Andrea K. Höst's Blog, page 10

Jurassic World (Spoilgrrs)

There's been some debate, leading up to this release, as to Jurassic World's treatment of women, given that the trailers made it look like an "uptight Smurfette gets lesson in loosening up" narrative.

This is and isn't true.  In fact, it's a little worse than that.

Jurassic World is pretending the second and third movies in the series don't exist, and thus spends a lot of time making direct references and call-backs to the first movie, including mixing and matching a large similar set of main characters.

Jurassic Park was about:

John Hammond - wealthy guy and dinosaur fan, due for a lesson in hubris.
Dr Grant - paleontologist and dinosaur fan, there to save the day and learn that kids can be okay.
Dr Sattler - paleobotonist and dinosaur fan, there to save the day and make direct feminist points.
Dr Malcolm - chaos theorist, there to snark and be shirtless.
Lex - grandchild, computer fan, with a sibling relationship to work out.
Tim - grandchild, dinosaur fan, looking for a dino-loving friend.
Muldoon - manly man doing manly thing.
The Lawyer - there to be wrong.
Samuel L Jackson - as himself.
Nedry - greedy bad guy, there to get his just desserts.
Scientists of debatable morals.

In Jurassic World we get :

Aunt Claire - Park operations manager, brittle control freak, due to get in touch with her inner Ripley.
Grady - Velociraptor trainer, nature fan, there to save the day.
Zach - nephew, fan of girls, there to remember he should care about his younger brother.
Gray - nephew, fan of dinosaurs, there to tremble and be unhappy about his family.
Hoskins - there to be wrong, and to get his just desserts.
Cruthers - there to snark and to wish he could look half as good as Dr Malcolm shirtless.
Masrani - wealthy guy and dinosaur fan, due for a lesson in hubris.
Barry - there to be somewhat luckier than Samuel L Jackson.
Vivian - there so Claire isn't (practically) the only woman with a speaking role in the park.
Karen - busy guilting Claire about not caring enough about her nephews or about having kids of her own.
Scientists of debatable morals.

Grady is clearly Grant + Muldoon, but Aunt Claire (it was hard to catch her surname at all) is definitely not in the position of Hammond or Dr Sattler.  She is not a fan of anything except control, for a start, and spends her time reciting statistics (ah, KPIs and deliverables, how I dislike corporate-speak).  She's also not ultimately in charge, is answering to people of higher authority, has had vital information kept from her, is never shown to be respected, and is operating two beats behind competency.  Her story arc is about how she should lighten up, spare more time for her family, and maybe think about having kids.

In other words, Claire is an essay on work/life balance.

[Strange timing - I just finished a review over on Goodreads about how Dragonsbane is an essay on magely work/life balance.]

While Claire does morph into Ripley toward the end of the movie - and is given two separate crowning moments of awesome - this story would have been so much more powerful if Claire had started out as effortlessly competent and respected, lauded for the Park's safety record.  Instead, we have someone constantly being lectured on how wrong wrong wrong she is.

A poor foundation for any character arc.

Cover reveal: Tangleways

This (Australian financial) year, a couple of Bookbub promos have seen a spike in my royalties that I suspect won't be repeated next year, so I have been busily upping my expenses (and thus lowering my taxes) by commissioning covers well in advance.

No-one is going to be surprised to discover that the Cwn Annwn are a factor in Tangleways after this cover. :D  I asked Julie to use salukis as the model - and this hound of death is just as gorgeous and strange as I hoped.  [DWJ's Dogsbody was one of the major inspirations for the Trifold world.]



The font layout was HARD for this one, because the background curves aren't symmetrical, but I think this works.  [I've taken to designing an ebook cover with larger fonts, and then a TPB later - where the edges will be cropped.]

WIP-wise, I've been bouncing around.  I've written one of three planned short stories for the trip to France that sits between Pyramids and Tangleways.  Actually, at around 7,500 words, it might just creep into novelette status - a first for me, and the next will probably be a little longer, though the third is just a shortish scene that could helpfully be titled "Ned's First Kiss".

Primarily, though, I've been working on The Sleeping Life and still expect it to be my next release, out toward the end of the year.

