My Readercon 2018 Schedule

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

I’ll be attending Readercon 29 July 12-15, 2018 in Quincy, Massachusetts. My schedule is below.

Thursday, 9:00 pm, Salon 6
“Living in Material Worlds, Part 1: Fabric Goods in Fictional Settings”
In many post-apocalyptic landscapes and colony worlds, everyone has clothing but no one ever talks about where it came from. Who wove the cloth for that shirt, and who designed the pattern and cut and sewed it? What do station inhabitants feed their fabricators? This panel will dig into the influence of material culture on worldbuilding, and may also explore dye, fiber, and fabric in handicrafts, art, communication systems, and more.
Elaine Isaak [moderator]; Tom Greene; Victoria Janssen; Natalie Luhrs; Sarah Smith

Friday, 5:00 pm, Salon 5
“Reclaiming Stories of Victimized Women”
After reading Theodora Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues, Amal El-Mohtar tweeted, “Please please let these books usher in a new era of books in which women claim the fuck out of popular stories where they’re victimized.” Are we seeing other signs of such an era on the horizon? Which stories are the ripest for this sort of reclamation?
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Naida Bulkin; Teri Clarke; Hillary Monahan; Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

Friday, 8:00 pm, Salon C
“Dorothy Dunnett, Literary Legend”
Alaya Dawn Johnson called Dorothy Dunnett “the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground”: not many people read her, but everyone who did wrote a book. A painter, researcher, and opera lover, she wrote what she wanted to read: epic historical drama. Come learn what our panelists and many other writers learned from Dunnett.
Kate Nepveu [moderator]; Lila Garrott; Alexander Jablokov; Victoria Janssen; Nisi Shawl

Saturday, 10:00 am, Seven Masts Room: Kaffeeklatsch

Saturday, 9:00 pm, Salon C
“Living in Material Worlds, Part 2: What Do Clothes Convey?”
Having examined where clothing comes from and what it says about a culture, this panel will move on to discussing what an individual character’s clothing conveys about gender, class, wealth, affiliation, ability, access to materials and craftsmanship, and much more.
Elaine Isaak [moderator]; J.R. Dawson; Samuel R. Delany; Greer Gilman; Victoria Janssen; Emily Lavin Leverett

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My May Reading Log

Posted on July 6, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
The Black Tides of Heaven by J.Y. Yang is Asian-flavored science fantasy with a familiar plot, following the twin children of a dictator as they grow into their paranormal abilities and oppose their mother’s reign. Only one of the twins is a point of view character in this volume, which leads me to believe the companion volume/sequel features the other twin, the one with the more rare and powerful psychic gift. Neat stuff: gender is chosen when the child decides on it, and is then surgically/medically expressed; before that, you’re a child. One character does not choose to have gender expressed, which appears to be somewhat unusual in this society. Trigger: late in the book, there is a child death which I found upsetting. Overall, this is quality speculative fiction.

Rainbow Islands by Devin Harnois is a YA LGBTQA pirate novel, set in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic future. The first-person narrator is exiled from the Christian Republic to the Rainbow Islands of Sappho and Alexandros and discovers the wonders of free gender expression and found family. Fluffy escapism ensues, and also there are kraken, and giant flying eagles who bond with asexual humans exclusively. There is a war but it is remarkably non-traumatic. I was not opposed to any of this.

Song of the Navigator by Astrid Amara is a male/male space opera romance about Tover, a (he thinks) privileged improvisational space navigator taken captive by his mysterious lover Cruz and subsequently, accidentally, trapped with Evil Pirates and tortured. The torture was pretty visceral, even though he is rescued and nursed lovingly back to health by Cruz’s doctor mom and fed lovely food by Cruz’s sister. Eventually Tover forgives Cruz (whom I kept picturing as looking like Oscar Isaac because his planet is like a CO2-atmosphere version of Guatemala), because he is attempting to save his planet from the evil colonialist company that Tover works for. Triggers/Spoilers: torture, and the awesome doctor mom is killed, for which I am not sure I forgive this author. Otherwise, everything works out happily. The setting is imaginative and rich and complex, and there’s a lovely variety of characters in all shades of gray, whether they work for Evil Colonialist Company or fight against it.

Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells was fun! The first-person narrator again swept me along, and some questions from the first story were answered, and the worldbuilding was deepened, and some new characters were introduced. My only sadness is that it felt too short.

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly is a noir cabaret political novel that is entirely too close to what’s happening in the real world right now. It’s beautifully written, complex, and tragic. I probably should not have read it at this time. Recommended if you don’t mind bad things happening to people who are just trying to live their lives freely.

Radiance by Grace Draven is about a political marriage between a human and a human-shaped magical nonhuman who display amazing decency and practicality to cope with their situation, and develop a rich and lovely relationship. If you like “marriage of convenience” stories, you will very likely enjoy this quite a lot. I devoured it rather quickly. There are additional books that I will check out at some point.

Secrets in Death (Book 45) by J.D. Robb was, like other recent books in the series, a good thing to be reading in small chunks while very busy doing other things throughout the day. I think it was a bit better than the last one, but not terrific. I was mostly invested in wondering if anything exciting would happen to the secondary couple while they were on vacation, after the book ended.

Lone Wolf by Sara Driscoll is about an FBI agent and her scent tracking dog who get caught up in a serial bombing case. I learned about the many uses of forensic scent tracking in both apprehension of criminals and in search and rescue, but wasn’t hugely attached to any of the characters, or invested in the case, except when the tracking dog was potentially in danger. It featured good people with good intentions, with the exception of the bomber. It was a good airplane read.

