So, the H and I finally got to see Inception.

OK, so I can see what the fuss is all about. It’s a neat idea, and a great cast to assemble around it (props for Watanabe, whom I love, and Cillian Murphy who for once wasn’t stuck playing a psycho). And the movie tries so hard to be clever and to go beyond the ol’ Hollywood action thriller.

But but but…

It makes no sense.

Or, rather, to be more accurate: it sets up rules in its first half or so that it then spends most of the time ignoring.

For instance: a “kick” is supposed to wake up whoever is in a dream, as long as they’re not nestled in a deeper dream. So why did the very first “kick” (the van going over the bridge, which is explicitly referred to as a kick by Cobb) fail to wake up Arthur, who wasn’t under at the time?

Why does Fischer Junior not recognise Saito? Again, it’s clear that you can remember real life during the dreams, and yet Fischer Junior (the man who has been coached to take control of his father’s empire) doesn’t recognise the competitor who is their main target?

Why does no one (Arthur or Yussuf) bother to shape the dreams they’re in more strongly? The reason that was invoked at the start is that if you make too many modifications, projections will converge on you to kill you. Er… How is that different from what is happening in those dreams? (especially Arthur, who already has the entire hotel after him).

Or how about totems–they’re brought up, and then seem to serve no purpose, other than presage the “shocking” ending.

About that ending. For me, it’s pretty clear that Cobb is still dreaming. It’s strongly implied he’s been on the run from the police for a number of years, and yet his children have not aged a day when he does come back–worse, they’re in the exact same position they have been in flashbacks during the entire movie.

Unfortunately, I was too busy going “uh?” at the movie during the last half-hour or so that the “cleverness” of the ending entirely bypassed me…

The movie had so many great parts, but in the end, it didn’t gel for me. I kept expecting there would be some kind of a better twist there (in particular, Fischer Junior felt way too naïve for who he was supposed to be, and I kept expecting he’d turn the tables on the team. But no, he was exactly as foolish as he appeared all along), but honestly, I could see what twists there were coming a mile off.

Sigh. I might be becoming too jaded for this.

Joyce Chng, Csilla Kleinheincz, Kate Elliott, Karen Lord, Ekaterina Sedia and I discuss the Russ Pledge in the context of World SF. Well, sort of. That started out as the intention, but I think the resulting roundtable covers a lot more ground than that (partly a result of six different people on six different time zones editing a common google doc!). Many thanks to Lavie Tidhar for putting this together and for his heroic formatting work in order to make google docs communicate with the World SF blog.

Note: I tried to do my best with the “SF in France” bits of the conversation, but I have a narrow perspective on the matter (ie, just my own, and I’m hardly a typical French reader or SF writer). If you’re reading this and have more reliable information on the matter of SF in France, women in French SF and/or SF Bandes Dessinées, please hop on over to the World SF blog and leave a comment at the bottom of the post.

So, here’s the variant on the carrot cake…

A picture, though it’s really hard to make this look good, as it basically lacks contrast of any kind. It does taste like all kinds of yummy, trust me on that.

Adapted from kitchen tigress, who got it in turn from Angela Nilsen. I replaced those ingredients I didn’t have, and adjusted the quantities of oil, which seemed a bit excessive.

You’ll need:
-85 g pecan nuts, chopped into pieces
-1 tablespoon orange blossom water
-2 tbsp orange juice
-115 g chopped-up prunes (substitute raisins if prunes are lacking)
-225 g flour
-5 g baking soda (half a packet)
-1 rounded tsp ground cinnamon
-175 g sugar
-100 g sunflower oil (about 1/4 cup)
-3 eggs
-280 g finely grated carrot (3-4 carrots)

Like most carrot cakes, it came with an icing layer, which is basically sugar and butter. I dislike both, and the cake tastes good enough without them, so I skipped that part without much remorse.

Preheat oven to 180°C (thermostat 6/7).
Sift the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and sugar together until well-mixed (this is more important than usual, because you really want that spoonful of cinnamon to spread in the cake, otherwise you could be in for an interesting surprise after the cake is cooked).

