Black Blade Blues, by J. A. Pitts

When I skimmed the blurb for this book, I miscategorized it. I read that it was about a blacksmith named Sarah who winds up with a powerful magical sword, and I assumed it was traditional, secondary-world fantasy. But no! It's urban fantasy, set in the modern world.

For many readers, that's a selling point, but not for me. I love books with deep worldbuilding and deep characterization, and urban fantasy usually disappoints me in both. The worldbuilding is just the equivalent of mixing chocolate and peanut butter. The modern world, plus vampires! The modern world, plus werewolves! Yawn.

In this case, it's the modern world, plus Norse mythology! Which I admit is cooler, because it hasn't been done to death yet, and Norse mythology has some depth to it. As for characterization, urban fantasy books pretty much all have the same character. She's a young woman with attitude. She'll have some kind of physical marker of counter-culture status, such as a tramp stamp. She may have some feelings of insecurity, but she'll always kick ass. And she'll have two impossibly hot guys chasing after her that she'll have to choose between.

Let's see if Sarah from Black Blade Blues fits the mold.

Young woman. CHECK.
Physical marker. CHECK (Doc Martens).
Insecurity. CHECK.
Kicks ass. CHECK.
Two impossibly hot guys...

Actually, no. Because Sarah's a lesbian! She has a girlfriend, and their relationship is rocky and troubled, but there's no choosing between two hot love interests in this book. I read over 100 books a year (which is why I get so jaded when it comes to certain genres), and do you know what? This is the first book I've ever read with a lesbian protagonist. So right there, that was my favorite thing about this book.

As for the rest, I think it just wasn't for me. It opens well, with Sarah discovering that a sword she picked up is the legendary Gram, a magical weapon from Norse legend, and suddenly she's being tracked by a variety of creatures from Norse mythology and asked to kill a dragon, who's currently taking the form of an investment banker in Portland. I liked the idea of dragons hiding in the U.S., disguised as powerful humans.

But then the pace gets sluggish, and we have a couple hundred pages of slow plot development along with some relationship drama between Sarah and her girlfriend Katie. The relationship drama revolves around Sarah, who was raised by religious fundamentalists, being uncomfortable accepting herself as a lesbian, especially in public, whereas Katie has no such issues. In theory, it's a good conflict, but it didn't really draw me in, especially since Katie didn't feel well-developed as a character. Also, I wanted to see Sarah's religious background come into conflict with her increasing awareness that the Norse gods, in this world, are real, and that never happened.

Things get exciting again when there's an encounter with Odin--who takes a surprising but mythologically accurate form--and a giant battle with a dragon, which is great for a while but goes on too long. I also raised my eyebrows at a few things, like when Sarah's friends from the SCA help her fight, but with swords and axes. Guys, in a life or death battle, why not GUNS? Later, they find out that guns would not have worked, but they didn't know that going in. It made it seem like they were treating the battle as a game, when in fact people had been kidnapped and it was serious business.

Another thing I wanted in this book and didn't get was more blacksmithing details. Blacksmithing isn't a common profession in the modern world, and I'm a geek who likes to know how everything works, so I wanted to get a picture of what it's like being a modern-day blacksmith. We got a few details, and a couple of good scenes that show how Sarah's work calms and focuses her, but I wanted more. What was it like nailing shoes onto recalcitrant or frightened horses? What were the different metals she used, where did she get them, and did they require different techniques to work? How does she add decorations and such to the swords she makes for con-goers and collectors?

On the whole, I was looking for more depth than I got, but honestly, I have this reaction to almost every urban fantasy book I read. This book strikes me as a good example of its genre, and for anyone looking for something a little fresher than vampires and werewolves, and especially anyone who likes Norse mythology, Black Blade Blues will probably satisfy.

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Starcross: A Stirring Adventure of Spies, Time Travel, and Curious Hats by Philip Reeve (YA science fiction)

If you loved Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series and lament the fact that there is no spiritual successor to those books, this Philip Reeve series comes closer to that than anything else I've seen. It's not so much pure comedy as a mix of comedy and adventure, but I haven't read anything this funny in a while.

