(1) VALENTE TARGET OF KIRK DEATH BACKLASH. Catherynne M. Valente told her newsletter readers about the death and other threats she’s received after being targeted on a list retweeted by Elon Musk in “Through the F***ing Looking Glass, Folks”. …What … Continue reading →
The New Yorker is trying to convince me that Bluesky has become annoying and everyone’s back on Xitter. Not linking because it’s paywalled. True or false?
I never got the hang of Twitter. I have similar problems with Bluesky. I don’t need a social site to deliver me more links. I want conversation. Is conversation dead? Where is it? (I know there’s some here…)
The winners of the Deutsche Science Fiction Preis 2025 were announced on August 26. The juried award for the best short story and best novel published in the German language in the previous year is sponsored by the Science Fiction Club Deutschland, … Continue reading →
The Science Fiction Research Association announced their 2025 award winners on August 12. STUDENT PAPER AWARD The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student. MARY KAY BRAY … Continue reading →
It’s come ’round again, the anniversary of the first day I sat down and wrote something here intended for daily(ish) updating, twenty-seven years ago, long ago enough that AOL was still a viable and ongoing concern and that blogs weren’t called “blogs,” they were called “online diaries” or “online journals.” Because I was a former journalist and also a bit of an ass, I spurned both those titles (as I would the word “blog” a little later), preferring to say that I wrote an “online column.” Over time, I have become rather less precious about this, especially now that “blog” is a concept that now hearkens back to a cretaceous era of the Internet, before social media and algorithms and the concept of being “terminally online.” If only we knew then what we know now. We might all go running into the night, never to return.
Be that as it may, Whatever continues, and I still post here regularly, along with my daughter Athena, who was a couple months from being born when I started this whole thing. At this point in time, she actually does more here than I do; she posts almost all the Big Ideas, and writes as many of the longer pieces here these days than I manage. This partly because so much more of my professional life happens offline these days — in the last week or so, as an example, I wrote a short story, a script treatment and some of my novel, and then traveled to Portland for a convention, and starting Monday I embark on a two-week book tour — and partly because Athena is writing cool and interesting stuff and I’m really happy about that. The Whatever is better for having her as part of it, and it’s been fun watching this place grow from my personal soapbox into a two-person shop. I like that 27 years on, this site is still evolving.
I am very really happy with what’s going on in my professional writing life at the moment (I have some very cool stuff going on right now I absolutely cannot tell you about yet, but when I can tell you, I think you’ll be excited), and one side effect of that is that at the end of the day I often don’t have it together to post more than something short here. I don’t think this is a tragedy, but I would like to write slightly longer here than I have recently. I have some ideas how to do this, but a lot of that will have to wait after the book promo season I am about to find myself in. In the meantime, there will be views out of a hotel window, posts about cats, and more cool stuff from Athena.
And so, onward — for Whatever and for me and Athena. I like where everything is with Whatever, and I look forward to where we go from here. Another year awaits.
Seem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:
(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).
As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.
Our newest addition to the Scamperbeast clan continues to be friggin’ adorable, and also his personality is beginning to show more. He is rambunctious, which is to be expected in a kitten, and also a bit of menace, since he discovered that he enjoys both the stairs and being underfoot, which is a dangerous combination with one is trying to navigate the stairs at night and suddenly there is a kitten. There are reasons why, when I turned forty, I trained myself to start reaching for the railing on the stairs, and this kitten is definitely one of those reasons.
In terms of the other cats, Saja continues to be an annoyance to Sugar and Spice, the former of whom still wants nothing to do with him, and the latter of which has come to grudgingly accept that he might be on the bed at the same time she is. Smudge is more congenial to him and the two of them tussle on a regular basis now:
This is lovely for us, as it reminds us of when Smudge was the kitten a Zeus was the one tusslin’ with him. It’s nice to know the tussle reaches over generations. Charlie and Saja also continue to get along famously. It’s as good an integration at this point that one could hope for.
The one real annoying thing Saja will do is try to eat my face, which he does every night between three and five am. He’s probably not actually trying to eat my face, he’s probably trying to nurse, which will not avail him of anything, alas for him. This will continue until I grab him, take him downstairs and then plop him in front of a cat food bowl, at which point he goes, oh, right, that’s where the food is. I’m hoping he grows out of this; I would really prefer to sleep through the night. We’ll see.
Six works new to me: two fantasy (one a roleplaying game), four science fiction. The roleplaying game is part of a series but otherwise, they all seem to be stand-alone.
(1) LIVE AND DIRECT. [Item by N.] Nintendo livestreamed an hour-long Nintendo Direct today, featuring announcements and trailers for video games and DLC coming to the new Switch 2 console, including the sequel to the Hugo-winning Hades, breaking out of … Continue reading →
We’ve made it to another Friday, and here is a new set of books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound. What here is piquing your interest? Share in the comments!
Okay, my dearios, I am sure all dear rdrs are with me that tradwives are not trad, they are deploying an aesthetic loosely based on vague memories of the 1950s - and meedja representations at that - and some very creepy cultish behaviour - they are not returning to some lovely Nachral State -
And that as I bang on about a lot, women have been engaged in all kinds of economic activity THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY since economic activity became A Thing.
I have a spot of nitpickery to apply - it rather skips over and elides the move from the household economy into factories e.g., leading to 'separate spheres' with wife stuck at home (and even that was a very blurry distinction, I mutter); and also the amount of exploitative homeworking undertaken by women of the lower classes (often to the detriment of any kind of 'good housekeeping').(Not saying middle-class women didn't also find ways of making a spot of moolah to eke out household budget.)
And of course a lot of tradwives are actually performing as economically productive influencers: TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media - in a tradition of women who made a very nice living out of telling other women how to be domestic goddesses, ahem ahem.
CONN: Hello everyone, and please welcome to the show a legend in her own time, Theamh ni hUlnach na Craiobh!
THEAMH: Who are you talking to?
CONN: Don’t ask. Shriia, thanks for coming on the show, I know you’re very busy doing other things right now.
THEAMH: I mean you told me you needed something so I kind of had to be here.
CONN: True. I just…I can’t find the usual host, I don’t know where she is. Hiding, is my guess. But I just…wanted…no. No, I needed…I mean I need to talk to a shriia. And you were the first one I could find.
