Ursula

My story Flannelfeet is now live at Frivolous Comma!

This is feel-good portal fantasy about a practical Wisconsin teenager, pandemic anxieties, and figuring out who you want to be when you grow up.

Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow.

Ruthi Johnson (currently going by Evelyn Ojukwu) is running a con on the awkward heir of a major intergalactic insurance concern to get back at him for jilting her baby sister. But it's hard to focus on breaking Esteban's heart when his wildly dashing half-sister is standing right next to him.

This--like the ostensible Miss Ojukwu's game--is the kind of project that takes a massive amount of craftsmanship to pull off while seeming light-hearted and casual the entire time. There's an immense satisfaction in watching the various gears line up. If you're thinking of Ruthi's universe as a hand-crafted mechanism, it's one with a surprising heft: early twentieth-century musical comedy IN SPACE needs no extra justification, but I appreciated the depth in Fraimow's imagined cultures. Even the seemingly frothiest fashions are based on assumptions about where money comes from and how it is used, and there are layers and layers beneath questions such as why debutantes wear bubble-dresses (the better to dance in half-gravity!) or when it's gauche to take a radiation pill before eating, to say nothing of the best methods for interstellar transport of kosher duck.

(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC; in the US, it comes out on June 4.)

The Neon Hemlock 2024 series Kickstarter, which includes North Continent Ribbon, is live and creeping up on fully funded. Only a little bit more than $1000 to go!

The cover for my short story collection North Continent Ribbon is live now on yhlee's newsletter!

Suggest a topic, and I'll try to post about it in the next month or so? (I usually do this in January, but this feels like the first time in a while I've had free energy.)

2023 was a good year for sharing projects I've been working on for a long time. I also wrote up my best explanation of my hard-won sense for plot, and posted a game!

fiction

• Closer than your kidneys, Frivolous Comma.
  
• The Fifteenth Saint, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (novelette; excerpt here).
  

poetry

• Persephone takes up the garnets, The Deadlands.
  
• Olympia, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
  
• Circle Packing, Rosalind's Siblings.
  

game design

• Monster in the Wilderness.
  

math and writing careers

• The Gamemaster's Guide to Short Story Plot, SFWA blog.
  
• Branch cuts: writing, editing, and ramified complexities, Aspiring and Inspiring: Tenure and Leadership in Academic Mathematics.
  

An important development! (I've known all along that this was the problem I was writing toward, but now I have to figure out what happens next.)

The previous installment was here.

( The Frenchmen secured us below the hatches... )

Kelly Link, The Book of Love.

I spent a year in college listening to 69 Love Songs on repeat. This is the most quintessential queer-teenager experience I've ever had, although (a late bloomer in this respect) I was in my early twenties before I owned the album. One of the Magnetic Fields' sixty-nine songs is "The Book of Love." After half a lifetime of falling for books full of music without recognizing any of the allusions, I'm startled when I know a reference:

The book of love has music in it
In fact that's where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb
But I... I love it when you sing to me...

There you have it: The Book of Love is about music, unclearly reciprocated devotion, being nineteen, and--the book in the song was, it warns us, "written very long ago"--the weird stretched feeling of eternity. Book of Love is also the first full-length novel by Kelly Link. For some people, that will be recommendation enough on its own. For people who want to know more, or enjoy watching writerly attempts to describe the numinous reflect each other like lines of mirrors, here is a sketch of what appears.

Near the beginning of the book, four teenagers return from the dead. Two of them, David and Laura, used to be in a band. Laura's sister Susannah was also in that band. Neither she nor Laura can shake the feeling that they are backwards--that Susannah is the one who should have fucked up in an unpredictable way, like dying.

One of the other songs layered into The Book of Love is the ballad of Tam Lin. It's not a direct Tam Lin retelling, not even as close as Nghi Vo's Siren Queen, which weaves the ballad in among many other strands. However, we do meet a beautiful man named Thomas who serves a dangerous mistress. That mistress is the book's antagonist, though it's possible that Laura, who has always been a good girl--ambitiously good--is even more terrifying.

One of the characters in The Book of Love is a Black woman who had a hugely successful career writing romances about a purple-eyed redhead. Rather than settling down after one book to live happily ever after, as modern genre convention would have it, the doubly fictional Lavender Glass fled between pirate ships and Scottish castles, having one adventure after another. I don't want to imply that all the love in Book of Love is romantic--for starters, the romance writer character I just mentioned is a beloved grandmother--but I was interested in the book's take on romantic love. There's a strong measure of awe in much of it. There's also a lot of casual sex that nobody expects to last. Often these feelings exist simultaneously.

Romance novels generally assume that the romantic leads are good for each other, even if it takes them a book's worth of misunderstandings to realize it. In The Book of Love, it's always possible that the beautiful person who just kissed you might be la belle dame sans merci. That kiss might also be something that is tremendously important now, but will not matter when you cease to be nineteen; or you might be destroying a relationship that matters dearly because you assume nothing you do can matter yet. I very much admire Link's willingness to let all these possibilities exist simultaneously.

The Book of Love reminds me of another Tam Lin book, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which I read over and over when I was beginning to be a teenager and didn't want to be. Both books slide back and forth between hilarious and meticulously observed accounts of everyday life and supernatural danger. They're each packed with enough reference and mysterious implication to fill six ordinary novels. These are not the books you read if you want every little thing explained (unless you want to make a career from the explaining), but they are books to read more than once.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. It will be released on my birthday, February 13.)

Aliette de Bodard, A Fire Born of Exile, and Malka Older, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles.

These are both smart, good-hearted queer romances that reference nineteenth-century novels and are written on the principle of incorporating as many of the writer's escapist impulses as possible. I suspect this means that how well they work for you will depend on how closely the writer's psyche mirrors yours.

I loved Older's previous novella in this sequence, Mimicking of Known Successes, and Unnecessary Obstacles was just as good. The general setup is lesbian Sherlock Holmes on Jupiter, with an academic devoted to studying lost Earth ecologies in the role of Watson. Pursuing intellectual questions by reading old books by a cozy fire while somebody else bakes the scones is absolutely wish-fulfilment. But Older's well aware of the layers of exploitation built into university projects, real or imaginary, and both the mystery plot and the romantic uncertainties depend on the protagonist Pleiti's growing awareness of these inequities.

My feelings about Fire Born of Exile are more mixed. The reference for this one is the Count of Monte Cristo. I've read another Count of Monte Cristo in space novel (Gwyneth Jones' Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant), but I've only read the very beginning of the original novel. I think it might have helped to know going in that the main arc is "protagonist wonders whether an elaborately planned revenge has gone too far" rather than heist-like competence fireworks around the revenge itself. I ended up most invested in the third viewpoint character, the teenager Minh who is trying to break free from her mother the cruel judge, rather than either of the romantic leads.

This is a book with lots of kids, from teenagers to toddlers. Some are human and some are spaceships (as one might expect from a de Bodard novel), but all are charming and generally good-hearted. Aliette de Bodard has written about the erasure of mothers in fiction, and it's clear that the presence of children in her work is a matter of both love and politics. If representation of parents and parental figures is important to you, you'll find it here in spades.

The danger of this particular mission is that being good with kids can become shorthand for being a good person. Fire Born of Exile definitely slips over this line from time to time. I don't find it as claustrophobic as, say, the recent work of Lois Bujold, which often reads like a memo requesting more grandchildren, because de Bodard is interested in relationships of siblings, aunts, teachers, and informal mentors as well as literal mothers. But it doesn't bring me the sense of expanded possibility it might hold for another reader.

(I read both of these books as Netgalley ARCs.)