Comics:
The Unstoppable Wasp Vol. 1: Unstoppable! by Jeremy Whitley and Elsa Charretier features one of the newer heroes in the Marvel Universe, Earth-616, Nadia Pym, Hank Pym’s daughter from his first marriage. Nadia was raised in the Red Room, so has combat skills as well as Science! skills. She’s recently come to the States and is finding her place as a hero and a scientist, with the help of Janet Van Dyne (original Wasp) and Jarvis. She’s begun contacting a bunch of young female scientists to start her own lab, which looks like it will be the focus of Volume 2, which I’ve already purchased. …so I guess this is yet another Getting the Band Together iteration of my reading… Because of the optimistic outlook of the protagonist and the female focus, this comic reminded me of the recent Hellcat series by Kate Leth, minus the manga-style art. Recommended if you just want to read some damned enjoyable comics.

Invincible Iron Man: Ironheart Vol. 1: Riri Williams (Invincible Iron Man (2016-)) by Brian Michael Bendis got better as it went on, because Riri meets Pepper Potts. Otherwise, I’m still a bit annoyed that the superhero angst of a black teenager is gun violence; it just seems too on point, and in addition removed Riri’s single female friend, which no. Hook her up with the Unstoppable Wasp crew, stat; they are scientists and have things in common.

Monstress Volume 2: The Blood by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda continues being super-excellent with complex characters enacting mythic drama in a deliciously dense Asian-inflected fantasy world, where human witches devour the life energy of magical animal people, and dangerous gods are supposedly locked away but maybe not. Also, the gorgeous inkwashy art is so awesomely rich and detailed that I spend a really long time on each page; I can’t imagine this story looking any other way. Volume two has pirate mafia tigerpeople and a supremely creepy island of the dead that you can’t remember after you leave, at least if you are in the comic itself. I remember, and it was supremely creepy, parts of it like a twisted mirror of the forest in Princess Mononoke, except the little forest spirits are saying things in tiny speech bubbles like “help me,” and you see what looks like humans partially turned into trees. Maika, the protagonist, gets more information about her origins and the monstrous tentacle god she’s hosting, but it’s unclear if she remembers all of it. I am still wondering about the child fox Arcanic, Kippa, and if she will ever play a more complex role in the story than, essentially, The Doctor’s Companion.

Pretty Deadly Volume 2: The Bear by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios is also a perfect example of story and art being perfectly integrated, elongated figures adding to the supernatural feel. For a comic about death, I was actually a bit uplifted by this volume, though melancholy as well. The story has moved forward in time to World War One; an elderly woman from volume one is on her deathbed, and though her family has gathered to say goodbye, one son is in the trenches in France. (He’s black and American, which historically means he was most likely in the support services arm of the military, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be in a trench some of the time; he and another black guy are set to taking care of horses at one point, reinforcing the idea that they were initially there as support.) The Reapers are fighting War and Fear, and soldiers are fighting despair. I know this doesn’t sound uplifting, but it kind of was, because at the end, the dead tell their stories to feed the garden (an in-between place), and the garden feeds the world, and that vision of Story and legacy makes me tear up, because it says we’re not just destined to be compost, noble as compost might be.

Fanfiction:
Travelogue by neveralarch is a delightful story in which both Black Widow and Hawkeye have the hots for Bruce Banner, and keep “accidentally” running into him all over the world. Spoiler: they get it on.

watch them rolling back by napricot is an emotionally satisfying sequel to Avengers: Infinity War.

I re-read Ghosts by torch, a classic Krycek/Mulder X-Files story from the 1990s, in which it rains a lot, and there is sleeping in the same bed and wearing each other’s clothes. It’s still redolent of the 1990s and that period of fandom for me, and still a classic so far as I’m concerned.

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My April Reading Log

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey posits an extremely clever alternate American history in which hippo ranching took over the Mississippi Delta and other areas before the Civil War. Set in the 1890s, the plot follows an eccentric group of hoppers (hippo wranglers/riders) who are contracted to remove a herd of dangerous feral hippos and, incidentally, take care of some revenge. There is a non-binary character who is not white (possibly Asian?), and a bisexual English character who is not white, and a Latina assassin, and a female French con artist who sometimes likes to dress as a man and can impersonate one convincingly. Louisiana is a frontier in this world, and the story is a Western like unto The Magnificent Seven, albeit one with modern sexual mores and various breeds of hippos, some of which apparently eat meat, including people. I could accept all that; it’s fantasy.

However, for the entire length of the novella, I could not stop wondering what had happened to all the black and indigenous people in America. Because there was not one mention of slavery, slaves, Reconstruction, displacement, any of it, and I don’t think you can really have an alternate America without dealing with those things, even with just a passing comment. It felt more glaring to me because of the effort the author had put into having characters with various ethnicities and sexualities; both of the non-white characters experience or remember micro-aggressions, such as “where are you really from,” but that only made me feel the gigantic slavery-shaped hole in the story more strongly.

On the other hand, it made me think about how I would approach the story, which is an entertaining exercise. South Carolina rice country, for example, could be full of hippo ranches, tended by slave hoppers, who after emancipation might have traveled West and ended up in Louisiana, some of them taking a chance on getting rid of those feral hippos for a payout and perhaps dying in the attempt, or perhaps ending up working for the villain who wants to keep the feral hippos to protect his territory. One dead black hopper (a friend of one of the crew?) and one black henchman could easily have taken part in the story. Were there any indigenous hippo ranchers, perhaps still fighting to keep their land (like Cherokee farmers in Georgia), perhaps occupying land they’d been pushed onto by white hoppers, perhaps plotting a war to regain their land once they’d bred the perfect war hippo? I would totally read that.

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho is set in a Regency England which has always had magic. The male protagonist Zacharias, a black man adopted as a child by a white couple, has recently become Sorcerer Royal under circumstances that are slightly mysterious for most of the novel. The female protagonist Prunella, of mixed race, also has strong magic but her advancement is hampered by her circumstances, her gender, and her dislike of convention. I enjoyed both of them, particularly Zacharias’ bookishness and introversion, but my favorite character by far was a powerful Malaysian witch because she was a Cranky Middle-Aged Lady like me, except she had magic and was not averse to using it.

