graculus

I posted here about the best books I'd read till then back in June, so I thought I'd do a follow-up post about what I've read since then which has also been good. In late December, I'll probably do a best books of the year post but expect a number of these to make a good showing then as well:

California Bones - Greg Van Eekhout

The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods - NK Jemisin

Smiler's Fair - Rebecca Levene

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Claire North

Midnight Robber - Nalo Hopkinson

Regeneration - Stephanie Saulter

Sorcerer to the Crown - Zen Cho

The House of Shattered Wings - Aliette de Bodard

Penric's Demon - Lois McMaster Bujold

Point of Honour - Madeleine E. Robins

Ancillary Mercy - Ann Leckie

The Copper Promise - Jen Williams

The Traitor - Seth Dickinson

Wheel of the Infinite - Martha Wells

The Fifth Season - NK Jemisin

If you're interested in finding out what I thought of particular books above, you can find my reviews over at Booklikes.

I'm also still finishing up the current books in the Vorkosigan series (as I write, I am midway through Diplomatic Immunity with just two more books to go before the new one comes out in February) and subscribing to Tremontaine, which is a serialised prequel to Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner.

It's been an interesting couple of years to be a fan of SFF, that's for sure. The latest kerfuffle is over the subject of an award, given by the World Fantasy Con every year, which currently is in the shape of what I can only describe as a caricature of the fizzog of said HP Lovecraft. I'm not going to post a pic here, because it's pretty awful, but if anyone's desperately curious to see it, you can find a pic of it and the man himself here.

Basically, for the past few years there's been something of a campaign to get this award statue replaced by something a) less awful and b) not representing someone who was a massive racist, even by the standards of his own avowedly-awful period. Naturally, this has seen some pushback - mostly by white men, it has to be said, which will come as no surprise to anyone, I'm sure - because of Lovecraft's influence on the genre. Except that, racist arseholery aside, I'd argue that if there was a competition to say which dead white guy has had the most influence on the Fantasy genre, Tolkien would be a shoo-in.

Anyway, good news, the award is going to change from this year so we're waiting to see just what replaces it. In the meanwhile, we get to retread the argument about whether you should separate the behaviour and atittudes of the creator of something (whether we're talking books, movies or whatever) from the thing they've created. This becomes more complex, naturally, when you're thinking about past times as the 'but everyone was [insert prejudice of choice here] back then!'.

I think, as I've got older and thought more about people other than myself (I hope!) then I can empathise with a zero tolerance approach even though I might not maintain it myself. There are certainly creators of modern media who I think are unmitigated arseholes and I choose not to engage with anything they are involved with - if anyone's interested, my list includes but is not limited to Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Steven Moffat, Orson Scott Card and various less well-known folks within the SFF genre who I have seen be arseholes online. I have zero tolerance for people who are either plagiarists or who have been caught being arseholes to anyone who criticises their work (Anne Rice is the first person who leaps to mind, but there are others). There are also folks in fandom who I have seen be arseholes online so I now won't read anything of theirs, even if they happen to be in fandoms I would otherwise read.

As for historical stuff, that's a little more difficult - apparently, even for his time Lovecraft was considered massively racist, which is saying something. It's an easy out to say 'oh, everyone thought like that' because that's never been true of any time period, since if it was true nothing would ever change because nobody would ever think it needed to. There have and will always be outliers, good and bad, with most folks being somewhere lumped in the middle of whatever opinion is current. Still, we choose what we value and what we give head-space, and I choose to be more selective than that, since there's plenty more out there that isn't produced by arseholes.

Just got the letter offering me my classes for January onwards and apparently I will be teaching every morning, Monday-Friday, as a minimum. So that basically means I need to get myself organised and down to London this side of Christmas as there are currently a number of fantastic-looking exhibitions on and the thought of missing them/struggling through Saturday crowds makes me come over all peculiar:

The Celts: art and identity at the British Museum, which includes a visit by the Gundestrup Cauldron, which is usually in a museum in Denmark, among other things.

Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age at the Science Museum - the main challenge with this will be not leaving with an armful of posters and so on... There's also an exhibition on at the Science Museum about Ada Lovelace.

