Marie Brennan's Blog, page 203

Gun control

Sure, let's go ahead and play with fire. I trust my readers to be civil to one another in the comments.

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I simply cannot. understand. the state of gun laws in this country, and the direction they're headed in. That people think private gun ownership should be legal, yes; that people think civilians ought to be able to walk around with a semi-automatic rifle, no. That you should be able to go hunting, yes; that you should be able to carry a concealed handgun anywhere you like, no.

And yet our current progress is toward less regulation of guns, not more.

I've seen the usual pro-gun arguments, and very few of them make sense to me. Hunting! Do you need an AR-15 to kill a deer? Defending my home! How many lives have been saved by shooting the intruder, and how many have been lost due to those guns being put to another purpose? If only somebody in that theater had been armed, they could have stopped Holmes! It's a nice fantasy, but do you really think one or more civilians shooting in a darkened, panic- and smoke-filled, chaotic room -- against a guy in body armor -- would have resulted in fewer deaths, rather than more?

I could go on. Even if we ban guns, criminals will still find ways to get them. So this means we shouldn't try to regulate them, to keep an eye on who's buying what, and to keep the really dangerous things out of the hands of people without black market connections? People will still kill each other, just with different weapons. Weapons that can't easily take out their victims in mass quantities; I'd call that an improvement. You're far more likely to die in a car accident than from a gunshot! True, and I'm also in favor of improving automobile safety, as well as regulating guns.

But treating those two as equivalent is nonsense. Cars serve an absolutely vital purpose in our society that has nothing to do with inflicting violence on others. If we banned motor vehicles, this entire house of cards we call a country would fall down. Furthermore, there's a balance point between minimizing risk and the costs thereof, and it's hard to decide where that should fall. Most people agree that making cars incapable of going over twenty miles an hour would be an unacceptable cost, no matter how many lives it would save. We make calculations like this all the time, even if we don't like to admit it.

But right now, we're saying -- as a society -- that this is an acceptable cost for gun rights. So are this, and this, and this. And a bunch of this, though I can't find a list that just covers the United States. And we're saying that minimizing that risk would cost more than we're willing to pay. That waiting periods, background checks, mandatory training, prohibitions against carrying a concealed handgun in particular places, bans on weapons that serve no purpose but to slaughter large numbers of people at high speed -- those would take away something so precious that it's worth the lives of all those people.

We'll ban costumes at movie theaters instead. Because we all know that guns don't kill people; people wearing costumes do. (With guns.)

And yeah, yeah, Second Amendment! This post is a very rational assessment of that, and I agree with a lot of what it says (including the follow-up). Our private gun ownership laws, in their current condition, are not providing us with "a well regulated militia," nor are they contributing to "the security of a free state." Quite the opposite, I'd say.

Mind you, I do agree with the guns versus cars post that we're doing a terrible job of promoting solutions. Those of us who favor gun control need to find new tactics, a way to change the conversation to one the NRA hasn't already won. I don't know how to do that -- but I do know we need to actually talk about it, and not just mouth platitudes about tragedy and then go our way as if Aurora was no more preventable than an earthquake.

I do take comfort from the statistics that say gun violence has actually declined in recent decades, and so has gun ownership. That's good to hear. But when smallpox deaths declined, we didn't celebrate that and stop there; we went ahead and eradicated the disease completely. Do I think we can eradicate gun violence? Of course not. But we can do better, and should.

Monday assortment

Belatedly, I am over at SF Novelists again this month, posting about why failure is good for you.

Also belatedly, I am in another Mind Meld at SF Signal, this one on the topic of monarchies in fantasy.

Clockwork Phoenix 4 is a go! Now it's a matter of hitting the stretch goals. $6500 will allow Mike Allen to pay contributors four cents a word (instead of three); $8000 will allow him to pay five cents a word, which is the baseline for professional rates in science fiction and fantasy. There are still sixteen days in which to make those happen . . . .

Gorgeous sculptural book art by Guy Laramee. I think the first is my favorite -- that hidden canyon.

