ursula

I have a new newsletter post up at buttondown. If you want the very quick version, there are links to my essay The Gamemaster’s Guide to Short Story Plot and the book containing my career/coming-out essay Branch Cuts, along with a cat picture.

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates.

Chih is a cleric who travels the world collecting stories with a startlingly intelligent bird for a companion. At the beginning of this novella, Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey--but the abbey is strangely empty, and there are, as you might have guessed, war-mammoths at the gates.

All of Vo's books about Chih are built around the ways the same story can be told. They're always fascinating on an intellectual level, but some stories will inevitably lie closer to the heart than others. This one lies close to mine.

Returning to a place you used to call home and finding both you and it has changed is a theme that has obvious autobiographical resonance for me. But I'm also interested in the facets of this specific story, which involves memories of a person who was a beloved leader to the clerics and an honored grandfather to a pair of warriors, and the way Vo refuses to let the messages resolve into anything as simple as "This person was good" or "This person was bad" (OK, maybe there's some autobiographically resonant grief there, too). I also enjoyed learning more about those long-remembering birds, the neixin, who have been a matter-of-fact background element in many of the Chih stories, but now come to the fore.

Though many of the novellas in this series could be read in whatever order you joyfully stumbled upon them, this one does assume some existing curiosity about Chih and their world, so it might not be the right place to start. It's definitely one to look forward to, though!

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out in September.)

M.A. Carrick, Labyrinth's Heart.

This is the third and final book in the Rook & Rose trilogy, which began with The Mask of Mirrors. Ren is confronted with an unexpected rival for society's attention: the person she has been pretending is her mother. She loves the family she has pretended is hers, in whose register her name is now inscribed--but what will those affections mean as her lies begin to unravel? Does that even matter, when the city she calls home strains under the weight of an ancient curse?

This series is lively, adventurous, and intricately plotted. In this installment, Ren learns more about her birth family, including the Vraszenian culture whose rituals she only half-remembers, if she ever learned them at all. The quest to lift the curse reveals ancient secrets, too, including the true nature of the murderous zlyzen. To protect her city and claim her true love, Ren will have to integrate all the fractured aspects of her self.

There are a ton of balls in the air here, and I can't guarantee that every one will land in the spot a particular reader hopes for. I was somewhat frustrated with a plot strand involving Ren's adopted cousin Tanaquis, a scholar obsessed with understanding the connections between the academic magic of inscription and the Tarot-like Vraszenian pattern decks. The plot depends on Ren taking a dismissive attitude towards Tanaquis's admittedly significant weirdness, and though Ren eventually regrets her actions, the whole thing rings a bit oddly if you're naturally inclined to be most sympathetic to Tanaquis (I studied math and Latin, I think we all know where my interests lie). I would have liked to know more about the fate of Ren's other cousin Giuna's exciting flirtation, too. We do learn the identity of Ren's father--it's even weirder than I suspected, and I've read my share of eighteenth-century novels--as well as all sorts of things about the history of the shadowy Rook.

If you're already reading this series, Labyrinth's Heart will give you lots to think about. If you haven't found it yet, it's well worth finding Mask of Mirrors and embarking on the journey.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

My poem Persephone takes up the garnets is up now at The Deadlands! It's full of mythological allusion, but it's also a sideways-from-Hades-the-video-game meditation on what might make Persephone find the underworld compelling.

This is an adaptation for

yhlee of a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's Quick & Easy Indian Cooking for a modern approximately-six-quart Instant Pot. This is a good first Instant Pot recipe because it only uses one feature. I'm suggesting lots of shortcuts, but if you want ideas about how to shorten the prep even more, let me know.

Make rice to serve this with separately. (Some people use an Instant Pot to make rice, but these are weird people who are not simultaneously using the device to make something to put over the rice.)

Ingredients

2 small or 1 large onion(s)
1-inch piece of fresh ginger
4 cloves garlic
1½ pounds lamb meat cut into chunks (you can often buy "stew meat" or "kebab meat" at the butcher counter of your grocery store, already cut up)
1 14-ounce can diced tomatoes
3/8 cup (6 tbsp) plain yogurt
1 tsp ground cumin
Big pinch salt
1 tsp garam masala

Prep

Peel the onion(s) and cut them in half, then into fine half-rings. Peel the ginger and chop it finely. Peel and chop the garlic.

Cooking

Dump everything except the garam masala into the Instant Pot. Stir if you like. Put the lid on and lock it. Check that the valve is set to Sealing (on mine there is a picture of three narrow Ss inside a square). Select the Pressure Cook option and set the time for 30 minutes (on mine I would use the "meat stew" option).

The Instant Pot will take some time to come up to pressure, and then it will count down until the 30 minutes are over. At this point, it will beep and the temperature will switch to low to keep the contents warm (you may see an indicator reading "Lo").

