Beyond Selidor

It's the fourth day of the four-day weekend, and life is good. Four days travelling is great, but four days catching my breath at home is better, and, in this case, was exactly what I needed. I got so much done, but not in a way that made anything feel rushed and frenzied.

It feels easiest to break things down into subheadings.

Gardening

When I left you on Friday, I was crowd-sourcing advice on things to plant in our recently landscaped back garden. Taking all your suggestions on board, Matthias and went to the market and gardening shop on Saturday after lunch, and returned with a truly ludicrous number of seeds and seedlings (plus there was a woman selling indoor plants so I ended up with four more of those). We spent a hour or so on Saturday, and another hour this morning starting to sow seeds and transplant seedlings. So far we've planted beetroot and parsnips in one of the vegetable patches, a few rhubarb in 1/4 of another vegetable patch, and scattered a mixture of seedlings (mainly flowers, but also a fern, and two strawberry plants) and wildflower seed mix across the raised beds in the front and back garden. It's meant to rain this afternoon (and for much of the next week), so it was a good time to get all this done.

Movement

We've been on several little wanders around the cathedral and the river — nothing too lengthy, but enough to feel the fresh air and smell all the flowering plants. I've been to the gym for my usual two hours of classes, plus 1km swim per visit on three consecutive days. And then there's been yoga — slow, restorative, stretchy classes, with the bedroom window open and the warm breeze filling the room.

Food and cooking

I won't list everything eaten this weekend, but highlights include the lamb shoulder I made yesterday (marinated in a dry spice rub overnight, then slow roasted over a bed of fennel, onions, garlic and white wine, served with a roasted red capsicum salad; I made stock out of the lamb bones this morning), today's lunch (potato salad with asparagus, radishes and cucumber, dressed in a handmade lemon-garlic-mustard dressing — no gloopy mayonnaise for me — plus some cold seafood spontaneously bought at a little pop up stall near the river), multiple hot cross buns, toasted under the grill and served with melted salty butter (the last of which we will eat with our afternoon cup of smoky tea), and the first iced coffee of the season, picked up and drunk during this morning's wanderings.

Reading

I'm working my way through Kate Elliott's Furious Heaven, the second in her gender-flipped (and very, very queer) far future Alexander the Great space opera trilogy, and loving it a lot. Like all Kate Elliott books, it's a massive doorstopper, and it takes at least 100-200 pages to work itself up to the main plot, after which point things carry on forward at a page-turning clip for the remaining 500+ pages. The worldbuilding and secondary characters are excellent.

I was also reminded (via my Goodreads feed) that the Easter long weekend is the correct time of year for a Greenwitch (Susan Cooper) reread, since the book's action takes place over a week during the Easter holidays, in a fictional Cornish seaside town. It remains my favourite book in the Dark Is Rising sequence — melancholy and haunting, with the successful completion of its child characters' quest hingeing on people's (and in particular women and girls') symbiotic relationship with the sea. (In other words, is it any wonder that this one is my favourite?) I've got about forty pages to go, and I'll finish them during the aforementioned afternoon cup of tea.

Apart from all the other activities mentioned previously, Matthias and I spent a good bit of time sitting outside — at the riverside bar yesterday, and several visits to the courtyard garden of our favourite local cafe/bar. It really does lift the spirits to be able to eat and drink outdoors again, and it only remains for us to clean our garden furniture and deck — and then we can do so in our own garden, under the flowering (and later, fruiting) trees.

Idyllic really is the only word to describe how things have been these past four days.

The summer has continued to stretch into October — it was 25 degrees and sunny yesterday, which was perfect for our planned activity: wandering around the stalls on the green outside the cathedral, then picking up lunch to eat under the sky. The stalls themselves were there for the annual (and incongruous due to the weather) harvest festival: a heavy focus on apples (sold as fruit, juice, cider, in baked goods, etc), and various craft and food stalls selling their wares. We picked up a large haul of rare-ish varieties of apples, a couple of bottles of sharp, sour apple juice, and some fudge, and then paused to eat lunch at one of the large central tables — Jamaican food and prosecco (me), and pizza and cider (Matthias). It was lovely to be outdoors, so we spent a few hours in town, drifting from place to place.

