Award for Marusek translation, 2312

Together with Jasper Nicolaisen, I received the Kurd Lasswitz SF Award for our German translation of several Stories from David Marusek's collection Getting to Know You (published by Golkonda, German publisher of, among others, Ted Chiang, Paolo Bacigalupi, Joe Lansdale, K.J. Parker and Samuel R. Delany). These are great and beautifully written stories, and tranlating them was highly rewarding in itself - among the stories I translated was "We were out of our minds with joy", and it's one of my favourite short stories, period. It's wonderful not only to see our work reognized this way, but to see that we have been able to convey our enthusiasm for Marusek's writing.

http://www.kurd-lasswitz-preis.de/2012/KLP_2012_Beste_Uebersetzung_Laudatio.htm

Beyond that, translating Marusek also has been a door-opener - at the moment, I'm translating Kim Stanley Robinson' 2312 into German for Heyne. So basically, I'm getting paid for reading (and corresponding with) one of my favourite authors! That one will be followed by Brom's new novel Krampus, and if his The Child Thief is anything to go by, I'll have a blast translating it.

If life keeps treating me so well, I'll probably get spoiled ...

German authors: Markolf Hoffmann

This is the first of (hopefully) many articles about some of my favourite authors writing in German; most of them haven't been translated into English (yet), so if you don't speak German an feel that you absolutely have to read one of the books im writing about, you'll just have to find a publisher who's willing to translate them!

Further entries will (probably) be about Walter Moers, Gero Reimann, Karla Schmidt, Marcus Hammerschmitt and Jasper Nicolaisen.

I would like to say that I am a longtime fan of Markolf Hoffmanns books, but I actually only discovered him two or three years ago. His first Quadrilogy of fantasy novels is Das Zeitalter der Wandlung (The Age of Transformation), which comes across as one of many pseudo-medieval fantasies about a Chosen One who has to save the world from an Invasion of fearsome lizard creatures, but quickly becomes a complex tale about politics (think Game of Thrones), about the authoritarian core of the myth of the chosen (think China Mieville), about the malleability of mythological truth and about the double-edged human capacity to dominate nature. Even though The Age of Transformation is flawed (it is a first novel, or a first four novels, after all), I would still rate it the best work of post-tolkienesque High Fantasy written in the German language. Due to a somewhat troubled publishing history, however, the later volumes went pretty much unnoticed. It probably didn't help these are "difficult" books with complex and not always smpathetic main characters.

A few years ago, I got to know Markolf Hoffmann and 2011, I had the opportunity to publish a collection of his fantasy short fiction, Das Flüstern zwischen den Zweigen (The Whispering Between the Twigs). Most of these stories are about the problematic relationship between man and nature, and at the same time quite romantic as they are critical of pastoral romanticism. They are post-Tolkien in the truest sense, respectfully picking up Tolkiens ecological argument and turning it from it's head to it's feet. Their protagonists tend to end up in pretty gruesome moral dilemmas. Most of the stories are set in pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds with subtle, but noticeable elements of magic, with something bizarre bubbling up here and there and a good helping of dark and occassionally grisly humor. The best comparision might be Witcher stories by Andrzej Sapkowski.

Hoffmann's new novel, Ines öffnet die Tür (Ines Opens the Door), is a YA book about a girl that inherits a secret room from her grandmother, the door of which, unseen by others, follows her everywhere. Once appropriated, the room grants certain types of wishes. However, not only is it situated within an impenetrable fog which is said to hide dangerous secrets, there's also an old magician who has been collecting rooms like this for centuries and who is now on Ines heels ...
Ines öffnet die Tür is an old-fashioned YA-book: There is an element of suspense, but it does not have the frantic pace or over-the-top violence and action elements of The Hunger Games or The Knife of Never Letting Go (the latter of which I consider one of the best YA books in recent years). There also is a teenage romance, but it has nothing in common with the hystericism of Twilight - it is firmly situated within the mundane world and has nothing to do with Ines' discovery of the magical room beyond the door, and when romance and magic finally intermingle, it means nothing but trouble and disappointment. The romance aspect is handled quite believable, because first love plays an important role in the life of 13-years old Ines, but certainly not the most important role. Her relationship to her parents, the sudden disappearance of her grandmother, her best friend Sonja - in the end, all of this means much more to Ines than one good-looking guy.
While all of this gives Hoffmann's characters a pleasant sense of authenticity and believability, it also makes the book feel a little tame. The story and the mystery of Ines öffnet die Tür are well thought-through, the characters easy to grasp and yet not flat, and there is a good dose of quirky humor, but in the end, it feels as if Hoffmann was holding back. Maybe there will be a sequel (the ending would allow for it) that delivers that little something that seems to be missing.

