So, finally… (apologies for the tardiness of this, I was very, very busy throughout last week, and when I finally had some time, I couldn’t get hold of the pictures Matthieu had taken).

Imaginales is a French con dedicated to fantasy (its “sister” con, Utopiales in Nantes, is more focused on SF). I’d never been before, but Stéphanie Nicot very kindly invited me, and so gave me the opportunity to discover Epinal.

Imaginales is pretty much the event of the weekend in May: you arrive at the train station and face the first of many billboards advertising the festival, listing all the authors. Unlike Anglophone cons, which are often put together and run by dedicated fans, Imaginales has the support of the town hall (and area council, …), and they put on quite an amazing show. They have strong ties to the restaurants, hotels and high schools of the area (teachers organise visits; authors drop by for chats, and every year artists paint a fresco which is later donated to a high school); and entrance to the event is free for everyone, which insures a very steady flow of local people curious to see the wares. There’s even a special Imaginales vintage (repackaged wine probably, but still cool).

Pretty much the centrepiece is the book tent, which is a ginormous space with a looooong set of tables, where each author has a spot: you sit there behind your books and sign stuff for whoever feels like buying. It helps if you think of it as a cross between a book fair (a Salon du Livre, if you’ve ever been) and an Anglophone con: there are a few events on programming (2-3 tracks), a gaming tent, and a café area, but the heart of the show is the book tent.

Two views of the book tent with authors signing (and yes, if you look closely at the first pic, I’m the second author on the right, behind the man in the orange T-shirt)

As an opportunity to meet readers, chat and peddle books, it’s pretty much invaluable; though I did feel it was a bit less convivial for meeting other authors, since you do end up sitting behind your table most of the time, and the café area is small and mostly used for restful moments rather than for impromptu meetings (unlike Utopiales, where everyone ends up in the bar). Might just be me; especially since I have close to zero experience of French cons, and don’t know many people in the French publishing industry either. And because of…

The small café space to the left of the book tent

The magic mirror (aka the space for panels)

Well, to put it bluntly, it was also a very bad idea to do the Nebulas and Imaginales back-to-back, since I arrived pretty much knackered from the Nebulas, and not in a mood for socialising (I’m not the world’s most social butterfly, and two weekends of constantly reaching out to people does take its toll, especially if you factor in jet-lag).

In spite of all of this, it was an amazing event: I had a very cool panel on “Rewriting History” with Eric Holstein, Johann Heliot and Pierre Bordage, where we discussed alternate histories; and a nice, well-attended interview with Stéphanie Nicot on “Being French and writing in English”. There was also great food in the many nice restaurants of Epinal–we had awesome couscous, flammekueche(s), cakes, … And, of course, I saw old friends, met new people (including a couple of Anglophones invited by the festival), and generally had a great time.

We also acquired a ton of books–the H is currently engrossed in Pierre Bordage’s latest space opera pentalogy, “La Fraternité du Panca” (The Panca Brotherhood); and I have the complete set of Elisabeth Vonarburg’s “Reine de Mémoire” (Queen of Memory), an amazing alternate history of France and its Indochinese colonies. Promises many sleepless nights…

So, awesome con; just that next year, I will make sure not to do two events back-to-back…

–“Dom Jaguara pogrążony w cieniu” (“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” in Polish), courtesy of polter.pl. With nifty illustrations, and a complementary author interview! Courtesy of Bartek, Izabela ‘Isabell’ Mazur, Bartłomiej ‘baczko’ Łopatka, and Artur ‘mr_mond’ Nowrot
–בונת הספינות (“The Shipmaker” in Hebrew) at sf-f.org.il. Courtesy of Ehud Maimon, and Ibar Inbar Grinstein (not entirely sure I got the names right, as this is the one page I cannot make head or tail of all fixed now!)
–“Constructorul de nave” (“The Shipmaker” in Romanian) at srsff.ro, courtesy of Cristian Tamas, and Antuza Genescu.
–“Casa Jaguarului, în umbră” (“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” in Romanian) at srsff.ro. Same culprits as above 🙂
–D’Obsidienne et de Sang, of course, the French translation of Servant of the Underworld, courtesy of Eclipse. My awesome pretty pretty softcover edition 🙂
-and a forthcoming French translation of “Jaguar House” (“Quand l’ombre se répand sur la Maison Jaguar”) in Galaxies, courtesy of Pierre Gévart and Camille Thérion, which I’m currently rereading…

Still holding out for a Spanish translation, which would amuse me (because of the Mexico connection, and also because I speak the language…) But pretty darn happy with all of these.

