It's Over Nine Thousand

All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk, isn't really about one man's experience of reading 27,000 Marvel comics, although it touches on that. It's not a history of Marvel, although it touches on that. It's not a summary of the Marvel Universe story so far, although the final chapter skims through that.

Instead, this is Douglas Wolk, after reading 27,000 Marvel comics, picking out his favourite bits, and that makes for a compelling book, although it's not exactly how the book is marketed.

But it is interesting how, in all of those thousands of stories, Master of Kung Fu stands out as problematic as heck but also really, really good, or how the Dark Reign crossover turns out to be more clever and insightful than it appears, or how Jack Kirby was a genius but his Black Panther run was (probably) terrible.

I like that personal, my-favourite-bits, approach, and while a couple of chapters feel a bit perfunctory, I could quite happily have read another 15 chapters of this.

(Or maybe another 15 chapters by someone else. It would be lovely -- if impractical -- to get other people to read 27,000 Marvel comics and present their own favourite parts, just for a variety of voices. I'd love to read sequels to this by other authors.)

There are some disappointments -- there's an early interesting Grant Morrison-esque thought about the Marvel Universe being a unique fictional construct but it doesn't go anywhere; the Black Panther chapter doesn't quite grasp the importance of what Don McGregor was doing -- and perhaps overall the book is a bit fluffy, but it's always entertaining, and well worth reading for the parts in which Wolk pulls out a surprise favourite, or delves a bit deeper into a subject, or both.

Jay Arr Pee Gee

I want to love this book. It's very handsome and well designed, and it's (mostly) exhaustive. It is in many ways, lovely.

But.

The lead writer isn't very good. He has an unfortunate tendency towards presenting sweeping, unsupported, statements as fact, and has a lazy approach to research; if it's not part of his direct experience it's going to get dismissed, if it's acknowledged at all. It is very obvious if he hasn't played -- or just isn't interested in -- a game about which he's supposed to be writing, and it's not clear if he's fully aware that Europe exists.

(As this book has a team of writers, this is a trivial issue to resolve: just say "I don't feel like writing about Ax Battler; can someone else do it?" There you go. Wasn't difficult.)

I'm familiar with the writer from his website, and the same problems are apparent there too; if I'd realised he was the head writer for this book, I'm not sure I would have bought it.

The organisation is a bit odd too. It's not clear why games are ordered the way they are, and when other games are mentioned in an entry they are sometimes given a page reference, but most often not. Why? Who knows? If a game has multiple titles -- for example, English and Japanese titles -- they are listed only by one, and again it's not clear why that name is chosen. There is an index, but it's just an alphabetical list; again, if a game has alternate titles, they aren't indexed. Indexes by year and platform would have been useful too.

So it's a beautiful book, and there are plenty of surprises even for the most enthusiastic JRPG fan, but I would be very wary of treating it as any sort of authoritative, let alone scholarly, text. Ignore the title; it's not a "guide", it's more of an overview, albeit a fun and (very) pretty one.

It's a Kraken

China Miéville clearly quite likes Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, or perhaps he thinks it's deeply flawed. Either way, Kraken marks the second time, after the excellent Un Lun Dun, that he's tried to write his own version of Gaiman's story, but this attempt is rather less successful than the first.


The characters are the weakest I've yet seen from Miéville. His protagonist goes from undefined nobody to undefined hero, his "sidekick" remains fuzzy and indistinct throughout, and there's an attempt to introduce a secondary protagonist who more or less does nothing except wander around the edges of the story failing to get involved until she's kidnapped near the end. Oh, SPOILER, sorry. We get characters who turn out to be quite important to the plot but who we don't really get to know in any meaningful way, so their contributions seem hollow. Likewise we get characters (the same one, sort of, but to say more would be a spoiler) who are important up to a certain point, but then just sort of fade away into the background for no apparent reason. The most memorable character is a police-officer-cum-witch who is notable for her inventive swearing and little else. It's a bit of a vague mess, and the cast could have done with a bit of trimming, to allow more room to develop the rest.

