Jōi said: “Because imperial anthologies are used to flatter those of high rank and to grant favor to their lackeys, true skill in composition, elegant taste, and practice have become of secondary importance.”
Tonna, From a Frog at the Bottom of the Well, translated by Steven Carter (source link)
Welcome
This month I’m sharing some recently released stories I’ve enjoyed and some medieval-inspired synth. And (since those awards reading periods are in full swing) a tongue in cheek look at poets with very strong opinions about their peers.
Shitposting Poets
It’s probably no surprise that many poets have strong opinions about poetry. Sometimes, though, those opinions cross the line to straight-up disdain.
Okay. Sometimes they don’t “cross” it so much as “light it on fire and stomp on the ashes.”
That earlier quote is a great example.
Imperial anthologies were compiled at the order of the reigning Japanese emperor from the 10th to 14th centuries, and were intended to showcase poetic excellence and mastery. In reality, of course, influence and personal taste played just as much a role, as Tonna points out by including this anecdote in his advice book for younger waka poets.
Poetic shitposting is by no means restrained to early medieval Japan. Admittedly, it is often not very poetic.
In a letter to a friend, Lord Byron called John Keats “trash” and urged that he be “flayed alive”
Alice B. Toklas, in her autobiography, describes Gertrude Stein calling Ezra Pound a “village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
Oscar Wilde (who I think everyone can agree was a fantastic shitposter) once said that “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Alexander Pope.” (source obscure, as with many things Oscar Wilde said or supposedly said)
Music to Listen to: Tales Under the Oak
Stressed out by the very idea of poets making snarky comments about each other’s work?
Take a breather with the soothing sounds of The Toad Alchemy by German dungeonsynth group Tales Under the Oak. (With bonus hour-long audiobook about the toad kingdom included!)
We’re only a couple of months into the new year, but there’s already an embarrassment of riches when it comes to great SFF stories to read.
I particularly enjoyed Isabel J Kim’s “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” in the February edition of Clarkesworld. LeGuin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” is one of those stories that I’m always down to engage with, and I thought the way Isabel approaches it was razor-sharp and timely (up to and including the digs at social media discourse). This one will definitely give you something to think about!
I have two short fiction releases this month, if you’re into that sort of thing!
“Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” (original, 1484 words) – Out in this month’s Lightspeed Magazine, this story describes the thematic use of companion animals in a fictional animated series. Free to read or listen to online, this story is an homage to Sailor Moon and other magical girl anime that’s filled with subtle references. I had a blast writing this one, and I’m excited it’s out in the world at such a great market! (Content notes: violence against animals, abduction, suicidal ideation, grief)
“A Difference of Opinion” (reprint, 4100 words) – First published in Kaleidotrope a couple of years back, this far-future space opera story about diplomacy and artificial intelligences is getting a print appearance in Flame Tree Publishing’s latest anthology, Learning to Be Human, where I’m sharing a ToC with P.A. Cornell, Yelena Crane, Nemma Wollenfang, Franz Kafka, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells (just to name a few).
I’m still hard at work on my next full-length text game, and I’ve also being doing some scholarly research and writing related to libraries. Finally, I’ve had a couple of other stories accepted for publication, with both likely coming out sometime this year.
I’ve been pretty busy with short story and game writing. Here’s an update on what I’ve been writing and reading, along with some music to enjoy.
The Copenhagen Exhibitions
My flash story “The Copenhagen Exhibitions” is available to read for free in the Quantum Shorts competition.
Quantum Shorts is a long-running competition where authors and film-makers create work inspired by quantum physics. I think quantum physics is fascinating, so I’ve entered it several times over the years.
My entry this year is about every SF author’s favourite quantum oddity: the idea that the universe splits into multiple universes with every decision we make. It’s also got romantic discovery and heartbreak! Which maybe shouldn’t have an exclamation mark after it, I guess.
The BSFA awards use a three-tiered voting process, whereby anything with at least one vote appears on the longlist. Longlist entries are then voted on by the BSFA membership to create the shortlist, which is voted on by anyone with a membership to Eastercon (an annual British SFF convention).
I don’t have any expectations of appearing on the shortlist considering all the other great work in the short story category, but it’s nice to know that somebody liked my work enough to consider it worthy of an award.
I lately finished Alix E. Harrow’s latest novel, Starling House.
If you like dark fairy tales, living houses, metafiction1 or protagonists who use sarcasm to hide their gooey, vulnerable center, you might enjoy it as much as I did!
Next up I’m starting on Anita Harris Satkunananthan’s Watermyth, an epic story of mermaids, storytelling, and war. What I’ve read so far is engaging and immersive, so I’m really looking forward to diving in more. (Get it? Mermaids? Diving?? I’ll show myself out.)
My new choicescript game is one thing that’s been taking up my time these days.
I have most of the first chapter finished now, a little bit ahead of schedule, and I also wrote some kind of fun minigames to include in a festival scene in the chapter. (I always enjoyed the festival scenes in old-school JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and Wild Arms.)
Hagiwara Sakutaro was a poet known primarily for his imagist work in the 1910s through 1930s, and his 1928 book Principles of Poetry (詩の原理). Hagiwara’s work usually has intense imagery, but his haiku are generally considered uninteresting and unoriginal.
Still, his ideas are interesting enough (if admittedly tendentious) that I wrote a brief bio of the poet and a translation of some of his haiku, which you can read in Modern Haiku at the source link above.
