tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32354312662336024222024-02-27T03:15:14.378-08:00Silver GogglesWorn by the steampunk postcolonialist when engaging with issues of race, representation, diversity, and other such exciting adventures as one might find in our genial genreJhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.comBlogger238125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-59754598038259171092018-03-03T09:23:00.001-08:002018-03-04T00:21:50.996-08:00Review: Cold Magic, by Kate Elliott<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When one hears a book described as "<a href="http://www.kateelliott.com/index.php?pageID=6">Afro-Celtic icepunk fantasy</a>," it is imperative that one reads said book at some point in time, especially if the description came right out of the authoress' mouth into one's ears directly. And thanks to a kind soul who responded to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/354IHQ2SSUK7G">my Amazon Book Wish List</a>, I have this lovely book in my physical hands. Thank you, book buyer! This review is for you!<br />
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<i>Cold Magic</i> is set in the 18th century of a world like ours, but with a radical split in civilizational development. Kate Elliott, however, did not throw in just one bifurcation in history as we understand it: West African groups have moved to the Mediterranean; the Roman Empire still exists, and the Celts of the north have moved down south. This creates a cosmopolitan world recognizable to us by the references to the histories of the Mali and Roman Empires alongside the development of certain technologies we commonly associate with the 19th century, such as rifles and airships. </div>
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Because this is also a fantasy novel (more genre ruminations in a moment), there are also: references to a zombie outbreak that establishes certain ethnic groups in various places, cold mages who can't hang out like regular people because they can literally put out fires with their mere presence, a liminal plane where ghosts and spirits live in conjunction with living world geography, prophetic dreams, trolls (well, large bird-like people with feathers and stuff) and shapeshifters. This is a world in which one can get married with a spell so binding that divorce is just not possible, find a family member in the form of a saber-toothed cat, and walk between the worlds pursued by one's unwanted but dashingly handsome husband, while being embroiled in struggles between various world powers. </div>
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That's the journey we follow Catherine Hassi Barahal on in her first-person narrative. Does it get kind of bonkers? Yes, of course it does, it's a fantasy novel. Cat is an orphan living under her uncle's roof, growing up alongside a beloved cousin, Beatrice, in a house long-reputed to be mercenaries, spies, and couriers. Cat is loyal, smart, curious, occasionally impulsive. She steps up to protect her cousin out of a deep affection that's clear in the teasing that the two trade back and forth. She also has some of those deep-in-denial feelings for her cold mage husband, Andevai. Through Cat's eyes, we're introduced to this changed world that is dominated by African and Celtic influences, a far cry from usual neo-Victorian steampunk, or even faux-European fantasy fare. There are multiple cultural groups within the novel, not even taking into consideration the obvious differences between towns that are a day's travel apart from each other, expressed with different approaches to strangers and guest-rules. </div>
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Categorizing this novel as steampunk, if we are so inclined, means asking questions about genre definition, and the function of that definition. Is this novel steampunk? </div>
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Can we apply that vague general rule "steampunk is what you make of it" to this novel? Probably. It's a useless rule, of course; we use it so we don't get into fights about defining steampunk and letting as many people play in the sandbox as much as possible. </div>
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Does this novel have the hallmarks of what makes a steampunk novel? As I've mentioned in my own <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2013/07/jhas-very-own-steampunk-101.html">Steampunk 101</a>, some 5 years ago now, the core elements of steampunk, unlimited by geography, are <b>technofantasy </b>(or fantastical technology), an <b>alternate world history</b>, and an incipient or ongoing <b>industrial revolution</b>.</div>
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A plot point involves the destruction of an airship and its hangar: "Like a bird, it moved in the air without pluging to earth, but it had such an astonishing shape, not like a balloon at all, but rather like a balloon caught at opposite points and drawn out to an ovoid shape. ... A huge basketlike gondola hung beneath, and ... lines were tossed ..." (64). Lectures involving the science of the airship, and students taking down notes with the appropriate amount of technobabble, with Bee demonstrating her attention to lecture, "Bouyed up by a force equal to... gases expand in volume with..." (29) There are rifles, and a climactic scene takes place in a factory. So far, so steampunky.</div>
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What, then, of the alternate history? Elliott's worldbuilding is <i>extensive</i>. As I mentioned above, it doesn't have just one event that brings the changes to this 19th century, but several. Paris is still called Lutetia. The Hassi Barahals are offended to be called Phoenicians, insisting on being called Kena'ani instead. Despite the Roman Empire having risen and fallen a long time ago, its presence is still felt in bloodlines and family ties still maintained, such as the Hassi Barahal family with two branches, one in Ardunam (where most of the action takes place) and the other in Havery, intermarrying to strengthen ties between them. In describing her lineage, Cat says, "My mother's people are the Belgae. They lived in the far north... My father wrote that you could see the ice from their villages. The Romans fought them. The mage Houses civilized them" (140) and continues, "My father's lineage came out of Qart Hadast (Carthage) in the north of Africa. His people are Kena'ani sea traders, who in ancient days battled the Romans to a standstill" (141). </div>
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Ethnicity coded in physical features pops up often, driving in the difference of this world from ours. When Cat finally has the presence of mind to ask her new husband for his name, she remarks, "You name yourself in the Roman style .... Yet you are obviously not of Roman descent" (128). Andevai is described as having "a proud face more Afric than Celtic and very handsome eyes" (134) while her shapeshifting brother has "reddish-brown cast of skin" and coal-black straight hair (372). One young man is "milk white," another is "coffee dark" (27) and presumably they're both deliciously handsome. Though descriptions of physical appearance don't crop up often (except for what Andevai wears; Cat is very observant of the various things he wears, because it indicates his struggle to fit into the class he was raised, but not born, into, and also because she is in <i>so much</i> denial about how attractive she finds him), Elliott makes enough of them to indicate the physical diversity of the people inhabiting the world. </div>
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(Of course, knowing some readers, this is likely to be completely lost on them, and they will assume everybody's white, simply because they all have skin.)</div>
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There is a great deal of pleasure to be had as a history buff in steampunk for the identification of "Easter eggs"--the bits of historical fact in among the counterfacts, the challenge of teasing out where the histories diverge and tickling our brains with the extrapolations of how history unfolds as a result. That's the draw of the alternate history genre, and <i>Cold Magic</i> fulfills this brief admirably; half the time I felt alienated by the history of the text in such a way that piqued my curiosity further about the originating points that Elliott was trying to diverge from. </div>
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To add further complication to the alternate history are the elements of magic: cold magic is wielded by the mage Houses, purportedly to offset the power of non-magical princes who rule by military might. This power is thought to be linked to lineage and genetics, leading to breeding programs and systemic rape. Creatures from other dimensions interacting with humans for unclear reasons, such as the eru who helps Cat. There are "trolls," based on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon">troodons</a>, because why not have dinosaurs in our epic alternate history fantasy while we're at it.</div>
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Empirical science and fantastical magic as we understand it in our world are often opposed to each other--the era of magic gives way to the era of science in many fantasy stories in which modernization is occurring. Similar happens in <i>Cold Magic</i>: the cold mages are opposed to guns and Andevai is sent to destroy an airship early on. (Compare this to, say, <i>Everfair</i>, in which mystical elements are key to working with nuclear power.) Cat and Bee are constantly being menaced by the machinations of cold mages (haha see what I did, nvm) that seem opposed to mechanical technological development, a reflection of the age-old tussle between tradition and modernity.<br />
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Industrial revolutions are interesting not just for the ways that new technologies are introduced into a society, but also for the ways that people's bodies and talents are instrumentalized for profit; in the world of <i>Cold Magic</i> and in fantasy worlds generally, these bodies and talents are magical, flukes of nature. Andevai is the result of a rape two generations past by a cold mage seeking to reproduce cold magic through a possible lineage in a breeding program. He is psychologically torn down to keep him in line. Bee's family is forced into a difficult position because of her prophetic powers. These are not the sort of things that crop up in a mass populace. Class differences are addressed in the novel; Cat and Bee are daughters of a poor household, and there is a factory scene, which are circumstances borne out of historical happenings, but they're not the focus of the novel. Maybe this changes in the next two books (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/354IHQ2SSUK7G">buy them for me?</a>). </div>
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I thus hesitate, as a result, to call <i>Cold Magic</i> a steampunk novel, because of this opposition. This theme of magic-versus-technology doesn't force a re-consideration of the development of technology. As a steampunk reader, I am more interested in the ways that technology and tradition meld together into a cohesive whole even as its disparate elements are clearly visible, whether as a patchwork blanket or a well-planned quilt, rather than as opposing forces. That said, as a genre-blending piece, this novel is pretty scintillating in how it plays with its various elements. It has the comfort of my dad's Saturday fried rice, pulling out leftovers from the whole week to throw into the wok, with egg and rice and soy sauce, everything sort of blends in together, and you know you just put chicken and pork into your mouth at the same time but they are no longer disparate flavours, having been transformed by each other. So <strike>eat</strike> read the thing. Enjoy it for what it is and don't expect exact conformity, which is what we steampunks are used to anyway.<br />
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Also, the series is finished, hurray! Kate Elliott's <a href="http://www.kateelliott.com/index.php?pageID=6">site has a whole list of places where you can buy this book from</a>.<br />
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Thanks again to the person who bought me this book!! If you enjoyed this review, please consider <a href="https://ko-fi.com/jaymeegoh">dropping me a few bucks for tea or hot chocolate</a>.</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-56312219720936703702018-01-01T01:18:00.000-08:002018-01-01T01:18:09.275-08:00The Steampunk Postcolonialist is DONE SCHOOL!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I rarely post here these days, and it's not from a lack of desire to do so. I've had multiple reasons not to:<script type="text/javascript">
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- I've had to focus on writing my dissertation and other such papers. Writing blogposts for a public audience is very different from writing for an academic audience: the discourse differs, the language loosens. I would start writing a chapter the way I hoped I would write about for this blog, and my adviser would remind me that when I write a dissertation, I can't write it as I would a blog. And fair enough! However, it became very difficult for me to switch gears regularly and write posts that I would be happy posting. But writing is also so very difficult, and expending energy on more than one thing seemed unproductive. Graduate school (and academia generally) is an anxiety-producing space and I would feel tremendously guilty for wasting my time thinking about blogging than writing my dissertation. Now that I am free, I am going to take my time re-discovering my ideas in a fast and loose fashion, and re-acquainting myself with you, my audience. </div>
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- This blog gets cited, sometimes. While I believe in the freedom of ideas, I am also deeply cognizant of the power dynamics involved in the ways that ideas are circulated: that certain people are given credit for saying things already said by others. Other people are in a much better position to lift ideas and while citation should be a form of giving credit, the non-academic often loses out. When Diana and I began writing on multiculturalism in steampunk, our critiques fueled other people's work. Unlike many other people, I don't tend to get terribly excited about being cited; it's nice, but the chances of misinterpretation, especially by white academics, are high. And I hold nothing against these white academics--often they are doing this because it's important to acknowledge the racialized elephant in the room when it comes to steampunk. I don't have to be comfortable with something I acknowledge. (And, of course, neither do you.) And because I am also a jealous person, I didn't want my ideas, half-formed and incoherent, out there to be picked up upon before I was ready.<br />
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- Most of the things I've had to say about steampunk and race have already been said, are in my archives, and I don't like repeating material. I get that people need things hammered into them but honestly I'm not anybody's parent, and there are only so many ways to say "stop being a racist." New material would require me to remain plugged into the steampunk community, and I had to withdraw because of graduate school obligations: I've attended very few steampunk conventions due to lack of transit options and connections; I sort of stopped buying books because there is only so much white steampunk I can tolerate (works featuring non-white protagonists written by white authors fall into this category); there is so much work to do to share things with you.<br />
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- And I just.... got tired. And I didn't feel like blogging as much anymore. I left this blog up as a general repository, and also because every so often someone on Twitter whinges about how come there is no POC in steampunk and I need to deploy a list of links at them. Folks don't know what they don't know but I don't need to see people who are new to steampunk talking about POC in steampunk as if we were a <i>new</i> idea. This is not a "get off my lawn" sentiment; this is a "welcome to the party, the bar is there, the washrooms are at the back, please stop talking about improving the club when you literally stepped in five minutes ago and aren't more than five feet from the door." (I am not a very gracious person, as you may have noticed.)<br />
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Either way, this bitch is back in the club. I would really like to get back to steampunk, to blogging about steampunk. I've seen some really marvelous things, read some really marvelous books, met some really marvelous people. This blog will remain about postcolonialism and steampunk. You can <a href="http://jhameia.blogspot.com/2017/12/ma-fuckin-doctor.html">read a more general view of my academic journey at my other blog</a>, and I will go into further detail here. I'm also hoping to put up the whole of my dissertation here on Silver Goggles in some fashion, so that it gets wider dissemination. (This will be a different blog post.)<br />
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Happy new Gregorian, steampunks. I look forward to getting to know you again. </div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-70102353082393868142016-05-01T13:09:00.000-07:002016-05-01T13:09:33.158-07:00Transcript: "Claiming Narratives, Re-Telling History: Bringing Southeast Asian Steampunk to the World Stage"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Recently I went to a conference held by the <a href="http://cseas.berkeley.edu/">Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley</a>, entitled "<a href="http://cseas.berkeley.edu/making-southeast-asian-cultures-UCB-UCLA-conference">Making Southeast Asian Culture: From Region To World</a>." Thanks to Dr. Gui Weihsin, I was on a panel on literary transformations in Southeast Asia.<script type="text/javascript">
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I wouldn't really say I'm a Southeast Asianist. In my main blog, I <a href="http://jhameia.blogspot.com/p/about.html">describe myself</a> as being involved with <a href="http://seatrip.ucr.edu/">UC Riverside's SEATRiP program</a> not by research, but through my creative pursuits. I DO study Southeast Asian history and cultures, but that is because I write stories that are meant for a Southeast Asian audience. So when Dr. Gui invited me to submit an abstract for this conference, I wracked my brain trying to think of a good usable topic (that could, in the interests of an academic career, transform into a publishable paper) and thought of something completely different, but completely untenable, and he said, "why not just talk about your book? You edited it, you know the field, you'd be the only steampunk specialist there, and it's Southeast Asian literature."</div>
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<i>I can do that?</i></div>
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And turns out, of course I can, which put me into the position of speaking <i>as an academic</i> about a book I <i>personally</i> edited. I was very uncomfortable because on the one hand, Dr. Gui was right, it IS Southeast Asian Literature (we've got one white woman in the entire Table of Contents; white women are very diverse these days) and I AM an expert on the field and it IS a great opportunity to tell people about the book, but on the other hand, I have been taught, in so many ways, that being proud of my work and what I've done and talking about it is kind of big-headed, arrogant, and kinda rude. But I have the support of many lovely people here at UCR, including my adviser, so I wrote it, and made a very nice Powerpoint (which I'm not actually putting up here). </div>
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So here is the transcript!</div>
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Firstly, thank you <a href="http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty-profile/pheng-cheah-1">Dr. Cheah Pheng</a> for letting me into this conference, and to <a href="http://english.ucr.edu/people/faculty/weihsin-gui/">Dr. Gui</a> for inviting me onto this panel. I would like to preface this by noting that my research isn’t Southeast Asianist specifically, but my creative work is, so this paper comes from that position. I’m going to discuss the production of <i>The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia</i>, an anthology I co-edited with Singaporean writer Joyce Chng. I would like to begin by first situating this project and identifying the gap that it is designed to fill, a triangulation between three closely related spaces: the hashtag #ownvoices on Twitter, Anglophone Southeast Asian science fiction, and steampunk. Then I'll talk about the theoretical questions that inform the project itself, and I'll finish with the challenges that came up during the creation of the project. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>#OwnVoices is a Twitter hashtag invented by Amsterdam-based science fiction writer, <a href="http://www.corinneduyvis.com/">Corinne Duyvis</a>, to start a conversation on authors, particularly those of marginalized groups, writing narratives inspired by their own experiences, without being autobiographical. This addresses the trend for diversity in publishing which often leads to more books written about the Other, rather than by Other'd authors themselves, due to a variety of industry biases. This hashtag comes a few years after a major conversation in science fiction and fantasy publishing and fandom, called RaceFail, in which non-white fans finally spoke out in multitudes about their experiences of alienation and racism within the genre. The fallout from RaceFail led to a heightened awareness of issues of race and racism, the effects of media representation, and industry inequity. </div>
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Within the last few years since RaceFail, science fiction has seen the presence of non-white authors who write racial markers into their speculative works. Southeast Asian writers across the world have become noted for their output: <a href="https://rcloenenruiz.com/">Rochita Loenen-Ruiz</a> in the Netherlands, <a href="http://aliettedebodard.com/">Aliette de Bodard </a>in France, <a href="http://zencho.org/">Zen Cho</a> in the UK, <a href="https://beekian.wordpress.com/">Benjanun Sriduangkaew</a> in Thailand, and <a href="http://thaoworra.blogspot.com/">Bryan Thao Worra</a>, a Lao-American poet who appropriates Lovecraftian mythology.[1] Local science fiction pulp has also proliferated: Filipino science fiction writers release an annual anthology of Best Philippine Speculative Fiction; Malaysian pulp publishers like Buku Fixi and Alaf 21 have invested in the genre; and LONTAR, a journal of Southeast Asian speculative fiction, operates out of Singapore. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit to Mariam Lam for taking this picture! Click to embiggen. <br />Also, Alyssa Wong is a finalist for the Campbell!</td></tr>
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This of course does not necessarily mean that Southeast Asian writers have a significant presence in publishing overall. Nonetheless, we are slowly but surely building a presence in what has been a predominantly Eurocentric field. Steampunk is part of that field. </div>
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Ask ten people to explain steampunk, get ten answers, because it is a culmination of three different groups who have connected through the Internet: Do-It-Yourself artists inspired by the Victorian science fiction movies of the 50s; costume players, or cosplayers who enjoy anachronistic dress; and writers using pseudo-Victorian settings. Steampunk is often criticized for its reliance on comforting re-imaginaries of the 19th century, re-visiting the Industrial Revolution in order to have the exciting changes in technology without truly confronting the historical consequences. This is one factor in its appeal—steampunk doesn’t necessarily challenge us in our assumptions of history, but relies on them. The generally accepted elements of steampunk, articulated by Mike Perschon, are <b>neo-Victorianism</b>, <b>technofantasy</b>, and <b>alternate history</b>. The major conceit of steampunk is to inject today’s technology into historical settings just to see what would have happened: how would people of the past have taken up this accelerated technology? What does it look like? It presents a way to think about the present through the past. This description allows us to talk of steampunk as an aesthetic that can be applied to a variety of visual and narrative media. As a result, steampunk has also been called a creative arts movement, and a subculture. Combined with a performative aspect, we have people running around dressed in 19th century-inspired costumes, because dressing up is a lot of fun. </div>
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[Imagine here, a slide of steampunks of color, from various conventions over the period of 2010 to 2012. I don't take many pictures of white people at steampunk conventions, because that's too many.] Here we are, steampunks of colourful glory, dressed in both neo-Victorian fashion, and a more defamiliarized form of cosplay that reinvents “ethnic” costuming. Now, Neo-Victorianism has its own set of Eurocentric connotations, and alternate history is a genre unto itself. So we must revise Perschon’s articulation of steampunk, to something a bit more widely encompassing:<b> technofantasy</b> gets to stay; alternate history must extend to become <b>alternate world history</b>, in order to draw attention to the wider complexities of geo-political concerns that come with changing power relations; and neo-Victorian we can just do away with altogether for <b>neo-retrofuturism</b>—our modern, or postmodern, imaginings of what the future could have looked like, from the perspective of what we think our ancestors might have thought. </div>
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So what does Southeast Asian steampunk look like? This was the goal of <i>The Sea Is Ours</i>: to see what it could generate out of a subgenre that thrives on re-iterations of historical events and re-conceptualizations of technology, as well as visual aesthetics that are associated with the past. It argues that steampunk can be de-territorialized from the geography of Victorian England, and demands attention to a region underrepresented in genre publishing. Prior to this there had been a few iterations of such: here’s <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/p/reading-list-primary-works.html">a brief bibliography</a>: </div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"On
Wooden Wings," by Paolo Chikiamco. <i>Philippine Speculative Fiction 6</i>.
