Catching up–those are both a bit late, but they do make for awesome sharing:

-Alexander Chee on comics, X-men and race, especially with regards to growing up mixed-race. It’s a great post, especially with regards to the experience of belonging neither here nor there–there must be other such accounts, but this is the first one I’ve seen. I’m probably reading the wrong blogs again, but the issue of mixed-race people often seems to get skipped over, or assimilated to POC problems. Which it is, partly–but for me, it does seem to bring extra problems, such the ones Chee points out. Mostly speaking from my own and limited experience there…

-Tricia Sullivan on the SF ghetto and issues of classification within the genre. Brilliant. Just darn brilliant.

-For the gamers amongst us, particularly those who’ve played Mafia/Werewolves (of Thiercellieux if you hail from France): there are people writing articles about Mafia game theory… Wow.

In other news, devoured King’s Dragon and Prince of Dogs, the first two volumes of Crown of Stars by Kate Elliot. And wow. It’s amazing. I’ve bitched before about the lack of historical realism in fantasy, but this book gets so many things right I don’t know where to start. It’s got depths, and a real sense of a world with a complex history, and many cultures interlocked. It’s got a very real religion, which is omnipresent in everyday life, and not continually questioned by 90% of the characters (one of my favourite characters, Alain, is a devout man). And the matter-of-fact inversion of genders is fascinating: in Elliot’s world, inheritance can go through the female line–a concept supported at all layers of the society from village to kingdom, and also in religion. You feel it as something organic which naturally derives from the societal structures, and not as an abstract thought experiment that doesn’t fit in with anything else (there is nothing that annoys me more than anachronistic feminists, probably because I’m prone to the fault; and I love the fact that it’s so natural for everyone that it’s not even discussed).

Fortunately, there are more volumes in the series