I've also been straying a little into my MMO game series, and have commissioned two covers for it (as part of my "OMG, I don't want to pay that much tax I'd rather buy covers" splurge).  After TSL has been released, I'll be working concurrently on both the Trifold and Singularity Game series, working my way through them.  Singularity is an open-ended series - no fixed end point.  I'm finding its worldbuilding endlessly entertaining, especially since people have been talking lately about utopias and the game in Snugships would probably qualify for one - though humanity is kinda on the level of chocobos in that universe.  [For those who don't get the Final Fantasy reference, that means we make great pets. ;) ]

Poltergeist (2015)

The original Poltergeist, even with its now very dated special effects, remains a wonderfully effective movie.  The compact storytelling sets out in easy strokes a young family, and then it introduces WONDER.

The family reacts much as any family would.  A little disbelieving, a little nervous, but mainly with "HOW COOL!"  It is only when the phenomena steps up that it's even treated as a horror story (and even then there is a ton of wonder, and beauty and _joy_ in the story).

The 2015 version fails on just about every level.  From the very beginning the camera shots treat the family's new house as wrong, as full of lurking threat.  It skips almost all of the wonder altogether, instead taking us on a little tour of jump scares and obligatory dragging girls up stairs.

It's also just plain badly done, lingering on boring scenes (the check-out scene, particularly, is just pointless) and in every instance replacing the things that were cool with less interesting, scarier scenes.  Worse, no-one reacts with any logic, and apparently no-one has ever read any of the rules of scary movies.

I did not expect the 2015 version to wholly recapture the magic of the original, but this was a miss on every level.  I recommend skipping it altogether.

Cover Reveal: The Sleeping Life

Another from the fabulous Julie Dillon, The Sleeping Life is the sequel to Stained Glass Monsters, and I just love the thematic echo in the swoony light and jewel tones of TSL's cover.  Due out toward the end of the year!

Fallon DeVries has a sister who lives only in his mind. Paying the price of magic gone wrong, Aurienne is trapped watching a world she cannot touch, only able to communicate with her brother while he sleeps.

And it's slowly killing him.

Fallon and Auri's best chance of untangling their lives is to win the help of a mage of unparalleled ability. But how can they ask for help when the warped spell prevents him from speaking?

Besides, Rennyn Claire - once the most powerful mage in the world - is a shadow of her former self: ill, injured and unlikely to recover unless she can hunt down the monster who once tried to make her his slave. But that Wicked Uncle is nowhere to be found, and other dangers, once slumbering dormant, are stirring..

Self-publishing and SFF Awards

It's SFF awards season!  And very, ah, exciting it's been so far.  Since I published no eligible novels in 2014, this seems like good timing to talk about how self-published books stand in regards to SFF awards.

There are a lot of SFF awards out there, and the good news is that unlike many non-SFF awards, self-published books are eligible for almost all of them!  Very few SF awards restrict entries according to manner of publication, being far more concerned with criteria like year, length, place of publication and, sometimes, theme or content.  You can view a full(ish) list of SFF awards on the Science Fiction Awards Database, broken down into a number of categories.

So can a self-pub win any of these awards?  Well, yes.  Self-published authors have already begun to pop up on nomination lists, and even to win the occasional award.  What are the chances?

To understand that, we need to get into an additional major division for all awards: voted or juried.

VotedUnless you're a well-known figure in the SFF community, or have had a blazing break-out book, a voted award is not an easy bar to hurdle for a self-pub - or, for that matter, the average trade published author.  You're just one of the horde swarming the foothills of Discoverability Mountain, staring hopelessly at the genre's luminaries blazoned in countless reviews across the blogosphere.

The results of voted awards can vary wildly each year, because different groups of people are nominating the books.  Some are open to anyone with an internet connection who knows about the award (such as the Locus Award) and some are only open to a restricted group, such as the Norton Award (SFWA members).  Some combine a limited nomination field with an open voting pool (eg. the Gemmell Award).  One of the absolute biggest is the Goodreads Awards, which merely has SFF categories, rather than being dedicated to the genre, and is weighted heavily toward those books that are already the most-shelved.

