I CONTRADICT MYSELF

I'm not good at self-promotion.  I kind of hate talking about myself outside the confines of marshmallows and cockatoo sightings, and pointing out anything good that has come of my writing tends to raise the hackles of my Protestant upbringing.  Conversely, though, I love talking about my stories.  They're like my kids or my pets, and I'm extremely proud when anyone says something good about them.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

All of this is leading up to say that two of my stories are on industry recommended reading lists this year.  "Amor Fugit," which is also being reprinted in Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, is on both the Locus and Tangent 2010 Recommended Reading lists.  More surprising, at least to me, "The Door in the Earth" is also on Tangent's list.  Of all my stories so far, "The Door in the Earth" received the most divided reception.  I think it was one of those that you either loved or hated, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity in fiction.  I'm surprised and delighted to see it on Tangent's list.

There are some really great stories on both lists, including "Eating at the End-of-the-World Cafe," by Dale Bailey, "The Green Book," by Amal El-Mohtar, and "A Thousand Flowers," by Margo Lanagan.  Head over and check them out!

"RAMPION" IN F&SF

This past summer Jeremy spent five and a half weeks in Italy on an archeological dig.  It was the first time we had been apart for any significant amount of time since we got married, and I suddenly found myself with a lot of time on my hands.

The result of all that time is coming out next month in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  It's a novella called "Rampion." It's a historical fantasy set during the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in 11th century Spain, loosely based on the fairy tale "Rapunzel." (By the way, if you want to read a really interesting book about the Muslim rule of southern Spain, I can recommend The Ornament of the World, by Maria Rosa Menocal.) Like history, it isn't always pretty, but I hope you end up enjoying it.

STEP OFF, HOBBIT HATER

This afternoon, Jeremy drew my attention to Ginia Bellafante's New York Times review of HBO'S new fantasy show "Game of Thrones," based on the first book of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.  In short, Bellafante doesn't like the show.  That's fine.  I'm not too crazy about designer shoes and apple-tinis, so I never really got into Sex and the City the way one of my college roommates did.  We all have our cups of tea.

What's not fine is that Bellafante uses her review as a platform to summarily dismiss fantasy as a genre and make the bizarre, blundering generalization that women aren't interested in it whatsoever.  She also seems to have a problem with the existence of dwarfs (in this setting, a little person, not a fantasy creature), battle scenes, and the idea that the show's producers called someone in to create a language for the horse-riding nomads of Martin's world.

The first episode airs Sunday night, so of course I haven't seen it yet (nor will I until it comes out on DVD, since the money fairies have yet to produce the hundreds of dollars we would need to subscribe to cable TV), but I finished reading Martin's books earlier this year.  They aren't high art, but they're well-written, fast-paced, and full of complex characters.  Most notably, Martin includes a range of convincingly-written female characters, which makes Bellafante's pronouncements about female viewers all the stranger.

For example, speaking about the predictably high level of sex in the show (it's not TV, it's HBO) she writes,

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Never mind the fact that the books have their fair share of illicit encounters.  Boy fiction? Seriously?  Did I miss a memo somewhere that disqualified me from reading about swords and sorcery based on my possession of ovaries?  I have nothing against realism.  I'm a great fan of writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Charles Frazier, and Toni Morrison.  I even had a major John Irving stage for a while there.  But I also love Neil Gaiman, Robin McKinley, and yes (horrors!) Tolkien.  (Incidentally, in high school, when I wasn't scarfing down Anne McAffery novels, I was writing Tolkien dwarf runes all over my backpack in glitter pen.)

I love fantasy.  So do all of the women packed into theaters to watch the Lord of the Rings movies and all the millions of paranormal romance fans.  Perhaps Ms. Bellafante needs to widen her own social circle if she's truly never met another woman interested in the fantasy genre.  Or perhaps if she stopped being so snotty, some of those Lorrie Moore fans might confess to liking Tolkien, too.

What I find truly disheartening is Bellafante's general tone of lazy disrespect.  Midway through the review, she laments,

The bigger question, though, is: What is "Game of Thrones" doing on HBO?  The series claims as one of its executive producers the screenwriter and best-selling author David Benioff, whose excellent script for Spike Lee’s post-9/11 meditation, '25th Hour,' did not suggest a writer with Middle Earth proclivities.

Can she truly not conceive of a world where people want variety in their entertainment, or is she so blinded by her personal distaste for all things fantasy that excellent scripts and Middle Earth proclivities automatically become mutually exclusive?  Maybe the bigger question is actually, why did the New York Times choose someone with a fundamental dislike and lack of understanding of the fantasy genre to review a fantasy show?  It's like sending someone with a professed hatred of mysteries to review "Murder on the Orient Express."

Even if "Game of Thrones" turns out to be a flop, I hope the kind of snobbery and artistic bullying Bellafante displays in her review won't keep people from reading quality fantasy like Martin's.  There's room for variety in the world, and life is too short to kowtow to the hobbit haters.

IN WHICH I AM TOO LAZY FOR WORDS

What we have been doing this month:

1. Playing with Nerf swords.

2. Harvesting asparagus from our garden.

3. Spring cleaning.

4. Hosting an all-cat production of The Princess and the Pea.