The sister book to the 2011 Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords…

In Chicks Unravel Time, editors Deborah Stanish (Whedonistas) and L.M. Myles bring together a host of award-winning female writers, media professionals and scientists to examine each season of new and classicDoctor Who from their unique perspectives.

Diana Gabaldon discusses how Jamie McCrimmon inspired her best-selling Outlander series, and Barbara Hambly (Benjamin January Mysteries) examines the delicate balance of rebooting a TV show. Seanan McGuire (Toby Daye series) reveals the power and pain of waiting in Series 5, and Una McCormack (The King’s Dragon) argues that Sylvester McCoy’s final year of Doctor Who is the show’s best season ever.

Other contributors include Juliet E. McKenna (Einarrin series), Tansy Rayner Roberts (Power and Majesty), Sarah Lotz (The Mall), Martha Wells (The Cloud Roads), Joan Frances Turner (Dust), Rachel Swirsky (“Fields of Gold”) and Aliette de Bodard (Obsidian and Blood series).

In case you have doubts: yes, this isn’t an entirely nice essay. Some of the eps were a good load of fun (particularly the one on Gallifrey, which had a nice plot in addition to awesome costumes), but Season 14 unfortunately included the infamous “Talons of Weng Chiang”, aka OMG. I’d been warned was full of fail, but hadn’t expected to be quite *that* bad. Watching it was pretty much like watching a train wreck in progress. Guess we can say it’s a product of its time (considering TV shows of the time on British TV, you can actually argue it’s more advanced, which is kind of scary), but I’m really glad we don’t live in those times anymore…

Me, reading. Yes, I really made some funny faces while reading. Blame my theatre experience.

Things I learnt when reading: don’t start a 6000-word reading without a bottle of water nearby, it’s a mistake you’ll soon rue. Also, “Rồng” when pronounced English-style really is undistinguishable from “wrong”, which is a little problematic for actual comprehension… And, finally, it’s really hard to mix Vietnamese and English when talking, unless it’s for safe words like “phở” that I know very well… But it went well overall; at least no one ran away screaming

Among the attendees were Cristian Tamas, Eugen Lenghel, Marian Truta, Alexandru Mironov, Sorin Repanovici, and Jack Feinberg (sorry, didn’t get everyone’s names!). You can see the Romanian report on the meeting here.

Afterwards, we repaired to a nearby restaurant, where we ate nice Romanian cuisine (I’d been in Bucharest for two days but only managed to eat Italian, go figure), and continued to talk about anything from movies to video games. And Cristian very kindly got us back to our hotel afterwards. Overall, it was a really great experience, and it was really nice to talk to a science fiction community outside of the usual US/UK/French suspects (and I really felt embarrassed about all the fuss made around me, lol)

Also, it was really funny to see the H’s face when Cristian introduced him to everyone as “Monsieur de Bodard”. That was really priceless

(thanks to Eugen Lenghel for the pictures)

Not much progress those past two weeks, other than listen to tapes (parents away on holiday). I can confirm my written comprehension is fairly good as long as we’re talking basics (asking people’s names, ordering in a restaurant, managing train tickets, etc.). However, oral comprehension still sucks (mostly, people are talking too fast for me to parse). Continuing my drills with the FSI tapes, and hoping that something clicks at some point.

In other sort-of-related language news, I finished Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, and his translation of Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều), one of the major works of Vietnamese literature. Kiều was particularly interesting, because it’s a bilingual edition that’s heavily annotated, and it was really interesting to see the notes and compare with the text (not, you know, that I understood more than a few words here and there, but I could see some of how it was all pieced together). Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s scholarship is fairly impressive, and it’s full of fascinating tidbits (also very fascinating to see how the novel echoes the original Chinese work while clearly forging its own specific identity). Also, even though it’s a metaphor for scholars (the woman who doesn’t know who to entrust her fate to represents the scholars unsure of where their allegiances should lie), it’s really nice to have a woman main character in a tale. In many ways, it reminded me of Dream of Red Mansions;: the content is very different, but it’s also ostensibly focused on domesticity and the upheavals in daily lives in a way that the more martial novels aren’t.

Also, at some point I will post a report of the Bucharest event, once I have actually sat down and written it…

The cover and ebook design is by the ultra amazing Patrick Samphire, who recently launched his own ebook cover and ebook design business over at 50secondsnorth. He blogs about the design and the choices he had to make here, on his blog.

Isn’t it fabulous? Many thanks to Patrick, who’s got a very sharp eye for what works for books covers, and does absolutely freaking gorgeous stuff (and his rates are pretty darn affordable, too). You know you want an ebook this summer

Also, my Chinese-y story “Under Heaven” will be available in Electric Velocipede issue 24, in which I share a TOC with Ken Liu (then again, who doesn’t share a TOC with the ever-prolific Ken? ) and Ann Leckie. You can find the full list of stories here, and their publication date should be available soon.

Finally, I’ve sold my short story “Ship’s Brother”, set in the Xuya continuity, to Interzone for their next or after-next issue. Featuring a ship named after a fairytale character (Mị Nương, aka The Fisherman’s Song. If you’re read the fairytale, you’ll know why). Many thanks to Chris Kastensmidt and the ever-awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for reading it and offering very cogent suggestions!

