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I don't do star ratings, because it's really hard for me to sum up what does and doesn't work about a book on a one-dimensional axis. But one of the things that often comes up in these reviews is "does it stick the landing." Because sometimes my assessment would be like "boring first half, 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because it finally gets good." Or "compelling prose, 3.5 stars, rounded down because the end is a total anticlimax." This really impacts my reading experience.

Singer Distance is a book that sticks the landing. There are digressions that are less engaging than the SF stuff, like, flashbacks to the narrator's teenage years and pranks that local kids play on his dad's farm. But it all comes together in a way that I didn't see coming but then totally should have, which is the sign of doing something right. There is closure to the plot questions we have, I'm not sitting there thinking "well that was a waste." So it gets the rounding-up seal of approval that way.

Premise: the "channels" on Mars really were canals; there are intelligent Martians, and they're sometimes communicative. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Martians carve large-scale displays that Earth can see with telescopes, and correctly interpret them to be mathematical formulae. Earth responds with similarly large-scale constructions.

Within a few months a robust plurality had settled on this interpretation:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = _
Our first true message from the Martians: pop quiz, kindergartners.

But then the Martians pose something about distance that befuddles all Earth's scientists, and when nobody can formulate a response, Mars goes silent. The book begins in 1960; Rick is a grad student at MIT, and his girlfriend, Crystal, thinks she's solved the equation. They and some friends go on a road trip from Boston to the Arizona desert to broadcast their answer.

Rick is madly in love, and he proposes, but she tells him to finish his own degree and not bask in her reflected glory. Then she basically ghosts him. Thirteen years later, in 1973, Rick has to go on another cross-country road trip, this time without his buddies in tow.

There's opportunities for US regional humor:

The great thing about Oklahoma, Priya said, was that each state after it got a little better.

Just my luck, I thought--I was trying to find the love of my life and had to rely on the goodwill of a Philadelphian.

I like SF, and math, and can relate to nerdy obsessive mathematicians also having interests in music and cartography and other seemingly unrelated things, so this book was a specific recommendation to me. The flip side is, I can be more critical of things I know well. It's harder for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to "what if the way we conceptualize distance is misleading, what if there's a more meaningful sense of distance? Sometimes when you're physically close to somebody, emotionally, you're still miles away. Everything is relative, dude." That kind of faux-profundity is a hard sell.

This is the best explanation of "Singer Distance" we get, and I actually think it's a pretty good one in terms of "fake math":

Imagine a mountain range. Traditional measurement was like measuring from the base of the southernmost mountain to the base of the northernmost mountain in a straight line through the Earth, ignoring the complex topography of the thicknesses and compositions of each peak. Though she theorized that mapping the actual, exact topography of any distance was a task on par with mapping the universe, she explained how the averages could be calculated, with a detailed process that had to take into account inertial speed or acceleration, medium, and a mysterious variable the editors referred to as the Tanzer Value, but which Crystal named "Intent."
I sort of agreed with the editors, that Intent was a troublesome name for the quantity, one that both failed to help visualize how the variable operated and anthropomorphized an ineffable particle; it made distance seem subject to mood swings.

This is good. There's also a follow-up Martian message about entropy, and the humans comment, "you can't reverse the flow of a river...well actually yes you can, they literally did that in Chicago, maybe entropy isn't the whole story," which was fun. But by the time we get there there's been a lot of "how can you be so far away and I still feel so close to you??? #makesyouthink."

The discovery of intelligent Martians changes very little about Earth's history from the 1890s onwards. The world wars still happen. NASA still lands on the moon in 1969. There are eventually orbiters sent to Mars, but they abruptly lose transmission 13,000 miles away. This disinterest in alternate history makes it feel more like "litfic with SF elements" than "attractive to SF fans."

This is a small nitpick but: "She'd started college at seventeen and grad school at twenty-one. Twenty-four now, she was the youngest of us by four years."

How realistic is this? In my experience it's pretty common to begin college at 18 and, if you go directly to grad school from undergrad, start that at 22 or so. Let's say Crystal is more prodigious than her peers and skipped a grade early on. I still don't think it would be super likely to see a four year gap between her and her colleagues? Was it different for people in the sixties?

More generally, I find the dynamics of "socially awkward genius/"person who has practical and social skills" as a romance trope can be kind of tiresome. This version has a woman in the first slot and a man in the second instead of the reverse, props. But I don't think we get a compelling sense of what Crystal sees in Rick. She treats him (and other people close to her) with incredible callousness for those thirteen years. And then he's extremely forgiving, like, "I would rather have her in my life than be estranged from her for no reason, maybe she just went crazy from too much math and can't help it," but it felt unearned. Their relationship parallels the Earth-Mars one; Mars is aloof and normally doesn't bother to communicate with Earth unless Earth can solve their puzzles. Crystal says that maybe Earth just needs to change the conversational topic. In the Earth-Mars case, it might work, although Mars is destroying/turning off/ignoring their rovers, so it still might not. I'm not convinced that "the relationship between unequals" really works for Crystal and Rick, even if Crystal claims she's in awe of his practical skills.

Bingo: I'll probably use this for the "recycle a bingo square" (there's plenty that it could count for, eg, "Published in 2022," hard mode as Chatagnier's first published novel). I've been very lucky in not needing to fall back on that one yet!

If you're interested in using it for this year's card, arguments could be made for "a book in parts" (there are three parts, longer than traditional chapters, but they aren't subdivided into actual chapters). It's not dwelled on in detail, but Crystal and her parents were refugees from fascism in the WWII era, so arguably "stranger in a strange land." If you really want to stretch it, maybe "Impossible Places," because what if small distances and large distances are actually, like, indistinguishable, dude. Big spoilers:

( the bingo square is a spoiler )

( Politics is mostly 2008-era )

Further to this, I am happy to say that I am now at 100% of sections begun and mostly complete, ahead of the deadline I was aiming for. If it's not selected, there may be future opportunities to revise/resubmit. And there will probably be a little more padding/editing to go, but the total word count won't grow by more than about 10% of the current total.

I've archive-locked a couple old posts from years ago, since I'm borrowing/rephrasing some of that content to include there. So if you see any broken links, it's probably not you, it's me.

Google Drive automatically puts it at the top of my "suggested documents" to open. Usually it was just "you last opened it January 18," but the last couple days, in the evening, it's like "you usually open it around this time," they know my daily pattern-of-life...

I think I'd seen this series mentioned somewhere before as inspiring "A Memory Called Empire" and maybe other stuff. First contact, alien linguistics stuff, sure why not, let's try.

Cherryh mentions in a foreword for the 10th anniversary that her editor was responsible for having her include the first scenes. Interesting disparity for the "book in parts" bingo square:

Part One (15 pages): A human spaceship carrying "Earth's whole damned colonial program" gets lost in space and winds up far from where they were trying to go and has to keep searching for an inhabitable solar system.
Part Two (34 pages): 150 years later. The atevi, the local species, have some technological sophistication and recognize that the appearance of the "foreign star" has something to do with the powerful machines that have recently started tearing up the terrain. From the human POV, there was a schism between the Pilots' Guild, who want to leave the atevi planet alone and look elsewhere, versus the rest of the station, who want to land and take advantage of the hospitable climate there. The latter finally decide to land and try to force the pilots' hand, but are conscientious about trying to stay out of the atevi's way. When the atevi eventually make contact, the startled human radios back to his buddies like "please don't react with force, we're really gonna try and communicate peacefully here." I liked this part, with the alternating atevi and human POVs, and wanted more.
Part Three (358 pages): 200 years after that. Bren Cameron is the paidhi, the human ambassador/translator among the atevi, while the rest of humankind lives on an island. One day an assassin breaks into his quarters, and he's forced to take precautions and eventually evacuate. Making things worse, atevi don't really have a concept of individual fondness or friendship, so he's constantly going "I kind of like these security guards, why are they treating me as if I was a child and not telling me anything that's going on...oh wait it's dangerous to project 'like' onto them, they don't do 'like.'"

Just math-wise, the back of the book says "it had been nearly five centuries" since the original spaceship disappeared. 150+200=??? Also, there are about four million humans on the planet at the time of the main plot. How enormous was the original ship?

Atevi, especially less modern ones, are very superstitious about numerical feng shui.

The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.
...
There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number--but a million didn't seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue...

And if you play cards with them, they can and will count cards. I enjoyed that part.

In addition to an absence of humanlike emotions, atevi can also be literal-minded and tend not to show facial expressions. Which made for some interesting parallels with autism, with Bren as the minority POV character being frustrated at trying to communicate to people whose brains work very differently from his. Not sure how much of that I'm just projecting.

Unfortunately, it feels like a great deal of the plot is "high-ranking atevi pressure Bren into doing something, he doesn't really have a choice but to comply, and grudgingly goes along with it." Repeat for 350 pages. You can understand his feelings of being treated like a child; it's frustrating for us, too, that he doesn't get to exercise a lot of agency. Basically he's just trying to keep up with the atevi, who are much stronger and more physically durable than him, without complaining, and hoping that he'll earn their respect that way. There's a little bit of speculation as to "maybe the aiji [political leader] is just testing me." Later, when he's in the custody of more rural, conservative atevi, it's like, are they trying to assassinate him or do they just forget how flimsy humans are? If he endures their brutal treatment enough, will he eventually win them over? He tries to protect the individuals he finds himself caring about, and then people slap him in the face because Atevi Don't Do That.

The subtext is "humans tried to stay out of the way and not do a colonialism, but after the hopeful beginnings of Part II, atevi politics were so warlike and assassination-driven that war was inevitable anyway, that happened offscreen, and the paidhi system emerged in response." But for me it was kind of like...why bother. We do finally learn a little more about why specifically Bren is being jerked around now, beyond just "it's a test," but I felt like what we learned was pretty slight, compared to his overall lack of agency.

Early on the sentence-level prose style pinged me as verbose, but I didn't flag any specific examples and it wasn't particularly egregious overall. But there are lots of sections that are just pages of Bren introspecting and moping, with no other humans around to communicate with and no atevi POV to break it up. Again, I prefer a little more agency in my main characters.

Bingo: Book in Parts, I think a case could be made for "Stranger in a Strange Land."

This year the USA will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So in that spirit, I read a book published in the year of the 200th anniversary (1976), about the 500th anniversary (2276), by a British guy living in Sri Lanka.

