Ye Olde Authors Layeth the Smack Down

These days, writers bitching about one another just isn't what it used to be.

Sure, every now and then you'll overhear vague Chinese whispers of one author talking smack about another, but in this day and age, it's a rare pleasure indeed - certainly when compared to those bygone days you hear so much about, those years when, if a recent article on The Examiner is anything to go by, literary trash-talking seems to have been something of a popular pastime.

I don't suppose it's any wonder, really. With publishing in such a precarious state these days and an as-good-as omniscient media that act - whatever the contrariness of the truth of the matter - as if they're starved for scandal, only a nominal few authors stand on firm enough foundations to allow them to express their honest opinions about other writers. In recent memory, I can only recall a couple braving the consequences.

Stephen King, firstly, is on the record as asserting, rather comically, that Stephanie Meyer of Twilight infamy "can't write worth a darn," while Harold Bloom hates on J. K. Rowling thusly: "How to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do."

But by and large, we live in an Orwellian world of doublespeak, where to diss a fellow author in public is potentially to risk everything. Even these joyously open opinions come across as somewhat softly-softly compared to the damning criticism of old. Only a very few, at the end of the day, can afford to offend. And that mannered rot goes right through from the big leagues to the littlest; when even someone as small potatoes as I call Twilight derivative drivel, I risk driving any readers who enjoy Meyer's novels away from The Speculative Scotsman.

So to look back on better days is a pleasure, and The Examiner have gone above and beyond this week to collate together 50 authors talking glorious smack about other authors. You can read the article in full here. But for you, dear readers, a few, choice highlights...

To begin with, Henry James thinks "an enthusiasm for [Edgar Allen] Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection," which hurts me deeply, so it does. Or it would if I had the least interest in anything written by Henry James - and Uni saw to it that I most assuredly do not.

George Meredith, meanwhile, thinks that if Charles Dickens' novels "are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them."

And despite asserting that he "hasn't any right to criticise books," Mark Twain features twice in The Examiner's list, talking trash about Sir Walter Scott and latterly Jane Austen, of whose work he asserts: "her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader... Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig [Austen] up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." Harsh words indeed. I don't know that I'd subject Jane Austen's corpse to quite such punishment, and yet...

The 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire pulls out all the stops to criticise fellow frogger Voltaire, calling him "the king of the nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist," and several other names. Clearly this needs to be settled with gunge and cream pies.

As I say, do pop on over to read the original article in its entirety, but let me leave you with one last particularly memorable bit of literary trash talking - and I've saved the best for last. Norman Mailer read Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and said of the excruciating experience that it "can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist - how you resist! - letting three hundred pounds take you over."

Book Review: Altered Visions by Vincent Chong

Buy this book direct

from Telos Publishing

"Vincent Chong burst onto the horror and fantasy scene several years ago with a sequence of incredible artworks. Since then he has gone on to provide cover artwork for authors such as Stephen King, and has worked with publishers all around the world, as well as providing illustration for record covers and websites. Now some of his incredible artwork is collected in Altered Visions."

***

In his brief and down-to-earth introduction, noted horror author Simon Clark - whose latest novella, Humpty's Bones, is adorned with an atmospheric collage of red brick and bloody bones originating from the pen of the subject of this gorgeous art-book - admits that he is not "fluent in the language of artistic techniques," deferring to his "emotional response as a human being to Vincent Chong's work." In this review, I mean to do the same. Whilst I can tell a pretty picture from a child's idle scribblings, The Speculative Scotsman is no high-falutin' art critic, and so I'll spare you from a woefully uninformed appraisal of what lies between the pages of Altered Visions - save to say that assuredly, you will not soon forget it.

It is difficult to reconcile how new Chong is to the proverbial game with the sophistication of his body of work. Having emerged from the murky depths of Manchester a mere six years ago, he has in that short time come to be near synonymous with some of the most memorable art in the medium: his efforts have graced the covers and interiors of exclusive limited editions of fiction by a veritable who's-who of genre authors, including the likes of Stephen King, John Scalzi, Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Joe Hill. Today, his work is not only highly sought-after, but surer than even to imprint itself upon your psyche, stealing, as Simon Clark testifies, "into your midnight dreams" and informing your impression of those stories to which a Chong cover is the only certain imagery.

