Starcraft: Frontline by Knark, Washid, Furman, Elliott, Benjamin, Sharmek, Sevilla, Eldar & Kamarga.

The Swarm, Forever!
The Protoss & Humans will
make worthy new strains.

Quick hit: the story of the first narrative in here was the best, with constant callbacks to the in-game lines ("Jacked up & good to go!" & "Honor guide me!" & the like) without it being overwhelming. The art on the Zerg sucked though. The plot on the rest was all-- pretty forgettable, erring on the side of silly. The art was sometimes good, sometimes poor. Still, I like Starcraft.

The Deep by John Crowley.

The Just raised the Gun.
The Gun is named Suddenly.
Then, Suddenly speaks.

I liked this better than Engine Summer I think? Well, it is tough to say. They each have strong points over the other. The biggest problem with this is also a perk-- what exactly is going on, here? I mean-- just what is going on? That said, I really like the pieces of this. I enjoyed it all around. I am too busy & hungover to go into it, though.

Inversions by Iain Banks.

The Good Doctor said:
"Ah, so you are serious."
The drone killed them all.

Cheating! I shouldn't be writing this here but want to at least get something down before I lose my train of thought. This isn't officially a Culture book, but it might as well be. Well, it might as well be a fantasy novel, set in a made up land-- with two suspiciously advanced people, a doctor & a bodyguard. Like many Iain Banks works, shit gets bad at the end-- but because our protagonists, or at least, the focal characters, are from the Culture, it ends up okay. Either through technological murdertech, or through social advancement-- why revenge yourself? I quite liked it. That is all I'm going to say about it for the moment, though. Not out of disrespect for the book, which I rather liked, but rather because it is time for me to write some in my novel (I hope).

Spacesuits by Amanda Young, photos by Mark Avino.

Severian saw
a knight in white armor
with a gold visor.

Okay, that might be my favorite haiku of all time. In The Book of the New Sun, one of the greatest books ever written, the protagonist is in the corridors of a museum, full of every ancient wonder-- & the caretaker shows him the "oldest painting" they have, & Severian our narrator describes it as a knight in white armor, with a gold visor, standing on a blasted battlefield, holding an eerie flag aloft. It is of course the moon landing, but being set however many tens, hundred of thousands years later-- millions-- Severian has no reference.

This book is gorgeous. Still photographs of the clothes you might need to go to outerspace. The writing is historically interesting-- who competed, who won the contract-- but except when it gets technical, the pictures dwarf it. The layout is fairly crazy, if only because reading along with the text forces you to jump all over, but there aren't a lot of options when you have loads of full page art. My favorite might by the AX-1-- a hardbody suit with rotary joints that managed to look like the most ungainly & most elegant option at the same time. I read this at work while doing a bit of drudgery that I had to wait around to finish, & I was surprised by the reactions I got-- everyone wanted to talk about it. People stopped me in the elevator-- "you know, Platex had a contract with NASA to build spacesuits!" or had an opinion. Just goes to show you, the space race isn't dead! Come on, Ares! Seriously though, why did we call our rocket Ares? Ares is the god of war. We're not even trying to scare the Russians anymore with our ballistic prowess. Why! I think the USA was just jealous of India having the guts to call their "I"CBMs Agni. Which to be fair is a pretty intimidating thing to call your nukes.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.

The People of Flame
came before the Talking Men,
& after the Blood.

In Adam's Tongue the argument was how language & proto-language drove the evolution from ape to man. Well, from animal ape to human ape, I should say. Or at least Homo ape. The premise of this book is that cooking was the impetus of that same change-- or I should say, that is how the premise is stated. Luckily, the book is more scholarly than that pithy statement, & the turn of a phrase that suggests cooking made humans out of apes veils the real thesis of the book: that fire is what made Homo habilis into Homo erectus. In fact, Bickerton's argument in Adam's Tongue regarding abstract displacement & "power scavenging" fits right into Wrangham's scheme-- or at least, the power scavenging does; Wrangham puts increased meat consumption as the kick in the pants that jumped Australopithecus into habilis. Though I should be clear on something-- Wrangham prefers the term "Habaline", much the same way one might say "Australopithicine." He reserves judgment on species or genus, which I think is overly conservative, but it really doesn't impact his argument but to make the stepping stone from Habaline to Homo erectus all the more discrete.