Other than that (and the usual classes and swimming at the gym), I've been watching a lot of gymnastics, as the World Championships have been on. I'm not too fussed about who wins (or being spoiled about it), so mostly I've been watching things on catch-up having already known the results — I'm just here to see what the gymnasts are able to do. The quality has been high, and I find it pleasing in general that more and more countries seem able to send fantastic gymnasts to these kinds of competitions, rather than the same handful of usual suspects.

Due to spending a lot of time watching gymnastics, I've not had so much time to devote to reading, but I have read three books:

The Lion-Tamer's Daughter (Peter Dickinson), a reread of a book of four YA spooky stories that arrived in the boxes sent over by my mum. This was much more unsettling than I remembered — which has been my experience in general with the 1980s/1990s YA ghost story collections (of which I have several). It's not so much that the stories are scary, it's that they have chilling implications that completely passed me by when I read them as a teenager but which are extremely obvious to an adult reader.

The Sea of Tranquility (Emily St John Mandel) — the second pandemic novel by this author. It consists of four interlinked stories set in 1912, January 2020 (with some flashbacks to several years earlier), the 2200s, and the 2400s, with characters dealing with grief, loss, and the devastating shadow of historical and imagined pandemics. I found each individual section and its characters to be brilliantly drawn, written with exquisite perception and empathy (the book tour on Earth of a novelist based on a lunar colony in the 2200s is particularly well done), but I found the time travel conceit linking them to be kind of trite, with nothing original to be said about the ethics of time travel or the moral dilemmas it places on the time traveller. In some ways I just wish it could have left the mystery of the connection between the four stories unexplained and open ended.

A Study in Drowning (Ava Reid), a secondary world campus novel/gothic horror story in which two undergraduate academic rivals find themselves working in the mysterious, decaying manor of their country's most prestigious (and recently deceased) author, and uncovering terrifying and dangerous secrets. I really loved the atmosphere of this, and the book played to Reid's strengths (she's particularly good at writing characters who are dealing with mental illness and the aftermath of abuse and trauma), although the two central mysteries of the novel will be obvious to anyone who is familiar with both British and Irish folklore about otherworldly fairies, and A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. When I was proved right on both counts due to my own knowledge of such things, I didn't feel particularly cheated — I was just happy to be carried along on the wave of Reid's writing.

I'll close the post with a couple of Instagram recommendations if you like looking at beautiful and interesting places. Two of my favourite authors — Samantha Shannon and Kate Elliott — have recently returned from research trips to some spectacular parts of the world: Iceland and Central Asia respectively, and the photos they've been posting are wonderful. If you have Instagram accounts, you can view them at say_shannon and kateelliottsff.

It's been a weekend of contrasts: Saturday was busy and full of people, with a trip into Cambridge to run several errands and go to the Mill Road Winter Fair, which was back after two years' hiatus due to the pandemic. This is one of my favourite regional events — it takes place on a long street in Cambridge which is home to most of the city's international grocery stores, a bunch of restaurants and cafes from South, Southeast and East Asia, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as various Italian delis and independent cafes. The street gets pedestrianised, there are parades and live music, and all the cafes, shops and restaurants sell food from stalls outside their front doors. Even if a shop isn't one that sells food, they tend to set up stalls selling things like mulled wine, sweets or baked goods, or even more elaborate street food for the day. We were spoilt for choice when it came to lunch, cobbling a meal together from several different food trucks, and drinking mulled wine as we wandered up and down the road.

Sunday was a much more typical affair for our household, with all the usual activities: swimming when the pool opened at 8am (with a cold walk home enlivened by various cats sitting in windows and a flock of swallows swooping back and forth across the morning sky, making a sound like gently-breaking waves in a quiet bay), stewed fruit and crepes cooked to the soundtrack of a Massive Attack album, writing Yuletide fic while the biathlon played in the background. I've just come back downstairs after doing my normal Sunday evening yoga, a stretchy slow flow to calm my typical end of the weekend anxiety.

fandomtrees has a few days to go before it closes for sign ups. My tree is here, and I'd definitely recommend this fest as a low-pressure opportunity to create some fanworks, and hopefully get some nice ones of your own.

