Aka bò bún. I figured it was high time I posted my own recipe for this It’s best to think of bò bún and many other dishes involving rice vermicelli as a giant salad. This will prevent you from requesting a warming of the dish, or, worse, microwaving it for better flavour (true story: I was once sitting in a Chinese deli having a wonton soup. Every single customer who walked in and asked for a bò bún would request for it to be warmed, at which point the owner would pop the bowl in the microwave and serve them a bò bún with limp salad and soybeans, making me feel very very sad angry that the dish had taken such a battering).

Anyway: bò bún! It’s a fairly flexible dish (I’ve added cucumber and/or carrots for the crunch, or even mange-tout; you can replace all or part of the beef with chả giò/fried rolls, put other herbs if you don’t have mint or coriander, etc.). Two things to remember is to serve the noodles cool and not straight from the boiling water, and to have a kickass dipping sauce because it’s half the flavour of the dish.

(for the nuoc cham recipe, see here)

Here’s my World Fantasy Convention schedule: this time around, lots of readings… All of this is assuming that I make it to Toronto, of course–because at the moment, it looks like Sandy and I will be making landfall in Toronto at about the same time Wednesday evening… My flight goes through Montreal, so it looks like I can make it to Canada fine, but there’s a very high probability I might end up stuck in Montreal on Wednesday

• Thursday 2:30pm-3:00pm: reading. Will be reading a longer portion from the novella On a Red Station, Drifting. Come if you like Vietnamese on space stations, food porn and strong female characters!
• Friday 1pm-3pm: group reading for John Joseph Adams’ Epic anthology (aka sharing a TOC with Ursula Le Guin and Kate Elliott, squee!). Vice President Suite (room number 1073) in the Sheraton. The Epic authors present include Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Rothfuss, and George R.R. Martin, so I’m assuming it shouldn’t be too hard to find… Will be reading about half of “As the Wheel Turns”, a story that’ll also be published on Lightspeed on Nov. 6th. Aka: reincarnations, Chinese philosophy and the power of choices to shape several lifetimes

Any other times will include my being in the bar–feel free to grab me and say hi, I don’t bite

So, the H comes home tonight and shows me the picture above. “Wanna take a guess on what this is?” he asks with a (suspiciously) broad smile. I take a look. “Ratatouille?” I hazard, knowing it can’t be that.

Apparently, this is what a La Défence restaurant sold as bò bún. It has, let’s see… carrots, rice (badly cooked, according to the H), shrimps and some other unidentified vegetables that the H assured me were all Western in origin. No bò (beef) or indeed bún (rice vermicelli) anywhere to be seen.

I am not really sure whether I want to laugh or to cry at this stage…

Via Cristian Tamas, a rather cool-looking initiative: Europa SF is an English-language portal dedicated to all (non-Anglo) European SF. They have reports on conventions, articles on Dutch, Estonian, Lithuanian SF, and much much more!

Let me cheat a bit and quote from their official presentation:

Europa SF is conceived as an English-language portal of news and information from and for the European fandom, a generic site: http://scifiportal.eu (on demand will be created specific subdomains for each country/fandom involved − bg.scifiportal.eu, hr.scifiportal.eu, ro.scifiportal.eu, de.scifiportal.eu etc − and each country will manage its own subdomain).

Our central idea is to have a permanent, real-time mirroring of all European SF&F products, events and activities. We hope that all European countries with a SF&F community will become involved in this pan-European project.

Europa SF is dedicated to posting news, links and original materials related to science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, films and TV series from all over Europe. Here are the columns we suggest and their titles:

1. Editorial – a monthly, 2-4,000-character general article on European SF

2. On the spot – short articles (1,000-1,500 characters) about important national or European events (festivals, conventions, book fairs, conferences etc.)

3. News – short news (400-700 characters) on major/minor European or world events

4. Events – a calendar, just the name and the date of the event

5. Reports – 2,000-character articles about (on-going) national or European events

If our correspondents indicate there is an interest in interviews, panels, essays, films, TV series etc. we will introduce new sections to cover them.

Any suggestions and recommendations are most welcome. We need at least one English-speaking person from each European SF community who is willing to help us with this project.

BTW, if anyone is reading this from France and would like to give them a hand with the project, they could use some help…

Not much to see, sadly–I wish I could say it’s all been exciting new writing, but for the most part it’s been exciting proofreading and interviewing…
We did watch Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. Plus points: Rupert Everett, who makes a surprisingly entertaining Holmes and who has got great interactions with Ian Hart’s Watson. Also, it was nice to see a return of Holmes’ moral principles, which have been mostly glossed over in Sherlock. Also, Michael Fassbender (who doesn’t like movies with Michael Fassbender). Minus points: the plot, which is voyeuristic and not really convoluted enough for me to forgive the “let’s kidnap and torture young women” vibe. As the H said, it was a great shame the movie lacked suspects altogether and made its conclusion pretty foregone.
I’m off to Bristolcon for the weekend, where I’ll be hanging out with Gareth L Powell, Tricia Sullivan, Patrick Samphire and Stephanie Burgis. Internet connection will hopefully be sporadic (I have a story to write!). To tide you over: go read Mari Ness’s snarky review of the pilot for Revolution (which sounded hopelessly racist and hopelessly science-light in its trailer).