The first thing Wrangham does is sit down & spell out what cooked food means in terms of biological ecology. He also ends the book with a bit of a screed about caloric information-- which is a revisting of his arguments. Simple as pie: cooked food lets you scrape our more calories, more quickly. Which frees up your time & your biology. Humans use the same amount of energy as you would expect for a primate our size-- but with a vastly larger brain sucking up a hugely increased proportion of that energy. How does Homo sapiens afford it? By externalizing digestion-- well, & then some. It isn't like cooking replaces digestion; it supersedes it, really. He talks about raw foodists-- not as a rant, but an example-- & sheesh, I never realized how recklessly awful raw foodists are to their bodies. Semen stops flowing, sex drive drops off, infertility & amenorrhea set in, metabolism drops & thus energy decreases, bones start melting & muscles coming unhinged. Just a disaster! & really if you stop & think about it, you can see that humans are pretty unarguably adapted to eat cooked food. The smaller teeth, the tiny mouth, & the radical change in intestinal length & processing. "Natural" is a cooked meal, for a human-- & Wrangham posits that it has been for a long time.

Wrangham folds in all the benefits of fire in with cooking-- & that is fine, but really the arguments terms are reversed I think. This is a study that dwells on cooking, but that is only a facet of fire. It is fire that we are really talking about. Catching Fire has no problem appealing to the other benefits of fire, but casts them almost as fringe benefits; protection from predators & light at night allowing sleeping on the ground, making bipedalism viable, for instance. The articulation of fire's role in bipedalism happens in two parts; elsewhere Wrangham speaks to fire's ability to warm allowing humans to shed their hair. The picture he paints is much more evocative than just heat dispersal on the savanna; it is long distance running or walking-- it is letting sweat bead on your skin, instead of under a layer of insulation. With fire, you don't need a heavy coat to protect you from the elements-- you can go naked of fur, ready to take full advantage of your bipedalism. He argues that clustering around the fire, whether for warmth, protection, or for shared food, results in self-domestication. Protohumans who are calm & share get a spot in the circle, prosper. It is fire that this book really speaks to-- not just cooking.

There is a chapter of the book that deals with cooking & the sexual division of labor. Now we're getting into some interesting territory! & choppy waters. Wrangham dismounts the chapter well, leaving you with a fairly decent couple of quips, but the body of the chapter is a little...heteronormative. Which I want to preface saying. I don't in any way think that discussing gender roles in societies & their place in evolutionary psychology or biological anthropology is something to shy away from. That said, there are dangerous corridors that must be carefully navigated, for here steps in many of the cultural assumptions of the viewer. Gender binary is a real social construct, but it is easy-- to easy-- to ignore queer outliers. Or to believe that the data you are looking at confirms your own biases. & I'm not saying Wrangham is bad, or heaven forbid misogynist, but just that this is a chapter to stay on your toes for. There are a lot of givens, a lot of sweeping pronouncements. Which are always difficult. Anyhow, I confess to a certain amount of essentialism in my feminism-- & I happily embrace the Industrial Age & Information Age for its ability to enfranchise women.

That disclaimer said, I do think there is a strong clustering at the poles, there are gendered divisions of labor all up & down human & the near-prehuman history. Heck, I even like the Neanderthal extinction theory that says human gender specialization is what drove them to extinction. Wrangham makes some compelling arguments about cooking, & its cross-cultural role. He doesn't split men & women into hunters & gatherers, but rather hunters & cookers. It is a fairly intriguing way to frame the data, & he backs it up with figures & statistics. The hook my interest is most piqued by is his argument that economics come before paternity. That cooking, as a means to split up time & to manage caloric economy, precedes sex & parentage in terms of marriage. The two pieces may very well fit together, but that survival beats out parentage-- I have to say I see strength in the idea. & it wouldn't be fair not to mention that my household operates by the schema he lays out. I bring home the meat (from the grocery store...) & then Jenny cooks it up. Of course, a lot of the societal surveys that Wrangham brings up enforce female subservience to the cooking pot with domestic violence, he ends the section with a brief discussion of this-- so it works out.

There are a few tidbits in here I will end this by discussing. Wrangham puts fire's discovery with protohumans pounding meat to make it more digestible, which is as good as any argument, but ultimately beside the point. Imagining the circumstances a thing like that caught on is fruitless. He also talks about how cooking might have happened-- food dropped into fires, or seeds left after you've moved it. Again, immaterial. People (& presumably proto-people) are weird. Who thought up eating rotting milk, or fermented grapes? Who knows? He also name checks Antalya's forever burning fire, mentioned by Homer, which is great, awesome, sweet. & WTF Kanzi the bonobo will make FIRE? Apparently, yes. Give Kanzi sticks & matches & he'll cook up marshmallows. What the heck. Lastly, this book has a lovely notes section, bibliography, & index. Oh it warms the cockles of my heart.

Geektastic edited by Holly Black & Cecil Castellucci.

Clark Kent wears glasses.
Kal is a newspaper geek.
Jor-El? Science geek.

