Marie Brennan's Blog, page 207

ANHoD Giveaway: the winner!

My high-tech not-quite-randomization system (which excludes certain people, like those who are already getting an advance look at the book via other means, or my mother) has picked a winner for the first ARC: Janet, from Goodreads!

I am still chewing on title thoughts, so feel free to go on suggesting things. In related news, Jim Hines' fundraiser for rape crisis centers has raised more than $2500, which means another ARC of ANHoD and a copy of With Fate Conspire have both been added to the pool of prizes. If you chip in over there, you'll have a chance at both of them, and also a host of other awesome things. (I should also note that donations to RAINN will be matched, so you get double money for your dollar, there.)

And now I shall ponder what to do with the remaining copies . . . .

ANHOD giveaway, Urban Tarot, and Jim Hines' fundraiser

My thanks to everyone who sent me a title suggestion for the second book of Isabella's memoirs! I received comments here, on Twitter, on Goodreads, by e-mail . . . the whole gamut. Give me a little while to sort through them, and then I'll announce a winner.

Speaking of winners, Jim Hines' fundraiser for rape crisis centers is less than $200 away from hitting the benchmark that tosses a signed copy of With Fate Conspire and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons into the prize pot. There are new rewards, too, at levels up to $4000, and some of them are very shiny.

And finally, we're in the last days of the Urban Tarot Project. $375 dollars more there will mean embroidered bags for everyone receiving the deck! And there are still signed copies of With Fate Conspire available there, too, so if you want one of those (along with all the other parts of the reward package), you have 71 hours left in which to get it.

Excelsior!

CQD. This is Titanic. CQD. This is Titanic.

Like sovay (from whom I got this), I had no intention of blogging about the sinking of the Titanic. But then she posted this.

This is the conversation that rattled across the North Atlantic the night the Titanic sank. You can hear the moment Jack Phillips stopped transmitting a personal message from a passenger, cutting off abruptly only to begin broadcasting again: "CQD. This is Titanic. CQD. This is Titanic." The old distress call -- SOS had only just been instituted, and wasn't added to the message until later that night -- followed by the announcement of the collision. And then the replies from other ships, fragments of information being passed back and forth, questions and offers of help until the chatter gets too thick and Phillips just sends, "Stop talking. Stop talking. Jamming." And everybody shuts up until he starts again.

All of it so level, so lacking in inflection. Because this is the record of the wireless messages, run through voice synthesizers to translate that conversation into a form the layperson can understand. But you know what's behind the words, and that makes it all the more devastating.

Then static creeps in, as Titanic's signal weakens. And then silence.

Seeing the tragedy from that angle . . . it's like a punch to the gut. Especially when you think that if the captain of the Californian hadn't decided the ice was too thick to proceed, if he hadn't ordered his ship's boilers shut down for the night, if the wireless operator had stayed up a mere half hour later before going to bed, then the Californian would have heard the distress call, and would have come to help.

(Or, y'know, if there had been a firm code for the use of ship's rockets, so the guys on the Californian who saw them fired off from the Titanic would have known for sure it was a distress signal. Or if the captain of the Titanic had paid attention to the Californian's warnings in the FIRST PLACE, and hadn't gone charging full speed into an iceberg. If, if, if. There are so many ways the Titanic, or at least its people, could have been saved, but none of them happened.)

The link goes to an article, but if you click through to here you should be able to listen to the broadcast directly. Be warned, though: after the Titanic sends its last message, there's a stretch of silence . . . and then a bloody advertisement starts up, before the program returns. And to add insult to injury, the ad I got -- don't know if it changes -- was for a performance of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. In Gujarati!

Yeeeeeeeeeeah. Not only is that probably the worst Shakespearean play title you could choose to interrupt the story with, the Gujarati singing is especially out of place.

But go read the article, and listen to the broadcast if you have the time. It's worth it.

Fundraising for rape crisis center

The ever-awesome Jim Hines running a fundraiser this month for rape crisis centers. For every benchmark hit, he'll be giving away one of a whole slew of books, which you can see at that link. And if the fundraising gets up to $2500 (which I devoutly hope it will!), then I'll be tossing in two things to sweeten the pot: a signed copy of With Fate Conspire , and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons .

(This is separate from the title-suggestion giveaway for the first ARC. Two chances to win!)

Head on over to his post for details, including how to donate. It's an excellent cause, and I hope it raises enough money that he has to find more prizes to give away!

The Togashi Dynasty, Part Two: Before the Clan War

Okay, so you have the alternate history for the founding of Rokugan that I laid out in my previous post. Where do you go from there?

