The Plot
With Hachimaki off to Jupiter, his former crewmates (and current wife) are left to deal with the garbage in orbit around Earth on their own. Fee, the captain of the Toy Box, is feeling adrift. Some time spent with her family gives her a new perspective and she begins trying to prevent an environmental disaster threatened by a war between two factions on Earth. Meanwhile, the trip to Jupiter continues and the crew is aware of how momentous their journey is. Sort of.

My Thoughts
Ugh. These last two volumes are a real let down even compared with the averageness of the first three. At least 1-3 had a sort of cohesiveness — they were tied together by the thread of Hachimaki’s quest to join the Jupiter team and his journey to make it. But all that goes out the window for these last two volumes (which are clearly only one volume, padded out by extra materials to make two. For more profit? Who knows.)

Volume 4.1 takes place some time after the prior volume. Hachimaki and Tanabe were married and he has left on his mission to Jupiter. But we see none of this, because it all happened off camera. Instead, the whole of the manga portion of this volume is taken up by a nearly incoherent story starring Fee and to a lesser extent, Yuri and Tanabe. (Very much lesser.)

We start with Tanabe, who makes friends with a Tek Jansen looking dude who claims he’s an alien who’s been punished for his bad behavior by being made into a human. She tries to help him make some friends. And that… is the end of that story. I was pretty confused, because it seemed like it was leading somewhere, but then the whole thing was abruptly dropped. We see the guy again, briefly, but his alien nature (or lack thereof) receives no further discussion.

We move quickly on to the next issue. Apparently, the space around Earth is mined, and the garbage collectors are (naturally) not allowed to collect these mines and must leave them floating there. Now, all of these mines belong to different nation states down below, and are there just in case. Though this is poorly explained, one has to assume there’s some new sort of cold war and philosophy of mutually assured destruction which forms the political backdrop of how this situation developed.

We see some bickering between military types, one of whom is named Colonel Sanders and yes, looks exactly like Colonel Sanders. There’s even a fried chicken joke. I’m not sure if it’s the translation or the original writing that makes this section unclear. But apparently, even though there is a 100% probability that using the space mines will create a debris field that will pretty much cut Earth off from space, two countries (The US and some… very vaguely named Republic. China? A coalition of Arab states? Never explained) have decided to screw everyone and escalate tensions to the point where blowing stuff up seems like the only option.

Meanwhile, Fee is visiting her family, and her son, whose father apparently is incapable of training or disciplining him, has a bunch of unruly dogs living in their small apartment. The neighbors are unhappy. But even though she knows the dogs should be trained, Fee cannot stand up to the power of sad looking puppies and children and gives up on the whole business. Somehow this gives her an epiphany that children rail against that which ‘does not make sense’ rather than accepting it and so she goes off to try and stop the debris field from cutting off the world. This goes about as well as one might expect, and eventually they are all captured by the military. But there doesn’t seem to be any consequence for their actions — they aren’t deemed terrorists or thrown in prison or executed.

In fact, I never quite figured out what happened with this war at all. Did the dreaded Kessler Syndrome take place? Was Earth surrounded by an impenetrable debris field? I have no idea.

Hachimaki finally reappears in volume 4.2. The Jupiter mission is either being deliberately kept in the dark as to what’s going on back at Earth, or else they’re so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t care, because none of what’s going on seems to be a concern to them. The captain is too busy angsting about needing to write a memorable and pithy statement for when they arrive on planet. I admit that this is a legitimate concern, to know that your speech will be immediately part of history and to feel the pressure of making it good. But this worry consumes a very large portion of the final volume. And in the end, he doesn’t even write it at all, but forces the task upon Hachimaki who makes some trite speech about how love is the most powerful force in the universe.

The other plot thread which winds through these two volumes is that of the driving force behind the Jupiter mission. He’s been visiting memorials for those who died in an accident during the original testing of the spaceship’s propulsion system. But really, he feels no guilt or sadness, he just wants to improve his public image a bit so he can move on with his next big idea which is a mission to Saturn. We never do find out what his interest in Hachimaki actually was.

