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In a future Morocco, a young woman named Hariba with no prospects has herself jessed, a process which renders her loyal to whoever buys her, and sells herself as an indentured servant to a wealthy household. There she meets Akhmim, a harni - a genetically engineered human designed to be a perfect lover or companion. Hariba falls in love with him and runs away with him, but because she's jessed, she becomes extremely sick due to defying her loyalty implant.

Up until this point, the book had a compelling atmosphere a bit reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale in that it explored the daily life of people living with very little agency in the home of someone who owns them. But once Hariba gets sick, she becomes completely sidelined from the story and basically lies in bed suffering for the entire middle part of the book, while the POV switches from Hariba and Akhmim to first her mother, then her friend - neither of whom are very interesting.

( Read more... )

This is a well-written book with interesting issues that sags a lot in the middle portion when Hariba basically drops out of the story, and ends in a note of depression and gloom.

Though I didn't love this book, I'm sorry that McHugh doesn't seem to be writing novels anymore as I did quite like China Mountain Zhang and Mission Child.

erinptah

Taxes are done for the year, time to reward myself with some PetShopOfHorrorsposting. My readalong has reached the start of Volume 3 in the Seven Seas Collector’s Edition, which is the start of volume 4 in the original Tokyopop release.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

One thing before I start: There’s an AO3 tag for a PSOH character called “Madam C“. She only shows up in one fic, in this chapter. Haven’t seen her in my reread yet. Anybody know what part of canon she’s from?

(There’s a “Madame” in the Sofu D spinoff manga, but she doesn’t get an initial. And this fic has “Madam C” interacting with Leon, so, probably not the 19th-century Paris woman.)

D with red carnations, cover art of volume 4

( As you can see, there are no humans here. )

tcampbell1000 posting in

scans_daily

The Global Guardians were only the third most popular “GG” in the JLI era, after Guy Gardner and General Glory. But they merited at least a little attention after all their buildup. Assistant editor Kevin Dooley slid into the writing role for these four stories with Andy Smith on pencils, though it’s hard to believe the same people wrote and drew all four of them. Even by JLI standards, they’re quite varied in tone.

( Almost as much as Sumaan Harjavti’s skin and hair are from appearance to appearance. )

runpunkrun posting in

fancake

Poll #34481 round 186 theme poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 91

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Collaborations & Remixes
25 (27.5%)

Journey/Travel
38 (41.8%)

Whump
28 (30.8%)

glitteryv posting in

recthething

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fics/fanart/fanvids/other kinds of fanworks/fancrafts/podfics have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

neonvincent

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: House in the woods at the edge of town
Current Music: Star Wars: The Old Republic

umadoshi

Our planter is here! Getting it wasn't actually a saga, but it felt a bit like one. ( TL;DR: delivery service annoyance )

We also both took yesterday off (and I'm off the rest of the week, but got up at my usual workday time today in hopes of getting a fair amount of manga work done), and ventured out to buy veg seeds for the planter. (We also still need to get soil/fertilizer/etc., but want to read up on it more first. I think I might order a hard copy of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, which I got on sale in ebook recently and like so far.)

Yesterday's important lesson: when noting down which seed varieties we like the looks of, include the source, because our local store, at least, has separate displays for each originating company, and knowing that would make it much easier to check for the various varieties. Anyway, here's what we wound up with (descriptions are in my last post):

Basil: Devotion.

Cabbage: Early Golden Acre (green) and Serpentine F1 (savoy).

Spinach: Bloomsdale and Renegade.

Lettuce: Brighton (Butterhead), Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf), Red Salad Bowl (red leaf), Grand Rapids (green leaf), Freckles (romaine), and Drunken Woman.

Current Mood: busy

rmc28

Post-game interview on Facebook for the game against Invicta on Sunday (we lost 10-1). Favourite comment from a friend: "you both pulled such funny faces when the other one was speaking".

My feedback on the Hull camp shared (with permission) on their Facebook page: "I've enjoyed all the camps so far and I think they're good value for money. I think they're helping me improve as a player, and I've definitely seen other players level up in skill and confidence after attending. I'm very much looking forward to three whole days in July. I also really value the friendships I've been building with players from other teams, who I met because of these camps, and the mutual support we've been able to give each other over this past season."

