Hi everyone. Sorry I've fallen off the posting again.
Here are some Yuletide recs:
Imperial Radch/Translation State - Ann Leckie: a perfect preservation (so we’ll never fall apart). If you haven't read Translation State yet, then I strongly recommend not reading this fic until you've read canon. Otherwise, recommended. (I was the recipient.)
People really watch Benoit Blanc movies without having ever encountered any detective fiction other than Sherlock Holmes and feel fully qualified to comment on the connections that they think they've made.
Remember the terrible articles in the late 90s that repetitively and confidently asserted that Rowling had invented YA fantasy, or low fantasy, because they didn't bother to check a single library or bookstore?
A lunchtime lark and the foreshore was full of tourists.
One man was showing his small daughter how you should scrape the top level off, in an area where no surface disturbance is allowed. That annoyed me.
Anyway, apart from the tourists, there was one other mudlark there that lunchtime, wearing wellies, mostly in the mud.
I didn't find a lot. A chunk of a John Maddock plate, possibly from between 1906 and 1927. I don’t usually find sherds with words on in this area. A bit of a plastic flower. A bit of glass that said 72 on it. A piece of Staffordshire style slipware, some bits of Bellarmine. I was happy to find a button.
It was near to low tide so I walked underneath Grant’s Quay Wharf. It's a bit dark under there so more difficult to mudlark but it feels like you're somewhere secret when you're amongst the wooden struts.
(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)
22 recs in As You Like It, British Airways, Cabin Pressure, Cadfael, Dogsbody, Enigma, Flower Fairies, The Good Place, Georgette Heyer, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, Ludwig, The Prisoner, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Shakespeare & Hathaway, Time Master, Welcome to Our Village Please Invade Carefully & Yes Minister at my journal.
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
I was awake at 5AM and I was the only person to get on the first train of the day at my station.
It was Solstice, and at sunrise, I was on the foreshore, staring at the Thames and the pink sky.
I found a broken plastic domino! I found a jack (alley gob) similar to the one I found previously!
–
I found a sherd from an inventor who exhibited in the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace!
The sherd says 17 Silver-Street, Wood Street on it.
Mayo & Co were located at this address and appear in a catalogue for the Great Exhibition, which was held at Crystal Palace in 1851.
Description from the catalogue: “Patent syphon vases, for containing aerated or gaseous mineral waters. They afford the means for withdrawing at pleasure such quantities as may be desired, whilst that which remains for subsequent use retains its purity and effervescence. The vases exhibited are specimens of the combination of metal with pottery. The process of manufacture is the invention of the exhibitor.”
Silver Street no longer exists, but there is still a small garden - St Olave Silver Street, where a church once stood. There's also a plaque in the garden for Shakespeare as he had lodgings on Silver Street.
–
I found a pink plastic star spokey-dokey, that may once have been attached to a bicycle.
I found an orange button.
I found a stoneware sherd that says “gin”, but it probably contained ginger beer.
Two pieces I haven’t figured out: The dark brown sherd that has the word “king” visible The lighter brown sherd that has “N.Higg” visible.
Glass:
– A good chunk of a bottle that says “216 Kingsland Road” and “Batey” on it. Batey made ginger beer and mineral water and “Batey’s Britannia Steam Works” was located at 216 Kingsland Road from 1847.
9 recs over at my journal for: IVE, Two Husbands One Wife, Bend It Like Beckham, Billy Elliot, Blackadder, NMIXX, Revenged Love, Sabrina Carpenter - Manchild, Set It Up
This is one of my all-time most prolific writing years, both in terms of total word count and in the fact that I averaged just over a fic a week. I guess vampires + doctors = inspiration. Who knew?
Apollo 13 is a film that sits atop a small but diverse and, for some people, extremely enjoyable sub-genre of film: Competence Porn. This has nothing to do with actual pornography (well, I guess it could, given the right pornographic film, but I am not aware of one, nor am I going to stop writing to find out) and everything to do with competence: exceptionally smart and capable people doing exceptionally smart and capable things in moments of crisis where the alternative to being competent is, simply, disaster. There are other very good movies in this genre — The Martian is a favorite of mine, and rather more recent than this film — but the added edge that Apollo 13 has over so many other of its competence porn siblings is this: It really happened.