Nonfiction:
To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South by Angela Cooley dismantles and displays how food became an instrument of white supremacy, hammering home once again how racism is entrenched in the baseline of American society. Which I knew, but I can always be unpleasantly surprised by an unexpected angle on how pervasive it is.

At a basic level, white southern women championed domestic science because they saw that its methods could help to sustain white supremacy, establish class lines, and promote racial purity. They did not have to read too much into its principles to draw out these ideas. The architect of the national domestic science movement, Ellen H. Richards, explicitly envisioned a profession that would help to improve the white race. During an initial naming controversy for the new discipline, Richards suggested the term “euthenics.” She explicitly saw it as a companion to, and an improvement on, eugenics. “Eugenics deals with race improvement through heredity,” Richards wrote. “Euthenics deals with race improvement through environment.”

From domestic science to the sociology of early fast food restaurants to lunch counter sit ins, if you’re interested in food and history at all, you’ll get something out of this book.

See also this Atlas Obscure article: Why Eating Insects Is an American Tradition for striking at indigenous peoples via their food.

A Brief History of the Dynasties of China by Bamber Gascoigne was a relatively quick read and helped me to get an overarching idea of the span of Chinese dynastic history, which was the goal. There were more occasions of body horror than I would have liked; historic, yes, but I would’ve settled for fewer details. I am possibly over-sensitive on this issue. Before this book, I knew very little about Chinese history in general, and I can definitely recommend this as a starting place. I think it will help me a lot in future reading.

Comics:
Black Panther by Christopher Priest: The Complete Collection Volume 2 took me a bit longer than Volume 1 because I got stuck in the middle, the middle being a rather tiresome and stagnant series of crossovers with Moon Knight, Avengers, and Deadpool. Eventually, I managed to slog through all that, and the rest went quickly. This volume sympathetically features both Killmonger and M’Baku, two of Black Panther’s ongoing villains; it was fascinating to see what had been remixed for the movie, so I won’t spoil anything here. Female villain Malice gets a less nuanced treatment, I felt. This volume, especially the M’Baku issues, also features the Chicago-raised teenager who becomes a Dora Milaje, Queen Divine Justice. She is absolutely terrific for outsider commentary on Wakanda and its culture; I vastly prefer her to Ross for this role. I am pretty sure elements of her character made it into the movie version of Shuri (who at this point in the comics did not yet exist).

Captain Britain and MI: 13 Vol. 1: Secret Invasion by Paul Cornell was a simple and satisfying story of defending Britain from a Skrull (alien) army, with the excellent dialogue I expect from this author. I’ve been wanting to read this run for a long time, having read the author’s Doctor Who tie-in novels long ago, but it was very difficult to get hold of. Hooray for electronic format comics on the tablet!

Black Bolt Volume 1: Hard Time by Saladin Ahmed is ostensibly about the Silent King of the Inhumans, whose voice can destroy planets, who’s become trapped in an alien prison. For me, it was really about Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man. Creel is a longtime Marvel villain, but here he’s the most talkative character in the prison, and the person whom we learn most about in this story. It’s difficult to write about a protagonist who doesn’t speak, and even when Black Bolt’s powers are muzzled and he does speak, he doesn’t say much. Ahmed makes this work by making good use of the other characters, among them Creel and an inspirational female Skrull warrior/pirate named Raava. Christian Ward’s art is absolutely gorgeous, especially on the high resolution tablet screen; it looks like ink wash with lots of deep blues and bright oranges (one of my absolute favorite color combinations) that give the whole story an appropriate otherworldly, almost underwater feel that lends itself well to the idea of being trapped. Recommended even if you’re not familiar with the Inhumans comics (my knowledge of them is minimal).

Astonishing X-Men: Northstar by Marjorie Liu was a very big deal at the time it originally came out, because it featured the very first superhero gay wedding. It was okay. I think there were so many corporate expectations layered on this issue that it was difficult for the story to shine through. It felt really odd that the awful things happening to and caused by one of the characters, Karma, were shoved away in favor of the rather abrupt wedding, though that’s kind of the nature of serial comics. It was about as good as it could be, I think. In contrast, the volume also included the infamous 1992 issue of Alpha Flight in which Northstar adopts a baby infected with HIV, and he and the former Major Maple Leaf discuss how terribly HIV-positive people are treated while having a big smashup fight. Yes, the baby dies. But Northstar and Major Maple Leaf bond over MML’s son MML2, who was gay and died of AIDS, and Northstar realizes he should come out. Giant hammers, meet anvil.

Fanfiction:
Fourth Floor by dirtybinary, mithborien, and picoalloe is a very Alternate Universe Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers romance, of the subgenre ShrinkyClinks, which means Steve is his pre-serum self. The setting is a New York City where magic is normal and in the public eye. Steve stubbornly wants to go to college and learn magic, to honor the memory of his mother, but hasn’t been able to get in anywhere; it isn’t spelled out, but he seems to be dyslexic, so written spells cause him no end of problems. While auditing classes in which he is not actually enrolled, he takes a room in a very cheap magical building with many odd characteristics, and there meets Bucky, Natasha Romanoff, and other Marvel characters, all re-envisioned through a magical lens. But the building is in danger! From Hydra! So Steve steps up to defeat them, along the way learning how he can express his magic, and it’s all very cleverly done and rousingly entertaining.

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My WisCon 2018 Schedule

Posted on May 24, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Here’s my updated Wiscon schedule.

Friday, 1:00 pm – 2:15 pm, Conference 2
“Caveman Issues: Evolution Narratives in SciFi”
Victoria Janssen [moderator], Seth Frost, Lesley Hall, Anonymous
Scifi loves to play with evolution, from de-evolution machines and “beer bad, tree pretty” to cavemen who miraculously wake up in the present day and have to sell insurance for some reason. What do these [totally incorrect] stories tell us about what is intrinsic to humanity? Which gender and race narratives about human evolutionary history do they reinforce? What might it actually mean to meet a Neanderthal?

