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Oh wow, the new Chalion ebook novella is adorable. I mean, after the Ivan book I was dubious, but this story is unconnected (directly) to any other Chalion story and that seems to be enough to bring life back to Bujold's writing.

Who knows how the coming Vorkosiverse book will pan out, but this one at least is definitely worth paying some money for.

I suspect that Bujold may just be burned out on long-form writing lately, and honestly that's not surprising. A lot of authors seem to hit Novel #20 or so at a slog, and you can just feel how fritzed out they are, wandering off down plotless paths of "well, this is an interesting idea" that utterly fail to go anywhere. But short-form doesn't demand as much in terms of plot-depth, and lets the author wallow around happily in a small bit of world-building and one or two engaging characters. That's where Penric's Demon falls.

(Incidentally, it's where A Net of Dawn and Bones could also have fallen if Vathara hadn't, unwisely in my opinion, tried to make a larger work of it.)

tl;dr: yeah, buy it, it's way cool.

One of the benefits of being a friend of the author is: sometimes you get free books.

And this was quite a good free book, so I’m reviewing it. Not in hopes of getting a copy of the next one at all, of course. I’m much too high-minded for that kind of thing. *looks suitably virtuous*

( So let us consider The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim Hines. )

I first encountered Duane’s wizards more or less by accident. I like cats, I like some fantasy, and when I was recommended Book of Night with Moon, it seemed like a good bet. It was. I enjoyed the cats, and the magic was pretty interesting, not falling into the “this is really a role playing system” trap at all. So I picked up the other Feline Wizards book and took home a bunch of the Young Wizards books, too. I’m also generally fond of young adult books, and had hopes that those would be equally interesting.

The Young Wizards books had interesting characters; I liked following Kit and Nita’s adventures, which are engaging and rather amusing as they deal with being teenagers and saving the world with a curfew. But, while the Feline Wizards books had a reasonably original take on the Enemy character, I found the portrayal of “the Lone Power” in the Young Wizards, a not-at-all-disguised Devil, to be disappointingly trite. The minions were often more interesting than their boss. The feline version of this recurring character was, at least, ambiguous, and was clearly a character that the felines interacted with in a varied manner, depending on the circumstances. The human version, by comparison, is rather flat and uninteresting, less a real character than a talking abstract idea. In general, I find that abstract evil only works as an Enemy if it is not personified in a single character.

I also thought, as I read further, that Duane should have stopped at four Young Wizards books, as it looked like she originally intended to. Dealing with the Ultimate Enemy in a conclusive fashion and then attempting to keep the story going with the same enemy is a recipe for eye-rolling, non-linear timestream or no. Another point in the Feline favor is that she does not seem to be making that mistake with them. The third book of that series appears to have a fresh, new Enemy.

That, however, brings us to my greatest problem with Duane, which is not an artistic criticism but rather a professional one.

Duane started writing her third Feline Wizards book, The Big Meow, as a subscriber-supported book. Her fans would donate to the project, and she would write it; she would post the chapters online as she went, and, at the end, everyone who donated a certain amount or above would receive a paper copy via a print-on-demand service.

Normally I would applaud this approach, and Duane’s readers certainly came through to support it, sometimes with pledges far in excess of the ‘base’ donation.

Duane, however, has not come through with the book.

This project has been plagued from the start with repeated, major delays. To be sure, Duane was dealing with some very bad Real Life problems during this time period, but the book is currently stalled at Chapter Seven, and has been for around nine months. Twice, Duane has promised that the next chapter will be forthcoming by a set date, and both times has failed to deliver, or explain her failure, or communicate in any way about the project for months on end. This while still blithely posting in her blog on other topics entirely and, therefore, clearly capable of communication.

Personally I find this an inexcusable breach of faith, and contract, with the readers who have already paid for a finished product. Let me repeat that: Duane has already taken their money. This is not an advance, backed by the working capital of a publishing company; this is money paid out directly by readers for a product which has not been delivered.

My recommendation, therefore, is to read Feline Wizards, but do not hold out any especial hope that a third book will ever appear. Most definitely, do not put any money into the third book until and unless it is actually finished.

So, I just finished Japanamerica, How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S. by Roland Kelts.

