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Shimmin on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 09:22 on 14-03-2010 - link Really? I'm very fond of them. Never mind.
Arthur B on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 23:00 on 13-03-2010 - link I remember being very, very unimpressed with Thraxas. It felt like substandard Chandler being written by substandard Pratchett. :(
Shimmin on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 22:56 on 13-03-2010 - link That sounds pretty good. I'll look out for it. It sounds a bit Jasper Fforde as well, in terms of the casual interweaving of total oddness.

While I'm at it, I'll see your noir fantasy and raise you one comic noir fantasy.
Arthur B on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 20:32 on 13-03-2010 - link I'm reasonably sure, in fact, that since it originated as part of a carnival procession the steam-powered truck in question is in fact one of these.

Certainly, the fact that it's steam-powered seems to be an oddity - I don't remember that any of the conventional cars are described as steam-powered, which (if this really were steampunk) would surely be the norm.

Additionally, I don't think "interwarpunk" would work because the really striking counterfactual elements to the story aren't SFnal in the slightest. The secret art of dream detection, although the Agency exploits it using pseudotechnological jargon, is pretty clearly meant to be magical. Part of the point of steampunk/Elizabethanpunk/all those other words which misuse "-punk" is that they're a kind of alternate history which, ideally, uses alternative technologies which might conceivably have been developed at the time, whereas dream detection comes completely out of left field.
https://me.yahoo.com/a/pBaXwEEot.yF6GNKVgctiyRdtR8brhU-#7af07 on I Wish I May, I Wish I Might, Find Someone Who'll Translate This Right at 19:42 on 13-03-2010 - link
She also seems to have translated some other stuff, but as a general rule, when choosing a translator one should hire someone who is a native speaker in the target language. I'm wondering whether Ms. Stok is such a person or just a native Polish speaker with an excellent knowledge of English. Full bilingualism generally requires someone who managed to get a pre-college level education in both languages and live as a child in both countries. (E.g. I spent the second half my childhood in a French speaking country and I'm equally comfortable reading French and English, but since I was mostly in an English language school, I could not competently translate a novel into French.) Such people exist, but they're very rare - I know quite a few folks who know both Polish and English well, but only one person who would be equally comfortable translating in both directions. I know a few more who would qualify for full French-English bilingualism, but again, they're far less common than native speakers of one who are fluent in the other language.
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 18:13 on 13-03-2010 - link I just loved it for that classic rock ballard of "Chord-chord-chord-chord-chord-chord-other chord-chord-chord-chord-chord-chord-chord-other chord"
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 18:12 on 13-03-2010 - link No, there are no airships, and the closest the book gets to stereotypical steampunk is with the giant steam-powered truck two of the antagonists drive. I suppose you could claim it as "steampunk" by saying it does for the interwar period what traditional steampunk does for late Victoriana/Edwardiana, but that would just broaden the definition so as to make it meaningless.

Personally, I found the Manual to be one of the few books I would happily describe as "Kafkaesque." It's a term that's thrown around a lot, but Berry actually manages recapture that sense of bureaucracy as an self-contained ecosystem and of that special type of palpable menace exuded by unknowable higher authority that drives Kafka's best work. (He avoids Kafka's tendency to destroy his protagonists at the end, but I guess that's not for everyone). At any rate, it's convinced me to make another attempt at The Trial.
Arthur B on I Wish I May, I Wish I Might, Find Someone Who'll Translate This Right at 13:56 on 13-03-2010 - link Googling around I find Danusia Stok, whose main speciality in translation seems to be... textbooks. Which isn't the best background for someone you want translating fiction.

Oh, and she also seems to be involved with translating crime novels by Marek Krajewski; it sounds like at least some people there think that her translation style works for those, since they seem to have a somewhat austere and terse style anyway.

It does sound more and more like they just plain picked the wrong translator for the job.
https://me.yahoo.com/a/pBaXwEEot.yF6GNKVgctiyRdtR8brhU-#7af07 on I Wish I May, I Wish I Might, Find Someone Who'll Translate This Right at 07:13 on 13-03-2010 - link Probably a long dead thread, but seeing the speculation about what it reads like in the original, I figured I'd comment. I'm American, but grew up speaking Polish, have lived there a couple times. I haven't read the English translations but a couple remarks in this piece, and other reviews I've read, indicate that there is something very wrong with the translation.

But the prose style of The Last Wish seems somewhat flat and monotonous
The original's prose style is a sardonic faux archaic voice. Think of the pre-modern novel epic tale style crossed with a pastiche of Tolkien's style crossed with a pastiche of Walter Scott to get sort of an idea of what this is like. (It's also a bit of a reference to a turn of the century Polish Nobel winner, much beloved in Poland, except by those like me who can't stand him) I'm not too fond of it, but flat and monotonous it is not. It is especially present in the dialogues. Judging by what I've read about the translation, the translator couldn't be bothered to try to render the author's language in English, and just did a literal translation into the most basic English equivalents she could think of. Depending on deadlines and her fee, I may or may not sympathize with that choice.

