Aspettate e Odiate

4th Street Panelage for 2013

2013-05-04T15:58:16Z

So I posted the current list of panel options over in the 4th_st_fantasy community.

Comments disabled to encourage people to provide feedback over there. I've been kind of swamped this week, but when I get some breathing room I hope to be able to respond to people's thoughts.

Books, April

2013-05-01T08:14:05Z

Dan Abnett, Dr. Who: The Silent Stars Go By: An Eleventh Doctor novel, in which Abnett deftly captures the dynamic of the banter between Amy, Rory, and Matt Smith's Doctor as they face off against a mysterious foe (though the cover reveals the Ice Warriors are involved). It's Abnett, so the action is top-flight, and there's some cute stuff with the faux-medieval village and their language having shifted over time, but the book isn't notably more than the sum of its parts, making it a perfectly fine tie-in but not much more than that.

Chang Wejen, "Classical Chinese Jurisprudence and the Development of the Chinese Legal System": This is an English-language overview of the philosophical foundations of the Imperial Chinese legal system, which I downloaded in the course of reading Debt but didn't get around to finishing until this month.

Professor Chang represents the views of Confucian and Legalist scholars fairly accurately, but he approaches the works of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi from the perspective of a western-influenced legal scholar, which results in a really weird reading of their work. (Lao Zi opens the Dao De Jing with the statement that the Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao-- in essence, that trying to define the Dao using words distorts its meaning and encourages misunderstanding and dogmatism-- and I feel that Professor Chang's exegesis of Daoism as a secretly tyrannical philosophy only proves his point.) I also feel like classical Chinese Legalism was a reaction to the chaos of the Warring States period, in much the way that Hobbes's Leviathan and Machiavelli's Prince were reactions to the English Civil War and the age of Borgia dominance-- in times like those, Confucian platitudes about the inherent goodness of man were unlikely to be very convincing. That said, Professor Chang's analysis of how the three schools of philosophy affected Chinese jurisprudence from the Qin and Han onward is consistent with my understanding of Chinese history. Recommended (with caveats) to anyone interested in the philosophical basis of Imperial Chinese governance and law.

Dorothy Dunnett, The Unicorn Hunt: Discussed elsewhere. To elaborate on my 'replaced by evil robots' comment, however, my feeling is that the book's scheming works on a purely tactical level, but neither a strategic or emotional one. The only way I could keep reading the book was to turn my critical faculties down as far as they could go and read it as a sequence of moderately interesting events that weren't causally connected.

I'm going to keep reading the House of Niccolo books, but The Unicorn Hunt is my least favorite of the series to date.

Judith Herrin, Women in Purple: An intriguing but largely speculative history of three Empresses of Byzantium, wherein the newest and most controversial part of Herrin's thesis-- that Empress Euphrosyne bridged the gap between her grandmother Irene and her stepdaughter Theodora, in terms of providing continuity of both iconophilia and female knowledge of how to maintain Imperial power-- is bolstered mostly by interpolation and circumstantial evidence. For the most part, I found the glimpses into Byzantine court life which Herrin provided on the way to making her argument (Eunuchs! Bride shows ala Cinderella!) far more intriguing than questions of whether Euphrosyne and Theodora were secretly loyal to the iconophile faction, as Herrin does a solid job of providing context for both the iconoclast movement (which was popularly linked to military victory against the iconoclastic armies of Islam) and Byzantine life and politics as a whole. There are also some very nice maps at the front of the book, which is always a plus.

Peter Higgins, Wolfhound Century: So you know how I was talking about privileging aesthetics over coherence earlier in the week? Yeah. Aesthetically Wolfhound Century combines the anarchy and agitation of pre-Revolutionary Russia with the gulags, propaganda machine, poverty, and purges of the Stalinist era to create the Vlast, a faux-Communist empire that controls most of the world and is locked in an endless war with the Archipelago. The Vlast's magic and technology are fueled by the stone flesh of angels, who have fallen to earth out of the skies for three centuries, and the only angel to have survived the fall has extended its influence to prompt a coup. Opposing the angel and its minions are the old gods of the forest, who have hidden away a seed from which the old world can be restored from backup, overwriting the Vlast and all its works.

All of this is fine as far as it goes (and Wolfhound Century is the first half of a two-part book, so it only goes so far) but the hodgepodge of Russian-derived content didn't really add up for me. Aristocrats are persecuted, but there's no visible communist ideology behind the persecution; it's just there to add to the Russian-ness. The world appears to consist of the Vlast, the Archipelago, and a smattering of Free Cities, which broke my brain a little because so much of Russian history is defined by hordes rolling in off the steppe, centuries of interaction with Europe (see: Lenin's delivery to Russia via armored train), and the like. You don't get Communist Russia without the French Revolution; you don't get Russia as an industrial power without Armand Hammer, and Lend-Lease, and the enslavement of German technicians-- and you sure as hell don't get Stalin or Kruschev or any dictator going around without a set of personal bodyguards who they and their intimates regularly vet for their loyalty. Higgins uses a lot of verbiage and angel stone to try to gloss over this stuff, but fundamentally he's far more interested in his characters being horribly oppressed and in his coup being dramatic than in having the world he's painted be coherent.

(It doesn't help that the wise giant who saves our heroes in the marshes has a Finnish name. For those who didn't know, the Finns are the Magical Negroes of the Russian narrative tradition. Not cool, dude.)

Higgins' work has drawn comparisons to Mieville, but I felt like Mieville's world-building ramified in interesting ways. The risk in drawing on history is that people who know what you're drawing on will object to the liberties you've taken, and in the end I felt like Higgins was treating Russia like a box of paints, and in the service of a plot that strained my credulity past breaking at several points. Not recommended.

Marie Lu, Legend: So the thing with the knife did turn out to be a clue-- but not for the reasons I thought! Oh no, it was a clue because the knife had been moved from Metias's shoulder to his heart. (Let us ignore the fact that June-- who is Sherlock Holmes when the author wants her to be a badass-- missed this at the time because plot convenience.)

Okay, complaining about knife-throwing aside, Legend is a fairly standard dystopian YA novel save in certain regards. Since the novel was loosely inspired by Les Miserables, Day (our !Valjean) and June (our female !Javert) start out on opposite sides of the economic and social divide in post-apocalypse Los Angeles, with June as a committed servant of the tyrannical Republic. Ms. Lu doesn't flinch from having the Republic's military engage in behavior of the sort described in Dirty Wars (at least until Day falls into their clutches), which means June has to deal with being on the same side as torturers and killers, but the murder of her brother Metias motivates her to hunt down Day, and she only switches sides once it becomes clear that she's been lied to.

The government of the Republic is cacklingly evil and shortsighted, as is typical of the genre, and the novel's grittiness gets turned down quite a ways once Day is captured. Day and June fall in love/lust with each other more or less immediately, due to them being physically and mentally perfect aside from Day's theoretically bum knee. And yet, despite all of this, the second half of the book held my attention all the way through. Legend has real strengths; the question for every reader is going to be whether the details of its setup or internal dramatic arc throw them for a loop.

Anthony Price, The Old Vengeful: Another month, another few Price novels. The Old Vengeful traces the recruitment of a former naval captain's daughter into Audley's military intelligence department, following the death of her father and a raid on her house which is foiled at the last minute. As usual, all is not as it seems, and though I get why the traitor's identity was credible, in context, I could really have done without that character, of all people, turning out to be a villain.

Anthony Price, Gunner Kelly: Probably my favorite out of this month's Price novels, Gunner Kelly follows Audley and a German counterintelligence officer as they attempt to puzzle out who killed the aged General who was the patron of a remote English valley, and who can possibly be after the titular artilleryman. There are lots of lovely bits in Gunner Kelly, including the mobilization of the valley, its infiltration, and the visit to the tank museum, but the bit that impressed me the most was how swiftly Price wrapped everything up by having the violence occur off-screen and only showing the aftermath. By the time I was four pages from the end, I was honestly worried as to whether he was going to be able to wrap everything up.

