It’s the weekend! I’ve picked two longer works, both about… Axis war crimes, and the different interpretations of victors and victims. Yes, this is still my series of reviews on speculative fiction, you’ve read that right! I want to talk about both at length, so I will post the reviews separately, and over the course of two days (G-d willing).

Before we start, a different issue – I’m a bit annoyed to see that some of the stories I was sure would fit into the short story category run in the novelette category on this year’s Hugos. I had originally intended to concentrate on short stories, but many places don’t post word counts in story headers, and in some cases stories are split up over multiple pages, which makes them appear shorter… like this one, which is actually a novella, even longer than a novelette! So I’ll have to reorganize the list and group stories by length.

Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove (an American Jewish man)

from Tor.com Originals, Apr 14 2011

This story looked like a quick read when I scrolled through the page (and I wasn’t really in the mood for anything longer), but when I actually started reading, I was quite surprised to see “Page 1 of 4″ and a link to the following page at the bottom.

I read on, and I was very happy I did. AWESOME happens right after that page break. I want to say as little as possible, but still something that will make you read the story, so I will just say that Turtledove takes the timeworn shtetl-kitsch clichés and subverts them masterfully, while still staying true to the sentiment that pervades them. Amazing, really.

There are some minor inconsistencies, for example when it comes to pronunciation, but (spoiler!) since the characters are historical reconstructionists, it’s perfectly understandable they would get at least a few things wrong.

I only had a small gripe with the story – as an Orthodox Jew, I’m uncomfortable with fully spelled out divine names included in works that come without warnings to treat the names respectfully. As this stands, readers will probably print out the story and toss the printout once they’ve finished, or read it in the bathroom, etc. all of which would be prohibited by halachah (Jewish law).

The author is secular and thus probably not particularly bothered by it, but I am! If you as a reader want to play it safe, the easiest way is to just leave the story in electronic format (which does not qualify as “writing” as per halachah) and read it that way. This also saves trees

Another minor gripe which has nothing to do with the story content:  sometimes there were extra spaces inserted before and after vowels with diacritics, I guess someone’s word processor goofed up there!

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Here is a beautiful Karliner nigun which demonstrates my point above. In practice, divine names are often hyphenated or substituted when not praying. In the video, you can hear people sing “Kah echsof” while the text reads Y-ah echsof”.

Here is another version (by Aharon Razel & co.) where they sing “Y-ah echsof”:

My wrist is getting better and I can type with both hands now, though I still can’t do everything I’d like to do. Updates will resume shortly IY”H, though this week is going to be fairly busy for me, and my health is not perfect either (even besides this unfortunate injury, sigh).

I took down a comment spam filter a while ago – I had problems with it and I was frankly curious what would happen. It’s strange, most of the spam I get consists of lengthy, baroque, and sometimes downright bizarre compliments. I guess people are most likely to approve comments containing compliments? There was even one which said that my site increased the size of their testicles. Lolwut?

Along completely different lines, I also got spammed by a Chareidi website (I’d rather not say which, but it’s not one I normally visit). Spamming is asur, people!

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!

I’ve won a book on Haikasoru’s latest contest. I hope it gets here in one piece! My Book Depository orders get here without problems, but I’ve had books won in contests end up completely lost in transit.

They had an interesting topic: the future of gender, so I’m going to reproduce my answer.

The questions were: “What is the future of gender? Is gender static, or does it shift naturally? Can it, and should it, be manipulated purposefully for scientific or social ends?”

I think gender and sexuality are going to become increasingly flexible with the progress of medical science, but that doesn’t mean they are going to become less important, or irrelevant. To the contrary, people tend to be especially attached to the identities they themselves choose – for example, people who convert to another religion tend to be more vocal about religion than people who stay with their parents’ religion.

Yay Genderform already lists 947 different possibilities, and the list goes on… I think writers often manage to reinvent the wheel, and come up with groups intended to be fictional which already exist. (Not really gender-related, but the other day I even managed to find a story in this year’s Hugo crop which seemed to reinvent Asperger syndrome.) Worse still, the fictionalized group often ends up treated as inhuman in the story universe. I’m hesitant to link to TVTropes because it can eat up time like nothing else, but the Hermaphrodite page is a good example, featuring only a few realistic portrayals of intersexual characters and a lot of, um, alien porn or straight-up fetishism.