This is a collection of stories, ruminations on nerdery, in particular, on High School geekdom. Contributed to by a whole host of the "cool kids" of YA literature-- & to sit at the popular table in YA fandom you kind of have to be a big nerd. The first story, by Holly Black & Cecil Castellucci, is a romance between a con-going pair of cosplayers-- a Jedi & a Klingon. Mostly when the 501st show up as the undisputed authority, that part is the best. They also wrote the interstitial comics, with illustration by the always awesome Bryan Lee O'Malley & Hope Larson. That story, & the comics, are very strong. A lot of the other stories are fine, or cute-- or in the case of Kelly Link's "Secret Identity", really weird. The only one I didn't like I pretty viscerally disliked-- Barry Lyga's "The Truth About Dino Girl." The culmination of that story? Has the protagonist, a paleontologically inclined girl with a crush on the baseball jock with the lame tattoo of a flaming baseball, bumping into the aforementioned guy's girlfriend, & spilling her borderline stalker doodles of said aweful ink all over. The girlfriend says predictable things-- "he's my boyfriend, you are a weirdo who is stalking him, leave him along" & then doesn't tell everyone in the school. She tells the boyfriend with the terrible tat, but leaves it at that. So our "protagonist"? Her "revenge" is to sneak into the girl's locker room, take pictures of the girlfriend while she's showering, & post them all over with a note saying "I R A SLUTZ" & posting the girls home phone. Okay, newsflash Barry Lyga. Your protagonist is the bully. Your protagonist is the villain in the other stories. On a lighter note, probably the sweetest story is "The Stars at the Finish Line," by Wendy Mass.

None of these were my geek childhood, though.

The Heart of the Great Alone by David Hempleman-Adams, Sophie Gordon & Emma Stuart.

"I am just going
Outside and may be some time."
-"No Surrender" Oates

I'm of course familiar with these gentlemen, not least because two months ago I read a similar book focusing on the Scott expedition. & we get a recap of Scott & Shackleton here-- your Cherry, Birdie & Oates, Captain Falcon, all that. Antarctica blows my mind. It is like an outerspace you can go to. Just right there, south, awaits a physical manifestation of nihilism. I'm sorry, Ice-shirt but you are well & truly put to shame by the Great White. Hempleton-Adams made a modern, one-man trip to the south pole, where he was picked up by an airplane-- he has no illusions about who are the real heroes. The appendix of chronologies records the dates as "'heroic age' of Antarctic exploration" & really, it is, isn't it? You get to see human being stretched to their most admirable-- science! Bravery! Exploration! Without the clouding tint of imperialism or commercialism-- pure stuff, here. & heart break. Oates, knowing his frostbitten feet are holding back the team from possible survival walks into a blizzard to die, his last words "I am just going outside and may be some time." Damn, man. That said, you don't come here for the story. You come for the pictures! The book is chock full of 'em, gems like Ponting's "Castle Berg" below. A great deal of them haven't been exhibited before, coming from private Royal collections. The book also has a number of chapters on photography, both technique & history, which frankly went over my head. Also deliciously brimming with appendices, including "non-photographic material" like the various journals compiled by the expeditions. Oh, I liked this book. I wouldn't stop talking about it!

Another Faust by Daniel Nayeri & Dina Nayeri.

"I am friend of Faust"
A fair enough translation.
I like "not light lover."

To get out of high school, you had to write a research paper. Some 12 page bit on an assigned book, with all the pointless requirements that attend it, like notecards. Seriously, I never used notecards after I was required to use them for a grade. Okay, confession, I didn't do them when I was required to, either; I didn't do so well on that score. I just stayed home the day before the last day of school & wrote it. Hey, you do what you have to do. My book was Goethe's Faust & reading it I realized-- I hate Goethe's Faust. My solution was to make my thesis a cheap excuse to talk about Marlowe's Doctor Faustus as much as possible. Kit Marlowe is my jam. So, given that background, when I saw Jenny reading Another Faust, I figured "hey, might as well read it. Maybe I'll like it. Or maybe I'll hate it." Well, I don't know if I hate it, but it certainly was a failure, in the end sum.

