Rocky IV Part II?

Okay, so Vladimir Putin -- as in Russian President Vladimir Putin -- has just been awarded a ninth-degree black belt in taekwondo. That means Grand Master Putin now outranks Chuck Norris. I swear I am not making this up; here’s the article from the BBC.

Obviously Chuck can’t take this lying down. I can’t help but think of Rocky IV, where Rocky Balboa goes to fight the pride of the Soviet Union, Ivan Drago. And like Drago, Putin has considerable combat training, including a black belt in judo. (Here’s a video clip from the DVD with the best title ever, Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin.)

Unlike Drago, Vladimir Putin is not a roid monster and has never beaten Carl Weathers to death. But as you can see in these images, both men employ the same Soviet supersoldier stretching techniques.

I can only hope that Chuck Norris is in a barn in Siberia right now, doing Pilates or running through the snow with a tree trunk on his back. Preferably with Survivor singing some kind of training montage song. That’s what it will take for an aging underdog fighter with a lowly eighth dan to defeat one of the most powerful men in the world. After that, maybe Putin can be the bad guy in The Expendables 3.

Happy Pub Day!

Only A Shadow comes out in audiobook format today! I’m excited to listen to it; this one has a new narrator I haven’t heard before.

By the way, thanks to everyone who came out to Barnes & Noble about a week ago. I’ve just scheduled the next public event of Year of the Demon. I’ll be doing a reading at 3:30 on December 9th in Milne Library, which is located on the campus of SUNY-Geneseo. The event is not limited to Geneseo students only, and in fact if you’re not a student, staff member, or faculty member at Geneseo, you get really good parking spots. So if you’re in that neck of the woods on the afternoon of the 9th, please do stop by.

Milne is also hosting a Celebrate Geneseo Authors event on November 20th. Guests of honor are all those Geneseo scholars who have published academic work in the last year. (Some 50 faculty and more than 30 students!) I’ll be there because of Compassion and Moral Guidance, not for the Fated Blades.

I highly recommend the event to everyone who likes university life and to everyone who likes dessert. Last year’s cookie tray was to die for.

Year of the Demon's first public event!

I’m happy to announce the first public event celebrating the release of Year of the Demon. I’m doing a reading and signing in Rochester, Minnesota, at the Barnes & Noble in Apache Mall. If you’re in the area, it would be great to see you. Last year I autographed someone’s baby. I don’t know how we’re going to top that this year, but let’s give it a shot!

Come on down to Barnes & Noble on Saturday, November 2, starting at 3:00. I’ll sign your book, your offspring, or... well, we’ll see, won’t we?

Samurai vs. Knight?

Historians, medieval re-enactors, and D&D players have been wondering about this one for a long time: who would win in a one-on-one fight, the samurai or the knight in shining armor? At long last, someone with credibility as a swordsman and historian of sword combat has dared to speculate. Here is John Clement’s take on the subject.

And while you’re at it, click here check out his analysis of the katana compared to the fencing sword.

Gravity

So far I’ve been unimpressed with Hollywood’s movement toward 3D movies. The 3D effects spoil my suspense of disbelief much more often than they suck me in to the story. Thor throws his hammer at a giant and all of a sudden it’s coming at me, knocking me right out of the world of the film and back into my seat in the theater. Illusion shattered. Magic dispelled.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked Thor. I just didn’t like it in 3D. As near as I can tell, there are only two directors who understand what the 3D tech is for: Werner Herzog and Alfonso Cuarón.

Cuarón’s Gravity opens with a 17-minute single take, panning from the Earth to a space station to the astronauts space-walking around it, a shot that The Onion’s A.V. Club calls “one of the great feats of modern special effects.” That’s a bold claim if ever there was one, but I’ve got to say it’s the most memorable single take since the iconic opening shot of Star Wars.

I adore this movie. Not everyone will. A certain cynic who is very close to me summed up the plot as, “Bad things keep happening to Sandra Bullock.” That’s not altogether wrong (though I’d point out that it’s pretty hard to tell a good story if nothing bad happens to your protagonist). But in the case of Gravity, it’s not just bad things; it’s jaw-dropping special effects that -- because Cuarón actually understands what 3D is for -- feel completely real.

