The Mirror Empire throws down the "fantastic" gauntlet

Bear cavalry with forked tongues.  Cultures with three genders or five.  Hostile, mobile plants. Parallel universes.  Magic drawn from satellites that orbit at irregular periods.  As far as I remember, Kameron Hurley's new novel The Mirror Empire doesn't include a kitchen sink, but pretty much everything else is there.  Those unfamiliar with Kameron Hurley should go read the Hugo-award winning We Have Always Fought.  (Those interested in how to do an online book-marketing campaign should check out this blog tour, btw).  I'm still digesting The Mirror Empire, but there's an element that jumped out immediately: Kameron is clearly throwing down the gauntlet to authors and readers, challenging us to broaden our horizons and expectations for epic fantasy.

Let's start with the non-peopled setting of The Mirror Empire.  Carnivorous plants that can walk around make it dangerous to live outside of guarded settlements.  People ride dogs and giant bears with forked tongues.  A plant-monorail system.  There are at least three moons that orbit irregularly, which give different powers.  Also, there are other very very similar universes, and it's possible to travel between them.  Basically, the world of The Mirror Empire is fantastic in the truest sense of the word.  I've certainly never read a fantasy series (with the possible exception of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, which gets a lot more of it's fantasy from the cosmology & not the world) that really embraces the limitless potential of getting to tell your story in a truly invented world.  Authors - the gauntlet has been thrown down.  Your imagination is the limit.  (Readers too: if these elements alone don't challenge your expectations for "fantasy", something's wrong).  There are a lot of ways that Hurley's novel just begs to be made a movie because of the fantastic setting.

The people and cultures of The Mirror Empire are equally mind-bending.  One is a highly militarized matriarchal society.  Another is based around consent - even before sympathetically reaching out to comfort someone, you ask.  That culture also has five genders and performs ritual cannibalism.  There's another culture with three genders and yet another government structure.  Each of the societies is well-thought out and nuanced, internally and in their interactions with each other.  And with each culture, there are scenes that allow Hurley to deliberately challenge her readers; there's a refrain among many bloggers and critics that there's a sameness developing in pseudo-medieval fantasy, and Hurley absolutely breaks that mold in ways that I certainly found challenging and exhilarating.

There's a scene early on where a general in the matriarchal society comes home to her husband, a kept man she remains married to primarily for his sex appeal.  What I didn't realize until I saw a few people reacting to the scene on twitter was that even though the general has already been introduced as a strong and dynamic character, I read the scene with the husband at the center.  Which is tough as she casually and ruthlessly dominates him.  The Mirror Empire is full of scenes that deliberately challenge established reader expectations, sometimes by directly gender-flipping them and other times in more subtle ways.

And here's where my difficulty with The Mirror Empire comes in.  The world is so complex and fantastic, and Hurley drops you straight into the deep end, that for the first third of the book I felt like I was just along for the ride, enjoying the parade of wonders and hoping that enough would stick for the plot and characters to begin to take shape, which they did.  But even after I stopped feeling like I was treading water, Hurley kept throwing up scenes and storylines that were like looking at traditional fantasy through a funhouse mirror, then shattering the mirror.  Which is tough because so much of my expectation for fantasy is that I'll just be immersed in the world and the story, but The Mirror Empire kept pushing me around and knocking me out of the story.  Sometimes this is clearly an intentional attempt to challenge me to stretch my imagination to fit in an even more fantastic world.  Sometimes it was clunky writing, a character thrust to the fore of a diplomatic mission because he's a protagonist, or the climax of a character arc that just felt rushed and emotionally flat.  There are weaknesses in The Mirror Empire, but it's such an intentional, ambitious, and challenging novel that I'm not sure how many of those weaknesses are just related to my inability to let go of my own preconceptions. "I don't understand" is an empowering phrase.  I repeated that a lot while reading The Mirror Empire.

