Vacation Mode = ON

Jun. 14th, 2025 12:49 am
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Posted by John Scalzi

Hey, you know what happens next week? Krissy and I celebrate 30 years of being married. She and I are taking a little vacation to enjoy it together. You may not see me for, uhhhhhhh, a while. If I do show up, it will be pretty brief. Don’t worry, Athena will be around for you, and we have a lot of Big Ideas for you next week too. It’ll be fun. Just mostly without me.

Bye!

— JS

Something Fishy

Jun. 13th, 2025 02:23 pm
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[personal profile] kevin_standlee
There is a fish and chips food truck that visits Fernley around once a month. For some reason, I typically get notifications of them coming here after they've already moved on to a different city. This time, I knew they would be here today, stopping at Big R Ranch & Home. As it happens, I needed to go there anyway. The water pump on the swamp cooler has stopped pumping. I think there's just been too much hard water build-up in it. Also, the pads into which the water is pumped have too much build-up in them. It's easier to just replace the pump and pads than to try and clean them. So I went over to Big R, bought the swamp cooler parts, and went outside to get some fish.

On The Hook )

It was pretty good fish.

Murderbot Day

Jun. 13th, 2025 12:08 pm
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[personal profile] marthawells
* Interview with Sue Chan, the production designer:

https://filmstories.co.uk/news/murderbot-designing-a-future-world-that-doesnt-look-like-alien/

“I started out by taking the most ancient societies on each continent – Etruscans, Asian, European, and African cultures,” Chan tells us. “I looked at the most fundamental motifs and gathered them into a bible, then asked my team to imagine 100 generations from now, when the diaspora of Earth have chosen to live together in society. How would they evolve a unified set of symbols? A language that really honours where they came from.”

This informed the alphabet that can be seen in the decoration painted across the otherwise grey, corporate habitat the PresAux crew are leasing. At the same time, acknowledging how much of the crew is queer and polyamorous, the colours of the rainbow are also entwined into their decorations.

“All of that is mashed up but it has a fundamental logic to it,” says Chan.




* Interview with Akshay Khanna (Ratthi):

https://squaremile.com/style/akshay-khanna-murderbot-actor-interview/

I’m incredibly excited for people to watch Murderbot on Apple TV+. Sci-fi has been my favourite genre by a country mile forever, and being on a show like this has always been a career goal of mine. Frankly, I had too much fun filming that show, and getting paid to do it constantly felt like I was getting away with something on set.

And the show is just so good. I can confidently say it’s fantastic – and if you don’t like it, then I would gently tell you that it’s OK to be wrong sometimes.



* Interview with Sabrina Wu (Pin-Lee):

https://www.autostraddle.com/sabrina-wu-interview-murderbot/

And then once I got the role, I read the books and I was legit just blown away at how funny the books were. I just haven’t seen such a dry sarcastic sensibility with this kind of hero sci-fi stories. And then I also just really liked that it was in the tradition of I felt like Octavia Butler, where it’s like, “oh, this is a queer imagining of the future.” So I don’t know. I just thought it was a really sweet, funny, different world. I also, obviously every comedian who becomes an actor, their dream is to get to work on something with action to move beyond an It’s Always Sunny kind of comedy. I believe there was already an opportunity for me to be in a spaceship and shoot guns, and it just made me happy that it was genuinely funny source material.



* Video interview with Tattiawna Jones (Arada) and Tamara Podemski (Bharadwaj):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NllgfEekw9s



* And a video interview with Noma Dumezweni (Mensah)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZpigqUqZXQ



* and a video interview with Noma and David Dastmalchian (Gurathin)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=361cKOujISE



* And a video interview (with a transcript) with Alexander Skarsgard, Jack McBrayer, and Paul and Chris Weitz:

https://collider.com/murderbot-alexander-skarsgard-jack-mcbrayer-creators-paul-weitz-chris-weitz/


* And there is a profile of me in The New Yorker (!!)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/do-androids-dream-of-anything-at-all
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The embittered Martian aerialist and the nonconformist live a thousand-plus years apart, in different solar systems. What, then, connects them?

A Rebel’s History of Mars by Nadia Afifi

Interview with Natania Barron

Jun. 13th, 2025 12:00 am
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Posted by Paul Weimer

Today, Paul Weimer talks with his longtime friend, Natania Barron, about her Queens series.

1. Can you introduce yourself to our readers unfamiliar with you and your work?

I'm Natania Barron, a fantasy author and fashion historian who loves monsters, magic, and mayhem. My books are almost always historical in some capacity, unapologetically queer, and full of fabulous costumes, adventures, and found family. My background was originally in academia, primarily focused on medieval literature, but I'm a big fan of the 19th century as well. I read voraciously, garden enthusiastically, and love traveling. At present, I live in North Carolina with my family.

2. You've written a fair amount of fantasy before tackling the Queens series. Why the jump to Arthuriana? What's the appeal?

This is the funny part about publishing. Chronologically, I've been working on the Queens series longer than almost anything else. The first draft of Queen of None was written in 2010, but it languished with me for about ten years, living in a state of limbo. It was, in many ways, the thesis I wish I'd written in graduate school, resurrecting a character I'd found in Geoffrey of Monmouth--which is a 12th century quasi-history that features King Arthur--named Anna Pendragon. Anna was the full sister of Arthur, with the same parents (Igraine and Gorlois). So, in a sense these books have been with me all along. In fact, keen eyed folks will notice quite a few Arthurian nods in some of my other works, including in Pilgrim of the Sky and These Marvelous Beasts.

