Yuletide and fiction!
I got a lovely Killjoys fic for Yuletide! Breadcrumbs takes off from where canon stopped, showing various characters reacting to the memory wipe and Lucy saving the day.
I wrote an iZombie story: Completely Frank Liv, featuring Clive and Liv undercover as a couple during Season 1, though Liv ends up more exposed than undercover.
KJ Charles, The Ruin of Gabriel Ashleigh: Short story in which foolish gambling leaves Gabriel Ashleigh at the mercy of his worst enemy (who was tormented by Gabriel’s awful brother at school, though Gabriel is not innocent of offense either). You’ll never guess how he might pay off his debt …. The ultimate sex isn’t coerced, though.
Genevieve Cogman, The Mortal Word: Irene is sent to investigate the murder of a high-ranking dragon that threatens to derail peace negotiations between the dragons and the Fae, in a late-nineteenth-century Paris that’s under threat from anarchists and, it turns out, the Countess Bathory. Kai, no longer working under her, is still constrained by his family obligations (which include the suggestion that he seduce Irene to get more information about the Library’s activities), while Vale comes along to help investigate, as does the Fae Lord Silver. It’s a good entry into the post-Alberich situation with the Library and the varying worlds.
Ramsey Campbell, Think Yourself Lucky: Protagonist is a nebbish who is constantly put-upon by most people he knows and/or interacts with. Fantastic accounts of the vicious deaths of people resembling his tormenters start showing up on a blog, and he starts to worry that he might be somehow responsible. Every person in the book communicated in the same passive-aggressive, “what did you think I meant, then?” repetitive style. Not for me.
Welcome to Dystopia, ed. Gordon van Gelder. It’s very hard to do Trump-adjacent dystopia without either doing nothing more than reporting or seeming cartoonish, or both. The more successful stories tend to reach beyond ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios. Janis Ian’s story of a white woman who fetishizes the Mexican workers forced to labor in her family’s fields was the most disturbing-it feels accurate about how sexuality can relate to racism but it is dystopic so it may not be something everyone is ready to read. Deji Bryce Olukotun’s The Levellers is about ecological levellers with politics that are not standard left or right and thus is more thought-provoking/speculative than many of the other immigration-focused stories. Mary Anne Mohranaj’s Farewell is the best of the human immigration-focused stories, though it isn’t particularly fictional or speculative (it’s about denaturalization of naturalized nonwhites). J.S. Breukelaar’s Glow is an immigration story with a difference, about aliens and humans and the thin skin between. Harry Turtledove’s and Barry Malzberg’s stories are cartoonish; sadly, Yoon Ha Lee’s is as well, and Jane Yolen’s poem; Geoff Ryman’s story from the perspective of a sexist whose wife likes liberal North California better than the guns-and-guns republic in the south is the same. Ray Vukevich’s story about ritualized humiliation of female resistance is the best of the cartoonish/satirical ones-it manages to insert genuine menace and an understanding of what makes people complicit in oppression even when they say to themselves that they disagree.
Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City: Climate change has turned much of humanity into refugees. Qaanaaq is a floating city in the Artic, controlled by its shareholders and teeming with both registered and unregistered occupants. When the sole survivor of a genocide arrives with an orca and a captive polar bear, she provides an impetus for a war by a crime syndicate against a powerful shareholder. All the while, the strange disease the breaks is driving people to horrible deaths amidst images of lives they’ve never led, and the AIs running the city can’t do anything about it. Although almost everything goes wrong and key players don’t make it to the end of the story, it’s also about the kind of hope that can persist even in ashes, and the family connections that survive all kinds of wrongs.
R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War: Fantasy with realistic atrocities, bringing comparisons with N.K. Jemisin’s work. Rin is a war orphan-the Second Poppy War has brought her China-analogue country to difficult straits, and she claws her way out of the provincies to the premier military academy by raw force of will. But once there she’s a despised outsider, even after she discovers her connection to the gods and the great powers they can offer. When Japan-analogue invades, she has to decide how much destruction she’s willing to unleash, and it’s a lot. Multiple genocides, mass rape, and other large-scale destruction leaving readers to ponder whether salvation is even possible after such horror.
