Review: Makers

Cory Doctorow’s latest, Makers is a loving tribute to mad invention and the people responsible for it.  It reminds me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano with its world run by engineers scenario.  But unlike that dystopian view Makers is instead about the sheer joy of creation.

But this is not a purely optimistic book either.  The protagonists are far from perfect and spend just as much time ruining their lives as improving them.  But with one or two exceptions the characters aren’t terribly interesting anyway.  This just isn’t a book that’s really focused on people.  

Instead its about what people can acomplish when they are given the means to innovate.  When Doctorow gets lost in talking about people doing neat things his enthusiasm is infectious and the novel soars.  But the rest of the time the book is a bit of a misfire, feeling less like a novel than an extended essay on how large corporations are not conducive to creative thought.  Not a horrible book by any means, but probably Doctorow’s weakest novel to date.

Review: the Hunger Games

I picked up the Hunger Games after nearly everyone I knew with an interestest in YA fiction spent the better part of the last year telling me I had to read it.  I can see why it earned the adoration.

At first glance the book isn’t anything that original, treading ground seen previously in such books as Battle Royale and Tunnel In the Sky.  A group of children are carted off to a wilderness arena and are forced to fight to the death.  Why that’s become its own genre is probably something that would make for a halfway decent master’s thesis.

So, what makes the Hunger Games different?  Primarily its that Suzanne Collins isn’t actually  interested in telling an survival story.  Instead this is a dystopian story, and a damned good one.  The games in this world are used as a means of both entertaining the ruling class and ensuring their dominance over those beneath their station.

The dystopian elements were by far the most engrossing aspects of the story, but very often they also led Collins to make some slight missteps in the story.  The action elements occasionally feel somewhat unfullfilling, with quite a few major pieces of the plot occuring offstage and a few Chekhov’s Guns left unused. 

But still the book left me craving the sequel, which seems like it ought to focus more on the politics of the world Collins has created, and that interests me a great deal more than the Hunger Games detailed here.

Review: Essential Amazing Spider-Man Vol.9

This volume of the Essential Spider-Man covers the issues published between 1978 and 1980, which is not a particularly well known era for the character despite a lot of significant stuff that happens here.  The Black Cat, Madame Web, Jigsaw and Calypso all make their first appearances.  Aunt May dies for a few issues, Peter quits the Daily Bugle for a few more, John Romita Jr. becomes the regular artist and their are decent confrontations with Electro, Doc Ock, Kingpin and Mysterio.  But the story here that has sort of endured is the return of the Burglar (he who shot Uncle Ben).

Everything here’s pretty average for Spider-Man, with the possible exception that Peter’s age is starting to get a little awkward on occasion.  The character’s a TA in grad school at this point and the writers are still trying to give him the occasional problems with school/work/dating issues from when he was in high school, while occasionally attempting to actually portray him as an adult.  However, what results is Peter going to C.B.G.B’s on a date and complaining about how loud the music is there.  

But besides that, this is classic, Spidey with some very competantly told stories from comics legends Marv Wolfman and Denny O’Neil.

Review: Rex Mundi: the Valley At the End of the World

Up until now I had been a big fan of Rex Mundi, a great, well researched, alternate history/fantasy that reads like what everyone wishes the Da Vinci Code had been.  But the penultimate volume is just a huge mess of a book.

Okay where to start.  How about the fact that there are now vampires randomly introduced into the story’s third act and which have nothing to do with the main plot.  Then there’s the culmination of the war which has been building up through the 4 prior collections.  At the end of chapter 2 in this book France is on the verge of defeat, with Paris sacked and its allies abandoning the nation.  When chapter 3 starts France has magically conquered most of Europe.  

Which brings me to the use of magic in these books.  Magic has always been a part of this series, but up until now most of the characters only ever used it to light cigarettes.  Now there are suddenly mystical duels with fireballs and flying and of course those pesky vampires.  

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this approach to the story, but I sort of felt like it along with the stylistic change brought about by new artist Juan Ferreyra changed the tone of the story far too much.  Eric J’s art from the earlier volumes was rougher and full of deep shadows.  Ferreyra’s on the other hand is a little more detailed and…well lets just go with prettier.  It’s gorgeous work, but I just don’t feel it suits the material terribly well.

So yeah, this is pretty much a textbook case of a good book turning bad.  There’s one volume to go and Arvid Nelson may be able to salvage things with it, but right now Rex Mundi is really becoming a disappointment to me.

Review: Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds

The Legion of 3 Worlds is a very strange book.  It serves as the culmination of various plot threads from Geoff Johns’ runs on Teen Titans, Superman, Green Lantern, and the Flash but has nothing whatsoever to do with Final Crisis, despite the title.  Then there’s its stated goal of redeeming Superboy Prime, the villain of two massive DC events (Infinite Crisis and the Sinestro Corps War) and a continuity headache in his own right thanks to his role in Crisis on Infinite Earths.  And then of course the book is actually supposed to be about the Legion of Superheroes, and is an attempt to straighten out the three different continuities that exist in the Legion canon.

Can you follow all that?  If so this is the book for you.  For the other 99% of the population who won’t have a chance of groking this story without a wikipedia IV I think this book will pose a substantial problem.  