Anthony Price, Sion Crossing: If no one would ever use the phrase "Romantic but wrong" or its corollary ever again, especially in reference to the American Civil War, I would be a happy man. Price isn't at his best here, both because he's describing a culture further away from home than he usually does, and because one of the novel's major characters is black. The book is enjoyable enough, and getting Oliver St. John Latimer's POV for once is a nice change of pace, but overall this didn't strike me as one of the stronger entries in the series.

Dorothy Sayers, Five Red Herrings: Good heavens, what a mechanistic, traditional mystery novel this is, especially when compared to The Nine Tailors or Gaudy Night. Neither Lord Peter nor Bunter really display much in the way of personality in Five Red Herrings, which is unfortunate, because nobody else really does either-- not the suspects, not the police, not even the victim, whose only real trait is that he's obnoxious (and then dead). For completists and those in need of a mystery novel who won't be disappointed that it isn't a different book by Sayers.

Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: This is less the book I expected it to be-- one which gathered many specific accounts of collateral damage and night raids and the like in one place-- than a historical overview of how America's targeted killing program developed and expanded over the years. There's a great deal of content about Anwar al-Awlaki and his transition from moderate imam to public enemy #1, and a great deal more about Yemen, and Somalia, and Pakistan, how the various players at the CIA and JSOC jockeyed for control over the secret wars and proxy prisons that the US had set up all across the globe.

Takeaways include: Surgical strikes are a fantasy; special operators and drone pilots are regularly working off of bad intel that hasn't been double-checked; Government pronouncements about who was killed in night raids and drone strikes (and whether they were armed) are not to be trusted; Anwar al-Awlaki and other Islamist propagandists who are US citizens deliberately skirt the boundaries of protected speech when calling for jihad; and there is a horrible symbiotic feedback loop between violent extremists and the US targeted killing campaign. US foreign policy is in thrall to a macho fantasy of special operations precision-- three Somali pirates sniped simultaneously! Smart bombs going down a chimney!-- that is only really practical when operations have solid intel, are carefully planned, and nothing goes wrong. And in war and covert operations, things always go wrong.

Dirty Wars is seriously depressing reading, but important for understanding the world we've made and the limits of covert military force.

Adam Stemple, Singer of Souls: I was promised total carnage at the end of this book, and I was mildly disappointed that the junkies escaped alive.

...what, you wanted more than that? Sheesh.

Singer of Souls follows Douglas, a busker and junkie who comes to Edinburgh to break away from the life of dissipation and petty crime he'd made for himself in Minneapolis. His grandmother is awesome, and her influence goes some way to helping Douglas straighten himself out, but then one of the fae allows him to see other fae, and everything goes straight to hell. Douglas, finding himself stuck between a fae-killing priest, some junkie acquaintances, and what are basically the Seelie and Unseelie courts from Changeling: the Dreaming, ends up wrecking everything good he's built and rewriting himself and those around him in order to survive.

I'm not really sure about the pacing of the book as a whole, but I can tell you this much: When reading future Adam Stemple novels, I will be much more concerned about him killing off his characters in gruesome ways than I am of George R.R. Martin offing his protagonists. Much more concerned.

Arthur Copies of Analog

2013-04-25T18:04:48Z

So I just got my contributor's copies of the July/August issue of Analog in the mail. "Milk Run", which mrissa and I co-wrote, can be found on page 80. Yay!

There is also a giant cavalry bird* on the cover. Isn't that a thing!

I suppose I'm lucky, really. The cover is completely lacking in pink dinosaurs or astronaut protuberances.

*: Not a Chocobo, obv. That series is called Final Fantasy, and this is Analog. Full of totally serious hard science fiction!

Some thoughts on interpretive protocols and the reader's 50%

2013-04-21T18:29:13Z

So I've been reading a dystopian YA novel for research purposes. And yesterday I hit a bit where my brain rebelled and told me what just happened in the book is impossible and completely wrong for umpteen different reasons, and therefore the dude who supposedly got killed by having a kid hurl a (non-throwing) knife into his heart from a significant distance must have been killed by someone else.

Spoilers: There is no conspiracy and he did not get killed by someone else.

Part of what's going on here, of course, is that there is a strong tendency for certain genre YA novels to privilege aesthetics, drama, and emotional response over plausibility. This is especially true when the kind of plausibility in question isn't regarded as common or interesting - say, knowledge of what tank treads do to the surfaces of streets, or the logistical base required to maintain an effective air force of any kind (hello, Hunger Games). Often this is even true on the part of the audience-- many moviegoers of my acquaintance will tell people to "just go with" various implausible things, because "it's just a movie".

Now, "It's just a movie," is not a very compelling argument. It's clear, though, that some readers or viewers will accept implausibilities and others will balk at them, and my hypothesis is that reader knowledge, expectations, and interpretive protocols determine their reactions.

If the filter a reader is processing a work through is "Stupid action movie," then they are going to have many of their critical faculties tuned down, so only the most implausible and ridiculous set-pieces will prompt a "Oh, come on!"

In contrast, if a reader is processing a work as serious mimetic literature, they're going to be hyper-sensitive to any perceived deviation from the world and human behavior as we know it.

My suspicion is that both my knowledge (of violence and the military) and my reading protocols are askew from the intended audience of this book. The author wants the set-piece to prompt an aesthetic or emotional response-- the protagonist's brother has been tragically slain! REVENGE!-- and not a skeptical or intellectual one-- Wow, that's some BS. What are the odds of that happening?

I strongly suspect that one of the things that's silently dividing the SF field internally, as well as dividing SF from YA, is the degree to which different audiences' reading protocols skew towards privileging aesthetics and emotion vs. intellect and pattern-matching. (I don't feel like this maps precisely or even closely to the Fantasy/SF split at this point, though people keep on trying to make the conversation about that, which I feel does a damn good job of obscuring what's actually in play.)

There's a whole 'nother post to be made about plausibility and the rhetoric of realism in fiction, but I don't have the time or bandwidth for that right now.

One Reason Why I Enjoy Classical Chinese Literature

2013-04-16T03:56:53Z

The following exchange is from "The Dragon King's Daughter" in The Core of Classical Chinese Fiction, which I picked up at a museum in Shanghai at the end of 2002. The speakers are the Dragon King and his brother, who has just returned from punishing the husband of the titular daughter for mistreating her:

"How many did you kill?" asked the king.

"Six hundred thousand."

"Did you destroy any fields?"

"About three hundred li."

"Where is that scoundrel, her husband?"

"I ate him."

The king looked pained.

"Of course that young blackguard was insufferable," he said. "Still, that was going rather far."

The king's 'going rather far' just slays me. (The purported death toll and ravaging of the fields are pretty standard for works of this period.)

Dorothy Dunnett's The Unicorn Hunt

2013-04-15T02:55:40Z

I'm almost done, and I have to say: this book reads like every single character from previous volumes was replaced by an evil robot.

In many cases, the robots aren't just evil, but also irrational. And very fond of poetic-but-ineffective multi-stage revenge plots.

Books, March

2013-04-05T23:43:03Z

Quite a mixed bag this month, from The Dubious Hills to comics, Warren Ellis's Gun Machine, and the first volume of William Manchester's Churchill bio.

Dan Abnett & I.N.J. Cubbard, The New Deadwardians: Britain (and implicitly the world, though we never get to see that part) is overrun by the risen dead, and the upper classes take "the Cure" - that is, become vampires - in order to avoid the risk of becoming a zombie. Abnett does some thoughtful worldbuilding in terms of considering the social and security consequences of a zombie apocalypse on Edwardian England, though the logistics of Empire and maintaining the upper classes in their privilege are glossed over.

