Where to find me at WorldCon!

I have my schedule for Dublin WorldCon! If you’re going to be there, do try to catch me at some point and say hi.

What has science ever done for art?

Format: Panel
15 Aug 2019, Thursday 18:00 – 18:50, Liffey Room-1 (CCD)

From the making of art materials to the understanding of anatomy, what scientific discoveries have helped to make art what it is today?

Grzegorz Aleksander Biały (Atelier Improwizacji), Tom Toner (Gollancz), Marie Brennan

The above panel was unfortunately canceled.

Stories from other media turned into games

Format: Panel
16 Aug 2019, Friday 12:00 – 12:50, ECOCEM Room (CCD)

From the transition of ‘select-your own adventure’ books to Douglas Adams’ first computer game version of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, storytellers have been happy to entice their audience to play in their worlds through games. What are the different ways they done this? Which stories have transitioned well? Which have not?

Michael Cule (M), Rebecca Slitt (Choice of Games LLC), William C. Tracy (Space Wizard Science Fantasy), Marie Brennan, Keith Byrne (Tantalus)

Autographs: Friday at 14:00

Format: Autographing
16 Aug 2019, Friday 14:00 – 14:50, Level 4 Foyer (CCD)

Victoria “V.E.” Schwab (Tor Books, Titan, HarperCollins, Scholastic), Marie Brennan, Sarah Pinsker (SFWA), Taiyo Fujii (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan), Sam Hawke, Mary Turzillo

Reading: Marie Brennan

Format: Reading
17 Aug 2019, Saturday 13:30 – 13:50, Liffey Room-3 (Readings) (CCD)

The bare bones of worldbuilding: archaeology in SFF

Format: Panel
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 10:00 – 10:50, Wicklow Hall 2B (CCD)

Whether it’s an actual archaeological dig looking for evidence of alien civilisations or fantasy characters camping in the ruins of their ancestors, archaeological evidence and research can be used to help develop a world beyond the here and now and add complex layers to a story without the need for exposition. The panel will discuss the ways in which archaeology has been used to deepen SFF worldbuilding and storytelling.

Ehud Maimon (M), Dr Katrin Kania (pallia – Mittelalter hautnah), Alyc Helms, Marie Brennan

Kaffeeklatsch: Marie Brennan

Format: Kaffeeklatsch
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 11:00 – 11:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Invented Mythologies in SF

Format: Panel
19 Aug 2019, Sunday 19:00 – 19:50, Wicklow Hall 2B (CCD)

Whether it’s creation myths for sentient AIs or a pantheon of alien gods, invented mythologies can add depth and weight to SF storytelling. How have myths from our own past informed the creation of fictitious mythologies in SF? Where do you start when inventing mythology? What makes a mythos convincing, and how do you subtly weave your mythology into the narrative?

Fonda Lee (M), Marina J. Lostetter, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Marie Brennan

Dragons, wyrms, and serpents: why the myth endures

Format: Panel
19 Aug 2019, Monday 12:00 – 12:50, Wicklow Hall 2A (Dances) (CCD)

There are a lot of mythical beasts that can and do feature in fantasy, but the dragon/wyrm/serpent seems to be one of the most popular. What are the reasons for this enduring popularity? What roles does it perform? What mythic properties does it embody and why do these continue to resonate (if they do)?

Marie Brennan, Karen Simpson Nikakis (SOV Consulting LLC -SOV Media) (M), Aliette de Bodard, Naomi Novik, Joey Yu (Kino Eye Ltd. / Freelance)

It’s going to be a busy few days . . .

New Worlds: Vaccination

I was fascinated when I found out that vaccination against disease goes back centuries further than I thought. So this week on the New Worlds Patreon, we’re talking about immunization — and how the technology to do it (at least for smallpox) is available in pretty much any century! Comment over there . . .

Too little, too late

I’ve been watching a little of the ITV Agatha Christie’s Marple series, and enjoying Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple quite a lot — she does a lovely job contrasting her mild manner and soft voice with her sharp awareness of murder and what drives people to it. But I’m burning out very rapidly, and not for any reasons to do with the show itself. Instead it’s a matter of genre — and my fundamental problem with murder mysteries.

They are, a priori, about a bad thing having already happened. The best the protagonists can do is to try and deliver justice after the fact.

In a few cases they may forestall a subsequent murder, e.g. in the case of a serial killer going after their next victim. But in many cases shows try to raise the stakes by whacking a second person along the way, so now the detective or cop or whoever is playing cleanup to two horrible crimes. Sometimes more.

I’ve been re-watching Veronica Mars with my husband (who’s never seen most of it before), and while the metaplot of season one is indeed about a murder, the individual episode mysteries are about other crimes. Somebody has been conned out of their money, or a car’s been stolen, or a father has gone missing. I think that’s a large part of why I’m able to take the show in larger doses than I can take murder mysteries these days. In those plots, it’s possible to make people whole — to not just get justice, but to undo or at least significantly mitigate the harm.

These days, I think I need that. I mean, it’s not to say that non-mystery novels don’t frequently involve bad things happening that can’t be put right; obviously they do. But it feels different to me when the entire raison d’etre of the series is to have people die, again and again, with the heroes only taking action after that’s happened.

