Marie Brennan's Blog, page 126

Deviation from the Norm

Tonight I read an article in the New York Times about how lots of business set their thermostats according to a formula devised in the 1960s, which assumed the average office worker was a 40-year-old, 154-pound man. Because of the differences in base metabolic rate between men and women, not to mention different standards of seasonal clothing, this results in countless women bundling up every summer to avoid freezing at work.

What struck me about the article was the way it framed its topic. “Women get cold more easily,” it tells us. It could just have well said “Men overheat more easily.” A small linguistic difference — but not an insignificant one. Saying that women get cold more easily defines the male average as the norm, and women as deficient in their ability to warm themselves. Phrasing it the other way around defines the female average as the norm, and men as deficient in their ability to cool themselves.

I get a lot of this in my daily life, because I am definitely at the warm end of the spectrum. In fact, a little while ago one of my friends made a comment about how I have a very narrow range of temperatures at which I can be comfortable. I retorted that this was not true: it’s just that half of my range is considered completely unacceptable by society at large, so nobody ever sees it. Long before we get anywhere near my upper limit, everybody else is pleading for a window to be opened because they’re dying of heat. (They should try working in my office. It’s upstairs, with a western facing, in a townhouse with no air-conditioning and three skylights. On a warm summer day, it isn’t uncommon for the temperature at my desk to approach ninety degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t claim to enjoy that temperature — but almost every person of my acquaintance would flee for their life.)

The article was mostly even-handed, pointing out that it would be more energy-efficient in summer to raise the temperature a little, not to mention more considerate of female employees, and that a lot of offices have setups that completely warp temperature control anyway, with cubicles and partitions stopping airflow and thermostats in different rooms from the areas they regulate. But still, the bias was ingrained in the language, even as it was pointing out how bias is ingrained in the culture. If we want to avoid the latter, we need to notice the former.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Preserving Fire

I recently read an article about a museum exhibit in Boston that initially allowed visitors to try on a Japanese kimono. Protesters decried this as racist, exoticizing, Orientalist — and in response, the museum changed the policy, leaving the kimono where people could touch it, but not allowing anyone to wear it.

What struck me in the article was this:

But the reaction to the exhibition from Japan — where the decline in popularity of the kimono as a form of dress is a national concern — was one of puzzlement and sadness. Many Japanese commentators expressed regret that fewer people would get to experience wearing a kimono.

It’s a useful reminder that the American perspective is not universal, and that the identities we construct here (the protestors were not Japanese, but Asian-American) carry their own political baggage that doesn’t necessarily mesh with other parts of the world. It also raises questions of how we should weigh competing concerns: at what point does a movement to oppose colonialism in the United States become, in and of itself, a colonial insistence on making other countries adhere to our standards of proper behavior? If people in Japan are okay with Americans trying on a kimono, should Asian-Americans be standing in the way of that?

It also comes back to the issue of “tradition” and its role in society. I was a folklore major in college and grad school, and since folklore is often defined in ways that put “tradition” at the heart of the field, that means I read a lot of definitions for what tradition is. My favorite, by far, was completely non-technical in origin (it’s a quotation from the composer Gustav Mahler), but I felt it got to the heart of the issue in a way that technical definitions don’t:

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

“Kimono,” as we think of them now, are the fossilized relics of nineteenth century fashion, the domain of specialists who have learned all the rules and can steer clueless modern people through them like dolls. It’s as if a “dress” in Western society meant a corseted garment worn with a lobster tail bustle, made out of fabric that matches the color and pattern aesthetics of 1870, and god help you if you mistakenly wear a day dress to an evening dinner, or a riding dress when you intend to go for a walk in the park.

If that was what a “dress” was in 2015, it would be going the way of the dodo.

