Katharine Kerr's Blog
June 28, 2012
There's a new giveaway -- Morrigan Press is giving away 2 copies of its anthology, THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES. I have a Deverry story in it. Lots of other good stories by authors like CE Murphy! You can put in a request starting on July 1st.
June 26, 2012
Lately I've seen some arguments online about the place of women in historical fantasies. In certain popular series, women seem to exist to be mothers, tavern wenches, hookers, and rape victims. The authors and fans of these series like to say that those were the roles women played historically -- with a few exceptions like Cleopatra or Eleanor of Aquitaine. No one seems to wonder how the exceptions managed to get so exceptional, if every other women lived down in the dirt or locked up for safety in her husband's house.
The thing is, this view of women's lives as drudges and victims is based on ignorance and indifference. Uncovering the truth about women's lives in different periods of history can be difficult, mostly because the majority of surviving historical writings we have were written by men. Until the 1970s, most modern histories were also written by men, and most of them didn't much care about women's lives unless they somehow influenced the men around them. Which brings us right back to the exceptional few.
Fortunately, things have changed in Academia since then. What follows are some recommendations of books and sources for anyone interested in learning how women really lived "back then." These are just a few of the available texts out there. The Bibliographies in each will lead on to other books and articles. I haven't listed much about the Middle Ages or about non-Western civilizations, because those are out of my area. I like to recommend books that I've read and can judge with some degree of knowledge.
The best overall look at the history of women that I know is called, oddly enough, "The History of Women", in a number of volumes from Harvard University Press. The general editors are Georges Duby and Michelle Perot. These volumes can be hard to find new, but any good library should have them.
What follows are books that focus on invidual times and places. A quick search at any of the big online bookstores will turn up many more titles. If you read a few of these books, you'll begin to see how information can be gleaned from grudging sources. To say that we know nothing of women's roles during the vast sweep of history is the defense of lazy authors.
Let's start at the beginning. THE INVISIBLE SEX by Adivasio, Soffer, and Page, Smithsonian Books, discusses how the evidence for women's lives in prehistory has been ignored, while male prehistorians made up charming myths based on very little evidence about the men.
On the other hand, feminist scholars can misinterpret evidence, too. THE GODDESS AND THE BULL by Michael Balter, The Free Press, discusses the controversial site of Catalhoyuk, and the misunderstandings of what it represented.
Moving on to Classical times, too many people assume that all Greek women lived like Athenian females -- married off young to older men, expected to stay inside for the rest of their lives, and such. Sarah Pomeroy's SPARTAN WOMEN, Oxford University Press, is a good corrective to this view.
Some pagan women in Classical times lived prominent lives in public positions. Joan Breton Connolly's PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS, Princeton U.P, discusses such women and has lots of illustrations, too.
Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant have put together a good collection of sources in translation: WOMEN'S LIFE IN GREECE AND ROME, 3rd edition, from Johns Hopkins Press.
Patriarchy was of course deeply engrained in classical culture. An interesting story survives out of early Christian Egypt in SHENOUTE AND THE WOMEN OF THE WHITE MONASTERY, by Rebecca Krawiec, Oxford University Press.
In the early days of Christianity, women were extremely influential. Once the religion became romanized, the men in charge did their best to remove them from positions of power. THE BONE GATHERERS by Nicola Denzy retells this grimly interesting story.
One note from the Medieval period: A good discussion of how difficult it can be to piece together information about individual women's lives is Kari Mand's PRINCESS NEST OF WALES, Tempus. It makes clear how even a fairly influential woman could be ignored and her story nearly lost by the men around her.
If anyone has other books to recommend, I'd welcome posts about them in the "Comments".
The thing is, this view of women's lives as drudges and victims is based on ignorance and indifference. Uncovering the truth about women's lives in different periods of history can be difficult, mostly because the majority of surviving historical writings we have were written by men. Until the 1970s, most modern histories were also written by men, and most of them didn't much care about women's lives unless they somehow influenced the men around them. Which brings us right back to the exceptional few.
