Marie Brennan's Blog, page 129

Let’s play “guess that story!”

While I’m on tour, I’m taking a crack at drafting something new. I’m pretty sure it’ll be either a novelette or a novella, but if this piece works, it might also be a launching-point for something bigger. And I figure, to keep you all entertained while I bounce from city to city, I’ll give you a chance to guess at what it is!

Here’s your first hint:

Ignore the visuals; it’s the song itself that’s the clue. It rather perfectly encapsulates the character this story is about. Mind you, it’s a bit of a long shot that anybody might guess this one; you kind of need insider knowledge to put it together with things I’ve said before and realize there’s a connection. But don’t worry; if nobody guesses it from this, I’ll provide another hint to make it easier.

(If you’re one of the people I’ve talked to in person about wanting to do this story, then you are disqualified from guessing, for obvious reasons.)

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

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What I Did on My Summer Vacation I Mean My Book Tour

Because Mary Robinette Kowal is a mad genius, one of the stops on our book tour was the Oregon Regency Society’s Topsails and Tea event. And of course, if you’re going to go on a tall ship . . . you’re going to do it in costume, right? (Here’s another shot that shows more of the ship.)

In fact, I got to go on board twice. After our reading and signing on Saturday afternoon, we partook of the Evening Sail, during which I may have pretended I was Lady Trent on my way to see dragons. >_> And then before we left for Portland on Sunday, we decided to go back for the Battle Sail.

And, well. I had this other costume sitting around my closet, left over from a one-shot LARP, that I’d thought I would never have an excuse to wear again . . . .

Yeah, I hauled a naval lieutenant’s uniform — bicorn and all — to Oregon, just so I could wear it on board a tall ship while there were guns firing. :-D

There’s another twist to this story, too. I didn’t realize, before I got to Oregon, that the ships involved in the Topsails and Tea event were from the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport Authority: the Hawaiian Chieftain and the Lady Washington. Many of you may know the Lady as the Interceptor from Pirates of the Caribbean; some of you may have heard me rave about their “Two Weeks Before the Mast” program, where for a remarkably small fee and a fortnight of your life, you can volunteer on board and learn to sail. I’m intending to do that next year, as research for the book I’ll be writing after the Memoirs of Lady Trent are done, so this was a little foretaste of what’s to come. Between that and the fact that I was in uniform, I really felt like I ought to be doing more than standing around . . . .

Yep, they’ll let you pull on a line or two if you ask nicely. ^_^ But really, this is what I’m looking forward to:

Next year, my friends. Next year.

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Cover reveal!

I just barely beat Tor.com to the punch, announcing during last night’s Chicago event that the title for the fourth Memoir of Lady Trent will be In the Labyrinth of Drakes. Now, hot on the heels of that, you can see the cover!

Once again, Todd Lockwood knocks it out of the park.

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Books read, April 2015

I bounced off a lot of books this past month. Nearly as many as I read. But every time I think to myself, “maybe you’re being too harsh; maybe you should have given them more of a chance before you stopped,” I think of The Summer Prince and Three Parts Dead, and how I didn’t have to give those books a chance. They hooked me from the start, and didn’t let go. I need an exceedingly good reason to spend my time on books that don’t do that, when I know there are books out there that are so much better.

Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, Richard Parks. A collection of Parks’ “Lord Yamada” stories, about a demon hunter in Heian-era Japan. Because these are often structured as mysteries (the real challenge is for Yamada to figure out what’s going on with the supernatural problem, rather than finding a way to make it stop), they can be a bit repetitive; I recommend reading this in leisurely doses, rather than trying to mainline the whole thing in go. I especially liked the stories that diverged more from the formula — there’s one where Yamada doesn’t even really solve the problem, except insofar as he lectures the person who should be solving it until they come up with a clever solution. The weakest for me was probably the last tale; it read to me as setup for the novel I also have on my shelf, rather than a substantive conflict-and-resolution in its own right. But I picked these up because I wanted to read about yokai and ghosts in Heian Japan, and was pleased with what I got.