So people in Japan are trying to figure out how to preserve fire, instead of worshipping ashes. Part of that means relaxing the rules, so that you no longer have to do things exactly the way they were done in 1870 Japan. Different fabrics, different patterns, different ways of tying obi. Treating kimono like clothing, rather than a symbol of national identity that has to be kept under glass like a dead butterfly. Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing chain, is selling yukata in their American stores, because they want Americans to buy them. (I got one the other day. It isn’t just a bathrobe calling itself a yukata; it comes with an obi and instructions for how to tie it. Though it doesn’t tell you that it’ll look better if you put a towel around your waist to flatten out that curve before you get dressed.) And it isn’t just kimono: when I went to the wedding of an Indian friend from high school, I felt wildly out of place in my appropriate-for-a-Western-wedding dress. All her law school friends, most of whom were not Indian, were there in sari, because she’d offered to pick some up for them when she went to India to buy her own wedding gear. Sari are still going pretty strong because they’re adapting, developing different styles within the broad space of the concept, rather than remaining what they were in the days before the Raj.

There aren’t any easy answers for this. I own a sari now, one I bought in India with the help of a female relative of that high school friend. She not only helped me pick it out, she ran me all over town to make sure I got a blouse and underskirt to match it, and all the right jewelry, too. She’s totally cool with me wearing a sari. But Random Stranger #948 on the street? Might view it differently. Just like those Asian-American protestors thought the museum exhibit was racist cultural appropriation, while people back in Japan made sad faces over Americans not experiencing the beauty of the kimono. People don’t always agree, and you can’t explain to every person you pass on the street that you have the following reasons for believing it’s okay.

There’s one thing I can do, though. This Kickstarter aims to bring a kimono show to New York Fashion Week. The people organizing it seek the recognition of kimono as “a universal formal wear that is beyond cultural and ethnic boundaries.” To me, the key word there is boundaries. Kimono have been fenced in — like an exotic animal at a zoo, for outsider to goggle at and locals to say “yeah, remember when those were all over the place?” I don’t think the exhibit is about erasing the origin of kimono, forgetting their Japanese connections. It’s about knocking down the fence, letting the concept back into our social ecosystem. Letting it adapt to its new environment.

I’m backing the Kickstarter. And I’m thinking a lot of thinky thoughts.

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Who knew Jane Austen was so naughty?

This got buried in my browser tabs, so I’m posting it rather late. But you may recall me linking to this fundraiser, for a lovely woman I met during my tour and her husband who were in a horrifically bad car accident not long after that weekend. The fundraiser is to help keep them going during the months of recovery and rehab, because neither of them will be able to work for quite some time, and insurance doesn’t take care of everything.

In order to encourage people to donate, Mary Robinette Kowal has organized some Acts of Whimsy. The first of these got posted a while ago: Mary Robinette Kowal reading a passage from Jane Austen in her best “phone sex voice.” It really is true . . . you can make anything sound dirty if you read it the right way. ;-)

The fundraiser is more than 80% of the way to its goal, but there’s still a little distance to go. So if Mary has successfully entertained you, please do think about helping out!

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two sensory experiences

By which I mean, two pieces of media that focus on sensory experience in one way or another.

***

Perfect Sense did not, in the trailer I saw, bill itself as a science fiction movie, and in a lot of ways it isn’t. The focus is primarily on how the relationship between two people (a chef at a restaurant, and an epidemiologist who lives in an apartment overlooking the restaurant alley) is affected by an unexplained (and inexplicable) global epidemic that begins with people losing their sense of smell. But the epidemic doesn’t stop there: next they lose taste, then hearing, then sight. What makes it SFnal is the exploration of how individuals and society adapt to these changes. Eva Green’s epidemiologist never does figure out what’s causing the change, but at the restaurant where Ewan MacGregor’s chef works, they keep looking for ways to pursue their art even as the basis for it is pulled out from under them. Smell is a huge part of how we experience food, so when that goes away, they begin putting together the most strongly-flavored dishes they can. When taste goes, they turn to sound and texture: crunch, squish, softness, grittiness. (There’s a great scene where the restaurant manager reads out a glowing review of their work.) The transitions are bad; they’re always preceded by some kind of huge emotional swing, and many of these are extremely destructive. But after hearing fades, you see a table full of people at the restaurant carrying on a cheerful, animated conversation in sign language. Since the characters we’ve been following are still communicating through written notes and a handful of very rudimentary signs, there’s an unspoken implication that the people at those table were deaf long before this began: what the viewer has been encouraged to see as a calamitous loss is ordinary life for them, and that life can still be good.

