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auroracloudI haven't yet been doing the Snowflake Challenge except when I accidentally did the previous challenge a couple of hours before it was announced by reccing/squeeing about Kaleidotrope. And I've been meaning to catch up with some of the previous challenges. But I saw today's challenge and damn, I want to talk about it now, so who cares about order, here is my entry for the newest challenge and I'll do some of the others at some point, hopefully.
Challenge #10
In your own space, talk About A Creator/Someone Who Inspired You. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I'm not going to try to choose just one. I'm instead going to talk about several different creators who have inspired me, especially in the last years, but also over a much longer period of time. This is not an exhaustive list - that would take forever, as I'm constantly being inspired by big and small things, but it's rather the creators that rolled out of my head like a snowball rolling down a mountain when I gave myself a moment to think about the challenge.
Over the last few years, I've been discovering a lot of new authors whose work I love, and they all fall within the newest waves of English-language science fiction and fantasy. This is a pretty varied bunch I'm talking about, but I guess what the ones I'm singling out have in common is that they're doing new things with the genre, and they're bringing in a lot of diversity, stories of people whose stories aren't often told, but in a way that allows those people to be more than just their marginalized identities, allows them to be complex and fully-fledged actors in their own stories rather than just victims of oppression. I'm not saying there wasn't any such SFF before, but there has been a lot more of it in the past several years, or I've been discovering it more easily than before. They mix genres and styles in ways that I love, put together things I love but am not used to seeing together. Some of this work is comforting and gentle; some of it's much rawer and darker; but they all somehow help me deal with difficult stuff and affirm hope and life for me, however they do it.
I'm talking about authors like Becky Chambers who wrote the hopeful spacefaring The Wayfarers series I nearly always end up writing for Yuletide; Ann Leckie who wrote the Imperial Radch books in a world where gender is irrelevant and spaceships very much have personalities and go on empire-shaking personal quests to right wrongs; Yoon Ha Lee whose rather mind-breaking, very queer, political space opera Machineries of Empire broke me and helped put me back together in the best way (these are the darkest books on this list, but they too have hope and humour, and I got to them at the right time); Martha Wells with the very validating and comforting Murderbot novellas validate me and the fabulous Books of the Raksura fantasy series about a shapeshifter species with complex social lives and awesome colony trees.
There's Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone for the f/f time travel novella This Is How You Lose the Time War which I've been squeeing about, Arkady Martine with the amazing and insightful A Memory Called Empire (I'm eagerly waiting for the sequel); Heather Rose Jones with the historical fantasy of the Alpennia series which combines two of my very favourite things, 19th century European history and f/f romance or, more generally, intelligent women supporting each other and having important networks, and adds elements of magic that spring organically from existing cultural history. (Look, I'm apparently doing book recs in this as well.) And Aliette de Bodard's magnificent work, whether we're talking about her Vietnamese space opera / science fantasy with sentient spaceship and rich layers of culture woven into sci-fi worldbuilding, or In the Vanishers' Palace, an f/f retelling of the Beauty and the Beast in which the Beast is a Vietnamese dragon and a single mother who needs Beauty to teach her not-quite-demon adopted children. (Yeah, definitely doing book recs at the same time.) I've discovered Gail Carriger before any of these others, but her book series and novellas in the Parasol Protectorate universe, delightful steampunk fantasy comedies of manner / romance / adventure stories have wonderfully diverse casts, several same-sex romances, people of colour from many backgrounds. They fall very much within the same emotional category for me as the previously mentioned books, though they're lighter and more comedic in style.
I've been going through a rough patch emotionally and mentally for... well, frankly all of the 2010s, but especially the latter half of it, and I discovered most of these books around the same time (with the exception of Gail Carriger's novels, it started with the first Becky Chambers book in 2016), and they've been really important in more than one way. They've showed me it's possible to write about marginalized experiences and do so honestly. That it's possible to write about emotional hurts and structural oppression and unfair politics and messed up mental states, but do so in a way that's ultimately hopeful and life-affirming. That it's possible to write stories centering women or minority groups (or both) and have them support each other or at least work together despite problems. That it's, simply put, possible to write stories about things and characters and worlds that interest me and that people do so and those books get read and loved even by other people than me. And also, I'm not sure and I don't have detailed information about their lives, but it seems to me that it hasn't brought the world crashing down around these authors (they all seem to be very much alive and interacting with others and so forth) so maybe doing so wouldn't do it for me, either.
