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@poisonpainter
Spreading the word far and wide -- the long awaited sequel to DORKNESS RISING (2008) and GAMERS 3: HANDS OF FATE (2013) is kickstarting through June 29th!
Writer/Director Matt Vancil has gotten the original Dorkness Rising team back together to finish the story
Gamers 4: Dorkness Falls - www.dorknessfalls.com
I think the biggest thing I struggle with in regards to the argument that fanfiction shouldn’t be judged like original published fiction re: the messages the story might tell and the racism/misogyny/etc. contained within because fanfiction is niche and has relatively low readership is that I’ve never seen a clear articulation of where the line should be drawn.
My most popular fic has 21,052 kudos as of when I’m writing this, with 153,610 hits. Those would be great readership numbers for the vast majority of published books. And so it seems to me that, if the argument is based on readership, that fanfic should be judged the same as original published fiction.
But what about my next most popular fic? What about the fic with 2000 kudos? Or 500 kudos? Or 19 kudos?
At what level of engagement and readership does it become acceptable for my stories to be racist?
And how is an author to know beforehand? I never expected my most popular fics to get the readership they did, and so I couldn’t have gone into them knowing whether I should be judged by the apparent fanfic standards versus the original published story standards.
On the other hand, if an original published story absolutely bombs, do we lower our standards of how we judge it? Do we say, that story didn’t get any traction so I guess it’s okay if it glorifies domestic abuse? If only fifty people buy it, do we become cool with its homophobia?
What an interesting question! And I come at it from a slightly different angle.
(The Audience Engagement Meter is a really interesting thought, though. Because a lot of fanfics have readership that traditional publishing can only dream of — and they leave a mark! As does all art! People get their favourite fics bound and tattooed and they live rent free in their head for weeks and years. But as with everything, it’s up to the participant to engage with the material in a mindful and reflective way. No-one can create something everyone will view in the same way, and neither should they. Life is multifaceted!)
I don’t see it as much as an engagement matter than an institutional one. The publishing industry is still (less today of course, with self-publishing and fabrication and so on widely available) a gatekeeper. They decide what counts as “good literature” and you have editors and a whole publishing team and surely all these people are great at quality control and know everything about literature and so all published books are “good”! And if they tackle difficult concepts, it is by design and you have a nice foreword where A Personality presents the issue and cautions the reader.
In fandom, fics are often solitary endeavours. Some authors have alphas and/or betas to help, but many do it all alone. And thus there’s less questioning of the authors choices or clarification on language and so on. So both conscious ideas and unconscious themes get published with little to no oversight.
And this is what I think lies at the heart of the “what counts as real literature” discussion — if the institution of literature, as legitimised through the publishing houses, officially lets your work run free in the world, then it must be Real Literature. And if you, yourself, publish it on AO3 or ff.net or wattpad, then that’s on you as a person, not the literature machine as a whole.
And this is a double-edged sword! “If this book is published, it must be good or not racist because they wouldn’t publish something like that these days without a foreword and warnings, right?” And so people might be more likely to a) not notice or b) ignore undercurrents in the published work in a way you might not in fandom spaces where you often have a direct line of communication with the writer and writers actually often are very appreciative of comments on their works and engage with their audience in a way few traditionally published authors do.
As someone who "lives in both worlds", meaning I have published both original and fan fiction, I'd like to add a few thoughts, though I can only talk about publishing in Germany.
From what I've experienced over the years, fan fiction is in itself an artform that is a lot more advanced/progressive than the majority of original fiction. It deals with topics of diversity, is critical about our past and shows versions of the future than could be called an utopia.
Original fiction in the big publishing houses rarely has that. Some occassionally try, but I have seen several progressive writers originally hired for a two-book deal be dropped after the first one was published. Luckily they were then picked up by small publishers who are way more part of the progress to change what is considered "mainstream".
Without dare I say, brave, small publishers, the only chance progressive writers have for their stories is self publishing. And in a lot of cases that is what people choose to do, because they don't want to get the dismissals or re-writes some editors would put them through to make the story fit more into the publisher's themes.
With self publishing you have all the choices. You choose how many people read your story before you put it out there and that doesn't mean just alpha/beta readers, this includes editor, proofreader and sensitivity readers (someone who critically reads passages or stories to see if you've treaded a subject like racism, sexuality, illnesses, ... respectfully and without spreading misinformation). You choose them all.
Which technically sets self published stories closer to fan fiction than original fiction. Judging by the way it is ocassionally treaded as "lesser fiction" it also has just as bad a reputation. As was said above: A publisher didn't choose it, so it can't be good.
