32 - Jaime Lee Moyer wants to add to your TBR pile

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This episode, Jaime Lee Moyer (@jaimeleemoyer) joins me to discuss Historical Fantasy and basically drops a huge pile of To Be Reads across many genres and eras.  Also a review of Sorcerer of the Wildeeps from Leslie Light of Black Nerd Problems.

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

 JM - I think one of the joys of writing fantasy is being able to write the world you want to see, to a certain extent

*Opening Music*

JSM - Welcome to Cabbages & Kings, a podcast for readers of Science Fiction & Fantasy, I’m your host, Jonah Sutton-Morse

 

My guest this episode is Jaime Lee Moyer, an author who lives in San Antonio.  She writes books about murder, betrayal, and kissing, an activity her cats approve of, even the kissing. She’s the author of the Delia & Gabe books, and also a poet, editor and reader.  We’re going to talk this episode about historical fantasy among other things.

 

But I think we will start as we often do just with a little bit of your history with the genre - how did you get into reading SFF, has it always been there, was it something you drifted in and out of?

 

JM - Once I got into SFF, I never left.  When I was a kid my mother would take all of us to the library at least once a week. There were four of us, we would walk down the streets of LA to wherever the closest library was where we were living, and we were allowed to check out as many books as we could carry.

And I discovered, the first book I remember reading was The Borrowers, which is a fantasy book by Mary Norton, a British author, and it's about a race of people, small people, that live in the houses unseen, unheard, and unnoticed.  And I fell in love with that book, and it was the first in a series, and I read the whole series and then I went looking for more.

And as I went on, I discovered Bradbury and Heinlein and Asimov and once I took off, I just kept going.

JSM - OK, so you went from the borrowers to spaceships it sounds like?

JM - I did.  When I was younger, the majority of what I read was Science Fiction.  And I loved all of it.  I loved being in other worlds and other places, but as I got older, and became an adult, fantasy became my first love.  I still, I still love Science Fiction, I still read science fiction, but my heart is really in fantasy.

JSM - And are you an omnivore, do you stay very close to the genre, do you differentiate fiction & nonfiction?

JM - Oh yeah.  My friends actually laugh at me because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool fantasy writer & the vast majority of my nonfiction reading is science.

JSM - Okay?

JM - I've read through entire sections of the library about y'know human evolution, paleontology, dinosaurs, paleoarcheology ... I read Howard Carter's original 3-volume set on discovering King Tut’s tomb. I have read so much science anthropology that its not even funny, but yet I write fantasy.

JSM - Is that research? Or just that this is what interests you & draws you and you've gotta be reading something new & learning something more?

JM - It's what draws me. I'm curious all the time.  I want to understand how people function, I want to understand how the world functions, and reading Jane Goodall's books about the chimpanzee's or reading Lewis Leakie's books about discovering early humans, all of that fascinates me. And it keeps me entertained.

 

I have never been a person that likes the classics.  I know a lot of people think this is heresy, but I can't stand to read Jane Austen.  It drives me crazy. If anything I think studying psychology may have made me a better writer.  Because I understand characters and motivation and studying abnormal psychology probably helped make my bad guys worse.

*Interstitial Music*

JM - The first story I remember writing and finishing,I was eleven.

And I showed it to my best friend's mother, who took the story and kept it because she said that what I had written was inappropriate for an 11 year old girl.

*laugh*

JSM - That's helpful

JM - It was very helpful.  And on the one hand I was like, she kept my story, and on the other hand I was like: wow, I had an impact.

So I, y'know, I have written my entire life

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - We’re going to move now to Jaime’s connection to fantasy and historical fantasy, and moving on from the spaceships of Bradbury and Heinlein.  You’ll be shocked to learn there’s a library involved.

*Interstitial Music*

JM - It was kind of a discovery and a revelation, because what I found in the bookstore was mainly male SF writers, and then we moved to a different place, and I'm going through the library, and I found these books, a series of anthologies that Pamela Sargent edited called Women of Wonder, which were a mix of SF and I believe there was some fantasy in there too, but it introduced me to all these authors I had never heard of before, and they were all women.  And I was just, I was like, wow! So I started looking, consciously looking for these women.  And a lot of them wrote fantasy. And that's how I discovered Anne McCaffery, Mercedes Lackey, Vonda McIntyre, Barbara Handley, as I'm chasing these authors down the rabbit hole and trying to find books by them I found books by other women, and once I got into that kind of fantasy, I didn't leave. It was amazing.

JSM - Now McCaffery for me was always, like my images are always gonna be Lessa sort of afraid and seeing the dragons for the first time, and being introduced to the little wyrmlings, the dragonets or whatever they're called, but I remember that having very strong, kind of visual & having a scene that sort of jumps out & is in my head. Is that the sort of connection you made there? Or was it characters?

JM - It was characters, it was the dragons, it was the fire-lizards, it was the Harpers, it was the jumping between and the cold and the breathlessness.  All of that hooked me.  And before I got to her dragon books, I was reading the Ship who Sang, her science fiction.  And I loved those books.  I read those, I loved that, and that's what led me to her dragon books.  And I can see some of the problems with the books now that I couldn't see when I was tearing through them like, y'know

JSM - mmhmm

JM - a starving person

JSM - I'm pretty sure that Dragonriders was the first book I fell asleep reading.

*laugh*

JM - I can't say that, but I, once I discovered these books I just ripped through them as fast as I could.  Everything I could find, and I found Ursula Le Guin, and that was like instant love. The Wizard of Earthsea, loved those books, just loved them.  And I love her science fiction too, but the Earthsea books were the first ones that I read, and they were just astonishing.  Barbara Handley's books were astonishing to me.  She doesn't get the recognition she deserves.