Another sidebar in Imperial Histories mentions that Hantei didn't have to step down and let his son Genji become the Emperor. What if he'd gone on ruling forever, as an immortal kami? Well, that's more or less what happened with Togashi in canon: every Dragon Clan Champion until the Second Day of Thunder was in fact the founding kami, under a series of aliases. So you could easily have the same thing here, not even bothering with the cover story. Emperor Togashi just goes on ruling.

Since a) he's canonically very reclusive, because of the way his gift of foresight works, and b) we're aiming for mystic weirdness here, I figure he withdraws more and more from Rokugani society as the years go by. People almost never see him; ise zumi or other members of the two Imperial families (the Mirumoto and the Agasha) carry out his orders, or relay them to everybody else.

Until the dawn of what is, in canon, the Gozoku era: the late fourth century.

(I'll take a moment here to acknowledge that really, if you go changing something as major as the Emperor of Rokugan -- and therefore the entire shape of Rokugani society -- you should logically end up with a highly divergent AU, not the same historical events reworked. But that would mean really re-inventing the L5R wheel, and besides, I think it's fun to keep filtering canon through this lens.)

So how do you get the Gozoku conspiracy when the Emperor is an immortal kami with foresight?


I see the inciting incident being some order of Togashi's that goes horribly wrong. It causes some unnecessary battle, maybe, which is the total opposite of what it was supposed to do.

One of the canonical Gozoku conspirators investigates. You could pick any of the three, and Bayushi Atsuki maybe makes the most sense, but I like Doji Raigu, because he's the one who was motivated by the incompetence of Hantei Fujiwa. He goes sniffing around, and finds out the big Imperial secret: nobody has seen Togashi in more than a century. He went into seclusion to meditate or something, and before doing so, wrote out a whole bunch of orders, with instructions for when they should be opened and carried out. One of his minions screwed that up, and that's why it went wrong . . . because Togashi is, for all intents and purposes, asleep at the wheel.

(Or so Raigu thinks.)

So the Gozoku conspiracy forms because Togashi's negligence is letting Rokugan spiral too close to chaos. I won't go through all the events detailed in Imperial Histories, but the important question is how it ends. There's no Hantei Yuguzohime in this timeline, to ride in and chop the head off her half-brother (who also doesn't exist).

. . . but there is Hoshi, Togashi's hidden son, who was born some time in the second century. I'd plug him in to replace Yuguzohime, and then borrow a page out of real Japanese history, with the tradition of cloistered rule: Togashi continues to rule as the "Retired Emperor," using his foresight to guide Rokugan, but Hoshi and his descendants take over as the actual public face of the throne.

There should also, as in canon, be the rise of an actual Imperial court. Under the Hantei dynasty, this was when the Otomo stopped being a mostly useless appendage to the Imperial line and started being the social piranhas they are in later centuries, tasked with making sure the Great Clans are too busy bickering with each other to ever plot against the Emperor again. I don't want to just apply them here, though, because they're designed for a very different Emperor and Rokugan. (One socially dominated by the Crane, in fact -- and I don't think the Togashi dynasty would make a habit of marrying Doji the way the Hantei did. I imagine they'd gravitate toward wives from the Phoenix and the Bear, except when orders came down from the Retired Emperor to pick somebody else, for whatever precognitive reason.)

The Kitsuki don't really work either, though. They may be a courtier school, but they're really more magistrates than anything else, which isn't the kind of thing that would be created by the Gozoku conspiracy. I'd maybe suggest they get their start around now anyway, because they could play a role in tracking down Gozoku manipulation, but it's only been a few hundred years since Soshi Saibankan created the magistrate system in the first place. So possibly it's too early to have them.

Anyway, the upshot is that I'm not sure what sort of courtiers to create for the Imperial line. I'd have to browse through some of the more obscure stuff for ideas.

I'm also not sure what to do with the Battle of White Stag a few years later. It's too soon, I think, to let Hoshi be gacked -- and besides, the dude's a half-dragon. It should take more than a stray cannonball to kill him. I do think it should still end with the country being closed to gaijin, since that suits the tone of this setting (openness to foreign trade is more Empress Shinjo's schtick), but the path to that point should be a lot weirder: stuff involving the non-human races in Rokugan, and also nemuranai, both of which ought to be a lot more prominent in this version of history.

(Definitely still have the Mantis becoming a Minor Clan, though. Togashi would have foreseen the necessity of their strength leading up to the Second Day of Thunder.)