Captain Alatriste, Arturo Pérez-Reverte. I retain enough trivia about seventeenth-century European history that the instant a certain nickname got used, I went “oh JESUS is that what’s going on,” long before the actual explanation arrived. Which was not a bug: I liked tumbling to it early, rather than feeling as if that spoiled the story. I’m not sure I’m going to continue with the series, though; I didn’t really warm to any of the characters, and am still in a mood where having the two most prominent female characters be a) not very prominent and b) a former hooker and a little girl described, with no irony I can discern, as having been born evil, did not sit very well with me. On the other hand, if you want more Dumas and have run out of Dumas to read, this may well scratch that itch for you.

Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman. Short story collection, read for review purposes. I’ll link to that when it goes live, and for now only say that I think it’s about on par with his previous collections: not every story worked for me, but enough did that I enjoyed reading it overall.

The Nine Tailors, Dorothy Sayers. Another Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. Ye gods the bell-ringing detail in this . . . but it avoids being as tediously dreary as Five Red Herrings, so that’s good. I figured out how the guy had died a bit before the characters did, and felt like they were a little slow in not thinking of it sooner — and nrgggggh, how awful — so while this one was enjoyable, it’s certainly not at the top of my Sayers list.

Lifelode, Jo Walton. Lovely domestic fantasy set in a world where moving between east and west changes not just how magical the world is, but how rapidly time passes. The main character can see through time, kind of, which is (I presume) why the book is told entirely in present tense, with little to no signaling when it’s about to slip from one point in the timeline to another; once you get the hang of that, though, the effect is lovely. And I adore the way religion operates here — Hanethe’s experience with Agdisdis and so forth.

In the House of the Seven Librarians, Ellen Klages. Not sure if this is a novelette or a novella or what, but I read it in a stand-alone printing, so it goes on the list. Seven exceedingly peculiar librarians keep running a library after it’s shut down, and then find themselves raising a little girl when someone drops her through the return slot along with a book of fairy tales several decades overdue and a note apologizing for the lateness and offering up a firstborn child in repayment.

The Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson. This, as I mentioned above, is the book that made me decide that I’m right to drop things that don’t hook me fast enough. It’s probably the best YA book I’ve read recently — but it’s hard to describe why, because part of what makes it good is its complexity. The setting is four hundred years post-apocalypse, and the characters live in the stratified Brazilian city of Palmeres Tres; you could call it a dystopia, but that implies the society is straight-up bad, which undersells the reality. Johnson got her Golden Bough on with the worldbuilding: the city is ruled by a queen, who is chosen by a summer king elected by the people. But the summer king reigns at her side for only one year, at the end of which the queen sacrifices him in a public ceremony. In the story, the current summer king is a guy named Enki who hails from the lowest stratum of society, and the narrator, June, becomes obsessed with him, in ways that are only partly romantic. She’s an artist who likes to play with the idea of transgression; through her interactions with Enki, her work becomes more genuinely revolutionary. So the story is about art and politics, and life and death, and the tensions between age and youth and technological progress or the lack thereof. The whole way through, there is the inescapable awareness that Enki will be dead before long, and what his death will or will not mean. It’s full of beautiful detail, and I devoured it in record time.

ITLoD, Marie Brennan. Revisions. My own books don’t count.

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. This is one of those books that defies description. The tech level of the setting doesn’t pigeonhole neatly into any real historical period, and when it comes to describing the plot, I wind up kind of flailing my hands and saying something about necromantic lawyers trying to sort out claims on the essence of a recently deceased god. Except that if I describe it that way, it sounds like the type of thing I would put down very fast, and the opposite was true. Partly this is because the book is not infrequently funny: there are a lot of aspects that would make me call the book grimdark, if it weren’t for the fact that the narration keeps being hilarious. Plus the main characters are mostly good people, underneath their various character flaws — and the ones driving the largest percentage of the plot are women, too, so bonus points for that. Add in a wild assortment of interesting worldbuilding touches (yeah, it’s a theme with me), and I am looking forward to picking up the next one. In fact, if the series continues this good, I think I know what one of my Hugo novel nominations will be next year . . . .