Arthuriana has always appealed to me, as I grew up loving fantasy and it was a natural progression in my academic pursuits. For me, it's about the tension of the Matter of Britain (the fancy term for Arthuriana) between the golden age and its inevitable fall, the strong king and the affair that shook the kingdom, the ever-changing characters who go from most renowned to reviled and back again. Courtly love itself is walking contradiction! I often speak of Arthuriana as an amoeba, and certainly as fanfiction. From the 12th century onward, it traveled across Europe and beyond, capturing imaginations right and left. And every time it was retold, it changed shape. I mean, truly, so much of what we know about King Arthur are not Welsh or English in nature, but decidedly French. This amalgamation of myth over the next near millennium has shaped so much about how we think about fantasy, kingship, and romance. And it's delightfully episodic, so you have the opportunity to zoom in or out in the story as much as possible, which is wonderfully appealing as a writer. I'd love to continue the series at some point in the vein of what Joe Abercrombie does with his interconnected novels, and I feel like the genre is absolutely built for it.

3. The central logline of the trilogy are three Queens. What prompted you to tell your take on their stories in the Arthurian Cinematic Universe

Women are both plentiful and invisible in much of the Matter of Britain. They are most often used as mediums for succession, or as political pawns. Mothers, in particular, are everywhere and yet nowhere. Once a woman has done her duty to have a child, typically by a knight or king, she is of no use in the narrative. But their stories matter, and they're all there in the margins. The three women in the story are all queens in their own right, or should be, but their queenliness is more than their genes. Anna surrenders her throne; Hwyfar learns to claim her own; Morgen's realm is not of the mortal plane. Anna is a mother, Hwyfar is a maiden (in that she is unmarried), and Morgen is the crone. They are all powerful, but in vastly different ways. And their actions and alliances shape the very foundations of the overall myth. That was one of the really joyful parts of writing the third book, which occurs 20 years after the first, being the ability for me to tie up all the loose ends. And usher in a new generation! Because that's one of the other fun things about writing in this genre: it takes place over a fairly long stretch of time, and there are different phases of folks involved.

4. The time frame of most fantasy novels is months, or even weeks. Having books that take place over years or lifetimes is rare. What models and inspirations in fantasy and mimetic literature did you have in telling the lifetime stories of your characters

Well, in-genre there is certainly T.H. White, who has a similar approach in The Once and Future King. Each section follows a different character or characters, and we begin with Arthur as a boy, and the story reaches all the way until his departure to Avalon. I think, if I'm being academic about it, it's sort of woven into Arthurian DNA to both expand and contract time as needed. In my approach, the first book spans about 10 years; the second is just a few months; the third is a few weeks. But there are breaks of time between each one, so I can zoom in and zoom out as needed. The timelines get more complex, though, even though the time spent is less. By the time we get to Queen of Mercy, there are even dual timelines to contend with, as Morgen's story is happening in the background of the story happening at Carelon with Gawain, Hwyfar, and the triad of Galahad, Percival, and Llachlyn. I don't think anyone does complex timelines as well as N.K. Jemisin, I'd say, outside the Arthurian genre.


5. Maiden Mother and Crone is an interesting alignment for your Queens. What other mythic models and frameworks might readers look for in the trilogy?

Oh, there's so much. In fact, there are so many mythological Easter eggs that I stumble into some I had totally forgotten about when I'm re-reading or listening to the audiobooks. A big theme in the stories is around the contradictions of chivalry and courtly love in the face of a world experiencing magic that is both vanishing and changing shape. I poke plenty of fun at Arthur's very simplistic view of Christianity, but show how well it molds to certain minds looking for straightforward answers. The magic of Avillion is complex, old, and very matriarchal--save that their king is a man. There are heroes, and there are anti-heroes, but there are very few true villains in the story. One of my favorite frameworks is the escape to the wilderness/descent into madness cycle that you see very often in the Matter of Britain. Both Lancelot and Yvain have moments where their minds, essentially, experience a psychotic break. The wood is both healing and challenging in their subsequent adventures. I got to work through Yvain's story a bit in the last book, which was quite the adventure.

I suppose, the biggest theme is the magical woman--the woman of both actual and perceived power. So often, especially Morgan le Fay is associated with seduction and sexuality, and I wanted to change that. In much of the Arthurian canon, powerful women are rarely revered. They are feared, othered, and often looked at as obstacles rather than healers or wise women. In the Vita Merlini, which is from the 12th century and her first large appearance in literature, she's a powerful woman who clearly comes out of the Celtic past, an herbalist, and respected for her work. She's not described as wily or difficult or hedonistic. That all comes later. So I wanted my version of Morgen, who appears within the first chapters of Queen of None, and conveys throughout, in a similar way. She chooses, when Merlin spurns her, to work as a midwife at Carelon. Her magic is not just the magic of Avillion, but blended powers she learned from Merlin as well as her own connection with Death itself. She is called the "midwife of souls" for that reason, and I pulled a lot of my inspiration from the triple-goddesses of death you see in some religions, and especially in Celtic lore.

6. Arthuriana is a vast place and perhaps daunting for readers to find their way in, at least beyond the usual ones. Where you do suggest readers who have read your trilogy wade in next?

Some of the books I suggest run the gamut from faithful retellings to general vibes, and I love that. There's a Palamades even in Gideon the Ninth and plenty of Arthurian echoes. Tracy Deonn's Bloodmarked series is a fantastic YA modern take on the Arthurian inheritance. Of course, Lev Grossman recently wrote The Bright Sword, which has a lot of the humor that I love in writers like T.H. White, but shaped in a way that is very much his own

7.  The sheer diversity of differences in the Arthurian mythos from book to book and story to story is breathtaking, and your works add to that tradition.  Why do you think that remixing and reinterpretation is so popular?

