K Tempest Tumbles
I have a non-Tumblr blog and that's where the majority of my long-form posts go. This blog is for my more fannish activities, link sharing, and squeeness.
-
Doctor Who “stained glass” prints by Mandie Manzano
-
High-speed photographs of ink mixing with water by Alberto Seveso
-
Ravens! Via yukadelavega: Raven smootchies.
Source: Canislupuscorax & DeeOtter
-
Meet: Kerream Jones
Although the term “Starving Artist” does not apply to the Painter, Kerream Jones, the hunger of the...
-
by Priscilla.
Have you seen all the stuff available in the Magick 4 Terri auction? That’s just the tip of an especially fancy iceberg up there. Books, CDs, art, handmade clothes, jewelry and so, so much more.
Click here to peruse the offerings. The auction closes on December 15th at 5PM Pacific.
Beloved editor, artist and writer Terri Windling is in need, and we are asking for your help in a fundraising auction to assist her.
Terri Windling and her family have been coping with health and legal issues that have drained her financial resources at a critical time. Due to the serious nature of these issues, and privacy concerns for individual family members, we can’t be more specific than that, but Terri is in need of our support. As a friend, a colleague and an inspiration, Terri has touched many, many lives over the years. She has been supremely generous in donating her own work and art to support friends and colleagues in crisis. Now, Terri is in need of some serious help from her community. Who better than her colleagues and fans to rise up to make some magick for her?
Bid! and Reblog if you’re so inclined :)
This is indicative of everything that made me love Martha from the beginning. When her hospital gets transferred to the moon in “Smith and Jones,” Martha doesn’t panic, logically deduces that the windows can be opened, and, when asked by the Doctor who she thinks is responsible for transporting the hospital, she immediately answers: extra-terrestrials. This was a very pointed way for the show’s creators to indicate that Martha was a companion worthy of the Doctor.
Another thing I liked about Martha was her willingness to stand up to the Doctor and tell him off when it was clear he needed it. Badly. … As things began to go south in “The Sound of Drums,” she refuses to simply follow his orders and puts her concern for her family over his priorities. …
I love that even before Martha met the Doctor, she was already clever and competent and doing something with her life. She didn’t need him to help her escape from a mediocre existence, she didn’t need him to blossom into an extraordinary person. That she did grow due to their travels is a bonus, but because she came from a solid foundation, she was better able to walk away from the Doctor when she needed to. The scene where Martha left the TARDIS was the perfect end to that season, especially given all the crap she had to endure while inside it.
For those of you who need to scrub your brain after dealing with evilbambi’s post.
“This is my last year, I think. I’ve seen this too many times. I don’t want to see again.”
When asked why she came this year, Hannadotter says she did it for her mother.
“I ask my mother every year why we come. We had seen his last moments. He even spoke to us in the camera. He said he loved us. I want to honor him, but maybe this is not the way.”
Others have also raised concerns over the ongoing nature of the haitai ritual. Though performing it after the first or second anniversary isn’t unheard of, most clerics don’t recommend it. Wassirian cleric Anes Mshai is an outspoken opponent of further Red Seteshday haitai.
“Bringing closure and allowing family members to say goodbye is healthy. Especially in the case of such a massive disaster. But reliving and recreating the event over and over again every year may be keeping them from moving on.”
Anes works closely with Bel-Leuken of the Interfaith Coalition to quell the violence that inevitably arises as the anniversary approaches.
“Doing this ritual every year, long after the event, is like ripping a scab off a wound so it can’t heal. It’s not just the families, either. Twelve cities from here to Khmet to Britannia effectively stand still on this day, and the anger comes fresh again and again.”
So Lavie Tidhar wrote a story called “The School” and he knew that the story would prove so controversial that he had doubts of it getting published. He tried, anyway. One editor accepted it, but then the publisher said no. Another editor accepted it on condition of something being changed, but Lavie didn’t want to change it. So, he posted the story on his blog. No point trying anyone else, right? Right. An excerpt for you:
White people are better than brown people and white people of Nordic extraction are better than dirty-white people like the Italians or the Irish. When I grew up I learnt there had been factions amongst the Teachers and that one faction had tried, over centuries, to breed a new kind of human, blending African and Jewish genetic lines–“to mix the African’s physical prowess with the Jew’s intellectual power”, I think it says that in the original notes. But the project was disbanded and all the samples destroyed, and now they only breed us out of good white stock–the best kind.
#
When a technologically-advanced society meets an alien society with less firepower, the only result–so the Teachers say–is war. There is, the Teachers say, admonishing us, no other possible outcome, no negotiation, no compromise.
This is known as the David Weber Axiom.
Here’s the thing. I can see why he feels that the story would be a tough sell and I can see why a publisher would want to avoid controversy of an unpleasant nature by publishing it. What I don’t see? Is a story worth publishing on its own merits.