Starcross is the sequel to Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space. The premise for the setting is that you throw science out the window. Space isn't a vacuum; it's filled with aether, and it can be navigated with alchemy-powered aetherships. All the planets and moons are inhabited by strange creatures, as is space itself. We're in the Victorian era. The American Revolution failed (put down by Admiral Nelson), and the British Empire, which closely guards the secrets of alchemy, has spread into space and made colonies of several planets.

We follow the adventures of Art and his older sister Myrtle, and the pirate Jack Havock (all of whom are teenagers, I think, though I'm not sure of their exact age). Most chapters are written from Art's point of view, but we occasionally switch to Myrtle's, and their brotherly/sisterly sniping at one another is a constant source of amusement.

Myrtle is one of the most original and interesting characters I've seen in science fiction. She's obsessed with being a proper English lady. Here's a passage from the book that explains her better than I could:

Mother was concerned about Myrtle's education, too, for it seemed to have been confined to piano playing and deportment. She kept asking anxiously whether Myrtle would not like to study for some Career or Profession, for, as she said, 'This is the Nineteenth Century, Myrtle, dear, and many avenues of life which were once purely the preserve of men are now wide open to members of the fairer sex.' Had not Mother's dear friend, Miss Marian Evans, lately been appointed editor of the Westminster Review? But Myrtle insisted that a lady does not seek anything so common as Paid Employment, and continued playing her horrible piano, and embroidering improving samplers. However, she did agree to learn a little French, for, as she said, 'then I may write in my diary in French, and if A Certain Person is ever tempted to steal bits of it again, he will be most aggrieved to find he cannot read it!'

The events of the book keep putting Myrtle in danger, and while she always hopes the dashing Jack Havock will rescue her, more often than not, she finds that she has to do the rescuing herself. As it happens, she's quite resourceful and more than capable of rising to the occasion. This is one of the funniest takes on feminism I've ever seen. Myrtle is determined to be useless, but continually proves herself otherwise.

It still blows my mind that so many SFF readers/writers are not reading YA, because there's a revolution happening in SFF right now, and YA is where it's happening. We're getting top-notch writing, fast-paced stories, deft characterization, and wildly original ideas. This book is part of that revolution.

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If you're not up to date on the Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle, go read John Scalzi's hilarious rant on the subject. It summarizes what happened pretty well.

I spent my software career working in electronic publishing, which gives me some perspective on this situation. I've been out of the industry for a while, so much of my knowledge is out of date. However, I have a good overall sense of the business. This kerfuffle has led me to think some more about the future of the publishing industry, and what role companies like Macmillan (traditional publishers) are likely to play in it.

Question #1, What is a publisher's value-add?

Before I look at that, I have to answer question #2, Why do we care about a publisher's value-add?

We, and by we I mean readers, care because we pay for that value-add. When I buy a traditionally published book, I am paying 3 different entities, not counting middlemen. A percentage of my money goes to the retailer (e.g., Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble), another percentage goes to the publisher (e.g. Macmillan, Random House), and another percentage goes to the author. While I don't know exact numbers, my impression is that the retailer gets the largest share, followed by the publisher, followed by the author.

Here I have to bring in self-publishing, because it's my belief that self-publishing and the growing ebook market are very closely related, in that as ebooks replace paper, self-publishing will become more viable, and it represents a threat to traditional publishing. When people self-publish, they cut out the publisher's percentage of the take, because there is no publisher. The take is split between the retailer and the author. The author has a choice of pricing his book the same as a traditionally published book and taking a larger cut for himself, or using the savings to undercut the market and price his book lower.

Given the financial advantages of self-publishing, why do most authors opt not to do it? Because having a traditional publisher is well worth it. The publisher provides value-add.

What's the publisher's value-add?

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Blizzard has made a simple but profound change to dungeon running in World of Warcraft. In many ways, it's a good change. It makes the game more accessible and more fun. But it has a downside. It's having a negative impact on game culture.

To explain the change, I will need to give you a brief explanation of dungeon running. Don't worry, it will only take me a paragraph. Dungeons are areas in WOW where a group of 5 people work together to kill 2-5 "boss" monsters, each of which drops loot. Each piece of loot that drops can be picked up by only one player in the group. To determine who gets it, WOW brings up a little box where you select "Need" or "Greed." Generally, you select "Need" if the item is something your character can use (e.g. cloth armor for mages, plate armor for paladins) and is better than what you already have. If you don't need the item, you select "Greed" with the intention of selling it. Once everyone has made their selection, WOW rolls the dice. If anyone chose Need, WOW will roll the dice for them first. The highest Need roll wins the item. If nobody chose Need, WOW rolls the dice for those who selected Greed, and the highest Greed roll wins.

