…ion patterns in today’s globalisation), and the frustrated, powerless soul-searching of Asians seeking to conciliate the Industrial Revolution ideologies with their own traditions. On the other hand… I can’t speak for the Indian parts of the accounts (though this article can and isn’t overly pleased about them), but I also found it a very frustrating book, because Mishra distorts facts to suit his theory of unified Asian resistance to the West (to…

…hat there will be a happy ending. (also, the focus on economics and war is really interesting, even though I wasn’t 100% sold on some of the politics). I did find myself wanting to argue with it, at length, after I’d finished it; but I suspect you’re meant to do so. –Shattered Pillars, Steles of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear: I’d read Range of Ghosts, the first volume of the Eternal Sky a while back, when it first came out, but I hadn’t had a chance to…

…re closed for summer. Mum helped me make the reservation—Brita’s her aunt, really, not mine, and they’re pretty close. Yes, I’m thirty-two years old. Yes, I’m terrible at calling people I don’t know. -Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s first column for Strange Horizons is up, on Identity and the Indigenous Spirit. Everything she says is worth reading and mulling over. From Tita King, I learned to wade through the dead weight of imposed culture and the acquired…

Just saw on twitter that Clarkesworld owner and editor Neil Clarke has lost his day job, after having a bummer of a year that included a severe heart attack and a hurricane. If you want to support the magazine by taking out a subscription, now would be a great time, and you can do this here. In addition to publishing my short stories “Immersion” and “Scattered Along the River of Heaven”, Clarkesworld also has consistently strong fiction: my favou…

…r because he wanted an exotic Oriental character is definitely… not what I really needed to read (the introduction includes a bit where he says that bringing Yoko back to Japan was difficult because she was no longer exotic, and that Japan was hard because he couldn’t make things up. I haven’t tried to reread that actual BD, but it has ninjas and multiple references to samurai honour and losing face as some sort of ultimate deterrent in Japanese c…

Cover for The Other Half of the Sky So, here’s the cover for The Other Half of the Sky, the anthology of feminist space opera story edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt. It’s courtesy of Eleni Tsami (that link leads to Eleni’s blog, where you can see her discuss the evolution of the cover and show the full wraparound). Isn’t it pretty? The anthology has my Xuya story “The Waiting Stars” as well as stories by Ken Liu, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Chr…

…So… looks like my recent website troubles have been fixed (the culprit to all my problems was a WP plugin that went funky, but nothing else looks wrong). However, given that the website’s still being hit by spambots (275 attempts in 2 hours!), I activated CAPTCHA on comments. Sorry for the extra nuisance; I hope that doesn’t put people off, but I see no other way to get rid of them….

…Speaking of cover reveals… Here’s the cover for On a Red Station, Drifting, my novella forthcoming from Immersion Press. More information about the novella here and here. This is my “Dream of Red Mansions” in space with fish sauce and family feuds (oh, OK, and a cool AI and mem-implants and various shenanigans). It should be released mid-December as a limited-edition hardback–more pre-ordering information when I have it!…

Got the recent Locus, and Rich Horton recommends “Heaven Under Earth”, and says this in his review: Best of all is ‘‘Heaven Under Earth’’ by Aliette de Bodard. Liang Pao is the First Spouse of a man on a planet where, for some reason, women are rare. Liang is genetically male, but has been altered to be able to bear implanted children as have his fellow Spouses, but now he must welcome a surprise – an expensive female bride. His first concern is…

…nd putting spread on canapés), but a group of guests very kindly agreed to come ahead of time and help with that–we made such good time that we were basically ready ahead of the 6pm starting date. The only surprise of the evening turned out to be our waffles: the H took the waffle recipe from the Larousse des Desserts , a venerable encyclopedia of French desserts which turned out to have quite a lot of embarrassing typos–specifically, when he popp…