…rom your vocabulary on mixed-race people. I don’t particularly enjoy being compared to animals, or the long history of prejudice inherent in that term (it’s a bit like thinking “mulatto” or “nigger” are appropriate descriptive words). For God’s sake, think on what it is you are saying before flinging this kind of word around. Disclaimer: this is based on my experience and on those of friends growing up (mostly in Europe, and most Asian-white mixed…

…Robots: The Recent AI, The Future is Japanese and Breaking the Bow on the list of recommended materials). I’m also on it for my two Clarkesworld stories “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” and “Immersion”, and for my novella On a Red Station, Drifting (which is mentioned by both Rich Horton and Gardner Dozois). The February issue of Locus also contains Rich Horton’s review of that selfsame novella: I recently saw two very strong novellas that mi…

…/recommendations post is here. I would add to those short stories already listed: Zen Cho’s “First Witch of Damansara”, a really funny and poignant story of culture clashes, wedding dresses and vampire grandmothers (published in E. Sedia’s anthology Bloody Fabulous, contact Zen directly for a copy; it’s well worth a read) Rose Lemberg’s “Seven Losses of Na Re”, about persecution, the loss of languages and relatives–which just made me cry Still hun…

…lised that what mattered to the Nebulas (as confirmed by the Nebula Awards commissioner Tom Doyle) was territory of sale and not location of publisher. And that, since the book was on sale everywhere including the US, it was indeed eligible for the Nebulas. At which point I naturally felt very very silly, and very humbled that in spite of my shooting myself in the foot, people had kindly voted for the novella… So thank you very much to everyone wh…

…ecent influx of traffic towards this post, so I feel the need to post an addendum. The above is my perception of Serafina as a book about the mixed-race experience (which was why a number of people explicitly recommended it to me). Someone has since pointed out to me that I didn’t consider the book might be addressing issues faced by less immediately visible minorities like Jewish people (I think Hartman is Jewish? Quite happy to be corrected on t…

…Just thought I’d repost this here if you have anything you can spare: Singaporean SFF writer Joyce Chng (J. Damask) is going through a bit of a sticky pass at the moment due to repeated hospitalisation of the family cat on top of other health issues. If you have a moment and want to buy books and/or swag, please head here. Any signal boosts much, much appreciated….

…yourself a favour and go read someone else’s account of modern Vietnamese history (from the independence onwards), because I felt the book didn’t really capture the ins and outs of what was happening in Vietnam in that time period. Again, this might all be my personal feeling, and it is also because, to some extent, I was expecting from a book that size something fairly comprehensive, which, in all fairness to them, clearly is not what the authors…

…ake nước màu (caramel sauce) in my cast-iron enamelled pot (which was a welcome change from the bad saucepan I used the last time). The sauce is cooling as we speak; I’ll be hunting for a jam pot next. Have to say oven mitts are great for protection during the risky endeavour of heating up sugar… Now I’m off to spread the laundry to dry. Ah, heady days… (also bought a copy of Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, and am currently reading it with fascinatio…

…o basically come to the conclusion I needed to take a baseball bat to my existing scenes and change the existing structure to better reflect the plot arc. This is part of my “Vietnamese in space” series with the Rong people (the same as in “Immersion”). It’s also, er, a somewhat angry story about colonialism, cultural legacies and virtual realities. Should be in the March issue of Clarkesworld. Many thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Tricia Sullivan,…

…ugo nominations deadline is on March 10th; I’ve already put up an awards recommendation post (and supplementary recs here). But since the Hugos include non-fiction categories, I thought I’d add a few more recommendations in that direction: Best Fanzine: Both the World SF Blog and Europa SF have done a great job of taking SF past the Western Anglophone bias that still dominates the field: Europa SF is mainly focused on Europe whereas the scope of t…