Obligated to Exaggerate

Free fiction!

2012-02-01T09:51:00.003-05:00

It's really hard to place a reprint of flash fiction. Not many markets want pieces that short, and not many want reprints, anyway. So I've put U8: Alexanderplatz (1989) up on my website. It's got a little paypal button at the bottom, if you want to drop some money my way.

(I tried to figure out the Amazon Payments system, but I couldn't get past the business information part.)

Book review: Fly Into Fire

2012-01-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Fly Into Fire, by Susan Jane Bigelow. 2012, Candlemark and Gleam

Fly Into Fire picks up three years after Broken left off. Be forewarned that this review contains a few spoilers for the ending of Broken.

Sky Ranger has spent the last three years hiding from and fighting the Confederation government, which he had helped to uphold. He believed them to be honorable. He was wrong. He's bought passage on a refugee ship bound for Räton space.

When the ship crash lands on a desert planet which the Rätons had given to the Confederation, Sky Ranger and the handful of survivors build a small tent city while they figure out a way off of the planet before the Confederation finds them.

He befriends Renna, and he tries to take care of Dee, a young girl who was orphaned in the crash. Dee runs off one afternoon, and when he goes looking for her, he finds a massive sandstorm coming in. The survivors take refuge in an abandoned Räton house, except Sky Ranger, who searches futilely for the last two members of the search party for Dee. They're captured separately.

Sky Ranger finds unexpected friends and allies in his captivity: remnants of the Extrahuman Union. He also finds unspeakably cruel captors in his former employers, the Confederation.

Fly Into Fire is just as compelling as Broken. It's a fast-paced adventure story, where well-drawn characters have to figure out how to survive the government that oppresses them long enough to escape.

Another aspect of this book that may appeal to some readers is that Renna is a trans woman. It's not a book about transitioning or being trans*; Renna's just this woman who's a refugee, who falls in love, who makes friends, who fights for her friends...and she's trans. Granted, being trans is the reason she's a refugee, but that's still not the main point of the story.

Fly Into Fire comes out January 24. If you want to whet your appetite and you haven't read it yet, you can pick up Broken here.

Book review: No god but God

2011-12-29T13:40:00.002-05:00

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan. updated edition, 2011.

Reza Aslan was born in Iran, and his parents fled to America with him and his younger sister in 1979, during the revolution. He's a scholar of Islam and its history. When Aslan originally published this book in 2005, it was in response to the growing Islamophobia in the United States and the western world. He wanted to show that Muslims are no different than any other residents on this planet, and that, in the US and other (theoretically) secular western democracies, they are as deserving of religious freedom as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, atheists, and everyone else.

The book that resulted does this very well. He begins with the Arab tribes in what is now Saudi Arabia, where Mohammed lived, and he describes Arab polytheism and their tribal traditions. The origin of Islam that he describes, when Mohammed moved to Medina (then called Yathrib), is one of equality for all.

Aslan spends a good half of the book on Mohammed, his life, and the internecine, often literal, warfare that occurred after his death. He also describes the two main minority sects, Shi'ism and Sufism, each in their own chapter. Then he skips forward to the mid-1800s, when Muslims yearned to throw off the yoke of colonialism in India and Egypt, touching on the effects colonialism had on Islam and its evolution, including the beginnings of the Taliban.

There's a chapter set in the Islamic Republic of Iran, beginning with a description of his trip back to Tehran as an adult after the travel ban was lifted, which leads into a reminiscence of his family's run, hand gripped firmly in hand, through the airport to catch a plane out.

This same chapter ends in India, with the British partitioning of it into Pakistan and India. He says that pluralism and secularization, not secularism, are the key to democracy in the Muslim world, declaring

Finally, neither human rights nor pluralism is the result of secularization, they are its root cause, meaning that any democratic society--Islamic or otherwise--dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following the unavoidable path toward political secularization.

Because, in Islam, only the Prophet held both secular and religious authority, and he is no longer here, so the leaders in an Islamic democracy can only be in charge of civil things (like, for example, traffic laws, business regulations, etc).

The final chapter is dedicated to the Islamic reformation. Aslan compares the internet age to Gutenberg's printing press and Luther's translation of the Bible from Latin into German. (In an echo of this concept, The Economist wrote how Martin Luther went viral.) He discusses the various movements in Islam right now and what some of them could result in.

He glosses over the Crusades, unfortunately, and any chapter could easily be twice as long. He gives an extensive bibliography and very detailed end notes, which someone who wants more detail can turn to.

It's very well-written, not dry or tedious, but still with a turn toward the academic at times. It's a very accessible history of Islam, and I highly recommend it.

Long time, no update

2011-12-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

I keep meaning to not get so far behind in writing here, but I keep getting distracted.

I bought myself a Kobo Touch for Christmas. I like it so far, though it has trouble with rtfs over a certain size, so I had to do some workarounds to be able to use it to beta read a friend's novel. I've also read two more books on it, one of which I'm reviewing for Bull Spec, and the other I'm probably writing up here, though I'll ask Sam if he wants it. I'm also on the list for an ARC of Exogene, the sequel to Germline. Pretty excited about that!

You should read Pilgrim of the Sky by my friend Natania Barron. This is the one I'm reviewing for Bull Spec, so I'll just say here that it's a compelling whirlwind adventure with lovely, poetic descriptions that are still accessible to people who weren't English Lit majors or MFA students. I'm not just saying that because I know her, either. I couldn't put it down, especially once it took the left turn at Albuquerque.

I just finished a book I bought back in October, and I intend to review it here in the next few days.

In personal-life stuff, I've applied for jobs and been rejected every time. I got to the interview for one of them, but no farther. I got advice from the HR person on what I need to either work on or find better examples of, and I can apply for similar positions again in May. Assuming there are any. I'm not holding my breath.

Nervous anticipation

2011-11-12T17:15:00.001-05:00

Lois McMaster Bujold recently posted that she's finished the near-final draft of her next book, which focuses on Ivan. Since Ivan is my favorite character in the Vorkosiverse (though Cordelia rocks, and Elena Bothari is awesome, and Laisa's pretty darn cool, too, and... yeah, it's hard to pick just one), you'd think I'd be jumping for joy at a book finally focusing on him.

I'm awaiting the release with trepidation. As much as I love Bujold's books (especially Memory), the constant backbeat of "happiness = man + woman + babies" is really frustrating to me. It's so darn heterocentric.

Not all relationships are man + woman. Not all man + woman relationships result in babies. (I have none, and no plans to do so!) Not every person who is single is desirous of and pining for a marriage/other long-term relationship.

Yeah, the Vor have the excuse of needing to carry on the family line because they're basically inherited nobility, but there's precedent in the text (and, you know, actual Earth history...) for nephews or cousins, etc, to inherit.

I'm sure I'll read it, and I'll enjoy it, but I'll be saddened by Ivan, who has spent the last 14 books avoiding marriage but having plenty of girlfriends and otherwise enjoying the bachelor lifestyle, succumbing to marriage fever. The explanation that he's "grown up" or "matured" and finally realized he needs to settle down and get married isn't all that great. It assumes that the only way to be a real grown-up is to get married (and, of course, have babies), which bothers me on a visceral level.

People say that you should write the book you want to read. That's why my characters reflect my experience. There are happily married people with children, happily married people without children, happily unmarried (single or partnered) people with or without children, unhappily married people (with or without children), and unhappily single people. That's a fairly reflective cross-section of people I know in real life (though I don't think I know any people who are currently unhappily married; I know some who were, but divorced and are in happier relationships now).

Fiction reflects (or should reflect) reality. Reality is pretty diverse and awesome.

So you like male writers. So what?

2011-11-06T15:00:00.002-05:00

A writing pal of mine recently wrote that he figured he ought to read more books/short fiction by men, because he realized his shelves were mostly full of books by women. Cool, whatever.

My shelves are mostly full of books by women. They're mostly full of books by two authors: Lois McMaster Bujold's entire bibliography (including The Spirit Ring) and a sizable fraction of CJ Cherryh's bibliography. My shelves are a good 4' wide, and her books take up two of them. The only other author whose books come close to the same amount of space? Terry Pratchett. Lynn Flewelling comes in fourth place, with seven books.

That doesn't count the random selection of Literatyoor from high school or college and assorted non-fiction, nor the extensive manga collection (mostly by women, except the large Naoki Urasawa section).

Apparently, it's brave for people to say they like male authors, or that they plan to read more male authors. I disagree with another writing pal that the drive to promote women in fiction has evolved into open season on men, as if a predominately male field of writers in the past means that men writing now must all be assholes.

I didn't talk up male writer TC McCarthy's debut novel Germline, because I hate male writers and think no one should talk about them. Oh wait, I blogged about it and wrote a really positive review of it for a magazine, and I've talked it up to everybody I know who enjoys military SF.

I didn't review books by Mark Van Name, David Drake, Eric Flint, Tom Standage, or Patrick O'Brian in the last three months, either. The feminist anti-male-writer conspiracy has me silenced!

But, apparently,

This is what we’ve done, readers. We’ve allowed ourselves – as a community of writers and readers – to think that talking about women (in a positive way, of course) is right and good, but liking men leads to shady behavior.

As they say on wikipedia, [citation needed].

It is good to expand one's reading horizons. It is good to find books written by people who come from different backgrounds than you, because they often have different perspectives than you do. If you are reading books by only one type of person, you are limiting yourself. If you say that only men can write SF, and women don't belong in the SF clubhouse, you may be sexist.

No one is saying that reading books by male writers makes you a bad person prone to "shady behavior." What people are saying, and this comes up more often than it should, frankly, is that readers should expand their horizons.

Isn't expanding horizons and exploring different perspectives what science fiction's supposed to be about? Why's there such a push-back, then?

Book review: A History of the World in Six Glasses

2011-11-03T19:15:00.000-04:00

A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage, 2005.

I often enjoy reading pop histories, especially if they have a sort of gimmick to them. In this book, Standage looks at how beverages shaped world history.

He starts out with beer, which was invented/discovered by the Mesopotamians around the same time humanity was working out agriculture. The Hymn to Ninkasi was a recipe for beer, and a brewery in California made some based on it. I'd be interested to try it! (The Mesopotamians made a bread of sorts with the malted barley and used that as their beer starter. No hops, at that point.)

Then the Greeks started making wine, which the Mesopotamians called "beer of the mountains," and that became fuel for Greek philosophy. The Romans and early Christians adopted the drink, and wine became important for ritual.

The Age of Sail and colonization brought sugar plantations, which brought molasses, which brought rum. Rum bought slaves in Africa, slaves produced sugar, and the byproduct of sugar refinement--molasses--was turned into rum. The colonists in the inland US, where buying molasses was too expensive, turned to corn and rye to make whiskey (bourbon and rye, respectively).

Coffee was very popular in the Muslim world, where alcohol was forbidden, but with the advent of rationalism in the 17th century, people wanted a drink that increased their mental acuity rather than make them drunk. Coffeehouses became clearinghouses for news (the internet of its time), and people held discussions in them. The London Stock Exchange grew out of a coffeehouse!

The Chinese kingdoms and empires of the tenth century had spread tea throughout Asia, but the British Empire popularized it through the world. Tea became the drink for the masses in England.

The sixth glass is Coca-Cola, which, for better or for worse, parallels the rise of American power. (Standage entitles one chapter "Globalization in a bottle.") Unsurprisingly, Coke became popular in the US during Prohibition. It went to Europe and North Africa with the troops in World War II, and after that, there was no stopping it.

As an epilogue, Standage asks what the next beverage to shape human history will be. Water, he says. He's probably right; much conflict today is about water use and water rights, and that's not going to go away.

I enjoyed the book, and if you like pop histories, you may, too. It's not extremely in depth (at just over 300 pages, including endnotes, index, and references), but there are always the sources he drew from.

On eating vegetarian in Germany

2011-10-24T12:05:00.001-04:00

John Scalzi is back from Germany, and he says he's happy that I was not a vegetarian. In comments, someone agrees.

There's a pervasive myth that German food consists entirely of meat, notably in the form of sausage. I can assure you it doesn't. It's true that a lot of the traditional recipes are based on meat, and there are a lot of sausages, but there are a lot of other options. Yes, even in traditional restaurants.

I've been vegetarian since 1993. I spent my junior year of college (1996-97) living in Germany. I had, frankly, a much easier time eating vegetarian there than I did in my college's dining hall in Pennsylvania, or than I do eating here in North Carolina -- where even the vegetables have meat in them (often in the form of a hambone thrown in, or bits of bacon), at least in traditional Southern restaurants. Germans caught on to the organic food thing much earlier than Americans. I had probably the best soy sausage in my life while I was living in Marburg, picked up at a Bioladen (organic food shop) and grilled for Canada Day (one of my neighbors was Canadian).

When in Germany, if I'm staying in a pension (akin to a B&B), I eat the traditional breakfast: rolls, cheese, butter, jam, Nutella, quark, muesli, soft-boiled eggs. Everything except the cold cuts. If I'm in a hotel, I'll pop over to a bakery or cafe and get a pastry or two: nut-nougat croissant, pretzel roll, cheese roll. Left to my own devices (with a kitchen and grocery store), I eat the same thing I do here: cereal and milk.

For lunch, there's always falafel or vegetarian döner, pizza, sandwiches from the bakery (or your own kitchen), or whatever sounds interesting. For dinner, you can sit down anywhere. I've had really good Indian food in Munich, a nice Mission-style burrito in Berlin, vegetarian Maultaschen (also in Berlin), spinach strudel, baked pasta casserole, South Asian fusion (also in Berlin), amazing brown butter tortellini (in Berlin), delicious cheese spaetzle in Vienna...

I think you get the point by now, and I'm not the only one who's had a relatively easy time eating as a vegetarian in Germany. The folks at Happy Cow have a section for Germany to help you out, and I've found that Lonely Planet guides are good at pointing out places that have veg*n options as well as listing some straight-up veg*n places. (They're my favorite guide books, and they've never steered me wrong.)

Book review: Master and Commander

2011-10-17T16:15:00.000-04:00

Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian. 1970.

Since I enjoy space opera, I've been told many times I need to read this series, since, really, space opera is a riff on the Age of Sail (in space!). After giving David Drake's futuristic take on this source a go, I thought I'd give this a try.

Captain Jack Aubrey, British Navy, meets Stephen Maturin, a doctor and naturalist, and persuades him to join his ship as its surgeon. They sail through the Mediterranean a lot and fight the French (and maybe also the Spanish? I was never very clear on that, and the whole Napoleonic Era is largely skipped in US high school curricula). There's also a subplot about the Irish Catholic rebellion.

I'd been warned about the quantity of ship-talk, but, man, that was more than I expected. There were entire pages I had no idea what was going on, except they were talking about topsails, mainsails, gallants, topgallants, royals, studdingsails, staysails, masts, yards, xebecs, snows, sloops, frigates, and cannons. "Oh, they're doing something with the ship again," was basically my take-away from it. That was fine when all they were doing was setting the rigging, but when it was important to what was going on, like during the naval battles, the result is just confusion. The only time I understood what was going on was when Jack was explaining in normal-people language to Stephen.

It's meticulously researched and written in meticulous 1810-era British navy slang and jargon. If you can handle that sort of thing, have at it. I find that it's too hard to wade through, honestly. Needs more spaceships.

World Beer Festival, Durham, 2011

2011-10-10T11:32:00.000-04:00

These are my notes from this year. I didn't take very detailed notes, because I, in a fit of talent and rushing out the door, forgot both my pen and my carefully-planned list of booths I wanted to hit. I managed to recreate it on my phone, at least. A bit of a pain in the ass, but what can you do?

Unibroue, Quebec, Canada: Don de Dieu (tripel) I tried this toward the end of the night, and I remember it being good. Fruity and sweet, like most tripels.

Legend Brewing, Richmond, VA: Tripel: nice, drinkable. Quad: fucking amazing. I passed this one around, and everyone liked it (even Ben, who isn't into quads), then I had to get more, because I didn't have any left.

Kind Beers, Charlotte, NC: Belgian Style red ale: Mo got this, and I had a sip. It was awful. Very bitter and unpleasant.

North Coast Brewing Co, Fort Bragg, CA: La Merle (Belgian specialty ale): It was fruity and pleasant, and it had a thick mouthfeel. I had a sip of Enne's Brother Thelonious (Belgian dark strong ale), and it was as good as I remembered it.

Kuhnhenn Brewing Co, Warren, MI: I wanted to try their White Devil (imperial white), but they didn't have it. The imperial creme brulee java stout was really good, though it had a strong coffee bitterness (unlike the Southern Tier creme brulee stout). So I tried the Simcoe Silly (Belgian/American hybrid) and strongly disliked it.

Timmermans Brouwerij, Dilbeer-Itterbeek, Belgium: Bourgougne des Flanders (Flanders brown ale). When I got the sample, the pourer said, "It's sour, just warning you." I told him I drink straight Berliner Weisse, which is really damn sour, so bring it on. This was easily my favorite beer of the night, with Legend's quad in a very close second. It wasn't very sour; I'd argue that it's not sour at all, but someone who doesn't enjoy sour beers might disagree. [Interestingly, Belgian whites/wit beers are also technically sour beers, though I don't find them sour at all. I can kind of taste it if I think about it while drinking one. Lambics are another popular sour style.] It had a fruity note to it, and a heavy, thick mouthfeel. Very, very nice.

Mystery Brewing, Hillsborough, NC. I sponsored their Kickstarter project last year or the year before, so I had to go try their beer. I tried the Langhorne (rye wit), and it was odd. It tasted like a wit, but it had an unfamiliar note to it, which was the rye. I'd try it again to see if I liked it. Sadly, the beer we all wanted to try, the Six Impossible Things chocolate breakfast stout, had fallen victim to a catastrophic beersplosion. Ben got the Queen Anne's Revenge (black IPA), and I think he said he hated it less than other black IPAs he'd tried. (Neither of us is a fan of IPAs in general; they're victim to the American craft brewers' belief that MOAR HOPS is better. Yuck.)

Bull City Burger and Brewery, Durham, NC. Pro Bono Publico (porter): All I have written down is "bitter."

Aviator Brewing Company, Fuquay Varina, NC. Devil's Tramping Ground (tripel). I don't know if the batch was off or if it had gotten skunked (or if they gave me the wrong one), but this was very unpleasant. It wasn't like a tripel at all.

Roth Brewing, Raleigh, NC. Forgotten Hollow cinnamon porter: I still love this beer. I first tried it when I went to the Flying Saucer one time when my dad was in town and they had it on draft. It's kind of like drinking autumn. Their Dark Construct stout was nice, though it's not going to be my new favorite stout. Ben really enjoyed it.

Palm Brouwerij, Steenhuffel, Belgium. Palm (Belgian amber ale). Dear readers, I poured this one out.

Boulevard Brewing Co, Kansas City, MO. The Sixth Glass (quadrupel): Not as nice as the Legend quad, but it still had a good flavor and modest sweetness to it.

Holy Mackerel Beers, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Panic Attack (Belgian Strong): very sweet, thick mouthfeel. Special Golden Ale: good, but not as sweet.

Anderson Valley Brewing Company, Boonville, CA. Winter Solstice (seasonal ale): tasted like Christmas spiced cider. It was really good. This would probably be my third favorite new beer.

Number of beers sampled: 18 (plus refills on two of them, one of them twice...)
Top three samples: Timmerman's Bourgogne des Flanders; Legend's quad; Anderson Valley's Winter Solstice.

Movie review: Space Battleship Yamato (2010 live action)

2011-09-20T12:29:00.001-04:00

I imprinted on Leiji Matsumoto's works at a very early age. I was about 5 (we only had HBO for a year), and I was watching the cartoons they showed one day. There was a kid, a space train, and this woman with long blonde hair, which was all I could remember about it until I found a VHS (remember those?) of Galaxy Express 999 at Suncoast (remember them?) when I was in college. Those were the days when you had to pay extra for the "collector's edition," which was Japanese audio with subtitles, because those letters were really expensive.

Back in the 80s, Matsumoto's other main work, Space Battleship Yamato, was dubbed into English and shown on American TV as Star Blazers, renaming ace pilot Kodai Susumu to Derek Wildstar. (I almost put Rick Hunter there, but that's what Ichijou Hikaru ended up as in Robotech, the US adaptation of Macross.) This fan site has plot summaries.

Last December, the live action movie was released in theaters, starring quite a few famous Japanese actors like Kimura Takuya (from the J-drama and movie Hero, about a lawyer, among other things). They made a few changes, notably making Dr Sado, of the bottle of sake and large orange cat, a woman, making it a little less of a sausage-fest. Still, there are only three named women on the Yamato: Sado, Mori Yuki, and the one whose name I forget but who's one of the Black Tigers.

It's the year 2199, and about five years ago, meteor bombs started hitting the Earth, making the surface too irradiated to live on and sending people underground to try to eke out a living. Humanity is fighting off Gamilas attacks, and everything they do, the Gamilas adapt to counter them. Captain Okita is leading an assault/defense force at Mars, and the Gamilan fleet is too strong for their weaponry. Kodai Mamoru, captain of the Yukikaze, uses his ship as a shield to allow Okita to escape and take the news to Earth.

Kodai Susumu is a scavenger. He goes out looking for metal to take to the military. While he's out scavenging, a strange object falls from the sky and knocks off his protective gear. He picks it up and mysteriously survives the deadly radiation levels. At the same time, Okita's ship returns. He takes the object to the military, and they examine it and find coordinates for planet Iscandar, where the Gamilas come from, and blueprints for a warp engine and a powerful weapon, the wave motion gun.

The leader of the military decides to send the Yamato out to Iscandar to find a decontamination device, which would allow people to move back to the surface, and Kodai joins up again. He'd been an ace pilot at the time of the initial Gamilan attacks, but he left after a personal tragedy. He is angry at Okita, because he believes Okita sacrificed his brother in order to escape. He meets up with his old buddies, the Black Tigers.

The name for the ship wasn't chosen at random. The Yamato was a WW2 battleship that was sent on a mission to defend Okinawa until it was destroyed, to give the Japanese people a last hope (as Kodai explains in a speech at the end). Pasting from wikipedia, Yamato's symbolic might was such that some Japanese citizens held the belief that their country could never fall as long as the ship was able to fight. The word Yamato also carries significance in Japan as a poetic name for the country and remains as a metaphor for the end of the empire.

While they're in transit, they're repeatedly attacked by Gamilan forces, and when they eventually make it to Iscandar, they find something unexpected. I won't spoil the ending, but I saw it coming, because I've seen the old anime movies.

At times, it's goofy. I couldn't help but laugh at the Star Trek-like "the bridge is shaking, everybody lean to the right and look like you're hanging on" effects, but the CG was really nice. I couldn't figure out why they made a land assault at Iscandar rather than stay in their nice ships, other than to allow for heroism and sacrifice. The zero-g-love scene made me giggle (mainly because it put this song in my head). But it's based on one of the classics of science fiction anime, and even as it changes and updates a few things (like the Gamilans being energy beings (they're still blue, though) and the Cosmo Zero having something like a Valkyrie's Gerwalk mode, probably just because it looks cool), it's still the story Matsumoto wrote at its core.

It's worth seeing, if you know how to get hold of it. There's no word yet of an English release.

Back from Dragon*Con

2011-09-08T14:18:00.003-04:00

I've actually been back since Monday evening, but Tuesday my lack of sleep caught up with me in the form of a low-grade migraine (sinus pressure, headache, no appetite, mild sensitivity to light), and yesterday I had to get back into my normal routine.

I had a lot of fun, as usual, though there weren't as many panels or people I wanted to see this year. Yeah, they had Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), but he wasn't my favorite, and I don't think he could top Matthew Lewis' panel from a few years ago. I really enjoyed Eric Flint's panel in the alternate history track about Marxism. It was a guided discussion (by a moderator, who asked questions like "How does your Marxism influence your writing?" and "How do you portray class in your works?") between him and SM Stirling (who is very much not a Marxist), which was incredibly interesting. It gave me a few things to think about for my writing.

This year I watched the parade, which I hadn't done in any of the previous five years I've gone. It's a great way to see a lot of cool costumes without much effort. Also, the whole lot of Stormtroopers bringing up the rear (yay, 501st) is a really impressive sight.

I also got my copy of Shades of Milk and Honey signed.