The story itself is a murder mystery, with a nobleman dead and the last murder detective in England (an officer, decorated in the Rising, who took the cure himself) sent by reluctant superiors to uncover the truth about his death. Various theories are advanced, but the ultimate solution is both very Vertigo (DC's 'adult' line, which published The New Deadwardians) and rather disappointing, both as a solution and in its explanation for the Risen Dead. Cubbard's art is also pretty variable, so while I like bits of it, I can't really recommend the whole package.

Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere: Mona Bright is an ex-cop whose life has gone down the tubes, but when going through her father's things, she finds that she's inherited a house that her mother owned in Wink, New Mexico: the site of a government research facility along the lines of Los Alamos. Once she arrives, it becomes clear that something is deeply wrong with Wink - the town is too perfect, and nearly completely cut off from the outside world. Inter-dimensional and trans-temporal weirdness ensues, culminating in a family feud that engulfs the whole town. While American Elsewhere is gripping - I stayed up until 3 AM to finish it - I don't feel like it holds up to scrutiny as well as The Troupe did, especially if you try to treat the science as anything other than a plot device. It's still a Robert Jackson Bennett book, though, and well worth your attention.

Deborah Bloom, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York: Book club book for March. There are lots of lovely anecdotes - mostly of the "How the hell did our ancestors survive amidst such health hazards" variety (answer: some of them didn't) - but while I enjoyed the book it felt rather slight, content-wise. Recommended for anyone interested in being appalled at Prohibition or in need of a reminder of why we have laws about lead, and arsenic, and radium, and various other industrial chemicals/pollutants/toxins.

C.J. Chivers, The Gun: A history of the Kalashnikov line of assault rifles, starting out with the origins of automatic weapons by covering the Gatling and Maxim guns, and then focusing on the AK-47, its successors, and the botched introduction of the M-16 into Vietnam. (It turns out that while arms merchants are generally kind of horrible people, Hiram Maxim was awful. Seriously, I am tempted to fake-spit every time I say his name from now on.)

The strongest bits come when Chivers focuses in and grounds his narratives in both concrete incidents and historical/political context, which basically means that the development of the AK-47, which is still shrouded in secrecy and conflicting accounts, comes off as rather unsatisfying set of probability clouds in comparison to much of the rest of the book. Still and all, Chivers does a good job of making his account comprehensible to lay readers, though the book as a whole has a bit of a grab-bag feel. (There's a bit of a gap between WW I and the AK-47, in which the Sturmgewehr and Thompson SMG are touched on briefly, while guns like the BAR don't even rate a mention.) Recommended despite a few rough edges.

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills: This book is brilliant, and I was not at all surprised to hear that it was a beast to write. In the Dubious Hills, young children can do household magic (though most lose it as they age), uncertainty is a natural law unless you grow into adult Knowledge or have said Knowledge shared with you (and even then, characters attribute their lowercase-k knowledge to an authority 'saying' that a thing is true), and foreigners who wander into the Hills are often driven mad by their strangeness, protecting them from wizards and invading armies. Into this intimate and alien pastoral landscape come wolves who are not wolves, offering strange and ominous gifts, and Arry - the Physici, who Knows pain and hurt - and her siblings and neighbors must deal with them while also going about their daily lives.

I said this was brilliant already, right? Because it is. The Dubious Hills is a triumph of domestic fantasy, where philosophical arguments have terrible weight, and dealing with your neighbors and making sure the kids are occupied and not getting into too much trouble is as immediate and important as dealing with a threat to the world you've grown up in. Most fantasy novels privilege violence and conflict over everyday life in ways that The Dubious Hills doesn't. Everyone working in or around the SFF field should read this book. It's that good.

Warren Ellis, Gun Machine: Warren Ellis writes a serial killer procedural, except not as over-the-top or grim as that description might imply. Ellis's trademarks are all on display here, from poorly socialized and damaged protagonists and techies to a police band that's basically all grue and Kitty Genovese-style blind and deaf bystanders all the time (it's not clear whether Ellis hasn't read the debunking of that particular narrative or chose to ignore it), but aside from the unbelievable cavalcade of horrors lurking off-screen - seriously, New York's murder rate isn't close to that high, nor that consistently weird - Gun Machine is surprisingly grounded and credible despite its moments of melodrama. Guardedly but not strongly recommended.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Outcast Blade: Grimwood is busily ticking off items on the Urban Fantasy/Supernatural Romance genre checklist here, though his terse, hard-boiled style means that events come off far more like an account of an alternate-history Vampire: the Dark Ages game than Renaissance Twilight. The Outcast Blade is chock-full of gratuitous drama and sex, and the impression one gets of Duchess Alexa and Regent Alonzo's political acumen over the course of the book isn't terribly favorable, but it's readable enough, even if the structural obviousness (and political stupidity) of various developments made me roll my eyes. Recommended only for those interested in a different (mostly non-romantic) take on historical vampire and werewolf-fantasy.

Yumi Hotta & Takeshi Obata, Hikaru no Go v.8: It turned out I had one more hardcopy volume of Hikaru no Go than I thought. Hikaru gets further into his Insei training (see the Shonen Jump formula in action!), and we get some more glimpses of the professional Go world.

William Manchester, The Last Lion, Vol. 1: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932: Uff da. This is a big goddamn book, and a readable one, despite the reader needing to compensate for Manchester's evident hero-worship of Churchill and general tendency to apologize for colonialism. Many of the best bits are those contextualizing Churchill's upbringing, or various events in his and his father's parliamentary careers, though of course Churchill's life is often fascinating in its own right. It's evident that Churchill was astonishingly lucky to have avoided death or injury in his military service, and also evident that his personal good fortune in military affairs reinforced his tendency to view armed conflict through a romantic lens. That said (assuming Mr. Manchester wasn't outright lying) I was surprised to learn that Churchill wasn't responsible for the debacle at Gallipoli, and that his idea of a strike on the Dardanelles is understood by military historians as a sound one that could have completely altered the course of the war if the Royal Navy had followed his instructions and not backed off.

It's also quite striking how Churchill's vehement opposition to Communism and Labour seems to have totally overshadowed his contributions to Britain's NHS and the minimum wage, and all sorts of other safety net legislation. Churchill is a conservative hero (in the modern sense) only if you ignore dozens of inconvenient details - and there are many inconvenient details, no matter where you stand politically, as he was an unreconstructed Imperialist and more than a bit racist. Manchester pleads for the reader to consider the time, but I feel one must understand historical figures both through the present and the context of the past. Hagiographizing or demonizing them undermines our ability to understand both history and the impact that their deeds and beliefs have on us today.

Sandy Mitchell, The Greater Good: A perfectly serviceable Ciaphas Cain novel that follows up on some developments from The Emperor's Finest, though it doesn't really do enough with them to retroactively make that book worthwhile. There's some nice detente with the Tau here, as well as inter-service conflicts between the Mechanicus and the Imperial military, and a nice three-sided battle at the end, but overall there's nothing outstanding on display in this one. (Other than the description of the Tau as "inscrutable" on the back cover. I could really do without seeing that word used to describe Asians, or aliens - or anyone - ever again.)

Chris Moriarty, The Inquisitor's Apprentice: A lovely little middle grade book about a boy from an immigrant Jewish family in New York apprenticed to a police Inquisitor tasked to investigate witchcraft and crimes involving magic. The characters and setting are compelling and well-drawn (even if some of the jokes about Wall Street Wizards are a tad groan-worthy), but while I understood why Sacha didn't confide in his Inquisitor or fellow apprentice earlier, that element of the plot still felt a bit contrived. Also, the book is clearly the first in the series, as only half of its main plotline was resolved by its end. Complaints aside, I eagerly await the sequel.

