Interview with Joshua Mowll, creator of Operation Storm City

If you were intrigued at all by my post last week about Operation Storm City, go check out the interview I just did with the UK author/artist behind the series, Joshua Mowll.

He was also kind enough to send me some cool images from the book, too--which you can check out in the Q&A--like this schematic of a zoridium bomb:

Maximum War Game

I don't normally read manga. I'm 55, okay? But I had to. I mean I had no choice. This manga is different. It's about go.

Hikaru No Go features a boy who finds a go board while exploring in the attic. The go board is possessed by the ghost of an ancient Japanese go master (Go is the national game of Japan. At Gobase, you can study games of today's masters, and games dating all the way back into the 1700s, as well!).

Hikaru learns to play from the ghost. Only Hikaru can see him, and Sai (the ghost) still loves to play.

I love this game. Anyone who enjoys games of strategy and tactics, such as chess, should learn to play go, IMHO. At the Chess and Go program at the local library, some of the regular players taught themselves the game by reading this manga series or watching the anime. But learning the rules is just the start, as Hikaru finds out. To play go well, you have to keep playing. As the series progresses, Hikaru gets better and better.

So how is go better than chess? Well, first, it's a game about conquering territory, much more like war than just capturing a king. And second - while a chess board has 64 squares, there are 361 points on a go board. There are way more possibilities to consider, offensively and defensively.

Try the manga. It's quite fun. And if you want to pursue go, Janice Kim's Learn to Play Go series, reviewed here last June, is an excellent introduction. I also like the four-volume series, Graded Go Problems for Beginners, though I haven't made it past volume 2 yet. I just have too much to read, you know?

How to Properly Stunt Your Growth

While I recognize that April is National Poetry Month it also happens to be the month that begins with one of my favorite non-holiday holidays: April Fool's Day. Is there anything more delicious than planning and pulling off that perfect prank, that preposterous practical joke? It seems such a shame that there's only one day a year dedicated to (mostly) good-natured frivolity; after all, they repackage Halloween candy as Christmas candy, and as Easter candy, and even in "fall colors."

But I think the problem is that it can be difficult to come up with the perfect stunt to pull off in a given situation. Putting a vacuum cleaner under someone's bed and waking them up with it instead of an alarm clock (as I did this year) doesn't work at a party, and similarly you can't pin a glass of water to the ceiling with your elderly aunt the way you could with younger sibling. Wouldn't it be great if someone could collect hundreds of these sorts of things, illustrate them in an amusing cartoon format, and present them in one volume with an index so you could look up the exact stunt you are looking for when you need it?

Ta da! I present you with Sam Bartlett's collection, The Best of Stuntology. Like the subtitle says, 304 pranks, tricks and challenges to amuse and annoy your friends.

I think the word "friends" is key here because you really ought to know who your audience is before performing some of these nifty little numbers. Some people have a lower tolerance for the absurd, where others just don't appreciate humor at their expense. It's too bad, because I do think at times like the world has lost it's sense of humor, and if only people could laugh (and laugh at themselves) more then maybe things would be alright. Then again, I'm not so sure how I'd feel if someone convinced me to try and catch a quarter in a funnel tucked into my waistband so they could pour a drink down my pants when I wasn't looking. I'd like to think I would laugh if someone could convince me to draw a moose with my eyes closed and tricked me into sticking my finger into peanut butter when I got to the "tail."

But Stuntology is more than pranks, as its name implies, and there are plenty of stunts that don't embarrass or otherwise deliberately set out to cause grief or hard feelings. Many, in fact, are participatory fun. One can, for example, engage in a conversation where each side only gets to say two words per sentence. Good fun. Not easy. Takes practice. Or you could dealing with some other annoying aspects of life via stunts. Say you've got a telemarketer on the phone and you can get past your immediate response to just hang up. Why not tuck your tongue between your teeth and lower lip and attempt to have a conversation until the person who called gives up in frustration?

