The wonderful Shweta Narayan is offering a supporting Worldcon membership (which lets you nominate and vote for the Hugos, and get the Voters’ packet)

So I’d like to [pay a membership], for someone who couldn’t otherwise afford it, but wants to, and can:

– read widely
– optionally (though it’d be awesome!) blog about stories, either critiquing or just signal-boosting ones they loved.
– nominate in all or nearly all categories
– vote in all or nearly all categories

I’d like this to be someone who is marginalized in multiple ways (because I think we have under-represented perspectives) so I’d like to consider people who are some combination of:

poor, of color, not US or UK citizens, queer, female or non-binary IDed, living with a disability (including physical or mental illness), not neurotypical, under 35, not native English speakers, not Christian, and/or marginalized in ways I’m not thinking of right now.

Just to be clear, I’m not holding out for someone who’s all these things! But more than one is a good thing.

More details here–and don’t hesitate to reblog this and otherwise boost the signal!

So, we were talking with Jonathan Strahan and Ian McDonald at Worldcon about the shameful holes in our reading, and I ended up confessing I’d never ever read any Heinlein (and got a bunch of recommendations in return). And I realised that Heinlein was far from the only hole in my, er, SF pedigree, for want of a better word.

A lot of speculative fiction writers seem to have grown on a steady diet of Golden Age or New Wave SF/fantasy, and/or comic books–I was on a panel with someone (I think Saladin Ahmed) who mentioned D&D and classic sword-and-sorcery as a major influence when he was growing up.

Me? I’m a latecomer, both to English and to genre. The thing is, I didn’t seriously start reading in English until I was 14 or so; which means that a lot of my formative stuff (aka the one that always remains behind in the hindbrain and keeps cropping up in what you write) was in French. Which isn’t to say there was no SF in it: I gleefully devoured nearly all of Verne’s books, read about all of Isaac Asimov’s translated short stories, and even dipped into Patricia McKillip (Changeling was actually translated as a middle-grade book over in France). What there wasn’t, however, was genre: it wasn’t until I moved to the UK that I became aware of the SF/fantasy section of the bookstores. When I was growing up, my local library had a “general fiction” bookshelf, and that was pretty much it. You found Victor Hugo side-by-side with romance novels, or Zelazny’s Lord of Light. And believe me, I read and enjoyed a heck of lot of Victor Hugo (my fave is Ninety-Three, in case you’re wondering). Not so much Zelazny, as the French translation of Lord of Light sucked big time, and it basically put me off Zelazny for ten years (they recently re-issued that book in French, with a new and improved translation, which I’m told is much better).

Similarly, a lot of my speculative fiction didn’t come from comics, but from bandes dessinées (BD), the French comics (sort of. There are big differences, mainly about mainstream acceptance of BDs in France, but I won’t go into them here). I read Yoko Tsuno, about a Japanese tech in Brussels who faces down aliens, time-travelling megalomaniacs and weird creatures (it’s unabashedly centered on Yoko herself, to the point that her male sidekicks often appear totally incompetent); Thorgal, which is this odd mix of Viking-era sword-and-sorcery and science fiction (the eponymous Thorgal came via spaceship down to Earth); and a lot other more BDs which had supernatural or science-fictional elements, but which were always classified as mainstream. In fact, in my library, the main division for BDs was whether or not they were for adults (amusingly, Mandrake the Magician qualified as adult, as did most US comics. I can only presume it was because of the excessive violence) [1].

