-Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear (ARC provided by author): set in a fantasy version of the Silk Road Empires (their cultures spanning the gamut between pseudo-Muslim, pseudo-Mongol and pseudo-Chinese), Range of Ghosts. Temur was left for dead by his uncle in a power struggle–his brother slain, his true name lost, and with a horde of ghosts hunting after him. Meanwhile, Samarkar, who was once a princess, sacrifices her body to become a wizard, away from the petty squabbles of her family. But when an entire city is laid waste by sorcery and hungry ghosts, both Temur and Samarkar find themselves drawn into a fight that could change their entire world…
It’s hard to talk about this book without gushing, because it’s so good. It has Bear’s gorgeous prose and complex characters, as well as intricate worldbuilding that recalls the cultures of the Silk Road–a rarity in a field where non-Western fantasy is still the odd thing out rather than the norm. And the plot zips along from gorgeous set-piece to set-piece (Samarkar’s exploration of the ruined city is wonderful in this regard, conveying both the richness of what has been lost and a growing sense of danger). The one thing I regretted was not having a map (though, as this was an ARC, it might well be that there’s a map in the final edition); and the other was that I was going to have to wait an entire year to get the sequel to this, Steles of the Sky. *want*
Oh, and did I mention the horse? Temur’s mare, Bansh (aka Dumpling) deserves a book of her own. Seriously. She’s so much smarter than any of the characters, and darn if she doesn’t know it, too. I’m not a horse-lover, but I definitely could love this horse to bits. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to her in the next book.

-Obsidian Moon, Obsidian Eye: werewolf Jan Xu is now leader of her pack–and, following the events of Wolf at the Door, hopes to raise her children in peace, and enjoy the company of her pack and her friends in peace. But sinister things are afoot in Singapore’s supernatural world, with the resurgence of a darkness Jan Xu thought banished long ago. At the centre of it all are the Drakes–the Western dragons and fire-breathes, aggressive and eager to make their mark on the city–and Gabriel, a half-drake half-Chinese dragon who seems to be hiding much more than a mixed parentage. When Jan Xu’s friends begin to disappear, she finds herself confronted with an unexpected enemy–and the consequences of something she put behind a long time ago…
I liked Wolf at the Door a great deal, and this is more of the excellent same–except with more polished writing, better structure, and stronger characters. Damask’s Singapore–multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and a crossroads for different cultures–continues to be impressively portrayed, and I just loved seeing the drakes square off against the Asian dragons. I did have one niggle about the fact that Gabriel ended up choosing “sides” (but that’s just my personal belief that mixed-bloods shouldn’t necessarily have to pick one side of the family above the other). But I’m definitely looking forward to more of those characters, and more of that awesome setting.

-Two Dudes in an Attic reviews Harbinger of the Storm–with snarks, but without harming any owls
-Blue Tyson’s capsule review of Master of the House of Darts
-Martin McGrath on “Why does SF hate Ordinary People?”. Fair point about the elitism of SF, though I wonder how much of it is already present in literature (I can’t remember who, but someone pointed out that recent literature, especially the source literature of SF, was the province of the bourgeoisie; while the older texts were the province of nobility)

In other news, busy weekend ahead: friends coming over on Saturday, and we’re probably headed into the 13e Sunday to see the New Year’s procession.

-My friend Cécile is having a poll on her LJ for readers of SFF–if some of you feel like dropping by and answering, it would be awesome. She’s doing this for her PhD, and she needs enough data before she can work on the results. The poll is here.

-The SFF translation awards is looking for donations and/or prizes: this is a prize for best translated SFF (split equally between the writer and the translator), both for long form and short form. It is solely financed by grants and by generous sponsors, so naturally seeks enough money to award a decent prize.
In a field which is over-focused on Western Anglophone works (I’ve rehashed this to death, so I won’t add anything), this is a most welcome breath of fresh air. Plus, awesome works on that list!. I’ve offered up a signed copy of Master of the House of Darts as a donation prize, and there is plenty more cool stuff on that list (and more to come!). So, if you feel like helping a worthy cause…

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Tôi chúc các bạn mạnh khỏe và nhiều niềm vui.

