Pixel Scroll 2/7/18 In Space Nobody Can Hear Your Red Tesla’s GPS Scream “Recalculating!”

(1) ABIGAIL NUSSBAUM. Last year’s Best Fan Writer Hugo winner announced that she won’t accept a nomination this year.

Third, this is something that I was pretty sure I wanted to do last August, but I gave myself some time to consider it, and now I’m certain: I’d like it known that if I were to receive a nomination in the Best Fan Writer category for the 2018 Hugos, I would respectfully decline the nomination.

I’ve debated with myself about whether and how to make this announcement.  Not, to be very clear, because I’m uncertain about not wanting to be a nominee again.  Without sounding like I’m complaining–since it all turned out so wonderfully in the end–being a prospective and then actual Hugo nominee is one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had.  It certainly didn’t help that the period during which I became a viable candidate coincided so perfectly with the various puppies’ campaign against the awards, so that on top of the regular pressures of will I be nominated/will I win, I spent a lot of my time wondering whether my nomination would be scuttled by a fascist terror campaign (which is, in fact, what happened in 2015 and 2016).  By the time 2017 rolled around, I had been on the Hugo merry-go-round for four years, and it was pretty hard for me to enjoy the convention or the lead-up to the awards from wondering whether this was finally going to be my year.

So while I may one day want to be nominated for the Hugo again (and maybe in another category too, if I’m eligible), I have no interest in going through the whole rigmarole again so soon, and especially when you consider that there are several other great potential nominees whose crack at the Hugo was scuttled by puppy interference.  It seems like absolutely the right thing to stand back.

(2) GEORGE R.R. MARTIN. Martin, in his Hugo eligibility post, asks people not to nominate A Song of Ice and Fire for Best Series — but feel free to nominate “The Sons of the Dragon” for novella. (Following this excerpt, he has more to say about the Best Series category itself.)

The only writing I had published in 2017 was “The Sons of the Dragon,” which was published in THE BOOK OF SWORDS, Gardner Dozois’s massive anthology of original sword & sorcery stories. Like “The Rogue Prince” and “The Princess and the Queen” before it, “Sons” is more of my (fake) history of the Targaryen kings of Westeros. By length, it is a novella… but it’s not a traditional narrative. By design, it reads like history, not fiction; but since the history is entirely imaginative, it’s still fiction, even if dressed up as (fake) non-fiction.

It has been pointed out to me that the publication of “The Sons of the Dragon” makes the entirety of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE eligible to be nominated as Best Series. I suppose that’s so. All I can say to that is: please don’t. If you like fake history and enjoyed “The Sons of the Dragon,” by all means nominate the story as a novella… but it’s really not part of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and sneaking in the entire series by means of a technicality seems wrong to me.

(3) TRADEOFFS. I was interested to see Abigail Nussbaum and I had the identical thought about this piece of news.

(4) FULLER BRUSH-OFF MAN. Two showrunners have left the building: “Apple’s ‘Amazing Stories’ revival loses showrunner Bryan Fuller”.

Apple has yet to launch any of the original shows funded by its $1 billion war chest, but it’s already losing part of its production team. Hollywood Reporter has learned that showrunner Bryan Fuller (of Star Trek and American Gods fame) has left Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories revival for the tech giant. The departure was “amicable,” according to sources, and stemmed from creative differences. Reportedly, Fuller wanted to make a Black Mirror-style show that wasn’t what Apple intended.

Fuller wasn’t new to the Amazing Stories continuation. He’d been around since 2015, when the series was attached to NBC and Spielberg wasn’t involved. He’s had some relatively short stints lately: he was booted from American Gods after the production company wanted to reduce the per-episode fee, and left Star Trek: Discovery over cost and casting issues with CBS.

The Hollywood Reporter source story has added this update:

Hart Hanson, who had partnered with Bryan Fuller on Amazing Stories, has also exited the anthology as Apple and producers Universal Television are now searching for a showrunner.

