Some Surprisingly Strong Women in ERB's Oeuvre

I made my debut a few weeks ago on the SFFAudio podcast, talking with the host Jesse Willis, plus regular contributor there (and my Skiffy and Fanty Show crewmate) Paul Weimer and fellow guest Evan Lampe about an obscure Edgar Rice Burroughs novel called The Efficiency Expert (1919). You can hear the podcast here, listen to the audiobook here or here, or read the book here. I highly recommend it, although a content warning is necessary for two objectionable words* used a few times, a little onscreen violence, and an offscreen murder.

artist: not listed in book

Set in 1919 Chicago, the book is a very good read, full of interesting incidents but also sparkling with sardonic humor and social commentary. (I'll say more about this later.) Although the protagonist starts out very full of himself, the epitome of an overconfident mediocre white male, he suffers trials and tribulations, sometimes of his own making, due to his principles or ego, and sometimes from bad luck or villains. Along the way, he meets three women, all with speaking roles, all of whose actions affect his life in significant ways.

This is fairly unusual contrasted with the majority of ERB's oeuvre, where many books have just one significant female character, most women exist to scream and be saved, even the occasional wandering princess generally doesn't have much agency except to reject a few suitors, and the hidden-city queens basically exist merely to lust after and lose Burroughs' heroes.

artist: Frank Frazetta

I am familiar with a lot of ERB's work, thanks to growing up with my daddy's extensive paperback library of  Science Fiction&Fantasy, Westerns, and adventure yarns. (Mom collected mysteries, Georgette Heyer and Literature.) In fact, the first adult-level speculative fiction book that I remember reading, beyond the level of, say, Alexander Key's The Forgotten Door, was The Beasts of Tarzan (1916), left carelessly on a coffee table. I suppose the animal-centric cover misled me a little, and I struggled with some of the concepts, but I had absorbed enough of the legend of Tarzan to keep going.

So I've read more than 20 Tarzan books, about a half-dozen of the Mars/Barsoom books, one of the Venus books, a half-dozen Pellucidars, The Land That Time Forgot and a couple of sequels, and a half-dozen more of his stand-alone books. I reread only a few specifically for this essay, but there are several more that I've revisited over the years because something about them stuck out in my mind. I've been thinking about them a lot since recording the SFF Audio podcast. Following are my impressions of the strongest female characters that I've encountered in Edgar Rice Burroughs books.

Jane Foster in Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan and The Son of Tarzan, primarily (read here or listen here). (Content warning for nearly all Tarzan books: racism and fights to the death.) She is mentioned in many later books in the series (he's a one-woman man, but often separated from her, so she doesn't have scenes in all of them) but past the first four books or so, often just needs rescuing (she often needs that in the first three too). But beyond being beautiful and brave like all Burroughs heroines, Jane is remarkable through changing the way of life of the hero who loves her, at least changing it for a while, as opposed to many Burroughs women who want nothing better than to join with the hero and follow his path.
MILD SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST FOUR TARZAN BOOKS: At the beginning of The Beasts of Tarzan, she and John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, are married and living in London with baby Jack. At the beginning of The Son of Tarzan, they've returned to "civilization" and she forbids adolescent Jack to read books about animals or explorers, or even to go to the zoo, for fear that it should rouse his apparently inherited "savage" instincts -- which is pretty insulting to Tarzan, really, if you think about it. John/Tarzan protests mildly, in private, but in front of Jack, he concedes and backs up his wife in imposing these restrictions, which Jack objects to as mollycoddling. After Jack goes to Africa and grows up there in the jungle, and they eventually reunite joyfully, they all go back to England again! Jane is clearly wrong-headed about this, but I have to admit she is strong-willed.

Meriem in The Son of Tarzan (read here or listen here). (CW: A villain uses the N-word, and "Bwana" calls his African employees boys. A rich man acts on classist attitudes. Violence.) Jack/Korak is the protagonist, but Meriem is the second most important character, with six full-page illustrations plus several smaller ones in my family's tattered 1917 first edition.

artist: J. Allen St. John

We encounter Meriem as a child in an Arab compound in Africa, being beaten by the Sheik. Jack/Korak feels sorry for her and leads her into the jungle. He teaches her the great apes' language and to swing through the trees as lithely as himself.
MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS HERE: After she grows up, they're separated by circumstances; she thinks he's dead, and the Europeans whom she encounters think that her jungle tales are delirious ravings, and her memories fade. But when peril threatens, she's able to leap into action again. She's self-confident in her jungle lore, but she is very naive and easily manipulated.
Also notable: All the Claytons think Meriem is an Arab, but not even Jane minds her marrying Jack. But, perhaps to appease the early 20th century readers, it turns out she's French nobility after all.
Meriem also appears briefly in Tarzan and the Ant Men, with Korak and their toddler son Jackie, but doesn't play any significant part there.

Bertha Kircher in Tarzan the Untamed (read here or listen here). (CW: This book is written during and set near the beginning of World War I, and all Germans in it are treated as irredeemably evil.)
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THIS BOOK! Skip this paragraph if you haven't read it and might sometime! After his estate in Africa is attacked by Germans and Jane is apparently slain, along with many Waziri warriors, Tarzan goes on a rampage of revenge. However, he can't quite bring himself to overcome his gentlemanly instincts and kill the German spy, Bertha Kircher. Near the end, it turns out that Bertha was a double agent for the Allies all along, thus proving her courage, intelligence, resourcefulness and goodness.

Dejah Thoris in Under the Moons of Mars/A Princess of Mars and sequels (read here or listen here). (CW: Debatable stand-in racism: These are alien species, but later books advocate separate rulers for each race of Barsoom, united under one white-savior Warlord; also, protagonist Captain John Carter is a Confederate veteran, although that's merely mentioned, not discussed. Additionally, of course, there are many fights that end in death.)

artist: Roy Krenkel, Jr.

Dejah Thoris is the princess of the red race of Helium. She's not a typical Burroughs damsel in that she can wield a sword in her own defense, although of course she doesn't measure up to the fighting skills of the comparatively heavy-gravity superman from Earth. Sometimes she needs rescuing, and during The Gods of Mars, it is discovered that she has given way to despair. (Things get better later.) But I actually love her character in the horribly marketed, unfairly maligned 2012 "John Carter" movie, where she is also a scientist trying to save her world, and eventually figures out some important plot points.
Sola, a female thark, also stands out as a character in the book by being different from most of her green-skinned, six-limbed race in that she demonstrates compassion instead of just ferocity, and argues in defense of that despite social scorn.
Thuvia in The Gods of Mars is the princess of another Red Martian city, who also falls in love with John Carter; however, she risks her life to help Dejah Thoris. It's also significant that Thuvia has charms to soothe the savage banths. Other female characters include Phaidor, a third and spiteful rival for JC's affections, and Issus, the evil "goddess" of Barsoom. Thuvia and Phaidor also appear in The Warlord of Mars.
Sadly, when Thuvia gets her own book in Thuvia, Maid of Mars, one of only two ERB books titled after a woman's name, she basically just plays the captured/rescued princess role, although she does get to stab somebody. Carthoris is the real protagonist of the book.