Yeah, no, they decide what is profitable, they are a business. And if we don't shape the market through small publishers and self publishing so that the mainstream wants to read more progressive/diverse stories, they will continue to be stuck in their old ways, because that's what gets them money.
Fun Fact: A lot of the larger publishers don't even know/use Sensitivity Reading. Which in turn occassionaly causes outcries in the communities, when a book is published that has insensitive topics or rather a harmful portrayal of them. For those it doesn't matter how many read the book, just that the right person criticises it to make a change.
So in conclusion, I guess, I would say: It is up to you how you include the topics you write about. No amount of readers gives you the right to (intentionally) hurt other people with your writing, but you can choose to work on portraying critical topics in a respectful way.
10 Years? Fascinating ... pretty sure I did not create my account on the first of January ^^'
I barely post here anymore but that is due to me not knowing in which language to post and mostly writing stuff on my blog in German at this point ...
Maybe I'll figure something out in this new year?
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Also don’t think a
book is old because it’s in
the public domain
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Want audiobooks instead?
LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.
Public domain works in the US are:
Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
Certified Library Post
“I always remember having this fight with a random dude who claimed that ‘straight white men’ were the only true innovators. His prime example for this was the computer… the computer… THE COMPUTER!!! THE COM-PU-TER!!!
Alan Turing - Gay man and ‘father of computing’ Wren operating Bombe - The code cracking computers of the 2nd world war were entirely run by women Katherine Johnson - African American NASA mathematician and ‘Human computer’ Ada Lovelace - arguably the 1st computer programmer”
- Sacha Coward
Also Margaret Hamilton - NASA computer scientist who put the first man on the moon - an as-yet-unmatched feet of software engineering, here pictured beside the full source of that computer programme. #myhero
Grace Hopper - the woman that coined the term “bug”
- @robinlayfield
Grace Hopper did more than coin the term “bug”. She invented the first program linker in the early 1950s, for the UNIVAC I. A program linker translates instructions from one language to another (for example, numerical codes that represent instructions translated to machine code that computers can read), which is the very foundation of how computer’s operate independently. she also pulled a steve rogers and tried to enlist in the military a bunch of times and was denied. then, an exception was made for her when she joined the navy reserves, and she ended up serving for over 40 years (half of which was active duty). she retired from the navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. she was born in NYC in 1906. Grace Hopper was a fucking badass.
also computing was typically a job for women (many of whom were black women that made incredible contributions) back in the day, so it’s absolutely fucking wild that straight white men think they are the foundation of computer innovation. men PUSHED women out and took the credit.
Reblogging to do what the failed education system never did.
Reblogging to do
what the failed education
system never did.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Adding Wendy Carlos to the list! Trans icon and pioneer of synthesized music!!
Also, just about every computerized device outside of desktops is running ARM chips now. Your phone, your keyboard, your car, your watch. Basically everything.
And ARM was primarily designed by Sophie Wilson, a trans woman.
Also gotta throw on Lynn Conway, whose work brought about VSLI [Very Large Scale Integration] in chip design in the early 80s. Basically all modern microelectronics depends on Conway’s work, which got logic gates on a single chip up from thousands to millions.
BTW all of this was after IBM fired her in 68 for disclosing she wanted to transition. They apologized in 2020.
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)
The Monster of Sentan
The Witch’s Cat
Raise Both Children
Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)
Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)
My Arch Nemesis Cynthia
Pirates and Mermaid
Eindred and the Witch
The Demon King
The Cornerwitch
Grandmother Beetroot
Apocalypse Daycare Worker
Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon
New Year Saga
A Story About Changelings
Ranger in the King’s Forest
The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit
Goblin Men (Canines)
So apparently Ask a Mortician has gotten told this video “violates community guidelines” for showing “non-graphic dead bodies without educational intent,” “excessive law enforcement without educational intent,” and “blood and gore.” (Spoiler: none of those things happened.)
It’s a documentary on a disaster you may never have heard of, the USS Eastland. It’s done with incredible quality, research, and heart, and it’s all but been delisted. YouTube is refusing to give answers as to why. (I have my suspicions, which are “she came down pretty hard on a shitty corporation in this video and it hit just a liiiiittle close to home.”)
Caitlin has asked that if viewers enjoyed the documentary or found it helpful, we share it directly with others. So I am here. Y’all know how important history is to me.
Make this important to you too.
I watched this, and it's good, which all of Caitlyn's work is, but it is also such a tragic story, and one I think we should know about. More people died than died on the Titanic. Most were women and children, and immigrants or recent descendants. They just weren't rich, the ship wasn't famous, and so there was no romance to it, and WWI was dominating the news, and this tragedy just slipped through the cracks.