Ed. Nikki Alfar and Kate Aton-Osias. Kestrel DDM, 2011. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"The
Terracotta Bride," by Zen Cho. <i>Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk
Stories</i>. Ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft. Torquere Press, 2011.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"Between
Islands," by Jaymee Goh, <i>Expanded Horizons #19</i>. June 2010.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 27.0pt; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"Lunar
Year's End," by Jaymee Goh, <i>Crossed Genres #25: Celebration</i>.
December 2010<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 27.0pt; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"Hidden
Strength," by Jaymee Goh. <i>Steampunk World</i>, ed. Sarah Hans.
Alliteration Ink, 2014. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 27.0pt; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"One
Last Interruption Before We Begin," by Stephanie Lai. <i>Steam-Powered 2:
More Lesbian Steampunk Stories</i>. Ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft. Torquere Press,
2011.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"The
Last Rickshaw," by Stephanie Lai, <i>Crossed Genres #18: Eastern</i>. Dec
2010.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"The
Construct Also Dreams of Flight," by Rochita Leonen-Ruiz. <i>Steampunk
World</i>, ed. Sarah Hans. Alliteration Ink, 2014.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->"The
Governess and We," by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. <i>Steampunk World</i>, ed.
Sarah Hans. Alliteration Ink, 2014.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is an ongoing compilation. The LitCritters of Manila had a steampunk short fiction challenge, which would go on to populate the pages of the Philippine Spec Fic Annuals. I wrote, and continue to write, a series of short stories set in an alternate-history Penang uncolonized by Captain Francis Light. Stephanie Lai also re-imagines Penang, but uses the more modern image of the KOMTAR building, as a port for airships. Paolo Chikiamco released <a href="https://storylark.ph/titles/high-society/high-society-1-of-3">a comic in which anito trapped in trees are carved into movable forms and participate in anticolonial struggle</a>. In 2010, I also ran a collaborative world-building project with a few Malaysian friends, with the intention of creating a meta-setting, or a toolkit from which role-playing games could be generated. In this project, called <a href="http://steampunk-nusantara.dreamwidth.org/">Steampunk Nusantara</a>, fictional “translators, cryptologists, cataloguers, illustrators, archival photographers, data entry clerks, engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists, mathematicians, linguists, X-Ray technicians, wonderful volunteers, and suckered low-wage workers of Sharekat Perkapalan Samudera Sdn. Bhd.” worked tirelessly to create a catalog of a warehouse full of mysterious artifacts from events that never happened. (This project fell by the wayside because nobody was getting paid to work on it, and since we were also not game developers, we couldn't think of a way to monetize the idea.) There is a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13191967-the-steampowered-globe">Singaporean steampunk anthology</a>, although it does not specifically center on Singapore. </div>
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Recent years have seen the rise of multicultural steampunk; most examples are variations of Victorian steampunk with ethnic accouterments, or assumptions that without colonialism, technologies in non-European countries would develop the exact same way the Industrial Revolution in Europe did, just with different aesthetic flourishes. <i>Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia</i>, therefore, would have to interrogate this trend. My co-editor and I began with the position that a successful non-Eurocentric steampunk project would first see Victorian steampunk as, essentially, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Provincializing_Europe.html?id=_LgfM0Q4kwIC">a regional project, made popular by the supremacy of Eurocentric history</a>. Therefore, a non-Eurocentric steampunk moves away from the Victorian as the frame of reference, historically, geographically, and culturally. It takes up the question of <b>geographical materialism</b> in Chen Kuan-Hsing’s <i><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=6RAJ2Zd3cBwC">Asia as Method</a></i>: </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"<b>To spatialize historical materialism is not only to remove
Eurocentrism, but also to launch another round of spatializing (after historicizing)
epistemology.</b> For instance, the analysis of the Asiatic mode of production can
no longer take the European mode of production as the ideal model or point of
comparison. It is no longer a question of explaining why a Chinese mode of
production cannot develop into a real (European) capitalist mode of production.
<b>Instead the question becomes: within the imminent historical-geographical
formation, how does a geographical space historically generate its own mode of
production?</b>" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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In science fiction fantasy parlance, this is what we call “worldbuilding,” which is a nice start, but where many genre stories fall short, because bad writers tend to regurgitate what they have consumed without examining the logic behind those choices. We also made further demands: they should offer what Darko Suvin calls “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darko_Suvin#Cognitive_estrangement">cognitive estrangement</a>,” to refer to how science fiction re-casts the world we know into something a little different, something that challenges how we understand our world and the possibilities available to us. This should be two-fold: since it doesn’t take place in a geography familiar to most readers of steampunk, it should ensure a similar dissonance for the foreign reader through a refusal of the exoticism associated with the region. It should say something about the region that the reader cannot take for granted based on superficial, tourist-oriented knowledge. </div>
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Speaking into the aether of social media, we sought considerations of indigeneity in the development of technology: what does a locale need, and what technologies come out of that? We wanted technology that might not be recognized as such elsewhere. Perhaps, too, machines that never had the chance to be invented, superseded by the monopoly of colonial capitalism. Perhaps, too, 21st century machines placed in the hands of the colonized, to change the historical trajectories of the region. We did end up with stories containing anti-colonial themes, exploring how colonial technology is appropriated and subverted against the colonizers, or how a local technology is grown in response to colonialism, for example, a story in which <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html">a puppet maker works out British punch cards used in a Frankenstein figure built out samsui women</a>. </div>
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Our wishlist also included: syncretism in the development of local technology, stories that dealt with the interaction of different groups and the conflicts that arose, and stories rooted in the local geography. This is how one ends up with <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-robert-liow.html">a multi-ethnic group of children creating armor for their fighting spiders</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">a floating fleet of ships that serves as an academy for young engineers</a>, and <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">airships that use energy siphoned from the volcanoes across the Philippines</a>.</div>
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Therefore, we looked for particular strategies in the submissions, taking our cue from thinkers like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth">Franz Fanon</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Aj9OJMLQoRIC">Syed Hussein Alatas</a>. We wanted narratives that examined historical events through the lens of the colonized, rather than a colonizer, however sympathetic. This could take the form of creating an alternative historical trajectory that changes the outcomes of colonialism and exploring the consequences thereof, or referencing some historical event that is under-referenced. We didn’t receive very many of these, but we did end up with <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">a story featuring the Vietnamese Boat People</a>, and <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-pear-nuallak.html">a story taking on the conflict between Thailand and Laos</a>.</div>
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Regarding the question of indigenous technologies, we requested stories that refused the binary of tradition versus modern, in which "traditional" means resistance to change and new forms of technologies, while the modern is necessarily the progressive, and better option. This also opened stories to tackling the fantastical side of the speculative, re-examining folktales and supernatural aspects in tandem with questions of science, rather than in opposition to science. So <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">monks build dragonfly-shaped machines deep in the forest as a meditative exercise</a>, researchers scour mountain ranges for flora and fauna to exhibit at a Saigon Exposition biome, and <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-alessa-hinlo.html">duende demonstrate their genius through extreme botany</a>.</div>
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Right out the gate, we had problems. In science fiction publishing, the diversity in Tables of Contents is often an issue—most Tables of Contents skew white, as a result of the sheer number of white writers looking for a new market (because science fiction pays!) and the sheer number of non-white writers not submitting (even though science fiction pays!). <a href="http://roselemberg.net/?p=830">Speculative poetry editor Rose Lemberg addressed this issue in a thoughtful essay on the work that editors must perform in order to reach the constituents they hope will submit.</a> It is not simply a matter of putting out a call for submissions and stating that we want more diversity in authors who submit. </div>
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Our first problem was that steampunk hadn't, and still hasn't, really, been picked up in Southeast Asia or by Southeast Asians as a form of exploring locality. Although the submissions were open to anyone, we wanted Southeast Asian writers first and foremost, and that a table of contents populated by non-Southeast Asians would diminish the mission of the project, and defeat the purpose of it. So, if there's no one writing the thing you want to see, you have to ask for it. While the name of the anthology alone encouraged submissions, we spent a lot of time asking our various contacts within and without the region for help in amplifying the call for submissions. This bumps up against the next major problem anthologies that seek a diversity of writers have: self-rejection. Self-rejection is the term used for usually new writers, especially minority writers, who consider their work to be not good enough for submission. As a result, they may either sabotage themselves by missing deadlines since they keep working on their submission, or they just don't try at all. </div>
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Among other problems we had were: Southeast Asians writing us to ask if they could still submit even though their first language was not English, diasporan Southeast Asian writers dithering about submitting since they didn't feel authentically Southeast Asian enough, and writers asking if we would consider stories from the Pacific Islands that were not on our list of Southeast Asian countries. The submissions stage, far from being a period of sitting back and waiting, is a stage of emotional labour. This must have paid off, because we ended up with 40 submissions out of 75 from Asian writers, if we eyeball the names.</div>
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A few problematic trends emerged from the slush pile of submissions. Many submissions lacked an alternate history aspect in their re-formulation of steampunk; either their work attempted to bypass the problem of engaging with history by using a secondary world that just so happened to be populated with brown people names, or they attempted to situate their steampunk using recent problems without engaging with their historical bases. Several stories demonstrated a reliance on Eurocentric tropes and/or folklore, or vague impressions of local culture that allow the story to take place anywhere vaguely Asian. A few people thought Japan and China counted, because they can’t read submission guidelines or maps. </div>
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A huge part of these trends stem from the lack of general knowledge about the countries in the region—access to old manuscripts is limited, anthropological data is plentiful but we don't always know where to get it and once we do, we don’t always know what to do with it, and most of us work with impressions of the past, not direct knowledge of, because there is no direct knowledge to be had of the past. It doesn’t seem to matter whether we are in diaspora or not, in my conversations with fellow writers, there is an air of being cut off from history as a result of the race to be modern. </div>
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Nonetheless, the final results were an anthology of 12 stories: 5 set in the Philippines; 2 set in Singapore, 2 in Thailand, 2 in Vietnam, and 1 in Indonesia, with illustrations. Admittedly, this is hardly representative of the region. Stories set in these countries, especially steampunk stories, are rare enough on the North American market that trading on this was a viable marketing move in order to raise funds for publication, which also functioned as a pre-ordering system. The anthology has found wide appeal, beyond the initial niche markets of Southeast Asian interest and steampunk. A story has been translated into French, we have sold <a href="http://gbgerakbudaya.com/bookshop/index.php?main_page=product_book_info&products_id=2918">the rights of publishing and distributing the collection in Southeast Asia to Gerak Budaya</a>, and May will see the release of the Czech translation of the anthology, because the <a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/olsa_jaroslav_jr">Czech Republic's current ambassador to the Philippines is a huge fan of Filipino science fiction</a>. </div>
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The final challenge, then, is the feeling that this was not, in the larger picture, enough; that the anthology somehow shortchanges its intended audience with meager representation, and participates in the very framework that it is intended to push back against, because as editors, we don’t know very much about other countries, a common problem that Dr. Melani Budianta pointed out in her keynote speech. Since the final analysis is probably not mine to make, there’s reason to be optimistic about its longevity on the capitalist market. Given how many reviewers felt the need to say how often they consulted Wikipedia in their reading, we’re also optimistic that steampunk can be recuperated from accusations of glorifying empire, into a literature that engages meaningfully with history while offering uplifting alternate histories away from postcolonial melancholia. I end with this brief note that the anthologies released by my publisher, <i>The Sea Is Ours</i> included, are doing so well, that he has been forced to embark on <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/rosarium-publishing-the-next-level#/">a larger, more ambitious fundraiser, in order to move from print-on-demand, which is cheaper for small print runs, to off-set printing in order to accommodate the ongoing orders</a>. If he doesn’t fold from the unexpected success, maybe we’ll even have a second volume. </div>
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[1] As luck would have had it, Bryan is also acquainted with one of my co-panelists, Ma Vang, who also cited him in her paper, and my adviser, Mariam Lam, who has also published and cited him in the past. Both Ma Vang and I were very pleased to be able to POINT AT HIM sitting in the audience because he came to support us, despite the busy-ness of Songkran (Lao New Year). </div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-34521979579962051882016-04-13T00:46:00.000-07:002016-04-13T00:46:38.046-07:00Con Report: AnomalyCon<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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About a year ago, Kronda Seibert, chair of <a href="https://www.anomalycon.com/">AnomalyCon</a>, invited me to an Author Spotlight, with the bonus of me getting a free flight and hotel out. This is pretty great! Of course I'll go to a con that gives me a flight out! Since it also happened during Spring Break, that was a no-brainer. The flight was reasonable, the hotel was comfortable. </div>
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Denver also snows! </div>
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This is a feature, not a bug. People who have spoken to me about this have found that I am one of those strange people who do not like the long California summers and I've been craving for a reason to go back to some snowy place for some time. (Most of the conventions I've been hitting up aren't really that far north, save WisCon, and that's after the snows have melted.)</div>
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Since AnomalyCon was at the end of March, it snowed! </div>
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Kronda had slated me to give a brief spiel at Opening Ceremonies, which didn't really sink in until like a week before. Looking through my archive of messages, she definitely had asked me several months before, but apparently <i>my brain has become a sieve</i>. And I thought, "Oh, I'll write my thing on the train ride out to the airport!" Then it was "oh, I'll write my thing on the plane ride there!" And then it became "oh, I'll write my thing right before (even though I'm horrifically underslept), it'll be <i>fine</i>."</div>
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So I did.</div>
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And then I didn't get to read it because the sound guy got stuck in the snow so the Opening Ceremonies started like 45 minutes late.</div>
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It was <i>fine</i>. I got to hang out with friends in line and talk to random people. </div>
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So instead I wandered the vendor floor. AnomalyCon's hotel had most of the panel rooms downstairs, with the registration and merch tables on the second floor. I think it was a really nice setup, although I imagine it must be a pain to have to pack up every night. There was also a vendor hall, of course. And what should I see first?</div>
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The local bookstore!!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCVWO2oTnsCEqs8grjpI_xRvFuE4F-daYYZTrGAJBWK8epLMEqscrsmKxhhFXL-QEUtISf3tWE8a1AswqKGFxNuHo20vVrtoDA-XZi1dI6a6-wOiS6eJS-7uCbUawZu_8eXJSBnlExaUt/s1600/P1060017.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCVWO2oTnsCEqs8grjpI_xRvFuE4F-daYYZTrGAJBWK8epLMEqscrsmKxhhFXL-QEUtISf3tWE8a1AswqKGFxNuHo20vVrtoDA-XZi1dI6a6-wOiS6eJS-7uCbUawZu_8eXJSBnlExaUt/s320/P1060017.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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They had copies of <i>The Sea Is Ours</i> and everything! And they made me sign things! They identified me correctly as soon as I came in since they were right by the door and I was very surprised. I don't really know what to do with fame and people recognizing me. Especially when I hadn't even met them. </div>
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I meandered and got to meet some folks I already knew, like Richard Preston, of the<a href="http://richardellisprestonjr.com/?page_id=11"> Romulus Buckle</a> books. (Full disclosure, he gave me <i>Romulus Buckle and the City of Founders</i> at San Diego Comic Con 2013, and I have yet to read it, because <i>my brain is a sieve</i>.) And <a href="http://www.frenchyandthepunk.com/">Frenchy and the Punk</a>! Sam and Scott remembered me from the last time I saw them back in 2012 which was really nice of them. And a fellow ragin' Asian: </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkQ5PCBIAWgWTDvJjYbi4XByclw3X-AQT0Cb7T6OeU6Pk5tT24e8UA5QQrgiZKYV80S4EdXmHUJorhXvxRJ1XgV5OtrlMnc2zey5FKfm6NXDC3SH5HT-eP2u7Hf7UrRdKYPqFpdiAesC95/s1600/P1060055.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkQ5PCBIAWgWTDvJjYbi4XByclw3X-AQT0Cb7T6OeU6Pk5tT24e8UA5QQrgiZKYV80S4EdXmHUJorhXvxRJ1XgV5OtrlMnc2zey5FKfm6NXDC3SH5HT-eP2u7Hf7UrRdKYPqFpdiAesC95/s320/P1060055.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken on the last day but who cares about the chronology of such things</td></tr>
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Kat Tanaka Okopnik and I would be on several panels over the weekend.</div>
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I would also like to note that I was confused for her about <i>four</i> times over the weekend.</div>
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Wandering the floor, I got to meet people I didn't know either, especially many artists of colour, because my Steampunks of Colour project still goes on even if I drop out of the scene. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidG8hSsrFFdYxG051GSnwu5zMPOzeaFHFVUNPxaBz_gPNH6D8sz0ibCPSJYU3eLPIr2la7nHiwGYYp8LmO-eoMpoKR39pt68Lnq-_T4WcbFvvXz9r6JFMN91dhX0z9LZ9CgXkx8atVnQEQ/s1600/P1060018.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidG8hSsrFFdYxG051GSnwu5zMPOzeaFHFVUNPxaBz_gPNH6D8sz0ibCPSJYU3eLPIr2la7nHiwGYYp8LmO-eoMpoKR39pt68Lnq-_T4WcbFvvXz9r6JFMN91dhX0z9LZ9CgXkx8atVnQEQ/s320/P1060018.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here is Sarin Tatroe, a Thai-American artist whose artwork is inflected by manga, especially really old-school manga from the 90's. I like this sort of thing, I like going through portfolios and seeing how many old school things I can identify to get nostalgia. Check her out on DeviantArt: <a href="http://sariochan.deviantart.com/">http://sariochan.deviantart.com/</a></div>
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Stan Yan does zombie caricatures, among other things. There was a little board with a Pony vs. Zombie thing going on, recording how many of each were bought over the weekend. I swore I'd get a pony, because ponies. Check Stan's stuff out here: <a href="http://stanyan.me/">http://stanyan.me/</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9bKe7DGZXWu2dfkk40QFeEG2jOXbtOsCUAE4BI-UcqEqIq12Y59iyrnZ0zNIXf3HHaxflka-osOiazJRGI4ZO-6dvdQ5VkrCwbfRqNayQcwMbtrjB6hq9YQtQ_yZiUT_G-LykyrHKkWi3/s1600/P1060028.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9bKe7DGZXWu2dfkk40QFeEG2jOXbtOsCUAE4BI-UcqEqIq12Y59iyrnZ0zNIXf3HHaxflka-osOiazJRGI4ZO-6dvdQ5VkrCwbfRqNayQcwMbtrjB6hq9YQtQ_yZiUT_G-LykyrHKkWi3/s320/P1060028.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
Here are <a href="https://www.facebook.com/The-Art-of-Gerry-M-1391372124420937/">Gerry Mulowayi</a> and <a href="http://www.veronicarcalisto.com/">Veronica Calisto</a>. Veronica wrote <i>Mad Black Witch</i>, and Gerry is an illustrator and designer.<br />
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Here is <a href="https://dionharris.carbonmade.com/">Dion Harris</a>, an artist and illustrator.<br />
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Another artist, and part of Pandora Celtica, which disbanded after a farewell concert at AnomalyCon, here is <a href="http://www.chazkemp.com/">Chaz Kemp</a>. <br />
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I did FINALLY get to check out The Cog Is Dead! And got CDs after their concert, even. I'll say more about the concert after.<br />
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<a href="http://www.emmyjackson.com/">Emmy Jackson</a>, in Denver all the way from Detroit!<br />
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And <a href="https://r-alan.tumblr.com/CV">Alan Brooks</a>, who is working with Dion to create Spotless, an urban fantasy comic!</div>
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Ugh enough of all these people Jaymee, how were the panels???</div>
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Full disclosure: I was on eight of those suckers all weekend, so despite my best intentions to get out to other panels, I did not. So I could only speak to the panels I was on. </div>
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<b>Panels I could actually speak on: </b></div>
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"Language, Dialect, and Code-Switching" -- This was a fun panel, at which I met Veronica Calisto, Steven Dunn, Vivian Caethe, and Kat Okopnik. I'm not entirely positive we were all awake. It must have been a good conversation, though.</div>
