Marie Brennan's Blog, page 157
June 4, 2014
Under the Mango Tree
I’m slightly torn about posting this only because of Amazon’s recent bad behavior — if I could point you at a different retailer, I would. But this is a good cause in its own right, and I don’t want people to be reluctant to support it just because of Amazon.
Under the Mango Tree is a collection of folktales from Sierra Leone, assembled by a Peace Corps volunteer in the country. All profits from the book go to the students who wrote it, and to a scholarship fund for their education. Given the economic differences between the U.S. and Sierra Leone, roughly three book sales is enough to pay for a year of education for one child, meaning that every copy sold is rather more than just a drop in the bucket.
I’ve picked up a copy myself; in fact, I installed the Kindle app on my tablet just so I could do so. 
I haven’t read it yet, but will certainly report in once that’s done.
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A Year in Pictures – Paired Horses
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I stood for bloody ever at the railing above this sunken area, waiting for a gap in which to photograph this pair without somebody else in the picture. (In fact, I didn’t quite succeed; fortunately, the person who started walking into frame as I took the photo could easily be cropped out.) I loved the foreground/background juxtaposition — even if horse-head sculptures always do make me think of the Mafia . . . .
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June 3, 2014
A Year in Pictures – Dome of St. Peter’s
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The fact that you can see anything in this photo is a testament to the power of Lightroom. The lighting inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome is rather on the dim side, and you aren’t allowed to use flash; as a result, the structure in the foreground is still basically invisible. But that’s okay, because the real attraction here, at least for me, is the gorgeous dome and the gold background on the inscriptions.
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June 2, 2014
Books read, May 2014 (and other months, too)
April was another month where I was terrible about recording things, and then never even got around to posting about it. But the good news is, I remembered another book from January, which is the previous time I forgot to record stuff! So this post is mostly but not entirely from May.
Sword and Fan L5R book, read for proofreading. I dug the hell out of this one, or rather the latter half thereof. While I like swords as much as the next sword-wielding woman, a lot of the focus in the first half is on armies rather than individual warriors, and I both respect L5R for making mass combat a thing you can do interesting stuff with, and have little interest in using that in my own game. But the latter half is all about courtly politics in Rokugan, and it was full of tasty tasty info.
Shattered Pillars, Elizabeth Bear. Moar Central Asian epic fantasy! I think I’m not engaging with this quite as much as I want to, and I think the reason is point of view; like many epic fantasies, this one has a lot of pov characters, but the difference here is that Bear cuts between them very rapidly, so that many scenes are only a page or two long — or even shorter. I keep wanting to sink into one strand of the story and follow it for a while before shifting to someone else. I will spare you the lengthy digression of me thinking about epic fantasy plots and the pov management thereof, in favor of saying that Hrahima is still awesome, the world of the Eternal Sky series is full of sensawunda touches, and the characters are so screwed. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story ends.
Voyage of the Basilisk, Marie Brennan. Revision. My own books don’t count.
The Master of Heathcrest Hall, Galen Beckett. Conclusion of the Jane Austen + Lovecraft trilogy (vibe only; this is secondary world, with no actual Austen or Lovecraft in it). I don’t know whether Beckett did this before and I only just now noticed, or whether the tic showed up/got worse in this book, but a certain structural pattern started to drive me up the wall. Beckett has three pov characters in this series, and mostly switches between them from chapter to chapter; as a result, many chapters begin with the character having moved forward some distance in the timeline, then pause for the text to fill you in on what happened in the interim. This is a perfectly fine technique, but if you use it again and again and again it swiftly becomes predictable and aggravating.
Or rather, it’s aggravating for most of the book, then becomes unforgivable when the following more or less happens at the climax of the novel:
CHARACTERS: “Let us outline our plan for dealing with the terrible evil from beyond the stars. Everyone clear on their part? Okay — let’s go!”
<chapter break>
NARRATIVE: “The characters staggered upstairs, having defeated the terrible evil from beyond the stars. The heroine reflected on how it had gone, which is to say, pretty much according to plan.”
I wish I were making that up. I like this series overall, and Eldyn (who annoyed the snot out of me in the previous book) is a much more interesting character this time around — but holy crap, no. You do not pull the “let’s flash back to what happened before this moment” trick with the CLIMAX OF THE BOOK. For the love of god.
The Book of Void Another L5R book; another round of proofreading. I ate this one up with a spoon: the Elemental series have been organized according to the thematic connections of each Element, and in this case that meant The Book of Void is the Book of Weird Stuff. Like, there’s a whole section on kaidan. I really want to say more, but I signed an NDA and this book isn’t out yet, so you’ll just have to take my word that it’s full of the kind of supernatural weirdness that I totally dig.
