— by Wombat-socho

I am probably the last person to find out that Dragon*Con, probably the largest non-comics convention in fandom, has finally bestirred itself and created its own set of awards – the Dragon Awards. This has been greeted with much glee by Sad and Rabid Puppies alike, with Declann Finn going so far as to declare victory. I’d say he and our Supreme Dark Lord are probably correct in predicting that the Dragons will almost certainly eclipse the Hugos, given the much larger voting base which makes any kind of gaming the nominations or the final vote futile. Looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Bosch Fawstin has attracted a fair amount of attention for being a “recovered Muslim” and outspoken cartoonist, currently engaged in annoying his former co-religionists by offering to draw Mohammed on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day for people who can’t draw. He’s also gained some notoriety for his comic book series The Infidel, featuring Pigman. I picked up all three issues (the other two books are War of Words and Reprisal) for the Kindle, and was pleasantly surprised that the Kindle Fire does an outstanding job of presenting comics. The Infidel itself is a complicated tale, being at the same time an examination of the divisions between Muslims (and ex-Muslims) played out between twin Albanian brothers and a superhero comic in which Pigman wages a violent counter-jihad against Muslims that comes to a climax in Mecca itself. Fawstin’s style is reminiscent of Frank Miller’s in The Dark Knight Returns, though Killian Duke has far less to work with than Bruce Wayne. It is disturbing, thought-provoking, and very well done; I hope Fawstin has more issues planned.

I wish I could say the same for Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I’m very glad I borrowed from the county library instead of blowing eighteen dollars (!) on the Kindle edition. While it starts with an interesting idea – the Moon is hit by a pair of fast, dense objects that break it into many smaller pieces, which threaten humanity with extinction, so a global crash priority effort to expand our presence in space rapidly ensues – the execution is sadly reminiscent of his previous SF novel, the clunky Anathem. Most of the book is taken up with the base of the story: rapid expansion of the International Space Station as an ark for humanity, selection of an elite group of kids from around the world, a tragic mission to retrieve a comet to provide water to the rapidly expanding orbital colony, and a disastrous attempt to reach Mars by a breakaway group of colonists. Many important (and not a few unimportant) characters carry the Idiot Ball in this part of the book, to the point where one begins to yearn for a Heinlein Individual of either sex to just start shooting the assholes causing all the trouble. This unfortunately doesn’t happen, and soon humanity in space is reduced to seven women and a genewriter, which over the course of five thousand years grows to several millions of men and women living in a greatly expanded set of orbital habitats largely built from Lunar rubble. We don’t get any exposition of that part, nor do we get any narrative covering the people hiding under mountains or at the bottom of the sea in submarines. What we do get, as in Anathem, is a hurried final section telling the tale of the orbital folks meeting the undermountain folks and then the undersea folk, with a fair amount of conflict between the two blocks of orbital folk. It’s almost as if Stephenson got bored with the plot and just decided to wrap it up and turn it in; frankly, I would have much rather he just stopped after the council of the Seven Eves. This has been nominated for the Hugo, but frankly, I don’t think it deserves it; if I bother to buy a MidAmericon membership and vote, I’m certainly not going to rank it very highly if I vote for it at all.

Speaking of my county library, apparently somebody in the purchasing department likes the combination of BDSM porn romance and technothrillers that is John Ringo’s “Paladin of Shadows” series, because they have the whole series from Ghost through Tiger By The Tail, which Ringo co-wrote with Ryan Sear. I checked them all out, because they’re decent brain candy, and the proportion of rough sex to balls-out violence diminishes as the series goes on. In addition, Ringo is parceling out information about the Keldara culture bit by bit, and I admit to being very fascinated with it. The series has all been out for a few years by now, so I’m not going to bore you with plot summaries, especially because it’s pretty formulaic: the US has a problem, usually involving WMD (although in Choosers of the Slain, it’s a missing daughter of a political donor with clout) and only the Kildar and his Mountain Tigers have the plausible deniability and sheer “git er dun” to solve that problem. And somehow, wherever they go, the Kildar keeps collecting loose women…many of whom turn out to be real people with useful skills, or at least trainable. Adds some occasionally dark humor to the tales of dirty deeds done in the nastier parts of the Third World…like, say, Disney World. At $6.99 apiece for the Kindle, I may wind up adding these to the electronic part of my library.







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