The Rise of Renegade X

In a world of superpowers, if you could choose to be hero or villain, which would you pick? Or is this a question with no easy answer... can we be both heroic and villainous, kind and mean spirited? Wouldn't surviving high school make us both?

He Said, She Said: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

Welcome to He Said, She Said, a feature for GuysLitWire in which a guy (Book Chic, a recent college graduate) and a gal (Little Willow, a bookseller) discuss books that will appeal to both genders.

Today, we'll be discussing Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. This collaborative novel is a perfect fit for He Said, She Said. Levithan and Cohn wrote alternating chapters, each from his or her main character's point of view, following the model they set up in previous bestselling novels Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Naomi & Ely's No-Kiss List. (Little Willow adds: I found Dash & Lily to be just as amazing as Nick & Norah. This novel is absolutely delightful - a true holiday treat!)

When Dash discovers a red Moleskine notebook on the shelf of The Strand bookstore, he opens it and finds questions and challenges inside. Lily, the girl who left the notebook, wants to liven up her holiday break. The two teenagers start a lively game of dares, each writing in the notebook and leaving it in designated locations for the other person to discover. Along the way, they challenge themselves just as much as they challenge each other. Will they ever dare to meet in person? You have to read the book to find out!

Now we challenge you to read our roundtable. It's simple, really. Just keep going...

Hey, Ma, Pass the Sliced Manflesh: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

Somehow, the holiday season tends to turn my mind to the subject of zombies. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the hordes of blank-eyed people shuffling through stores for products that television has told them to buy.

One thing we've been told to buy recently are zombie and vampire stories. They're "bigger than ever" according to film and publishing executives -- some of whom seem a little like zombies themselves for pursuing the fad with a grim mindlessness: The Walking Dead, 30 Days of Night, Twilight, 28 Days Later, The Crazies, Resident Evil, Shaun of the Dead, World War Z. Some of these are excellent explorations of what undeath might mean, and others...aren't so much.

Regardless of the "quality," there's no denying that stories in which sentience must contend with instinct appeal to many of us at a base level -- maybe as some kind of primal memory from the time not so long ago when we fought that battle a lot more often. They're also reminders of the price of surrendering that sentience for consumer culture or jingoism or rage or love any of the other forces that appeal more to our brain stem than to our frontal lobe.

It's no coincidence that zombies want our brains, the one thing that differentiates us from them. And it's no coincidence that our politicians want them, too.

Perhaps one of the better novels of the undead is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. It is often thought of as a vampire novel given the biological constraints of the undead depicted in it (only emerging at night, susceptible to religious icons, and so on), but I think it may well be the clearest and most compelling performance of the zombie myth.

In the novel (not to be confused with ANY of the terrible adaptations of it), Robert Neville finds himself struggling to survive long after human civilization has collapsed. By night, he barricades himself in his home from a siege of zombie-like creatures, many of them calling his name, all of them desperate for his flesh. By day, he patrols the neighborhood, looking for the creatures as they repose during the day to stake them through the heart.

At its simplest, I Am Legend is a handbook for comporting yourself after a zombie apocalypse. There are handy tips here for growing your own food, providing your own power, sealing off those pesky windows and doors, and pursuing scientific experiments to eradicate the plague or those who suffer it.

In fact, Neville's scientific bent may be most instructive of all. He reminds us that calm reason is often our only hope in any disaster -- the calm reason required for isolating variables, testing hypotheses, and proceeding with new information.

But the vampire/zombie/undead metaphor is at its best in this book when we're thinking about the role of an individual on the edges of society. Is it okay to do as the Romans (or zombies) do when in Rome? What do you do when you're a minority of one? What becomes of your culture or your morality? For all its adventuresome coolness, I Am Legend addresses heady questions like these, too.

If you're hungry for brains during the zombie holiday season, you may find I Am Legend to be a feast.

Dust City

There have been a lot of urban fantasy novels published lately. It is possible that some readers may be just a teensy bit done with them for a while. I promise you that Dust City, by Robert Paul Weston, is special. I also promise that there are no werewolves in this book. Honest. You should read it, and not just because the cover is so awesome which will make you want to carry it around, facing out, as you walk down the street, stopping every so often to spend a little time staring into the spooky wolf eyes. You should read it because it is gripping, clever, richly imagined and thematically complex.

Henry Whelp isn't just any wolf. His father is the wolf who killed Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother. It's hard enough to be a wolf in Dust City to begin with, but it's way harder when everyone expects you have murder in your blood, and they're just waiting for you to lose it, like your dad. For a while, Henry has been keeping quiet in a Home for Wayward Wolves outside the city, but after a murder in the home he breaks out. He's looking for answers. He wants to find out once and for all what really happened the night his father became a murderer, and he thinks it may have something to do with Dust, a mind-altering drug sold on the black-market in the city. He also hopes he might discover what happened to the fairies, who disappeared and took their powerful fairy dust with them, inspiring thaumaturgical companies to create an entire industry to provide synthetic dust to an increasingly addicted populace.