I usually like my SFnal exploration more front and center, rather than squeezed in around the edges. But the anthropologist in me quite enjoyed this one.

***

Sadly, I was not as enthused by Sense8, the new Netflix series from the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer.

They did a great job setting up the cast. Our main characters are eight individuals linked by telepathy, and it’s obvious the writers had a mission statement to represent a broad cross-section of the world: the cop from Chicago and the hacker from San Francisco might seem like standard issue, the DJ from Iceland and the thief from Berlin a little less so — but then you get the banker from Seoul, the film star from Mexico City, the privileged young woman from Mumbai, and the bus driver from Nairobi. Four are women, four are men; one of the men (the film star) is gay, and one of the women (the hacker) is a transgender lesbian. I’m sure some people have sneered at this as “diversity for diversity’s sake” (as if that’s a bad thing), but it also matters to the story — because one of the important things going on here is that they have different backgrounds, different skill sets, different assumptions about the world. And it’s fun to watch those things collide. The “sensates” can project their spirits out so they see each other’s surroundings, and then they learn to possess each other’s bodies. It means they can give one another comfort and advice and, in a pinch, solve their problems for them: the Korean banker is also a participant in underground fighting rings, and kicks the asses of people threatening other members of her cluster. The Kenyan driver winds up behind the wheel of more than a few getaway vehicles. The Mexican movie star lies like a rug to get the German thief out of trouble, etc.

So why didn’t I like it more?

In a nutshell: too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby. In the first episode of the series, it becomes obvious that (of course) there’s some kind of nefarious conspiracy to control and/or kill sensates. By the end of the twelve-episode first season, we know that . . . there’s some kind of nefarious conspiracy to control and/or kill sensates. We can put some faces and names to individuals involved, and we know there’s a doctor who specializes in lobotomizing them — but we don’t know why, or what makes sensate clusters come into existence, or really anything of great substance about the metaplot. Most of the show’s attention is devoted to the lives of the sensates in this cluster and how they interact with one another. This means you’re tracking eight different plotlines at once: there are hints that some of them may connect, but even after twelve episodes, it’s little more than hints. And however much I may enjoy some parts of the character development (like the horrific encounter between Nomi and her family, or the hilarity of the kind-of threesome Lito ends up in), ultimately, I was really frustrated that the show seemed mostly content to wander around in the characters’ lives without really tying the whole group together and going somewhere with them.

Really, the opening credit sequence perfectly represents the problem. It’s a montage of shots from all around the world: famous sites, scenes of daily life, brief little snippets from Nairobi and Seoul and San Francisco and Mexico City and all the other places the characters are from. But there’s no arc to it, no coherent thread other than “hi, our show takes place all over the world!” It is, to use the old description of history, just one damn thing after another. Individually the bits may be lovely, but I want the whole to add up to more. And while it’s entirely possible the show will get there eventually . . . I’m not sure I’m willing to wait around for “eventually” to happen. I gave it one season to hook me; I don’t know that I’ll give it more.

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Books read, June 2015

Very, very belated. But at least I’m managing to get it posted before August?

High volume of reading this month, and 100% of it was for work. It was revision/copy-edits/whatever, or it was material for a blurb, or it was research, or it was Hugo reading. There was nothing I finished this month that I picked up just because I felt like it. This makes me slightly cranky, even though I enjoyed a lot of what I read. Especially since so far in July, the pattern has been much the same.

Anyway, the books. I’m leaving the Hugo stuff out because I discussed it already in a separate post.

Chains and Memory, Marie Brennan. My own books don’t count.

sooper-sekrit novella, Marie Brennan.</b> Neither do my own novellas. Even if I read them twice in the course of revision.

