Magic future tech

I got heavily into Chinese webnovels last year - an addiction that has yet to pass.  Originally I was reading licensed and/or fan translations of the novels, but lately I've shifted to reading directly on the official original sites (first dozen chapters or so are free, and then you can purchase the rest), and letting Google translate take care of me.

Google translate (the automatic function through Chrome) produces perfectly readable Chinese webnovels.  This is such an amazing thing to me.  Occasionaly there are confusions (particularly for people's names, which usually have a distinct meaning - so occasionally someone the novel usually calls 'Liang You' will be called 'cool pomelo' instead), but for the most part it's clean and readable text.  This is pure magic to me - to have that barrier of language taken away and give me access to reams and reams of virtual books.  [I'm presuming that Chinese somehow lends itself into translation into English - whether through similar syntax or some other congruity, because I've seen many very poor machine translations.  Or perhaps Google is just improving their translation tech year by year and has reached 'readable' level.]

I tend to be what I guess could be called a 'glom' reader.  Like, I'll get into the mood for Rex Stout or Agatha Christie, and then will spend the better part of half a year reading all their books in order of publication.  I don't think it's possible for me to glom the entirety of China's web novel output - the books are being written faster than I could ever read - but I seem to still be in the mood to try.

I started out with the historical reincarnation/transmigration novels, but am now on the modern day reincarnation/transmigration, with an admixture of gaming and game system novels.  [I just finished a gaming one which (entirely coincidentally) started off with a take-off a game I'd just been playing called Raft.]  I prefer the stories that go for around 100 chapters, though I've gotten quite a ways into some of the really long ones.

No novel has kept my attention for 6000 chapters, but I have made it more than a million words into a few of them.

On the gaming front, recently I've played a ton of Two Point Hospital, a fair bit of Raft, and have completed the first location in Viscera (a game where you are the janitor that cleans up after Doom Guy [or other equivalent] has blasted their way through the latest zombie outbreak or alien invasion).

Writing-wise, I'm about 3/4 through 'Firsts', which I guess counts as New Adult, but as usual for me doesn't quite match the genre.  It's something between slice-of-life and romance, with some plot vagaries and a ton of sex that somehow manages to be more friendly than erotic.  When I finish it, I'll move on to 'Seconds', a sequel, mainly because I like the characters, and then back to Tangleways.  [So, not a permanent shift to New Adult or anything - just want to write this story.]

All quiet on the corona-virus front - still working from home (with hopes of transitioning to at least part-time working from home once all this is over).  I purchased a face mask in case NSW mandates masks (it probably won't, but Australia's otherwise good progress tripped up and we've gone all second wavy here, and so I'd rather not be caught out trying to convert my socks into a mask at the last moment).

Hope you're all keeping well.

That time I was reincarnated...

I've been tracking my reading on Goodreads since 2010, with a peak of 159 books in 2011 (I was having a big Rex Stout binge), but halfway through this year Goodreads tells me I've read a grand total of four books.

Now, the site has never captured all my reading, since it's very much focused on traditionally published media (by that I'm not talking about self-published or not - I mean the reading of things that have ISBNs or ASINs or things that there's some kind of formal system of indexing).  I've never tried to track the webcomics I read, or even more formal 'Western' comics, let alone the volume of illicitly translated manga/manhua I tend to read.

Earlier this year, the reading of webtoons led me to a translation site of the vast reams of web novels that often form the basis of webtoons.  These are almost all Chinese, Japanese and Korean language stories that aren't available in English (and thus the translation site exists in a legal shadowland in much the same way as fan translations of manga).  These translations are practically the only stories I've been reading since February.

As the title of this post indicates, reincarnation is the hot trope in web novels at the moment (and for the last few years), combining neatly with the other hot trope, isekai (other world) stories.  Many of these are fantastically indulgent power fantasies, but that's okay, I like fantastically indulgent power fantasies.  Better still, not all of these power fantasies feature your Standard Ordinary Guy Lead.

The three countries these stories are sourced from do have some distinct variants (at least in the stories I read - never underestimate the sheer variety of stories out there).

The Korean stories I read tend to fall into two categories.  Girls who pull fantastic derp faces while lying to mystical creatures who have strayed into modern Korea, and guys in some kind of gaming environment becoming supremely powerful and looking incredibly cool while being underestimated.  [I like zero to hero stories like this so long as they don't turn into harem stories.]