My favourite quote from him is this extremely uplifting bit from Principles, translated here by Chester C.I. Wang and Isamu P. Fukuchi:
All the themes of so many poets since ancient times are but the unfulfilled desire and the insufferable loneliness that vibrate through life’s depths.
All of which is a long, roundabout way of saying that personally I’m a fan of melacholy fog at the year’s end, whether it’s on rocky beaches or elsewhere.
So for this end-of-year newsletter, let’s make a theme of “melancholy things I enjoy!”
Delving into Dungeonsynth
In 2019, I played The Longing, a dark, meditative point and click game where you play a shade who waits for his king to awaken after 400 (real-time!) days.
The Longing is about as relentlessly gloomy and weird as you’d think from that description—it’s like Edward Gorey smashed up with Myst—and it made a big impression on me. It also got me interested in dungeonsynth, a musical genre that marries dark, ominous ambient sound with lush, quasi-medieval melodies and patterns.
A standout example of what makes dungeonsynth such a rewarding genre is Depressive Silence’s Mourning.
Despite the gloomy band and album name, Mourning is a fantastic soundscape, with a mix of synth and chant-like vocals that provide an almost revelatory quality to the music. Highly recommended if you’re into that kind of thing!
It’s the end of the year! And that means it’s time for a 2023 wrapup.
Whether you’re reading for awards or just curious to see what I’ve been up to, here are my poetry and fiction publications for the year:
Three untitled haiku and a haibun titled “After the Storm” — Scifaikuest, February 2023
“Four Scenes from Proxima b,” a short SF story inspired by the Fermi paradox and Cixin Lui’s Three-Body Problem — Manawaker Podcast, March 2023 (listen online)
“Six Ways to Get Past the Shadow Shogun’s Goons, and One Thing to Do When You Get There,” a short, SF, banter-filled romp in the tradition of Dumas — Galaxy’s Edge, May 2023, with an audio version from Escape Pod in September (read/listen online)
“Magic Dad’s Cookie Bites,” a short slice of life / slipstream story about a magician who wants nothing more than to see his tween child smile. Content notes for off-screen transphobia, but otherwise it’s pretty sweet. — Cosmorama, August 2023 (read online)
I also wrote a heck of a lot of game-related stuff this year.
First and foremost, I’m very proud of The Bread Must Rise, a 450,000-odd word interactive cosmic horror / fantasy / baking / comedy novel I co-wrote with the excellent James Beamon. That came out from Choice of Games this September, and it’s a lot of fun! Maybe… too much fun?
Other games I’ve written in 2023 include 4 solo visual novels at StoryLoom, a shorter spin-off of The Bread Must Rise in this year’s IFComp (also with James), and a short solo game called Haunted House for Social Phobics which does what it says on the tin.
2024 is very soon, somehow, and I already have a few pieces of fiction and games in the works.
My story “Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” is coming out in Lightspeed‘s February issue. This will be my second time in Lightspeed! If you have fond memories of Sailor Moon, know that I call this my “Like Sailor Moon but more messed up and depressing, oh wait, wow, actually Sailor Moon is deeply messed up and depressing already, dang” story.
I’ve also started on a new game for Choice of Games called Gigantea: Age of Rot. For this one, I’m leaning into all the genre novel and JPRG trappings I enjoy the most. We’re talking mythic science future, godkings, gods and spirits, community organizing, festivals, and maybe even a minigame or two. The game isn’t scheduled to release until 2025 (yikes!) but so far it’s been a lot of fun just to immerse myself in the world and get to know its people.
Earlier this month, Manawaker Studios released a podcast of an original flash fiction story I wrote called “Four Scenes from Proxima b.” The story, as Addison Smith noted, is an example of extreme worldbuilding.
Rather than following a single character through a single event, like most flash and short fiction does, it follows an entire planetary civilization (or at least, parts of it) through an apocalypse. I originally wrote the story to a prompt about philosophy in fiction, and the inciting incident is similar to Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem and L.X. Beckett’s Gamechanger: What would happen if we suddenly found out we weren’t alone in the universe?
After that, though, it’s really more about the decisions we make in times of crisis, and how we decide to move through the world.
Anxa is at the WorldMind, reporting on a meeting of the world’s most eminent women, men, and xan. It’s an important assignment, one she’s worked for since she was a broodling with big dreams.
A member from the Lem Anarchy speaks, xyr voice insistent: “…caused by nothing more nor less than inroads into sacred Lem space, Consolidator Kao!”
Kao, a commander from the steppes to the north, flares his nostrils in a show of contempt. “All we have done,” he says, “is installed a station for our peace-keepers.”
Anxa knows she should repeat this exchange, but she’s tired. Why can’t these self-important fools see that they’re doing more harm than good?
The mics cut out, and a xan in a white jacket ascends to a podium at the room’s center. “Stop this bickering,” xey say. “Our long-range detectors have picked up transmissions. They are from people — people just like us, half the galaxy away!”
The massive screens that line the room light up behind xem. They are strange, these ‘people’ — all flesh and hair, incisors and nails. They march across the screen in grainy black and white. They argue, they strike at one another. They kill.
The floor of the WorldMind erupts into chaos, members speaking out of turn, shouting to be heard over one another’s arguments.
Anxa snaps her fingers, getting the camera-xan’s attention. “Keep filming!” she mouths, then turns on what she thinks of as her ‘reporting voice,’ thick and gravely to mimic the xan poet-singers centuries before, expertly calibrated to catch the attention.
“This is t’Ly Anxa on the floor of the WorldMind,” she says, “where we’ve just received a warning from beyond the stars.”
