Reviews on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Charles Portis – “True Grit” [review]

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 13:38:46 +0000

A Western of which I knew absolutely nothing before I picked it up (via Humble Bundle). But I’m glad it was in my audiobook bundle, because it was a joy to listen to – even though I’m happy I didn’t need to do any audiobook narrating of my own, since I picked up a Southern accent because of it.

Mattie Ross is a 14 year-old girl whose father was killed in another town by a drunkard who stole his horse, $150 and 2 gold coins. Her mother isn’t very down-to-earth and there isn’t anyone else to take care of her business, so she goes to recover her father’s body and set his affairs in order.

The story is told by a much older Mattie, which is clear mostly in the puritanical, older tone of her occasional musings, and in her comments on journalists who would later try to get her story, but wouldn’t get it right. Her 14 year-old self is a clever, determined, no-nonsense girl who knows what she wants, knows how people function and who’s very willing to do whatever it takes to reach her goal.

The dialogue she has concerning the marshal who could track down her father’s killer sets the tone of the action pretty neatly:

“Who is the best marshal they have?'

The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, ‘I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.’

I said, ‘Where can I find this Rooster?”

The style is lovely, the action is fun to read and there’s something almost epic about the story. It’s funny in places, but it has an air of serious drama as well, keeping a careful balance between. The dialogues are a huge part of the charm.

Really recommended.

Yahtzee Croshaw – Mogworld [review]

Sun, 20 Jul 2014 07:54:23 +0000

The necromancer stood in front of his newly risen army of undead zombies who wouldn’t get on with the program, his evil laughter trailing off into uncertainty.

„I know this one,” I told myself. „Please tell me it doesn’t go where all noobs have not-so-boldly gone before. Including me, years ago.”

As agreements were reached and the necromancer led his army away into his evil castle, providing them with a good life of decent employment and bad entertainment, I was starting to feel a bit uninterested, but then the unexpected happened: angels came out of the sky and deleted the castle of doom out of existence.

This being a parody of games, written from the perspective of the people within, it had a few obvious jokes – like, say, interpretations of bugs and glitches, or of abandoned heroes whom players didn’t want anymore and who stood posing for eternity. Even so, I found them enjoyable (in the way in which, faced with a robot-era Romeo and Juliet, you might be curious to see how Juliet’s nurse fits in).

Some running gags ran around a bit too often, I felt, but they had a way of eventually stopping and walking off into a direction I couldn’t predict. Which was good.

All in all, I found it to be an enjoyable, easily readable volume.

(findable on Amazon for Kindle versions, and on the Book Depository for paperback)

Warren Ellis – Gun Machine [book review]

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 08:39:27 +0000

The reason why I keep reading Warren Ellis’s books is that I loved Transmetropolitan (his graphic novel(s)). Unfortunately, I don’t feel that his work translates very well to the written word. Sometimes it results in fascinating little swirls of crazy style… and at other times it feels oddly lacking.

Gun Machine is a good example of what I’m talking about: gory, very visual details like someone’s eye popping out of its socket as he gets killed; the murderer seeing the modern world as herds of deer, predatory animals, wolves with glowing eyes – and we’re talking about cars here. It feels definitely different from your usual sort of novel, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s a mystery novel, the sort with a killer and a lot of unsolved crimes. Detective Tallow is out working a case with his partner which ends up with a lunatic shooting his partner dead. Tallow kills the killer – but ends up blowing a hole in the wall of a nearby apartment, which turns out to be some sort of creepy church-like place dedicated to guns. He’s supposed to take some time off, but due to somebody wanting to finish him and get him out of the job (why? I’m not sure), he’s back working the case of the crazy gun room, with the expectation that he’ll fail to solve it. And it turns out that each and every gun has been used to murder someone.

He’s left pursuing a crazy case, collaborating with a pair of wacky CSU, with coincidences forwarding his case (one of the people he randomly saves on the street turns out to be related to the guns/murderer), everybody knows things about Native American history, the police radio keeps spouting insane murders at every hour of the day – you’d think 20 to 50 people got killed every day there for all sorts of reasons. If the novel is meant to be realistic instead of fantasy, and I get the feeling it is, some of the details are wildly exaggerated.

An okay murder thriller, readable, with decently fleshed out characters… but at the same time it felt to me like it kept making small messes for the sake of convenience.

(findable on Amazon in Kindle format and as paperback on BookDepository for approximately the same price, with free shipping)

Kristen Slater – Working it Out [review… + reminiscing]

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 07:33:57 +0000

Around 2008-2009 I discovered that Project Gutenberg, which is one of THE best sources for free, out-of-copyright books, was suggesting that people can volunteer for producing those books. I signed up.

I became a proofreader for the aptly-named Distributed Proofreaders. The system is long and beautiful and it produces the excellent books on the Gutenberg website today (I can tell you all about it later).

It was a lovely period of my life. I recommend Distributed Proofreaders to anybody who likes free books. I think I quit in… 2011? or so?… Maybe 2010? I got busy with a lot of other things and I didn’t log in for some time, then failed to log in at all. I miss it sometimes, and it taught me a lot.

Anyway, as it happens, I got to know a few people there and to talk to them. I posted on the forum, I enthused about all sorts of things. This blog has been around since the end of 2012, but the incessant talker in me has been around for much longer. So imagine my surprise when I got an e-mail not too long ago from a person who was a fellow proofreader, Kristen Slater, who was contacting me to say that she was getting published and she was dedicating the novella to me.

I have bragging rights, so here’s the dedication 😀

To Roxana Kiril, without whom I would never have discovered writing.

I didn’t do much, but I’m too flattered to be able to properly disagree with her.

So what’s the book about? Well, it’s about 55 pages of fluffy, casual m/m romance. It doesn’t say or do anything very uncommon, and the plot won’t surprise you with a thousand twists and turns. It doesn’t connect all the dots and sometimes you feel like you’ve been cheated out of reading things that were interesting (Joe getting his boss kicked out, for example). But if fluff and a feeling of fuzzy warmth are your thing, you might like it.

The premise is in the official description, so I won’t be spoiling you much: the two main characters have been together for awhile, but is it love? It takes an accident to find out, and some talks, and some help from friends.

One thing I really liked were the small details that Kristen inserts here and there – like the two characters eating chocolate that’s been dunked in black coffee. They’re small, life-like little touches which are fun to remember.

Another thing I enjoyed: the novella isn’t focused on sexual desire. It’s not that the two characters are not interested in each other (they are), or that they don’t get in bed together (they do), but it isn’t used as *the* driving motor of their relationship. And the story is entirely unapologetic about the lack of sexy tidbits, which is refreshing, really.

Overall? A book that fans of fluffy, romantic, casual stories might like reading.

(You can find it here)

Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged [Book Review]

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 19:22:18 +0000

If I were to make a movie based on Atlas Shrugged, I’d ask for all the sets to be made of cardboard – all the buildings, all the walls, all the backgrounds. Paint and cardboard, and only a few solid objects, when they really need to be interacted with. Then I’d ask for actors who look like adventurers and throw them in suits and call them „businessmen”, and for actors who look like bureaucrats and call them „politicians”.

It’s because Atlas Shrugged isn’t a very realistic book. It’s more of an allegory – a monster of an allegory that’s over 1000 pages long in pretty much any edition. It’s an allegory of capitalism and of socialism, with a dash of the ridiculous (some of Rand’s ideas made me simply incredulous), and a lot of repetition of the same ideas, dropped on your head like anvils in cartoons.

But that being said, if you’re up for a challenge, it’s a very intriguing book which is worth reading once in a lifetime for a number of reasons, which are below. It should be taken not with a pinch of salt, but with an entire sack of it.

If you wish to buy it, it’s available as an ebook on Amazon, and as a paperback on the Book Depository, where they offer free shipping in a lot of countries.

1. The Philosophy – Decent ideas, badly done.

Here’s the gist of it: capitalism is good, socialism is bad. Socialism comes in different shapes and sizes, it tries to dictate how people ought to live, it fails to consider individual motivation and psychology and it doesn’t value the person, only the masses. Unfortunately, masses are made of people, so…

Ayn Rand has a lot of good criticism on socialism, really. If you look back on what happened in communist countries (for her I suppose it was looking forward), her points do get confirmed: if there’s nothing to gain personally, individuals will tend to stop trying too hard. The doctrine of taking from each according to their possibilities and giving to each according to their need fails: needs will be misunderstood or exaggerated, those who work will not see the point in working so hard anymore, since there’s nothing in it for them, those who cheat will cheat more and work less… and so forth.

A lot of systems crashed, just as Atlas Shrugged predicted they would crash.