THEAMH: Idair moves in mysterious ways. You know in all the millions of words in this saga, I don’t think we’ve ever actually met. I mean, there was that one time–
CONN: But that’s not canon. No, in the actual books, I don’t think we ever meet. We just…watch each other from afar.
THEAMH: Well I hope I will live up to the legend. So…what do you need, friend?
CONN: I…
…
CONN: You won a war against the worst and most evil people to ever come out of our country without killing anyone.
THEAMH: We did.
CONN: How did you do it?
THEAMH: I mean, with the help of Idair, the way we do everything.
CONN: I know. I just…I’m looking for models. Hope. Inspiration. Something. Can you give me some details.
THEAMH: So first of all, we did lose a lot of people. There were eighteen shriic martyrs in that war. So that’s one thing nobody wants to talk about really but it is very important: you can decide not to kill, but you can’t always decide not to die. And you have to know that and be ready to die. And maybe that’s easier for us, because we have Idair, and we trust that when we die she’ll take care of us, one way or the other.
CONN: I never thought about whether I was ready to die. I just…did what I felt like I had to do.
THEAMH: In times like these, that’s basically what it means to be ready to die. But of course you also have to know how to fight. I’m bad at strategy, other people handled that. But I do know how to fight.
And it also helps that we’re usually not fighting dark users directly, one to one. They do their work and we thwart their work and most of the time we don’t actually meet in battle. Which is good, because in one on one combat with dark users our disadvantages are significant. If you don’t have surprise or the numbers advantage, in a hand to hand firefight you’re most likely going to lose. I mean it’s a lot easier to kill an opponent than to disable one. You can block and wrap people but that’s temporary and it’s exhausting. If you want to disarm one of us, you really have to disarm her.
CONN: That’s horrifying.
THEAMH: Sorry. It’s a scoil joke. But I guess I think I should point out that we didn’t take out all of our opponents. They took each other out. Frequently.
CONN: How did you get them to do that?
THEAMH: I think the only role we played in that was putting stress on their system. When things started getting harder and going wrong and not working, they turned on each other. Dark users don’t work well together. They never really trust anyone, and most of them can’t see anything beyond their own desires. That’s what made Lythril so dangerous. She actually understood the importance of organization and she tried to do it. But when the going got tough, she just started getting rid of the people who’d failed her and pissed her off.
CONN: So you’re saying you didn’t beat the Dark One, the Dark One beat itself.
THEAMH: Call it a joint effort. I mean you can’t just trust the Dark One to defeat itself. You have to fight it. But it helps to know that when you fight it, the Dark One will eventually start fighting itself.
CONN: Why? I mean are dark users not smart enough to figure this out and stop doing this?
THEAMH: One, most dark users are actually not that smart–Lythril is unusal that way–and two, even the smart ones just…can’t help it. It’s the nature of evil. I get what I want for me and mine and to hell with you and yours. They can cooperate with each other against a common enemy in a specific and limited way. But no dark user will go against his own interests to help out another dark user. No dark user will sacrifice herself–or really anything that matters to her, including her gold or her leisure or her pleasures–for another. I mean I have not had the chance to test this theory but I am pretty sure that self-sacrifice is a loss violation on the dark side.
CONN: What is the Dark One anyway? You must know.
THEAMH: You know it as well as I do. It comes out of her world and you’ve spent so much more time in that than I have.
CONN: I still don’t…I don’t think I really understand it.
THEAMH: Friend, nor do I. But I know what it’s made of. Greed.
CONN: Right. Hatred.
THEAMH: Violence.
CONN: Cruelty. I mean that’s basically hatred plus violence. Ambition?
THEAMH: Ambition takes on the color of whatever you put it next to. There are some true shriias who are ambitious. Morat, in her way. Aine, in a different way. Just not me.
CONN: Where does the laughter come in?
THEAMH: What?
CONN: Dark One’s Laughter. That’s an oath on the dark side, right?
THEAMH: Yes.
CONN: But you…you all make jokes, you all laugh.
THEAMH: Sure. But the Dark One’s laughter is different. It’s bitter and black and contemptuous. It’s hateful. The Dark One laughs at suffering and pain. If you laugh at death that’s the Dark One’s laughter. You fight evil and you get to really hate certain proponents of it and there are temptations. But I hope I’m dead and burned before I ever laugh with the Dark One.
CONN: What if you hear it in your head?
THEAMH: Is that why you really needed to talk to me, friend?
CONN: It is.
THEAMH: Listen, friend. You fought these people too. And you won. Without killing anyone. How did you do it?
CONN: I wasn’t in the resistance. I was locked up.
THEAMH: Friend, you were locked up because you were in the resistance. You WERE the resistance. All of it that we had at the time.
CONN: I don’t know who they had to fight to get us out of there or how much damage they did.
THEAMH: They waited until they could do it without staining the victory. They waited for us to weaken the dark users and they waited for the ordinary people to turn on the traitors. I mean they were working at it, not just waiting. But that’s how any of it’s possible. You weaken their power and then when it’s too weak to withstand you, you break it. And when you break it, instead of fighting, they run.
CONN: It seems like a lot to ask. That much work and that much patience and that much dying.
THEAMH: It is a lot to ask. And…I mean…like I can say “without staining the victory” and you know what I mean because even though you’re not a shriia you understand that death is a stain. We live the way we live and have the rules we have because we’re trying to show people why we have to protect life even in our enemies. And we don’t pretend it’s easy. And some of us die doing it. And we hope that makes it easier for ordinary people to protect life and hate death. But…I don’t think the Cretid Nation has anything like the Order.
CONN: It doesn’t. It has guns and prisons and police and the Dark One’s laughter. So…if you’re a Cretid…how would you do this? Defeat evil without killing anyone?
THEAMH: Don’t you think that if there were an easy answer to that, Aine would have found it?
CONN: I guess I do.
THEAMH: You want the hard answer?
CONN: If you have one.
THEAMH: You can’t free the Cretid Nation. You have to turn the Cretid Nation into some other place, and then free it. I mean in the way we’re talking about. Because all of this–your way of fighting, my way of fighting–it only works at all because we have the people with us. In the Cretid Nation the people can’t be with you, they can’t be with each other even.
…
THEAMH: I told you it was the hard answer.
