Rich Horton reviews “Immersion” in the August Locus:

Aliette de Bodard’s “Immersion”, in June’s Clarkesworld, addresses cultural imperialism. As we have come to expect from de Bodard, the story is thought-provoking and challenging, and built around a nice SFnal idea. The story is set on a space station inhabited by apparently Asian-descended people. Quy’s family runs a restaurant often catering to “Galactic” tourists. The central SFnal maguffin is “immerser” technology, which helps people take on different appearances, and speak different languages, to deal with people of other cultures. Quy uses it, begrudgingly, to deal with customers. Her more rebellious sister is more interested in understanding how the technology works. And, more affectingly, one visitor is the wife of a Galactic man, and she seems to use the tech to fit in better with her husband’s milieu. But this only distances her from her own self, her own history. All this is very intriguing, and quite thought-provoking, but the story doesn’t fully work: it seems a bit too programmed – and some aspects of the setting don’t quite fit. The space station, in particular, seems unnecessary (though perhaps this story fits into a wider future history where it all fits together).

Hahaha, I must protest. Space stations are always necessary for a good plot!

The H, after we discovered I’m going to have to cut down on dairy consumption due to mild intolerances, “Kind of curious though, most Vietnamese don’t eat dairy. Where do they get their calcium from?”

Me, after a quick spot of google and some thought given to the matter. “Well, uh, from seafood and algae and nuts, I guess? And, ha, I think I understand why they eat the shells on the shrimps now!”

(I *always* eat my shrimp shells, which puzzles the H as he can’t envision why I’d want to)

-You can support Michael J Vinegar’s Tome of Ideas, a sourcebook for writers, roleplayers and gamemasters, over at kickstarter: the tome will feature gorgeous artwork and include prompts from writers like Kevin J. Anderson, Dan Wells, Naomi Novik–and more up-and-coming awesome people like Ken Liu, Eugie Foster, Tony Pi, and many others besides! Check it out here.
-My short fiction sampler Scattered Among Strange Worlds went live on amazon:
.
Contains “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” and “Exodus Tides” in handy mobi format, two stories of families, loss and exile (with postapocalyptic mermaids and swarms of nanobots!). Buy at .com, .co.uk, .fr, or any other amazon places. I’ll look up into how to put it for sale on smashwords on days when I feel less lazy, promise…
-Proud to announce I have sold “The Waiting Stars”, the space opera story I was working on last week (snippet here if you’re interested) to Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt’s The Other Half of the Sky, an anthology of feminist space opera that’s shaping up to be quite impressive. Many thanks go to my betas on this: Abhinav Jain, Brandie Tarvin, Andy Coughlan, John Murphy, and extra helpings of said thanks to Ken Liu and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose very perceptive comments helped me fix a disastrous ending.
You can go read Athena’s posts about the anthology here and here if you’re interested to see the genesis of the project. My story focuses on, er, postcolonial trauma, and also squads of homicidal drones and women doing awesome things with robotics, signal processing and biology, just because, you know, women are awesome as a matter of course 😀

It’s not strictly equivalent, but… spraying stuff with oil, sticking it in the oven quite close to the heating element (about 2/3 of the way up) and turning it over at the halfway mark (when the upper surface has gone golden) is a pretty good and painless substitute for deep-frying [1].

[1] Deep frying has two drawbacks: the first is that it’s fairly messy with high risks of burns (yes, clumsy cook here), and the second is that I can only do it in batches of 4-5 objects in order not to crowd my wok. By contrast, I can stick 20 fried rolls into the oven at a time (more if you count the fact that I’m using both oven grids, one on the bottom to cook the inside, and the one on the top to do the final “frying” stage).
Also, spraying oil is way more healthy since there’s less of it around than with deep frying.

Was originally shooting for 6k words on this one, and I ought to have remembered that a two-strand narration with six main characters was a bad idea for length… Very fortunately, I checked the guidelines for the market I’m supposed to submit this to, and realised I’d misremembered and that it was going up to 10k (I doubt they’re going to be very happy about the 9k, but there’s clearly no way I can cut text out of this. If anything, it’s too short).

