Author: Andrew Wheeler

Carrie Vaughn is best-known for her “Kitty Norville” urban fantasy series — about a radio talk-show host turned reluctant werewolf — but she’s also written other things. Just last year, for instance, she came out with [[[After the Golden Age]]], a superhero novel about Celia West, the completely unpowered accountant daughter of the two most popular and powerful heroes of Commerce City.

So, the first question is: what comes after the Golden Age? Whether you’re Hesiod or Jack Kirby, the obvious answer is “The Silver Age.” And After the Golden Age is a quite Silver Age-y book, full of gangsters (organized into teams, with spiffy nicknames, and I would not be at all surprised if many of their gangs had dress codes) who politely kidnap Celia repeatedly in the vain hope of using her as a shield against her parents. (This is seen to never work, but — in best Silver Age fashion — the gangsters keep doing it, because they need to follow the essential Weisinger plots or else they are nothing.)

This is lucky for Celia; if this were an Iron Age story, she’d be in pieces in the fridge before page ten, and we wouldn’t have much of a novel. But she does live in a more genteel age, with defined standards of behavior for both heroes and villains, and so her kidnappings tend to just disrupt her schedule and horribly frustrate her.

(Vaughn lampshades the inevitable question: Celia doesn’t leave Commerce City because she doesn’t want to — sure, she has no relationship with her parents, and has a career that usually takes young public accountants through extensive travel around the country for the first few years of their careers, but, by gum! she’s going to stay right there in Commerce City because the plot requires it no villains will drive her out!)

The rest of the book is agreeably muddle-headedly Silver-Agean like that: Celia starts dating a young police detective, Mark Paulson, whose father is the city’s Mayor, with the usual obvious parallels between their parents. Celia’s ur-kidnapping was by the Olympiad’s (her parents’ superteam) greatest foe, the Destructor, as a young teen, and she ran away to join the Destructor’s gang not long afterward, in a fit of teenage pique at sixteen. (And this is endlessly brought back up throughout the novel, as though this was a superhero world in which no one had ever made a heel or face turn even once — let alone dozens of times a year, as in the modern era.) Celia is given primary responsibility to build a forensic accounting case against the Destructor (even though he’s old, possibly senile, and has been locked up in not-Arkham for a while now) as part of a major criminal case against him, for no obvious or specific crimes, and even though her multiple conflicts of interest would make any opposing counsel salivate at the thought. The whole plot, in fact, is entirely second-hand: it’s all standard superhero furniture that seems to be in this novel because it belongs somewhere in a superhero story, and not because Vaughn had specific reasons for wanting any of it.

Vaughn keeps it all going with her narrative voice, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you spend any time thinking about it. But, remember: in the Silver Age, stories aren’t supposed to make sense. Celia has more than the recommended level of angst, and is batted around by events — she’s supposedly driven and responsible, but her accountancy work isn’t dramatic, so Vaughn just mentions it now and then, and it really doesn’t add up to much.

Celia bounces off the supers of her hometown — her parents, Captain Olympus and Spark; Arthur Mentis, the telepath who was a late addition to their team; Annalise, aka Typhoon, a water-powered hero her age — as she slowly learns about the requisite sinister plot. And, of course, she gets kidnapped in the furtherance of that plot, but it all turns out all right in the end — city saved, true love found, the whole nine yards.

After the Golden Age is a pleasant if slightly musty-feeling superhero story; it’s based on several-decade-old tropes and doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to what superhero stories look like these days. (Of course, superhero stories have looked horrible for much of the last two decades, so not looking like that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Vaughn makes it entirely an enjoyable read, but this isn’t a book to think too deeply about motivation or realism as you’re running through the pages.

This story is a week old, but I neglected to mention it when it hit: Amazon declares that Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy is the highest-selling series ever for them in the US.

This does not mean that Collins’s books have sold more copies overall than, for example, J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, which was the prior record-holder. And it doesn’t mean any of the things implied in Sara Nelson’s self-lauding statement at the link.

What it means — and what everyone who works in publishing already knows, but doesn’t usually like to say in public — is that Amazon is capturing an ever-larger share of the book business, which means that they sell a larger percent of books now than they did ten years ago — so ofcourse the big sellers now are bigger for Amazon than the big sellers were ten years ago. (Look for a similar statement about those “Fifty Shades of Grey” books in another year, especially if a movie does get made.)

This is good if you think that a single retailer should dominate the entire retail landscape for a particular kind of product. If you don’t think that’s such a good thing, your mileage may vary.

