mostly harmless books

My trip to Ukraine was awesome (saw a very good friend again, made new friends, saw cool places), but I didn’t spend all the time socializing. Long train journey + lots of downtime meant I also got to read a lot, four books to be exact:

• John Joseph Adams (ed.) - Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
• Charles de Lint - The Ivory and the Horn
• Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins - Left Behind
• Charles de Lint - Memory and Dream

Three of them were mine, the other borrowed from the lovely Peace Corps lounge. I was this close to also reading Richard Adams’ Shardik (solely for the Dark Tower connection, I admit), but then I saw that the “small” book I had borrowed also had really tiny fonts, so it was impossible to read in a couple of days.

Anyway, thoughts on the books forthcoming.

This is one big OMG. How did I miss it?

Via FBS: a new novel by Roger Zelazny, called Dead Man’s Brother, will be published in February 2009. There are some details here and an excerpt here. It’s published by Hard Case (which, for me, as someone who doesn’t read crime novels, means “the guys who published King’s Colorado Kid“).

The excerpt is yummy, typical Zelazny. I loved the way he used hardboiled elements in his fantasy, it should be really interesting to read a whole crime novel from him.

This makes me happy. I thought the amount of Zelazny books I could read was finite (the downside of your favorite author being dead), but yay! for new (old) books.

Yesterday, when I left home, I took Ally with me thinking I had about 20 pages to go, more than enough for the journey downtown. I finished the book unexpectedly, after about 5 pages, in a subway station. “Whoa! The ship left! Let’s see what happens next… Shit, the book’s over!” Who’d have thought a book has acknowledgments and editorial stuff at the end? Yeah, I’m a bit thick sometimes.

I thought of 2 or 3 titles before finally deciding on this one. I think it fits, because in the end, almost every character in the book is alien in a way. The wess’har, the eqbas, the bezeri, the isenj are the “classic” aliens. Little green men (squid, insects…) from Mars (Bezer’ej, Umeh…). But Shan, Eddie, the marines are also aliens. Shan was an alien even on Earth due to her unusual mentality; Eddie became an alien when he got attached to Wess’ej and a little matriarch-to-be.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was the wess’har amazement at the way humans conduct their affairs. Once you think about it, we don’t make much sense, and it’s very weird to hear it coming from an alien, completely innocently. It’s never judging, it’s simple curiosity: how can humans be so stupid? It’s a very refreshing change of perspective after all the SF based around “the human spirit” conquering all. Let’s face it, we’re screwing up our planet and fighting pointless wars, we probably shouldn’t be running loose around the galaxy.

But then… is genocide justified for environmental reasons? (more…)

Thanks to my friend Cristi who dragged these all the way from New York to Bucharest, I have new books! I’ve been drooling over Wastelands for about a year now, so I am excited.

I’m going to save them, however, for the trip. 27 hours by train from Bucharest to Kiev is a lot… And since I want to re-read Vellum, Ink is scheduled for after I get back home.

Not the best day I’ve ever had. Although I knew it before, today I was once again proven that the book industry is just that, an industry, and like in any economic activity some people will do anything to try to preserve their good image, even outright lie. Oh well, good thing I’m too lazy to delete my e-mails.

And in other, much better news, on Wednesday I’m meeting the friend who brought me lovely books from the US! (Ink, Wastelands and two novels by Charles de Lint) On Sunday I’m leaving for Ukraine and I will have a lovely train journey with my new shiny books :D