The Alchemist, The Executioness and The Letdown

I was stoked with anticipation for Paolo Bacigalupi's foray into fantasy, the novella The Alchemist. Not only did I love most of his short fiction (strangely enough with the exception of „The Calorie Man“) and his novel The Windup Girl. Also, The Alchemist was to be published by Subterranean Press, and therefore became associated in my mind with another fantasy novella from that publisher, the excellent Purple and Black by K.J. Parker. It didn't hurt that The Alchemist comes paired with The Executioness, a novella by Tobias S. Buckell, an author I'd been planning to check out for some time.

As it turned out, neither of the two novellas did anything for me – I found both of them pretty uninspired and conventional, even irritating. While, on the surface, they seem to be ambitious and eager to broaden the scope of the fantasy genre, if you scratch that surface, you'll find little but well-worn tropes beneath it. That's not to say that either of the two novellas is bad – the stories are both more or less well-told and well-constructed. They are just not very good, and certainly not what one would have expected by an author like Bacigalupi (I can't say anything about Buckell, because I haven't read anything else by him yet), and they are certainly not on par with fantasy works by authors like R. Scott Bakker, K.J. Parker or Jeff VanderMeer.

Here's the specifics on what bugged me about the novellas:

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Alchemist

In a world were each use of magic feeds the deadly bramble encroaching on the land, the executioner's axe awaits all unsanctioned sorcerers. But Jeoz, the title character of the novella, has found a non-magical way to kill the hardy bramble by using alchemy. However, when he presents his invention to the lords of the city of Khaim, they decide to put it to use in a perverse way …

The concept behind the world devised by Buckell and Bacigalupi actually has merit (although it is vaguely reminiscent of the Dungeons&Dragons RPG setting Dark Sun), especially insofar as neither of them is using it to shove any platitudes along the lines of „magic (i.e. Technology) is bald because it disturbs the balance of nature“ down the reader's throats. Instead we get the next-best platitude, namely that inventors may have the best intentions, but they can't control the use that powermongers will put their inventions to. There's nothing wrong about this concept, but it is pretty tiresome if it is presented as shocking twist about halfway into a story, when you actually can see it coming from page one.

There's a more interesting conflict in The Alchemist, about taking part in some greater evil by committing small and necessary sins, and about the injustice of of punishing the small sinner when the great sinner is the one dealing out the punishment. However, Bacigalupi makes little of this concepts except trying to convince us that the people in power are evil and sadistic.

All this would be forgiveable, if The Alechemist was not an exceedingly melodramatic novella. Bacigalupi gives Jeoz a terminally ill but heart-warmingly couragous littel daughter, whose suffering is clearly a blunt device to choke the reader up, but provides no sense of the ugly reality of sickness and fear of death. Add the fact that Jeoz, while commiting a few small sins, is clearly a blameless man pushed around by evil powermongers, and the character of his loyal housekeeper who also happens to love him unconditionally, and you have to ask yourself how so much mawkishness can come from the author of The Windup Girl.

As a fantasy reader, I feel vaguely insulted by The Alchemist. It feels as if Bacugalupi is slumming, as if he thinks that in fantasy, he can get away with lazy characterisations, half-baked world-building and cheap melodramatics. I'm pretty sure that I'm overreacting and that that was not Bacigalupi's intention at all, but at the very least I have to say that The Alchemist is by far his weakest work yet.

