Oh, I didn’t think your sex was a secret, I just didn’t know whether to call you NK or Nora on my blog. Usually I make an effort to address people here however they self-identify, but “The Korean” or, “A Reader Who Disagrees” work when I don’t know who it is. When I do know, then usually my first thought it to use their first name, is all.

Yeah, the thing I liked about the Pagels is that she gets into the various early Christian branches, including several that were lopped straight off. As I see it, gender’s only a part of it; the Early Church was a lot less controlled and uncentralizable, so you had all kinds of mystic beliefs and rituals and stuff, and it was all flowing back and forth. The thing being that a lot of the wilder and more imaginative mystic groups were, well, sort of disorganized and fragmented, while the more humorless and control-oriented types quickly organized. Maybe I’m just mapping the contemporary left and right onto it, but I did get the feeling that it was sort of like a kind of slow-motion Kristallnacht that eliminated any group (and their texts) who might have had a softening effect on the more authoritarian, sexist, and brutal elements within the church.

That said, hmmm. Female armies haven’t been that common, have they? I know female soldiers provided some advantage in the Taiping Rebellion, because the rebels were mostly Hakka and Hakka women had unbound feet (and unlike the better-off Chinese women, they could march); but I have to wonder if doctrinal changes would really move women to such a prominent place in the military of Europe. One example is in Sikhism, which explicitly declared women equal to men and thus allowed to participate in war and the military, but I don’t think there was a massive swell of women inwards after that. It seems to me once you have really big empires (Roman, Chinese, Mongol, etc) women seem to ted to get relegated to producing more little warriors — and so many of those died off in childbirth I wonder if there were enough left over to make a widows’ army. (Certainly, from the various timelines on Wikipedia, it seems women did play more of a role in the military in ancient times, and less and less until the present, where again they get an expanded role.)

Hmmm. Well, it seems to me you could probably find a way to work that alt-Christianity angle into a story with the ring around Earth. (I was thinking of a still-pagan Europe and their mythology about the ring, myself.) :)

A shared world thing about alt-Christianity, it could be interesting also. But I’ve no idea what I would write. I’d probably be plumbing some other bit of history, though… something like, say, Kierkegaard’s religious rants in this other setting, or something.

Nora’s fine. I’m “out” as a girl. =) Glad you’re feeling better!

Not sure about the New Readercon, but ordinarily pretty much all of Readercon is academic-oriented; the panels are geared towards a lit-crit-savvy audience. (Which is kind of an issue if you’re talking about untrained Oprah-book-club type “readers”, but that’s a rant for a different day.) But if you’re asking if they encourage academic paper reading? I’m not sure they ever did that. Wiscon does, though. There’s also ICFA, which seems to also be wholly academic, and which I’m planning to go to for the first time this year. I’ll let you know how it is, if you can’t make it.

Thanks for the rec on The Gnostic Gospels! Y’know, your mention of an alternate Christiandom is making my eyes glaze over with story ideas. An alternate universe in which different books were incorporated into the “main” Bible, or holy books of the other Big Three (four?) religions. What would our modern world have been like if the book of Judith had been considered canonical, with its kickass female protagonist? I could see early Christian kingdoms defended by armies of “Judiths”, with military service as a way for widows to support themselves… medieval women who want to remain chaste having either the nunnery or the army to turn to… female generals helping to end WWII or prolong Vietnam… a modern-day draft for young men and middle-aged women… whoa, I gotta write that one down. Or maybe we could do a shared-universe thing, invite the other LaunchPadians in on it. =)

Hmm. Well, check out the essay and let me know what you think sometime, if you like. I’m curious whether my vague memories (of Saito as a very sympathetic and defensive lover of all things otaku, as well as an academic) is erroneous.

As for the theistic refutations, they seem equally applicable to any major, imperialized religion, it seems to me: Islam, for example, to randomly choose the example in which I’m immersed right now. Have you read Elaine Pagels? Her The Gnostic Gospels is a pretty interesting look at some of the groups and texts that were smashed and stamped out in the formation of Christianity as we know it, and gets me thinking as much about what an alternate (and more diverse) Christendom might have looked like as Ezra Pound’s crazy megapoem got me thinking about how a truly pagan, unChristianized Europe might have turned out.

Looking forward to the drink at a con, though it might be a while yet… I can’t go somewhere during semester without funding unless they have an academic panel. Maybe Wiscon, or… does Readercon have academic track? I think not anymore. Hmmm.

