The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison

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Cover of The Goblin Emperor


The Goblin Emperor
Katherine Addison
502 pages
published in 2014

One of the dirty little secrets of book reviewing is that the circumstances under which you read any given book can massively influence how you feel about it. Since I read the first half of The Goblin Emperor on a sunny Thursday afternoon while drinking a nice IPA sitting at an Amsterdam terrace and the other half sitting in my garden on the Friday afternoon following, drinking an even nicer IPA, it’s no wonder I feel quite mellow about it. But in this case I would’ve enjoyed it even had I read it during one of the grey, dull, wet afternoons that you normally get in Amsterdam in early April. This is a great novel and well deserves its Hugo nomination. It’s also the sort of novel you can’t help but read fast, a true page turner.

The Goblin Emperor at heart is a very traditional power fantasy, about the boy of humble origins who becomes emperor by happenstance and now has to very quickly learn how to survive in a world of political intrigue he’s completely unprepared for, filled with people who either want to manipulate him or replace him with a better figurehead. It’s one of those fantasy scenarios other writers can write multiple trilogies about to get to that point, but Katherine Addison has her goblin hero confirmed as the emperor within five pages, the rest of the novel being about him getting to grips with his new job, woefully inadequate though he feels.

Read more…

Books read March

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Really? I’ve only read four novels this month? Apparantly so. Granted, most of the month was spent reading through this list of short fiction, but even so, this is disappointing.

Juniper Time — Kate Wilhelm
Read for Joachim Boaz’s Kate Wilhelm review series. This is one of the novels the cyberpunks were rebelling against.

Reaper Man — Terry Pratchett
I read this in the wake of the news of Terry Pratchett’s death, his most fitting novel as it revolves around mortality and DEATH.

King’s Dragon — Kate Elliott
It’s unfair. Here I was expecting at best a compentently written epic fantasy story, but instead Elliott made me think, by never choosing the lazy option, by actually creating a medievaloid fantasy world that is more than just modern people in medieval drag. It also has one of the most harrowing depictions of the psychology of domestic abuse I’ve read in any novel.

The Shining Girls — Lauren Beukes
Serial killer horror is not my thing as it so often puts its sympathies with the killer more than with their victims; cf. The Silence of the Lambs. Beukes however keeps her sympathies firmly where they belong, showing the waste and destruction the killer engages in without glamourising it.

Your Happening World (March 12th through April 11th)

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  • The Westminster child abuse ‘coverup’: how much did MPs know? | Politics | The Guardian – Another day, another set of shocking headlines about allegations of historical child abuse and high-level coverups, this time a dossier being handed over by the Metropolitan police themselves to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to examine 14 allegations of Scotland Yard’s own complicity in the alleged coverup of a high-level paedophile ring.
  • On the “dispute” between radical feminism and trans people – In a world where left-wing politics has often derided LGBT identities as “bourgeois” and then accused us of splitting the movement, it infuriates me that I’ve had to take a break from writing a piece on the Tories’ “liberation” of the NHS to write 8,500 words to debunk a sexological concept that was shown to be untenable before the start of the First World War.
  • Featured news – Skeletons uncovered at Ipplepen reveals major Roman cemetery – University of Exeter – The significance of the discovery took on further importance when one of the skeletons was found to date from around 250 to 350 years after the Roman period, an era often referred to as the ‘dark ages’. These discoveries are of both national and regional value in providing a glimpse into Romano-British life and how the settlement continued into post-Roman times.
  • Minister-President over discriminatie: oplossing ligt bij slachtoffers – "Eén van de dingen die ik [van leerlingen] leer, is hoe ingrijpend discriminatie is. Dat het in Nederland nog veel voorkomt en het echt uitmaakt of je Mohammed of Jan heet als je solliciteert. Ik heb daar over nagedacht en ben tot de conclusie gekomen dat ik dit niet kan oplossen. De paradox is dat de oplossing bij Mohammed ligt. Ik kan tegen Nederland zeggen: ‘discrimineer aub niet, beoordeel iemand op karakter en kennis.’ Maar als het wel gebeurt, heeft Mohammed de keus: afhaken wegens belediging of doorgaan. Nieuwkomers hebben zich altijd moeten aanpassen, en altijd te maken gehad met vooroordelen en discriminatie. Je moet je invechten."
  • Who wants to be a millionaire? Peter Oborne on Tony Blair – But Tony Blair has made a fortune. A J P Taylor, in his masterpiece English History 1914-45, noted that Lloyd George was the first prime minister since Walpole to leave office considerably richer than when he entered it. Blair falls into the tradition of Walpole and Lloyd George (though his exploitation of the office of prime minister came after he left Downing Street).
  • Malaysian SFF writers and projects: a directory | Zen Cho – I’ve been conscious for a while that I’m no longer able to keep up the list of Malaysian SFF writers in English that I put up awhile ago — because I’m busy, but also because there are more of us than ever! I think it is helpful to have a directory for interested readers and people who want to connect with other local writers, but it needs to be updated regularly if it’s to be of use.
  • Google Bullies, Censors MintPress & AntiWar.com Over Abu Ghraib Photos – On March 12 Google AdSense contacted MintPress News threatening to disable our Google Ads if we did not remove gruesome and now infamous photos of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison.
  • Miwa Hirono: my Home Office hell | Opinion | Times Higher Education – Because of this policy, I am now forced to quit my permanent position at the University of Nottingham after six and a half years of dedication and contribution to the university and to the wider policy and scholarly communities. My family and I will be removed from this country as of next Sunday.
  • Student political protest is under threat, not free speech | Comment is free | The Guardian – We are deeply concerned about the letter “We cannot allow individuals to be censored and silenced” on 15 February, which contained serious inaccuracies. For example, neither Kate Smurthwaite nor Germaine Greer were no-platformed; poor ticket sales were a factor in the cancellation of Smurthwaite’s show and Greer’s talk went ahead.
  • We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals | letters | World news | The Observer –
  • What is Twine? (For Developers) | Liz England –