So… the humongous rice cooker has among its many functions a “cake” setting, and I’m intrigued… Any good recipes for rice cooker cakes? Are we talking about regular cake baking, or steam baking, or something in between? (I ask because I’ve got a bunch of recipes for steamed cakes, and was wondering whether they’d work)

Inquiring minds want to know 🙂 (well, OK, the H said he didn’t want to know, but I reckon it’s worth a try)

Hmm, what can I say about X-men? First, that clearly the recruiting pitch of the bad guys is way superior than that of the good guys. In no particular order:

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To Stéphanie Nicot (organiser of the French con Imaginales among many other activities), and her companion Elise, for tying the knot yesterday at the town hall of Nancy!

(you can actually see them both here, via big French daily Le Figaro, which covered this because of the–somewhat crazy–legal situation: homosexual weddings are still not allowed in France, but since they didn’t allow Stéphanie to change gender on the records, I guess it sort of worked out. Sort of…
ETA: don’t look at the comments on the article if you don’t want to get depressed at the general state of human tolerance and intelligence…)

Following excellent posts by Nicola Griffith and Cheryl Morgan on Women’s invisibility (if you missed the twitter storm, this started off as a Guardian article asking people to name their favorite SF–which mentioned more than 500 books in the comments, out of which only 18 women…), it’s high time I play my part in redressing the balance…

Part of the problem, as Cheryl and Nicola both point out, is that best-of lists tend to be made by men, and that it’s been proved that while women will read men and women equally, men tend to read and remember men (and women tend not to volunteer for voting or for making such lists in the first place). So it’s a vicious circle in which men continue to predominate on awards lists, and to be enshrined in history while women mostly slip by the wayside.

Accordingly, I’m making my list of favorite novels written by women. Pretty much no criteria (I’m no good at Golden Age SF, since the only authors in that batch I read were Asimov and Zelazny; and I came very late to fantasy): only that I read and enjoyed the book. Here you go, my recs:

SF
Dust, Chill and Grail, Elizabeth Bear
Moxyland, Lauren Beukes
Miles Vorkosigan series, Lois McMaster Bujold
Golden Witchbreed, Mary Gentle
The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
The Snow Queen, Joan Vinge
Empire of Bones, Liz Williams

Fantasy
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (as Kari Sperring points out, the history in this one is rubbish. Nevertheless, as a revisionist version of a well-known myth from a female POV, it’s definitely seminal)
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
Crown of Stars series, Kate Elliott
Tamir trilogy by Lynn Flewelling
Ash, Mary Gentle
The Liveship Traders, Robin Hobb
Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones
Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner
Cyrion, Tanith Lee
The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Patricia McKillip

What about you? What are your favorite genre books written by women? Feel free to make your own list! (whether you’re a woman or not, BTW. We need more people celebrating women in the genre)

ETA: additions suggested in comments:

SF
Virtual Death, Shale Aaron
Happy Policeman and Brother Termite, Patricia Anthony
Catherine Asaro
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
All the Windwracked Stars and sequels, Elizabeth Bear
The Darkover series, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (and other books)
Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh (and other books)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins
The Mount, Carol Emshwiller
Sarah Canery, Karen Joy Fowler
C.S. Freidman
Slow River, Nicola Griffith
God’s War, Kameron Hurley
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Lear’s Daughters duology, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg
Nancy Kress
A Different Light, Elizabeth Lynn
Dragonriders of Pern, The Talent series, Anne McCaffrey
The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon
The Healer’s War, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Virtual Girl, Amy Thompson
Star of the Guardians, Margaret Weis
Uncharted Territory, Connie Willis
Looking for the Mahdi, N Lee Wood

