Dear everyone,

I’ve injured my left wrist & can only type with one hand. It’s not broken & it’ll hopefully heal soon. Until then I’ll only type the minimum amount necessary for work… I have two entries almost finished though, I might end up posting those. Sigh! BTW, next up is Lightspeed Magazine… IY”H.

PS – recommend me games that can be played with the mouse only

I spent today traipsing around in Vienna, Austria (something that sadly hasn’t happened in a while) and realized – among other things – that comic book artist Craig Thompson had a huge gigantic tome out (titled Habibi), and a massive ad campaign behind it. Get a signed print! Get a tote bag! Buy the companion volume! Shopping spreee!!! I totally missed all this because I was busy surviving the Jewish holidays.

Habibi costs €40 – for comparison: I bought two armfuls of remaindered English books earlier today for the same amount of money. I also bought a complete German set of Emma (10 volumes) for €35 – BTW, did the exchange rate have to tank in the past weeks? I’ve been looking for a set for years now. So €40 for a single volume is way, WAY over my impulse buy threshold, and probably even my not-really-an-impulse-buy threshold.

But there’s another reason why I didn’t pick it up. It seemed gorgeously drawn (as can be expected from Thompson), but also very orientalist. In addition to that, I also found myself blinking stupidly and thinking “wow, some his Black characters look like typical Western caricatures, is he trying to pull this off with a straight face? Is this for realz? Are people really selling this stuff in 2011? Are people buying it?!”

Lately I’ve read way too much “Westerners reflect on Exotic Arab Culture” stuff where I felt that as a Jewish person I was closer culturally to the supposedly oh so exotic Arabs than to the authors themselves… which made all their effort to woo me as a reader look really ridiculous. At first browse it looked like Habibi would in all likelihood fit into this trend. Maybe it tries to subvert those tropes, but I’m kind of doubtful about that.  This kind of imagery has a very nasty history, which makes even a subversion tricky; this looked like nothing of the sort and more like “wow, I get to draw naked Middle Eastern chixx! See my sophisticated and progressive story? Here, have a rape scene” on the author’s behalf. For all these reasons, the whole ad campaign left a bad taste in my mouth.

Since I don’t have the book (yet?), I can’t say more, but here is a long and image-heavy review by Nadim Damluji that makes many of the points that occurred to me upon cursorily browsing the book in the bookstore. (Be sure to check out this round-up of Arab comics by the same author.) It also has TUSKEN RAIDERS. Nuff said.

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By the way, I don’t know what’s it about the purchasing habits of Austrians or English-speaking expats… I regularly buy great, recent English-language fiction from the bargain bin, the remaindered section, etc. All that great stuff doesn’t sell? At all?

I love it when people say “you should buy ebooks, they don’t take up space”. Um. In most cases, ebooks cost more than my actual purchase prices… I do actually buy ebooks when they are reasonably priced. Unfortunately several major publishers seem to have strange notions about ‘reasonable’. Today I saw an ad for one of Daniel Glattauer’s recent books (a very slim volume of short essays), only €13.50 as an ebook! Excuse me? That costs more than a paperback edition!

After a successful subscription drive, Clarkesworld is switching to three stories per month starting with this issue. So let’s see what we have…

I’m going to say right away that I’m not a fan of stories published in parts spaced out with a month between them. Sure, this way there is more material per issue, there is also more longer-form fiction available for free, but I strongly dislike having to wait for the next instalment – it makes me think I’m back in the days of old Galaktika issues printed on yellowing and brittle paper, as opposed to the bright and glamorous twenty-first century. Then again, I’m the sort of person who watches entire seasons of a TV series in a week, and then goes for months not watching any television at all. Coming to think of it, I should be doing that again, it’s been a while… anyway, let’s get back to the issue.

Clarkesworld, Issue 61 – October 2011

Staying Behind by Ken Liu (a Chinese-American man)

A post-Raptu– errr, I mean post-Singularity story, very realistic, very down-to-earth. I liked it, but I liked Ken Liu’s previous story in Clarkesworld this year much better. There’s not much to say about it, there are some fascinating ambiguities in there, but I’d rather not venture into spoiler territory, especially when the story itself is quite short (as in this case).

For Dash – there is a very minor mention of technological telepathy.

Pony by Erik Amundsen (an American man)

Ponies are back in fashion – I blame My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This time we have gritty postcyberpunk space pony wranglers. Not bad, eh? The story is charming and aggressive at the same time. Well, maybe not exactly charming, but quite good nonetheless.

There is a strong narrative voice, the kind that would be annoying were the story much longer, but at this length it works quite well. I could almost hear the gruffy macho protagonist grumbling in my ears while reading.

