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Sunshine Challenge - Day 4
Jul. 13th, 2025 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evandar
Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.
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evandarFun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.
( Read more... )
(SFF Bingo): The Birthday of the World And Other Stories, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Jul. 12th, 2025 09:05 amprimeidealI'm pretty sure I've read one book by Le Guin before (this would have been ~15+ years ago so I'm not sure on the details): "Changing Planes," a collection of various worldbuilding descriptions of fantasy worlds accessed from the liminal space of airport terminals. Not much plot, just descriptions. The K. in Ursula K. Le Guin is for Kroeber; her father was an anthropology professor at Berkeley who, among other topics, studied Ishi, an indigenous man from California who was the last of the Yahi people. So this is quite the setup for SF as anthropology.
The reason "The Birthday of the World," in particular, was on my radar was because it contains two of Le Guin's three stories about "sedoretu," a complex social structure where culturally-sanctioned marriages are in groups of four; this premise has taken off in the fanfiction world, because sometimes you're like "this character has a hard enough time trying to find one partner, how would they handle it if they were expected to marry three?" So I wanted to know how more about how worldbuilding worked in that setting--how are names handed down? That kind of thing.
There are eight stories in this collection, most of which are set in the "Ekumen" universe she's used as a setting for many of her novels and short fiction. And several share the themes of "slice of life that's more about revealing the setting than a big plot or conflict."
"Coming of Age in Karhide"--same world as "The Left Hand of Darkness" (which I haven't read), about a planet where the people are mostly human but experience gender and sexuality very differently from Earth people. The changes that come with puberty (or menopause) are weird and scary for everyone, no matter where you are in the galaxy; part of why we have rituals is to help us cope with that. It raises some questions I've seen in a contemporary context about "what kinds of things do people tolerate if they believe they're inevitable, but would rebel against if they thought an alternative was available?"
"The Matter of Seggri"--snapshots from a planet with a very skewed sex ratio and how it evolves over the centuries. One thing that this and "Coming of Age" both did well was depict how children's play is a mirror of what they see in adult society--when kids on our world "play house" or act out stories with their stuffed animals, they're imagining what it means to be "the mother" or "the father," and even if this is a very limited understanding, it still tells you something about the world they live in. Which is oftentimes more interesting or revealing than just depicting the adults doing adult things.
"Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" are the sedoretu stories. In this world, you can only have sex with someone of your same moiety. This is a very big taboo; cross-dressing to adopt a different gender is okay, if that helps with the marriage balance, but the moiety division is more fundamental.
In the introduction (which is great, and has some very funny asides), Le Guin describes "Solitude" this way:
There are some abrupt jumps when it seems the most interesting stuff is happening offscreen (Luis' friend argues with him about religion; a moment later, Luis is elected council leader because everyone likes him, even the religious people). But overall, this one was really compelling.
Bingo: Five short stories. Hot take: at least some of the stories ("Coming of Age in Karhide," the sedoretu ones) are sufficiently slice-of-life, "low stakes, minimal conflict" to meet the spirit of "Cozy SFF." (I don't think "Old Music and the Slave Women" counts in any sense of the word.) I have no idea what I'm actually going to use for that square, something like "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" doesn't do it for me.
The reason "The Birthday of the World," in particular, was on my radar was because it contains two of Le Guin's three stories about "sedoretu," a complex social structure where culturally-sanctioned marriages are in groups of four; this premise has taken off in the fanfiction world, because sometimes you're like "this character has a hard enough time trying to find one partner, how would they handle it if they were expected to marry three?" So I wanted to know how more about how worldbuilding worked in that setting--how are names handed down? That kind of thing.
There are eight stories in this collection, most of which are set in the "Ekumen" universe she's used as a setting for many of her novels and short fiction. And several share the themes of "slice of life that's more about revealing the setting than a big plot or conflict."