Fortunately, things have changed in Academia since then. What follows are some recommendations of books and sources for anyone interested in learning how women really lived "back then." These are just a few of the available texts out there. The Bibliographies in each will lead on to other books and articles. I haven't listed much about the Middle Ages or about non-Western civilizations, because those are out of my area. I like to recommend books that I've read and can judge with some degree of knowledge.
The best overall look at the history of women that I know is called, oddly enough, "The History of Women", in a number of volumes from Harvard University Press. The general editors are Georges Duby and Michelle Perot. These volumes can be hard to find new, but any good library should have them.
What follows are books that focus on invidual times and places. A quick search at any of the big online bookstores will turn up many more titles. If you read a few of these books, you'll begin to see how information can be gleaned from grudging sources. To say that we know nothing of women's roles during the vast sweep of history is the defense of lazy authors.
Let's start at the beginning. THE INVISIBLE SEX by Adivasio, Soffer, and Page, Smithsonian Books, discusses how the evidence for women's lives in prehistory has been ignored, while male prehistorians made up charming myths based on very little evidence about the men.
On the other hand, feminist scholars can misinterpret evidence, too. THE GODDESS AND THE BULL by Michael Balter, The Free Press, discusses the controversial site of Catalhoyuk, and the misunderstandings of what it represented.
Moving on to Classical times, too many people assume that all Greek women lived like Athenian females -- married off young to older men, expected to stay inside for the rest of their lives, and such. Sarah Pomeroy's SPARTAN WOMEN, Oxford University Press, is a good corrective to this view.
Some pagan women in Classical times lived prominent lives in public positions. Joan Breton Connolly's PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS, Princeton U.P, discusses such women and has lots of illustrations, too.
Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant have put together a good collection of sources in translation: WOMEN'S LIFE IN GREECE AND ROME, 3rd edition, from Johns Hopkins Press.
Patriarchy was of course deeply engrained in classical culture. An interesting story survives out of early Christian Egypt in SHENOUTE AND THE WOMEN OF THE WHITE MONASTERY, by Rebecca Krawiec, Oxford University Press.
In the early days of Christianity, women were extremely influential. Once the religion became romanized, the men in charge did their best to remove them from positions of power. THE BONE GATHERERS by Nicola Denzy retells this grimly interesting story.
One note from the Medieval period: A good discussion of how difficult it can be to piece together information about individual women's lives is Kari Mand's PRINCESS NEST OF WALES, Tempus. It makes clear how even a fairly influential woman could be ignored and her story nearly lost by the men around her.
If anyone has other books to recommend, I'd welcome posts about them in the "Comments".
May 24, 2012
Some thoughts inspired by a recent conversation with a friend, concerning technological change in fantasy secondary worlds.
Really, that title should be, "is a given piece of technology inevitable?" Humans are tool users and fiddlers-around-with. All primates, I gather, have figured out how to pick up a rock to smash open a fruit or a stick to knock high-growing fruit down to their level. I've seen footage of a wild chimp using an abandoned tin can as a cup. The difference: somewhere in the early days of genus Homo our particular brand of primate began fiddling around with the rocks and sticks, and technology was born.
Once the fiddling starts, it doesn't stop. BUT that does not mean that every single piece of technology we have today is pre-ordained. There is not some inevitable path that "progress" takes. I remember when I used to have time for RPGs. In TRAVELLER, I think it was, there was a list of "tech levels" for planets and sapient species, ranging in tidy steps from rock throwing to atom bombs and beyond. In far more academic sources, scientists wondering about alien civilizations have speculated that most destroy themselves "as soon as they get atomic weapons."
But who says they will get them?
Is it really a fore-ordained Universal Law that a very specific way of killing lots of enemies will be discovered? Or for that matter, is it pre-ordained that every civilization must develop radio technology? Or aniline coal tar dyes? Or one of a million other -specific- gadgets? Notice that "specific" there. It seems logical that communication at a distance is going to be important to any civilization, for example, or even the ability to wipe out enemies on a large scale. But will every civilization come up with the exact same solutions to these problems? It's even possible that some species will decide that wiping out enemies or sending rapid messages don't really matter to them.