JSM - I don't know anything about her.  Science Fiction, Fantasy, what's

JM - She writes a little bit of everything. She writes - the books I was reading were fantasy, I can never pronounce this correctly, but it's the Darwith trilogy I believe.  The Time of the Dark, the Walls of Air, and there's a third one.  Those books scared the crap out of me.  They scared me, they delighted me, I adored them.  And I read every single thing she wrote in the science-fiction & fantasy genre.  Everything I could find.  She also writes mysteries - she writes the Benjamin January mysteries.  I have friends who devour those, I haven't gotten into them because I'm trying to keep up with my own genre here

JSM - mm hmm

JM - She wrote two books, two vampire books that to me are probably the top 2 vampire books written before, y'know M L Brennan started her generation V series.  They're called Traveling with the Dead and Those Who Walk The Night.  They're set in like a victorian era England, and they were amazing, they weren't like other vampire urban fantasy that was out there that I'd been reading.  They were incredible.  They're still incredible.  People will read them until their copies fall apart & then hunt down new used copies because they're out of print.

So, y'know, Barbara Handley is amazing.  One of my favorite fantasy books is one that she wrote called Dragonsbane about John & Jenny who are older, they're parents, and they are like it was one of the best books I have ever read, because y'know Jenny has to make choices she has to decide between whether her husband and her children come first or whether she's goes off & does this other thing, and they were incredible books.  y'know they're part of a series too, and I loved 'em.  I loved all of it.  

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - Jaime came onto this episode to talk about historical fantasy, a genre I’ve heard discussed more than read.

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - This is pretty far out of my wheelhouse because I tend to read or have been reading the sort of big secondary world vaguely medieval but the point was not really to capture any essence of medieval fantasy, and I've sort of dabbled in historical fantasy a couple of times, but not a lot.  Can you maybe talk a little bit about what that is, and what are some of the hallmarks of the genre and some of the books that really define it for you?

JM - Historical fantasy can be a lot of different things.  A lot of what I see defined as alternate history I think is really historical fantasy in disguise.  In some ways steampunk is historical fantasy because it's set against the backdrop of the victorian era and uses a lot of those different tropes and shorthands, and then there's there are writers like Charlie Finlay again, he put out a series of novels set during the revolutionary war that dealt with magic and witches and wizards, but he peopled his novels with real historical figures, historical figures were the characters, and then there's the kind of historical fantasy I write & I believe Elizabeth Bear writes, and there are other people out there, Marie Brennan with her Lady Trent memoirs.  The history is the backdrop for the characters, and that's the way I like, that's my favorite kind of historical fantasy - to where the history is what goes on around the people in the book, and around their story & they're just living their lives just like you would or like I would.  And that's how I like to write historical fantasy & that's my favorite kind to read.

I love Elizabeth Bear's last book - Karen Memory, it's set in a Seattle that never really existed, it's kind of sort of steampunk, but it's in the american west, and it's a great book and she put a couple real historical figures in there.  Bass Reeves is a Marshall who shows up in the book who was a real US Marshall in US History.  That was great.  I love Marie Brennan's books because even though they're not real-world historical fantasy

JSM - well, with dragons and all

JM - yeah, with the dragons and the made-up countries, but they still have that same society to them, that happened in that, in an equivalent time period in the united states.  Mary Robinette Kowal's books are the same way.

Things like that.  I love historical fantasy where the characters are an integral part of the world but the history itself is not the story. Just like we might be concnered about the presidential election, they might be concerned about getting women the vote.  And my characters are.

For instance, in my trilogy, WWI is always there, because the trilogy takes place during those years, and people could not escape it if they wanted to, and every once in a while it reaches out & it touches their lives.  It taps them on the shoulder and reminds them it's there. There will be newsboys on the corner, they called them newsies then, they were usually barefoot children and they would be standing on the corner shouting the latest headlines from Europe, refugees fled to the United States, fleeing the war, so there are reminders, but it's not the centerpoint of the story.

JSM - mm hmm

JM - If I want to read history as the centerpoint of the story, I will read a biography or a history book.

JM - There's, there's a series of books I read a long time ago - the first book was called Across the Nightingale Floor, which was set in a world that was feudal Japan, but not real Japan, and it was ... an excellent book, I loved it. Not only because of the beauty of the language the writer used, and the history and the atmosphere and the culture, actually it was because of the language the history and the atmosphere and the culture.  I never totally connected with the characters, which is why I never finished the series.  But the first book I loved it for those other things, and that's what I mean, to a certain extent, about everything needing history to back it up, because Liam Hearn, this writer did great things with that background and that history, and created a culture I could totally believe in, including y'know the restrictions on widows marrying other men, and it was, it was an incredible book just because of that, and that's what I - and it was totally, definitely, fantasy, just like George R R Martin's books are based on I think it was the War of the Roses

JSM - Yeah, I think so although I don't, I don't know enough of that period to recognize the references, but I've heard from people who do that it's recognizable.

JM - Yes, so y'know you can take any period in history and read it and let it churn and mix in your brain and spit out a totally different story that still has a historical background, y'know it doesn't have to say "hi, this is about the year 1214", y'know it can be, but it has to be ... based in that, it has to have some foundation, or it doesn't come across as a realistic world. Readers aren't gonna invest in it.

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - I’ll note for those interested that there’s also a new Liam Hearn series coming out - I’ll have a link in the show notes.  We’re going to take a break now to run a review of one of my favorite books - Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.  Those of you who follow on Twitter or listen closely are probably aware that I adored this book.  I read a review by Leslie Light of the website BlackNerdProblems that captures the book extremely well, and Leslie agreed to read it for the podcast.  

