Battle of the 2013 Books, Bracket One, First Round :: The Scholar, the Sphinx and the Shades of Nyx by A. R. Cook vs. The Doctor and the Dinosaurs by Mike Resnick

This is our eighth and last first round match of Bracket One of Battle of the 2013 Books, which features The Scholar, the Sphinx and the Shades of Nyx by A. R. Cook versus The Doctor and the Dinosaurs by Mike Resnick. The winner will be the book I (Jackie) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

The Scholar, the Sphinx and the Shades of Nyx:  Knox Robinson Publishing, May 2013; 286 pages; cover illustration by Grzegorz Rekas. A. R. (Alison Reeger) Cook has written short stories and short plays, which have received honorable mentions in some journals and digests. Her second book in this YA series is titled The Scholar, the Sphinx, and the Fang of Fenrir.

We begin the story in Cervera, Spain, in the year 1852. David Sandoval, our 16-year-old hero in The Scholar, the Sphinx and the Shades of Nyx, procures an architectural apprenticeship from a family friend who lives in Paris. Despite the misgivings of his parents, David persuades them to let him travel to Paris on his own.

At an inn near Paris, David hears music in the street. The innkeeper informs David that a traveling gypsy show is performing. "Just keep your coin purse close. Got to be watchful of sticky fingers," warns the innkeeper. David meets a young girl and a Scotsman juggler who challenges David to perform in the gypsy show. David does so and wins an old-fashioned dagger that is "curved like a basilisk’s tongue."

That night a strange creature breaks into David's room, entering through the window. The creature's breath soothes David into a peaceful lull, but he wakes himself enough to push the creature away, reach for his knife, and scare it away. He sees his coin purse on the floor and a fancy gold coin on the windowsill. David assumes the creature is with the gypsy troupe.

The next night David steals into the woods to find the gypsy caravan with the intent to kill the creature that attacked him, to potentially save others from such a fate. After finding and creeping into the creature's wagon — smelling the same smell from the night before — he sees a female sphinx, who suddenly awakens. Trying to escape, he is caught and tied up by the gypsies. The creature pulls him into her wagon, and lulls him to sleep with her breath.

The next morning, David, still tied up, observes the gypsy camp as people are eating breakfast. The sphinx is serving her group a delicious smelling stew.

The Doctor and the Dinosaurs:  Pyr; December 2013; 255 pages (with and extra 30 pages for appendixes); illustration by Andrew Bosley. Mike Resnick is a prolific writer of novels and short stories and has edited 40 anthologies. He has won five Hugo Awards and has been nominated over 30 times. He is the author of the Starship series, the John Justin Mallory series, and the popular Kirinyaga series. Resnick's novel The Doctor and the Dinosaurs is the fourth book in his "Weird West Tales" series.

The Doctor and the Dinosaurs takes us on a trip to an alternate version of the Wild West. Doc Holliday is dying in a sanitarium in Leadville, Colorado. An owl rests on the windowsill and watches as Doc coughs up blood and gasps in some breaths. The owl turns into Geronimo who then offers Doc a chance to live about one or two more years if he will help him with a problem. According to the Apache Geronimo, white men are digging for dinosaur bones on sacred Comanche land. Geronimo thinks Doc Holliday can convince the men to stop digging, using any means possible, including Doc’s famous gunmanship.

Doc asks why an Apache leader is helping the Comanche people in Wyoming. Geronimo reveals that the Comanche medicine men plan to resurrect some of the dinosaurs to destroy the white men and end the digging. Unfortunately, once the dinosaurs are resurrected, they can't be controlled and will go haywire and mindlessly kill anyone else in their path, which includes Apache and Comanche, as well as anyone else in their path. In Geronimo's opinion, the better plan would be to simply stop the dig and leave the dinosaurs as bones.

After Doc Holliday agrees to this deal, Geronimo does some chanting. Although Doc still coughs, he feels as he did two years ago. Doc then sets out on his journey, which first takes him to Cheyenne, Wyoming. There, he meets up with Theodore Roosevelt, who is not president yet, and they head in a northwest direction to find the paleontologists' digging site and to see what's what. They notice two Comanche following them.

The Battle:  We have a Wild West alternate-reality fantasy battling against a YA mythological fantasy. After reading the first 25 pages, I find these books to be a good pairing. May the best book win!

In The Scholar, the Sphinx, and the Shades of Nyx, David, our scholar and hero, loves stories and devours books. He is young and ready to embark on his life's journey. Unfortunately, he makes a poor decision, which takes him on a creepy path of abduction and magic.

