Modern Felicity

For various reasons, which I won't go into here, I haven't been blogging much, or tweeting much, or tumbling much. Sorry! I have been doing things, though. I've read some books! And I recommend these particular ones to your attention.

Finder by Suzanne Palmer

Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.


His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia's Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He’ll slip in, decode the ship’s compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.


Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a backwater deep space colony called Cernee. But Fergus’ arrival at the colony is anything but simple. A cable car explosion launches Cernee into civil war, and Fergus must ally with Gilger’s enemies to navigate a field of space mines and a small army of hostile mercenaries. What was supposed to be a routine job evolves into negotiating a power struggle between factions. Even worse, Fergus has become increasingly—and inconveniently—invested in the lives of the locals.


It doesn’t help that a dangerous alien species Fergus thought mythical prove unsettlingly real, and their ominous triangle ships keep following him around.


Foolhardy. Eccentric. Reckless. Whatever he’s called, Fergus will need all the help he can get to take back the Sword and maybe save Cernee from destruction in the process.

This book is some good old-school adventure fun--lots of fights and explosions and suspense. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I gather it's the first of a trilogy, so there's more to look forward to!

The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall

She lived where the railway tracks met the saltpan, on the Ahri side of the shadowline. In the old days, when people still talked about her, she was known as the end-of-the-line woman.


In The Border Keeper, debut author Kerstin Hall unfolds a lyrical underworld narrative about loss and renewal.


Vasethe, a man with a troubled past, comes to seek a favor from a woman who is not what she seems, and must enter the nine hundred and ninety-nine realms of Mkalis, the world of spirits, where gods and demons wage endless war.


The Border Keeper spins wonders both epic—the Byzantine bureaucracy of hundreds of demon realms, impossible oceans, hidden fortresses—and devastatingly personal—a spear flung straight, the profound terror and power of motherhood. What Vasethe discovers in Mkalis threatens to bring his own secrets into light and throw both worlds into chaos.

This is lovely! In fact, I blurbed it. I said it was ""Beautifully and vividly imagined. Eerie, lovely, and surreal."

Terminal Uprising by Jim Hines

Human civilization didn’t just fall. It was pushed.


The Krakau came to Earth in the year 2104. By 2105, humanity had been reduced to shambling, feral monsters. In the Krakau’s defense, it was an accident, and a century later, they did come back and try to fix us. Sort of.


It’s been four months since Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos learned the truth of that accident. Four months since she and her team of hygiene and sanitation specialists stole the EMCS Pufferfish and stopped a bioterrorism attack against the Krakau homeworld. Four months since she set out to find proof of what really happened on Earth all those years ago.


Between trying to protect their secrets and fighting the xenocidal Prodryans, who’ve been escalating their war against everyone who isn’t Prodryan, the Krakau have their tentacles full.


Mops’ mission changes when she learns of a secret Krakau laboratory on Earth. A small group under command of Fleet Admiral Belle-Bonne Sage is working to create a new weapon, one that could bring victory over the Prodryans … or drown the galaxy in chaos.


To discover the truth, Mops and her rogue cleaning crew will have to do the one thing she fears most: return to Earth, a world overrun by feral apes, wild dogs, savage humans, and worse. (After all, the planet hasn’t been cleaned in a century and a half!) What Mops finds in the filthy ruins of humanity could change everything, assuming she survives long enough to share it.


Perhaps humanity isn’t as dead as the galaxy thought.

This is the second book of Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse, and you want to start with Book 1, which is Terminal Alliance. Both books are great fun, and I'm looking forward to Book 3.

The True Queen by Zen Cho

When sisters Muna and Sakti wake up on the peaceful beach of the island of Janda Baik, they can’t remember anything, except that they are bound as only sisters can be. They have been cursed by an unknown enchanter, and slowly Sakti starts to fade away. The only hope of saving her is to go to distant Britain, where the Sorceress Royal has established an academy to train women in magic.


If Muna is to save her sister, she must learn to navigate high society, and trick the English magicians into believing she is a magical prodigy. As she's drawn into their intrigues, she must uncover the secrets of her past, and journey into a world with more magic than she had ever dreamed.

