Beyond Selidor

The current snowflake_challenge is one that I always find incredibly stressful: I don't really collect fannish merch (other than ... physical books? Dreamwidth icons?), and I'm completely incapable of taking decent photos of anything that isn't a) a tree or b) a body of water.



So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here is the prompt:

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt. earch in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

1. A favorite character
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A bookshelf
4. A game or hobby you enjoy
5. Something you find comforting
6. A TV show or movie you hope more people will watch
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A thing from an old fandom
9. A thing from a new fandom

My photos can be found on Instagram. Edited to add that the bad-quality photos were stressing me out so much that I deleted the whole photoset from Instagram, so the link here will no longer work. The descriptions of the photos remain below.

I have merged several categories.

1. A favourite character — Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. This is the back of a t shirt which is possibly the only piece of fannish merch I own, a quote from McDougall's book referencing Una. (A picture McDougall drew of her own character, plus this quote, forms my default Dreamwidth icon.)

2. and 3. Something that makes me laugh + a bookshelf — a small portion of the Terry Pratchett section of our bookshelves. This is only a small portion of our collection as a whole — my copies are all still at my mum's place in Australia, and many of Matthias's copies are still in Germany. At some point, we will have all the copies in the one place and may have to discard the duplicates.

4. and 5. A game or hobby I enjoy + something I find comforting — swimming swimming swimming. I am, as I have said many times, half woman half ocean. Swimming is the only thing that stills the sea inside.

6. A TV show or movie I wish more people would watch — Babylon Berlin

7. A thing from an old fandom — the final lines of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This isn't my oldest fandom, but it was my first experience of fandom as an online community, and the HDM forum I joined still remains my gold standard for online fannish spaces. It was the perfect welcome and introduction to fandom-as-shared activity.

8. A thing from a new fandom — the extant books from Pat Barker's Briseis-centric Iliad retelling trilogy.

I read three more short stories yesterday. All are free and online at the Tor.com website.

( Short fiction )

I'll post about the Australian election result in the next few days once the dust has settled, given it is uncertain whether we will have a minority Labor government with a confidence-and-supply deal, a Labor-led coalition with Greens and independents, or a Labor government with a tiny majority, but as you can probably tell from the array of possibilities, I have breathed a sigh of absolute relief.

Suffice it to say, I have a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge.

once_upon_fic authors were revealed yesterday, so I can now post enthusiastically about what I received, other recs from the collection, and share the work that I wrote myself.

My gift was this wonderful character study of the selkie woman in the Icelandic 'The Sealskin' folktale:

only a seal, only a skin (1131 words) by Pingoodle
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Sealskin (Icelandic Folktale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Selkie Woman/Husband
Characters: Selkie Woman, Husband - Character
Additional Tags: Pregnancy
Summary:

I taught my six children what to look for, to soothe my heart. Again and again they’d come to sit at my feet and tell me: Only a seal, only a skin.

I also wrote a selkie story, although mine was for the slightly different Scottish variant on the tale:

The Sea Inside (1687 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Scottish Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie (The Selkie Bride)
Summary:

This is a story about the language of the sea, and the language of the land. An earthbound selkie sheds and reclaims many words, and many skins.

It seems to have been well received, and I'm glad from the comments that people could see what I was trying to do with language, with the landscape, and with the sea.

Here are my recs from the collection.

( Four recs behind the cut )

This was a great exchange in which to participate, and I'm so glad I took part!

I've always had a lot of oddly specific scenarios that I'm desperate to see in works of fiction, and which I'm always seeking and never quite finding. Some of them I'd be unable to explain ('vampires, but not like that,' 'angels and demons and the war with heaven and the Fall and Christian-ish cosmology, but not like that,' 'an Iliad retelling, but not like that,' 'dark academia but not like that'), I just read books in the hope they might give me what I want and then find they haven't done so. Sometimes I encounter a new piece of media and it gives me a new-to-me oddly specific scenario that I didn't even know I was seeking (the first season of Peaky Blinders, Novik's Spinning Silver, Kate Elliott's Crossroads trilogy).

