Marie Brennan's Blog, page 130

Sonya Taaffe now has a Patreon

Sonya Taaffe (sovay on LiveJournal) has just set up a Patreon to back her film reviews.

If you don’t understand why I’m signal-boosting this, you probably haven’t been reading her reviews. She writes beautifully about film, primarily with an eye toward the performances of the actors: she has a knack I envy, of describing characterization and behavior in a concise, vivid fashion, and showing how characterization is revealed in behavior. She also has wide-ranging tastes; while a good deal of her blogging is about classic or forgotten films from decades ago, she isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a snob. Here is her review of Thor, and here is The Avengers. Both, as you might expect, pay particular attention to Loki:

Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don’t have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he’s a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child’s desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.

Or here she is about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the ten minutes of really great movie buried in the middle of an extremely mediocre one.

I love her film-blogging enough that I sent her a complimentary DVD of Seven Souls in Skull Castle, just because I want to know what she might have to say about it. (And by the way, if you want to see that movie for yourself, you can now buy your very own copy.)

So if you want to see more of that, consider supporting her Patreon. More lovely film-blogging for everybody!

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

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I’m declaring today #AppreciateAnAuthor Day

There’s been a lot of nasty stuff in the last week, what with the controversy over the Hugo Awards and all. I think we all need to cleanse our palates with some good, old-fashioned fannishness.

Pick an author whose work you love. Or more than one! (Living authors preferable: you can hold a seance to raise the ghost of a deceased author, if you prefer, but that’s a lot of effort.)

Send them a message telling them how much you like their work.

It’s that easy. Send them a tweet, if they’re on Twitter. Or email, if you want to say more than fits into 140 characters. Or post something to their Facebook page. Or make a blog post, and send them the link to the post. Hire a plane to do some skywriting over their house — wait, no, that one’s a bit stalkery. (Don’t call them, unless you’re already good friends. Again: stalkery.) Tell them about a character you love, or a plot twist that blew your mind, or a book that you imprinted on, or a short story that lifted your mood on a day when you really needed it.

Be a fan. Let them know.

You may just make their day.

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

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looking for a deck-type-thing

Every so often I get stuck on a story, in a way that involves my brain going around and around in the same rut without exploring different possibilities. Sometimes when this happens, I turn to external tools to help me brainstorm new options — most often cards of one kind or another. Which kind depends on the story in question: I have at my disposal tarot (two different decks), Brian Froud’s Faerie Oracle, Edward Gorey’s Fantod Pack, that Once Upon a Time storytelling game, another thing of that type for B-movie horror tropes that I’ve never actually used because I don’t generally write that kind of story . . . .

But it works best if the cards I’m using have at least some aesthetic/conceptual connection to the kind of story I’m working on. Which brings me to my question:

Does anybody know of something like that which is East Asian in flavor?

Doesn’t have to be some kind of traditional thing (I have a hanafuda deck, but it ain’t much use for story ideas, unless I really need to brainstorm flowers). Could be a game — though please, something where I can buy the entire deck in one go; I do not want to wander down the primrose path of a collectible card game like Yu-Gi-Oh! or whatever. Doesn’t even technically have to be cards, though I like cards, so that’s what I’d most like to get.

Any suggestions?

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

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Sad Puppies Aren't Much Fun

Quick synopsis, for those not already aware: this year, Brad Torgersen organized the third iteration of the “Sad Puppy+” slate for the Hugo Awards, which, at least on the surface, was about campaigning to get conservative SF/F authors on the ballot (giving them the place they have been denied by their political opponents). Unabashed racist/sexist/homophobic bigot Theodore Beale/VD++ apparently also decided to organize a “Rabid Puppy” slate, on similar principles, only more so.

Between them, these two initiatives managed to have a huge influence on this year’s Hugo nominations, dominating the short lists for many categories. (Here’s a rundown on what they achieved.) This was met with a great deal of dismay in many corners of fandom.

We all caught up?

+No, I don’t know how that term came to be attached to this. If you know, please enlighten me in the comments.

++I find his chosen moniker sufficiently arrogant that I decline to oblige him by using it.

