a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2023-01-02 03:38 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2023-01-02 03:38 pm
Entry tags:
First linkpost of the new year
I've been gathering various fandom-related links over the past few days, and it's got to the point where it would be a good idea to share them and close some tabs.
First up, if you're looking to meet new people on Dreamwidth,chromaskies has posted a new year's friending meme:
Click the banner to join us and make some new friends!
The![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomtrees fest is coming to an end, and there are still some participants without any gifts. If anyone feels like creating anything, the 'needy trees' spreadsheet lists all participants with no gifts, or only one gift so far.
If you like fairy tales, folktales, myths and legends, you may be interested in participating inonce_upon_fic, an exchange for fic in these types of fandoms. There's an announcement post listing rules and this year's schedule — nominations are set to open in a couple of weeks.
naye has written a really detailed, clear and comprehensive guide to using Mastodon, if that's something people were interested in doing.
In addition to the links, I've started the year off with some reading: two books so far.
The first is The Women of Troy, Pat Barker's incredible follow up to her amazing The Silence of the Girls, which remains my gold standard for Briseis-centric Iliad retellings. As before, the focus is on the women of the story, in this case those held captive in the Greek camp after Troy has fallen. Some of them — such as Briseis, who remains the main narrator of the story — have been enslaved since earlier in the war and living in the camp for several years, others were captured after the fall of Troy and handed out as 'prizes' to the victorious warriors. The emphasis is on the dirt and grit of everyday life — sex, pregnancy and childbirth, preparing food, caring for the wounded, burying the dead — all the things done to and by (there is no 'doing with' in this context) women to sustain life and community, unnoticed and unacknowledged by men. As in the previous book, there's a sense of a hidden community of women, standing in solidarity with each other, managing the fragile egos of the violent men around them, slipping unseen everywhere, knowing better than the men who hold them in their power what is going on in the camp — because knowledge is a kind of currency, and it may mean the difference between survival and destruction. I love this series so, so, so very much, because it gives me what I want from an Iliad retelling (and specifically a Briseis-centric retelling) that so few other female character-centric retellings ever seem to manage. It allows the women to be furious at their situation, and allows them to resist in a way that doesn't look like American YA heroines leading resistance movements, and it shows the terrible, disorienting tightrope that those without power must walk in order to survive a violent honour culture that views them as property.
Babel (Rebecca Kuang) imagines a fantasy alternate history version of the nineteenth century, in which language and translation powers the magical devices that run the world. It's set among students at Oxford, brought (for the most part) from colonised countries so that their skills in language can continue to build the wealth and industrial might to expand and sustain the British Empire. It's a clever metaphor for the exploitation of colonised countries' resources and people by the imperial centre, the emphasis on etymology and translation is a lot of fun, and Kuang (who has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge) has captured exactly the bittersweet joy of studying at Oxbridge (the delight at finding the small handful of people who share your intellectual interests and the vast academic resources at your disposal, the horror of the vast inequalities and injustices inherent in the institution's existence, the appalling privileged people you meet there who just continue to fail upwards). However, I feel the book suffers from a kind of anxiety that I've noticed in a number of other SFF works from ... let's just say the Extremely Online SFF Publishing Community: a worry that unless the book explains itself extremely bluntly and didactically, someone might misinterpret depiction of 'problematic' things to be an endorsement, or a lack of awareness of these things on the part of the author, and drive a Twitter pile-on their way. (One example: a particularly ghastly oblivious wealthy English man reacts to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire by saying that 'of course Africans enslaved each other as well,' and Kuang feels the need to insert a footnote explaining how the European chattel slavery of Africans was different. I can't imagine most readers needing this, but it's as if Kuang is anxious that leaving this remark stand might lead to readers thinking she endorsed it as an author, rather than interpreting it — correctly — as an ignorant statement made by the kinds of white people who feel uncomfortable about the existence of slavery and want to feel less guilty about it. The book is full of similar footnotes.) Ultimately, there are things I liked about this book, but I felt it suffered from this undercurrent of anxiety, which led to a lack of subtlety. Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire does a better job of exploring that terrible, painful tension between falling in love with the literature and culture of the imperial centre while knowing — as a colonised person — that this culture others you, and never truly views you as a person.