There weren't a whole lot of shiny things for me in the dealers halls, though I bought a t-shirt from an artist's table (it was tan! with a cute kitsune on it!) and two model kits from Gundam 00. And a statue of Ozma Lee's Valkyrie from Macross Frontier. Not much else really jumped out at me.

I really enjoy going to Dragon*Con; it's a 4-day nerd party, where you don't get judged for wanting to dress up like Superman or Batman or Zatanna or Captain Harlock or a space Marine or an alien or a zombie, vampire, werewolf, or Macho Man Randy Savage or ... you get the point. It's getting ridiculous to get hotel rooms; rumor has it the Hilton is already sold out for next year (though I'm skeptical of that). The Marriott and Hyatt sell out within hours of the block opening.

I want to attend a World Con sometime soon, but, annoyingly, the next two are Labor Day weekend. Not that I could afford to go to both even if they were different weekends, mind. 2012 is going to be in Chicago, 2013 in San Antonio. 2014 hasn't been voted on yet, but London's bid is unopposed. I can't afford to go to London, and being in London is extremely expensive (especially since it's usually 2 pounds to the dollar, and a sit-down meal will cost you 20 pounds or so). I'm not super excited about San Antonio; it's Labor Day weekend. Atlanta is hot enough, and I don't want to go someplace hotter. Which means Chicago next year is the likeliest option in the near future. I've never really visited Chicago, and depending on how things work out with the hotel and travel days, we could have a short vacation there.

Which leads to an additional problem. My oldest cat, Isis, is an evil tortie, and she has diabetes. The cat sitter we hired for last weekend had so much trouble with Her Evilness that she had to bring a second person to help hold her to get her shot, for which we owe her additional monies. It stressed Isis out badly enough that she must have had a sugar spike, because she was sick when we got home and is on two different antibiotics right now. She doesn't hate our usual cat sitter, but she's got a second job now, which gives her crazy hours, so she's not always available. Maybe by next year, she'll have enough seniority not to get the shit hours.

We need to decide fairly quickly, though. Memberships are $175 each right now, and the price goes up October 1. Blech. (I understand why they're so expensive: each World Con committee has only one chance to recoup their costs for guest transport, hotel rental, etc. I can still think it's too damned expensive.)

Book review: When the Tide Rises

2011-09-04T09:00:00.002-04:00

When the Tide Rises, David Drake. 2008, Baen Books.

This is the sixth novel in Drake's RCN series. I haven't read any of the previous books, but that didn't make much difference, as far as I can tell. Perhaps I missed some of the in-jokes or references, but that's not a big deal. It stands well on its own.

In the introduction, Drake cites the memoirs of Lord Cochrane as his source/inspiration for these books. This is the same memoir that Patrick O'Brian used for his Aubrey/Maturin books, so they bear a lot of similarity.

Commander Daniel Leary is in the employ of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy, and he's assigned to a planet that's declared independence from the Alliance, Cinnabar's enemy. He makes a stop at Diamondia, a planet under siege by Alliance forces, to check in with the man in charge there and see what the most recent intel is.

Adele Mundy, Leary's signals officer and librarian-hacker-spy, meets a young man who's the grandson of her mentor. His parents have just been killed by the head of the Alliance, and he wants her help. She brings him along on the trip, even though her sociopathic servant and bodyguard Tovera thinks it's a bad idea.

Once they arrive at Bagaria, Leary is enjoined to the Bagarian fleet, and he commands them in a few raids in Alliance space. There are crosses and double-crosses, and politicking, and hardcore librarian spying.

There are a lot of details about the ships and sailing, and I will admit I skimmed them. I found it odd that starships had literal sailing masts and rigging, but it fit the book itself. I'm not sure what the sails were made of (probably described in more detail in earlier books in the series), though I remember mention of it being very thin. (Nanomaterial?) I will say that it's disheartening to read about a ship with the name of your football club (which itself is named for a ship) being sunk a few hours before they're set to take the pitch. (Sports fans are a superstitious lot. We won, btb, for the first time this season.)

There's a lot of adventure, and I really liked the hardcore traumapast librarian. If you read the Aubrey/Maturin books (Master and Commander, etc) and thought, "You know what these books need? Spaceships," the RCN series is for you. If you like Bujold's Vorkosigan books and don't mind fine attention to sailing detail, you might enjoy them, too.

The first three books are available at the Baen Free Library, beginning with With the Lightnings.

Book review: 1632

2011-09-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

1632, by Eric Flint. 2000, Baen. Available in print and at the Baen Free Library

The premise behind 1632 and its sequels is that a mining town in West Virginia from the year 2000 is magically swapped with an equal-sized piece of land in Thuringia in 1632. The Americans are dropped in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, during which the Catholic Holy Roman Empire was doing its level best to wipe out the Protestants.

Mike Stearns, a union organizer and UMWA member, organizes a militia to defend their town and the neighboring towns. Their personal gun collections are vastly superior to the arquebuses of the 17th century, so they have quick, decisive victories, until they get embroiled in the greater conflict surrounding them.

Flint goes into a good bit of detail about how the town residents can scale their existing level of technology--electricity, internal combustion engines, etc--down to something more sustainable with the resources available to them in the mid-17th century. He also goes into a good bit of detail about the military history and manouevres.

There's a very strong "Wooo! USA!" jingoism to the book, but it's a leftish sort of jingoism, focused on equality, freedom of religion, and worker's rights. From someone of Flint's background (former labor organizer and member of the Socialist Workers' Party), that's not too surprising.

There were several not-so-subtle digs at Americans, including remarks from 1632-era characters like "Americans don't know how to cook without a ton of meat," and "Why do they think walking everywhere is such a horrible thing?" which I found rather apt. He also takes a few digs at institutionalized sexism.

The best marksman in town is a high school senior named Julie. Before they got bamfed back to the 17th century, she was training for the Olympic biathlon qualification. She takes her shiny rifle and joins a party to act as a sniper. Mike tells her it's OK if she can't bring herself to shoot people, and that even in the military, they let you drop out of sniping without prejudice. She ignores him and sets up her targets.

Finally, an expression came to her young, almost angelic face. But Mike couldn't quite interpret it. Sarcasm? No, it was more like whimsy; or maybe, wry amusement.

"Did Uncle Frank ever tell you the story," she asked, "about the first time I went deer hunting? How I cried like a baby after I shot my first buck?"

Mike nodded. Julie's expression grew very wry.

"You know why? The deer was so pretty. And it had never done me any harm." Julie cocked her head toward her observer, a girl no older than she. Another recent high-school graduate. Slender, where Julie was not, but otherwise—peas from a pod.

"Hey, Karen! Those guys look pretty to you?"

Karen shifted her gum into a corner of her mouth. "Nope. Ugly bastards. Mean looking, too. Look more like wild dogs than cute little deer."

Julie bared her teeth. The smile was far more savage than anything belonging on the face of an eighteen-year-old, male or female. "That's what I thought. Hey, Karen! Watcha think they'll do—to you and me, I mean—if they get their hands on us?"

Karen was back to chewing her gum. Her words came out in a semimumble. "Don't want to think about it, girl. But I'll tell you one thing. Won't be trying to sweet-talk us into the backseat of a car. Not likely."

The smile left Julie's face; but, if anything, the sense of whimsy was even stronger in her eyes. She gave Mike a level gaze.
"That's the whole problem with allowing men into combat," she said solemnly. "You guys are just too emotional about the whole thing."

Overall, I enjoyed the book, even though I had some quibbles with the German. ("Thank God" is three words in German, not two, and it's not "Danke Gott," but "Gott sei Dank." Threw me out of the story both times it came up. This is not likely to be a problem for most readers, however.) There were some stylistic quirks that bothered me, but not enough to make me stop reading. If you like alternate history and military fiction, with some focus on the characters, you might like this. (And it's available free online, so giving the first few chapters a go won't cost you anything beyond your usual internet fee.)

Off to Dragon*Con!

2011-08-31T15:37:00.002-04:00

In the morning, anyway. I've got my stuff together, clothes and food and a book to get signed, and we're driving off in the morning.

I'll be reading with Broad Universe at 10 pm Friday in Greenbriar (Hyatt). Come say hi!

Book review: Jump Gate Twist

2011-08-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

Jump Gate Twist, Mark L. Van Name. Baen Books, 2010.

This omnibus collects the first two Jon & Lobo books, One Jump Ahead and Slanted Jack, and two short stories, "My Sister, My Self," and "Lobo, Actually." The author has written intros and afterwords for each section of the book, which reveal some insight into the writing of each tale.

One Jump Ahead starts with Jon attempting to take a vacation, but, thanks to a careless indiscretion, he's hired to rescue a man's daughter from her kidnappers. One of the local heads of a vast, interplanetary conglomerate is trying to get sole usage rights to the planet Jon's vacationing on, and the other major vast, interplanetary conglomerate is angling for the same thing, so the daughter is kidnapped. Except Jon ends up entangled in a plot that is a lot more complicated than that, and he seeks the aid of his former employer, the Saw, a mercenary outfit.

In "My Sister, My Self," Jon loses the person who means the most to him: his sister, Jennie. But not before she "fixes" him. The events in this story are referenced throughout the rest of Jon's stories, and this gives us some insight into his life on Pinkelponker before he's taken to Dump Island (see Children No More).

Slanted Jack is a con artist who used to be Jon's partner in crime, and he waltzes into Jon's life with a request to help this boy who's a descendent of people from Pinkelponker. Of course it doesn't turn out to be so easy, and Jon ends up tangling with arms smugglers, the colonial governing bodies, and the followers of a religion based on Pinkelponker, as well as Jack.

"Lobo, Actually," is a Christmas story told by the AI of a Predator-Class Armored Vehicle: Jon's ship, Lobo, but before he's Jon's ship. A young boy's father is dying of an illness that's going around their planet, because the hospitals don't have the cure. Lobo feels something like pity for him, though it's partly also boredom from being stuck in the town square as their pet scarecrow.

All together, the stories that comprise Jump Gate Twist are enjoyable. They're full of action and adventure, with politics creeping up the side. Jon himself isn't political, but the structural politics of the universe he inhabits are visible as he maneuvers through them. If you like adventure stories (in space!), pick up this book.

My Online Life

2011-08-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

There has been much discussion about pseudonymity and real-name policies in the wake of Google+ (I'm on it! Come say hello!), and what expectations different groups have for online interactions.

I didn't meet the internet until I started college. I didn't get email until I started college. I'd guess about half my peer group (Gen X) was about the same, though among my friends (geeks with a high fraction of CS/math/physics types), I was late to the party. They had 512 baud dialup to BBSes and whatever. I couldn't figure out how to play Oregon Trail on the high school computers. I'm sort of the generation that had a lot of formative experiences in meat-space before the internet really took off. (I know people who are a decade younger than me who say they're "from the internet.")

Yet I have many friends online, some of whom I've never met in person, but I see pictures of their kids or pets on facebook or twitter. I received a box full of Turkish media (books and DVDs) in English from an almost-complete stranger who offered to send me some things to help me understand Turkish culture better. (I was expecting, like a book or 2. I got 5 plus 3 DVDs.) I commented that I love German Christmas foods, and an acquaintance sent me a care package full of marzipan and Lebkuchen and hazelnut chocolate. I hope someday to return the favor, or pay it forward to someone else.

I have friends who I met online and have become close friends, with whom I share trials and joys, to whom I offer support and congratulations. Some of them I've since met in person, but many, possibly even most, I haven't.

I met my husband via the internet, through some people I met in person who had an IRC channel they hung out on and a mailing list.

Thanks to twitter and the German football league, I have casual friends who live in Norway, Pakistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh, as well as Germany and various places in the US and Canada. I talk with fans of my club team on twitter, and the next time I make it to Berlin, I'll see about meeting some of them in person. (To catch a match at the stadium or in a bar, whatever.)

I've been online for seventeen years now, close to half my life. I became more involved in the internet about thirteen years ago, when I met the people with the IRC channel. I've had a dozen online identities since then, on mailing lists, general forums, topic-oriented forums, blogs, communities. I currently have seven different handles online, some more public than others. I don't make it a secret that @exaggerated and @strafraum are both me, but @exaggerated is where I put pictures of my cats and links to my blog, and @strafraum is where I talk about (FIFA) football.

Where was I going with this? Right. I think online is where a lot of people have formative experiences, develop deep friendships, and generally interact with other like-minded individuals. It's so much easier now than it was twenty years ago to find other people who like reading/writing the same kind of stories you do. I've wondered so many times how my high school life would have been different if I'd had access to the internet, or even known that there were other people out there who liked SF/F. (A much less trivial aspect is that LGBTQ teens in small towns can find support online through various communities and know that they're not alone.)

Oftentimes, these experiences take place under a pseudonym, a handle. The handle, once used long enough, becomes as real as the name on the driver's license or birth certificate. It's a name we choose, not the name we are given, and that's as real to us as the name our parents chose for us at birth -- and sometimes more real. People legally change their names for a variety of reasons, and whether it's because they hate their birth name or because they're transgender and their birth name is wrong, those are equally valid reasons.

The first link in this post discusses who is harmed by real-name policies. The answer is anyone who is outside the societally-accepted norm.

ReaderCon 22 writeup: No Childhood Left Behind

2011-07-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

I haven't seen any other writeups on this panel yet, and, of course, this is one I didn't take ~excellent~ notes on. (I was always a poor note-taker in school, preferring to rely on vague suggestions to jog my memory.) I have just over 2 pages, mostly attributed. The discussion wandered some, and I had a hard time keeping up with it at times.

Panelists: Leah Bobet, Chris Moriarty, Sonya Taaffe, ? Wilber, JoSelle Vanderhooft

Taaffe introduced the panel and the topic, and there was a brief discussion about what each panelist thought the panel was about. Someone mentioned in their introduction that one aspect of the panel description involved the old standards, and I have two unattributed paraphrased comments.
- Problematic old standards are the books people keep reading
- socialization and the ossification of SF culture

Question: Is there a YA canon/classics?
Bobet: It's what people decided to read when they were kids; it doesn't reflect reality more than other canons do (eg high school/college Literary Canon)
Wilber: All post-WW2 SF was written for youth, specifically boys. It was full of American optimism, which changed in the 60s as the boys grew up and found women, and we learned that America isn't always right. It's gone in a new direction.
Taaffe: Are there books you'd consider canon (ie, that you and a lot of people read as a kid) but don't want to admit? Is Piers Anthony canon? (many groans and laughs from the audience and panel)
Moriarty: There's not really a canon, just a nebulous list of things that a critical mass of people admit they have read. There's a big wall between YA and SF (in bookstores & many libraries), leading to ossification. Are we losing the next generation because they aren't being shown the SF that exists?
audience: when I was young, we only had Asimov & Heinlein.
Wilber: pays attention to what his teenaged daughter reads. lately it's been Scott Westerfeld.
Bobet: Segregation is an SF cultural thing. SF readers are smarter, special (different), and we don't need YA SF because kids go straight to adult books. We did this to ourselves.
Moriarty agrees.
Wilber: read adult SF of the day, which could be classed as YA today because there was no strong language or sex
Bobet: The emotional age of the books matters. The Belgariad (not marketed as YA) is perfect for a childhood understanding of the world
Vanderhooft: Is this segregation a result of the (recent) American fear of science?
Taaffe: There was a brief period in the 40s where scientists were heroes. Eleanor Campbell's "Boy in the Mushroom Cloud" (?) had a mad scientist who wasn't evil or comic relief
Wilber: US and UK SF diverged in the 50s, and they haven't converged again.
audience: Is the older Asimov-Heinlein canon relevant to today's youth? How do we recommend books to kids?
Bobet: we have our heads up our asses on this.
[crosstalk]
audience: there's a difference between YA books kids like and ones adults like.
audience (librarian): once we stopped taking award winners (and started choosing based on recommendation?) circulation went up
audience: young people today have a lot of shared experiences, books they all talk about
Moriarty: adult canon - a bunch of old books approved by academics, but youth canon changes in waves with generations
audience: isn't canon what you need to have read to understand the rest of literature? (gave example about the bible and much western lit) Especially in a grenre like SF that often responds to its predecessors?
Moriarty: not as much a problem in fantasy as it is in hard SF, which is very referential
Wilber: it becomes exclusive
[rambling audience comment led into digression about definition of YA and the Library of Congress]
audience: interested in moving canon, read OZ but not many people recently have read them. They were the Harry Potter or Twilight of their day; there are problematic representations as well as things like dropped subplots
Taaffe: E Nesbitt is great, until you hit the anti-Semitism
Bobet: reread a book about an orphanage and realized it was about eugenics (missed title)
audience: moving canon as a gateway drug
audience: kids & YA totally separate, SF was restricted in the 60s, we've come full circle and it's exclusive again
audience: how much of this debate is because SFF sealed itself off from YA?
Bobet: all of it. It's an in-group/out-group marker, and it has become a mainstream thing (Harry Potter, manga, etc) w/kids, and it resulted in a different worldview. They don't worry about jocks stuffing them in a locker.

I thought this topic was interesting, because I wasn't raised by a fan. I wasn't exposed to much of what my peer group (SFF fans between about 27 and 40) read as kids/teens until I was out of college, sometimes WELL out of college. I read Narnia, the Hobbit, and LOTR by the time I was 10 (I read LOTR in 5th grade), and I read the Belgariad and its sequel series in middle school, and the first three Shannara books when my grandma bought them for me at the used book shop. I found Madeleine L'engel in the school library, then moved on to LeGuin (they were next to each other) and Earthsea, but after that, nothing. I didn't read Ender's Game until I was 23 or 24 (and wasn't impressed, really), and The Dark is Rising I read while I was on my residency -- at 30. I'd never heard of Diana Wynne Jones (RIP) until the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle came out.

In a way I feel cheated, I suppose, because I don't have that shared experience, and anybody who's spent ten minutes in SF fandom knows that shared experience is THE fannish shibboleth. But spending time on could have beens is futile. I guess it's a good thing that there isn't a true canon for YA, or I'd have a lot of catching up to do, and I can't even manage the current books I want to read.

Bull Spec issue 6 is available

2011-07-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

It's got my review of Germline in it. You can get the pdf here (for free or a price you choose; suggested donation of $2).

I really liked the book, and I hope more people buy it and read it. If you like gritty military SF with a realistic set of politics in the background, you need to read Germline. It's seriously amazing. It's not pretty at times, but it feels true and honest, and the religion the genetically-engineered supersoldiers are fed -- based on a cross between Christianity and the modern combat manual -- is perfectly creepy.

If you want to know more of my thoughts on the matter, get the full issue. You can get it for free, if you like. (Though Sam's a nice guy and is funding the entire thing out of his own money, so throw a little scratch his way.)

Back from ReaderCon

2011-07-22T10:30:00.000-04:00

I took the train up to Boston and back, and I don't recommend this course of action. It was nice to see my sister (and her new tiny basement apartment in Capitol Hill), but 16 hours each way on a train means having to pack an entire second bag full of things to do in transit, which gets really heavy after a while. If only we had a real public transit infrastructure in this country...

I went to some very interesting panels, saw Don and Carrie and Eric and Julia and Ana and Kate and Camille and Bart & Kay and Shira and Joselle and lots of other people I know I'm forgetting.

I took notes on many of the panels I attended, and I hope to write them up in the near future. Panels marked with a * have notes. Some are more detailed (who said what quasi transcript) than others (summaries of concepts discussed).

Friday:
11: What writing workshops do and don't offer*
12: Classic fiction: Howl's Moving Castle
2: No Childhood Left Behind*
3: SF in Developing Countries*
5: De Gustibus Est Disputandum
9: Broad Universe group reading (I read!)

Saturday:
10: Book Inflation
1: Urban (fantasy) renewal
2: Location as Character*
3: Cities Real and imaginary*
8: I've fallen (behind) and I can't get (caught) up

Sunday:
10: Great War geeks unite pt 2*
12: Narrative treatment of permanent physical harm*
1: Social Darwinism in SFnal thought*

Seriously, ReaderCon is probably the most cerebral SFF convention I know of (with WisCon a close second, though I've not yet attended that). I can't wait to go again next year and feel woefully undereducated ;)

Draft finished!

2011-06-26T15:06:00.003-04:00

I finished the first draft of The Novel and sent it off to some friends who volunteered to read it and give me feedback. Which means for the next six weeks, or until I get all their replies, I don't have to write!

I'm going to
- start making a dent in my to-read pile (which is about three feet tall, seriously)
- organize the disaster that's my sewing room
- sew a dress I've been meaning to for a couple years
- make the chiton I'm supposed to for the Greek gods costuming group at DragonCon
- come up with panel suggestions for my guests in the literature track at ConTemporal
- figure out what I'd intended to do with a bag full of fabric I bought 3 years ago
- finish crocheting the fingerless gloves I'd wanted to have done for LAST winter
- play Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3
- rewatch Gundam Wing
- go to ReaderCon

I should probably also work on the synopsis, and I may think about outlining Novel Two. I'm going to be spending about 30 hours in trains in a couple weeks, and that'll give me a LOT of time to get through several of the things here.

Writing, anime, travel.

2011-06-20T16:42:00.005-04:00

It's been close to a month since I last posted. Time flies...

I finished my review of Germline and sent it off to BullSpec. I'll let you know when that issue's available. I really liked it, though it was a tough read at times. Like military science fiction? Pick it up.

What I've been focusing on the last few months is finishing this draft of my novel. I'm just a few scenes from the end, and I found something I have to add in to an earlier scene to make something make sense, but other than that, I'm close to the end. I have a few friends who've volunteered to read it for me and let me know where it falls down, and while they have it, I'm going to do other things. Like clean up the terror that's my sewing room, maybe actually SEW SOMETHING, and play Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 (which comes out 6/28).

I'm rewatching Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory and the 08th Mobile Suit Team (which Ben's never seen, somehow). I might move on to Gundam Wing afterward and see if it makes more sense now and if I like some of the characters better. I wish Bandai had better prices on their US DVD sets, because I don't want to spend tons of money for a 52-episode series on 10-12 DVDs at $20-30 each. They also take up a ton of space. More thin-packs, please!

I'm going up to ReaderCon in Boston again. This time, I'm not driving (that was a bad idea) but taking the train. I'm stopping in DC both ways and staying with my sister overnight. I wish it didn't take 6 hours plus delays to get to DC by train, then another 8 plus delays to get to Boston, because we don't have good public transit in this country.

The Economist (British newsmagazine, leans economically conservative with a dash of laissez-faire) ran an article about how terrible it is, and they said that Raleigh-Durham to DC is as far as Paris to London, which is a 2.5-hour trip on Eurostar. It takes over twice as long--plus inevitable delays-- to go the same distance, because we don't have high-speed rail, or even dedicated passenger rail for that matter, and bills to make HSR are being fought tooth and nail because, apparently, communism. (So says George Will, anyway.)

A woman wants to avoid the War on Liquids and the untested radiation/naked scanner or grope on airplanes, and her travel time is multiplied by six to eight (it's about 2 hours direct to Boston Logan from here) plus an overnight stop. Go us! USA number one! It's 700 miles as the car goes from Durham to Boston, which is about as far as Berlin to Vienna. I've done Berlin to Vienna by slow overnight train. It stopped in the Czech Republic for over an hour, and it still took less than 12 hours to get there (left around 7:30 pm, arrived at 6:30 am.)

Er, that got a little on a tangent. Oops. Now I have to make dinner. More later.

Con, movie, book

2011-05-23T10:30:00.000-04:00

I went to Gaylaxicon @ Outlantacon two weekends ago. A friend drove here from Boston, then we drove down to Atlanta together. The con is small, but it was fun, and I ate way too much in the consuite. Every other time I went up to get some food, there was cake or cookies or chocolate, and, well. I love those things. Saved me from spending much money, though. (The hotel's restaurant was good and delightfully inexpensive. A room service omelet was only $6.)

This weekend I went to a tai chi push hands workshop at one of my teachers' home. It's in a very rural area, and he's got this pavilion (looks like a carport for the roof with nice wood flooring and roll-down sides) set up. He's a former Marine, and one of his children is in the service, so his entire house is full of USMC and other military paraphernalia as well as Chinese and tai chi-related things. It's kind of surreal. Anyway, the workshop was cool, and there may be future Saturday seminars, but they tend to be in the morning, and Saturday mornings are bad for me, because that's when we go grocery shopping. (And from August-May, there's Bundesliga football...) So I may start going to the Monday night push hands class, since my Tuesday class is going on hiatus for summer.