I don't know how much more I can go on because I'm trying to keep this a public post and I've already been close to tearing up, but I'll try to say it: most of my life, for a lot of reasons I don't want to go into now, I've felt very intensely that I don't belong, that I don't have a place in the communities of other people, that I'm not okay or can't be accepted except maybe by a few other outcasts if I'm lucky enough to find some, and that it's not safe to be honest about who I am. Whether we're talking about my weird and geeky interests, or the fact that I'm a queer woman, or my mental health baggage, or something else. And these various books have made me feel that I do belong. That there can be communities and people out there for me. That it can be safe for me to be whoever I am - even if in order to regulate how much stressful social interaction I get, I may still be selective about how much I reveal in different contexts. That my school bullies, the more close-minded of my relatives and the less imaginative of my ex-colleagues don't get to define my experience of this world, no matter how hard they may have tried. (ETA: To be clear, when I say I feel that there can be communities and people out there for me, I'm talking in general; I'm not expecting these authors to become my BFFs just because their fiction resonates with me. While I've had some interaction with some of them on social media and in cons, I'm still pretty shy and awkward about that (or alternatively gushy and excited and then embarrassed about it later) so uh, I'm not managing a lot of it! But that of course isn't the point here.)
A lot of these authors are openly queer in one way or another, and pretty much all of the work I've mentioned has at least some queer characters, and, even if their lives have problems, being queer isn't the biggest problem or isn't necessarily a problem at all, and it's really helped me be more okay with myself. I'm still a work in progress because I've got self-acceptance issues in general, but I'm way, way ahead of where I was even just 5 or 6 years ago. Fandom and fan fiction and queer online and RL friends have helped, but also these books, and others like them, and also creators telling stories of other marginalized identities, have played a big role in that.
And they've not only helped me accept myself - they've also fueled my own writing. Sometimes in a very concrete way, when I've been writing fan fiction about these books - and that helps, not the least because I know that even if I never manage to publish my own novels, some of my fanfic has already touched some people, so my words are getting read and they do something to others. But in more general way, I've learned so much about what I really want to write, and I've seen it's possible to do that. These books have opened my mind so much about different ways to write, to imagine, to combine different genres and worlds and experiences, and I'm now much braver to write what I want than I was before. My writing is still also a work in progress - I haven't finished a novel manuscript in years and I haven't had any published yet, and I struggle with getting the story structures to work and with staying focused on a project long enough to finish it. But I know much better what I want to work towards than I did, say, ten years ago. I wrote back then, too, and I did write some things I intensely loved, but I was a lot more focused on what others might think of what I wrote, and what would be expected of me, and I think today I know much better what I want to write, and I also find it easier to find my own words for it.
My personal stuff and my creative stuff are enough tied together that it's impossible to separate these effects sometimes, and what helps one is bound to help the other as well. I think the reason why these authors and works stand out so much for me is because they do so much for both of these sides. And there are many other authors besides these who also have played a role in these developments, but I can't go and list all of them, so I listed the ones that stand out the most. And it's very possible I've forgotten some really important ones, and I know I'm constantly discovering new books and creators who do these things to me. And I feel blessed by that.
I really wanted to talk about other kinds of inspiring creators as well, but this post is awfully long already. So just a quick shout-out that I'm also inspired by many podcast drama creators who've delighted me in the past year and have in many ways continued the work that the aforementioned books have done for me, but have also opened up a new medium and its thrilling possibilities. These podcast dramas include The Bright Sessions, The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, The Penumbra Podcast, Girl in Space, Kaleidotrope, The Far Meridian, Moonbase Theta, Out, We Fix Space Junk, and I'm most likely forgetting a few.
