I’m really happy to present the new table of contents for Rosalind’s Siblings – Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Scientists of Marginalized Genders. Such an awesome list of authors, I am so glad they entrusted me with their work. The book is coming this September from Atthis Arts! Check it out on the publisher’s website, where you can also preorder the book.
This anthology changed publishers because the press which originally acquired it went out of business before releasing the book, so there have been some changes in the ToC due to that. Three stories are not currently available due to their rights situation; so in consultation with E.D.E. and Chris Bell of Atthis Arts, the new publisher, we decided to acquire new stories from those three authors. The more the merrier! I am excited.
Do please feel free to squee about the ToC in the comments 🙂
I signed my contract and the official announcements went out, so now I can say it –
I’m starting in a new position at the University of Kansas in the fall – I’ll be Assistant Teaching Professor of Slavic, German and Eurasian Studies & Jewish Studies.
I’ve taught at KU for quite a while now, as a part-time adjunct lecturer with varying hours, and I’m really happy to take a full-time position. KU students are great and teaching them is a pleasure. I’m grateful to everyone at both departments and at the Dean’s Office who made this a possibility, especially Chairs Ani Kokobobo and Rami Zeedan + also special thanks to the members of the external review committee last year, who recommended hiring me on a longer-term basis. Thank you also to my family members for all their support!
This also means I won’t be doing three different part-time jobs to make enough money 🙂 I’m resigning from my publicity position at Ben Yehuda Press (I enjoyed working there and would recommend them!), and I’m also closing for manuscript editing and consultations – though I might still take some on a case by case basis, especially from repeat clients.
I will be able to spend more time on fiction and poetry writing, and it will even count as a small percentage of my job duties! (Really just a small percentage, this is not a creative writing position; but I will be able to put those things in my CV.) So if you’re reaching out to commission me, solicit a story / poem / etc., or something along those lines, I will still have openings for that and I’ll be delighted you thought of me.
I’ll also be able to spend more time on reviewing books, I should really be mindful that recent academic books should be reviewed for academic venues 😀 but everything else will continue to be here on Patreon – alongside my fiction, poetry, the occasional drawing, etc. Patreon will continue to be the best way to support me directly. I enjoy doing Patreon, even though my backing has dropped by a lot during the pandemic and hasn’t bounced back yet – having a more stable job situation will help me keep on doing it.
This is a massive tome – around 980 pages –, a typographically experimental novel that is ostensibly hard SF. (More on the “ostensibly” in a bit.) I picked it up because a book club I belong to is reading it in July; I honestly don’t know if I would’ve either started or finished it otherwise, but I enjoy complaining about books in good company 🙂
The plot has two intertwined main storylines: an astronaut on the Moon who meets a crashlanded extraterrestrial, and the shenanigans of three employees of a London micro-startup in AI and game development. The setting is vaguely present-day, with some changes, e.g., there is a massive telescope on the far side of the Moon.
There were many things I loved about this book. Some of the typographic elements were really cool (others were a bit tiresome, and the handwriting font was terribly illegible). There was also a lot of fun big-picture, sense-of-wonder science fiction stuff. Yes, please give me more huge, galaxy-spanning everything! I love large-scale, and some of this was strikingly imaginative. I also appreciated the novella that was embedded in the novel, though it completely failed to fulfil its conceit of either being a real 1960s science fiction serial, or commenting on 1960s science fiction serials in a fun meta way. It just wasn’t similar enough to its supposed source material… (I might have read too much 1960s SF, if there can be such a thing.) But it was a cool read in itself.
Unfortunately there was also a lot of meh, and some elements I found just bafflingly bad.
Most importantly, you can’t have a massive hard SF tome where the science just doesn’t work. The computing stuff in particular was especially nonsensical. I found myself thinking to myself “That’s not how programming works, that’s not how computers work, that’s not how information itself works.” A very small example I can offer without plot spoilers: the author seems unaware that source code needs to be compiled to run. One of the characters edits the source code of an app and the app just changes. This is really minor in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully illustrative of the level of inaccuracies without touching on major plot elements. I’ve seen several reviews say something along the lines of “I didn’t understand the programming because I don’t have enough of a background” or “I’d enjoy this more if I was a programmer” – I just want to reassure you that it’s not you! Don’t blame yourself! It’s nonsense, the emperor has no clothes. If you are looking for a similar hard SF book where the computer stuff might be difficult to understand, but it ultimately makes sense, I recommend Greg Egan.