I'm literary chair for a new convention here in Chapel Hill, and I have a guest of honor, which is exciting. Once she signs the contract (I'm not in charge of that end of things, just of figuring out whom to invite, panels, and the like) and it's on our website, I'll be sharing the heck out of it. I persuaded Ben to be on staff, too, and he's the comics/media chair. I'll promote more later :)

We went to see Thor Friday night. I enjoyed it! Lots of people have said they didn't like it, or were underwhelmed, or whatever, but I had a great time watching this piece of blond beefcake with a cheeky grin being hilarious alongside Natalie Portman and her cute assistant. Kenneth Branagh directed it, and he's known for his Shakespeare movies. If you view Thor as Shakespeare in modern English, the movie makes a lot more sense.

I've agreed to review a book for Bull Spec. It's Germline by TC McCarthy. It's dense and gritty, told by a protagonist who's not a very nice guy but you kind of like him anyway. If the cover shown there and the blurb on that blog post make it look like the kind of book you'd like, you probably will. I really like that cover. I'm looking forward to the second book, and I'm only halfway through the first!

I won't be able to post that review here, but I'll let you know when that issue of Bull Spec is available. Also, props to the author, because in the extras section at the back of the ARC, they ask who his favorite authors are, and he breaks it down by country, including Russia and Kazakhstan. I couldn't even name a Kazakh author if you asked, and my Russian knowledge is limited to the big 19th century guys, Nabokov, and Sergey Lukanyenko (Night Watch).

Movie review: Hanna

2011-05-08T14:15:00.000-04:00

After yesterday's review of something I didn't like, I'll talk about something I did like.

I'd heard a little bit about this movie about a girl (Saoirse Ronan) who was raised in remote Finland to be a super killer, because as soon as Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) finds out, she'll stop at nothing until Hanna's dead. It got some good reviews, but the thing that made me perk up was that the last act was set in Berlin, including a frantic chase through the Spreepark. (There's a set of photos here accompanying an article about punks in the GDR. It's an interesting article, but only in German.)

So. It could have been a gratuitously violent flick like Kick-ass (the one about the little potty-mouthed killer superhero(?) girl, which I never saw) or anything in Quentin Tarantino's repertoire. There was definitely violence, I won't lie. The fight scenes are interestingly choreographed and set to music by the Chemical Brothers. There's also some spinning, dizzying cinematography, and the first time it was OK, but the second time it kind of dragged on.

Hanna has lived in the forest with her father (Eric Bana) her whole life. She's never met another person than Erik Heller, or heard music, or used a computer, or seen a car. She encounters people for the first time, and she doesn't quite know how to react to them. The scenes where Hanna's trying to figure out how people work are a delight, because they're realistic.

It's a good movie, not for the squeamish, and worth catching before it leaves theaters.

Overdue book review: Darkship Thieves

2011-05-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

Darkship Thieves by Sarah A Hoyt. 2010, Baen Books

Back in March, I went to StellarCon and got some books for free at the Baen Roadshow. This was one of them.

The story opens with Athena Hera Sinistra, the daughter of a Patrician on a future Earth which has seen rule by not-so-benevolent genetically-engineered overlords, who were overthrown in a war and replaced by Patricians on quasi-seasteads. (Patri Friedman would be proud.) She's awakened from sleep by a thug who is intent on abducting her, and she escapes from him using "feminine wiles" (aka ripping her nightgown open down the front. I actually literally rolled my eyes there.)

She aims for the collectors, since she has friends among them. So, this future Earth has Magic Energy from these energy pods that grow around the planet, and people harvest them. Anyway, she has some friends there, and she aims the escape pod toward the vines. She runs into a darkship, piloted by a descendant of the escaped bio-lords. He is, of course, a fine specimen of the male figure.

This story is one part romance, one part mystery, one part political intrigue, and three parts paean to anarcho-individualism. When Athena and Kit return to Kit's home, she's shocked by the lack of traffic laws. Because OF COURSE everyone drives defensively, and they'll swerve out of the way of oncoming aircars at 50 mph. And never hit another aircar. I came very close to throwing the book across the room on more than one occasion because of the idiotically naive worldview set on Hoyt's pedestal.

Another thing that made me want to fling the book was a bit of full-blown Islamophobia. "By the mid-twenty-first century it was obvious that Europe was dying. There were other problems too. The last gasps of a religion that refused to integrate into modernity had caused a war..." (p 257).

Ironically enough, it's OK to be gay in Hoyt's future libertarian-idyllic world. Athena has a gay best friend (two, actually), and various people from Kit's colony are in same sex couples. It's not OK to be Muslim or to believe that there are no inherent intellectual gender differences, apparently. "In the twenty-first [century] people believed the zaniest things. That there are no gender differences in the human brain." (p 87) [Reality-based spoiler: there aren't. There are more differences between individual males or females than between the average male and female on the bell curve.]

The romance aspect wasn't believable for me. I know romance novels shove the heroine and hero together and suddenly magic happens, but I didn't really see Athena developing any feelings for Kit. I saw him making awkward romantic gestures to her (going on a picnic, for example), but her inner narration didn't give the impression that she liked him until all of a sudden.

The one positive I can pull from it is that Athena has no desire to have children, and this goes against romance tropes.

The book is written in first person, Athena's POV. I thought she was annoying, and there were things I figured out a hundred pages before they were revealed (the hinting from the doctor on Kit's colony, for example). Maybe not the exact specifics, but I twigged to the Big Secret WAY before Athena did. That's one of the drawbacks of first person POV. Some readers may be more intelligent than your MC.

The story is interesting, if rushed at times, and the ending isn't what I suspected it would be when I started reading it. However, I cannot recommend this book to other people without reservation for the right-wing agenda aspects listed above (that is, Islamophobia and anti-feminism).

Beer blogging: the local edition

2011-04-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'm lucky to live in an area with an abundance of small breweries.

I wrote about the Big Boss taproom last year. Since my birthday fell on one of their tour days, I got a group together and went out. The weather was gorgeous that day, 75 and sunny, and two food trucks had set up shop in their parking lot. When we got there about 15 minutes before the tour started at 2, there were at least 50 people in line already. The tour is free, but you can buy tickets for samples for $1 (up to 3 per person). When you hear sample, you think 4 ounces or so, right? Ha, this is a full glass of beer (12 or 16 ounces, I'm not sure). They had three brews on tap: D'Icer, their new dunkelweizen, Aces and Ates, their coffee stout, and possibly High Roller IPA, I'm not sure. I didn't have that one. Whichever it was, it was one of the hoppy ones. You can get one before the tour and the rest after. With the beautiful weather and the food trucks, their parking lot turned into a big party.

I had the D'Icer. It was good, though it wasn't Weihenstephaner. Probably not a fair comparison, that. I had 3, anyway, so I liked it pretty well. (Ben was driving.)

Lone Rider isn't having brewery tours at the moment due to space issues. But they had a cask night at my local bar (which seats about 35 people, if some stand at the bar) last week, where they had bourbon-barrel-aged DeadEye Jack porter with cacao nibs (and you got to keep the glass!) It was smooth and delicious. Porters, I've mentioned, are hit or miss for me, and last year's regular Jack was a little on the hoppy side for me, but still drinkable. Barrel-aged with the cacao nibs, it was amazing.

I tried their seasonal dubbel, Belle Starr, and that was also excellent. There are still a few bottles at the co-op. Maybe I'll pick another one up before they vanish.

Triangle Brewing had a tap take-over night at a restaurant in Durham, and we went there with a couple friends. I wanted to try their bourbon-aged dubbel, and they also had a habañero beer, which Ben tried. It wasn't overly spicy, unlike the one he tried in Vienna (at 7Stern), which tried to knock his teeth out.

The dubbel was excellent, fruity but not too sweet, and lightly carbonated. Ben liked it. We wanted to get a growler of it, but Ben could never get hold of them to see if they were open. There's always next year. For year-round beers, their white and golden ales are nice.

A decidedly not local brewery that I'm fond of is Colorado's New Belgium. Their 1554 black ale is easy to drink. It's got dark stouty notes, but it's a lot less dense.

Their Lips of Faith series includes a Berliner Weisse (straight, no shot), which I enjoy immensely and a dunkelweizen. The dunkel pours Coke-black with some carbonation and is vaguely sweet, which you'd expect from a dunkel. At $7 for a 22-ounce bottle, I'm not sure I'd buy it again, since Weihenstephaner is $3 for half a liter.

What I'm looking forward to this summer, and need to ask the beer orderer at the co-op to get for me, since I'm apparently the only person who buys it, is Dogfish Head's Festina Peche, a peach Berliner Weisse. It's kind of like drinking a beer made with peach sour gummies. If that sounds good to you, try it. If not, well, more for me.

I tried their Midas Touch on a friend's recommendation, and it's very strange and sweet and good. We picked up a bottle of Sah'Tea once, and it was like drinking black chai beer. Ben likes their pumpkin ale; I'm not fond of it. (I prefer Shipyard's, which is based on a hefeweizen, while Dogfish's is a brown ale.) I wasn't impressed by Theobroma, but a couple of my friends were. Raison d'Etre is a brown ale, so Ben likes it more than I do.

If I take up another hobby (homebrewing), I'm going to try my hand at a Berliner Weisse, I think. They're good, and nobody* makes them. Then I'll try to replicate Malheur 12, which I have a bottle of in my fridge that I've been saving for a special occasion. It tastes what I want red wine to taste like.

*Notice I said that after listing 2 Berliner Weisse. But they're both seasonals.

Where to go in Germany part 11: Berlin-Brandenburg

2011-03-21T09:00:00.002-04:00

We reach our final installment of this series. *tear* I've saved my favorite for last, but we have to get through Brandenburg first.

There's not much in Brandenburg. If you put "brandenburg" into Google, one of the top video hits is this song, Rainald Grebe's "Brandenburg." (Sample of the lyrics: "There are 3 N*zis standing on a hill, and they don't find anyone to beat up in Brandenburg.") Some of this emptiness is due to the exodus of young people to places where there are jobs, some of it is due to the wilderness preserves.

Once upon a time, about 75 years ago, Brandenburg was part of the Kingdom of Prussia and site of the state's two capitals: Potsdam and Berlin. Today, the tourism council is marketing it as "Berlin's beautiful backdrop."

Brandenburg an der Havel is a mid-sized large town (75,000 residents) with lovely architecture, as expected in thousand-year-old German cities.

Eastern/southeastern Brandenburg is Lusatia (Lausitz). It's one of the last places you can find Sorbs. Cottbus is the cultural center for this ethnic minority in Germany.

The Spreewald biosphere reserve is southeast of Berlin, in the Lusatian area.

Potsdam is an easy 30-minute trip from Berlin (on local public transportation, even. As far as the BVG is concerned, it's part of Berlin.) There you'll find a historic downtown, with a couple lovely churches/cathedrals, and a sign hung under a window indicating that Mozart lived here for 6 months. There's a much smaller Brandenburg gate than the one you'll find in Berlin, and some ruins that are in the process of restoration. The big draw in Potsdam, however, is the castle park at Sans Souci. Sadly, the day I went there it was about 40 degrees and raining, which made for a miserable trip and no wandering through the gardens.

The palace was built by Friedrich II (the Great), more on him in a bit, to get away from the city and his wife. (He was forced to marry her, and as soon as his father died, he separated from her.) It's a lovely palace, and inside is decorated in a very rococo fashion. Reportedly, the palace grounds (free to the public, I believe) are beautiful, but I couldn't see them (see above re rain and cold).

Berlin is the German capital. (During the time of division, Bonn was the capital of West Germany and East Berlin that of East Germany. Once the infrastructure was in place after reunification, the capital moved back to Berlin, not without controversy.) Visit Berlin is the official tourism website, with up to date information on museums, theater, opera, concerts, and exhibits, as well as hotel booking.

It's surprisingly difficult for me to condense my thoughts on Berlin. I love the city, and it's hard to find a place to start.

I can recommend a guided tour company: Insider Tours. Ben and I took a tour with them in 2007, and it was very well done. We saw the major tourist sights in 2-3 hours.

Frederick the Great (1712-1786) was downright progressive for his time. His grandfather wanted Berlin to be a city of religious tolerance and immigration. When Frederick heard that the Huguenots (protestant) were being persecuted in France, he offered them a home in Berlin and let them build a cathedral. It's right across from the nearly identical German Cathedral on the Gendarmenmarkt. The third major building at the Gendarmenmarkt is the Concert House.

One of the things I love about Berlin is that there's always something going on. You can decide to take a walk up Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate and encounter a demonstration (for the legalization of marijuana on the particular day I decided to do that), buskers, tourists, and any assortment of buses that will take you on a tour through the city.

Friedrichstrasse near the train station is one of the major shopping districts (the other being the Kurfürstendamm). During the division, the Friedrichstrasse train station was an internal border station, and that was where people transiting between the sides had to go. The station is very modernized and beautiful. If you walk south a bit (or take the U6 2 stops south), you'll reach Checkpoint Charlie, where there's now a museum.

The Museum Island is a must-visit for anyone in Berlin, home to five museums built from 1830 to 1930. The Pergamon Museum is amazing: they have a Greek temple reconstructed inside, part of a Roman temple, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. The Bode Museum is OK; early Christian art isn't quite my thing. Protip: Buy a multi-museum pass. It's only a few Euro more, and it will let you in to 2-3 museums on the same day.

The Berlin Cathedral is also on the Museum Island. It's a Lutheran church, believe it or not from the interior. Down in the basement is the Hohenzollern crypt, but Frederick William I (the Great Elector) and his wife Sophie are interred on the main floor. If you enjoy walking up several hundred steps, the view from the cupola is very nice.

When the GDR was expanding the wall along Niederkirchenerstr, they found the basement of a N*zi jail/torture house. It's now publicly visible as the Topography of Terror. It's free and open until dusk most days.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is haunting. Concrete slabs rise from half a foot to towering over you as you walk through this cemetery-like garden.

Parliament meets in the Reichstag/Bundestag. Due to the terror threats last year, individuals can no longer go in except as prearranged tours. It's a beautiful building, though, and the view from the top is remarkable.

Potsdamer Platz, once a barren wasteland on the internal Berlin border, then the largest construction site in Europe, now houses office plazas, shopping arcades, and the Sony Center (which has 2 movie theaters). There's a weekly flea market on one of the open spaces above the train station.

The Zoo and Aquarium are worth the combined ticket. Like with the Museum Island, buying both is cheaper than buying separately. RIP, Knut.

Alexanderplatz is mainly remarkable for the TV Tower (which in 2006 was made to look like a soccer ball during the World Cup). There are a few shopping plazas (Galerie Kaufhof and Alexa), and above the U-bahnhof, out front of Galeria, is a fountain. In short walking distance of Alex is the Red Town Hall (named for its color, not the lean of its politics, though Berlin is run by a red-red coalition) and the Neptune Fountain.

Hackescher Markt and the Hackescher Höfe are a somewhat trendy shopping district nearby.

Over on the west side of town, Kurfürstendamm houses a lot of trendy shopping. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, known locally as "lipstick and powder compact," is in easy walking distance. It's bombed-out remains of the church commemorating Wilhelm I and some modern glass buildings. In the same district is Palace Charlottenburg, another example of rococo architecture. The grounds are free to the public.

One of my favorite sights in Berlin is the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse. There's a fully-intact section of the wall, including the death strip, which you can view from a (free) overlook (when it's open). Between my first visit in December 2007 and my second in May 2010, they added more outside exhibits and looked to be expanding further. The ghost stations exhibit is fascinating.

The weekly flea market at the Mauerpark (Sundays morning until evening) is worth the trip to Prenzlauer Berg. You can find everything from Soviet-era tchotchkes to art prints to antique photo postcards, dishes, and furniture, to handcrafted purses or t-shirts to English language books. There's also food stands so you can fortify yourself for several hours of shopping.

If, like me, you're interested in Cold War-era things, a tour with Berliner Unterwelten is highly recommended. I took tour 3 (Cold War bunker in the subway) and regret that I didn't have time to take more.

I've made a google map with more places than I could fit into this post (without making it even more ridiculously long). You can view it here.

Where to go in Germany part 10: Thüringen & Sachsen-Anhalt

2011-03-14T09:30:00.000-04:00

In the interest of finishing this series this year, I've combined these two states into a single post. Sadly, eastern Germany has a lot of cities of historic interest, and lovely scenery, but not as dense as western. Much has been written about the exodus of east Germans to the west, as well as the reasons for it, and I won't get into it here. (A twitter friend of mine has this exploration of how reunification has affected football.)

Thuringia (Thüringen) is to the west of Sachsen, bordering Bavaria to its south and Hessen to the west. Its northern edge includes the Harz Mountains. The official tourism council has more information.

Erfurt is the largest city and state capital, and it's the approximate geographic center of Germany. (Fun facts!)

Weimar was home to Goethe and Schiller and various artists and composers, and birthplace of the Bauhaus art style. A day trip to Buchenwald, if you're so inclined, is possible.

Jena is home to a glass industry, including Carl Zeiss lenses, and a thriving university-research community. It's been home to philosophers and poets, from Goethe to Hölderlin to Hegel, over the centuries.

Eisenach was also home to people you may have heard of, including Martin Luther, whose half-timbered house still stands in the town, and Bach. The Wartburg has seen a lot of history in its almost-thousand years of existence.

Saxony-Anhalt lies to the northeast of Thüringen. Its southwest includes the Harz Mountains. The official tourism council has information on the state and its UNESCO World Heritage sites, as well as suggestions for themed excursions, such as the Romanesque Road.

Magdeburg has also been home to famous people, but it's noted more for being the state capital and its architecture.

Dessau is the current home of the Bauhaus architectural college, after it was forced to move from Weimar, and played home to the composer Kurt Weill.

Halle (Saale) is the largest city in SA and neighbors Leipzig. There is a sizable research industry, as well as remnants of a chemical industry from the Soviet era.

If you want to visit the church to which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, a trip to Lutherstadt Wittenberg is worth your while.

Next up: the final installment: Berlin-Brandenburg

StellarCon

2011-03-06T16:00:00.000-05:00

The UNCG SF club runs a little con about 50 miles from here, called StellarCon. This was its 35th year. Ben and I went for the day yesterday.

It was very small, maybe 700 attendees, but it was a bit easier to interact with the guests than at Dragon*Con (which has about 40,000 attendees). There are up sides and down sides to the small con: easier interaction, as I mentioned, but if you're there on a day pass, and you don't have a room to retire to during down time, you can get kind of bored. There weren't a whole lot of panels I was interested in, so I spent a lot of time loitering and using my wireless data plan.

One of the fun panels I went to was the Baen Roadshow, wherein publisher Toni Weisskopf gives away free books to people who ask good questions. Toni throws them to the recipients. Ben got one early on, for being polite and slowing down one of the books before it hit the receiver in the head. He asked what i wanted him to get, so I said Darkship Thieves, which I've wanted to read for a bit and just plain has a cool title. At the end, she invited those of us without books to pick one up, so I got When the Tide Rises, one of David Drake's RCN novels. Sam of BullSpec had a promo where if you show your Baen swag (a little button), you got 10% off, so I picked up Jump Gate Twist, an omnibus of 2 novels and two shorts by Mark Van Name (whose novel Children No More I reviewed last year).

If we go again next year (which, I'm told, should have more of an SF orientation), we'll probably only go one day, but we should get a room so we can stay for the parties Saturday night.

Samsung: on my anti-rec list.

2011-03-03T09:10:00.000-05:00

As you may recall, I bought a Samsung Captivate last August. I went with this phone in part because I don't like the iPhone, and I wanted an Android phone. The Android selection on AT&T was fairly awful until the Captivate came out, and the non-Captivate selection is still pretty bad. (AT&T wants you to buy the iPhone, of course!)

I was pleased with the phone, even when it began exhibiting the random shutdown bug. I got it replaced for a second one, and when that one had an even worse variant of the shutdown bug (it wouldn't stay on while in idle for FIVE MINUTES), I swapped it for a third (which, to date, hasn't shut itself off).

It's still running Android 2.1 Eclair (while other phones are on 2.3, and 2.4 is already rumored). When the Froyo update was finally released last week, I was excited...until I found out you could only install it using their proprietary Windows-only software. Like this user, I'm a Mac user. Exclusively. There are no functional computers running a modern Windows operating system in the entire house. (My ca 2001 Sony Vaio laptop ran WinXP, except it quit working around 2007. The power supply seems to have disconnected from the hard disk. That's when I got the MacBook I'm writing this post on.)

I contacted @galaxyssupport on twitter and asked if there's any plans to stop excluding their customers who use Mac. The answer's no. Through them I got a way to send email to customer "support," and I detailed my complaint regarding the Kies software and my Mac, and stated that, because of this, I will never purchase another Samsung product again. Here's their response.

Dear Conni,
Thank you for your inquiry. We understand your distress concerning the Froyo update but unfortunately, the software of the captivate is intended for windows software.
We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thank you for your continued interest in Samsung products.
Sincerely,
Technical Support

I'm so thrilled that they actually read my email. I'm not "distressed;" I'm angry.

I would like to point out at this time that nowhere on the box my phone came in does it state that Windows software is required to update the phone's software. Nowhere does it state that Kies is Windows-only. (Kies is their backup-to-PC program.) I can mount my phone to my Mac as an external drive. I can use the bluetooth in the phone to talk to the bluetooth on my Mac. I can pop an SD card into the phone and manually copy things to it, pop it out, and pop it into my Mac.

Thanks to the wonderful people at AT&T, sideloading the update (by copying it to said SD card and installing it that way) is impossible. They blocked it when they added their proprietary bloatware.

Thanks to the amount of sheer nonsense and lack of Mac support, I can no longer recommend Samsung phones to anyone who asks my opinion on them, and I will in fact recommend them to get anything but a Samsung phone. I will also never purchase any other Samsung products, from TVs to DVD players to other consumer electronics.

Where to go in Germany part 9: Saxony

2011-02-24T10:00:00.002-05:00

Saxony is the southeasternmost state of Germany. It borders Poland to the east and the Czech Republic to the south. Along the Czech border are the Lausitz (Lusatian) mountains and the Erz (Ore) mountains. Saxon Switzerland is also a beautiful natural park on the Czech border.

Dresden is known to Americans mainly as "the place the Allies bombed the crap out of during WW2," but Dresden has a cultural history which earned it the nickname "Florence on the Elbe." Notable sights include the Frauenkirche, the Hofkirche, palaces, museums, and gardens.

Near Dresden is Meißen, known primarily for its porcelain industry. If you have 30,000 Euro to spend on a tea set, you'll be buying it from Meissen. It's beautiful porcelain, to be sure, but I don't have that sort of money.

The other city of note in Saxony is Leipzig. I took a day trip there from Berlin last year and wandered through the old city. Notable sights include the Thomaskirche, where Bach worked as cantor for a while, and city halls (old and new). The restaurant where Goethe ate as a student and is home to a scene from Faust, Auerbach's Keller, is in the basement of what's presently a shopping plaza. My friend and I didn't eat there, because it was too expensive, but the statues of Mephisto tempting Faust and Faust's friends holding him back are on the public level. Rubbing Faust's foot is considered good luck for students, so it's a very bright gold.

Next stop: Thüringen.

Where to go in Germany part 8: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

2011-02-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the first of the former GDR states I'll be discussing. It's the northernmost of them, bordering the Baltic Sea and Poland.

I asked a German acquaintance on Twitter if there's anything to see in MV, and he said no. The state tourism council is trying to fix that conception.

Schwerin is the state capital, and the castle where the state government meets is very impressive. It's a picturesque town surrounded by lakes.

Rostock is a former Hanseatic League city on the Baltic. The town seems to have shaken off its association with radical rightists and hate groups in recent years, which can be a good thing.

Stralsund is another former Hanseatic city on the Baltic. It's got a maritime museum with a giant squid (since 2005). It's one of the main gateways to the island of Rügen.

Rügen is one of the islands in the Baltic, which are very sunny and warm in summer (and temperate in winter). The Baltic coast is a fairly popular vacation spot. On Rügen you can find megaliths, a Slavic stone fort at Cape Arkona, castles, chalk cliffs, and various seaside resorts. This is a place I definitely want to go.

