The Great Westeros Wedding Massacre

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Cora

So the axe came down on Game of Thrones last week. The much anticipated and feared Red Wedding happened. And a lot of people are bothered.

Warning, spoilers behind the cut! Continue reading →

Posted in Books, TV | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Remembering two wonderful and underrated actors

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Cora

German actor and comedian Eddi Arent died last week aged 88. Eddi Arent was one of the biggest stars in the German entertainment cinema of the 1960s and was known mainly for variations of a single role, that of the bumbling comedy Brit with the dead-pan face and stiff upper lip. He played this role in some of the biggest successes of the 1960s, namely the Edgar Wallace adaptions and the Winnetou adaptions, both produced by Horst Wendlandt, and brought some much needed comic relief to the rather grisly going-ons of the Wallace films and the melodrama of the Winnetou films. In the adaptions of Karl May’s Winnetou novels, he played Lord Castlepool, a British aristocrat stumbling through the Wild West (shot in Croatia) while collecting butterflies. In the Wallace films (21 altogether), he played a variety of roles from dead-pan butlers via roving reporters and bumbling police sergeants to a fellow with the unfortunate name Lord Selwyn Moron.

The Wallace series include some of the IMO best films of German postwar cinema (and a few duds) and the Winnetou films, while clearly dated (How could they not see the slashiness?) and no longer politically correct (lots of white actors playing Native Americans), are still highly watchable. Alas, the official line of German movie criticism is that Weimar Republic cinema was good, Nazi cinema was evil and German postwar cinema was mostly crap, until a bunch of young directors got together in Oberhausen* and declared “grandpa’s cinema” (i.e. entertainment cinema that actually attracted viewers) dead in favour of the New German Cinema peddled by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Alexander Kluge and others.

This official narrative is wrong. Because the German cinema of the postwar era is a lot better than its abysmal reputation and indeed resulted in a lot of very good films. And while a lot of them were escapism, I don’t think anybody could accuse films such as Rosen für den Staatsanwalt, Wir Wunderkinder, Das Mädchen Rosemarie or Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen of being escapist. And even the escapism was often surprisingly good and surprisingly critical. Nonetheless, the “German postwar cinema was a load of escapist bullcrap made by people who did not want to reflect on the Third Reich” narrative continues to go strong. Even I believed for the longest time that German films of the 1950s and 1960s were crap, even though I had seen the good films (and never liked New German Cinema at all). I just thought the good German films of the era were outliers, until I realised that there was a whole lot of outliers.

Nonetheless, the obituaries for Eddi Arent like this one from Die Welt reflect the established narrative. Good actor, but the films were silly genre crap. It makes me wonder whether whoever wrote this ever watched a single Edgar Wallace film.

Never mind that Eddi Arent’s stock character of the bumbling Brit often had hidden depths. In the very early films, he usually did play the pure comic relief character, though I challenge anyone not to feel a certain chill at the final scene of The Red Circle (1959 – theatrical trailer here), when Eddi Arent – playing a police sergeant – escorts a villain, who had previously escaped justice due to a malfunctioning guillotine – to the gallows and replies to the villain’s question what will happen if the rope breaks, “Then we’ll simply take a new rope” in his typical dead pan delivery. From approx. 1963 on, Eddi Arent’s characters – while still bumbling comic relief figures – did fall under suspicion of being the master villain on occasion. Nor were they always quite as innocent as they seemed.

Take one of my favourite Eddi Arent roles – Archibald Finch, the cleptomaniac butler in The Ringer (recently reviewed here). Finch insinuates himself into the inner circle of the villainous lawyer Maurice Messer and inevitably manages to unsettle the villains with news of the vigilant known only as the Ringer, who’s trying to kill the whole gang. At the climax, it is revealed that the bumbling cleptomaniac butler was just an act and that Finch is the Ringer’s trusty assistant. The delightful trio infernale of the Ringer (Rene Deltgen), his beautiful wife Cora Ann (Margot Trooger) and trusty secretary Archibald Finch (Eddi Arent) is reunited in New Adventures of the Ringer.

In The Sinister Monk (1966 – theatrical trailer here), the unthinkable finally happened. For when the hood of the bullwhip wielding killer monk was finally lifted, the man under the hood was none other than… Eddi Arent. Turned out that his character – the harmless and bumbling janitor at a girl’s boarding school – had been kidnapping female students, including such future stars as Uschi Glas, Dunja Raiter and Susanne Hsiao, for a human trafficking operation and eliminated the members of a treacherous family because of his unrequited love for Karin Dor, the doe-eyed star of many Wallace films. I’ve always viewed The Sinister Monk as the revenge of the Eddi Arent character for always having to play the bumbler and never ever getting the girl.

Eddi Arent played villains in two more Wallace films, another human trafficker in The Hunchback of Soho and a knife throwing killer in The Mystery of the Silver Triangle (both 1966). The latter film is remarkable, because it has Christopher Lee as a good guy and Eddi Arent as a killer.

Finally, I’ll leave you with two clips of Eddi Arent in the Edgar Wallace films of the 1960s, namely interviewing Wolfgang Völz in the middle of a firefight in The Green Archer (1961 – yes, that is Gert Fröbe sitting in the chair about to to shot by the archer), belittling Heinz Drache’s inspector in The Squeaker and playing ping pong with Siegfried Schürenberg in The Squeaker (1963). The Squeaker is another film where Eddi Arent’s character turns out to be not nearly as bumbling as he appears, for his roving reporter character Joshua Harris is constantly berated by his boss for not getting the hot scoops that his mysterious rival “Jos” gets for a competing paper. In the final scene, he informs his boss that he has been “Jos” all along and that he has finally gotten a fixed contract – at the rival paper.