There's a lot going on in The Mirror Empire.  It generated a lot of buzz in at least my small corner of the twitterverse, and it's a stunning and ambitious book.  I didn't love it, and I wouldn't recommend it unreservedly.  Fans of fantasy who've been drifting away because it's feeling stale or cliched might well find The Mirror Empire to be a gateway back to the genre (and would be rewarded for doing so!).  Enthusiastic readers and other writers should also definitely read and consider what Hurley's doing because The Mirror Empire is very actively in dialog with the surrounding genre.  In some sense she's throwing down the gauntlet for both authors and readers to reconsider the fantastic in fantasy.  I expect that readers will find their expectations constantly challenged, and authors may find themselves inspired to stretch further in the worlds they create.  I certainly hope that the ripples of The Mirror Empire will still be visible years from now.  And I'll be reading it again and again.  I'm just not sure how much I'll be immersed in the story or how much I'll be poking at the scenery, and being bitten.

Casual Sexism: Eifelheim

I recently finished reading Michael Flynn's Eifelheim for book club, and generally really enjoyed it.  By which I mostly mean: I will forgive a great deal of a book that manages to present religion in a respectful way, and I have a particular soft spot for medieval philosophical debates because ridiculously amusing.  (Aside, did you know that there were very real & worrisome questions about how the resurrection of the body would work if you ended up in a river eaten by a fish that someone else later caught and ate because then the same particles would end up in two people and that would be confusing when God raised everyone?)  (Second aside - did you know that on Twitter Ta-Nehisi Coates inspired a bit of a discussion about body/spirit theology because football? Start here.)

Point being: while Eifelheim may or may not be "good" to the extent that that's relevant, it pushes a lot of nice buttons for me.  And until recently, no real downsides.  But this time, I noticed that in the "present" timeline, our protagonist Tom had been a bit of a man-about-town until he finally finally fell in with his girlfriend Sharon.  Sharon is a physicist who's settling Tom down, but not particularly exciting, so he gets to meet librarian Judy: "a fine-featured woman, decked with a long print dress and adorned by large, plain glasses. Her hair met behind her in a tight bun."
"Lieber Gott, Tom thought. An archetype!"

Well yes, but as we'll soon see, not only in the way Flynn meant.  Judy is introduced as a fine-featured woman, and she flushes when Tom speaks to her.

A paragraph later: "That was the nexus. A lonely librarian wanted a human conversation, and a lonely cliologist needed a break from his fruitless hunt".  Coupled with the fact that Tom's just been thrown out of his apartment by his girlfriend, the archetype Flynn's setting up has all sorts of sexual connotations, and every time we return to the present, there's some reference to Judy the librarian increasingly intruding on Tom's time which his girlfriend resents.

It's all perfectly innocent of course.  Tom and Sharon are An Item, and there's no hint that either Tom or Judy wants to start an affair.  It's just that the present timeline needs a bit of spice, and a lonely, fine-featured librarian to introduce a bit of jealousy is the perfect ingredient.

Tom's girlfriend has a research aide.  He's male.  We never really learn much about his physical appearance, and there are no hints of sparks, jealousy, or anything else, of course.

The sexism in Eifelheim is casual and unconsidered.  It's the sort of thing that I either didn't notice on previous readings, or maybe grinned at a bit.  It's not overt to the point it intrudes on the story, just quietly there.  And now, it detracts from the novel.  Because safe spaces and scaly llamas.  Because for some readers, it's going to reinforce negative views and for others it's going to be actively unpleasant (like being punched in the face at a restaurant) and there's no reason they should have to have that experience while reading Eifelheim.

I can't consume media the same way I used to anymore.  I'm a lot more sensitive to casual racism & sexism than I used to be. I suspect a lot still flies by me (and there is plenty of other writing that's insensitive & insulting to other communities like the disabled, LGBT, and others that I mostly miss).  Sometimes when I notice this, I get a bit sad, because I'd love to read Eifelheim without having the sexism detract from it.  Except, the author could do that to.  The author could write a more inclusive book that's not casually insulting, and then I wouldn't have this problem.  And loads of other people who aren't represented in fiction could also enjoy it.  That would be great.  I guess I'm saying #weneeddiversebooks ?  Also, authors: do better.  I'll reward you by buying your books, because there are fewer and fewer that don't bug me as I'm reading them.

Marigolds

Marigolds in Long Hidden has perhaps the most gripping introduction of any of the stories in the anthology.  It's a visceral and horrifying opening scene set in a brothel in Paris during the french revolution, and I can still remember the creeping horror of realizing what is happening as the scene unfolds.  As I read the rest of the story, I found myself vacillating between intense disgust and fascination, and a somewhat dull disinterest until the climax of the story.  At the end, I felt a dissatisfaction which, the more I reflected on it, seemed more a comment on my own reading blind spots than any weakness in the story.  Review below, with spoilers.

