2015 - Dear Yuletide Author

[jjhunter]

aka Idhren

Thank you for signing up to write me something! As in previous years, I'm very open to wherever the muse might take you--prose, poetry, lyrics, letters, whatever delights or inspires or snags you and won't let go.


Glamourist Histories Series - Mary Robinette Kowal
The final book for this series came out earlier this year, and I still can't decide if I'm more drawn to the worldbuilding^1a or to the characters. 'Jane Austen with magic' is insufficient to describe it - the vocabulary^1b and cultural references start in a similar genre niche, but each successive book goes further afield (sometimes literally) - the series starts with the marriage plot, yes, but then keeps going, and asks questions like what further adventures might happen once people get married?^1c How might one come of place?^1d If you are drawn to the worldbuilding, I'm really interested in how glamour might have affected the development of other art forms (what would theater be like? different traditions of puppetry (bunraku et al.)?), ways it might impact everyday occupations and traditions,^1e and technical descriptions of any kind related to practicing, refining, experimenting or otherwise making use of or observing the effects of glamour. Character-wise, in addition to anything touching the themes mentioned above, I'm still really interested in reframing Melody's past; further adventures of Dr. Jones; Lousia meeting Melody; Nkiruka Chinwe's POV; Jane & Vincent as teachers; and really anything that might catch your fancy, I just want more in this universe.


Hamilton - Miranda
I'm open to wherever you might want to take a shot with this — I love everything from the premise^2a to the density of dexterous wordplay to the characters and the little throwaway details.^2b There's lots of potential for missing songs / scenes throughout^2c, and resonances in the construction that lend themselves to character exploration. (For example: Aaron Burr is very obviously a foil for Alexander, but so is Angelica.^2d) Meta-wise, I'm fascinated by the ways different characters attempt to shape and rewrite the narrative^2e, and the way aspects like gender seem to bound the available beats.^2f This is definitely a canon that lends itself to complicating and annotating the various narratives at play.^2g


Serei no Moribito | Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
This is a canon where I am as gripped by the exquisite little character moments as I am by the gorgeous animation and fight scenes. So many mysteries in the limited chunk of the canon that's been translated into English / animated!^3a What of the previous people Balsa saved? How did she grow from the little girl we see in the glimpses of training montages & backstory to the tough, steady woman who accepts death but does not seek it in the show? I adore her dynamics with Chagum (and likewise Torogai with Tanda). Torogai's perspective on Tanda and Balsa over the years would be a delight; ditto further collaboration between Torogai and Shuga. There's so little access to the Second Queen's perspective - what was she thinking during her meeting with Balsa, and the lead up to it? I'm also intrigued by the worldbuilding, especially the various philosophies at play and contested history of the empire, but primarily as it informs & influences the perspectives and positions of particular characters.


Solar System (Anthropomorphic)
When considered truly to scale^4a, our solar system is so very large and so very, very empty. To be a planet or dwarf planet or large minor planet (trans-Neptunian object?) must be to sometimes sense others outside one's local influence but almost never get to touch anything that one doesn't catch oneself. How strange, how thrilling (unsettling?) would it be to have a self-directing, gravity-defying potentially sentient robotic visitor come willing to land, or pass teasingly close as it goes where one cannot follow? What might it be like to be one of those robots (Curiosity, New Horizons, Juno ^4b) going where no earthling has gone before? If robot feels are not your thing, I'd be equally interested in anything where your characterization of a planet / moon / etc. is informed what's known about its geology & degree of geologic activity.^4c


Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage^5a
Last year, I requested 19th Century Scientists RPF^5b. The more I've read about the lives of scientists like Maria Mitchell^5c and Ada Lovelace since, the more appealing the Thrilling Adventures pocket universe of shenanigans and less unhappy ends becomes. Like other experiments in dimensional manipulation^5d, this pocket universe collapses tyranny of time in favor of dimensions of space for play - play with potential alternate histories, play with concepts, play with forms of communication & transformative powers of imagination, play with the unrealized becoming real and the metaphoric literal, etc. etc.. Gratuitous use of charts^5e, puns^5f, coding concepts^5g, mechanical diagrams^5h, primary sources⁵ⁱ, mathematical references^5j, footnotes⁷, science & engineering jokes, and/or theatrical spectacle^5k accordingly encouraged. Character-wise, I am especially drawn to Lovelace's struggles with 'the demon poetry'^5l; Lovelace and Brunel being bros; further Lovelace & Babbage adventures of any sort; and Minion the enabler's POV.


