ursula

It's 2022, there's an old pandemic and a new war, and maybe you just want to read about a fallen angel babysitting. That's the spirit in which Aliette de Bodard's newest novella, Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, is written: the universe as a whole may be bleak and cruel, but for the span of this particular story, we can concentrate on kindness, caring, and men wearing fine linen shirts. There's a ghost child whose wishes are uncertain--she might wish to play with other children, or to eat them--and a mystery involving a derelict shrine. But the focus of this story is definitely on Asmodeus the fiercely protective fallen angel, his husband the river-dragon Thuan, and their affections.

This isn't the place to begin with Thuan and Asmodeus. Read House of Shattered Wings or House of Binding Thorns if you want the grand sweep of competition among fallen-angel Houses. For a more domestic introduction to the setting, you could try Children of Thorns, Children of Water, which is half about Thuan attempting to spy on the household of his future husband and half about a cooking contest, and follow up with Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders, which I reviewed here.

By the time you get to Of Charms, Ghosts, and Grievances, you can relax and enjoy your old favorites. You may form some new ones along the way! I was personally a bit impatient with the romance side of the plot (Thuan is scared and ungenerous for once, and the narrative is clearly designed to prove him wrong), but I enjoyed Thuan's opinionated apothecary ex-girlfriend very much.

(I read this novella in an ARC provided by the author.)

After many adventures, my essay Your Own Private Universe: Neal Stephenson, Max Gladstone, and Cyberpunk’s Midlife Crisis is live at Ancillary Review of Books!

Max Gladstone's forthcoming novel Last Exit is aimed straight at me.

Why me, specifically? When I turned forty last year, I had the following conversation with

redshiftnova:

Me: I hadn't planned on having a midlife crisis, but instead I got a worldwide pandemic.
Red: YOU OVERACHIEVER!!!

This was hilarious--and it's the precise set of baggage that the characters of Last Exit carry. The age; the scholarship to an elite East Coast college (Last Exit is about Yale, and I went to a small liberal-arts college whose students prided themselves on being smarter and working harder than the Ivy League trust fund kids, but that just means the sweatshirts came in garnet instead of navy); the math degree driven by the lure of impossible things; the exhortations to save the world; the knowledge that the world is falling apart.

The world is ending; but the world has always been ending. The question is whose world, and whose world you think matters. Last Exit is an American novel, a big sprawling ensemble-cast American road trip novel, and the question of who exactly has been fucked how badly by the continuation of America is never far from the surface.

Flip things around, try the active voice: will a terrified person fuck things over, to keep America the same? Last Exit asks the question that way, too.

This is what the novel is about, in a grand thematic sense. But what happens? The story begins in New York City, as Zelda, a grown-up gay kid from small-town South Carolina, is preparing to apologize for losing her lover Sal. Instead of Sal's mother, she meets Sal's teenage cousin June. June is a veteran of the BLM protests; she has watched cops on horses try to kill her friends. She doesn't want Zelda's apology for failure. She wants to try again.

New York City has a solid weight; it knows what it is. But Zelda has a knack for going other places, and in less populated spots, or when people are looking away, she can walk (or ride or drive) to other possible worlds. Turn The City We Became inside out, and send it on the road to Amber.

Send it back to Montana, where Zelda fucked things up the first time.

Bring the team back together: Sarah (a doctor, married, a mom, an Army brat, Sarah whose sister has gone home to the reservation), Ramón (who tried to go into finance but found his soul again fixing cars), Ish (whose Silicon Valley surveillance company watches for the serpent eating the heart of the world), Zelda, and June (who looks like Sal, and isn't). Retrace the steps of the last adventure, to the Green Glass City, and the tower where they met the princess.

Meanwhile, something is following our friends: the reason that the world is ending, growing tangible. Last Exit has a lot of horror in its DNA. Things are twisted. Bodies are twisted into non-Euclidean geometries. People die.

