Marie Brennan's Blog, page 55

New Worlds: After Death Do Us Part

In speculative fiction, we have surprisingly few stories that focus at all on what happens after someone’s spouse passes away. This week, the New Worlds Patreon looks at widows and widowers — comment over there!

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Books read, September 2020

Still catching up (or at least trying not to fall more behind) . . . short list for this month because a large chunk of it was taken up by revisions on the second Rook and Rose book.

the second Rook and Rose book Doesn’t really count, even though I read through the whole thing.

We’re not done yet

So Biden has won both the popular vote and the electoral college. Yay! This is, of course, an enormous relief to me.

. . . but if you think that means we can all now cruise along and not worry, think again.

We still have a pandemic to deal with, and it’s not magically going to go away because of an election. Neither is climate change. We need to fix our broken system of immigration, and demilitarize our police. There are countless problems that still need to be addressed, and the momentum for addressing them is going to come from us.

Especially since . . . y’all, this election should not have been remotely close. By any objective metric, Trump has been a disastrously bad president — the sort who should have been catapulted out of office without thinking twice. In previous decades, he would have been. Instead, the election was close enough that it took days to count the votes to the point where news outlets could cautiously say that Biden appears to have won. Because in addition to the problems I listed above, we’ve got a problem right here in our own body politic.

And that problem is quite simply white supremacy. Not just in the active, obvious, neo-Nazi sense, but in the creeping sense where fifty-seven percent of white people voted for the most incompetent president most of them have seen in their lifetimes. You can’t just blame it on QAnon conspiracy theories — and the reason those conspiracy theories are meeting with such an eager audience is, at its root, still white supremacy. Fred Clark at Slacktivist (himself a white evangelical) has for years now been charting out how much of American white evangelicalism is driven by white supremacy: built on a base of justifying slavery, continued in the opposition to the Civil Rights movement, and now desperately seeking grounds to say that no really, they’re still the good guys by embracing overheated lies which tell them at least they’re better than those Satanic baby-killers underneath the local Pizza Hut. Imprisoning immigrants at the border? White supremacy. Our inhumane carceral system? A replacement for Jim Crow laws. Housing policy? Time and again, looking for ways to keep people of color out, to keep them down. And it’s no accident that the voter suppression efforts disproportionately hit those communities. I’m not going to say there are no other factors playing into this mess, but white supremacy is the poison at the root of this tree.

If you are glad that Trump is on his way out of office, thank the black voters, the Latine voters, the Asian voters, the Native American voters. Because if it had been left up to white people, he would have won with ease. Sure, 42% of my own demographic looked at the corrupt, incompetent, pathologically dishonest bigot and said, “please, let’s not.” But that’s not enough. It isn’t remotely enough. We’ve got to leach this poison out, and that means getting more white people to take positive action.

As soon as I’m done posting this, I’m going to go donate to the campaigns for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who are headed into runoffs in Georgia. I’m also planning on writing more letters through Vote Forward, which specifically seeks to encourage underrepresented demographics (such as voters of color) to step up to the ballot box. You can donate to Black Lives Matter, the Native American Rights Fund, LUPE, and more. Give your support to the people white supremacy wants to keep down. The more power they have, the stronger we all will be.

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New Worlds: More Types of Marriage

Because humans have historically used marriage as one of the fundamental building blocks of society, previous New Worlds Patreon essays have not quite exhausted the topic. This week we’re talking about a few more types, including a basic anthropological concept underlying all marriages. Comment over there!

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For your Halloween delectation

Aconyte Books, publishers of The Night Parade of 100 Demons, have put together a free sampler for you with chapters from five of their recent or upcoming novels — mine included! Do not be unduly alarmed (or later disappointed) by the title “Terrifying Halloween Tales;” I am in there by dint of my novel concerning rather a lot of supernatural creatures of a malicious sort, not because it’s anything you’d call horror. But if you want a sneak peek at the story (or at any of the others), here’s your chance!

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New Worlds Theory Post: Essentialism

Since October has five Fridays, the New Worlds Patreon gets a bonus “theory” essay! This time we’re looking at the concept of essentialism, and how it can be both useful and dangerous in speculative fiction. Comment over there!

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The hundred demons have a face!

On Monday The Imperial Advisor (a major L5R site) got to do the cover reveal for The Night Parade of 100 Demons, along with an interview (which you can read at that link). Today, I get to show it to you!

This one’s due out February 2nd, and you can pre-order it here.

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History with Magic StoryBundle!

If you could use some distraction right now, may I offer the History with Magic StoryBundle? It includes my novel Midnight Never Come, the first of the Onyx Court series, and ten other excellent books by Natania Barron, Alma Alexander, Jo Graham, Karen Lord, A.M. Tuomala, Robin Shortt, Nina Munteanu, Su Wei, E.N. McMahon, and Stefan Mears. To quote from the organizer’s blog post:

The stories in this bundle range widely over cultures and eras: from Tang imperial China and medieval Samarkand to post-reform czarist Russia and Belle Époque Boston, to Depression-era Mississippi and contemporary Senegal; from god avatars in shifting configurations across parallel universes and twinned conduits who collapse quantum-entangled history lines to plotting faeries in Elizabeth I’s court, ancient souls who act as spies for Napoleon, struggling exiled dissidents in Cultural-Revolution China and dueling magicians in Portland, Oregon. Full of rousing, sweeping derring-do and jeopardies, risky missions and fraught choices, intricate alliances and jarring betrayals, it's all here—with the layers of real history, and its very concrete consequences, glimmering like fata morganas through the gauze of fiction.

It is very shiny and you can get it here, for about the next three weeks.

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Truly, The Face of Stars is the card of good luck

Alyc and I have netted a STARRED review from Booklist for The Mask of Mirrors! The choice quote:

“For those who like their revenge plots served with the intrigue of The Goblin Emperor, the colonial conflict of The City of Brass, the panache of Swordspoint, and the richly detailed settings of Guy Gavriel Kay.”

. . . yeah, I’m basically rolling around in that like catnip.

The book comes out January 19th, which feels like it’s foreeeeeeeeeever from now. You can pre-order it here!

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Manuals for 2020

This really reads like a how-to manual for 2020:

(Though actually, this is the real manual:)

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