#or their families killed and enslaved

[sarafangirlart]

Imagine if I made an au where Perseus adopts Medusa’s kids, ppl will rightfully call me deluded bc he literally killed their mom and Medusa’s sisters are right there and deserve to keep whatever they have left of their sister. This is how stupid y’all’s au where Odysseus adopts Astyanax.

[bakedcrossaintt]

is anyone else so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so sad about beta or is that just me

[scattered-winter]

it's about knowing someone so well that you know you can raise a child with them. it's about suffering so much and losing everything you once loved as a child but building a world where your child would never have that happen to them. it's about spending your life as a tragic story and making a conscious decision to close the book and find peace. and most of all it's about raising your kid with the person you've been through seven different kinds of hell with and knowing that your kid will only know about it from stories, not from experiencing it themselves

the powerful urge to give all my traumatized ocs kids after the war is over both as a sign that they have recovered enough to care for another human being and as a sign that they feel safe enough to raise children in a world they know will be better to the kids than it was to them

[not-so-superheroine]

Since it's not going in my article due to space constraints, i'll share a bit about Jane Manning James here. It won't be superfleshed out atm bc it got cut. I plan to do more later. As I am *Reorganized*, writing this for a Community of Christ publication, i researched Ld-S shared history to the point of Nauvoo. my article doesn't follow west (technically). the main resource was an LDS one (thank you v much for your freely available archive) asking about her time with the prophet of the Restoration.

Jane Manning James

A significant Black Latter Day Saint from the early church was Jane Manning James. A woman from Connecticut notably made the walk from Buffalo, New York to Nauvoo, Illinois on foot, with most of her family. This was only after being separated from the group of recently converted latter day saints in Buffalo, possibly due to their race. Jane was baptized in 1842 by missionaries in her home state of Connecticut. She recorded these things about her journey and arrival to Nauvoo and her faith when asked to recall her life living with Joseph Smith in 1905.

“When I went there [Nauvoo] I only had two things on me, no shoes nor stockings, wore them all out on the road… They [Joseph and Emma] was looking for us because I wrote them a letter. There was eight of us, my mother and two sisters and a brother and sister-in-law, and we had two children, one they had to carry all the way there, and we traveled a thousand miles.”

She was sure in her belief of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Modern Prophecy. She says in her recollection, after seeing that Joseph Smith Jr was indeed the man in her vision in Connecticut, that “This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and there will never be any other on earth. It has come to stay.” Sister James would later go west with the saints under the leadership of then Apostle Brigham Young.

--------

me tumblr posting again:

thank you for the example set Sister James on faith, dedication, and perseverance. She also had spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongue and faith healing. She believed following the gospel, knowing it was a key to a better way of living life (for her.) it wasn't easy for her, and yet, i think the faith community i observe today (and mormonism in general) is better, just for her having lived it.

may she be at peace, and in a manner God, Sister Jane herself, and her family she led that meant so very much to her, see fit.

[kyros-tha-soldier]

HE DOESN'T KNOW... OH GOD HE DOESN'T FUCKING KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON HE'S JUST A LITTLE BABY

[purple--queen]

I do feel so sorry for Briseis. She was truley free for a moment just to get killed by a spear thrown by Achilles son

[suffarustuffaru]

so i was inspired by @zeivira

[thenixkat]

Ya know. I'm gonna assume that its less that ogres are rare and more that the local tallmen regularly kill and enslave them, break up their territories and steal their land

[kareenvorbarra]

hmmmmm ketil anime backstory bad

[barxism]

Hektor is by far and above the best character in the Iliad nobody even comes close

[kat-astrophic-todd]

Jujutsu Kaisen // Geto Suguru

[littlekidsteve]

Please I swear fucking vote as a brit I'm screaming at you to vote, as a person with black relatives living in your nazi fucking country VOTE. I don't give a fuck no more how let down by the system you are if you don't vote worst people will get people killed everywhere.

I don't give to fucking shits about how you feel no more om fucking frightened for the lives of my family and even myself because if Trump wins the UK government will follow in the US fascism (we saw it once and it will happen again)

Also Trump will destroy small island with global boiling, will kill native people in his own country and others, oh you think you safe cuz you're white ahahahahahah fuck you he'll find away to dispose of you too. He hates the poor, queer, and disabled amongst you.

So im gonna say this once and say it loud.

SO FUCKING VOTE YOU SELFISH WANKERS!

i need people to understand that truly? things can get worse. you are not making a statement by not voting/voting third party, you are just letting people more vulnerable than you suffer. fucking vote

[silvermediabox]

[gemstarb]

Oh the Irony....

[mademoiselle-crabaletta]

Once you start noticing the passive voice being used for men's actions, you can't unsee it. In history class it was always "women weren't seen as equal human beings" or "women weren't able to own property or have jobs or get education" rather than men legally considered women their property and banned them from work, school, and property rights.

In the news it's always "girl raped in park" or "woman killed in home" which would make some sense if the perpetrator was unknown, but they often have already caught the culprit by the time the article comes out and it's always a man.

The amount of times I've seen a headline about a man murdering his entire family before killing himself being titled "man commits suicide after family is killed" with a nice little family photo of them is absolutely absurd.

Hell, just last night I saw an article titled, "3 kids killed after mom let ex-partner take them to get food." Her male ex took the kids to get food and murdered them before killing himself. Not only is the headline passive, but it also phrases it in a way that makes the mother somehow look guilty like she knew what he had planned or knew he was insane.

To top it off, people get really uncomfortable if you stop using the passive voice for this stuff. They start squirming if you straight up say "men wrote laws banning women from voting" even when that is literally what happened. BOTH men and women act this way. It's like we're all just supposed to pretend that rape, enslavement, murder, and other human rights violations against women just fell from the sky.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. For Winston, the world of 1984 is totalitarian: the Party knows all, controls all and misses nothing. To merely think a disloyal thought is to be doomed, because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent Party will sense the thought and mark you for torture and "vaporization."

Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.

Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.

Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

Julia is also perfectly positioned to uncover the vast blank spots in Winston's supposed intellectual curiosity, all the questions he doesn't ask – about her, about the Party, and about the world. I love this trope and used it myself, in Attack Surface, the third "Little Brother" book, which is told from the point of view of Marcus's frenemy Masha:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface

Through Julia, we come to understand the seemingly omniscient, omnipotent Party as fumbling sadists. The Thought Police are like MI5, an Island of Misfit Toys where the paranoid, the stupid, the vicious and the thuggish come together to ruin the lives of thousands, in such a chaotic and pointless manner that their victims find themselves spinning devastatingly clever explanations for their behavior:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

And, as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is a first-rate novel, expertly plotted, with fantastic, nail-biting suspense and many smart turns and clever phrases. Newman is doing Orwell, and, at times, outdoing him. In her hands, Orwell – like Winston – is revealed as a kind of overly credulous romantic who can't believe that anyone as obviously stupid and deranged as the state's representatives could be kicking his ass so very thoroughly.

This was, in many ways, the defining trauma and problem of Orwell's life, from his origin story, in which he is shot through the throat by a fascist: sniper during the Spanish Civil War:

https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html

To his final days, when he developed a foolish crush on a British state spy and tried to impress her by turning his erstwhile comrades in to her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Newman's feminist retelling of Orwell is as much about puncturing the myth of male competence as it is about revealing the inner life, agency, and personhood of swooning love-interests. As someone who loves Orwell – but not unconditionally – I was moved, impressed, and delighted by Julia.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic