My essay on non-Western, no-Anglophone SF is now up on the Asimov’s website. Go here to read it.

The wonderful M.G. Ellington has been kind enough to lend me some space on the Apex blog, where I ramble on what I should have done when writing Obsidian and Blood:

When I settled down to write my novel, the Aztec noir fantasy Servant of the Underworld, I had only the vaguest idea it might turn into a series. My first thought was to finish the darn thing, and not really to map out what might be happening to my characters after the plot was over.

That was 2007; now we’re in 2010. I’ve sold Servant and two more books in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy to Angry Robot; I’ve turned the sequel, Harbinger of the Storm, to my publisher; and I’ve just completed a tentative synopsis for the as-yet-untitled book 3. Looking back to how I wrote the series, there are a few things I did right, and a few things I should have paid more attention to.

Read more.

Go check it out!

In other linkage news, Mike Johnstone reviews the February 2010 issue of Asimov’s, which contains my alt-hist “The Wind-Blown Man”:

Her prose deftly taps into the atmosphere, rhythm, and thoughtfulness of Chinese tales (Buddhist, Taoist myths): it is measured, unhurried, soothing; it suggests a depth just tantalizingly out of reach.

That’s all for now. I’ll go back to RL stuff and programming (and %% implicit conversions).

It’s the 28th of the month again, and I’m blogging over at SFNovelists on Narrative, Resonance and Genre in different cultures. Go check it out!

So I thought I’d post about this here, because there’s a bunch of clichés floating around about Ancient China that are not exactly true, or at least not in the way you think. By order of growing annoyance:

-All Chinese practised special brands of martial arts: er, ok. While martial arts are pretty old (Shaolin Monastery, for instance, was founded in the 5th Century), martial arts have always been viewed with suspicion, and it’s only recently that they’ve become mainstream. The dominant and mainstream culture of Ancient China was Confucianism as practised by scholars, and this frowned upon sports (which were viewed as risky and unbecoming of an apprentice scholar, who had better things to do than rub in the dirt–such as learning the Classics by heart). To a lesser extent, diehard Confucianists also frowned upon religion, especially the excesses they engendered: both Daoism and Buddhism promote setting aside the world, and this didn’t sit well with a culture that valued ancestral worship and promoted family ties. Shaolin monastery, and many other places where martial arts were practised, were the target of several government purges because they were suspected of harbouring dissidents. So, if you have a martial arts practioner, chances are the authorities will not be looking kindly on them (nor his neighbours, if they’re scholars).

-All Chinese had pigtails: that one is a bit of a sore spot. When the Manchu invaded China in the 17th Century to found their own dynasty, they forced all Chinese to wear pigtails as a means of differentiating between Chinese and Manchus. The pigtail was a humiliation: before that, the Chinese wore their hair in buns.

-China has always been ruled by the Han Chinese: or not. It’s been more a “Chinese rule, mongol rule” for a long time: the Song dynasty (960–1127, 1127–1279) held only part of China, and co-existed with the Liao and the Jin dynasty, neither of which were ethnic Han, the Yuan (1271–1368) were Mongols (Gengis Khan founded the dynasty), the Ming (1368–1644) were Chinese (but pretty closed to external commerce as a backlash to the previous invasion), and the Qing (1644-1911), the last imperial Chinese dynasty, was founded by the Manchu, who have much more in common with the Mongols than with the Chinese (at the beginning. They adapted pretty well afterwards, though they never did get the hang of customs like bound feet).

-Chinese porcelain is pretty blue designs on white porcelain: ironically, this kind of design was way more successful abroad (both in Islamic and in European countries) than it ever was in China. Chinese ideas of beautiful porcelain is more celadon, or other techniques that produce a glaze without deliberate motifs.

-White is the mourning colour and very unlucky. Yes and no. White is the mourning colour, and is worn at funerals, associated with ghosts, etc. But strictly speaking, the colour this is referring to is su, which is that of unbleached hemp–a sort of brownish-yellowish pale colour, rather than pure white. Hemp was worn as mourning clothes because it’s uncomfortable as much as for the colour. Also, while some things associated with white are unlucky (wearing white in one’s hair, for instance), white has associations with virginity, purity and the unknown. You thus find a lot of references to white in Daoism.

