Wis[s]e Words – Page 635 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Mary Gentle

Published on February 26, 2003Leave a comment

Mary Gentle is an British writer of fantasy and science fiction, who finally got some of the attention she deserves in 1999, with her excellent fantasy/secret history book Ash: A Secret History. Before that, she was better known as the writer of the darkly humouristic Grunts, a novel about those bad boys of fantasy Orcs, (featuring such lines as “Pass me another elf, this one has split“), as well as of the science fiction duology Golden Witchbreed/Ancient Light. The latter is what I first read of her and are also the books with which she first gained prominence.

However, some of her more obscure and less accesible books also deserve a wider audience, but apparantely are too difficult or too weird to have gained one. I’m talking of the White Crow series, which consists of several short stories as well as the novels Rats and Gargoyles, The Architecture of Desire and Left to His Own Devices. They take place in a sort of alternate 17th century England, where the compass has a fifth direction to it, (and the directions are all still 90 degrees apart), a female Charles Stuart and Olivier Cromwell, a magic system based on alchemy. And yet their author still insists they are science fiction rather than fantasy.

It’s no wonder then that Mary Gentle has just as outspoken ideas about her role as a science fiction writer:

A slightly less megalomaniac way of saying that I write to reform the SF/fantasy field is to say that I’m a reactive writer. When I see something done wrong, I want to do it right. When I see SF and fantasy novels that insult the intelligence of a weevil, I want to write a novel with an academic book list in the back of it. Or one that bases a lot of obscure English Civil War jokes on the conceit that Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell were female. When I get up to here with cyber-utopias fronted by dim young men who do not know where their dicks are, Valentine starts making waspish remarks and gets herself a job with the military-industrial complex. When I have seen more gaming fantasy-magic than even I can take, I want to write about a magic that works by pictorial association from a vocabulary of Baroque images. And when I see SF with a crew from central casting, and a political stance as naïve as the Sun, then I start writing near-future SF about Valentine and Casaubon’s messy home lives and respective families, and Marlowe’s take on the Internet.

25 February 1941

Published on February 25, 2003Leave a comment

This post is aimed at those who feel uncomfortable with Communists and Socialists leading the protests
against Bush’s War.

Amsterdam, 25 february, 1941. It had been almost a year since the Nazis had invaded and occupied The Netherlands. It would be almost a year before the USA entered the war. Officially Germany and the USSR were still allies. On the other side of the North sea was the only free fighting country in Europe, still fighting for survival. Tthe Jewish population of occupied Europe started to suspect the ultimate fate the Nazis and their cronies would have in store for them. Just two days before, the first large scale razzias had been held in the traditionally Jewish neighbourhoods of Amsterdam. Tensions were high. Already there had been sporadic resistance against the Jewbaiting practised by the occupier and their Dutch collaborators. Members of the Dutch nazi party, the NSB had been beaten up when they attempted to molest Jews. The razzias had been revenge for this.

But Amsterdam was never a city to cower in the face of brutality. Nor did it this time. On 25 februari, exactly 62 years ago, a general strike broke out in the city, to support its Jewish inhabitants. All trams stopped; those who did attempt to ride were pelted with stones and chased back to their garages. Other council services also striked and Amsterdam workers took to the streets, chasing the German ordnungspolizie out of the city. The strike went beyond the Amsterdam borders, to other parts of the province of Noord-Holland. For a moment it seemed it would be succesful and then the Nazis struck back, mercilessly. Several of the organisers and participants were arrested, tortured and killed.

Who they were? They were Communist. It was the Dutch Communist Party who started the strike, who were amongst the first to go into resistance against the occupiers and many of whom paid the ultimate price for it.

Today we remember them and all those others who fought beside them against the Nazi oppression during those late february days in 1941.

That would be a good trick

Published on February 22, 2003Leave a comment

Guess which of the books listed on the Del Rey website won’t be written by the author they give here?

(Click on the image if you want a bigger size screenshot.)

Bigotry or just obnoxiousness?

Published on February 19, 2003Leave a comment

One of my bêtes noirs is anti-French bigotry, which for some reason USAnians are most likely to indulge in (with UKians a close second). The litany is familiar: they’re whiny, arrogant, stinkyand cowardly; the sort of lazy stereotypes any good bigot has ready to hurl at their favourite target.

In the current political climate, with France taking a stance against the mad plans Bush has for Iraq, it’s no surprise hatred of the French has gone mainstream again. Not a day goes by without some pundit getting a dig in at the perfide French. For the most part, this is coming from people who are beyond redemption anyway, so it doesn’t really bother me. However, when it’s somebody who’s normally more sensible than that, somebody who’s not a rightwing nutbar, somebody like Jim Capozzola from The Rittenhouse Review, it gets my goat.

Jim thought it would be funny to post one of thoes mass forwarde e-mails, something called The Complete Military History of France –I bet you know already where this is going, right? Correct, it’s a “hilarious” summing up of all the wars France was in and how bad they were. A real kneeslapper. It features such gems as:

Hundred Years War: Mostly lost. Saved at last moment by a schizophrenic teenaged girl, who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare: “France’s armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman.”

(Why did you link “schizophrenic teenaged girl” to Body and Soul, btw?)

Duh! Because she posts as Jeanne D’Arc, of course, as Jim has pointed out to me. sometimes I am an idiot.

World War I: Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it’s like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn’t call her “Fraulein.” Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.

World War II: Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.

In short, it betrays not only a astonishing lack of historical knowledge, it’s also incredibly offensive. If you don’t agree with me, do a gedankenexperiment and imagine the response a similar list with examples of “Jewish greed” would get.

Apart from the offensiveness of statements like “Going to war without the French is like . . . well . . . World War II” –Word War II did not start in 1941, you know– what irritates me as much is the smugness of the whole “essay”. It is drenched in a sence of superiority which is wholly unearned: when was the last time the US fought a serious war on its own territory or had a real, strong enemy at its borders? The US has not had to deal with anything like the amount of war and devastation France had to; I sincerily doubt it would’ve done better.

UPDATE: edited to make it clear Jim only posted this, not wrote it. He has e-mailed me (after I notified him) that the main reason he posted it was because he’s always the last to recieve such
forwards:

Actually, the reason I posted it wasn’t because I hate the French or anything, though I’m no fan, but because — as I’ve said on my blog several times — I’m usually the last person in the world to receive
e-mails with those kinds of world-traveling “humor” pieces. I was trying, at least, to make fun of myself, not the French, though that seems to have escaped nearly everyone who read it.

Fair enough. Obviously, it has somewhat backfired… Let me make clear that I don’t think Jim is a bigot at all; his post just irked me enough to rant about the attitude as displayed in that piece.