Meanwhile…

I have some ideas to finally spruce this place up with some art. If I can find the time to actually do it, keep an eye out for that. I’m hoping to do it without destroying the site. Anyway…

Thought I’d share a few things I’m reading (or just read):

Iron Council, by China Mieville - Jens raved about Mieville not too long ago, and I’m forced to agree. This is a fantasy steampunk with absolutely stunning prose. Apparently it’s book three in a series about this setting (which is not our earth), but I didn’t even realize that until it was pointed out to me, as the books aren’t really connected. There are all sorts of remarkable facets of the book and its take on fantasy – I may try to organize my thoughts for a few separate blog posts. But let me highly recommend this novel. It will change the way you think of fantasy. I’ve just started in on Perdido Street Station, which is the first book of the series.

The Nightly News, by Jonathan Hickman – I mentioned Hickman’s Pax Romana in this space a while back, an effort that I thought was laudable but ultimately a failure (simply because there wasn’t enough of it). This doesn’t suffer from that so much – in fact, I’d say this story about a home-grown cult of anti-media terrorists fits the comic book medium perfectly. It packs quite a bit of punch, and Hickman’s annotations at the end of the book are as interesting as the story. As an artist, Hickman’s style isn’t easy to describe. He’s a lot more of a graphic artist than a traditional penciler, and for better or worse he leaves behind the old style layouts of most comics.

Queen and Country, Definitive Edition volume 1, by Greg Rucka and various artists - Who doesn’t like a good spy story? And this one is great. It’s not super spy business, so don’t look for battles between skiers down the side of a mountain or invisible cars. It’s gritty, realistic spy drama and action. It makes me want to write my own spy stories. I like the Steve Rolston art on the early material best, at least in this collection.

Update! On a somewhat related note that not-so-coincidentally comes roughly 3 hours after this post, I finally saw Inglourious Basterds and it rocked. It was a lot more of a spy movie that I thought, and a great one.

That is all.

I just wanted to drop a recommendation to head over to Kris Straub’s Ichor Falls. If you are a fan of horror he’s doing some pretty interesting writing over there (albeit all too infrequently). I actually wrote an Ichor Falls-inspired exercise here some time ago, back when Ichor Falls was just a webcomic experiment that Kris was playing around with.

In particular I like this piece, which is very possibly one of the creepiest stories I’ve ever read. It’s also a good example of incorporating contemporary internet culture into fiction without it coming off as patronizing or insulting.

I doubt I’ll get a chance to post anything tomorrow, so I’ll just do it now. Tomorrow morning I’ll be hopping on a flight to California, and won’t be home until the 14th, over a week from now. Communication will be spotty, but I will especially try to check in next Monday, when I have a story go live over at Every Day Fiction. I’ll probably set up a post for that to appear automatically if I can figure that out.

My in-flight reading material:

Torso, by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko. A true crime novel about a serial killer case Elliot Ness investigated after all that Chicago business. Looking forward to this one. I met Andreyko a couple years ago and he seemed like a pretty cool guy, and I’ve enjoyed most everything Bendis has written.

Strangers in Paradise, volumes 1-3, by Terry Moore. I don’t really know what this is about, but all I hear is great things, and I’m greatly enjoying his current series, Echo.

Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order, by Gene Yang. I’m a huge fan of his American Born Chinese, which I heartily recommend to anyone who is a fan of things that are good. You know who you are.

So I suppose that will be it for the next week or so. How will you all get by without me? I don’t know, but don’t tell me. All my illusions will be shattered!