(5) HOOKED. K.M. Alexander argues “Your Fave is Problematic—That’s Okay”.

My favorite character from A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic, is Jaime Lannister, the heir to the Lannister family, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and an all-around terrible person. No, really. There are forum threads dedicated to his awfulness, and I don’t disagree with anything they say. He is awful; that’s not up for debate. But I don’t care; I still like him. There is something about his wit, his tenacity, his strange sense of honor, and his odd drive to do right by his family that draws me in as a reader. He’s my favorite.

In his Banquet Speech, William Faulkner observes good writing as “the human heart in conflict with itself.” I adore that line. As a character, Jamie embodies that for me. There is so much to loathe but a lot to like. It makes him complicated, and it makes him human. However, in some circles, my statement draws ire. How can I enjoy reading about someone so terrible? After all, he is someone who symbolizes the opposite of many values I hold dear. To those people, it doesn’t make sense; it feels two-faced and hypocritical.

These voices are nothing new. I remember hearing them as a kid from conservatives, and I’ve heard them as an adult from progressives. Recently they’ve become particularly pronounced on social media, shouting down and hunting those who dare explore life through the lens of problematic fiction. Over the last few years, I’ve seen several authors attacked—on social media, within articles, in reviews, and on blogs. Fans have gone after them for the problematic circumstances, events, and behavior of characters within their novels. It’s not surprising; it’s an extension of the same attitude we have seen play out in the social sphere. In addition to holding real-life humans accountable, fandom is now trying to hold fiction accountable….

(6) SIGNING OFF. The Geek Feminism Blog says they are “Bringing the blog to a close”. No specific reason given, but they did take a look back —

Alex Bayley and a bunch of their peers — myself included — started posting on this blog in 2009. We coalesced around feminist issues in scifi/fantasy fandom, open culture projects like Wikipedia, gaming, the sciences, the tech industry and open source software development, Internet culture, and so on. Alex gave a talk at Open Source Bridge 2014 about our history to that point, and our meta tag has some further background on what we were up to over those years.

(7) NEXT IN THE JURY BOX. A new Shadow Clarke juror greets the readers: “Introducing Samira Nadkarni”.

More than anything else, community as a space for discussion and critique forces an awareness of frameworks. A friend, Shabnam, once took a lot of time to point out to me that my excitement about a book that I believed destabilised gender and problematised caste in Indian contexts was, in fact, written to privilege the upper caste cis gaze. Her emphatic point at the time was that if someone mentions a gender and caste dystopia, I should look at whose interests are being played to, and that if the book couldn’t decenter the very idea of cis and caste-based constructs of gender, then this book was not innovative in its destabilisation at all. While this was applied to a specific book series, it was an excellent lesson to take away, learn from, and cross apply to future criticism: the fact that stepping away from standard representation itself is not enough until we think about who it privileges and what it says.

These are big questions for me, and I think also big questions more generally, about how inclusion can be kindness and violence all at once, and how navigating that critically can be fraught. For me in particular, I have strong feelings about postcolonial SFF writing in general (and this is primarily what I read in my spare time), and this also forces me to recognise how this is playing to a different set of privilege systems locally that can continue to foster violent hierarchies, or aren’t being dealt with or made visible enough yet. It’s complicated and I’m honestly not equipped to do it alone.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • February 7, 1940 — Walt Disney’s vision of Pinocchio debuted.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Cath spotted a comic that perfectly fits out recent “Cats Sleep on SFF” theme in Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News from 2016.

(10) SUPER BOWL BET. Here’s how the Boston Public Library paid off after losing its Super Bowl bet.

(11) FREE READS. Asimov’s has made four Locus-recommended stories available as free reads.

Congratulations to the authors of our stories on the Locus Recommended Reading List. We’ve posted the tales here for your enjoyment. If you’re voting in the Locus Poll and you haven’t read the stories or you’d like to refresh your memory please take a look at them now.

