Interviews: Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery

“Two novellas, bound in one book. Mongol-inspired Sword & Sorcery. A claustrophobic, pressure-cooker siege, and a caravan striking out under an open desert sky. Orhan the Snow Leopard and Goatskin the nomad. Dariel Quiogue and Bryn Hammond.”
― from the Backerkit page for Double-Edged Sword and Sorcery

I'm excited by a new project from Brackenbury Books: Double-Edged Sword and Sorcery. Oliver Brackenbury is the editor of the New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine, of which I enthusiastically reviewed the first few issues in November 2023, for The Skiffy and Fanty Show blog. ("Last year, I became aware of a debut magazine called New Edge Sword & Sorcery, which aimed to revive the “outsider protagonists, thrilling energy, wondrous weirdness, and a large body of classic tales” of this old subgenre of fantasy with a focus on inclusivity and diversity (of both characters and creators).")

Do you remember the old Ace Double Books, dear reader? I do! My SFF-loving daddy had quite a few of them. These were the old two-books-in-one paperbacks, bound together head-to-toe style so that you'd finish one short book, reading through to the middle, then flip it over, and read a whole new story, usually by a different author. This way, each of them got their own front cover and equal billing. (This was back when genre books were usually short, not the typical doorstoppers of today.)   

After following NESS #0-2 with two more upcoming issues of NESS and an anthology of spicy/romantic S&S stories, Brackenbury is bringing back the doubles format with a book that comprises two novellas stuck together head-to-toe, with characters who've caught readers' interest in the first few magazine issues. They're both centered on  Asian adventurers, but Dariel Quiogue's Orhan the Snow Leopard and Bryn Hammond's Goatskin the nomad are very different characters, written engagingly but in very different styles. I'm looking forward to seeing more of each of their journeys.

The project successfully crowdfunded at over $9,000 raised as of Wednesday, including an extra Orhan story for all crowdfunders and bookmarks for all physical copy backers, plus some poems coming from Hammond if about a dozen more backers join. The stretch goals are colored spray edges (like old-fashioned paperbacks) at $10,600, and a two-page art insert between the novellas if the campaign reaches $12,800. The Backerkit campaign concludes on Saturday, and I'd really like to see it get a little more support.

To that end, and because I like talking with writers and editors about the craft, I emailed questions about the project to Brackenbury, Quiogue and Hammond. Please read on and enjoy, share if you're so inclined, and back the project if you have the funds and interest. (Answers have been very lightly edited for format, e.g. making everyone's dashes the same style.)

Oliver Brackenbury, editor, NESS, DESS and more

Oliver Brackenbury, photo by Ardean Peters

Q: How did you come to select a Mongol-inspired Sword & Sorcery theme, and these two authors and novellas in particular, for this book?

A: In short, because it's a fascinating culture & period of history, Asian set S&S is almost always rooted in Chinese or Japanese historical inspiration, and because it allowed me to pair two authors I love in one book, writing characters I'd seen people react strongly to in our magazine, each exploring basically the same setting in their own unique way.

In detail, it was an organic product of how the magazine began, and grew into book publishing.

The magazine started with a sweat equity prototype issue #0, available free in digital and priced at cost in soft/hardcover, and the table of contents was drawn almost entirely from a single online community where a bunch of us had strong feelings about how to take Sword & Sorcery into the future.

This included two authors who set their stories in Mongol-rooted settings yet write with totally unique voices: Bryn Hammond writes the nomad Goatskin having adventures in a more fantastic version of our world, while Dariel R.A. Quiogue writes the deposed warlord Orhan the Snow Leopard's adventures in a secondary world heavily rooted in the same setting & time period ― that of Genghis Khan.

Bryn is a respected, published scholar of historical non-fiction about that period, while Dariel is an amateur student of the era with over ten years experience writing fiction set in it. Bryn writes in a awe-inspiring, poetic, Weird-with-a-capital-"W" style, while Dariel specializes in pulse-pounding stories that astound with their action. Both can bring the full spectrum of Sword & Sorcery to a tale, but those are some of their specialties.

As part of the crowdfund we actually did a short story panel discussion livestream where we analyzed one Goatskin and one Orhan story, getting deep into what makes them worth reading'.

But yes, having organically lucked into working with two knowledgeable, skilled authors ― and great people ― writing with complementary voices in a similar setting, Mongol S&S made perfect sense to me for this pairing of novellas.

To the novella format itself, many have correctly said before me that the pacing, episodic nature and other genre elements of Sword & Sorcery make it ideally suited for shorter tales. Wanting something more "Book" than a short story or novelette, which are much harder to get reviewed or even read, to me the logical format then is a novella. Bind two of them together in a Double and hey hey, you've got a wordcount that contemporary Fantasy readers without a prior investment in the genre might feel more comfortable with.

Q: My father had a bunch of old Ace Doubles, which I remember fondly. What fun to read a short, snappy story, turn the book over, and then read a whole new story! Have you encountered many old Ace Doubles yourself? Is that what gave you the idea for packaging your second Brackenbury Books publication this way, or was it more because of the practicality of printing two novellas in one blow? Or some other reason?

A: I'm lucky enough to live in a large city with a vibrant second-hand bookstore scene, so I've come across a decent amount of Ace Doubles in the flesh and have added a few to my personal library. I very much had them in mind, as well as some contemporary riffs on the format in other genres such as Shortwave's horror novelette pairings in the Split Scream series. So yes, I was indeed inspired by them.

However, there was also absolutely some practicality in play. Brackenbury Books is barely two years old, a real baby of a publisher, the idea of saving money on printing while making the more economically lucrative traditional printing more in reach was an appealing one. Being able to, once the print run is paid off, deduct expenses from the full sale value of the book makes a big difference in both what profits the company makes and how much we're able to pay our authors in royalties. With print-on-demand you're always starting from the value of the book minus printing cost, since there is no print run, just eternally printing...on...demand.

But yes, it's also just fun! Art direction is one of my favorite things in publishing, so getting to commission two original covers and two full page interior illustrations doubles my enjoyment for sure. Add in the creative reasons given in my last answer and doing a double felt like a no-brainer.

Q: Does the tête-bêche head-to-toe flip printing make production a lot more complicated than just giving both books the same orientation, one after the other? (But it’s cool that this way, both authors/stories have equal weight/promotion, with two full covers, one on each side.)

A: Blessedly it's as simple as laying it out normally, rotating and reversing the page-flow of one half, and voila! Shout out to my talented friend & collaborator Nathaniel Webb, who does our most excellent layout & design.

Q: You've hit the basic funding goal with a few days to spare; congratulations! The stretch goal of spray color edges also seems feasible; does that have any functionality like making the books last longer, or is it just aesthetically pleasing? Also, the stretch goal of two pages of full-color illustration inserted between the novellas is desirable, much nicer than the cigarette ads, etc., I would see in the middle of some Ace Doubles, but is it realistic to hope for the kind of last-minute surge in backers that it would take to make that happen? 

A: Thank you! It feels great to have had this many people show this much faith in what we're doing. I don't know that the spray edges make the books last longer, however, going by some classic paperbacks on my shelf, the color can still be quite vibrant even fifty years later. As for our art insert stretch goal, it's certainly a lofty one at this point in the campaign but...never say never. If nothing else it exposes our audience to Sajan Rai's art, which is good because it's only a matter of time before I work with Sajan on something I publish. Dude is too unique & talented not for me to keep pursuing that.

Heck, as I finished typing this answer a kind backer who was already pledged for a hardcover just upped their pledge by another $40; not buying anything extra; they're just showing they want us to succeed as much as possible. With that kind of positive energy being directed our way, who knows what we might achieve?

Q: This is the second Brackenbury Books publication (as opposed to New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine). The first was the Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes anthology, which easily funded successfully on Backerkit in July. Do you feel like you’re starting to establish a solid foundation as a new publisher, or is there no such thing?

A: I feel like I should knock on wood before I answer that definitely this year giving us three for three in successful crowdfunds, with the first at just under 200% funding, the second at 151%, and the third looking to land somewhere comfortably north of 100%...it ain't bad, that's for sure! My goal is very much to make this what I do for a living, to eventually be able to have paid employees, and further increase what we're able to do for our authors & artists. This year feels like a solid step toward all that.

Q: Has BH&B-A been delivered to backers yet? And are NESS #3&4 still on track for the revised November fulfillment?

A: Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, our spicy/romantic S&S anthology, is still being edited, as we expected it to be at this point. Everybody involved is working hard to get the anthology and the magazine issues to our backers before the year is over, and we'll keep people updated if anything prevents that. To the magazine in particular, the printer has been paid, their presses are hard at work, and issues should be put on the boat to cross the Pacific before the month is over. How the waves, and US customs, treat us is outside of my hands, naturally, but we'll keep people updated if any delays occur. Honestly, considering everyone involved is doing this in their spare time, not as their job, I'm quite proud of what we've been able to accomplish so far.

At the table where I write this, there sit final proofs of NESS 3&4, unbound but otherwise finished softcover editions. Flipping through those, seeing the assembly of what's only been so many disparate files on my computer until now, gives me faith that whether our backers get the issues sooner or later, they'll feel it was worth the wait.

Q: What’s next for you, Brackenbury Books, and/or NESS?

A: After we finish this crowdfund, I reckon...a nap. In my madness I chose to raise a puppy through its first year of life in the same year I expanded the magazine into a book publishing business, so for me sleep has definitely become something other people get to have.

But, beyond the steadily fulfilling the year's crowdfunds, work has already begun on 2025's issues of the magazine, and rough plans for publishing some S&S novellas next year - two of which will be second volumes in episodic series kicked off by those in the Double - are taking shape. Other than the magazine and the novellas, it all comes down to me sitting with a pile of index cards, one for each potential publication, and really figuring out what else we can accomplish next year.

We shall see what that is! 

Bryn Hammond, author of the Goatskin the nomad stories (and more)

Bryn Hammond

Q: What led to your fascination with sword-and-sorcery and to your specializing in stories set in the Asian steppes?

A: Sword & sorcery is a style of fantasy I enjoyed when young, and I happily got neck-deep when I found there was a revival going on. There was a stack I liked about New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine and the ideas of the people behind it: not just its conscious pursuit of ‘a wider swathe of humanity’ than traditional sword & sorcery was famous or infamous for, but I was in sync with much else. Oliver [Brackenbury] and I saw eye to eye on a certain joy that we feel belongs in sword & sorcery, a life-affirmation, if I have to use those words, that isn’t so nasty, short and brutish. The magazine, crucially for me, isn’t tongue-in-cheek about its subgenre, it’s straight-up sincere. The community drew me in, further than I meant to go …

Before that I’d been self-publishing historical fiction that isn’t terribly commercial but that I invested heavily of myself in. That’s set in the Asian steppes, which I had been attracted to too far back to analyse why. One of my early memories is getting my hands on Anna Comnena’s Alexiad young, and being entirely won over by her Turkic antagonists. It’s a Byzantine history of the 11^th -12^th centuries, and they have a lot of run-ins with Seljuq Turks, straight off the steppe. That was certainly a milestone in my steppe craze. Another was going straight for the Attila and the ‘Zingis’ (Genghis) parts of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I can’t remember which I stumbled over first, in my teenage years.