Since these few stories aren’t nearly enough to fill two pretty thick volumes of manga, there are large sections of each which are devoted to notes and world-building materials. These are interesting, and it’s nice to see how much thought was put in to the development of the setting. I just don’t feel like the setting was exploited to its full potential. The author really seemed to get distracted by a desperate desire to make some big statement about life, the universe and everything and forgot that the first and foremost point of writing fiction is to TELL A STORY. The story grew more and more secondary in these last two volumes and it contributed to their lack of cohesion and the jerkiness of the plot. Motivations were not properly attended to, and there was next to no resolution of anything.

In Short
The author of Planetes started with a pretty cool idea (the sort of jobs and ‘common people’ who might end up in space if space-flight becomes routine). And then, as happens pretty frequently, he was unable to execute it to its full potential. So in the end we have a relatively short manga series that shows flashes of greatness but is mostly a muddle of lost plot threads, exposition and random character actions that seem to come from nowhere. I had heard pretty positive comments about Planetes before reading it, so I was disappointed to find it like this. Perhaps the anime is more coherent?

The Plot
In the not so distant future, humankind has made orbital space-flight relatively routine. Hakimachi, who dreams someday of the freedom of owning his own space ship, works as a space trash collector, clearing dangerous debris from orbit. But he knows that won’t ever earn him enough to fulfill his dream, and he has his sights set higher. His shipmates aren’t sure whether to encourage him or convince him he’s being a fool.

My Thoughts
Before I get started on talking about the content, I must mention a huge issue I had with these volumes, a problem I place squarely at the feet of Tokyopop, who organized the English edition. The DATES. Oh my god, the freaking inconsistent confusing dates. Pretty much every new story arc began with a date, and it’s clear from the text that the volumes proceed along strictly chronological terms except for one prequel side story at the end of volume three. Unfortunately, the date progression Tokyopop provides is as so: 2068 > 2074 > 2075 > 2070 > 2075 > 2075 > 2076 > 2075 > 2077 > 2056 (flashback) > 2077 > 2077 > 2050 (flashback).

That’s just sloppy, and I find it hard to believe that this is the fault of the original. Just a short online search turned up scans of the French edition which had no such issue. This sort of idiocy on behalf of the editorial team is simply unforgivable. It is obvious no one read this through before it went to press.

Now, the story itself is more interesting than I thought it would be upon first glance. The conceit is a good one: spaceflight has become relatively routine, another industry. And yet there are still the elite, the explorers, and the grunts who do the maintenance, the work that makes the rest possible.

The main character, Hachirota Hoshino, aka Hachimaki, dreams of owning his own spaceship and answering to no one. In the meantime he works as a debris collector on a ship with a crew of three (later four), and saves his salary.

He soon decides this isn’t the way to riches, and determines to join a new group set to head for Jupiter. In spite of his many issues both physical and mental, he is finally accepted to be part of this crew. In fact, the man in charge has become very determined to have Hachimaki on board, for reasons which remain unclear.

Outside this central plot we meet a few other secondary characters who receive more than a passing introduction. Fee and Yuri, Hachimaki’s crewmates from the beginning, are interesting enough, but I can’t think of anything in particular to say about either of them. The most annoying of the secondary characters is Tanabe, an androgynous looking girl whose behavior is irritating and whiny from start to end. Inexplicably, Hachimaki eventually falls for her and at the end of volume 3 they announce their intentions to marry.

More to my taste is Hachimaki’s disreputable father Sirius Black Nanjirou Echizen Goro Hoshino. Goro is a famous and accomplished astronout who was part of the first team to go to Mars. He is semi-unwillingly tapped to head the Jupiter mission.

The plot itself and its vision of a not-so-distant future is strangely compelling. I found myself interested almost in spite of myself, because on its surface this isn’t the sort of story that I like to read. This considerable strength wars with the manga’s weaknesses: Tanabe, who I wanted to strangle, and Hachimaki’s continual hallucinations/philosophical fugues. The latter, often starring Evil!Hachimaki or a random talking cat, pull down what would otherwise be a fascinating tale of the future. They seem to be inserted because the author could not figure out how to otherwise include these maunderings on the nature of humans vs. outer space, and are a dreadful example of telling, not showing.