The book flows well and the storyline so far is interesting. The writing is good, and there are some high-quality vocabulary words, which I appreciate when reading young adult novels. The name-dropping of myths and famous authors, such as "Perseus" and "Victor Hugo," seem to be placed in the story to educate the reader rather than move the story forward. Some references reminded me of the Percy Jackson series.

I wondered why the sphinx and the gypsies didn't rob David and kick him out of their gathering. Why is the sphinx interested in David? The good writing makes me believe the reasons will be forthcoming and plausible.

The Doctor and the Dinosaurs is witty and easy to follow. Humor seeps in a lot. After Geronimo temporarily heals Doc Holliday, Doc goes to a saloon where he sees Thomas Edison entering: a prosthetic-armed man walks into a bar... I was expecting a joke to follow! Then Doc says, "I've still got consumption, but at least I can function." Both seemed funnier while reading the story than they do as I write about it now. But what matters most is how much I liked the words as I read them.

Doc, a true alcoholic, believes that "water was for bathing, whiskey was for drinking, and only a fool mixes the two up." Other quotes worked well in the story and never pulled me out of the story.

Historical figures are fictionalized characters in The Doctor and the Dinosaurs. In addition, many other Wild West and famous names are "dropped," such as, Kate Elder, Lillie Langtree, Wyatt Earp, Ned Buntline, boxers John L. Sullivan and William Smiley, outlaw Johnny Ringo, famous paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, and philanthropist George Peabody. And that was within the first 25 pages!

However, The Scholar, the Sphinx, and the Shades of Nyx also included a few dropping of names: David and Goliath, Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, and writer Johann Ludwig Tieck who wrote about Brunhilda.

Both books include data for thought: historic names and mythological references. They seemed to me like books to read along with school topics, although only The Scholar, the Sphinx and the Shades of Nyx is a YA novel.

After reading 25 pages of each book, I (Jackie) enjoyed both books. But for Battle of the Books a winner must be chosen. Although both authors had unique writing styles and cleverly created stories of interest, I choose to continue reading the story that takes me to the Wild West.

THE WINNER: The Doctor and the Dinosaurs by Mike Resnick

The Doctor and the Dinosaurs advances to the second round to face The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Bracket Seven, Second Round :: The Doctor and the Rough Rider by Mike Resnick vs. River Road by Suzanne Johnson

Our second match in the second round of Bracket Seven of the Battle of the Books, features the match-up of The Doctor and the Rough Rider by Mike Resnick versus River Road by Suzanne Johnson. The winner will be the book I (Amy) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

The Doctor and the Rough Rider:  Pyr Books, December 2012, 304 pages, cover art and interior illustrations by J. Seamas Gallagher. Mike Resnick is the award winning author of over seventy novels and over two-hundred and fifty stories, and the editor of over forty anthologies. This is Resnick's third book in his ongoing A Weird West Tale series. The Doctor and the Rough Rider reached the second round by defeating werewolf horror book, Wolf Hunter by J.L. Benét.

In The Doctor and the Rough Rider, the United States, as a nation, has been prevented from expanding west to the Pacific by an Indian medicine men spell, although many miners, settlers, and farmers have been allowed past the Mississippi. Geronimo tells Doc Holliday that he wants to make peace and that he is willing to negotiate an end to the spell with one man: Theodore Roosevelt. But Geronimo knows that many Indians won't want the spell lifted and they will try to kill him and those who stand with him.

Bat Masterson goes to young Theodore Roosevelt's ranch in the Dakota Territory, on Holliday's request. Masterson asks Roosevelt to travel to Tombstone to deal with Geronimo. Roosevelt is excited to go and help fulfill America's destiny.

Doc Holliday arrives in Tombstone from Leadville. He chats with inventor Thomas Edison, who was sent to the West to try to break the Indian spell. Holliday asks Edison to produce something to help Geronimo and Roosevelt's cause.

Roosevelt and Holliday ride out into the desert to Geronimo's lodge for negotiations.

River Road:  Tor books, November 2012, 332 pages, cover art by Cliff Nielsen. River Road is the second book in the Sentinels of New Orleans series. River Road reached the second round by defeating paranormal romance, Guardians of Stone by Anita Clenney.

In River Road, we learned that after Hurricane Katrina, unbeknownst to almost everyone, historic undead and other preternaturals flooded into New Orleans. Drusilla Jaco, aka DJ, a Green Congress wizard, and her co-sentinel, the shapeshifter Alex Warin, are employed by The Elders to handle paranormal problems. Historical undead pirate Jean Lafitte, who finds DJ attractive, has asked DJ to negotiate a truce between two clans of feuding merpeople.