It's a good book, less a study of any particular anime or manga or game or toy than an overview of cultural interaction between the US and Japan, around the axis of popular culture. Kelts especially focuses on the rise and fall(ing) of the anime industry, and its struggle to find a business model that will a) actually make money and b) not stifle the creativity of the medium. He tells the story in a colloquial tone, via many interviews with industry historians, giants and newcomers. His comparisons of the possible cultural consequences of the bomb and of 9/11 are speculative but thought-provoking.

The one area I think he falls down on is the gender and sex analysis. He devotes a chapter to anime/manga porn, and, in that chapter, cleaves to the side of the debate that says the pervasive violence of Japanese porn is pure fantasy, not reflected in the actual actions of the culture, and not harmful in any way. He points to the rape stats of Japan, which are far lower than in the US.

In a later chapter, he mentions in passing the frequency of groping on trains as the one truly common form of sexual assault in Japan, and notes that the women almost never protest or say anything about being so assaulted in public. Nor do bystanders speak up or intervene, except in truly exceptional cases. Kelt does not, apparently, see the connection between this and the earlier chapter, in which he tells us about a video game in a porn store, which is a first-person perspective 'game' in which the male customer acts out a rape. He does not make the connection that a pornography industry that caters so relentlessly to violent, degrading images of women being attacked and humiliated for the sexual pleasure of men supports and inculcates the mindset that leads to a real life man putting his hand up a real-life woman's skirt on the train and not meeting with any opprobrium, or social or legal consequence. Or to 'compensated dating'. Or to the view in the Japanese workplace, still prevalent, that a woman is there to serve the men and not to be a fully functional, working and productive subject in herself. I find this a rather extreme failing in an otherwise perceptive and interesting book.

My recommendation: Read it, but skip the chapter titled "Strange Transformations".

This page has a partial bibliography of the things I read just starting off, to get a feel for the background and culture of the anime I was watching.

History/Politics

The Japanese Experience, by W. G. Beasley. This is a reasonably compact history of Japan, written for the lay-person.

Contemporary Japan, by Duncan McCargo. This one covers late 20th century politics and general culture.

"Bushido or Bull? A Midieval Historian's Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition," by Karl F. Friday; in the journal The History Teacher, v27.3. This was pure serendipity; I found it right behind a different article for a whole different project. But it's hugely entertaining. Talks about what the code of bushido really looked like in practice, in it's first romantic reconstruction in the 17th-18th c, and what it looked like in it's second reconstruction in late 19th early 20th c. The author takes my favorite historical approach: the Sardonic school.

General Culture

Modern Japanese Thought, edited by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. An anthology dealing with changes in socio-political thought in Japan; time-frame seems to be post-Perry (the fact that this defines modernism should give you a hint about the anthology as a whole). Very interesting, but it seems to take it for granted that ideas like individualism and personal rights simply didn't exist in Japan until imported from the West; personally, I don't quite buy this. But it does have a lot of good, solid information under the ideological cellophane.

Popular Culture

The Electric Geisha, edited by Atsushi Ueda. This anthology covers a lot of pop culture phenomena, including, as indicated by the title, the karaoke machine.

Japan Pop!: Inside the Wold of Japanese Popular Culture, edited by Timothy J. Craig. Another anthology. This one came out of the Conference on Japanese Popular Culture held at the University of Victoria, Canada, in 1997. It has a lot on music and TV programming.

Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, edited by John Whittier Treat. A lot of this one is pretty academic, but the last four essays deal with media and there's some good stuff on music. The one by Treat himself, on the position of shoujo in Japanese culture, is absolutely fascinating.

Language and Popular Culture in Japan, by Brian Moeran. Contrary to how the title sounds, this a a wonderful book. Anyone who wants to know about how the in/out and public/private divisions work absolutely must read the first chapter. It's easy to understand and written in a delightfully dry humor. My favorite, so far.

Literature

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, by Susan J. Napier. Interesting book. It focuses mostly on the issues/presentation of women.

The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan, by Kawai Hayao, English translation ed. by Gary Snyder. This is a Jungian analysis of Japanese folk tales. I don't entirely agree with Jungian theory, but Kawai certainly does first class pattern analysis. The basic idea of this book is that the Japanese psyche is feminine. I think he's partially right, under the definitions used here. A thought provoking book, not for light reading.

Other People's Bibliographies

Recommended Books on Anime and Manga. This is Gilles Poitras' page of recommendations. Poitras is a librarian, and thus deeply invested in the dissemination of good information. His newsletter, containing info on releases in this country, appears in the General(ist) Links page.