In Short
This science fiction story is at its strongest when actually attending to the plot and not digressing into a metaphysical mumbo jumbo of talking cats and phantoms. I enjoyed it more than I expected and look forward to seeing how the characters progress in the final two volumes.

So anyway, the latest kerfluffle in the publishing world is the showdown between Macmillan and Amazon.com. As a complete outsider, I understand it as this: Macmillan wants Amazon to charge more for certain e-books, and Amazon wants to keep the price capped at 9.99. Amazon took the unorthodox step of removing the ability to purchase Macmillan material from its site, though they have since supposedly backed down (this is debatable — reports are that some items are still not able to be bought)

I guess my first question is, how is this situation different from Apple’s original effort to force the music industry to cap the price of a song download at .99? I fail to see much of a difference. The music industry howled because, omg, if a song was popular enough, clearly they ought to be charging what the market could bear and no less. They wanted to find the exact balance between volume and price where they maximized profits. Apple thought .99 was a good price point and a psychological barrier, plus -they- wanted to maximize the profits from sales of the portable devices, made by them, tied to their download store.

Sounds pretty much the same to me!

The publishers are on crack if they don’t think this exact situation will happen again if Apple really tries to make an iWords store for book downloads.

I’ve heard a lot of perspectives on the amazon/macmillan showdown, from the side of authors, from the side of retailers, from the side of publishers. But what I haven’t really heard is the side of the consumer. Well, I am neither publisher nor retailer, nor am I an author at this point in my life. What I am is a consumer who has watched the price of books skyrocket over the past 20 years. The rise of the hardcover and the trade paperback have vaulted the price of books that used to be $2 and $3 to $8, $13, $25. I can hardly think of anything else besides college tuition and health insurance that has risen in price at such an astonishing rate.

What does this tell me? Like the health industry, the publishing industry has a model of service that is broken. Their situation isn’t exactly the same as the music industry, though, so I’m not sure the solution can be the same either. In the music industry, most people don’t actually want a whole album. They want the two or three songs that they like and nothing more. Portable music is also a much more flexible format than a physical cd — so in many ways, the downloading consumer is getting a much better product than someone who spends the cash and buys the entire album on cd. (Not including DRM which negates the value of the download completely).

For publishing, this doesn’t work, since no one just wants three chapters out of twenty. You need the whole book or nothing. On the other hand, a physical book is, so far, more flexible than the same book on an ereader. You can write on it. You can share it with a friend. You can resell it. You can donate it to a charity. Taken care of, a book may last for 100 years or more.

You can do none of that with any of the current ebook models. This makes them far less valuable and their price should be lowered accordingly. The accessible lifetime of any current ebook is, by my best estimate, perhaps 5-10 years. And it could be much much shorter. Add onto this that to make an ebook, the distribution cost is pretty much nil. No shipping, no printing, no extra copies that have to be pulped later on. As a consumer, I’m not willing to pay more than $5 for a book in such a limited, crippled format. Which is one reason why I haven’t bought a Kindle and why I have no intention of buying any ereaders until this has been sorted.

Okay, I know in my last post I sort of intimated that I wasn’t looking to take on any new grand plans or projects. I already have quite a lot of stuff that I need to do this year and certainly random blog projects by necessity must fall at the very bottom of the list.

But oh, I read today that they’re bringing the Baby-Sitters Club books back into print. Now, my guess is that like Trixie Belden a few years back, they’ll get about ten books in to the series and quit. The thing is, though, I’ve had this of and on urge to reread that series. All of it. The regular series, the Mysteries, the Super Specials, the Little Sisters. I don’t own all of them, but I do own quite enough to make a really good start; if I ever got so far as to get through all of mine, I could justify hunting down the rest.

Rereading, of course, is fine, but it doesn’t really feel a worthwhile pursuit without -making- something of it. Reviews, perhaps? I’m going to have to ponder this a little more.

This blog has been spluttering along for the past what, three years now, with hardly any posts or content. Once in a while I’ll manage to throw something up here, but a one off is hardly useful, is it?

I thought about trying to post every day, but that’s hardly likely to occur, and the first time I missed I’d be discouraged and either cheat by backdating or, more likely, give it up altogether and have several more months of nothing.

