Had a lazy weekend, which involved much writing, eating Russian food (thanks to a friend who made us discover borscht, dressed herring, pierogi, and grilled pork), and of course Vietnamese food (a rather copious shrimp curry, thanks to my grandma).

Entering my second-to-last week of the job; also, entering French summer, which means everything suddenly is going very slowly, and people are unavailable… (frustrating). On the plus side, this week is the annual picnic of the department; I volunteered for salad. I hesitate to make bò bún, but I think I’ll go for a more classical French or Italian dish, if only because leftovers are more easily recycled.

In other, more exciting news, slowly filling in the holes on the novella, and answering a couple questions about the French translation of Harbinger of the Storm. The new novel project is going to be, er, an old one, ie revising Foreign Ghosts [2] before it is sent out. (with a side order of brainstorming sequels).

*rolls up sleeves*

[1] Apologies for the inevitable spelling/usage mistakes: I’m doing my best to retranscribe from Cyrillic, but Russian is nowhere near my native language…
[2] Foreign Ghosts is the Xuya novel. In the words of the blurb I wrote a couple years ago:

The year is 2009–but the world is profoundly different. China’s discovery of America before Columbus has given rise to a West Coast ruled by Xuya, the former Chinese colony. Now, instead of San Francisco, the bustling metropolis of Fenliu is Xuya’s second-largest city, where Irish-Americans walk side by side with Aztec warrior-spies, and the vermillion-painted houses of Xuyan gentlemen-scholars contrast with the grime of Inca clan-compounds. Transportation is done by aircars and maglev trains; and technologies such as network sockets, communicators and weapons are routinely implanted into human bodies.

In this bewilderingly foreign world, PI Jonathan Brooks is desperately looking for a way to fit in. His latest gamble was to rent a flat in one of the posher Xuyan areas of town–but it backfired with the flat turned out to contain a cache of illegally imported mummies. Expropriated and considered a suspect, Brooks must discover the truth and clear his name before he is arrested and tortured.

But Brooks’ hurried and careless investigation may have unintended consequences: Fenliu is a city of many cultures, perpetually poised on the cusp of dislocation, and the racial riots of five years ago need only the flimsiest of excuses to flare up again…

-Tansy Rayner Roberts on Pratchett’s Women: the Boobs, the Bad, and the Broomsticks:

How rare is it to have a fantasy novel BY A MAN which is entirely about female characters? How rare to have a story with so many women in it that you don’t even need a romance because the women already have plenty to do?

-N.K. Jemisin on The Limitations of Womanhood in Fantasy

Why is it hard for a female character to be considered strong if she’s self-effacing or modest, for example? Lots of women who are trailblazers and asskicking heroes are modest. This is all of a piece with America’s ongoing devaluation of traditional women’s gender roles, like being a housewife. (Or a househusband; we also devalue men who chose “women’s work”.) I can’t remember the last American fantasy I read that starred a housewife. I’m hoping there are some out there — recommendations welcome — but offhand, I can’t think of any. But housewives can be great characters, if they’re written right.

Here’s the problem with this wholesale rejection of both societally-imposed and self-chosen “typical” women’s behaviors — in the end, it amounts to a rejection of nearly all things feminine. And that’s definitely not good for women.

-Max Barry on Dogs and Smurfs:

Let me walk you through it. We’ll start with dogs. I have written about this before, but to save you the click: people assume dogs are male. Listen out for it: you will find it’s true. (..) People assume animals are male. If you haven’t already noticed this, it’s only because it’s so pervasive. We also assume people are male, unless they’re doing something particularly feminine; you’ll usually say “him” about an unseen car driver, for example. But it’s ubiquitous in regard to animals.
(…)
Then you’ve got Smurf books. Not actual Smurfs. I mean stories where there are five major characters, and one is brave and one is smart and one is grumpy and one keeps rats for pets and one is a girl. Smurfs, right? Because there was Handy Smurf and Chef Smurf and Dopey Smurf and Painter Smurf and ninety-four other male Smurfs and Smurfette. Smurfette’s unique personality trait was femaleness. That was the thing she did better than anyone else. Be a girl.
(…)
Male is default. That’s what you learn from a world of boy dogs and Smurf stories.

Meanwhile, work is chugging along on the Novella that Wouldn’t Die. One more scene, and some recurring characters are finally started to show up (I know, it’s a bad sign when the Named Characters in your cast number above 10–for this length, at any rate).

The H and I just handed in our Hugo ballot. There’s until July 31st to read and vote, but we’re both really absent-minded, so better safe than sorry.

You can actually still register online, either as a full attending member, or as a supporting member if you’re not planning to attend the con. In both cases, you get the voters’ packet, which is chockfull of goodies, including awesome comics like Fables, and entire novels only available in hardcover. Well worth the (50$-) price of admission. Plus, of course, you get the right to vote for the Hugos–and, like any popular awards, the Hugos are determined by their voters. If you’re happy/unhappy/angry with the Hugos, now is the chance to make your voice heard!

(and, while you’re at it, if you have a moment to consider my story “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” for Best Novelette, I’d be really honoured and grateful)

Ginger and pepper mutually reinforce each other’s taste when put in the same dish.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off looking for a big bottle of water.

