Found this on twitter. Kathleen Alcalá on SFF alternate universes vs reality:

Last quote on the importance of ethnic sensibilities: Your alt reality is my everyday life.

Yes. It’s a brilliant summary of what’s wrong with the “rule of cool” SF (and why you need to be careful about which bits of which cultures you put into your story, as I argued elsewhere)

Activity this week is likely to be sparse, as I have to fit in a Vietnamese lesson, a few appointments left over from before the summer, and a workshop in Brittany with Kari Sperring, Tricia Sullivan and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Can’t guarantee I’ll post, but maybe by next Monday I’ll have solved that %% virtual reality story.

Had food. Went to visit Orléans with the H and spent far too much time in a games shop looking at everything they had. Stared at my story until beads of blood formed on my forehead. Tried to ply my muse with food; it didn’t work. Proofed outcoming novella On a Red Station, Drifting (well, the first two thirds, anyway).

Off to watch some Thin Blue Line before bed, methinks.

Athena Andreadis has announced the TOC of her feminist space opera anthology The Other Half of the Sky:

Athena Andreadis, Introduction

Melissa Scott, “Finders”
Alexander Jablokov, “Bad Day on Boscobel”
Nisi Shawl, “In Colors Everywhere”
Sue Lange, “Mission of Greed”
Vandana Singh, “Sailing the Antarsa”
Joan Slonczewski, “Landfall”
Terry Boren, “This Alakie and the Death of Dima”
Aliette de Bodard, “The Waiting Stars”
Ken Liu, “The Shape of Thought”
Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Under Falna’s Mask”
Martha Wells, “Mimesis”
Kelly Jennings, “Velocity’s Ghost”
C. W. Johnson, “Exit, Interrupted”
Cat Rambo, “Dagger and Mask”
Christine Lucas, “Ouroboros”
Jack McDevitt, “Cathedral”

Very pleased to be part of this awesome lineup! Mine is… er, weird, and involves Xuyan mindships, a Vietnamese rescue squad and homicidal nanobots. You can read samples from all the stories below, courtesy of Kate Sullivan:

Also, I went back to my Vietnamese lessons with Mom and managed to get through three entire sentences without being corrected in anything! (yes, it seems measly. However, to pronounce Vietnamese words without screwing up requires quite a fair bit of training)

Reposted from my twitter feed because I think it’s worth saying:

The physical description of your Asian characters to easily ID them as Asian is not the first thing you should be obsessing about. Basically, this is the most Othering version of describing characters of colour–they’re just like white people, except with different physical features! But it’s not only features that make people “different” , and in fact our differences are often much much more than skin-deep. To whit: I can write (and have written) an entire story that features recognisably Asian people, without a single distinctive physical description. So can Rochita Loenen-Ruiz.

(I wonder how much of the emphasis on physical appearance is shaped by our worship of movies/TV series? I sometimes think that Hollywood et al. influence our way of telling stories, not necessarily for the better…)

“Heaven Under Earth” mostly started as a dystopia: I wanted to show a society in which women were so scarce that men had had to improvise around their lack. This involved quite a bit of handwavium (mostly a background biological weapon developed by neo-Confucians to keep women in their place, and which backfired when used in the field), none of which actually showed up in the story but was necessary to help me design it!

Continue reading →

My story “Heaven Under Earth” is up at Electric Velocipede:

Husband’s new spouse is brought home in a hovering palanquin decked with red lanterns, its curtains displaying images of mandarin ducks and kingfishers—the symbols of a happy marriage.

First Spouse Liang Pao has gathered the whole household by the high gate, from the stewards to the cooks, from the lower spouses to their valets. He’s standing slightly behind Husband, with his head held high, with pins of platinum holding his immaculate topknot in place—in spite of the fact that he’s been unable to sleep all night. The baby wouldn’t stop kicking within his womb, and the regulators in his blood disgorged a steady stream of yin-humours to calm him down. He’s slightly nauseous, as when he’s had too much rice wine to drink—and he wonders why they never get easier, these carryings.

Check it out here, and tell me what you think.

Author’s notes forthcoming Thursday or Friday, depending how much free time I have.

Electric Velocipede is also having a kickstarter to fund their next year of online fiction, here: if you want to support quirky online fiction, this is the place!

ETA: edited this slightly to save my comments on the story for the author’s notes.

Words mean something; they weigh, like contracts between families in the olden times. Cam uses them cheaply, for they’re the weapon by which she makes her way in life.

Yup, not terrifically original, but I rather like it.

Snippet from our holiday in Brittany:
Me: “So, I want this story to be about child refugees and their experience. It kind of needs something else to be SF, though…”
The H: “Space stations? Spaceships? AIs? Nanomachines?”
Me: “Ooh. I like nanomachines. Sold, now I have to think of a plot to go with those. Mmm…”

Yup, this is how my SF gets plotted, which kind of explains a lot of things…
(I usually get the setting from combining one societal thing with one science/SF thing; however, at this stage I’ll throw in a random element to provide the actual plot that goes with the setting. Lately, it’s been a fairytale motif, go figure)

Off to a short but well-deserved holiday in Brittany until Sunday late evening. Probably no internet, or at any rate much ice cream, swimming and cycling which will keep me off the Internet.
There’ll be no hemi-semi-weekly cooking post on Wednesday, and the posts I had in the queue (on cultural appropriation and engineering in SF) are set back by about a week. Will be back next Monday. If you feel like you need a fix of Aliette de Bodard, may I point you to the #feministSF chat on Sunday afternoon/evening (depending on your timezone), which will focus on “Immersion” and Sofia Samatar’s “A Brief History of Nonduality Studies”?

“Chín người, mười ý”: “nine men, ten opinions”.

All I’m going to say is LOL.