And I do still have something to say about more long-term influences, which are more local. While I have a complicated relationship with the literature of my own country (because Finnish-language literature was created back when deeply socially conscious and serious realism and even naturalism were all the rage and seems to have never learned to consider any other genres or styles might be just as worthy; there are other genres being written and published here, but they often lack a flair, probably because the efforts of publishers, editors, writing teachers etc. are only focused on the kind of literature deemed worthy)... I still have been deeply inspired by the early authors in my language in the late 19th and early 20th century. They effectively created a rich, gorgeous language of literature out of a language which had until recently been derided as being unfit for any kind of cultural endeavors because it was only the language of peasants or servants.
And though our cultural history is skewed towards men, there were important women in our literary history early on - for one thing, right from the start many of our best playwrights were women, for example Minna Canth, Maria Jotuni and Hella Wuolijoki, and though their works might be too steeped in realism for me, they're inspiring characters and they wrote well. Later there were unique and excellent poets both in Finnish and Swedish (I have to mention Swedish here because Edith Södergran), many of them women or, on some occasions, queer men - I've felt more at home with my language's modernist poetry than with any other part of our literature apart from children's literature.
And though she wrote in Swedish, I specifically must mention Tove Jansson. Her Moomin books have for long been a cornerstone of the imaginative and enchanting in our literature and have fueled my imagination along with the works of international fantasy authors; but she also was an excellent writer of adult short fiction and some episodic novels which find so much depth in the everyday and in quirky, fascinating characters she writes about. And even more importantly and inspiringly, she was an absolute badass queer lady who gave no fucks, who travelled Europe alone in the 1920s and 1930s to learn art and see the world, who derided Nazis even when Finland was allied with the Nazi Germany in the Second World War (that's a whole other kettle of worms I'm not getting into now, but the long and short of it, it was really freaking hard to exist next to the Soviet Union and it was not an ideological alliance, but that doesn't make it okay and I really wish that part of our history had been different). She had long, intense relationships with women even when same-sex relationships were illegal, and lived with her artist partner for decades and had friendship networks of queer artistic ladies and she was awesome. And also a fabulous letter-writer.
Okay, whoa, I've had my say now. I think I need to go do some baking. But it was really good to say some of these things. I hope I won't regret saying so much publicly and won't lock the post later.
Challenge #10
In your own space, talk About A Creator/Someone Who Inspired You. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I'm not going to try to choose just one. I'm instead going to talk about several different creators who have inspired me, especially in the last years, but also over a much longer period of time. This is not an exhaustive list - that would take forever, as I'm constantly being inspired by big and small things, but it's rather the creators that rolled out of my head like a snowball rolling down a mountain when I gave myself a moment to think about the challenge.
Over the last few years, I've been discovering a lot of new authors whose work I love, and they all fall within the newest waves of English-language science fiction and fantasy. This is a pretty varied bunch I'm talking about, but I guess what the ones I'm singling out have in common is that they're doing new things with the genre, and they're bringing in a lot of diversity, stories of people whose stories aren't often told, but in a way that allows those people to be more than just their marginalized identities, allows them to be complex and fully-fledged actors in their own stories rather than just victims of oppression. I'm not saying there wasn't any such SFF before, but there has been a lot more of it in the past several years, or I've been discovering it more easily than before. They mix genres and styles in ways that I love, put together things I love but am not used to seeing together. Some of this work is comforting and gentle; some of it's much rawer and darker; but they all somehow help me deal with difficult stuff and affirm hope and life for me, however they do it.
I'm talking about authors like Becky Chambers who wrote the hopeful spacefaring The Wayfarers series I nearly always end up writing for Yuletide; Ann Leckie who wrote the Imperial Radch books in a world where gender is irrelevant and spaceships very much have personalities and go on empire-shaking personal quests to right wrongs; Yoon Ha Lee whose rather mind-breaking, very queer, political space opera Machineries of Empire broke me and helped put me back together in the best way (these are the darkest books on this list, but they too have hope and humour, and I got to them at the right time); Martha Wells with the very validating and comforting Murderbot novellas validate me and the fabulous Books of the Raksura fantasy series about a shapeshifter species with complex social lives and awesome colony trees.