Snippet:

You never liked your sister.

I know you tried your best; that you would stay awake at night thinking on filial piety and family duty; praying to your ancestors and the bodhisattva Quan Am to find strength; but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart.

I know, of course, where it started. I took you to the ship–because I had no choice, because Khi Phach was away on some merchant trip to the Twenty-Third Planet–because you were a quiet and well-behaved son, and the birth-master would have attendants to take care of you. You had just turned eight–had stayed up all night for Tet, and shaken your head at your uncles’ red envelopes, telling me you were no longer a child and didn’t need money for toys and sweets.

In other news, packing for Romania in a bit of a panic. More later, but a small reminder you can find me in Bucharest Friday 17:00, at the Calderon Cultural Center, 39, Jean-Louis Calderon Street, sector 2, for the Society of Romanian Science Fiction’s ProspectArt meeting. I’ll be interviewed by the tireless Cristian Tamas, and will read from “Immersion”, a full two weeks before it’s published in Clarkesworld!

-@requireshate, Joyce Chng, Rachel Swirsky, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Ekaterina Sedia and I engage in a discussion on non-Western SF. We tackle writing other cultures, exoticism, non-Western narratives: part 1, and part 2. Many thanks to Fabio Fernandes, Lavie Tidhar and Charles Tan for making this possible.

requireshate: I want to respond to a few things Joyce brought up–the expectations for people like us to be exotic. I’m often questioned as to the authenticity of my identity, because to westerners I appear to be writing “just like them,” steeped in “North American culture” (when in truth I know almost nothing about North America!). This assumption comes about because the hegemony is so huge and pervasive that it becomes, itself, an invisible mass and the default assumption. Mostly, if you write in English and aren’t breaking into malapropisms or broken syntax constantly, you’re immediately assumed to be “one of them,” part of the western paradigm.

(also, because I know this is going to come up at some point, and it’d be hypocritical of me not to mention it: I’m well aware that I’m committing outsider narrative in Obsidian and Blood. I’m doing it for what I believe are good motives–out of interest for the Mexica, to rehabilitate a culture that got the really short end of the stick, and show a mindset that is radically different without descending into Barbaric cliché; I’m doing it in reasonably good conscience of the issues involved in cultural appropriation [1] [2]; but it doesn’t change the fact that my books are not insider depictions of 15th-Century Tenochtitlan. It doesn’t make them worthless or bad; but yes, you can totally argue that, as an outsider writing about that culture, in both time and space, I’m to some extent perpetuating an exoticism problem, and I won’t disagree! I did try my best, but I most probably stumbled in places.
Also, I most certainly do not advocate people should stop writing about other cultures. Just pointing out it’s a fraught subject)

During the American occupation, the passing on of the oral tradition was suppressed as the native priests and their rituals were demonized not only by the white colonizer but also by the white missionaries who followed in their wake. This meant that the true traditions and the original culture were slowly overlaid with the glaze of white culture and white belief.

Add all this up and it is no wonder that the psyche and the culture of the Filipino is so scarred and wounded to the point where we see the white and the west as being superior to us in all things.

Reading the history of conquest and colonization is a traumatic experience for the colonized. The Philippines went through not one, but two colonizers. I wonder how many colonizers other countries had to endure.

From reading these histories, it becomes clear to me that the erasure and subjugation of existing indigenous narratives were prioritized as these were viewed as being rival to the colonizing power.

Well worth reading, discussing and sharing.

I obsessively proofread the upcoming “Immersion” in Clarkesworld; I think I’ve got everything, but probably I haven’t Kind of worried how it’ll come across: I seem to have moved in a new phase where I attempt very ambitious and very personal things, and end up always worried I’ll get something wrong or get howled at by everyone (OK. Not that very different from the Impostor Syndrome. Just turned up to max, for no reason I can see).

Cooking wise, this was very much a week for not trying out anything new–bought some coconut milk to make a bánh chuối nướng in order to consume leftover bread; of course ended up with leftover coconut milk, so made cà ri tôm (sort of a merge of this recipe and this recipe with half the ingredients substituted for something else). Next week, however, I have some crab to use up, and I’m going to be more adventurous (might even open the VN cookbook and check out promising stuff, ever-so-slowly and with the help of my trusty dictionary ).

Now I’m off to buy some running shoes and celebrate a birthday–and eat the last of the chả lụa Grandma brought back from Saigon (which is going to make me regret Vietnam all over again…).

Accordingly and for your reading pleasure, a series of disjointed observations on the use of aliens and supernatural creatures in SFF:

-When you portray a group of funky-looking people with odd customs who either live on different planets, or try to integrate in a modern human society–whether you consciously want it or not, you’re bringing to mind real-life parallels. Namely, respectively non-Western countries (during the colonial era or during the globalisation era, depending on your portrayal), and immigrant communities.
If you don’t believe me, put side-by-side the following: someone travels to a foreign planet and describes the sights; and someone else (of the somewhat clueless variety) travels to, say, Vietnam or China, and describes what they’ve seen, and what odd customs those people follow, or what odd things they eat. Or try this one: a group living on the margins of society (or within society but still not integrated), hiding their extent of their difference from a fearful and prejudiced mainstream; and say, the situation of Muslisms in modern-day US. See how broadly similar they are?