***

I’ve felt for years now that the Hugos are a thing I should maybe be more involved in. Two things have stopped me: first, you have to pay for a Worldcon membership in order to nominate or vote, and even a supporting membership is a non-trivial expense, at $40. Second, my reading is very disorganized; much of what I read in any given year was actually published long before, meaning I’m not very au courant with the stuff that’s eligible for awards. This latter point makes nominations in particular quite daunting, because there’s a whole swath of stuff to choose from, and I haven’t read most of it.

This year, for the first time, I’ve bought a supporting membership so I can vote on the Hugo Awards. I’d like to talk about why, and what exactly I intend to do with my vote.

***

There are several things to consider regarding the works or individuals that were on the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy slates.

1) I agree with Abi Sutherland that slates are antithetical to what the Hugos are meant to represent. In theory, nominating a work for the award means you think it’s one of the best things you’ve read all year. A slate, on the other hand, is somebody else giving you your marching orders. It doesn’t really matter to me what the motivation was of the person assembling the slate: whether they’re trying to make a political point (as seems to be the case with the Sad Puppies), trying to trash the process (as seems to be the case with the Rabid Puppies), or whatever, the fact remains that you, the voter, have laid aside your own opinions in obedience to someone else’s, so that “your side” can win. I don’t like this.

2) The Sad Puppy candidates apparently don’t have a very broad base of actual support. According to this comment, Torgersen gathered suggestions from his followers as to what should be nominated. For Best Novel — always the category with the most participation — there were apparently thirty-five suggestions from forty-one people, and none of them got more than three backers. It was Torgersen who decided what should get nominated, and then everybody else followed in step. Which means there were a lot of people nominating a book they didn’t actually think was the best thing published that year. They didn’t care: they were more interested in “taking back the Hugos” or sticking it to the enemy (which is liberals/social justice activists/etc).

3) Some people are arguing that, however the works got on there, the only fair thing to do is to read them all and give them an equal chance. I haven’t decided yet how many works I will extend that consideration to, but I’ll tell you right now, it isn’t all of them, and it may be none. Because there are many factors that go into the equation of “what do I think is the best?,” and outside considerations are on that list. Theodore Beale/VD, for example, is a sufficiently repellent excuse for a human being that I feel neither the desire nor the obligation to grant his fiction real estate in my brain. I read a small amount of John C. Wright’s stuff before I learned more about him as a person; I wasn’t terribly impressed with it at the time, and therefore am not inclined to give him yet another chance. On a non-ideological front, I read the first four or five Dresden Files books and got bored; I find it unlikely that the fifteenth book in the series will mean enough to me to make up for my previous opinion. (Especially when even fans of the series are saying, “yeah, it’s far from the best.”)

Regardless of what you personally chose to do: you are under no compulsion to read them all. As someone said elsewhere, you don’t always have to taste the milk to know it’s bad; sometimes a sniff is enough. And as another person said, insisting that you have to try has creepy overtones; it’s like a guy in a bar saying “c’mon, it’s not fair to just blow me off. You have to sleep with me, and then decide if you maybe like me after all.”

4) If you’re wondering what the heck “Castalia House” is and how they got so many works on the ballot, it’s a publisher run out of Finland by Beale/VD, dedicated to publishing his work and that of like-minded people. Which is to say, bigots.

5) There was at least some amount of effort to recruit #GamerGate backers to support the Puppy slates, explicitly as a way of “hurting social justice” and “fighting the infection.” That says quite a lot about the dynamic here. (It’s about ethics in Hugo voting! No, really!)

***

As always, the question is: what now?

There are a lot of proposals to change the Hugo rules in ways that will prevent, or at least discourage, this sort of behavior in the future. Going that route will be hard, though, for two reasons: first, it’s a minimum of two years to introduce any changes to the Hugo procedures (because of Worldcon’s bylaws), and second, many of the proposed changes would disenfranchise a lot of voters who have been participating in good faith. (A fact which, fortunately, I have seen many people point out. The problem is known, and I devoutly hope it won’t be accepted as the price of doing business.)

In the short term, and quite possibly the long one, the better answer is social rather than legislative.