Half of the Japanese stories I've been reading are "I've been reincarnated into an Otome game, and I'm the villain!".  [An Otome game is a story-focused romance game aimed at girls.]  The web novels almost always have the 'villain' trying to avoid the execution waiting at the end of the game through good deeds, while somehow failing to realise that she's made all the people she expects to be her enemies absolutely adore her.  But there are quite a few variants - one where the would-be villainess embraces her role (probably in attempt to avoid the love interest being executed in her place).  The other half are straight isekai or reincarnation (transported or reborn into another world that's not an Otome game).  A good third of these are homages to Japanese cooking, where earnest Japanese strays introduce deprived other worlds to things like spices, and not drowning your food in oil, and other basics of cooking.  Being reborn into your own past and attempting to save the lives of soon to be murdered family members is another common one (Lady Baby being an amusing entry here).  But there's some wild variants - the girl with the magic bear suit, the girl who became insanely powerful killing level 1 slimes, and wildest of all, the girl who saves the magical kingdom by hiring mercenaries from her own world and taking down those dragons with tanks - while wearing a gothic lolita princess dress.

But it's really the Chinese reincarnation stories where I've spending most of my time.  Not least because these are frequently 1000 to 2000 chapter stories, but also because many of these stories fulfil my yen for overpowered female mages (in a sub-genre called 'Cultivation' stories).  I rarely make it to the end of any of these stories, not least because they're often not fully translated, or are still on-going, but I enjoy reading them until I can't take the power ups any more.  They take your traditional zero to hero story, focus it around a female character, and add lashings of slapping, family politics, coughing up blood (a sign of fury/chagrin), epic beat-downs, ruthless pragmatism, and fifty servings of revenge (both hot and cold).

Not all of the things I've been reading are magical power fantasies, however.  "To be a virtuous wife" by Yue Xia Die Ying is this amazingly languorous story about a very lazy 'reincarnee', and is also one of the most nuanced 'tell it in the spaces around the words' stories I've ever read.  If you want to read a story about the heights of formality and restraint, this one's for you.  And there's a series of stories which starts off with a detective and a forensic pathologist reborn as two of three sisters (which, amazingly, have actual endings to the stories, even if they're all interlinked).

If I had one negative for the Chinese sub-set of these stories is that most of these girls are thirteen to fifteen years old (not counting their reincarnated souls), and are considered 'too old' if they hit seventeen unmarried.

Anyway, that's how I've been spending my reading time.  Still working on Tangleways - slow going because it's such a damn complex world and I struggle to turn infodump into story flow.  And I think I'm going to have to go straight into book 3 of Trifold once I finish Tangleways, rather than hop back to Singularity because it's super hard to keep all the details this world in my head.

[Also coming up to a major anticipated game release, which will significantly impede writing progress for a few weeks.]

Things I Bounce Off Of: Hyper-aggressive Posturing

I rarely read urban fantasy, even though I keep thinking I should.  Most urban fantasies use detective tropes, which I love, and many of them feature interesting female leads (or at least women not stuck only in the roles of tavern wench, princess and prostitute).  So what keeps me away?

I just bounced off another today.  I'd picked it up because I was impressed by what I'd seen of the author online, and because bunches of people who like some of my favourite books seemed to really like it.  I'd waded through chapter one a while ago, before returning to some 1970's espionage books, then gave it another shot and bounced again halfway through chapter two.

And I should like this book.  Original and complex worldbuilding and a juicy main female character and a big sprawling city setting and...all the speaking parts so far except the main character have been male.  And all of them have been aggressive males who might kill you at any minute if you look at them wrong.  And one of the team we're going to spend the most time with has lots of history with the main character that is surely full of trust broken and hatred born of wounds, and she wants to kill him, and he mocks her a lot.  While another of the team is so immensely powerful that there's a lot of time given to "I could hardly be bothered to kill you but don't push me".

And, yeah, I know my books are overfull of stoics, and this is also a character type that exists.  But I just can't read this book.  I can't bring myself to spend time with these people.  I far prefer the courteous, the quiet, the contained, the ineffably polite, the impish, the dreamfilled, the tongue-tied, even trickster types.

So...does anyone have recommendations for urban fantasy that doesn't revolve around, essentially, two rams butting their heads together?  I really liked how Neumeier's Black Dog took us through how difficult it would be the live in such a culture, and how it's something to work away from, but I wouldn't be sad to see a complete absence of "say one wrong word and I'll take your head off" characters.

Sour Cream & Chives Fantasy vs Cheese & Onion Fantasy

The last six months or so I've repeatedly stumbled across an ongoing debate which could be roughly summarised as "gritty fantasy vs heroic fantasy".  Gritty fantasy has been called "nihilistic", while heroic fantasy (more by implication than direct statement) has been cast in the light of shallow wish fulfilment, an old-fashioned kind of fantasy which the genre has 'matured' away from.

Gritty fantasy can be roughly defined as minimal-magic books dealing with the harsher aspects of conflict, where the protagonists are not necessarily likeable, admirable, or 'good'.

Heroic fantasy at its most straightforward is The Hero(ine) vs The Evil.  Magic is strongly present in these novels, making clearer just who The Evil is, often with (as Diana Wynne Jones pointed out in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland) helpful Colour-Coding.