So, key point: If you select Need, you automatically win the roll over anyone who selected Greed. Got that? Okay.

In the olden days (by which I mean a year ago), you had to assemble your 5 people for the dungeon manually. Someone would sit in a major city and use the chat channel to recruit people for a group. It was tedious. You could spend more time recruiting your group than running the dungeon. Blizzard improved on this by adding a "looking for group" list you could add yourself to, and this helped a lot, but group assembly was still a slow, manual process.

Then, last month, they added the Dungeon Finder. The Dungeon Finder is revolutionary in the MMO world. No more manual assembly of groups! You bring up the Dungeon Finder, select the role you are qualified to play (tank, healer, or damage-dealer), and select a dungeon. Wait about 60 seconds, and WOW builds a group for you and teleports you directly into the dungeon. No more sitting in town spamming the chat channels! No more tedious travel to reach the dungeon! Pick your dungeon, wait a minute, and bam, you're there and playing.

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Looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers? Try these geek-tested choices:

For teenagers and adults, The Hunger Games and its sequel Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. These may be the most intense books you ever read. They're set in a dystopian future America. A teenaged girl named Katniss is randomly selected to participate in an annual reality show where 24 people enter a gladitorial arena, and only one walks out alive. As bleak as it sounds, the story abounds with love; you will see humanity not only at its worst, but at its best. It may be too scary for kids under 14.

 For younger kids, The Lightning Thief and sequels by Rick Riordan. My 11-year-old son loves this series about a boy who discovers he's the son of a Greek god. This book is being made into a movie which comes out in March of 2010, so your kid can be extra cool by reading it before then!

 For geeky parents, Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. This nonfiction book is a collection of the latest research on how children develop and how much of our current thinking is wrong. Learn why praise can backfire, why kids lie, and why early high school start times are hurting our kids. You may not agree with everything in this book, but it will certainly get you thinking.

For the mythology nut, Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout. The book follows a super kick-ass Valkyrie who is fed up with blind obedience and strikes out on her own to stop the end of the world and rescue her sister from Hel. She teams up with Hermod, a down-on-his-luck son of Odin and one of the few gods whose future is not laid out in the myths. He's kind of prone to catastrophe, for being a god. The author does a great job of keeping in the spirit of the myths while creating a new and compelling story around the lesser characters.

Know someone who likes romance novels, but can't stand it when the heroine is a pathetic weakling and the so-called "hero" is an asshat? Here are three feminist-friendly romance novels guaranteed not to be thrown against the wall!

Can't Stand the Heat, by Louisa Edwards. She's a snarky food critic. He's the head chef of a hot new restaurant. Hardly brooding or angsty, our hero is happy and passionate and devoted to his kitchen, which he runs with an iron fist and zero tolerance for lackluster work. This book is as fun for its look at the inner workings of an upscale restaurant as it is for the romance.

Games of Command, by Linnea Sinclair. She's a starship captain with a checkered past. He's an admiral and a biocybe--a cybernetically enhanced human. Theoretically, he's emotionless, except wait, he's not. He has her assigned to work on his starship. She thinks it's because he's learned something about her past and is out to get her, but actually it's because he has a GIANT CRUSH on her. Great fun. Bonus geek points for being set in a Star Trek-like universe.

In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia-Spencer Fleming. This is actually a mystery novel with romance elements. She's a former army helicopter pilot, now an Episcopalian priest. He's a Vietnam vet and chief of police in the small town where she's just been assigned. They bond while working together to solve a crime--but there's one small problem. He's married. Uh oh!

Got a gamer in the family, but can't stomach those $50 game prices? Here are some high-quality but inexpensive options:

Plants vs. Zombies. This little gem from PopCap, makers of super-addictive casual games like Bejeweled, lets you plant a garden of ravenous plants to defend your household from a horde of marauding zombies. It's very cute. I defy you not to laugh when the dancing zombies show up! While it's aimed at adults, I've seen kids as young as 5 get into this game. It's $20 purchased directly from PopCap, or $10 on Steam.

