astray in worlds and words.

Author: Simone Page 2 of 5

Simone Heller is a life-long traveller of the oceans of speculative fiction. She lost her heart on many a world and found it again, pounding in exitement, when she set course to a new destination.

Reanimation

Hey, what have you been up to since November, Simone?
November, huh? It’s been so long, I even need a lousy fake interview set-up to get these rusty gears going.
Mostly, I’ve been a good little translator-bot. I translated a net total of 532,000 words of text, fiction and non-fiction, one of them an epic MCU in-universe encyclopaedia which nearly killed me with its legions of weapons and gadgets, half of them real things, half of them Marvel inventions (yeah, thanks for nothing, Captain America!). I copy-edited a smaller amount, about 364,000 words, also fiction and non-fiction, one of them an epic DC Comics encyclopaedia which nearly drove me crazy with its (sorry, DC) stupid timelines. Superheroes galore for me!
I read 25 books as a judge of the Seraph (original works) and the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis (translated works), both German sff awards. I co-conceptualized and co-hosted an awesome three-day workshop about storytelling as a tool for photographers with my camera-wielding partner in crime Chrononauts Photography.
And I last-minute-applied for Viable Paradise, because it sounded like pure workshop goodness. Which turned out very well so far: I don’t think I have ever experienced such a warm (virtual) welcome anywhere.

Did you write stories?
I wrote a thing for my VP application. Next step: improving my miserable story/workshop ratio. Feeling like the fraud of frauds here …

But you did write something, somewhere, didn’t you?
I didn’t even do much social media. Just work, eat and see to it that my back won’t give out, work again and then some more, sleep, repeat. Every single day (I had three free days over Easter, yay!). It felt like a never-ending nightmare, and that’s why I’m taking some time off now. Otherwise things would become an endless slog towards self-annihilation. Not cool.

What about stories, passive mode?
I didn’t read much apart from the nominated titles for the awards. There was T. Kingfisher’s romance/rpg adventure novelization hybrid Clocktaur Wars, which I thoroughly enjoyed (gonna write more about that one). I went to the movies a few times, to avoid becoming a hermit and such: I liked The Shape of Water – not the deep story about encountering the Other I expected from the trailer; but a beautifully shot film about misfits. Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok where my favorite MCU movies so far, one for its vision and coolness, and the other for combining heroics and fun.
I played some Overwatch. I also played Fortnite, but that was for a job (and it’s probably not my cup of tea). Ah, but now, as this full-frontal march towards burnout is at its end, I’ve been reading nice things again. A short story collection by Roger Zelazny. What a feast! I started reading the Sword and Sonnet anthology recently. And after that, Murderbot vol. 3 is waiting for me. Oh, and I picked up Divinity 2 again, so good (gonna write about it).

What now?
There’s still some editing work and small jobs to do. Probably should be looking for bigger jobs, too, but apart from that, I feel like I could sleep a whole month.
Most of all, I miss my lizards and robots and powerful ladies, and my random ramblings about stories and stuff. But I’m beginning to find back to my own words, so stay tuned. Winter is coming! Again! Ugh, this has been a long time off …

Sunday Story Time: Scaredy Cat

This is the Halloween edition, and today’s story morsel is a tiny webcomic made by Heather Franzen in 2012, Scaredy Cat. I love the idea of silent comics, and this kitten’s nocturnal adventures really don’t need any words. No jump-scares or other or other terrifying stuff here; the only thing you’ll need to be afraid of is immense cuteness!

You’ll find the comic on Heather Franzen’s Tumblr, and on the artist’s website, she’s offering a printed version.

Small Crush: Blade Runner 2049

I realized how often I must have seen Blade Runner (all the different cuts, too) when I sat down for its 2049 incarnation and felt compelled to watch out for a myriad little details, to see if they where different, if they were just a stale rip-off, or something else. Blade Runner 2049 was a movie that couldn’t possibly win from my perspective: I wanted it to be the same, and I wanted it to be vastly different. Most of all I didn’t want it to be like all those awful sequels I had to mentally disengage myself from over the last years.

