Women's History Month: Glenda Larke

Glenda is one of several friends who said "I really shouldn't be writing a post for you - I'm not interesting enough." Yet Glenda works in rainforest conservation and writes top-notch fantasy novels. I found her view of herself rather astonishing at first and then I realised it's why we need Women's History Month. We need to be able to see women like Glenda, to appreciate their lives and their work, even if they themselves think "Pfft, I'm just ordinary." If you want a bio (to prove that Glenda would have to work very hard to be uninteresting, you can find one here. In a perfect world, we'd all appreciate our own personalities and lives and talents, but in this imperfect world, at least we can appreciate the personalities lives and talents of other women.

I’m here under false pretences. Gillian wants blog posts from interesting women and I don’t think I am. Well, I shan’t dispute the “woman” part; it’s the “interesting” I have an issue with. I spend most of my days sitting in front of a computer, hardly a world-shaking existence. But I suppose I have led an unusual life. I blame my childhood and a love of reading for that.

I was brought up on a farm without playmates, pre-TV. (Pre-plastic of any kind, if you can imagine that…) So I lived in books and in my imagination. Part of my pre-teen reading was a stack of tattered National Geographics – all in black-and-white with the index on the cover instead of a photo. They were piled up in the wooden wash-house on the other side of the back lawn, just the place for a quiet read when there were chores to be done. Talk about telling a farm kid there were places to go and things to do that didn’t involve housework…

At nineteen, I stuffed all the money I had (money earned from making beds and cleaning loos in a holiday hostel on an island) in my pocket (no ATMs or credit cards back then), and headed off to New Zealand for a three month hitch-hiking holiday. Alone. Geez, it’s a wonder my mother didn’t have a heart attack. I came home unscathed, but with the certain knowledge that I wanted to see more of the world.

As a child, entertainment was scarce – no TV, films, dance lessons, records. Nothing but books. Many of these had the pages out of sequence, or printed upside down. (My aunt worked at a printers, and we were given all the books they messed up.) If I ran out of reading matter, then there was my imagination. And that was where the making up stories came from, along with the certain knowledge that one day I would be a writer of fiction.

And then I married. A foreigner, a Muslim, a scientist, an Asian – all the things I wasn’t. (Talk about exposing a wannabe fantasy novelist to the scaffolding needed for world-building! I couldn’t have done anything better.)

Does that make me an interesting person? No, I don’t think so. But it certainly gave me an opportunity to see interesting places and meet people vastly different to myself.

I’ve done interesting things, or more often had interesting things happen to me. I’ve climbed mountains, skin-dived with seals and penguins, been followed by a wild tiger, been chased by irate wasps through a mangrove swamp, been surrounded by an Australian bushfire, camped on the beach of a uninhabited tropical island, been on a fishing boat in the Malacca Straits that promptly started sinking as we left the coast behind, ceremonially slipped the engagement ring on the finger of a young woman, been attacked by a skua with the wingspan of a roc, watched the sunrise from the top of Kinabalu, seen the midnight sun from my tent, killed a cobra in my house, sat next to prime ministers, seen with my own eyes a revolution play out in the streets of a city while a cabinet minister took us out to dinner and pretended nothing was wrong, chatted to a queen, tramped the Headhunters’ Trail in Borneo and the Arctic taiga and the Hungarian steppes, watched the sea birds twist and turn on a far-off tropical atoll in the middle of the South China Sea…

Does any of that make me an interesting person? No, I don’t think so. In fact, it might well make me a crashing bore who talks too much…

But it does make me a lucky person. And oh, what a store of interesting memories I have to draw on - and mangle - for my fiction.

More Angry Robot! (Dan Abnett's Embedded)

Today was unexpectedly warped, so, once I'd done my can't-do-without work, I turned to my next Angry Robot e-review book. It was Dan Abnett's Embedded. The last book I read of Abnett's was Triumff, which is one of Life's Great Books of Fun (and wonderfully satirical).

Embedded is not Triumff. Triumff is a rare silly book that's also serious and good at history in precisely the same way that The Mikado is understanding about Japan - it's lovely social commentary of the best and most evil variety, but not about the precise subjects that it announces it's about. Instead of mocking historical fantasy and derring-do, Embedded begins by mocking SF and derring-do. Also other things. Many other things. Often at once. That's how it starts, anyhow. It does get serious and very dark as it progresses. It reprises a bit of our history (in SFnal terms) that I'm very glad we're no longer having to deal with. That's one thing about Embedded, there's not much new in it. But then, there doesn't have to be.

Abnett puts his universe for Embedded together here the way he puts his London together in Triumff: lots of words and ideas thrown at it, often lyrically or wittily, but the reader's picture comes from the abundance. This means that neither Embedded nor Triumff are books you want to read when you're likely to be distracted: you'll miss stuff. Although it's easy to be distracted by certain resemblances to a certain film with big blue aliens or a certain other film with... And this is part of Abnett's style. Or the twistyiness of his brain, perhaps. It makes reading more fun, but also, on occasion, like running a maze with a bull following and really important signs that contain crucial information just flickering past.

There are cute touches. A linguistic patch* that gives you a safe replacement for all swearing, including a special 'trademarked' sound at the end (since the patch is sponsored, of course). The result of this is that every recognisable piece of bad language counts - we know who has been given the patch and who hasn't, and, of course, I want to know why. It's the sort of novel where 'want to know' becomes very important and where cute touches ought to build up and up and become something decidedly uncute.

Does the cute stuff build up? I'm glad you asked: it does. What does it build up to? I'm glad you asked…and I'm not going to tell you. Embedded is a bit of a Transformer, turning into hard SF, with hard-nosed characters, and hard choices. It goes places. For certain. When the serious stuff starts, when things get tough, there are fewer cute things. Which is a pity. But it means that the pace picks up. And up. And up. It reminds me of Jeff VanderMeer writing Predator, to be honest.

This is a book I can sum up in a single sentence. The more you know about SF and about war movies, the more this novel will hold for you, but even if you don't know a single thing, it will be a great romp.

This is a very good book with a very dark underbelly. How good is it? Good enough so that I read it anyway today - 'anyway' - well, today was as bad as yesterday was good. Evil plus physical pain (to add spice to the mix - I took regular 'eyes can't see' breaks) and I still had to finish it and to tell you: read it**.



PS I'm developing a set of perfect panels for SF conventions. I want to put Jeff VanderMeer, Tessa Kum and Dan Abnett on the same panel. It would be a question of adding water, stirring (a lot of stirring, Australian-style) and then see what interesting explosions eventuate. If water doesn't work, then I would add alcohol instead.

PPS Did you see how I embedded the title? That was my single almost-clever thing for the day.



*abbreviated to 'ling patch' - which was perhaps unfortunate, because I kept visualising fish.

**Not a book for people who like happy bunnies frolicking in green pastures full of sunbright daisies. I need to make this disclaimer about most Angry Robot books. Maybe all of them. Increasingly, they fail on the sweetness and light and innocent joy front. Thank goodness their darkness is so very adorable.***

***Today is a footnote day. If I must suffer then everyone else must also needs suffer.