Of the 'core' SFF awards, the best-known voted award is the Hugo, which is an endlessly confusing award run by a new set of people every year (each year a different group of people hold a World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention (WorldCon), and a combination of attendees and supporters of that individual convention, and the previous convention, can nominate).

There are some people who go to almost every one of these conventions, and some who go to the occasional one (I've been to four).  A solid percentage of WorldCon participants are industry professionals (authors, publishers), who are positively overwhelmed by the flood of books released each year.

Frankly, for many voted awards, most SFF books published each year will not have been read by more than one or two voters (if any).  On the flip side, for many of these awards the nominating pool is relatively small (particularly in some of the short fiction categories), so if your work happens to be known and liked by a group of voters, there's always a chance.

JuriedJuried awards, like the World Fantasy Award, invert this system. The judges read all the work submitted.  Who wins will depend entirely on the particular tastes of the judging panel, and that could just as easily be a self-published work as a trade published work.

Technically.  There are still several hurdles for self-pubs with juried awards.

Cost of entry is big factor.  Most legitimate awards have no entry fee or only a small entry fee, but many still require or prefer physical copies to be mailed to various parts of the world.  Looking at the addresses on the World Fantasy Award list, it would cost me (in Australia, one of the most expensive places to mail things from) a couple of hundred dollars to send physical copies.  While I see that the WFA has opened up to e-submissions, the hard copy is apparently preferred.

Which leads into the second point - perception of your book.  Will the judges seriously read/consider self-pubs?

As the occasional wins of self-pubs on juried awards show, the answer is yes.  Oh, sure, you may get the occasional judge who is actively negative toward self-pubs, but it appears to me that most people who get on award juries make a solid attempt to work their way through the entries and judge without fear or favour.

At the same time, I'm not going to pretend that judges aren't human.  A person who has been hearing buzz about a particular book all year, who has read multiple trusted reviewers claiming that X book is award-worthy - they'd have to be a paragon to pay exactly the same amount of attention to a self-published book by some author whose name they don't recognise.  They are almost certainly going to spend more time on the highly-lauded book, while the unknown will need to "prove worthy" of a full read, and prove it straight out of the gate.

Because this is a numbers game.  I don't have the stats on how many books get entered in the World Fantasy Awards each year, but it would be a rare judge who could wade through them all.  And every year, more books are published.  Can any judging panel realistically give all entries a fair shot?

The YA-oriented Cybils Awards uses one possible solution to this very problem.  Instead of one overwhelmed jury labouring through hundreds of books, two stages of juries are formed.  Stage one involves multiple juries reading an allocation of the eligible books and passing a set number along to the stage two jury, who chooses the finalists.

But are overwhelmed judging panels the biggest barrier to self-pubs winning juried awards?

Here's an interesting statistic about the Kitchies.  198 submissions.  8 self-published.  I read that, and then read it again in wonder.  Only 8 self-published authors entered the Kitchies?  I mean, I know it's a relatively new award, but it seems there were 190 non-self-published works entered.  What the heck's going on there?  Where's the tsunami?

But, you see, where trade published work is concerned, it's often not the author entering the work.  It's the publisher.  Over and over again I've seen self-pub authors (and, heck, creators of all stripes) talk themselves out of entering or drawing notice to their award-eligible work because to do so looks arrogant.  When you're a self-pub author, well aware of the stereotype of the deluded self-pubbed writer unable to judge the quality of their own work, do you really want to be so tacky-embarrassing as to put your own name into the hat?

I personally had the chutzpah to enter the Australian version of the WFA, the Aurealis Awards (and I've made the finals list a few times).  But there are a lot of awards out there.  Take the Tiptree Award, which recognises "science fiction or fantasy that explores and expands the roles of women and men for work by both women and men".

The last book I released featured a highly competent woman suffering from a variation of imposter syndrome, who falls in love with her country's Crown Princess.  Although the country is relatively egalitarian, I deliberately set out in that book to break down gender roles and expectations, starting simply by showing the majority of people in positions of power as female.  I am always exploring the role of women in my novels.  I usually write egalitarian worlds. Sometimes they're binormative worlds.  You'd think I'd be throwing myself at that award.  Yet I've never put my work forward for consideration for the Tiptree.

