If you’re going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 19th, come join me at SF in SF! I’ll be reading with Ysabeau Wilce and Erin Hoffman at 7 p.m. (the doors open at 6).
. . . no idea what I’ll be reading; I need to find out how much time I’ll have, and ponder options. But I promise to pick something cool. 🙂
The trend of reading fiction by women instead of men continues. Partly this is because half of the titles I finished this month were YA (and three-quarters of those were by Suzanne Collins), but still. I had this odd feeling of, I dunno, backwards activism or something when I sat down with Saladin’s book — like I was virtuously promoting diversity in my reading by picking up something by a man. <g>
[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]
To fill the time between now and the final spate of WOT analysis (which is currently scheduled to begin in September, but that’s assuming the January pub date for A Memory of Light stays put), I bring you: the Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game!
(Core book only. I did not pick up Prophecies of the Dragon, the sole expansion published before they dropped the line, though I have read a summary of it. The material in it is considered non-canonical anyway.)
Ground info first: this is a d20 game, published in 2001 (between Winter’s Heart and Crossroads of Twilight) meaning it dates back to the brief heyday of third edition D&D — third edition, not 3.5. Since WOTRPG has its own world-specific set of classes, the revisions made to the class system between editions don’t much matter, but the skill system is the old mess, lacking not only the simplifications introduced by Pathfinder, but even the improvements of 3.5. (“Intuit Direction” is a skill!)
Before I dig into the grotty details of the system, though, I should talk about the presentation of the book itself. As is usually the case with merchandising of this sort, it doesn’t appear to be entirely certain whether it’s trying to market itself to fans of the books — who already know the world, and are itching to imagine themselves as the Dragon Reborn or whatever — or to lure in outsiders who might then become enamored of the world and go pick up the series. Frankly, I’m always dubious of the latter approach: did anybody really say “oh look, another generic-looking d20 epic fantasy supplement!” and rush to play it? Everybody I know who bought or played it (which isn’t very many people) was already a fan — the sort of people for whom the “fast-track character creation” makes sense, because they already know what an “Aes Sedai Accepted” or “Runaway from the Stedding” is, or for whom it’s interesting to see Rand et al. get statted. And yet, there are little one-page potted descriptions of the Aiel and so on, and a worldbuilding section that explains all the countries of Randland, rehashing information fans already know.
Those are the same people for whom the art is going to be infuriating. Instead of the familiar map, we get a less sophisticated redraw — I guess they weren’t able to license the rights to the old one? — featuring place names like “Tamen Head.” Um, yeah. And the character images . . . well, let me just show you the Wise One apprentice:
Don’t you love her dark skirt, white blouse, and dark shawl? Or how about the Cairhienin noblewoman, with her striped skirt?
I know this is probably stock art purchased on a budget, but sheesh.
Actually, the art is a good lead-in to my main point, which is that d20 is an abysmal system for running a WOT game. It is, in fact, the stock art of the gaming world: cheap and easy to get, but bearing at best a vague resemblance to what it’s supposed to describe.
. . . then we’re nearing a novel’s worth of argument here.
A while back, jimhines posted shots of himself posing like women on the covers of books. ocelott followed up with a compare-and-contrast of men’s poses vs. women’s, again with attempted reproduction.
Well, now Jim has done the other side of the equation, posing like some male cover models (from romance as well as fantasy). As he points out, not only are the poses less uncomfortable, their mode of objectification conveys power rather than sexualization. And those are really, really not the same thing.
And, for an encore, there’s Emily Asher-Perrin’s article on Tor.com, “Hey, Everyone — Stop Taking This Picture! (No, I Mean It.)” And, um, yeah. Quit it with the butt shots already.
If you can look at those things and still not think there’s a problematic pattern . . . oof. I think the kindest interpretation I can put on that is “willful stupidity.”
Since it’s annoying to have to page back through archives in search of something, here’s an index post for all of my entries in the Diana Wynne Jones Project, alphabetized by title.
While rooting around in my archives looking for something else, I discovered I never put up an open book thread for With Fate Conspire!
So consider this an invitation to make any comments or ask any questions you might have about that book. (Needless to say, this will result in spoilers. Read the thread at your own risk.) I, er, can’t promise I’ll be able to answer everything with perfect clarity; at this point my head is full of Isabella instead of the Onyx Court, so I may be a tad fuzzy on some of the details. But I’ll do my best!