There is a difference in my mind between "invention" and "discovery". One discovers things that pre-exist -- the orbit of the earth around the sun, the tendency of water to run down hill, the existence of atomic nuclei, and so on. One invents things that don't necessarily even need to exist: golf balls, electric can openers, bombs that split the aforementioned nuclei. Many of the "big" inventions we take for granted, like gunpowder, were put together by accident. Gunpowder was inadvertently invented by a Chinese alchemist looking for a drug that would produce immortality -- one of the greater ironies of technological history.
What if he'd never messed around with charcoal, nitre, and sulfur? The Chinese themselves never invented the handgun or anything approaching a musket, though they did make grenade-type weapons using the new bang-bang stuff. Doubtless some military genius would have come up with another way to kill enemies one at a time with a weapon he could carry, but it might not have involved gunpowder at all.
Readers, usually male, who complain that fantasy worlds never develop guns as we know them might think about these questions. It's quite possible for a culture to not develop guns as we know them. Certainly the Greek and Romans had powerful flame-throwing siege weapons -- but they never stumbled across gunpowder. When their empires collapsed, the knowledge of how to build those weapons -- and the money to do so -- disappeared. It was never really revived until the 1960s, with napalm, because in the meantime the accidental invention of black powder had spread west.
There is no one single inevitable path that these technological developments had to follow. One thing that a fantasy world might show us is that simple fact. And something new is not necessarily a sign of Progress in the capital letter Whiggish sense.
Really, that title should be, "is a given piece of technology inevitable?" Humans are tool users and fiddlers-around-with. All primates, I gather, have figured out how to pick up a rock to smash open a fruit or a stick to knock high-growing fruit down to their level. I've seen footage of a wild chimp using an abandoned tin can as a cup. The difference: somewhere in the early days of genus Homo our particular brand of primate began fiddling around with the rocks and sticks, and technology was born.
Once the fiddling starts, it doesn't stop. BUT that does not mean that every single piece of technology we have today is pre-ordained. There is not some inevitable path that "progress" takes. I remember when I used to have time for RPGs. In TRAVELLER, I think it was, there was a list of "tech levels" for planets and sapient species, ranging in tidy steps from rock throwing to atom bombs and beyond. In far more academic sources, scientists wondering about alien civilizations have speculated that most destroy themselves "as soon as they get atomic weapons."
But who says they will get them?
Is it really a fore-ordained Universal Law that a very specific way of killing lots of enemies will be discovered? Or for that matter, is it pre-ordained that every civilization must develop radio technology? Or aniline coal tar dyes? Or one of a million other -specific- gadgets? Notice that "specific" there. It seems logical that communication at a distance is going to be important to any civilization, for example, or even the ability to wipe out enemies on a large scale. But will every civilization come up with the exact same solutions to these problems? It's even possible that some species will decide that wiping out enemies or sending rapid messages don't really matter to them.
There is a difference in my mind between "invention" and "discovery". One discovers things that pre-exist -- the orbit of the earth around the sun, the tendency of water to run down hill, the existence of atomic nuclei, and so on. One invents things that don't necessarily even need to exist: golf balls, electric can openers, bombs that split the aforementioned nuclei. Many of the "big" inventions we take for granted, like gunpowder, were put together by accident. Gunpowder was inadvertently invented by a Chinese alchemist looking for a drug that would produce immortality -- one of the greater ironies of technological history.
What if he'd never messed around with charcoal, nitre, and sulfur? The Chinese themselves never invented the handgun or anything approaching a musket, though they did make grenade-type weapons using the new bang-bang stuff. Doubtless some military genius would have come up with another way to kill enemies one at a time with a weapon he could carry, but it might not have involved gunpowder at all.
