Author: Eugene Fischer

Hyacinth looked at this child, at her flinty eyes, and saw how much she believed that she was not only right, but also justified. And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she'd made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the men who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings. –from The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson

The Most Annoying Thing About the New iOS Music App

Apple has updated the music app for the iPhone to include their new subscription music service. That’s fine. I don’t personally want to use a subscription music service, preferring to buy my music, but it’s easy enough to deactivate in the settings menu. They also gave the app a visual makeover, another fine thing to do. My problem is, the visuaI makeover seems to have introduced UI inconsistencies. That is not fine.

There are now an unpredictable number of hierarchies between me and my music. If I have my music sorted by artist, I’ve currently no idea what I’m going to see when I tap on an artists name. For example, if I tap Simon & Garfunkel, I get a collapsed list of albums that I have to tap on to see track names:

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But if I tap on The Submarines, I get a scrollable list of tracks with the albums as floating headings:

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Personally I would prefer it to always work as it does for The Submarines–a hybrid album and track view–which is how the old app worked. But more than anything I want it to be consistent. Not knowing what UI I’m going to encounter from artist to artist keeps me from developing muscle memory, and creates occasional frustration when I’m trying to play a specific song. If I can’t remember which Simon & Garfunkel album “Cecelia” is, I used to be able to just scroll until I saw it. Now I have to search, either by hand through the albums or by typing in the name. That delay between deciding what I want to listen to and being able to find it is new, and unwelcome.

Anyone know how to fix this?

Reading 2015: June

Reading2015June

This was the month that I accepted I am not going to hit 100 books this year. Some of that was my continued travel, some of that was an increased work load. But the biggest part? The announcement that Fallout 4 will be released in November, on my birthday. That pretty much guarantees I won’t be reading many books in November. I’m already far enough behind that skipping a whole month makes the goal impossible. I’m still going to try to beat last year’s mark of 73, though. But I didn’t make good progress in June, reading only one novel and two graphic novels. I started several other books last month, but haven’t finished them yet. Hopefully that prefigures a much higher count for July.

  1. The Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace – I picked this up at WisCon on the strength of a recommendation from Delia Sherman and my general faith in Small Beer Press. It’s published through their YA imprint Big Mouth House, about which more later. This is the story of a young woman in a brutal but magic-rich post-apocalyptic world who teams up with the ghost of a supersoldier from the distant pre-apocalyptic past to correct an ancient injustice. The plot is frenetic, and I found it difficult to put down, even as I suspect that the sheer pace of events is letting the narrative get away with less justification for its worldbuilding than I would normally require. The scenes whip by fast enough, and are exciting enough, that I didn’t stop long to worry that I can’t come up with any theories about how the world-that-was could have turned into the world-that-is, or why the afterlife functions as it does. Which I guess is a way of saying that one of this novel’s strengths is its confidence. Really, the only thing that bothered me while I was reading was that this book is positioned as YA. I’m on record as thinking the only requirement for a YA novel is a young protagonist, and canonically Wasp is sixteen years old. But we don’t learn her age until close to the middle of the story, and I had been reading her as much older. Even after learning she was sixteen, she seemed more like a character in her early to mid twenties to me.
  2. Super Mutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki – My graphic novel collection (and likely comics pubishing as a whole) is so brutally canted toward male creators that every few weeks I stop into my local comic shop and specifically ask what new books they have that are (1) written by women and (2) not about superheroes. This book was a find from my last such trip. It’s primarily a collection of single page gag strips featuring a recurring cast of high school students who just happen to be wizards and mutants and creatures out of myth. The humor ranges from darkly cynical to absurd, and in the last twenty or thirty pages an actual plot begins to coalesce out of nowhere. A fun, fast read.
  3. Vattu: The Name and the Mark by Evan Dahm – I’ve been a fan of his work since he was first serializing Rice Boy, but haven’t kept up with his material online. As he writes sprawling, surrealist fantasy epics, I prefer to consume his work in big chunks. Vattu, the slowest-paced of the Overside stories I’ve yet read, was served well by this practice. This is only the first volume of a tale about people looking for identity after being displaced from their cultures by a colonizing empire. Dahm’s color and line work, which started out great, have become sublime. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this. (Also notable for other Rice Boy fans: he’s currently doing a commentary-laden rerun of that story.)