Sad Puppies: what to do?

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The more I think about the whole Puppies situation, the more I think my initial reaction during the Emergency Hugo Panel at Dysprosium this weekend is correct: the people driving the Puppy slates do not care for fandom or science fiction, even if they call themselves fans and SF writers, they’re political operators who jumped on science fiction fandom as an easy target for their kulturwars. As Nicholas Whyte succincintly said: this is a political act that needs a political response.

And the first thing to remember is that these people for all their rhetoric aren’t conservatives, but radicals. They have a vision of what they want fandom and science to be and no respect for its values or history. What the Puppies have instead are massive entitlement issues and equally massive egos. They know they’re supposed to be the popular kids, that they have a right to the Hugos, that only a conspiracies of critics and other leftists is stopping their inevitable domination of science fiction.

All of which is pure projection on their part. Because they are the sort of people who lie and manipulate to get their slate on the Hugo ballot, they naturally assume anything they don’t like is the result of similar manipulation. Their own actions therefore are done in self defence against the shadowy conspiracy of Social Justice Warriors. It’s bogstandard rightwing conspiracy thinking that’s motivating the Puppies, the same sort of logic behind the idea that Barack Obama isn’t really the president because he wasn’t born in America, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Engaging them therefore is pointless. They don’t care about anybody who isn’t like them, don’t think anybody who doesn’t share their politics is legitamite. What to do instead?

This year, all we can do is contain the damage. There are basically three short term responses to their wrecking of the Hugos: 1) business as normal, ignoring the slate and just voting on merit, as Geri Sullivan proposed at the Hugo Emergency Panel discussion and also preferred by John Scalzi, 2) No Award everybody on the slate, innocent or otherwise and vote normally otherwise, which is what I did last year with the previous slate and 3), the most radical, No Awarding everything because the intrusion of the Puppies is so massive it’s an unfair advantage for even non-puppies to get normal consideration. This is an option Erik V. Olson explained on Metafilter:

I feel that this year’s awards are fundamentally compromised, and that maybe a better solution is this.

Vote No Award on *everything*.

Why? Because if we honestly No Award every award, then, well, no awards are given in 2015. We now have a mechanism in place to fix them — the Retro Hugos. Normally, we have to wait some large number of years (50, IIRC) to do that, but the other critera is that we only do Retro Hugo’s when there were no Hugo’s awarded.

So, if we No-Award this year, and change the constitution a bit, we could run the 2015 Retro Hugos in 2017.

It’s not a perfect answer — but it could be a better answer than most. It’ll be an award for 2015. It’ll let everyone have a fair shot again. It won’t affect the next years award like an all-kill and extend eligibility would.

