Marie Brennan's Blog, page 22

Twenty-two years of persistence pays off!

There is a very particular pleasure that comes from selling a story to a market I’ve been trying to crack for a dog’s age. In this case, I am delighted to announce that after twenty-two years of trying, I’ve sold my first story to Interzone: “999 Swords,” a tale that could almost go equally well in my historical category as my folklore, as it weaves a path between the factual reality of Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Saitō Musashibō Benkei and the wild tales about them, shamelessly pillaging from a sixteenth-century source as it goes.

Not sure when this one will be out, but I’m looking forward to it!

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“Learning” from AI

Over on Mastodon, the question came up the other day of whether people thought it was acceptable to use ChatGPT and that sort of thing as a “writing coach,” to improve your own writing.

Let me propose an analogy, by way of illustrating my feelings on this.

Pretend for a minute that someone comes to you and says, I would like to be your writing coach! I don’t actually speak English [for the purposes of this analogy, you’re all bilingual, so you can have this conversation with the coach]; in fact, this person says, I’m illiterate. But I have here a Big Book of English Sentences, and I will improve your writing by comparing what you’ve done to my book, whose content I don’t understand, to suggest what sentences you should use next.

I somehow doubt anybody would be in a hurry to hire that person as a writing coach.

And yet, you get people out there who think using AI to improve their writing is a good idea. They want to learn from something that does not understand what it’s saying — because it has no actual mind with which to understand. The only difference it sees between “the man walked the dog” and “the man ate the dog” is that the first of those verbs is more commonly followed by “the dog” than the latter is. And because it has no comprehension, it is incapable of aesthetic judgment; if anything, it might steer people toward cliche because cliches are statistically common. It certainly isn’t capable of moral judgment, i.e. having an opinion on the content of what you’re saying or helping you determine if that’s really the message you want to be sending.

What benefit are you actually going to get from a coach like that? The purpose of writing isn’t simply to get words down on the page without violating the rules of grammar. It’s about learning to use words for a purpose, whether that’s to present facts or persuade opinion or just evoke an emotional reaction. They’re a tool. And AI doesn’t even know what kind of tool a dog leash is, and what differentiates that from a fork. If you ask it to help you write an essay about how to solve world hunger, it could very well come back with “A Modest Proposal.”

But hey, it’s cheap, right? Much cheaper than paying a teacher or a tutor to work with you, someone with actual comprehension and skill who can explain to you why it’s useful or unwise to write in a particular fashion. And if there’s one thing late stage capitalism likes, it’s “cheap.”

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It’s coming: the pattern deck Kickstarter!

Ever since Alyc and I started working on the Rook and Rose books, we’ve had an ambition: to make the pattern deck which features heavily in the story into a real, illustrated set of cards.

At long last, it is coming.

Or rather — as you’ll see if you click that link — the Kickstarter is coming. Paying for art from real! live! human! beings! costs money, so coming next month, we will be crowdfunding the deck. Right now you can sign up to be notified on launch, which is a very helpful thing to do; not only does it ensure you won’t forget, but having more pre-launch followers increases our visibility on Kickstarter, which in turn increases our chances of reaching our funding goal. So if you like the idea of the deck existing (as something other than the blank deck I marked up with Sharpie for writing purposes), sign up to be notified, and tell your friends!

It’ll be more than just the deck, too. We’ll be providing rules for games to play with the cards, and there will be rewards and add-ons ranging from signed books to tea blend samples to bespoke clothing to me and Alyc running an online one-shot RPG for you and your friends. (Yes, really: that will be on offer.) So even if the deck itself is a relatively small draw, we may have other things you want . . .

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New Worlds: The Art of Diplomacy

For July, the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to international affairs with the first of several posts on diplomacy! Comment over there . . .