And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? To draw us in so deeply that we forget we’re sitting in a theater? Gravity will do that for you. See this one on the biggest screen you can get to.

Happy Pub Day!

Happy Pub Day! Year of the Demon hits shelves today, and I’m pleased to say it has been meeting with some very nice reviews. All Things Urban Fantasy called it “excellent” and likened my work to that of James Clavell -- the highest of high praise, in my opinion, because Clavell is one of my all-time favorites. (The reviewer’s too. Good taste, ATUF!)

This reviewer made one comment that I found especially flattering, despite the fact that technically it’s a warning against reading my novels:

Since I’m writing this review for All Things Urban Fantasy I almost feel as if I should warn folks that this is very much not your typical urban fantasy. The magic in this world is ancient and subtle and very much not front and center like most novels of the genre. I hope that doesn’t scare off curious readers because that is very much a good thing. In a field that lends itself so often to copycat rehash novels of whatever trope is currently popular it is fantastic to find a novel that doesn’t use any of them.

So yeah, no fireball spells illuminating the streets of Tokyo. You’ll have to live with LEDs and neon. But I think there’s enough action front and center to keep you turning pages while that ancient, subtle magic does its thing.

More Fated Blades!

I’m very happy to report that I’ve closed a deal with Roc for the third book in the Fated Blades series. Also, it’s official that Year of the Demon will be released in mass market paperback in the fall of 2014 -- timed to herald the release of the third book in the series, no doubt. More swordplay for all!

So I kinda forgot what country I'm in...

This weekend I decided to re-read Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE. The first time I read this book, I decided that if I ever teach a fiction writing class, this will be the textbook on rising stakes. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It starts off nice and slow -- almost boring. You meet some interesting characters. They draw you in. Then things get swiftly worse for them. It becomes a study in what Donald Maass calls “microtension”: line by line, page by page, you’re drawn along. And since you’re so caught up in it, you figure you know what the book is about.

Then, in one line -- my Kindle tells me 27% of the way through -- everything changes. Personal stakes become global. Every character you thought was embroiled in an unholy shitstorm turns out to be in the eye of that storm. As bad as things have been getting -- and they’ve been getting worse from one page to the next -- they all look easy compared to what happens next. By 30% everything is much, much worse, and the tension keeps mounting from there.

But here’s what really got me today. I’m flying to from Rochester Minnesota to Rochester, New York -- small airports, so small planes, much like the planes Stephenson’s characters have been flying around in. Some of these characters have flown to Xiamen, a tiny island off the coast of Taiwan. Stephenson goes in to loving detail describing the urban sprawl, so much so that when I got off my plane, and got onto the highway, I was surprised to see all the signs and billboards and license plates in English. Some part of my brain expected to see them in Chinese.

A great book can make me forget where I am for a while, but that doesn’t take me into the book itself; it just makes me forget that I’m in my hammock, that I’m thirsty, that I’ve been cultivating a kink in my neck for a few hours. I’m transported, but I’m transported to nowhere -- outside of my body, away from everything other than reading. I don’t know that a book has ever transported me so completely that I forgot what continent I’m on.

So yeah, read REAMDE.

This just in

I had two big boxes waiting for me on my doorstep today. I knew what they were the instant I saw them: my copies of Year of the Demon, hot off the press. They look spectacular -- and of course you can have yours the day it comes out if you pre-order it now.

Daughter is back, with a Demon on her heels!

Daughter of the Sword hits shelves today, this time in mass market paperback. Especially exciting for me -- and maybe for you, too -- is the fact that your first glimpse of Year of the Demon hits the shelves at the same time. Look at the very end of the new Daughter and you’ll find the first chapter of Year of the Demon.

RIP Frederik Pohl (1919-2013)

We lost another luminary of the Golden Age of science fiction. Frederik Pohl died today, and up until yesterday he was still writing.



For those who don’t know the name, Pohl was a contemporary of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke -- you know, the people who made science fiction. Not to take anything away from guys like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells; they’re the giants whose shoulders we stand on. But it was the Golden Age writers who brought us flyer saucers and intelligent robots and guns that go pew pew pew!

