Things Which Are Great

I've been busy with the new day jobbe, but wanted to share some things which are great:

Alice in Wonderland
Never been a fan of Alice in Wonderland. Annoying little kid wandering around a crazy place eating and drinking indiscrimiately and poo-pooing about like it's all a great inconvenience. Tim Burton's take (with a lovely script by Linda Woolverton), was absolutely stunning. Not just visually, which you expect from a Tim Burton film, but a fantastic coming-of-age-and-finding-yourself story about a 19 year old Alice whose destiny it is to lead a rebellion against the Red Queen. Yes, really! Check out the Joan of Arc armor! There were some heavy-handed moments, but nothing so egregious as you wouldn't expect it in a fairytale. It was wonderfully cool to see a girl-comes-of-age movie (she even ends up on the prow of a ship at the end... like Titanic!) where she gets to pick up a sword and slay a real dragon. The performances are all amazing, too. Anne Hathaway as The White Queen takes herself just-not-seriously-enough to make her incredibly likable. Helena Bonham Carter is a perfect Red Queen, and though Depp is often over the deep end, it's not too terribly annoying because he's not on screen the whole time. Mia Wasikowska is a strange Alice - I especially like the dark circles under her eyes - but the strangeness is what makes her so interesting. Great story, great actors, great visuals - and, have I mentioned? - Alice gets to slay? Yeah. Highly recommended.

Dragon Age: Awakenings
This is the sequel/expansion for Dragon Age: Origins. I am a sucker for a lot of Bioware games, primarily because they're full of great stories, great characters, and a level of interaction with other characters that you just don't get in any other game. It's a tough followup to Dragon Age: Origins. Origins was longer, had more in depth relationships with the characters, and all that. Awakenings got off to a rough, slow start, with lots of installation issues, game crashing, and annoying lack of access to character conversations. Once you figure out their new system for character interaction, it gets easier (basically, you can't talk to your folks any time you want. When you unlock a prompt, it either automatically starts the dialogue, or you have to select an object to trigger the conversation). But, you know, the gear is better, you make more money, and the choices are sacrifice this or sacrifice that. Lots of ambiguity. Lots of gray. I love that. Also, ass kicking female characters. There's still the requisite "chick with boobs hanging out," but as with Origins, they're not *all* that way, which is what makes the difference, to me, between a lazy, sexist game and one that acknowledges that hey, yeah, woman have different characters and personalities, too! They don't all run around with their boobs hanging out! Was also pleased that my golem armor didn't have the obligatory boob-enhancements. What the hell kind of armor forms a breasplate with two custom boob-protrusions? Really? Nice to get away from that at the end with my warrior and the Sigrun the dwarf rogue. Also, very nice Buffy moment there at the beginning with Mhairi. Love you too, Bioware. Overall, A-.

Health Insurance Reform Passes

Freaking out? Here's a great party-neutral fact sheet of what you can expect the next couple of years.

For me, this means I don't have to spend my nights filled with terror about whether or not I'll be laid off or how we'll pay for J's cancer scans. It means I'm not chained to a day job for the rest of my life. It means that if I do start to make it as a freelance writer, I'll be able to afford to stay home and write books if I want to.

What a lot of people don't realize is that the biggest dream I lost four years ago when I got t1 was the dream of being a full time writer someday (that, and being a licensed scuba diver. Needless to say, the writer thing was far more tragic). It's going to be very interesting to see what kind of explosion in entrepreneurism we have now that we don't have to be employed in order to afford healthcare.

Is it a perfect bill? Of course not. It's going to be messy to implement, and people will freak out. It will be a rough ride. But when I explain the madness that was being uninsurable to my nieces and nephews in twenty years, they'll look at me like we were some kind of crazy barbarians living in a madhouse distopia.

And, to be honest, if you had an illness like mine, if you fought with insurance companies the way I did, if you had to scream and cry and beg for care you were actually entitled to (let alone try to afford uncovered care) - you were.

New Book Trailer!

New! And! Improved!


God's War by Kameron Hurley - Book Trailer from Kameron Hurley on Vimeo.

One for the Road

I am engaged in lots of web-pagery today. Here's one for the road:

Steampunk Africa

"Virtuoso" New comic of a steampunk Africa that never was... 

My Ideal Nyx

My first pick for the movie version of Nyx was always Michelle Rodriguez, but she's a bit short for the role (5'5), and notoriously a lot of trouble on the set.

