Episode 12 is available for streaming here, downloading here, and can also be found on iTunes by searching for ‘Galactic Suburbia’

In which we talk about publishers behaving badly, authors self-publishing, the future of reading and the price of a short story. Also we talk about books. Shocking, isn’t it?

News

Night Shade apologises for any problems they’ve caused any of their authors

SFWA puts Night Shade Books on probation as a qualified SFWA market for a period of one year, effective immediately.

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As you all may have guessed by now, I’ve been reading my way through the Graphic Novels section of the Hugo packet. It’s been a really interesting way for me to get a taste for what is out there, and has been easing me back into graphic novels as a format – already I’ve been looking beyond this shortlist and picking up other titles from my local library!

But I’m not going to be reading Captain Britain, by Paul Cornell. Which is a shame, because I was looking forward to it. I’m interested in Cornell as a writer, and also in the idea of a British superhero… but sadly this is the one Hugo-nominated graphic novel on the shortlist whose publishers decided to make it complicated.

The others all provided the works in a pdf format that I found easy to open, navigate and customise on my computer, for comfortable reading. This one instead provides an html link that opens a web reader which feels fussy and annoying, strains my computer’s capacity, and basically is trying too hard to control how I might want to read it. And oh yes, they only provided two issues as a ’sample’ rather than the entire work.

I realise at this point that I am basking in utter entitlement. Only a year or two ago, the concept of a Hugo packet, of voters receiving a whole bunch of free works to help educate their vote, was revolutionary. Indeed I think this is the first year that every shortlisted work is represented in the packet, though I could be wrong in that.

But… yeah. Over-entitled I may be, but the fact remains, my time is pretty tight, and educating myself before making my Hugo vote isn’t my absolute top priority. As it is, I’m picking and choosing which works and which categories I am going to try to cover. Anything I can’t easily and comfortably access is absolutely not going to get read, and Captain Britain just lost me and my vote.

Written by Neil Gaiman, pencilled by Andy Kubert, and inked by Scott Williams.

Yep, another one from the Graphic Novels Hugo Packet!

This two-issue mini-series of Batman comics was commissioned to bring the iconic Detective Comics title to a close, and to provide a moment of closure before Batman was once again reinvented for a new audience of readers. Neil Gaiman, who also writes an introduction to this graphic novel, was pretty much given free rein to write whatever he wanted, and he produced what he felt was a story that provided a ‘The End’ for Batman.

The thing that makes characters like Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman so unique is that they don’t ever end – and yet there are countless deaths and alternate futures provided through comics such as the Elseworlds series or even more standard storylines, because when you have a character who lives on forever, ageless and constantly being reinvented, it’s fun to mess with the formula. There’s hardly a character in the DC Universe who hasn’t been killed and brought back, or lost their powers, or in some way been divested of the very elements that make up their character.

Writing ‘the End’ feels like an important thing to do, despite the fact that it has little weight or sense of permanence. The truth is, nothing in a comics universe has weight or permanence. There have been so many reboots, retcons, alternate worlds, dimension-crossings that it’s hard to tap into the kind of emotional resonance that a novelist or screenwriter can summon up by killing off a beloved character.

The beauty of Gaiman’s story is that it acknowledges all these things. It is a very meta story at its heart, that shows a deep love and respect for the long, complex and utterly incomprehensible Batman backstory. The premise is that Bruce (at least, we think it’s Bruce) is witnessing his own funeral – or, rather, that of the Batman. Mourners have gathered from both sides of the law – Batman’s allies and friends, and his worse enemies. One by one, they bear witness to how the Great Detective died.

Bruce has several mysteries to solve. Where is he? How is he able to observe his own funeral? Why does everyone have a different version of his death?

At its heart this is a very simple what if kind of story, but it has some moments of real brilliance. Alfred’s story was really extraordinary, and I loved the focus on the old school Selina Kyle’s Catwoman, a character who for me has never been better than she was in the old 60’s and 70’s comics.

The artwork too, deliberately evokes several different eras of Batman, and there are many lovely touches of nostalgia to balance out a mixture of sentimentality and sharp wit in the script. On the whole this is a very readable story, which anyone could pick up but I think would mean more to those who have traversed some of the many threads of Batman’s history. It’s the first so far from the packet which I have been genuinely tempted to pick up in hard copy, if only for archival reasons.