"I watch Maurepas enter the room, framed by my knees. He is plump and old, like the others that come to us ... Smelling of cognac and roasted birdflesh, their doughy skin scored by silks and velvets cut for younger bodies. He strips now, this minister, and when the last piece of cloth is discarded he is just another old man." (from Marigolds, p. 91)

The opening of Marigolds is captivating.  The physical details that lead from a woman looking at the ceiling, to her placement in a brothel servicing her client, who is in turn stripped of his finery and revealed as a wrinkly old man, anxious to reclaim some semblance of vitality through the act of sex while the woman is having her period are very effective.  The scene unfolds slowly, revealed through the implication of these details.  Later in the story, characters dig through chamber pots, and the entire magical element of the story is built on the powers of a woman's body when she is having her period.  Magical sigils are being used to encourage the terrible excesses of the revolution  L. S. Johnson excels at presenting these physical details, and while the scenes are disgusting, they also held my attention & were some of the strongest writing in the story.

It's also soon revealed that Claire, our protagonist, is in love with Isabella, one of the other women in the brothel.  In the month between the first and second moments of magical sex, there are a handful of scenes where Claire is teased, survives a riot, and uncovers the secret to the magic that is being worked.  Here is where I found myself disengaging from the story.  The errands seemed mere placeholders, the danger of the riot is clearly not a threat to either Claire or Isabella, so it is mostly just a chance for Claire to be out with her beloved before the climax the following month.

Eventually, though, the women are ready to perform their magic again, and the great ministers come to the brothel again.  Only this time Claire has learned the secrets of the magic, and is putting up a different spell for Isabella.  (I will confess that on first reading I feared Claire was going to essentially give her beloved a love potion.  I was happy to be proved wrong).  The next day, the course of events has not been changed as desired.  Claire and Isabella have both done magic to try to help the other escape! They fight their employer and leave to live happily ever after.

"We do not plot; we suggest.  No hunger, no suffering, no murderous rage. Just the slightest touch on the tiller, turning the world towards something a little kinder, a little sweeter, a little more like love." (Marigolds, p. 104)

I am dissatisfied with this ending.  It feels too pat, and simple.  My reactions after a second reading are less strong than on first reading, however.  When I first read Marigolds, I essentially stopped reading about the relationships after the opening scene.  Claire was secretly in love with one of the other women in the brothel.  From this, I made a whole series of assumptions that laid down blinders as I read the story: Claire would need to keep this attraction secret because it was shameful.  Her love could not be reciprocated because when you're attracted to someone of the same gender, what are the odds that they'll feel the same way?  When the story ended with the two living happily ever after, all my assumptions rose up angrily.  Too pat.  Too much author manipulation.  Implausible.

On a second reading it's clear that in fact Claire's feelings are an open secret in the brothel.  While Claire and Isabella never discuss them, Claire is often teased about her devotion in front of Isabella.  Isabella, for her part, initially rescued Claire and seems to have feelings for her.  Everything I objected to was foreshadowed throughout the story, I simply ignored it because of my own assumptions (and to some extent because I didn't find the prose compelling).  I'm still not particularly satisfied with the conclusion to Marigolds, but after two readings, it's pretty clear that most of my issues on first reading had much more to do with me than the story.

Have I mentioned that I've learned a lot from Long Hidden, including a lot about my own blind spots as I read?

Safe Stories in Long Hidden

I started this post a bunch of times, and kept getting bogged down.  And then the Hugos happened, and Kameron Hurley's "We Have Always Fought" won (deservedly) and I re-read it (you should to), and I stopped focusing on arguing about the place of women in wars (not really the point, and the fact that I was focusing there showed I was missing the point), and instead started focusing on llamas and the way they're written about versus how we actually experience them (hint, not actually about llamas).  And then I realized that not only had I re-read a darn good (and award winning!) essay, but also I could lean on Kameron for this piece.

So let's take as a given that stories give us a lens to look at the world, and that sometimes the lens of story can be as influential as our actual experiences, particularly when we don't have a lot of firsthand experience.  And if you don't want to take that as a given, then maybe go read "We Have Always Fought", don't argue with it like I did, and then come back here.  I'll also drop some more links at the bottom.