And yeah, I’m feeling a lot better, thanks for asking! The fever and the runs have mostly passed, and now I’m just fighting my way out from under that freelance gig I need to finish ASAP so I can get onto my debut novel. :)

OK, I get you. Yes, the definition of yaoi has escaped its original boundaries, particularly in is American application (where it’s used as a euphemism for “hardcore” male/male as opposed to the softer-core “boy’s love” — the terms aren’t used the same way in Japan at all, as I understand it; in Japan yaoi is amateur/fan-made, BL is commercial, plain and simple). But there’s still supposed to be a “gonzo”/anything goes element to it, which leads to those WTF pairings you described. (But I would be VERY leery of defining the genre by those moments; I think they’re outliers. I am also similarly leery of any essay about a by-women, for-women genre that’s written by a man. They almost never Get It, and almost always get sidetracked by the most prurient and shocking bits of the field. But I’ll try to track it down to read.)

I think there are refutations of Christianity throughout the book, actually. =) And support for it as well. Specifically the ways in which Christianity has been warped by those who would use it for power, and imposed on non-Christian people against their will. Learning about the Apocrypha blew my mind when I realized just how much the Christianity I’d been raised with had been folded/spindled/mutilated. So I wanted to capture some of that.

But specific to the male/male element (which, remember, is actually male/male/female — a trinity, hint hint)… weellll, let’s talk about that at the next World whatever Con, over a drink. I’d rather not put that in writing! =)

Hey, now that you mention the meaning of yaoi I agree, it’s perhaps the wrong word… though I was also under the impression — I think from an essay by Saito Tamaki titled “Otaku Sexuality” (which I read in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams), yaoi had kind of branched out beyond that, to include all kinds of other narratives including some where sexuality was merely implied, and spun off genres where cute little boys were just friends… and also others where naked babies had sex with adult men or women. It’s all quite fuzzy in my memory, though, as an academic discussion of an alien culture sometimes becomes. (And because I was less interested in the otaku themselves than in Saito’s strategy by making the consumers of a genre (and their psychology, ostensible among the public and intrinsic as manifested in their subculture’s language, rituals, and interests) central to his explanation of Japanese speculative fiction genres… something I think Western SF critics might benefit from. Either way, I agree that all the sex, even the male-male sex, advances the plot, characters, or even at times the setting. To be honest, I think yaoi came to mind because the male-male scenes seemed more likely to excite your [straight] female readership than to the [straight] male readership, in a way vaguely like what yaoi apparently does. (No complaints here: there’s lots of narratives using female-female to appeal to straight male readers, so why not?)

Anyway, I laughed when you mention Shiv’s flaming lingam — as I’m reading Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days at the moment, and Shiv comes up often. I was looking up hijra to see how much of it was McDonald’s invention, and discovered Shiv is one of two deities revered by that group. Not to map WEstern terms onto them, but to simplify, traditional Indian transsexuals/eunuchs worshipping a god one of whose major iconographic images is a pahllus? Wow. The human mind is interesting, no?

I’m curious about whether there is a refutation of Christianity elsewhere in the text, in the passage I mentioned, but I won’t ask since this is, after all, a review. :) Maybe over beer sometime.

No worries, the review is my honest opinion and I’m glad to put it out there. Hope it’s not too full of typos, given my current condition. (And the fact it wasn’t supposed to be posted… it went up by accident and I thought it wasn’t online yet; I was meaning to email you after posting it — after another proofread, actually. Thank goodness you’re watching your blog’s trackbacks!)

This post was mentioned on Twitter by nkjemisin: Wow, fantastic and THOROUGH review of 100K by bud Gord Sellar: http://bit.ly/7Pd9MU…

The only quibble I would have with any part of this review would be your mention of yaoi, and that’s only because I’m a pedant. Yaoi, by definition (using the Japanese definition), means “no point, no meaning” — cracksmut for the sake of cracksmut, in other words. In this case there was definitely a point and meaning. …But also, I will admit, I find ancient mythology incredibly hot! Isis desperately cobbling together a dildo for her undead husband… Zeus sexing everything that held still… Shiva’s giant flaming lingam… if you think about it, ancient pantheons were chock full of this god jumping that god or another, and creating universes at the moment of orgasm. So there wasn’t so much a refutation of Christianity in what I did with 100K, as a gleeful embrace of pantheism, warts and dildos and all.

Anyway, thanks again for the great review. =)