Kate Elliott's Blog, page 35

Going to Places & Note Seeing the Sites

On Twitter this evening, I had a tweet conversation with Lavie Tidhar, who was stuck in the Athens airport with no time or ability even to do a crash few hours of sightseeing. But, he pointed out, he'd been in China and never seen the Great Wall, and in Paris and never gotten close to the Eiffel Tower.

What well known place have you been and missed its most (or a most) famous landmark?

A Treasure Chest of Linkage

I wrote a long post yesterday and then lost it as poor livejournal was hung up in something or other.

My pithy words: Gone.

Tonight you will have to be content with me linking to four quite fine posts by other people. Really, who needs me?

Michelle Sagara West rants (in her inimitable way) on Conventions, Panels, & Bad Panelist Behavior:

Look, I understand the desire to talk about your own work. It's natural because I am incredibly interested in my own work. But if I don't want to listen to anyone else talk about their own books for hours on end, it's pretty clear that the only person who is quite as interested in the topic is...me.

So if you need to have that long droning talk - do it in your room before you join the other panelists.


Judith Tarr speaks great wisdom on Being the Other. Understood in the more general sense of writing about anyone (or creature, like horses) that isn't YOU, but specifically about writing historical fiction or historically oriented fantasy.

Getting inside the Other requires the writer to recognize and set aside her ingrained cultural biases. She must realize that ideas and values that she regards as default may not in fact be current in the Other world at all, and that her assumptions not only are not universal, they may in fact be regarded negatively by the culture she is writing about. And–as the Marquise notes–she must beware of treating it all as a game. To the people who have to live through it, it is absolutely and devastatingly real.


And on the subject of the devastatingly real, Juliet McKenna writes about getting stopped dead in her writing by certain real world events.

And I'm doing all that for the sake of entertainment. I'm killing fictional people off, right, left and centre, in the service of a thrilling story. But real world death isn't thrilling or entertaining. It's heart-breaking, infuriating, frightening. It has real world implications for our security, our laws, our freedoms, for the abuse of 'others' by the prejudiced and the opportunist in this age of global media and social networking. This stuff matters.

So I need to know that my writing matters. I need to be certain that my characters suffer loss in a way that doesn't belittle a real bereavement. That the effects persist as they do in real life – or if they don't, I need to be clear why that might be. When high heroic deeds deliver triumphant outcomes, I must always make sure that I acknowledge the cost to those who had no choice or chance to opt out. Not to the detriment of the story overall but just using enough light and shade to paint a realistic picture.


Finally, on a different note, Foz Meadows discusses Romance, Strength, & Femininity.

To wax briefly lyrical, love is the great leveler: if you don't lose your dignity at some point during the process, then I'd contend that you're doing it wrong. Sometimes, and as treacherous an idea as it might seem to our sensibilities, loving another person does fulfill us in a way that nothing else can; nonetheless, love is not our only means of fulfillment, nor even – necessarily – the most important. Love is unique; it fascinates and enthralls. As countless narratives from Harry Potter to Pride and Prejudice have been at pains to point out, neither love nor loving is a weakness. Which isn't to say that love is never destructive, ill-conceived, fleeting, hurtful, wrongheaded, violent or stubborn. It can be all that and more – but the saving grace is, it can also be exultant, glorious, unexpected and gleeful. Contrary creatures that we are, it can sometimes even be all those things at once.

What I'm Reading Right Now

Fiction:

Aliette de Bodard's SERVANT OF THE UNDERWORLD.
A very well done fantasy mystery. Because my spouse did his graduate work in Mesoamerican archaeology, I'm a hard sell on Aztec (Mexica) settings. But de Bodard has an engaging writing style and a solid grasp of the place and culture. I believe in her Mexica world.


Non-fiction:

Various books in various stages of use for research, but that's not actually quite the same as "reading."

When in New York City recently for the Liberty Challenge (outrigger canoe race--yes, I must write a post on that, mustn't I?), I went to the African Burial Ground National Historical Park, a most excellent national park. At the bookstore there afterward I bought and am now reading the really excellent

IN HOPE OF LIBERTY: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks 1700-1860. By James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. It's social history, and it's really quite well done, highly recommended.

questions

Was out late doing social things and missed my midnight deadline to post.

The terrible news from Norway is pretty stunning. Even as a writer, I can't quite fathom someone who would carry out such an act.

That's all, really.

A Question of Toes and Names

A ton of linkage, which some of you will have already seen. I append a final comment at the end.

A number of posts have popped up in the last few days that feel to me related, not in direct subject matter but in exploring elements of fiction and or our response to fiction and the larger experience of deciding who and what to read as well as how we write and decision we make while writing.


Kari Sperring writes an excellent post about stepping on Other people's toes: A rant. With a lot of good comments, besides.

And while I'm talking about this, let's have a look at another phrase I'm seeing a lot lately, 'Eurocentric fantasy'. This, as far as I can tell, means fantasies set in backgrounds drawn from a sort of default idea of mediaeval Europe (usually Western Europe at that). I understand what people mean by this, and what they are thinking about. The thing is, as a European myself, these fantasies don't feel 'Eurocentric' to me. They don't feel like Europe at all, they feel like a mix of 50s Hollywood historicals and Las Vegas, they are theme park fantasies.


Cora Buhlert riffs in part on Sperring's post in Sometimes it just hits a bit too close to home , talking a bit about World War II as an historical setting for fiction and film. She goes on to say:

What's the way out of this dilemma? Just write what you know? Never use anybody else's history or culture for fear of offending? That would make for much more boring literature and we don't need that. The key is to do your research and take particular care with living cultures and with historical periods that are still within living memory. Nonetheless, we'll all probably mess up somewhere.