Best Short Fiction of the Year at io9

Over at io9, K. Tempest Bradford and several other reviewers have put together a list of the best short stories of the year so far. Somehow my twenty thousand word novella managed to sneak itself a spot, where it’s in company with the work of so many other great writers that I’m dazzled just looking at the page. Much thanks to Tempest and Amal, to whom my own inclusion is due.

If you haven’t read “The New Mother” yet, but find ongoing critical enthusiasm persuasive, the story is right here for your enjoyment.

Four Years of Science Fiction Writing at the University of Iowa

Screen Shot 2015-06-29 at 3.16.21 PMOne of the things I was proudest to accomplish while at the University of Iowa was establishing an undergraduate curriculum for science fiction writing. I taught it for two years, first while a TA as a proof-of-concept class within the Fiction Writing track, then as an adjunct with an official course title: Writing and Reading Science Fiction. These classes were popular with students, and I was thrilled that even after I left the University the course continued, taught by Van Choojitarom. And it continues still, now under the steady professorial hand of Willa Richards. By the time she’s done with it, there will be a graduating class of Hawkeyes who’ve never known a semester when a course on writing genre fiction wasn’t offered by their university. That is perhaps the most satisfying thing I’ve yet achieved in my career. So thanks, again, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and University of Iowa for championing science fiction, and to Van and Willa for keeping it going.

Some Lovely Words

In 2008, after the second misdiagnosis of the terrible wasting disease that had me bedridden and wretched, I sought the opinion of a colorectal surgeon. He did a cursory (yet still excruciating) examination and pronounced me “severely diseased,” a horrifying phrase to hear while lying on a doctor’s table. He said that when I found a new gastroenterologist we needed to reconsider the possibility that I had Crohn’s disease. Which, of course, I did. I started monoclonal antibody treatment for it in 2009 and began to improve. Crohn’s does flare intermittently, but I’ve responded well to the biological medications, and in the last few years suffered only rarely.

Yesterday I had my first colonoscopy since I was originally diagnosed. It was possible that my doctor would find evidence that my disease was still active–not enough to be symptomatic, but still enough to require more medical intervention. That didn’t happen, though. From looking at my colon and ileum, he couldn’t even tell I had Crohn’s. The words I get to take away from this examination are, “complete remission.” That’s a phrase I like much better.

Patriarchy in my Vault

Vault510Welcome to Vault 510, my creation in Bethesda Softwork’s new iPhone game, Fallout Shelter. The people here are happy. They have plentiful food, water, and power. They have a medical bay and a science lab. They have a radio station for entertainment, and a strong door protecting them from the uncivilized, irradiated wastes outside. On those rare occasions when raiders do break in, they have powerful weapons with which to defend themselves. And when they’ve been working too long, they can retire to the well-appointed living quarters for some romantic company. There is no jealousy in Vault 510, and as little incestuous behavior as I, their Overseer, can manage with a population this small. There are also no gay people, and apparently no birth control, because every liaison results in a pregnancy. Children scamper through the corridors, and most of the women are cheerfully pregnant.

That last bit shouldn’t be a problem, but it totally is.

All the Bethesda games I’ve played have had the unwritten rule that children shall not be harmed. In games like Fallout 3 and presumably the upcoming Fallout 4, when there is violence children will run, scream, and cower, but never get injured. They are functionally invulnerable. The player can fire bullets at them, and the only response will be a young voice declaring it mean. This is a perfectly defensible choice on Bethesda’s part, and they’ve carried it into this game as well.

