Fantastic Metropolis

The Scar, China Miéville

Liked this one better than Perdido Street Station, which was great and astonishing, with depth and complexity of prose, but seemed to me a bit small-boy-fascinated by squashy things, unpleasant fluids and bad smells. Character development only took place in the last four or five pages of the story. The Scar, though, is not a Boy Genius book. The Scar is a mature work examining the human condition, and moreover one of those books that tip you off to the fact that the artist has an entire world in his head, absolutely alive, real and complete in every breathing detail. We want to know more of it. (Disclosure here: I am an avowed slut for anything pirate-related.) Even if he doesn’t set more stories in a floating pirate city, though, I’m going to be buying Mieville’s books in future.

Treasure Planet, Disney

I DON’T GIVE A DAMN WHAT ANYONE ELSE SAYS, I LOVED EVERY FRAME OF IT. I have seen it repeatedly. I bought the soundtrack and the art book. I loved the characters. I loved the visual homage to the Brandywine painters. I want to sail on one of those ships with solar sails. If Robert Louis Stevenson had collaborated with Jules Verne, the result might be this fantasy with its 18th-and 19th-century styling. (See the above Disclosure note.) I hear great things about Spirited Away, which I haven’t seen, but I don’t seem to be able to enjoy Anime as a class; it seems to me cheesy, derivative, incoherent and badly animated, a naked emperor parading down the street of pop culture. Meanwhile, most of the critics of Treasure Planet admit to never having read the book on which it’s based. Trust me on this one: the only reason this tanked was that the Mouse was fool enough to pit it against Harry Potter II.

The Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Pratchett is a much better writer than you think he is. He’s a much better writer than he thinks he is, too. I have been following his career for some years now in increasing amazement. What started out as fairly lightweight parody of the fantasy genre, with stuff like Eric and The Color of Magic, has deepened, has darkened. His recurring characters—my favorites being Death, his granddaughter, and the three witches of Lancre—are brilliant creations, but his stand-alone efforts like Small Gods are equally impressive. Yeah, okay, he has the Pythonesque humor thing down pat. The Night Watch, though, is about bravery in the face of meaninglessness, lost causes, forgotten heroes and honor. I couldn’t put it down.

Samurai Jack, Genndy Tartakovsky for Cartoon Network

Simply freakin’ brilliant. Visually it reminds me of the old UPA cartoons of the early ’50s. Spare, stylish, elegant, blackly funny, visually gorgeous, and genuinely moral. Across a bizarre multiplanetary wasteland of the future, peopled with robots, animal-alien hybrids and Christ only knows what, a lone warrior pursues Aku, the Shapeshifting Master of Evil, as voiced by Mako with howling, mythic grandeur. Jack, his upright samurai nemesis, is a pillar of stern virtues with an unbreakable code of honor. He doesn’t say much, but damn can that boy slaughter the hordes of evil!

Rewards And Fairies, Rudyard Kipling

As you may have guessed by now, some of my best friends are dead white European males. I grew up on the Kipling classics, but my favorite was Puck of Pook’s Hill, wherein Puck, as the soul of the land, is called up by two English children. He brings them visitors out of England’s past: a Roman soldier who served on Hadrian’s Wall, an old crusading knight, a Jewish merchant from King John’s time, a smuggler. This book was one of the big influences on my life, fascinating me with history. So imagine how you’d feel if, at the age of fifty, you suddenly discovered that a book you loved as a child had a sequel? And that it was just as great? More pagan magic, more stories told by people like Elizabeth I (my favorite politician), by a bronze-age flintworker, by one of Francis Drake’s crew, by a Napoleonic-era adventurer. Good stuff indeed.