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Posts Tagged ‘linkage’

a possible explanation of the Amazon thing

I don’t know if this theory is correct, but I frankly consider it a more likely explanation than “Amazon’s executives got lobotomized and decided to institute a PR disaster over Easter weekend” —

http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html

Short form is, some organization (no idea who) may have mobilized to flag certain content on Amazon until an automated feature kicks in to remove it from the rankings. It would explain the bizarre selection of items hit, and also why the initial response of Amazon flacks was to say they’re de-ranking “adult” content — if this theory’s right, that’s exactly what they’re doing, but they hadn’t yet realized somebody was gaming the system.

And Easter weekend is a sadly unsurprising time to see positive LGBT* content hit in such fashion.

So. We’ll see what develops. But this makes a lot more sense to me than this being some kind of actual corporate decision on Amazon’s part.

*Or whatever form of abbrevation you prefer. Man, I hadn’t realized just how many permutations of initials that cluster of ideas had until I started seeing posts about this incident all over my flist. What the heck is the (QQI) add-on?

my kind of fiction

After being really busy and falling behind for a while, I’ve finally caught up with all the stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Can I just say how delightful it is to find a magazine that is reliably For Me? I’ve always been sporadic about subscribing to print mags, because I’ve yet to find one that hits my personal buttons consistently enough. I pick up free issues of F&SF at conventions, and a couple of years back there was one where every single story was at least decent, and some of them were fabulous . . . but that isn’t my usual success rate with F&SF. Generally I find maybe one story I like in each issue, which isn’t enough for me to keep up a subscription. (It is probably not coincidental that I’ve sent practically every short story I’ve ever written to them, and not sold a single one.)

Note that this isn’t me saying what they publish is bad. It just mostly isn’t to my taste.

But Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in thirteen issues (with two stories per issue, a couple of them serialized across two issues), has so far had almost a 100% success rate on that front. By which I mean that pretty much every story is at least the kind of thing I want to read, and many of them are both the right kind and good enough to entertain me.

What kind of thing are they publishing? A broad definition of “secondary world fantasy,” in that pretty much the only fantasy they don’t take is stuff set in the modern world. Invented settings are good; historical settings are good; alternate histories are good. But more than that, the editor has demonstrated a clear preference for secondary settings that are different, in exactly the way I appreciate. I think I decided I was really enjoying the magazine in issue #8, with Aliette de Bodard’s Mesoamerican fantasy “Beneath the Mask” and Megan Arkenberg’s creepy Enlightenment-era French fairy-tale piece “Winterblood”. They’ve also had fantasy westerns, Russian-tinged puppet magic, classical-myth arena fighting, and an alternate faerie English Civil War — yeah, that one got my attention. And something in an African-inspired setting! The magazine is already getting well away from the quasi-CelticNorseFeudal trifecta that’s fantasy’s standard; I’d love to see it explore more non-European settings, too. (Based on the evidence, I suspect they’re open to it, which probably means they haven’t gotten enough good submissions of that type. If you have such a story, send it to them!)

Of course, I’m going to be biased in favor of any magazine that keeps picking up my own work <g> — but not just in an ego-stroked way; if they’re buying what I write, they’re (obviously) buying the kinds of stories I’m interested in. Our priorities coincide. They also podcast some of their fiction, so if you’ve got a car commute that doesn’t allow you to read en route, you can give them a listen instead. If you, like me, enjoy rich and interesting settings for your fantasy, they’re definitely worth a try.

Good-bye, April Fools.

My LJ was remarkably quiet today, and featured a dearth of attempts at jokes. From this I conclude that most of you were hiding from the Internet, afraid of being suckered in.

(The only one that actually got me today? An announcement that Norm Coleman had conceded the Minnesota Senate election. I wish.)

Anyway, now that’s over, have a bunny! Or, to be more precise, a baby fennec hare. Dear moonandserpent: don’t click on that link until you’re seated in a comfortable chair, because it’s going to turn you to a puddle of cuteness-induced goo.

gathering data

I was going to post this myself, but Mindy Klasky has done a good job translating the survey into an LJ poll, and it’s easier to have all the data in one place anyway. Therefore, I encourage everybody to head over to her journal and answer a few questions about your preferences in cover art.

The survey in question was started by Elizabeth Moon, and is part of an attempt by some SF/F authors to suss out the decisions made by publishers’ art departments, and how those fit/do not fit with reader preferences.

a worthy cause

I know that now isn’t a great time for lots of people to be donating their money to a cause, but I have to give a shout-out to , an LJ community dedicated to launching a new small press, one focused on minority characters. So far there’s just a comm (I think), but you can donate money to help cover their startup costs, including website design and all the rest. Yes, they’ve blown past their initial fundraising goal, but I don’t imagine more money will go amiss, as it will help them attract attention and hit the ground running.