Saturday, 10:00 am – 11:15 am, Capitol B
“Fantasy Worldbuilding in Comics”
Aaron Kashtan [moderator], Dylan Edwards, Victoria Janssen, Jennifer Margret Smith
Marjorie Liu/Sana Takeda’s Monstress and Kelly Sue Deconnick/Emma Rios’ Pretty Deadly set their stories in complex fantasy worlds outside of the more common superhero-based canon. How is worldbuilding for comics different from worldbuilding for prose fiction? And what does that mean for the reader? We’ll discuss the perks and challenges of fantasy worldbuilding in comics.

Saturday, 10:30 pm – 11:45 pm, Caucus
“When An Alien and an Astronaut Love Each Other Very Much”
Heidi Waterhouse [moderator], Robyn Fleming, Victoria Janssen, Charles Payseur
From gay werewolf shifters in heat to androids in love in space, speculative fiction is fertile ground for romance. This panel will discuss the general state of spec fic in romance and romance in spec fic – and talk about the difference!

Sunday, 1:00 pm – 2:15 pm, Caucus
“Found Family”
Victoria Janssen [moderator], Maddy, Ariel Franklin-Hudson, Emily Jiang, Kiersty Lemon-Rogers, Isabel Schechter
Found family is a big theme in fiction, especially in speculative fiction. It’s also a reality for lots of us who live on the margins of society due to gender and orientation variances, disabilities, etc. What does it mean to be part of a found family? Can a found family include family members of origin or biological family members? Why are we so attracted to found family dynamics in our fiction? How is it that so many stories set in sci-fi or fantasy worlds have found families at their cores? Does isolation from the norm naturally lead to the need of forming alternative family structures? What are some of our favorite fictional found families? What do our real life found families look like? What are the connections there?

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Love is in the Details: Crooked Hearts by Patricia Gaffney

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

I was a late convert to Patricia Gaffney’s novels. I’m not sure how that happened; back when I first became interested in romance novels, in the mid-1990s, I deliberately sought out classic novels in the genre. Perhaps in my catching up on older novels, I missed what was then current.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2010 that I finally read To Have and To Hold (1995), one of the most-discussed romance novels ever, and was astonished by its complexity [link leads to my blog post about it]. Next, I read Wild at Heart (1997), set in Gilded Age Chicago, which entered my Keeper collection.

Crooked Hearts (originally released 1994) is one of the best romance novels whose protagonists are on the wrong side of the law. For me, criminal heroes are a hard sell. I began to wonder about how Gaffney had done it, how she had made me not only like but love two confidence tricksters, Grace and Reuben. I realized, once I started collecting and reflecting on quotes, the brilliance of her characterization.

Gaffney is specific when she tells us what the characters love about each other. Saying, for instance, “he was the most gorgeous man she had ever seen” is bland. Gaffney does this instead to show what Grace likes about Reuben:

His voice was low-pitched and intimate, like a cello playing a slow waltz… She liked his scholar’s forehead and his long beak of a nose, his romantic mouth…

It wasn’t even his good looks that caused the devastation; if anything he was too handsome, a man not to be trusted on that score alone. No, what really made him dangerous was the fatal thread of sincerity that wove through his effortless charm, smooth as snake oil.

Reuben’s thoughts about Grace are equally appealing. I particularly love how he mingles thoughts of “traditional” attraction to her waist, hips, and breasts with attraction to her unique characteristics.

…slim, womanly hips, a minute waist he could probably get his hands around, and breasts—big palmfuls at odds with the smallness of the rest of her, proud and perky as a couple of high-nosed thoroughbreds in the winner’s circle. He even knew what beat behind the luscious breasts: a larcenous heart…That’s what he liked about her: the combination of bunco artist and bleeding heart. You didn’t find that very often, especially in a woman.

Reuben notes even the tiniest details of her physicality, which makes clear how closely he’s been paying attention to her throughout the narrative.

…Her left eyetooth was slightly crooked and overlapped the neighboring incisor, a defect that gave a rakish twist to her sly smiles…In fact, he couldn’t say which of her so-called imperfections he liked better, the bumpy nose, the crooked eyetooth, or the little mole under her left ear.

Finally, I adored the way Gaffney shows Reuben falling into love with Grace. It’s not stated directly, but shown to the reader, so we can realize along with Reuben what’s wonderful about this woman, not in general, but specifically wonderful when these two people interact; and best of all, what he loves about her is integral to her character.

She wasn’t really beautiful. That too came to Reuben with a jolt, for up to now he’d believed completely in the illusion of beauty she deliberately fostered. But it was a trick. She tossed her hair, looked deeply into your eyes, smiled her suicide smile–she acted beautiful, and by sheer nerve and sleight of hand she made you believe she was. You never saw the flaws because you were too caught up in the trick, the mystique; seduced by the patter, you were watching the wrong hand. The degree of courage an act like that must require took his breath away.

If this novel isn’t art, I don’t know what is.

[This post was originally written for the Heroes and Heartbreakers blog but, in its original version, is no longer online. I make it available here, updated and edited, for posterity.]

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My March Reading Log

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas entertained me just as much as the first book in the series, and I am really bummed the third book isn’t out yet. I love the many female characters and the complexities of their relationships, as well as the aristocratic brothers who serve as, respectively, unattainable love interest and guy with the government. I also love that young Charlotte Holmes is not infallible, mostly due to a “proper young lady” upbringing that hampered her in learning about the world, despite her hyper-intelligence. I am enjoying this series in ways completely separate from its association with Doyle’s Holmes and Watson.

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard is a science fictional take on a female Sherlock, with a Watson who is a shipmind [The Shadow’s Child], but still a veteran of war and tragedy, who has taken to brewing individualized, specialized teas to help humans tolerate the Deep Spaces through which ships travel. Long Chau needs both a brew and a ship to help her find a corpse floating in space. It’s an intriguing and different take on two classic characters. Like the Sherry Thomas series, I would enjoy this one even without reference to the Conan Doyle source material.