"Coming of Age in Karhide"--same world as "The Left Hand of Darkness" (which I haven't read), about a planet where the people are mostly human but experience gender and sexuality very differently from Earth people. The changes that come with puberty (or menopause) are weird and scary for everyone, no matter where you are in the galaxy; part of why we have rituals is to help us cope with that. It raises some questions I've seen in a contemporary context about "what kinds of things do people tolerate if they believe they're inevitable, but would rebel against if they thought an alternative was available?"
"The Matter of Seggri"--snapshots from a planet with a very skewed sex ratio and how it evolves over the centuries. One thing that this and "Coming of Age" both did well was depict how children's play is a mirror of what they see in adult society--when kids on our world "play house" or act out stories with their stuffed animals, they're imagining what it means to be "the mother" or "the father," and even if this is a very limited understanding, it still tells you something about the world they live in. Which is oftentimes more interesting or revealing than just depicting the adults doing adult things.
"Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" are the sedoretu stories. In this world, you can only have sex with someone of your same moiety. This is a very big taboo; cross-dressing to adopt a different gender is okay, if that helps with the marriage balance, but the moiety division is more fundamental.
What is a moiety? a Gethenian asked me, and I realised that it’s easier for me to imagine not knowing which sex I’ll be tomorrow morning, like the Gethenian, than to imagine not knowing whether I was a Morning person or an Evening person. So complete, so universal a division of humanity — how can there be a society without it? How do you know who anyone is? How can you give worship without the one to ask and the other to answer, the one to pour and the other to drink?
I wanted to know more about the stereotypes associated with these. Are Morning people or Evening people the ones who ask, or pour? When you meet someone new in a big city, how do you tell their moiety--would people introduce themselves the way some people in our world make a point of introducing themselves with gender pronouns? I didn't feel like the stories really fleshed that out for me. (Which means I'll just be left to my own devices if I ever decide to write fanfiction with this conceit.)In the introduction (which is great, and has some very funny asides), Le Guin describes "Solitude" this way:
the concern of the story...is about survival, loyalty, and introversion. Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extraverts rule. This is really rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
We have been taught to be ashamed of not being “outgoing.” But a writer’s job is ingoing.
I'm not sure I would agree! The premise, at the start, is that this is another anthropological story; Leaf wants to learn more about the world of Eleven-Soro, but finds it very difficult to talk with the people there, because they barely have any social structure. Her Hainish colleagues think it might be easier for children who grow up in Sorovian culture to understand and make sense of it, and so Leaf raises her son Borny (eight) and daughter Ren (five) on Soro. Years later, Leaf and Borny want to go back to their spacefaring society, but Ren wants to stay. The Sorovians are not "a people;" they are "persons," and Ren wants to be a (solitary) "person." Leaf is aghast and believes she's failed if her child is rejecting all the opportunities of high-technology life in favor or an isolated existence in the jungle.
In some ways, women have a stronger social structure and slightly better lives than men on Soro, so the fact that Borny wants to go back to the Hainish ship and Ren doesn't is understandable in light of that. But I think their ages at the beginning are also significant. Borny can remember a time before Soro, and appreciate what the space station has to offer, much more clearly than Ren. Everything Leaf experiences makes lots of sense--if an ethnographer can never really get an objective, bird's-eye, view, the only way to understand a culture is to live in it authentically, then maybe the only way to do that is to do it from childhood...she wouldn't want to interfere with the native Sorovians and abduct them away from their home, but it feels different leaving her daughter to experience what seems to be a much lower quality of life.
If it was just a story of "extraverts versus introverts," then I might feel more aligned with Ren's attitude of "I don't need a big social structure, I'm just me." But I think there's an asymmetry in that it would be easier (not easy, but easier) for a Hainish person to choose a life more like the isolated Sorovians, than for a Sorovian to make the reverse decision. There's a lot of discourse about "is it a weakness of liberalism that it doesn't tell people what the good life is, or is it a strength that it allows different people and different subcultures to pursue different versions of the good life?" Our world, and Hainish spaceships, are not perfect, but I'm grateful for the different opportunities and technologies they allow.