Chris Roberson, Further: Beyond the Threshold: Apparently the first in a new series from Roberson from Amazon's 47North imprint, Further feels like it really needed a good developmental edit or two. The book's structure and shape are both massively out of whack - basically the first two-thirds of the book are setup, with the protagonist being awakened from cold sleep and learning about a Culture-esque future linked by a teleportation network, and the last third of the book contains all the action. Against (basically) space nazis.

Let me just say this - if I never have to roll my eyes at space nazis again, I will be a happy man.

There will probably be readers who enjoy Roberson's attempt to set up a new, Star Trek-like series about interstellar exploration, and it's possible that forthcoming volumes will be better than Beyond the Threshold. But given what a mess this book was, I'm inclined to let the former discover if the latter is true, rather than reading them myself.

There are Giants in the Magazine

2013-03-21T16:20:48Z

So mrissa and I both have stories in today's Beneath Ceaseless Skies: "Armistice Day" (mrissa) and "Blood Remembers" (me).

Mris's story is about race relations in the wake of a magical Great War, while mine is about book-burning and history and how the past is always with us - but some of us more than others. (Also there are popes, anti-popes, heresies, blood magic, and other fun stuff.).

Go check them out.

Has the Grass Been Greener on the Other Side At All?

2013-03-20T08:27:38Z

So that's a revised draft.

One of the things I noticed in going back to Vicious for the Nth time in a decade is that I've since learned not to waste words specifying exactly where a character is looking, or every twitch of their lips, or precisely how they're holding their sword... You get the idea. Anyway, there was a lot of that cluttering up my previous draft, and now there isn't, so hurrah for that.

One thing I will note here and probably return to later re: the whole incoherent grimdark discussion is that I (almost universally) do not write about nice people. One of the most memorable secondary characters in Vicious, for example, is a ten-year-old who wants Malefor to kill someone for her. Which isn't to say that I try to write one-note downer stories about mean people doing mean things - the world, and art, have and need more range and contrast than that. (Also, in context, the homicidal ten-year-old is hilarious.)

I feel like I had a point to make here, but I lost it. Ah, well. I try to make my characters interesting, anyway. And I have more thoughts on contrast which may get written down at some point. You never know.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Halfway through revising Vicious

2013-03-19T09:01:53Z

By chapter-count, anyway.

I will refrain from the renaming rant, because its late, but I may need to go into that at a later date. The short version is that being conscientious about portraying a mix of cultural influences and, um, political/ethical attitudes via names is hard. Especially when you don't want to accidentally have all the nobles come off as Anglo when literally no one in your book is Anglo, including the death-white, red-haired princess of Hell. (Her hair is the color of cinnabar and hellfire. At least, now it is.)

Anyway. The book is being good. I'm enjoying it even as I cut out thousands of words of stage directions and try to make things pithier and more clearly Asian-influenced. I mean, you'd think adapting poems from Li Bai (Li Po, in Wade-Giles) would be clear enough, but apparently not, so I've laid on the bamboo and tigers and rice something fierce in the opening. Duke Matthew is now Duke Zhan (and so on, and so forth).

Because that, apparently, is how I roll.

Books, February

2013-03-11T02:05:16Z

Much delayed, due to travel and travel-related exhaustion. I started Robert Jackson Bennett's American Elsewhere on the plane on February 28th, but finished it a few hours past midnight on March 1st, so I won't be going into it in this post.

Iain M Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata: So this was an enjoyable but ultimately minor Culture novel (and, as mrissa notes, kind of a waste of a good title). Banks seems to be cribbing from both his own prior work (particularly Excession and Consider Phlebas) and that of William Gibson here, and while there are some rather nice bits included in the mix, the cumulative effect was to make me feel like I'd read the book before, and not in the delighted way one re-reads an old favorite. I kind of feel like there's still the potential for an ending of the sort which The Hydrogen Sonata has to be powerful, but in this case the book just kind of fades out, not quite with a whimper. Ah, well. I wanted a Banks novel with things exploding, and despite the occasional intriguing glimpses we get of non-Culture civilizations, that's really all there is to see here.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Troupe: I already mentioned that I nominated The Troupe for the Hugo this year, and hinted at the reasons. Bennett's third novel follows a teenage Vaudevillian (who is depicted quite realistically - often painfully so) as he searches for his father and joins his vaudeville troupe, and discovers that he and the rest of his troupe are being hunted due to his father's involvement in world-shaking magical intrigues. The Troupe manages to create an American fantasy landscape that is eerie, rich, and troubled as the history it draws on, and the pacing of events and revelations surrounding the climax is carefully and expertly orchestrated. A very good book; highly recommended.

Dorothy Dunnett, Race of Scorpions: I continue to enjoy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series more than the Lymond books, and Race of Scorpions kicks up the pace and density of intrigue from Spring of the Ram, with Nicholas having to navigate between two rival claimants to the throne of Cyprus, the Venetians and the Genoese, and a bevy of rivals and enemies such as King Zacco's Mamluk commander, Katelina Van Borselen, his Portuguese cousin Diniz, and the Vatachino - a rival mercantile syndicate that shows up late in the novel. Race of Scorpions is more explicitly military in character than the previous Niccolo novels, which was a nice change of pace, and made its drama-tastic moments a bit easier for me to bear. Probably my favorite in the series so far, though possibly eclipsed by Scales of Gold.

Dorothy Dunnett, Scales of Gold: Opening with the Vatachino and Simon St. Pol threatening everything Nicholas has built, Scales of Gold follows the convolutions of his expedition to Africa, where he and his companions seek the gold of the Silent Trade, an exchange of salt for gold attested to in Herodotus. Theft and treachery and betrayal pile up atop one another for the first half of the novel, at which point Nicholas and those of his companions who've survived arrive in Timbuktu, and the whole character of the novel changes. There's a resonant harmony that runs through the second half of Scales of Gold and follows Nicholas home to Venice and Bruges - a harmony which Dunnett deliberately shatters in the novel's closing pages.

I'm not sure how I feel about the direction Dunnett chose to take here. From a conflict- and drama-maximization approach, I see how the logic flows, but as I noted above, I could actually do with less "Oh! The Drama!" moments in Dunnett - I feel like her books would be better if she actually let her characters attain some semblance of peace at the end of a narrative arc, however transient it proves, because the alternative is awfully predictable (in direction if not specifics). Also, while I haven't read The Unicorn Hunt yet, it strikes me that the character in question had plenty of straightforward opportunities to destroy Nicholas and chose an incredibly baroque approach instead. That sort of thing tends to undermine my willing suspension of disbelief.

That said, I really really enjoyed Scales of Gold before the inevitable reversal, which is why I'm vacillating between it and Race of Scorpions for my favorite in the series so far.

David Graeber, Debt: Another book where I'm not entirely sure what I think of it. There are large sections of Debt that strike me as persuasive and enlightening, and others that appear to be built on little more than Graeber's Anarchist convictions and belief that Islamic trade across the Indian ocean was a 'truly free' market (i.e. one without coercive/state enforcement of contracts). Also, I'm not convinced that Graeber understands how honor and 'face', Guan Xi, and the like have historically functioned in societies where public honor and private integrity are distinct, which problematizes still more of his claims. Debt is a very interesting book, but also one where many of the arguments appear to be built on correlation rather than causation - and I say this as a reader who agrees with the general shape of many of Graeber's arguments about the IMF and the like. Recommended guardedly, and only to the well-read and critically-minded.

Anthony Price, Tomorrow's Ghost: papersky's review on Tor.com spoiled me for one aspect of the ending, but that didn't detract from my ability to enjoy the book. The specifics of the wheels-within-wheels plot of Tomorrow's Ghost really worked for me once they were revealed (especially Colonel Butler's whereabouts on the day in question), though to be honest the book took a while to get there. Still quite enjoyable, in the same vein as other Price, and certainly loaded with more references to Tolkien and fantasy/ghost stories than the other books in the series.

