WHY a Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books?

1. GUILT. We receive an awful lot of review copies of books, more than we could possibly review, and we have been reviewing fewer books recently. This is because I (Aaron, FR's primary reviewer) have had work and family conspire to reduce my free time, and I've been devoting more of the free time I have to my own writing (which also means most of my reading lately has been short fiction, as I try to teach myself how to write short stories). We are well aware that the publishers sending us these books are on tight budgets, and we feel we either need to stop accepting review copies or find some way to help publicize the books we receive even if we're not going to review most of them. Many bloggers do "books received" posts for this purpose, but the Battle of the Books seemed like a more interesting and unusual way to promote all these books and their authors.

2. NEW AUTHORS. At Fantastic Reviews, we love to publicize talented new authors. We've been able to do that recently as to short fiction with our Story Recommendations of the Week, but we haven't been doing as much to spread the word about novels by new writers. The Battle of the Books will prompt us to discuss new writers whose books come to us, and will give them at least a fighting chance at being reviewed.

3. POSITIVE REVIEWS. Having some of my own stories published this past year has taken away my enthusiasm for writing scathing (or even lukewarm) reviews, for two reasons. First, I've been learning just how difficult this writing thing is. Second, I worry that readers may take any negative comments to mean I think I could have done better. Through the Battle of the Books, I'll end up mostly reviewing books I really enjoyed, while the negative responses will be limited merely to a paragraph on why a book's opening pages didn't grab me.

4. LEARNING EXERCISE. I've focused my writing on short fiction so far, but in the present market, novels are where it's at. If I'm going to stick with writing, before long I need to work at novel length. A strong opening is crucial for selling a novel and for attracting readers. So reading the openings of many different books should be a useful exercise.

5. SOMETHING DIFFERENT. It just seemed like fun.

Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books :: The Rules

THE BASICS:

Every 16 review copies we get will be placed in a bracket.

For the first round, the Fantastic Reviews judge (usually me, Aaron Hughes, but sometimes Amy Peterson) will read the opening 25 pages of both books. The winner will be the book I most want to continue reading (not necessarily the better book -- how would I even know that after only 25 pages?). The winners advance to the second round.

For the second round, I will read through page 50. The winners advance to the semifinals.

For the semifinals, I will read through page 100.

For the finals, I will read through page 200.

The winner of each bracket will be read completely and reviewed at Fantastic Reviews.

THE DETAILS:

Brackets.We will name four "seeded" books that we're especially looking forward to, with each seeded book placed in a different quarter of the bracket. (So you are welcome to send us your self-published book, just know there's a good chance you'll be playing the role of Prairie View A&M to Catherynne Valente's Kentucky.)

Right to Add Books. We reserve the right to add into the tournament "wild cards," i.e., books that we picked up on our own that we feel inclined to add to the mix. Even if we don't enter them into the tournament, we reserve the right to review other books in addition to the tournament winners, including tournament non-winners -- so if we love both finalists in a bracket, we may review them both.

Right to Decline Books. While our intention is to include all the review copies we receive, we reserve the right to exclude particular books. This is a science fiction, fantasy, and horror site, so if you send us something outside those areas, we may deem it unsuitable for our audience. Also, if we get swamped by self-published books, we may decide to choose the ones that look most interesting, rather than entering them all.

Format. Any printed copies of books sent to us for review are automatically entered. Audio copies sent on CDs are also eligible. Electronic copies are not automatically eligible. We have the right to add e-books as wild cards, but mostly we won't, because (i) the two people who run this site are book collectors who love books as physical objects, and (ii) the biggest reason we're doing this is guilt over all the resources publishers have been putting into printing and shipping us review copies that we've been ignoring; e-books sent to us carry no such guilt burden.

Collections & Anthologies. Single-author collections are eligible. With collections, we will not read from page 1, but will skip first to any previously unpublished stories. Anthologies are not eligible for the tournament; however, we still welcome anthologies, and original stories in them remain eligible for Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week.

Page Counts. We will count the pages we read from the first page of the story, ignoring blurbs, introductions, dedications, quotes, etc. So if Chapter One begins on page 11, for the first round we will read through page 35 -- and if a chapter ends on page 37, we will probably finish that chapter.

Tournament Dates. Brackets will be dated by the copyright date of the books. If we receive an advance copy of a book previously published in a limited edition, which we never saw, we can pretend the previous edition never happened. Also, we reserve the right to fudge the dates.

Judges' Discretion. All judges' rulings are final. This competition is built around inherently subjective criteria. You are welcome to post on the blog why you disagree with a judge's ruling. But there is no right of appeal.

