The Big Idea: Madeleine E. Robins

Oct. 14th, 2025 03:23 pm
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Posted by John Scalzi

Eras in the past had a focus on manners — a word that in itself was a code for something more controlling. For her novel The Doxies Penalty, author Madeleine E. Robins revisits a past era to look what maneuvers behind the manners, a thing much more interesting and possibly more sinister.

MADELEINE E. ROBINS:

One of the tasks adolescents face is trying to parse the rules of the world they live in — and the potential penalties. Not the say-thank-you or don’t-kill-people rules, but the subtler rules that may not be spoken but that can bring your life to a standstill if you run afoul of them. As a kid I knew they were out there, but figuring out what they were? How seriously to take them? What the penalties were? That’s a lot for a person already dealing with algebra and puberty.

So I suppose it makes sense that when I was thirteen and discovered Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels I fell hard. So many weird rules (a young lady at a party mustn’t dance more than twice with the same man! a woman who drives down St James’s St. is clearly a whore!) that made little or no sense to me. It wasn’t until I went from Heyer to Jane Austen that I began to understand. Many of the rules were there to “protect” women—which is to say, to control them. Flouting the rules could have life or death consequences. These odd, frivolous rules meant survival.

It’s all there in Austen: a damaged reputation could ruin a woman’s chances at marriage. And marriage was not just the presumed goal of every nice young woman, but an economic necessity. Mrs. Bennett obsesses over her daughters’ marital prospects because the alternative is a life of genteel poverty. Marianne Dashwood skates on the edge of ruining her reputation by making her feelings for John Willoughby so public. Both Lydia Bennett and Maria Bertram teeter over into disgrace and are only saved from being handed from man to man by the intercession of family and friends; others (Colonel Brandon’s first love, for instance) are not so lucky.

These unspoken rules, and the weight of their consequences, fascinated me. I began study the Regency: the rules and manners, but also the politics, the wars, the Romantic movement, the rising tide of technology. It’s an astonishingly rich period; the more I learned, the more I wanted to play in that sandbox. At the time I started writing, alt-history and mixed genre books were not a thing. To play in that period I did what was expected of me (I followed the rules!) and wrote Regency romances, with the manners and the clothes and the rom-com happy ending. But by the time I finished the fifth of my romances I was done with happy endings. I switched to writing SF.

But I wasn’t done with the Regency.

I conceived of Point of Honour, my first Sarah Tolerance mystery, as a “Regency-noir:” a Dashiell Hammett story with an Austen voice. I wanted to wander the mean streets that Jane Austen didn’t mention and most modern Regency romances ignored. The streets where the rules were broken, and where punishment for breaking them was inevitable.

In noir, the protagonist is “morally compromised”(in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is not a good guy—he’s just better than most of the people around him). But compromised can mean more than one thing. In the 19th century the word attached to any woman with a damaged reputation, a woman who had had—or was suspected of having had—sex outside of marriage. Or just dancing too often with the same man. Compromised, ruined, soiled, fallen, different terms for the same thing. Sarah Tolerance, Fallen Woman and Agent of Inquiry, has a sometimes uncomfortably solid moral compass, but by the rules of her society she is ruined: unfit for marriage or respectable employment.

How did that happen? At sixteen she fell in love with her brother’s fencing teacher and they eloped. Years later when her lover died, she faced the world with almost no options: the respectable jobs open to genteel women (companion, teacher, governess, seamstress) are closed to her. A fallen woman can be one man’s mistress, or prostitute herself to all comers. Neither fate appeals to Miss Tolerance

So she does an end-run around the consequence of her ruin: she invents the role of agent of inquiry, using her knowledge of genteel society, her facility with a sword, and her considerable wit, to do the jobs private detectives do: find people, answer questions, solve mysteries. She is out on those mean Regency streets, tracing straying husbands and acting as a go-between in sordid transactions, and all the while operating in a sort of liminal space in her society. She sees the way the rules of her world keep even the most virtuous women vulnerable. In 1812 a married woman’s money and property belonged to her husband, she didn’t even have a say in how her children were reared, unless her husband permitted it. Single women had it slightly better, but any money or property they had was likely to be administered by a man (who could do whatever he liked—and have her tossed into a madhouse if she complained). And women outside the pale of respectable society? They had only as much freedom as the system allowed—which meant that the poor and ruined were constantly in danger.