BEST NOVELETTE

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine, Greg Egan – Nov/Dec 2017
Wind Will Rove, Sarah Pinsker – Sept/Oct 2017

BEST SHORT STORY

Persephone of the Crows, Karen Joy Fowler – May/June 2017

An Evening with Severyn Grimes, Rich Larson – July/August 2017
Confessions of a Con Girl, Nick Wolven – Nov/Dec 2017

(12) BOARD MEETING. “Superdense wood is lightweight, but strong as steel” – Daniel Dern saw the story and asked, “How many existing sf/f ref’s does this conjure up? The first that comes to (my) mind is Howard Chaykin’s Ironwolf comic books… possibly also from Sean McMullen’s Moonworlds Saga, e.g. Voyage of the Shadowmoon.”

View the video

Newly fabricated superstrong lumber gives a whole new meaning to “hardwood.”

This ultracompact wood, described in the Feb. 8 Nature, is created by boiling a wood block in a water-based solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite. The chemicals partially strip the wood of substances called lignin and hemicellulose, which help give wood its structure and rigidity. Then the block gets squeezed between metal plates heated to 100° Celsius at a pressure of 5 megapascals — about 50 times the pressure of sea-level atmosphere. That squashes the gaps between the cell walls in the wood, shrinking the block to about 20 percent its original thickness and making it three times denser.

Researchers found that the densified wood could withstand being stretched or pulled 11.5 times harder than its natural counterpart without breaking. That makes it about as strong as steel, even though it’s more lightweight. Stainless steel pellets fired from an air gun and moving at 30 meters per second easily busted through a typical wooden plank, but got lodged in a stack of densified wood sheets with the same total thickness.

(13) ASIMOV LAUNCHED. From The Verge I Iearned — “The Falcon Heavy test flight included a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels”.

SpaceX has just successfully launched its new Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time, and just before launch, the company revealed on its live stream that inside the rather unique cargo of a Tesla Roadster, the company had placed an “Arch” storage system containing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation book series.

An Arch is a “5D, laser optical quartz storage device” that is meant to be able to survive even in the harsh conditions of space, built by the Arch Mission Foundation. The foundation’s goal is to preserve libraries of human knowledge for interstellar travel (and to protect information in the event of calamity to Earth itself). It’s a goal that the group says was inspired by Asimov’s novels, which see mankind working to write an “Encyclopedia Galactica” to protect mankind against a coming dark age.

(14) IT’S OFFICIAL. Netflix has released Marvel’s Jessica Jones – Season 2 Official Trailer.

Jessica Jones is back as New York City’s tough-as-nails private investigator. Although this time, the case is even more personal than ever before. Fueled by a myriad of questions and lies, she will do whatever it takes to uncover the truth.

 

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Todd Dashoff, Mark Hepworth, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, Cath, Kevin Mangan, Will R., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

76 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/7/18 In Space Nobody Can Hear Your Red Tesla’s GPS Scream “Recalculating!”

  1. So if New England had won the Super Bowl, what would the Philadelphia library have had to display? Maybe Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games?

  2. Second first.

    I kind of expected this item about Forrest J Ackerman to end up on the Scroll. (via Phraryngula, but the thread mentions that VD touched on it. They’ve conflated that with Vox the news site, which shows that they’re lucky souls.)

    Pixel, pixel, scrolling bright
    on the servers through the night
    What fannish one or naught
    could frame thy single glowing dot?

  3. evilrooster: I kind of expected this item about Forrest J Ackerman to end up on the Scroll.

    I forwarded that thread to Mike a week ago, but then the site admin removed the entire thread. They’ve now re-posted it under a different URL. Thanks for finding it.

  4. (11) FREE READS:
    Looks like five stories, not four 🙂

    That’s a nice selection! Reading Asimov’s was one of my 2017 to-dos; these are good picks as a diverse group of highlights. “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine” was a strong story about the sense of people becoming less and less… necessary; and Karen Joy Fowler is always incredible.