Readers, usually male, who complain that fantasy worlds never develop guns as we know them might think about these questions. It's quite possible for a culture to not develop guns as we know them. Certainly the Greek and Romans had powerful flame-throwing siege weapons -- but they never stumbled across gunpowder. When their empires collapsed, the knowledge of how to build those weapons -- and the money to do so -- disappeared. It was never really revived until the 1960s, with napalm, because in the meantime the accidental invention of black powder had spread west.
There is no one single inevitable path that these technological developments had to follow. One thing that a fantasy world might show us is that simple fact. And something new is not necessarily a sign of Progress in the capital letter Whiggish sense.
May 2, 2012
The fourth Nola O'Grady book, LOVE ON THE RUN, will come out from DAW this August. (2012.)
But DAW won't be publishing any more of them after that. I'm considering doing Kickstarter or some other way of bringing the series to a close. I figure by now some people at least want to know who or what the Peacock Angel is!
Lots of thanks to those of you who liked the series enough to follow it! I'm sorry that it never caught on enough to keep a traditional publisher interested.
But DAW won't be publishing any more of them after that. I'm considering doing Kickstarter or some other way of bringing the series to a close. I figure by now some people at least want to know who or what the Peacock Angel is!
Lots of thanks to those of you who liked the series enough to follow it! I'm sorry that it never caught on enough to keep a traditional publisher interested.
April 26, 2012
Writing in the first person, from the point of view of women much younger than I am, has shown me something interesting about language -- how quickly it fossilizes. I starting learning English in 1945, not that I remember doing so. My family used to tell me how early and how fast I learned to speak. That's nearly 70 years ago. In the age of print, TV, and other media, you might think language wouldn't have changed all that much, but it does. Nothing seems to stop it from changing, not the detailed prescriptive grammar of my school years, not the moaning of newspaper pundits, either. (Never listen to William Safire is my advice.)
Language is the river, not the fixed place on the riverbank.
Like my very basic Welsh, my basic English is old by linguistic standards. Distinctions that I learned to make as a child are outmoded now. Some of these usages I've dropped over time. "The book that I was reading" is just as "correct" as "the book which I was reading." "I dislike the idea of him traveling with us" is okay; it doesn't have to be "his traveling with us." I can pronounce it har-RASS as well as HAR-rass and people will understand me. Ditto for deBACle instead of DEBacle. Doubtless everyone reading this could give other examples of changes they've noticed.
And then there's the matter of slang. As a decaying old hippie, I still use the slang of the 60s in my own speech. My twenty-something characters are not going to. A few pieces survive. "Cool" is something the 60s inherited from the hipsters of the 50s; it still appears to this very day, though fashion periodically tries to replace it. "Sweet" is the current candidate. These too will either stick in the language or fade away to join 60s expressions like "cosmic!" used to express approval.
Most pieces of slang either disappear or become standard English. The oddest bit that I know of is "booze." The first recorded instance is in Chaucer, yet it's never become standard for "alcoholic drink."
Some fossils leave traces for an amazingly long time. Consider the expression "last but not least." It's a cliche, long dead, should be pruned out of formal speech, but it refuses to go. One reason we still use it is its pattern of alliteration and accentuation. DAH da da DAH. L x x L. This pattern -- not the words but the pattern -- goes back to Proto-Indo-European, ie, back to about 3000 BC.
Language is the river, not the fixed place on the riverbank.
Like my very basic Welsh, my basic English is old by linguistic standards. Distinctions that I learned to make as a child are outmoded now. Some of these usages I've dropped over time. "The book that I was reading" is just as "correct" as "the book which I was reading." "I dislike the idea of him traveling with us" is okay; it doesn't have to be "his traveling with us." I can pronounce it har-RASS as well as HAR-rass and people will understand me. Ditto for deBACle instead of DEBacle. Doubtless everyone reading this could give other examples of changes they've noticed.
And then there's the matter of slang. As a decaying old hippie, I still use the slang of the 60s in my own speech. My twenty-something characters are not going to. A few pieces survive. "Cool" is something the 60s inherited from the hipsters of the 50s; it still appears to this very day, though fashion periodically tries to replace it. "Sweet" is the current candidate. These too will either stick in the language or fade away to join 60s expressions like "cosmic!" used to express approval.