-This is then reinforced by choosing to depict, say, specism/racism against your aliens/vampires and basing it (because you have to) on real-life examples.

-This then poses some serious problems, because as a parallel, this suffers from a very deep flaw. Vampires are rightly discriminated against because they feed on blood and kill human people; the fae have wild and dangerous magic and toy with human lives; and aliens really are different species.
Foreigners and immigrants are none of these. They’re human; they have no special magical powers; and above all, they don’t make a habit of hunting down human people or drinking their blood. All of these have been used against POCs/minorities at some point: the different species to justify racial classification; the magical powers in what I call the “mystical East” clichés (but also in tropes like the Magical Negro or The Native American In Tune With Nature); and the drinking of blood in stuff like blood libel.
Making those features literally true for otherworldly creatures, and drawing explicit parallels between treatment of those creatures and the treatment of existing people is hugely problematic. Because the main reason all those treatments are utterly wrong-headed is… they’re not true. Foreigners aren’t magically different species.

-Assuming you’re depicting racial prejudice against said creatures–the other reason it’s problematic is that it’s very often accompanied by a total lack of actual prejudice against actual foreigners. Aka the “we have solved this stuff already” fallacy. I find it disturbing to assume that in an alternate New York City that reads like today’s New York City with added magic, people can be so outspoken against vampires/werewolves/etc., and not have prejudice against Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, LGBT people… Bonus point for UFs in which the vampires/fae/werewolves remain a secret community, and people who don’t know about the existence of such communities are still not racist… Yeah, like that’s a realistic depiction of the world.
Equally puzzling is that in the far future, humanity will magically have become this homogeneous mass that has let go of cultural conflicts. Honestly, so far we’ve shown remarkable capacity to pick new sets of prejudices as our immediate spheres became larger and larger (first communities and villages, then countries; and now the world, to an extent and with problems [1]): I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t continue doing this as mankind spreads to other planets!

-The specific comparison of UF supernatural creatures to immigrants and minorities is also problematic because in many books, it ends up putting such a high value on “normal” society (by which read heterosexual, White and American)–even more so than if it was just immigrants trying to fit in. It’s… something like this: when even immortal vampires, fairies, etc. feel so good about US high schools or US cities that all they really want to do is join in the fun, you basically have a narrative that reinforces the superiority of the “normative” society over all other expressions (sure, sometimes this is depicted as something enforced through lack of choice [2], but by and large the Fae/vampires do a surprisingly good job of fitting into human society). The pinnacle of achievement becomes joining a biology class in high school (I’m looking at you, Twilight): the centre of the world is humans and their values, and not the other way around. Now replace “humans” with “White male” (or dominant paradigm), and “fae” with POC/LGBT/etc. See how problematic it all becomes?

-Bonus points: the handling of “mixed-race” people. Those include alien/human crossbreeds (though these are rare); supernatural creatures/human crossbreeds, and the odd ones out like changelings, humans raised by aliens. I have yet to find a book that doesn’t make a huge splattering mess of things.
A couple of things not to do (and that I’ve seen in books!): mixed-race people aren’t suicidal or depressive because they hover on the cusp of two cultures. They’re also seldom in a position to actually draw little boxes and list their habits and physical traits, and separate them into mother’s stuff/father’s stuff. Except in very specific cases, sentences like “he had the beautiful exotic features of his father, but his true beauty came from his German mother” are not only racist as heck, but also quite unrealistic. And uh, not every mixed-race child will end up making an explicit choice of their father’s side or their mother’s side at the expense of everything else (I’m somewhat wondering, though, how much that is true in the US, which seems to have an odd elusion of mixed-race identity. If you’re mixed Chinese and White, you seem to magically become Chinese or White, but you can’t be both. Can someone from the US confirm or infirm that?).

Also. Wow. Now that I’m looking at the whole list I’m becoming quite depressed about some aspects of genre. I think I need a stiff tea…

Feel free to comment/discuss/disagree below, I’m off to write some novel chapters…

Two plus sides: I’m slowly starting to make myself understood by other people; and as a related issue, I’m also reading much faster (obviously, since Mom doesn’t scream every two words that I got the pronunciation wrong). Not really perfect yet, but he, I’ll take what I can get.

Funny stuff: I used to have an awful lot of trouble with the descending accent (the one in “nào”) because I confused it with the neutral; now I *still* have a lot of trouble with it, but I confuse it with the *other* descending accent (the one in “mẹ”, which has a longer duration and goes to a lower pitch). Can we take that as a sign that I know how to descend tones on a word? (rather than a sign of regression ).

Was trying to tranlate Tấm and Cam as a language learning exercise, but I think I’ll turn to Trương Chi and Mỵ Nương–they’re both fairytales I know very well, but Trương Chi is like, ten times shorter? I think I need an easy one before tackling the longest fairytale in the book…