Going from Altered Visions, Chong, it seems, is a man of few words. On his cover for the Subterranean Press edition of Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains, he remarks: "I wanted this image to be very simple and striking and for the figure to look imposing and have a statuesque quality about it." This on a piece that is perhaps the least remarkable of all the artwork brought together for this 48-page, A5 format hardcover collection - an iteration of that fantasy figure with a sword archetype made distinct only by a texture that puts me in mind of handmade paper.

When the occasion calls for it, however - and that piece aside, it does more often than not - Chong goes into greater detail on the inspiration behind his art, even detailing the practical aspects of the composition of a few covers. His talk of building plasticine Obin figures and lighting them for a piece published in John Scalzi's The Last Colony makes for a fascinating insight into Chong's process; as does the artist's admission of the inspiration frequent Neil Gaiman collaborator and Cages creator Dave McKean has been to him. Indeed, there are clear allusions to McKean's body of work throughout Altered Visions, most presciently in a revelatory interior for Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, but Chong does not seem to imitate or ape the masters who inspire him, rather stitching from of the fabric of their art something wholly unique.

Altered Visions is a modest but gorgeous collection of the work of one of the most promising new artists to have arrived on the scene in recent memory. The work of Vincent Chong brought together herein functions both as an object of stark and often darkly fantastic beauty and as a high watermark for the artists of a fledgling tomorrow to measure themselves against.

***

Altered Visions

by Vincent Chong

April 2010, Telos Publishing

Buy this book direct
from Telos Publishing

The BoSS for 19/04/10

Hold on to your hats, readers. Do you have good, firm grip on them? Then let us proceed...

This has to be the most exciting week on The BoSS since Under Heaven and the new Ian McEwan arrived within days of one another! Four hugely exciting new novels lead the charge: His Dark Materials mastermind Philip Pullman courting controversy, The Desert Spear, the latest from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell. Oh, and tentacles. Yes! Tentacles!

Not to mention the second wave of proofs and advance copies that popped through the letterbox this past seven days. A damned impressive line-up this week. Best Bag o' Speculative Swag to date? I'm calling it...

But it wouldn't do to give everything away in the intro, now would it. Tell you what: I'm honestly at a loss as to which book to start reading first. Who wants to help me choose?

Click through to read Meet the BoSS for an introduction and an explanation as to why you should care about the Bag o' Speculative Swag.

Read on for a sneak peek at some of the books - past, present and future - you can expect to see coverage of here on The Speculative Scotsman in the coming weeks and months.

***

Kraken
by China Mieville

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

07/05/10 by Macmillan

Review Priority:

5 (Immediate)

Plot Synopsis: ""Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

"For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

"A god that someone is hoping will end the world..."

Commentary: Alright, I confess. I should really be asking for advice as to which of the rest of the books in this week's edition of The BoSS to read next. Was there ever any doubt that I wouldn't drop everything for Kraken? For a little background, click on through to read an extensive preview that ran on The Speculative Scotsman in early January. Now, having read the first few hundred pages of this mammoth new Mieville - the bound manuscript I was lucky enough to receive clocks in at just shy of 500 A4 pages - I'm no less excited for what's to come. What's surprised me most about Kraken, however, is that it's... fun. Not that Mieville isn't usually. But Kraken seems to be a comedy above all else. Extreme origami, anyone? Nevertheless, it's dense, poetic and prosiac; this is a China Mieville novel, make no mistake, just with more whimsy and farce than I for one had expected.

The Thousand Autumns
of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

13/05/10 by Sceptre

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "Imagine an empire that has shut out the world for a century and a half. No one can leave, foreigners are excluded, their religions banned and their ideas deeply mistrusted. Yet a narrow window onto this nation-fortress still exists: an artificial walled island connected to a mainland port, and manned by a handful of European traders. And locked as the land-gate may be, it cannot prevent the meeting of minds – or hearts.