If you like nature parks, there are a variety of nature reserves, conservation areas, and parks throughout the state.

Next time: hopping over Brandenburg and going straight to Saxony.

Book review: Broken

2011-02-07T15:30:00.000-05:00

Broken, by Susan Jane Bigelow. 2011, Candlemark and Gleam.

In the interest of disclosure, I received a free review copy of this ebook.

About a hundred years from now, Earth has been invaded by two species of aliens, and, thanks to a world war, is united in a single government based out of Australia. One of the invasions gave humans the capability of interstellar flight, and now there are colony worlds around the galaxy. For reasons not explained in the text, a fraction of people have developed superpowers since the Rogarian invasion, and, for reasons that will be familiar to X-Men fans, the "extrahumans" are all brought to Union Tower, where they're kept together (and away from "normal" people).

Michael Forward, a young prescient, is looking for Silverwyng, a member of the Union who's been missing for about ten years, because he needs her help to get a baby to Valen, one of the colony worlds. This baby, whose mother hands him off to Michael in a train station, has the potential to be humanity's savior or its greatest dictator. He finds Broken, who used to be Silverwyng.

Michael, Broken, and the baby, whom they name Ian, have to escape from the Black Bands, the enforcement arm of the Reform Party, who have just taken control of the government and are in the process of enacting totalitarian rule. On the way, they meet some people who follow the Räton (the other set of aliens) lifestyle, anarchists, and neo-nationalists.

The overall setup is a fairly standard dystopia, wherein an ostensibly fairly elected government turns totalitarian and outlaws opposition parties. Bigelow puts a very relevant spin on this classic trope. The Reform Party was voted into office on a wave of anti-alien sentiment and a hearty dose of fear of Extrahumans. The newsmedia has become a mouthpiece for the Reform Party and serves mainly to feed the public the Party's spin on events and whip up their fear of the Other, in order to cement their radical right-wing policies.

One of the most poignant moments in the book occurs about halfway through. Michael and Monica, one of the Räton followers, are picked up by the American Liberation Army, who proudly display an American flag, now banned as a symbol of nationalism. Michael remembers something his mentor Joe had said before he died, about how he'd fought in the Last War, that the flag "used to stand for something a lot better than what it ended up standing for," and that Joe's father had "hated Greenleaf [the last President]. But he loved this....they were two separate things to him." (p 191-2)

Highly recommended.

This novel is available in e-format only. I read it on my laptop using Preview. The cover is nice, and the typeface is very clean. There's a minor formatting issue where occasional words mid-line are hyphenated, but it doesn't detract. I tried it out on my Android phone using Adobe Reader, and it looked nice there, as well. It's also available for Kindle, in addition to the pdf version linked above.

Where to go in Germany part 7: Hamburg & Schleswig-Holstein

2011-02-04T11:55:00.000-05:00

These are getting spaced further out; I apologize. These are places I haven't been, and I find it difficult to muster enthusiasm.

Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany and the eighth-largest in Europe. It's situated in the middle of the border between Niedersachsen and SH, and close to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on the Elbe River. It has your usual complement of continental architecture, as well as cultural opportunities like opera. It was once a member of the Hanseatic League, as was Bremen, and it's still a major shipping port in Europe.

Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost province of Germany. It's the lower half of the Jutland peninsula, south of Denmark. Shipping is a major part of this area's economy.

Kiel is the capital of the state. It's the site of an annual regatta at the end of June.

Flensburg has the distinction of being the northernmost German city, at the Danish border.

Lübeck is Germany's largest Baltic port. It's practically on the border with Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It's also home of the marzipan industry.

Up next: a trip eastward to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Baltic coast.

Where to go in Germany part 6: Lower Saxony & Bremen

2011-01-25T12:00:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in this series; a bit of life intervened.

The city of Bremen is actually a city-state. (There are three independent city-states in Germany: Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin.) It also includes the town of Bremerhaven, which just means "Bremen's harbor," at the mouth of the Weser river at the North Sea, I've been told it's a very typical northwestern German city, with typical German architecture.

Bremen is in the northwestern section of Lower Saxony. In Lower Saxony, the dialect is Plattdeutsch, or flat-lands German. The dialect spoken in the westernmost region is very similar to Dutch, which is unsurprising, as modern Dutch is an outgrowth of the old Low Franconian languages. It's tantalizingly similar to English, but not understandably, unless you also know German. The wikipedia entry is also available in Platt.

Most people have probably heard of Hannover. It's the state capital, home to several universities, and full of culture.

Braunschweig was recommended by an acquaintance who lived there. It's over in eastern Lower Saxony, in the direction of Saxony-Anhalt. Many places called Brunswick are named for this city.

For the folk tale aficionados, Hamelin is a hop from Hannover, and the Pied Piper is enacted weekly in summer.

The third major German automotive company (after Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart and BMW near Munich) is Volkswagen, which is headquartered in Wolfsburg. The city itself was founded to be the home of the VW factory, and it's still the main employer. The main thing to see is the open-air automobile museum.

Next up: Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.

Where to go in Germany part 5: The Rhine, NRW

2011-01-17T16:00:00.000-05:00

We're heading back west to visit the Rhine and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).

Taking a Rhine cruise is enjoyable in nice weather. It runs the whole way from Mainz to Cologne, but you can get on or off at any of the stops in between. The Mainz/Rüdesheim to Koblenz stretch features castles galore, the remains of various kingdoms, fiefdoms, and assorted people who wanted to collect taxes from people traveling down the Rhine. The hostel at Bacharach is inside one of them. (Reserve well in advance if you want to stay there, and be aware that it's often filled with groups of schoolchildren.)

NRW borders both Hessen and the Rhineland on the south. As you may guess from the name, the Rhine flows through. The Ruhr, Ems, and Weser do as well. The southern and southeastern region is mountainous, but the northern part is flat lowlands.

The one city I've been to in NRW is Cologne. There's not a whole lot of interest in Köln, but there's a famous cathedral. It's easy to find: go out of the train station (following signs) and look up. Marvel at its size, take a tour. That's about it.

The former capital of West Germany, Bonn, is also in NRW. Beethoven spent some time in Bonn, and there was an elector of the Holy Roman Empire based there. There's a palace you can tour.

Münster is in the northern lowlands, the Münsterland. It's home to a Romanesque/Gothic transition cathedral, a castle, and a university.

Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle, for the Francophiles) is in far western NRW, somewhat near to Köln, by the border with Belgium and the Netherlands. Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse) built a mansion there, and Otto I was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the cathedral Charlemagne ordered built, as well as subsequent Holy Roman Emperors.

The Ruhrgebiet is in west-central NRW and is the largest industrial-metropolitan area in Germany.

Düsseldorf has a lot of culture and nightlife, and I'm told it's more interesting than Cologne.

Next up: probably Niedersachsen/Lower Saxony.

Where to go in Germany part 4: Bavaria

2011-01-15T14:25:00.000-05:00

When most Americans think about Germany, they picture Lederhosen, buxom barmaids, and picturesque mountains. That's found mostly in Bavaria.

There's a joke that Bavaria is kind of like Texas: big states, largely rural, more conservative and religious than other states (though Bavaria is mostly Catholic, while Texas is protestant), would secede into their own nation if possible. Bavaria is formally known as the Free State of Bavaria, and in the wars of German unification, led by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia, the Bavarian kings resisted and sided frequently with neighboring Austria over their more aggressive northern neighbors, unless long-standing rival France was involved.

The Thirty Years' War raged across Bavaria in the mid-1600s, pitting the Protestant north against the Catholic south.

Nuremberg is a lovely town in north-central Bavaria. The imperial castle overlooks the city, and you can walk around the former moat, now dry. Probably most famous for the trials of war criminals held there, Nuremberg also has the Plaza of the Declaration of Human Rights, which has each of the articles engraved on a pillar in multiple languages. Nuremberg has a lot of very strange statuary throughout the city, including a creepy dead rabbit and an allegory of Death.

One of the coolest things to do in Nuremberg are the Felsengänge, a series of interconnected tunnels under the city, which were built in the 14th and 15th centuries as beer fermentation cellars and were used as air raid shelters during World War Two. As much as 75% of the city center was destroyed in Allied bombings, but Nuremberg had a lower death rate than similar-sized towns because of the beer tunnels. ("Das Bier hat uns das Leben gerettet.") Check the website for times and prices and advance ticket purchase. Highly recommended.

On the topic of Allied bombings, Sankt Sebaldus Kirche was largely destroyed, except for the main supports on the corners. When I was there in 2005, they had a display of immediate post-war pictures inside. Some of the original sculptures and windows remain, damaged, of course. I found it very moving, but I'm predisposed to the rebuilding from rubble/ashes type of story.

The Romantic Road runs through a lot of quaint towns in Bavaria. For the fit and energetic, it's possible to bike the length of it. The rest of us can take the train. One of my favorite stops on the Romantic Road is Rothenburg ob der Tauber, the only city, according to locals, with its medieval wall largely intact. (Rebuilt, naturally, after having been bombed to smithereens.) Rothenburg has an enviable position on a hilltop with a cliff on one side and the Tauber river on the other. It was also at the junction of several trade roads, but after the Thirty Years' War was broke. The Black Death didn't help matters any, either. When other cities were taking down their walls, Rothenburg didn't have the money to follow the fashion. This would work to their advantage several hundred years later, when romantic poets and painters went to visit and told their friends about this quaint walled city in southern Germany. There's a lot of kitsch, but it's worth a visit. You can see everything there is to see in a single day. Take a trip up the city hall tower to get a view of the city, and walk along the wall. You can take it almost the entire way around. Get a Snowball at Diller's. Take a tour with the Night Watchman. Have dinner and a drink in Hell. Get your Christmas ornaments at Käthe Wohlfahrt.

The Romantic Road ends in Füssen, your starting point for a trip to Neuschwanstein Castle. The town itself is scenic and has some typical German architecture, as well as restaurants to feed you after a nice hike back down from the castle itself. It's an easy day-trip from Munich, and fully accessible by public transportation. Buy your ticket at the ticket center before hiking up the mountain. It will give you an entry time/group number, and you wait in the courtyard of the castle for your group to be called. Neuschwanstein is the most touristed place in Germany, for good reason. When Mad King Ludwig was building the castle in the 1880s, Pöllat Gorge was known as a romantic hiking and picnic spot. A bridge behind the castle crosses the gorge and gives you a great photo op of the castle.

If you want to hike the gorge (good weather only!), do it on the way back. You might miss your tour if you hike up.

Do I need to say much about Munich? No tour of southern Germany is complete without a stop in the city most Americans have heard of. From there, you can go to Neuschwanstein, as I mentioned above, and Dachau. In central Munich, the Altstadt, you can visit the Viktualienmarkt (a huge open-air market that sells victuals, largely sausage, bread, cheese, and fruit, as well as souvenir folk art), Marienplatz (where the Gothic town hall with the famous bell tower lives), towers, cathedrals, and various statuary. Outside the city is Nymphenburg Castle, where you can find some particularly mean swans in the water gardens. The German Museum (Deutsches Museum) is home to some seriously cool technological artifacts: original steamboat engines, a U-boat, an ENIGMA machine, and several really old computers.

The train ride from Munich to Füssen is gorgeous. Off to the south, you can see the Bavarian Alps. It's rural, so you have to take a regional train, which stops at every little burg on the way.

There's a lot more to Bavaria than this handful of places, but they're the big ones, and I've spent a lot of words on this handful. Next up: a trip back west to the Rhine & North Rhine-Westphalia.

Where to go in Germany part 3: Baden-Württemberg

2011-01-14T15:00:00.000-05:00

Baden-Württemberg the the southwestern-most state in Germany. It borders France, Switzerland, and Bavaria. It is a mountainous state and home to the Black Forest. It's the place people think of, along with Bavaria, when they hear "Germany." (Culturally, the Swabians & Franconians and Bavarians are quite different.)

Deep in the southern mountains lies the Bodensee, or Lake Constance, which touches Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The Danube has its source in the Black Forest.

This is the state with a lot of cities you've (maybe) heard of: Stuttgart, home of Mercedes-Benz; Heidelberg; Mannheim; Freiburg im Breisgau; Baden-Baden; and some you may have not, like Tübingen. I'll start with the places I've been.

Heidelberg is a smallish university town in northeastern BW. The Neckar flows through the center, and there's a ruined Gothic-Renaissance castle up on the hill. In the castle, you can get a taste of the local wine as well as visit the German Apothecary (Pharmacy) Museum, which is actually kind of cool. The town is quaint, but there's quite a lot of tourists.

A little bit further up the Neckar, and near Stuttgart, is the similarly quaint and less touristed university town of Tübingen. There's a lovely island in the river where you can walk, and the old city walls are still partly visible, though built on. The castle houses part of the university and a museum, which is a great place to go if the weather's awful. (German weather in spring is unpredictable.) It also provides a great overlook of the river valley. The town hall has an elaborate facade. For the bibliophile, you can visit the antiquariat (used book shop) where Hermann Hesse worked.

Down in the bottom of the Black Forest is Freiburg im Breisgau. It's the quintessential Black Forest town, complete with a medieval church and timbered houses. It's the gateway to the Black Forest. I admit I was kind of bored there, but if I were looking for a getaway with gorgeous scenery, where I could relax or pop off to take a walk in the woods, that would be the place to go. It's also reportedly the warmest, sunniest city in Germany. 78 F for the average high in July is downright balmy to this North Carolinian! That's springlike for me ;)

Places I haven't been in BW: Stuttgart, where you can take a tour of the Mercedes museum and the Porsche museum and see the house where Hegel grew up, as well as your usual complement of cathedrals and castles.

Baden-Baden. If you take a guess from the name, it's a place where there are baths. Around the time Londoners went to Bath to take the waters, Germans went to Baden-Baden for the same purpose. It's still home to mineral spas and cure resorts.

Next up: Bavaria.

Where to go in Germany part 2: Rhein-Pfalz

2011-01-13T14:00:00.001-05:00

The Rheinland-Pfalz is west of Hessen, and easily accessible by train from Frankfurt. It's the home of German wine, along the Rhine and Moselle valleys. Similarly to Hessen, the Pfalz is a hilly region with river valleys. The Pfalz is the ancestral home of a lot of German-American communities, including the Pennsylvania Dutch.

My first trip to Germany was in 1992, with my high school German club. It was a three-week exchange with a school there, in the town of Schifferstadt, which is a sister city with my home town. There's an old house built by a settler from Schifferstadt.

Speyer was founded by the Romans and is home to the Cathedral, a UNESCO heritage site. Various diets during the Reformation were held here. A much more famous diet was held in Worms.

Mainz is home to the Gutenberg Museum, which has a variety of antique printing presses and old books. Mainz was also founded by the Romans. The Rhine-Main region was strategically important for them.

Easily my favorite place in the Pfalz is Trier, the oldest city in Germany. It was founded by the Romans, and there are still ruins you can visit. The Black Gate, the baths, and an amphitheater are available for your viewing *without* having to go to Italy. Trier is home to one of my favorite juxtapositions: the palace and basilica. Trier is extremely out of your way, unless you're going to Luxemburg, but it's worth going if you can squeeze it in.

The Palatinate Forest, south of Kaiserslautern and southwest of Worms, is a nature park, and there's hiking and that sort of thing. We went to Bad Dürkheim while I was there.

Near the Rhein-Pfalz is Saarland, which is largely industrial and not very touristy to my knowledge.

Up next: Baden-Württemberg.

Where to go in Germany part 1: Hessen

2011-01-13T13:30:00.001-05:00

People ask me this a lot, and I rarely have enough time to answer thoroughly (and if it's on Twitter, I don't have enough characters), so I thought it would be fun to write about some of my favorite places.

I'll start by recommending the Lonely Planet series of travel guides. They've never steered me wrong, and they have recommendations for inexpensive places to eat and sleep, which is great for the budget traveler, or pretty much anyone who thinks paying $100+ a night for a hotel room is ridiculous. There are also e-versions of them, and you can buy individual regional chapters. If you have a smartphone, this is a great way to save paper and carrying things.

Most of the popular tourist areas are in southern and west/central Germany: Bavaria (Munich, Nuremberg, the Romantic Road), Frankfurt, the Black Forest, the Rhine. So if you have a limited time in the country, you can see a lot of sights by getting off the plane in Frankfurt (second busiest airport on the Continent and a hub for many airlines) and hopping trains toward Munich and back.

I'll start with the middle: Hessen. Hessen has many rivers, including the Rhine and Main, and is very hilly throughout and mountainous in the south. Hessian Mercenaries fought in the American Revolution on the side of the British, and in my hometown there still stand Hessian Barracks, which are home to the Maryland School for the Deaf.

Frankfurt am Main is a major financial center. I've never spent much time in the city itself, just the airport and train stations. There's a shopping district, museums, and the like.

I spent my junior year in Marburg an der Lahn, a medium-sized town about an hour northish of Frankfurt by train. It's scenic, and the central old town, the Oberstadt, has some funky cool old buildings, including the oldest Gothic cathedral in Germany and the oldest Protestant university in the world. The Brothers Grimm studied at Uni-Marburg, and Rapunzel's Tower stands in the mountains nearby. The landgrave's castle high up in the Oberstadt (ober means above/over) commands an amazing view. If you have time to spare, swing by Marburg.

Fulda, in far eastern Hessen, is a name that should ring bells for anyone familiar with the Cold War: a gap in the mountains at Fulda was the proposed route for a potential Soviet/East German invasion of the west. It had been used for various invasions over the centuries, so why not?

Hessen has a lot of quaint towns that are less touristed than those in neighboring states, as well as lots of hiking in the mountains. I grew up in the shadow of the Blue Ridge, and the geography of Hessen was comforting.

Next up: Rhein-Pfalz, where I took my first trip to Germany (and barely remember).

Things I'm working on

2011-01-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

Blah blah, new year, resolve, etc.

I'm trying something different this year to get my act together. I spend far too much time fooling around on facebook, twitter, and other places on the internet and too little working on things I need to do, like revising The Novel. So on multiple friends' recommendation, I'm trying a planner from DIY Planner. I spent most of Tuesday afternoon mucking around with templates and designs, and I'm going to start implementing my daily trackers next week. Maybe having a physical record will keep me honest and accountable.

I also plan to work harder at taiji this year. I'd like to become a teacher, and there's a lot of study required before and during that training. I have no idea if my teacher would allow me into the teaching class, but I'll ask him the next time I see him. I've enjoyed working in small groups in class, with newish students, and I think I'd enjoy teaching a full class. No doubt it would improve my personal practice significantly.

Another aspect of that is keeping notes on forms, postures, and the like. Partly to help me put it back together if I lose any of it, and partly because I've never been a contemplative learner. I learn something, and I accept it, and I move on. (This means, unfortunately, that a career in research academia is completely out of the question. I'm not wired for research in the scientific sense.) I pick up taiji forms very quickly, and I hit a bit of a plateau, I think is the right word. I don't improve, because as far as I'm concerned, I'm doing it right. I can try to incorporate the principles I've learned (breathing, whole body movement, etc), but if I'm practicing the long form Chen style, after the first 5 minutes of a 20-minute routine, the breathing goes out the window.

This serves a larger, longer-term goal as well. I want to move to Berlin. I'm sure this surprises exactly no one. I've looked into what it would require to become a pharmacist in Germany, with my American PharmD, and from what I can tell, I'd need a) a course in medical German, b) 1500 hours of internship (oh joy, I can repeat my fourth year of pharmacy school), c) a course in German health care law etc, and d) to sit the license exams (in German, of course). While (a) could be fun, and (c) is something I'm interested in, (b) and (d) are in no way something I want to go through again.

So what other things can I do? Hey, I love taiji, and I think I'd enjoy teaching it. There are several taiji schools in Berlin, and I figure I could contact them in a few years and become acquainted and eventually ask if I could be an associate instructor at their school. I could offer classes in English for other expats, even. I love my school and its focus on fundamentals and philosophy. The difficult part of this idea is that the various ways I've learned my forms may not be the same as theirs. So it's not going to be extremely easy, but I think I can do it.

I could also become a tour guide. That seems to require having been resident in the city for a period of time and being extremely knowledgeable about the city's history, or an aspect of it. And since Cold War Berlin is one of my favorite topics, I could read books about that all day.

And, naturally, I plan to continue writing.

I need to convince Ben that the extreme complicatedness of the situation is manageable. All these little details, like doctors, dentists, insurance, jobs, furniture... they're all on the internet now. We can look it up! It's not going to be terribly soon, at any rate: I won't be able to teach on my own for quite some time, and we'd need to save up money for moving expenses, among other things. I've wanted to move back to Germany since I finished my junior year of college. I've waited 15 years. What's 10-15 more?

Anime rec: Princess Tutu

2010-12-30T16:45:00.000-05:00

Long time, no update, and I come bringing a recommendation!

Princess Tutu is a magical girl show in which the battles are fought with ballet.

No, wait. Come back! I promise it's not like Minky Momo with toe shoes. Let me try again.

Princess Tutu is a deconstruction of fairy tales and tropes and a consideration of fate versus free will.

That makes it sound really boring. Have I mentioned that the magical girl is a duck?

Now that I (hopefully) have your attention, let's get more into the details of the story. There once was a man who died. He was a writer of fairy tales, and before he could finish his last piece, the story of the prince and the raven, he died, and the prince and the raven escaped from the story. The prince had to shatter his heart to seal away the raven.

Ahiru (Duck) is swimming on her pond, when she sees a beautiful boy with sad eyes dancing ballet. She wishes she could make him happy, and a creepy old man pops out of the air and asks her what she would give to make him happy. She answers, "My life." The creepy old man gives her a pendant that turns her into a girl. It also turns her into Princess Tutu. (Got that? A magical girl who's really a duck.)

The beautiful boy with sad eyes is the prince from the story, and it's Princess Tutu's job to return the shards of his heart. His name is Mytho, and he's best friends with Fakir, another student at Gold Crown Academy's ballet section. His girlfriend, Rue, is another ballet student. But, naturally, none of them is just a ballet student.

It's not that simple, of course, and every magical girl needs a nemesis. Tutu's comes in the form of Princess Kraehe, the raven's daughter. The tale of the prince and the raven is about to begin anew, and the principal actors in the tale rebel against their fate: the knight refuses to die, the puppet refuses to be on its strings, the princess who's fated to vanish upon confessing her love refuses to speak the words that will turn her into a speck of light.

Gold Crown Town is a place where stories become real and where nothing is quite normal. Ahiru's ballet teacher is a slightly anthropomorphic cat. There's another student who's a goat, along with meerkats, aardvarks, and cows. A traveling troupe comes to perform a show, and the troupe leader turns into an electric eel. (One of the dancers says, "He wasn't like that until we came here.")

It's an excellent deconstruction of both fairy tale tropes and magical girl tropes, and the characters are very realistic. There's no lack of stock characters -- the lovelorn widow, the show-off who's really awful -- but the handful of characters who matter are well drawn, and they're active, which you'd expect in a story that's all about challenging your fate. Speaking of well drawn, the character designs are perfect.

It's a magical girl show in the vein of Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is also (technically speaking) MG and about revolutionizing the world.

You can buy the complete collection.

New achievement!

2010-12-03T15:54:00.003-05:00

I think I just leveled up.

Longing for a change of scenery, I took my laptop to my favorite local coffee shop this afternoon so I could write and enjoy a steamed coffee-like beverage. (Since I'm still trying the 'no caffeine most days' thing, I went with a cinnamon-chocolate steamer, which was excellent.)

A man came in and started chatting to the people at the table beside him. I kept working and occasionally looked up. Then they left, and he started chatting with me. He asked if I like my Mac, so I talked about how much I like it, and about how much I like Scrivener, because I'm a writer.

Which led to him telling me about how he tried writing a novel once, and he couldn't finish it, and then he said, "I thought I'd just tell a writer my idea."

A complete stranger told me their idea for a novel with the implication I should write about it. That's never happened before. I kind of hope it never happens again...

Though I did meet and exchange cards with another local writer, who's working on a memoir, after she overheard us, so it wasn't a total wash. And I did get some editing done.

Musing on music

2010-11-24T20:30:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of writers out there who make writing soundtracks, character playlists, and that sort of thing. Some days it seems that everyone is doing it but me.

I like music. I like having tunes playing when I'm on a long drive or in the background during a party. Sometimes I get really excited about a new-to-me artist or CD and play it on endless repeat.