So a more reasonable goal is to post a certain number of times this coming year. Considering I only had 33 posts last year, it’ll hardly be difficult to outdo myself. 200 seems like a doable number, so that is the goal: 200 posts over the next year, only one of which can be a post where I claim to have nothing to post.

Last year I managed to read 110 books. Considering the pathetic months of July and September, this is pretty remarkable. Considering 38 were manga and at least a dozen more were either picture books, graphic novels or for children, this is less remarkable.

No goals on this, however; it’s hard to predict how much time I’ll have available to read, and of course, if I were counting everything, the number would be about 500, 300 of which would be Princess Baby or Dr. Seuss’s ABC.

I would like to make some progress on my long procrastinated newbery medal project. If I can get another dozen of those done this year I’ll consider it to have been good progress.

The Plot
NYPD Detective Nikki Heat has two problems: a dead Donald Trump clone whose murder she has to solve, and a journalist who’s tagging around with her while she does it. Plus, it’s really hot out.

My Thoughts
So here we have a somewhat average modern-day mystery-thriller. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of these sorts of books; I much prefer the type of mystery that is generally referred to as ‘cozy’ or (more accurately) ‘puzzle’. I’m not entirely sure where the cozy is meant to be — murder is not exactly warm and fuzzy even if Jessica Fletcher is the one investigating.

It’s short, hardly worth the cover price at a mere 197 pages. It has a few elements of a caper/humorous sort of mystery (a la Stephanie Plum) but it wants to be more hardcore than that. And if that were all this was, then Heat Wave would be pretty readily dismissible, an okay book in a crowded genre, devoured by a few and just as quickly forgotten.

But Heat Wave has a slightly more interesting pedigree: its author, Richard Castle, is himself a fictional character on the television show Castle. So it must be evaluated on this second level as well, as an offshoot of the fictional New York City established in the Castle universe.

For anyone unfamiliar with the television series, the premise is that the best-selling author Richard Castle, friends with the mayor of New York, wants to start writing a new series starring a female detective as his lead character. Through his friendship with the mayor he is given the privilege of tagging around with a NYPD detective. A hot female detective. His new character will be based upon her. Their relationship is defined by banter, some of it friendly, some of it not so friendly, some of it flirty, some of it not so flirty. He uses his authorial contacts and imagination to help her fight crime, she puts up with him and the fact that he bestowed upon his new character the porn-star name Nikki Heat.

Looking at the book as if one is living in the Castle-verse, there is more of interest: not so much the plot, but the subtext. Though Castle and Beckett are not romantically involved on the show (and one hopes the writers are smart enough to avoid allowing this to happen in the future), Castle’s self-insert book character, Jameson Rook (ha ha), manages to do some self-inserting with Nikki well before the mystery wraps up. Does this mean Castle secretly (or not so secretly) wants Beckett? Is he just showing her what she’s missing out on? Is it all a big fake out? Who knows. But it’s this sort of meta-pondering that made the book interesting and not the fairly tired plot. (I mean, come on — the identity of the ultimate criminal was a cliche. It could hardly have been more obvious.)

In Short
For fans of the television series Castle, this book is really a must read. It adds a new depth to the characters (Richard’s especially) and raises questions which can now be examined on the show now that it’s received a full second season order. For fans of mystery-thrillers, eh. By no means is this bad; it’s a decent representative of its type — but it is also very short. I don’t know if there are plans to continue the Nikki Heat series in the real world (in the Castle world more books have been contracted for), but unless one is watching the show I’m not sure it would be worth getting invested in the characters for a mere 200 pages.

The Plot
In the city of Astreiant, children have been disappearing — and not the sort of children that would be expected to run away to seek their fortune. Nico Rathe, adjunct pointsman at Point of Hopes, is determined that his investigation will see the children found before anything can happen to them. But with approximately zero leads, he’s mostly just poking around and hoping something pops out. Meanwhile, the city is growing more tense and hostilities are starting to break out.

My Thoughts
This wasn’t a book I’d picked out, and I again had a curious reluctance to pick it up and start it. But unlike the last book where that happened, once I got going with it I didn’t really have trouble continuing.