But the scariest thing isn't non-Euclidean geometry, is it? It's other people.

Bring the team back together. It's time to save a world.

(I read Last Exit as a Netgalley ARC.)

My story "The Spirits of Cabassus" is coming out on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast later this year! Here is the official announcement.

"Spirits of Cabassus" is about ghosts, chronic headaches, and a radical intentional community in the fourth-century Byzantine empire.

rugessnome asked me to post about, "Your choice of ingredient that you've used in recreating historical recipes but isn't used much in modern American cooking, or is used very differently."

I've been pretty good about writing up my medieval cooking experiments in the last few years, so I'm having a hard time thinking of something that I've used recently but haven't written about. This probably means that I'm taking some odd practice for granted. But let's talk about a tiny recipe mystery involving something I don't use very often: oatmeal.

I like granola, but I've never liked oatmeal for breakfast (I wish I did, since it's compatible with a bunch of my annoying dietary constraints!) Consider, now, this anti-oatmeal recipe for "buttered worts", from Gentyll manly Cokere, c. 1500:

To make buttyrd Wortys. Take all maner of gode herbys that ye may gette pyke them washe them and hacke them and boyle them vp in fayre water and put ther to butture clarefied A grete quantite And when they be boylde enowgh salt them but let non Ote mele come ther yn And dyse brede in small gobbetts & do hit in dyshys and powre the wortes A pon and serue hit furth.

Notice the warning: "let non Ote mele come ther yn" ("Let no oatmeal come therein"). A similar recipe from a slightly earlier source has the same prohibition.

Why, you might ask yourself, are the recipe writers going out of their way to warn you not to put oatmeal in your dish of buttery greens? One answer shows up in a seventeenth-century Danish cookbook:

VI. To cook cabbage

There is no need to write much about it, every farmer’s wife knows how. And often at a farmer’s you will taste a better cabbage than in the noble’s kitchen. However this is how a cabbage is cooked: Put water and oats on the fire with a red onion or two finely chopped. Let it seethe until it is nice and smooth. Chop the cabbage finely, the finer the better it will be. When the sauce is smooth then put the cabbage into it and let it seethe until it is soft. Then put butter in: but if you want it with lard then grind the lard finely first and let it seethe with the oats.

It's unusual to see a medieval recipe for oatmeal with vegetables, because "every farmer's wife knows how"--you have to infer its ubiquity in other ways, such as the prohibitions against it. (A friend once shared a variation on the oatmeal-with-vegetables theme using steel-cut oats and bacon, and it was very good!)

While I'm browsing, here's a recipe for a snack or dessert involving a sweet oatmeal pudding on toast:

To make a cawdle of Ote meale.. TAke two handful or more of great otemeale, and beat it in a Stone Morter wel, then put it into a quart of ale, and set it on the fire, and stirre it, season it with Cloues, mace, and Suger beaten, and let it boile til it be enough, then serue it forth vpon Soppes.

And the Danish cookbook has a recipe for cherry glop on fried bread, which is more the sort of dessert I would choose:

Take cherries and put them in a colander so that they don’t touch each other. Put the colander in a warm oven so that they are well dried and then they are good prunes. These you can use this way: Take wine and water equal amounts. Seethe the cherries in it and put some sugar into it. Then fry bread in butter and let this sauce over it.

Here's a collection of the fiction, poetry, and popular math writing that I published in 2021.

fiction

The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers, at Cossmass Infinities.

poetry

"Ansibles" (Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine)
"Unmarked Country Roads" and "Marseille" (Cirque Journal)
"Physics 6" (Climbing Lightly Through Forests)

I participated in an online poetry reading and was interviewed in the Asimov's blog:

Asimov's interview about poetry and "Ansibles"
Video of me reading "Physics 6" and "The ten categories" for the 2021 Bridges poetry reading.
Video of sbrackett and me reading the poem for the 2021 Bridges poetry reading.

math

My big math-writing accomplishment was posting the preprint version of an essay on gender, sexuality, and career, Branch cuts: writing, editing, and ramified complexities.