I could also do without Miéville's strange and recurring tendency towards baiting his audience; this time he has a go at fans, Star Trek in particular, but the intent is clear, and he also throws in a couple of jabs at those who may have thought that a novel about cultists of a squid god might, just might, have some connection to HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu. In interviews, Miéville says that these swipes are affectionate, but they do seem rather bitter and unnecessary in the text. Then again, I get the feeling that a lot of his fanbase probably don't think of themselves as readers of fantasy, so these little nods probably empower their distended snootiness glands.

Miéville's biggest flaw remains that he is better at creating worlds than he is telling stories. His Bas-Lag series (there are three books so far, but it's not a trilogy) offers a look into a fascinating fantasy world, quite different from your bog-standard post-Tolkien elves-and-dwarves faff, but while The Scar presented a rollicking pulp pastiche and is easily his best book yet, Iron Council was a bunch of ideas looking for a plot, and Perdido Street Station was somewhere in between. Kraken is set in modern-day London rather than Bas-Lag, but the same problems remain, and it hovers somewhere in the middle of that scale.

I'm going to lose some of you here, but Kraken rather feels like Miéville's campaign setting for his personal modern magic role-playing game, just as his Bas-Lag books often seemed like primers for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. There is a plot here, and it's quite clever in places, but it seems like it is really only there to link together the writer's ideas, which in fairness are also very clever. It still makes for an enjoyable read, but not entirely a satisfying one, unless you're looking for ideas to pinch for your Unknown Armies game.

(I'm done with the excessive geekery now; normal people can resume reading at this point.)

Kraken is not a bad book, and it's miles better than Iron Council, but it's not great either. Un Lun Dun may have been for kids, but it was a much more enjoyable read than this occult thriller which forgets to thrill.

Un Pot Ter

One of my big problems with the Harry Potter books, aside from the chronically unsympathetic protagonist (really, how do you get your lead so badly wrong?) is that they just don't make any sense. It's as if Rowling came up with some ideas ("Oooh, a dual world of magic and mundanity") without actually thinking any of it through. So there's no attempt to explain how the dual world works, why a school for wizards not only labels a full quarter of the student body as "evil" but actively encourages villainy, and so on. The stories might be good, and the characters (apart from Harry) might be compelling, but the books are just utter nonsense, and they drive me mad.

Un Lun Dun then, is a breath of fresh air (pun intended). One of China Miéville's strengths as a writer has always been his elaborate but thoughtful world-building; sometimes, as in the case of Iron Council, he forgets that we're all here for a story, but the worlds he creates are always interesting. Un Lun Dun has a good old-fashioned (only not) adventure story, a strong cast, including a great "protagonist", and best of all, it all makes wonderful sense. Yes, there's magic, and big slabs of psuedoscience, but there's an internal logic, not only to the ideas, but also to the plotting. It's a bit Neverwhere, a bit Narnia (the good bits), and even a bit Army of Darkness, and it's hugely enjoyable, a book that delights with each new invention or plot development, full of ideas that make me want to stand up and applaud. Great stuff, and I'd be happy to have Miéville write more of these, even if we never see a grown-ups' novel from him ever again.

The Golden Age of My Arse

The Golden Age of Censorship is the worst book I have ever read. I get the feeling that Paul Hoffman wanted to write something about his experiences as a film censor, but realised that some limp anecdotes and half-formed musings on censorship and the nature of film weren't enough to carry a novel, so he bolted on a superficial bit of soap opera nonsense in place of a plot. Said plot only starts to get going about halfway through the book, and isn't worth hanging around for, because it's far too thin and useless to be compelling, no matter how much Hoffman blathers on about destiny and inevitability. There's an absurd twist ending that makes no sense whatsoever, subplots that go nowhere, and the majority of the cast are introduced early on, then ignored for the rest of the book, including the two most interesting personalities.