On its surface, this seems like a book I would like very much: I’m a fan of mysteries and I’m a fan of fantasy and this one has both. The surface impression is not entirely wrong, either.

The book’s main character, Nico Rathe, is the adjunct point in the area of Astreiant called Point of Hopes. It’s clear immediately that a ‘point’ is a sort of patrolman and detective rolled into one. But at that point (ha ha) the worldbuilding breaks down a little, and information is not provided as quickly as I desired it. First, I found that I was confused about the geography: I initially thought that Point of Hopes was a town and all these other places mentioned were also towns, all within the country of Astreiant. But that was a mistaken impression. Instead, Point of Hopes, Point of Dreams and so forth are actually neighborhoods within the city of Astreiant which is in the kingdom (queendom) of Chenedolle. I didn’t figure this out until about halfway through the book, at which point some things started making a good deal more sense.

There was also confusion with vocabulary. Now, it’s the prerogative of fantasy writers to make up new words for their new worlds, and I have nothing against that. The danger of made-up vocabulary, however, is a failure to adequately define a term in context. The authors mostly avoided this pitfall with one glaring exception. The world ‘point’ seemed to refer to the policemen, locations, the charges which were being filed and was just flung around far too freely for me to keep track of its meaning. The point at the point made a point on the point to pointy point point.

Setting these issues aside, the mystery gets underway quickly, with Rathe interviewing people to find out more information about what’s going on. As his investigation stalls, tensions begin to rise within the city, and the cityfolk let their fears dictate their actions — they become suspicious of outsiders and inclined to violence. It’s mostly due to this that Rathe encounters the unemployed soldier Eslingen and decides to use him as a mole within the household of someone his boss’s boss has decided to finger as a suspect in the disappearances.

The mystery continues at a very slow burn until the last quarter of the book when the pace picks up, some vital information is finally shaken loose, and things race to a conclusion. While I found the final confrontation anti-climactic, it didn’t seem inconsistent with anything that had been established earlier in the book and was all right.

My main lingering complaint after the end of the book was a definite lack of information that was conveyed about the world. It was clear from the details that did emerge the authors had done some thinking about the world and how its mechanics operated. But they were very stingy with their revelations! For instance, we are told throughout the course of the book that in this world, astrology is real, and the stars of your birth can have a significant impact on your odds of success or failure in certain professions. But though this was actually a major plot point, I still felt, by the end, I didn’t understand precisely how this worked.

There are also hints that homosexuality, particularly among the young, is accepted and even encouraged. There are indications that inheritance in this world is through the female line, with daughters being the first to inherit. The world is fairly equal, most likely as a direct result of the inheritance laws not requiring men to assure themselves of their sons being fathered by themselves. Ghosts are real. But none of this is detailed or explored — it’s all just an aside.

There is a sequel, which presumably would expand on the world and provide a deeper look at some of these issues, but I think this book could have been made better by the inclusion of just a little more time, a few more pages, put into explaining the setting.

In Short
As a mystery, it wasn’t bad. It worked a great deal like other mysteries set in the distant past (Death Comes as the End), in a distant location (Rowland’s Sano Ichiro series), or in an alternate Earth (Garrett’s Lord Darcy series). In other words, the mystery itself was not really ‘fair’ in that you couldn’t necessarily solve it before the investigator due to a lack of information about the setting — but on the other hand, the solution was not convoluted because of the lack of need to obscure the clues. As a fantasy, I felt like the worldbuilding had clearly been done, but that information wasn’t conveyed to the reader in as much depth as I wanted it. It was a slow read, but I did like it.

The Plot
For many shows, the first season is a season of finding the right voice and settling in; of characters who are still in development and premises that are still undergoing revision. This was the case for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wil Wheaton, a cast member, revisits his memories of the making of the first half of the first season, evaluating the episodes from the perspective of 20 years.

My Thoughts
When I was very small, I had an irrational prejudice against certain shows and movies. I quite liked Star Wars, but I was anti-Indiana Jones, anti-TOS, anti-Doctor Who and anti-Battlestar Galactica for reasons I can’t now remember.