A discussion on fictional gender might seem like a diversion from the future of gender, but what I’m trying to say is, the future is already here, it just goes unnoticed by the people who are not “early adopters”. As for whether gender should be manipulated purposefully, my answer is more or less the same – if it can be done, it will eventually be done, and in many cases, it has already been done!

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Tim Lieder is taking submissions for his second anthology of Bible-themed horror stories. I thought the first one was awesome (I didn’t like the Catherynne Valente story, though) and I’m all for Bible fiction, so this is great news. Submit stuff, I want to read the anthology as soon as it comes out

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You can’t be pro-GLBT and still work to exclude transgender and transsexual people, that’s a contradiction in terms. Harvard University still tries to pull it off – post by DesiArcy.

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I realized Amazon also sold clothing items, so I decided to search for clothing items I like to wear – for example, wrap skirts. It’s not that I’m going to order anything from Amazon – the shipping would probably cost much than the actual product – but it’s a fun diversion, you know?

Except it was The Lulzy Fail. Apparently everything that even vaguely resembles clothing I wear is somehow “exotic”, “tribal” or “Gypsy”. (These items have nothing to do with actual Gypsy clothing, but nevermind.)

If you don’t know me in person – I wear two kinds of clothing. Either the “all black with metallic implements of torture” type of oldschool rivethead clothing (with a dash of goth or punk) or loose clothing with color prints.  This time I was looking for the latter, since the former is usually just a black skirt, a black shirt and my mostly self-made accessories, I don’t need an online store for that.

I like bright colors and busy prints, ideally both at the same time, but I often have to compromise on bright colors (sigh!) since it’s hard to buy this type of clothing locally. As a religious Jew I’m also a modest dresser, which really constrains the type of clothing I can buy in mainstream shops, even when I’m taking layering into account.

So I am apparently Super Exotic because I wear long skirts. Go me?

Due to health problems and work-related issues I haven’t been able to post much lately… I’ll try to make up for the delay, G-d willing. First, a bunch of links I thought would be worth sharing–

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An article where two YA authors talk about their experience trying to sell a YA novel with a gay protagonist has caused quite a furor lately. “The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.” A huge flamewar erupted with some people essentially claiming the authors were lying. Here is a summary.

Flamewars of this kind make me uneasy irrespective of my viewpoint being represented… but some people linked to resources I was previously unaware of, and these are definitely worth sharing.

I’ve found a list of YA spec fic with major LBGTQ characters, collated by LJ user tanuki_green. This particular entry looks especially interesting, to me at least: “Guardian of the Dead, by Karen Healey. An ambitious urban fantasy making thoughtful use of Maori folklore. A major supporting character is asexual.” (Edited to add: Wow, this review is… discouraging, to say the least. Sigh!)

And in case people were wondering about the state of queer YA, here is a post with actual statistics. A few quotes: “Less than 1% of YA novels have LGBT characters.” “50% of LGBT YA books are about boys, with only 25% about girls.” [The rest feature LGBT parents, multiple characters, etc.] “only 4% of LGBT YA books are about transgender or genderqueer characters.” – I assume asexual characters would be included in this category? (Edited to add: Dash made the point that it made little sense to group these categories together – I agree)

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Something completely different, here is a video game project I’ll be keeping an eye on. Warco is a first person shooter, except you shoot film, not guns: you play as a news correspondent in a war zone. I loved the photojournalist theme in Beyond Good and Evil (the game, not the book!) and this looks similar, except it’s set in a realistic setting.

Alas, with this type of game everything hinges on the storyline. It can be a gritty drama where you learn something about real-life war zones beyond “ooooo third world country getting destroyed!” (sigh) or it can be something totally failtastic, or something else entirely…

I think this would be a good opportunity to link to Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical article on writing about Africa. (It also has a sequel!) …wow, I’ve even found a crowd-sourced “how to write about poor people”.

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And a third topic, here is a poignant essay on Martin Luther King’s impact, by HamdenRice. It struck really close to home because it’s related to what I see people go through in my own ethnic group – of course there are differences, but it’s close.