Duncan Makenzie comes from a prominent family on Titan, the hospitable low-gravity moon of Saturn. He gets invited to Earth to give a speech at the quincentennial party. A lot of the book is kind of random worldbuilding speculation about how Titan's hydrogen would contribute to the economy of the solar system, and various touristy adventures on Earth without a lot of connective plot or characterization.

The title refers to the idea that Earth might play a role in a dispersed solar system similar to that of the capital in the ancient Roman empire; most of the other planets and moons can do their own thing, but if you really want patronage and cultural influence, you have to visit the capital. Why? Because interplanetary communication suffers from the light-speed barrier; you can't have a real-time video chat and observe the facial expressions and nonverbal communication of someone on another planet. On Earth, however, everyone can video chat with each other instantaneously, which made a one-world government inevitable (so while the USA's anniversary is an important symbolic occasion, it really doesn't function as an independent country). Man, I wish. D:

Makenzie is a clone. His grandfather, Malcolm, suffered DNA damage on a shuttle between Earth and Mars, which made it impossible for him to have a healthy child the old-fashioned way. So he cloned himself, and then his son cloned himself, yielding Duncan. Duncan plans to take advantage of the trip to Earth to have a fourth-generation kid and continue the family.

I would probably have bought "the Makenzies have DNA damage and it's not reparable, cloning is the only workaround" if it hadn't been for the "sustained between Earth and Mars" bit--like, would that have affected every cell? In an afterword to the paperback edition, Clarke admits that he's gotten pushback and criticism on this point, even though he tried to keep it vague, and winds up joining Ray Bradbury in the "sometimes you just have to run with it for artistic license" response.

There are a few nods to "hmm, creating unused embryos might have some ethical issues, is it okay to treat surrogate mothers this way...IDK let's just throw up our hands" that felt kind of underwhelming, but in the same way a lot of contemporary discourse is underwhelming. (1976 was two years before the first child was born through IVF, so this was still, just barely, SF.) More frustrating for me was the text trying to insist that the Makenzies all have other partners and stepkids who they love just as much as their biological relatives and are totally part of the family--but these characters barely get any interiority or screen time, there's a lot more emphasis on a love triangle from Duncan's teenage years that didn't carry over into long-lasting family ties. There is a twist ending to the clone plotline, but I couldn't suspend disbelief for the "oh yeah I totally love my non-biological family" part.

"[Saturn's] remaining satellites were barren aggregate of rock, overgrown snowballs, or mixtures of both. By the mid-2200s, more than forty had been discovered, the majority of them less than a hundred kilometers in diameter. The outer ones--twenty million kilometers from Saturn--all moved in retrograde orbits and were clearly temporary visitors from the asteroid belt; there was much argument as to whether they should be counted as genuine satellites at all."

Clarke underestimated that one, already we've discovered several hundred moons, some of which make people go "these are too puny they shouldn't even count'!

Presented without comment:

"And the Kennedy Center--that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but it's been given up as a bad job."

2276 people don't care about the details of 1700s-2000s technology:

"...quaint old photographs of stiffly-posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original George Washington--no, cameras hadn't been invented then)..."

More worldbuilding notes: 2200s political officials are chosen by random sortition, again one of those NationStates "crazy third option" policies. :) Earth only has four time zones now, global communication made it impossible to stick with 24. Real meat is not illegal, "yet," but manual driving has been illegal for a century.

"Though enthusiasm was not actually illegal, it was in somewhat bad taste; one should not take one's hobbies and recreations too seriously."

Why do whales make big jumps above the surface sometimes?

"Nobody really knows. It may be pure joie de vivre. It may be to impress a lady friend. Or it may be merely to get rid of parasites--whales are badly infested with barnacles and lampreys."
How utterly incongruous, thought Duncan. It seemed almost an outrage that a god should be afflicted with lice.

Great mental image! And the evocation of beings existing beside each other in massively different orders of magnitude comes up later, but mostly it's just vibes.

Duncan enjoys pentomino puzzles; in an afterword, Clarke notes that he got into them via Martin Gardner's recreational mathematics writing. (Same here.)

...when, on July 24, 1975, I appeared as a witness before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space Science (in the very building libeled and destroyed in Chapter 33!), I was able to quote extensively from Duncan's address to Congress in Chapter 41. Thus the House of Representatives' hearings now contain extracts from the Congressional Record for July 4, 2276, which should cause confusion among future historians.

Bingo: Book in Parts; Stranger in a Strange Land; LGBTQIA protagonist (Duncan comes from a culture where bisexuality is default, and "could never feel quite happy with someone whose affections were exclusively polarized toward one sex.")

( Read more... )

Hello! Thank you for creating for me. I'm primeideal on Ao3, and I'm requesting fic for all fandoms, art for Divine Cities and Stormlight Archive. Treats are enabled on Ao3.

As always, if you already have an idea in mind for these characters/relationships, go for it! This is just a starting point. I have many previous creator request letters from which this is copy-pasted and endlessly rewritten, feel free to browse previous versions. I would be equally delighted with gifts for any of these!

General likes

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-time travel

-happy endings

-sad endings (when providing some measure of closure or melodrama; I'm fine with character death)

General art likes:

-black and white art

-bright/bold colors

-traditional or digital art

-objects that represent/are strongly associated with characters

-fantastic/speculative worldbuilding elements

-in-universe artifacts/sketches that the characters might have drawn

General art dislikes (please don't consider these binding DNWs: if your interests or preferences lie strongly along these lines then feel free.)

-pastel-heavy palettes

-deliberately wildly disproportionate/chibi-like characters

-completely non-representational art

DNWs:

-second person POV (unless canonical--see notes for "Debrief"--or in something like interactive fiction)

-eye trauma

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine), explicit depictions of genitalia in art

-underage sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics (**Marco flirts with the governor of California: fine; Marco flirts with the governor and this is a metaphor for the Newsom administration: no thanks.)

-character bashing

-cliffhanger endings (see notes for "Debrief")

Animorphs

Aftran/Cassie
Aftran & Illim
Ax & Elfangor
Ax & Tobias
Elfangor/Loren
Tobias & Loren

Aftran/Cassie, Aftran & Illim: The early days of the Peace Movement; how does Aftran decide to trust Illim (or anyone else) with the Animorphs' secret? Illim trying to stay above suspicion when Aftran is suspected/disappears? How would anything post-29 have been different if Aftran had stayed either in Cassie or elsewhere in the human world? One of the "canon AUs" (the 41 dystopia, time travel stuff) if Aftran had been there?

For the Ax-Elfangor-Tobias-Loren family stuff, feel free to mix and match, I like these characters in any combination!

Ax & Elfangor: growing up in Elfangor's shadow and resenting it? Coming to terms with Elfangor's legacy (and/or hirac delest?) post-canon? Not understanding weird human habits Elfangor picked up?

Ax & Tobias: Ax's misunderstandings about human culture? Tobias visits the Andalite homeworld with Ax post-canon? Some human developments encroach on the scoop and they have to move?

Elfangor/Loren: their time building a life on Earth. Elfangor's reaction to human tastes? How did they acquire DNA for him to morph? Are Tobias' aunt and uncle Loren's sibling(s)/that person's ex?/related to the fake husband that the Ellimist retcons in? Maybe they use the Time Matrix to go somewhere else--a new "pocket universe"? Elsewhere in the past or future of canon? Elfangor stays on Earth and they organize a human resistance as the Yeerk threat grows? Loren gets her memories back somehow (the hirac delest shows up? Something like the utzum ritual? Ellimist nonsense?)

Loren & Tobias: Loren experiences one of the canonical bad reactions to morphing (allergies, Z-Space nonsense, etc.) post-book 49 and Tobias has to help her through it? AU where she raises Tobias, maybe with memories intact, maybe not--what changes? They get back together post-canon and try to build a family?

Debrief

Robert Alderidge/George Russell

So on the one hand, RPGs can be kind of difficult to prompt for, in that everyone's playthroughs are different and will result in slightly different characterizations; on the other hand, I have so many feelings about these guys and would absolutely love any version. A retelling of your playthrough, what happened next, more backstory, fix-it, "fix-it" that makes it worse...

-I love the dramatic irony of seeing the same incidents from different POVs in the character sheets, and then trying to talk about it just makes it worse. (The Catholic Underground in Spain, Courtenay's investigation.) Anything expanding on those or another memory that they technically share but actually remember differently.

-From Alderidge's sheet: "Bykov has the distinction of being the only human on Earth, apart from George Russell, who has ever known you in any meaningful sense." What's going on with these two? How much does Bykov know about the OUC? Is there hatesex?

-Does any of this ever get declassified? How much do Dora or Jean, or the kids, ever figure out, correctly or incorrectly?

-Worldbuilding! What kind of research is the OUC (or the Soviets) doing into ghost technology? What are spirit mediums doing in other parts of the world? At rates of ~one in ten thousand, it's unlikely you'd ever run across another unless there was some effort--but there are also more people who acknowledge ghosts and auras even if they can't directly witness them.

For me, the disruptor was an important focal point of the playthrough--my version of Russell is increasingly horrified at the thought of using it on Alderidge, meanwhile, Alderidge is insisting that it's this great tool of mercy and it's not clear whether he's talking about himself. Then once my Russell admits to himself that getting Alderidge to cross over and get closure is more important to him than anything else, he gets his act together in kind of a ruthless Pascal's Wager-y way. The sense they both have of "okay well here's when I draw the line, it's different when it's you at risk" is part of what I love about this dynamic, so anything touching on that (or the disruptor in general) would be great, but obviously everyone's characterization will be different!

Feel free to lean into the shippy aspects, or not, as you prefer; I don't really want anything too anachronistic or setting-changey, but Alderidge's level of candor (or Russell's level of having-a-clue) can be anywhere on the scale, it's all good.

Note: some of the DNWs I've listed for other exchanges do not apply to this request. For instance, I think the use of second-person POV works very well in the character sheets, so I enthusiastically opt in to second-person POV fic here! (As well as first or third.) Also, go as dark as you want in terms of "possible outcomes include ghosts being destroyed forever with the disruptor, or haunting the world until they decay and lose all coherence."

Divine Cities

Ahanas/Voortya

Anything expanding on their relationship as portrayed in "City of Blades"! What does it look like to them, to their fellow Divinities, to contemporary worshipers? In-universe scholarship from people like Efrem and Shara trying to puzzle it out centuries later? Religious art combining symbols associated with both of them?