And now, finally, back to The Efficiency Expert. Aside from just the plot points, it's very well written regarding both language and structure, with some surprising twists, humor, and insights. Burroughs constantly writes in a way that invites the reader to laugh at the protagonist's foibles yet eventually root for him, while giving sidelights on poverty, class prejudice, bad cops, labor movements, and other issues.
I'm about to give some MAJOR SPOILERS TO THE PLOT OF THE BOOK, so I encourage readers of this essay to view or listen to it before continuing. Jimmy Torrance Jr. is the aforementioned protagonist, who graduates last in his college class but still thinks he just has to advertise his availability to land a job as a manager. He doesn't, gets desperate, takes a series of low-level jobs, and sinks so low as to briefly consider a life of crime as an accomplice to The Lizard, a safe-cracker. Then he cons his way into a job as an Efficiency Expert, and then there's a murder.
Elizabeth Compton, her friend Harriet Holden, and Little Eva/Edith Hudson are the three women who affect his life. Elizabeth is the daughter of a factory owner, snobbish and judgmental, and Harriet is her friend, classy and thoughtful. After they encounter Jimmy several times and he helps them, Elizabeth figures there must be some flaw in this guy's character that has made him sink so low, but tells him to give the chauffeur his address and they'll send him some money. Harriet gives him her address and invites him to come by so she can help him find a better job through her connections. He is too proud to accept help from either. Meanwhile, working as a waiter, Jimmy meets Little Eva, who likes him because he treats her "like a decent girl" despite her bad-girl profession. The Lizard tells Little Eva that Jimmy's too good for her, but she stands up for herself and says, "I'm as good as you are and a damn sight straighter. What I get I earn, and I don't steal it."  
Little Eva encourages him to apply for an advertised Efficiency Expert job, loans him money for good clothes and helps him forge some references.
     "What do you have to know to be an efficiency expert?" asked the girl.
     "From what I saw of the bird I just mentioned the less one knows about anything the more successful he should be as an efficiency expert, for he certainly didn't know anything. And yet the results from kicking everybody in the plant out of his own particular rut eventually worked wonders for the organization. If the man had any sense, tact or diplomacy nothing would have been accomplished."
     "Why don't you try it?" asked the girl. Jimmy looked at her with a quizzical smile. "Thank you," he said.
     "Oh, I didn't mean it that way," cried the girl. "But from what you tell me I imagine that all a man needs is a front and plenty of punch. ..."
Jimmy buys a book on industrial efficiency, which focuses on streamlining and common sense, and is hired. Harriet recognizes Jimmy, now the Efficiency Expert working at her father's plant, as the hosiery clerk/waiter/boxer/milkman she has kept running into; she seeks to denounce him, but he threatens to tell her dad all the places where she's been slumming, so she backs down. Little Eva  gets a job working as secretary Edith Hudson.
Then the murder happens, and Jimmy is the prime suspect. Harriet and Eva help him in different ways. Alas, despite how much I like Eva/Edith, her self-reformation isn't enough to overcome the Bad Girl tropes, so Burroughs clears her out of the plot to make way for Jimmy to choose Harriet.
One of my main delights in this book is how different all the women are from each other, with distinct personalities and ways of interacting with others. Burroughs doesn't do deep character studies on any of them, but they all are pretty vivid on the pages.

artist: Boris Vallejo

Shannon Burke/Gaza de Lure in The Girl from Hollywood (1922). Read here or listen here. (CW for a character using an objectionable epithet for Hispanics, casting-couch scenarios, an obscurely described miscarriage, and deaths.) This Prohibition-era novel portrays the corruptions of Hollywood as the lives of decent (although flawed) people are ruined.
Shannon Burke goes to Hollywood and takes the stage name of Gaza de Lure, but all the directors she meets just want to sleep with her, not give her roles in movies. One of them tricks her and gets her addicted to cocaine; she still refuses to become his mistress, but becomes a sub-dealer for him. Eventually, she reforms herself and helps some other people.
The Girl From Hollywood is not full of humor like The Efficiency Expert, but it does contain a few smiles like these:
     During the deer season, if they did not have it [the banned liquor] all removed by that time, they would be almost certain of discovery, since every courageous ribbon-counter clerk in Los Angeles hied valiantly to the mountains with a high-powered rifle, to track the ferocious deer to its lair.
NEAR-TOTAL PLOT SPOILERS FROM HERE: When her mother dies, Shannon stays at the ranch of some neighbors for the funeral and gets involved in their lives, and the neighbor family's lives. She conceals her sordid past and kicks her habit, but makes an error in judgment that gets the ranch heir, Custer Pennington, arrested. He suspects her of betraying him to a gang of bootleggers, but actually she was trying to protect him. Custer convinces Shannon not to tell the authorities that it was actually the neighbor Guy Evans who was in league with the gang, because Custer's sister Eva is engaged to Guy, as Custer is engaged to Guy's sister Grace, who has gone to Hollywood to try to make her mark there as an actress. Custer gets six months in jail.
After Custer serves his time, Guy finds Grace dying after domestic violence, having succumbed to drugs and sex in the wicked city, and he collapses mentally and emotionally. Later, after Eva cajoles her father into allowing a movie company to film on the ranch, there's a sexual assault, an attempted suicide, and a murder. Both Custer and Shannon are charged with the murder, but she is acquitted and finds evidence to clear Custer.
Shannon is by far the strongest character in this book. Custer has moral standards but also has a weakness for alcohol, getting blackout drunk during a crucial moment; Eva is volatile and silly, and their parents are wishful thinkers; Grace is a victim, and Guy allows his best friend to serve his prison term. In contrast, Shannon reforms her way of life, keeps her commitments and acts generously to protect others.
Incidentally, the 1950 cover portrays Shannon/Gaza as Hispanic, but I didn't find any evidence in the text to confirm that; she might have just given herself the Gaza de Lure stage name to make herself seem more exotic. Neither her mother nor her eventually discovered long-lost father have Hispanic names (although we only learn the nickname, not the first name, of the father).

Corrie van der Meer and Sarina in Tarzan and the Foreign Legion (1947, not public domain). I'm describing these characters later than the other Tarzan-book women I mentioned because Foreign Legion is pretty different in tone, more of an ensemble piece and told from more perspectives than any other ERB I can think of, and written decades later. (CW: Set during World War II, this book is viciously racist toward the Japanese soldiers, condescendingly colonialist toward indigenous Sumatrans and a Chinese worker, and also stereotypes the Dutch. However, if you are willing to look past all that, there are some strong and active female characters to enjoy.)
Incidentally, Foreign Legion refers to the mixture of Allied characters in the book, not the French military force. Here, ERB inserts Tarzan into the Pacific Theater of Operations by having RAF Col. John Clayton be an observer on an American flight over Sumatra that gets shot down, so he can fight tigers and encounter orangutans. Just go with it.
BIG SPOILERS AHEAD: Corrie is 16 years old at the start, when the Japanese invade Sumatra. They murder her stubborn Dutch planter father, and she and her family's faithful Chinese servant hide out for two years, wandering the mountains until the end of Chapter 1, when she's captured and he's left for dead. Tarzan and the American flight crew rescue her in Chapter 5, and she quickly learns how to make bows and arrows and becomes a good shot at guns too. Capt. Jerry Lucas is initially disturbed that this sweet little blond girl has not only learned to hate but exults in it, while she argues that her hatred is pure and good.
     Jerry looked up to see Corrie disentangling the slung rifle from the body of the other J**. He saw her standing above her victim like an avenging goddess. Three times she drove the bayonet into the breast of the soldier. The American watched the girl's face. It was not distorted by rage or hate or vengeance. It was illuminated by a divine light of exaltation.
      She turned to Jerry. "This is what I saw them do to my father. I feel happier now. I only wish that he had been alive."
      "You are magnificent," said Jerry.
Some other Burroughs women have killed in self-defense, but she's the only one I know who gets to go to the full length of glorying in her frequent revenge killing, and is rewarded by Lucas' love and the adoration of the rest of the flight crew.
Sarina (no last name) doesn't get quite as much page space as Corrie, but she is the most badass Burroughs woman of all, who is allowed to succeed. We encounter her as a member of a group of bandits, sleeping with their chief. She is a 35-year-old Eurasian, daughter of a Dutch pirate and on the other side, granddaughter of a headhunter and of a cannibal, and has served time in prison for murder. She sees Corrie, whose parents she knew, and decides to join Corrie's band instead.
    "When I got in trouble, your father hired a fine attorney to defend me. But it did no good. Justice is not for Eurasians, or perhaps I should say mercy is not for Eurasians. I was guilty, but there were circumstances that would have been in my favor had I been white. That is all past. Because your father and mother were kind to me and helped me, I shall help you."
Sgt. "Shrimp" Rosetti, who grew up in gangland Chicago but is good-hearted despite his lack of schooling and initial mistrust of women, falls like a ton of bricks for Sarina. She thinks he's cute, and learns that he is brave, so she gets a happy ending too. It is entertaining to imagine her back in Chicago after the war, correcting Rosetti's English (she was well taught by Catholic missionaries) and terrorizing his neighborhood.

So there you have it. By the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs' books are still full of racism, but he admits through character backstories that colonialism may contain elements of systemic oppression, and he allows women to be out-and-out killers without suffering social consequences. Instead of letting only virginal white women prosper, he writes a murderous, mixed-race, middle-aged Bad Girl who is Winning at Life.