(starts at 15:45)

Leslie’s review - linked in Show Notes

(ends at 21:30)

JSM - Again, thanks to Leslie for that review - I’ll probably be experimenting with running a few other reviews on the podcast.  Let me know what you think, or if there’s a piece you’ve really enjoyed somewhere.  Now we’re going to return to the discussion with Jaime about the importance of fantasy, and also add a few more books to your To Be Read pile.

*Interstitial Music*

JM - I think one of the joys of writing fantasy is being able to write the world you want to see, to a certain extent.  I'm not thinking in terms of message books, but in because you're building a world basically from scratch even when you're doing historical fantasy, you can change things around and give people a view of the way it could be, or the way you'd like it to be.

JSM - mm hmm

JM - And I think that's one of the best, the very best things about science fiction and fantasy.

They used to say that SF was the literature of ideas. I think it still is, I think fantasy is to, and you can show people things in a story that you couldn't just come out and say to them.

JSM - mm hmm

JM - And that's one of my favorite things about genre. Hands down.  That and keeping the sense of wonder. Y'know I never ever want to lose that wow factor when I'm reading a book or when I'm writing a book, I always want to amaze myself and I want to be amazed when I'm reading.

JSM - Yeah, I  just finished Julie Czerneda's Survival which is the first book in a trilogy that she's got and it's science fiction and it's a scientist who's a, she studies salmon in a near-future earth that's part of an intergalactic civilization and she makes friends with an alien & discovers a great possible threat to all life, and the book kept reminding me that there was this human and this human with a kind of small worldview and focus, she'd been very focused on doing her science and studying her salmon and sort of ignoring the outside world as much as possible, reminding me that there was this human who didn't know all that much who was interacting with an alien and an alien with a different physiology and a different psychology and I've found one of the things, like I think there are a lot of different ways to think about and read let's see if I can remember how you said it - the world that you would like to see, or maybe making possible, or showing the world as it could be, and I really like when a book - if it's a science fiction book and it's making me more conscious of and thinking about a way to look at the world and a way to see how different species are interacting and a way that those differences kind of drive some level of tension and friction, and thinking about societies and how societies could function and who's in the background and who's in the foreground and I am reading a book right now that in some ways is really trying to have more equitable gender dynamics but at the same time there's just this background threat to women, sort of if there are some characters in the background and if there is an evil knight around (because it's got a medieval setting), probably the way that the badness of the knight will be shown is going to involve a threat towards women, and it's interesting that now I'm noticing that, and I'm seeing that in the books I'm reading & I'm seeing that & realizing there's an authorial decision there, and that's a perception of the world, but you see that enough & it sort of becomes an assumption about how the world works, and so I do - what you said about being able to show the world as it could be or the world the way you would like it to be really registered for me, because I know some of the things I've responded to in books (both positive and negative) are ways that the world is being shown to me as I don't see it right now, because books have that possibility.

JM - Books are powerful - they really are, and you can't forget that when you're writing.  If you're a reader you can forget it sometimes, but you can't forget it as a writer because the words you put out there will affect somebody somehow.

One of the best days of my life was when someone new I met on Twitter through another friend & I friended her - she told me that she'd read my books multiple times & they were her comfort reading, and I was like blown away.  And I can't forget that people I don't even know, that something I write could have this affect on them.  And that's why I'm very careful about what I write.  I'm very careful about how I portray women in my books, um, in the series I just finished, the first book has six women main characters.

JSM - mm hmm

JM - Y'know and women are the main characters. Tehre's two guys that go through the book the whole time - Gabe and Jack go through the whole series.  But there is no doubt that the women drive the story & they are the protagonists.  I just read two books recently that illustrate this, they're by two new writers, one was called "Radiant" it's the first book in a series by Carina Sumner-Smithe and it is an amazing book about a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world who ... is rare for the fact that she doesn't have any magic.

Magic is the currency in this world, and she doesn't have any, so she's the lowest of the low, but she can see ghosts, so people will pay her off in magic to deal with their ghosts.  And the way she evolves and the way the world evolves in this book is incredible.  I fell into that book and immediately fell into the second one and I just got the third one and I can't wait to read that.

And another book that blew me away is called Archivist Wasp by Nichole

JSM - I've heard really good things

JM - You need to read this book. You really do. And again it involves - Wasp is the archivist for her people & what the archivist does is capture ghosts & try and get them to relay their history.  To tell them something because they've lost their history.  But she is dominated and controlled at least as much as he can control her, by a priest who, from this y'know this I don't want to say cult but it kind of comes across as this y'know cult religion

JSM - mm hmm

JM - And he has control of all these girls and young women and Wasp finds a way to take that away from him, and she does it by freeing one of the ghosts.  And becoming involved in the ghost's life and I can't tell you all of it because I'll spoil the whole thing

*laughs*

JM - But it's incredible  and she discovers there's so many things in her world that she didn't realize existed.  And so many layers and lies and other stories and y'know it, I loved it.

*Interstitial Music*

JM - Have you ever read Robert Jackson Bennett

JSM - I haven't, although City of Stairs is one of the books that comes up in about half the episodes I'm recording

JM - I'm about 150/160 pages into City of Stairs, and it's not the first of his books I've read: I read Company Men first and I read the Troupe, and The Troupe could be looked at as historical fantasy because it's set like in the 1930's in a vaudeville troupe that travels around the country. And it is one of the wierdest books I have ever read.

*laughs*

JM - But wierd in that vastly entertaining y'know way, and it made me cry at the end and there's no higher praise from me than for a book to make me cry.  So you should read his books.