This is a delightful follow-up to the equally delightful Sorcerer to the Crown. I highly, highly recommend both.

Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water by Vylar Kaftan

All Bee has ever known is darkness.


She doesn’t remember the crime she committed that landed her in the cold, twisting caverns of the prison planet Colel-Cab with only fellow prisoner Chela for company. Chela says that they’re telepaths and mass-murderers; that they belong here, too dangerous to ever be free. Bee has no reason to doubt her—until she hears the voice of another telepath, one who has answers, and can open her eyes to an entirely different truth.

I loved this novella. Vy's written a lot of great short fiction, and if you're not familiar with her work this would be a good time to remedy that.

Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein

If you ask, she must answer. A steerswoman’s knowledge is shared with any who request it; no steerswoman may refuse a question, and no steerswoman may answer with anything but the truth.


And if she asks, you must answer. It is the other side of tradition’s contract — and if you refuse the question, or lie, no steerswoman will ever again answer even your most casual question.


And so, the steerswomen — always seeking, always investigating — have gathered more and more knowledge about the world they traveled, and they share that knowledge freely.


Until the day that the steerswoman Rowan begins asking innocent questions about one small, lovely, inexplicable object…


Her discoveries grow stranger and deeper, and more dangerous, until suddenly she finds she must flee or fight for her life. Or worse — lie.


Because one kind of knowledge has always been denied to the steerswomen:


Magic.

Actually I didn't just read The Steerswoman, I read all four books (currently) in the series. These were first published starting in the late eighties, but Kirstein has recovered the rights and reissued them. In the back of the last one it said she was working on book 5, which I hope is the case? I enjoyed these a lot.

So, one of the things I've really been looking forward to is touring for the release of The Raven Tower. I love to visit the bookstores and meet the people who keep us all in great books to read, and I love getting to meet my readers, who in my experience so far are a delightful bunch of folks.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, I can't do that this time. I was all set to, dates were finalized and announced, we were ready to go, but...some things have happened that make it impossible for me right now.

I'm not going to go into specifics, but so no one is unduly concerned--no one has died, no one is dying. I and my family are safe and sound.

I can't tell you how unhappy I was when I realized I had to cancel my appearances. I will miss meeting you all so much. But there was just no way to make it work.

In the meantime, I can't wait for you all to be able to read The Raven Tower, and I do hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

As it says in the subject--it's the last day of my giveaway. I'll ship anywhere it's possible for me to ship!

Since things seem to be going flaky over at Tumblr, and also since I have other things to do that I'm avoiding, I thought I would figure out how to make a community here on Dreamwidth! And so I have. Behold,the republicoftwosystems!

Currently anyone can join and any member can post. It's meant to be a place where folks can hang out and chat about whatever.

(and now I have to do the actual work thing.)

So, there's this band. They're called Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate. They're a London rock band, and they've got science fictiony sensibilities--like, check out their 2016 album When The Kill Code Fails.

So, their newest release is Out of Mind, and one of the tracks is called "When I Was A Ship" and yes, they do mean that ship.

This song was inspired by Ann Leckie's Ancillary series. The main character had once been a warship, whose artificial mind had been distributed within the ship, and also within many ancillaries - prisoners who have had their minds wiped. The ship itself and all of the other ancillaries was destroyed, leaving just one fragment of the mind left in one body.

So, like, that's a thing that happened.

You can hear "When I Was A Ship" on Spotify. You can also purchase it at Bandcamp, along with When The Kill Code Fails and their other albums. I've been listening to WtKCF for the past few days and really enjoying it.

So, back when Ancillary Justice was essentially sweeping that year’s SF awards, there was some talk from certain quarters about it not really being all that, people only claimed to like it because Politics and SJWs and PC points and Affirmative Action and nobody was really reading the book and if they were they didn’t really enjoy it, they just claimed they did so they could seem cool and woke.