I'm not at all saying that it is necessary for a modern SFF reader to read ERB. There are numerous very objectionable elements in his books, and there are many entertaining modern writers whose works are not full of cringeworthy moments. However, for someone who is digging into the history of the genre, Edgar Rice Burroughs offers many points of interest, including several surprisingly strong female characters.



*Objectionable elements in The Efficiency Expert: 
1. The Lizard refers to Jimmy as "a white guy" as a compliment, meaning he's a good guy. Google says "white" originally meant radiant or clear, but by the 1870s it was used as slang for fair and honorable. I doubt Burroughs meant to use this word in a racial way here, but a modern reader may find it jarring. Growing up in the South, I only ever heard that expression used sarcastically, e.g. "That's mighty white of you." YMMV.
2. Burroughs describes the inferior boxer Young Brophy as "a pu*** fighter" -- and doesn't use asterisks. The Language Log blog says the word originally meant sweet and amiable, but applied to men came to stand for weak and effeminate. Language Log says this is parallel evolution for the slang for female private parts, but definitely then and now is a pejorative applied to men. I doubt ERB meant Jimmy thought of Brophy as homosexual, just kind of feeble or cowardly, but it's an ugly term.
3. Perhaps more objectionable than those words is the fact that apparently in ERB's version of 1919 Chicago, no people of color live there, or move in any circles that the protagonist encounters, despite his activities throughout various levels of society. One might suppose that POC live in ERB's Chicago but he simply doesn't mention them, except that he does state (neutrally) that a married pair of landlords are Jews.
4. Not really objectionable, but it's definitely weird that the book, published in 1919, does not mention The Great War or its veterans AT ALL, although it does mention the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. I guess Jimmy missed the war by staying in college.

My debut on Twitch

I've started watching a couple of Twitch streams with nice, friendly chat groups during the month that I've been working from home. It's easy, non-demanding background stuff to keep me company while I'm working, or after work, and occasionally I think of something clever or kind to say in the chat texts. It feels much more socially connected than just watching TV and maybe talking to someone about it later.

One of those Twitch streams is ArvanEleron, devoted to games of various types, usually either watching the host playing video games solo or watching groups play RPGs, although sometimes the host just talks about various game-related topics. Also, sometimes he digresses and talks about politics from a liberal/progressive slant, and he throws in jokes and literary references (he's a literature professor), and the chat shares jokes and cheers him on, and members cheer each other too.

Once every two months, Arvan holds "Arv Streams Dungeons & Dragons with Viewers" -- i.e, he plays with some of his viewers instead of solo or with pro guests. That happened Saturday night, and he asked for volunteer viewers to play D&D with him online. He forgave my lack of webcam since I have a good microphone, courtesy of my sister, so I got to play!

Here is a link to the Twitch stream. 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/596166779  

I'm not sure how long it will be up - probably a week at most -- and then there will be a gap, and it will go to YouTube eventually.

The recording totals 4:42:50, but fear not, there is quite a lot of chatting and setup before the game begins. You can first hear my voice starting at about 1:27:10, although you will occasionally see text comments from me (trishemats) in the chat text prior to that. We continue setup, and I make some jokes.

The characters and players are introduced starting at about 1:41:00.

The actual game starts around 1:49:15. The game ends around 4:21:50 although the talking continues for another 20 minutes or so.

I play Thistle, a halfling rogue (very traditional character). The character sheet Arvan sent me had quite a lot of backstory on it, which explains some of the mysterious actions I take during the adventure.

The other Twitch stream I've been watching lately is the Rusty Quill, associated with the Rusty Quill Gaming podcast and creators of the Magnus Archive horror podcast. The games I've seen played there range from simple tanks-ships-planes shooters to tech horror like Soma to a hilarious stick-figure Weird West thing, but the chat room is super sweet and supportive, of the hosts and of each other. But watch out for puns in the chat!


Update: The D&D with Viewers: Lost Mine of Phandalver show is no longer available on Twitch, but it's up on YouTube now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFN12RweGc4

Roundup of my podcasts in 2019-20

2019 was a very busy year for me, so this is a very belated roundup of my podcast activities released that year. I am also including my podcasts from 2020 so far.

First of all, I appeared on Storium Arc, the podcast that discusses various aspects of Storium.com, the online storytelling game. It's sort of like a role-playing game without dice, or like a round-robin writing game. Usually a host/narrator sets up a world/conflicts, and players/writers take turns saying what their characters do and feel. I've been a member since 2016 and have written more than 49,000 words in various vignettes.
One game that I completed in November 2018, originally titled Vampires Vs. Marines but later retitled The Twilight War, was picked as the original Arc-eology podcast, a subcast of Storium Arc that focuses on specific games/stories. The podcast hosts Chris, Mickey and Zachary interviewed host Tacronicus (Jim Sebastian), me and fellow writers TimWB (Tim) and Swede (David):
http://storiumarc.com/episode/arc-eology-twilight-war/
Content warning: graphic violence and deaths

I continued being one of the Skiffy and Fanty crew and co-hosts. The Skiffy and Fanty Show was one of the six finalists for the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Podcast! I went to Ireland and met some of the crew in person instead of just over the Internet! It was amazing! I didn't get a trophy, but I got a shiny rocket pin and an exclusive dinner, and sat in the auditorium for the awards show and clapped for the winners!
https://skiffyandfanty.com/announcements/2019hugoawardthanks/
The nomination was for 2018 episodes, of course.

Here are the Skiffy and Fanty episodes that I appeared on in 2019:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/356lookingbackmovingforward/
I couldn't make it to the scheduled recording, but I sent them a voice clip with my thoughts.
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangers9memory/
Discussion of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosiverse book "Memory" with Paul Weimer, Alex Acks, Kate Sherrod and my sister, Sarah Elkins!
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/358alasdairstuartmargueritekenner/
Jen Zink and I interview Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner, the CEO and COO of the Escape Artists podcast group (Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders.
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangersshorts4mexicanxanthology/
Brandon O'Brien, Daniel Haeusser and I discuss A Larger Reality: Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural Margins / Una realidad más amplia: Historias desde la periferia bicultural edited by Libia Brenda
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangers10komarr/
Stina Leicht, Paul Weimer and I discuss LMB's Komarr.
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/torturecinema92starcrash/
Jen Zink, Shaun Duke and I discuss Starcrash, a terrible 1978/79 movie, in a Torture Cinema episode. The torture is the badness of the movie, not anything gory.
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangers11acivilcampaign/
Kate Sherrod, Alex Acks, Stina Leicht, Paul Weimer and I discuss probably my favorite LMB Vorkosiverse book, A Civil Campaign.
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/atm80terminatordarkfate/
A lot of people, including me before this fall, preferred to act as though the Terminator saga ended with T2 or after The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But did you know that Terminator: Dark Fate, which came out this fall, was actually great? It both subverted and extended some of the mythology in ways that Alex Acks and I found incredibly pleasing! Listen to us rave!

I continued the Supergirl Supercast, reviews of The CW's Supergirl episodes.
Supergirl S4E10 Review: “Suspicious Minds” with David Schaub and Brianna Taeuber
Supergirl S4E11 Review: “Blood Memory” with David Schaub, Deanna Chapman and Sarah Elkins
Supergirl S4E13 Review: “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” with David Schaub
Supergirl S4E16 Review: “House of L” with David Schaub
Supergirl S4E17 Review: “All About Eve” with David Schaub and Deanna Chapman
Supergirl S4E18 Review: “Crime and Punishment” with David Schaub
Supergirl S4E19 Review: “American Dreamer” with David Schaub and Deanna Chapman
Supergirl S4E20 Review: “Will the Real Miss Tessmacher Please Stand Up?” with David Schaub
Supergirl S4E21 Review: “Red Dawn” with David Schaub and Deanna Chapman
Supergirl S4E22 Review: “The Quest for Peace” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E01 Review: “Event Horizon” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E02 Review: “Stranger Beside Me” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E03 Review: “Blurred Lines” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E04 Review: “In Plain Sight” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E05 Review: “Dangerous Liaisons” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E06 Review: “Confidence Women” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E07 Review: “Tremors” with David Schaub and Deanna Chapman
Supergirl S5E08 Review: “The Wrath of Rama Khan” with David Schaub
All of the Supercast episodes are collected here:
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/supergirl/

Now, I'll go ahead and start my 2020 list instead of creating a separate list right now. I may break it off in a separate post later.