Farscape

Crais & Talyn

Aeryn & Zhaan

John & D’Argo Sun-Crichton

John/Aeryn

Moya & Pilot

Pilot & Aeryn

Crais & Talyn: Anything that leans into the tragic melodrama of canon would be great, but also, fix-it is good too. I'd especially like something that depicts Talyn as a character in his own right rather than just anxious beeping noises mediated through Crais--it doesn't necessarily have to be from his POV, but something that shows he has a POV, if that makes sense. How does Stark's temporary link with Talyn contrast with Crais' long-term bond? Does Crais explain his role in creating the hybrid program, and how does Talyn react? What does a relatively peaceful, happy day look like for them? Talyn's POV on their last couple episodes?

Aeryn & Zhaan: I love the contrasts between their backgrounds and the ways they approach problems. Anything contrasting these approaches, or where they have to earn from each other's strengths, would be cute. To what extent does Aeryn's relationship with Pilot factor into Zhaan's decision to sacrifice herself for Aeryn? How would the later seasons have been different if Zhaan had survived?

John/Aeryn, John & D'Argo Jr.: Post-canon adventures! Does D'Argo have the wormhole-making power? What does a "normal" day look like for John and Aeryn when they're not running for their lives? Do they ever return to some of the planet-of-the-week locations from canon? Contrasting POVs on canon events in the early days of their relationship?

Moya & Pilot, Pilot & Aeryn: There's no way that "our" Pilot can just be named "Pilot"--what was his identity before he bonded with Moya? What are their sensory experiences like, communicating with each other and with the crew? What's his POV on donating his DNA to save Aeryn; how does that change her? Did he vote for her to be captain in 4.6? We hear very little from Moya directly--I'd love to see something from her POV about the weird tiny aliens living inside her and the trouble they cause.

Stormlight Archive

Any Radiant & Their Spren
Dalinar/Navani
Navani/Raboniel
Renarin/Rlain
Shallan/Adolin

Any Radiant Spren: Really just...anything about the spren and their outsider POVs on humans! Syl discovering what it means to grow and change? Pattern comparing everything to math? The irony in Ivory's name and the importance of free will? Glys' relationship to Sja-anat and the free will issues there? Pattern and Testament gossiping about Shallan's love life? All the spren!

Dalinar/Navani: Outsider POV on the scandal of their relationship? Cute moments taking care of little Gav? The Stormfather and Sibling bickering about how humans are the worst, and now they're inlaws? Accidental "time travel" to another era (via the Spiritual Realm flashbacks) and having to make senses of things there? AU where Navani chooses Dalinar instead of Gavilar back in the day? Does she meet the same fate as Evi?

Navani/Raboniel: Bonding over science and figuring things out together! Is the Sibling exasperated, or trying to set them up? Parallels between their grief for their kids? What if Raboniel had been more honest about what the Anti-Voidlight was for, and Navani realizes she doesn't really want Raboniel dead? For this prompt, I'd prefer no infidelity--so an AU where Navani/Dalinar aren't a thing, or Raboniel lives and reconnects with Navani after Dalinar's death?

Renarin/Rlain: When did Rlain first have feelings for Renarin? Early moments in Bridge Four, the biggest outsiders even among outsiders? What's next after "Wind and Truth"? Culture shock? Trying to make things work in the new listener society?

Shallan/Adolin: More adventures in the Cognitive Realm? Trying to keep in touch via the communication spren post-canon? Pattern, Testament, or Maya's POV on their relationship? I'm not super interested in Shallan's alternate identities, so I'd prefer if they weren't a heavy focus.

Crossover Fandom

Sazed (Mistborn) and Taravangian (Stormlight Archive)
Rowan (Steerswoman) and Shallan Davar (Stormlight Archive)
Mikhail Rodinovich Bykov (Debrief) and Alexander Molokov (Chess)
Cordelia Naismith (Vorkosigan Saga) and Rowan (Steerswoman)

Sazed and Taravangian: They both control two Shards now--Sazed's seem like inherent opposites, Taravangian's don't. What happens when they meet? Taravangian tries to talk Sazed into letting Taravangian combine more shards for the greater good? Sazed turns Taravangian's logic against him? Could they meet in some kind of pocket universe/Cognitive Realm nonsense/AU setting where their immense powers don't really come into play and it's just the two guys bickering at each other?

Rowan and Shallan: Both of them have conversations in their respective fourth books that hinge on a misunderstanding of "power," and it's just like...two nickels! Shallan stumbles through a weird portal in the Cognitive Realm and winds up in Rowan's realm? One of them happens across the other one's logbooks? AU where Jasnah is a Steerswoman and Shallan is her apprentice? (I imagine that the Steerswomen's prohibition against lying would be a disaster waiting to happen with Shallan's...everything.)

Bykov and Molokov: It might require a little timeline fudging, but I imagine Bykov being a mentor to Molokov and both completely hating their jobs. Molokov: "this is so dumb, they're making me go to a chess championship and pretend I care about chess, the indignity." Bykov: "stop complaining, when I was your age I was a handler for a double agent dealing with ghost shit." "There's no way that's real, that's just a legend to haze new recruits." "You probably don't have clearance to hear about the ghost shit, forget I said anything."

Cordelia and Rowan: Credit to pendrecarc on dreamwidth for coming up with this galaxy-brained prompt: what if Rowan's world was the long-lost Alpha Colony, and the Betan Astronomical Survey team rediscovered it instead of the events of "Shards of Honor"? Maybe Cordelia finally explains to Rowan what's up with the wizards, or maybe she accidentally winds up under the ban and gets very exasperated with "Alpha colonists!" How much do the "Christers" know about their homeworld, and what does Cordelia make of them? I'm fine with a / aspect to this relationship too. (I have not read beyond "The Vor Game;" I'm fine with spoilers if you want to bring in Vorkosigan characters/events from beyond that point, but some of it may be lost on me.)

--
As usual, all of this is optional, anything about these fandoms/relationships will be great. Thanks for creating for me!

So I've been working on a long project which continues to be...in progress, and in part due to that, my main collection output was not particularly prolific, but, events conspired in such a way that I produced plenty of tiny ficlets!

My original assignment was for "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook to Surviving Medieval England." When I first read it, my reaction was: "There's also a tantalizing offscreen subplot hinted at involving the "Waelish" who preceded the Anglo-Saxon arrivals, but despite my guesses and extrapolations about what was going on there, it didn't really turn out to be as prominent as I'd expected." The Waelish leader is a King Arthur expy! Which is interesting! But then he just...doesn't play into the overall plot.

Anyway, as a tagmod, I get to be privy to discussions in tagmod chat as nominations come in. One of my fellow tagmods took a screenshot of this book, nominated with the only character "The Black Bear," and commented "this is also making me laugh. Probably it's clear! It's just funny. The only character." So immediately I responded:

i have that book and can fact-check (i don't remember that character)

ohhhh is it the [spoiler tag]king arthur expy[/spoiler] who never appears on screen 😠

(i wanted that character to be more of a thing than he was 🙁

yeah, he's an offscreen bad guy. [spoiler]the Waelish king[/spoiler]

Anyway, someone requested him and was interested in his POV on the conflict/other Arthurian allusions, so I was very excited about offering that, and then that was what I matched on! Like I mentioned before, canon review was relatively quick (the Bear is only mentioned in a couple offscreen places), it was just a matter of procrastinating until I finally wrote it. In a world where the monotheists are Zoroastrians instead of Christians, presumably they'd go on a quest for the sacred fire rather than the Holy Grail!

Very loose correspondences to the Arthurian knights, somewhat based on notes I took on Le Morte d'Arthur years ago:

The Boar ~ Sir Bors
The White Shoat ~ Helin the White (Bors' son)
The Peacock ~ Sir Persaunte, the Indigo Knight
The Lark ~ Dinadan
The Turtle ~ Tristram
The Otter ~ Lancelot
The Cub ~ Galahad
The Bull ~ Palomides (Zoroastrianism celebrates a "primordial bovine"!)

Also, 2023 me noted: "There are a lot of illustrations/marginalia (especially for the in-universe portions), done by Steve Argyle, which I think I'll be able to better appreciate when I get a hard copy." Well, this was my first time reading the hard copy cover to cover, and sure enough, in the inside back cover, there are pictures of the characters in the post-canon era. Runian and Sefawynn getting their happily-ever-after while Logna looks on from a distance, etc. And there's also one of Yazad...with a bunch of windmills, implying he succeeded in teaching that technology to the locals <3

The True Tale of the Black Bear (1681 words)
Fandom: The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England - Brandon Sanderson
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Black Bear (The Frugal Wizard's Handbook)
Additional Tags: arthuriana
Summary: Come, all you Keltmen, and hear of your hero, most feared in the forest! Accept no slanderous skop's substitutes, none of Logna's lies.

Then for Steerswoman, some in-universe mythology based on one of the stories Rowan hears at Rendezvous (and later tells Steffie).

Outcast (1156 words)
Fandom: Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: In-Universe Mythology, Outskirters, Ghosts
Summary: "Rowan heard of...a haunting, where the spirit of an uncast man killed his tribe's goats, one by one, until his body was found and given proper rites." -The Outskirter's Secret

Madness:

I saw a request for crossovers with the Snake Fight Thesis Defense, and the requester linked to a list of 100 influential books. Scrolling through that I was like...this person has great tastes, all of these academic types should fight the snake. So I turned it into a drabble sequence. (Crossover fandoms are: Gödel, Escher, Bach; Kairos (Murry-O'Keefe) books; Oxford Time Travel Universe; Vorkosigan Saga; Steerswoman)

Not An Exact Science (526 words)
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense - Luke Burns
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Drabble Sequence, 5 Things, Crossover
Summary: Five worlds where the snake fight thesis became a tradition.

I have been super into Slay the Spire for the last few months, so I figured I'd write something for the Merchant. It turned out to be a one-sided conversation between the Merchant and the Watcher.

Masked Man (674 words)
Fandom: Slay the Spire (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Merchant (Slay the Spire), Watcher (Slay the Spire)
Summary: Only two things are certain here, death and my completely arbitrary sale prices! But mostly death.

My first stab at the Steerswoman fic was on the shorter side, so it was like, "maybe I'll write several pieces of in-universe mythology and collect them into an anthology-type thing." Then when I wrote "Outcast" it was like, okay, this is already 1000 words, fine. So I posted this separately in Madness. It's a...very different kind of in-universe mythology story.