Given the time it was created, it's surprising to many how diverse and far-reaching Arthuriana is. As a medievalist, that's not shocking. The medieval world went far beyond the borders of Britain. And indeed, the West's "Dark Ages" were far from homogenous (or, as the quotes indicated, "dark" to begin with). Indeed, in the Middle Ages, people were asking many of the same questions we're still positing about gender, religion, faith, power, and patriotism. Because of all of this, and its historical context, Arthuriana is built flexibly, diversely, and with a great adaptability. In many ways it's similar to the adaptation and appropriation you see when the Catholic Church really sinks its teeth into the West, and you see all these Celtic and pre-Christian figures remixed as saints. It's deeply location-based and very personal. Knights, ladies, villains, monsters... these can all be absorbed into Arthuriana, as well. We like our own context, and the way these stories are written and shared really welcomes such remixing.

And what's fascinating to me, at least, is seeing it reshaped to either combat or acquiesce to current political, religious climates, etc. Courtly love was adored by the French, and during the 12th and 13th centuries, Lancelot and Guinevere's relationship was seen as sacred even though it very much lived outside the Christian marriage pact. But it shifts, especially by the time you get the Malory--and of course, it's primarily Guinevere who is demonized in that instance. Women are blamed for their power over men, rather than men given responsibility for their actions. So these changes aren't always for the better, but they do tell us a great deal about the cultures from which they're told. I'm curious to see what direction Arthuriana goes, considering the current political climate. Might vs. right has never been so essential.

We see it happening in real-time, to some extent, with comic books and superhero movies, film, and books, in the 20th and 21st centuries. They're, of course, building on thousands of years of myths, but given the acceleration of media production, we get remakes and retellings at breakneck pace. We no longer have to wait for the next minstrel hit to literally travel leagues, changing all along the way to better suit the audience.

8. What's next for you now that you have completed this trilogy?

The third book in my queer Regency witches series (Love in Netherford) is called The Game of Hearts, and that should be out later this year or early next. Then, well, I'm always working on something. I have a secondary world romantasy that needs some revisions, but I also haven't given up on Arthuriana yet. Lately, Palomydes, Tristan, and Isolde have been gnawing away at my consciousness. I've even been dreaming about them! And lots more of the Questing Beast. In addition, I have a few nonfiction projects I'd like to tackle. Ideas are never the issue!

9. (and the soft outro): Where can readers find you and your work?

My website is nataniabarron.com, and I'm @natania.bsky.social on BlueSky, @nataniabarron on Instagram, and @nataniabooks on TikTok. Both the Queens of Fate series and the Love in Netherford books can be found online, or at my publisher's website (Solaris/Rebellion - https://rebellionpublishing.com/)

Thank you, Natania!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

If you know me, you know one thing I complain about a lot (and probably more than any sane person should) is the use of licensed music in animated movies. I especially hate the use of licensed music in Illumination studio movies. Though, I can recognize that I am biased because I hate Illumination as a whole and dislike 93.3% of their movies (I did the math).

There is one movie, though, in which I find the licensed music to not only be tolerable, but enjoyable. Megamind is the only movie where licensed music is absolutely essential throughout the film, and integral to the very character of Megamind himself.

Megamind is a flashy, theatrical villain who is in it for the love of the game. He lives for the showmanship and flamboyant performances that are the fights between him and Metro Man. As he says in the final fight of the movie, the difference between a villain and a supervillain is presentation. And you can see this ideal of his throughout the film.

In the first interaction with Roxanne Ritchi, where she has been kidnapped and is in Megamind’s evil lair, he unveils all these supervillain-esque devices to her in hopes to come across as a threatening villain. There’s alligators, spikes, a disc blade sort of thing, a mini gun, even a flamethrower. She is impressed by none of it, of course, and his confidence deflates as she mocks him. She also asks where they get all their blinky dials and Tesla coils, to which Minion responds that they come from an outlet store in Romania.

As we can see from this exchange, Megamind goes out of his way to aesthetically meet the requirements of being a villain. So much so that he even buys fake equipment from overseas to look professional. Essentially, he has props. Because he’s a theater kid!

Megamind is obsessed with the pageantry of heroes and villains. We can see this in the exchanges he has with Metro Man and their “witty” banter about microwave warranties. He loves it so much that when he is training Hal to be a superhero, he specifically tries to teach him how to have that same back-and-forth like Metro Man did with him. Even during their first fight, Megamind says “Now it’s time for some witty back-and-forth banter!”

Right before this fight, Megamind accuses Hal of being “unprofessional” and that Metro Man would’ve never kept him waiting, because he was a pro. Hal isn’t “professional” enough for Megamind, and when Hal catches him after their fight and says he’s going to kill him, Megamind says “that isn’t how you play the game.” Proof that Megamind sees this all as a big stage play. It’s a game to him, and one he loves and takes great care in making sure all of the details and specifics are just right and fit his ideal narrative perfectly.

In this same vein, Megamind is obsessed with perfecting his outfit, the Black Mamba, for his first fight with Hal. He wants his costume to look good for his big battle. For what is a good show without the costuming department? In the beginning of the movie, he intentionally points out that he’s wearing custom baby seal leather boots just to prove to everyone he is the bad guy. Look how evil he is, see how dastardly Megamind is. He’s obsessed with painting this picture of himself that presents himself as heinous and diabolical.

