Sable Aradia's Blog, page 36
June 11, 2018
The Penti-Con @ThePenti_Con
The Penti-Con is a comic-con style event that happens annually in Penticton. This year was the second year of the con but it’s already grown exponentially. They expanded from one day to two, and even had to change venues this year to accommodate. I was pleased to be part of last year, when I was a Geek Guest of Honour and I presented on tabletop RPGs, and this year I was able to present on my work with the SFWA YouTube channel and the SFF market.
I love this con! It was organized by nerds for nerds. Clearly these humans went to enough cons in other places and decided they wanted one of their own, because they know how it works, and they obviously love what they do.
There was some confusion with the sudden growth — mostly a few hiccups in organizing. I recommend they have more communication with the people who run their social media, because I found it difficult to connect to organize my panel. I will say that it happily worked out in the end, however, and everyone was extremely nice, and accommodating.
There was something for everyone at this con; everything from kids’ potion classes to Cards Against Con, which was understandably an 18+ event. The disabled access was excellent. I mean really excellent. They even featured a “sensory hour” for autistic people and folks who don’t like crowds in the morning on Sunday. They turned down the lights and kept the sounds low. And there was a HUGE Pride presence! Signs posted at the entry said things like “This con welcomes everyone” over a rainbow flag, and “Please respect your fellow con-goers; do not take photos or touch without permission.” I was turned down only once for a photo and was happy to respect that.
The local LGBTQ+ youth group did a couple of fundraising con-related activities, like running a Sorting Hat for $1 and selling nerdy LGBTQ buttons (I got a rainbow D&D logo and a rainbow Star Wars button.)
Outside, the Axe Monkeys held a booth to try your hand at axe-throwing. The 501st Garrison was on site, wearing their fantastic Imperial and Stormtrooper uniforms (and featuring an amazing Boba Fett,) and you could take as many photos as you liked on your own, or get a professional quality photo for a donation to the local food bank (if you’re not familiar, these folks dress up in Imperial outfits and raise money for a variety of charitable causes this way.)
The guest cosplayers were amazing, as were the amateur cosplayers! Most of my photos are some of their amazing work. My favourite were the couple who were dressed in vintage Trek costume, including tricorder. The pros included the Queens of Idol Hell, Stoosh Cosplay, Archetype Cosplay, and Benny G Cosplay.
The guest of honour was Garrett Wang, who of course played Harry Kim in Star Trek: Voyager. He was funny, interesting and entertaining. He spoke about how important it was for him, as an Asian actor, to be cast in a non-stereotypical Asian part; which was a novelty at the time. He was charging a reasonable fee for autographs and my friends got a few (I never did successfully track him down, but autographs really aren’t my thing anyway.) I did get a chance to talk with him briefly with my friend, though.
The other guest of honour was Chantal Strand, who has done voice acting for Dragon Tales, Hamtaro, Sabrina: the Animated Series, Gundam SEED, and Gundam SEED Destiny. She’s currently working on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, where she voices Diamond Tiara and her mother, Spoiled Rich.
They also featured Michael Perry, Illustrator and Replica Prop Master, who’s done more work on more projects than I can count; Jeff Klyne, a young actor recently cast in Sabrina the Teenage Witch; digital artist Hidden Rainbows; and Sfe R. Monster, queer comic creator, Lambda Award winning editor of Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comic Anthology and co-founder of Beyond Press.
There were all kinds of gaming booths available to anyone. My favourite was the Dance Dance Revolution booth, and my best moment was watching two guys in air-supported T-Rex costumes competing against each other. I got a photo but I was at my table at the time so it’s kind of hard to see.
A gentleman in a Mask costume led a conga line for cosplaying kids. He was amazing, doing all the exaggerated gestures and facial expressions of the Mask! I got photos of him too.
And OMG the vendors! There were hundreds of them, selling handmade dragon figurines (Peace in Dragons, who had a table next to me, and I think I made a couple of friends,) crocheted characters, anime and fantasy art, 3D printing, fabulous handmade cosplay costumes, mugs with Star Trek and Harry Potter quotes, buttons, and a million other things perfectly suited to us nerdy types. Bring money if you’re coming next year; you’re going to want it.
I wasn’t the only author, either. They had about half a dozen SFF authors, most of whom were indies or hybrids. I connected to a few of them and their work looks awesome! There was a few high fantasy authors, a dystopian YA author, and more. You can check out L.G.A. McIntyre, A.K. Baxter, and Kris Moger at these links.
I didn’t get to see as many of the panels as I would have liked because I was there alone this time, and had to watch my table, but they had a full schedule of three simultaneously running events at all times, including a metric shittonne of cosplay events, main stage presentations from the featured guests, a Q &A with Garrett Wang, and all-day board games. My presentation “SFWA, the Nebula Awards, and the Changing Face of Science Fiction and Fantasy” was attended by a small but dedicated group, lots of whom asked me questions about SFWA and the SFF market and self-publishing afterwards.