Really clever designs for Avengers-inspired evening gowns. Not just the major heroes, either: it hits Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Coulson, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, though I had to go hunting to find Loki separately. (Full group shot here.)

Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Evening

Look, I sympathize. It is genuinely difficult to have your POV character be Totally Wrong about something in a way the audience can detect but he is completely unaware of, and have that work. But one of its failure modes is "your POV character is a blithering idiot," and I'm afraid that's how I felt in this instance.

It probably didn't help that everybody else in the novel was coming across as abrasive and unhelpful, too.

Sorry. I really wanted to like your book, but it just didn't work out.

Geekomancy

Huge, huge congratulations to my friend Michael R. Underwood, whose first novel, Geekomancy, is out this week from Pocket Star.

It's e-book only, which means I cannot do the traditional friend service of running to the bookstore and surreptitiously turning all the copies to face out, while having a loud conversation about how this book changed my life and even made my bed for me when I got up this morning. But I can link you to it, which is . . . okay, not as entertaining. But it's something!

Conga-rats, Mike. A very long and energetic line of them. :-)

Information Density Pt. 2, or, let's try an example

I said before that it's hard to talk about certain issues in writing without specific examples. Since I just finished reading a book that I think illustrates the challenge of information density and scale very well, I'm back for a follow-up round.

Before I get into the example, though, an anecdote. One of the archaeological sites I worked on has reconstructions of period houses as part of a public display. Several are very well-constructed, and one is a mess. But I'll never forget what one of the archaeologists said about that one: "We've learned more from our mistakes here than we have from the ones we did right."

The book I want to discuss is one I think failed to manage the kinds of issues that don't fit easily into fiction. It tried, but it didn't succeed. I think well of the author for trying, and am not here to mock or belittle her effort; in fact, as the author in question is Tamora Pierce, she's someone I think fairly well of overall. But I think you can often learn more from an ambitious failure than a success.

Oh, and just in case anybody didn't see this coming: there will be MASSIVE SPOILERS. If you haven't yet read Mastiff, the third and last of the Beka Cooper books, I will be discussing the main conflict (though I will try to stay away from spoiling some of the other important things that happen along the way).

For those who haven't read any of the series . . . it's about the Provost's Guard, aka the Provost's Dogs, who are the police force for the medievalish kingdom of Tortall. (Aside: yes, it's odd for a setting like that to have an organized police force. But whatever; it's the buy-in for the story.) The protagonist, Beka Cooper, starts off as a "Puppy" or new Guardswoman, and becomes more experienced as the series goes on. Each book deals with a different type of crime: in the first one, it's smuggling; in the second, it's counterfeiting; in the third, it's slavery.

. . . sort of. Slavery is actually legal in Tortall; the actual crime in this book is treason. But slavery is more central to the plot in many ways, and if you follow me behind the cut to spoiler territory, I'll start to unpack that.



The moral and emotional center is slavery. It may be legal, but it isn't nice, and a lot of the narrative focus is on the various aspects of the institution: the slave-trading caravans, the jobs done by slaves, the way they're treated by their owners, etc. This is a topic that has been present in the series from the start, but it doesn't become the focus until the third book.

The actual threat, however, is treason: a coalition of noblemen and mages have banded together to murder the king, queen, and young prince, and place someone more to their liking on the throne. This is connected to slavery in that a lot of the nobles involved earn money from that trade, and furthermore a slave caravan is used as cover for the kidnapped prince . . . but their treason isn't Because Slavery.

In fact, it's actually Because Mages. The motivation for the plot is kind of muddled, but appears to largely be driven by the fact that the king has decided to tax mages, oversee their accreditation, require a certain amount of service from them, etc. This offends some of them, and so they decide to join up with some nobles who are likewise offended that King Roger (who used to be a feckless womanizer) has decided to shape up and run the country like he should.

There are some clear structural problems with this, starting with the fact that the mages are the ones with the strongest -- albeit still weak -- motivation, but they aren't the ones spearheading the plot; that's in the hands of a nobleman. But I don't think you can separate out the basic structural issues from the kinds of difficulties we were talking about in my previous post.

