dukedom_enough in 2014

I didn't have a thread here last year. Will aim to do better this year, and perhaps also review a few of the ones I missed noting last year. Will probably have to fill in with short-fiction reviews, since I'm not reading as much, lately, being preoccupied with that annoying non-book world. Don't worry, I can be pretty long-winded about short fiction.

Books/stories in 2014
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You have already done better than last year by having a thread this year. Looking forward to those science fiction reviews.

Great to see you back, look forward to your reviews.

I like short fiction and I like SF. So I suspect I will be visiting your thread a lot...

I'll be looking in as well. I'll also being reading a few short stories, due to some gift certificates and a cheap tablet I decided to give some the SF magazines a try again.

>1 dukedom_enough: - re being long-winded. Wasn't it Samuel Delany who wrote a book length study of a Thomas Disch story? So you'll be in good company.

>6 Jargoneer:. Oh yes - the study on "Angouleme".
I am usually playing catching up with my magazines but I am still curious - which ones did you decide to give a try? :)

>7 AnnieMod: - I thought I would give Asimovs another go since it used to be my US magazine of choice, and F&SF, which I always felt I should love but never did. Also Lightspeed, and I'll try to keep up with Clarkesworld online. I'm tempted to try Interzone again but worried I'll never read another book this year if I keep reading magazines.
It's interesting that the magazine market is dying in terms of sales but booming in terms of the number of online magazines.

I forgot Subterranean Online. Writers like Lucius Shepard & Bruce Sterling for free. You can't argue with that.

>8 Jargoneer: No, you can't. I guess we will be comparing notes - all of those are on my list this year :)

baswood, stretch, AnnieMod, Jargoneer,

Thank you all for your kind welcome; am looking forward to sharing our love of reading.

Jargoneer,

My F&SF subscription began in 1963, and I'm hoping to keep it going until the end of either their life or mine. More likely theirs, since their current circulation is about 11,500, while it was about 60,000 in the 1960s. Steady decline in recent years.

Asimov's is probably the better magazine, but I don't have the sentimental attachment I had for F&SF, and don't currently subscribe. I do look at Clarkesword.Will look into Subterranean more.

I think short SF fiction may be turning into something like poetry - a relatively small number of readers, and little chance of making much of a living at it.

AnnieMod, Jargoneer,

As I understand it, as of about ten years ago, Delany's Angouleme book could not be reprinted, because Disch was mad at him and would not give another reprint permission for the story. The book reprints the entire story, I believe, so fair use doesn't apply. I don't know what the status is now that Disch is dead.

>11 dukedom_enough:

But it had been like that for years... Short stories (and novelettes and novellas) are the genre where SF thrives... at the same time getting them published is not as easy - and not so many people read them. All the magazines are going down with their numbers. I don't know - I love short fiction - but I had also seen a lot of magazines fold and close in the last few years (even though new ones seem to reappear all the time).
PS: That's a lot of years of F&SF :)

>12 dukedom_enough:
Did not know that -- but then I only knew of Delany's book as a curiosity... No clue what is the status now.

Re The American Shore - something must have changed. According to the blurb for Delany getting the SFWA Grand Master Award it is due for republication later this year.

Disch died - which might have changed things. Enough money might have convinced the estate to allow the reprinting. Yeah - I am sometimes cynical about these things.

Gregory Feeley is the literary administrator for the estate; he may've given the go-ahead, I guess.

OK, this is interesting. The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer is an annual award for which new writers in science fiction and fantasy are eligible. And here we have an anthology with most of the writers eligible for the 2014 award, to be presented at the World SF Convention next August. 860,000 words, 111 authors, in a free eBook. Those who can nominate for the award - members of this year's convention and the 2013 and 2015 ones - can now sample these writers' stories and novel excerpts.

Going to be a lot of bad writing in there. You don't have to be a good new writer to be eligible. This wouldn't've been feasible before the web; as a book, it would be way too big. Still, it tempts the would-be obsessive reader in me.

Yes, but how do you think it's been done in the past? Wait for the Locus magazine lists in February and then just read what's on their recommended list before deciding? Seems voting for something like this is a lot harder these days what with easy web publication and what must be an explosion (as evidenced by this eBook) of the numbers eligible.

