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I 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. ( I'm cutting this part because the post is so long, but it's an important part of what I'm saying, both about the personal effect on me, and the effect on my own writing )
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. ( I'm cutting this part because the post is so long, but it's an important part of what I'm saying, both about the personal effect on me, and the effect on my own writing )
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.
