#wuxia

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Hehe this is a good video and I wonder if any folks agree. She talks about how so many popular books these days, written by women, are often thinly disguised p**n.
Also another reader I stumbled on complained that fantasy books are now dominated by romantasy, and he desperately wants new, good solid fantasy novels but can't seem to find them. 🤔 (He's read all the fantasy there is, I think.)

I advised him to look east towards Asia, and asked him to explore the older novels.

On a personal note, I have kinda stopped reading new English fiction. As a fantasy and scifi reader I just don't find anything interesting to read so I'm now reading Chinese classics.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ffvRhsViyIQ

Ever read books about plot structures? Imagine being trained your whole life to write stories according to one culture’s storytelling rules—only to realize those rules don’t fit another culture’s way of telling fiction? This is what I realised when I started writing wuxia and xianxia stories - genres that are uniquely Chinese.

This is when I discovered that the traditional Chinese stories are structured differently, with different thematic emphasis, and probably will go against the "rules" of modern Western literature.

https://elizabethtai.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-one-storytelling

quoted The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

S. L. Huang: The Water Outlaws (Hardcover, 2023, Tor.com)

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong …

Content warning Minor sporilers for the Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang ~ 40%

commented on The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

S. L. Huang: The Water Outlaws (Hardcover, 2023, Tor.com)

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong …

Lu Da's staff weights "60 jin". A Jin is a little more than a US pound, so it's about 54.5 pounds. Which seems heavy as fuck for a staff.

A modern Chinese Gun (Staff) is six feet long and an unspecified on Wikipedia thickness. At an inch thick, a six foot oak staff would be like, 2 pounds. Even an inch thick staff of pure lead (the most common "really heavy, yet fashionable" thing I can think of,) would only be 23 pounds.

Now, given this is wuxia, so fantasy, and I don't know what kinds of metals were available during the Song dynasty, it could be something fantastic rather than real, but were it real, it might be an inch and a half lead core with a quarter inch of iron around that for support.

That is fucking big.

#TheWaterOutlaws #SLHuang #Wuxia …

I noticed the 1996 Taiwan (?) TV adaptation of "New Dragon Inn" is uploaded on Youtube (by TTV), which is fun - I love NDI.
It's in dubious 720p and stretched to fit the HDTV ratio though, and it only has burnt in Chinese subs.
So I decided to correct the video ratio, OCR the subs from the first 5 episodes and auto translate them, to see if I enjoy the show enough to do all...oh, god, 50 episodes.
The OCR, while fairly automatable, still takes a lot of manual work. :/
I'll do the first 5 at least, we'll see how it is.

My wuxia epic fantasy THE WATER OUTLAWS is only $2.99 today — Dec 31 only!!!

Queer bandits!
Women of all ages and types!
Action, adventure, stabbing! (Truly disturbing amounts of stabbing.)

A “best of 2023” in:

✨ WaPo
✨ PW
✨ Booklist
✨ Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup

& longlisted for the Carnegie Medal! 😊

All retailers: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250198761/thewateroutlaws (says $14.99, but all clickthroughs are $2.99 😄)

cc: @bookstodon @sffbipoc

Book cover for THE WATER OUTLAWS by S.L. Huang, with a badass Chinese warrior woman on a rearing horse. Multiple bandits cavort fighting in the background.

I'm closing out tabs and wanted to rec this (again) before I clicked out of it. Jeanette Ng's 2021 article for Tor.com, The History and Politics of . Situates wuxia as a genre in its diaspora roots and historical context, I really recommend it. https://www.tor.com/2021/06/29/the-history-and-politics-of-wuxia/

reviewed The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

Zen Cho: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (Hardcover, 2020, Tor)

A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all goes downhill from there. Guet Imm, …

Rich in character and heart despite its brevity.

I'm new to Zen Cho, but this certainly ensures I'll come back. A #wuxia (or potentially #xianxia) novella, about a bandit crew dealing with the sudden imposition of a new member.

Funny, endearing, and with a lot of heart. Well recommended.

has published a special edition and I think it's wonderful. There's three stories, some poems and essays on the genre. All for free.

@bookstodon http://strangehorizons.com/issue/29-may-2023/