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SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates most Fridays.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John Macrae
Remembering Armistice Day…and may there be an armistice all over the Earth next Armistice Day.
I’m proud to announce the first episode of my new podcast, Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, has dropped at Acast and your local podcast app.
Solidarity Forever is, as it says on the tin, the history of American labor – from 1619 to the 21st century. Informed by my reading on labor history and organization, and my own lived union experience, I aim to provide the big picture of American labor history – who the mill girls were, what happened at Homestead, the first Red Scare, what a sit-down strike is – and the tools you need to go out and make some labor history of your own.
This first episode, “The History of the History of American Labor” discusses what labor unions are, what the podcast is about, who I am, and why you should care. It’s fifteen minutes long – go have a listen.
The past few weeks, I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4. It started out as an excuse to boom headshot slavers and raiders, but then I got into the settlement system.
Like.
Way into the settlement system.
If architecture is politics, then my Sole Survivor’s “wherever we go, we build a common house, a shared kitchen, a garden, a library, a place to drink, and a place to dance” is my own socialism in stone (well, in concrete, wood, and metal). My imagination exploded unbidden, conjuring emerald cities from grains of wasteland sand and the Minutemen reformed into something like a bastard cross between a Roman legion and the Civilian Conservation Corps, a force proud to “eat Super Mutants and shit roads.” Each Minuteman armed not just with a laser musket, but a flare gun and a shovel. As they plant gardens, lay rail tracks, dig wells, and clear out ghoul nests, they’d need something to eat.
And I thought about how all my Fallout characters enjoy mirelurk cakes (despite how many of them keep kosher) and the intriguing fruits of the in-game cook stations…some of which, despite my best efforts, I wanted to try. After retaking the Castle from the sea monster and declaring a clam cake jamboree the likes of which Boston has never seen to celebrate, I knew what I had to do.
Hence, the “shovelhead supper,” “the dinner that beat the Brotherhood of Steel.” Mirelurk cakes, shipped from Boston alongside the Gwinnett stout, razorgrain grill biscuits, and vegetable stew from whatever gardens and farms you just helped plant, protect, and harvest.
With Melissa’s (very bemused, non-gamer) friend flew in for dinner, I kind of had to. Just for the look on her face.
Without further ado, your own shovelhead supper – and I’m listing these in order of preparation, so the mirelurk cakes (and homemade aioli) themselves come at the end.
This meal comes in five parts, so if you’d like to jump to the individual recipes, here they are in order of preparation:
Razorgrain Biscuits
(Although they don’t show up in Fallout 4’s cook-stations and campfires, something like these have to exist, since you can also make noodle soup and dumplings. There’s razorgrain, there’s water, there’s sourdough starters, there’s Dutch ovens and cast iron pans, somebody in the Commonwealth has made biscuits! Next time, might experiment with sourdough stout biscuits for lore reasons – after all, the Double Eight Flyer from Vault 88 station brings in razorgrain and Gwinnett stout every morning at 5am, might as well make use.)
Ingredients
Method
Vegetable Soup
(Cheap, plentiful, simple. Even Melissa’s non-gamer friend agreed this restores +55 HP. In game, just some dirty water, tatos, and corn, and you’re good to go. I’ve subbed in canned tomatoes for the “tato” fruits, but if you wanna smash your own garden tomatoes you go right on ahead.)
(Special thanks to the Unofficial Vault Cookbook for this recipe)
Ingredients
Method
Homemade Mayonnaise
(I made homemade both for lore reasons [have you ever seen butter or mayo anywhere in the Wasteland? Thought not!] and because homemade mayonnaise is simple to make and inexplicably impressive to guests. This is probably close to what “Marjorie” makes.)
Ingredients
Method
Mirelurk Cakes
(the piece de resistance of the Minutemen’s main meal, as literally adapted from the Fallout 3 easter egg in Anchorage Memorial.)
1 bucket mirelurk meat
12 eggs, mixed up
1 loaf bread, stale and crumbled
1 bottle mayonnaise (see Marjorie for mayo)
1 branch scrub plant, dried and crushed
2 fists of salt
Oil (for pan)Remove any shell from mirelurk. In bucket, toss together bread, egg, scrub and mayo until moistened, but do not over mix. Add any available spices for taste
Ball up 25-30 cakes, 1/2 to 3/4 inches thick. Place in freezer until they firm up. Sprinkle batch with salt.
In a heavy pan, fry cakes in oil, turning once until both sides are brown
The original fallout 3 recipe
Ingredients
Method
Homemade Aioli
(this is more garlic mayonnaise than a true aioli, but it can be quickly and easily assembled from the remaining homemade mayonnaise and really brings the mirelurk cakes to a new level. Lorewise, I like to imagine my [former housewife] Sole Survivor started whipping it up for the jamboree and it became a Minuteman tradition to imitate the General.)
Ingredients
Method
Pour the vegetable soup into a bowl (a tin Army surplus mess kit for authenticity), set the mirelurk cakes on a plate and drizzle with the aioli, serve with one or two biscuits for dipping and an Ice-Cold Nuka Cola or Ice-Cold Gwinnett (Guiness) Stout. Guaranteed rad free! Swap tales of killing a deathclaw with your bare hands.