That mode wears on me after a while, even when counterbalanced by a charming old lady. Which is why I think I’ll be turning to something else soon, no matter how adorable Geraldine McEwan is as Miss Marple.

New Worlds: Germs and Bad Air

This didn’t go up on Friday, but better late than never: medical month continues in the New Worlds Patreon with germs and bad air! Competing theories for what causes disease, which overlapped just often enough to obscure the fact that one of them was wrong. Comment over there!

The RAICES fundraiser returns/continues

UPDATE: I just received copies of the UK trade paperback of Turning Darkness Into Light. I’m offering five of those for $25 each — higher than the usual trade paperback price, but it’s a month before the book’s release, and I figure this is good incentive for people to donate.

Last year I ran a fundraiser for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services in Texas. Since then, things have only gotten worse, with the United States government operating concentration camps to imprison immigrants.

The fundraiser technically never ended, because it’s always a good time to donate to RAICES. But after a year, it has naturally slipped off people’s radars, so I’m officially renewing it. The plan is the same as before: I’m “selling” books, i.e. you donate the money to RAICES and get books in return.

It goes like this:

1) Peruse the book list below and find one or more books you want.

2) Contact me to verify those books are still available (I’ll update the list, but stock sometimes changes quickly).

3) Once I’ve confirmed, donate to RAICES and send me a copy of the receipt (with your personal information blacked out).

4) I mail you books, signed and personalized if you wish.

I’m willing to ship internationally, but because of the cost involved there, I’ll ask you to PayPal me money to cover shipping expenses. (I’ll cover shipping with in the U.S. myself.)

I’ll note that at this stage my stock is very skewed toward the end of the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and toward foreign-language editions. Sadly I haven’t sold any of my novels to a Spanish-language publisher, but if you have any interest in practicing your German, Romanian, Polish, or Russian, I think any and all embracing of foreign languages is an appropriate response to this kind of xenophobia and bigotry.

Current total (including 2018): $1005

As of it tailing off last year, the fundraiser had netted $790 for RAICES. I’d love to see that clear a round $1000 if possible — can you help us get there?

Doppelganger in a Humble Bundle!

I’m delighted to announce that the two Doppelganger novels, Warrior and Witch, are in a Humble Bundle curated by my agency!

The usual Humble Bundle setup applies: the amount you pay unlocks more books as you go along, until for $15 you get 26 books. It’s an incredible deal, and you’ll get a sampling of a great set of authors, including Aliette de Bodard, Tanya Huff, Simon Green, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Charlaine Harris, Jack Campbell, and more. The bundle is available for two weeks (i.e. ending July 31st), but there’s no reason to wait — get ’em now!

New Worlds: Disease

My lovely Topic Backers for the New Worlds Patreon have selected “medicine” as this month’s theme — which was supposed to begin with a different essay, only halfway through writing it I realized that a) it needed to be two essays and b) I had also started in the wrong place. So we begin with disease itself, and the mind-boggling extent of its effect on our history and our world. Comment over there!

Moderation in all things

The more time passes, the less patience I have with the notion that “a real writer writes every day.”

Try subbing in some other words there and see how that sentence sounds. “A real teacher teaches every day.” “A real programmer programs every day.” “A real surgeon performs surgery every day.” These are all patently absurd. The teacher, the programmer, and the surgeon are all better at their jobs for not going to work every day. For taking some days off.

I wonder if what’s going on here is a weird collision between the romanticization of ~art~ and the #@$*%! “Protestant work ethic.” On the one hand you have this sense that writing, or any art, is a ~calling~. And if it doesn’t call to you every day, why, then, you’re not a real writer, are you? On the other hand you’ve got Max Weber frowning over your shoulder and questioning whether what you’re doing is Real Work — so you have to silence him by keeping your nose to the grindstone every day, without respite, because otherwise clearly you’re just a good-for-nothing layabout.

(I’d like to pause and appreciate the value of the tilde for indicating a kind of vaporous awe around a word. Italics just don’t convey the same effect, and neither do quotation marks.)

Writing is Real Work. It may be fun work (a thought that would probably horrify the Calvinists Weber had in mind), but it requires effort, concentration, hours of your life. Some days it’s easier than others. But it’s also weird work, in that sometimes the most vitally useful thing you can do is go for a walk or wash some dishes, because while you’re not looking, your brain sneaks off and figures stuff out. When people ask me how many hours I work each day or week, my response is to give them a baffled shrug, because there aren’t clean boundaries around it; I’m definitely working while I’m drafting a story or answering emails or going over page proofs, but I also may be working while I’m vacuuming the rug or brushing my teeth or reading a book. Which means that days in which I’m not at the keyboard may still in some fashion be work days — but thinking of them that way is pernicious. If an idea comes to me, awesome, but in the meanwhile I’m going to have a life.

Because contrary to what corporate America wants us all to believe, we can have lives outside our jobs, and we should. We will not just be better employees for the time off; we’ll be better people, too. And that’s just as true of writers as it is of anybody else.

Substitute for fennel bulb?