Upcoming: BUIHA will live stream Nationals this weekend on YouTube, my games that will definitely be on it are:

Sat 15:15 Cambridge Huskies v Leeds Gryphons B
Sat 18:18 Cambridge Huskies v Nottingham Mavericks C
Sun 14:20 Birmingham Lions B v Cambridge Huskies
Sun 19:25 Oxford Women's Blues v Cambridge Huskies

(There's one more group-stage game that will be played on the other ice pad and not streamed, and then depending on how we do in group, we'll be assigned to the semi finals for either Bronze, Silver or Gold finals so we'll have up to two more games on Sunday.)

darths_and_droids_feed

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/2766.html

Episode 2766: Smoke, on the Daughter

Times change. Things that we think are normal today weren't normal years, decades, centuries ago. Things that were normal back then aren't normal now.

Take a simple lifestyle change, or something that would be considered unusual today, and make it an everyday feature of your campaign world. It can add to the otherworldliness of the setting, serving as a constant reminder that isn't just the world your players are used to with monsters.

aurilee writes:

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

Ooooh. Hm. Hmmmm. I'm not quite sure what to think of this, and I'm not even directly affected by the revelation.

I think that Finn/Annie might be taking a bit of a back seat or spending some time off screen now. Possibly Poe/Jim as well. Kind of like how Annie and Jim had that argument where they needed to step out in Episode III for a bit, or where Corey was distracted with online arguments and then ran out in Episode VII following the website hack. Having a possibly life-changing realization and working through that is definitely going to take priority over playing a role-playing game.

Transcript

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/2766.html

mastermahan posting in

scans_daily

I need you all to understand how batshit crazy the ongoing Storm comic is.

( Read more... )

sholio

I had a need for fluff and so I wrote me some (plus banter and a smidgeon of angst and sex) from my nebulous Babylon 5 post-canon fixit future: A Nice Little House on Narn.

----

Today I discovered the existence of Murderbot Maladies, basically a whump / h/c event for May, but the list of prompts is AMAZING and I am going to reproduce it under the cut. As someone who has participated in h/c events basically since they have existed on LJ and similar, I can only say that this is perhaps the best prompt list I've seen, mixing as it does a number of serious h/c staples with such glorious inventions as "harpooned", "inhaled a drone", and "accidentally called Mensah 'Mom'".

( The prompt list )

kitewithfish

What I’ve Read
The Wimsey Papers by Dorothy L. Sayers – A great look at Sayers’s wartime thoughts in 1935. It’s a loose collection of “letters” between Wimsey relatives that give the impression being Sayers’s soapbox. It’s honestly fairly touching but I’m biased.

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson – Fascinating alternate history novel, told in several timelines. The older timeline is an alternate history of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, where it actually went off as planned with Harriet Tubman’s help. The younger timeline is about the survivors of a dead astronaut coping with the new Mars mission. It’s great and weird and hopeful and antiracist in a wrathful and constructive way.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata – Mixed bag. The first section is from the perspective of an abused and neglected child with a single friend – she’s so alienated from humanity she grows to actually believe she’s an alien. It depicts the abuse and violence with the character disassociating thru it all in a very convincing and harrowing way. She thinks of herself and society as The Factory – they make babies and enforce that role on everyone around them – she’ll grow up into the role eventually. The second half of the book didn’t work for me so well – we meet up with the same character in a much calmer time of her life, but the forces of The Factory are more distant until they are radically not. The second half of the book feels ... like a parody of alienation? She’s not feeling her own emotions anymore and so the more shocking actions of the later book didn’t land as closely. It’s an interesting attempt, but I think that Tender is the Flesh did the “cannibalism as dehumanization” thread more justice.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley – Re-Read. A strange and inconsistent creature – McKinley’s one urban fantasy experiment did not actually land the logistics and plot of an urban fantasy, but the vibes are dreamy and weird and I love that.

What I’m Reading
Fabric of Civilization – no movement

Chalice by Robin McKinley – Sunshine made me crave more.

What I’ll Read Next
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (eventually)
Animorphs – I enjoyed these books and recently tumblr has tempted me into finishing the series.

neonvincent

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: House in the woods at the edge of town
Current Music: Sims 4

yourlibrarian

1) My partner injured yet another finger playing baseball last weekend and had to go to the emergency room. Luckily it was not broken, just dislocated. Since then we have gotten 3 phone calls from the hospital group asking for a survey response.

