a collection of reference and inspiration -
personal art blog marblemartin.tumblr.com - icon by cryptidclub
otonin: Hello! I loved Gideon the Ninth so much!! and would like to draw fan art, would you mind sharing any helpful summaries of what each character looks like? or must us fans hunt through the book for every offhand line of description? (not that I'm not planning on rereading it anyway)
I have let myself drift back onto Tumblr after two weeks, am deeply affrighted and excited at the idea that anyone has drawn my kids (I had an AMA on Reddit and as said there, my editor every so often hollered into my inbox about amazing shit people were doing, but I was too busy complaining back to him that my face had gone numb and that I no longer slept, but instead the darkness of the grave claimed me for four to five hours each night). Thank you so much to anyone who has already done this. Many people on my team have yelled and yelled.
Back early on in the piece I made a document for him about what characters looked like in terms of basic ideas/outlines for copyediting, covers and sense purposes, and I’ve dug out that document and slapped it up here for general delectation. As a note: I imagine specific things when it comes to my characters (I am a Kiwi: I write Kiwis In Space as a default) but as I have nothing but joy in my heart for how anyone would want to draw these characters, feel free to glance over this, then toss it out the window. It would bring tears of beauty to my eyes if anyone was like “Yes, but when I was reading I imagined Naberius Tern as a huge monitor lizard,” because absolutely yes, Naberius Tern was just a huge monitor lizard, godspeed.
I had only described below the specific cavalier-necromancer pairs, so that’s what you’ll find below, sorry if anyone wanted Teacher.
I’ve seen a lot of Short, Introductory, Beginner’s reading lists with ten or twenty links, and, well, they’re intimidating. While you might not want to leave off something important, if everyone gets scared off by your list, nobody reads anything. So, let’s try something a bit more approachable! Here are three easy-to-read works.
If you’re new to communism, this short-ish work will introduce you to… the principles of communism! Engels’s writing style can be a bit difficult, and he references a lot of old-timey stuff (what’s a spinning-jenny?), but it’s a good introduction!
If you like the thought of communism, but are wary of ‘authoritarian’ or ‘totalitarian’ communism, this very short (one page!) text might help you understand why historically, communists have supported those measures (hint: if they just wanted power, they wouldn’t be siding with the powerless!).
Quotations from Chairman Mao, while longer than the last two works, is made up of small, self-contained… quotations, which are individually easy to read (and reread), and if you’re interested in learning more about a topic, you can always check out the work the quote is referenced from. This ‘little red book’ discusses communist perspectives on topics ranging from education, the military, and study, to self-criticism and culture.
Mao’s writing style is, I find, much easier to read, and the little red book covers such a wide range of topics that, if you only try to read one of these, I’d say to try this one. If feudal peasants were able to study and understand it, so can you!
I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.
The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.
Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”
We stan an icon.
I never knew the whole quote or its circumstances. Lord she was amazing.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” – Ursula K LeGuin