In the online edition of this month’s Friends Journal (the country’s largest Quaker magazine), they’ve published my essay “A Friend with Taoist Notions” as part of their Ecumenical Friends issue!
In it, I discuss how my youthful convincement of Taoist principles and cosmology led me to become a Quaker, and how the Tao fulfills itself through Friends.
If my philosophical natterings are your bag, head on over to Friends Journal and give it a read!
Today, my podcast interview on Matthew Wayne Selznick’s Sonitotum hits the Internet!
We talk about karate, about Quakerism, about Taoism, about Blade Runner, fridging, ritual…and, most important, about creating and about staying sane while you do it.
Have a listen either at Matthew’s website or wherever better podcasts are streamed.
This is a guest post from Melissa Mathieu on our second date in just over a year.
The Barbie movie affected me more than I imagined — I cried a lot during the movie. Margot Robbie’s Barbie showing empathy far beyond what I expected from a movie in the Marvel era. There’s a togetherness that all women and femmes do share, in our pain, and in our shared experience of oppression. The oppression is often structural, often relational, but it also limits us at to possibilities.
Barbie came from a world where Kens are superfluous. As a child, I played with Barbies, not baby dolls, which made me feel somewhat less feminine than I should have been, and yet fashion and the form of an adult women (however anatomically incorrect) held my interest whereas baby dolls didn’t make any sense to me. Ken was truly superfluous in this context (unlike my husband, who is very much needed).
What are you supposed to do with him? And Barbies kissing other Barbies was very common among all the children I played with. Ken just didn’t make sense in that context. It wasn’t playing house, which I also enjoyed, it was very much an exercise in self-identity, in vanity, and in the female image. This is pre-male gaze. It’s the female gaze, and that is one of the things I loved most about the Barbie movie.
My jaw literally dropped for the first 15 minutes of the movie. My eyes bathed in colors and sparkles. It truly moved me to see spaces, even fake ones, where it was all about the girl’s point of view. Restraint? Not needed. Accommodations for men? Unwarranted. The visuals were beautiful to me, and as an adult, I realized how deprived I feel of extreme femininity (trans femininity included). There is something so delicious to me about extreme femme spaces. In our town there’s a place called the Madonna Inn which is pink, pink, pink.
I love the surreality of the space. How much more did I relish the idea of being cute, of no restraint, of pure love of color and sparkles, of the adorable outfits Barbie wore, especially the white and blue ones.
There is something missing in me. The embodied vanity, the pure joy of being femme without the baggage of being a new mother, a tough woman in a man’s world, of just allowing my form to be totally embodied as a work of art, but also as an ego wrapped in a supremely beautiful body. Barbie in the real world sits at a bus stop with an elderly woman, and says to her “You are so beautiful.’ The elderly woman replies, ‘I know it.’ It’s not just about vanity or beauty. It’s a way of fully embodying my form. Something I haven’t had the freedom of experiencing since I was 13.
I remember that rich summer. I was largely alone, and felt amazing. It was the 90s and the 70s were in. I spent that summer both being in my body, and seeing myself as a very glamorous — being in my vintage clothes, listening to Jimi Hendrix, and The Carpenters (why? I can’t tell you), and a bit of Hole and Nirvana. I took time doing my makeup, and being creative with my hairstyles, spending 45 minutes bathing and shaving my legs. You might say that is childish, but I don’t think so. The creativity, the self-adoration, the freedom were intoxicating. I crave that kind of love and embodiment.
Cut to 2023, My worries about survival, my complete focus on my baby, and the demands she places on my body— the deprivation and the disconnection from having to wait on my own needs to care for her, they block “the me that feels” a lot of the time, the part that has my own thoughts. I want to see that freedom again, and truly, fully enjoy how beautiful I look in a dress (however I look).
Someday I will have a bathroom or a boudoir that is totally femme. Ballet pink and gold. Just for me. A pre-male gaze space. When I was a young child, I hated pink. It felt forced on me, when what i[I can change this, but I sense this part is very much stream of consciousness, and would leave it like this if you prefer] really wanted to wear was purple and red and yellow. But today I can honestly say I love pink. I spent 30ish years hating the color, and now you can see I love it. It’s actually a darker shade of purple to some extent.
There are many more things I could say about the movie. I think it’s a good reminder of how little progress we’ve truly made as femmes/women. The double standards are ridiculous. I’ve carefully cultivated friendships with people who love others regardless of gender, and don’t tear them down. I’ve gained power as a femme, but what crushes me isn’t the systemic oppression, it’s the way I’ve dulled myself down, the way I’ve lost my sparkle (literally, there is nothing sparkly in my whole wardrobe) to fit into a man’s world.
Also just an aside, they should’ve had Barbie eat, at least when she became human. It’s a small thing, but I think it’s important that girls and women see beautiful women eating. We deserve to enjoy food! I also really enjoyed seeing the Jewish creator of Barbie so lovingly portrayed by Rhea Perlman, and how loving and nurturing she was to Barbie. No feminism is complete without including older women, and no feminism is complete without being intersectional. (Where were the queer and non-binary Barbies?)