CONN: Yeah.
…
THEAMH: Have I given what you need?
CONN: The closest thing to it that I can have, I think.
THEAMH: Goodbye then. Take care, friend. Idair with you.
This time I disappeared because I have been having way too many feelings about KPop Demon Hunters.
WAY. TOO. MANY.
I did not like the ending of this film. However, to say that I'm currently obsessed with it might be an understatement, so obviously I'm in. I bought all the way in, otherwise I wouldn't be left like this--feeling betrayed. I'm not going to go into all of my feelings because all of them would have to be under the cut thanks to the fact that they're all releated to the ending, so MAJOR SPOILERS.
But, yeah, I've literally been doing that thing that I do, which is to google the crap out of things that were mentioned in the film, like saja (fascinating stuff there!) and Korean water demons (mul gwishin), etc.
For those of you who saw it, what did you think of KPop Demon Hunters?
EDITED TO ADD: Fair warning! Spoiler FEELINGS DUMP in comments!! Do not read comments if you do not want spoilers!!
I'd been posting reviews to LiveJournal since April of 2014 but on September 12, 2014, James Nicoll Reviews went live, with a review of Robert A. Heinlein's Between Planets.
Philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia’s Memories From The Jungle, newly translated from the French by Christopher Beach, is a profoundly sad novel about a civilized chimpanzee who must return to nature. While Garcia does at times plumb the comic potential of this set-up, the book is mainly a bleak exploration of the faithlessness of masters over those they dominate. In his own language, the protagonist and narrator Doogie is “faithful to the human,” but as the story progresses it becomes clear that humans have betrayed that faithfulness. The novel succeeds in spades at what it sets out to do. Unfortunately, in getting there, it ventures into malignant racial territory in ways that a contemporary novel about an African ape ought to be more self-aware about avoiding.
Originally published under the title Mémoires de la jungle in 2010, it is the second of eight novels written by Garcia and also the second one to be translated into English. Structurally, each of the novel’s chapters is subdivided into two sections. In the sections headed “From The Jungle,” Doogie narrates his adventures in the Congo Basin following the crash of a spaceship. In the sections headed “Memories,” Doogie recounts his youth at a zoo near Victoria Falls, where he was raised as the surrogate child and sibling of a family of ethologists. The main body of the novel, meanwhile, is bookended by chapters narrated by Doogie’s surrogate older sister and primary caretaker, Janet, reflecting on the experiments she and her family performed on Doogie and on the chimpanzee’s ultimate fate. Both Doogie and Janet, then, are unreliable narrators in different ways: Doogie is an ape with a point of view that is different from a human’s; Janet dissembles and self-justifies.
Garcia makes interesting choices to show that Doogie’s consciousness and command of language is different from that of a human. For example, Doogie’s narration slips between first, second, and third person and between past and present tense. Sometimes these shifts occur multiple times inside a single sentence. Oftentimes Doogie forms phrases in an idiosyncratic or childlike way. The effect can be entrancing.
Language is also used to explore the novel’s overarching theme of civilization versus nature. At those times when Doogie gets closer to nature, for example, his syntax and vocabulary decay, as do his abilities to recall and articulate memories. Indeed, a dialectic between civilization and nature is at the center of Doogie’s thinking across all the years during which he is able to think in complete sentences. For Doogie, civilization is desirable and nature undesirable. At the beginning of the novel, his views on this are so extreme that he feels guilt even when he eats a piece of jungle fruit he wasn’t trained to consume in the zoo. To Doogie, the sine qua non of civilization is being “faithful to the human.” This faithfulness compels Doogie to walk on two feet and wear a tattered button-down shirt and a dirty pair of XXL underpants for most of his adventure in the jungle. He tries to keep clean and longs for shampoo.
As a child, Doogie’s reward for being civilized is proximity to, and being cuddled by, Janet. Janet teaches Doogie most of his sign language and conveys to him much of the other knowledge he has about the world. His obsession with her borders on Oedipal. Doogie fixates on Janet’s smell, Janet’s clothes, and Janet’s red hair. Janet programs Doogie to believe that civilization means that there is always a “good behavior camera” on him and that she can always see him. In actual fact, for most of Doogie’s adventure in the jungle, he is wearing a watch that unbeknownst to him contains a camera through which Janet does indeed observe his activities.
Doogie strongly associates civilization with humans being masters. Indeed, he views some of this masterfulness to have rubbed off on him. One of his less flattering traits is that he believes being civilized means he can dominate other animals. At various points, he refers to a dog, monkeys, and less civilized apes as “slave” animals. The reader learns Janet has repeatedly chided Doogie not to be “racist” against macaques and other monkeys. Ironically, the animals in question have no human masters and it is Doogie with his ideology of faithfulness who has a slavish mentality. Doogie goes as far as to think that what God is to humans, humans are to him. Echoing Christ on the cross, Doogie’s statement of abjection is: “Janet! Janet! Why have you forsaken me?” (p. 159).
This brings us to the theme of masters and their faithlessness. Janet’s knowledge of Doogie’s whereabouts is a betrayal. Doogie spends the whole novel struggling to return to Janet and until the watch is destroyed near the novel’s end, she could have rescued him at any time. The reason that she did not is that she and her family intentionally bred and raised Doogie with the intent of renaturing him to see if an intelligent, civilized ape could thrive in the wild. As a result of this experiment, Doogie faces a grave fate.
Though Memories From The Jungle is unquestionably science fiction in the sense that it is a story about an intelligent ape who speaks sign language, and is set in a future where most of humanity lives on space stations, it is not apparent whether the novel is in explicit conversation with the Anglophone speculative fiction tradition. Nevertheless, fruitful comparisons between the novel under review and some canonical works of the genre can be drawn.
The theme in science fiction of humans experimenting on animals in order to civilize them is as old as H. G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau in which the eponymous mad scientist psychically and ideologically tortures beasts into simulacra of men and women. A more benign take is Lester del Rey’s short story “The Faithful,” first published in the April 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in which artificially evolved Dog-People and Ape-People rebuild civilization following a world war. Like Doogie, these Dog-People and Ape-People imbue their late human masters with semi-divine attributes. We’d be remiss here not to also mention the six novels comprising David Brin’s Uplift Universe and, of course, Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel Planet of the Apes.