I also posted three AMS Feature Columns:

reviewing

Risk Analysis and Romance is a book review as well as a math essay. You can find more book reviews under the reviewing tag!

M.A. Carrick, The Liar's Knot.

The Liar's Knot is the second in a twisty, plotty trilogy filled with class and cultural contrasts. The setting feels a bit like seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Venice. It's refreshing to read a long fantasy series that's unapologetically urban, with magic woven into the fabric of the world rather than tacked on for flashy special effects.

At the end of the last book, our heroine Ren saved the city and was inscribed in the Traementis family register. But questions still remain. Chief among them: why was Ren struck by the Traementis curse, when her claim to be a long-lost cousin was part of an elaborate con?

At the beginning of the story, Ren, the uneasy officer of the watch Grey Serrado, and the jumped-up river rat Vargo are at odds. Some of the conflict is caused by misunderstandings, a plot device I always find stressful. If you're like me, rest assured that in the course of the story, many masks are removed. Ren, Serrado, and Vargo team up to investigate the greater mysteries behind a secret society of spoiled aristocrats, expanding the kinds of magic and magical threats that we know about.

Liar's Knot provides answers to some ongoing puzzles, such as what's going on with Vargo's pet spider, and some fun authorial triple crosses. For example, I thought I'd guessed the identity of the mysterious Rook early in the first book, later concluded I was wrong, and learned in the course of the story that I'd been half-right all along. Since this is a middle book, it also offers larger mysteries--and leaves some puzzles, such as the identity of Ren's father, yet to solve. If you'd like a series to sink into at the turning of the year, this is an excellent choice!

(This review is based on a Netgalley ARC.)

My novelette "The Last Tutor" is officially scheduled to appear in the May/June 2022 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine! It contains a terrible teenager, a six-legged salamander, and the universe's worst solution to the trolley problem.

There's a particular satisfaction I associate with long serieses of literary novels--I'm thinking of A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter books or the Jane Smiley trilogy that starts with Some Luck--where a conflict between two people appears intractable because it's fundamental to who those people are, but slowly, over the course of many years, the people change and the world transforms around them, until at last a realization crystallizes: the old irreconcilable problem can be, not overcome, but gently set aside.

Jade Legacy is like that, but with knife fights and martial artists downing helicopters.

At the beginning of the novel, the Kaul family, leaders of the No Peak Clan and therefore informal rulers of half the island nation of Kekon, are in serious trouble. Their old enemy, Ayt Mada of the Mountain clan, is ahead of them in terms of subordinates and resources. Worse, they don't trust each other. The cheerfully ruthless Pillar, Hilo, isn't talking to his sister Shae, the clan's Weather Man and business leader. ( His wife Wen... ) The family needs everyone's skills--Hilo's warrior leadership, Shae's business acumen, Wen's personal insight, and even contributions from their cousin Anden, who has chosen not to fight with jade at all--to stand against the Mountain.

I read the first chapters of Jade Legacy slowly, balancing the bleakness of the setup against the bleakness of the real world. No Peak members swear an oath: "The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master." At the quarter-mark, that oath heralds a transformation: an excruciating doom I had dreaded was turned aside, and the story becomes bigger and stranger. After all, Ayt Mada might not be the Kaul family's greatest threat. Kekon is only one island. Other nations, particularly the great powers locked in the Cold-War-like Slow War, would love to take Kekon's superpowered jade for themselves. The Kauls understand that wearing jade requires honor and responsibility--there are rules to follow and balances to maintain. The foreigners just want drugged-up supersoldiers. I sped through the remaining hundreds of pages in a matter of days.