Anthony Price, Soldier no More: This took a while to get started too, for similar but not identical reasons to Tomorrow's Ghost - Roche is immediately privy to the high-level plot, but until after he's met Audley and the shenanigans get started, he's mostly just trying to get up to speed on who the players are and what's going on (and of course he's wrong about a great deal of it). I also felt like the historical romance/Hollywood subplot was a bit eye-rolling - if only it really was that easy to knock out a bestseller! - but the book's still fun in spite of its flaws.

Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince: Apparently Fedorovism is a real thing? I had no idea. Anyway, The Fractal Prince picks up where The Quantum Thief left off, with Jean de Flambeur heading toward Earth on the Perhonen, and introduces the reader to a variety of human characters still living amidst the haunted ruins of Earth's ubiquitous computing networks. The action is brisk, and the imagery vivid, but once I figured out the terms and history of the Fedorovist/Zoku conflict underlying the action of the series so far, I was (possibly inevitably) disappointed by it. Also, I kind of feel like several of the book's twists were set up in ways that weren't really fair to the reader in terms of giving them the information they needed to see them coming. I'm not sorry I read The Fractal Prince, but I kind of feel like it was trying a bit too hard to be hip and cutting-edge, and managed to undermine itself in the process.

My Best Novel slate

2013-03-08T09:24:30Z

I didn't read a lot of short fiction this last year, so I'm not going to talk about those categories much other than noting that mrissa's Tor.com story, "Uncle Flower's Homecoming Waltz", was awesome. I did read a lot of books, though, and these were my favorites that were eligible.

In no particular order:

Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. Arguably a sequel/follow-up to Memory, this is Bujold in fine form.

Elizabeth Bear, Range of Ghosts. A really solid non-western epic fantasy, full of changing skies, steppe ponies, and hungry ghosts.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Troupe. Manages to make American-inflected epic fantasy work, which is no small task. The teen protagonist made me wince with recognition.

Kameron Hurley, Rapture. God's War got all the attention last year, but Infidel (the second of three books) was better. Rapture, the trilogy's conclusion, is better still.

Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey, The Steel Seraglio. Not horror, despite being published by Chizine. 1001 Nights as filtered through a city of women - warriors, traders, diplomats, spies. I love this book to bits, and it deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Honorable Mention:

Ben Aaronovich, Whispers Under Ground. I love this series, and this book was just killer. That said, it didn't quite rise above the others on my shortlist.

Anyway, that's my novel ballot for this year.

Books, January

2013-02-01T23:03:29Z

Highly variable length and density here. The 50 Year Sword is basically a 5-person dramatic reading dressed up like a novel, whereas Norwich's A History of Venice is a 700-page doorstop of politics, strife, historical gossip, and footnotes about doge's tombs.

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons: swan_tower uses a somewhat lighter tone here than in the later Onyx Court books, but her ~~Regency~~ early Victorian-styled fantasy about Lady Isabella Trent, dragon naturalist, is full of carefully chosen details and implication-laden worldbuilding. The combination of the memoir form and the social constraints Isabella has to overcome mean that there bits in the first half where the pacing lags slightly, and when combined with me being a stressball, this meant I didn't read A Natural History of Dragons straight through, but the second half of the book is full of pulpy goodness, with smugglers and ruins and (of course) lots of dragons. Recommended, especially as the sequels promise to build on this book's strengths.

Glen Cook, Sweet Silver Blues: I would have sworn that I read this when I was in my first Glen Cook phase, at 13, but if I did, most of its content must have gone in one ear and out the other. Cook borrows an unfortunate quantity of misogyny and racial stereotyping from the hard-boiled detective novels he pastiches, but if you can push past that (and I understand many readers won't want to), Sweet Silver Blues is an intrigue-laden excursion into a monster-haunted war zone where two empires are waging an endless war over the economic and magical power granted by silver mines. About twice as problematic as The Black Company, with about half the payoff - though of course I love The Black Company with an irrational affection.

Mark Z. Danielewski, The 50 Year Sword: There's a lot of pretension baked into this one, which shouldn't come as a surprise, since Danielewski rose to prominence with House of Leaves, a surreal horror novel using $BIGNUM fonts and footnotes to in order to appear really damn clever. The 50 Year Sword has its text nested in 5 colors of quotes, in order to indicate which of the 5 orphan/narrators is meant to be reading it during its performance. Each page of text is also matched with a photograph/illustration, some of which are quite clever, but really you don't need to spare more than a glance to most of them until halfway through. The story proper is thin enough - a woman whose husband has left her goes to the birthday party of the woman who caused the dissolution of her marriage and gets stuck watching 5 orphans and a storyteller who claims to be a bad bad man with a very special sword - but the imagery around the rest of the sword-smith's weapons and the prices he demands were kind of cool. Not really recommended to people who don't obsess about that sort of thing, though.

Dorothy Dunnett, The Spring of the Ram: I continue to like Claes/Nicholas more than I liked Lymond, both because he isn't perfect (save for plot convenience) - he screws up at a grand scale at least once in this book through inexperience - and also because this series shows him learning. That said, The Spring of the Ram is kind of a weird book. It's not nearly as frustrating as I found Queen's Play, but in a lot of ways it's the sort of series book that's just marking time. We're told that Nicholas was never really worried about Doria as a threat, even though the book is structured so the reader's desire for Doria's elimination just keeps on building, and... yeah. There were a lot of places where readerly expectations and authorial intent didn't really mesh, at least for me, making The Spring of the Ram feel like it had a throwaway antagonist and was primarily about setting up Nicholas and Catherine for subsequent volumes, rather than its own events.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (re-read): For me, at least, Ginzburg's arguments about folk culture take a back seat to the glimpses we get of the Inquisition and rural life in the Friuli through Menocchio's trial. An interesting counterpoint to Norwich's A History of Venice, even if Ginzburg's larger claims about oral culture among peasants are more speculative than well-grounded.

Yuki Hotta (illus. Takeshi Obata), Hikaru no Go 1-7 (re-read): A pre-teen Japanese boy touches a bloodstained Go board in his grandfather's attic and is haunted by Fujiwara No Sai, the spirit of a Heian Go master who cannot rest until he plays 'the Divine Move'. Enjoyable as a comedy in the first few volumes, the series gradually grows more concerned with the trappings of professional Go in Japan as it goes on, even as it falls into the common tropes and rhetoric of Shonen Jump manga - i.e. "strength", and "training". At least in these early volumes, Sai is one of the best parts of the story (though once Hikaru goes pro, the focus shifts enough that the supernatural elements of the series are dispensed with).

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice: Norwich's history of Venice was both awesome and awesomely catty, with entire centuries dismissed in a few pages only to have the deeds of one of Norwich's favorite (or least favorite) doges take up several chapters. I can't really do the book justice in this post, but A) it's remarkable how many of the characters and atrocities in Dunnett's novel are taken from actual history - I'm still boggled that Dragut Rais was a real person - and B) after reading Norwich's account of the Turkish expansion into Europe, it's painfully clear that the Ottoman Turks were one of the historical models for Mordor. Not only does the sense of doom evoked by reports of the Turkish advance precisely match that evoked by Tolkien and later writers, but the Turks reached much further into Europe than I'd thought. (For example, Turkish raiders burned and pillaged the Friuli, one of Venice's provinces, on multiple occasions.)

Miho Obana, Kodocha v. 4-10 (re-read): Oh, teh dramaz! For a generally light-hearted girl's manga featuring a protagonist whose usual response is to overreact to everything, Kodocha goes some pretty dark places. Which is one of the reasons I like it, of course.

Anthony Price, The '44 Vintage: An interesting companion piece to Hour of the Donkey, The '44 Vintage follows Corporal Butler and 2nd Lieutenant Audley through the aftermath of the Normandy invasion, as they're seconded to a covert operations force tasked to recover hidden treasure from the retreating Nazis. Inevitably, things go wrong, and Audley and Butler have to navigate their way through a many-sided maze of intrigue. Enjoyable on its own, as well as a lens on Price's characters dealing with espionage and greed during World War II.