So rest in peace, Eddi. You will be missed.

And just because she deserves to be remembered as well, swimmer and actress Esther Williams died June 6 aged 91. Unlike the German postwar cinema, Esther Williams’ films were pure escapism, watery extravaganzas that bore as little resemblance to actual water shows as Busby Berkley routines bear to Broadway stage productions.

But oh, they were gorgeous to look at: For proof, I give you this delightful underwater dream sequence of Esther Williams swimming with antique statues in Jupiter’s Darling (1955), a water ballet from Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and a water-skiing spectacular from Easy to Love (1954). Ms. Williams also shared an underwater sequence with Tom and Jerry (not online unfortunately), which is pretty damn awesome. Plus, she was romanced by none other than Ricardo Montalban, the only and only Khan, in Neptune’s Daughter (1949) and shared a still famous duet, Esther Williams singing “Baby, it’s Cold Outside” with him.

Her obituary in the New York Times reveals the price Ms. Williams paid for shooting those amazing scenes – she was repeatedly injured during the filming work.

Golden Age Hollywood – they don’t make ’em like that anymore.

*Little known fact: George Lucas – yes, that George Lucas – actually won the Oberhausen short film festival in 1968 with the original version of THX 1138 – take that, New German Cinema bores.

Posted in Film | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments

Photos: A Very Big Crane

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Cora

I’m not talking about SF and girl cooties today for a change. Instead, I’ve got something very big, very hard and very phallic for you today. Honestly, the subject of this post is masculine enough to satisfy even the most macho of hard SF writers (and maybe even VD).

I present you…

A Very Big Crane

Condenser unit

This is a condenser unit. It needs to be installed on the roof. Unfortunately, it weighs roughly 60 kilos. So how to get it up there?

Truck-mounted crane

The solution: A truck-mounted crane. Here it’s still parked on the street this morning.

Truck-mounted crane

Moving into position on the conveniently empty meadow beside the house.

Truck-mounted crane

However, before the crane can do its job, it first needs to be stabilized. This is done via extending hydraulic supports on both sides of the truck.

Hydraulic crane supports

A closer look at the hydraulic supports, already extended, but not.yet lowered. The wooden beams are supposed to keep the supports from sinking into soft ground.

Truck-mounted crane

Going up

Truck-mounted crane

Partially extended crane jib with foliage

Crane jib

The crane jib, still only partially extended. The chains and shackles dangling from the crane hook will be connected to the condenser unit.

Crane over rooftops

Crane over rooftops.

Truck-mounted crane

The crane seen through a gap between houses. Note that it has swiveled around from where it started.

Hooking on the cargo

Hooking on the condenser unit.

Condenser unit on crane

Condenser unit in flight

Crane delivery

Incoming…

Crane delivery

Almost there…

Disconnecting cargo

Got it. Disconnecting the condenser unit from the crane.

Crane jib

Swivelling back over the rooftops

The whole operation took less than an hour, most of which was set-up and dimantling time. The actual transport took maybe five minutes. Through it all, the crane was never fully extended BTW. I wanted to ask crane operator about the outreach of the crane, but couldn’t remember the German word for “outreach” for the life of me. It’s a weird problem to have, knowing some technical terms better in English than in German.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I am sorely tempted to use one of the photos I took today for an erotica cover with the title “Look, it’s so big”. Of course, that would probably have to be a piece of Transformer erotica (I’m sure it’s out there somewhere).

Of course, if you’re a Transformer, those probably are exceedingly dirty pictures.

Posted in General, Personal | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Revenge of the Girl Cooties or Do we need a different writers organisation?

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Cora

Warning! Knowing what happened to other women who dared to have opinions, be warned that trollish comments will either be deleted with extreme prejudice or held up for ridicule.

In the past few days, the ongoing discussion about women in SFF has heated up considerably. Most of this is due to some highly problematic columns and articles in the SFWA member magazine Bulletin. I’m not going to comment on the articles themselves, since I’m not an SFWA member and thus haven’t seen the magazine, which is print only (in 2013? Honest?). Besides, the issue seems to be with various articles, including one about the bikini bodies of female editors (Do I get to say that Nathan Bransford and Neil Gaiman are cute, too?) and one about Barbie of all things (liked her, played with her, collected her and designed outfits for her, but I never wanted to be her nor can I quite see what she has to do with SF). The widely reproduced Red Sonja cover image doesn’t bother me that much, but then as a long time comic and SFF reader I am desensitized to unrealistic covers. And I’m shameless enough to flaunt even really out there covers in public – hey, I read pulp mags with damsel in distress covers at university and gave everyone an earful who dared to call me out on it. And BTW, the same people who hated the sight of my superhero comics at university (without ever having read any of them) are now begging me to let them borrow those very same comics, because they never realised how good comics could be.

However, Jim Hines has got a comprehensive round-up of posts and reactions here. If like me you don’t get the actual magazine, Natalie of Radish Reviews has posted some quotes and scans of the most problematic column and it’s not pretty. Sorry, but people saying “This is kind of sexist” is not censorship, sorry. Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 55 Comments

Interview with Writer Nathalie Hamidi a.k.a. Irma Geddon

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Cora

Cover NightmarZ Asylum Today I welcome Nathalie Hamidi a.k.a. Poison Godiva a.k.a. Irma Geddon to my blog. Irma is a French writer of dark fantasy and has been nice enough to answer some questions for me.

Hi Cora! Thanks for having me! ^^

  1. Tell us a little about yourself.

I have always wanted to do something creative with my life. When I was a young girl, I had dreams of playing music, singing, dancing, painting, and most of all, writing.