The oddly specific scenario that's taken hold of my mind for the past two days is a rarity — something I can explain in a (hopefully) comprehensible manner. I will preface this by saying I'm certain that works of fiction exploring it exist (because I find it exasperating when someone online goes, 'why has no one written X?' or 'where are all the X works of fiction?' and I'm aware of myriad books/films/etc that fulfill those those specifications), but so far they've been hard for me to find.

There is a lot of genre fiction concerned in one way or another with revolution — overthrowing an unjust regime, defeating some great oppressive evil, getting rid of bad political leaders and replacing them with good. Like every speculative fiction fan, I enjoy reading this kind of stuff. But what I really want to read/watch are stories that start after the revolution has already happened, and look at how peoples, communities, nations have to deal with the fallout. Not revolution, but justice, reconciliation, and community building.

I have additional oddly specific requirements here: it needs to be a specific type of revolution. I'm not particularly interested in the aftermath of e.g. a bad monarch being replaced by a supposedly good one. I'm more interested in seeing people, communities, or whole nations grappling with how to live in the aftermath of some monumental, society-wide injustice (colonisation, genocide, a political regime that oppressed some but not others) that has been recognised as such, and both the oppressors and oppressed, the wrongdoers and the wronged (and the bystanders and passive beneficiaries) have to find a way to a) honestly admit and confront the past injustices, b) agree on what justice, reparations and reconciliation would look like in the wake of that, and c) live among each other as neighbours and fellow citizens. I want to see the messiness of that — the outrage and guilt and grief and distrust — from a variety of different characters' perspectives.

As I say, I'm sure such fiction exists — I'm probably just bad at finding it, or the social circles from within which I get the majority of media recommendations don't seek it out so I don't get recommendations. But I also suspect it's less common because creators have fewer real-world examples from which to draw. I'm not saying that there are no real-world revolutions or endings of injustices, but they don't tend to lead to the scenario that I've outlined above, with oppressors and oppressed living together and messily working out what justice and trust would look like. Instead, oppressors leave (as in postcolonial countries which gain political independence), or oppressed minorities emigrate if they can, or (as in the case of my country of origin) one form of oppression is replaced with another, and any attempts at having an honest conversation about either past or current oppression is shouted down ('why are you still so upset about what happened in the past?' or 'we're not doing the bad things that were done to you in the past so what do you have to complain about?'). And in general, a lot of real world injustice simply gets replaced with another form of injustice (often at the hands of the same group of oppressors), and a lot of denial about the gravity of what happened before. So I guess if this kind of scenario is difficult and rare in the real world, it's not surprising it would be hard to get right in fiction.

This is a meandering and weird post, but I guess all that is building up to two questions:

1. If anyone has recommendations for this extremely specific scenario in fiction, could you share them with me? (Please no video games, podcasts, or comics that require reading vast numbers of back issues for things to make sense — books, TV shows or films only.)
2. Do any of you have similarly specific fictional scenarios that you also find nearly impossible to find?

Somehow this has turned into a recs post, I suppose?

Edited to add an update with the recommendations I've been given so far (because a lot of you are recommending the same things):

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (recommended twice)
Bitterblue — Kristin Cashore (recommended three times; I've already read it)
Winterkeep — Kristin Cashore
Holdfast Chronicles — Suzy McKee Charnas
Nostalgia de la luz
Papirosen
Logic series — Laurie Marks (recommended twice)
Tir Tanagiri series — Jo Walton (I've already read it)
Commonweal series — Graydon Saunders

Via nyctanthes and a couple of others in my circle, I discovered this fun set of fandom-related questions created by squidgiepdx. The idea is that you answer one question a day for the first twenty days of June, and that's obviously not going to happen in my case, so instead I will answer them in batches until I've done the lot.

I should also preface this by saying that a lot of the questions apply to an approach to fandom that's very different to my own — for various reasons I gravitate towards tiny fandoms, and once I'm fannish about something those feelings never switch off, so 'being in fandom' for me tends to be a) a solitary activity and b) a permanent state of being in which new fandoms are added, but they never replace old fandoms.

( Days 1-3 )

( The other days )

I've managed to pack quite a bit into what started out quite a sleepy Sunday: a sunny walk along the river, among the houseboats, swans, geese and crows, crepes for breakfast, a bit of yoga. I've just returned after a desperate rush into the garden to rescue the laundry from — of all things — a hailstorm.

