Yesterday spelled the end of Aussiecon, the 68th annual world science fiction convention, held in Melbourne this year. Sunday night was the Hugo award ceremony, which actually had a tie for the main event - Miéville's The City & The City and Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for Best Novel. The rest of the Hugo award winners are listed here.

AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

 

It's often been quoted that the main difference between us and [insert monstrous invader of your choice] is that we bury our dead. It is, for some reason, something that we identify as a key factor of being human - that we have a ritual to honour and mark the passage of our friends and kin.

Animals don't bury their dead - with the exception perhaps of elephants, few animals die in such a peaceful fashion as to allow it. Usually, nature takes care of the basic process, and the dead are someone else's lunch. If you're being hunted by lions as a matter of course, it makes little sense to risk your whole herd in order to perform a ritual for a member who's no longer there. 

It's a recognised luxury, however - whenever the dead start to outnumber those who are left to bury them, rituals tend to go out the window. Consider the mass graves during the plagues (and that was at a time when the law decreed the dead had to be dealt with for the survival of everyone else). Any horror movie or video game will show you - dead left where they lay signifies total social panic - a regression back into our animal values - survivalist rather than social. 

What your society does with its dead speaks volumes. Their mythology and religion is laid bare by the basic rituals (or lack thereof) that mark important life moments - birth, death, marriage or mating, entering adulthood.

 

Fantasy has a great love affair with prophecies. From King Arthur to Eragon, prophecy is to fantasy what DNA traces are to CSI screenwriters - overused, underutilised, and usually nonsense.

They come in two flavours, usually:

We're All Doomed (but really I just meant that it'll be a little bit rainy on that day, everything's going to be fine.) We're Going To Win (but there's going to be a really big kick up the bum for somebody).

There's occasionally a prophecy like 'everyone will wear hats on Thursday' but unless you're Terry Pratchett, prophecies are rarely so incidental to your plot. In fact, they're usually the whole plot: Here is the Hero, Here is the Prophecy, Here is the Resolution, Hah, I bet you didn't see that coming!

Well, yes, that's exactly the problem. We did.

Picked this up a while ago as an Australian fantasy debut:

Can healing defeat the sword? In seasons long past, twin gold-eyed princes sundered a kingdom. Rejecting his twin brother's warrior ways, Kasheron established a community deep in the southern forests. Forgotten by the outside world and protected by the trackless trees of Allogrenia, Kasheron's Tremen community has flourished, with his legacy of peace and healing upheld generations on. But now the forest has been breached by hostile intruders ... Fighting and bloodshed follow, testing even the skills of Kira, the greatest of all Tremen Healers. As well as sharing Kasheron's gift for healing, Kira has inherited his golden eyes and inspirational qualities - she, too, is seen as a leader amongst her people. As the attacks upon the Tremen become more violent, Kira is faced with a terrible dilemma. Should she stay and risk the annihilation of her community, or set out on a perilous journey north to seek aid from their long-lost warrior kin?

 

 

There is a trend in teenage fan-fiction fiction for creating characters with overly interesting eyes. Either they're a completely unnatural shade, cat-shaped or perhaps bioluminescent, but the one I find truly groan worthy is eyes that change colour. Double demerits if the eyes change colour according to the character's mood. Googleplexian-demerits if they're the only character in the world/book with emoti-coloured eyes.

I take comfort in the fact that I'm not the only one, here - somewhere along the way, enough people have noticed this that its made its way into various Mary-Sue litmus tests. I encountered an otherwise-well-written novel the other day whose main character hit the jackpot - the only eyes in the world that flashed gold whenever she was happy, angry, excited, surprised or presumably any emotion other than morose.

On the basis of it being otherwise an enjoyable read and a debut novel, I granted the author the benefit of the doubt and grimaced my way through each passage that was devoted to those damned irises. But I started to wonder - exactly what is it about eyes that change colour that makes them so (forgive the pun) eye-roll worthy?

 

Religion is always a delicate topic. It's unfortunate that in most novels, it's treated with a very heavy-handed approach. Religion in speculative fiction seems to fall into one of: thinly-disguised Christianity, flat-out corrupt and evil, Gaia-worship, or non-existent.

Which is a shame - because religion will tell you so many things about a society's values and the context of a character. It's an area rich with potential for developing interesting philosophies and concepts. And creating a religion isn't that difficult (hello, Hubbard.) - it's just a matter of looking at how things interconnect.