 

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - Each Episode closes with a memory of a significant book

*Interstitial Music*

 

JM - The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

JSM - ah hah?

JM - I read that book I don't think I was even fourteen yet.  I read it again later, late in my teens.  But the visions of the martians in their crystal spires, and y'know dark they were and golden-eyed, I have never forgotten that: the visions of Mars that Bradbury put into my head will be with me my entire life.  And Bradbury taught me as a writer that you can write the most beautiful poetic prose in the world, and scare the crap out of people.

*laughs*

JM - I will never forget the Veldt, although that wasn't part of the Martian Chronicles, but I read all his books: I read Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, Golden Apples of the Sun, R is for Rocket. I read all of those books, and at one time I owned all of them.  I loved all his stuff, but the Martian Chronicles will always live on with me.  The sands, the canals, the town that they built, the american settlers built on Mars that transformed into a martian town and they became martians ... all of that just blew me away and it will always be with me and be one of my very favorite images in books.

*Interstitial Music*


Thanks for listening!

31 - Women in Grace of Kings

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This episode, Kate Elliott (@KateElliottSFF) joins me and @afishtrap to discuss women in Grace of Kings.  The (lack of) women in the story is highly noticeable early on, while the great warrior Gin Mazoti & other women come to prominence late in the novel.  We talked about the roles of women, loving a story while seeing its flaws, specific characters (particularly Kikomi and Mira), and how women are often presented in Epic Fantasy.

Other episodes in this series can be found here.  

Kate's review of Grace of Kings at A Dribble of Ink

Booksmugglers' review of Grace of Kings (quoted in episode)

Kate's essay at tordotcom about the historical roles of women.

Outtake here - a clip that didn't quite make the cut discussing the historical roles of women.

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

(AF - @afishtrap, KE - Kate Elliott, JSM - Me!)

KE - I just think this whole thing of where we're trying to list the women & what their relationships are is an interesting part of how women are often used in Epic Fantasy, female characters, I mean

 

*Intro Music*

JSM - Welcome to Cabbages & Kings, I'm your host, Jonah Sutton-Morse. With this episode, Kate Elliott joins Afishtrap & me to discuss the women of Grace of Kings. Those of you who’ve read it probably remember that despite the large cast, there are few women early on, and they are generally defined by their relationships with men. Later, more women appear - I remember being on Twitter as people read Grace of Kings, and the frequent chorus from those of us who’d finished the book to those who were wavering partway through: wait for Gin, wait for Gin!

In this episode, you’re going to hear us talking about a book we love, an aspect of the book we didn't always love, and various ways we responded to different women in Grace of Kings.  The conversation is rooted in the book, but it is also a snapshot of the many ways that readers navigate their relationships with problematic faves and the presence or absence of women in epic fantasy.

I'm going to start with Kate Elliott, just after we had refreshed our memory & cataloged the women of Grace of Kings.

 

KE - I need to start what I’m about to say because it’s going to sound critical.  First of all, I loved this book.  I loved this book, and I can't wait to read the second one, I think it is an incredible piece of work, brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived, and I adored it, and I actually hit a point about a third of the way in, and I had no idea what to expect.  And about a third of the way in, I got in and I said to myself "there's like two women in this book"

AF - *laughs*

KE - A third of the way in there are only two women in this book, and two things I talk about later had kind of irritated me, and I sat there for a minute and I said “normally, normally when I read an epic fantasy and I'm a third of the way in and there's only two women and they're minor characters, and one of them's whole story seems to revolve around sex, and beauty, I'm done, the book's over.”  And I sat & I thought, but I love this book so much that there could never be any more women in this book & I would still love it, because I can love things just because I enjoy them, they don't have to fit whatever my thing is, so I'm just going to love this like I've loved so many things across my life that had almost no women in them.

AF - Yeah

KE - I loved the first Star Wars film and it has Carrie Fisher who's phenomenal and she's like the only woman, right?

AF - She is the only one

KE - Well, the aunt is there briefly

y'know

AF - Oh, that's right

KE - And in the second one I think there's the senator who speaks a line, maybe she's in the third one

But having said that, what's interesting to me about this list we're making, is that we are identifying all these women according to how they fit the men's stories, whereas the men we identify them by their stories.

AF - Well, the counterpart to that is I got a third of the way through this story and hit a certain chapter and said to myself this story has so much of what I have always wanted to read, but couldn't because most of the stories have this sort of feeling, haven't been translated into english

So I either have to wait for somebody to post it so that I can read it, very slowly, or for it to be made into a television show.  The Chu-Han contention just is not something that you see in western media a lot, and and so I was so loving getting to be able to read somebody who's in dialog with that history that what would've usually had been a completely Do Not Finish point for me I was just like y'know what we're just going to skip this chapter, this chapter just doesn't exist, because otherwise it would've been a DNF, but the rest of the story, yes! I mean I wouldn't have talked for so many hours with Jonah if this were not a story that entranced me in a hundred other ways

*Interstitial Music*

KE - Have both of you seen Red Cliffs, the film?

JSM - No

AF - Yes

KE -I love that film.  I love it.  And so, in a way, I'm totally agreeing with what you're saying, this book is in dialog with that tradition, and that tradition has this element in it.  And so what was interesting to me is that Ken, then, at the end, and we'll talk about this more at length, but at the end because he's set up this tradition in which women are very minor characters & they have very set piece roles that are always in relationship to the men, and then suddenly at the end he kind of blows that up, and it wouldn't have ... this is the irony is that it wouldn't have worked as well if he hadn't adhered to that expectation and that tradition through so much of the book.

