I just found out that (Market) is buying (Story)! I don't want to post the details right now, lest I curse it before any actual paperwork has been signed, but I will say that (Story) is very dear to my heart. I'm jumping-up-and-down-and-squeeing kind of thrilled that it's found a home with (Market).

I wouldn't want anyone to doubt the overinflatedness of my ego, however, what with this apparent show of reserve. So -- I've decided to open a new livejournal, over at gwendolynclare. I've actually been sitting on this handle for a while, but now feels like an apt time to make the switch, since the world looks all shiny and optimistic. Most of the usual features of this lj will now appear there, and while I may occasionally post more personal entries here, I expect ithych to experience the sound of crickets and then die a slow death.

So I somehow got roped into the WiSE (Women in Science and Engineering) planning committee, and now I'm in charge of leading a women in science fiction book club... which means I need books to read! Ideally, the books should...

- have feminist leanings, or at least address gender issues in an intelligent way
- contain elements of badass, extra-sciency science fiction
- be written by women authors, preferably (though not strictly necessary)
- be accessible/comprehensible to sci-fi newbies and not tediously long

Any suggestions?


Also, I've somehow gotten behind again with the book reviews, so here's books sixteen through twenty one:

Dresden Files: Storm Front and Dead Beat by Jim Butcher
The protag/narrator has a thoroughly enjoyable voice and really keeps the pages turning. As a bonus, any book in the series can stand on its own, so you can pick and choose which ones sound most interesting to you. (Which is good, 'cause I found Fool Moon to be a bit yawn-worthy and didn't bother finishing it.) However, this series not recommended for Chicago residents, unless you enjoy sneering at all the details Butcher gets wrong.

Through Alien Eyes by Amy Thomson
A comfortable, easy to slip into sequel to The Color of Distance, but I didn't find it as wondrous or as intellectually challenging as its predecessor. Only recommended if you didn't get enough of the characters the first time around.

And now, the usual YA extravaganza...

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead
I was surprised (and delighted) to discover a YA vampire novel that is thematically deep and subtle. The protag feels very raw and real, and while Mead pulls a major narrative trick on the reader, she manages to make it work. My fantasy-brain didn't engage with the mythology, though.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
Entirely the opposite problem: interesting mythology, but characters that fell flat. The only character who interested me was a minor one without much screen time. Also, why is everything ever described as "blue-black"? Seriously -- white people don't have blue-black hair without the aid of a carton of hair dye. I'm just sayin'.

City of Glass by Cassandra Clare
Aahhh... just right! Laugh-out-loud humor, compelling characters, mythology that digs deep into my hindbrain and makes a nest there. Clare gets the climax perfect -- humanizing the villain just in time for the protag to have to defeat him. Beautiful!

I've escaped unscathed from Mormonland, though the conference itself reduced my brain to a semi-solid consistency not unlike jello. Once I'm functional again, I'll get to play around with all the fun new ideas I collected, and possibly gasp in horror at the grandiose proposals I put forth. I may have promised Caz that I would save the world with a database-slinging web app that I'm in no way qualified to program myself. Oops! Any l33t hax0rz out there wanna save the world for me? I can offer insultingly little monetary compensation and co-authorship in an obscure journal. Bueller? Bueller?

I can't spend one more minute thinking about non-metric multidimensional scaling, so... books!

Mainspring by Jay Lake

A lot of people complain that the protagonist, Hethor, is too passive. To them I say, "Congratulations, Captains Obvious. Would you each like a gold star?"

Yes, the protagonist gets tossed around from one event to the next for much of the book. This is because the acquisition of agency can't happen unless there's a lack of it to begin with. By the end of the novel, Hethor is thinking for himself, making decisions, and driving his own journey, and the decisions that he makes are all the more powerful because they are, to a degree, the first decisions he's ever had to make in his life.

The issues of free will versus destiny and responsibility versus rebellion are intimately tied up in the problem of agency, as well. Steampunk, in the narrow definition of the genre, is a literature of rebellion, and Lake flips this paradigm upside-down and backwards. The protagonist rebels against an oppressive rationalist regime to literally save the world by fulfilling a holy mission, and though Hethor is devout, Lake manages to pull off the story without making it feel dogmatic. I think there's even more to be teased out of this novel on the agency front, but it's still souping around in my subconscious.