I didn’t really find out about comic books before I was 13 or so; and compared to the bandes dessinées I was reading at the time, the comic books of that era felt painfully underdrawn, with bad colouring, and a style that failed to engage me, as its conventions were so different from the French/Belgian ones. I grew up mostly uninterested by them, with one notable exception: X-Men (which must have appealed to my 13-year-old self because it so viscerally described people trapped between two worlds). They did remain a guilty pleasure, because even at 13 I found a lot of the available storylines too simple (especially in terms of morality), and because they were expensive, costing nearly as much as a BD but printed on much cheaper paper (by that time, I suspect what was being translated into French was 10 or 15 years late, which probably didn’t help either with the storylines or the art. A lot of it, now that I think back, was Cold-War era comics, and there was probably a cultural disconnect because I grew up mostly after the Cold War ended…)

As to classic sword-and-sorcery… The closest to that was actually Andre Norton’s Witch World, which I found via a circuitous road: I became a fan of Star Wars early on, though I was frustrated by the simplistic morality of the movies, and went foraging into the authorised novels, hoping to find something more suited to my tastes (I sort of did, but mainly I learnt a lot of cool vocabulary around lightsabers and spaceships). Around the time I was 12 or 13, Pocket, a big editor of SF in France, launched a new line for young adults: part of the lineup was some Kevin Anderson Star Wars novels (of which I soon owned the complete set), and the remainder was the Andre Norton books. I distinctly remembered picking one up, reading cover to cover, and thinking, “wow, I’ve never read anything like this”. So much for sword-and-sorcery. I didn’t read Leiber until I was 20; and I confess to still not having opened a Conan book (I think I’m too late for those, in any case. I strongly suspect they work better when you’re a teenager).

Basically, I read what was getting translated into French and available at my local library–and that means that some books just never made it into my repertoire. I read Silverberg, but only the Lord Valentine books; I read Asimov’s, but only the short stories; I read a lot of Bradbury, because his works were very popular in France (I remember a couple of his short stories gave me nightmares). I never opened a Heinlein, a Clarke, or a Van Vogt. I also read a lot of French originals, though I’d be hard-pressed to remember any names among those (I read a lot, and a lot of that stuff has just merged into an indistinct blur).

So, there you go: my influences, all laid out for you to lob tomatoes at. All that Golden Age stuff… Sorry, but it’s not just not in the hindbrain. I did do a massive amount of catch-up later, when I was in the UK and started voraciously reading genre from Blish to Le Guin to Gemmell (and yes, I did end up reading Clarke and Van Vogt), but that was only after I’d started reading in English, and way after the rest of that stuff had formed layers in my brain. I already had my own worlds, and they’re what tends to bubble up when I write SF–and I have no idea if they’re better or worse than the common grounds of SF, but they’re certainly very different.

What about you? What were your experiences of growing up with SF? Do you have the feeling there are classics you missed out on when you were a child?

[1] As an aside, if you want BDs, Cinebook has started translating some of the most successful series. The quality of the translation is… variable, and they sometimes make odd choices as to series order. But they’re still very much recommended, if only to get a glimpse into an art form not everyone will be familiar with (BDs and comics are very different beasts).

So we had a great romp in the US (except for the bit where we burst the tyre landing, see earlier post): we got to stay with the amazing Dario Ciriello and his wife Linda; to meet up with Keyan Bowes, Jason Ridler, Erin Hoffman, Nick Mamatas, Katherine Sparrow, Kate Kligman, and Mike-whose-last-name-I-keep-blanking-out-on (sorry. If you’re around in comments and want to amend, I’d very much appreciate it).
And I had a great worldcon altogether, meeting with many many friends, and staying up far too late. I got to see good friends T.L. Morganfield, Chris Kastensmidt and Ken Scholes, met a whole bunch of people I only knew from online (or didn’t know at all) and spent a lot of time hanging out with awesome people, which is always cool. Many thanks to Patty Wells and her organising team –it is truly a massive labour of love to organise those events, and I don’t think I’m near aware enough of the enormous quantity of work that goes on behind the scene to give us this wonderful space in which to share our love of genre.