There’s no good answer, but maybe that’s the least bad. But I’m personally not willing to vote for the few non S/RP nominees, because they’re not running against the works they should be running against. They’re basically getting a free ride if I do that. It’s not fair to them or to the works that were shoved off by the slate.

Which I’m honestly starting to lean towards, considering how many categories have been tainted. It’s the strongest possible rejecting of slate voting and the puppies, it could provide a fresh new start, but it would depend on enough people joining in, otherwise it’s pointless.

But at the very least all puppy candidates should be No Awarded, should be taught the lesson that if you’re on the slate, you may get nominated, but never win and now your name is mud. This should be done across the board, even for things like the various movies put on the slate, even if these were only put in as a cover. The same goes for the socalled “innocent” or “pressganged” puppy nominees, be they high profile authors who could’ve arguably had a shot at a Hugo on their own like Jim Butcher, or naive fools like Kary English. They cannot win in any category, they must be rejected entirely. Fandom must show it rejects slate voting and it rejects the attempt to make the Hugos into a partisan political mud fight.

And for those who are on the Puppy slate against their will, they should do the honourable thing: withdraw themselves from consideration.

Two faces of fandom: Doc Weir & Sad Puppies

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Martin Hoare with the doc Weir Award at Dysprosium 2015

During the closing ceremony of this year’s Eastercon on Monday, the Doc Weir Award was handed out to the bloke on the right, Martin Hoare. Martin is one of those people who has been active in fandom, mostly behind the scenes, for years and decades, quietly helping British fandom ticking over. There are a lot of these nutters spending their free time doing things like setting up artshows at cons, or organising real ale bars, printing newsletters, etc, all with no expectation of reward and little public recognition. The Doc Weir Award is British Fandom’s way of drawing some attention to these unsung heroes, named after somebody the majority of fans never met since he died long before they were born. Arthur “Doc” Weir was somebody who had found fandom late in life and had flung himself headlong into it. It was in his memory that the award was set up in 1963, making it more than fifty years old: hard to think of a better example of fannish timebinding and tradition. There’s no monetary part to the price, just a trophy you get to keep for a year to drink your choice of alcohol out off. For all the ongoing controversies, the day to day aggrevation fandom can stand for, it’s sometimes good to remember that this is fandom too, full of some of the nicest and hardest working people you’ll ever meet.

emergency Hugo panel with Niall Harrison, Charlie Stross, Vincent Doherty, Gaie Sebold and Kari Sperring

In sad contrast to this stood the news we got the day before, of the way in which the socalled Sad & Rabid Puppies slates had managed to pack the Hugo nominations, in response to which an emergency panel was convened. Niall Harrison, Charlie Stross, Vince Doherty, Gaie Sebold and Kari Sperring all were eloquent about the damaged done to the Hugo and the room as a whole was outraged and hurt by it. If you come late to this whole thing, basically two groups of rabid rightwingers with massive entitlement issues set out to game the Hugos by running slates of ideologically acceptable candidates (and the occassional useful idiot) then got their followers to vote for them, with the socalled Sad Puppies run by Brad Torgenson and Larry Correira being the most visible of the two, seemingly providing cover for the more reactionary Rabid Puppies slate run by Vox Day and John C. Wright. Correira had the cunning to withdraw himself from consideration while Torgenson didn’t manage to get nominated in the first place even with the slate, but that still left Vox Day & John C. Wright stinking up the Hugos, as well as a host of supporting assholes and the occassional useful idiot.

The response at Eastercon was one of disbelief, horror and despair about what happened. That something bad was coming was well known, with various rumours doing the rounds in fan Twitter and such, but the sheer scale of it depressed people. It seemed that the organised temper tantrum had gotten what it wanted in terms of attention, that all the good work done in the last few years of making fandom and science fiction more diversive, more welcoming, was done in vain. It was not a happy mood that the con was in that Sunday. All the good cheer of the rest of the con, seeing all those people coming together to celebrate a mutual love for science fiction and fandom, for a moment was hidden behind this cloud of grief. While it’s not yet clear what we should do, we should keep in mind the last words of Joe Hill:

Don’t mourn, Organize!