And, to a degree that is unusual for Hollywood, the real disaster and journey of Apollo 13 happened very much like it happens in this movie. There is a missed telemetry burn here and a scripted argument there (and a few other minor things) to separate the two, and Tom Hanks doesn’t really look much like Jim Lovell, the astronaut he portrays. But in terms of film fidelity to actual events, this is about as good as it gets. With an event like this, you don’t need too much extra drama.
The event in question is a big one: On the way to the moon in April 1970, the Apollo 13 mission experienced a major mishap, an oxygen tank explosion that threatened the lives of the crew members, Jim Lovell (Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Sweigert (Kevin Bacon), and would prevent the Apollo 13 crew from touching down on the moon. The three astronauts and the entire mission control crew back in Houston, led by Gene Krantz (Ed Harris) and bolstered by astronaut Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinese), improvised a whole new mission to get the Apollo 13 crew back home, alive.
On one hand, there is irony in declaring this film to be about extreme competence when it is about a technical incident that jeopardized three lives, and, had the rescue attempt ended tragically, could have curtailed the entire Apollo program after only two moon landings. But on the other hand, there is the competence involved in getting things right, which while ideal, doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, and then there is competence involved in saving the day when things go south, which is inherently more dramatic. I’m sure if you were to have asked Lovell, commander of the mission, he would have told you that he’d prefer that everything had gone according to plan, because then he would have landed on the moon. But after that explosion, he probably appreciated that everyone in Houston turned out to have the “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” type of competence as well.
This sort of competence happens several times in the film, but the scene for me that brings it home is the one where carbon dioxide levels start to rise in the lunar lander module, and the crew in Houston has to adapt the incompatible air scrubbers of the command module to work in the lander — literally putting a square filter into a round hole. This is possibly the most unsexy task anyone on any lunar mission has ever been tasked with, given to (we are led to believe) the people at NASA not already busy saving the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts. Unsexy, but absolutely critical. How it gets done, and how the urgency of it getting done, is communicated in the film, should be studied in cinema classes. Never has air scrubbing been so dramatically, and effectively, portrayed.
This brings up the other sort competence going on in this film, aside from what is happening onscreen. It’s the competence of Ron Howard, who directed Apollo 13. Howard will never be seen as one of the great film stylists, either in his generation of filmmakers or any other, but goddamn if he’s not one of the most reliably competent filmmakers to ever shoot a movie. Howard’s not a genius, he’s a craftsman; he knows every tool in his toolbox and how the use it for maximum effectiveness (plus, as a former actor himself, he’s pretty decent with the humans in his movies, which is more than can be said for other technically adept directors). Marry an extremely competent director to a film valorizing extreme competence? It’s a match made in heaven, or trans-lunar space, which in this case is close enough.
Howard and his crew, like the Apollo 13 mission control crew, also had the “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” point of view when it came to how to solve some of its own technical problems, such as, well, showing the flight crew of Apollo 13 in zero gravity (yes, I know, technically microgravity, shut it, nerd). This film was being shot in the first half of the 1990s, when CGI was not yet up to the task of whole body replacement, and most practical solutions would look fake as hell, which would not do for a prestige film such as this one.
So, fine. If Howard and his crew couldn’t convincingly fake zero gravity, they would just use actual microgravity, by borrowing the “Vomit Comet,” the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker NASA used to train their astronauts. It very steeply dives from 38,000 feet to 15,000 feet, giving everyone inside the experience of weightlessness for 23 seconds or so each dive. Howard shoved his Apollo 13 spacecraft sets into the plane and rode up and down and up and down and up and down, filming on the dips, until the movie had all the zero-gravity scenes it needed. Then the actors had to go back and re-record all their dialogue for those scenes, because it turns out filming on a vomit comet is a very loud experience.