2. Ruin
Kel hobbles through the haze that hangs over the once-proud city of Hab, xyr hands clenched tight on the shopping trolley xey took from a store, years ago at the start of the troubles.
The wheels squeak, but the trolley still serves its purpose: to hold food xey have scrounged to give nourishment for xyr broodlings. Survival for xyr family. Hope for xyr future.
A staccato burst of gunfire sounds from several streets ahead, and Kel quivers, fighting the temptation to clench xyr earflaps tight. Noise means a fight, yes, and danger, but is also a warning, and without that xey are dead. Xey turn down a side alley, speed xyr steps.
“No! Please, I’m begging you!”
The shout comes from same direction as the gunfire. It’s far enough away that the speaker can’t mean xem, but the despair in that voice makes Kel’s stomachs twist.
“You can’t — You — “
The speaker breaks into sobs, and Kel presses xyr eyes closed until xey see stars. Xyr broodmother would be ashamed if xey abandoned someone. Xyr own family’s future just as bleak.
Xey push the trolley behind a loose wall panel, settle xyr stomachs with three deep breaths, and break into a run.
3. Superposition
Somebody has lit the library on fire.
Flames leap from hexagonal holding cube to hexagonal holding cube with all the hunger of the triple suns, turning centuries of learning into ash and melted plasteel.
Panli saves what she can: treatises on chemistry. Physics proceedings. Vids of famous plays, children’s rhymes, countless stills of art from a score of dead and dying civilizations. She is too drained to cry, and focuses her energies on keeping the books secured as she staggers down the stairs with a commandeered book cart.
At the bottom of the staircase, the cart tips sideways, dumping precious knowledge across the floor in a clattering that rings loud against the dim roar of flames. Panli retrieves some, fingers shaking. She should have brought a satchel, a strap to tie them down.
She doesn’t see the attacker before he slams one foot into her shoulder, shoving her the rest of the way to the floor. He has a gun, and his face has been painted in a grotesque mockery of alien features.
His eyes have nothing in them of compassion, nothing of a possible future. “Unbeliever,” he whispers. “Heretic.”
“Please,” she says. “All I want is to save the things I love. To give others hope.”
The man raises his gun, and Panli scarcely dares to breathe, lest she knock the future free from its precipice — to ruin or hope? to life or death? to freedom or captivity?
“Please.“
At last the man bows his head, and when he looks up there is something like shame in his eyes. “Go,” he snarls, lowering his gun. “Go, before they kill us both.”
Panli holds her treasures close, and she does not look back. Not even when the screaming starts.
4. Contemplation
The seekers’ fast is built upon an outcropping at a canyon’s edge, its walls clinging to the jagged rock at an angle as though at any moment might tumble downward. It is mid-morning, and the largest sun’s heat has not yet cleared the mist from the canyon, so that it appears an abyss, endless and unchanging.
In the garden at the centre of the fast, three seekers sit in quiet conversation.
“But Locutor,” one says. “Why did Panli not encourage the man to come with her? They could have saved more knowledge between them. Helped more people.”
The locutor shrugs. “It was a long time ago,” xe says. “And without her choice, the fast may never have been founded. The light and knowledge we carry may have been lost for good.”
The first speaker harrumphs. “If it were me,” she mutters…
The locutor smiles. Xe remembers being new to seekerdom xemself. What it felt like to be certain the answers were there for the taking, rather than endless mirages in the mist that wreathe the walls of the fast. “We can never know the truth of others’ actions,” xe says, not unkindly. “But, my children, that does not change what we can do: Think deeply. Act well. Guide each other as we watch the stars’ wheeling path — and our own.”
2022 has been a weird year, writing-wise. I’ve spent nearly all my writing energy on a forthcoming comedy/fantasy/baking/isekai/eldritch-horror game co-written with James Beamon. (Look for that from Choice of Games in 2023, by the way!)
That and some freelance nonfiction accounts for nearly all of my written output this year, so it’s been easy to feel like I haven’t done anything. It’s a little surprising, then, to look through what I had published this year!
I had seven original short stories and one game released this year, as well as the first few chapters of a second game.
Here’s a brief run down, with links when available!
2022 Short Stories
“The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation” (Lightspeed, December)
The daughter of the Minotaur lives on. Will she ever step out of his shadow—or the labyrinth? A fantasy story of roughly 1000 words inspired by the art of Leonora Carrington and the stories of Jorge Luis Borges.
(Content notes: violence, emotional abuse)
“Veracity’s Find” (Wizards in Space, November)
“Veracity’s Find” – Wizards in Space 8, November 2022
A woman living on board a world-spanning orbital station goes on a treasure hunt to get over a break-up. Will what she finds there help her or make her feel worse? More importantly, will Station ever keep its weird ideas to itself? A science fiction story of around 1600 words.
(Content notes: low self-esteem)
“What Not to Do When You’re Polymorphed and Stuck in a Time Loop” (The Sprawl, October)
What do you get when you drink a polymorph potion and suck the essence out of powerful mages in a desperate attempt to get out of a time loop?
It sounds like the start of a highly specific and very strange joke, but it’s also the concept behind this weird little genre-bender of 750 words.
“The Nature of Stones” (Prismatic Dreams, June)
“The Nature of Stones” – Prismatic Dreams, All Worlds Wayfarer, June 2022
A quiet science fantasy story of 3000 words about childbirth, relationship conflicts, and negative self-talk, set on a planet where there’s no concept of gender and giant boulders drift slowly down from space to crash in the ocean.