Joseph Bruchac, Killer of Enemies: Lozen is named for the Killer of Enemies and used as a hunter/stalking horse by the elites who’ve imprisoned what remains of her family in their post-apocalyptic compound. (The elites survived the Cloud, which destroyed everything electronic and battery-driven in the world, and now run tiny fiefdoms, half-crazed by what they’ve lost and by their genetic modifications.) Lozen has a plan to get her family free, but it’s complicated by a cute boy and by the psychic powers she’s starting to suspect she has. Suffered from comparison to Rebecca Roanhorse’s book, which is also about a young woman in a post-apocalyptic southwestern landscape using tribal powers to fight monsters awakened by the apocalypse; Bruchac seems to be writing for a slightly younger audience than Roanhorse, with lots of exclamation points, which also didn’t help me as a reader.
Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit: Valen is a renegade pureblood, with magic in his veins that he can’t risk using. Suffering a nearly fatal wound, he ends up an abbey where he tries to take refuge, but his drug addiction and his dyslexia may keep him from being accepted, even setting aside that it’s unlawful to give sanctuary to a pureblood. Valen is selfish, self-pitying, and scared through most of the book, but I have to admit that the story grew on me as he discovered more about the abbey’s mysteries and its connection with what seems like the forthcoming end of the world.
Ilana C. Myer, Last Song Before Night:In a somewhat bog-standard medievalesque fantasy world, bards used to be able to do magic, but that power left them decades ago. A number of them, including a woman on the run from her abusive family who hopes to be a poet even though there are no female poets, and a few non-bards converge around the attempt to restore magic and stop the corruption at the heart of the realm. Although the characters I’m pretty sure we were supposed to like generally didn’t approve of the misogyny/emphasis on female “purity” of the dominant culture, they were still operating in an otherwise apparently unchallenged system and I didn’t like any of them enough to justify spending my time there.
William Alexander, Ambassador: Gabe is the middle child in a busy family, responsible for looking after the young kids while his father cooks, his mother works, and his sister works/goes to summer school. But that changes when an alien picks him as the Ambassador for his world. And then ICE comes for his parents. Intriguing YA with a sympathetic protagonist and an unusual take on what it means to live in peace with others.
Jacqueline Carey, Starless: Khai was born at a propitious time and chosen by the gods to be the Shadow of one of the Ageless, the rulers of his country who live for hundreds of years by eating sacred seeds. He’s raised as a fighter, killing and beating grown men at an improbably young age. He’s also bhazim-born in a female-identified body but raised as a man, something he finds out relatively late in his life (and he mostly continues to identify as a man). When he meets his Ageless match, they embark on an improbable journey to save the world from an angry god. Carey does some unusual things here, most obviously that she tells a full story in one volume where many would stretch it out to at least a duology. Khai’s companion doesn’t have full use of her legs and (spoiler) doesn’t get magically healed even as she gains other magic powers. Khai’s own culture of origin is sexist and constraining for women but they encounter, and don’t have a hard time with, other cultures-though some of the culture clash is notable, for example the people who always use sarcasm/minimization and thus sound super confusing to Khai because they’re saying the opposite of what they clearly mean. I liked Carey’s take on fate and “racial” characteristics demanded by the respective gods much better when she was redoing the Lord of the Rings from the bad guys’ side.
Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth, ed. Neil Clarke. Dating from 1998 to 2014, these stories offer a sampling of pre-Trump/nationalist wave takes on alien presence. Cixin Liu’s Taking Care of God stood out for me because of its background assumptions about the place of filial piety-and the resentments that entails-when humanity’s aging parents return home. Kelly Robson’s The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill is about the rape-murder of a Native girl who then saves the world, maybe, or possibly damns it, while no one is looking; it’s very good but very depressing. Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life is in there as well; also represented: Nancy Kress, Steve Rasnic Tem, Gregory Benford (sigh), and others.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon: Robinson’s not afraid to take chances; he’s just such a cerebral writer, both in terms of landscape description and ideas, that it’s easy to feel like you’re reading something at a distance. This one is mostly about China, and its dominance of the moon during a time of domestic unrest as the current generation of leaders prepares to retire. Dramatis personae include a feng shui expert and minor celebrity who goes to the moon to explore its feng shui. He gets caught up with a pregnant political dissident (a princeling daughter of a Central Committee member who thus has powerful friends as well as enemies) and a non-neurotypical Westerner used as a pawn in an assassination plot and thus endangered by factions in the Chinese state. Robinson is interested in political change, this time with Chinese characteristics. I’m not sure it’s successful-instead of the Whitmanesque observations of his novel set at the same time in the US, he uses a Chinese AI’s musings to punctuate things throughout, and it feels more disjointed.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
I wrote an iZombie story: Completely Frank Liv, featuring Clive and Liv undercover as a couple during Season 1, though Liv ends up more exposed than undercover.