Hiroaki Samura, Blade of the Immortal 1-3: It's hard to tell how much of this is the original text vs. the localization, but I feel like Studio Proteus really got into its groove w/ regards to the translation later in the series. Which isn't to say that Samura's characters aren't gruesome and his depiction of conflicts between Tokugawa-era ronin problematic - they certainly are - but the combination of a localization that's still finding its feet with content that makes me more uncomfortable than the stylized ultra-violence that later characterizes the series made re-reading these tougher going than I'd expected.

The art and fight scenes are still crazy awesome, though.

Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors: Possibly my favorite of the books I read in January, The Nine Tailors is a relentlessly domestic mystery set in the English fens, which spares almost as much attention to campanology and civic engineering as it does to the question of how an extra body could turn up in the local kirkyard. The actual mystery is intriguing, and the solution is ingenious (if not necessarily plausible), but what really worked for me was the care and attention Sayers took in describing not only the life of a country parish and its church, but the degree to which she integrated flood planning into the core of the book. The Nine Tailors is relentlessly nerdy, and does a better job of world-building in its description of Fenchurch St. Paul and its surrounding area than many SF novels do. Recommended as an example of a mystery novel that manages to be about much more than just the mystery.

Lucky #13, and small sample sizes

2013-02-01T04:13:09Z

So as mrissa said a few days back, the two of us sold "On the Weaponization of Flora and Fauna" to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, making it the 4th collaborative piece we've sold together (and my 13th fiction sale since May 2011 - I'm waiting on the contract to publicly announce #12). I'm really fond of the story, so I'm glad it found a home.

With two sales so far this year and a fair number of editors hanging onto my stories for consideration or otherwise responding slowly, I was grimly amused to note that my acceptance percentage had bounced from 0% to 50% before hitting 67% for a day. It's now back down to 40%, and should descend further towards sanity as the year continues. (Lest anyone be discouraged, this is purely the result of calculating statistics off of a biased sample and small sample size. My cumulative acceptance rate is closer to 4% at the moment.)

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2012 - Year in review

2013-01-03T20:10:44Z

2012 was a good year in some ways and a rough one in others. I got laid off at the end of March due to cash flow problems at my employer, and spent the rest of the year looking for a new design gig, with lots of phone and in-person interviews but no offers so far.

Things went better on the writing front, with 8 fiction sales, 1 poetry sale, and 6 stories and the poem seeing print. A full list of my sales and publications is here - only "Volition" and "The Vigil" saw print in 2011. (As the link indicates, this is my last year of eligibility for the Campbell.)

I actually have no idea how many stories I finished in 2012, given that my spreadsheet is in California and I'm not. Based on the number of collaborations I worked on with mrissa I'm guessing it's in the 8-10 range? I got serious about sending Choice to agents, too, and have partials with two of them at present.

I read more books than usual - my count is well over 100, counting manga & GNs - did programming for 4th Street, attended FogCon, Minicon, 4th Street, and Farthing Party; played a huge variety of games for research purposes (when prompted to list the games I played in the last 6 months on a design test, the list was over 60 games long); and did a ton of work on a couple of unpaid side projects, as well as spending several weeks on design tests and interviews.

In retrospect, I guess I did a lot last year, even though my brain is trying to tell me I did nothing but twiddle my thumbs and play Call of Duty.

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Books, December

2013-01-02T02:36:24Z

Ordered alphabetically by author this time.

Pamela Dean, The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, The Whim of the Dragon (re-read): So I noticed several things in the course of re-reading the Secret Country books, but possibly the most relevant here is that while they are clearly portal fantasies and draw extensively on fantasy genre tropes, they are mostly doing something that is orthogonal to the rest of the genre. I am a bit ashamed to say that I didn't really notice the extent to which this was true last time, but in terms of traditional genre action set-pieces (which is to say, duels, poisonings, battles, etc.) there is only slightly more than one per book. Most of the interest from the reader's perspective resides in character interactions, dialogue, and the characters (as well as the reader) trying to figure out what's going on.

In addition to this more mystery-oriented approach to fantasy, pameladean does a great deal with magical landscape and the exploration thereof in these books, and even when the children have revealed their identities to the denizens of the Hidden Land and can ask them what's going on, the various magical loci sometimes have properties that take them by surprise.

I will confess that it had been long enough since I last read The Whim of the Dragon that I'd forgotten how the intrigue plot ended. That said, I really enjoyed the way the series resolved, and how Pamela dodged the 'Death of the Magic' ending there.

Dorothy Dunnett, Niccolo Rising: So possibly it's just because I never cottoned to Lymond much, but I enjoyed Niccolo Rising and Claes more than I recall liking most of the Lymond books. I think part of it is that I can actually see why people would like Claes, and that he doesn't start out amazing at everything. The opening is a bit slow in terms of indicating why one should care about these characters, but I'm apparently more interested in Renaissance trade and mercenary warfare than the average bear, so once everyone made it to the Venetian galleys, I was hooked.

Sarah Monette, Corambis: It's been quite a while since I read Melusine, so it's possible that my memories mislead me, but I'm pretty sure I like Corambis even better than I liked that book (and I enjoyed Melusine quite a bit). I'm a huge fan of how truepenny integrated things like the Titan Clocks, the Corambin trains, and the engine that lies at the center of the novel into her world. For an added bonus, Felix acts like a human being most of the time, and there are fossils and bog bodies and a bunch of juicy history and magical metaphysics. I like it when people set books at magical universities that work like actual universities.

It's a shame that the Doctrine of Labyrinths series ended with Corambis, but I look forward to reading The Goblin Emperor when that comes out.

Miho Obana, Kodocha v. 1-3 (re-read): These are a somewhat light-hearted Shojo manga series about a child actor and the trials and tribulations that she and her friends go through. I still enjoy them, but there are some bits that strike me as a tad problematic in the early volumes.

Aya Nakahara, Love*Com v. 1-7 & 11 (re-read): A Shojo romance series about a teenage girl who is much taller (5'8"! OMG gigantic for Japan!) than the boy she's interested in (5'1"). Deeply silly in a lot of respects, and yet affecting in terms of how it depicts teenage social dynamics re: social cluelessness, preconceptions, and how people ignore the things they have in common with people to chase after imagined ideals.

Daniel Pinkwater, Bushman Lives: More dadaist than most Pinkwater I've read, Bushman Lives doesn't even have a proper ending. What it has instead is a lot of bits that appear to be Pinkwater's musings on art, as channeled through the narrator and his life, as well as a bunch of his usual surreal ideas and imagery, but unfortunately the good bits never quite cohere into anything solid. Read The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death instead, or maybe Young Adult Novel if you want something more dadaist but with an actual ending.

Anthony Price, War Game: A convenient death during a historical reenactment and the discovery of a long-lost treasure lead Audley into a maze of intrigue that centers on the English Civil War. Fun stuff, and I didn't expect the final complication, even though I saw the second-to-last twist coming from miles away.

Anthony Price, Hour of the Donkey: A pair of BEF officers who stumble on evidence of treason in the leadup to Dunkirk barely avoid being wiped out with their unit, and must try to survive and make their way across the French countryside in order to deal with the traitor. What's remarkable about The Hour of the Donkey is while its protagonist is a bit of a coward, can't hit a damn thing with a gun, and is definitely not the brains of the operation (that would be his injured companion), he comes off as remarkably sympathetic through a combination of stubbornness and shame-faced accidental courage. Part of this is authorial contrivance, of course, but I tend to have little to no sympathy for this sort of character, and Mr. Price made me very fond of Harry Bastable, donkey though he was.