There is also a lot of complete WTF regarding both the nature of consciousness, and religion. Reading XX, I felt that the author clearly ran a lot of the physics by a physicist, but I don’t think there was input from a religious studies scholar 🙂 Here there were also elementary mistakes, like stating that the Gospel of John was in Genesis. Even if you are a hardline atheist, this is just factually wrong, and also nonsensical. The book presents an atheistic worldview, which is not a problem for me as a reader (I like when authors have thought about religious aspects of their book, implications of the plot, etc.), but it comes across as the kind of banging-on-table, crude “New Atheism” that went out of fashion about a decade ago – simplistic and preachy. I felt like I could’ve argued for it better, and I’m not even an atheist.
The book endlessly refers to “memetics,” so I’d also like to remind everyone that memetics is pseudoscience. (Though here the author put in the effort: one of the very few remaining proponents of memetics is credited as having consulted on the book.) I honestly thought that several aspects of the plot would’ve worked better as straight-up fantasy. For example, the “digital memetic entities” – there is even a pun that they are like demons, and they are Western-occultist-style thoughtforms / egregores. Why not just call them that and have a science fantasy or otherwise mixed-genre book? “Ideaspace” would work better as a fantasy concept too. I promise it’s not morally wrong to write fantasy! You can even write fantasy and have computers!
There were parts where the author is trying to make fun of humanities scholars, I found this also simplistic and preachy, and rather at odds with the general left-wing tone of the book. There are repeatedly painfully unexamined colonialist asides that would in fact be crucial to the plot if considered in more depth, so maybe the humanities could’ve been of some use after all, besides being presented as a laughingstock. The most aggravating is when the author tries to show the social climate by pasting in fictional racist online postings about aliens (a meme and a 4chan post), this is both entirely unnecessary and just reproduces racism – including the n-word spelled out in full. Just don’t.
Something else that could’ve used a bit more of the humanities, or just plain human consideration: this is a very dudebro book. I found myself reading chapter after chapter and thinking “will it ever pass the Bechdel test?” I wanted to give you the page number, but I had to return the book to the library very fast because someone requested it, so I can’t – sorry about that. It is both a dismayingly high page number, and not a very substantial pass, plus the women characters are often portrayed in high dudebro fashion too. The whiteness of the book you can probably estimate based on the preceding paragraph, but it’s grotesque that possibly the only major character of color isn’t even technically human. (All the major characters are really underdescribed despite the page count, so I might have missed something, but they are all portrayed as culturally white.)
To end with something small that annoyed me – I can’t just leave it out: I was looking for the image credits and couldn’t find them at first. They are on page seven hundred something due to some plot-related WTF. Don’t use image credits as a meta device over 700 pages into your book with no mention of the page number in the front or back matter, please. This is harmful to the original creators.
All in all, I don’t regret that I’ve finished the book, but I like the occasional hateread and XX slowly turned into that. The first half was much stronger than the second, and overall at least 300 pages could have been cut with ease. My experience was like “Oh this is intriguing, even if massively redundant” – “Okay, now there’s randomly a novella, which is mostly fun, but I’m not sure why it is here” – “wellllll this is not all that great anymore :/// ” and even the perspective widening to the intergalactic didn’t save it. Oh well!
Volume 2 of the graphic novel Prism Stalker by Sloane Leong: The Weeping Star. I loved the first volume, and was super happy when the author reached out if I was interested in blurbing the second!
There is a fun promo graphic that I embedded above, but I’m putting the text here as it doesn’t fit into the alt text.