There's Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone for the f/f time travel novella This Is How You Lose the Time War which I've been squeeing about, Arkady Martine with the amazing and insightful A Memory Called Empire (I'm eagerly waiting for the sequel); Heather Rose Jones with the historical fantasy of the Alpennia series which combines two of my very favourite things, 19th century European history and f/f romance or, more generally, intelligent women supporting each other and having important networks, and adds elements of magic that spring organically from existing cultural history. (Look, I'm apparently doing book recs in this as well.) And Aliette de Bodard's magnificent work, whether we're talking about her Vietnamese space opera / science fantasy with sentient spaceship and rich layers of culture woven into sci-fi worldbuilding, or In the Vanishers' Palace, an f/f retelling of the Beauty and the Beast in which the Beast is a Vietnamese dragon and a single mother who needs Beauty to teach her not-quite-demon adopted children. (Yeah, definitely doing book recs at the same time.) I've discovered Gail Carriger before any of these others, but her book series and novellas in the Parasol Protectorate universe, delightful steampunk fantasy comedies of manner / romance / adventure stories have wonderfully diverse casts, several same-sex romances, people of colour from many backgrounds. They fall very much within the same emotional category for me as the previously mentioned books, though they're lighter and more comedic in style.
I've been going through a rough patch emotionally and mentally for... well, frankly all of the 2010s, but especially the latter half of it, and I discovered most of these books around the same time (with the exception of Gail Carriger's novels, it started with the first Becky Chambers book in 2016), and they've been really important in more than one way. They've showed me it's possible to write about marginalized experiences and do so honestly. That it's possible to write about emotional hurts and structural oppression and unfair politics and messed up mental states, but do so in a way that's ultimately hopeful and life-affirming. That it's possible to write stories centering women or minority groups (or both) and have them support each other or at least work together despite problems. That it's, simply put, possible to write stories about things and characters and worlds that interest me and that people do so and those books get read and loved even by other people than me. And also, I'm not sure and I don't have detailed information about their lives, but it seems to me that it hasn't brought the world crashing down around these authors (they all seem to be very much alive and interacting with others and so forth) so maybe doing so wouldn't do it for me, either.
I don't know how much more I can go on because I'm trying to keep this a public post and I've already been close to tearing up, but I'll try to say it: most of my life, for a lot of reasons I don't want to go into now, I've felt very intensely that I don't belong, that I don't have a place in the communities of other people, that I'm not okay or can't be accepted except maybe by a few other outcasts if I'm lucky enough to find some, and that it's not safe to be honest about who I am. Whether we're talking about my weird and geeky interests, or the fact that I'm a queer woman, or my mental health baggage, or something else. And these various books have made me feel that I do belong. That there can be communities and people out there for me. That it can be safe for me to be whoever I am - even if in order to regulate how much stressful social interaction I get, I may still be selective about how much I reveal in different contexts. That my school bullies, the more close-minded of my relatives and the less imaginative of my ex-colleagues don't get to define my experience of this world, no matter how hard they may have tried. (ETA: To be clear, when I say I feel that there can be communities and people out there for me, I'm talking in general; I'm not expecting these authors to become my BFFs just because their fiction resonates with me. While I've had some interaction with some of them on social media and in cons, I'm still pretty shy and awkward about that (or alternatively gushy and excited and then embarrassed about it later) so uh, I'm not managing a lot of it! But that of course isn't the point here.)
A lot of these authors are openly queer in one way or another, and pretty much all of the work I've mentioned has at least some queer characters, and, even if their lives have problems, being queer isn't the biggest problem or isn't necessarily a problem at all, and it's really helped me be more okay with myself. I'm still a work in progress because I've got self-acceptance issues in general, but I'm way, way ahead of where I was even just 5 or 6 years ago. Fandom and fan fiction and queer online and RL friends have helped, but also these books, and others like them, and also creators telling stories of other marginalized identities, have played a big role in that.