I stayed with my friends in Penticton, and they took great care of me. I was better fed, better watered, and better slept than I’ve been at a con or festival in a long time. They also provided a space for me to do the projects I had going on online over the weekend, including the SFWA channel’s episode of #ThePanel on Steampunk, and a class on writing flintlock fantasy with Django Wexler and Cat Rambo. So shout-out and thank you to Jenn and Dominic!
I will certainly be back next year, and I suggest you go too. It’s still small enough to have a real community feel, but big enough that there’s always something for everyone to do. Well worth it!
June 7, 2018
Inside Baen’s Slush Pile
This was a livestream of how sorting through Baen’s slush pile works. I think it’s excellent insight on how publishing companies select the work they want to publish.
On the other hand, it pisses me off. Publishers say they want the whole manuscript done and run through an editor before you query. So chances are I’ve been running through it, draft and editing, for a good year or two. Then I send it in, and Baen, like many companies that actually still read their slush pile, take about a year to process. So basically, you’re going to decide whether or not my three years of time have been wasted in ten minutes.
How about you let me write the first pages and the synopsis, which is what you actually read, and you tell me whether it would be a waste of my time or not, and then I write the book?
It hardly seems fair. Yet, this is how the industry works, and I really don’t know any better way to do it without cronyism being the only way anything would get sold. Which would exclude poor and marginalized writers (like me) anyway.
I guess forewarned is forearmed, eh? Anyway, it was interesting. Enjoy!
June 4, 2018
Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Read for the Apocalypse Now Reading Challenge.
For me, this book was a resounding meh.
I have read an awful lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. For me, Pulitzer Prize or not, this book added nothing new to the genre. It’s beautifully written, don’t get me wrong, but in places it’s downright pretentious and the ideas are not original. All I have to say is, FFS literary people; please read some science fiction that’s actually written by science fiction writers. You keep giving undeserved awards out for originality because you don’t know the genre and have never read anything about it. You sneer at genre fiction so you don’t read it (so how you can presume to sneer at it, I fail to understand). At least familiarize yourself with the genre you presume to critique.
Okay, so moving on from my soapbox. I like the style here. What I don’t like is a) the utterly illogical nature of the world McCarthy has created b) the pretentious language c) the pointlessness.
A man and his son are moving south to the coast through a post-apocalyptic world. I get the feeling that it was caused by nuclear war, because there was a reference to a flashback where he sees a rosy flash of light at a distance. The thermonuclear war is sufficiently global to have made ash out of most of the landscape and to have killed ALL the plant life and caused nuclear winter. This is made clear again and again in repetitive description.
Except that this global thermonuclear war did not incinerate bodies or any manmade structure. The man and the boy (never named) are surviving by breaking into the ruins of houses and taking whatever canned goods they can find. And there aren’t many of them, because it’s maybe eight or ten years after the disaster. We know this because the boy was still a fetus when it happened. The mother is dead. She went off somewhere, presumably to take her own life – or at least, that’s what she said she was going to do.
Of course human structures are decaying. In some places, they were blasted out; in others, the structures were damaged enough by heat to be a bit off-kilter. In other places, people and their belongings were partially melted into the road, but their bodies weren’t incinerated. WTF? Fine with the decay; that happens, we know that. But some of it is in part caused by rot, and there’d be very little rot in a world that has no mold, likely few bacteria, and no animals, not even insect life. He has exactly zero understanding of the science. Please do some research.
People are understandably getting desperate. It seems that most have resorted to cannibalism, even hunting one another for food. The pair spends most of the book avoiding the other people for this reason. The big ethical dilemma appears to be whether or not the man will do the same to save his son, or if they’ll remain “the good guys.”
For a while the book grew on me. I decided that the landscape was a metaphor for bankrupt human morality. The man talks about saving and helping people, but routinely abandons others for the sake of himself and his son. The son calls him on it.
The man is also sick. This does not surprise me because I’m sure there’s radioactive dust everywhere. He coughs, and the coughing continues to get worse. But the boy doesn’t get sick. Why not? Radiation poisoning is harder, not easier, on the young, and if things were that bad, and that global, Chernobyl should tell us that the boy, at least, was likely to have been born with some significant birth defects, and it would be a miracle if anybody left were fertile at all. Again – science, research.
In other words, I can’t see that there’s any possible future for the human race in this world. So what’s the point?
But the book completely lost me at the ending. No spoilers, but it was sudden, seemed pointless and improbable, and came out of nowhere. If I wrote a book like this, because I’m not already considered a “respected literary writer,” no publisher would publish it, and my rejection letters would likely be nasty. Stuff along the line of “learn how to write.” So why do we give a man who’s supposed to be such a master a pass on it?
So if you’re reading for language – sure, this was cool. But otherwise, I suggest you give this one a pass.
June 1, 2018
May 31, 2018
How to Get to Mars Without Going Mad
By Andrew Masterson
The technological challenges involved in sending a crewed mission to Mars are daunting, but new research highlights the need to focus on the psychology of spaceflight to prevent world’s first Mars explorers arriving at their destination stark raving crazy.