It's entirely possible that Hoffman is being very clever indeed with this novel, but even if so, he's also a million miles away from being at all entertaining. The worst book I've ever read.

Not the worst book I've ever started, mind. That honour goes to The God of Small Things, which was so staggeringly inept that I gave up about eighty pages in.

In other news, today I finally finished the comic I talked about here. Not the "funky comics project", but the one I was drawing for a friend. Which is not to say that it's not funky, because it is, only a different kind of funky to my funky comics project. Er...

Anyway, it's done, and I'm not too displeased with it at all, beyond being horribly late, of course. Rol, for he is said friend, does some big-upping of the strip here. When Rol first gave me the script, sometime around the abolition of the Corn Laws, I thought it was for something he was going to put on his website; little did I know that he was actually going to be printing and selling it, and I had no idea that I was going to be in such august company. I'm not sure when PJANG! will be published, but I'll give it a plug here when it's out.

Oh! And I almost forgot. Or in fact, I did forget, but came back to add this bit later. The other day, I came home to find that the postperson had delivered my copy of the limited edition hardback collection of volume one of The Rainbow Orchid! It's absolutely gorgeous, and if the completed book is half as lovely, it'll be very lovely indeed.

The Buried Pyramid

I'm not at all familiar with Jane Lindskold, I must confess, but she's apparently quite popular, as this book was a challenge to get from the local library, and moreover was impossible to renew. I was put on its trail by a very favourable description on Alan Robson's book reviews page, a site I thoroughly recommend for readers of scifi and other genre fiction.

And I can see why Robson enjoyed The Buried Pyramid. It's a very fun, exciting book. The first three quarters are a rip-roaring adventure in the Haggard or Burroughs (or, if you must, the Indiana Jones) style, a travelogue across exotic lands with dashes of adventure and intrigue along the way. Apart from some niggling editorial glitches like disappearing punctuation, this is a wonderful read. Well, there is another problem which soured my enjoyment of this part of the book, but we'll get to that in a bit.

The last quarter involves an audacious plot twist that changes the tone and the very concept of the book. This in itself, I don't have a problem with, and it is handled very well here, with the breakneck pace and sense of fun from earlier on left intact. It is the details that led to my frustration, with many questions left unanswered. Sadly these weren't questions of the "ooh, isn't this intriguing, I wonder what it means?" sort, but of the "why did this happen?", "what was the point of doing that?" and "how does that serve the story?" sort. The most frustrating thing about these problems is that a more careful proofreading could have caught them and led to them being sorted out.

This editorial blindness also perhaps accounts for the problem that distracts from the otherwise excellent first, pre-twist, part of the book. The heroes are occasionally sent messages by a mysterious ally who warns them about the perils that surround the party. Of course, as is the tradition of these things, the messages are written in code, and whenever the heroes receive one, we're treated to delicious passages of them sitting around with pencils and paper, trying to work out the key to unlocking the codes. The problem with this ongoing plot thread is that it's quite clear from the beginning who the mysterious benefactor is. It's certainly arguable that Lindskold is making no atempt to hide this person's identity, and that it's supposed to be obvious, but all evidence points to the contrary, especially the climax of the novel in which the revelation is treated as being one last, quite important, loose end that needs tying up. Adding to the frustration is the fact that editorial laxness leads to one character correctly working out the identity of the message writer both at the climax and earlier on, around the point at which the plot takes its interesting turn. I've read and re-read the bit in question, thinking perhaps I've missed or mininterpreted something, but it's quite clear that the hero discovers the identity of her ally 117 pages before she, er, discovers the identity of her ally...Surely that's something an editor should pick up?

All that said, The Buried Pyramid is a good fun read. I think it's perfect for the younger reader, who'd be sophisticated enough to follow the subtleties, but perhaps not so on-the-ball that they'd pick up on the klunky bits that led to me not enjoying it as much as I could have. Still, well worth a read, especially if your literary diet has been devoid of fun of late.