I’d like to see a world where all people are free to gender how they want. I want to stop having to be tough, I want to stop having to be feminine. I want to be this messy, sexy human that is me. We all deserve free expression.
My apologies for the radio silence, folks. It’s been a rough couple of weeks.
Short version is: I’ve lost my day job.
We’re still in flux over here, but the rent will get paid this month and I’m trying to organize time to write while I’ve got it. Normal posting will be back next week.
If you’re so inclined, now would be a great time to Buy Me A Coffee or become a patron.
“So what do you write?”
All writers hate this question.
I’ve gotten it several times over the past few weeks, each one a smiling opportunity to make a new fan and a new friend. But, just in case I’m not standing in front of you (or on the other side of a Zoom call), I’m putting together this post to explain a little of where I’ve been and where I’m going.
And, who knows, even those of you who’ve been on the journey with me might find this useful!
So this is what I write:
Since my earliest days back in the depths of 1999, my sci-fi and fantasy has always had a philosophical bent, what Amazon.com now calls visionary SF. The first SF story I ever sold was a meditation on karate’s iron body techniques and the power of hope, on Mars. Others have included an exploration of mystical transcendence disguised as hyperspace, an existential jaunt about the meaning of the space program long after the world’s moved on, and a vampire story contrasting Buddhist and Catholic understandings of what a vampire even is. Probably the best exemplar of my visionary SF would be my bestselling “Hull Down,” a milSF first contact that takes a severe left turn halfway through and never looks back.
Even No Time: The First Hour is visionary…albeit cunningly disguised as a murder mystery.
In 2016, of course, I discovered solarpunk, humans solving human-size problems with human gifts after a solid decade of Singularity or Apocalypse. It was a breath of fresh air, fresh green air, and I’ve been inhaling the stuff ever since. Almost all of my traditional sales since have been solarpunk, from turning the sunken city of Surat to new life to defining one’s own gender on Mars. By far the best example of pure solarpunk in my history, though, is “Glâcehouse,” from the moment Mackenzie beholds the dome that holds winter within it and it takes her breath away.
But over the last few years, a certain vigor has been creeping into my fiction. I’m not afraid to draw on the tradition of Lester Dent and Doc Savage, of Jack London’s muscular, Progressive prose, of Indiana Jones and the serials that inspired him. These new stories are drawn to larger-than-life dimensions, with characters who stand for their ideals more than Dostoevsky-certified realism and aren’t afraid to take direct action to act on them. These are the stories I’ve dubbed solarpulp. Doña Ana Lucía…
…springs from this new impulse, in all the novels and stories I’ve written of her to date, but she’s hardly alone. Gooch pulls his gun and uses his fists and some of the heroes of my new Cheminéc cycle, growing out of “Glâcehouse,” are just as red-blooded. But, by far, the best example is “Fire Marengo,” the free story you get when you sign up for my newsletter.
We passed, a shadow inside a shadow, beneath the broad lip of the Sheikh’s isle of Valhalla. Tchang reefed our sail, for we had to maneuver slow in that sliver of darkness. Far above, the sirens sang and men shouted, but us two stories below, our ears were keen on the lapping of the water. The slightest sound different could mean life or death there beneath the Sheikh’s pleasure-grounds. I kept the gaff off our starboard bow, to push Valhalla away from the little Sacramento lest we dash ourselves to pieces on the beautiful, deadly coral.
The sound that broke us was the terrible splash. You’ve all heard it, you’ve the faces for it – the sound of a man hitting the water. Tchang clapped his hand over my mouth to stifle my shout, and in my surprise I let the gaff slide off into the dark waters. Tchang and I looked to each other – the Law of the Sea demands we rescue the poor devil. Even if it might expose us. A rescue within a rescue! But I’d want a good sailor to do the same for me if I hit the drink. Even so…
I craned my neck out to get an eye of the situation. The man was floating there, buoyed by his close-necked shirtsleeves, pale and washed out in the mighty lights.
“Game overboard!”
Game? Man overboard surely.
“Is the game dispatched?”
The man shifted in the water, and here I saw illuminated the red blossom of the hole in the back of his head. It was impossible not to see.
“The game is dispatched! Tally to the Sultan of Valhalla!”
Game…now I got it. He meant hunting game. Not like you or I rustle up the occasional cougar for our supper, but as rich men do. And these weren’t no mountain lions, he was hunting men. He was hunting the entire third watch!
And more of that to come in the future – I’m wrapping up edits on the next No Time novel, No Time for the Killing Floor: The Second Hour, and querying Doña Ana Lucía Serrano …to the Future! to traditional publishers. I’ve a fistful of novelettes featuring her, from heists to heiresses to meditations on sexuality and the Peace Testimony. And, if you’re in a more sedate mood, more visionary solarpunk (with a hint of satire).
Well, there it is – where I’ve been, where I am, and where I am bound, as of 2023. But as Hope Hopkinson says, you can only plot a trajectory from where you are.
Who knows where we’ll be in five years?
I look forward to finding out.
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