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Note to non-Yuletide people: Regular programming will return after the New Year. Mostly.
By the way, if anyone wants to try to guess what I wrote, I wrote five stories this year for Yuletide - the perks of being trapped in bed for a week. They're all in the main archive. One is in a fandom I’ve written before and the rest are not. One has been getting a lot of attention, three have gotten a moderate amount, and one has been very well-appreciated indeed by its recipient and the handful of others who managed to stumble across it.
There were three (three!) marvelous stories about Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagon this year, and I recommend them all. But if I had to pick a favorite, it would be On the Moonlit Road of Dreams, in which they team up to, in an in-character and period-appropriate manner… fight crime.
I was sitting and watching the fireflies on the garden pond with a group of court ladies when the news came that the Empress had been poisoned and was in grave danger of losing her life. The Second Chamberlain's daughter burst at once into tears, sniveling and wiping her eyes. There is something so hateful about a lady with reddened eyes, I think. Rather than show my emotions so crassly, I picked up my pen and quickly wrote a poem:
In the dusk
The cuckoo's cry falls.
So too my heart.
It was not perhaps the most elegant poem, but when reacting to sudden news, whether good or bad, speed is more essential than splendor.
So We’ll No More Go A-Roving. From Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a story that takes the themes and structure of the original and plays a marvelous little variation on them. Lovely and clever and heartbreaking – it reminded me of Thomasina and Septimus’s discussion of the Library of Alexandria, and their waltz that simultaneously can never come again and is always happening, forever.
Poor grieving Septimus Hodge went mad trying to calculate the great heat death of the universe so that he could prevent it, so that he could reverse its course and bring the beautiful girl with the flowing hair back to him. After all, the equation must exist, if only one might attain it. But Thomasina simply loved the formulas for themselves, for the knowing. For the proving.
In a now-fading lesson book, she once tried to render the world in four dimensions, as only she was able to see it. Innumerable possibilities, unimaginable angles, the patterns repeating and shifting and echoing one another across history and geometric space, looping in endlessly upon themselves, infinite and beautiful.
A Piece of the Continent, a sequel to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which Genly Ai is sent on another assignment to a completely different planet and culture, but, since he’s still in many ways the same person, encounters many of the same problems he had on Winter.
I could read an entire book of this – I love anthropological sf, and this is an excellent example of it.* The precise details of the language and the culture are the best sort of worldbuilding, and the revelations are beautifully orchestrated. I love the delicacy of the emotional moments. You could almost read it just knowing that bad stuff happened on his last assignment, but the climax probably depends on more specific knowledge.
*Except for the reproductive rate – if not all women have children, and each woman can only have one child in her lifetime, won’t the species eventually die out? I will assume Genly Ai misunderstood that part.
I didn't know what I could say. I don't know the word for "beautiful," if there even is one.
I said, on impulse, "It's right." A phrase that someone had used, with great warmth, when Connac finally fixed the radio the other night; and again one afternoon, when a school of fish, startled by something too deep to see, veered and flashed across the underside of a wave, lacing the blue with gold.
The Opposite of Swarb. Based on Connie Willis’s Bellwether, but accessible without knowledge of the source: I had no trouble following it even though I read the book when it first came out, then instantly forgot about it. A woman studies internet phenomena while her boyfriend studies a colony of baby vampire bats, and finds that everything is interconnected.
Of the many fannish in-jokey Yuletide stories, this is the one I thought was the funniest and best-constructed. Like Willis’s own comedies, this story is elegantly structured, with every little detail and joke bouncing off each other and returning unexpectedly, in an effortless-seeming pattern.
am_i_swarb_or_not (2004-2008) LiveJournal community fad, in which members voted on whether to reject applicants for being 'swarb' or allow them to join and rate others in their turn. Died out after four years because no one was able to tell whether anyone else was being ironic. Contemporaneous with the fad for the website ratemyducttape.com.
Sweet William. A prequel to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire which you can probably read without any knowledge of the source. The Spanish Armada is about to descend upon England, and her greatest hope is a captainless dragon hatchling. This story assembles a cast of likable humans and dragons and weaves them into history and folklore in a very satisfying manner, even if the romance is a bit sudden. I can’t provide an excerpt without ruining one of a whole set of reveals which aren’t exactly shocking, but are fun to come upon at one’s own pace.
Inscribed on Glass Plaques, a perfectly meta Princess Tutu story. (You need to know the canon to make any sense of this.) A set of plaques for objects in a museum, revealing and concealing new stories, old stories, new versions of old stories, stories within stories within stories.
By the way, if anyone wants to try to guess what I wrote, I wrote five stories this year for Yuletide - the perks of being trapped in bed for a week. They're all in the main archive. One is in a fandom I’ve written before and the rest are not. One has been getting a lot of attention, three have gotten a moderate amount, and one has been very well-appreciated indeed by its recipient and the handful of others who managed to stumble across it.