Defense Grid: The Awakening. Know someone who loved Plants vs. Zombies but thought it was too easy? Like Plants vs. Zombies, Defense Grid is a tower defense game. You build defensive structures to repel an invading horde, in this case aliens instead of zombies. It's not as cute as Plants vs. Zombies, but it's far more strategically complex, because the placement of your towers alters the path of the invaders. A great game for puzzle solvers and engineering types who like to tinker and get a design just right. The gameplay is addictive, and the storyline is actually touching in places. $20 on Amazon or $10 on Steam.

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Last night I babysat a friend's 10-year-old daughter at my house. I have two sons, no daughters, so my house is full of boy stuff. And kids get hard to entertain when they reach the tween years. She was kind of bored. She listened to her MP3 player, noodled around on my piano, pulled out some of my old toys and played with them.

I finished my evening chores and booted up World of Warcraft. She came over to watch. I was playing my shaman, doing a quest where I had to identify traitors in a keep. I have this orb I can use to find the traitors. Wouldn't it be nice to have an orb like that in real life? After I find a traitor, guess what I do? KILL him, of course!

The friend's daughter watched with mild interest as I executed my McCarthyist mission. Then I shifted my character into wolf form, and she perked up. "Whoa! How did you do that?" she asked. I showed her the ability. She asked if the class you choose to play affects what things you can change into. I said yes and told her the druid was the ultimate shapeshifting class. I logged in my druid and showed her how I could turn into a bear, a lion, or a bird that can actually fly. Then I showed her my shaman's ability to summon spirit wolves, and my priest's rideable white dragon.

Well, that was it. She wanted to play herself. I let her create a new character on my account. Originally, she wanted to make a druid, but there are only two races available for druids, tauren and night elves, and neither appealed to her much. Then she clicked on the blood elf and gasped, "She's so pretty!" Forget the druid--she wanted to be a blood elf! I steered her towards the hunter class because clearly she liked animals, and a hunter gets to choose any animal in the game to be her pet. "Do they use bows?" she asked. I said yes, they did, and apparently that was a selling point, because she decided on the hunter.

While the the WOW population is mostly male, the game has been very successful at luring in women gamers. A lot of the reason for that is that the game is social and cooperative. But Blizzard also gets a lot of mileage out of other details, like companion animal fantasy. I enjoy many aspects of the game, but there are two things in particular that really lift my spirits. One is summoning my shaman's wolves:

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Want to save the world? Here's how to do it: become a champion of women's rights.

Check out this NY Times article, The Women's Crusade. 

Some particularly interesting quotes from the article:

"The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine "gendercide" far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century."


"WHY DO MICROFINANCE organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor - especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we've come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn't afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week."


"Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. "Well, if you're not fully utilizing half the talent in the country," Gates said, "you're not going to get too close to the Top 10." The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering."

I [heart] Bill Gates!

One thing the article didn't mention was something that anthropologists know, but many laypeople do not: in countries where women have sufficient rights to control their reproduction and support themselves economically, birth rates fall dramatically. Thus, countries impoverished by having more population than their natural resources support (often exacerbated by environmental degradation, caused, again, by overpopulation) could solve that problem by ending the oppression of women.

Quote from Mother Nature by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy:

"Around the world, there is a tendency for people who are better off to have a lower birthrate. This tendency is evident among peasant women in India as well as women in industrialized societies. Witness the declining birthrates in Japan, or the below-replacement fertility that has long characterized modern France and Italy and is increasingly true in established populations in the United States. Wherever women have both control over their reproductive opportunities and a chance to better themselves, women opt for well-being and economic security over having more children."

Women's rights. If we ever save the world, that will be how we do it.

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The Time Traveler's Wife is one of my all-time favorite books. So when the movie came out, I was all excited, and then it started getting lousy reviews. Uh oh.

What do you do when one of your favorite books gets turned into a movie, and all indications are the movie sucks?

If you are me, you go anyway! If it was a train wreck, it was a train wreck I had to see, if only to know why it sucked. How did the moviemakers succeed in mangling such a great story?

So I saw it. And you know what? It didn't suck. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I'm rather flummoxed by its poor reviews.

