…f people aren’t shown at their best, but since she’s the only lesbian it becomes problematic). Still, I quite like the anime. It’s soapy as heck, and has a big tendency to the melodramatic, but that ending always has me in tears. Meanwhile, all you need to know about Mawaru Penguindrum is that it was written by Ikuhara Kunihiko, aka the man who brought you Revolutionary Girl Utena. So if you don’t like symbolism-heavy anime, or anime where things…

…Locus kindly interviewed me for their August edition. You can find an excerpt from the interview here (and a neat picture that handily disguises the snakelet bit of the equation). Many thanks to Liza Groen Trombi, Francesca Myman and the rest of the Locus team (and wow. If anyone had ever told me I’d share a cover with Kim Stanley Robinson…)….

…The view from our window So, we have survived the move,–except that we live among a pile of boxes at the moment, and spare time is pretty scarce. There is an internet connection, but we’re busy unpacking and setting up. Hopefully more soon……

…Samatar Picture: One Pillar Pagoda by Francesco Paroni Sterbini, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs [1] Again, I’m using China as an example because there aren’t so many Vietnamese narratives lying around. If any Chinese people are around and would like to correct me, feel free! [2] Vietnamese dragons are Heavenly messengers, and humans aren’t really part of their diet. Meeting one is only dangerous insofar as meeting angels is…

…Just a quick note to inform those who don’t know already of the birth of the snakelet last week–which in turn explains my continued radio silence. We’re all well, but overwhelmed–as those things happen 🙂 Blog’s going dark for a while, though I may update with the occasional rant……

…n. Wow. She’d never thought they’d lose him–that in one bloody, confused night as the neighbouring House of Hawthorn tore itself apart, he would take his sword and his wings, and walk out of the House he had founded; and never come back, leaving almost nothing behind–a scattering of things he’d infused with his power, a handful of ill-prepared students at the helm of a faltering House; and Selene, his heir by virtue of having been the closest to h…

Ok, so I’m biased because I wrote the preface for this, but you can now buy the e-edition of Djibril al-Ayad and Fabio Fernandes’s We See a Different Frontier here on amazon. (I admit I’m not a big fan of the cover, but that’s my personal opinion, and the fiction collected in the antho itself is well worth a closer look) The anthology collects SFF from the point of view of people outside the usual SFF hegemony, with countries such as Brazil, Sing…

…days, the phoenix, the phuong hoang, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive. But those are the days of the War; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defenses; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile.   (for those who are wondering: I am indeed slowly working on the novel, but right now my brain is a bit frazzled and i…

…s, the phoenix, the vermillion bird, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive. But those are the days of the war; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defences; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile. # When Thien Bao was thirteen years old, Second Aunt came to live with them. She was a small, spry woman with little to…

…I’ve just discovered that there’s emails I haven’t answered to, so if you sent anything to me from 1st Sept to 10th Sept and are still waiting on an answer, would you mind poking me? I didn’t have email access while in hospital and obviously misplaced a couple things when we got home with the snakelet……