In Hungary most Jews are afraid to admit they are Jewish, because they do not want to be on the receiving end of verbal and yes, physical violence. They are in the closet for this very reason. When I decided in my teens that I would become more religiously observant (and eventually Orthodox), I knew I could not remain in the closet without constantly lying. Why won’t you eat this – just a bite, why won’t you go out with us on Friday evening, why won’t you shake my hand etc. – I would’ve had to lie in response to all these questions. You can’t really live a religious life in the closet because it affects every little thing you do.

But this meant I became the token Jew everywhere – even when there were lots of other Jews in the group, since they would not tell the non-Jews. Sometimes they would not even tell me, and I’d find out about it through mutual acquaintances.

And yes, I became a target. I’ve been in situations where I had to defend myself physically, where I had to run, I’ve even been in a situation where a policeman walked away from such an event. People say at least anti-Semitic violence is not institutionalized in Hungary (implication: you shouldn’t complain) – well, if a policeman refuses to protect you, i think that’s exactly what’s going on. Two of my friends decided to pursue similar cases through official channels, with quite negative results – one of them was even told to drop the case or they would prosecute him.

But you know what: it’s not that bad. What’s the worst thing that can happen? “They will kill us” – newsflash: they’ve already tried and we’re still here. We need to be proud of who we are.  If we all did it together,  eventually we would not have to live in fear. …and it would certainly be easier on me, the token Jew!

I updated my list of Hungarian popular-science articles; I hope this isn’t getting repetitive for non-Hungarian-speakers! FYI – I don’t recommend Google Translate for Hungarian in its present state: when I sent a friend of mine an anti-racist essay, said friend managed to conclude with the aid of automatic translation that it was a racist essay! Uh oh.

I need to thank Dash (of Expanded Horizons fame) for recommending “Biblical Hebrew mistranslations” as a topic, the article is already available and it’s proving to be quite popular. Thanks again!

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If you are in Hungary, I have a conference presentation at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistics next Thursday morning. I’m going to talk about the necessity of applying formal linguistic methods to semiotic data in light of the recent Indus Valley controversy. It’s going to be a short presentation that’s intended to be thought-provoking, it will have amusing pictures and oddball references.

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A bit of squee about projects I’m involved in: nyest.hu just reached 1000 Facebook likes yesterday (like it and win random stuff!), and World SF News had this to say about Expanded Horizons: “Expanded Horizons has become the premier webzine publishing international writers these days, and their latest issue is a strong one, including two Apex Book of World SF II contributors! Check out stories from Hungary, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Hong Kong and the Philippines at this great publication“.

Donate for Expanded Horizons, we’re all volunteers at the magazine and all donations go toward paying our contributors! Teaser: the next issue is going to feature, among other things, interviews by Muslim and Arab authors we have previously published. In the meanwhile, the Muslim/Arab special issue of Apex Magazine is also out!

I also got She Nailed a Stake to His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (edited by Tim Lieder) in the mail and read it last weekend; I wonder if I can find a market for a review… This sort of stuff should be reviewed as often as possible – the more biblically-themed fiction, the merrier! Now I just need to find some time to finish writing that Bible space marine story…

Just a small post -

First of all, Expanded Horizons has a new issue out, I just finished uploading the content. Make sure to visit! It also has an autism-related story.

Second, I registered on Playstation Network, my username is “prezzey”, add me and I’ll probably add you back – if I don’t have the slightest idea who you are, first send me a message, leave a comment here, etc. you get the idea. (BTW I have the same username on Xbox Live.)

Third, I was very angry to see when I came online after the chag that the Pesach robots video has been removed – here is a writeup of the contents in case you were wondering. This video has been online for a year and I had no idea it would disappear over the holidays… *sigh!*

Pesach starts in an hour (at least in my time zone), I hope everyone who’s been preparing is more or less prepared! (I could fall asleep standing. ) I’d like to take the time to wish a kosher Pesach for my Jewish friends, a joyous Easter for my Christian friends and a happy spring holiday for everyone else!

To mark the occasion, here is a really cute Pesach video from Israel… with robots!

Traditional Judaism and Hungarian mythology all-in-one feature! Click now ;]

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