And if you have a question about a previous novel, the other open book threads are still open. Though I don’t have one for the doppelganger series, now that I think about it. Well, if you have a question about one of those, let me know; I can make a new thread if there’s need.
Note: As an experiment, I have closed this thread until the beginning of 2013, in an attempt to convince spammers to stop spamming it. If you have a question, feel free to ask it elsewhere, or come back in January.
I’ve had friends in town for the past several days, and sightseeing with them almost made me forget what today was. Thankfully, several posts on my friends-list reminded me: it’s International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!
I’ve been celebrating this holiday since it started in 2007. (You can see the relevant posts, including some history, under the tag.) A little earlier this year, a reader informed me that the changes over at Abyss & Apex meant my story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” was no longer available for free in the archive; I have therefore chosen that as this year’s contribution. And if you want more, you can always browse the free fiction on my site!
And now, I go collapse. Who knew sightseeing was so tiring?
My high-tech not-quite-randomization system (which excludes certain people, like those who are already getting an advance look at the book via other means, or my mother) has picked a winner for the first ARC: Janet, from Goodreads!
I am still chewing on title thoughts, so feel free to go on suggesting things. In related news, Jim Hines’ fundraiser for rape crisis centers has raised more than $2500, which means another ARC of ANHoD and a copy of With Fate Conspire have both been added to the pool of prizes. If you chip in over there, you’ll have a chance at both of them, and also a host of other awesome things. (I should also note that donations to RAINN will be matched, so you get double money for your dollar, there.)
And now I shall ponder what to do with the remaining copies . . . .
My thanks to everyone who sent me a title suggestion for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs! I received comments here, on Twitter, on Goodreads, by e-mail . . . the whole gamut. Give me a little while to sort through them, and then I’ll announce a winner.
Speaking of winners, Jim Hines’ fundraiser for rape crisis centers is less than $200 away from hitting the benchmark that tosses a signed copy of With Fate Conspire and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons into the prize pot. There are new rewards, too, at levels up to $4000, and some of them are very shiny.
And finally, we’re in the last days of the Urban Tarot Project. $375 dollars more there will mean embroidered bags for everyone receiving the deck! And there are still signed copies of With Fate Conspire available there, too, so if you want one of those (along with all the other parts of the reward package), you have 71 hours left in which to get it.
Excelsior!
Like sovay (from whom I got this), I had no intention of blogging about the sinking of the Titanic. But then she posted this.
This is the conversation that rattled across the North Atlantic the night the Titanic sank. You can hear the moment Jack Phillips stopped transmitting a personal message from a passenger, cutting off abruptly only to begin broadcasting again: “CQD. This is Titanic. CQD. This is Titanic.” The old distress call — SOS had only just been instituted, and wasn’t added to the message until later that night — followed by the announcement of the collision. And then the replies from other ships, fragments of information being passed back and forth, questions and offers of help until the chatter gets too thick and Phillips just sends, “Stop talking. Stop talking. Jamming.” And everybody shuts up until he starts again.
All of it so level, so lacking in inflection. Because this is the record of the wireless messages, run through voice synthesizers to translate that conversation into a form the layperson can understand. But you know what’s behind the words, and that makes it all the more devastating.
Then static creeps in, as Titanic’s signal weakens. And then silence.
Seeing the tragedy from that angle . . . it’s like a punch to the gut. Especially when you think that if the captain of the Californian hadn’t decided the ice was too thick to proceed, if he hadn’t ordered his ship’s boilers shut down for the night, if the wireless operator had stayed up a mere half hour later before going to bed, then the Californian would have heard the distress call, and would have come to help.
(Or, y’know, if there had been a firm code for the use of ship’s rockets, so the guys on the Californian who saw them fired off from the Titanic would have known for sure it was a distress signal. Or if the captain of the Titanic had paid attention to the Californian‘s warnings in the FIRST PLACE, and hadn’t gone charging full speed into an iceberg. If, if, if. There are so many ways the Titanic, or at least its people, could have been saved, but none of them happened.)