I had the good fortune to be on a panel with Pohl -- my first panel as a sci fi/fantasy writer, in fact, and it was a humbling experience to say the least. I was sitting next to Nnedi Okorafor, who like me had recently won the Writers of the Future contest, and unlike me already had a novel to show for it. Next to her sat Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, who at that point had published something like 100 novels between the two of them. And then, at the far end of the table, sat The Man Himself.

I worked up the courage to talk to him, but I was so nervous that now I can’t remember what we talked about. At the time I was thinking, “Why did they put me on this panel? What am I doing here?” Now I know: I was there so that ten years later I could look back and say to myself, “Dude, you were in the same room as Frederik Pohl.”

RT says it "excels wildest expectations!"

Year of the Demon just collected its second review, this time from RT Book Reviews. Their verdict:

What readers get in Bein’s second novel is not one, but three stories that alternate between different time periods. Bein excels beyond any history lover’s wildest imagination with exceptionally researched, vivid descriptions of ancient Japan. Japanese social norms, both past and present, are broken down in order to deliver memorable protagonists that push against the boundaries of their eras. (RT Book Reviews October 2013)

Thanks to Elisa Verna for such a flattering review, and for the short interview that followed it. (I’ll post a link to that when I can.)

Elysium: Best SF film of the year?

I saw Elysium last night, and I was totally blown away. Neill Blomkamp does not disappoint. I don’t use this comparison often, but this film is in the same vein as Blade Runner.

The last time I compared a movie to Blade Runner, it was Blomkamp’s District 9, which to my mind remains one of the best SF films of the modern era. So to say that Elysium isn’t quite as good as District 9 is no insult; movies that good only come around once every five or ten years. Like District 9, Children of Men, and Blade Runner, Elysium gives us a world so gritty that you almost feel you have to wash up. The CGI is seamless, but more than this, the visual effects are fully real because so much thought has been devoted to how technology has advanced in this bright-and-dark future.

So why are the critics panning this film? I just don’t get it. It’s true that Elysium is another expression of Blomkamp’s fascination with the interplay of the haves and have-nots, but who cares, so long as the interplay is engaging? Sharlto Copley’s character may be a reprisal of the rogue mercenary sociopath in District 9, but at least it’s Copley we get to see reprising the role. He’s brilliant. This isn’t a knock-off, it isn’t a brainless summer action flick, and it certainly isn’t “another X-Box allegory” as it was dubbed by The Onion’s AV Club (still my favorite source of movie reviews, though I think they got this one all wrong).

As a superhero movie guy, I had a great summer: Iron Man 3 was fun, The Wolverine was better, and Man of Steel knocked my socks off. People don’t seem to think of them this way, but all three of those are sci-fi films, and so it’s a big deal for Elysium to blow them out of the water. I haven’t seen Europa Report yet, and I’ve got high hopes for it, but at this point Elysium is my top sci-fi film of the year.

PW calls it a "gripping follow-up!"

Year of the Demon just collected its first review, and it’s a good one:

In this gripping follow-up to 2012’s Daughter of the Sword, Tokyo police officer Oshiro Mariko is now working in the Narcotics division. In the aftermath of a raid, an ancient mask is stolen, and its Yakuza owner demands that Mariko retrieve it. Her search for the mask leads her to a cult with a deadly agenda and a centuries-old mystery connected to the legendary sword she now possesses. Extensive flashbacks to the lives of two historical characters—Daigoro, a 16th-century lord who wielded Mariko’s sword, and Kaida, a 15th-century one-armed pearl diver forced to contend with ruthless mercenaries—further expand the story, essentially making it three books in one. Bein combines the best parts of police procedurals, buddy-cop films, historical fantasy, and intrigue-laden adventure, enhancing them with painstaking research and attention to atmosphere. Despite all the action, this middle volume feels incomplete, but all three stories promise to wrap up in gripping style.

Thanks, Publishers Weekly! (Click here for the original text.) And thanks also to my partner, Michele, for pointing out that this is probably the first time “painstaking research” and “buddy-cop films” have ever been used in the same sentence!

