Howard Waldrop and I’s Review of Alice in Wonderland
March 9th, 2010In Which I Fail to Review Gene Wolfe’s The Sorcerer’s House
March 8th, 2010Gene Wolfe
The Sorcerer’s House
Tor, 2010. $24.99
So, once again I’m faced with the problem of how to review a Gene Wolfe book. This is much akin to explaining to radio listeners what a great dancer Fred Astaire is: For those who have seen him, such an explanation is unnecessary; for those who haven’t, such an explanation is impossible. (“Aw man, you should have seen that move! It was totally graceful! Trust me…”) I’ve managed (somewhat) the feat before, having reviewed The Knight in The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Such it is with The Sorcerer’s House. I started a standard review, with a standard plot description (educated man just out of prison mysteriously given deed to house he was squatting in), discussed Wolfe’s literary experimentation (the book is told in epistolary format), and generally tried to jump through the usual hoops of a book review. Then after about three paragraphs, I read what I had written, and went “Damn, this is awful! If I had never heard of Gene Wolfe, this review certainly wouldn’t inspire me to pick it up!”
So: You should read The Sorcerer’s House, because it’s very good, it’s tricky, and it’s better than An Evil Guest. It’s got a fox woman, antique dueling pistols, an impossibly old samurai sword, a trapped vampire, werewolves, and a house that just seems to get bigger it goes along, and, strangely, it all works.
But most of all you should read it because it’s Gene Wolfe.
Oh, it also has a scene where the protagonist tells his newly incarcerated twin brother that he shouldn’t go on about how excellent to food was, since he know prison food is bad. And then he spend the next page or so describing what he ate.
Filed Under “Nightmare Fuel” On TV Tropes
March 5th, 2010I can’t possibly imagine why…

And Alice in Wonderland opens today, and Easter is just around the corner, so it is topical…
Avoiding the Obvious
March 4th, 2010Every now and then I come across an article that, for whatever reason, defies my usual snarky, dry-humored approach. Such is this case with this five-year old article talking about how Huey Lewis and The News have a very significant following among the clinically retarded. In this case it defies that approach because: A.) Too easy, B.) I have no strong feelings (positive or negative) about Huey Lewis, who has always struck me as very competent craftsmen of a type of music I have no particular affinity or antipathy toward, C.) It’s actually a pretty interesting article, and D.) Making fun of the retarded just makes you look like a dick.
Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back May Suck…
March 3rd, 2010…but Paul Simon’s cover of “Biko” is pretty good:
And Stephen Merritt (who Neil Gaiman is big on) at least makes a credible effort on “Not One of Us”:
Dan Simmons Signing at BookPeople, Tuesday, March 2, 7 PM
March 2nd, 2010Yes, that’s today. Signing his new book Black Hills. Only found out recently myself, and have been too busy to put up a link…
Pictures from the 2009 Readercon
February 28th, 2010I put these up on my Facebook account back before I had the blog, but I suspect many non-Facebook people would like a look at them as well.

Gene Wolfe, Liz Hand, Rosemary Wolfe

Chris Nakashima-Brown, Gordon Van Gelder

Chip Delany, Liz Hand

Paul Di Filippo, Howard Waldrop, Jeri Bishop?

Mary Robinette Kowal

Peter Straub, John Crowley

Gary K. Wolfe, John Clute
Mark Finn on Howard and I on The Wolfman
February 28th, 2010And here’s Mark Finn’s take on Howard and I’s review of The Wolfman. (I’m not sure if non-Facebookers can see that page, though.)
And here’s your receipt for my receipt.
P.S.: As for the commenter that suggested that people who didn’t like the movie “don’t know what an old fashioned monster movie was or they just don’t want to see one”: Well, I’m not untutored in the genre, but you could certainly find more knowledgeable classic horror movie buffs than I. But if you actually want to suggest that Howard Waldrop doesn’t know/and or like old horror movies, then BEEEEP! I’m sorry, you lose, you get nothing. Good day, sir!
Great Moments in American Forgery
February 25th, 2010From the “Old News is So Exciting” front, from half a century ago, here’s the story of Joseph Cosey, one of the greatest forgers in American History.
Cosey received an even greater tribute from the New York Public Library when, in 1934, with the dual purpose of educating the innocent and removing from circulation as many specimens of his work as possible, it set up, under Bergquist’s supervision, a special file known as the Cosey Collection, to which it has been adding ever since. Consisting principally of items the library has been able to prevail upon Cosey’s dopes to donate, the Collection now comprises seventy-eight documents—thirty-one Lincolns, eight Poes, five Franklins, five David Rittenhouses, four Mary Baker Eddys, four George Washingtons, two Edwin M. Stantons, two Thomas Jeffersons, two John Marshalls, two James Madisons, one John Adams, one Samuel Adams, one Button Gwinnett, one Lyman Hall, one Benjamin Rush, one Richard Henry Lee, one Patrick Henry, one Alexander Hamilton, one Walt Whitman, one Mark Twain, one Sir Francis Bacon, one Earl of Essex, and one Rudyard Kipling, the last three being rather unusual examples, since Cosey made few excursions into the foreign field. Bergquist started the Cosey Collection with two specimens he had more or less confiscated from the forger himself —a Lincoln legal petition and a draft of some notes Poe wrote in connection with “Tamerlane.” The latest additions—two Franklin pay warrants, probably copied from the one Cosey stole—were contributed in 1954 by Arthur Swann, a vice-president of Parke-Bernet, who weeded them out, with the owner’s approval, from a group of autographs the galleries were about to auction off. Although speculation is almost meaningless in such matters, one well-informed collector has ventured to guess that if its contents were genuine, the Cosey Collection would be worth about a hundred thousand dollars.
The issue is of particular interest to me because the anonymous nature of the Internet and venues like eBay have given rise to a boom in modern forgery. Though concentrated in sports memorabilia, there have been some notable recent cases in the book trade as well. This is why I won’t buy a Robert A. Heinlein or Philip K. Dick signature without provenance. (I currently have no signed Philip K. Dick and only a single signed Heinlein (an inscribed book club edition I bought from David Hartwell.) There is a also certain online seller (whom we shall refer to as F_________) that my friends and colleagues are reasonably sure makes his living selling forged signatures (though mixed in with real ones, just to keep people guessing).
As always, caveat emptor.