I will read just about any reworking of a fairy tale. Love 'em. I was extra excited about Dust City because Robert Paul Weston is uber-creative and accomplished. (His debut verse novel, Zorgamazoo was phenomenal and so much fun. Anyone who can write in iambic pentameter for close to 300 pages without a misstep is a rockstar in my books). The Big Bad Wolf is not the only fairy tale character who makes an appearance here. Henry's best friend is Jack, a notorious thief with a bag of beans. The gutsy, ass-kicking detective on Henry's tail is Inspector White, with cherry-red lips and skin white as snow. There are more clever surprises, but I'll let you discover those yourself. I was prepared for dark, and it was.

POD by Stephen Wallenfels

Dropping down through the clouds, silent like a spider on a web, is a massive black sphere.

It's a mile away, at least, but even from this distance it dwarfs the neighborhoods below. I brace myself for the horror of watching houses crushed with people inside. But it stops well above the trees, maybe five hundred feet off the ground. It hovers soundlessly. (p. 14)

At 5:00 in the morning, just days from his sixteenth birthday, a painfully loud metallic noise jarred Josh from his sleep. Hundreds of miles to the south, twelve-year-old Megs was already awake, waiting in a car for her mother to return from a job interview. The noise that shook them both, as well as millions of other people, announced the arrival of giant spaceships capable of making people and cars on the street disappear in a second.

The Foundling's Tale, Part Three: Factotum...and a Contest

If you're a fan of D.M. Cornish's unique and astoundingly detailed world of the Half Continent, as portrayed in the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy—now known as The Foundling's Tale—you'll be pleased to know that A) the third book, Factotum, is out THIS MONTH, and B) it's a truly satisfying end to the tale of foundling-turned-lamplighter-turned-monster-fighter's-assistant Rossamünd Bookchild.

One of my favorite aspects of this trilogy is the fact that the world Cornish has created is so rich and so utterly unlike anything else, down to the use of language at the individual word level. It's not just that characters and places are named in an unusual way (like J.K. Rowling, he's got a talent for naming people), but even the terminology for technology and social structures in this semi-industrialized setting is unique to this book. Words are put to use in new and connotative ways, related to the meanings we might already be familiar with, but not quite the same, with a pure enjoyment of the very sounds of the words themselves. The words are decontextualized, but somehow all of this adds to the feeling of atmosphere in these books—and, as an unrepentant word nerd, you'd think that would annoy me, but instead, I'm happy to go along for the ride.

I don't want to give too much away about this book, but the one of the central themes revolves around the definition of what is, in fact, a monster—and whether in fact all monsters are nefarious and to be universally reviled, or if there may be some (as we learned in book 2) that help humankind and coexist peacefully.

Hard Science Space Pirates

In a speech at a convention on open source last year, Karl Schroeder mentioned the idea, discovered by cognitive scientists studying ship navigation, that there are some cognitive activities that cannot be accomplished by a single cognitive entity. What does that mean?

Put another way, sometimes humans act as a hive mind, rather than a collection of individual thinkers. Hearing that blew my mind. You can find out more about this on his website, where you'll also see that he's a writer. As you may guess, he's a Science Fiction writer, with a heavy emphasis on the science.

It's his love of trippy science, and of following a single scientific idea down the rabbit hole, that lead to one of the coolest sf fictional worlds to come along in a long, long time.

Sun of Suns, the first book in Schroeder's Virga series, is as bizarre as it is scientifically accurate. Imagine a five thousand mile diameter sphere orbiting a star, and the inside is filled with air, water, and chunks of rock big and small. Now populate that space with people. Give them early 20th century technology. What you get is mindbending physics jammed into a swashbuckling adventure: inhabitants experience atmosphere but not gravity, so they create spinning city states and miniature fusion suns and do battle like it's 1799 in wooden space ships.

Adventures in digital publishing

With the recent popularity of e-readers and smartphone reading apps, some writers have been having a lot of fun with the freedom and interactivity provided by the new technology. Here's three writers pushing the envelope on how books are published and how they're experienced.

I reviewed Reinhard Kleist's fantastic graphic novel biography of Johnny Cash, I See a Darkness, last month. Now Ave! Comics has put out a downloadable "soundtrack" edition for the iPhone and iPad. Along with the full novel, the app has a soundtrack feature which will search your music library for appropriate songs to fit the section you're reading. (And if you don't have the songs in your library already, it gives you the option of buying them through iTunes.) This is a really simple integration of words, pictures, and music that makes all three much more vivid.