Anthony Price, The Memory Trap: Set in the late 1980s, in the era of Glasnost, The Memory Trap hand-waves its way through the computer-related aspects of information storage and espionage in ways that suggest it was a mercy that Anthony Price didn't try to keep writing spy novels forever. The twists and turns the plot takes, with assassinations designed to distract people from piecing clues from years before together, are actually quite lovely, even if I'm not sure I buy the accuracy with which characters remember things from twenty years before. It's hard to complain too much, though - unnaturally vivid, accurate memories and flashbacks are a convention in nearly every kind of fiction these days.

Lavie Tidhar, Osama: Osama follows a private investigator through a purportedly alternate history as he tries to track down the author of a series of pulp novels about Osama Bin Laden, the contents of which depict various acts of terror from our own history. Tidhar is clearly tapping into Philip K. Dick's paranoid oeuvre, but the incoherence of his alternate history (World War II clearly occurred, but Japan apparently never invaded China or Southeast Asia and is - ha! - evidently sincere about a 'co-prosperity sphere'; there's no Cold War or war on Drugs; personal computers and credit card machines magically never happened; and so on and so forth, with no apparent historical logic aside from authorial fiat) kept distracting me from the meta-fictional conceit. Having the "refugees" haunting the alternate world be the victims of terrorism in ours didn't do much for me either, and the Mike Longshott fan convention struck me as incredibly cheap.

Some people clearly liked the book, as it won the World Fantasy Award, but I honestly can't see why. (I suspect fundamental disagreements about the point of SF and Fantasy may be responsible.)

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Happy thoughts for the new year

2013-01-01T10:30:42Z

Usual blah about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it... Or maybe not, in this case.

From John Julius Norwich's A History of Venice, p.204:

"Another event which in retrospect might be considered to have been of even greater moment - the arrival in 1321 of Dante Alighieri as special emissary from Ravenna - seems to have aroused little or no interest in the city... when the time came for his return, Venice refused to grant him a safe conduct by the most convenient route. He was consequently obliged to make his way back through malarial swampland, as a result of which he caught a fever and died."

Norwich tends to privilege narrative over strict accuracy, but seriously - I don't think most folks, Venetian diplomats or otherwise, are very likely to think, "Hey! Lets send this special envoy guy home through the fever swamp! That'll be awesome!"

May the year to come be better for all of us than the year before.

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Vibrato is not your friend

2012-12-31T06:46:15Z

Yes, Hugh Jackman, this means you. Even when you're trying to emote. Really.

In other news, Lily Kane - erm, I mean Amanda Seyfried - has a vibrato that could cut glass. Seriously, Marius: Eponine (Samantha Barks) has a lovely alto and can actually sing. I suggest running off with her rather than the Bourgeois two-a-penny thing.

As for Russell Crowe, he hit all the bits that were in his actual range out of the park. Too bad that meant more than half of Javert's songs came off swallowed and understated. "I will never yield," is not a line that can drift off breathily. (Nor are most of his other lines, for that matter.)

In other news, the libretto for Les Miserables beats the pants off of that of Wicked.

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Children of the River

2012-12-28T21:12:37Z

So I just finished a draft of a story I started after 4th Street in 2010. The progress of fiction writing is often grindingly slow, but apparently after nearly two years of lying fallow, the story decided it was time, so now I have another novelette to revise and shop around to all 8-10 markets that will even look at it.

One of the things about fiction at this length is that I find myself building up the spear for the first half of the story, so when the time comes to stab the reader in the feels with it (as it were), there's more weight to lean on. There's a rebellion going on in this one, but no one dies "on screen" until the very end. Instead, my characters skulk and chat and argue politics on boats. It's all very civil, aside from the burning barges floating by.

Another thing going on with this story, which delayed it a bit, is that the setting is Asian-influenced but not simply Fantasy Legalist China. When people write about Asian cultures in English, there's a tendency for the nomenclature to become Orientalizing in ways that make me uncomfortable - characters are either named Lao Hu or Old Tiger, and they always wield dao or butterfly swords, or some other phrasing that either A) is opaque to people who don't know the language being used, which creates exoticizing distance, or B) panders to a particular vision of the Exotic East. I mean, I'm willing to deploy both techniques when writing something set in actual Mythic China, or people who literally speak Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Whatever but I try to be sparing with them otherwise.

One of the things you run into when trying to do something that draws on historical Asia but isn't just Nongols and the Non Dynasty, though, is that cultural defaults are powerful. Many western readers really want to read characters as white who aren't supposed to be, and so on, and so forth, and going the route I did, with names that are unfamiliar but parseable means that some people are inevitably going to get the wrong idea, re: intended whiteness, or cultural appropriation, or whatever. It would be a lot easier to lean on familiar tropes like origami imagery and naming characters things like Number Ten Ox. Then everyone would be comfortable and know where they stood.

One of the things that's always frustrated me about Asian fantasy in the west, though, is how limited its sources are. There are huge swaths of Chinese culture and classics, like Outlaws of the Marsh/The Water Margins, Romance of Three Kingdoms, and Strange Tales from Liaozhai which are basically completely unknown. Even Journey to the West is better known via Dragon Ball than on its own. These are not obscure books, any more than Japan's Sengoku period is obscure. That more work doesn't draw on them is frankly embarrassing.

Perhaps trying to tamp down formal exoticism while also presenting material mostly unknown in the west will prove a bridge too far. But as mrissa is wont to note, China is big, and Asian culture is even more expansive. Even if I fail, I feel it's worth it to try to sneak as many river-walkers (zou jiang hu de) and grasping magistrates and wise tigers and Obon-like festivals into my stories as I can. Because Asia isn't a monolith, and Asian-influenced stories shouldn't be either.

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Sauron's Holiday Song

2012-12-25T20:41:05Z

This probably still needs work, but in honor of the season, I give you "Twelve Days of Conquest."

On the first day of conquest, my minions brought to me
The One Ring that subjugates the free.

On the second day of conquest, my minions brought to me
Two Fallen Towers
and the One Ring that subjugates the free.

(Let's skip to the final verse...)

On the twelfth day of conquest, my minions brought to me
Twelve Beornings Dancing
Eleven Rangers Striding
Ten Hungry Hobbits
Nine Nazgul Riding
Eight Fell Beasts Flapping
Seven Shards of Narsil
Six Palantiri ~~Sons of Elrond~~
Five Dwarven Kings
Four Elven Lords
Three Silmarils
Two Fallen Towers
and the One Ring that subjugates the Freeeeeee...

It would probably be better to have Wizards at 5 and Dwarves at 7, but being able to belt out '5 Dwarven Kings' is probably worth the loss of canonical association there.

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Extrapolation as Aesthetic

2012-12-16T04:32:45Z

So I'm still trying to work through all of my thoughts on this, but I've been noticing a fair amount of SF lately (often, but not always, alternate history) that seems to treat extrapolation - examining the consequences and implications of its premises or rules - as optional.

This alone is only moderately frustrating. I don't usually write the hardest of hard SF myself, so I'm not exactly about to start throwing stones at people for not calculating out all the trajectories in their story via slide rule and graph paper. But what worries me a bit is when some of these stories get lauded as amazing and rigorous and full of great and rigorous extrapolation, leaving me wondering if the people who are praising and nominating them for awards read the same story I did.

Let's take Jake Kerr's Nebula-nominated "The Old Equations" as an example here. Obviously the story is riffing on/responding to the famous and famously flawed "The Cold Equations", which I feel is a worthy thing to do. (mrissa and I may have taken a line or two to do that in the story that recently sold to Analog.) The story, which is set in 2193, is about an astronaut being sent on an interstellar mission running into quantum communication problems with Ground Control and his wife, which turn out to be the result of time dilation due to relativity. Which the people in this timeline don't know about because Einstein died before he discovered it.

(At this point some of you are probably staring at me going, "Okay, and...?" while readers who have a sense of how much of modern physics is built on special relativity are either wincing or rolling their eyes.)

