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.

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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.

So, it’s occurred to me I didn’t actually provide this for my latest release–accordingly, there you go, author’s notes for On a Red Station, Drifting.

I started writing On a Red Station, Drifting after one too many readings of the Chinese classic  Dream of Red Mansions, and musing on old literature.

It’s no secret that “classical literature”, at least the brand taught in French schools, is overwhelmingly male and concerned with “male” affairs: wars, violence, fatherhood, father/son relationships… I found the same preoccupation prevalent in SFF, to a point where it became unsettling–it’s a subject covered by Ursula Le Guin in her Language of the Night  and by Joanna Russ in many of her writings. One of the things that drove this home for me was seeing the statistics compiled by Martin Lewis for the Clarke Award (among the highlights: around 90% of the books had at least a male protagonist, a good quarter featured no women main characters at all, and a good 81% of the books had the protagonist kill someone, while only under half the protagonists were in a stable happy relationship).

Continue reading →

So… that time of the year again when people make eligibility posts 🙂  I had a busy year in 2012, but out of all the pieces I published I think “Immersion” (Clarkesworld, June 2012)  is the one that had the most visibility: you can read it online here, listen to the podcast by the awesome Kate Baker here, and I’ve made EPUB, MOBI, RTF and PDF versions available (the downloadable versions include the lemongrass chicken recipe that is so central to the narration). If you’re a SFWA member, you can find those  in the SFWA forums, here.

It’s eligible for the Hugos, Nebulas, and BSFA Awards, etc. if the fancy takes you.

On a  less selfish note, here’s some stuff that was awesome, and that I intend to nominate this year:

-Short stories: Nghi Vo’s “Tiger Stripes”  (Strange Horizons, May 2012) is a great story of a magical Vietnam where tigers take human shape, and where a widowed mother can develop a poignant relationship with the creature that ate her son.

I’m biased, but Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Song of the Body Cartographer” (Philippine Genre Stories, June 2012) is also well worth a look–great imagery, awesome worldbuilding, and the relationship between two very strong women, each with their own specialness.

-Novelettes: the single best thing I read this year is “Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon” (Giganotosaurus Nov. 2012) by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a wonderful lesbian retelling of Houyi and Chang’e, with crunchy language, bittersweet choices, and always excellent worldbuilding. If SF is more your thing, can I recommend “In the Country of Machine-Gods” (The Future Fire, issue 2012.24), a far-future story about the heroine of a war and her special relationship with her machines and her squad-mates?

-Novellas/Novels: Ken Liu’s novella “All the Flavours” is a great tale of Chinese immigrants in the West; it sometimes lacks a little subtlety, but is a welcome antidote to the clichéd Western depictions of inexorable marches of progress which elude racism.

I don’t have much in this category; and would quite welcome recommendations this year. Bonus points for POCs and/or people beyond the usual Western Anglophone World.

-Campbell Award: it’s Zen Cho‘s second year of eligibility, and I think she deserves wider recognition–she writes awesome fiction that is at once funny, heartbreaking and creepy (see “The House of Aunts” on Giganotosaurus for an exemple of what I mean, or “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life” for a shorter piece).

(I mistakenly thought Benjanun Sriduangkaew was eligible for the Campbell, but it turns out she’ll only be eligible once her Beneath Ceaseless Skies sale goes live, so quite probably in time for next year. Saving my ammo on this one :p )

-Best Fanzine: The World SF Blog has been making a tremendous effort to showcase writers beyond the Anglophone World, and I think that also deserves recognition.

(Picture credits: bgrimmni on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Generic License)

Happy new solar year everyone, hope it’s a great one filled with many awesome things!

Enjoying my last hours of calm before the madness of 2013 starts up again 🙂

So, with 2012 almost over, time to get back in the writing saddle for one more year! It’s been a rollercoaster on several levels (RL and work, to mention just two of these). On the writing front, I was glad to come back to short fiction, even though I never managed to actually get into the swing of the novel thing (that’s my resolution for next year/the end of this one). I felt like I sailed over a plateau, albeit a very uncomfortable one, when I started injecting more of my personal life and experience into my stories (probably why writing a lot of them felt like pulling teeth, lol)–and I was the first one surprised to have so many stories recognised (in addition to the Year’s Best, “Immersion” also got mentioned here, here and here, got massively recommended for the Nebulas, and got nominated for a BSFA Award *blushes, hides*).

On the non-writing front, I’ve finally acknowledged that it was time to consider cooking a time-consuming hobby–expect the website to be redesigned to better highlight that bit (in fact, hoping to get the site in general tidied up). I bought Photoshop Elements in the hope of improving my pictures (yeah, I know. The software isn’t going to change the fact I have crap picture taking instincts, but I hope to improve that too, lol).

And, finally, the Vietnamese learning will continue, though I’m not sure I’ll blog quite as much about it: basically, I’ll be trying to increase my vocabulary, which is less filled with awesome discoveries but darn useful to move beyond my meagre “survival” skills.

Pleased to announce my novelette “A Slow Unfurling of Truth” has sold to Carbide Tipped Pens, a forthcoming Tor anthology of hard SF short fiction. Many many thanks on this one to the marvellous Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Tricia Sullivan, for reading it at the last minute, encouraging me to persevere with it, and their sound advice about writing & life.

It’s set in the Xuya continuity, on an isolated planet called Tài Mệnh which has developed a rather… unorthodox method for testing people’s identities and credentials. The brief for Carbide Tipped Pens was to centre the story around a given science: I picked something I’m exceedingly familiar with, probabilities and applied mathematics. Expect… way too many probability distributions and goodness-of-fit tests, a mindship-human partnership, and funky things with memory encryption and advanced cyphers (also, the usual family/postcolonial/food preoccupations, plus bonus references to The Tale of  Kiều 🙂 )

Snippet:

Huong Giang was putting away her trays of instruments when Thoi walked into the room. “Elder sister.” He was out of breath, his youthful face flushed with what seemed like anger or trepidation: Thoi had been in his body for less than a year, and he was sometimes hard to read.

But, new body or not, he still should have known better. “Thoi, you’re not meant to come here,” Huong Giang said. “I made it clear–“

“I know,” Thoi said. “But you need to come, elder sister. Now.” And, after a pause that was rife with implications– “There’s a man that has come here to Celestial Spires–a Galactic.”

Aannd we finally have liftoff on the holidays! Am going to enjoy my much-deserved week of rest and enjoy Christmas and the New Year. The blog is going dark for a week or so; in the meantime, have a few Virgin Mary pictures to tide you over (all from Vietnam, in case you were wondering  🙂 ).

To all those who celebrate, Merry Christmas and a Happy (Western) New Year, and see you on the other side!