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"With All Due Respect" -- This was the panel in which Kat and I proved that Asians are not a monolith, and we have varying disagreements and tolerances for various levels of fuckshit that we are willing to put up with. I, for one, can't stand corsets on kimonos (I find this to be intensely lazy) whilc Kat would rather a corset on a kimono than a clockwork girl or a badly-tied obi. I was approached afterwards by a nice young woman who wanted something more solutions-based, like, an example of how to do multicultural fashion right, and I internally sighed and said, "is there a way I could do this without re-centering the white body? Without giving white people carte blanche to have accolades for getting it right?" </div>
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"How To Fail Gracefully" -- I was on this with Lisa Mantchev, who had actually failed a while back. Between the two of us, I think we carried the entire hour fairly well! I for one had gotten notes off my friend the Amazing K. Tempest Bradford (who is currently running <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdd0zgX7d2FD3JgBKXh73TBM2wskZoZFR">the Tempest Challenge</a>, check it out!).</div>
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"The Future of Racism" -- This was a morning panel and I had been dancing the night before, so I was probably not on top of it as I should have been. But we did end the panel with suitably angry notes and a firm pessimism that yes, of course racism is going to exist in the future, fuck everything. </div>
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<b>Panels I can see why I was Stuck On But Uh:</b></div>
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"Queer Identities After the Apocalypse" -- This was a fun little panel that had some very optimistic on one side of me, and some very pessimistic on the other side of me, which started to show some twenty minutes into the panel. I offered to moderate since I didn't really have much to say, and it worked out terribly well. </div>
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"Colonialism in Fairytales" -- I don't actually know that much about fairytales, to be quite honest, but I did do some reading on the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Fairytale Index. My co-panellists, however, I think really brought the panel to life, and the audience had some good questions, except for that one guy up front who was clearly up front so he could ignore the rest of the room and interject without raising his hand. I had been having some really polite and easily informal conversations the rest of the time so I wasn't quite prepared for it. But I shut him down anyway, because that is what you do with mouthy white men.</div>
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<b>Panels That Made Me Go "But Why?"</b></div>
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"Science Fiction and the Future of Childbirth" -- Y'all, I'm childless and not even in the medical field, and I just don't know. Among the panelists were: two moms with vastly differing childbirth experiences, one nurse, and one new dad. And so, I offered to moderate and prevent the panel from degenerating into childbirth stories (this is a topic that people get real passionate about) so we had some interesting experiences. By and large, I think we mostly wanted to see more writing about childbirth in the first place. </div>
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"We Have Always Fought: Women Warriors In History" -- So I'm not a historian and I was stuck on this panel with a writer and someone who I'm not sure is a historian but he definitely knew a lot of things and sure liked to talk. He was also pretty okay with being shut down because there were specific questions about things like representation and why don't we ever hear about these women and other things like that, which he was responding with "here's another cool woman in history!" And I was not about to let this become a one-man show of encyclopedic knowledge (why it was even set up as a panel, I shall never know), so I shut that down before he could finish his sentence because, like I said, this is what you do with mouthy white men. Not to say I didn't appreciate his knowledge; I did, but audience questions must be answered. </div>
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<b>Panel I Was Not Actually At:</b></div>
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"Cleavage Contest" -- Soooooo over the course of the weekend I had no less than four totally different dudes say to me, "hey, thanks for what you said the other night." This was especially confusing on Saturday, because I was not in any shape to be on any goddamn night panels on the Friday. In response, I would blink, and ask, "what was it I said?" And they would say something that I purportedly said on this panel, and I'd sigh and say "you're thinking of Kat." </div>
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What was kind of terrible was that this tended to happen like, the second (or over) time I met these people. I suppose Kat and I have similar mannerisms and we do share the same kind of hardass attitudes, and this is not a new thing to either of us, but come on. </div>
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<b>The Swag:</b></div>
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Here are some cool things I got!<br />
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I mentioned Stan Yan's Zombies vs. Ponies thing, right? Well, when I got there Saturday night, there was NOTHING for the Ponies! Horror! So I bought a pony caricature of myself on the spot:<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9QQOtvUyMLegdJeiAsCvfkLBPE736jrUzglw7vW-DVra8cpbGCN0ynmy4Dg_otnz9mrgsuaScaFnc8RAv5f4aTu7W5De4CbNC2WriXXStwexR3xVixE4axsxA_IxaGIWjAnh-_UDzWI4l/s1600/PonyStanCaricature.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9QQOtvUyMLegdJeiAsCvfkLBPE736jrUzglw7vW-DVra8cpbGCN0ynmy4Dg_otnz9mrgsuaScaFnc8RAv5f4aTu7W5De4CbNC2WriXXStwexR3xVixE4axsxA_IxaGIWjAnh-_UDzWI4l/s320/PonyStanCaricature.jpeg" width="271" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pay me, I'm cute.</td></tr>
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Kronda had also asked me to participate in the AnomalyCards as an author, so I provided a flash fiction set in a steampunk-inflected fantasy 'verse I'm developing, and Sarin Tatroe did the art:<br />
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These books are from <a href="https://stantlitore.com/">Stant Litore</a>'s table. He's been working on a <i>Zombie Bible</i> series for a while now, which also have some of the most beautiful covers I've ever seen! Stant recognized me from somewhere else, I suppose, and was very gracious to me. Which was nice since he was one of the people who confused me and Kat =)<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJCE02UYDUyKZBgyqS5BAuNNUpKvU4m5n5WB_3vTXFe0x-FkFr5Q1vVN51_mNignJMmN9Ld_SBeRO9n8veElH2RluKRNxm0VNudCQQv4zsOwnyazXsadDnWxCzmfHlqTOH0u14U_C6iEd/s1600/P1060027.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJCE02UYDUyKZBgyqS5BAuNNUpKvU4m5n5WB_3vTXFe0x-FkFr5Q1vVN51_mNignJMmN9Ld_SBeRO9n8veElH2RluKRNxm0VNudCQQv4zsOwnyazXsadDnWxCzmfHlqTOH0u14U_C6iEd/s320/P1060027.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.vogelein.com/">Jane Irwin</a> and husband <a href="http://www.paulsizer.com/comics/">Paul Sizer</a> had a table, and I haven't seen Jane in years! Her Vogelein comics are really adorable, so it was exciting to see her come out with a new book, the <i>Clockwork Game</i>, a historical comic of the legenday chess-playing automaton. I also got a copy of <i>The Little White Mouse</i> from Paul, which features a Malaysian-Chinese protagonist in the far future.</div>
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I can't wait to dig into these!</div>
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I also bought a deck of playing cards from co-panelist <a href="http://www.studiondr.com/">Dylan Edwards</a>, featuring queer pin-up art! His comics sound really awesome too; I highly recommend folks check them out.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrDSVGoVFHI_RPzk9V26Nxztgtb5Vxrto1DvxWGqbHNmInMRodLNXigE45eC07UkeYo7qXIspw5ldDnmvdhtNi6nytd5uK4Gau4mFShDWKQl8Z5dY8oG2rR2fmGOQszI66nALKe-DVaty4/s1600/P1060021.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrDSVGoVFHI_RPzk9V26Nxztgtb5Vxrto1DvxWGqbHNmInMRodLNXigE45eC07UkeYo7qXIspw5ldDnmvdhtNi6nytd5uK4Gau4mFShDWKQl8Z5dY8oG2rR2fmGOQszI66nALKe-DVaty4/s320/P1060021.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>The Dancing</b>:</div>
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Folks, when I go to a thing which implies there might be dancing, I will go dancing. On Friday, after much dithering, I decided that yes, I will indeed go check out the "Dark Grand Ball" which, as it turns out, was neither Dark nor really, honestly, that Grand, not because the con wasn't trying, but because there were so few people dancing, and most of them were dancing in pairs. I did get on the floor a couple of times, once even upon invitation, which was quite super. There may have been a Time Warp, and a caterwauling chorus of Bohemian Rhapsody. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But let's talk a bit more about this lack of dancing!!!! Because I went to the Grand Concert on the Saturday night, which opened with Pandora Celtica (which I missed) and The Cog Is Dead and I saw that chairs!!! were on!!!! the dance floor!!!!! I was very concerned about this!! I ran into Kronda outside the concert hall and in possibly-overexcited tones said, "Kronda! This is terrible! Why are there <i>chairs on the dance floor</i>!! Why is no one dancing??"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
And Kronda replied with a tragic expression, "I don't know! The attendees put the chairs there themselves! They wanna sit really close and listen!"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
There were people sitting right up front who were literally bouncing in their chairs and this made zero sense to me. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Kronda!!! You've got to get the chairs off the dance floor!! For Frenchy and the Punk!!!" and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to express this concern that night. (I'm just the excitable version of the request.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In the meantime, off to the side where there was some space, I danced with Aubri, Kronda's elder child, as one should do at a concert. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The chairs were cleared in between sets, and a marvelous dancing time was had during Frenchy and the Park. This began with a can-can line, and at some point included that thing where you hook your arms with someone else and then go around in a small circle before switching partners and I don't really know how that works equitably at all. Dancing was had! That's all that needs to be said! </div>
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<div>
<b>Other Backgroundly Impressive Things</b>:</div>
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Aside from attracting a fairly queer crowd, there were gender-neutral bathrooms on the second floor of the convention hotel. I did mosey into one at some point, and rather liked the experience. Kronda had made clear that she wanted to make the con as safe as possible for queer folks, and I think the convention as a whole worked together to make sure this was the case. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Also, give it up to the hotel restaurant for having some really fucking amazing food. The braised lamb, bacon mac-and-cheese were pretty amazing, and I went back specifically for dessert at some point. I had some really good conversations over these meals, too. </div>
<div>
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<div>
<b>And now, some assorted pictures</b>:</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW-Hb8L1WuH9CyYN-5L2_IddEL5prjXCxozF9azTZtBbcDkf1cpWWEsXuXx08odCLiwHt1tJ1vAghaxcBrmyJrqm1_kr50zCHhubWJxEyGyCfiR2LBF0ZNVZ2Y_nIVyqaDkT96S-jXSSol/s1600/P1060033.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW-Hb8L1WuH9CyYN-5L2_IddEL5prjXCxozF9azTZtBbcDkf1cpWWEsXuXx08odCLiwHt1tJ1vAghaxcBrmyJrqm1_kr50zCHhubWJxEyGyCfiR2LBF0ZNVZ2Y_nIVyqaDkT96S-jXSSol/s320/P1060033.JPG" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The fine captain of the good ship AnomalyCon<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimHDGyIYMiu5znute3-0OTJ245KsnbvSEWWnHv3YXTFhqMOzi7Q0teQBNb8lnnq3YnWOXwnb7OaPo8HkSZQe7M-7nUEFPasKkJmH814nLKg5q-2ZsmUnvoaTuuaaHUSzy8Yu_3_vsGn1NJ/s1600/P1060030.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimHDGyIYMiu5znute3-0OTJ245KsnbvSEWWnHv3YXTFhqMOzi7Q0teQBNb8lnnq3YnWOXwnb7OaPo8HkSZQe7M-7nUEFPasKkJmH814nLKg5q-2ZsmUnvoaTuuaaHUSzy8Yu_3_vsGn1NJ/s320/P1060030.JPG" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This belledame is con chair of Motor Steam City!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsOemumoFTS6TRAdidUhCqyq5eGDz9fM97kqyRZBclMjVx-Bcs51Y1MnnLOD2oz68sJOusZ0qM1d_Vmx1jl1itmoLkt_ejAljChS9p3sKiH2RPbU7-U3p3rHYVh8Lcw2fFjwD8RcXDGt31/s1600/P1060031.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsOemumoFTS6TRAdidUhCqyq5eGDz9fM97kqyRZBclMjVx-Bcs51Y1MnnLOD2oz68sJOusZ0qM1d_Vmx1jl1itmoLkt_ejAljChS9p3sKiH2RPbU7-U3p3rHYVh8Lcw2fFjwD8RcXDGt31/s320/P1060031.JPG" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adorable little knitted be-tentacled companions</td></tr>
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Some attendees of color whose name I might have asked for but do not remember:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpo_CLnQrEH8O3VQXaOUOgJGsg9HdTz-hGGauzzGNDHNV9dD12ImtfE0ugOKmNTEnkLbE4URgL6d6Huon0AyMvRFrijD2nbjCd7IQ95kmJd8HIRMmIRtYoMbT9WaYN5Iisoiv8sce7xY5-/s1600/P1060034.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpo_CLnQrEH8O3VQXaOUOgJGsg9HdTz-hGGauzzGNDHNV9dD12ImtfE0ugOKmNTEnkLbE4URgL6d6Huon0AyMvRFrijD2nbjCd7IQ95kmJd8HIRMmIRtYoMbT9WaYN5Iisoiv8sce7xY5-/s200/P1060034.JPG" width="112" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGVXIO2mfz31JQj26wriJTa1WaGm7UIVvfANmDguteCY1HVqqyq0YDzwqG_oD7b3_w-CoWusYfPJfsRbnavAEvcL0RUDqLfIOMB1HZSBoj-KJDT_N0y28GbihPSOtEmskJpfF9rjh5fOuL/s1600/P1060035.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGVXIO2mfz31JQj26wriJTa1WaGm7UIVvfANmDguteCY1HVqqyq0YDzwqG_oD7b3_w-CoWusYfPJfsRbnavAEvcL0RUDqLfIOMB1HZSBoj-KJDT_N0y28GbihPSOtEmskJpfF9rjh5fOuL/s200/P1060035.JPG" width="112" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiZgCYW3rKIvD-G5gN6B-ly18KGdBEYVFCq-cbl4GkSfkVphiPlvnsI0QJRl5HC9gXFBlperjrcL0eA4dUX3ZMpvjS-Q5WIOyQcMLeUzCY2q6ED6C9jb_ggVi6kL7F6Sw5UqodAV4dJ1M5/s1600/P1060038.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiZgCYW3rKIvD-G5gN6B-ly18KGdBEYVFCq-cbl4GkSfkVphiPlvnsI0QJRl5HC9gXFBlperjrcL0eA4dUX3ZMpvjS-Q5WIOyQcMLeUzCY2q6ED6C9jb_ggVi6kL7F6Sw5UqodAV4dJ1M5/s200/P1060038.JPG" width="112" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhurDblN42uG5TxMFKSz3Rw8ZJtKELONez43mqnAMCul3l0yRegx4cqeAfl8F91EXGCfBYszGe4prtFspWzuDoHhfUX3FJj05uRKheAOoKrOabAjjtH0-GDDP4LJMdvo1KqFGn3VLgMJrPs/s1600/P1060054.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhurDblN42uG5TxMFKSz3Rw8ZJtKELONez43mqnAMCul3l0yRegx4cqeAfl8F91EXGCfBYszGe4prtFspWzuDoHhfUX3FJj05uRKheAOoKrOabAjjtH0-GDDP4LJMdvo1KqFGn3VLgMJrPs/s200/P1060054.JPG" width="150" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL7pKRxj6Y0BXT_CqgYIKtbqEQ6LLWLLxKkFdzwrCe9OGmGYeVrAmHI-7sRkQSE-lVCk6yzG2lO34YzkFA0QCeGTYFaMa2xS3TOg6Ab1zkjG5oIYnXlvSzGoN3DKiihoOO-_kgPYNydWzC/s1600/P1060051.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL7pKRxj6Y0BXT_CqgYIKtbqEQ6LLWLLxKkFdzwrCe9OGmGYeVrAmHI-7sRkQSE-lVCk6yzG2lO34YzkFA0QCeGTYFaMa2xS3TOg6Ab1zkjG5oIYnXlvSzGoN3DKiihoOO-_kgPYNydWzC/s1600/P1060051.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL7pKRxj6Y0BXT_CqgYIKtbqEQ6LLWLLxKkFdzwrCe9OGmGYeVrAmHI-7sRkQSE-lVCk6yzG2lO34YzkFA0QCeGTYFaMa2xS3TOg6Ab1zkjG5oIYnXlvSzGoN3DKiihoOO-_kgPYNydWzC/s1600/P1060051.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL7pKRxj6Y0BXT_CqgYIKtbqEQ6LLWLLxKkFdzwrCe9OGmGYeVrAmHI-7sRkQSE-lVCk6yzG2lO34YzkFA0QCeGTYFaMa2xS3TOg6Ab1zkjG5oIYnXlvSzGoN3DKiihoOO-_kgPYNydWzC/s200/P1060051.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9DuBJ82hWyPrJbb6kpeclW9gKmDLWzijZ_7kQb7O872v0uMCta0AXLN0g2AFWWCFS6v16nOZFO_PSpSUEXNhaFIYD7YxHB1gbXidHNMEyvkk-WKBdwNkdn5zV0RsfPsGi9ikAmam8JyXf/s1600/P1060053.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9DuBJ82hWyPrJbb6kpeclW9gKmDLWzijZ_7kQb7O872v0uMCta0AXLN0g2AFWWCFS6v16nOZFO_PSpSUEXNhaFIYD7YxHB1gbXidHNMEyvkk-WKBdwNkdn5zV0RsfPsGi9ikAmam8JyXf/s320/P1060053.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It was for some reason difficult to get them at the same time throughout the weekend, and I was beginning to think Dion was pulling my leg; there is no Alan Brooks, or he's secretly Alan Brooks (and I'm sure I did confuse him for Alan Brooks at some point because Dion had told me, "Alan's gonna be here tomorrow!" so I was really weirded out by the possibility of calling Alan Dion when Dion was supposed to be not at the table??) but in the end I did get them together at the same time. </td></tr>
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OK, so let me finish off by giving you what I was originally going to say at Opening Ceremonies, in case you wanted to know:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I’d like to begin by acknowledging that we are on the lands of the Ute tribe, and that I, having never been here before, say to the rest of you, welcome back to AnomalyCon. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Kronda asked me to say a few things about what I do, which is a difficult question! Like many of you, I do many things. I am the People of Color Safer Space Liaison of WisCon in Madison, WI; I write science fiction and fantasy, and also edit the stuff. My last edited anthology, The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia, came out in November; a few of you may have bought it. I am also on the bid committee to host the North American Science Fiction Con of 2017 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. If you are voting in WorldCon this year, and if you also have always wanted to go to Puerto Rico, kindly do not overlook site selection, and vote for us. I am a member of the Carl Brandon Society, an organization dedicated to racial diversity in speculative fiction. I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and my dissertation is on steampunk iconography, its affects, and its entrenchment of white supremacy. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I am probably here because of my blog, Silver Goggles, where I write about steampunk from a postcolonial perspective. The term “postcolonial” refers to many, wavering things: it is a “time period”, that is, the time period after the decolonization post-World War II. But a closer glance at the state of politics and economics of many of these formerly-colonized regions shows that that’s not true; so postcolonialism is also about neocolonialism. In order to understand what nation-states and their peoples are going through, we look at the history of colonialism; so postcolonialism also looks at colonialism. Postcolonialism examines the psychology, the traumas, and the scars left behind by the last wave of empire-building, the consequences made all the more stark because of the industrial revolutions and large-scale migrations. Postcolonialism thinks about who we are, past the veneer of having put history behind us, because history is not made of discrete narratives, separable into categories and centuries. It is instead porous, and the crimes of the past often reverberate in the oppressions of the present. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Like postcolonialism, steampunk is also porous, although it is more purposeful. It is by its postmodern nature consumptive, appropriative, insistent on the breakdown of neat categories and genre, so it can snatch, like a magpie, shiny things from the past to make our present looks gorgeous. We are going to have many conversations about steampunk in the next few days. But let me propose to you a definition of steampunk beyond the obvious qualifications of genre, trend, fashion, what-have-you: that steampunk is a conversation of the present with history. It makes people nervous to look at steampunk and what we pull from history into it, because for most of us, the only history easily and readily available to us is a dominant narrative of linear progress, technologically, ideologically, from the last great period of colonialism that encompassed the world, and put into place many systems of oppression still in existence today. We’d like the shiny; we’d like to not be reminded from when it came from, not just because it reminds us of empires past, but also because it perforce must remind us of genocide and imperialism today when we’d like to think them gone. Yet by its very presence, of its when-ness in the now, that history demands to be spoken to, to be in conversation with. Very uncomfortable conversation, about imperialism, oppression, white supremacy, colonialism, their shapes and sounds, their echoes today, and into the future. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>May you have such safe spaces this weekend in your pocket fairyland for such conversations. I look forward to speaking with you and yours. </blockquote>
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Hope to see you next year, AnomalyCon!</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-63899063585605983272016-03-16T19:27:00.003-07:002016-03-16T19:27:35.560-07:00The Steampunk Postcolonialist @ AnomalyCon! <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is a little late because I've been busy writing my dissertation and avoiding trying to wade through the program Excel sheet that is AnomalyCon's program grid. I'm doing it now because I am at ICFA and trying to avoid working on my dissertation for now. <div>
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I'm generally pleased, though, to announce that I am an Author Spotlight at AnomalyCon 2016! Here is my schedule of things:<script type="text/javascript">
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FRIDAY:</div>
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4pm OPENING CEREMONIES</div>
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SATURDAY:</div>
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Language, Dialect and Code-Switching</div>
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<b>11am<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Windstar A</b></div>
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Representing code-switching in fiction, but also how it relates to a miltilingual and diverse geek community.</div>
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Science Fiction and the Future of Childbirth<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>12pm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Mesa Verde C</b></div>
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Childbirth is often glossed over--even in Star Trek where they "beam" the kid out. But in futuristic worlds, what can reproduction look like, and beyond the cis-normative? <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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With All Due Respect: Multicultural Fashion<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>2pm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Mesa Verde B</b></div>
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Steampunk isn't just about Victorian England! Dive into costuming from every angle and discuss cultural respect without appropriation. </div>
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How To Fail Gracefully<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>7pm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Windstar A</b></div>
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As you write, you're likely to mess up, or hurt someone without realizing it. How to take steps to learn gracefully instead of turning a mistake into a FAIL and grow from the experience.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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Queer Identities After the Apocalypse<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>8pm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Wind River B</b></div>
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Trans healthcare and queer reproductive choices in post-apocalyptic worlds. <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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SUNDAY:</div>
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The Future of Racism<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>11am<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Mesa Verde C</b></div>
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The past's virulent racism against the Irish has now faded to language artifacts like "red-headed stepchild" and "paddy wagon." What traces will present-day racism leave behind, and what new forms of racism will emerge?<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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Colonialism of Fairytales<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>12pm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Wind River A</b></div>