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Books read, June 2023

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing, K.C. Davis. I didn’t actually read this in its entirety — there were quite a few sections I skimmed — but I’m reporting on it anyway because others might find it of use. Davis is writing particularly for those who, for reasons of disability, executive dysfunction, or other factors, have a particularly hard time keeping their house tidy. The core message is to decouple your thinking about domestic labor and self-care from morality: you’re not lazy or lacking in virtue if your house is a mess, and if you stop beating yourself up with that mentality, you open up the door to approaches that you might find vastly more sustainable. For example, after spending way too long in a cycle where her clean laundry would sit in a pile in the laundry room waiting to be folded, she realized that it actually didn’t matter if most of the items in the pile got wrinkled — so why not hang up the few where it matters, and just sort the rest into baskets? Less guilt, more actual progress (the laundry at least got sorted), and more energy for dealing with other things. She also advocates thinking of some tasks in terms of them being a kindness to your future self . . . and recognizing that sometimes, being kind to your present self will need to take priority instead. I’m not in the core audience for her message, but I found parts of it very eye-opening all the same.

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, Ann Swinfen. I enjoyed Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mystery series enough to pick up this, the first book of an Elizabethan spy series. It’s less cozy than the other; for starters, the central conflict of the one is the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary Stuart on the throne, which is not a bit of history in which anybody comes off well. The protagonist is working for Walsingham, and the narrative doesn’t shy away from the fact that he blatantly entrapped Mary, to the point of having a post-script forged onto one of her letters to the conspirators.

Having said that, this still has the general vibe of being interested in the time period and what life was like during it. I think Christoval’s/Kit’s life meshes a little less well with the plot than Nicholas’ in the medieval series; where Nicholas comes across as an ordinary guy living an ordinary life with the mystery plots happening around the edges, Kit’s time is more overtly bifurcated between work as a physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and recruitment as a code-breaker in Walsingham’s service. But Kit is also — and here I’m not spoiling anything that doesn’t come out in the first two chapters or so — a Portuguese Marrano, i.e. a Jew forcibly converted to Christianity but keeping faith in secret, and furthermore is actually Caterina Alvarez. So that whole “secret world” thing contains many layers, referring to the espionage, the religious persecution, and the cross-dressing. I’ll be interested to see how those latter parts develop over time, as there’s an antagonist who knows her secrets, plus (of course) a love interest who doesn’t know. Me, I’m sitting over here remembering that Walsingham historically said it was infamous to use women agents, and wondering if he’ll ever find out; learning the answer to that might be enough to keep me reading all on its own.

The conclusion of this volume is a bit loose, since honestly the resolution of the Babington Plot involved a lot of people running around after different targets, and Swinfen doesn’t go the route of engineering a pivotal role at a vital moment for Kit. But I don’t particularly mind; I’m here for the details of Elizabethan cryptography and medicine.

City of Miracles, Robert Jackson Bennett. I have not been doing myself any favors by letting years elapse between me reading the various installments of the Divine Cities trilogy, but at least it’s one that can survive such gaps; while each book references earlier events as backstory, it’s not attempting to do a narrative so temporally close-knit that you have real problems if you don’t remember what’s happened.

Apart from that . . . I was reminded very powerfully of the difference it makes, whether you’ve read an author’s work before or not. See, the back cover copy on this one starts out by saying, “Revenge. It’s something Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is very, very good at. Maybe the only thing.” And that, my friends, is not a character I felt terribly compelled to read about. But I liked the earlier volumes in this series, so I gave Bennett the benefit of the doubt. And I kept giving him that even as I read the first few chapters and yep, here is Sigrud being exactly the kind of person the cover copy suggested he would be: grim, scarred, not at all reluctant to kill people and blow shit up (repeatedly), dragging the weight of his past around with him, etc.

That benefit of the doubt meant I got far enough into the book to hit the the point where the story said, Yeah. Those things you don’t much like about Sigrud? We’re gonna talk about those. In fact, talking about those is what I am here to do.