Perhaps the most sensitive work in this intelligent animal subgenre, however, is the 1944 novel Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Garcia’s fellow philosopher Olaf Stapledon. The titular long-lived, talking sheep dog has a lot in common with Doogie. Stapledon captures what a wonder it would be to be able to interact with the mind of an intelligent dog and how that dog would be ultimately doomed as an outsider to both human and canine society. Similarly, at his most astute, Doogie realizes he has been undone by humans civilizing him. Rhetorically addressing humanity, he begs the question, “Why did you put me all by myself into language, on the threshold of the door of the human but not inside it?” (p. 183)
This questioning follows an episode in which Doogie lives among a bonobo colony he calls “Heaven,” and in which his memory temporarily decays. There he discovers love and sex with a female bonobo he sometimes calls “Doogette.” Because Doogette lacks speech, Doogie is never quite sure if he is making love to the same bonobo or a series of bonobos. When Doogie recovers his memories, he feels no choice but to leave Heaven and continue on a mission he believes Janet has communicated to him via a talking parrot. He feels instant remorse for what he considers an unavoidable decision. He narrates (referring to himself in the second person), “In the forest you have love and happiness, and in civilization you have faithfulness. Why do you have to decide to leave and say farewell to Heaven?” (p. 182)
The mirror image of Doogie is his surrogate human brother of the same age, Donald. Donald was also experimented on by his parents. The details of this come out murkily, because Doogie doesn’t quite understand it and Janet’s narrative doesn’t cop to it. What is clear is that as result of the experiments Donald has a limited vocabulary, a speech impediment, and a limp. In some ways Doogie is like a changeling for Donald, soaking up the love and attention from Janet and their father that is not granted to the human boy. Indeed, as a child Janet expresses that she considers Doogie, not Donald, to be her real brother.
Where Doogie strives to become civilized, Donald embraces nature. It’s here that we must get into the novel’s racist baggage. In so doing, it’s unavoidable for us to get into a major spoiler. So proceed forewarned.
Some background worth noting before diving into this is that, in the centuries before the main narrative of the novel, Africa became depopulated in a world war. The continent has been allowed to become, as the novel repeatedly puts it, “fallow.” Every human in the novel has a European or Asian name. The result is a novel set in Central and Southern Africa in which no explicitly Black people appear. Moreover, both Doogie and Donald interpret Blackness using its historic racist associations with primates and ugliness.
As a child, Donald’s descent toward nature and ever-present animalistic qualities are symbolized by him painting his face black. Doogie remembers, “The little old human has covered the front of his beautiful white face with black” (p. 231). A turning point in Doogie’s childhood comes when Donald becomes very ill and their mother takes him to a space station to receive treatment. On the journey back to the zoo, the spaceship crashes and Donald flees into a gorilla preserve. Their father goes into the preserve to retrieve Donald and reports that a beast simply called “the Animal” has violently killed Donald.
In the following months, the Animal begins liberating his fellows from the zoo. He is able to organize them in intelligent attacks against the zoo, ultimately causing the ethologists to abandon it. At the end of his adventure, Doogie returns to the fallen zoo and encounters the now adult Donald, again with his face painted black, “on all fours, his feet painted black and black like an ape, his hands pink and his mouth red” (p. 232). The Animal was Donald’s blackface alter ego all along. Doogie observes, “He’s big, he’s white, he’s redheaded and handsome like a Donald. But he’s been painted and repainted: he’s black … His face is like wiped-off coal” (p. 234). Doogie concludes, “Donald is trying to look ugly” (p. 235).
It may be tempting to excuse Garcia’s use of blackface because he is not an American. This does not bear up to scrutiny. Like the United States, France has a long and vile history of white performers in blackface demeaning Black people. In the seventeenth century, this took the form of blackface court ballet that justified colonialism and slavery. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, as in the United States, it was common for white minstrels in blackface to belittle Black people as uncivilized characters of fun. Controversies around blackface in France have abounded even into the twenty-first century. Garcia did not write the scenes of Donald “the Animal” in blackface in a vacuum, innocent of a foreign racist tradition. Having the white boy-turned-ape wear blackface is a wilful, self-inflicted wound on what ought to be a good book. It doesn’t seem right to laud or recommend a recent release that carries on like this.
It speaks to Garcia’s craft at building up the surrogate brothers as emotionally resonant characters that the struggle that ensues after their final meeting is powerful reading despite this. Doogie’s faithfulness is such that he is prepared at first to let Donald take his life. Moreover, he realizes their roles ought to have been reversed. In his colorful turn of phrase, Doogie thinks, “I would have liked to live as just a monkey, and for you, as a man, to be the human. Donald, take back my you” (p. 237).
This isn’t to be. Donald is undone, much like Doogie, because he doesn’t fit into either nature or civilization. Donald’s own animal followers rip him apart when they hear him speaking to Doogie like a human. In Memories From The Jungle, there can be no synthesis between civilization and nature. They must be kept totally apart. Humans must live on space stations and animals on the Earth. Otherwise they must destroy each other. Beings such as Doogie and Donald who live in an uncanny borderland between the two are foredoomed.
this takes place directly after the end of the Illustrious Client so make sure you’re caught up!
Notes:
I wanted to try a different style! This is drawn with the default vine charcoal brush on Procreate. I had a few reasons…I am drawing a full graphic novel right now and want to flex different muscles in this project. But I also think it is appropriate as this marks a change within the dynamic of these characters. (and of course, the horny reason: I love to draw body hair and a thick line style just wasn’t delivering the results I wanted.)
Font is ‘Neucha.’
Volume 1 and 2 of Watson’s Sketchbook is still available, though numbers are getting low :) thank you for buying it!
Watson rewrites 'The Blanched Soldier’ considerably for publication, taking out a good deal of melancholy poetry attempts and a full three paragraphs which (unfavorably) compared Sir James Saunders’ company and appearance to Dr. Watson’s. He also waits until 1926 to publish it, to protect the identities of the young lovers it is about).