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Many people only know of tales by Grimm and other Western authors, sometimes only the versions revamped by Disney. A discussion on colonialism in fairy tales and mention of those outside the "mainstream."<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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We Have Always Fought<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<b>2pm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></div>
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<b>Mesa Verde</b></div>
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The History of women in warfare, and how women have never been so demure as history would have you believe. </div>
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Considering how many panels I'm on, I'll probably stagger to school the Monday after. But I hope you all come! You may not like what I have to say, but you should come anyway.</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-15418972564770203072016-02-25T18:15:00.000-08:002016-02-25T18:15:06.613-08:00SHAW 2016: Keep Calm and Caper<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was gonna share a bit of my dissertation with you but changed my mind, because I realized I wanted to share something funnier. Steampunk has brought some incredible moments to my life, some hilarious stories, some good anecdotes, and trivial lessons. My favourite lesson is this: keep calm and caper.<br />
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What does that even mean? It means that when all else fails, do a little dance. In costume, out of costume, probably especially after you take off your costume because unless you dress Super Steampunk Casual you might be a little stiff. Do a little caper. It can have marvelous effects.<br />
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I end this Steampunk Hands Around The World here with a couple of my favourite stories: </div>
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<br /><a name='more'></a><b>#1 Busking</b><br />
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In 2012, I embarked on a May Marathon Madness of conventions. For the stretch between Texas (where I attended AetherFest) and Massachusetts (Watch City Festival), I traveled with <a href="http://birdsbeforethestorm.net/">Magpie Killjoy</a> and <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2012/05/steampunk-poc-pablo-vasquez-aka-mr.html">Pablo Vasquez III aka Mr. Saturday</a>.<br />
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At some point, as we approached New York, we stopped off to the side for Magpie to take a break from driving after a long day. "I think I'm going to play my accordion," he said.<br />
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"Cool!" Pablo replied.<br />
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Then we stopped, got off, and Magpie actually did take out his accordion, which rather surprised Pablo who thought he was joking. As Magpie played, Pablo and I did a little jig around him, to stretch our legs, also to generally enjoy ourselves, because that's what you do when music is playing. I'm sure it was a grotesquely charming sight, and you need to embrace that sort of thing.<br />
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Then some white woman came up to us with a little bag, and told us, "I'm almost home now, so if you like, here's some stuff for the road!"<br />
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Well, you don't turn down stuff like that! Of course we took the loot. That is how we ended up with a few bags of nuts and trailmix, a water bottle, and a small bottle of vodka. Why the vodka? What was the woman doing with the vodka, and why did she give it to us? I have never been able to reason this out; white people are a mystery.<br />
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<b>#2 The Crusty Shaman at the Turnpike</b><br />
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So this was a thing we learned from our friend Ceightie, who traveled with us along the stretch from Texas to South Carolina (or was it North?): there is a dance started among the crust punks, who don't know how to dance at metal concerts.<br />
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At metal concerts, you pound your upper body forward with your hands raised as if praising God with a slow dignity, because the music often calls for that. It's got a solid bass line that booms and dooms through the hall, and you should probably respect death as it walks among your ranks.<br />
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Crust punks, apparently, do not understand this. The crust punk dance at metal shows, as a result, is a form of swaying one's body back and forth while wiggling one's hands up and down at the sides of one's head. It looks like an irrational baby of flailing and having a seizure, except it is obviously very controlled and artful, unlike babies.<br />
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This dance is called "the Crusty Shaman."<br />
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At the New Jersey Turnpike, with Magpie and Pablo sitting up front, they had fallen silent since traffic jams are naturally stressful.<br />
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"Why is it <i>so slow</i>," Magpie grumbled.<br />
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"Quick, we need to do the Crusty Shaman!" Pablo yelled.<br />
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Reader, there is no way to really express the effect this had, except perhaps through a comparison to gargoyles. If they could move and caper.<br />
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And the turnpike cleared.<br />
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We were on our way.<br />
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I reiterate for you, keep calm, and in whatever capacity you can, caper. Caper in your mind, caper in your body, caper in your soul. </div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-71520221618394930212016-02-18T18:02:00.000-08:002016-02-18T18:02:06.552-08:00SHAW 2016: Tipu Sultan's Tiger<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
And today, a poem:<script type="text/javascript">
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Tipu Tiger, how do you do?</div>
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Locked away far from home,</div>
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can you call your master where you are?</div>
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Roar, Tipu Tiger, </div>
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and eat that white British,</div>
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he's delish,</div>
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but be careful of your tummy!</div>
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Tipu Tiger, what do you see?</div>
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Surrounded by foreigners,</div>
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can you run home to where you belong?</div>
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Be still, Tipu Tiger,</div>
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before the eyes of the white British,</div>
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they're skittish,</div>
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be careful of their clumsy hands!</div>
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Tipu Tiger, what do you think?</div>
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Is muggy England like India,</div>
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can you taste the passing of time,</div>
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so long since you were home?</div>
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Wait, Tipu Tiger,</div>
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maybe someday you'll be bought home,</div>
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brought home, come home, </div>
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eating that white British</div>
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all the way home.</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-31044084464443940282016-02-11T17:52:00.000-08:002016-02-11T17:52:09.334-08:00SHAW 2016: Syncretic Balinese Treasures<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I went to Bali in 2010, before starting my M.A. degree, with my family for Lunar New Year. Bali is a state of Indonesia, at the far-eastern tip. (It also shares the same timezone, which makes it a bit confusing when you wake up at 5am and it's already pretty light out and you're not used to that.)<script type="text/javascript">
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Balinese culture is a combination of different cultures, and it's pretty easy to trace where each element in their architecture and aesthetics are from, while still appreciate it all as singular wholes unique to the region. The Hindu and Buddhist influences stand out strongly, coagulating into the local folk aesthetic.</div>
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And boy are there some steampunky things there!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF_RYsAiLR8F4N9RRaolavC79if_sxdGEBOqJTu5C3QyouyriS1DIqTJlNgnSLxPITN7cvmlLPZ6HupLULEghLSwcQp0tJ0qycKylxzxlCUV1bImleUes-hvY6t25aPc-3qo1VfeFYEAOy/s1600/P1000296.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF_RYsAiLR8F4N9RRaolavC79if_sxdGEBOqJTu5C3QyouyriS1DIqTJlNgnSLxPITN7cvmlLPZ6HupLULEghLSwcQp0tJ0qycKylxzxlCUV1bImleUes-hvY6t25aPc-3qo1VfeFYEAOy/s320/P1000296.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Bamboo is used for many things, especially building. You must use what you have in your immediate environment to get the job done!</div>
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Bali grows enough rice to feed all its people and then some. It never has to import rice from the other Indonesian states. Poverty being relative, it does not mean you go hungry here. And a huge part of why is because of its agriculture. Terraced fields like these are an agricultural technology still practiced across the world in so-called "underdeveloped countries." </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhMb4bVo__QUA6FZR27AvHxs7Ved0fEdqgdud7NqOpSo_RaSL79VfOg0wFYmhKWlyEpiY1_3w7cm8qxypuhTlJoPQZ7yfrFJR3cFpjUq65mATChKiSpbAriFv6mnAPiODkgW_wuCvDNhFb/s1600/P1000447.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhMb4bVo__QUA6FZR27AvHxs7Ved0fEdqgdud7NqOpSo_RaSL79VfOg0wFYmhKWlyEpiY1_3w7cm8qxypuhTlJoPQZ7yfrFJR3cFpjUq65mATChKiSpbAriFv6mnAPiODkgW_wuCvDNhFb/s320/P1000447.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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For scale, that's a person!<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYPaV4VGyXsh3wjRrUwj9zgYqS6TvF5p33rfDadGqwn5C7jbKKJH1ODqshFa5qcS-LeUF4BHLeZfoUvEWbDwliaAEfzu7MHJt_VXib8jmOMZdFCp3Vax8dNNkMH78tEuxqF5spuDJK-gR/s1600/P1000528.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYPaV4VGyXsh3wjRrUwj9zgYqS6TvF5p33rfDadGqwn5C7jbKKJH1ODqshFa5qcS-LeUF4BHLeZfoUvEWbDwliaAEfzu7MHJt_VXib8jmOMZdFCp3Vax8dNNkMH78tEuxqF5spuDJK-gR/s320/P1000528.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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My brother and I went wandering town, and saw this cool diver's helmet! Why is it here? I didn't know who to ask. Perhaps I'll never know. But there's a story there...</div>
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"United States Navy</div>
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Diving Helmet</div>
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Mark V Mod. 1</div>
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Serial No. ??? Date of mfg ???</div>
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Aschrad's and Son Division</div>
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Soovil Manufacturing Company</div>
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Incorporated</div>
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Brooklyn N.Y. USA"</div>
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I don't know whose bike it was, but it was the brassiest, most daring thing I'd seen. I liked it so much, I took more pictures of it:</div>
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Finally, this cool thing which possibly has a more solarpunk feel to it than a steampunk one, but I'm pretty sure some steampunk novel an Indonesian will write someday will have this:</div>
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A doorway cut from the roots of an ancient hardwood! </div>
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What secrets must it hold! What history must it have seen! </div>
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There were other things I saw on this marvelous trip, like a little cannon in the shape of an elephant, and a musical water feature that was more complicated than it probably needed to be (the Rule of Cool was clearly in place, there), but evidently my camera died on me so you will just have to take my word on it. </div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-66718529134482033152016-02-04T17:43:00.000-08:002016-02-04T17:43:08.475-08:00SHAW 2016: The 4 Most Steampunk Places of Riverside<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Yes, Silver Goggles is once again participating in Steampunk Hands Around the World!<br />
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Folks may or may not be aware that currently, I live in Riverside, California. I'm not a fan of Riverside, exactly: the sun is aggressively hot and bright for too many months of the year; it's too dry; Southern California does not believe in public transportation; affordable housing apparently does not exist. That there are palm trees everywhere also gets on my nerves: they don't belong here, they're here only for the "exotic" feeling which is pretty pointless, and the desert could use more good desert-loving trees that provide shade to its inhabitants. I am not, however, the architect of this region.</div>
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Fortunately! Not all is lost on me here in Riverside. Today, I give to you my four favourite spots in Riverside that I try to make people aware of. Two of them are right downtown, and if you visit, I will make sure to take you there.<br />
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<a href="http://www.missioninn.com/"><b>1. The Mission Inn</b></a><br />
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The Mission Inn hotel and spa is neither a mission nor an inn. It began as a humble boarding house in 1876, and Riverside's most eccentric figure, Frank Miller, took it over from his father and began really developing it. Now, it is several stories high and comprised of some five different wings, each built in a different time period with a slightly different aesthetic; there is a Spanish wing, an Oriental Garden, a Rotunda, and a Cloister. It was designed to be the hub of commerce, and Frank Miller owned most of Main Street back in the day. </div>
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Tours are led by a docent most days of the week, and I will happily spend the $16 to follow the docents around. </div>
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Frank Miller was a magpie at heart--if he saw something shiny that he liked, he bought it home, and put it somewhere. This means that the collection of stuff accumulated in the Mission Inn is pretty unique. And he would keep the extra stuff in the basement, and price most everything on display. When a guest bought something, he simply brought something else up from the basement to replace it. </div>
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And like a steampunk, he never catalogued the stuff and so nobody really knows the details of where he got things. </div>
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They are from all over, some with incredibly interesting stories. For example, the chapel altar! He bought it, sight unseen, from a Mexican silver-mining family down on their luck, and it came in by train in thirty-something separate boxes packed with used stable hay. It sat in one of the ballrooms for a while, while Frank Miller figured out what to do with it. Then he got Tiffany windows (which have their own story!), and had a chapel built especially for these pieces.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The chapel. Go on a weekday because there's a wedding there practically every day.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit6BS_F2X8r1VHsjzGQzJoORgL_TYjRphN-mGUsnbYz3sBftwYvSNualpEZsnXs_TPJSFJvI0Ox3o0VlvTQwpGMQS6B1FMC9B6Zp1UBFArHC2l59y_qTbupFF80RlqHwb4oZCAnewdVlxo/s1600/Resize_0331151655-02_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit6BS_F2X8r1VHsjzGQzJoORgL_TYjRphN-mGUsnbYz3sBftwYvSNualpEZsnXs_TPJSFJvI0Ox3o0VlvTQwpGMQS6B1FMC9B6Zp1UBFArHC2l59y_qTbupFF80RlqHwb4oZCAnewdVlxo/s200/Resize_0331151655-02_01.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioSgiDUOtqp4tsg9X2Ts6srDnb1CzEA8RQlbl3MXJIoliTGqhpdMc0QaI5_Ara40lLOd1O-B8RQI45D3BNhJP7iz826fdtTjxlmarTtrhdv9oxp6itbROo7C4yVdc7ZYi8WS3IFBhxaPwB/s1600/Resize_0331151701-00_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioSgiDUOtqp4tsg9X2Ts6srDnb1CzEA8RQlbl3MXJIoliTGqhpdMc0QaI5_Ara40lLOd1O-B8RQI45D3BNhJP7iz826fdtTjxlmarTtrhdv9oxp6itbROo7C4yVdc7ZYi8WS3IFBhxaPwB/s200/Resize_0331151701-00_01.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwNejPcbYLRMdfeArmNTTFgo5YkSR2cnXs2_wcziFLULXnEtOg3LCv96R3-BhZidcNueLrkN4eoqMMFoiRY6Q3kezVfgjrHptvmhyphenhyphenbrLsvympC2L8VIKjp9aq0nUumMpOdh3bYnQOYiQjN/s1600/Resize_0331151702-00_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwNejPcbYLRMdfeArmNTTFgo5YkSR2cnXs2_wcziFLULXnEtOg3LCv96R3-BhZidcNueLrkN4eoqMMFoiRY6Q3kezVfgjrHptvmhyphenhyphenbrLsvympC2L8VIKjp9aq0nUumMpOdh3bYnQOYiQjN/s200/Resize_0331151702-00_01.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
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Many things in the Mission Inn were built by local artisans if they weren't bought. And like good steampunk art, they bring in disparate pieces that cohere into their own aesthetic that evokes the past and the present, to take their history into the future with them.<br />
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<b><a href="http://tiostacos1.com/?page_id=10161">2. Tio's Tacos</a></b></div>
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Where to begin with Tio's Tacos? A restaurant with three separate dining areas: indoors, a patio, and a chapel courtyard. When the owner, Martin Sanchez, started it in 1990, having arrived in the States, the first thing he noticed was how much garbage Americans generated. He came from an incredibly poor background, and so he decided to contribute to his new home, he would start recycling the garbage from the kitchen as art pieces.</div>
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This is where you'll find structures built of glass bottles cemented together. There're large people made out of cans out back. Stuffed toys rescued from the landfill populate the trees. Every corner of this half-acre of land has got some visual treat. It's a nice place to hang out, yes, but if you come with me, I will drag you around to show you the water-feature with flagstones and lucha libre fights and ant sculptures. You'll not miss the giant mermaid and the fellow standing on his hands. </div>
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Every few months, Sanchez builds something new, so it's always worthwhile going back just to see what has changed. </div>
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<a href="http://www.steamonly.org/"><b>3. Hunter Park Live Steam Society</b></a></div>
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There is this park on Iowa Ave, called Hunter Park. It was owned by Joe Hunter, an industrialist, who loved steam locomotives, and saw their decline. So he built Hunter Park, with a little train track running around it, and left it to the City of Riverside when he passed. Now, of course, the City didn't have the faintest clue what to do with it, so they handed it over to the Live Steamers Society, who still maintain the park to this day. (There will be a new Metrolink station there in a few years.)</div>
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To maintain it, the Live Steamers Society give free train rides to visitors every 2nd and 4th Sundays of the month! You just wait at the "train station" and sit on the little train, and around you go! It's a good ten minute ride, very satisfying. I've gone at least thrice, and each time it's families with kids and joy. </div>
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<b><a href="http://www.saveourchinatown.org/aboutchinatown.html">4. Riverside Chinatown</a></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmGh1FNC87dYVvS1V1dFq3fMkRaF-MvrUcNfJkT9Z6BOr9otLlQ8VwcoqJArR0PMouXy4EQhtebed2hN-iceQDCNBym8SDzmit3a_KmEQO9gJCoqIkJmIXnNhNB8Ezq9IEln2yTPNbNvYR/s1600/Boundary+Marker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmGh1FNC87dYVvS1V1dFq3fMkRaF-MvrUcNfJkT9Z6BOr9otLlQ8VwcoqJArR0PMouXy4EQhtebed2hN-iceQDCNBym8SDzmit3a_KmEQO9gJCoqIkJmIXnNhNB8Ezq9IEln2yTPNbNvYR/s320/Boundary+Marker.jpg" width="320" /></a>Riverside Chinatown is one of those little miracles of humanity that give me hope about how we think about our communities and histories. There used to be Chinese businesses in Riverside downtown, but in 1885 (which would be a few years after the Chinese Exclusion Act), new ordinances forced them out. This second site of Riverside's Chinatown is along Teqesquite Ave between Palm and Brockton. There is a marker at the corner of Teqesquite and Palm.<br />
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Mostly it is now an empty lot. By the 40s, only one resident, Wong Ho Leun, was left, who hung onto the land until his death in 1974. In the 80's, there was an archaeological project to investigate the remains. Attempts to commercialize the site have been unsuccessful. (You want to bet that Hungry Ghosts have something to do with this?)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghNkvfnCcKLf1o6TCC6gR_SOAnenvxdn54J1BZcArx0IpwfW0BCv39eS3DE6UfeWNE3byMlGpACbiC_YuS8xeHYRr-lGPFkv4fDYjb33WKCg5i_2lyZGqUuJoMaj5nfDF939MHyGfNO7cu/s1600/Wong+St+Sign.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghNkvfnCcKLf1o6TCC6gR_SOAnenvxdn54J1BZcArx0IpwfW0BCv39eS3DE6UfeWNE3byMlGpACbiC_YuS8xeHYRr-lGPFkv4fDYjb33WKCg5i_2lyZGqUuJoMaj5nfDF939MHyGfNO7cu/s320/Wong+St+Sign.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Riverside Chinatown is an example of the local community rallying around to preserve a piece of the city's history. The Save Our Chinatown organization has been working to convert the area into a heritage site since. I hope that it will be able to retain what is historical about it, while being allowed to evolve into something new, bringing its near-forgotten past into the future with it by resisting attempts to forget it and wipe it from public memory. </div>
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So go visit these places when you are in town. They are super historical!</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-31663462904531336912015-10-23T11:57:00.003-07:002015-10-23T11:57:43.359-07:00#SEAsteampunk news! <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I haven't really been posting here much about the <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-sea-is-ours-tales-of-steampunk-southeast-asia/x/10629128#/story">IndieGoGo Campaign</a> for <i>The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia</i>. Mostly because I've been pretty obnoxious about it on other social media platforms (sorry, Twitter and Tumblr followers and Facebook friends). Also because in the first couple of weeks of the campaign, I was emotionally exhausted by the whole thing. <div>
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It is now twelve hours to the end of the campaign. We hit the ground running, and we actually reached the base goal of $8,000 on Day 15. There was a lot of weeping involved. Since then we have been aiming for the first stretch goal, and we hit that the other day, too. </div>
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Joyce and I will be working on a teacher's edition for the anthology. We hope to have it done by early next year, and it will be available for download, probably with a pay-what-you-like fee. </div>
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The book has now been sent off to the printers, and it will be ready for the shelves on November 30. It's a delay from the originally stated November 1 date, because our publisher, Bill, recently suffered a tragic loss in his family. </div>
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Bill himself will be going to Europe for the next few weeks, and when he gets back, he'll be making many, many, many trips to the post office. (Customs for international shipping takes about 5 minutes each parcel, aaaaaaaaand he does it on top of a day job! No, don't ask me how he does it, yes, lean back and stare in wonder.) </div>
