-International Science Fiction reprints my Xuya novelette “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn”. Check out the rest of their fiction, too: they focus on non-Western-Anglophone authors, and they’ve got pretty cool stuff up already, including nice non-fiction articles.

-@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)

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[1] Complicated by the fact that this is a historical culture and not a present-day one–makes some issues simpler, makes other issues harder…
[2] To be fair, my conscience of those issues kind of improved over the trilogy, so I can see the cringy bits in Servant of the Underworld that I tried to smooth out by Master of the House of Darts

Ah-ha, so I wrote a story during our romantic weekend in Champagne-Ardennes (yes, that was pretty much a fail in terms of actual romanticism, lol. But I did write most of it yesterday, after the weekend was over, so it’s OK )

Set in the Xuya continuity, in my new sandbox of the Đại Việt Empire (aka the Vietnamese in space, lol). And has, er, ships. Lots of ships, a pregnant woman, and cultural conflicts around space travel. I actually started it out a couple of months ago based on three different kinds of tea (longjing, keemun/qimen and bai hao yinzhen): each scene was to be introduced by a short excerpt that would focus on the experience of drinking a tea, as well as introduce the central emotion of the scene. But when I wrote the story, the tea parts didn’t actually mesh very well with the rest of the (1st-person, addressing 2nd person) narration, so I just struck it out. It’s also 4000 words, which is starting to be a bit long for a first person addressing a second person, but what the heck. Narrative persons are made to be messed with

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.

And, hum, now I’ve finished procrastinating, I’ll go back to my novel chapters…

The bleariness is mostly a ref. to doing Vietnamese early in the morning, which always makes me feel inadequate as a language learner (but offset by the fact that I think I’m getting somewhere with the latest short story brainstorming, yay!).

However… this is also offset by the fact that I’ve sold two short stories–one sale I think I can’t announce yet, and the other… Sheila Williams let me know she was taking “Starsong” for Asimov’s. Doing the Snoopy dance here. Many thanks to the November 2010 Villa Diodati crew for reading the first version of this (Ruth Nestvold, John Olsen, Jeff Spock, Steve Gaskell, Ben Rosenbaum, Nancy Fulda, and Christian Walker); and for my last-minute awesomely fast beta-readers (Mark Hünken, Tricia Sullivan, Chris Kastensmidt, and Kate Elliott [1]). You guys all rock.

This is the Xuya story with the Flower Wars in space (and, in a bit of an Easter egg, the origin story of the Minds, my ship-bound AIs borne in human wombs–though it will take many, many decades of work before the incident described in “Starsong” leads to the creation of Minds).

In other news, I just discovered I’m a little under halfway through the Vietnamese lesson book. I certainly don’t feel halfway proficient, but I have faith…

Back to brainstorming a story. See you guys later…

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[1] The market I had in mind originally for this (and which set the punitive deadline) turned out not to be a match for the story, so I emailed it to Sheila.

For those who might be interested: my novelette “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”, first published in Asimov’s, July 2010, is now available for free on my website for your reading pleasure. (and, of course, if you happen to be in the right fraction of the population, it’s eligible for the Hugos/Nebulas/Locus Awards/Asimov’s Awards etc.).

Jason Sanford listed it as one of the three best novelettes in Asimov’s for 2010; so did Richard Horton; and it’s already received at least one Nebula nomination.

Go here to read it, and don’t hesitate to pop back here and tell me what you thought!

Second installment of Author’s Notes, this time for “Shipbirth” (in the February 2011 issue of Asimov’s).

Hmm, first off, this one requires an apology: the tonalli, the life-force according to the Aztecs, is of course not located in the heart but in the head. I realised I made this mistake only after the issue of Asimov’s went to the printers, when it was already too late to correct this.
The Aztec medicine system was fairly complicated, admitting the presence of no less than three entities in the body: the tonalli (in the head), which is the lifeforce, and, when chased out of the body by a fright or a spell, can result in catatonia; the teyolia (heart), which is the closest to what we think of as a soul (in particular, it’s the part that survives into the various afterlives), and the ihiyotl (liver), which is more numinous. See Mexicolore for more information, if you’re interested.

(more after the cut, though spoilery)

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Wasn’t sure how public this was, but apparently people have already been announcing their own acceptances over the Internet. So…

Gardner Dozois has picked up my Xuya story “The Shipmaker” (which is in the current issue of Interzone) for his Year’s Best.

Er, wow? Particularly pleased, as this was the first story where I attempted to put Vietnamese on the map of my alternate universe–there aren’t that many Vietnamese main characters in spec-fic[1], and it’s high time I did my bit to remedy this.

If you need me, I’ll be in the corner, jumping and squeeing…

ETA: and it looks I get to share a TOC with Yoon Ha Lee’s “Flower, Mercy, Needle Chain”, which is one of the absolute best SF stories I read this year. W00t.

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[1]There’s plenty of Vietnam War stories, which tend to be told from the American point of view–so not really fitting the billl. Plus, while the war was definitely traumatic for the country, it’s not the only thing that defines Vietnamese culture…

So, I thought I’d trying out something new when a story comes out: author’s notes, the equivalent of DVD extras. Might contain mild spoilers, though this time they don’t. Every story has those extra little bits that I couldn’t fit into the main narrative, and I figured I’d share some of them with you.

We’ll start with “The Shipmaker”, which is in issue 231 of Interzone, now out in the wild. It’s the Jason Sanford special issue, with three stories by him (you can see previews here, here and here), and an interview. The remaining stories are by Matthew Cook, and by me.

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Andy Cox just let me know (he actually let me know much earlier, but I was away from internet and didn’t twig to it) that he’s buying my short story “The Shipmaker” for a future issue of Interzone.

It’s the story I was talking about here. There’s a snippet, too (the beginning has changed a bt, but not drastically).

Many thanks to everyone who critted it on OWW: Ruth Nestvold, Pete Aldin, Christine Lucas, Cécile Cristofari, Georgina Bruce, L. K. Pinaire, and Mark Hunken. (and yup, I do still owe some crits to some of you guys. Apologies. The wedding threw things off schedule pretty drastically, and I’m still struggling to catch up with various stuff).

This is the first published Xuya story that has Vietnamese main characters (and an alternative Vietnamese history, though I was forced to remove a lot of it to make the story comprehensible). It’s also a companion piece to “Shipbirth” (forthcoming in Asimov’s in Feb. 2011).

Temporarily titled The Shipmaker until I can think of something better. 5000-ish words, Xuya story.

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat–even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking and cutting the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced into becoming a ship. They had to flow together into a seamless whole–to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

Interesting facts… For writing this story, I researched, in no particular order: Vietnamese names (I know the naming system, but looking through the dictionary for suitable first names took more time than I’d envisioned), the history of Vietnam and of the Vietnamese language, shipbuilding, aircraft-building, feng shui, physiology of pregnancy and childbirth, and childbirth in Ancient China.
Grand total: 2.5 days, including a long conversation with the H about the merits of building in orbit vs. planetside.

The actual writing of the story? took me 1 day, and 1 other day to fill in the little holes I’d left.
(we’re not talking 12-hour days here, as I was at the dayjob all along, more like lunchbreaks, a bit of commute time, and large chunks in the evenings).

I think we’ve proved I’m a research addict. Quite hopelessly so.

Also, it feels good to write stuff again.

Lookie lookie, I found this awesome illustration for my Xuya continuity story “Fleeing Tezcatlipoca” (out now in Space and Time Magazine), courtesy of Alan F. Beck.