And they've not only helped me accept myself - they've also fueled my own writing. Sometimes in a very concrete way, when I've been writing fan fiction about these books - and that helps, not the least because I know that even if I never manage to publish my own novels, some of my fanfic has already touched some people, so my words are getting read and they do something to others. But in more general way, I've learned so much about what I really want to write, and I've seen it's possible to do that. These books have opened my mind so much about different ways to write, to imagine, to combine different genres and worlds and experiences, and I'm now much braver to write what I want than I was before. My writing is still also a work in progress - I haven't finished a novel manuscript in years and I haven't had any published yet, and I struggle with getting the story structures to work and with staying focused on a project long enough to finish it. But I know much better what I want to work towards than I did, say, ten years ago. I wrote back then, too, and I did write some things I intensely loved, but I was a lot more focused on what others might think of what I wrote, and what would be expected of me, and I think today I know much better what I want to write, and I also find it easier to find my own words for it.
My personal stuff and my creative stuff are enough tied together that it's impossible to separate these effects sometimes, and what helps one is bound to help the other as well. I think the reason why these authors and works stand out so much for me is because they do so much for both of these sides. And there are many other authors besides these who also have played a role in these developments, but I can't go and list all of them, so I listed the ones that stand out the most. And it's very possible I've forgotten some really important ones, and I know I'm constantly discovering new books and creators who do these things to me. And I feel blessed by that.
I really wanted to talk about other kinds of inspiring creators as well, but this post is awfully long already. So just a quick shout-out that I'm also inspired by many podcast drama creators who've delighted me in the past year and have in many ways continued the work that the aforementioned books have done for me, but have also opened up a new medium and its thrilling possibilities. These podcast dramas include The Bright Sessions, The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, The Penumbra Podcast, Girl in Space, Kaleidotrope, The Far Meridian, Moonbase Theta, Out, We Fix Space Junk, and I'm most likely forgetting a few.
And I do still have something to say about more long-term influences, which are more local. While I have a complicated relationship with the literature of my own country (because Finnish-language literature was created back when deeply socially conscious and serious realism and even naturalism were all the rage and seems to have never learned to consider any other genres or styles might be just as worthy; there are other genres being written and published here, but they often lack a flair, probably because the efforts of publishers, editors, writing teachers etc. are only focused on the kind of literature deemed worthy)... I still have been deeply inspired by the early authors in my language in the late 19th and early 20th century. They effectively created a rich, gorgeous language of literature out of a language which had until recently been derided as being unfit for any kind of cultural endeavors because it was only the language of peasants or servants.
And though our cultural history is skewed towards men, there were important women in our literary history early on - for one thing, right from the start many of our best playwrights were women, for example Minna Canth, Maria Jotuni and Hella Wuolijoki, and though their works might be too steeped in realism for me, they're inspiring characters and they wrote well. Later there were unique and excellent poets both in Finnish and Swedish (I have to mention Swedish here because Edith Södergran), many of them women or, on some occasions, queer men - I've felt more at home with my language's modernist poetry than with any other part of our literature apart from children's literature.
And though she wrote in Swedish, I specifically must mention Tove Jansson. Her Moomin books have for long been a cornerstone of the imaginative and enchanting in our literature and have fueled my imagination along with the works of international fantasy authors; but she also was an excellent writer of adult short fiction and some episodic novels which find so much depth in the everyday and in quirky, fascinating characters she writes about. And even more importantly and inspiringly, she was an absolute badass queer lady who gave no fucks, who travelled Europe alone in the 1920s and 1930s to learn art and see the world, who derided Nazis even when Finland was allied with the Nazi Germany in the Second World War (that's a whole other kettle of worms I'm not getting into now, but the long and short of it, it was really freaking hard to exist next to the Soviet Union and it was not an ideological alliance, but that doesn't make it okay and I really wish that part of our history had been different). She had long, intense relationships with women even when same-sex relationships were illegal, and lived with her artist partner for decades and had friendship networks of queer artistic ladies and she was awesome. And also a fabulous letter-writer.