The Cloven Men (424 words)
Fandom: Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: In-Universe Mythology, Canon-Typical Sexism
Summary: Steerswoman have gathered all sorts of stories, from Inner Landers and Outskirters and even Christers.

But there are other, ancient, stories, in this world, that no Steerswoman has yet heard nor seen.

The three-minute song/music video "The Devil Went Up To Boston" (a rewrite of "The Devil Came Down To Georgia") was linked on the promo post on September 16. I got around to watching/listening to it on December 22. Typical Yuletide procrastination. (In the video, Sully wears a Red Sox hat and the Devil wears a Yankees hat. Which is great, but also, Damn Yankees crossover potential?)

Anyway, we have the devil. He makes deals for people's souls. He goes to Boston. The subway cops get mad. If you are like me, and familiar with goofy songs via Yuletide osmosis, the conclusion is obvious.

Counterproposal (100 words)
Fandom: The Devil Came Up to Boston - The Adam Ezra Group (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: The Devil (Devil Went Down to Georgia), Sully (Devil Came Up to Boston)
Additional Tags: Drabble, yumadrin, Crossover, Canon-typical language
Summary: And you thought the subway cops were mad before.

Anyway, then Yuletide came around and the fics revealed and we all got our gifts and lived happily ever after OH WAIT there was a weird glitch and the authors revealed. The mods and tagmods who were around did yeopeople's effort in getting things fixed and re-anonymized, I get zero credit for this because I was going to Christmas Eve worship. But then they were like "what causes the glitch, can we test it, let's do science." And then they set up a mini-Madness type thing for tagmods to treat each other, basically just treating it as "any fandom I've requested before" via the autoapp.

Now the thing about Yuletide mods and tagmods is that they have exquisite tastes in fandoms. So it was very "senpai noticed me!" when I got recruited. And there would be a zero percent chance of me creating for all the possible recips I could, even if I had all of the Yuletide creation period. But! Because it was so short-term and low stakes, I was able to relax enough to just do some short ficlets (which I put on my 3SF/art sock) and not worrying about making it epic masterpieces. (This was Christmas Eve night for me--less busy for my family than previous years but that's another story.) I was able to focus enough to treat the mod-mods, and the newest members of the tagmod team.

What if Baze and Chirrut (from Rogue One) were nohecharei (from The Goblin Emperor)? That's it that's the fic.

Firsts in War (235 words)
Fandom: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus
Characters: Baze Malbus, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fusion
Summary: The first nohecharis has a favor to beg of Her Serenity.

Prompt was for Shara and Olvos from Divine Cities, but it's from Tatyana's POV. (I may have been too coy about who Olvos is. Hazard that comes with writing for old prompts.)

Eternal Flame (360 words)
Fandom: The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tatyana Komayd, Ashara "Shara" Komayd
Summary: Parents worrying about their kids is a universal.

Another prompt was for A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), horror. Hmm, do they have Christmas in ASOUE-world? I think I remember reading somewhere that that setting seems to be more culturally Jewish. Maybe they have Hanukkah. Maybe from a certain point of view, Hanukkah lends itself to horror tropes.

Wick(ed) (477 words)
Fandom: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Violet Baudelaire, Klaus Baudelaire, Sunny Baudelaire
Additional Tags: Hanukkah, Horror, Lemony Snicket Narrative Style
Summary: One person's miracle is another person's horror story.

And then for a fellow roguelike appreciator, FTL! Anything silly that would work in the FTL setting? What if the Biblical Epiphany story was an FTL encounter, that seems like the kind of absurdity they would go for.

Star of the East (310 words)
Fandom: FTL: Faster Than Light (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: Christmas, Biblical Epiphany Narrative
Summary: Wise beings have traveled a long way for this. Like, a really long way.

I already knew that mod pendrecarc enjoyed Divine Cities and Steerswoman, so clearly more exquisite tastes, but also I had just written for those so I was kind of in the mood for something different. And then I saw this extremely galaxy-brained prompt: what if Rowan's world was the long-lost Alpha Colony, and Cordelia Naismith (from the Vorkosigan Saga) had discovered it in the Shards of Honor era? Yes please. This is totally a premise that deserves a 10k epic, but a 400 word ficlet is what we're getting, so there. Also there was still time to nom it for Candy Hearts so...yes, I will be plagiarizing some prompts there.

Shards of a Guidestar (436 words)
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold, Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Rowan (Steerswoman)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Canon-typical levels of dysentery, Dubauer can't catch a break on any planet, Religion
Summary: Cordelia gets stuck on a technologically primitive planet. You know how this goes.

Of course when I went to post this on my sock I was kind of tired and I just kind of...forgot about...the "post to collection" button. So I just hit "post" and did it the normal way. Which meant it was not anon and pendrecarc, who came up with the idea in the first place and was the original collection maintainer, got an email notification. From an unfamiliar username, not the one I normally use in the tagmod channel. So while we were trying to troubleshoot the anonymity glitch, it was like, "what's going on now." "Nothing interesting, just user error, sorry." "Oh okay!"

And so then we lived happily ever after.

Ada Hoffmann first came to my attention via The Neurodiversiverse anthology. This is the first installment in a trilogy. In a future where superintelligent AI are worshiped as gods, an autistic scientist accidentally causes a disaster on a space station. As a result, she's basically kidnapped by angels working for the god Nemesis, who need her help in tracking down her former doctorate advisor. Both the forces of Nemesis and the heretic Dr. Talirr have the potential to cause terror, so Yasira does a lot of bouncing between a rock and a hard place. "The Outside" refers to forces beyond our universe's space and time, which occasionally breach containment and cause "madness" in onlookers, but of course, "madness" is subjective. (In the acknowledgements, Hoffmann places this book within the stream of "Lovecraftian subversion.")

The worldbuilding of AI-as-gods requiring mortal trust to perpetuate themselves, and eventually absorbing human souls after they die, is fascinating. Ditto some humans' desire to build their own space stations without relying on godly technology. The glimpses we get of other alien species are great:

Your Boater dictionary had two words in it before you started drawing on my work. And both the words were variations on 'destroy the soul-eating abominations.'

...

However, any culture studied in sufficient detail will yield up a word, and often a fairly sophisticated system of safeguards and protections, for the things in this universe which are inherently incomprehensible to sentient minds. The semantics of the word chosen can be culturally informative. My favorite, of course, is the Spider term: Ȋsȋrinin-neri-ȋnik, or 'that which eats reality.'

Yasira comes from a culture that's comparatively accessible for disabled and neurodiverse people, and that filters through early. This description felt true-to-life:

Yasira's neurotype was supposed to be all about joy, about being so in love with science and knowledge and patterns that they eclipsed everything else. She'd been like that as a child, throwing herself into dusty physics texts the way other kids played games or ate candy. So excited when she tackled a new problem that she'd abruptly throw the book down and run around the house laughing. At some point, maybe in grad school, that had faded somehow. Who knew why? She was still good at the things people liked her to do, so there wasn't much wrong. Maybe it was just part of growing up.

I would have liked to see even more contrasts of how someone like Yasira might relate to angels or nonhuman entities differently than other humans would. This struck me as strange:

Akavi peered over Yasira's shoulder at the chart of the galaxy. This was unnecessary, since he had downloaded the chart into his head and could mentally examine it from whatever angle he pleased. But the physical signs of shared attention helped put mortals at ease.

The Outside, by definition, is outside ordinary understanding and language, so any depiction of it is inherently vague. It wasn't too much gross-out horror for me, but I'm not super into "we can't describe it, it was just some bizarre wrongness."

I would have liked more worldbuilding about what happens to humans after they die and how that relates to the gods. Yasira, quite understandably, is reluctant to do things that will get people killed; life, even life with some "madness," is better than death! But in a world where the existence of afterlives is common knowledge rather than a matter of faith, I imagine people's ethical calculations would be different in some circumstances. I didn't get enough of "how divine are the 'gods,' really" to feel like I necessarily understood Yasira's reactions.

( Vague spoilers )

Yasira's girlfriend, Tiv, comes from a culture with great names and nicknames: "Tiv" is short for Productivity, "Citizenship" goes by "Ship," etc. Yasira struggles to have faith in the gods or experience religious transcendence; she looks to Tiv as an example of how a "good girl" would behave. Unfortunately, most of the time she's offscreen, and it's mostly like "if you ever want to see Tiv again, you better do as we say." We don't get a good sense of what Tiv sees in Yasira; to me, these sorts of relationships can come off as "anxious autistic person and their emotional support neurotypical." I understand that some people will value seeing f/f romance depicted in these settings! In my entirely personal opinion, I would have liked to see other kinds of relationships in Yasira's life.

(There is also a very funny subplot involving an angel who's crushing on his clueless boss, featuring a great Ironic Echo resolution.)

Bingo: Gods and Pantheons, LGBTQIA protagonist, Impossible Places, Epistolary (almost every chapter starts with an in-universe epigraph)

This is a novel in verse about King Xau of Meqing (fantasy China). Much like Maia in The Goblin Emperor, Xau is the youngest of four sons, and after his father's death, he's the only one left to take the throne; he then proceeds to astonish everyone by his Incorruptible Pure Pureness, in particular, not thinking himself better or more important than ordinary people.

Let's consider the "novel in verse" part first. I can be very picky about free verse. I usually prefer formal constraints, like rhyme and meter. Often, I find that contemporary poetry written in free verse also tends to be inscrutable. Especially in academia, there's a lot of "reading the same few lines over and over again to try and figure out what it's getting at," it's not just "the curtains are blue" but there's that same "hopefully the professor can tell us what's going on because I don't know." In speculative outlets, I sometimes feel that the borderline between flash fiction and free verse falls into this "incomprehensible word salad" category, to its detriment.

I am happy to report that "The Sign of the Dragon" avoids this problem. Most of it is free verse, but not in an inaccessible way: more in the way that a drabble or very short story might just pick out a few details or sentences, leaving the reader to infer the rest of the plot from a few highlights. I wound up turning off my poetry goggles for most of it and just reading it as flash-adjacent prose, and I think that's totally fine. There are a few sections that became more rhyme-based (especially the horror parts; there were several lines about slaves/caves and chain/pain, etc. that repeated over and over in the "monster" POV sections, I would have liked more different kinds), and others that are sort of loosely haiku-structured.

Also, obligatory shoutouts to Enlai the bard. Enlai composes songs and ballads about how great and heroic and legendary Xau is, and Xau always tries to avoid them, because it's embarrassing. But, like...the entire story we're reading is the poetic saga of how great and heroic and legendary Xau is, as much as he tries to downplay it. So I don't think we can be too hard on Enlai!