"The nation was Japan, the port was Nagasaki and the island was Dejima, to where David Mitchell's panoramic novel transports us in the year 1799. For one Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, a dark adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith and murder is about to begin – and all the while, unbeknownst to him and his feuding compatriots, the axis of global power is turning..."

Commentary: This could be brilliant. There's every chance. I loved Ghost Writer, and though Cloud Atlas left me frustrated and that experience has meant I haven't yet cracked open Black Swan Green, David Mitchell is an author of the highest caliber, with boundless imagination and breathtaking flair. I expect a lot from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, his first novel in four years. And that's fair, I think. You don't get shortlisted for the Booker prize twice by being average. And whatever this book is, it won't, I'm sure, be that.

The Desert Spear
by Peter V. Brett

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

01/04/10 by HarperVoyager

Review Priority:

5 (Immediate)

Plot Synopsis: "The Deliverer has returned, but who is he? Arlen Bales, formerly of the small hamlet of Tibbet's Brook, learnt harsh lessons about life as he grew up in a world where hungry demons stalk the night and humanity is trapped by its own fear. He chose a different path; chose to fight inherited apathy and the corelings, and eventually he became the Painted Man, a reluctant saviour. But the figure emerging from the desert, calling himself the Deliverer, is not Arlen. He is a friend and betrayer, and though he carries the spear from the Deliverer's tomb, he also heads a vast army intent on a holy war against the demon plague... and anyone else who stands in his way."

Commentary: Oh, indeed. That's what Omar would say; he loved The Painted Man. And what do you know? So did I. I wasn't expecting much going in, and perhaps my mediocre expectations are partly why I was so disarmed by Peter V. Brett's first novel. But I don't truly believe that. The Painted Man was not a perfect fantasy narrative, but it was a very, very fine one which went from strength to strength as the pages raced past. As such, I've been anticipating the sequel for a long time, and to have the mailman bring me, unbidden, a copy of The Desert Spear... that's pretty much all the validation I need to justify the hard work that goes into maintaining The Speculative Scotsman each day. I've tried to stay spoiler-free, and though several complaints about the pacing of this much longer novel have filtered through, I can only continue to do as I have done over the past year: hope for the best.

Wintercraft

by Jenna Burtenshaw

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

13/05/10 by Headline

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "Ten years ago Kate Winters' parents were taken by the High Council's wardens to help with the country's war effort.

"Now the wardens are back... and prisoners, including Kate's uncle Artemis, are taken south on the terrifying Night Train. Kate and her friend Edgar are hunted by a far more dangerous enemy. Silas Dane – the High Council's most feared man – recognises Kate as one of the Skilled; a rare group of people able to see through the veil between the living and the dead. His spirit was damaged by the High Council's experiments into the veil, and he’s convinced that Kate can undo the damage and allow him to find peace.

"The knowledge Kate needs lies within Wintercraft – a book thought to be hidden deep beneath the graveyard city of Fume. But the Night of Souls, when the veil between life and death is at its thinnest, is just days away and the High Council have their own sinister plans for Kate and Wintercraft."

Commentary: What with Dark Life and Alex Bell's first Lex Trent novel, I've had such lovely experiences reading YA literature over the past few months that my faith in all-ages fiction has been damn near renewed, though the kicking it took in the wake of all the awful nonsense that followed the tremendous and - let's be honest - largely unwarranted success of Harry Potter novels has left me cautious. That said, Wintercraft sounds like loads of fun... although - bear with me here - there's a Silas. And there's a book in a graveyard. The Graveyard Book, anyone? No doubt the similarities will be but skin deep; and if they're not, hell, I'll take another Neil Gaiman, thank you very much.

British Science Fiction & Fantasy:
Twenty Years, Two Surveys

by Paul Kincaid & Niall Harrison

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
22/03/10 by Odd Two Out

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "Who writes sf and fantasy? How do they perceive their work, and how is it received?