With another author — one whose books I hadn’t read and enjoyed before — I might not have continued, because I would not have had the built-up trust that this road was going to lead me somewhere good in the end. And the thing is, you generally can’t do an effective job of telling the type of story City of Miracles does without spending a solid chunk of time developing the thing it’s going to critique. But of course the problem with that is, the reader has to spend that solid chunk of time hanging out with the thing they want critiqued, waiting for that moment to arrive. Which requires trust in the author, or else trust that whoever recommended the book to you knows that the payoff is one you’ll like. (And sometimes, even with that, the investment is too large or long-term to make the payoff worth it.)

Fortunately, though, this book did have other aspects I was enjoying. Like an antagonist who is both terrifying and kind of sympathetic, and metaphysics I find interesting. So I kept reading, and I’m glad I did.

Inkheart, Cornelia Funke, trans. Anthea Bell. I’ve seen the film of this several times and really enjoyed it, so I decided to read the book, with an eye toward continuing on to the rest of the series once I knew the differences. Turns out that until the very end, the differences are pretty minimal! I think the screenwriter did a good job of streamlining the book plot without losing its general substance, e.g. having everyone taken to Capricorn’s stronghold together rather than Mo being taken and later followed by Meggie, Elinor, and Dustfinger. I’m not certain if I’ll continue on as planned, though; while I’m very much on board with the basic premise here (a profound love for books and storytelling, and then magic based around being able to pull things from books into reality), I’m not sure I’m quite in love enough with the characters to read onward.

The Black God’s Drums, P. Djèlí Clark. Novella that tragically seems to be a stand-alone, at least thus far. It takes place in an alternate history where the U.S. Civil War dragged on for eight years before ending in a stalemate treaty that left the city of New Orleans independent of either Union or Confederacy, and furthermore Haiti’s independence was won in part through the deployment of the titular weapon, a cannon that summoned devastating storms (whose aftermath still threatens to drown New Orleans on the regular).

The novella stands on its own just fine, but it also feels a bit like the setup for something. The main character, who prefers to go by the name of Creeper, bears the orisha Oya within her; she has to team up with an airship captain who bears Oya’s sister-wife Oshun, in order to stop a disaster. I would happily read more about what happens afterward, especially since I loved Clark’s attention to detail in the dialects of the different characters.

The Great Gods, Daniel Keys Moran. He’s moving forward with his series at last! In fact, glancing at the previews I can see on his Patreon, there are quite a few things coming down the pipeline.

This is still a Continuing Time book, but it doesn’t (heh) continue with the narrative we’ve had so far; instead it steps about a thousand years into the future to focus on a character who . . . okay, this gets into the weird structure of the series as a whole, the almost frame story where Emerald Eyes starts off with the Name Storyteller being chased by Camber Tremodian through time etc. Well, it’s time to talk about Camber! Honestly, the biggest effect for me here was a desire to go back and re-read earlier books in the series to see what’s been said before about various things popping up here: most notably, Camber, the Name Storyteller, and the Great Gods of the Zaradin Church. This is clearly a massive tapestry of narrative Moran has had in his head for probably most of his life, and while I have no doubt that new ideas have come in or existing ideas have been tweaked (this book has a lot more acknowledgement of genderqueerness than I remember from earlier volumes), I also fully believe that some sizable percentage of what I just read is building out concepts Moran had in mind back when Emerald Eyes got published decades ago.

As for the book itself? Well, Camber’s no Trent, which is to say this book has less a sense of humor than The Long Run or The A.I. War. There’s much more a feeling of weighty pieces of history moving into place; I’d put it more into a bucket with books like Dune or maybe Foundation (I’ve only seen the TV series of the latter). It still has the same overall style, though, which is to say you’re either on board with the infodumps or you’re not, and if you’ve been following the Continuing Time since the original books, you already know you are. If not . . . I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point, I don’t think. But I will definitely read more.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie, Śivadāsa, trans. Chandra Rajan. More classic Sanskrit literature! Though I really ought to prioritize reading a better version of the Ramayana over less well-known works like this. (I’m open to suggestions; the only one I’ve read is William Buck’s heavily abridged rendition.)

