Ho ho, ha ha: Geekmas 2024

It's been a couple of years since I've done a Geekmas posting, due to the temporary blog hiatus, but I've received some subtle (and not-so-subtle) suggestions that a little help in the area of holiday seasonal shopping would be in order, now that we're back in production - so here are some hopefully helpful options for Christmas gifts.

Gaming

A Steam™ gift card of whatever denomination seems appropriate would certainly be appreciated - as far as I know, they're now available on those gift card mega-displays that you can find at London Drugs or Best Buy.*  It's certainly something I would use, a reluctance to pay full price is the only thing that's kept me from buying Starfield from Bethesda, or Space Marine II, the popular sequel to Relic Entertainment's Warhammer 40K third-person shooter Space Marine from 2011.

 

Books

 

Initially, I wasn't sure what to suggest for books, but once I started looking, I was surprised how easily I found six options. Sadly, it's all hardcovers or trade paperbacks, both of which seem a bit spendy, but that's the way the market has gone, mass market paperbacks are getting harder to find. (At least on the science fiction and fantasy shelves, I can't speak for the mystery or romance marketplaces). That being said, at the moment they're all under $25 on Amazon.ca, which is fairly standard pricing these days.

The first two options are both posthumous offerings from Terry Pratchett:  A Stroke of the Pen is a collection of short fiction by Pratchett written for newspapers in the 1970s and 80s, and A Slip of the Keyboard is a collection of his non-fiction.  I'm pleased to have the opportunity to read some more of Pratchetts's writing, but it does feel a bit like a record label releasing long-buried demo tapes, it's never too late to make a buck off an artist.** 

Sharps and the first volume of The Two of Swords come to us from the prolific pen of K. J. Parker, aka Tom Holt.  Parker's fantasy never fails to entertain, and either of these two books would be a welcome addition to my little library.  (Although, if I receive the first volume of The Two of Swords and it's enjoyable, that does open the door for two easy additions to next year's list...)

Finally, Arkady Martine's epic Teixcalaan space opera series: A Memory Called Empire, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2020, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace,which took the Best Novel Hugo in 2022.  Oddly enough, in a genre overwhelmed by trilogies, Martine explicitly stated in a 2021 Reddit AMA that there will not be a third book in the series, the two books stand alone as a duology.  (Although she also suggested that she has plans for more books set in the Teixcalaan universe, which may well feature some of the same characters, she is adamant that the story told in the two books ends there.)

I have to confess that I've already read both of these books as bootleg digital downloads, and they're brilliant:  creative, astonishingly original and beautifully well-written.  As such, I feel that Martine deserves the support of actually buying the paper editions of the texts - I feel that anyone who exhibits so much originality in a sometimes repetitive genre should get paid for it.

Although I've linked these books to Amazon Canada™, they may very well be available at your local bookstore should you prefer to do a little browsing, something which I can never manage comfortably on the Amazon web site.

 

T-shirts

And to wrap things up, two t-shirts options:  one for Star Wars, one for Star Trek.

I've mentioned the Millennium Falcon t-shirt in a previous Geekmas posting, but it's still in play: conveniently available on Amazon, dark grey and XL, please.

The options for licensed Star Trek merchandise is a little bit less to my taste, they have a tendency to make jokes rather than just represent.  Nonetheless, I was able to find a simple t-shirt for First Contact on Startrekshop.ca - shame that they don't have something similar for Generations.  Again, XL for sizing, for anyone who skipped over the previous suggestion.

If anyone decides to go rogue on the t-shirt front, please PLEASE use the above as guidelines for style.  There are a million science fiction and fantasy t-shirts for sale on the internet - I've got a pretty good collection, but they're all distinguished by being licensed products. I don't want to appear ungrateful, but if you buy me a t-shirt featuring, say, a kawaii interpretation of the crew of Serenity***, I will certainly thank you for your generosity, but sadly, I will be unlikely to wear it unless I'm painting the living room.

And, if this all seems just like too much work, plain old Amazon™ gift cards are the gift that keeps on giving. 

- Sid

Update

We happened to be in the local Indigo on Friday, and I took a quick look in the SF-Fantasy section to see if any of my book suggestions were in fact available.  The bad news is that only two of the books were on the shelves: A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, although it's possible that the Pratchett books could have been elsewhere.

The good news is that I added a couple of things to my shopping list.  Anything from Hugh Howey's Silo series would be a good option - I don't have any of them in my collection, so let's start with Wool (I assume that anyone who is actually buying me a Christmas gift can coordinate with the rest of the group to avoid duplication.)  I'm also long overdue to read Tamysn Muir's critically acclaimed Gideon the Ninth, which, coincidentally, lost out to A Memory Called Empire in the 2020 Hugo Best Novel vote.

- Sid

* Question: does one company handle all the gift card creation and sales, or did someone see a gap in the marketplace and put together a gift card rack that they sold to LD et al? 

** It's fortunate that Pratchett's daughter Rhianna is in charge of her father's intellectual properties, and has no intention of licensing any of his material to other writers, as with And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel, or the endless imitations of Robert E. Howard's Conan.  

*** Not a suggestion - or a challenge - but, as per my nephew Chris, you can find anything on the internet, it's like New York only bigger.

