Ursula

For the past year or so, the shape of escapism I've wanted has been a murder mystery. I struggle with stories that are too frothy and joyful when the world around me isn't. Mysteries offer a world where evil exists, but can be contained: a fantasy of justice. But for the past year I've been more acutely aware than ever that justice in America is a fantasy in the pejorative sense.

P. Djèlí Clark's book A Master of Djinn, set in an alternate 1912, is a mystery novel for people who want to imagine that justice could work differently. The heroine, special investigator Fatma el-Sha'arawi, works for the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, a new bureau formed to manage the chaos caused by the late nineteenth-century reappearance of djinn. Egypt is central, here. It is the cosmopolitan land that the djinn chose; Cairo is now full of shining buildings designed by djinn architects. The colonizing European countries, suspicious of magic, form a smug sort of backwater.

Master of Djinn waltzes backwards and in very sharply shined shoes through a number of classic mystery tropes. I particularly enjoyed seeing Fatma, with her bowler hat and huge collection of coordinated pinstriped suits, as the cynical and grumpy senior detective resisting a new partner. The partner in this case, Hadia Abdel Hafiz, is a feminist activist who wears bright blue hijab and knows a mosque that holds Friday services for women. Like all good grumpy detectives, Fatma is entangled with a mysterious and alluring woman. The femme fatale in question holds an unsettling allegiance to the goddess Hathor and occasionally manifests literal claws. She also has a large and loving family who run a bustling restaurant, and an aunt who, in classic matriarchal fashion, dispenses wise advice. But my absolute favorite reframing of mystery tropes is the moment when the masked antagonist who has been posing as a literal master of djinn reveals a fascination with Fatma, a grand rivalry propelled by rhetoric about twins and shadows, and Fatma laughs at the ridiculous overweening arrogance this construction entails.

Though Master of Djinn is hanging out in a cool club drinking sarsaparilla with mysteries, its home is the fantasy genre. The clues that matter are clearly telegraphed, but the reason why each clue matters involves magic and the nature of the city itself, and the reader won't have the context to generate these explanations until the story gets there. The key, I think, is interlocking gears. The center of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is a clockwork brain designed by a djinn. It represents the interlocking factions and desires, some humans and some more than human, actively maintained by the commitments and collisions that make a city. I hadn't read Clark's previous stories about Cairo, but I'm looking forward to consuming all of them, joyfully and in no particular order, bolstered among pillows or curled in a cozy chair, or (someday, again) on trains and planes.

(I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.)

A velokab can more or less pilot itself. But machines can’t make moral choices. Or strategic ones either, supposedly. That’s why, if a kab ever crashes, its driver is supposed to pay the price.

When people talk about humans taking responsibility, they always seem to mean somebody else.

My story The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers is now available to read for free at the Cossmass Infinities website!

I have two really different publications out today.

• Climbing Lightly Through Forests, an anthology in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin, includes a poem called "Physics 6" that I wrote as an undergrad and revised in grad school. You can find the book via the Aqueduct Press website or my bookshop.org affiliate link.
  
• In the February AMS Feature Column, Risk and Romance, I write about research projects for a Courtney Milan heroine.
  

My story "The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers" is now for sale, as part of the January issue of Cossmass Infinities. The story involves unions, sex work, murder, ride-shares, elaborate descriptions of hair ribbons, exuberant bisexuality, and a planet that isn't ours.

( Here are some of the ideas braided into the writing... )

( I made two big changes... )

She stomped on the pedals. Her velokab lurched forward, straight toward a tourist hugging an overstuffed duffel. The tourist dropped their bag. I started to scream. But the velokab’s sensors cut in and jerked sideways, sliding the kab into traffic a hand’s-breadth behind a fat gray truck.

I watched the kab drive away, bobbing and turning through the traffic like a candy wrapper floating down the river. I made myself relax my toes and my fingertips. I thought about breezes on water. But my breath was still knotted up like a Company contract. I had almost stolen somebody’s life, because she hurt my feelings.

You’re shaking your head. You wouldn’t hold me to account. The judges wouldn’t either, no matter how smug they are, in their snow-white wigs. That’s what kab drivers are for: to be responsible. A velokab can more or less pilot itself. But machines can’t make moral choices. Or strategic ones either, supposedly. That’s why, if a kab ever crashes, its driver is supposed to pay the price.

When people talk about humans taking responsibility, they always seem to mean somebody else.

This story isn't actively about math, but it is about work. One of the characters has taken a job that keeps her away from her family for long stretches of time. One of the places I thought about, while writing that character, was Alberta. That's a place I've been for work. It's a place my dad worked in, too--he lived in a hotel for weeks at a time, doing engineering design for oil pipelines, in a year the US economy was struggling. We had dinner together once, when I was flying into Edmonton from one state and he was flying out to another, and traded paperbacks. I thought about the wide-open Edmonton sky, writing this story.

Dandrielle Lewis interviews me about identity and intersectionality in the January 2021 issue of the Mathematical Association of America's Focus magazine.

yhlee asked for a calligraphy post.

Here's something I learned from my middle-school art teacher that has come in handy for all sorts of signs and bits of art, over the years. Traditional calligraphy assumes you have a pen with an edged nib. If you want huge letters and you don't have a huge pen, you can hold two pencils together, and use those to calligraph an outline. The result (after closing off a couple of serifs) looks like this:



Then you can color in the letters however you like. In this case, I used sparkly watercolor:



Here is a less dimensional but even more sparkly image.

(You are welcome to request more topics here.)

The scroll I've been working on was given out today in Midrealm Court.



( brief documentation )

( Scroll text )

I browsed through MetaFilter Projects the other day and discovered Chess Patch Notes, a guide to historical changes in the rules of the game of chess, described as if they were updates to a massively multiplayer online game. For example:

We wanted to speed up the early game and make sure players can get right into the action, so we're buffing the early game Pawn.

Buff: Pawns can now move two spaces forward if they have not yet moved.

I made crumpets for brunch on Sunday!



glasseye has been maintaining a sourdough culture, so the main effort involved was acquisition of crumpet rings. (I bought stainless steel ones, on general principle.)

I need to find or make more jam: our current collection has lots of relishes and hot pepper jelly, but no classic fruit jam or marmalade.