This one, sometimes called the Vetala Tales — Rajan chose to analogize the vetala to a genie in his translation — comes with a stonking 68 pages of introduction for a 181-page text (plus another fifty pages or so for some selections from the Jambhaladatta version). It’s less an introduction than a whole academic article. But I didn’t mind, because it honestly helps to draw out tones and elements that get glossed over in the actual text, like just what picture is being painted by the frame story, and the creepy mood that’s easy to forget as you read along.

The structure here is that King Vikramaditya agrees, for Reasons, to go fetch a corpse that’s hanging in a tree and bring it to a spot in the burning grounds where an ascetic (who is Not a Good Man) is going to conduct a ritual with it. The ascetic tells him not to speak or the corpse will return to the tree, but the vetala that’s possessing the corpse keeps telling Vikramaditya stories and then posing moral questions at the end. So the five-and-twenty tales of the title are the king’s trips back and forth to the tree, until at last he has no answer to one of the questions and remains silent, at which point the vetala — impressed by the moral wisdom Vikramaditya has shown — instructs him in how to defeat the evil ascetic.

It’s a very cool structure, and some of the tales are pretty enjoyable in their own right, though (as per usual for a lot of ancient literature, not just Sanskrit) there is some hair-tearing misogyny tossed in: Vikramaditya makes the jaw-dropping claim not just that women are worse than men, but that “men are rarely guilty of serious wrongdoing.” Does make it a little tough to imagine him as the exemplar of moral wisdom and righteousness he’s supposed to be . . . (This is the same king who features in the Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne.)

Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, ed. Matthew Bright. I found myself reflecting recently that I put down a lot of books which fail to hook me in a reasonable time, and I also stop reading short stories for the same reason. So why, exactly, do I feel compelled to read anthologies cover-to-cover, regardless of what I think of any given story? Because I can’t count it as a “book read” if I’ve skipped anything? Yet I’ve reported on nonfiction where I didn’t read the whole book — see the first item in this month’s post. So why not anthologies?

Yes, that’s a long lead-in to say I didn’t read every story in this anthology, though I did read the majority of them. (My hope is that taking this approach will encourage me to pick up more anthologies.) This one is as it says on the tin, steampunk + Egypt — specifically things related to ancient Egypt, though many of the stories here are set much later in history, and also not all of them take place in Egypt. Several are related to existing series by the author in question; unsurprisingly, some of those work better for readers who don’t know the existing series than others.

I have to admit I reflexively side-eye any piece in an anthology that’s written by the editor, but in this case, Matthew Bright’s “Antonia and Cleopatra” was one of my favorite stories. I also really enjoyed Chaz Brenchley’s “Thermodynamics; and/or The Remittance Men” (full disclosure: Chaz is a friend), Rob Duncan’s “The Museum of Unlikely Survivors,” and K. Tempest Bradford’s “The Copper Scarab.” The theme here leads to a certain amount of motif repetition across the stories — e.g. a whole swarm of clockwork scarabs — but all four of those stories managed to give a very different mood, and all delighted me in different ways.

Also, a special shout-out to whoever at Inkspiral Design did the splash-page “cover” illustrations for each story. I’m sure that made the anthology more expensive to produce, but it added a ton of flavor to the overall effect.

Poems, Diana Wynne Jones, ed. Isobel Armstrong. In my defense, when I spent a year on my Diana Wynne Jones project, re-reading all of her work (and catching the few bits I hadn’t read before) in memorial for her passing, this collection of her poetry hadn’t yet been published.