The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross. Second of the Laundry Files. I like this one better than The Atrocity Archives; Stross has hit more of his stride here, and Mo gets to be a much more interesting character than she was before. In particular, I am an excellent audience for the trick he plays here with the geas and using narrative as a form of magical power. The actual plot of the villain still strikes me as unutterably stupid, but hey. That isn’t out of place here.
Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal. Full disclosure: I was on tour with Mary while she was promoting this book.
Jane Austen heist novel! I am very sympathetic to the challenges of writing a heist plot, and the result in this instance was great fun. There was a spot in the middle where I almost checked out for a while, but that’s because Kowal does a very very good job of depicting a kind of conflict that is rarely shown with such realism. (Romantically starving in a Venetian garret: not romantic at all.) There are nice touches with secondary characters knowing their jobs better than the protagonists do — as they should! — and some freaking awesome nuns. Basically, this series continues to get better as it goes along, though I’m not sure whether this or Without a Summer (the third book) will turn out to be my personal favorite.
The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross. Third of the Laundry Files. The entire thing with the creature code-named TEAPOT was highly entertaining, especially the bit at the end where the bad guys’ plan kind of backfired enormously on them.
However, there is one thing that’s beginning to really annoy me, which I will rot13 for avoidance of spoilers:
V nz fb irel gverq bs rirel srznyr obff be fhcrevbe Obo unf gheavat bhg gb or vapbzcrgrag, rivy, be (serdhragyl) obgu. Be, gb chg vg nabgure jnl: rirel gvzr gur Ynhaqel unf na vagreany ceboyrz, fbzr rzcyblrr cynlvat gur ebyr bs ivyynva (engure guna vg orvat na bhgfvqr rarzl), gung ivyynva vf n jbzna. Vg unccraf va “Gur Pbapergr Whatyr,” vg unccraf va “Cvzcs,” naq vg unccraf urer. Ng gur fgneg bs guvf obbx, V fnvq gb zlfrys, “uheenu, Obo unf n uvtuyl pbzcrgrag naq flzcngurgvp srznyr znantre ng ynfg!” Naq gura Vevf ghearq bhg gb or gur phyg yrnqre. Guvf vf ernyyl ortvaavat gb obgure zr — gb gur cbvag jurer vs gur arkg obbx unf gur fnzr guvat unccra, V jbhyq yvxr gb or jnearq, fb gung V pna pbafvqre jurgure V jnag gb ernq vg ng nyy.
Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, Stephanie Barron. Jane Austen murder mystery (I had a bit of a theme going on this month, I guess, this book being more literally Jane Austen than most). Recommended by Mary while we were on the road. The conceit here is that, well, Cassandra destroyed many of Jane’s letters and papers, so all kinds of fascinating things could have been hidden in those lost texts! The novel stayed mostly in the mode where Jane investigates by talking to people and understanding what makes them tick, rather than engaging in feats of derring-do, which I appreciated.
Islam: A Short Guide to the Faith, ed. Roger Allen and Shawkat M. Toorawa. Nonfiction, as you might guess. This does what it says on the tin, including the part about being short: 139 pages to cover topics ranging from the founding of Islam to its role in America today. But it does a very good job of packing a lot of information into those pages, including a rundown on what the history and differences are for Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi traditions (which is one of those things that’s really important to current events but I’m only just starting to get a handle on). I had initially been reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Islam, having had a good experience with the equivalent Judaism book, and that one is still better as an overview of theological details (e.g. the afterlife) and daily practice (e.g. prayers), but I think this one is the superior introduction to the religion on a social level.
Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny. I ended up getting the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks omnibus of the first five, because at least it’s a good binding (unlike the more recent ten-book omnibus) and slightly more manageable in size. I wish I had known going into this that the first five tell a more continuous story, rather than being self-contained; it took me by surprise that things were not at all resolved at the end of this book. But the good news is, I have the next four right here! The shift in diction between high-flown fantasy-speak and 1970s American keeps throwing me a little, but on the whole, I like the casual awesomeness of the Amberites, and the frank understanding that they’re not terribly good people.
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Chains and Musicry
Over the weekend, the Chains and Memory Kickstarter reached its first stretch goal. This means that every backer, current or yet to come, will also be receiving the next best thing to me sharing the novel soundtrack itself: a discussion of the “score” I made for Lies and Prophecy, with links to the songs where possible.
I’m looking forward to putting that together. The first song on the list is basically the reason I make novel soundtracks at all: I listened to it a bunch while writing the first draft of the novel, which caused it to become associated with the story in my mind, and then I leveraged that to help me get in the mood for writing, which led to me making playlists for books and so onward to the actual, formal score-type-thing. I love having the story in musical form; it adds another layer to how I perceive the characters and events. And now I can share that with other people!
