Novel of the week: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

My new "novel of the week" review should have been written weeks ago. Months ago. I've been epically derelict in not reviewing the epic fantasy The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu, which is one of the best novels I've read this year.

I'm usually not a fan of epic fantasies. Not merely because so many of them are boring Tolkien retreads where moral dilemmas are never truly a dilemma. Or that so many epic fantasies adhere to absolute rights and wrongs which never enter those troubling moral gray zones of real life. Or that the settings of these fantasies are often epic only in their authors' minds as they endlessly copy from a medieval Europe which never truly existed.

I don't dislike most epic fantasies for any one of those reasons — it's for all of those reasons. A combined irritation, if you will, at the state of the fantasy landscape bequeathed to us by a half-century of epic fantasy failures.

Thankfully, Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings avoids these issues as he stakes out his own ideas and beliefs on what an epic fantasy should be. Inspired in part by Chinese history and in larger parts by our modern world, Liu has created a fantasy unlike any other. The story is fast paced with plenty of endearing and believable characters, filled with engrossing action, and features an exciting mashup of steampunk elements, gods and magic.

I'm tempted to go on about the novel, but as I said I should have reviewed Liu's novel months ago. By now many others have given far better reviews than I ever could. (For one of the most insightful reviews, check out Andrew Liptak's take at io9.)  My short review is here to simply tell everyone that I really enjoyed The Grace of Kings and that the novel is a serious contender to make my Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy shortlists.

Review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens from a kid who ran away to see the first Star Wars film

Before any science fiction fan nitpicks to death my Amber Alert tweet, yes, I'm aware Amber Alerts didn't appear until two decades after Star Wars: A New Hope arrival in theaters. It's a joke!

The ancestry of a 21st century multi-racial American family

My wife identifies as African American and was born and raised in Ohio. I identify as white and was born and raised in Alabama. We met while serving together in the Peace Corps in Thailand.

As our kids grow older we've become fascinated by our family's ancestry, so we recently completed autosomal DNA tests to fill in the gaps on our family trees. The results came in today.

My ancestry breaks down as 3% from Africa (divided between northern Africa and Mali), 95% from Europe (with Great Britain at 30%, Europe West at 26%, Ireland at 17%, Scandinavia at 13%, and other regions like Greece and Italy at 9%), and the Middle East at 2%.

Here's my ancestry map. The darker the shading the more ancestry I have from that region. Outlined regions indicate lower percentages and trace readings.

Jason's ancestry map. The darker the shading the more ancestry from that region. Outlined regions indicate lower percentages and trace readings.

Jason's ancestry map. The darker the shading the more ancestry from that region. Outlined regions indicate lower percentages and trace readings.

My wife's ancestry breaks down as 46% from Africa (with Cameroon/Congo at 14%, Nigeria at 11%, Senegal at 10%, and other regions at 11%), 13% from Asia (with India at 11% and other regions making up the remainder), Europe at 38% (with Ireland at 16%. Europe West at 13%, and other regions at 9%), and Pacific Islanders at 2% and trace readings for other regions.

Here's my wife's ancestry map. 

My wife's ancestry map. Again, the darker the shading the more ancestry from that region. Outlined regions indicate lower percentages and trace readings.

My wife's ancestry map. Again, the darker the shading the more ancestry from that region. Outlined regions indicate lower percentages and trace readings.

A lot of this matches up with what we already know from our family histories, but a good bit doesn't. My wife didn't know about her ancestors from the Asian region. I didn't know about the small amounts of African/Middle East ancestry, although since I'm from the American South I'm not overly shocked. We're also amused that we share almost identical ancestry percentages from Ireland.

So what do these percentages mean? Well, one way of looking at this is to compare the percentages of DNA we all share with our recent ancestors. Here's that breakdown:

  • Parents: We share exactly 50% of our DNA with each parent
  • Grandparents: 25% for each grandparent
  • Great-grandparents: 12.5%
  • Great-great-grandparents: 6.25% 
  • Great-great-great-grandparents: 3.13%
  • Great-great-great-great-grandparents: 1.56%

If you have 3% ancestry from a region that could mean one of your great-great-great-grandparents lived there. Or it could mean many ancestors had parts of their ancestry from there. Or it could even result from the margin of error of the DNA test (the lower the percentage the greater the chance of an error).

Of course, the fun part of human ancestry is that you don't have to go back very far to discover that all people are related. If you go back 10 generations, say around 200 years, you have 512 ancestors. If you could track your family tree back 600 years or a mere 30 generations, you'd discover that you have more than 500 million ancestors, or more people than lived in the world at that time.

