally good stuff, with some nice touches - how did Margaret Thatcher really survive the Brighton bomb? And one particularly nasty character grumbles, "The world's gone soft! See where your Teletubbies have led you?!"

It is supported by a good deal of material on the characters, including several complete original stories, as they appeared in Valiant, which I confess I don't remember ever reading myself (and which ceased publishing before Leah and John were even born). Also this is the second book I've written up this morning to have a recommendation from Neil Gaiman, who unlike me is old enough to have read the comics first time round and contributes an introduction.

38) Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison

One of the sf classics that I am currently working through (not sure where I got hold of that list in the first place); a 1975 collection of stories by Ellison (mostly published elsewhere previously) loosely linked by themes of godhood and religion. Ellison's sheer pride in his work is a bit overwhelming; he warns the reader not to do the whole book in one sitting, as "the emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting". I dunno. What I felt was that the style was unrelentingly similar, and that the misogyny was off-putting; also, horror isn't really my thing anyway. Neil Gaiman says that this collection was a strong influence on American Gods (it "burned itself onto the back of my head when I was still of an age where a book could change me forever"); I have to say that although Gaiman's book has its flaws, I think he did it better. Perhaps I am just too old, and the genre now too mature, and Ellison's reputation now too much in decline, to really appreciate this collection.

23) Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman's latest collection of short stories, including this year's Hugo nominee, "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", several other pieces that I knew and liked already (such as Hugo winner "A Study in Emerald" and Locus winner "October in the Chair"), and two that were new to me but left a strong impression: "Bitter Grounds", a memorable tale of zombies, impersonation and an academic conference, and "Monarch of the Glen", the novella sequel to American Gods, which takes Shadow, the book's hero, to the north of Scotland for mythic combat.

This is a great collection. I am repeatedly astonished by the way Gaiman's prose draws you into the story, yet hinting that there is more going on behind the scenes than we can possibly (or might want to) imagine. (For those who appreciate poetry there's some of that here too.)

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Knowing God, by J.I. Packer

Neil Gaiman on Doctor Who:

...the shape of reality – the way I perceive the world – exists only because of Dr Who. Specifically, from The War Games in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swan song.

And, on a different level, miss_s_b on Postman Pat:

Greendale is Postman Pat's personal harem, isn't it? ALL the kids in Greendale have his nose or his hair or both. ALL of them.

7) The Last Temptation, by Neil Gaiman

I have found a nice little second hand bookshop near work, on the rue Froissart between rue Belliard and place Jourdan. It has a decently eclectic selection of books in English, which rather look like they were mostly bequeathed by retiring British officials in the European Commission. Not all, though, and this graphic novel by Neil Gaiman sort of jumped out at me saying "Me! Me! Buy me!" And when a book says that, then I usually succumb to temptation.

And appropriately enough, this book is about temptation, written by Neil Gaiman in consultation with Alice Cooper, tying in with Cooper's album of the same name. I know almost nothing about Cooper except that he wears make-up. Even so, I really enjoyed this brief tale of Steven, an adolescent who is tempted by the sinister manager of the Theatre of the Real (a Cooper lookalike) with the offer of eternal life at an unspeakable price. It would have been better to read it at Halloween; it would certainly have meant more if I was a Cooper fan; but I felt it was also in some ways a trial piece for Gaiman's American Gods, and all the more interesting for that.
------------------

matgb wants to know which of the Livejournal virtual Valentines is worst. It's a tough call.

drasecretcampus is marking essays about vampires.

Neil Gaiman's hair.

Someone on my f-list posted a link in a locked entry to New Scientist's coverage of the astronaut love triangle story. Apparently:

Most astronauts are relatively young and in excellent physical health, putting them in a demographic that is unusually sexually active. In addition, most have higher than average levels of education. "That often translates into higher levels of sexual activity and adventurousness," says Ray Noonan, a professor of human sexuality affiliated with the State University of New York, US.