I would have been shocked to learn that it did work out after all, only I didn’t have the attention to spare: I was glued to the screen for nearly all of its close to three hours. You’d expect to grow impatient with its meditative pace, but there’s so much tension from the beginning, so much going on under the surface of those poetic images that I almost never felt it lingered too long. It’s the much needed trust in your story and the engagement of your audience’s thoughts that so many other movies lack. It provides the blank spaces and the time you need to tell your own story. Its use of light and color, objects and scenery is powerful, but never heavy-handed.

And the nods to the original are subtle, not the bland rebranded quotes we’ve come to expect. They’re mostly in the visuals and thematic variations. I’m not sure if the story would work entirely on its own, without the groundwork of the first film. To me, it doesn’t matter, because the themes of Blade Runner were extrapolated upon in meaningful ways and adapted to our age of late capitalism and hidden slavery.

But – here come the nitpicks – in 2049, the Blade Runner world still runs on patriarchy. It’s a white man’s (or male replicant’s) world with beautiful virtual girlfriends and replicant sex workers, all there to be enjoyed by our hero. But what if Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright as another complex, super tough woman, yeah) walks home after an exhausting day on the job and wants a come-on from a hot giant holo-boy? Didn’t see one of those lounging in the bleak urban canyons …

And while we’re at it: for Wallace (Jared Leto as another overdone lunatic, meh), I couldn’t see any motivation, he was just your off-the-shelf self-absorbed tech tycoon and his were the only scenes where I wished the film would have mercy and just move on. Bespectacled and mickey-mouse-hairlined Tyrell wins this one easily.

There was no Roy Batty and no tears in the rain either, and that’s a flaw in every movie out there – but apart from that, Blade Runner 2049 was so much more than I had hoped for: a feast of muted colors and beautiful cinematography, an exploration of humanity and its relationship with the other(ed), a story to take away some overwhelming artificial memories from.

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Fun fact: This trailer seems to tell a somewhat diverging story, differently emphasized. I can’t see how this would be better, but let those gazillion different cuts come already!

My Primal Apocalypse

It all began with Gremlins.

When I was a child, VCR was the shiny new gadget you needed to have. Well-meaning, but ill-informed, my father brought home Gremlins as one of the very first rentals.

I wasn’t old enough to read stories on my own then (and to choose from any shelf I wanted to), so I had mostly encountered children’s stories. Gremlins might have started like a totally acceptable children’s story, but it soon turned out to be pure horror for me.

Gremlins movie posterI didn’t even make it very far, and my father, who must have felt that I was a little bit too terrified, sent me to bed before it got wild. Which was a bad decision. I knew that suspiciously cute Gizmo would turn into something nasty, and I had learned the rules: The thing with the water and the thing with the feeding. I got it all mixed up when I applied my own logic to the concept: So they turn nasty and grow bigger and multiply when they get wet and eat? You can get wet anytime. And they are monsters, so they’d want to eat people, and BAM! They become even bigger and nastier!

I didn’t only lie awake the whole night in terror. Over the next few days, my imagination led me into a desolate, dark future, where fat, ugly, grown-huge-as-houses Gremlins roamed the streets, looking for more people to feed upon. I thought about how I would sneak through the shadows to hide from them. I felt a little better when I realised that at some point, they would have eaten most of us. Then they wouldn’t find anything else, and the cycle of feeding and growing and multiplying would come to an end. But most of the time, I was half crazy with fear. It could happen anytime. It would be the end.

It couldn’t have been too long until my father noticed something was wrong, but as I remember it, I spent something like a fortnight silently descending into fear and depression. At some point, my father reassured me it was just a movie. A funny movie, even. And it had a happy ending.

But it didn’t matter. I knew now. I knew that something like this could happen, that the world as we knew it could end. That everything could (and would) be gone. And it terrified me.

But it also fascinated me. It was my first what-if extrapolation, my first post-apocalyptical world. I don’t think my final disaster scenario had a lot to do with Gremlins anymore. But until today, I haven’t watched the whole movie, and every time I see a picture of those little pests, they give me the creeps. Even the “real” gremlins, the mechanically inclined imps, make me shudder because they remind me of them. But I’m not entirely sure whether I should condemn director/writer team Joe Dante and Chris Columbus (and my father, I guess) for introducing existential crisis into my life, or thank them for fueling my doom-driven imagination.