The link goes to an article, but if you click through to here you should be able to listen to the broadcast directly. Be warned, though: after the Titanic sends its last message, there’s a stretch of silence . . . and then a bloody advertisement starts up, before the program returns. And to add insult to injury, the ad I got — don’t know if it changes — was for a performance of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. In Gujarati!
Yeeeeeeeeeeah. Not only is that probably the worst Shakespearean play title you could choose to interrupt the story with, the Gujarati singing is especially out of place.
But go read the article, and listen to the broadcast if you have the time. It’s worth it.
The ever-awesome Jim Hines running a fundraiser this month for rape crisis centers. For every benchmark hit, he’ll be giving away one of a whole slew of books, which you can see at that link. And if the fundraising gets up to $2500 (which I devoutly hope it will!), then I’ll be tossing in two things to sweeten the pot: a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons.
(This is separate from the title-suggestion giveaway for the first ARC. Two chances to win!)
Head on over to his post for details, including how to donate. It’s an excellent cause, and I hope it raises enough money that he has to find more prizes to give away!
Okay, so you have the alternate history for the founding of Rokugan that I laid out in my previous post. Where do you go from there?
Another sidebar in Imperial Histories mentions that Hantei didn’t have to step down and let his son Genji become the Emperor. What if he’d gone on ruling forever, as an immortal kami? Well, that’s more or less what happened with Togashi in canon: every Dragon Clan Champion until the Second Day of Thunder was in fact the founding kami, under a series of aliases. So you could easily have the same thing here, not even bothering with the cover story. Emperor Togashi just goes on ruling.
Since a) he’s canonically very reclusive, because of the way his gift of foresight works, and b) we’re aiming for mystic weirdness here, I figure he withdraws more and more from Rokugani society as the years go by. People almost never see him; ise zumi or other members of the two Imperial families (the Mirumoto and the Agasha) carry out his orders, or relay them to everybody else.
Until the dawn of what is, in canon, the Gozoku era: the late fourth century.
(I’ll take a moment here to acknowledge that really, if you go changing something as major as the Emperor of Rokugan — and therefore the entire shape of Rokugani society — you should logically end up with a highly divergent AU, not the same historical events reworked. But that would mean really re-inventing the L5R wheel, and besides, I think it’s fun to keep filtering canon through this lens.)
So how do you get the Gozoku conspiracy when the Emperor is an immortal kami with foresight?
I’ve said before that the setting for Legend of the Five Rings is really well-developed, such that you can have all sorts of fun messing with it. The most recent book for the fourth edition supports this in interesting ways; in addition to giving all kinds of historical info, it has sidebars scattered throughout, suggesting AU scenarios that might have resulted if events had gone differently.
One of those concerns the founding of the Empire. Canonically — for those who don’t know — nine kami, the children of Lady Sun and Lord Moon, fell to earth (and one of them fell through the earth into Hell, where he became corrupted). The remaining eight gathered mortal followers and held a tournament amongst themselves to decide who would rule this realm. Hantei won, and the other seven founded the Great Clans, and that was how Rokugan got started.
The sidebar in Imperial Histories asks, what if a different kami had won?
It gives a few sentences for each of the other kami, reminding you of their personalities, and outlining the general flavor that would have resulted if Doji or Hida or whoever had set the tone for all of Rokugan. The one that caught my eye the most was this:
If Togashi had been destined to defeat Hantei, he would have built an Empire far different from anything imagined by his siblings — a place of mystery and enigma, where religious contemplation and individual enlightenment were the highest goods. A GM who wishes to make Rokugan closer to the sort of mystical martial arts setting depicted in many Asian films might find a Togashi Dynasty suitable to the task.
Granted, I am playing a Dragon PC (a member of the Clan that kami founded in canonical history), and a Togashi monk to boot. But I think those lines would look shiny to me even if I weren’t, because I’m a fan of movies like The Bride With White Hair (which is the first example that leapt to mind). And so my brain immediately started playing with this notion. How could you redesign L5R for a timeline in which Togashi won?
I’m splitting this into at least two parts because the more I think about it, the more interesting notions come to mind. Everyone, and L5R geeks in particular, are invited to hop in with comments and suggestions. For this first part, I’ll start with the founding of the Empire and the Great Clans.
Trying to minimize the amount of stuff you have to design from scratch, with mixed success.
Just laid this out piecemeal on Twitter; here it is in less truncated form.