Q: Goatskin is often irritated by people but has learned a lot about different cultures in her wanderings. She’s enough of a leader to be deferred to as a respected caravan guide. She’s very complex, far from the naivete one might expect from her rural background and the rustic clothing that generated her nickname. How did you come up with this intriguing character?

A: I’d say she’s mostly irritated by settled folk who condescend to her as a nomad from a people of goatherds, or she’s irritated by those who hire her, when they don’t know how to live in what they think of as the wilderness. But also she likes to be alone, solitary wandering is her preference. I wrote her that way as a woman who thinks of myself as a loner, mostly, who shares that preference for solitude.

And I’m conscious of how women, when they are dropped into adventures to feature, are often grouped, given company ― like when the Doctor in Doctor Who suddenly had several companions when she regenerated as a woman for the first time. As if she can’t hold a story down with one other. I think of Rebecca Solnit who writes magnificently on walking, and put that in light of recent discourse on women walking in public spaces, in isolated places. Walking has been so necessary in my creative life, and in my practical life since I’m a woman who lives alone and doesn’t drive. Goatskin gets to wander as freely as Conan does, on her own, and that’s important to me.

I wanted her to be an intelligent person who has listened and learned, although not literate – she’s from an oral culture, and she dodged education in the schools that assimilate and convert her people. In the same vein, I make her bandit girlfriend, a commoner, a ex- villager, notably philosophical. This is quite deliberate.

Q: In the two Goatskin stories that I’ve read, “The Grief-Note of Vultures” in NESS #0 and “Sister Chaos” in NESS #2, I appreciate that although there’s plenty of action and combat, Angaj-Duzmut (Goatskin the nomad) solves some problems creatively and some through talking, rather than just facing everything head-on with her weapons. What’s your process for putting Goatskin into predicaments and figuring out resolutions?

A: Yes, I’m never going to be a swords-first writer, clobber them on the head and that resolves your plot. For one thing, my monsters tend to have a case, and Goatskin is as likely to learn a sympathy for them and she might end up on their side. If I have a pattern, that’s it. I start with the monster and its meaning, what I want to say by that piece of weird, and work outwards from there to how Goatskin encounters it, what changes for her, what she takes away.

Q: I also appreciate the warm and sexy relationship, on- and offscreen, between “Duzzy” and the many-named bandit leader. But will readers find out whether it’s a committed partnership, or if other entanglements are possible when Goatskin is off on her own solo adventures? 

A: It might be spoilery of another story to answer that one. I have a novelette out early next year in an anthology of sword & sorcery & romance, Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, again from Brackenbury Books. It’s set early in their friendship, and her girlfriend drops the c-word on her, commitment.

But I’ll say she only asks for a loose commitment, no clause to exclude other flings ― she specifies she won’t hassle Goatskin about those. Obviously she’s had far more experience than Goatskin and has been fairly casual in the past. Still, it’s her bandit girlfriend who seems most tenacious of a partnership, sometimes, as may come across in Waste Flowers.

I’ve wondered about this question myself. It hasn’t happened in the few stories I’ve done, but in the one I’m plotting, subsequent to Waste Flowers, it’s an issue. That’s a bit of a tease of an answer.

Q: Will readers ever learn why Goatskin left her mountainous homeland, whether it’s just wanderlust or if she has some more urgent, personal reasons in her backstory?

A: There’s a glimpse of this in Waste Flowers. Both Goatskin and her bandit girlfriend are forced to look back and ― with different levels of reluctance ― reveal the old stories as to why they had to leave their home mountains or their village as girls of fourteen or fifteen.

Q: I enjoyed the weirdness of the creatures Goatskin encountered in the stories I’ve read so far. Will we see more of these oddities in Waste Flowers? Are some of them drawn from specific Mongol legends, or more generally inspired by stories from the steppes?

A: There are certainly more of these oddities in Waste Flowers. Most of the weird I’ve written so far, or mean to write in future for the Goatskin tales, does come from the Mongol imaginary or adjacent cultures, is based on or at least sparked by a Mongol conception. My monsters ― although ‘oddities’ is better ― try to throw light on a piece of that world, too. I want them to function as part of my world-painting, to contribute to an understanding of world view, not to be random. I guess it helps that my monsters tend to have a point.

Q: Is your scholarly work (Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe; and Secret History of the Mongols) a resource for your fiction? Does anything flow the other way, from the creative toward the academic, such as what topics you choose to research and study?

A: [amendment: my Voices is about the 13^th-century text, the Secret History of the Mongols]
They go hand-in-hand. Voices was commissioned by Simon J. Cook at Rounded Globe, because he liked my historical fiction: he encouraged me to write a novelist’s-eye view on interpretation of primary sources, in this case the Secret History of the Mongols. My blog posts which sometimes burst their seams originate in research for my fiction, but one becomes committed, beyond the novels, to historical investigation for its own sake. I began to care as much about how Mongols are written in our history, about the historiography of it. I have ambitions to do a reception history of Chinggis in English.

Q: Please share a little about your Amgalant novels.

A: Amgalant closely follows the Secret History of the Mongols, which is the chief Mongol source on the life of Chinggis Khan. It’s a history told with epic flourishes, a painstakingly honest history assembled from communal memoirs, back to those who knew Chinggis Khan. It’s oddly intimate. It’s strikingly humane in its focus, as in concerned with human things. It’s strong on speech and on interaction, like a novel itself. It dips into the style of oral epic to lend its subject grandeur, but only at finely judged moments ― not to obscure the reality.

This fascinating text I set out to put into a novel version, being as faithful as I can to its matter, to its style, and to its positions ― its angles on the story, the things it cares about.

Q: Can you say anything about whatever works you’re developing now?

A: I’m writing a second Goatskin novella. Oliver Brackenbury has said in public that he’d like to follow up next year with another instalment from both Dariel and I, if this crowdfund goes well. However it ends up being published, I’m irrevocably engaged in the next, titled What Rough Beast?, which I hope is a leap beyond Waste Flowers. It’s even more personal a story for Goatskin. 

Daniel Quiogue, author of the Orhan the Snow Leopard stories (and more)

Dariel Quiogue

Q: What inspired you to focus on what you call “Forgotten Asia” stories? What drew you to the Sword & Sorcery subgenre in general?

A: My fascination with Sword & Sorcery started first, when my sister gifted me one weekend with a copy of Conan the Swordsman (by Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg & L. Sprague de Camp) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars. It was the very same year Star Wars came out, so I developed a taste for swashbuckling adventure tales in exotic settings early on ― I was ten years old at the time. That dovetailed with early introductions to Homer’s The Odyssey and Herodotus’ Histories, Arthurian tales – Boorman’s Excalibur came out only just a few years after – and at the time, our TV stations would show sword and sandal films every Holy Week. So I had a taste for historically-flavored adventure.

As I started writing and playing fantasy role playing games, I noticed the dearth of material with Asian inspirations that were not Chinese or Japanese. From Araby and Asia Minor to Xinjiang, from Siberia south to Ceylon and Southeast Asia, there was a yawning void ― and being Southeast Asian myself, I thought, hey, this could be my field.

Q: One of the two novellas in Double-Edged Sword and Sorcery will be your Walls of Shira Yulun in which your hero Orhan is “trapped in a besieged city” while striving to keep an old promise. Crowdfund backers will also get a loosely related digital exclusive Orhan story, “The Shaman’s Blood Price.” I see that you have another story coming in NESS #4; will that be another Orhan story? What fascinates you about this character?

A: Yes, my story in NESS #4 is also an Orhan Timur story. I think there are two main reasons that make make this character so fascinating and easy to write for me. Number one, he’s got a powerful, clear-cut and constant motivation – he’s been overthrown by his own sworn blood brother, that’s a really serious breach in Mongol culture, and he wants revenge; at the same time, his former blood brother is always scheming to get rid of him, so he’s always in danger. At the same time, I get to contrast that long-term motivation with his more human side, the two are often in conflict, and he’s often in situations where his pesonal code will cause him to torpedo his own long-term goal.

Second, he has a very wide playing field to have adventures in ― practically all of that West to East gap I mentioned earlier in talking about Forgotten Asia. So I can have Orhan Timur adventures set anywhere from my secondary-world equivalents to Persia, the Tibetan highlands, Northern India and of course the steppes. In that regard he’s like REH’s Conan, he can wander across most of his known world, though I’d say he’s different in that his wanderings are more driven.

Q: In “The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” in NESS issue #0, Orhan is alone, recently betrayed and deposed, although he eventually makes a sort of alliance. In “The Demon of Tashi Tzang” in NESS #2, he’s alone again, but receives aid from some unexpected people. If he is ever to regain power, he’ll need to build some lasting support. Will Orhan eventually start building and leading teams, or will your stories keep focusing on Orhan the fugitive? Is his loner status partly just a function of what Sword and Sorcery stories are, and the kind of character fans want to read about?  

A: That’s a good question. I believe most of my stories will focus on the time between Orhan’s deposition and his final destiny, which I won’t reveal yet. Partly that’s because I feel Orhan-in-trouble fits the needs of a pulp-styled Sword & Sorcery story best; it’s when he’s at his most driven and desperate. For me, affirmation of values like self-reliance, the ability to survive the toughest trials both mental and physical, and indomitability are core Sword & Sorcery values ― and they’ll be tested more with Orhan as fugitive than with Orhan as Khagan.

There have been stories wherein Orhan tried to build support, a power base from which to regain his throne – but things always happen. In my story "Valley of the Yellow-Eyed King" Orhan has united the bandits of the mountains and is forging them into an army, but then he gets called away to hunt down a demon tiger. The novella The Caves of Koro Shan is set after that, and shows the aftermath of his (unintended) long absence from that warband. Both stories can be found in my collection, Track of the Snow Leopard.

Orhan Timur, being based on Genghis Khan, will of course never stop trying.

Q: I love your combination of descriptive passages of scenery and temples, etc., combined with the hard-hitting action scenes. They feel very grounded in details, with vivid word choices. What can you share about your writing process? Do you outline plots and fill in details later, or start with a vivid scene and then follow it forward and backward in time, or what?

A: Thanks! Part of that I believe is because I have a really visual imagination ― when I’m writing I often see things like a movie playing in my head. Also I make sure I have a good visual library to draw on when writing – I research locations that are analogous to my settings, plus I used to have a big collection of National Geographic magazines. For vivid writing, there are no better teachers than Robert E. Howard himself – he really knew how to choose and pace his words. Refinements to that I learned from reading Leigh Brackett, David Gemmell and others,

and when I wax lyrical, I believe I’m channeling Tanith Lee.