Sunday Story Time: The Secret Life of Bots

With the Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer, I came for the title and had my eyes glued to the screen from the moment Bot 9 is activated and given a (rather domestic) job on a starship with a (rather crucial) mission. It is a beautiful, fun, and fast-paced story you don’t want to miss if you have ever suspected appliances might have feelings, too.

While exploring the diversified bot population of the ship (always operating within well-defined parameters), Suzanne Palmer keeps you grounded: Familiar space opera/military sf tropes are used as a mere backdrop … until they aren’t.

You can follow the adventures of amiable busy-bot 9 on Clarkesworld #132 (also podcasted). And don’t forget to put Steve Jablonsky’s Transformers soundtrack to good use for the finale of this stellar story!

Small Crush: Paper Girls (Vol. 1)

Brian K. Vaughan has written so many interesting comic stories that he was bound to show up here eventually. Some of them I love (Pride of Baghdad will get an entry, too!), some I found intriguing, but they didn’t draw me in.

Paper Girls Vol. 1Paper Girls immediately got me by reminding me of two other immensely popular tales: Like Stranger Things it features teenage heroes riding bikes and getting involved in fantastical and mysterious events, and it seems to hop on the train of 80s nostalgia. Like Lumberjanes, it’s focussed on friendships between girls and shows what a girl gang is capable of, even when confronted with the most improbable events straight out of the cheesiest b-movie inventory.

Paper Girls transcends them both. While the combination of space age and suburban life provides a charming backdrop for the events, the ongoing story doesn’t get stuck in the 80s formula. And there is a distinct sf feel from the beginning, anchoring the onslaught of the supernatural we soon face.

What I liked most – besides the brilliant before-sunrise color scheme – were the characters. Paper Girls develops four very different girls into firmly grounded heroines, without adhering to common types and clichés. Tiffany, the geek, is teenage girl first and geek second, and I’d even hesitate to call her “the geek”, because she’s drawn as a human with many facets (and all four girls are geeks). They have poignant, sometimes shockingly sad backgrounds, and their tough decisions and hasty reactions when their neighbourhood is beleaguered by more than leftover stragglers from Halloween feel all too real. As do the consequences of their actions.

I’m curious about where the story will end up, and I hope there’s at least a half-decent plot in the end. But for the moment, I want to see more of Cliff Chiang’s rad art, and enjoy what turned out to be the most relatable and likeable girl gang of all the all-female casts I encountered in the sf comics field recently.

Sunday Story Time: Crab

A mean, old, very short animated video from Birdbox Studio. Yes, I’m easily amused. Especially by creatures with eyestalks.

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Of Cats and Chickens

Writing buddy Sam of Moyas Buchgewimmel passed the baton of the Versatile Blogger Award, so I guess that’s what you get this week: 7 random (yikes!) facts. And I’ll gladly pass it on to whoever likes to share their own random facts. I must admit I love to read those from time to time, so go on and jot something down!

1: I like limits
I don’t like to follow them to the letter; on the contrary: give me a limit, and I will test it and stretch it and try to break it. But I think I get inspired by the challenge, by having something to chew on. Form, length, theme, or character constraints – anything is better than starting with an anything goes premise.
So, first of all, this list needs a limit. Seven facts about me finding words.

2: I’m wordy
I could drone on and on about those facts. Tl;dr is my worst nightmare. Social media and the need to have your say in way too less characters or as a caption for a picture (to stand in for the remaining 995 words) go against my instinct to get to the bottom of things. But I learned to cut. See?

3: Copy-Cat
Clever ways of saying things, phrasings, lyrics, and expressions get stuck in my head like blueprints. I try to be aware of that.

4 (copy-catted at Sam’s place): I only write when it’s dark
Not entirely true, but also not completely false. I am the night. Leave me to my own devices, take away dependancies on other people’s schedules and opening hours, and I’m guaranteed to mutate into a nocturnal creature.

5: The chicken is IN
All words are great in the night. So it’s best to re-evaluate them in the morning. As. If. I. Could ever read them again. So many brilliant ideas lost in the realms of chicken scratch. Woe is me!