Imperial Histories includes a new era between this and the Scorpion Clan Coup: the Great Famine in the seventh century. Which is a little difficult to integrate, depending as it does on the FLAMING INCOMPETENCE of the Emperor at the time. Not that Hoshi's descendants would be totally immune to FLAMING INCOMPETENCE -- but getting that to happen is tricky when the Retired Emperor can see the future. Because this is a new addition to the canon, it doesn't have the long-term effects of (say) the Gozoku, which means I don't have any good opening for saying, "well, Togashi knew it needed to happen in order to set up X later on." You could still have the famine and disease -- and Togashi would still sit it out the way he did in canon, because he knew he couldn't stop it -- but you wouldn't have the Emperor running around making it worse by being a blind dick. I think I'd either water it down, saying the era had lots of natural disasters but not so much Imperial bungling; or I'd add in some kind of suitably mystical layer. An outbreak of spirit weirdness, or the Shadowlands march the book suggests in a sidebar, or whatever.
I'll stop there for now, because again, this is already a pretty long post, and the part that comes next -- the Scorpion Coup, the Clan War, and the Second Day of Thunder -- ain't exactly going to be short. Besides, I haven't yet read those chapters in Imperial Histories. ^_^ (I do have my basic ideas in place already, but I'm sure they'll get refined by what I read there.)

As before, feel free to make suggestions if you know L5R. Especially for the Imperial courtier thing, or the Battle of White Stag, since I don't have any great inspiration for either of those at the moment.

The Togashi Dynasty, Part One: Founding

I've said before that the setting for Legend of the Five Rings is really well-developed, such that you can have all sorts of fun messing with it. The most recent book for the fourth edition supports this in interesting ways; in addition to giving all kinds of historical info, it has sidebars scattered throughout, suggesting AU scenarios that might have resulted if events had gone differently.

One of those concerns the founding of the Empire. Canonically -- for those who don't know -- nine kami, the children of Lady Sun and Lord Moon, fell to earth (and one of them fell through the earth into Hell, where he became corrupted). The remaining eight gathered mortal followers and held a tournament amongst themselves to decide who would rule this realm. Hantei won, and the other seven founded the Great Clans, and that was how Rokugan got started.

The sidebar in Imperial Histories asks, what if a different kami had won?

It gives a few sentences for each of the other kami, reminding you of their personalities, and outlining the general flavor that would have resulted if Doji or Hida or whoever had set the tone for all of Rokugan. The one that caught my eye the most was this:

If Togashi had been destined to defeat Hantei, he would have built an Empire far different from anything imagined by his siblings -- a place of mystery and enigma, where religious contemplation and individual enlightenment were the highest goods. A GM who wishes to make Rokugan closer to the sort of mystical martial arts setting depicted in many Asian films might find a Togashi Dynasty suitable to the task.

Granted, I am playing a Dragon PC (a member of the Clan that kami founded in canonical history), and a Togashi monk to boot. But I think those lines would look shiny to me even if I weren't, because I'm a fan of movies like The Bride With White Hair (which is the first example that leapt to mind). And so my brain immediately started playing with this notion. How could you redesign L5R for a timeline in which Togashi won?

I'm splitting this into at least two parts because the more I think about it, the more interesting notions come to mind. Everyone, and L5R geeks in particular, are invited to hop in with comments and suggestions. For this first part, I'll start with the founding of the Empire and the Great Clans.


You have to start with the Tournament of the Kami, of course, to explain why it had a different result. I say, keep it almost entirely as-is, with one early tweak: before the tournament is suggested, Togashi recites a poem, which is enigmatic and meaningless to his brothers and sisters.

Things proceed along their normal course, with the kami all facing off (except Togashi, who is sitting it out). It ends, as in canon, with Akodo and Hantei, and Akodo realizing he was about to kill his brother, then throwing his sword down and kneeling to Hantei. All the other kami are about to follow suit when Shiba says, hang on a sec. Togashi predicted all of this. Because he's thought back to the poem, and realized that its enigmatic comments were in fact descriptions of the very mistakes and flaws that caused each of the kami to lose their bouts. And, as Shiba points out, that means Togashi defeated them all, without ever raising a finger.

So the kami instead kneel to him -- as Togashi had foreseen.

Now you need to sort out the Clans. The simplest answer is to just plug Hantei in Togashi's place as the founder of the Dragon Clan, but of course that isn't satisfactory; the whole point is that the Dragon style is now the style of Rokugan as a whole. You could treat the Imperial families as Clan families and vice versa, but that also doesn't really work; the Otomo courtiers in particular, but the Seppun and Miya as well, are so very much designed around the Emperor and his court, that demoting them to mere Great Clan status seems weird. Better to ask, what kind of clan would Hantei found?