Submissions. Feel free to send review copies for the tournament to:

Amy Peterson
Fantastic Reviews
P.O. Box 5415
Englewood, CO 80155

If a street address is needed (such as for UPS or FedEx)

6855 S. Dayton St. #5415
Englewood, CO 80112

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The License Plate Game by Samantha Henderson

This week's Story Recommendation of the Week goes to The License Plate Game by Samantha Henderson, from the November 2011 issue of Bourbon Penn. I will confess I never heard of Bourbon Penn, until they attracted my attention by publishing a Samantha Henderson story. I seem to be one of Samantha Henderson's ideal readers, as I've enjoyed everything of hers I've read and given her a Story Recommendation of the Week three times. She joins only Rachel Swirsky and Aliette de Bodard as three-time SROTW recipients.

"The License Plate Game" starts out as a simple tale of a young girl's vacation with her mother and best friend, which started out great fun but somehow turned sour:

The drive home is interminable. You've listened to the good CDs too much, and what was delightful has become boring, and your Mad Libs are marked up, and you're surprised you ever thought them funny. Jillian looks out the window, bored with you, and you know on the first day of school she's going to turn away from you with that superior look and whisper to Margaret Lanhelm, and they'll laugh as if everything was a joke that you've no hope of understanding.

This first part of the story strikes a universal chord, underscored by Henderson's choice to write the piece in second person.

The fantastic element comes in late in the tale, and Henderson keeps it vague just what's happening. The focus of this story is on the kind of everyday resentments that might lead someone to make the sort of terrible choice demanded in a fantasy story. "The License Plate Game" is a nicely written, thought-provoking piece.

Book Review Teaser :: White Cat by Holly Black

New on Fantastic Reviews is Amy's review of White Cat by Holly Black.

From Amy's book review of White Cat :
White Cat by Holly Black, book one of The Curse Workers, is a dark twisted tale, a YA fantasy noir. It's a fast reading, modern-day fantasy which I, as an adult, can highly recommend.

This is the first book I've read by Holly Black. She is best known as the co-creator (with artist Tony DiTerlizzi) of the bestselling children's series The Spiderwick Chronicles....

The setting of White Cat is in and around New Jersey. This isn't your typical urban fantasy because there are no supernatural beings to battle or to romance. No vampires, no werewolves, no zombies. There is magic, but isn't called that, it's called "curse work". Only a small minority of people are curse workers. Curse work is banned in the USA and it's controlled by a handful of Mafia-like worker families.

There are seven kinds of curse workers: luck, emotion, physical, dream, memory, death and transformation. Some types, such as luck, are more common. People can be worked with a brush of a bare finger, so in this world, everyone wears gloves....

To read the entire review -> White Cat

New Story Published :: "The Burbles" at The Dream People

My latest story, “The Burbles,” has just been published on-line in Issue 36 of The Dream People. “The Burbles” is the first Bizarro story I've attempted to write, so I’m vey excited to have it appear at The Dream People, a respected Bizarro publication. In addition to my piece, Issue 36 of The Dream People includes a story by Cat Rambo, one of the best new authors to emerge in the past few years (her collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight is excellent), an interview with outstanding mystery and horror author Joe R. Lansdale, and much other goodness.

Glen Duncan Is A Dick

[The following screed reflects the opinions of contributor Aaron Hughes, and not necessarily the views of the Fantastic Reviews Blog. It concerns an issue about which Hughes is perhaps a tad oversensitive, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.]

I've never met Glen Duncan, so I don't know if he's always a dick. What I know is he made a dick of himself with this review in the New York Times. Duncan reviewed Zone One by Colson Whitehead, a new zombie novel by a respected mainstream author.

Duncan begins his review: "A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star." In this analogy, genre fiction is the porn star, sexy but stupid, while the intellectual is Colson Whitehead. Much more to the point, the intellectual is Glen Duncan, also a mainstream author who has dabbled in genre tropes, particularly in his most recent novel The Last Werewolf and its forthcoming sequels (which have made him Britain's second most successful fantasy novelist named "Duncan," behind Hal Duncan). Glen Duncan's review is in large part a self-serving complaint about the mistreatment "literary" novelists receive when they write genre. So, for example, when Duncan warns Whitehead that uncultured Amazon reviewers will fail to appreciate his intellectual approach to zombie fiction, we can safely infer that Duncan has been closely studying his own Amazon reviews.