"The two surveys collected here answer these questions, and many more. With in-depth responses from over 120 writers, and detailed analysis, Twenty Years, Two Surveys offers a comprehensive view of the state of British science fiction and fantasy, and charts the changes that have taken place in the field over the last twenty years.

Commentary: No, I'm not a member of the BSFA, nor, indeed, did attend Eastercon, where I understand Twenty Years, Two Surveys launched - though I dearly wish I'd been able to. Thankfully, Torque Control mastermind and Strange Horizons reviews editor Niall Harrison kindly sent a copy along - clearly to make amends for having stolen my name. I don't imagine you'll see a review of this on the blog - how to review a collection of interviews? - but I certainly mean to discuss it. From well-renowned genre authors such as Iain Banks and Paul McAuley to more recent arrivals to the science fiction and fantasy fold, amongst them Adrian Tchaikovsky, Kit Whitfield and Richard Morgan, this thorough census of authors through the ages should shed light on the differences twenty years of days can make to the perception and understanding of speculative fiction. Meaty, thoughtful stuff, and from what I'd read of the PDF before my tree-based copy arrived, exceedingly well put together.

The Good Man Jesus and
the Scoundrel Christ

by Philip Pullman

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
29/03/10 by Canongate

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories."

Commentary: Philip Pullman, courting controversy? Never... That cynical attitude aside, even the Archbishop of Canterbury had nice things to say about The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ in his surprising review for The Guardian. All the same, Pullman's first novel proper since the final volume of His Dark Materials has been ruffling feathers everywhere, and though I'm about as a-religious as people come, I can see the value of the Bible as a good, inspirational story - and is there anymore more sacred than that? If anyone's up to the task of retelling the Gospels to appeal to a skeptical modern readership, it's got to be Philip Pullman. Let's just hope he keeps an even hand in so doing.

Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
20/05/10 by Canongate

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever. But for Meg - locked in a dead-end relationship and with a deadline long-gone for a book that she can't write - this thought fills her with dread. Meg is lost in a labyrinth of her own devising. But could there be an important connection between a wild beast living on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time, a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe and the Cottingley Fairies? Or is her life just one long chain of coincidences?"

Commentary: I really wanted to love The End of Mr Y - though to be fair I only bought it because it was on offer at Tesco, it had a hypnotic cover (in much the same vein as this), it was the middle of the night and my decision-making skills were sleeping - but I didn't. Nevertheless, though I felt Scarlett Thomas flubbed a few aspects of her book about books, I enjoyed it nevertheless, and Our Tragic Universe sees the author revisiting similar territory with a story, I'm told, about stories. Here's hoping she can maintain a tighter grasp on this metaphysical narrative than she did in its somewhat self-indulgent predecessor.

On the Tivity of Awards

Having read three of the six nominees for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award - as I have - the great book-mage Amanda poses an excellent question over on Floor to Ceiling Books:

"In the case of this award, what constitutes best?

"Best use of science fiction concepts? Best novel in terms of readability? Best novel because the judges had the most fun reading it?"

Sweary Mary Sam Sykes has already posted his thoughts, and Amanda's ponderings moved the Speculative Scotsman, too, to comment. I'm balls-deep into The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet at the moment - more on that in The BoSS tomorrow - and a wee bit short on time otherwise, so I thought rather than leave you lot wanting for content today, I'd repost my take on what exactly constitues best in this case here. So...

I judge the books I read with certain criteria, and so too, I imagine, do judges for the likes of the Clarke awards. You read a book. You feel certain things. You think back on those feelings, that experience - when it's done - and you deem it either bad, average, good or great according to your own measures. Sit ten people down in a room, make each of them read the same six books, assign numerical values to those general feelings (if you please), and collate the responses. The highest scorer = the best.

Endlessly subjective, but of course it's going to be. There are no hard and fast ways to say this intangible thing is better than that intangible thing... just collective, subjective judgement.