First point first: this is the least diverse cast of a book? Ever? The beginning tries to make it seem as if it is the most diverse, but I don't know how to tell you this-- all white European people are the same. I mean, one upper class kid from Greece & two upper class kids from Italy & one lower class kid from England & one lower class kid from France...come on, what? They all relocated to New York immediately, & have their family histories erased, making their backgrounds moot, regardless. It isn't till about half way through the book, when some characters have had a chance to "fall" a little bit & others have had the chance to rebel a little that they start differentiating-- that, & when their mutant powers activate! Because in this case, selling your soul to the devil nets you superpowers like mind reading or time manipulation. Why not! I will say this-- certain bits of the book have some vivid imagery behind them-- the blue house/red house concept has some David Lynch influence lurking in the shadows, but wasn't played enough. Victoria's bug-room was well done. Vileroy's scarred iris was a nice piece of conceptualization. The "reveal" with Bice at the end was clever, but badly executed. Other than that though, I think the book fell flat. Relationships were wooden, for one thing. You don't notice that certain people are acting a certain way until the character's spell it out in expository dialogue. The plot was fairly tightly wound, with each character's actions falling into the next, in a sort of "master plan" scenario, but then that never came together. A let-down. Probably a hundred pages too long, too.

John Dies at the End by David Wong.

First Person Shooters
are Murder Simulators.
Praise Korrok, & DOOM.

I can't quite figure out what I want to say about this book. I liked it, I liked it enough to anticipate a sequel. It isn't what kingtycoon thought it was: he said he imagined Buffy: the Vampire Slayer was like this, having never seen that show. No, definitely not. First off: this is definitely a Wastelands book. I think it is even set in the novel in Ohio, but that is tough to remember since they mostly call the town "Undisclosed." Horror & comedy has been the peanut butter & chocolate for a little while not, & this is a fine member of that family. Set in the apocalypse that is the post-industrial midwest, the stage moves from small video stores to abandoned shopping malls, to rickety old semi-Victorian houses. The weather in the book ranges from a blizzard that knocks out all the power in the town, to a heatwave so bad the protagonists spend a few hours in a hell dimension just to get a break from the oppressive heat. Yep, that pretty accurately sums up the couple of decades I spent there. I mean, without exaggeration, that is what it is like. Yes. So I was a little wistfully nostalgic! Then of course the monsters & surreal events start happening. Which also reminds me a lot of the Wastelands, actually. There are supernatural drugs, monsters with clip on wigs, flesh-computers, shadow people, the whole thing.

Probably the most compelling part of the book is the post-modern stuff it takes for granted. David Wong is trying to be clever but not trying to "explode the novel as we know it" or anything. He's just internalized PoMo to the point where he can, for instance, skip a character through time, & have his actions ripple throughout the book. Or create inconsistencies in the text (how many people got in the van?) that seem like bad editing that he then reveals later are in fact intentional & germane to the story. Or deconstruct a character inbetween chapters. On top of everything, it made me laugh out loud a few times. Like when the protagonist takes a perception enhancing drug, the first thing he thinks is: Pro wrestling was real. But not real in the sense that we perceive reality. It was more real than reality. As a non sequitur, it worked for me. So yeah. I was definitely entertained.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.

Abandon all hope
ye who enter here. By here,
I mean Prentisstown.

skycornerless lent this to me, & I ended up unimpressed. I'll be brief with my blurb of it, thus. The premise is thus: dystopian farming community on another planet, medium Christian overtones. All men! All telepaths! Claimed to be part of a biological attack launched by the original humanoid inhabitants of the planet, the Noise killed all the women & made all the men constantly spewing their thoughts all over. Which is the "hook" for the book; boy's dog can talk to him! Boy is inundated by the stray notions of fellows. Boy sends his every niggling though as a broadcast! The other pithy bit of the book is the spelling-- "desperayshun" for "desperation" & lots of ain'ts & what have you-- & lots of scribbly font for the Noise. The real issue I have with the book isn't either of those things, though.

First, is the relentlessly bleak tone. I'm so over the idea that constant misery makes something deep. Oh man bad things happen to everybody, all the time! Yawn. The second is related: lots of cheap tricks, narrativly. Just when you thought X...Y! Oh..okay? Then, for no reason, Z jumps out of the bushes! Third problem hooks into both of those, too: I hate stupid protagonists. I will admit a weakness for competance porn, but I really don't like characters who are willfully ignorant. "Oh, you mean this big book of plot exposition? No, I'll just carry it around in my backpack without ever reading it. No, it is probably best if I don't look in the big book of plot exposition till the end." Note: there is an actual book, this is not a metaphor. Along with plenty of "He shows me something in his Noise, but I don't want to narrate about it here in the story. I'll wait till the end of the book." Oh & of course related to all three of these things is the fact that everything the protagonist believes is a lie, so of course there are still women alive, still aliens alive, &c. Which brings me to one of the just boring, problematic things in the book. The men, they shoot their Noise everywhere, while women, they just don't have any. They are silent! Okay, it turned out not to be as much of a disaster as I thought that would be (Creative Light! Consuming Void!) but still, it got under my skin. & again, is easy, cheap. Oh boy, gender dichotomy! Really though, the thing that most bugs me: this is a series? What. Why. The same scene is repeated again & again in this book-- the evil preacher attacks the boy, the boy doesn't kill him, the boy escapes. That happens...three? Four times? Can we maybe condense that? No, because then we wouldn't get the bleak, cheap, implausible, predictable twist at the end, would we. Really, if whatever is in the latter books was gleaned, put into here, I might be more forgiving.