DJ, Alex and Jean Lafitte met up at DJ's small strip mall office. Lafitte tells them the restaurant in Plaquemines Parish where the merpeople clan representatives have agreed to meet. DJ drives the red Corvette which Lafitte arrived in, because Lafitte desperately needs driving lessons. Alex follows in DJ's SUV. When DJ realizes that Jean Lafitte, being a pirate, stole the Corvette, they abandon it. Alex drives all of them the remaining way to their rendezvous.

The mermen are Cajuns. First they met Lafitte's friend, the tattooed Rene Delachaise, and his twin brother Robert. The other merman, Denis Villere, who is older, arrives on motorcycle. After a couple hours of arguing while eating a seafood lunch, they come to a tentative agreement on clan territory borders, contingent on solving the untested water contamination problem.

The Battle:  This match-up features a Wild West steampunk book going up against an urban fantasy book set in New Orleans.

The Doctor and the Rough Rider uses famous historical figures as characters. They banter and point out each other's exceptional talents. Doc Holliday calls Edison "our greatest genius". Theodore Roosevelt acts like a fanboy about meeting Geronimo, Doc Holliday, and Thomas Edison.

There are signs of upcoming conflict between those who want to end the barrier spell and those who don't.

Although several women have been mentioned (plus "metal harlots"), no female character has yet made an appearance in The Doctor and the Rough Rider.

In River Road, on the other hand, there's tension between the characters. Alex and Jean Lafitte hate each other, and DJ is caught in the middle. Lafitte humorously calls Alex, the shapeshifter, Monsieur Chien or Mr. Dog. The feuding merman dislike wizards, and DJ threatens them with her elven staff to break up a fight.

But I don't see any imminent threat to New Orleans, not yet anyway.

The protagonist of River Road, Drusilla Jaco or DJ, is female, and she's the only female character encountered. I like that DJ, as a wizard, is afraid of water.

After 50 pages, I found these dissimilar books to be an even match. For me, there was no clear winner. This battle easily could have gone either way. Both books were entertaining. What eventually decided this battle for me, was that I could relate a bit better to DJ, a modern woman, than to characters based on famous men from over a century ago.

THE WINNER: River Road by Suzanne Johnson

River Road advances to the semifinals where it will take on The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Bracket Seven, First Round :: Wolf Hunter by J.L. Benét vs. The Doctor and the Rough Rider by Mike Resnick

Our third battle in the first round of Bracket Seven of the Battle of the Books is Wolf Hunter by J.L. Benét versus The Doctor and the Rough Rider by Mike Resnick. The winner will be the book I (Amy) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Wolf Hunter: Belfire Press, December 2012, 199 pages, cover art by Tamar Karataş. Wolf Hunter is Denver horror writer J.L. Benét’s first novel.

During WWII, a group of Nazi scientists under the command of a high ranking SS officer secretly transform Viktor Huelen and a trio of other men into werewolves. The items they use to perform this are an audio device called a Feraliminal Lycanthropizer, a pungent all-body salve, and a wolf-hide girdle with a pentagram of iron rivets.

Huelen tries hard but is unable to control the werewolf he becomes. In the first test, Huelen helps kill the weakest member of their werewolf pack. Afterward, Huelen is thrown into a dungeon-like cell where he is repeatedly given drugged raw meat and experimented upon. In another test, two men are released in the forest and Huelen is told which one to hunt. The beast inside Huelen tracks the wrong man and kills him.

A group of armed SS soldiers arrive and they escort everyone outside the castle. Apparently the werewolf experiment has been terminated.

The Doctor and the Rough Rider: Pyr Books, December 2012, 304 pages, cover art and interior illustrations by J. Seamas Gallagher. Mike Resnick is the author of over seventy novels, and over two-hundred and fifty stories. He has won five Hugo Awards for his short fiction. He has also edited over forty anthologies. The Doctor and the Rough Rider is Resnick’s third book in his ongoing A Weird West Tale series.

Doc Holliday is a card dealer at a saloon in Leadville. Two young men, seeking to make a reputation for themselves, confront Holliday supposedly over their friends’ deaths at the O.K. Corral. Later they threaten Holliday's life and he shoots them in self-defense. The Sheriff arrests Holliday and throws him in jail.

Geronimo visits Holliday in jail in the middle of the night. In this world, Geronimo is a shape-shifting magic man. The United States is prevented from expanding west of the Mississippi by an Indian barrier spell. Geronimo is willing to negotiate an end to the spell with only one man: Theodore Roosevelt. Bat Masterson knows Roosevelt. Geronimo magics Holliday and a clerk to the telegraph office in order for Holliday to send a telegram to Masterson telling him that it's essential to bring Roosevelt to Tombstone as quickly as possible.