Because?  I guess I ran short of "FIGJAM".  How many other self-publishers are doing the same thing?

Does it matter?  In the grand scheme of things, awards are an ego-boost, with very few awards making a noticeable difference in sales.  But since making the finalist list a few times in the Aurealis Awards, I've seen the resulting reviews of my work that start "I don't usually read self-pub work, but...".  And award lists (when they're not melting down the internet) are fun - I like talking about SFF, and I'm not going to pretend I don't like my work being talked about.

One thing all the dramas in awards over the last few weeks have made clear is that, in this broad, diverse and fragmented community, if there's a book you want to see on award lists, talk about it, nominate it, enter it, put it out there.

Awards are part of the literary experience.  You may never win one.  You may think yourself a hack.  You may think that you won't be considered fairly.  But don't count yourself out at the start - become part of the discussion.

An Experiment With Gender Numbers

You may already be familiar with Geena Davis's Institute for Gender In Media.  Discussing the results of the Institute's studies, Ms Davis has stated:

“If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50.  And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”

Now, in SFF we're sadly familiar with stories that barely manage one or two female characters, often with background characters strangely almost completely male (even when the story is ostensibly focused on women - such as the Pixar film Brave - they're apparently set in worlds where men outnumber women 100 to 1).
In my own books, outside the main characters, I usually aim for a roughly even split: if the last passing character was male, the next will be female.  If there are two guards, one will be male, one female (or alternating sets).  If the Chamberlain is male, the Captain of the Guard will be female.  I don't use a precise split, and have never counted them up, but I've always aimed for an equal 'feel'.
When drafting The Pyramids of London, I decided to try something different.  I would skew the background character numbers female to see how a book would read with 33 percent men 'in the room'.
Pyramids is set in an alternate Britain (Prytennia) where there's a legal equality between men and women that has grown out of a near-unbroken rule by a Trifold under the aegis of the goddess Sulis.  Only women can become one of the Trifold, and so no man can rule Prytennia.  However, while the country has become matrilineal, it is not strictly a matriarchy, but one where both men and women are equal partners in marriage, and where gender is not a factor for most roles in society.
Reader reaction (and keeping in mind that most people who have read Pyramids come from a background of my already woman-heavy other books) has been mostly positive.  Readers notice that there are a plethora of women, but find it novel or enjoyable.  Only a minority of reviewers comment negatively on the balance.
Anyway, a while ago I read this post by Marie Brennan about the absence of women in a particular fantasy work and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take with Pyramids
And it was!  Very interesting, in this book where I'd set out to to achieve a 70/30 skew in favour of women, I created 82 female-presenting characters and 83 male-presenting characters.
I don't think I'll do this exercise with the books that I thought were 50/50.  That may bring embarrassment.
I suspect that one of the reasons that Pyramids feels so full of female characters (beyond our apparently ingrained perceptions) is that the skew of powerful women to powerful men is much more distinct.  Prytennia's Trifold is always made up of women.  And when making clear that both men and women could hold important office, I did so by mentioning men formerly holding the roles, but naming current women.  With the exception of Lord Msrah and Lord Fennington (and the foreign Gustav) all the people shown to be in charge of groups and organisations in Prytennia 'just happen' to be women.