Hel is the best icon I have for this.

janni is the one who needs to read this, if she hasn’t already, but Vanity Fair has done an awesome piece on the collapse of the Icelandic financial market. And I say that as somebody who pretty much detests economics, so even if you don’t care about how Iceland turned itself into one giant (and now defunct) hedge fund, the article’s worth looking at.

If only for the bit about the elves. Seriously. Search for the phrase “smelt aluminum,” and go from there.

Only the gods are beyond *our* comprehension.

This is an interesting chart — we say “it’s Greek to me,” but what do the Greeks say? (Arabic, it turns out.) What about the Arabs? (Hindi.) And a crap-ton of cultures point at Chinese for sheer buh? factor.

But the punch line? Apparently the only language the Chinese feel is utterly beyond them . . . is the language of Heaven.

medical advances, and the missing thereof

SF author Jim MacDonald has put another one of his excellent medical posts up at Making Light, this one on Why We Immunize.

He talks about the individual diseases there: their symptoms, their mortality rate in the past, and the development of their vaccines. That last detail coincides with some of the alchemy reading I’ve been doing — which you wouldn’t think, except that the eighteenth century was when chemistry finally started to pull itself free of its predecessor, as a part of a more generalized medical and scientific revolution that also included the development of the smallpox vaccine.

Here’s the thing that’s been striking me, in that reading: how frustrating it is to see the scientists of the past come so close to figuring something out, and then missing. The easier one to bear is Boyle and Hooke and their pals, who almost sorted out the combustion thing . . . but they didn’t yet have a means of handling gases (“means” = both tools and theory), so chemistry charged off down the bonny (and idiotic) path of phlogiston for another fifty years before getting back on track.

But it’s a lot harder to bear when the thing thisclose to being right is medicine. Paracelsus comes along in the early sixteenth century, says hey, this Galenic theory of humours is a load of bunk, I think diseases come from outside, and we should be treating them with chemical cures. From my seat here in a modern house with a cabinet full of chemical medicines not ten feet away, I’m cheering him on! . . . but then the iatrochemists (aka chymical physicians) get on a roll and start dosing people with, oh, antimony sulphide, mercury, and other things pretty well guaranteed to poison the patient, often fatally. Not that the Galenics were any better, mind you — their medicines were equally poisonous, just on the theory that they would help balance the humours — but I read about that, and I want to yell at the book, as if I could somehow reach back in time and make them get it right.

Eventually we figured it out. Even before we really knew what was up with germs, we figured out how to protect people from smallpox — where by “we” I mean that China and the Islamic world worked it out a couple centuries before Europe did, and India possibly even earlier than that, so let’s give credit where credit is due. Europe: not always smart. But I wonder what the history of Europe would look like if Paracelsus’ iatrochemistry had taken a more accurate angle, or foreign inoculations been recognized and adopted sooner.

It’s a good thing no one will ever hand me a time travel machine, or I’d pack up a giant case of modern medicines and zap around feeding them to people, destroying the time stream and probably getting myself burned as a witch.

reading outside the box

I’m making this post mostly as a means of collating links so I can find them again, but also so they may be useful to others:

Carl Brandon Society, February recommendations — a spec-fic list for Black History Month.

Another from the Carl Brandon Society — this one for American Indian Heritage Month.

Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler — as near as I can tell, this is English-language fiction from authors in the Philippines, not translated materia. But I’m interested to see how their work differs from the stuff coming out of Anglophone countries.

It’s Pick a Fight Day on LJ!

(No, it isn’t. Just on my LJ.)

So, I’m mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it’s okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It’s certainly true that it isn’t possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that’s been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.

But here’s where the writer and I part ways:

This is not an argument against the literary canon. I do believe there are certain key authors – most of them Dead, White, European and Male – who jolly well ought to be studied at school by virtue of the quality and intelligence and depth of their writing. And I certainly don’t believe in the modern anything-goes approach to teaching novels to children in school where they’re served up in gobbets of “text” (whole books being considered too challenging for the Xbox generation) and where literary merit is thought of less importance than “relevance” or “accessibility”.

All I mean is that once you’ve had a reasonable grounding in sufficient “proper” literature to form your taste, you should never again read a book out of duty.

Er.

Okay, middle first. I’m with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren’t many schools doing that. But. But.

Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they’ve got a majority share on “quality and intelligence and depth.” Gyah. I won’t even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.

The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading “proper” literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids — because “relevance” and “accessibility” are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.

How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you’re forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?

A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you’re a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman’s pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You’ll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.

I don’t think any power in the ‘verse could have made me like that play, but I’ve got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I’m ready for them.

But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn’t the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it’s okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I’m not reading Updike is that I’m reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one’s interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn’t matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it’s entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it’s also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place — or, y’know, other books in general.

If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they’re engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they’re reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you’ve done that, the chances of there being an “everything else” get a lot higher.

It’s a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation — while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.

a view from another world

I confess to having said a negative thing or three about MFAs in my time, so in the interests of fairness, I link to this defense.

What do I think? I think that Ms. Harding sounds believably correct . . . as far as it goes. I also think she’s writing from a foreign country, the one frequently called Literary Fiction. In the last few paras, where she talks about how writers are supposed to go about getting better, I think of the fairly vibrant network that exists over here in SF/F. It isn’t a perfect network by any stretch of the imagination; for everyone who can afford the time and money to go to Clarion (which we might as well label a short-term genre MFA program), there are a bunch of writers who can’t or have never even heard of it. But Clarion isn’t the only workshop. There are online critique networks. There are mentoring programs. There are conventions and other social gatherings, in person and online, in which you might find yourself becoming friends with a writer further along the path than you, who may very well pause on the trail to give you a helping hand upward. It’s usually not Ursula K. Le Guin descending from on high to help out a young woman who just finished her first novel, but the SF/F writing world is full of communal bootstrapping, a continuum stretching from established pros all the way down to newbies, and bit by bit we all haul each other and ourselves upwards.

I also think that the criticisms she’s responding to are not, for the most part, the ones I’ve leveled in the past. These days you can find a small number of MFA programs that are willing to let you write genre fiction, an even smaller number who employ professional SF/F writers who know something about your genre. Those programs? May well be great, for all the reasons Ms. Harding describes. But to quote two of the motifs she brings up — “Creative Writing Programs Foster Mediocrity” and “Real Writers Don’t Need No Skool” — I do think creative writing programs as a whole foster a particular kind of writing that is not what most SF/F folk are engaged in or would even benefit from, and while I wouldn’t say real writers don’t need no skool, I would say you don’t necessarily need school to become a real writer. Exhibits A through We Need A Bigger Alphabet: very nearly every professional SF/F writer I know. In fact, I stand by my conviction that if you can get your craft lessons by some other route — which in many cases you can — then you’re better off majoring in something that will feed your brain material, like biology or history or whatever suits the kinds of stories you’re telling.

Mind you, were a certain kind of literary type to wander by and read this (unlikely), they’d probably hit the second half of that paragraph and conclude that’s what’s wrong with genre fiction anyway.

But let me state for the record: I don’t think MFA programs are encouraging hordes of mediocre writers, for the reasons Ms. Harding describes. And it sounds like they serve a very necessary purpose in the corner of publishing she’s talking about. I do, however, stand by my belief that while they may do good for the occasional SF/F writer (especially the ones who make it into, say, James Patrick Kelly’s program), they’re not necessary — sometimes not even beneficial — for those of us over here in genre.

Yes, they really did all of these.

“The 10 Most Insane Medical Practices in History.”

Reading that reminded me of one of the unexpectedly difficult things about writing Ashes: dealing with Jack as a doctor. The character is an intelligent, inquisitive man absolutely dedicated to practicing the best medicine he possibly can — but let’s face it, the guy lives in the second half of the seventeenth century. His idea of cutting-edge medical science is using Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood to improve bloodletting techniques.

Jack is probably my favorite character in the whole book, but I wouldn’t let him within a hundred feet of me if I were sick. And yet I had to write lines describing how he’s trying to save somebody’s life by way of techniques that probably made things worse.

Note to time-travellers: if you ever get thrown back into European history prior to, say, the twentieth century, you’re better off refusing a physician entirely than letting one of them treat you. The body has this lovely thing called the immune system, and it stands a better chance of saving your life than any of them do.

faskinating

“Never Say Please to Mother.”

I adore things like this, little tidbits of cultural behavior that run directly counter to patterns ingrained so deeply in me they predate my memories of being taught them. It’s rude to say “please” and “excuse me” to family members? Like, they’ll be offended by it? That’s awesome! I had never thought about viewing familial intimacy through that kind of lens, and it’s kind of like trying to put something in a box by looking in a mirror. I can understand the rules that govern what I’m seeing, and they totally make sense — but man, if I stop thinking actively about it every second, my brain tries to revert to what it knows is “right.”

