Tilting at Tomorrow

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I get so wrapped up in making flyers, planning activities, visiting and traveling and trying to keep up with myself - and after a long, happy day of hard work and hobbit-wrangling, it's a shock to log on and read about a profoundly broken world.

I worry sometimes that I'm too fortunate and insulated - that all of what I'm doing basically amounts to building castles in the sky while Rome burns. I hope that's not true. More than anything, I want what I'm doing to matter. I expect we all do.

But here's what I know for a certain fact: there is going to be a tomorrow in which the all-consuming crises of today don't feature. Our current problems will pass away, just as surely as the Cold War and the 1918 flu did before them, and new ones will grow in their place.

And when tomorrow gets here, I want to make sure that we still remember how to co-exist. I want to make sure that clickbaiting and fearmongering and runaway intellectual inbreeding don't deprive us of our friends and neighbors. We're in the middle of a hard and essential fight right now, but there's something completely unlike it already waiting in the wings... and whatever that is, we absolutely can't afford to meet it at half-strength.

I hope you registered to vote today, if you weren't already signed up. I hope you have been using every good means at your disposal to weigh in on the big decisions, and take ownership of the small ones.

But I also hope we remember the last vital stranger who helped us - on the side of the road, in the hospital, a thousand miles from home - and how little their political views mattered when we really, desperately needed them. And I am going to join my fellow big-hearted eventroverts in continuing to raise up little tentpole-spaces for good people to meet face-first and practice helping each other out... because that's the best way I know to ensure we still have a common ground left to come back to after today's fight is finished.

And because I just god damn love wearing a fancy name tag and buying tax-deductible donuts.

On Barber-Surgeon-Wizards and Interracial Siren/Selkie Relationships

Okay, public service announcement.  If you were under the impression that we were buddies, and are now wondering whether that's still the case (because all of a sudden I stopped doing/replying to everything, ever), let me assure you: our bud-ness is as far beyond question as tribbles are beyond cute.  And I am a sweaty, disorganized mess.

But!  No matter how long the to-do list gets, I cannot let this week pass without celebrating two new releases in the SFF-sphere.  Two of my favorite books of 2013 are dropping sequels this week, and I am going to hold you by the scruff of the neck and shove your face into them until you repent share my enthusiasm.

LOOK AT THIS.  LOOK AT IT.

See that one on the right?  That blue hunk of gorgeous is J.K. Cheney's The Seat of Magic, sequel to The Golden City.  And I've blogged about this before, but like... so often, a huge part of a story's appeal is its setting, its atmosphere.  How can we even think about Lilo and Stitch without Hawaii, or Harry Potter without Hogwarts, or Tombstone without, you know, Tombstone?  This is one of those: Cheney has worked like a dog to bring turn-of-the-century Portugal to life (do you know what a Baedeker is?), and it pays off fabulously.  Plus, of course, there are murder mysteries, sinister magic, and secretive sea-people.  You know.  Like y'do.  If you're just casually awesome like that.

BUT THAT IS NOT ALL.  Segue with me, won't you, from "richly beautiful" to "alluringly disgusting."

Actually, "alluringly disgusting" is a great way to describe E.C. Ambrose's Elisha Barber, and so much of what I'm looking forward to in the sequel, Elisha Magus.  Elisha is obviously not the first medieval hero in the fantasy aisle - but it's pretty dang rare that the medic gets first billing in any story, and rarer still that any writer takes such pains to show the real, unglamorous reality of medicine, hygiene, and life in that time - and not just for plot-glorifying shock value (though we love you, GRRM!), but as a mainstay of the plot itself.  E.C. Ambrose just did a terrific podcast with my good buddy "Evil" Dan Bensen on this very subject - which also includes discussion of historical fantasy vs. straight-up fantasy, which is a whole other post for a whole other time.

So here we are with two historical fantasy sequels by two fantastic writers - and what I think holds them together (more than just their release dates!) is the commitment to the historical part of their fantasy - the love and passion and uncountable hours of research that they've poured into their subjects.  If you're anything like me, your to-read pile is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon, but I highly recommend checking these out.  There's no shortage of books in the world, but passion is priceless.

When the Cavalry Ain't Coming

You know what's BS about Pandora's Box? 

You (or at least I) grew up hearing about how she opened the box and let every imaginable evil out into the world - war and death and disease and inner-ear zits and all the rest - but then she closes the box and hey, it's okay, because HOPE is still inside.

Well hold on there, Sparky: if Hope were still in the box, we wouldn't have it out here in the real world, right?

I've always preferred the scholars who translate that word, elpis, as Expectation.  Without Expectation - without actually KNOWING how we're going to die or what-all's going to happen to us in the meantime - we have a chance to go forward optimistically, to live the Eric Idle creed and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life... because hell, you never know; today might really be better than yesterday!

Which is why, when done well, historical fiction can REALLY put your emotional knickers in a twist.

Take this book here: Between Shades of Gray.  (And no, I don't know what Ruta Sepetys thinks about E.L. James, but I would LOVE to see a cage-match for title rights.)  It's about a young Lithuanian girl named Lina, who's taken from her home by Soviet police in the summer of 1941, and condemned to a brutal Siberian labor camp, along with thousands of other political prisoners.  At first glance, it's one of these Very Important Books that get big applause on the YA circuit, because it highlights and humanizes an especially horrendous period in history in a way that's accessible to young folks today.

So there I am, reading along with my 9th-grade tutoring student as the atrocities mount and the body count rises, and I start feeling my old Anne-Frank instincts kicking in.  "Come on, Lina - just hang in there 'til '45, and then G.I. Joe and the Allies are gonna come romping and stomping through there and everything'll be... wait, hold on."

I actually had to go look it up, because - come on, how much did YOU learn about Lithuanian history?

And I tell you what, friends, that one Google search got me right in the breadbox.  No stars and stripes for these poor souls: Lithuania and the other Baltic states were swallowed whole, annexed by the USSR (you remember, those other guys who were so helpful in blowing up the Death Star that we went halfsies on Germany), and the pathetic fraction of those millions of stolen citizens who survived internment weren't pardoned until 1954.   The Baltic states didn't reappear on the world map until *1991*. 

Which means that in all probability, Lina wouldn't live to see her country resurrected.  (No spoilers for the book here - its scope doesn't extend nearly that far.)  She and the millions whose experience she represents would have lived the remainder of their lives as second-class citizens, slowly smothered to death by age and unrelenting censorship. 

But okay, that's maybe not news: if you one-upped me and stayed awake in fourth-period history class, you knew all that already.  You would crack open this same book already knowing how the broader strokes of the story will play out, even if you don't know what will happen to the individual characters.  (There's that Expectation thing again: for the Baltic prisoners as a whole, it's already flown the coop - we know how things will turn out for them - but hey, Lina and her family might still make it somehow!  Turn them pages faster, damn you!)

Instead, what I want to point out is how, when we see tragedy like this in historical fiction, it's so often played in a "damn, just missed it" context.  All Quiet on the Western Front, Grave of the Fireflies, The Plague  - hell, even Titanic sucks you in with this timeless trope, that better days are just around the corner for anyone who can make it that far.

But I think we can get just as much moral mileage, if not more, out of stories on the other side of optimism: when the author (of the novel or the history book, either one) has made it clear that there's not going to be any reinforcements or armistice or vaccine coming - that with the course of history already set, any hope to be had must come from the characters themselves.

Anyway, that's my deep thought for the week, hope you enjoyed it.  And now to bed, cuz tomorrow is going to be exceptionally long on Hope and short on Expectation.

They took me in my nightgown.