My reactions to these debates has generally been:

- Gritty fantasy is supposed to be something new?
- Gritty fantasy still reads like fantasy to me - we're not going to run out of new sub-genre seats on the fantasy bus.
- It doesn't help to suggest that non-gritty fantasy is somehow immature.
- There are a lot more than two sub-genres in fantasy.

For the most part I've regarded the whole debate with slight bemusement, the same as I would if I found page after blog-page devoted to how Sour Cream & Chives chips are the one true chip, while Cheese & Onion chips are mere pretenders to the deep-fried potato world - or how only kids eat Sour Cream & Chives, and educated folk prefer Cheese & Onion.

And of course I can't help but apply the debate to my own novels, which certainly don't fit the definition of gritty, but don't match that definition of heroic fantasy either (Salt & Vinegar fantasy!).  My books are very high in the magic quotient, and my heroines are generally likeable (I hope), but I'm not falling conveniently into this gritty v heroic argument.

One of my favourite reader reviews for Champion, from the inestimable Chich, says:

Aside from the main character—and you probably know this only because you are in her head—there are no good guys or bad guys. Instead, there are a group of powerful people, everyone with their own agenda trying to impose their will over the rest. But seriously, at one point or another, you have reason to doubt the motives behind anyone's actions. Maybe because this other series I was reading, where the bad guys were so very evil, I kept trying to find someone to blame—to hate. However, much as it happens to the characters in the book, most situations could be looked at from different perspectives and with enough reasons for their actions, instead of anger, the most you can feel for some characters is pity.

When I'm writing, I tend to write about people, not good guys and bad guys.  I don't write massively detailed back stories for every single person who trots across the page, but if they do something, I need to have some vague idea why they're doing it.  "Because they're evil" isn't a very useful motive.

I don't tend to regard the vast majority of people as awful monsters.  I tend to regard most people as a variable combination of kind and petty, operating under a straightforward system of enlightened self-interest.  They'll be helpful or indifferent toward you, unless their own interests are in some way impacted, and then they start making moral decisions.  But in increasingly extreme situations, self-interest and circumstances can lead people into becoming 'evil'.

Champion does have a kind of evil lurking behind everything (Champion's world is actually my fantasy version of a genetic engineering makes monsters which kill you Frankenstein story), but almost everyone is acting in their own self-interest, or the interest of the country they're loyal to.  Stained Glass Monsters is about the process of becoming evil (or not), and how the small choices you make while trying to do whatever you must, can dramatically change what other choices you have to make, and how you're regarded.  Medair, of course, gives us two sides and then hopelessly muddies them, and adds to that a second question of how 'good' Medair's side was - the Ibisian invasion is undoubtedly an evil, but it takes Medair a tremendously long time to recognise that the utopian Palladian Empire she constantly mourns is the result of the systematic invasion of an entire continent.

Gritty?  Heroic?  Neither?  Not real fantasy?  Bleh.  Silly argument.  Fantasy is an infinitely adaptable genre, and we all have our own flavour preference.

Please don't...

... introduce me to a frustrated, unhappy, petty person who transcends her faults and limitations to be glorious, then wipe her memory so she doesn't remember how truly wonderful she could be.

... give me a female character who can defeat all comers with one hand tied behind her back - except for her love interest.

... offer me a vivacious woman who cherishes her independence, and then have her get into a 'pickle' and need to be rescued.

... show me a smart active woman doing her utmost to save her world, then make me watch her raped by a monster while the virginal passive and 'pure' woman ends up happily married.

... capture me heart and soul with the story of a girl who was the useless baggage of a team, who vowed to be more to save someone she loved, who stepped up and stepped up, overcame set-back after set-back, until finally...she decided she would never be strong enough and that she would leave it to the guy to fulfil her vow.

... make me regret all that I loved about a story.

This post was brought to you by teeth-grinding plot developments.

Amiable Self-Deprecation

My reading taste revolves primarily around fantasy, science fiction, manga and mysteries. Although I was a wider reader when younger, it's a rare thing now for me to stray outside my genres. One exception is Saki, whose short stories simply work for me - particulaly 'Sredni Vashtar'.

Another is Bill Bryson, who came to me via my sister. Travelogues. I have almost all his books now, but have not branched out to other travelogues.

So why does Bryson work? No doubt the mixture of sharp dissection and affection, but I think there's also something Andy Warhol-ish about Bryson's writing - a celebration of the things we see every day and take for granted, which we see anew through his eyes.

He does make me want to write science fiction, to produce a Bill Bryson of the Thirtieth Century, returning to his home planet after a few decades away, and marvelling at the Thirtieth Century version of cup-holders. A near-plotless ramble complaining about how no-one drives any more, but merely teleports everywhere.

I have too many ideas.