All the same, I don’t remember protesting at all when my dad took myself and my brother to see ST4 at the movie theatre. The rarity of such an outing cannot be overstated: I can’t remember a time before or after (until we became near adults) that my dad willingly took both of us to the movies by himself. I assume my mother had flatly refused to see this movie and my dad, not willing to appear so very selfish as to head out and see it on his own, decided we would be reasonable camoflage. And really, if you had to pick a Trek movie to which you should take two elementary school kids, ST4 is the one. By osmosis, I knew enough about the characters to identify them by name, but very little more than that (the significance of the end of the movie, where the Enterprise-A is revealed, was lost on me.)

Somehow, in between viewing ST4 and the arrival of TNG on television, I became a fan. Not of TOS (that came later still), but of the idea of Star Trek. I was SO EXCITED there was going to be a new one. I was worried (and cynically sure, even at age 11) that it would soon be cancelled. There were girls! Three of them! and a kid! (A boy, sadly, but I will rant about that later) and the guy from Reading Rainbow! By the time TNG ended, 7 years later, I was about to leave for college, I was an unabashed fan of all things Star Trek, Doctor Who, and I’d found a few sci-fi authors to follow as well.

Star Trek, and especially TNG, was a big part of my life for a lot of years. I watched it faithfully: new episodes, which were in first-run syndication, could be viewed at four different times during the week on a couple of different channels (five, if you count the station that only came in with much squinting and tinkering with the antenna). Older episodes were rerun at 6pm and at 7pm every weekday night. And I tuned in about 99% of the time.

Wheaton, who, as people (everybody?) know, played Wesley Crusher on the series, divides his thoughts on each episode into two or three sections. The bulk is found in the synopsis, which will be familiar for anyone who frequented Television Without Pity back before it went all to hell. Wheaton does not spare the snark in evaluating the success of these early episodes, and with his insider knowledge is often able to put his finger on the exact problem, be it the writers, the director, or the powers that be.

At times, I think he was a little hard on both himself and the writers in his reaction to Wesley in these episodes. It’s a fact that Wes annoyed a lot of people, but his presence also served a purpose — he gave kids watching an entry point, a character with which to identify, and helped to create a new generation of Star Trek fans. As an 11 year old, I didn’t find him annoying, and I found his behavior perfectly reasonable. The show lost something when Wheaton made his departure, and even though the later seasons were far stronger than the first two, I still wish there had been a better resolution for the Wesley character before Trek went off the air. (With all the time travel that was going on, he could totally have showed up on Enterprise…)

I also liked his insider’s view of the episodes, the bits he remembered from production and encounters with the guest stars. This is the kind of stuff that you don’t usually hear about (Wheaton has written several production diaries in the past couple of years when he’s guest starred on other shows, and this is the same sort of thing.) It also helps to drive home the work that’s involved in the creation of these shows that appear magically on our televisions. I know I can’t be the only one who has a difficult time thinking of acting as hard work requiring lots of training and effort, and as he’s done before, Wheaton really brings that side of things to life.

In Short
The whole idea for this book was brilliantly conceived, and I really hope that rather than stop at season one, Wheaton continues through and does the rest of the seasons in which he was involved (plus the handful of episodes where he was a guest after he stopped being a regular). I’m a sucker for snarky show recaps, especially ones as well done as these. Could have spared a bit of the OMG the writers! It was all the writers! [who made Wes obnoxious!] but overall this was great and I can’t wait for the next one.

Campion (Margery Allingham)
I got three more of Margery Allingham’s Campion books last month; I’ve been semi keeping up with the reissues of these from Felony and Mayhem press. I heard of Campion mainly because of the tv version, which starred Peter Davison (aka Doctor #5). The books are good enough; I don’t like them as well as Christie, but they’re easily as good or better than Marsh, though the characterization is not as good as Sayers. Campion has a propensity, like Marsh’s Alleyn, to randomly fall in love with women involved with the cases, which is annoying, especially as he has a Bertie Wooster-ish quality to him in the first place. Also interesting is the fact that unlike, say, Poirot and Holmes, he is sometimes mistaken in his conclusions even all the way to the end of the story.