As her sister Isobel (who served as editor) notes in the introduction, the poetry is for the most part not much like her novels. It seems to have arisen from a different impulse; she apparently wrote most of it in the periods of depression that inevitably followed on finishing a book. None of it has rocketed to the top of my short list of poems that deeply move me, but I did enjoy reading it — for one thing, she and I seem to have shared a love of form, despite it being somewhat out of fashion these days. I think I was most struck by the paired villanelle and sestina that were clearly her taking two runs at “The Song of Amergin,” and specifically Robert Graves’ rendition thereof. As someone shopping around my own poem based on the same inspiration, it was profoundly interesting to see what she did with it, especially with the two versions to compare.

The Art of Prophecy, Wesley Chu. Over and over again it happens: I’ll go through a period where I bounce off a lot of books and start wondering if I’m just not giving them enough of a chance, and then I pick up something where I don’t have to give it a chance, because it hooks me right from the get-go. Oh, right, books can do that, can’t they?

This is the start of a wuxia take on the “prophecied hero” subgenre of epic fantasy, which wastes very little time in turning that trope on its head. Ling Taishi, semi-retired war artist and grumpy old lady, gets sent to see how things are coming along with the Prophecied Hero and his training to fulfill his destiny and kill the Eternal Khan, and finds the answer is . . . not good. Things get worse from there. But they get worse with enough humor laced through to entertain me; I’m finding more and more that I actively crave that in the books I read. Not that they need to be snarky throughout — in fact, authors who lean too hard on snark often lose me — but jeez, let your characters crack a joke occasionally, or recognize the ridiculousness of the situation they’ve ended up in.

Chu does something structural here that I really appreciated, too. Lots of epic fantasies learned the wrong lesson from Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin; they give you one chapter of Character A, then one chapter of Character B somewhere else and dealing with some other plot, then one chapter of Character C . . . by the time you get back to A, you’ve forgotten what they’re doing and why you ever cared. Chu instead gives you two chapters of Taishi and Jian, then cuts away for one chapter of obviously relevant action elsewhere, then two more chapters of Taishi and Jian, then a chapter of the other significant protagonist following up on what happened in the previous break, etc. It did a lot to keep my interest strong, rather than fragmenting the narrative every which way right out of the gate. Eventually it cuts back and forth more frequently, and in places I wish it hadn’t; it would have been stronger for me if e.g. I got two chapters of stuff with Jian before shifting focus, especially when the timing of the different chapters isn’t closely pegged.

I also did have the problem later on that I just didn’t find one of the viewpoint characters terribly interesting. Villain pov rarely works for me, and while I see why it was necessary here to keep certain things from coming inexplicably out of left field, I just didn’t care as much about Qisami. Which became a problem when, toward the end of the novel, her chapters got more frequent, and the narrative executed a maneuver that makes me think I’ll be expected to care about her as the series goes forward. This went hand-in-hand with the back third of the novel feeling overstuffed: certain things (e.g. the exodus from Jiayi) were way too large for the extent to which they got shoved into the backdrop, and there were so many competing agendas, changes of plan, and betrayals as everybody started gunning for the same target that I wound up losing my feeling of momentum. Not fatally — I’ll still be happy to read onward — but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the more focused beginning.

As a side note, the map in my copy is very pretty and borderline useless. Locations that feature critically in the story, like Jiayi or Caobiu or the Grass Sea, don’t get labeled, while locations that are mentioned in passing maybe once are prominently marked for your convenience. But there’s some very cool worldbuilding, including of the landscape: the Grass Sea isn’t a poetic term for a steppe, but rather a wholly fantastical environment of towering grasses (bamboo? something else?) that form a traversable but not entirely solid mat above actual water. I’ll be interested to see whether that gets explored more in future books!

