This is an odd movie. I came to it knowing Detective/Judge Dee from Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series (and his translated Dee Gong An), and I confess I was expecting less wuxia and more, er, detecting?

The story is set in Tang China, in the days just before the coronation of Empress Wu (the only woman in China who ruled as Empress in her own right, and not as a consort or dowager). Wu is a ruhtless woman who rose to power with the magical help of the Chaplain Lu Li (a spirit who takes on both human and deer form, and helped her clean the court of those nobles and officials which opposed her); for her own coronation, she has commissioned a huge statue of the Buddha to be completed in time for the ceremonies. All is going according to plan–except that court officials involved with the Buddha’s construction spontaneously start catching fire. Empress Wu, frightened by this plot against her, calls back Detective Dee–a respected judge who spoke against her and was imprisoned for state treason.

Let’s start with the good points: the cast. Tsui Hark has got together the cream of the cream of Hong Kong cinema, and the cast list is a fan’s wet dream. The setting is also (for the most part) marvelous, bringing to life Luoyang in its heyday, as well as more exotic locations such as the Phantom Mart, a city beneath the city, and a weird monastery that might or might not be the theater for black magic… The set pieces are also very good: the actions scenes are fantastically choregraphed (and this from someone who doesn’t care much for action).

The bad… Remember that summary? That’s pretty much the extent of the plot. Well, OK, there’s slightly more, but overall it’s the most disappointing bit of the movie: for all its cool ideas and cool characters (and awesome actors), it does end up feeling a little light. All the set pieces seem to be put there mostly to keep the spectators from getting bored: as soon as the action lags a bit, we get ninjas and martial arts randomly thrown in. Also, I did expect that it wasn’t going to make sense in the scientific fashion of the world (ie, the explanation for the murders was probably not going to hold water by Western forensic standards), but internal coherence would have been nice. For instance, an explanation why and how the bad guys could hire so many ninjas–and other fine points of the plot such as the Chaplain’s role in events…

Overall, it’s a decent movie for an evening; but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again, and it did leave me feeling a little disappointed. A bit like Curse of the Golden Flower (which also had the ninjas randomly thrown in). As historical wuxia movies go, I much preferred Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; as far as purely historical movies go, Red Cliffs (which takes liberties with Three Kingdoms, but still).

Also, I’m a history geek, and I kept complaining about “but, but, Luoyang doesn’t have a sea with three-masted ships, it’s by a river!”, and “why does the giant Buddha look like Guanyin before Guanyin actually existed?” This is why you shouldn’t watch a movie with me…
(I might, of course, be wrong about all of this–being hampered by my inability to understand Chinese)

Been working on the novella again. Still not sure about the form–I feel it should be more complex than a short story, but I have this sinking feeling I put way too much in this, and that it’s really a novel in disguise. I’m also fighting my own genre pre-conceptions with this: I wanted to do a generational tale on a space station, focused on the troubles of a family in the wake of a civil war (basically, Dream of Red Mansions rather than Three Kingdoms), and my brain keeps insisting that I’m doing unimportant fluff, and that there should be explosions and battle scenes, and Important Scientific Problems to solve. Grr. Not where I wanted to go. Which isn’t to say, of course, that things aren’t earth-shattering in this, but they’re meant to be far less of a Boys’ Own Tale of Adventure, and more focused on consequences of dramatic acts on families and children (yes, I’m partly doing this in reaction to the whole Women in SF thing. You can tell).

Anyway, hope this shakes out all right. But darn, it does feel good to be writing again.

In other news, let’s see if replacing bean paste with hoisin sauce in the xa xíu marinade was a good idea. (my local Asian grocery had no bean paste, as it’s a Chinese ingredient and not a Vietnamese one).

