jeffy

 

Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky. This is the latest of the Rivers of London series, with both Peter and Abigail getting point of view in alternating chapters. If you're enjoying that series so far, rejoice, here's another. And it's up in Scotland, which was good for me because further north and may be good for you because variation in setting. Do I feel like this is one that moved the arc plot forward immensely? No, I really don't, this is one where he wanted to let the characters do some things. And they did. Okay.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. The jarring thing about this book is that it reads exactly like the essays I'm reading about Ukraine, Gaza, etc. in New York Review of Books (and, to a lesser extent, London Review of Books) in terms of tone. Occasionally that's comprehensible because some of those essays are still being written by Timothy Garton Ash. Sometimes it's just a boggling moment of "oh gosh it's been like that the whole time."

Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China. When you were a teenager, did you have a friend whose father insisted that everything of note had been invented by his own ethnicity? And would occasionally pop up while you and your friend were in the kitchen getting a snack to give you another example? I have seen this with Irish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Italian dads, and there may have been more I'm not remembering. Well, I don't think Mr. Beckwith is actually Scythian (...some of the dads in question were not actually their thing either), but other than that, it's just like that. And the thing is, he might be right about some of it. He certainly seems to be right that taking a contradictory and known hostile account as our main source about an entire culture is not a grand plan. It's just that I feel like I want more information about whether, for example, the entire field of philosophy from Greece to China was actually invented by Scythians, whether most reputable scholars would agree with his theories that Lao Tzu and the Buddha were both meaningfully Scythian, etc. But gosh it sure was something to read.

Ingvild Bjerkeland, Beasts. One of the questions that arises with literature in translation is how unusual a particular shape of narrative is in its original. Because in English, this is a very, very standard post-apocalyptic narrative of two siblings' survival. Is it similarly standard in Norwegian? I don't know. Possibly I don't know yet. Anyway, it was reasonably pleasant to read and short, if you're looking for that sort of thing, but for me it doesn't have a particularly fresh take on the tropes involved.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox. Kindle. Penric's children are growing up. He's not that thrilled. Having to deal with a possessed ox does not help matters. I wouldn't start here, because I think it leans on having a sense of Penric and Desdemona from the previous volumes, which are luckily all still available.

Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore. Discussed elsewhere.

A.R. Capetta, Costumes for Time Travelers. This is a cozy that is actually cozy for me as a reader! Gosh. That rarely happens. I think part of the strength here is brevity: at 200 pages, it's only trying to do some things, not everything, which gives me fewer loose...uh...threads. So to speak. But also Capetta is quite good at focusing my attention on the stuff they care about, which is a major skill in prose. And: time travelers! getting clothes from somewhere specific! Fun times! I will probably give this as a gift more than once this year.

P.F. Chisholm, A Clash of Spheres. This is a case where I am really frustrated not to have the next one RIGHT NOW, but I generally don't do that (more on why in a minute). It's very much more in the land of politics than of mystery per se, but a good Elizabethan era [Scottish/English] Border politics novel, much enjoyed, last line cliffhanger aaaaagh. (It is also book 8 in its series. Don't start here. Chisholm expects that you will know various things about the characters and setting and care proportionately, and I'm glad she does, it works for me...but I've read all the preceding books. I recommend that.)

Emma Flint, Other Women. So...I'm part of the problem here. I know it. I talk a good game about how evil is largely extremely mundane and unglamorous, and how we really need to think about whether the way we portray villainy in fiction is fueling unproductive assumptions about some of our moral opponents being geniuses when some of them are in fact very venial, grubby, and straightforward. Well. This is a book with two narrators united by one man, and that man is one of the most banal villains in all of fiction. The only reason he can charm anyone is 1) extreme good looks, but as this is prose, you will have to be willing to imagine that yourself for it to work; 2) they are very very vulnerable. They are desperate. This is a book about the "extraneous" women of the 1920s, after the mass male casualty event that was the Great War, and how vulnerable such women could be, particularly with the gender norms and assumptions of the time. It is based on a true story. Its prose is reasonably well done. Also I did not enjoy reading it and do not recommend it, because "Look, isn't he gross? but basically very mundane?" is not something I like spending a whole book with. So I continue to be part of the problem, and I continue to think about what to do about that, but in the meantime, meh, still not thrilled with this book.

Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal. Absolutely a straightforward book about democratic norms and practices in Senegal and how it is similar to and different from other countries in the region, how it is influenced by France and how not. Absolutely the book it's claiming to be.

Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear. This is why I don't put the next book in a series on my wish list until I've read the preceding one: because sometimes I will just be D-O-N-E after the mess an author makes of a book in a series I've previously enjoyed. This book was published less than a decade ago, which is far, far too recent for not one of the investigators to run into a person they have identified with one birth gender IDed as another gender and have nobody say, "Oh, well, what if they're trans." The response instead is not overtly transphobic but is kind of a disaster both in terms of handling of gender and in terms of the logistics of the actual murder mystery at hand. Not recommended, and it's killed my interest in the rest of the series.

Rebecca Lave, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Definitely not what it says on the tin. This is instead an attempt to wade through and adjudicate the effects of a single outsized personality on the field of stream restoration. Which was sort of interesting as a case study, and it's short, but also I was hoping for stream restoration. Oh well, I have another book to try for that.

Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal: A Travelers' Portrait. In this one, on the other hand, you'll never guess what they did. That's right: they sure did go to Portugal. This is a very weird book, a giant compendium of short accounts of British people who went to Portugal for various reasons (grouped by reason). I like Rose Macaulay a great deal better than the average person on the street, but this is not the good end of her prose, including paragraphs that stretched for more than three pages at a go. If you want to know things about Portugal, go elsewhere unless it's super specific stuff about really obscure British travelers. If you're a Rose Macaulay completist, come sit by me, and we can sigh in mild frustration over this book. If you're not in either of those categories, this is definitely not for you.

Alastair Reynolds, The Dagger in Vichy. Kindle. This is tonally different from the other mid-far future stuff Reynolds has been doing, and I'm here for it; I like to see people branch out a bit. I don't know whether he's been reading some of the same historical mysteries as I have, but I ponder the question not because I feel like anything is derivative but because some of the same interesting ideas may have come into play. In any case, this is short and fun and I like it.

Nicole C. Rust, Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders--And How We Can Change That. This is also short and fun and I like it. Okay, maybe brain disorders are not an entirely standard shape of fun. But Rust is very thoughtful about what hasn't been working and what has/might, in this field, and her prose is very clear, and I recommend this if you're at all interested.

Vikram Seth, The Humble Administrator's Garden. Kindle. There's a groundedness to these poems that I really like. They have a breadth of setting but a commonality in their human specificity.

Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Miss Plum and Miss Penny. I'm afraid the comedy of this light 20th century novel did not hit particularly well for me. It didn't offend--there were not racial jokes, for example--but it was just sort of. Not hilarious. It's the story of a middle-aged woman who takes in a younger woman in need, is rightfully much annoyed by her, and learns to appreciate her own life a lot more thereby. I'm not offended by this book. I just don't have any particular reason to recommend it.

Sonia Sulaiman, ed., Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction. I really like that there is a wide variety of tone, emotion, speculative conceit, and relationship with Palestine here. As with most anthologies, some stories were more my jam than others, but I'm really glad this is here for me to find out.

Darcie Wilde, A Useful Woman. A friend recently told me that this is the open pseudonym of Sarah Zettel, whose science fiction and fantasy I have enjoyed. This is one of her Regency mysteries--I understand she also writes romances under this name but I found the distinction to be clearly labeled, hurrah. Anyway this is just what you would want in a Regency mystery, good prose, froth and sharpness balanced, good times, glad there are more.

Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128. Flooding and river course changes! Environmental devastation and famine! References to James C. Scott in the analysis of how the imperial government handled it! Absolutely this is my jam. It's a very specific work, so I can't say that everyone should read this, but I never say that anyway, people vary. But if you have an interest in Chinese environmental history, or in fact in environmental history in general, you'll be pleased with this one.

Ten books new to me: five fantasy, two mysteries, and three science fiction novels. Four are series books and the other six seem to be stand-alone.

Books Received, August 9 — August 15

will feature an idealistic would-be knight, an idealistic but extremely cynical town watch member, a 600-year-old wood elf who has a little magic and is terrible keen on progress as it applies to firearms, and an artisan who adheres to most dwarven stereotypes but is in fact a short human.

The knight is the only one who can read, and the elf is their best medic, in the sense they have a 50% chance of binding wounds, rather than under 40%.

After one session:

The knight is a killing machine, with poor social graces in his current context. Well, that isn't quite true: he knows courtly manners. He just doesn't think they apply in the Empire and is very irritated that the peasants keep making eye contact.

The artisan is a relentless engine of effort, quite good at hitting things with a hammer but not so good at dodging. However, unlike the knight, he didn't stay in melee range to get bit.

The elf has almost supernatural reflexes and situational awareness and is a crack shot... but the dice were not on their side.

The town watchman is oddly crap in combat to the point they wanted to sell their sword for something where if they missed, at least they weren't next to whatever they missed. They are, however, keen-eyed and socially adept.

Amusingly enough, had the elf examined the adorable girl who accosted them, their tiny knack for magic would have revealed the revenant was somehow magical... but they were the one person who didn't side-eye the dead girl as she led them into an ambush.

Lucky St. James is offered a dream job: save the world or die trying.

VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

In Women of Futures Past, Rusch quotes Willis:

"The field didn't just have women writers--it had really good women writers. These were wonderful stories, and I don't believe they were overlooked at the time, because when I read them, they were all in Year's Best collections."

Rusch speculates that Willis is referencing Merril's Best S-F. However, Rusch says she only did a spot check. I reread the whole of Merril's Best S-F in 2023. Her anthologies were mostly stories by men.

OK, so maybe it was one of the other Best SF series around back then? But I checked Bleiler and Dikty, Harrison & Aldiss, and Wollheim & Carr and it's not them.

Was there another 1950s-1960s Best SF series?

Or was Willis thinking of a magazine-specific annual like Analog 1?

Not literally Analog 1, obs. But something like it from another magazine.

My guess, having checked the early years, is Willis was reading The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction. Specifically, Boucher's run.

(Guess two would have been something edited by Goldsmith but she does not appear to have edited anthologies)

What could possibly go wrong while transporting a possessed ox?

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox (Penric & Desdemona, volume 14) by Lois McMaster Bujold

A zeppelin-full of digital graphic albums featuring Studio Foglio's Girl Genius, the "gaslamp fantasy" webcomic of adventure, romance, and mad science.

Bundle of Holding: Girl Genius (from 2020)



Even more Girl Genius, plus Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire.

Bundle of Holding: Girl Genius 2 (from 2023)

In the 1970s, many of the best new authors were women — the trick was finding their work.

Women Have Always Written SFF — But It Wasn’t Always Easy to Find

Yes, I know comments are not working. No, I have no control over that. Yes, I have mentioned the issue repeatedly. No, I don't know when it will be fixed.

The SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) has announced that they are participating in a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic AI, which used an absolute metric shitton of authors' books to train its AI. While it's been ruled in one case that these actions don't, technically, constitute copying the book (because the training doesn't leave actual copies of the trained books, only of the  responses to having been trained on it, in short), it HAS been ruled that just grabbing copyrighted material and using it for a commercial purpose (such as training your commercial AI) is not a fair use. 

Anthropic AI is currently valued at around 150-160 billion dollars, just as a note. This is not a small company. 

From my point of view, it's absolutely open and shut: did they make use of copyrighted works to make a commercial product? Yes. Did they know they were doing so? Yes. Did they know they SHOULD pay for the rights to make use of those works? Yes. They simply concluded that it would be expensive, so they grabbed archives of pirated copies. 