My feelings were so hurt that I wept bitter, miserable tears every time I drove to the bank with my royalty checks. I mean, those people must be right, it’s totally typical for non-fans who don’t actually like a book to write fanfic or draw fan art, totally boringly normal for students to choose to write papers about a book that just isn’t really very good or interesting, and for professors to use that boringly not-very-good book in their courses, and for that book to continue to sell steadily five years after it came out. I totally did not laugh out loud whenever I came across such assertions, because they were absolutely not ridiculous Sour Grape Vineyards tended by folks who, for the most part, hadn’t even read the book.

Now I am sorry–but not surprised–to see some folks making similar assertions about N.K. Jemisin’s historic (and entirely deserved) Hugo Threepeat. Most of them haven’t read the books in question.

But some of them have. Some of them have indeed read the books and not understood why so many people are so excited by them.

Now, Nora doesn’t need me to defend her, and she doesn’t need lessons from me about the best way to dry a tear-soaked award-dusting cloth, or the best brands of chocolate ice cream to fortify yourself for that arduous trip to the bank. Actually, she could probably give me some pointers.

But I have some thoughts about the idea that, because you (generic you) didn’t like a work, that must mean folks who say they did like it are Lying Liars Who Lie to Look Cool.

So, in order to believe this, one has to believe that A) one’s own taste is infallible and objective and thus universally shared and B) people who openly don’t share your taste are characterless sheep who will do anything to seem cool.

But the fact is, one doesn’t like or dislike things without context. We are all of us judging things from our own point of view, not some disembodied perfectly objective nowhere. It’s really easy to assume that our context is The Context–to not even see that there’s a context at all, it’s just How Things Are. But you are always seeing things from the perspective of your experiences, your biases, your expectations of how things work. Those may not match other people’s.

Of course, if you’re in a certain category–if you’re a guy, if you’re White, if you’re straight, if you’re cis–our society is set up to make that invisible, to encourage you in the assumption that the way you see things is objective and right, and not just a product of that very society. Nearly all of the readily available entertainment is catering to you, nearly all of it accepts and reinforces the status quo. If you’ve never questioned that, it can seem utterly baffling that people can claim to enjoy things that you see no value in. You’ll maybe think it makes sense to assume that such people are only pretending to like those things, or only like them for reasons you consider unworthy. It might not ever occur to you that some folks are just reading from a different context–sometimes slightly different, sometimes radically different, but even a small difference can be enough to make a work seem strange or bafflingly flat.

Now, I’m sure that there are people somewhere at some time who have in fact claimed to like a thing they didn’t, just for cool points. People will on occasion do all kinds of ill-advised or bananapants things. But enough of them to show up on every SF award shortlist that year? Enough to vote for a historic, record-breaking three Hugos in a row? Really?

Stop and think about what you’re saying when you say this. Stop and think about who you’re not saying it about.

You might not have the context to see what a writer is doing. When you don’t have the context, so much is invisible. You can only see patterns that match what you already know.*

Of course, you’re not a helpless victim of your context–you can change it, by reading other things and listening to various conversations. Maybe you don’t want to do that work, which, ok? But maybe a lot of other folks have indeed been doing that, and their context, the position they’re reading stories from, has shifted over the last several years. It’s a thing that can happen.

Stop and think–you’ve gotten as far as “everyone must be kind of like me” and stepped over into “therefore they can’t really like what they say they like because I don’t like those things.” Try on “therefore they must really mean it when they say they like something, because I mean it when I say it.” It’s funny, isn’t it, that so many folks step into the one and not the other. Maybe ask yourself why that is.

This also applies to “pretentious” writing. “That writer is only trying to look smart! Readers who say they like it are only trying to look smarter that me, a genuine,honest person, who only likes down-to-earth plain solid storytelling.” Friend, your claims to be a better and more honest person because of your distaste for “pretentious” writing is pretension itself, and says far more about you than the work you criticize this way. You are exactly the sort of snob you decry, and you have just announced this to the world.

Like or don’t like. No worries. It’s not a contest, there’s no moral value attached to liking or not liking a thing. Hell, there are highly-regarded things I dislike, or don’t see the appeal of! There are things I love that lots of other folks don’t like at all. That’s life.

And sure, if you want to, talk about why you do or don’t like a thing. That’s super interesting, and thoughtful criticism is good for art.