This is particularly irritating because this group has been buying up hospitals, clinics and medical practices in the area, and is currently the only emergency room in town and provider of certain services.

So what is the point of the survey? What choice to we have? How will any response actually do anything to improve care?

2) I've been warming to High Potential, and recently Keith Carradine guest starred. I knew I recognized him as soon as he appeared, but I couldn't place him. Instead I kept wondering why he made me think of Joel Kinnaman in For All Mankind. For sure they could play relatives.

3) I have not been reading any fic for the better part of a year now. Some months back I read about 4 or 5 that had probably been downloaded over a year earlier, but I haven't been doing offline reading for the first time in a very long time. And when it happened before it was because I didn't have access to material, whereas now I have dozens of commercial books and even more fic.

(I say "nothing" though this doesn't count the random drabble or ficlet someone recs.) ( Read more... )

4) The thing that really stood out to me about Amazon announcing they're discontinuing service to 2012 and earlier Kindles was to think that there's not many electronics that are still running after 15 years. ( Read more... )

5) The Pillowfort Anniversary festivities have ended and it was fun. Many (not even all!) of the activities could be summed up with the bingo card. ( Read more... )

I'd love to see someone else take this on in a few years' time.

Poll #34476 Kudos Footer-571

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

Want to leave a Kudos?

View Answers

Kudos!
10 (100.0%)

superfangirl1 posting in

scans_daily

( Read more, )

resonant

( The Hero's Journey, by Tony Hoagland )

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing! My big accomplishment is having the energy to put together a Book Club for the 616 Discord. It consists of two comics about the Avengers doing their taxes.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Ultimate Wolverine #16 )

What I'm Reading Next

Not sure yet; it's hard to tell how much brain I will have at any given time, as I am currently getting two or three days between migraines. In baseball non-fiction reading, I am partway through Billy Bean's autobiography but I don't know what fiction to try reading. Probably I should just go for some more tropey m/m romance or something.

Current Mood: dorky

cyberghostface posting in

scans_daily

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erinptah

Down to 939 fandoms total. (Only 26 currently have any tags to wrangle.)

I’m keeping up the pace of “shedding about 100 per month.” Still working on the second A-to-Z sweep, just finished with the P’s.

Also, still chipping away at recruiting “wranglers who aren’t over-the-limit” to pick up unwrangled Religion/Mythology/Folklore fandoms. I’m doing a little basic research on each one first. Someone with the right cultural/research background will always be better at spotting subtle inaccuracies, but for the fandoms that don’t get a wrangler like that, at least I can request fixes for anything really glaring.

Latest win: figuring out that this Ukranian “Folk Tale” fandom needs a rename, because all the fic is actually for the adorable 2024 cartoon Pravda & Kryvda. (11-minute pilot, free on Youtube.) Ukranian folklore-inspired with angel/demon vibes (I’m 0% surprised the artist has also done Good Omens fanart), extremely f/f shippy, has a fascinating “they were created around the same time but now there’s an overt age gap” dynamic…yeah, okay, I’m subscribing.

AMT updates: With the Madoka subtags approved, I went ahead and made the new Fake News tree request last week. (Basically the draft proposal I shared in February, with some slight tweaks.) Still no response to the behind-the-scenes question I mentioned in March…so yeah, I’m going forward on the premise of “if it’s that unimportant, it won’t be a roadblock.”

pauraque

As a kid I never played any of The Learning Company's dozens of Reader Rabbit games, so today we'll be correcting this surprising gap in my edutainment knowledge.

zorealis suggested the first game in the series, 1984's Reader Rabbit, aka Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory. The alternate title sounds suspiciously Oompa-Loompaish to me, so fingers crossed that we will not meet with any gruesome poetic justice.

The game's menu offers nine options: Sorter, Labeler, Word Train, and six different Matchup Games. In Sorter you get a series of words, and you have to decide whether each one matches a given letter in either the first, second, or third position. If it matches, you move it over to the side, but if it doesn't you throw it in the garbage. (This obviously predates the 1990s eco-tainment craze, or else we'd be recycling.)

player chooses to save the word cod or throw it away

player chooses to save the word cod or throw it away

( More on Reader Rabbit )

Reader Rabbit was wildly popular and led to a slew of sequels and spinoffs. I had never heard of 1986's Writer Rabbit until

delphi brought it to my attention. Now, I'm not saying that playing this game will make you as good of a writer as

delphi is... but I'm not not saying that.