Except… not really. Here comes the cardboard: Ayn Rand believes that people using their brains are rare and that they can be easily brainwashed through universities and, well, osmosis I guess. Whereas in real life, it took a lot of violence to get intellectuals and businessmen to obey communist systems. In Rand’s world, people refuse to think out of a personal choice of sorts – and the whole of US crashes. In the real world, things were worse – and North Korea, which would have crashed in chaos in a Rand-like world, is still a closed and terrifying state.

What really bothers me is the book’s description of capitalism, which is naive in a number of ways: in the capitalist utopia, the „brains” only need to think in order for things to work out: copper mines appear where no copper appeared before, oil is found where convenient, science booms further as if the only thing it needs is a bit of freedom, „don’t die because I love you” is replaced with „don’t die because your life is valuable” and capitalists are brave, wonderful, clever, honest, handsome and lively. As opposed to cowardly, stupid, dishonest, apathetic socialists.

Worse, happiness is presented as a goal in life and as the validation that one’s life is worthwhile, since it can (only?) be achieved by producing, creating, meeting one’s goals. Rand’s socialists are a miserable lot, incapable of enjoying life and sometimes even incapable of having sex, because it would be a joy and all joy is denied them. This is why the book needs to be considered an allegory, as far as I’m concerned, because taken literally it would validate psychos and cheats who are very happy about what they do.

By the end of the book, I found Rand’s capitalists annoying to no end, especially considering their tendency to snap the sign of the dollar onto just about everything, from cigarettes to graffiti. Enough!

2. The Plot – Actually fun.

The plot isn’t bad and if Rand kept the novel *a bit* shorter and wrote a bit better, Atlas Shrugged might actually be a page turner. The main character, Dagny Taggart, is a heiress and the Director of Operations in charge of the largest train company in the United States (in this world, trains take care of most of the necessary transportation, so it’s a Big Thing). Unfortunately, her brother, James Taggart, is the actual president of the company and he’s an inept fool who wants to help people and appeal to the masses, and who has no idea about how to run a company.

Things in Washington are getting pretty bad as a lot of socialist decrees are passed, making life hard for the businessmen who actually achieve things in the favor of the businessmen who don’t – at least apparently. For example, they limit the production of some companies so that others may have a fair chance to make a living – unfortunately, the ones that „don’t stand a chance” are putting out faulty products, or don’t honor their orders on time or at all, or have other issues. The imbalance created by decrees like this one puts more and more of a strain on previously safe businesses and eventually makes them crash.

To top it off, people of ability keep vanishing all over the place. So we get to see a lot of Dagny in action, trying to save her trains and to keep the world turning in the face of ever-worse odds. Trust me, you will give a damn about trains by the end of the book. I didn’t to start with, but if I said I wasn’t cheering for Dagny after a particular achievement, I would be lying.

It’s a bit of an adventure business novel, combined with cleverness and some mystery and action, with a dash of romance. Some of the twists and turns are subtle, unpredictable and interesting, which would makes this a particularly cool novel, but…

3. The Style

Rand likes to comment on capitalism and on the importance of intellectuals and of thinking everywhere. She’ll often go on and on and on about the same ideas in a gritting, repetitive thing. Towards the end, there’s a whole chapter which reiterates what we’ve already heard throughout the entire novel which is supposed to be brilliant, but it made me cry tears of boredom.

And, of course, some scenes are drawn out and some characters monologue endlessly.

Otherwise, the style is simple enough and readable enough – nothing very special, and nothing abysmal, either. But this is one of the few books where I’m of the opinion that if you really want to skip a paragraph, you should.

4. The Characters

They’re cardboard characters, all of the socialists. Their opinions, when you first read them (and you first read them on the first few pages), seem to be sordid parodies of real life instead of the opinions of people. And I’ve already complained about the perfection of capitalists.

However, once you get used to them, they have their more subtle parts as well, their little things which make them three-dimensional in their own parallel universe in which the world is different. You can see the evolution from guilt to self-assured confidence of Hank Rearden, the downfall of James Taggart, and of the scientist Robert Stadler, in ways which make sense, and which make them interesting. Unfortunately, sometimes the unrealistic universe in which Atlas Shrugged takes place means that the capitalistic men sometimes come out looking like wimps, but thankfully it doesn’t last *too* long.

The only character whom I really disliked was John Galt, who’s a lot more interesting as a mysterious name everybody keeps repeating that as an actual presence in the story. He’s an incarnation of Rand’s capitalism and as such he is perfect, clever, fearless, handsome, desirable, prone to monologues, and generally two-dimensional. Which is a pity.

Also, the only competent woman in there was Dagny. There are some mentions of other capitalist women (in one or two whole places!), but for some reason Rand doesn’t bother too much about them. Because… I don’t know. Whatever. Maybe she didn’t want her main character to share the spotlight.

5. The Relationships

I have no idea how this book didn’t get banned a lot. Dagny has a lot of surprisingly explicit sexual relations with men. I suppose that what saved Atlas Shrugged is the fact that they’re explicit about anything but sexual organs. Otherwise, I’m reading the same sort of discourse one might come across in BDSM erotica, from the pleasure of submitting to the pleasure of possessing another human being. (also, Rearden’s wife is frigid… possibly due to socialism)

She braced her feet for an instant, to resist, but his mouth was pressed to hers and they went down to the ground together, never breaking their lips apart. She lay still—as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the unendurable pleasure it gave them.

It’s a surprisingly hedonistic novel in places and emotions between capitalists run high. The homoerotic subtext is so explicit that it’s a wonder Ayn Rand herself never caught it. I’ll throw in a few quotes, okay? (because this book doesn’t need a lot of slash fanfic writers to reinterpret it creatively, it already tells us Hank and Francisco love each other)

Rearden’s startled glance at him was like the involuntary thrust of a hand grasping for support in a desperate need. The glance betrayed how much he wanted to find the sort of man he thought he was seeing. Then Rearden lowered his eyes; almost closing them, slowly, shutting out the vision and the need. His face was hard; it had an expression of severity, an inner severity directed at himself; it looked austere and lonely

And then this, same Rearden with the same Francisco:

He had caught himself glancing through the newspapers to see whether Francisco d’Anconia had returned to New York–and he had thrown the newspapers aside, asking himself angrily: What if he did return?–would you go chasing him through night clubs and cocktail parties?–what is it that you want from him?

More Rearden and Francisco, with Francisco calling Rearden his best and greatest conquest:

„What are you doing at this party?”

„Just looking for conquests.”

„Found any?”

His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered gravely, almost solemnly, „Yes–what I think is going to be my best and greatest.”

Dagny and Rearden about Francisco:

Yet, when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he’s the one.”

She gasped. „Hank, are you saying that you like him?”

„I’m saying that I didn’t know what it meant, to like a man, I didn’t know how much I missed it—until I met him,”

„Good God, Hank, you’ve fallen for him!”

„Yes—I think I have.” He smiled. „Why does it frighten you?”

Let me guess: it frightens her because she’s sleeping with Rearden, who’s going around confessing his love for her ex. I’d be a bit worried that I’d be left out, if I were her. Just saying.

Anyway, there’s more to the Hank Rearden/Francisco d’Anconia relationship, with some life saving and apparent (but not real) betrayals in there, as well as other romantic tropes. It’s quite fun to read, because it’s either the best friendship of all ages, or two guys having the hots for each other without the author noticing.

6. Conclusion – Or, tl;dr.

A book that’s stuck in limbo between good and bad, but it’s one of those stories I’d recommend for people with more than a bit of patience. The plot and characters are often interesting in their own parallel universe sort of way (unless Rand does things to them in the name of ideology), even if the style is enough to make you headdesk and some of the ideas are silly no matter how you look at them.

Bonus: random straight erotica and two men who really love each other, enough to make slash fangirls go starry-eyed.

One thing Atlas Shrugged does right is to make you feel passionate about achieving things and exercising your freedom of thought. It’s that sort of a book.

So, again, if you’re into literary masochism for a good purpose, I recommend it. And yeah, it’s available as an ebook on Amazon, and as a paperback on the Book Depository (where they offer free shipping, which is why I’m not recommending the Amazon paperback, unless for some reason you want that).

Doctor Who – Christmas special 2013 review [spoilers]

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 19:39:04 +0000

Warning: this review contains spoilers. And it also doesn’t make any sense if you haven’t seen the episode. Or the series. If you don’t watch Doctor Who, or if you haven’t seen „The Time of the Doctor” yet, go back. I mean it.

To start this off: I am not mad at Steven Moffat. I remember all the cool episodes he wrote for Doctor Who, I remember Sherlock and Coupling and Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death and hell, even Press Gang. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that he’s bitten off a bit more than he can actually chew. Some episodes of Doctor Who are sheer brilliance and they make me jump around in excitement and shout „This! This is Doctor Who, dammit!” while others make me nearly apologize to people.

