As many of you know, I’m a huge baseball fan. My team for good and bad is the Houston Astros. As a kid, we moved to Houston in 1978 and for whatever reason I became hooked. Re-locating to Austin in the late 90s didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for the team.

This season marks the 50th for the ‘Stros (nee Colt .45s) as a major league franchise. To commemorate this event, MLB Productions has produced the impressive looking 5 DVD box set: Astros 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition

Can’t wait to get my hands on this one!

Astros at 50 was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

As part of his ongoing column at New Pulp, Alan J. Porter serialized our story “The Raven: Nameless Here For Evermore,” scheduled to appear in the not yet published Protectors anthology. The conclusion ran today.

Read more at New Pulp.

The Raven Concludes was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

[  Mood: Evil ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
So Joel Stein put the cat among the pigeons with his New Your Times piece March 29, 2012. To say he caused an uproar in the YA community would be an understatement.

Some have claimed that Stein is a satirist, that he doesn’t mean this seriously. Others have railed against him, thinking his comments are serious. That he is offering a criticism of what is wrong with adult culture.

So what is his purpose then? I would never presume to tell someone what someone else is thinking, but in reading what I see is a troll. I see that Internet demon that destroys message boards and comment threads. You know what I mean, the pot stirrer who gets his or her pleasure out of upsetting others and then watching the fallout.

And Stein hits all the Troll buttons, and none too gently at that:
* SEXIST: He implies that men are less manly if they read Twilight and Hunger Games. These are "girls books" and "men" don’t read those.
* ELITIST: He states that the only adults who should read picture books are those whose lips move when the read. Never mind that Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is the best exploration of the Immigrant Experience I have ever seen, and there is not one word in it.
* IGNORANT: He lumps Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games together. Those who have read all three series know that they share little in common beyond the designation of "Young Adult"
* AGEIST: He refers that his teachers would never have assigned him Donkey Kong, because it has no value. So things were better in his day. They had standards!
* DISMISSIVE: He states that if his parents had read Judy Blume, he would have looked into boarding school. Never mind that reading what your kids are reading is considered good parenting because it helps you relate and helps you understand what they are going through. And you are showing them that you value them as human beings.

So why is he trolling? Who knows? Again, only Joel Stein knows his real motivations. And even then, he might not understand it himself.

What I do see is yet another adult who thinks it is acceptable to dump all over Tween girls. As if by definition, something being popular with a Tween girl automatically means that it is of lesser value. That it is shoddily made, and won’t stand the test of time. (Tell that to Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, BTW.)

There is something inherently sad about an adult who thinks that it is acceptable to devalue Tween girls. An adult who builds themselves up by putting down children. Children who really can’t fight back. Makes Stein look even more pathetic now in my eyes.

I am a teacher, and where I work people who put down others in order to build themselves up or, worse, for pleasure are called bullies. We know that bullies were most likely picked on themselves as children, leading to low self-esteem. So they in turn bully to build up their own self-esteem. Is that what happened to Stein? Was his the money he was going to use to buy a new translation of Tolstoy stolen by the captain of the football team? Again, I don’t know. I am not Joel Stein.

But as a victim of bullies through junior and middle grades, I have also never understood why former victims turn into bullies. Why would they ever want to make someone feel as low as they did? Unless they lack empathy, and that puts them into to category or sociopaths and psychopaths who derive pleasure from hurting people or simply don’t care. Now calling Stein a sociopath or psychopath is probably going a little far. I am not Joel Stein’s psychiatrist.

So what to do about Joel Stein? At the very least he is like that media pundit, hired because they can spout for hours about things they know very little about. At the very worst he is a twisted little misogynist who gets his jollies picking on children. Neither of these should be people we give the time of day to, let alone try to emulate.

Instead, read. Read a lot. Read a variety. There is a lot of good literature out there. Some of it was written for adults. Some of it was written for teens. Some of it was written for children. There is also a lot of crap out there. Some of it even appears on the New York Times opinion pages. Don’t waste too much time on the bad. We have so little time on this planet. Spend it looking for the good. Because as Joel Stein has proven to me, your reading will change you, and sometimes not for the better.