Which is exactly why all of the licensed music in this movie fits Megamind perfectly. More often than not, he is the one actually playing the music out loud. When he takes over Metro City, he tells Minion to “hit it” and plays “Highway to Hell” on a big boom box that Minion carries around. He proceeds to dance to it, and makes his smoke show entrance to city hall while it plays. For his final fight with Hal, he plays “Welcome to the Jungle” out loud and creates a huge smoke and light show with his Brain Bots. This is the part where he proclaims “presentation!” is the key to super villain. At the end of the movie, he plays “Bad” on an even bigger boom box and him and Roxanne dance to it.

The point here is that his music choices are intentional. The songs are tools that serve his purpose of painting himself as an iconic, nefarious villain. The licensed music isn’t just thrown in, it’s part of the world and a part of Megamind himself. It is intentional. And it works.

God, I love Megamind.

Do you like Megamind? Do you hate licensed music as much as I do, or am I just obsessed with something niche? Should I talk about why Despicable Me is the only good Illumination movie? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

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Posted by John Boston

by John Boston The July Amazing is fronted by John Pederson, Jr.’s second cover, an agreeable Martian-ish scene, reminiscent of nothing so much as . . . Johnny Bruck on a good day.  So maybe the new commitment to domestic artists isn’t quite the boon I thought it was.  We’ll see. by John Pederson, Jr. … Continue reading [June 12, 1970] Something Good! and Nothing Terrible (July 1970 Amazing)

The post [June 12, 1970] Something Good! and Nothing Terrible (July 1970 <i>Amazing</i>) appeared first on Galactic Journey.

Mooned

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:44 am
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As Kayla headed out for breakfast this morning, she snapped a photo of the "Strawberry Moon," which if I'm reading right is about the largest the Moon will appear in our sky for a long time.

Moon Over Fernley )

The camera phone is of course not very good for taking this sort of picture.

LiveJournal continues to show a 403 Forbidden error.
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Very nice and punctual but they've basically learned nothing in the year they've worked at the theatre. Not where to stand, not which row is which, or the general location of a given seat. The last two really matter during reserved seating shows. Whatever side that usher is on is going to have lines, and people may end up in the wrong seats.

So I was discussing the situation with my boss and I said my current approach was that each shift would be to pick one thing that usher does not know, and do my best to ensure they know it by the end of the shift. Last shift was "where to stand", for example. My reward is, I think, that usher is now _my_ special project who I will be working with whenever I HM.

I did assure my boss I do remember a previous HM who grilled ushers on seat location and would ding them a quarter hour for minor uniform infractions and that I wasn't going to use them as a model. Well, I do, but only in the sense of asking myself if the way I want to handle something is how that person would, and if it is, I do something else.
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An artisanal cheesemaker's attempt to save her precious cheese cave lands her in the middle of an interplanetary crisis.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann LeBlanc
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Posted by Roseanna

A gut-punch in book form.

A while ago, Molly Templeton wrote a piece at Reactor about not needing to understand everything in a book that I vibed with so very hard - I am quite a "roll with it" reader in many ways, and it is lovely to have someone put good words around an experience you've had. It came back to me as I was reading Red Sword, the new novel from Bora Chung, because not only is it a story without a lot of handholds to find while reading, but is in fact one where the confusion is emphatically part of the point. It is a story that languishes in that feeling of ignorance, of lostness, and does something fantastic with it.

The story begins with ignorance - the protagonist is on an alien world, at a loss about most of the details, knowing only that she has been brought there by an imperial power who have violently coerced her into this place to fight. What then proceeds for a large chunk of the novel is action absolutely devoid of context. Things... happen. The protagonist endures and experiences. We the reader experience alongside her. We have just as little context as she does, must endure the bafflement along with her. The events that she experiences and endures are confusing, traumatic, violent and often horrible. The novel is full of sequences of fighting, of death. People - many of whom the protagonist knows by description rather than name - are forced to fight an overwhelmingly superior enemy without guns, and die horribly in the act of it, beginning in the first few pages with an unnamed man the protagonist has come to love during their mutual imprisonment on the ship that brought them to this planet to fight.

Her experience then is shaped not by understanding but by inexplicable bloodshed and death. For a cause she doesn't know, let alone support, in a place she doesn't know, with rules she doesn't know. But she keeps being pushed back into these violent encounters, suffering at the hands of the imperials who brought her here as well as the mysterious white aliens they fight.

Already, I think it's clear this sounds like a grim story. It is. It's apparently inspired by the stories of Korean soldiers who were sent to fight in Russia for the Qing Dynasty, and that sense of powerlessness, of being dragged into an outside conflict, comes through at every turn. But it's not just the events and the thematic resonances of this that reinforce it. It's the language.

This is a translated novel, so it's never going to be clear (particularly to me, who speaks no Korean), the extent to which the object that comes into my hands owes its phrasing to Bora Chung or to the translator, Anton Hur. But whatever portions they poured in to the alchemical pot that made this worked perfectly, and particularly in one specific way: the sparseness of the prose. Now I am normally a fan of ornate. Give me something deliciously overwritten and I will, like as not, go mad for it. But Red Sword goes hard in the opposite direction, and is just as brutally impactful for it as something embracing adjectival rococo. To the extent that... I don't even quite understand how it's doing it. How using simple sentences, direct statements, with flat tonality, somehow turns into an emotional gutpunch. There are brief moments that make sense - after a paragraph of text, the contrasting bluntness of a single, brief sentence character death obviously has the benefit of contrast. But it's not just those individual moments. It's the whole thing. All of it is in this almost detached, distant, plain language. And yet it manages to be some of the most emotionally affecting.

To give a specific example, there's a long section in the middle of the book, where the protagonist is thrown from violent situation to violent situation on a foggy field of battle. She doesn't know where she's going or what's going on, and she is simply trying to survive situation by situation. It culminates with a scene of her smashing a weapon into the body of an imperial soldier over and over and over and over again, before cutting to a section break, and then opening the next with her being distracted from almost a reverie by a female scream.