Tobias S. Buckell - The Executioness

My reaction to the second novella set in the same world as The Alchemist wasn't that strong. The Executioness is an ironic take on classical fantasy notions of heroism, but it's notions about the nature of heroism as something imposed from the outside are pretty conventional. Tana, the protagonist, is a simple women who dons the axe and the cloak of her father, an executioner, and leaves her home to save her children who have been abducted by raiders. Reluctantly, she takes on the role of a symbol of courage in the fight against an enemy who kidnaps children to reeducate them, even though she accomplishes most of her heroic deeds by accident. Buckell goes through the standard motions of de- and reconstructing heroism - Tana is not a great warrior at all, but it is her reluctance to accept her role that marks her as a true hero of the people. In the end, she finds out that the enemy might not be that wicked after all and that being a symbol might put her in a position that keeps her from fulfilling her personal goals. It's all pretty much by the numbers and occasionally preachy. What's worse is that, while the foreword implies that Buckell was trying to write a vaguely feminist fantasy novella by choosing a middle-aged female protagonist, there's actually a pretty disturbing kind of sexism at work in it, implying that while men fight for money and glory, women fight for their families.

Finally, Buckell's prose style is serviceable but just not very interesting or engaging. In the end, The Executioness is only slightly more successful than The Alechemist because it aims a little lower.

By the way, Subterranean Press made up for these two novellas by publishing K.J. Parkers new novella Blue & Gold, which is thematically similar to The Alchemist, but much more complex, surprising, engaging, funny and well-written. Maybe part of the reason that I'm coming down so hard on Bacigalupi and Buckell is that I've read a lot of Parker's stuff in the last few weeks (The Folding Knife, The Hammer, Blue & Gold and "Amor Vincit Omnia"). It's hard to top Parker when it comes to writing about scientific genius, accidental heroism and good intentions paving the road to hell. Bacigalupi and Buckell are obviously not up to it, at least not when they're writing fantasy.

Short Update

Reading: Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany. Hard work, but worthwile.
Also Reading: Wenn das der Führer wusste (translated into English as The Twilight Men), depressing and hilarious.

Published: Short Story "Die betrübte Strahlenkanone" ("The Aggrieved Ray Gun") in Hinterland, an anthology of 20 fantasy/sf stories inspired by David Bowie. More about that project soon - there's a German/English website with extracts in English.

Also published: Raumanzüge & Räuberpistolen (Spacesuits & Penny Dreadfuls), an anthology of nine fantasy/sf stories by me, Jasper Nicolaisen and Simon Weinert, all from our monthly reading at the lovely pub tristeza in Berlin, Neukölln. More soon.

Also published: "Im Himmel" ("In Heaven"), a Lovecraftian (or maybe Barronian, if there is such a word) short story, in Zwielicht 2, the second Horror anthology edited by Michael Schmidt. (despite having the same surname, we're not related.) More soon.

And soon to be published: A Hungarian translation of my short story "Auslese" ("Selection") at sfmag.hu. The first time one of my stories gets translated into another language! more (including a link) in January.

Yay - I wrote a blog post!

K.J. Parker Nightmares

I've just started reading "The Escapement", the last volume of K.J. Parkers brillantly wry and disturbing Engineer Trilogy. I'm planning to write an extemsive post on the trilogy, "The Company" and "Purple and Black" as soon as I finish reading "The Escapement". Until then, I just wanted to share that last night, I had a gruesome nightmare about the dangers of melting steel, which was a direct lift from "The Escapement". I had to make a steel rod with a machine that melted metal down to a clear, ultra-hot, water-like fluid which burned its way straight through the two-inch-piece of wood that I tried to catch it with. Obviously, I must have done something wrong, and I ended up all mutilated by hot, spattering metal for it ...
Just to give an impression of the strong effect these amazing books have on me!

Laird Barron, Occultation

A couple of weeks ago, Laird Barron was so extraordinarily kind to let me have an advance look at his second story collection, Occultation. I noticed his first collection, the Imago Sequence, when visiting Judith and John Clute at their beautiful home in London in 2007 (great eerie cover art by Eleni Tsami!), and I just knew I wanted it. When I finally got my hands on the TPB edition, it pretty much made me an instant fan and forced me to buy a bunch of Horror anthologies (most of them edited by Ellen Datlow) to get my hands on more Barron stuff, which lead to me reading the work of a bunch of other authors included in these anthologies, which lead to buying more of their stuff ... to put it shortly, Barron's stories forced me to re-discover modern horror, which has become quite an expensive undertaking. (Thanks a lot!)