There might be something about Doctor Who and that show’s writers. They all try so damned hard, you can feel it. They know they’re making history. They don’t want to ruin it. They want it to be Epic. And sometimes Epic means ‘Bad Wolf’ with its subtle hints all over the place and that wonderful ’the drums, the never-ending drums’ (saying nothing of ‘don’t even blink’)… while at other times we get Jesus!Doctor resurrected by good thoughts from the whole of humanity or something like that.

That being said… I liked the way in which „The Time of the Doctor” started. I really did. My buddy Linda said she was really disappointed with the episode, but I couldn’t see it: Clara was having Christmas dinner with her family, the Doctor was off investigating a mystery with a Cyberman’s head by his side… Sure, all sorts of alien ships gathered around a planet had the potential for corny plots, but it wouldn’t be like that, right? Right? Wrong.

Problem number one: too many things. The Cyberman’s head. The Church of the Silence. Clara’s family. Time Lords. The answer to the crack in the universe (what’s behind it). The answer to what caused the crack in the universe. Weeping angels. Supposed nudity. Tasha. Tasha flirting with the Doctor. The fact that the Doctor is at his thirteenth incarnation. Do I go on?

Look, I don’t mind a lot of details in my stories. I’m a fan of details! But too many things thrown in at the same time make things messy. And do you know why? Because of Problem number two.

**Problem number two: **Rushing. Ruuuuuuuuuushhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. Was I supposed to feel sad at the Cyberman’s head dying? Because I didn’t. Do you know why? Because he was introduced this episode and got five minutes of screen time, at most. I know that the Doctor spent hundreds of years with it, but… no. I can’t bring myself to care.

What about the answer to the crack in the universe? It’s just thrown in there! Seriously, I was very curious about that, but the show went all „Yeah, it’s because we tried to blow up your TARDIS so you wouldn’t get here, and the Time Lords are on the other side.” Really? It sounds like something Moffat thought up after a day of pondering how to write this episode. There’s nothing much leading up to this.

Problem number three: forgotten plot threads. We were led to believe there’s something very scary on the other side of the message. But Time Lords? What the hell, are they chanting that message in Tolkien’s orc language for ominousness? Also, the Weeping Angels. You know they’re there because they have fans. There isn’t much of a reason for them to be there otherwise. You get a scare, you think you know where all this is going… and then the Weeping Angels vanish.

The truth field is another problem of the sort: it serves very little purpose except having the Doctor tell the truth a few times. Why’s it there? In-universe, not story-wise, I mean. Story-wise it’s there to further the plot. But why the hell would the presence of the Time Lords create a truth field?

Problem number four: running gags outstaying their welcome. You know them – Doctor Who, Doctor Who? Yes, we know! It’s the bloody name of the show! Move on!

Or the thing about the Doctor snogging people. He’s doing it with everyone these days – it’s gotten to the point where if I were a random sexy woman in the Doctor’s world, my expectations of Doctor-snogs would be at about 50%.

Problem number five: cheap storytelling. The narrator’s voice is meant to be magic and stuff, but it really kind of isn’t. I suppose this might be more of a director-thing than a writer-thing, but it doesn’t work so well. We don’t really get sucked into the Doctor’s life and aging process because it’s all too fast (see problem number two). I understand 60 minutes aren’t enough to really show everything you want to show, but here’s an alternate way of doing it: no narrator’s voice. Follow Clara, follow her back home, then she puts the key in the TARDIS and flies back. When she gets there, the Doctor is old. We felt that just a minute passed, too. We can empathize with Clara much more than we can with him. Yes, we miss the part with the Doctor kicking ass with that ‘reversed polarity’ thing, but maybe that time is best spent elsewhere? Eh, whatever. There are many ways of telling a story. I’ve already gone too far with the speculation here.

Also, the Time Lords are calling to the Doctor through the time crack? As my friend Linda pointed out, we’ve kind of heard that one before, but they were doing it to the Master, with the sound of drums. Except it worked better in that episode.

To sum it up: I’m sorry to see the Time Lords show up again so fast. We didn’t get to wish for them for too long. We didn’t get any buildup. They’ve technically been there since the fifth series (or the first, if you think about it), but now they’re up and kicking as if they knew that everything was fresh for the Doctor, that he’d only just saved them and it’s time to pop back into his life.

The whole episode is rushed and it answers questions in what I feel to be unsatisfying ways. Moffat seems to want to cram the world into an episode sometimes, but it doesn’t always work. Several things seem to not be very well thought through.

The most disappointing part, to me, is that I feel that it all started in a good, fun way.

Working with the Big World Network

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:20:34 +0000

Flight from Hell is well into its second season by now – the fourth episode is out today and episodes 5, 6 and 7 are ready for when their time will come. 8 has been written, 9 is being written.

And the one thing I keep saying this morning is that I have awesome publishers.

First of all, the reason why I decided to get a novel published with them is that I absolutely loved the concept. I come from the wonderful world of fanfiction, where you wait for a new episode and you text your friends things like „Holy fucking shit! Beside You in Time was just updated :-O It’s alive!” Or you run around and tell people in Canada that silverkytten updated, or that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just got a new episode.

Literature can be a domain where you eagerly wait for more, where you can get involved, speculate, hope for more. We’ve kind of lost that in the mainstream when serial novels stopped being published – but fanfiction, where the chapter is the default posting unit, brought the excitement back. The only problem being that many, many series lie abandoned, maybe never to be finished (such as some of my own, actually… hiatuses just keep growing)

The Big World Network publishes one chapter/episode per week, though, so you’re ensured against heartbreak of looking at series that will never be finished. And I love that. It’s brilliant.

And of course, they publish audio episodes as well. Which is lovely, I adore audiobooks.

But. Part 2 of the story of my love for the Big World Network is the unseen one: what happens behind the scenes. After all, sometimes the books that are published can be lovely and so can the concept, but when you end up working with the people who make the magic happen, you can feel like crap (I’ve been in that situation before).

The truth is: I absolutely love the BWN team from this point of view. I’ve been working with them for some months now and they are awesome.

Here, let me bullet point the neat stuff you don’t see from the outside:

They’re great with planning. They take their time to come up with solutions, set deadlines which allow for unforeseen delays and think things through before they act. They know the extent of their abilities, and they know what to expect of the average author. In other words, they don’t rely on optimism and improvisation to get things done – which is a nice change from some of the artistic teams I’ve been in. „Better early than on time” is a decent standard to function by, no? And you always have time to notice whether anything needs more work that way.
They’re transparent about what they do. We get team updates regularly, in which we find out what the Big World Network is planning: site changes, convention participation, events, plans for certain events, what is going on with other parts of the Big World Network. Technically, I don’t need to know some of that (e.g. changes in the way the site looks like), but it does make me feel like I’m welcomed into their home. Which is great. I get to know who I work for and what they do.
They listen. I’m a nitpicking sort of person, and a lot of people grumbled over how evil and criticizing I am (I don’t mean it in a bad way, though). But the BWN guys don’t grumble. They check, explain, fix, improve. Is there a typo anywhere on the site? It will be fixed. A broken link, an audio glitch, anything that falls under the category of „you missed a spot”? That spot will be checked ASAP. And I’ll get replies to things like „Have you tried selling your books with X, Y or Z?”
They also dialogue. Let’s hit the full spectrum of communication here: I can discuss the merits/downfalls of an idea concerning either the novel or the site with them and some solution/compromise will be reached. And they’re polite, nice and assume you’re (trying to be) the same as well (which really helps people like myself, who can put their foot in their mouth regularly).
They try new things: today they’re at a convention, tomorrow they’re finding people on the net who will promote them, yesterday they talked to some people about promoting your work for some time to come, at some point they will do something promotional and neat God knows where.
I should’ve mentioned this above, but it’s obvious from the way the site looks: they’re very skilled at what they do. Novel covers look great – and they look different. My banner is very different from Thralldom’s banner, which in its turn is very different from the banner for Billie vs the Unseen. Perhaps some are less impressive than others, but you can see a personality in them, professionalism. The same goes for editing: Amanda and Wendy (yes, I have two editors) find typos and problems easily, fix my convoluted sentences, tell me when something is wrong and, all in all, save my ass every once in awhile. And, of course, everything runs smoother than smooth on their side.

They make you feel like you’re part of the team and, overall, they make my life a bit more cheerful than I’d expected it to be. Which is why I’m writing this post.

And it isn’t just me saying it, either.

Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor [first impressions, no spoilers, no coherence]

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 21:32:25 +0000

…and it was everything that I remembered Doctor Who being, because it was awesome and plot-filled, humor-filled, and with loads of adventures and running about through time and some aliens and huge decisions to make.

And several Doctors!

Really, I missed David Tennant and it’s wonderful to see him interacting with Matt Smith.