Fantasy
Blood and Iron and sequels, Elizabeth Bear
The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke
Deverry series, Katherine Kerr
The Farseer trilogy, Robin Hobb
The Fox Woman, Kij Johnson
His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
The Earthsea Cycle, Ursula Le Guin
Lavinia, Ursula Le Guin
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
The Riddle-Master trilogy, Patricia McKillip
The Folding Knife, KJ Parker (assuming KJ Parker is indeed a woman)
The Orphan’s Tales, Catherynne Valente
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner

Catching up–those are both a bit late, but they do make for awesome sharing:

-Alexander Chee on comics, X-men and race, especially with regards to growing up mixed-race. It’s a great post, especially with regards to the experience of belonging neither here nor there–there must be other such accounts, but this is the first one I’ve seen. I’m probably reading the wrong blogs again, but the issue of mixed-race people often seems to get skipped over, or assimilated to POC problems. Which it is, partly–but for me, it does seem to bring extra problems, such the ones Chee points out. Mostly speaking from my own and limited experience there…

-Tricia Sullivan on the SF ghetto and issues of classification within the genre. Brilliant. Just darn brilliant.

-For the gamers amongst us, particularly those who’ve played Mafia/Werewolves (of Thiercellieux if you hail from France): there are people writing articles about Mafia game theory… Wow.

In other news, devoured King’s Dragon and Prince of Dogs, the first two volumes of Crown of Stars by Kate Elliot. And wow. It’s amazing. I’ve bitched before about the lack of historical realism in fantasy, but this book gets so many things right I don’t know where to start. It’s got depths, and a real sense of a world with a complex history, and many cultures interlocked. It’s got a very real religion, which is omnipresent in everyday life, and not continually questioned by 90% of the characters (one of my favourite characters, Alain, is a devout man). And the matter-of-fact inversion of genders is fascinating: in Elliot’s world, inheritance can go through the female line–a concept supported at all layers of the society from village to kingdom, and also in religion. You feel it as something organic which naturally derives from the societal structures, and not as an abstract thought experiment that doesn’t fit in with anything else (there is nothing that annoys me more than anachronistic feminists, probably because I’m prone to the fault; and I love the fact that it’s so natural for everyone that it’s not even discussed).

Fortunately, there are more volumes in the series 🙂

There will definitely be an Imaginales report (I even sent the H with the camera to take pictures of the setup, which is unusual by Anglophone con standards), but right now I’m way too tired… So instead, I’ll just scream from the rooftops that my book is out in France (in all good bookstores, can be ordered, yadda yadda. You know the drill 🙂 )

It’s kind of odd that this feels more real than the English publication; most likely because I can see it on shelves near my workplace, and hand it to friends and family who don’t happen to speak English. With the English version, all I could do was watch amazon, and the odd English-language bookstore in Paris. Not quite the same, somehow…

On bookshelves at my local bookstore

(cut to spare you from further book porn)
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So, I’m still perusing Irene Kuo’s Key to Chinese Cooking, and along the way I happened on a chapter that talked about Asian noodles, and how you could basically substitute spaghetti for Chinese egg noodles. Which struck me as odd because they don’t taste anything alike, but… see, the book was written in the Seventies, and back then, finding genuine egg noodles in the middle of the US must have been really hard (to some extent, it’s still freaking hard to find proper egg noodles in my part of the Parisian suburbs). And this put me in mind of a conversation I was having with a friend of mine, about how nước mắm used to be so hard to find in France, so the very first recipes that the Vietnamese immigrants came up had to make do with soy sauce… (which again tastes nothing like nước mắm)

It all comes back to a subject I find fascinating: the authenticity of cuisine–something I see crop up a lot on the internet, especially with regards to cookbooks. What makes an authentic recipe? What is and is not an acceptable variant? [1] How should a cuisine as a whole be judged? Because truth is, like cultures, cuisines merge and adapt, and evolve. Sometimes, they adapt because they don’t have basic ingredients: there’s a very cute Vietnamese cookbook in French, Le Chant du Riz Pilé (Song of Crushed/Ground Rice), which makes do without half the Vietnamese staples, because it’s an old book and those staples weren’t available in France at the time.