I think this all very cool and also I am deeply happy I was not on that crew, because I would have never stopped horking. I believe every member of the cast and crew who were on that plane should be known as honorary steely-eyed missile people.
Apollo 13 is, to my mind, the best film Ron Howard has yet made, the one that is the best marriage of his talents to his material. Howard was, frankly, robbed at the Oscars that year, when the Academy chose Braveheart over this film and Mel Gibson as director over Howard. These were choices that felt iffy then and feel even more so now. Howard would get his directing Oscar a few years later with A Beautiful Mind (plus another one for producing the film with Brian Glazer). That film was an easy pick out of the nominees that year — 2001 was not an especially vintage year in the Best Picture category, which helped — and also I feel pretty confident that the “Al Pacino factor” (i.e., the award given because the award should have been given well before then) was also in play. An Oscar is an Oscar is an Oscar, especially when you get two, so I’m sure at this point Howard doesn’t care. He did get a DGA Award for Apollo 13, so that’s nice.
I haven’t really talked much about the cast in this film, except to note who plays what. That’s because, while everyone in this film is uniformly excellent, competence requires everyone on screen to mostly just buckle down and do the job in front of them. With the exception of one argument up in space, no one from NASA gets too bent out of shape (and tellingly, the argument in the film didn’t happen in real life because astronauts just do not lose their shit, or at least, not in space). This works in the moment, and Howard and his team do a lot of editing and music and tracking shots and such to amp it all up, but it doesn’t translate into scene-chewing drama. This film lacks a Best Actor nomination for Tom Hanks, which might have hurt its chances for Best Picture. Its acting nominations are in the supporting categories, and it’s true enough that Kathleen Quinlan, as Jim Lovell’s wife Marilyn, gets to have a wider range of emotions than just about anyone else (Ed Harris was also nominated; his performance is stoic as fuck).
(To be fair, Hanks was coming off back-to-back Best Actor wins. It’s possible Academy members were just “let someone else have a turn, Tom.”)
Every film ages, but it seems to me that 30 years on, Apollo 13 has aged rather less than other films of its time (and yes, I am looking at you, Braveheart). Again, I think that this comes down to competence, on screen, and off of it. The story of hard-working people saving the day ages well, and Howard’s choices (like the actual microgravity) mean that the technical aspects of the film don’t give away it’s age like they otherwise might.
The thing that ages this film most, alas, is nothing it has anything to do with: the recent decline in the application and admiration of competence, in many categories, but in science most of all. Watching Apollo 13, one acknowledges that those were indeed the good old days for competence. Hopefully, sooner than later, those days will return.
And Picture Book Advent draws gently to a close. A note for my future self: although traditionally Advent ends on December 24, I think it would be nice to have a final picture book for the morning of Christmas. (My sister-in-law’s large extended family does a BIG Christmas, so we’ve simply ceded Christmas Day to them and have our own little family Christmas later on, which leaves Christmas morning open.)
Because of the way the dates of Advent fell, I had only two books left to review. First, The Wee Christmas Cabin at Carn-na-ween, by Ruth Sawyer, illustrated by Max Grafe, a picture book version of a story I first read in Sawyer’s story collection The Long Christmas. After a lifetime helping out in one cabin after another, with never a home of her own, old Oona is at last driven from her final house on Christmas Eve… only for the Good Folk to build her a house, and grant her wish that every white Christmas hence, the hungry and the lonely will be able to find her home for succor.
A lovely story. Another solid example from Sawyer that the spirit of Christmas is “generosity” and not “copious evergreens.”
And second, The Christmas Sweater, Jan Brett’s new Christmas book this year! Theo’s Yiayia knitted an extremely gaudy Christmas sweater for his dignified pug Ari. Hoping to win Ari over to the cozy warm sweater, Theo takes her for a snowshoe in the woods… only for a fresh fall of snow to obliterate his tracks! But fortunately, Ari(adne)’s sweater caught on a twig near the edge of the woods, so they can follow the unraveled yarn back home.