This is a slightly longer version, I always give longish blurbs because it’s easier to cut than to extend 🙂 :
“A diamond-sharp look at colonization and imperialism, Sloane Leong’s PRISM STALKER faces the demons of classic science fiction head-on. In the second volume, Vep and her fellow students have learned how to manipulate the planet’s strange energy field, only to become ever more enmeshed in the campaign to seize the land and destroy its inhabitants. Who are the arbiters of sentience, and who decides which beings deserve life? How do people justify violence – even to themselves? PRISM STALKER shows with fearsome clarity and breathtaking psychedelic visuals how autocratic power holders turn subjugated people against each other. Read it and draw strength from it: it’s a story that grows more timely with each passing day.”
The graphic actually says the launch date is July 25, but I’ve been informed it’s been moved to August 1. This is doubly cool because August 1 is my name day! This is a minor Hungarian holiday (the smaller version of a birthday) that you can now celebrate by… getting this book.
Here are some book buying affiliate links 🙂 I recommend Bookshop as usual.
Random factoid: about one third of the blurb requests I get results in a blurb.
In the meanwhile, I also wrote a whole heap of reviews that will be posted as Patreon entries, probably scheduled for this weekend & the next. Stay tuned!
This review was available on Patreon first. If you enjoy reading my reviews, I strongly suggest signing up – there’s a lot of other fun stuff too that doesn’t become free, like the regular DNF pile event that is only for my backers 🙂 The current Patreon review is XX by Rian Hughes, something I read for a book club, enjoyed at first, then slowly slid into MAKE IT STOp.
This is a French comic anthology about women’s body positivity, translated into English by Ivanka Hahnenberger. It’s slightly different in concept than similar American anthologies – here the comic creators don’t write about themselves, but rather each of them is paired up with an interviewee who shares her story.
I think this has approach both advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that you can hear about uncommon experiences without having to find a comic creator who has had that very specific experience; which might not be possible. For example, here there was a chapter about a woman who survived the Bataclan terrorist attack, and was severely injured. This was a great take on a topic that is often considered unspeakable, unapproachable.
The biggest disadvantage is probably that there is more of a distance between the creator and the person speaking; one of the chapters involving tattooing I wasn’t even sure at first who was being interviewed, the tattooist or the woman getting tattooed (it was the latter).
So what does the book have? The people skew young, though the very first chapter talks about aging, from a woman who’s 71. (She’s the only contributor over 40.) There are multiple chapters about fatness, eating disorders, and about gynecological conditions, including pregnancy complications – which is another topic I don’t see much of. One interviewee talks about Black womanhood, and there is at least one other woman of color (who is Vietnamese) who doesn’t discuss race. I’m saying “at least one” because there is another interviewee who seems Asian, but this isn’t mentioned in the text at all. There are chapters that mention visible scars, and also one of the speakers has a physical disability that is not gynecological. There are queer contributors and also incidental queer inclusion (e.g., when someone talks about something that is illustrated with couples, there is an F/F couple). There is also a chapter about rape.
What isn’t included? Obviously not everything can be included in only 12 short chapters, but it’s still worth taking a look – I possibly had more difficulty with the exclusions than what was there in the book.
There isn’t anything about being intersex; I was hoping they could interview an intersex woman, but sadly not. This was especially frustrating because the usual barrier to that is the lack of cartoonists who are intersex and out about it (I know at least two American projects where this has been a problem), and that wouldn’t have been an issue here because of the format.
There is one chapter that tackles gender nonconformity in a way that made me wonder if the interviewee was genderqueer / nonbinary in some way, but this isn’t discussed explicitly, and there is no trans-focused chapter either beyond that. There are no trans women / transfeminine contributors either that I could discern from the book itself. The Goodreads description says “women and non-binary people,” so I wonder if someone came out as nonbinary since the book came out, because there isn’t any explicit discussion of nonbinary topics, and the introduction etc. only talk about women. There is a brief mention of nonbinary people in the acknowledgements at the end, but this is easy to miss. And this is another case of assuming nonbinary = AFAB non-intersex people, which I find always troubling. In any case, this isn’t deep and thoughtful trans/nonbinary inclusion, but something that seems almost accidental?
