Sometimes, when I’m reading SF (particularly old SF, but also recent SF that should know better), I am reminded of those  couple paragraphs from friend Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, in her Strange Horizons column:

There is a popular science fiction trope that speaks of venturing out into the great unexplored. Those who venture out are pictured as heroes. They go out and find new civilizations, they expand earth territories, they discover aliens, they subdue or befriend, they are hailed as saviors, and many times the worlds they enter into are very different from the hero’s homeworld.

While this trope appeals to a part of myself that desires to see and experience other places and other cultures, it does not speak to the true experience of migration and colonization. This popular narrative belongs to the dominant culture, to cultures that have conquered and colonized without regard for the consequences to the culture that gets trampled underfoot.

I really do wish more people would reflect on this (and the closing remarks of the column) before they so blithely spoke of colonists seeking adventures in space…

1.5L of water, half an onion, 1 knob of ginger, a good teaspoon of five-spice powder, a good tablespoon of instant chicken broth powder, a LOOOT of fish sauce (1 or 2 tablespoons), a 1-inch piece of kombu, 8 shrimp with their shells, and 3 nests of egg noodles. And a dash of sesame oil before serving.

Broth heaven. Yum yum.

So… unlike in Vietnam, it gets pretty cold in France in the winter, as should by now be evident. For those cold and snowy winter nights (and your yearly cheese overdose), French cooking has precisely the thing: tartiflette!

Tartiflette is basically potatoes with lardons and reblochon (I think of it as a Savoyard dish, but apparently it’s a recent invention, derived from an older dish called péla–though the H also thought it reminded him of provencal dishes. I’m not an expert). Today you’ll find tartiflette on the menus of pretty much every other Savoyard restaurant, and it’s a typical skiing season dish.

Without further ado…

Tartiflette

Still in the spirit of signal-boosting…

The World SF Travel Fund (whose Board I’m a member of) is seeking funds to send BSFA Award Nominee Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Hungarian-Vietnamese writer Csilla Kleinheincz to World Fantasy 2013 in Brighton. I’m going to keep this brief, but if you read this blog you’re surely aware of how much imbalance there is in the field between Western Anglophone writers and the rest of the world. The World SF Travel Fund aims to bridge some of that gap by enabling more non-Anglo writers to come to major Anglo cons. The first recipient was Charles Tan from the Philippines, who travelled to the US for World Fantasy Con, and in 2012 the Fund helped Swedish authors Nene Ormes and Karin Tidbeck travel to Toronto for the same convention. If you’d like to contribute to this effort, please go donate here.

(if you could signal-boost this as well, this would be much appreciated)

Been remiss in blogging lately, but please go congratulate good friend T.L. Morganfield on selling her Toltec novel The Bone Flower Throne to Dario Ciriello’s Panverse Publishing.

While you’re at it, you can pick up her short fiction collection Night Bird Soaring and Other Stories on amazon (including the title story, which was shortlisted for the Sidewise Award).

Andy Cox let me know that he was buying my magical realism piece “The Angel at the Heart of the Rain” for publication in a future issue of Interzone. Always happy to be published in this magazine

Many thanks to Dom Conlon, Scott Kennedy, Christina Vasilevski and Glen Mehn for the crits–and to the usual suspects Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Tricia Sullivan for the invaluable encouragement and feedback.

Snippet:

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 Commission for Refugees. Behind her, you hear the dull thud of bombs falling like rain on a tin roof–the same sound that swells and roars within your dreams until you wake up in a room that feels deathly silent.

New story, set in the same world as “Immersion” (sort of) and my Other Half of the Sky‘s “The Waiting Stars”. Tentatively titled “The Weight of a Blessing”, around 6000 words long.

On her third visit to Sarah–on the last occasion that she sees her daughter, even if it is only in V-space– Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her.

Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leeched from her body into her daughter’s–and braces herself for the future.