I’ve been given a nice-sounding recipe for pork tenderloin braised in white wine and elderflower liqueur with thyme, red onion, and fennel bulb. But I’m not a huge fan of that last item — what would the chefs among you recommend as a replacement? With or without altering other ingredients (e.g. a different herb, if something else would harmonize better).

Note that due to allergies and/or dislikes, mushrooms and squash are both out.

Three Things meme

There’s been a meme going around where people give you three random things to talk about. Mine, from Larry Hammer, are:

1) Feathers

The “swan” thing goes back a long way, and stems from the fact that people who know German but not Swiss German often think my legal last name has something to do with swans. Possibly that’s why the family coat of arms has swans on it? Anyway, I didn’t want my website to be mariebrennan.com because at the time I expected to go into academia, studying science fiction and fantasy, and I wanted a site that could serve for both purposes. (In fact, the first incarnation of it had two distinct halves, one for each part of my work.) My thoughts drifted to swans, and then the phrase “Swan Tower” popped into my head, and it sounded good.

As for swans themselves, I like how they’re beautiful and elegant and can break your leg with their wings. I played a swan pooka several times in a Changeling game, but she was more the dream of a swan than the physical reality of one; if I were doing it now, I might try to stat her in a way that reflects the dichotomy.

Also, my husband is allergic to feathers.

2) Polyhedra

Thanks to RPGs, I interact with a much wider range of these than most people do. 😛 d4s are caltrops (don’t drop them on the floor); d6s are kind of boring; d8s rarely seem to get used; d10s are fun to arrange in different patterns while I’m listening to someone else’s scene; d20s really like to roll off whatever surface I’m using, so when I’m playing Pathfinder I roll in a shallow dish instead of on a book or table. Alas for the poor d12, used even less often than d8s; a friend of mine once swore they were going to design an RPG that used nothing but d12s. We also own some weird things, like d2s from the PolyHero Dice Kickstarter campaigns, or a single giant d30.

I find it fascinating that there are d20-shaped artifacts from (I think) ancient Rome, that we’re not sure what they were used for.

3) Angst

I try to avoid this? On the whole I tend to be fairly level-headed, so while I can get stressed or depressed about things, there have only been a few times in my life that I’d characterize as angsty — and adolescence mostly wasn’t one of them, for which I’m eternally grateful.

Having said that, I often go on kicks of listening to thoroughly angsty music, and can have a lot of fun with this in stories, whether I’m reading them, writing them, or playing them in an RPG. Twisting the knife is fun . . . as long as it’s in a fictional person’s flesh.

If anybody wants to give me three more, I can do more of these posts — though depending on how many I get, no guarantees that I’ll make it through them all.

What a difference technology makes

I’ve spent the last two days holed up in our den, which the lowest part of our split-level house and rather cavelike — therefore the coolest room we’ve got. Our thermostat caps out at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, so I can’t say for sure what temperature it’s been in our dining room, but whatever the answer is, the top floor — which holds both my office and the bedroom — was hotter. Much hotter.

I grew up in Dallas. Highs in the high 90s were a totally normal feature of my childhood summers. But that was a place where nearly everybody has air conditioning. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area? Not so much. And living in a house without A/C means that when our temperatures spike, the experience is very, very different.

The extent of that difference got hammered home to me yesterday, when I’d been at the (air-conditioned) chiropractor’s office. When I walked outside in the late afternoon, it felt . . . not nice, exactly. But familiar. And pleasant enough. Yes, it was very warm, but my subconscious said “that’s okay.” Which was very different from how I’d felt leaving my house an hour and a half earlier; then I was going from a sweltering indoors to a sweltering outdoors, barely any contrast at all, and vastly more unpleasant. I know I’ve lost soem of my heat tolerance (I used to do marching band in Texas, navy blue wool uniform and all), but a lot of it is also just the artificial environment. Give me A/C, and I still don’t mind the heat all that much. Without it, though . . .

Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about low-tech measures against the heat, from keeping blinds closed that we normally open for light (and angling them upwards to reduce the amount of direct sunlight that enters the room), to occupying myself with books instead of heat-emitting laptops, to the dance of opening windows and turning on fans once the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside.

NEW WORLDS, YEAR TWO is now in print!

If you like having your writing references in hard copy and not just pixels, you may be glad to know that you can now buy the print edition of New Worlds, Year Two! And now is a great time to become a patron of the series — I’ll soon be sending out the next poll for what topics I should address, and of course all patrons get weekly photos. It’s patron support that is keeping New Worlds strong, and I thank all of them for it!

Lessons in people pictures

Over Memorial Day weekend I was hired to do candid and portrait photography at a three-day LARP (one my husband plays in, which I’ve played in before, but not regularly).

This was . . . an adventure.

See, my usual attitude toward people photography is “I will wait here with my camera poised until you get out of the frame.” My tastes, as you can probably tell, lean firmly toward architecture, objects, and landscapes. Sometimes I can’t avoid having people in the picture, and every so often they add a great deal to the image — the dude in the punt in Cambridge (though I wish the two up on the wall weren’t there), or the guy walking in front of the church in Basel — but people are rarely if ever the reason I’m taking the picture.

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