I’m chewing over potential titles for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs. I want it to sound Victorian and travelogue-ish, and/or to potentially echo something having to do with sub-Saharan Africa (which is the region I’m taking as my model for this installment). My tongue-in-cheek placeholder is “Mrs. Camherst, I Presume,” but that’s not great as a title, hence looking for a replacement.
Right now I’m charmed by a pattern that showed up in Victorian travel-writing, exemplified by “Along the River Limpopo, With Gun and Camera.” The whole thing is unwieldy, but maybe a “With X and Y” phrase? If I can find suitable nouns to plug into it. (And if I can shut up the part of my brain that says I already have one published book whose title begins with With.) Or, y’know, something else.
Anyway, all that rambling is just to give you an idea of the flavor I’m looking for. The actual point of this post is to say that for the next week, I am opening the floor to title suggestions. In between now and noon PST on Monday, e-mail me, leave comments here, or post to Twitter with the hashtag #ANHODgiveaway. I can’t promise I’ll take any of the suggestions as a permanent winner, but I will pick someone as a contest winner, and send them one of these advance copies of A Natural History of Dragons.
If you don’t have any suggestions, don’t worry! I have four ARCs to give away, which means there will be three other opportunities to snag one. In the meanwhile, let the suggesting begin!
Eeeeee! Much earlier than I expected, a packet of advance reader copies for A Natural History of Dragons has shown up on my doorstep.
. . . wow, y’all. This thing looks tiny next to With Fate Conspire. Which it is; that monstrosity was nearly 157,000 words in the end, and this one is a svelte 93,000. But it’s a little startling.
I should think up a contest to give some of these away, but first I need to spend a little while beaming at them and gloating. ^_^ (I promise only to pet the one I’m keeping for myself, though. Otherwise it might get a little weird.)
Bookses!
I’m very pleased to say that with ten days to go, the Urban Tarot deck is just over a thousand dollars away from being fully funded. Close enough, in fact, that the artist Robert Scott has started making plans for what to do if he overshoots his funding goal.
The full updates (here and here) have more details, but the short form is that if the project goes $3K over the original total, he will add in custom silk spreadcloths for every donor above $65, and if it goes $5K over, then every donor receiving a deck will also get an embroidered velvet bag.
Also, Rob has added a second offer of the “Hermit and the Leviathans” reward package, which is the one where you get a personalized tour of the Fossil Halls at the American Museum of Natural History from one of the deck models, Chris Hall, who is a docent there. Why a second offer? Because the first one got snapped up in record time, and I can understand why. if I didn’t live on the other coast, I’d consider going for that option myself! (As it stands, I went for the option of being a card model instead. No, I’m not telling you which one. You’ll have to wait and see.)
And speaking of things that went fast . . . we’ve added five more to the “Marie Brennan” package, in which you get a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, along with my signature on the guidebook — which, if you recall, will include a short piece of introductory fiction from me. So if that tempts you, head on over to the project page and donate.
Whether you paid any attention to Christopher Priest’s rant about the Clarke shortlist or not, you should go read Cat Valente’s follow-up post, about what would have happened if a woman had said anything even half that scathing.
This is the reality women live with online, and sometimes in person. It isn’t even just a thing that happens when we yell at somebody, when we criticize something, when we get angry. It can happen when we say anything the reader doesn’t like. Express a political opinion? Post pictures of yourself online? Root for the wrong sports team? “Bitch, I hope you get raped to death like the ugly cow you are.”
Because for a frighteningly large segment of the populace, that’s what you say to shut a woman up. It’s a knee-jerk reflex, like swatting a fly.
How large of a segment? Who knows. Any number larger than “pathologically unwell people who are or should be seeing a mental health professional” is too large. And they’re loud. They swarm the internet, they take over the comment sections on various sites, they poison the water and drive out the good, and for whatever reason, we let them get away with it. We don’t band together like we should and say, start acting like a human, instead of something out of Lovecraft.
(I’m laying off the hyenas, out of consideration for my commenters.)
Sometimes we say it. Some of us do. I don’t do it often enough because, to be honest, I stay away from comment threads most of the time. When I see things like the response Jim Hines dissects, my hands go cold, my fingers start shaking, and whether I respond or not I spend the rest of the day chewing that piece of foul-tasting meat over and over and over again; it’s easier just to avoid the trap. But I need to go to bat for human decency more often. We all do. Again and again, until we’ve sent this malignance howling for the shadows.