-Chinese culture didn’t change for millennia: That’s about as rational as saying that French Gaul and France today are the same. There have been some pretty big upheavals (Mongol invasions, see above), but even then, the culture changed a lot. The traditions evolved: during the Han dynasties (3rd century BC-3rd Century AD), China didn’t know Buddhism, and even Daoism was still developing its ideologies. The flamboyant princesses of the Tang dynasty have very little in common with the Qing dynasty women, cloistered in their apartments and with very few rights of their own. Also, China is huge, and different regions have wholly different histories: the area around Beijing doesn’t have much in common with that around Guangzhou, climate-wise, food-wise, culture-wise…

So, I’ve recently noticed I started writing Aztec steampunk (“Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood”, up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” forthcoming in Interzone, and “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”, which I haven’t sold yet). I’ve had several people mentioning how it’s a bit odd to be mixing Aztecs with the steampunk aesthetic, and that set me wondering about where I was coming from when I was writing that kind of stuff.
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So, about that sekrit project I mentioned way back in April? Looks like it’s gone public: my non-fiction piece, “The View from the Other Side”, about non-Western/non-Anglophone SF, will appear in the September issue of Asimov’s.

First time I have non-fiction in a major venue, on a fairly controversial topic. Should be fun…

I’ve been a member of SFnovelists for a while, but I was mostly lurking. Now I have decided to de-lurk, with my very first blog post on translation, language and cultures. You can find it here (and I’ll be posting monthly from now on).

My fellow Shine author, Gareth L Powell, very kindly invited me to play in his sandbox. Hop over to his blog to see me (briefly) discuss scientific plausibility in SF. Take a look–any and all comments welcome!

(and many thanks to Gareth for the space)

So, I said I was going to get around to reviewing this, which I’ve had for a couple of months now.

Meet my Bebook Mini:

Just in case you’re wondering about scale, here’s the pomegranate that’s propping it up compared with other, more familiar objects (the pomegranate in question is one from Chili, weighs close to one kilo and has got to be the biggest one I ever saw. It was very tasty, too). The smudges is me reading in quick succession a bad quality newspaper and an ebook–the ink stays on my fingers, and transfers…

I bought this after much hesitation and browsing over at mobileread.com. My initial specifications for an e-reader went something like this:

• Must have e-ink (way better for my eyesight, battery holds out longer), and no glare
• Must support variety of formats (so I didn’t have to worry too much about conversion, and above all didn’t end up stuck with a proprietary format at a time the industry’s still trying to agree on a standard)
• Must have memory card (handy for swapping books, even though it would take a lot of books to fill even 512MB)
• Must be cheap (I wasn’t willing to pay above 250 euros for it).
• Must be relatively straightforward to order (because I wasn’t willing to jump through hoops for this)

I didn’t care so much about wifi (I was going to load books before, say, leaving on a trip), or about touchscreen or other niceties like that. Its primary function would be to read books, not to be another laptop.

This set of criteria turned out to be more restrictive than I thought… In particular, it ruled out both Sony readers (the PRS-300 doesn’t take a memory card, and the PRS-600 has a %%% reflective layer over the screen so that it can be touchscreen). The Kindle I didn’t like so much, mostly because I don’t care for being tied to amazon, for all their usefulness; and the Nook wasn’t/isn’t available in Europe (haven’t been following up on that). I could have got a PRS-505, which is the same brand my father bought, but I had handled it and hadn’t been so much a fan of it; plus, by the time I decided I was going to get an ebook-reader, Sony had phased out the PRS-505 and it was near-unfindable in France. That essentially left me with the Bebook and Bebook Mini, both devices sold by the Dutch firm Endless Ideas. The Bebook is the rebranded version of a Chinese handset, the Hanlin V3, and the Bebook mini is the rebranded version of its successor the V5. The difference between both was screen size: the V3 is 6”, the V5 is 5”. As I’m a fast reader, I was worried I would end up turning way too many pages for the 5” to be viable. But the V3 is older hardware, with fewer graylevels and a slightly older processor, and I didn’t much like the idea of buying old stuff. In the end, I plumped for the Bebook Mini, aka V5.
I’ll gloss over the “straightforward delivery” (it would have been fast, if some unforeseen problems hadn’t held up the package for a few days), and skip to the device itself.

First things first, I’m not regretting the size at all. There’s practically no strain from turning pages, and the big advantage of a 5” over a 6” is that I can fit it into my handbag. That way, I always have something to read.

