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…

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!

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.