The Seven Lucky Gods of Japan, Reiko Chiba. This is a tiny book my husband picked up somewhere: only forty-two pages in all, and small pages at that. But it’s bound as its own thing, so it gets an entry. Brief discussions of the so-called “Seven Lucky Gods” (Benten, Bishamon, Jurojin, Fukurokuju, Hotei, Ebisu, and Daikoku): nothing terribly in-depth, but a very pretty little introduction.

Ichiro, Ryan Inzana. Graphic novel. I found it intensely frustrating, because it feels like the plot has only just gotten started when oops, the book ends. A Japanese-American boy who’s just moved to Japan gets dragged into the world of the spirits, where he finds out there’s a war going on . . . and then he gets booted back home, story over. I can’t find any sign that there’s a sequel en route. This appears to be the whole story; Ichiro learning not to be a little brat is what it’s actually about, not that whole spirit war thing.

A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine, John K. Nelson. This book is amazing if you’re intending to write something that deals closely with Japanese religion. (You may notice a regional theme in this month’s reading choices.) It’s loosely organized according to the calendar of festivals and ceremonies, but with digressions into related topics like the politics of Shinto — both on a national level and a “how do the priests at this particular place get along” — and full of wonderfully concrete detail. It’s easy to find books that will talk about the theology or history of a religion; much harder to find books that talk about the daily, lived reality of that religion. This one is excellent for the latter.

Genrenauts: The Shootout Solution, Michael R. Underwood. Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine. Read this for blurbing purposes; it’s a novella coming out soon from Tor.com, and I believe one of my proffered blurbs was “Catnip for story geeks.” There’s a multiverse where each realm is governed by the laws of a particular narrative genre; the Genrenauts are the people who parachute in to fix stories when they go wrong, lest those problems rebound in bad ways on Earth.

Isami’s House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family, Gail Lee Bernstein. Historical/anthropological study of a gentry family in north-eastern Honshu, from the Tokugawa Period up to the present day. Their patriarchs were the headmen of a particular village, and ranged from exemplars of what a good, functional lord/peasant relationship should look like down to wastrels who nearly frittered away the entire family fortune. (I shouldn’t actually call them “lords,” because they weren’t samurai, but it’s the easiest way to shorthand it for this post.) The twentieth-century portion was depressing to read, as the family’s fortunes spiraled downward through a series of body-blows: the modernization of Japan, the militarism of the Taisho period, World War II, and the seven sons of the extremely prolific Isami turning out to be major disappointments, while his seven daughters tried to hold things together. But if you want an on-the-ground view of social dynamics through those three centuries, this is great.

What Is Japanese Architecture?, Kazuo Nishi and Kazuo Hozumi, trans. H. Mack Horton.

Architecture in the Shoin Style: Japanese Feudal Residences, Fumio Hashimoto, trans. H. Mack Horton.

Feudal Architecture of Japan, Kiyoshi Hirai, trans. Hiroaki Sato and Jeannine Cilotta.

Lumping these three together because I bounced back and forth between them, mostly failing to learn what I wanted to know (which was the use of space in pre-modern domestic architecture). It turns out that “the shoin style” is based more or less entirely on a particular type of room that became common in aristocratic dwellings and later in more plebian ones; this tells you bupkiss about what people were doing in all the other rooms of the house. The Hirai book has this great fold-out map of the Asano daimyo’s residence in Edo, which was huge: it IDs gates, entryways, and the shoin rooms, but virtually nothing else. What were all those other rooms used for? I still don’t know. But man, if you want a bone-dry discussion of how by a certain year the flooring panels of the tokonoma had become thinner and ooooh this person made the daring move of having the chigaidana on the left side of the room instead of the right, or you really need to know what the “Three Supreme Shelves” were, then the Hashimoto book is for you.