A far better pick, I discovered (while watching Rome) would be a buffed-out Zuleikha Robinson (who clocks in at nearly 5'8, which is closer to Nyx's 5'10/11), who's apparently picked up a gig on Lost and some other tv shows since I first saw her in Rome. Maybe I can convince her to do the audio book version?

Interview

Interview up with me at The Daily Femme! Check it out.

WIP: Iron Maiden

In the beginning we were a Legion of 500 worlds – intrepid warriors, travelers, seers and mystics.

The first world to fall was Moswen, along the Outer Rim, swallowed by a foreign sun at the edge of known space. The second was Jung Mei. She fell from the Core – spinning, breathless, screaming – and tried to turn home, too late. She was last seen orbiting a dying star. Then the Valente clipped the Ken’ichi on the Inner Rim, and lost her inertia. The Legion listened to her dying beacon for a hundred years. Her voice faltered, then faded… then died. There was no place in the Legion for the wounded, the stragglers. We had not yet reached the Edge.

It was the Edge that broke us. When we came to the Edge we saw nothing ahead of us but blackness. We had lost nearly a hundred worlds by then – to stardust, collisions, failures, insurrection, and blight.

But that was nothing compared to what was to come.

Because when we went over the Edge, something came over with us.

- Addendum 176, The Annals of the Legion, 442 AD

1. Zahrah

I do all my dreaming in the dark. That’s all it is out here - a world of darkness. The old bottom world mechanics who work for my mother say they heard stories from their folks about a time before the darkness, when you woke up to the bright burst of light that was the Edge. But to me, the Edge is just another point of light that helps the Legion navigate the darkness. It’s the big smear we point our sextants to in nav class. The last gasp of a dying galaxy.

My mother’s in charge of our family’s worlds in the Legion - the Katarzyna worlds. Her mother and her mother’s mother boarded, mobbed, and manned the Katarzyna 1 and 2 back before I was born. They pounded them so good that nobody’s even sure what they were called before that. It was my mother who took the neighboring worlds, Aatai and Sjorka, and made them Katarzyna 3 and 4. That’s us. Our family. Katarzyna. And it’s a name that’s feared and respected all along the Outer Rim. My mother says it’s the name that will unite the Legion. I’m pretty proud of that.

My mother’s proud, too. She worked hard for it. She once brought me out to the great docking hall and opened up all the bay doors with her big iron fist. The shields were all intact, of course, but it was still thrilling, standing there at the edge of space and looking into the black. From the docking hall you can see the nearest of the Outer Rim worlds – Katarzyna 2-6, Dima, Matrona, and the two FA satellites. If you look deeper, you can see The Tern, the big world they hijacked from the Core forty years ago, and out past that, a hint of the Jagadev and the Naabhi worlds, and then – the Bhavaja worlds. All four of them.

“All this is going to be yours, Zahrah,” my mother said, sweeping her iron arm out toward the worlds slowly spinning in the darkness around the Core, the black well that keeps us together as we push farther and farther from the Edge.

She reached toward the dim shape of the nearest Bhavaja world, so it looked as if she cupped it in her palm. Then she closed her iron fist around it. I heard the metal grind and creak – solid metal skinning a heated organic core. I had seen her crush men’s heads with that hand.

“But you’ll have to fight for it,” she said. She shook out her hand, as if to rid herself of the dust of the shattered world. “Just as I did. And my mother before me. Everything here on the Outer Rim comes with a cost. You understand that?”

“I know what keeps the worlds spinning,” I said. I looked up at her. She’s taller than me by a head. Every time I see some short, umber-skinned sub-captain or petty lord, I wonder if he was my father.

Everybody on the Katarzyna worlds - the Aatai and Sjorka refugees, the indentured castes in the lower wards, even the mechanic’s guild and grower’s union and the man who was my father – they all pay a fealty tax to my family in blood or bone. That’s bodies for our grinder, genetic material for kids like me, or labor to keep the world running and the armies moving. And we have a lot of armies on the move these days, now that the Bhavaja are on the move again.

My mother looked back out into the spinning worlds in the darkness. “It’s more than just the Outer Rim,” she said. “A seer prophesized it.”

“Which one?” I asked. I know most of my mother’s seers, the spidery crones and broken old men who make a living off our family’s offal down in the sludge hall.

“She came to me before you were born,” she said. “Never told you about her. I wanted you to see me take Aatai and Sjorka, first. I wanted you to know what’s possible.”