As for my writing process, I’m a trying-to-reform pantser. I can’t seem to work with detailed outlines, but I do a lot of preparatory work before drafting; though sometimes I’ve written an opener, just a few paragraphs, then do the background work, including a very rough outline, after doing the opener. Stories usually start out as a what-if premise, often based on a historical event or snippet of mythology. Then I research and take notes – like for Walls of
Shira Yulun I bought Osprey Books’ Siege Engines of the Far East Volume 1. Sometimes I have to kill a story premise and do something else when my research shows things couldn’t have/wouldn’t have happened that way. And as I said, I do visual research – I look up photos and videos, the explosion of travel photography and videography is a boon for me there.

After I’ve digested and internalized my research, I’ll start writing – or just as often, spend days trying to figure out my opening scene. The first few sentences for me are crucial. The reader has to be hooked within just a paragraph or three. This is the same leeway I give myself when choosing a book to purchase – if the author hasn’t gotten me hooked within the first page, I put the book back on the bookstore shelf.

Q: Your own anthology, Swords of the Four Winds: Tales of swords and sorcery from an ancient East that never was, looks like a lot of fun, too. Do you think you’ll mostly stick with shorter stories, or are you developing any other longform fiction plans besides the soon-to-be-published novella?

A: I’m currently working on a novel, a sword and planet piece, but have to shelve that temporarily to do another Orhan Timur novella. I believe the bulk of my work will continue to be shorter fiction though, as that’s the form I believe works best for Sword & Sorcery. Eventually I’ll do an Orhan Timur novel, but like Moorcock, I’ll likely be doing it as a sequence of interconnected short stories.

Thanks!

Flash Fiction: Infernal Salon 9/21/24: Mina and the Mice

On Saturday, Sept. 21, Arvan Eleron's Twitch channel hosted another Infernal Salon, as part of his two-day Arvathon sub-a-thon to get more subscribers on Twitch and more Patreon pledges. During most of Friday and Saturday, he played Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures video games, but for about an hour and a half on Saturday (around 04:09:40 to 05:35:00 here), he held a writing salon where professional authors (and a musician) created flash fiction (and music) based on prompts taken from the Negocios Infernales game. 

This is a diceless game created by Carlos Hernandez and CSE Cooney that uses a special deck of tarot-like cards to "create characters, establish relationships, and inspire roleplay" -- cards, all with unusual and interesting art, emblazoned with new adages like "Roots enough can bring the castle down" and "And yet, however stumblingly, progress." 

The premise of the TTRPG is that aliens have interrupted the Spanish Inquisition -- people bargain with them for things, becoming "wizards" thereby, as the apparently benign aliens try to guide humans toward kindness and thus toward galactic civilization. However, if you don't want to try that, you can just use the cards as writing prompts: ideas to spark your own stories!

So on Saturday, the game creators led William Alexander, Sol Foster, Steve Toase, Sophia Babai, Danni Brigante, Silvatiicus Riddle, and Dylan Haston through a quick creation session. Each person got a set of three cards drawn from the deck, and then they were allotted 20 minutes to use one card or combine them with each other to inspire them to write poems, short stories, or music. 

After the pros got their sets, the viewers in chat all got a set from which to craft their own creations. I was apparently the only person watching the stream to create something, although we usually have several people contributing.

Once all the prompts were drawn and read out, Hernandez and Cooney vamped for a little while, and then the 20 minutes were up for the first creator, who read their creation aloud as the next creator finished their activity.

Prompt cards for chat (including me):

In Your House, Make Mice Fear You
The Scavengers Win Every War
Piety Is Surrender

I thought first about a housewife battling mice, and considered calling her Minnie, but that was too on-the-nose, so to speak. Then I thought of naming her Mina, and everything else fell into place.

This is what I wrote in 20 minutes. Arvan read it onstream after all the pros were done with their pieces, and it was well received. I thought of some possible revisions later, like pointing out the awful possibilities if Mina hadn't submitted (incarceration at Seward's asylum, or even Lucy's fate), but I think it came out alright, even if obviously derivative:

Mina and the Mice

Mina had been through a secret war, fighting by her husband’s side to defeat a horrible predator who had killed her best friend, who assaulted, and menaced her husband, their allies, Britain, and all of Europe. Now he tried to shelter her from every wind – she, without whom the monster would have escaped to regroup – and denied her equal partnership in his work and even in their marriage. She was reduced to the home front, cooking and cleaning, now the scourge of nothing more than mere mice scavenging for scraps, a far cry even from the rats who had swarmed the monster-hunters in the estate next to the asylum. 

Her heart and mind rebelled at this reduction of her sphere, but every time she tried to step off her pedestal, her husband gently, lovingly, protectively placed her back there. He said she’d been through enough, and wouldn’t have her sullying herself in the business world. When she argued, he looked worried. He wouldn’t say it, but she could see him wondering if she’d been left tainted after all. He brought the learned professor in to consult. He said the scar on her forehead that had marked Mina as the monster’s had vanished with his vanquishing, so she appeared pure and pious once more; however, the professor didn’t say not to worry. He said to watch. 

And so Mina settled in for a long campaign. She must have patience. She would bide her time, and wait for the scraps of information that her husband let fall at night, and build a plan for her eventual freedom. She would remain pure and pious in public, surrendering to her husband’s will. Mina made herself  a meek mouse. Eventually, the watcher’s attention would waver, and then she’d seize her chance. THIS scavenger would win the war. 

Jason Thompson's Dreamland RPG

Summary: Jason Thompson's Dreamland RPG is easy to learn and fun to playtest. You should give it a try if you're interested in fantasy RPGs, dreams vs. the waking world, and storytelling, and if you like the thought of stringing words together quickly into sentences in response to prompts.

Cover art by Jason Thompson

I met artist/writer/game designer Jason Thompson remotely a couple of years ago via the SFFaudio Podcast. I think the only episode we've actually been on together was a discussion of The Cats of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft, but I've listened with interest to several other episodes he's been on, and I was really struck by his gorgeous and often very moving cartoon version of HPL's The Doom That Came to Sarnath, that was linked from the podcast notes when I discussed that story (my take: The Sarnath invaders deserved what they got.).

H.P. Lovecraft was undoubtedly a racist, not just as "a man of his time" -- but he had an incredibly rich imagination, inspiring generations of writers, filmmakers and showmakers, artists, and gamers who continue the conversations and, at least more recently, often subvert his problematic themes. 

Many people refer to the Lovecraft mythos, but he is far from the only, or even the first, author to write about cosmic horror. Moreover, Lord Dunsany wrote earlier about the concept of fantasy lands that could be visited via dreams (or drugs). However, Lovecraft's connected stories mapped out a Dreamland that is weirdly approachable, but still wondrous, if sometimes intimidating, and his continuing popularity means that extensions and reinterpretations keep arising from his work. 

The Call of Cthulhu RPG system is originally based on Lovecraft's mythos, of course, although it has progressively updated its ethos and expanded far beyond its inspiration. CoC, now in its 7th edition, has a Dreamlands extension. The Eldritch Horror boardgame has a Dreamlands expansion, and there are probably plenty of other Dreamlands-inspired indie games that I haven't heard about.

Moreover, there are other options if you want to play alternating Dreamer/Waking characters. Girl by Moonlight, an Evil Hat RPG based on the Forged in the Dark engine, is one game that facilitates this; I've seen a really great 11-video actual play campaign done by Speculate!, originally broadcast on Arvan Eleron's Twitch stream and now available on YouTube.

But you can never have too many options. Each new game brings something different to the metaphorical gaming table. 

Thus, I was really excited when I heard that Jason Thompson was working on a Dreamland RPG. As noted above, his artwork is gorgeous, sometimes stark and sometimes lush, but it also shows the artist's deep thinking about Lovecraft's stories, especially those set explicitly in fantasy lands.  I've been wondering what his particular focus would bring to an RPG.

His Dreamland RPG is currently in playtesting and slated for full release in 2025. I've been trying to get in on this playtesting for quite a while, but most of those games had been starting around 8 p.m. Pacific, or 11 p.m. my time, which didn't work for me. However, I finally got to play in a recent afternoon session, and I enjoyed it very much.

The original plan was for Jason to GM this private playtest, but he ended up stepping back and asked one of the Dreamland RPG writers, Aaron V., to run it instead. He put us through his short scenario, Band on the Run, with some elements inspired by the Paul McCartney/Wings song. We used Discord to talk with each other and Roll20 for the virtual tabletop (Steam is another option).

Dreamland is much simpler to pick up than the above-named RPGs. The free Quickstart Guide is 52 pages, but probably about half of those are tables, cartoons, maps, and character sheets. Aaron took me and two other newbie players, Alastríona Órfhlaith and Stuart, through character creation and the basic rules in about 45 minutes (including waiting for tech issues to be resolved), but he said Jason usually gets that down to half an hour.

Some details will almost certainly change before the final release. But for now, players get to choose or roll a Dreamlands type from 25 Roles (occupations that come with different advantages, skills bonuses, and special powers), and to choose whatever Waking Self they want. Each player also chooses or rolls for 3 Memories that their Dream self carries from the Waking world; these Memories can be spent to create Marvels, which can help Dreamers in difficult situations, and help Dreamers advance in levels. However, if all their Memories are spent, their Dream self may detach from their Waking self. 

However, the 300 Word cards provide the main mechanic for playing the game. The GM provides a limited pool of Words that the players can either take into their own "hands" or draw later. When they come up against a challenge, from climbing a wall to negotiating with a vendor, or whatever, they'll decide how many Words to spend as bonuses (1 point per word) to the dice rolls associated with their skills. The player spends those words by creating a little narrative from them that explains how they'll prevail. But if they spend a lot of Words, there's a higher chance that they'll break one of the Dreamland Pillars.

The five Pillars of Dreamland are Passion, Loathing, Mystery, Faraway, and Wonder. Each Word is associated (color-coded) with one of those Pillars (e.g. "heart" for Passion, "hell" for Loathing, "fate" for Mystery, "Yann" [a place name] for Faraway, or "radiant" for Wonder), plus there's a sixth suit of neutral (color-coded gray) words (and using them doesn't risk breaking Pillars). Most Dreamland Roles have an advantage associated with one of the Pillars (for instance, getting double bonuses from that Pillar's Word cards).

That's the majority of what's needful to know for a Dreamland one-shot playtest. There's a Waking phase at the end of each session, which Aaron used to help us wrap things up, but that's mainly important for longer campaigns. You can also acquire Impairments and have to deal with them later. Furthermore, Dreamland mishaps can even kill Waking selves.

But you're probably asking, aside from the mechanics, what was it like to actually play Dreamland? Well, I don't want to give away too many details from Aaron's scenario, but after we created our characters, we entered the game to find our characters running from a scary pursuer. We all passed our skill-and-word-narration challenges to escape, found ourselves wandering through a wilderness, got some advice from an enigmatic stranger doing a questionable job, and found ourselves entering a town. My Dream character was a painter, so in exchange for room and board at an inn, I painted a new sign for the business, with peacocks and elephants. Then our scary pursuer caught up with us. The other players and I resolved the situation by combining our characters' aspects to create a Marvel, so an elephant came to life from the new painting (with a peacock perched on its back) and went after our antagonist. And then we all woke up! We spent a little time narrating what our Waking characters did after the dream, and how it affected their lives. My Waking character was an accountant; she didn't quit her job, but she did start painting every weekend, all the spare time she could take, gaining a new Passion Memory.