So the more education you have, the more sexually active and adventurous you are? Sounds to me like something New Scientist's readers will be pleased to hear about themselves, but that doesn't make it true!

Someone challenged me to find an UnSuggestion where I was the only person to own both books. I have a couple of near misses - while I do own copies of Good Omens, the top UnSuggestion for both Gilead and John Adams, and I also own Goodnight Moon, the top UnSuggestion for Native Tongue by Carl Hiassen, I have omitted to put either of the UnSuggestions in question in my catalogue.

But eventually I found a case where I not only own both books but they are both in my LibraryThing, so I am indeed the only user to have catalogued both (and have reviewed both on this journal). The top UnSuggestion for Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. Not surprised - I found the latter insipid and self-indulgent, and the former dense but rewarding.

Well, that's a satisfying start to the weekend!

Edited to add: Gosh, here's another one that is a bit more surprising - the top UnSuggestion for Russell Shorto's superb history of New Amsterdam, The Island at the Centre of the World, is the equally superb first volume of George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy series, A Game of Thrones. Do enthusiasts for early American history have and aversion to epic fantasy, and vice versa? I wonder.

This is the first of two sets of interview questions. I know I owe questions to a number of you; if you wish me to owe interview questions to you as well, say so in the comments.

From ang_grrr:

1. Which public figure, if any, makes you the most mad? ( answer )
2. Which international politician do you most admire? ( answer )
3. How on EARTH do you find the time to do the reading you do? ( answer )
4. I've never been entirely sure what an intern is except they get the rubbish jobs on The West Wing. Please enlighten me. ( answer )
5. What's the best meal you've ever cooked. ( answer )

From hawkida:

1. Were you an ambitious child? ( answer )
2. What do you think people get as a first impression of you when meeting in a social situation? ( answer )
3. Sub-question: Do you think it's different in a work encounter? ( answer )
4. Do you sew, knit or do anything else that's stereotyped as a female pastime? ( answer )
5. Why do you have a livejournal? ( answer )

From talvalin:

1. You may well have answered this here, but how much of your SF/fantasy purchasing is based on recommendations/reviews from friends, reviews online, award-nominee lists and random browsing? ( answer )
2. Why are you so fascinated with shagging fictional characters? ( answer )
3. How did you get into fandom? ( answer )
4. Did you like Dan Simmons's Endymion books, and if so why (or why not)? ( answer )
5. What do you think about secret history novels (eg: books by Tim Powers and Tom Holland)? A worthy genre or misappropriation of historical figures that should be left in peace? ( answer )

From bennmorland:

1. Which Gaiman work/project are you most looking forward to (or least trepidacious of)? ( answer )
2. What is your opinion of Louis MacNeice? I have been reading him recently, and am curious as to how you find his work. ( answer )
3. Do you favor, in an ideal world, the parliamentary or presidential system (providing the legislative and executive branches remain coequal and competitive)? ( answer )
4. When did you realize your parents were mortal, and how did it make you feel? ( answer )
5. Would you meet one, and only one, person from history? ( answer )

1) Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 edition, edited by Rich Horton
2) Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 edition, edited by Rich Horton

Before I start, I was amused by the difference between the cover illustrations of these two books:



One might be forgiven for thinking that whoever chose the pictures believes that fantasy is for girls and science fiction for boys.

Anyway. I don't blame Rich Horton for this. I know him on-line as one of the people I most enjoy debating with in my increasingly rare appearances on rec.arts.sf.written, and he has served up two cracking anthologies of stories here - far less overlap with the other "Best of Year" collections than they have with each other, and almost all new to me (apart from two Hugo nominees and one or two that I remembered from Interzone). He has also eschewed the tendency of other editors to introduce each story individually, instead opting for brief word about each of them in an introduction to the whole book, which makes the whole thing feel more unified.

