Things about Star Wars I haven't seen elsewhere, or just want to say anyways.....

Since only two people read this blog, I'm not worried about big spoilers, but if you two haven't seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens, go away now.

Refugees

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I am descended from a man who came to this country as an indentured servant.  He overcame these humble beginnings by marrying a rich widow.  I've never been clear on whether her previous husband was his master or not.  150 years after that there was a revolution (I suspect we were on the wrong side of that one) and 329 years and 13 generations later I was born here.

My quick internet search reveals a range of less than 1% to as much as 10% of current American citizens being descended from colonists.  I'm not "proud" of descending from the original land grabbers, but I don't lose a lot of sleep over it either.

I find the current squawking over Syrian immigrants deeply offensive.  90% of YOU are descended from people my ancestors wish had stayed home.  And 99%+ of us are folks the first residents could have lived without.  We forget how deeply suspicious "we" were of the Irish, the Poles, the Italians. 

I thought being American meant doing the decent thing, even if it killed you.   I don't think we are ACTUALLY at any risk from Syrian refugees, mind you.  But even if we were? 

The libertarians say that:

Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States, and none was successfully carried out.  That is one terrorism-planning conviction for every 286,543 refugees that have been admitted.  To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014.

 I cannot imagine having to live in Syria as it is today.  I looked up the population at one point, it's too large for the US to take it all in, and at some point the rest of the world needs to be a better place to live, but we can continue to take the few, highly vetted, refugees we do take.

Is the 80-hour Rule Ruining Medicine?

Comparing our system to itself isn't going to answer the question, of course things get worse when you cut the hours and continue to do things the same way. European medicine as outcomes as good as ours, and much more reasonable training hours. How do THEY do it.
I spent 6 weeks as a medical student in a French hospital. The only things I have to suggest is that there seemed to be more direct attending to resident time, and fewer residents per attending. There wasn't this endless cloud of residents talking to each other. (I have just put this together. I am going to think about this some more.)

Eating with the Men in Black

Envy of Angels by Matt Wallace was a a digital-only novella released October 2015.  There is another author on Amazon with the same name, but I believe Envy of Angels to be this author's first book.  I liked it.  The idea of a catering company that works for the Men in Black is fun.  Although the non-humans here include more than aliens.  

This is the first book in the series and introduces a largish number of characters.  I have three criticisms, none serious, all of which I think stem from it being a first book with a lot of ground to cover.

The last sections of the book rocked, and rocked hard, I laughed a bunch and wasn't sure what would happen next.  I enjoyed the mix of mass culture with the arcane in a new way.

• The boss' decision to fully embrace the new employees who serve as the audience surrogate along with how he incorporates them both into some of the early action seems forced.  Another reviewer commented how the male half of this duo seems particularly limp as a character.
• We are informed early that one of the characters is gay.   This fact plays no role in the plot and we are not told the sexuality of ANY OTHER CHARACTER, so it feels forced.
• The very end is slightly over written.  It underestimates the intelligence of the reader.

These issues did not keep me from enjoying the story, and I have already pre-ordered the next one.

Maine Game Wardens

...or Why I'm Not Worried About Going to Hell


I have a very good friend who is worried that I am going to hell. Sweet woman, never lived more than 100 miles from where she was born. I don't think she knows well anyone besides me who is not a Christian. So I tell this story, which I am copying from a review of the book:

It was a cold, rainy November day. The wardens had found the body of the suicide, and the Reverend was speaking to the victim's brother. He looked solemn for a minute, then asked if the church would bury his sister, since she had just been told in church that suicide was a sin that God could never forgive. Her answer was basically this:

"The game wardens have been walking through the freezing rain all day trying to find your sister. If they hadn't found her, they would have looked all day tomorrow and the next day, in the cold, in the rain, so they could bring her home to you. If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that God is no less kind, committed, or merciful than a Maine game warden."

~Kate Braestrup Here if you Need Me

If there is a god, I believe that he will forgive my lack of faith, and be pleased by my attempts to serve his creation. I also have no interest in a god who would be petty, mean or wasteful. Eternal damnation is a silly idea.

Vermont and Guns and My Man Bernie.

Bernie Sanders is my candidate.  According to a poll I took, I agree with him on 95% of things. However today he said something stupid, and it breaks my heart, yet I understand.  Bernie is an old white guy, a transplant to second whitest state in the country.  It is also the second least populated.  (Only Maine is whiter and only Wyoming as fewer people.)  I was born in one of these states and grew up in another, I am intimately familiar with the well-intentioned "not getting it" we can have.  I was painfully schooled by some very smart black people and now I mostly keep my mouth shut.

There's not a lot of gun control in Vermont, but there are more deaths than the Senator realizes.  In 2011, for the first time, there were more gun deaths than motor vehicle deaths.  This summer Vermont suffered a quadruple homicide, and it was not the first in the state's  history.  According to the Vermont State Police that was a mentally unbalanced service man in 1945, who apparently shot to death a family of four.  There was another one in 2001, a man attempted to sell a gun and when rebuffed shot four members of the same family.