(Content notes: brief suicidal ideation)
“The Calligrapher’s Granddaughter” (Haven Speculative, May)
This far-future space opera features AI, drones, golden retrievers, and sly (or not so sly) references to the work of Ursula Le Guin and Iain M. Banks. Approximately 4100 words.
(Content notes: accidental poisoning… sort of)
2022 Reprints
I had three stories reprinted this year as well, one as an audio reprint:
“How They Name the Ships” – 750 words, Flash Fiction Online. First published in Frozen Wavelets in 2020.
It’s your first year trick or treating alone. Will it be your last?
Trick or Treat or Trick or Treat or Trick is a parser game about time loops and trick or treating, written for Ectocomp 2022 in October. It’s set in the 90s, hence the eye-watering cover art.
The game scored dead last, probably because it was my first time writing anything in Inform (the game engine I used) and I decided that it wouldn’t be challenging enough without introducing weird time loop mechanics. For some reason?!
I’ve fixed the (many!) bugs that were present in the competition release and introduced a hint system, which I hope makes this more entertaining to play. If you enjoy interactive fiction, or are curious what exactly it is, check it out!
“Library of Worlds” (Storyloom, Ongoing)
A demon lord in the library?!
Inspired by my love for isekai anime and my library career (sort of, anyway!), “Library of Worlds” is a cozy reverse isekai fantasy visual novel. That’s a lot of adjectives — basically, it’s a game where you talk to various characters from a fantasy world have been reborn in our own, but without the seriously high stakes and tension that are common to certain types of fantasy stories.
The first six chapters are now available to play, and I anticipate publishing another five each in January and February, bringing the story to its completion.
Also, check out that gorgeous cover the Storyloom art team put together for me. Wow!
The Storyloom site is in beta and all games are currently free to play, but getting to a specific title is a little tricky still. If you want to try this one out, I recommend clicking the link, signing up for an account, and then coming back here and clicking the link again.
2022 Submission Statistics
Seven stories and three reprints published in one year sounds like a lot.
Wow, I must be so successful! The sting of rejection banished from my writing practice for good!
Well, not so much.
My secret (it’s not very secret) is that I write a lot of very short fiction and I make a lot of submissions. That means I net more accepted stories than I would if I rarely sent things out, but it also means I get a heck of a lot of rejections.
Here are this years stats:
Stories Started: 6 (all flash)
Stories Finished: 3 (mostly flash)
Words Written: ~150,000 (almost all in the choicescript game)
Submissions: 220
Acceptances: 15 (some from 2021 submissions, some for things that will come out in 2023 — or beyond)
Rejections: 140 (9 personal, the rest forms)
Pending: 42 (as of late December when I’m writing this post — most will likely be rejections)
According to Duotrope, which I use to track my submissions, my acceptance ratio for the year is just under 9%. (Duotrope doesn’t have every single one of my submissions, which is why the numbers above don’t add up properly, so my acceptance ratio is probably lower in reality.)
That’s actually about where it’s been since 2019, and my submission numbers per year are about the same too. To put things into perspective, this means if I’d only submitted the seven stories I had accepted, I wouldn’t have gotten any acceptances. (Yes, I know that’s not how statistics work.)
For most people, 217 submissions in a year is kind of bonkers, although I definitely know authors who submit more stories and poems each year! I’ve set myself a goal of 15 submissions a month since about 2020. For me, that’s a relatively easy task because:
I write primarily flash fiction and short stories that are on the shorter side.
I have a pretty decent stable of published short stories built up from my ~10 years of submitting (Just under 70 stories published as of December 2022) so I can send out lots of reprints.
If you’re a writer yourself, I’d love to hear from you about short stories you had published this year!
“The Spread of Space” focuses on a couple of other tropes I find myself returning to — either as a reader or an author — time and time again:
Found families
Ships/AIs with feelings
Parenting feels
Learning to let go, even when it hurts
It’s also got an ensemble cast, with a crew of colourful characters — something I’m particularly amused about in a 1200 word story!
We’ve got Kala, a historian with a tendency for self-insertion. Eun-ja, who is obsessed with dramas. Iope, the crew’s well-intended heckler. And of course there’s Zander, essentially the kind of person who feels he has to keep everyone else on track and is perpetually tired as a result.
The story follows the crew (and, of course, Ship!) as they examine a newly rediscovered asteroid out on the edge of known space, complete with a mysterious ancient ruin that seems to have been inhabited all too recently and weird alien writing.
But what’s in the cellar? Why does Zander keep going down there? What does it all have to do with time loop stories?
It is somehow October, and I have a new piece of science fiction poetry and a new piece of flash fiction out on the same day!
Do you like time loops, Regency dramas, mother-daughter relationships, and sarcasm? How about classic SF robots and poetry?
If the answer to either of those is “yes,” “maybe,” or even just “What?”, then I am happy to introduce you to “What Not to Do When You’re Polymorphed and Stuck in a Time Loop” and “The Three Laws of Poetics,” which came out this month in a brand new and a solidly established magazine, respectively.
Flash Fiction: Of Time Loops and Tea
First up, what do you get when you drink a polymorph potion and suck the essence out of powerful mages in a desperate attempt to get out of a time loop?
The Prague Astronomical clock, a medieval clock that probably doesn’t involve time travel. (Used under a CC-BY license from George M. Groutas)
I’m particularly excited to be in the first issue of the magazine, which has a focus on queer, feminist, anti-colonial content. If that sounds up your alley, definitely go check out the full contents of the issue. It has a bevy of fantastic poems and stories! (I hear a print version is in the works, as well.)