Have I gotten death threats, rape threats, any of the hatred Cat describes? I haven’t, actually. But the sad thing is, I know that isn’t because I’m a nice person who doesn’t deserve it, a good, demure woman who doesn’t need to be put in her place.
It’s because not enough people are reading what I write. Give me a bigger microphone, and the sewage will come to swamp me, too.
We need to cut this shit out. The men who spew this kind of thing need to get over whatever misogynistic reflex makes them say it, and the rest of us, men and women alike, need to keep telling them so until they do. I don’t know how we do that — I don’t know how we get it through their skulls — but we have to try. Even the attempt is a form of support for the ones drowning in the bile, and they need all the support they can get.
For fuck’s sake, people. That is a person on the other end of the things you say. Remember that. And summon up the basic compassion to care.
Or rather, in which I link you to other people being ranty. I’ve had some of these sitting around for a dog’s age, and I’m never going to wrangle my thoughts into anything like a coherent enough mass to make an actual post out of it, so instead you get other people being articulate for me.
Must the Rich be Lured into Investing? Who are the Real “Job Creators?” — Supply Side [economic theory] assumes that the rich have a zillion other uses for their cash and thus have to be lured into investing it! Now ponder that nonsense statement. Roll it around and try to imagine it making a scintilla of sense! Try actually asking a very rich person. Once you have a few mansions and their contents and cars and boats and such, actually spending it all holds little attraction. Rather, the next step is using the extra to become even richer.
How Capitalism Kills Companies — There’s no limit at all to the amount of growth that the public companies will demand: in 2007, for instance, after a year when Citigroup made an astonishing $21.5 billion in net income, Fortune was complaining about its “less-than-stellar earnings”, and saying — quite accurately — that if they didn’t improve, the CEO would soon be out of a job. We now know, of course, that most if not all of those earnings were illusory, a product of the housing bubble which was shortly to burst and bring the bank to the brink of insolvency. But even bubblicious illusory earnings aren’t good enough for the stock market.
Central Tendency in Skewed Distributions: A Lesson in Social Justice — The point being, the lesson of the positive skew, is that the distance between being middle class and being poor is very, very small.
Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality — There is something almost quaint — but decidedly refreshing — about the commissioners’ blunt language. “Effective action by Congress is required…,” the report proclaimed, “to check the growth of an hereditary aristocracy, which is foreign to every conception of American Government and menacing to the welfare of the people and the existence of the Nation as a democracy.” Far from debating whether “corporations are people,” the commission took for granted that concentrations of corporate power were undemocratic, that gigantic fortunes “constitute a menace to the State,” and that it was the duty of government to restore a balance of power.
Jubilee. Jubilee. Jubilee. — Reduce the principle, forgive a portion of the debt, proclaim a jubilee. It would save taxpayers money. It would keep hundreds of thousands of families in their homes.
But it can’t happen if we decide to act like jerks.
Person, Person, Corporate Asset.
And one I missed including in the race-related link dump, that you absolutely should read if you have not already: Teju Cole on The White Savior Industrial Complex.
We had another session of our L5R game on Sunday, which astute readers will recall was April Fool’s Day.
The Togashi monks — of which my character is one — are renowed for doing kind of weird and/or inexplicable things. Clearly I needed to play a few April Fool’s jokes in character, right? Unfortunately, I’m not much of a prankster, and by the time I thought up this idea, I was already at FOGcon (meaning my brain was well on its way toward being fried). The only trick I managed to come up with in the end was to give the Ikoma libraries a text they did not have, namely the Book of the Cricket: the world’s tiniest scroll, detailing the many calamities that should have killed my lucky cricket but haven’t. (And I do mean tiny. I had to use a magic tattoo to be able to see well enough to write it, and the Ikoma had to use a pair of spells to copy the scroll and then enlarge the copy before they could read the damn thing.)
But because my brain can apparently do folklore in its sleep, I did come up with a story for why there is a tradition in Dragon lands of playing tricks on the last day of the month of the Dragon. For any interested parties, I give you the tale of Chibuta and the passing of winter.