My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler.

Linotype Sabon
is the type face of this book.
Ketel One is hers.

I like Chelsea Handler. I liked her on Girls Behaving Badly & her Chelsea Handler Show was flat out brilliant for the hot second it was around. Chelsea Lately is fine, just fine, but I've stopped keeping up with it; I only record it during slow television seasons. I picked this up since, hey, I'll read whatever I want to. Besides, commedic essays & memoirs are not usually my thing. I find they still aren't my thing. A lot of the "shocking" things in here might be more shocking to Middle America than they are to me, but at least Handler has a solid sense of humor. Plus, she's honest-- which is a a weird thing to say for someone who lies all the time-- but she's honest enough about her biases. Awareness counts for something! Her adventures with Shoniqua (I assume based on her former co-star Shondrella Avery?) were the strongest parts, to me. This is probably a great gift book. Put it in the correct hands & you'll crack the right person up. I think I'll have Pam read it.

Adam's Tongue by Derek Bickerton.

Acheulean axe!
Pride of a million years,
is a death frisbee.

Derek Bickerton is a linguist whose big claim to fame is his work with creoles & pidgins. Just so you know that he is kind of great-- he proposed stranding a bunch of families who speak different languages on a deserted island to see how creoles develop. Dumb old National Science Foundation said it wasn't "ethical." In this post-Survivor, post-Jon & Kate plus Eight world, though, maybe it would fly? This book is Bickerton's delve into the evolution of language, & it is academic enough to bear scrutiny. I of course can only give it the most casual of scholarly readings, but his arguments are plausible enough, at least on the anthropological side of things-- I can't speak to the lingustics of it so much. The subtitle of the book should clue you in on the assumptions underlying everything, & his eventual direction: "How Humans Made Language; How Language Made Humans." I should also mention-- Bickerton has the sense of humor that you might expect of a somewhat eccentric professor; Jenny could barely read over my shoulder without groaning at some of his chestnuts. "Pidgins fly to the rescue!" or "Like a ververt (but not for the very first time)" being notable.

He dwells for a while on differentiation between "Animal Communication Systems" & language, showing the first tied to here & now, & most importantly, to behavior modification. A predator warning isn't abstract, & it isn't raw info; it means "get up into a tree!" & it directly influences the hearer to get up into a tree. Bickerton is clear that he's trying to scrape out anthropic bias, while at the same time thinks that failing to show language as a new thing is just a return (around the other side as it were) of that homocentrism. Putting language on a continuum with ACS isn't right, & it has its roots in dogma, not science. I have to say, I was largely convinced; maybe it was him hammering home that evolution does just the minimum needed to get by, but simultaneously arguing that there isn't a hierarchy; an ACS does what it needs to do. It isn't a crappy language, it is different from language. Further more, he has an interesting tactic when it comes to a lot of primatology studies: just simply pointing out that apes & monkeys, while they may be phylogically similar to humans & early hominids, are a world apart ecologically. There isn't habitat overlap; there aren't savanna apes. Or rather there are, & it is us.

Niche evolution was the key that unlocked Bickerton's speculation. Environment puts the natural selection hammer down, but animal behavior both creates new niches & can change the environment. There is a feedback loop there, which old school evolution tends to downplay or ignore. I'll crib his example, since it is a good one: beavers. Rodents start living in the swamp. They start adapting to the swamp. A new behavior sets in: building swamps. They start adapting to building swamps. Forgive me for the gross simplification, but you can see what I'm getting at. Or rather, what he's getting at.

So what is his argument? He says the cornerstone to language uncoupling is...displacement. Not just the physically & temporally present. How do you get there from here? Well, Bickerton paints a credible enough picture. He puts protohumans moving from "terrestrial omnivore" to "low-end scavenger." Low-end scavaging, connected to the period of protohuman distribution of cachement. What we are talking about in practice is tribes of protohumans, largely sedentary, who go to kill sites after all the other scavangers have had their way, & steal the bones. The bones too big to be cracked, which they then get into with stone tools, right into the rich marrow. Alright-- this is just setting the stage for what he thinks is the key phase: Power Scavenging. The transition to the niche of high-end scavenger. Now, he's not shy about pointing out that there are some heafty breeds of megafauna about-- as he puts it, half a dozen genera-- not species, genera-- of just big cats. Big cats. So how they heck is he arguing that a bunch of claw- & fang-less apes gets in there? Well; first by having the needed tools to cut heavy hides before bacteria cause gas to rupture them (the moment all the scavengers are waiting for). Those teardrop shaped hand axes you find all over the place in archeology? Them.