I put the book down after reading that section, hit with a sudden certainty that what I just read was a vivid depiction of someone in shock.

That's what Chung and Hur's prose does here - it situates you emphatically in this experience of living moment to moment, contextless and confused, and by doing so in such blunt terms, hammers home the reality of that experience. Like the protagonist, you are completely at sea in the horror of it all. Her emotions echo out to the reader through this sympathetic experience. The detachment isn't detachment; it's indicative of the real emotional toll being exacted by the horrors she faces. And it is so powerfully done, it cannot be quickly consumed. For all its simplicity, it is prose you need to sit with and digest. I can't quite figure out how its doing what it's doing, but I can absolutely revel in the experience of it.

As the story goes on, some context does leak in. There is some sense of clarity and closure by the final part of the story, but even then, that feeling of being lost never truly ebbs. The bones of the context are there, but we don't have the fleshing out of exposition that would be my expectation of the usual speculative novel. There's no grand speech laying out motive. Only snippets, and even they form a small part of a larger picture unseen, only speculated. But we don't need to have the architects of all this misery come to speak their peace. We see someone experiencing its effects. What does the context matter in the face of the facts? What do the explanations matter in the face of the suffering?

A lot of this, I think, also comes down to trust. Chung lays actions out simply and clearly, with short snippets of dialogue, and mostly expects the reader to infer meaning from how they interact, how those pieces of dialogue or the rare intrusions of meta interact with one another, or to infer that meaning is, at this point, unattainable. Explanations come predominantly at the granular level - how the protagonist got out of the river, how she broke her sword, how she shot the gun. Overarching plot theorising? Not so much. But these moments piece together into a whole, and that whole shows us those effects. We see what this empire is by what it does.

And so I think this is a novel that makes an art out of incomplete understanding. It would be a worse book if the underpinnings were explained at any point, and especially the start, because it would rob us of the chance to ride along with the protagonist and be lost with her, to flow with the story as she flows with it, in shared confusion. It is that shared experience that absolutely makes the story what it is, and allows for some incredibly powerful moments. I do not think I have read scenes of violence in a story - especially as someone who generally finds battle scenes and extended fights tedious - that have affected me quite so strongly, and I think it is precisely because I have to experience them situated in the moment with the character, rather than trying to fit them into a broader context, or seeing them as a moving part in a puzzle, a set piece hurdle to traverse. They're not. The violence is, the experience of that violence, is the point. The protagonist's experience is the point. When the story reaches its conclusion, a number of questions open up about personhood, about who gets to be real, and about the disposability of human life in the endless grind of the imperial machine. Those questions are better served by the time spent paying attention to the material consequences of those imperial decisions.

Red Sword is deceptively simple. Its simplicity is its power; its contextlessness is the point. By removing all the guardrails, it forces the reader to confront the brutality of the experiences of its protagonist, and reckon with them purely as they are, before coming to any kind of broader conclusions about the wider politics at play. The human first. The real, lived moment first. The consequences first. Only then context, a little, but even that ultimately serves that larger section of the text. Chung has turned confusion into an emotional weapon, and drives it home with every brief, brutal sentence. I may not have always understood it all, but I felt it.

--

The Math

Highlights: 

  • some of the best writing of violence I've come across in a book
  • vivid, clipped prose that shocks you into emotions
  • immersive perspective

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Bora Chung, Red Sword, [Honford Star, 2025]. Translator: Anton Hur.

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

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Posted by John Scalzi

Obviously, to commemorate the passing of Brian Wilson, one of the great pop songwriters of this or any other era. This cover is a rather pale imitation of many different versions of this song, not withstanding the Beach Boys’ own version, but it is also a perfect song, able to withstand me essaying it. I produced it to sound like what you might hear if it came on a transistor radio, which I think is fitting for the song and its era. Enjoy.

— JS

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Have never worked a show run by human golden retrievers...

Some Sleep is Good

Jun. 11th, 2025 06:56 pm
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Another 3 AM start today. Things went okay, but by the time we got to Noon PT, I was done. I laid down and slept for several hours before being awakened by yet another phone spammer. Because of the nonprofit corporations on whose boards I sit, I'm targeted by sales calls that assume that all corporations have millions and millions of dollars to spend, and have a difficult time contemplating all-volunteer organizations with no employees and no reason to spend vast sums of money on their services. After all, isn't it illegal to not make a profit?

Anyway, I hope to get caught up on sleep tonight and put in an ordinary work day tomorrow.

I'd cross-post this to my LiveJournal, but I'm getting 403 errors trying to open LJ.

Adventures Elsewhere — May 2025

Jun. 11th, 2025 10:55 pm
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[personal profile] helloladies posting in [community profile] ladybusiness
Adventures Elsewhere collects our reviews, guest posts, articles, and other content we've spread across the Internet recently! See what we've been up in our other projects. :D


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Our Favourite Media of May 2025

Jun. 10th, 2025 10:51 pm
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[personal profile] helloladies posting in [community profile] ladybusiness
Each month, we look back over the media we loved in the previous month, from books to film to video games and more. This entry in the series was written a while ago, but we haven't posted a favorite media since then, so we're posting it now for maximum completion!