Don’t have a title yet: it’s called The Turtle’s Citadel after one of the main characters, but it’s a really bad title and I need to change it as soon as my magical title generator (aka the H) has read it and offered opinions. Also waiting for bunch of readers to read it and see how much is unclear. Lots of space scenes, which is unusual for me (I find space boring. Fortunately, a squad of homicidal attack drones generally makes things very interesting for everyone concerned). Also, lots of reflections on postcolonialism, imperialism and cultural clashes, as par for the course.

The derelict ward was in an isolated section of outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided–skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep spaces, passed around at low speeds by outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move–living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars–things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved–catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles–Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within–dead or crippled, forever unable to move…

So, I went to the butcher’s yesterday and asked them for a whole chunk of pork belly for thịt heo quay–just the meat, no need to prepare it in any special way or anything. I should have known something was up when the butcher looked at me oddly, but I didn’t twig until they asked me “so, what are you going to do with it exactly?”. Then I remembered that the French tend to buy pork belly in little chunks to use as lardons or bacon, and that people wanting a huge uncut chunk of pork belly with the skin on were not exactly common… [1]

Darn. Last time we moved, it took more than 3 visits to the butcher’s before I got flagged as “that girl who makes the weird recipes with our meat…” [2]

Current mood: amused

[1] Bit surprised though, because the neighbourhood is fairly cosmopolitan, and I can’t believe I’m the only one in need of that kind of ingredients on a regular basis…
[2] It took about a year and a half for my butcher to work out something was up–after repeated requests for minced unsalted pork meat. (again, not so much a French ingredient. At least I assume not, given the reaction)

Very quick post to let you know that I’ve guest-posted over at Khaalidah’s blog on worldbuilding and its attendant issues: the post is here (thanks very much to Khaalidah for the invitation and her ongoing patience with my missing her deadlines…) It’s less an admonition that a series of questions I’ve been asking myself–and to which I freely admit not having answers to. Any thoughts/discussions much welcome!

And here’s the artwork by Jim Burns for my story “Ship’s Brother”, which will be in Interzone 241. Full table of contents here (I share a TOC with Gareth L Powell, yay!).

(click to zoom)

This is part of the Xuya continuity and deals with Vietnamese in space. Snippet (with diacritics added in):

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 Âm 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.

(the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that I used “yin” instead of the more correct “âm”–Vietnamese yin and yang are âm and dương respectively. I would have used the correct words, but since this was a passing reference and was never ever explained, I thought there’d be more chance of people recognising it)

-Tricia Sullivan on “Some Thoughts on SFF and Reality Checks”. As Tricia says: what if authors, through shiny worldbuilding, erase someone else’s reality? What if the Vietnam War becomes replaced by a stream of good American soldiers fighting the evil communists? (or the reverse. Not really saying one is better than the other)
-On the same subject, Marie Brennan has a series of posts on Information Density and whether it is possible to educate the reader away from what they know while keeping a narrative going at full clip: here and here

I guess that, for me, it all boils down to: worldbuilding doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have obligations not only to produce something cool and shiny to keep your reader entertained–but since your narration will affect other people who read it and shape their idea of the world/the history, you also have an obligation not to distort what you take from, as much as is humanely possible (and “not distorting” can get tricky).

Current mood: thoughtful.

ETA: have edited the post following some hard thinking

Bonus: two proverbs!
“Bụng làm, dạ chịu”: “the stomach makes, the heart/mind bears”. Insofar as I can tell, you reap what you sow (or maybe it should be you are what you eat”?. Bonus more usual proverb: “Gieo gió, gặp bão”: “sow the wind, meet the storm”.

In other news, I have learnt more vocabulary by translating a fairy tale (Mỵ Nương and Trương Chi). I’m pretty sure mandarin ranks of Ancient Việt Nam are of no practical use, but “hát” (to sing) could conceivably come in handy. Still torn over words like “cung” (palace, temple), ngôi (throne), and “nhan sắc tuyệt trần” (exceptional, divine beauty), but who knows, I might need them some day…