(with a few that are a bit old, but I’d missed them before…)

–Keyan Bowes on “Why I write American”, chiming in on the differences between Asian (where she used to live) and American fiction as she perceives them
-Amal El-Mohtar on “Towards a Steampunk Without Steam”, a great discussion on why imposing Victorian values on steampunk is a bad idea (and yes, it’s an old post)
-Gabrielle Gantz interviews me for The Faster Times
-Lawrence M Schoen interviews me for his feature Eating Authors
-Val’s Random Comments weighs in on Master of the House of Darts (aka, thank God, the book is working)
-Jaoob at Drying Ink reviews Master of the House of Darts

In other news, huge congrats to the Angry Robot overlords Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris for winning the World Fantasy Award last night! (even though a bit sad there wasn’t a Bragelonne win, as this would have been the very first win of a non-Anglophone) The complete list of winners is here.

And Happy Halloween everyone–we don’t celebrate here, so I’m going to stick to some phở…

(via pretty much everyone on my f-list)

Katherine Jennings illustrates “The Dalek Game”, aka she takes book titles in which she randomly replaces a word by “Dalek”. For instance, The Dalek in the Willows, Where the Wild Daleks are, …

It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I love this one, derived from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (and Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Handful of blog posts, while I’m off hammering more words on the novella:

-Ekaterina Sedia on “Challenges of Writing Alternate History Set in Other Cultures”. Some very interesting stuff–like, yeah, I could do an alternate history in which Gia Long’s eldest son acceded to the throne instead of Minh Mạng and Việt Nam was softer on Christian missionaries, but conveying the turning point and its consequences gracefully would require a looot of footwork to make you understand (and I can do the same with “obscure” bits of French history, too, and it would be hard too, though French history is less obscure than Vietnamese).

-Jess Nevins on “The ‘Problem’ with Asian Steampunk”. I’m a little… ambivalent about this? There are a lot of cool ideas here, but by and large they take the tropes of Victorian steampunk (the treasure hunter, the PI, the pirate) and make them more culturally appropriate than a mere cut-and-paste–basically, this is taking the blatant Orientalist out of steampunk, but I should think there’d be ways to do Asian steampunk with uniquely Asian tropes instead of warmed-up Western/Victorian ones (how about Chinese scholars trying to survive the upheaval of the Ming/Qing transition? Vietnamese building steampunk boats in order to resist the French encroachment?)
Yes, it’s the extremist in me again. I’m not against better “crossover” steampunk that uses this kind of trope (and some of these would definitely make for very interesting stories); but I’m also in favour of going yet further afield, and using the culture(s) more effectively? I’m thinking of Shweta Narayan‘s awesome steampunk series, which make good use of the Indian motifs of tales-within-tales even as they draw on Mughal history; but I’m pretty sure there are/will be others (if anyone wants to recommend good Asian steampunk? [1]).
At any rate, that’s my ambivalence towards lists like those, because they go, “ooh, check out those cool stories” without explaining what makes them cool. In this particular case, although you can argue some of those tropes are also appreciated in Asia (the martial art school, for instance), the sum total of them is a list of cool Victorian/pulp adventure tropes, which are more Western than anything else. Yes, I know, me splitting hairs again. It’s a tricky line to draw…

[1]Defined as “does not make me want to tear my hair out by exoticising or white-washing its protags”.

-Monica Byrne on Why Fantasy Matters (Fantasy, Science and Religion, all three matters dear to my heart)
–10 best Southeast Asian Children’s Books (could be wrong, but from a quick skimming these all appear to be published by Asian Americans, not Indians)
–Asian Historical Architecture: sites from all over Asia, with plenty of pictures (and some fairly obscure stuff, too)
-And wanna see (and possibly fund) a cool game project? Kickstarter page for Astronaut, Moon, Mars & Beyond, an MMORPG about exploring the solar system

Over at SF Signal, Paul Weimer kindly asked me to contribute, in answer to the question:

Go check out my answer here–along with those of participants such as Peter Orullian, Laura Resnick, Chris Moriarty, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood (whose idea I utterly love)

-Tess Gerritsen on “Non-white heros: the kiss of death in the marketplace” (I realised for the first time that Gerritsen herself was Chinese-American, something that was–I now realise–carefully passed up in bios and promo material, at least over here). And urk. I’d read a thriller with an Asian detective in a heartbeat…

-Cora Buhlert on “Women Writers, international writers, marginalised writers”. Towards the end, she speaks of the tendency to assume that ESL learners have bad English, a fact which I’m all too aware of: I have a stack of reviews which complain about the lack of fluency in my writing style, and what’s fascinating about those is that they all, without exception, were written by people who knew English wasn’t my native language. See Juliette Wade’s awesome post on the subject. It’s an interesting (if infuriating) phenomenon). Though nobody has been pressuring me yet to write more “French” stories. Thank goodness, I wouldn’t know where to start on those…

-Over at the World SF blog, Joyce Chng interviews Malay writer K.S. Augustin.

-Liz Wiliams on “Science Fiction reflects the extremes of human belief”

Yes, I know. Blog’s been fairly quiet. I’m chugging away on the novella, slowly rediscovering the joys of worldbuilding and writing (which took a big hit when my headspace was occupied by the job hunt, the flat renovation, and sundry RL items). Also, dealing with Harbinger of the Storm French translation, plus the edits for Master of the House of Darts just came in, and I realised I hadn’t written the acknowledgements or the historical footnotes at all. Darn. And I thought the summer was going to be quiet…

-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).

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.

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.