sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2009-05-11 08:23 pm

Hello, internets!

I have not been around much lately; work + social life/volunteerism + writing fiction has stolen all my online time and most of my energy. (Woe!) And it doesn't help that my workplace has tightened its rules on blogging, so I can't pop in and check LJ during the day. Hopefully things will lighten up soon.

Hmm, what's going on these days ...

1. [livejournal.com profile] sga_genficathon is humming along nicely. I am thrilled to be able to sit back this year and watch stories magically appear, with just a few very minor snags to iron out and/or author requests to fix formatting errors, etc. I am still way, way behind on reading, but I am really impressed with the variety of stories, styles and subjects available to read -- The Choices That Damn Us deserves way more comments than it's gotten (a chilling, believable, Teyla-centric AU that depicts a very plausible direction in which the Stargate Program could have gone). On a much more cheerful note (yes, I am counting apocafic as "more cheerful") Where the White Lillies Grow is a long and very enjoyable, John & Rodney-centric story of two clashing AUs, one in which a series of Years Without a Summer in the 1800s wiped out most of civilization on Earth, and another in which a darker Atlantis expedition never regained contact with Earth. A malfunctioning Stargate causes them to collide ...

2. Switching to serious RL stuff, Tor Books does it again with a YA fantasy about a magical USA in which the continent is conveniently empty of inhabitants when the Europeans arrive. This is not, in the book, presented as a terrible tragedy or a reason to explore a necessarily very different America; instead it's an excuse for a light-hearted romp with mammoths and covered wagons in an America that (in defiance of logic, reason or morality) is pretty much the same as the one we know except for the no-pesky-indigenous-people thing. Then Lois McMaster Bujold, whose books I like very much, gets involved in the comments and makes everything so very much worse. *headdesk* Due to the whole lack-of-time thing, I haven't read more than a random smattering of posts on this, but naraht has link roundups. (How do you make the LJ-user code work for Dreamwidth accounts? Cannot figure it out. Brain is very limp and floppy tonight.)
ext_19052: (ynm surprised)

[identity profile] gwendolynflight.livejournal.com 2009-05-12 10:02 pm (UTC)(link)
It's got some awesome books for sale. As soon as I'm off this fixed income, I'm going shopping! But yeah, I've always been fascinated by native culture but unable to find anything worthwhile in terms of research. It's all by white men! And the one time I found an awesome reference I didn't take down its name or the author's name, and I've never been able to find it again. Very sad story, that. It was actually on male/male relationships in different tribes, the history of, because obviously things changed when the damn explorers arrived with their prejudice and christianity. :p So several chapters did engage with the impact of European mores on native mores. Interesting, but very sad. Still, even after researching, I don't know if I'd have the balls to write a book about a native culture from the native perspective. Being an outsider I could only ever approach that culture from the outside, which begs the question, why does that culture need me sticking my nose in? It doesn't. But then again, it might be nice to have people of color in my worlds, ya know. What do I do??? What's the balance??? ::dies::