Bat Masterson arrives in Medora in the Dakota territory seeking out Theodore Roosevelt at his ranch.

The Battle:This match-up features a werewolf horror book going up against a steampunk weird west fantasy. These books are very different in tone. So far, Wolf Hunter is dark and bloody, and The Doctor and the Rough Rider is a lightweight, sometimes humorous, adventure.

In Wolf Hunter, I liked that there were codified items and a pseudo-scientific method used to make werewolves. I found it interesting that the Lycanthropiser machine utilized Latin chants and made Huelen's mind feel "floaty".

Huelen seemed like a decent guy, but he had little backstory. He merely reacted to the things happening to him. I wondered why Huelen was chosen for this werewolf experiment.

There were a couple of instances of sexual content that I felt were gratuitous. In my opinion, these could have been dialed back a notch.

The Doctor and the Rough Rider uses historical figures as main characters, instead of as supporting characters, in an unreal fantasy setting. I'm not sure that I’m totally on board with doing this. I feel it’s using these people out of their context. This being book three in the series probably didn’t help the issue. Yet The Doctor and the Rough Rider is easy to read and the dialogue is good.

Resnick wrote that the day in Leadville was as hot as Tombstone (and hotter than hell), which I found difficult to believe. According to Wikipedia, the all-time record high temperature in Leadville is 85 degrees, not exactly sweltering.

I liked the illustration of the steampunk gun at the head of chapters, and the talking prairie dog was cute.

After reading 25 pages of each of these books, I found this to be a fairly close match. Both of these books are potentially interesting, in their different ways. But for my pick, I’ll go with steampunk western.

THE WINNER: The Doctor and the Rough Rider by Mike Resnick

The Doctor and the Rough Rider moves into the second round, to take on either Guardians of Stone by Anita Clenney or River Road by Suzanne Johnson.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Aaron's Take on the 2012 Hugo Nominees :: SHORT STORIES

Kudos to the folks nominating for the Hugo Awards this year. All of this year's Hugo-nominated short stories are well written, and the nominees include my two favorite short stories of 2011, either of which would be a most deserving winner.

Working my way up, "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu features some beautifully constructed sentences, which are especially impressive from such a young author. But I confess I reached the end without understanding the point of the exercise. The fault may be mine as a reader, but people who nominated this piece for the Hugo plainly got something out of it that I missed.

John Scalzi's "The Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue" is a very funny parody (and I believe Scalzi ties Connie Willis for most colons in a Hugo-nominated title). I particularly love the first three sentences. I don't begrudge the story's nomination—it's not easy to write something this funny—but to me there's not enough substance for this one to win the award.

"The Homecoming" by Mike Resnick is a strong tale of a father's reunion with his son, who is estranged in more than one sense. The father-son dynamic put me strongly in mind of Resnick's story "One Perfect Morning, with Jackals," which received a well-deserved Hugo nomination in 1991.

That brings us to my two favorite short stories of 2011, and I'd be happy if they tied and both won the award. Forced to pick one, I'm going to make Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie" my #2 choice. The story is simple yet moving, presenting basic themes—an immigrant's alienation; how children often don't appreciate their parents until they're gone—in an original and powerful way. Great work by a fellow Writers of the Future winner.

My personal favorite short story of 2011 (and it was from the time it first came out) is "Movement" by Nancy Fulda. Like "The Paper Menagerie," this is a powerful and moving tale, with the added element that it successfully tells the story from a nearly-alien point of view. Most impressively, Fulda uses her protagonist's condition to craft the story's sad and poignant ending. This is a unique and outstanding piece.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Short Story
1. Nancy Fulda - Movement
2. Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie
3. Mike Resnick - The Homecoming
4. John Scalzi - Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue
5. E. Lily Yu - The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

Aaron's Take on the 2010 Hugo Nominees :: SHORT STORIES

Short stories are often my least favorite of the Hugo fiction categories, but this year's slate has a good ratio of two excellent stories (one that I nominated and one I would have if I had read it in time), two good ones, and one lousy one.

My top choice is "Spar" by Kij Johnson, about a woman who escapes a spacewreck in a lifeboat shared by an amoeboid alien, with whom she cannot communicate except to engage in sexual intercourse. The opening line is, "In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly." Kij Johnson is usually an elegant writer, but this story is deliberately harsh. "Spar" is not an enjoyable reading experience, but it is a powerful, memorable story. It has important things to say about gender issues and sexual politics, concepts Johnson could not convey without the SFnal premise. I suspect I will still have strong recollections of "Spar" decades from now, that it will still be coming up in conversation. That is the kind of story I like to see win a Hugo Award.