Mrs. Bradley (Gladys Mitchell)
A few years ago, Mystery showed several of these on PBS. Diana Rigg starred as Mrs. Bradley, a middle aged, multiply-divorced woman of means who is a well known expert on psychology and crime. (Peter Davison was also in several of the episodes as well. He’s been busy.) They caught my attention because unlike a Miss Marple type, Mrs. Bradley has professional qualifications and a reputation that extends beyond her village. But I never quite got around to trying to find out if these were based on a series of books until just recently. Interestingly, for a series with dozens of books in, it seems fairly hard to get hold of some of the early titles and I have to wonder why she is not more well known than she is. A local library had a handful of titles from later in the series and the style was readable, if a bit different than what I’m used to. Mrs. Bradley is nearly as energetic as some of her younger counterparts and seems to be constantly driving around the countryside interviewing suspects and even spent some time crawling about on a roof and shimmying down a drianpipe.

The Baby-Sitter’s Club
I followed this series for quite a long time, pretty much until I went off the college and got behind in buying the books and couldn’t keep up (this is when I lost track of the Star Trek novels, too). It ended a while ago, but every once in a while I’ll get the urge to a) reread it and/or b) complete the set. Anyhow, a couple of years ago Scholastic had the idea to reissue four of the books (#1, #3, #4 and #7) as graphic novels. I bought the first one and was surprised (and a little depressed) at how much of the story I remembered. The graphic novel itself was quite well done — the art was clean, the character designs to my taste, and I think the artist did a nice job trying to capture the essence of the girls while trying to draw them in a way that wouldn’t become dated in about a month. Because the one thing the graphic novels dropped entirely was the effusive descriptions of 80s ‘cool’ clothes that permeated so much of the originals. First, because descriptions of that nature are not necessary when you have pictures, but second because while Anne Shirley going on about puffed sleeves may be historical now, I imagine it was a turn-off for girls in the 20s and 30s. And somehow I just don’t see the BSC enduring quite long enough for an armful of jelly bracelets to feel historical.

Picma
I really am not a fan of picross, but somehow the description of this game on jayisgames lured me in. I played the first three levels with little difficulty and was actually enjoying it. It appealed to the same part of my brain that got horribly addicted to sudoku for several weeks and which still occasionally wants to do some. But when I got to the 20×20 sized grids, I found the flaw in the game: the playing area is too small. While picma does provide a little tool which you can use to slide the grid around and see the edges, it’s incredibly annoying to try and fill it out without being able to see all of the numbers around the board. There needs to be an option to play full screen or an option to zoom out. I managed to do one puzzle shifting the grid around, but after that I was forced to give up.

Copycat
Another game I discovered through jayisgames, this one provides a pattern of colors on one side of the screen which you have to duplicate on the other. This is done by arranging shapes and then dumping paint over the rest of the canvas — you have to figure out in which order to apply the colors and where to place the stencils so you end up with the proper result. I hadn’t really ever seen any game like this before, and I was fascinated. It was very interesting, with the only annoyance being the possibility that you would accidentally hit the ‘winning’ percentage of replication before you were actually done with your efforts. This could easily be fixed by requiring people to submit their result for judgement rather than automatically judging it after every action.

The Plot
Fifty-five years ago, the British Empire was faced with an uprising of the non-colonial sort: the dead were walking and they wanted brains. The scourge continues unabated, but life has adapted to cope with the continual threat. The five Bennett sisters have all been trained to fight the menace, but their mother would like to see them well married as well. Enter Mr. Bingley, a single young man of good fortune who has just moved into the neighborhood.

My Thoughts
When this book first came out, I resolved not to read it. The original Pride and Prejudice is my favorite book of all time, coming as close as any book has to my idea of perfection: lots of witty, interesting characters saying pithy things to one another and a happy ending to boot. I love it well enough to hate the vast majority of sequels I’ve tried, because they simply couldn’t live up to the original, or they took liberties to which I objected.

At any rate, my resolve weakened against PPZ. The author had kept a great deal of the original text, and the juxtaposition of zombies with the social machinations of the original might be, as one of Austen’s characters would put it, exceedingly diverting.