By Gary Whitehouse: Dr. Sunya Song is an expert at teasing information out of ancient archives. She has travelled long and far to an exotic location to do just that, surviving an attack by pirates along the way, only to … Continue reading →
(1) SHARP THINKING. “Writing Sword Fights: Three Tips from a Professional Swordsman” is Guy Windsor’s advice to SFWA members. All the best stories end with a sword fight, and there are usually many sword fights leading up to the climactic … Continue reading →
This morning the YouTube Music app decided I needed to hear "Merry & Happy" by Twice. Even though it's a Christmas song, I listened to it, because I love this song. It lifted my spirits, so I went back and listened to it again, which lifted my spirits some more. So now I'm sharing it with you.
After this experience, my daily affirmation for today was "Take joy wherever you can find it. If that means listening to Christmas music out of season, so be it."
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.
If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case.
You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.
Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
Text today from my general practice to book Covid + flu jabs - actually in a months time, but I now have a slot booked.
***
Having been moaning on over at bluesky about scholars these days not acknowledging existing (older) historiography, Dept of Preening Gratification was coming across footnote cite to 30 year-old co-authored work as 'A key starting point' for certain 'productive considerations' within the field.
***
On the other prickly paw, I am still failing to get up to a proper swing at the essay review - keep niggling and picking at the bit I've already done.
Partly due to Interruptions happening.
Also partly due to not sleeping terribly well this week for some reason.
***
Discovered today that I had somehow acquired an ebook of recent work on subject I have had far too much to do with and had totally forgotten about it. Looking up an area of Mi Pertikler Xpertize, o dear, a number of niggling Errours.
***
Attended a webinar the other day where someone claimed that a certain class of records did not survive in respect of the lower orders on account They Could Not Write, and I was more, no, it's an issue of preservation, what about those postcards that I spoke about on a TV programme once - but that is such an annoying story, what DID happen to the cards after the filming? - apart from the flaunting of Being Meedja Personality, so decided not to raise my virtual hand.
The word “sonder” refers to the realization that every other person is living their own, whole life outside of what you see. For author Ren Hutchings, she has experienced this with side characters in media, wondering about their lives outside of the story. Expanding on this idea, she ended up writing An Unbreakable World. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how this companion novel focuses on characters who are outside of the spotlight.
REN HUTCHINGS:
I’ve always had an interest in the relationship between history and folklore, a theme which has influenced so much of my speculative writing. I’m most intrigued by a close, individual perspective, viewing the past as a moving tapestry of small lives and stories, rather than a series of big, significant events.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve often found myself invested in a seemingly insignificant side character in a book or movie, that person who only pops up for a brief encounter and says three lines of dialogue. I’d be wondering about where they went next, or if they had a family, or what the rest of their life was like. Because of course they must have had a whole life that existed outside of that one time when they happened to cross paths with the heroes!
And so, when I set out to write a new novel set in the same universe as my debut, Under Fortunate Stars, I found myself pulled toward the stories at the outer edges. The result is a standalone novel that’s in many ways a companion piece to my first book, but in other ways its opposite. Because while Under Fortunate Stars was about a group of unexpected heroes who famously stopped an interstellar war and saved humanity, An Unbreakable World is very much about those folks on the periphery. In a vast galaxy fraught with intrigue and turmoil, this story asks what was going on with the people who didn’t become historical heroes.
The protagonists in this book are people whose names and deeds won’t be remembered in songs or poems. They’re people whose most important choices will never be known to history, whose motivations will never be examined by future biographers. The point-of-view characters are each struggling to find a meaning in their own lives, and looking in all the wrong places for an ever-elusive sense of purpose.
Almost everybody you meet in An Unbreakable World is experiencing deep isolation. Page is a petty thief who woke up from stasis without most of her memories, and while she searches desperately for any shards of her missing past, she closes her mind to the possibilities that the present is offering her. Meanwhile, Maelle has dedicated years of her life to plotting a long-game revenge scheme, and she’s likewise been ignoring every opportunity to take a new path.
On a distant world, Dalya of House Edamaun is an anxious young heiress growing up in a restrictive, sheltered society, on a planet that has intentionally cut itself off from the United Worlds of Humanity. She’s struggling with spiritual and existential questions, crushed by the weight of a responsibility she doesn’t feel ready for… until she comes to realize that she actually has more choices than she thinks. In forging small, intimate connections with others, each character finds the shape of their own story becoming clearer.
Both of the Union Quadrant books touch on themes about storytelling, memory, and the historical record. But the thing I really wanted to explore in An Unbreakable World is the way our search for a bigger meaning often begins with our most personal choices.
Most people will never do any epic deeds, or perform incredible galaxy-changing feats. And some people whose actions do have far-reaching effects won’t even realize it. Indeed, most of us will never know exactly how our lives will affect the fabric of history, or how far the ripples of our decisions travelled. But we can make choices about what’s important to us, about what we want to stand for and believe in. We can choose which things we find meaning in when our future isn’t clear and everything seems hopeless.
Sometimes, the journey to save yourself – and to accept that you’re somebody worth saving – can be just as monumental as a heroic quest to save the galaxy.
A woodcarver's foster daughter sets out to free a maiden from a magical tower prison, just the sort of thing that always works out exactly according to plan, without unforeseen geopolitical complications.
The winners of the 2025 Prix Actusf de l’Uchronie were revealed on May 20. The award will be presented during the Hypermondes festival in Mérignac being held September 20-21. It is a juried award for work in a specialized segment of sff … Continue reading →
(1) HIDDEN FIGURES. Robert J. Sawyer shared his concern about the proposed Anthropic settlement with Facebook readers. The thing about the Anthropic AI author class-action settlement that I’m worried about is the split, if any, of the proposed US$3,000 per … Continue reading →
The 2025 Pegasus Award finalists were announced on August 29. The Pegasus Award is presented by the Ohio Valley Filk Fest (OVFF) for excellence in filking. Anyone in the filk community can vote on the winners, and community is broadly defined — check out … Continue reading →
The six titles shortlisted for the 2025 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award announced August 21 include only one work of genre interest, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks. The award, judged by a team at Goldsboro Books in … Continue reading →
(1) JUDGE CONDEMNS PROPOSED ANTHROPIC SETTLEMENT. “Judge: Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement is being shoved ‘down the throat of authors’” reports Ars Technica. At a hearing Monday, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic’s rampant piracy of books … Continue reading →
Would it amuse any of our costume/fashion experts and autodidacts to point me toward information about the introduction of the crinoline in Victorian women’s fashion of the mid-19th century and the apparent moral panic inspired thereby?