I ended up with a meeting where I added a male secretary just so the vampire wasn't the only man at the table.
Quite possibly Prytennia is, in my subconscious, biased against men in roles of power.  But would a reader even notice the skew if it was all powerful men, plus Lady Msrah and Lady Fennington?
I'll be returning to attempting relatively equal numbers in the next book, Tangleways, and hope that doesn't mean I accidentally produce 30/70 F/M.  I don't think I'll count them, but I'm glad to have done this exercise.  As eye-opening as a white-gold/blue-black dress.
For those who love detail, below is the breakdown of characters (divided up by importance in the story, and taking gender presentation at POV character assumption in regards to less binary gender identities).  I also chose to count all characters, even those identified only as "a girl".
Critical to the plot (F: 4/ M:3)One Aunt (F)Two Nieces (F)(F)One Nephew (M)One Vampire (M)A Suleviae Princess (F)An Alban (M)
Important to the plot (F: 2/ M: 4)Another Suleviae Princess (F)Another Alban (F)A Swedish Prince (M)A Bound (M)A Roman friend (M)An Eccentric (M)
Plot role/several paragraphs of dialogue (F: 26/ M: 11)Another Bound (F)A collection of Royal Heirs (F)(F)(F)(M)Two Sphinxes (FF)A Consort (M)A Suleviae Queen (F)Another Vampire (M)A Cab Driver (F)A Dragonfly Rider (F)A Daughter of Lakshmi (F)A Warden of the Borough (F)A Family of Grocers (MF)An Eccentric's Assistant (M)Two God-touched (M)(F)A Pharaoh (F)A Curator (F)A Police Commander (F)Conspirators (F)(M)(F)(F)A Wisdom (M)A Coafor (F)A Page (F)A Minister (F)Fulgite Conspirators (MFFF)A Custodian (F)Gods/higher powers affecting plot (M)(F)(M)(Unspecified)
Brief role/appearance/dialogue (F: 22/ M: 27)A couple on a train (UU)Station Master (M)Train driver (F)Two train guards (MM)A Courser Rider (M)A Workshop Manager (F)A gawp of Warehouse Workers (MMM)A Shop Gossip (M)Volunteers and Grove Visitors (FM, U)A Warden's grandchildren (FM)A gift dog (M)A horned serpent (F)Various triskelion (N)(N)(N)(N)Various other horned serpents (U)Folies (U)A current First Minister (F)The Daughter of a Pharaoh (F)Hotel doorman (M)A Roman Engineer (M)A Palace Factotum (M)A Sacred Mare (F)A Wind Stag (M)Hounds, Owls, Mice, etc (U)A Grove Administrator (F)Three Potential Students (FFF)A Fencing Instructor (M)A Brace of Drunkards (FMF)A Hand of Huntresses (FFFFF)A Secretary (M)Day Staff (M)A Foreman (M)Roman Expert (M)Cart Driver (M)Minister's Second (M)A Chauffer (M)An Attendant (U)Dead People (MMFF)A Caracal (F)Siege Fellows (MUUUUU)
Mentioned, but do not appear (F: 28/ M: 38)Niblings' parents (MF)The Three Sisters (three former Suleviae) (FFF)Three Prytennian Dragons (FMF)Aunt's parents (MF)Cantankerous great-uncle (M)A Dacian Proconsul and his son (MM)A French Princess (F)Mayor Desh-aht (not specified)A former First Minister (M)Train passenger (F)Hotel staff (not specified)A former Keeper of the Deep Grove (F)Aquitanian Hoteliers (FF)A Lawyer (U)An Apprentice (F)A Vendor of Patent Medicine (F)An Egyptian King (M)A Student Artist (M)Wisdoms (M, unspecified)A Coafor (M)A Karnatan King (M)A dog walker (F)A French Great-Aunt (F)A Taxi Driver (U)Palace Guards (F, U)A Princess' Grandfather (M)A member of the Tuatha De Danaan (U)A King of the Tuatha De Danaan (M)A Dragon Emperor (M)A Tutor (U)A Kitten (M)A French Prince (M)A Roman Consul (M)An Auction Purchaser (M)An Artist's Model (U)Feuding Siblings (M)(F)A Deiographer (M)An Estate Guide (U)An Art Teacher (M)A Drink Inventor (F)Four Nephews (MMMM)An Avid Driver (F)Unlucky Child (M)Fulgite Dealer (M)Artists (UUUF)A Captured Driver (M)Nomarch of the East (F)Gods/higher powers (M)(M)(M)(F)(F)(F)(F)(F)(M)(F)(F)(M)(M)(M)(M)(F)(M) 8/9

D&D vs Otome

I've played far more D&D based games than otome games (otome is a Japanese term for 'girl games').  The majority of otome games I've run across are variations on visual novels, where you mostly endlessly click Next, with very occasional decision moments.  There are also massive amounts of games in Japan that have no official English language release and which I'm far too unmotivated to try and play.  Some of these seem to be quite dark.