You now have a choice. You can wait around until the pressure releases naturally (wait about fifteen minutes and then see if you can move the lid). Alternatively, you can do a "quick release". That means moving the valve to let the steam out. DO NOT PUT YOUR HAND OVER THE VALVE, OR YOU MAY BURN YOURSELF. I usually cautiously flick the valve with my thumb, holding my hand to the side, but you can look for Instant Pot quick release instructions on YouTube if you want more detailed instructions or suggestions on possible tools. The steam will hiss loudly until the pressure is normalized.

Finally, remove the lid and stir in the garam masala.

Variations

You can use cubes of stew beef if you prefer. If you want to use a different quantity of meat, the rule is twenty minutes per pound. Double the time if the meat is frozen when you dump it in.

Increase the garlic to six cloves if you like garlic (I dial garlic levels back sometimes because that lets me procrastinate on trips to the big grocery store).

If you want a hotter spice level, you could add anywhere from a quarter-teaspoon to a teaspoon of cayenne, depending on your preference and how fresh your cayenne is.

Garnish with chopped cilantro, parsley, or mint if you want something green. Slices of cucumber on the side would also be good, especially if you're adding cayenne.

I wrote a column about number theory, particle physics, and the geometry of doughnuts!

(This one does assume some calculus, but there's a compensatory Jorts cartoon.)

My bisexual assassin/starship princess story "Closer than your kidneys" is up now at Frivolous Comma!

I also wrote a little about where the title comes from and an unexpected influence.

I'm heading to Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium later this month. It's an indoor, class-focused event, so I've been thinking about how to make pre-1600 clothing that conceals a modern KN-95 mask.

One option is ancient Greek garb! There's an excellent book by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones called Aphrodite's Tortoise that describes the many different styles of veils worn by Greek women (and occasionally by Greek men). You can see one example of a bronze statuette where a dancer wears a long mantle over a face-mask at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I decided to make a tegidion. The word means "little roof," and Llewellyn-Jones hypothesizes that it referred to a style of veil that could be flipped back over the head to make a pointed hat.

Turns out it works!

The beginning of Ann Leckie's Translation State is in the best tradition of romantic adventure stories. We have Enae, the put-upon unmarried relative who receives an unexpected inheritance on hir grandmaman's death, Reet, the adopted child whose birth family might have more-than-human powers, and Qven, the child of an aristocratic family drawn into danger by a charming friend. Reet isn't sure where he comes from, or why he feels a disconcerting urge to peel the skin off the people around him and see what's inside. Qven, on the other hand, is clearly alien, raised (and specially designed) to become one of the Translators who interpret human experience for the inscrutable and dangerous Presger.

It would be easy to collapse the various differences into one grand binary--to contrast human love for family with Translator coldness, or to make the Translators' strangeness a metaphor for human neurodivergence--and I admire Leckie's refusal to do anything of the sort. Enae's relatives don't care about hir, while Reet's adoptive parents love him dearly. His blunt, awkward Nana won my heart with a cynical observation on group dynamics that will be familiar to geeks the world over:

"You know how it is with clubs and such," Nana continued. "Everyone loves the idea, and they love to come to the parties or whatever, but no one wants to do the work to keep things going and make the parties happen."

I was settling in for a book balancing lighthearted tropes and acutely observed social commentary ( when the story shifted... )

North Continent Ribbon, my collection of interwoven short stories about the fictional society of Nakharat, is coming out from Neon Hemlock Press next year! Here is the link to the official Twitter announcement.

My novelette "The Fifteenth Saint" is in the May/June issue of Asimov's! Right now you can also read the beginning on the Asimov's website.

This is a story about a man whose best friend is a book, in a city that's ever more hostile to machine intelligences--and the way life can simultaneously feel very ordinary and full of doom. There's an attractive spy, and a bus, and a standardized exam. If you read it, I'd love to hear what you think.

I really enjoyed the beginning of How to Send a Secret Message from Rome to Paris in the Early Modern Period: Telegraphy between Magnetism, Sympathy, and Charlatanry, which describes a sixteenth-century scheme to send secret messages via magically linked compasses. It's part of a special issue on early modern concepts of action at a distance (many of the articles are open access). It's really interesting to watch the way the boundaries of what counts as science changed.

My poem "Persephone takes up the garnets" will be in The Deadlands later this year!

I'm a source for an article on Pi Day and the movie Pi that's in Wired today.

The Middle Persian Inscription from Meshkinshahr translates a section of a fourth-century Persian inscription as:

Now, the prince, grandee, or freeman who may come along this road and whom this castle may please, then let him say a blessing for the soul of Narseh-[the builder]! You whom it may not please, then you make a castle better than this!

My bisexual assassin/starship princess story "Closer than your kidneys" is going to be in Frivolous Comma this summer!