She pointed her metal hand out toward the hijacked Core world, The Tern. It didn’t quite sit right in space. It wobbled more and more with every rotation of the Legion. Forty years it had been out there, my mother said. Someone or something had brought it up out of the Core back when my mother was born, thinking they could escape the Legion and chart a new course. But some other world had crippled it on the way out of the Core, or maybe it’d clipped a world out there, or they’d killed or maimed whatever group or thing had hijacked it. Now it hung out here on the Outer Rim, deceivingly dark, like some derelict. But it wasn’t a derelict - not yet.

“Every year I assault The Tern. You know why?” my mother asked.

“It’s part of the Outer Rim. It should be Katarzyna,” I said.

“You need to think bigger than that, Zahrah. What use do I have for a Core world?”

I watched the jagged black hull of The Tern. It was easily a hundred thousand jumps from where I stood, but I always hoped I’d see some sign of life – a flicker of light, the reflection from a survey pod, the shimmering umbilicus of a resource-strapped space walker.

“I’ve been watching that world my whole life,” my mother said. “And in the eight assaults I’ve made on The Tern, I’ve brought in no pods, no refugees, no fighters. That defense grid is automated. There’s nothing alive in there. All we need to do is wear down the grid and take the world back.”

“Back?”

“Back to the Core,” my mother said.

Nobody talked much about the Core out here. It was the first time I heard her mention it. We’re Outer Rim people - the fittest, the strongest, the keenest. It’s our sacrifices that have kept the Legion together this long. We’re the first and last line of defense. Controlling the Outer Rim meant controlling the Legion, everybody said. They couldn’t survive without the goods we brought in. They’d never survive the terrors we protected them from.

To reach the Core, you had to go through the black spaces of the Outer Rim where world after world fell had fallen among the stars, then through the Inner Rim worlds, navigating the debris and deitritus of four hundred lost and broken and embattled worlds. Then deeper, into the Rim where the worlds got bigger and the spaces between them got smaller. And finally, through the dark, shimmering Fade that protected the Core worlds. Nobody had been through the Fade, not since the Legion had reached the Edge.

Nobody but The Tern, anyway. And they were headed the other way.

“We take the Core, we take the Legion,” my mother said.

“I thought owning the Outer Rim meant owning the Legion,” I said. I come from a line of conquerors. Why hadn’t I thought of taking the Core?

My mother grimaced. “That’s a cheap story we tell ourselves to make this life mean something. No.” She heaved her big metal arm out toward the worlds of the Outer Rim. “If I wait until we’ve broken the Bhavarja to mount an assault on The Tern, it could be another decade before we’re in a position to take it again. With The Tern, we can cripple every Bhavaja world from here to the point.”

She turned and met my look. Hard face, grim as some dead spacer. Her eyes met mine. It’s always hard to meet my mother’s look. Her pupils are enormous. They swallow all the color in her eyes, even in bright light. Like most of us, she wears goggles when we navigate the inner core of the world.

She pushed her metal fist into my chest. The metal was warm. “We can take it all, Zahrah,” she said. “But we will have to sacrifice everything to do it. You understand that?”

I took a shallow breath. “I trained my whole life for this,” I said.

I wake up every morning in the darkness, for this.

My mother pulled her hand away. My chest was still warm where the metal had touched me.

“Tomorrow you come of age,” she said. “Tomorrow I give you an army. Tomorrow we take The Tern.” She crossed her arms, flesh and metal. “And then – the Legion.”

New Digs!

All settled into the new digs. Check it out! (everything here but pics of J's room, which he's still putting together a bit)

(Click here for full set)

Twilight Vs. Buffy

You know what Buffy did when she had to choose between the guy she wanted and saving the world? She fucking killed the guy. Duh. Sometimes you have to kill what you love to save the world. That's a real story. Ripping off your shirt to show off your sparkle and cliff diving because you can't live without a guy is fetishized 50s porn. When the sum total of your choices is - should I screw this guy or should I screw this guy? - you're living in a pretty boring world.

C'mon now, people. Where's my backlash against the backlash?

2010

A little stunned that the first woman to win Best Director won in 2010.

That's two-thousand-and-ten, people.

At least this happened before the flying cars?

Oh, How I Love Thee....

J. and I have nearly finished the first full season of Farscape. Last night, he looked up some actors on IMDB to see what else they'd done, then came back into our room and said, deadpan, "Did you know that most of the actors are Australian?"

Oh, J....