More to the point though, he says, are numbers. Bickerton posits that high-end scavenging comes along with territory ranging hominids, & points at a fission/fusion tribal model for how protohumans are behaving. Splitting up into smaller groups, ranging around till they see the proverbial circling vultures, & then? Running to go get help. Derek Bickerton puts recruitment center stage for language acquisition, for two reasons. One, the more "language-like" of ACSes are bees & ants...who both use them for recruitment. Two, for the simple fact that suddenly, you've got displacement. You run up to a couple of hairies & point, make mammoth noises, whatever...& you are talking about somewhere else with benefits in the future. So the hominids gather all the help they can, fusing back into a big group, & start picking up more hand axes. There are lots of piles of hand axes in the archeological record. A lot, with most of them seemingly unused. To the point where there are theories that the hand axe wasn't a tool at all, but a ritual object. The point is, there are a lot.

So you grab up as many hand axes as you can carry. They are in piles all over the place; when you don't have bags, piles all over the place are the best way to ensure you have things available. Maybe there are more on the way to where the other protohuman is leading you, & you grab more there. You & all your friends gather up & get to the dead mammoth. Sabertooth cats & whatever are gathering in a circle, maybe have already claimed it. So what do you do? You start whipping those hand axes at them. Just a huge group of apes throwing stone shuriken , driving off competitors long enough for some of the others to butcher off some of the best cuts before you abscond. The best thing about this theory? Is that it fits the facts. Around the time hominids are in sedentary tribes, you find bones with stone cuts on top of predator toothmarks-- meaning afterward. When the bones start dating from territorialism, you begin to find the opposite-- the stone tool marks under the gnawed grooves.

I know I'm focusing on the human evolution aspect more than the linguistic; that is just what I know more about. Derek Bickerton fills out the other half of the equation admirably. He has some stiff words for Noam Chomsky-- but not before putting in a disclaimer that I thought was rather compelling. Bickerton recognizes that Anti-Chomsky has become a political position, an easy way to for small dogs to make a name for themselves, but that doesn't stop him from disagreeing...but he disagrees because he thinks Chomsky is wrong. & to my reading, Bickerton trounces him pretty soundly. Of course, Chomsky has been pretty wishy-washy about language origins for so long, & I'd hardly put his opinions on the subject as central to his linguistic schema. From the displacement Bickerton outlines, he puts the next step to pidgins, & then from there he argues, the process is largely autocatalytic.

Me, I like locating language 50,000 years ago rather than 2,000,000 years ago, but only because it solves the Great Leap Forward problem. Even then, the two aren't necessarily at odds; if protolanguage develops two million years ago, who can say how long it would languish unformed before some necessary threshold was passed & human brains were neurologically rewired utterly?

(One aside. On page 230, Bickerton lays out an instance in which language's arbitrariness is outlines, where a woman drives past shouting "pig!" & the man assumes she's a rabid feminist obsessed with male chauvinism, only to find there is a dead pig in the road ahead. I'd just like to register a complaint, & point out the total immersion of misogyny in modern culture, where straw women are set up with unthinking regularity. You know who yell sexist things out of cars? Men, at women. This is one of those reversals of reality that is prevalent but untrue-- the prowling "man-hater." It just isn't true. It doesn't detract from the book-- the book itself is largely gender forward, with frank discussions of the role of females in the Power Scavanger motif & how gender divisions of hunting & gathering aren't set in stone. I just want to be aware of the tiny little blips, the stuff that could be overlooked, but shouldn't be.)

The Child Thief by Brom.

The great god Pan is...
alive? & in Prospect Park.
With Excalibur.

I picked this up from the Brom name alone. I have really been into him-- I think probably starting with the cover of Harlequin's Back. I have a thing for commedia del'arte soldiers. A pretty big thing. Anyhow, Brom's art adorns plenty of roleplaying material, but I've followed him over to his less & less illustrated novels, from Plucker to Devil's Rose. This book has black & white pieces at the front of each chapter, & an insert of colour pages in the middle, but isn't what you'd call an illustrated novel, you know?