I have done all of this in time, but the one thing that stuck all those years with me (and the last 8 years in particular) was writing. As soon as I got the net at home, I started writing blogs (I was one of the blogosphere pioneers in France), with multiple secret identities, and then more recently I have started to write in my own name.

Life is hard, it’s difficult to find the time to write. My two sons are handicapped: they have a form of autism that goes from mild to severe, and they need constant stimulation for them to make progress. This has lead me to build a very big blog for french-speaking people who have autistic children, and to self-publish a few manuals along the way.

Now that my sons are getting a little bit older and go to school, I can use the time to work on my dream: writing fiction. To publish them I have had to overcome a lot of negative thoughts and dismissal, from people who should be supportive. And publishing, being happy, finding readers — even if it’s one by one — is it’s own reward.

  1. Tell us a bit about the Z series. What is the series about and how many episodes are there so far? How many do you have planned?

So far, I have published two episodes in the Z series, and I am working on episode 3. When I started rewriting and editing my stories, I already had the first eighteen episodes (or, the first three seasons) done. I feel I need at least two more seasons to tell the story right, but I might have to write more than that to feel satisfied with the story I want to tell.

The Z series is about a young girl, Gabrielle, who realizes that her nightmares are coming after her. Of course, this is a very frightening and emotional time for her. To add insult to injury, her father — witness to the first attack — decides to commit her to an asylum and abandons her there. We follow her while she tries to discover what is happening to her, and with the help of Parfait — a mysterious but helpful young man — we will try to understand what the curse that has plagued the women of her family in generations really is about.

I’ve wanted to tell a tale of accepting who you really are, striving for a better life, what love and trust really mean, and why it is important to rise above what life has handed to you. During the following seasons, those themes will evolve as well as Gabrielle.

Cover NightmarZ Parfait

  1. What was the inspiration for the Z series?

All my life, I’ve loved scary stories. Nothing moves me more than a great challenge, a suspenseful read, or a hair-rising, goose-bumping anticipation. I’ve also always been a big nerd about survival and being ready for the zombie apocalypse. I’ve devoured King’s books, Masterton’s, Koontz’s. All I ever wanted to do while reading their books was to write one of my own, to provoke in someone else the thrill I felt right then.

As I was readying myself for NaNoWriMo 2010, the clock was ticking and the beginning of the challenge was rapidly approaching. I was shuffling ideas for plots in my head — I had been unable to decide for one in the previous weeks, and I was quite panicked at the idea of starting November with a blank page in my head. Just before midnight, I had an idea that stuck with me: what if your nightmares became alive and attacked you. From that, during the next thirty days (of literary abandon), the story became alive by itself. I just followed Gabrielle’s and Parfait’s decisions and motives, and let my brain go free. I would have thought this would lead to nothing good, but the story stuck with me for three years before I decided to give it justice by editing it and publishing it.

  1. Z is a serial of novelettes. The serial is, depending on your POV either a very new format that was born from the indie e-book boom or a very old format revived for modern times. What are in your experience the main challenges of writing a serial and what is your approach? Do you have a series bible, detailed outlines, pre-planned plot arcs, etc…?

I love serials. They’re the TV show episode format for books. I have been, all my life, a big fan of good series on TV. Eighteen years ago, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and now it’s Supernatural, Teen Wolf, The Walking Dead… I love that each episode is its own story and that it’s possible that all those episodes develop into a main theme for a season, have an overarching plot, and trickle into the next seasons as well.

With the ebook revolution, it’s now possible, more than ever, to really appreciate this format. I can’t be as avid a reader I once was because of all the work I have to do with my two sons, but eight years ago I would have jumped on that format, which permits a quicker publishing cycle. I always want more, more, more of the characters and universes I like. I like to be able to gorge myself with those stories, and not to need to revisit them after one year of waiting impatiently for the next book.

When I decided to try the serial approach, it came to me naturally without having to rewrite much from my first draft. I was already using the serial format: each episode must be satisfying, and move the plot forward. It was just a matter of cutting in the right places, and adding plot “reminders” in the following episodes — no one wants to re-read the previous episodes, so small reminders are a good thing for readers.

I don’t outline, or loosely. If I write down or tell the story to anyone, I lose the will to write it, so I just list a few ideas, and pick from that along the way, or do a small graph of the pacing of the season. My idea of a good pacing? It always gets worse before and after it gets better.

For writers who want to get into that format, I recommend reading The Secret Story Lair which is full of ideas, and re-watching your favourite shows season by season, to study how it’s done.

Cover NightmarZ

  1. The popularity of serials is controversial, to say the least, since some readers flat out hate serials. Have you ever run into such readers and how do you deal with them?

So far, I haven’t had one reader complain about the format in a way that would make me uncomfortable. The fact that I write short installments is of course mentioned, and some readers write in reviews that they would have prefered something longer, but no one has been aggressive or diminishing. Actually, I take it more like a compliment. They liked my words. They just wish there were more of them!

I think that every reader is entitled to want to read their format of choice. I like serials, so I’ll go on writing serials, since this is what makes me happy for the time being. I will also release a “complete season” ebook and paperback once all episodes are out, that way readers will have the choice: read all at once, or read it along the way, with the possibility of giving me feedback — I welcome feedback. The story is what it is, but I can make it more enjoyable for my readers when I rewrite my first drafts if I know what they are looking for!

  1. As a French native speaker writing and publishing in English, you’re one of a growing number of authors who write in a language that is not your mothertongue. Can you tell us a little bit about the challenges of writing in a language that is not your first? Did you have to deal with any prejudices?

