Take a look at this map of the Caucasus region. I count twenty-nine languages, in eleven different branches of three different language families.
Here’s the question: when was the last time you read a fantasy or scifi novel with that level of linguistic complexity? Heck, when was the last time you read a fantasy with three languages, let alone three language families?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The other interesting thing is how jumbled together all the language groups are. The boundaries overlap and bleed into each other and dance around, with little islands of one group inside the boundaries of another, and several tiny languages that exist only as enclaves within a bigger area. Keep in mind, this is a historically normal linguistic situation. We here in the USA are used to the idea of enormous, homogenous linguistic areas like contemporary North America, and so we project that assumption into our sff. If we do bring in linguistic diversity, we do it in the European style, with a simplistic “one language per country” assumption.
This is ridiculous. The really large mono-lingual areas (the Americas, Russia, Australia) are all the result of imperial expansion obliterating earlier linguistic diversity. And Europe’s “one language per country” is nothing more than an illusion: the national language of most European countries is really an amalgam of highly divergent dialects, and every European country is pockmarked with minority linguistic and ethnic enclaves. To give two examples close to (my) home, there are Germans in Romania and Romanians in Hungary.
<<Sigh>>. Well at least I’m doing my best to solve the problem 
.
I won!
This was a nice surprise: I got an email from Strange Horizons the other day letting me know that I had won. Evidently there was some sort of prize involved. I had given some money to their fundraising drive back when they were having it, which entered me in a drawing for an incredibly awesome list of prizes. A few of the items were already claimed by the time I got to pick, but nonetheless I’m walking away with a brand-new copy of Twenty Epics edited by Susan Groppi.
Thanks, Strange Horizons!
Rock Lobster
There are days when you really want to listen to Rock Lobster.
Then there are days when you really want to listen to the heavy metal cover of Rock Lobster. Today is one of those days:
(A)sexuality
This week at Strange Horizons: Sex With Ghosts by Sarah Kanning.
This is the first story that I can recall reading whose protagonist is explicitly asexual–that is, not hermaphroditic or ungendered, but simply lacking any sex drive. And of course she gets paired with a robotic double who consists of nothing but sex drive, and hilarity ensues.
Well, not quite hilarity. The story winds up being an interesting reflection on the nature of sexuality and personhood and the interplay between them. There is a suggestion that the sexless narrator is lacking something, and that the encounter with her hypersexed robot twin is necessary to teach her about herself and humanity. There’s a more explicit suggestion that the woman and the robot are mirror images of each other, and are so equally equipped to do the job of interviewing the robot brothel’s clients–the one because she’s completely indifferent to the clients’ behavior, and the other because she’s pruriently interested in all of the clients’ needs.
I find that an intriguing idea, though I don’t know if I’d actually apply it to life. In particular, I have known one or two people in my life who were asexual or close to it, and I don’t think that they are incomplete for it. And if I knew someone who was suffered from monomaniacal nymphomania in the way the robot does, I’d consider it deeply unhealthy. The story was nonetheless thought-provoking.
Annals of Amusing Rejections
A while ago, I got a rejection slip from JJR at F&SF for my story The Last Free Bear. However, the slip called the story The Last Free Beer.
Well, now at least I know what sorts of stories he’s looking for.
People (Don’t) Gots Issues
Hey, so it turns out that Meghan McCarron, who wrote Tetris Dooms Itself that I briefly commented on yesterday, also wrote The Magician’s House, which appeared a few weeks ago at Strange Horizons.
If I were to analyze McCarron based on these stories, I’d suggest that she has some issues that need working out. Tetris is a story about an icky, abusive relationship centered on violence and mutilation; The Magician’s House is about an icky, abusive relationship borne of an older magician’s ability to manipulate his student. Ick and abuse all around!
But I don’t actually think she has issues, mostly because (a) I’ve never met her and know nothing about her, and (b) writers are not their stories. Item (b) is the important one, here. I hate to think what someone would think who was diagnosing me based on the stuff I’ve written.
Sexual Violence
Tetris Dooms Itself by Meghan McCarron, currently up at Clarkesworld.com, reminds me a lot of Kill Me by Vylar Kaftan. Aside from the themes of sadism and masochism, they both left me feeling icky. Stories about extreme sadomasochism just don’t work for me. In the case of Tetris Dooms Itself, there’s the bonus of not understanding much of what happened in the story, even at the literal level.
On the plus side, Blue Ink by Yoon Ha Lee was awesome.
Re: Transcriptase
August 8, 2008 at 12:37 pm (reading) (commentary)
Transcriptase has been up for a few weeks. I meant to link to it a while ago, then put it off, then decided to say something substantial about it.
My first reaction was pretty negative. I wasn’t directly involved in the debacle or the ensuing debates, but it seemed to me that a lot of people had a draconian, puritanical reaction My feeling was, yeah, what he said was reprehensible, but I support the rights of people to hold ugly opinions without having to be drummed out of polite society. The reaction to the incident should not have been to brand Sanders with a scarlet R and purge him from sff-dom. Thus, Transcriptase seemed like a bad idea.
Then I read their “About” page and the accompanying author statements. This gave me a much broader view of the controversy, and a better view of the motives of the participants. The key was seeing Sanders’ reaction to the whole thing. It’s one thing to use insulting language in a private letter; it’s quite another to act like an asswipe in public. Plus, many of the author statements up at Transcriptase said basically the same thing I just did. With that in mind, my feelings shifted: whatever the proper reaction to the first incident was, the subsequent response was just asinine. The writers at Transcriptase have every reason to want to get their work away from that.
Plus: Transcriptase has an RSS feed, and Helix doesn’t. That right there makes me about 100x more likely to read it.
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