Settler: “A person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few previous inhabitants.” (from my Apple dictionary and from google def, not sure what the source is?)
Colonialism: (1) “The practice or manner of things colonial” and often serves as a synonym for “provincial;” (2) “The colonial system or principle. Now freq. used in the derogatory sense of an alleged policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power.” (from the Oxford Dictionary of English)

No or few previous inhabitants? Wow, that’s a convenient myth that erases all the people who happened to occupy the land you were on before (like all First Nations in America).
And gotta love the “alleged” and “backward or weak people” in definition (2) of colonialism.

I think my faith in dictionaries has just about hit rock bottom…

Some of you might remember that snippet from my WIP I posted a while back? It was a snippet of character work I’d planned to shelve, but in the face of the enthusiasm I turned it into a short story, “The Two Sisters in Exile”, which was about Mind-ships and countries at war, and inciting incidents (as Rochita was saying, it’s actually a very 9/11 story, though I hadn’t realised it at the time). It’s set in the Xuya continuity, in that developing bit of space that has two factions of Imperial Vietmam cohabit rather uneasily.

And, er, I sold said short story to Ian Whates for Solaris Rising 1.5, an ebook anthology that will be out this summer. Will you just look at that cover. (also, at the names. Wow. Rather nice company to say the least). Shiny planets! (I usually don’t do planets, so I seldom get that kind of cover 🙂 )

My thanks to everyone who took a look at it on OWW–Christine Lucas, Merrilee Faber, Larry Pinaire, Chris Behrsin, Justin Tyme, Darryl Knickrehm, and Oliver Buckram–and to the inimitable Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose critiques are always fabulous. Also, many thanks to the entire crew of VD10 for making this possible–I cleaned it up, returned the crits during the workshop, and submitted it shortly afterwards.

OK, now that I’m almost over the line with the proposal (improvised 2 sequels yesterday, lol), time to lift the blogging hiatus! First off, some shameless plugging links:
-Lovely story by Tori Truslow, “A Catalogue of Unreadable Things”. All I’m going to say is that it takes place in a library of sunken books and mixes sailors and librarians. Doesn’t get much cooler than this!
-You can find me over at the Founding Fields blogging on writing non-Western fantasy, cultural appropriation and the Obsidian and Blood books–many thanks to Abhinav Jain for the invitation (and for the rather awesome review).
-Also, I’m at Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog for “My Favourite Bit”, in which I talk about the monsters in Obsidian and Blood
-Reviews of “Immersion” at too many places to mention (and, hum, I haven’t been keeping track of all of them while I was fighting with my synopsis), but can I jump up and down at having been mentioned by io9 as worthy of Dangerous Visions? Also this one by Bogi Takács, basically thinking it award-worthy. Wow wow wow. Also, lively discussion on imperialism, cultural oppression and standards of beauty happening in the story comments if you’re so inclined.

Yup, that’s right, you can buy Obsidian and Blood, the massive omnibus containing the series of Acatl’s adventures, plus all the short stories (they’re all in the ebook edition but not in the print one due to space constraints; if you buy the print edition, you’ll get a link to download the ebook supplement). Get your complete trilogy now!

More info, including buy links, here. I’ll be guest posting at various places over the Internet, though it’s going to be a very short blog tour…

Now if you excuse me, I have a synopsis to polish the heck out of…

Haven’t done this for a while, but here’s a rundown of the awesome stuff I’ve been reading lately:

-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Song of the Body Cartographer” is up at Philippine Genre Stories. Like all of Rochita’s stories, this combines lovely language with awesome characters–and a universe that just begs to be explored (the good news is that Rochita is writing longer stuff set in the same universe!). Fascinating handling of indigenous cultures vs. outsiders and the clashes that follow. Also, I get to be immortalised as a city of wise women–which doesn’t happen every day!

–“The House of Aunts” by Zen Cho. Malaysian vampires in high school, but nothing like Twilight! The vampires in question are the pontianak, women who died in children and feed on human flesh; and the youngest among them, Ah Lee, goes to school in human shape–and comes back in the evening, to eat her aunts’ cooking (of fried liver, innards, etc.–this is possibly the story that has the highest body count ever without showing a single murder…) All goes well, until Ah Lee meets a boy… I loved the relationship between her and Ridzual, and the way it was handled–sweet and heartbreaking without being cloying. And the big reveal at the end works so well. I was cheering by the end. That this got left off awards ballot is… a little saddening.