Yokai Character Collection, Michael Goldstein, illustrated by Chip Boles. I didn’t realize when I bought this just how short it was: 73 pages, each one mostly filled with pictures. It would make a great gift for a kid in your life: there’s a paragraph on each yokai (a nebulous term for supernatural creatures), alphabetized according to the Japanese syllabary, with the name of each critter written in hiragana below the Roman letters and that page’s syllable highlighted in red. The full syllabary is printed at the back of the book. Somebody of the right age to read the first Harry Potter book would probably love this, and bonus points if you want them to learn Japanese.

A History of Japanese Religion ed. Kazuo Kasahara, trans. Paul McCarthy and Gaynor Sekimori. Giant brick of a book, but hella useful if you need a refresher course on these matters because the last time you read about the history of Buddhism in Japan was your sophomore year of college. It discusses everything from the archaeological evidence of prehistoric religion to the early days of Shinto and Buddhism to Shugendo (a thing I never even heard of during that college course) to folk religion to Christianity to the “new religions” that began springing up toward the end of the Meiji Period. I have decided that I love Dōgen for not being a flaming misogynist the way the other founders of major Buddhist sects were. This book is sometimes short on the details of theology, and frequently short on the details of practice, but if you need a road map to get you started on knowing what the broad currents were, this is a good place to start.

Folk Religion in Japan: Continuity and Change, Ichiro Hori, ed. Joseph Kitagawa and Alan L. Miller. Based on a series of lectures, which means there’s a certain amount of repetition, and also (conversely) things that don’t really get explained because the audience was assumed to understand already. Good for getting a sense of the shamanistic strands in Japanese religion, though, outside the mainstream establishments of Buddhism and Shinto.

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, Ivan Morris. The thing I’m going to write isn’t set in the Heian Period, but I’d gotten this book as a Christmas present and wanted to read it, so. It was hilarious going in places, because boy howdy, you can tell that somebody who wrote for earlier editions of Legend of the Five Rings had read this book; the courtly events of Rokugan are taken wholesale from Genji’s world. The book itself is fairly engaging, even if (as the introduction in my edition notes) certain parts of the analysis have become rather dated by current historical standards.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes, Marie Brennan. This one doesn’t count either.

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Hugo Reading Report

I’ve accepted that I will probably not make it through all the Hugo reading before it’s time to vote. Uff da — what would I do in a normal year, when there aren’t chunks of the ballot that I’ve ruled out entirely? I have no idea. As it stands, I already kind of resent the amount of time I’ve spent reading things that aren’t what I would have chosen if left to my own devices. Possibly this means I am just not good Hugo voter material.

But anyway! I figure that before I make my (extremely belated) post about what I read in June, I should make a post about what I’ve read out of the Hugo packet. Not so much because I’m campaigning for people to vote in a particular way — rather, I want to work through my reactions to things, and my first attempt at thinking through “do I consider this to be Hugo-worthy material?”

If you need to refresh your memory on my personal Hugo reading rules, do so now. I did indeed end up reading some of the Puppy candidates, though I did not finish them all. I’m skipping over the Dramatic Presentations and the artists in this post.

Best Novel

Haven’t tackled this one. Made an executive decision to leave it until last, because one novel would eat up as much time as another entire category (or more than one), and because I’ve already read one of the non-Puppy nominees; of the other two, I haven’t yet read Ancillary Justice (therefore am reluctant to pick up Sword, because spoilers), and I know The Three-Body Problem isn’t going to be my kind of book, however well-written it may be.

Best Novella

Got to skip most of this category, thanks to the Wright/Castalia House skew. Started in on Flow by Arlan Andrews, Sr, but bounced right out of it. Had way too many italics for emphasis and Unnecessarily Capitalized Words for my taste.

Best Novelette

I may very well vote “No Award” on this one. To say that I found the sole non-Puppy candidate (“The Day the Earth Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt) rather underwhelming is kind: the effectiveness of the story depends heavily on how sympathetic you find the protagonist, and I wanted to drop-kick him off the planet. Gravity has reversed itself (sort of) and people are falling to their deaths in the atmosphere, but that’s the second time the world ended because the first was when your girlfriend broke up with you? Nope, nope, and nope. Plus Heuvelt admitted in the interview that he wasn’t really interested in the how or why of the gravity reversal, but was just using it as more of a metaphor, and that’s an approach I rarely enjoy. So: not impressed. Not inclined to say it’s Hugo-worthy.