Many of the poems were previously published in various speculative journals. This surprised me, because it didn't feel like the proper names and stuff would make a lot of sense without context. Maybe I'm just being sour grapes about "well if I tried that I'd probably have no luck," but also, I can't see myself wanting to write a novel in free verse anyway so hopefully that's nothing to worry about?

Okay, now the rest of it. In Maia's case, he came to the throne because his father and all three brothers simultaneously died when their airship crashed. Xau's father died of natural causes, and all four brothers went to the mountain of the titular dragon. The other three, one by one, fail to return, so they send Xau; he impresses the dragon enough to be allowed to live and be crowned king.

Page 16:

"We are angry, not sad--
our father should have warned them."

I think, to me, this caused me to misinterpret this as Xau having been warned, or having some kind of foreknowledge of what to expect from the dragon? But he really didn't. The dragon decided Xau's father would make an adequate king, despite him being a terrible person by comparison, but Xau's brother Keng, who cared about him and gave him a nickname and who Xau names his first child after, doesn't pass. And Xau just winds up shooting the breeze with, and going to get advice from, the creature who killed this brother and all the others. I don't buy it.

There's a fairly heavy tonal dissonance between the book at its lightest and its darkest, and for me, this undermined it pretty severely. Explaining why will go into heavy spoiler territory, so.

( Spoiler Territory )
Bingo: Book in Parts, Readalong (I was doing the Reddit Readalong so I've been at this for a couple months), Parent Protagonist, Author of Color

I am working on a long-form original writing project. It's one of those "very specifically crafted to a certain outlet, if it doesn't get selected for publication there, it's not really the kind of thing that could be pulled and submitted elsewhere." The outlet's premise seems perfect for me, but, who knows, there are probably lots of other people saying the same thing. So I don't want to go into specifics because I don't want to jinx anything.

As of this writing, I have started 1/4 of the sections that will comprise the overall project. (Obviously, "started" =/= "finished," there are some that still need a lot of work, and others that may turn out to be unsuitable and that I'd have to replace. So this is just an estimate.)

It's one of those...if I have an enormous chunk of time available to me I just procrastinate and play "Slay the Spire" all day, if I tell myself "okay this is a school night, I just need to knock out one section, that's enough for today," it's more feasible that I might get something done. The holiday weekend is coming up and I'll just be chilling with my extended family, again, I hope this leaves time to write at least a few more sections, but no promises.

In the meantime because there is so much to do for that, and so much room to procrastinate, I have not written a word for Yuletide. Canon review for my assignment was relatively speedy, so again, if I don't overextend myself and get too overwhelmed to start, I feel like the assignment should not be tedious. (I'd love to keep up my prolific-treater streak.) But again, it's just like...gotta actually buckle down and do it.

IDK, wish me luck. One step at a time.

In a fantasy world where magic exists alongside familiar forms of scholarship, a mysterious event wipes out at least one city and possibly most of the human world. Rukha, a geographer, is exploring an abandoned tower when Eshu, a student wizard, emerges from the "Mirrorlands" that used to connect major cities via a parallel world and literally runs into her. Rukha decides they're friends and it's her job to help him get home, but with modern forms of transportation disrupted, it turns out to be a longer journey than anticipated as they make their way across the post-apocalyptic landscape.

The good: worldbuilding. Creepy ruins of a city that's been overrun by crystals:

All around him, towering spires of fluorite and fool's gold clawed toward the sky. Downhill, where switchback streets led inexorably to the sea, shards of quartz gleamed like knives from every roof and balcony. Blood-brown garnets lay beneath the ruins of merchants' awnings, which hung in shreds over heaps of broken stones. Temples wept icicles of some thick, green stone swirled with black.
Whatever this city had been before, now it was a wasteland of glittering rock.

Eshu's branch of magic involves "telling the world a story" and convincing it to work differently; this is usually expressed through the metaphors of song, with evocative imagery. When fighting another wizard, he tries to make a magical airship fly, and she tries to make it sink:

She didn't sing, but he felt her magic like a song: the remorseless pull of gravity. The eager ground to which everyone in time returned. The laws of the universe, every fixed planet orbiting every spiraling star, all of them circling the vast devouring void. All obeyed a commandment older than language, older than life. It was right. It was righteous. The first thing any creature did was fall.

Usamkartha, one of Eshu's wizard friends, passes through a mirror as it's breaking, and the description is compelling:

When she looked at him straight on, he was an ordinary man of her mother's generation: lean-faced, dolorous of eye, his hair greying and balding. The veins stood out like serpents on the backs of his hands.
When she let her mind wander for even a moment, he was a mass of shining scales and coils.
"What happened to you?" she asked quietly.
With his free hand, Usamkartha thumped his book. "I am writing a manuscript on my condition, if you care to know the details," he said. "The first true theoretical work on the aftereffects of traveling through a broken mirror--the condition has been called fragmentation by past scholars, but I believe it is more properly termed abstraction. If I'm going to die from this, at least my death advances the field of scholarship."

This description of Eshu practicing his faith in a minority environment is also great:

Being Njowa had mattered so much to him back in Usbaran, when he and Mnoro had been the only Njowa at the university; they'd kept the feasts and fasts together, knelt for prayers together, warned each other about which street vendors fried their vegetables in pork or duck fat. When their exam period meant they couldn't make it home for High Summer, they'd built a holiday hut out of blankets instead of reeds and hidden in its shelter, trading city comedies. Faith had been a kite string linking him home--to Kondala, to his family, to the centuries of far travelers who had come before him.

The bad: I didn't really care about the characters. Basically Rukha just decides "okay, we're stuck together" and never reconsiders, even when Eshu is being whiney and frustrated that he can't find any hair cream or lotion in the post-apocalyptic world. She's been out of university for "a few years"--if there were a big age difference, I could maybe see her being protective in "he's just a kid trying to get home to his family" kind of way, even if Eshu thinks of himself as an adult. But it just kind of borders on the therapy-speak ("you're really not treating me like a friend right now," Eshu confronting his abusive ex), in an underwhelming way. I get that it's trying to subvert the "mismatched strangers to friends to lovers" plotline in a "mismatched strangers to friends who are very important people in each other's lives, they don't need or want a romantic or sexual aspect to their relationship," but there are plenty of times when it's like "why are these people even hanging out together if they don't particularly like each other."

Most of the back half of the book is set in the city of Kulmeni, which is less catastrophically impacted than other human settlements. After "the change," a new "prince" took power, who was until recently the leader of an organized crime gang. The complexity of "maybe she's actually making things better for the common people and representing them better than the aristocracy, maybe she's just out for power" was handled well. There's a great interchange where Eshu talks to the Anjali River, who sometimes appears in a deity form, before they have to duel (it makes more sense in context) and points out the parallels between his situation with an abusive ex and the city's situation with "do we just stick with the devil we know?" and that helped, somewhat, in justifying the "abusive ex" plotline.

There's a brief mention towards the end of the book about Njo, the deity Eshu worships, that made me hope for more "Steerswoman" parallels with the combination of magic and science, but that might have been just wishful thinking on my end.

Bingo: Impossible Places (borderline hard mode, if you count all the chapters set in Kulmeni and/or the Mirrorlands I think it would be over 50%?), Gods and Pantheons (the Anjali's anthropomorphic form is referred to as a god), LGBTQIA protagonist, was a previous Readalong, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land?

"Last in a Series" bingo was going to be a tricky one, because what series are there that I haven't read all of/can complete while doing twenty-four other unrelated authors? (Thursday Next almost worked, but "Dark Reading Matter" is now delayed to 2026.) So when I saw a "fantasy mountain climbing" duology among Yuletide fandom recs, it was like, sure, I'll try a duology, we don't need to do hard mode here. "All the Wandering Light" follows directly on from "Even the Darkest Stars," and I wouldn't say the plot/characterization work well as a standalone, so this will really be a (spoilery) dual review.

Kamzin and her sister Lusha live in the village of Azmiri; their mother was a famous mountain climber, and so they know the path to the unclimbed Mount Raksha, the tallest mountain in the world. The renowned Royal Explorer, River Shara, wants to climb it, and Kamzin is desperate to accompany him and have an adventure. In the sequel, Kamzin and Lusha discover a falling star, which holds magical power which might be the key to saving the empire from fearsome witches, so they have to track that down in another mountain range and then deliver it to the emperor.

The "fantasy Himalayas" stuff is more prominent in the first book than the second. Raksha is "only" about twenty thousand feet tall, which is more like the Alps than the Himalayas--no need for fantasy!bottled oxygen, etc. There are some artifacts known as kinnika that are magical bells (I think more like jingle bells and cowbells than musical bells), which was neat. In general, I was more interested in the mountain climbing than the "weird evil creatures" stuff.

I can recommend this if you like cute animal sidekicks. The dragons are kitten-scale, and provide bioluminescence in lieu of lanterns. Kamzin has a fox familiar, and Lusha has several raven friends.

Neat fantasy!Tibetan worldbuilding from book 1:

It was a finely carved wooden chest painted in bright reds and blues, lined with niches for ceramic statues representing generations of ancestors. Most of the little doors were closed, but one was ajar, revealing an empty shelf.

I knelt before the shrine and opened the first door, my fingers brushing against the patterns of overlapping knots carved into the wood. The statue behind it was old—so old that the clay was discolored and crumbling. The statues were not made to be recognizable, however; they were always rough, only vaguely human in shape, and meant to decay over time. I traced the character carved into the base—my great-great-grandmother’s name. I carefully returned the statue to its niche and examined the other shelves.

And realistic consequences of magic from book 2:

I shivered at the reminder of Emperor Lozong’s unnatural life span. It was said that he had ruled for over two centuries, kept alive by some strange shamanic spell. Most outside the Three Cities believed it a tale invented by the first Lozong’s descendants to intimidate his enemies.

The bad news is that a lot of this is what I call "YA as pejorative." First person ambitious teenage girl narration--none of this is a bad thing in and of itself, but in combination with embarrassing misunderstandings, making dumb decisions when drunk, love triangles, just happening to get help from allies who make unnecessary prophecies...it can be kind of painful. (Book 2 was better than 1 in this regard, there was another case of "oops, uncomfortable misunderstanding" but that one felt more like an "okay, well-played.) Kamzin's best friend accompanies her to the high altitudes despite having fantasy asthma and it's like...why are you doing this. Everyone is teenagers and thinking with their hormones, I get it. If we cut out all the "gosh, I don't know if I can trust this person, given everything that's happened, but I really want to!" it would be a lot shorter.