Sometimes, they merge with other cultures: the most well-known Vietnamese dishes, phở and bánh mì, didn’t actually exist before the turn of the 20th Century: they’re creations made in the melting pot between Vietnamese and French culture. Likewise, there’s a pretty common Vietnamese dish, thịt bò khô (beef stew), which has more than a few common points with an equally famous French dish, boeuf bourguignon (the Vietnamese version has more spices and herbs, but it’s strikingly similar). French cuisine now, as compared to the one at the turn of the century, has grown to include Mediterranean dishes such as taboulé and couscous, and Italian pasta have basically become part of every cook’s repertoire.

In the specific case of immigrants, new dishes become created, whether for the diaspora or for a foreign audience: General Tsao’s Chicken is a pretty good example of a typical Chinese-American dish that you won’t find in Chinese restaurants in France (and, if Wikipedia is correct, which isn’t always the case, a dish that the Chinese in China didn’t much appreciate).
Dishes fall out of favour, or become only cooked within the home of immigrants, because the majority doesn’t appreciate them: there is a fascinating phenomenon whereby most foreign restaurants in a given country will serve the same staples, because they’re the ones that the the majority of people appreciate (it can be because the majority of people is not immigrants, and is freaked out by stuff like pig’s ears; but it can also be because ingredients just aren’t the same. In Vietnamese cooking, chicken used to be a luxury, served mostly for feasts; but when the Vietnamese arrived in France and in the US, they found chicken was available really cheap, and so chicken began to feature on the menu a lot more than in Vietnam). Most Chinese restaurants in France serve the same things; the few Chinese restaurants I tried in the US also served the same things–but not at all the same as the French Chinese restaurants. It’s a fascinating process of accretion, whereby some parts of the cuisine just vanish, and some others acquire a disproportionate weight, depending on where and when the immigration happens. [2]

And, sometimes, things just change because time passes, and mentalities change. French cuisine used to rely a lot on butter for cooking ingredients, and on stuff like homemade stocks. Today, we’re more health-conscious (I don’t use butter, though I do know people who still do), and we’re more pressed for time–so the time-consuming parts of cooking such as making stock tend to get skipped (again, I do know people who make stock. It’s just not the norm anymore). What my French great-grandparents considered a good meal probably would have made me sick; and what I eat today would probably seem strange to them (even sticking to broadly French/European dishes. Let’s leave the nước mắm out of this for the moment…)

Not to mention, of course, that each of us have their own background and their own cuisine, often passed on from parent to child. The H considers his mother’s recipes to be the reference for a lot of things, and will scoff at other recipes (not because they’re inauthentic, but because he thinks they just don’t taste as good). I make my own stuff, mostly pastry, and the odd Vietnamese-French fusion dish (especially when my pantry is bare and all I have lying around are shallots, garlic and nước mắm. You wouldn’t believe what you can improvise with those around). Every French person has a different idea of what good French cooking is, and they’ll likely pass on some of it on to their friends and family–and get stuff passed on to them, as well, from their friends and family.

Yes, I know. I’m having a philosophical moment because of a cookbook. But still… it’s really fascinating stuff. Cuisine as a metaphor for culture. There you go, the thought of the day 🙂

[1] Mileage varies a lot, but here’s a hint as far as I’m concerned: don’t try to sell me chả giò (fried rolls) made with egg roll wrappers (chả giò should be made with rice paper). Egg roll wrappers are for Chinese or other Asian cuisines; the only Vietnamese dish I know which makes use of is a variant of wontons.
[2] There’s also the “restaurant effect”: restaurants tend to serve festive food that you can’t make at home; therefore, most people’s perception of foreign cuisines is really skewed, because the signature dishes tend to be extravagant dishes that are only served for feasts. One good example in France is chả giò, fried rolls, which everyone associates with Vietnamese cuisine in spite of the fact that it’s hardly part of an every day Vietnamese meal.