The Child Thief is at its most basic a retelling of Peter Pan-- a dark retelling. In the afterword he says it was reading the actual text of Peter Pan that inspired it, which-- yeah, duh. If you read the actual Peter Pan, he's a pretty bloodthirsty & selfish monster. It is great. So Brom imported the myth into the modern world, & mixed in a strong helping of British mythology. The "dark modern world" is laid on pretty thick at first; I mean, Roman Polanski evil, you know? Almost cartoonish, except you know there are people who are raping kids & getting away with it (topical!) & so it is kind of distressingly plausible. Well, if pressed. The beginning is almost like the fiction in one of White Wolf's World of Darkness books-- everything is decayed & everything that could go wrong is turned up to 11. The main character (besides Peter) is from Park Slope, but not the gentrified Park Slope I live in-- no, a spooky, gang ravaged place. It gets to be a bit much, but once that shuffles into Avalon (which substitutes for Neverneverland) things really start falling into place.

A weakness the book has is that it occasionally asides to talk about the boring old "technology destroyed the magic in the world!" trope, combined with the sort of condescending attitude towards indigenous peoples. No, the aboriginal Americans did not live in a Garden of Eden in perfect harmony with "nature." Sorry. Neither did the ancient Celts. That aside though, Brom does some very clever stuff with the British Island mythology. The Lady of the Lake is part of a trinity of gods who made Avalon home, including The Witch & the Horned One...it should come as no surprise that (spoiler!) Peter is revealed to be the bastard son of the Horned One. See, because Peter Pan, right? I've always been fascinated with that cognomen, so I was happy to see Brom capitalize on it. Also, the treatment that The Captain gets is really interesting. It goes in an unexpected direction. & yeah, Christianity is made out to be a big bad, too-- witch hunt style Puritanism-- which I only fault as being a little tired. Then again, I might be jaded to that more than others. All in all, I liked it, & more & more as I got into it.

Requiem Chronicler's Guide by White Wolf.

"...worms play pinochle..."
"If this coffins a-knockin'..."
"I do not drink...wine..."

I looked at this at primroseport's recommendation; I never would have otherwise. I just don't mine my ideas from books like this, & a lot of the advice in Narrator guides like this tend to be fairly obvious. This still bends a little bit that way, but does follow the absolutely stellar gem at the core of the "new" World of Darkness-- not having a canon. Now, I wasn't a hater of the "old" World of Darkness metaplot, since I can discard & use whatever I feel like, but I have to admit that the new flag they sail under really warms my cockles. There are quite a few ideas in here that say "scrap the whole shebang from Vampire: the Requiem & try this on for size," like "Damnation" in which every Player is cursed by God/Devil/Kali/Whatever, individually; various "Clanless' pitches, The "Other" where the Beast is replaced by a sociopathic evil, & the most compelling: "Monster Garage" where you strip the character down to just Power, Finesse, Resistance & Vices-- Sloth operates like Obfuscate or Resilience, Pride like Majesty or Dominate, etc. There are chronicle-as-setting ideas, like "Bottle" where they say "put the bloodsuckers in prison! or on that Lost island!" There are even a few that sort of explode the meta-logic of play style, which you know I dig on; "Solo" is basically the "snapshot" style of play, writ large; "Generational" suggests an Ars Magica style elders/neonate level play. Interesting; something to flip though for ideas, to refer back to for new takes when you have an idea.

Baby's First Mythos by C.J. Henderson & Erica Henderson.

Where the Deep Ones Are by Kenneth Hite & Andy Hopp.

...& with strange aeons
even death may go bye-bye.
"Bing! Please turn the page!"

The Crawling Chaos
is called Nyarlathotep. "Bing!"
"Turn the page, master."

I'll put these two together, since I got them together & there are alike in intention. Both are children's stories set in the Lovecraftian milieu. Baby's First Mythos I kept for potential future starpawn of star-Mordicai; the most charming thing about it is that it is done by a father/daughter team up. Where the Deep Ones Are is a telling of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in a Where the Wild Things Are style, & that one I gave to Alicia for her birthday! Though I did sneak & read it first; used book! Tainted! Anyhow, both are super cute & important; as Baby's First Mythos says, the Whatley's had to start reading some kind of primer when they were little, right?

The Island of Doctor Death & Other Stories & Other Stories by Gene Wolfe.

Sugarland is Oz.
The Captain is Captain Hook.
& Edward Teach, too.

I'm not one for short stories. They just aren't my cup of tea; I don't need to speak ill of them. I just prefer novels, whether it is because I like a discrete entity (cover to cover, one thing) or the way my attention span is cut, or something else. It might be fairly strange to say, me not liking short stories, given my propensity for Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, & Jorge Luis Borges. & well, given Gene Wolfe's fondness for J.L. Borges, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he's got oodles of short story collections. I own all the ones in print, but have only read piecemeal from them ("Empire of Foliage & Flower"), figuring hey, at least this way I'll have Gene Wolfe to parcel out for a little while, along with his (what now seem to be) nearly annual novels. I can live with that! Well, I decided to break the seal on one of them, & get into it.