If you began the series when Jade City came out, you have some idea what Jade Legacy might offer. If you're just picking up the series now, you'll find a fantasy story sideways from the twentieth century, rather than the more common medieval-ish technologies, that doesn't center fantasy-Europeans. These are books where bias and bigotry are real but are not destiny. They contain astonishing and bloodthirsty martial arts sequences, people who excel at mayhem, people who understand that finance is also mayhem, and small children who are their own people. Come for the jade; stay for the rich, layered, inexorable sense of transformation.

(Jade Legacy officially comes out on November 30. I read an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)

Depending on how you count, Charles Stross's new novel Invisible Sun is either the conclusion to a trilogy that began with Empire Games, or the latest installment in a series that began with The Family Trade in 2004. Science fiction readers know the feeling of staring at a massive tome, a book heavy enough to merit a warning from Human Resources, and wondering, "Is this story actually going to end?" Due to a dearly lamented cat who used to eat books, I have shifted most of my reading to electronic format, but the slowly creeping percentage bar has some of the same emotional force. Here, therefore, is a FAQ about what kinds of resolutions to expect from Invisible Sun.

Q. Are there a lot of nuclear weapons in this book?

A. Yes. A truly obscene number of nukes appear in this book. They are used both in peaceful technologies and for offensive purposes.

Q. I read the first Merchant Princes series and now I'm getting worried. Does the US government murder all the humans on some version of Earth for a second time?

A. No. The first Merchant Princes series channeled anger about Bush-era government. This series offers a different flavor of chilling: a fractured and dystopian federal government that is more statesmanlike and more competent than the actual United States.

Q. Do we ever find out what the deal was with that miniature black hole?

A. Yes.

Q. Does it pose an existential threat to humanity that can't possibly be resolved unless Stross gets a contract for a follow-up series?

A. Well, sort of. But at the end of Invisible Sun, all the humans on the Earths we care about are safe, decisively. For a while.

Q. So, what does this book actually feel like?

A. It feels like a bureaucracy pulling off a heist.

The lumbering nature of bureaucracies is part of the aesthetic, for layered reasons: because one of the governments in play favors the proletariat over aristocratic fripperies, because old-fashioned technology is more amenable to radiation hardening, and because this book is riffing on Cold-War-era thrillers.

There are two different Cold-War-esque conflicts in play here. The first conflict is between an alternate United States and a shiny new North American democracy in another world. Here, we see Stross meticulously working out the implications of world-shifting technologies on larger and larger scales. This plot strand is full of tasty, crunchy spycraft, as well as German police officers being sarcastic about American lapses in civil liberties.

The second conflict is between humans across all kinds of worlds and something that is decisively not human. This conflict reminded me a bit of Mass Effect. That seems like convergence of tropes, rather than direct reference--to the best of my knowledge, Stross is not that sort of gamer!

Q. But it's a lot of fun to imagine Brilliana giving spy lessons to Commander Shepard, isn't it?
A. Yes!

(Disclaimers: I received an ARC for review from Netgalley, and I read part of a pre-publication draft of this book.)

I posted the slides from my class on sixth-century food at https://tinyurl.com/AnthimusInContext. I found a bunch of fun archaeological sources while I was working on this; sources focused on archaeobotany were particularly useful!

This weekend, I did some test cooking from the sixth-century dietary manual De observatione ciborum (Anthimus). I skipped the pennyroyal because you don't use an herb traditionally employed to induce uterine contractions unless all the potential diners are on board for that experiment, I skipped the spikenard because our probably-American stock is so old it's tasteless and true Nepali spikenard is endangered, and we were out of a couple of other odd ingredients. But I did buy a costmary plant:

This herb smells lemony and tastes bitter; you can use it fresh or dried.

