So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Allyn Gibson]

There's a question... Are the original Sidney Paget illustrations in public domain too? If so, they could be used as cover art.

Yes, as are many illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele.

Some of the Rathbone films are public domain, so his image, at least from those films, would be fine.

 

[korblborp]

Speaking of Nimoy's Holmes...

The last dozen years or so, I've noticed that some self-published Holmes books and comic books will use Jeremy Brett's Holmes on the cover, which annoys me as the literary character is in the public domain, Brett's likeness and performance as Holmes is not. Two or three years ago, Amazon suggested a Holmes pastiche to me that used Nimoy on the cover. I applaud the willingness to go in a different direction and infringe other copyrights!

they should use Jason Gray-Stanford occasionally

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I have slightly less of a bee-in-the-bonnet about non-canonical Holmes than about Oz that egregiously and needlessly contradicts the Baum canon.

Which is to say I generally ignore non-canonical Holmes, unless it egregiously contradicts Doyle. Because non-canonical Holmes is so much easier to ignore.

 

[bdub76]

Finished The River Has Roots. This wasn't bad, but I wouldn't call it award winning based on other science fiction/fantasy that I have read in the past that won Hugo awards. Maybe the Nebula Awards are really not for me. I have enjoyed the Pulitzer Fiction winners, but I haven't much cared for the Booker Fiction winners. Maybe it's the same thing. Though I do plan to read Uncertain Sons and Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The later was on my TBR anyway.

All this talk of Sherlock had me reading another story in the Return of Sherlock Holmes last night. Always love his stories. For written fiction, I do enjoy Enola Holmes. And I did enjoy the original Young Sherlock Holmes film, where the writer really captured the Watson's voice really well. It's only let down by some cheap special effects, but it's otherwise a good film.

 

[Stevil2001]

I recently finished watching the animated series Pantheon on Netflix, so I decided to read the Ken Liu short stories it was adapted from, six of which are in Liu's collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, with the earliest story in that continuity, "Carthaginian Rose," being in an anthology called Empire of Dreams and Mirages. The series is mainly based on the 3-part series consisting of "The Gods Will Not Be Chained," "The Gods Will Not Be Slain," and "The Gods Have Not Died In Vain," while the final episode draws on elements of the story "Seven Birthdays." The show has little in common with the other three stories, "Carthaginian Rose," "Staying Behind," and "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer," aside from the general concept and setting and a couple of details. They're all short stories or novelettes, so I was able to read all seven in two sittings this afternoon and early evening.

What surprised me was how much of the show was not from the stories. The first episode is largely a very faithful adaptation of the early scenes of "Not Be Chained," and the overall story provides the arc of much of the first season, but it's mainly focused on the character of Maddie and her family (who were named Wynn in the stories, rather than Kim as in the show), with passing mention of the characters Laurie Lowell and Chanda (whose first name is Nils rather than Vinod and is a rather different character). The plot diverges heavily as the series goes on, with the main commonality with the latter two "Gods" stories being the character of Mist. Startlingly, everything in the show involving Caspian, his family, Stephen Holstrom, and Julius Pope is completely original. I'd expected to find out that maybe they were from a different set of stories and Craig Silverstein combined them into one narrative, but no, they're all-new. None of the characters outside the "Gods" trilogy are incorporated into the show, although the actions of the protagonist in "Seven Birthdays" are performed by Maddie in the show.

All in all, I think the TV series is probably an improvement on the stories. It incorporates many of the same ideas and character threads, but adds a lot of new, rich storylines and SF concepts that feel mostly as smart and plausible as the ones in Liu's stories. Although there's one element in the stories that I found very implausible. They posit that uploading human minds into digital existence uses far less resources than living, embodied humans, so that humanity giving up bodily existence to live as software in data centers would allow the environment to heal. But we've seen in recent years that large data centers consume massive amounts of power and are terrible for the environment. (Also, who repairs and maintains them and their power plants if all humans become virtual? Well, robots, I guess.)

I regularly teach the three "Gods Will..." stories plus "Staying Behind" in a college class about technological forms of immortality. I do think the "Gods" stories have some worldbuilding questions they just totally skip over in favor of sometimes cheap melodrama, but they teach well. (Many of my students have raised the same issue of what will actually support the uploads.) "Staying Behind," though, is excellent, one of my favorite short sf stories full stop. Really dark, really clever, really unsettling.

I haven't seen Pantheon.

I'm reading at work, The River Has Roots. I heard it won a Nebula award, so I'm giving it a shot. Another title that won an award is Buffalo Hunter Hunter. But it's a full length novel, and I already have two going right now: Odyssey and Good People.