It's no secret that an overwhelming majority of western fantasy is Euro-centric, stealing creatures, worlds and plots wholesale from old Celtic lore, with the occasional dash of Greek or Roman for flavour. Leaving aside for the moment the rampant borrowing of feudal systems and monarchies, why do so few authors bother to go beyond simple cut-and-paste when it comes to their mythology - especially when said mythology is set within an entirely difference world? There seems to be some kind of romance with Celtic mythology, especially. But it leaves your reader in an odd position: you're linking their world experience (the Celtic fey, of which almost everyone has some experience - Banshees, tricksy fairies and the like) with the otherwise-entirely-unrelated world of your novel. The reader is unsure how much of that experience can be relied upon - often, they'll just dump their whole hazy recollection of the myths into your world, and read on with that mirky not-quite-imagined feeling permeating the whole mythos.

Or, if you luck out on a particularly educated or mythology-enthusiast, they'll sit there picking apart all the places where you deviate from the standard mythology as examples of you failing to do your research. Honestly, why not just create your own?

I nabbed this with glee from the bookshop some time ago, and it gradually filtered up through my giant To Read interdimensional-bookshelf-portal. I knew of (though have not yet located and read) Black Juice, her most famous work of short stories (though I didn't know she's actually produced a fair number of books, most of which are largely unheard of by even the literati, it seems) but she's held a special place in my author-repository ever since a judge somewhere compared my writing encouragingly with hers nearly a decade ago. Ego is a powerful thing.

She became something of an unknown-role-model (interestingly, she also resorts to technical writing 'when the money runs low'), without my ever taking the time to go and research or, you know, actually read her work. 

 

 But - Tender Morsels, her much acclaimed novel released mid-to-late last year, did not disappoint. Except for the parts where it did, but the rest of it was so strong that I didn't mind - ney, I even expected and was happy to receive - disappointment.

When building a solar system, or even just a planet, the star(s) it revolves around is one of the most crucial aspects. The star affects the planet's atmosphere and life-supporting capabilities, temperature, year length, climate, life expectancy, mineral composition, evolutionary trends, and a host of other, smaller aspects. 

I'm not going to give you numbers and maths - it would take far too long to explain, and it's usually not strictly necessary. If you want the maths, I recommend World Building by Stephen L Gillet. At some point I'll dig out and share the tiny program I made to calculate these things for me, so I didn't have to. The important thing to remember when creating stars (and indeed any aspect of worldbuilding) is: everything is interlinked. Changing one thing will ripple changes through the whole design. This is clearly demonstrated by star-building:

Fire is Cashore's pseudo-sequel to Graceling, focussing on different characters in a different part of the same world - the Dells. Here, instead of Gracelings possessing innate, unsurpassable talent, there are monsters: versions of everyday creatures that are mesmerisingly beautiful (literally - they have mind powers), carnivorous and savage.

Fire - the title character - is a rare human-female-monster, so-named by her mother for the impossibly vibrant reds, pinks and coppers of her hair. She is beautiful, so much so that men lose their heads at the sight of her, succumbing to their basest instincts to possess, rape or destroy.

Fire, however "monstrous" her appearance and abilities, understands and feels the difference between right and wrong. She fears her own power, fears the nightmare she could become if she allowed herself the ease of manipulating those around her. But her kingdom, and those she loves are in dire peril, and Fire must face that fear if she wants any chance at protecting her home.

 

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I picked this up some time ago, while browsing in Reader's Feast for someone else's birthday present. The premise in the blurb intrigued me - inverting the traditional roles of Orcs as savage aggressors, and humans as victims:

Stryke, Captain lf the legendary Orc Warband the Wolverines, though that he had lef them to safety in a realm far from Maras-Mantia. A santucary fom the cruelty of man. But hen a message reaches him. A message from his past. A message of terrible foreboding for Orbs everywhere...

 When I picked it up, I'd never head of Nicholls, and had no idea that this was actually the first book of a sequel-trilogy to the Orcs: First Blood trilogy. Probably the kicker "the orcs are back!" should have clued me in, but it didn't - it actually wasn't until I went looking on amazon (where I swiped the cover image, right) that I discovered the previous series. And  that explained a lot.

Three of the books I read (or, in one case, tried to read and gave up on) last year were what's usually termed 'slow writing'. It's writing that doesn't provide continuous story development. We're never sure if what we're reading is actually progressing the main plot, or just an aside or a character moment. In extreme cases, we're not even sure what the plot is. Not, at least, until we're most of the way through the book, by which point a lot of readers have probably picked up something more immediately compelling.