Last month Nancy Pearl invited me on her cable show, Book Lust, to talk about The Mirage. The video of the interview was posted yesterday on the Seattle Channel website:

My thanks to Ms. Pearl, and to the UW bookstore for hosting us.

"...and then the Marvel CEO says, 'Joss, is it OK if we pay you in gum?'"

Lisa and I caught a Friday afternoon showing. We both felt like we got our popcorn money’s worth. I may have some deeper thoughts later, but for now here’s my initial take:

* New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott was onto something when he called The Avengers “a snappy little dialogue comedy dressed up as something else.” The verbal sparring among the main characters was far and away the best part of the film for us, and I’d have happily watched two and half hours of Bruce Banner and the rest of the gang just hanging out somewhere—My Dinner with Loki, anyone? Or to put it another way, screenwriter/director Joss Whedon was worth every penny that Marvel paid him, and I really hope he got a percentage of the gross. (Hah!)

* The special effects were predictably awesome—as in, simultaneously impressive and nothing I hadn’t seen before. More than once I caught myself thinking, “Wow, this scene is gorgeous, and if I didn’t care about the characters I’d be bored to death by it.” I really, really hope Marvel understands that, and that they offer Joss Whedon an even bigger percentage of the gross to get him to come back and do the sequel. (Double hah!)

* The action sequences were a mixed bag. The small-scale fights were great, because, again, characters! Snappy dialogue! The big battle aboard the flying aircraft carrier, with The Avengers in danger of literally tearing themselves apart, was way cool too. But the final battle felt anti-climactic to me. It was still fun, don’t get me wrong, but unlike the act two fight I was missing the sense that there was anything real at stake.

I mean, we know the seemingly unstoppable alien army is, in fact, going to be stopped. The only question is what it’s going to cost. And here we run into the problem that while this may be Joss Whedon’s movie, it’s Marvel’s property. You can try to head-fake me into thinking Tony Stark is going to sacrifice himself to save the earth, but we both know Marvel still needs him for Iron Man 3, so I’m not buying it. (OK, maybe I bought it for a microsecond. But not really.)

One other huge misstep in the finale is that the invading aliens are faceless drones who cannot be bantered with. That’s right, they’re made of Whedon Kryptonite! What genius executive thought that was a good idea?

* I guess we really are in a post-post-9/11 era. I remember going to see Spider-Man in the summer of ’02 and being spooked by the Green Goblin tossing pumpkin bombs at Manhattan crowds. Ten years later, Loki’s peeps completely trash midtown and I didn’t even blink.

* Shawarma!

As you may have heard, yesterday’s May Day protests in Seattle were marred by an anarchist reenactment of the WTO riots. Amid the window-smashing, there were reports that Seattle’s leading real-life superhero, Phoenix Jones, was pepper-spraying members of the Occupy Movement. Jones quickly posted denials on Facebook and Twitter:

I NEVER PEPPER SPRAYED ANYONE I DID GET SPRAYED BY ANARCHIST “PROTESTER” OCCUPY IS OK BUT ROITS ARE NOT

— Phoenix Jones (@ThePhoenixJones) May 1, 2012

Bleeding Cool has more on the story, including pics of Jones and his sidekicks standing guard outside the Seattle courthouse:

…and in an ominous development, Seattle’s first real-life supervillain, Rex Velvet, has posted a video on YouTube:

So you can see where this is going. By now I’m sure Nathan Myhrvold is putting the finishing touches on his Iron Man suit (or at least snapping up all the related patents), and thanks to The Hunger Games we’re knee-deep in potential Hawkeyes. As for Thor, I’d look for him up on Phinney Ridge.

And Nick Fury? Hmm…

"They call me Mr. Glass."