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Book Review: City in Chains

Jun. 11th, 2025 12:00 pm
[syndicated profile] nerdsofafeather_feed

Posted by Alex Wallace

A well-executed fantasy story that is fighting yesterday's battles


I am going to be up front with the reader here and now: I cannot ever be fully objective about the oeuvre of Harry Turtledove. When I was an impressionable fourteen year old, I learned of his WorldWar series. For the unaware, that is his eight book series about an alien invasion that happens to land in the particularly eventful year of 1942. I inhaled those books, and then the eleven books of his Southern Victory (also called ‘Timeline-191’ or ‘TL191’ among online alternate history fans due to its point of divergence revolving around special order 191) series beginning with How Few Remain. I have read over forty of his books, as of writing, and he is the writer that gave me my enduring love of the alternate history genre. He is in a sense what I aspire to be as a writer, with several different speculative genres coexisting with a solid historical bedrock under all of them. I would not be the writer or indeed the man I am today without the hours and hours I spent reading his books, getting lost in his worlds. Not for nothing, his books consistently come with the blurb calling him “the master of alternate history.”

In the alternate history circles I frequent, the man’s work has something of a mixed reception. They say he relies too much on historical parallelism, such as his Southern Victory series quite clearly reenacting European history in the first half of the twentieth century in an American setting, or his Atlantis trilogy reenacting the early history of the United States on a landmass that consists of our world’s Nova Scotia to Florida, having drifted off of the mainland in prehistory. The man has had some deeply bizarre sex scenes in his work, some involving real people (although I will argue that Robert Conroy’s sex scenes are leaps and bounds worse). His work at points has had some very repetitive characterization (such as how often Sam Carsten is sunburned), as well as a few stock turns of phrase (“he said it with inevitability, like the sun will rise tomorrow”). As I have grown from an impressionable fourteen year old to a jaded twenty-eight year old, his books from the 2000s come off to me like the Star Wars prequels; with hindsight, I can see all the myriad flaws that others have pointed out, and many things could have been done better, but I still find myself enjoying the experience, and in awe of the worlds they opened up to me.

Much of the weaknesses of his big series are often connected to the fact that he had to pay for the college educations of his three daughters in quick succession, and writing is his sole source of income. He had to churn a lot out, and quickly, to give his children a future, and I can’t be mad at him for that. His work since then has been leaner, less dependent on well-trod periods of history, and with less bizarre weirdness (but plenty of fascinating weirdness). His book Three Miles Down (reviewed on this site by Arturo Serrano) is easily his most personal book, being a look at the Los Angeles the man himself grew up in, with plenty of wistfulness and added aliens. His Alpha and Omega is delightfully weird. Now, dear reader, I shall get to the point: his most recent novel, City in Chains.

This is one of Turtledove’s straight fantasy novels, with no direct textual reference to our history. However, those with familiarity with the periods that he likes to write about will see the inspiration, as the novel is rather clearly a pastiche of occupied Paris during World War II. The city is Lutesse (no relation to certain peculiar characters in the Bioshock series) in the Kingdom of Quimper, a name which it shares with a city in Brittany (mention is also made of a battle at a place called Carentan, which is also real, and I learned from the mission in the original Company of Heroes). This city, and this kingdom, are under the occupation of the villainous Chleuh, and the quotidian cruelties have become part of the fabric of life.

The exact aesthetic of this whole shebang is a little bit confused, or so I thought. There are trains, but the occupying forces are primarily still using crossbows. As such, the novel feels like an odd mishmash of the Middle Ages and the 19th century with some tropes of World War II fiction thrown in. Of the latter, the most obvious of these is a sort of magically-infused crystal that occupies the role of radio in the historical fiction that inspired this novel. Nighttime bombing raids are in this world nighttime dragon raids; there is a brief plotline where a dragon rider, having been shot down, is secreted away in the basement of one of the main characters and later handed off to the organized resistance (a plotline which, sadly, is ultimately underdeveloped). The whole thing is a mishmash, one with a lot going for it, but overall Turtledove neglects to really describe what this city looks like, smells like, sounds like. The entire project feels more than a little threadbare, abstract even, rather than something concrete.

The book does shine, however, in its two main characters. One of them is Malk Malkovici, a junkman of the minority Old Faith sect who is a refugee from persecution in another country now occupied by the Chleuh. The Old Faith is the target of genocidal persecution by the occupiers, who are sending them to vaguely described but clearly ominous camps in the east, territory occupied by the Chleuh and conquered (albeit apparently temporarily) from a strange monarchy that believes that the gods have declared that wealth needs to be shared. It becomes clear quite early on that Malk is a member of the group that is this world’s analogue for Jewish people under Nazi occupation.

What makes life more complicated for Malk is that his services as a collector of junk, including various types of metal, is in high demand by the occupiers who hate him and, on an ideological level, want to kill him. He and his family are complicit in the occupation and from there the mass murder and the genocide. He has rapport with officers who come to buy his wares, as well as a collaborating policeman whose beat is his neighborhood, and tries not to advertise his religious beliefs. He is wracked by the knowledge that he is, however indirectly and however reluctantly, complicit in evil, but he knows there is a huge price to pay if he were to stand up for himself.

The other main character is Guisa Sachry, a rich man, a great actor, the head of his own theater troupe, and the greatest star of the Lutesse theater scene. He has a much younger wife (his third) and had planned to keep his head down throughout the occupation with inoffensive slice-of-life plays until an officer of the Chleuh military came knocking, ‘asking’ him to appear as one of the Lutesse luminaries at a parade honoring the city’s new rulers. Knowing he stands to lose a lot, perhaps even his life, if he says no, he goes along with it. He is then asked by the occupation to write a play glorifying the occupation and demonizing the resistance. He does so, reluctantly (and the solution he devises to this is a very clever one on Turtledove’s part, one that he is capable of creating because he knows how people interact with the historical and cultural context in which they live), and from there is pulled head first down the vortex of collaboration.