KJ Charles, The Ruin of Gabriel Ashleigh: Short story in which foolish gambling leaves Gabriel Ashleigh at the mercy of his worst enemy (who was tormented by Gabriel’s awful brother at school, though Gabriel is not innocent of offense either). You’ll never guess how he might pay off his debt …. The ultimate sex isn’t coerced, though.
Genevieve Cogman, The Mortal Word: Irene is sent to investigate the murder of a high-ranking dragon that threatens to derail peace negotiations between the dragons and the Fae, in a late-nineteenth-century Paris that’s under threat from anarchists and, it turns out, the Countess Bathory. Kai, no longer working under her, is still constrained by his family obligations (which include the suggestion that he seduce Irene to get more information about the Library’s activities), while Vale comes along to help investigate, as does the Fae Lord Silver. It’s a good entry into the post-Alberich situation with the Library and the varying worlds.
Ramsey Campbell, Think Yourself Lucky: Protagonist is a nebbish who is constantly put-upon by most people he knows and/or interacts with. Fantastic accounts of the vicious deaths of people resembling his tormenters start showing up on a blog, and he starts to worry that he might be somehow responsible. Every person in the book communicated in the same passive-aggressive, “what did you think I meant, then?” repetitive style. Not for me.
Welcome to Dystopia, ed. Gordon van Gelder. It’s very hard to do Trump-adjacent dystopia without either doing nothing more than reporting or seeming cartoonish, or both. The more successful stories tend to reach beyond ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios. Janis Ian’s story of a white woman who fetishizes the Mexican workers forced to labor in her family’s fields was the most disturbing-it feels accurate about how sexuality can relate to racism but it is dystopic so it may not be something everyone is ready to read. Deji Bryce Olukotun’s The Levellers is about ecological levellers with politics that are not standard left or right and thus is more thought-provoking/speculative than many of the other immigration-focused stories. Mary Anne Mohranaj’s Farewell is the best of the human immigration-focused stories, though it isn’t particularly fictional or speculative (it’s about denaturalization of naturalized nonwhites). J.S. Breukelaar’s Glow is an immigration story with a difference, about aliens and humans and the thin skin between. Harry Turtledove’s and Barry Malzberg’s stories are cartoonish; sadly, Yoon Ha Lee’s is as well, and Jane Yolen’s poem; Geoff Ryman’s story from the perspective of a sexist whose wife likes liberal North California better than the guns-and-guns republic in the south is the same. Ray Vukevich’s story about ritualized humiliation of female resistance is the best of the cartoonish/satirical ones-it manages to insert genuine menace and an understanding of what makes people complicit in oppression even when they say to themselves that they disagree.
Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City: Climate change has turned much of humanity into refugees. Qaanaaq is a floating city in the Artic, controlled by its shareholders and teeming with both registered and unregistered occupants. When the sole survivor of a genocide arrives with an orca and a captive polar bear, she provides an impetus for a war by a crime syndicate against a powerful shareholder. All the while, the strange disease the breaks is driving people to horrible deaths amidst images of lives they’ve never led, and the AIs running the city can’t do anything about it. Although almost everything goes wrong and key players don’t make it to the end of the story, it’s also about the kind of hope that can persist even in ashes, and the family connections that survive all kinds of wrongs.
R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War: Fantasy with realistic atrocities, bringing comparisons with N.K. Jemisin’s work. Rin is a war orphan-the Second Poppy War has brought her China-analogue country to difficult straits, and she claws her way out of the provincies to the premier military academy by raw force of will. But once there she’s a despised outsider, even after she discovers her connection to the gods and the great powers they can offer. When Japan-analogue invades, she has to decide how much destruction she’s willing to unleash, and it’s a lot. Multiple genocides, mass rape, and other large-scale destruction leaving readers to ponder whether salvation is even possible after such horror.