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Thanks to everyone who's been supporting us so far, and looking forward to your reactions when you get the book!!</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-67688453805551561442015-10-23T11:43:00.001-07:002015-10-23T11:43:39.378-07:00Hamilton: The Musical<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Do you like musicals, friends? I do. I don't get to see them often, and the last one I went to see was <i>Allegiance</i>. I'm not good at reviewing theater, but I do like it. Have you heard <i>Hamilton</i>, the Broadway musical about Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America? I heard the original cast recording when it first dropped on NPR, and it made me weep, but last night, I sat down to listen to it more closely on Spotify, accompanied by <a href="http://genius.com/albums/Lin-manuel-miranda/Hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording">lyrics and commentary from Genius</a>, and I wept harder. I do not recommend the experience of doing it while grading papers. <div>
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And after it was done and I was considering the genres it had been written in, its themes of history-making, its subtle digs at today's climate of anti-immigration and economy, I thought to myself, this musical has a most steampunk sensibility!<a name='more'></a></div>
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It doesn't fit <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2013/07/jhas-very-own-steampunk-101.html">my recipe for steampunk</a>, true... at best it has a very retrofuturistic element, because there is a constant pressure on the part of the characters to build something for their future, something that will be their legacy. It's a modern interpretation of how people in the past would have looked to the future. There's no technofantasy, and it's less alternate history than it is setting the historical record straight and putting forward a reparative narrative. </div>
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But that reparative narrative unto itself is also a kind of alternate history--presenting history a different way from how it's normally narrated to us. Uncovering little things that may not matter in the long run gives us insight into how particular events have unfolded. As a result, this people who are the subject of the musical not only become part of the background of one's historical culture, but become fully fleshed out and human.</div>
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What I mean by a steampunk sensibility is that of (mis)representing history with full awareness of the present. We like to think about history as this cordoned-off, self-contained series of events that happened without our involvement--how could we be involved, when it happened before we were even aware of it? And a lot of steampunk stories are written in the same way: self-contained, distant, having little to no link to the present... completely invented history. However, the present and the past have no definitive borders in relation to each other: the way we view the past is always coloured by how the present shapes us, and the way we view the present is always coloured by what has happened in the past. </div>
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When I consider what is <i>good</i> steampunk, I find that good steampunk always has this leaking of the present into the alternate history, of the truth into the fictional that shapes the fictional into something that speaks to a deeper level. That's why steampunk projects that don't reference history and which purport to be something faraway don't interest me very much; there's no truth binding it, there's no curiosity to spur about something that really happened, there's nothing to impart. I don't want just the trappings of history, I also want a dialog with it. </div>
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That is what's happening in <i>Hamilton</i>. By choosing hip hop and rap as the genre through which to tell the story of an immigrant who rises up ala the American Dream narrative, Lin-Manuel Miranda indexes histories of hip hop and of the Founding Fathers, links them to give history a fresh look. Hip hop is very much a modern genre; it's rarely associated with anything "historical" in the sense that we're used to in steampunk (which is, generally, anything more than a hundred years ago). Telling a historical story through an extremely modern genre--and then doing it well in a way that really respects the genre and plays up the genre's strengths--isn't just good for novelty value, but also forces us to consider how we approach the genre and the history. Consider: a genre often associated with Black people, taken up commercially to tell white people's stories and line white people's pockets. In this musical, hip hop has (and pays!) non-white people to tell a white man's story, and the story of a white male immigrant from a predominantly Black country at that. </div>
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Throughout the musical, there is an awareness on the historicized characters that people are watching, and they are making history, and time gets to tell "who lives, who does, who gets to tell your story." There are lines lifted directly from historical documents, and then there are lines which paraphrase them. There's a bit of moving events around for the sake of plot, and there are narrative choices made for added drama (for example, Maria Reynold's ignorance of her husband blackmailing Hamilton, when records show otherwise), and these are fairly obvious. There's also an attempt to fill in the gaps, as in the songs by Angelica and Eliza, from perspectives that probably won't show up on history textbooks. In Eliza's "Burn," she angrily "removes herself from the narrative," refusing the future a chance to witness her reactions and claiming her right to privacy from not just the public eye of her time, but also the public eye for posterity. </div>
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The casting choice of peopling the stage with people of color, rather than default to white actors, is another hugely steampunk'd choice: the choice of historical mis-representation that brings historical events closer to our present reality, by anachronistically foregrounding non-white people in a historical narrative that they are usually erased from. We could write whole papers about what this does! For this blog though, what it does is highlight that this is a text written by people of the present, for people of the present, trying to be true to the present itself. As such, verisimilitude or conforming to what we think of historical settings isn't exactly a concern, and good thing too! (Let's be real, what with all the numbers of mad scientists and adventurers running amuck, steampunk isn't exactly concerned with verisimilitude. That is why there is so much bad world-building in the genre. There, I said it.)</div>
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In sum, <i>Hamilton</i>, while not being steampunk, does what good steampunk stuff does: re-present history in a ripping good story, re-interpreting historical record to bring forward things we might otherwise miss in common narratives, in a frame that is self-aware of its recent-ness and modernity. I'm so glad it exists, and I hope more people look to it as inspiration for steampunk!</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-80267663310379259112015-09-23T23:37:00.002-07:002015-10-23T11:57:59.667-07:00The SEAsteampunk IndieGoGo Goes Live!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In the midst of the quarter starting, one more round of prospectus revisions, and further research, plops into my lap <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-sea-is-ours-tales-of-steampunk-southeast-asia/x/10629128#/story">the IndieGoGo campaign for <i>The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia</i></a>! We need to raise $8000 to pay everyone involved. (The anthology will go to print whether we reach this goal of not, but it would be really nice to get paid.) The campaign ends in 30 days, and while we've got a strong start right now, we really need to keep it going.<script type="text/javascript">
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Two of our Special Guest Rewards have been snapped up, but we have more forthcoming! So keep an eye out!</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-61448412032511937092015-09-16T12:11:00.003-07:002015-09-16T12:11:35.595-07:00The Steampunk Postcolonialist @ CONvolution 2015!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I just got my schedule for <a href="http://con-volution.com/2015/">CONvolution 2015: LEGION OF FANDOM</a>! Unfortunately I will miss the Friday, because TA duties occur then, but I'll leave Riverside as soon as possible to hie myself to Burlingame! The schedule <a href="http://con-volution.com/2015/schedule/">is now live</a>, but here are the ones specific to me:<script type="text/javascript">
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<b>Saturday 10:00 - 11:15, Harbor B</b></div>
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<b>South East Asian SFF</b></div>
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Science-Fiction and Fantasy are global. Our panelists discuss the works and perspectives of South East Asia.</div>
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Panelists: Jaymee Goh, ZM Quynh, Bryan Thao Worra, Emily Jiang</div>
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<b>Saturday 11:30 - 12:45, Sumac </b></div>
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<b>Non-European Steampunk</b></div>
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Pat MacEwen (M), Jaymee Goh, Bryan Thao Worra</div>
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<b>Saturday 14:30 - 15:45, Pine</b></div>
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<b>Diversity in Speculative Fiction</b></div>
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Gregg Castro (M), Jaymee Goh, Thaddeus Howze, Bradford Lyau, Balogun Ojetade, Sumiko Saulson</div>
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Sunday 11:30 - 12:45, Pine</div>
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Asian Ancestresses</div>
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Jaymee Goh (M), Emily Jiang, Bradford Lyau</div>
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<b>Sunday 13:00 - 14:15, Oak</b></div>
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<b>Reading 3</b></div>
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Kyle Aisteach, Sumiko Saulson, Ms. Amy Sterling Casil, Bryan Thao Worra, Jaymee Goh</div>
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I have no idea what I'll be reading for Sunday yet! But hopefully you'll stick around and come see me and my fellow readers anyway. I'm especially excited to be on panels with fellow steampunk POC Balogun Ojetade and Bryan Thao Worra! You will also meet zm quynh, who will be in <i>The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia</i>!</div>
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Emily Jiang and I have been on Asian Ancestresses before, when it debuted at WisCon a few years ago, and it was a blast! I am also looking forward to renewing acquaintance with Bradford Lyau, long-time fan-scholar and one of the first researchers using the Eaton Special Collection at UCR!</div>
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See you soon, Bay Area!</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-21871199397399140052015-08-20T00:52:00.000-07:002015-08-20T00:52:57.416-07:00Some #SEAsteampunk news!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So while I get back on track with my PhD adventures (which I will definitely post more about in a bit!) I had some news to share about <i>The SEA Is Ours: Tales Of Steampunk Southeast Asia</i>!<script type="text/javascript">
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Firstly, we have a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SoutheastAsianSteampunk">Facebook page</a>, and <a href="http://sea-steampunk.blogspot.com/">a blog</a>! That is where I've been posting most of the news. You'll also find me nattering about it on Twitter under the #SEsteampunk hashtag, of course. If you go Twitter-searching, or tweeting, use the hashtag, because when you search "the sea is ours" on Twitter you get some really strange results--mostly maritime border declarations, U.S. Navy merch, and folks taking selfies on the beach. </div>
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Secondly, ARCs have gone out! If you are a reviewer and would like to review The SEA is Ours for your media site, please <a href="mailto:sea.steampunk@gmail.com">fire me an email</a>! I will have you know that this anthology is built to appeal to all sorts of audiences. Except for racist white people who can't handle stories that are not about white people. (We don't have very many stories with white people in them.) </div>
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Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1495607569/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_asp_EFBnJ.2V7VJ4C">you can pre-order The SEA Is Ours</a> on Amazon now! </div>
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Fourthly, the fundraiser will be in September! I'll post more details when I can. Save some money for us! And keep with us--Joyce and I recorded some goofy videos when I last went to Singapore to see her. You'll get to see and hear us in all our accented glory.</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-18385246084141181572015-04-27T11:38:00.001-07:002015-04-27T11:38:54.373-07:00PhD Adventures: Inscrutably Oriental--Some Sartorial Observations on Intention and Reaction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Some of you readers may be familiar with my steampunk magistrate outfit that I've worn to conventions across North America:<script type="text/javascript">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is not me; this is the designer, <a href="http://costumemercenary.blogspot.com/">Jeanette Ng</a>.<br />I look like <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/p/blogmistress.html">this</a>, as well you know, or should.</td></tr>
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I commissioned this in 2010 from the Costume Mercenary, a history-graduate-student-moonlighting-as-designer for Live Action Roleplaying (LARP) outfits. The idea was this: the character I was gestating would be a magistrate for one of China’s colonies in Maritime Southeast Asia, most likely one of the Malay sultanates (present-time Malaysia, where I am from). Chinese traders had established their own port communities since the 1400s at least, and until China closed its borders after the Zheng He expeditions, clearly had imperialist ambitions abroad. The character would be a lead in a LARP game <a href="http://beyondvictoriana.com/">Ay-Leen the Peacemaker </a>and I had thought up. </div>
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The game would involve my character accusing Ay-leen’s <a href="http://ashleylaurenrogers.com/about/">partner </a>of smuggling opium into the colony, and Ay-leen would lead the players through the game, collecting clues to both clear her partner’s name, and educate the players about the extent of the Opium Wars that led to the establishment of a British colony in what is now Hong Kong. </div>
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Although the LARP Game never happened (I'm still holding out that it will, though), I still wore the outfit to steampunk conventions across Canada and the United States, firstly out of a sense of satisfaction with how fantastic the whole outfit is, secondly to kickstart conversation in which I talk about the Opium Wars and of Chinese diaspora communities, and thirdly to embody what steampunk could look like when divorced from the Victorian aesthetic. </div>
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Now, if you read this blog, you presumably know a bit about steampunk, so you know that roleplaying a steampunk persona, or a “steamsona,” is very popular, because it gives newcomers a thematic idea around which to start building their costume. One goes in or out of character to steampunk events, and theoretically, if all else fails in finding things in common to talk about, we can always ask each other about our steamsonas. </div>
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Because convention spaces are a rush of people trying to get from event to event, and also because attendees are socially awkward nerds, one is also likely to speak at length about one’s costume, forgetting to ask one’s interlocutor about their own costume as well. </div>
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I love you all very much, but let's not mince words here, this is a thing! And I, too, am guilty of this. </div>
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There is a disconnect between what I think I am communicating with my outfit, and what other people are reading from it. In all the conventions I have attended wearing this outfit, exactly one person understood it enough to exclaim at me, “does that necklace have exactly one hundred and eight beads?” </div>
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In his articulation of this problem, in a lovely book called <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fashion-theory-malcolm-barnard/1113557205?ean=9780415496216">Fashion Theory: An Introduction</a>, Malcolm Barnard interrogates the idea that clothing can send “secret messages” through the analogy of telecommunications. There is a tension in the space between sender and received, which he calls “noise,” that creates an anxiety, on both ends, on whether the right message is being sent or received. The lack of cultural knowledge that Barnard touches on permeates this noise, adding or subtracting from the cues of what could be passed, and sounding completely different to each person. </div>
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This probably accounts for the tension I feel around other Chinese people in this outfit; a recognition of something that should be familiar, but has been defamiliarized for a variety of reasons, without the words of exact knowledge to articulate how or why. I once passed by a restaurant on the street wearing this outfit, and when I looked in through the glass wall of this restaurant, I found a whole host of Asian elders looking at me. I still wish I knew what they were thinking. </div>
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This is probably also the psychology behind how a white man, who I ended up trapped in an elevator with, decided that the best compliment at the moment was, “nice geisha outfit.” </div>
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This is not necessarily a breach of etiquette: if one sees another wearing a lab coat with all sorts of laboratory accoutrements attached, one might say, “nice mad scientist outfit,” because those items all belong in the category of ideas associated with the mad scientist. Because we are socially awkward, we might not ask questions, for fear of looking ignorant. Much like in the game of Chinese whispers, no one can just state what they think they are hearing volubly, no one thinks to ask for clarification, everyone fills in the gaps of the message with their own words, there are mumblers and murmurers, and thus the person at the end of the line hears something completely different from the original statement.</div>
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If my outfit was a category of ideas, from my end, one might summarize it as “a Chinese magisterial woman wielding moral and legal authority as representative of the Imperial bureaucracy.” This requires the receiver to remember that China was an imperial power, with its own justice systems and symbols thereof. Without this key component, the phrase becomes, “a Chinese <strike>magisterial</strike> woman <strike>wielding moral and legal authority as representative of the Imperial bureaucracy</strike>.” In the larger context of North American race relations, the ability to differentiate between cultural outfits of Asia is not common, so the phrase becomes “<strike>a Chinese </strike>an Asian woman.” This Asian woman, however, is clearly wearing something ethnic, something formal. </div>
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When I queried the man as to why he assumed I was wearing a geisha outfit, he clearly panicked, and backpedaled: “your shoes.” </div>
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Ah, my shoes. These shoes, from <a href="http://www.foamtreads.com/collections/womens-closed-back/products/womens-foamtreads-debbie-brown-printed-flower">Foamthreads</a>, which I bought in a Hamilton store, meant for indoor wear and the exact kind of old-lady patterns I like a lot. A pattern I might see in Malaysia, which is very far away from Japan. These shoes:</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">They were on sale for $25!</td></tr>
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I <i>suppose</i> it looks reasonably Asian. The generous reading of his reading on his end, therefore, is that he had no other point of reference for “an Asian woman wearing silk, beads, gold shoes, and makeup” besides “a geisha,” which does contain the generic connotation of “beautiful Asian woman” in North America, but also, unfortunately for him, me, and everyone else in the elevator, the stereotypical connotation of “a beautiful Asian woman providing entertainment and occasionally sexual services to an elite class.” </div>
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In the liminal space of the elevator, all these ideas floated about in ideological combat, expressed in the silence of the man’s confusion at whether he had said something wrong, everyone else’s faint embarrassment at the exchange or at not knowing whether he had said something wrong, and if he had, what it was, and my refusal to explain what had gone wrong with the pleasantry. </div>
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The magisterial robe became inscrutably Oriental, its whispers unheard. </div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-18266440186521353772015-04-17T11:36:00.003-07:002015-04-17T11:36:50.974-07:00PhD Adventures: An Anecdote Apropos of Nothing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
During a presentation of Steam Around The World, when I was taking questions, a young woman, white woman, wearing a robe of some sort, stood up, to explain her costume, which went something like this: "this is the costume of an Orientalist. I'm purposely dressing wrong just like how they would have done it back in the day. It's supposed to show how ignorant the colonizers were back in the day that they would appropriate clothing from the natives like this. So it's not that I'm dressing to be a racist, just to look like how they would have done it back in the day."<div>
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I didn't really know how to respond to it back then, but this moment, among many other such moments, has stuck with me to this day. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm filled with secondhand embarrassment for this girl, so I guess it's good that I didn't really have an answer for her back then, because I think today I might have just burst out laughing in her face. <script type="text/javascript">
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-69317669998420783802015-04-13T16:34:00.004-07:002015-04-13T16:34:59.326-07:00PhD Adventures: A Brief Bibliography of Articles About Mad Scientists<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A while ago I posted my transcript for the paper I wrote on mad scientists, and promised to post the articles I found and used (not all cited). Some of them are easily found on JSTOR, others on Project MUSE. </div>
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The bib is also annotated in case you cared to know what the articles are about, from my perspective at least. I really enjoyed reading them, especially the Allen piece, so I hope you find them too!</div>
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<b>Benedict, Barbara M. “The Mad Scientist: The Creation of a Literary Stereotype.” <i>Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century</i>. Eds. Robert C. Leitz III & Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS Press, 2004. 59 – 107.</b></div>
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This chapter examines the beginnings of the mad scientist figure, with roots in conjurers, virtuosos, amateur scientists, and physicians, alongside the development of the sciences and the reception of the new knowledge by the masses. In the wake of the Restoration, Benedict argues that the virtuosi class of scientists had failed to establish themselves as good for the society, as the ideals of objectivity clashed with the desire to claim superiority of knowledge (89). At the same time, madness shifted from a connection with the divine that could not take life seriously due to the heightened awareness of mortality, to a pursuit of immortality that sought to understand mortality in order to conquer it (90).</div>