Avatar: The Rift, vol. 3, Gene Luen Yang. Third and final volume of the trio I started in March. The conflict here is one that shows up again in The Legend of Korra, and I’m glad I read this, because I haven’t yet finished watching the show, and I’ll be curious to see how the two interlock.

Of Noble Family, Mary Robinette Kowal. Last of her Glamourist Histories. I devoured it in a single afternoon and evening, which will be more significant when I explain to you that this one is a brick — roughly twice the length of most of the other installments. Vincent and Jane go to Antigua to sort out issues with his father’s estate, and things get REALLY COMPLICATED when they arrive. But the story does not quite go in the expected directions, and is frequently more interesting for doing so. Also, the payoff of the repeated “I am not a china cup” line is possibly the best moment in the entire series. :-D

And on that note, I remind you that Mary and I will be touring together starting this week. I hope to see some of you there!

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Clockwork Phoenix 5!

Clockwork Phoenix, the anthology series edited by Mike Allen, is back for a fifth round. Kickstarter page is here.

I have a particularly fond relationship with this series, because I’m one of two authors (Tanith Lee being the other) who has had a story in every volume so far. Previous installments have included “A Mask of Flesh,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Gospel of Nachash,” and “What Still Abides.” Mike is the guy who will buy a fake book of the Bible from me, complete with King James-era prose; he bought a piece written entirely in Anglish. Clockwork Phoenix is where I can cut loose stylistically, or explore weird philosophical concepts in story form. I know what I want to write for this volume — in fact, I’ve started writing it already — but of course the anthology needs to happen before I can sell anything to it.

So go forth and Kickstart! The CP books have been great so far, with a wide range of really weird and beautiful stories, and I’d love to see the series continue.

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Edmund Schubert, IGMS, and the Hugos

Edmund R. Schubert, editor of Intergalactic Medicine Show, has withdrawn himself for consideration in the category of Best Editor, Short Form.

My understanding is that it’s too late at this point to actually withdraw; his name will be on the printed ballots. But he no longer wishes to be in the running, and therefore would prefer people not vote for him.

Why am I posting about this? Because he’s put together a free sampler of material from IGMS — basically the stuff he might have put into the Hugo Voters’ Packet had he stayed in. And there’s a story of mine in there: “A Heretic by Degrees,” the first Driftwood story I ever published.

Schubert approached me ahead of time and asked whether I would be willing to let him reprint that story in the sampler, given the controversy around the Hugos. I told him I was fine with that, and in turn, I asked and received his blessing to talk about my relationship with IGMS.

As many (but possibly not all) of you know, the full name of IGMS is Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. And Card, as many (but possibly not all) of you know, has become increasingly vocal over the years about his homophobia. This is, to put it mildly, not a position I support — which makes my relationship with the magazine complicated.

When I sold “Heretic” to IGMS, Card’s homophobia and other offensive behaviors were not fully on my radar, and I had not yet begun to think through such matters to the extent that I do today. I was just looking for a place to sell the story, that would pay me a decent rate. Later on, that changed: I knew full well what he was like when I sold them “Love, Cayce,” which is the other story of mine they’ve run. By then, my decision hinged on two things:

1) Card’s name is on the magazine, but he isn’t the editor. He hasn’t been the editor since 2006, and while he has occasionally selected a story for the magazine, this is rare. The vast majority of what you read in IGMS is there because of Schubert, who is not taking his marching orders from Card.

2) It pleased me to take money from a magazine bearing Card’s name for a story that has a lesbian relationship in it. (It’s a small detail, not the focus of the story — which is part of why Schubert didn’t pick “Love, Cayce” for the sampler. But it’s there, and it’s treated as both positive and unremarkable.)