(normally, it should say something like “Happy New Year. I wish you all good health and many joys”, but since I basically cobbled the sentence together with a dictionary, I’m sceptical about the actual meaning…)

Hope it’s a great Year of the Dragon for everyone!

(ETA: yes, I’m aware it’s still Friday by 30 minutes… I screwed up with my posting system, and I don’t feel like undoing the automatic twitter and FB notifications)

So, a very quick update, because 15+ people are showing up tonight tomorrow night at my house, in order to see off the Lunar Year in style (ok, I lie, nothing to do with that. We’re housewarming with a bad sense of timing).

-D’Obsidienne et de Sang, the French translation of Servant of the Underworld, would appear to be a finalist for the Prix Masterton, a French literary award for SFF and horror (mainly geared towards horror and dark fantasy if the list of past winners is to be believed). The shortlist includes China Miéville’s The City and the City, and Gail Carriger’s Soulless (opening novel of a series which, amusingly, I’m reading right now) Er, wow? (and yes, the irony of being listed under “Fiction translated into French” has not escaped me).
-Couple Obsidian and Blood spottings: Cynthia Ward mentions both Servant and Harbinger in her end-of-year recap for Acqueduct Press, Harbinger gets noted by Duncan Lawie in his end-of-year review for Strange Horizons; Jacob at Drying Ink (who did this amazing interview with me a while back) ponders why you should read Historical Fantasy in front of a rather fetching cover of Master of the House of Darts
-hum, did I mention “The Bleeding Man” was going to be in Ian Whates’ Dark Currents, an anthology debuting at Eastercon which includes Adrian Tchaikovsky, Adam Nevill, Tricia Sullivan, Rod Rees, Nina Allan, Andrew Hook, Finn Clarke, Lavie Tidhar, Jan Edwards, Emma Coleman, Rebecca J Payne, Sophia McDougall, Una McCormack, Neil Williamson, V.C. Linde? No, I don’t think I did (I’ve known for a bit, but it wasn’t public).

I’m working on an SF story involving probabilities, and finally got in my nominations for the BSFA (short fiction, since I didn’t actually read any 2011 novels except for the aforementioned Gail Carriger (Heartless, which technically I haven’t started, having just downloaded it to my ereader).

Actual content to come, including mini-reviews of Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts (short version: you have to pre-order this book now), and David Gemmell’s Troy.

-More “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” linkage: Two Dudes in an Attic (in an analysis that is not only gushing but starting to rival the story in length, wow), Jonathan Crowe, and Marina
-Warpcore SF reviews Master of the House of Darts
-Jim Hines tries to duplicate female poses on genre covers, and posts pictures. Hilarious. (even though, yeah, women do move a little more easily at the hips than men, it’s true that none of those poses look exactly comfortable for men). genreviews does the same thing comparing male and female poses on covers.
-Related: Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits, or why boob plates are the most impractical idea ever.

“Cái nết đánh chết cái dẹp.”: “Good behaviour trumps [lit. "beat to death"; I'm assuming it means "utterly triumphs over" rather than "bludgeon to death"] beauty”. Again, could be wrong; this was me with a dictionary and the vocab I learnt so far (actually, literally, I think it means something like “the good behaviour thing beats to death the beautiful thing”, but obviously it’s a little awkward that way).

Meaning pretty much self-evident.

Also, I managed to say the equivalent of “I speak a little Vietnamese, here are the words I know” over twitter and not get laughed at! (it did pose a funny set of problems, because the pronoun “I” depends on the perceived age of your interlocutor, and the pronoun “you” depends on their age and gender. Now guess what you do when you have neither? Flounder, quite obviously… [1]) It’s amusing how the internet generates new sorts of language problems that you never really think about…