Not so much about the introduction as the popular response - includes contemporary newspaper letters to the editor and satirical cartoons. From the Lancaster County (Pennsylvania, USA) Historical Society.
Finished Love at All Ages - think I said most of what I felt moved to say last week, but there was also a certain amount of Mrs Morland whingeing and bitching about the Burdens of Being a Popular Writer (when she wasn't being Amazingly Dotty), whoa, Ange, biting the hand or what?
Sarah Brooks, The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands (2024), which I picked up some while ago on promotion and then I think I saw someone writing something about it. I liked the idea but somehow wasn't overwhelmingly enthused?
Read the latest Literary Review.
Since there is a forthcoming online discussion, dug out my 1974 mass market paperback edition of Joanna Russ, The Female Man - I think this was even before excursions to Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed, somehow I had learnt of Fantast, a mailorder operation with duplicated catalogues every few months that purveyed an odd selection of US books. It's quite hard to recall the original impact. Possibly I now prefer her essays?
Carol Atherton, Reading Lessons: The Books We Read at School, the Conversations They Spark, and Why They Matter (2024) - EngLit teacher meditates over books that she had taught, her own reading of them, their impact in the classroom, general issues around teaching Lit, etc - this came up in my Recommended for You in Kobo + on promotion. Quite interesting but how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....
Lee Child, The Hard Way (Jack Reacher, #10) (2006) - every so often I read an interview with or something about Lee Child who sounds very much a Good Guy so I thought I might try one of these and this one was currently on promotion. It's less action and more twisty following intricate plot than I anticipated with lots of sudden reversal, and lots and lots of details. I don't think I'm going to go away and devour all the Reacher books but I can think of circumstances where they might be a preferable option given limited reading materials available.
On the go
I literally just finished that so there is nothing on the go, except one or two things I suppose I am technically still reading.
Would it amuse any of our costume/fashion experts and autodidacts to point me toward information about the introduction of the crinoline in Victorian women’s fashion of the mid-19th century and the apparent moral panic inspired thereby?
Her name is Elif because she is the first of us to live on this world. You will do well to remind her of this name. Elif is just a baby, for now. She is a little pink thing that wriggles and squirms. Often she’ll place her whole fist inside her mouth. It won’t make sense but you just need to keep her safe. There won’t be any set instructions to stop her from crying. You’ll struggle at first, but I know you can figure it out because I am going to help you do it.
So begins the prologue of Madeehah Reza’s Orphan Planet. I had to look up the meaning of the name “Elif”—apparently it is the first letter of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, similar to the Arabic Alif. And indeed, it seemed fitting that the first person to live in a new world would be named after the first letter of the alphabet.
These instructions have been given to VAS-H, an artificial intelligence entity assigned to take care of Elif, a baby who also happens to be the sole inhabitant of the planet Maoira-I. Elif has no contact with another human until she is twelve years old, when she is contacted by Commander Aremu, from the spaceship Polaris. Commander Aremu reveals that Elif is the “warden” of Maoira-I, and her job is to figure out whether the planet is suitable for human inhabitation.
Naturally, this baffles Elif, who has only ever had VAS-H for company, and whose knowledge about other humans comes entirely from screens: “She had seen humans before on films and shows, but they never looked directly at her. They were in their own worlds, not aware of the girl’s existence,” we read, highlighting how unnatural Elif’s life has been. Elif is unfamiliar with very basic ideas about human life and society, with her asking questions like what “dressing professionally” meant, and what a family was. When she is addressed as “Warden,” she has to look the word up, and finds out it has two meanings: It can mean someone who is in charge of, or cares for or has custody over persons, animals or things; or it refers to the highest executive officer in charge of a prison. While we’d assume the former meaning is what Commander Aremu intends, the latter meaning also makes sense. Maoira-I is in a sense, a prison for Elif; however, as its only inhabitant, she is also the highest “officer” in charge there.
Elif’s new life as Warden revolves around “assignments,” which mostly involve scouting the terrain in order to check if it is suitable for human inhabitation, as well as growing different types of plants. While she does as she is told, Elif also has much natural curiosity in her, and she constantly looks for answers and tries to find out new things about the situation she is in. But Commander Aremu eventually gets replaced by another commander, named Bishop, who is much sterner with Elif. He says that Elif might soon get another human companion, an idea which discomfits the girl, who continues primarily to associate an artificial intelligence with the idea of company. “It would mean rationing the food, sectioning of the dormitories for the,. Sharing her space. A whole other human being living with her, breathing the same air,” she realizes.
Despite her isolation, aside from Elif we also see the story from the perspectives of two other characters. One is Commander Isobel Aremu herself, through whose eyes we find out both about the Interplanetary Mission, which aims to find a new home for humanity, and the Return to Earth Collective, which seeks to return all humans to Earth. Indeed, we also learn about protests against the presence of Elif as an unaccompanied minor on Maoira–I. The other character whose perspective we see is Rokeya, whom we meet years later, when Elif is twenty-one.
In these intervening years, Elif has experienced a change of seasons for the first time, and we see her learn more about the planet, and about herself. But when Rokeya eventually lands on the planet, she becomes the first person whom Elif encounters in real life—and Elif reacts with shock and reluctance. Nevertheless, through Rokeya’s and Isobel Aremu’s points of view, we get to learn more about how Elif came to be in the position she is in.
Rokeya also happens to be the granddaughter of Latif Khan, one of the crew members who originally landed on Maoira-I. During her stay, Rokeya tries to figure out the secrets of the planet, and of Polaris’s actions. She is left particularly aghast by Elif’s presence, and the fact she has been left alone on the planet as a young child: “How could a child have taken all this in, have understood any of these complexities; how could a child have understood how to take care of herself,” she wonders. Meanwhile, she also wants to learn more about her grandfather, to whom she refers as Nanabhai.
The dynamic between Elif and Rokeya turns out to be one of the most interesting aspects of the story. Rokeya, is after all, the first other human Elif meets in person. Elif has become so used to the status quo of being the only inhabitant of a planet that she is resistant to any change in the situation. While Rokeya is naturally shocked at Elif’s plight, it takes Elif time to get adjusted to the change in status quo which the new arrival represents.