Ninja role model

I finally got out to see The Wolverine--and I say finally because this is the movie I had hoped for from the very beginning of Wolverine’s film career. I’m a huge Frank Miller fan, and for me the best Wolverine story ever told is the Frank Miller/Chris Claremont series set in Japan. Logan as fallen samurai is much more interesting than Logan as pissed-off guy killing stuff. So tonight I finally got to see the movie that I should have been first in line to see last Friday, and I finally got to see the movie I wanted to see the last time Wolverine was in theaters four years ago.

Now I’m wondering exactly how influential Frank Miller has been in my writing. Yes, Wolverine’s girlfriend’s name is Mariko, and yes, my Mariko is named Mariko. That much was a deliberate tribute; I named my Mariko after Frank’s. (Incidentally, I loved Tao Okamoto as Mariko Yashida, but if they were filming the Fated Blades books today, I’d cast Pacific Rim’s Rinko Kikuchi. For one thing, at 5’9” Okamoto is much too tall to play my Mariko, but more importantly, Kikuchi was a shoo-in as soon as she started whupping ass with a bo staff.)

Now that I think about it, I’m realizing that my favorite comics growing up weren’t my favorites because Frank Miller wrote them. Early on, I only followed the characters, not the people who wrote and drew them. Frank’s books were my favorites because they were the ninja and samurai stories. For example, here’s the cover from Daredevil issue 189:

Not many covers stick with me from way back when. I remember this one because I read this issue over and over. The plot was pretty straightforward: Daredevil, his ninja girlfriend, his ninja master, and their ninja buddies duke it out with a few hundred ninjas. Textbook Miller. (I’ll give you a spoiler about The Wolverine: Logan throws down with a few hundred ninjas.)

By the time I was in high school, I knew that if Frank Miller’s name was on it, it was going to be a good book. Today I can see that the young Frank Miller was deeply infatuated with Japanese culture--and let’s not kid ourselves: especially Japanese martial culture--and that this fascination informed a lot of his writing. But the other thing I’m seeing is that my own fascination with Japan was fueled at least in part by Miller’s. I love ninja and samurai stories, and I started reading them around fourth and fifth grade--right when I was also getting plenty of Batman and Wolverine and Daredevil, all of whom are at their best after they get samurized and ninjized by Frank Miller.

Probably the best thing about being a writer in the 21st century

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I was one of those writers who could sit down in the local coffee shop, overhear a snippet of a conversation, and write a story about it. A cup of coffee is a whole lot cheaper than a flight to Japan. But no, I had to set my novels halfway across the planet.

Since I can’t afford to fly back to Tokyo every time I want to get a specific detail just right, every day I thank my lucky stars that I’m writing in the Silicon Age. Generally speaking, I’m a major technophobe, but I’ve got to admit there are a lot of handy sites out there if you want to find out what color the floor tiles are in a particular Yokohama subway station, or how many miles it is from Hakone to Kyoto on the Tokaido Road.

If you’re like the great majority of my readers, you haven’t been to Japan, you don’t know much about Japanese history, and your Japanese vocabulary goes about as far as Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto. Since I find Japanese culture utterly fascinating, and since maybe you do too, and since I spend a lot of time googling this sort of thing anyway, I thought I’d compile some of my favorite web pages on this site. You’ll find them on the new Links page.

Star Trek meets BisQuik

So it’s Sunday morning, and at my place that means pancakes. Truth to tell, I’ll take any excuse to eat pancakes. I could eat them at least seven times a week and never get sick of them. But I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed. Not by any stretch of the imagination, as a guy named Nathan Shields will soon prove to you.

Today is also May 12, and that means the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek film comes out this week. I’m not a Trekkie. Truth to tell, the only reason I know anything about Star Trek is that some of my best friends in college were Trekkies, and if you spend a lot of days hanging out with a Star Trek episode playing in the background, you sort of learn the stuff through osmosis. So I get all the Shatner jokes, but I’m not obsessed. Not like Mr. Shields.