One of the great things about this collection is the portability of the stunts. Of the stunts that require props, few involve items not commonly found around the house. It is entirely possible to keep a mental storeroom of a dozen or so stunts that you can perform at parties or while visiting other people's houses. No need to buy fancy gewgaws at the joke or hobby shop (or online), simply show up and become the life of the party!

The pranks are single-page mini comics and Bartlett's illustration style has a playful naive quality, filled with rubbery pranksters and patsies who convey the full range of emotions. And without being explicit, one can gather from the response of the cartoon victims what a prankster or stuntologist can expect - no claims of "but I didn't realize you'd get upset" will be accepted.

The Best of Stuntology
Pranks, Tricks & Challenges to Amuse & Annoy Your Friends
written and drawn by master trickster
Sam Bartlett
Workman 2008

We like to be fair. Most of us learned fairness on the playground and around board games. Fairness is further reinforced by our educators and schools, and then by the media which often tries to report “both sides” of a controversy. We hold these values dear. When I taught composition to freshman college students, the most commonly used sentence was “Everyone is entitled to their opinion.”

And of course I have to agree with this sentiment. I like fairness and I value open-mindedness very highly. But when fairness is exploited at the expense of truth, it’s time to re-evaluate. Being fair and open-minded does not mean giving equal weight to all ideas, it means giving proper weight to ideas based on the strength of the evidence and arguments supporting them.

I suspect that people, including school board members and educators, who consider Intelligent Design (or other variations of creationism) as an alternative to the theory of evolution mean well and are acting only in the interest of fairness and open-mindedness. But they are doing themselves and their students a great disservice. It’s like proposing the ideas of the Flat Earth Society as an alternative to the Spherical Earth Theory.

Jerry Coyne, in Why Evolution is True, complains that the story of evolution has not been told often enough or well enough, and that it is simple ignorance, even among scientists, of the extraordinary wealth of evidence in support of evolution, that leaves people susceptible to creationist ideas. The truth is that Intelligent Design proponents ask some intriguing questions of nature, the answers to which are anything but obvious (How could an eye evolve? Or a wing? How does a cow-like creature transition into a whale-like creature?). But what is largely unknown is that evolutionary thoerists have asked the very questions and come up with answers for them, answers that agree perfectly with the fossil record and with what evolutionary theory predicts. People simply need to be aware of all that evolutionary theory has allowed us to learn about the natural world.

The evidence Coyne outlines is vast and can leave no doubt in the reader that species evolved through natural selection very much as Darwin first established 150 years go (Happy Anniversary, Origin of Species!). Using the theory of evolution, scientists have repeatedly been able to predict the existence of extinct species and then have been able to find examples of those creatures in the fossil record, nearly exactly where the theory predicted. The power of selection has been clearly demonstrated by plant and animal breeders, who, in the course of a few thousand years, have been able through artificial selection to create chihuahuas, blood hounds, and great danes from a single species of wolf. Native American farmers bred corn from a species that resembles crab grass. Certainly these examples show the potential for modification through selection that exists in living species. What’s more, natural selection has been observed in real time in nature—on the Galopogas islands, finches responded to tougher seed husks by developing larger beaks in a mere ten years. Furthermore, natural selection and speciation have been demonstrated in the laboratory. In one experiment, new species of bacteria emereged in a laboratory environment in only weeks . Given all of this evidence, it becomes much less difficult to believe that the forces of natural selection, applied over hundreds of millions of years, could create the diversity of life on this planet and even lead ultimately to human beings.

Coyne never lays out exactly what the ideas of Intelligent Design and other creationists are. Rather he answers ID proponents and creationists point-by-point in passing as he lays out an airtight argument for evolution.

What is most valuable in this book, though, isn’t its excellent argument, but rather Coyne’s illumination of the myriad ways in which evolution has worked on species, the fascinating adaptions that have developed (some of them blatantly unintelligent), and the clever and dedicated science that explains our natural world. Any threat to that kind of knowledge demands a defense.