The Puppy candidates ranged all over. “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rineheart) was decent; “Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra was almost quite good, but tripped over its own determination to be clever at the end. “The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn drove me up the wall with the inconsistency of its diction; I would have liked the effect if the high-flown language mapped to the plavver dialogue and the folksy tone to the sprock, but it didn’t seem to. Then there was the female character who felt like she stepped straight out of Golden Age SF (and not in a good way). When I hit the point where one of the characters assured her that “babe” was a term of respect for women, I put the story down. Then there was “Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner: I bounced out of it early on, wondered if maybe I hadn’t given it a fair chance, tried again, bounced out again, and could not tell you what it was about if you paid me. It made that little of a mark on my brain.

Best Short Story

All Puppies, all the time. “Totaled” by Kary English was the best of the bunch, insofar as I think it had an interesting idea at its core, but English’s writing (both on a prose level and a plot one) isn’t quite there yet, and didn’t pull off the concept as well as it might have. “A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond fell in an awkward zone for me, partway between being not specific enough in terms of time and place and the character’s background, and not mythic enough in terms of being the sort of story that doesn’t need those details. Put down “On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli without finishing it; the story was just too infodumpy in its opening stages. Did not read the Castalia House candidates.

I should note that I did seek out Annie Bellet’s short story “Goodnight Stars,” which she withdrew from the ballot. For me, it fell firmly into the camp of “not groundbreaking conceptually, but made me cry” — so kudos to her for that. Has made me think thinky thoughts about what exactly makes me consider something “Hugo-worthy” or not.

Best Related Work

More Puppies. Letters from Gardner by Lou Antonelli had a semi-interesting concept, in terms of talking about his growth as a writer by discussing the crits and rejections he’d gotten, but ultimately the material which enacted that concept wasn’t very interesting at all. Plus, a distracting number of copy-editing errors. “Why Science is Never Settled” by Tedd Roberts was a perfectly cromulent piece, but not remarkable; I wouldn’t call it Hugo-worthy, in that I don’t really see why anybody five years down the road really ought to pick it up. Did not read the remaining entries.

Best Graphic Novel

Didn’t read the Puppy that wasn’t in the packet, but I read the rest. Ms. Marvel was decent, and I liked the different angle the “secret identity” concept gets when the superheroine is a Pakistani-American girl; the major flaw here is that I’m frankly really bored with origin stories. I’d rather read about her once she’s found her footing as Ms. Marvel. Rat Queens I bounced off initially, and only went back because I heard friends saying good things about it. Ultimately I ended up liking it, but I have to admit that initially the characters came across as a pack of abrasive sociopaths. Saga was the one I enjoyed the most, even though I was a bit at sea regarding the world and the characters (this being the third volume in the series). Sex Criminals was definitely the least interesting to me, because I just didn’t like the people in it, and the concept made me roll my eyes.

Best Editor, Short Form

Liked Jennifer Brozek’s sample reasonably well, though after a while I started getting bored with reading about robots. Haven’t finished Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s yet, but I’m skipping a higher percentage of the stories from that one. That’s all I’ve gotten through here. (This is, in fact, the category where I started to run out of steam.)

Best Editor, Long Form

Haven’t read any of the samples yet.

Best Semiprozine

Unsurprisingly, given my taste, I liked the Beneath Ceaseless Skies sampler the best. In the Lightspeed one, I ended up passing by the SF stories, but mostly enjoyed the fantasy ones. For Strange Horizons . . . I’ve known for a while that their taste is not mine. This continues to be true. The Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine sampler was a mixed bag; some decent stories, some I didn’t think should have been in there at all. Haven’t made it to the Abyss & Apex one yet.