Some Kind of Hero by Suzanne Brockmann is the latest in a very long series of romantic suspense novels (Troubleshooters) involving quantities of Navy SEALS as well as FBI agents and batches of random people who unfortunately ended up in the middle of a terrorist plot. I have read most of Brockmann’s work, from her early category romances all through the extensive Troubleshooters series, so I devoured this pretty quickly. For me, it slotted into the Found Family sub-genre, and I could see that Brockmann is still trying to be inclusive in her work by having more Black characters than usual. Plotwise, it was pretty fun. The heroine is currently blocked on her bestselling series of novels about an FBI team that also has lots of hot sex, and there are several discussions on tropes of romance novels worked into the story. She ends up helping the Hot Navy SEAL across the street to locate his missing teenage daughter, who’s been framed and dragged into trouble with local criminals.

Quotes of note:
…he smelled good. Like sunblock and fresh air and a scent she assumed was pure Navy SEAL hotness.

And alas, even though she’d spent her career writing books where this kind of impromptu meet-cute would end with them having screaming animal-sex before the clock struck midnight, Shayla wasn’t as bold as her romance novel heroines. She didn’t look all that much like them, either. In fact, she was lucky that she’d showered and put on real pants before she’d crawled away from her computer in order to drive-and-drop Frankie at his high school debate club practice.

Icon by Genevieve Valentine is the sequel to Persona, ostensibly, but it really felt like just the second half of that book. It had been while since I read the first book, and this second one makes no effort to remind you of the characters and events. I’m not sure why it was released in two volumes. If I’d known, I would have re-read Persona first. Anyway, the story continues exploring the politics of being a Face, a government representative who is at the same time a celebrity manipulating the press for advantages for their country. Protagonist Suyana is wiser and more paranoid in the second volume, and has to maneuver through various tragedies in order to make change happen. It’s a bit stressful at times, and very interior. I wish there was an edition with art of the various Faces. Highly recommended (both books, not just the second one) if you’re interested in celebrity, performance, and the ethics of fame.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar is slow and immersive and poetic. It’s a Stranger in a Strange Land story, except the stranger knows and valorizes the strange land through having read its books, while his own country is illiterate. It’s about his journeys, and being changed by journeys, and learning to empathize, and making mistakes, and learning to take some of what he learns and use it for his own purposes, while rejecting other parts. It’s also about the connection between and teacher and his student, and about coming to understand parents, mostly mothers, from an adult perspective. Several times, the book made me melancholy or angry or sad, but by the end it got me through, and you can’t really ask for more than that.

An example of the poetic prose and beautiful rhythm:
Facing us is the door, a jagged crack in the chalky stone, in that crumbling sand-colored rock with its channels of dust, its piled offerings. Leeks, a bird’s nest, bundles of sweet hay tied up with ribbons. A flask of olive oil, a small white harp. We walk past the seashells of supplication, the mulberries of remorse, and enter the long slit in the wall of the hill.

And another quote, because it’s such a good example of what the travelogue portions of the book are like:
The Ethendria Road, wide and well-kept, curved down into the Valley, into the shadow of cliffs and the redolence of wet herbs. The grape harvest was ended, and the country was filled with tumbled vines, rust-colored, mellowed with age, birdsong, and repose…. Everything shone in that sumptuous light which is called “the breath of angels”: the hills flecked with the gold of the autumn crocus, the windy, bronze-limbed chestnut trees and the radhui, the peasant houses, sprawling structures topped with blackened chimneys.

The narrator thinks back on this quote later in the book, and so did I.
She looked at me, her eyes wet and green as celadon. “You are very young. I think that you have not built anything yet?”

I thought of my life: lessons, a journey, an angel. I shook my head.

“No,” she murmured. “I thought not. It is dangerous to build. Once you have built something–something that takes all your passion and will–it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don’t realize that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom–something which, later, will make you suffer.”

Nonfiction:
They Called It Passchendaele: The Story Of The Third Battle Of Ypres And Of The Men Who Fought by Lyn MacDonald is, like other books by the same author, constructed from first-person accounts, interspersed with each other to achieve chronological order, at least, on events that beggar imagination. Focusing on a single, grindingly endless, muddy campaign, this book is a good introduction to many of the issues with trench warfare in World War One, so long as the reader is not squeamish. I did not read it very quickly because every chapter was so intense; at the same time, sometimes I read several chapters in a row, because it was so intense. Recommended if you’re interested in World War One, not recommended if any of the following could be a trigger for you: being helpless in the face of machine gun or artillery fire; bodies ripped apart by same; large quantities of unburied bodies over a long period of time; and drowning in either water or mud.

Comics:
I dove into G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel Volume 7: Damage Per Second hoping for escape but finding that the big bad was gerrymandering and Hydra attempting to hijack the election for mayor of Jersey City. It was really good, and really well done! Just very topical.

Ms. Marvel Volume 8: Mecca was even more topical and terrifying, as a personified computer virus and a villian from Volume 6 get backing from a bunch of bigots. The main people shown being persecuted are mutants and inhumans, but Kamala’s brother is swept up, too, and at one point they take refuge in the local mosque. It all turns out okay, just a little more stressful than I needed that week…and in case you miss Bruno, there’s an issue about what he’s up to in college in Wakanda.

I love the complexity of this comic so, so much. I’m currently caught up, and waiting impatiently for the next volume to come out.

Poetry:
Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014 by Ursula K. LeGuin helped me to prepare for a LeGuin memorial event at local bookstore Big Blue Marble. I was unfamiliar with some of the poems, and particularly loved and was comforted by the range of ways she wrote about aging and being old. The collection includes various experiments with form, which she writes about in the highly recommended accompanying essay. Below is a selection from a group of four-line poems that I particularly liked.

Artemisia Tridentata

Some ruthlessness befits old age.
Tender young herbs are generous and pliant,
but in dry solitudes the grey-leaved sage
stands unforthcoming and defiant.