Long Hidden is an anthology of stories from the margins of history.  (Have I mentioned you should buy it?) Many of those stories are about experiences and histories that I have very little firsthand exposure to, and haven't even read much about.  One of the things I'm most grateful to the authors and editors for is creating a safe space to read these stories.  I don't have to go in with my guard up, looking for a Magical Negro, Damsel in Distress or other damaging stereotypes, but could instead open myself up to unfamiliar experiences.  Two stories in particular really created a safe space for me: The Witch of Tarup and A Score of Roses.  (Witch of Tarup discussed first, with few spoilers, Score of Roses second with all the spoilers).

In The Witch of Tarup, there are a number of characters with physical disabilities.  Some permanent, some temporary.  Traditionally, disabled characters tend to be portrayed as either bitter and angry or else fonts of wisdom who transcend their disability.  Either way, they are defined by that disability.  The Witch of Tarup features neither.  The disabled characters fit into their story and community.  They need assistance at times, but can function with their disability, and are defined by their other characteristics and other ways they've fit into the community.  The story was one of my favorites from the anthology simply in the way it spun out and revealed the very touching conclusion, but also because it gave me a safe space to think about disability as a part of the whole person, rather than the defining characteristic.

Troy Wiggins' A Score of Roses also provides a safe space to tell a story too often negatively stereotyped in both fiction and media.  (Spoilers ahead!)  The two characters in 1870's Memphis are clearly identified as members of the black community by the use of African American Vernacular English (since I had to look up AAVE when I first saw it), but also as non-human spirits.  Together they fall in love, court, raise a child, and the mother (at least) leaves the family.  It is, viewed baldly, a story about what could be described as a broken family, where the child is growing up with only one parent present, the other absent with no clear indication when or if she'll return.  But mostly it's an incredibly tender story about parents falling in love and passing on their strength and identity to their children.  I did not, at all, get the sense from A Score of Roses that the family was broken in any way.  Instead I found myself smiling at the affirmation of strength and love that the characters had for each other.  It was only reflecting afterwards that I realized Troy was threading a needle by telling a story about strength and love in a family situation so often demonized or characterized as broken.  A Score of Roses may not all by itself tear down all of my preconceptions about what family means, but it certainly highlighted some of the ways those preconceptions are dangerous, flawed, and created by narratives.  (Scaly llamas!)

(After re-reading A Score of Roses, I've also remembered what a simply beautiful story it is.  Unfinished: a more detailed response to A Score of Roses by itself, because I have done this story an injustice by only bringing up the way it presents a nontraditional family in a safe, loving and supportive way).

Many of the stories in Long Hidden create safe spaces in one way or another, or challenge the stereotypes that other narratives have created.  I'm grateful to the authors and editors for doing so in a respectful way, and providing me a space to read stories that may make me uncomfortable, but also always challenged and rewarded me.  It's an incredible anthology.

If "We Have Always Fought" wasn't enough for you, more resources on the way our worldview is shaped by narrative, and some of the dangers that entails:
MedievalPOC, which shows how people of color have been removed from our view of medieval and early modern european society.
Nnedi Okorafor on The Magical Negro
Mary Robinette Kowal on writing the stereotype of the "psychotic half breed" while trying to combat other stereotypes
Ta-Nehisi Coates' point that Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns blows up the myth that black ghettoes were caused by illiterate broken families migrating to the north
Ann Leckie on restaurants that do (or don't) punch people in the face.  (Again, not really about restaurants)

Edited to correct title of The Witch of Tarup

Unfinished -
Review of A Score of Roses

Bouncing off stories & how I read

I'm slightly over halfway through Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History now, and I'm beginning to see some patterns in my reactions.  (Tracked here).  A few days ago I mentioned that with Long Hidden, there are 4-5 stories competing for my "Favorite", and only a couple that I've bounced off of.

Let me take a moment to suggest that you go buy Long Hidden right now and read it if you have any interest in SFF / speculative fiction more broadly, or if you enjoy short stories, or (like me) want to like short stories but usually have trouble.  Because my usual hit rate on a short story magazine or anthology is really enjoying 1 or 2, and being glad I read more than half.  So Long Hidden overdelivered with about the first 5 stories.  It's a phenomenal anthology.  Go buy it.  I'll wait.