But never while I'm working. It's too much of a distraction. I can't focus on creating at the same time I'm consuming. Even back in high school when I was working on papers or any sort of homework that required intense focus (which wasn't a lot of it, really), I couldn't have the radio on.

So I don't really get the whole writing soundtrack and character playlist thing. I'm just not wired that way.

I will, however, fire up iTunes and AirTunes it in to my sewing room, as long as I'm in the putting things together stage, and not the part where I'm calculating how to shorten the pattern to fit my short self and laying it out and tracing it. And if I run into something that's confusing, I turn them off.

Hmm, I have a bunch of sewing I need to do. Pity my sewing room is a bit of a disaster, and the thought of going in and straightening it up makes me want to avoid it forever.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (part 1)

2010-11-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Harry and his friends since about the time book 3 blew onto the scene. I saw Matthew Lewis (Neville) and the Phelps twins at Dragon*Con (the latter twice), and I spent Release Day reading the books. There were some parts of book 7 (the epilogue, especially) that bothered me, and some of the writing doesn't stand up to critical re-reading (dropped plot points, illogical plot points), but damned if Jo Rowling can't tell a story that makes you turn the pages.

The first two films, mostly light-hearted fare about Harry being introduced to the Wizarding World and Hogwarts, were directed by Chris Columbus (Home Alone). The third, Prisoner of Azkaban, was directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The beginnings of the menace come into play here, and as such, and with Cuarón's hand, the movie gets a little darker. I liked it a lot better than the first two, quite honestly. The fourth, Goblet of Fire, was directed by Mike Newell, and it continues the darkening trend, as the book did. In GoF, the first actual death occurs, and Harry seems to realize for the first time what the stakes are and that his and his friends' lives are actually in danger.

Since the fifth film, Order of the Phoenix, David Yates has been at the helm. This has improved the consistency in style between the films, which is a good thing. The darkness increases; bad and worse things start to happen, and movie six, Half-Blood Prince, ends with evil prevailing. (I believe a lot of important plot-related things were cut from the movie, most likely in service of time constraints. Occlumency, and Harry's being crap at it, is the main one.)

The Deathly Hallows continues the tendency toward darkness, and Harry knows the stakes. As in the book, he tries to leave without his friends, but they won't let him go by himself.

The crisis at the center of the story should be familiar to anyone who's heard about World War II. Lord Voldemort takes over the Ministry of Magic (through his minions, of course; he remains hidden) and institutes policies to purify the Wizarding World of "mudbloods" and "Muggle-borns." There are propaganda pamphlets about what to do when Muggles attack, done in a style that will ring bells in a lot of people's minds. I thought that was a very effective choice of design.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend the movie alone, out in the wilds of England, where they don't know if their friends and family are safe. We only see Neville once, and it's on the train to Hogwarts, when the Death Eaters search for Harry, and he stands up, far removed from the timid Neville of book 1, and says, "He's not here." We see Draco a couple of times; the Malfoys are long-standing members of the Death Eaters, though not at present in Voldemort's best graces.

The kids have grown up.

It ends, as you'd expect from a two-part film, on a cliffhanger, one which spells certain doom for our heroes. The second movie, opening in July, will see Harry and co going back to society and fighting in the battle for Hogwarts.

This is entirely selfish of me, I know, but I want to read about Neville Longbottom and his underground, anti-Ministry group at Hogwarts. Neville, who started the series as a dumpy, doughy, timid -- terrified -- kid, developed a lot more confidence over the series, and he became the centerpiece of the anti-Voldemort society. I want to read that. I want to read more about the implications of the police state and the 'blood trials.' Rowling only gives us flashes of those, through Harry's encounters with them. Fair enough that she does; it's her story, her world.

It's an idea I'd love to see explored, even only in fanfiction.

Anime rec: Victorian Romance Emma

2010-11-14T13:15:00.000-05:00

Victorian Romance Emma is an anime based on a manga by Kaoru MORI. Emma is a maid in London in 189X. Her employer is a widow who used to work as a governess for the Jones family. One day, William Jones, the eldest son, comes to visit Mrs. Stowner, and Emma opens the door on him (in a near-slapstick fashion, before he even knocks). They fall for each other, but his family strongly disapproves: they're gentry, she's a maid.

Complicating matters is William's father, who wants him to marry Miss Campbell, the daughter of Baron Campbell.

The anime adaptation follows the manga fairly closely in the first season, which covers two volumes, then makes some changes in the second season, which covers the remaining six volumes. The second season focuses on the obstacles placed in William and Emma's path by the mores of Victorian society, as well as members of that society.

The manga was meticulously researched, and MORI included everything from Mudie's library to the Crystal Palace, and she got the fashions spot on (after the first few chapters).

William has a friend from India, Prince Hakim, whom he met at school, and Hakim has a small troupe of girls who surround him all the time (and are silent). There may be a bit of stereotyping going on here; I'm not familiar enough with Indian culture during the colonial occupation to make that assessment.

Mori doesn't gloss over the rigid class hierarchy in England at the time, but she doesn't get Dickensian on it, either. When Mr. Jones says that he won't allow his son to marry a maid, it's in part because he's just ascended into the Society that includes balls and debutantes and nobility, and he doesn't want William to tarnish his reputation, but also because maids are lower class. But Baron Campbell scorns the Joneses as nouveau riche scum. He can't win, it seems.

The anime runs 26 episodes. Even for anime, this was a very niche title. Nozomi Entertainment licensed and released it in the US. Each season comes with a 100-page booklet on Victoriana and about the characters. The packaging is very nice, and if you look in the extras on disc 1 of season 2, you'll see my name listed as one of the people who supported the release of the second season.

The manga has 9 volumes and was published in the US by CMX. Older volumes are hard to come by on Amazon (they start at $25 for a $10 book). Right Stuf still lists most of the volumes.

Caffeine free.

2010-11-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

Neurologist's orders. Apparently, I have several types of migraine all mixed up together, and caffeine contributes to one of them. So I had to quit cold turkey. My neurologist hath a blog, and he wrote about the link between caffeine and headaches, if you're interested.

But, on the plus side, once I've detoxed completely and I no longer have the sinusy headaches, I can have all the caffeine I can drink two days a week. Good thing, because I have a ton of black and green teas in my cupboard that need to go.

I've been drinking herbal tea in the mornings of late, going through Christmas tea dated 2008 and 2009. Celestial Seasonings Gingerbread Spice is AWESOME. Most likely I was hoarding it for future drinking, which explains why I drank maybe half the box. You can only buy it 3 months of the year! I have a box of Sugar Plum Spice (dated 2009) still in its shrink wrap in the cupboard, which will be the next to go. Maybe tomorrow I'll have some of that.

In related news, I crocheted a cozy for my teapot. I improvised, which means it took me 5 tries before finding a method that worked. My teapot is a non-standard size, not round, but more UFO-shaped (an older model of this one, I think), so the half dozen patterns I saw on Ravelry wouldn't quite work.

Pattern for a tea cozy:
ca 100 g worsted weight, size H hook

Ch 6, sl st to form ring.
DC 12 in ring. sl st to close. ch2
2dc in each dc (ch2 counts as 1dc) sl st to join. ch 2.
*dc 2 2dc in next dc* around ring. sl st to join. ch 2.
*dc 3 2dc in next dc* around ring. sl st to join. ch 2.
*dc 4 2dc in next dc* around ring. sl st to join. ch 2.
*dc 5 2dc in next dc* around ring. DO NOT JOIN. This is the spout. ch 2.
*dc 6 2dc in next dc* to approximate midpoint (leave space for handle). ch 2, turn.
*dc 5 dc2tog* to split. ch 2, turn.
*dc 4 dc2tog* to handle space. ch 2, turn.
*dc 3 dc2tog* to split. ch 2, turn.
*dc 2 dc2tog* to handle. ch 2, turn.
*dc 1 dc2tog* to split. Fasten off.
Tie on at opposite side of split. *dc 6 2dc in next dc* to handle space. ch 2, turn.
*dc 5 dc2tog* to split. ch 10. (this will be the strap) ch2, turn.
dc 10 in chain. *dc 4 dc2tog* to handle. ch 2, turn.
*dc 3 dc2tog* to strap, dc 10. ch 2, turn.
dc 2, ch 1 skip next dc, dc 7 (to make buttonhole). *dc 2 dc2tog* to handle. ch 2, turn.
*dc 1 dc2tog* to strap (may dc first 2 stitches tog for aesthetics), dc to end. ch 1, turn.
sc in each dc. at handle, ch 2 (or number of stitches left open for the handle) continue around.
Crochet (or purchase) a button and fasten it in the appropriate position.
Wash, block dry on teapot.

It should look something like this (handle shot) when you're finished.

Bull Spec: a spec-fic magazine based out of Durham

2010-11-06T17:41:00.003-04:00

There's a vibrant little spec fic community here in the Triangle, and Sam Montgomery-Blinn, the founder and editor of Bull Spec is tapping into it. He's also making an effort to publicize spec-fic-related events here in the Triangle, to bring the community together.

I just got back from the launch party for issue 3, over at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, where David Drake read a excerpt from the book he just turned in (a sequel to The Legions of Fire), Melinda Thielbar read from her story in issue 3 (a clever piece looking at the hyperprevalence of technology and its effects), and a pair of comics guys did a Mad-Libs-improv comic book, in which a superhero named Dwight saved his librarian/Scrabble champion girl from the evil Coach K. (That's Coach Krzyzewski, of Duke b-ball, for those of you not immersed, voluntarily or not, in the local rivalry.)

Then there was a Q&A, and some time to interact with people. I had a chance to talk with David Drake a bit, and let him know that despite not being the target audience for his Hammers Slammers stories and his having warned me off them, I read them anyway and liked them. I was looking for more realistic military SF, and they're certainly that. Then he recommended me his space opera series, which I'll look into once either I have money again or my to read stack is less terrifying.

I had a chance to chat with other local writers, some of whom I met at Mark VanName's reading the other week, and we'll be seeing each other again at the NC writers' night next week. Many thanks to Sam for all his efforts in rounding up the events and publicizing them to everyone he knows about!

(I'm watching the second half of an anime that I want to write a rec post on soon. Spoilers: it's not science fiction. Shocking, I know.)

Show homophobia the red card.

2010-10-28T08:20:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of association football, and I'm an advocate for LGBT rights. There's a brand new campaign to promote awareness of homophobia in football and to kick it out of the game: Red Card Homophobia.

It started out over in livejournal, but they also have tumblr, facebook, and twitter accounts, and a forum.

Anyway, all this to say that I wrote a piece over there on football culture and homophobia. Go have a read!

Anime rec: Patlabor

2010-10-19T10:00:00.000-04:00

Part two in a potentially-ongoing series.

Patlabor is a franchise about a misfit band of cops assigned to robot crimes. It's a giant robot show for people who hate giant robot shows.

In the vaguely near future (or recent past, as it's nominally set in 1998), giant robots (called "labors") are developed for use in construction. Naturally, people being people, criminals get the bright idea to use them to commit crimes. The Special Vehicles Units are born to fight these crimes, using patrol labors -- Patlabor.

Mamoru OSHII and Headgear have their fingerprints all over the series; if those names mean anything to you, you know they mean awesome.

There exist several series, from the original OVAs, to a TV show, to a second set of OVAs, and three movies. Sadly, they're mostly out of print in the US. (Right Stuf has the movies and TV series right now, but not OVA2.)

Of course the one I'm going to talk about is OVA2, aka The New Files. Wikipedia is utterly useless on this score (which goes to show just how underappreciated this series is), so this fan site will do. Warning, warning: there be episode summaries and, naturally, SPOILERS.

Our heroine, IZUMI Noa, is a new recruit to the SV2, who really digs giant robots. She nicknames her labor "Alphonse" and spends evenings polishing him. Her support driver, SHINOHARA Asuma, is a semi-outcast heir of a major labor manufacturing company.

There's also Captain GOTOH, whose dry, sardonic wit is unparalleled, OHTA, another labor driver, who prefers to shoot first and question witnesses later, Kanuka Clancy, on loan from the NYPD, and NAGUMO Shinobu, head of the SV1 and Gotoh's rival of sorts.

The SV2 is the red-headed stepchild of Tokyo PD, and brass think they're a waste of money.

Two episodes stand out in my mind: Episode 7, "Black Trinity," and 8, "Seven Days of Fire."

In "Black Trinity," our heroes have to find a yakuza (mobster) with three moles under his arm. Because of circumstances, they do this in a public bath, which happens to be frequented by yakuza. The scene in which they attempt to surreptitiously sneak peeks under yakuza armpits is comedy gold. Added bonuses for anime nerds include references to Golgo 13, Hokuto no Ken, and original Gundam.

In "Seven Days of Fire," we focus on the mechanics, who are stuck fixing the wrecked labors time and time again. Except they don't want so much with the fixing, because the chief mechanic found their porn stash and burned it, so they're on strike.

So why is this a mecha show for people who hate mecha shows? One of the things people hate about mecha shows is that they're basically ads for the robot model kits Bandai is putting out, with lots of flash and fighting and politicking, but not so much character development or interaction. [This applies to a lot of mecha shows, but more recent ones are better with the character thing. Thankfully.]

Patlabor isn't like that. There aren't epic space battles, double- or triple-crossing anti-heroes, or new robots introduced to sell more toys. It's about the people, the SV2, and how they interact. Yes, there are robot fight scenes; they're cops. They go hunting bad guys in their giant robots. But it's still, at root, about Noa and Asuma and Gotoh and Ohta and Clancy and how they deal with brass that wants to cut their entire unit.

It's a fun show, and one that too few people have seen on this side of the Pacific. Unfortunately, with it being out of print, I don't see that situation changing very soon.

World Beer Festival 2010

2010-10-10T11:15:00.000-04:00

This year I went in with a crazy new plan: not tasting any beer I already know I like. I have to save up, right? There's only so much beer a gal can drink.

brewery, name of beer, style, description from program book, rating, notes.

Abbaye de Leffe: Leffe Blonde, Belgian pale ale. "smooth and fruity with a spicy aftertaste of bitter orange." 5. Very smooth, refreshing, akin to a Belgian white.

Abita Brewing Co.: Andygator, helles doppelbock. "dry finish with a slightly sweet flavor and subtle fruit aroma." 3. It's doppelbocky, but somehow odd.

Atwater Block Brewery: Vanilla Java Porter, robust porter. "made with chocolate malt, blended with vanilla and Java coffee beans." 4. As advertised, there's vanilla and coffee flavor. Kind of like drinking espresso with a shot of vanilla.

Aviator Brewing Co. Didn't get to try the Devil's Tramping Ground tripel because they were out. The brewery's just over in Fuquay (pronounced few-kway), so I could go try it there.

B. Nektar Meadery: a) Vanilla cinnamon mead, "light clover honey, then aged on American oak with whole vanilla bean and cinnamon sticks." 4+. I love cinnamon, and I love vanilla. This is awesome.
b) Orange blossom mead, made with orange blossom honey. 3. Kind of like orange flower water.
c) Wildberry pyment. "made with shiraz grapes, clover honey, and natural strawberry, blueberry, and blackberry flavor." 2. The wine grapes are what did this in for me. Tasted like wine, yuck.

Brasserie Lefebvre: Blanche de Bruxelles, Witbier. 5. If you like Hoegaarden, you'll like this. Very refreshing and balanced.

Breckenridge Brewery: Agave Wheat, fruit beer. "American style unfiltered wheat ... [with] Salmana Agave." 4. The fruity flavor was a bit odd, but it was still drinkable. I think I like their Vanilla Porter better.

Deschutes Brewery: Black Butte Porter. "slight hop bitterness up front enhances the distinctive chocolate and roasted finish." 2. I think I'm figuring out what I don't like in some porters, and it seems to be ones that have more hops in them.

Foothills Brewing: People's Porter. English-style robust porter. "Firm unsweetened chocolate flavor with moderate notes of caramel and toffee, an herbal hop bitterness up front." 2. See above re hoppy porters. The label art is a socialist realism homage.

Heavy Seas Beer: Yule Tide 2009. Belgian Tripel. "slightly sweet with a complex malty flavor." 4. For a tripel, it wasn't too heavy.

Huske Hardware House Brewing Co.: Sledgehammer Stout. "An imperial oatcreme stout ... finished with lactose for extra body." 3. I think this was more like a porter than I prefer.

North Coast Brewing Co.: Brother Thelonius, Belgian dark strong ale. 3. I don't remember much about this one. It was heavy. The label art depicts Thelonius Monk.

Roth Brewing: a) FoeHammer, Barleywine. "well-hopped, heavily-bodied beer ... sports hints of toffee and apricot." 2. I'm not a fan of barleywine in general. The crew wore plastic Viking hats.
b) Forgotten Hollow, cinnamon porter. I didn't try this at the festival, but I had it at the Flying Saucer the other week. 4. It's got a huge cinnamon flavor. If that appeals to you, give it a try.

Samuel Smith: Taddy Porter. "very dark porter, fairly full in body." 4. This is most of the way to a stout.

St Martin: St Martin Brune, Belgian strong ale. "Sweet caramel flavor, some molasses and fruit with Belgian spice notes." 3. I had a sip of Ben's, but I don't remember much about it.

Starr Hill Brewery: Dark Starr Stout. Dry stout. "pours like velvet and drinks like a slice of grandma's pumpernickel bread." 2. Too bitter.

Thomas Creek Brewery: Dirty Monk. Belgian porter. Not listed in the program. 2. Too hoppy.

Top of the Hill: Old Well White. 4. It's not Hoegaarden, but it'll do. [For those not in the know, TOPO is in Chapel Hill, and their beers are all named for local/University landmarks and people.]

Triangle Brewing Co.: Belgian-style Golden Ale. "complex mouthfeel, strong malt flavors, spicy hop presence and soothing alcohol warmth." 3. I think I prefer their white ale.

Unibroue Brewery: Maudite. Belgian dark strong ale. "aroma of wild spices and floral hop notes. It is spicy vinous, and deliciously complex." 4-. This was an end of the evening try. I think it was OK.

Weeping Radish: Peachy Keen, Kölsch. This wasn't listed in the program book, but the brewer told me it was a Kölsch with peach essence. I don't like the Kölsch style, but this was OK: very fruity. 4. [I wanted to try Black Radish, but they didn't have it.]

Weyerbacher Brewing Co.: Merry Monks. Belgian tripel. 4.

I look forward to next year!

An artist who's on my wavelength

2010-10-02T18:15:00.000-04:00

One of the things I love about Berlin is its history. When I walk through the streets, it's almost like I can feel the people who came before, or imagine the buildings that were there a hundred years ago but aren't anymore.

Russian artist Sergey Larenkov takes recent photographs of cities (Moscow, Berlin, Kiev, among others) and matches them up with historical photographs (mainly from WW2), then puts them together, so you have modern-day Muscovites walking down the street past a gun emplacement or the Reichstag simultaneously whole and under attack.

It's like he read my mind.

Cool Triangle spots: Big Boss taproom

2010-09-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

As I may have mentioned, I'm a fan of craft beer. (That's what we're calling microbrews these days, because not all craft beers are technically microbrews.) I'm fortunate to live in an area where there are easily a dozen craft breweries within an hour or two's drive from my house.

Big Boss Brewing is located over in Raleigh, near 440 and Capital Blvd. Their beer selections include Hell's Belle (a Belgian blond), Angry Angel (a Kölsch), Bad Penny (a brown ale), and rotating seasonals like Harvest Time pumpkin ale and Aces and Ates coffee stout.

Ben's birthday was last week, and he wanted to go have a couple beers at the taproom with some friends. So we did.

Finding the brewery for the first time, in the dark, was not so easy. It's in a dark parking lot on a poorly-lit street in an industrial(ish) neighborhood. The sign isn't prominent at all, and Ben only found it by the neon "OPEN" sign in an upper window.

There is outdoor seating (for the smokers). Inside the door is the brewery off to the left, and the taproom is up a flight of stairs. It's not a huge place. There's half a dozen seats at the bar and several smaller rooms off the various hallways. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it used to be an office of some sort. One room has darts, another a pool table.

The wall decor has a WW2-era theme to it, with miniature fuselage, some with kill counts on them.

We occupied one of the smaller rooms. It had two couches facing each other with a low table in the middle. The overhead light was two fluorescent bulbs, one of which flickered, so we left it off and chatted by the light of the lamp on the table (and the neon sign, once we opened the blinds).

We got in pretty early, around 8 pm, and it wasn't busy at all. When we left close to midnight, it was hopping: people were playing darts, there were several pool games going on, and the outdoor seating had multiple people with pitchers. The music never felt too loud, though whether that was because we were in a side room, I don't know.

I plan to make it to one of their brewery tours (the second Saturday of the month). October is out because of the World Beer Festival, but maybe November.

In summary: Big Boss taproom is a nice, gemütlicher place to chat with friends while drinking beer brewed just downstairs.

Anime rec: PLANETES

2010-09-21T10:20:00.000-04:00

Over on twitter, an exchange with Don inspired me to start a potential series on anime recs. There's always a chance I'll lose interest, or get distracted, but here's a good start.

PLANETES is a near-future SF tale about garbage collectors in space. Stick with me if you think that sounds boring.

The anime was made in 2003, and it was based on a series of manga that came out several years beforehand. The seed idea is the Kessler syndrome: space debris colliding with each other can make a huge amount more of space debris. It's relevant now, even. Space junk could disrupt communications networks. Just a year and a half ago, a US comsat was destroyed in a collision with a Russian satellite. New Scientist published a piece on space junk potentially cutting us off from space.

The story opens in 2075, and there's a settlement on the moon. That means there's a lot of shuttle traffic between Earth and the moon. A tiny piece of space junk can rupture the hull of a spacecraft, and that's what our intrepid misfit heroes try to prevent.

Newcomer Ai Tanabe joins the crew of the Toy Box, where she meets Hachimaki, Fee Carmichael, and Yuri Mihailkov. The story follows her integration into the team, and her training in EVA manouevres. Hachimaki wants to join the mission to Jupiter, but debris collection isn't very prestigious, so he has to fight for it.

There's also politics, both terrorist plots and interpersonal/company politics. The wikipedia entry has full details, with spoilers in the "plot summary" section, and episode summaries.

Planetes has been compared to Patlabor (another great series I should write about), as a band of misfits trying to do their jobs while being low team on the ladder. It's full of humor and dramatic tension in good proportions. The budding romance between Hachimaki and Tanabe is done realistically and well.

One episode focuses on Fee's need to have a smoke. On the space habitats, there are designated smoking enclosures, with extra filters, etc, so the life support systems don't get gunked up. She goes from enclosure to enclosure, only to find that they're closed. The reason they're closed is the Space Defense Front's attacks. The thread of Fee's frustration is woven skillfully through the larger political issue.

It's a great show, and one that I don't think has gotten enough recognition in the US.

Book review: Shades of Milk and Honey

2010-09-17T09:30:00.000-04:00

Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal. 2010.

I finished this book on Wednesday, but I've been trying to figure out what to say other than "OMG you guys, go buy this book right now!" (Which you should do, really.)

This is Kowal's debut novel, though it's not her first published work.

The idea behind the novel is this: What if Jane Austen had lived in a world where magic was real? What sort of novel would she have written? Then Kowal set out to do just that.

There's a main character, Miss Jane Ellsworth, aged 28, plain, and unwed. She has a younger sister, Melody, aged 18, who is beautiful. Jane has a great talent for glamour (the magical art, which is considered one of the arts a lady should learn, like painting, playing piano, and French), but Melody does not. Mr. Ellsworth is a delight - he loves his daughters, but he has no patience for nonsense (like fainting from nerves).

Their neighbor, Lady FitzCameron, hires an artist to make a glamural (a wall painting suffused with glamour). Jane sees it, while in progress, and she looks at the etheric folds that create it, and inadvertently offends the creator, Mr. Vincent.

Their other neighbor, Mr. Dunkirk, receives his sister for a visit, and she and Jane become fast friends. Melody and Jane both find him attractive, and there is no lack of sibling rivalry there.

Of course, not all goes perfectly, and there's a bit of Drama, but all ends well. It's a romance, you see.