These are great examples of why everyone, including Vermont, needs better gun control.  Alright, maybe not the 1945 murder, but interestingly, mentally unbalanced white man, just sayin'.

But my man Bernie went on about how Vermont was "different" from Chicago and Los Angeles.   There are two immediate issues here:

1. I suspect many perceived Chicago and Los Angeles as coded talk about non-white people.
2.  These mass shootings aren't happening just in urban places.  They happen everywhere.   Almost exclusively perpetrated by white men.

I love Bernie, I would like to see him get better knowledge about racial issues.  I have no doubt that he means well....

The Aeronaut's Windlass

I really liked this book.  I read it all in a day and I will re-read it a couple of times, I am quite sure.

The plot flew, the characters were interesting, the world building fantastic.  I read it all in a day, mostly on the treadmill.

My only quibble, and I wish I didn't notice it, is that although there are a several female POV characters, the book is missing women in the background, and older women.  The Master Mage is an elderly male with a younger female apprentice, the older guard is male with two young women trainees.  Our ship has a male captain and apparently and entirely male crew, but his ex-wife commands another ship.  Although we see no women in the crew on her ship.

The military of the enemy spire exhibits casual sexism, but "our guys" are only a little better.  The ex-wife makes a comment about the engineer allowing women in the engine room.  I wasn't sure from that if we were supposed to see women in public life as a new thing in Albion.

One of the trainee's mother gets a short POV.  A major villain is female but she is the puppet to an unknown master (whose gender may not yet be specified).  And the exterminators are mentioned as being male and female, although the two named ones (the guild master and the dead guy) are male.

I really doubt that this was intentional on the author's part.  It didn't keep me from enjoying the book, but as a middle-aged woman in the background, I'd like to see more of my own.  There were a number of minor characters that could have easily been made female, Esterbrook, either ship's surgeon, the inn keeper, the guild master, the Spirearch, Barnabus....

I really like this author and I would love to have a skillful way to bring it to his attention without risking offending him.  Ah well.

P.S. The only people specifically mentioned as black or brown are foreigners at the docks.  Albion could be a multi racial society, but it seems unlikely as the black and brown folks are presented as "other". Is the guy on the cover the ship's captain, who is explicitly middle aged in the text?  Also, when did I start noticing this shit?  I really wish I didn't, but I also think unless people notice it won't change.

Good Government as Fantasy?

Yesterday I started reading California Bones by Greg van Eekhout.  I stopped a few chapters in and switched to re-reading The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.  I realized when I continued reading this morning that the books have in common that a POV character in each has as a revolutionary goal, Good Government.  Not conquest and empire, but infrastructure and opportunity.

This says something about our world.  I was thinking back on SFF books I've read recently:

John Scalzi's The End of All Things and Harry Connolly's A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark both have good governance as aims of major characters.

It's a form of competence porn, I suppose, and one I find attractive and like to read.  Hmmm.

Iceland and Refugees

I think....

1. Iceland should limit themselves to 300 to start with (that's 1/1000 citizens).
2. It might be nice if they picked a region or an ethnic, linguistic or religious minority and tried to take all of that group, to provide some cohesion to their new community.
3. They should be spread out over Iceland like a finely knit shawl, with a little clusters and lines.
4. They should have to agree to learn Icelandic.
5. There should be a matching service, so that farmers took in people interested in learning to farm, and teachers with teachers...

I'm not a professional at any of this.  Just a day dreamer.  We could do the same thing in the US.  If we took 1/1000, we could take 318,900.  The population of Iceland.

Hugos 2016

I was a first time Hugo voter. I paid for my own membership. I did not vote in every category (I ran out of time & energy). With one exception, in every category in which I voted I attempted to read every entry. With one exception if I didn’t finish it, it went below No Award. In no category in which I voted was No Award ranked first. I will be nominating for Worldcon74. Give me a list of things you think are good, and in the novella, novelette and short story categories, I will read them. I am not promising to read a 10-20 novels.  And I am probably not interested enough in FanCasts and related works to be useful.

Some of the puppy choices were excellent. ‘Totaled’ and ‘Ashes to Alluvium’ stood out. Some didn’t interest me. Some were awful.

I will not boycott any publisher for anything less than slave labor.  I will not “boycott” any author, I just don’t read what I don’t like.

Hugos 2015, Done and Dusted.

Well, that's over.  I listed some of the puppy nominees above no award because I thought they were good.  None of them won.  I'm sorry for those authors and I wish them well another year.  I have to consider whether I am willing to read enough to nominate this year.  I suspect not.  But I will be voting.  And I am already a member of Worldcon75!

Best Fancast

I punted.  I'm not interested enough to listen to these.  I ranked the two that are not on a slate in a random order.  Please forgive me if I chose unwisely.

Best Fan Writer

Oh god. This one was miserable.  I read the entries in the packet and went to a couple of the websites.
I read part of Laura Mixon's report on the Requires Hate/Thai writer conundrum.  I don't entirely understand the situation, but I think that's because the person involved (not Ms. Mixon) is, as we say in the south "not right".  I've never heard of any of the people involved, I can't understand why she was willing to spend this much time on it*, but she was.  I have read arguments and counter arguments on whether this piece "deserved" to be nominated.  Oy!