From the dedication, it looks like one of Brett’s children married into a Greek family, and this book is an homage to that family connection. I particularly enjoyed Ari’s expressive face, and indeed all the dogs running around in the snow in this book.
The Complete Astreiant by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett
Award News:
Point of Hopes (Astreiant #1) by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett won a Midwest Independent Publishers Association Award for speculative fiction
Catherine Lundoff won an Alice B. Readers Award for her body of work in sapphic fiction
Terror at Tierra de Cobre by Michael Merriam was a finalist for the Inaugural Small Spec Book Awards, Horror Category
The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones was nominated for the Indie Ink Awards in 2 categories, including Aromantic/Asexual Representation
The Complete Astreiant by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett is eligible for the Hugo Award for Best Series this year
Other Cool Things:
The University of Minnesota Library Upper Midwest Literary Archive is officially collecting us, with a finding guide and everything, crossed listed with the Tretter Collection.
Point of Hearts was reviewed in Locus Magazine, our first title in Locus.
Apart from that, we did 36 events this year! That includes conferences, book festivals, bookstore readings, book events at breweries and other venues, podcasts and probably something I'm forgetting. It was a lot! If you were one of the folks who hosted us, bought our books, reviewed our books, supported our Patreon and/or generally helped us get the word out about our books, you rock! Thank you!
And a big thank you to our authors, cover designers, book designer and my assistant, Alexa, for all your hard work this year! Additional shout out to Kate Larking who did a bunch of marketing and publicity work for us! See you all in 2026!
a knock at your front door by anonymous, Chalion Saga, World of Five Gods - Lois McMaster Bujold. Five Gods in modern times. Vividly written, highly recommended.
The long way out of a dark tower by Anonymous, The Tower at Stony Wood - Patricia A. McKillip. I'm a longtime McKillip fan for the RiddleMaster of Hed series and Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and I thought I had read everything she wrote, including this one, but the characters didn't sound familiar at all. I'll have to go back and find it. Anyway, you don't have to know canon, lovely story.
Nic Low is a writer of Ngāi Tahu and European descent who divides his time between Melbourne and Christchurch. His writing on wilderness, technology and race has been widely published and anthologised on both sides of the Tasman. His first book was Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd prizes, and named a New Zealand Listener and Australian Book Review book of the year.
This was a real mixed Dog of stories, not in quality or interest but in tone. They ranged from very speculative future dystopias to... I don't even know what the counter to spec fic is. Normie? Mundane? I can't remember the last time I read garden variety fiction. But one of the Low's mundane stories was a total riot - 'Rush' describes a group of First Nations Australians styling themselves as the Aboriginal Land Council of Minerals and digging up a war memorial in central Melbourne to prospect for gold. It was bang on in tone and hilarious in the way it perfectly captured the double standards and unconscious (or just fucking conscious, really) bias of colonised Australia. (hey remember the time when a brown muslim woman tweeted on ANZAC day about the human rights violations Australia was inflicting on (brown and mostly muslim) refugees and the backlash was so strong she lost her job, had to move house and eventually had to flee the country?)
I had to check to see when this book was published to work out which of the many sacred First Nations sites destroyed by the resources industry could have prompted this story, but considering the book is 11 years old there's too many to even consider.
I also really liked 'Facebook Redux', about a 70 year old millennial who digs up his old Facebook Profile to find his dead wife's old profile and gets scammed by Russian AR hackers. A really prescient story about what we broadcast online and how it can be used against us.
Low's style of not using quotation marks for speech was a bit challenging to get used to, but it was worth persevering to experience the depth and variety of these well-crafted stories.
5/5 stars. Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.
The third and final volume in the YA time travel urban fantasy Monsters trilogy, this definitely cannot be read without the previous two installments.