The penalties for this should be substantial. This isn't like someone just downloading a book to read, in which case the most you could argue is that they owe you the purchase price for the copy they made. This is taking people's copyrighted work to use to make a commercial product that you intend to profit from. Conceptually this is no different than making a movie or other derivative work from the copyrighted material. The movie may differ drastically from the book -- it may in the worst case have little but names to show the connection. Even so, the moviemaker HAS to have paid the author for the rights to make the movie using their book. 

Note that there is no argument in this case that Anthropic did not, in fact, make use of these works. It's admitted that they did. 

But if "not retaining a copy, just the impressions" is good enough, then why can't I go and publish a Lord of the Rings fanfic? If I put the book away and don't look at it while writing, I'm just using my own impressions from the book to write the fanfic. Better yet, there's a lot of books I've only read once; if Anthropic's allowed this argument, then I should be able to freely use anything I remember from any book I've ever read. 

To an extent, of course, we DO do that -- we're influenced by everything we read, inspired or angered by it. But we also are expected to make a conscious effort to not merely TAKE the intellectual property. Since current AIs are incapable of "conscious effort", and by their nature literally do not RECALL the sources of their training (part of Anthropic and others' defense against accusations of 'copying'), the responsibility for such conscious effort devolves upon Anthropic and their personnel. 

Thus, it would be my contention that Anthropic currently owes every author whose work was used for this training, first a licensing fee -- negotiated appropriately for current and anticipated valuation of their business -- and second, a penalty fee for having DELIBERATELY chosen to try to avoid doing the legally obvious and required licensing. 

I would think that a minimum for that would be a thousand dollars per book infringed for licensing, and five hundred for being deliberately sneaky about it. That's a lowball figure -- note that even an OPTION to use someone's book for a movie -- not even an actual rights assignment -- is usually in the thousand-plus range. In this case it's not just an option -- they DID use the intellectual property. 

The other reason it has to be a significant number is that everyone is aware that the various IP industries are very much interested in eventually using AI to supplement or even replace human creators. If that's the goal, well, those of us who'll be being used to TEACH our replacements deserve a hell of a salary, so to speak. 

I hope this suit goes forward well. 



 

Bathed in unquenchable fire, Ruri struggles to maintain her grade point average.

RuriDragon, volume 6 by Masaoki Shindo

I've had some people say "okay, Ryk, now that we see what's going on is it important to keep posting about Project 2025?"

The answer is "absolutely YES" and I'll explain why. First, for those who haven't seen my long writeup on 2025, here's the link.  Note that the ORIGINAL document is about 900 pages, and even my summary and high points commentary is something like 150. 

Okay, now, WHY is it important to keep talking specifically about Project 2025, even though we're well -past the point where we can prevent someone (whose name begins with T and ends, appropriately, with RUMP) from initiating it?
( ... cut for length... )

War crime survivor turned expert swordswoman and student sorcerer Cheon resolves to obliterate the nation responsible, make herself queen, and find a like-minded woman to court.

The Four Wishes (Cheon of Weltanland, volume 1) by Charlotte Stone

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This collection featured stories I'd read--and very much liked--before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that's not unexpected for any collection these days. What's less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.

There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn't hurt that Campbell's sense of place and culture is a northern one--not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There's death and transformation here--these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I'm so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.

Ironsworn, Starforged, and Sundered Isles, tabletop roleplaying games of perilous fantasy, space opera, and seafaring adventure by Tomkin Press.

Bundle of Holding: Ironsworn-Starforged

2009: The Horrible Histories TV show debuts, Britons are treated to a Giles-worthy winter, and police decline to investigate the cash for influence incident so that they might better focus on the custard-tossing scandal rocking the nation.



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2009 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
Martin Martin's on the Other Side by Mark Wernham
The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper
The Quiet War by Paul J. McAuley

With an * on the McAuley because it was too grim and I didn't finish it.