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“[The mad scientist’s madness] denotes the obsessive pursuit of forbidden knowledge, the willful tossing aside of the good things of this earth and of the promise of the world to come for Satnic knowledge; this is rebellion against the social consensus on what makes a good or proper life” (60).</div>
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“Not only did the virtuosi’s posture of disinterestedness seem deluded, but it also suggested that virtuosi were indifferent to the plight of their fellow men, especially if they occupied a dependent social position” (71).</div>
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“One reason for [the depiction of scientists as being prone to insanity] is the illegibility, construed as secrecy, surrounding science” (Benedict 104).</div>
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<b>Stiles, Anne. “Literature in ‘Mind’: H.G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist.” <i>Journal of the History of Ideas</i>, Vol. 70, No. 2 (April 2009). 317 – 339.</b></div>
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In her analysis on the 19th century journal Mind, Stiles follows the development of the mad scientist figure through the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing especially on how genius was perceived through eugenicists and biologists, as well as the class lines along which this development followed. Genius and the development of the brain indicated the simultaneous degeneration of emotions and fertility, according to French zoologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. At the same time, the Romantics (that informed the Victorian sensibilities) saw the genius as a “rebellious figure who challenged social hierarchies by suggesting that innate creative powers trump class status,” (322) which might account for why scientists did not oppose the depiction of their profession as one leading to insanity. Stiles specifically focuses on Wellsian depictions of the scientist figure in his fiction.</div>
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“[Various authors] argued that mankind had evolved larger brains at the expense of muscular strength, reproductive capacity, and moral sensibility” (319).</div>
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“Politically, the Romantic genius was a rebellious figure who challenged social hierarchies by suggesting that innate creative powers trump class status” (322).</div>
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<b>Toumey, Christopher P. “The Moral Character of Mad Scientists: A Cultural Critique of Science.” <i>Technology and Human Values</i>, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn 1992). 411 – 437. </b></div>
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Toumey argues that the mad scientist figure is cultural criticism of scientific work by an antirationalist public. He identifies the idioms used to represent science (414) and notes that the artistic rendition of scientific figures often occurs independently of actual science (417). Focusing on Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde characters, Toumey engages with how depictions of these two characters reflect changing moral priorities while still maintaining the vilification of the scientist.</div>
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Response: This article was written in 1992. How would this critique be different now? While steampunk does not critique science, it celebrates science in the form of pseudo-scientific chatter and performance. As such, it encourages a performance of scientific conquest. Moreover, the concept of evil is troubled in the millennial context of the post-modern.</div>
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“Let us say that three kinds of idioms could be used to represent science: (1) the physical paraphernalia of science, (2) scientific knowledge, and (3) the people who are scientists” (414).</div>
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“… it is assumed that events occurring within scientific circles produce changes in mad scientist stories … [however] artistic processes [that] shape the mad scientists who personify science … operate more or less independently of real science and real scientists” (417).</div>
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<b>Pesic, Peter. “The bell and the buzzer: on the meaning of science.” <i>Daedalus</i>, Vol. 132, No. 4 (Fall 2003). 35 – 44.</b></div>
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In discussing the investment of science in human society, Pesic harks back to the Baconian ideal of “new philosophy” that called for a “decisive break with [the] ancient authority” of the Greek natural philosophers (35). The mad scientist figure is a parody of the dilemma of this ideal: the scientist is caught between passion for seeking the truth, while forced to be objective in testing theories. Interestingly, Pesic captures the affects that this paradox produces (43).</div>
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“Bacon anticipated that the votaries of his ‘new philosophy’ would prick their desire to know with the spur of self-questioning. Fire with visionary excitement, they should nevertheless try to undermine their own dearest theories, lest they fall victim to self-delusion … Consider the paradoxical demands that Bacon anticipated. On one hand, the seekers must be cold, impersonal, testing each theory mercilessly. On the other, they must be filled with ardor, on fire to imagine radically new insights into the depths. … This paradox threatens to unravel the seekers’ selves and to paralyze their desires. As a result, their humanity may be hostage to their integrity as ‘scientists’ or ‘physicists’” (37).</div>
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<b>Allen, Glen Scott. “Master Mechanics & Evil Wizards: Science and the American Imagination from Frankenstein to Sputnik.” <i>The Massachusetts Review</i>, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 1992). 505 – 558.</b></div>
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Allen roots his argument of the anti-scientist turn in the World War II environment, when the post-war expectations of the wonders of science failed to manifest and scientists had built powerful weapons that represented a shadowy enemy’s capability to wipe cities off the map. However, Allen goes back even further into the 1800s, discussing two different kinds of sciences: theoretical sciences which could not be made immediately relevant to the general public (514), and applied sciences which could used by independent amateurs to develop inventions that were easily monetized. Thus, intellectual, abstract work is looked down upon as it does not contribute to a larger community, and indeed encourages self-imposed alienation (526). The Evil Wizard in the title refers to the aristocratic archetype whose work cannot be commercialized; the Master Mechanic is the innovative inventor, a rugged individual whose work is practical and enables others to conquer nature. This is also reflected in American technological utopias (536). Allen also examines the relationship between the scientific establishment and the military.</div>
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“In the absence of any strategic threat then, perhaps what frightened us was not the ‘gadget’ itself, but what it represented, the knowledge and organization behind it” (506, original italics).</div>
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“In four short years, the scientist had metamorphosed from a figure of immense stature and wisdom to an enemy … What had become of the SCIENTIST, the near-God handing the power of the atom, for better or for worse, to us mere mortals? One answer might be that the promise of wartime technology … created expectations which, when unmet, produced considerable disappointment, and a subsequent backlash of resentment and finger pointing” (509).</div>
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“European scientists considered their American cousins impatient, diffuse, and so eager for new discoveries that they didn’t bother to thoroughly investigate those already made” (512).</div>
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“[The other difference] between European and American science … was the need in this country to make science ‘popular,’ a requirement seen by European scientists as quite irrelevant to their work” (514).</div>
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“… the early versions of American ‘mad scientists’ were often faintly tainted by an aristocratic, even autocratic attitude. … while the European protagonists were usually Counts or Barons, in American fiction they became Doctors and Professors—thus emphasizing their anti-democratic elitism. And while the Reformers may only affect European manners and accents, the Megalomaniacs typically possess ancestral titles, own estates and castles, are entrusted with young female wards, and display a most unpedestrian knowledge not just of physics and medicines, but also of brandy and cigars” (525). </div>
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“… it is important to distinguish applied from theoretical scientists; and in the case of the Great Independents [such as Thomas Edison], what established and nourished their legendary status were the practical commercial results of their labors—and a good deal of propaganda work on the part of consumer media of the time, as well as the inventors themselves. … The mythology of the Great Independent was founded on essentially a single tenet: that their lack of association with any institutions, organizations, or co-workers was the basis of their inventive inspiration” (532, original italics).</div>
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“And yet another important difference between the Great Independents and the theoreticians is that the former were great entrepreneurs as well as great scientific investigators. In fact, first and foremost they were businessmen, who also happened to conceive and manufacture what they sold” (535, original italics).</div>
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<b>Larsen, Kristine. “Frankenstein’s Legacy: The Mad Scientist Remade.” <i>Vader, Voldemort and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Media</i>. Ed. Jamey Heit. NC: McFarland & Company, 2011. 46 – 63.</b></div>
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Larsen examines the figure of the mad scientist in the following media: the TV series Lost and Doctor Who, and the literary Lord of the Rings. She begins by quantifying the properties of the mad scientist, and identifying these properties in how they play out over the various arcs in the media listed.</div>
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“Starting from this concrete example, we can begin to quantify the distinct properties of a so-called mad scientist. His or her research:</div>
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1. Has an immoral intent (the classic case, often portrayed in the media, is world domination);</div>
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2. Employs an immoral methodology (such as experimentation on human subjects who have not given their expressed and informed consent to take part in such an experiment, or experimentation which does not treat its human or animal subjects with respect and compassion);</div>
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3. Has an immoral result (such as the development of a biological weapon);</div>
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4. Is carried out in secret (out of sight of peer review or governmental regulations);</div>
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5. Disregards the ethical considerations and regulations of society in general, professional organizations, and the scientist’s nation” (47 – 48)</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-31744146001326678772015-03-24T20:22:00.001-07:002015-03-24T20:22:38.837-07:00Transcript: "Steampunk Mad Scientists: Exclamation, Effect, Affect" @ ICFA 36<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Recently I had the chance to present a paper at the <a href="http://www.fantastic-arts.org/annual-conference/">International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts</a>, which is like a major East Coast Science Fiction conference, and rather than save myself some trouble and present a paper I'd already written, I decided to write a whole new thing! Because after all this could get folded into my dissertation project and get me thinking about more coherently. This was the abstract I submitted:<script type="text/javascript">
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In steampunk, the figure of the mad scientist looms in the background, either benign inventors who enable the technofantastical imagined setting, amoral villains threatening the world, or the space in between as morally-ambiguous sympathetic enactors of change with questionable methods. Literarily, they provide an avenue to explore the darker side of human choices; theatrically, they offer a chance to chew the furniture. This paper will survey how the figure of the mad scientist has been taken up in various steampunk media—Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series, music by steampunk bands Vernian Process and The Clockwork Quartet, and the webcomic Girl Genius. Though the narratives and the scientist figures are wide-ranging, they retain similarities in the depictions of their methods and psychological profiles even as they are deployed self-reflexively. The paper will then compare these mad scientists with one of the original mad scientists, Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and evaluate the influence of the trope on the steampunk subcultural values and aesthetic.</blockquote>
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However, as I developed the paper, I realized that this abstract was full of <i>lies </i>and I didn't actually want to do a survey of steampunk mad scientists, because that sounded totally boring! I betook myself to the databases to learn everything I could about mad scientists (which was, actually, a lot of fun, will post my annotated bibliography if anyone is interested) but just couldn't figure out an angle with which to tackle the subject.<br />
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Then I had to fix something in my apartment, and it needed some problem-solving skills and some other knowledge, and when I was done, I threw my hands in the air and shouted, "SCIENCE!" <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">I am sure everyone in
this room has done this. If you have not, I 100% recommend this experience. </span><br />
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And so I had my paper topic. the affective appeal of the steampunk mad scientist. The mad scientist is not a new figure—he's quite spread out over a range of pop culture media. For this presentation, I will focus not just on literary representations of the mad scientist, but also on the performative aspect in music and in sequential art. I'll also touch on the subcultural aspect of steampunk, in which participants adopt steampunk personas, or "steamsonas" as they are called, with a good chunk affixing the title "professor" or "doctor".</div>
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To begin, who is the mad scientist? We could probably list a set of traits of what he is like and never go home, but perhaps more importantly, why is he? He can be traced quite far back in the Western tradition. Peter Pesic takes us to the Renaissance period, the Baconian ideals of new philosophy that broke away from the natural philosophy of the Greeks. There, he identifies the beginnings of the psychological paradox that forecasts the mad scientist: "On one hand, the seekers must be cold, impersonal, testing each theory mercilessly. On the other, they must be filled with ardor, on fire to imagine radically new insights into the depths. … This paradox threatens to unravel the seekers’ selves and to paralyze their desires." Later on, in the long eighteenth century, the sciences would be established among the ranks of conjurers and physicians, and amateur scientists called the virtuoso class. Barbara Benedict argues that in the wake of the Restoration, this virtuoso class of scientists failed to establish themselves as good for the society, as the ideals of objectivity clashed with the desire to claim superiority of knowledge. Continuing with the ideals of Bacon to maintain an impersonal approach, "the virtuosi’s posture of disinterestedness seem deluded, [and] also suggested that they were indifferent to the plight of their fellow men."</div>
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Through this historical synopsis we get a sense of how the modern mad scientist has come to be. Because the shape of the mad scientist takes on many forms, occasionally contradictory ones, let’s borrow from cognitive theory the concept of the radial category in which its members are not defined by shared properties, but by “variations on a central model.” Steven Winter writes that “because these variations derive from the central case in different ways these extensions may have little to nothing in common with each other beyond their shared connection to the central case.” Such a concept allows us to count many different kinds of mad scientists as examples.</div>
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I could, of course, provide a catalog of steampunk mad scientists! I am, however, pressed for time, and besides which I am more interested in speaking of the affective dimension of the mad scientist figure and why he is so wholeheartedly embraced in the steampunk subculture.</div>
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So, briefly, what do I mean by the affective dimension of mad science? (digression!) Affects are usually vaguely described as feelings, or emotions. A concept derived from psychology, it is part of the processing of stimuli. The way I have seen it most usefully taken up is as a form of reaction that does not find itself easily articulated verbally, but rather physically. If I were to describe a shudder up the spine, I might mean it as a reaction to cold—however, there might be other valences to it: of fear, anxiety, sudden nervousness. It might be within the body, or in the atmosphere of the room which affects the body, it might be an individual reaction or a shared one. Thus, although I could share with you how scientists are variously depicted in steampunk, I instead want to focus on texts that are centered on the perspectives of scientist characters themselves, as well as on their physical motions and feelings. First, I’ll look at Victor Frankenstein, then a song by the Clockwork Quartet, a UK band, and finally, the webcomic Girl Genius.</div>
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I assume we all are familiar with the story of Victor Frankenstein. It's a morality tale, raising Gothic anxieties of the consequences of transgression. A purely secular figure, Frankenstein embodies the defiance of humanity towards the mysteries of life in an attempt to dominate it, only to have this endeavour backfire against him. During his quest, he collects gross things, he’s secretive about it and loses touché with his family, and, in his frenzy to carry out his experiment, in his surety that he is doing something great, his physical health suffers: [SLIDE] "Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; a disease that I regretted the more because I had hitherto enjoyed most excellent health, and had always boasted of the firmness of my nerves. But I believed that exercise and amusement would soon drive away such symptoms; and I promised myself both of these, when my creation should be complete." Anyone in the throes of research generally can relate to this sentiment. If you don't, you are either good at self-care or lying. However, possibly where we depart from Frankenstein, mentally and physically, is when he actually accomplishes his work. Instead of exulting, he reacts badly, exclaiming, "I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!" and promptly runs out of his laboratory, to have a nice lie-down and think about his wrongness and feel bad about, only to be disturbed by his creature, to which he responds by running out of the house and pacing the garden all night. And continues to feel bad. It's not enough for Frankenstein to tell you he feels bad; he must also tell you how it affects him, physically. Through this, we get a sense of how horrified he is at what he has done.</div>
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How does this translate over into other media? Mad scientist perspectives can be expressed beyond the verbal accounting of physical affects. In examining representations of science, Christopher Tounmey lists three idioms: "(1) the physical paraphernalia of science, (2) scientific knowledge, and (3) the people who are scientists.” This physical paraphernalia interests us in this next example: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHEJrXPvU5s">“The Doctor's Wife”</a> by the Clockwork Quartet. This ballad is a series of journal entries chronicling the deterioration of the titular character, while her husband struggles to keep her alive. As each verse opens, we hear the sounds of his typewriter. [SLIDE] You need the typewriter in science. Quoth Adam Savage of the Mythbusters, “the difference between messing around and science is that in science, you write it down.” The bass of the orchestra (0:08), serving as bass line, lends an air of intense concentration. Towards the end of the verse, the Doctor makes a declaration of what his wife will do, again (0:47). The chorus is his wife, urging him to keep his promise to save her (1:05). Note the softer, faraway sound of her voice, contrasted against the immediacy of the doctor’s voice. As her deterioration continues, this chorus punctuates the doctor's memory of his wife's health. </div>
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By the middle of the song, he sings [3:13], "for though she's paralyzed, I know that inside there must still be a functioning mind!" At this point we know the chorus is all in his head, creating the haunted pathos for this particular mad scientist. By the final verse, his apparatus is the only thing keeping her alive, [4:23] he has had to stop her heart, and he declares, [4:35] "what nature has neglected, the fruits of modern science shall provide!" (Index: Science!) In the meantime, questionable things are happening: “and I’ve broken every code of practice / but for my love, I’d shake the planet’s axis.” And then he starts shouting and that's the audience's cue that he's totally lost it; we can no longer trust it when he says he can hear her whisper the chorus. In literary form, this would be marked with, maybe, an exclamation point or two; in this medium, the auditory cues build both the image in the listener's mind and the atmosphere of the listening experience.</div>
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But could we combine the two? Turns out you can, in sequential art that relies on knowledge of auditory and visual cues, as well as literary tropes. The webcomic Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is arguably one of the biggest influences on the concept of mad science in the current steampunk zeitgeist, but I’m not taking any polls. It is the story of Agatha Heterodyne, (note the index: science!) as she unravels her family's mysterious history amidst warring political factions, in an Europe changed by technofantasy. A major plot device in this universe is called “The Spark,” a spark of genius that can be inherited or occurs spontaneously with various levels of strength. The Spark drives several characters to create devices that defy laws of physics (and to also chew the scenery). Going into full-blown “Spark mode” is called “the madness place” by the layperson, “fugue state” by scientists, and in this state, harking back to Frankenstein, all considerations of practical application, consequences, and ethics are sidelined, causing havoc for regular people and heightening feudal conflicts between scientists and aristocracy. In Girl Genius mad scientist characters run the gamut of moral and ethical positions. One must note that the appellation of "mad scientist" does not necessarily mean "immoral person" despite the obvious fear that madboys and madgirls evoke in the general populace. It does, however, mean that appallingly dangerous work conditions are acceptable in this universe, for example <a href="http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20040213#.VRIpaI54qWQ">in this scene where Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, a love interest, shows off his prototype lightning generator</a>. This casual acceptance of dangerous science is especially marked in the town of Mechanicsburg <a href="http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070530#.VRIpD454qWQ">where the inhabitants, long-time minions of its ethically-devoid rulers, cheer the heroine on and enable her as she re-builds a cafe's coffee engine</a>.</div>