WTF Evolution (Tumblr)
This canon combines two things I adore — mind-boggling real-life organisms of the sort I mentally tag #science #in an adventure with reality^6a, and unpacking design choices/progressions, or more generally: how stuff works & how it got to be the way it is.^6b I have a lot of sympathy for Evolution's Manager, given my sneaking suspicion that anthropomorphized Evolution could be like an unholy fusion of young Miles Vorkosigan & MacGyver - gets any requested job done in an avalanche of initiative, unintended consequences, and repurposing of common elements to, shall we say, innovative solutions. If you wanted to go for a longer sequence, what might happen if Evolution's Manager tried to take on a more active management role to rein in Evolution's tendency to, I dunno, invent species like Vespa mandarinia^6c when bored? If you have different headcanons or scenarios you'd like to explore, by all means, go ahead - if you're having fun with weird or unlikely organism appearances, behaviors, and/or evolutionary paths, chances are I'll enjoy it too. For optional inspiration, check out the unsettling implications of sponges^6d, bacterial agency^6e, highlights from Wired's Absurd Creature of the Week archives, the Ig Nobel awards, and/or indignities suffered by beavers.



FOOTNOTES this year they're practically canonical!⁷ for the delight of footnotes

1a As Mary Robinette Kowal describes it in a Big Idea interview,

The magic in my world is called “glamour” and its practitioners are glamourists. It’s a largely illusionary form of magic and considered one of womanly arts like painting, music, or needlepoint. Like these other womanly arts, everyone has the potential to do it but practicing them takes training, energy, and time to which restricts these arts to the leisure class. A farmer’s wife might do folk glamour in the same way someone would beautify their home with folk art but in general wouldn’t have the energy to do much with it.

And glamour does take energy, the same way running up a hill takes energy. If one does too much glamour, or are wearing a corset, one might faint. [...] Because glamour is considered a woman’s art, I used language related to textiles for how glamourists describe what they are doing. They’ll talk about folds of glamour, or weaves or stitching, all of which are metaphors for the way that they manipulate the magic.

The kinds of art creation via glamour described in the series has its own (very rough & yet to be refined) parallel in emerging types of virtual reality art creation (How a Disney artist’s deceptive VR demo still heralds a new digital art future).

1b If you would like to duplicate the feat, check out Kowal's The Jane Austen Word List post. ("I’ve created a list of all the words that are in the collected works of Jane Austen to use for my spellcheck dictionary. It will flag any word that she didn’t use and I can then look those up to see if it was in use in 1815.")

1c Spouse team-ups for the win! Why isn't this more of a thing?

1d For the concept of "coming of place", I am indebted to Steven Popkes' essay Consideration of Works Past: Parzifal. Rather than quote massive chunks of it, I recommend reading it in full. (I don't agree with all of his arguments about 'coming of age' stories, but 'coming of place' is a handy term for narratives with a similar character arc direction I otherwise don't have a category word for.)

1e If you have experience with an unusual occupation or family history that doesn't fit neatly into typical history book generalizations, entwining that with glamour would be really neat. The example Kowal sets of extensive historical research and consulting with experts to get it right is beyond what I would hope for in a Yuletide fill, so if you already have bodies of specialist knowledge to draw on, why not work from there?

2a The already mythic origin story of Hamilton, as described in the NYT coverage, is that Lin-Manuel Miranda started reading the Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton, and in Hamilton, "he saw a figure he recognized: a word-drunk firebrand with untrammeled ambition, raw talent, an outsize ego and a lust for combat, verbal and otherwise. Miranda saw a rapper." What other historical figures are recognizable as word-drunk firebrands whose stories might be told in such a way? Catullus, perhaps? Al-Suyuti? Pauli Murray? Harlan Ellison? Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? Dr. Anna H. Shaw? etc.

2b For example, "Martha Washington named her feral tomcat after him!", while historically dubious, does lend itself to wonderful notions like Martha Washington entertaining herself by finding the perfect animal to name after each and every person in the play. What would she have chosen for Aaron Burr, self-described 'strange sort of animal'?