Guisa Sachry is not a good man, and the narrative correctly emphasizes that fact again and again. He hires a dancing girl from another company on the condition that she have sex with him. He is deeply and profoundly unpleasant to his wife, with whom it is clear he doesn’t really love, and the feeling is mutual. He is ruthless to his underlings and sycophantic to the men who pay him off. But it is with that sycophancy that the novel really furnishes its theme, that of complicitness.

Both Malk and Guisa are men who are constrained by structural factors from acting free of the occupation. Malk dislikes working with the Chleuh out of his religious beliefs and his own moral principles. Guisa, on the other hand, has no principles whatsoever, and his own naked self-interest is what compels him to comply; even if he is the ethnic majority in Lutesse, the Chleuh would still make an example if he were to fall out of line. Both don’t want to collaborate, but both are forced into collaboration, their distinct characters and distinct paths nevertheless reaching the same destination.

As a longtime reader of Turtledove’s work, Guisa Sachry as a character reminded me strongly of another one of his characters: William Shakespeare, as portrayed in his novel Ruled Britannia. That novel is set in a world where the Spanish Armada succeeds, and England is under the cruel yoke of Philip II. This version of Shakespeare is a covert sympathizer with the English resistance who is coerced by the Spanish to write a play glorifying Philip, while simultaneously writing a play about Boudica, the ancient queen of the Iceni people who lead a failed rebellion against the Romans, and a thinly-veiled diatribe against the Spanish. Shakespeare, as portrayed by Turtledove, is a man with a strong moral conscience who is forced into collaboration, but takes covert action to resist. Guisa Sachry, on the other hand, is a man with no moral conscience at all, and his arc is almost that of a foil to Shakespeare’s in the earlier novel.

At its core, City in Chains is about collaboration. Many Americans in recent months have been beating the drum against collaboration with the new Trump administration, filled to the brim with neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a rogues' gallery of some of the most unpleasant, most boorish, most malevolent, and most stupid people on the planet. We have, rightly, been infuriated with the spinelessness of Democratic Party leaders in not taking a harder line against the wrecking of the federal government or the evisceration of trans rights in this country, to name but two examples (but a part of me thinks that Ta-Nehisi Coates was right in saying that you can’t really expect a party that had no spine to stand up against the genocide in Gaza to have the spine to stand up for democracy). We are in a moment where the moral imperative is not to comply, but to resist. Releasing a book like City in Chains in a time like this is an interesting decision, and one that is revelatory.

Harry Turtledove is an outspoken liberal on his social media; before he decamped from Twitter, his pinned tweet was “I didn’t mean to be topical” repeated several times. He is consistently good and well intentioned, if not radical, on racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights, and is blisteringly critical of the current administration. I remember that, in his novel Alpha and Omega, a novel set mostly in Israel (and released a few years before the current genocide), he states frankly, but does not dwell on, the the second-class status of Palestinians in that country. I do remember one particular interaction I had with him on Bluesky where told upcoming writers to share their new works, and I shared Broken Olive Branches, the anthology in which I have a story raising money for refugee relief in Gaza (and discussed on this blog here). He liked and boosted the anthology, for which I am grateful to him. In terms of his historical interests, he has been blisteringly critical of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates.

But the man is not without his blind spots. His portrayal of race is very much that of an older white liberal; his novel Guns of the South has been taken to task by multiple critics in recent years, such as by Monroe Templeton on the Sea Lion Press blog (which, for full disclosure, I have written many articles for in previous years). As an Asian-American (half Filipino through my mother), I was more than a little irritated by the fact that his Hot War trilogy, a series about World War III breaking out over Korea, has no Asian viewpoint character; the only Korean character is the plucky sidekick of a white American soldier.

Ultimately, I think the core of the issue is that Turtledove’s view of World War II is very much that of old war movies, where brave soldiers fight for justice, and innocent civilians bear the brunt of the ultimate evil. The conflict becomes a great moral drama between justice and injustice (in fairness to him, Turtledove has always been frank about American racism both in that period and in other periods). In that regard, he glorifies the resistance fighter and denounces the opportunist, but fundamentally casts the thing that they are resisting as a foreign force, an invader.

This is a view of fascism that has been superseded in the historical literature by a view that situates fascist regimes in the broader context of the imperial world of nineteenth-century Europe. Aimé Cesaire, in 1950, published Discourse on Colonialism, which made the argument that colonialism made Europe a savage continent, one that had come to accept racial hatred and mass murder as de rigueur, a formulation that culminated in Nazism deciding to do those things to other Europeans. Cesaire’s English translator called this a ‘boomerang effect,’ an abstract but effective translation of the original French phrase ‘choc en retour,’ literally ‘return shock.’ Not long after Cesaire, Hannah Arendt argued in her magnum opus Origins of Totalitarianism that Nazism was the confluence of millennia of European antisemitism and the race thinking of imperialism. Hitler himself openly stated that the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was explicitly modeled on the United States.

Here I shall analyze City in Chains as a critical work, in the manner that Phoebe Wagner on this very blog discusses Andor. In attempting to critique modern fascism, he falls into myths of the original fascism. Contemporary American fascism is not something that was imported from Europe; Trump is not merely the achievement of Russian propaganda, but rather a culmination of centuries of American bigotry. A president who is promising ethnic cleansing cannot be considered a break from a country that systematically expelled its indigenous populations from their homelands. A movement that is backed in no small part by violent militias cannot be considered a break from a country that has enforced slavery, white supremacy, and indigenous dispossession with heavily armed mobs, some of which called themselves militias.