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In the visuals of the dialog, font type and word balloons indicate the kind of voice speaking, and when a Spark moves into fugue mode, their dialog font changes, indicating growing intensity of speech and forecasting technobabble. On the auditory front, there are onomatopoeias. These readable sound effects, among other visuals, give an affective language for the atmosphere within the given panel. They also depend on literary tropes and expectations as such, hence even a lack of a certain onomatopoeia indicates something gone awry, as Moloch notes, "I expected a bit more ka-boom."</div>
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Between explosions, lightning strikes, clockwork whirring, bells and whistles, whither comes the madness of the mad scientist? Do we view them from the lens of morality or mental illness? More importantly, why is this figure compelling in steampunk, and what does it reproduce? If, as Barbara Benedict says, that one reason for the depiction of scientists as being prone to insanity is "the illegibility, construed as secrecy surrounding science," then, I argue, and I’m not alone in this, possibly the performance of the mad scientist figure recuperates science for the layperson, through roleplay and the Do-It-Yourself Maker movement.</div>
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Because steampunk refuses neat linearity, let's go back in time a bit again, to World War II and before, and have a look at attitudes, especially American attitudes, towards science and scientists. In a comprehensive history, Glen Scott Allen identifies two figures, tied to two different kinds of sciences: the Evil Wizard, associated with theoretical sciences which could not be made immediately relevant to the general public, and the Master Mechanic, whose applied sciences could used by independent amateurs to develop inventions that were easily monetized. Thus, intellectual, abstract work is looked down upon as it does not contribute to a larger community, and indeed encourages self-imposed alienation. The Evil Wizard refers to the aristocratic archetype whose work cannot be commercialized; the Master Mechanic is the innovative inventor, a rugged individual whose work is practical and enables others to conquer nature.</div>
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Back to the present, one sees, at steampunk conventions, multiple workshops and lectures are run by presenters affecting scientist-sounding names, without necessarily being institutional scientists. Sometimes these steamsonas are for play only, and sometimes, they are artist brands. For example, Professor Jake von Slatt, a self-described dilettante <a href="http://steampunkworkshop.com/how-build-wimshurst-influence-machine-part-1/">here with a home-made Wimshurst Machine</a>. The steampunk mad scientist in this field attempts to share scientific knowledge with the masses, even if the knowledge is not immediately relevant, and artistic objects that don’t serve any function abound. They try to bring back the image of the amateur scientist in their own workshops. They romanticize the conquering of the illegibility of science while creating avenues of accomplishment through the application of hands-on skills that may well serve to inspire further searches for understanding. This is particularly important in face of the highly-specialized, copyrighted machines permeating our daily lives.</div>
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To humour me, I invite everyone in the room to do the following: we'll throw our hands up in the air, and yell "SCIENCE!" and give it our best mad scientist laugh. Thank you. Note the difference in the room. Some of you may feel slightly giddy, some may have elevated blood pressure. Some of you may even be smiling. Essentially, the affects of the room have been heightened. This, then is what steampunks look for in marrying the master mechanic figure with the evil wizard—exulting in joining pragmatic skill with specialized knowledge, now made available to all. This is an affect found at Maker-heavy environments and steampunk conventions, and I suspect that this affect contributes to the popularity of steampunk today, in the midst of all the media.</div>
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Thus concludes my presentation, thank you for playing along.</div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-896455780530727082015-02-20T18:01:00.001-08:002015-02-20T18:01:13.847-08:00#SteampunkHands: Steampunk as Unlearning<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For those of you who are new to me, my blog, and my work, you should probably be forewarned that I have a reputation for being hyper-critical, rather ornery, impatient with fools, and dissatisfied with the way most steampunk works. <script type="text/javascript">
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When I first discovered steampunk, it seemed like a whole new world of thinking about history had been opened to me. I emailed my friend <a href="http://beyondvictoriana.com/">Ay-leen the Peacemaker</a> incessantly. Our emails kept getting longer and longer. My writing had new life, new purpose. </div>
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Around the same time, I discovered postcolonial theory. I didn't know what it was, exactly, only vaguely knew about it from conversations surrounding <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Racefail">RaceFail</a>. I was finally coming to terms, years after leaving home, with what the word "identity" meant, and what ignoring it meant for my writing. While visiting a friend at St. Francis Xavier University (the Nova Scotian one), I grabbed a book off a shelf that caught my eye, an introduction to postcolonial theory (because Nova Scotia has a delightsome inter-library loan system that is prompt, timely, and flexible, and I still miss it). </div>
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I fell in love with it, and fell in love with myself in a more full way, neither of which would have been possible without discovering steampunk. </div>
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A lot of people think of steampunk as a subgenre. Some call it an aesthetic (finally!), because it moves between mediums easily. In 2011, I cited Martha Swetzoff, calling steampunk <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2011/12/conversations-with-ghosts.html">a conversation with the past</a>, a conversation with ghosts who cannot be laid to rest, because they are not addressed. I wrote about the ghosts that relive the violence of the past, and how cultural appropriation is the demand for access to these ghosts, in order to inflict further violence on them under the guise of benign consumption. </div>
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There are other ghosts one must be in conversation with. </div>
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When I began writing steampunk stories, I created a new world in which the British never took over the Malay sultanates, while they certainly have a presence. In this world, the Golden Age of Islam never ended, and has developed all kinds of technologies at a sophisticated level, enough to create an airship that can cross great distances. The Malay peoples have learned how to breed birds that carry messages from depot to depot. The kingdoms of what we now call South Asia too have seen inventors rise despite the boundaries of the caste system. </div>
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Like my fellow writers, I have suffered from anxieties of authenticity. I quietly scream pain at how much of my ancestors I don't know, and how little access I have to them. By dint of colonial history, my primary language is English, and by dint of personal history, I have access only to a language of the majority of my home country, which is not the language of my ancestors either. (Note that I do not lament knowing this language, which I have made bend to my will.) There are stories I will never have, never recover, there are gaps in the alternate history I have written.<br />
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It is too easy to say that into that aphoria we write new things, because it is an <i>alternate</i> history, not true history. However, to say that is to ignore whole histories of erasure, of writing over, of having been written over. Those of us who write today know well we write from lenses tinted by the knowledge of the colonizers. (There are those who would defend those anthropologists and explorer for having "preserved" knowledge of these lost peoples and stories; to them I say, why could they not have stopped their own from performing the genocide?)<br />
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In writing steampunk, I must carefully consider that which I know, and how I know them. I must think about how I know and speak of the knowledge I have. I must be careful to consider whether I do an injustice to the histories I am writing of. If I craft something new into this empty space, I must think: does this reproduce what I know? Does it push back in such a way that it reinforces colonial structures, rather than move beyond them? Do I reproduce stereotypes? Am I writing characters who are full, complex human beings, with varying intentions and drives in life? Is this a logical way for this history to develop, given the resources, values, and priorities of these particular communities and characters?<br />
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Through steampunk, I commit to a process of unlearning a lot of things that have shaped my life, my views of history and of different peoples and cultures, even my own. I commit to listening to other people reprimanding me if I write their people in a way that reinforces prejudicial views of them. I commit to finding new ways of telling stories, of re-discovering, of re-shaping, and commit to the knowledge that to find out what would be truly new, truly transformative, I must know what has passed.<br />
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In this workshop and classroom of steampunk, where the mainstream idea is to learn learn learn and absorb as much knowledge as possible, I ask that we carefully consider letting go of certain things we have learned, self-consciously, carefully. In this way, we can say, we are truly re-writing history, in a way that reflects the values and ideals of the present that we wish to adhere to, that upholds a standard of being we aspire to.<br />
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Because, especially for those of us with these gaps, we must write, we must fill those gaps with our own visions rather than the ones we have been fed. If we do not do it for ourselves, someone else will, someone with blithe disregard for the history of the gap.<br />
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We must unlearn that which continues to shape the present that harms peoples.<br />
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Otherwise, the steampunk we perform is all steam, sound and fury, signifying nothing. </div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-28588829045971055832015-02-08T19:55:00.000-08:002015-02-08T22:04:50.419-08:00THE SEA IS OURS Roundtable: Olivia Ho #SteampunkHands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Olivia Ho hails from Singapore, and writes to us from Scotland (ah, we fine expatriates) a story that rather fits the theme that informs many other stories in this anthology: COMPLETE LADY-FEST. Cranky ladies, angry ladies, confused ladies, curious ladies, smart, smart-mouthed, ladies ladies ladies. Here she gives us an anecdote of explaining steampunk to her father, whose response is 10000x more awesome than my own dad's:<br />
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<b>Give a one or two sentence summary of your story.</b></div>
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When a Chinese woman disappears in a Malay neighbourhood in turn-of-the-century Singapore, one-eyed mercenary Ning Lam is hired to track her down. But her quarry is not all she seems, and nor is the widowed mechanic sheltering her.</div>
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<b>Why did you choose this particular theme?</b></div>
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My parents had a lot to do with this, as they do with many of the choices I make. My mother taught me to love the heritage of Singapore, including the neighbourhood of Kampong Glam, which in a sense is where Malay culture in Singapore first takes root. From the start I knew I wanted to set a large part of the story in Kampong Glam, and a lot of the story locations are mapped onto real-world reference points there (for instance, Khairunnisa's toy shop in the story is where a children's toy museum stands on the real Bussorah Street today). It is a very old, very wonderful part of Singapore that never ceases to be fascinating.</div>
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I tried to explain the concept of steampunk to my father, whose response was "YOU MEAN LIKE KILLER ROBOT SAMSUI WOMEN?" And I was going to correct him, but then I thought - you know, why not? Why not killer robot samsui women? Historical samsui women were already pretty superhuman to begin with, when you consider what they went through to get Singapore built. So what would happen if you took that and added 'killer robot' into the equation? Everything snowballed from there.</div>
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<b>Did you do a lot of research for this story? If you did, found anything interesting?</b></div>
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I didn't do as much research as I would have liked - I was based in Scotland at the point of writing, not Singapore, and didn't have access to all the resources I wanted. Something I read up on and wished I could have written about more in the story was the history of the mui tsai, 'little sisters', young girls sold into slavery by their parents to rich Chinese or Peranakan families. The girls usually worked as servants until they had paid off their 'bonds', although the lack of contracts meant they often risked being sold by their employers to brothels instead of receiving the freedom they were promised. In 1932, the British colonial powers banned the import of mui tsai and required the registration of existing ones. In this story we get a brief glimpse into Ning's previous life as a mui tsai; a sequel, I hope, would explore her path from from bondmaid to mercenary.</div>
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<b>Tell us a bit about where you've set your story.</b></div>
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This story is set in turn-of-the-century Singapore, in a world where the advent of steam technology has made air travel possible, thus negating the relevance of Singapore as a trading port and forcing its colonial government to reimagine the island as a dirigible hub instead. Thus we have the construction of Changi Airport several decades earlier, leading to the flood of Chinese immigrant workers - among them the samsui women - occurring earlier than the 1920s to 1940s. The secret societies are weakening in the wake of a crackdown by the Chinese Protectorate, following the 1887 axe attack on the Chinese Protector William Pickering, and they are casting around for ways to hit back at the British. </div>
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<b>What was the hardest part about writing this story?</b></div>
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Language is a major aspect of this story, and I struggled with getting the representation of the various tongues right. Everyone knows how Victorian English sounds because of the glut of literature on the subject, but what does early 20th-century Malay sound like? Early 20th-century Cantonese? And then how would all this sound translated back into English? For all linguistic anachronism, I apologise in advance.</div>
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Thanks, Olivia!<br />
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Other #SEAsteampunk writers: Other #SEAsteampunk authors: <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">Marilag Angway</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-kate-osias.html">Kate Osias</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">Paolo Chikiamco</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">zm quynh</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">L. L. Hill</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-ivanna.html">Ivanna Mendels</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-alessa-hinlo.html">Alessa Hinlo</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-robert-liow.html">Robert Liow</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-pear-nuallak.html">Pear Nuallak</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-timothy.html">Timothy Dimacali</a></div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-53203322950659868432015-02-08T08:39:00.000-08:002015-02-08T22:05:10.624-08:00THE SEA IS OURS roundtable: Timothy Dimacali #SteampunkHands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When I first read <a href="http://ph.linkedin.com/in/tjdimacali">Timothy Dimacali</a>'s story, I said to my co-editor, "Joyce, this thing has got <i>flying whales</i>." I didn't yet link him to the story I had read and adored in <i><a href="http://www.rocketkapre.com/2011/alternative-alamat-table-of-contents/">Alternative Alamat</a></i>, "Keeper of My Sky," a retelling of a love story between an earth goddess and a god who holds up the sky. "Flying whales, Joyce," I insisted, to which Joyce replied, "flying whales!" It immediately made me think of the Fantasia 2000 segment, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBy1lBXgtE">Pines of Rome</a>." As it turns out, butanding aren't whales, but very large catfish generally. Which I am also all for!<script type="text/javascript">
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In a world where the power of flight can be had for a song, freedom has its price. </div>
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<b>Why did you choose this particular theme?</b></div>
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I've always been fascinated by flight, particularly the "fly-by-wire" open cockpit kind experienced by the Wright brothers and the early aviators of World War 1. I like that pilots of that era had a direct, tactile connection with their flying machines.</div>
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I also happen to be a violinist by avocation, and I love the tactile feel of the instrument under my fingers. There's also something to be said for the feeling of being in an orchestra: there's a heightened sense of awareness and camaraderie that comes with it that you can't get anywhere else. You're required to have a certain level of discipline as well as implicit trust in your comrades, and it sometimes struck me how reminiscent this is of a military institution.</div>
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And so I dreamed up a world where musicians weren't just for entertainment but were so essential to society that an entire global economy was built around them that would collapse without them.</div>
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<b>Did you do a lot of research for this story? If you did, found anything interesting?</b></div>
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A whole lot! I looked into everything from science to history textbooks. For example, the flying butandings central to the story are a fictional species of catfish, indicated by the scientific name I gave them: <i>Clarias volantis</i>. This suggests that these catfish are related to <i>Clarias batrachus</i>, a species of catfish common to Southeast Asia. ("Volantis" comes from "volare", the Latin word for flight). </div>
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In the Philippines, "butanding" is actually the common name of the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), which is completely unrelated to catfish. I had originally imagined my universe's butandings to be whale sharks, but I realized that the evolutionary history of catfish made more sense for the latter to be a better candidate for the flying creature.</div>
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<i>Clarias volantis</i>' distant catfish ancestors were likely also mud dwellers that would invariably have ingested high amounts of gravidium (the fictional element that enables flight, more on that later) on a regular basis. This would have enabled them to eventually evolve into flying creatures, and the natural lack of predators would have allowed them to grow to immense sizes.</div>
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I imagine that my own ancestors would have been more awed by these giant flying catfish to call them "butanding" over the relatively smaller, water-bound whale shark.</div>
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<b>Tell us a bit about where you've set your story.</b></div>
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My story is set in an alternate-history Philippines that is the location of the single largest natural deposit of gravidium, an element that converts sound waves into repulsor or anti-gravity waves. It's a discovery that makes the Philippines the crown jewel of the Spanish empire, which realized that gravidium was worth far more than its gold interests in South America.</div>
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This is a world where heavier-than-air flight became practical and widespread as early as the 1700's, and where musicians are the backbone of society and the economy. In this world, the Wright brothers were johnnies-come-lately, their invention of the airplane seen as a mere curiosity by the rest of the world and only heralded as a breakthrough by the Americans because it meant a way out of the US' dependency on Spanish musician-navigators.</div>
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<b>What was the hardest part about writing this story?</b></div>
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The hardest thing was deciding on whether I should make it an "alternate history" or an altogether different "alternate reality". I had inadvertently stumbled onto a potentially rich storytelling tapestry, and the setting would've affected way I chose to include certain narrative elements into the story. But it was really very important for me that the story resonate with "our" real-world history, so I chose the former course.</div>
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Thank you, Timothy! Timothy will be tweeting from @tjdimacali on February 15!</div>
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Other #SEAsteampunk authors: <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">Marilag Angway</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">Paolo Chikiamco</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-kate-osias.html">Kate Osias</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">zm quynh</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">L. L. Hill,</a> <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-ivanna.html">Ivanna Mendels</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-alessa-hinlo.html">Alessa Hinlo</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-robert-liow.html">Robert Liow</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-pear-nuallak.html">Pear Nuallak</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html">Olivia Ho</a></div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-6741441672335168322015-02-07T19:36:00.000-08:002015-02-08T22:06:46.817-08:00THE SEA IS OURS Roundtable: Pear Nuallak #SteampunkHands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://pearnuallak.com/about/">Pear Nuallak</a>'s story finishes off the anthology, a fine, crisp, clear, queer wine. They write to us from the seat of steampunk, England, and from there deliver this finely-crafted story of chittering clockwork bugs, lady spies, and ambitious village girls caught in the whirl of political upheaval. <script type="text/javascript">
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Two girls reach an age where their lives change utterly: Kaew is a girl in rural Khorat who secretly dreams of making machines, while her mother, Amphon, makes a living out of secrets; her past was re-made by the command of a singular Lady Mo, the necessity of war, and the quiet whirr of certain insects.</div>
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<b>Why did you choose this particular theme?</b></div>
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I wanted to fit a story into the gaps between existing narratives. I’d been reading Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin where war which is as much as part of the cycle of life as peace. Within the peace, however, there's complex domesticity which constantly moves between comforting routine and terrible emotional abuse.</div>
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The story of Ya Mo's 1826 resistance is familiar to many Thai people, particularly those in Khorat. Ya Mo and her daughter, Boonluea, have been transformed into protective goddess figures. My mother’s side of the family is from the province, though the family moved to Bangkok when they were young. The Thai and Khorat narrative is that Ya Mo's cunning and courage defeated Lao troops; all other narratives point out her role is more likely a story spun by Khorat to convince Siam of their loyalties. </div>