I wonder if they will somehow have to develop longlists/shortlists in the future....

Nominating for these awards is arbitrary because the readers can't read everything, especially now that we have a zillion web magazines of various sorts.

I suppose this is somewhat self-limiting in that those nominated are from the more read magazines, likely Asimovs, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Subterranean; and various anthologies.

And new novelists -- the Campbell is not restricted to short stories writers only.

>17 dukedom_enough: - thanks for the list. If anyone manages to get through the whole thing perhaps they should be nominated for an award - the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Reader.

>21 AnnieMod: - looking at winners, it's about 60-40 in favour of novels.

>21 AnnieMod: Yes, that's true, but I was using short stories writers as an example because of the potential for an almost unreadable number of eligible writers.

AnnieMod,

The ebook has 29 novel excerpts. Also some flash pieces "and a Poem."

Jargoneer,

The New Reader award could be given posthumously, I trust?

avaland,

Most at LT track number of books read, not number of authors, but I bet 111 or more is rare.

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch

This, the first of Stanley Crouch's projected two-volume biography of musician Charlie Parker (1920-1955), ends at the point where a jazz fan's interest might begin, at the "Honey and Body" recording. Sometime in 1939 or 1940 - we're not sure exactly - Parker recorded, for his private use, a brief medley of "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Body and Soul"; it's his earliest known recording, and of great interest as a milestone in his musical development. For telling us about all the historic recordings that would follow, about who Parker was and what he meant, Crouch is mainly reserving the second book of the biography.

If you're unfamiliar with Parker, or need a reminder, here's "Ko-Ko" from 1945, just a few years later (Youtube: don't know if these links will last, and sorry about the ads). Here's "Donna Lee" from 1947.

But our jazz fan really needs to read this book, which tells us how Parker came to be Parker: his life to that point, his personal and musical growth, the people he knew who later served as witnesses to these years. But, beyond that, Kansas City Lightning is the story of all the threads of African-American life that came together around this boy/young man as he developed his extraordinary talent.

Crouch gives us a pocket history of African-American music and culture. An African-American named Frank Johnson led a popular dance band in 1819. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-Americans were able to make increasing use of what freedoms were available to them to travel widely, observing the musical styles in distant cities, and organizing their own nightlife despite the repression from white society. The early popularity of ragtime preceded the development of jazz, a new music having improvisation as its central characteristic. Crouch expands on the tension between minstrelcy - the clowning behavior that entertainers were confined to for so long - and the elegance and dignity exemplified by Duke Ellington; on the importance of music teachers in racially segregated high schools, providing rigorous training for musicians who were largely excluded from higher education; on the meaning of boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, proving that an African-American was as good as anyone.

Supremely important in this world was the character of jazz as a blood sport - a ferocious competition between players or bands, wherein the better musicians won the day and the lesser ones went home in shame, according to a judgment shared by everyone on the bandstand and in the audience. In this mileu, performers were constantly seeking to improve their skills and, equally importantly, to develop unique personae of sound and style that were theirs alone, matched by no one else. Parker's hometown, Kansas City, developed a regional coterie of players who could match the best visitors from Chicago or New York. We're used to the modern jazz idiom now, and it's hard to comprehend the decades of work and competition among hundreds of superbly talented people that brought it into existence. Crouch starts the book on this point, in early 1942, with the Jay McShann band winning New York's Savoy Ballroom with Parker's alto saxophone, before going back to the start of his subject's life.

In Kansas City, Kansas was born Charlie Parker, the indulged child of a fiercely admiring and protective mother who was his only parent from an early age. He grew, played with friends, went to school, married, and studied the saxophone. What Crouch tells us comes from the testimony of his playmates, fellow aspiring musicians, and his first wife, Rebecca Ruffin Parker. Amazingly, and outrageously, no one interviewed Rebecca Parker, the first wife of one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century, until Crouch did so in 1981, 26 years after Charlie's death. This and other lacunae mean that our knowledge of those years is rather fragmentary in parts - but the story of a developing talent is clear, even as Parker as a person remains a bit mysterious.