Having said that I liked them all, the SF volume had a slightly wider variation in quality. I loved Joe Haldeman's very short "Heartwired", Susan Palwick's "The Fate of Mice" (a tribute to "Flowers for Algernon") and Daniel Kaysen's social networking story "The Jenna Set". But I am still making up my mind about Alastair Reynolds' "Understanding Time and Space" - work of genius, or hotch-potch of ingredients from Stapledon, Bradbury and Baxter with the ghost of Elton John as an extra? I guess the fact that I am still thinking about it says something.

In the fantasy volume, I was struck by how few of the stories took the standard sword-and-sorcery milieu as their setting, far more of them belonging to what might be called the urban fantasy sub-genre. In the former category, I thought at first that "Empty Places" by Richard Parks was going to be a run-of-the-mill wizard-hires-thief story, and wondered what it was doing in the collection; but I was converted by the punchline. In the second category, I really liked re-reading Paul Di Filippo's "The Emperor of Gondwanaland". The other standout story was Neil Gaiman's "Sunbird" (though I found myself wishing it was illustrated).

I think I will continue to get all of the "Best of Year" anthologies, because I am such a completist, but if Rich continues with this experiment I shall be particularly looking forward to his volumes in future years.

Half a dozen new comment notifications to this post revealed to me that Neil Gaiman had come across my review of his latest book, as a result of browsing himself on Library Thing. It's a small internet. (My very first post on this livejournal was about meeting him at an autograph session in Brussels.)

2) Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman.

Previously noted by pickwick here, sinclair_furie here, and Cheryl Morgan. (No serious spoilers on any of those.)

I love Neil Gaiman's writing, though I was disappointed to discover that both American Gods and Coraline had hidden shallows, in that neither of them moved very far from his previous work, and neither had a really profound message despite the flashy packaging. Anansi Boys is different, taking a new look at Gaiman's old themes of family, death, divinity and identity and doing it very well, with an impressive dollop of humour throughout. I creased up with laughter at the story about President Taft in the first few pages (OK, my sense of humour is peculiar) and basically couldn't put the book down last night once I had started it properly. Yeah, it takes a wee while to get going (the plot only really takes off on page 146, when Daisy goes to work); yeah, the fact that all our characters are going to converge in the same place at the end is signalled so far in advance that I don't think saying so can possibly count as a spoiler (but at least that makes it look more like Fate than Coincidence); yeah, it's a bit corny that I got the "special edition" a la DVD (with a deleted scene, author's note book, interview with the author, and discussion questions to make sure you're read it properly); but I loved it. Cheryl's prediction that it will win lots of awards is, I suspect, a good call.

( more with spoilers on mythology, girlfriends and race )

Apparently Lenny Henry is going to read the audio-book. I'm not into those as a rule, but I just might get this one.

11) Smoke and Mirrors

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

The other nice freebie I got with my new Palm T|X was an ebook edition of Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, with three extra stories not in the print version. Lots of good stuff here; we start with the Holy Grail turning up in an Oxfam shop, and finish with Snow White, as told from the stepmother's point of view; and the Cthulhu mythos as it might have been interpreted by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a strange English coastal resort:

The beer had the kind of flavour which, he suspected, advertisers would describe as full-bodied, although if pressed they would have to admit that the body in question had been that of a goat.

And several other jewels, including a homage to Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October and the story of a 1960s schoolboy who liked Michael Moorcock. Here is one story in full, a seasonal drabble:

Nicholas Was...

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho.
Ho.
Ho.

Great stuff.

Am now reading Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett's take on "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and pondering the similarities and differences with Neil Gaiman's version from Sandman. The two of them have often tackled similar themes in different ways, witness Hogfather and American Gods.

And of course, both of them have anthropomorphised Death as a recurrent character who likes to wear black, with an extended family. Though if you look at the two pictures below, you may spot certain subtle differences in the way each author portrays the character.

Death, by Pratchett	Death, by Gaiman

See what I mean?

3) Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano

Obviously a bit of a spin-off from the original Sandman series, but pretty beautiful in its own right; Gaiman retells an old Japanese story, as prose rather than script, with beautiful illustrations by Amano, and manages to keep the tone consistent throughout, with a somewhat ambiguous ending that pulls us smoothly out of the Japanese environment and into Gaiman's own mythos.