Overall this was an interesting anthology, I liked reading it even if I didn’t think it was perfect. It was quite short (there are 12 people speaking) and some of the chapters seemed more superficial than others. It also seemed based on a video project originally, I wished there was a bit more explanation of that. There were also sometimes little asides that I wished would have been edited more firmly; like when one of the people not interviewed about fatness complained about gaining weight, and there’s also something about colonialism in one of the white people’s chapters that would have either needed to be interrogated more, or left out, to work for me.
Overall I’m here for even more body-focused anthologies – let me plug Corpus: A comic anthology of bodily ailments edited by Nadia Shammas. If you liked this one, that one is not to miss either. Or if you found this one a bit too short, Corpus is quite a bit longer…
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Source of the book: Impulse borrow from Lawrence Public Library new comics shelf
This is the wraparound cover for the latest anthology I edited, Rosalind’s Siblings: Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Scientists of Marginalized Genders 🙂 Art by Mia Carnevale and cover design by Chris Bell.
First of all, I have various pieces of news items! They are all much better than the past two days’ incredibly dispiriting news from the US Supreme Court. (I haven’t really finished processing it emotionally yet…)
The Rosalind’s Siblings cover reveal is coming on Sunday! Still finalizing the new version of the manuscript and some authors are changing their story titles, so the ToC announcement is going to happen a little bit later. But we wrote the back cover text 🙂 thank you to publishers E.D.E. and Chris, who have both been very proactive about this anthology.
The cover reveal is also part of a fun weekend event at publisher Atthis Arts – check out their various social media:
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I finally did my conference registration, on the last day it was due (oops), so this is also going to happen: I’ll be participating in the “SF in the Classroom” panel at SFRA/GFF 2023: Disruptive Imaginations! This is a conference in Dresden, Germany, but I’ll be attending remotely.
I’m going to talk about how I use the toolset of futurism to teach Jewish ethics! (It’s really fun)
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And now for the book reviews! Only two this time, because they’re quite long. Links are US Amazon associate links as usual! Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, and Into the Dream by William Sleator.
This is a science fiction / fantasy mix-up novel; which isn’t the same as science fantasy. It has aliens and demons. I’d compare it to All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders in this aspect, when it comes to genre mashups (in other aspects it’s extremely different). I really enjoyed it, but I do have some odd little hangups with it.
First of all, the things I loved the most seem to be the ones that gave most other readers trouble; at least going by Goodreads reviews. There are a lot of very short sections with perspective shifts between them – I loved this, this is how my brain works, I wanted to HUG the author. It felt honestly welcoming. I don’t know how this type of structure would come across in audiobook; but on the print page, it was exactly what I needed and what I often don’t get from other books.
I also enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek tone combined with extremely serious topics. This is very much an Eastern European (often specifically Jewish) literary approach in my mind, but it can clearly be Asian American as well 🙂 People who are uncomfortable with this need to consider that this kind of approach is a trauma response. I know, these days everything gets called a trauma response, but this really is. The plot makes it also very clear IMO.
Somewhat relatedly, I am late to the party and everyone has already told me about this book – but what I was surprised by was how many people online described it as cozy. (I didn’t hear this from personal friends, but saw it a lot online from strangers.) This is extremely not a cozy book. Without getting deep into spoiler territory, one of the main characters is sexually assaulted within the first 50 pages. Later, two people are gruesomely murdered and several other murders also happen off-page. Please don’t conflate the seemingly lighthearted tone with coziness.
So all that worked for me really well. The detailed descriptions of violin playing were awesome too; I don’t play the violin, but one of my family members does, so this was a delight to read. (Bonus point for Bartók! Thank you so much!) I was also happy about the mentoring relationship that seemed to deliberately play with expectations of how such a relationship usually plays out in fantasy novels.