Black Georgians: The Shock of the Familiar at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton.

There's bound to be even more than that, once I get looking at everywhere else, but that ought to be enough to be going on with - any London folks, if you'd like to meet for dinner or some such, let me know? I'm currently looking at Wed-Thur-Fri-Sat of the last week in November as provisional dates, but it could be the week after.

September is the start of the new TV season for most things so it's been traditional for me to post something around then about what I'm watching, what didn't survive the end of last season and what I'm looking forward to - yep, I know we're in mid-October but there's still new stuff coming so whatever... Spoilers likely in the comments, opinions welcome!

The old faithfuls (some class, some cheese - you decide which is which)

I'm still watching Person of Interest and even though s5 is only 13 eps, I'm already looking forward to it. No date yet for the US premiere as far as I know. Meanwhile Elementary season 4 is back on 5th November, again with no UK date confirmed. I was delighted to discover that one of the ITV channels here was showing s3 of The Americans, though I'm still a few episodes behind as all that season has aired in the US.

Season 3 of Brooklyn Nine Nine just started in the US, with no sign of a UK premiere date yet, but it's still good. ( spoilers )

Somehow I made it to the end of the previous season of Sleepy Hollow and have seen the first episode of the new season, which premieres in the UK on 22nd October. ( spoilers )

As for shows currently on hiatus, still loving both Vikings and Orphan Black and was delighted when Sense8 was renewed - I also quite enjoyed Daredevil. I also have a backlog of both Turn and Longmire episodes to catch up on. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I absolutely loved Agent Carter.

For those folks in the UK who're wanting to see s3 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Alibi has the season premiere on 28th October.

I caught up with Empire earlier in the year and s2 just started in the UK, so loving the scenery-chewing but only just tolerating (and to be honest, fast-forwarding through at times) the bursting into song/rap.

What didn't survive or which I am unsure about

This year I bid adieu to Grimm after losing interest partway through the last (problematic, imho) season and then also Hannibal - I made it all the way to near the end and then noped out of a particular scene in either the last or penultimate episode. Started season 2 of Dominion but lost interest and wandered off.

I just started watching season 4 of Arrow and get the sense that could go the way of the previous shows quite soon, ditto for The Blacklist which went a bit crazy at the end of last season.

I've also seen the pilot episode for Blindspot and ( spoilers )

Impressive newcomers & what I'm looking forward to

I was mightily impressed with season 1 of The Detectorists, which is a very charming little comedy staring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones. Season 2 starts on 29th October.

Meanwhile, season 2 of iZombie just started in the US, as did season 2 of How to Get Away With Murder (UK premiere is 28th October), so we'll see if they can maintain their respective interest for me. Season 2 of Jane the Virgin just started in the US and again this is a show I enjoyed more than I expected to but am unsure whether it will be able to hold my interest in the longer term.

On recommendation, I watched and quite liked season 1 of Killjoys - for some reason Syfy here in the UK have not shown this yet, which is frustrating.

I am very much looking forward to Jessica Jones, which is due in November and am hopeful about a show called Into the Badlands which seems to be an odd mixture of all sorts of genre influences (so is likely to either be awful or awesome, no middle ground), also due in November. I've also seen the pilot of The Man in the High Castle which is based on the Philip K. Dick alternative history novel of the same name and that again could go either way when the rest of the episodes are released, again in November.

I've been a vegetarian for about 20 years - not a vegan, because god knows I would sell my soul for cheese and usually have at least 3 or 4 kinds in the fridge at any one time, and then let's not get into the horrorshow that is non-dairy ice cream - but any time I tell someone they always seem to ask the same question. What do you eat?

Well, for starters, I don't eat meat or fish or seafood. And then I also am quite picky when it comes to checking the ingredients of pre-prepared food; you'd probably be horrified if you realised just how many things have beef or pork gelatine in them, especially if you know how gelatine is made. This is particularly a problem with desserts, including at one point a whole swathe of Muller yoghurts. Yeuch.