At first glance, I thought these were poor line drawings, maybe with a leaky brown marker. Nope. They’re pancakes. My man Nathan Shields makes them for his kids for breakfast. And not just Star Trek. This was just a random one-off thing. He makes Leonardo da Vinci pancakes on Leonardo’s birthday, and Charles Darwin pancakes on Darwin’s birthday. He does Angry Birds pancakes and then flings them at his children. He does animals, animal footprints, even animal droppings. He even makes three-dimensional structures.

How can you not love this man? Check out the rest of his work here. I have only one complaint: his Dr. Seuss pancake (made for Dr. Seuss’s birthday, of course) does not come with a side order of green eggs and ham.

Time travel, anyone?

Very good news on the publishing front this week! I got an e-mail from Ann VanderMeer, who with her husband Jeff is editing a new anthology called The Time Traveler’s Almanac. Look up Jeff and Ann VanderMeer online and you will find that these two have produced one successful volume after another, with short stories from some of my very favorite writers in sci-fi and fantasy.

So that means the Ann VanderMeer e-mailed me the other day to tell me she’d like to include my short story, “The Most Important Thing in the World,” in The Time Traveler’s Almanac. This is a really big deal for me. For one thing, it’s my first reprint. But more importantly, it means I’ll share a table of contents with some of the biggest names in the field. We’re talking Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, people like that. People who have to worry about having pigeon poop on their shoulders, because, y’know, they’re monuments.

Prior to this, my only claim to membership in these circles was that in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America member registry, I was on the same page as Arthur C. Clarke. This is a pretty big step up from that. The VanderMeers have described this anthology as “the ultimate treasury of time travel stories,” and lo and behold, one of my stories is going into the treasure chest. Woo hoo!

Why Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are even cooler than we remember them

Today is the 60th anniversary of the first human footprints set on the summit of Mount Everest. Today so many people climb Everest that if you wanted to set a new record, you’d have to do something like the first naked snowboard descent on a Tuesday. Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but not by much: this year’s record was for climbing Everest twice in one week.

Reinhold Messner, who is The Man, said that all the advancements in climbing gear over the last few decades amounts to “the murder of the impossible.” I’m of two minds on this. Part of me cheers when we redefine the limits of what’s possible. I’ve done it in my own life. (I’m a skinny nerd with no innate athleticism. Finishing grad school was on the list of what’s possible for Steve to do. Earning a black belt wasn’t. Earning black belts in combative arts that involve a whole lot of full-contact fighting sure as hell wasn’t. And of course technology has redefined what’s possible many times over. My mom survived breast cancer because we can do what used to be impossible.

But I teach bioethics too, and so I read a lot about it, and much of what I read scares the bejeezus out of me. It’s not beyond our capabilities to design a baby to be a better martial artist. I’m serious. Read up on gene therapy. The debate for a lot of people -- maybe even the majority -- isn’t whether we should tinker with our babies’ DNA, but rather to what extent.

I have no answers to those questions, but a big part of me is sympathetic to Messner’s position. Maybe some impossibilities shouldn’t be killed off. In any case, on the 60th anniversary of their historic climb, I thought I’d share this narrated slideshow about why Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s accomplishment was a hell of a lot harder in their day than it is in mine. Today you’d be insane to climb with the kind of gear they were using then.

Do I finally get my jetpack?

It’s about damn time! Ever since kindergarten, people have been promising me a jetpack. Granted, those were cartoon people, but still. Marvin the Martian had some sweet rides, and Tex Avery’s “Cars of Tomorrow” made it pretty clear that by the time I was old enough to drive, I’d be able to fly. I mean, Elroy Jetson was a putz, and even he had a jetpack.

Well, at long last, they’re finally making progress on anti-grav technology. I don’t understand what took them this long, but I’m glad that engineering professors the world over are finally taking Mr. Avery a little more seriously. CERN’s lab seems to have a leg up, but might I suggest to the good people at Suzuki that while I enjoy my V-Strom very much, I’d be even happier on that kick-ass hoverbike in the beginning of Star Trek.

Props to artist Johnny Eaves for the cycle sketches, and to the Smithsonian, which takes jetpacks so seriously that they have a 24-part series on the Jetsons. At the Smithsonian.