SF Revu has a nice review of Seeds of Change: “These are not your usual short stories — each one is a true gem. If you haven’t already found this book on the shelves, go look for it now. It will supply hours of absorbing reading and lots of food for thought.”
Also, the Minimal to the Max blog says: “Seeds of Change exceeded my expectations. I found it to be quite an engaging read, and … I think the majority of it will appeal to readers everywhere.”
Publishers Weekly reviews The Living Dead: (Starred Review) "Recently prolific anthologist Adams (Seeds of Change) delivers a superb reprint anthology that runs the gamut of zombie stories. There’s plenty of gore, highlighted by Stephen King’s ‘Home Delivery’ and David Schow’s classic ‘Blossom.’ Less traditional but equally satisfying are Lisa Morton’s ‘Sparks Fly Upward,’ which analyzes abortion politics in a zombified world, and Douglas Winter’s literary pastiche ‘Less than Zombie.’ Also outstanding, Kelly Link’s ‘Some Zombie Contingency Plans’ and Hannah Wolf Bowen’s ‘Everything Is Better with Zombies’ take similar themes in wildly different directions. Neil Gaiman’s impeccably crafted ‘Bitter Grounds’ offers a change of pace with traditional Caribbean zombies. The sole original contribution, John Langan’s ‘How the Day Runs Down,’ is a darkly amusing twist on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. There’s some great storytelling for zombie fans as well as newcomers."
Also, the blog Dusk Before Dawn reviews The Living Dead, providing capsule reviews for each story. The reviewer’s favorites were: Ghost Dance by Sherman Alexie, The Third Dead Body by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Malthusian’s Zombie by Jeffrey Ford, Home Delivery by Stephen King, Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale, and The Song the Zombie Sang by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg.
As I mentioned in my previous post, in college I wrote an essay about Tom Disch’s poetry collection, Dark Verses & Light. Here it is:
***
Thomas Disch’s Dark Verses & Light is a diverse assortment of poetry, including traditional verse, a verse play, and the poems of a fictional poet. Disch includes everything from a verse play with a talking corpse exploring the properties of particle physics to a deceptively simple poem pondering which tie to wear. Reading this collection is an emotional roller coaster, and the poet’s voice ranges from innocence to cynicism.
Section one contains only one poem, “The Snake in the Manger: A Christmas Legend” and the verse play “The Eightfold Way: A Masque in Five Tableaux.” In this section, you will find experiments in meter and rhyme, and the occasional turn of phrase so clever it makes the poem worth reading all by itself. In “The Eightfold Way” a man reincarnated as a woman dances with his former male self and explores the nature of DNA:
Thymine, my other self! Mythical twin,
Twining with me in serpentine helices,
Mirror reversing right and left,
Machine of perpetual emotion,
Loom on which the shuttles of my soul
Flash to and fro, genetic spinning jenny,
Sin with me, spin with me
Deoxyribonucleically.
Another example of Disch’s playful use of language can be seen in the following excerpt from the same verse play:
What care I where I am
While I am with you? Were you of uracil,
Still would I love you, still would my oxygen
Lock to your phosphorus. Across the Aegean
And up through the Bosporus, my galley should sail,
Like a new Cleopatra’s.
In this startlingly bizarre verse play, you will also find a corpse and a mechanical mouse conversing, talking electrons, and an impression of Robin Leach doing “Death-styles of the Rich and Famous.” The play ends and finishes its explanation of physics with a game of cosmic “three-shell monte.”
Section two begins with a powerful short poem, “Back Here,” which tells us that one can never go home. However, perhaps the strongest piece of this section, “Why This Tie, Why That,” portrays both the innocence and cynicism of Disch’s poetry. This is a poem exploring the reasons for wearing a tie. The poem hits hard by lulling the reader with the mundaneness of the subject matter (“Because it was foremost on the rack”). Then we’re slapped with emotion by a line like “Because I’m blue.” The reader is then left with a mixed feeling of hope and sadness when the poem ends with the last and perhaps most telling reason of all:
Because this is exactly who I am,
could be, might wish to be,
today, this afternoon, or some day soon.