Just finished watching a Thunderbirds video with F, which reminded me that I never properly wrote up two other Doctor Who stories I watched last month.

( Remembrance of the Daleks )

( The Ark in Space )

( Thunderbirds: Trapped in the Sky/Pit of Peril )

Incidentally, I suppose that Neil Gaiman's idea of the Endless contacting each other through their portraits in Sandman was inspired by the Thunderbirds' control room, where the Tracy brothers' pictures turn into video connections? Or is there an earlier inspiration?

Neil Gaiman provides sensible commentary.

I, Cthulhu. Owes more to Robert Graves than Isaac Asimov. But doesn't owe much to either. ( Intriguing postscript )

here, including Catherine Asaro, Ben Bova, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neil Gaiman, Frederik Pohl, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis and Patricia Wrede, from the Library of Congress 2004 book festival.

What's on the T-shirt, several of you ask (though not natural20, who has one of his own).

Answer: it's Dream, from Neil Gaiman's classic series Sandman, which I was reading for the first time in December last year.

I really like Sandman, and as I've written about American Gods and Coraline, I just hope he finds some new material soon rather than reworking the old.

Though the evidence from his latest writing (see end of this page) is pretty encouraging.

Most of you will have seen this. But I thought it was interesting.

Well, no really bad story won, and only one category really disappointed me.

Best Novel: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I'm a fervent Bujoldian, and really like this book; I just happened to think two other nominees were slightly better. Bujold's third fantasy novel, and her second in the world of The Curse of Chalion, the action is set in a much smaller scale than the continent-spanning action of its predecessor; the characters are beautifully drawn, in a world where theology is an applied science; and it's nice to have an adventure and romance story whose character is actually middle-aged.

Best Novella: The Cookie Monster by Vernor Vinge. I thought it would win, as Vinge tends to win Hugo awards these days. Seems at first to be a normal story a la Microserfs. But then it turns out to be much much closer to numerous classic sf stories, mentioning any one of which will give away the main point of the plot. I don't normally go for Vinge but I thought this was pretty good (though Frederik Pohl did it better). I still preferred The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker.

Best Novelette: Legions of Time, by Michael Swanwick. I find Swanwick's sense of humour sometimes a bit wearing, but this one worked for me. Woman in 1930s New York has a job where she Must Not Open The Door. She opens the door. Time-travelling and saving the world ensue. Good fun, but I put it fifth out of six.

Best Short Story: A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman. This is by far the best story from a collection of stories melding the worlds of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft; the narrator takes us through his unspeakable experiences in Afghanistan, his eccentric Baker Street flatmate, and encounters with a royal family whose habits are rather unlike the home life of our own dear queen, and a final confrontation with his version of England's subversive mastermind. I think Gaiman's writing is a bit more uneven than most people like to admit, but he's caught the voice of Conan Doyle perfectly here, and interspersed the narrative with slyly allusive small ads from the alternative London he has envisaged.

Bujold now has twice as many Best Novel Hugos as any other living author (Heinlein ahead of her on five, but only if you count the retro-Hugo he was awarded on Friday, and Brin, Card, Cherryh, Clarke, Haldeman, Le Guin, Vinge, Willis, and the late Asimov and Zelazny on two each). Swanwick has now won five Hugos in the last six years, a unique winning streak. Gaiman has won three Hugos in different categories in consecutive years, a feat only previously managed by Ursula Le Guin in 1973-75.

3) The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman. a recent coda to the Sandman series, with one short story for each of the seven Endless siblings. A couple of them - Despair and Destiny - really seemed pretty pointless, and I didn't think much of the Dream story either. I enjoyed all the others though; a marvellously sultry tale of Desire, and the Destruction, Delirium and Death stories all left me wishing they had been longer.

Excellent Hugo-nominated story from Shadows over Baker Street, now online on author's website:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/StudyinEmerald.asp

4) Shadows over Baker Street, edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan

This is the first of the Hugo nominees package I gave myself for my birthday; Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" has been nominated for Best Short Story and is the lead item in this anthology of authors attempting to meld the worlds of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft.