"Old Music and the Slave Women" is a follow-up to "Four Ways to Forgiveness" (haven't read that either), stories about a Hainish observer on a world full of slavery and, in this installment, civil war. He gets captured by the pro-slavery government, spends some time getting tortured, then awkwardly tries to make small talk with the (former?) slaves like "haha, I, too, have been tortured in the cages!" Is this trauma dumping as bonding opportunity, or cringey "guy who has only been tortured for a couple hours can't possibly understand people who have been slaves their entire lives?" I don't know. There were some poignant reflections on what it means for a family of slaves to have a child born into freedom, even if he only lives for a few years, but on the whole it was very bleak.
This isn't specific to any particular story but I will note that Le Guin is extremely blunt and to-the-point about the facts of life. Societies and family units differ widely across all the settings, but I found a lot more explicit discussion of penises, vulvas, fucking, and rape than in most of what I read. Which can be useful and illustrative, but sometimes gets wearing. (The sedoretu stories were probably the least explicit in this regard. Yeah, their rituals and structures are different from ours, but these are very conservative, socially considerate and rule-following people.)
"The Birthday of the World" is about a society that worships their monarchs as deities (but then it falls apart). There's a first-contact story going on behind the scenes, but the narrator is only observing it at a distance, so her interpretations are intriguing but we only get a little of it. Inbreeding is bad? IDK. It's not exactly "slice of life with no plot" but neither is it "characters making meaningful decisions and traditional plot." Slice of death.
"Paradises Lost" is longer than the others, explicitly set close to Earth and not part of the Hainish continuity. And it's also great. The setting is a generation ship that's going to travel for 200 years to explore a new planet, and how the people who spend their whole lives in transit might (or might not) find purpose. The contrast between how the original ("Zeroes") generation who left Earth fear they may have cheated their descendants, versus how the descendants actually feel about the whole thing, is fascinating. The beginning is a stream-of-consciousness about how a fifth-generation spacefarer might try and fail to conceptualize Earth:
In some ways, women have a stronger social structure and slightly better lives than men on Soro, so the fact that Borny wants to go back to the Hainish ship and Ren doesn't is understandable in light of that. But I think their ages at the beginning are also significant. Borny can remember a time before Soro, and appreciate what the space station has to offer, much more clearly than Ren. Everything Leaf experiences makes lots of sense--if an ethnographer can never really get an objective, bird's-eye, view, the only way to understand a culture is to live in it authentically, then maybe the only way to do that is to do it from childhood...she wouldn't want to interfere with the native Sorovians and abduct them away from their home, but it feels different leaving her daughter to experience what seems to be a much lower quality of life.
If it was just a story of "extraverts versus introverts," then I might feel more aligned with Ren's attitude of "I don't need a big social structure, I'm just me." But I think there's an asymmetry in that it would be easier (not easy, but easier) for a Hainish person to choose a life more like the isolated Sorovians, than for a Sorovian to make the reverse decision. There's a lot of discourse about "is it a weakness of liberalism that it doesn't tell people what the good life is, or is it a strength that it allows different people and different subcultures to pursue different versions of the good life?" Our world, and Hainish spaceships, are not perfect, but I'm grateful for the different opportunities and technologies they allow.
"Old Music and the Slave Women" is a follow-up to "Four Ways to Forgiveness" (haven't read that either), stories about a Hainish observer on a world full of slavery and, in this installment, civil war. He gets captured by the pro-slavery government, spends some time getting tortured, then awkwardly tries to make small talk with the (former?) slaves like "haha, I, too, have been tortured in the cages!" Is this trauma dumping as bonding opportunity, or cringey "guy who has only been tortured for a couple hours can't possibly understand people who have been slaves their entire lives?" I don't know. There were some poignant reflections on what it means for a family of slaves to have a child born into freedom, even if he only lives for a few years, but on the whole it was very bleak.