If you've already read The Imago Sequence, you can probably skip right to my review of Occultation in the next paragraph. If not: Imago contains nine stories, most of them rather long and rather scary. Thematically, most of these are pretty straightforward horror stories in a Lovecraftian tradition, but without any Cthulhu-Myth trappings. Also, while the motives are similar to the Cosmic Horror of the later Lovecraft stories, Barron has a totally different style. His imagery is vivid, but often created by short, slightly psychedelic flashes - moments of sudden, intense escalation. These stories are shocking not because they are drastic (although a lot of them are drastic), but because of the way in which reality becomes unhinged for a moment, never quite recovering. One story in Imago, "The Procession of the Black Sloth", is a sublime series of these types of concussive shocks. After each one, the world has more trouble realigning, until the protagonists physically and psychically disintegrate along with their worlds.
The process of the desintegration of the protagonist is the process of the stories in Imago: Most of them are propelled by drugs, alcohol and psychological stress, held together only by their self-destructive momentum. They are falling apart (sometimes literally) from the first page. "Black Sloth" and "Hallucigenia" are the most relentless stories in this regard, and the latter is also a central piece in the horror mythology that spans some (though not all) of Barrons stories.

While several stories in Occulation are pretty much in the same vein as the ones in Imago Sequence, he also shakes some stuff up with his second collection. And while occassionally, I feel that this diminishes the disturbing effect, it must be said that Occultation is a more diverse and even more impressive collection overall.
The two most haunting pieces are "The Lagerstätte" and "Strappado". In both cases, Barron concentrates on the psychological desintegration of his protagonists but strips away most or even all of the supernatural elements he employed in The Imago Sequence. Both are relatively short and highly intense and deal with survivor's guilt.
In "Strappado" the protagonist is on a business trip in India when he runs into a an ex-lover, and both take the opportunity to renew their acquaintance. The affair grants both of them temporary asylum from the emotionally draining environment that consists of European and American money people, who are conducting business by day and looking for short-lived kicks by night. Both of them join a bunch of these people on a small trip to an obscure and probably illegal performance art event, which turns out very ugly ... The most haunting thing about "Strappado" how it shows people that allow themselves to be victimized simply because they cannot acknowledge the reality of the situation they got in. It's all so unbelievable that the impending catastrophe seems like an illusion (and hence, there's no need to panic and make a scene), and at the same time, it all makes so much sense that the catastrophe seems inevitable (and hence, there's no point in resisting) - a true dialectic of terror ... The story doesn't put it that way (it works in far more subtle and striking ways), but it's all about the failure to deal with a situation that is impossible to deal with, and about how it irrevocably breaks the people involved.
It's been a while since I've read "The Lagerstätte", so I'll let it suffice to say that it felt very much like "Strappado", but that I remember it as a little less shaking.

Another truly great story that is more in the vein of the previous collection is "--30--", which is about two scientists and ex-lovers watching strange animal behaviour out in the wilderness. Nature is becoming abject in small ways and infecting humans. There's a highly disturbing, vaguely pornographic scene about tufts of wasps that I would really prefer not to dwell on ... The whole thing is not as psychologically complex as "Strappado", but it's shaking on a physical level, driving home the notion that man is a part of nature in one of the most disturbing ways imaginable. While it is unlike anything Lovecraft would have ever written, thematically it is pretty close to stories like The Shadow over Innsmouth.

Talking about Lovecraft, we have the very Whisperer-in-Darkness-like "The Broadsword", which picks up the quasi-Lovecraftian mythology of alien terrors developed in some of the stories from Imago Sequence. In essence, it's a well-told, moody ghost-story, and it's grumply-old-man-protagonist is a nice change of pace and injects some humor. However, it suffered a little bit from re-using too many motives already known from Barron's previous stories.

The story in the collection that is most clearly steeped in Lovecraft and in Barron's own mythology is "Mysterium Tremendum". It starts with something that is nearly, but not quite a Lovecraft reference (a mysterious, occult book hinting at secrets that might shatter the sanity of anyone who dares to delve deeper), then peaks with a disturbing scene of intense, but totally mundane violence, before it finally returns to the motive of cosmic horror. While it is the longest story in the collection (about 50 pages), I think it might have benefited from being longer. The characters could have used some more fleshing-out, and in terms of mythology, the story pretty much ends where several other's have ended before, hinting at terrors that feel al little to familiar by now without adding some new, more disturbing dimension to them. It's a good story, but I feel that it could have been pushed further, maybe even to novel-lenght.

