30 - Representation with Justina Ireland (part 1)

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This episode, I am joined by Justina Ireland (@justinaireland) a Young Adult author & purveyor of awesomeness.  Justina often tweets about issues of representation of marginalized identities, and recently launched Writing In The Margins which mentors and facilitates emerging authors so that those whose stories have been silenced by history & societal oppression can find their audience.

I apologize for the delay in new episodes (should be back with a slightly looser format and 2-3 episodes per month), Justina talks about seeing yourself on the page (or not), praises Kate Elliott's Court of Fives, and tells her story of reading Ancillary Justice.  Also Charles Payseur is back to recommend short stories.

(We also briefly alluded to the decision to remove the H. P. Lovecraft bust as the symbol of the World Fantasy Award)

Short fiction recommendations from Charles Payseur (of Quick Sip Reviews)

Letter Writing resources: International Geek Girl Letter Writers, Letter Writers Alliance, The League of Extraordinary Penpals

The amazing art which inspired me to actually get this project off the ground was created by @etrandem

Send feedback! Tweet me! Tweet the show! Be a guest on the show! 

Music - Jazzy Ashes by The Underscore Orkestra

If you want to subscribe to the show, the RSS feed is: http://www.cabbagesandkings.audio/?format=rss

 

Transcript:

JSM - Me

JI - Justina Ireland

CP - Charles Payseur

*Intro music*

Welcome to Cabbages & Kings, I'm your host Jonah Sutton-Morse, and I want to start by apologizing for the delay in getting this out.  March got a little bit crazy & I realized it was going to be a little while until I got the new episode out & also I wanted to reimagine the show a little bit, so thank you for your patience.  I am rethinking the show a little bit.  You are probably at the beginning of most episodes going to hear me rambling.  Right now it's about the show, in the future it'll be about what I'm reading.  I am also going to have some more guest spots that I am hoping to integrate.  In this episode we've got Charles Payseur back with some short story recommendations for us.  I will probably as part of this not be holding quite so strictly to the 30 minute limit.  Between me, other guests, and the main interview I would expect the show will often be pushing about 40 minutes, but hopefully as I get better at editing & finding key moments in an interview, that'll move back down.  I am certainly not giving myself permission to go ramble forever. Today is the first of two parts interviewing Justina Ireland.

*Interstitial music*

JSM - My guest this episode is Justina Ireland a young adult author and purveyor of awesomeness.  Among many other things, Justina often Tweets and Tumbls about representation of historically marginalized identities, and I wanted to bring her on to talk about this representation. Specifically what it's like to read an identity presented well on the page, and what exactly presented well even means.  And also ways that reader can see negative presentations deconstructed on the page.  And the ways authors can do that, and present problematic material.

I usually start by asking guests about their path into the Science Fiction & Fantasy genre.  Can you tell us a bit about your reading history & what brought you into the genres that you read.

JI - Sure, yeah, I do read pretty broadly, I read a lot of SFF, that's kind of where my heart has always been. The first I think, I mean most people usually point to something like A Wrinkle In Time as the first book where they fell in love with SFF, and for me it was actually Anne McCaffery's Pern Books.

JSM - YEEES

JI - I actually read the Pern books out of order because you know when you're a poor kid & you go to the library you just take whatever's on the shelf.  So I ended up reading, the first book I ended up reading was DragonsDawn, which is this weird mix of SF & F, and so I spent a lot of time reading that kind of stuff and kind of escaping, because like a lot of kids I had a terrible childhood and so  one of the reasons I like SFF is it gives you this outlet to explore heavy subjects without really exploring those really heavy subjects.  So when you talk about race relations or race issues, there's this automatic instinct to hunch your shoulders and take a defensive posture, but when you're talking about y'know the interplay between cat people & mice people, it's a different kind of interplay.  So I've always liked that ability to look at social aspects or aspects of social justice within fantasy & SF, without really looking at those aspects.

So even within young adult when I read Young Adult books or Middle Grade or whatever I read, there's always that aspect of SFF. Young Adult is a little bit more willing to embrace the idea of representation and this, y'know this diversity soapbox, whereas there's a lot of pushback in the SFF world.

JSM - Yeah

JI - Yeah, and very kind of unexpected pushback - wow I didn't really think anybody could actually thing that way

JSM - I was just going to note, since I often run these well after the interview that this is the weekend after the World Fantasy Award announced Lovecraft will no longer be the bust of the WFA.

So some of tgat pushback & people owning their bigotry is happening online right now.

JI - Right, and I'm just kinda surprised because it's Lovecraft, but like no one (garble) for Poe, like no one is out there picketing the streets because someone talked bad about, um, Bram Stoker.  It's less about Lovecraft & more about the idea of having to give anything, like give any kind of ground.  Like if we let Lovecraft be removed from the WFA then the terrorists win.

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - Yeah, do you remember either one of, or an early time or a recent time that you found yourself feeling represented in what you're reading?  I'm assuming it did not happen with Dragonsdawn ...

*laugh*

JI - No, so the strangest thing is it was a different Anne McCaffery book, I think it was Elvenborn, which is this realy really kind of terrible book, with humans and elves - Anne McCaffery & Andre Norton are the two writers, they co-wrote it, and it came out in the mid 90's

JSM - I think Lackey was the coathor, so Andre Norton & Mercedes Lackey

JI - Yeah, there you go, Andre Norton & Mercedes, thank you

The whole premise of the book is there's an alternate planet fantasy kind of realm where like the royalty they're basically like white plantation owners, and humans are enslaved.  But humans have magic but they're all collared

So, I think Norton died before the series was finished, because there were a couple more books that were supposed to happen.

Anyway, there was this character who was half-human and half-elf, so she has this magic & she finds a way to lead a rebellion, which y'know yadda yadda yadda, but she was the first character I had ever that was kind of existed between two worlds. I'm actually biracial, my mom is white & my father is black, and that was a constant theme when I was growing up, that existence between two worlds, and that kind of fitting in, really in neither world, so when I read this book I was, for me it was kind of like oh, wow, this was really awesome, you can do this! But at the same time I kind of was irritated that you had taken something like the idea of being enslaved, and like chattel slavery and then just put white people in there.  *laugh* which is kind of like a terrible thing, let's talk about slavery without talking about slavery.

JSM - the flip side of fantasy & SF being able to tackle social issues without really tackling social issues.

JI - Right, it's very much a double-edged sword to use a cliched term, but at the same time it was nice to see a couple of authors taking on this idea, and there was a whole bunch of stuff about feminism and like equality within there as well, but mostly it was just nice to see someone take on this idea of, y'know, obviously slavery is inherently bad, but how do you reconcile that with, because by the time you get to the third book you get the elves' point of view and you realize y'know they're thinking feeling people too, they're not all just evil, terrible plantation owners, so how do you reconcile being a good person with participating in this ... kind of system that is, terrible?

JSM - mmhmm

JI - I kind of like really enjoyed that but at the same time

I was kinda like, you took black people out of slavery, and you just completely erased them from the landscape, and we always talk about reading White, and that when you read the default is White unless somebody tells you otherwise, and it was very much, this was very much the case, like the humans had tan skin and the elves had really, really pale skin, and that was really the only variation in skin tone you got in the books.

So, just more recently I read Kate Elliott's Court of Fives, and she does a similar thing.  Her main character is biracial as well, but Kate does a really great job of actually saying this person is half black, and she talks  about how the mother has this very coily hair, how she's very tall, how the main character is very strong, and everyone looks at her and calls her a mule because of her looks, but she does a great job of doing the same thing that Lackey & Norton had done, but without the erasure of people of color, and I think that's so so important, to be able to tackle these very deep ideas of colonialism & identity and actually put them into constructs that don't erase POC.

Because when you don't, you're kind of saying it's a problem but it's not really a problem for those people who are impacted, so you're kind of giving the real meat of the subject short shrift.  So, I'm just really in love with what Kate's done in the book. I'm a sucker for a romance, forbidden romance has always been my deal, y'know I think we can blame Romeo and Juliet for that, but I think she does a great job of acknowledging those cultural differences, and the fact that she can do it as a woman who does have a lot of privilege, she's taken herself out of her current construct and we always talk about the empathy, always trying to find that empathy, and like I won't lie, I've read a lot of books where I think it's going to go well, and there's something in the middle of the story where it's like "oh my god! it just went off the rails! where'd the empathy go?

JSM - mm hmm

JI - And I didn't have that moment with Kate's book, and I think that's just, it's just really nice to be able to lose yourself in a story & not get to a point halfway through where you're like "whelp, here's the part where now I'm upset" and just be able to enjoy the story.

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - Going back for a second to sort of noticing ... noticing representation and noticing seeing yourself on the page, do you remember kind of the flip side of that and when you noticed an author or commenter or reviewer or something who was not writing with that empathy and just sort of imagining a world that doesn't include me or that I don't fit into?

JI - I think that's part of the nature of marginalization, after a while you don't expect to see yourself anymore, which is probably kind of the saddest thing of all.  So what happens is when you do see yourself it becomes a huge treat.  I've had this conversation ... my husband is a white dude so you know he has all the privilege, and we've had this conversation a lot and he's like, I don't, I can't imagine picking up a book and not being able to see myself in the pages at some point.  And I'm like y'know it's kind of funny, I'm the opposite, if I pick up a book and I can see myself in the pages, that's pretty exciting, y'know, the majority of the western canon revolves around heterosexual able bodied white men, so y'know you spend your entire childhood reading books that are not about you, everything you read is not about you except for like a couple books about suffering like Sounder and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, and I'm thinking even Sounder that's a children's book but it's a male lead, so you go through your entire life being told the world is not for you, that at best you can be like a secondary character.

*Interstitial Music*

JI - It's difficult to say like when did you recognize the world was not for you, I think the bigger question is "when did you recognize the world didn't have to be that way?" And for me as a reader I mean honestly it was probably five years ago that I was like wait a minute, why am I not a main character in a book, and not just like The Bluest Eye which is a book about suffering, something like I can have a happily ever after, you see the same thing in Romance, where you have all these couples and you have, maybe a hundred redheads,  on the page, but god help you if you find a woman of color, and I think that's ... a profound thing to see and to think, hey wait a minute I could be a main character, why am I not a main character? Even thinking like to movies, like it's y'know it's very rare that you even see a woman of color leading in movies.  Now TV has gotten a little better, the percentages are still awful, we're so used to seeing white dudes that even a couple women we're like "oh my god women are taking over!" but yeah I think it's more a fact that I should be able to see myself, but I don't expect to.  And I think that's what makes me sad, is even ... I'm pretty plugged into this stuff, I talk about diversity a lot, I talk about it with my friends a lot, with my husband a lot, I talk about it at work a lot, but even me being somebody who we always say "someone who's woke", I still don't expect it.

For example, back to TV when I watched Empire and I saw, like Cookie (the main character on the show who she served 17 years in jail is Cookie), but she's not a stereotype she's got depth to her, and when I watched that I was like "holy crap! there's a woman who has depth, who has something going on!" because even movies where you have a woman of color starring and she has this role & people are like oh such a moving role & so awesome, it's still reduced to a stereotype.

Like if you look at the movie Precious, that's a terrible movie! It's the most depressing story of the inner-city there is no light in that movie, there is no hope in that movie.  That doesn't mean it's not realistic or authentic, but that's the story that usually gets told.  I always joke that if you're a Woman of Color on TV, you're probably the maid or a slave, or marching for civil rights, the civil rights movement, so like the roles & positions that you see WOC in both in TV and movies, and on the pags of books tend to be very reductive, but then like you look now and you're like we have How To Get Away With Murder and we have Empire and we have all these really great roles for women especially WOC, but then you have Sleepy Hollow where you have a great role for WOC, and then halfway through the second season she's reduced to some sort of caricature again.

 

So it makes me mad, it makes me mad at myself because I don't expect to see myself anymore, and it makes me mad that why have I given in to that idea so easily when I should demand more representation, instead of just saying "wow I'm excited I have some representation", and as far as bad representation that's *laugh* that's more often than not, to the point where the more the reviews talk about how great & moving a book is, the more I know its going to be a terrible terrible book.  I always call it The Help syndrome.  Like the more mainstream white America likes a book, the more I know it's probably a terrible depiction of people of color.  I think it's a Chris Rock joke who says "the movie that's great about slavery is the one black people want to see not the one white people want to see because Nazis aren't lining up to see movies about the holocaust", right, so if it's an authentic & moving portrayal of slavery for POC, it's probably not going to be something white people want to see.

And that tends to be, that's more that conversation of who are you writing for, who is your lens, because what you see a lot of times is even when authors of color write books, they're still thinking of a white middle-class heterosexual audience and that tends to skew the story that's told.