And this brings us back to the sampler. Schubert told me his reason for putting it together was, he wanted to showcase what IGMS stands for, under his leadership. Because he is not Orson Scott Card, and he is not running a magazine that stands for homophobia, racism, misogyny, or any other kind of bigotry. I’m not claiming IGMS is a flawless paragon of diversity and progressive ideals; to be honest, I don’t read it regularly. (These days I don’t read any magazines regularly, not even BCS: most of my fiction consumption has been novels.) But it is not a microphone for Card’s views. Nor is it the kind of straight white male conservative bastion the Puppies seem to love so much. Schubert was not asked if he wanted to be on the Puppy slate; he does not applaud their tactics. And he does not agree with their bigotry.

Jim Hines posted recently against the polarization of the field, the sense that you have to “take sides” (and of course in that view there are only two sides, with no crossover or nuance or conflicting agendas). In the end, I think of my stories in IGMS, and my professional interactions with Schubert, as being a rejection of the notion of “sides.” As I told Schubert in email, I have no idea what his politics are, and I don’t care. Or perhaps it would be better to say: what matters to me about his politics is how they influence his professional behavior. I have seen no sign that he’s using his editorial position to promote bigotry; on the contrary, he deliberately crafted the sampler to be 50/50 men/women, and a quick glance shows me at least four non-white writers on the TOC. Nor has he been so publicly hateful that I can’t avoid knowing about it, a la Card. Could I judge him for keeping company with Card, for being willing to run a magazine that bears the name of a man who is so interested in hurting gay people? Sure. And I’m sure there are people out there who judge him in precisely that way. I can’t really fault them for that. But if I’d let that stop me back in 2011, IGMS wouldn’t have run a story about a bunch of second-generation D&D-style adventurers, one of whom happens to be a lesbian, getting into all kinds of trouble.

I don’t want to help build the echo chamber. I’d rather tear the walls down.

So that is where I stand. I haven’t sold IGMS anything since 2011, though I did send them one piece in 2012. Whether or not I send them anything else will depend on how much short fiction I manage to write, whether I think any of it fits with the magazine, and whether think I can sell it somewhere else that will pay me more — no offense to Mr. Schubert. :-) They aren’t my top market, but they aren’t off the list, either. And I’m happy to see “A Heretic by Degrees” included in the sampler, because I’m happy to be an example of what Schubert wants IGMS to stand for.

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If you show up for my tour, you get to see . . . .

. . . something shiny and new. I won’t show it to you yet, but here’s a hint:

Full tour schedule is here. If you live in or near Chicago, San Diego, Petaluma, Portland, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale, Houston, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Asheville, or San Francisco, I hope to see you there!

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Intent is not magic, but it *does* matter

I don’t know why, but recently I’ve been seeing posts around the internet about intent and its role in harassment/discrimination/etc which, to my eye, are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I am 100% on board with the “intent is not magic” message. If you hit me in the face, then my face hurts, regardless of whether you did maliciously or by accident because you turned around to throw something and didn’t realize I was right behind you. Your good intentions don’t erase the pain and give me a magically unbroken nose. And if your intentions were good, then the proper reaction to finding out that you hurt someone else should be to feel horrified and apologize for what happened. If you get defensive? If you bluster on about how you didn’t mean to like that changes what happened? Then you’re doing it wrong.

(This example is actually not theoretical for me. During the karate seminar in Okinawa, I accidentally rammed somebody in the cheekbone with the end of my bo while trying to slide it out of the way for people to sit down on a bench. I felt terrible, to the point where even now, nine months later, I want to apologize to her again. And I wish I spoke more than ten words of German, so a language barrier wouldn’t have gotten in the way of my attempt to make amends.)

But what I am not on board with is an actual sentence I read the other week, which is: intent doesn’t matter.

It does.

Intent doesn’t erase the damage, no. But it goddamned well ought to inform what happens next. If you hit me in the face by accident and were mortified the instant it happened, then I don’t need to lecture you on how hitting people in the face is bad: you already know that, and just need to be a little more careful. If you hit me in the face because you weren’t aware that face-hitting hurts, then somebody needs to explain that basic point to you, and you need to take a good hard look at your habits to figure out what things you’re doing are likely to result in face-hitting. If you hit me in the face because your society says, yeah, face-hitting hurts but it’s totally okay so long as it’s done to the right targets, then you need to rethink not just your habits but your morals, and the change needs to be not just to you, but to the cultural environment that taught you to behave that way. And if you hit me in the face because you hate my guts and want to see me hurt . . . then I need to get the hell away from you, because the odds that any positive change can be effected there are nil.