Now, of course, it’s on to Stretch Goal #2: Short Story. The most likely prospect is that I’ll write about Henry Welton during First Manifestation — the days when half the planet suddenly had psychic powers and no idea how to control them. It’s possible something else will suggest itself while I’m drafting Chains and Memory, though. Speaking of which: I’ve started work on it, and am now a little more than 7K in, counting some material that got written beforehand. That puts me on track to finish it before October 4th, with time off for being in Okinawa and having ankle surgery, with a bit of a cushion to spare. Fingers crossed that things continue to go well.
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A Year in Pictures – Malbork Fragments
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Like much of Poland, Malbork got the snot bombed out of it during World War II. Restorations are ongoing, but in the meanwhile, bits and pieces get stuck . . . wherever. These decorative fragments are hanging off a wall near where you purchase your ticket and audio tour, and the late afternoon sun lit them very pleasingly.
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June 1, 2014
Jay Lake
Most of you have probably seen in one or more places already that Jay Lake passed away, after a long . . .
I don’t actually know how to finish that sentence. The usual phrase is “battle with cancer,” but Jay had opinions on that metaphor and its flaws. I remember him noting that it would be more precise to say he was the battlefield of cancer.
Last December I sent him an email with a link to a song that made me think of him. The email was much larded about with warnings that the song was about death, and I would totally understand if that was something he thought about enough already; I had no way of judging whether this would be of interest to him or one straw too many. He wrote back to say he did indeed like the song, which I had described as sort of “an atheist anthem about the afterlife.” Jay was a committed atheist — he had no belief that he would persist after he died — but this is an afterlife I think he could believe in:
But I place one foot before the other, confident because
I know that everything we are right now is everything that was
(Full lyrics here.)
I didn’t know Jay nearly as well as many of the people memorializing him today. I met him at ICFA and hung out with him there on several occasions; I showed up to various dinners and such when he came to the Bay Area, or would say hi to him in passing at conventions. Diana Sherman and I once chased him through a room party at World Fantasy describing the anthology concept we’d had over dinner, until he suddenly turned and began declaiming ex tempore the epic charge of the war elephants across the fields of Gettysburg. (Another reason to be sad Jay is gone: we never did get that anthology off the ground, and if it happens eventually it will not have the title story from Jay that it deserved.) He had an expansive personality, boundless energy, and a faster wit than probably any human being I’ve ever met.
Cancer is a thief, taking those things from Jay, from all of us. If you want to do something for Jay, and for what he fought for, make a donation here:
Clayton Memorial Medical Fund
c/o OSFCI
P.O. Box 5703
Portland, Oregon 97228
Jay is gone, but he is remembered; he remains.
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May 30, 2014
A Year in Pictures – Hagia Sophia
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May 29, 2014
Updates: Kickstarter, tour, sale, SF Novelists, WisCon
Five updates make a post . . . .
1) The Chains and Memory Kickstarter is a bit over halfway to the first stretch goal. The pace of progress has (unsurprisingly) slowed down; I welcome any signal boosting, and/or suggestions for other things I could do to spread the word.
2) While Mary and I were on tour earlier this month, Tor sent a camera crew to film our Portland event and interview us afterward. It was a fascinating experience; this wasn’t the “sit and have a conversation in front of the camera” kind of thing, but rather raw material for the following video:
If you’d like a sense of what our events were like, check it out!
3) Driftwood fans take note: I’ve sold the audio rights for “The Ascent of Unreason” to Podcastle.
4) My SF Novelists post for this month was “Pleaser Don’t Doed Thising”, in which I take aim at Bad Fantasy Latin, Bad Fantasy Japanese, and other such linguistic sins.
5) WisCon! I went. It was a thing.
Sorry, that’s just the tiredness talking. Going to WisCon was a good idea; going right after being on tour, less so. I feel like I didn’t take full advantage of the experience, partly because I was going easy on myself, partly because I’m new to the con’s culture and therefore didn’t know in advance about things like the Floomp. It was fun, though: lots of interesting people, some good panels (and some I really wish had dug further into their topics), some &@#$! awesome GoH speeches, etc. The good news is, now I know what to expect and can get more out of it in future years. Will I be back in 2015? Dunno; I’ll have to look at my schedule. But I do intend to be back eventually.
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A Year in Pictures – Entrance to St. Paul’s
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I have taken a lot of photos of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. (When I went there for research, the hostel I stayed in was literally one block away from it.) After a while I figured I had taken all the shots I needed of the cathedral as a whole, so I started focusing on details — like this shot of the western portico.
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