We should know, because the lives lost mattered. Because there are lessons to be learned from this tragedy and if we don't remember, we won't keep those lessons. (In this case: don't fill part of your ship with concrete, you fucking walnuts.)
What strikes me most, though, is how a big part of the story as Caitlyn lays it out is of how the city leaped into action to help, with civilians going in to recover bodies, and workers tirelessly helping identify and preserve the dead. We should know about that and talk about that, too. How collectively people's first impulse in acute crisis genuinely is to rush to help one another. Something I think we lose sight of. Especially now in an ongoing crisis that we aren't handling well, because that kind of crisis is not easy to maintain empathy through, and poor leadership at the start led many to embrace the opposite of what is best because of political ideology.
But we helped, then. Humans rushed in and helped. Workers and survivors agonized over the identity of a single, final, unidentified child, the papers mourned him. A teenage boy went into the water over and over, at first trying to find survivors, and persisting even when there were none to be found, until he was exhausted. A man who barely made it off alive immediately began helping on the shore. We helped.
The fact that she very much mentions that the Chicago Police Department tried to keep people and rescuers AWAY also might have ruffled some feathers.
So yeah, share this, like it, watch it all the way through, to spread it and bump it up on YouTube.
Seeing more and more nativity scenes featuring a certain green being and remembering a story I wrote back in 2016 and thus realising that something I came up with as a pun on “Baby Jesus” years ago is now a reality ... that is cool and creepy at the same time.
(In retrospect the name I chose for the crib-builder is also way more fitting considering his choice for one of the Wise Men ...)
In short: I had a Baby Yoda before it was cool. :D
And I still would love to see that crib build one day ...
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
@we-are-threadmage
Someone port Doom to a blanket
I really love tumblr for this 🙌
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns. Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
Newspaper fantasies.
Illustration by Thomas Theodor Heine for Simplicissimus, 1907.
For those curious about the picture’s description - as it is just as curious as the picture itself.
It reads in German (including the old spelling of some of the words):
“Während der Hundstage pflegt in den überhitzten Spalten der Zeitungen die Seeschlange aufzutauchen. Neben ihr finden wir jetzt häufig die Nachricht, daß der Kaiser den König Eduard besuchen will. Wir erwarten demnächst zu lesen, dass der Kaiser auf der Seeschlange nach England reisen wird.”
Which translates to:
“During the dog days the sea serpent tends to appear between the overheated columns of the newspapers. Beside her we now often find the news, that the Emperor wants to visit King Edward. We are expecting to soon read, that the Emperor will travel to England on the sea serpent.”
booknet ask game.
1. what are you currently reading? how would you rate it so far? 2. what was the last book you rated 5/5? 3. what was the last book you rated 1/5? 4. are you an adventurous reader? 5. have you ever gifted someone a book you liked? which one was it? 6. do you join reading challenges? why or why not? 7. what was the last book that made you cry? 8. do you like looking up spoilers for the books you’re reading or do you like to go in blind? 9. do you actually check out books that have been recommended for you? 10. what was the last book to surprise you? 11. how many books are on your to-read list right now? 12. do you set annual reading goals? why or why not? 13. how do you feel about marking your books? (writing your name on them, dog-earing them, annotating them, etc) 14. what’s the oldest book on your to-read list? when did you add it? 15. how do you feel about reading buddies? 16. do you decide on a monthly to-read list? if so, do you stick to it? 17. how do you keep track of your books and reviews? (goodreads, a blog, etc) 18. what was your favourite book when you were 10? 19. which book were you nervous to begin reading? 20. how much do book covers matter?
First line meme
Tagged by @chierei
Traurig betrachtete Aurelia ihr Heim, dass immer mehr hinter den anderen Häusern des Dorfes verschwand.
in English:
Aurelia looked sadly towards her home that was dissapearing more and more behind the other houses of the village.
One of my first attempts at writing Romantasy, not sure if it actually works out ...
I’m not going to tag anyone, but if you want to participate in this feel free to do so
Happy Halloween meine Lieben! Unter dem Hashtag #Wanderkürbis möchte ich euch ein paar Leseempfehlung|en für die geisterhafteste Nacht des Jahres mitgeben. Was könnt ihr noch hinzufügen? Tobt euch aus & lasst die Kürbislaterne wandern!