I've read 16 of the 27 stories in #LongHidden and have bounced off maybe 2. Depending on my mood, 4 or 5 are competing for "favorite"
— Jonah Sutton-Morse (@jsuttonmorse) July 20, 2014

@jsuttonmorse I'm curious--which ones did you bounce off of and why?
— Dandy McFopperson (@rosefox) July 20, 2014

@rosefox I need more than 140 characters for this one, but I'll write about it, I promise!
— Jonah Sutton-Morse (@jsuttonmorse) July 20, 2014

Here's my attempt to talk about one story* in particular that I just think I didn't really give a fair reading, and some observations about what that says about how open to diversity I am as a reader.
(General disclaimers - this isn't a review.  I'm not experienced enough to write reviews, and I haven't even finished the anthology.  This is personal reaction and thoughts about those reactions.  Also, some light spoilers follow.)

The story I most remember having trouble with was "Across the Seam" by Sunny Moraine, centered around the 1897 Lattimer Massacre (of unarmed striking miners in Pennsylvania).  The story's protagonist is an immigrant from central Europe, haunted by the witch Baba Yaga, and perhaps beginning to identify as a woman rather than a man. (Despite some googling and listening on twitter, I don't have the vocabulary to describe the gender identity.  At the beginning of the story, Iwan is "him", but Baba Yaga and his own behaviors and feelings challenge that identity as the story unfolds).

Throughout the entire story, I spent my time alternately arguing with the author and puzzling over this choice.  The story is set during an important labor event.  The main character is an immigrant, already an outsider.  Why include this confused gender identity? Some of the time I was looking for the reason the gender identity was necessary to the story.  The rest I was deciding that it wasn't necessary, so the various hints and inclusions could be removed.

I'm going to pass over the necessity of gender identity very briefly.  It's possible that Baba Yaga is primarily linked with women and so this confusion is "necessary", or that the scenes strengthen the link to the importance of women in the labor movement, or simply that the author always envisioned the character this way.  Critiquing the "necessity" of these elements feels a bit like "a group of mostly white writers telling a hapa writer and a Pakistani writer what was culturally authentic ... about nonwhite people"  (Aside - I can dig more into how Baba Yaga figures in this time/characters, because there's a bibliography for each of the stories on the Long Hidden website!).

Instead I'm going to talk a bit more about my reaction demanding that this identity be necessary to the story, or be removed.  Because implicitly what I'm saying here is "keep your characters within a nice, safe, gender binary that I'm familiar with, or justify it."  In the real world, this has a pretty ugly corollary: "you can't identify as something other than your biological sex without constantly proving it, going through therapy, etc."  In fictional reading, I'm a half step away from "keep your characters all white men or justify it".  And that's a bit of an unpleasant realization, because I've been reading, and cheering, about why We Need Diverse Books.  I backed Long Hidden because I wanted to read diverse and unfamiliar stories.  Because diverse and unfamiliar stories by diverse authors brought me back to SFF.  I'm also just going to link to Kameron Hurley's "We Have Always Fought" and Kate Elliot's "The Status Quo Does Not Need Worldbuilding" because they also make good points about the value of diverse representation in fiction.

One more counter to my "that non-binary gender character better have a good reason to be in this story".  Here's my reaction when re-reading the Dragonlance Chronicles when Tanis asks "Who is he" about the Forestmaster and the centaurs slap him down with "She".

Also, the Forestmaster is a lady, so stuff your patriarchal assumptions Tanis. (Contemporary with Belgariad, shortly after Shannara)
— Jonah Sutton-Morse (@jsuttonmorse) July 18, 2014

Sometime after reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms I was exclaiming with someone about how amazing the scenes with Nahadoth were, and she pointed out that they were sex scenes.  I was actually a bit taken aback.  My reading identity was as someone who doesn't generally read sex scenes, particularly not from the perspective of a woman.  Except that these scenes were some of what I most enjoyed about one of my favorite books (even if I'd been hiding behind descriptors like "sensual").  It took a few days, but things finally clicked.  "OK" I thought to myself.  "I'm someone who can read and enjoy sex scenes.  They're not porn, they're not just sensual, they're sex scenes."  And when I got to sex scenes in other stories (including some of those in Long Hidden), I got to read the sex scenes.  No need to skip, get flushed, or anything else.  I'm not, right now, a reader who can read stories with protagonists who don't have a clear binary gender identity.  But I can change that.  So after I finish the anthology I get to go back to "Across the Seam" and read it again.  And I'm pretty sure also "Neither Witch nor Fairy".  And I get to set aside my expectations about the categories a character is allowed to fit in