–The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho: OK, I’ll freely admit that romance isn’t my stuff, but this is so sweet and so sharp at the same time that it’s well worth a read. In the London of the Roaring Twenties, writer Jade Yeo struggles to make a living–until her path intersects that of noted writer Sebastian Hardie, with unexpected consequences. I loved seeing a well worn historical period from a non-English point of view (and having the subtle indictment of colonialism as well). Zen has a very sharp eye for detail, which makes the pages of this just fly by (loved that Jade snarkily comments on the quality of Chinese vases in London townhouses, and just loved her relationship with Ravi). Zen is posting one chapter a day on her website, or you can buy the book from amazon or smashwords if you want to support her (well recommended!)

–Night, Again, by Linh Dinh: all right, I’ll confess. One of my pet peeves about fiction set in Vietnam is the freaking high number of said fiction that’s set during the Vietnam War (and 90% of the time from an American or White POV). It’s as if the entire country was nothing more than a theatre for shooting Viet Congs and explore PTSD (but not from the Vietnamese point of view, or at least not from a convincing Vietnamese point of view [1]); and also as if the country itself didn’t exist before the war, and wasn’t worthy of mention after the war, which is… freaking annoying I guess? Therefore, it was a relief to find a book that was a. written by Vietnamese, and b. overwhelmingly not about the war.
The stories run a gamut of tones, though most are dark (satire, or just plain horrible). Among my favourites were Nguyen Huy Thiep’s “Without a King”, a mordant portrait of an extended family’s daily life (the title is a reference to the saying “money is king”, and money and lust form a large part of the family’s concerns); Tran Ngoc Tuan’s “The River’s Curse”, which has a strong fantastical element, and a truly horrible ending not because of any gore, but rather because of its realistic portrayal of cowardice mingled with the (ineffective) desire to do well; Pham Thi Hoai’s savage “Nine Down Makes Ten”, a woman’s portrayal of her successive lovers and their failures, and the concluding story, “A Ferry Stop in the Country” by Nguyen Minh Chau, an elegiac portrayal of an invalid watching his son cross the river he’s lived by all his life. The only caveat is that the book is a bit old (the inside cover says 1963, though it’s been re-edited), and that a bunch of the stories feel a bit old. But still, I’d definitely recommend it as a read. Meanwhile, I’m off to read my Tran-Nhut Mandarin Tân mysteries (which sadly, haven’t been translated into English yet).

[1] Here’s a handy guide about how NOT to write about the Vietnamese/American war. Please please don’t make the only Vietnamese characters women who have relationships with American soldiers, who exist to be raped/impregnated/killed… (hello, Watchmen, I’m looking at you…). Also, please please look up the history of Vietnam BEFORE 1968?

And… here’s the unveiling ceremony of the project that’s been keeping a bunch of us busy, aka the Cultural Imperialism Bingo Card. With many thanks to everyone involved, who were quite willing to jump through a lot of hoops (some of them last minute!).

If you think colonialism is dead… think again. Globalisation has indeed made the world smaller–furthering the dominance of the West over the developing world, shrinking and devaluing local cultures, and uniformising everything to Western values and Western ways of life. This is a pernicious, omnipresent state of things that leads to the same unfounded things being said, over and over, to people from developing countries and/or on developing countries.

It’s time for this to stop. Time for the hoary, horrid misrepresentation clichés to be pointed out and examined; and for genuine, non-dismissive conversations to start.

Accordingly, here’s a handy bingo card for Western Cultural Imperialism–and we wish we could say we’ve made it all up, but unfortunately every single comment on this card was seen on the Internet.

Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho and Ekaterina Sedia in addition to above authors (and an army of willing signal boosters whom we wish to thank very much!)

Would very much appreciate signal boosting of any kinds (reposts, links, RTs, …). Thanks in advance!

Just a quick reminder I’ll be in London this weekend for the BSFA/SFF mini-con and AGM, as a guest of the Science Fiction Foundation (for which many many thanks to them!). Takes places from 10:00 to 16:30 at The Royal Astronomical Society, Burlington House, on Piccadilly, in London. W1J 0BQ. Halfway between Piccadilly Circus and Green Park stations, on the north side of the street. I’ll be there the entire time, and will participate in two features: one interview, and one panel on SF and Colonialism with Lavie Tidhar, Maureen Kincaid Speller and Sophia McDougall. The other guest of honour is astronomer Marek Kukula.