There were three (three!) marvelous stories about Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagon this year, and I recommend them all. But if I had to pick a favorite, it would be On the Moonlit Road of Dreams, in which they team up to, in an in-character and period-appropriate manner… fight crime.
I was sitting and watching the fireflies on the garden pond with a group of court ladies when the news came that the Empress had been poisoned and was in grave danger of losing her life. The Second Chamberlain's daughter burst at once into tears, sniveling and wiping her eyes. There is something so hateful about a lady with reddened eyes, I think. Rather than show my emotions so crassly, I picked up my pen and quickly wrote a poem:
In the dusk
The cuckoo's cry falls.
So too my heart.
It was not perhaps the most elegant poem, but when reacting to sudden news, whether good or bad, speed is more essential than splendor.
So We’ll No More Go A-Roving. From Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a story that takes the themes and structure of the original and plays a marvelous little variation on them. Lovely and clever and heartbreaking – it reminded me of Thomasina and Septimus’s discussion of the Library of Alexandria, and their waltz that simultaneously can never come again and is always happening, forever.
Poor grieving Septimus Hodge went mad trying to calculate the great heat death of the universe so that he could prevent it, so that he could reverse its course and bring the beautiful girl with the flowing hair back to him. After all, the equation must exist, if only one might attain it. But Thomasina simply loved the formulas for themselves, for the knowing. For the proving.
In a now-fading lesson book, she once tried to render the world in four dimensions, as only she was able to see it. Innumerable possibilities, unimaginable angles, the patterns repeating and shifting and echoing one another across history and geometric space, looping in endlessly upon themselves, infinite and beautiful.
A Piece of the Continent, a sequel to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which Genly Ai is sent on another assignment to a completely different planet and culture, but, since he’s still in many ways the same person, encounters many of the same problems he had on Winter.
I could read an entire book of this – I love anthropological sf, and this is an excellent example of it.* The precise details of the language and the culture are the best sort of worldbuilding, and the revelations are beautifully orchestrated. I love the delicacy of the emotional moments. You could almost read it just knowing that bad stuff happened on his last assignment, but the climax probably depends on more specific knowledge.
*Except for the reproductive rate – if not all women have children, and each woman can only have one child in her lifetime, won’t the species eventually die out? I will assume Genly Ai misunderstood that part.
I didn't know what I could say. I don't know the word for "beautiful," if there even is one.
I said, on impulse, "It's right." A phrase that someone had used, with great warmth, when Connac finally fixed the radio the other night; and again one afternoon, when a school of fish, startled by something too deep to see, veered and flashed across the underside of a wave, lacing the blue with gold.
The Opposite of Swarb. Based on Connie Willis’s Bellwether, but accessible without knowledge of the source: I had no trouble following it even though I read the book when it first came out, then instantly forgot about it. A woman studies internet phenomena while her boyfriend studies a colony of baby vampire bats, and finds that everything is interconnected.
Of the many fannish in-jokey Yuletide stories, this is the one I thought was the funniest and best-constructed. Like Willis’s own comedies, this story is elegantly structured, with every little detail and joke bouncing off each other and returning unexpectedly, in an effortless-seeming pattern.
am_i_swarb_or_not (2004-2008) LiveJournal community fad, in which members voted on whether to reject applicants for being 'swarb' or allow them to join and rate others in their turn. Died out after four years because no one was able to tell whether anyone else was being ironic. Contemporaneous with the fad for the website ratemyducttape.com.
Sweet William. A prequel to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire which you can probably read without any knowledge of the source. The Spanish Armada is about to descend upon England, and her greatest hope is a captainless dragon hatchling. This story assembles a cast of likable humans and dragons and weaves them into history and folklore in a very satisfying manner, even if the romance is a bit sudden. I can’t provide an excerpt without ruining one of a whole set of reveals which aren’t exactly shocking, but are fun to come upon at one’s own pace.
Inscribed on Glass Plaques, a perfectly meta Princess Tutu story. (You need to know the canon to make any sense of this.) A set of plaques for objects in a museum, revealing and concealing new stories, old stories, new versions of old stories, stories within stories within stories.
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Thank you. I was starting to think I was the only one who stuttered to a stop on that line. (And it was a really great fic, aside from that!)
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Is the Stoppard story recommended for those unfamiliar with the play? The only Stoppard I've seen is The Real Inspector Hound, which based on what you say above I daresay is rather different from Arcadia.
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SPOILERS FOR ARCADIA
The play parallels two stories, (past) a girl genius and her tutor, and (present) the academics studying them and coming to some wrong, and some right conclusions. They're both in the same house at different times, and literally pass each other by onstage. The girl was way ahead of her time, and might have been a world-changing mathematician had she not died at the age of sixteen, in a fire. The other thing that's important for the story is that there are two young boys in each timeline, played by the same actor. The one in the present doesn't speak, and in the play we never learn why.
The play is all about how everything is fragile and impermanent and unknowable, and how in a broader sense that doesn't matter. If you've read Connie Willis's story "Fire Watch," it's extremely similar in tone and theme.
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Re: SPOILERS FOR ARCADIA
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