I think I am one of the lucky ones. I have learned English, German and Italian at school, and those were my favourite lectures. I have worked in multilingual environments (in Germany, and for an Italian company), and I have always been praised for my language skills. But you never really know, because people want to be nice and think the fact that you can even converse in a language that is not yours is the ultimate achievement.

I came to the Kboards forum quite confident people wouldn’t slap me with a virtual trout if I made mistakes in English, but I really wanted to make sure that my books would be as much above reproach as possible, so I hired an editor to check them out, and this has been a great experience for me. That is why I don’t give any warning in my books about the fact that English is not my mother tongue, and why I have a little paragraph on my blog asking forgiveness if I make mistakes, since I don’t send forum or blog posts to my editor to check!

  1. In my experience, indie publishing and the e-book revolution has been a particular boon to international authors such as ourselves who live far from the centres of the English language trad publishing industry. Would you agree?

I agree one hundred percent. I can’t fathom why some e-distributors such as Barnes & Noble aren’t yet allowing people from outside the US to work directly with them.

I have a lot of “fans” in French-speaking countries, thanks to my autism weblog. Those are people who would probably buy my books, but won’t, since I write them in English. They’ve been pestering me (in a nice way) and asking me to have them translated in French for them, but for me it’s not yet worth the time or money spent…

English is one of the main languages on Earth. I have many more potential English-speaking readers than there are people who speak French. It’s much more valuable (and interesting) for me to publish in English.

  1. Did you ever pursue traditional publishing, either in French or English? And if so, what were your experiences?

I have never pursued traditional publishing. Until I learned about how it was possible to self-publish, I had stopped dreaming of being an author, because I knew that the waiting around, the rewriting of a story I like into something else, the false hopes, and the fact that my genre is not the one preferred by publishing hourses, would crush me. I just would not have the patience.

Then I learned about Amanda Hocking’s incredible achivement, I’ve bought and read all her books, and the little spark in my heart came back. If she could do it, why couldn’t I? I don’t even want the mega success story: I want to be able to tell my stories, have people read them, and eventually — if I’m lucky — to be able to do this for a living, at my own page.

I like to do my own thing. I like to be the chief, to be the only one who makes decisions with my art. I like being in charge: it’s a wonderful feeling that I’ve lost for the last fifteen years. It feels good to be back with a (writing) revenge!

Cover Calamari Spa Fantasies

  1. In addition to the Zseries, you also write non-fiction under your own name and erotica as Poison Godiva. Can you tell us a little about that?

In 2009, when I started blogging about autism, I realized there were a lot of people that needed help in France. The autism situation here is very dire, and our children are left without proper care, or even tortured by psychoanalytic whim. Other parents were at a loss on how to help their kids.

That’s why I wrote some manuals. They’re very easy to understand, and I aim to be readable by everyone: no scientific words are unexplained, I don’t assume you know even the most basic notion. A lot of people wrote me back to tell me how those books had helped them to potty train their kids, or how they gave them the strength to insist for a real diagnosis for their kid.

I hope to write more of them, based on my own successes with my own kids.

I want to explore more genres than non-fiction and dark fantasy, though, and that’s why I’ve dabbled a little bit in erotica with my Poison Godiva pen name. Erotica is one of the hardest genre to write in, in my opinion. It’s hard to produce something that can work for other readers — that’s true with any kind of fiction, but it’s particularly true for erotica. I like challenges, and most of all I like to write for myself first. I’m hoping some readers will find my paranormal erotica interesting as well.

But I’m not stopping there: I’ll try writing in more genres in the next few years, in order to see what I’m good at, what I really like, and maybe take a few readers on board with me.

Irma Geddon

  1. With Irma Geddon and Poison Godiva you have IMO two of the coolest pen names ever. How did you come up with them?

It’s like having DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Irma and Poison are like a part of me, as much as the Nathalie Hamidi part. Yeah, I know, weirdo, right?

Irma is my web-persona, the one that is strong. She is very nerdy, like a mix between a squeeing fangirl and a D&D monster, and does things Nathalie and Poison wouldn’t dare to do. The name came from my IRC days, where I used irma- as a nickname (for Irma Vep, the vampire film). I wanted a domain name for a while, and Irma Geddon was the one that fit: puntastic, as a reader put it, and it sounded like it came with a bang, which was what I wanted.

For my erotica pen name, I wondered how to find one tasteful and intriguing. I love the Lady Godiva story, it is a classic in erotica. Poison is because I love to write about women that know what they want, and are not afraid to say it — “toxic”, “phallic” girls, in the eyes of my nemesises, the French psycho-analysts.

There are a lot of pen names waiting for me to “wear”. As I discover new interests and plots for my fiction, I hope you’ll come to meet them too! 😉

  1. Is there anything else you want to tell our readers?

Reading and writing are some of the most important skills in life. If you can write, read, to get inspiration and to learn the craft.

If you can’t write, or don’t want to, read anyway, and engage with your favourite authors. Make their words/worlds yours by participating. Tell them if you feel their story was special, if it struck a chord in your heart or in your guts.

Authors feed on stories and contacts with their readers. Thank you reader—you make us feel like we’ve found our place in life and we’ve fulfilled our storytelling destiny when your eyes meet the pages of our books.

Thanks for answering my questions, Irma a.k.a. Nathalie a.k.a Poison.

If you want to find out more about Irma, visit her website and blog or follow her on Twitter. Her other personas Nathalie Hamidi and Poison Godiva may be found here. What is more, Irma has recently started Find, Read, Love, a discovery site for new indie books, organized according to author and genre.

The Z series is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and Sony. The first installment, Asylum, is currently free so grab a copy and jump into the world of NightmarZ.

