A Book By Its Cover: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
From Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. to Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse to Matt “Grim-Dark” Groening’s upcoming Futurama X-Treme, the standard script for science fiction featuring artificial intelligence (AI) has been machine rising up against humanity. This theme reached its artistic pinnacle in 1953 with the widely acclaimed masterpiece Robot Monster from noted auteur Phil Tucker, a cinematic disciple of Bresson and Ozu. The plot should be as obsolete as MS-DOS 4.0. Yet, authors and Hollywood writers all keep going back to the robot production factory for ideas. The fear inherent in this fiction has historically accompanied each technological development; with each increase in technology’s power and reach, so goes the fear. Recently, both Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk voiced concerns and warnings regarding AI. Yes, it is true that Hawking and Musk are both usually known for lunatic ramblings, but their warning here does seem logical and warranted.
A Book By Its Cover: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Picture yourself on a boat or a lakeshore, with pastel balloons and ominous skies; Some monster calls you, you answer quite slowly — the girl with the GLOWING RED EYES! My Best Friend’s Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix, is a work of art. You can tell just by looking at the cover. There is a LOT going on here! It tells a story all by itself, but go on and read the book, too. I can’t promise you’ll be glad you did, since I don’t know you, Gentle Reader, but I’d be amazed if you’re not interested! The first thing to notice — well, no, the first thing I noticed was the girl with the glowing red eyes, but I’ll get back to her in a bit. The first thing to talk about is the cognitive dissonance introduced by the cover. It has a yellow smiley “BE KIND, REWIND” sticker at the top right. (The Young Adult audience of today won’t remember this, but there used to be things called videotapes, sort of like DVDs, but once you watched them, the next viewers couldn’t watch until rewinding to the beginning. But I digress.) Just below and to the left, there’s a green “A NOVEL” sticker. Then at the bottom, it says VHS, which refers to the most common, if not the best, format of videotape. This book/movie disparity is explained by the fact that the story is about the filming of a direct-to-video flick that never even got released, because things went horribly awry during the location shots.
A Book By Its Cover: Steel Blood by J.L. Gribble
A worthy successor to Steel Victory and Steel Magic, this third volume in Gribble’s Steel Empires series continues the ambitious genre mash-up that has delighted fans of all ages forty-four through sixty-two. The official sequel to the play/film Steel Magnolias from the late ’80s, and a Sega Genesis console game from the early ’90s, the Steel Empires series began by successfully merging a story about a close-knit group of women in a small-town southern community with the plot of a side-scrolling, shoot-’em-up Steampunk videogame. In a story that is ThunderCats meets a Chemistry Textbook meets Lord of the Rings meets your Aunt’s blog, Steel Blood expands and fortifies Gribble’s mash-up creation even more, keeping it shiny fresh, though not completely stainless.
A Book by Its Cover: The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
Morgan Filchberger is the last 911 Dispatcher to be promoted to Detective after floppy-armed robots replaced the entire workforce. Anyone else might be bitter about that, but Morgan has failed the Department of Uniformed Detectives Exam five times. Now, he’s living the dream: the pay is good and he gets to tell his high school buddies that he’s a real badass. That is until members of the Irradiated Blue Man Group start showing up dead and partially digested in the streets of Orlando. With Captain Northrup Wilkinson and the union representative of the IBMG breathing down his neck, Morgan wonders if he’s really cut out for the detective life… Enter Felicia Guffman, a smartmouthed rookie slash amateur thespian with a penchant for unfinished Greek tragedies and Morgan’s new partner. If there’s one thing Felicia does well, it’s propping up mediocre (male) members of law enforcement to make them look good. Call it a gift. Or a curse. Whatever you call it, Felicia has been putting her talents to use since graduating from the Louisiana Academy of Detective Youths four years ago. And a bunch of dead glowing blue guys aren’t going to keep her from making a name for herself, even if she has do it by making Morgan into a hero before exposing him for the fraud that he is.