Perhaps the most interesting portion of this collection is brought to us in section three, by the fictional former filmmaker and world’s worst beat poet, Joycelin Shrager. Disch gives us a detailed short history of Joycelin’s life, then leaves us to wander through her poetry, which ranges from the humorous (“i am just a plain poet”) to the obsessive (“when i am sick science fiction”). Included in all “Shrager’s” poems are her idiosyncrasies, including but not limited to her total lack of capitalization and punctuation, her constant misspelling of poem as pome, her overuse of ampersands, and her refusal to title her poems. “Shrager’s” unusual personality comes through in each “pome,” but perhaps most clearly in “if you know what i mean,” which is dedicated “to john ashbery with love from joycelin.” This poem in a way responds to a line from “i am just a plain poet” in which “Shrager” quips:
you can’t expect them to like
a subtle poet like john ashbery
(who i have to confess doesn’t make
a scrap of sense to me)
In “if you know what i mean,” “Shrager” explains how her teacher “andy lowe explained” ashbery’s poems and ordered his class “go thou & do likewise.” The rest of the poem then goes on to explain to the reader how “Shrager” cannot understand the method of Ashbery’s madness.
Section four opens with a return to Disch’s own poetry, and a disconcerting one at that. “Selected Quirks” explores “whether the moral status of mankind has undergone an improvement in our times.” It does so by citing twelve cases of aberrant behavior. “Case One had masturbated all his life…. / Case Ten had incest twice with Case Eleven.” Disch then ends on a somber and disturbing note, “But worse than these was Twelve, who would not choose.” Disch’s cynicism is most readily apparent in his “Poem from the Pen.” This is a poem about a normal everyday man who
could have been a boxing pro
but drugs & liquor laid [him] low.
He “killed a man” and now he’s in prison “For forty years.” The poem ends with one of Disch’s best stanzas, which contains both a clever turn of phrase and seamless rhymes:
They say you shouldn’t bear a grudge
But if I could I’d kill my judge
And hang the jury who hung me
Oh how I long for liberty
Overall, this collection will make the reader smile, frown, and shake his head in consternation. It is a complex lot, not easily categorized or referenced. Critic Thomas Fleming has characterized Disch’s poetry as “quirky, unpredictable, and irreverent with a satire that is savage in its restraint.” That is a beginning to classifying Disch’s work, but Disch himself would likely resist these and all other labels. In any case, Dark Verses & Light is too diverse a collection to pass up, whether it can be fit neatly into a category or not.
As the editor of a post-apocalyptic anthology and someone who is generally considered to be something of an expert on the subject, I feel it is my duty to provide this public service announcement in regard to the recently released film Doomsday. It is, quite simply, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
Here’s a quick synopsis, in case you’re not familiar with it already: There’s a massive plague in England, which is contained by sealing off Scotland along Hadrian’s Wall. Thirty years later, the virus starts showing up in the rest of England, so a team is sent into the quarantine zone to search for a cure among the survivors.
Okay, but here’s the thing. Almost nothing that happens in the movie makes sense. None of the SF elements are thought out at all. There’s tons of cliches such as the idiotic post-apocalyptic biker punk society that arises inside the quarantine zone, who for some reason turn to cannibalism even though there are, inexplicably, so many cows wandering around that when the "outside" team enters the quarantine zone they run them over with their tanks. It’s like director Neil Marshall surveyed all of post-apocalyptic fiction and film, took all of the worst elements from each of them and threw them into this movie.
It’s just absolutely abysmal. You just might find yourself wishing the end of the world would come just so you wouldn’t have to sit through another second of this pathetic excuse for a movie.
Trust me: Don’t waste your money. Hell, don’t even go if you get in for free–life’s too short.
John over at the great SF Signal blog posted a glowing (four-out-of-five stars) review of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse offers a great selection of end-of-the-world stories proving that stories in a single setting (or a single subgenre of science fiction) need not be similar. While the prevailing theme, as would be expected, is one of hope, the stories are presented with unique focus and voice. But the mood is as dark as it should be with such serious subject matter. With rare exception (Neal Barrett, Jr.’s comical "Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus") these stories are gloomy indeed. But isn’t that the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction after all?
John Joseph Adams has culled a great selection of stories here dating back to 1973, with more than half of those written in the last seven years. […] In then end, Wastelands proved to be more entertaining than the average yearly "Best of".
One of the thing I like so much about SF Signal’s reviews is the fact that when they cover an anthology, they review each and every story. That’s the case here as well–John provides mini-reviews of each tale, along with a star-rating for each. So go check out the full review, and add SF Signal to your RSS feed-reader.