I had a lovely time on panels as well, though in retrospect I should have taken on more programme load (I wanted to avoid the Montreal burnout, but I ended up on too few items). The panel on non-European fantasy we had with Chris Kastensmidt, Ken Scholes and Saladin Ahmed had a great discussion going on, and many insights (and it was filmed, too, which means you should be able to see it on the internet somewhere…) I mostly played wallflower on the Minorities on Covers one (though I should really have registered my opposition to the notion that the reason Hollywood movies were so racist was because of foreign demand. Uh, I’m sorry? We don’t particularly care about White Americans over in Europe either, and I’m pretty sure most of Asia would rather have Chinese-Americans than middle-aged White dudes. Please stop using us non US-ians as excuses for all-Hollywoodian failings). And I ended up cancelling the Cross-Cultural Influences one because I was so nervous about the Hugos (which was stupid, I freely admit. I could have managed it). Reading and kaffeklatsch went pretty well, and so did autographing session. And I came home with lots of books (OK, not so many. Got Warbreaker, my fave Brandon Sanderson book, and a load of Shlock Mercenary comics).

It’ll come as no particular surprise that not only did I not win a Hugo, I also ranked pretty much last on most people’s ballots… [1] Not complaining though. It is truly an honour to be a nominee, especially for a Hugo, aka the award which defined so much of my science fiction reading. And it was a very strong ballot, and I am truly humbled by the number of people who read, enjoyed, and voted for “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”. Also, I got to show off my lovely dress, which counts for something [2] 🙂 (and the Hugo nomination was an excuse to do the California roadtrip with the H–on which more later, when we upload the pictures–, so pretty good there as well).

Many congrats to the Hugo winners, in particular to Mary Robinette Kowal for picking up her first Hugo, to Clarkesworld for their second (NOTE: Neil posted they were retiring from contention for next year, in the interests of the category)–and especially many many congrats for Sheila Williams for her well-deserved win: given the number of Asimov’s stories on the Hugo ballot/who won a Hugo in recent years, not having her win Best Editor for Short Form seemed downright odd. A bit miffed that the following wins didn’t happen: Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House (plus, Ian in kilt was awesome), N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (yes, it’s two in the same category. I’m allowed to be schizophrenic), Alastair Reynolds’ “Troika” (Alastair hasn’t exactly been recognised by the Hugo voters before, and it’s a crying shame…), and Lauren Beukes (who is very much made of awesome. Definitely looking forward to her next book). But you can’t win every time…

The H and I were also fairly puzzled by the Japan video at the Hugo Awards: we loved the glimpse into other cons in another country, but listing only the Western Anglophone winners on the Seiun Awards felt… oddly self-centered? We kind of wanted to see what was cutting edge in Japan, as well [3] (and I have to admit neither of the two names meant much to us except in a “oh, I’ve seen this name before” way, so seeing a few Japanese names and publication covers wouldn’t have been so conceptually different for us).

In travel news, I knew this already, but I think I’ll never trust security checks again: we realised after we’d cleared security that we had a folded Opinel knife in the outer pocket of our backpack, in full sight–and that absolutely no one had seen it or commented on it. But, on the other hand, I couldn’t check in online with American Airlines because they couldn’t figure out that “Aliette Debodarddelajacopiere” and “Aliette de Bodard de la Jacopiere” were really the same person (hey, not my fault the reservation systems has limited space for my full name and insists on lumping it all together…); and we got the suitcase searched coming AND going. Which, at a guess, probably didn’t yield much of interest (except if you’re looking for fully licit Shlock Mercenary contraband, of which there was plenty), and got me fairly miffed when whoever repacked the suitcase broke all the cookies we were bringing to the con. Still wondering–was it the TSA-friendly lock that they saw as a challenge?