Fellow player Alastríona Órfhlaith enjoyed the game so much that she sketched art of the elephant breakout scene and posted it on Bluesky!

I very much enjoyed my adventure in the Dreamland RPG and hope I'll get more chances to play. I think a longer campaign could be very rewarding, with the right companions and Dream Master. I can see huge potential for different styles of Dreamland play, leaning toward humorous, pulpy, noir, horror, etc. Currently, the Roles are slanted toward playing in a mostly agrarian type of fantasy world, but I can imagine making adjustments for an alt-universe or SF dream setting instead.

If you'd like to try playtesting this Dreamland RPG yourself, you can join the Dreamland Discord server, follow on Facebook, or download the free Quickstart guide and other materials, or watch a video of some other people playtesting it, at https://www.dreamrpg.com/upcoming-playtests/ -- enjoy! 

Virtual panelist at Glasgow 2024 WorldCon!

 I'll be a virtual panelist on two hybrid discussions at #Glasgow2024 ! Both are on Saturday, Aug. 10.

"30th Anniversary of Stargate" 17:30 BST, 12:30 EDT
with Eric Choi (moderator), Inge Heyer, and Barry Tilton, who will all be there in person.
"Ancient Egypt with Aliens! It's been 30 years since the Stargate movie launched a franchise on to the world. Our panellists discuss the influence of the film and the franchise and how it may have impacted the wider SFF landscape."

"The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era"  19:00 BST, 14:00 EDT
with David E. Hook (moderator), Cora Buhlert, Mark Plummer, and Perianne Lurie, who will all be there in person.
"The Retro Hugo Awards, a tradition where Worldcons retrospectively awarded prizes for years prior to the establishment of the Hugo Awards, have had both avid supporters and vocal critics. The last two Worldcons eligible to grant Retro Hugos opted not to do so, and Glasgow is following suit. Does this signify the demise of the Retro Hugos? And if so, is this necessarily detrimental?"

I have not been greatly impressed by hybrid panels at other conventions -- even without technical difficulties, the virtual panelists tend to get short shrift. I am hoping the Glasgow organizers can make it work better than I've experienced before.

This year, Glasgow's programming lists 34 online-only events and 301 total events that have online components (online only, hybrid panels, or just events that will be streamed, with Discord discussion channels).The price for an online membership is less than in-person membership, but still significantly greater than a mere supporting membership (the level required for voting for Hugo Awards, and getting the Hugo Voters packet). I know that a lot of people have been working very hard to make this con a success, and I hope that after it's over, the virtual members will feel that they got their money's worth.
To find out more, visit https://glasgow2024.org/ 

Anyway, it's an honor to be selected for two panels. I know of at least one Hugo finalist who was only selected for two panels, and I'm not even nominated for any group awards this year.

UPDATE 8/19/2024:
I was very pleased with how both my events went. It was slightly irritating that I couldn't see the other Stargate panelists, but after a little struggling with technology, I could hear them, and they could both see and hear me. The tech went fine for the Retros panel.
More importantly, the moderators for both events were mindful of my presence, including me in question rounds and discussions. I've certainly seen hybrid panels in the past where the remote participant was treated as a mere afterthought.
Also, as a frequent Twitch stream guest, I was able to keep an eye on the Discord chat for each event while being a panelist, occasionally commenting in those channel discussions. One person even said how thrilled they were that a panelist was participating in the chat, so I gather that was unfortunately rare.

UPDATE 9/23/24:
Dave Hook, who was on several panels with me at ChiCon 2022 and who chaired "The Conclusion of the Retro Hugo Era" panel this year, wrote up the panel here. As he stated, there were some good arguments for and against the Retros, but the day after the panel, the WorldCon Business meeting voted to end the Retro Hugos, with Seattle's biz meeting in 2025 expected to ratify that decision. Dave has written to Seattle WorldCon people to suggest that they could still run Retro Hugos in 2025, before the ratification; alternatively, he suggested that they could run a Retro track of panels (without awards), like ChiCon did.
I look forward to hearing what comes of these suggestions.

Audio/Video/Gaming Roundup, 2024 Part 2

Scroll down this post for the most recent updates (latest is 12/13/24). For roundups of the first half of 2024 and my 2023 activities in podcasting, gaming, videos, etc., please see here, here and here. Activities from before then are listed further back in my blog.

AUDIO:
The Stargate SG-Fun podcast I do with David Schaub and Andrew Pontious has cleared its backlog with the publication on July 21 of our 15th episode. That means I have to watch 4 S3 episodes before we record again on Saturday!
https://sgfun.space/threading-the-needle-with-a-hammer/

AUDIO/VIDEO:

The Skiffy and Fanty Mining the Genre Asteroid discussion between me and Paul Weimer of Suzy McKee Charnas' Walk to the End of the World (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2136600063) was released as Skiffy and Fanty podcast #776:
https://ia600401.us.archive.org/34/items/sand-f-776-charnas/SandF_776_Charnas.mp3
Also, here's the YouTube video, which came out in June:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xBPZ7zU9dU

June 21: I streamed/recorded Skiffy and Fanty Mining the Genre Asteroid: Diadem from the Stars (see 9/23 update) with Shaun Duke and Paul Weimer.
June 28: I streamed/recorded Skiffy and Fanty Torture Cinema: From Hell It Came with Shaun Duke and David Annandale.
(Update 12/12/24: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg0gYZ9pVV0
podcast: https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/787fromhellitcame/ )
July 26 I streamed/recorded Skiffy and Fanty Torture Cinema discussion on Demolition Man (see 8/19 update)

GAMING:
June 29: Ninefox Gambit one-shot, run by Andrew Pontious!
July 4: Private Delta Green: Last Things Last
July 10: Private RPG: The Cawdor Complex (stranded time-travelers make dinosaurs into partners)
July 28: Private Call of Cthulhu game: Swamp Song, Part 1. This is the first time I ever built a character on Foundry VTT. Part 2 is on Aug. 4. UPDATE: My character, Eulalia, survived and didn't even lose a lot of sanity!

UPDATE 8/19/24:
AUDIO:
August 4: Skiffy and Fanty 784. Demolition Man (1993) — Torture Cinema #144, with Shaun Duke, Julia Rios, and me. https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/784demolitionman/ and 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka9ggrCSJGY&t=1s

This Saturday, Aug. 17, I recorded another Stargate SG-Fun podcast, discussing some more SG-1 S3 episodes, so that should be out in a week or so. https://sgfun.space/

GAMING: August 16: Private Call of Cthulhu game, part 1 of 3, with keeper Morpheus. I'm playing Carson Webber III, a self-made millionaire, a Patreon of the Debunker Bunker, which is sort of like Mythbusters. They've created a mysterious machine and invited me and a select few others to witness its activation.

UPDATE 9/3/24:
GAMING: Aug. 23: Finished the Call of Cthulhu Inversion game. This 3-session adventure went on a bit long for me; there were six players so it took forever to go through people's actions, round by round. Interesting stuff happened, but stretched over too much time. 

AUDIO/VIDEO: On Friday, Aug. 30, I streamed on Skiffy and Fanty for what will be Torture Cinema #145, discussing Space Camp (1986). There will be a podcast and a YouTube video. Spoiler: I haaaated Kate Capshaw's character, Andie.

On Saturday, Aug. 31, I participated in a discussion about H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. Very wide-ranging, interesting and cordial! On The Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord.

UPCOMING: I'll be playing a Call of Cthulhu one-shot tonight, set in the 1920s at Mammoth Cave, Ky. My pregen is a Dilettante archetype. On Thursday afternoon (9/5), I'll finally get to play Jason Thompson's Dreamlands RPG, on his Discord channel. And on Friday (9/6), I'll be on Shaun Duke's channel, streaming and recording about the 2024 Hugo awards, finalists and longlist.

UPDATE 9/23/24:
I enjoyed the Dreamlands game, which ended up being postponed to 9/12.
The Hugo Awards discussion was also postponed, and I'll post a link here once the YouTube and podcast are up.
Skiffy and Fanty posted the Mining the Genre Asteroid episode where Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer and I discuss Jo Clayton's Diadem from the Stars. My take: This had some interesting stuff, but the series got much better later. The show is available on YouTube and as a podcast.

UPDATE 11/16/24:
Oh my, it's been a while! Arvan Eleron held his Arvathon mini-marathon seeking new subscriptions on Aug. 20 and 21, but since this was basically him playing a video role-playing game for 6 and 12 hours, I didn't have to organize anything; I just moderated and participated in the flash fiction Infernal Salon.
AUDIO/VIDEO:
On Oct. 11 I discussed "The Mummy" (1999) plus "The Mummy" (1932) and "The Mummy" (1959) with Shaun Duke and David Annandale for Skiffy and Fanty's Totally Pretentious subcast. I love the 1999 version, of course, but I was joyfully surprised by how good the 1932 version was. The heroine was temporarily possessed by a revived spirit, but she ended up effectively saving herself by praying to Isis. It was incredibly satisfying! Neither the video nor the podcast of our discussion has been released yet, but the Twitch stream is here.
GAMING:
On Oct. 31, Halloween, I played a private game on Discord, run by Groundhoggoth (but he also played) and joined by one other player. Foretold: In Its Shadow is a prompt-based, cooperatively told narrative-driven game. The public goal was to defeat a monster, but the players also each had their own agendas. I played Celia, "whose lover was a victim of the Beast and had come to Herb to get his professional assistance in building a trap for the killer she believed was something inhuman." Celia blamed Herb for not helping her in time to save her lover. The other player acted as Lee, a Hunter with their own TV show, but ended up being a mole for the Beast. Herb used himself as bait to immobilize the Beast mid-transfer, and Celia killed them both (with Lee left catatonic). Celia fled to escape the police (and loan sharks). It was great fun playing off each other.
On Nov. 11, I began a new campaign GMed by Groundhoggoth, run on The Good Friends of Jackson Elias server on Discord. Thunderchild is set a month or so after H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. This was a Session Zero for world-setting plus character creation and development. All the players are working at a project called Thunderchild that focuses on studying alien tech and ways to defeat the Martians if they come back. But we all have our own agendas, too! I'm playing Iris Worthington, the daughter and sister of industrialists, ordered by Papa and Ronny to steal some secrets for Worthington Chemical Corp., but I'm also a suffragette (secretly, a really RADICAL suffragist). One player is a journalist who's secretly working for the Diogenes Club, and another is openly secret service but secretly an anarcho-communist; the last player is a distant heir to the throne who wants to be a lot closer to the throne.
On Nov. 15, I played another private Discord game on Groundhoggoth's server: Down the Witches Road. Taking inspiration from the recently finished Marvel show "Agatha All Along" for thematics, it used the Blood & Water system but G took care of the GM details; all we had to do was make cases for advantages (or disadvantages) and roll a d6. This was possibly the best oneshot I've ever played for cooperative play and yes-and-ing each other, building off each other's suggestions. I and the other 3 players all had different powers/specialties. I was a witch who'd had a great secret stolen from her, and had trouble hanging on to apprentices; it turned out that the secret had been stolen by my first apprentice, so I was self-sabotaging all the apprenticeships that followed. Groundhoggoth said later that it was one of those sessions that was just on fire. We all had a great time!