I've also just finished a book: The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick (a pseudonym for the collaborative efforts of Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms), which felt somewhat old-fashioned in a rather refreshing way — more like the kind of twisty, page-turning secondary world fantasy I used to read twenty years ago. The setting evoked Renaissance Venice (with a dash of the Balkan coastal cities as well), the characters are all, in various ways, con artists attempting disparate kinds of heists, there are various political plots afoot, and everything is artifice in one manner or another.

The eleventh prompt for the book meme asks for:

11. A book that came to you at exactly the right time

( My answer )

( The other days )

I feel as if every day has been a slow act of semi-hibernation. We're heading towards the chilly heart of winter: short days, icy nights, frost-covered hedgerows. This morning, the mist covered the land, and it hasn't lifted all day. Now the sun's gone down, but the mist still fills the sky. I'm hoping it will linger tomorrow.

I had so many plans: to finish off my second Yuletide treat (the assignment itself is done, as is one treat, and this second treat is about half-finished), to start reading a new book, and so on — but they all fell by the wayside. Instead, I wore soft clothing, snuggled up indoors, and rested.

Matthias and I did watch one film: Vampires versus The Bronx. The title pretty much tells you exactly what you're getting: a group of Plucky Teenagers™ realise that the gentrifying capitalist vampires who have moved into their neighbourhood are literal vampires. Although it lacked any standout actors with the charisma of John Boyega, it reminded me very much of Attack the Block, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I also read Malinda Lo's novel A Line in the Dark: a contemporary YA thriller which reminded me in some ways of Pretty Little Liars (tense group of teenage girls in a claustrophobic small town, lots of dangerous secrets, someone gets murdered and everyone appears culpable). Other than this book, I've not had much luck with reading this month: it's as if my brain is frozen. I may attempt a reread of the Winternight trilogy, which at least feels seasonally appropriate.

I did, however, manage to engage my brain to the extent that I listened to this (free) recording of a panel on speculative fiction by Filipino authors. The panellists were Vida Cruz, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Eliza Victoria, and Isabel Yap.

I've got two more weeks of work to go before I go on leave, and I'm really ready for a break. I feel like my Christmas lights: shining resolutely against the darkness.

This day of transition from daylight saving to standard time is my favourite of the year: I'm a morning person, I tend to wake up early, and I like waking to sunlight. The extra hour is always much appreciated as well. This time around, it meant that Matthias and I were up and off for our walk to Grantchester by about 7.30am, and back home — via the French bakery for a fresh, warm baguette and coffee — at about 8.30am. It was bright, crisp, and clear, and the cows were all gathered in the field closest to the carpark, ready to be moved out of their summer home, as always happens when daylight saving ends.

The rest of the morning was taken up with yoga (a fast flow sequence that was perhaps a bit more ambitious than I felt like, focusing heavily on core strength), a bit of food prep for dinner, cleaning empty fountain pens, and finishing up the final fifteen per cent of the book I'd been reading, Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender.

This was a book that was so ambitious and compelling in some regards, and so incredibly frustrating in other areas that I almost feel incapable of reviewing it. It's the first in a fantasy series grappling with the history of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, and it has really interesting things to say about revenge. It's essentially a revenge tragedy, and Callender does a great job of showing what it is to live a life solely motivated by revenge — how it corrupts and poisons everything, how it hollows out a person, and how it causes such a person to justify every injustice they perpetrate as working towards that ultimate end. I applaud Callender also for writing a book whose protagonist is so thoroughly contemptible (there are several things that she — the narrator, Sigourney — does that cross a moral line beyond which I am incapable of finding a character sympathetic) but for whom it is still possible to feel pity.

But at the same time, the book — which is supposedly adult fiction — was dreadfully let down by how closely it stuck to the typical US young adult novel formula. The first person present tense grated — I can see why the former was necessary, given the book was intended to bring its readers into uncomfortable proximity to the mindset of a woman so thoroughly convinced that 'the master's tools will dismantle the master's house', but present tense is almost never warranted, and certainly wasn't here. The obvious Designated Love Interest was unnecessary. And the twist at the end was so obviously telegraphed (it's basically Chekhov's Mind-Reading: if you have a narrator who has supernatural abilities to read people's minds, those responsible for the unsolved string of politically-motivated murders are going to be the people whose minds she refrains from reading out of respect, or dismissal of their importance, and I figured this out after I'd read about a third of the book). And from a structural point of view, it's really poor writing to have this great twist revealed in a huge infodump (secondhand, as the narrator reads someone's mind) for the final fifteen per cent of the book.