The otome games I have liked tend to be a combination of "life simulation" (where you raise skills) and some kind of fantasy or SFF plot (like God Save the Queen).

So, anyway, last weekend I downloaded on Steam both a D&D game, and an otome game...and the otome game was better.

The D&D was Pillars of Eternity, a kickstarted revisit to a classic period of D&D gaming - if you played Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale you'll have met this sort of game before - you control a little party, running around various maps, killing stuff, exploring dungeons.  These games were a precursor to what we have with Dragon Age today - an early level of party banter and epic plotting, but without quite the level of detail.

Pillars of Eternity was neither brilliant nor entirely bad. But along with the things that were really good about this period of games, it also features some of the more frustrating problems - boring trots slowly across the map, giving the gameplay a feeling of crawling through mud, and combat that simply isn't fun.  I don't entirely dislike games with tough combat, but PoE requires a level of micromanagement to survive even minor battles on the easiest setting and, yeah, maybe I'll grind my way through this game eventually. Maybe I won't.  Hopefully the other game of this type I backed on kickstarter, Torment: Tides of Numenera, will balance all this more on the side of 'fun'.

On the other hand, the otome game turned out to be a lot of fun.  With the rather unwieldy name of 1931 Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum, this offers the usual harem of bishounen for our intrepid heroine to stumble across (yes, including a mummy), but is just as strongly focused on Scheherazade (or Sadie) carving an Indiana Jones-esque path through a half-dozen historical locations in between studying at university in 1931.

The archaeology and mythology aspects are remarkably detailed (though with a rather hilarious trip to Australia to track down Mary McKillop's relatives), and the dialogue is often rather amusing.  The skill management, once I figured out how it worked, was challenging, but not impossible and it even makes me interested in doing more than one play-through (with judicious fast-forwarding), to see through some of the other character plotlines.

So, yes, still not doing much writing - in part because there is so much I want to write - short stories, Tangleways, and the siren call of my Singularity SF series.  Pyramids has had a rather quiet launch, but one of the true strengths of self-publishing is that I can keep writing what I want to write, without any pressure to kill myself jumping through promo hoops out of fear that the series will be dropped.

Various games

The Swapper Of the various puzzle games I've recently purchased, The Swapper is the most playable.  It's a relaxed pace platform puzzler (my preference since I don't like the ones where you have to constantly run) and starts with you, an identityless, voiceless figure in a spacesuit, wandering about in the aftermath of a disaster that has left a mining installation abandoned.

The plot is mildly interesting, but the strength of this one is the puzzles, which involve getting into difficult places by creating a clone of yourself, transporting your consciousness into the new copy, and abandoning the old body (or positioning it strategically on switches).  The atmosphere is also nicely spooky, and I've been working my way steadily toward the end.

Never Alone Never Alone is both similar and virtually the opposite of Swapper.  It's another puzzle platformer (with some required running, but not constant momentum).  Again it's very atmospheric, and relies on working together to get through, but the puzzles so far are not as compulsive, and the main draw is the sheer cuteness of your arctic fox companion, and the slow discovery of Alaska Native culture.

It doesn't have the same forward drive as Swapper, but I'll continue it on and off to the end.

The Unfinished Swan The Unfinished Swan combines a fairytale story book narration with a mechanic that involves throwing blobs of paint in all directions to reveal the location of walls/floor/objects.

This is very cool for the first couple of rooms, but then begins to pall a little and even though they mix up the paint-throwing mechanism later, there's no real narrative or puzzle interest to pull me through.

I may finished it.  Maybe.

Resident Evil: Revelations 2 I've played a lot of different Resident Evils.  This one takes Claire Redfield, pairs her with a less kick-ass girl, and gratuitously kidnaps them to some sort of experimental facility where someone appears to be channeling GLaDOS, but without the entertaining passive-aggressive snark.

I'm only at the beginning of the first episode of this, and not sure I'll buy any more.  [One advantage of these chapter by chapter game releases is you save money when you discover you don't find a game interesting.]