The premise is this: about a half-century before our story opens, zombies suddenly began appearing to menace the living. They are witless creatures, not impossible to destroy or even to distract, but doggedly determined in their quest for brains. Zombies seem to have two sources: the already dead may rise again, and the living may be infected by exposure (such as being bitten). In response to this, the army has mobilized, and also the general citizenry has begun to train and arm itself. Even women have received some training, including women of quite high station. The opening of a new economic door to women has seemed to have an effect on society: crudeness and innuendo is more common and there is a great deal more violence.

It’s clear from reading that the author has put at least a little thought into how this situation might change polite society. Unfortunately, in many cases it seems to have been very little. It’s hard to tell whether this is meant to be a “serious” retelling of the story or if it’s just meant to be a silly parody. Different rules apply in the latter case, but just enough effort has been made to maintain the integrity of the plot and story that the argument falls flat — this is not the literary equivalent of Scary Movie. And that makes it all the more galling in the cases where it’s abundantly clear that something has been inserted only because Grahame-Smith just couldn’t resist and not because it made sense in either the original or the re-imagining.

I get the sense, too, that the author didn’t have a great deal of respect for(or understanding of?) some of the original characters. In several places, Austen’s original text is included, but the speaker (or writer) is not the same as the original book – and yet they’re using the exact same phrasing. This is just sheer laziness on the part of the author. The work is almost bookended by the two of the most egregious examples of this: first, where Caroline Bingley takes over some of Darcy’s lines in an early exchange with Elizabeth, and then at the end, where a letter originally sent by Mr. Collins is penned instead by Colonel Fitzwilliam. In neither case are either pair of characters in any way similar and so the reassignment of words is out of character even within the context of this new book.

Similar problems arise when Austen’s text is revised for no apparent purpose beyond dumbing it down for the modern reader, something which happens at multiple points. A single example here will suffice to illustrate the danger of this.

Original:
“No. It would have been strange if they had. But I make no doubt, they often talk of it between themselves. Well, if they can be easy with an estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. I should be ashamed of having one that was only entailed on me.”

Zombies:
“No; it would have been strange if they had; but I make no doubt, they often talk of it between themselves. Well, if they can be easy with an estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. I should be ashamed of putting an old woman out of her home.”

In the original text, we refer back to Mrs. Bennett’s refusal to admit that the entailment of her husband’s estate makes sense or is legitimate. Further, we have a joke: of course the entailment is pefectly legal, that is the entire problem. In the Zombie version, even though there is no zombie-related information conveyed here, the text is altered: the joke is removed and the reader is not reminded that Mrs. Bennett is ridiculous or of the inheritance situation, but instead is apparently meant to feel bad for her.

There are examples of this sort of careless editing all through the text, toning down the snarkiness of the dialogue and the narrator in some sort of misguided quest to make it more simple. In many cases, these changes cause anachronisms to creep in.

In addition to these changes, there are still more points of fail.

The illustrations: These are just awful. The clothing, which is not particularly mentioned in the text as being different in most cases, is just odd looking. Not at all correct for the time period or even sensible allowing adaptations for fighting and training.

The “Oriental” stuff: I’m not even sure where to begin with all of this. Lady Catherine with ninjas is, I’m sure, the vision that made the insertion of all of this stuff irresistible. And I wouldn’t object to it all overmuch (I leave it to someone else to complain about the potential Racefail aspects of it) were there not such a big deal made about Chinese training versus Japanese training. Because even to my non-expert eyes, it was clear to me that the author was making a distinction he was not prepared to follow through with: Chinese-trained Elizabeth fights with a Japanese sword, there are random bits of Chinese culture at Darcy’s supposedly Japan-inspired home, and so forth. If the author was actually Jane Austen, one might suppose these cross-contaminations were a subtle jibe, but unfortunately, based on the rest of the book, Grahame-Smith is incapable of such a thing.

In Short
This was actually a very clever idea, and I think it could have been very good, with just a bit more effort expended on research and editing. Unfortunately, as it stands, this was definitely a failure, as a parody (not enough liberty was taken) and as a true rewrite (it was too slap-dash and sloppy). I don’t quite regret reading it, but I definitely won’t ever be reading it again, nor will I be picking up the next book, even though it’s to have a different author.

[This review is also posted at Tripletake.]