Second, the battery life on that thing is amazing. I’m using it for more than two hours a day, and I’ve charged it maybe a handful of times since acquiring it. The charge is good for weeks at a time.

What else? Well, it supports a lot of formats, but it’s really unequal: the display options vary greatly between formats. For instance, .DOC support is really lousy, with very few fonts and very few font sizes; RTF is the best I’ve found so far (I’m told f2b is even nicer), with a choice of two fonts, several sizes and some other nice stuff. PDF is OK but not great, since PDF is so heavily geared towards one page size and the screen is much smaller than that (the first ebook I read on the device was Spin in PDF format, and it was a bit of a pain, with huge blanks in the middle of pages). EPUB is the one I’m most used to, since a lot of ebooks are in EPUB format: you can’t change the font, but you have five levels of zoom (though all but the lowest two are actually useless unless you have serious eyesight problems).

On the reader, you can set your books into a folder architecture. You’ll laugh, but some of the other ereaders don’t actually support folders. At any rate, it’s handy to keep stuff organised. There’s an edition of Adobe Digital Editions, too, which I haven’t tested yet (bought the paying books from Baen’s. More on this in a minute). Reading’s pretty nice, with the contrast a little lower than paper–in particular, it means I need decent light to actually make out the words on the page (good thing we’re in summer and I no longer take my bus in the dark). The transition’s a little funky at first (the whole screen goes back, and then flashes into the next page), but you get used to it pretty quickly.

There’s one unexpected bonus: the three different ways to turn the pages. You can hit the rocker on the right-hand side of the reader, hit the two arrow keys at the bottom, or the two on the left-hand side–and all of those will allow you to navigate through the ebook. This hadn’t struck me as practical–at least, not until I got to stand in a packed suburban train, holding onto my handbag with one hand, and turning the pages with the other. The rocker might be the easiest way to turn the pages when I’m sitting, but let me tell you the left-hand buttons are life-savers in a crowd (way easier to hit one-handed).

I really like it, bar one or two things. The first one is that I wouldn’t want to use it for books to keep, as I’m extremely unsure I’d still be able to open those in, say, 20 years (and yes, I’m the kind of person who would like to keep books for 20 years). The second, somewhat related problem with ebooks, is that searching is kind of awkward. You can’t really flip the pages, and if you happen to be looking for a specific passage without wanting to read the whole book in sequence, you’re sort of stuck. Even going to a specific page number is a pain in the neck. (I suppose a search function with a proper keyboard could fix some of that, but I still miss being able to flip through the physical pages. Funny).

And the third, and last problem…

Well, it doesn’t really have to do with the ebook reader, per se. It has to do with ebooks. See, I’d be quite ready to buy them and pay for them–but I’m not allowed to. Many sites on the internet (fictionwise, I’m looking at you) will only sell to visitors from a certain country. The reasoning, I presume, goes something like this: I live in France, so I’m only allowed to buy from French sellers. Who, you wouldn’t know, sell books in French, because that’s what they have the right to sell. Which is great, but I happen to be a little weird linguistically speaking, and I want to read in English (or Spanish. Or whatever). And I know or suspect those US/Canadian sites don’t have the right to sell books in France, but it’s really dumb. The French shops sell the translated French version, and I don’t want that, I want the original, and I just can’t buy it. It’s a little like showing up in a shop with cash, and being told they don’t want to see my kind of people here. Now, all of this made sense at the time we had physical stuff, but in the days of the internet… For ebooks, selling rights by country feels outdated, real fast (not to mention really annoying. I’ve never been so sorely tempted to pirate stuff). Rights by language would be smarter, but I’m sure it’s a lot easier to say than to iron out legally speaking.
Whatever the case, I sure hope this can be sorted out in a smart way (ie, not the way they sorted out the DVDs, which leaves me unable to get English subtitles for Japanese anime unless I buy the UK version. Because everybody in France only wants French subtitles, right? *grr*).

Rant aside (and this isn’t a problem with the device, more with the lay of the land at the moment), this is a terrific little machine. Does what it says on the can, and I’m not regretting the purchase. I just don’t think I’m going to use it for books I’m going to be rereading heavily in the next few years. I’ll get the paper version for those.

