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.

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:
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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 😀

(yes, I like Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Sue me)

I was planning to do a longer and more detailed post, but time, once again, has got away from me (sigh, already so late on so many things. Clearly, I need a better juggling teacher). So here’s the shortened version…

There are few things that throw people out of your carefully researched novels faster than getting names wrong. I once opened a novel that had a French protagonist, and didn’t get past the first page because all the French names looked like they’d been fished out out of an internet baby list [1]. Names are one of the first contacts people have with your characters, but they’re a surprisingly common source of fail in fiction.

The main reason they’re a source of fail is because often, people assume that the same naming rules they’re familiar with will apply everywhere in the world. And that’s hardly the case, as countries and cultures can have vastly differing naming customs. For instance, we don’t have middle names in France and think it a very odd concept when it does crop up in American movies (and Vietnamese do have an intercalary name, but it doesn’t have the same function or characteristics as a US middle name).

Here are a handful of examples to demonstrate the common traps into which writers can fall: they shouldn’t be taken as actual knowledge, more like an indicative checklist that things that can vary across cultures. Also, not an exhaustive list, as I drew from those cultures I was at least vaguely familiar with, which were mostly Vietnam, France, and Russia–but already, you can see that names can follow very different customs!

Some errors I’ve seen in books (beyond the obvious ones of picking names that are ridiculous or don’t exist):

-Getting name order wrong (Chinese/Vietnamese last names come before the intercalary name and the first name: for instance, someone whose last name is Nguyen, intercalary name is Thi and first name is Hanh would be Nguyen Thi Hanh, not Hanh Thi Nguyen)

-Not understanding that you might have little choice for last names. In Vietnam, 99% of the population bears a total of 14 last names, which means you just can’t invent a Vietnamese last name if you feel like it! However, first names aren’t taken from an accepted list but rather chosen by the parents on the basis of words/concepts they like (there are rules/guidelines/usages, but I won’t go into them here), which means you can have extremely uncommon first names. A related one is Russia, where people have a patronymic name (derived from their father’s first name) and a family name–which means names have a very distinct structure.

-Not understanding what marriage does to last names (in a lot of cultures, women don’t actually change their name to match their husband’s)

-Getting diminutives wrong (a lot of cultures have different patterns than the usual Anglo one of shortening someone’s name by a few syllables to be more informal or more affectionate. See, for instance, Russian. Getting affectionate in Vietnamese mostly involves pronouns rather than diminutive forms of the names–OK, partially because Vietnamese first names are so short!)

-Conversely, not understanding how to address people formally. Using someone’s last name isn’t always the formal method to address them. In Vietnam, you use Mr./Mrs [2] + First Name to address someone formally.

I’m sure there are plenty more things to watch out for, but I’m only familiar with a handful of cultures… Anyone else have tidbits about how naming principles differ across cultures?

[1] Internet baby lists can be very dangerous, as they’re the first things that pop up when you’re looking for “names from xxx culture”, but are either badly compiled, or list all possible names without warning you if they’re popular or dorky choices (hint, for instance, don’t try calling your French female MC “Cunégonde” unless you want everyone laughing at her).
[2] “Mrs.” actually covers lots of different modes of address depending on how old the speaker is compared to you (“Grandmother”, “Aunt”, “Elder Sister”, “Younger Sister”, “Child”…), but this is very complicated and beyond the scope of this list!

(picture credits: Timitrius on flickr, shared under a creative commons attribution share alike generic license)

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!