I've always had a liking for Holmes pastiches, and vividly remember as a teenager devouring John Dickson Carr's The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, based around adventures mentioned but not fully recounted in the canonical stories, and Robert Lee Hall's Exit Sherlock Holmes in which ( spoiler ). Also of course there's the early long-unpublished Bujold story, "The Adventure of the Lady on the Embankment".

And as for H.P. Lovecraft - indeed, some (all?) of the original stories are pastiche, most overtly the one where his friend and fellow author Clark Ashton Smith turns out to be the ( spoiler ). And the tradition of Cthulhu pastiche has been alive and well for decades; an earlier Holmes/Elder Gods crossover which I much enjoyed was Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October.

I'm sorry therefore to report that this is a pretty poor showing. Over and over the same themes get rewarmed - unspeakable entities in or from Afghanistan; the truth behind Colonel Moran and/or Irene Adler and/or (once or twice) Moriarty; dark hints, never fully explained, about bees. The editors have done a poor job with details of the setting - Guildford in Surrey has a "d", folks; Fylingdales in Yorkshire has no "r"; "Inswich" is a poor attempt to combine Innsmouth and Dunwich from Lovecraft with Bram Stoker's Whitby; the less said about the attempts at Welsh and Dutch the better (though I was amused to read the tale involving the young Princess Wilhelmina at Noordeinde Palace just two weeks after I helped celebrate her great-grandson's wedding there).

The jewel (the emerald?) of the collection is certainly the Gaiman story, which turns everything on its head to combine irony with horror. Three others, by Steve Perry, co-editor Michael Reaves and F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, deserve honorable mentions. But it would be better to leave the rest sleeping in R'lyeh with the Great Old One himself.

Best Novel: The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. OK, so it deals with a subject close to my heart, but it really is a good book. The only other nominee I'd read, Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold, was great but minor by Bujold's standards.

Best Novella: Coraline by Neil Gaiman. This gives Gaiman two wins out of two nominations in the written fiction categories for both Hugo and Nebula, and makes Coraline the 55th story to get the double. I thought it had some strong competition (and several others were more like Nebula winners) but obviously Gaiman is on a roll right now.

Best Novelette: "The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford. The best in its category I thought. At first seems to be just a bizarro piece about synaesthesia but then turns out to have a plot as well.

Best Short Story: "What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler. Creepy story about gorillas.

( a few more )

10) The Sandman Book of Dreams, ed Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer (and, uncredited, Martin Greenberg)

A nice idea, short stories based around the Sandman structure. The one that really stood out for me was the horrific "Splatter" by Will Shetterly, telling the story of the Cereal convention from a different perspective. (Oddly, Shetterly doesn't appear to have published a short story since this 1996 collection.) Most of the other pieces were good but not remarkable.

4) The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender: Great stuff, this, very much helping one understand the series much better. Structured very nicely as well so as to avoid spoilers - one could easily read the series a book at a time and cross-refer to the relevant chapters here. Obviously there's much more to say about Sandman, and plenty of room for debate - for instance, I really rather liked the Cluracan's story about the city of Aurelian from World's End, though Gaiman reckons it one of the weakest of the series; and I wasn't particularly gripped by Ramadan which seems to be a general favourite. Basing the book around interviews with Gaiman about what he thought he was doing is a risky tactic - Theodore Krulik's book about Roger Zelazny is a yawn a minute as a result of doing the same - but Bender is not afraid to debate Gaiman's own writing with the author. It really does enhance one's enjoyment of the books. (But is Gaiman claiming too much when he seems to imply that with Death he invented the Goth look?)

5) Ask Me Anything about the Presidents by Louis Phillips: A harmless little book picked up at the Smithsonian shop in Washington National Airport. I did not know that two nineteenth century presidents were arrested during their terms of office for offences involving horses. You learn something new every day.