It's hard to answer, because as far as "personalities of the kami" go, Hantei's pretty much consists of "is the Emperor." Take that away, and he doesn't have much left. It's more effective, I think, to ask what role his Clan could have in Rokugan, that isn't already filled by one of the canonical Great Clans.

My first thought was to make them craftsmen. Steal a bit of thunder from the Kaiu engineers and the Kakita artisans (because really, do the Crane need to have the bestest courtiers and and the bestest duelists and the bestest artisans evar?), and say Hantei's followers Make Stuff Real Good. It has the merit of being vaguely connected to Hantei's personality -- treating Rokugan as a thing he "made" in the canon timeline -- but I came up with an idea I like better. If Togashi's Rokugan is more mystical and weird, then it should probably feature a much higher degree of interaction with the non-human races, like the naga and the nezumi, right? Put Hantei's Clan in charge of that.

(Yes, I know that's a bit of an odd choice, given that in canon Hantei is the one who ordered the samurai to hunt down and kill non-humans, leading to the near-extinction of the kitsu. But it suits the flavor of the timeline.)

Call them the Bear Clan. (I don't know if this is true of the Ainu, but I know the folklore of a lot of cultures sees bears as being almost quasi-human, which seems fitting here. I'm open to alternative names, though.) Setting them up as the people who deal with non-humans suggests what to do about their schools, too: steal the Kitsu from the Lion to be their shugenja tradition and have their bushi be the Kenku Bushi School from Enemies of the Empire. You'll have to come up with some replacement shugenja for the Lion, and probably design from scratch a courtier school aimed at diplomatic interactions with the other races, but you've got a decent basis for a Bear Clan already. [Edit: On reflection, the Kitsu technique is too well-matched to the Lion Clan to take it away. I'd give them a new name, and not have them be connected to the kitsu race, but leave them where they are. For the Bear Clan shugenja, I'd instead steal the Kitsune school -- heck, probably the whole family, and eliminate their history with the Unicorn Clan.]

On the Dragon-now-Imperial side, I'm inclined to keep a number of the Dragon families and schools almost as-is. You definitely still want the ise zumi, whom I imagine as being sort of weird special agents: monks with suitable tattoos get sent out on random missions for the good of the Empire, then vanish back to their trackless mountain home. (Is the capital of this Rokugan still Otosan Uchi, where the kami fell to earth? Or does Togashi move them to the northern mountains? Or did they fall up there in the first place? No idea. For simplicity's sake, it's probably easiest to keep the geography more or less unchanged, and put the Bear Clan in former Dragon lands. But give the ise zumi a suitable mountain to hide on.)

Keep the Mirumoto as an Imperial bushi family, but maybe buff up their techniques to be just a hair more powerful. Definitely erase their rivalry with the Kakita, because I like the notion that the niten style is reserved for Imperial bushi ONLY. Nobody else is allowed to fight with two swords at once. Ditto perhaps the Agasha, with their alchemical technique. Somewhere along the line -- perhaps earlier than in canon -- you could also get the Kitsuki Investigators, though obviously their method would gain acceptance much more rapidly, with Imperial backing behind it.
But in these early days, of course, none of that stuff is terribly well-developed yet. For the Imperial court to take its proper shape, you have to move forward to the Gozoku era. And I have a notion for how to keep that -- a notion that springs from another alternate-history sidebar, where it asks what would have happened if Hantei had just kept on ruling, instead of handing off the throne to his son. For the tale of Rokugan under the immortal emperor Togashi, tune in for the next installment, whenever I get around to posting it. :-)

A Natural History of Dragons: Giveaway the First

Just laid this out piecemeal on Twitter; here it is in less truncated form.

I'm chewing over potential titles for the second book of Isabella's memoirs. I want it to sound Victorian and travelogue-ish, and/or to potentially echo something having to do with sub-Saharan Africa (which is the region I'm taking as my model for this installment). My tongue-in-cheek placeholder is "Mrs. Camherst, I Presume," but that's not great as a title, hence looking for a replacement.

Right now I'm charmed by a pattern that showed up in Victorian travel-writing, exemplified by "Along the River Limpopo, With Gun and Camera." The whole thing is unwieldy, but maybe a "With X and Y" phrase? If I can find suitable nouns to plug into it. (And if I can shut up the part of my brain that says I already have one published book whose title begins with With.) Or, y'know, something else.