Long Hidden is a fantastic anthology.  One that deliberately set out to tell stories from the margins of history, and stories about people on the margins.  The stories are rich, and varied and on the whole delightful.  Every story that I've been able to read, instead of arguing with, I've enjoyed.  Even those that I found a bit disappointing are stories I would have been thrilled to find in any other anthology.  And apparently I can mostly read and enjoy them, trusting the authors and editors to tell these stories respectfully, except when it comes to non-binary gender.  That's a disappointing realization for me, but also an empowering challenge.  At least, that's how I'm going to take it.


**Unfinished - Long Hidden has a bibliography.  I am so excited about this!
Unfinished 2 - Long Hidden as a safe space for me because I'm unfamiliar with many of these stories & worried about exploitative/dishonest/incomplete storytelling.
Unfinished 3 - "OK, I'm someone who can read and enjoy sex scenes"
Unfinished 4 - Yeah, I also need to talk about "Marigolds".

I don't know how to read this

Scott Lynch's Republic of Thieves punched me in the gut recently, and made me aware of just how much I've grown accustomed to the tropes of fantasy.

Partway through Republic of Thieves (oh, um, spoilers.  Blanket policy: I'll be spoiling the books I'm talking about. This one is not ruinous to the book), our protagonist Locke is traveling with his companions including Sabetha who he's had a crush on since he was about six.  Locke wants to talk about feelings, and since he's told her he likes her, wants to hear that reciprocated.  Sabetha is interested, but she's also the only woman in this band of thieves, which she's been in charge of until Locke took over. She's also probably the more ambitious of the two, and Locke has had her up on a pedestal all this time.  It's complicated. Sabetha sees this. Locke doesn't. Over the course of a few scenes, Sabetha guides Locke, and the reader through this.  She doesn't use the terms "male gaze" or "male privilege", but the concepts are there.  She doesn't call herself a feminist, but her message is recognizable to a modern reader.

I don't know how to read these scenes.  And that's empowering, rather than a problem.

I can read the words and process the ideas.  I even often agree with them.  But they're outside my reading experience.  I grew up on the generations following Tolkien, and studied Medieval History in college. I can read a pseudo-Medieval European Epic Fantasy with a man at the center that only exposes it's social agenda by reinforcing the status quo like nobody's business.  

And when I do, I yell at anachronisms, and I yell at "message" passages that might illuminate the author's views, but break me out of the story because I don't believe the character would say that, dammit!

MedievalPOC has been busy challenging my belief that I actually understood what "the reality" of medieval and early modern Europe was.  Scott Lynch just challenged my belief that I understand how to create a believable secondary world that the reader is immersed in.  I'm still reeling a bit.  (In other recent readings, Kate Elliot's Spirit Walker series, written intentionally and emphatically in the head of a female protagonist also knocked me out of my comfort zone on a number of occasions).

I've been learning, slowly, and primarily from authors and critics on Twitter, just how many assumptions I've let pass unchallenged as I grew up on Epic fantasy.  And for a while I started to walk away from Fantasy and Science Fiction because all I was seeing was more of those assumptions being fed back to me.  (I'll save the story of being brought back to the fold by Saladin Ahmed and N. K. Jemisin for another time).

I'm also learning, slowly, how powerful "I don't understand" is.  I could read these scenes that aren't what I'm used to and reject them.  Bad writing.  Not for me. Political/Message fiction.  Or I can read them and ask why the author includes them.  I can use these scenes that I don't understand as jumping off points that expand my view of the world.  I can take Kate Elliot's Spirit Walker series as an invitation to the (a?) female gaze.  A gaze I rarely look through.  I often say that one of the reasons to read SFF is to be exposed to new worlds and new ways of thinking, and to see our own world in a new way.  I'm learning, slowly, that every scene that makes me say "I don't understand" is an invitation to do exactly that, and to learn to understand.

A final note: my current reading pile:

(Lightspeed Magazine's "Women Destroy Science Fiction" #wdsf, which is definitely bringing some "I don't understand" moments, and The Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles, which is about as comfortable a genre read as I can think of)

**Unfinished - how I came back to fantasy.