In the post bag
Please keep going with the fascinating and often surprising casting suggestions. I just wanted to pop in for a moment and share some correspondence wherein people bring up various interesting points.
First of all, this, which came directly to the site here:
"So after a semester's when-I-could-snatch-the-time grinding through
the Ravenor omnibus, I've finally plowed through the thing. Love it,
course. That's pry a given. Do people bother emailing you to tell you
you suck? But--and forgive me if you hear this one on a weekly basis,
cause I wouldn't be surprised--I was one hundred percent firework
display birthday breakfast in bed gratified at the couple of nods to
non-straight behaviour in the books. I think it amounted to a grand total of two
or three casual mentions across all three novels, depending on how you
interpret some of Thonius' comments, but it's hard to express how much
even that affected me. It takes an awful lot of balls to mention
anything remotely non-straight in the, uh, slightly Asperger's context
of mass market science fiction, specially when it's t'do with male
characters, and even the simple head-nod of having Kys ask if a mark
is hetero and the mention of a pair of young men on a roof together in
Basteen was deeply meaningful for me.
"Warhammer's hardly tryina be gender lit, of course, and I'm real glad
that's the case. It's probably for the best that sex and sexuality are
mostly absent from its storytelling. But it does ache a little
sometimes, being even a sidelines participant in a great creative work
like 40K and feeling unacknowledged to the point of deliberate
alienation. In a conceit that already feels at times laughably
over-the-top and unconcerned with anything remotely relevant to real
human experience, it can be a vague but real detractor from suspension
of disbelief and love of franchise. But even pawing oilily through
Eisenhorn back in high school, I felt like it was the wild variety and
complexity of the Abnettverse that really glowed in a sea of samey
space marines. Without Eisenhorn and Ravenor, 40K would probably
always have stayed an indifferent fantasy universe lurking in the back
of my head. "That one where they made up that cool word for psychics
and wire dead godmen to chairs," probably. It's the reality you've
managed to instill in the components of the setting, the sense of
place and purpose and individuality in the face of the teeming
faceless billions and the ONLY WAR, that have drawn me in and kept me
there. I'm not concerned with complex ideas, social messages,
progress, all that dead air. I just love the knowledge that an author
and a publisher were brave enough to say, "Yeah. This is a world we're
crafting here. And you and yours, well, you're part of it, too."
"So yeah. I felt like some kind of an acknowledgment was in order, on
the slim chance nobody'd ever said it before. Thanks, Mista D. If a
vote's ever called, I'll be sure to put you down as one of the good
guys. "
Over at this link, you can find a review of Prospero Burns that touches on something I take quite a lot of time pondering. When you're working up and developing a strand of 40K culture - such as the pseudo "Viking" lives of the Fenrisians - is there a danger that in making it sound convincing to English-speaking readers (by the use of researched Scandanavian and Icelandic words), you end up with something corny and far too on the nose for readers from those parts of the world? This is a positive and encouraging view of such efforts.
Finally, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who came out to see me at GW Lakeside and GW Bluewater this weekend, and direct you to this opportunity to win a signed copy of Prospero Burns.
First of all, this, which came directly to the site here:
"So after a semester's when-I-could-snatch-the-time grinding through
the Ravenor omnibus, I've finally plowed through the thing. Love it,
course. That's pry a given. Do people bother emailing you to tell you
you suck? But--and forgive me if you hear this one on a weekly basis,
cause I wouldn't be surprised--I was one hundred percent firework
display birthday breakfast in bed gratified at the couple of nods to
non-straight behaviour in the books. I think it amounted to a grand total of two
or three casual mentions across all three novels, depending on how you
interpret some of Thonius' comments, but it's hard to express how much
even that affected me. It takes an awful lot of balls to mention
anything remotely non-straight in the, uh, slightly Asperger's context
of mass market science fiction, specially when it's t'do with male
characters, and even the simple head-nod of having Kys ask if a mark
is hetero and the mention of a pair of young men on a roof together in
Basteen was deeply meaningful for me.
"Warhammer's hardly tryina be gender lit, of course, and I'm real glad
that's the case. It's probably for the best that sex and sexuality are
mostly absent from its storytelling. But it does ache a little
sometimes, being even a sidelines participant in a great creative work
like 40K and feeling unacknowledged to the point of deliberate
alienation. In a conceit that already feels at times laughably
over-the-top and unconcerned with anything remotely relevant to real
human experience, it can be a vague but real detractor from suspension
of disbelief and love of franchise. But even pawing oilily through
Eisenhorn back in high school, I felt like it was the wild variety and
complexity of the Abnettverse that really glowed in a sea of samey
space marines. Without Eisenhorn and Ravenor, 40K would probably
always have stayed an indifferent fantasy universe lurking in the back
of my head. "That one where they made up that cool word for psychics
and wire dead godmen to chairs," probably. It's the reality you've
managed to instill in the components of the setting, the sense of
place and purpose and individuality in the face of the teeming
faceless billions and the ONLY WAR, that have drawn me in and kept me
there. I'm not concerned with complex ideas, social messages,
progress, all that dead air. I just love the knowledge that an author
and a publisher were brave enough to say, "Yeah. This is a world we're
crafting here. And you and yours, well, you're part of it, too."
"So yeah. I felt like some kind of an acknowledgment was in order, on
the slim chance nobody'd ever said it before. Thanks, Mista D. If a
vote's ever called, I'll be sure to put you down as one of the good
guys. "
Over at this link, you can find a review of Prospero Burns that touches on something I take quite a lot of time pondering. When you're working up and developing a strand of 40K culture - such as the pseudo "Viking" lives of the Fenrisians - is there a danger that in making it sound convincing to English-speaking readers (by the use of researched Scandanavian and Icelandic words), you end up with something corny and far too on the nose for readers from those parts of the world? This is a positive and encouraging view of such efforts.
Finally, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who came out to see me at GW Lakeside and GW Bluewater this weekend, and direct you to this opportunity to win a signed copy of Prospero Burns.
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