I made my debut on another podcast today! The SFF Audio podcast is one that I've been listening to for quite a while. They discuss mostly classic, public domain science fiction and fantasy stories. Usually they release a book one week and have the discussion the next week, although sometimes for a short story they'll combine them for an episode. On Twitter, I mentioned my favorite obscure Edgar Rice Burroughs book, The Efficiency Expert, set in 1919 Chicago (no SFF elements). After some conversation, the host Jesse Willis invited me onto his podcast to discuss it. My Skiffy and Fanty buddy Paul Weimer joined us, along with Evan Lampe.
https://www.sffaudio.com/the-sffaudio-podcast-572-readalong-the-efficiency-expert-by-edgar-rice-burroughs/
SFF Audio packaged the Librivox reading by Delmar H. Dolbier in one convenient 5-hour podcast here:
https://www.sffaudio.com/the-sffaudio-podcast-571-audiobook-the-efficiency-expert-by-edgar-rice-burroughs/
Spoiler: I have already recorded a couple more podcasts with SFF audio!
Also, I plan to write more about The Efficiency Expert in a later post. Brief content warning for now: a few uses of objectionable language and an offscreen character death.


I have continued podcasting on Supergirl:
Supergirl S5E09 Review: “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Parts 1-3” with David Schaub
Supergirl Supercast: “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Parts 4-5” with David Schaub. Doesn't technically include a Supergirl episode, but she's in all the Crisis episodes, as part of the CW crossover.
Supergirl S5E10 Review: “The Bottle Episode” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E11 Review: “Back From the Future, Part One” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E12 Review: “Back From the Future, Part Two” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E13 Review: “It’s a Super Life” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E14 Review: “The Bodyguard” with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E15 Review: “Reality Bytes" with David Schaub
Supergirl S5E16 Review: “Alex in Wonderland” with David Schaub.

UPDATE:

We finished reviewing the coronavirus-truncated season with just two more episodes:

Supergirl S5E17 Review: "Deus Lex Machina" with David Schaub and Alan Yu

Supergirl S5E18 Review: "Immortal Kombat" with David Schaub and Alan Yu

The Skiffy and Fanty show has dialed itself back a little, so I haven't appeared in any episodes so far this year. However, I still have a Reading Rangers episode (on Winterfair Gifts) in the can, which will hopefully be released eventually.


My podcasts from 2018 are listed here:
http://whatsthewordnow.blogspot.com/2018/06/roundup-of-my-podcasts-2018.html

and my podcasts from before then are listed here:
http://whatsthewordnow.blogspot.com/2017/02/podcast-roundup.html

Also, I have read some chapters for two Librivox books:
The Child of the Moat by Ian Bernard Stoughton Holborn
(chapters 3, 14, 18, and 21)
I wrote a full blog post about it here:
http://whatsthewordnow.blogspot.com/2018/01/audiobook-child-of-moat.html

and
The Secret Power by Marie Corelli (chapters 14 and 15)

I also sang in Librivox's 13th Anniversary Song with other readers and volunteers.

Ethiopian explorations in literature

I took a break from my Hugo Awards reading to finish a couple of overdue library books. Usually I stick to fiction during my time off, since I read nonfiction all day for my job, but these were an exception. I've been doing character-backstory research for a game I'm playing/writing at www.Storium.com and needed more of a personal feel than the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Ethiopia could provide. So I turned to my lovely local New Hanover County Public Library and found two books pertaining to Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie. They are "The Wife's Tale: A Personal History" by Aida Edemariam and "The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat" by Ryszard Kapuscinski. They are about as different as two biographies can be that cover the same era in the same country, but they are both fascinating, and the combination of perspectives is illuminating.

The Wife's Tale (2018) is the story of Yetemegnu, an Ethiopian woman who lived from about 1916 to 2013, from feudalism and monarchy, through fascist invasion and occupation, back to monarchy, through revolutions, and into modern times. A child bride, married to an Orthodox Christian cleric, she was repressed for much of her life, but remained strong and smart. After her husband was imprisoned, she petitioned the emperor for his release, or at least a fair trial, and he agreed to hear the case. But her husband died, and she led her family after that, raising the children, and arguing court cases herself to protect their property, and eventually learning to read.

The memoir is written by her granddaughter, a journalist for The Guardian, who had heard many stories told by and about Yetemegnu. It is intensely personal, including details of beatings by her unjustifiably jealous husband, and many conversations with her relatives, and her dreams and religious experiences. It is also extremely immersive in Yetemegnu's way of life, everything from the expectations placed on her, to the food she cooked for her family and for her husband's many guests, to details of clothing and how the household was run.

Through all these personal details, and watching the rise and fall of Yetemegnu's husband, and what happened to some of her children, a vision of Ethiopian history is also revealed. Strict hierarchical traditionalism is combined with the arbitrariness of courtly and churchly intrigues, punctuated by the Italian occupation and conflicts of when cooperating to survive might turn into collaboration, and then the revolutionary periods affect Yetemegnu's family.

Parts of the memoir are a little hard to get through because of the emotions sparked by what is happening, but it's still a very accessible book, told clearly and plainly. This sometimes strict but always loving woman is worth getting to know, through her granddaughter's words.

The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (1978) is not a personal book, though it contains personal perspectives. It is a compilation of interviews with some of the former members of Haile Selassie's court, after he was deposed and they went into hiding. Kapuscinski, a Polish foreign correspondent who'd reported from Ethiopia before, sought out these eyewitnesses and interwove their descriptions and anecdotes, with occasional explanatory bridges of his own writing, into a coherent narrative of what happened leading up to, during, and immediately after Selassie's ouster in 1974 -- as coherent as you can get when courtiers are explaining everything through the lenses of their own perspectives and agendas, anyway.

I was amazed and appalled to read about how the emperor maintained his power throughout most of his reign, until it melted away. He kept his entire court off-balance all the time, raising the status of some and lowering others' each day during the Hour of Assignments, so that the courtiers and ministers had a hard time trying to maintain any momentum, let alone power bases. He also disapproved of any efforts at reforms made by anyone other than himself; apparently, he alone was to be the dispenser of mercy, justice, and any improvements in the people's lives; he alone was to be their father-figure, their savior. He denied reports of mismanagement and waste by his officials, sometimes elevating them to show that they couldn't possibly be guilty (and he couldn't possibly have made mistakes by appointing them); he and his court decried "troublemakers" whenever complaints arose.

The emperor made ambiguous verbal statements, written down by the Minister of the Pen, so that he could claim any unpopular decisions had been misinterpreted. He was a master of evasion, avoiding capture by the Italians before World War II, and surviving the attempted coup by Mengistu in 1960; when the Army encroached on his power, making arrests in his name, he appeared to accept their decisions; when he was finally officially deposed, he said "If the revolution is good for the people, then I am for the revolution."

The interviewees often speculate about the reasons for their emperor's habits and decisions, but they don't know, because he rarely, if ever, trusted anyone enough to reveal his thinking. Some of the interviewees seem to maintain their adoration of the emperor; others use overtly respectful language that yet seems to be incredibly sarcastic, given the ironic juxtapositions with the events being described.

This book has an incredible way with words. I have no idea how true the 1983 English translation of the Polish book (probably mostly translated from Ethiopian originally) is to what those courtiers actually said, but the phrases are often poetic -- conveying mood and mindset with elegance.

Some examples:

"All the people surrounding the Emperor are just like that--on their knees, and with knives."

"In a poor country, money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud because of your hedge."

"Yes, looking was a provocation, it was blackmail, and everyone was afraid to lift his eyes, afraid that somewhere--in the air, in a corner, behind an arras, in a crack--he would see a shining eye, like a dagger."

"There was such a fear of the precipice in the Palace that everyone tried to hold on to His Majesty, still not knowing that the whole court--though slowly and with dignity--was sliding toward the edge of the cliff."

"And how can anyone justify not having achievements in today's world? Certainly it was possible to invent, to count things twice, to explain, but then troublemakers would immediately stand up and hurl calumnies, and by that time such indecency and perversity had spread that people would rather believe the troublemakers than the Emperor."