Let me offer a counter-analogy to Glen Duncan's porn star comparison. Glen Duncan fancies himself an intellectual, so we'll picture him as a college professor. And since he doesn't see anything wrong with dropping casual references to women as mindless bimbos, let's place him in the 1950's. Duncan is at a faculty party when the new associate professor arrives with his wife, so gorgeous and shapely one might say she looks like a porn star. Duncan enviously snickers to the other tenured professors in the corner about what hot sex the new guy must be getting, but he never speaks to the fellow's wife long enough to realize she is the smartest person in the room.

In his review, Duncan snickers that knuckle-dragging genre readers will balk at Whitehead's use of terms like "cathected" or "brisant." He makes a point of dropping fancy terms of his own -- I had to scratch my low brow at his reference to "ludic violence." But China Miéville, arguably the most important British fantasist of the current generation, doesn't shield his genre readers from his extensive vocabulary. If Duncan hasn't read Miéville, how about J.G. Ballard and Thomas Disch, British authors who were using lots of them big words in their genre fiction before Glen Duncan learned to stop sucking his thumb? Duncan's assertion that authors must dumb down their language to satisfy genre readers is demonstrably false, and only reveals his own appalling ignorance of the genre he is currently writing in and writing about.

(As an aside, Colson Whitehead doesn't seem to share Duncan's insulting and condescending attitudes. He recently admonished literary purists asking why he would write genre fiction, "Don't be such a snob." So we should try not to hold Duncan's deplorable review against Whitehead.)

I will grant Duncan that genre readers have less tolerance than "literary" mainstream readers of aimless meanderings in their fiction. In his review of Zone One, Duncan is untroubled to declare that the book has no plot, and he snidely dismisses anyone who might dislike this as suffering from "limited attention span." But could it be that genre fans are simply more discerning readers? The strength of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genre is that most of its authors seek to combine an effective writing style with an engaging story. And once you become accustomed to books that tell a good story, you can quickly lose patience with those that don't.

A few days before Duncan's obnoxious review, the New York Times published a more thoughtful review of recent genre fiction by Dana Jennings. Jennings correctly identified Geoff Ryman's "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" as one of the most powerful stories of the past decade. "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" is a ghost story by a genre writer, but I would be surprised to learn that Glen Duncan has ever in his career written a passage as beautiful or thought-provoking.

Of course, not all genre fiction holds to this level. A few authors have found great commercial success despite clunky prose, by keeping their stories moving along and usually by including plenty of sex. But a great many science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors take a far more literary approach to the genre. And the readers who enjoy their literary genre fiction are in many cases the same readers who made Glen Duncan's Last Werewolf a success. If Duncan would like the sequel to earn out its advance, he had best hope that his readers were too busy watching porn to read the New York Times this weekend.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: "Run," Bakri Says by Ferrett Steinmetz

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "'Run,' Bakri Says" by Ferrett Steinmetz, from the December 2011 issue of Asimov's. This is Steinmetz's second SROTW.

Authors have been writing stories inspired by video games since I first began reading science fiction in the 1970's, and for far longer than that they've been writing fiction to illustrate the dehumanizing effects of war. Yet in "'Run,' Bakri Says," Ferrett Steinmetz manages to do both in an original and powerful way.

In an unnamed battlefield in the War on Terror, Irena is desperate to rescue her brother, captured by American soldiers, before he reveals to them what he has invented. She uses the invention to try to save him, but its effects are not predictable. The inexorable progression of the rescue attempt is both poignant and disturbing.

I don't want to reveal the way the brother's invention works, for fear of spoiling how the story unfolds, but I will say it involves a subtle form of time travel. And so I'm most annoyed the story came out at the same time as my story Random Fire, thus entirely overshadowing my own attempt at writing a fresh time travel story.

"'Run,' Bakri Says" is not a pleasant story to read, but you'll be glad you did.

New Story Published :: Random Fire at Abyss & Apex

Forgive a moment of self-promotion, but I have a new story called Random Fire just posted in the 4th Quarter 2011 issue of Abyss & Apex. This story has a rather unusual structural element to it, but one you might miss if you read quickly. I am very anxious to learn how many readers catch the gimmick, and what they think of it.

This is my fourth published story, with two more forthcoming. It's making me feel almost like an actual writer. Heck, I even have a perfunctory author page. Man, I better go write something . . .

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Ray of Light by Brad R. Torgersen

An alarming trend over the past few years has been the dismal tone of most new science fiction. Gene Roddenberry credited the success of Star Trek to the fact that it offered viewers hope for the future. While there is plenty of excellent new science fiction today, not much of it is very hopeful. It's as if a few years' economic slowdown has defeated our collective abilities to imagine a better future.