Yes, it’s very shocking in a sensationalist way, but the story doesn’t say much that I don’t already know. It reveals nothing, it just pokes you in the side with a Klingon pain stick over and over and insists on asking “Isn’t that just TERRIBLE?” Well, yes, but I already knew that.
Perhaps because I’m POC and an activist that I just don’t find the story shocking or even revelatory or shining some new and interesting light on our society or human nature. It’s just kind of… there.
Anyway, the story is pretty short. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on it. Am I just crazy and it’s a groundbreaking piece of fiction worthy of the ages or whatever?
Tablesaw made me aware of the story Household Spirits by C. S. E. Cooney
It is a story published in November of 2010 by Strange Horizons.
Strange Horizons has this in their mission statement:
“We’d like to help make the field of speculative fiction more inclusive, more welcoming to both authors and readers from traditionally underrepresented groups, so we’re interested in seeing stories from diverse perspectives and backgrounds.”
This is the author of the story:
And this is her bio:
C. S. E. Cooney lives in a Chicago attic with a lively cross-breeze and a few paper cranes to dance in it. Her stories and poems have appeared in Subterranean Press, Ideomancer, Doorways, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Goblin Fruit, and Mythic Delirium. She has two novellas forthcoming in 2011 issues of Black Gate Magazine, as well as with Drollerie Press and Papaveria Press.
And before I was fully a page deep into this story, I was asking myself: WHEN WILL WHITE PEOPLE STOP MAKING
MOVIES LIKE AVATARSTORIES LIKE THIS?!The story is a classic ‘White boy moves out onto The Frontier and Communes With The Natives and Joins the Tribe ’ narrative. But because these are Space!NDN’s he gets to use Alien Magic to Actually become a member of the tribe For Reals. A tribe that is conveniently mostly dead because they all committed self-genocide with a side of deliberate child abandonment, politely getting the ‘Vanishing Natives ’ trope into place without any of the Nice White People having to be culpable for atrocities. The Magical Natives left one of their kids physically bound to each of the households that were taken over by the encroaching (demonstrably white) humans because…moving on. Anyway. The Magical Native Boy attached to their house is So Wise and So Loving and Communes With Nature and Does Magic. When they kill a deer, it WOUNDS HIM SO. Sure, it’s gussied up as Alien Magic, but painting the Mary Sioux blue does not make it less a Mary Sioux. Noble Savage all the damned day long. And the most pacifistic pacifists ever to exist. Because then they can be delightfully Christlike, the better to trigger and then sooth the reader’s White Guilt. But it’s ok because they’re full of VULCAN RAEG.
See now’s a great time to segue into some quotes.
Just is case you were wondering if you were in a proper Space Western:
“Reckon we’ll stay through Holyday before pressing the frontier. Jessemee says he’s tuckered but it’s me he watches. Our boy don’t miss a thing. Well. My bones don’t mind the rest. Funny folk in Prophetdam. Lots of drinkers.”
Which is going to be about White Guilt Catharsis: “Nary a one seems fit to split a smile with a fellow or meet him eye to eye. Walk crunched over too, all of them. Even the kids. Like they’re guilty just for living.”
It’s the job of the Nice white People to repair the Tragic Busted Natives:
“Mimo looks a bit like this old Kilquut farmhouse we bought sight unseen. Skinny and leaning, with dirt on it so thick I don’t reckon a bunch of bachelors like us’ll ever get it scrubbed clean.”
(We know, by the way, that our protags are Nice White People because there are also Bad White People in the story. Of course, our Protag defeats the Bad White People with his Mighty Whitey powers of not being bound to pacifism. This action kicks him over into being Really Native.)
Natives have dark complexions. And are blue. I can’t help but imagining it like Hollywood War Paint.
“Mimo’s a tiny critter, maybe your height, Del, but even darker. Got blue marks all over ”
“I won’t get to watch her grow up small and dark…”
They are also STOIC.
“She’s usually got no more expression than a tree stump, and it was like all of a sudden I could see that tree stump bleeding.”
They are FULL OF RAEG.
“Look,” he said. There was this boulder by the river, where the Guzzlers had lined up all their bottles for targets. Most of them were in pieces, but one empty handle of gin stood upright. Mimo just looked at it and it shattered. Then the boulder itself exploded. A piece of it came so near my face, it cut me.
“That is how angry I am,” Mimo said, “all the time.”
But they refuse to utilize violence or even active but nonviolent resistance to their oppressors, because they’re beatific like that. The whole premise started out thusly:
“…The Kilquut elders had a sit-down at their meetinghouse (big ramble of a place the Gladstones have overrun), and said, They’re coming. We can’t fight them. We can’t become them. We can’t leave.”
Because…moving on. They all kill themselves and leave their kids bound to the old homesteads.
Because our author felt that this was the neatest way to get rid of them. Because our author needed her Space!NDN characters to be ghosts.