A paper in the journal American Psychologist reviews the already extensive research done by NASA into the psychological trials that come with being an astronaut, and concludes that there is still a hell of a lot of work still to be done.
The central problem for would-be Mars travellers is that early missions will comprise a team of people confined in a tin can about the size of a small Winnebago for two or three years. During this time, communication with family and friends will be extremely minimal. Even talking to Mission Control will be difficult, given that signals to and from the craft will take almost an hour to arrive.
And that – say authors Lauren Blackwell Landon and Kelley Slack, both from NASA, and Jamie Barrett from the US Federal Aviation Authority – means teamwork and the ability to resolve both mechanical and personal issues without outside help will be essential.
Read the full article at Cosmos Magazine.
I deal with this issue in a story I wrote and in my WIP The Cloud. Thought it might be interesting to share with friends & fans.
May 28, 2018
21 Books That Changed Sci-fi & Fantasy Forever
By Ryan Plummer and Madeleine Monson-Rosen
Speculative fiction is the literature of change and discovery. But every now and then, a book comes along that changes the rules of science fiction and fantasy for everybody. Certain great books inspire scores of authors to create something new. Here are 21 of the most influential science fiction and fantasy books.
Read the full article at i09.
The Merqueen’s Report: Nebula Awards Weekend, 2018
By Cat Rambo, President, SFWA
I will add more pictures in later, editing them in as they get processed. For now, I want to record some of my thoughts and memories from the past weekend and the Nebula Awards conference weekend, before a brand-new weekend eclipses any part of the splendor. Kudoes to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America events team, particularly Kate Baker, Mary Robinette Kowal, Terra LeMay, Laurie Mann, and Steven H Silver, for work well done.
I flew into Pittsburgh on a Tuesday, getting there late enough that I didn’t look for anyone after checking in, opting instead for a glass of wine, a piece of cheesecake, and quiet reading. In retrospect, that may not have been my smartest move, because my stomach was thoroughly upset by the time I got up the next day.
We (the members of the SFWA board) don’t usually get there on Tuesday, but this year the board was trying something new, a strategic visioning session. I’m glad to say that just about everyone from both the incoming and outgoing sets were able to attend and I look forward to catching up the couple of absent folks with all the amazing stuff we got done.
I cannot go into all of the details, nor will I post any of the pictures. But I will talk about some of the general things that emerged, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve figured out things like timelines and deliverables and measures of success, as well as assigning work items, most of whom did not have “Cat” written on a post-it in the “who will drive this” spot.
So what can you expect to see as a result of this session?
Read the full article at Cat Rambo’s blog.
May 24, 2018
I Was on the Pagan-Musings Podcast
Here’s the archive of my appearance on the Pagan-Musings Podcast. It’s very off-the-cuff! This is probably is the closest to how I am IRL that I’ve heard on a podcast because I was so relaxed. Enjoy!
Author Diane Morrison, aka Sable Aradia, returns to the show to talk fiction and nonfiction. She’s been hard at work creating new stories in her Wyrd West Chronicles, and now she’s come full circle to creating new material for the Pagan world. Between writing steampunk (cattlepunk), podcasting, and working on her newest Pagan focused projects, Diane has been working with other authors to produce some of the best sci-fi/fantasy out there from the Indie World of Books. Tune in and learn more about her latest projects, both fiction and nonfiction! On the Horizon anthology. The Toy Soldier Saga. Her music. Sit for a Spell on YouTube. Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America on YouTube.
Book Review: Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss
Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read for the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge and the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club.
This was an extremely interesting book. A generation ship suffers a major plague, and the resulting society changes, to the point where the descendants of the original crew lack the technology to even be certain that they’re on a ship; or, if they do realize this, they think that all worlds are ships. The protagonist, Roy Complain, is dissatisfied with his simple hunter’s existence in the forests of the “ponics,” so he sets out on a quest to find out what’s really going on. And the answer is amazing. But time is short to solve the mysteries, because the ship is breaking down.
Previous generations of readers might have remarked how the ship society has “descended into barbarism.” Don’t make that mistake. I don’t want to spoil the book any further than that (understanding they’re on a ship already spoils part of the surprise, but I felt that was already clear in book descriptions and other reviews, so I felt it was okay to mention) but Aldiss actually has a lot to say in this book about human ingenuity, the tragedy of the short human lifespan, and Colonialism, especially as applied to anthropology, which is a subject that I think we should really examine. So much of modern anthropology and psychology is based in Colonialist assumptions that I believe we should really unpack if they’re going to continue to serve humanity in any useful way. I don’t know that previous generations of readers caught this element, but I have no doubt in my mind that Aldiss clearly intended to send that message.
Once again, this book is hampered by a pervasive sexism that’s reflective of the time in which it was written (first publication 1958,) which gets really old; and yet, I still recommend it because of the questions it asks, and attempts to answer.
May 22, 2018
Book Anniversary – Food on Their Table Trailer
Happy book anniversary to me! To celebrate I made a trailer for it. Food on Their Table Book Trailer (post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, dystopia, cli-fi, horror). Get it at https://amzn.to/2KKV4em