The Throttle Rockets' Luna Negra breaks away from the pack © 2012 Frank Blau Photography

Nehi Nightmare makes full eye contact with the opposition © 2012 Frank Blau Photography

So the one downside to being in L.A. last weekend is that I missed the Rat City Rollergirls playoffs. Grave Danger beat out the Sockit Wenches and the Throttle Rockets beat the DLF, so it’ll be Grave Danger vs. the Rockets in next month’s championships. I can’t wait! The championship bout is on Saturday, May 19 at KeyArena. Ticket info here. More great photos here.

I mentioned this in yesterday’s long post about the L.A. Times Festival of Books, but wanted to break it out again here just in case anyone missed it: The Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore has chosen The Mirage as their April book club selection and will be hosting a discussion of the novel this Saturday, April 28, from noon to 1 PM at their Redondo Beach location (2810 Artesia Blvd. Redondo Beach, CA). I will be joining the conversation via Skype.

The event is free and open to anyone who wants to come by the store, so if you missed me at the Festival, here’s another chance to say hi. Hope to see you there.

I attended the L.A. Times Festival of Books last weekend. Short version: It was fun and I had a great time.

Longer version: I flew down on Friday, on Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines, let us state clearly, has an above-average safety record, but because they had a fatal crash in 2000, the same year Lisa and I moved to Seattle, and because that crash was attributed to poor maintenance and oversight, I persist in thinking of it as the deadliest airline in the Pacific Northwest (yes, Alaska Airlines PR department, I realize this is horribly unfair and irrational, I’m a mindless sheep, deal with it). Adding to the perception of risk was the fact that I was sharing the flight with a high-school sports team, which, if God happens to be in a joking mood, is like a giant bull’s-eye on the fuselage.

Miraculously, we did not explode in midair. There was a moment on final approach to LAX when I noticed some kind of smoke/vapor passing over the wings and thought, “Hm, fire in the cargo compartment?” But no, it was just smog. Hello, Los Angeles!

Friday night I went to the SoCal Mystery Writers of America party at Skylight Books, a great indie bookstore in Los Feliz. Among other nice people I met Steph Cha, lawyer by day/novelist by night, whose first book, Follow Her Home, is being published by St. Martin’s Press early next year. She’s in the middle of copyediting right now, and we bonded over our shared unorthodox notions about usage and punctuation. (Yeah, like you don’t have a opinion on commas.)

Saturday morning was my discussion panel, “Seeing the Light.” It turns out the Festival has this tradition of making up panel names and leaving it to the participants to decide what the panels are actually about. Our moderator, Mary Otis, did her best to tease out shared themes of mystery, enlightenment, and transcendence, but really it was three authors talking about their work for an hour, which the audience seemed perfectly fine with. My co-panelists were Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black and White Oleander, and Alex Shakar, whose novel Luminarium just won the L.A. Times Book Prize for fiction. (Alex also gets the prize for biggest reversal of fortune: This is a dude who sold his first novel for a six-figure sum, only to get hit by a double whammy when (a) his editor died, and (b) his book tour, scheduled to begin on September 13, 2001, was preempted by Al Qaeda. I didn’t get to hang out with him as long as I would have liked, but he struck me as a good guy, so it’s great to see him getting another shot at recognition. Check out his book, it sounds really interesting.)

Saturday afternoon I went to see Judy Blume get interviewed onstage at Bovard Auditorium. I’m a Blume fan from back in the day, but I don’t think I’d ever heard her life story before: Married and with two kids by age 25, feeling like something was missing, she started writing in her spare time and became one of the most successful authors in history. Now 74 (!), she’s been at it long enough to have multiple generations of fans. During the audience Q&A, there were middle-aged readers bursting into tears as they described how much her books had meant to them, and little kids barely tall enough to reach the microphones begging her for one more Fudge novel.