And our protags are white. It’s not mentioned until quite late, but it’s clear that we are to assume so. In fact that the author would probably be shocked if we hadn’t assumed so. We get it confirmed because when one of them is involved in a house fire, he comes back looking like this:
“His face was black, black like the sailors from the Ivory Islands, the ones with gold in their ears and their teeth and their eyes.”
So. White protags. Space!NDN windowdressing. White Guilt Catharsis. Mighty Whitey Goes Native.
This story is one of a long line of stories EXACTLY FUCKING LIKE IT. To quote the iO9 article above:
[this narrative] imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America’s foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent…These are [stories] about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
In this instance we have a tidy post-genocidal world with tragic vanishing native survivors – without the genocide being anyone’s fault, of course – so that some white kid protag can literally Save The Natives and then Go Native and it can Be Beautiful. Indians can be Exotic and Tragic and most importantly Dead. We have yet another installment of the same tired stereotypical bullshit about Native People that feeds into how REAL LIVE NATIVE PEOPLE are perceived and treated by the culture.
Let me pull you aside here.
First, some Sherman Alexie.
How To Write The Great american Indian Novel
And a little background on Moff’s Law and its trope
And here’s Chimamanda Adichie talking about The danger of a single story.
Are you on the same page with me yet, lovely readers?
Then you’ll understand what I mean when I say that
STORIES LIKE THIS HURT ME.
They hurt PEOPLE LIKE ME. The especially hurt CHILDEN LIKE ME. They hurt me because they are part of a cultural narrative that erases the reality of my existence. That claims that This is what NDNs were and Now they Are Gone isn’t it Sad? But if our good readers had been there, OH IF ONLY THEY HAD BEEN THERE, they would have been some of the Good White People and would have Joined The Natives. Yes they would. Which neatly absolves them from having to think about the fact that their ancestors didn’t and the lasting ramifications that has on native people living today. Everyone weeps cathartic tears and insistst that they’d have helped the Na’vi fight to keep out the unobtamium miners, but precious few of them then go home and help the REAL FUCKING LIVE Dineh (Navajo, to those playing the white name game) fight the uranium miners TODAY in the REAL WORLD. And why should they? The story already absolved them.
Just to add insult to injury? Author has done this shit before. Here’s a delightful excerpt from her story “Pale, and from a Sea-Wave Rising”
“She pointed, and Quill couldn’t help noticing her hand. A fine set of phalanges. Skin a bit too brown. Slave blood? No. Maybe a touch of the Red Indian. A Narragansett Princess, torn from her tribe by the force of the storm. A wind dancer. A witch. Delicate in the carpals, perfect at the wrist, where ulna met radius. Had Quill dissected such a hand, he would never have forgotten it. ”
BRB, fetching my scalping tomahawk. I mean, that tradition wasn’t ever something my tribe did, and was in fact introduced by white people to plains tribes and really used far more upon them than by them, but what the fuck. It seems fitting.
Gross.
So, just so you know, Strange Horizons’ fiction editors do actually give a fuck about having things like this pointed out to them. They wish to Not Fail, but of course many people Fail even when they try their best. I would suggest pointing them to this commentary so that they can see the deconstruction and better know how to spot Fail such as this in the slush pile.
(via jhameia)
For those who found that anthology eyeroll-worthy, here’s something awesome, instead:
The cold, brutal, impoverished nations of Christian Europe have little to offer the Mayan traders. When, in the third katun of the twelfth baktun, the green trimarans finally enter the Mediterranean, they find a continent depopulated by famine, pestilence and war, where barefoot peasants in low thatched huts toil in the shadow of Gothic cathedrals whose buttresses are stained with the smoke of tallow candles.
The “god-towers,” as they are called, are a continual source of amazement to credulous Mayans, who find it difficult to believe that a people as backward as the Christians could produce such monumental structures, the equal of anything in the Western Hemisphere up to the end of the Stone Age.
from: 9th baktun, 9th katun, 2nd tun (AD 615) by David Moles - Read the full story here.
Originally published in “Five Irrational Histories”, Rabid Transit #3: Petting Zoo, Velocity Press, May 2004.
“Ro, is that you?”
Data helped her sit up just as Worf arrived with two security officers.
“Commander.” Worf’s voice was both a question and a warning, but Geordi’s focus was on the ensign.
“Is this the Enterprise?” Ro asked.
“Yes. Where did you come from?”
She smiled, her breaths coming much harder now. But she made the effort to turn and look right at him. “The weeping angels. Don’t blink. Do you blink?”
Dr. Crusher arrived just as her eyes closed and her heart fluttered, then stopped.
Have I mentioned how in love I am with the cover?
Happily Ever After is now out, available in paper and electronic book forms.
Because ktempest said so.
Besides the MRP and the poems at Kakak Killjoy, I’m also writing/Tumblring something called The Measure of Deathness, which I’ll update every evening with ~200 words or so.
Any amount of monies or reblogging you could put towards this would be much appreciated ~<3
YES. please sponsor Jha because she’s so fabulous and everyone everywhere wants more of her writing.