But think twice before you sneer at what other folks like, think three times before you declare that no one could really like a thing so it must be political correctness, or pretension, or whatever. Consider the possibility that whatever it is is just not your thing. Consider the possibility that it might be all right if not everything is aimed at you. Consider that you might not actually be the center of the universe, and your opinions and tastes might not be the product of your utterly rational objective view of the world. Consider the possibility that a given work might not have been written just for you, but for a bunch of other people who’ve been waiting for it, maybe for a long time, and that might just possibly be okay.

Sorry, I haven’t been blogging at all lately! I’ve been doing lots of other things–revisions on The Raven Tower and a short story for an anthology, and more stuff that’s not worth mentioning here.

But! Worldcon approaches! And I will indeed be in San Jose. You can see the whole schedule here (though I’d check it a few times between now and the convention, I gather it might well need some updating in the next few days, for various reasons, and I’d like to give a shoutout to Mary Robinette Kowal and her fabulous team).

Here’s my schedule as of today:

Friday August 17, 2018

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Pronouns Matter — Gender Courtesy for Fans
San Jose Convention Center , 210C

Spend an hour talking about pronoun and identity variations, and why they matter to our fellow fans. How do we ask about pronouns? What possible pronouns are there? How can we make our fannish spaces more inclusive when we write, name, and interact with other fans?

Moderator Ann Leckie | Roni Gosch | Angela Lujan | Ellen Kuehnle | Rivers Solomon

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Kaffeeklatsch: Ann Leckie
San Jose Convention Center , 211B

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Autographs
San Jose Convention Center , Autographing

Ann Leckie | Fonda Lee | Shelley Adina | Nick Kanas | Carrie Patel | Stanley Schmidt | Gail Carriger

Saturday August 18, 2018

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Reading: Hugo Finalists – Best Novel
San Jose Convention Center , 211A

Listen to some of this year’s Hugo Novel finalists as they share their work.

Ann Leckie | John Scalzi | Mur Lafferty

So there it is, that’s where you can find me at Worldcon this year. And do please feel free to say hi if you see me around. I can’t promise I’ll have much time to stop and chat, if I’m on my way somewhere with a definite time attached (which can happen at a con), but I do want to see you! Also I plan to have badge ribbons for folks who are interested in that.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all!

(crossposted from https://ift.tt/2OPgjyu)

I haven’t been blogging much lately–being busy will do that! I’ve turned in a book to my editors, and am waiting for the inevitable moment when I’ll have revisions to do, and in the meantime I’m working on another project, and I’ve been doing Stuff. Like, look at this shiny thing I made!

I took some lessons from Elise Matheson, who is a fabulous teacher.

Anyway! I’ve also managed to read some things!

The Waterdancer’s World by L. Timmel Duchamp

I’m not sure I can do better than the description at Aqueduct Press: “Humans have been struggling to live on Frogmore for almost five centuries, adapting themselves to punishing gravity and the deadly mistflowers that dominate its ecology. Financier Inez Gauthier, patron of the arts and daughter of the general commanding the planet’s occupation forces, dreams of eliminating the mistflowers that make exploitation of the planet’s natural wealth so difficult and impede her father’s efforts to crush the native insurgency. Fascinated by the new art-form of waterdancing created by Solstice Balalzalar celebrating the planet’s indigenous lifeforms, Inez assumes that her patronage will be enough to sustain Solstice’s art even as she ruthlessly pursues windfall profits at the expense of all that has made waterdancing possible.”

The review at Strange Horizons suggests a theoretical subgenre called “realistic space opera” within which tWDW might fit, and that rings true to me. It’s about fateful events in the history of Frogmore, but it tells its story almost entirely in terms of the interactions and choices of individual characters. I found it compelling reading.

Which didn’t surprise me–some years ago I bought a copy of Alanya to Alanya in the dealers room at Wiscon, figuring it was a nice hefty book that might take me some time to read, and if I enjoyed it I’d buy the second volume the next year. Once I picked it up, though, I couldn’t put it down, and it only took me a few days to finish reading it. And then I really really wished I had the next book on hand, so next Wiscon I just bought the rest of them in a big stack, and read them in a couple of weeks.