There are several things in book 1 that I think could have been introduced earlier. Like, we mention something, and then a chapter later we mention it again, and it's like...you could have just given that detail the first time. (Aimo and Dargye are siblings; seers like Yonden (and eventually Lusha) can't really have romantic relationships; Tem and Kamzin briefly dated, but it didn't work out; there's a witch empress who is very scary.)

River comes from a family of four brothers. The boys are Sky, River, Thorn, and...Esha. What's going on here. This is like the "Esha's mom has four sons" puzzle.

Spoilery things:

( Read more... )

Bingo: I plan to use "Wandering Light" for Last In A Series. "Darkest Stars" would count for Generic Title. Both of them are A Book In Parts. I think you could make the case that the "sky city" showing up towards the end of "Wandering Light" counts as Impossible Places.

I have been extremely into Slay the Spire over the last few months, just now I beat the "bonus level" (Act IV) final boss for the first time :D Playing as the Defect (robot juggler), who's probably my favorite.

I got the colorless card "Apotheosis," combined with the Power card "Static Discharge," that's like "when you take attack damage, channel one lightning." Once I upgraded, it was "when you take attack damage, channel two lightning." Got some good potions towards the end (Regen Potion, Potion of Capacity giving me extra orb spots, I also had "free power card" which I wound up not even needing...) So I was able to have lots of orb slots. And then the Heart does a strength-3 attack 12 times, which meant I was channeling twenty-four lightning that turn. So...yeah. That worked.

Will I try again with the other characters/ascension bonus modes? Probably. Will this mean I'm slightly less addicted to it and can do other things as well? We can only hope.

This is the first installment in the "Green Bone" trilogy that ranks highly in /r/fantasy polls, and I found it lived up to the hype!

Premise: Jamloon is the capital city of Kekon, an island country that's the source of bioenergetic jade. Most ethnically Kekonese people--but few others--get magical powers from touching jade, and so they can train as martial artists to hone their skills. A couple generations ago, the One Mountain society of Green Bone warriors (and their civilian supporters) fought a guerilla war for Kekon's independence, as part of a wider global conflict. But after the war, the society splintered into feuding clans (sort of like the Chinese "triad" organized crime system), which are now on the verge of outright gang war. And it's happening against the backdrop of a late-20th century tech level. People strangle each other with telephone cords, record incrimidating conversations on cassette tapes, and there's a whole scene of "how do I get in touch with this guy, do I use his home phone number or his work phone or call his girlfriend or what?!" from the just-pre-cell phone era. I normally roll my eyes when authors namedrop a bunch of RL car makes or brand name guns, but if it's fictional car or gun manufacturers that coexist with fantastical superpowers, it turns out I'm here for it.

There are a lot of POVs, but not in an overwhelming way. The main focus is on the Kaul siblings, prominent in the No Peak clan: Lan, Hilo, and Shae, and their honorary "cousin" Anden. At times, mostly early on, it felt like head-hopping--are we in character A's POV, or did we just switch to B's? But maybe it's just A having a reasonably educated guess what B is thinking, either from normal human intuition or, in some cases, magically augmented Perception.

If you like magic systems, with clearly-outlined "disciplines" and delineations of what jade can accomplish, this book is for you. Anden is in his final year at the academy, which features such exciting tests and rituals as "the Massacre of the Rats," as well as non-magical education such as "competitive matches in poetry recital, speed math, and logic game." Would attend. And if you like the Wheel of Time-style magic where different people have different tolerances for magic, it can be dangerous and addictive, but there's a lot of social status riding on who outranks whom, this book is definitely for you. The descriptions of jade addiction, and the obsessive desire it provokes both in experienced users and small-time criminals with delusions of grandeur, are very compelling. A new drug has promise for increasing people's tolerance, or making foreigners able to use it when they wouldn't otherwise, but comes with its own side effects. Will international trade help Kekon modernize, or will they export their "backward" martial culture to the rest of the world? The tension that comes from being on the precipice of great technological change is palpable everywhere.

I loved the description of the war of independence, and how in some ways it was easier than maintaining unity in peacetime.

During the war, the people called Ayt the Spear of Kekon. He was the daring, vengeful, ferocious Green Bone warrior that the Shotarians feared and hated, a man who spoke little but wreaked deadly havoc on the occupiers, only to always escape into the shadows and up into the mountains.

His closest comrade, Kaul Sen, was the elder, more seasoned rebel, a shrewd and masterful tactician who, along with his son, Du, distributed secret pamphlets and broadcast subversive radio messages that inspired and organized the network of Lantern Men that became the key to the One Mountain Society’s success.

The Spear and the Torch.

Kaul Sen's right-hand man, Yun Dorupon, turns out to be a total creep. This part was powerful but not overstated.

Years away had not dimmed Shae’s loathing of Yun Dorupon. He’d cost her not just a friend, but the once matchless admiration she’d had for her grandfather.

Some small nitpicks:

When the story begins, Shae has just returned to Kekon after parting on bad terms with her family two years ago. At first, it's like, "she was dating a foreigner, Kekonese people can be xenophobic, that's too bad." It's not until the 46% mark that we learn more about what she was doing that was so disgraceful before she left. I would have liked to learn that a little earlier, it feels pretty important in evaluating her character. That might say more about my priorities IRL, though.

When describing Kekonese festival or cultural traditions, the narrative voice occasionally jumps into generic present tense, which felt jarring. There are a couple "interludes" that recount Kekonese religious lore about the first humans; those were fine because they were their own chapters.

There's a sex scene early on that was a bit too NSFW for my tastes, I would not want to read 500 pages of that. The rest of the book is not like that, however. Even when there were other descriptions of intimacy, it was less gratuitous.

The ending:
( spoilers )
But overall, there are lots of great perspectives, like a small-time criminal getting a fancy gun:

He’d never owned anything bigger than a pocket-sized pistol and couldn’t believe his luck. He felt as if he were holding a baby; he didn’t know where to put his hands, how to properly cradle such a valuable object.

Or this kind of culture shock:

Sporting events on Kekon were different from how they were in Espenia. Shae had been astounded by how rowdy and jovial the crowds were over there. The Espenians sang and chanted constantly; they cheered and booed, waved flags, and shouted nonsensical instructions at the players and coaches. The Kekonese were no less passionate in their team loyalties, but no one would think to yell at the field or distract the participants.

The other countries aren't fleshed out in detail, so it's not distracting in the way that "oh this is just clearly the USA/Russia/China with the serial numbers filed off" would be. On the other hand, Espenia has a secretary of the War Department so...that aged well.

Bingo: Author of Color, was a previous readalong.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Optional details are optional! Please feel free to write anything about these fandoms/characters, this is just to provide some suggestions if you're interested. I have treats enabled on my Ao3 account.

I'm also primeideal on Ao3 (and Tumblr), and Ember Nickel on FFN. I have many previous dear author letters from which much of this is copied, pasted, and endlessly rewritten. I've written/blogged more heavily about several of these fandoms than others at times, but I would be equally delighted with fic for any one of them.

For the fandoms where it's relevant, I'm checking the box for "one or more chosen tags," ie, if you want to focus on one character/worldbuilding tag and not include the others, that is very welcome! (If I requested only one character, then I specifically want that character.)

General Likes:

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-interactive fiction--I prefer formats like Twine to open-ended parsers.

-happy endings

-sad endings (character death, melodrama, heartbreak!)

General DNWs (see canon-specific notes for details):

-explicit on-screen sex (fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-character bashing

Anathem

Erasmas, Jad, Orolo, Worldbuilding

Erasmas: What does his life look like in the post-canon era? Is he a mentor to future fids? What changes with the Second Reconstitution? More of his friendships with Sammann or Jules, or his family relationship with Cord?

Jad: What did a "normal" day in the life of a Millenarian look like, pre-canon? Is he bouncing around nearby "alternate universes," or moving farther up the Wick? Jad mentions that if it hadn't been for the Daban Urnud's arrival, Orolo would likely have become a Centenarian and then a Millenarian himself someday--what would their relationship have been like?

Orolo: How did he react when the Ita picked him to secretly spy on the Daban Urnud? What was actually going through his head in the early chapters that he couldn't tell Raz? Or during his death scene?

Worldbuilding: I'm primarily interested in the world of the concents pre-canon. Weird bell patterns! Giant clock towers! Math and science! Bizarre dictionary definitions! Whatever it is the Ita are up to! But if there's something you have ideas for in terms of the Daban Urnud or polycosmic travel, go for it.

For this request: DNW discussion of allswell or other mind-altering drugs.

Debrief

George Russell, Robert Alderidge, Worldbuilding

-Does any of this ever get declassified? How much do Dora or Jean, or the kids, ever figure out, correctly or incorrectly?

False Doctrine series

Evvie, Sara

So maybe this was an osmosis failure, but I'm not sure I completely understood Evvie's plotline. At first, her conviction that she's called to the monastic life could have been a case of "I know what I'm called to do in life, other people [and their heteronormative stereotypes] might not understand, but that's okay." But then she meets "Fee," who "fills the void in her life," and Charlie and Hal, who maybe open her mind to different vocations and ways of serving God in the world. And there's Sara's whole thing about "I can't marry George, I think I'm the handsome rake," and the demon pointing out that Evvie finds people like Daphne attractive. It sort of seemed to be setting up an Evvie/Sara endgame? Then in the the last chapter, there's the quick swerve from "not exactly a yes" (about going back to Patmos) to "actually, talking to Charlie made me decide I want to be a nun after all..."?

So with that:

-I would be interested in an Evvie/Sara AU where Evvie realizes that maybe her vision isn't really telling her what to do anymore, and considers other alternatives for what to do next.

-Alternatively, something canon-compliant, where Evvie talks more with Sara and/or Kit on the voyage back to Patmos. Kit and Evvie comparing notes about their relationships with their half-siblings? Or Sara and Evvie staying friends and pen pals, post-canon? (I'll admit I don't know a great deal about Greek Orthodoxy, I'm assuming nuns aren't so cloistered that they can't have friends and pen pals in the outside world?)