Tricia Sullivan, and Liz Williams on Women in SF, and the Solaris Rising controversy . Well worth a look. I’ve been really crazy busy, and sort of missed most of this one… But let me add my voice to the fact that I don’t think it’s fair to blame Ian (who’s a great bloke) for the lack of female representation in the previous Solaris books (in which he had no part at all). The Solaris Rising TOC (4 women authors out of 16-17 stories) doesn’t strike me as particularly horrifyingly sexist either–there’s just no way you can guarantee you’ll have 50-50% female representation in anthologies, both because of the sample (less women writing SF for a variety of complex reasons), and because of the way things shake out (as an anthologist, you can try invite 50-50% men-women, but you can’t even be sure the responses will be balanced).

Which isn’t to say there’s no problem with the genre in the UK (and indeed, with the genre in general). I think we can all agree there is one. But I don’t think specifically blaming Ian is the right strategy.

If I may borrow Tricia’s words for a moment:

I want to see change but I don’t want to work in a climate where individual people are at risk of being brought to ground, cornered and shamed for issues that arise out of a much more nebulous problem in society–and in this case, in the peculiarities of the SFF scene in Britain. I don’t think editors in Britain are chauvanist pigs. I’ve worked with several book editors in this country and have never had a whiff of old-school sexism from any of them. Do we live in a sexist culture? Yes, absolutely. Fucking yes.

Because of this and for other reasons it seems to be impossible to precisely identify the problem in SF in this country. I’ve said again and again in personal conversation that I believe it is systemic. I don’t think it’s merely a case of mistakenly attacking the branches instead of the root of the problem (as I’ve seen the attacks on Ian described) because it’s not a rooted sort of problem. I suspect the whole ecological cycle is messed up and I doubt there is any one action or plane of action that will ameliorate it. As I said to Juliet McKenna at the AGM: the whole is dumber than the sum of its parts. And I think it would be good to address this on all levels but perhaps only in small ways in some situations because sometimes that is all you can do for the moment. The main thing is to keep it going and move it forward. The scene didn’t get like this in a day and it’s not going to be fixed in sweeping strokes.

-DMS crunches numbers for the women on the Hugo ballot. I’m a bit sceptical of the actual maths of the thing (number of samples is slightly too low for my personal taste), but it’s definitely worth a look, and parallels some worrying trends in the genre (see the moving average…). Also, apparently, I have a 41% chance of winning as the lone female nominee in my category 🙂
(and it all reminds me that, darn, I still need to finish the nominated novels in order to hand in my ballot)

-Michael Dirda on the bestsellers lists and why they’re bad for diversity: not a surprise, but nice to see someone articulate so strongly.

And, as promised, here is J. Damask (Joyce Chng) on her process of writing Wolf at the Door–enjoy!

Back in the first half of 2009, I was pregnant with my second child. I was also filled with an inexplicable energy to write. Novels, short stories – you mean it, I wrote them. Call it a weird side-effect from pregnancy: I was just incredibly productive.

I wanted to write an urban fantasy story. Yes, urban fantasy, not the kind I saw popping up everywhere, replete with kick-ass heroine, hunky hero and assorted kinds of were-animals. I wanted to write an urban fantasy set in Singapore, the land of my birth. The main character would be a mother with kids. She would not fit the mould of the stereotypical werewolf. Most of all, she would be Chinese.

So, I wrote. At first, the story grew into a novella, Full Moon, Dragon Gate. But you know about novellas: they are hard to sell. I ended up putting the novella on the back-burner. I delivered and two months later, decided to write a 50k novel for Nanowrimo. That’s right. 50k in a month. I had a newborn to look after. What was I thinking? People were going “You must be kidding me!”

Throughout the entire process, I was telling myself that I was crazy. Why would I want to write the novel within a month? But I did and Wolf At The Door was born.

As the story goes (no pun intended), I shopped around for a publisher. The rest, you, know, is history.

Perhaps it was/is the drive to see more urban fantasy (and heck, SFF) novels from Southeast Asia that pushed me on. There are novels set in the United States of America, Britain and even Australia. I want to see stories coming from Singapore and the rest of the Southeast Asian countries. I mean, just look at the mythologies – they are so perfect for urban fantasy, the old adapting/co-existing/interlacing with the new (urbanization). I want to see more urban fantasy – creatures of myths and legends living side by side or within the human population. I want to see more of the cultures.