We generally expect the third book of a trilogy not to be wholly self-contained, but to draw on things established in the first two volumes. But Mastiff doesn't really do that. Not only is the leader of the rebellion not a prominent character from the rest of the the series, he doesn't even show up until maybe the last third of this book. (I felt this was also a weakness in a more personal strand of the plot: new character, not enough investment.) And on a thematic front, a similar thing happens: slavery is present as a nasty thing in Terrier and Bloodhound, but it isn't a crime within the setting, which means it isn't presaged as a conflict that must ultimately be addressed. (Again, I felt a similar thing happened on a more personal front, too.) And the whole business of taxing mages . . . if that got mentioned anywhere in the preceding books, I missed it entirely.

Whether it did or not, the problem is the same. Beka isn't a mage. Nobody very close to her is a mage, either; there's one minor secondary character who recurs, but she's not important to the plot. In fact, Beka doesn't even like magic: she avoids it whenever she can. So the Big Issue that's supposed to be sufficient cause for regicide and high treason comes out of her blind spot. One of the ways to handle complex issues is to position a character where the impersonal will become personal for them, but that doesn't happen here.

I've said before, and sort of meant it, that I want to give this series to people who think the be-all and end-all of "grittiness" and "realism" in fantasy is people dying horribly and women being raped. It was Bloodhound that made me say it, because that book delves into how counterfeit coin can destroy a nation's economy -- not exactly an issue that often gets addressed in our genre. In general, I like the fact that Pierce is using the cop's-eye view to tackle fresh topics.

But I think a different character could have helped more. Beka's weakness as a protagonist, from the standpoint of being able to wrangle the bigger picture, is that she doesn't want to engage with things outside her immediate job. She likes arresting criminals and helping people: that's great, we like that in a heroine. But she doesn't like dealing with mages, as I detailed above, and -- most crucially -- she doesn't like dealing with nobles. Put her around people who outrank her, and she just wants to go back to the streets. Ask her to speak in public, and she begins stuttering. So she avoids the higher-level aspects of being a Provost's Dog like the plague . . . and that means we lose a window we might have otherwise had into the larger issues.

Some of this may be Pierce's weird positioning with respect to the YA genre. I don't know how old Beka is at the conclusion of Mastiff, but I think four years pass between the start of the series and the end; she's not younger than nineteen, and I suspect she's at least twenty. She has a job and lives on her own. She's been engaged. She isn't a girl; she's a grown woman, and if Pierce weren't established as a YA/children's author, I don't know that the Cooper books would be in that category. As they are right now, they can skate by -- but if you did some of the things I think might help strengthen the story, they very well might not.

See, if Beka were politically engaged, you could tell the story of how she became Lady Provost. She'd be a naive Puppy in the first book, get involved in the bigger picture in the second, and have the information she needs to really address the top-level issues in the third book, culminating in the emotional payoff of her being put in charge of the Guard. That version of her would know the nobles involved in the treason, and would understand the kingdom-wide stakes in the changes Roger is making. Unfortunately, that version of her would also be much less of a YA-type protagonist.

I also think it would help if slavery were made, not the cover for the rebellion, but its cause. As it stands, the emotional payoff is the abolition of slavery: at the end of Mastiff, because of the way his son was mistreated as a slave, and because of the way slavery financed and aided treason, Roger announces a plan for phasing it out, and Beka, as a reward for her service, gets to sign the Act as a witness. Emotionally, it works -- but structurally, I think the tension around slavery should have been building through the first two books, and then have the third one start with abolition. It would make it more obvious who the rebels are -- since they'd be the ones who stand to lose a lot from that change -- but that isn't a bad thing; then they'd be present in the story as characters from a much earlier point. And the driving force of the conflict would be much more apparent and believable.

Instead, most of the book is locked into the four-person manhunt pursuing the kidnapped prince, with very little understanding of what's causing it all. There's literally a point near the end where Beka and her companions have retrieved the prince, and see as they're fleeing the bad guy's castle that the army has shown up to squash the rebellion . . . but they ignore that and keep on riding, because their orders are to return the prince to his family, and by then everything is so muddled they don't know if they can trust whoever's leading the army to help them. It's like Mockingjay, the third Hunger Games book: the first-person viewpoint is too restricted, to the detriment of the narrative's ability to show the plot in full.

