The mainstreaming of nerd culture has benefits and drawbacks to people who’ve been nerds their entire lives. On the one hand, you can buy Spider-Man or vintage video game T-shirts anywhere; on the other, most adults wearing them do so based because of some misplaced sense of irony — there’s no love, no appreciation there. This results in conversations such as:
Me: “Nice JOUST T-shirt, guy. Man, those pterodactyls are sons of bitches, am I right?”
Man in JOUST T-shirt: “JOUST is so lame! The graphics are so bad! I find it humorous that anybody would have any appreciation for such badly aged entertainments, bro!”
Me: “Oh. I like JOUST.”
MIJTS: “That makes you lame by association, bro!”
Me: (hangs head in shame)
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In THE STRAIN, the first book of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s “vampires reimagined” horror trilogy, New York and its surrounds were consumed by zombie-like, stingers-that-can-shoot-out-of-their-throats monsters commanded by a mysterious master over the course of a week. Now in paperback, the second novel, THE FALL, picks up where we left off, with our previously independent protagonists finally banded together, and the new vampire race slowly gaining intelligence.
In the wake of STRAIN’s down ending, our fearless vampire hunters — government epidemiologists Eph Goodweather and Nora Martinez; New York exterminator Vasiliy Fet; and would-be Van Helsing Abe Setrakian, whose history with these monsters dates to his childhood — are holed up in Setrakian’s well-fortified building, planning their next steps and trying to determine what the monsters will get up to next.
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Published in 1962, H. Beam Piper’s LITTLE FUZZY is an easy-to-like, somewhat forgotten, Hugo-nominated, science-fiction book that is very much rooted in its time. John Scalzi is a prolific, easy-to-read, Hugo-winning novelist whom I think of as the spiritual successor to the authors of science fiction’s golden age. So if Scalzi decides he wants to “reboot” LITTLE FUZZY, let him, for L. Ron’s sake!
Yes, it’s a “reboot,” not a sequel. FUZZY NATION takes the characters and general theme of the original, and remixes, updates and revitalizes them into a novel that’s hard to not read cover-to-cover in a single sitting (a long one, with bathroom breaks, of course). It’s also sort of like AVATAR and, at the same time, awesomely superior to AVATAR.
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At the front of my review copy of THE FALLEN BLADE is a letter from Orbit Books’ senior editor Devi Pillai. In it, Pillai says that this novel “promises to add commercial success to [Jon Courtenay Grimwood's] outstanding critical acclaim.”
“Crap,” I said to myself when I read that sentence.
Yes, mostly traditional plot structure isn’t the kind of high-level mindfuck that regular readers have come to expect of Grimwood’s novels. Yes, there’s a brooding vampire who struggles with his nature and a young girl with a heaving bosom who’s thrust into events she can’t imagine. But no, it isn’t the disaster I feared it to be.
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The idea of the United States’ “manifest destiny” is an insidious one — the implications it has regarding Americans’ relative importance in comparisons with their neighbors are wide-reaching and dangerous.
But Paul McAuley has taken the idea of an American empire and spread it across dimensions. COWBOY ANGELS takes place in a reality where the USA has found a way to travel to alternate dimensions, and when the government finds out that not every America is as “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet,” the government in America Prime sets out to correct this error, installing governments across dimensions that fit within its idea of “America.”
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