Then fold in the eggs one after the other, followed by the orange juice and orange blossom. Then dribble the oil in, mixing thoroughly until you have a thick dough. Add the nuts, prunes and carrots. Mix well.

Flour and butter a cake mold, and put in the oven for 45 minute-1 hour, until golden and risen.

In other, writing-related news: Kathleen Bellamy let me know that my story “Horus Ascending” was going to be part of the forthcoming IGMS anthology. Full TOC here, and some pretty awesome company.

Couple of links:
-Joyce Chng at the World SF blog on the Russ Pledge seen from outside the Western Anglophone world.
-Jonathan Dotse on why the future isn’t Western
-And two from Cheryl Morgan: one crunching data on SF anthologies, and the other on “Diversity is Hard”.

In other news, Irene Kuo is a genius. I’m down to 6 recipes picked out of her Key to Chinese Cooking (tea eggs, cha siu, white-cut chicken, two broccoli recipes, and the sweet-sour sauce), and they all worked out great. Also, the explanations are really clear on why you should do stuff, and it makes for way easier cooking.

While googling stuff on how to use cornstarch, I found this book: On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. Science and cooking? I’m sold… (but broke)

Recipe of the day: creative carrot cake (didn’t have raisins, so chopped up prunes after removing the stones; didn’t have orange zest, so added Orange Blossom instead; didn’t have walnuts, so put in pecans. And not entirely sure I had the right quantity of carrots. This could be fun)

Right. Back to the %%% story.

This is an odd movie. I came to it knowing Detective/Judge Dee from Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series (and his translated Dee Gong An), and I confess I was expecting less wuxia and more, er, detecting?

The story is set in Tang China, in the days just before the coronation of Empress Wu (the only woman in China who ruled as Empress in her own right, and not as a consort or dowager). Wu is a ruhtless woman who rose to power with the magical help of the Chaplain Lu Li (a spirit who takes on both human and deer form, and helped her clean the court of those nobles and officials which opposed her); for her own coronation, she has commissioned a huge statue of the Buddha to be completed in time for the ceremonies. All is going according to plan–except that court officials involved with the Buddha’s construction spontaneously start catching fire. Empress Wu, frightened by this plot against her, calls back Detective Dee–a respected judge who spoke against her and was imprisoned for state treason.

Let’s start with the good points: the cast. Tsui Hark has got together the cream of the cream of Hong Kong cinema, and the cast list is a fan’s wet dream. The setting is also (for the most part) marvelous, bringing to life Luoyang in its heyday, as well as more exotic locations such as the Phantom Mart, a city beneath the city, and a weird monastery that might or might not be the theater for black magic… The set pieces are also very good: the actions scenes are fantastically choregraphed (and this from someone who doesn’t care much for action).

The bad… Remember that summary? That’s pretty much the extent of the plot. Well, OK, there’s slightly more, but overall it’s the most disappointing bit of the movie: for all its cool ideas and cool characters (and awesome actors), it does end up feeling a little light. All the set pieces seem to be put there mostly to keep the spectators from getting bored: as soon as the action lags a bit, we get ninjas and martial arts randomly thrown in. Also, I did expect that it wasn’t going to make sense in the scientific fashion of the world (ie, the explanation for the murders was probably not going to hold water by Western forensic standards), but internal coherence would have been nice. For instance, an explanation why and how the bad guys could hire so many ninjas–and other fine points of the plot such as the Chaplain’s role in events…

Overall, it’s a decent movie for an evening; but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again, and it did leave me feeling a little disappointed. A bit like Curse of the Golden Flower (which also had the ninjas randomly thrown in). As historical wuxia movies go, I much preferred Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; as far as purely historical movies go, Red Cliffs (which takes liberties with Three Kingdoms, but still).