Maybe the problem is that it doesn't fit neatly into a genre. The Time Traveler's Wife is about 1/3 science fiction, 1/3 romance, and 1/3 literary novel. A lot of reviewers who didn't like the movie complained that they didn't believe the premise. Guys, DUH. It is a time travel novel. You are not supposed to believe the premise. This is how spec fic works. You ask yourself, WHAT IF this impossible concept were possible? Then what would happen? Too many reviewers don't seem to get that.

Then there was vast ignorance on the part of some reviewers, like the guy who called the original novel "lighthearted chick lit." Yeesh. It is neither lighthearted nor chick lit.

Other reviewers were simply confused by the movie's disjointedness and its jumping around in time. That may be a valid concern. It all fit together for me because I'd read the book, and I could fill in the 3/4 of the novel the filmmakers had to leave out. However, the friend who saw it with me said he liked it, and he had never read the book. I don't think he had trouble figuring it out. So, not to impugn the reviewers and all, but maybe they just weren't smart enough to put the timeline together!

I'm kidding. Sort of. Can you tell I'm a little defensive about this movie?

 I'd have been upset if the filmmakers had not been true to the book, but they were. Sure, they had to cut out 3/4 of the novel to make it fit into 2 hours, but the kept the most important scenes. And while they did change the ending--a slight disappointment to me--the ending they used was at least true to the spirit of the original.

BTW, The Time Traveler's Wife (the book) has the best ending of any novel I have ever read. I can tear up just by thinking about that ending.

The book has its flaws. I never cared for the frostbite scene--I thought it added unnecessary darkness to the novel. And the characters were never all that likeable. It is very unusual for me to love a novel where I don't bond with the characters, but in this case it happened. The book didn't grab me with characters. It grabbed me with intellectual interest (piecing together the disjointed timeline) and emotional resonance. The movie softens the edges of the characters, actually improving on that flaw, but the filmmakers didn't cut the frostbite scene. Pity.

The Time Traveler's Wife is billed as a romance, but to me it's actually more about grief and missing the people you love. If you've ever lost somebody close to you, I think you will find this movie especially poignant. Imagine being able to go back in time and see that person again, when they were still alive. If they died when you were a child, imagine being able to see them now that you are an adult. Imagine being able to go forward in time and see your future child, years after your own death.

And imagine knowing exactly when and how you will die...

Henry's jumping in and out of time, his involuntary leaving of Claire and coming back to her, represents the ephemeral nature of all our relationships. People are with us for a while, and then they go, voluntarily or not, often when you least expect it. And yet in a way they are always with you.

If those concepts resonate with you, I think you will get something out of this movie, reviewers be damned.

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Check out this article: Why Young Readers Don't Like Romance Novel Rapists. It's talking about romance novels of the 70's, which often involved "forced seduction" (a.k.a. rape) of the heroine by the hero. Apparently young readers tend to mock these novels now, a fact which romance novelist Moriah Jovan laments.

But I think it's a good thing. Below the cut, I'll discuss why I think such novels were appealing to readers in the 70s, why they are less appealing today, and why I think that represents progress. This post might not be safe for work.

Question #1 is why rape fantasy is appealing to women at all. Despite some rapists' claims that "she asked for it," I will state the obvious: women do not want to be raped. So why does rape turn up so often in female sex fantasies? Two reasons, to the best of my knowledge (this is a subject it's hard to get much information about):

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Columbine, by Dave Cullen

I've never taken much interest in the Columbine massacre or other school shootings, partly because they're so depressing and partly because I don't like that media coverage makes celebrities out of murderers. However, when I saw Janet Reid's review of this new book about Columbine, I had to read it. It appears that most of what we think we know about Columbine is wrong.

The myth of Columbine is that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullied outcasts who got revenge on the jocks and popular kids. So they were meting out a kind of misguided, vigilante justice.

Turns out, it's not true. Eric and Dylan were not outcasts; they appear to have had average popularity. They did not lack friends or social contact. Their journals contain no accounts of being bullied. They do contain much bragging about how they themselves picked on "freshmen and fags." Eric and Dylan also routinely went on "missions" where they vandalized the homes of kids they didn't like. Eric and Dylan weren't bullied. They were the bullies.