"That's it, my friend--His Venerable Majesty wanted to rule over everything. Even if there was a rebellion, he wanted to rule over the rebellion, to command a mutiny, even if it was directed against his own reign."

I do wonder how many of those courtiers surrounding the emperor were out for their own advantage, and how many were just doing the best they could to survive in that court of chaos? It's hard to say, but it's pretty clear that anyone who'd told the emperor he was on the wrong path would have been swept away.

Anyway, I feel lucky that my recreational interests led me to read these two books. The Emperor, despite its specificity of period and place, has some important things to say about autocracy and access to power, and the wise and foolish uses thereof, which are relevant to here and now. The Wife's Tale tells us about a woman whose life was very different from most of ours, but she has a lot to teach anyone about perseverance.

Aside from the life lessons, it's really interesting to steep myself for a little while in another culture. These two books are both great, in very different ways, and I highly recommend them both.

2018 Hugos: Novellas

As I continue my Hugos vote-reading, I come to Novellas! This category has really been growing in accessibility for the past few years, not only in the voter packet but out in the wild. My lovely local library had several of them, and ebooks mean you can find novellas easily by themselves instead of just serialized in magazines or contained as the cornerstone of an anthology, with some short stories to pad out the publication to book length.

Mind you, I've read some "novellas" that just feel like Part One of what should be a book-length book, but the best feel like complete stories, with tighter focus than book-length books but a little more room for exploration than short stories or novelettes.

The nominees for this year's award:

• All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
• “And Then There Were (N-One),” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)
• Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)
• The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)
• River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

"And Then There Were (N-One)" is mildly enjoyable, but I really don't see why it's drawn the accolades it has. The idea of encountering multiple versions of oneself, from various universes where one has made slightly different choices, is not new. I've heard several stories on this theme from Escape Pod and others in the past few years, my favorite being "Send in the Ninjas" by Michelle Anne King on Podcastle. The murder mystery here isn't all that special to me either. However, I'm OK with the open-ended ending, because the premise implies that all choices would be made at the end, spawning new variations of the multiverses.

"Binti: Home" is interesting, and let us find out much more about Binti, her homeland, and her conflicts. However, although "Binti" stood on its own as a first story, B:H really feels like a part-two excerpt from a novel. It posits as a fundamental piece of her origin something that, if it was even hinted at in the first novella, I never caught; moreover, the ending is a cliffhanger. So this isn't at all high on my list of votes.

"The Black Tides of Heaven" is interesting, although I never got emotionally attached to the characters. It's disturbing what happens to some of them, but it feels removed, like an old fairy tale. However, I understand from Paul Weimer's review on Skiffy and Fanty that the twin/sequel to this novella, The Red Threads of Fortune, explores the characters' choices some more, after the events of the first, and deconstructs some elements. I'd like to read that sometime.

"Down Among the Sticks and Bones" is a prequel to the excellent "Every Heart a Doorway," which I think was my top novella vote for 2017, although I might have voted for the amazing "A Taste of Honey" by Kai Ashante Wilson instead. EHAD is about a school for children who've had portal adventures in other worlds and have trouble adjusting when they come back home, and it's great. DAtSaB is about two sisters who were at that school, and their repressed childhoods, and their lives and choices after they go through the portal to a world that's grim in different ways, before coming out. But I already knew how everything would turn out for them, and how they would turn out, so while the prequel is mildly interesting, it lacks impact.

"River of Teeth" is a story with great worldbuilding and interesting characters. I love this alternate world where hippopotami infest the Louisiana bayous, which is a thing that actually almost happened. The people in this world are sharply drawn, if some of them are a little flat, and there's a lot of good action. However, stories where people feel impelled to do something that they know will probably doom them, and don't seem to struggle much against their fate, aren't compelling to me. I was very excited waiting for this to come out, and in fact pre-ordered it, but I haven't gotten around to reading the sequel.

"All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries" is my favorite in this category this year. I have loved Martha Wells' fantasy for a long time (Wheel of the Infinite, The Death of the Necromancer, etc.), so I was excited when I heard she was going to try science fiction, and pre-ordered it. What a debut this is! Murderbot, as the protagonist calls itself (I think the pronoun was "it" IIRC), is a guard cyborg who just wants to be left alone to watch its soap operas, and conceal that it's hacked its control software, but the people it's assigned to protect are attacked, and it has to figure out what's happening and how to save them, and itself. I just adore this story, and have reread it several times. I had been putting off getting the next one in the series, due to my mountainous TBR pile, but I just bought it, to save as a treat for myself (we'll see how long that lasts -- hopefully until after the Hugos voting period, at least) and to encourage one of my favorite authors to keep writing in this genre.

2018 Hugo nominees: Movies

This year, I had actually seen all the Hugo nominees for longform dramatic presentation on the big screen. (Why don't they just call this categories movies, you may ask? Because one could nominate other longform presentations here, such as miniseries or audio dramas. But it's almost always movies.)

Best Dramatic Presentaton - Long Form

Blade Runner 2049, written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Alcon Entertainment / Bud Yorkin Productions / Torridon Films / Columbia Pictures)

Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele (Blumhouse Productions / Monkeypaw Productions / QC Entertainment)

The Shape of Water, written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, directed by Guillermo del Toro (TSG Entertainment / Double Dare You / Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson (Lucasfilm, Ltd.)

Thor: Ragnarok, written by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost; directed by Taika Waititi (Marvel Studios)

Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder & Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs, directed by Patty Jenkins (DC Films / Warner Brothers)

Blade Runner 2049 was an amazing movie, continuing, extending, and sometimes subverting the conversations from the original movie. For details, please take a look at the review I wrote for Skiffy and Fanty. I think my own best sentence from 2017 is the conclusion of that review:

You can keep refining the tests and moving the goalposts for who gets to matter or make decisions or be seen as one of you, but only at the risk of losing your own humanity.

However, as breathtaking as it was, it's at the bottom of my Hugo voting list. It was brilliantly executed, but it's not original. You can see it without knowing the first movie (let alone Philip K. Dick's book), but the movie would lose a lot of its resonance. All the other movies were amazing on their own.

The Shape of Water was a lovely movie, and I spent at least half an hour afterward discussing it with my friends in the lobby. And then I discussed it again on a Skiffy and Fanty podcast. I was really impressed by it, yet I don't feel much of an urge to see it again. I know other people who'll enjoy re-seeing it and reanalyzing it, but I feel like I pretty much got what I wanted to out of it. So it's fifth on the list for me.

The Last Jedi adds some original storylines to the Star Wars saga, and there were quite a few moments I really adored, and I'll happily watch it again when it comes my way. However, there were some eye-rolling moments too, and it really didn't hang together too well for me. I understand some of the meta reasoning and character development behind the "side quest," and I think those were good choices, but the movie just didn't quite cohere for me. So it's just fourth.

I'm having a really time with my third and second rankings. I've already gone back and changed my ballot once, and I may do so again. But for the moment...

Thor: Ragnarok is another movie that doesn't really stand on its own. Anyone who hasn't seen a significant number of Thor and Avengers movies already is going to miss a lot of callbacks and punchlines. But for someone like me who has seen them, it is SO SO good! I was laughing really hard through a whole lot of this movie, from the arena reunion to the classic "Get help!" maneuver. And yet, this movie also has great action, moving moments, and layers upon layers, literally, as Thor and Loki find out the covered-up truth about previously heroic-seeming Asgard's colonialist, conquering past. I'll definitely be watching it again when I get the chance. Ranked third, currently, for me.

Wonder Woman forever crushed the myth that an action movie starring a woman can't succeed. It broke the box-office ceiling in a major way, and it deserved all its accolades. It wasn't a perfect movie, but it got so much right, and moved me so much. I saw it twice, wrote a pretty glowing review for Skiffy and Fanty, and also discussed it in a podcast.

There was never any question about my first choice for the Hugo. Get Out absolutely blew me away, and it astounded a whole lot of other people, too. It proved that writer-director Jordan Peele is a master at drama and horror in addition to the comedy for which I first knew him. It very much deserved the Oscar it won for best original screenplay, and I'd have been happy to see it win Best Picture. I think it's a perfect movie, and I wouldn't change a frame. Here's a Skiffy and Fanty podcast where three crewmates, including me, and two guests all talk about the many reasons we all love this movie. Winner!