*Interstitial Music*

 

JSM - I read Sorcerer of the Wildeeps recently, which is one of TorDotComs novellas, by Kai Ashante Wilson

JI - I haven't had a chance to read it, but I've seen the cover and the cover's amazing.

JSM - The cover's amazing, it is spectacular, it's very secondary world, they're off on an adventure, going traveling through a jungle, but it's a group of caravan guards so it's a group of Men being Men Together and two of them are in love with each other, and many of them are speaking African American Vernacular English, and some of them are speaking French, and there are different varieties of Black Men together, and they have different attitudes towards gay people and different attitudes towards women when they stop off at the caravan stop & there are the brothels down the street, and it was interesting for me reading it, partly because there would be scenes where there would be dialog between 5 or 6 people, and I kind of pick up on what a couple of them were talking about, and ways that a couple of those conversations related to conversations that I've y'know heard people talking about on Twitter and talked about with African American friends, but there was stuff there that I wasn't getting, and it was clear to me that there was some level of discussion of masculinity and black masculinity that just I was not aware of, and I don't have the context for, and that was there in the book, and thinking about who is the author writing for, it's one of the very few times that I've read a book and felt "I don't understand this, this isn't being written for me, I don't have the context to know what's going on there." But I really enjoyed it.

JI - *laughs*, yeah and I think I don't think the book all the time has to be for us.  I think you get something different from a story when you're not necessarily the intended audience.  The problem comes when you're always not the intended audience.  And this is one of the things I talk about a lot with Hamilton, because y'know everything in my brain right now is Hamilton

JSM - Sooo goood.

JI - It's so good, it really is. But one of the things I love about Hamilton is that there's this subtext that you don't get if you aren't necessarily, there's subtext if you're an immigrant in there.  There's subtext about respectability.  Like I talk about Hamilton with some people and they're like, I didn't get that they were doing that.  Like the fact that Burr doesn't Rap, that Burr is always all about being the respectable, black man

JSM - I had missed that ...

JI - right, so when you're listening to it, you get different things from it.  I had a coworker who tried listening to it who said "Oh I didn't like it, it was just too much", and I'm like, well, I understand, I get that, but y'know for me when I listen to it, it reminds me, it's very much like the rap music I listened to in my childhood: y'know old Run DMC and Beastie Boys and that kind of stuff, and then it kind of as you move through the story the styles change and like I have this conversation I think I said with my husband, and his rap touchpoints tend to be different from mine, just because different upbringings, so it's kind of funny that the things he picks up on are not the things I pick up on, so we have these conversation and he's like "oh I see what you're saying I totally missed that" and I'm like "right" and in addition my bachelor's degree's in History, so there's also this historical subtext. And I think not everybody needs to pick up on  every subtext to enjoy the story. But I think it's super-super important to include those groups that don't ever get any kind of subtext to give them a subtext.

 

There was a YA book, not spec fic, but a contemporary YA called Gabi: Girl in Pieces, and huge portions of the story were in Spanish, the author did that on purpose, she wanted to kind of communicate this experience of being in America and then also being part of this other culture, and y'know people were really upset because they're like I don't read Spanish why is so much of this book in Spanish, but I'm like "if you are a Spanish speaker there's a different story you take away from that."  You can still get the great story even if you aren't able to read the Spanish, being able to read the Spanish helps, now I don't think it was, especially difficult Spanish, there was enough you could google it, google translate is a thing.  But people were really angry that they felt they were left out of this story because they didn't speak Spanish.

And I'm like imagine feeling like that All the Time

JSM- *intensely* THAT'S ...

JI - That's the thing, like imagine you pick up a story and you know like only half the story's going to be for you.  I don't think people understand that's what it feels like to never see yourself reflected in media.  You know going in there's going to be something that's going to make you feel like oh, well this sucks.

That's what happens when you never see yourself reflected, or you see yourself reflected poorly consistently.  Like oh look here comes the magical negro character, obviously they're going to help out and then die in some self-sacrificing heroic act, they never make it through Act II.  so I think it's really important to keep that in mind that y'know not every story has to be for every person, but if you never have any stories for you, that's a huge tragedy.

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - On that note, we're going to take a break to get some short fiction recommendations, then Justina will be back to talk about Ancillary Justice and share a memory of a significant book.

*Interstitial Music*

19:02

CP - Dear Listeners, it looks like you're trying to recommend short fiction. Do you need assistance?

Hello, and if that clever intro did not clue you in, I'm going to be recommending some stories today that take the form of letters, and part of why I'm doing this is that I want to show just how versatile the form of the letter is in fiction.  It's very prevalent, it's used all the time, and yet it's done so for a very good reason.  And most of the stories that I'll be recommending today are from 2016, one of them is from 2015, but very still worth checking out.  Without further ado, I'm just going to get straight into it.  There are 5 in total, the first 2 came out in February, important I guess, or appropriate, because February is both the month that includes Valentines day, which these are both romantic stories, or kind of romantic stories and secondly that February is lettermo, so letter writing even more appropriate.  The first appeared at Flash Fiction Online in February and it is Love Letters on the Nightmare Sea by Rachael K Jones and it's this very romantically dark story, so you get that juxtaposition right in the title: love letters / nightmare sea, and it's about two people who had a long distance, or are in a long-distance relationship that is finally coming together and the power of words to overcome barriers.  And to pierce the distance and to get over anxieties and worries.  And it's this very romantic story that is told as a letter to someone who's present but mentally not there.  That sort of feeling of distance between the characters is palpable, and there's also Nightmare Jellyfish which is creepy.  It's just all very well done.

The second story is very different but still very romantic.  It appeared in Uncanny's February content, and it is the Deseret Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Barrevyar by Rose Lemberg and in this one this features letters two-sided.  The letters in the previous story were pretty much one-sided but here you get both sides of the exchange and people meeting for the first time in letters, and establishing a relationship in letters, and talking about art and about distance again and that sense that letters are something that overcomes distance.  That here are two people who are separated not just by miles but by cultures, by climates, by all of these things, that they're just from two incredibly different worlds, linked by the art, linked by the magic that they share, and they have this connection that goes deeply and allows them to sort of bridge the gap between them and take chances that they wouldn't and just it's a very lifting romantic story.

so the first two are like the romantic stories and the theme sort of continues and gets a little darker as we progress.

The next story could be almost considered romantic, but it is more on the erotic side of things.  It appeared in The Flesh Made Word, an anthology of speculative erotica from Circlet Press in later 2015, and it is Rival Pens by Benji Bright.  And that story, it's in a collection of erotica for a reason but it's not exactly what one would call romantic.  It's sensually rich, the tone of it, the voice is charming & it's about two playwrights who are kind of frenemies I guess, or the current term would be frenemies, who are exchanging letters back and forth, and the letters sort of both inspire and destroy each other's muses.  It's like they're sharing a muse, it's like they have the opportunity to do something constructive and instead they decide to be destructive, and the outcome of that is that they're both completely, well, I will not spoil too much, but it's a very evocative and strong piece that uses the form of the letter to, these letters back and forth between them to show just how kind of nasty they can be, just how biting, but also captures this eroticism in the piece that's just very good and worth checking out.

Along a similar vein but darker still we move to a piece that appeared in the first issue of Orthogonal Science Fiction, which was out I believe in late January of 2016, called The First Wife by Sarah L Johnson.  This piece is very short, like the first one that I did, but it is ... very dark.  And it's nicely done, it's like brilliantly done because it's a little bit of a mystery & it has this great twist later on & you're getting this sense of what's going on.  It's taking a very classic kind of letter, one that is normally reserved to something that's much more innocent, and it's making it something that is definitely not.  It's another one that has a great sense of eroticism to it, a dark eroticism definitely but a sensualness and a language that is just sharp and cutting and hits and very much worth checking out, and then we get to the last piece which sort of goes full circle, now we're into like full horror.  So we've transitioned from more romantic sides of things into the more strictly horror side of things.  And this one appeared in Nightmare Magazine's March issue.  And it's the Modern Lady's Letter Writer by Sandra McDonald and this story again is taking the form of the letter & dos something different than all of the other ones.  The other ones were about bridging distances or creating distances, this one is about how letters and language can be used as tools of oppression, and just the ways that letters are used throughout these stories is very interesting.  This one is letters being written to a woman to try & get her to do a specific thing, to get her to fit into a specific role, it's part letter, part etiquette manual, but it's very well done, it captures a feeling of a time & it works itself into a different kind of story, it's a Cthulu-Mythos story which is very well and subtly done here, it's not a monster story, it is definitely one that is exploring the idea of letters & the idea of voice, and the idea of things reaching out in these ways that are unexpected and all of these stories really do an excellent job showing why the form of fiction of letter has endured, and why it probably isn't going anywhere despite the fact that many people don't see letter-writing as exactly a thing to do anymore, which is a shame.

I am a letter-writer myself, I like the old snail mail, and to see these stories just gives me a bit of a uplifting boost even though they're by and large kind of on the darker side of things, they're very much also capturing sort of the strength of why people write letters, the hope that they can inspire, the amount of damage that they can do.  Yes, they have this thing, there's a sort of intimacy and also a facelessness that comes with writing letters that all of these do very well to capture.

And they come from some unusual sources, or at least sources that I feel people don't always look to for Speculative Fiction.  The first two places, Uncanny Magazine & Flash Fiction online are fairly big.  Orthogonal is brand new the last two - Nightmare despite being a SFWA qualifying market & putting out amazing content I don't think gets enough credit for the, it's speculative horror, and I think too often people see the horror aspects and just don't want to look at it.  But it's speculative fiction first and that applies as well to the Circlet piece, which is seculative fiction first, erotica as well.  They're linked, yet, but it's not like the erotica makes it not SFF.  So, there you have it, 5 stories that do an amazing job with the form of the letter.  Most of them from 2016.

For people who might think about getting into snail mail, just on a similar topic, there are a number of geeky ways that you can do that: there is the International Geek Girl Letter Writers, the IGGL, which you can look up.  There is the Letter Writers Alliance, which does a lot of wierd things with the mail, like you can send fake pigeons, there is the League of Extraordinary penpals, which again sort of a geeky letter-writing group, some of them you have to pay for, some of them are free, but, indeed.

Sincerely, Charles Payseur

28:10

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - We've talked about the impact of representation, it's scarcity, the problems with chronically stereotyped representation. Justina also talked about her experience reading Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, both in terms of reader representation and also the importance of challenging reader assumptions.

I hadn't read any review I had just heard some buzz it was a really great book, oh that's cool, there hadn't been any cool space operas in a minute that had come across my radar and so I picked it up & I had no idea about the everything was female pronoun, so I'm reading this book & probably a third of the way through I'm like "man there's a lot of women in this book!" and then I'm like "holy shit! that's not really the case right she's just using this female pronoun in like a wierd way", so then I had to go back to the beginning and read again and I was halfway through the book and I was like "why do I care?"

JSM - ah hah

JI - It doesn't matter because she's managed to write a book, Leckie managed to write a book that, like, the main character is empowered enough that like it you assume the main character's, I assume the main character's female regardless of the gender pronouns, but what she kind of did there was kind of give everyone a way into the story, unless you are truly a genderfluid person in which case she kind of didn't do the, that so great, but y'know if you subscribe to like if you're cisgender and you're just kind of like this is my pronoun you could imagine Breq as male just using a female pronoun or you could imagine Breq is truly female.

And for me that was like, it shouldn't be, it's 2015, it's the future, but for me that was groundbreaking because this is the first time I can actually read a story and not worry that the person, that the main character's going to end up falling in love with the wrong person (because that happens all the time when you have a female main character), or doing something stupid so the male character can save her (because that happens all the time when you hve a female main character),

And then this is why I'm excited! I'm excited to read, read something that's truly gender-neutral.  I'm excited to read something that's truly genderfluid, I'm excited to read a fantasy with a trans main character. because y'know when you take people out of their comfort zone & when you give them that thing they're not expecting and you do it well, it opens up whole new ideas. I'm Cis, I don't think about gender as much as I do in terms of y'know feminism, so I don't think about gender identity and the more I read about it, the more I think about it, the more I think about it, the more I questions how we interact in the world, and I think the more I question how we interact in the world the more I'm open and receptive to new ideas.

*Interstitial Music*


 

JSM - Each episode closes with a memory of a significant book: The Right Book at the right time, an interesting find, or just something that stuck around.

*Interstitial Music*

JI - Probably my favorite book, we were just talking about Jemisin, that I read and the book that I was like it doesn't have to always be this way! Was the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I picked that up kind of on accident, somebody had given it to me & they were like "you have to read this book" & I was like "Okay" and it was somebody who actually didn't like Fantasy, so that's always a nice thing when somebody who doesn't like fantasy is like you like fantasy, you'll like this book.