Most pieces of slang either disappear or become standard English. The oddest bit that I know of is "booze." The first recorded instance is in Chaucer, yet it's never become standard for "alcoholic drink."
Some fossils leave traces for an amazingly long time. Consider the expression "last but not least." It's a cliche, long dead, should be pruned out of formal speech, but it refuses to go. One reason we still use it is its pattern of alliteration and accentuation. DAH da da DAH. L x x L. This pattern -- not the words but the pattern -- goes back to Proto-Indo-European, ie, back to about 3000 BC.
April 24, 2012
Writers and readers both love to discuss, and maybe argue about, what constitutes "good" prose. From the readers' points of view, the definition really has to come down to a matter of taste, is the conclusion I usually end up drawing from these disussions. Some people enjoy complex sentences and unusual words. Some people hate them. Some people hate short sentences and basic vocabulary. Others like them. And so on.
It occurred to me that we might look at the problem from the other side: the writer's point of view. What constitutes good prose? Prose that has the effect upon the reader that the writer intended it to have.
Does the writer want the reader to zip through the story and enjoy it as an entertainment? That will require one style of prose. Does the writer want the reader to experience the story as an immersion into a strange and foreign place and time? That will require another. Is an incident supposed to be funny? Humor demands a certain choice of words. Is the incident supposed to make the reader get all teary-eyed? Then the writer had better avoid that distanced, ironic humor.
We can define "bad" prose as words that fail to do what the writer wants them to do. Really bad prose is so muddled that we can't even tell what the writer had in mind, but such rarely does get into print. Usually the examples are less extreme. A strict-genre entertainment might be written in such complex, rambling sentences that a reader looking for a few hours of escape decides to throw the book across the room. A thoughtful, serious near-future SF work that sounds like a middle grade adventure story is not going to get much respect.
Here's an example of how bad prose can wreck a story, one I remember from a writing class of many years ago. I've forgotten the writer's name, and I bet he'd be glad I have. Anyway, the story concerned a Sensitive, Poetic Young man who yearned for a certain girl at a high school dance. He asks her to dance, she makes fun of him, his pain knows no bounds. The reader does feel his pain and feels sorry for him until he rushes out of the dance into the parking lot, where
"in the glare of floodlights the pale trunks of the eucalyptus trees looked like cottage cheese."
That, folks, is mood-shattering prose.
It occurred to me that we might look at the problem from the other side: the writer's point of view. What constitutes good prose? Prose that has the effect upon the reader that the writer intended it to have.
Does the writer want the reader to zip through the story and enjoy it as an entertainment? That will require one style of prose. Does the writer want the reader to experience the story as an immersion into a strange and foreign place and time? That will require another. Is an incident supposed to be funny? Humor demands a certain choice of words. Is the incident supposed to make the reader get all teary-eyed? Then the writer had better avoid that distanced, ironic humor.
We can define "bad" prose as words that fail to do what the writer wants them to do. Really bad prose is so muddled that we can't even tell what the writer had in mind, but such rarely does get into print. Usually the examples are less extreme. A strict-genre entertainment might be written in such complex, rambling sentences that a reader looking for a few hours of escape decides to throw the book across the room. A thoughtful, serious near-future SF work that sounds like a middle grade adventure story is not going to get much respect.
Here's an example of how bad prose can wreck a story, one I remember from a writing class of many years ago. I've forgotten the writer's name, and I bet he'd be glad I have. Anyway, the story concerned a Sensitive, Poetic Young man who yearned for a certain girl at a high school dance. He asks her to dance, she makes fun of him, his pain knows no bounds. The reader does feel his pain and feels sorry for him until he rushes out of the dance into the parking lot, where
"in the glare of floodlights the pale trunks of the eucalyptus trees looked like cottage cheese."
That, folks, is mood-shattering prose.