2018 Hugo Nominees: graphic stories

For a really thoughtful look at the 2018 Hugo Award nominees for Best Graphic Story, I highly recommend my Skiffy and Fanty crewmate Stephen Geigen-Miller's analysis.  He didn't name his top picks, though. So I'll give my quick reactions here.

Best Graphic Story nominees

Black Bolt, Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed, illustrated by Christian Ward, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Marvel)Bitch Planet, Volume 2: President Bitch, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrated by Valentine De Landro and Taki Soma, colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Image Comics)Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)My Favorite Thing is Monsters, written and illustrated by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)Paper Girls, Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher (Image Comics)Saga, Volume 7, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)

I really loved the first few volumes of Saga. But nothing moved me in this one; it just felt like echoes of what started out as big, fresh ideas. Moreover, in no way does Volume 7 stand on its own. The graphics are great, as always, but there's just not enough story for me. I'm not putting No Award above this on my ballot, but I'd be happier with any other entrant winning.

The 2017 entrants for both Paper Girls and Monstress were big improvements on their previous years, for me. The stories were much more coherent than in the first volumes, and that gave me room to feel more empathy for the protagonists.

Bitch Planet, Vol. 2 was a huge improvement over last year's entry, in my eyes. Vol. 1 just kept hitting me again and again with the horrors of a female-oppressing dystopia, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. Vol. 2 weaves together disparate threads and gives considerable forward momentum to the story. This is one of my top three picks, and I'd be fine with it winning.

However, choosing my winner between Black Bolt and My Favorite Thing is Monsters is really difficult.

BB,V1 tells the story of a sometime king, imprisoned and learning about and from the other prisoners, and resisting torture with them. It tells a complete story, and a very satisfying one at that. The art is bold and striking. I'm thrilled that Black Bolt's success has led to other Marvel projects for writer Saladin Ahmed, and presumably Christian Ward too, although I don't follow his career (or Twitter) like I do Ahmed's.

MFTIM is something really unusual, told as the diary/art journals of Karen Reyes, a girl who pretends to be a werewolf so she can try to avoid being afraid and sad so much of the time. She tries to investigate the mysterious death of her upstairs neighbor, but she also writes and draws about other things in her life, and sprawls across the pages with asides and insets instead of filling them with panel-panel-panel like so many comic books do.  I don't feel quite right with where the story stops, but I'm enchanted to have had this chance to go through part of Karen's life with her. I'm very glad that my lovely local library has this graphic novel, and I hope a lot of people read it. That's why I'm giving My Favorite Thing Is Monsters my top vote for the Hugo Award, to try to boost awareness for this amazing debut work by writer/artist Emil Ferris.

Hugo podcast nominees, and other favorites of mine

The 2018 Hugo Awards finalists for best fancast (podcast by fans) are
The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace
Fangirl Happy Hour, presented by Ana Grilo and Renay Williams
Galactic Suburbia, presented by Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce and Tansy Rayner Roberts; produced by Andrew Finch
Sword and Laser, presented by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt
Verity!, presented by Deborah Stanish, Erika Ensign, Katrina Griffiths, L.M. Myles, Lynne M. Thomas, and Tansy Rayner Roberts


I'll admit I didn't nominate any of these, because I only nominated the two podcasts in which I frequently participate: The Skiffy and Fanty Show, which reviews books and movies, interviews creators and editors, and occasionally comments on fan issues, and the Supergirl Supercast, a part of The Incomparable's family of podcasts, which reviews episodes of the CW's TV show. I didn't think the Supercast had much of a chance, but Skiffy and Fanty came close to being a finalist once, according to that year's Hugos longlist.


Most of this year's finalists have been on the list before, but I listened to at least three 2017 episodes from each show. That was a lot harder for some nominees than others, but I tried to ignore that and judge them on the basis of the podcasts as one would normally listen, not the faultiness of the links they submitted for the Hugo packets.

The Coode Street Podcast, however, once again had technical issues (echoes, reverb) with one of their suggested episodes. It features some very interesting interviews and discussions, but I'm not voting for it to win until they can submit at least three trouble-free episodes in one year's packet.

Ditch Diggers provides fascinating discussions about the craft and business of writing and other forms of creation.

Fangirl Happy Hour is a very pleasant listening experience. I really enjoyed their discussions about fandom and about books/media.

Galactic Suburbia has some very interesting discussions about books/media and fandom, but all the stuff about the hosts' personal lives and careers is only interesting if you're interested in those personal lives and careers.

If I were a regular watcher of Dr. Who, I would have voted for Verity. It's a great discussion of the show with deep analyses of the episodes and their implications, and the fandom, interesting even to an infrequent watcher like me.

Sword and Laser is my favorite this year. It starts out with "Quick Burns," news about new/upcoming releases, and then the hosts talk about a book. The discussions are thoroughly engaging. This is the one podcast on the list that I'm adding to my regular listening.

In case you're interested, here are the podcasts I've already been following:
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me: The NPR quiz show, one of the few I'm compelled to listen to as soon as it comes out, because it's highly topical and highly amusing.
Cryptic Canticles Dracula RadioPlay Experience: A full-cast narration of Dracula by Bram Stoker, which releases an episode every day that the book has a diary entry, letter, telegram etc. Another I listen to every day it's released.
Coastline, a regional topic-focused newsmagazine produced by my local public radio station, WHQR.
Ken Rudin's Political Junkie: Topical politics with a lot of historical context. I usually either listen that day or skip it.

Revolutions, because Mike Duncan does a great job of bringing history alive.
In Our Time from BBC has great scholarly discussions about a variety of historical and sometimes scientific topic.
Ask Me Another has fun pop-culture quizzes.
Storium Arc has great discussions about Storium, a collaborative storytelling site, sort of like roleplaying games by bulletin board.
The Incomparable has great discussions about books, media, and culture, plus game shows, roleplaying games, radio plays, etc.
Tea and Jeopardy has interviews by Emma Newman of various writers and other creators, set in a very entertaining framework with an evil butler.

Finally, what brought me to start listening to podcasts in the first place: audio fiction!
There are a great many fiction podcasts out there. Many are magazines with self-contained stories:
The Escape Artist family is what I started listening to long ago. I'd be hard-pressed to choose between Escape Pod (science fiction) and Podcastle (fantasy), but I also listen to Pseudopod (horror -- it has great, thoughtful intros and outros by the host, although I can't always bear to listen all the way through) and Cast of Wonders (children's/YA speculative fiction).
Uncanny Magazine has great stories and poems, although there's quite a lot of chatter from the co-editors about their personal/professional lives chatter before the fiction starts. But they're very enthusiastic!
I also listen to Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Apex, although I tend to get backlogged on all of them. I used to have a long commute and don't now, so I tend to catch up while doing housework, exercising or going on long trips.

I also listen to some serial fiction podcasts.
Welcome to Night Vale is sort of like listening to public/underground radio in a very weird town. Many episodes are self-contained, but there are long ongoing arcs.
SAYER (I am Sayer) is sort of like a cross between Night Vale and a game of Paranoia, narrated by the computer. It's nearly always creepy, always interesting, and occasionally heartbreaking. I nearly had to pull over my car and cry at the finale ... but after a break, the show resumed with Kickstartered seasons, which I am enthusiastically supporting.
Metamor City (well, actually, it's The Raven and the Writing Desk now, but I'm old-school) is secondary-world urban fantasy with magic, vampires, shapeshifters, telepaths, cops... some short stories and some book narrations. Fantastic worldbuilding and characterizations.
This Kaiju Life: What's it like to work in a kaiju containment facility? Funny and wry.

Done but not forgotten:
The Drabblecast: Extremely interesting weird stories with a great host/narrator. Please check out the archive! This contains my favorite two-part podcast ever, Mongoose, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, about a guy and his cheshire, hunting toves and raths on a space station, trying to prevent a bandersnatch incursion.
We're Alive: Incredibly well-done full-cast zombie apocalypse tale. The story is over, although the creator has done/is doing a few supplemental projects, so if you're a completionist, try this.
The Mask of Inanna: Won the 2012 Parsec award. Combines a fictional old radio drama with modern intrigue. Amazing 10-part story!