(So I guess that's a useful tip to bear in mind: if you want to deal with society-scale problems, third person is your friend.)

If you want to deal with big issues -- slavery and its abolition; the regulation of mages in a fantasy society -- you have to make sure your canvas is big enough for the painting, and that the reader can stand somewhere that allows them to see it properly. In other words, it behooves you to lay the groundwork for your third book in your first, and position your viewpoint character(s) such that the key components aren't left off-screen. Both of those were lacking here, and so there wasn't nearly as much force behind those punches as there could have been.
I'll refrain from speculation as to why exactly Mastiff ended up shaped like this -- I can think of circumstances that might have produced these results, but I know it gets up my nose when other people publicly opine about why I wrote things the way I did, so I try not to do the same -- but I think it's instructive to imagine changes that could have made it more successful in handling its attempted scale. Sometimes it's easier to see why something didn't work, and how it could have, than to see why it did.

Clockwork Phoenix 4 . . . ?

I'd like to take a break from fielding comments on my last post to announce something very exciting:

Clockwork Phoenix 4.

Or rather, a Kickstarter campaign for it. You may recall the first three Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which I was very pleased to have a story in. The anthologies did quite well, in terms of both recognition and sales . . . but Norilana Books, the publisher, has fallen on hard times due to non-business-related issues, and can't do a fourth. Since the small press is a very precarious world -- and anthologies are even more precarious -- Kickstarter is the best way to go about continuing the series.

As you can tell by the fact that I've been in all three books so far, I really like the CP anthologies, and would love to see them continue. (Full disclosure: yes, of course I intend to submit something. And given my track record so far, I have high hopes of success.) So take a look at the project page, and if you see anything you like in the rewards, pledge a few bucks. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we can make this happen.

Information Density, or, cramming a fifty-pound sausage into a five-pound sack

alecaustin recently had a thought-provoking post on his LJ, riffing off some recent discussions about the people and issues that are "invisible" in fiction to talk about information density and how you can't fit everything into a story. In particular, there are certain kinds of topics that fit very badly indeed. He has a few examples of his own, but since I want to dig into this issue more deeply, I'm going to use one I know fairly well, which is the English Civil War.

One of the books I read when doing research for In Ashes Lie was called Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 . As the title suggests, its argument is that the wars of the mid-seventeenth century had their roots in the sixteenth -- which is exactly the kind of thing that's hard to convey in fiction, when the cause in question isn't a simple case of "this person was assassinated five generations ago, and we still bear a grudge for that." In particular, I'm going to tease out one economic strand for the purposes of our discussion here. If you're not interested in reading about that sort of thing (if you aren't, I can't blame you), then scroll on down; I'll get back to my point in a moment.

(Fair Warning: my point is long. And digresses along the way.)

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But here's the gist of it. Originally, the English Crown was supposed to run the country's government out of its own pocket. Mostly this meant revenues from Crown lands, but there were also a few tax-type sources (like tonnage and poundage, traditionally voted to the monarch for life by their first Parliament). If the king needed more money than usual -- if, for example, he was waging a war -- then he had to convene Parliament and get them to vote him a special tax for a limited time. This was seen as a terrible imposition, a failure of government to pay its own way.

Over time, this broke down. The business of government got more complicated, and therefore more expensive. At the same time, revenues from Crown lands were declining -- partly in their own right, and partly because kings kept selling bits of them off when they needed ready cash. Henry VIII propped himself and his descendents up for a while when he abolished the monasteries and confiscated their lands, but too many of those lands ended up being hocked, too; the problem was only postponed. In the reign of James I, the Duke of Buckingham sold baronetcies to the highest bidder, and raised a fair bit of coin that way . . . but none of it could fix the fundamental problem.