6: Chicken out
I tend to leave things unfinished for lack of a perfect ending. Maybe it would be better to put them out anyway, instead of chewing on them forever or letting them perish incomplete in the drawer/drafts folder/wip shelf?

Small Crush: Every Heart a Doorway

Magical Boarding Schools are not exactly my kind of thing. When characters in stories have to go to school, I tend to skip whole passages, unless it’s Jo Walton’s Morwenna in Among Others, who hates her school experience in a very relatable and well-narrated way.

So I was genuinely surprised when I came upon Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway in my Hugo readings and began to feel this novella was written for me.

Every Heart a DoorwayIts main emotion is longing, an unhealthy and absurd longing not to live in this world anymore. It’s the main motivation of every student in Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, because everyone of the girls (and very few boys) there has once been lost, following a path to another world, and now all they want is to go back there, where they feel they truly belong.

Or so they say.

Their parents see another story, of troubled young minds and traumatised kids they can’t reach anymore.

There are so many layers and ways to read Every Heart a Doorway: is it a metaphor about growing up and leaving childhood dreams behind? Does it tackle mental illness and trauma? Or is it a fairytale, where special children are called to other worlds?

It is, first and foremost, acknowledging that people have very different needs. Some will never fit in, and they will break under the expectations and demands of the world. Unless someone offers them a place to be themselves, and that’s what Eleanor West (whose own story is one of the heartbreaking moments of this novella) does.

But her small bubble of inclusion is threatened when students start to get murdered. The whodunit part of Every Heart a Doorway is not its main feature, though – it’s the diverse and varied bunch of characters and their stories instead. That’s why the murders hit so hard; they show very clearly the stories that are left unfinished. From goth-like, fascinated by death Nancy to wannabe mad scientist Jack, these characters are somewhat quirkier than your standard magical boarding school students.

I’m still not sure what to think about the ending. It was a little bit anticlimatic, so very easy, and it seemed to narrow down the story and to factor out some severe implications. Discussing it with a friend, I found it could still be ambiguous, Pan’s Labyrinth style. If anybody wants to know more or discuss, I’ll write some spoiler-y thoughts in the comments section.

Every Heart a Doorway starts the Wayward Children series, and I’m also not sure I needed to know more, because it was pretty self-contained. But I’m willing to get surprised once more.

Worldcon & Work Done

Attending Worldcon 75 in Helsinki made the deadline of my last translation project a real challenge (and I had to switch to translatorbot mode upon my return). But I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Welcome in HelsinkiHelsinki was quite welcoming, giving out free public transport rides and a warm, fuzzy feeling in between the frequent showers. While it felt a little bit disorganised in the beginning, Worldcon got better by the day at managing its huge crowds of fans.

A workshop about societies in post-apocalyptic fiction taught by dramatist Taj Hayer was a great way to start the con and meet new people. It wasn’t only fascinating to learn about all the different backgrounds people brought up that got them interested in post-apocalyptic settings. We also did a cool group exercise about world and plot building and ended up with a world reminiscent of Mary Rickert and Octavia Butler stories, where only children are able to communicate, and form an anarchist society. I wonder which one of us will end up writing it … Anyway, I really appreciated Taj’s teaching, so if you’ve got the chance to attend one of his classes, go for it!

I could totally relate to the things stated in a panel about writing while multilingual (with Ken Liu, among others), fell in love with the sheer display of knowledge in “The Times that Shaped the Science” (mostly about the birthing age of modern science and how it came to pass), and had the best of times with an epic snark battle-panel between Babylon 5 and Star Trek, shortly before rushing back to the airport (no big spoiler: Babylon 5 won).

But my favourite panel was “True Grit: The Appeal of Grimdark Fantasy”. So much thoughtful input here, especially from Scott Lynch, on a fascinating topic. You can watch it on Youtube, too (with appropriately gloomy lighting).

Posing with Major Ursa

Posing with Major Ursa

Apart from that, there was a small Taos Toolbox meet-up, a visit to a glorious steampunk bar, meeting old and new friends, and discovering cool Finnish artists and a really flourishing sff scene. I didn’t know that so many books are translated into Finnish (and they’re beautifully designed, too).

Oh, and the Hugos were a blast, of course: I loved the fact that many of my favourites won, and they were dominated by women this year! Bam!

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