Not science, but science fiction

Via boing boing, science fiction affects the mainstream in all sorts of unexpected ways:

1. Robotics. This is probably the most well-known of these, since Isaac Asimov is famous for (among many other things) his three laws of robotics. Even so, I include it because it is one of the only actual sciences to have been first named in a science fiction story (”Liar!”, 1941). Asimov also named the related occupation (roboticist) and the adjective robotic.

2. Genetic engineering. The other science that received its name from a science fiction story, in this case Jack Williamson’s novel Dragon’s Island, which was coincidentally published in the same year as “Liar!” The occupation of genetic engineer took a few more years to be named, this time by Poul Anderson.

3. Zero-gravity/zero-g. A defining feature of life in outer space (sans artificial gravity, of course). The first known use of “zero-gravity” is from Jack Binder (better known for his work as an artist) in 1938, and actually refers to the gravityless state of the center of the Earth’s core. Arthur C. Clarke gave us “zero-g” in his 1952 novel Islands in the Sky.

The list continues at the Oxford University Press blog.

Grifter's Game -- Lawrence Block Hard Case Crime, #1

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year. (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.) Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining. They make me happy. If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Since I jumped in somewhere in the mid-50's, I have, of course, been worrying about what I missed. So I decided to go back to the beginning and read their releases in order.

Grifter's Game was the first Hard Case release. It was originally published in 1961 as Mona. It's about con artist Joe Marlin, who's been pulling the old check-in-to-a-hotel-and-stay-for-a-while-before-taking-off-without-paying scam. It's an easy way to stay comfortable, well-fed and well-hydrated, but it's much easier to pull off if you're carrying expensive luggage when you check in -- hotel clerks are less likely to ask for money up front that way. So he steals some suitcases.

Which turn out to contain a large amount of uncut heroin.

And then he meets the wife of the man who owns the suitcases.

And falls in love with her. And she with him. And so the husband has to go, one way or another. Leading Joe Marlin to say, "I don't know whether the kiss was a sign of love or a bargain sealed with lipstick instead of blood."

I've read quite a lot of crime novels. And watched lots of film noir. So the set-up was a familiar one. The first thirty pages -- where Block sets the stage with Joe scamming rich women and hotel clerks -- seemed so familiar that I almost got up and started going through my recent reads to look for another book with that same situation. Almost.

But even after I hit the point where I was totally and completely positive that I hadn't already read the book, I kept waiting for the situation to play out as I expected it. Because crime novels where A GUY KILLS FOR THE LOVE OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN WHO TOTALLY HAS THE MADONNA/WHORE THING GOING ON don't usually end well for the guy. But then I started wondering if maybe this story was going to be different -- and right up until the last few pages, I really didn't know which way it was going to go. I had no idea that Lawrence Block was so tricky.

Apart from the trickiness of Lawrence Block's from-left-field-I-totally-didn't-expect-it-and-I'm-going-to-be-thinking-about-it-for-a-good-long-while plot twist, I loved the details about Joe Marlin covering his tracks -- like switching license plates on a car before stealing it -- and I loved Joe Marlin's musings about memory, the emotional baggage that comes with murder and about how the moments that haunt you aren't necessarily the ones that one would expect. He's not a quipping cold-blooded killer by any means, which made the last quarter of the book especially effective.

Though I'm very familiar with Lawrence Block's name, I'm not all that familiar with his books. That's going to change.

(cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom)

Book Review- The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
"In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?"

Now, yes, this book is from a girl's point of view, but I still think that boys would appreciate this book. It's got zombies in it and some great, well written heart-pounding scenes throughout the book.