When a tragedy like Columbine happens, we want to explain it in terms that make sense. The shooters were bullied outcasts getting revenge. Violent videogames twisted their minds. Bad parenting sent them down the wrong path. If we can assign the tragedy an external cause, then we feel a sense of control. We can prevent future tragedies, if only we implement some anti-bullying programs, or ban violent video games. Unfortunately, the root cause of Columbine appears to be something not readily controllable. The root cause is that Eric Harris was born a psychopath.

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I'm running, and my heart is pounding because I'm carrying the flag. Every enemy will be gunning for me. I see my teammates up ahead--but there are two enemies in the way. I go wide, trying to veer around them. But it's no use. As the flag carrier, I'm highlighted on their map. They make a beeline for me.

I can't handle two enemies. I can't even handle one. I'm a holy priest, a healing specialist with almost no offensive capabilities. If I stop and fight, I will die, so I grit my teeth and keep running. By my side is a child--an elvish orphan. She is not attackable, nor will she fight for me. Her presence seems pointless, yet she is the reason I'm here.

The enemies catch me, and I start taking damage. I can't fight, but I can heal. As a holy priest, I have 5 different healing spells I can cast while running, and I cast them all, one after another. It's not enough--I'm down to a sliver of health, and I can't cast my heals again for several seconds. I gulp a potion, which saves my life.

My teammates reach us and engage the enemies, allowing me to break away. I'm panting with relief. This is my sixth attempt at this battleground, and the first time ever I've managed to grab the flag. I tell myself, This is ridiculous. As a holy priest, I'm a terrible class for flag running. But the tower I have to deliver it to is just ahead, and it's a clean run--no enemies in sight. My fingers tremble, poised over the keyboard. I'm terrified something will go wrong.

 
It does. A rogue, lying in wait, pops up from stealth. He stuns me. I mash the keys, trying to fire off my heals, but it doesn't work. I can't cast, can't move. He's got me in stunlock. I've died like this to so many rogues. Somehow I manage to throw up a shield; even so, I can see my hard-fought victory slipping away.

My teammates arrive. Someone heals me, and the rogue is too busy fighting for his life to harass me further. I'm off and running. The tower is in front of me. I run inside, and BANG! The Achievement cannon goes off, with three Achievements at once. One for running the flag for the first time, one for running it with an orphan in tow, and one for completing the requirements for Children's Week.

I can't tell you what it feels like to hear that cannon go off.

I've become a fan of the Achievement system in World of Warcraft. When it first came out, I ignored it. I was focused on leveling and dungeon running. I would get Achievements by accident. I'd finish all the quests in a zone, and BANG! The cannon would go off. Finished a new dungeon. BANG! Sometimes the cannon went off for silly reasons. I fell down an elevator shaft. BANG! Achievements aren't private either; they're broadcast to nearby players and to everyone in your guild. Every time I get an Achievement, people congratulate me.

I ignored the cannon at first, but now I'm hooked on it. I'm working on a major Achievement, one that will take me a full year to complete, but which will give me a rideable Violet Proto-Drake as a reward. Guys, it is a PURPLE DRAGON. How can I turn down a PURPLE DRAGON? To get my purple dragon, I have to complete all the world events. The most recent one I did was Children's Week. Among other things, it required me to run the flag in a battleground with an orphan in tow. It's time-limited. I had to finish all the Children's Week Achievements within a week. Hence my profound relief at hearing that cannon; if I hadn't gotten it soon, I would have had to wait a full year before I could try again.

WOW's Achievement cannon has made me realize how little our real-world achievements are recognized. We acknowledge some of the big ones--graduation, weddings--but the little ones go by without so much as a whisper. I'm a single mother, and most of the things I do never get acknowledged. I stay up all night with a sick child? Nobody knows or cares. I cook a delicious, healthy meal for the family? The kids whine and ask for pizza. I make it through my son's grueling soccer season? At the end, we all just drift quietly away.

Real life should be like WOW. We should have Achievement cannons every time we do something new or cool.

Brought home your first paycheck? BANG!
Just turned 30? BANG!
Made it to every last one of your son's T-ball games? BANG!
Jibed a Laser sailboat without capsizing? BANG!
Actually paid attention while your son recited the abilities of every Pokemon in his deck? BANG!
Types "THE END" on your 100,000-word novel? BANG!
Lost your virginity? BANG!

Wouldn't that be totally awesome? Life needs an Achievement cannon.