Best Fanzine

Opened Journey Planet, went “omgwtfbbq that’s a lot of pages about Doctor Who,” and closed it in favor of reading something shorter first (I was not tackling the categories in order while reading). Haven’t yet made it back, and haven’t looked at any of the others yet.

Best Fancast

I’m a bad judge of these, because I look at them and groan “why are you an hour long???” I don’t have a commute, so I don’t have an easily-assigned span of time to just listen to things that demand my attention. I listed to The Sci Phi Show first because it was short, and thought it had an interesting premise. Then I tried Tea and Jeopardy, which was cute but not especially memorable, and I thought the sound quality needed some help. I appreciated that the Galactic Suburbia Podcast chose to showcase their discussion of GamerGate, but here I ran into my “I’m a bad audience for this” problem; it was too long (I didn’t finish listening) and not constructed tightly enough for my taste, with the speakers rambling on without a sufficient sense of direction. (Also, was one of the women blowing her nose into the microphone? Seriously, people: mute your mike if you need to do that. Or at least take off your headset.) Did not get to the rest yet.

Best Fan Writer

I know Laura Mixon’s stuff already, and think she has said some important things. The rest, I haven’t looked at yet.

Campbell Award

Haven’t gotten to these yet.

Not sure how much I’ll be able to finish in the remaining time, but I figured I would rather make this post now than hold off and possibly never make it at all. I’m going to have to think a lot, when it comes time to vote, about what it means to me for a work to be worthy of a Hugo. I don’t think it’s enough to merely say “this is the best of the available candidates;” the reason we have No Award is to provide an option for when you think the entire field is made up sub-par entries. So I need to decide how to rank things, and how to decide which ones don’t deserve to rank above No Award. I think my yardstick is a fuzzy one: do I think the story is one that should be remembered five or ten or twenty years from now? Or is it good but ultimately disposable, a mildly entertaining experience without much in the way of innovation or heft or staying power? It’s a whole lot of judgment calls to make, and some of them won’t be easy.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Actual Quote from an Actual Thing I Actually Read

From Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes, by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, following a discussion of George Mallory’s social circle in Cambridge which features a number of quotes that make you think “my, that sounds more than a wee bit homoerotic”:

“But it was James Strachey, the future translator of Freud, and not his older brother Lytton who evidently initiated Mallory into the pleasures of ‘the higher sodomy,’ as [the Bloomsbury Group] called it. The precise nature of ‘l’affaire George’ is unclear and ultimately uninteresting. What is interesting and of some significance to the history of Himalayan mountaineering is” . . .

No. No, you do not get to drop a phrase like “the higher sodomy” into your book on the history of Himalayan mountaineering and then declare it uninteresting. You were interested enough in it to mention it; you bloody well ought to explain it. If the explanation does not fit into this book, then neither does the phrase. Stick with the fact that George Mallory slept with men; you don’t have to leave your reader wondering what precisely distinguishes “the higher sodomy” from “the lower sodomy” — a question which only invites the brain to come up with increasingly creative answers, all of which are an unnecessary distraction from the tale of how Mallory came to be chosen for the Everest expedition.

(One also cannot help but wonder if Isserman and Weaver were slightly uncomfortable with Mallory’s sexuality, given that they later say “the heterosexual side of his nature asserted itself permanently when he met and fell in love with Ruth Turner,” Mallory’s eventual wife. This book was written in 2008: bisexuality had been invented by then, guys. You don’t have to use a phrase that implies Mallory got over his attraction to men.)

EDIT: My brain being what it is, of course I had to go and google the phrase. As near as I can tell, “the higher sodomy” was the groundbreaking notion that instead of just buggering your fellow students in the good old public school fashion, you should also have romantic feelings for your partner. Shocking!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Empathy for Strangers

The other week I linked to a crazy Indiegogo campaign that was about crowdfunding a bailout for Greece. It didn’t hit its goal, of course — 1.6 billion euros is rather a lot to crowdfund — but it raised a surprising amount of money: over 2 million in a really short span of time. The person who started the campaign regrets not having thought of making it a flexible-funding effort, which would have meant that whatever funds were raised got used, even if the final goal was still miles away.