Aboriginal Tales of Australia, A.W. Reed. My family members know that I like collections of folklore from around the world, so when my parents went on a big trip to Australia and New Zealand, they brought back several books, of which this is the first. It was originally published in the ’80s, so the introduction is not quite up to current standards in terms of how it discusses Aboriginal Australian culture, but the stories themselves are fine and often entertaining. In particular, several of them are nice antidotes to any assumption that all traditional folklore features women only as passive objects or manipulative villains.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi. This book went onto my wishlist when I was on a cartography-related binge, but it turns out to only partly be about maps. It is also, or rather more, about writing, with cartography as its central metaphor. I found the analogy between them more strained at certain times than others, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say I found it more shallow at certain times than others: “maps have blank spaces and details they leave out, and so do stories! There are conventions to how we create and read maps, and the same goes for fiction!” Etc. Like How Fiction Works from last month’s reading (and it’s worth noting that James Wood gets quoted in here), this book is far more interested in high modern and postmodern fiction than any other sort, and makes a drive-by shooting at video games along the way. But if you want a more philosophically-oriented “book about writing,” you could do worse than this one — and since it gave me a really interesting idea for how to handle the map in a possible future novel project, I can’t really complain about the time I spent reading it.

Crowned: Magical Folk and Fairy Tales From the Diaspora, Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. This is as much an art book as it is a story collection. Each tale is illustrated with photo shoots of Black children dressed up in some amazingly rococo costumes, mixing elements of modern, fantastical, and traditional African styles. I covet some of the jewelry, and the face and body painting is excellent!

The stories themselves are divided into three categories. The first includes the usual Disney suspects, heavily modified; many of the characters have new names drawn from African and African-American sources, and the plots are freely rewritten to suit modern sensibilities. I was less interested in those, though I can understand why parents might want versions they can read to their kids that don’t close said kids out of the narrative. The second category is why I acquired the book; I have relatively little in the way of African- or African-American-derived folklore in my library, so that plus the art was very tempting. (No idea if those tales are as heavily modded, since I’m less familiar with the sources — though I did notice all of John Henry’s fellow railroad workers stepping up to assist him, turning it into a parable about community and worker solidarity.) The third category, which I didn’t realize would be in here, consists of modern tales with something of a folkloric sensibility.

The stories are all brief — I read this whole book in maybe an hour or two — i.e. suited to being read out loud to small children. Even reading silently, I noticed that there’s a lot of internal rhyme and such worked into the prose, which I appreciated; I feel like many fairy tale collections, even those intended for bedtime reading, forget that there’s a special art to oral narration, one that gains from leaning on the sonic aesthetics of the language.

The authors have a previous book, Glory, which appears to be similar on the photography front, with the content focused more explicitly on Black beauty and self-image. I’m genuinely tempted to get that one just for the art!

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New Worlds Theory Post: Logical Consequences

I’m betting that quite a few of you have examples you could trot out for this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay, which concerns what happens when storytellers fail to think through the consequences of their worldbuilding. Share yours over at Book View Cafe!

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New flash, and an upcoming novelette!

I was so busy this past weekend that I failed to post on the day of, but Flash Point SF honored me by choosing my story “The Merchant With No Coin” to run on the 24th, which was National Flash Fiction Day! It’s a little snippet of folklore from the Rook and Rose setting, very quick to read.

I’m also pleased to say I’ve sold another story in that world to Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! This one is a novelette set some years before the novels, a fun little heist that also ties in with some side details in the main narrative. It will be out in August, in time to whet your appetites for Labyrinth’s Heart on the fifteenth!

I’ll have some more stuff out soon, too, I think — not Rook and Rose-related, but other short fiction (and even my Very First Poem, whee!). It’s busy times around here . . .

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New Worlds: A Plague of Vermin

Today’s New Worlds Patreon post comes with a trigger warning for discussion of many unpleasant critters, as we talk about vermin . . . comment over there!

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New Worlds: Beautiful Society, Ugly Laws

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, some of the ways in which societies have tried to make themselves better by doing worse things. Comment over there . . .

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New Worlds: Making Ends Meet

This week, the New Worlds Patreon looks at what kinds of odd jobs the desperately poor might take in order to make ends meet. Comment over there!

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