Quick Takes: Diablo Cody, Poppy Z Brite, Vernor Vinge

This is quite possibly the oddest lineup of books I’ve put together at one time...

Candy Girl, by Diablo Cody: Diablo Cody became known because of a popular Twin Cities blog she wrote while spending her year working her way through Minneapolis strip clubs. On the strength of her blog she was offered a book deal to write a memoir. The result was Candy Girl. Candy Girl is Diablo Cody’s account of the year she spent as a Minneapolis stripper and is marked by quirky and snarky turns of phrase. Cody takes us from her life as a good girl working in an office to walking in one night for Amateur Night. Cody was hooked and over the course of a year she works her way through various Minneapolis strip clubs (including Deja vu) to the peep show booths at Sex World. The oddest thing about this memoir is that Candy Girl is not in the least bit titillating. The descriptions of the clubs, Cody’s experience, the patrons, and the other girls are highly entertaining but there is no sense of voyeurism. Diablo Cody treats her subjects with a fair amount of respect, which I suppose only makes sense because she frequently mentions how much she enjoyed the work. The biggest flaw of Candy Girl is its brevity. Coming in at just over 200 pages Candy Girl does not delve too deeply into Cody’s motivations in becoming a stripper, except that it seemed like a good idea at the time and she enjoyed it. Maybe there is nothing more to the story. Besides not examining Cody’s motivations, I thought that Candy Girl could have touched more upon the other girls working at the clubs and more about the patrons, about the oddities she saw and about why some of the other girls were taking their clothes off for money. Instead most of the girls were complete enigmas, as is Cody herself. Around the time the book came out Diablo Cody was featured on quite a few local radio shows, but also garnered an appearance on Letterman. Candy Girl is a brief but fascinating look at the Minneapolis skin trade.



D*U*C*K, by Poppy Z. Brite: I believe D*U*C*K is related to her Liquor novels, but since I haven’t read any of them I couldn’t really say for sure. I know this is a slim novella (120 pages) from Subterranean Press and it features G-Man and Rickey, the owners of Liquor, a New Orleans restaurant which features alcohol in every item on the menu. It’s a slice in their life over the course of several days / weeks, I’m not sure. D*U*C*K is steeped in food and cooking and running a restaurant and it –feels- authentic, or as close to authentic as I can figure out from having read Kitchen Confidential...and for the average reader I think that’s good enough. I’ll trust that Brite did her research in getting the rest of the details and the feel right (I believe she is also married to a New Orleans chef). The flow of D*U*C*K is a bit choppy, a bit on and off in terms of hooking the reader and telling a story, but it’s a nice little story as Rickey and G-Man get a job to cater a dinner for a former New Orleans Saints star quarterback. Pleasant, yet profane. D*U*C*K is a good little story which is likely to be a real treat for fans of the Liquor novels.



Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge: Rainbows End was awarded the Hugo for Best Novel in 2007 (for a novel published in 2006). The full text is available online and that’s how I read the novel. It’s....fine. Well thought out, Librarian Militias and all, but the best novel published in 2006? Not even close. I’ve read a handful of novels published in 2006 that I would easily place above Rainbows End (Blood and Iron, Dark Harvest, The Road, Crystal Rain, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Mistborn, The Jennifer Morgue, His Majesty’s Dragon, Starship: Pirate, The Android’s Dream, need I go on?). It’s not that Rainbows End is bad, because it isn’t. Not by any means. It’s just utterly unremarkable and not nearly as pleasing as anything I put on that above listing. There’s a global conspiracy, new technologies, the future of libraries, old people, kids, interfamily crisis, global crisis and...oh, Vernor Vinge has packed a good deal of information and ideas into Rainbows End, but it doesn’t amount to a truly compelling narrative.

2007 Hugo Award Winners

Courtesy of Science Fiction Awards Watch:

The Awards That I Really Care About:

• Best Novel: Rainbow's End - Vernor Vinge
• Best Novella: "A Billion Eves" - Robert Reed
• Best Novelette: "The Djinn’s Wife" - Ian McDonald
• Best Short Story: "Impossible Dreams" - Tim Pratt
• Campbell: Naomi Novik

List of Nominees.

My (brief) thoughts on the Novel and Campbell nominees. Worth noting that I've still only read the one novel nominee and it wasn't the winner.