UPDATE 12/12/24:
GAMING: I've played two more sessions of Thunderchild and am having a great time with it! I continue to be really pleased with the yes-and cooperative storytelling that everyone is bringing to this game.
AUDIO/VIDEO: 
On Sept. 24, Skiffy and Fanty released the video (https://youtu.be/R28Cx3NWASU?si=OgzIAgJ2Qh2FlCka) and podcast (https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/786edenroyce/) of a Skiffy and Fanty interview with Eden Royce, focusing on her newly released YA book, The Creepening of Dogwood House.
On Nov. 22, Shaun Duke and I interviewed K.B. Wagers about her new book, And the Mighty Will Fall, billed as a stand-alone in her Near Earth Orbit Guard (NeoG) series, on Shaun's Twitch stream, for Skiffy and Fanty. The Twitch stream is here, for now: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2308665562 and I'll post links whenever the podcast and YouTube video are posted.
On Dec. 1, Skiffy and Fanty released the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_08FRbB99-Q) and podcast (https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/788adapalmer/) of a Skiffy and Fanty SF at School interview about the broad topic of The Renaissance that Shaun Duke and I had done with historian/author Ada Palmer.
On Dec. 9, Skiffy and Fanty released the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2w1iZJYSwY) and podcast (https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/791loveaftertheend/) of a Reading Rangers review/discussion of Love After the End, edited by Joshua Whitehead, between Daniel Haeusser and myself.

On Dec. 9, I participated in a Skiffy and Fanty discussion on Shaun Duke's Alphabetstreams Twitch channel, about the most iconic SFF of the 21st century, following posts on Reactor.com and other genre sites about that topic. This will eventually be released as a Patreon-exclusive Speculative Dispatch podcast.
On Dec. 13, at 8 p.m. EST, I'll participate in a discussion about Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow on Shaun Duke's channel, https://twitch.tv/alphabetstreams, for Skiffy and Fanty.

UPDATE 12/31/24 (actually entered 1/1/25, but contains nothing from the New Year) 
On Dec. 18, Skiffy and Fanty released the podcast (https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/794spacecamp/) and video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XliyXjzdnz8) of the Torture Cinema discussion of Space Camp (1986), with me, Shaun Duke, and Paul Weimer talking about it.
On Dec. 21, Skiffy and Fanty released the podcast (https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/797kbwagers/) and video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSV9YVjkfl8) of Shaun Duke and me interviewing K.B. Wagers, the author of the recently published novel And The Mighty Will Fall, in her Near Earth Orbit Guard (NeoG) series.
Also, I am continuing to catch up on generating and editing podcast transcripts as Skiffy and Fanty released a burst of episodes during the holiday break.

Audio Transcripts

After I moved home in 2008 to live with my Daddy, I did a lot of odd jobs and freelance work before I found full-time journalism work again. One of the types of work I did was transcriptions of audio files. Some of this was for my church, transcribing interviews of longtime church members for a 100th Anniversary book. Some of it was for agencies. 

Now, once again freelancing while looking for full-time work, I have also been volunteering a fair amount of time for The Skiffy and Fanty Show. I've been doing more podcasts and writing more reviews. Recently, I've also been doing transcripts for the show, starting with podcast Episode No. 762, Science Fiction Empires. 

I find this pretty enjoyable. Back then, it was all me listening and typing, sometimes at half speed, sometimes at full speed but doing a lot of pausing and rewinding. I tried doing some transcripts as a volunteer for the 2019 WorldCon Fringe Festival, but trying to transcribe panels was overwhelming, with so many people talking, sometimes cutting each other off and talking over each other, so I had to renege on my offer, sadly. (Google docs offered free transcriptions at the time, but it was horrendously bad.) 

These days, all I'm doing is downloading the MP3, uploading it into MS Word, and then proof-listening while I proofread the document. I'm not trying to fix all the grammar mistakes and run-on sentences, etc., just mainly getting everyone's names right and looking out for egregious errors -- for instance, today I changed Word's misheard "our incest" to "orange zest." Sometimes getting names or titles right does take quite a while; I once spent about 10 minutes figuring out that a garbled sentence referred to a character name, and then hunting for a review that named characters in that book, so I could get it right. But unless it's a Torture Cinema or something where people are talking over each other, I can usually proof the transcriptions at about twice speed, so it's not too time-consuming.

Sometimes I can tackle transcripts right away, but sometimes it takes me up to a week to get around to transcribing something. But a lot of people don't listen right away, either, so I figure that's OK. Once I'm finished, I upload the transcript to a folder, and Shaun amends the episode Shownotes to add my transcript.

Audio Editing: Pro work for Arvan Eleron

 The former podcast editor for Arvan Eleron has moved on to other, full-time work. I've taken that over, turning video episodes of Arvan Eleron's Twitch RPGs into podcasts, after having been responsible for making shownotes and timestamps from his videos for quite a while. Editing audio episodes for pay is new, although I've had a fair amount of experience editing audio for Skiffy and Fanty, Stargate SG-Fun and the Supergirl Supercast. My first podcast for Arvan, Shire Adventures - Episode 28, went live on his website on Monday, April 22, and I'll be putting those episodes out weekly from now on. Eventually, certainly by the end of Shire Adventures if not before, I'll start turning his Eberron campaign into podcasts.

Review: Death in the Spires, by KJ Charles

I've loved KJ Charles since I stumbled across her historical fiction a few years ago, starting with Band Sinister, a sort of frothy gender-flipped combination of Georgette Heyer's Venetia and Sylvester, progressing to the wonderful caper/crime/romance Any Old Diamonds, reveling in the supernatural adventure/romances of This Spectred Isle and the Magpie Lord trilogy, and various other fun romps that combine crime/suspense/adventure and romance. Charles' latest book, Death in the Spires (being released April 11), is not a romantic romp like many of her others, but it is a gripping, immersive, deeply engaging and well told mystery.

It opens in 1905 with clerk Jeremy Kite being shown an anonymous letter that his employer had received, accusing him of killing Toby Feynsham. Yet again he has lost a job due to a scandalous unsolved mystery from 10 years ago, when he was one of "The Seven Wonders," a close circle of shining students at Oxford. After Toby, the leader of the group, had been found murdered, Jeremy had been unable to concentrate on exams and dropped out into obscurity. Now, he reaches out to the others to find out if they've been plagued with similar accusations, and finally decides to find out who ruined his life by killing Toby.    

I've read plenty of books set at Oxford (the Spires of the title) between the World Wars. This is a bit earlier than that, but the only major change I saw was that in 1895, women weren't yet awarded degrees, although they were allowed to study there. So there were only a couple of female members in the charmed circle. One of the students was Black. Jeremy himself was lame in one leg and a scholarship student from a poor background to boot (and secretly homosexual). Toby, however, had drawn all these apparent misfits into his circle, and for a while they brought out the best in each other.

A decade after Toby's death, some of the others are doing just fine, at least on the surface, but others have fallen nearly as far as Jeremy. However, they have mostly moved on and want him to drop the matter. Despite warnings, pressure, and eventual attacks, Jeremy perseveres in his investigation, traveling across the country to question his former friends and others who might know anything, and returning to Oxford to dig for clues in the past. Secrets are revealed, old wounds are revived, and old relationships are renewed, for good or ill.

Death in the Spires was a compelling page-turner; I raced through it in one night. The protagonist is highly sympathetic and relatable, and the other characters in the group are sharply drawn. The writing is evocative, and the revelations throughout the book and at the end were surprises but felt natural after all. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in historical mysteries, especially anglophiles.

Content warnings: Death, violence of various forms, a few short sex scenes, and negatively portrayed sexual and racial discrimination and ableism.

Comps: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Disclaimers: I received a free eARC of this book via NetGalley.

Review: Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery

I ran across Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery, story by Mat Johnson, art by Warren Pleece, and letters by Clem Robins, in the graphic novels section of my local library. It's fiction, but it's based on the true story of Walter White, the former head of the NAACP, who was, as Johnson puts it, "an African-American even paler than I was." White went undercover passing as a white man in the Deep South in the early 1900s to investigate lynchings, which was, of course, incredibly dangerous.

Incognegro's protagonist is Zane Pinchback, who works for the New Holland Herald of New York, reporting undercover on lynchings in the 1930s. Having narrowly survived his last assignment, he wants to switch to local Harlem coverage, but his editor pulls him back one more time by telling Pinchback that his brother back in Mississippi has been charged with murdering a white woman, his partner in distilling illegal moonshine; meanwhile, a sheriff's deputy has gone missing. Zane will save his brother Alonzo if he can, and cover the expected lynching if he can't. 

This effort becomes more complicated when his best friend turns up on the train. Carl wants to tag along and learn how to become an incognito black reporter himself, but he's overestimated his acting ability, and gets into his own trouble. Also, it turns out that missing deputy was keeping a major secret, too, which plays a major part in how things turn out.

I admire the characterization and plotting here; Johnson tells a great story, interspersed with ironic humor that highlights the horrors of dehumanization. He's aided in this by Pleece's striking black-and-white artwork; its bold expressiveness really brings people, including their conversations, arguments and actions, to life. Additionally, the juxtaposition of cheerful camaraderie in some of the crowd scenes with the crime that they're there to perpetrate is quite chilling.

The version of Incognegro that the library had was a 10th anniversary edition, published in 2018. An afterword by Johnson written for this edition says that when he first wrote it, he thought of it as a story of America's past -- not that racism was gone, but that its organized, overt expression had largely been defeated. But now, "the racial dynamic of the early 20th century seems to be, in some ways, repeating itself. ... Sadly, the era of racial terrorism covered in Incognegro is suddenly relevant again." 

I couldn't agree more. I'm from the South myself, and the facts that acted as a springboard for Incognegro weren't any surprise to me; however, seeing how they played out here in fiction acts as a visceral reminder of how normal and accepted vicious racism has been in this country's past, and if we don't work hard to stop its current recurrence and spread, may become so again in the not too distant future.

Content warnings: Lynchings and other violent deaths, drawings of dead bodies, casual and vicious racism, racist language.

Disclaimers: None

A Vanilla Villain's Variant Villanelle

 “After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.”

– Dave McCarty’s much-repeated statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards.

 

 

A Vanilla Villain's Variant Villanelle

It’s wrong to allege we were mere censors’ tools;
If you knew all the facts, you’d condone our behavior.
I grok Chinese fans, and was their White Savior.
I maintain the Committee just followed the rules.

We guarded our fellows by serving as footstools!
The Committee’s allowed to use our discretion,
so we bowed to preempt any Chinese repression.
It’s wrong to allege we were mere censors’ tools.

To dodge any offense, we looked hard for cesspools.
So what, if we glitched on some searchable facts?
Our Ineligible rulings were protective acts;
I maintain the Committee just followed the rules.

