eddvick

Carolyn See
Random House / 2002

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Not so much a how-to book, though there's a lot of practical advice. This is more of a why-to book. From chapter 18, the last chapter:

If you're not a bona fide "bestseller", money comes in a variety of ways. You can teach "creative writing" (if some institution will hire you), you can do the occasional book review, you can give inspirational speeches (if anyone will consent to listen), and you can sell books out of the trunk of your car. All that is fun. But money for the serious - and even frivolous - writer flows to you basically in three ways: by applying for grants, doing magazine pieces, and having some fun with the tax man. You can go on with your day job - T. S. Eliot was a banker, William Carlos Williams was a doctor, etc. - or you can go looking for "a big advance" with your big-advance truffle pig, but only a true maniac would expect to make money from writing short stories or literary novels.

There are a lot of assumptions in this paragraph, not the least the recognition of myself as a 'maniac'. But grants? If I didn't have a full time job that would be something interesting to follow up on. I'm writing grants for the adoption agency for which I work, and plan to write them for our SF conference Foolscap if we succeed in getting our 501(c)3.

Kim Long
1988 / Johnson Books

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I picked this one up cheaply at Half Price Books just to make sure I was getting lunar terminology and science correct. Sure it's dated, but I was looking for the basics. I'm trying to write a story for this contest, but it's slow slogging.

Here's a term I doubt I'll be using, from the glossary:

Apolune: The point in the orbit of an object (such as a spaceship) around the moon when it is farthest from the moon's surface.

Thomas Perry
2008 / Harcourt

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This novel is part of my booty for judging Jeff Wood's latest Snowbuni pinup contest. Thanks, Jeff!

I've read every one of Perry's books. This is not one of the better ones, though better than most suspense novels. I think the focus is on the assassin too much, and the heroine and her partners don't get to be clever enough. I can highly recommend Perry's Metzger's Dog or Island -- indeed any of his first nine books except Butcher Boy. His next one, coming in January, features his series character Jane Whitefield, whose specialty is helping people disappear. I'll be in line for it.

Roald Dahl
1982 / Scholastic

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Another one Katie read to me in the car. She likes Dahl a lot, except for Willie Wonka.

Charles Stross
2007 / Ace

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Call me a gradualist. The older I get the less I seem to believe in asymptotic futures. Maybe the singularity will come along and prove me wrong, but I think that generally things are going to get slowly better or slowly worse. Probably both at the same time.

Halting State's future is one of gradual improvement in tech. Driverless vehicles, massive LARPs, and virtual shared environmental overlays (ie:CopSpace) are the rule of the day. If there are gradual apocalypses in other spheres (the environment, population), they're shuffled off to the side. And that's fine, in what is at base a near future thriller. It starts with a robbery in a MMORPG and escalates (and escalates and escalates).

I won't give away any plot twists. Suffice to say it's a very satisfying read.

(edited to add) I forgot to mention one of the cooler elements of the novel: it's told in second person. This has the effect of making it appear to be an old text game, like Colossal Cave Adventure, which I played on SMU's Control Data Cyber 72 circa 1979.

So long as I'm linking to Lifehacker, I'll mention they have links to ways you can get 'free' books. Some are virtual, so are physical, some of the latter you may have to pay postage for.

G.M. Ford
2008 / Morrow

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Everything else gets put aside when a new Ford novel comes out.

Edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka
1992 / Norton

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There aren't very many flash fiction anthologies out there, and most of them appear to be co-edited by the Thomases. Anyway, most of the stories herein are good, some incomprehensible, some downright bad, and a very few brilliant. I have quite a few favorites, but am particularly partial to Marlene Buono's "Offerings", whose lead collects apologies:

Some days she could fit all the apologies into her purse, but most days she had to stuff the overflow into her pockets and under her wig. Sometimes she cut them into circles and dropped them into the coin rolls she picked up at the bank.

Barrington J. Bayley
1976 / Doubleday

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Bayley is an inventive, phildickian writer of space (and occasionally time) operas, largely forgotten. Garments sets two civilizations on a collision course, the paranoid Ziode and the garment-controlled Caean. Scenes alternate between Peder Forbarth, a lowly 'sartorial' who happens across a near-legendary suit of clothes that begin subtly altering him, and a Ziode ship secretly probing the origins of the Caean culture.