I read most of the January 2009 issue of Asimov's when it came out, but I skipped "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh, because the story idea sounded unpromising: young women who have died are kept frozen, in hopes that a rich man will come along to pay for the expensive procedure to revive them, in the future's version of mail-order brides. But McIntosh adds a crucial additional element, that another option for a dying person is to preserve his or her identity in the mind of a survivor. Our protagonist Mira is a frozen potential bride, who previously held her mother's personality, but it was lost when Mira died, to her guilty relief. To be resurrected, Mira must hope to marry a rich older man, even though she is gay, which makes the whole set-up a metaphor for societal barriers against gays. These different elements combine together nicely into a very strong story.

In "The Bride of Frankenstein," Mike Resnick similarly writes of a bride in unusual circumstances. The story is a humorous take on the Frankenstein story, told from the point of view of Victor Frankenstein's bitchy, modern wife, who doesn't understand why he's squandering her stock portfolio for experiments on a hideous creature. Resnick takes the tale in a romantic direction I found quite charming.

N.K. Jemisin's "Non-Zero Probabilities" is a well-crafted story, which finds an optimistic take on a daunting premise, basically that Murphy's Law has taken utter control of Manhattan. When the Hugo nominations came out, I started to read this, was quite enjoying it, and got well into the story before realizing that I already read it last year. So this is an enjoyable but not at all memorable story, completely the reverse of "Spar." The good news for Jemisin is now I recall why I picked up that copy of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms sitting in my to-read pile.

Last and by far least is "The Moment" by Lawrence M. Schoen, a dreadful piece that has no business on a Hugo ballot. The story is about aliens visiting Neil Armstrong's footprint on the moon, but you can't give Schoen credit for that mildly clever idea -- it was written for a theme anthology of stories about aliens visiting the astronauts' footprints on the moon. "The Moment" is a hopeless jumble of sentences like, "The generation ship of Krenn frantically dumped velocity as it splooched from the fuel-efficient but mind-numbing slowness of intramolecular phasetransit back into the normal time-space continuum, less than a cubit above the moon." Perhaps this is meant as a tongue-in-cheek send-up of really bad pulp-era skiffy, but it is that only in the sense that "The Moment" is itself really bad pulp-style skiffy. I actually wrote a long rant for this blog chastising whoever stuffed this turkey onto the ballot, but I think I won't publish it. I googled around and while I can't find much praise for this story, I also don't see that others have disliked it as much as I did. Rich Horton has called it "interesting" and "worth reading," so maybe I missed some redeeming quality.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Short Story
1. Kij Johnson - Spar
2. Will McIntosh - Bridesicle
3. Mike Resnick - The Bride of Frankenstein
4. N.K. Jemisin - Non-Zero Probabilities
5. NO AWARD
6. Lawrence M. Schoen - The Moment

Aaron's Take on the 2008 Hugo Nominees :: SHORT STORIES

As is often the case, the short story Hugo nominees are a weaker group than the novelettes, I suspect because it is difficult at such a short length to draw the reader in deeply enough to create the impact one expects of an award-caliber story. As a result, the Hugo short story ballot typically contains an unfortunately high proportion of fluff pieces.

This year, that includes Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359? by Ken MacLeod, a fun far-future romp that had entirely passed out of my mind one day after reading it, and A Small Room in Koboldtown, a silly little SF mystery that I found well short of the level of Michael Swanwick’s best work. (Apparently many others liked it rather more than I did as it just won the Locus Award, although that may just reflect the asinine decision by Locus to change how they counted the votes after the ballots were cast -- note that Koboldtown had fewer total votes and fewer first-place votes than Tideline.)

A half-notch above those two for me is Mike Resnick’s Distant Replay, the simple but charming story of an elderly gentleman who meets a young woman remarkably similar to his late wife, and Last Contact by Stephen Baxter, in which the human race learns that the end of the world is nigh, with understandably sad results.

My favorite of the short story nominees is Tideline by Elizabeth Bear, the poignant story of a derelict but intelligent war machine struggling to find meaning in its final days. Even if the short story category is not terribly strong overall, Tideline would be a worthy Hugo winner.

Aaron's Ballot:
1. Elizabeth Bear – Tideline
2. Stephen Baxter – Last Contact
3. Mike Resnick – Distant Replay
4. Ken MacLeod – Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?
5. Michael Swanwick – A Small Room in Koboldtown