But what the statement really is saying is “we own the book market now, suckers.” So you might as well learn to love Big Brother.

I am a bad SFnal blogger, since these nominees were announced a good two weeks ago. (Perhaps I delayed because I believe, based on my own WFA judge experience, that the winners in all categories have already been determined, and so most of the nominees are doomed to forlorn hopes.)

Anyway, congratulations to all of the nominees, and good luck to them. I leave the annual exercise of determining which two entries in each category were voted on by the convention membership and which were picked by the judges to fandom assembled.
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Everyone has their niche, their two inches of ivory that they work over so closely with a fine-haired brush. Some niches are larger than others — project manager, superhero artist, war apologist, social novelist — but they all bind, more or less, around the edges. Some artists fight against that niche, and some embrace it.

Guy Delisle is a cartoonist — originally Canadian, though resident in France for some time — whose niche is creating books about the strange foreign cities he finds himself living and working in. First was Shenzhen (see my review), about time spent working as an animation supervisor in that Chinese city. Then came Pyongyang (see my review), in which the same job took him to that very odd, constricted North Korean capital. And then there was Burma Chronicles(see my review), by which point Delisle had transitioned to a full-time long-form cartoonist, and was accompanying his partner (a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator) to the capital of the country that wants the rest of us to call it Myanmar. (Somewhere in between, he also published two books of unsettling, mostly sex-role related cartoons — Aline and the Others and Albert and the Others — which I also reviewed.)

Delisle’s work typically has a crisp, clean line — as one would expect from an animator working in France — with a good eye for detail and enough description and narration to allow the drawing to be simple; he doesn’t try to cram everything into either words or art.

Recently, Delisle’s wife was posted by MSF to Israel for a year, and so, eventually, that experience turned itself into his most recent book, Jerusalem. It’s larger and more diffuse than those previous books, over 300 pages long, and filled with lots of small stories about Delisle’s and his family’s life in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. (And that location is the first manifestation of what will be a major concern of Jerusalem: borders, both physical and mental, and how they interleave themselves, through walls and checkpoints and bus routes and roads and prejudices.)

Jerusalem doesn’t grapple directly with the legitimacy of the Israeli state, or of its treatment of Palestinians (or, conversely, with the actions of Palestinians and others against Israel), making it feel a bit politically naive at times. (Reading it in tandem with Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days Or Less — see my review — would be interesting; Glidden was in Israel for a short time, on a tour, specifically as a tourist on a heritage tour designed to make her intensely pro-Israel, and intensively questioned the Palestinian situation, while Delisle lived in Israel for a year, mostly among vaguely pro-Palestinian expatriates, and lives the physical discomfort of the occupation without engaging with it on a theoretical level.)

Delisle’s job — besides writing books like Jerusalem — is a house-husband; he had two small children during that year, and just taking care of small children (even if they are in day-care part of the time) is massively time-consuming in ways that it’s hard to describe. When you wake up with a toddler, you get through the day somehow, and then wonder, at the end, what you actually did during the last sixteen hours. So Delisle isn’t as free to move around this year as he was in Shenzhen and Pyongyang — but, then again, those were shorter trips, so he had more time to immerse himself in Jerusalem (and, before that, in Burma), more time to live in those places rather than just passing through them.

Jerusalem is a discursive, rambling book, equally about daily life as an expatriate in East Jerusalem and the physical problems of just moving around so militarized and controlled a country [1] as it is about Delisle’s continuing attempts to sketch and draw and work on his cartoons when he has time away from his young children. It’s a long, looping story, circling back to those same few concerns — time to sketch, physical access, which day things will be open — and is more obsessed with time (the right day, the right time of day, enough time to do something while the kids are in day-care) than one would expect. Throughout, Delisle is an interesting and thoughtful guide to Israel, showing us the things he did and saw and thought, and what it was like to live in that place for that time. I expect some people will be unhappy at Delisle’s take on the Israel-Palestine situation — people on either end of that argument, because as much as he engages with it, he’s somewhere in the middle — but that’s an occupational hazard when you create books about your time in odd, contested, unlikely places. Delisle is always honest, and shows us what he sees and feels: you can’t ask for more than that.

[1] His partner was posted in Gaza for most of this trip, and the one crossing into Gaza is more tightly controlled than any other gate in Israel.

There have been a lot of parodies/mash-ups of that particular Liam Neeson soliloquy, but this one is quite clever and fun.

(Well, I think so, at least.)