There was something that I was confused by on first read. When it came to Shizuka Satomi, the teacher/mentor character, I couldn’t quite square her behavior with her grim backstory of how she had behaved with other students (which is revealed right away, this is not a spoiler). I ended up thinking about this a lot. Some spoilers (decode with ROT-13): Ng svefg V gubhtug, “fur vf whfg gbb avpr sbe ure onpxfgbel.” Gura V gubhtug “Ohg znlor fur vafgehzragnyvmrf ure avprarff.” Gura: “Fur vafgehzragnyvmrf ure avprarff, ohg fhfgnvaf vg sbe fb ybat gung vg orpbzrf trahvar va gur raq.” (Xvaq bs? Ubcrshyyl?? V nz abg ragveryl fher, ohg gung’f cneg bs gur grafvba.) Juvpu vf npghnyyl ernyyl vagrerfgvat naq abg n gnpx zbfg bgure FSS abiryf gnxr. Fbzrjung eryngrq Wrjvfu gnatrag: Bar bs gur Punfvqvp eroorvz erpbzzraqrq gb n fghqrag bs uvf gb tb gb n qvssrerag gbja sne njnl, naq fcernq n ehzbe gung ur jnf n fnvag. Gura ur jbhyq or rkcrpgrq ol rirelbar gurer gb orunir yvxr n fnvag. Naq univat gb xrrc guvf hc sbe n cebybatrq gvzr, ur jbhyq trg hfrq gb vg naq ghea vagb n fnvag!
So after having thought my way through this point, most of remaining my annoyances were much smaller. I felt that some of the side characters were rather simplistic, often introduced and then abandoned, even though there was plenty of word count. I especially expected to find out more about Tamiko. Some plotlines also didn’t quite resolve.
Overall I found this book a great read, even though I had some frustrations with it, primarily afterward – I tore through the book with little time for reflection, because the way it was told resonated with me so strongly on multiple levels. There isn’t any other novel that’s quite like this one; I’d suggest giving it a try.
Spoilery discussion of the ending:
V’ir frra n ybg bs qvfphffvba nobhg ubj Fuvmhxn Fngbzv snprf ab pbafrdhraprf – V qvfnterr; fur unf gb yrnir Rnegu jvgu yvggyr punapr bs fnsryl ergheavat. Gurer vf n qrzba jub unf vg va sbe ure! Fur svaqf bhg nobhg jung’f unccravat gb nyy gur crbcyr qrne gb ure bayl guebhtu oevrs hcqngrf! Gurfr nofbyhgryl ner pbafrdhraprf gb zr. Znlor vafhssvpvrag, ohg gung’f n qvssrerag nethzrag. Vg zvtug frrz yvxr fbzrguvat bs ab pbafrdhrapr vs lbh qba’g unir n “zvtengvba onpxtebhaq” nf Treznaf yvxr gb fnl vg; ohg vs lbh qb, vg’f irel qvssrerag.
I just joined a local book club – invited by one of our local farmers, thank you Robert!! – where this is the next month’s title, so I’ll probably have even more thoughts at a later time, once I’ve had a chance to discuss it with more people.
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Source of the book: Someone bought it for me from my wishlist, but it came without a name. Thank you Anonymous Benefactor!
Several people told me to read William Sleator when I asked for vintage YA SFF. Some of them specifically recommended the Boxes duology, I thought because of the queer representation? But it turned out they recommended it because of the telepathic crabs. Ok then! XD
I haven’t written about the Boxes books yet; this is my third Sleator title in rapid succession.
Into the Dreamis a science fiction / horror / paranormal adventure from 1979 – it’s fast-paced and sometimes genuinely terrifying. While reading, I felt that the author’s fears more closely paralleled mine than is the usual case with horror. I had just been thinking about this re: video games – I found Subnautica relaxing because I’m not afraid of the ocean. I’m also not afraid of the dark, which makes a lot of video-game scary vibes not-scary, in general. Here on the other hand, we have terrifying things like A FERRIS WHEEL. Noooo!
The back cover text only mentions that two kids realize they have the same nightmare, and they decide to investigate. This is indeed how the story starts, but it ends up having many unexpected and entertainingly bizarre elements, breakneck chase scenes, and more. Also, if you’ve been a kid in an adult library, it will be relatable too 😀 I don’t want to spoil the plot any further, it has multiple offbeat turns.