But credit where its due, the story here holds together remarkably well despite just how much is going on here in so little space.  And much of that is due to the legendary George Perez turning in some amazing art work.  Throughout the series he has to draw a couple hundred characters, not to mention distinguishing between all the alternate versions of the Legionaires.  Its a pretty impressive tour de force and it makes this comic a must read, but really only for the hard core DC fans.

Review: Dexter By Design

The latest book in Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series was sadly a disappointment to me.  The main problem at this point may just be that its not the show, which has left the books behind in its wake.  Dexter is still a phenominal character and Lindsay does well by his creation, but the story this time is really lacking.

In this book Dexter returns from his honeymoon (note this is the same as the current season of the tv show) to encounter an artist who uses corpses as his chosen medium.  This isn’t such a bad gimick for a Dexter story, but Lindsay just doesn’t do a whole lot with it.  Dexter and the villain spend the book nearly encountering each other until they reach the climax where Dexter is stuck as a mere observer.  He’s the reason to read these books and yet he barely does a thing in the course of this entire novel.

The worst part is the character moments that ought to be here are largely lacking too.  The fourth season of the show is primarily about Dexter adjusting to his marriage, the plot involving the villain is almost incidental.  Here the marriage barely even enters the book besides the fact that Rita is put in danger in the final chapter.  And the best part of the novels, Dexter’s relationship with Rita’s kids, only gets a few scenes as well (but at least they’re good ones).

This isn’t an awful book by any means, just a forgettable one.

Review: Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers in one of the benchmarks of the science fiction cannon, as well as just about the most troubling book in it.  This is the book that gave birth to proper military s.f; with everything from Aliens to Halo borrowing themes and idea from it.  It’s the first and possibly the best book about an interstellar ground war.

But what makes the book so fascinating and problematic is the central philosophy that Heinlein is using the book to promote.  That citizenship is not a right, but a priviledge that should be earned through service to the state.  He plays fair with this at least, mostly.  The chaos and horrors of war permeate the book, so he’s not trying to glamorize military service by any means.  In fact every last veteran to appear in the novel is missing a limb or two.  But on the other hand anything truly tragic happens off-screen.

It’s also impossible to think of this book without bringing up Heinlein’s follow-up novel, the legendary free-love masterpiece Stranger In a Strange Land.  Heinlein is an incredibly hard author to pin down, but one well worth struggling with.  Starship Troopers is one of the key pieces in that puzzle, as well as simply being essential reading for anyone in fandom.

Review: Grandville

Grandville is Bryan Talbot welcome return to the sort of storytelling he made great in his Luther Arkwright books.  This is one big ole s.f. tinged, very British, adventure story.  But of course this being a Talbot book there’s more to it than that.

The book is a tribute to the works of French illustrators J. J. Grandville and Albert Robida, winding up with a Steampunk, funny animal political thriller with a bit of Sherlock Holmes thrown in.  The result is a gorgeous book, possibly a lesser work from Talbot, but only because he’s clearly writing this for some fun after the tour de force that was Alice in Sunderland.  

The tone of the book is fairly dark, but he casts Snowy (the dog from TinTin) as an opium addict!  Not to mention throwing random tips of the hat to works like Maus and Omaha the Cat Dancer.  This is Talbot at play, and that’s wonderful to see.

Review: Scalped: High Lonesome

Well the cover blub on the latest volume of Scalped (from the Philadelphia Daily News) states that this is “one of the best comics ever created”.  I’m not sure if that’s totally true, but it’s certainly in contention, and actually might be the best crime comic to date.

Jason Aaron is just an incredibly brave writer, crafting a painfully bleak work that lacks even a single sympathetic character.  In High Lonesome he tells a series of 5 interconnected stories revealing both the motivations behind the main cast and the answers to most of the major mysteries that have driven the plot up until now.  

It’s a ballsy movie by Aaron to unmask everything all at once, but it works incredibly well, and it really feels like the right approach for him to have taken.  And even with all that out there, there still seems to be plenty of story to come.  No padding, just plenty more misery to heap upon the residents of the Prarie Rose Reservation.  I can’t wait.

Review: Planetary

Well it took a decade for a mere 30 issues (counting the 3 specials) to come out, but the wait was worth it.  Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary is one of the key comics of the last decade and unquestionably a must read for any fan of the medium.
What makes the book such a standout is the two levels the story works on.  On its surface this is an adventure book about 3 adventurers dedicated to their catchphrase “it’s a strange world, let’s keep it that way”.  To do so the team of “mystery archaeologists travels the world finding wonders and trying to save them from the 4, a group dedicated to hording those treasures for themselves.

This is where Planetary goes from being a merely good comic to something special.  The four are clearly patterned on the Fantastic Four, who if you know your comics history, launched Marvel’s dominance of the comic stands.  The FF are explorers at heart, a quartet that goes into the unknown in order to define it.  In this book, Ellis instead portrays them as the death of the heroic age that came before them.  An age in which the pulp heroes sought out the same sorts of wonders, but soley to have the experience, and not to define them and limit their capacity for evoking a sense of wonder.

Ellis then combines this analysis of pulp history with his archaeologists to turn the comic into a tribute what was lost.  Up until the end when Ellis starts wraping up the story every issue serves as a meditation on a different part of that history.  There are issues dedicated to Doc Savage, Japanese Kaiju, the Justice League, and big dumb object s.f. tales (think Rendezvous with Rama), plus many more.  Ellis is always respectful of these inspirations, and Cassaday’s art, which made him a superstar, is the perfect compliment for it.

Just an incredible book.