While Reader Rabbit offers a solid but fairly staid selection of spelling exercises, Writer Rabbit is far more wacky. After punching out from a week of back-breaking labor at the Word Factory, it's time to attend Writer Rabbit's Sentence Party and cut loose with a mix of games mashing up sentence diagramming and Mad Libs. In the Ice Cream Game, you are given a phrase and have to identify it as either WHO, WHAT, DID WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, or HOW.

game asks what part of a sentence the phrase 'with style' is

game asks what part of a sentence the phrase 'with style' is

( More on Writer Rabbit )

You can play Reader Rabbit and Writer Rabbit on the Internet Archive, for the finest in lapine-themed edutainment. Did anyone else play a game from this series? There are a million of them!

sovay

Today I have slept less than three hours for the second day in a row and the afternoon just clouded over. Have a couple of links.

1. I can't tell if the BLO's Daughter of the Regiment will be queer enough for its invocation of Deborah Sampson, but then I was distracted by discovering Alex Myers. I blame it on plague that I missed the queer Arthuriana of The Story of Silence (2020).

2. I had an excuse to link Bradley Kincaid's "The Two Sisters" (1928), the oldest version of the ballad I have heard recorded as opposed to seen written down. I used to sing its bleaker descendant by Roger Wilson. Tom Waits does a pretty straight one.

3. Hen Ogledd's "The Loch Ness Monster's Song" (2020) is a setting of Edwin Morgan. It may be the most zaum thing I have encountered since Victory Over the Sun (1913).

For the first time in this apartment, there was an Interloper Cat. Collared and silver-tagged, on the doorless back porch, a substantial ginger and white presence had seated itself in one of the windows with its evident object of a robin in the other. It stared directly through the back door. Hestia was wild. The bird was motionless. I did not let her out and the next time I looked, both bird and interloper had gone.

Current Music: The Grownup Noise, "See You in the Hall"

ribirdnerd posting in

common_nature

I got out to one of our local trails late last week.

This one is an old state park that has been partially developed. It's a fun but small trail that has a variety of habitats for wildlife.

It goes around this drainage pond, which attracts many birds and waterfowl.

Then it passes the condo development, eventually leading to a bike path along the bay.
You can see one of the condos on the right.

rachelmanija

Danny is a 15-year-old closeted trans girl in a world where superheroes are real. She's across town from her home and her transphobic abusive father, hiding in an alley and painting her toenails with polish bought in a shop as far from her home as she can manage, when America's strongest superhero, Dreadnought, gets in a fight with a supervillain, crashes at her feet, and passes on his powers to her, since she's the only one there to receive them, before dying.

His powers automatically reshape her body into her mental ideal. So now she's physically a very pretty, very strong girl with superpowers... who now has to explain this to her abusive transphobic parents, everyone at her school, and the local superheroes, one of whom is a TERF. Not to mention that the supervillain who killed Dreadnought is still out there...

This is basically exactly what it sounds like: a superhero origin story for persecuted trans teenagers. It's very earnest and has absolutely no subtext. My favorite parts were the bits where Danny gets her gender affirmed by new friends and a sympathetic superhero, which are genuinely very sweet, and when Danny finally proclaims herself the new Dreadnought, which is a great stand up and cheer moment . But overall, I'm too old to be its ideal reader.

Content notes: A LOT of transphobia and transphobic slurs.

anneapocalypse

Watch on YouTube

"Green Grow the Rushes" (not to be confused with "Green Grow the Rushes O," a different Irish song!) is a song I heard at my cousin's house as a kid and remembered only pieces of and spent many years trying to find! I had figured out that it was Altan but it took a while to find which album the song was on.

Tracy Chapman is a classic of course. "For My Lover" is one of the first songs of hers I remember listening to (though it may not actually have been the first), on a friend's Walkman on the bus on a school trip.

senmut

Question for anyone to ponder:

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, movie version, played with larger than life literary persons of the 19th century dealing with a threat just at the turn of the century to the 20th.

What persons, literary or real that have been mythologized, would have been a good 20th century team to deal with a more nefarious Y2K plot?

