Magic and mirrors
Extremely long time no write! I keep promising myself I’ll be better at putting out a newsletter regularly, but then writing about things other than prophecy-defying mothers or sexy dragons turns out to be so much less motivating. What’s new with you?
Write
In May I was privileged to lose a Nebula Award to the excellent A.W. Prihandita, and in June, my newest novella, “Starstruck” came out. I first wrote this book about 10 years ago, as a young adult fantasy. Recently (well, in 2022), I decided to revisit it and pare back a lot of the layers that meant less to me. What was left wasn’t YA anymore; so if you’re looking for a read with a middle-aged protagonist, this is it. Especially if you’re looking for a middle-aged protagonist who also happens to be a radish. It has been described as having cozy vibes, and I think it has a sense of humor about itself, but it’s cozy in the way a Miyazaki movie is cozy: there’s eating scrambled eggs and bicycling in a forest and painting the walls of a house in there, but also a quiet devastation and a loss that can only be reckoned with, never forgotten. Anyway, please consider buying it, or ask your local library to pick up a copy, to support a cool small press and the only author out here writing about middle-aged lesbian radishes.
It’s been a quieter year for me on the short fiction front, as I focus on longer work. My favorite piece from this year was “Because I Held His Name Like a Key”, which appeared in June in Strange Horizons. This story about is AI/LLMs in a way, and also not really about that at all. Alan Turing steps through a door and finds himself in the parlor of a prince of Fairyland.
I also had a piece of flash out in the latest anthology from If There’s Anyone Left, “The Sister Who Left”. I rarely write stories for specific people, but this one I wrote for my own sister, and I’m glad I did.
And finally, I got to write a story for Magic: the Gathering’s new Edge of Eternities setting. It’s called “The Wefthunter”, and there’s also an audio version read by Jesse Inocalla, who voices my kid’s favorite character on The Dragon Prince on Netflix. I’m not always a particularly cool mom, but now and again I get to be a very cool mom indeed.
Read
I’ve been reading a lot of useful but not particularly moving research material for the next book I’m planning on writing, which means less time for reading new stuff. I did get to The Incandescent by Emily Tesh this month, which is good, because I proposed it for next month’s book club read. I loved Tesh’s previous novel, Some Desperate Glory (enough to loosely base a D&D campaign on it), and the new book was also a delight. The Incandescent takes on the magical school from the perspective of the faculty. The villain feels intensely familiar, and the novel pulls back the curtain to show off the inner workings of the system that, if not intentionally villainous themselves, have created problems and then fossilized around them.
I also read The Dragon Waiting, which has been on my reading list since the last time I went to Fourth Street Fantasy in person, pre-pandemic, and which popped up recently on sale in the email digests I get from BookBub. I enjoy an interesting alternative history—what if Christianity never took off and remained a marginalized minority religion on the fringes of the Eastern Roman Empire?—as well as an interesting vampire, both of which are on offer in this one.
Also recommended: I Who Have Never Known Men, another book club choice. Absolutely bleak and very lovely. Would be interesting to read in the original French sometime, although I cringe to think how long that would take me these days. I’ve seen it described as “The Handmaid’s Tale for Gen Z”, which colored my expectations going in; I was anticipating something more political, to do with reproductive freedom. But the book is much less interested in any of that; it’s about what it means to be human, both when there is nothing left to hope for but also when there is nothing left to overcome. Most of the book club was frustrated with the lack of answers the book offered, but this is not a book about what happens, it’s about who we are when terrible and confusing things happen. And when nothing really happens at all and probably never will again.
No time for a novel? Then here’s a piece of short fiction from L Chan, who never disappoints: “And the Planet Loved Him”. Grief, unexpected lines of communication, corporate malfeasance, fungus, and lovely writing to tie the whole thing together.
Reveal
I’m about 45,000 words deep in my current novel, which I’m writing and the narrator is telling out of chronological order. It’s about a woman who receives a prophecy that her (then unborn) daughter will one day give her life to save her people, who then undertakes to isolate the kid from civilization enough to keep that from ever happening. The narrator is a refugee twice over who happens to find himself in her company for several years, though he didn’t learn until much later that she and her daughter were the subjects - or the objects, maybe - of that prophecy.