And Billie Piper! I mean, sure, at some point most of us thought that Rose Tyler was getting a bit too much of a ditzy blonde, although she was nice, but right now Billie is just perfect and I was, like, wow. Hello, you. Missed you and didn’t realize it until now! You are FANTASTIC!

Clara was nice, but somehow I feel like she’s getting the short end of the stick as a companion now. But seriously, with three Doctors around, everything else was bound to be in the background. But she was still useful and cute and she reminds me of a sparrow, as always.

Which reminds me that we did get cheesy aliens and some cheesy lines, but somehow that’s part of Doctor Who. Good ol’ British cheese, different from American cheese because it’s less pompous and more in good humor.

Which, in its turn, reminds me that they didn’t miss the chance to throw in a joke at the expense of the US XD They keep doing that. But, hey, of course they would.

I’m just squeeing and running around like a proper fangirl now and going „Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!” all over the place.

Tomorrow I might actually catch my breath (and my brain) and write a proper damned review.

Reading the Romance [Book Review(s) + ruminations on women's literature]

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:19:01 +0000

A few years back I read this interesting academic book by Janice Radway, called Reading the Romance (published in 1984). The romance in question is the romance novel. The readers are a small community of women.

Radway’s book has its issues, to be certain. Her sample of romance readers is small, and you can really feel that she looks down on the whole matter. This would be a deal breaker for me, but Radway went through with her study in a professional manner, asking questions rather than making assumptions, and drawing conclusions based on evidence rather than prejudice. I am uncertain whether I agree with all her conclusions, but that’s another story.

The romance genre is, from Radway’s point of view, a female response to patriarchy. Women living in traditional homes use it as a way to come to terms with their society-defined roles. Let me explain: they had to be mothers and respond to all the demands of their children; they had to be wives and respond to all the demands of their husbands; and they had to smile and be kind and meek and loving during all of it, while none of it was really appreciated. („As a mother, I have run ’em to the orthodontist. I have run ’em to the swimming pool. I have run ’em to baton twirling lessons. I have run up to school because they forgot their lunch. You know, I mean, really! And you do it. And it isn’t that you begrudge it. That isn’t it. Then my husband would walk in the door and he’d say, „Well, what did you do today?” You know, it was like, „Well, tell me how you spent the last eight hours, because I’ve been out working.”” – p. 92)

They don’t want out, mind you. Radway’s women aren’t feminists. They don’t complain that they have a right to work, to be independent, to lead their own lives, to be less than perfect, to not be nurturing. They feel guilty about reading romance novels because it’s a pleasant, hedonistic activity. They hide their books from their husbands because they would object to them. And they want to come to terms with their roles, to feel loved for what they do, to be happy in their positions. Romances show them women who end up experiencing appreciation and love for being nurturing and satisfying the traditional stereotypes; the male character’s sexual desire for the woman is deeply connected to love (perhaps to explain away the reader’s husband’s sexual urges as meaning more).

One of the books mentioned over and over as a good romance is The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. I looked it up, found out that it revolutionized the romance genre and that it sold in a few million copies, that it was ‘sensual’ and ‘described erotic fantasies of female subjugation’. Not bad, for a 1974 historical romance novel. Naturally, I decided to read it if I ever came across it and felt like reading something light. And guess what? I did come across it.

Ooooh, boy. Let me put it this way: the heroine, Heather, has some misadventures and ends up on the docks late at night. She’s confused for a prostitute and brought to a sea captain, Brandon, who rapes her. He mistakes her ’no’ for play, her struggles for acting. After realizing she was a virgin and therefore no prostitute at all, he decides to show her that ‘it doesn’t hurt’ and rapes her again, because ‘she will learn to like it’. She eventually runs off, but when it turns out that she’s pregnant, a family friend finds Brandon and makes him marry her.

I am not kidding about it being a rape. She’s traumatized, for fuck’s sake and she’s scared of his every move. What she needs at first is hot tea, a blanket and support from either a professional or some really damned good friends who know what to do. And to never see that person again. Instead, she gets married to him – I mean it in the passive tense, because marriage happens to her imposed by someone else. She is dragged there and told to get married, so she does.

Later on, this grows into romance. He realizes he’s in love with her because she’s an innocent, beautiful creature and she falls in love with him because… he’s… handsome? Dunno. And she just can’t stop working: making clothes, cleaning things etc.

There are so many things which are wrong here that Linda, who reads romance the way other people (*cough* me *cough*) read Cosmopolitan (for the giggles), told me to give it up and read Nora Roberts, or some other big-named romance writer. Fluffier stuff, where rape does not equal love, where characters forced to marry don’t have a horrible past together.

I’d be tempted to say that the horrid stuff mistaken for love is a fluke of The Flame and the Flower itself, but it somehow manages to remind me of the less overt horrid situations in Twilight or 50 Shades. The man imposing leadership of the man is ever-present, the abusive gestures justified because male: Brandon in The Flame… sleeps with a lot of women and rapes Heather; Edward in Twilight is a stalker who makes all the important decisions about Bella’s life, safety and body; Grey in 50 Shades is a perverted playboy who considers it perfectly normal to throw a sexual slavery contract at a woman he barely met. Their counterparts are no better: Heather lets the rape thing slide; Bella finds it romantic to be spied upon in her intimacy; and Anastasia makes me want to poke her eyes out for accepting Grey’s complete control of her life.

And these are all popular novels. One was popular in the ’70s. The other two are popular today, nearly 40 years on.

I am, as you may have deduced, not a fan of this sort of literature. But I acknowledge that other people are. Which begs the question of ‘why’.

I suppose I could go two ways with this:

(Some/A large number of) Women still feel disempowered and have the same fantasies as their mothers and/or grandmothers, which serve them to better fit in the patriarchal system. If you fancy the less feminist, more traditional view, this is where you can stick the ‘women are submissive and want to be conquered by men’ argument.
There are a lot of naive readers out there and women’s naivety comes in this shape and form.

I don’t like either of those options overly much.

I don’t like saying that women are still disempowered – it would suggest that nothing changed, when it did. The fans of today’s _Twilight/50 Shades _are far from Radaway’s Smithton readers, who were mostly wives in patriarchal families. Twilight fans appear to be teenaged girls drooling over a sexy vampire and 50 Shades has fans from all over.

There’s still some pressure to conform to the standards of femininity: look at the number of movies and shows in which the girls are given a makeover to bring out their beauty and make them confident (it backfires in Glee, where Rachel’s attempt to become more slutty a la Grease is a Bad Idea, but still). If you don’t like that example, think of a woman who doesn’t shave her armpits and of the disapproval she gets if this fact is found out. The assumption that women are by nature sweet, kind and motherly and Can Take Care of Things. Advice for women that they oughtn’t call a guy after a date, that they shouldn’t sleep with someone until the xth date.
But aside from all that jazz, women can move a lot more freely in the world, admit to their likes and dislikes, build their own lives.

Why do we still have the fantasy of the controlling, abusive, yet protective male? (by ‘we’, I mean ‘we’ as a society)

I can only speculate, since I like none of the threesome of dirty books. Maybe it’s a guilty pleasure thing – you want to feel really good, but that would make you feel guilty, so you have someone obsessively push you into what you want. Heather ends up rich and happily married to a desirable man, which her modesty wouldn’t have allowed her to even consider if she hadn’t been forced into the situation. Anastasia gets the likewise rich and handsome man because he forces his way into her life, seeing her potential when she didn’t (neither did I, really; I still don’t). And Bella gets… erm. Bella gets the emo vampire (not sure why that’s a good thing). Oh, yes! Wait! She gets the rich and supposedly handsome emo vampire and immortality, yes. Who stalks his way into her life because he thinks she’s special and he falls in love and possessiveness instantly. It has to be the man who wants it and forces it on her, because otherwise the female protagonist, a paragon of virtues and modest aspirations (probably) and virginal innocence (usually), will be indistinguishable from the sexy, wily bounty chaser.

So why the hell is the protagonist a paragon of virtues and modest aspirations anyway? Maybe girls still dream of themselves as princesses, which isn’t the female equivalent of princes: princes fight, struggle, win, get rewarded. Princesses look pretty and are admired for some talent or another – mostly, they need to sit still and wait.

Even if you don’t believe that, you know the trope. You’ve heard countless stories like that, watched enough Disney, read enough Victorian literature, have been faced with enough Female Stuff to know how it goes.

But I do believe that people have read and read these books because, partly at least, they don’t know better. They haven’t come across the good stuff yet – or the older stuff. This explains why there are people out there who didn’t realize that Twilight and 50 Shades are basically romance novels, with very slight differences from the traditional schema of the genre. This explains why the abusive things go over people’s heads, why they don’t stop to think that certain ideas in these books are cringe-worthy.