We learn about the mentors Parker admired and sought out, his student and early professional days, his hopping freight trains - in the midst of the Great Depresson - to Chicago and New York. We see proved once again the adage about genius being mostly perspiration. Parker practiced many thousands of hours, over years, before he was even good enough to be allowed on the bandstand with the pros. He listened to live performances, radio broadcasts, and records for many more thousands of hours.

Sadly, we learn that, like many great men, Parker was capable of abusing women. He neglected Rebecca and their baby son for the streets, and for other women, and at one point held a pistol to her head. In this, Parker's story, far from unique, is much too familiar.

Crouch writes with a lyricism that, though a bit overdone at times, captures the feeling of the music in non-technical terms. Here's that 1942 Savoy date:

The rhythm section lit out. The band came in and played the song's ensemble chorus, sixty-four bars of a tune notorious for its complex harmony, all those holes you could break your musical legs in. This was one of those times when the griddle was hot and nothing came up except steam. Arrogant and proud of themselves, the rhythm section reared back and pounced on Charlie's back when he put his horn to his mouth. And his saxophone, in turn, became a flamethrower of rhythm, melody, and harmony. They pushed and drove, chorus after chorus. Then as professional experience had taught them, they lulled, let him get a little stronger, went back to their basic strategy, and let him dance his hot-footed dance with suble support. Then they tore into him again, setting fire to his tail.

(...)

That afternoon, sixteen miles away from Harlem, bassist Chubby Jackson was working at the Adams Theatre in Newark. He was playing with the big band led by Charlie Barnet, who had had a hit with "Cherokee" two years before. While on break, Jackson decided to see (...) the Savoy broadcast. As soon as he turned on the radio, a sound that was almost brutal shot out of the speaker. The song was "Cherokee", but the sound leading McShann's version was that of an alto saxophone almost completely devoid of vibrato, notes flying thick as buckshot, slapping chords this way and that, rambling quicker and with more different kinds of rhythms than his band had ever heard from a saxophone. Everybody stopped talking, fiddling with their instruments. Who the hell was this? Oklahoma trumpeter Howard McGhee, who was there that afternoon, chuckled at the memory: every musician standing there with his mouth open knew where he was going that night.

At the end, we are left with Parker making that private recording at 19 or 20; already estranged from Rebecca, already addicted to opiates, already more than halfway through his terribly short life, already a master musician whose name would someday serve as half of Miles Davis's summary of the history of jazz: "Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker". The needle cuts into the recording disk. Crouch has worked on this book since 1981; he has promised the sequel in a couple of years. Can't wait.

4-1/2 stars

Great review of Kansas City Lightning. I have recently read Ross Russell's Bird Lives!, which I thought was the standard biography, but Stanley Crouch's book will be a must read for me.

Great review, and very informative.

Wonderful review on a topic not familiar to me, even if the reviewer is (ha ha, and I'm not the least bit biased).

> 26 baswood,

I read Bird Lives! in the 1990s sometime. I remember it being rather hagiographic. Russell admitted the substance abuse but I don't recall him noting the terrible treatment of Rebecca. I don't think Russell had access to Crouch's interviews with her. I'm thinking of looking into some of Crouch's references. I know there are several other biographies out there. Crouch is a better writer than Russell.

> 27 rebeccanyc,

Thank you!

> 28 avaland,

Ooh, I'll play you some of those Parker cuts tonight! :-)

>29 dukedom_enough: Will we be You-tubing on the wild internet river, so something more private? (didn't we pack all the CDs up already?)

I don't have the details at hand, but I recall doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed that most of the Charlie Parker that we have today, we owe to the existence of pirated/bootleg recordings.

I don't know anything about jazz, but I'm still intrigued by the myth of Charlie Parker. Enjoyed your excellent review.

OK, after watching so many Midsomer Murders with Lois, this is funny:

"We lead the country in candlestick bludgeonings."

Via Making Light.

So many murders in Oxford, (Morse, Lewis) I'm always a little relieved to see zenomax posting, as proof he has escaped the carnage

Also, best we stay away from Denmark and Sweden, on the evidence of The Killing and The Bridge. Is anyplace safe!?

Meant to say: thank you, Dan. And, AsYouKnow_Bob - after all, in many cases the artists got nothing even from authorized releases, thanks to creative accounting.