I wrote a little bit about the story's title and the Secret History of the Mongols for my newsletter.

Rebecca Fraimow, The Iron Children.

In this forthcoming novella, a young woman named Asher finds herself in command of a group of Dedicates--soldiers given iron bodies to fight a desperate, defensive war--on the edge of a mountain in winter. But one of her Dedicates is a spy.

I have a soft spot for the military-fiction trope of the sergeant who knows way more about what's going on than their commanding officer, and the sergeant in Iron Children is pretty great. But this isn't, fundamentally, a story about who's going to win the war. It's about what it means to be an ordinary person living through one piece of it.

I know Fraimow's writing from her historical fiction about being queer and Jewish. Though Iron Children's Dedicates are commanded by a military order of nuns, this feels like a story with a Jewish ethos: the characters belong to (multiple, distinct) religious minorities, and each individual has to figure out what being ethical means on their own, and then live up to it. There are gripping snow-survival moments and knotty questions about agency. Sometimes these are literalized questions about who controls a Dedicate's iron body, presented with the kind of intensity and specificity that fantasy does best.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. Fun fact: it's a novella that's coming out from Solaris! It's nice to see more imprints publishing fiction at this length.)

flowersforgraves asked, "What do you look for or search by if you're looking for new things to read (i.e. are you more likely to pick up something if it's by an author you've previously read in a different genre, vs if it's a similar genre but an unfamiliar author, etc.)?"

This is a great question! I definitely read by author, and sometimes I read everything by a particular author. This can be systematic, if I really like someone's work, but sometimes I casually pick up books by the same author until it turns out I've read all of them. Sofia Samatar is a "read everything, quickly" writer for me, for instance; I initially read her novels, then her collected short stories and prose poetry, and I'm really looking forward to her new memoir.

I don't keep an official to-read list--I'd rather read whatever seems most fun to me at any given moment--but if I come across a rec or review of something that sounds intriguing, I'll add it to either a wishlist or my library ebook holds. I scroll through my wishlist when I want to read a new book but I'm not sure what book I want to read. (The wishlist I use for this purpose lives on Amazon, but all else being equal I'd rather give other people money, so once I pick a book, I often buy it from somewhere else or request it from a library.)

I do pay attention to which writers blurb which books, especially when I'm browsing in a library or bookstore. The extreme case here is Fonda Lee's Jade City: the library hardback was covered in blurbs. I inferred that it was Asian-inspired secondary-world fantasy that people who care about worldbuilding liked a lot and checked it out on that basis. When I started reading, I was startled to discover it was based on twentieth-century rather than medieval history.

Another thing I do when browsing in person is read pages out of the middle of a book to see what I make of the prose and general attitude. When I was younger I'd also read the last page of a book to check whether it was unbelievably depressing, but these days I have both more interest in tragedies and more faith in my ability to guess a book's emotional tenor from other clues. The last book I read because I'd enjoyed pages chosen from the middle of a book is Saad Z. Hossain's Djinn City, which was fascinating, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes bleak. It does end on a massive cliffhanger, but (in full disclosure) the book I flipped through physically was a sequel, so I couldn't exactly have checked.

My newsletter now has a third issue!

This one contains a particularly energetic cat picture.

Arkady Martine's Rose/ House takes preoccupations that readers of her novel A Memory Called Empire will be familiar with--a living place, the impression that a dead man leaves behind him, the seductions of intellectual fascination, the way an idea you love can cut you open--and refracts them through a different genre. Memory Called Empire and its sequel A Desolation Called Peace were adventure stories: there's a protagonist setting forth to learn more about the world, a beautiful woman, nobility engaged in elaborate plots, startling self-sacrifice, and a stack of similar motifs you might have met anywhere between Cherryh's Foreigner series and The Three Musketeers. Meanwhile, Rose/ House is a ghost story--a science fiction ghost story, with climate change and artificial intelligence and an architectural marvel in the Mojave desert all held up to the prism.

Rose/ House isn't coy about its genre. We're told early on that, "Yeah, Maritza grew up here, she knows like anyone else that Rose House is a haunt, and was glad when it was shut up inside with itself for good." The word "haunt" persists and multiplies, occasionally as the adjective commonly applied to houses, more often as that stark noun. But there are references to other genres too--casual references to carjackings for water rations, a detective who stubbornly investigates an inexplicable corpse--and I was inclined at first to read the book as a mystery. That's not the core. The core is the house itself: intelligent, inhuman, and beautifully, terrifyingly interested.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

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dragons and aspirations

mammoths at the gates

labyrinth's heart

(no subject)

lamb with onions

(no subject)

(no subject)

masks, historical edition

translation state

book impending

the fifteenth saint

magic compass messages

dead lands

(no subject)

some sentiments are eternal

closer than your kidneys

iron children

January journal: choosing books

(no subject)

Rose/House

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