While I’m sure this makes for a pretty slender graphic novel, being only two issues, it is fleshed out with a whole bunch of value-add content, particularly several Batman universe stories previously written by Gaiman, to which he refers in his introduction. You can see here the progression of his interest in Batman as a concept, though he has never properly “done” Batman before. The best of these is a meta-story about Batman and the Joker hanging out together behind the scenes of the comic, which should be a one page joke and yet manages to be a far more substantial and poignant piece. I also was quite interested in the Poison Ivy origin story, though the Riddler one felt far less effective and well-realised.

So yes, Neil Gaiman can write Batman, and does so rather cleverly. Anyone surprised? I think my favourite ‘end of Batman’ story is still the arc from the animated series Batman Beyond & Justice League Unlimited, but the cleverness of this story makes it almost completely compatible with almost every other version of Batman’s possible future. That’s what is so very clever about it.

Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham; Art by Peter Gross & Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn; Colour by Lee Loughridge & Laura Allred; Letters by Todd Klein (Vertigo Comics)

Another freebie from the Hugo Packet. Like Girl Genius, Fables is one of those things I’ve been meaning to get to for some time. It sounds on paper like it is exactly the sort of thing I love to read: a world that takes fairy tale images and iconography and does something new and inventive and meta with them.

Sadly, unlike Girl Genius, this one is not for me.

I was reasonably compelled by the first chapter of the selection which has been nominated for the Hugo – the character of Gepetto, a former evil dictator, and his reluctant attempts to fit in now that he’s just one of the people, did catch my attention. But after that first promising chapter, I mostly found myself bored.

Yes, I started reading quite far in, and yes the story isn’t meant to be read that way. But I should be able to tell from this volume whether it’s worth my time to go back and read Fables from the beginning, and from what I see here, it’s really not.

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This graphic novel is one of the freebies that was sent out with the Hugo packet to help those with voting rights become more informed about the shortlisted works. Can I just say, how awesome is reading comics in e-format? I need to digitise my JLA collection stat.

Girl Genius, written and drawn by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is a webcomic available free, which also releases the stories in graphic novel format each year. I’ve been interested in this one for some time and gone so far as to bookmark the site, but have never got around to actually finding the time to check it out properly. This fantastical steampunk (or gaslamp fantasy) tale of “Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!” has been running for ten years and I knew going into it that starting at Vol. 9 was asking for trouble.

Sure enough, it was hard to get into at first. I liked the artwork, which is bright and gorgeous and features some beautifully human-shaped women (by no means a common event in any comic art). I liked the steampunk/gaslamp iconography, but for the first several pages it seemed like it mostly consisted of young people in corsets and tight trousers shouting at each other.

Gradually, though, Girl Genius got under my skin. The slow dripfeed of backstory and worldbuilding meant that by the time I was halfway through, I pretty much knew most of the relevant things that had happened so far, and what was at stake. I was also very attached to many of the characters, mildly invested in the romances, and starting to laugh at the in jokes.

Agatha and her friends are stuck in a sentient castle that may or may not want some of them dead. One of her love interests is dying in any case, from a mysterious and extremely colourful ailment, and the other is wandering around with an Agatha-imposter, flexing his muscles and generally getting into trouble. As promised on the tin, there is adventure and romance and mad science. The worldbuilding is beautiful, especially the concepts of the Sparks, and the way that magic, science and engineering intersect with each other. The characters are appealling and I particularly loved the scenes where the two boys were forced to work together, acknowledging that they both care for Agatha and, it seems, have a secret past of their own.

Agatha Heterodyne is definitely worth your time, especially if you have a thing for strong, talented female heroes, snark, steampunk, love triangles and people building shiny things in dark laboratories. It has a feel of a particularly smart manga to it, and you can read it without paying a cent. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Ooh, and you can buy the collections in pdf form. I’m so there!

I can tell the end of The Creature Court is on the horizon, because I’ve spent the day being hit in the head by other books. Important, exciting future books which are not yet. The trouble is, now I’ve answered the last questions about Book 3, my brain is telling me that the job is all done, which is patently not true.

Also both the books smacking me over the head today are the Wrong Books and in no way the one I planned to write next. For which I have sensibly been applying for grants, and planning to use to put a proposal together for Voyager in the second half of the year.

Damn it. Work’s not done. Work’s not done. Could someone inform my brain of this important fact? I don’t have time to construct a lavish Shakespearian alternate universe right this second.

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The Hugo shortlist nominees went up on Twitter this morning, Australian time – luckily I had been woken up early by my adorable/dreadful children, so I was around to read them as they came in.