But it was just amazing! Like, I am a huge, huge, fan of the pantheon fantasy where you have the gods kind of the meddling gods in the story but to be able to finally read a story where you had POC, where you had brown people feature prominently, and you also had, she was, back again being between two worlds, the main character in that book is also biracial, and that was my first book I ever read and I'm like y'know you could write a fantasy with POC and it doesn't have to be reductive & POC don't have to be orcs or some other type of fantastical creature, you could have just really well-done fantasy that doesn't feel alienating, and that was kind of the first book I read and I was just, this, and it's still on my shortlist whenever someone's like "I want to start reading fantasy what should I start with?" That's the one I hand them. Without fail.

JSM - Yeah, it's so good.

JI - It's so good

JSM - That was another one I had to read more than once, the first time through for me it was all about Nahadoth and Sieh & her relationship with the gods and the romance going on there, and I just, I was at that point kind of walking away from fantasy because I'd been reading the same book over and over again by lots of different authors with lots of different titles and then I read Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and sooo good.

JI - Yeah, you're right it did come at a time where everything was very much the same, I saw a quote on Twitter the other day: "Maybe you're not tired of Fantasy, maybe you're tired of old white kings camping in the woods?"

That's really the thing, how has something that allows us to dream as big as we want to dream become so reductive? Like how does that happen?

Jemisin is, she's my literary hero!

*Interstitial Music*

JSM- Thanks for listening to Cabbages & Kings, please let me know what you think of the show!

29 - Making Worlds out of Words

in
CityOfRoses

This episode, Kip Manley (@kiplet), author of the acclaimed web serial The City of Roses, joins me to talk about this genre that makes worlds out of words and sharing stories with our children.  Additionally, Charles Payseur returns to recommend three stories centered on cooking.

Kip's original post on this topic, and my post over at BookPunks about telling The Hobbit to Tadpole.

Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (review & description of categories)

Fangirl Happy Hour on The Last Unicorn 

Octavia Cade's series "Food & Horror" at The Book Smugglers

The amazing art which inspired me to actually get this project off the ground was created by@etrandem

Send feedback! Tweet me! Tweet the show! Be a guest on the show! 

Music - Jazzy Ashes by The Underscore Orkestra

If you want to subscribe to the show, the RSS feed is: http://www.cabbagesandkings.audio/?format=rss

Transcript: JSM - Jonah Sutton-Morse (host)
KM - Kip Manley (guest)
CP - Charles Payseur (guest short fiction expert)
*Intro Music*
JSM - Welcome to Cabbages & Kings, the podcast for readers of Science Fiction & Fantasy, I'm your host, Jonah Sutton-Morse
*Interstitial
JSM - My guest this episode is Kip Manley.  Kip is the author of the acclaimed and long-running webserial the City of Roses, which is published as a series of serialized novelettes.  Kip also has a long history with the genre and a small child who he's been introducing to the genre & occasionally blogging about.  And since I also have one small child, the four-and-a-half-year-old Tadpole is taking in some of the stories, although I haven't read very many things to her.  Sprout is not yet at that stage, but I figured I would talk to Kip about introducing our kids to the genre and their relationships both to stories that we're telling & books that we're reading. So, Kip, welcome and thank you.

KM - Thank you very much, hi.

JSM - I will start by asking you to just tell us a little bit about how you came to Scienc Fiction & Fantays & some of the important books for you.

KM - It's difficult to pin a very first book. I mean one of the things that I remember is that my folks had a copy of the Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, on the shelf.  Little out of character for them, but they had them and I did ah read those at about the same time.  We were living in Kentucky, very far out in the middle of nowhere.  Trips to get books would be few and infrequent, but I had an enormous number, and one of them my mother comes back from Louisville or somewhere and she had a copy of the Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov, of course, and a copy of The Grey King by Susan Cooper.  Without any of the other books in the Dark Is Rising Sequence.
JSM - Oh, yes

KM - And I just I remember that particular dyad, or dyptych whatever you want to call it, very vividly.  And the one that stuck, the one that just really sunk in, was the Grey King, that's what infected, that what took hold.  Asimov just didn't stand a chance I guess.

But, I'm mentioning those two, but at about the same time I'm getting into the John Carter books, I remember also vague things, I think the cartoonist was Galen Wilsonwas illustrating a bunch of children's books at the time, Leonard Looney or something like that about aliens who live on the moon, and the adventures that they had, Harry the Fat-Bear Spy, all of these things are kind of coming together all at the same time.  And it's making that sort of syncretistic mishmash of pulp, y'know the thing that isn't Fantasy, that isn't Science Fiction, that's just adventure stuff out there, away.
And, so that's what I got hooked on.  But the Susan Cooper, the Asimov, those two it was almost like, you have a choice
*laughter*
Which door will you walk through? And I ended up going through the Susan Cooper door and so here I am a fantasist.
JSM - You chose the portal instead of the rocket
KM - *laughs* pretty much.
So that's kind of my origin story.
Oh just a good thing ... long car rides at this point, always taking books along, I also remember the Raymond Feist books
JSM - Yeah, I got
KM - Magician ... yeah
JSM - I think I read Apprentice & Master & then drifted away.
KM - It first came out as a single giant book and then they broke it up & I got it when it was a giant book because this was when Oh My Goodness This is a giant book!
And also at the same time Stephen Brust, but that's coming a little later.
And going all over the map here, and then again it sort of like, this in my head fits in the same category but is neither Fantasy nor SF, Ellen Raskin: huge impact.  The Westing Game, Figs and Phantoms, The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon I Mean Noel, these books and they're all, I dunno making a world, making a world out of words., This was what was important
JSM - OK
KM - And I've gone all over the map.
There we go.
JSM - Are you primarily a genre reader, do you read omniviorously? Fiction, nonfiction?
KM - At this point, the vast majority of what I read at this point is online. I have books, I read books!  But, the focus has been less on that lately, and part of that is just the way we live today, part of that is keeping up with the conversations that I'm interested in, a lot of that is research, the things I'm looking for it's easier to find online.
I don't have, or don't make as much time for, just sitting down to read a novel lately.
JSM - mm hmm
KM - Right now what I'm in the middle of reading is Sylvia Townsend-Warner's "Kingdoms of the Elfin" and I'm kind of parcelling that out , it's loosely connected short stories.  And, published in the 1980's I think, the last book that she put out.  It's just, I'll read one of these stories & then stop & feel utterly useless and bereft for a while because she is SOO GOOD.
The other thing I'm working through right now is I finally got around to reading David Gregor's Debt: The First 5000 years, I was reading that 3 or 4 years ago.  So, I'm a little behind the times when it comes to the paper reading.
5:12
JSM - And did you have a period of leaving and coming back, or have you had sort of pivotal moments that have shifted what you were interested in & what you wanted to read?
KM - hmmm ... well I still am primarily interested in again those books that make worlds out of words for want of a better term.
(slightly pretensious)
genre *deep heavy sigh* ... it's such a big mess. *laugh*
I, like, for instance when I was first sitting down with City of Roses and then starting to realize OK I need to kind of get a handle on, take this as an example "Urban Fantasy", what's become of it, because what I started to think of it as and what I was dealing with it as was what had started to come out at the end of the 80s.  War For the Oaks (Emma Bull), and the Bordertown books, Ellen Kushner, this sort of thing was what I was thinking of, and I start to look around and I discover of course that it has changed, changed & not changed, in the way that it will, and it's now more paranormal romance, that is what Urban Fantasy has become.
JSM - Right, when I think of it, that's what I think of.
KM - Right. and so I went through a period where I was : OK, I need to try to figure out what people are doing.  And so I got The Mercy Thompson books, and the Jim Butcher Books, the Dresden Files, I got a couple of those.  Jane Heller, these various Urban Fantasy Series and being dissatisifed with them, but at the same time, trying to pick them apart as an intellectual exercise to see what makes them tick, why they do what they do, and y'know starting to develop a sort of a theory of how it starts off in one place, this sort of growth of things coming vaguely horror, vaguely what ah Farah Mendehlson referred to as the intrusion fantasy all of that, and it's distorted by the dual impact of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Vampire: The Masquerade Role-Playing Game
7:18
JSM - So you were reading Urban Fantasy to try to figure out what Urban Fantasy had become.
KM - Yeah. So you have this dual reaction where on the one hand you have genre as a marketing category, which is sort of the thing that you know you say Urban Fantasy you immediately think OK it's got the book cover, it's got the woman standing with her back to us & you can't quite make out her face and she's y'know all of that is sort of predetermined, a marketing category.
And it becomes very constraining and very difficult to talk about or even enjoy something in that sense, because is it so determined.  Defined.  But at the same time, you can't talk about a work without talking about all the things that it's in conversation with: the genre that it's in.  And, it's such a difficult tricky silly stupid word.  But at the same time I come back to the fact that I'm trying to think of what unites all these things that I enjoy that aren't Science Fiction, that aren't Fantasy, or that are one or that are the other, but they're still the same thing, and what they do & how they work, and I have a very conflicted relationship with attempting to be able to generalize about them, particularize specific things, y'know it's the joy and the wonder of thinking about the thing you do. 
You never come to an answer, you never come to a solution, you're always: I'm over here now and it looks different from this perspective and look at that, maybe I'll go over there next, and so
The question was: have I always been enamored of, or within, genre, to a certain extent yes I suppose from a very young age all the way up it's always been y'know I want the stuff beyond the fields we know, that thing, I'm going to go over there& see what happens next.  And, while, one can't help but be impressed by, taken with books that don't do that, still it's not, it's not one of the primary impulse.
*Interstitial*9:17
JSM - Before I get to actually reading stories with our kids, Charles Payseur has three short story recommendations centered around cooking
CP - Hi everybody and welcome back.  I'm Charles Payseur and we're going to be tlaking about some short fiction today. Today's topic: actually where my recommendations going is something that is near & dear to my heart: and that is cooking.  And I love cooking so much.  Cooking is one of my favorite things, food is one of my favorite things, and so these stories are like fairly recent and involve excellent uses of food & cooking in speculative fiction. 
The earliest one of these that I want to talk about is from the sadly defunct Crosed Genres magazine.  This one in their August Portals issue, which was an incredible issue.  This particular story I feel like I almost overlooked to some degree because it was in the same issue as one of my favorite stories of the year.  But this one: Where Do You Go To, My Lovely, but Yusra Amjad, is incredibly good.  It is short, it is about a woman who can transport people with her food, and it's this back and forth between her and her nephew examining her powers and getting to the heart of what she's doing, and its an excellent examination of food's power to transport people to specific places and times in their memory and how that gets translates and how that sort of differs from person to person.  It's an incredible story & I recommend you all go check that one out.
The second story that I want to talk about is from November's Clarkesworld magazine & it is So Much Cooking by Naomi Kritzer, and this story is one that is more like geographically near & dear to where I am because it takes place in the twin cities of Minnesota during a future where there's a pandemic and there is a disease that is sort of decimating, or at least has created a crisis and the form that the story takes is that of a mommy blog, which for anyone who gets a lot of recipes off of pinterest, you will know exactly what I am talking about and the story makes excellent use of that and in some ways shows about affluence and pandemic situation and shows this family sort of going through the scarcity and dealing with taking in more people, and it's just this rather wrenching story and examination of this one person as she sort of makes it through a very difficult situation with food.  And how she relates to her world and how the food that she makes mirrors what's happening with her.  The last story that I want to talk about is a story that was in the January very huge issue of Apex Magazine.  This one is Soursop by Chikodeli Emelumadu.  Which ... it is like rather difficult and very speculative, very imaginative, you get this future where all the soil has basically been pulled off of the earth and put on this ring that goes around where the wealthy lives, and everyone else who's been left behind as a sort of punishment for things that they've done, are forced to watch these cooking programs both as a way of sort of like giving them something to do because they can experience in part what's going on in the program but it's very good examination of how cooking can be an oppressive tool, and especially when you're looking at the last story to this one, you look at affluence when you do have this even scarcity in the last story, the ingredients being used, the way it's all been doing, and you come to this one where the same sort of thing, where a cooking show has beome this thing that people look to both as sort of an aspiring wanting to experience these things that are no longer available to them, wanting to be taken back to a time and place where they would've been able to enjoy the foods that they're seeing eaten, being able to experience them, being able to taste them. This is a very sensual story, meaning it uses the senses in very profound ways and it's just the another fairly short story, but there's so much worldbuilding that goes one and the character work with the experiences there are just very good.
If you're looking for more cooking related things, there's a lot, and Chikodeli Emelumadu who did Soursop has done quite a few, in fact if you want to go back as far as I believe June 2015 her story in One Throne Magazine, Soup, is probably one of the most disturbing cooking stories you will ever read, and at first seems like something where it's going to be "yes, it's cute, there's a talking fish!"  which is the spoiler that I'll give for that.  There is a talking fish and it is like charming and then you get to a certain point and you're like "oooohhh my god!"
And it's very good, so these are many different ways that writers use cooking to sort of convey place and convey culture and convey an attitude to examine memory and to examine where we are and how we related to our food which is very fundamental to our lives.
Further reading if you go to the BookSmugglers, Octavia Cade has an amazing series where she talks about food & reading and writing and very wroth going over there & checking those out, those are very dense, very long essays & lots to read there & lots to enjoy and if you're like me and ever want a very good cry, you could probably go to PBS & check out their tribute to Julia Childs.  It is a very well done musical tribute to her using clips from a long time and I tear up every time I watch it, but especially in the context of a lot of these stories it's interesting to think of especially like that being used as a torture device.
That's all that I have for this month's recommendations.  I wish you all bon appetit.
*interstitial music*
15:11
JSM - Now we are going to pivot because you are also a father of a child whose name comes from a beloved childhood fantasy book,
KM - Yes
JSM - what was it like to introduce Taran to the Lloyd Alexander books?
KM - Book of Three is the first.
JSM - OK.  I encountered them at the library I think out of order.Did you start by reading the book to her, did you start by teliing the story? How old was she when you were, when she found out that there was this character that shared her name?
KM - Probably about 2 or 3.  We had the books, we would talk to her a little bit about where her name came from, and the first book, we have a The Dell Yearling edition which has the cover that I had when I was a kid, you see Taran in his sort of Luke Skywalker looking tunic & leggings with his dagger drawn and Aurn the Horned King riding past with a great red cloak fluttering.  It's a very striking cover on those books, a skull mask with the horns, and so she was taken by that.  And explaining that the figure on the cover, Taran, that's who she was named after.  We came up with the name, we had various different negotiations for talking about if it's a boy, if it's a girl, but we kind of fixed on the name very particularly very early on before we knew whether Taran was a boy or a girl.  It was going to be Taran Jet
JSM - Going to be Taran and that would work either way
KM - Yep.  And so it has.  The name the problem for her of course we spell it as it's spelled in the book, T-A-R-A-N, and that getsa lot of people saying "Taraan", or, something along those lines, and she very indignantly corrects people: No, Taran!
JSM - Good!
*laughs*
KM - The first time that I actually tried to read Book of Three to her was when she was three and she actually came to me because she saw it & wanted to read about it.  And that time she had an alternate persona, sort of, she was (sometimes) batmangirl
Because she was very into Batman from Brave and the Bold Cartoons - she'd watch those & she really like Batman.  And so she wasn't batgirl she was batmangirl. 
JSM - makes sense
KM - And batmangirl was sort of the figure who was there to do the difficult things that had to be done, which at this point included such things as potty training, and batmangirl was sort of the figure that she wanted to be, she aspired to be.  And so she had the book and she was looking at it & looking at the figure of Taran on the cover of it, and she said this is the book about me, and I said Yes.  I said that's Taran, that's who you were named after, and she says"Read it like it's Batmangirl!"
JSM - OK
KM - So y'know you get started & Batmangirl wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of her education decided to make horseshoes.  And you start to read that and you slip in batmangirl and you slip in she, and her, and it just made for an interesting reading experience that first time.  And we didn't get very far that first time, mostly because she was 3 and there were no illustrations.
JSM - I have read the opening passage to The Tombs of Atuan 3 times.
KM - *laughs*
JSM - we have not gotten any further, but I've read the opening passage three times.
KM - We've since read several more chapters.  We've moved on because we do bedtime reading still as a nightly thing.  We are starting to work her way into actually working some chapter books into the progression.  The first one that we finished was actually (it's another childhood favorite) was The House with a Clock in its Walls, by John Balares(?)
Taran was born on halloween. halloweed is a very very vital holiday for her of course, so we were talking about scary books and I was telling her about the scariest book I remembered from when I was a kid and so she wanted to read it, and so we actually we worked our way through each chapter every night.  When we got to the point where they're actually summoning misses Izzard from the tomb, we got to that chapter she had to take a break.
And then the final chapter where there's the big confrontation, we had to take another break, but we stuck it out the whole book all the way through, and she was thrilled with it.
JSM - GOOD
*Interstitial Music*
KM - The Last Unicorn because she has seen the movie and loved the movie and loves the theme song and will sing it at the drop of a hat
JSM - *laughs*
KM - we have not worked our way through that but she found it very interesting with that one to listen to especially the opening chapter which maps somewhat onto the opening of the movie but there are differences, and so she started to point out the differences & so we started to talk about them & how that worked, and why movies do one thing one way and books do them a different way.
JSM - we've had that experience with the animated hobbit and the story of the hobbit that I have told her.
KM - laughs.  I have not been able to interest her in the Hobbit yet.  I haven't tried that hard.  I am very leery of pushing books.  The hardest I've probably pushed are the Moomintroll books, and those,she really likes the ah the cartoon of course, watches on YouTube,she likes the comic strips that we have, but we haven't really sort of worked the books in very firmly into any sort of rotation or discussion at all.
And I'm not sure what the resistance is on her part, we haven't talked about it much, again because I'm a little leery about pushing too hard, but at the same time, that's kind of my first taste of "why don't you love this thing that I love?"
JSM - I KNOW
KM - you apostate!
*Interstitial music*
KM -  she's in first grade at a Japanese Immersion school, so she's spending half the day learning Japanese, half the day learning english, but she has a couple of times brought Japanese picture books home and read them to me, because of course I cannot read a single character, I am ... I can recognize her name now in hiragana, it's a little dangerous, we're teaching her a language that we don't speak or read ourselves, and she's already quite good at it!
But she took great pride in reading to me from a book about little group of acorns who make hats for all the woodland animals, and
JSM - That's great
KM - yeah, and then mocking me when I tried to follow along as she read, so her being able to do this, I could not, she is very pleased with that.
*Interstitial music*
KM - One of the things that she got into very early on because it was a book that we got her, she was maybe one or two, one of the first I think they came out, The Octonauts books, are you familiar?
JSM - I know the web series, I haven't read the books
KM - They started as children's books and we kind of got them because they were beautifully designed & very well done & so we were reading those to her from a very early age, and then the cartoon comes out, the toys start to come out, she's very interested in the toys, and then finally the cartoon comes to Netflix, so she can watch it,
JSM - Yep
KM - And it's full of animal facts which is something that she's just soaking up with the ... whatever she can get at this point.  She's mainlining it, and she just watches this because it's information & she's soaking it up.
The Octonauts are a crew of 8 varied scientists & characters who are doing all of these things and when we had been reading them to her before, they're not the most well-devleoped, well-rounded characters in the world but still there's something to hang on each one and so of course voices develop for them.
You have professor inkling who gets the querulous old pedant voice and you have captain barnacles bear and he gets the hero voice and so y'know I'm doing the voices and I'm doing the voices as I'm reading them and she tells me, wait papa you're doing the voices wrong. 
JSM - Oh do you have to do the voices the way they do them on TV now?