In other words, interesting ideas, shame about the execution.

My other recently read books have, with one exception, been a lot more satisfying.

( Two novellas and three novels behind the cut )

The rest of the weekend has been spent signing up for Yuletide, poking around the letters app (I now have a list of six potential requests I want to treat, and the only thing that's stopping me from starting is that I like to write my assignment first before committing to any treats), and trying to hunt down an elusive book which unfortunately has (to the best of my memory) an extremely generic name.

My obsession with fiction set in Al-Andalus (either when it was experiencing its glittering golden age, or in its dying days and collapse), particularly when the point-of-view characters are religious minorities, was kindled way back in my undergrad days, when my Jewish History/Religion/Culture lecturer assigned us an excerpt of a historical novel set in that period (alongside the typical academic books and journal articles). I'd always meant to track down this book, but its name eludes me, and while a lot of Googling by both Matthias and me yesterday unearthed an entire library of historical fiction books covering similar ground (now all added to my to read list), I still cannot find the book in question. Now my only hope is that all my photocopied course notes are still sitting in my old room in my mum's flat in Sydney, so that whenever international travel is possible again, I can go through said notes and find the reference to the book I'm seeking. At least I've got an interesting looking set of other books to read at some point in the future!

In the time it's taken me to write this post, the sun has completely disappeared. Any lingering hint of summer has definitely well and truly vanished!

I've been avoiding Twitter for quite a while now, so I missed the latest instance of ghastly identity policing to have bubbled up on YA publishing Twitter, but the beats are as predictable as they are infuriating. As far as I can work out, a bunch of people decided to start calling out author Becky Albertalli for being straight, writing books about queer teenagers, and 'taking up slots' for the books of queer authors which might otherwise have been published. Albertalli, rightly upset by all this (for reasons which will soon become apparent), was thus forced into outing herself as bisexual not at a time of her own choosing, but in a way which was upsetting, and in the wake of harassment. (There seems to then have been a bit of subsequent goalpost-shifting by Albertalli's harassers, who, when they realised they now looked like awful people for bullying someone out of the closet before she was ready, started backpedalling and saying their issue with Albertalli's books had never been that their author was straight, but rather that they clearly weren't written by someone immersed in 'the queer community' — as if this were a monolith, and as if it were a universal requirement for a queer identity.)

I've been watching iterations of this play out in both transformative fandom and certain corners of professional publishing for at least a decade now, and I'm coming to the frustrated realisation that concepts such as ownvoices or writing certain tropes/pairings 'to cope [with trauma]' are reaching the limits of their usefulness. Ownvoices, which started out as a powerful tool to point out structural inequalities and ill-informed and harmful narrative choices and stereotypes, has become watered down at best into a marketing tool, as well as a shield publishers can wield to protect themselves from criticism. But at worst — and far more commonly, in my experience — it seems to be weaponised in instances of professional jealousy in the case of professional publishing, and personal jealousy in the case of fandom. The consequences can be awful: sourceland POC policing the experiences of those in the diaspora (and vice versa), people outed against their will, people feeling pressured to reveal mental illnesses and other invisible disabilities, people forced to make public past traumatic experiences to justify media they consume or stories they write, with the risk that these traumas are now known to their own harassers. I've been speaking in the general sense, but I have witnessed multiple concrete examples of every single one of the things I've described.

I really don't know what to suggest as a solution to this, because I believe it is right to point out structural inequalities in publishing (as it is in other fields), and I believe people are entitled to think critically about their own fannish, narrative, and tropey preferences. (I am slowly, however, coming around to the idea that outside of formal — by which I do not mean 'paid' — reviews and criticism, people need to take a step back from criticising or lamenting the fannish, narrative or tropey preferences of other people, or of fandom as a whole.) I certainly think we need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking of (marginalised) identities as monolithic, and we need to strive against linking purity, morality, experiences and identity from fannish, shipping, and narrative preferences. Of course certain stories and pairings and fandoms will resonate more than others — we are in fandom precisely because of these resonances — and sometimes that will be down to our own identities or experiences. I'm quite open about this when such things are true for me. But we don't owe those identities or experiences to anyone — we are entitled to choose how much of ourselves we make public, and no one is owed an explanation or justification for the fanworks we create, the professional fiction we publish, or the media both paid and fannish we engage with.