I haven’t been as excited about a Hugo shortlist in years – not just because I got to nominate and will get to vote in these particular ones, but because it does look as if there has been a bit of a demographic shift this year. There are lots of women, new writers and online publications represented across most of the categories. Many things I really liked and indeed nominated got up, which is rather nice.

Congratulations to all the nominees! Hope to see as many of you as possible at Aussiecon this September.

The shortlisted items/people I am most excited about are:
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor) [best novel nominee]
“Act One”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09) [best novella nominee]
“Eros, Philia, Agape”, Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09) [best novelette nominee]
“The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2) [best novelette nominee]
“It Takes Two”, Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three) [best novelette nominee]
“Spar”, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09) [best short story nominee]
On Joanna Russ, Farah Mendlesohn (ed.) (Wesleyan) [best related book nominee]
The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms, Helen Merrick (Aqueduct) [best related book nominee]
Jonathan Strahan [best editor, short form nominee]
Shaun Tan [best pro artist nominee]
StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith [best fanzine nominee]

And the works that have been added to or moved up to the top of my reading list are:
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra) [best novel nominee]
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade) [best novel nominee]
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean) [best novella nominee]
Soulless by Gail Carriger [The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominee]
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire [The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominee]

Ah yes, somehow it all comes down to more books for Tansy to read… funny, that.

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In honour of it being awards season, Twelfth Planet Press is offering free e-copies of Horn, A Book of Endings and SIREN BEAT through the month of February.

If you’re eligible to nominate in the Hugos or the Ditmars, obviously we’d love it if you thought any of the above works were worthy of your nomination. (not sure when the Ditmars are opening for nominations but it’s sure to happen eventually)

Even better, if you enjoy reading your free e-copies, consider buying a hard copy of your favourite Twelfth Planet Press book. Indie press appreciates your support!

Paul Haines is offering his acclaimed novella Wives in free electronic copy for anyone who asks. This is an awesome, epic piece of Australian horror/post-apocalyptic science fiction from last year, and if you’d like to see some Australian content on the Hugo ballot, this would be a marvellous one to support.

Wives isn’t just a great piece of fiction, it’s an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that he writes stories I hate, about people I hate (and I don’t mean mild revulsion, I mean actual HATE), and yet I can’t pull my eyes away. “Wives” is his best work to date, an utterly hideous vision of the near future, exploring issues that are already very relevant to many people – the lack of women sticking around in country Australia, the sociological effect of preferring male children to female and, oh yes, the ingrained misogyny that hovers just out of sight in our culture. Haines exposes the ugliest sides of human nature in this epic story of “Bridal Services,” rape and slavery, told through the eyes of a narrator so utterly screwed up by his circumstances that it’s hard to blame him for the despicable, thoughtless way that he speaks, lives and acts. This is post-apocalyptic fiction at its best and worse, because there is no apocalypse. There’s just us.

(in discussion with my fellow LSSers about “Wives,” I said “I don’t know whether I want to nominate it for the Tiptree or BURN IT TO THE GROUND.” Yeah, that. Just that.)

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Some links on feminist issues, sexism & gender awareness.

Sarah Rees Brennan is writing awesomeness about women in fiction again, debunking all the dumb excuses people give for being more critical of female characters than male (features the big spoiler for The Demon’s Lexicon):

There are also issues with writing people with disabilities, people of colour, people who are gay. There are even issues with writing straight white guys, because they too live in a world where inequality exists, and this affects them too! All these issues! That’s why it is impossible to ever write any characters at all. And so all my writing goes like this ‘the void… BLANK PAGES … the void… BLANK PAGES.’ It’s very deep.

Cheryl Morgan talks about how to get women nominating for and appearing on the Hugo shortlists, and looks a bit at the psychology that means women usually don’t get fairly represented. In particular she suggests that women are more likely to disqualify themselves from being well-read enough to venture an opinion.

 coffeeandink on male privilege & perception of merit in comics – a beautiful illustration of the ways in which some men can unconsciously discount the work of women, particularly in geek-friendly arenas. This might be one to bookmark and point people to as a great example of invisible sexism at work.

A round-table discussion on how to define and redefine ’strong’ when it comes to YA heroines.

Moving away from speculative fiction and geekery circles, here’s an interview with Natasha Walter about the return of sexism and the pressure on young girls who don’t feel they have a choice to opt out of porn culture.