I knew we’d be hearing some protesting mewls,
so I massaged data while dragging things out,
and blamed lots of factors for the info-drought.
It’s wrong to allege we were mere censors’ tools.

Those who’ve assailed us are ignorant fools;
My Facebook inquirers, I rightly rejected,
except for Neil Gaiman; the ONLY affected.
I maintain the Committee just followed the rules.

So sorry I / we had to bury some jewels.
I’d have liked to give Weimer some facetime to vent,
But I’d have said that we ruled just the way that we meant.
It’s wrong to allege we were mere censors’ tools.
I maintain the Committee just followed the rules.

 

(I thought the repetitive nature of a villanelle was a perfect match for McCarty's self-referential defensive statements. Yes, I know a true villanelle should have been five tercets followed by a quadrain, not five quadrains followed by a quintain. But I needed a bit more space, and I am proud of some of these rhymes.)

 

UPDATE same day: Edited to fix McCarty's name.

Audio/Video/Gaming Roundup, 2024

Scroll down this post for the latest updates. For roundups of my 2023 activities in podcasting, gaming, videos, etc., please see here and here. Activities from before then are listed further back in my blog.

AUDIO: The SFFaudio Podcast #767 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Charwoman’s Shadow by Lord Dunsany, published Jan. 1, 2024. I discussed the novel with Scott Danielson and host Jesse Willis. I really enjoyed this old-fashioned fairy tale set in Spain. The audiobook is 7 hours, 40 minutes, and our discussion follows, bringing the podcast up to a total of 9:37:39. I haven't had a chance to review our discussion yet, but I certainly enjoyed exchanging thoughts about the book.
https://www.sffaudio.com/the-sffaudio-podcast-767-audiobook-readalong-the-charwomans-shadow-by-lord-dunsany/

UPDATE 2/7/24:

GAMING: On Wednesday, Jan. 17, I played a Call of Cthulhu one-shot on the Shadows of Nox Discord channel (video and audio). I thought it was being taped, but it hasn't been released as of 2/7/24.
On Saturday, Jan. 20, I played another session of the Stargate RPG, with Andrew Pontious as the DM. As always, I had a lot of fun. It was private, as usual, so it wasn't recorded. I STILL NEED TO EDIT OUR FIRST SESSION, THOUGH.
UPCOMING: I have a private Star Trek Adventures game set for Sat., Feb. 10, and another Stargate game set for Sat., Feb. 17.

CONVENTIONS: I went to Capricon in Chicago Feb. 1-4 and came back Feb. 5. I played my first game of Traveller with the Fan GOH, Victor Raymond, and attended a lot of panels. Very pleasant!

UPDATE 2/9/24:

VIDEO/AUDIO: I was on The Skiffy and Fanty Show's Looking Back, Looking Forward discussion last Friday, where Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, Brandon O'Brien, Daniel Haeusser and I discussed Books, Media and Other things that we'd enjoyed in 2023 and that we are anticipating in 2024. Currently the VOD is on twitch.tv/alphabetstreams (Shaun Duke's Channel), but eventually this will be edited into a podcast.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2058256572
(Update: This was posted on the Skiffy and Fanty podcast feed on Feb. 17 at
https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/759lookingbackmovingforward/
as a and YouTube video on Feb. 18 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibtWceJvwq8 .)

UPDATE 2/25/24:

GAMING: I played three role-playing games in February: Star Trek Adventures on Sat., Feb. 10, Stargate (by Wyvern) on Sat., Feb. 17, and Cthulhu Invictus on Sat., Feb. 24. All three were over Discord speech/video, and Stargate and CI also used Roll20. Both Paul Weimer and Andrew Pontious are very good gamemasters who do a lot of preparation but roll with it when players strike off in unexpected directions. Zoekitten (who offered the CI one-shot via The Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord) is also fun to play under; she used the scenario Akhenaten Unveiled, where we were servants of the old gods taking action against the heretic monotheistic pharaoh.

I'll be playing several more private games during A Weekend with Good Friends, a free online gaming convention organized by The Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord channel, this weekend. I'll be playing a science fiction game in the Bulldogs system, a villagers vs. monsters (or aliens) game in the Mutant Crawl Classics system, and a Nahuatl (Aztecs) vs. conquistadors game (we're the doomed Nahuatl) in the Unknown Armies system. And who knows, I may also end up in a pickup game or two!

VIDEO/AUDIO:

Paul Weimer used to do a regular column for Skiffy and Fanty, called "Mining the Genre Asteroid", back before the blog went on hiatus. Now it's been reborn as a discussion and podcast, intended for every month or two. It's being first broadcast live on Shaun Duke's Twitch stream, then converted into podcasts and YouTube videos. 

The first "Mining the Genre Asteroid" revival episode, on Feb. 16, had Paul, Shaun and me discussing The Demon Breed (1968) by James H. Schmitz, which featured a female scientist using her planet's ecological expertise to fight alien invaders. Rarely for the time, especially for male writers, Schmitz often wrote using tough, competent female protagonists, usually without even a male love interest. We had a good time talking about this one! https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2064916424
The podcast https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/760demonbreed/
and YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvOZQJugbZ4
were both released on Feb. 22.

AUDIO: I'm in The SFFaudio Podcast #774 – READALONG: Farnham’s Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein, released Feb. 17, with host Jesse, and Paul Weimer, Maissa Bessada, and Jonathan Weichsel. The discussion is almost 3 hours long, and does not include the audiobook. I definitely recommend skipping the audiobook, unless you're a serious genre historian, because there are a lot of vile ideas in this post-apocalyptic exploration. Maybe read Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood instead, if you want to read about an America where Blacks rule over whites (because the Plague killed off 90% of Europe in the Middle Ages). But you may still be interested in our discussion, because we had a LOT to say about this book.
https://www.sffaudio.com/the-sffaudio-podcast-774-readalong-farnhams-freehold-by-robert-a-heinlein/

UPDATE 3/5/24: 

GAMING: I was offered a slot in a Moonlight on Roseville Beach game on The Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord's A Weekend with Good Friends free online role-playing games convention, on Thursday, Feb. 29, but I had to back out with an hour's notice because one of my freelance science editing projects ran long. However, someone else snapped up the slot within 5 minutes of its availability being posted, so I didn't feel too bad. I've played this game before, and it's fun with a willing crew, and easy to pick up.

As the convention continued, I played 3 RPGs on Saturday, March 2, and every one of them had a no-show. Now, THAT is rude! But, whatever the GMs may have had to do on their ends to adjust threats/balances, things appeared to go smoothly from the players' viewpoints, and we had fun anyway.  I won't put other players' names here, in case they expected privacy (games were not permitted to be recorded or streamed).

Slot 9, 10-2 Saturday, March 2: Diverted Through a Nebula, for Bulldogs (FATE system), run by River, with three other players and me (and a no-show). It was a science fiction game, where we were exploring a derelict sending out a distress signal, but it wasn't abandoned after all. I hadn't played Fate before, but I had watched and listened to several Fate-based Actual Plays, and the GM was pretty good at talking us through our options. I played a medic ejected from a military service for triaging people and saving supplies TOO efficiently, and losing too many patients. My goal was to find something worth writing a paper about so someone would buy my contract back into civilization from the fringes. I enjoyed my RP, and so did the GM (who found something nice to say about everyone). Good game!

Slot 10, 3-7 Saturday: Temple of the Sk'wik for Mutant Crawl Classics, run by Blythy, with two other players and me (and a no-show). It started out with me, playing a sentient plant, with a human and a rat-mutant with a gun, all defending our village from gun-wielding wormy invaders, but took several unexpected technological turns. Not much RP, but a ton of fun action!

Slot 11, 7:30-11:39 Saturday: A Bed of Roses for Unknown Armies, run by mellonbread, with two other players and me (and a no-show). This was set during the fall of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), and we were struggling against the conquistadors. Again, I hadn't played Unknown Armies, or watched/seen it, but our GM talked us through it, and I had a fantastic time once I got the hang of it. I was extremely satisfied with my glorious Flowery Death that saved my son to fight another day! The GM has a wonderful write-up of the one-shot here:
https://bellenmred.blogspot.com/2024/03/unknown-armies-bed-of-roses-playtest-two.html

UPDATE 3/22/24:
GAMING: I played another really fun game of Star Trek Adventures on March 9. What had been planned as mainly a medical research/rescue mission turned out to have a lot of political angles, at least in the mind of my acting captain. We found a cure for the plague, but then various territorial/warlord wars heated up on that planet, and now numerous people are asking our ship for asylum.

On March 16, I played "Trailer Park Shark Attack" on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord. It was a lot of silly fun.  I forget the system, but it was pretty simple to pick up. The venue was Owlbear Rodeo, which only requires the GM to have an account. 

VIDEO/AUDIO:
On Friday, March 1, I streamed on Shaun Duke's alphabetstreams Twitch stream with him and Paul Weimer, discussing Science Fiction Empires. That discussion was released as a podcast on March 10 (https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/762sfempires/)and on YouTube on March 11 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnZqbxVymZQ).

AUDIO:
I was on The SFFaudio Podcast #778 – READALONG: Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr., with host Jesse and Paul Weimer, Scott Danielson, Will Emmons, and Jonathan Weichsel, released March 18. It's a grim but extremely well written novella from 1976, about a group of astronauts who return to Earth and find out that all the men there had been wiped out by plague long ago. Our discussion was very lively. 