One thing to consider for present-day readers is that out of the two kids, the boy has rather misogynist attitudes about the girl – which are proven mostly wrong during the course of the book, but this means that readers will still have to read and be frustrated with all that. I’m an adult and understand the context of the late 1970s, and also the vaguely learning-experience-y aspect of this subplot, but younger readers might be more annoyed.
I haven’t had a chance to put up reviews because I was catching up on day job activities after our plumbing disaster resolved. But I’ve done a few things…
I’ve been working on finalizing the text of Rosalind’s Siblings! Because the anthology was in limbo for such a long time, I’ve asked everyone to give another read to their stories/poems and see if they needed any changes. I’m still making my way through the edits, I’m done with around half. There are also going to be some changes in the ToC due to rights/availability. New ToC and cover art announcement coming soon, G-d willing.
Other interesting news items related to my writing / reviews / editing / etc:
I am $6 away from posting some queer Kansas poems for you! Tell your friends or raise your backing, there’s also some cool drawings of farm animals down along the line. (I can also be convinced of posting an extremely fluffy dog. Not my dog, but very cute – and I, a cat person, don’t say this lightly.) At the end an entire alternate-Kansas story is waiting for you!
Ignyte Awards voting is closing in about a week! I’m a finalist in the Critics category, and there’s a lot of awesomeness on the ballot all-round. You can vote here.
Thank you for your support and I hope to bring you many more things! especially when our plumbing doesn’t explode. XD
…now I can say that I was one of the jury members in the LGBTQ+ Studies category. We chose Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics by Darieck Scott as the winner. I love this book and now I can tell you about it! 😀
It’s really a superb book with deep thought on Black queer fantasy and superhero comics, also a great read in addition to its scholarly value; plus it doesn’t shy away from difficult-to-approach topics such as queer erotica and pornography, either.
Here is a purchase link from Amazon and from Bookshop (both are associate links).
I’ve judged for the Lambdas before, but this was my first time in this category – and also my first time judging an academic book award.
Welcome to my summer Patreon event. I teased it a bit earlier, but now I can announce it. It’s going to be themed! The theme will be QUEERS OF NO COAST.
I want to focus on queer life in the US Midwest, because I live in the Midwest (as an immigrant), have done so for quite a while, and have absolutely no intent of moving away from here >:) Regardless of the best efforts of the Kansas legislature!!! Please send me fortitude.
The way this is going to work is like similar previous events. You back my Patreon and/or talk your friends and/or your enemies into it. Raising your current backing also works! When we reach a specific goal, I will post a specific thing.
Unlike previous times, I’ve already made the things to be posted – with the exception of the book reviews, where you’ll be able to suggest books to be reviewed. This is because life has been rough (you know if you’ve been following our plumbing disaster) and I want to make sure you will get your rewards. But this also means the rewards are a bit less flexible. …Except the book reviews. Those are very flexible. THROW books at me! Or send me to the library, where I can throw books at myself. 😉
$325/mo. – Kansas poems! (we are very close to reaching this one!)
I have been working on a set of Kansas poems for a few months now, but I haven’t posted any of them anywhere or sent them to journals either. Now I will share three handpicked pieces!
$350/mo. – I draw farm animals!
I’ve already drawn the farm animals 🙂 at the state fair where the 4H kids were exhibiting. I will scan and post them for you! Because I’m Jewish, the animals include a pig.
$375/mo. – Midwestern book review bundle!
I will post at least three lengthy book reviews from queer (especially trans) authors from the US Midwest. I have already decided on one, but two more are still open, so tell me about your Midwestern favorites! Any genre (literary fiction is also a genre).
$400/mo. – Alternate Midwest story!
This is going to be a story set in an alternate-universe Kansas. I’ve already written it and you will be able to read it. The story will contain 100% authentic Kansas weather.
The event will last however long it lasts – if we finish it before the end of the summer, I’ll do my best to come up with further goals 🙂 It’s not a Pride month only thing.