No real surprise that Novik won the Campbell for Best New Writer. Scott Lynch may pick it up next year in a fight with Patrick Rothfuss (just guessing and predicting). In the comments of the above linked post of mine, Brandon Sanderson predicts that Novik wins this year (he called it) and Rothfuss wins next year. I think it'll depend on the success of Red Seas for Lynch.

My thoughts on the short fiction nominees back before I read them all...but reading the not reads didn't change my mind. "Impossible Dreams" was my Short Story Pick, I did not care at all for "The Djinn's Wife" for Novelette, preferring instead Mike Resnick's "All the Things You Are". For the novella category I much preferred "The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko over "A Billion Eves"


I like Awards. It gets me thinking about novels and stories and exposes me to work I wouldn't have read. I'm working on the World Fantasy Award nominees, as I can.

Quick Takes: Vinge, Patchett, Moorcock

True Names, by Vernor Vinge: What is the first book that comes to mind when I mention the subgenre "Cyberpunk"? Neuromancer? Yeah, that's what I got. Neuromancer is certainly the most well known of the cyberpunk novels and may rightly be considered the father of cyberpunk, those novels which deal with a future vision of the internet and technology and a punk attitude towards authority and the coming corporatization of technology and information and the world in general. But, if William Gibson and Neuromancer is the father, Vernor Vinge and True Names is likely the Grand Pappy of Cyberpunk. More a novella than a novel, True Names is Vinge's early look at what could be considered a combination of the internet and virtual reality. Reading the novel we get the sense of 8 bit Nintendo graphics used to build the virtual world, even though the descriptions suggest that everything looks and feels like life. So, the 8 bit Nintendo analogy does not quite work, but when Vinge referenced old adventure games, I pictured the classic Pitfall, with the appropriate graphics (played with a paddle rather than a contemporary controller). True Names combined a fantasy feeling virtual world and a high technology real world into a solid story. Revolutionary at the time and predating much of cyberpunk, True Names still holds up as a solid piece of fiction and a well thought out and well imagined work of science fiction and "speculative" fiction.

The Best American Short Stories 2006, by Ann Patchett (editor): Ann Patchett's four published novels (The Patron Saint of Liars, The Magician's Assistant, Taft, Bel Canto) are exceptional works of contemporary fiction. They are graceful, beautiful novels which draw the reader in and tell stories we do not wish to put down. Her non fiction book Truth and Beauty is a compelling exploration of her friendship with author Lucy Grealy. So, when I saw that Patchett was the editor for the 2006 edition of The Best American Short Stories I hoped for some great selections. Then I remembered that while the guest editor is responsible for selecting the twenty stories published in the anthology, the series editor is the one who picks out the several hundred stories to send to the guest editor. So, it is difficult to say exactly whose fault it is that I found very few stories which held my interest and not one story I feel the desire to hold up as the outstanding story of the collection. Next year (or, this year I suppose since the collection comes out in the fall) we get two things that should be very interesting. First, Stephen King will be the Guest Editor, and while I don’t expect King to fill the collection with horror, I do hope and expect that his selections may be a bit quirkier than we are used to seeing in B.A.S.S. The second Interesting Thing is there is a new Series Editor. Excellent! Nothing against the previous series editor because she served her role well and selected the stories she thought were the best to send to the guest editor, but I do not believe her tastes matched with mine very well. Hopefully the new Series Editor will give a fresh breath to the series and hopefully the combination of the new editor and Stephen King as the guest editor will deliver a truly fine anthology. Hmm. I spent very little time in this paragraph actually writing about the 2006 edition. I guess I didn't really care. Oh! There is one fun thing Ann Patchett did (may her next novel be swiftly published), the stories were arranged in reverse alphabetical order by author. So, Ann Beattie had the last story in the collection. And...I've run out of interest in this topic.

Corum: The Coming of Chaos, by Michael Moorcock: This Corum volume is the eighth entry in the Eternal Champion series and it contains the novels: Knight of Swords, Queen of Swords, King of Swords. It is nearly unreadable. I believe many of the place names are based around the Cornish or Welsh language, and that's fine, but the story is so basic and underplotted that Knight of Swords reads something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, only not as much fun to read. So much in the first seventy five pages seemed extraneous that I have to believe Moorcock needed to fill space with ink and even though he is a talented author and even though some of the other Eternal Champion novels are a pleasure to read, Knight of Swords was brutal. Bad enough that even in 300 or so total pages for THREE Corum novels in this omnibus, I could not finish one. I've got better things to read.