In all of these cases, my face still hurts, and you should still apologize. And maybe I’ve been hit in the face enough that for my own well-being, I need to get the hell away from you without pausing to find out whether that was just an accident. But to say that intent flat-out does not matter — to say that there’s no point in figuring out the causes behind actions — that, to me, is taking the point waaaaaaaaaaaaay too far. (And both “intent doesn’t matter” and “I don’t see why we should figure out motives” are actual arguments I’ve seen in the last week or two. I’ve debated whether I should include links, but I decided I’d rather keep the focus on the concepts, rather than the people promoting them — especially since one of those posts was not recent, and for all I know the writer has changed their views.)

The minute we give up on intent, we treat every injustice done to us as a nail, to be hit with the exact same hammer. And that’s not going to get you very far with screws or rubber bands.

We should not put intent above the effects of a hurtful action. We should not act like it’s a magic shield against responsibility for your actions, and the person who was hurt should stop whining already. But we shouldn’t throw it out entirely, either, and it disturbs me to see people saying we should.

EDITED TO ADD: From Mrissa in the comments, an excellent link that says this better than I did, including the concept that “intent is data.” And data is useful.

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Protagonists and Villains

This post is going to talk about the new Daredevil TV series. It isn’t really spoilery, but if you want to avoid all hint of what the characters do in later eps, be warned that I do hint.

So my husband and I finished watching Daredevil last night. I liked it well enough; there were some elements I really appreciated, and it turns out I have some hard-coded subconscious switch that responds really well to black masks tied at the back of the head, because they remind me of the Man in Black from The Princess Bride. :-P (I actually didn’t want to see him get his proper costume, because I liked the simple black mask so much.) If you want to chat about the show in general in the comments, feel free.

What I’m here to talk about is Karen Page and Wilson Fisk.

***

Karen first. I’ve never read the comics, but I understand that she’s Daredevil’s love interest, the Mary Jane to his Spider-Man. I was relieved to see that not be the case here: I’m sure they’re building toward it, but the writers are content to take their time, to let it happen in a way that (we can hope) will feel natural, rather than shotgunned. In fact, the romantic relationship she has is with Foggy, not Matt — and now that I look her up on Wikipedia, it looks like that love triangle is a staple of the comics. But it doesn’t get played as a love triangle, not yet. Karen kind of drifts toward him, then drifts away when they all start having interpersonal problems in the later part of the season. By the time the finale happens, it’s clear she and Foggy aren’t a thing anymore, without ever having had a Breakup Scene. And I liked that.

Did I like Karen? Eh . . . yes and no. The “no” part is that I never really warmed to her as a person, never found myself punching the air over her dialogue or bouncing with excitement to see what she would do next. Then again, that’s true of most of the people on the show. About three-quarters of the way through the season, though, I figured something out:

The show treats her like a protagonist, not a sidekick.

Her introduction is totally sidekick/love interest material. Matt saves her; she becomes their secretary. But it turned out the plot that introduced her isn’t a one-off thing, an excuse to bring her into Matt and Foggy’s lives. It’s the start of something bigger, and having gotten hold of one end of the thread, Karen doesn’t stop pulling. She gets offered a moral choice by the villains, and chooses. She recruits allies. She investigates. She is frequently off in scenes without either Matt or Foggy around, and argues her side when she joins up with them again. She gets kidnapped by the bad guys; she gets her own damn self out of that trap, and deals with the consequences of it without (so far) ever telling Matt or Foggy what happened. In short, she is a proactive character with her own story going on, which interlocks with but is not dependent on that of the hero.

And for that, I love her.

***

As for Wilson Fisk . . . .