Saturday night was the Young Literati’s Book Drop Bash—aka the Socially Anxious Introverts’ Mixer—at the L.A. Central Library. I chatted with Greg and Astrid Bear for a while, then introduced myself to John Scalzi. That led, in turn, to the most surreal moment of the entire Festival, in which I found myself sitting around a table in the kid’s lit section of the library with Scalzi, Lev Grossman, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer alumnus Amber Benson. It was pretty late in the evening by that point, so my main contribution to the conversation was to restrain myself from blurting out “HOLY SHIT, AMBER BENSON!” but it’s these small acts of self-control that make civilization possible.

My Sunday event was a book signing at the Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore booth. It turns out The Mirage is Mysterious Galaxy’s book club pick this month, and when I asked if they’d like me to join in the book discussion via Skype, they said yes. So if you missed seeing me at the Festival, here’s another chance. The meeting is this Saturday, April 28, starting at noon, at Mysterious Galaxy’s Redondo Beach location (2810 Artesia Blvd. Redondo Beach, CA).

Sunday afternoon I roamed around the Festival grounds. I bumped into my pal Aimee Bender, and met (and got a big hug from) Tayari Jones, one of my favorite new NEA Fellows.

And then it was time to go see the “Nerds Shall Inherit the Earth” panel, co-starring the aforementioned Amber Benson and John Scalzi, along with Maureen Johnson and Pamela Ribon. I’d been told in advance by several people that Maureen Johnson is hysterically funny, and also that she “has crazy eyes”, and both those things are absolutely true, but the funniest moment of the show belonged to Pam Ribon. Asked what nerdtastic thing she was most obsessed with right now, she said she had discovered a hidden YouTube genre of girl/horse breakup videos. The actual videos are kinda sad (well, some of them), but what had the audience falling out of their chairs was Pam’s explanation of why adolescent girls are so drawn to horses in the first place (paraphrasing from memory here, with emphasis added): “It’s this big, muscular thing that you can ride, like your Dad, while you transition towards your first adult relationship with a man or a woman.” To get the full effect, you have to picture John Scalzi rearing back in horror, while Maureen Johnson rests on her elbows, one eyebrow arched, giving this sideways look that says, “Well now, I wasn’t aware this panel would include discussion of unnatural acts.”

…and that was pretty much a wrap on the Festival. I took a last pass through the grounds, caught the shuttle back to my hotel, downloaded a copy of Pamela Ribon’s Going in Circles to my iPad, ordered room service, and crashed. Monday’s flight home—on Alaska, with a middle-school orchestra filling up the rows behind me—was uneventful. We even landed a little early.

Thanks L.A., that was fun. See you next time.

Home, happy but exhausted, from the L.A. Times Festival of Books. I’ll have a report on my adventures there shortly, but in the meantime, while I was away, the San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on The Mirage:

The Mirage is a topsy-turvy tour de force, another winner from a truly inventive and unpredictable storyteller.

Full review here.

Tomorrow I fly to Los Angeles for the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Hope to see some of you there.

My current schedule:

Friday, 6:30-9:00 PM, at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave. — Attending a party hosted by the Mystery Writers of America.

Saturday, 11:00 AM, in the Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL 101) — Panel discussion, “Seeing the Light,” moderated by Mary Otis and with fellow panelists Alex Shakar and James Wallenstein Janet Fitch, to be followed immediately by a book signing.

Saturday, 8:30 PM-midnight, at the L.A. Central Library — Attending the Young Literati’s Book Drop Bash. This one’s invitation only, but if you’re there, come say hi.

Sunday, 11:00 AM, at booth #372 (Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore) in Founder’s Park — Book signing.

And for those of you who are staying in Seattle while I jet down to SoCal, Saturday night at Key Arena is the Season 8 playoffs for the Rat City Rollergirls roller derby league. Doors open at 4:30 PM, first bout starts at 5:30. Don’t miss it!

Last Saturday, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio ran a piece on alternate histories—”ucronías”—featuring an interview with yours truly. The article is behind a paywall, but here’s a grab from the PDF the reporter, Alberto Rojas, sent me:

The other books mentioned in the article are Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Keith Roberts’s Pavane, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna, and Jorge Baradit’s Synco.