Also, a highly quotable line: “in space, you can’t not telegraph the evil you’re about to commit.” There are other similar nuggets interspersed throughout the story, but you’ll have to read it to find them.

Silently and Very Fast (Part 1 of 3) by Catherynne M. Valente (an American woman)

Another mention of Sumerian mythology in Clarkesworld (see the previous one). I don’t want to go all prescriptivist, and there’s no One True Way of spelling Sumerian, but the spelling of Ereshkigal as Erishkegal really annoyed me – it’s one of those little persistent nags I can’t get rid of while reading. Fortunately, the story soon veered off and took a different path altogether.

I know Valente has a very vocal fanbase (which includes some of my friends), but her style never clicked with me. “She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones.” Is that supposed to be poetic, or is she literally covered in black eyes?

Still, here the purple has been dialed down a few notches and the story is actually readable, though not particularly engaging. I found myself growing sleepy and I was increasingly inclined to skim. Japan also makes an appearance as an Ooh So Exotic Backdrop (and Look, They Are Eating Exotic Food!). I’m thoroughly uninterested in the sequels, and if not for this series of reviews, I would probably skip them altogether.

On the upside, there is a good point made about the Turing test and privilege. It’s just lost in the flowery prose.

Clarkesworld, issue 60 – September 2011

This issue didn’t really move me – I felt like there just wasn’t much novelty involved. I have a small confession to make: when I started writing the Hugo reviews in September, I considered starting with the current issue and working my way back, but I was so turned off by Pack that I decided to begin with the January issue.

Pack by Robert Reed (an American man)

A postapocalyptic (?) story about someone living in a castle and being taken advantage of by dogs. A lot is left in shadow and there is a twist ending. The story could’ve been written any time in the past fifty years, and in some respects it even felt dated – misery being demonstrated by a female dog masturbating left me wondering why it had to be a female dog, not to mention how she was “very young” and despite that, already a mother (begging the protagonist for an abortion).

I think the only women in the story were subjugated and sexualized (though the former is debatable because the ending is deliberately left ambiguous), while the males were building empires and fighting battles. I couldn’t care much for the protagonist who seemed like a jerk. There is a possible reading that the dogs are human and the protagonist is not, that would make the story slightly more interesting, but only slightly.

Signals in the Deep by Greg Mellor (an Australian man)

This one had an interesting concept, and I liked it how all the hard-SF elements were just there to provide background to a very personal story and were not shoved in our faces; that happens all too often (and I like hard SF!). But the writing seemed somehow off – at first I wondered if the protagonist was an AI, but she wasn’t, it’s only that the writing wasn’t convincing enough.

There were all kinds of little details I loved: the chapter headings showing distance from Earth, (technological?) telepathy presented just as an aside as a normal, even positive thing, and so on.

This is also possibly the most human (and humane) treatment of the issue of embodiment in interspecies communication I’ve come across. But it left me thinking all this could have been better told.

Clarkesworld, Issue 59, August 2011

A really interesting issue which even includes a translated story…

Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee (a Korean-American woman)

After Gord Sellar’s musical tale in the previous issue, we have another stylistic experiment in the pipeline, but this one actually works, and works very well. Yoon Ha Lee’s previous story in Clarkesworld sort of grew on me after a while, but this one I loved from the outset.

The plot is inspired by Sumerian mythology – the main character is identified as Inanna right at the outset, so this is hard to miss. Inanna’s descent to the underworld becomes a video game, with an inventory of items and a second-person narrative. I always think of text adventures when I see second-person viewpoints in prose (and I suspect many of my generation do), but very few works of non-interactive fiction exploit this association. I’m very pleased to see this one does.

Conservation of Shadows is a clear candidate for my Hugo nomination… I’ll try to put up my Battle of the Stories page soon IY”H (it still needs a button graphic), and then you’ll see the rankings so far.

The Fish of Lijiang by Chen Qiufan (a Chinese man), translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu

A translation! An actual translation! Rejoice! (Note the lack of an irony marker. We could certainly use more translations of world SF into English.)

This is a pushy, aggressive story. With Pantone colors. (Not kidding this time either.) It has the driving force of cyberpunk, with a brash, angry male protagonist. The plot uses experiential time to address issues of capitalism, the labor market, etc. It’s a very interesting read, though I wasn’t completely satisfied with the pacing, or how the main character needed everything to be spelled out for him. There was also a throwaway “I’m not a telepath” line that I resented. (I thought that was an American thing, having to reassure each other that they were not telepaths… pfff.)