Anyway, more later (including a confession post, and California picture trips). Gotta cook dinner and go to bed, and then we can see about this writing thing tomorrow…

[1] Most people on the internet seemed to be complaining about the story not working for them, so I figured my chances ran pretty close to a snowball’s in Hell…
[2] And the rocket pin. Don’t forget the rocket pin. I now have a Nebula pin, a Hugo pin and a Campbell pin, and feel I can dazzle my way out of pretty much everything (and if it doesn’t work, I’ll just hit people with the BSFA trophy).
[3] And thanks to the magic of Google, here’s the list of winners, and nominees (nominees isn’t great, there seem to be info missing from it, but I don’t read Japanese, it’s the best I could find…)

Am home from Worldcon. It was a good one, though I’m thoroughly exhausted at the moment: con fatigue + jetlag does not make a happy writer, or indeed sane human being…

More later when I have had some sleep (though a quick impressed shoutout to American Airlines for managing to transfer both us and our luggage in under 30 minutes at Fort Worth airport. Compared to this, the 30 min wait at the French end feels painfully under-efficient…)

I was stunned to learn this morning that my friend and fellow AR author Colin Harvey had died of a stroke. I’ve known Colin for a while–I met him at my first Eastercon, way back in 2008; and then again at Worldcon for the launch of Angry Robot. We saw each other at Eastercon each year; and he was nice and friendly, and funny and generous as he could always be, introducing me to a bunch of people, and quite happily chatting away around a beer or a coffee. The last time I met him in person was at this year’s Eastercon, where he briefly dropped by–intending to use the rest of the holiday to spend some quiet time with his wife. As usual, he had plenty of projects he wanted to tackle–from anthologies he wanted to edit to his novel in progress, and to the courses in film-making he took at Bristol university–and I had been looking forward to meeting him again next year. Now, of course, all I’m left with is the painful knowledge I won’t meet him again.

I’ve only read Colin’s recent work, the two novels he wrote for AR–he had a way all his own of making gritty, deprived futures feel real, and to create sympathetic characters who struggled against oncoming disasters. He also did so much for the field, by working hard on Bristolcon, and by editing those wonderful anthologies (I still have my signed copy of Future Bristol, though I think I’ll never look at it quite the same way).

The news leaves me stunned, and saddened, and angry at the unfairness of the world (but then, the world’s hardly ever fair). Colin leaves a gaping hole, and he will be much, much missed.

My thoughts go to his wife Kate and his family on this sudden loss.

(“San Francisco arises”. Famous French song 🙂 )

Having now safely arrived in San Francisco (I may not have been clear in my previous post, but we were delayed by 4 hours–we didn’t remain stuck in Chicago), we now set about to a. sightseeing, and b. eating out with friends.

(ok, there was c. awesome reading at Borderlands, thanks to Jude Feldman, Naamen Tilahun and the rest of the staff–and everyone who showed up to listen to me blather on about the Aztecs. Now I’m all set for the Worldcon reading 🙂 )

Thoughts on a.: wow, that is a hilly city. We have a map, but as Nick Mamatas pointed out, what we really need is a gradient map. We walked from Chinatown to Pacific Heights over a bunch of hills, and were mostly ready to collapse by the time evening came around.
Oh, and I’m in love with Chinatown. Definitely more Chinese than Vietnamese (unlike in Paris where the reverse holds true–we call it “Chinese district”, but there’s very little Chinese about it). I love the herborist shops and the teahouses (must snag a tea before I leave), and the crafts shops (lots of touristy stuff, but there’s some really pretty things. Friend and I got a bunch of paintings–mine’s of mountains lit by the setting sun, lost in a sea of clouds with a solitary little house on the peaks). And the food… mmmmm…
Thoughts on b: had drinks and/or food with Mike, Nick Mamatas, Kate Kligman, Jason S. Ridler, Erin Hoffman, Katherine Sparrow, Dario Ciriello and Keyan Bowes (hope I haven’t forgotten anyone…). The Chinese restaurant in particular (Chef Jia’s) had amazing food (mmm, vegetable potstickers), though we managed to eat three meals with it (the original meal, plus the leftovers over two other meals…). And the company was great, though we were a little frazzled by so much sightseeing. Have learnt useful things RE US food: “hot” is not hot at all on my scale, and “sweet” is definitely over the top for me.