So now they’re trying again. This time the goal is more modest: 1 million euros, of which 20% has already been raised, and however much actually gets contributed will go toward helping out in Greece.

I find this fascinating because it’s a demonstration of empathy for strangers, and the ways in which individuals may be more compassionate than their governments. All through this ongoing financial trainwreck, we keep hearing about “austerity” and how people have to tighten their belts to get out of the hole. Debts have to be repaid, after all — you can’t weasel out of them, can’t ask for somebody to help you up when you’re down. But the effects of austerity are disastrous for the people who are least able to take the hit, while the wealthy cruise along with their belts untouched. And who says that forcing people to pay their debts is really the best and most moral answer? Why shouldn’t we help those who are down? Maybe someday, we’ll need someone else to do the same for us.

It’s the same principle behind Strike Debt, and (less explicitly) behind a lot of other charitable efforts. It’s people saying, I don’t care if you can’t repay me. What matters is getting you on your feet. We all do better when we help one another. It’s the Biblical/Torah doctrine of Jubilee: forgive the debts, let people wipe their slates clean, give those on the bottom a second chance. The way we run things these days, it sounds unthinkable — even immoral, letting people get out of their obligations. But when the alternative is to grind them down, and down, and down some more, until they’re buried so deep they’ll never have a chance of repaying you, much less achieving anything resembling success . . . then which one is really the moral choice? I choose Jubilee.

So I’m going to contribute to the Greek fund. I have no idea what world leaders are actually doing with Greece, but I know this much: fifty percent of young Greek men and women have no jobs. In September I’ll be visiting the island of Corfu as a tourist, oohing and aahing at the ancient ruins while being carefully steered away from the modern ones. I’ll feel a lot better if I know I’ve done something more direct to help. It’s a drop in the bucket, and I know that — but buckets get filled one drop at a time.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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This time Mary Robinette Kowal has done a Very Silly Thing

. . . and an awesome one. :-D

You see, during our tour we made a pact. I wasn’t going to hold her to it, because I know she’s a ridiculously busy woman — but when I came up with my idea for a Glamourist Histories fanfic, we agreed that if I wrote that one, Mary would write the Lady Trent fanfic idea she had come up with.

And so she has.

It should still work just fine even if you aren’t familiar with Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. (Though if you aren’t: oh my god, you should go watch that show. It’s fabulous.) There’s also an AO3 version, if you have an account there and want to be able to do the whole bookmarking/reccing/etc thing — but you should still check out Mary’s post, which has an explanation for how the story came about. (As I recall my reaction, it looked a bit like this. Or that look Mako Mori gives Pentecost in Pacific Rim, when Raleigh says he wants Mako to have a shot at the co-pilot test and she looks like every Christmas for the rest of her life just got offered to her at once.)

I hope you all are half as entertained by the result as I was. :-D

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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I have done a Very Silly Thing

So Mary Robinette Kowal and I were on tour back in May, which gave us abundant time to chat about various things. At one event, an audience member asked several questions that began with the disclaimer of “this probably isn’t a thing you’ve bothered to think about, but” — which had the effect of proving that no, really, Mary has thought about pretty much everything in the world of her Glamourist Histories. As we were changing back into civilian clothing at the end of the event, I said to her, “I’m willing to bet you’ve thought about the uses of glamour for porn.”

To which she laughed and told me about a glamural Vincent created in his student days.

Here is the tale of Vincent’s old glamural — and how Jane wound up seeing it.

All errors are my own (and there may be more than a few, since I wrote this on the plane flight from North Carolina to San Francisco and did basically no research whatsoever, apart from asking Mary a couple of glamour questions while we were retrieving our luggage). She is in no way responsible for any missteps of either history or canon. But I when I told her I was going to write this fic, she laughed so very evilly — and I hope you all will laugh, too!

(No spoilers for the series, apart from the inevitable and rather obvious one of “which characters got married at the end of the first book?”.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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