I should note that my ScB in Geophysical Sciences hampered my sense of wonder somewhat. I am very good at accepting the initial conceit of a spec fic story, but after that, my science-brain wants everything to follow logically, or my suspension of disbelief takes a hit. For instance, a planet running along the inside of a track means no axial tilt, and no axial tilt means no seasonality. I won't even get into the various and sundry tectonics issues. But for a reader who hasn't taken years of geology classes, I imagine the world-building would be a once-in-a-decade sort of spectacle. Highly recommended.


Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

This is another once-in-a-decade book, but for very, very different reasons.

I should first qualify that Little Brother is not a stunning work of English prose. It reads as if the smart, tech-savvy, seventeen-year-old protagonist wrote it himself (which, obviously, is part of the point -- it is YA, after all). Marcus sometimes halts the narration for several pages to deliver a vaguely-relevant recollection from his backstory or explain how one of his gadgets works, and it does hellish things to the flow of the plot structure.

But. But! This book does so much that it doesn't really matter how the content is packaged; the packaging isn't designed for me, and that didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the content one bit. Doctorow writes a poignantly realistic criticism of the Department of Homeland Security and the terrorism scare, and he doesn't stop there: he also provides a powerful argument for ability of technology to enable us, as citizens, to maintain our civil rights. It is complex, and moving, and deeply patriotic (in the true sense of the word), and it should be taught in every high school in the US. I might cry if it doesn't win the Hugo.

In a few hours, I'm off to Snowbird, Utah for a week at BontaniCon 2009 (also known as the BSA/MSA joint annual conference). I think they like to host conferences in beautiful parts of the country just so we can feel extra-depressed about spending all day in an air-conditioned conference room talking about bioinformatics techniques.

Actually, I'm excited about my weekend workshop -- ecological approaches to analyzing complex community datasets -- but then, I don't have a deeply-ingrained terror of learning to program in R, the way some of my labmates do. Later in the week, I'll present a poster on my data from the Mexico trip I went on last summer, and then I'll be entirely stress-free (or so I hope). Maybe they'll even let me go outside and see the sun, once or twice.

On this afternoon's edition of Things Gwen Despises: friends who turn out to be closet homophobes.

I was at a party on Saturday (yes, it's still bugging me four days later) and my friend -- let's call him "Johnny," because that's not his name -- said something that made it clear he thought anal sex was disgusting, and bad for one's health, and possibly even Wrong. Naturally, I protested his off-hand comment, but much to my shock, Johnny was adamant.

Are there health concerns related to anal sex? Yes, of course; there are health concerns related to any kind of sex. There are health concerns related to driving a car, or riding a bike, or even breathing if you live in some parts of the country. Hell -- I know three different people in my department who have almost drowned at some point in their adult lives, but Johnny doesn't run for the hills when we all go swimming. There are risks involved with lots of activities, but the correct solution is to do them as smartly and safely as possible, not to avoid them like the plague.

What it comes down to is stigma. Johnny has internalized the stigma that our society attaches to non-heterosexual, non-vanilla sex. The problem is, if you attach stigma to an activity that's an integral part of the lives of a particular group of people, you also attach stigma to those people. You cannot support the people and damn the behavior (unless you only want to support abstinent gays).

I don't know why this conversation hit me so hard. Maybe I've spent too much time around uber-leftist bi poly awesome people and have forgotten what everyone else is like. Regardless, that conversation felt like a punch in the gut, and my insides are still hurting. I thought I could feel safe around Johnny; I knew we had some differences in our chosen lifestyles, but I thought he was basically an open-minded and accepting person. Turns out that wasn't a good assumption, after all.

Sometimes, late at night, I start thinking about how small atoms are, and how much space there is between them in most molecules, and how very small subatomic particles are, and how they really only take up a minuscule fraction of the available space. Then I start looking at things around me, things that look solid, feel very reliably solid, and I think about how there just isn't very much stuff in any of it. Everything's basically a microscopic latticework composed of 99.999999% interstitial nothing, and the 0.0000001% that actually exists, does so according to a probability curve.

And this is why it's a good thing I'm not a physicist. I'd end up seeing the world like this all the time, and it's disquieting enough just viewing it this way every now and again at one in the morning.

Nobody told me this was going to be hard.

Okay, that's a lie. My I Liq Chuan instructor told me it was going to be hard. And take months. And hurt like a bitch. All of which turns out to be true. But the rotator cuff is such a tiny little muscle, it shouldn't be allowed to make so much trouble.

Can't I just replace it with a cybernetic left arm? Pleeeease?

Regarding the oppression of drug use in our society:
gay is like Cats (“now and forever”), while heroin is like Twitter (fun at first, sure, but you’ll regret it one day).

This xkcd pretty much sums up my personal life for the past semester. Except that I need to use more graphs.