Robert Macfarlane's love of The Dark Is Rising is something I've always found very pleasing: I knew and enjoyed his nature writing before I knew we shared a love of Susan Cooper's children's books, and always felt he looked at the landscape with a similar eye to that of Cooper. So when I heard he was involved with a radio drama adaptation of the second book in the series, to be released around the same time of year as the story takes place, I was delighted. He's talked a bit more about his relationship with the books in a newspaper article for The Guardian.

I've just read one book since my last log — Servant Mage (Kate Elliott), the first in a novella duology. I'm not sure whether it can be described as 'epic fantasy' due to its brevity, but it certainly has that scale in terms of its sense of the sweep of history, violent shifts in politics, simmering revolutionary movements, and the interaction between the supernatural and people's everyday lives. All Elliott's strengths as a writer are on display here: comprehensive and well thought through worldbuilding, an emphasis on power relations and the terror and destruction wrought by those with social standing on those who lack power (and the foolish lies the powerful enforce in order to maintain their position), and a sense of people and societies grappling with vast, rapid political upheaval and social change. Elliott always has an interest in writing about what happens after the revolution succeeds, or the prophesied chosen one claims his kingdom, or the 'bad' monarch is replaced by the 'good' — she's never been satisfied with the standard fantasy trilogy closure, only with genuine justice. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

This is definitely a night to light a fire in the woodburning stove and burrow under one of the throw rugs — proper The Dark Is Rising weather, although hopefully not with the corresponding supernatural onslaught!

I've mentioned Kate Elliott's latest book, Unconquerable Sun — a space opera about a gender-swapped Alexander the Great — several times in previous posts. As Elliott is one of my favourite authors, I felt the book warranted a longer post than a few lines in my monthly reading roundup.

( No spoilers behind the cut )

It's Day Twenty-One of the fandom meme:

U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

I have a lot of favourite characters, so limiting myself to three is hard.

I love Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. She is my default icon on Ao3 and Dreamwidth, and I wrote a gushing post about her for another meme a while ago. Rather than write everything out again, I'll put what I wrote about Una in that other post behind a cut, because it explains why she's my favourite ... at length.

( A lot of words about Una )

The second character I'll list here is Mai, from Kate Elliott's Crossroads series. I've spoken a bit about her in an earlier post for this meme, and I also wrote about her at length in an older post for another meme. Again, I'll repost what I wrote behind the cut:

( More on Mai )

And the final character I will talk about is my beloved Pagan Kidrouk, the narrator of the first three of Catherine Jinks's wonderful Pagan Chronicles books, who is probably my favourite fictional character of all time. Weirdly, I don't think I've actually ever written down all my thoughts about him and why he is my favourite, but in brief: he is a dispossessed refugee who has to make a life for himself in a land where he knows no one (in his case, he is a Christian Arab who leaves Jerusalem in the twelfth century and ends up living in Languedoc), he is a literate person in a world where most people he encounters do not know how to read, he is traumatised and alone and has to build his own found family, and he uses words as his strength and weapons to make sense of situations where he is frequently at a massive disadvantage, and, slowly, over the years, he builds a new home for himself in the strange land in which he ends up.

Generally, for characters to be my favourites, they need to be at least one of these things:

Immigrants or refugees who find a new home and a sense of home and belonging in other people

Women whose heroism lies in their talents at quiet, unglamorous, unnoticed 'women's work'

Women who almost always read situations correctly and know the right actions to take, but whose advice is often ignored

Characters who are soft-hearted and sentimental and dismissed as being weak because of this

Characters who are hyper-observant of other people's moods, bodies, behaviour, reactions and perceptions out of grim necessity, for the sake of their own survival

Competent, maternal older women

Women who have survived trauma and reacted in certain ways which I find hard to summarise/articulate here

( The other days )

The final day of Worldcon was a day for winding down. I had committed to only one event, a reading by Jeannette Ng, in which she read from a work in progress, her short story 'How the Tree of Wishes Gained its Carapace of Plastic' (published in an anthology of stories in conversation with works by Kipling, called Not So Stories), and recited excerpts from the Mulan epic poem in Cantonese, translating into English as she went.