UPDATE 3/30/24
GAMING/VIDEO/AUDIO: On March 26, I played "Cats of Catthulhu II: The Wraith of Chan" on Shaun Duke's Twitch stream (https://www.twitch.tv/alphabetstreams). Cats of Catthulhu is a very light-hearted, light-on-rules role-playing game, unaffiliated with Call of Cthulhu or any other cosmic horror game as far as I know. But there IS weird/eldritch horror, as seen, reacted to, and affected by cats. Part I of this game was played privately on Discord a few months ago. In Part II, my character, the adorable Abyssinian Tora-Chan, had, unknown to themself, acquired an evil twin named Tora-Khan. Congrats to Paul for successfully Catherding us to a conclusion in less than 2.5 hours!
Currently, the game is on Twitch, but I'm hoping that it will eventually be posted to Shaun's YouTube channel.
In case it doesn't, I made some clips:
https://clips.twitch.tv/FaintVastBillTBCheesePull-oDWdWd1xJD5fLw9U (Tora-Khan-I-Do-The-Eating)
https://clips.twitch.tv/UnsightlyToughOysterWoofer-LsK_ZsjAdUigb2-C (CalamityButtonsAndMoonChildArgue)
https://clips.twitch.tv/FurryCrypticWombatVoteNay-8DWJ5AmRm0Lx85nn (WeShouldTakeTheVesselWithUs)
https://clips.twitch.tv/SuccessfulArtisticPeanutNerfRedBlaster-g34GPEXDoa4kuYeV (Tora-ChanVsMoonChild)
https://clips.twitch.tv/HelplessGoodAnteaterTwitchRaid-WWEulJMClIKHogE-  (MoonChildEatstheSacredBean)
https://clips.twitch.tv/TardyDependableMeerkatFrankerZ-Q_QtSaP85fHdSWix (DrownTheBookAndPissOnTheGrave)

VIDEO/AUDIO:
On March 29, I was on the Skiffy and Fanty Show's Torture Cinema episode discussing Meteor (1979), starring Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, and a bunch of other people. It was honestly better than anyone expected, although the pacing was bad. Shaun Duke hosted the discussion on his alphabetstreams Twitch channel, and it should eventually be added on YouTube and as a podcast.
Meanwhile, here's a clip that ConfigurationQueen made of Shaun and me singing the "Meteor" theme that CQ wrote during the show: https://www.twitch.tv/alphabetstreams/clip/FlaccidSmokyMuleOptimizePrime-FU4vOZYW1o9uD7l1?filter=clips&range=all&sort=time
Unfortunately, our singing was out of sync due to the lag, but you'll get the idea.
(UPDATE 4/15/24: Here's the podcast: https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/766meteor/
and here's the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siz-ZLLVZfs )

AUDIO: I was on the Hugos There podcast released on March 27 that was a tribute episode to Vernor Vinge, who died March 20. Seth Heasley hosted, as always, and the other guests were Rich Horton, Olav Rokne, and Russ Newcomer. https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/vernor-vinge-tribute-episode/

On March 29, Andrew Pontious, David Schaub and I released an episode of Stargate SG-Fun that we had recorded in 2021 and finally got around to editing. This one, "Horse and Serpent Guards," was a deep dive into two episodes from Season 2, "1969" and "Out of Mind." Also, David attached pictures of Vancouver, where the show was filmed, from "1969" and the real 2021.
https://sgfun.space/horse-and-serpent-guards/ 

GAMING: I played a prompts-based science fiction game on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord server on March 30. It was a playtest for Foretold: From Earth, which should be available on itch.io next month. It doesn't use dice or character sheets; it's more like a one-shot that is a Session Zero where each player reacts to a prompt drawn randomly from a list (that's the only mechanic), and then everyone else yes-ands their ideas, expanding from what they've said to extend the worldbuilding. I enjoyed it quite a lot, but it needs to be played with a group of thoughtful, creative people, or it could end in stagnation or quarreling.

UPDATE 4/23/24:
GAMING: I played Call of Cthulhu: Poetry Night, a one-shot RPG, on Thursday, April 18, on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord. I played an arts-focused Twitch streamer who had permission for the first time to stream a poetry night from the Lakeside Coffee House, a tavern in Colorado. Unfortunately, someone chose to recite something from a forbidden tome. Most of the four characters made it back, only to find the world had changed. Lots of fun role-playing here. The keeper was Joseph.

I also played the Stargate RPG on Saturday, April 20. Andrew Pontious had set up a really fun two-part "season finale" for our team of five players, following the premise that each session of play represented a TV episode. As usual, this was over Discord with audio and video. Everyone got something to do that pulled on our strengths -- for instance, my Aturen character Jileria pulled apart Dr. Anderson's glasses to turn them into lockpicks so we could escape from a Goa'uld holding platform, but that's OK because Dr. A is a secret Tok'ra who doesn't really need glasses and just wears them for show.

AUDIO: About six months ago, I participated in The SFFaudio Podcast #783 – READALONG: Ill Met In Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber with host Jesse Willis and guests Paul Weimer, Scott Danielson, and Jonathan Weichsel. It's an extremely well-crafted urban fantasy novella from 1970. However, some aspects of the characters and plot annoyed me, so soon after that, I reread S.M. Stirling & Shirley Meier’s novel, Saber & Shadow (1992). I compared and contrasted the two works for Skiffy and Fanty in "BOOK REVIEWS: ILL MET AND WELL MET" on Oct. 30, 2023. Now, on April 22, the podcast has finally been released. I haven't had a chance to re-listen to the discussion yet, so I can't guarantee that it won't have any annoying or stupid parts itself, but I do remember enjoying the discussion.

UPDATE 5/7/2024:
GAMING: On April 24, I played "CoC Pulp Cthulhu: Waiting for the Hurricane" on TGFoJE Discord, set in Key West in 1935. It was fun, but it was a private game, so there's no link. I have a couple more private games coming up this Wednesday and Friday, should be fun! In PLAYTEST - Pulp Cthulhu: A Night at The Monolith, I'm playing a parapsychologist in 1935, and in Deep Freeze (Pulp Cthulhu), I'm playing an "egghead professor" in Alaska in 1936.

STREAMING: On May 3, Paul Weimer and I discussed Suzy McKee Charnas' Walk to the End of the World on Shaun Duke's Twitch channel for the Skiffy and Fanty Show. I had remembered it as basically a feminist rant from 1974, and it's certainly angry, but there's also a lot of interesting worldbuilding and really good writing craft. Here's the Twitch link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2136600063
Eventually there will be a podcast, too. UPDATE 7/31 I forgot to post this when it came out, but here's a direct link to the podcast, Skiffy and Fanty #776:
https://ia600401.us.archive.org/34/items/sand-f-776-charnas/SandF_776_Charnas.mp3
Also, here's the YouTube video, which came out in June: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xBPZ7zU9dU

AUDIO: The SFFaudio Podcast #784 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Skull-Face by Robert E. Howard. The podcast starts with the book being read by Connor Kaye (4 hours, 5 minutes), then has a discussion with Connor, host Jesse Willis, Alex, Jonathan Weichsel, and me. 
https://www.sffaudio.com/the-sffaudio-podcast-784-audiobook-readalong-skull-face-by-robert-e-howard/

UPDATE 5/11/24:
GAMING: I played 2 pickup one-shot RPGs this week and one in a campaign. Wednesday afternoon was "PLAYTEST - Pulp Cthulhu: A Night at The Monolith" on TGFoJE Discord, run by Zander, set in the 1930s. The setup was that a hotelier in the Appalachians had discovered a mummy and called in a bunch of experts to examine it. My pregenerated character was a parapsychologist. The game was limited in scope but interested; my biggest challenge was that with just voice and nothing to look at except occasional rolls in the text chat, pure theater of the mind, my attention kept wandering anyway.

Friday afternoon I played "Deep Freeze (Pulp Cthulhu)" on TGFoJE, run by Morpheus, also set in the 1930s but in Alaska. This one had a lot more elements going on, starting out with a car chase across the ice, pursuing Russian mobsters, then a boxing match, then in-town investigation, then a final confrontation at a secret base/temple. It ended up running an hour past the stated end time, although the Keeper said he'd already cut some stuff to shorten it to a one-shot. However, I had a lot of fun. Everyone was really engaged in it. My pregen character had an Irish background, so I put on an accent and did things like praying to St. Christopher, patron of travelers. It wasn't a *good* accent, but the other players appreciated the effort. This one also was voice with no video, but we also used the Roll20 virtual RPG environment. There weren't any maps, but there were illustrated character tokens and some beautiful landscapes/maps (and a chase counter for the first part). It just helped the immersion a lot.

Today I played Star Trek Adventures for the first time since March. This is an ongoing (sporadic) campaign with three other players, some of whom prefer to remain private, but they are really good gamers. This comprises creativity and ingenuity, LISTENING to the GM and each other (other characters' actions and goals), yes-anding them, passing the ball, and remaining engaged.
Today the GM originally intended a quick trip to the political center of the cluster and then on to the next mission, but we went off the rails pretty quickly. My character, Brevet Capt. t'Hrienteh (a Romulan, secretly a Rihannsu from Diane Duane's The Romulan Way alternate universe), held an officers' meeting for evaluations and assessments following our medical mission of mercy that ended up sparking war on the ailing planet. It became clear that NPC First Officer Gordon, who was transferred here at the same time I got my brevet promotion, had been foot-dragging and doing the minimum. This is affecting morale, including that of my new NPC XO, Faust. At the PC Ship's Counselor's recommendation, I ran training exercises, partly to give the First Officer opportunities to either shape up or screw up enough for me to act against him. Meanwhile, the PC Medical Officer, with whom I had a fair amount of friction during the medical mission, has been hovering on the brink of insubordination, but the Counselor appears to be drawing him into a plot against the FO, which helps me. Since the Counselor appeared to be gunning for ME at the beginning of this campaign, this is a little bit of a surprise, but he said to Dr. Siq'Suq that I've been doing a good job as a captain. None of this is helping me to get ready for the diplomacy on Meetpoint Station, though!

UPDATE 6/3/24
AUDIO: I forgot to mention before that on April 28, we at Stargate SG-Fun released Episode 14, "You Don't Have to Choose Your Favorite Child." In this, we ended our Season 2 discussions of SG-1 with an overview, picking our favorite and least-favorite episodes.
https://sgfun.space/you-dont-have-to-choose-your-favorite-child/

GAMING: On Friday, May 31, I wrapped up a two-part Pulp Cthulhu, "The Uncanny! Curse of Sekhmet" that started with my character and others confronting a bank robber on a plane in Italy, continued with rescuing a professor from a band of thugs, and ended with a scenario in Egypt reminiscent of the first Indiana Jones movie. This was GMed by Morpheus, on The Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord and Roll20, and as usual, I enjoyed the art that came with this adventure, which helped with immersion. Also helping with the immersion were the other characters, who threw themselves into the RP, as I did.

 

 

WorldCon trying a consultative online vote

Scrolling Mastodon on Dec. 19, I saw a post from Nicholas Whyte about the 2024 Glasgow WorldCon planning a consultative (nonbinding) online vote about a proposed change to the Hugo Awards, which would add two categories.  

I was pretty excited about this, and posted threads about it on both Mastodon and Bluesky. I got a few favorites on Mastodon and a lot of favorites and boosts (and a few new followers) on Bluesky. I'll recap here:

This is pretty exciting and potentially important for SFFH fans! Glasgow Worldcon is holding a consultative ONLINE vote between the close of award voting and the start of the convention, about a proposal to create two more Hugo Award Categories. But this will also test online Hugo voting in general.

The onsite-only voting process does require a demonstration of true commitment from voters (I can attest to this, having attended several lengthy Business Meetings). But as I noted, it's far from inclusive.
Per @nwhyte 's press release for Glasgow2024 Worldcon: "In 2016, the idea of an approval vote for Hugo finalists, as a third round in the nomination process, was passed at the Business Meeting but not ratified in 2017. We therefore propose to test the operation of a consultative vote..."

So while this consultative online vote will be nonbinding for this particular Hugo Awards resolution, it could help to eventually lead to WSFS members voting online as a *part* of a future three-step ratifications process (with the other two steps presumably being on-site votes at successive cons).

I'm excited by this idea, which would help make the World Science Fiction Society amendment-ratification process more inclusive every time, instead of swinging between the populations of whoever can make it to the onsite, multi-day WSFS Business Meetings at two successive Worldcons for each change.

I think trying to move to online-only voting (with no onsite steps) would be far too drastic a change to the WSFS amendment process for now. But adding an online voting component absolutely seems appropriate to me. Participation in this nonbinding vote will help bring that future possibility closer.