AF - Yeah but at the same time, it's if he had not been telling the story with which I was already really familiar, I don't think I would've ... if it had been say for instance a retelling of The Odyssey, or one of the Greek Myths, I think I probably would've made it a third of the way through the book & said I've foudn the cure for insomnia. It was the dialog with the history that I already knew that got me through the parts where normally I would be like, I don't ... life is too short to put up with having women shoved to the background.

That requires a great deal of trust in the text, to be able to say I will wait it out and see if you're going to turn this around, because 99 times out of a hundred the books never turn it around and the text never even seems to realize that it needs to be turned around, it speaks to the text's ability to ah to have that authoritative storytelling voice that I kept reading

KE - There's a ... this is so fascinating, what you're saying is so fascinating to me first of all, that element of trust is *really* important to point that out, I think you're absolutely right about that.  And a third of the way in, I trusted the story, to be a story that would have things in it that would interest me whether or not women were included.

Because again I'm old enough that I'm so used to loving stories that have no women in them.

I mean I love Lord of the Rings, how many women are there in LotR, right?

AF - uhhh *laughs*

KE - The expectations have gotten ... I'm now less patient, I mean I think as all three of us are now, about stories that don't include women now, but sometimes I'll read something and I'll say, y'know.

So I trusted him.  I also know people who did read the first third & say I'm done with this.  I know people who stopped reading because of that issue.

But I wanted to go back to something else you said - you said you felt you were able to continue because you were familiar with the tradition

AF - Yeah

KE - And I was able, if this had been a story set in a medieval Europe, I would've stopped at that point.  But because I knew enough of this tradition from watching films and reading y'know some of Dream of, I've read like 3/5ths of Dream of Red Mansions, I've read a little bit of Three Kingdoms. I've read enough of it, it was the fact that it was something new for me, the landscape was new for me, and I could kind of accept that, that was why I kept reading because there was new stuff in it, but if it had been the medieval stuff I would've been out.

 

*Interstitial Music*

 

JSM - So we’ve talked about the strength of the narrative voice, and the other appeals of the book that made us fall in love even as the opening was so empty of women. Now we’re going to turn to Kikomi, the beautiful queen who aspires to lead her people & is advised by the goddess to do so with her sex appeal.

*Interstitial Music*

 

AF - Sometimes I would rather not be on the the page at all than see myself on the page done wrong. And I did get to that point with Grace of Kings where I was thinking y'know what, if you can't do women right, just don't try, just stop. And that's, that's a wierd kind of position to be in as a reader where you would rather take erasure over yet another "oh look, she's using her sex and beauty in order to get ahead, who thinks this is good", I'm just like no just don't.

And I think that was the one point of irritation because it felt like, it felt like it was pandering to that sort of expectation that if a woman was going to show up and get any sort of airtime at all then that was one of the four things she had to fit into.

KE - You're talking about Kikomi, right?

AF - mmhmm

JSM - Yeah

KE - You know what? If you want to know the two things that irritated ... I had very mixed feelings about Kikomi, because I had very much similar to your feeling, it was like why, why is this what we're getting and then because I loved the book so much, if I love a book a lot of course don't we all do this, that we make excuses and find ... it's not excuses, we say "well, hey, we can make it", like if my friend says this offensive thing then I'll find a way to say it wasn't so bad but if someone I don't like says it than I'm like ohmygosh I gotta like y'know drop a piano on them, right?

So we all do, I don't know maybe you guys are not like this.

JSM - Oh no, yes.

KE - This is why I don't read, like if I meet someone and I really don't like them I will never read a book by them because I can't give them a fair shake, and I know that about myself as a reader, so I just accept that that's how it is, I'm judgemental and subjective.  But, but

So I got to Kikomi, but then he did that thing, then I thought y'know what I think he's trying to show that this limited sphere she has, right, you can hear my brain ticking the rationalization, the limited sphere she has she's trying to make the statement that the young prince does when he immolates himself, and at the same time she's trying to protect her country and this is the only way she knows how to do it.

 

*Interstitial Music*

 

AF -There is one thing I'd like to explain what in particular actually, because Kikomi is very textbook, we've read her in a thousand other books, there was a maneuver that the text does that was the specific part that made me want to just start throwing things.

It's when she first meets the goddess. She's been introduced as somebody who's like, I can do this, I can take care of things, I can be more than everybody expects me to even if they're disappointed that I'm not a boy.  And so you've got this emphasis that she's willing to go beyond that, and I'm like, OK this is pretty standard.  But it's the maneuver when the goddess meets her, that feels kind of like, one big fucking lampshade where the author says "hey by the way, I'm going to maneuver this character into the same end result that you would've had anyway, but I'm going to try to be slick about it" and that is what actually pissed me off the most.  It was not that you have a stereotypical character who could've been stereotypical, coming to a stereotypical end, it's this little interlude with the goddess where you have the character saying to the goddess: "I want to do more, I want to be, I want to lead these people right" and the goddess is saying "oh, no no no, you know what would be really, really good, is if you used your sex appeal, and then the character goes "oh my goodness, you're so right"

I'm like, “what the hell, what the hell am I reading here?” And that in particular felt like - the text felt like it was well aware that it was contorting things to reach a specific end, but it treated me like an idiot in the course of doing it, and so that was actually the part, not the rest of Kikomi, but that particular discussion that made me feel like, oh just be honest, just say that you wanted her as a plot device to die.

KE - Is that, because the Kikomi incident comes very soon after the prince who immolates himself, am I correct about that? Because I felt like it was an echo of that - these are people trying to salvage what they can of their kingdoms or their places they rule & are responsible for

JSM - mm hmm

KE -  And so I felt like it was almost written as part of that same discussion about what must a responsible ruler do, what is their duty, and in both those cases, the end result is that they must die in order to protect their people.