-More about Sara's relationships with any of the "From All False Doctrine" characters. Does her love for fabricating completely unnecessary details come from Uncle Peachy? What does Elsa make of the events of "Neither Have I Wings," once she's all caught up? Was there more going on with "Hal's" appearance to young Sara than we knew? Does Uncle Sven have advice on living with a disability?

Master & Margarita

Behemoth

I'm just delighted by Behemoth and everything he chooses to be. He gets on the streetcar and pays his fare! He plays chess with a living board and cheats at it! He debates informal versus formal pronoun usage! Anything along these lines would be wonderful.

Completely optional, but for this fandom, I think there's potential for humor in a setting-change AU and/or crossover. Put Behemoth (and/or Woland and some of the other demons) in another setting, another awkward political situation, and create more "even the literal devil is no match for human incompetence" nonsense. Anything I've previously requested or written on Ao3 is fair game. Demons versus the Cold War-era KGB ("Debrief," "Chess")? Demons versus aliens in the Cultural Revolution ("Remembrance of Earth's Past")? Demons versus...other demons in World War II ("Neither Have I Wings")? For this prompt specifically, I'm even opting into RL contemporary politics mentions, as long as there's at least a little humor.

Project Hail Mary

Steve Hatch

I love Steve and how faith and science complement each other for him. Ryland kind of lampshades "you're the most optimistic guy I've ever met," which is saying something by the standards of an Andy Weir novel. More about his optimism in dark times? He seems very confident in his belief that the Beatles are just objectively the best musicians; more of his unshakable takes? Is he still alive by the time of the Beatle (spaceships)' return, and if so, what does he make of them? How does he incorporate the discovery of Eridians into his worldview?

Remembrance of Earth's Past

Cheng Xin, Yang Dong, Ye Wenjie, Worldbuilding

Cheng Xin:

A fix-it where she doesn't miss Yun Tianming at their star? Any kind of outside POV on her and the many different hats she wears: Older men patronizing her during Project Staircase? The humans resenting her in Australia? Luo Ji and the museum? What if she'd stayed on the cylinder worlds near Jupiter where things felt "normal" and 2000s-y? Her relationship with Guan Yifan--is he really a different kind of human for having been to space, or are they more two sides of the same coin?

Yang Dong:

For someone who has very little time "on screen," she casts a long shadow over all of the books. More about her friendship with the programmer from "Death's End," and/or with Luo Ji? What if she'd survived--what would she have made of her mother's betrayal? How would things have gone with Ding Yi?

Ye Wenjie:

Secrets at Red Coast Base? Some more of the "declassified" documents? The early days of the ETO? What did she work out about Dark Forest theory before meeting Luo Ji? What if Yang Dong had talked to her about the documents she'd sneaked a look at? Or if Ye had lived long enough to discover more of Deterrence theory herself?

Worldbuilding:

More of the "video game" that taught people about Trisolaris--what were others' experiences like playing it? The aftermath of Gravity and Blue Space? The four-dimensional artifact Guan Yifan talks to? The legacy of the old universe in the new?

Slay the Spire

Defect, Merchant, Worldbuilding

I love this game, and these prompts are just a few jumping-off points--feel free to bring in any of the characters or mechanics. Trying to make a narrative out of the deckbuilding mechanics would be great.

Defect: I think they're my favorite character to play--the orbs doing damage automatically, the rainbows and the self-repair power! How did they become self-aware? What's the deal with the "claw"-type cards--they seem an odd combination with all of the computery, robotic stuff.

Merchant: Why is he such a jerk?! What's his relationship with the "Courier" like? What is he doing in Act 4? Just more of the Merchant snarking at the adventurers.

Worldbuilding: I mean, take any relic, look at the flavor text, there's a story there. The annotations from legendary explorers of the past? What's going on with the "leave a card for your future self" mechanic, or the tesseract, or the keys? What's the deal with vampires and ghosts, etc, running around and trying to recruit you? Who is Neow? Or the whale at the beginning?

Steerswoman

Worldbuilding, Bel

I was thrilled by the worldbuilding in this series--the depiction of Rowan's scientific inquiry is great, even if our perspective as readers is different from the characters'. And I especially enjoyed the complexity of Outskirter society in "Steerswoman's Road"--the tribes closer to the Inner Lands growing more militaristic and less cultured, the Face People and Efraim's weirdness around women, the naming ceremony and recitation of ancestors, the importance of poetry and lore--that makes them much more than "wilderness raiders." I'd love to see more about Bel's approach to life as a warrior and a bard, whether that be with Kammeryn's tribe or others in the outskirts, or adapting to Inner Lands culture (Rowan being impressed by the way she learns the importance of the "once upon a time..." narrative was a really neat touch!) I'm open to shippy Bel/Rowan if you're so inclined, but gen is great too.

Something more worldbuilding-focused elsewhere in the world would also be neat--documents at the Archives? Steerswomen and wizards' POV on the same events? What does religion look like in a world where Christian symbols and language exist but most people don't remember their homeworld? (I'd prefer no authorial bashing of any specific belief system or lack thereof, but canon-typical disagreements/skepticism on different characters' part is fine and expected!)

Feel free to bring in any canon characters or OCs. Steffie's POV sometimes dragged for me so I would prefer if he wasn't a central character, but mentions are fine.

---

Again, this is all optional, feel free to use as much or as little as is helpful. I look forward to reading your story!

It's Yuletide season, so time to discover new books via fandom promos and random tagset browsing! Full disclosure, this is the first in a trilogy, so some of the things I criticize might be addressed in future books; the rec said that book one is satisfying on its own and would be plenty to use as a basis for writing fanfic about, so that's as far as I've read.

In 1895, Leda Cassidy travels from Scotland to Singapore to serve as a companion to a young lady whose mother and siblings have recently died. Unfortunately, the house is haunted. Fortunately, Miss Cassidy came prepared.

Singapore in the 1890s is a vibrant mix of people and cultures--Malay, Chinese, Indian, British; Catholic, Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist. It's a time of change, on the cusp of modernization; secret societies run extortion rackets, and families debate whether it would be beneficial to a daughter's future to bind her feet. A lot of the charm comes from the evocation of what, to me, was an unfamiliar and compelling setting. There's even a great Chekhov's gun on the etymology of the name "Singapore" (which means "Lion City.")

“And since their father has insisted the girls must meet their suitors, I cannot pick a man who is ugly, or fat, or has pockmarks, or any of these things,” she concluded in disgust. “They would simply refuse. At their age, they are still foolish; they want a handsome husband. Ah, I wish all brides could be like Mui Ee—she was easy. ‘Find me a husband who is patient and will not beat me,’ she said, ‘and the rest can be dealt with.’”

Miss Cassidy had to admit, Mui Ee’s criteria summed things up rather sensibly. It was striking how many men failed to fulfil those basic requirements, in Miss Cassidy’s experience.

She had not appeared to materially change anything in that bare little accommodation, yet it had seemed brighter for her presence in some indefinable way. Of course, if he asked the womenfolk, they would have pointed out that Miss Cassidy had cleared the yard of weeds and rubbish, swept the floor, put in fresh sheets, and polished the window-grilles and fixtures till they shone, so wha he thought of as a mysterious aura of crisp goodwill was merely the result of efficient housekeeping.

At first, I got the impression that Miss Cassidy was kind of a Mary Poppins-type character. She's seen a lot of strange things, to the point where it makes her unflappable, but she's basically looking for a decent job like any other forty-ish Scotswoman. When she just happens to have useful salt or iron on hand, my reaction was: "okay, at some point, we'll learn more about her backstory and what she went through to make her realize the value of these tools." But gradually, it's revealed that she's way older, and more powerful, than she looks. We get some teasing hints of "her showing up at this haunted house wasn't just a coincidence, someone else was pulling the strings and needed her help," but not enough about Miss Cassidy's own motivations. At her age, what's in it for her?

Then she meets a Chinese widower, and "Nobody else had such an effect on her, from demons and shamans to goddesses and ghosts; only this mere mortal man had such an astounding ability to continually stagger her." Okay, I'll suspend my disbelief; true love is always mysterious, no matter who you are. But Miss Cassidy's vastly different perspective means she can come off as sort of condescending towards ordinary humans: "if you want to celebrate the birth of your deity on December 25th, that's cute, I approve of festivities and merriment with family." This is maybe just something I'm unusually sensitive towards, but it doesn't feel like a recipe for a mutually loving, respectful relationship.

Almost the entire book is from Miss Cassidy's POV, but there are a couple jumps into other characters' perspectives. I think it would have been stronger if it was either in the same POV throughout, or there was more purposeful, consistent, "let's get outsider POV on the mysterious stranger in town." Instead it felt like kind of hamfisted "oh, we need to introduce this other character who Miss Cassidy hasn't met yet."

There are a couple big character developments that happen offscreen that I wanted more of. There are twins considering getting married, and slowly realizing that they'll have to live apart for the first time (unless they marry a pair of brothers...) But then there's a bit of a timeskip, and they wind up marrying unrelated people. I wanted more about that. Another character goes from being a practicing Catholic to marrying an Anglican curate. What happened there?

It's a fast read, but I'd have preferred it to be a little slower and answer more of the questions it raises.

Bingo: Book in Parts, Gods and Pantheons, Author of Color, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Saw this as a recommendation for the pirates square, enjoyed Hardinge's "Unraveller" enough to try her again!

Premise: an archipelago setting (the "Myriad') where, until thirty years ago, terrifying and unknowable sea monsters ruled as gods. Now, the gods are dead, and humans are trying to move forward, mostly by salvaging the dead gods' corpses and using them as fantasy tech. So in that "arms race" respect, it's very reminiscent of "Shadow of the Leviathan," and having read those books kind of primed me to guess a couple of the twists along the way.

Frecht was the old word, a harsh word ragged with superstitious awe. It was an ugliness and otherness that could only be holy, a breach of the rules that echoed those that no rules could bind. The ancient, sacred buildings aspired to that sublime distortion. Frecht transcended beauty and carried you into a realm of awe and terror. It demanded your slavish devotion. Nobody used the word anymore, for it dripped with the memory of the gods. However, sometimes people said beautiful and meant frecht.

Our protagonist is Hark, a teenager who comes from poverty and makes his way in the world by scamming and bluffing people.

He’d never been captain of anything in his life. He hadn’t even been captain of his own life.