On a personal note, I'll certainly be participating in this vote. I'd been planning to attend the Glasgow Worldcon this summer, and participate in the business meetings, until I found out that neither masks nor vaccinations will be required. Now I'm torn, but at least my opinion will be seen online.

For the record, I'll be voting against the proposed change to the Hugo Awards, which would add two more categories to an already long list of awards. But I think adding an online component to the voting process is a great idea.

Duolingo 2023 Year in Review

 Duolingo sent me its 2023 Year in Review assessment (despite there being nearly a month left of 2023, grrr). I'm a top 1% Spanish learner! My streak of days in a row doing language exercises now stands at 576. 

This year, I focused on Spanish. In 2022, I had started off dabbling in Latin and German, then switched solely to Spanish after being laid off, partly in hopes of making myself more marketable. That hasn't produced any professional results yet, but I'm enjoying the process and keeping my brain sharp with this course.

The chart says 3,838 words learned, but that's a bit ambiguous. First of all, it's total words learned, not just Spanish; second, I think Duolingo means individual words, not lexemes (e.g. "be" would be a lexeme that includes am, are, is, was, were, etc.). So female and male versions of adjectives would each count, as well as each variant (person and tense) in a conjugation. Spanish also has declensions in pronouns, for subject vs. object vs. possessive. So what I really have learned so far in Spanish is probably between 2,500 and 3,000 word variants. 

Experts differ on how many words it takes to be considered fluent; I've seen anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 words for basic conversational functionality, from 4,000 to 10,000 words to live and work in another country, and 10,000 to 20,000 to be considered native-level fluency. I am not sure whether this means words or lexemes. Anyway, I have a long, long way to go toward fluency, but I am confident I could visit a Spanish-speaking city and get around as a tourist without too much trouble, after adjusting to whatever accent is prevalent there and getting people to "hable más despacio, por favor" (speak more slowly, please).

Besides Duolingo, I've started watching some shows and movies with closed-captioning in Spanish, where that's available, to try to increase my familiarity with the sounds of the language. So I'll hear the dialogue and try to match it with what's printed on the screen.

Meanwhile, my phone has started showing me some ads in Spanish. Sometimes I understand a whole sentence, but more often I'll just catch a word or two. I think it'll be quite a while before I try the reverse audio exercise of watching an English-record show in Spanish with English captions -- unless I start watching something made originally in Spanish. I'd rather not just try random telenovelas, so recommendations are welcome!

 

 

Book Review: Uncanny Times, by Laura Anne Gilman (with light spoilers)

Skiffy and Fanty was offered an electronic Advanced Reader Copy of Uncanny Vows (The Huntsmen, Book 2, out today, Nov. 28) for review, but I hadn’t read Uncanny Times (Book 1) yet. Although I strongly believe that a book up for an award should stand on its own, I think a reviewer should try to experience a book in context, rather than jumping into the middle of a series and then complaining that they don’t understand what’s happening. 

Of course, a mid-series novel should contain enough back-references for someone plucking it off a library’s New Books shelf to be able to enjoy it without feeling lost, but most people read a series from the start. I think that’s better for reviewers, too, when possible.

Luckily for me, my lovely local library had an audiobook of Uncanny Times via Hoopla, so I was able to listen to it first, before starting the sequel.

I ended up feeling slightly lost anyway. I was a little annoyed by the beginning of Uncanny Times, which started off “Four. By the time the Harkers made their way back to the boardinghouse, darkness was creeping its way back through the treetops.” Rosemary and Botheration were named, so it seemed like these were the Harkers, but then “they” took Botheration to his kennel. So Botheration was a dog -- or a watch-wher, for all I knew at the moment, but that was enough to be going on with. Then "Aaron" laughed, so he was the other Harker, but it took a while longer to understand that Rosemary and Aaron were brother and sister rather than husband and wife, and even longer to figure out why they were at this boardinghouse (to investigate a mystery in the town).

I am not a reader who demands to be spoonfed information. Part of why I love speculative fiction is the enjoyment of figuring out how a world works; for example, I felt shocks of joy when things started coming together and making sense in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit. However, when reading a gaslamp fantasy, what I want to be figuring out is the mystery, not the book’s structure.

What could have been a perfectly good framing device was only revealed later in the book, in Chapter 1 (the second in the book, after 4) – the brother and sister received a help-me letter from someone who’d aided the Huntsmen organization before with information. But for some reason, Gilman opened the novel after the story was already in progress.

It’s fashionable these days to start novels in the middle of the action: a fight, a chase, an argument. This method reveals some of the tone of the book, and promises that it’s not going to be too heavy on exposition. Preferably, there’s enough revealed during this action scene that the reader can start caring about the result, rather than just waiting impatiently to find out why it matters. But simply moving Chapter 4 to the first position in the book strikes me as a very bad choice.

I was also annoyed by some other early elements in the book. The Harkers appear to unquestioningly accept all the lore and governance handed to them by the Huntsmen, in whose service their parents had died when they were fairly young, and seem completely accepting of the view that humans are mostly good and everything else is unnatural/evil. However, I loved Gilman’s complex and nuanced Devil’s West trilogy (Silver on the Road, etc.), which is why I had jumped at the chance to review Uncanny Vows. I couldn’t believe that everything was going to continue so simplistically black-and-white, so I kept reading, and my patience was justified.

MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW:

It turned out that the mysterious killings that drew the Harkers to this town had some human complicity, and the villain had gotten involved out of entirely understandable motives. The Harkers got assistance from some totally unexpected quarters, and their final report to the Huntsmen ended up shading some of the truth to protect some allies.

So I was pleased to see the Harkers’ worldview expanding, and I fully expect to see more of that in the sequel.

I did quite enjoy the relationship between the Harkers, with their love and trust, and making allowances for each other’s bad habits, intermingling with teasing, small frictions and secrets. Their relationships with each other and with the Huntsmen reminded me more than a little of Sam and Dean Winchester and their (looser) association with the Hunters in the Supernatural TV series.

So far, I’m not as impressed with the opening of the Huntsmen books as I was with The Devil’s West, but Uncanny Truth was an entertaining light read, once I got past the beginning. And anyone who would like to read something that feels like early Supernatural episodes certainly might want to give the Huntsmen series a try.

Content warnings: Violence, deaths, drug abuse, era-accurate sexism

Comparisons: Supernatural TV series (early seasons)
 
Disclaimers: None (library book) 

UPDATE 12/14/23: My review of the sequel, appears at Skiffy and Fanty. "I’m sure I’ll continue to like the Harkers’ relationship, and although Uncanny Vows ties up most of its plot elements in a satisfying way, there are plenty of intriguing hints left to be explored in future books."
https://skiffyandfanty.com/blog/book-review-uncanny-vows-by-laura-anne-gilman/

Review: Marcie R. Rendon’s Cash Blackbear mysteries and forced assimilation

I saw Marcie R. Rendon’s Murder on the Red River on the New Books shelves at my lovely local library (written in 2017, republished in 2022), and picked it up and wolfed it down. I whizzed through the series via Libby, continuing with Girl Gone Missing and Sinister Graves.

I don’t have much in common with the protagonist, Renee “Cash” Blackbear, at least in the beginning, but I found her compelling. As the series starts, in the 1970s, she’s a freelance farmworker in the Red River Valley who loves playing pool. A 19-year-old Ojibwe, she was taken from her reservation so young that she barely remembers anything from there, and her time in the foster-care system was so traumatizing that she now drinks herself to sleep most nights. But she’s friends with Sheriff Wheaton, who helped her when she was younger and still checks in with her every once in a while. She helps him to identify the body of a Native American found in a field, and this leads her to get involved in other mysteries.

Despite Cash’s trauma, she is capable of empathy and more. She tries to save some orphaned kids from getting split up into the foster system; when she starts going to college in the second book, she starts making friends, or at least acquaintances, and leads some strangers out of serious trouble.

She’s sensitive, although she mostly hides it, acting out on occasion, and intelligent, although this too gets her into trouble. She also has dreams, visions, and occasional out-of-body experiences, which are not always as effective at warning her as she would prefer. It could be argued that she may not have mystical powers and is just putting facts together subconsciously, but at least while reading, I prefer to take her word for it.

By the end of the third book, she has cut down on her drinking, moved through a couple of empty relationships and found someone who seems to truly understand and appreciate her for what she is instead of just using her. She has made some other life changes that seem very positive, although I won’t give any more spoilers than I already have. If these three books are all we get of Cash Blackbear’s story, I’m satisfied with her arc.

Besides Cash’s story, a major throughline of Rendon’s books is the mistreatment of Native Americans, particularly children. Individual crimes against individual Native Americans are easily swept away and unnoticed. Broken foster-care systems in the Midwest are depicted as a pipeline for forced agricultural labor, and abuse is routine.

In foster homes, there were days and nights that were hell on earth–times she would fall asleep hoping to not wake up, or almost convincing herself life was a dream and dreamtime was the real time. Her one respite during all those years was compulsory education. That was a rule even the foster families didn’t dare break. – Sinister Graves

Of course, compulsory education has itself been used as a systematic tool of oppression and erasure of Native American culture. Between 1819 and 1969, more than 500 indigenous boarding schools were operated in the U.S., many with explicit goals of assimilating children into majority-white society, by taking children from their parents, renaming them, forbidding them from speaking any language but English, and disallowing their local hairstyles and clothing; moreover, many of these schools were also associated with churches and missionary societies and exerted considerable pressure for Christian religious observances.

A 2022 U.S. Interior Department investigation “found that 19 boarding schools accounted for the deaths of more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children but the number of recorded deaths is expected to increase.”

The Author’s Note at the end of Sinister Graves says it was written before 215 children’s bodies were found in unmarked graves at the Catholic-run Kamloops Boarding School grounds in Canada. Thousands more died while attending Indian residential schools in Canada, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

Coincidentally, around the time I was finishing Sinister Graves a few weeks ago, news broke on multiple outlets about Tibetan boarding schools that appear to be enforcing assimilation into Chinese culture. According to the Associated Press, “China has shuttered village schools across Tibet and replaced them with centralized boarding schools over the last dozen years.”

About a million Tibetan children, which is most of the school-aged population, including preschoolers as young as 4 years old, are estimated to be studying at these schools. Chinese authorities claim that’s voluntary, but with former local schools closed and penalties for non-attendance, it’s not much of a choice.

I doubt that international calls to disband these boarding schools will have any effect on Chinese policy, any more than protests have had against their Uighur re-education camps. It took the U.S. and Canada well over 100 years to realize how wrong they were to attempt forced assimilation of indigenous populations into the dominant cultures, and unfortunately, many people still believe in this policy, or at least see little harm in it (e.g., efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act).

Books like Rendon’s help bring the impact of this horrible policy into emotional reality for readers. Moreover, this series is interesting and occasionally very exciting. Sometimes the villains are a little predictable, and I’m not so sure that things would always turn out as well for Cash as they do, but she earns it. On the whole, I’m cheering for Cash, and I recommend these books.