Sarah Monette's Blog, page 72

fantasy, politics, epistemology--the usual

jaylake has asked a question about fantasy and politics (which I answer here with an addendum here). This is a huge, complicated question, and obviously your answer to it depends on how you define "politics" in the first place.

It also ties in with a couple of things that Behemoth is making me think about. (N.b., this is a segue: what follows has no necessary connection to the discussion in Jay's blog except a cross-connect in my brain.) Neumann's historical analysis is oversimplified and hoo ...

5 things

1. This is now quite possibly my favorite ad of all time.

2. John Scalzi has declared this International Grover Appreciation Day. Personally, my heart belongs to Mr. Snuffleupagus.

3. I'm finally starting to feel better. I still clearly have a cold, but I don't feel like I'm devolving into some horrible crawling mucus-monster anymore. We're gonna count that as a win.

4. It's snowing.

5. This is going to sound flip, but I swear it's a serious question. Do you ever have days where you get up and l...

one last swipe at Liddell Hart

I'm about fifty pages into Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (1942, 1944), and I just want to note that he's already, more or less in passing, demolished the "we are simple soldiers!" defense. In talking about the Weimar Republic, he says:

The Reichswehr, reduced to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty, continued to be the stronghold of conservatism and nationalism. With army careers now closed to many and promotion slow, there is little...

Catzilla and I have this conversation twenty times a day.

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UBC: The German Generals Talk

Liddell Hart, B. H. The German Generals Talk. 1948. New York: Quill 1979.


Reading this book was a very strange experience, a little like reading alternate history, because it is a dispatch from the world of the gentleman professional soldier. Each of those three words, "gentleman," "professional," and "soldier," is crucial.

Liddell Hart was himself a professional soldier*, and he clearly approached the German generals, not just on that basis, but with that as a kind of secret handshake: a tacit...

Gromitpunk is all about tea, dairyfat, and pies.

1. I still have this cold.

2. However, yesterday I was feeling grungy but not unbearably subhuman, so all the books from the auction are in the mail. (Megan, the manuscript stories are going to have to wait until I get a new toner cartridge, because I owe you better print-quality than I can currently provide.)

3. I have plane tickets for CupcakeCon.

4. I am told that the Publishers Weekly review of Jonathan Strahan's Best SF/Fantasy of 2009 praises "Mongoose" for its "humor amid life-and-death p...

Poll results: podcast short fiction

The list I'm looking at is:

1. Elegy for a Demon Lover*
2. National Geographic on Assignment: Mermaids of the Old West
3. Sidhe Tigers
4. The Yellow Dressing Gown

That's a total of 9,055 words; to round it out, I'm adding:

5. Darkness, as a Bride

So you'll be getting 10,250 words of spoken fiction from me: two Booth stories, two Artist's Challenge pieces, and a fifth story about monsters and love.

When you'll get it is another question. At the moment, I have a cold; I'm hoarse and coughing, which is ...

perspective hurts

A lot of the time, my mind wanders along thinking about things without my paying any particular attention to it--you know, background noise while I get on with the boring mundanities of life; every once in a while this results in my getting hit with something about like a dead fish upside the face. As for example, this morning in the shower, we were bopping along, everybody minding their own business, and suddenly I listened to what my brain was doing and thought, OH MY GOD THERE'S ONLY TWO W...

Better things

1. I need to say thank you to everyone who has responded to "After the Dragon," both here and in the comments at Fantasy Magazine and at FWD/Forward. This was a really hard story to write, and I was not convinced I'd done a good job with it, so I deeply appreciate everyone who took the time to share their response. (If you're reading this, and you know one of the commenters, please pass my thanks along.)

2. Today, yuki_onna has a Maine Coon kitten,

3. and a wonderful quote from Jacob at Televis...

UBC: The Case for Auschwitz

van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

with an assist from:

Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
Long, ranting in parts, depressed in others.

The Case for Auschwitz is a massive book, 551 pages not counting the index, and larger than an average hardback. I almost didn't buy it when I found it at the used bookstore because it was so intimi...