Amal El-Mohtar

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Interesting links and a book to look forward to

Aliette de Bodard has a short novel in a new continuity forthcoming in October: clocking in at a little under fifty thousand words, In the Vanishers’ Palace (Kobo; Amazon; print not yet available for preorder) is a closely-observed and darkly compelling Beauty-and-the Beast retelling between a scholar and a dragon. (Both main characters are women.) I intend to review it at length in another venue, because this is a story that deserves attention: you should all keep an eye out and read it.

Melissa Caruso has a Twitter thread on chapter breaks and tension.

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Ann Leckie talks about taste and enjoying things.

Autostraddle, an excellent website for queer lady culture, needs more members to support its continued existence into 2019.

An older thread from Dr. Mary McAuliffe, on queer Irish women of the early 20th century. (Queer Irish female revolutionaries included.)

A Twitter thread I have been holding close to my heart:

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A tumblr post, likewise.

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People having thoughts about THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT

Both Amal El-Mohtar and Arkady Martine enjoyed it significantly more than I did.

Amal has something important to say about responses to THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT, while Arkady turns a very penetrating gaze on its thematic arguments.

I think THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT is proving to be an interesting book to think with, and to think about, despite – or perhaps because of – how very angry it made me. Baru Cormorant herself, the titular main character, is a monster. Perhaps the most monstrous protagonist I’ve ever read. And not in the simplistic fashion of so many grimdark-type antiheroes, either. She’s a sympathetic monster. An understandable monster. The monster in the mirror, writ large: all our compromises with power for the sake of security, for the sake of personal advancement, for the hope of changing the system from within, rendered in mass murder and personal betrayals. I think Dickinson is trying to explore some very difficult thematic territory, and trying at the same time to sustain fairly radical literary politics. If he fails in many respects at both –

Well, it’s an ambitious failure. There’s much to be said for that.

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Two links of interest

Amal El-Mohtar, Of Award Eligibility Lists and Unbearable Smugness:

There’s a peculiar, unbearable, vicious smugness in sitting back and talking about how tacky it is of people to list their publications and that of course YOU won’t do so because while winning awards is nice naturally YOU don’t really care about them. I find that behaviour several orders of magnitude more repellent than asking for votes. Requests for votes I can ignore; what I can’t ignore is the real toll taken on brilliantly talented people by this kind of rhetoric — brilliantly talented people who already think themselves unworthy of any kind of positive attention.

Martin Lewis, Elementary:

Of course, human nature is messier than that; intellect and emotion can’t be so easily divided. Creating art is a hugely personal endeavour and what is being criticised is the product of blood, sweat and tears so it is natural to feel wounded. On the other side of the fence, the whole reason I am writing this is because of a residual sense of sheepish hypocrisy. But the concept of manners simply doesn’t apply here and it is dangerous to import it from social situations. It goes without saying that I think negative reviews have value (to inform and entertain potential readers and to contribute to a wider discourse). It should also go without saying that criticising a professional writer’s published art is entirely different to telling someone that their shoes are ugly or the dinner they’ve just cooked you tasted of ass. Unfortunately this isn’t the case and negative reviews are often seen as direct attacks on the author – and, increasingly, their fans – unless they are couched in the politest and most equivocal terms.

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Linky has been doing the devil’s work (idle hands)

At Tor.com, Amal El-Mohtar is talking about How To Read Poetry:

Part of me is perpetually astonished that I need to explain to people why they should read poetry. The mainstream perception of poetry in the anglophone West is fundamentally alien to me. Over and over I encounter the notion that poetry is impenetrable, reserved for the ivory tower, that one can’t understand or say anything about it without a literature degree, that it is boring, opaque, and ultimately irrelevant. It seems like every few months someone in a major newspaper blithely wonders whether poetry is dead, or why no one writes Great Poetry anymore. People see poetry as ossified, a relic locked away in textbooks, rattled every now and then to shake out the tired conclusions of droning lecturers who have absorbed their views from the previous set of droning lecturers and so on and on through history.

Cora Buhlert on Hugo Nomination:

Odd. I’d have thought that this year’s Hugo shortlist was pretty much uncontroversial. I mean, we have a healthy representation of women and writers of colour, most of the nominations went to works and writers that are popular or at least talked about, there are very few “What the Fuck?” nominees compared with other years (e.g. last year’s nominees included a filk CD and a Hugo acceptance speech from the previous year). Sure, there still are issues, particularly with certain categories, but there always are issues.

Which is why I was surprised to find that this year’s Hugo slate is apparently considered highly controversial in certain corners of the SFF community.

Everything Is Nice on Clarke Award Data:

Unfortunately, we can’t compare submissions historically but we can compare with the shortlists. So, in the first 10 years of the award 30% of nominees were female, 50% of winners were female and there were three years when there were as many women as men on the shortlist. Whereas in the last 10 years 22% of nominees were female, 20% of winners were female and men made up the majority of the shortlist every years.

So the record of the Arthur C Clarke Award is getting worse. I think this has to reflect the worsening situation for women in British science fiction publishing over this period. The fact that this year’s shortlist is made up entirely of men is a symptom of this and we need to address the root cause.

There’s a lot of talk about Night Shade Books’…thing.

Kameron Hurley, Deal/No Deal.

Tobias Buckell, Night Shade Sale Summary.

Staffer’s Book Review, Night Shade Books: What Went Wrong?

Michael A Stackpole, The Night Shade Books/Skyhorse Publishing Deal.

Phil Foglio, Publish & Perish.

JABerwocky Literary Agent, The Night Shade Writers of America.

Shaun Duke of the Skiffy & Fanty Podcast invited me to join himself, Paul Weimar, and Stina Leicht to kvetch about the Hugos and the Clarkes. So that’s available over there. Apparently I can be counted on to go on, and on, and on at length.

(And also to do some research first.)