It's a fascinating conversation and I'd recommend you all pop on over to Floor to Ceiling Books quick-smart and share your own thoughts.

Book Review: In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

"In a tense, divided court, a young princess watches her mother struggle to hold the throne. On a remote coastal estate, a scholar finds a child washed up on the shore. Anne Henry, a Christian princess of the royal blood. A pagan bastard, groomed all his hidden, lonely life to make a grab for the crown. In this work of stunning imagination, Kit Whitfield has written a fictional history at once familiar and alien. Since the ninth century, when the deeps men invaded Venice, an uneasy alliance has held between the people of the land and the sea. That alliance was brokered by the warrior queen, Angelica, half landsman, half deeps man, the mother of the royal houses of Europe.

"Now, centuries later, no navy can cross the seas without allies in the ocean - and without deeps men guarding its shores, no nation can withstand invasion. The hybrid kings keep the treaty between both sides, protecting their people from the threat of war. The royal blood is the key to peace, and ferociously protected. The penalties for any landsman who tries to breed with a deeps man are severe; the fate of any 'bastard' child, born of such an illegitimate union, is terrible.

"But the royal house of England is staggering, collapsing under the weight of centuries of inbreeding. Anne prays for guidance, a way into the future without hatred or bloodshed. Henry holds with fierce certainty that only the strong survive. But if either of them is to outlive the coming conflict, they may need more deeps man faith alone..."

***

Much as Guy Gavriel Kay has famously riffed on places and periods from the annals of human history, embellishing the past as we know it with such tropes of fantasy as to create rich and rewarding near-as-damnit realities to let loose his characters in, for her second trick after Bareback, award-nominated author Kit Whitfield takes 16th century Europe as the backdrop for a narrative that is, in its sombre, seditious way, as powerful as the very best of Kay's backlist. In Great Waters is a glorious triumph of imagination; an involving and emotional chronicle of a world not so very different from our own.

What sets Whitfield's Europe apart from that we might learn of in textbooks and on the History Channel is the existence of deepsmen, which is to say mermaids, mermen, a race of aquatic beings who have made their home in the ocean. In Great Waters has it that after an insurgence in Venice, "the deepsmen of the sea were... no longer sailors' yarns, but an engaged force with loyalties of their own." Aghast, the people - landsmen, if we are to succumb to Whitfield's terminology - entered into a partnership with their underwater equivalents whereby the blood of the deepsmen now courses through the veins of Europe's royal houses. But hundreds of years have passed since Angelica rose from the canals to turn landlocked humanity on its head; she is but a legend, now, set against the harsh reality of Kings and Queens inbred to preserve her bloodline.

Edward rules in England, but he grows weak, and when his thoroughbred heir perishes, the country looks set to inherit an horrendously deformed second son as their monarch. Seeking to preserve their grasp on the great nation, the royal family have taken to burning those half-caste children born of unions between deepmen and landsmen. But secreted away in an estate on the outskirts of London, one has survived, and horrfied by the treatment of such unfortunate offspring as Henry, the timid granddaughter of King Edward seeks to alter the itinerary of history again.

Anne and Henry; Henry and Anne. Whitfield treats us to a book in the company of each, heavyset with dense information dumps and gradual character-building, before the worlds of each - the broken court of the ailing King Edward and the training ground Henry's landsman saviour has set for him - come together with a defeaning crash and their narratives intertwine. They are a fascinating, engaging pair: different sides of the selfsame coin in their ways. Anne has been born and raised on land but is of deepsmen breeding; Henry, meanwhile, is utterly of the sea, but removed from it struggles to find his land-legs. Anne is God-fearing, obtuse and fiercely intelligent; Henry, however, is blunt, brutish, illiterate and adamant in his Godlessness. Anne grapples with huge issues such as war, politics, monarchy and loyalty while the outcast deepsman faces down only clothes, and latterly, a painting.