I, uh, don’t have much idea of what I’m up to, other than this engagement, having lunch on Sunday, and presumably wandering into Forbidden Planet at some point 🙂

ETA: I have the con schedule, thanks to Shana Worthen and Simon Bradshaw

10:00 am Welcome (SFF)
10:05 am BSFA Event
11 am Aliette de Bodard interview with Edward James
12 pm – 12:45 SFF AGM
12:45 pm – 1: 45 pm Lunch
1:45 pm – 2:30 pm BSFA AGM
2:30 pm – Marek Kukula talk
3:30 pm – SF & Colonialism panel with Aliette de Bodard, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Lavie Tidhar, and Sophia McDougall (moderator)
4:30 Concluding Remarks (BSFA)

I have a memory–I can’t place it exactly, but I’m at the school fair flipping through used books. You have to picture the scene: my school was in an upper class neighbourhood of Paris. I hadn’t been there long, and I had no liking for the place: the combination of being the only Asian/non-white person at school plus something of a geek pretty much guaranteed me a miserable time, making me the target of a number of unpleasant quips and jokes and other nice forms of exclusion (I did have a few very good friends, and the overall situation got better as the years went by–and I’m not complaining at all! Just setting the scene for what happens next).
The books on display were mostly of the boring “educational for children” variety, or non fiction books, which mostly didn’t really interest me at the time. So I was bored; and thinking of moving to another stall–until I found this book. It was a small tattered volume of short stories, and I flipped it open, and read the first one in a single sitting. It was… quite unlike anything I had read before–there was no happy ending, no triumph of technology, just the thoughtless cruelty children will cheerfully mete out between them. It spoke to me in a language I could appreciate and relate to–which fascinated and repelled me all at once. I bought the book and took it home.

The story was “All Summer in a Day”, and the book was an anthology of Bradbury’s stories–to this day I remember that first story, and the one that came just afterwards, “The Long Rain”. It was decades ago, so far ago that the past feels almost like another country; and I have forgotten the titles (which were in French anyway); but I have not forgotten the stories. They were threatening and witty and cruel all at once, and though there was little science to them, they nevertheless encompassed profound truths about the human condition and the savage irony of our lives.

Rest in peace, Ray Bradbury. Your words are in my heart.

“Immersion”, like many stories, grew out of conversations–specifically with Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and several other Asian bloggers/writers.
I wanted to write a story about cultural domination; about how the cultural norms from the dominant culture also infect the non-dominant ones; about how globalisation and its products don’t necessarily make the world smaller and communications between cultures easier, but tend to foster a harmful atmosphere in which one culture or subset of cultures (US/Europe, to be specific) takes over the existing ones and remakes everything in its image. That the takeover is subtle, not done by guns but rather through commerce and the diffusion of media, doesn’t make it less visible or excusable: not all wars are waged with weapons and violence; and the more subtle and insidious version of cultural colonisation that’s currently going on in the world is a phenomenon with obvious and damaging impact (and also includes Western tourism in developing countries, which is often intensely problematic and fraught with coloniser attitudes).

The story is also very obviously based on our trip in Vietnam and my rants at the guidebooks which distill a culture in an outsider, monolithic (and many times wildly inaccurate) version: the immersers from Galactic to Rong are guidebooks V2.0. I also imagined their counterpart from Rong to Galactic, something that would make it clear that unbalanced cultural exchanges could lead to severe cultural distortion, as well as rejection of one’s home culture–a phenomenon that’s not always harmful, but is taken to its extreme in Agnes. I also tried to tackle how damaging the imposition of languages and standards of beauty could become, though through lack of space I had to go for a fairly caricatural version of it.

(mild spoilers, plus somewhat long rambles)
Continue reading →

And you can now read my story “Immersion” at Clarkesworld. This is the rant against globalisation, tourism and cultural imperialism that I wrote in a single sitting (but after 3 weeks of intense reflexion 🙂 )

It’s dedicated to the awesome writer and friend Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, without whom this story wouldn’t have come to be (and I also owe massive thanks to her for suggesting I flesh out Quy a little bit more). Thanks are owed also to Glen Mehn, who volunteered to read it in spite of my warning that it was unkind to white men [1]; and to the Villa Diodati crew: Ruth Nestvold, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Floris M Kleijne, Stephen Gaskell, John Olsen, Nancy Fulda.

It’s, er, another of those ambitious pieces where I’m unsure if I succeeded or fell flat on my face; if you have a minute to read it and comment, I would love feedback on how it strikes you.

In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are.

You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

You’re dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-travelled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

Read the rest at Clarkesworld!

The issue also includes fabulous writers E. Catherine Tobler, An Owomoyela, and non-fiction by VD co-conspirator Stephen Gaskell, Daniel Abraham and Jeremy L C Jones. Quite an impressive lineup!

[1] I mean, it does contain the line “their faces an unhealthy shade of pink, like undercooked meat left too long in the sun” 😀 😀