The book’s title, Orphan Planet, seems to have two different meanings. It refers to Elif, a literal orphan stuck on a planet, and to the planet Maoira-I itself, which has been abandoned and therefore in a sense orphaned. The story is character-driven, with Elif’s inner world, and her relationship with VAS-H, Aremu, and Rokeya being the highlights of the novella. Indeed, the worldbuilding in this book is fairly standard: While there is quite a bit of attention paid to Maoria-I’s terrain and weather, the characters take centre-stage.
Yet, while the exploration of Elif as a character was interesting, at times she felt a little too well-adjusted for a girl who grew up on a planet alone with only an AI for company. I would have liked a little more psychological depth and exploration when it came to Elif. Some questions I had about her circumstances also remained unanswered. Perhaps those loose ends could have been tied up better if this book were written as a full-length novel instead of a novella. Nevertheless, I really appreciated how this book allowed us to watch Elif grow into her own person amid extraordinary circumstances, and I really enjoyed how the character dynamics were written. The novella as a whole was really engaging, and I am eager to find out what Reza will come up with next.
Diversicon selfie with (left to right) me, Naomi Kritzer, and Scott Lohman
It's Wednesday, so I'm back on Dreamwidth. It is really starting to amuse me that I spend so much time intending to get over here to blog and then, inevitibly, it is somehow ALWAYS a Wednesday when I do. Seriously, I had been planning on doing a daily con report from Diversicon, but I somehow did not manage it. To be fair, we were "on" a lot at the con.
Okay, so--how did it go?
I will be honest. I was really uncertain that this convention had its ducks in a row. There were duck in the pond, clearly, but I wasn't sure, at first, that anything meaningful was going to happen with said ducks.
naomikritzer , for instance, only HAPPENED to notice that the Diversicon programming grid had us at a reading at Webber Library on Thursday earlier that week. She checked the HCL schedule and an author appearance at Webber was nowhere to be found. Well, that turned out to be because Diversicon had privately rented a room. But, regardless, I wasn't sure if I was going to a library in NE Minneapolis or not! Or, if I did go, if anyone other than Naomi would be there. We did try to ask, but only got a confirmation the day of.
Like much of what follows, everything turned out not only to be FINE but actually kind of great (??)
Image: Naomi reading. The library meeting room was smallish, but the event was decently well attended!
I am not in this picture because I took it, but I would say that despite the fact that I feel like the whole thing went off last minute, the event was very well attended. I ended up reading from my newest book, which I am kind of struggling with. So it was nice to have some audience reaction to it and to get a chance to gauge how it read out loud in a very specific way. For instance, I regularly read my stuff out loud for flow, but I rarely read it out loud to other people to guage involvement. The bonus of being neurotypical (besldes the obvious) is that I can feel attention leaving the story when I read it out loud in a room like this and, of course, when the audience ignites. So both this and my reading at Diversicon really shaped my sense of the novel. (So thank you to everyone who was there!)
I sort of thought that we'd lucked out with the Thursday night reading. I did not necessarily think that the luck would hold all weekend.
But it did.
I do not know what black magic Diversicon had going on, but despite the fact that behind the scenes the programming schedule seemed to be changing minute by minute right up until the doors opened, once things started, not only did they run smoothly, but the energy of the convention increased as the con went on.
Friday was the most chaotic for me because I had a lot going on at home. I didn't really see (or remember to ask or check) my Diversicon schedule, so I had to let Diversicon know that I couldn't make it to the convention until almost 4 pm. That turned out not to be true. Mason was done with his interview by 2 pm and I was able to be on my way to pick up Eleanor Arnason and off to the convention by 3 pm, which meant I made it into the con by 3:30 pm.
In another wierd bit of black magic, both Friday and Saturday, we arrived exactly at the same time as Eleanor's friend Ruth Burman. This was great for Eleanor because the one thing I couldn't provide was an EARLY ride home for her. Eleanor, who is even less of a night owl than I am, would have had to stay at the con until nearly midnight on Saturday if it wasn't for Ruth.
My first panel was about something I wasn't sure I knew anything about. "Queens of the Apocalypse." When I was waiting for Mason to finish his interview before I headed to the con, I had a chance to ponder this. I think the panel title had gotten a bit lost in translation because Naomi has been known recently as the queen of the cozy apocalypse thanks, in part to stories like "So Much Cooking" and "The Year Without Sunshine." Since I was listed as the only panelist, I decided that what I'd do was introduce the audience to the subgenre of "Soft Apocalypses" which is a Thing and hopefully start a conversation about what the appeal of such things are, etc., etc. LUCKILY, Naomi didn't have a panel scheduled opposite this one and so she joined me in the discussion. Given that I planned it out in the car on the way to the con, it went surprisingly well. As you can see in the selfie above, one of the fun things about the convention hotel (there weren't a whole lot of them, it being way out in Plymouth and laid out extremely strangely) is that the panel rooms all had whiteboards, which we just decided to use. So, I was able to write out all of my recommendations. People took photos of the whiteboard after the panel!
Then, I attempted to get dinner in the hotel, which was a complete disaster.
They had a "make your own" sandwhich which listed chicken as a substitute for hamburger, but I apparently made a mistake choosing that option. I just wanted a simple chicken sandwhich--chicken, American cheese, lettuce, and mayo. That's it. But, not only did my food never arrive until everyone was finished, when it did it had no cheese, lettuce that seemed to have salad dressing on it, and a dollop of salsa? Which was not great because thanks to GERDS I really can't eat raw onions anymore and I'm not a fan of tomatoes, I never have been. But, whatever, I was so starved at that point that I ate it. The only nice thing? The waiter could tell how irritated I was and comped my meal.
But, like that's the other weird thing about this hotel? NO LUNCH service.
I hung around after dinner because as GoHs, it's expected that you attend both opening and closing ceremonies. Scott L, who is chairing this year, asked me to say an opening statement, which I should have expected that I'd be called upon to do, but somehow didn't. I fumbled a little bit, but then thinking about how this might be our last Diversicon, I launched into a whole schpiel about what I have loved about Diversicon since its inception.
Eleanor had gotten a ride home with Ruth at that point and so I hung around a little bit longer, but bailed early under the assumption that Saturday would be the late night.