JSM - Right

KE - But then the choices that are made, how they each get to go, are

AF - Yeah, are so based on their sex organs instead of, I mean, really what I got to at about the halfway point of the book, I just flipped the genders: in my head, Kikomi became male & the young prince who immolates himself became female, that was all I needed

I just wanted to see something other than “girls uses her sex”

JSM - And in fact the goddess' speech is very explicitly that - she says "these are the labels men have put on women.  You speak as though you despise them, but you're parroting the judgements of historians.  Think of the hero who played with the hearts of Rapa and Kama, who showed his naked body to the gathered princes & princesses of Crescent Island, claiming himself to take equal delight in men & women.  Do you think historians call him a seducer, a harlot, a mere bauble?"

And, I feel like there's - that is the attempt to say y'know, if you gender flip what is happening with Kikomi it doesn't read as the stereotype that it is.  But I ... I think it just didn't, it didn't make that jump.

*Interstitial Music*

AF - it's one of the things that Jonah & I have talked about before, of, his sense and the idea that certain plot elements are happening in order to maneuver us and manipulate us towards Kuni is awesome & no matter what he does the plot is going to prove that out.

JSM - Well, yeah, so I justified my, doing the "well I love this book so this problematic element I'm going to kind of make excuses for" as just seeing this as yet another set piece, another origin story because there were so many of those scattered throughout the book. And I felt like so many of those origin stories lean into cliche. And lean into trope.  And I said OK, we are leaning into a trope,

AF - Just roll with it

JSM - and I'd rather not see it, and I wish something else, but y'know that's a piece of ... going back to the notion that one of the things that is really neat about GoK is there it is unfamiliar & it is doing things that you don't see in a lot of other epic fantasy, one of the things that I really jumped on as something that I liked was the structural sort of "okay we're just going to take a minute & tell you an episode"

KE - I loved that

JSM - that's very cliched & tells you how the hero became who they are.  And I loved that & so when I read this Kikomi bit, especially because he spent so much time setting up the beautiful, perfect, idyllic city that she ruled over, I just thought all right, that's the piece of this that I'm going to be reading, is how is this particular tale told, not the fact that this particular tale could probably do without being told at all

AF - I'm pretty sure that on the list of Jonah's 10 things he remembers about this book, that city is number 1, 2, and 3.

*laughter*

JSM - No, the Narwhals riding up the castle is number 1, the city is in my top 5 of the things that I remember.

AF - That visual.  Yeah.  But it is also one of the few places in the book where he really, where the text does layer on the visual.

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - Is there more to say about Kikomi?

KE - I have one more thing I can say about here - so I do think that y'know we meet, first we meet Jia and Jia is clearly so much smarter than any other man in the book, right? And she's always got, she's like such a classic character who is the woman who has devoted her life - I saw this in graduate school in the academic world all the time.  The woman who has devoted her life to her husband's career.

AF - ah-huh, I saw it growing up in the military

KE - Yeah, and she is that character, and so on the one hand I was like why couldn't the book have been about her, but OK, that's what this book is, right, so I'll go with that.  But with Kikomi I was like, that was really for me, because those two are really the only women in the first 2/3rds.  So with Kikomi it was like okay now we really get hammered now with the sexism and the patriarchy of the society.  And, what for me happens with that is that then when he does bring in, start bringing in more women.  

When the women do enter the story you set up so much expectations and especially with Gin that um that great scene, where she crosses the river and there's that great scene where that dude is going oh no we can't fight them because we can't cross the river because that would be bad, that goes against tradition and furthermore she's a woman what could she do anyway.

The text doesn't have to say anything more, it doesn't have to explain anything because we have seen this for 2/3rds of the book.  We totally get that this would happen, I don't have any trouble believing that she can win victory after victory because these idiots see her as a woman and then can't do anything.

 

*Interstitial Music*

 

JSM - I think this point about how Kikomi & Jia’s stories reinforce the patriarchal society in Grace of Kings is really important, and I’m going to take a minute here to quote from a review by Ana of the Booksmugglers that really hammered home for me why the absence of women in so much of Grace of Kings is a problem for so many readers. After acknowledging that the text challenges and questions the misogyny of the society even in the early pages, Ana wrote:

 

“I cannot begin to tell you how much I resent – and a lot, it appears – this. The lives of women are not a “long game”, sorry. I don’t want to be “incremental woman”, you know, one who appears only when it’s convenient after a point has been made, regardless of the obviously good intentions behind this choice.”

 

We’re going to turn away from Kikomi now to some of the women who did appear later in the story, and two stories in particular that reflect each other quite nicely & also show the breadth of the stories brought into Grace of Kings as the novel unfolds.

 

*Interstitial Music*

 

KE - I liked Mira because she didn't have any ambitions.  She leads a life that is very similar to what many women in many societies lead across the entirety of their lives, and these are lives that are so ignored and treated so much as if they don't matter, these, they're just like treated as disposable in narrative, y'know the invisible people who we just kind of throw away,

AF - The background expendables,

KE - the background, but her journey of her grief and her trying to understand what it means & her hatred and how she turns it to tidying up after this man and then the whole thing that happens with her & Mata, I found it so interesting that he chose, that that story was told at all and I think it's important because I think that those stories are almost the ones that get left out more than any other stories of the narratives that we value and that we trumpet.