It can be poor writing on one side: wanting to throw in conflict and getting a rape and a forced marriage which makes feminists draw back in horror. Wanting to prove that the man is in love and making him a stalker. Wanting to see the main character react to BDSM and making the man throw a sexual slavery contract at her, regardless of how stupid that is on his side. And readers taking actions at face value, being convinced because the author tells them to be.

And when you run into something new – sexy scenes for The Flame…, the romance genre for Twilight, steaming perversions for _50 Shades _(at least in theory), you’re more likely to see that one thing and ignore bad writing, unfortunate implications, all sorts of things which would detract from the enjoyment of that one new, shiny feature.

I’m really not sure about everything I’ve written here. Just ruminating on things. I might be wrong, but it looks right from where I’m standing right now.

Plug for Eliza Enea's "Small Steps"

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 07:53:13 +0000

Fairytales coming to life during your University years are often more annoying than magical.

Well, just so you know, the South Wing of the university vanished (so no classes, because that’s where they were held) and the roommate with the crossbow isn’t on goblin patrol duty because she went to a werehamster convention, or something like that.

It’s the cheerful, absurd, fantastic, fluffy style of the story that brings on the fun. It has the air that you could be attacked by soft rabbits at any point of time and will need to pet them before you move on. The plot is cute and amusing – sometimes you might think there’s no stopping the matchmaking ways of the older generation of women, except through paranormal means. I have been assured that the behavior of such middle-aged women is entirely modeled on reality and have to be Mighty Glad to have escaped a large collection of aunts trying to set me up with cute men (I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t have liked being subjected to eye-candy whenever I visited relatives, but that’s another story).

Eliza Enea’s lovely, heart-warming series, „Small Steps” is happening over on the Big World Network, where it’s read by the authoress herself in her own clear, pleasant, talented way. Check it out!

Why Person of Interest makes me headdesk

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 18:30:14 +0000

So. Watching this show because my buddy Linda suggested it – „Person of Interest”. It’s about guy number 1, who’s some sort of super-agent James Bond whose vocal chords got set to „rough and mysterious” in childhood and who only ever loses a fight when plot demands; and guy number 2, who’s one of those genius programmers you keep hearing about.

This show takes a helluva lot of suspension of disbelief. I mean, sure, most film hacker/programmers are modeled after a 100-handed monkey with the brain of a thousand top programmers and thus manage to do in a single day what the entirety of Google does in a month, but this show’s programmer is just… yeah.

Look. The government told him to build a machine that spots the bad guys, ok? The terrorists. So he built a huge thing from scratch and made it check every surveillance camera, every phone, every e-mail, everything, to figure out who has criminal intent.

I can sort of suspend my disbelief for that.

He both constructed the thing as far as hardware goes, and wrote the program, as far as software goes. It’s 100% accurate.

I can sort of suspend my disbelief for that.

He initially made it work for New York, then it took him a pretty long time to get it working for the whole US (like, proportional time).

It doesn’t really work that way, but whatever. I can sort of suspend my disbelief for that.

The machine started seeing ‘small fry’ along with terrorists – you know, murderers and such. Which I can totally buy, because that sounds like one of the usual computer bugs. But for small fry, the machine doesn’t differentiate between victims and criminals.

…this is where my suspension of disbelief is starting to fail. What do you mean, it doesn’t differentiate?! There’s a huge difference between „I’m going to bash Johnny’s head in with a souvenir tomorrow at 8 o’clock” and „Lalala, I’m Johnny and I’m making fries tomorrow night at 8 o’clock”. I mean, come on!

And then there’s something else: the genius programmer/hacker/hardware person who built the damned thing is guessing as to its intentions. He supposes it knows what it’s doing. He ventures ideas about what the thing means to say.

This is where my disbelief grows too much to be suspended. It crashed down like a ton of elephants. So, the guy built the thing. From scratch. Did all the genius stuff to make it work. Wrote every line of code to make it function in the right way. Thought about every single aspect. And then… turned around and forgot everything he did? O_o

I’m starting to think the machine is actually a box with a psychic monkey inside, typing social security numbers and clapping for bananas. That would make more sense than the actual premise.

Neil Gaiman's "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" [Book Review]

Sat, 31 Aug 2013 06:37:22 +0000

Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Author: Neil Gaiman

Rating: 5/5

Is this book for me? Yes.

It takes a certain amount of magic to make you not realize that the main character has no name until you need to write the review.

He is a man in his late forties, early fifties, driving down the lane where he used to live as a child. There was a funeral. It doesn’t say who died, because it doesn’t matter at all. If you’re like me, you’ll think it’s the father. But it doesn’t really matter.

I started by thinking that this is a story I’ve heard before – at some point, if an author gets old enough, there might come a book about remembering.

At the end of the lane, there’s a farm where Old Mrs Hempstock, Mrs Hempstock and Lettie Hempstock used to live. He walks in and asks if there’s still a pond at the back – or an ocean, because that’s what Lettie called it. Sitting by the pond, he remembers.

Except this is Neil Gaiman writing; and the story isn’t about children. Or, well, it’s about him, when he was a child, that summer when he was seven and the opal miner died and he woke up one morning choking on an old coin that had barely appeared into the world. It’s about the girl who had an ocean which was a pond and the thing which wanted to make people happy. It’s about the careless cruelty of adults and the lies they tell to themselves, and about memories and the way they change and the way you fill in the blanks.

The novel (it’s a short novel) has a sketch-like quality to it. If it were a painting, I’d say it’s one of those Eastern things, done with a bit of ink, simple lines and a lot of empty space to draw attention to what’s really important. Or maybe it’s just one of those stories where you’re supposed to scribble on the side. His point of view as a child caught only some things, not others – but his adult self leaves the unpleasant bits in so they’ll catch your eye for a moment and scratch your sense of suspicion.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane isn’t a book for children (you would probably be horrified to know they’re reading it – but, in a way, I think they’d like it). It doesn’t go deep into fantasy worlds, where we would expect some things to happen badly just because that’s how stories go. It’s just at the edge of reality, with him going between the very real reality of his old childhood home and the magic of the world beyond.

(P.S. It’s available, as usual, through Book Depository (free shipping), Amazon UK and Amazon US)

Free award-winning fantasy prose from Tor

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:44:11 +0000

I’ve only just seen this today, but the awesome Tor.Com, one of the biggest short fantasy stories publishers out there, is giving away a free mega-book of the award-winning prose they’ve been posting on their site for five years.

I’ve just downloaded my copy and it’s huge. I mean it. You should have a few extra hundred MB for the .pdf and the .mobi is well over 100 MB as well. 151 stories, 3800 pages. Pictures, great writing, everything. And you should get it ASAP, because the offer ends on Tuesday, September 3rd.

Get the eBook(s) here.

And have faith that they’ve got good stuff. They’re a bit like legends in the biz.

Table of Contents:

When We Were Heroes, by Daniel Abraham
Olga, by C.T. Adams
Foundation, by Ann Aguirre
The Department of Alterations, by Gennifer Albin
The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model, by Charlie Jane Anders
Six Months, Three Days, by Charlie Jane Anders
Intestate, by Charlie Jane Anders
Legacy Lost, by Anna Banks
   The Witch of Duva, by Leigh Bardugo
10.    The Too-Clever Fox, by Leigh Bardugo
11.    The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder, by Elizabeth Bear
12.    The Horrid Glory of Its Wings, by Elizabeth Bear
13.    Faster Gun, by Elizabeth Bear
14.    The Final Now, by Gregory Benford
15.    Grace Immaculate, by Gregory Benford
16.    Backscatter, by Gregory Benford
17.    River of Souls, by Beth Bernobich
18.    A Window or a Small Box, by Jedediah Berry
19.    Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, by Michael Bishop
20.    Catch ‘Em in the Act, by Terry Bisson
21.    TVA Baby, by Terry Bisson
22.    The Cockroach Hat, by Terry Bisson
23.    Shall We Gather, by Alex Bledsoe
24.    Prophet, by Jennifer Bosworth
25.    The Ruined Queen of Harvest World, by Damien Broderick
26.    Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order, by Damien Broderick
27.    The Memory Coder, by Jessica Brody
28.    The Desecrator, by Steven Brust
29.    Brother. Prince. Snake., by Cecil Castellucci
30.    We Have Always Lived on Mars, by Cecil Castellucci
31.    Our Human, by Adam Troy Castro
32.    The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere, by John Chu
33.    Fare Thee Well, by Cathy Clamp
34.    The Commonplace Book, by Jacob Clifton
35.    What Makes a River, by Deborah Coates
36.    The Ghosts of Christmas, by Paul Cornell
37.    The Elephant in the Room, by Paul Cornell
38.   Day One, by Matthew Costello
39.   Am I Free To Go?, by Kathryn Cramer
40.   Tourists, by Sean Craven
41.   Eve of Sin City, by S.J. Day
42.   The Cage, by A.M. Dellamonica
43.   Among the Silvering Herd, by A.M. Dellamonica
44.   Wild Things, by A.M. Dellamonica
45.   Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, by Cory Doctorow
46.   On 20468 Petercook, by Andy Duncan
47.   The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday, by G.D. Falksen
48.   Men Who Wish to Drown, by Elizabeth Fama
49.   The Iron Shirts, by Michael Flynn
50.   A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings, by James Alan Gardner
51.   Lightbringers and Rainmakers, by Felix Gilman
52.   Shade, by Steven Gould
53.   Bugs in the Arroyo, by Steven Gould
54.   Steampunk Quartet, by Eileen Gunn
55.   Mother, Crone, Maiden, by Cat Hellisen
56.   The Ink Readers of Doi Saket, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
57.   Too Fond, by Leanna Renee Hieber
58.   At the Foot of the Lighthouse, by Erin Hoffman
59.   Ghost Hedgehog, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
60.   A Spell of Vengeance, by D.B. Jackson
61.   The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles, by Kij Johnson
62.   Ponies, by Kij Johnson
63.   Crazy Me, by James Patrick Kelly
64.   First Flight, by Mary Robinette Kowal
65.   How to Make a Triffid, by Kelly Lagor
66.   A Water Matter, by Jay Lake
67.   The Speed of Time, by Jay Lake
68.   The Starship Mechanic, by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes
69.   Dress Your Marines in White, by Emmy Laybourne
70.   A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel, by Yoon Ha Lee
71.   Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz, by Marissa Lingen
72.   Earth Hour, by Ken MacLeod
73.   Farewell Performance, by Nick Mamatas
74.   Though Smoke Shall Hide the Sun, by Brit Mandelo
75.   The Finite Canvas, by Brit Mandelo
76.   The Hanging Game, by Helen Marshall
77.   The Courtship of the Queen, by Bruce McAllister
78.   Heads Will Roll, by Lish McBride
79.   Swift, Brutal Retaliation, by Meghan McCarron
80.   Preparations, by Mark Mills
81.   About Fairies, by Pat Murphy
82.   Fire Above, Fire Below, by Garth Nix
83.   Ruled, by Caragh M. O’Brien
84.   Hello, Moto, by Nnedi Okorafor
85.   Sacrifice of the First Sheason, by Peter Orullian
86.   The Great Defense of Layosah, by Peter Orullian
87.   The Battle of the Round, by Peter Orullian
88.   Sweetheart, by Abbi Mei Otis
89.   Ragnarok, by Paul Park
90.   Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure, by Richard Parks
91.   The Rotten Beast, by Mary E. Pearson
92.   Angel Season, by J.T. Petty
93.   Silver Linings, by Tim Pratt
94.   The Button Man and the Murder Tree, by Cherie Priest
95.   Clockwork Fairies, by Cat Rambo
96.   The Next Invasion, by Robert Reed
97.   Our Candidate, by Robert Reed
98.   Swingers, by Robert Reed
99.   The Cairn in Slater Woods, by Gina Rosati
100. Jack of Coins, by Christopher Rowe
101. Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory, by Rudy Rucker
102. Good Night, Moon, by Rudy Rucker
103. Loco, by Rudy Rucker
104. Jacks and Queens at the Green Mill, by Marie Rutkoski
105. The Film-Makers of Mars, by Geoff Ryman
106. Firstborn, by Brandon Sanderson
107. After the Coup, by John Scalzi
108. The President’s Brain is Missing, by John Scalzi
109. Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue, by John Scalzi
110. A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon, by Ken Scholes
111. Making My Entrance Again With My Usual Flair, by Ken Scholes
112. Two Stories, by Ken Scholes
113. If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear, by Ken Scholes
114. Rag and Bone, by Priya Sharma
115. Do Not Touch, by Prudence Shen
116. The Night Children: An Escape From Furnace Story, by Alexander Gordon Smith
117. King of Marbury, by Andrew Smith
118. Beauty Belongs to the Flowers, by Matthew Sanborn Smith
119. Overtime, by Charles Stross
120. Down on the Farm, by Charles Stross
121. A Tall Tail, by Charles Stross
122. Zeppelin City, by Michael Swanwick
123. The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree, by Michael Swanwick
124. The Dala Horse, by Michael Swanwick
125. The Mongolian Wizard, by Michael Swanwick
126. The Fire Gown, by Michael Swanwick
127. Day of the Kraken, by Michael Swanwick
128. Eros, Philia, Agape, by Rachel Swirsky
129. A Memory of Wind, by Rachel Swirsky
130. The Monster’s Million Faces, by Rachel Swirsky
131. Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia, by Rachel Swirsky
132. Sing, by Karin Tidbeck
133. What Doctor Gottlieb Saw, by Ian Tregillis
134. Vilcabamba, by Harry Turtledove
135. The Star and the Rockets, by Harry Turtledove
136. The House That George Built, by Harry Turtledove
137. We Haven’t Got There Yet, by Harry Turtledove
138. Shtetl Days, by Harry Turtledove
139. Lee at the Alamo, by Harry Turtledove
140. Running of the Bulls, by Harry Turtledove
141. The City Quiet as Death, by Steven Utley
142. The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While, by Catherynne M. Valente
143. Terrain, by Genevieve Valentine
144. Last Son of Tomorrow, by Greg van Eekhout
145. Errata, by Jeff VanderMeer
146. A Stroke of Dumb Luck, by Shiloh Walker
147. Last Train to Jubilee Bay, by Kali Wallace
148. Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction, by Jo Walton
149. The Nostalgist, by Daniel H. Wilson
150. Super Bass, by Kai Ashante Wilson
151. The Palencar Project, by Gregory Benford, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., James Morrow, Michael Swanwick, and Gene Wolfe, Edited by David G. Hartwell

Amnesia

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:10:05 +0000

Amnesia is a scary game
Amnesia is a fright
I love to play, so it’s a shame
It kills my sleep at night.

Insomniac, I walk around
A glass of drink to find
When in the dark I hear a sound–
Steve might be right behind!

I dart around, a crazy girl
In an old, friendly house
I find a box, in it I curl
More quiet than a mouse.

When dawn is nigh, I crawl outside
And glance around in fear
The laptop then I open wide–
The time to play is here.

AU Bleach via hijacked subtitles

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 21:03:10 +0000

Many years ago, I ran into this fan-subtitled version of the Bleach anime. The subs were good – until the second half of episode 41, where they were hijacked by someone out to troll, who replaced perfectly good lines with gangsta „You owe me money, bitch!” and sex-related themes.

In other words, this nice, clean anime about loyalty and friendship and fighting for what’s right turned into its complete opposite under my terrified eyes, thanks to the insane ideas of whoever was in charge of the subtitles. Poof! There goes your innocence.

I don’t know who the people/person who did this were/was, but I would like to thank them from the bottom of my heart. That version of the second half of episode 41 is one of my favorite things ever. The subs just work with the images perfectly – and this was long before Hitler was taken over by Youtube and turned into a meme. And, by the way, Hitler was easier to do, because it mostly just him talking. Here we have a number of characters, with emotions going everywhere, a flashback and so on and so forth – and yet the crazy subtitle person went ahead and created a perfectly coherent if extremely deranged plot.

Whenever I’m in the mood for complete crack, I play it to see the improbable ’everybody owes Ichigo money’ plot, combined with the way more improbable secondary plot of Byakuya being an abusive, perverted, gay (or bi and incestuous?… hard to tell) weirdo.

There’s a few brilliant lines in there. By the way, the first time I watched it, it was probably the following line which tipped me off that the subs were fake.

So, the deranged, gay, money-owing plot goes like this: Byakuya (pictured above) has a bit of a fight with Ganju over money and sex – which is when Byakuya says that line above. Ganju is defeated and ends up in a pool of blood. Byakuya is about to keep attacking, but white-haired Ukitake shows up to complain about being cheated on – and about their relationship in general:

And to drop a bomb on Byakuya (related to, say, the actual plot of Bleach XD):

Then Ichigo shows up on the scene. And he apparently came for a very important reason: to get his money back from Hanataro!

But Hanataro doesn’t have it, so Ichigo turns to Rukia, who has a sudden flashback of the event – we find out she owes Ichigo a lot of money. Like, 50 yen (that’s about half a dollar). Unfortunately, she can’t pay him back.

We switch back to the present, where Ichigo finally notices Ganju lying around looking dead. And he remembers that „that dead guy” owed him money as well. What to do, what to do?… He tells Rukia she’ll pay with her debt with her body. She complains a bit, then says yes. Ichigo is pleased, of course.