A Book By Its Cover: Bad Island by Doug TenNapel
Tennille Moffat is the world’s foremost authority on Beatles’ collectibles – from tickets to their iconic performance at the Ed Sullivan show to a gold lapel pin from George Harrison’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Suit, she knows better than anyone both the sentimental and monetary value of items both common and rare. When a mysterious client, Mr. Blue, invites her to his island sanctuary in the Maldives claiming that he has the half of the hole given to Jeremy in Yellow Submarine , Tennille has no choice but to take him up on his offer. When she’s met at the docks by Captain Denaho, a swarthy Maldivian pilot with a mischievous glimmer in his eye, Tennille’s initial apprehension, about traveling alone to a secluded island in a country that she doesn’t know the language, is dispelled by his outstretched hand and a glass of fermented coconut milk. But when Tennille wakes with a throbbing head in a field of flowers surrounded by stone sentinels, she realizes perhaps that she didn’t understand anything about The Beatles at all. As a Beatles fan, I was instantly intrigued by the conceptual nature of this novel. It combines fantasy and science fiction into a cohesive, but occasionally difficult to follow, story full of rich characters and surreal circumstances. Doug TenNapel has successfully incorporated his fascination with history, pop-culture, and science that has previously only been hinted at in his earlier non-fiction, works like, The Theoretical Physics of Earthworm Jim and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: or How the Agriculture Industry is Trying to Kill You. Bad Island is obviously a labor of love and Beatles history and the subculture dedicated to it are the main focus of the novel. It isn’t often that a world is so richly drawn by a writer that you come up grasping for air and needing a dose of reality, but TenNapel does exactly that with his prose. If he fails at anything it is in revealing too little. When the main character, Tenille, realizes what is going on, the reader is still left completely in the dark and struggling for another 50 pages. However, with such intriguing characters – Tenille, Captain Denaho, and the enigmatic Mr. Blue – there to escort you through the dense puzzles, it is easy to forget that you’re suffocating on an overabundance of background information, while desperate for immediate clues. Books that force you to operate, metaphorically, with one hand tied behind your back, or one eye blindfolded, create an unnecessary handicap that can occasionally be frustrating. I will say that, by the end of the book, I felt as if I had just spent a semester in a pop-culture history course that revealed both a great deal of factual information, but also spent a lot of time speculating as to the motivations for and social ramifications of “The Beatles” culture. It was a fun romp which managed to be both sparse in prose and rich in detail and I would recommend it to anyone who likes their history with a dash of adventure. (A Book by its Cover is our weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about. Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)
A Book by its Cover: Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer
Back cover blurb: “By the author of “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” one of the great Midwestern marine horror novels of the 21st century, comes a novel so chilling that it comes with a wool blanket at the check out counter. Finnigan Mt. Belucci, estranged son of the famed Belucci Fishing Family, just wants to lead a normal, northern Wisconsin life with his wife, Margaret. He wants to get a few chickens, maybe a cow — lord knows enough of wild beasts roam the countryside — and a little shack on Bayfield’s idyllic coast. Everything is blue bonnet’s and walleye fish fries until a heavy fog rolls in February 14th. The Mt. Belucci’s, on a romantic ferry ride, get stopped half-way between Madeline Island and Bayfield. As strange noises begin to emanate from below deck, all semblance of humanity leaves the ferry goers. As the Belucci’s try desperately to escape the madness around them, one thing becomes immediately apparent: they’ll never look at candy hearts the same again.” Ann Packer made her name in Midwest Gothic, and this is a blissful return to form. Having taken a departure to study French Buddhism, Packer immediately began work on the fevered dreams that would become Swim Back to Me on her return to her native Green Bay. Six years and two dozen drafts later, this little masterpiece dropped on my desk. It’s a slim volume, and innocuous looking. The faded pastels of the cover betray the transgressive musings inside. Packer’s parallels between the color of prop churned seabed and human carnage are nauseating. The early decline of the Mt. Belucci’s relationship over a misinterpreted text message give Packer the opportunity to rebuild their relationship on the boat ride. However, even though [spoiler alert] Finnigan gets his hand cut off in the second act, forcing Margaret to protect and coddle him back to health through the incredibly rapid onset of infection (one gets the sense that time is distorted on the ferry), we never get the sense that love will retake a hold in their relationship. They rely on the familiar in unfamiliar, and terrifying, surroundings, but, as in King’s 1408, the relationship never re-materializes. This would be my main criticism of the book: the rekindled relationship Packer sets up never comes about. I may have been misinterpreting the foreshadowing, but it seemed as if it was inevitable, and inevitability is a main theme of the novel; from the sense of foreboding that Margaret gets when she sets foot on the ferry, to the mutated fish that claw their way up the hull and begin disemboweling anything with a heartbeat, to the ultimate sacrifice of Captain Helena using her own body as a replacement prop shaft. It seemed out of sorts to have the most inevitable outcome of the book to go by the wayside, but, again, this could be Packer putting us on edge once again. In the end, this is a great example of old school horror done with a deft hand. Recommended. (A Book by its Cover is our new weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about. Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)