NYCfan
Sister Magpie on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 19:48 on 12-03-2010 - link I love the MST3K Hobgoblins: it's the only way to learn their names:

Meet the Hobgoblins: Frankie, Sniffles, Bounce-Bounce and the Claw!
Sister Magpie on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 16:57 on 12-03-2010 - link Wow! Writing this one down...
Arthur B on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 10:15 on 12-03-2010 - link I'm pretty sure there aren't any airships in it.

At least, there aren't any that play a sufficiently significant part that I remember them. And even if there were any, I would say that their presence wouldn't make it steampunk or even alternate history - there's nothing counterfactual about having airships bobbing about in the 1930s.
Frank on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 07:27 on 12-03-2010 - link I placed a hold on it at my library which shelves it in the mystery section.

Are there any airships in it? Maybe that's how Mr Moorcock (wow, really?) became confused.
Rami C on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 01:25 on 12-03-2010 - link This sounds utterly brilliant *adds to Amazon wishlist*
Arthur B on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 00:47 on 12-03-2010 - link "Never Sleeping", Al. ;)
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Noir Fantasy: My New Favourite Subgenre at 00:02 on 12-03-2010 - link Um...wow...I just finished this book. Yesterday night.

...
...
...

GET OUT OF MY HEAD, ARTHUR!!!

I have to run now, so I'll say something deeply insightful tomorrow.
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Same Vodka, Different Bottles at 14:23 on 11-03-2010 - link Not in bookstores, no. I managed to get the first two paperbacks in a comic book store back in 2006, and had to order the last two from their website. It's sorta the downside of the "whenever I feel like it" publishing schedule: if you need to consult the auguries to know when the next book is coming out, there isn't much incentive to keep stocking it.
Rami C on Same Vodka, Different Bottles at 00:26 on 11-03-2010 - link I am a sucker for a well-done industrial aesthetic, so I may need to pick this up -- is it available in mainstream bookstores?
Arthur B on The Reading Canary: The Eisenhorn Trilogy at 23:23 on 10-03-2010 - link I've got the Ravenor omnibus, it's in the backlog. I'll get to it at some point, but there's over 100 books in my backlog, so it may be a while. :)

Of course, in Eisenhorn the problem is further compounded because his retinue is actually quite inconsistent from book to book, due to deaths and new members and so on, until at the end of Hereticus he's left with...absolutely no one he knew in Xenos except the daemonhost.

To be fair, it's kind of thematically appropriate that Hereticus should end like that. ;) But I agree that the inconsistent cast doesn't really help.
http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on The Reading Canary: The Eisenhorn Trilogy at 22:55 on 10-03-2010 - link An omnibus edition of Ravenor just came out last year, including the "Playing Patience" short story you passed over in Let the Galaxy Burn and another short story, featuring interaction between Ravenor and Eisenhorn. Have you had a chance to take a look at it?

I think one of the biggest problems of Eisenhorn has been addressed in Ravenor, namely Eisenhorn's gigantic retinue of fairly uncharacterized helpers. Of course, in Eisenhorn the problem is further compounded because his retinue is actually quite inconsistent from book to book, due to deaths and new members and so on, until at the end of Hereticus he's left with...absolutely no one he knew in Xenos except the daemonhost.

Ravenor has a smaller retinue than Eisenhorn, and Abnett spends more time writing from their POV than Ravenor's. Unlike Eisenhorn, which was exclusively Eisenhorn's first-person perspective, the Ravenor books alternate between first-person (Ravenor) and third-person limited (his crew). His warband is both smaller than Eisenhorn's and more stable. It helps that a couple of its members, Kara Swole and Harlon Nayl, were at least cursorily established in Eisenhorn before we met them again in Ravenor.

Re-reading Ravenor, I'm struck by how far short Sandy Mitchell's books about the Inquisition fall. Much as Xenos was a tie-in novel for the Inquisition game, Mitchell was tapped to write Scourge the Heretic (and, later, Innocence Proves Nothing) for Dark Heresy. Unfortunately, Mitchell's books are rather less interesting. The characters arem't quiet transplants of characters from Ravenor--Danuld Drake is rather less badass than Harlon Nayl, for example--but they definitely never really take off on their own. It's really apparent that Mitchell is at his best when writing Ciaphas Cain books (which I absolutely love and adore); when he isn't writing funny stuff about well-characterized folks like Cain, Jurgen, and Vale, he's just...not that good.

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