  5. “I kind of expected this item about Forrest J Ackerman to end up on the Scroll. “

    Gah. It takes time to stop seeing red after things like that. I have stopped reading Asimov and I will never try Ellison. Thank god I haven’t got any nostalgic memories regarding Ackerman.

  6. (7) NEXT IN THE JURY BOX:

    I’m really pleased to see how nicely the Sharke intros are focusing on reviewing, what it means to them, how the nature of reviewing has changed and become… less authoritative. This is the third intro, and I’ve really enjoyed them all. This bodes well for the 2018 Sharkes!

  7. 5) I strongly agree with K.M. Alexander on this one – people are complicated, fictional characters (to be convincing) need to be complicated too, and no one is a villain inside their own heads.

    Something I’ve said quite often, at one time or another, is that viewpoint characters need to be sympathetic, but that is not the same as being likeable, never mind good. The outstanding example, for me, has always been Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. As readers, we are led to empathize with Ripley, and Highsmith is good at making us feel along with his striving for happiness, his yearning for social acceptance, his deep fear of being found out. Familiar feelings to most (if not all) of us… and Highsmith uses that to get us under Ripley’s skin, to sync up with him, emotionally – to be, in some sense, on his side… even though, by any objective standard you care to name, he’s a heartless sociopathic monster. There is nothing remotely nice about Ripley: he is in no way good, or likeable… but he is a sympathetic character, and that’s what counts.

  8. Steve Wright,

    I think Flashman is the poster child for “sympathetic but not likeable,” at least in the early books. He’s a rapist, a bully, a liar, treacherous, and a coward, but the reader can sympathize with his terror as he flees Afghans or rides with the light brigade.

    I haven’t re-read the books, but my impression was that in some of the later volumes, Fraser started to succumb to the temptation to make him a bit more likeable (or maybe that’s an inevitable consequence of a reader spending so much time in Flashman’s headspace)

  9. Nickp says I think Flashman is the poster child for “sympathetic but not likeable,” at least in the early books. He’s a rapist, a bully, a liar, treacherous, and a coward, but the reader can sympathize with his terror as he flees Afghans or rides with the light brigade.

    We’ve got an interview somewhere on Green Man where Kage talks about her deep, fanatical love for that series and that it was one of her major influences for The Company series. And yes she told me in an email that she knew he was anything but a sympathetic character.

  10. (9) Yay! My first scroll item. I shall celebrate with the drink I earn by noting that “out recent” s/b “our recent.”

  11. @Cat: I wonder if I’d find a reference to Flashman if I checked the passage in the Company books when the Charge of the Light Brigade occurs?

  12. Connected to #5: I stopped reading Robert Parker’s Spenser books because at some point I couldn’t deal anymore with the viewpoint character presenting himself as fighting on the side of good (not just taking cases for the money), while cheerfully ignoring the fact that his best friend and occasional companion in battle was a hitman.

    I don’t know how that would have looked from Hawk’s viewpoint: from Spenser’s it seemed to be “yes, he’s a paid killer, but he’s really good at it, and cultured,” and that plus occasionally wanting a backup in fights was enough. And when the character’s motivations seem to be personal relationships, cooking, and a desire to make the world better, it matters who he’s chosen for those relationships.

  13. Sympathetic criminals and murderers are not uncommon in crime fiction, particularly of the hardboiled variety. We root for Richard Stark’s Parker. I have a soft spot for Lawrence Block’s Keller stories, about a hit man who is otherwise an ordinary middle class guy who collects stamps. I suspect there is an interesting challenge for writers in trying to manage the reader’s response to such characters and situations.

  14. 5) Joe Ambercrombie’s ficational Logen Ninefingers qualifies as well. By the end of the First Law trilogy, I wasn’t rooting for him to “win”, but I was disappointed with how things turned out for him nonetheless.