Her writing is consciously Austen-esque. Kowal said she would write a chapter, then read a chapter of Austen, to get a feel for it. I'm not a connoisseur of Austen's work, but I think she did a good job of it. (I can compare her style to Heyer's, and I find Kowal's more lovely, where Heyer's is somewhat over the top.) It also reminds me a bit of Swordspoint in the prose style.

In conclusion: if you like Jane Austen; if you liked Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (or even if you thought it was a bit long and dragged a bit, but you like the idea of the Regency + magic); if you like Georgette Heyer, go out and buy Shades of Milk and Honey right now. You won't regret it.

Book review: Children No More

2010-09-14T10:00:00.002-04:00

Children No More, Mark L. VanName. 2010.

I bought a copy of this book at NASFIC, after hearing that Mark is donating all proceeds from this novel to Falling Whistles, an NGO working to rehabilitate child soldiers in Congo. (It turns out Mark lives somewhere around here, actually. There are a lot of writers in these parts.)

The story is about a freelance/retired mercenary named Jon and his ship, whose AI is named Lobo. They're contracted by a former coworker named Alissa Lim to help rescue a group of children who have been pressed into combat. Jon was himself a child soldier, and he takes the mission for personal reasons.

This book is not happy fun times. The opening chapters depict the rebel forces training the boys to be killers. There is a lot of unpleasantness, depicted unflinchingly. However: the ending, which I won't spoil, is worth every flinch, every gut punch. There are moments of levity (Lobo is sarcastic as hell) throughout, and it's not unrelentingly bleak. There's a strong thread of hope: Jon's hope for the boys, Jon's hope for himself.

The main thing that bothered me was that Lim was portrayed as losing her temper easily. She's the only major female character (there's another one, but she's fairly secondary and one of the counselors in the rehab camp; well, there's also Maggie, who's a love interest for Jon), so there's not really a counterpoint for "wimmin: they're so emotional, amirite?" Now, it's true that Jon isn't as in control over his emotions as he likes to think he is, at least regarding certain things, but here's the thing. When Jon loses his control, good things happen. When Lim loses her control, bad things happen. It seems minor, but when this is viewed alongside every other story with the same stereotyped characterizations, it's just another brick in the wall of oppositional sexism, dividing Men from Women as mutually exclusive groups.

(Note: I don't believe that Mark had sexist intentions when writing this book, or creating Lim's character. I'm also not calling him a sexist. I'm commenting on the existing sexist tropes in American culture, which surround us so much that we don't even know they're there.)

In the end, it's a tale of humanity. It's a tale of overcoming horrors and moving on with your life, even if the horrors come back to haunt you now and again.

Strongly recommended.

(association) FOOTBALL!

2010-09-13T10:00:00.001-04:00

As you may know, I'm a football (soccer) fan. Between June 12 and July 13, I watched close to 60 football matches, mostly in Spanish (on Univision, low-def). I own a jersey for the German national team (2006) and covet a 2010 away jersey in gorgeous black.

The Bundesliga's just starting up again, 3 match days into their 34-match season. I had to decide which team to follow. This was difficult. In years past, it's been more of a peripheral attention I've paid, because US news sites don't really cover German football, and it was hard to keep track. But now there are blogs and livejournal communities and twitterfeeds, and all sorts of things that are made possible with the internet.

Anyway. I don't live in Germany, much to my dismay. If I did, I'd live in Berlin, so picking a Berlin team is only natural, right? Hertha BSC was relegated to the 2nd league after a disastrous 2009/10 season, and who cares about the 2. BuLi, right? But Berlin is the home of my heart, so Hertha is the team of my heart. And they're in 3rd place in the 2nd league right now, having won all three of their games so far (ties in points are decided on goal differential, and they're 3rd on that.) So maybe they'll be back in the 1st league in 2011!

So I looked for a 1. BuLi team. There are some players from the national team whom I really like watching play, so I checked out their teams. Mesut Özil was bought by Real Madrid, so that took away my main reason for interest in Werder Bremen. As much as I like Müller, Klose, Schweinsteiger, et al, there's no way in hell I'm rooting for FC Bayern. It's like rooting for the Yankees (if you're not from New York or don't have a long-standing family tradition).

Then there's the lovely center-back Arne Friedrich, who used to play at Hertha, but moved to Wolfsburg after they were relegated. Then he slipped a disc in practice and had to get surgery, so he *still* hasn't played this season. :P

I don't like deciding on something without seeing how they play, so I watched a few Wolfsburg matches, and I tried watching a Werder match, but I couldn't get into it. And, despite the fact that the Wolves have lost all three of their matches so far (one of which went from a comfortable 3:1 at half time to 3:4 at the end), I still like them. When they actually work together, they look good. And we're doing better than Schalke (though only on goal differential...) The defense keeps falling down on the job, though. (Hopefully that'll change when Arne's deemed fit to play again.)

It's weird to sit down and consciously decide which team to support. It's not like anyone in my family has a favorite team in the German Football League; they're all American Football fans, if they follow sports at all.

I really need to time my next trip to Germany to include a live Bundesliga match. Tickets aren't too unreasonably priced.

Dragon*Con

2010-09-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

So, despite my mystery ailment rearing its head, I made it to Dragon*Con. Unfortunately, the antibiotic I was on at the time (Levaquin) made me really sick, so I spent a lot of time in my room, sleeping (and one morning in the ER and another in an urgent care clinic, where they took me off Levaquin).

The theory, which is a good one, is that I have a lingering sinus infection (possibly from the cold I got in Berlin) that flares up and gives me nasty post-nasal drip, which gets into my stomach and gives me GERD-like symptoms. While I was taking the z-pak (what I was switched to), I felt better, but in the last few days, my sinuses have felt worse, so I'm going to call my PCP (again) and ask if she thinks I should do another round of antibiotics, because the first one did OK but didn't eradicate the bastards. Persistent cusses.

Anyway, my dear Ben read my story for me in the RFR (because I was sleeping in my room). I made it to things on Sunday, including a great Q&A with James & Oliver Phelps (the Weasley twins), but I was too tired to do much else, and nothing after 10 pm.

I sure hope this whole mess is just from a sinus infection and that another round of antibiotics kills them dead and I never have to deal with this random nausea nonsense again.

Accursed mystery ailment

2010-08-31T19:51:00.002-04:00

Since the end of June, I've been dealing with periodic nausea. It resulted in leaving for ReaderCon later than planned and missing half of NASFiC because I was in the hospital.

Because the universe finds it amusing, I woke up with nausea this morning. This does not bode well for driving to Atlanta, but we'll see. We're not scheduled to leave until Thursday around 10 am. Today my anti-nausea drugs had kicked in by then, so with any luck they'll work tomorrow and the rest of the week. (With even more luck, I won't wake up sick again. That's a lot more luck than has been on my side lately. I was hoping that I'd have a 3-week respite again, like the one I had for most of July. No such luck.)

For the curious, I've been to my GP, a gastroenterologist, a GYN, and the ER/hospital. I've been tested for food allergies, celiac disease, pregnancy, gallstones, pelvic cysts, parasites, and bacteria. I've had ultrasounds of my gallbladder and pelvis, and an upper endoscopy. The only test that showed any abnormalities was the endo, wherein my GI doc found a polyp, which she sent off for biopsy. Results may be in tomorrow, or early next week, depending on how complicated it is.

If I have to skip D*C, I'll be sure to post here, on facebook, and anywhere else I can think of.

Official site live!

2010-08-30T13:04:00.002-04:00

My friend Tammy did all the hard work, and I'm grateful that she's got an eye for design (I don't!)

Point your browsers to CD Covington.com and have a look.

I'm not abandoning my blog, don't you worry :)

I got a smartphone.

2010-08-28T17:20:00.003-04:00

I got a Samsung Propel in February 2008. It's not a bad phone, really. I got a data plan on it, and Ben and I split unlimited text messaging. At the time, I was looking at a smartphone of some sort, Blackberries mostly, but the data plans for them were sort of insane, so I went with the 3G phone.

I got a bug about researching Android phones a couple weeks ago, and I looked into the ones from AT&T (since they're my carrier). The only Android phone that got good reviews was the newest one, a Samsung Captivate. (I wish mobile phones didn't have such ridiculous names.)

In the course of my errand-running yesterday, I stopped by the AT&T store to try one out, because all the reading on the internet isn't going to let you know what it feels like in your hands. So I asked at the counter when I was eligible to upgrade, expecting the answer to be December or January. I was already eligible. So I got one.

I like it well enough so far, and I've spent way too much time futzing around with it since yesterday afternoon. I've barely had the thing 24 hours and I've already installed 2 beer-related apps and one that has a live text feed of Bundesliga matches. (Plus facebook and twitter.) And rearranged the icons a bit and sorted things out.

Nifty things:
Haptic feedback (it vibrates) on keypresses, because it's a touchscreen and some people like that. I'll probably try it without the feedback and see how I feel. I kind of like the feedback right now.
Swype. You can drag your finger from key to key on the keyboard and it guesses the word, even if you bugger it up. If there are multiple options, you can select from a box. It guessed "endoscopy" correctly, even when I inverted several letters.
AMOLED display. It's a really fancy LED screen that's wicked bright. There's an option to set your brightness, or to let it sense the ambient light and optimize the display. (This is also a power-saving feature.)
Puzzle lock. If you get a text message (or miss a call), when you go to unlock your phone, there's a puzzle piece out of place, and you drag it over to the hole, and it takes you to the message. It's gimmicky, yes, but it's also nifty.
Seamless integration with google accounts. I have all my gmail contacts, my gcal, my picasaweb, and gchat on my phone. I would expect nothing less from a phone running an operating system written by google.
Built-in wifi. When I'm at home (or in a location with open wifi), I can use that instead of my data plan. This is one of the reasons I went with the 200 MB data plan rather than the 2GB.
The phone looks really nice. It's got a big 4" screen and doesn't weigh any more than my Propel. (A downside of this is that it's too big to fit in the cell phone purse I have; but it's the perfect size for my camera.)

Annoyances:
One of the reviews I read mentioned that the design feature of a curved top makes it hard to reach the mini-USB input (aka power cord slot). No shit on that one. I had trouble getting the power cord it came with to stay plugged in so it could charge overnight.
It made me realize how much information of mine Google has. (Annoyance? Kind of.)
A lot of the reviewers talked about the look of the GUI (user interface) and how they hated it; I kind of like it. The UI designers were obviously going for the iPhone look; whether this is a feature or a bug depends on the user in question.

All in all, so far, I like my phone. I'll be signing up for the Boingo Mobile soon, because they have a hotspot at the Marriott in Atlanta, where I'm staying for Dragon*Con. (The Marriott charges $12.95/day for internet access. The math is obvious.)

Interview: Outer Alliance Spotlight

2010-08-27T22:44:00.002-04:00

Retro Spec (specifically editor Karen Romanko, fellow contributor Leonard Richardson, and I) was featured in the Outer Alliance spotlight this week.

Have a read! (And thanks, Julia!)

Reading at Dragon*Con

2010-08-26T11:17:00.002-04:00

I'm participating in the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading, which will be on Saturday, September 4, at 11:30 am in one of the lit track rooms. I'll be reading from "U8: Alexanderplatz (1989)".

If you're at the con, stop by and have a listen!

Retro Spec is available!

2010-08-18T20:34:00.003-04:00

In my inbox this evening was a great little piece of news: Amazon and B&N have Retro Spec available for purchase!

You can get a copy at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Book review: A Woman's Liberation

2010-08-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

A Woman's Liberation, eds Connie Willis and Sheila Williams, 2001.

This is a collection of short stories reprinted from Asimov's and Analog, where Williams was an editor (at the time; possibly still). All the authors are female, and the main characters are all female. It's a collection of stories of "futures by and about women," as the book's subtitle declares.

(Note to anyone who thinks it's so hard to make a TOC in an anthology not composed 100% of men: you're not looking hard enough.)

Willis' story "Even the Queen" is a hilarious look at the politics of menstruation. S.N. Dyer's "The July Ward" is a haunting tale of a doctor's day on a neuro ward (though it barely counts as speculative, IMO; it's still quite good). The piece that lent its title to and inspired the anthology, Ursula LeGuin's "A Woman's Liberation," is a story about freedom (literally; the POV character was born a slave).

There are stories of loss: "The Kidnapping of Baroness 5" by Katherine MacLean is about loss of collective memory (thanks to prions), and Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" is about the loss of verbal communication. "The Ship who Mourned," by Anne McCaffrey, is also about loss.

The other stories are also good, but harder to summarize. "Fool's Errand" by Sarah Zettel is about saving the universe from rampant AIs; "Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy is about a chimpanzee imprinted with a human teen's personality; "Inertia" by Nancy Kress is about people isolated in camps because they had a communicable, non-fatal disease; "Of Mist, Grass, and Sand" by Vonda McIntyre is about a woman who heals people with snakes.

I highly recommend this anthology to everyone, especially anyone whose bookshelves are populated with mostly male names.

Book review: Total Oblivion, more or less

2010-08-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

Total Oblivion, More or Less, Alan DeNiro. 1st ed, 2010.

I picked this up at ReaderCon, while I was looking for Ellen Kushner's chapbook "The Man with the Knives." Alan was working at the Small Beer table, so we chatted briefly, and he signed my copy. He's a nice chap.

The story begins with a teenaged girl in Minnesota whose world changes completely overnight. Technology stops working, and armed barbarians (Scythians, for example) invade. She and her family travel down the Mississippi in search of a new life (or at least a safe place to live), and they encounter villains and ad execs and a strange plague that involves wasps.

The story is billed as humorous, though it's a very dark sort of humor in most of it. It keeps the story from being overwhelmingly bleak, through the sheer absurdity of things Macy and her family encounter.

I liked the way DeNiro told the story: it's mostly in first person (Macy's POV), but there are short mini-chapters between the regular chapters, which are things like pamphlets, news bulletins, and background info told in third person. To fill the reader in on things Macy has no reason to know and give hints of what's coming up.

I enjoyed the book. If you like the idea of an absurdist apocalypse, this book is for you.

Crisis managed (for now)

2010-08-08T18:22:00.002-04:00

I spent about 24 hours at UNC hospital, where I got 3.5 liters of IV fluids (thanks to not having eaten for most of a week and having, shall we say, digestive issues) and some drugs to treat the symptoms. They kicked me out yesterday evening, because there's no reason to keep me there, since I was rehydrated and they don't need to keep me there to wait for test results. Hospitals are loud and full of germs. But they still don't know the root cause, so I'm going to the GI specialist in 2 weeks. Hopefully she'll have an idea.

The fabulous Julia read my story for me in the RFR Friday night, while I was stuck in the ER with 2 bags of normal saline dripping into my arm. She said people liked it, and that makes me happy.

I went back to the con today, attended a panel, then hung out with Natania and Julia for a while, and Lee Martindale was outside for some fresh air, so she joined us. It was a nice chat, ranging from GLBT rights issues to feminism and writing and what books we'd read recently and writing and stuff.

But I'm home and fixed up, temporarily, at least. I'm starting to get my appetite back, even.

NASFIC: Change of plans

2010-08-06T12:55:00.002-04:00

I'm going to the hospital instead. I haven't eaten in a week, and a diet of clear liquids hasn't helped.

I hope they can figure out what's wrong with me. I'm tired of being sick. Hopefully this'll fix it in time for Dragon*Con.

NASFiC/ReConStruction panels!

2010-07-29T15:15:00.001-04:00

I'm going to be on several panels at NASFiC next week. Here's a tentative list:

Thursday 8/5
1:00 pm LIT108: Harry Potter retrospective. Now that it’s over, was it as good as we thought?

Friday 8/6
10:00 am LIT009: Fifty years ago today. A retrospective of SF/F in 1960. I may try to swap this one for something I actually know about.

4:00 pm LIT008: Rural settings in SF/F. Typically rural areas appear in Fantasy and cities in SF. What does this say about the two genres? Or is this generalization even true? I have no strong feelings on this subject. I will, however, gladly blather at length on it.

8:00 pm CON006: Broad Universe rapid fire reading. I'll be reading approximately the first half of "U8" and probably an excerpt from my in-progress short story, currently titled "Valkyrie One." (Other Broads will be reading as well.)

See you there?

Book review: The White Road

2010-07-24T14:00:00.001-04:00

The White Road by Lynn Flewelling, 1st ed 2010.

The White Road picks up where Shadows Return left off, so you'll be extremely lost if you didn't read SR. You know all those questions left dangling all tantalizingly at the end of SR (and alluded to throughout the first 3 Nightrunner books), like "what on earth is a rhekaro?" and "why did the Hazadrielfaie fuck off to the mountains of the north, anyway?"? They're answered very satisfyingly, yet there are enough threads left dangling for further sequels: Phoria is still at war, and still hates the wizards of the Oreska, and distrusts Nysander's Watchers.

Alec and Seregil are dealing with the fallout of the Plenimaran plot that got Alec captured and resulted in Sebrahn's existence. They retreat to Aurenen for a while, where Seregil's nemesis Ulan of Viresse plots against them. They decide to go back to Plenimar to retrieve the book that Yhakobin used to create Sebrahn, to attempt to destroy it, or at least get it out of enemy hands.

Meanwhile, the Hazadrielfaie set out to destroy Alec and Sebrahn, because they exist and they should not.

I admit, I got really bored of all of Alec's "mothering" instincts toward Sebrahn. That whole subplot did nothing for me, even if Sebrahn himself started to grow on me. Aside from that, I loved the book. A lot of the scenes in Aurenen were very poignant, especially the scenes with Seregil and his family. Then the action started, and I didn't want to put it down.

I recommend this book if you've ever read Flewelling's other works and enjoyed them (even if you didn't like SR very much because of Sebrahn). If you haven't read her other works (and you like fantasy), go pick them up!

Ghost stations of Berlin

2010-07-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

I am a child of the 1980s, and as such, the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union happened around the time I came into political awareness. It's only to be expected that something of that magnitude would have influenced me a lot.

I've been to Berlin 3 times now. Once for 3 days in 1997, once for a week at Christmas 2007, and most recently May 2010. At Christmas 2007, I learned about a consequence of the Berlin Wall that I'd never heard of before: Geisterbahnhöfe: ghost stations.

The public transit system in Berlin was started in the 1890s, and the rail system several decades before that. So when SED-president Walter Ulbricht built the wall (which he rather famously denied plans for), the two subway lines and one street-train line that crossed from West to East to West were closed down, and no one could get on or off at those stations. (With exceptions: at Friedrichstrasse there was a border station, where the West Germans could pay a fee and visit family in the East.)

Berlin wasn't divided in half on a north-south line. The Soviet sector encompassed a certain set of districts, and Mitte, where the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz are located, bulged out a bit into the west.

The Soviet/SED leadership called the wall an "anti-fascist protection wall," a fine bit of doublespeak: while they claimed to want to keep the "fascists" in the West out, they really wanted to keep the East Germans in. And, of course, someone could hop onto a train at, say, Alexanderplatz, and get out in the West and never look back. So, of course, they walled off the entrances and stationed border police inside, to prevent people from escaping through the rail tunnels.

Of course, people tried, and some were almost successful. People also built tunnels under the Wall, usually from a starting point in the west (in somebody's basement, frequently), but they were also discovered eventually.

Then in 1989 and 1990, these stations that had been abandoned for close to thirty years were in terrible disrepair, and it took years to reopen them all.

When I learned about the ghost stations, I knew I had to write a story about that. It took a while to find it, but I finally did. "U8: Alexanderplatz (1989)" is the result.

Back from ReaderCon

2010-07-13T15:00:00.000-04:00

Thanks to an offhand comment on Twitter, Jaym Gates and I decided a roadtrip from Raleigh-Durham up to Burlington, MA (northwest Boston) for ReaderCon would be a good idea. Having done it now, and spent about 30 hours in the car round-trip, I have to say it's nowhere near as good an idea as one would think. But it was a fun trip, mostly because of the company. Next year, though, I'm flying.

I attended a handful of panels, which were all interesting. I was sad to miss the Great War Geeks Unite! panel, because the World Cup third place match was on, and Germany was playing. (Stupid Spain.) Though in the 15 minutes I was there, I heard some great book recs and wrote them down. I'm not yet a full-fledged Great War geek, but I'm working on it. (I started reading Stone's World War One: a short history recently; while it's impossible to go into great depth in a 200-page book, it seems so far to be a good overview for anyone who wants to fill in the gaps their high school education left.)

The weird thing I think about it was that I went to the bar to hang with Jaym, and she was hanging with some people, one of whom I later found out is the editor of Realms of Fantasy. Um. (He's a pretty good nerdcore rapper, actually.) And I got a hug from the assistant editor of Lightspeed. It's apparently that sort of con. Which is awesome, in both senses of the word.

I read from "U8: Alexanderplatz (1989)" at the Broad Universe RFR, and I got a lot of compliments on it. I had my Germany jersey on (it was game day!), so I was pretty recognizable, and a couple people came up to me later in the day. I also had a report that someone went to the BU book table and asked specifically about the book I was in! (It isn't out yet, sadly.) So I'm sort of chuffed about that.

I volunteered 8 hours at the con, so I get a free 2011 membership. It's a pretty good way to spend time and meet people, especially if you have a lot of free time between panels you're interested in.

Then after the con, I went with Jaym to have dinner at Bart Leib's house. (Kay was out of town.) They're the co-editors of Crossed Genres. (And they have two adorable kitties!) I met some other fannish folks there, and we may meet up at either NASFIC or Dragon*Con.

All in all, it was a good con, and I look forward to going back next year. By airplane, thank you very much. Hopefully I'll have a different published story to read from!

What am I doing?

2010-07-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

- I'm writing a short story about women in the military. I'm hoping to have a first draft in the next week or so.

- The notes I've received on Iron and Rust are percolating in the back of my mind. I've only gotten one set back so far, and I'm waiting on two more. Once I get the others, there'll be more for my brain to gnaw on while I work on other things.

- I'm going to ReaderCon in Boston next week. I'm alternatingly terrified (the other attendees are way smarter and more well-read than I) and excited (a con! for book geekery!) I hope to meet some more Broads and learn some cool stuff from the panels.

- I'm also going to NASFiC. That's here in the Triangle, so I don't have to make extensive travel arrangements. I'll probably be sleeping on a pair of friends' couch, since they live much closer than I do. I have some more news on that, but it's not official yet, so.

- For my third con in three months, I'll be going to Dragon*Con in Atlanta. I don't have much to say about D*C, other than I can't wait, because I love D*C. I don't go for the guests or the panels, really, though sometimes they're pretty awesome. I go to be with geeks for four days.

- And, of course, it's World Cup season, so I'm watching a lot of football. In Spanish (on Univision) because I don't get ESPN. The Argentina vs Germany match is going to be interesting. I'm holding my thumbs for the Nationalelf.

Book review: The Complete Hammer's Slammers (vol 1)

2010-06-24T10:00:00.001-04:00

The Complete Hammer's Slammers (volume 1), David Drake. Baen, 2009. (Individual stories 1974-2005)

I enjoy reading space opera and books about people fighting in space. The stories I write are about people fighting in space. It's a good idea to read other books in your subgenre, to see what other people have done (so you don't repeat it, for one thing).

David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series was recommended to me by a friend, and a different friend gave this to me for my birthday. I went to a writers conference outside Charlotte in April, and Drake gave a seminar. Afterward, I asked him if he'd sign my copy, and he told me I shouldn't read it. I was perplexed: an author is telling me not to read his book. He elaborated: I would probably find it disturbing, because it's based on his actual experiences in Vietnam and depicts soldiers being soldiers in wartime.

That's what I was looking for in the book, actually, and that's what I got. I will admit that some of the imagery was unpleasant, if not outright disturbing (and, on one occasion, made me regret reading it while I was eating breakfast), but it wasn't shocking.

It's not pleasant. The men and women we meet in the Slammers are human, with everything that entails. They have flaws. They fuck up. They make bad decisions. They make good decisions. They love, they hate, they do their job.

Recommended for anyone who enjoys military science fiction or space opera.

Further reading: David Drake's official website

Book review: Das Paradies am Rande der Stadt

2010-06-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

Das Paradies am Rande der Stadt, Volker Strübing. yedermann, 2005. Paradies und Das, Zeitschock

In my quest for German-original science fiction, I managed to find one book, at least on a bookshelf and that didn't require ordering via amazon. I flipped through, found some humorous bits, read the flaps, and bought it.