Anyway, all that rambling is just to give you an idea of the flavor I'm looking for. The actual point of this post is to say that for the next week, I am opening the floor to title suggestions. In between now and noon PST on Monday, e-mail me, leave comments here, or post to Twitter with the hashtag #ANHODgiveaway. I can't promise I'll take any of the suggestions as a permanent winner, but I will pick someone as a contest winner, and send them one of these advance copies of A Natural History of Dragons.

If you don't have any suggestions, don't worry! I have four ARCs to give away, which means there will be three other opportunities to snag one. In the meanwhile, let the suggesting begin!

BOOKSES BOOKSES BOOKSES MY PRECIOUS

Eeeeee! Much earlier than I expected, a packet of advance reader copies for A Natural History of Dragons has shown up on my doorstep.

. . . wow, y'all. This thing looks tiny next to With Fate Conspire. Which it is; that monstrosity was nearly 157,000 words in the end, and this one is a svelte 93,000. But it's a little startling.

I should think up a contest to give some of these away, but first I need to spend a little while beaming at them and gloating. ^_^ (I promise only to pet the one I'm keeping for myself, though. Otherwise it might get a little weird.)

Bookses!

Urban Tarot update

I'm very pleased to say that with ten days to go, the Urban Tarot deck is just over a thousand dollars away from being fully funded. Close enough, in fact, that the artist Robert Scott has started making plans for what to do if he overshoots his funding goal.

The full updates (here and here) have more details, but the short form is that if the project goes $3K over the original total, he will add in custom silk spreadcloths for every donor above $65, and if it goes $5K over, then every donor receiving a deck will also get an embroidered velvet bag.

Also, Rob has added a second offer of the "Hermit and the Leviathans" reward package, which is the one where you get a personalized tour of the Fossil Halls at the American Museum of Natural History from one of the deck models, Chris Hall, who is a docent there. Why a second offer? Because the first one got snapped up in record time, and I can understand why. if I didn't live on the other coast, I'd consider going for that option myself! (As it stands, I went for the option of being a card model instead. No, I'm not telling you which one. You'll have to wait and see.)

And speaking of things that went fast . . . we've added five more to the "Marie Brennan" package, in which you get a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, along with my signature on the guidebook -- which, if you recall, will include a short piece of introductory fiction from me. So if that tempts you, head on over to the project page and donate.

Death threats are part of the game we play

Whether you paid any attention to Christopher Priest's rant about the Clarke shortlist or not, you should go read Cat Valente's follow-up post, about what would have happened if a woman had said anything even half that scathing.

This is the reality women live with online, and sometimes in person. It isn't even just a thing that happens when we yell at somebody, when we criticize something, when we get angry. It can happen when we say anything the reader doesn't like. Express a political opinion? Post pictures of yourself online? Root for the wrong sports team? "Bitch, I hope you get raped to death like the ugly cow you are."

Because for a frighteningly large segment of the populace, that's what you say to shut a woman up. It's a knee-jerk reflex, like swatting a fly.

How large of a segment? Who knows. Any number larger than "pathologically unwell people who are or should be seeing a mental health professional" is too large. And they're loud. They swarm the internet, they take over the comment sections on various sites, they poison the water and drive out the good, and for whatever reason, we let them get away with it. We don't band together like we should and say, start acting like a human, instead of something out of Lovecraft.

(I'm laying off the hyenas, out of consideration for my commenters.)

Sometimes we say it. Some of us do. I don't do it often enough because, to be honest, I stay away from comment threads most of the time. When I see things like the response Jim Hines dissects, my hands go cold, my fingers start shaking, and whether I respond or not I spend the rest of the day chewing that piece of foul-tasting meat over and over and over again; it's easier just to avoid the trap. But I need to go to bat for human decency more often. We all do. Again and again, until we've sent this malignance howling for the shadows.

Have I gotten death threats, rape threats, any of the hatred Cat describes? I haven't, actually. But the sad thing is, I know that isn't because I'm a nice person who doesn't deserve it, a good, demure woman who doesn't need to be put in her place.

It's because not enough people are reading what I write. Give me a bigger microphone, and the sewage will come to swamp me, too.

We need to cut this shit out. The men who spew this kind of thing need to get over whatever misogynistic reflex makes them say it, and the rest of us, men and women alike, need to keep telling them so until they do. I don't know how we do that -- I don't know how we get it through their skulls -- but we have to try. Even the attempt is a form of support for the ones drowning in the bile, and they need all the support they can get.

For fuck's sake, people. That is a person on the other end of the things you say. Remember that. And summon up the basic compassion to care.