2c So, so many possible missing songs / scenes. For a sampling: between 'The World Was Wide Enough' and 'Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story', might Eliza sing 'It's Quiet Uptown (Reprise)', 'Hurricane (Reprise)', both, something else entirely? (I'm drawn to the obliterated place death keeps leaving in Eliza and Alexander's lives, and the temples they build / might have built there. The parallels between Washington's position in 'Meet Me Inside' and where Alexander is left after 'Stay Alive (Reprise)'—!) More poetry by Philip, or narrative from Theodosia the younger would be amazing. What would an A. Ham/John Laurens song based on their correspondence be like? If Sally Hemings ("Sally be a lamb, darlin’") gave herself the freedom to call Jefferson out (at least inside her own mind) on his inconsistencies, what would Sally's version of 'Burn' be like? etc. etc.

2d Angelica's line "I’ve been reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine /So men say that I’m intense or I’m insane" reminds me painfully of that Gregory Corso quote about the missing women of the Beat Generation ("There were women, they were there… their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ‘50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.” See Elise Cowen: The Female Beat Poet You’ve Never Heard Of for more). With that context in mind, it's worth noting that Angelica acts as Alexander's foil not just intellectually but also socially & sexually. 'Satisfied' establishes more than her ability to match wits with him on the same level; it and the previous 'The Schuyler Sisters' set a precedent for how a member of the Schuyler family (with all the privilege that entails) ought to behave when entertaining sexual prospects on the street or at a party. Angelica is no less a person of passions than Alexander ("Set my heart aflame, ev’ry part aflame"), but she's able to read him and Burr at a glance, and take into account not only the insidious NYC gossip and her family obligations, but also his likely motivations and Eliza's feelings. In contrast, Alexander comes across as distinctly naive when he finds himself in a variation of Angelica's position in 'Say No To This'; he fails to accurately read Maria's motivations (she's after him for his money, not his honor) or recognize the agency she wields, he fails to control his bodily passions, he fails to take into account the potential political ramifications and gossip he's laying himself and his family open to, and he fails to take into account Eliza's feelings. There's a particular ironic satisfaction in how Eliza's response in 'Burn' takes the flushing 'flames' of passion Alexander's looks and winning words have roused in her and Angelica's bodies, and turns that flame back on his source of power & preoccupation, i.e. his words, or more specifically a portion of the record of his words that he hopes will preserve his name in the historical narrative. Eliza has read him more thoroughly than he has read her.

2e For all that Eliza calls it 'the' narrative, and Washington speaks of History in the singular, the play actively subverts singular readings (or as Burr puts it, "History obliterates /In every picture it paints"). Within the flow of the play, various characters have internal narratives they create themselves or pick up from other characters as preoccupations (Burr's 'wait for it', Alexander's 'a million things I haven't done, just you wait', Eliza's 'how lucky we are to be alive right now', Angelica's 'never be satisfied', etc.) that feed back into conversations between individuals or as underlying characterization annotations of the dominant narrative of particular songs. The public narrative of the present within the play is debated by congresses, fed by gossip, shaped by newspapers, sometimes synonymous with 'the people', sometimes with the image presented of 'the colonies' / 'states' / U.S. abroad. The historical narratives of what comes next after game changing events, such as when someone retires or literally lacks breath to keep speaking (dies), add pressure of setting good precedent and/or finding a way that one's name or family name (legacies / names as synecdoche for people, that could be a whole extra footnote in itself) could remain active within latter narratives. tl;dr, written and spoken and unspoken stories & fragments of stories quite literally shape people's lives and decisions individually and nationally; people who question received narratives or conforming to the status quo ("there are things that the /Homilies and hymns won't teach ya"; "You would put your hands on mine" /"You changed the melody every time"; "We have to make this moment last, that’s plenty /Scratch that /This is not a moment, it’s the movement" etc.) may or may not turn the world upside by changing the game / rewriting the narrative, but their stories have the potential to.

2f While everyone writes letters and engages in conversation, men also use private duels as a way to control or test each other's narratives (force retractions or discredit the one speaking); verbal dueling in taverns and public meetings to connect, establish rep, and/or push directions; and essays and editorials published in newspapers under pseudonyms or their own names to influence public narratives; whereas women seem to act primarily as editors of the narrative through choices of curation (what should be archived?), documentation (interviews adding desired individual stories to the written narrative), and education (what knowledge & frames for interpreting narrative should children have? etc.). ETA: Oh, and let's not forget how women and men en masse use war to challenge & potentially change narratives on the nation level even as they leverage it to change and charge their own narratives (war is a force that gives us meaning...)

2g Within the canon of the play, 'Farmer Refuted' and 'Satisfied' give two different examples of external/public and internal/private complicating annotations to narratives, respectively. Outside it, I keep imagining what the genius.com annotations for the play would be like if they were all written by Laurens or Angelica (or both Laurens and Angelica?) or other characters from within the play. (Alexander would be a terror at annotating; he'd be like business owners on yelp, unable not to respond to any critique of his actions.)