Octavia Butler
1993 / Four Walls Eight Windows

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Yes, this book will make for a lively discussion at Potlatch. It's a postapocalypse novel that states several times in the narrative that it's set during the apocalypse. Civil society has broken down: police only work for bribes and are best avoided, company towns with indentured servitude are making a comeback, roving bands of marauders are killing, pillaging, and burning everything in sight. And yet, it can get worse.

Edited by Mike Resnick
1996 / WC Books

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RAEBNC

Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
2007 / Hard Case Crime

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This was my most recent 'coat book', the book I keep in a jacket pocket to read while waiting here and there. At root a comedic serial killer book, it follows seven characters, only one of them vaguely likable, most of whom come to bad ends. The interest is not in rooting for anybody but in watching them collide with each other in a rocket of a plot. As such, Slide works. The down side for me was a number of in-jokes that didn't feel appropriate.

Steven Brust wrote a Firefly novel, was unable to get it published, and has just released it as a Creative Commons free download. I'll be reading it.

Jumper
Steven C. Gould
1992 Tor

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I wanted to read it before I saw the movie. Good book, thoughtful.

The Candlemass Road
George MacDonald Fraser
1993 / Harvill

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Promoted from the to-be-read shelves because of the untimely death of Fraser. After writing The Steel Bonnets he obviously wanted to put all the history into a novel set on the Scots-English border. Quite a violent time and place. The story is told in first person and though dense at times is still clear. To wit:

"And yet," says he, all chapfallen, "I fear me he will find occasion to clatter at my lady's ear, and mow and girn for his cracked pate to move her pity - and seest thou, father, it will look ill for me, a tenant oppressed crying Justice! and I can do nowt for him, wanting power at hand, and but the bailiff." He called Bell an earwig and a bastard and worse, that had not the wit to pay his blackmail as in the past, so all would have been quiet.

The story ends unexpectedly 4/5th of the way through to make way for a historical postscript every bit as fascinating as the novel.

Live! from Planet Earth
George Alec Effinger
2005 / Golden Gryphon

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Effinger wrote like an angry angel.

A true plus is that this collection includes all of the O. Niemand stories (and one poem) written in the styles of various mainstream authors: Steinbeck, Lardner, Thurber, etc.

Matilda
Roald Dahl
1988 / Puffin

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Strictly speaking, I didn't read this myself. Katie has become an accomplished reader, and read this to me in installments on the way to school for the past month.

FYI: Did you know this is science fiction? At least in the "John W Campbell psychic powers" sense of the term.

There are only a few hours left on this eBay listing of two books with the same innards but slightly different cover paintings by the great Robert Stanley.

Tales Out of the East
Lafcadio Hearn
1952 / Story Classics

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This is an illustrated landscape-formatted and slipcased hardback I picked up at Powells when we went down to Portland a few weeks ago. Turns out it is also a limited edition, but the front hinge is starting so it's not worth all that much.

The book is half-and-half stories from China and from Japan. Having read Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio when we went to both countries, I was familiar with several of his Chinese stories.

Excerpt (an artisan has made an exquisite bell)"

And the Emperor spoke to him, saying: "Son, thy gracious gift hath found high favor in our sight; and for the charm of that offering we have bestowed upon thee a reward of five thousand silver liang. But thrice that sum shall be awarded thee so soon as thou shalt have fulfilled our behest. Hearken, there, O matchless artificer! It is now our will that thou make for us a vase having the tint and the aspect of living flesh, but - mark well our desire! - of flesh made to creep by the utterance of such words as poets utter - flesh moved by an Idea, flesh horripilated by a Thought! Obey, and answer not! We have spoken."

It doesn't end well.

Gotta love that King James Version rendition, too. Still, there were some creepy plots to those old stories.

San Francisco Noir
edited by Peter Maravelis
2005 / Akashic Books
The Akashic series is all over the place in look-and-feel. Some of the editors are more noir-oriented, some more into litfic, and even in one of the anthologies there's a real variety. I still think my fave was Dublin Noir, though this one's close. Alvin Liu's "Le Rouge et Le Noir" has more to do with China than Chinatown, but so perfectly encapsulates revolutionary fervor. "Deception of the Thrush" by Will Christopher Baer has an astounding turnabout halfway through, one of those creeping realizations. There's even an out-and-out science fiction story, Jim Nisbet's "Weight Less than Shadow".

They're editing a Seattle Noir book now, and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.