Dutch Comic Con

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Hawkeye and one of the numerous Deadpools squaring off

Coming back from Imagicon last week I was sat with some cosplayers discussing rumours about the Dutch Comic Con, being held this weekend. Apparantly the organiser had run into money troubles, various guests had cancelled or were supposed to threaten to cancel and it was all a shambles. Worrying news, as I’d just bought tickets for it, but on the other hand most of the guests were of little to no interest for me, various actors and such, some coasting on their appearances in a fondly remembered decades old SF classic, some being supporting actors in a current telvision fantasy hit. All great for those who like that sort of thing, but it’s not my fandom. For me therefore I didn’t matter too much as long as the con went ahead: worst case scenario it would just be another comics con, where the main attraction is the opportunity to buy loads of shit at reduced prices. Best case scenario it would be something special, more in line with English or American comic cons.

Red off Team Fortress 2 represents, but where was Blue?

The end result turned out to be somewhere in the middle. The con seems to have consciously modelled itself on the San Diego Comic Con and similar, with the main attraction being the media stars and the comics reduced to a supporting role. The disadvantage there being that if you’re not quite as interested in that sort of stuff, there was indeed little else to do but walk around and look at the various merchandise and retailing stands. Unlike Imagicon, there was no real programme other than the various Q&A sessions with the guests and the movie programme running in the cinema, no real room to sit down for a while otherwise. After a few hours of this, I really felt it.

Mortal Kombat cosplay courtesy of InuNeko Cosplay

What made this more than just another “stripbeurs” was the audience, which like at Imagicon was young and very much into cosplay, as the pictures here show. Jazzgul Some indeed, like Hawkeye in the first pic there, were at both cons. What I liked about the cosplayers was their enthusiasm, skill and generousity. People were more than happy to pose and some groups and people were very popular. There was some real creativity there as well: not just your Deadpools, Storm Troopers, Black Widows, Lokis and Thors (this time both in male and female versions), but I also saw a captain Haddock, a trio of Giffen era-JLA cosplayers doing Guy Gardner, Fire & Ice and an absolutely adorable father/baby combination dressed up as Where’s Wally. As always the cosplaying seemed to be roughly equally divided between immediately recognisable movie/tv superheroes, obscure to me but apparantly massively popular figures from anime/manga/videogames and the occassional sui generis character, like the frog man from Fables I saw.

Guy Gardner, Ice & Fire from the Giffen era JLA

Now I could’ve taken many more pictures of cosplayers, were it not for the pressures of the crowds. I’ve heard reports that at its peak the con had some 16,000 visitors and I can well believe it. At times getting through the crowd was … difficult… Doctor StrangeThe layout of the con didn’t help. There was a huge, largely empty hall for the Q&A/music sessions, there was the main hall where you came through which was badly lit and confusingly laid out with the main sponsors and retailers, as well as the space for the autograph sessions, which took up a huge chunk on the side of the hall with crowd barriers and such but where you could only see which person was signing once you skipped the barriers and walked to their table. The secondary hall, where all the smaller retailers and standholders were located, also had a lot of wasted space at the edges and at least one lane that was too narrow, leading to huge traffic jams. It didn’t help one of the ways to reach it was through one of the con center’s food outlets. What happened to the artist alley was even worse, a few picnic tables put together in a corner inbetween the main and secondary halls, easily overlooked. Not helping matters was the lack of sign posting everywhere.

artist alley, in a forgotten corner of the con

These are all typical first con growning pains and if the con is repeated next year, I hope they’ll go for a different layout. For my part, I had a blast visiting and talking to the people manning some of the smaller stalls, like the people at the new comics artist collective Taus Art, your archetypical indie comics makers. I also spent half an hour talking to Eelco Koper, whose Superhelden magazine is busy addicting a new generation of readers to the best of all ages superhero comics, including Paul Grist’s Mudman and Dave Sim’s Cerebus (!). And because the audience wasn’t quite in the Eppo range, I could also spent some time chatting to Eric Heuvel and Marissa Delbressine while they were sketching, which I’ll scan in and post separately.

Supergirl, Two Face and annattaZ yalpsoc in the middle

Considering it seems the con has been a success and assuming it will be repeated last year, what would I like to see done differently?