Hark's parents died when he was young; his best friend/found family is Jelt, a boy his age who keeps dragging him into schemes. Unfortunately, they have what to the readers is clearly a horrifically abusive relationship. Pretty soon, a scheme goes awry, and Hark winds up being sold into slavery/indentured servitude, a way of life that the characters are all cheerfully blase about. His con artist skills come in handy, though, and he winds up as the part-time assistant to a mad scientist (there are shades of Ana and Din if you squint, although I probably wouldn't have made that parallel if I hadn't already been primed by the setting to think of "Shadow of the Leviathan"), and part-time caretaker at a nursing home for elderly priests who couldn't cope with the "Cataclysm" a generation ago.

Because of the pervasity of diving, salvage, plunder, etc. on the Myriad, divers needed to evolve a rudimentary signing system. And then being underwater for long periods of time can cause hearing loss, so the signs evolved into full-fledged sign languages; there are a lot of people with various levels of hearing loss, and a thriving Deaf culture. The other main character, Selphin, is the daughter of Rigg, the pirate captain; Selphin is deaf, and as fearsome and swashbuckling a pirate as any other, except that her misadventures have left her with a phobia of water.

There are a lot of layers of complexity here. Some deaf people can read lips, some remember how to speak spoken languages well, someone who has a community of fellow signers around them is not necessarily socially disabled, but there are times when Selphin resents not being able to hear and wouldn't mind being "cured" of this condition. On the other hand, she's very averse to having any treatment for her mental health issues; it feels like it would be altering her deepest self. All of this felt very thoughtful and true-to-life.

About halfway through the book, one of Hark's priest friends challenges him:

“Perhaps you need to work out which parts of yourself are essential to your nature. Who are you? What aspects of yourself would you fight to protect, as if you were fighting for your life?”
Hark’s mind went blank. What could he say about himself?
Hark is Shelter-bred. Hark tells stories. Hark lies. Hark can haggle in fifteen languages. Hark is Jelt’s best friend, closer than blood. Hark holds the Shelter record for the longest time holding a racing crab with bare hands . . . None of these sounded right. They were true, but they didn’t describe the heart of him.

But we, the readers, don't really have any better answer than he does. Basically most of what we've learned about him so far is "Hark tells stories, Hark lies, Hark is Jelt's best friend, closer than blood." By the end of the book, he finally seems to have figured out what's most important to him, and I'm not sure that was entirely earned.

But for fast-paced adventure, cool worldbuilding, and nuanced disability rep, overall this is a fun read!

Bingo: Pirates, probably Biopunk, Gods and Pantheons?

This had been vaguely on my radar for a while (I have a friend who rates it among his favorites, I tried Piranesi when it was eligible for the Hugos in 2022), and then I saw it recced for Epistolary (there are letters and in-universe documentation, although they're a relatively small fraction of the book, as well as lots of footnotes). So, sure, I'll try.

The first and most important thing is that, on my e-reader, when you click to expand a footnote, it pops up at the bottom of the page, and sometimes it might continue onto a second screen. But it only displays a single paragraph. If the footnote is multiparagraph--and some of them are quite extensive--you have to click through to "jump to footnotes" to read it all. You wouldn't know there was more to it! Sometimes it just stops abruptly, but since some footnotes are nothing more or less than a "bibliographic" reference to a nonexistent book, you can't always tell whether another footnote is really just a one-liner or if there's more. It's 2025, I feel like we should have figured this out by now.

The second thing to say is that my e-reader edition came to 850 pages (but all of the footnotes are "on" page 850). This is not the only version of the book. One edition runs to 782 pages, another to 1006. You should probably be aware of this! Now, many of you are going to say, "if you're the type of person who picks up an 850-page fantasy novel for fun, 1006 is not that much different than 850." Which is true. But, perhaps because of bingo gamification, I like to know how to pace myself and know what I'm getting into. Unfortunately, I'm not confident that it was worth the time investment for me--it felt like less than the sum of its parts.

To its credit, the book is droll in a Dickensian way, in that everyone is kind of spectacularly missing the point. There's an insufferable toady who says things like "Isn't it such a shame that this woman died so young? D: She was going to be married! And her husband would have been given a thousand pounds a year! Alas, alas..." If you love to hate characters like that, there are plenty of hateable characters who get terrible comeuppances.

Unfortunately, the titular characters aren't easy to root for. Jonathan Strange only gets interested in magic because a prophecy said he would, and he wants to have a steady job to convince the woman he's crushing on that he's marriageable material. Mr Norrell tries to have a monopoly on magic and then is surprised when other people resent him for it, and his only "friends" are the insufferable toadies. There are sympathetic characters who are kidnapped by powerful magical forces, but whenever they try to talk about it or explain their problems, they're cursed to babble nonsense, so there's not much room to exert agency.

One of the big themes is that the characters are trying to restore English magic. There used to be a powerful magician in early medieval times named John Uskglass, aka the Raven King, who was raised in Faerie lands and eventually became a king of northern England. So there's a lot of "we're trying to bring back magic that was as powerful as Uskglass had access to, instead of just reading about it in books." (The "what are the political implications of England having another king" are kind of teased at but never really fleshed out.) The English characters travel throughout Europe and do magic on their country's behalf elsewhere during the Napoleonic Wars. Are we supposed to believe that magic is thriving elsewhere? Do other countries have their own versions of John Uskglass who have also abandoned them? Is England the only magical places because that's where the faeries hang out? This doesn't really get resolved.

To some extent, there are themes of "rich white men are oblivious, everyone else is actually having stuff happen." A servant literally takes a bullet for his employer but gets taken for granted; a woman kidnapped by the faerie powers is like "oh, my husband doesn't really love me, he only loves his books" while he's trying to move heaven and earth to rescue her. The contrast between "scholars who just stare at books all day" and "people who live in the real world and have emotions and do stuff" is not something I enjoy.

On the other hand, Stephen Black, a black man who works as a butler, commands the respect of his colleagues and it's like, "they subconsciously respond to his charisma and good looks by assuming he's actually a long-lost prince and will someday return to rule his homeland as a king." Which is hilarious, in a "reverse Nigerian prince scam" kind of way! Then a magical fairy meets him and has the exact same reaction--"you're dignified and handsome, obviously king material, QED." I enjoyed this part.

I was hoping for a reveal of "two aliases, same character." Like, maybe Norrell was the Raven King all along, and his fear of summoning up the Raven King is because he's terrified of what he used to be and doesn't ever want to go back to it? (I've been spoiled by "Warbreaker.") But no. And maybe the whole thing was just the Raven King playing 5D chess, but like...there's no one in the book who can match him, it isn't clear why he would have to resort to 5D chess. It's suggested that Norrell has just been sitting around and trying to get famous and hobnob with important people at the beginning of the story, but it takes Segundus' asking him "hey, you're a magician, could we see some of your books," to be the inciting incident, and it's like...again, straining credulity that it takes so long.

Likewise, the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall to be like "Mr Norrell (a less fanciful person than I)", and I wanted this to tie together--is the narrator also one of the minor characters, is this a whole in-universe document? But no luck on that front either. The footnotes are more of the same, including plenty of droll ones, but they're not as witty as Pratchett, and it wasn't clear what the dividing line between footnotes and the "main plot" was.

Enjoyed trying to spot the gratuitous "this must really be Clarke's id" stuff, both based on having read part of Piranesi and not. Like, there's an elaborate description of paintings of Venice that aren't really plot-relevant, hundreds of pages before elaborate descriptions of Venice proper. Labyrinths are a favorite motif, shades of Borges. Even Piranesi's RL namesake gets namedropped.

The title is not a typo: "Mr" has no period in British English. (Neither does "St".) On the other hand, she's trying to use period-typical spellings, so "chuse" rather than "choose," "any body" as two words, "sopha" for "sofa..." If it was rewritten in 21st century US English, I wonder whether the character count would grow or shrink or what. Probably not enough to make up a 156 page difference.

Parallels to other books: same era as Lord Byron and the scholarly parliamentarians of The Difference Engine, Mary Shelley and the crew behind Frankenstein get namedropped, more "why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo???" fodder for the time travelers in To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Mr Norrell tries to stop people from accessing a book published by Strange, and it kind of backfires on him. From the footnotes:

The letter contained two implications which were considered particularly offensive: first, that the purchasers were not clever enough to understand Strange’s book; and second, that they did not possess the moral judgement to decide for themselves if the magic Strange was describing was good or wicked.

Turns out when you condescend to people all the time and not only insult their intelligence but also tell them they don't know what's good for them, they don't like you. WHO KNEW. Good observation of human nature.

Here's some great excerpts from an in-universe book review:

...one of the generals had the original notion of replacing the Cavalry’s horses with unicorns. In this way it was hoped to grant the soldiers the power of goring Frenchmen through their hearts. Unfortunately, this excellent plan was never implemented since, far from finding unicorns in sufficient number for the Cavalry’s use, Mr NORRELL and Mr STRANGE have yet to discover a single one.

...

MERLIN...was upon his mother’s side Welsh and upon his father’s Infernal, he will scarcely do for that pattern of respectable English Magic upon which PORTISHEAD, NORRELL and STRANGE have set their hearts.

The buildup to Waterloo was another hilarious chapter. Saving a Belgium town from being captured by teleporting it to America. Annoying birdsongs that later became children's skipping rhymes. I wish the whole thing had been that engaging.

Bingo: probably using it for epistolary, although again, that was a relatively small proportion of the contents. Definitely counts for A Book In Parts. Argument could be made for some level of Impossible Places, although to much less of an extent than Piranesi.

Happy 9-16-25 (or even 16-9-25 if you're in a country that has that dating system) to Raz from Anathem and all other perfect square appreciators! ;)

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primeideal

January 2026

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(SFF Bingo): Singer Distance, by Ethan Chatagnier
The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth
The robots become slightly more self-aware
(SFF Bingo): Foreigner, by CJ Cherryh
(SFF Bingo): Imperial Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
Random Christmas vacation happenings
Dear Valentine (Candy Hearts 2025)
Yuletide/Madness/Tagmod Nonsense 2025 Reveals
(SFF Bingo): The Outside, by Ada Hoffmann
(SFF Bingo): The Sign of the Dragon, by Mary Soon Lee
~25%
(SFF Bingo): The Map and the Territory, by A. M. Tuomala
(SFF Bingo): All the Wandering Light, by Heather Fawcett
Spire = Slain
(SFF Bingo): Jade City, by Fonda Lee
Dear Yuletide Writer (2025)
(SFF Bingo): The Formidable Miss Cassidy, by Meihan Boey
(SFF Bingo): Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge
(SFF Bingo): Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
Pythagoras be like

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