In Great Waters, for all its grandiose manouvering and dodgy politicking, is a remarkably personal narrative, and though some will wish Whitfield had painted her wonderful world with more depth and texture, its greatest function is as a backdrop for the lives of these two characters - but they are such lives, fraught so soon with hardship and tragedy, sin and decision. It can be hard, in fact, to reconcile the awful things Henry and Anne must face down with their youth; even at the end of In Great Waters, Anne - whored, married, murderer - is only 14 years young. Such insight it difficult to bear, at times, but bear it you must, for the journey, across land and sea alike, is often spectacular.

As Bareback before it, In Great Waters showcases the effortless elegance of Whitfield as a wordsmith, and while her world would have perhaps resonated more with the addition of a third, less isolated perspective, that is not the focus of her nonetheless superlative second novel. Tight and restrained, imtimate and unadorned, In Great Waters succeeds in spades as a powerful and personal tale of the inhuman told with touching humanity.

***

In Great Waters

by Kit Whitfield

March 2010, Vintage

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

From Your Blogosphere Correspondent (15/04/10)

My oh my, it has been a while, hasn't it?

Well, fair readers: never fear. As of today, Your Blogosphere Correspondent is back. I'm afraid I just don't have it in me to catch you all up on everything that's happened since the last round-up, but all the same, there's a whole host of stuff on the agenda, so let's get right to it.

The iPad came out - at least in the US - and while buying first-generation Apple hardware is never, to my knowledge, a terribly smart thing to do, I was right there with everyone during the big reveal. I'd be in the territory of porky pies and pickled lies were I to say I couldn't see the appeal; I do. Or at least, I did. But before I get to that, I'd be interested to know: who bought one? Go on, everyone, confess your consumer sins...

Yesterday, however, news broke that the iPad's UK release would be delayed until the end of May due to - apparently - overwhelming demand for the glorified tablet PC in the States. How Apple could possibly have failed to anticipate this I don't know - nor, indeed, do I care. Not a sausage. Because I have desire. An HTC Desire, that is, which is to say: the first so-called iPhone (and thereby iPad) killer I've actually believed might have a hope in hell of living up to its ledeline. I could spend this entire round-up burbling about how the Desire kicks the iPhone's shiny mechanical ass, but I'll spare you. The only downside of going against the tide, as admittedly I'm often wont to do - I still refuse to drop the big bucks on an iPod - is that the support isn't quite there yet. The Android app store, though it ticks all the boxes in theory, just isn't up to scratch compared to the Apple marketplace, but all good things in time, I think.

In the meantime, my lovely little Droid does everything I could possibly want it to. And though I certainly didn't buy it to read ebooks on, to my surprise I came across a wonderful little app called Aldiko preloaded with public domain fiction that worked so well that... well, I went and bought my first ebook. Congrats to Peter V Brett! As an ode to the author's idiosyncratic composition of The Painted Man, I thought its recently released sequel, The Desert Spear, would be the perfect fodder with which to pop my e-reading cherry. I'll report back on the particulars of my first experience with paperless fiction just as soon as I can.

Not only that, but my HTC Desire displays comics like a dream, too. As if I really needed the door opened to a medium of entertainment I'd done away with largely on the premise that physical comics simply took up too much space!

Anyway. Enough about my gorgeous new gadget. Here's a trailer for Gears of War 3:

Best thing about that? I mean, other than the fact Gears of War 3 - as if we didn't all know that it'd be along sooner than later - will be out in April 2011? Surely, it's got to be the music. Which, in fact, is very much in keeping with the trailers for the first two games of Epic's franchise. The first had Gary Jules' heartbreaking cover of "Mad World," and the Gears of War 2 campaign introduced me to DeVotchka - though I've not found a single song of theirs up to the bar set by "How It Ends". This latest trailer features music by a folk rock group going by the name Sun Kil Moon which... well, I'm just going to have investigate further, aren't I? "Heron Blue" is certainly beautiful enough to warrant a bit of legwork.

