(image via Bits & Pieces; boingboing)
I just read “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu at io9. The story won all three of SF’s major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. The narrator’s Chinese mother was picked by his American father out of a catalog. The story’s a bit heavy, but it pulled at my heartstrings. You can read it at io9, but perhaps you have to be prepared for an upsurge of some filial guilt that you’ve been trying to keep under wraps.
This is Neil Gaiman’s wonderful talk at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts that awarded him an honorary doctorate (re-embedded from boingboing). Make good art!
One commenter at boingboing posted this link to J.K. Rowling’s speech at Harvard commencement in 2008. Luckily, I clicked on it and found this powerfully moving and magically inspiring speech. You’ve got to hear her talk about failures and of hitting rock bottom which became her solid foundation. It also pungently reminded me of my parents’ hardships and sacrifices that I sometimes forget (though it was not the message of the talk), of other people’s pain and suffering that we too often ignore, and of evils happening that we cast into oblivion. To quote bits of her wisdom: ”I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”