The Doxies Penalty is the fourth book in the Sarah Tolerance series. In the first three, Miss Tolerance has dealt with murderers, spies, criminals and courtesans. By now she has settled into her role as agent of inquiry and sometime protector of the vulnerable. Then an elderly woman comes to her with a problem: she’s been swindled out of the meager savings which she hoped to retire on. And because this particular old woman is Fallen, she has even less recourse than any other victim: no one to fight for her, no family to fall back on. Miss Tolerance takes the case seeking the swindler and discovers that her client isn’t the only one—that he has left a trail of victims, all of them elderly, Fallen, and defenseless. Soon, many of them are dead.

By the rules of their society these women don’t matter. They made their choices, they broke the rules, and now they have had the bad manners to survive to old age. Poverty and death are the expected consequence of a moral lapse.  When a rule-breaker dies, the Law shrugs. Society shrugs.

Miss Tolerance will not. Even if she has to break the rules.


The Doxies Penalty: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram

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Posted by John Scalzi

With the admission that I somehow missed it last year, probably because I have a head full of mostly cheese these days. That said, Whatever’s been on WordPress now for 17 years, both the blogging software and the hosting of the site, and in that time I’ve been absolutely grateful for WordPress’s platform stability and accessibility. The downtime I have experienced with WordPress has been so small that it’s genuinely surprising when it happens, and even then the issue is usually resolved in minutes, not hours — hours being what I would need to wrangle problems back when I was self-hosting Whatever prior to October 2008. It just works, which is a nice thing to be able to say.

WordPress doesn’t need my endorsement — a sizeable chunk of the internet uses its software and/or hosting — nor does it ask me to write this (mostly) annual post. I do it because I appreciate the service. If you’re looking to create a site, or move a site over from janky hosting, it’s an option I can recommend. Check it out and see if it will work for you.

— JS

Love and Leashes

Oct. 14th, 2025 11:00 am
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Posted by Patrick Kearney

Flashback: My last serious girlfriend was kinky. I am pretty vanilla — I’m not a natural sub — but I was game. We got into D/s play, and we went to some big fetish parties together. Her favorite “foreplay” was having me kneel between her legs while she showed me guys on dating apps she’d … Read More »

The post Love and Leashes appeared first on Dan Savage.

Happy Locktober to All Who Celebrate!

Oct. 14th, 2025 11:00 am
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Posted by Nancy Hartunian

Compare and contrast these two body image calls: A woman’s boyfriend is so insecure about his big body, that he can’t get hard. She thinks he’s hot as can be but can’t seem to convince him of this. Meanwhile, a man finds that most of the women he meets in his open relationship dating community … Read More »

The post Happy Locktober to All Who Celebrate! appeared first on Dan Savage.

ok, it's at least ironic

Oct. 13th, 2025 09:29 pm
julian: Picture of the sign for Julian Street. (Default)
[personal profile] julian
So a week before we move is a *great* time to have the fire alarms go off, credibly. (That is, all of them at once, ours and the upstairs neighbors', going off at once, which is probably required in the fire code by now but isn't how I'm used to them behaving.) I checked in with the upstairs guy, and neither of us saw smoke or anything likely to cause anything dangerous, but Calluna and I nonetheless got the cat into the carrier and go bag and purses outside, Just In Case. And called 911.

The fire guys (who have a fire station about 3 blocks from us so we get a hell of a lot of Fire Truck Noise) arrived just as the upstairs guy was solving the problem by starting to take down the smoke detectors, one by one. First one he tried was the relevant issue, which makes sense given as it was date-stamped 2007. (...yes.)

Lessons taken from this: a) I don't think the upstairs guy had the right approach to the problem -- that is, I think the fire guys should do that kind of conclusion making, and b) I need to do some practicing for an actual fire, clearly, because I dithered too much. Since I want to make sure we have reasonable fire exits in our upcoming basement (that's easy, there's huge windows that open and you can just crawl out) and the upcoming 2nd floor (not sure there), that'll just fold into the consideration.

Anyway, not to bury the lede, but we bought a house in Pepperell (on the border of NH, as opposed to where we are now on the border of RI), it's cool, we're having the movers next Monday, will quite likely have to do a smallish truck (or van) the weekend after for remaining stuff, dislike packing vociferously, but! we can finally get the Stuff From Storage from when we stuck it there like 5 years ago.

More about this soon, or, as is more likely given me, more much later.
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Posted by Jack Izzo

The FBI closed the case after U.S. President Donald Trump took office, according to several reliable news outlets.
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Posted by Aleksandra Wrona

The White House press secretary did not accuse the Kansas City Chiefs star of hypocrisy and "representing a broken system."
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Posted by Anna Rascouët-Paz

U.S. President Donald Trump amplified a claim by conservative media outlets that suggested 274 undercover federal agents incited the insurrection.
[syndicated profile] snopes_feed

Posted by Laerke Christensen

Stephanopoulos cut to commercials after Vance denied having knowledge of border czar Tom Homan allegedly taking a $50,000 bribe.