AF - And you know actually the part I liked with Mira was that Soto, Lady Soto seemed to be the bookend, that you have Mira for whom everything seems to be on the surface, in other words the narrative tells you right up this is what's going on, this is her background, this is what she's working through, and then you have the completely opaque one who is kind of performing the same sort of background, expendable but in a different household, so these two acted as different facets of that same person in the background who normally would just be ignored and I did like that part.  I did think that was in some ways the more Mira got highlighted in terms of how she felt the more intriguing I found Soto for not getting any of that attention, yet still being in the narrative.  Still very much playing a role.

KE - Yeah, I do think that they form bookends, and for me I always felt that there are all these hidden depths in lady Soto that we're gonna not find out until book 2 that she knows a lot & that she's hiding a lot and that she has her own, her own plots and plans and schemes and long-term motives whether, whereas Mira's just like trying to make sense of this, of how her life was destroyed by all this war.

Y'know, she's a refugee, which is why I loved the thing where she just starts tidying up, she's putting her life has been torn apart, she's been completely torn out of all of the things that she had to where she was rooted to herself and now she's just tidying up, and I thought that was just symbolically, and because she is a very surface character - you really know who and what she is and what her conflicts are, and there isn't a lot of depth in there, and I don't mean that in a negative way I mean that's just who she is.  and I liked that contrast between the two women, and how their what they're doing in each of those different households, because they're performing similar but kind of different functions.

AF - Well it's also, the interesting thing is Mira seems to be there to learn, about herself and about what's going on and about what she wants to do whereas lady Soto is there to teach.

KE - mmmm that's interesting.

AF - Both of them are assessing the person they think is an opponent.  Mira assumes that Mata is her opponent on some level, and Lady Soto walks through the door quite aware that Kuni in some ways is a potential opponent and yet both of them end up making their peace and their resolution is Mira is very much I'll learn what comes next, and Soto's like all right, you've got the potential, sit down kid I'm going to teach you a few things because you're going to need to know this, and Jia's response is allright, it's a nice architectural move in terms of the structure of the story.

 

KE - yeah

 

*Interstitial Music*

 

JSM - One of the reasons we invited Kate Elliott to help with this discussion (beyond the obvious delight afistrap & I both took in being able to talk to one of our favorite authors & her general thoughtful reading) was that Kate posted a review of Grace of Kings that specifically engaged with the absence of women in the story.  She had a few other critiques as well, and Kate and afishtrap had a discussion of the distant islands that Kuni approaches with his men.  Earlier, we brought up the way that stories like Kikomi’s and Jia’s reinforced the patriarchy that limited the society in Grace of Kings, which heightened the prominence of women later in the story.  What follows is more along the lines of a missed opportunity - a discussion of alternative historical precedents that could have been contrasted with the overwhelming patriarchy of the empire, a what-might-have-been.  For those of you who want to dive deeper into historical precedents, I’m going to link to another essay Kate wrote, and post an excerpt that didn’t quite fit into this episode onto soundcloud. Those’ll all be findable in the show notes.

 

*Interstitial Music*

KE - Actually the two things that bugged me most were right at the beginning in the procession where like the second thing you see is the fucking dancing girls

AF - *much laughter*

JSM - Ah Ha

KE - The first thing, I'm like oh my god, no, no, why do they have, that's so western to me, it's not even western, they wouldn't even have that if they had a procession in medieval europe, that's so modern to me, it's like why? I almost stopped right there, but then I'm like no I'm going to keep going.

28:30

And then the other one that bugged me, uh, man if I'd been his editor I'd have told him to cut that because it doesn't even matter, right, the other one was when they go to the islands for the first time

AF - ooooh, yes

JSM - I hadn't picked up on this until I read your review & comments

KE - What bugged me was that I thought, as a reader, that here was an opportunity to suggest that this is a different society, with different customs and that you could still have the dudes that were following be sexist, but that you could undercut it, right, you could undercut it with them not quite getting things that are going on but that we the reader could be reading, but instead the women are seen as tits and ass and people who bring food to the men.  That was it.  And it is so, the other thing is is I thought there was a suggestion this was kind of more of an islander culture, and it was so not an islander culture, which just doesn't work like that.

AF - how is that, I mean, islander culture?

KE - Well, I read at least a couple of reviews that have said they felt that they drew from Polynesian, that he drew from Polynesian influences and I just don't see that.  Because for one thing in Polynesia you have definitely a culture with a lot of war going on, and a warrior culture, but first of all *laugh* someone, someone was saying to me that there was more, for instance in Hawaain culture, in ancient Hawaaiin culture, and I'm not an expert on this so if someone who actually knows, if a native Hawaain who actually knows something hears me say some things that are untrue, I hope that they will correct me, I've been told for instance that there were no taboos about sex, about having sexual relationships with people, I mean in the sense that , in the Puritanical sense that we see in our culture for example, but there were a lot of taboos about food, the other thing is that the nature of social relations is such that  - you see this also in bronze age Greece as compared to classical Athen- Athens Greece -  the differences between the hierarchy between who are the nobles and who are the commoners is greater than the differences between the genders.  So, how the

AF - oooohh

KE - If you're an Ali’i If you're the chief, whether you're male or female, if you're in Hawaii you would have, y'know, you would have mana,

from bronze age, speak sharply to a man who speaks to him too familiarly, but he treats Penelope as an equal, even though of course it's a patriarchal society but he treats Penelope as an equal because they're both nobles & so therefore

And so in Polynesian society I ... you would see that, the common people would have more between the men & women would be, they wouldn't have this gender divide in the same way and instead it's just like a mirror of what happens in the other culture where gender is the big divide

AF - And the thing that twigged me about the islanders is was actually something completely different

KE - oooh

AF - Which is, these islanders, and it was more a missed opportunity, in that one of the things that fascinates me the most in reading SE Asian history is the way that each culture interacted with, western contact and include arab contact in that as well as indian continental contact, and the changes that those had on the different cultures and then the arrival of the colonizers, so in this story, we have an emperor who united a bunch of different islands, right, he was basically an imperial dude who said everybody is gonna do this my way, so why is it that we travel out to the islands and the islanders aren't like "screw you, and your continental colonizing ways", why was it, "oh, hey, dude, c'mon over & lets all hang out" because colonization even for a short period of time scars people.