Joseph Bruchac, Killer of Enemies: Lozen is named for the Killer of Enemies and used as a hunter/stalking horse by the elites who’ve imprisoned what remains of her family in their post-apocalyptic compound. (The elites survived the Cloud, which destroyed everything electronic and battery-driven in the world, and now run tiny fiefdoms, half-crazed by what they’ve lost and by their genetic modifications.) Lozen has a plan to get her family free, but it’s complicated by a cute boy and by the psychic powers she’s starting to suspect she has. Suffered from comparison to Rebecca Roanhorse’s book, which is also about a young woman in a post-apocalyptic southwestern landscape using tribal powers to fight monsters awakened by the apocalypse; Bruchac seems to be writing for a slightly younger audience than Roanhorse, with lots of exclamation points, which also didn’t help me as a reader.
Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit: Valen is a renegade pureblood, with magic in his veins that he can’t risk using. Suffering a nearly fatal wound, he ends up an abbey where he tries to take refuge, but his drug addiction and his dyslexia may keep him from being accepted, even setting aside that it’s unlawful to give sanctuary to a pureblood. Valen is selfish, self-pitying, and scared through most of the book, but I have to admit that the story grew on me as he discovered more about the abbey’s mysteries and its connection with what seems like the forthcoming end of the world.
Ilana C. Myer, Last Song Before Night:In a somewhat bog-standard medievalesque fantasy world, bards used to be able to do magic, but that power left them decades ago. A number of them, including a woman on the run from her abusive family who hopes to be a poet even though there are no female poets, and a few non-bards converge around the attempt to restore magic and stop the corruption at the heart of the realm. Although the characters I’m pretty sure we were supposed to like generally didn’t approve of the misogyny/emphasis on female “purity” of the dominant culture, they were still operating in an otherwise apparently unchallenged system and I didn’t like any of them enough to justify spending my time there.
William Alexander, Ambassador: Gabe is the middle child in a busy family, responsible for looking after the young kids while his father cooks, his mother works, and his sister works/goes to summer school. But that changes when an alien picks him as the Ambassador for his world. And then ICE comes for his parents. Intriguing YA with a sympathetic protagonist and an unusual take on what it means to live in peace with others.
Jacqueline Carey, Starless: Khai was born at a propitious time and chosen by the gods to be the Shadow of one of the Ageless, the rulers of his country who live for hundreds of years by eating sacred seeds. He’s raised as a fighter, killing and beating grown men at an improbably young age. He’s also bhazim-born in a female-identified body but raised as a man, something he finds out relatively late in his life (and he mostly continues to identify as a man). When he meets his Ageless match, they embark on an improbable journey to save the world from an angry god. Carey does some unusual things here, most obviously that she tells a full story in one volume where many would stretch it out to at least a duology. Khai’s companion doesn’t have full use of her legs and (spoiler) doesn’t get magically healed even as she gains other magic powers. Khai’s own culture of origin is sexist and constraining for women but they encounter, and don’t have a hard time with, other cultures-though some of the culture clash is notable, for example the people who always use sarcasm/minimization and thus sound super confusing to Khai because they’re saying the opposite of what they clearly mean. I liked Carey’s take on fate and “racial” characteristics demanded by the respective gods much better when she was redoing the Lord of the Rings from the bad guys’ side.
Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth, ed. Neil Clarke. Dating from 1998 to 2014, these stories offer a sampling of pre-Trump/nationalist wave takes on alien presence. Cixin Liu’s Taking Care of God stood out for me because of its background assumptions about the place of filial piety-and the resentments that entails-when humanity’s aging parents return home. Kelly Robson’s The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill is about the rape-murder of a Native girl who then saves the world, maybe, or possibly damns it, while no one is looking; it’s very good but very depressing. Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life is in there as well; also represented: Nancy Kress, Steve Rasnic Tem, Gregory Benford (sigh), and others.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon: Robinson’s not afraid to take chances; he’s just such a cerebral writer, both in terms of landscape description and ideas, that it’s easy to feel like you’re reading something at a distance. This one is mostly about China, and its dominance of the moon during a time of domestic unrest as the current generation of leaders prepares to retire. Dramatis personae include a feng shui expert and minor celebrity who goes to the moon to explore its feng shui. He gets caught up with a pregnant political dissident (a princeling daughter of a Central Committee member who thus has powerful friends as well as enemies) and a non-neurotypical Westerner used as a pawn in an assassination plot and thus endangered by factions in the Chinese state. Robinson is interested in political change, this time with Chinese characteristics. I’m not sure it’s successful-instead of the Whitmanesque observations of his novel set at the same time in the US, he uses a Chinese AI’s musings to punctuate things throughout, and it feels more disjointed.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.