KM - We kind of compromised.  She accepts the fact that basically her papa is imperfect and cannot do them exactly right.
*Interstitial Music*
JSM - Now do you do, do you do many sort of extemporaneous stories
KM - In terms of structured stories they come from books and movies.  We have conversations, we talk about things and ... we spend time for instance, walking to and from the bus stop things like that & we're talking about what we see and it's not so much telling stories as it is spinning bits about them.
JSM - Right
KM - And where we're working in myth and science and everything so y'know we talk about the crows, we talk about what we know about them from science but we also talk about ah the murder of crows and what a scary thing that is and there's kind of a vague world building thing going on with the neighborhood faieries.
JSM - That sounds excellent
KM - There's a row of arboretae, which is an apartment complex for them, she knows where they all live, the holly, anytime you see a holly tree or a holly bush that's a faerie bank.  And so we've talked about that.
So it's less storytelling and more worldbuilding if you wanted to y'know
JSM - mm hmm
KM - draw a net around it. The storytelling impulse, I mean, I get, so caught up or tangled in what it needs to do what it could do, what it might flop around and do a different way, it becomes very difficult to sort of extemporaneously sit down and tell a story.
So, it's that old thing with you know I wanted to write you a short note but I didn't have time so I wrote you a long one instead.
*Interstitial Music*
JSM - anything you're looking forward to on the horizon and saying "either I'm really excited about maybe getting to introduce this or I am kind of dreading when we have to talk about this sort of thing"?
KM - Tthe big thing for me right now the one that I don't ever want to push and want her to come to on her own would be Ellen Raskin, that I mentioned earlier, It doesn't work being read aloud, it's gotta be I guess secret discovered yourself.  So that's something that's kind of a milestone that I'm looking forward to soon to come to.
JSM - Just kind of casually leave the book lying around & hope she picks it up and carries it off?
KM - Yeah
*Interstitial Music*
KM - One thing that I did have a lot of fun with Taran is something that I started to look for for kind of like sort of my birthday present to myself and also sort of her birthday present, or one of them, it was a book that I remembered from when I was 5 or 6 years old, one of the first books that I read at school and I can't at this point remember if I had a copy of my own, or if I just read the one at school until it was burned however hazily into my memory, but I did remember the title, I didn't remember who wrote it, I remembered the vague look of it, I remembered that it was about these two girls and one of them had a dog, a very lazy dog who got kidnapped or ran away and ended up in a dog food commercial
JSM - OK
KM - It was this thing that was sticking in my head, it was like this ur-reading experience from when I was very very small and so I found essentially a forum where people are describing books & other people are saying oh that's such and such by so and so, and I searched for the key terms and I found it.  Something queer is going on a mystery by Elizabeth Leevy and Mordecai Girstain, and y'know found a copy, ordered it, got it, and just kind of holding it was one of those really, y'know Madeline moments.  Here's this book that I haven't seen in years and I have it again in my hands and its exactly as I remember it.  And reading it to her and talking about it to her, it's one of her favorites now. It's basically the two girls are Jill and Gwen and they're best friends and they solve mysteries and it turns out there's a whole series of them, they started off as being Something Queer books, and at some point somebody in Marketing said maybe we'd better change the title and so they ended up being called the Fletcher mysteries because Fletcher is the name of the dog. In this book at least there's a point where they figure out that the neighborhood nemesis, Fernbach, has ah stolen the dog, he's the one who makes commercials and he's kidnapped the dog for these dog food commercials.
So they're running away when they've figured it out, and they start chanting "I finger Feedler Fernbach for Filching Fletcher" is what they yell
JSM - *laugh*
KM - Feedler Fernback Filch Fletcher, Feedler Fernbach Filch Fletcher, it's just this wonderful rhythm thing again as we're reading along.
But there are other things, it was published I think in 1973, ok so a little later than I remember, but there's this marvelous point: basically the dog goes missing, the girls they go through the neighborhood, canvassing the neighborhood looking for him, and they determine that it must be Fernbach who took Kletcher, and they're figuring this out toward the end of the day and it's kind of getting late, and there's this really extraordinarily odd moment where it's getting dark, said Jill, my mother will be worried and so they're going to meet in the morning and follow him, it's this typical kids adventure story clock but immediately the problems arise: he's going to go to work in his car, we have school, and Gwen, who is kind of the sardonic sarcastic friend takes a moment and she has this habit of tapping on her braces whenever she's thinking so she's tapping on her braces, so she says "your mother's OK, isn't she", and Jill says "yeah, she's OK", well we need her to get ... and then they go & tell Jill's mother about this story.  It's this really weird rupture in the genre.  Because ordinarily of course a kid's adventure you have it as a kid, you don't go and drag in authority figures.  They go to Jill's mother, Jill's mother is obviously it's set in West Chester Connecticut, Jill's mother works in the city, but she's also very obviously a single mother, Jill doesn't have another parent on the scene, and Jill's mother listens to this and says OK, yeah, I can get out of work, I'll write you a note to get out of school, and we'll follow Fernbach and find Fletcher.
*laughter*
And it's just this wonderfully, just this rupture of how the story is supposed to go and it, it was something that I hadn't noticed of course as a 5-year old, but something that really just boomed when I read it for the first time again.  Woah, this book is doing something strange that stuck with me.  Yeah, i dunno, it was pretty cool.
*Interstitial Music*
JSM - Each episode closes with a memory of a significant book.  The right book at the right time, an interesting find, or just something that stuck around.
*Interstitial Music*
KM - Again talking about just sort of the raw elements of language. I don't *think* that it is a real true and legitimate memory, it's something that is kind of part of family lore. My sister was born when I was three and I would start to read to her when she was an infant, and I think a lot of what I was doing then was picking up a book and reciting what I remembered from it, although the family lore is that I learned to read when I was three years old, but I do roughly about the same time just have this memory of the page of Go Dog Go resolving itself into the words that my father was saying
JSM - Okay
KM - And its kind of like ok this is, this is like the moment when you figure out that those are words and that's what he's saying and that's how it works.  I, again, don't trust it as an actual memory but I still have this sensation of that, a very specfic moment and very specific page on Go Dog Go
JSM - Actual trustworthy momory or not, that sounds pretty amazing and extraordinary
KM - So Go Dog Go has always been just another one of those books, OK that's totemic, it's on the shelf, so that's something again I read to her from a very early age, she's very fond of the hello hello do you like my hat, I do not like your hat, goodbye goodbye, she likes to, us to take turns reading those lines, so she'll be one dog I'll be the other dog, things like that.
JSM- Thanks for listening to Cabbages & Kings, please let me know what you think of the show!