Well, D is off to Rio for the summer. We'll see what happens when he gets back. Hopefully, his return will be relatively angst-free.

In other news, I found a tiny baby praying mantis in my house, and I'm going to keep it as a pet. My friend Cynthia says there's a cart for used fruit flies where she gets her feeder insects for her spiders. (Yes, my department has a used fly cart.) My parents adopted a cat today; I adopted the itsy bitsy monster.

Been spending too much time working on fiction projects when I should be finishing lab work. Regarding Protag in Work In Progress: facepalm! How could I get it wrong for so long without realizing it? I feel like I've been beating my head against a refrigerator and then wondering why I have a headache. DUH.

I just realized that I haven't posted about any of the books I've been reading this semester, and now the year is nearly half-gone. Well, now it's time for a massive catch-up session. Without further ado, books one through fourteen...

Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water by Elizabeth Bear
Bear is really talented at writing books that contain multiple sets of sympathetic characters with opposing goals and building a plot around how these characters screw things up for each other. If you like clear-cut, direct narratives instead of meandering ones, she's probably not for you, though. My biggest complaint was that I didn't feel like I had time to get to know and care about the entire cast, because there were so many characters. I believe I counted seventeen new characters in the first 70 pages of Whiskey and Water, on top of the large continuing cast that were first introduced in Blood and Iron. Too many cool people meant that I just wasn't invested in most of them.

I Remember the Future by Michael A. Burstein
There are plenty of people who write like they want to be the David Foster Wallace of the spec fic world, who do no mind if a sizeable percentage of their readership get to the end of the story and say "huh?", who may even consider this result to be not a fault but a feature of their work. Burstein is not among them. Along with his deliberate emphasis on clarity, Burstein is a master at dealing with the classic sci fi info-dump -- an issue I've been wrestling with lately, so this was an informative reading experience. I think Kaddish for the Last Survivor is my favorite.

Unwelcome Bodies by Jennifer Pelland
Another short story collection from Apex publications, I bought this one because I read Captive Girl when it was first printed, and it's stuck with me ever since. If you like twisted, character driven stories, you'll like Pelland. She reminds me of Peter Watts in that the reader sympathizes with her characters not because they're likeable but because they're believable. Captive Girl is still my favorite in the collection.

Harry Potter 2-7 by JK Rowling
As many a reader has promised me, the books did get better as the writer and the audience matured -- which was a good thing, since the first book sort of does resemble the simplistic tripe I was expecting from the whole series. In Goblet of Fire, the characters start acting like real people, with separate emotional realities and personal flaws and whatnot, and from then on I found the series much more palatable. Though I did get a bit tired of the climactic twist-ending where a good character turns out to be evil, or visa versa; Rowling kind of gets the Overused Plot Devise award for that.

The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson
I'm always excited to discover a writer who really knows how to write non-human sentient species, and this is a task at which Thomson excels. Within a setting of well-researched and creatively-imagined tropical biology, she asks the questions of what it means to be human, and what it means to be a person -- regardless of species. Her future view of humanity is a cautiously optimistic one, but not unrealistically so.

Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory
I've enjoyed Gregory's short stories, so I was excited to read his debut novel, and it doesn't disappoint. The sharp, detailed realism of the setting and characters juxtaposes eerily with the theme of demonic possession that's central to the plot. I won't say anything about the end except that the twist is so worth it, and very well handled on Gregory's part. Overall, an insightful and thought-provoking exploration of the human psyche.

New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear
I don't usually like the format where a novel gets built out of quasi-independent novelette-length pieces, but somewhere in the middle, I was too invested in the characters to stop reading. Really, really strong on the character front, and with a delicious gaslamp-fantasy historical mood. The ending didn't quite pack the punch it was supposed to for me, but that might be a personal problem.

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
Based on a well-known short story of the same name written half a century before, this book feels a bit too long; it really wanted for a stern editor to chop about 50 or 100 pages of its 340. The plot that is there, however stretched it may feel, is a truly delightful intellectual exercise. And I say this despite the fact that the only female character who isn't made of cardboard seems to have been lifted directly from Taming of the Shrew. Oh well, it's Golden Age style.

Bad Idea: coming home from work after 10pm.

Good Idea: coming home from work after 10pm and making oneself a tasty alcoholic cocktail.

Bad Idea: coming home from work after 10pm and making oneself a tasty alcoholic cocktail when one is already dehydrated from hours of continual caffeine consumption.


Aw, crap.

