What if Roger Zelazny wrote a hard-boiled murder mystery, and no one knew about it for more than thirty-five years? Well, now you can buy it on Amazon…

It’s been out since last February, but it didn’t make it onto my recommendations list until a few weeks ago. And, of course, I’d never have gone looking in that genre.

How is it? Not bad. It was a complete manuscript, but it’s got some rough spots, as if he planned to go back and work it over again, but then moved on to something else. Their best guess puts it right around the same time as Nine Princes in Amber, and I can see some similarities (stylistically, that is) to the opening section on Earth, before Corwin recovers his memory.

The following four images are the front covers of the Japanese editions of two well-known science fiction novels (two each, because novels are frequently split into two volumes in Japan). I have crudely blacked out the author’s name, so as long as you don’t sight-read katakana, you can examine the covers and try to guess which novels they are.

The Japanese and English titles are below.

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…briefly.

「ンガイ・ングアグアア・ブグ＝ショゴグ・イハア、ヨグ＝ソトホース、ヨグ＝ソトホース……」

「イグナイイ……イグナイイ……トゥフルトゥクングア……ヨグ＝ソトホース……」

「イブトゥンク……ヘフイエ――ングルクドルウ……」

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…that the Lensman novels had been translated into Japanese. Also, there’s a sequel, predictably titled Samurai Lensman. Sadly, while the author’s other book covers feature sexy ninja girls and moe demon hunters, SL’s cover restricts itself to a heroic male. While this may be in keeping with the old-fashioned spirit of the Lensman universe (modulo Clarissa and the girls), it was written in 2001, and I can’t help feeling that it’s time to infuse Doc’s classics with some modern tropes: Kyonyuu Tsundere Meganekko Catgirl Maids of the Lens.

[Update: turns out the girl on the cover is holding a big gun, and she’s a scrappy tomboy who uses it quite effectively, joining forces with Our Hero. And she’s named Cat. And she’s definitely a healthy female mammal. Not a samurai or lensman herself, though, and no sign of glasses or a maid costume, but it’s still more progress than I expected. There is a gender-ambiguous pre-teen cat-person in the story, listed as one of Cat’s younger siblings (presumably an adopted Vegian), but without actually reading the book, I can’t count that one as a loli catgirl yet.]

Oh, katakana word for the day: スペオペ.

[and this picture is just too cute for words…]

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Please do not give Clyde Calwell any future cover-art work. Or, at the very least, give him a description of the main character beyond “lives in cool-looking city, female, long dark hair, spends time on rooftops”.

I say this because I’ve been reading PC Hodgell’s novels since 1982, and the chick on the cover of The God Stalker Chronicles ain’t Jame.

I’ll have to scan in the cover of my battered old first-edition paperback, because that is Jame.

I recently read the two new pre-Ringworld Known Space novels by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds. Very short summary: Fleet was pretty good, Juggler less so.

The big difference: Fleet is a standalone novel set in Known Space. If you have a vague memory of Ringworld and the short stories, you’ll be fine. Juggler, on the other hand, is not only a direct sequel to Fleet, but also to more than a dozen Known Space short stories (including everything in Crashlander), which are air-dropped into the story at seemingly random intervals. The “big surprise” is also so poorly handled that for several chapters you can’t be sure that a major character wasn’t just another reference. On the plus side, it gives a faint nod to the old “down in flames” story idea, which was more fun than most of the backstage views of decades-old stories.

I’ve read all of the Known Space stories several times, so I got most of the references, but the secret history of the secret history of Beowulf Shaeffer just got tiresome after a while, and it took up space that would have been better spent expanding on the interesting new characters who were the focus of Fleet. They’re pretty much reduced to spear-carriers in Juggler.

Fleet stands alone quite nicely, and adds some real depth to the Puppeteers, both individually and as a race. I didn’t dislike Juggler, but I doubt I’ll reread it.

Harry Dresden is a rather unconventional wizard, in a rather decent set of urban fantasy/detective novels. He has no significant connection to Japan, and indeed his magic is very strongly Western in origin.

So where did the glowing runes on his staff come from?

The paperback edition of Dead Beat doesn’t seem to name the cover artist anywhere, but whoever it was decided that the English loanword マトリックス (“matrix”) made a dandy set of runes.

[oh, and I just noticed that Amazon has a new “Amapedia” site…]

It’s not a bad collection of sci-fi babes, but I’m not the only one who choked on this line about Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:

One of the main plot points of Heinlein’s original novel was that all the experienced officers were killed off, leaving only the kids in charge.

What are they teaching kids in school these days?