Heute habe ich die Ehre Meara Finnegans #KGFestival abzuschließen. 10 Jahre nach unserem ersten #Interview (zu finden auf Literatopia) stand mir Verleger Torsten Low (Verlag Torsten Low) erneut Rede & Antwort. https://www.randompoison.com/2019/09/30/iv-low/
Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.
This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…
Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint.
S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf.
Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.”
Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well.
The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons.
Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:
Witchmark by C.L. Polk
A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
The Day Before by Liana Brooks
A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell
Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai
Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books
TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers.
Never forget the amount of hate R.F. Kuang got for explicitly stating that The Poppy War, one of the most triggering books I’ve ever read, should never be shelved as YA. She did so out of extreme concern of the content getting into the wrong hands without warning.
And then two days later Jay Kristoff said the same thing about Nevernight…and nothing happened.
Das #Mörchen
Es tut mir Leid, dass es so lange gedauert hat, aber zwischen Durchatmen, Überarbeitung und Vorbereitung für andere Aktionen/Veranstaltungen hab ich einfach kaum Zeit gefunden hier weiterzumachen. Da ihr euch für die tatsächliche Auswertung noch etwas gedulden müsst, möchte ich euch heute mit dem Ergebnis des #Mörchens die Wartezeit versüßen. An drei Stellen habe ich euch am letzten Tag des Märchensommers einen Geschichtsanfang gegeben, den ihr weiterschreiben konntet. Die Facebook-Gruppe schaffte es die Geschichte mit ein paar interessanten Wendungen zu beenden.
Das Mörchen
Es war einmal ein #Plotbunny, das hatte schon viele Geschichten vom großen Mörchen gehört. Nun, da es alt genug war, wollte es sich auf die Suche danach begeben ... (Poison) ... Read the full article
Yo ok what if there was a Cinderella story where Cinderella is a trans woman and that’s really why her stepmom treats her like shit and won’t let her go to the ball and when the prince and his men come around looking to try the slipper on every woman in the land her stepmom tells the prince there aren’t any women left in the house because she insists that Cinderella is a man, but Cinderella comes out and the prince recognizes her and says something along the lines of “well I’d say that’s a woman if I ever saw one”
“Ella is transgender. She’s known since she was young; being a woman just fit better. She was happier in skirts than trousers, but that was before her stepmother moved in. Eleanor can’t stand her, and after Ella’s father passes she’s forced to revert to Cole, a lump of a son. She cooks, she cleans, and she tolerates being called the wrong name for the sake of a roof over her head. Where else can she go? An opportunity to attend the royal ball transforms Ella’s life. For the first time, strangers see a woman when she walks down the stairs. While Princess Lizabetta invited Cole to the ball, she doesn’t blink an eye when Cinderella is the one who shows. The princess is elegant, bold, and everything Ella never knew she wanted. For a moment she glimpses a world that can accept her, and she holds on tight. She should have known it wouldn’t last. Dumped by her wicked stepmother on the farthest edge of the kingdom, Ella must find a way to let go of the princess and the beautiful life they shared for an hour. She’ll never find her way back. But it’s hard to forget the greatest night of her life when every rose she plants is a reminder.”
In case anyone is interested in German stories: There are at least three I can think of, that change the classic constellation.
“A Happy Ending is hard work” by Tina Skupin is told from the Fairys perspective and stars a trans female “prince” and his male love interest and a lot of very funny humour in regards to probability calculus. (You can hear an excerpt from the story here: Ein Happy End ist harte Arbeit.)
“An Avocado for Cinderella” by Katherina Ushachov has a male protagonist that loves dressing up for the ball to meet his male love interest. Both are short stories in the first anthology by the Märchenspinnerei a group of authoresses that retell Fairy Tales from a more modern perspective. You can find it here: Es war einmal ... ganz anders The third one is a gender bent novel-length version where Cinderella is the bastard son of a king: Der siebte Sohn (The Seventh Son) by Julia Maar
Both books were nominated for the German Fantasy Award in 2018.
But those aren’t the only Fairy Tale adaptations that break with tradition:
“Der tote Prinz” (The Dead Prince) by Katherina Ushachov is a gender bent PoC adaptation of the Russian version of Snow White in a fascinating Plastic Punk setting.
“Tropfen der Ewigkeit” (Droplet of Eternity) by Eva-Maria Obermann is a Steampunk adaptation of Rapunzel, with Rapunzel being a PoC woman.
“Hexensold” (Witchespay) by Nora Bendzko is another Rapunzel version. This one relying on cross-dressing of the male protagonist into the assassin Rapunzel.
and more ...
In short: Fairy Tale adaptations are daring and it’s fascinating to see those old concepts in a different light.
