Dream with Our Eyes Open

Hey, it's the last weekend of this year's auction, which provides funds for people of color to attend SF&F conventions. There are some great fannish things for sale, including signed copies of books and ARCs by folks like N.K. Jemison, Martha Wells, Seanan McGuire, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ann Leckie, Neil Stephenson, and Patrick Rothfuss, custom jewelry, crtiques of your writing, and so forth.

Go ye forth and bid.

I finished the latest October Daye novel, Once Broken Faith. I think it had less cutesy "Gee, I'm so awkward and blunt" than the previous ones, but not by much. It sort of ended in the middle of things. I think it's that the earlier books were each a self-contained story arc that had some sort of growth or change for Toby. Now McGuire is moving into the end game, as it were. There are three more books, according to McGuire's website, but I think they will all be part of the same uber-arc (hmm, rather like Samurai Deeper Kyo's huge Mibu arc ... although that was proportionally even longer).

I read this on my Kindle. It includes a bonus novella, about some of the recent events from the point of view of Arden Windermere, Queen in the Mists. And then Great Big River suggested another short work, the novelette "Full of Briars," which has Toby's squire Quentin as the POV. I sort of liked it? But I had to agree with a couple of online reviews I read that the event and idea at the very end seemed to come out of nowhere. TVTropes actually has some pointers to where this material was telegraphed earlier, so some other time I'll check that out.

But reading these works one after the other pointed out something: McGuire doesn't seem to have very distinctive voices for these characters. If you had some general statements from Toby, Arden, and Quentin, selected so as not to indicate directly who was talking, it might be hard to tell them apart. Huh.

I'm now reading Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, a nonfiction book about the African American women who were the "computers" for the U.S. space program. It's interesting but certainly not involving the way fiction is for me. Part of the issue may be the scope of the story. The author is not telling the story of just one of these women, and she is also giving the sociopolitical background against which they first came to work for the government (as part of the aviation research effort in WW II). This includes the situation of African Americans in the military during the war and afterward and will later include the 1960s Civil Rights Movement events. So the pace gets a rather uneven, I think. I'm a little less than halfway through it.

If you think you may have heard of the book and are not sure why, you may have, like me, been seeing ads for the movie based on it, which is due out in 2017. Those ads showed up on F-book even before the book was released (Sept. 6). There is some really impressive talent involved in the film (official movie site).

Not sure what I'll read next. I have some more nonfiction, but I think I will want some fiction at that point. I may do a re-read of something that was new to me in the past few months: I have a lot of choices there.

Saw this a couple of days ago at Scalzi's Whatever:

The little bug girl at 3:32 will steal your heart away. And I saw "myself" several times. How about you?

"Con or Bust helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF cons. It will be taking requests for assistance attending cons in April, May, and June from February 15-25, 2013. For now, this post is where to find out more about requesting assistance."

- Read more in general about Con or Bust here

Cho here: The Con or Bust auction is a win-win situation all around. If you're a bidder/buyer, you can walk away with some deeply cool stuff, like autographed books or vintage fannish posters (I got an original U.K. teaser poster for "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" one year ...). If you're a fan of color (and that includes aspiring authors/artists etc.), you can apply to get financial support to attend a convention, with all the associated opportunities to network, talk to publishers, and do all the usual con-type stuff (GOH speeches, coffeeklatches, author panels, special film showings, art shows, the dealers' room, fannish live performances, etc.).

Dine (Navajo Nation) filmmaker Brian Young is trying to get his animated film off the ground. See more (and back the project) at Kickstarter.

There's something Seanan McGuire refuses to do to her characters ... and I think I need to check out her books now.

In the comments, nancylebov references a very interesting article from TOR: A need to deal wounds: Rape of men in Cherryh’s Union-Alliance novels. You should note that this is specifically the rape of male characters by female characters. The lead exhibits are Signy Mallory in Downbelow Station (spec. with regard to Josh Talley) and Ariane Emory I in Cyteen.