Hugo/Nebula Shorts

I've started devouring the Hugo Awards packet for this year (voting in 2018, written in 2017). I'm going to try to write a post each time I finish and vote for a category, although work and life are likely to interfere with that goal.

I had already read all but two of the Hugo short stories for the Skiffy and Fanty podcast about the Nebula finalists, so that put me ahead. And since all these stories are free to read (or hear) online, I thought this category would be the best starting point.

The stories on both lists are
"Carnival Nine" by Caroline M. Yoachim, text and podcast (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2017)
"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" by Fran Wilde, text and podcast (Uncanny, September 2017)
"Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, text and podcast (Uncanny, September/October 2017)
"Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse, text and podcast (Apex, August 2017)

The stories on the Hugo list but not Nebulas are
"The Martian Obelisk" by Linda Nagata, text only (Tor.com, July 19, 2017)

"Sun, Moon, Dust" by Ursula Vernon, text and podcast (Uncanny, May/June 2017)

And the stories on the Nebula list but not Hugos are

“The Last Novelist (or a Dead Lizard in the Yard)” by Matthew Kressel, text only (Tor.com, March 15, 2017)

“Utopia, LOL?” by Jamie Wahls, text and podcast (Strange Horizons, June 5, 2017)

The Nebulas-only stories had points of interest, but neither of them felt to me like award winners, so I'll focus on the others.

"The Martian Obelisk" is an interesting character study of a woman amid an apocalypse, trying to build a monument so that something will remain after humanity is gone. It left me a little hopeful at the end, but that didn't feel quite earned to me.

"Sun, Moon, Dust" was a very warm-hearted story about someone who inherits a magic sword, which hosts spirits of great warriors, but he just wants to be a farmer. It's a fairly simple story, but deep, and if you want to read or hear something to make you feel good, try it.

"Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" is unlikely to make any reader/listener feel good. First off, it's told in second person, and I always resist any story that tells me that "you" do this or "you" feel that,  but it turns out that this is a very good choice for this kind of story. It's about an Indian who works for Vision Quest, providing an "authentic" experience for the virtual tourists. Was he displaced, or did he ever belong in the first place? It's very meta, and interesting, and heart-wrenching.

"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" is also in second person, and also uncomfortable, by design. "You" are being taken through an increasingly disturbing museum, being confronted with hurtful things that have happened, and being transformed by the experience. It hints of horror in which "you" are somewhat complicit. It's creepy and very interesting.

"Carnival Nine" had the best worldbuilding among the nominees, in my opinion. It's set in a world where all the people run on clockwork, with a mainspring that the "maker" winds up in a limited number of turns each night when they're asleep, and everyone is keenly aware of how much energy they have to make it through each day. They can reconstruct themselves, and their children, to an extent, but only the "maker" determines how strong or weak your mainspring is. The protagonist, Zee, has a good mainspring, but she's faced with constant choices about what to do and who else to help. I really felt for her in those choices and situations, and was fascinated by the world. The story also made me and other readers think of Spoon Theory, in which real-life people with disabilities have limited, often random-seeming, numbers of things that they can accomplish in a day; this fictional world appeared to express that very well.

"Fandom for Robots" was an incredibly sweet little story about a sentient robot who becomes a fan of an anime show that features a robot and a human, and starts writing collaborative fanfiction set in that world. The readers believe that the robot is just a human writing AS a robot, who never breaks character. This is the kind of story that makes me want to hug it.

Voting for these stories was hard, because they're all good. But the two that I wanted to reread/rehear were "Carnival Nine" and "Fandom for Robots." I ended up making "Carnival Nine" my top pick because the worldbuilding is so interesting and Zee is such a sympathetic and interesting character. 

However, my actual favorite story from 2017 didn't make it onto either of these lists. I nominated it for the Hugos, and I'll be interested to see where it falls on the long list, when that's released in August. That story is "Texts from the Ghost War" by Alex Yuschik, podcast and text (Escape Pod, June 9, 2017). I adore this story; I've read it once and listened to it at least five times. It's a sort of epistolary tale, since it consists of texts back and forth between two people, and I enjoy that sort of story when it's done well. (In the text, the two texters are right-justified and left-justified, respectively; in the podcast, two narrators read them.) Despite that format, Yuschik provides a lot of worldbuilding, but as subtleties within the conversation, not as infodump. I heard enough to make me really interested in this world, with its ghosts that eat the present, and the mech-suit soldiers who fight them, and sharp class/money divisions, and other things. But as much as I love that subtle worldbuilding, I love even more the dialogue and interplay between the two characters, sometimes snarky,  sometimes silly, sometimes terribly serious, and sometimes, as their relationship develops ... well, I won't spoil it, but it's ADORABLE. Please read it or listen if you haven't yet!  

Note: "Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse won the Nebula Award.

Roundup of My Podcasts: 2018

I decided it's time to create a new podcast roundup for 2018 instead of making people scroll down to my post from early 2017, that I just kept updating. I'll probably do this one the same way, though.

For posts from before, please see my original podcast roundup at   http://whatsthewordnow.blogspot.com/2017/02/podcast-roundup.html 

Also, I did an individual post for The Child of the Moat, the Librivox book for which I read four chapters, in January at http://whatsthewordnow.blogspot.com/2018/01/audiobook-child-of-moat.html

For this year's roundup, I will include one post that didn't make it into the original roundup, which ended with the Supercast's review CW's 2017 crossover four-parter, "Crisis on Earth-X." The Supergirl Supercast, part of the Incomparable family of podcasts, did have one episode after that in 2017, although some of us felt it would have made more sense to end that part of the season after the crossover. The review of S3E9 "Reign" by Brianna Taeuber, Dan Drusch and me is here: https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/362/

My first podcast appearance in 2018 was on the Skiffy and Fanty Show's 2017 wrap-up and 2018 forecast, "LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: THE 2018 EDITION" at   https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/345lookingbackmovingforward/ -- which had a bunch of reviewers and creators talking mostly about high points in what they'd read and seen and what they were looking forward to seeing in the coming year.

Scheduling didn't permit me to join the S3E10 Supercast, but I was there on the S3E11 "Fort Rozz" review at https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/386/ with Michael Gabriel and David Schaub.

My next podcast appearance was on Skiffy and Fanty, reviewing "The Shape of Water" with Julia Rios, David Annandale and Caitlyn Paxson. Listen here:   https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/atm66shapeofwater/

Next on Skiffy and Fanty, Jen and I discussed "Black Southern SpecFic" with Eden Royce and Troy L. Wiggins, "including how the speculative is part of the Black Southern experience, whether or not standard genre labels fail speculative fiction written by black people from the South, what gatekeepers can do to promote Black Southern voices, and so much more."  I'll admit I said something dumb during the recording (misattributed a story to Eden), but lovely audio editor Jen edited that out, so although I didn't get to say a lot during this episode, at least I don't sound stupid.  And the discussion itself is really interesting.   https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/347blacksouthernspecfic/

Back to the Supercast, I couldn't make S3E12 "For Good" but returned for S3E13 "Both Sides Now" with David Schaub and Jess Viator:   https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/397/

In March on Skiffy and Fanty, I greatly enjoyed discussing "The Black Panther" with Jen; Brandon O'Brien, who has joined the crew; Justina Ireland; and Faridah Gbadamosi, who was last on S&F in our "Get Out" review. Here's the show:  https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/atm67blackpanther/

In April, Skiffy and Fanty launched its new "Reading Rangers: Shorts" show, in which we discuss short stories. The main Reading Rangers show is still making its way through the Vorkosigan saga. For the initial Shorts episode, Brandon O'Brien, Elizabeth Fitzgerald and I discussed the six finalists for this year's Nebula Awards:   https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangersshorts1nebula/

The Supercast did not return until the end of April, due to the CW's hiatus. In the interval, CW aired the 13-episode first season of "Black Lightning" -- it was really good and interesting, and explored how a black superhero would see a lot of different perspectives than CW's mostly whitebread heroes would (although Supergirl at least has lately moved beyond alien metaphors to reflect real-world racism problems), and I was blown away by the revelatory final episodes. I recommend it!