Lois has been urging me to note the short stories I've been reading lately, since I've mostly not been reading novels. Have been reading through The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. This is the current collection, with stories from 2012. Haven't liked many of these, though that might just be my mood, lately

"Under the Eaves" by Lavie Tidhar is a girl-meets-cyborg story - more a vignette, really, set in a future Tel Aviv. Girl wonders whether her part-human tin man can really love her. The world is dominated by post human Others who sometimes dip into human affairs. The story is interesting as far as it goes, but feels like it might be a chapter of something longer. There's been a lot of buzz about Tidhar, but one can't tell from a piece like this.

Thank you :-)

>33 dukedom_enough: That was funny!

>25 dukedom_enough: Fabulous review of Kansas City Lightning! I'll definitely pick this up soon. And thanks for the links to Ko-Ko, which I know well, and Donna Lee, which I'm not sure I've heard before. (Is that Bud Powell on piano?)

Rachael (FlossieT), who works for the London Review of Books, told me about an LRB article about three biographies written about Bird last year, including Kansas City Lightning. I haven't read it yet, but here's a link to the article:

Birditis

I think that you can read the full text without a subscription to the LRB. Let me know if you can't read it.

kidzdoc,

Now that's a long review! Cool (actually, hot and swinging!), thanks!

I think that's Al Haig in Donna Lee - anyway, not Powell. I looked, hoping to have a connection to your Powell book review.

I'm very sorry to learn this morning that writer Lucius Shepard has died. News via numerous people on twitter, including LT member Ian Sales.

I'm not particularly a fan of dark fantasy, but when Shepard is writing it, I am. His stories of marginal men encountering evil or the uncanny at the fringes of the world are often among the very best of speculative fiction. He was one of the rare writers in SF/F still making a living while writing mostly shorter fiction, though there are a few novels.

When he was guest of honor at Readercon in 2007, I volunteered to be his at-convention liason. He was a lovely person, laconic, generally laid-back, and easy to work with. He had a pretty tough life, especially when young; he seemed older than his then-59 years.

If you want to sample his fiction, A Handbook of American Prayer is an excellent short novel. I suggest the early stories collected in The Ends of the Earth for novelettes and novellas; Abe Books has a number of inexpensive paperback copies. The excellent The Best of Lucius Shepard is just $2.99 for an ebook from Kobo or iBooks.

Here is his entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

>42 dukedom_enough: - it is sad news, he was a talented writer. To your recommendations I would add The Jaguar Hunter to the list. (Although off the top of my head I can't remember the differences between the UK and US editions). One of the things that I admired about his was that he stuck to producing novellas, a form he excelled at, and didn't to go the route of padding them to make weak novels.
He is also a writer I always thought would appeal to a non-SF audience but never seemed to manage to breakout to a wider readership.

Michael Swanwick notes Shepard's passing.

Period of intermittent net access for avaland and me starts today, FYI.

Reporting in for avaland and me. We closed on the new house and moved in. Lots of boxes everywhere. Today was clean-the-old-house day, and we'll have to come back tomorrow or Monday to finish the job. Closing on the old house April 2.

We're enjoying the new house when we're not too tired. Again, no internet access there until April 15, except for our phones, which aren't very good for writing LT posts.

New house is just 5 miles from our favorite bookstore. I've already special-ordered a book. Uh-oh.

Congratulations on the move!

Checking in; we closed on the old house two days ago. That was a big relief. Still a lot of work to settle in to the new one. Poetry unpacked and shelved in one of the house's built-in bookshelves.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

A bit embarassingly, I had never actually read this novel before. Mary Shelley will be the Memorial Guest of Honor at Readercon this summer (2014), so now was the time.

Shelley's story of a great scientist who dares beyond his limits set down one of the major motifs of modern imaginative fiction. After nearly two centuries of imitations, derivatives, replies, films, and commentaries, the novel itself holds few surprises, except perhaps that it still is entirely readable and gripping.

I had not expected the book to have so much landscape in it - the Romantic movement's emphasis on the sublime in nature is much on display, as Dr. Frankenstein contrasts his guilty misery with the beautiful Alps and other places about him. His monster's strength and agility is displayed by its easy traverse of those landscapes.