The Big Idea: Catherine Asaro

Oct. 13th, 2025 02:18 pm
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Posted by John Scalzi

The motto for the Olympics translates to “Faster, Higher, Stronger” — but in Gold Dust, author Catherine Asaro takes athletic competition to heights even the greatest of Olympians might not have ever dreamed of.

CATHERINE ASARO:

With Gold Dust, I wanted to explore sports in the future, track and field especially. My interest in the subject has a long history. In my youth, ballet was my forte; I never considered myself an athlete. But for some reason in my teens, I decided to go run around a grass field in a nearby park. For the life of me, I can’t remember what possessed me to do it, but I got up at some absurd hour, like 6 in the morning, and out I went. After a few laps, I thought, “I feel tired.” Then I thought, “Might as well keep going.” (ah, to have the blithe durability of a sixteen-year-old again). After a while, I thought, “Hmmm. I don’t feel tired anymore.” I kept it up for about forty minutes. Then I went home, showered, and set off to school.

With that auspicious beginning, I decided to run every morning. I’ve no idea why; no one told me to, and I didn’t come from a sports-oriented family. But I loved to run. Back then, girls had fewer options in sports, and it never occurred to me that I could join a track team. Eventually my interest shifted more to ballet. Years later, in graduate school, I started running again, getting up every morning at some god-awful hour, 5 or 6 am. Eventually I stopped, and concentrated on dance instead, because I am very much not a morning person.

However, as a result, I’ve always enjoyed track and field, and as a science fiction writer, it felt natural to extrapolate it into the future. So Gold Dust came into being.

In the main plot, three interstellar civilizations vie for honors in the Olympics. Instead of countries competing, teams come from worlds or space habitats. More populous worlds dominate the Games. In contrast, the team from Raylicon, a dying world with failed terraforming, has one of the worst records anywhere. They draw only from the City of Cries, a wealthy city true, but still just a few million people.

Except.

The people of the Undercity live in ancient ruins below the Cries desert. In their culture, crushing poverty exists alongside great beauty. When your survival depends on how well you fight and how fast you can run, you can produce incredible athletes. The wealthy elite in Cries despise the Undercity, and the people in the Undercity keep to themselves, protecting the fragile beauty of their culture from outside interference.

Then Mason, the coach for the Raylicon Olympic track and field team, discovers the spectacular Undercity runners. When he convinces them to join his team, they encounter his above city athletes. They don’t trust anyone from Cries, and the people of Cries barely consider them human—but now they must all learn to work together.

As I wrote, I wondered if futuristic human enhancement would ruin the Olympics. I decided to have sports divide into two types, leagues that allowed augmented athletes and leagues that didn’t. Meets for enhanced athletes would probably become contests over who could create the most advanced cybernaut. In contrast, Gold Dust involves “natural-body” sports. Athletes not only have to take drug tests, they must also prove they haven’t had genetic modifications, cybernetic augmentation, or other enhancements. Sure, sports training and medicine improves, but those changes involve more basic additions, such a nanomeds that circulate in their blood to help maintain health. And those would be closely monitored.

I also assumed the current trends of women closing the gap with men in many sports would continue. Unlike in the paucity of my youth, women’s sports is huge now. Even in 1989, Ann Transon won the 24-Hour National Championship ultramarathon against all competitors, male and female alike. In the book, I extrapolated that trend to the limit where men and women could fairly compete together.

Another factor would also come into play for star-spanning civilizations. Differences will exist among human-habitable worlds. If you train on a low gravity world and then compete on one with even a slightly heavier gravity, what does that do to your performance? Nuances of atmosphere, length of day, and subtle differences like the hue of the sky or how much dust floats in the air will affect the athletes. That all wove into the plot.

Another aspect of running that struck me was the path to healing it can offer. Six years ago, I was grieving the loss of my husband. I also found out, not long after he passed, that I had cancer. Fortunately, we caught it early and the doctor got it all. But with so much happening, I stopped exercising, no longer dancing or even walking much.

So I started to run again.

This time, I’ve kept at it, mixing outdoor running with inside treadmill work, weights, and rowing—in the evening instead of the morning. It helped inspire my writing Gold Dust. I penned the first draft during the summer Olympics. What struck me as I watched the Games was how the Olympics isn’t just competition, it also represents a dream, using sports to bring the peoples of humanity together in peace. It can help heal a person—or an entire world. I like to believe we will carry that tradition into the future no matter how complex our civilizations become.


Gold Dust: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Web site|Bluesky|Facebook|Patreon

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