28 - Wisdom of the Crowds: Dune

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This episode, I'm joined by Liz (@pixelfish), Paige (@rhiannonrevolts), and Paul (@princejvstin) to discuss Frank Herbert's Dune, published 51 years ago.  This is the first "Wisdom of the Crowds" project, gathering audio from various listeners and then bringing it together.  We discuss Dune as Epic Fantasy In SPAAAACE, the orientalism and colonialism in Dune, and of course the Litany Against Fear and Dune's ecological messages.  This episode closes with a pitch for the People of Colo(u)r Destroy SF Kickstarter project, open through Friday, Feb 19 (in the US).

Links - 

On Problematic Faves

People of Colo(u)r Destroy SF

Wired Geek's Guide to the Galaxy interview with Nalo Hopkinson (fiction editor), Nisi Shawl (reprints editor) and Sunil Patel (personal essays editor)

Essays collected by Sunil Patel (@ghostwritingcow) by Troy Wiggins (@troylwiggins), Ken Liu (@kyliu99), and Caroline M. Yoachim (@carolineyoachim)

The amazing art which inspired me to actually get this project off the ground was created by@etrandem

Send feedback! Tweet me! Tweet the show! Be a guest on the show! 

Music - Jazzy Ashes by The Underscore Orkestra

If you want to subscribe to the show, the RSS feed is: http://www.cabbagesandkings.audio/?format=rss

Transcript:

L - Lis (@pixelfish)
PK - Paige Kimble (@rhiannonrevolts)
PW - Paul Weimer (@princejvstin)
JSM - Me!

L - And before long, I'm sneaking into their bedroom, I'm climbing the bookshelves and getting Dune down so I can read ahead.  I didn't exactly understand lots of it because ... age 4

*MUSIC*

JSM - Welcome to Cabbages & Kings, a podcast for readers of SFF.  I'm your host, Jonah Sutton-Morse.  This episode I asked a few people to send in their thoughts about Frank Herbert's novel Dune, which turned 50 last year but still looms large in my imagination and many others.

PW - Dune is one of my heart-books of SFF.  I read it first in the mid-80's I was a teenager which means I was the perfect age to read Dune.

JSM - That's Paul who you may remember from our past episode discussing Amber & Kate Elliott's books.  I encountered Dune when I was a bit older than Paul but much older than Lis.  I was not 4.  We'll hear from Paige next.

PK - Hi, I'm Paige Kimble.  With regards to Dune and my experience of Dune, I first tried to read Dune when I was at my father's when I was about 14 or 15 and had run out of books.  And I got through about 50 pages and bounced off the top of it.  I think I musth ave bounced off of it 3 or 4 times before I actually managed to read it in college.

*INTERSTITIAL MUSIC*

JSM - We're going to start with a favorite game of SFF fans: What subgenre is it?  This book that has Dukes & Spaceships & Sandworms & Imperial Planetologists and of course prophecies and faster-than-light travel via the Spice.  How do we begin to make sense of Dune?

PW: It's really an Epic Fantasy IN SPAAAACE.  It is!  I mean you have ostensibly magic powers, you have feudal structures, you have all sorts of court intrigue, yes there are spaceships, yes there are there's wierd technology, but Dune again and again reinforces that fantasy feel.  I mean, consider the personal shield which make physical hand-to-hand combat which you'd think in the future with laser guns and big weapons would be out of fashion ... no, it's actually learning how to fight with knives & other things is not only practical it's essential in an age of personal shields and things which bring down conflict to a very personal, intimate level, and that's again Epic Fantasy.  I mean consider the final fight between Feyd and Paul, I mean that's a classic epic fantasy climax where you have the villain and the hero going at each other blade to blade.  That's not space opera at all.  There is a lot of wierd and perhaps uncomfortable orientalism in Dune.

PK - With regards to orientalism, I really have to wonder if Edward Said ever read Dune, just because it feels like an example out of that book.  At least in the first novel, we see everything through the eyes of Paul.  We never really get any one else's perspective.  We sort of do.  WE sort of get Jessica's perspective, briefly off & on.  But in terms of understanding, everything is sort of framed through how Paul understands it & how Paul comes to be part of the Fremen culture.

L - The fremen are definitely patterened on middle-eastern cultures, and as such I'm not really equipped to say how this world-building resonated or harmed folks from that culture.  I can only talk to my experience.  And reading as a child, I believed that the fremen were awesome badass fighters.  I really wanted to grow up & y'know live in a hidden fremen sietch and learn how to handle a crysknife and all that.  I do thing that there could be an element of exoticising or romantacising that sort of background.
In my most recent reading I detected a very patronizing tone from Jessica when she talks about utilizing fremen superstitions to survive.  The missionaria protectiva has been implanted by the bene gesserit centuries back among the fremen.  She can't even grant that their beliefs and cultures are their own, because she knows where they came from.  And you can kind of see how this is and indictment of both religion but it's also a very colonialistic attitude: Jessica doesn't think anything of exploiting this.
4:14
PK - I have a lot of thoughts about how Herbert looks at colonialism and what his take on it is.  And why it seems so contradictory.  I should sort of preface this by saying that I don't believe in death of the author.  I feel that the context and the history of when an author was writing is really, really critical to understanding and analyzing the work.  Herbert's writing this in the late 50's, which is right after or right around the time of the Suez crisis.  The empires of Europe were losing their imperial control, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think Herbert could've been looking at it from the perspective of a typical white american perspective even today which is that freedom is good & empire, being a colony, not being free, is bad.  Which is fine, and to a certain extent correct, but it's overly simplistic and it also ignores the fact that the US was and is a colonial power in many ways.  So my take is that Herbert's writing this from understanding and feeling that, oh these people need to be free.  But as is typical of people with privilege, he's imposing his own understanding on the situation.  He can't really comprehend it & make it work without it being on his terms, so you've got Paul Atriedes, the white savior (I mean he could be in a textbook), and he's the one who's sort of the chosen one from legend who's going to save them all.  And you'll notice that at the end of Dune the first novel, Paul basically just takes over the empire.  He realigns it so that the Frement have control of Arrakis.  He can't really comprehend a non-empire state of being, but he wants the Fremen to have control of The Spice because, well, they own it, it's theirs.  But at the same time he can't comprehend the idea of the system not working the way that he's grown up with it.  And I feel that as the novels go on you can see his growing and shifting understanding of empire, at least again from his perspective complicit in a colonialist power, his understanding of it shifts along with the understanding of it worldwide.  So what Leto does, Leto the second, by God-Emperor is he's created a whole new empire in his vision, his Golden Path, which it turns out wasn't what he wanted it to be at the end of Children of Dune by any stretch of the imagination.  He's just created stagnancy again.  So I think that you could look at that as Herbert commenting on the post-colonialist powers and what happened in a lot of the post-colonilist powers after they became independent.
I should really clarify that I think his view is flawed.  I think he, he really isn't coming at this with particular sort of sense of empathy.  But I think he's not someone who's ever really questioned his priviliege and so he's trying to tell this story about freedom and post=-colonialism and he's ending up basically just reinforcing the same old tropes.
7:38
JSM - I think it's interesting how clearly Dune indicates both the anxieties of 50 years ago & also brings out many contemporary political and literary critical trends.  I'm going to drop an essay on problematic faves that I find helpful into the show notes.
We're also going to talk now about the history and the world that Herbert built.
PK - I think what's really interesting for me is that Herbert mashes a whole bunch of stuff up in Dune.  Stuff that doesn't necessarily go together in fact stuff that we see as pretty much polar opposites.  So the Zensunni, referring to Islam and Buddhism and the Orange Catholic Bible, which William of Orange being the protestant and here in Glasgow we have Orange Marches which are Protestant sectarian marches so Orange Catholic is pretty much a contradiction in terms.  I think that's the extent of where Herbert's imagination could go with regards to how things are going to be different in the future.  That everything would be mixed up into one or two sort of dominant philosophies, and I think that's valid but then everything really sort of loses it's point.  For example he mixes up a lot of stuff out of Islam and then Judaism into it, and it sort of becomes one amalgamation of exotic that I don't think does anythign more than expresses exoticism.  These big ideas like, "oh, we can't have artificial intelligence because of some mysterious thing that's only mentioned in the back of the book", so The Butlerian Jihad and all these other things being mostly window dressing for having this culture and these characters and this other cultures and these characters.
PW - It all came about messily because that's the way history works.  In the original Dune book, we're presented this whole wierd interlocking set of things that have grown up over thousands of years and yeah they don't all quite work together, some of them feel like they should be in different books.  We have the Bene Gesserit over here, the spacing guild over there.  It's a feature, not a bug.
JSM -

I also asked people about iconic scenes and characters in Dune.  Personally I always return to the banquet scene in the palace, which we see through Jessica’s eyes, where every participant, every comment, even the seating arrangement is analyzed for its political implications.  There are veiled warnings of danger through the Atriedes coded language, empty-headed plus-ones who steer the conversation towards commercially or politically relevant topics, always this looming sense of danger.  I suspect it’s a polarizing scene that plenty of readers find boring *laughs*, but I loved it.  Even though I mentioned it when I asked for responses, no one else brought it up.  Plenty of other moments came through, though.

10:39 L - One of my favorite scenes is the scene where they cross the sand at night, using the Thumper.  And make their way to the basin where the fremen are watching them.

And Paul first confronts Jamis and Stilgar and eventually Jamis has to call him out & Paul's forced to fight Jamis in order to prove that he has the right.  And not just him, but he's basically also fighting for his mother, because she would be accorded status as a witch and not allowed to live as she hasn't been trained up to the fremen ways they want to render her body down for water at this point.

JSM -

It’s interesting because from here I go to the funeral, Jamis’ baliset which reminds Paul of his friend Gurney Halleck, and the iconic scene where Paul, not yet used to the fremen water discipline, cries, and the tribe is moved: Usul gives water to the dead.  But it turns out there’s even more to take from this sequence.

L -

Paul is defending his mother & yet she's perfectly capable of defending herself. (laugh)  A fact that is made perfectly clear by the fact that they actually have injunctions for Jessica not to speak lest she somehow turn the tide of the battle towards her son.  And you kind of get the feeling that Jessica is really, really powerful even when her son is fighting on her behalf.

You never felt that Jessica's power was undercut at any point.  She's just a strong woman and her son is proof that she's a strong woman.  She raised him.  She trained him. The fruit comes from the tree.

 

I really liked that about this series.  Jessica and Paul were easily my favorite characters even when they're being shortsighted, unfortunately. I still love them & I love Jessica & I love being in her brain.  I love that we saw so much of her thoughts as she analyzes the world around her.


*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*
12:18
PW -

The Baron, we probably should talk about the Baron and some of the problems of the book at this point.  I mean his, quote unquote sexual deviance and how it's treated as a character flaw is definitely way out of current morality. The miniseries doesn't go anywhere near that.  It just doesn't bother with talking about the Baron's preference for, for homosexuality.  In the book it's a horror, and that goes back to the whole very conservative Epic Fantasy sort of world.  Of course it is, I mean consider: he doesn't even have an heir of his own, of his own line.  I mean he has his two wacko nephews as his heirs, and one's worse than the other!

And that's presented in the book as the Baron's sexual deviance being a bad thing, so ... that's really out of step with today's society and it's something you have to look at the book and go "well that society is screwed up in the head that way, and Herbert's not advocating it or shouldn't be advocating it, he's presenting it"

JSM -

Cards on the table here: my reading is that Baron Harkonnen, who’s a grossly-self-indulgent man and Leto’s archenemy, is portrayed in horrific ways as someone who’s outward disgusting appearance reveals his inner hideousness.  In Dune, I believe the pinnacle of the Baron’s despicableness is that he is not only gay but a pedophile, and that in the book there’s no real distinction between those two things - he is simply a sexual deviant along with so many other terrible characteristics.  I find this aspect of the book reprehensible.  I cannot express how much it bothers and offends and disgusts me to read the Baron portrayed in that way and to have homosexuality equated with pedophilia and to have those be representative of the Baron's moral character or lack thereof.  I find that awful.  I tend to cope by downplaying to myself the scenes where those aspects of the Baron come up whenever I think about or read the book.  Let's go back for a moment to the notion of problematic faves.  For me, I have no interest in trying to find logic or significance in any aspect of the portrayals of Baron Harkonnen. I find it easiest to simply note that he is vile, note that he sometimes moves the plot forward, and get away from that as quickly as possible.