Even during that time when she and I were as close as wine and bottle, she never spoke a word to me of her trip down to the godsblood lake. Everything I know about it, I have gathered up from other voices, other texts, other songs. But I picture her down there in the darkness, so young, with gooseflesh on her bare arms. Only, what?--four-and-twenty, five-and-twenty years old. Before worry had taken the chance to carve its price from her face. Before she’d grown as recklessly hard-hearted as when I knew her. I would have held her hand, if I walked down into the sacred darkness beside her. If she would have let me.
Rant
Inspired by all the people who have lost their media jobs recently for speaking truly, about Palestine, about the current American administration, about a recently deceased right-wing activist; as well as listening to the cheers and applause in the backgrounds of the painfully buffoonish clips from yesterday’s MetaAI demo: a few words about the mirror.
The mirror is the world as experienced by fascists and by the technological elite. These groups are not the same, but there’s enough overlap, in their persons and in their worldviews, that it doesn’t matter enough to distinguish between them. When they open their eyes, all they want to see is a mirror, which reflects them and nothing else, and only ever from the best and most flattering angle. Polishing the mirror is your job, and everyone’s job who is not already privileged to be among the reflected. You must not tilt the mirror to reveal an unsightly mole, or a dirty hand.
All this is perhaps most obvious in the current American regime, which demands not only total control, but that we must love it while they step on our necks. But you can see it also in the tech industry, where tech journalists pretend to be amazed at every new development. They choose to act - for reasons of access? of not wanting to be the first person in the room to ask why the emperor is naked? - as if Altman and Amodei and Zuckerberg and the rest are serious people. However inane the new “feature” is, however obtrusively it’s jammed into a workflow, however much spending outpaces revenue, however much cash pours into these companies that are theoretically supposed to become for-profit enterprises any minute now. However downright bad a product is - it’s okay, it’s probably just spotty wi-fi causing the problem. It’s okay, we’ll fix it in the next release. No, the next one; the one when we create artificial general intelligence, probably. It’s okay, we’ll put in safeguards by making the computer automatically call the police for you, because obviously nothing bad has ever happened when the police get brought in to a fragile situation. What do you mean you think this tech is bad? Do you hate progress? The incredulousness is breathtaking, in the same way as a particularly dire bout of food poisoning is.
It’s all of a piece with the psychosis-fueling sycophancy dispensed by large language models themselves: why yes, of course you can do that! Of course I can help you! Of course it’s going great! It’s all of a piece with helping yourself to the unpaid labor of thousands of artists and writers because you deserve it, because your business model doesn’t work unless you steal the raw materials - because you exist in the weird quantum superposition where you don’t have enough money to compensate creators, but you do have enough to get away with what would count as a crime if a normal person did it.
They want a fan club and a cadre of happy servants, or at least servants who can/are willing to perform happiness; it’s irrelevant whether the fan or servant providing a particular service is a computer or a person. When they smile into the mirror, the mirror must smile back at them. They need ChatGPT to tell them that they’re the best and most brilliant at art and writing; they need art that doesn’t challenge their preconceived notions in the least, that is exactly the same as everything else they’ve ever enjoyed, only more so. They need the newspapers and 24-hour TV programming to say what big smart strong boys they are, and also, these big strong smart boys need to never, ever hear a word against them. Don’t you dare leave one single fingerprint on the mirror. How can you be so callow? Why would you be so critical? At a time like this?
We’re privileged to live in a time with an incredible degree of access to people who have lived different lives than ours, as well as to a diversity of artistic works available for our enjoyment and wonder: all the painful and precious and horny and beautiful angles of the wide, weird world. I cannot imagine looking at all that and desiring instead something that regresses toward the mean. I cannot imagine peering into the well of human creativity and being disappointed that I don’t see my own face looking back up at me.
The mirror is massive and there’s a lot of money constantly being funneled into its maintenance and upkeep. Scratch it anyway. Kick it hard enough to crack, if you’re in the position to do so. Their egos are fragile, and so is glass.
Reward
You made it this far! You deserve a little something for your efforts. How about a dog picture? Don’t worry, I have a lot of them, you’re welcome to this one.
Thanks for reading, and, as the man said, fix your hearts or die.