Last fall, I took the ugly aluminum awnings off my house -- all except for one, which housed a sizeable paper wasp nest. I've been loathe to take it down ever since, not knowing whether they winter their young in the nest or not.

Well, spring is here now, and I can tell because the paper wasps have hatched (or awoken from hibernation, maybe?). They are big and beautiful and mild-mannered wasps, and it's really rather pleasant to have them buzzing around the yard again. The only problem is that they sneak inside sometimes, and there's nothing to be done but wait until they die and clean up the bodies. I know they don't have a central nervous system, but I can't help but wonder if it's sad for such a social organism to die alone.

I haven't really posted anything about what's going on in my life recently, so instead of reading these annoying papers on genetic canalization, I'm going to post! I've got a backlog of book reviews and whatnot, too, but that'll have to wait. Here's the CliffsNotes version of my semester so far:

- Acquired second cat as a playmate for Anansi. Rowan's very sweet and playful and scared of humans, and if he doesn't stop pouncing on my toes in the middle of the night, I swear I'm going to rename him Loki.

- Broke up with D, got back together with D, currently floating in the nebulous purgatory of being involved but not officially dating. Does this story sound familiar to anyone? I'm such a broken record when it comes to relationships.

- Still working on various writing projects, though nothing particularly exciting to report. I did get a personalized rejection from a Major Editor asking me to keep sending stuff their way, which means that I got out of the slushpile at Major Magazine and onto Major Editor's desk.

- Messed up my shoulder a month ago, had to pass on an I Liq Chuan weekend workshop because of it, and I'm still pretty much out of commission. It makes labwork hard, too. Stupid shoulders.

- Still plugging away at my Mexico data, and I need to rework my systematics project so I can present it in a few weeks at a mycology conference in Maryland. Progress is slow, and I doubt I'm going to be ready to take my prelims in the fall.

Saw it on Monday and I'm still pondering. I enjoyed it a lot, though it fell short both as a movie and as a translation of the original work. The soundtrack was atrocious; every time I noticed the music, it was because I was wincing at how poorly it matched up with the feel of the scene. Some of the visuals were predictably stunning, though.

I think everyone can agree that Jackie Earle Haley, in a fair world, has an Oscar coming his way. Everything about his performance -- his voice, his hunched body language, the subtleties of his face when the mask is off -- brought Rorschach to life as if he were channeling the soul of the character. I liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan just fine as the comedian, as well. All the other acting jobs fell short for me, from the mediocre to the laughably absurd. Matthew Goode's Ozymandias in particular was hilarious. Talk about telegraphing the twist -- were we really supposed to be surprised that Ozymandias was the pseudo-villain?

There's something interesting to be said about the styles of violence, though I haven't quite pinned it down yet. I don't think I've ever seen so many different cinematic varieties of violence in one movie before, from Ozymandias' hyper-stylized Matrix-esque fight scenes with the other Watchmen to the raw realism of the Comedian in 'Nam to Rorschach's gruesome splatter. I guess the director was using styles of violence as a way to talk about who the characters were. I'm not sure whether I feel that it worked or not.

Guess I need to see it again.

In the words of Neil Gaiman, "Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!"

"Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed."

"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

"Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please."

"We can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders ... For the world has changed, and we must change with it."

"This is the price and the promise of citizenship."



I never believed I'd be able to say it, but I think I'm ready now.

*deep breath*

I'm proud to be an American.

I just had this epiphany about how weird and gross endoskeletons are.

I mean, I'm okay with ribcages. I like ribcages. The hard bits are toward the outside, and the soft, squishy, delicate bits are safely on the inside. But limbs?! The hard piece is in the middle, and the squishy bits are just sort of... hanging off of it. Ew!

If we ever meet intelligent alien lifeforms, they are going to poke us with a stick.

Space-time is grainy, and the universe is a giant hologram.

I heart those wacky physicists.

Greg got a shipment of black truffles for his research, but he gave one to me for teh culinary consumption. I think I'm going to try to make truffle oil with what's left of it. (I love being a mycologist.)

On a completely related note, Weathorr seems to be vacationing in NC this week. Seriously, the low for tonight is supposed to be eight degrees Fahrenheit. Eight! Degrees! I can only assume this is a sign of the approaching apocalypse.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to go looking at cats again, continuing my epic search for a playmate for Anansi. I hadn't thought it would be this difficult and involved. I also hadn't thought it would require leaving the house when I don't own a proper winter coat anymore and the outside temperature is below 20 degrees. Argh.

I was supposed to go in to work today and do, you know, real work. That was my plan.