    Regards,
    Dann
    Basic Programmers Never Die! They just GOSUB w/o RETURN.

  15. re: Flashman in SF, he makes a cameo appearance as an old portrait in The Peshawar Lancers.

    Someone in a comment somewhere (Making Light, I think), suggested that Flashman would plan to be on the first evacuation ship out of London after The Fall, but he would actually end up clinging to the hawser of the last ship, closely pursued by a howling mob of cannibals.

    In an alternate universe, I would dearly love to read that volume of the Flashman Papers

  16. 5) Jorg of Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence was a pure bastard, one of the worst I’ve read about. Which did not stop me from rooting for him.

  17. Flashman was just almost a character in the Black Adder series, which is alternate history that has veered into science fiction and fantasy. “Lord Flashheart” turns up in two episodes.

  18. Time for Blackadder quotes? It’s always time for Blackadder quotes.
    “Meredith moments and cat stories Godstalk our Scroll like… two Pixeled Godstalking things.”

  19. Spenser having problematic friends, including Hawke, didn’t bother me. Eventually, though, the depth and texture that made things work faded, and Spenser and Hawke spent a book out of state, just being killers. Stopped reading them then, except for occasional rereads of older books.

  20. For me, the platonic ideal of how not to handle an unsympathetic character was Hannibal Lecter, at least in the Thomas Harris books — in Red Dragon & Silence of the Lambs, he worked well because he was clearly a monster, clearly with his own agenda, and, most importantly, clearly a secondary character.

    Once Harris tried to make him the protagonist in Hannibal (which is, I admit, the last of those books that I read) it all fell apart because Harris tried to make him sympathetic, first by creating an even more monstrous antagonist and second, and more damningly, by trying to give him a “tragic backstory” to explain his peculiar culinary preferences.

    I am reminded, though, that I do need to watch more of the Bryan Fuller TV series.

    You wouldn’t know a pixel scroll if it painted itself purple and danced naked upon a harpsichord singing, “Pixel scrolls are here again!”

  21. One that immediately comes to mind is Karl Schroeder’s Venera Fanning. Manipulative, ruthless and quite willing to get blood on her hands. But I still like her. Don’t know why, but I do.

  22. Andrew says @Cat: I wonder if I’d find a reference to Flashman if I checked the passage in the Company books when the Charge of the Light Brigade occurs?

    Good question. I’ll ask Kathleen, her sister, if this happened.

  23. Vicki Rosenzweig on February 8, 2018 at 6:03 am said:

    Connected to #5: I stopped reading Robert Parker’s Spenser books because at some point I couldn’t deal anymore with the viewpoint character presenting himself as fighting on the side of good (not just taking cases for the money), while cheerfully ignoring the fact that his best friend and occasional companion in battle was a hitman.

    While I’ve read most of them (except for the newer ones written by not-Parker) I stopped because it was hard to tell which ones I’d read from which ones I hadn’t. Like was this the one where a client talks to him, some people try to scare him off the case and it goes badly for mostly them, him and Hawk prepare for defense/attack, then Susan eats a salad and tell him something that solves his case, then there’s a shootout? Can’t remember.

    Hadn’t heard of a pure main character movement that seems pretty lame. If there’s no room for the character to grow and they begin and end as a paragon of virtue that sounds boring.

  24. I know several people who stopped reading the “Thomas Covenant” books when the title character became a rapist. Which was early in the first book. Donaldson hadn’t given them sufficient reason to be invested enough in the character to continue. I did finish the series, but that was when I was more of a completist than now; I had more time to read. Now when I hit a “nope”, I stop and start something else. And yet Mount TBR never seems to diminish…

    (Probably because my filters are better and I’m less likely to pick up a “nope” novel in the first place.)

  25. 5) Richard III as imagined by Shakespeare. And if “likable” can be expanded or morphed in the direction of “charismatic,” “eloquent,” or “compelling,” we can add Willie’s Falstaff, Edmund, and Iago*. And Webster’s Bosola. (Actually, the Jacobean stage is crowded with villains you can’t take your eyes off.)