One of the longest recipes in Anthimus is for a beef dish:

Beef which has been steamed can be used both roasted in a dish and also braised in a sauce, provided that, as soon as it starts to smell, you put the meat in some water. Boil it in as much fresh water as suits the size of the portion of meat; you should not have to add any more water during the boiling. When the meat is cooked, put in a casserole about half a cup of sharp vinegar, some leeks and a little pennyroyal, some celery and fennel, and let those simmer for one hour. Then add half the quantity of honey to vinegar, or as much honey as you wish for sweetness. Cook over a low heat, shaking the pot frequently with one's hands so that the sauce cooks the meat sufficiently. Then grind the following: 50 pepper corns, 2 grams each of costmary and spikenard, and 1.5 grams of cloves. Carefully grind all these spices together in an earthenware mortar with the addition of a little wine. When well ground, add them to the casserole and stir well, so that before they are taken from the heat, they may warm up and release their flavor into the sauce.

( cut for interpretations and more recipes )

Kate Elliott writes long fantasy and space opera series that are densely packed with world-building. Servant Mage is the first installment in a new YA series. In Elliott terms, the YA part means there's only one viewpoint character and the plot develops more quickly. This novel also gestures toward a love triangle involving the heroine Fellian and two nobles of very different backgrounds, though my sense is that the series will reconfigure the YA love-triangle trope rather than leaning into it.

As Servant Mage opens, Fellian is illegally teaching a friend to read. A few decades before that lesson, a rebellion overthrew an oppressive monarchy. Because mages once served the monarchy, the new government oppresses them in turn, binding children with mage talents into service and refusing to teach them the details of their craft. A secretive group of mage Loyalists recruits Fellian because her talent completes their team: together, they make a full hand of earth, air, water, fire, and aether mages. By combining their skills, they can locate a baby who might become the next monarch--but the government's August Protector is ahead of them.

In another fantasy novel, the baby's right to rule would be unquestioned. But Kate Elliott is more interested in exploring the way inherited power shapes character than she is in justifying it. We see the damage that the Protector's government causes, but Elliott slowly shows us the other kinds of damage that the Loyalists take for granted. Fellian's loyalties lie somewhere else. By the end of the book, she's talking to her own friends and kin about what self-determination looks like. I'm very interested in seeing how this develops across the course of the series!

(I read this book as an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)

I wrote about the medieval educational game of rithmomachia for the July AMS Feature Column.

My poem "Ansibles" is in the July/August issue of Asimov's Magazine. An interview with me is up on their contributor's blog today! I'm amused by the introduction:

Mathematician and poet Ursula Whitcher, whose “Ansibles” appears in our July/August issue [on sale now!], is ready to fight for the honor of being the second-most-famous SF author named Ursula. Below, she discusses the influence of the first-most-famous SF Ursula, other literary inspirations, the origins of “Ansibles,” and her poetic process.

My poems "Unmarked Country Roads" and "Marseille" are in the latest issue (Vol. 11, No. 2) of Cirque Journal. You can read them online: go to p. 148 (it's labeled 150-151 in the online viewer).

I made cherry rhubarb crisp the other day, substituting frozen sour cherries for strawberries in a Joy of Cooking cobbler filling, and using the topping from this vegan crumble. A bit more cornstarch in the filling and a bit of butter in the topping would have made this crispier when it first came out of the oven, and some nuts in the topping would have made it a more filling breakfast, but if you want a big bowl of fruit to consume over a couple of days, I highly recommend this strategy!

( cut for eel quotes )