If you like this story, you might also enjoy some of my other published fiction, since this isn’t the first zany thing I’ve written that messes about with time travel tropes.
My other new publication is a short piece of science fiction poetry titled “The Three Laws of Poetics,” appearing in the November/December issue of Asimov’s as well as for free on their website.
If you’ve ever read Asimov’s short fiction, it’s probably obvious just from the title what I was doing with this piece. And, yes, it’s just what you think: an examination of the classic SF author’s three laws of robotics, but applied to poetry and poets instead of (his vision of) robots.
If you’re an Asimov fan, I hope you enjoy it.
And even if you’re new to Asimov (or untinterested in his problematic stereotyping or personal behaviour, which I definitely understand) you don’t need to be a fan to read and hopefully enjoy the poem. It should stand alone.
What is Science Fiction Poetry?
As defined by Suzette Haden Elgin, who coined the term, science fiction poetry treats scientific matters with “rigor.” Today, the term describes poetry that uses science fiction tropes. Science fiction poetry is a type of speculative poetry, which also includes fantasy and horror poems.
Speculative poetry today
Today, most science fiction poets consider themselves speculative poets (or just poets!) and–as Elgin herself lamented as far back as 1999–her proposed definition of poetry that had “rigor” never realy stuck.
In fact, the topic of “what is science fiction poetry” is probably a good way to get into a debate with most people who write poetry with science fictional themes. If all that sounds like fun, check out the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA).
And if you’d like to read some excellent speculative poetry, the SFPA’s annual contest is a fantastic place to start.
I’ve had two new stories out in May and June, so to celebrate their publication I’m here with yet another blog post about things that interest me and probably nobody else!
First off, the stories!
Two New Short Stories
Debuting in May over at Haven Speculative, I’m pleased to present “The Calligrapher’s Granddaughter,” a short story set in early modern Japan. It’s got magic, calligraphy, snotty samurai, probably too much detail about kanji radicals, and found family feels. (Content notes for off-screen child abandonment and child endangerment, plus animal use.)
Next, appropriately published in June, is “The Nature of Stones” in All Worlds Wayfarer’s delightful Prismatic Dreams anthology. Billing itself as a “kaleidoscope of queer speculative fiction,” the anthology has 30 stories featuring queer characters in a variety of genres. My story is about childbirth, mythic astronomy (???), and unhealthy relationships. All set in a world with no concept of gender.
Please consider purchasing a copy of either or both of these great publications if you can afford it, and thank you for supporting small publishers! :)
What is Early Modern Japan?
Early Modern Japan roughly coincides with the period between 1580 and 1868. The Edo Period, with its strong central rule, relative peace, and cultural unification, is emblematic of Japan’s early modern period, to the extent that most historians do not use the term “early modern.”
Myths and Realities of Early Modern Japan
Only one of my new stories is set in early modern Japan, but it’s certainly a time and a place that I return to again and again for inspiration and as a setting for my short stories.
Even if you don’t know much about Japan, you’ve probably seen some kind of popular media set in this time period. Seven Samurai, anybody? Naruto? Shogun?
The inimitable Toshiro Mifune (right) as Sanjuro, a wandering samurai, in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961).
In fact, early modern Japan is so popular a destination for popular media—both domestically and abroad—that people unfamiliar with Japanese history often claim that Japan has always been a closed-off land of honor-obsessed samurai where nothing ever changed, the social class you were born into was inescapable, and rich lords sat in their tea houses as the shogun plotted against them.
That’s actually not true at all. Like most nations, Japan has a long and fascinating existence with many changes. The early modern period (generally dated between the late 1500s to the late 1800s) amounts to a decent but not outsized portion of its roughly 1400-year recorded history.
For instance, there was no shogun in the Heian period (794-1185) and samurai didn’t even exist as a class or a concept until sometime in the 12th century. Likewise, Japan certainly wasn’t a “closed” country until the Tokugawa shogunate enacted a policy limiting contact with the outside world in the 1630s, and even then it was impossible to totally block out foreign influences.
By the early modern period, however, genre movie staples like samurai and ninja were very much on stage (if only in the popular imagination), and rigid social structures with a powerful centralized government were well entrenched. Despite the somewhat tyrannical rule of the Tokugawa, though–or perhaps because of it–early modern Japan was also a fairly peaceful period in Japanese history, with less outright militancy than some other periods.
All of this is a very oversimplified description of Japanese history, probably to the point where it’s almost as inaccurate as American movies about samurai. (Okay, hopefully it’s not that inaccurate.)
If you’re interested in learning more about Japan during the rule of the Tokugawa, The Tokugawa World is a recent collection of scholarly essays exploring everything from the military to comic books in the time period. (That link will take you to WorldCat, where you can find it in a library near you. Yay, libraries!)
If a whole scholarly book sounds exhausting, the Wikipedia article on Edo period Japan isn’t terrible, either–just don’t tell anybody I suggested it or my librarian street cred will be shot!
“It’s insulting,” the Intelligence drone they’d been assigned to was saying, now. “Yes, we asked you to come here; yes, we asked to join the Federation. But that doesn’t give you the right to treat us like… like…” The drone’s iridescent carapace shuddered slightly, and their speakers gave a remarkably convincing approximation of sputtering with rage. “Like computers!”
From “A Difference of Opinion,” Kaleidotrope, April 2022
The spring 2022 issue of Kaleidotrope includes my story “A Difference of Opinion,” a short space opera in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin’s Hain Cycle and Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. The story features self-aware AI (with AI children!), far-flung federations with an interest in collecting different polities, and a take on the “battle of wits” scene from The Princess Bride. (Yes, that’s right: it’s got AI, space opera, AND poison!)