I'm half way through The River Has Roots, and it's basically a lot like Stardust, but it isn't as good as Stardust. There is also a non-binary character called Rin that isn't described. I have a really hard time picturing a character that is non-binary without a description, and it's hard to read text with a lot of they and them. I struggle with it.

At this point, it's not a recommend yet. It's a read Stardust instead. Or better, watch the film.

I read The River Has Roots a couple weeks ago because it is a Hugo finalist. I found it very forgettable. I'm currently reading another, Cinder House, which I'm enjoying a lot more.

got a little way into Transformers Compendium Book 1 (UK stories separated version)

I am working my through the integrated Til All Are One compendiums; recently finished volume one. I have read most but not all of these stories before, but never the US and UK stories in sequence. I am enjoying the experience. I appreciate Bob Budiansky a lot more this time!

 

[Steve Roby]

Currently reading Everything is Permitted: On Assassin's Creed by Cameron Kunzelman. It's a readable academic work from a university press, but more importantly for casual readers, it's a book by someone who has played the hell out of all the main games in the series and is fascinated by its worldbuilding. There are chapters on broader subjects like the First Civilization and conspiracies followed by close readings of some of the games. I haven't played all the games and haven't paid a lot of attention to the modern day components of the stories, so I'm finding this an informative and thoughtful read.

 

[Greg Cox]

The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine.

A suspense thriller set in the worlds of publishing and celebrity chefs. A book editor, whose career is on the ropes, gets a chance to edit the long-awaited memoir of a celebrity chef -- who is rumored to have disposed of her husband decades ago . . . .

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

"Disposed of." Why am I suddenly thinking of a certain business partnership between Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett?

 

[Greg Cox]

"Disposed of." Why am I suddenly thinking of a certain business partnership between Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett?

I suspect the story may be heading that way, although there have to be more twists than that to sustain a whole novel.

 

[Starbreaker]

Dungeon Crawler Carl #6: Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman

I'm almost done. This is probably my favorite of the six so far. They all have some serious pacing issues when they get bogged down in game mechanics, but they are so much fun.

 

[bdub76]

I read The River Has Roots a couple weeks ago because it is a Hugo finalist. I found it very forgettable. I'm currently reading another, Cinder House, which I'm enjoying a lot more.

Thinking about trying out Automatic Noodle.

In the meantime, I have some short stories that were short listed to read. Hopefully, they're better.

 

[JD]

Sir Sherlock: The Red Letter Day, by Kenton Hall, adapting the audio drama by Gary Hopkins.

Sir Sherlock is a series of audio dramas set in the 1920s starring Tom Baker as Sir Sherlock Holmes (he's knighted as the series begins) and John Leeson as Dr. John Watson. The first in the series was offered on Kickstarter earlier this year, and the Kickstarter for the second, The Sickle and the Sea, launched this week. As part of the rewards for the first book a novelization was offered. Published by Chinbeard Books, it's a hardcover novella of about 20,000 words.

I probably should have listened to the audio first, but I read the novelization first instead. I might get to the audio in a few days.

I'm persnickety when it comes to Sherlock Holmes pastiches. If something feels off, I bail. Life is too short to read bad Sherlock Holmes fiction... unless it's so actively bad that I just have to witness a train wreck, which I have done. I'm not going to name and shame, sorry.

The Red Letter Day is not a train wreck. I don't feel that I wasted my time reading it, but it doesn't evoke much of a Sherlock Holmes feeling in me. John Watson has a voice, not just a character dialogue voice but a prose voice. Hall's prose didn't hit the Watson prose voice for me. But it was also short enough -- about 80 pages -- that I didn't mind too much and carried on. It was perfectly adequate.

Two Egyptologists from the British Museum are murdered and their bodies left by Cleopatra's Needle in London. Holmes, who is in London to be knighted, receives a cryptic missive (the "red letter" of the title) that starts him on an investigation. Along the way he meets a familiar friend -- Lord Lestrade -- and makes two new acquaintances, Lestrade's granddaughter Emily and a young consulting detective named Norton (portrayed, in the audio, by Young Sherlock Holmes' Nicholas Rowe) at various points. There's some deduction, a Holmes plan, and a thrilling and dangerous climax.

It's a pilot. I was discussing this in the Doctor Who forum this morning that pilots have to do several things -- introduce the concept, the setting, the characters, plant some seeds to be picked up on later, and, oh yeah, incidentally have a story as well on which to hang all of these. As a pilot, it's effective. While I didn't find the mystery itself terribly interesting -- like some of Doyle's Holmes stories, the point is not the mystery and clues that can lead the reader to work it out -- the longer term plot elements have their points of interest, and I would be curious to see how they develop across the series.