The trouble is, in Fallout Shelter adult pregnant women get treated the same way as children. When a fire breaks out, or there’s an infestation of radroaches, non-pregnant women will calmly start dealing with it alongside the men, but pregnant women will run away and hide. They can’t handle emergencies at all. Presumably they act like this because they are considered to have an inviolable child inside of them (which is dubious enough), but the result is that pregnant women are thus significantly less capable. As I am trying to keep this bottled society as functional and happy as possible, this makes me have to do several uncomfortable things:

  • In the early game I am incentivized to keep women pregnant as often as possible because it (a) makes them happy and (b) raises the vault’s population and thus my labor pool.
  • I have to take weapons out of the hands of women and give them to men, because even if a woman is holding a combat shotgun, if she’s pregnant and a roach appears she will run and hide rather than shooting at it.
  • I have to separate the pregnant women and lean toward having male-dominated working environments, because if an emergency breaks out and all the pregnant women flee, the situation could spread, whereas it will be contained if the room is staffed primarily by men or non-pregnant women.

The mechanics of this game are forcing me, as Overseer, to institute patriarchal norms into my society. If I want my vault dwellers to survive, I have to disempower pregnant women. And since the women want to be pregnant and I’m incentivized to keep them that way, this functionally means disempowering all women. While I’m otherwise enjoying this game, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout Shelter insists on being a big ol’ boys club. I really don’t like that.

Where’s Imperator Furiosa when you need her?

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“The New Mother” Now Online

Did you miss your chance to grab a copy of the April/May 2015 issue of Asimov’s? Well now you have another way to read my novella “The New Mother.” The full text is available online.

A reminder of some things people have said about it:

  • “I’m astounded by this story, by its elegant, thoughtful thoroughness” –Amal El-Mohtar, Tor.com
  • “[A] thoughtful look at a fundamental change in the nature of human reproduction” – Gardner Dozois, Locus
  • “This is a particularly effective story with a SFnal idea embedded right in its beating heart” –Bob Blough, Tangent Online

Give it a read, see what you think.

Reading 2015: May

I got in a bicycle accident early in May and broke my wrist, so was unable to type for about a week and a half. This took a bite out of my work schedule, which I filled with, yes, more TV, but also more reading.