Although the term space opera started out as a pejorative one for low-quality science fiction, the subgenre is now long established as a force to be reckoned with. Especially in the last five or six years, space opera has been been having “a moment.” Books like Ancillary Justice, Gideon the Ninth and A Memory Called Empire (and their sequels), the Murderbot novellas (and a novel, now!), and all sorts of other great stories have received critical attention in the way of award nominations or wins.
If you’ve read some of those titles and are looking for more, I’ve pulled together a list of some of my favourite space opera settings ranging from classic titles by LeGuin to newer stories by equally amazing authors.
1: Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya
Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya is one of my absolute favourite settings regardless of genre and sub-genre. It interrogates
It has the delicious mix of high-stakes interplanetary conflict and intimate personal stakes that’s one of space opera’s most defining elements, all set in “Confucian galactic empires of Vietnamese and Chinese inspiration.”
If you’re interested in Classical Chinese and Vietnamese culture, or—frankly—just like amazing storytelling with memorable characters, lushly and lovingly described, you’ve definitely got to pick up some of Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya books and stories.
The Tea Master and the Detective, the Nebula-award winning novella that de Bodard describes as a “gender-swapped space opera Sherlock Holmes retelling,” is a great place to start your exploration.
2: Macross Seven
Okay, stick with me here. If you’re not into anime, you’ve probably never even seen that word before. But if you like your space opera with a healthy dose of romantic melodrama and “not taking itself entirely seriously,” you’ll likely appreciate this one.
The Macross franchise of anime (and manga, and games, and…) is well-known among anime fans for a few things, including love triangles, the integration of music into space battles, missile barrages that paint the sky with explosions, and fighter planes that transform into giant, humanoid robots. While its subgenre is technically mecha (“giant robot”) rather than space opera as such, the conflicts are often inter-cultural and inter-species as well as personal, so for my purposes I’m just going to go with it.
There are many different Macross series, but my personal favourite is Macross 7—probably also the one that takes itself the least seriously.
Macross 7 follows pacifist rock musician Nekki Basara as he embarks on a one-man quest to stop war and spread love by… flying a giant transforming space fighter jet / robot that seems to be powered by guitar.
Oh, also he fires speaker pods into enemy fighters and sings at them.
The grungy, catchy opening song, “Seventh Moon.” Yes, the whole series is every bit as ridiculous as this makes it look.
It may be goofy, but it’s a lot of fun. Give it a chance, and soon you too will be shouting 「俺の歌を聴けー！」 (listen to my song!)
Sadly, the DVDs are out of production and it’s not available for streaming, so you’ll have to do some work to find copies of this one.
3: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s Sun Lords of the Principality
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is a Nebula award finalist whose work always moves me. Their Sun Lords of the Principality story series is no different.
Fair warning, some of these stories are super dark—at times, even unrelentingly brutal. But even at their grimmest, they have an inescapable core of humanity and empathy that gives them a warm place in my library. If you’ve ever asked yourself how you can possibly keep going with the world as messed up as it is, give these a try.
Also, I heartily recommend checking out some of Merc’s other work! Their latest publication, “Hero’s Choice“, is a humorous fantasy novelette that sounds like it’s just crying out for an isekai anime adaptation. Or for a broader taste of their work, try Friends for Robots, a recent short story collection.
4: Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle
Okay, Ursula K. LeGuin probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. With decades of acclaim under her belt at the time of her death in 2018, most people know of her work either from A Wizard of Earthsea or sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s the latter we’ll concern ourselves with here.
Le Guin’s science fiction stories usually (but not always) fall into what is referred to as the Hainish Cycle (although the author herself didn’t like the term “cycle”), a series which all deal with a spacefaring civilization called the Ekumen. The Ekumen, and its main planet, Hain, is a kind of Star Trek like galaxy-spanning confederation of planets dedicated to inclusivity and cooperation. Most of the stories and novels in the series deal with members of the Ekumen called mobiles, who go to newly-admitted or isolated planets and observe (while usually also agitating for membership and Hainish values).
A lot of SF fans have read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but my favourites set on Hain are The Telling, set on a suddenly-capitalist-consumerist planet where the old way of doing things still lives on under the surface, and “Five Ways to Forgiveness,” five connected stories about slavery and social change. If you want something shorter and more fun, try “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” a short story that does some fun things with FTL travel.
If you can afford it, I recommend splurging on a copy of the Library of America’s Hainish Novels and Stories boxed set, a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin’s space opera. The two books contain all the stories and novels that feature Hain, including “Five Ways to Forgiveness,” which hasn’t previously been published in full. Also, they’re absolutely gorgeous to look at!
Bonus Story: “How They Name the Ships”
So there you have it: four space opera settings I enjoy!
I don’t have a fully-fledged universe of my own that spans dozens of published stories—yet. But if you like “A Difference of Opinion,” it does take place in the same setting as “How They Name the Ships,” published in 2020 in Frozen Wavelets. That one is only about 750 words, so it’s a quick read.
As the title suggests, it’s all about the power of names and naming—a theme that’s particularly important in a lot of LeGuin’s fiction, but one that also shows up a lot in other space operas. If you’re interested in the topic, you can see what I wrote about some of my favourite ship names from other space opera series in an older blog post: “Ship Names, Naming, and Identity in Space Opera.”