My story recommendation of the week is for "Ray of Light" by Brad R. Torgersen, from the December 2011 issue of Analog (cover art by Bob Eggleton), which lives up to its title, a ray of light in the gloominess of 21st Century science fiction.

"Ray of Light" starts out well within the parameters of the dark style currently in vogue. The story is set some twenty years after aliens entered our solar system and scattered a cloud of small mirrors inside the Earth's orbit, depriving our world of most of the sun's light. Max Leighton and his teenage daughter Jenna are two of the small group of remaining humans, struggling to survive at the bottom of the frozen oceans. Early on, Max flashes back to when Jenna was four and asked why they didn't live where it's dry and sunny like the characters on Chloe and Joey, her favorite pre-catastophe kids' show:

People were dying all over the world when NASA and the Navy began deploying the deepwater stations. The Russians and Chinese, the Indians, all began doing the same. There was heat at the boundaries between tectonic plates. Life had learned to survive without the Sun near hydrothermal vents. Humans would have to learn to live there too.

And we did, after a fashion.

I explained this as best as I could to my daughter.

She grew very sad, a tiny, perplexed frown on her face.

"I don't want to watch Chloe and Joey anymore," she said softly.

Max and the other adults in this deep-water society work hard to keep everyone alive, but in their hearts they have lost hope for the future. Jenna and her young friends will need to teach them (and us) a lesson about maintaining the determination to reach for a better tomorrow. It makes for a moving reading experience.

I had the pleasure of meeting Brad Torgersen at the Writers of the Future workshop -- he was a winner the year before with his excellent story "Exanastasis," which you can find in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVI. Brad is a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, and looked sharp in his dress uniform at the WOTF ceremony. Since winning WOTF, he has become a regular in Analog. His story "Outbound" was the AnLab winner as Analog readers' favorite novelette of 2010, and I certainly won't be surprised if "Ray of Light" makes him a repeat winner.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: In Apprehension, How Like a God by R.P.L. Johnson

My story recommendation of the week is for "In Apprehension, How Like a God" by R.P.L. Johnson, the third SROTW I'm permitting myself from Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVII. The gorgeous illustration is by Dustin Panzino, reproduced here with his kind permission.

"In Apprehension, How Like a God" was this year's WOTF Gold Award winner, and a most worthy champion. (But not necessarily the only story that would have been worthy -- I'm glad I didn't have to vote on that.)

The story is set in a future where the internet has been superseded by the aethernet, which allows everyone to see images and information superimposed over everything around us using the Higgs field, a quantum field permeating the universe. (The Higgs field is a real physics concept, but not yet known to have all the properties described in this story.) Our protagonist, Detective Conroy, must investigate a murder at the monastic "Academy" in Uganda, home of the AI "nodes" that superimpose all that information onto the Higgs field. Conroy soon learns that the Academy is working on improving the nodes so they can "read" the Higgs field as well as "write" onto it:

Now I was the one feeling sick. "You're describing a machine that's as close to omniscient as makes no difference."

"Omniscient," the Arch-Mage weighed the ancient word. "I suppose so, within certain practical parameters of storage, processing capacity and power consumption. But in any case the project is at an early stage."

Hopefully it's not giving too much away to say that the murder relates to someone's attempt to gain control of the aethernet, control that would give you the power to change the reality being experienced by anyone you choose. The savvy reader can guess that Detective Conroy will be subject to such a reality shift, which not only makes his job difficult, but also proves an effective metaphor for his personal turmoil since the death of his daughter.

"In Apprehension, How Like a God" (the title is from Hamlet) is a great example of effective post-cyberpunk science fiction. It has all the interesting techy speculations of a future where we simultaneously co-inhabit the real world and a consensually visualized virtual world. But at the same time it is a strong story on an emotional level, with none of the coldness or smartassery that pervaded much of the original cyberpunk subgenre.

In addition to Writers of the Future XXVII, Richard Johnson has appeared at AlienSkin Magazine -- you can find that story here -- and he has another story forthcoming at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, with hopefully many more to follow.

Let me conclude by emphasizing one more time, all of the WOTF27 winners are excellent. For purposes of SROTW, I've limited myself to three stories that especially spoke to me personally, but another reader might as easily have three different favorites. I read quite a bit of short fiction, and I keep a running list of my favorites of the year. So far I've read well over 100 pieces of short fiction published in 2011, and most of the WOTF27 winners are currently on either my top ten novelette list or my top ten short story list. That's some high-quality writing, and I am proud to be in a table of contents with every one of the other winners.