That misery raises a question. Did his incessant introspection on his horror over his mistake really seem a sensible response to Shelley's contemporaries? To me, it appears much too self-dramatizing, and paralyzing to a character from whom a much more active response is needed.

I also wonder whether Shelley's readers found the doctor excessively clueless. Dr. F, when the monster says it will be with you on your wedding night, it's perfectly obvious to a modern reader that it's not primarily threatening you. Today's novelists would not foreshadow so clumsily.

So: change in the expectations of readers, or just the flaws of a very young writer, just eighteen when she had the idea for the story, and only a little older when the first edition appeared?

The past several years have seen numerous storms over the increasing visibility of women, and of people of color, in science fiction as writers and characters. It's timely to read this book, and remember that the very first, true science fiction novel (as Brian Aldiss has argued) was in fact written by a woman, who gave us a book like none before, and forced her many followers to write in response.

You've made me want to reread Frankenstein and look at it from the Romantic landscape point of view, something I wouldn't have considered in detail the last time I read it. Unfortunately my English novels are in storage as we have just put the house on the market... you know all too well what that's like! It will be something to look forward to way down the road. I had not heard of Readercon before but it sounds wonderful.

>50 dukedom_enough: I like your thoughts on Frankenstein. I am also one of the few people who have only gotten around to reading the novel this year. I certainly agree with you on the descriptions of landscapes. I had the same thought when I read the book.

>50 dukedom_enough: Clueless or a monster himself - take your pick

Nice review. I like that you included the questions that came up for you. You did not say much about it as science fiction, except for Shelley's place in the canon (though didn't Tom Disch argue that it was instead Poe who wrote the first "true" science fiction).

51 > SassyLassy

Lois and I were on the Readercon committee for a decade, but we've stepped back to volunteer (me) and just attending member (her). Many great conversations about literature, not just SF & F either. Just had the 24th one; stressful but a good time.

Hope your move goes well.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

This novel combines cyberpunk and urban fantasy motifs, with an modern Islamic flavor. Alif is the nom de net of a young man, an Arab-Indian computer hacker, living in an unspecified, authoritarian, Persian Gulf emirate. He sells cyber security services to political dissidents in his own and other Islamic countries, keeping them safe from State discovery; in his personal life, he pursues a forbidden relationship with a wealthy, aristocratic woman. Her parents betroth her to a powerful man, head of the government security forces, who is intent on shutting down the activities of Alif's customers and friends. This precipitates a series of events that land Alif in trouble with the State - and with supernatural forces, for the jinn of The Thousand and One Nights are real, living in a world just outside our experience. Her last gift to him is an extremely rare book, a copy of the Thousand and One Days, a shadow version of the humanly-written 1001 Nights, as dictated by the jinn themselves. While being pursued by his country's brutal secret police, he realizes that its text provides insights for hacking, far more powerful than anything the humans know, insights he must master if he and his allies are to survive.

Any book written by a Westerner, that attempts to see modern, Islamic culture from within, falls automatically under the suspicion of committing orientalism. Author Wilson avoids the problem to a fair degree - Alif and the other characters are convincingly modern people, not robed exotics. In particular, Alif possesses a degree of sexual sophistication that seems credible in a young man, living in a society where women are often veiled and always restricted, but where the educated have access to global media. The politics of relations between the ruling Arabs and their guest workers from the Indian subcontinent are explored through the lens of Alif's dual heritage. Herself a convert to Islam, Wilson owns up to her outsider status by putting a version of herself in the story - "the convert", a Western woman who participates in Alif's story, sometimes as a figure of fun, sometimes as a useful ally and important mover in the plot.

Finally, however, while this book is not really fantasy from a non-Westerm, Islamic point of view, it is fast-paced, interestingly different, and worth reading on its own terms.

...And the review just preceding mine, by lquilter, notes a number of sexist and homophobic failures in the book, which I managed not to note. They're there, all right, but I think the book still counts as an advance on the most common treatments of the Islamic world in SFF.

>56 dukedom_enough: I had to work hard to find the title of this novel Alif the Unseen. It was interesting reading the two reviews.

baswood,

Thank you for noticing that; I used mostly the same text for the posting on this thread and the review for the work page, and the latter doesn't need the title.