Having said that, I think that Paul is right that like many otherepic fantasy stories, Dune is a book concerned with dynasties, and the baron’s inability to father an heir is an element of his role as the anti-Atreides, and I think that there are ways in which if you were willing to sort of entertain the notion that it's reasonable to talk about the baron and the fact that he can't produce an heir and contrast that with Leto and think about what heirs mean in the book, I think there's something you can get out of that.  It's just - I have no interest in thinking about that aspect of the Baron.  I would like to get past that part of the book as quickly as possible.  Dynastic considerations also feature prominently with Paul’s mother, the lady Jessica, and his concubine Chani, and we're going to move on to those topics now.

15:12

PK -

I mean, think of Jessica for example.  She defies the Bene Gesserit, and the Bene Gesserit are amazing in so many different ways, both bad and good.

She defies the Bene Gesserit because she loves Leto.  Because she loves Leto she won't give him a daughter like the Bene Gesserit want.  She'll give him a son.  And I don't think you'd necessarily have that today without it being sort of further examined.  And it's *really not*.  It's really just sort of a given.  She'll give him a son and an heir.

But this is 10,00 years in the future, so why would that necessarily matter?

*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*
What's interesting is Herbert really develops the Bene Gesserit later on in the series, particularly in the last 3 books that no one ever reads. And they become much more human.  Much more people with both flaws and strengths, rather than sort of hubris and heroism. Which, y'know, I gotta give Herbert a little bit of props for that, that he actually develops his writing of women over time.  It's by no means perfect, but he did learn.

And Chani I suppose is also really kind of, well, really quite disturbing.  In that she's both this very competent warrior-woman, and yet she also becomes quite submissive and, and sweet to Paul when they get together and y'know sort of really capturing the orientalist sort of perception of women in both ways y'know. I don't think Herbert really tried to write The Other in any way shape or form, I think he just sort of ended up writing up as he perceived people to be. He tried hard (I think) to perceive people and tried to perceive people who he wasn't (y'know anybody who wasn't a white guy), but I think in the end he was limited to what he could see and and what he could understand.

JSM -
The Litany Against Fear came up frequently when people talked about iconic moments in the story

L -

I suppose the scene that defines Dune for me the most is the scene where Paul & Jessica are fleeing the Harkonnens and they plunge straight into a sandstorm with Paul piloting the ornithopter.  And this scene is particularly famous because it contains the litany against fear recited for the first time in the text as a whole litany.

I still use this scene in my brain when I'm flying on an airplane & encounter turbulence.  I try to recall that no matter what else is going on, I am not in a sandstorm on Arrakis.*laughs*

And it's a whole man against his environment, be the environment political, ecological, be it social, but I think that there's this whole theme of are we adapting to our surroundings or are we going to be rigid and let it kill us?

And at some point you just have to kind of ride the whole thing out, the way Paul rides out that sandstorm.

PK -

I can't really discuss this without looking at the Litany Against Fear, which I think a lot of people have really taken to heart.  I don't know that I necessarily agree with it, to be perfectly honest with you, because I feel like fear can be useful.  Fear can be a tool.  And I think that the Bene Gesserit would have known that fear can be a tool.  Though maybe that's what they're saying when they say to let it flow through you, and only you remain at the end.  So to analyze the fear and take and learn something from it.  It is really telling that that's the Bene Gesserit way of determining whether or not someone is quote unquote human.

That never really gets brought up again after the first novel.  In fact it doesn't really get brought up again after the first few scenes, y'know in the entire thing.19:04

So maybe it's there just so we can see "oh, Paul is really special, and this is how he's gonna go become Mr White Savior Last Samurai guy!"

But at the same time its not something that the Bene Gesserit usually give to men.  Which is really interesting.  It's something that they only use to judge themselves.  And so they've judged Paul as being the special man.

You have to wonder if Herbert knew about women and pain tolerances and that sort of thing or if that was something that just past him by & he was just making it up.

19:36

JSM - I also asked people about Dune's legacy.
PK -

What's Dune's legacy?

Um

Is it bad if I say Dune's legacy is how not to Write The Other?

 

Which is true.

*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*

But I think Dune sort of made it acceptable in mainstream Science Fiction to write about really strange things, and really strange sort of understandings of the human mind, for example, with the Spice Trance and that sort of thing.  And to write about Drugs! But to do it in what's a very mainstream science fiction novel, rather than something that you had to be tripped out to really understand.

L -

I think that Dune is an important novel science fiction wise partly because of the ecology focus.

Right now more than ever we are seeing our planet change as the result of human action, and if we don't want to end up *laugh* in a frankly apocalyptic wasteland or other terrible future scenario, we could probably do a lot worse than to look at Dune and the lessons of ecology that are contained therein.

One of my favorite bits is when Kynes is out in the desert without his stillsuit & he realizes that his planet is going to kill him.  He loves this planet.  He is a desert creature as he puts it. He has changed and adapted to this planet & ultimately the dream that he's been working for will be realized.  He's actually aided the person that will basically push his dream into reality.  

PK - There's this prophecy among the Fremen that eventually Arrakis will become green and and fertile. And Paul thinks this is a great idea!(laughter) Lets redevelop Arrakis and make it in these people's image.

PW - In Dune, when you start mucking around with the natural environment, be it trying to mine spice, trying to harness worms, trying to, make Dune the planet into a places with water and much more hospitable to humans you're going to wind up doing things you don't intend or expect.  And, that's a very important these days especially now when we're pumping so much Co2 into the atmosphere we *are* changing our planet whether we will or no and we're not quite sure what's going to come out of it, but it's not all going to be good. And Dune 50 years later seems even more prescient about, when you start messing with the planet on a wide scale, you don't know what you're going to get & you're probably going to regret it. And THAT, that is something especially as this 21st century goes on that'll keep making Dune relevant.

L - And yet, there's this whole sense that like Kynes, he doesn't fall short, he just becomes one with his planet when it finally destroys him.

And, there's this sort of beautiful meditation on the way his planet is bent on destroying him and it's this sort of ... the way his planet destroys him is the way we're destroying our planet in some respects. If you think about our planet as sort of a body for humans and what we're doing to it is we're basically trying to mold it & change it & exploit it & I think that the ecological messages of Dune are going to be very timely in the near future.

*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*

22:52

JSM - We’re going to move now from Dune to a kickstarter project that closes this Friday.  People Of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction (and horror, and possibly fantasy) is the third annual “Destroy” short story anthology from Lightspeed Magazine.  The project will compile new and reprinted short fiction from authors of color (it is all selected by and everyone working on the project identifies as a person of color), it includes many personal statements from authors of color, many of which are already on the website destroysf.com slash poc.  (I will have plenty of links in the show notes)  This project actually came up quite a while ago when I had Akil on.  It is now live.  I highly recommend supporting the project, which again is up through this Friday February 19th (at least here in the states).  You will get a lot of really great fiction by new and established authors, selected by highly respected anthologists.  I asked the personal essays editor Sunil Patel to talk a bit about the project, which we will hear after a few clips from earlier episodes with Akil Harris and Troy Wiggins.

 

AH - I read, I think it was Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin a month or two ago and I think that's like the first speculative fiction novel I read by a black person.  And it was really nice, I liked it.

*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*

TW - There is a book that is directly responsible for my deciding to write Fantasy Fiction.  And it's David Anthony Durham's Acacia.  I was ... this was one of the times I was coming back to the genre. This was after college, I had just graduated.  And I was unemployed and I didn't have anything to do really but apply for jobs, so while I was applying for jobs at the library, I went and picked up a book.  And I hadn't been in the SFF section for a while, so I went over there and I had a phone, a smartphone, and I was like "black fantasy authors", I googled it.  And his name was one of the first names that came up.  And his book was called Acacia.  And so I found it and I went and I picked it up and I started reading it and it was *great*!  And I was like, this guy's writing, I mean why can't I write a book about stuff like this, and so I started writing that day.  I started writing a story.

*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*

AH - Ooh, can I tell you a little story?

JSM - Please

AH - OK, so, are you familiar with the Queers Destroy SF Kickstarter?

JSM - I am.

AH - That was through Lightspeed.  I found out about that just as I was looking into reading more about queer experiences. This is really cool.  And they did one for women too!

JSM - There's some really good stuff in there.

AH - But I was looking at it and I thought it was so cool and at the same time I was thinking, this is really cool but are they going to do one for People of Color? Because that'd be awesome too. And so what I did was I emailed them saying how awesome I thought it was that they were doing this to try to promote marginalized voices and stuff like that.  But also I was asking y'know are you guys going to do one for POC, because that'd be really cool, because I realize now I really don't see a lot of stuff written by POC.

And so John Joseph Adams [the publisher of Lightspeed Magazine] emailed me back saying that yeah, we actually are going to do one.

*MUSIC INTERSTITIAL*

25:56

SP - Hi, I'm Sunil Patel, personal essays editor for Lightspeed's POC Destroy Science Fiction special issue.  We have a Kickstarter going on right now which you can find at destroySF.com/POC and I'm here to talk to you a little about it. Thank you to Jonah for having me on the podcast.

So, POC Destroy Science Fiction is a special issue of Lightspeed that is completely written, edited, produced, illustrated, all by People of Color.  Which is great!

Because as you might know from being in the world, POC, that is people who are not white, are generally seen as a minority despite the fact that actually worldwide there are more people of color than white people.  But that's a whole other issue.  This issue is about giving POC a voice.  Putting stories by POC in one place so that you can see a whole bunch of great stories.  Because what you normally see is a bunch of stories written by white people.  In my personal essays, a lot of people talked about erasure, and the fact that they didn't realize that the world was sort of this, full of white supremacy. And so when they started writing stories, they were writing white characters because that is all they'd ever seen.

I did the same thing.  I did not realize when I started writing that I could write indian people, because I'd never read indian people in books.  If they were in there at all, they were sidekicks.  They were never protagonists, they weren't doing anything.  They talked about the fact that they didn't see themselves in stories, and that made them feel like they didn't belong in stories.  Which is completely untrue! We all belong in stories, we all have a place in stories! No matter where you come from, who you are, what your background is, we all deserve to have our stories told, and POC Destroy SF is a project to allow that.

We have actually reached our goal of destroying SF, which is great.  We've also reached a stretch goal of destroying horror.  We're getting close to destroying fantasy. [update - all stretch goals met].  Now, your support will help us destroy so many genres, because there's also this, there's this thought, this notion, that people often have, that stories written by POC are inherently lesser.  And that's wrong.  And that's, it's Wrong with a capital W is what it is!

Its because white supremacy is sort of insidious and oppressive and subconscious, it's not something that you do on a regular basis.  Even I, as a nonwhite person, have been affected by it.  I inherently think, oh, it's something written by a white person, it must be better because that is the majority of our entertainment that we get.  All those books that we see pushed, the most famous, the classics of all time, everything you read in school is all written by white people. *laughs* And so you get the impression that that is what literature is, that's what stories are supposed to be.

POC Destroy SF says "No!" We can do more than that.  There are other people who have no had the chance to have their voices heard, and we're giving them a place to have those voices heard.  And, you, by supporting this project, are helping these voices find their way into the world.  You can help debut new voices! You can help promote voices that deserve to be heard even more than they already are! And as a bonus, as a kickstarter backer you will get personal essays delivered to your inbox every day.  We only have a few days left, but the backer updates are there right now online and they're all essays written by people from all around the world from different backgrounds and they explore what it means to be a POC exploring SF.  What it means to watch SF and not see yourself, or to see yourself depicted as a stereotype and a horribly offensive stereotype at that. So I hope that what you will do after listening to this podcast is go to destroySF.com/POC ,look at the backer rewrards.  At this point you get so much for just $5 it is just ridiculous.  You get the issue, you get horror, you get magazines, you get a sampler anthology, you get so much for $5, and I think it is absolutely worth your time and your money to help support this project: POC Destroy Science Fiction.

 

JSM - Thanks for listening to Cabbages & Kings.  Let me know what you think of the show.  On the website- cabbageandkings.audio, there's a feedback form & also a page if you'd like to be on the show.  Or just go ahead and email contact@cabbagesandkings.audio. I'm on Twitter @jsuttonmorse, the show is on twitter @kingcabbagecast.  Let me know what you enjoyed, what books you're reaching for now, what I can do to make the show better.  The website also has an occassional blog, my running tweets on what I'm reading, and importantly a link to the RSS feed for this show which you can also find on iTunes & wherever fine podcasts are aggregated.  Until next time, enjoy your reading.