Instead, I finished writing a full draft of the book I've been working on since late June. It clocks in at a nice, lean 75k words. Maybe, now that the teen angst is out of my system, I can go back to working on the stuff I was working on back in the spring, before this piece totally derailed me.

I expected to feel lackadaisically self-satisfied, having finished my first book (at least in rough draft form), but I'm feeling antsy, instead. Cut loose, projectless. There's nothing worse than being projectless. Now I have to convince my brain that prepping 600 root samples for sequencing will be a fun project.

I ended up five books short of my goal for 2008, so I'll make the same New Year's resolution as last year: reading an average of three books per month. While I'm at it, I'll add another: writing one book per year. And not failing out of grad school. I should probably add that.


Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
A classic; probably his most famous work. I found it to be sometimes brilliant, and sometimes snorably boring. It does manage to cover a lot of intellectual ground for such a short book, though.

Blindsight by Peter Watts
I heart Watts, and not only because he's obsessively thorough about his background research. His characters are damaged people, and there's something beautiful to me about damaged people. They're real. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, both IRL and in the context of fiction; it might warrant a post of its own at a later date.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling
Finally read the first HP book, and it lived down to my expectations. The only real character (in the sense of having moral complexity) is Snape, and the reader doesn't even know about that until the very end. Harry must be the most happy, well-adjusted child abuse victim EVAR, and -- as Watts understands -- happy, well-adjusted people aren't real.

Jemma7729 by Phoebe Wray
Sort of rough and blunt, from a writing perspective. Not very subtle with the Morals of the Story, but it still had a decent emotional kick to it, since Wray doesn't pull her punches.

In lieu of complaining about how I am a failure at basically everything of significance in my life, here's a long-overdue post about the fiction I've been reading this semester.

Ironside by Holly Black
The sequel to Tithe, and not quite as good, but still darkly delightful. I imagine that this was the kind of book that had to be wrestled to the ground, not the kind that sprung easily from the author's fingertips.

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
One of the original, classic works of urban fantasy. Oddly enough, I actually prefer Holly Black's take on the modern faerie, even though Black could be called "derivative" of Bull.

Bear Daughter by Judith Berman
A beautiful YA fantasy based on the rich mythological tradition of Pacific Northwest Native Americans. Smoothly, intelligently synthesized. I'll be interested to see where Berman's fiction goes from here.

Blood Price and Blood Trail by Tanya Huff
Too much NYPD Blue, too little Anne Rice. I tried picking up the third book in the series and didn't make it through the first chapter. Oh well. The Canadian TV adaptation was pretty sweet, though.

Agyar by Stephen Brust
Aaahhh... there's the vampire. The ending haunted me for a long time after reading it.

Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint
There are so many Newford books, I picked this one practically at random; luckily, it didn't disappoint. Lots and lots of characters, but de Lint is so skilled that he juggles them with ease.

Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
A finely crafted work of fiction that really shows Gaiman's maturity as a writer. However, I didn't connect very well with the main character; I felt like I never really got inside his head. I'd be interested to know how children (the intended audience) react to it.

Astonishing X-Men Vol. 3.1 by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday
The third book suffered from serious Middle Book Syndrome, so it took me a while to get around to reading the fourth, but I'm glad I did. The final book in the Whedon/Cassaday run had me intermittantly laughing out loud and tearing up.

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia
More evocative and unsettling than satisfying. Sedia masters both the aesthetic and social conscience of the steampunk genre as a background for a story that comments on what it means to be human through exploring what it means to be not.

According to a book reviewer over at Time.com:
"There is only one kind of novelist left who takes seriously the idea that complicated intellectual ideas can be the basis for an enthralling narrative. That is the science fiction novelist."

I'm not sure how I feel about such a statement. On the one hand, the elitist in me says, "well, of course spec fic authors carry the torch of intellectualism." But is that really true? Writers were putting Big Ideas into books long before science fiction became a well-defined genre. Any counter-examples out there from non-speculative contemporary literature? If not, I feel like it should be noted more as a failure of, well, everybody else than as a success of sci fi writers.


(And now, back to my regularly scheduled final paper writing.)

Obama's so getting laid tonight. What about you?

It was awesome voting in a swing state for the first time. As of this morning, it looks like NC has gone for Obama by a margin of only 12,000 votes out of ~4.2 million. (Not that it matters in the grand scheme, but I'm still proud.) Most of the local stuff worked out the way I wanted it to, as well. Yay for having a governor who cares about education and resource management!

(Let me be saccharinely optimistic for just this one morning, and then I'll go back to my usual world-hating self.)