As I said, I’ve bought a supporting membership; if you have $40 to spare and the inclination to officially register your displeasure with this situation, you can do the same. (This also, by the way, gives you the right to nominate candidates for next year’s Hugos — and, as a special bonus, the right to vote on the upcoming Worldcon bids! Look for another post later about the Helsinki bid and why I think people should support it; that’s enough of a digression I don’t want to go into it here.)

What’s the best way to use your vote? Well, the Hugos use an interesting system: instant runoff voting. This is a system built to discourage the triumph of small but dedicated voting blocs over the general sentiment of the electorate as a whole; it means the winner is likely to be a candidate most people thought was pretty good, rather than one a few people adored and a bunch of other people hated.

The Hugos also have “No Award” in every category. When you rank this on your ballot, you are saying that you would rather see no award given in that category at all, if the alternative is to see it go to one of the works you have ranked lower (or left off your ballot entirely: for a cogent explanation of the different effects between those two, see here.) This has happened before, though not recently; the last time No Award won, it was 1977.

I stand with those who say, the problem here is the entire “slate” approach: even if the slate consisted of works I like, I have a profound objection to the entire notion of organized campaigns of followers nominating and voting for the candidates their leaders have selected. That isn’t what the Hugos are for, and if five years down the road we have the Sad Puppy Slate competing against the Social Justice Slate competing against the Can’t We All Just Have Fun Slate, I will consider that a disaster for the Hugos, no matter what I think of the works on the slates themselves.

One way to speak out against the slate approach is to use IRV and the No Award option to register your disapproval. There is a Puppy-free list of candidates here (and if you needed a visual demonstration of how thoroughly they dominated certain categories, there you go). Rank non-Puppy candidates as you feel they deserve; when you’ve run out of candidates you think might be worthy of the rocket, rank No Award. Then rank everything else — Puppy candidates, and anything non-Puppy you thought really was just utter crap — below No Award, or leave it off your ballot entirely.

In other words: say you would rather see no prize given than these tactics rewarded.

This may mean voting against some works you’d ordinarily support. In the case of Dramatic Presentation (Long), for example, maybe you really enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy or The LEGO Movie. But voting for them says, “well, I don’t like slates, but I guess they’re okay so long as they pick things I agree with.” That encourages us to form competing slates in future years, which is precisely what many of us are trying to prevent. If you think it would be wrong to give the rocket to Edge of Tomorrow or The Winter Soldier, then rank No Award first — that’s your decision. But please, don’t support the slate.

Because fundamentally, the slate approach is fundamentally not about fannishness or enjoyment of books. It’s about making sure your side wins. And in this case, it’s also about hurting people who have until now been nominating and voting for works they love, and stroking the egos of a few individuals who have felt disenfranchised by the fact that the Hugo electorate doesn’t like their stuff. (It is not even about supporting the kind of SF they claim to like: both Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and the second volume of Patterson’s Heinlein biography are right up their alley, and several SP/RP types, including both Larry Correia and Beale/VD, have commented that they probably would have supported those. So even their side gets hurt by this, as the decisions of the ringleaders locked out things their followers genuinely enjoyed and might have wanted to vote for.) It is about championing bigots like Beale/VD and John C. Wright. This is, in short, a move undertaken explicitly to upset and drive away people like me and many of my friends.

I will not be driven away. And I will not reward their efforts.

Is it idealistic to believe the Hugos should be about nominating books you, personally, enjoyed? Maybe. But I will do what I can to support that ideal.

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

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Orphan Black and the Reverse Bechdel Test

I promise one of these days I’ll post about something other than Voyage of the Basilisk or TV. :-P It’s just that right now, I can’t say much about either of the books I’m revising (because spoilers), and I have limited brain for anything else.

So let’s talk about TV! Again!

My husband and I have started watching season two of Orphan Black, finally. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the show follows a group of young female clones (in the modern world) who are finding out where they came from and what’s going on around them.

To begin with: can I say how much the main actress, Tatiana Maslany, impresses me? Not only does she play all the clones (and we’re talking more than half a dozen characters, here), but she differentiates them beautifully. Not just the obvious things like accent and clothing changes, but body language and so forth — and then there are the times when she’s playing one of the clones pretending to be a different clone, and that performance, too, is distinct. Maslany playing Sarah pretending to be Allison does not look the same as Maslany playing Allison. It’s a remarkable achievement.