SF author Michael Swanwick recently posted that “New Zealand is giving away books they don’t own.” While I haven’t seen too much conversation about the New Zealand case yet, I’ve definitely seen other folks, including the authors guild and other large authors’ organizations, understandably angry and frustrated at a perceived threat to their livelihood, make similar hyperbolic, overblown, inaccurate claims in the past about library digitization programs. (For an example of a press release that presents the issue accurately and in-context, check out SFWA’s.)
I’m not here to say people are wrong to feel that way, but to say that this is not an accurate description of what’s going on. In reality, what the National Library of New Zealand is doing is donating some books it does own to the Internet Archive, which will digitize and lend them to one user at a time.
Incidentally, this post isn’t the first time the National Library of New Zealand has received negative attention for their project to deaccession a portion of their print collection–they’ve been drawing ire for it in one way or another since they announced the deaccessioning project in 2018. And the Internet Archive is definitely no stranger to controversy in the publishing world. (Vox has a good summary.)
But do authors really need to worry? Are libraries out to ruin us? Do they want us to starve while they benefit from our hard work unfairly?
In a word: no.
Super Basic Summary Version
The rest of this post is pretty long. If you don’t care that much but just want to know why people are mad and what you can do to protect your own rights, here’s a summary that covers the basics and sets right some misconceptions.
1. The National Library of New Zealand is getting rid of 428,231 books in a collection focused on authors and publishers outside New Zealand. They are not “giving away books they don’t own” because they do own these books and have purchased them. (Also, 200,000 of these are unequivocally in the public domain and only 775 titles in the list have a publication date of later than the year 2000.)
2. They are donating the books to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit focused on creating accessible digital archives of books and other forms of media. They are not digitizing the books themselves and then sending over the digital copies. Instead, the Internet Archive will take ownership of the print books.
3. The Internet Archive will digitize the books and let anybody with an account check them out. Loan periods vary, with access to downloadable files usually limited to two weeks. They are not letting anybody just download copies of the ebooks to keep. Also, during the time they are checked out nobody else will be able to access the files.
4. You can opt out of the National Library of New Zealand’s project by December 1st if your titles are affected. To check if anything of yours is in the overseas collection they are getting rid of, download this excel file from their website (warning: it is 45MB) If your title isn’t in that spreadsheet, then this won’t affect you personally and you don’t need to opt out of anything. To opt out, follow the directions here. (Basically, you just email them with the titles and their numbers on the spreadsheet and your email needs to match your author name).
5. If you miss the December 1st deadline, you can still have your materials removed from the Internet Archive, which has a takedown process detailed here.
So, what’s really going on in New Zealand?
What’s actually happening is that the National Library of New Zealand is donating deaccessioned print books (that is: books they do own and have paid for but decided they don’t need anymore) from one specific collection, the Overseas Published Collection (OPC), to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that digitizes print books and lends the virtual copies to pretty much anyone.
The overall mission of the National Library of New Zealand is like any library’s: to make sure people have access to books and other materials. In 2003, the library’s mission changed slightly. As it describes in its collections policy for the OPC, the library started to focus more on published materials that relate to New Zealand and the Pacific. The OPC, which is a more general-purpose collection that holds items published outside the country and region, doesn’t fit with their new mission so much, so they are deaccessioning the majority of it.
The titles that they’re getting rid of are going to be donated to the Internet Archive, who will digitize them and lend the digital copies to anyone with a free account. Note that lending here means that only one person can access a given title at a time, not that anybody can download the title for as long as they want.
258,625 titles were published before 1924, making them almost certainly in the public domain
Of the remaining 169,606 titles, only about 60,000 were published after 1980. If you go up to 1990, that number drops to 10,000 titles
I could only find three titles in the list that were published after 2010, and all of them are from 2011
A note on this: the date field is a little buggy in the provided data, which is not unusual for Excel or library cataloguing. There are quite a few dates like “19996” or “Apr 19” (which turned out to be a date from 1931), which makes it hard to get a good handle on what’s in there in a short period of time.
Someone with more free time than me or better Excel skills can probably clean up the data or even create a web interface for searching it, but for the purposes of this blog post the point is: the vast majority of titles in this collection are 40+ years old. This is definitely not some scheme to rip off a bunch of recently-published books and deny up and coming authors the royalties they would be owed.
Help! My Titles are in There and I Don’t Like It
If you find your titles in the spreadsheet and are upset by the idea that the National Library of New Zealand is going to give your books to the Internet Archive, you have until December 1st to opt out of the donation.
The procedure for this is pretty straightforward. Basically, search the Excel file for your work and get the unique number from the spreadsheet. Send this to their email address with “proof of rights” and they will process your request.
Let’s say you’re Jane Austen and you’re very upset. Here’s what the process looks like from start to finish.
Step 1: Find Your Titles
Open up the Excel file and do a find for your name (or book title).
A good tip here is to highlight the author column and search for Lastname, Firstname to weed out false positives:
Now you have a list of your works.
Step 2: Get the Unique Numbers
Next, for each title you want removed, scroll over to column I, titled Our Unique Number. This is the number you need to send the library with your opt out request.
Let’s say Jane Austen doesn’t mind if they have Emma, but Pride and Prejudice? That’s right out. Here are the rows for the two copies of Pride and Prejudice in the collection. The unique number is the very last column on the right.
That screenshot’s hard to parse, so the numbers are:
995774093502836 995718743502836
Step 3: Email with the numbers and proof of rights
This sounds like the most complicated part. How do you “prove” your rights?
Fortunately, the library is not making this hard. All they want is an email sent to opcmanagement@dia.govt.nz containing the unique numbers from the spreadsheet and coming from the “persons or organisations whose names correspond with rights-holders’ names.”