Posted in Books, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Invasion of the Girl Cooties

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Cora

At The Story Hub, Stuart Sharp offers his opinion about the increased popularity of science fiction romance. If you assume that he is worrying about romance writers somehow sullying the sacred halls of the SF genre, you got it in one.

Here are some choice quotes:

Except that the new authors coming into the field don’t necessarily get [the shared cultural references of the SF genre]. Their references are all to do with The Formula, grand gestures, love triangles, the tropes of romance or chick lit or YA. They don’t understand the reasoning behind some of the arguments that have been bubbling for years. They certainly don’t get that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep reference you made in chapter three.

Oh no, those romance writers dare to write SF without having read the past eighty years of SF writing and all Hugo and Nebula finalists since the 1953/1966. How can they possibly hope to understand the genre? And they obviously won’t get a Philip K. Dick reference, because it’s a well known fact that romance fans never read outside their genre (actually romance readers are some of the most voracious readers around and read plenty of things aside from romance). And they have obviously never set foot inside a cinema and never saw Blade Runner (which even has a romance subplot) or any other Philip K. Duick adaption. Bonus points for calling romance a formula genre.

Here’s some more:

The classic involves a romance author thinking they’re being stunningly original while in fact an idea has been given a pretty thorough going over by the sci-fi world already. There’s the part where they often don’t get the details right. And yes, you can be wrong about the details. Or at least, you can go against everything legions of sci-fi fans have decided over the decades. More importantly, there’s the sense in some cases that they don’t care about the details the way some people do. That the romantic story at the heart of the book trumps little things like whether the aliens would conveniently look like attractive humans and be able to speak English.

Right, because aliens who look like humans and can speak English have never appeared in traditional SF at all. I guess I must have imagined Spock and the Doctor and Dejah Thoris and Star Wars and countless others. Never mind that I obviously wasn’t invited to the big meeting where legions of SF fans came to a final and binding decision about all the important details such as how FTL really works or what the singularity is.

Even worse, those romance readers and writers don’t even care about what how FTL works (or can it work at all?) or what the singularity entails. They just care about such unimportant points as characterisation and story. Because it obviously makes for so much better literature if SF writers give us brilliantly imagine big ideas in stories with paper-thin characters and romantic relationships so unrealistic that I wonder whether the author has ever met an actual living, breathing human being before or whether he is secretly the first computer to have passed the Turing test.

Here’s a final quote, because that post really invites it. And BTW, anti-scraper plug-ins are fine, but disabling right-click and copy and paste altogether is a nuissance.

As several romance writers have shown in the case of fantasy already, they have no problems whatsoever trampling over the most beloved elements of the genre.

Those horrible romance writers. How dare they use the furniture of some other genre to write their own stories without consulting the genre consensus first? Never mind that way too many SFF authors, fans and pundits have no problems whatsoever trampling over the feelings of romance writers and readers by calling their works formulaic and just plain bad.

To be fair to Stuart Sharp, he does finish his post on a somewhat conciliatory note that it’s of course possible that romance writer’s perceived ignorance of the genre might lead to original work and that plenty of SF is derivative as hell. Plus, he claims to have written both real SF and romantic SF, plus he apparently used to work as a ghostwriter. At any rate, he has an Amazon author page under his own name here.

Nonetheless, those conciliatory closing remarks don’t mitigate the fact that this is a typical, “Eeww, girl cooties” post. Nor am I alone in interpreting it that way. At Tracing the Stars, SF romance writer C.E. Kilgore asks why SF romance is treated as a genre outcast and why the SF community feels so threatened, considering that SF and SF romance target different readerships. Now I don’t agree with the fact that SF romance or paranormal romance for that matter should be segregated on the romance shelves, so that SFF readers don’t have to see it, because this contributes to keeping crossgenre books invisible to SFF readers. Plus, it’s also a way to keep female writers of SFF, romantic or not, invisible, because if the books are segregated, they might as well not exist. Never mind that we have already seen this with urban fantasy, where books by men are shelves as SFF, while books by women, whether romantic or not, are shelves as paranormal romance and – in one notable case – erotica – for a book that didn’t have any romance, let alone sex scenes. Waterstone’s in the UK is particularly bad about this to the point that I actually once asked a Waterstone’s employee point blank why they were hiding SFF books by female authors in a corner of the crime fiction section.

At the Spacefreighters Lounge, a group blog by writers of romantic SF, Pippa Jay points out that plenty of time-honoured SF classics have important romantic subplots and that without romance, Dune would be just a book about worms. She also refers back to the recent controversy (exhaustively discussed in these pages) about the skewed gender balance with regard to reviews and points out that an SF novel with a strong romantic subplot would be classified as SF, albeit with a romantic subplot, if written by a man, and as SF romance, complete with “Eww, girl cooties”, when written by a woman. And of course, it’s pretty obvious that the SFF genre community does its best to marginalize female dominated subgenres such as urban fantasy, paranormal romancem SF romance and large swathes of YA as “Not part of our genre”, even though it obviously is.

Not inspired by the SF romance discussion (at least not as far as I can tell) but definitely related is this post by Joshua S. Hill at Amazing Stories, wherein he asks why female fantasy writers are immediately dismissed as “girly” for writing romantic plots, whereas men are not.

Meanwhile, another author of romantic SF, Greta van der Pol, asks how romance readers view the SF genre. She also points out that the science and worldbuilding occasionally really is weak in explicit SF romances. Finally, she also makes another interesting point:

I confess I don’t read romance much. I’m too interested in action and adventure to find a love story absorbing. Which probably tells you a fair bit about my writing.

I suspect that this is true for a lot of writers and readers in hybrid genres such as urban fantasy, paranormal romance, SF romance and romantic suspense. These writers and readers are often longtime SFF fans (or suspense fans for romantic suspense) and they like action, adventure and worldbuilding, but they also want a bit more emotion and yes, romance, than “pure” SF/fantasy/suspense tend to offer. I certainly count myself among those readers/writers. I was increasingly unhappy with speculative fiction devolving into emotionless big idea fiction on the one hand and increasingly grimdark macho fantasy with unpleasant characters on the other hand. Then one day, I became aware that there was a whole slew of subgenres such as futuristic romance, paranormal romance, time travel romance and fantasy romance, full of books written mostly by women, which promised the action and worldbuilding I had come to enjoy about SFF, but with more female characters, hopefully less needless violence against said female characters and characters and relationships that rang true to the experience of actual human beings. And I’d never heard of those books and authors and neither had the rest of the SFF community.

Of course, I was overjoyed and began to seek out the books and writers whose names I heard mentioned (mostly among romance readers). And yes, my first attempt at reading SF romance – a book in the now defunct Dorchester LoveSpell line – really did skew too far towards the romance end of the spectrum and had worldbuilding issues. I picked this book and no other, because it had an Asian heroine, BTW. And for all its flaws, it was still a much more enjoyable read than the highly regarded big idea SF novel through which I forced my way at the same time. BTW, the author of said highly regarded SF novel has recently blogged some background information about his various older books, including the one I slogged through at around the same time I discovered futuristic romance. Here is even more. Note what’s missing? There’s hardly any discussion about the characters.

But SF romance has moved on since the early 2000s and the variety of books available now is much broader, just as the science and worldbuilding have become better on average. Indeed, Dorchester – which was the main publisher of SF romance and related subgenres such as time travel and fantasy romance in the early 2000s – used to caution against “long descriptions of science-fiction-type hardware, technology, etc…” and even had a “no time machines” request in the submission guidelines for their time travel romance line, which always confused me to no end, because how can you travel through time, if not by time machine? Nonetheless inventive writers have come up with all sorts of solutions from portals in stone circles (Diana Gabaldon) via magical spells (Theresa Medeiros), magical gemstones (Catherine Mulvany – really good book), magical shoes (Gwynn Cready), brain tumors (Tamara Leigh), malfunctioning electric chairs (Deb Stover – another really good book) to vigorous masturbation (Robin Schone). And coincidentally, Dorchester did publish some novels with technologically based time travel such as Time Transit by Kay Austin.

Indeed, the growing popularity of SF romance that Stuart Sharp remarks upon as well as the fact that the books are getting better with regards to worldbuilding and science than those from the 1990s or early 2000s is largely due to the digital revolution in the publishing industry, which makes niche works such as SF/romance hybrids a lot more viable than they used to be. And IMO this is a very good thing.

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A Big Dump of Mixed Links

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Cora

Somebody found my blog today by googling “cora buhlert sexy pics”. Now I’m torn between wondering who would be looking for sexy pics of my little old self on the internet and what exactly they were hoping to find.

The past few days, I’ve been on something of a roll over at the Pegasus Pulp blog and posted about the renaissance of short fiction due to the e-book revolution and shared some mixed e-book links of interest.

While on the subject of pulp, at The Huffington Post crime fiction writer Walter Mosley writes about the magic of pulp fiction. Walter Mosley has also recently edited an anthology called Black Pulp, which sounds fascinating.

At SF Signal, John H. Stevens offers his take on the current debate about “realistic” female characters in SFF. Meanwhile, Kate Elliott wonders whether it’s possible to not fall into writing that caters to a male gaze.

More on the subject of fighting women, the latest relaunch of the X-Men has an all-female team consisting of Storm, Rogue, Psylocke, Jubilee, Kitty Pryde and Rachel Grey a.k.a. Phoenix. Sounds like a great line-up featuring a lot of characters who were favourites back in my X-Men reading days. Rachel is the only one I don’t much care for. Coincidentally, I’m also happy that Psylocke and Kitty Pryde have gotten better, since last I knew they were dead (Kitty had the hands of likeable character serial killer Joss Whedon at that).

The BBC asks if Doctor Who was rubbish in the 1980s. Even the most casual Doctor Who fan agrees that the answer is “Yes, it was. Sorry.” Though to be fair, there were some excellent Doctor Who stories made in the 1980s such as the Fifth Doctor’s swansong Caves of Androzani, which also features a very young Robert Glenister in a double role. And even the much derided Sixth and Seventh Doctors (not their fault, scripts and budget were ridiculous at the time) have some stories I quite like such as The Mysterious Planet, one of the stories in the Trial of a Timelord plot arc of Colin Baker’s time (on the other hand, I was totally buzzed on anti-cold medicine while I watched it) or Paradise Towers, a good story marred by terrible production values and a guest cast who seem to have been kidnapped from the audience of Top of the Pops, from Sylvester McCoy’s time.

The 2013 Cannes Film Festival has been and gone. Now I have stated my views about the Cannes Film Festival in these pages before. And this year’s festival and awards did absolutely nothing to change that perception. Anyway, the Palme d’Or went to La Vie d’Adèle a.k.a. Blue is the Warmest Colour a three-hour plus drama about a lesbian couple, while the grand prize of the jury went to the Coen brothers latest offering. However, Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel in which La Vie d’Adèle is based, is not happy with the film, since she considers the sex scenes heteronormative and unrealistic.