Continuing right where Never a Hero left off, the book starts off with main antagonist and Joan’s half-sister Eleanor having finally succeeded in creating a world where monsters rule over humans and she reigns over all, and the plot revolves around Joan and the othes desperately trying to find a way to undo this and return to the world they know.
First of all, I have to talk about that resolution to the love triangle— major ending spoilers I had suspicions from the structure of the earlier two books (ex. the division of page-time between the two male love interests) that Len might be going for a poly/throuple ending, but I wasn’t sure if she had the guts to go for it in a mainstream YA series. I’m very pleased to report that she did, in fact, have the guts to go for it! Even though generally the soulmate/predestined trope is not a romance trope I’m fond of, and having the predestined couple turn out to be actually be a predestined throuple all along only slightly mitigates my indifference, but otherwise I really liked how this played out. One of my worries was how she was going to flesh out the Nick/Aaron side of the throuple, but I thought Len managed to concisely convey the sense of a deep, intense relationship between the two in an alternate timeline, enough that I could buy the current versions working out—though I could have read an entire book about about gladiator!Nick and Scarlet Pimpernel!Aaron (hopefully the fanfic writers will tackle this).
The worldbuilding continues to be one of the most intriguing parts of this series, and in this installment I really liked the depiction of a dystopian alternate world where humans and part-humans were basically slaves. The time-travel continues to run on vibes and Doctor Who-esque rules, but I didn’t mind since we got some cool action sequences and juicy character interactions (in particular, I loved every instance where a character has to interact with a different timeline’s version of someone they cared about) out of it.
As for weaknesses, I thought Joan was a pretty reactive heroine in this book, and it did sometimes feel like she’s going along with the requirements of the plot instead of having a distinctive personality of her own that actively drives the plot forward. I also found the epilogue/ending to be a bit too unbelievably happy in terms how easily all the conflict between human and monster society were resolved—I would have preferred if it ended more on a hopeful work-in-progress instead. And as with the previous two books, I felt like the prose could have been prettier on a sentence-by-sentence level.
But overall, I quite enjoyed this trilogy, and thought Len explored some pretty cool ideas even if she didn’t 100% stick the landing. I’m definitely looking forward to her future works! Goodbye, My Princess by Fei Wo Si Cun (trans. Tianshu)
A bit of an odd duck of a book. Translated Chinese webnovels have been steadily growing in popularity in the Anglosphere, but most of these are danmei (M/M). I’ve seen this book marketed as YA het fantasy romance, despite 1) covering some pretty mature topics (liked forced abortion), 2) there being exactly one fantastical element in the setting—a magical amnesia-granting river—and is otherwise full on historical fiction, and 3) having an infamous tragic ending, which would preclude this from being considered a romance by Western genre conventions. What this really is, is a tragic romance, and an excellent example of the genre.
mild spoilers under the cut The plot: Xiaofeng is a cheerful, naive young princess from the desert kingdom of Xiliang who has been in a loveless arranged marriage with Li Chengyin, the crown prince of the Li empire, for the last three years. It has not been a happy union—Li Chengyin alternately fights with Xiaofeng or ignores her in favor of his preferred noble consort, and Xiaofeng mainly copes with the stifling nature of court life by crossdressing and sneaking out of the palace to roam the city with her faithful maid/bodyguard A’du. Then one day she encounters a stranger who claims to be her lost love from a life Xiaofeng can no longer remember. As Xiaofeng tries to piece together what had happened in the past, she and her husband finally start growing closer, but what she doesn’t realize is how truly brutal the royal court is, and that some memories are better left forgotten.
The entire main story is told entirely from Xiaofeng’s first person narration, which was a very effective and immersive choice. She is a naive, kind-hearted and trusting person stuck with limited language and cultural fluency in a foreign court stuffed to the brim with schemes and intrigues, and everyone knows it. So you only get a glimpse of all the political intrigue as they all fly completely over her head (these schemes only get explained in full in the epilogue/side stories told by the side characters) and have to try to figure out for yourself what’s actually going on. There is also an excellently done character progression as she slowly loses her innocence and happiness and is ground down into despair—her voice starts off rather silly and childish and then grows both more mature and much more sad.