Do yourself a favor and check out this movie called Fido (now on DVD). Basically, it’s what you’d get if you mashed up Leave It to Beaver and Night of the Living Dead. In the 50s there’s some kind of space germ that turns the dead into zombies, resulting in a zombie war. A company called Zomcon develops technologies and strategies for beating back the zombie hordes so people can live in peace again. There are vast areas of land known as the "Wild Zone"–desolate wastelands where the zombies roam free. An oasis in that wilderness is the town of Willard, which is a sort of perfect, utopian piece of suburbia. The town is made possible by the perimeter fence that keeps the zombies out. Or the wild zombies anyway. See, some scientist developed a collar that allows you to control zombies. Put it around their neck, and you can stifle their impulse to consume human flesh. It also makes them receptive to commands, so they become a sort of slave, doing menial tasks no one else wants to do. The movie’s about a boy whose family gets their first zombie, who he names Fido.
It’s good stuff. A good, solid story, with just the right amount of humor. Pretty good performances all around, and some nice, subtle social commentary. Highly recommended.
Marshall Payne reviews The Pirate Issue for The Fix. He singles out J. K. Cheney’s "A Hand For Each," Rajan Khanna’s "The Furies," and Grant Stone’s "Hard Times for Bartelby Crow" as the best of the issue. Also, he has some additional comments on his LiveJournal.
Yesterday, Grasping for the Wind posted a review of The Pirate Issue, and now they’ve posted an interview with me:
GFTW: You were recently invited to be a guest editor for the Pirate Issue of Shimmer Magazine. What was your approach to choosing stories for this issue?
JJA: One of the things I wanted to do with the Pirate Issue is have a broad range of pirate stories, which took some liberties interpreting the term "pirate." Of course, there are some stories in the issue that are your typical iconic Caribbean-style pirate, but it was important to me to have a certain diversity represented. So that was one factor.
Other than that, I was really just judging the stories on their own merits as I would judge any story. In fact, that was the only way I could judge them, really, because Shimmer employs a "blind" reading system, in which the names of the contributors are stripped off of their manuscripts before the editor sees them. So when I read each story, all I had was the title and the text. It was kind of a liberating feeling to read each story with absolutely no preconceptions, not even subconsciously, about what I might think about the story I was about to read. (And this was only enhanced by the fact that I read all the submissions electronically, so every submission looked exactly the same to me–there were no variations in manuscript formatting or other things like that to get in the way of me engaging with the story.)
The only other time I’ve ever read a story anonymously, as far as I know, is when I read Neil Gaiman’s "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" for F&SF. The manuscript didn’t have Gaiman’s name on it, just the title. I kind of felt like I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t put my finger on who it was. After I got to the end, I saw Neil Gaiman’s name, and so I learned who wrote it. But I was glad to have read it that way, and I enjoyed reading a whole slush pile’s worth for Shimmer that way.
Click to read the whole interview.
Also, SF Signal asked me to participate in their new Mind Meld feature, in which they get a bunch of knowledgeable folks and ask them to chime in on a certain issue. So click through to read my thoughts about online book reviewing, along with thoughts from folks like David Hartwell, Niall Harrison, James Patrick Kelly, and others.
As I mentioned in my interview with David Moles, the December 2007 issue of F&SF is now on sale. That means that all of the non-fiction in the issue is now available on our website:
A Canticle for Leibowitz adapted for radio by Karl Schmidt and John Reeves from the novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr., read by a full cast
Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1959 Hugo Award-winning masterwork revolves around the Abbey of St. Leibowitz and the monks there who seek to preserve and rediscover the knowledge of the ancients, most of which was lost in the aftermath of the great Flame Deluge. Beginning in the 26th Century and covering a span of some 1800 years, with humanity progressing from a new dark age to a new space age, A Canticle for Leibowitz tells a tale of the pursuit and folly of technological advancements and of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization.
The novel is brought wonderfully to life by this captivating radio dramatization produced by WHA Radio and Wisconsin Public Radio (in association with NPR). Carol Cowan, the primary narrator, reads the text in a grim, compelling tone that leaves the listener hopelessly ensnared. The rest of the cast deliver likewise sterling performances, breathing life into Miller’s characters, capturing at once the profundity of the novel’s themes and its sly, dark humor. Sound effects can often hamper an audiobook production, but here they complement the dramatization well; the sound of church bells and the eerie chanting of the Edgewood College Chant Group help fully immerse the listener in this vision of a post-holocaust America.
Genre purists will probably want to first read the novel, or listen to the unabridged audiobook from Books-on-Tape (read by Jonathan Marosz), but for the casual fan (or the purist who has already read the novel), this is sure to delight. Perhaps it’s best to think of this production as an illuminated manuscript—though it can never replace the sacred original, it is a pleasing replica and a fitting tribute.
Originally appeared in Amazing Stories