By the time Charles I took the throne, it was all falling apart. His first Parliament, who didn't like him very much, broke with tradition and voted him tonnage and poundage for only one year, rather than for life. Charles, strapped for cash, resorted to every legal method (and some illegal ones) to get the money he needed: he collected tonnage and poundage anyway, levied ship money, revived distraint of knighthood, etc. This did not go over very well with Parliament, and that whole pit of economic trouble was one of the causes of the English Civil War.
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Or -- because it's easier to make a point with two examples to illustrate -- take the U.S. Civil War. Above all, that war was about slavery, about the subjugation of one race by another and the desire by some people to end it. But it wasn't only about slavery. There were other conflicts and causes tangled up in that particular Gordion knot: economic imbalances between the North and the South, cultural differences, states' rights, and so on, even before you get to the military conflict itself. It wasn't a simple matter.

If you're writing a book that deals with the U.S. Civil War, how much of that do you include? Your answer can't be "all of it," unless you're Shelby Foote 2.0, writing a three-volume, 2968-page, 1.2-million-word monstrosity. (In which case it will take you the better part of twenty years to finish.) Generally speaking, that doesn't work. Even in fantasy, where many of us are used to reading giant bricks, we just aren't going to sit still for it. You need a story in there somewhere, a narrative through-line and characters to carry it, and those things take words, too. They also take focus, which is probably the more valuable commodity: readers can only pay attention to so many things at a time.
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Unfortunately, simplification often leads to distortion. Most of your readers live in modern democracies, and furthermore are used to fictional conflicts that divide neatly into Good Guys and Bad Guys. Because of that, if you boil the English Civil War down to monarchy vs. democracy, then Charles becomes the Bad Guy and Parliament becomes the Good Guy. On a general philosophical level I agree -- I like living in a democracy -- but the truth is that the more I read about the actual people involved, the more I hated all of them, and the horses they rode in on, too. (Pride's Purge. 'Nuff said.) If you decide to take the road less traveled, and write about it from the economic angle instead, then you lose the personalities -- Charles being an autocratic asshole, Pym screaming about the privileges of Parliament -- and make it all look very impersonal, the result of century-long social changes that I don't think anybody on the ground at the time actually saw in that sort of analytical light. (I could be wrong. But none of the histories I read mentioned anybody having a nice sane conversation about how maybe they needed to rethink the fundamental basis of Crown finances.) Neither picture is accurate.

Even if you don't outright warp things by simplifying, you close off some of your narrative options. If the only cause of the U.S. Civil War that you bring up in your novel is slavery, then the guys in the North are all fighting to abolish it, and the guys in the South are all fighting to preserve it. That makes it hard for you to address the issue of racism among Union troops, or all the debates about having black soldiers. (If you do address those issues, then pretty soon you're having to talk about all the other things that were going on besides slavery.) Do you have to have such issues in your book? No. You can write about uncomplicated Northern abolitionists and the free blacks fighting alongside them. But that's less interesting, and in general -- here I'm not speaking about Civil War books in either country, but historical fiction of any stripe -- we probably already have stories about the simple, Good vs. Evil versions of things. Me, I want more books that will dig into the complexity that usually gets overlooked.
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. . . except that isn't a solution. Nations rarely tear themselves in half over some Johnny-come-lately bit of conflict. It takes a good run-up to get enough momentum for that kind of bloodshed. If you give me a massive, country-wide war without those deep roots, odds are I'm not going to find it very persuasive. And okay, sure, some of your readers will suspend their disbelief for it -- but as with the simplified version of real history, you're missing out on the chance to do something more interesting.

So you worldbuild. I'm writing a secondary-world series now, and I don't have to worry about what led Parliament to whack the head off King Charles I; but I do have to worry about the confluence of economic and political factors that led Scirland and other Anthiopean nations to stick their oar into the conflicts between various Erigan powers. Every time I say "because X," I find myself asking, "okay, so why X?" And once I've figured out "because W," then I move on to "because V" and so on, until I'm inventing the entire bloody alphabet of history that has created the situation seen in this novel.

Which, again, doesn't all fit into the book.
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Personal stuff fits just fine. We're accustomed to reading fiction through the lens of character; even if it isn't your protagonist whose life history is driving a particular situation, it's easy for us to accept that the war happened because Bad King Balthasar had daddy issues. Wars fit pretty well, too, maybe because we're all so used to the model of history that's pretty much just a chronology of strife.