And so the reaction that the islanders had to all be so friendly and welcoming just felt really contrived.

JSM - My impression was that the, the empire had never gone there.

AF - I got the impression that they had interactions.  

KE - I thought that they had an interaction, I wasn't, it wasn't clear to me or else I guess I don't remember whether they had conquered it, or if they just showed up and said "hey, we're a big empire, why don't you y'know, sometimes"

JSM - I got the sense that there was some level of contact

AF - Interaction

JSM - But at no point, I think that the island is Tana Du, and I don't think it had ever been conquered & absorbed into the empire

AF - However the other thing that you need to remember is that islands are not islands in the - I think westerners, especially living within a continental landmass as opposed to say Hawaii where you might have absorbed a slightly different view of things, is that we tend to think of oceans as being vast expanses between land, when in fact when you have an island culture, we think of the waters as a front yard and a back yard, so the idea that they would not be aware of what's going down in other places, like is there no trade, is there no interaction? You know what's going on in your backyard, it's your backyard.  So even if they were put themselves in & "we were pretty lucky, no one came & took us over", I just it makes no sense to me to have a world where somebody on an island wouldn't in some way be aware by some means of what's going on in what they consider their territory, their backyard.

KE - That's an excellent point! Do either of you remember how long it takes to sail there?

JSM - The text says "the sun always set to the right of the ship as they sailed ever southward & then sometime later so presumably at least a few days they were at Tan Adu ... savage cannibals, not a place for civilized men, over the years various states had tried to settle and subdue the island but they'd always failed. " so, it's not y'know it took days to get there, was not easy to get there & there was clearly a level of hostility to people who tried to [garble], or at least that's what the text sets up before Kuni manages to land & talk his way into stay on Tan Adu for a while

 

KE - Yeah, because, just because yeah the polynesian islands were in contact with each other and of course island chains that were relatively close together even if you couldn't see the next island if you could get there in a day or two or three or four, that was still considered a neighbor

And this is why I thought that there was such a chance here to show a different form of gender, relations, than the main archipelago, and that instead it just seemed to be a recapitulation of the same thing.  Because even if the guys don't, can't really see it, you can still show it.  

And I want to add here, it's so funny for me, because I really really never, I don't like to criticize books, and I've reached a point in my life where I will only criticize a book if I really loved it.

AF - Yes, agreed

JSM *laugh*

AF - The books that I really loved are the ones that I criticized the most.

 

*Interstitial Music*

JSM - I said at the beginning that this is a discussion of Grace of Kings, but it’s also a broader discussion of the genre.  We’ve talked about some specific characters, though our conversation on Gin Mazoti never got much farther than what Kate wrote in her earlier review: a martial character she very much appreciated & enjoyed, we’ve talked more broadly about how much a text changes depending on who women are relating to and whose story is being told.  As often happens, the discussion ranged from the fantastic elements and the secondary-world of Grace of Kings to analogues and historical precedents in our world.  I’m going to close with another exchange along those lines.

*Interstitial Music*

AF - Well, all I was going to say was the one problem with Medieval history & Chinese history or any other history is This Book Is Fantasy! It doesn't even take place in our world.  It's like that excuse just doesn't hold water to say oh, well, my ahistorical view of that time period is X, and I'm like But You're Writing Fiction, Make It Up!

KE - Y'know and it's interest - this kind of thing about "well there's dragons why do we also have to have patriarchal sexism?"

And like I'm, first of all I totally agree with that, but even, this is my other thing, even if you just take actual history you can see that the stereotypes that people have about history are totally wrong!

You don't even need the element of saying "well it's just a fantasy" because we have examples of women doing every possible thing in real history, so y'know between those two elements, a) it's a fantasy and you have dragons & magic, and b) historically women did everything that you could possibly want to do, you just have to make the choice to put them in.  You have to be able to see them & ultimately the problem becomes is we get (and I include myself in this because I struggle with this all the time) we have to get past that own, that veil that obstacle that gate that we are shut behind and we have to say "hey wait, I can open this up"

 

*Interstitial Music*

 

JSM - As it turns out, there are many gates we are shut behind, and many wonders visible to us when veils are removed.  This has been a tough episode for me to fit together, since the roles of women in the Grace of Kings have been the most discussed and most criticized pieces of the book.  If I were a better editor I’d have mixed it better among the other episodes focused on Grace of Kings - the technology of “silkpunk”, the marriage of eastern and western tradition & ideas of divinity, heroism and nobility, the techniques that mediate orientalist reader expectations, and the heroic episodes interspersed throughout this gorgeous sprawling narrative.  

 

I’d like to thank Kate & Afishtrap for lending their time and expertise to this discussion.  And I’d like to reiterate the earlier statements that all three of us loved this book, we spent a lot of time discussing it because it was wonderful & it enchanted us, and we are all eagerly awaiting book 2! I’d also like to thank you listeners for sticking with these Grace of Kings discussions.  There have been a lot.  This is it, barring one possible future episode talking to Ken to see what else we missed, so thanks for coming along on this journey.

JSM - Thanks for listening.  Give us feedback! (paraphrase)


30 - Representation with Justina Ireland (part 1)

in

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

in

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.