Supercast's S3E14 "Schott Through the Heart" was a duo with David Schaub and me:   https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/415/

I missed S3E15 of the Supercast but returned for S3E16 "Of Two Minds" with David Schaub, Brianna Taeuber and Michael Gabriel. Side note: At the beginning of the recording, I had called the show "Both Sides Now" -- but luckily, our wonderful audio editor Seth Heasley caught that, and I was able to record the real title and send the clip for her to insert. Here's the show:   https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/423/

David Schaub and I discussed S3E17 "Trinity" here:   https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/427/

I missed S3E18 but returned for S3E19 "The Fanatical" with Brianna Taeuber (and a recorded recap from David Schaub):   https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/436/

Updates will follow!

UPDATE, Dec. 17, 2018
During the summer, I participated in Librivox's 13th Anniversary Collection by singing the 13th Anniversary Song. I was one of nine Librivox volunteers who sang, separately and remotely. The Librivox editor combined our voices into one song. I'm a soprano voice and I also cheer occasionally.
Here's the 13th anniversary page, with our song as one listing:
https://ia802904.us.archive.org/19/items/13thanniversarycollection_1808_librivox/thirteen_13annivsong_128kb.mp3
And here's a direct link to the song, which autoplays:
https://ia802904.us.archive.org/19/items/13thanniversarycollection_1808_librivox/thirteen_13annivsong_128kb.mp3

Supercast episodes from June through December, not including the Crossover:
Supergirl S3E20: "Dark Side of the Moon" with Brianna Taeuber and David Schaub:
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/440/
Supergirl S3E21: "Not Kansas" with David Schaub, Brianna Taeuber and Alan Yu:
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/442/
Supergirl S3E22: "Make It Reign" with Brianna Taeuber:
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/446/
Supergirl S3E23: "Battles Lost and Won" with David Schaub:
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/449/

Supergirl S4E1: "American Alien" with Brianna Taeuber, Alan Yu and Jess Viator
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/478/
Supergirl S4E2: "Fallout" with Brianna Taeuber
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/483/
Supergirl S4E3: "Man of Steel" with David Schaub
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/488/
Supergirl S4E4: "Ahimsa" with David Schaub
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/490/
Supergirl S4E5: "Parasite Lost" with Alan Yu
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/495/
Supergirl S4E6: "Call to Action" with David Schaub
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/501/
Supergirl S4E7: "Rather the Fallen Angel" with David Schaub
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/503/
Supergirl S4E8: "Bunker Hill" with David Schaub
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/509/

The discussion of the CW Crossover series for 2018 -- "Elseworlds" -- recorded Dec. 16 will be found, when published, at
https://www.theincomparable.com/teevee/supergirl/

Skiffy and Fanty discussions from June through December:
Paul Weimer and I interview Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas and Matt Peters about the 5-year anniversary of Uncanny Magazine, published Aug. 20:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/352uncannymagazine/
Reading Rangers: Brothers in Arms - Miles is in double trouble as our Vorkosiverse read-through continues! With Paul Weimer, Alex Acks and Stina Leicht, published Sept. 17:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangers7brothersinarms/
Reading Rangers: Shorts #2 - The 2018 Nommo Award, in which Brandon O'Brien, Elizabeth Fitzgerald and I discuss the nominees for a short fiction award hosted by the African Speculative Fiction Society. Published Oct. 8:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangersshorts2nommo/
Reading Rangers: Mirror Dance -- Paul Weimer, Kate Sherrod and I found uncomfortable things, and things to love, in this Vorkosiverse installment. Podcast went live on Nov. 19:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangers8mirrordance/
Reading Rangers: Shorts #3: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World, with Brandon O'Brien and Daniel Haeusser, aired on Dec. 17:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/readingrangersshorts3solarpunk/

Month of Joy: The Order of the Air by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott

I'm actually cross-posting this in June but back-dating to January because that's when the post I'm talking about here actually went up on Skiffy and Fanty. The science fiction and fantasy fan site that I co-edit had a "Month of Joy" in January, when creators from all over the blogosphere were invited to write an essay about something that provides joy to them.

My essay was about The Order of the Air series by Melissa Scott and Jo Graham. I said these are "some of my favorite comfort reads. Parts of these period adventure-fantasies are very cozy, but aside from the wonderful characters’ mutual support, love, and humor, there are also some tense and exciting action sequences, with almost ordinary people teaming up to resist evil and try to make the world better."

Check out the rest of my review here:  https://skiffyandfanty.com/blogposts/reviews/bookreviews/monthofjoymatson/

Audiobook: The Child of the Moat

I'm pleased to announce that LibriVox has released the second audiobook in which I've participated: The Child of the Moat by Ian Bernard Stoughton Holborn. I haven't had time to listen to it all yet, but I very much enjoyed reading the book.

The Child of the Moat was published in 1916 but the setting is 1557 England. A little Catholic girl and her cousin rescue a Protestant fugitive and hide him, and adventures ensue, ranging from secret messages to swordplay, plus some side missions to help other people. Aline, the protagonist, is almost too saintly to believe, but she is an *active* saint, not a languishing one, and often disobedient for a good cause. The supporting cast includes a number of interesting characters.

This is a children's book, or more specifically, subtitled A Story for Girls. The backstory behind this book is perhaps even more fascinating than the book itself. From the Librivox description:

Ian Holborn (professor of archaeology and a writer) was on board the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed, and as it sank he rescued a 12 year old girl named Avis Dolphin. She later complained that books for girls were not very interesting, so he decided to write one for her "as thrilling as any book written for boys!" 

So although it's a slightly old-fashioned book in terms of style, there are some quite progressive elements: empowerment for girls and religious freedom. I recommend it.

If you're not an audiobook fan, you can check out the text at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/53281/53281-h/53281-h.htm

And here's the audiobook link again:
https://librivox.org/the-child-of-the-moat-by-ian-bernard-stoughton-holborn/

Both LibriVox and Project Gutenberg are free, done by volunteers.

Technical notes:

The book is 30 chapters long, and I read four of them: 3, 14, 18, and 21. Mine ranged from 14 to 48 minutes long; if I recall correctly, the longest was about 7,000 words.

The hardest thing was trying to keep reasonably consistent voices for characters when I was doing the recordings months apart, between Jan. 5, 2017, and Jan. 9, 2018, although of course I would listen to my previous chapters as a refresher. One voice that I changed quite a bit was Eleanor Mowbray, because I changed my mind on how to characterize her. However, I think I was pretty consistent for Aline.

I did my best to check out pronunciations before reading, but I found out later that I mispronounced Edinburgh, which I now know should be said edinbrugh instead of like burger. At least I pronounced edin correctly, like editor instead of Eden.

Enjoy!

Movie Review: BladeRunner 2049 ('As Clear As Dreaming')

I reviewed BladeRunner 2049 on the Skiffy and Fanty website soon after the movie premiered. It was not a perfect movie, but I did think it was great in many ways.

http://skiffyandfanty.com/blogposts/reviews/moviereviews/bladerunner2049review/

I think this, the conclusion of my review, is probably the best single sentence I wrote in 2017:

You can keep refining the tests and moving the goalposts for who gets to matter or make decisions or be seen as one of you, but only at the risk of losing your own humanity.

*I'm really posting this on Jan. 10, 2018, but back-dating it to when the post went live on Skiffy and Fanty. Remember, the best way to keep current with my creations is to follow me on Twitter.

Wonder Woman review

I wrote this review of Wonder Woman on the Monday of opening weekend, but I'm cross-posting here to keep it with my other creative endeavours:

https://skiffyandfanty.com/2017/06/06/reviewwonderwoman/

I grew up reading Marvel comics, not DC, so most of what I know about the lore of Wonder Woman is what I absorbed from the 1970s Lynda Carter TV showplus vague memories of the Super Friends. I’m aware that the character has had many reboots and reinterpretations, but my perspective is that of many viewers who come to the movie with only a small amount of background knowledge. I think most of them, like me, will love it. (Spoilers, with a warning, appear about halfway through this review.)

“Wonder Woman” is a very satisfying film, even if it isn’t perfect. I have some logical quibbles with some of its elements in the beginning, and it is not exactly subtle; however, the notes it hits ring true all the way through. By the end, tears of both sorrow and joy were trickling down my cheeks.

There’s a lot of building up and following through, from the quiet, simple, opening narrative to the firm statement of purpose at the end. It doesn’t have the snappy patter of many Marvel movies, but the emotional payoffs are pretty great.

Follow the link for the full review.