Kassandra Jo Tomaras's Blog, page 8

SYRIZA, KKE and the "Workers' Government" Slogan

Credit: Great Moments in Leftism. Reproduced with permission.

The challenge in writing about Greek politics for an Anglophone audience is explaining all the parties, groupings, maneuverings, cliques, vendettas, and outsized personalities in understandable terms, sacrificing just enough nuance for someone who can't read all the original speeches and policy statements in the original language, let alone discern the cultural signaling taking place underneath the surface meaning of the words spoke...

Revised Hugo Nominations Ballot, version 2

After Nick Mamatas explained to me that Hugo nominations are tallied according to ranked-choice, instant runoff voting, and thus that multiple nominations would not dilute one's top choices, I started revising my nominations ballot. (That is a good thing, or otherwise I might not have learned from the Sasquan folks that a "known bug" had deleted some early ballots. If you submitted your nominations early, you may want to double-check.)

So far, the only category in which I have filled in all fi...

Starting the Year with Self-Promotion

Nominations for the Hugo Awards (and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer) are now open.

May I remind you that I wrote some things that were published in 2014, and that I am eligible for the Campbell?

Do your thing.

A Bit More from 2014

My round-up of 2014 was a touch premature, not in terms of my writing or its publication--what was slush remains slush--but in terms of my reading. My work is closed for the holidays, so I have gotten quite a bit more reading done, and quite a bit of it has been good.

First I need to remedy my oversight of not including Prison Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and part of Akashic Books' excellent place-noir series, in my list of good books for the year. Not every story included is great, but m...

2014: Results and Prospects

I think it is safe at this point to assume that no further stories of mine will published in this calendar year. Here are some retrospective notes.

This year, five stories of mine were published for the first time, by people who had paid for the rights to do so. They were, in chronological order from first to last,"Hypothetical Foundations of a Quantum Theory of Familial Social Physics" (FLAPPERHOUSE No. 2, Summer 2014)"Bonfires in Anacostia," August 2014, Clarkesworld No. 95"Cold Duck" (FLAPP...

On the Maine 2014 Election: Part 2, Class Consciousness

My decision not to write a post about the Maine gubernatorial election was based on an impressionistic error, albeit one that I shared with most of the chattering classes in the state. While I expected that the bear hunting referendum would drive turnout among people more likely to vote for LePage, I thought that Eliot Cutler's semi-withdrawal and Angus King's 11th-hour endorsement of Michaud would result in enough Cutler voters switching to Michaud for him to eke out a victory.

Unsurprisingly...

A Note on Ideology & Science

I'm not going to post about the Maine gubernatorial election after all, as the sort-of-kind-of withdrawal of Eliot Cutler has made it less interesting. There are still good points to be made about the class structure of this state and the political system of this country, but there will be better ways and occasions to make them.

Instead, since it's not every day that a twitter argument with an overcredentialed buffoon leads one to clarify one's thoughts about matters of importance, I would rat...

On the Maine 2014 Election: Part 1, Of Bears and Men

The phrase "As goes Maine, so goes the nation" dates to a time (the late 19th century, after the betrayal by the Federal government of Black Reconstruction and liberation in the South) when the national electorate was far more white and agrarian than it is today. Maine is still far more white and far more agrarian than most of the country, and is also by some measures the most aged state: The nation that went with Maine is long gone, while the state itself remains, at times charmingly and mor...

Self-Promotion Again, More Shameful than Shameless

The folks at Haikasoru, in what may have been one of the worst possible marketing moves for Phantasm Japan, asked me a few questions about my story "Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self". In the process of giving my answers, I may have offended bureaucrats, poets, Trotskyists, Mainers, New Yorkers, the people of Japan, the editors of Cracked, and my own father.

Also, Big Pulp committed my words to print in the second issue of M: Mystery and Horror

Isn't it shiny?

The story contain...

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Station Eleven is in part a warning that, when things get really bad, the people who say that "everything happens for a reason" are to be avoided at all costs. For that reason alone it is praiseworthy.

But it is much more than that: A meditation on memory and identity. A post-apocalypse that proceeds, not through a forward march of irreversible decline, but through a web of recollection, reconstruction and redemption. A speculation on how it is that cultural...