In any case, my reading is certainly off to a good start in terms of giving me lots to think about.
First up, if you're looking to meet new people on Dreamwidth,
chromaskies has posted a new year's friending meme: Click the banner to join us and make some new friends!
The
fandomtrees fest is coming to an end, and there are still some participants without any gifts. If anyone feels like creating anything, the 'needy trees' spreadsheet lists all participants with no gifts, or only one gift so far. If you like fairy tales, folktales, myths and legends, you may be interested in participating in
once_upon_fic, an exchange for fic in these types of fandoms. There's an announcement post listing rules and this year's schedule — nominations are set to open in a couple of weeks. naye has written a really detailed, clear and comprehensive guide to using Mastodon, if that's something people were interested in doing. In addition to the links, I've started the year off with some reading: two books so far.
The first is The Women of Troy, Pat Barker's incredible follow up to her amazing The Silence of the Girls, which remains my gold standard for Briseis-centric Iliad retellings. As before, the focus is on the women of the story, in this case those held captive in the Greek camp after Troy has fallen. Some of them — such as Briseis, who remains the main narrator of the story — have been enslaved since earlier in the war and living in the camp for several years, others were captured after the fall of Troy and handed out as 'prizes' to the victorious warriors. The emphasis is on the dirt and grit of everyday life — sex, pregnancy and childbirth, preparing food, caring for the wounded, burying the dead — all the things done to and by (there is no 'doing with' in this context) women to sustain life and community, unnoticed and unacknowledged by men. As in the previous book, there's a sense of a hidden community of women, standing in solidarity with each other, managing the fragile egos of the violent men around them, slipping unseen everywhere, knowing better than the men who hold them in their power what is going on in the camp — because knowledge is a kind of currency, and it may mean the difference between survival and destruction. I love this series so, so, so very much, because it gives me what I want from an Iliad retelling (and specifically a Briseis-centric retelling) that so few other female character-centric retellings ever seem to manage. It allows the women to be furious at their situation, and allows them to resist in a way that doesn't look like American YA heroines leading resistance movements, and it shows the terrible, disorienting tightrope that those without power must walk in order to survive a violent honour culture that views them as property.
Babel (Rebecca Kuang) imagines a fantasy alternate history version of the nineteenth century, in which language and translation powers the magical devices that run the world. It's set among students at Oxford, brought (for the most part) from colonised countries so that their skills in language can continue to build the wealth and industrial might to expand and sustain the British Empire. It's a clever metaphor for the exploitation of colonised countries' resources and people by the imperial centre, the emphasis on etymology and translation is a lot of fun, and Kuang (who has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge) has captured exactly the bittersweet joy of studying at Oxbridge (the delight at finding the small handful of people who share your intellectual interests and the vast academic resources at your disposal, the horror of the vast inequalities and injustices inherent in the institution's existence, the appalling privileged people you meet there who just continue to fail upwards). However, I feel the book suffers from a kind of anxiety that I've noticed in a number of other SFF works from ... let's just say the Extremely Online SFF Publishing Community: a worry that unless the book explains itself extremely bluntly and didactically, someone might misinterpret depiction of 'problematic' things to be an endorsement, or a lack of awareness of these things on the part of the author, and drive a Twitter pile-on their way. (One example: a particularly ghastly oblivious wealthy English man reacts to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire by saying that 'of course Africans enslaved each other as well,' and Kuang feels the need to insert a footnote explaining how the European chattel slavery of Africans was different. I can't imagine most readers needing this, but it's as if Kuang is anxious that leaving this remark stand might lead to readers thinking she endorsed it as an author, rather than interpreting it — correctly — as an ignorant statement made by the kinds of white people who feel uncomfortable about the existence of slavery and want to feel less guilty about it. The book is full of similar footnotes.) Ultimately, there are things I liked about this book, but I felt it suffered from this undercurrent of anxiety, which led to a lack of subtlety. Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire does a better job of exploring that terrible, painful tension between falling in love with the literature and culture of the imperial centre while knowing — as a colonised person — that this culture others you, and never truly views you as a person.
In any case, my reading is certainly off to a good start in terms of giving me lots to think about.