 

Grace of Kings and other Narratives

in

This 4th (and antepenultimate) discussion of Grace of Kings with @afishtrap opens with the first chapter - an exotic parade of wonders.  We use the parade as a jumping off point to talk about reader expectations of "oriental" narratives, and how these are handled in Grace of Kings, The House of Shattered Wings and Scale Bright.  Our discussion also touches on the Single Story alluded to in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk and the weight placed on narratives by and about creators from other historically marginalized backgrounds.  We also mention a few other authors & books telling their own stories, including Sorcerer to the Crown, The SEA Is Ours & poet Brian Thao Worra.

The episode concludes with an older book memory: All The Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders, originally described in episode 6 by Aidan Moher & now actually in print.

The Dangers of a Single Book Cover from AfricaIsACountry.

You Don't Have to Write Autobiography by Ken Liu.

Aliette De Bodard on Colonialism, Evil Empires, and Oppressive Systems 

This episode of Another Round with Anil Dash is not only well worth a listen but also includes a discussion of trying to get stories of the immigrant experience out of immigrant parents.

The amazing art which inspired me to actually get this project off the ground was created by@etrandem

Send feedback! Tweet me! Tweet the show! Be a guest on the show! 

Music - Jazzy Ashes by The Underscore Orkestra

If you want to subscribe to the show, the RSS feed is: http://www.cabbagesandkings.audio/?format=rss

TRANSCRIPT (thanks to @afishtrap) 

 [music intro]

JSM: Welcome to Cabbages and Kings, a podcast for readers of science fiction and fantasy. I'm your host, Jonah Sutton-Morse. This episode continues my discussion on the Grace of Kings with A.Fishtrap. This time we're using the exotic and oriental parade of wonders that opens the novel, to talk about reader expectations and the weight of the single narrative, by and about historically-marginalized groups and creators. We're going to compare the approaches of Grace of Kings, House of Shattered Wings, which features an immigrant in the midst of ruined magical Paris, and Scale Bright, a modern urban fantasy set in Hong Kong full of demons and goddesses. Plot spoilers for Grace of Kings, much less so for the other two books. We'll kick off this fourth and-- I think-- antepenultimate episode discussing Grace of Kings with promises made to the reader, and the beginning of the book.

[music]

JSM: Chapter 1 opens with a parade of wonders. We know that we are in the seventh month of the fourteenth year of the reign of One Bright Heaven. I think that doing a sort of month-and-year based on the reign of a name like ‘One Bright Heaven’, conjures to me an Eastern imperial setting.

AFT: Yeah, the year and the reign is really what did it for me, because Western tends to go by the christian calendar?

JSM: And also, from the reign of a certain king, but this is not Louis the Fifteenth.

AFT: [laugh]

JSM: This is One Bright Heaven. It's almost immediate, third paragraph, they're here for the imperial procession. Uh, we have a fleet of giant imperial airships, battle-carts with oxenu[?] draped from the stone-throwing arms, engineers spraying water from ice wagons, we have...

AFT: Elephants.

JSM: Elephants... Ah, you've skipped over the maidens gyrating seductively!

AFT: Yeah, that's.. that's...

JSM: Sword-twirlers... that wasn't the part that you were really excited about? The elephants?

AFT: Well, I like elephants.

JSM: Yeah.

AFT: Who doesn't like elephants? Actually, that part about the maidens who gyrated seductively-- kinda made me laugh, because I saw so many things on twitter where people are like, "Auh, the dancing girls, why is it always, blah blah blah", and I'm like, uh, you haven't actually watched any wuxia, have you. You'll have dancing girls who are fully clothed. [laughs] Like, we have a slightly different measure. I mean, that's so par for the course with wuxia that I was just like, yeah, yeah, okay.

JSM: After that, we get a composition by the great imperial scholar, which happens to also tell us what all of our kingdoms are.

AFT: Mm-hnh.

JSM: Decorative knots, meant to evoke logograms for prosperity and luck...

AFT: Mm-hnh. We get the long silk banners embroidered with scenes... That silk, right there, is also an indication, as opposed to, say, wool!

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: Linen.

JSM: Then we get the emperor.

AFT: In his pagoda.

JSM: I missed that, yes.

AFT: The only mention in the entire book of a pagoda. It's also the only place there are gyrating dancing girls.

JSM: Yeah!

AFT: Or, I think, elephants? There's an awful lot of imagery in this opening part that just doesn't show up anywhere else.

JSM: YES. I think that's really key. So there's both expectations, like very clearly, you read that parade of wonders, and we are in an exotic, oriental, landscape.

AFT: Mm-hnh.

JSM: And I say both of those words, I feel like 'oriental' carries all the weight of Orientalism, which I have not actually read, but-- Said's critique--

AFT: Yeah.

JSM: --about the ways that the West consumes and fetishizes the East. And 'exotic', I think very similarly. There are ways in which this is kind of set up as the Other. And certainly set up for Western/American readers, as the Other.

AFT: I mean, this is taking it up, several steps.

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: And that was part of why I skimmed a lot of this opening part... but, on the other hand, y'know, I imagine somebody who normally reads medieval fantasy-- which does not usually have parades with five hundred people singing, and elephants-- may've been like, oh my goodness, I have never read anything like this before, this is so cool.

JSM: And I will say, as someone who tends to not to read for detail, very much, I tend to be skimming, I tend to be thinking about what are the ideas going on in this, about nobility or chosen one, or how does the magic work, how does the magic work, I really like to think about. But who are my characters, what is their skin color, what is the setting that they're in, are they bleak landscapes or dense jungles... I don't notice those sorts of things. I am someone who sort of needs to be hit in the head with this level of detail.

AFT: The level of detail here, it is orientalized. That's, y'know… and it feels very intentional, and I think there is that abrupt shift when you get through this chapter, it's like, alright! there! there was your--

JSM: That's the thing.

AFT: There was your bit, I hope you're happy now, we're done, let's move on with the actual story. [laugh]

JSM: Even within that first chapter, you get things like, Kuni laughing and saying, this is what I call a view, I can see the attraction of being an Emperor. So he's already kind of undercutting--

AFT: Mm-hnh.

JSM:  --and making a bit of mockery of the parade, but, yeah, after you get through chapter one, and the assassination attempt, you get to Mata and it's like, okay, we're in a real setting--

AFT: Yeah!

JSM:  --that deals with the fact that it's been recently conquered, and lots of people have been killed, and lots of other people have been taken away from their homes to work on building the roads and the great monuments that the Emperor wants built. And we're no longer sort of flying overhead, watching a parade of wonders, we're on the ground, with people tending bars, and trying to figure out how to pay their bills, and dealing with imperial occupying soldiers.

AFT: Which is a nice shift, in some ways, because it does feel like, for the reader who hit that second chapter and was like, "okay, one chapter of opulent orientalism, I'm happy, I have now satisfied my quotient of the unfamiliar." It is a shift that I think sort of says, okay, here's the fantasy, both the fantasy of the Emperor's parade and at the same time, a fantasy of, here's this fantastical China that in your head, fed by Western media's interpretation, is what you think it was like, but, in the middle of that, you've got the Emperor stomping his feet because, y'know, his legs are going to sleep. And then you have the assassin on top of everything else, and it's not a graceful kind of rescue of the Emperor, it's awkward, and I think somebody gets shoved under a chair--

JSM: yeah.

AFT: --and there's chaos everywhere, and it is a breakdown both of his parade, and of this literary facade that's been created, as it literally breaks down in front of us.

JSM: Right.

AFT: And then, all that is kinda wiped away, off the screen, and now let's introduce you to the story of how it really is, and the people as they really exist, outside of this one-day spectacle.

JSM: I think that I...I mostly agree, but for instance, I would say… we go from the procession to Mata. He's not Kuni; he's not a person on the street. He is a person who is being raised to be a hero.

AFT: Mm-hnh.

JSM: And we go from that procession to someone being raised to be a hero, to Kuni, and then fairly shortly after that to the prophecy of the fish. So we go, we go a little bit gently down...

AFT: I feel like it's more a series of veils. We have--

JSM: I like that.

AFT: --we have the outer, and then you tear that away, and you have another layer inside, where it's like, okay, this is still kind of, there's a myth-making going on in the second chapter. That's what you're seeing, is the process of the myth that results in those sorts of parades.

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: And then take that away, and you have Kuni, who is myth-making in his own right, but in a less neatly-packaged way.

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: These three, the emperor who's gonna go the way of emperors -- dead -- and Mata, who's going to rise and then fall, and Kuni, who's going to rise...

[music]

AFT: I think on one of the Writing Excuses, one I remember, Mary Robinette Kowal talking about, just point out a single detail and suddenly you have a characterization that is radically different.

JSM: Yes.

AFT: Y'know, a man sees a woman sitting in a chair. And, so you have this very simple sentence--

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: --but when she follows up with, 'the chair was, y'know, draped in a baroque fabric, and had a slightly Edwardian curve to its legs', you're like, this is somebody who knows furniture. He's not actually noticing the woman.

JSM: Yes.

AFT: So you have gotten detail there, but at the same time, you've also gotten a very definite characterization. And, that's what I mean by yes, you can have a parade, you can have a lot of stuff going on, but that first chapter is loaded with keywords that blare out in neon signs on the side of the road, that say: "hey! Look, exoticism." I mean, we have... the dancing girls, we have the elephants, we have the pagodas, we have the logograms, we have the silk banners, it's almost like... the author took a list of the things  that are obligatory?

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: --in faux-Chinese literature, and just went, BAM. BAM. BAM. Went right down the list and knocked every single one of them down and said, “alright, I got 'em all out of the way.” I think he could have easily have had a parade that had basically the same content, but with some judicious different choices in his details, we would have had a very different impression, yet still just as wondrous.

JSM: Yes!

AFT: The author is dealing with pre-conceptions on the part of the readers.

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: The question here-- above and beyond how the rest of the story unravels-- the question is, how did this author, knowing ahead of time that people are gonna look at the book and they're gonna see dandelion, maybe is that a chrysanthemum on the cover, and his surname, and they're gonna say, "oh! this must be something awesomely Chinese." Look. And they're going to go into it expecting dragons, and mandarins, and whatever other nonsense that they've swallowed from Hollywood. And he handed it to them, on a silver platter, right down to the pagoda. And then tears it all away, bit by bit. And... that is a very different maneuver from the other two books.

[music]

AFT: House of Shattered Wings, Aliette does what I would normally expect, which is she sort of cozens you in, sideways. And so by the time you get to anything that would overlap with orientalizing, you have already been situated in the world, you have a point of view through which you're seeing it, and she's sort of slides it in, into the middle of it.

JSM: Well, I think in House of Shattered Wings, it unfolds much more slowly. In part because the setting is a ruined Paris. And, the first thing that our character from Vietnam does, is kind of dispel magic that he shouldn't be able to dispel. But we first just have the clue that he's--

AFT: From somewhere else, yeah.

JSM: I don't think at first it's even 'from somewhere else', it's just that he can do something that he shouldn't-- that no one should be able to do. And then later we figure out, okay, that's because of where he was from, and there are different paths to immortality, and we start to get more and more layers built up about him and his backstory... And understanding that we have, interestingly in this case, an Easterner looking at a Western setting, and a Western culture, so we have the outsider looking in, kinda from the other side.

AFT: Philippe is... she's not coy about it. She does tell you, I mean, within the first two or three pages, she mentions... being an Immortal, and Annam. France broke [Vietnam] into these different pieces. Annam was the one at the south.

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT:  But even without knowing that, it's still: this is not a Western name, this is clearly not a Western place. She places it in 1914, the Great Houses War, definitely as opulent as Ken's opening chapter. But in a very different way, with different details.

JSM: Yes.

[music]

AFT: You know [Phillipe] is an outsider. You know he is coming from somewhere else. But she really doesn't dig too much into it, and it seems to be less a matter of she's not digging into it, so much as the character... the character's perspective is, "I don't want to think about that." So it doesn't feel as if the author is going, "oh, I'm just gonna side-step this question that's forming in your head," so much as the character saying, no, no, no, let's not go there.

JSM: Yeah... You're more comfortable saying 'the author' than I am. I feel like  the text--

AFT: Well, yeah.

JSM: The text choose not to engage. I agree the character is pretty interested in not thinking about what he has lost. And yet, at the same time, I think there would be ways to engage more with the fact that he is from Vietnam, and--

AFT: I think that's the key, though. I think that there's something going on--  it's a difference in what those details are, that get exposed.

JSM: YES.

AFT: If you are... okay, so let's take, being French, being European, as somewhat vaguely on a civilization-level,  equivalent to western-slash-anglo-slash-american, since [we're] American readers. We don't have an experience of either being colonized, or emigrating across a massive distance--

JSM: YES.