There's been interesting video game news breaking all over the place since Your Blogosphere Correspondent last wrote, in fact - and a bunch of it bearing, fortuitously, on the speculative fiction we all love so much. For starters, Richard Morgan, author of the likes of Altered Carbon and The Steel Remains, talked some smack about the quality of writing in the Halo games, which the internet, in its infinite wisdom - and not helped by some irresponsible journalism over at Kotaku - proceeded to explode over. He said:

"I don’t like the Halo series at all. Okay, Halo is not actually bad, it's just, you know, average. The reason that its fiction doesn't work has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t get to see Master Chief’s face, it's because of lines like ‘Okay... I’m gonna get up there and kill those guys'. Halo is full of these bullshit archetypal characters and there's no real emotional effect."

Of course, the Halo fanboys took Morgan's comments out of context and blew them entirely out of proportion. If you ask me, the man's spot-on. Storytelling in videogames only very, very rarely approaches the caliber of more accomplished media, and the Halo games, however polished and satisfying the gameplay mechanics are, are simply not amongst the select few games - Bioshock and Heavy Rain come to mind - which have accomplished such excellence. Which isn't to say the universe isn't well and truly ripe for a good writer to come along and exploit it properly; much as Morgan intends to do for Crysis 2 later this year - though we'll see how that goes.

By all accounts, a couple of recent announcements suggest that 2010 could well be the year in which videogame worlds become that much more legitimate. None other than award-winning sci-fi author Greg Bear has penned, speak of the devil, a Halo novel, the first in a trilogy documenting the time of the Forerunners so often referred to in the games proper. It's coming from Tor in the US this Autumn. Or Fall. Whichever season floats your goat, really. I for one am chomping at the bit to see what he's come up with.

Not only that, Tor just broke the news that they'll have an original Dead Space novel coming out in late Summer - presumably as a precursor to the release of Dead Space 2 later in the year. None of which is particularly exciting, except for the fact that Brian K Evenson, author of last year's hugely acclaimed horror novel Last Days, is writing it. Now I'm not often one for tie-ins, but as far as Dead Space: Martyr and Greg Bear's Halo novel go, I can hardly wait.

But that more than enough videogame talk. There have been books, too. There was a whole convention full of them, in fact - Eastercon, which cannily occurred over the Easter weekend this year - and though I sadly wasn't able to attend this year, Niall Harrison (hereafter known as The Other Niall) posted an excellent, involved write-up of his impressions of the gathering of geeks over on the excellent Torque Control. I'd advise you all pop over there and see what all the fuss was about. I'm really hoping to make it to a con one of these days. Come on, organisers: get something together for us misbegotten Scottish souls, why don't you?

Recent reports of Mark Charan Newton's internet demise have been exaggerated, it seems. The pot-stirrer himself returned to his rightful place at the fore of debate in and around the blogosphere with a typically insightful post on Book Factories, which you can get caught up on here. I've been skeptical of authors who release new work with such alarming regularity myself. Stephen King comes suddenly to mind. If there's not a new book bearing his name each and every Winter, I'll eat my feet. Truly, I'd rather he took his time composing better novels than those to have come out since the excellent Duma Key.

And last for today - but by no means least - Gav from the ubiquitous NextRead has kicked off Book Bloggers, a forum in the hope of keeping book bloggers such as myself from talking shop on our blogs. I've joined - though I fundamentally disagree with the premise that there's no place on blogs for discussions of blogging (nor, as Aidan of A Dribble of Ink pointed out, for discussions of not blogging about blogging on blogs) - and if you keep a blog yourself, I'd heartily recommend you do too.

Right. No news in briefs today. In fact, no more news in briefs until I've designed a spiffy image of a newspaper clad in underpants to go alongside it. So that's your lot From Your Blogosphere Correspondent today. Hope you enjoyed!

In the immortal words of - who was it again? Ernest Shackleton? - I'll be back!

Till then, what's your take on the apparent legitimisation of videogames through genre literature? Are we talking from the frying pan to the fire here, in terms of mainstream perception? And I'll ask again: are they any amongst us with an iPad? Come out come out wherever you are...