#

Even in the visitors’ V-space, Sarah looked awful–thin and wasted and so ethereal that Minh Ha wanted to take her daughter home and ply her with rich dish after rich dish to bring some fat back on her bones. But, of course, it was too late for that–had been too late for this, ever since the much publicised arrest and the even more publicised trial, all the grandstanding that had brought a taste of bile in Minh Ha’s throat.

Now to let it rest for a bit before taking a hammer to it :p

Very very honoured that “Immersion” has been shortlisted for a BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction–and also very very happy to see Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Song of the Body Cartographer” is also on the shortlist, as well as a number of familar names

My deepest thanks to everyone who nominated it, and good luck to everyone!

Full list here.

Quite happy to announce that “La Mère des Nefs” (lit. “Mother of Ships”, except “nefs” has a grandeur to it that “ship” doesn’t quite have in French…), the French translation of “The Shipmaker” will be appearing in the inaugural edition of Orbs, L’Autre Planète, a cross between a bound book and a magazine (“beau-livre magazine” as they say in French).

Many thanks to Maxence Layet and Nathalie Barneix and the rest of the Orbs team for the opportunity and the translation–it’s always fascinating to see the process of translation into another language you speak, and this was no exception. Also, I have seen the galleys, and it all looks quite gorgeous. Looking forward to it!

-Spirit by Gwyneth Jones: basically a gender-flipped retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo in space, Spirit follows Bibi, an orphan taken into the household of Lady Nef and General Yu. As the years pass, Bibi rises into the hierarchy of the new order on Earth–until a terrible betrayal shatters her life and the lives of those she loves. Honestly, the book had me at gender-flipped Monte Cristo, but there’s actually quite a bit more to it than that! Set in Jones’ Aleutian continuity, this is a rich, dense book with an unusual plot and great examination of gender roles. It’s also very striking, as Zen Cho pointed out to me, that this is one of the few books that depicts a Chinese-dominated society in a plausible and no-fuss manner that is miles above Joss Whedon’s attempts in Firefly (don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff about Firefly that I love, but realistic depiction of Asians isn’t really one of them). I missed it on the first reading because I was struggling a bit with the universe, but it does get a lot of little details right (the immortals, the festivals, the ranks in the household). As Zen points out, it also falters in places (where are the Classics and the Confucian influences, for instance), but still, pretty good. The other reason I loved the book was the strong emphasis it placed on family and family bonds–Bibi’s vengeance is centred on what happened to her mistress rather than on the loss of her own love, which is in the end a small part of the story.

-Witcher Saga and Witcher short stories, by Andrzej Sapkowski (read in French translation, though you can find volumes 1, 3 and 4 on amazon, respectively The Last Wish, Blood of Elves and The Time of Contempt–volume 2, Sword of Providence, is another series of short stories like The Last Wish). Those were massively successful Polish books (giving rise to a number of derived products including a rather well-known series of video games). It’s… well, Tolkienesque. There’s a bad-ass sorcerer who beats everyone at sword fights and his very powerful lady love, and a lot of times this skirts perilously close to wish-fulfillment from the author. There are elves who like nature, and dwarves who love mining, and humans who are slowly replacing them on the world stage. But what saves this is the totally cynical and black outlook on the setting: elves and dwarves are persecuted by humans in successive pogroms, all sides can act like selfish bastards as it suits them, and it’s very hard to see who would be the good guy, as everyone is busy playing politics and making sure their kingdom comes out on top; and even the horrible monsters the hero is meant to slay pale in comparison with the monstrous behaviour of humans acting in their own self-interest. I’m not saying it’s got very deep messages, but it’s a reasonably entertaining read if you don’t mind violence (there’s a lot of graphic wounds and battlefield scenes which don’t shy on the hours of suffering for the wounded), or sex (lots of explicit sex and ribald jokes, also I think some rapey content–there’s very little fetishisation of it, but it’s… explicit, as said before). It’s also not a monument of feminism, but it was rather a breath of fresh air to see several female main characters with their own storylines (and their own kick-ass moments) rather than the shrieking damsels-in-distress I’ve been seeing in far too many genre books lately.