AFT: --to a different country, within our living memory. So to us, it's an object of fascination.  It's, here's somebody, who's come from somewhere else, oh, let's find out all about them. Which is how you have Americans who meet immigrants, and they're like, oh, do tell us all about where you came from. And, I have immigrant friends who-- if people remark on their accent, they’re like, I don't want to talk about this. It could be, y'know, not wanting to be marked out as different, it could be they left a war-torn country, it could be, y'know, there was some reason they had to flee-- but because we haven't gone through that,  we don't understand the weight that that causes? And I think that there are books you can read, where the author doesn't understand that. And so they're like, let's dig into this character, and, and give you more details-- whereas the text in the House of Shattered Wings respects the immigrant experience. And so, when Phillipe, when the story requires it, you find out where Phillipe came from, and more of what he went through. But the point where the character's like, I don't want to talk about it--

JSM: Right.

AFT: --the text does not look at him from the outside, but understands him from the inside.

JSM: I think-- I think that is a really excellent way of making that point.

[music]

JSM: I feel like we are talking our way around an assumed audience.

AFT: [laughs]

JSM: Like, I kinda want to get a little specific about this. I think that we are saying... that both Grace of Kings and House of Shattered Wings were written with the expectation that they were going to be writing an unfamiliar setting and culture? But one that had a kind of weight of preconceptions already established? They were going to try and write a 'truth' that was different from the preconceptions established, and they were expecting to be writing to a white American audience that would be unfamiliar with the culture they were writing about. Y'know, unfamiliar with Philippe's culture, or unfamiliar with China and Chinese history, but would have lots of expectations, and being used to viewing those kinds of settings as just sources of wonder, and fascination. I think  we are saying that both of these books seem to be trying to mediate that. And both kind of reset expectations, in some way, or deal with those reader expectations in some way, while also writing the culture and the truth, that they're trying to write.

AFT: I think there's different maneuvers going on, here. Because in some ways, the experiences are different? The background with which the text is having a dialogue-- is different. So Grace of Kings is busy talking to the myth of a nation, whether this is Greek or Chinese, and how this myth is created. And taking taking that myth and reflecting it, and expanding it, and digging into parts, and dismantling other parts--

JSM: Yes.

AFT: Whereas, House of Shattered Wings is more interested in the experience of the immigrant. And so, while there is an exotification of the Other, which in Grace of Kings is the entire text, if you think of history as the 'exotic Other', the past being a foreign country, how we look back and take that apart--

JSM: Yeah, but...

AFT: But House of Shattered Wings is very much-- even the angels themselves are immigrants to an unfamiliar country.

JSM: Yes.

AFT: And while they may have been immigrants who landed with a great deal of privilege, they themselves also have that disassociation. This, this separation, between where they once were, and the place they knew they belonged, and this place that they are now. And they happen to end up on top, whereas Philippe-- who knows, fairly well, where he was before he came to this place-- he's ended up on the bottom.

JSM: What is it... the difference between the immigrant and the ex-patriot?

AFT: Yeah... i don't think Paris is the exotified part. I can see how readers, especially those of the default-- meaning unmarked, white, western, anglo-- might instinctively be unsure how to react or feel, in that Philippe is introduced as a sympathetic point of view, but then promptly the other point-of-view characters other him. Left and right. Whenever he is seen through the eyes of another character, he is Othered and marked as something that is so completely alien.

JSM: Yes.

AFT: Which carries the reader along into that exiled, isolating experience of being Othered, when you're seeing through Philippe's point of view, which in my opinion was the main brilliance of the narrative path. Because-- you are now seeing those characters, that you might instinctively say, "hey! those are western european anglo characters like myself, I can relate to those characters!"-- and yet, the narrative is turning it around such that you are relating to Philippe. You are being put in his shoes, and you understand how it feels to be Othered. And then when you switch back to the point-of-views that you should be able to relate to? You're othering the very point of view that only a chapter before, you were sympathizing with.

JSM: Right.

AFT: It humanizes Philippe.

JSM: YES.

AFT: And now, when you are seeing him through the eyes of someone who is Othering him, it feels like-- "no, no, no, othering is to dehumanize, but I related to this character, he was humanized for me." And so, to have a character Other him-- feels wrong. And not only empathizing with him, I get why he's so pissed off. [laughs]

JSM: Absolutely.  The word that I picked up on there, was the disconnect. That I felt like having Philippe, and having Philippe presented sympathetically, and then having the other characters see Phillipe the way they did, and other him, did... give me a sense of disconnect. And made it harder to identify with anyone else. It made me realize that sort of everyone there...

AFT: --is disconnected.

JSM: Yeah. I think having Phillipe in the story was really essential to the overall experience of House of Shattered Wings.

AFT: The one who has been colonized, is damaged by it...

JSM: Yes.

AFT: And the one who colonizes-- is also damaged by it. Because their world has just gotten smaller, because they have literally cut off parts of the world from being seen as human.

JSM: Right.

AFT: And while the damage is different, it is not a system that leaves anybody untouched. Both texts, both Grace of Kings and House of Shattered Wings, are dealing with how we orientalize. But I think Grace of Kings is dealing with how we orientalize and think we know the other, and House of Shattered Wings is dealing with how we orientalize in order to dehumanize the Other.

[music]

JSM: I think one thing that's really different between Grace of Kings and House of Shattered Wings-- It felt to me like they both showed similar expectations about readers. And the notion that part of what they were going to have to mediate, and be in dialog with, was reader expectations.  But where House of Shattered Wings is a more or less familiar setting, with a character from the East (and I don't know that I would ever really use the word, kind of, exotic, with the full connotations there)-- but like, we have this character who is brought into a Western setting. Whereas with Grace of Kings, I feel like what is going on is an invitation, to readers, to come into this eastern setting. And so, the way you have to deal with the fact that we the readers probably have a burden of expectations, that we're bringing, is show and then deconstruct, and move away from those expectations.

AFT: And that's where I think the difference is-- I think that Grace of Kings is assuming, from the start, that the story itself will be Othered.

JSM: Right.

AFT: So it presents to you what you think you're gonna get-- that Other distant, and then it breaks that down bit by bit.  Where House of Shattered Wings doesn't assume that there's a distance between it, and its reader.  It shows you the Othering that exists, within its text.

JSM: mm-hm.

AFT: The reason I wanted to also compare Scale Bright is because I think what's most fascinating about it, in contrast to House of Shattered Wings and Grace of Kings, is the Othering there-- is assumed not to have anything to do with the orientalism. It’s assumed on the basis of sexuality.

JSM: OK, say a little more, because I feel like there's just much less burden of reader expectations on both of those axes.  Like, I feel like Scale Bright's general approach is "here's my story, deal with it."

AFT: [laugh] It felt to me as immersive as House of Shattered Wings, and frankly Grace of Kings did not feel immersive to me in that respect.  Because Grace of Kings did start with that, "here's what you expect, and then here's the mythmaking, and then here we're going to break it down."  And so in some ways, I was not thrown into the deep end-- in terms of something unfamiliar, because what was handed to me was the Hollywood spectacle of what's expected. Scale Bright... it was like diving headfirst into the deep end.  "I'm not going to spoonfeed you this.  I'm not going to hand you what you think you want, and deconstruct it.  I'm just going to hand it to you, and then I'm going to deconstruct it in the middle of the story.  And you've just gotta stick with it."

JSM: Well, but, I mean deconstruct it? I don't feel, especially Scale Bright I don't feel like there was much ...

AFT: That's what I meant by, I don't think what got deconstructed was any issue of orientalism or exotification.  Because Hong Kong wasn't treated as, here's this place you've never been to, and it’s so-- amazing. It was simply: "yeah, she's getting on the subway to go home from work. Hong Kong has subways, too."  The part that was deconstructed is your expectation of the patterns of the romance.  What it turns its attention to, and lavishes its attention on, is very much a universal human experience-- did I fall in love with the wrong person. And so, despite being in a setting that would make most western people go: this is so unfamiliar ... it's like: no, actually, the setting is not the issue here.  Knowing that English language readers are going to be walking into it with these sets of assumptions, it's a very different way of addressing-- or not addressing-- knowing what your readers are going to be thinking.

JSM: I'm not sure if we mostly agree or not.  I see the approach in Scale Bright as in many ways in contrast to the approaches of both House of Shattered Wings and Grace of Kings. It reads to me like Scale Bright is just saying: "look, this is the story I want to tell."  There's no veil to be pulled away, there's no setting up and then deconstructing of reader expectations... in the same way that Brandon Sanderson writing pseudo-medieval Europe doesn't have to worry about introducing castles and the duties that lords have because ...

AFT: [laugh] ... because we already know.

JSM: Both of those are not really thinking very much about “what are my readers going to expect?” Do we need to set up some expectations, and then deconstruct them, so that the reader can get at the story I want to tell...

AFT: But I think in some ways, House of Shattered Wings does let Phillippe have that same kind of, “here is simply what it is.”  It's also kind of difficult in some respects to compare them because obviously Grace of Kings is the one that has the ... the completely made-up world.

JSM: Right.

[music]

JSM: At this point, we’ve talked-- or at least talked around-- the ways we see these three stories addressing the expectations of a white american audience.  We also spent some time talking less coherently about how those expectations are shaped and weigh on authors.  The rest of the episode will be playing some excerpts from that part of the discussion.

[music]

AFT: I think [Scale Bright] is gutsy, because so often, stories that are written by that non-anglo-slash-immigrant experience-- they constantly have to confront it in some way. 

[music]

AFT: There is a huge pressure, if you are writing from the outsider’s point of view, that you should deliver that exotic shadow play, so that you can perform your Otherness.

[music]

AFT: And it's exactly what these three authors are dealing with, they're tackling in their text. They know-- based on their picture, or their surname, or what they've put in the story, or the biography at the end of the book-- that readers are going to look at it and say, "oh, you are Asian, so therefore, y’know, I expect to see Asia.  The Asia that's in my head, y'know, I should see mandarins and pagodas and dragons."

JSM:  Mm-hmm.

AFT: And there's gotta be at least one chrysanthemum on the cover, somewhere.

[music]

AFT: The farther you get away from that unmarked state-- y'know, a white heterosexual western english-speaking man-- the more you have to battle against the fact that you're going to be put in this box.  Grace of Kings says, "screw you, I've gift-wrapped this box the way you'd expect it, and now I'm going to break it out, piece by piece." House of Shattered Wings says, "let me show you what it's like inside the box, and let me show you what it's like outside the box." 

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: "And let me put you back in the box, and see how, y'know, see how that feels.  How do you like that?" Scale Bright says, "Screw you, there is no box."

[music]

AFT: The most dangerous thing that can happen, is that we only have one narrative.  If there's only one story that they're able to tell, whether it's the story of the immigrant, or the fantasy story where it's fake China, or even the Hong Kong where everything is so exotified-- and there's gods in every corner, it is to the detriment of us all.

JSM: YES!

[music]

JSM: I think that there is a fourth text out there-- that may well have been written by a white guy, or is more likely a Hollywood movie--

AFT: [laugh]

JSM: --that is the American Imperial Gaze telling the story of the exotic, oriental, and entirely unified East.

[music]

JSM: Because the thing is, that if you are from a marginalized background, there is another story you can write.  The Fourth story, right?  Like, if you are from anywhere in East Asia, you can write the exotic story, and be lauded.  And if you are an african-american author, you can write black suffering.

AFT:  Mm-hmm.

JSM: Right? Like, there are-- if you are from Africa, you can write the African story.

AFT: Yes! And you will have to have at least one acacia tree on your cover--

JSM: Yes!

AFT: And the sun, and-- and that is your one cover, that you get, and your one story, and you could be-- I think it was Adichie?

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: --She talked about writing-- coming to America, and writing a story for one of her classes in college, and it was about life back home-- which she’s talking about living in a city, catching a cab, and y’know, it’s modern Africa. And her professor graded her down, because, he said, it wasn’t African enough.

JSM: Mm-hmm.

AFT: And that-- that is the overwhelming single story.

[music]

AFT: And that’s where I think it’s so important to broadcast, and to signal-boost, these three books, and other books like Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown-- as well as The SEA Is Ours, the anthology that got kick-started, I guess last month…

JSM: Mmm… yeah!

AFT: --a selection of Southeast Asian authors. Or even, y’know, poets-- like Bryan Thao Worra-- I think I just said his last name wrong. And they say, “I am not only not going to perform my Asianness for you, but I am going to define it myself.”

[music]

26 - The Pagan Night by Tim Akers

in

This episode, Tim Akers (@timakers), author of newly-released The Pagan Night is here to talk about portrayals of religion in science fiction & fantasy, and tell us about The Pagan Night.  Also, this episode, Charles Payseur (@clowderoftwo) shares short story recommendations around a theme he's noticed: millennial fiction.

The Pagan Night (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound)

The blog post that first intrigued me: "I am careful with religion."

Roundup of The Pagan Night links.

Neuromancer (cover)

The amazing art which inspired me to actually get this project off the ground was created by @etrandem

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Music - Jazzy Ashes by The Underscore Orkestra

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