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Stuart’s Coat: Sartorial Eroticism in Untie My Heart by Judith Ivory

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Untie My Heart (2002) was Judith Ivory’s final romance novel, and I’d like to tell you about the hero’s fur coat. Well, that and the infamous “chair scene.”

The heroine of Untie My Heart, Emma Hotchkiss, is a former con artist who’s become a sheep farmer in Yorkshire. The hero is Stuart Aysgarth, Viscount Mount Villars, who’s just arriving at his new property when his carriage accidentally kills one of Emma’s valuable lambs. Emma is eventually forced to enact a con on him to be reimbursed for her lamb, and when Stuart discovers this, they end up having sex on a chair. Keep in mind they’ve barely met before that.

Emma’s first mental descriptions of Stuart, even before she and he have sex, are very sensual, and beautifully set up the chair scene, subtly preparing the reader for what’s to, umm, come.

…she couldn’t see him; he was a tangle of coat, a play of shadows under the brim of a hat. Though she could smell him, a warm, suede-soft odor so distinct it was like walking into a subtle, spicy cocoon of it, exotic: foreign.

Note Stuart’s physical form is here almost indistinguishable from his coat. He’s been living in Russia and his coat is suited for Russian winters. Emma’s luscious, almost sexual thoughts about the coat make it a metonym for Stuart himself. Compare these descriptions of the coat to her description of the man I just quoted.

Ooh, la, his coat was fine. And, in point of fact, its hem, cuffs, and lapel—silvery white fur mottled with light and dark gray–weren’t trim exactly. They were overflow. The coat was lined with the stuff: lined through and through with the softest, thickest, silvery, speckled fur she’d ever set eyes or fingertips upon. She couldn’t get over the extravagance…They stood up, and his coat dropped back down around him with a waft of that warm, faintly Eastern scent. The fabric held a rich, spicy fragrance; frankincense, myrrh…At this unlikely moment, the word vicuna came to Emma. It was the name of the wool of his coat. While the fur inside it, which invisibly composed most of the garment, was chinchilla…meant, dear God, his coat cost more than the average piece of English real estate. And was so thick and double-bunny-smooth, where it brushed against her hand.

Mount Villiars swung it up off the chair and down onto his arms in a single movement–she wouldn’t have minded building a wee cottage on it, moving in, living there. If only she could have gotten him out of it first…His greatcoat had all the excess and drama of a Russian novel: As he buttoned it about him, tight and fitted, it showed the line of his shoulders, narrowing down his broad chest to a slim waist, after which it billowed to the floor. Then he tugged on a silvery cuff, ran a hand down a wide lapel. A coat Karenin would have worn in St. Petersburg. Emma had never been there, but she had read of the book. A coat out of a Tolstoy novel.

Soon after, Emma enters a room and finds Stuart there waiting for her…with his coat. She mentions the coat first.

The Viscount Mount Villiars’s coat lay on her bed, the viscount himself on it…on his coat’s fur lining, a silver white run so dense it crowded in on itself there in the shadows, fur so thick it wrinkled in places.

But as she gets to know him better and he reveals he’s recognized her con game, he is in turn further revealed to Emma. The personality revelations are represented by layers of clothing removed.

It’s only after this she begins to become aware of his flaws, and to be intrigued by them; every aspect of the future beloved becomes worthy of attention, from outer garments to inner self. Her attention to detail teaches her about him.

The small shifts. The protracted vowels. Emma would think she heard them, then not. They remained missing long enough that, each time one came up, it seemed new, unexpected. His speech flowed over them…she stood there, hand to mouth, heart in throat, hanging on the possibility of more words out this peculiar human being’s mouth, wanting the cadence of them: The strange poetry–the personal song–of an adept, quick-witted adult in control of a stutter.

Only after Emma observes all of those personal characteristics does she pay close attention to his face, the usual starting place for romantic observations. Then it’s back to clothing, rich with erotic possibilities.

…he reached to his neck and unknotted his cravat. It slipped easily against itself, then a little zizz of foulard silk as he yanked, pulling it through the fold of his white, starchy collar. It jerked free, loose in his hand…Round and round, he wrapped her wrists to the chair with silk.

I don’t want to go through this scene line by line, though it’s rich enough to do so! Suffice it to say that even after Emma is tied to a chair with a piece of Stuart’s clothing, the revelations–both his and hers–continue. Gradually, each learns the true situation of the other, which led to their original conflict, and they’re newly and more closely entangled.

When they finally do have sex, with Emma still tied to the chair, they don’t fully undress, and after they’ve finished having sex, both rapidly replace any disarranged clothing amid dialogue. The clothing is directly representative of the characters. Though the truths of their respective situations have been revealed to each other, many other truths–most importantly, their emotional truths–remain hidden, symbolized by their clothing, only temporarily disarranged.

[This post was originally written for the Heroes and Heartbreakers blog but, in its original version, is no longer online. I make it available here, slightly edited, for posterity.]

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My February Reading Log

Posted on March 23, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
Last October, my friend Natlyn recommended A Study In Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas to me. I’d read Thomas’ historical romances; she has really lovely prose, but I found her romances stressful (very good, just stressful!). I bought the book for Xmas reading, then was sick the whole time, and finally got to it this month. I then devoured it in a little over a day, buying the sequel, A Conspiracy in Belgravia, when I was about two-thirds done. The premise is that Sherlock Holmes is a construct, like Remington Steele a mask for Charlotte Holmes, except a man doesn’t show up to play Sherlock on tv. Watson is Mrs. John Watson, a former actress who married an army surgeon who died in Afghanistan. Charlotte also has a sister, Livia, who is interested in writing, and an older sister, Bernadine, who appears to be severely autistic in that she doesn’t speak and is obsessed with spinning objects. Plus there’s a police inspector and his very interesting wife; an aristocratic archaeologist who appears to be a romantic interest of Charlotte’s, except he’s married to someone else; and a charming bounder whom Charlotte uses to achieve a goal. Though I figured out small parts of the mystery, I stayed up late reading it until the end.