Ryan's debut is simply remarkable; it is a gripping, post-apocalyptic tale that's hard to put down. Mary is such a well-written, multi-layered character and it's so easy to get emotionally invested in her, eagerly turning the pages to read more of her story. This book is about much more than zombies, which in turn makes it more than just a run-of-the-mill horror zombie novel. One of the things I enjoyed about this book was that everything had already happened- in the small amount of zombie books I've read so far, they seem to be more about how the infection starts and spreads, and how people cope with it and try to fix it. In this story, the infection has already spread and no one has been able to stop it, just protect themselves from it in being within their enclosure. And, in the end of the novel, the infection has still not been stopped. Nothing is tied up neatly in a bow at the end; sacrifices have been made, tons of lives lost, but it's not all bleak. At the end, there is still a sense of hope, of perhaps something better to come. I am excited to read the sequel when it comes out.

This is Not a Game

Dagmar is in trouble. Just after finishing an assignment from her multi-millionaire boss she takes a well-deserved vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia. Overnight the city is wracked with political instability, riots, fires and unrest. Stranded, with no way to leave and her Blackberrry and only a few dollars to her name, Dagmar waits for a private security company to mount a rescue operation.

Dagmar does have one other resource to call upon. As gamemaster for an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) she has a network of people around the globe plugged into their computers looking for clues about the next ARG and how to solve it. With a few emails to people who know people she eventually is spirited out of the city thanks to the gamers that find her peril just another puzzle to solve.

After returning to the States, Dagmar's problems don't get any smaller. She is being pressured by her boss, Charlie, to run the biggest flashiest game yet with a giant budget and even bigger expectations. She calls upon and old friend, B.J., to help her knowing he and Charlie hate each other. And then a mutual friend, Austin, is gunned down in the parking lot.

Juggling the game, B.J.'s true motives, Charlie's secrets, and an investigation into Austin's murder using the gamers around the world Dagmar finds herself in her own high-stakes contest. She is running out of time to figure out if she is a puppet-master or only a pawn in This Is Not A Game.

On West Virginia, fixing cars and painting water towers

I have to give author Melissa Wyatt a lot of credit for setting her coming-of-age drama, Funny How Things Change, in West Virginia. The butt of thousands of late night jokes, the state is known more for what everyone says about it then anything else. Wyatt counters these misconceptions head-on with her story about high school grad Remy who is conflicted about his girlfriend's plan to leave their hometown of Dwyer for Pennsylvania where she intends to go to college and he plans to live with her. He thinks it is an okay plan but more importantly, he knows he is supposed to think it is a good plan. The problem is that the more Lisa talks about what she wants, the more Remy begins to consider how what he wants doesn't seem to be much of a concern for her - and the more he begins to realize that he doesn't really know what he wants anyway. That's a big problem when you're thinking about leaving home to be with someone forever and it's even worse when that someone doesn't seem to know (or care about) what you want either.

Here's a bit of what Remy is going through with his girlfriend Lisa:

Remy stood, his hands jammed into his back pockets, and looked out over Dwyer. Everything was going wrong. It wasn't supposed to be about sacrifices, but about doing what they wanted, both of them.

"I don't know." He couldn't trust himself to say any more.

"Oh!" Lisa got to her feet. "What does it matter what you do? It's not like working in a garage is a career or something!"

It was another sucker punch, only he knew she wasn't deliberately taking a jab at him. It was how she saw things. He stared at her, feeling like he'd swallowed his own heart, and wondered why she still looked the same when it felt like he was seeing her in a whole new way.

I saw a quote the other day from the current president of the United Steelworkers Union. He said that Washington has two sets of rules, one for those who shower after work and one for those who shower before. That classism - the notion that those who actually get dirty to earn a living with their hands are somehow less intelligent, less creative, less significant, is just one of the many cultural constructs that Wyatt tackles with Funny How Things Change. (No worries about this degrading into stupid elitism/"Real America" vs the East Coast political campaign garbage though - it's just a straightforward peek at misconceptions.) Do you really have to go to college to be successful? Do you have to leave home to be happy? What makes a life worth living and what if your ideas are different from everyone elses? What should you do?

What would you do?

Funny How Things Change is a revelation in many ways and a book I highly - highly - recommend. Remy is a very engaging and relatable protagonist, the problems and concerns for people in small town WV are explored (like mountaintop mining)and there's also a nifty subplot with a female artist who has been hired to paint murals on water towers across the state.

