The #ThoroughlyGoodBooksbyPoc Reading List

Update:  The list is now alphabetical by author!

(Note:  The following books are what was listed on Twitter under the #ThoroughlyGoodBooksbyPOC hashtag at 5:45 PM EST (the 21st of August).  Twitter will not allow me to view anything that might have appeared earlier than the morning of the 21st.

It should also be noted that some folks have expanded the list to include books featuring POC characters, even when such books are written by white authors.)

A little background:

In response to the recent Weird Tales fiasco, author Jim C. Hines decided to switch things around to get people to list their favorite novels by people of color, irrespective of genre.  I've decided to compile as many of those books as I possibly can.  The following list will, I hope, be updated over the course of the week (please understand that I am in grad school, which begins anew tomorrow, and so my time may be limited to do this).

(Note:  Some authors will not have specific titles listed.  This is either because people suggested practically everything written by those authors or specifically stated "anything by."  Please excuse any repetitions you may find.)

Now for the list:

Crowdfunding: The Last Day to Help!

Today's the last day to donate to my crowdfunding venture and get a bunch of free stuff in the process (free fiction, more free fiction, and amusing ways to torture me).  If you can spare a few bucks, please consider sending it my way.  You can do that by using the little widget on the side.  Further details about perks and all that jazz can be found here.  Or you can simply ignore all of that and send donations straight to my Paypal:  arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com.

I'm enormously grateful to everyone who has donated thus far.  You are simply wonderful.  Thus far, I've handed out a whole bunch of personalized ebooks and given dictatorship powers for the Torture Cinema feature of The Skiffy and Fanty Show to a handful of folks.  Pretty much everyone who got an ebook says they love their special alt-hist introduction, which makes me happy indeed.  However, I won't pretend to be enthused by all the crappy films I will have to watch...

Thanks to all that have helped by giving or spreading the word.  Whatever happens today, I'll at least be closer to getting a new laptop without having to go further into debt.

Now back to your regular programming...

The Weird Tales / Save the Pearls Fiasco: Preliminary Reactions

(Disclaimer:  This post is a preliminary reaction.  I have not read the novel in question and can only respond to what others have said about it.  As such, what follows will not be based on what I know about the book itself, but rather a series of curiosities and questions that I suspect will be answered later this week.  An educated reaction will follow.

Note:  I am collecting links to other responses at the bottom.

Note 2:  The original Weird Tales post has been taken down.  An apology has been put in its place.

Note 3:  Some new details have surfaced.  You can find my update here.)

Twitter was in a rage this morning about this Weird Tales announcement involving the publication of the first chapter of Victoria Foyt's Saving the Pearls:  Revealing Eden.  Authors/bloggers N. K. Jemisin, Celine Kiernan, Martha Wells, Nick Mamatas were among the most vocal hitters, decrying the selection as, at best, a phenomenally stupid choice of publication and, at worst, a throwback to the racism that might have made Lovecraft proud.

If you're not familiar with Saving the Pearls, then you're not alone.  I am writing this post from a position of profound ignorance, having only read reviews of Foyt's novel, and not the novel itself (such as this review or the numerous reviews on the Amazon page). What many seem most bothered by is Foyt's portrayal of a reverse-racist society which uses blackface to make its supposedly anti-racist point (a historically derogatory practice originally used by whites to stereotype and denigrate blacks -- the white-race-glorification film, Birth of a Nation, for example, used blackface in order to portray black males as sexual "beasts," which, as it turns out, is another stereotype that Foyt, according to reviews, unsuccessfully "turns on its head").  Coming from the outside, my first reactions were along these lines:

Captain America Talks About Some Guy's Stupid Project

My good friend, Ghetto Captain America, decided to make a video about my Fund-a-Laptop project. You can find the details about the crowdfunding project (how to help, etc.) here.
Thanks to +Alison Marlowe +John Ward +Edison Crux +Patrick Thunstrom +Nalo Hopkinson +Mike Reeves-McMillan +Stina Leicht +Brent Bowen +Eric James Stone +Adam Callaway +Dirk Reul Hallie O'Donovan Benjamin Kissell +Jennifer Barth!

Larry's Silly Survey of Silly

Over at OF Blog of the Fallen, Larry has put up a bunch of seemingly random and bizarre questions for folks to answer.  The following are my equally silly responses:


1.  Do you believe that global warming could be ameliorated if there were more pirates in the world?
Unfortunately, no.  Because pirates have a tendency to burn things -- such as boats and makeshift cigarettes and small coastal towns ripe for the picking -- they contribute at least 50 times the amount of atmospheric pollutants as all volcanoes combined.  In truth, to stop global warming, we would have to systematically hunt down and imprison all pirates.  I'm told the Federated League of Ninjas is waiting for the call...

2.  What is the last book you read and would you recommend it to a hobo who likes to speak in alliterations?
Libidinal Economy by Jean-Francois Lyotard.  And, no, I would not recommend it to an

Book Review: In the Lion's Mouth by Michael Flynn

(Note:  This review was originally intended for publication, but certain professional and personal obligations prevented its completion.  My apologies for its lateness, but I could not sit on this version any longer.  Thanks to Abigail Nussbaum and others who viewed it in earlier incarnations.)

Michael F. Flynn's In the Lion's Mouth is a space opera of the new variety, which is to say that it takes a genre that once stood for oversimplified adventure, sometimes of the Campbellian mode and redolent of the pulps, and infuses it with political intrigue and sociological awareness.  The planets that make up the novel's empire have ceased to be spaces only of conquest, adventure, and wonder, and become contained worlds connected by a common but divergent history.  This is not to suggest that Flynn's novel has abandoned the tropes of the adventure story, but that it brings a rigorous examination of the conditions of the empire in which that adventure occurs.  In the Lion's Mouth is compelling not because of its adventure elements, but because it is at once an

Writing Wonders: Are Flashbacks Evil?

I think with all writing concepts, there are no simple answers.  Flashbacks are no different.  Just as you can ruin a book with poorly constructed multiple POVs, so too can you ruin a book with flashbacks.  It all comes down to how and when you do it.

Case in point:  I am currently reading Tobias Buckell's The Apocalypse Ocean, the fourth book in his Xenowealth series.  One of the POVs in the book is of a woman born from genetically augmented stock by an alien race known as the Nesaru.  But the only way we can really understand what her past means to her in the present of the novel (after the events in Ragamuffin, in which a human revolution against alien control had its first and most important victory) is by flashback.  Buckell could tell us her history in an infodump, but the result would