To Build a Fire by Jack London

I’m suddenly reconsidering, and re-exploring the short story. I haven’t put aside my big-ass (they are always big-ass when you’re writing them) novel that I posted about over the summer; in fact, I’m between drafts, as they say.

But I was asked to write a short story for a holiday-themed YA collection, locally produced here in SoCal (about which, more later, but it’s not really my project to announce. Yet), and that became the first short story I’d written... in years. There've blog posts and articles on the short side, and books on the storytelling side. But no short stories. I didn't realize how much I missed them.

So while I’m conjuring my own 2,500-word Yuletide apocalypse, reminding myself I’m not writing a “first chapter” but an entire arc, beginning to end, I come across a downloadable novella from Fantasy & Science Fiction about our grim globally-warmed future. I spend part of a morning with it, and was brought back to a type of reading I did much more frequently in my own YA days.

And then, concurrent to all this, I’m collaborating on with “Vampire High” author Douglas Rees on a longer project, which calls for us to, among other things, bone up on our Jack London.

So -- also for the first time in many many moons (in this case, the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma, eh?), I’m working my way through part’s of Jack’s canon (on which note, we have references to canons, and London’s near-contemporary, Eugene O’Neill, just a couple of posts below. Get ready to blast your way through than English syllabus!) and before I get to the "Iron Heel" -- there’s some politics in Doug’s and my genre work -- I’ve started with short stories.

I started with one I’d heard about, but never gotten to -- the stripped down, unrelenting “To Build a Fire.” It’s a simple tale -- a man in the Yukon, turn of the last century, is on his way back to camp. It’s cold and getting colder. He’s hiking with a dog -- who, we find, regards him somewhat skeptically (in dog terms) -- and makes one or two bad decisions. Which very quickly gets him in a position where a fire, a simple fire, will save his life. Or not.

It should be pointed out there are two versions of this iconic story -- the first, written around ‘aught two (and I don’t mean “2002,”) appeared a periodical known as “Youth’s Companion.” It was kind of like “Boy’s Life,” full of adventure for young lads (I’m not sure anyone thought that young lassies would be reading these compendia, too), though imagining yourself in a wild place, away from a cityscape, wasn’t nearly so difficult in that earlier ‘aught two.

In the first version, the walk isn’t nearly as harrowing, nor is the outcome. It’s written more as a cautionary tale (don’t walk alone when it’s freezing cold!), in a generally amiable, if somewhat stiff, 19th-century way. You can see London’s growth as a writer between the two versions, the first opening with some telling, instead of showing: “For land travel or seafaring, the world over, a companion is usually considered desirable. In the Klondike, as Tom Vincent found out, such a companion is absolutely essential. But he found it out, not by precept, but through bitter experience.”

By the time he got to to the second, darker, more renowned version of the story, a few short years later, he got right to it: “Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland,” and then later, when assaying the character of his once-likeable protagonist, “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.”

Sounds like our current crop of politicians!

In any case, even though stories aren’t structured this way anymore-- it’s all description, with no dialogue (though a little internal monologuing) -- the thing really moves. There’s scarcely an ounce of fat in it, and it’s a marvel of relentless writing an inexorable plotting. At one point -- as jaded a reader as I fear I’ve become-- I nearly gasped, sitting in the coffee shop where I read it, when a sudden reversal-of-fortune affects our ill-fated traveler. For that alone, I’m in Jack London’s debt.

Where’s that open-source audiobook version of "Iron Heel!?"

The Unidentified by Rae Mariz

It sounds so grab to go to school in a mall. But what would you say if your every move is watched by the marketing executives that run the school? In Rae Mariz's The Unidentified, there is no funding for schools, so a group of corporations are happy to run them in order to get the inside track on trends of music, fashion and more.

Katey, who goes by Kid, is getting average grades, average hits on her profile and has just a few followers on her intouch. At this rate she is never going to be branded and receive all of the perks of being a trendsetter and worshiped by the other teens. Really though, she isn't certain that she even cares.

Things change when a stunt takes place in the lunchroom. In a simulated suicide, a dummy is pushed over the balcony. The note pinned to it says, "UNIDENTIFIED. CHOOSE YOUR SUICIDE." Kid is stunned, shaken and wonders what in the Google this is all about, but no one else seems to care. She is now driven to find out who the Unidentified are and what they are trying to say.

This novel is very much in the vein of Cory Doctorow's books and stories. Though fashion and popularity are a big part of this book, there is a lot here for boys, including the technology of the near dystopian future, the rebellion against the marketers and strong male characters like the daring Mikey and the mysterious leader of the Unidentified.

This was an incredibly intriguing book and will appeal to those who enjoyed Jennifer Government by Max Barry, Rash by Pete Hautman and anything by Cory Doctorow.