But when people ask me what I eat, what they actually mean is 'I couldn't imagine not eating meat and so what is left to eat if you remove that?' Erm, lots of things. And that's even without touching on the whole pretend-meat segment of the vegetarian market (which I don't really like all that much, except for occasionally the Quorn pretend-chicken burgers). Not really sure what it is they think vegetarians eat, if not soy mince and, well I have no idea...

So, what do I eat? Well, today I had mushroom risotto, yesterday I had potato and cauliflower curry and tomorrow I'm probably going to have kitchari (which is rice and lentils, in this case cooked with cauliflower and peas). I eat a lot of Indian food, probably more than any other kind of cuisine, and my spice rack is starting to feel the strain as a result. I have a lot of jars and could probably do with a few more, if I can squeeze them in somewhere.

Luckily I also live close enough to shops where I can buy slightly more obscure things like asafoetida or get my hands on decent paneer (for some reason the variety the main supermarket I shop at stocks is far too crumbly) and also all sorts of weird and wonderful fruit and veg. I also usually end up with 2 or 3 meals at a time, so I really need to get another freezer and get myself more organised!

I haven't quite got to the point of grinding my own curry powder or making my own paneer yet, but I can sort of see the attraction. ;)

As regular readers of these posts will know, all my clever plans to teach this academic year and also start a part-time PGCE got given a major kicking by our lovely Tory government's inability to manage joined-up thinking. Sure, we're going to be taking more refugees (as we should, no argument from me) and in the meanwhile people need to learn English for reasons but this will happen by unfunded means similar in appearance to magic.

Anyway, the current situation is this - we're in consultation over what happens from January onwards. The folks I work for employ a bunch of folks on various fractions of a full-time post and then a few folks like myself who are paid on a sessional basis. The fractional folks have to teach so many hours per year, depending on their contract, and get paid through the year, while us sessional folks only get paid for what we teach and have no entitlement.

From next week, the organisation is running a reduced level of classes staffed by the fractional folks as a holding position while they reorganise for January, at which point people will either have a job or not. Fractional folks can take voluntary redundancy before this (and the teacher whose class I took over in January this year has done that) or will get compulsory redundancy if they don't get re-hired. Sessional folks are eligible for neither but it's been agreed we can put ourselves forward for re-hiring on the same basis as the fractional folks. This is an unexpectedly even-handed approach and actually I was pleasantly surprised to hear the door was open for us too.

So we're not completely bollocksed, but it's still a bit up in the air. We should get interviews mid-October, unless enough people leave or voluntarily reduce their hours prior to that and mean the relevant hours can be provided by everyone left without too much squabbling. There's already been at least one 'why don't we all play nice and reduce our hours a bit so we don't have to go through this?' but some of us don't have any hours to reduce and others can't afford to. It's a nice idea but relies on the concept that folks are doing this job for pin money and while that's certainly true for one or two I'm aware of, it's definitely not the case for others.

The PGCE is done for this year, though. No guaranteed teaching hours (at least not until January, assuming I'm successful at interview) = no place. I'm going to ask for deferred entry, as they'd accepted my application, as things will be settled this time next year, one way or another!

A lot has changed since I got into fandom, back in the late 1990's. That was also when I first got online and it was dial-up, which seems like another world completely - I regularly ended up paying extra at the end of the month because I'd exceeded my allotted time online.

At one point we were downloading episodes of SG-1 in what everyone referred to as 'squinty-vision' because the resulting files were huge (in relative terms) but the video produced was tiny and so you'd have to squint to figure out what was going on or even to tell non-speaking characters apart sometimes (the joys of a series that takes place mostly in a setting where people wear uniforms, I guess!). Those files still used to take literally hours to download, so I used to set them up before I went to bed and hope the download wouldn't crash overnight.

And then there were the mailing lists, long before the advent of LJ, and their own particular way of doing things. Some fandoms still have them and they're ticking over, but most of them have (understandably) gone the way of the dinosaur when LJ became the main place for fandom to be.

Now, bypassing the rise and fall of LJ, a lot of fandom is on Tumblr, which is by no means the right place for anything other than lots of 'ooh shiny' given the way it does things. And there's definitely a place for shallow and pretty, but that doesn't mean it works for anything else. So it's quite amusing (in a sad head-shaking and remembering we've been through this before) that some folks now on there are all 'oh, Tumblr is changing and fandom should leave'. This started last year, iirc, when Tumblr was bought by Yahoo and people starting having minor freak-outs. Yes, you should leave and come back to LJ and/or Dreamwidth where we can have proper discussions about things without horrible nesting issues.