As a narrative device and as abstract philosophy, the theme of complicitness in this novel succeeds. As a description of complicitness in today’s injustices, it falls flat. This novel has a model of the theme that could work perhaps most perfectly for Ukrainians under the Russian jackboot (and Lord knows they need it), but not in America or Western Europe. For the latter, the complicitness we face is different and in some ways more totalizing. Does the company that makes our food give money to pay tribute to Donald Trump? Is the fast food place we go to supporting the IDF as they raze Gaza to the ground? Is our laptop made in a slave labor camp in Uyghurstan? The complicitness we face now is our own convenience, our survival on a very basic level. What we are complicit with is capitalism, and capitalism gives us no choice. This is the essence of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

That is the sort of question that City in Chains has no answer for, as it is uninterested in probing the broader systemic reasons for why this occupation, this war, this genocide are happening in the first place. We only get broad descriptions of the prewar status quo, and most of that is a pretty clear parallel to interwar Europe. If Quimper is France, as its name will show, there is no Algeria, no Senegal, no Indochina, and from there no equivalent to the American insistence that the first Allied troops to enter a liberated Paris be white. According to this novel, the enemy is foreign, alien even, and it requires of us no introspection, no questioning of basic assumptions. In valorizing resistance to complicitness with a foreign evil, it leaves open the door to complicitness with a domestic evil, letting us be comfortable in satisfaction while continuing to play our own little part in keeping evil alive, be it through our purchases, our tax dollars, our employment, our voting, or our own personal conduct. The parallelism that is one of Turtledove's standard tricks works to the detriment of the broader moral indignation, and as such cannot even really be said to critique contemporary fascism.

As such, the basic narrative scaffolding of City in Chains is perfectly entertaining as fantasy fiction, but as an answer to the current moment it feels woefully out of date. The novel on some level feels like it’s fighting previous battles, not the current battle. Its portrayal of the struggle against fascism is what America of previous decades wanted World War II to be, and what modern white liberals want the struggle against contemporary fascism to be. It is a book that is fascinated by abstract questions of morality in years gone by, while not having much to say about concrete questions of morality in the present. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how the current moment is the compounded result of previous historical moments, and how the problems of today are deeply structural. It is a book I enjoyed very much, and it has some very smart moments, but on the whole the novel reveals the weaknesses of Turtledove’s worldview in an age of resurgent fascism.

--

Reference: Turtledove, Harry, City in Chains [Aetheon Books, 2025]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

The Great Closet Purge of 2025

Jun. 11th, 2025 05:03 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

Today in Incredibly Mundane Things That Yet Must Be Done, my side of the closet had become untenably crowded with clothes that I currently either can’t or won’t wear, and it was driving Krissy a little batty. So this morning she hauled all my stuff out onto the bed and told me to decide what was going to stay and what was going to go.

For an indecisive hoarder such as myself, this ultimatum filled me with existential horror, and yet I knew she was right: Much of what I have I can’t fit into at the moment (someone decided to eat a few too many snacks and not walk enough steps for, uhhhhh, a while now), and even with what I can currently fit into, I tend to default to basically the same five shirts and three pairs of jeans. So basically 90% my clothes are, essentially, just taking up space. I would never do a triage of all of it without prompting. So here was the prompt.

The “triage” was actually a quadage, as everything got sorted into one of four categories:

1. Clothes that don’t fit and/or I wasn’t wearing it even if it did: On the floor to be donated (as you can see in the picture above, with Charlie the dog for scale). In this category are a lot of shirts that are currently tight across my midsection, multiple Kickstarter t-shirts (sorry, Kickstarter pals, I mostly didn’t get the “t-shirt” tier because I wanted a t-shirt, I just wanted to send you extra cash), old convention/book festival t-shirts and sweatshirts, souvenir shirts, jeans in a waist size I will likely never see again, and shorts I can’t manage to get past my thighs. This is the largest category of stuff.

2. Apparel with sentimental value and only sentimental value: Put into a box for storage. These include gifts I would feel guilty disposing of, commemorative apparel I want to keep but can’t/won’t wear at the moment, or quirky stuff that amuses me, but I don’t necessarily want to be seen in, even if it fits. This is the smallest category, but it’s enough that it will take up a whole box.

3. Apparel I want to wear again but currently don’t fit into: Back into the closet, pushed to the back. This is mostly shirts. I need to lose at least 20 pounds before I unlock some of these again, and losing 30 pounds will unlock them all. Call them “shrink goals.” I’ll start working on that in earnest starting at the beginning of July.

4. Stuff I currently fit into: Back into the closet, obviously, shirts near the front of the closet, pant/shorts in their corresponding cubby holes.

Of the last two categories, what’s left? Honestly, not a whole lot! My regular shirts were basically entirely wiped out (note only two collared shirts there, although I will clarify that actual dress shirts and suits are in a different closet along with other more formal wear; this closet is for everyday wear), and what I have left are primarily t-shirts, most of which I recently purchased when I realized I let my sloth change my clothes size. On a day-to-day basis this isn’t an issue, since as I already mentioned, I tend to just wear the same five shirts anyway. Also it’s summer so I’m not exactly dressing up, and as a science fiction writer I’m not expected to dress myself up fancy-like when I do events, I just have to be, you know, not all covered in stains and crumbs. This current state of affairs will not present either a logistical or sartorial crisis for at least a few months.

Still, it was a little bit of a surprise to me how much of my ostensible wardrobe was functionally inert and just taking up space. It was a lot. And now all of that is off, or soon to be, to local charities who will hopefully pair the clothes with people who actually need and might actually wear the stuff. It’s not all Kickstarter tees, there are some things in there one could wear to work. The clothes being actually worn is a more useful fate than the one they had in my closet. Fly, extraneous clothes! Be free!

— JS

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