Afterword: so where am I getting my books? At the moment, I’m buying from Baen’s webscriptions, one of the few places that sells DRM-free and worldwide. I’m also told that Waterstone’s sells DRM-ed books to any country, but I haven’t tried yet. I’m also downloading a lot of stuff from gutenberg, for free, and from magazines like Tor.com, which has EPUB versions of all their short stories. And I read a lot of the freebies I got from various sources (Hugo voter’s package, Nebula Awards shortlist through SFWA, …).

So, Eastercon is approaching: this year, it’s at the Radisson in Heathrow, the same place where I attended my first convention in 2008 (also an Eastercon)–and my first real experience at socialising in English on a massive scale (I went to Bootcamp and WOTF before that, but I’d never actually dealt with so many people in such a small amount of space).
My first Eastercon will always remain etched in memory as the moment I realised that being fluent was one thing, but being a non-native speaker came with a few annoying side-effects. Here are a few:

• Unintentional idiomatic language:
  English is full of idioms–and it’s made worse by the fact that I have to reckon against a lot of local variations (the ones I know most are UK and US, but I bet I miss out on a lot of others, too, like Indian English and Australian English). Now, I generally know what a given idiom means; but the reverse–knowing that I’m using an idiom when I’m writing–is a lot less obvious. For instance, in Harbinger of the Storm, I have references to “bean counters” that are precisely that: dried beans used as die and counters for the patolli game. However, of course, the word has the other, far more common meaning of “accountants”, providing for much unintentional fun…
• The cocktail party effect (or lack thereof):
  You might not know what the cocktail party effect is. It’s a little magic trick of the brain: when you’re talking to someone in a noisy environment, your brain will automatically edit out the background noise (even and especially if said noise includes intelligible conversations), allowing you to focus on the person(s) you’re speaking with. It’s invaluable in parties (hence the name), but also in restaurants, bars, and other kinds of social functions.
  Sadly, I’m completely immune to it in both English and in Spanish, the languages I speak as a non-native. I think it comes from those hours of classes that forced me to listen to the language in order to understand it (and to fill in little summaries to make sure I’d made out the meaning of the words correctly). Now, when I hear people speak, I have to make a pass at understanding it. Even if it’s a conversation that’s completely unrelated to me. As a result, pub-time with me? I might look a little bewildered if the pub is particularly noisy. It’s not because I don’t care what people I’m saying–but rather because I’m trying to disentangle the current conversation from the four others happening at the neighbouring tables.
• Spelling issues:
  Ah yes. I think part of that one comes from the fact that I’m a visual person, and part of it from the fact that I’m a latecomer to English (I only started investing heavily in it at 16 or so). The most obvious effect of that one is that I will need a long moment to process when you’ve spelled a word. At, say, signings, it’s a little more problematic than I anticipated. I live in terror of the day I won’t have understood someone’s spelling out of their name, and will inscribe a book to the entirely wrong person.
  The other side effect is related to the other way around: if you’re pronouncing a familiar word in a way that I don’t expect, I’ll blank it out as “this funny word I can’t figure out”, even though I quite possibly know that word already. This happens a lot with French words or with words I’ve only seen in writing. I don’t seem to have quite the same flexibility for pronunciation as I have in French: figuring out alternative spellings for words I don’t recognise right off the bat has never worked out for me.
• Accents:
  That one often puzzles my BF. I can understand a lot of the more common accents (Scottish, Irish, Australian, etc.), because I sat for my Cambrigde Certificate of Proficiency back when I was 17, and that part of the training for that included listening to a text which would necessarily be in an accent of the Commonwealth. However, somewhere along the line to fluency, I lost the ability to understand the accents of non-native speakers: someone speaking English with a heavy French accent is going to be very painful for me. I remember we went to a panel at the 2005 Worldcon, which had four native English speakers plus a Japanese man. I couldn’t make head nor tail of what the Japanese guy was saying; my BF, however, couldn’t understand the natives, but could deal with the Japanese accent just fine. I think that for him, all non-native accents are somehow kindred, no matter how different they might be from French. For me, they’re just… too unusual to be parsed, I guess.
  (it’s not that bad, though. A few hours are usually enough for me to pick up a new accent and add it to my repertoire. I had a lot of trouble understanding Jetse de Vries‘ Dutch accent when we first met, but by now it’s become second nature).

So… is it just me? Do you share some of those, or know people who have the same issues? Are there other pitfalls when you’re a non-native?