Obviously we can't be descended from more people than existed at a time, which means everyone's family trees branch in and out of themselves. It also means the next time someone says they're descended from William the Conqueror or Genghis Khan or Cleopatra you can simply tell them so are you.

I understand the limitations of DNA tests, but they are still fascinating tools to explore our shared histories. Especially when you're part of a multi-racial family in the 21st century.

 

Story of the week: "An Ocean of Eyes" by Cassandra Khaw (with a few words about Lovecraft's influence)

My new story of the week is "An Ocean of Eyes" by Cassandra Khaw from The Dark, an excellent magazine of subtle horror and dark fantasy. Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story "The Cats of Ulthar," Khaw's story explores the modern town of Ulthar as seen through the interactions between an obnoxious womanizing tourist and Sigrid, a local woman he desperately wants to claim as his own.

The story is disturbing even if you aren't familiar with Lovecraft's original tale. Khaw's story is also an excellent exploration of obsession and how far too many people are willing to go to force their desires onto others — even when that desire is neither wanted nor reciprocated. As the tourist says in explanation of his increasingly desperate actions, “All maybes become a yes."

Except they don't. Or they shouldn't. As Khaw showcases so perfectly.

On a side note, there has been a lot of silly commentary lately about the decision to remove Lovecraft's image from the World Fantasy Award statue, with a few extreme critics like S. T. Joshi even saying that the "changing of the award is an implicit rejection of Lovecraft’s literary status." Which is, of course, nonsense. Lovecraft's influence on dark fantasy and horror isn't going to disappear merely because his likeness no longer resides on an award which makes a claim to represent the entire world of fantasy literature. 

Lovecraft's influence derives directly from the many authors over the decades who have done like Cassandra Khaw and written and played in his world. Lovecraft was not a great literary wordsmith — as proof, read "The Cats of Ulthar," which is more an idea of a story, a summary of a story, than a true story with fleshed-out characters, a developed plot, and rising and falling action. But his legacy is secure because of all the authors and creators who took his ideas and ran with them.

Despite what critics like Joshi say, most people are able to appreciate Lovecraft's influence on horror and fantasy while also knowing that Lovecraft is not an appropriate figure to represent all that horror and fantasy can be in this day and age.

No matter the desire of these critics to force the world to stay the same, change has happened. And that is good.

Stop Duotrope's attempt to own authors' personal submission data

Years ago I praised Duotrope's website, finding it a useful way for authors to track submissions and research thousands of writing markets. In many ways Duotrope began as an online alternative to the long-running Writer's Market series of books, with the added benefit that Duotrope compiled users' submission data, enabling them to create statistical reports on markets. Writers found this data invaluable and many of us, including myself, worshipped at the Duotrope altar.

After starting life as a donation-supported resource for writers, Duotrope eventually changed to a subscription-based website. While I disagreed with this change I understood it. Even though I drifted away from using Duotrope for my own submissions I still recommended the site to other writers.

I've now come full-circle. I'm currently writing so many short stories that I again need an online submission-tracking system. However, when I checked out Duotrope to see if I wanted to subscribe to their system I discovered something disturbing.

According to Duotrope's terms of service, "Any data downloaded from this website, including but not limited to submission histories, is strictly for personal use and may not be shared with any third parties or used for commercial purposes."

What does this mean? It means that if you upload your submission information to Duotrope, you no longer have the right to use your own data as you see fit. You can't use the data to write an article about submissions for a magazine or upload your data to another online submission system such as the site run by Writer's Market. Basically, once you use Duotrope you can't leave and take your data elsewhere.

Duotrope also attempts to make a blatant copyright grab, with their terms stating "The website and its database are also protected as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and treaties. All individual articles, pages and other elements making up the website are also copyrighted works. Use of any of these original works without written permission of Duotrope LLC is expressly forbidden."

Duotrope is skating on thin ice here because you can't copyright data. But combine this copyright statement with their terms of use for the data and Duotrope is essentially saying they own any submission data uploaded to their system by authors.

I hope Duotrope will clarify the language in their terms of service and state clearly that authors who use their system retain all rights to their own personal submission data, including the right to take their data to other submission systems is they choose.

Duotrope's is valuable because of the authors entering data into their systems. Without a large sampling of authors using their system, their statistics become worthless.

Until Duotrope clarifies this situation, and affirms that their users own their personal submission data and can do with it as they desire, I suggest authors avoid this website.
 

Update: Someone pointed out to me that website terms of service are the legal equivalent of a signed contract. One more reason Duotrope needs to change these terms.