Electric Velocipede are revamping their website to prepare for their launch as a e-zine. In the runup to that, they’re republishing fiction from their previous issues online. Among which is “The Dragon’s Tears”. Probably the best description of this is that I wrote as a homage to the Chinese fairytales I read when I was a child–I wasn’t very up to date on historical research then, but I think I nailed the feeling I got when I was six or seven, and immersed in a big fat book of wonderful stories with dragons, immortal carpenters, and crabby Iron-Crutch Li, where everything and everyone could turn out to be magical (and possibly deadly. That’s part of the deal with magical people).
Also, as Anne S. Zanoni points out, she sent me one of the sweetest mails ever after she proofread this–I’m a big Patricia McKillip fan, so being compared to her while I still felt like a raw newbie was, well, pretty magical…

Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter. Tonight, he thought, his eye on the empty streets, the neighbours’ barred shutters. Tonight he had to pass the door on the hill, or let the sickness take his mother.

Read more here, and do check out the rest of the cool stuff while you’re there.

Emmanuel Chastellière very kindly interview me for Elbakin, the French fantasy website. You can find the interview here.

So, the H and I finally got to see Inception.

OK, so I can see what the fuss is all about. It’s a neat idea, and a great cast to assemble around it (props for Watanabe, whom I love, and Cillian Murphy who for once wasn’t stuck playing a psycho). And the movie tries so hard to be clever and to go beyond the ol’ Hollywood action thriller.

But but but…

It makes no sense.

Or, rather, to be more accurate: it sets up rules in its first half or so that it then spends most of the time ignoring.

For instance: a “kick” is supposed to wake up whoever is in a dream, as long as they’re not nestled in a deeper dream. So why did the very first “kick” (the van going over the bridge, which is explicitly referred to as a kick by Cobb) fail to wake up Arthur, who wasn’t under at the time?

Why does Fischer Junior not recognise Saito? Again, it’s clear that you can remember real life during the dreams, and yet Fischer Junior (the man who has been coached to take control of his father’s empire) doesn’t recognise the competitor who is their main target?

Why does no one (Arthur or Yussuf) bother to shape the dreams they’re in more strongly? The reason that was invoked at the start is that if you make too many modifications, projections will converge on you to kill you. Er… How is that different from what is happening in those dreams? (especially Arthur, who already has the entire hotel after him).

Or how about totems–they’re brought up, and then seem to serve no purpose, other than presage the “shocking” ending.

About that ending. For me, it’s pretty clear that Cobb is still dreaming. It’s strongly implied he’s been on the run from the police for a number of years, and yet his children have not aged a day when he does come back–worse, they’re in the exact same position they have been in flashbacks during the entire movie.

Unfortunately, I was too busy going “uh?” at the movie during the last half-hour or so that the “cleverness” of the ending entirely bypassed me…

The movie had so many great parts, but in the end, it didn’t gel for me. I kept expecting there would be some kind of a better twist there (in particular, Fischer Junior felt way too naïve for who he was supposed to be, and I kept expecting he’d turn the tables on the team. But no, he was exactly as foolish as he appeared all along), but honestly, I could see what twists there were coming a mile off.

Sigh. I might be becoming too jaded for this.

Joyce Chng, Csilla Kleinheincz, Kate Elliott, Karen Lord, Ekaterina Sedia and I discuss the Russ Pledge in the context of World SF. Well, sort of. That started out as the intention, but I think the resulting roundtable covers a lot more ground than that (partly a result of six different people on six different time zones editing a common google doc!). Many thanks to Lavie Tidhar for putting this together and for his heroic formatting work in order to make google docs communicate with the World SF blog.

Note: I tried to do my best with the “SF in France” bits of the conversation, but I have a narrow perspective on the matter (ie, just my own, and I’m hardly a typical French reader or SF writer). If you’re reading this and have more reliable information on the matter of SF in France, women in French SF and/or SF Bandes Dessinées, please hop on over to the World SF blog and leave a comment at the bottom of the post.

In other, writing-related news: Kathleen Bellamy let me know that my story “Horus Ascending” was going to be part of the forthcoming IGMS anthology. Full TOC here, and some pretty awesome company.

Couple of links:
-Joyce Chng at the World SF blog on the Russ Pledge seen from outside the Western Anglophone world.
-Jonathan Dotse on why the future isn’t Western
-And two from Cheryl Morgan: one crunching data on SF anthologies, and the other on “Diversity is Hard”.

In other news, Irene Kuo is a genius. I’m down to 6 recipes picked out of her Key to Chinese Cooking (tea eggs, cha siu, white-cut chicken, two broccoli recipes, and the sweet-sour sauce), and they all worked out great. Also, the explanations are really clear on why you should do stuff, and it makes for way easier cooking.

While googling stuff on how to use cornstarch, I found this book: On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. Science and cooking? I’m sold… (but broke)

Recipe of the day: creative carrot cake (didn’t have raisins, so chopped up prunes after removing the stones; didn’t have orange zest, so added Orange Blossom instead; didn’t have walnuts, so put in pecans. And not entirely sure I had the right quantity of carrots. This could be fun)

Right. Back to the %%% story.