[You see, I keep repeating “I want”…]

So, if you want more diversity in urban fantasy, be sure to enjoy Wolf At The Door.

J Damask (aka Joyce Chng) lives in Singapore, loves gardening and is a cat herder. She has a writery blog at A Wolf’s Tale.

So, apparently, you can search the contents of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction on Amazon.com, and, hum, in addition to publication of “The Shipmaker” in the volume itself, I have 4(!) Honorable Mentions: for “Father’s Last Ride” in The Immersion Book of Science Fiction, “Desaparecidos” in Realms of Fantasy, and my two Asimov’s stories, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” and “The Wind-Blown Man”. Particularly happy for “The Wind-Blown Man”, which was a hassle to write because of the world-building (making up a new kind of science based on Daoist alchemy and not overly polluting the text with references to current science was a tricky balance to strike).

(and huge congrats to the friends on the HM list, but most particularly to T.L. Morganfield for “The Hearts of Men” in Realms of Fantasy, a story I’ve always believed would go far; and to Lavie Tidhar, who’s just racking up the HMs)

Meanwhile, a further 1000 words on the novella. Stopped because my cool ideas weren’t integrated well enough (ie, need to think a little more on how the science would work on a day-to-day basis without sounding too much like an engineer). Also, I fear people will tear out their hair with names like “Lê Thi Linh”, “Lê Thi Huu Phuoc”, etc. Yeah, Vietnamese without the diacritical marks is a bit of a hassle as well…

I can haz DVD of Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

It’s movie night 🙂

So, I guess it’s official now: my story “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces” will be in Sean Wallace’s Mammoth Book of Steampunk. Kind of hard to describe that one–sort of Aztec meets the Wild West (I’ve always pictured it in some sort of post-Apocalyptic Mexico, in the northern deserts). It’s got the requisite mine, train network, and the lonely gunslinger (well, OK, not quite what you think, on any of those things). And robots, too, because they always make stories more fun! Set in the same universe as “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”.

Many many thanks to Marshall Payne and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for helping me with this one. I’ve always been absurdly fond of this story, and I’m glad to see it find a good home.

Snippet:

The stranger came at dawn, walking out of the barren land like a mirage–gradually shimmering into existence beside the bronze line of the rails: a wide-brimmed hat, a long cloak, the glint that might have been a rifle or an obsidian-studded sword.

Xochipil, who had been scavenging for tech at the mouth of Mictlan’s Well, caught that glint in her eyes–and stopped, watching the stranger approach, a growing hollow in her stomach. Beneath her were the vibrations of the Well, like a calm, steady heartbeat running through the ground: the voice of the rails that coiled around the shaft of the Well, bearing their burden of copper and bronze ever downwards.

(and wow, will you look at that awesome TOC!)

… as evidenced below:

(yup, you can tell that we ran out of nice-looking bowls for the food…)

From left to right and top to bottom: rice, bok choy in oyster sauce, tôm rang thịt ba chỉ (caramelised shrimp and pork belly), nước tương dến ớt (sweet soy sauce with ginger), sweet and sour sauce, bún canh gà (chicken broth with vermicelli), nước mắm gừng (ginger-lime dipping sauce), sour-sweet sauce, and Hainan chicken (one of those Chinese dishes that emigrated to Vietnam). There were a couple minor disasters, such as confusing the pork belly and the shrimp when preparing the marinade (a little embarrassing, as it’s the pork that needs to be covered with sugar and nước mắm in order for its fat to caramelise on high heat), and not having enough ice (pretty much a vital component for the chicken), but overall, it all went fairly smoothly.

Also, there was shrimp toast. More on that later.

Girlyman, Saint Peter’s Bones

Aka the song I cannot get out of my head right now.

In other news, the cooking for tonight has begun (not liveblogging this, because I’d rather keep everything a surprise :=) )