[  Mood: Sick ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
So the Hunger Games is popular right now. And there are lots of people tossing around titles for people to read after they have finished Collins work. And believe me, there are many worthy followers, but what about a book that came before the Hunger Games? One that explores some of the same themes, but goes in a very, very different direction.

It’s 2154, and the world is a dystopian mess. Many years ago, some apocalyptic event occurred that caused the population to drop to a point that there was a lack of workers. To fill this need, governments created robots to do menial work. These robots began to get better, able to handle more complex work. This meant that as the population recovered, there was no work for them to do. Permanent classes of unemployed were created, living off government hand outs.

Into this world is born Lisse. As a child of an unemployed family, she is taken from her parents at the age of six to be educated. But with the robots taking more and more jobs, she too ends up Unemployed at the age of sixteen. Dropped off in the Designated Area in which she is now to live, Lisse bands together with a group of seven friends to survive their new world of gangs, drugs, garish clothes and government crackdowns.

But then one day, an invitation arrives for the group to attend the mysterious Game. With nothing else to do, they go and are exposed to a treasure hunt in a new world that seems too real to be true. Each return finds them wanting to do better and learn more. They devote a great deal of time to preparing for their next session. And then one day, it turns out the Game may have been all too real.

Author Monica Hughes’s work was published in 1991, and it shows a world where technology is replacing man in insidious ways. A precursor to works like the Hunger Games, there is a very socialist theme to this book, that big government may know better than we think it does. And the Utopian view that the children, when given a chance, can build a better world out of the ashes of our own.

It has aged very well and is worth the look.

T-shirts and hoodies adorned with Alex Solis‘ “Monkey Business” (aka the cover to The Apes of Wrath) are now available.

I’ve ordered a shirt. So should you. (But a word of advice, best not to wear your hoodie in Florida.)

The Apes of Wrath cover shirts & hoodies now available was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived at the Geek Compound.

Unterzakhn
by Leela Corman

Promo copy:

A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths.

For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life’s lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for “Underthings”) tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the “golden land,” where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

I reviewed this back in February. The best graphic novel I’ve read so far this year.

The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals
Edited by Chris Monks

Promo copy:

Ever since John Hancock broke into song after signing the Declaration of Independence, American politics and musicals have been inextricably linked. From Alexander Hamilton’s jazz hands, to Chester A. Arthur’s oboe operas, to Newt Gingrich’s off-Broadway sexscapade, You, Me, and My Moon Colony Mistress Makes Three, government and musical theater have joined forces to document our nation’s long history of freedom, partisanship, and dancers on roller skates pretending to be choo choo trains.

To celebrate this grand union of entrenched bureaucracy and song, the patriots at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (“The Iowa Caucus of humor websites”) offer this riotous collection (peacefully assembled!) of monologues, charts, scripts, lists, diatribes, AND musicals written by the noted fake-musical lyricist, Ben Greenman. On the agenda are…

Fragments from PALIN! THE MUSICAL

Barack Obama’s Undersold 2012 Campaign Slogans

Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Financial Crisis

Your Attempts to Legislate Hunting Man for Sport Reek of Class Warfare

A 1980s Teen Sex Comedy Becomes Politically Uncomfortable

Donald Rumsfeld Memoir Chapter Title Or German Heavy Metal Song?

Noises Political Pundits Would Make If They Were Wild Animals and Not Political Pundits

Ron Paul Gives a Guided Tour of His Navajo Art Collection

Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, As Told to Me By My Father

And much more!

Angels of Vengeance
by John Birmingham
Cover by Mike Bryan

Promo copy:

When an inexplicable wave of energy slammed into North America, millions died. In the rest of the world, wars erupted, borders vanished, and the powerful lost their grip on power. Against this backdrop, with a conflicted U.S. president struggling to make momentous decisions in Seattle and a madman fomenting rebellion in Texas, three women are fighting their own battles—for survival, justice, and revenge.

Special agent Caitlin Monroe moves stealthily through a South American jungle. Her target: a former French official now held prisoner by a ruthless despot. To free the prisoner, Caitlin will kill anyone who gets in her way. And then she will get the truth about how a master terrorist escaped a secret detention center in French Guadeloupe to strike a fatal blow in New York City.