Words learnt: 150 (plus stuff I don’t consciously learn, such as food and funky pronouns. See “mình”, the pronoun used between husband and wife, which also has the meaning of “body”). It has occurred to me that part of the problem with this %%% language is that it’s the first language I learnt that is so distant from French: English and Spanish both have a striking number of similarities with French, especially for newspaper speak. For instance, I can understand a sentence like “The Prime Minister of Great Britain declared that the crisis in the eurozone…” even if I didn’t know all the words, because so many of them are similar to French. Now, in Vietnamese, “prime minister” is “thủ thống”, “declare” is “tuyên bố”–and let’s not even get into “eurozone”… You do have surprise words: “súp” is “soup”, “phó mát” is “cheese” (aka “fromage”), “nhà ga” is “station” (aka “gare”. “nhà” is just “house, building”); but far fewer you’d have in Spanish (where I can fake understanding of a lot of words, because hey, Romance languages!). I have to reach for the dictionary every two words on a good day (and even more than that, because the grammar is so different from French and the whole act of translating really requires firing neurons in the right mindset. Kind of reminds me of Ancient Greek, actually. In worse…

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[1]Not totally true. There is a neutral and uncomfy pronoun “I”, “tôi”, which I can use for those cases. And, if the speaker is around my age bracket, “bạn” (friend), has the advantage of being genderless (but it’ll piss off someone much older than me really fast). Bit awkward, but hey.

So… My understanding of written Vietnamese is definitely improving (in the new lesson, I understood what they were saying to each other with just a few well-placed explanations from Mom); my pronunciation still kind of sucks. Let’s not speak of my spelling, which has got Mom going into fits semi-regularly. She’ll say a word, and I’ll write it down, and know that I got it wrong. The “this pronunciation translates to this accent” isn’t happening so well right now, whereas the “this accent translates into this pronunciation” is a little bit better ingrained. I can repeat fairly accurately; I can’t really manage unprompted unless it’s very simple things (“hello”, “thank you”, “please give me a bowl of phở” *g*). Not surprising: I’ve always been more visual than auditive (yup, writer. Why do you ask?) As I was saying to Mom, the main thing where I’ve improved is that I’m reasonably sure that I can read and understand a Vietnamese menu with close to no help (barring the odd unknown vegetable, though Vietnamese is very kind by providing classifiers: “rau” for herbs, “cây” for leafy things, “trái” for fruit, “củ” for tubers…). I *might* possibly be able to order, if I steel myself not to follow the path of least resistance and speak English.

Why does this matter, you ask? Weeelll… The first two weeks of February, the H and I will be traipsing through Vietnam. Specifically, through Huể (high time I visited the imperial capital, or what’s left of it), Hội An, Sài Gòn, and the South around Sài Gòn (yes, I know it’s HCMV now. Never quite got used to it). I’m down to two people warning me the accents of the Centre are horrible–that I should be more than adequately equipped to handle Southerners, might possibly manage to understand Northerners, but that the Centre is a law onto itself. Given that I can barely make myself understood by Southerners, I can’t help but think that the Huể/Hội An section of the trip is going to be so much fun… (Sài Gòn will be better, both because, hey, Southerners, and also because Grandma/the uncles will be around)

Three more lessons to go before we leave. Ouch.

Not much to report… It’s become a tradition that whenever I sell something big, the H and I will go to a restaurant and have a nice meal, so we went to the 13e and had a nice phở to celebrate the Clarkesworld sale (the owner knew what I was going to order when I walked in, too–drawbacks of eating at a restaurant which accommodates Mum and Grandma on a regular basis ). The couple next to us was a bit lost, I think–they started off by ordering a chè ba màu (three-colour chè, which I’ve always seen eaten as a dessert when it’s part of a meal), and they were desperately looking for a “light” soup without noodles on the menu (they don’t really exist: you do have broth, but it’s thin and not nourishing at all…). In cases like those, I always hesitate to butt in and offer unwanted advice: they could have had one of the various gỏi, the cold “salads” that include green mango/green papaya/grapefruit, which are full of vegetables (and nước mắm), if not very nourishing. But I would have felt really out of place making a suggestion to two total strangers, so I didn’t say anything (though, amusingly, I would have done it were we speaking English–I really think my English-speaking persona is more outgoing than my French).

And finally steeled myself and said “bye” in Vietnamese, and nobody looked vexed, so at least it worked (though I think I shouldn’t have said “Madam” to the waitress, who looked to be firmly from my generation, but hey, better be safe than sorry…).

Right. To bed, and then to work on that short story that threatens to morph into a novella all over again. Sigh. I really need to stop worldbuilding and start writing.