  1. I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura – An enjoyable graphic novel that was similar in many ways to Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. A creature out of myth intercedes in the life of a child who is trying and failing to deal with the serious illness of her mother. In this case the monster is a titan rather than the Green Man, and the relationship is for the most part adversarial rather than didactic, but thematically the two books have a great deal of overlap. I’m glad I read A Monster Calls first, as it’s the more emotionally complex work, doing deep explorations of things about survivor guilt that I Kill Giants only superficially touches. But it’s possible that whichever of these two one reads second will suffer due to familiarity with the shared narrative beats.
  2. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel – This graphic novel, meanwhile, isn’t superficial about anything. In many ways a sequel to Fun Home, this purports to be about Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, but more about using the concept of maternal relationships as a lens to look at memoir and neurosis. It struck me as a less focused book than Fun Home, but a trip through Bechdel’s expansive, unflinching intellect is so inherently interesting that the experience doesn’t much suffer for being less structured. It did make me want to go back and read Fun Home again, though.
  3. The Color of Money by Walter Tevis – This was the last Tevis novel I’d not yet read. (There should be a word for the bittersweet feeling of finishing the last unread book by a favorite, deceased author.) It’s a decades-later sequel to his first novel, The Hustler, and while it’s not my favorite of his novels, I found Tevis’s writing as gripping as ever. My main complaint about this book is that too much of it seemed to recapitulate emotional gestures from The Hustler and plot gestures from The Queens Gambit, both of which I’d judge to be superior works. But there was a moment I found really touching, one that only this book could do. There’s an important scene early in The Hustler where Fast Eddie’s opponent, Minnesota Fats, disappears into a bathroom and then emerges, composed, having washed his hands and face. Though Tevis never points at the callback, there’s a moment near the end of The Color of Money where Fast Eddie does this same thing, and for readers who’ve read both books the parallelism is profound.
  4. Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill – Gaitskill has sort of snuck up on me, slowly and quietly becoming one of my favorite authors. She’s one of the least sentimental writers I’ve encountered, but she creates emotional landscapes that are as solid as her physical settings. I first came to her work years ago after seeing the movie “Secretary,” and wanting to read it’s presumably pro-BDSM source material. What I found was much darker, more complicated, and personal than the movie had led me to expect. In Gaitskill’s writing I run into aching blends of disappointment and desire that are deeply recognizable, supported by sentences I never would have written. Her work captures facets of my lived emotional experience using a technology of images I don’t yet understand. This book, though it didn’t grab me as much as her second novel Veronica, wasn’t an exception. It’s about two women, Dorothy Never and Justine Shade, of different age, class, body shape, and worldview, but similarly traumatized by early life experience. They meet when Justine interviews Dorothy about her involvement with a thinly veiled Ayn Rand and Objectivist movement. It’s got some structural formality as well, with Dorothy’s sections in first person and Justine’s in third. This formality was a little bit of a stumbling block for me initially, for no reason than it made the book easier to put down at chapter transitions. But by the end the POVs are switching so fast and with such narrative momentum that I was hooked, and consumed the third section of the book in a compulsive gulp.
  5. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks – I’ve read nearly all of Banks’s science fiction, but this was my first of his realist novels. (I’m sticking with the “Iain M. Banks” tag since it’s the same person, even though he left off the middle initial for these books.) Calling it “realist” seems only barely appropriate. Though nothing in this novel is impossible, it’s improbable as all hell. The viewpoint character is a sociopathic young man, a former murderer and practitioner of sympathetic magic, in what turns out to be a whole family of mentally damaged individuals. In some ways it struck me, especially in the beginning, as a sort of adolescent version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The POV is interesting enough and the macabre violence colorful enough that I was pulled enjoyably through the book, but–and here’s where the SPOILERS start–the final twist seemed like something of a pointless gotcha. The openly misogynist main character who believes himself to have lost his genitalia in a childhood accident turns out to actually be a biological female whose father has been secretly dosing with testosterone since childhood. This is revealed only a few pages from the end, and never narratively problematized. It’s a fireworks show of imaginative voice and depravity, but didn’t in the end seem to mean very much.
  6. The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman – I met Stephanie at ICFA this year, where she was awarded the Crawford award for this novel. Now that I’ve read it, I think the win well deserved. It’s an intrusive urban fantasy story grounded in Jewish mysticism and structured like a mystery novel. Marjorie, who at the start of the book isn’t even aware of her Jewish heritage, discovers after her grandfather dies that all the fairy tales he told her as a child were true. She has to find lost documents and rediscover ancient knowledge to try to save her sister’s newborn son, sometimes opposed by her ultra-orthodox brother-in-law. My favorite parts of the book though are the four long, beautiful passages written with cadence of folklore. Also, as I have a somewhat uneasy relationship with my own Judaism, this narrative was embedded in a point of view that I found, tonally, very recognizable.
  7. Collected Fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi – I loved his debut novel The Quantum Thief so much that, barring a major disappointment, I’ll give anything he publishes a read. This is a somewhat disjoint short story collection, mixing near future SF, posthuman SF, ghost stories, folkloric fantasy, and some stranger things. My favorite pieces were “The Jugaad Cathedral,” the SF piece in this book that most successfully combined his typical technological fireworks with human interest, “Fisher of Men,” a fun outsmart-the-mythical-creature fantasy story, and “Skywalker of Earth,” which is a string theory pulp pastiche that is tonally unlike anything else I’ve read. The closest is probably some parts of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, but that lacks the hard science space operatics. Great fun. (Also, it seems that Rajaniemi’s third novel, The Causal Angel, came out while my life was topsy-turvy last year and I managed to miss it. Need to pick that up.)

Triquetrum

CTScanHere’s the relevant bit of the CT scan of my wrist. As the radiologist put it, “a mildly displaced intra-articular fracture involves the palmar aspect of the triquetrum.” The orthopedist explained that sometimes when a joint receives a sharp shock, the specific speed and angle can be such that a ligament, instead of tearing and resulting in a sprain, can break off a piece of bone. Apparently this is actually preferable, as bone-to-bone healing is less complicated than ligament-to-bone healing. I’m informed that, since the other bones in my hand are still lined up just fine, I don’t need surgery. The treatment for this is exactly what it would be for a sprain: keep wearing the wrist splint I’m already wearing for up to another four weeks.