To come: more sightseeing, and more food 🙂

And in shameless self-promotion items of the day, I forgot to post that if you’re in the UK, you can get the Kindle edition of Servant of the Underworld for £0.99, less than the price of a coffee. Offer’s good until the end of the summer if I recall correctly–so if you’ve always wanted to try out the book….

So…

We’d just landed in Chicago O’Hare, and the pilot was going on with the usual patter about the weather, when all of a sudden all the lights go off, and the cabin crew screams “we’re evacuating the plane, move move move now!”

As we were in the rear, I mostly had no time to panic–reaction only set in when I slid down the rear toboggan slide (interesting factoid: the landing is rather rough…), and saw three HUGE firefighters trucks bearing down on us with sirens wailing. Then we were standing on the grass and watching the trucks liberally drench the plane’s wheels with gallons of cold water.
Turns out, we had a bit of a bumpy landing, burst a tyre; and the aforementioned tyre caught fire. Just under the kerosene tanks, hence the panic.

As I said; we didn’t really have time to twig on to what was going, and everyone was fine. We did, however, miss the connection to San Francisco because the plane was impounded with all our stuff still on it, and we had to wait 2.5 hours in a no-mans’ land in order to get our stuff (including the passports), and clear Immigration.

Can I just say this was my first experience of evacuating a plane via the toboggan slides?

OK, I think we’re packed (thanks to the H’s supernatural powers of cramming things into suitcases).

Cue 12 hours of flight, and 20 hours of running around in transports and airports.

See you all on the other side of the Pond, either at the Borderlands Books event on Sunday, or at the various Worldcon panels.
(and I’m finally going to get some time to read A Dance with Dragons, yay!)

A quick note: I’m not sure how good the internet will be in the US (or whether I’ll have much time to connect). So, not blackout, but close…

la_marquise_de_ has a wonderful post about what history is for (short answer: nothing, it just is), and she finishes it by stating that expecting something to be “obviously and economically useful” is a very Western (and unhealthy) assumption. This, in turn, set me to digging up a couple thoughts about SF I had at the bottom of the drawer.

See, I’ve heard those thoughts before about useful things. The “utilitarian” approach (ie, it can’t exist unless it’s good for something) is also very strongly present in genre, and I hadn’t realised how much.

For instance, there’s a lot of advice about keeping things as short as possible, about making scenes do double duty, about avoiding bulky infodumps. There’s advice about keeping a clear and readable style, not getting into the reader’s way, and so forth. In other words: do not waste words. Do not waste the reader’s time. Do not be fanciful. Always be useful and give bang for the buck. If the book is thick, it had damned well be because every word counts.

There’s also a lot of advice about writing an SF story that boils down to being economical: for instance, the school of thought of the Novum (the idea that a true SF story should be about one technology/piece of technology, and following its resonance into society, ie most minor modification you can think of) definitely fits this. And how many times have you heard that a novel should be easily summarised and boiled down to an elevator pitch–and that, if you can’t, it has to be because there is a problem in the structure of the novel itself?

There is also this pernicious idea that stories have to depend on the technology or they’re not true SF: I say “pernicious” because on the one hand, I understand where we’re coming from in trying to define genre, to separate it from mainstream (though I’m not entirely sure I approve, but that’s another story)–but on the other, if you think about it, this basically amounts to saying “this setting/detail had better be useful” (sort of like Novum to the Nth power). This also comes in flavours of “this plot had better be useful” (aka, it has to have a point, an arc, a theme or whathaveyou), and in “this character had better be useful” (aka, the characters who are not essential to the plot shouldn’t be there [1])–and my favourite, the special alternate history bonus: an alternate history setting has to explicitly tell us something about our own world, or it might as well not exist.

And I find this… troubling.