Finally, to my surprise I found that there a three stories which are quite funny in this collection. The title story "Occultation" is mostly a dialogue piece about a couple lying awake at night in a dingy hotel room, smoking and drinking and specualting about a black blotch on the wall that can't quite be made out in the dark and that might be moving. In essence, it's another horror-of-nature piece like "--30--", but told in a totally different voice. "Catch Hell" is a story about the devil playing with the vanity and pettiness of human beings and pretty much giving them what they deserve. It has nothing to do with the impersonal horror most of Barron's stories are about. Evil has a face here, and even a somewhat likeable personality. "Six Six Six", the last story in the collection, is a mean little piece about satanism that's strangely funny, although I can't quite put my finger on it ...

I left out the first story in the collection, "The Forest" - I've read it nearly two years ago in an anthology, and I vaguely remember that it was pretty moody, that it somehow tied into the mythology and that I liked it.

On the whole, I'd say that while The Imago Sequence had a greater number of stories that truly unsettled me, Occultation is the more interesting and diverse collection - and "Strappado", "The Lagerstätte" and at least the first two thirds of "Mysterium Tremendum" are as unsettling as anything in the previous collection. Another interesting thing about Occultation is that Barron tries out new types of protagonists - while most characters in The Imago Sequence are emotionally broken, usually addict and often violent men, here we have anything from happy couples to old, largely content geezers. It feels like he is consciously broadening his scope, and quite succesfully. I can't wait for his novel - and I'm pretty confident it will deliver what I felt was missing about "Myterium Tremendum", and then some.

Resolution, Biologism and "The Devil's Alphabet" by Daryl Gregory

I took a long time getting into this novel by Daryl Gregory (who wrote the astonishing novella "Second Person, Present Tense"), but when I finished it yesterday, I really would have liked it to go on for another 200 pages. That's something that happens to me very rarely - normally, I'm kind of relieved about having finished a book, because another dozen promising books is waiting for me. I'd say that "The Devil's Alphabet" is a great novel, but also one that left me with a desire not only for more, but for a more satisfying resolution. However, the latter is probably the reason why I don't feel at odds with the book and why I'm able to embrace what I'm reading into it as its "message" despite the fact that Gregory is obviously so fascinated with biological determinism.

"The Devil's Alphabet" is about Paxton Martin coming home to his Smalltown of Switchcreek after fifteen years (or maybe it was ten - something along the lines). Shortly before he left, Switchcreek was afflicted by a weird illness that killed nearly a third of its pupoluation, turned most of the others into three different subspecies (or parallel-species) of humankind and then just stopped. Paxton is among the few who haven't been turned. i won't go into details on the story itself; let it suffice to say that Gregory has written a great, small cast of very flawed and relatable characters and a very quiet, unagitatet and moving story.
Among the central concepts if the novel is the question of how the changed people of Switchcreek, as well as the unchanged Paxton, are governed by their bodies. The "Betas", for example, procreate by parthogenesis and are therefore slightly a-social and totally focussed on their offsprings - most of the consider abortion a sin worthy of death. The giant, predatory "Argos" seem to develop a dangerous temper. And the montrously obese "Charlies" seem to have a complex biological strategy of mate bonding negotiated by the elders which is facilitated by means of some kind of psychotic drug that Charlies of a certain age sweat out (yeah, it's a little icky). It's made very clear that the transformed people of Switchcreak have been transformed in all regards, that their psychology is fundamentally altered by the biological changes.
It seems kind of deterministic. But before I'm getting to the question if this is really the case, let me outline what my problem with biological determinism is: While I wouldn't consider myself the hardcore deconstructivist I once was anymore (the one who read Foucault, Freud and Lacan only filtered through the perspective of Judith Butler), I still think that the insistence that certain kinds of behaviour are in some way biologically ingrained is more often than not a thinly veiled form of moralism that tries to prescribe to people how they should behave because it is supposed to be natural for them. Even in its less prescriptive forms, determinism seems to me mostly as a way to avoid a more complex evaluation of one's own behaviour ("Hey, it's not my fault I'm a rapist. It's my genes trying to force me to procreate.")
On the other hand, I'm absolutely in favour of acknowledging that we are our bodies, and that all of our behaviour, all of our options are in principle rooted in our bodies. I just insist that this relation should neither be charged with some form of determinism ("We have no choice but to behave in a certain way because we are automatons programmed by nature") or moralism ("we ought to behave like nature intended us to"). I also believe that Richard Dawkins is fundamentally wrong when, at the end of his "The Selfish Gene", he inverts this moralism and suggests that we should emancipate from our selfish nature (thereby reintroducing the idealist body/mind-duality he wants to leave behind). I think we should consider ourselves bodily creatures with a mind which is rooted in an evolutionary history as well as in the social interaction with other bodily creatures (who are the product of evolution themselves). I think evolution knows no goal and therefore, it's products (our social, bodily selves) can't be used "right" or "wrong" in any meaningful way. "Right" or "wrong" are ethical categories, and they are highly important because humans are social and self-aware creatures capable of empathy. However, nature knows no right and wrong, and trying to project these categories into nature are usually a conscious or unconscious attempt to close the debate about these categories and tell other people how to behave.
These beliefs admittedly put me in a difficult situation. I consider it important to acknowledge the importance of our physicality, but I get wary as soon as someone makes an argument based upon what we know about our physicality. So I'm not only on the fence, I have also already decided that I don't want to get down on any side of the fence.