But, oh no! Byakuya thinks he also has rights to Rukia. He argues with Ichigo and it gets to drawn swords. Perverted Byakuya takes his out and wants to play this game called „drop your and pants”. He explains it to Ichigo:

Ichigo, as you can see from his expression, isn’t very happy about it. The tension builds and builds – and it turns out that Byakuya owed money to Ichigo, too, because he borrowed money from Rukia!

Luckily, just about the time disaster is about to happen and the perverted, creepy Byakuya is about to fight hard and good with the money-lending pimp-ish Ichigo, Yoruichi shows up to stop the fight with a devastating revelation: Byakuya owes her money.

…to be continued!!!

Seriously, this is some of the most hilarious crack ever. It’s amazing what you can do with the wrong set of subtitles. It’s brilliant without knowing the show and it’s even more brilliant when knowing the show and knowing that Byakuya is probably the most law-abiding, rule-following, elegant and proper person. And the ‘you owe me, bitch, I’ll kill you’ Ichigo is in perfect contrast with his real ‘I will protect you and save you’ anime hero self.

Although I do believe the real Yoruichi would be thrilled to say the „you owe me, too” line.

So, thank you to whoever created this absolutely vulgar, deranged, gangster parody of Bleach. It is in horrible taste and it’s bloody amazing. You are part of the reason why I know how to create subtitles in the first place. And you’ve cheered many an evening for both me and my friends.

Tomb Raider and the History of Japan

Fri, 02 Aug 2013 08:49:54 +0000

[Note: This is a translation of an article I originally wrote in Romanian, but which I realized I wanted in English as well. And translators translate, even if they hate translating themselves.]

I’ve been playing Tomb Raider these days. I won’t pretend I’m enough of a gamer to write a proper review, but I personally liked it. The plot isn’t amazing, but the atmosphere is. And it’s really neat to play from beginning to end.

However, I noticed a few mysterious things about the history of Japan pretty early on. I won’t necessarily say they’re bad (it’s a game that has a strong fantasy side, in the end), but they drew my attention. (I was a Japanese major)

1. Yamatai.

The first time I heard the name, it sounded vaguely familiar – because I’d heard of Yamato (an old region of Japan, associated at one point with the imperial family). So I browsed the net to see what Yamat_ai_ was all about. It would seem that there are indeed old documents which say that it was the land where Himiko ruled, but the its location is merely „Where in Japan?”, not the romantic notion of „Let us seek out the lost kingdom”. Long story short, if it was in a certain area, then Himiko was the local ruler and that was that, but if the kingdom was in another (specific) region, then she might be connected with the imperial court later on.

2. Himiko

She is actually mentioned in Chinese chronicles, but not so much in Japanese ones. Or if she is, she’s mentioned under another name. The thing is, with the Japanese you can always encounter things like postmortem names for emperors or with the desire to avoid calling women by their proper names (in the Tale of Genji, 11th c., written by Murasaki Shikibu, the majority of women are named after where they live, or details that remind you of them; even „Murasaki Shikibu” is a pseudonym).

Technically speaking, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, two important Japanese chronicles, were written at the beginning of the 8th century and they avoided naming women during the Heian period, which started at the end of the 8th century. But whatever. I don’t know enough history to be able to tell if that naming interdiction existed earlier on.

3. Sam as a descendent of Himiko

This is where that interesting thing with the unknown location of Yamatai is of consequence. If Yamatai is in the area in which the Yamato imperial court lived later on, that means that the emperors of Japan are Himiko’s descendants. And here’s the fun part: it means that today’s imperial family is descended from Himiko, because the Japanese never changed their ruling dynasty. Moreover, the noble families descend out of the imperial family themselves – when it was clear that a child wouldn’t end up on the throne, he got a family name and became a noble. They didn’t ennoble commoners.

Then, after so long, and so many descendents in so many clans… it’s possible that Sam is very distantly related to a huge number of Japanese people, via Himiko. (so it’s not that unlikely that she’d be compatible with the funky blood-dependent rituals mentioned in the game)

Oh, and about that: in mythology, the Japanese imperial family descends from the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

4. Himiko’s samurai

This was the detail that had me going „Wait, what?!” in the beginning. That legends would say Himiko is guarded by samurai. The Ancient Himiko, guarded by Middle Age samurai. It’s like saying, „Legend has it that the Caesar was a leader from Ancient Rome and his personal guard was formed of loyal knights.” Not really. Warrior samurai appeared centuries after Himiko.

This should’ve been the legend that made Lara wonder what was going on.

5. Himiko as a Buddhist

The island is full of Buddhist statues and Himiko’s represented in the same way. But Himiko was most likely a Shintoist (Shinto is the Japanese indigenous religion, full of gods, demons and spirits). That’s probably where she gets her shamanistic reputation.

6. The art is all over the timeline

Between statues and paintings, my feeling is that they were more keen on representing medieval Japan. Which is explainable in context, but it really should’ve made Lara think.

7. Seppuku

The idea of suicide (with the implications and meanings we associate with Japanese suicide) started around the 12th c. and became a ritual later. So the corpse Lara finds of one of Himiko’s generals who committed seppuku was really suspect.

8. The mummies.

They’re very mummified. Which isn’t really something that would happen, considering the climate. Approximately all the dead you come across seem to have enjoyed the benefits of an Egyptian climate, in which they wouldn’t decompose too much. But considering the weather on the island, they would’ve turned to dust a lot faster. And the samurai who’d committed seppuku would’ve probably been eaten by various animals and bugs.

But, well. Magic!!!

A list of classy WTF books

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 08:01:23 +0000

Do you know those books which you can supposedly brag about reading? You know, like „Pride and Prejudice”, „The Satanic Verses” or „The Iliad”? Of course you do. You run into them a lot – and there’s others which are less known, but just as impressive to mention.

Except some of them are weird. Or very weird. Or, well, fucked up – despite being classics, critically acclaimed and other such. And despite their authors not thinking they were that twisted. Here’s a few:

The Tale of Genji.

This wonderful, beautiful novel was written sometime in the 11th century and it’s the world’s first novel. Or the first modern novel. Or the first psychological novel. All of those have been said at one point – it’s considered a masterpiece and the only real reason you’ve probably never heard of it is that it’s Japanese. Our Western world grew up without it.

It’s a splendid book, full of poetry and romance. Genji is a Japanese prince, so beautiful women fall in love with him at first sight, so handsome he makes men wish he were a woman so he could be their wife. And he has these wonderful affairs, yes?…

Well. For a few chapters. Then he falls in love with one of his father’s concubines, a woman who looks exactly like his dead mother. He can’t have her for his own because he can’t exactly snatch her away from the emperor, but he has an affair with her anyway. And, later on, he pretty much kidnaps a ten year-old from her family because she looks precisely like his father’s concubine (and his mother) – and raises the little girl to be the perfect wife.

If that doesn’t set your teeth on edge, then you should also know that pretty much everybody a character is likely to sleep with in this novel will be a blood relation. Because interbreeding yay!

House of Sleeping Beauties

Yasunari Kawabata won a Nobel Prize for literature. If that doesn’t make him a classy author, I don’t know what will.

Most of his novels have a haunting beauty, a delightful meditative atmosphere, a contemplative mood that will stick with you for quite some time. House of Sleeping Beauties is no exception.

…but then there’s the fact that the sleeping beauties are drugged prostitutes. The protagonist finds out about this brothel where old, impotent men go to spend the night with girls who’ve been fed sleeping pills so they wouldn’t wake up no matter what happened. And he spends quite some time thinking he’s still potent – what if he were to actually sleep with one of the girls?

The Japanese. They have way too many examples of creepy as hell fiction.

The Last Temptation (of Christ)

If you’ve only heard of one modern Greek author, Nikos Kazantzakis is probably it. He’s one of those VIPs of world literature whose novels got translated in all sorts of languages and then transformed into movies.

The Last Temptation of Christ is about a Jesus who is struggling with the destiny God threw on his shoulders. He spent his life as a carpenter making crosses for would-be Messiahs to be crucified on and he really, really doesn’t want to be the Chosen anything. Eventually, though, he ends up in charge of a bunch of misfits (the apostles), with Judas, who wants a real revolution and a liberation from Romans at his side.

It’s actually all weird, as if Kazantzakis was dreaming this in a drug-induced stupor, but the oddest part is where Jesus has this strong vivid dream/temptation where his „guardian angel” tells him he did well and he’s released from the cross. He goes away free, marries Mary Magdalen, and she dies. So then he goes off and marries both Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus and has lots of children with them.

The entire novel reads like an odd fever dream. I’m certain that’s not exactly the impression Kazantzakis would have liked to leave behind.

Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence. You’ve probably heard of him because of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is more of the same scandalous sex stuff. Except less explicit.