    Myself, I suspect that Harry Flashman’s family tree might contain a byblow from Fat Jack’s whoring days.

    * Especially as played by Bob Hoskins.

  26. Matt Y: Like was this the one where a client talks to him, some people try to scare him off the case and it goes badly for mostly them, him and Hawk prepare for defense/attack, then Susan eats a salad and tell him something that solves his case, then there’s a shootout? Can’t remember.

    LOL — aren’t there about 20 Spenser books answering to that description?

    My personal take is that the series died with A Catskill Eagle — Susan needing to be rescued, essentially as a consequence of making a bad romantic choice, was a complete violation of her established character. I still read every Spenser book that came after, I just didn’t pretend that they were as good as the early ones.

  27. @Mike: I think “Catskill Eagle” is the one that Lis Carey was referring to above where Spenser and Hawk spend time out of state just killing.

    A series can have a main character that doesn’t grow if the main character gives the other characters he meets the chance to grow and change (or fail to change). This happens in the Spenser books with Paul and with April.

  28. @Nickp

    I think Flashman is the poster child for “sympathetic but not likeable,” at least in the early books. He’s a rapist, a bully, a liar, treacherous, and a coward, but the reader can sympathize with his terror as he flees Afghans or rides with the light brigade.

    That wasn’t my experience. I only read the first three of the Flashman series, but through-out, my hope was the vile little man was about to get his. The closest I got to sympathetic was a level of horrified admiration at the sheer gall and opportunistic survival instincts he possessed.

  29. I got to the point where I was uneasy about Miles Vorkosigan and unconvinced by everybody else’s adoration for the man. Other characters in the series are flawed and know it; Miles thinks of himself as good and the narration agrees with him, but I can’t forgive him what he let Bothari do under his orders, and too often I remember that he fights for an authoritarian regime; benevolent, yes, but still undemocratic.

  30. @ Anna Feruglio Dal Dan

    I could never get into the Vorkosigan books for similar reasons. Milo never worked for me so the books failed, no matter how good Bujold was.

  31. Just finished A Night In The Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. Yeah, I know it’s not fall, or October, but Hurricane Harvey got the ILL book sent back and there were other obstacles.
    Anyway, that was a lot of fun! Snuff, Graymalkin and the lot of them. I think I’ll buy a copy for an annual read.

    Back to Provenance and then maybe Elysium Fire. That or back to Brookmyre’s A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away and maybe a Hitchhiker’s Trilogy re-read.

  32. And Meredith Moments for 2/8 only:

    Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick ($1.99)
    Nightwings by Robert Silverberg ($2.99)
    Expendable by James Alan Gardner ($0.99)
    Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany ($2.99)
    The Bishop’s Heir by Katherine Kurtz ($1.99)
    Snow Shadow by Andre Norton ($0.99)
    The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy ($1.99)

  33. BravoLimaPoppa3 says Just finished A Night In The Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. Yeah, I know it’s not fall, or October, but Hurricane Harvey got the ILL book sent back and there were other obstacles.

    Anyway, that was a lot of fun! Snuff, Graymalkin and the lot of them. I think I’ll buy a copy for an annual read.

    Don’t know if it ever officially got release as my copy quite some years back was from a radio show but Roger narrated this novel and his dry, drool voice is a perfect fit for the text. I prollystill have it somewhere on an Archive disc.

  34. @Matt Y
    While I’ve read most of them (except for the newer ones written by not-Parker) I stopped because it was hard to tell which ones I’d read from which ones I hadn’t. Like was this the one where a client talks to him, some people try to scare him off the case and it goes badly for mostly them, him and Hawk prepare for defense/attack, then Susan eats a salad and tell him something that solves his case, then there’s a shootout? Can’t remember.

