Best of 2008 Picks -- Tim Pratt

To begin on an utterly unoriginal note, how about that Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight, huh? He really made the film, in my opinion, and utterly upstaged the nominal star.

Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield's free weekly comic Freakangels is a thing of beauty, updated every Friday. The premise is basically "What if the Midwich Cuckoos grew up?" and it takes place in a drowned London.

Another comic: Jim Munroe's Therefore, Repent! is about the people left behind after the Rapture slurps all the Christians up into heaven. Subversively wondeful stuff.

Fables: The Good Prince by Bill Willingham is one volume in the long Fables saga of a war among fairy-tale folk, but I think it's the strongest single collection since Homelands, and that's saying something.

I've also greatly enjoyed the strange collaborative site Shadow Unit, which is like fanfiction for a supernatural cop drama TV show that doesn't actually exist... created by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, and Amanda Downum.

Moving on to prose in dead-tree form, I thought The Born Queen by Greg Keyes was a nice finish to his Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series, though some elements seemed a bit rushed; or maybe I just liked the world and characters so much I wanted another three or four volumes. It's possible...

Other ongoing fantasy series: I finally read A Betrayal in Winter by Daniel Abraham, second in his Long Price quartet, and it's quite good. He's doing really strange and unusual stuff, for a big fantasy series, and I urge everyone to seek the

Back to Elizabeth Bear, she went historical on her Promethean Age series with duology Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, which includes William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe doing all sorts of wonderful and terrible things. It's a secret history with witches, Faeries, and, of course, lots of man-on-fallen-angel sex.

Best first novels I read this year were: Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory, about people being possessed by strange pop-cultural demons. He's just a hell of a writer, period, and I wish he produced a lot more, because I've read everything he's published, and am drumming my fingers impatiently over here for more. And Superpowers by David J. Schwartz, about five college kids in Madison, WI who wake up one day with (you guessed it!) superpowers, and have to figure out how to get through their profoundly changed lives.

Of course, it helped that I read Bear's and Gregory's books in Maui on my vacation; that setting makes everything better. I recommend going to Mama's Fish House for lunch or dinner -- it's my favorite seafood restaurant by a wide margin. (Of course, with the economy tanking and the publishing industry eating itself, I don't know when I'll have the money to return to the islands, alas.)

I read and saw and ate lots of other good things, of course, but my baby (who just turned one a month ago!) is hollering for my attention, so I'd better stop now. Farewell!