Sofia Peiraro is a teenage girl who witnessed firsthand the murder and mayhem of Texas under the rule of General Mad Jack Blackstone. Sofia might have tried to build a life with her father in the struggling remnants of Kansas City—if a vicious murder hadn’t set her on another course altogether: back to Texas, even to Blackstone himself.

Julianne Balwyn is a British-born aristocrat turned smuggler. Shopping in the most fashionable neighborhood of Darwin, Australia—now a fantastic neo-urban frontier—Jules has a pistol holstered in the small of her lovely back. She is playing the most dangerous game of all: waiting for the person who is hunting her to show his face—so she can kill him first.

Three women in three corners of a world plunged into electrifying chaos. Nation-states struggling for their survival. Immigrants struggling for new lives. John Birmingham’s astounding new novel—the conclusion to the series begun in Without Warning and After America—is an intense adventure that races from the halls of power to shattered streets to gleaming new cities, as humanity struggles to grasp its better angels—and purge its worst demons.

Part II

Books received 4/4/2012 Part I was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived at the Geek Compound.

Amped
by Daniel H. Wilson

Promo copy:

Technology makes them superhuman. But mere mortals want them kept in their place. The New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse creates a stunning, near-future world where technology and humanity clash in surprising ways. The result? The perfect summer blockbuster.

As he did in Robopocalypse, Daniel Wilson masterfully envisions a frightening near-future world. In Amped, people are implanted with a device that makes them capable of superhuman feats. The powerful technology has profound consequences for society, and soon a set of laws is passed that restricts the abilities—and rights—of “amplified” humans. On the day that the Supreme Court passes the first of these laws, twenty-nine-year-old Owen Gray joins the ranks of a new persecuted underclass known as “amps.” Owen is forced to go on the run, desperate to reach an outpost in Oklahoma where, it is rumored, a group of the most enhanced amps may be about to change the world—or destroy it.

Once again, Daniel H. Wilson’s background as a scientist serves him well in this technologically savvy thriller that delivers first-rate entertainment, as Wilson takes the “what if” question in entirely unexpected directions. Fans of Robopocalypse are sure to be delighted, and legions of new fans will want to get “amped” this summer.

Caine’s Law (Acts of Caine: Act of Atonement, Book 2)
by Matthew Stover
Cover by Nara Osga

Promo copy:

SOME LAWS YOU BREAK. SOME BREAK YOU.
AND THEN THERE’S CAINE’S LAW.

From the moment Caine first appeared in the pages of Heroes Die, two things were clear. First, that Matthew Stover was one of the most gifted fantasy writers of his generation. And second, that Caine was a hero whose peers go by such names as Conan and Elric. Like them, Caine was something new: a civilized man who embraced savagery, an actor whose life was a lie, a force of destruction so potent that even gods thought twice about crossing him. Now Stover brings back his greatest creation for his most stunning performance yet.

Caine is washed up and hung out to dry, a crippled husk kept isolated and restrained by the studio that exploited him. Now they have dragged him back for one last deal. But Caine has other plans. Those plans take him back to Overworld, the alternate reality where gods are real and magic is the ultimate weapon. There, in a violent odyssey through time and space, Caine will face the demons of his past, find true love, and just possibly destroy the universe.

Hey, it’s a crappy job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Atlantis Mystery: Blake & Mortimer, Vol. 12
by Edgar P. Jacobs

Promo copy:

Deep under Sao Miguel island, rumoured to be the last emerging part of Atlantis, Professor Mortimer has discovered samples of a mysterious radioactive metal. Could it be the Atlanteans’ legendary orichalcum? When he and his friend Blake set out on an expedition into the depths to find out, sabotage occurs in the form of their old opponent Olrik. And soon, all three will be embroiled in a power struggle far bigger in scope than they could have imagined.

This will be my first exposure to Blake & Mortimer and legendary artist Jacobs. I’m really looking forward to reading it.

Part I

Books received 4/4/2012 Part II was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon