It's Spademan, Spademan All the Time!

Crows in the trees across the street, huddled up in the cold.

Sunrise was at 7:56, sunset will be at 4:38 pm.  Tomorrow!  Sunrise will occur one minute earlier than today, tomorrow we will have 1:42 more daylight than today.  Sunrise will happen at 7:55!  Calloo Callay!  I've loved walking to work in the dark, last week I got off the ferry in Bainbridge and IT WAS STILL DARK!  It feels so special to be out at that time of day- if you've ever worked the graveyard shift you know it's different, the people are different, quieter, the very air is different from what those who work in daylight hours experience.  We notice the wind pick up as the sun rises - some people never feel that happen.  I'll miss the dark when it's daylight as the alarm goes off.  But the earth will keep spinning and it will happen all over again.


I LOVE science fiction, speculative fiction, anything that takes our current time and knowledge and uses it to change what we expect the future to be.  Science fiction takes what we know now and expands it into the far future, mostly skipping all the in-between years inventing the various things we need to survive a changed world, enough time to evolve into different beings, time to move off our earth.  Science fiction expands where we are to where we will be.

Speculative fiction moves us only slightly into the future - our world, us, we are still recognizable, things have changed just enough to still be familiar but different enough to feel wrong.  I really like reading about these shorter jumps into the future, you can trace the journey we would take to get to the point where these stories take place. 

50 years ago, Fahrenheit 451 might have been science fiction, now it’s speculative: we have walls of television screens and are able to interact with the actors.  It’s only a matter of time before we can live and work, alone, sustained by outside forces called for by punching only a few buttons…oh, wait, sorry, already there! Green trucks full of groceries, brown trucks full of everything else.

Adam Sternbergh’s series about a massively damaged New York City is a great look at how a single, admittedly huge, disaster can change the course of the future.

A few years from now, a dirty bomb was dropped in Times Square and a series of bombs were released in the subways and on the bridges severing Manhattan from the rest of the city.  Millions were killed in the fallout over the years and thousands were killed and left buried in the rubble under the cities, many more died as the infrastructure fell apart.  The wealthy “tap in” to a virtual reality that takes them away from a ravaged world, nurses caring for their physical needs, others tap in as they can afford it.  The Limnosphere is addictive and insidious, you can get anything in there.  If you have the money.

Out of the destruction comes Spademan, a garbageman before the events, a hitman after.  To Spademan, garbage is garbage is garbage, give him a name, he will take it out to the curb.  This way of life works well for him since he doesn’t have anything else to lose, his wife died in the bombings, he spent way too much time in the limnosphere, he drinks too much – after he pulled himself out of despair, he decided to keep the streets clean in his own special way.  He asks no questions, he just doesn’t care.  Until his latest client points him at the daughter of an evangelical preacher.  Obviously, she’s done something Daddy can’t abide so she has to go missing. 

I LOVE this very noir mystery series set in the near future.  Spademan’s world is pretty well contained within the greater Manhattan area, the lack of complete bridges keeps most of the action on the island, so the world building (un-building?) feels true and pretty darned creepy and the Limnosphere is a really cool, but really scary, invention.  We already know what virtual reality is like, we know that people spend a lot of time in games, but what if you could design a world so much better than anything outside your head, you never wanted to leave?  Business is conducted, beautiful people are your friends, you can do whatever you want in the Limnosphere, including murder.

With Shovel Ready and Near Enemy, Adam Sternbergh has created a very dark world with an anti-hero we will all want to believe in.  

(Book number one is Shovel Ready, available now in paperback.  $14.00.  Book number two is Near Enemy, available January 13, 2015, in hardcover for $24.00. I don’t know when number three will be available, but I want it NOW!  Random House publishes these books under the imprints of Broadway Books and Crown Publishing.)

As always, you can give us a call, come by, or go to http://www.eagleharborbooks.com/Eagle Harbor Book Company’s website to get copies of any of these books.  We are happy to keep you in reading material!

Paul Doiron, Marie Lu: Trespasser and Legend

Sunrise at 71:9 , sunset at 5:29. Stormy tonight, windy and rainy. The sun's going down and there is a strip of clear, lemony light between the Olympics and the rest of the sky. The lights have been flickering and the radio's done that static-y thing that scares the bird. The rain is pummeling the windows.

It's been a long couple of reading days and night. Yesterday was the first day of my weekend, tomorrow's the first day of the next week.

I got up early and took D to the doctor and then to work; I love the drive back down Rainier Avenue South toward home, anchored in the way, way south by Mount Rainier. Every so often, mostly when the air is clear, I can feel the gravitational pull of having something that big at the southern horizon. It is the horizon.

Once, years ago, my friend Jo and I got off the bus in Banff, long before daylight, probably around 4 am, and spent the hours waiting for morning just wandering around looking in windows and deciding where to eat when things opened up. Just as the sky began to lighten, I got really dizzy. It felt like I was walking with a decided lean. When we could finally actually discern the difference between the sky and everything else, I realized that I must have felt the absolute massiveness of the mountain that loomed over the place we were in. It felt like the world had tipped a bit, the mountain was so big and straight up that, even though I thought I was standing upright, I was actually leaning at a slight angle to make the sidewalk seem flat. Bizarre. I think that was the first time that I realized that mass has pull.

I read off and on all day yesterday. It was a good day. I watched the Food Channel (Jamie Oliver is my very FAVORITE!), surfed through old photos, and read.

I absolutely loved Paul Doiron's next book in his series about Mike Bowditch, Maine State Game Warden, Trespasser. Trespasser is about a young game warden dealing with all the crap of trying to hold a relationship together while investigating the disappearance of a woman who hit a deer and then left her car. Great descriptions of the Maine woods in the middle of winter, great descriptions of the Maine folk who live on the edges of those woods and on the edges of society.

The first book in the series is The Poacher's Son. It is still only in hardcover (and well worth the money, in my opinion) but will be available in paper in April, 2011. Trespasser will be out in June. (Minotaur Books. $24.99)

I got to meet Paul at an author dinner here in Seattle last year. Good food, good company, good wine, good book, and then he wolf howled on the corner of 4th and Virginia. Absolutely fabulous night.

I finished Trespasser at midnight and was still not too sleepy so, quietly and with great stealth since every floor in our house squeaks, went into the next room to rummage through the stash of Winter Institute books that I have squirreled away. I found Legend, by Marie Lu.

Legend is a huge deal at Penguin. They rushed out a Special ABA Winter Institute Edition, bound in shiny black paper, with an exciting paragraph on the cover. Sometimes you have to kind of laugh about the serious discussions that people have about the books they are selling us. As booksellers, we hear SO many intense descriptions about certain kinds of books that they all begin to sound alike. And right now, anything that is in anyway about the future world, and not a particularly nice view of the world, is described as a little like Hunger Games, but with a twist. It isn't a very good way to get started with a book that should be read with new eyes.

It is a really good book; great characters, great themes, not so much a utopia gone wrong as a world in decline. It's the story of Day, a boy with issues, smart, caring, and worried about the health of his family. He's also on the run, the government's been looking for him, as he's been taking from the rich and giving to the poor. He's also supposed to be dead. Most of the poor have different versions of plague and he's been secretly stealing money and medicine to help his family.

It's also about June, a wealthy 15 year-old girl who has perfect scores, the highest scores on the youngest person ever allowed to join the military. Her brother has been training her to be the best officer ever, and it seems that most of their time is spent checking to see who hast he plague and looking for Day.

One fateful night, June and Day's worlds collide and their lives will never be the same.

Great read for everyone. It's exciting, well-written, sad and hopeful. I am really looking forward to telling everyone about it when it's published in NOVEMBER! AND it has to be a series because there are certain things in the story that aren't resolved. It ends in such a way that it could be finished, but I hope it does go on! Age 11 and up. (Penguin. Due November '11. $17.99.)