[I seem to be on a binge of books with lots of outsider characters making lives for themselves, or at least getting the band together to do so. The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss is one, Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys is another.]

Nonfiction:
The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj by Anne de Courcy used memoirs and interviews with, mostly, “Fishing Fleet” girls, their suitors/husbands from the Indian Civil Service and army, and their descendants, to look at one of the outcomes of Britain’s imperial efforts in India.

There is brief discussion of British/Indian marriages and relationships pre-Raj, during the East India Company’s dominance, and the social changes that followed once the British Government became involved and began to strictly enforce hierarchy even more than was done in England. There’s also some minimal discussion of how Eurasians fared in the Raj period, including one family who went to lengths to conceal that they were mixed race. One reason given for the change is that British/Indian familial relationships were considered undue influence so far as governance was concerned. I am sure it was much, much more complicated than that, but this book does not attempt any major critique, instead focusing on the major result, which was that the British men in India now needed British wives, so women who couldn’t find a husband in Britain, or whose families lived or worked in India, traveled there with the express purpose of finding husbands.

‘Broadly speaking, European women in India may be divided into two classes: those who are or have been married, and those who most assuredly will marry,’ wrote Claude Brown in 1927. Courtship in the Raj took various forms. From the point of view of the husband-hunting Fishing Fleet girl, single men also fell into two categories: those who had passed the age barrier after which marriage was permitted, and financially possible, and – a much larger category – those who had not. As few Raj bachelors were allowed to marry until they were around thirty, husbands were nearly always quite a few years older than their wives, an age difference so usual that at one time its desirability was firmly embedded in the national psyche.

There’s also the tale of Rajendar Singh, Maharaja of Patiala, who in 1893 married Florrie Bryan by the Hindu and Sikh ceremonies united…the bride’s name was changed to Harnam Kaur. I was sad to learn they both died young, her probably of pneumonia and him after a riding accident in 1900.

I do not have a thorough grounding in this region or historical period at all, but by the end of the book felt as if I understood a great deal about these women. If you like anecdotal social histories, and books that focus on the realities of womens’ lives, and don’t mind reading about imperialists, you’d probably like this.

Comics:
Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! Vol. 3: Careless Whisker(s) by Kate Leth was as adorable as the previous volumes.

America Vol. 1: The Life and Times of America Chavez by Gabby Rivera and Joe Quinones was a metaphorical story of finding yourself through connecting with your ancestors, in this case slightly more literally because America’s grandmother is a superpowered luchadora, so I really don’t have to tell you anything else, do I? Except that America is trying out interdimensional Sotomayor University and there are appearances from the Ultimates, Kate Bishop-flavor Hawkeye, and Prodigy, as well as a couple of America’s girlfriends, old and new.

Black Panther and the Crew: We Are the Streets by Ta-Nehisi Coates blends of the history of the civil rights movement with comics mythology by flashing back to a crew of black Harlem superheroes from the 1950s, their successes, and their ultimate downfall. Their former leader, as an old man, dies in a police cell after confronting gentrifiers in the neighborhood, leading eventually to a team-up of Black Panther, Misty Knight, Storm, and Luke Cage. All of the heroes have differing opinions on what should be done, and why, and how. Hydra and the Americops serve as scarily accurate stand-ins for white supremacists and police violence, respectively, and also give enough fantasy aspect that this feels like speculative comics and not a manifesto. I think you can read this if you’re not familiar with the canonical characters, and probably should.

Black Panther Book 4: Avengers of the New World Book 1, also by Ta-Nehisi Coates, picks up after the civil war/various rebellions that were happening in Wakanda, and brings in a new plotline: the gods appear to have departed Wakanda. The storytelling feels smoother and easier than the first three volumes, and I really love the way the Wakandan gods are presented and dealt with as both spiritual and factual. Ends on a cliffhanger, which is kind of annoying since the next volume doesn’t come out until June.

Black Panther by Christopher Priest: The Complete Collection Volume 1 is first of the run that started in Marvel Knights in 1998. Priest was notable as the first black writer of the series (so far as I’m aware), though he chose a white point-of-view character, the hapless government flunky Everett Ross, who refers to King T’Challa as “The Client.” Ross is used to subvert expectations of what an African king might be, though he gradually comes to realize that T’Challa is even more brilliant and strategically-minded than can be immediately guessed. The reader’s realization is supposed to mirror this, I think.

Priest invented the Dora Milaje, the king’s female bodyguards; in his version, they are teenagers whose ceremonial position as potential wives for the king prevents war between their tribes. T’Challa calls them “concomitants” and in no way thinks of them as potential partners. Perhaps needless to say, they are not drawn as teenagers, nor do they wear armor. Ross’ attempts to avoid ogling them because they are too young are treated as a source of humor, as is their casual approach to violence, lethal or otherwise. I think Priest was, again, trying to subvert images of black women and how they’re perceived by white people with the Dora Milaje, but I was a little uncomfortable with their portrayal, too, particularly Nakia’s unhealthy obsession with T’Challa (discomfort probably intended by Priest). Towards the end of the volume, however, an activist teen from Chicago is recruited by the Dora Milaje, and I really, really want to see more of her. She meets Hulk, and extremely entertaining spoilers ensue.

This first volume frequently tells the story out of sequence, mostly for humor value, but it still takes some mental energy to parse, so if you aren’t fond of that sort of thing, be warned.

I’d been putting off Ms. Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II by G. Willow Wilson because I knew it would be a stressful story, and it was, but it was also an important story for the character’s growth. And for those keeping track, there was a mention of Wakanda!

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My January Reading Log

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Ursula K. LeGuin passed in January, and that was a very hard thing.