3a I periodically poke at the internet to see if I can find more Seirei no Moribito-related things. My best find so far is an interview with the English translator, Cathy Hirano, which I highly recommend: Young Adult Fantasy in Translation: An Interview with Cathy Hirano.

4a See the short (and breathtaking) vid To Scale: The Solar System by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh. ("On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.")

4b More people should know about spacecraft Juno's mission! For evidence,

Juno will arrive at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, at 7:29 p.m. PDT (10:29 p.m. EDT).

Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011. Once in orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft will circle the planet 33 times, from pole to pole, and use its collection of eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover. Juno's science team will learn about Jupiter's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

Juno's name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.

As Jupiter's various moons are all named after mythological Jupiter's amorous conquests, a spacecraft bearing the name of his wife coming to investigate the state of affairs is, shall we say, suggestive.

4c The headlines of NASA's news releases about, e.g., recent New Horizon findings are a treasure trove of potential: Pluto’s Big Moon Charon Reveals a Colorful and Violent History, Charon’s Surprising, Youthful and Varied Terrain, Mapping Pluto’s ‘Broken Heart’, Perplexing Pluto: New ‘Snakeskin’ Image and More from New Horizons, etc. Or if you venture into latest news, gems like Researchers Catch Comet Lovejoy Giving Away Alcohol.

5a The book version is worth getting your hands on if you can — wild typography! additional panels and revisions! EVEN MORE FOOTNOTES, how could anyone resist? — but it does not include everything the online version does. In particular, you will miss out on a lot of monkey action if you only stick to the book.

5b I may have written the prompts as an ode to Mary Somerville to the tune of 'My Favorite Things'.

5c I have been slowly making my way through Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, which is awesome and so damn heartbreaking that I have to keep stopping and reading up on present-day female scientists like NASA's planetary protection officer (Catharine A. Conley is so awesome) to console myself that ever dwindling opportunities for Mitchell's students and her students' students is not the final word / end of the story, dammit. If I'm in a mood, I read Sofia Samatar's Girl Hours to twist the knife a little deeper instead.

5d For more about hidden dimensions of the universe that might exist, check out this review of Lisa Randall's mind-bending book Warped Passages. Randall's recent editorial about Dark Matter as generating space for discussion & exploration of other usually 'invisible' cultural forces is also awesome and potentially relevant. As for other specific pocket universes, Flatland: A romance of many dimensions is a classic, and Nick Sousanis' Unflattening is heading that way fast.

5e For construction of charts, Charles Babbage would probably approve of Nathan Yau's excellent Real Chart Rules to Follow.

5f Puns are wordplay. :D Have an episode of the Allusionist riddled with them.

5g For an introduction or inspiration, I've found Paul Ford's What is Code? to be thought-provoking. Also, xkcd is a code joke hoard of delight.

5h I <3 historical mechanical diagrams. For aid in interpretation, howstuffworks.com has many resources, e.g. How Gears Work.

5i Have a nice roundup of resources relating to Victorian England courtesy of the Charles Booth Archive Online. And for the heck of it, an index of digitized images that include sketches re: the 1851 Exhibition — John Leech Sketches from 1851.

5j Math <3 <3 <3. I suspect more people would feel the same if they knew There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs. Things get odd, to say the least, when one starts contemplating quantities on scales near Graham's number. I am easily entranced entertained by phenomena like Plants do sums to get through the night, simple if-then rules for complex animal behavior like swarms, and the metaphoric possibilities of increasing cell size decreasing the metabolic cost of more units of code (How did animals end up with such bloated genomes?).

5k It's historically appropriate! From p.234 of "Understanding the Victorians" by Susie Steinbach (see google books for free access to most of the chapter on science, Chpt. 13, Vestiges and Origins):

One way Victorian science was communicated — and consumed — was as spectacle. As entertainment, scientific exhibitions and demonstrations were competing with artistic, literary, and other displays for audiences' attention and were often very theatrical.

5l In addition to my own interest in science & poetry, Lovelace's strict mathematical upbringing and her inherited penchant for poetry offer opportunities to play with (very much still relevant) Victorian hangups about rationality and irrationality. More generally, both Lovelace and Babbage are generally acting within the pocket universe to effect increasing systematization, efficiency and automation; in our contemporary 'Information Age', questions of efficiency vs. meaningful inefficiencies are more relevant than ever. Do we need some 'noise' in our systems (biological and otherwise) for them to function without constantly getting stuck or stagnant because input is Wrong? Or in other words, when are autopilots & algorithms useful, and when might we want to engineer pause points for potentially changing scripts or inventing new ones?