What I find striking is how everybody has been remarking on the fact that a lesbian romance could win the Palme d’Or as some kind of great step forward for GLBT cinema. Meanwhile, at the Berlin Film Festival, an independent jury has been awarding the Teddy Award for the best queer film presented at the festival since 1987 (the inaugural winner was Pedro Almodovar BTW – his first award ever), because even back in the 1980s, Berlin had a significant number of films with GLBT themes in the running. Cannes, only 26 years behind Berlin.

That said, Steven Spielberg, this year’s president of the Cannes jury, really seems to enjoy lesbian romances. He was reportedly moved to tears by Aimée & Jaguar, a Jewish German lesbian romance during WWII (based on a true story – the surviving partner of the couple attended the premiere), which was the opening film at the Berlin Film Festival back in 1999.

While on the subject of GLBT issues, The Millions has interviewed speculative fiction’s most infamous homophobe Orson Scott Card in an attempt to offer a more nuanced coverage of Card and his work. Unfortunately for The Millions, the best way to offer a nuanced coverage of Orson Scott Card is not to let him talk at all, because the man keeps digging an ever deeper hole for himself. Anyway, in additions to gays and atheists (He explicitly says in the interview that there is no human being without religion – This human being manages quite fine, thank you), we can now add English majors, English teachers, university creative writing classes, universities in general, political correctness, pornography, experimental fiction, public funding for artworks that Orson Scott Card finds obscene and first person present tense narration and to the long list of things that Orson Scott Card hates. Oh yes, and he hates Germans, too, just because some of us believe that your religion does not give you the right to surgically alter the genitals of a non-consenting baby (scroll down past a lot of stuff about Mitt Romney and his wife). Honestly, by now I suspect that those who haven’t been offended by Orson Scott Card at some point are in the minority. At any rate, this non-religious German former English major and current English teacher who occasionally writes in first person present tense is proud to be disliked by Orson Scott Card.

National Public Radio has a nice article about the last remaining German speakers of Texas, descendants of German settler who came to Texas in the 1840s. Make sure to listen to the audio version, which has clips of two Texans speaking German. Found via Jay Lake, who has just listed me as one of his stops on his morning blog crawl.

For those who are following the travails of my hometown football club Werder Bremen, Werder has now hired a new coach to replace Thomas Schaaf who left/was made to leave not quite so mutually consensually after 14 years. The new coach is Robin Dutt, whose previous job was with the German football association DFB. Let’s hope he’s not a dud. Interestingly, a lot of Google News hits for Robin Dutt were from Indian news sources. Turns out – and I for one did not know this – that Dutt is the son of a German mother and a Bengali father.

I also have a trio of deaths to report:

Legendary SF Jack Vance died aged 96. I have enjoyed many of his works over the years.

German actress Hildegard Krekel died of cancer aged only 60. Ms. Krekel is one of the comparatively few celebrities I have ever seen “in the flesh”, since her husband Max Lorenz is a former Werder Bremen player. I recognized her before I recognized him BTW, because Hildegard Krekel was frequently seen on German TV and also heard as the dubbing voice of Helen Mirren and Bette Davis among others. Of the many shows in which she appeared I liked the little remembered Detektivbüro Roth (Detective Agency Roth) best. However, most Germans will remember Hildegard Krekel mainly as the daughter in the early 1970s sitcom Ein Herz and eine Seele, one of the many local adaptions of the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. Another adaption was the longrunning US sitcom All in the Family. Now I have never liked that show in any of its many incarnations – bigotry isn’t funny. Never mind that I suspect that a lot of the fans of the show in whatever incarnation secretly agreed with the bigot Alfred/Alf/Archie. So let’s remember Ms. Krekel for the many parts she played and not just for a single dated and unfunny sitcom.

Finally, Sarah Kirsch, one of the most famous German poets of the postwar era, died May 5 aged 78. The German paper Die Zeit has a longer appreciation which even includes some of her poems.

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Photos of Bath

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Cora

Today is sartorias a.k.a. Sherwood Smith’s birthday, so as a virtual present here are some photos I took during a trip to Bath, historic British spa town best known as the setting of some of Jane Austen’s novels and countless Regency romances, back in 2008 from my personal collection: Continue reading →

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Hugo – The Devolution of a Trend Cocktail

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Cora

I first came across the fashionable cocktail called Hugo in one of the trendier restaurants in town* (not my preferred hangout at all – I was there at the request of someone else) when I spotted what looked like a glass of pinkish champagne with a sprig of herb in the hand of a woman in our party and asked her what it was. “It’s a new drink”, she said, “It’s called Hugo and it’s a mix of prosecco, elderberry sirup and mint.”

That was in late 2011, at around the time that Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo was in cinemas. In fact, I wondered whether the cocktail had been named for the movie. Though according to this article, the drink predates the movie by several months at least and originates in South Tyrol in the Italian Alps.

In the months that followed I kept seeing Hugo on more and more menus in bars and restaurants that were far from anybody’s idea of trendy. By the summer of 2012, it was served as an aperitif at my aunt’s birthday party. And my aunt hasn’t been trendy since approx. 1975.

Fast forward to last week. I’m in the Aldi discount supermarket doing my weekly shopping, when I suddenly spot a bunch of bottles with striking labels and caps in shocking pink in the wine and liquor aisle. Intrigued (“Who on Earth thought that shocking pink was a good colour for a label on a wine bottle?”), I investigate and found this. It’s none other than Hugo, the trend cocktail, prepackaged and premixed and sold at a discount store.

From trend cocktail served in hip bars to pre-bottled drink sold at Aldi in one and a half years. Now that’s devolution.

*In Bremen, “trendy bar or restaurant” usually means that players of the local football club Werder Bremen have been spotted there. It can sometimes give a boost to highly unlikely places such as an African homecooking restaurant in an immigrant neighbourhood.