In the not-so-distant future, a man invents a computer program that gives people ultimate joy. He calls it Eden. It's completely free, and anyone who wishes can cross the rainbow.

The German government (at least) has collapsed, and corporations have stepped in to fill the gap, while some free enclaves sprang up outside the corporate cities. Churches compete with each other for members. Soulcatchers take people to Eden for bounties (with a free-will loophole, of course.)

The Church of the True Name of God is a new denomination. God came to its founder one night, and told him his true name: Kein Schwein. It was originally founded as a protest and satire, but people came to it without the irony. (Kein Schwein means literally "no pig," but it's an idiom that means "not a soul" or "no one": As one of the founder's sermons states, if you don't believe in KEIN SCHWEIN, then KEIN SCHWEIN will punish you. Which, for the irony-impaired, means that if you don't believe in no one, then no one will punish you.)

Our heroes are a group opposed to Eden's existence, who wish to destroy it. They meet a woman who was in Eden but left (to rescue her Adam, who left) and get caught up in a war between the church, the corporate city, and a group of neo-Nazi thugs for hire.

If you think this sounds like The Matrix meets Snow Crash via Terry Pratchett, you'd be right. I recommend this for anyone who speaks German and likes their humor with a touch of sarcastic irony.

Book review: Dear Shameless Death

2010-06-22T10:10:00.000-04:00

Dear Shameless Death, Latife Tekin (trans Saliha Paker/Mel Kenne). 1st ed 1983, 1st translation 2001. Marion Boyars Publishers (UK).

Magical realism is not typically a genre I read. I wanted to find books about Turkey, written by Turkish people, that included folklore and traditional culture. This book has those in spades.

It's the story of a girl who was djinn-touched, almost cursed and unlucky, and her family, moving from a village to the big city, and how life in the city changed them. There were times when I wanted access to a handy google or wikipedia, to see what some of the untranslated Turkish words meant, or find out what a reference or concept meant, but I was on an airplane, so I couldn't. I don't feel it detracted from the story, though having more familiarity with it would have helped.

That's one tricky bit when translating a book for a different audience than the writer intended. The translator has to decide whether to translate, say, djinn as demon, when a djinn isn't exactly a demon in the Christian sense, nor is it a genie as seen in Aladdin. It's one of those things a translator learns to do, and it's often a call based on their professional judgement.

It took me a little while to get into the book. The style wasn't what I'm used to, and I couldn't understand the characters, but I put it down for a little while then picked it up again while I was traveling to Berlin, and I finished it on the way there. Once I adjusted to the style, it was hard to put down. The characters and their lives were engaging, while tragedy after tragedy struck, and they worked to deal with each new crisis.

Recommended.

(A review from The Guardian, 2001.)

RetroSpec publication date & cover!

2010-06-16T12:08:00.004-04:00

While I was away, Karen Romanko, editor of the anthology my flash fiction piece will be appearing in, got the layout finished, and we now have a publication date! September 7, 2010.

I'll post links to where you can buy a copy when I know myself. :)

Been a long time.

2010-06-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry for that. I was in Europe for 6 weeks, and I didn't have much interest in updating. I have 3 book reviews, a manga review, and some exciting news about RetroSpec to post in the next few days. For now, I'll just post a wrap-up of my trip.

May 2-28: Berlin, Germany. I took a class at the Goethe Institute. Even after many years of disuse, my German is good enough to land me in the highest-level class, where we spent most of the time talking about stuff and going over finer points of German grammar and learning new idioms and the like. There were about a dozen of us.

I still love Berlin, and if it were possible or practical at all to move there, I would. Even if the weather was terrible the whole month.

May 29-June 5: Vienna, Austria. I've always wanted to visit Vienna, and now I have. I took an overnight train from Berlin, and Ben met me there. It was the start of our 10th anniversary trip. The weather was pretty bad then, too. Coldish and rainy.

Vienna is more elegant than Berlin, and a lot more expensive. It's also a more "finished" city, I guess you could say. It's got all these grand buildings, and it's home to tons of culture and art and music and the like. We could have seen a different Mozart concert every night, if we'd had the money. (We saw a performance of the Requiem in the Karlskirche, by a group using instruments from Mozart's time and balance and seating charts from the time. It was really cool.)

We took a day trip out to Carnuntum, which is the site of a Roman border fortress-town. They've rebuilt two villas and are working on the baths. One they rebuilt using Roman-era techniques and replica tools, including firing the bricks in an earthen kiln. That was sweet.

June 5-7: Bratislava, Slovakia. Bratislava is pretty cheap, and there's not much else going for it. They've got a big monument on a hill with a bunch of Soviet graves, dedicated to the soldiers who kept the Nazis out of Western Slovakia in 1944 or 45, which has a great view of the city. Bratislava Castle is uninspiring, but Devin Castle, a 20-minute city bus ride away, is really awesome. The hill has been inhabited since about 950, by Romans, Moravians, Slovaks, and even (briefly) the Habsburgs. There's a good bit of archaeology there, too.

June 7-13: Budapest, Hungary. Budapest is so inexpensive! We could eat a modestly expensive meal for $35 total. It's also a very pretty city, but less finished. That's probably the remnants of communism. There was a lot of reconstruction going on.

Szechenyi Baths are amazing. So, Budapest has a bathing/spa culture, which may be a remnant of its 140-year Ottoman occupation. They've also got hot springs, so they've got a good location. Szechenyi Baths have both thermal spas and swimming pools, and your admission fee covers both. (All-day admission to this palace of bathing costs 3100 forint, or about $13.50 at today's exchange.) It's rather literally a palace, with frescoes, marble columns, and statuary. Bath temperatures range from 20C to 40C. I spent most of my time in the 36, 38, or 40C baths, then we went outside to the swimming pool for a bit, which was also amazing. (The gallery shows mostly swimming pool photos, and none of the spas.)

My favorite thing was watching the USA/ENG world cup match on a giant screen in Szabadsag Ter with a thousand or so people. I haven't been ble to watch any more games since then, because I don't get ESPN, and ESPN360 is blocked on my ISP. But a friend told me that Univision is streaming all the games online, so I'm going to go switch computers and watch me some futbol. This one can't handle it.

Book review: Whipping Girl

2010-04-29T15:45:00.000-04:00

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano, 2007.

After I ranted about "girly" not being an insult, my friend Enne said I ought to read this book, and they brought it over for me to borrow, because they said I'd like it. They were so right.

Serano is a feminist, and she distinguishes between traditional sexism and oppositional sexism, which I think is pretty damn cool. (She has a glossary of terms on her website.)

traditional sexism
Sexism that is rooted in the presumption that femaleness and femininity are inferior to (and only exist for the sexual benefit of) maleness and masculinity. It targets those who are female as well as those who are feminine (regardless of their sex).

oppositional sexism
Sexism that is rooted in the presumption that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes, each possessing a unique and non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. It targets those who do not conform to oppositional gender norms. A number of previously described categories of sexism (e.g., transphobia, homophobia and cissexism) fall under the umbrella of oppositional sexism.

This book is not an introductory feminist text, though there are aspects that make it a very good introduction to trans-spectrum issues. There are extensive discussions of gender theory and takedowns of academic gender theory. Serano goes into moderate detail about her transition, including the hormonal aspects of things, without being explicit (for those of you for whom that would be an issue.)

Her primary thesis is a rebuttal of the notion that gender is 100% societally constructed and 0% nature, though she spends a good amount of time on rebutting the idea that gender is 100% nature, because these two ideas aren't as opposite as they appear on the surface. That trans-spectrum people exist refutes both of these. People who feel dissonance between their physical sex and their gender aren't receiving the societal norming that would be required under the all-gender-is-learned model, and they aren't getting it from their biology, either. The reality must lie somewhere between, of course. There's inherent gender feelings, but there are also learned behaviors -- some of which are survival skills: conforming to societal standards for female behavior on the job, say.

The other main thesis is that "feminine" stuff isn't inherently less valuable than "masculine" stuff, and that these aren't inherently opposite categories. "Feminine" stuff includes everything from looking nice to wearing makeup to displaying emotions to being nurturing. Society has devalued these things so much that feminine and female and frivolous and irrational are all synonyms, while their opposites are masculine and male and logical. Because god forbid that a woman want to be an engineer or a man want to be a nurse.

This is something I've had to deal with for quite some time. Because society views, and those of us who live in society are taught to view, these as two distinct, discrete categories, the idea that you can take a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B is pretty damned radical. I'm an intelligent woman; I majored in chemistry and German in college, and I'm a doctor of pharmacy. I like reading non-fiction to learn more about things that interest me. At the same time, I like pretty jewelry (even if I hardly ever put it on) and frilly skirts, and have a serious shoe habit.

Reconciling these things with each other, let alone with being a feminist, is tough, if you've only heard of the 70s/80s feminism wherein more masculine and butch identities and expressions -- an outright rejection of femininity for reasons discussed two paragraphs above -- are privileged over femme expressions. I reject that dichotomy; I reject that hierarchy. Serano's book gives me (and others like me) the language and theory to explain why.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in feminism or gender theory, who became feminist in the second wave, or who rejected feminism in the second wave. I also recommend it to anyone who lives in society.

Book review: The Persian Night

2010-04-28T17:00:00.000-04:00

The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution, Amir Taheri, 2009.

Taheri is an expat Iranian living in London and Paris. He's a journalist, and he edited a major newspaper in Iran until he left. He's also significantly more conservative in mindset than I am.

He begins with several chapters of the history of Iran and of Islam, as well as political philosophy in the Muslim world. Once, Iran was a welcoming nation composed of many different groups of people who lived in (relative) harmony. The regime of the Islamic Republic wants Iranians to forget that, to wipe out their thousand-year history.

There were several things I found incredibly interesting in this text, which I'd never learned before. The regime (the Khomeinists) oppose the existence of the state and advocate permanent revolution, along with the elimination of the Great Satan and the Jews, of course. The state exists on a precarious wire, trying to go about the business of running a government while the regime goes about trying to stop them.

The system is unstable, and it keeps teetering toward chaos, until someone with greater force steps in.

The 1979 revolution was made possible through the combined support of the Khomeinists, the Marxists, and people who just hated the Shah. They worked together, then the Khomeinists set about their true goal, which is pretty much what we see today. Because of this, the opposition is fractionated, splintered, and instigating regime change would require a lot of effort in filling the power vacuum.

Taheri actually advocates for regime change. He says the time is right, because the people are more disillusioned than ever with the regime which has lost its legitimacy. He does not, from what I can gather, advocate regime change a la Iraq, but more the sort where people with big guns aid the locals.

Above all, the United States should be resolutely on the side of the Iranian people.... More important and ultimately perhaps more effective is for th United States to use its enormous bully pulpit to publicize the Iranian people's struggle for freedom.

Taheri has written several other books on modern Iranian history, though his work is not without controversy.

Dear Iceland Volcano:

2010-04-20T09:02:00.002-04:00

Please stop erupting.

Dear EU air control: Please open airports and allow transatlantic flights.

I'm supposed to be flying to Germany in 11 days. There are very few flights leaving for Europe right now, and I have no idea if or when this is going to change. I'm stalking my airline's flight status page, and their separate page for volcano-related travel disruptions (which still only lists affected dates until this Friday), but everything is so unpredictable.

I should email the Institut and ask what happens to the $2100 I paid them if, due to this flight ban and thus circumstances out of my control, I can't make it to Europe at all. Because their refund policy (which I can't find in my email at all, annoyingly) has something to the effect of no refund if you cancel less than a week ahead of time.

Which, I have to say, if there weren't a VOLCANO spewing ash into European airspace, I sure as shit wouldn't cancel this trip I've been looking forward to for, oh, 9 months now. And the way things are shaping up, I may not even know if I can GET to Europe until the day I'm supposed to leave.

I don't deal well with changes that are out of my control.

Crunch time

2010-03-27T14:30:00.000-04:00

There are many things I want to blog about, but I don't have the time. It's frustrating.

I've only got a few more chapters to read in Whipping Girl, then I can write a review (spoiler alert: I love it!). I'm only a few chapters in to The Persian Night, about life in Khomeinist Iran, but I like it so far. It's easy to read. And I have a stack of Turkish fiction to read, in addition to the stack on my shelf, plus a friend gave me David Drake's The Complete Hammer's Slammers (volume 1) for my birthday.

So I'm kinda drowning in backlog of books, but I keep not finding time to read them. Which makes me a little sad.

You may recall my post on Yoshinaga Fumi's manga Ooku, which reimagines Tokugawa-era Japan with women filling the men's roles because the men died of smallpox. (Many of them, not all; they're more susceptible.) It recently won the Tiptree award for gender in fiction, which is awesome. I'm glad this manga is getting recognition on this side of the Pacific. (It's won prizes in Japan already.)

Why I haven't been able to read (or spare brain-cycles to blog) is because I'm trying to get the first draft of my novel (current working title Iron and Rust) finished before I leave for Berlin. On May 1. It's beginning to look grim, though not yet dire. The contract that was eating my life ended, so I have time again, but I'm at the point in the story where everything is crap and I hate it (because, honestly, that section kind of is poorly-thought-out crap, and I need to fix it a lot). So it's frustrating and I want to skip it and get to the part that doesn't suck. But I have to make this part no longer suck before I can move on.

If I get an hour or so of editing in today, that'll help.

Also, my Yoshino cherry is blossoming, my herb garden isn't dead, my rosemary bush is massive, and my chrysanthemum didn't die in the overly cold winter (for North Carolina.) The Japanese maple we transplanted last spring didn't die, either. (It was a concern...)

And a friend of mine is working on a website for me. I'll let y'all know when it's ready.

Long time, etc etc.

2010-03-10T09:20:00.002-05:00

So, I've been working 3 days a week, and with travel time and an hour lunch, I've been putting in 33 hours or so (to work 24.) That pretty much left me with just two days (plus weekends) to work on everything else. That contract is up, so I'm getting my life back.

I've edited 2 chapters in the novel so far (only 20 to go?), but some I'll need to finish the background reading to fix properly. Which means I need to spend some time reading the nonfiction in my giant to-read stack (mainly The Persian Night).

I only have 2 chapters left in the feminist manifesto a friend loaned me, and when I finish, I'll post about it. It's pretty amazing. Oppositional sexism, traditional sexism, the scapegoating of femininity... *swoon*

Today I need to edit some more, and make blondies for my birthday party Saturday. Friday a friend is coming over to help make a linzertorte, and at some point I need to make a spice cake. This may happen Saturday. (Yes, I'm making three cake-like things for my own party. I also have a bag of chips and a jar of salsa, several varieties of beer and sodas, and plan to make rosemary sweet tea, as is mandatory for parties at my house in spring or summer. My rosemary bush is threatening to take over the world. I must stop it by cutting it.)

And? A gal I met via livejournal who lives in Istanbul sent me a box of Turkish books (in English) and films (with subtitles). I was expecting a couple books, but I got like 6. My to-read stack is getting close to as tall as I am.

Awesome art!

2010-02-14T14:43:00.006-05:00

In January, over on livejournal, there was a fannish auction to help earthquake victims in Haiti. One of my friends, the fabulous Pluto, offered a commissioned piece of art, and I won it. Yay! (They've confirmed over $100,000 in donations as of a couple days ago. Never let it be said that fans never did anything good!)

I decided to ask for two of my POV characters, MSgt Atesh Metin and Maj Hikaru Yilmaz. I'm not a visual person in the least, so I don't have good images of them in my mind. I did, however, spend way too long on de.wikipedia looking at uniforms. So we emailed back and forth a bit, and this is what she came up with. (Atesh is on the left, Hikaru on the right.) Clicking will embiggen the image.

I love it so! She worked from my vague descriptors and some personality traits, and it's just so right! (Now I just need to finish, polish, and sell their story...)

Books I love: CJ Cherryh's The Faded Sun

2010-01-31T12:00:00.002-05:00

The Faded Sun was originally published in 1978-79, comprising three novels: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath. They were collected in an omnibus and reprinted in 2000, with a nice Michael Whelan cover. Unlike other books I love, I've only read this twice: years ago when I first heard of Cherryh and started getting my hands on all her books, and over the last few weeks.

The story is told in Cherryh's characteristic deep-third-person point of view. It's the parallel story of Niun, a mri warrior, Sten Duncan, a human special-ops soldier, and Melein, Niun's sister. We get occasional looks into other characters' minds: Stavros, Duncan's boss; various regul; other mri. But it's mainly Niun and Duncan's story.

For forty years, humans have been fighting against mri, who work for the regul. Mri are nomadic, and they do not build themselves. They contract warriors to another species, and they get goods in this fashion. Mri are vaguely humanoid, though desert-adapted, with nictitating membranes in their eyes, low body hair, and a coarse mane. The regul, however, are not humanoid at all; I imagine them as Jabba the Hutt. The regul have eidetic memories and think they're the pinnacle of life, the smartest beings in the universe.

Regul and humans have signed a peace treaty, and the regul have ceded Kesrith to the humans. There's one problem: the mri have Kesrith as their homeworld. Because the humans see the mri as enemies, as a warlike mercenary species, they don't want to have them as neighbors.

Duncan, assigned as aide to the governor of Kesrith (Stavros), goes out on a fact-finding mission when he begins to suspect the regul aren't being fully honest. Regul don't lie, you see, because it puts false memories into their history. But neither are they fully truthful: lies of omission are a time-honored regul tactic. While Duncan is out, he runs into Niun, who was sent to the mri ship that landed as an ambassador from his city. Together they witness a horrible betrayal, and Duncan begins to understand that what humans think they know about mri isn't anywhere near the truth. Duncan is sent on a mission, taking Niun and Melein with him. He learns, on the course of their voyage, to be mri.

Niun's story is one of growth and change, becoming the head of the warrior caste and fighting for Melein's right to govern. Melein become spiritual leader of the mri before she's ready, but through her confidence, she manages somehow.

This is the type of story that, on the surface, looks like it could be What These People Need is a Honky or Mighty Whitey (Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Avatar (the blue people), etc.) However, Duncan isn't the White Savior of the mri. He doesn't magically become better at being mri than the mri are. He's limited by his human-ness: mri reflexes are quicker; they're adapted to the climate of Kesrith (and Kutath); they're stronger and have better senses. He doesn't become leader of the warrior caste, supplanting Niun. He doesn't even get to be in the higher ranks of the warrior caste! It's true that he has one asset that the mri don't have: access to humans, and understanding how human minds work. But Melein uses it to her advantage, and Duncan allows himself to be used, because explaining to the humans that the mri aren't just mercenary killers will benefit Melein and the mri.

There are also matters of prejudice to explore: the humans think the regul are ugly, smell weird, and other things, but they're the allies now, against the mri. The mri look human, so various humans want to sympathize with them, if it weren't for forty years of war. A key theme of the trilogy, especially evident in Kutath, is that you fear what you don't understand, and if you don't try to understand the other, you'll never move beyond fear. The regul have no desire to attempt to understand mri or humans, and their fear leads to catastrophic results. The humans, once they learn to ask the right questions, make the attempt to understand mri (and regul, in a way.)

So it ends with hope: that humans can understand the other and not live in fear of it. This is a message as relevant today as it was thirty-odd years ago, and will remain relevant into the future.

Breaking silence

2010-01-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

So, since 6 Jan, I've been working 30 hours a week at a place 45 minutes each way. It's cut into my writing time, and because I work 1-7, it's cut into my evening time as well. (Get home 7:45, eat dinner, get caught up on email, and hey it's 9:30.)

I'm currently re-reading CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy and am so close to the end I just want to sit down and plow through it. I get frustrated when I can only read a chapter or two at a time. (And I read fairly quickly, too -- 50-60+ pages an hour, depending on density. Harry Potter's more like 100.) I love this trilogy, and while I remembered mostly what happened in Kesrith and Shon'jir, as I read Kutath, much of it is like new. I don't know why. I read it quite some time ago, though. (Annoyingly, the omnibus reprint has a ton of typos.)

I've been trying to keep up my writing, and it's hard. By the time I've skimmed, scanned, or read my RSS feed and gotten my needful things done, it's 10:45, and I have less than an hour to write, before I have to eat lunch & drive 45 minutes. It's frustrating to, at 11:35, be hitting a groove, when I have to quit writing at 11:40 or 11:45. My current assignment ends the 29th, so I'll get my time back after that. (Unless they want me to stay on until they hire a full time person, though I'm torn on that. I really want my writing time back, but I like getting paid.)

Cats can get diabetes, too.

2010-01-04T17:07:00.003-05:00

Isis, my oldest cat, who I picked up off the street in September 1997 and the vet said was about 3-4 months old, was just diagnosed with diabetes. Today she's in the hospital at the NC State Vet School, being given IV fluids and insulin to get her out of ketosis. With any luck, she'll be home and surling at us again on Wednesday.

I go into more detail on my online journal, since I'm trying to keep this blog writing-related.

Review: Consider Phlebas

2009-12-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks. Orbit, 1987/2008

The Culture is Banks' future post-human Utopia, of sorts. People in the Culture can change their gender at will, secrete a variety of drugs from genofixed glands, don't use money, and have hyper-intelligent machines. The Culture's machines, unlike those in, say, Terminator, are fairly benevolent, and the Culture's people are happy living under them, in their hedonistic paradise.

The Culture's spaceships are controlled by Minds, one variety of the hyper-intelligent AIs.

Consider Phlebas looks at the Idiran-Culture war, which is a war of principles. The Idirans are a war-like species (think the Klingons, except tripedal beetle-lizards) who are immortal religious zealots and consider the Culture an inferior species. The Culture sees the Idirans as a threat to their lifestyle and expansion throughout the galaxy.

Bora Horza Gobuchul is a Changer who works for the Idirans. Changers are a subspecies of human, who, as their name implies, can alter their appearance at will, to resemble someone else. He doesn't like the Culture's reliance on machines and thinks their plan for life is too sterile, and inhuman.

Perosteck Balveda is an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances division, a sort of spy, who is trying to stop Horza.

A Mind escapes from an Idiran attack and hides itself on a Planet of the Dead: a place where the people wiped each other out millenia ago. Planets of the Dead are guarded by Dra'Azon, a highly advanced species. The Idirans want to get their hands on the Mind, because it's Culture, and they want to control it. The Culture wants to get their hands on it, because it's more advanced than anything else they'd had before.

Horza used to live on Schar's World, so the Idirans task him with going there. He joins up with a hapless troop of mercenaries, and he sets about his task, with misadventures befalling him along the way.

The text is quite long -- 515 pages -- but it doesn't drag. Banks is good at dropping hints and picking them up chapters later. It ends on more of a downer than I prefer for books I read, but it fits the story, so I won't complain.

I've also read The Player of Games (more game theory than I cared about, so it was kind of boring) and Excession (wherein the ships take center stage, and I enjoyed it greatly.)

If you like space operas on a grand scale (where the ships travel kilo-light-years per hour), pick up some Banks.

Disney World!

2009-12-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

I went to Disney World with the in-laws for winter holiday festivities and togetherness time. I hadn't been since winter 95 or so, and the park has expanded a lot since then!

I won't go into excruciating detail here, since there's no easy way to cut text on Blogger, so you just get the highlights.

- We stayed in the Treehouse Villas at Saratoga Springs. They were nice, and recently renovated and updated. They were a bit further from more social things than I may have liked (the restaurant in the main house and pool were a bit far to walk), but they were comfortable and quiet.

- The Disney Dining Plan is more trouble than it's worth. It meant that one was limited to choosing certain items, when one may have preferred something else, so as not to waste the pre-paid food options.

- We ate at Marrakesh (Morocco pavilion, Epcot), Jiko (Animal Kingdom Lodge), Kona Cafe (Grand Polynesian), the Rose and Crown (UK pavilion, Epcot), the Electric Umbrella (Epcot), Columbia Harbour House (Liberty Square, Magic Kingdom), and a place in The Land whose name I forget. The Dole Whip float was awesome: soft-serve pineapple ice cream in pineapple juice. Hit the spot!

- The new Everest ride goes backward in the dark, and I don't recommend it.
- Space Mountain is still fun.
- Kilimanjaro Safari is best early in the morning, when the critters are active.
- The Jack Sparrow insertions into Pirates are subtle and well-done.
- Haunted Mansion is still cheese-tastic.
- IllumiNations is best viewed from Norway.
- Spectromagic is as much fun as it was when I was 6, even if they changed it a lot (and don't call it Mickey's Electric Light Parade anymore.)