I made friends with people in the queue for the reading, and was even given a bottle of colour-changing gin by someone else in the queue (apparently because I'd asked a 'kitbag question', which had impressed the gin gifter, an Israeli, who explained that due to the fear of an ordinary question becoming a kitbag question, asking questions is somewhat discouraged in Israeli culture, something they found frustrating. So the gin was a gift to me for being the opposite of that ... aggressively helpful to the point of personal detriment). Of course the problem was that we only had hand luggage with Ryanair, so I spent the remainder of the convention trying to find someone to give the gin to!

After meeting up with Matthias (who had been in a panel on literary representations of dragons), we headed off for a final lunch in Dublin, in a nice Japanese restaurant near the convention centre, before collecting our bags from the hotel and heading for the airport. In spite of the fact that we were flying with Ryanair, we had more luck getting home than many other friends, whose tales of flight cancellations and other debacles sounded horrendous. Our flight was only one hour late, which with Ryanair means you've come out ahead!

In spite of how much time I spent in queues at Worldcon, I didn't end up spending much time reading, but I did manage to finish two books (mainly on the flights and in the airports): The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu (a cosy mystery set in 1930s Singapore, told from the point of view of Chen Su Lin, a Singaporean Chinese teenage girl who works as the assistant to a police inspector, which I enjoyed so much that I immediately bought the sequel and am reading it now), and The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman (a disappointing urban fantasy set in Tel Aviv which unfortunately had flat characters, inconsistent worldbuilding, and essentially reminded me that while I like how Abigail Nussbaum writes her reviews, I tend to disagree with her taste and interpretation in 95 per cent of instances and shouldn't look to her blog for recommendations).

I've got a photoset of pictures from my time in Dublin up on Instagram, and also a photo of the lovely message Kate Elliott wrote in my copy of Buried Heart, which she signed for me.

All in all, I had a fabulous time at Worldcon, and am very glad I went.

This is my second post recapping my experiences of attending my first ever Worldcon. As before, I will post panel descriptions in plain text, and a few sentences summarising my own impressions in italics afterwards.

( Panels on space opera, grappling with the post-colonial in SFF, and Tolkien, plus a reading by Kate Elliott and a fountain pen meet-up hosted by Aliette de Bodard )

I promised to mention the thing with Kate Elliott. She and I have known each other for a long time online, chatting occasionally on Twitter, where we are mutual followers, but I never take that as a guarantee that authors know who I am or think of me as a friend. However, when I was queuing to go into her reading, she saw my name badge, and immediately told me how much a book review I had written more than ten years ago meant to her. She told me it was one of the few reviews she'd read that got what she was trying to do with the book/series in question, and one of the few that ever applied a higher level of depth and complexity to its analysis of her work. She still remembered it, and that I was the one who wrote it, years later. I have to admit that this made me quite emotional and overwhelmed! I wrote a Twitter thread about the whole thing here.

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 15: Favorite fictional father mother

I'm switching this to mother rather than father, because I honestly can't think of a book with a good father character — most of the books I've read have either terrible fathers, or they're dead. Good mothers are a bit easier to find (although a lot of them are dead in the fiction I read too). My favourite, however, is Kiya from Kate Elliott's Court of Fives — a story of the slow build to revolution of a colonised people against their colonisers (the setting is inspired by Ptolemaic Egypt). Kiya, a mother of four daughters at the start of the series (and mother to two more children by the end of it), is from the colonised people, and her husband (or rather, partner, as it's illegal for them to marry) is a soldier from the colonisers, and over the course of the series their relationship unravels as it becomes apparent that individual people's qualities and feelings are not enough to overcome deeply entrenched systematic and structural iniquities.