Okay, whoa, I've had my say now. I think I need to go do some baking. But it was really good to say some of these things. I hope I won't regret saying so much publicly and won't lock the post later.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 04:33 am (UTC)have in common is that they're doing new things with the genre, and they're bringing in a lot of diversity, stories of people whose stories aren't often told
I started following you because you were so excited about the books you listed. I'm really happy all these authors are getting published and getting a chance to tell these new and wonderful stories -- and, of course, I'm even happier that I get the chance to read them.
Books do have an amazing impact. When I first read the Imperial Radch books, I was so astonished by how gender was treated. I hadn't realized how much I'd been internally processing it, and internalizing ideas, until I reread the trilogy a few weeks ago as a refresher before I read Provenance. During the reread, returning to the world and Breq's perspective was a different experience again, but also comforting.
And these various books have made me feel that I do belong.
<3
no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 08:33 am (UTC)And yeeees, I'm so happy that all these authors are getting published, and visibly enough that I've been able to find them, and that we can read them. (That's something that still needs work in my country - I'm not seeing an awful lot of diverse genre literature in my language, or really any literature at all Yes, there are some books with LGBT+ themes and POC/immigrant authors and characters, but they're mostly depressing literary fiction, and especially POC and immigrants only get to tell stories of their own oppression or violence in their country. Children's and YA lit does better, but we need more.)
Maybe it's my passion with language & storytelling and my political science background coming together, but as I get older I've become more and more aware just how strongly our world is built by words and stories that are told. So things like the Imperial Radch trilogy are amazing. Those books would tell an awesome and meaningful story even without all the gender stuff, but that adds yet more complexity and importance to it. I love that with the writing choices made, it changes everything by removing the male default and decentering the gender divisions and stereotypes. At the same time it also reveals just how thoroughly gendered our cultures are.
My experience has probably been different from English native speakers, as my language doesn't have gendered pronouns. It's not the same thing as the Raadchai language - Finnish is still gendered in many other ways, and our culture has plenty of structural sexism, though it's better for women than many other cultures - but we don't separate genders each time someone needs a pronoun. So it's not weird to me to read something without different pronouns for different genders, because that's how I operate in my own language all the time, but specifically centering the female words and pronouns is still something that doesn't happen to me, so that had a huge impact. And reading about the culture where the sex/gender isn't significant at all still felt amazing. Finnish writers would still find a way to tell each character's sex and gender though the pronouns don't do it for us, but with the Radch books, we just don't know that stuff for almost anyone.
And Providence is yet another thing, where we know everyone's gender identity but haven't the faintest idea of anyone's physical sex.
I do need to give all those books a reread, I've been wanting to do it so much.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 11:55 am (UTC)And, I do hope you end up being happy that you shared your personal feelings. I think you'll find many people who secretly feel the same way in one sense or another. For example, while I have a deep and abiding home here in fandom, I often feel the same disconnect in real life that you do, mostly due to my introversion and mental health issues. Not letting decades-ago school bullies or conservative family define what is worthwhile (or not) about one is difficult, as you mentioned, let alone your own feelings of unworthiness. I don't think I have achieved this and I'm 50 and have had some good therapists. But as you say, it is hard to own about yourself and share even in safe spaces.
So {{{hugs}}} and just letting you know you are not alone.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-21 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-23 07:52 am (UTC)I guess it makes me think about that idea of traveling so that you have something to compare your own life and customs to. How does someone know there are other ways to do things if they've only experienced a thing in one way? And any time you read a book, you get to experience someone else's perspective, but especially in these science fiction and fantasy stories, the authors are building whole new worlds for the reader to experience, so it can be just a small shift, or a complete outsider pov, and it's fascinating when it's used like it was in the Imperial Radch books.
I didn't know that about Finnish! Really interesting that it comes off so differently in another language but still has an impact.