I think the easiest thing to say is that I found him an interesting character but a terrible villain. The show did a nice job of building him up as a person before we ever saw him do something bad. In fact, at one point I turned to my husband and said, “This doesn’t make him a good person by any stretch of the imagination — but my god is it refreshing to have a villain who isn’t a misogynist.” Fisk is extremely courteous to women. His love for Vanessa is real (though man, I can’t figure her out at all); so is his love for his mother. He appears to genuinely buy his own party line about improving the city, up until the end. I think you could even make an argument that the arc of the first season is, you start with two guys of moral ambiguity, and this is the process by which they change until you can properly sort the hero from the villain.

But as a villain, I have to say Fisk was a real disappointment. The characters are racing around for multiple episodes wringing their hands about how they have to “stop Fisk before he destroys Hell’s Kitchen!” His nefarious plan? Is to redevelop Hell’s Kitchen. Like, to build condos or something. He wants to gentrify a neighborhood that is, in the TV version of things, a crime-ridden slum. Even laying aside the fact that the real Hell’s Kitchen these days is nothing like what you see on the show, and even allowing for the ways in which gentrification is a problematic process . . . that is not the kind of Villain Plan that really inspires a feeling of desperation in me as a viewer, to the point where I would see why Matt contemplates murder to stop him.

Now, it’s absolutely true that Fisk is a bad person and a criminal. After building him up as this gentleman, the show then has him murder someone with utter brutality. I get that. But there’s this weird disjunct where he’s using a heroin distribution network to fund a scheme that looks like it came straight off of Wall Street. He’s apparently suborned a huge number of cops and judges and politicians . . . all to hide the unnecessary crime by which he is funding his nefarious condo development plan. Then you add in the fact that he seems to genuinely believe that he is going to make Hell’s Kitchen better, while never addressing or blatantly disregarding the fact that he’s one of the forces making it worse, and I wind up just throwing my hands in the air. I feel like the writers maybe did, too: the “smoking gun” the protagonists find on Fisk is that business with his father, which is not so much smoking as vaguely warm.

I get that the general aesthetic of this show was to keep things down on the level of near-realism. Nobody’s opening up portals for alien invasions here; this is about the daily lives of people in the city. I think that would have worked better for me, though, if the plot had felt more embedded in real conditions, rather than this uncomfortable marriage between Evil Crime Boss and Wall Street shenanigans. (This post compares Daredevil with Arrow, and praises the latter for having a better understanding of structural inequality and its effects. One might also usefully compare Wilson Fisk’s plan with Malcolm Merlyn’s.)

***

I did enjoy the show, and will watch a second season if (when, probably) one happens. Fisk might be a more interesting villain now that he’s less Fisk and more Kingpin. And like I said, there were lots of other touches I appreciated, paramount among which was the way it handled people finding out who Matt was and what he was doing. I adored the fact that the show didn’t softpedal that, didn’t have the one angry scene and then get over it; the problem was lasting, and highlighted all the ways in which lying to people about being a nighttime vigilante is a real betrayal of their trust. I liked the fight scenes and the way the choreographer managed to change them up so they don’t all look alike. (Man of Steel could have learned from these guys.) I liked Claire and her reluctance to hop on the Daredevil bandwagon; I liked the priest; I liked the amount of dialogue they had in Spanish, and the fact that both Matt and Karen speak it, with perceptibly differing degrees of fluency. (I totally want the fact that Foggy studied Punjabi to become relevant some day.)

I will miss the black mask, with its loose fabric tails at the back. :-P

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David Gemmell Legend Award

It’s come to my attention that A Natural History of Dragons is on the longlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award. Now, that is a very long longlist; there are forty-three other books on it. But still! Yay!

The Legend Award is bestowed by popular vote, so you can head on over there and register your opinion right now, if you so choose. Voting remains open until May 15th, and then once the shortlist is generated, there will be a second round. While you are there, you can also vote for the Morningstar Award (fantasy debut) and the Ravenheart Award (fantasy cover art — no, Todd Lockwood was not nominated, alas).

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