April 4, 2012
I've finished the new project, Runemaster #1, finally. It's not been sold yet, so we shall see what we shall see.
I also have had no word on whether or not DAW will buy the fifth and last Nola O'Grady book.
But now I can try to catch up on blog posts and reviews. I've been reading some interesting research material on various kind of magic and various periods of history.
I also have had no word on whether or not DAW will buy the fifth and last Nola O'Grady book.
But now I can try to catch up on blog posts and reviews. I've been reading some interesting research material on various kind of magic and various periods of history.
February 28, 2012
http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count
Here's something to think about. Women writers who write literary fiction and general non-fiction often feel that they get ignored by the mainstream press. The information gathered on this chart shows that yes, they're quite right to be worried. Women write almost half of all books published these days. You wouldn't know it for the notice taken by these important magazines.
When it comes to genre fiction other than the various categories of Romance, the same situation applies according to less formal figures compiled recently. Women, again, write nearly half of all non-Romance genre books. They are reviewed about 35% of the time.
Romance is assiduously ignored by mainstream reviewers, of course. Check out the snotty remark about women readers from the editor of the TLS on the website I linked to at the top of this blog post. The TLS appears down toward the bottom of that looong webpage. Which is why the Romance genre has its own magazines.
Here's something to think about. Women writers who write literary fiction and general non-fiction often feel that they get ignored by the mainstream press. The information gathered on this chart shows that yes, they're quite right to be worried. Women write almost half of all books published these days. You wouldn't know it for the notice taken by these important magazines.
When it comes to genre fiction other than the various categories of Romance, the same situation applies according to less formal figures compiled recently. Women, again, write nearly half of all non-Romance genre books. They are reviewed about 35% of the time.
Romance is assiduously ignored by mainstream reviewers, of course. Check out the snotty remark about women readers from the editor of the TLS on the website I linked to at the top of this blog post. The TLS appears down toward the bottom of that looong webpage. Which is why the Romance genre has its own magazines.
February 24, 2012
I get the impression that some readers don't know how little control authors have over: where their books are sold, for how much, and with what cover. The thing is, folks, when you sell a book to a traditional publisher, they control everything. You have no say over the price, the cover art, the discount offered to various stores, or when it goes on sale. In particular, the publisher of the paper version controls the ebook rights. They insist on having the final say on all of the above. The author can make suggestions on the cover art. That's it.
Well, unless of course you're J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. :-)
A self-published ebook is of course quite different. There the author decides everything -- and is responsible for everything. So if one of these has an ugly cover or typoes, you certainly may send a polite note to the author. It's his or her problem. With traditional books, there's nothing much we can do about it. If something really bothers you, by all means send email to the publisher via their website. They're the ones in charge.
Amazon.com also has a huge say -- too big a one, probably -- in when a book goes on sale. If they choose to release the paper version of a book before they release the Kindle version, all the author can do is tell his or her publisher. The publisher has to scream bloody murder before the vast lumbering one ton gorilla agrees to to correct the situation.
Just the old word to the wise . . .
Well, unless of course you're J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. :-)
A self-published ebook is of course quite different. There the author decides everything -- and is responsible for everything. So if one of these has an ugly cover or typoes, you certainly may send a polite note to the author. It's his or her problem. With traditional books, there's nothing much we can do about it. If something really bothers you, by all means send email to the publisher via their website. They're the ones in charge.
Amazon.com also has a huge say -- too big a one, probably -- in when a book goes on sale. If they choose to release the paper version of a book before they release the Kindle version, all the author can do is tell his or her publisher. The publisher has to scream bloody murder before the vast lumbering one ton gorilla agrees to to correct the situation.
Just the old word to the wise . . .
February 7, 2012
APOCALYPSE TO GO has been officially released today. If you've got an Ereader of some sort, you can now download it. The old-fashioned paperbook has been available in stores for a couple of days. Such is modern life.
:-)
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area -- I'll be reading at Borderlands Books this Saturday at 3 pm.
:-)
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area -- I'll be reading at Borderlands Books this Saturday at 3 pm.
