imagine mr. spock going "fascinating"

I hate to be all looking-at-fandom-like-it's-a-zoo-exhibit but here are some things I learned tonight:

1. There are people out there writing 450,000-word The Faculty fic - which is a sequel to a 250,000-word fic.

2. People still write 200,000-word Harry Potter fic. Also, Queer as Folk and LOTRPS are both still things. (Seriously?!) (Although I have to say that I saw this youtube clip the other day and I was a solid foil tinhat for a good sixty seconds.)

3. There are just shedloads of fandoms out there that not only do I not know about, I haven't even heard of their source (I think they're all computer games and anime, like Kingdom Hearts and Vampire Knight. OK I've heard of Kingdom Hearts but not really. Stuff I recognise but never knew there was a fandom for: Dragon Age, Final Fantasy (many numbers), JAG (?!!!)).

3.1 Someone needs to clean up AO3 fandoms - there's a Weiss Kreuz and a Weiß Kreuz.

4. As far as I can see there isn't a way to browse the AO3 by wordcount. You can search all stories and view by wc but as far as I can tell that only gets you the most recent 1000 fics, sorted by wc - and it turns out there are a lot of Russian-novel-length fics for fandoms I've never heard of.

5. This is annoying when you're in the mood I am, viz: "I want to read something between 30,000 and 100,000 words and slashy and I don't really care what fandom as long as I vaguely recognise people but also, the writing has to be good." Any recs along these lines gratefully appreciated, and if they happen to be in fandoms with which I'm familiar, bonus! (This is a massively weird mood. I sort of feel like I could go for some Ron/Draco. um? Please send other pairings?)

6. Relatedly, does anyone have any recs for books with gay protagonists? I just really am in the mood to read about people who aren't heterosexual for a change. Warning, I don't usually read commercial romance novels. I could probably go chicklit if it was, you know, lesbian chick lit. Also nothing too depressing please. *bats eyelashes* ty.

7. Speaking of, a few weeks ago I read Mission Child and then China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F McHugh - shoelessgirl lent me the former and then I hustled off and bought the latter from Arty Bees. I liked them both ENORMOUSLY and I can't recommend them enough - terrific, terrific science fiction, controlled, character-focused writing and plots, truly compelling characterisation and situations. Highly recommended. I believe there may still be a copy of one or the other at Arty Bees, although I can't recommend her third book, Half the Day is Night, because I got a third of the way in and stalled unhappily. (Not enough sex, probably.)

(no subject)

The NPR specfic meme:
( etc etc )

47/100, a solid score on any reading list, IMO.

I actually got into a mild Twitter allocation lol, whoops, altercation with @neilhimself (very mild, he wisely chose not to keep fighting my bored-at-work-on-a-friday stream of tweets) and chattycheese about this list, which allowed me to sort out what really annoys me about it, which is primarily this: there are far fewer women than there are men on this list (and vanishingly few people of colour). This by itself is a problem, but what I think is characteristic of this problem is that the women who are on here are very much canonical. They're the women who write the books that always appear on these lists; The Mists of Avalon and Frankenstein and The Handmaid's Tale are as inevitable and, in their way, as uninteresting, demographically speaking, as Lord of the Rings, Foundation and, sigh, American Gods (It's not that I don't love Neil Gaiman, because I really do, it's just that can't we agree that maybe The War for the Oaks is as interesting and influential if not more so than Neverwhere, for pete's sake?) In all of these kinds of top 100s, these books will always be there. They are tremendously influential in the genre, and they're extremely widely read - although they're not necessarily good, I don't think genre fans would throw away Anne McCaffrey and Misty Lackey, or David Eddings and Piers Anthony.

But ... then there are the spots that are, hm, not so serious; not so solid; not so inevitable except of course they are, because they always get filled with the same stuff: Miscellaneous White Dude. It's always The Sword of Truth and never The Ruins of Ambrai. It's always Old Man's War and never China Mountain Zhang. Twelve zillion books by Robert Heinlein and none by Octavia Butler (a freaking crime). Michael Moorcock, not Elizabeth Moon. The Codex Alera, but not the Crown of Stars. Brandon Sanderson but not N K Jemisin.

I feel like I'm not articulating this very well, and at the end of the day I've long since decided that lists that don't adequately represent women and people of colour well are not worth my time in terms of trying to find books I actually want to read. But I'm pretty bored of having this represented to me as inevitable (because they're all canonical; well, so is lots of other stuff!) or an adequate representation of the demographics of either the good stuff or the industry generally (emphatically not true). Sigh, IDEK.