    That’s a large part of why I don’t read a lot of long-running series. I managed to get through six or seven of the Dresden books. I read thirteen or fourteen of the Honor Harrington books (these days, I’d have given up after three or four). I’ve found that nearly any long-runing single-protagonist series falls into this trap after a while. Either it gets formulaic or I (as a reader) stop fearing for the main character(s). Or (all-too-often) both.

    It highlights the strength of series like Iain M. Banks’ Culture series or Max Galdstone’s Craft Sequence novels, or even Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, where the various books take place in the same world, but you get different spotlight characters on a regular basis, and no one character is carrying the entire series.

  35. Mike Glyer –

    LOL — aren’t there about 20 Spenser books answering to that description?

    Yep! I’ve even bought the same ones from a used bookstore before because it was hard to tell based on the dust jacket summary if I’d already read it or not, and in one case I was halfway through before I realized I had read it the year before.

  36. To my eye, the Spenser series peaks with LOOKING FOR RACHEL WALLACE and EARLY AUTUMN, and then starts a long, slow side downward. A CATSKILL EAGLE isn’t that good, but it’s pretty much the end of the series, at least as far as any character development goes. After that, it feels like Parker was simply making too much money from the books to stop, but he launched other series with characters he could actually have wrestle with personal issues and grow and change.

    There are a couple of decent books after CATSKILL EAGLE — notably HUNDRED-DOLLAR BABY — but the developing story of Spenser and Susan as characters is done, and doesn’t change thereafter.

    These days, if I reread any of them, I’ll read the stretch from MORTAL STAKES (book 3) to A SAVAGE PLACE (book 8), and maybe HUNDRED-DOLLAR BABY. But the series ran on fumes for a looooooonnnnnnnggg time.

  37. I will never try Ellison

    For what it’s worth, I read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” a year or so ago. The best thing about it is its title.

  38. Cugel the Clever is another contender in the sympathetic-but-unlikable department: he was a thoroughgoing jerk, but so was everyone else on the Dying Earth, and he was as much sinned against as sinning. And sketchy as he was, he never quite crossed the moral event horizon.

  39. Comsidering I couldn’t finish the first Flashman book after he raped someone, and after years of people telling me how good this series was and how well researched the history (and how venal the character, so it’s not like I wasn’t warned)…

    Well, my point is, when taking a chance on an anti-hero, YMMdefinitelyV.

  40. Kurt Busiek: These days, if I reread any of them, I’ll read the stretch from MORTAL STAKES (book 3) to A SAVAGE PLACE (book 8)…

    I first read them a couple of decades ago, then later reread them a couple times, and agree with you about the two peak experiences, although it has now been a long time since I did any rereads of the first 10-12 books. I came to the realization that Looking for Rachel Wallace well-suited my own poor grasp of feminism at the time but since I hadn’t gotten stuck there, I figure I will no longer enjoy Spenser’s early-on, cartoony efforts to “defend” Rachel Wallace. [SPOILER WARNING] Just the same, I still admire Parker’s setup that at the moment Spenser figures out where Wallace is being held, Boston is shut down by a blizzard, and if he wants to get there he has to walk for miles — which he does, alluding to that being something he had learned in the Army during his Korean War service, marching for miles in the worst weather.

  41. @BravoLimaPoppa3,

    Annual re-reads of “A night in the lonesome October” is definitely a thing.

    One variation is to read one chapter per night, but I’ve never been able to stop with just one.

  42. @Lenora Rose: This is somewhat tangential to your comment about Flashman, but especially since the Aziz Ansari story came out I’ve been shocked to reflect on the literature I learned about sex from–Boccaccio, Donne, Marvell–and realize how so much of it is suspect. The narrators of “To His Coy Mistress” and “The Flea” are trying much too hard for my tastes now, and “putting the devil in his hole” isn’t the sex-positive story of female desire I first, and rather naively, took it for.

    I don’t have any firm conclusions about any of it but I’m definitely reading things differently now.

Comments are closed.