---
Saturday got complicated by the fact that I was picking up Eleanor again and Saint Paul, in its infinite wisdom, decided to close down eastbound highway 94. I got myself coffee, but I still managed to be kind of bolluxed up by the whole construction situation. I was fifteen mintues late to pick up Eleanor, who admitted that had Patrick not sat with her, she was considering bailing. But, the highway going west was open and, shockingly, traffic free, so despite my delay we managed to get to the hotel on time. And, as noted above, right on the heels of Ruth Burman.
My first panel on Saturday was "SF Writers and D&D," which Naomi and I had proposed for a couple of reasons. First, she and I have started playing D&D again and, secondly, one of the posthumous guests of honor, Andre Norton, wrote Quagg Keep after having been invited by Gary Gyagax to play in the Greyhawk world of D&D (citation). We started out kind of uncertain about how much we'd have to say, but about a half hour into the panel the caffeine hit my system and I went FULL CON MODE.
Some of you have seen this transformation.
That was good because it carried me though the rest of the day. I missed Naomi's reading in favor of hanging out in the hall with Greg Johnson and Martha Hood and someone else whose name I missed, who like a lot of men who are aging in fandom has gone with Wizardcore as his look. The three of us discussed the Seattle Worldcon Hugo Awards as all of us watched it, either in-person or streaming.
Then I had a reading, followed by a panel on podcasts & podcasting. I was the only panelist listed on that panel, but Naomi and Martha joined me and so we managed to have a lot of good recommendations.
At some point in here I ate lunch brought to me by our fabulous guest liason, Bast, and a bunch of us went out to dinner together in the classic convention style. Table for SEVEN at the Red Robin (which was made kind of fantastic by our drill sargent of a waitress!) In the middle of dinner I asked the question "What will post-capitalism really look like?" and a half dozen or so people in rotating shifts proceeded to spend much of the rest of the night as we wandered back to the hotel's lounge area attempting to unravel this question. This included sraun who had to miss much of the convention due to the fact that his wife, Irene, had taken a fall on Friday night and ended up admitted to the hospital. She's home safe now, but that was NOT how anyone wanted her to have to spend the weekend!
Image: a visual break in the wall of text! A bumble bee on a purple flower.
------
Sunday.
The strangeest thing about Diversicon was the fact that the energy of this convention continued to rise throughout the weekend. Normally, there's a bit of a peak on Saturday night and Sunday feels like winding down. Not so Diversicon! We found out that one of the reasons for this is that Diversicon continued to gain memberships as the weekend wore on--they started with something like 38 and had nearly double that by the end. I know there are some of you out there thinking is 60-something really a lot? Diversicon is a small convention and this number was enough, in fact, to put the con into the black. There will be a Diversicon 33! Hooray!
Sunday started out strong, panel-wise, with "Keeping on Keeping on (Diversity in SF)" We can partly thank Elenaor Arnason, who was not able to come on Sunday, but who asked me this question as we were driving back and forth to the con. "Do we still need Diversicon? Is diversity baked into SFF now? Does it need its own convention?" This is a real question. I mean, I think the answer is an obvious "YES!" but it is notable that SFF, as a whole, has really made lifting up diverse voice a priority and it has, to many extents, worked. Obviously, there is always more work to do, but, especially with Gaylaxicon coming up, this was a question that was close to my heart.
The panel I should have prepared more for was "Hacking, Hackers & Heists," as it devolved (evolved?) into a discusion of artifical intelligence as it exists today -- LLMs. But, I think we mostly kept on topic, despite that.
I ate my lunch in the con suite and then caught the end of "End of the World Fiction and/or Hope Punk" which was pretty interesting, and then Naomi and I sat in to the Second Foundation/Rivendell Group Discussion of our work. Our final official panel was our Two-Person Book Club, which is something that Naomi and I do informally and we thought it would be fun to bring to an audience. Basically, we just trade hot takes on whatever it is we're currently reading. For poor Naomi, this often means listening to me talk about manga, but she's also been on a mainstream romance kick right now, so it seems like a fair trade. ;-)
Closing ceremonies was surprisingly high energy, like I noted, and I had hoped to hang around for the after con dinner, but my brain had, by that point, completely fried.
I had several absolutely lovely conversations with folks one-on-one and for a convention I was certain was going to be at best disorganized, Diversicon fully blew past my expectations and not only cleared the lowest bar but actually won the race (to over extend the metaphors and mix them up a bit.)
And they now expect the part in tomorrow, at which point we should be able to make an appointment to repair.
As I reiterated - but briefly, because the person making the call was not responsible for this situation - a delay in shipping is one thing, but lack of communication is something very different.
So, despite Charlie’s nifty surgical suitical—in fetching purple tie-dye—he’s still managed to get rid of a stitch or two. So today back to the vet he went to see if we could get the rest out. The answer? Nope. Nopey old nope. He’s healing well, but the last stitches can’t come out for another 2-6 (!) days.
HE. IS. NOT. HAPPY.
There again, as we’ve told him (and it does seem to soothe his pride), he looks great in purple, very imperious—very imperial. In Late Antique/Sub-Roman/Early Medieval Britain, Emperor Charlie might translate to Carolus Imperator—or, as they would stamp it on a coin or cut it in stone for his Triumphal Arch, CAROLUS.IMP.
Otaku Hina is delighted that her Japanese neighbour Kyuta looks just like Hina's favourite anime character. Alas, Kyuta dislikes anime almost as much as vampires like Hina.
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
file770_feed![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecat
Philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia’s Memories From The Jungle, newly translated from the French by Christopher Beach, is a profoundly sad novel about a civilized chimpanzee who must return to nature. While Garcia does at times plumb the comic potential of this set-up, the book is mainly a bleak exploration of the faithlessness of masters over those they dominate. In his own language, the protagonist and narrator Doogie is “faithful to the human,” but as the story progresses it becomes clear that humans have betrayed that faithfulness. The novel succeeds in spades at what it sets out to do. Unfortunately, in getting there, it ventures into malignant racial territory in ways that a contemporary novel about an African ape ought to be more self-aware about avoiding.
![Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/biology_department.png "Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.")
So begins the prologue of Madeehah Reza’s Orphan Planet. I had to look up the meaning of the name “Elif”—apparently it is the first letter of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, similar to the Arabic Alif. And indeed, it seemed fitting that the first person to live in a new world would be named after the first letter of the alphabet.