This isn't specific to any particular story but I will note that Le Guin is extremely blunt and to-the-point about the facts of life. Societies and family units differ widely across all the settings, but I found a lot more explicit discussion of penises, vulvas, fucking, and rape than in most of what I read. Which can be useful and illustrative, but sometimes gets wearing. (The sedoretu stories were probably the least explicit in this regard. Yeah, their rituals and structures are different from ours, but these are very conservative, socially considerate and rule-following people.)
"The Birthday of the World" is about a society that worships their monarchs as deities (but then it falls apart). There's a first-contact story going on behind the scenes, but the narrator is only observing it at a distance, so her interpretations are intriguing but we only get a little of it. Inbreeding is bad? IDK. It's not exactly "slice of life with no plot" but neither is it "characters making meaningful decisions and traditional plot." Slice of death.
"Paradises Lost" is longer than the others, explicitly set close to Earth and not part of the Hainish continuity. And it's also great. The setting is a generation ship that's going to travel for 200 years to explore a new planet, and how the people who spend their whole lives in transit might (or might not) find purpose. The contrast between how the original ("Zeroes") generation who left Earth fear they may have cheated their descendants, versus how the descendants actually feel about the whole thing, is fascinating. The beginning is a stream-of-consciousness about how a fifth-generation spacefarer might try and fail to conceptualize Earth:
The blue parts were lots of water, like the hydro tanks only deeper, and the other-colored parts were dirt, like the earth gardens only bigger. Sky was what she couldn’t understand. Sky was another ball that fit around the dirtball, Father said, but they couldn’t show it in the model globe, because you couldn’t see it. It was transparent, like air. It was air. But blue. A ball of air, and it looked blue from underneath, and it was outside the dirtball. Air outside. That was really strange. Was there air inside the dirtball? No, Father said, just earth. You lived on the outside of the dirtball, like evamen doing eva, only you didn’t have to wear a suit. You could breathe the blue air, just like you were inside. In nighttime you’d see black and stars, like if you were doing eva, Father said, but in daytime you’d see only blue. She asked why. Because the light was brighter than the stars, he said. Blue light? No; the star that made it was yellow, but there was so much air it looked blue. She gave up. It was all so hard and so long ago. And it didn’t matter.
I mean, this is fantastic:
The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder — that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us? History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
There's one part that's like "what if there are two types of people, people who need religion and symbolism and those who don't" that, like Anathem, was pretty iffy. But the narrative undercuts that: some characters try to tell "noble lies," if only by omission, in order to work against a potentially dangerous religious faction. One of the main characters points out that this is very contemptuous of the ordinary people who they're trying to convince, and potentially just as dangerous as the religious extremists themselves.There are some abrupt jumps when it seems the most interesting stuff is happening offscreen (Luis' friend argues with him about religion; a moment later, Luis is elected council leader because everyone likes him, even the religious people). But overall, this one was really compelling.
Bingo: Five short stories. Hot take: at least some of the stories ("Coming of Age in Karhide," the sedoretu ones) are sufficiently slice-of-life, "low stakes, minimal conflict" to meet the spirit of "Cozy SFF." (I don't think "Old Music and the Slave Women" counts in any sense of the word.) I have no idea what I'm actually going to use for that square, something like "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" doesn't do it for me.
Incest Bingo Card
Jul. 9th, 2025 09:30 pmevandar| Dream | Smarm | Unexpectedly encountering family member in a sexual context | Seduction/pursuit by younger character | Taboo |
| Serial incest | Rarepair | Mythology/The Classics | Offspring enters world as adult/rapidly ages to adulthood after being born | Age difference/Age gap |
| Time Travel - sleeping with self | Incest to characters but not audience | FREE SPACE | Estranged/separated relatives | It's not incest if you're not in love |
| MILF/DILF character | Multiple generations of incest | Disguised/mistaken identity | Incest to audience but not characters | It's not sex if... |
| Flaunting taboos | Relaxation | Not talking about it | Seduction | Contact with estranged family member forbidden/discouraged |
Sunshine Challenge - Day 3
Jul. 9th, 2025 09:03 pmevandar
Journaling prompt: What are your favorite summer-associated foods?