6a "...one of my favorite ways to get across excited jazz hands about SCIENCE and how weird & awesome & fascinating the universe is when you pay close attention to it. Often found in further combination with #life more surreal, when emphasizing surrealness of real." (navel-gazing source)

6b the podcasts 99% Invisible and Song Exploder are great examples of this.

6c "Evolution, your new hornets are killing all the local bees. We need the bees." "I can fix that!" Later "Look look, I taught the bees to mob hornet scouts and fry them to death in a vibrating ball of doom. Isn't that so cool?" "That's pretty cool. I still haven't forgiven you for the hornets."

6d Sponges, man. From Ed Yong's Consider the Sponge:

...this narrative shatters if ctenophores branched off first. It could mean that they evolved nervous systems independently from all other animals, including us. Meanwhile, sponges either never developed true nerves or started off with nerves and lost them (after all, what need does a sedentary filter feeder have for such an extravagance?).

This is a much tougher reality to accept. The idea of one group of supposedly primitive animals going off-script and inventing a different nervous system, and then a second group actually losing theirs, is practically unconscionable.

6e For a sampling, see Linkspam Is All About Microbial Ecology.

7 As Sydney Padua herself notes, "Ada Lovelace is celebrated for writing footnotes extending to 3 times the length of the work footnoted; a practice continued in this comic."

Comments

[luzula]

Ha ha, your footnotes. *snorts* I have just obtained the Lovelace and Babbage comic book and am looking forward to reading it. Also, I have only read the first of the Kowal books; I had no idea there were so many! Hmm, maybe I should read more.

[jjhunter]

I do enjoy having meta fun with form when it comes to seeding thematic possibilities. :D Between the examples set by Ada Lovelace & Sydney Padua, and having variants on annotating the narrative on my mind, I'm not surprised I ended up writing a deluge of footnotes this year. A little sheepish, perhaps, but not surprised.

Hope you enjoy Lovelace & Babbage in book form! I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts when you're through. And yes, I recommend checking out more of the Glamourist History books (the audio book versions are excellent if you enjoy audio, by the way) - several of the subsequent books kept surprising me in ways I return to and continue to think about. I mean, any series that puts serious thought into worldbuilding around art-as-magic (and specifically, manipulation of electromagnetic spectrum such as visible light) is already going to be hitting happy buttons for me for reasons, but to also keep hitting little strings of frame-shifting perspective nuances and character evolutions-! I will read all day about people being competent (or developing competence), but to also get character arcs of normally competent people struggling to deal with their blind spots and learning to depend on others to help overcome them is a narrative trope I don't encounter done well very often, and it's rare for a series to give me more than one variation on it without the supposedly competent people coming off as actually incompetent / supremely unobservant.

...clearly I could just go on and on talking about any of these canons. Go forth and enjoy them! and come back soon to talk with me about them some more.

[luzula]

The first Glamourist book was enjoyable, but it does have a fairly standard romance novel plot, even if it does fun things with it. So yes, I'll be interested to see where the characters go after that!

[luzula]

I have now started on Lovelace and Babbage. The footnotes of her footnotes have footnotes! ♥

[jjhunter]

The footnotes are amazing. Wait until you get to the parts where the characters in the comic panels start interacting with the footnotes! No opportunity for meta fun with footnotes left fallow! Cartoonist comments on history & history comments back! The singularity of hilarity is surely soon upon us! etc. etc.

You could say the footnotes add a whole extra dimension to the pocket universe metaphor...

[luzula]

"A Monument to Science and a Warning to Capitalists" - what an awesome thing to have written in your obituary! : D (Isambard Kingdom Brunel--although it seems that was not because he was against capitalism, more that his projects ruined them. Still awesome, though!)

[jjhunter]

Tombstones: One More Footnote For the Ages

:D

[brainwane]

May I link to this in hamiltunes?

[jjhunter]

Sure! I'd be delighted. Please consider this an open invitation for discussion here or elsewhere on any or all of the points I raised, however critical, tangential or whimsical - like Washington, I'm conscious of my defects. I'd very much enjoy hearing what others think. more opportunities to talk about Hamilton ftw!

[brainwane]

Thanks! Done!