My main issue with the execution of the concept has to do with the ages of the protagonists. Holmes and Watson are in their seventies, and while the story makes some references to their ages and the times, it generally feels like they're in their forties and operating where "it's always 1895" in Vincent Starret's famous phrase. I much preferred the treatment of the elderly Holmes in Chabon's The Final Solution and Mitch Cullin's A Simple Trick of the Mind. If the audio series can grapple with the realities of a septuagenarian Holmes it could turn into something interesting.

That said, with Sherlock Holmes now fully public domain, there is a metric fuckton of new Sherlock Holmes fiction on the market, and Sturgeon's Law applies hard here. A marketable angle -- old Sherlock Holmes as portrayred by Tom Baker -- serves well to differentiate this project in the marketplace and gives it a commercial hook that other Holmes projects wouldn't necessarily have.

I'm curious to see how this project develops.

Have you heard the Moriarty podcast with Cameron Monoghan as Moriarty and Phil Lamarr as Holmes. They go some pretty big names through the three different seasons they did, Season 1 had Billy Boyd as Sebastian Moran and then Ross McCall took over in Seasons 2 & 3, Season 2 had Cutris Armstrong as Lestrade, Rebecca Mader as Mary Watson, then Season 3 had Ben Kingsley as Moriaty's father.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Thinking about trying out Automatic Noodle.

I read a blurb about it. Sounds appetizing. I remember the first time I saw a hand-pulled noodle demonstration on Tom Snyder's old Tomorrow program. But I think I'll wait for the TPB.

 

[KRAD]

Have you heard the Moriarty podcast with Cameron Monoghan as Moriarty and Phil Lamarr as Holmes. They go some pretty big names through the three different seasons they did, Season 1 had Billy Boyd as Sebastian Moran and then Ross McCall took over in Seasons 2 & 3, Season 2 had Cutris Armstrong as Lestrade, Rebecca Mader as Mary Watson, then Season 3 had Ben Kingsley as Moriaty's father.

This is the second recommendation I've seen of that podcast in the last two days -- someone at Trek Long Island also recommended it to me after attending the Holmes panel that I did with Christopher D Abbott, Aaron Rosenberg, Michael Jan Friedman, and Derek Tyler Attico, after listening to my rant about how unutterably stupid the character of Moriarty is and how "The Final Problem" is the worst story in the English language written by an otherwise-talented author.

 

[Christopher]

This is the second recommendation I've seen of that podcast in the last two days -- someone at Trek Long Island also recommended it to me after attending the Holmes panel that I did with Christopher D Abbott, Aaron Rosenberg, Michael Jan Friedman, and Derek Tyler Attico, after listening to my rant about how unutterably stupid the character of Moriarty is and how "The Final Problem" is the worst story in the English language written by an otherwise-talented author.

A while back in the thread about CBS's Watson medical procedural, someone joked that the next CBS Holmes-based series set in the present day would be about Moriarty as a police consultant. They weren't far off, as someone is now developing a Moriarty TV series more or less along those lines, though a network isn't attached yet.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

"Be careful what you wish for. You may get it."

 

[Commander Troi]

Speaking of Holmes, I enjoyed the hell out of Young Sherlock on Amazon. I'm looking forward to season 2.

 

[Christopher]

Speaking of Holmes, I enjoyed the hell out of Young Sherlock on Amazon. I'm looking forward to season 2.

I couldn't get past the first episode, which surprised me, since I usually like Guy Ritchie's movies (at least the ones I've seen). I just couldn't recognize the lead character as a version of Sherlock Holmes.

 

[JD]

This is the second recommendation I've seen of that podcast in the last two days -- someone at Trek Long Island also recommended it to me after attending the Holmes panel that I did with Christopher D Abbott, Aaron Rosenberg, Michael Jan Friedman, and Derek Tyler Attico, after listening to my rant about how unutterably stupid the character of Moriarty is and how "The Final Problem" is the worst story in the English language written by an otherwise-talented author.

Oh, actually I didn't mean that as a recommendation, I was actually looking for his thoughts on it, if he'd heard it. I've been curious about it since I stumbled across it on Spotify, but haven't gotten around to listening to it yet.

 

[bdub76]

I read two more Nebula short list short stories over lunch today.

Through the Machine

This is really an AI sucks for authors/actors opinion piece masked as fiction. It's not really good.

Six People to Revise You

This is a well written piece of science fiction. You get some Total Recall vibes from it. But it also has a lot of identity politics in it, which would distract readers not expecting it.

Planning to read tomorrow at lunch: In My Country and The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead. I also have Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons on my TBR, but I'll see if I like In My Country first.