Iron Heart*.

Obadiah Stane: Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!

William Ginter Riva: Well, I'm sorry. I'm not Tony Stark.

Iron Man

During a recent workplace visit to our IT manager's office, I finally broke under the pressure after several surreptitious glances and said, "I'm sorry, but how is it that you have Tony Stark's original heart on your desk?"

After glancing over at the glowing arc reactor sitting peacefully on his desk extension, he gruffly replied, "Heavy late night drinking and easily accessible internet shopping."  Obviously a dangerous combination, but at least that explains why he also has not one but two Infinity Gauntlets on his credenza. 

- Sid

* Not to be confused with the Riri Williams character.

Reading Week 2024: The Fall of Urshurak.

When I refer to our Palm Springs trips as "reading week" it's not entirely a joke.  Life is full of little interruptions that can make it challenging to do any sustained reading, and as such I look forward to the opportunity to spend some quiet time with a book or two - or three. I'm not a swimmer, so while Karli floats around happily in the pool, I'm able to relax in the shade and do some reading.

This trip I brought along the New York Times bestseller The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland; The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner; and Urshurak, by Jerry Nichols and the Brothers Hildebrandt, which I had picked up at the newly reopened Lawrence Books in October. Urshurak's reputation had preceded it to a certain extent (not necessarily in a good way), and I was more than a little curious to see how it measured up.  

The award-winning duo of Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, known professionally as the Brothers Hildebrandt, were perhaps best known for their interpretations of The Lord of the Rings books, particularly their paintings for the 1978 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar, and their "Style B" Star Wars poster, along with numerous science fiction and fantasy book covers and illustrations, done both as a team and individually. Their work was distinguished by its lush, luminous style - no one paints white like the Brothers Hildebrandt painted white.

After discovering that they would not be part of the creative team for Ralph Bakshi's 1978 Lord of the Rings animated feature film, the disappointed twins were inspired to create their own epic struggle between Good and Evil, and set about building the world that would be the setting for their story. The result was the land of Urshurak, a monumental backdrop delineated in paint and ink, more than suitable for a mythic adventure. 

They originally attempted to have the story of Urshurak made into a live action film, but the project failed to gain any traction in Hollywood.  The Brothers then attempted to package the concept as an animated production, but once again had no success with the studios, and finally decided to present their concept artwork as part of an illustrated novel. 

Sadly, I couldn't bring myself to like the resulting version of Urshurak.  I did my best to read it with an open mind, but neither the plot nor the prose ever manages to rise to the heights of Tolkien, Peake, or Lewis - or Pratchett or Gaiman, for more modern references. Sadly, as cliché would have it, if it was easy, everyone would do it, and taking inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien is a long step away from being J.R.R. Tolkien: a simple and self-evident truth which hasn't stopped many people from trying over the years - and generally failing. 

I have this odd desire to apologize for my less than positive opinion. After all, Urshurak was originally intended as a movie project, not a novel, and there are probably hundreds of movie scripts that would fail as novels. Even so, with the best will in the world, the writing doesn't match the epic quality of the paintings and illustrations that inspire it. 

The narrative is an uncertain balance between broad comedy and Tolkienesque earnestness, the dialogue is often stilted and unnatural, the characters never quite ring true, and the epic events of the story somehow fail to become epic - it just doesn't work.  Sad to say, it might have been better left as just a coffee table collection of spectacular paintings and drawings united by a simple narrative, like still images taken from a film.

It's hard to read the book without wondering what might have been. All that I know about the novel's co-author Jerry Nichols is that the brothers refer to him as "an old friend" in the preface to the book, and research does not produce very much more information regarding Mr. Nichols or his writing credentials, making him an uncertain choice to anchor the project.  But, imagine: based on their creative reputation, the brothers could conceivably have reached out to any number of authors* to tell their story.  

The book was released in 1979: looking at a contemporary roster of writers, they would have been able to chose from an all-star cast of possible collaborators.  Imagine if they had recruited Roger Zelazny, or Ursula K. Le Guin; or how about Patricia A. McKillip, or Mary Stewart?  Tanith Lee; C.J. Cherryh; Katherine Kurtz; Samuel R. Delany; for a more classic touch, veteran fantasy authors Fritz Leiber and L Sprague de Camp are still active in 1979, along with Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson. 

Would any of them have said yes?  Impossible to say, but it's an undeniably talented group with a wide range of writing styles, any one of whom would have brought a unique vision to the story, a vision which might well have turned Urshurak into an archetypal masterpiece that would rival its inspirations, rather than weakly evoking them.

Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, D.O.D.O was a pleasantly fun read - Nicole Galland is obviously a good influence on Mr. Stephenson - and The Stone Book Quartet, although well written, was not really a fantasy as such, in spite of its author's reputation in the field.  

- Sid

P.S. I refer to the brothers Hildebrandt in the past tense throughout this posting: sadly, Tim passed away on June 11, 2006, followed by his brother Greg on October 31, 2024.

* Terry Brooks might have been a bad choice, given that, as above, they had done the cover painting for The Sword of Shannara, his personal LOTR homage/pastiche - one to a customer, as they say.