Thunderer

I alerted Andrew Wheeler to this post-hopefully he’ll stop by and shed some light.

Someone should ask the the Nielsen Haydens about this….

While I’m at it, the other fantasy books from this year you should be reading are:

Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory

Last Dragon by JM McDermott

post-Mievillian? That’s a bit premature isn’t it!!!

Apologies if I’m getting boring on this, but a few things occurred to me in the shower…

I see from my own thoughts on Thunderer that the cover blurb described it as “high fantasy”. There are two plausible reasons for that. The first is that the Random House marketing people (who may not be genre experts) haven’t got a clue about subdivisions of fantasy but know what buzz words sell. Alternatively they may have figured that the New Weird crowd would find the book anyway, so they might as well try pitching it to the elf crowd to expand sales.

Also, in recommending McDermott and Gregory I was, of course, thinking purely of debut fantasy. The most Mieville-like (it has gargoyles and a political revolution) of this year’s releases is Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, which is a wonderful book.

Finally CT readers might be interested in Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery, on the grounds that it is set in the USA after an economic collapse. (Slattery is an economics journalist, so he makes rather more sense on the subject that most SF writers.)

Felix Gilman was absolutely hilarious when he commented on Unfogged; he had some inspired “Fuck you, clown” poetry, if I recall correctly. Haven’t seen him around so much lately. I enjoyed his novel as well and am glad to see you plugging it.

Vandermeer loved a good internet slapfight in the olden days but he turned over a new leaf a while ago and is on his best behaviour now.

The fact that publishers and booksellers have figured out a set of packaging tropes that seem to consistently work to identify some subsets of SF and fantasy to their potential audiences does not mean that we’ve worked out tropes that successfully identify all subsets. In particular, we’re still pretty much at sea when it comes to many of the nuances of non-generic fantasy.

Unfortunately, the fact that we’ve managed to successfully target our packaging in some respects has created the expectation in many readers, particularly more sophisticated readers, that SF and fantasy cover packages are overall reliable. Thus LizardBreath’s comment above, about walking away from a book that LB might have otherwise checked out because “it looked exactly like standardized post-Tolkien ripoff.”

The remarkably thing is that for much of the history of modern SF and fantasy, this sort of thing rarely happened, because clued-in readers simply assumed that all the covers were misleading tosh. The basic project around which modern SF fandom organized itself was readers informing one another which of the publications-that-looked-like-crap were in fact crap, and which ones were actually worth reading. There were good cover artists and well-designed books and magazines, but you couldn’t count on them correlating with worthwhile fiction. Everybody knew that. Nowadays, the discourse surrounding the question of which SF and fantasy intelligent people should read seems to be half arguments and complaints about the goddamn covers.

I don’t mind discussing the goddamn covers, and I’m generally delighted when we actually do manage to expand the vocubulary by which publishers can send accurate signals to more precisely-understood subsets of the world of readers, but for cripes’ sake, modern readers sometimes have unrealistic expectations of being spoon-fed perfect signals. There’s a reason “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is copybook wisdom. If you only ever try books whose cover packages perfectly cater to your personal aesthetic, you may have a satisfactory life, but you will certainly miss a metric ton of genre fiction you would have otherwise enjoyed.

The mass market paperback version of Thunderer is a much better fit than was the hardcover. (Amazon link.) That flying jester lad in the hardcover image was rather unfortunately twee.

Patrick:

I confess to having complained about the cover, but only because it highlighted a white-skinned minor character, the main viewpoint character being dark-skinned.

Henry:

I’m interested to know what it would take for a blogger to be someone that you “really trust”. There is a huge amount of book-blogging that goes on these days, and one of the reasons I don’t write proper reviews any more is that no one seems to trust anything that anyone says, unless they actually know the blogger, or are a fan of the blogger.

Felix:

Psst, plug the sequel.

roac…
But that cover was the one under which, at 11 years old, I encountered Tolkien. Curled in a sleeping bag in a tent on Baffin freaking Island during a 48 hour rainstorm. Everything about the cover is wrong, but it evokes the memory or ecstasy.

I went with a school friend and his dad. The dad was an eccentric genius engineer. He made a lot of money and retired early to pursue his avocation: collecting first editions of the writings of the arctic explorers and retracing their journeys. This trek had something to do with Franklin, maybe. The experience was extraordinary and never miserable… except for the BI mosquitoes, which are built to penetrate caribou hide. The man drowned a few years later canoeing down a river to Hudson’s Bay.