Books: Monkeys, Gods, Bisexuals, And More

[woodwardiocom]

Code Monkey Save World by Pak, Coulton, et al

I helped to Kickstart this graphic novel, which is a mashup of the plots of assorted Coulton songs. It's sort of subversive in interesting ways. Our hero, a literal monkey who is also a wage-slave software engineer, pines after the pretty receptionist, and then gets caught up in the plots of assorted evil geniuses and world conquerors. In the end, he discovers the logical consequences of loving from afar. Recommended.

Supergods by Grant Morrison

This book is half history of superheroes, half Morrison's autobiography. The history half is more than serviceable, and has some good things to say about the recent decades of superhero comics. The autobiography part is genuinely weird, since Morrison is into drugs and magic in ways I am decidedly not, but at least he's sincere when he explains the secrets of the universe and why he wore a lot of PVC in the 90s. For those interested in the topic, definitely recommended, but bear in mind that there is no journalistic detachment in here. Morrison is unabashedly attached.

Anything That Loves, edited by Charles "Zan" Christensen

Another Kickstart'd comics collection, this is a diverse collection of stories defending and celebrating bisexuality. I thought it was pretty awesome, with one significant caveat: It's kinda polyphobic. There are several stories in which bi people react with disgust to the suggestion that they might be polyamorous, and no stories in which poly is portrayed positively. (There is a story about how to have a good threesome, but it explicitly kicks the special guest out of the house afterwards.) I still recommend it a lot, but it certainly surprised me that a book that is aggressively about inclusivity towards all forms of sexuality should drop that ball so hard.

Eternal Flame by Greg Egan

The second book in Egan's Orthogonal series, set in a world with very different physical and biological laws. Our scientists are traveling through space in their mobile mountain, orthogonal to the timeline of their homeworld, trying to find a way to prevent its destruction. In this volume, they discover their universe's answer to antimatter, and wrestle with their biology. (You, see, these aliens have two sexes, but women do not survive childbirth, and a well-fed woman will eventually give birth whether she has sex or not... so the only effective way for a woman to stay alive, and prevent a population explosion on their spaceship, is to fast, constantly...) Very hard science with lots of equations and diagrams, very well thought-out, recommended.

The Book of Skaith by Leigh Brackett

This is an omnibus of Brackett's 1970s Eric John Stark planetary romances. I like me a good planetary romance, but I read the first novel (The Ginger Star), and found it to be a dreadful chore to get through. The good bits are not imaginative, the imaginative bits are not good, and it reads like it was written by a man in the 1950s, not a woman in the 1970s. I'm not reading the other two novels, nor keeping the volume.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

This novel is set in an alternate universe where Israel did not succeed as a state, and a whole lot of Jews ended up living in the city of Sitka, Alaska, instead. It's a very intense study of Judaism crossed with a a pulp detective novel. I'm certainly not qualified to speak to how fair it is to Judaism and Jews, and it took me a while to get used to its dark tone. Our hero is very much at the end of his rope, much like the Jews of Sitka as a whole, and he ends up investigating one last murder more from a sense of failure than one of justice. Still, I'm glad I pushed through and finished it, and I recommend it. (Though don't forget it's a pulp detective novel! Chabon does not shy away from the pulp tropes.)

Comments

[tactical-grace.livejournal.com]

Code Monkey Save World sounds like it may follow the same plot as Code Monkey: The Musical. Which I guess wouldn't be that surprising...