My praise is not just an idle side note. It’s critical that she be able to pull that off, because the vast majority of the show’s weight rests on her shoulders. She’s playing literally half of the major characters, for crying out loud! Virtually all of the protagonists, and some of the major villains as well!

There’s something else that struck me while watching the first season, and it has to do with the way Maslany carries the show. In a nice reversal of what we so often see on TV, the male characters are almost completely defined by their relationships to the women.

Sarah’s brother. Sarah’s ex. Beth’s boyfriend. Beth’s partner. Allison’s husband. One of the big male antagonists is a scientist deeply involved with the clone project; his entire raison d’etre is this group of women. And because a lot of those men exist in separate spheres (the individual lives of the clones), they don’t talk to one another. When those spheres start colliding? It’s because of the women, and that’s what they end up talking about. It’s entirely possible the show up until this point has failed the Reverse Bechdel Test. Everything that’s going on is mediated by the clones and their stories; they are the engines driving the plots, the forces other characters respond to.

But at no point do I feel like the show is doing that just to hammer home a point. It’s simply a matter of: these clones are the story; they are women. Therefore, this is a story about women.

It is, in short, exactly the kind of structure I would expect if the story had been about a group of male clones. Just gender-swapped.

(When it comes to hammering home a point, though: my god, how often have we seen Felix’s ass? I find it kind of hilarious that most of the nudity so far has been male, and something like 50% of that has been Felix, with another 30% being Felix’s lovers.)

Anyway, we’re very much enjoying S2 so far. I’m cautiously optimistic about the Evil Science Organization metaplot; that sort of thing is often where SF/F shows fall down for me, but this one is doing okay, at least for the moment. And I love the clones: the range they show, the odd quirks and the way their strengths and weaknesses combine. I would drop-kick Allison out a window if I had to deal with her in person — but she’s a fantastic character, and has vastly more depth than you think when you first meet her. And Helena, oh my god. Ten pounds of Mentally Unstable in a five-pound sack. (Not without good reason.) The other characters, too: Mrs. S is becoming fascinatingly complex, and I’m rooting for Art to figure things out. (And is it wrong of me that I’m trying to remember whether Felix is bi instead of gay, because I’m starting to hope he’ll hook up with Allison? I mean, he came to her musical.)

No spoilers, please: I’m only three episodes into the second season, i.e. well behind. But it’s rock-solid so far.

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

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Books read, March 2015

Avatar: The Promise, vol. 1

Avatar: The Promise, vol. 2

Avatar: The Promise, vol. 3, Gene Luen Yang.

I read the first of these a while ago, but forgot until I went to shelve my new acquisitions that I hadn’t read the rest of the set. So I backed up to the start again.

In this trilogy of comic books, Yang takes on issues of postcolonialism and interracial marriage — no, really. It got me reflecting on the differences between what I’ll term a “simple” treatment of something and a “simplistic” one: here, those issues get resolved more easily than they would be in the real world, but they are present. I think of that as a simple treatment, but not a simplistic one. The city of Yu Dao is a Fire Nation colony, but it’s a century old; it has been built up from a tiny village by a mixed group of Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom citizens, some of whom have intermarried, others of whom are close friends. Making amends for Fire Nation imperialism by yanking all people of that ethnicity out of Yu Dao would not actually be justice . . . but just leaving them there isn’t quite a solution, either. And this all gets tangled up in a promise between Zuko and Aang, which provides your regularly scheduled dose of Zuko Angst. :-) I quite enjoyed it.

Avatar: The Rift, vol. 1

Avatar: The Rift, vol. 2, Gene Luen Yang.

Haven’t acquired and read the third volume yet. Aang takes the Gaang to see an old sacred Air Nomad site, and finds a factory has been built on top of it. Things get complicated from there. I’m really enjoying these comic-book continuations; they provide nice explorations of the world and how it changed from Aang’s day to Korra’s. And I really like how the Air Nomad fankids are being handled.