One of the characters describes “robots playing Naxi folk music” as “a donkey braying with its balls cut off” and says that humans were much better. So here is some Naxi folk music, played by humans… All the online videos seem to be from the same tourist show. I picked a segment with an instrumental solo on a Jew’s harp-like instrument. (Incidentally, I can play the Jew’s harp, even though it has nothing to do with Jews.)

The reviews are back – sorry for the long delay!

In this issue, both stories were trying to say something new about time-worn SF tropes, but I think only one of them managed to pull it off. Let’s see…

Clarkesworld, Issue 58 – July 2011

Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika by Gord Sellar (a Canadian man who lives in South Korea)

The ultimate triumph of style over substance! This story depicts evil robots taking over the world – that’s the entire plot and I’m not kidding. It is told in a flourishing style. Example: Gorgeous steel, stainless save the spattered blood of this metropolis aflame, and the reflections of frail bodies strung all about the towers above, ornaments to celebrate the tidings of the new year, the new world, the ends and beginnings of various histories. If this is not your thing, you won’t like the story, if it is, you probably will – it’s that simple.

There is sheet music included… maybe this is not so surprising, since the story is titled after Erik Satie’s Trois morceaux en forme de poire. The score reminded me of Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz, one of the classics of sheet music humor. In the audio version of the story there is actual music. It sounds better than it looks! It also sounds better than Faerie’s Aire (Youtube link!).

This is the second time this year that I’ve seen Clarkesworld run an “inspired by music” story. Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika really fell flat for me even though I’m a Satie fan… and I still prefer works of art that can stand on their own.

Here is a Satie mix by a friend of mine:

Frozen Voice by An Owomoyela (who is an American asexual neutrois person of color)

This one is about an alien invasion and book burnings. Fortunately, the aliens burn books for a rather unexpected reason – I won’t spoil it, read the story, it’s interesting.

I can see more potential here than a simple short story. I liked the way the aliens communicated with a “hum” in addition to spoken and signed (!) languages, even though this wasn’t really elaborated upon. Also, this is another story that will fit nicely into my “Languages in SF” series. Is the theme coming back in fashion?

There is a small typo in the text, the word for book in Arabic is kitab, not kitap. Just thought I’d mention it because in Arabic, only loanwords have p. But I readily admit this is not very relevant to the topic at hand…

Updates are a bit slower this time of the year: it’s the Jewish High Holidays, and when I’m not offline, most of the time I’m busy working (or procrastinating… you get the idea!). I apologize and I’ll try to post once in a while.

I actually have a regular Youtube Tuesday post I haven’t posted yet, but there’s something Youtube-related I’ve noticed that has to do with the holidays, so I typed it up. It has a lot of Hebrew, but I’ve tried to make the meanings reasonably clear.

Here’s what bugs me about this Rosh haShanah (R”H), the Jewish new year. Everyone was posting the same R”H music videos on Facebook (here’s one – here’s another), and to my surprise, I found myself disapproving. Maybe I’m a misanthropic curmudgeon, but in order to be less of a misanthropic curmudgeon, I decided not to tell people off on their own Facebook walls (that would be really rude!) and instead make a short – and hopefully moderate  – post here about my issues with these videos.

First, Rosh haShanah isn’t about partying like crazy: there are plenty of Jewish holidays like that, but R”H isn’t one of them. This is a Western idea that you have to party on New Year’s. R”H is about yirat haShem, midat haDin, etc. Of course, these concepts are hard to translate to English – you can say yirat haShem is “fear of G-d”, and midat haDin is “the attribute of judgment”, but these translations totally miss the point when considered in the framework of Western thought (which is not their own native framework). In any case, you can see that these are not happy-go-lucky ideas, and it might be hard to mekarev secular Jews with “OMG CAN YOU FEEL THE ATTRIBUTE OF JUSTICE!!!” – that is, to bring them closer to the traditional observance of commandments – as opposed to “Yay, Happy Jewish Party!”. But it would be… I don’t know, more honest? More appropriate?

Second, Gad Elbaz did the breakdancing frummies music video thing several years ago, so it’s hardly a new idea (I don’t like the rap verses, but the chorus is very catchy):

One can probably find even earlier examples (breakdancing Breslovers, maybe?), but anyway, this is a great excuse for me to link to another Gad Elbaz video – Al Naharot Bavel (based on Psalm 137). I love this song and it certainly has more to do with Hashem’s judgment. The video is slightly over the top and in the song itself there is some totally unnecessary autotune toward the end, but it’s still well worth watching and listening to (and again, and again ):

Gmar chatima tova!