The Island of Doctor Death & Other Stories & Other Stories is a collection of shorts from the 1970s, & you can see that they wear their decade. Not derogatorily; just an aroma in the air around them. "The Island of Doctor Death & Other Stories" starts it off, which is echoed back in "The Death of Doctor Island" & "The Doctor of Death Island." Of the three, "The Death of Doctor Island" is my favorite; plus, the protagonist has had his corpus callosum cut? Great. In my current Oubliette campaign one of the characters, (played by toughlad) has had his snipped; sure, Gene Wolfe, why don't you just go ahead & steal that six years before I'm born. Go ahead, thanks. A lot of these stories turn pretty quickly into meta-commentary; dipping a nod, wink, or sneer at Frank L. Baum, Walt Disney, Charles Dickens, Scheherazade...in no particular order. I think out of the whole bunch that "Tracking Song" is the best of them, though the decaying Washington DC of "Seven American Nights" summons up the most evocative images when it hits its high notes. Oh, & "Hero as Werewolf" lets not forget-- pretty great, pretty darn great. Yep, Gene Wolfe-- he's the greatest living writer; echo that sentiment, stars.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.

In the Games again!
Come on, mockingjay, chin up!
Tick-tock, doncha know.

The sequel to Hunger Games, which has a lot more of the same, but with one fatal flaw: Katniss has gotten stupid. I mean, there are parts that I expect would be drawn out that aren't-- Haymitch might get called, but then Peeta could volunteer--- but over all I stopped seeing her blindness to social situations as a personal quirk & starting finding it...well, frustrating. Clearly they are digging out the tracker, clearly things are afoot-- don't be purposefully idiotic, Katniss! I was surprised that this book retraced its steps as much as it did: I expected this would be the revolution, but no such luck. Really this time the most endearing part of the story was the pre-game work, the reality television show aspect of it. The games themselves were a little confusing, crowded, but on the flip side, Collins doesn't give you hollow characters. You never know what is going on inside any of the other character's heads, for good or for ill. & oh, the imagery around President Snow at the beginning is really strong, very evocative. So yeah; weaker than the first one, but still a compelling read. I understand her infatuation with the Games; but also, I have a matching fondness for hypercompetent characters that didn't get itched in this one.

Far North by Marcel Theroux.

The world has moved on;
Makepeace was its last sheriff.
Blue bottled lightning.

Post-apocalyptic novels set in Siberia make me a pleasant Mordicai. Now, fair confession, I've never read Cormac McCarthy; I am sick of "men's narratives" & that sort of macho nonsense. "in a world where XX is YY, what does it mean to be a man?" or whatever. Peppered with a liberal dose of random bleck horror. Yawn. I also don't care about Hemingway. Yeah, yeah, I should probably read McCarthy at some point, that isn't the point; my point is that I feel like I want to describe this book as what would happen if The Road acknowledged that women exist. As people even! At least, based on what I imagine The Road to be like. Hence my initial preface, about how I haven't actually read any of his stuff. Anyhow, I liked Far North!

I've heard it played like it is a "surprise" that the main character, the constable of a dying town in post-apocalyptic Siberia, is a girl. Theroux doesn't bring it up for...twenty pages. You know, I don't think you can call it a twist if it is only twenty pages in. Theroux doesn't dwell on her sex when it isn't germane, & doesn't fail to acknowledge it when it matters. I say "sex," since through most of the book she passes as a man, more or less without trying to, just by not correcting people's assumptions. Gender isn't really an issue here, which is interesting & refreshing. Not like I don't like it when gender is an issue, I'm just kind of charmed by the sparse treatment of it.

Is this bleak? Heck yes. Unrelentingly so? Maybe even. There sure aren't a lot of nice things. I guess what keeps it from tipping is the internal life of Makepeace. She is pretty darn admirable, & awfully plausible for all that. Marcel Theroux is writing with the thin convention of having the book be a narrative memoir. I don't mean thin in a negative way, I mean that it is a contrivance that impacts the story in only light, elegant nudges. For all that terrible things happen, Makepeace lives with them. Plans for bad outcomes, rolls with punches. The world is stupid, & random, & cruel in its indifference; she is alternatingly ruthless to match, & kind enough to confound. She is a real character, too; she does things that seem foolish, or arbitrary at least, because of her dang obsessions, & she doesn't make you resent her for it. She's not a clumsy storytelling device, making bad choices to advance the plot; the choices she makes are reasonable, from her perspective. & worldbuilding-wise, there is just enough to interest me (memory stones, the very notable Daniel's fire) & not too much that you can't overlay it on top of anything. Which is to say, it is near future enough to be unmistakably your future.