I'll add what I wrote about Kiya in my review of the final book:

But the character who meant the most to me was Jessamy’s brilliant mother Kiya, who was given a prominence and authority rarely seen in portrayals of mothers in YA literature. Kiya’s strength comes from her identity as a mother, and all the skills we later see her deploying are those she honed as a parent: care for others, the ability to juggle multiple tasks while also looking ahead to the near and distant future, a strong sense others and their needs and motives, and the ability to console and inspire. It is because of, and not in spite of, these strengths that she becomes the leader of the revolution sweeping Efua, and it was profoundly moving to me to see a character like Kiya honoured, lauded and respected in this way.

This is why she's my favourite.

( The other days )

That title doesn't quite scan, but it will have to do.

Via Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, probably the best thing I've read all week: Nine Ways We Can Make Social Justice Movements Less Elitist and More Accessible, by Kai Cheng Thom. Really important stuff.

Read this essay by Sofia Samatar about being a black academic.

On a related note, Black Sci-fi Creators Assemble at Princeton and Imagine Better Worlds than This One, by Rasheedah Phillips.

Kari Sperring talks about justice, socialism, fantasy utopias, and Terry Pratchett.

Here's Alana Piper on the myth that 'women secretly hate each other'. Nothing throws me out of a story faster than female characters with no female friends, so this post was right up my alley.

Kate Elliott needs your help in a workshop on gender defaults in fantasy.

Shannon Hale writes about writing outside her culture. Note that at least one of the recommendations of books 'by Asian-American authors' is not by an Asian-American author, but rather, a Palestinian/Egyptian-Australian. It's still a good list.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz interviews Zen Cho. I wait impatiently for my copy of Sorcerer To The Crown to arrive.

As always, the new posts at Ghostwords are a delight.

Two new reviews are up on Those Who Run With Wolves:

Vida Cruz reviews Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter.

I review Space Hostages by Sophia McDougall.

It has been twenty years since two formative works of my teenage years, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and the film Hackers, were released. Here's an interview with the Hackers director.

The Toast remains amazing. Two of my favourite recent posts: Dirtbag Milton (I remember studying him in uni and being furious about how badly he treated his daughters), and How To Tell If You Are In a Lai of Marie de France.

I hope your weekends are glorious.

Slightly flippant title, wildly inaccurate characterisation of my reasons for doing these linkposts. Over here I am gearing up for a much needed long weekend, after one of those weeks that just seem to go on and on and on.

Kate Elliott wrote a great post on 'Diversity Panels: Where Next'. I would encourage you to read (most of) the links that follow, particularly the panel discussion at The Book Smugglers, which I included in a previous linkpost.

Some (unintentionally Australian-centric) Hugos follow-up posts:

Liz Barr of No Award livetweeted the Hugos.

Galactic Suburbia did a podcast discussing the results.

On a less awesome note (in the sense of this needing to be said at all), Sumana Harihareswara responded to the use of the Hare Krishna chant in the Hugos ceremony in an extraordinarily open-hearted and giving way.

A lot of people were sharing this (old) 'How to (Effectively) Show Support' by Dahlia Adler. This part particularly resonated with me:

There is a really big difference between being a person who only rages and a person who both rages and makes a real move for change. And maybe people don’t realize that. Maybe they don’t get how. But I’m tired of seeing raging with no support counterbalance, and I’m tired of people thinking raging is enough without backing it up in a meaningful way. I’m tired of people not realizing how limiting the effects are when all you do is talk about who and what is doing things wrong and not who and what is doing things right.

(Incidentally, I think the first person I saw sharing the post was Bogi Takács, who very effectively shows support with regular roundups of #diversepoems and #diversestories recommendations.)

Aliette de Bodard has set up a review website, designed to host reviews of 'books we love, with a focus on things by women, people of colour, and other marginalised people'.

Here's Sophia McDougall doing a podcast with Emma Newman. My poor, Romanitas-loving heart hurt when Sophia talked about one particular scene in Savage City involving the Pantheon. (I know at least one friend is currently reading the series for the first time, so it might be wise to avoid this podcast until you've finished - it's mildly spoilery.)

More on the invisibility of older women authors, this time from Tricia Sullivan.

Ana has gathered some great, library-related links at Things Mean A Lot.

'Breakthrough in the world's oldest undeciphered writing'.

Via umadoshi, these photos of the world's oldest trees are really amazing.

I hope you all have wonderful weekends.