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Young Miles, by Lois McMaster Bujold

In my opinion, anyone writing character-based fantasy or science fiction should be reading Bujold for research purposes if nothing else, because she is the master.

I've heard her books described as SFF/romance hybrids, but I really don't think they are, at least not the ones I've read. They have hardly any romantic content at all. I think what makes people associate them with the romance genre is the skill with which her characters are drawn.

It is damn near impossible to read a Bujold book and not fall in love with the characters.

She just has that knack of creating fictional people you feel like you know, and want to know better. She could write any plot she wants, and I'd read it just to follow the characters.

Especially Miles, the star of this book. This book, incidentally, is actually 2 full novels and a novella, all squashed together into an 800-page paperback priced at $8--a fantastic value. The novella won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the novels won the Hugo.

Miles is the son of a great military hero, but an assassination attempt on his father and mother resulted in his mother being exposed to a powerful teratogen while Miles was in utero. They managed to save his life, but his bone development was affected, and he is deformed, only 4'9" in height, and wears leg braces to protect his brittle bones. Born into a warrior culture that kills defective infants at birth, he is reviled by his peers. His father's status protects him, but he's determined to make something of himself despite his physical shortcomings, and desperate to make his father proud of him.

(Can you see why this character is TOTALLY AWESOME?)

The two books leading up to Young Miles, by the way, tell the story of his mother and father, how they met, the assassination attempt, and lots of other stuff. Those were Shards of Honor and Barrayar, both of which I enjoyed, but Young Miles is where the series really begins to take off. It opens with Miles as a young adult trying (and failing) to pass the physical tests for admission into the Barrayaran Imperial Military Service. Some of Bujold's books have a slow start, but not this one--it drew me in right away.

Some authors write in blood, and Bujold is one of them. I can tell she is telling a story near and dear to her heart in this book, probably, on some level, her own story. It's my story too. It's the story of anyone who knows he/she has talent, but is routinely dismissed by others on the basis of some surface physical characteristic. For Miles, it's deformity. For others, it might be gender, race, looks. For Bujold, I suspect it was gender. She was born in 1949, so would have been a young adult in the 70's--a tough time to be a highly intelligent young woman.

In reading Bujold, I feel like I'm reading something my mother could have written. She would have been about that age. Over her own mother's protests, she got a degree in math and then went to work for IBM and NASA (on the Apollo Space Program--she was once on mission control!). This was in the 60's and 70's! My mother died when I was 12, so I never got a chance to talk to her about feminism and whether things were difficult for her. I do know that she was a Trekkie, and I can imagine why. Star Trek put women on the bridge of the Enterprise--that had to touch my mother deeply.

Bujold, too, was a Star Trek fan--perhaps for the same reason my mother was--and she wrote Star Trek fanfiction before writing her award-winning original novels (which take place in a Star Trek-like world). I think if Bujold and my mother had ever met, they would have liked each other.

One thing that particularly amused me, having heard Bujold's novels described as SFF/romance hybrids, was how much Bujold dodges romantic content. She must really hate writing courtship scenes, because in the novels I've read, they're entirely absent. Characters go straight from unrequited longing to marriage proposals! And that's not just because of Barrayaran culture in the Miles books, because a character does exactly the same thing in her fantasy novel Curse of Chalion!

It's funny because I kind of get it. Bujold is a very analytical woman (as am I), and analyticals tend not to "get" social rituals such as small talk and courtship. There is a whole subtext, a subconversation,  that goes on in those rituals that people like me have difficulty picking up on. We often wish we could skip all that BS and get directly to the point. Bujold does just that in her novels! For my part, while I do dislike small talk, I actually love the courtship phase of a romance and never leave it out of my novels. In fact, when reading romance novels, I usually like the first half of the novel (the courtship phase) better than the second half (the complications phase). All the same, I "get" Bujold's discomfort with it.

These are brilliant books. They sometimes don't have a sense of urgency to them; they can unfold slowly. But the character work in them is masterful, and so is the plotting. (Bujold describes her plotting method as asking herself repeatedly, "What's the worst possible thing I can do to this character?" Having read her books, I believe it!) I don't always feel dragged through these books, like I do with some that have really grabby plotlines, but I always feel immensely satisfied after finishing one.

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