Final Fantasy: Type 0 A pity Final Fantasy: Type 0 hadn't been released on a chapter by chapter basis!  This is a remastered PSP port, so I expected low-rent graphics (and got them).

You sure do get a lot of different characters to play with - you're an entire elite classroom, named for a deck of cards.

Unfortunately the gameplay is entirely uninteresting, and the story not much better.  I doubt I'll play more than I have.

Final Fantasy XV (Boyband): Episode DuscaeType 0, however, came with a demo of FF XV, set in a region called Duscae.  XV has been in development for something like six years, and was long considered vaporware until the past year or so, when new trailers and now this demo have been released.  And, from the demo at least, it's a solid step forward in the franchise, leaving behind the turn based gameplay for a quicker, smoother experience.  Timefillers like the way FF combat traditionally started and ended have been removed, and the process of finding and embarking on quests is much more fluid.  And there's some funny additions, too, like cooking for buffs.

The game is also unutterably beautiful.

Of course, being Final Fantasy, there's some inevitable negatives.  I call this "Boy Band" for a reason - all the known playable characters are male (breaking a long tradition of having at least a female healer character) and during the demo the only female given any time on screen might be a mechanic, but she's a mechanic in Daisy Dukes, suffering from camera angles focused on her hips and cleavage.



 However, at least one promo image suggests there are two important female characters in the game, and while one is the typical FF ingenue, the plot outline suggests that she's an ingenue that can match the main character in battle.  [Inevitably to be defeated, of course.]

Anyway, I was already interested in playing FF XV.  I've now moved it to the top of my list of games I'm looking forward to.  The demo was that good.

Life is Strange (game) - minor spoilers

I'm using my post-release break to play a few games.

Life is Strange is an episodic adventure game about a photography-obsessed girl name Max who has returned to her home town on a scholarship - and discovers she has time-rewinding powers.  Into Max's life we introduce a rich boy with a gun, an old friend with problems, a security control freak, a new friend with white-knight tendencies, and a disappeared girl.  And many varieties of bullying.  And a coming mega-tornado.

The production values are very high, and it's a nice, playable game, with puzzles that revolve mainly about choices leading to social consequences.  And I enjoyed playing the first episode of this game, and liked Max, and I'm probably not going to pick up the rest of the episodes.

Two issues - there's so much powerlessness going on here, so many different vortices of bullying, that I just feel no anticipation for the play experience, even if the likely end result is vindication or escape.

And - particularly in a game where the main character runs around taking photos of everything - I kept having to keep myself from shrieking "Take some video!  Gather evidence!  Video the creepy home surveillance system.  Video the rich boy with a gun!  Video the bullying security guard!"

The mega-tornado also feels weirdly unnecessary given all the other stuff going on.

Anyway - I do recommend this game to anyone with higher tolerance for this kind of story.  It's very atmospheric and interesting.  Just a not-for-me game.

Mildly spoilerish bit..
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Willing to bet that the all-around-wonderful photography teacher is a creepy murderer and video-taper of girls.

Pyramids Release

Out at last!

This was one of the more challenging books for me to write, just because when you start with an alt history of _our_ world you suddenly find yourself with the problem of how complex our world is. So many countries, so many different peoples, so many stories.

It amazed me, doing the research for this book, how much I didn't know about my own world. A million layers of civilisation, most forgotten, or half-remembered, or barely understood. I've read and seen stories about Egyptians all my life, but until I started properly reading about it, I didn't know what mummies were actually _for_. [And even the most knowledgeable Egyptologist can only have an imperfect understanding of a culture lost to sand.] So, anyway, alt history=HARD.

The story itself is going to sit across a dozen genres. Alt history, because I started with Earth. It's steampunk because dirigibles, but it's certainly not Victorian. It's going to read YA or even middle grade to some people, but one of its protagonists is thirty-six. It's science fiction (apparently that's where steampunk sits) and it does amuse itself with a technological impact, but it is, of all my books, the most full of the numinous, the strange and wondrous things that fantasy uses to catch your breath and then turn it to dragons.

There are quite a few dragons.

Anyway, this is a big venture for me - the first time I've embarked on a long series (five books, plus probably some shorts). I hope you all enjoy it!
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