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'We all know Khorat folk have no taste--they can't decide whether they're Isan or Thai,' an Isan friend said on our most recent visit. It's a meme: the Khorat language is casually described as being “inbetween” Thai and Lao. The impression I get, though, is that they are their own people. When they do historical re-enactments of the event in question, it's all using Khorat language, proclaiming their pride specifically as Khorat people.</div>
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I peered at all of these worthy, clashing stories and knew I wanted to speak from a young girl's point of view. Those without structurally-enforced power who persist in nurturing their flickering, individual brightness interest me most.</div>
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<b>Did you do a lot of research for this story? If you did, found anything interesting?</b></div>
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I became the most dreadful of armchair historians: it was mostly internet research, dozens of tabs worth, though this did mean access to a Khorat newspaper clipping about Ya Mo and a snippet from English-language books on Lao history otherwise unavailable to me.</div>
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An important bilingual source was a book gifted to me by a family friend, E-Sarn Mural Paintings /Jittakam phaap phanung Isan by Pairote Samosorn, published by E-Sarn Cultural Centre and Khon Kaen University. Before (and eventually adjacent to) photography, representations of normal daily life were recorded within mural scenes (Isan: hoop tam) on temples (Isan: sim). I wanted to understand daily life, everything from potential for social mobility to how people entertained themselves of an evening.</div>
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I was amused to find that the traditional call-and-response singing essentially comprised negging—the usual, 'Women are changeable and lie all the time!' stuff. I decided to make that as true as possible in my story with a nascent all-woman spy network, so there's that.</div>
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<b>Tell us a bit about where you've set your story.</b></div>
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19th century Nong Ngu Saeng Athit (Sunbeam Snake Marsh) is a fictional counterpart to the real and tiny Nong Ngu Lueam (Python Marsh), which I visited several months before I wrote the story. It's the area my mother's family live in. They share the remoteness, the barely-connectedness, the lulling countryside rhythms. While tucked away, they're certainly not in stasis.</div>
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The larger world is a Siam with the same socio-political frameworks (encroaching Western imperialism sharpening tensions within extant Siamese city-states; corvee labour and proto-capitalism) where magic is larger and even more real, so it is a tool within these power dynamics.</div>
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There's already a series of ancient, syncretic Brahmanic-Buddhist rituals deeply embedded in real-world Thai statehood and little gestures in everyday life. We don't necessarily go around spouting superstitions every single day, obviously; it's simply there. I wanted to bring it the fore, particularly in contrast to a lot of Western steampunk-tech narratives which rely on being (destructively) superior to nature. In this world, nature is not to be bested, but petitioned and partnered with.</div>
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<b>What was the hardest part about writing this story?</b></div>
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Understanding that full authenticity is impossible. I share heritage with the protagonist(s), but not time or lifestyle or even language (I only speak Central Thai). Letting certain details go for the sake of story writing was surprisingly painful. I didn't want to be just like every other Westerner who goes, 'Well, I tried, but there are always gonna be Cultural Issues!' and is unaware they've faithfully followed tradition in writing yet another Orientalist load of balls, for which they will be endlessly praised for their contributions to diversity in genre.</div>
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It was very hard to believe my story was worth writing (and submitting) if that's still the kind of thing SFF readers lap up. I get sad and quiet sometimes. But I also get angry, the sort of anger which grips a lighter in one hand and a can of knowledge in the other--a valid, informed response to a hostile world. I salted the earth and built a new one in my head.</div>
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What also pushed me through was the fact that I wouldn't be alone. Although a past and present regional power, Thai narratives are disenfranchised on a global scale. Even if my Thai-ness is awkward, displaced, it still comes from lived experience, so my wish is to add my voice to a growing SEAsian chorus. We are here, no matter what. </div>
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Thank you, Pear!<br />
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Other #SEAsteampunk authors: <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">Marilag Angway</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-kate-osias.html">Kate Osias</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">Paolo Chikiamco</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">zm quynh</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">L. L. Hill</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-ivanna.html">Ivanna Mendels</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-alessa-hinlo.html">Alessa Hinlo</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-robert-liow.html">Robert Liow</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-timothy.html">Timothy Dimacali</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html">Olivia Ho</a></div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-63241348211370699712015-02-07T08:07:00.000-08:002015-02-08T22:06:44.207-08:00THE SEA IS OURS Roundtable: Robert Liow #SteampunkHands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://medium.com/@BIVOUAC">Robert Liow</a> hails from my own home country, and like me, doesn't live there either. He writes to us from Singapore, with a story featuring a childhood game of FIGHTING SPIDERS. I have never played fighting spiders myself, but it's hard not to be aware that this is a thing. Combining this game with the technofantasy of steampunk, "Spider Here" has got the makings of a dramatic movie! <script type="text/javascript">
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Dai Ji, the young leader of a spider-fighting ring, is forced to confront the realities of political and communal tensions in a newly-independent Singapore after a suicide bombing.</div>
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<b>Why did you choose this particular theme?</b></div>
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First of all, I'm a Malaysian Chinese. I've lived in Singapore long enough to consider it my home, but I have family in Malaysia. Anti-Chinese discrimination in Malaysia has always been an issue close to me. My father was in Kuala Lumpur during the May 13, 1969 race riots, and Malay soldiers broke into his family's house, threatening to shoot them. The racism might not be so apparent these days, but it's still there; the 420.000-strong Malay-supremacist group Perkasa repeatedly makes inflammatory, violent statements against non-Malays, while serving Malaysian politicians including the keris-waving Minister of Defence have previously espoused similar Malay-supremacist ideas. Frankly, it terrifies me, and this is partly a reaction to that.</div>
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Secondly, I'm probably one of the biggest fans of both spiders and Singaporean literature around. I used to catch fighting spiders as a kid, though I didn't play the game. When I read Ming Cher's "Spider Boys", about a bunch of 1950s kids who bet on spiders, I said to myself, "This is it, this is pretty cool." I'm interested in telling a new kind of story about historical Singapore, one that takes the existing post-colonial literature and gives it a bit of a shake. I'm rebuilding Singapore, challenging and playing with existing narratives in a fictional universe.</div>
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<b>Did you do a lot of research for this story? If you did, found anything interesting?</b></div>
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I did a lot of research for this story, in order to try and capture the feel of the alternate Singapore I was constructing. One of the most interesting things I found was the Lanfang Republic, possibly the first republic in a long time when it was founded. It was one of many Chinese mining communities in West Kalimantan, founded by imported Chinese labourers. It declared itself a republic in 1777, six years before the USA was recognised as an independent country, and survived for 107 years before being defeated by the Dutch in 1884. It wasn't the only Chinese republic in the area, but it's the only one for which we have records. The main source I used for this, a book by Mary Somers Heidhues', goes into greater detail about autonomous Chinese mining settlements of the sort in West Kalimantan, which both fought and collaborated with the various Sultans already present.</div>
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<b>Tell us a bit about where you've set your story.</b></div>
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I've set my story in a world where Shaping, or the magical manipulation of biomass, is teachable and scientific. Shaping is commonplace and essential to daily life; the protagonist herself is a skilled Shaper, using this talent to make "casings" that house the fighting spiders, and operates a walking-chair with that same ability. In this universe, Shaping has helped people outside the West resist colonisation; while some areas eventually fell to colonial powers, many remain free thanks to military and technological advances made possible by Shaping. The various Sultans of West Kalimantan and the Chinese kongsi formed a symbiotic relationship to consolidate their forces against Dutch and British imperialism, resulting in the Federated Sultanates of Borneo, which play host to the autonomous Nanyang Republic (from the Chinese term for Southeast Asia).</div>
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This universe's equivalent of World War I started with a war between the Kingdom of Sarawak, ruled by Dutch- and British-backed Rajah James Brooke, and the Sultanates/Republic, backed by China and Thailand; the story takes place years after the war, with ex-British Singapore on the brink of transitioning from a Thai-Nanyang joint occupation to Nanyang control, sparking a confrontation with the Malayan Federation. The bombing in question was inspired by the MacDonald House Bombing of 1965, where two Indonesian saboteurs detonated a bomb at MacDonald House in then-Malaysian Singapore as part of the Konfrontasi, an undeclared war caused by Indonesia's opposition to a unified Malaysia.</div>
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<b>What was the hardest part about writing this story?</b></div>
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Choosing what to keep, and what to hide. I'm a military tech enthusiast; if you gave me the chance I'd go into detail about the various weapons technologies I've already come up with for this universe, but it wouldn't fit into a story about the more mundane experience of political conflict seen through the eyes of a 17-year-old girl. I also had to take out some material exploring the political side of things to streamline the story; it was a balance between getting the context right, and over-burdening the reader.</div>
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I might revisit this universe again from those angles, though. This universe is too interesting to leave alone. Stay tuned.</div>
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Thanks, Robert! Robert tweets radically at @boygainvillea and will be there for our February 15 #SEAsteampunk chat!<br />
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Other #SEAsteampunk authors: <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">Marilag Angway</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">Paolo Chikiamco</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-kate-osias.html">Kate Osias</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">zm quynh</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">L. L. Hill,</a> <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-ivanna.html">Ivanna Mendels</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-alessa-hinlo.html">Alessa Hinlo</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-pear-nuallak.html">Pear Nuallak</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-timothy.html">Timothy Dimacali</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html">Olivia Ho</a></div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-80344904908315872342015-02-06T18:13:00.000-08:002015-02-08T22:08:06.531-08:00THE SEA IS OURS Roundtable: Alessa Hinlo #SteampunkHands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.alessahinlo.com/">Alessa Hinlo</a> is one of those small and fierce women that we Asians should be famed for. I had the joy of meeting her, after a long time being aware of each other through social networks, at WisCon last year. Her story, "The Last Aswang," feels like a knife cutting in, and twisting. It is also a very strong example of steampunk that moves away from the materials we commonly associate with it to more nature-based materials--an indigenous steampunk form! <script type="text/javascript">
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<b>Give a one or two sentence summary of your story.</b></div>
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"The Last Aswang" takes place in an alternate timeline where the Philippines wasn’t colonialized by Spain and is about a diwata’s servant who receives a special visit. The title points to what’s actually going on in the story, but a more accurate description would be spoilery.</div>
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<b>Why did you choose this particular theme?</b></div>
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The seed that eventually became "The Last Aswang" came from a couple different sources. I write about women. Those are the stories I prefer to tell, and I like exploring different expressions of female power and agency. When it comes to the Philippines, the aswang and diwata are exactly that. They exemplify feminine power to me. I couldn't not write about them. Are they sometimes monstrous? Yes. Are they sometimes thwarted? Sure. Are they sometimes doomed? That, too. But that’s what interests me. I wanted to delve further into their legends and lore, to a place that accepts the monstrous and that celebrates the power…without destroying them in the process.</div>
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When we talk about countries like the Philippines, which have a long history of colonialism, I especially wanted to focus on the women. It is their stories that are often lost and in my alternate vision, I wanted my women to have a voice that could not be ignored.</div>
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<b>Did you do a lot of research for this story? If you did, found anything interesting?</b></div>
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Despite the focus on the Philippines, I wanted there to be a global context in this alternate timeline, so I did a bit of research into the Manila Galleon Trade Lines. What surprised me is that despite the name, the galleons’ first stop was Cebu, not Manila. Being Cebuano myself, I took that as a sign this was a story I needed to write. </div>
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<b>Tell us a bit about where you've set your story.</b></div>
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As I mentioned earlier, it’s set in an alternate Philippines that never fell under Spanish colonial rule. I spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas of what that would look like. Under what conditions would Spain fail to seize control? What would the steampunk technology look like? What resulted was a Philippines that occupied an uneasy position on the international stage and whose tech was fueled by supernatural magic.</div>
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<b>What was the hardest part about writing this story?</b></div>
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I was born in the Philippines, but my family immigrated to the US when I was a baby. I grew up in the US. I live in the US. And as a result, what's happened is that I struggle with writing speculative fiction that draws upon Filipino folklore. Delving into the mythology and re-imagining it as a story I can tell is a way to reconnect to my heritage, but at the same time, I don’t want to appropriate my own culture. Is that possible? Is this a thing? These are questions that go through my mind constantly This story, with its alternate historical basis, hit all of my insecurities surrounding authenticity. To be honest, I was paralyzed for a long time and almost gave up on the idea of submitting. But sometimes you just have to say, "Fuck it, let’s do this thing." And so I did.</div>
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Thank you, Alessa, for submitting and for your story and for sharing! Alessa will be tweeting from @alessahinlo on February 15 for our day-long #SEAsteampunk Twitter chat!<br />
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Other #SEAsteampunk authors: <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">Marilag Angway</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-kate-osias.html">Kate Osias</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">Paolo Chikiamco</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">zm quynh</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">L. L. Hill</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-ivanna.html">Ivanna Mendels</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-robert-liow.html">Robert Liow</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-pear-nuallak.html">Pear Nuallak</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-timothy.html">Timothy Dimacali</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html">Olivia Ho</a></div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3235431266233602422.post-60468019742410765112015-02-06T10:12:00.000-08:002015-02-08T22:08:04.298-08:00THE SEA IS OURS roundtable: Ivanna Mendels #SteampunkHands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I got really excited over Ivanna's story, which brings to life (well, kind of) an old familiar legend--she calls him Malin Kundang, I call him Si Tenggang, but it is essentially the same story: a rich man passes through his home village, where his mother recognizes him. Ashamed of his past, he refuses to acknowledge her, and she curses him to turn to stone. Ivanna is a lot kinder to Si Tenggang than I am, but I was extremely excited nonetheless! <script type="text/javascript">
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<b>Give a one or two sentence summary of your story.</b></div>
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Struggling to find their place in a recently liberated Indonesia, a band of sky pirates unwittingly discovered a conspiracy against the new republic. In a deadly battle against very peculiar raiders, the First Mate found shocking truths about his Captain.</div>
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<b>Why did you choose this particular theme?</b></div>
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There are a couple of reasons why I had chosen the theme. First of all, when thinking of steampunk, I immediately placed my story around the industrial revolution, but during that period, Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. I really want to be able to explore the idea of an alternate universe where Indonesia was almost superior in terms of technological advances compared to the Europeans, giving them the right edge to fight for and keep their freedom from the colonialists. I have toyed with the idea for a while now, and had even written another piece set in the same world. What would they create? What would they do with their freedom? Would they focus on trading, or spend all their resources on defenses? This universe was really fun to create and will demand more stories out of it. </div>
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Secondly, people familiar with South East Asian folklore might notice that the story is loosely based but centered around a local tale. Coming back to Indonesia after spending about seventeen years abroad, I felt the need to reconnect to my roots, so I dug some local stories from my childhood collections. After reading them again, I realized that these stories have so many potentials but are often overlooked. I made it some kind of a personal quest to bring these to stories back into the surface, seasoned with modern flavors to spice things up.</div>
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Thirdly, space pirates! I wanted to write about space pirates, period.</div>
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<b> Did you do a lot of research for this story? If you did, found anything interesting? Tell us a bit about where you've set your story.</b></div>
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I did enough researches. Since Indonesians are so different from one island to another, I had to make sure I had all my cultural references right. My world is set around 1880-1900, in an alternate universe where Indonesians, with their advance steam engine technology, managed to set themselves free from Dutch colonials (much earlier than in reality, 1945). Because the Europeans are very much still in need of colonies, the newly independent republic is constantly battling invaders and busy catching spies. The sky pirates in this story tried to be somewhere in between, they want to remain free but are patriotic enough to do their share to protect the nation. </div>
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I tried to get certain historical facts quite close to the real thing: dates, existing inventions, places, turning points, reasons for rebellion, etc. Honestly, I've forgotten most of my historical lessons from schooldays, so in a sense, everything I found is interesting. One finding strikes me, quite many of the skirmish wars against the Dutch were actually lead by women. This is not mention in this particular story, but I'm definitely keeping that in mind for future references. </div>
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<b>What was the hardest part about writing this story?</b></div>
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I have decided that while the story is about the Captain of the sky pirates, I do not want to tell it from his own perspective, yet. Petrified is mostly told from the POV of his First Mate. I think it is really hard to balance the amount of information I wanted to give the readers from the First Mate's POV. He clearly doesn't know what was going on, but I do, and I'm bad at keeping secrets! </div>
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I also had a hard time creating the First Mate's character. I wanted him to come across as being naive, unscholarly in a world suddenly emerging with new technologies, but he also needed to be a excellent First Mate, able and efficient in doing his job, respected by his men. I believe his characterization was where I spent most of my editing. </div>
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Thanks Ivanna! Ivanna will be one of the writers joining us for the Twitter chat in #SEAsteampunk on Feb 15!<br />
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Other SEAsteampunk writers: <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-marilag.html">Marilag Angway</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-kate-osias.html">Kate Osias</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-paolo.html">Paolo Chikiamco</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-zm-quynh.html">zm quynh</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-l-l-hill.html">L. L. Hill</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-alessa-hinlo.html">Alessa Hinlo</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-robert-liow.html">Robert Liow</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-pear-nuallak.html">Pear Nuallak</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-timothy.html">Timothy Dimacali</a>, <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html">Olivia Ho</a></div>
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Jhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985629384463009968noreply@blogger.com0