What doesn't fit very well: impersonal things, and long-term ones. Fiction is bad at handling society-wide matters playing out over a period of decades or more. People dying in the Black Death? Sure. The Black Death flipping the balance of power in Europe such that, where previously land had been scarce and labor plentiful, now land was plentiful and the labor to work it scarce, thus setting into motion a process of social and economic change that led to the rise of the middle class? Not so much. Unless you have a blind prophet intoning, "I foresee this will lead to greater urbanization and increased literacy, creating a body of popular culture that will be used to undermine the institution of monarchy," you can't really display the full scope.

Or, in the other direction, you have characters who can look back over the previous few centuries and say, "Aha -- the reason we have this peasant riot on our hands is because changes in agricultural methods two hundred years ago increased yield by nearly fifty percent, but a countervailing religious movement concentrated power in the hands of the aristocratic elite, thus decreasing the quality of life for the very farmers who are producing the country's prosperity." (Such characters bear an odd resemblance to modern academic historians. Gee, I wonder why.) You can show farmers subsisting in crappy conditions while the nobles live it up . . . it's the why that's hard to get across.
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There are nine and sixty ways of addressing these problems, of course. More than that, really; there's at least one way for each story, and what works in one case may not work in another. You can tell a tightly-focused tale positioned at the exactly confluence of character and plot that will allow you to cover one issue in depth. You can tell a sprawling epic that throws everything and the kitchen sink into the book. You can invent reasons for the impersonal to become personal. You can back off to an omniscient narrator who will explain things to the reader more efficiently than a character ever could. You can be one of those amazing writers who manages to convey in a single sentence what most people would take a paragraph or more to do.

The right answer is the one you can make work for the story at hand.

Which is totally unhelpful to say. But it's nigh-impossible to get specific without specifics to apply it to. I know what I did for my books, and why, and what I would do differently now. I can dissect other authors' books and talk about what I would have done if they were mine. I just can't offer a generalized prescription that will apply to That Book Over There, The One I Haven't Read.

But I can toss my thoughts up on the Internet for others to read, and invite comments. I know alecaustin isn't the only one who has been chewing on this; I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.

while the cat's away . . . .

A while back, I guest-blogged for jimhines , posting about the irrationality of fairy tales. Now I'm back for a second round: this time I look at legends, which not only make more sense, but are more closely related to fantasy.

Comment over there, either on the LJ post or its Wordpress mirror.

Purty pictures!

Now that everybody's had time to send me icons . . . alessandriana , you're the winner! Many, many thanks, and as you can see, I'm already using it. If you send your mailing address to me (marie {dot} brennan [at] gmail {dot} com), I'll get the ARC on its way to you.

Of course, those of you who have gotten ARCs have only gotten the story. (And a not-fully-revised version of the story, at that -- though at this point I've totally lost track of what I changed after they got printed.) You don't have the lovely, lovely cover, and you don't have what showed up in my inbox today:

The interior art.

See, back when I was developing this pitch, my agent suggested that I make Isabella an artist. Life drawing was -- and still is -- an important skill for natural historians. The idea clicked, and then I had a pie-in-the-sky hope: could I convince my publisher to include sketches in the book? Sketches of Isabella's own work?

Tor agreed, and so not only is Todd Lockwood doing the cover, he's producing ten rougher, black-and-white drawings that will be scattered throughout the novel. It is perfect. They aren't all done yet -- a few are still in the "preliminary sketch" stage -- but the ones I've seen are utterly fabulous. And it will add so much to the book, being able to have the artwork in there, supporting the idea that Isabella is drawing everything she sees in Vystrana.

I don't know if I'll be able to sneak any previews of that to you guys before the book comes out. But I wanted to let you know that my beautiful, beautiful cover is not the only Lockwood art this book will have; the purtiness continues inside. I can't wait to see the finished product.

Books read, June 2012

A timely post for once! And also a better list than I had last month, by far.

In Ashes Lie, Marie Brennan. Re-read for Sekrit Purposes.