Aka gà xào sả ớt. A classic of Vietnamese cuisine that I hadn’t got round to revisiting… I got started by a peak at Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and then went to consult my bible, aka Trầm Kim Mai’s Từ Điển 1001 Món Ăn Việt Nam (Encyclopedia of 1001 Vietnamese dishes). To say that they both had radically different ideas of the dish would be understatement of the century (Bach Ngo’s version didn’t even have the chillies, which is a bit embarrassing for a dish named after them…). I was intrigued by the presence of kẹo dậu phọng, Vietnamese sesame and peanut candy, in Trầm Kim Mai’s recipe, but of course I didn’t have the actual candy at home, so it was a bit hard to add to the mix: I ended up using chopped peanuts, sesame and honey to replicate the addition of the candy to the chicken. The result is… intruiguing, to say the least, sweet and hot at the same time and all made of yummy!

(most recipes for this I’ve seen online use nước màu, Vietnamese caramel sauce)

(why yes, I had no coriander either… well worth adding though, it adds a welcome note of freshness to the dish)

-Sightseeing, Rattawut Lapcharoensap. A collection of short stories set in contemporary Thailand, by turns cynical and sharp, sad and uplifting. The opening one, “Farangs”, set on a tourist island and from the point of view of a mixed-race Thai/American local boy, is a very biting look at the industry of tourism and how it distorts local life (and you gotta love the pet pig named Clint Eastwood). There’s a wide range of narrators and experiences, and it all adds up to a lovely atmosphere. It was a very refreshing book for me on two accounts: the first is that those are literary stories, and it’s nice to be reminded once in a while that short stories don’t have to follow the SFF genre conventions to work (few of those stories feature character change, but they still depict poignant and meaningful moments); and the second, of course, is that this is Thailand written by an insider, and a refreshing antidote to White Western writers depicting Thailand as a hellhole of prostitution where Thais abuse and/or sell each other.
-The Unicorn Banquet (Le Banquet de la Licorne), Tran-Nhut. Another episode in the ongoing adventure of the Vietnamese sleuth Mandarin Tân, and his sidekicks Scholar Dinh and Doctor Pig. The structure is unusual in that it’s a series of linked short stories told at a banquet held in the midst of a storm–and that the link turns out to be the lynchpin and decision point for the main character. There are mild fantastical elements (underwater naga kingdoms, for instance), but first and foremost, it remains an excellent crime novel, and a sharp look at all the layers of 15th-Century Vietnamese society, on the eve of the Trịnh–Nguyễn war. Also, OMG food porn. I was so hungry reading about the wonderful dishes of the banquet.

So, I’m attending Bristolcon next Saturday (where I’ll be catching up with lots of friends): here’s my schedule in case you’re interested. In between panels, I’ll be where the drinks are…

• 10:00-10:45: Colonising the Solar system: Many recent science fiction books, including Blue Remembered Earth by Al Reynolds, andThe Quiet War by Paul McAuley, are set in a solar system colonized by mankind. What would it take to make this happen? Could we really adapt to live on the Moon or Mars? Will space exploration ever be economic? With Guy Haley (mod), Michael Dollin, Aliette de Bodard, Ben Jeapes, Dev Agarwal
• 10:50-10:55: Reading. Not entirely sure what I’ll be reading with: either the forthcoming Immersion Press novella On a Red Station, Drifting, or the urban fantasy novel. Either way, something no one but very few people have seen before… 
• 12:00-12:45: Kaffeklatsch. You can sign up in advance for it here. 
• 13:00-13:45: The stress of space travel on family relationships: Returning to Earth to find yourself younger than your own grand-children isn’t just a headache for the greetings-card industry. The panel looks at depictions of the family and wonders, are all families in SF fiction dysfunctional? With Dev Agarwal (mod), Emma Newman, Aliette de Bodard, Gareth L Powell, Leigh Kennedy
• 14:00-14:45: Book launch of Stephanie Burgis’s A Reckless Magic, followed by general signing (I’ll have copies of Obsidian and Blood on hand!)

Aka tôm cari, a really lazy dish, courtesy of my grandma (I suspect it’s a cross between a Vietnamese cari and a lazy Thai green curry. Also works with potatoes, carrots, and pretty much every kind of nourishing vegetable you can think of).

Temp title is “The Angel at the Heart of the Rain” (might just keep it, it’s not that bad). Very much shorter than expected at 1.5k words, will have to ask the market that asked for this if they’re OK with this.

At first, you believe it is only a matter of time until your aunt joins you. You huddle in a small flat with your younger sister Huong and two other refugees, washing rice that smells only faintly of jasmine, cutting ginger that has grown hard and tasteless in the cupboards where it was hoarded like treasures–and you think of a home so far out of your reach it might be on another planet.

On the phone, your aunt’s voice is breezy, telling you not to worry–that she’ll find a visa and a plane ticket, that she knows someone who knows someone who can give her a hand with the formalities of the High Commissioner for Refugees. Behind her, you hear the dull thud of bombs falling like rain in the streets–the same sound that swells and roars within your dreams until you wake up in a room that feels deathly silent.

Which just leaves me with another story to write before the end of October (a month that includes Bristolcon and World Fantasy Con). Also, planning a novel with Mindships in my spare time.

Onwards, I guess…

Current mood: determined