Ursula and Gudrun are sisters. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun is some sort of artist. They become involved with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich and some very psychological stuff ensues, complete with philosophical discussions of politics and society. Which is probably what makes this book one of those ‘classics’ that you study in university (I know I did).

But aside from the crazy names which add their own special ‘huh?’ to the book, the title too is an oddity. It’s a misnomer, but I’m not sure it’s an intentional one. Considering D.H. Lawrence’s other books, I think the author doesn’t know what love is if it strips down to its underwear and paints the letters ‘L’,‘O’,‘V’ and ‘E’ on its naked body. If the book was called ‘Women in Relationships They’re Very Ambiguous About’, it would’ve been more to the point (but admittedly less catchy).

The book provides examples of what I’ve come to describe as ‘D.H. Lawrence sex’. It involves the couple being attracted, going to bed – and then suddenly one of them (usually the woman) has this revelation that she’s actually repulsed by the guy she’s sleeping with. It’s sort of the ‘oh my god, who and what did I do last night?!’, but experienced a lot faster than simply the morning after. Or the hour after. Or the minute after. Or just after – it’s during.

Between some instincts for violence and more dislike than love in the major couples, the only real relationship based on actual love and attraction in the book is between Gerald and Rupert. There’s a moment when the sexual attraction between them is palpable and much, much more real than what either of the two experience with the women. I’m not sure it’s what Lawrence intended, but the psychological ride you take in Women in Love is going to keep you going, ‘what the fuck?’ over and over.

Jude the Obscure

My literature professor called Thomas Hardy mid-evil (pun on medieval, of course), which was very witty and informative of her.

If you’ve read a single Thomas Hardy novel, it was probably Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which is pretty WTF itself. But Jude the Obscure beats it hands-down on the WTF scale. It’s sort of a small village boy-meets-girl novel, in which Jude is a young man aspiring to go to university and Sue is his beautiful, perfect cousin. It’s kind of a worrisome plot in the first place, but things go a lot worse when you get the hand of destiny practically making itself felt at every step of the book, and when you have a creepy as hell kid popping up in the novel for no other reason than to make you think Frankenstein was a perfectly decent and socially acceptable sort of fellow.

Combine the creepy magical-superstitious-fated part of the book with the supposed realism and by the end you’ll be wondering what the hell you’ve read.

Amanda Meuwissen's "Incubus" [Book Review]

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 18:01:58 +0000

Title: Incubus

Author: Amanda Meuwissen

Rating: 4/5

Is this book for me? Probably. Wait, no! Do gay people bother you? Then no, it’s not. But otherwise, yes. A cool, adventurous novel of the supernatural and romantic sort, complete with a Seer, fairies and magic.

Incubus is the sort of novel that keeps you turning pages (or, in my case, listening to the next audio chapter, read by the author herself). It’s sweet, a bit fluffy, romantic and it has action going on, as well as danger hanging over the heads of the characters for a bit of thrilling fun.

Now, I might be evil here (of course I am), but the story reminds me a bit of the TV show Supernatural – we have two brothers involved in a sort of battle against the supernatural world, a monster of the arc, a silent and stoic helper, some of that old-fashioned monster-chasing through the streets of cities and a sacrificing-for-each-other brotherly love.

Except Incubus has fairies, not angels and demons. And there isn’t anything disturbingly much like a love-hate relationship between the brothers (unlike in Supernatural where the show just thrives on Implications). Nor is the mood downbeat at any point. And, oh yeah, the gay relationship is explicit and clear.

The title character, the incubus, is a fascinating and attractive guy (bonus for chicks who dig wings: he’s got wings (at times, when he’s in incubus-form); and red hair; and tattoos – actually, his descriptions remind me of an occasionally winged, horned, fanged Abarai Renji, but that might be my long dabble in Bleach fanfiction speaking).

I won’t be spoiling your fun, but I’m assuring you it’s fun. And fluffy.

P.S. The paperback is available via Amazon, if Amazon is your thing. If you prefer going to the source, then the paperback, audiobook and Kindle or other eBook versions are on the Big World Network website. And you can of course just subscribe to the Big World Network at $3/month and have access to Incubus and a number of other series.

Wondering what I should re-read…

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 09:32:45 +0000

Three choices, all of which are awesome stories.

Lightning on the Wave’s Sacrifices series. Because it’s a wonderful mess of great characters, great writing, poetry references and psychological stuff. I loved it and I only read it once. Bad points: it’s 3 million words long. Good points: subtlety, great writing, I can’t remember things in it very well but I’d want to. It’s basically a series that starts with a gritting mindfuck and something that’s clearly wrong:

„What are your vows, Harry?”

Harry knew what they were, even though he was only five. He whispered them as his mother held him over his brother’s bed, and his mother said them with him, murmured hypnotic words that Harry had heard his whole life.

Think about it. A kid who has vows. Since he was 5. It only becomes horrible and then wonderful from there. Also the only story to make me wish I understood poetry more.

Peppermint Quartz’s Psychoverse. It’s got one of the most psychotic love relationships I’ve ever read. And it’s filled with disturbing scenes of the BDSM kind (not the 50 Shades stuff, I’m talking the real thing and then some), and of the freely psychopathic horror kind. When I first read it three years ago, I was giggling with horror and fascination and couldn’t stop talking about it. Bad points: I really need to dig up my list of which stories were part of it and in what order. Also, the writing isn’t that good in the beginning, although it gets better. There’s horror stuff going on. The author’s favorite way to move the plot forward is through porn. Good points: fascinating and horrible. It’s an interesting insight into psycho ways of thinking. It has occasional places where things and ideas just claw their way into your head and refuse to leave.

Thinking of Aizen made Ichigo tighten his grip on the battered steering wheel. He had actually begun to empathize with the traitor after spending almost two months with him and Ichimaru. He had fallen into their circle. They had wrapped everyone they came across into a spell – people saw the warmth and love they had for each other, and they wanted into that warmth. Hungered for it. Fought for it. Died for it.

Ichigo now realized that all the warmth was real, tender and genuine, and restricted to the two of them. They generated heat, that was true, but the heat didn’t touch any other person that they interacted with, merely a lure to lead the credulous in.

That pretty much__ describes the disturbed relationship of the story. The other parts are… less disturbing. Always a fascinating read, but clocking at over half a million words somewhere. Maybe more. I didn’t add everything up.__

Phoenix.writing’s _The Problem with Purity. _Basically a romance, but one with a plot, a very neat writing style and interesting ideas. I read it back when it came out, but I’ve always wanted to re-read. Good points: fancy writing, clever characters. Bad points: I can’t recall one, but maybe I’m not as enthused about it as about the others right now.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Suzanne Collins' "Mockingjay" [Book Review]

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 12:24:35 +0000

Title: Mockingjay

Series: The Hunger Games
Author: Suzanne Collins

Rating: 4.5/5

Is this book for me? If you liked the Hunger Games, yes. Definitely. This is where it gets wild(er).

Book three – and the final one – of the Hunger Games. It’s lovely.

The first two books seem in a way to be a prelude to the third, which is a full-scale war complete with media coverage, rebels, strategies and whatnot. If there’s a single thing I disliked about it, it was that Suzanne Collins didn’t go deeper into explaining the world she created and how it all fits together. Aside from that…

The main character (Katniss Everdeen) was very annoying at times, but in the best of ways. She’s not the usual style of hero, ready to give her all to the Cause from greatness of soul and self-sacrificing ardor. She isn’t even the antihero who goes off the beaten path and does borderline immoral, or even downright immoral things, for the Cause. Katniss is simply… normal. She’s very real. She’s a girl who doesn’t really want to be involved in a war which kills too many people. She wants to sit it out and sulk, she wants to get away from the madness of the Games, the madness of fighting, the madness of politics. But she can’t. And she is annoying because of this very realism. She isn’t born a hero, she doesn’t want to be the protagonist, but the role is shoved on her and she eventually, reluctantly, rises up to it. She’s a reminder that we’re human and that our most heroic-looking choices aren’t always the best, nor do they have the most amazing motivations behind them.__

As for the atmosphere of Mockingjay… A friend criticized Collins’ battle scenes as weak, but I think they have their own sort of „The Red Badge of Courage„-style quality to them. Well. Except „The Red Badge…” had nearly no plot and it mostly consisted of here-now descriptions of battles and confusion. Mockinjay, on the other hand, lets you see quite a lot of the war otherwise – from bits of things behind the scenes to media coverage and ruthlessness in strategies. It has surprising twists and turns and a powerful atmosphere. Collins keeps you wondering until the very end, and a bit after.

(Currently, Mockingjay is super-cheap on Amazon UK and on sale on Amazon US. Again, I’m not sure how much that will last. And there’s always free shipping on the Book Depository.)