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New Entries into Old Conversations

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Cora

The science fiction and fantasy genres have the tendency to have the same conversations over and over again, often for decades on end. There is the classic genre versus literary fiction debate, which never goes out of style, the evergreen “Science fiction is dying… again”, the “women in SF” debate, which is not quite as old as the other two, but still has classic status, the upstart grimdark debate and the ever popular “Our new movement will tear down and/or reform SF as we know it”. At the moment, we seem to have shelved the grimdark and “SF is dying” debates until the next outbreak, but this year’s reiteration of the “women in SF” debate is still going on and genre versus literary fiction is rearing its head. Plus, a new movement has been declared. So here are the latest contributions to these longrunning debates:

Foz Meadows responds to the Kameron Hurley essay I linked to in my last post and more precisely to its critics who complain that even if women have always fought in wars and done everything else that men did, those women were outliers by pointing out that the whole bloody fantasy genre is comprised of stories about outliers. So why is a white farmboy who is secretly a prince more acceptable to many than a black female pirate, since both are equally unlikely?

At Lit Reactor, Keith Rawson offers his take on the ongoing literary versus genre fiction debate. Oddly enough, this post comes shortly after the genre wars have been declared won in Britain.

Meanwhile, it’s SF movement time again, for at Tor.com David Barnett asks if there is a New New Wave of science fiction and if the genre needs one. As evidence he cites two new mags called Aventure Rocketship! and Arc as well as the Pornokitch site and the works of Tim Maughan. Now I quite like what Pornokitch is doing and am largely unfamiliar with the other four, but I’m not sure whether three zines and one writer together make up a movement.

Never mind that I’m highly skeptical of the SF genre’s need to constantly make up new movements anyway. And what’s up with naming every new movement something or other wave in homage to the original New Wave? Back in the early 2000s, I hung out with a bunch of guys who were going to storm the stair citadel of speculative fiction in the name of something they called – wait for it – the Next Wave. I don’t think they ever had a manifesto, but SF Site still has some columns about the Next Wave archived. As far as I recall – it’s been a while – it was a sort of Grimdark New Weird with literary ambitions, at least going by the list of writers coopted into the movement. As most of these movements, it never came to much, though they were on to something with noticing that Grimdark was a trend and the New Weird was big in the early 2000s.

Last year, there was a proposed new movement called the Human Wave. These guys were a bit better organized than my old Next Wave pals, cause they actually had a manifesto. The manifesto actually doesn’t sound all that bad and indeed I find quite a bit in there that I can agree with. The only problem is that the writers who associate themselves with the Human Wave dilute their decent points with rants about those evil feminist strawmen Communists in New York who hate science fiction and about how all that is published these days are books about the crime of being human (Paolo Bacigalupi is not the whole of SF) and about how white western men cannot be heroes anymore (they still are heroes in the overwhelming majority of SF). Plus, it seems that what the Human Wave people really want is for Robert E. Heinlein to rise from his grave and write more.

Besides, am I the only one who finds it amusing that even a decidedly rightwing SF movement still names itself in homage to the decidedly not rightwing New Wave? Say what you will about Mundane Science Fiction, but at least they managed to make do with the “wave” in their name.

And now we’ve got the New New Wave, whose name is even sillier than the Next Wave, which really takes some doing. As for what it actually is, David Barnett is remarkably vague on that point. From what I can tell from the Tor.com post, it involves a broader definition of SF, including elements of other genres (i.e. nothing really that the New Wave didn’t already try to do in the 1960s), coming to terms with the fact that the world we live in already is rather science fictional (Slipstream realized that in the 1990s) and being British. Now I am totally in favour of SF becoming more inclusive (so we can maybe stop having the women in SF debate sometime in the future and simply accept that women are part of the genre, as are people of colour, GLBT people, disabled people, non-US people and the whole broad spectrum of humanity out there) and incorporating elements of other genres, though that is already happening, albeit often in corners of the genre that core fandom ignores. But do we really need a movement to do that?

The truth is that speculative fiction, even the corner of it that is labeled SF, is now a very broad genre with lots of trends and subgenres, many of which flourish unknown and unremarked by the both core SF fandom as well as this year’s young revolutionaries storming at the gates of the SF fortress. The rise of indie publishing has further made it possible even for niche works to find their audience, though to be fair, most of the really big indie publishing success so far have been rather conventional and often even backwards looking, e.g. all of those college romances with unpleasant jerk heroes not seen since the demise of the bodiceripper. But just because the potential hasn’t been realized so far and many indie writers are more oriented towards what sells than traditional publishing ever was, doesn’t mean that the potential isn’t there. The Human Wave people mentioned above are mostly self-published, so they can bypass the feminist socialist editors in New York they imagine are holding them down. Most of the writers and zines mentioned in connection with the New New Wave post are either small press or self-published.

So whether the New New Wave really turns into a tsunami which blasts away the SF establishment or whether it fizzles out like most of its predecessors, I’ll still be doing the same thing I’m always doing, that is writing the sort of thing I want to write, whether it fits into currently accepted genre norms or not. Indeed, my attempts at writing SF, though it was always my favourite genre, were stifled by a row of “Thou shalt nots” such as “Thou canst not have FTL travel”, “Thou shalt write about the singularity”, “Thou shalt include global warming in everything that you write” and so on. However – and this is one point where I agree with the Human Wave manifesto, even though I politically disagree with its proponents – I have lately decided that as long as its internally consistent, I can write whatever the hell I want, whether it matches current genre fashion or not. And that’s really the only manifesto I adhere to.

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