And the wonderful thing about Gregory's book is that - for me - it articulates about how it feels to sit on this fence. Because the protagonists of the book constantly struggle with their bodies, and not in simplistic mind-over-matter sense. They struggle to understand and to position themselves within the fears and desires generated by their bodily situation and within their social desires and their sense of continuity as an individual. There are clues to what is what in this entaglement, but no certainty. And their struggle is never about finding meaning in biology or in rejecting biology, but about finding a way to negotiate the different aspects of their situation. It's not about finding the final answer about who these characters are, but about emphatically taking part in their ongoing process of self-definition in the face of new bodily and social realities. I even think Gregory explicitly comments on the futility of finding meaning in a biologically deterministic model of one's own self towards the end of the novel (you'll certainly know what I mean when your read it). I could be totally wrong and Gregory might not be sitting on the same fence as I am after all - but the beauty of it is that wherever he stands, his examination is so thorough and thoughtful and veritable that it is approachable from all kinds of positions.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

I'm starting this blog up again. Well, in a manner of speaking - I plan to use it to link to my most recent reviews on sfsite.com, including and beginning with:

Anathem

Infinityplus - the last update

The website infinityplus has recently posted its last update (including my review of Hal Duncan's INK). Actually, its the last update ever - according to Keith Brooke, who kept this wonderful science fiction site with its mix of reviews, essays, interviews and fiction up and running for ten years. I've only had the opportunity to contribute to infinityplus for a short time, but I'm really proud that I have been part of this project. If you don't know IP yet, count yourself lucky: there's still tons of faboulous content for you to check out!

New Review: Bone Song

I didn't really like Bone Song by John Meaney. Nevertheless, I reviewed it for SFsite.

SFSite: Richard K. Morgan

I reviewed Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen for sf-site. Interesting novel. Not absolutely sure if I like it all the way, but read yourself ...

Review of Fast Forward 1

Another review on sfsite.

Review of Jeffrey Thomas' Deadstock

My review of Jeffrey Thomas' new novel Deadstock is now online at sfsite.com.

New review on sfsite

My review of the eleventh issue of the strangely brilliant magazine Electric Velocipede is now online at sfsite.

New reviews on infinityplus

Two new reviews by me have been published on infinityplus:Tricia Sullivan's Double Vision and Justina Robson's Keeping it Real. Thanks again to Keith Brooke for running IP!

Two new reviews on sfsite

Issue 244 features 2 new reviews by me: Jeff VanderMeers short fiction collection Secret Life: The Select Fire Remix and (for the Buffy fan in me) The Existential Joss Whedon by Richardson/Rabb.

I'm a quoted critic!

Yesterday, I had a look in the Paperback edition of Hal Duncan's INK at my book dealer, and what did I find among the two pages of praise for Hal's previous novel VELLUM?

“a work of remarkable unity … Vellum is a raw mixture that will crystallise into an unique gem in the mind of the attentive reader." - SF Site

My very own words! Feels a little strange ... To my knowledge, this is the first time that one of my reviews has been quoted to advertise a book. Really cool!