We can see the results of this approach everywhere, I think (and to some extent, this goes beyond literature); and I don’t think we’ve necessarily gone good places with this. The “utilitarian” approach does have good sides (I’m not advocating we should let authors ramble on and on without firm editing), but it comes with strong dangers: it encourages simple stories with a to-the-point-backdrop and plot. It creates stories that are deliberately simplistic, with pre-catalogued plots, a cast of characters as thin as paper, and a world that can be summed up in one or two key concepts. It thins out the author’s voice (and authorial intervention), and ends up arbitrarily restricting what one can and can’t do with a story.
It prevents novels from being filled with random worldbuilding, with random acts and facts–whereas life itself is full of random things, of details that don’t fit in with each other–of plots that cut off and don’t necessarily make sense by the end.

And, most serious from where I stand, it plays on our already-exacerbated Western tendencies to tie everything into neat narratives, and also ends up reinforcing those tendencies–because, if you keep reading novels that have a point, you’ll soon expect all novels to have a point.
Similarly, the hunger for simple narrative has gone beyond fiction: there’s a general drive towards wanting simple accounts for a phenomenon, and single-factor explanations.
And that’s just not how things work in life.
Case in point (and brief digression): the Rio-Paris Air France crash. Nearly all media stressed one possible explanation (the pilots are to blame, for instance, which seems the majority vote). The truth is, like most accidents, this was a combination of improbable and serious events that led to the plane plunging downwards, and it’s impossible to pinpoint which incident “crashed” the plane. They all did: had even one circumstance gone differently, the plane would still be there. But people prefer the single-factor explanation. It’s simple. It makes sense. Why look for more?
Except, of course, that the single-factor explanation is bunk.

Stories didn’t use to be that simple. Les Misérables doesn’t work that way. Sure, you can argue that it’s a book about the redemption of Jean Valjean–but that completely fails to tell us about the book. You can argue it’s about poverty and the life of the destitute–and sure, it is that too. But the book is much more complex than that; it has a multitude of facets–a multitude of minor characters who all have their own lives (and if you only kept those necessary to the plot, it would be a much poorer book)–and this makes it breathe. This makes it real. This makes full; and fulfilling.

I’m not saying you won’t take anything away from Les Misérables or Dream of Red Mansions (that last being pretty much the epitome of “plotless” for me, but utterly wonderful nevertheless). Of course you will. Of course you’ll find your own lessons, and your own interpretations.
But to want novels and/or worldbuilding to be as simple as possible feels wrong to me–like we’re cutting off our own limbs because, after all, they’re not really necessary/economical… It reminds me of Karl Marx’s “religion is the opium of the people”. By this, he meant that religion gave people what they wanted–the illusion of stability and purpose–and kept them from realising they were exploited; we seemed to have moved to “fiction is our opium”–into a world where fiction satisfies our cravings for simplicity, and prevents us from realising how complex and difficult the real world can be.

So, anyway, that’s what I see. I’d never realised before how much it worried me, or how many of those things came together in a solid (and utterly wrong, at least from my POV) vision of the world according to fiction [2].

What do you think? Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments (specifically, if you want to disagree, do go ahead. I could use some reassurance here… [3])

[1] Wanting few characters in a novel didn’t apply in Ancient China, for instance: the list of Romance of the Three Kingdoms characters fills out half a thick volume; and the Chinese wouldn’t have considered the story realistic unless it listed tons of minor and major characters.

[2] I’m mostly thinking of popular fiction here (genre), and particularly of US fiction, but I do see it elsewhere.

[3]I’m aware we do have a counter-culture to this: we do have people seeking to make novels complex and organic; but I’m getting the strong feeling they’re the minority vote…

Over at SF Signal, Paul Weimer kindly asked me to contribute, in answer to the question:

Go check out my answer here–along with those of participants such as Peter Orullian, Laura Resnick, Chris Moriarty, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood (whose idea I utterly love)