  • A better layout, with less wasted space, room for people to just sit and hang out that’s not part of a food court, better lighting in places, more room for cosplay and photographing of same outside the main traffic
  • Much better signposting as well as more announcements of what’s going on
  • A proper artist alley, preferably combined with all the fan organisations and others now lost in the crowds amongst the stand retailing overpriced statues
  • Multi track programming with more to do than just listen to Q&A sessions with actors or getting your picture taken with the Batmobile and a larger emphasis on the comics part of the con.
  • Less perhaps of the traditional Dutch comics con stuff, more of a focus on US and Japanese comics/fan culture.

That should do it.

“Our protagonists, our characters, can be anyone.”

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Elsinore with black Ophelia

Katie Chironis is the team lead and writer for Elsinore and for Gamasutra she wrote about how her team approached diversity in the game:

Elsinore is an adventure game set in the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – which places it, historically, in 16th century Denmark. Since we began work on the project a year or so ago, I’ve shown the playtest build to family, friends, and strangers alike. After they’re done playing, intermingled with their feedback on gameplay, they often point to Ophelia and ask: Why is she black?

My answer is always the same: Why shouldn’t she be?

Which to me at least is sufficient answer. If anything has shown its adaptability it’s Shakespeare after all, but there are always morons who want to argue the toss about the plausibility of a black woman in 16th century Europe. Hence Chironis’ focus on historical research, even though the game itself isn’t very historical. It’s easy to nitpick her argument in the context of her own game, (as seen in the MeFi thread here), but that misses the point she’s making. Games need to be more brave at embracing diversity and not whitewash history, not cling to a faux-historical perspective that can’t see anybody but white men be assassins or knights.

Sounds ominous…

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden hears distant rumblings of discontent in fandom, possibly having to do with the Hugo Award nominations this year. It might just be that the Sad Puppies campaigners — happy to function as foot soldiers on another front in the right wing’s kulturkampf — has gotten its act together and managed to bulk vote its slate onto the ballots. The question is, given that this is true, is this a problem?

In the short term, yes, as it will mean other, more deserving candidates get excluded from the ballot, which in most categories is limited to five places, occassionally one or two more when multiple nominations get the same amount of votes. Slate voting like this, even if it can only get one or two candidates in each category and they have no real chance at the Hugo itself, means others will lose out on these places. And Hugo nominations can be important, especially for new writers, to establish a reputation as being worthwhile to pay attention to. Losing out on this because somebody thought making a political point is more important than actually rewarding good writers is bitter.

In the slightly longer term, if those who oppose the Sad Puppies are tempted to do the same as they, the damage may be greater. The Hugo Awards have been problematic for a long time, voted on by what you could uncharitably call a clique of ageing fans, but was starting to evolve away from this in recent years, the backlash against which erupted last year with the first Puppies slate. Remaking the Hugos into a popularity contest of warring politically motivated slates will put an end to this evolution. The same if we attempt to invent rules that makes this sort of slate pushing illegal.

Normally I’m not one to say we should just ignore the trolls, but perhaps in this instance we should. Voting in the Hugo costs money and to keep it up year after year in such a way as to be effective even more so. This campaign will run out of steam sooner or later but can do some real damage if we let them in the meantime. In this case what we need to do is to keep nominating and voting those writers and books we genuinely think are worthy of a Hugo, not engage the Puppies on their own level.

This makes no sense, but that’s libertarians

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Well, this is nice and loony. Holly Lisle quits the SFWA because taxation is evil:

SFWA moved from Massachusetts to California for the purpose of allowing SFWA to claim tax dollars to offer grants. I’m aware that there were other—good—reasons for the organization’s move, but this particular poison pill in the changes made to SFWA requires me to walk away and never look back.

[...]

“Giving” grants taken from tax dollars is nothing less than theft of taxpayer money. This action forces people who have no interest in the careers of writers receiving grants to support those writers’ work, no matter how distasteful, badly written, or objectionable they might find it.

The first thing I don’t understand about this, apart from the general libertarian looniness of thinking of taxes as theft, is why Lisle waited so long, as the SFWA members voted about this in 2011. Why wait fopur years to get indignant?

But she also seems to have misunderstood what exactly the SFWA gained from this: not direct grants from the government, but tax deductability of donations to the organisations as well as the ability to hand grants rather than loans to members in dire straights. Both are fairly standard for charities and I don’t understand why this would be a problem even for the most hardcore of libertarians. She should be glad the government misses out on money it could’ve claimed.