"You have twenty mopeds?!"
"I get enthusiastic about my hobbies."
"What do you do with twenty mopeds??"
[Party riffs on the question of agriculture in a setting where the sun was destroyed by uncanny powers hundreds of years ago.]
"Ghost power--you have haunted grow lights."
"Asparagus will just grow without light. That's how you get white asparagus."
"Just put an eel in your CSA box, and imagine."
"I'm not the eel guy!"
"Awww, eel pizza? No!"
"Sounds delicious. Eel pizza with ghost mushrooms."
[Party asks whether their cult can continue operating the coffee shop.]
"That could be arranged, but you would have to cancel all the poetry nights."
"Only sun theme. Only one kind of poetry."
"I don't have to talk to any, like, people?"
"Don't you talk to dead people?"
"Oh, dead people are fine. Dead people, babies, animals... Acquaintances are the worst."
"I don't have to worry about talking to acquaintances, 'cause I can always smoke-bomb my way out."
"Eel infestation!"
"Yes, spirit eels."
"We could Scooby-Doo this shit."
"We don't even have to use real spirits."
"You can commune with spirits and I can literally punch them away from places!"
"We do, after we're done with this, actually have to get rid of those ghosts."
"My plan was not to waltz in and put a summoning circle on top of the counter."
"Can we just do the summoning as, like, a poem?"
"Summoning at open mic night!"
"I like that we're rolling for success with basically a supernatural force and we roll triple 6's."
"Who is Nyryx possessing?"
"Is there anyone with a bongo drum?"
"Who works here?"
"The baristas don't make enough money for this!"
"One star! There is no pizza! I was promised a pizza guy."
"Is there an influencer there? Eel-fluencer?"
"Haunt the coffee machine."
"Every time you pull a shot of espresso just, like, screams come out."
"So the ghosts are, like, inside the pressure vessel."
[We confirm that the bongo player is possessed.]
"This is what happens when you play with bongos."
"Did you not read the bongo end-user license agreement?"
"It's boilerplate, you should have known."
"I gain my morning alertness from the glory of the sun god."
"I wake up at about 2 pm."
"Yeah, 'cause the sun-god isn't around yet."
"It used to get five out of five eels and now it barely rates an eel and a half."
"If we go, though, do you think they'll ask questions like, 'Who let the ghosts out? Who?'"
"I have no right to be annoyed at that, but."
"It's hard to do the twenty-sided sign of the cross."
"I-cross-a-hedron."
[players feel some remorse at their successful haunting]
"But you know, I've played other games where we were quote-on-quote evil, and this is much more fun."
"Look, it's called Blades in the Dark, not Hugs in the Dark."
"I'm glad we didn't take that cult value of honesty."
"I'm thinking the espresso machine blows up in a cloud of fire & brimstone. What do people think?"
"Is that a tall or a venti explosion?"
"Our god banishes ghosts and respects well-brewed coffee."
"We successfully took over the art deco Starbucks!"

"I've been smiled at by a moray in an aquarium tank before. That was enough for me."
"Did you know dolphins will do that on purpose to get high on puffer fish venom?"
"They're eels, right? We're smarter than eels."
"Are eels afraid of ghosts?"
"I might have just talked to my brother about cleaning out his pond."
"What did he clean out of it?"
"Was it eels?"
"Cows that went missing?"
"Before we run into a giant sentient fire-breathing eel man, let's find out what's really going on."
"Eelsquatch."
"Fish are usually more active in the morning and at night. The water heats up with the sun, and they don't like it."
"Is that true in a world without a sun?"
"Oh! Right! That's important in a game called Blades in the Dark."
"I don't see a checkbox for eel soporific."
"Is there any evidence of eel-to-plasm?"
"Out of the frying pan, into the fire, we can't even eat the food."
[Player throws a smoke bomb.]
"You know, what's really good, is eel that has been smoked."
"It was about to be culinarily interesting."
"I mean, smoked eel is really good."
"Are we going to call that tag-team combo a smote bomb?"
"You smote, I bombed."
"DARE: Drug Abuse Resistance (for) Eels."

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of charms, and ghosts, and babysitting

a private universe

last exit

sale!

January journal: oatmeal

2021 writing

knots and masks

a fortuitous date

Fonda Lee, Jade Legacy

invisible sun

Anthimus class notes

on the observance of foods

servant mage

rithmomachia

ansibles

poems!

crisp

Blades in the Dark persuaded a bishop to share a healing plant

Blades in the Dark reclaimed a coffeeshop for the cult

Blades in the Dark tried to clean out an eel pond

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