The author Fei Wo Si Cun has a reputation for angsty, obsessive, incredibly asshole male leads who are basically a forest of walking red flags. But it worked very well for me in this story because it becomes very clear after a certain point that the male lead Li Chengyin is also the main villain and primary antagonist of the story. In fact, the book can be seen as a deconstruction of the common “kind-hearted naive princess marries a cold ruthless prince from an enemy kingdom and then they fall in love” trope/storyline. Li Chengyin is incredibly ruthless and cunning because that was the only way to survive the intrigues of the royal court and stay alive as crown prince. Xiaofeng’s warm and open-hearted personality is like catnip to someone with his personality, but being a monster who loves only one person does not make him any less a monster, and so he loves her but he also destroys everything that she loves, and it all ends in tears.
Overall, recommended if you’re in the mood for what’s essentially a perfect tragedy, starring a pair of lovers so doomed even being granted a clean slate and a second chance by Fate is not enough.
A note about the translation: the English translation is by Tianshu, and this is one of the best Chinese-English translations that I’ve read recently. There is no awkward “translationese” or jerky sentences—the prose flows smoothly and is downright lovely in many parts, and overall feels like a labor of love. I also liked the choice to link footnotes to all the bits of classical Chinese poetry that’s quoted in text. The one choice I’m puzzled by is the change in structure; the original novel (or at least the version I found online) had 42 chapters in the main story, plus some bonus chapters that are snippets from the POV of certain side characters (these are technically not necessary to read but highly recommended). The English translation aggregates the text into four very long chapters/parts instead, plus the bonus side stories. I’m not sure why Tianshu decided on this grouping, as this means there is no easy point to take a break in the middle of a very long part compared to the original.
The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (trans. Faelicy & Lily)
My first danmei cnovel, and I had a great time! About Shen Yuan, a young man who hate-read the entirety of a super popular and clichéd cultivation harem webnovel and died while in the middle of raging about how terrible the writing and plot holes are...only to wake up having transmigrated into said webnovel, as the villainous mentor who will face a brutal end by the OP Gary Stu male protagonist. Now he has to somehow get into the guy's good graces to avoid his canon fate and fix the original novel's plot holes...and of course this being danmei he accidentally changes the romance from M/F one-dude-with-a-massive-harem to M/M along the way.
Shen Yuan's running commentary mocking the the cliches of the hackneyed harem cultivation webnovel he's been unwillingly transmigrated into were hilarious, and I also loved every instance where he had to stay in character as this cool and unmoved master while internally swearing and freaking out. He's also a very funny example of an incredibly unreliable narrator.
My only complaints were that 1) I wish the female characters got more to do (not unexpected for a danmei, but it’s still disappointing to have several intriguing and layered male side characters whereas all the side female characters are much more flat in comparison) and 2) that sex scene sure was...something. Still, this was incredibly fun to read, and I'm definitely going to check out MXTX's other works!
I feel like I'm so out of practice doing this, but I've got a nice collection of fics from a first pass run through Yuletide :)
Firstly, my two awesome gifts:
late night conversation (IVE - Off the Record MV) This is one of my favourite IVE MVs, it's got so much beautiful and intriguing visual imagery to think about. This fic does a lovely job of following the individual paths the girls take and wonder - why are they apart (and often, sad) when they were so happy together? - then draws them all back into the same house and back into each other's hearts. It's going to linger in my head for a while!
Two Coffees, One Tea (Mitsuda Takuzo/Satomura Shinpei/Yanoguchi Mia; 三人夫婦 | Two Husbands One Wife) This is exactly what I wanted for the three of them, just a sense of how they navigate life in the physical spaces of home, of travelling, in bed, and how they balance each other out in the best ways. Takuzo knowing where things are and being forthright about the things they need; Shinpei looking out for them and reminding them about the little relational things; Mia making their place a home and being bossy when they need her to be.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vass
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