Fiction:
I ended up being sick over most of my winter holiday, and took refuge in The Comfortable Courtesan: Being Memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart (that has been a Lady of the Town these several years) by L. A. Hall, reading all the way through volume twelve. The series is set mostly in Regency England with a few visits to Italy, and though it is not a romance exactly, it appealed to me as a romance reader; if I had to classify it, I would probably call it a Regency soap opera. Because the author is a historian, there’s a lot of fun detail from that angle as well. The diary format makes it great for reading in small increments of time, but carries the flow throughout with relationship issues and social puzzles to be solved, so I never hesitated to slide from one volume to the next. I loved the portrayal of the various poly relationships, and also the wombatts. Also, if Clorinda is not a Hufflepuff, I will eat my badger t-shirt. (Now I want the Harry Potter AU of the Comfortable Courtesan….)

Echoes in Death (Book 44) by J.D. Robb was definitely an Eve Dallas book. I think I detected slightly more feminist rage than usual and fewer appearances of the (many, many) secondary characters. It did what I wanted it to do, which was to be more of the same, only different.

Penric’s Fox: Penric and Desdemona Book 3 by Lois McMaster Bujold was also as expected, with the addition of some adorable wildlife and a snarky young female GrayJay (that world’s police equivalent).

The Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers) by Katherine Locke is about a modern girl accidentally sent back in time to 1988 East Berlin. Ellie Baum is Jewish, and her grandfather was magically rescued from a death camp. That same magic is now being used by a worldwide organization. I loved the ideas in the magical worldbuilding, which involved a lot of math and some blood as well as balloons; the book also explored ways the magic could all go wrong. I enjoyed and was sometimes moved by the philosophical discussions resulting from time travel, and saving who you can save, and the many versus the few. There is a romance between Ellie and Kai, who is a ridiculously attractive Romani boy from England who aids the balloon rescue efforts. I was intrigued by Mitzi, also one of the balloon rescuer group, who is native to East Berlin but estranged from her family because she is a lesbian; I wanted to see considerably more of Ellie’s and Mitzi’s growing friendship.

Strange Practice (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel) by Vivian Shaw was terrific. It has: female protagonist, found family, people who think they are monsters, medical neep about treating vampyres and mummies and ghouls, and a cracking good plot. And Greta is a doctor who acts like a real doctor despite her fantastical patients, and that was the best thing of all.

The XY Conspiracy by Lori Selke is about a UFO investigator who makes money as a stripper. She goes on a road trip to escape what might have been a Man in Black, and along the way, we learn about many types of strip joints and reasons why Y chromosomes might have been introduced by aliens. There aren’t any other books about that. I found the whole story viscerally satisfying, in a “take that!” kind of way.

Comics:
I read Avengers: The Enemy Within (Captain Marvel Book 3) by Kelly Sue DeConnick on my tablet, as I hadn’t been able to find an affordable print copy back when I was reading the Captain Marvel series. I already knew what to expect from the story, having read everything around it, so it was more filling-in-the-gaps for me, and a test for the tablet. I loved how great the pages looked on the tablet, and how easy it was to enlarge text or art if needed. The one thing that’s a tad bothersome is the backlighting, but I experimented with making that more comfortable for myself. The best thing about finally having a tablet suitable for comics is that I can buy some things I haven’t been able to get in print, or don’t want in print, and can save physical space on my shelves.

Nonfiction:
Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American voices, and Octavia E. Butler is a mixed bag of academic essays on Butler’s work, excerpts from interviews with her, and memorial tributes. The tributes hit me the hardest; I admired her and her work greatly, and grieve the work we will never see from her.

The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 by Paul Fussell is an intense, and sometimes brutal, collection of essays on different aspects of, well, a year in WWII in Europe – what it says on the tin. It’s a quick read, and was great to pick up and pick down because the chapters/essays were so brief. Afterwards, I felt much more informed about several aspects of the war in Europe I should have learned about in high school (but didn’t), all of it with a direct, personal feel. I would highly recommend this book if you write, or plan to write, WWII-era Captain American fanfiction, but don’t want to dive into, for instance, a massive John Keegan volume.

Fanfiction:
Little Animal Lives by adeepeningdig is a Bucky Barnes Recovery story featuring the trifecta of a house that needs rehab, a therapy dog, and a kid that needs a friend. Also bonus T’challa. A very soothing story of one of my favorite sorts.

Barnes’ Top 100 Music Charts by Kimbali for owlet was a fun story about Bucky figuring out what music he now likes, and what music is good for his mood. Set in the “Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail” universe.

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My December Reading Log

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt is space opera with a diverse crew of humans who encounter an old pre-wormhole, pre-alien-encounter ship with a single surviving crewmember frozen inside, a woman out of time. There’s an alien species, octopus-like with variant forms, that I found entrancing because their culture is so cleverly thought out and slowly revealed. The ship has a female captain, and there are several differently-abled characters including one with nifty cyborgian adaptations, and characters of various gender identities (of the matter-of-fact sort). There’s a lesbian romance subplot. And there is a Big Bad. It’s the best space opera I’ve read in a while, first in a new series, and I highly recommend it, especially if you like chewy worldbuilding and found families.

The Comfortable Courtesan: Being Memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart (that has been a Lady of the Town these several years) by L.A. Hall, gave me extreme delight, especially the appearances of the wombatt. They are perfect reading for the present time and state of affairs in the nation in which I live. Set in Regency England, and resembling a romantic soap opera with an enormous cast, there is really nothing else at all like this series and its portrayal of a vast array of romantic and sexual relationships. The diary format makes it great for reading in small increments of time, but carries the flow throughout with ongoing relationship issues and social puzzles to be solved, so I never hesitated to slide from one volume to the next.

Nonfiction:
Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American voices, and Octavia E. Butler, edited by Rebecca Holden and Nisi Shawl, has a mixture of personal essays about Butler with academic essays about her work, interspersed with an interview of her, and a number of lovely photos. I found the academic essays chewy and delicious, and the reminiscences poignant. It still hurts that she died so young. She was just so amazing, and I grieve the work she was unable to create.

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