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!

*

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”:

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!

I’ve been very busy with Pesach preparations, so I haven’t had time to post here… just two small pieces of news:

1. My friend Sarina has recently co-founded a band, Legionaire Now, and they have a fan interviews feature on their website. (Sign up for their newsletter to become eligible!) They picked me this week and I did my best to answer their questions. Read the interview here! It includes, among other things, autism, pizza and David Bowie

2. This also has to do with Sarina in a sense. I was just about to respond to her comment to my previous entry with “sure, my English might be ‘correct’ in the technical sense, but I always have this nagging feeling it’s not poetic enough”… I logged into my email… and I was very surprised to see an announcement from Astropoetica that they would like to run my poem I sent them (IIRC) sometime in December. It’s my first – and to date, the only -  English-language poem I submitted to any magazine, so this makes me really happy. The poem will probably be featured in the 2010 summer issue.

So I think I need to reevaluate my writing goals! In Hungarian I have been published in professional venues, and now that I’ve managed to sell multiple pieces to English-language semi-pro markets, I should really set my sights higher and submit to pro markets. My last excuse was “my English is not poetic enough”, which has just been thoroughly demolished. If it’s poetic enough to sell an actual poem, it’s definitely poetic enough for prose!

But, butbutbut, I have a brand new excuse at hand namely that I don’t have time to write. Unfortunately this is more or less true… I didn’t write any fiction or poetry in February, and in March I only had time to do scripting for Amesirun, my upcoming video game. (FYI – I moved the release date to April because of the holidays. Right now I think I could sleep for a week straight.)

I have to write more, and submit what I write. I also have two stories I want to revise, and a nonfiction piece on diversity in a recent spec fic video game (you’ll see which) that I need to finish ASAP.

I’ll also have to update this site more often, since it has started to get much more traffic lately than usual, mostly due to 1. Amesirun 2. my Linux posts. So, more Amesirun or more Linux?