I usually talk about cultural relativism in the context of extreme things like human sacrifice. This is a nice, small-scale example that doesn’t jump up and down on top of the ethics and squick buttons. It may look like Opposite World from your perspective, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I must become all things to all people . . . .

Many of you are probably tired of reading about the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, at least for this round; you can only take it for so long before your brain gives up. But this post is less about the debate’s focus than its execution: namely, one possible source for the difficulty of communication that I think we can all agree plagues any attempt to move forward. Based on my peripheral encounters with theories of communication, I think tablesaw is right about the ways in which the conduit metaphor shuts down the possibility of effective progress, and Reddy’s alternate metaphor of the toolmakers with their blueprints and the evil magician coming along to mess with them sounds like a pretty apt description of the situation we find ourselves in. (Not just here, either; just poke your nose into politics and watch it play out.)

But I have one big question for the “Becoming Toolmakers” portion of the essay. To quote:

In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better one-on-one communicator, I must learn more about the person with whom I wish to communicate and communicate to that person in mind. In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better writer and address a universal audience, I must learn more about everyone by learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own, and I must write with all of them in mind.

On the one hand, this is more or less how I think about communication: that you must always bear your audience in mind, and try to craft your ideas into a shape that will work within that audience’s context. On the other hand — sweet Pentecost on a pita cracker, how am I supposed to speak mindfully to everyone at once? I don’t even know who all my readers ARE! Even if we agree to leave out everybody who isn’t moderately fluent in English, according to this “solution,” in order to communicate effectively, I must learn about inner-city Chicago blacks and Pakistani immigrants in London and American-born Israeli Jews and nisei Japanese college students at Stanford and affluent Hispanic teens in Dallas and everybody else I haven’t named and then write with ALL OF THEM IN MIND.

And that’s before we even get to the possibility that the communication strategy which is effective with one group may be actively detrimental with another, and vice versa.

Dude. There is little in the world I love more than learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own. I spent ten years in school majoring in just that, and I’ll keep doing it on my own from now until you pry my library out of my cold, dead fingers. But the “solution” as framed above is not a solution; it’s a godlike ideal no human will ever be able to live up to. Is it sufficient if I try? Or if I decide, okay, there’s a black character in this story, so I will focus my efforts on trying to speak to the myriad of possible black perspectives (because there is no single “black perspective”) and not worry about what the Hispanics or Asians or whoever think? How do I account for all the perspectives in the world that aren’t mine, and speak to all of them at once?

I don’t have an answer to that. I think tablesaw raised some great points in that post, but I hit that bit at the end and my eyes bugged out of my head. It’s kind of like the rule we kept returning to, during the panel discussions at VeriCon: how do you do [thing X]? Be a genius! It’s the solution to everything. Except that I can’t just wave a magic wand and turn myself into a genius. I can take little baby steps toward this utopia, but will they be enough?

a followup to that safety thing

I don’t know if all the details on this are right (I’m confident there’s more we aren’t being told about), but this diagram of the new presidential limo is eye-opening.

Sure, its mileage is in Hummer territory, and it won’t be winning any races — but this thing could eat Hummers for breakfast and keep on rolling.

And the bottles of blood are a nice touch, if more than a little creepy.

yet more linky!

I don’t know why I’m accumulating weblinks like dust bunnies lately, but I really, really am. so have some more.

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I go to all the trouble of figuring out how the Nebula rules work, and then they go changing them on me. But I applaud the move — and it doesn’t invalidate my previous effort, since I believe 2008 works are still operating under the old rules. Anyway, the argument in favor of rolling eligibility has always been to avoid disadvantaging works published late in the year; the argument against it has always been that 1) it’s utterly byzantine to figure out and 2) it makes the Nebulas hit too late to be relevant. (As in, the majority of the works in the running for the 2009 award were published in 2007.) Me, I’m in favor of the change. The Oscars make it work; so can we.

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The science of fiction — namely, what effect reading fiction has on our minds. I’ve heard these ideas before, but this is a good presentation of them, especially since the scientists acknowledge at the end that they should go on to look at tv and movies and games and so on.

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Jesus Christ that cat is huge.

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Cat Valente’s advice to single male programmer types, re: housekeeping. So very, very true, even without the focus on getting laid.

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Interesting thoughts on core animal emotions, and how they might apply to the 2008 American presidential election and the proselytizing efforts of atheists.

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Now to deal with e-mail.