I really don't mean to pick on Jake or his story here, but to me, the idea that a society three centuries after Einstein which is advanced enough to build an interstellar spaceship doesn't know about special relativity is... frankly insane. I know that we've hagiographized Einstein to the point that people imagine he was a special genius, unmatched in all the history of the world, but seriously. 300 years is a long-ass time in physics, and there were dozens of very smart physicists who were Einstein's peers and would probably have stumbled on special relativity and time dilation if he got killed in a war. As such, the history of science which "The Old Equations" implies is more or less completely unbelievable to me.

This isn't to say that "The Old Equations" is any way a bad story, or bad SF, or that people can't or shouldn't enjoy it. But I don't feel like it's a work of rigorous extrapolation, however accurate the time dilation math is.

Why, you ask, does this matter? Well, because when we like and enjoy something, especially in these days of hyperbole inflation ("Best thing evar!") there is a tendency to praise it to the skies as *so* moving, and *so* well-done, and *so* rigorously imagined. There are a number of novels which have been up for major awards lately that have had a lot of people saying this sort of thing about them, and it makes me want to shake people, because words have meaning dammit.

To put it another way, there seems to be a growing conflation of the performance or appearance of rigor ("I came up with something cool I wanted to do and slathered it with handwavium!") with the actuality of rigor ("I put a lot of thought into the implications of my fantastical premise.") And I find that a bit alarming, because I feel like actual rigorous extrapolation, and not just the appearance of it, is valuable.

Like I said earlier, I don't want every - or even most! - stories to be the hardest of hard SF, or the most rigorously grounded of historical fantasy. Not every story needs to possess every virtue, and in fact many literary virtues are contradictory. (For example, if the Paarfi books omitted needless words, the world would be a sadder place.) But since I like reading stories where world-building has consequences and far-reaching implications, and I know that many of you do too, I figured I would put this out there and see if anyone else had noticed the same sort of thing.

Books, November

2012-12-15T19:28:11Z

Listed in roughly the order they were read.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance: I enjoyed 'the Ivan book' a great deal, even though I felt like it took several chapters to find its footing. The larger Barrayaran culture and history loomed in the book, the better I liked it, and I feel like whoever pointed out that the second half of the book is a sequel to Memory was on to something, even though the things I like about Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and Memory overlap only in terms of their connection to Barrayaran history and ImpSec. The opening aside, I feel like this is Bujold's strongest work in many years, up there with (but just a smidge below) Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign.

Dan Abnett, Pariah: I just wrote a review of Pariah for the NYRSF in which I claimed Abnett is the best military SF writer working today, and not for the sake of hyperbole. Pariah joins Only In Death in the ranks of Abnett's very best work, and despite being the 7th in a loose series, it's far more accessible to the uninitiated, due to having a first-person narrator who's discovering everything at the same time a new reader would. Set in a decaying city that's half Vancian and half Dickensian, Pariah is a twisty, tricky, inventive novel of intrigue where treachery is around every corner. Abnett even managed to surprise me a couple of times through deft sleight of hand. Recommended.

Ben Aaronovich,Whispers Under Ground (re-read): What can I say, Aaronovich's books are still great. I picked this one up looking for passages to read at one of swan_tower's parties and found I'd re-read the whole thing.

Greg Bear, Halo: Cryptum: Greg Bear's first Halo novel didn't quite reach the same high bar that Karen Traviss's Kilo-Five books did, but it's still miles ahead of the early tie-in novels for the brand. A young, naive Forerunner travels to pre-historic Earth, and with the help of two humans who've been genetically programmed with instructions by a Forerunner Lifeshaper, frees the Didact (the antagonist in Halo 4) from his Cryptum/time prison. The rest of the book focuses on galactic-scale history and politics, as the Didact and his young pupil discover what developments have brought the Forerunners to the brink of civil war.

(While Cryptum was a decent Halo tie-in, but it was a little odd reading a Greg Bear novel and going, "Wait, some of these people are supposed to be thousands of years old? How come they don't get all weird, like the post-humans in Eon and Eternity?" The answer, of course, is because that would narrow the book's appeal significantly. Still frustrating, though.)

Hilary McKay, Caddy's World: Yay, more Cassons! Even if it's a Casson prequel. mrissa once said (approximately) that the best Casson Family books are about Caddy or Rose, and Caddy's World seems to support that hypothesis. Caddy and her friends are a delight, as are young Indigo and Saffron, and some of the things the narrator and characters say about Bill Casson are so true they hurt. Anyway, great book, great series, recommended.

Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel, Indigo's Star, Permanent Rose (Rereads): I was re-reading these to try to get myself in the right headspace for writing Blood Valley High, and I was surprised at how my reactions to them had changed over time. I remember feeling stressed about Saffy being hidden away in Sarah's family car in Saffy's Angel the first time I read it, and that was gone this time, letting me enjoy the book in the spirit it was intended. Indigo's Star... focuses too much on Tom. Who is not actually as interesting or funny as the Cassons are, and (once you find out why he's in England) comes off as a bit of a jerk. Thankfully Permanent Rose replaces Tom with David (who is much more interesting as a foil for Rose, and a better catalyst for shenanigans), and has more of a Rose focus, which means it's more fun. It's a toss-up whether Permanent Rose or Forever Rose is my favorite of the series, at the moment.

Brian Michael Bendis, Dark Avengers v. 1: Hey, it's Bendis writing the Thunderbolts, except because of the Secret Invasion crossover, they get to call themselves the Avengers. I have to admit, I found Norman Osborne's overt politicking and the team's interactions with Dr. Doom to be the best part of this. The team's internal bickering felt like something I'd seen before, and it was done better in the likes of Sleeper and the original Thunderbolts series.

Mike Mignola, Hellboy - Right Hand of Doom: Mike Mignola can draw, but good lord was there no point to most of these stories. Bad stuff happens, Hellboy hits things/is clever, the end. (Okay, the bit with the monkey in the titular story made me laugh.)

Tite Kubo, Bleach 1-3, 21-24</i> (re-reads): I re-read these after watching the first 20 episodes of the anime, in order to see how they compared (1-3) and to remind myself what happened after the Soul Society arc (21-24). At least for the opening arc of the series, I feel like the Bleach anime may actually be preferable and/or better-paced - the comic starts out feeling incredibly frenetic, with really cluttered page layouts. The content is basically the same, other than how its presented, though.

Screwball Comedy! Now With Diplomatic Kidnappings!

2012-12-14T18:27:50Z

So mrissa's novelette, "The Radioactive Etiquette Book", is in the March 2013 issue of Analog, which I have seen on shelves and even purchased. It's a screwball comedy about interstellar and inter-species diplomacy, vaguely along the lines of Connie Willis' work: like the first half of To Say Nothing of the Dog, really, except with aliens instead of time travel.

I gather that the electronic edition of the magazine isn't available ala carte yet, but whether you can find a physical copy or are willing to wait for the electronic version, I strongly recommend the story.

In Your Deepest Pain, In Your Weakest Hour...

2012-12-13T06:31:52Z

So my story "Casualties" is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. When I sold it, I said it was about survivor's guilt, and trauma, and the price of victory, and it is. It's also a response to a lot of different things, including but not limited to the magical school/college genre, and continuity resets in fiction.

Everything has a price. Everything has consequences. But don't take it from me. Listen to Simon...

There is something contemptible about a man of five-and-twenty reminiscing about the good old days. This is especially true when the days in question were distinguished primarily by the number of your peers who didn’t survive them.

Read the rest here.

21st Century Analog Boy

2012-12-07T03:12:42Z

This post is probably 99% redundant with mrissa's, but the two of us just sold our collaboration, "Milk Run", to Analog.

There are space marines in this one. And pirates. And it's surprisingly non-violent for that.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.