So if your email is prettyunicornluvr69@yahoo.com, for instance, you might need to create a new account. Gmail lets you create free email accounts very quickly, though, so this should be pretty easy. If your name is already taken (it almost certainly is), try adding -author or -writer or something on the end. -professional is also a good one.
Jane Austen is, more’s the pity, dead.
But if she were alive today, she could create JaneAustenAuthor@gmail.com, paste her unique numbers into an email and send it off to opcmanagement@dia.govt.nz to let them know she does not want those titles sent on to the Internet Archive for digitization.
Step 4: But it’s After December 1st!
If you’ve missed the December 1st deadline to opt out but found your titles in the spreadsheet, you can still tell the Internet Archive you don’t want your stuff available for lending.
You can email info@archive.org with a DCMA takedown request and they will remove your items. This works for anything in their archives, by the way, not just books from this collection. You can even get your website unarchived if you want.
If you’re an author (like me!), the idea of the Internet Archive taking books they didn’t buy and handing out illegally made digital copies to anyone who asks is alarming.
Fortunately, that’s not what’s really happening here.
In late March of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic cutting off access to libraries for many people, the IA instituted what it called the National Emergency Library, a program that allowed anyone to check out digital copies of IA-owned books without limit.
Understandably, a lot of publishers and authors were angry about this. As a result, the IA (eventually) closed down the program in June of 2020. However, they didn’t stop lending books altogether. Instead, they implemented what’s called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), a fairly new framework that libraries are using to try and loan out digitized versions of print titles they own instead of purchasing additional electronic licenses.
Before we go any further, I should clarify someting: in addition to being an author, I’m also a librarian. (There are quite a few of us author-librarians, in fact!) In my professional opinion as both a librarian and an author, the Internet Archive and digital lending in general are not the pirate-supporting catastrophe they seem to be at first glance. More on that in a moment.
The short version is that the IA only allows one person to check out each digitized title at a time, and they are only lending the same number of coipes of a title as they have print copies. If they have one print copy of your book in their collection, they will let one person borrow its digital version at a time. If they have zero print copies of your book, they can’t (and don’t) even digitize it, let alone lend it.
If you want the long version, well… keep reading.
All About Controlled Digital Lending
At the core of this controversy is a relatively new library framework for ebook management called controlled digital lending (CDL).
Although it certainly helps libraries provide digital content to their patrons without paying for expensive publisher licenses, CDL is definitely controversial in the publishing and writing worlds. This is nothing new. In fact, CDL only the latest bugbear in the ongoing smearfest between libraries and publishers over how to deal with ebooks.
In other words, for every one copy of the print book the library owns, one patron can use the book in either print or digital form at any given time.
A similar concept has been around in libraries for ages: Interlibrary loan, or ILL. (Sorry, librarians love acronyms.)
With ILL, a library lets patrons at other libraries borrow copies of books they own. Just like CDL, there’s a one-to-one relationship. Libraries aren’t photocopying entire books and sending them to other people to do whatever with. Also like CDL, the library has to own the item. They don’t just go grab some random copy from somewhere and sneakily mail it to another library.
With CDL, libraries are not making endless digital copies of random books they don’t even own. They’re taking print copies of titles they do own and making one copy accessible in multiple formats. Only one person ever has the title at once, whether it’s the print or digital version.
As a sidebar, I really hate that this is classed as a “war.” Publishers, libraries, and authors are all on the same side: we all want to connect written works with readers. Yes, there are some disagreements on the best way to do that, especially with relatively new, disruptive technologies like ebooks.
Basically, the tussle over ebook lending is best classed as growing pains. Publishers have costs they need to cover, but libraries can’t afford to pay for ebook licenses under the current models (the article linked above cites a $60 title with an ebook license that costs $240 for every 50 loans or every two years, for example, and I know from experience that if you want multiple patrons to read the book at once it gets even more expensive).
As a result, what libraries are trying is digitizing copies of books they already own and lending them to patrons that way. This isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, happening on a large scale in most places. Digitizing books takes a lot of time, and so does maintaining the digital version and the software to lend it.
Is CDL the best thing ever? I don’t think so. I don’t think any library does. It’s just the latest attempt to find a solution that respects publisher’s and author’s rights while still allowing libraries to serve the needs of patrons who can’t afford to buy their own books without using more money than they have in their own budgets.
Conclusion: Support Libraries, Support Publishers, Support Authors
New technologies are disruptive.
Although it’s odd to think of ebooks as “new,” they’re much newer than print books.
Project Gutenberg published the first ebook in 1971, but most ebook publishing didn’t catch on until the late 1990s and early 2000s at the earliest. Print books have existed in some form or another since the 9th century.
And as the ongoing debate about CDL proves, ebooks have definitely disrupted the traditional, print-based models of publishing and libraries both.
But trust me, libraries don’t want to put publishers or authors out of business (we kind of, you know, need them in order for us to exist as public storehouses of knowledge and entertainment) and no author I know of wants to shut down libraries (or at least, would ever admit it in public).
I’m not a publisher, but I’m pretty sure publishers aren’t interested in closing libraries down, either. Even those that are sometimes antagonistic toward library ebook lending understand why libraries have value and are supportive of them, generally speaking.
So, by all means, protect your rights to not have your titles digitized without your consent if you want. Get your digitized versions taken down from the Internet Archive. But please, please can we stop characterizing this as some kind of zero sum game where libraries are melodrama villains interested in twirling their moustaches while authors starve in the streets?