I wonder where we'll end up next? ;)



Meanwhile, in related news, I'm happy to say that I'm managing to write at least 750 words every day and am currently on a 16 day streak. After a very scientific method of tossing a coin on August 31st, I also signed up for the month challenge on 750 Words, which gets me another badge and my name on the Wall of Awesomeness if I manage it. I am apparently much more easily motivated (in this case by small internet pics of animals and birds) than I ever imagined would be the case!

Now, after months of my subconscious going 'pfft, call yourself a writer, you can't even manage to sit down and do anything!', we've now moved onto 'oh, so maybe you can write everyday, but what you're writing is shit' which I guess is an improvement? Yep, just over 15,000 words and maybe some of it is crap, but at least it exists.

Been posting on the new UNCLE kink meme which is a bit of an odd experience, all this anonymity and so on - boy, there are some really 'interesting' prompts on there! And yes, I'm writing movie fic but plan to use the same method to break the deadlock on my two existing public WIP as well as clear out some of the other stuff I've had lurking on my hard drive, some of it literally for years.

Yep, looking back I see that I have posted one of these each year about August-September, so let's make it three in a row!

1. Tripping Over You - Milo and Liam, navigating the waters of a first relationship (m/m).

2. Supercakes - Kat Leyh is now getting more of a break in mainstream comics as an artist for Lumberjanes and things like that but hopefully this on-off series about superpowered girlfriends will continue! (f/f)

3. Hotblood! - centaurs in the American west (m/m).

4. The Center for Otherworld Science - as the author herself describes it, it's about "three women, awkward romance, interpersonal workplace dynamics, and a cryptozoology institute with questionable ethics." (f/f implied)

5. Dragon Husbands - Fai lives on a space station in the future and is more than a little surprised to find he's been betrothed from childhood and that his intended is a dragon. (m/m)

6. Eth's Skin - all about selkies and so on, in a slightly-altered British Columbia (queer).


I'd also previously linked to American Captain Comic which is a bitter-sweet comic drawn by one Steve Rogers, but that's now been on hiatus for 6 months so you need to bear that in mind...

After the metaphorical smack-in-the-face that was last week, I figure I deserved a break and on Monday I seem to have got a small one at least... I got a text from the agency who organised the time I worked in the university library (and I didn't think I was still on their books, as it was more than 18 months ago) asking for someone to do admin work for a couple of weeks locally.

I started yesterday and it's going to be 17 days' worth of work in all, in the office of a small manufacturing company (don't ask me exactly what it is they manufacture, something to do with insulation) dealing with purchase orders and all that sort of thing. Yesterday was a crash course in what to do, as the person whose job I'm covering is away on holiday, though she's only been there a couple of weeks herself!

And yes, they know I need next Thursday & Friday off (I can't believe it's time for Nine Worlds already!) and were cool with that too, so that's excellent news. Hopefully I'll be getting some work from the university in August too, as it's resit time and apparently there's a lot more demand than they were originally expecting (uh oh!), though there's a bit of an overlap so I won't be available for just over half of the resit period. Hooray for money! \o/

I'm reading a lot of books this year. This should come as no surprise to anyone at all.

I've signed up for the book challenge over on Booklikes and Goodreads, though I'm actually posting reviews of some of what I'm reading on Booklikes if anyone is interested... Anyway, 100 books and I've read 62 so far. This does not include books I started but didn't finish, but does include some graphic novels (which you may feel is cheating?)

Best books this year (so far) have been:

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin

All of the Vorkosigan books (I'm up to A Civil Campaign) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Redemption in Indigo and The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan

Fever Season and A Free Man of Colour by Barbara Hambly

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars by Elizabeth Bear

The Humans by Matt Haig

Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

Feast of Souls by CS Friedman

The more perceptive among you may realise that many of these books are the first in a series or trilogy, which means I have lots more (hopefully equally good) reading ahead of me! :)