A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan. Re-read for copy-editing purposes.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach. Popular nonfiction about the things we do with dead bodies (like surgical practice and crash-test dummies and alternative funeral arrangements). Generally enjoyable, though I did feel her humour was a bit too forced in places. Parts of it are definitely not for the squeamish.

The Book of Air. Another L5R book. AEG continues to put out fairly interesting supplements; this one was a hair on the thin side, as they're doing a series of Element-related books and you can see where they're stretching to find things they can metaphorically link to Air and then talk about for at least a page or two, but on the whole I'm pleased with what I get for my money.

The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan and Teresa Patterson. Discussed elsewhere.

Geekomancy, Michael R. Underwood. A friend's soon-to-be-published first novel, read for blurbing purposes. The premise is that there are weird kinds of magic in the world, and the one the protagonist develops is "genre emulation": she can read a book/watch a movie/etc and temporarily borrow a power from within the story. Probably the most entertaining instance of this was when she watched the BBC Sherlock and started seeing text popping up in her field of vision, analyzing everything she was looking at. If that sounds entertaining to you, this one comes out as an e-book soon.

Avatar: The Last Airbender -- The Lost Adventures, various authors and artists. A graphic novel collection of short vignettes taking place around the episodes of the original TV series. Most of them are very short, and if you told me some of them are basically just jokes or C-plots that got left on the script-editing floor, I wouldn't be surprised. Slight, but entertaining, and there are a few stories with more substance (of which the earthbending contest between Toph and Bumi is possibly my favorite).

Avatar: The Last Airbender -- The Promise: Part One, Gene Luen Yang (author) and Gurihiru (artist). First volume of a sequel story to the original series, which addresses the problem of Fire Nation colonies in the Earth Kingdom. I can't form a final opinion without reading the other two parts, but I like the fact that the beginning of the story acknowledges how it isn't a simple matter of "Fire Nation people should go back home" -- not when some of them are second- or third-generation residents of those colonies.

Nightshifted, Cassie Alexander. A friend's recently-published first novel. I read the opening of this in our crit group a while back, and the thing that hooked me then is still there: it is about a nurse on a secret hospital ward that cares for supernatural critters, and it is written by a professional nurse. So it is chock-full of vivid, concrete detail -- some of it squicky, but not as much as you might think -- instead of being a standard set of tropes assembled out of the Urban Fantasy Playbook. The protagonist's life was a bit too much "one thing going wrong after another" for my personal taste, but that is definitely a taste thing, not a flaw in the book.

The African Mask, Janet E. Rupert. I'm never quite sure what to say when I read a children's book. My knee-jerk impulse is to criticize things about the writing that may or may not just be part of How One Writes for Children; I don't read enough of the things to tell whether they're being done poorly or well. So I will just say that this is set in eleventh-century West Africa, and if you're looking for stories of that kind, this is one. Non-fantasy, and it should have had a different title; The African Mask is kind of insultingly generic (although there is indeed a mask that plays a central role).

The Africans: An Entry to Cultural History, Basil Davidson. Same guy who wrote the history I read last year. I'm glad I did that one first, even if I find this one the more interesting book, because (as I said at the time) I needed the 101-level history lesson so I'd have a framework to hang things on.

This book is much more anthropological, and exatly what I need for my current writing purposes: an overview of cultural patterns that are common, if not quite universal, across the continent. It is, in part, an answer to the eyebrow I raised while reading the history; Davidson does have some evidence to back up his claim of pan-African motifs. Not quite enough for me to fully get behind the scope of that claim; apart from the fact that very little of what he discusses here applies to anything in or north of the Sahara, there are regions of the continent about which not enough was known when he wrote this book in the 1960s for him to really cite them more than occasionally. But he does succeed in showing that certain things -- like the structure of lineages and ancestor cults, or witchcraft beliefs, or age-sets -- are at the very least widespread. He's very good about telling you where his evidence is coming from (there's even a map with numbers showing where the various societies are or were located), and moderately good about telling you when it came from (as he mixes historical evidence with more recent). On the whole, I recommend this.