Chris Moriarty moves into the women writing sf discussion with an interesting post called Birds, Dinosaurs, and the Secret Life of Labels.

So how can we be stuck, after all this time and all those brilliant flights of imagination, in a stupid fight about whether the genre is even broad enough to include women?

And, more to the point, how do we get out of it?


Finally, Linda Nagata posts a rumination of writing sf as a woman under a woman's name, What's in a Name? that she wrote some months ago (I read it then, in fact) but only posted now, with some trepidation.

I haven't done a lot of interviews in my career, but the question I least like to answer goes something like this: Do you feel it's hurt your career being a woman writing hard science fiction?

I'm sure I get this deer-in-the-headlights expression before breaking eye contact and muttering something self-contradictory. Because really, how does one answer a question like that?

To say, "Yes, I think it has hurt my career" sounds like whining and finger pointing without any evidence to back it up, and risks offending the men who are the core readers of the genre.

To say, "No, I'm sure that's not it" would be untruthful and would imply that my books didn't sell because they were bad. My hard SF books may not be for everyone, but I don't believe they're bad.

So in my own mind I mostly ignored the question. Some writers succeed, others don't. That's just the way it is.

But of course the only true answer is that I can't know. I can't go back and change my name to Greg or David or Alastair and re-publish the books and see how things go.


That's just it. We can't know. Questions of how readers may unconsciously approach a book in a way that may alter their perception of it without them necessarily realizing it are frightfully difficult to answer and possibly impossible to quantify in any meaningful way.

If I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now, I would probably write my seven volume epic fantasy series under a male or gender neutral name.

Global SFF, Woman, Representation

I linked earlier to this roundtable (in which I participated) on the World SF Blog on Global Women in SF.

Now Cora Buhlert weighs in on the subject as well.

Of course, it's likely that those stories didn't sell because they simply weren't very good. In fact, it's very likely. However, over time I also began to suspect that my nationality and the unconventional settings were an additional strike against me. Because why would anybody want to buy an urban fantasy set in the secret underground world of Antwerp or a fantasy about river spirits in the Ardennes, when some ninety percent of the readership wouldn't even be able to locate those places on a map. Of course, as an international reader was always expected to be interested in urban fantasies set in Milwaukee or Cleveland – cities I can locate on a map but don't know anything about otherwise. But the reverse obviously wasn't true.


The question of how open the US/UK/Commonwealth market and readers are to non US/UK/Commonwealth based fiction remains to a large degree unanswered. Even Canadian and Australian (and NZ) fiction can be a hard sell outside those regions if it is based in those regions, from my observation.

Anyway, much food for thought.

A snippet from Crossroads 4

I was going to put this behind a cut, but then I realized I didn't have to as there is nothing resembling a spoiler.

What follows are what are very likely to be the first four lines of Crossroads 4 (although I'm not specifically writing it at the moment).





"The lad has been nothing but trouble from the day he could walk. That's why we sent him to apprentice at the temple. We hoped the gods' discipline might make him less rash and restless. But you can see how that turned out."

Characters & Setting in Epic Fantasy

The July issue of Clarkesworld Magazine has a huge long roundtable on Epic Fantasy in which 26 writers (13 male and 13 female, I note with approval), an agent, and an editor are asked questions about "epic fantasy."

I flagged it before, but it's still up and if you haven't read it, you still can!

Here's my answer to one of the questions:


What is the relationship between characters and setting in epic fantasy?


People exist in a cultural context. Characters live within their landscape both in the ecological and the societal sense. The society/societies the characters come from will inform how they see the world, approach the conflicts they struggle with, and interact with others.

As a writer, I do not see character and setting as separate; I see them as intertwined in exactly the way my own character and person is intertwined with the world I live in. I write from that place, so even though it's also true that my approach, and thus the plot and character decisions I make, are necessarily informed by my own experience of the world, I must always attempt to see their world from their immersion in it.




I note that a second part will be published in the August 2011 issue, with answers to questions such as:


What role does humor play in your fiction in general and epic fantasies in particular?

Do you have any advice on dealing with violence when writing Epic fantasy?

Character Genres I Can't Help But Love

An earlier post on Character Genres I Avoid has a lot of interesting and quite amusing answers about "character genres" I, you, we, etc as readers can't stand or are sick of.

The post was inspired by manga_crow 's response in one of my other posts, which included this particular type which I found deeply amusing: Ungrateful jerk has life saved by being turned into something not-quite-human and won't shut up about how they want a normal life again.


BUT.


What about the flip side of this?

What about the character genres that get you almost every time? Even when you feel that perhaps you know better? Or can tell you're being manipulated, but don't care? Ones other people avoid but which you can't get enough of? The ones that if you read a version of it and it goes off the rails, you feel almost personally betrayed by what could have been?

I was going to say ones that may be guilty pleasures, but pleasure shouldn't be guilt-ridden. Life is hard enough without having to flagellate ourselves over eating ice cream, buying shoes, or liking a certain character plot just because it scratches an emotional itch.

You know what I mean. No squee-harshing here!


I am a complete sucker for:

The handsome asshole jerk (one who is actually decent at heart somewhere deep inside) who learns the hard way to be somewhat less of a jerk because of his interaction with a smart woman.


Not that you would recognize this character plot in anything I"ve written recently . . .

N.K. Jemisin writes a great version of this character genre in THE BROKEN KINGDOMS (Shiny!)

Marriage Equality in SFF published prior to 2000?

Can you all come up with examples of science fiction or fantasy published prior to 2000 whose worlds or countries have marriage equality?

I'll accept "same sex relationships are accepted in society" examples, but I am particularly looking for examples of institutional marriage equality.

[If possible, specify whether it is sf or f, and year of publication.]

Thanks in advance.