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

a friend’s novel in manuscript I won’t give the title or author here, because this book hasn’t even been submitted to editors yet, and it would be cruel of me to taunt you all with gushing about its awesomeness when you won’t be able to read it for who knows how long. :-) But never fear! I will be back to talk about it more when the time comes.

Chains and Memory, Marie Brennan. Can you tell what I’ve been revising this month?

Taltos, Steven Brust. The structure of this one was interesting. Based on the cover copy, I was quickly able to make a general guess at what was going on in the brief/later bits opening the chapters, and it added a nice (if slightly vague) element of tension. The flashback stuff . . . I liked it, but I think I would have liked a smaller/less frequent dose of it, just because it kept pulling me out of the main story with Aliera/Morrolan/the Paths of the Dead/etc. The latter had some very cool moments in it, and I would have liked to stay in that mood, instead of jumping back and forth. But hey: I don’t fault Brust for experimenting. With a long series like this, it’s nice not to have every installment be like every other installment.

The Guns of Avalon, Roger Zelazny. I was a little unfair to this one: I started reading it some number of months ago, got interrupted, and when I came back I didn’t feel like re-reading the beginning. So it took me a while to get my footing and remember what Corwin was doing, apart from “trying to take over Amber.” I got into it pretty well by the end: there was a point where it seemed entirely possible that the message of the story was going to be “by the way, the protagonist is the villain,” and even though it didn’t go down that path, it went far enough to be interesting. And I want to see what’s up with Dara, though given the time period these were written, I recognize that the answer to that question may frustrate me more than it pleases.

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

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Lady Trent sets sail!

Aaaaaand it’s official: Voyage of the Basiisk is on sale now in the U.S.!

Tell one, tell all, buy early, buy often. :-) And, as a bonus, here’s the “title” music from the soundtrack I made for the novel. Ironically, the song is called “Desert,” but it’s from Cirque du Soleil’s water-themed show O:

Consider this the discussion thread for Voyage (and previous books in the series). Feel free to ask questions or post reactions in the comments — spoilers are welcome!

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

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Finished copies are heeeeeeeere!

So these showed up at my house last night . . .

The production folks at Tor continue to knock it out of the park: deckled edges, three-piece case (in this instance, lavender and deep violet), even dark blue ink for the text. I think my other novels are starting to get an inferiority complex, sitting on the shelf next to these beauties. :-D

One week to street date — I can’t wait!

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A Year in Pictures: The Photo Set

It took me a while, but I finally have all the photos from A Year in Pictures up in a set on Flickr. Complete with tags! So if you want an easier way to browse through them all than paging back through my blog archives, now you have it.

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

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Tour schedule!

Mary Robinette Kowal and I will be going on tour again in May, for Of Noble Family (her) and Voyage of the Basilisk (me — out two weeks from today!). We’re hitting a few of the same locations as last time, but also some new ones; check below to see if we’ll be anywhere near you!

Tuesday, May 5, Chicago, IL

6 PM — reading and signing at DePaul University

Wednesday, May 6, San Diego, CA

7:30 PM — reading and signing at Mysterious Galaxy

Thursday, May 7, Petaluma, CA

7 PM — reading and signing at Copperfield’s Books

Friday, May 8-Sunday, May 10, Coos Bay, OR

Topsails & Tea
reading and signing at 2 p.m. on the 9th

Tuesday, May 12, Beaverton, OR

7 PM — reading and signing at Powell’s Cedar Hill Crossing

Thursday, May 14, Salt Lake City, UT

6 PM — reading and signing at Weller Book Works

Saturday, May 16, Scottsdale, AZ

2 PM — reading and signing at Poisoned Pen Bookstore

Sunday, May 17, Houston, TX

2 PM — reading and signing at Murder By the Book

Monday, May 18, Raleigh, NC

7 PM — reading and signing at Quail Ridge Books

Tuesday, May 19, Chapel Hill, NC

? PM — reading and signing at Flyleaf Books

Wednesday, May 20, Asheville, NC

7 PM — reading and signing at Malaprop’s

I will also be at BayCon the following weekend, and may have a Borderlands event in there somewhere, too. I’ll post the details here when I know about that for sure.

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