David Freer's submitted material was not appealing, but the bio on his website was.  He addressed the fact that he is also a professional writer.  I skimmed the first two posts from the submitted blog.  Okay, the third was a re-post from another nominee.  I was unable to finish it.  This nominee I am dithering on.  Oy!

Next - I didn't finish the sample.

Next - Ditto.

Jeffro Johnson submitted three samples, all book reviews of older books.  One and three were fine.  Two, two was dodgy.**.  However, he is a fan, he is writing, and some of his writing is interesting/helpful.  Even the squicky review was helpful, I'm not going to read the book.

Next year, I hope there are better choices.

*I initially meant why Ms. Mixon was willing to write about it, realized it was ambiguous, realized I meant it in both senses.  I don't understand why the blogger in the report spent so much time being awful to people.  What's the point?

**I have to say that Mr. Johnson's second review evoked certain stereotypes for me.  I'm not going to say anymore because I don't want to be hateful.

Best Editor - Long Form

This one wasn't too bad.  Only two of the Editors submitted anything to the packet, in both cases lists of what they had edited in the year 2014.  I ranked them based on how much I had enjoyed the books they edited.  I recognize that this is a proxy with issues, but it's what I have.

Sheila Gilbert & Anne Sowards (not necessarily in that order)

Two of the remaining editors work at Baen, edit a variety of works, some I like, some I don't.  They got ranked in a order that seemed appropriate to me:

Jim Minz & Toni Weisskopf

The other nominee was not ranked as I have yet to be able to finish anything he's edited.

Best Professional Artist

              I ranked four of the five nominees.  One nominee didn't include any work in the packet and the only results to my search were improbably large breasted women in impractical armor.  

My first choice was Julie Dillon.  Her stuff is incredible.  My biggest issue with it is I want to READ the novels that go with them, and they don't exist.  These worlds she created for her art are fascinating.

The other three are apparently from a puppy slate, but they appear to be talented professionals and I ranked them in the order they appealed to me based on their submitted works.

**Note: I set as one of my rules for myself that if I couldn't finish it, it didn't get ranked.  I think I am going to have to break that one.  I don't think I'm going to be able to get into The Three-Body Problem.  It's just not grabbing me.  I'm not nuts about a bunch of Asmov's stuff either, but I'm glad I read it.  I may be able to read this at another time, so I will rank it above no-award.

Reading for the Hugos

As a younger person I was a rabid reader of Science Fiction (and Fantasy).  Robert Heinlein, AnneMcCaffrey, Madeline L'engle, Patricia Mckillip, C.J. Cherryh, Andre Norton, and E. Nesbit come most quickly to mind.  I've since added Terry Pratchett, Jim Butcher, Harry Connolly, Barbara Hambly, more C.J. Cherryh, Patricia McKillip, Naomi Novik, John Scalzi and the incomparable Lois McMaster Bujold.  I've read a scattering of other authors I liked, Robin McKinley, Paolo Bacigalupi, John Ringo, David Weber, Chrostopher Paolini, Connie Willis, Tanya Huff, Cliford Simak.  You get the picture.  I have fairly broad tastes.
     I don't read a lot of fiction these days.  I work in an emotionally and intellectually demanding job and I spend most of my leisure reading time on long-form journalism.  I re-read a fair amount as I can put down a half-read book when I know the outcome.  (or skip to the last chapter without ruining my enjoyment.  I browse Reddit and follow some interesting people on Twitter which leads me to interesting articles.  I also read John Scalzi's blog, Whatever.  (I'm going to be honest, Scalzi is a good writer, but I am a bigger fan of the blog.)
     So when "PuppyGate" happened my first reaction was, "Nothing to do with me."  And then I decided it did have to do with me.  Younger me, for sure.  So I paid my $40 and I tooks my chances.   I have read 3/5; 0/5; 1/5;0/5; categories in order of length.  My thoughts after this picture break.

Reading late into the nights. 

1. I think next year for the novels, each publisher should submit the first 30% of the book.  If the voter is not inspired to buy the rest, they can rank it below "no award".  (Not sure how serious I am about this idea.  I have two novels left to go.)
2. I am going to at least start every work.  There may be valid choices on the Puppylist.  (One I've found so far is the short story "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium".)
3. If I can't finish it, it goes below no award.
4. If a category is of no interest to me, I will consider using a Puppy-free voting guide. (Fancast I'm looking at you.) Or I may leave it blank.  Not sure.
5. I wish Butcher hadn't been nominated.  I read the Dresden files on the day, I'm a hardish core fan. (I buy the Kindle version and later pick up a used hardback.) I think that it would have been better for the whole series to be nominated at the end, a la Wheel of Time.  To my knowledge he has said ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about this.  I suspect he is ambivalent about being on the Puppylist.  That said, I will rank it, but it's tough to know where.
6. In reading for the Hugos I am actually growing in appreciation for Scalzi's writing.  Locked-In was a very fresh idea.  I wish it had been nominated.