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Creative prompt: Draw art of or make graphics of summer foods, or post your favorite summer recipes.
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(SFF Bingo): Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories, edited by Michael W. Phillips Jr.
Jul. 5th, 2025 10:00 amprimeidealI'm not really a horror person but I kickstarted this anthology to support short fiction presses, it would definitely count for bingo, and I was going to send a submission anyway so why not. If that sounds familiar it's because it is. While I don't have a story in this book, I did find more highlights here than the last anthology!
My favorite story was "The River's Revenge," by Jen Mierisch, about monstrous two-headed eels appearing in the Chicago River and wreaking havoc. It's a delightful mix of humor with horror.
All of the authors are people who currently and/or formerly have lived in and around Chicago, so all the little place names and bits of local color were great. In the first paragraph of "Pedal to the Floor into Darkness," K. A. Roy shows off both the very Midwestern dialect of using "pop" for any generic soft drink (where other parts of the country might use "cola" or "soda,") and the obvious double entendre associated with Lake Shore Drive.
"A Good Kid," by Nick Medina, is about a Lego nerd and the mysterious murals in his neighborhood.
Speaking of police brutality, though. "Body Cam" by TJ Cimfel is an excellent use of form. It starts as a contrast between the supernatural horror of an unexplained Something, and the mundane horror of police officers manipulating evidence at black ops sites. We see an officer slowly watching a timestamped loop of bodycam evidence from a fatal incident three months prior, and at first it just seems to be bad guy cops trying to suppress the truth. Then it gets weird. A great example of what you can do with text that you can't necessarily do in another medium.
Bingo: Published in 2025, Five+ Short Stories, Small Press, presumably will still be Hidden Gem for a while (the Kickstarter e-books just came out, so right now no one has rated it on Goodreads yet!)
My favorite story was "The River's Revenge," by Jen Mierisch, about monstrous two-headed eels appearing in the Chicago River and wreaking havoc. It's a delightful mix of humor with horror.
“We might get to name it, huh?” Suki said. “How about Wriggly Field?”
Was that a smile? “I’m thinking Muddy Waters,” Ron said.
“No, wait! I’ve got it. Eel Capone.”
***
***
Last night, Suki had gone to Navy Bier, the closest bar to the Chicago Sun-Times office and therefore its reporters’ logical happy-hour spot. It was incredible how much gossip you could overhear while nursing a Scotch and scrolling Instagram.
Yes, the location mentioned on Wabash Avenue is real, and yes, you should look it up after you finish the story. Lest you worry that this is mere one-sided political ranting, be assured that the the RL Mayor Johnson makes a cameo to be like "everything is fine and under control" when everything is not fine or under control, Chicago's political machine is a thing. ;)
All of the authors are people who currently and/or formerly have lived in and around Chicago, so all the little place names and bits of local color were great. In the first paragraph of "Pedal to the Floor into Darkness," K. A. Roy shows off both the very Midwestern dialect of using "pop" for any generic soft drink (where other parts of the country might use "cola" or "soda,") and the obvious double entendre associated with Lake Shore Drive.
The first thing you need to know is that my sister died when I was fifteen and she was nineteen. Story goes that Lisa was driving too fast through the bendy part of Lake Shore Drive, you know the one, smack dab between Grand and LaSalle. She took that s-curve doing seventy, like she was running from something in her rearview mirror. Spun out. Hit the median like a spinning top, front passenger bumper crumpling like a stomped pop can. It was past eleven, which if you’ve ever driven down LSD at night, with all the lights and the trees and city on one side, the lake on the other, is something you never forget.