The winners are:

Best Novel: The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed, Solaris
Best YA Novel: Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao, Tundra Books
Best Novelette/Novella: The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed, Tordotcom
Best Short Story: “Blood and Desert Dreams“, Y.M. Pang, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue 408
Best Graphic Novel: Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way, Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio, IDW Publishing
Best Poem/Song “Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka“, Y.M. Pang, Invitation: A One-shot Anthology of Speculative Fiction
Best Related Work: Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Two
Stephen Kotowych, editor, Ansible Press
Best Cover Art/Interior Illustration: Augur Magazine, Issue 7.1, cover art, Martine Nguyen
Best Fan Writing and Publication: SF&F Book Reviews, Robert Runté, Ottawa Review of Books
Best Fan Related Work: murmurstations, Sonia Urlando, Augur Society, podcast

It is mid-August, the very height of blackberry season in the Pacific Northwest, and with some rain earlier this week the blackberries in my neighborhood have plumped up and are undeniably delicious. All this week, I’ve seen kids and their parents at the communal blackberry bushes that grow along easements, drainage ditches, and jogging trails. There’s no organized effort; it’s just take what you can, and if you’re late to the party, tough luck.

I was picking blackberries and mentioned that to someone else who was there with two kids. “I think they call that the tragedy of the commons,” he said. I didn’t answer him, but it is not, it is absolutely not, because those blackberry plants, while they are communal, they are not a commons.

A commons has three important features. First, it is a local, naturally occurring feature of the environment. Second, the community is dependent upon that feature for their very survival. Third, there is a widespread communal understanding that the feature is fragile and can be exploited, cheated, or damaged, and there is an ongoing, vocal communal effort to ensure that nobody damages it or cheats others out of their share.

Himalayan blackberries may be local, and they may be a plant, but they’re an invasive species introduced about a century ago, not something the Pacific Northwest has had since time out of mind. Nobody in the Pacific Northwest is dependent upon them for food, and certainly not warmth, water, or shelter. The only communal decision being made about them is that they have to be torn out quickly and often whenever they’re a danger to local agriculture, infrastructure, or a child’s scratched arms. The route from my home to the local light rail into Seattle has a patch where the vines grow out over the bicycle path, and sometimes the bicyclists will do some guerrilla weeding to get rid of them.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a racist trope invented to sound scientific and to get into the peer-reviewed journals because the inventor of the trope, Garrett Hardin, wanted white people to embrace “a fundamental extension of morality.” That extension was not to bring more human beings into the fold of those who we must protect; it was to convince white people that white people had a superior moral claim to the future, and if there was an planetary disaster that limited the Earth’s capacity to keep all of humanity alive, white people must be prepared to kill everyone else.

There were no tragic commons. Commons, for centuries, allowed communities to subsist, to survive, often with a reasonable expectation of “enough” heat, food, water, and shelter, through careful communal management of local environmental features.

Commons don’t exist much anymore because they were inconvenient to kings and emperors; they made it hard to tax, because nobody knew how to value them. Wikipedia’s article about England’s Enclosure Laws describes some of the process by which “commons” were turned into “resources”; the latter could be described, accounted, owned, and taxed by the ever-reaching arm of monarchies and empires. But while they did exist, they were valuable, sustainable, well-managed, and treasured by the people who depended on them.

Seattle’s Himalayan blackberries definitely ain’t all that.

Two Americans set out for Venus. Only one returned. Where is the missing man? Evans knows but Evans is not a reliable witness.

Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg

A book I'm thinking of having play an important role in the campaign is Heinrich and Moritz Tod's Morally Uplifting Tales for the Edification of Recalcitrant Children, the Tods being the Old World analog of the Brothers Grimm. Uplifting Tales is an important cultural artifact and also the sort of book you'd read to kids at bed time if you wanted them to cry themselves to sleep.

The Sidewise Award for Alternate History is looking for new judges to join the award committee.

This is the first time in the 30 year history of the award that they've made an open call for awards judges.

Apply here.