It's rained! It's cooler! It's continued to rain, and I am so happy!

The cooler weather cleared away the brainfog which was preventing me from being able to focus on anything, and as a result I read all five of the Hitch Hiker's Guide books in a few hours.

I've been really enjoying a series of videos posted on Guardian Australia, where children's/YA authors answer questions sent in by readers (or in some cases parents). They've only done a handful so far, but two of them are authors whose work I love, and whose books I've been reading in some cases since before I could actually read.

The first is Alison Lester, who started out as an illustrator, and then went on to mostly write and illustrate her own picture books. These are massively popular and beloved in Australia (and in fact I discovered that, in the past week, my mother — who linked the videos to me — had bought a couple of Lester's board books to give to the newborn baby of a school friend of my sister's). She answers questions mostly from young children, and some of the videos are really adorable.



The second is Garth Nix. I was reminded in his video of how friendly and warm a speaker he is. Back when I was a newspaper reviewer, he was the first author I ever interviewed. I was only about nineteen or twenty, I was extremely anxious, and I showed up at his office in Clovelly in Sydney as a complete bundle of nerves. But he was wonderful to talk to — we went to a cafe, the interview was basically just like having a conversation, and the resulting publication read really well.



Highlights for me from this video include:

The anecdote about hanging out with Philip Pullman in Oxford

The story behind how he came up with the lore/mythology of the Old Kingdom books

His response to a question about LGBT representation in his books — where he basically said he had been bad with all kinds of representation in the past, because he had felt it was sufficient for him, the author, to know everything about a character's (marginalised) identities, but never spell it out. He had not originally understood (perhaps because he, himself, had always seen himself in his meaningful childhood stories) that people need to see these things stated clearly on the page, and that if a character shares their marginalised identity it can be extremely powerful.

I'd also forgotten that he was a Canberran, like me, and actually let out a little exclamation of happiness when I remembered that! With prompting, I remember that he had spoken with me about the same things re: his Canberran childhood when I interviewed him, namely that his favourite place was a public library no longer in existence. Since one of my favourite places in Canberra growing up was also a public library that closed,* I can relate.

He's from the wrong side of the lake, though.

This started as a post about books, and ended up on a long rambling trip down Canberran memory lane. I'm feeling quite emotional about Australia, and the distance between it, and where I live now. I'm generally quite happy with the fact that I migrated, and that I live so far away. But the fact that I won't see my mother this year, and probably won't be able to go back at Christmas as I planned suddenly hit me like a tonne of bricks recently. The two videos reminded me forcefully of how much I miss hearing other Australian voices, particularly when they are the voices of people who are good speakers and really clear communicators.

*Amusingly, next to this very old online news article is a link to a fiercely raging debate in the comments section of an opinion piece about whether private school in Canberra is 'worth it' — the author of the piece having gone to all three state/public schools that I also attended (and being roughly in my age group, so I'm wondering why I don't recognise her name). This is one of those perennial Canberra arguments, and I'm kind of dying with laughter that the comments section could have been time-travelling from 1985, 1995, 2005, etc and it would still be exactly the same, with people making exactly the same points about the exact same handful of schools. Canberrans gonna Canberra, is all I can say.

Normally I try to keep a log of all the books I've been reading, TV shows finished and so on, but that flew out the window and it was all COVID-19, all the time. However, I have actually read a lot and watched a lot (mainly due to having no commute and being able to control my own schedule now that I'm working from home). Most things have been solidly good rather than mindblowingly amazing, with a few standout gems.

( Books )

( Film and TV )

I'm now reading Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk, a free ebook which I think is going to be an urban fantasy historical m/m romance, set in the late nineteenth-century in the United States. There are ciphers and museums, and the main characters are a philologist and a private detective. It seems cozy and undemanding so far.

In terms of TV, Matthias and I have just started the fourth season of Veronica Mars, which has only now been released in the UK, and the second part of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which is something we'd been meaning to catch up with for ages.

What are people reading and watching? Any good recommendations?