The Waterdancer’s World isn’t so (literally) voluminous (or quite so viscerally upsetting, as the Marq’ssan books are in places, to me), and is maybe a more manageable introduction to Duchamp’s writing.

The Beautiful Ones by Siliva Moreno-Garcia

Y’all should be reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia, if you aren’t already. This particular book is a romance, set in a Not Quite France where some people are born with telekinetic ability–ladies never indulge it in public, of course. If you enjoy the Regency-ish Romances With Magic kind of thing, you’ll want to check this out. I enjoyed it a lot.

And then maybe check out Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s other work, because, seriously.

(crossposted from http://ift.tt/2FzSaHK)

Yes, it’s time again for Some Stuff I Have Read and Liked Recently. As always–I am not a reviewer or any sort of critic, and I’m not going to try to be one.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl

Ever since I heard that Nisi was not only working on a steampunk novel set in the Belgian Congo, but that she had gone and sold that novel to Tor, I’ve been eager to read this. I finally got around to it, and I highly recommend it. It’s pretty epic, really, it covers a couple decades in time, from the POVs of a wide variety of characters. Seriously, check this out if you haven’t already.

Transcendent 2: the Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction edited by Bogi Takács

This is a nice anthology of short fiction by authors I’m already a fan of–like Charlie Jane Anders, Keffy Kehrli, and An Owomoyela–as well as authors I’m very happy to be introduced to. I’ve read way too little short fiction lately, and this was an enjoyable first step toward remedying that.

The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

These two books were first published in the 1950s and have not always been well-regarded. In the first, the narrator is a young man devoted to drinking palm wine. The person who works tapping palms to bring him that wine dies, and the narrator goes looking for Dead’s Town so he can find the man and bring him back. In the second, a young boy is separated from his family and ends up in the bush, where he encounters lots of dangerous supernatural creatures. Both are picaresque, their plots essentially one adventure after another, and both are told in the first person in a way that feels to me very much as though these stories were meant to be read or spoken aloud. They were written in a variety of English that may take a few pages to get familiar with, but once it’s in your ear it just goes nicely and enjoyably along. I couldn’t find an ebook version, and my nearby libraries didn’t have it,so I bought a used paper copy. It may be in a library near you!

BONUS the title of the second novel in this volume may seem familiar if you’ve heard of the Brian Eno and David Byrne album of the same name. If you haven’t heard it, or heard of it, give it a listen.

(crossposted from http://ift.tt/2BhlEHq)

 So, the other day the plugin I was using to crosspost from my WordPress blog up and stopped working. Actually, all my crossposters stopped working! But I gather everyone who's been crossposting to Dreamwidth is suddenly without a crossposter.

I've been poking around, looking for ways to make this work. I got my other xposting stuff cleared away--things are now going to Twitter and Tumblr and--though I pretty much never go there and it's not a good idea to try to contact me through it because I just won't see it--my author page on Facebook.

I couldn't find anything to do Dreamwidth for me. But I finally pasted something together. It's not perfect, it has some formatting things I can't change, but eh, it'll do for now. And I figured I'd share what that is, in case anyone else wants or needs it.

What I did was, I went to IFTTT. If you haven't used IFTTT before, well, it's actually pretty simple. You make an account, and then you can choose from a list of services that you want to use to generate a trigger for an action. WordPress is one of those services, but it won't accept my blog url as a valid blog url, which blows. If it does accept yours, make the "if this" part be a new post on your WordPress blog, and the "then that" bit can send an email to your Dreamwidth mobile posting email. 

If it won't take your WordPress url, then find the blog's RSS feed url and when you click on "if this" search for rss, choose the orangey "RSS" service and the "then that" is the same as the other method--have gmail (or email or whatever) send an email to your Dreamwidth mobile posting address.

It automatically generates a "[TITLE} originally appeared on [BLOG]" line which would be fine except it's got hyperlinks in the email but not in the Dreamwidth post. I can't get rid of that or alter it. So that's stuck there for now. But until there's another solution, that's how crossposts are going to look. It was that or do it manually every time, and eh, no.