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Also, I’m a history geek, and I kept complaining about “but, but, Luoyang doesn’t have a sea with three-masted ships, it’s by a river!”, and “why does the giant Buddha look like Guanyin before Guanyin actually existed?” This is why you shouldn’t watch a movie with me…
(I might, of course, be wrong about all of this–being hampered by my inability to understand Chinese)

Been working on the novella again. Still not sure about the form–I feel it should be more complex than a short story, but I have this sinking feeling I put way too much in this, and that it’s really a novel in disguise. I’m also fighting my own genre pre-conceptions with this: I wanted to do a generational tale on a space station, focused on the troubles of a family in the wake of a civil war (basically, Dream of Red Mansions rather than Three Kingdoms), and my brain keeps insisting that I’m doing unimportant fluff, and that there should be explosions and battle scenes, and Important Scientific Problems to solve. Grr. Not where I wanted to go. Which isn’t to say, of course, that things aren’t earth-shattering in this, but they’re meant to be far less of a Boys’ Own Tale of Adventure, and more focused on consequences of dramatic acts on families and children (yes, I’m partly doing this in reaction to the whole Women in SF thing. You can tell).

Anyway, hope this shakes out all right. But darn, it does feel good to be writing again.

In other news, let’s see if replacing bean paste with hoisin sauce in the xa xíu marinade was a good idea. (my local Asian grocery had no bean paste, as it’s a Chinese ingredient and not a Vietnamese one).

Tricia Sullivan, and Liz Williams on Women in SF, and the Solaris Rising controversy . Well worth a look. I’ve been really crazy busy, and sort of missed most of this one… But let me add my voice to the fact that I don’t think it’s fair to blame Ian (who’s a great bloke) for the lack of female representation in the previous Solaris books (in which he had no part at all). The Solaris Rising TOC (4 women authors out of 16-17 stories) doesn’t strike me as particularly horrifyingly sexist either–there’s just no way you can guarantee you’ll have 50-50% female representation in anthologies, both because of the sample (less women writing SF for a variety of complex reasons), and because of the way things shake out (as an anthologist, you can try invite 50-50% men-women, but you can’t even be sure the responses will be balanced).

Which isn’t to say there’s no problem with the genre in the UK (and indeed, with the genre in general). I think we can all agree there is one. But I don’t think specifically blaming Ian is the right strategy.

If I may borrow Tricia’s words for a moment:

I want to see change but I don’t want to work in a climate where individual people are at risk of being brought to ground, cornered and shamed for issues that arise out of a much more nebulous problem in society–and in this case, in the peculiarities of the SFF scene in Britain. I don’t think editors in Britain are chauvanist pigs. I’ve worked with several book editors in this country and have never had a whiff of old-school sexism from any of them. Do we live in a sexist culture? Yes, absolutely. Fucking yes.

Because of this and for other reasons it seems to be impossible to precisely identify the problem in SF in this country. I’ve said again and again in personal conversation that I believe it is systemic. I don’t think it’s merely a case of mistakenly attacking the branches instead of the root of the problem (as I’ve seen the attacks on Ian described) because it’s not a rooted sort of problem. I suspect the whole ecological cycle is messed up and I doubt there is any one action or plane of action that will ameliorate it. As I said to Juliet McKenna at the AGM: the whole is dumber than the sum of its parts. And I think it would be good to address this on all levels but perhaps only in small ways in some situations because sometimes that is all you can do for the moment. The main thing is to keep it going and move it forward. The scene didn’t get like this in a day and it’s not going to be fixed in sweeping strokes.

-DMS crunches numbers for the women on the Hugo ballot. I’m a bit sceptical of the actual maths of the thing (number of samples is slightly too low for my personal taste), but it’s definitely worth a look, and parallels some worrying trends in the genre (see the moving average…). Also, apparently, I have a 41% chance of winning as the lone female nominee in my category
(and it all reminds me that, darn, I still need to finish the nominated novels in order to hand in my ballot)

-Michael Dirda on the bestsellers lists and why they’re bad for diversity: not a surprise, but nice to see someone articulate so strongly.