We do not live in a "one size fits all world" and it is wrong to think that we should all pursue one type of success. Remy is brave enough to stop and consider just who he wants to be before he is swept away by the expectations of others. He is a wonderful character and this is a very cool book.

Funny How Things Change will be released on April 27th. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the Summer Blog Blast Tour announcement in May when I will be interviewing Melissa Wyatt at my blog, Chasing Ray.

[Post pic - what mountaintop removal looks like.]

David Levithan

Be it within a short story or a full-length novel, David Levithan always seems to create characters and scenarios which are realistic and relevant. Most of his books are led by teenaged guys who are trying to figure out something about themselves, and probably their friends, and maybe even the world around them.

Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I sing the praises of David Levithan's writing. Opportunity seemed to knock a lot last fall: When Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist was made into a film, I encouraged everyone to read the book (co-authored by Levithan and Rachel Cohn) before they saw the movie. As the presidential election heated up last fall, I talked Wide Awake up to customers and posted about it at both Bildungsroman, my blog, and SparkNotes. We also recommended Wide Awake at readergirlz last November.

I've read all of Levithan's novels to date. My favorites include:

Boy Meets Boy: What if someone's orientation was a non-issue? If people honestly, truly accepted gay and straight (and questioning) without question, and recognized love as love? Boy Meets Boy is a romantic comedy for ANYONE, but especially for teen boys who might be shy (or curious) about their orientation, and especially for librarians, teachers, and booksellers who support GLBTQ rights and wish more places would do so without blinking an eye. Here's a little peek inside of Boy Meets Boy:

There isn't really a gay scene or a straight scene in our town. They got all mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best. Back when I was in second grade, the older gay kids who didn't flee to the city for entertainment would have to make their own fun. Now it's all good. Most of the straight guys try to sneak into the Queer Beer bar. Boys who love boys flirt with girls who love girls. And whether your heart is strictly ballroom or bluegrass punk, the dance floors are open to whatever you have to offer.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: Take the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, set it at nighttime, make the main characters perfect strangers, and turn up the volume on your favorite rock CD, and you'll be in the right mindset. Nick & Norah have one wild and crazy night in the city filled with music, connections, and discovery. They tell their story back-and-forth, in alternating chapters, with Rachel Cohn writing for Norah and David Levithan writing for Nick. If you like going to live concerts and getting lost in the music and the crowd, if you like meeting new people and finding new bands, or if you like just driving around a busy city and seeing where the night takes you, you will definitely like this book.

What did you think of the movie? Did you read the book first? Tell me in the comments below!

Wide Awake: Set in the not-too-distant future, when a gay Jewish man is elected President and those results are challenged. His supporters include two young men, concerned teenagers at the center of our story, who are learning to stand up for their rights and speak out from their hearts.

Levithan's other major works include:
The Realm of Possibility - A verse novel, set at a high school, told from a dozen different POVs.
Are We There Yet? - Two not-so-close brothers, ages 16 and 23, take a trip to Italy.
Marly's Ghost - A modern-day version of A Christmas Carol set on Valentine's Day.
Naomi & Ely's No-Kiss List - Yes, girls and guys can have strictly platonic and very close friendships. Another collaboration with Rachel Cohn.
How They Met, and Other Stories - A collection of 18 short stories, unrelated except for their overall theme: "stories about love."
Due out in 2010: Will Grayson, Will Grayson - A collaboration with John Green (author of Looking for Alaska and other GLW-worthy reads!)

He is also one of three authors who work on the Likely Story series, in which a teen girl - the daughter of a famous soap opera actress - develops her own daytime soap. The series byline reads "David Van Etten," which takes the last name of one of the writers (Chris Van Etten) and the first name of others (Levithan and David Ozanich).

In addition to his work as a novelist, Levithan is also an editor. He founded PUSH for Scholastic, an imprint which has GLW written all over it. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies.

Kudos, David, for your highly approachable, commendable, and recommendable works.