incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

I have just purchased, as an e-book, Daniel Keys Moran's The A.I. War: The Big Boost. It looks to be about 70K words and is sold in a zip of multiple DRM-free formats.

popelizbet is organizing a Characters of Color in Science Fiction & Fantasy Faceoff, starting at con_or_bust and concluding at WisCon's Gathering. It's a bracket challenge like Suduvu's Cage Match or chickfight, except not Death Matches!!!, just a friendly opportunity to showcase some awesome characters and make silly arguments about who's better.

You can nominate people for the eventual bracket now. I'm already enjoying this and think it's going to be a lot of fun. (And as the icon suggests, one of my nominations was Wendy Watson from The Middleman.)

• To Protect and Kill: Morality in Action Manga - Mecha - io9 :: Thesis: "Just as Watchmen criticized the morality of superhero comics, manga like Bokurano and Fullmetal Alchemist criticize the "smiles and happy endings" of shonen manga." The only one of these works I'm familiar with is FMA, so I can't judge the article as a whole, but I thought people might find it interesting.
  (tags: manga)
• Suvudu Cage Match - Suvudu - Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Movies, and Games :: This March Madness for SFF geeks is basically hilarious. I'm not sure which is my favorite, top-seeded Shrike against Arthur Dent, Aragorn v. The Wee Free Men, or Dumbledore v. Vlad Taltos (yes, the very first comment is exactly what you think).
  (tags: sff geek)
• Ataraxia Theatre » Archive » What ERV really stands for :: Emmy makes a cameo in panel three.
  (tags: comic.strips chateau.steelypips)

This is a draft of my ballot for the Fan Writer category in this year's Hugo nominations.

• Abigail Nussbaum, who blogs at Asking the Wrong Questions (there are links to her reviews at other sites in the sidebar).
• coffee & ink, who blogs at coffeeandink.
• K. Tempest Bradford, who blogs all over but principally, for these purposes, at her own site and at The Angry Black Woman.
• Possibly James Nicoll, who blogs at james_nicoll; as much as I enjoy his LJ, I tend to think of it more as a news source and discussion place than a source of his writing.
• Possibly Deepa D., who blogs at deepad; she doesn't post as much as any of the rest of the people on this list, but her posts in January 2009 alone were beautifully written and important.

And though I feel deeply awkward in saying this, the nomination stats indicate that I have previously been nominated in the Fan Writer category by more people than just Chad. So I feel obligated to point out that while my writing here and at my sadly-neglected booklog is non-professional, my writing for Tor.com is professional and thus should not be considered in this regard.

How common are empires in fantasy that are oppressive or unjust (ETA:) and whose oppressions are a plot concern, but are not run by Evil Deities etc. and do not exist to be the opposition for the protagonist's polity? I'm thinking of David Anthony Durham's Acacia trilogy, a book that's not out yet so I'd prefer to avoid discussing it in case it's a spoiler, and . . . ?

I suspect, not very, as fantasy is well-known for its aristocratic preferences, but I thought I should ask.

Follow-up to this weekend's post:

The Carl Brandon Society has posted an Open Letter to the SF Community re: Ellison/Bradford Incident:

the Carl Brandon Society wishes to define some basic principles of discourse which were put into question as a result of this exchange. We hope community members will consider and respect these principles in future debates and disagreements.

Go, read, sign in comments if you agree.

At the Readercon talk on dealing with diversity (panel notes), the speaker brought up the idea of cultures having either high or low contexts, judged by the amount that people within the culture can take for granted in talking to each other. She went on to say that you can have SF about high-context cultures, but you can't have high-context SF, because you need a way in to the society.

Being a contrary sort, I immediately tried to think of examples of high-context SF. The first that came to mind was Doctorow and Rosenbaum's Hugo-nominated novella "True Names", which struck me as self-consciously SF 301 or even higher, that is, assuming a whole lot of prior knowledge of the field and making no concessions to catch you up.

What do you all think? Am I not understanding the terms properly? What about high-context fantasy, is there anything different there?

The game of identifying cool lines from speculative fiction novels over at Tor.com seems to have died down, without my getting to use these lines I'd picked out, so rather than let them languish in a file until the next time the game comes around, here they are:

1. These deus ex machinas have a way of sneaking up on us literary types.
2. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and "were to be regretted."
3. Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.
4. The National Symphony's performance of Handel's Messiah had started at eight thirty, so the choir was winding up the "Hallelujah Chorus" when the lead tenor turned into a wolf.
5. Truth won't always out, the wages of sin are bankable, and those who live by the sword perish mostly of syphilis.
6. Let the fairy-tale begin on a winter's morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff.

Identify a quote, and you get to post your own. Written speculative fiction only please.

Over at fight_derailing.

ETA: see fight_derailing for further discussion.

So, elsewhere on LJ, one proposal for fighting the derail [*] was setting up a fundraiser to send awesome fans of color to Wiscon. I started thinking about logistics of this, which are behind the cut, but one side-track of my thought was:

Would a community be useful? I see a lot of good suggestions around for fighting the derail, but not really centrally pulled out. I can create one—umm, actually, I seem to have created fight_derailing by accident, I thought I was only testing it. Well, I could get rid of its ads and put actual content in it, if people think it would be useful.

[*] Of anti-racism conversations into All About the Hurt Feelings and Bad Behavior of White Folk; I'm in a hurry tonight, see prior posts under these tags and rydra_wong for details.

( my thoughts on a Wiscon fundraiser )