"Lives Matter," by Jotham Austin II, is set in Hyde Park, on the South Side. Over the decades, Chicago has been de facto very segregated; the North Side is predominantly white, the West Side Hispanic, and the South Side black. The University of Chicago (where Barack Obama was once a law school professor) is in Hyde Park, which is a comparatively affluent and highly-educated area amidst the surrounding South Side. I know and love this area, and Austin brings out the little details (the Carl Von Linné statue!) Turns out he's also a UChicago professor and specializes in electron microscopy!Walking slow. Crossing 55th street. Down Lake Park toward MSI. Fast walking. Sirens scream in the distance. Stopping under the Metra station bridge. Stopping to catch my breath. Think.
Bigmom’s maxims reciting in my head. Pull that hoodie down, so you can hear and be heard. Show respect. Yes sir. No mama. No talk back. If you can, send an SOS text.
"A Good Kid," by Nick Medina, is about a Lego nerd and the mysterious murals in his neighborhood.
The shapes and sizes didn’t matter. The colors didn’t either. Whether he ended up with twenty 2x2s, thirty 1x1s, an equal mix of 2x3s, 1x4s, and 1x2s, or any other of the seemingly infinite combinations he could pull from the box, he trusted his fingers to build something worth bragging about.
There are several stories that lean into themes of discrimination and police brutality, etc. What I liked about this one was that it acknowledged the horror of, even in a great city in the wealthiest country on Earth, there are still people killed by violence that wasn't targeted at them, just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There aren't easy fixes, but it's good to acknowledge that the police aren't just cartoon villains being evil for evil's sake, they're responding to real forces.Speaking of police brutality, though. "Body Cam" by TJ Cimfel is an excellent use of form. It starts as a contrast between the supernatural horror of an unexplained Something, and the mundane horror of police officers manipulating evidence at black ops sites. We see an officer slowly watching a timestamped loop of bodycam evidence from a fatal incident three months prior, and at first it just seems to be bad guy cops trying to suppress the truth. Then it gets weird. A great example of what you can do with text that you can't necessarily do in another medium.
It’s at this point the impound lot camera footage jellies, smears to gray. A nebulous conspiracy has naturally formed around this. The CPD got ahold of the impound lot’s drive, wiped out Jackson’s involvement. Like there isn’t enough incriminating footage as it is. Besides, Campos had nothing to do with that. Not that he’s above such moves. Hell, those moves are why they hire him.
He could only stonewall for so long. The prying journalists and their relentless FOIA requests. The family, crying on the news every other day. Woke mobs spitting vitriol outside City Hall, shutting down traffic in the Loop. All of it so tiresomely predictable, so tiresomely effective.
"Lucky Charms," by Sandra Jackson-Opoku, depicts an interaction between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. A kid overhearing an "as you know, Bob" conversation for the readers' benefit is a little annoying, but what I like about this is that it doesn't just depict contemporary people reacting to something from the past (including an allusion to "Leprechaun in the Hood," and if I have to know that that is a thing that exists, then so do you), but also characters from the past trying to make sense of the present.
Not every story was a winner for me, but overall, I think if you love Chicago as much as I do, you'll probably find something to like in here!Suzanne heard a rumble from the other direction, the stomp of marching feet. She turned to see a group from the opposite end of the road approaching in military formation. They were men and women in identical blue clothing carrying weapons and see-through shields.
One voice was magnified by the large cone he carried. “This is an illegal gathering. You are not allowed to advance beyond this point. You must disperse. I repeat, you must disperse.”
Suzanne could differentiate the groups by what they carried—their signs, their weapons, their manner of movement. Could these be the Yankees and British at war once again?
Bingo: Published in 2025, Five+ Short Stories, Small Press, presumably will still be Hidden Gem for a while (the Kickstarter e-books just came out, so right now no one has rated it on Goodreads yet!)
Sunshine Challenge - Day 2
Jul. 5th, 2025 08:56 pmevandar
Challenge #2
Tunnel of Love
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.
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Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like
Please forgive me for writing this at speed. It's about one of my closest friends <3
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Sunshine Challenge - Day 1
Jul. 2nd, 2025 12:31 pmevandar
Challenge #1
Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
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