- I got my picture with Thumper, Donald, Lilo & Stitch, and Aladdin & Jasmine.
- I got an Eeyore plush in safari costume, with a detachable Velcro tail.

Book review: All the Shah's Men

2009-12-11T11:00:00.001-05:00

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer. Wiley 2003, 2008 (additional preface)

When Kinzer first published this book in 2003, GW Bush had started a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan and was preparing to start a second pre-emptive war cum nation-building exercise in Iraq. The average American couldn't have told you then that the US had aided Saddam Hussein in the early 80s, during the Iran-Iraq war. They probably still couldn't, today.

This book is a history of the 1953 US- and British-led coup in Iran that overthrew the first democratically-elected ruler of the country, Mohammed Mossadegh, and reinstated a corrupt Shah. The average American doesn't even know this happened. It wasn't covered in my history classes in high school. The US government didn't even acknowledge their part in it until 2000: almost 50 years after it happened (and, for the record, 2 years after I graduated from college.)

Kinzer begins with a brief overview of Iranian & Persian history, starting with Darius, touching on Mohammed and the Arabic/Islamic conquests, and discussing the unique version of Islam practiced in Iran, Shi'ism, which combines some aspects of Zoroastrianism into Mohammed's teachings. (The differences between Sunni and Shia Islam are more complex than that. I'm not qualified to go into detail on it.) There was a fight over succession, between Mohammed's grandson Ali and someone else. The Shia believed that Ali was the rightful successor, and he fought -- and died -- to maintain his position.

Ali's sacrifice, going against overwhelming odds, to fight a corrupt regime is a cornerstone of Iranian culture (which stems from Zoroastrian belief, I believe). Iranian history is filled with revolutions against corrupt dynasties.

He goes into great detail on the story of the coup itself. He begins with Mossadegh's fight to nationalize the oil company. Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was controlled by England, and they gave a meager fraction of the profits to Iran. Mossadegh wanted to see the books, and he went to the world court in the Hague to get England to treat them fairly. It didn't work. Then he was elected prime minister, and he decreed AIOC to be fully Iranian.

The British treated them horribly, as they did all their colonies. The Iranian workers at Abadan refinery lives in squalor, while the British had luxurious houses and servants. The colonialist attitude they expressed is appalling.

The British didn't want to lose their oil, so Churchill pestered Truman to help them overthrow the government. Truman thought it was a really bad idea and refused. Then Eisenhower was elected, and the Dulles brothers because CIA chief and Secretary of State. They had a Goal, and they wanted to overthrow Mossadegh, damn the consequences. They used the spectre of the 1950s - communism - to convince Eisenhower that it was necessary (because the USSR bordered Iran, and there was an active communist party there.)

Western politics in the Middle East are a sordid tale of nation building and colonialism, founded on access to oil. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.

After a year of politicking in Iran, Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's grandson) instigated a coup. The first attempt was unsuccessful, but a second attempt several days later worked. The Shah was reinstated, and he became increasingly dictatorial, until 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters declared the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The CIA's success in Iran (they were warned that it was a bad idea, but the Dulles brothers were single-minded) led them to believe that coups and nation-building exercises carried out covertly were a good idea, and the US went on to overthrow governments around the world.

Iran has been in the news recently, especially since the election in June. For anyone who wants to understand better what's happening there now, and why they took the American embassy hostage in 1979, and why we're the Great Satan, I recommend this book. Actually, everyone should read this book.

I knew a couple guys in high school who came from Iran. One of them, Sepehr N, must have come fairly young, because he didn't have an accent at all. The other, Soheil M, came in 8th or 9th grade, and he had ESL classes for all of 9th grade. (They both graduated at the top of our class.) I vaguely remember Soheil mentioning why he'd left; I want to say he had family in the military? I don't know. I wish I did. I wish there had been some class where history other than the Glorious American Society was discussed. That would be a good thing.

Double-barrel review: Two Regencies by Georgette Heyer

2009-12-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

Lady of Quality, 1972; Sourcebooks reissue 2007

Annis Wychwood, age 29, is "on the shelf," as they say. She enjoys being single, but finds her brother irritating, so she moves to Bath with a chaperone. One day, she meets a pair of teenagers in a broken carriage, who end up changing her life. The girl is an orphan, left in the charge of her aunt, who keeps her in an overprotected life. Her uncle (on the other side), Mr. Oliver Carleton, is rude and generally wants nothing to do with her, not being particularly interested in raising a teenager.

It's no surprise that Annis and Oliver meet and cross their verbal swords, exchanging set-downs and the like in the Regency style. It's also no surprise that they end up falling for each other, somewhat inexplicably. (You can deduce that simply by reading the back of the book.) But half the fun of reading a romance novel, whose outcome you can generally foresee when you meet your protagonists, is how the characters get there.

I liked this one better than the next one, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.

The Grand Sophy, 1950; Sourcebooks reissue 2009.

Sophy is sent to live with her aunt and uncle while her father is on a diplomatic mission to Brazil. Her mother died when she was young, and she spent far too much time (for the mores of the period) around soldiers. She's headstrong and generally fabulous. She's only 22, which I kept forgetting.

While at her aunt and uncle's, she resolves to "fix" some bad matches in her family, starting with her cousin Cecelia, who's fallen in love with a poet. Her second target is her cousin Charles, who's taken up with a rather dull character, who's marrying him for the money and is against Fun.

Naturally, Charles and Sophy take to each other like cats and dogs. I'd forgotten that it was common (or at least not taboo) among nobles during that period (indeed, up until the early 20th century) to marry their cousins, or I wouldn't have been quite as surprised when Charles' reaction indicated he was going to marry Sophy.

A Heyer novel typically includes manners and nobles and a romance starting with mutual dislike. It also includes a list of things writers are told not to do: synonyms for said, infodumping characters' life stories when they're introduced, jumping POV without warning. Once you get used to these things, which have fallen out of modern publishing conventions, it's OK, but it takes a bit.

That said, after reading them, I wanted to find something more akin to what I'm working on, to get my mind's gears working in that direction. So I picked up a book that's been on my shelf for months. I'm currently in chapter 3.

Book review: The New Space Opera 2

2009-12-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

The New Space Opera 2, eds. Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan. Eos, 2009.

I love space opera. CJ Cherryh's Foreigner and Alliance-Union series rank highly in my favorites, as does Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan series (especially Memory and The Vor Game.) so, clearly, an anthology of 20-ish space opera novellas by some people I'd heard of and some I hadn't was right up my alley.

I'm not going to review each story. Some I liked better than others; that's generally the case in anthologies.

I really enjoyed Elizabeth Moon's "Chameleons," a story about a man hired to protect a pair of pampered children on their way to school, for whom everything that could go wrong, does. There's a look at what it means to be human, as well as classism and prejudice, when they encounter the chameleons.

Another story I liked was Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Defect," about a spy who tried to come in from the cold, and found it harder than she expected.

Justina Robinson's "Cracklegrackle" is compelling and heartbreaking, the story of a man's search for his daughter, lost (kidnapped?) from a mining expedition.

Scalzi's "Tale of the Wicked" was enjoyable, with the ships having a mind of their own.

Mike Resnick's "Catastrophe Baker and a Canticle for Leibowitz" was funny -- if you read it in the style of an old west tale, with the storyteller being at least half full of shit.

Overall, it's enjoyable, and I only skipped a few stories after failing to get into them after a dozen pages. I won't say which ones they were.

Book review: Flower of Life

2009-11-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

Flower of Life, Fumi Yoshinaga. DMP books, 4 vols. (Amazon)

You may remember my pair of posts from September on Yoshinaga's Oo-oku (a new volume comes out in early December, and I'm excited!)

Flower of Life is a high school story, mostly comedy but with an aspect of drama. Main character Harutaro Hanazono starts high school a month late because he had leukemia. He befriends a semi-outcast chubby kid named Shota and a manga freak named Majima. Majima is president of the manga club, and Harutaro likes drawing, so he joins. There's a couple girls in the club, and the five of them become friends. In some respects, it's like Genshiken in high school. (Side note: Genshiken is funny because it's true. I should probably write about that at some point, too.)

It seems like a typical slice of life story, but interwoven is Harutaro's family drama. Because of his leukemia, his family treats him like he's fragile, though his sunny disposition keeps him from noticing. There's a reason for that, but it's not disclosed until volume 4, so I'll not spoil that for you.

Yoshinaga is one of the few mangaka whose works I'll pick up just for existing. I love them.

Book review: Bittersweet

2009-11-23T10:00:00.001-05:00

Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate, Alice Medrich. Artisan, 2003. (Amazon)

I picked this book up several years ago, and I read it then. It's a cookbook, devoted entirely to chocolate: truffles, cakes, brownies, and some savory dishes. Yet it's also a memoir, with stories about Medrich's experiences with chocolate: eating it, learning to cook with it, and teaching others to cook with it.

There are also notes about equipment, terminology, and a convenient conversion guide - if you use 75% chocolate, you'll need to change the sugar by X and the butter by Y to get the same results as with 55% chocolate.

I had a hankering for brownies recently, and I saw this book languishing on my shelf. I thought, "I bet there's a really good brownie recipe in here." Indeed, there is. I need to make more of the recipes in here. The wild mushroom ragout with cacao nibs sounds *divine*, except Ben won't eat mushrooms, so it's a bit of a waste.

I discovered that I'd bookmarked a chestnut torte recipe, and I vaguely recall making it. I have 2 lbs of chestnuts in my fridge; perhaps I'll make it again.

Book review: Palimpsest

2009-11-21T10:00:00.001-05:00

Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente, Bantam/Spectra 2009 (Amazon)

Cat's latest book has generated a lot of praise, mostly about her lyrical prose. I read her Big Idea post, and I thought the concept was intriguing: A sexually-transmitted city, whose map appears on your skin, and people who go there keep wanting to go back.

I didn't like the book. It makes me sad, because I wanted to like it -- the characters were interesting, even the ones you wanted to kick in the teeth, and it's generally quite sex-positive, and the characters had a wide variety of sexualities (including one who gets off on trains.) Some of my friends are friends with Cat, and she seems like the kind of person I could chat with over drinks at a con.

It was the writing that spoiled it for me. The lyrical prose so widely lauded bored me. At times, it seemed like she sacrificed the story for the words themselves, and writing should never call attention to itself. The execution, the way she put four separate yet interwoven stories together, was well done, but I couldn't get over my irritation at using a word's second cousin. It felt slightly pretentious at times, too.

However, if you're a fan of prose in an eyewatering shade of purple, it might not bother you.

Long time, no update.

2009-11-18T15:39:00.003-05:00

I haven't written here since October 21, according to my blogger dashboard. Yikes! I guess I don't think the day to day tedium is all that interesting, either to write about or for you to read about ;)

I've been working hard on my WIP, tentatively titled Iron and Rust. Since I've been basically unemployed since early October (I have a job, but my agency hasn't had any placements for me since then), I've decided to stop futzing around and get serious on this. I've got a daily target of 1500 words now, and when I sit down to write, I quit Firefox. It's been working fairly well. I've written 5000 words since Monday.

I'm vaguely concerned that I'm at 22,000 words and have reached the approximate midpoint of the story, since it should really be closer to 90,000 when I finish. But scenes seem to take up more space when I write them down than I think they will, and there's still the upcoming major battle. I also have a lot of places where I should go back and fix wording, add more detail and description, than sort of thing, and plenty of places where I could easily add another scene or even another chapter. I'll get through this draft and see where I need to add things in, do that, then go back and edit the details and repetition and suchlike. After that, it'll go off to betas.

In awesome news, I sold my 840-word short "U8: Alexanderplatz" to a historical speculative fiction anthology. I'm pretty stoked about that. Publication date is not yet announced, so I'll let everyone know as soon as I do.

I'm planning to go up to Mom's for Thanksgiving, and there's an exhibit of Safavid Persian and Ottoman Turkish art at the Sackler & Freer galleries, which I definitely want to see. Then Ben's folks are taking us to Disney World the week(ish) before Christmas. I haven't been since college, and none of them have ever been. Should be fun.

Less fun will be the crown I'm getting next month, with 2 or 3 more teeth my dentist is watching. This will be my fourth crown, and my second this year. If Blue Cross didn't have such stingy payments for bite guards, I could have gotten one six years ago and saved myself (and them, don't forget) several thousand dollars. Six years ago, there wasn't overwhelming proof that I grind my teeth, so they refused to pay. Bastards.

Happy Birthday, Ursula LeGuin!

2009-10-21T09:45:00.001-04:00

Today is LeGuin's 80th birthday, and also the 40th anniversary of the publication of Hugo-winner The Left Hand of Darkness.

LeGuin is one of my favorite writers. She's written fantasy, science fiction, and YA novels and short stories. You can read her extensive bibliography here, or the short version. (I need to get the other 2 books in the Annals of the Western Shore...)

I first read The Left Hand of Darkness in 1986 or 87, when I was in fifth grade. I'd just read Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, borrowed from my elementary school library, and LeGuin was shelved right next to her, so... I can't remember if I read the Earthsea books first, or if they were checked out at the time. I'm fairly sure most of the book went straight over my head, but I loved it. I found a copy at the used book store 7 or 8 years ago and reread it then. I've been working to complete my collection over the years, slowly. It's hard to get out of print books, you know.

The Left Hand of Darkness was a groundbreaking work in 1969. It's part of the Hainish cycle, a loose series of stories set in a future of space exploration and contact. On a planet called Winter, an explorer cum ambassador for the Ekumen (the league of worlds) befriends a Gethenian and goes on a walk with them. Gethenians are androgynous, almost a-gendered, except for a period called kemmer, during which they take on one set of sexual characteristics. It's not always straightforward which set they get, and it's not even always the same set! There's a story of political intrigue and betrayal, of course, though that seems like a side concern.

LeGuin's strongest suit, which is no doubt related to being the daughter of a very famous anthropologist, is creating worlds you can believe in, populated with people you can believe in. Much of the Hainish cycle reads like a vehicle for cultural anthropology. The Ekumen goes around exploring new worlds and observing the native inhabitants (without interference.) They may interact, but there are Rules about influencing their societies.

Her prose is sparse, almost Spartan, but still incredibly detailed. It's as far from the lyrical purpleness and skirting the point favored by some modern SF/F writers as possible, yet her imagery is at least as evocative as theirs. Moreso, perhaps, because it's not obfuscated under deliberately clever word choices.

If you've never read anything she's written, you're missing out.

Happy birthday, UKL. May there be many more.

Book review: The Graveyard Book

2009-10-13T09:15:00.000-04:00

Since this book was sitting on my shelf for a year, and I'd read a bunch of space opera, I thought I'd go for something different: a children's ghost story. Considering the book just celebrated a year on the NYT bestseller list, it was about time...

Neil Gaiman writes books about myths: American Gods, Anansi Boys, Stardust. His YA and children's books also have a touch of the mythic.

The Graveyard Book is about a boy named Nobody Owens, who grows up in a graveyard and is raised by ghosts. It's a retelling of The Jungle Book. In the opening chapter (and I don't consider this a spoiler), Bod's parents and older sister are murdered by the man Jack, but year-old Bod escapes, because he's a crawler, and he crawls out to the graveyard next door, where a pair of ghosts adopt him and raise him as their own. The whole graveyard chips in, actually.

Always in the background, until a turning point halfway through, is the mystery of Bod's family's murder and the man Jack. I don't want to go into detail, because Neil's revelations are wonderful and timed perfectly.

It's a story of growing up and learning who you are, and learning how to fit into your world, which is one of the main themes of children's and YA lit. It's got ghosts and werewolves and vampires and ghouls and bullies at school and a fleeting hint of romance. (It's not a kissing book, though. No worries.)

And a nice disclaimer for the FTC: I bought this book with my own money. I have no ties to Neil Gaiman, as much as I wish I did, because he's really adorable and has the dearest accent. I met him once at a signing and got him to sign a couple books (which I'd also paid for myself), and he was very nice and British, despite having 700 people to sign books for, just that night.

World Beer Festival 2009, Durham NC

2009-10-04T14:22:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was the WBF in Durham. I've gone the last three years and enjoyed it, and I plan to continue attending in the future. (I'll get back to posting about writing or books or whatever sometime soon. Promise?)

As is traditional, I'm compiling a list of the beers I tried and what I thought of them, if I remember. The problem with beer sampling is that it's still kinda alcoholic. ;) This year, the program book helpfully included an alphabetical list of breweries and had listed the beers the brewers brought, with little boxes where you could mark down what you thought of them (1-5).

* denotes breweries in the Southeast; ** denotes breweries within NC

*Abita: Abbey Ale. I marked this one a 4, which means I liked it. It was like a dubbel or tripel, kind of heavy but still smooth and drinkable. I asked the guy working at the booth about the Satsuma Wit, and he said they're adding it to their permanent lineup as a summer seasonal, because it went over very well. This pleases me. (The Satsuma Wit is a Belgian white with satsuma orange added in the process. It's delightful and refreshing; perfect for a July afternoon.)

**Asheville Brewing: Ninja Porter. I tried this one toward the end of the evening, and I didn't like it. I marked down '1' in the box, but I can't recall why I didn't like it.

*Atlanta Brewing: Double chocolate oatmeal porter. 4. I have a poor track record with oatmeal porters; I don't know what it is about them. But this one, damn. It was sweet but not cloying, and had enough chocolate to balance out whatever it is I don't like about oatmeal porters.

Atwater Block Brewery: Vanilla java porter. 5. Sweet jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, this was divine. The vanilla made it, I think.

Belgoo Beer: Magus. 5. This is a white beer, and I really liked it.

**Big Boss: Harvest Time pumpkin ale: 4; Monkey Business Belgian farmhouse ale: 5. This was toward the end of the evening, so my tasting was a bit ... subdued? The pumpkin was good, and I could taste the spices. Ben said he liked it better than the Shipyard, so I may have to track some down before Halloween. The Monkey Business was really good - I think it reminded me of a golden ale, but I'm not sure on that, unfortunately.

Bosteels Brewery: Triple Karmiliet. 5. I believe this was a tripel. It was also toward the end, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. It was a nice clear golden color, though.

Sam Adams: Imperial Stout. 5. Another entry in the Imperial line, this is bold and strong, as you'd expect from an imperial stout. Unlike others I've tried, this one doesn't have the alcohol aftertaste, so if you prefer your imperial stouts smooth, go for this one. (They also had the imperial white, which I enjoy. It's not what you'd expect from a white - it's almost thick, and very strongly flavored.)

*Charleston Brewing: Half Moon Hefeweizen. 4. I could have given this a 5, I think. It was a very nice, very refreshing hefeweizen, though iirc it was filtered.

Deschutes Brewery: Black Butte Porter. 2. There's something about porters that makes me either love them or hate them, and I wish I knew what it was.

**Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery: Baltic porter. 4. This was a porter that reminded me of a Belgian tripel, or possibly the New Holland Dragon's Milk. It was strange, but it worked.

**Foothills Brewing: stout. 2. I think this had a sour-hoppy taste to it that made me dislike it.

Fordham Brewing: Oak barrel stout. 4. I don't remember this one much, though it was relatively early on. But I noted that I liked it.

Gordon Biersch: Hefeweizen. 4+. The sign on this one said the hefeweizen had notes of bubblegum and banana, so I had to try it. It definitely tasted like bananas. Ben said he could taste the bubblegum. If you're into that sort of thing, it's pretty awesome.

Great Lakes Brewing: Christmas Ale. 3. I think this was fairly inoffensive, but I wasn't moved to enjoy it.

Kona Brewery: Pipeline porter. 3. Again with the porter problem.

Lao Brewery: Laotian beer. Didn't like it at all.

Leinenkugel's: Honey Weiss: 4; Berry Weiss: 4. Both delightful, refreshing wheat beers. The berry is raspberry, and it's a lot more fruity than, for example, Abita's Purple Haze.

**Liberty Steakhouse & Brewery: Blackberry wheat. 3. Generally inoffensive, but not particularly remarkable.

**Lone Rider: Shotgun Betty. 5. This is a hefeweizen, and I really enjoyed it. It was almost crossed with a white beer, iirc.

Malheur: Malheur 12. 4. This is a quadrupel, which I'm generally inclined to appreciate.

*Moon River Brewing: Wild Wacky Wit. 5. I think this one reminded me a lot of Hoegaarden, which is never a bad thing.

**Mother Earth Brewing: Weeping Willow Wit. 3-. I was kind of surprised to find a pagan-themed organic brewery out of Kinston, NC, but I didn't like their beer. I want to like organic beer, but there's just something off about them.

**Natty Greene's: Wildflower witbier. 4.

North Coast Brewing: Pranqster. 4. Belgian style golden ale.

*RJ Rockers: Son of a Peach wheat beer. 5. Holy crap, this was peachy and wheaty and I could probably drink it all day.

Singha: Did not like.

Tibet Lhasa Brewery: Also did not like.

**Top of the Hill: Old Well White. 3. Completely inoffensive, but not remarkable. I'd probably order it next time I go there for dinner, if they have it.

**Triangle Brewery: Belgian-style abbey dubbel. 4. I also wanted to try the Belgian golden and the Belgian white, but I didn't.

I wanted to try *Thomas Creek's Stillwater vanilla cream ale, but they were out.

Fumi Yoshinaga's Oo-oku, part 2

2009-09-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I gave an overview of Yoshinaga's work and some genre definitions. Today I'm going to talk about Oo-oku: the inner chambers, volume 1. The manga won the 2009 Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize, and the English version is being released under the Viz Signature line.

The story opens with a vignette about a farming family in early Edo-era Japan, whose little boy goes off to the woods and is mauled by a bear. After he dies, his brothers and father and all the boys become ill. Eight of ten die. This disease, with symptoms similar to smallpox, remains endemic in Japan, and boy children are rare.

The next chapter is years later, still during the Tokugawa shogunate. A young man, the scion of a samurai family, trying to avoid being wed to a woman he doesn't love, decides to apply to the Inner Chambers of Edo Palace. He's accepted, and he learns of the strange customs there. I won't go into further detail, because that would spoil the story.

The young shogun, a seven-year-old girl, is sickly, and when she dies, her aunt Yoshimune becomes shogun. Yoshimune notices that for record-keeping purposes, the shogun and their retainers are listed as men, and when they marry, their husbands are entered with female names. "It's almost as if the country was once run by men," she says. The reader, being aware that it's an alternate history story, and knowing that the Tokugawas were men (or were they?), knows the truth, and as the first volume ends, wants to learn with Yoshimune why the record keeping is the way it is, and wants to see what else is different, and what reforms Yoshimune will make.

In the Inner Chambers, the men, while treasured and told not to over exert themselves (or they'll get sick), still act like plausible men of their era. Mizuno, the young samurai, is a typical Yoshinaga spunky hero, who's good at kendo and interested in fashion. (In a capital city, upper class families, which samurai were, have to pay attention to trends and fashions. His fashion sense is manifest in the style of his topknot and tonsure.)

The women act like women of their era, to an extent. In an alternate world where women vastly outnumber men, there's competition for 'seed,' and only families of certain classes may take sons in law (ie, marry their daughters to a man.) So women turn, essentially, to brothels. On the other side of that coin, since women outnumber men, women have taken over the government and the army. In the manga, it is explained that, because of the existing bureaucracy, when the men died, it was easy for women to take their jobs seamlessly.

The English version: The Viz Signature line uses slightly oversize pages, and has a very nice full color cover with overleaf. The first three inside pages are printed in color as well. (Other Viz Signature releases include Monster and Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa, both of which are also recipients of the Tezuka Prize.) There's an explicit content warning printed on the cover, which is somewhat misleading, unless one finds mention of sexual activity explicit. The presentation of the manga is very nice. (I continually wish that the title pages for each chapter could be printed in color as well, but I understand that's difficult with how books are printed and bound.)

One interesting editorial decision was to have the characters speaking (oftentimes) in a Shakespearean style, thee and thou and hath, etc. It was somewhat jarring at first, but it makes sense. The Tokugawa shogunate began around 1600, so using archaic language of that period is logical. I don't read enough Japanese to have the original to know whether Yoshinaga wrote in an archaic form of Japanese. It's an interesting decision for Akemi Wegmüller at Viz to have made, and I think it works, once you get used to it.

I, for one, can't wait to find out what Shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune is going to do next.