Discord has offered Egg Shen (Big Trouble in Little China), Sarah Connor (Terminator franchise), and Hiro Protagonist (Snow Crash).

I offered the mythologized Jimmy Hoffa as either recruiter or villain, not both as M was in the movie.

Looking forward to your ideas. Let's build a team of adventurers!

ETA: as I have been hit by rules lawyers elsewhere: person must feasibly be able to exist/be established to exist on Earth of the late 20th century within their canon.

nverland posting in

recipecommunity

BBQ Mushroom Pizza
Makes one 12" pizza

Ingredients

6 oz. mixed mushrooms, cut or torn into large pieces (about 3½ cups)
2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
1 lb. store-bought pizza dough, room temperature
⅓ cup (or more) barbecue sauce
6 oz. fresh mozzarella, torn (about 1 cup)
2 oz. smoked Gouda, coarsely grated (about ½ cup)
½ small red onion, thinly sliced
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
Crushed red pepper flakes and cilantro leaves (for serving)

Preparation

Step 1 - Place a rack in upper third of oven and preheat to 475°.
Drizzle 6 oz. mixed mushrooms, cut or torn into large pieces (about 3½ cups), with extra-virgin olive oil in a large bowl; toss to coat. Set aside.
Step 2 - Swirl 2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil in a 12" cast-iron skillet to coat bottom and ½" up sides. Place 1 lb. store-bought pizza dough, room temperature, in pan; lift, stretch, and press dough so it fills pan. If dough shrinks from edges, cover with a kitchen towel and let rest 10 minutes before stretching again.
Step 3 - Bake just until crust is starting to set but hasn’t taken on any color, about 5 minutes. Carefully remove skillet from oven and spread ⅓ cup barbecue sauce over entire surface of crust. Top with 6 oz. fresh mozzarella, torn (about 1 cup), and 2 oz. smoked Gouda, coarsely grated (about ½ cup), followed by ½ small red onion, thinly sliced, and reserved mushrooms. Season with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper.
Step 4 - Return skillet to oven and continue to bake until crust is golden brown underneath, cheese is melted, and mushrooms are golden, 16–20 minutes longer.
Step 5 - Heat broiler. Broil pizza until mushrooms are browned and crispy and cheese is browned in spots and bubbling, about 2 minutes. (Begin checking after 1 minute.)
Step 6 - Drizzle more barbecue sauce over pizza if desired. Top with crushed red pepper flakes and cilantro leaves.

icon_uk posting in

scans_daily

How to kill my interest in Absolute Robin's in one panel

I confess I've only been glancing at the Absolute Batman title, it's just.. not to my tastes. If you're enjoying it, then more power to you, but not for me.

However, me also being me, I was interested to see what they'd do with the concept of Robin.

So how does the latest issue introduce the concept? With one panel they poured cold water over me.

( Oh no... not HIM )

olivermoss

Bar I was going to watch the Torrent at is closed tonight, looks like they are doing some repainting and stuff?

Got home and saw both CJ in net and also 4 goals allowed. Ugh, CJ gets a start and gets lit up? Despair...

Turns out, no! Poor Shroeds was having a terrible night. She got pulled. CJ, non-binary icon, gave a perfect performance in their first chance in net for Seattle. A flawless performance did not save the them from elimination tonight. Both Seattle teams are out.

The highs and lows of Seattle hockey

But CJ kept the net on lock every second they were in!

sunnymodffa posting in

fail_fandomanon

Aunt Agnes vs an Italian Nonna would be a fight to watch from a safe distance.
Ganymede ought to do.

Meme does get a lot funnier if you imagine it's all a bunch of Italian grannies fighting and talking about smut.

... Nonnies do fight over the minutia of canon details the same way nonnas will fight over what nuance of a recipe is better.

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kalinara posting in

i_read_what

So last time, we read the first story in the Chronicles of Pern. In it, we see the initial survey of Pern. Not a lot happened and the characters were more interesting concepts than fully developed, but it wasn't bad.

Let's see what "The Dolphins' Bell" gives us.

( We haven't seen Dolphins much yet, though there will be a book about them. Hopefully better than Renegades of Pern... )

thesleepingbeauty posting in

graphics

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thesleepingbeauty posting in

fandom_icons

All icons HERE @

little_mermaid ♥

Note: This post will only be open for a few weeks … after that it will be locked to members only, so feel free to join / subscribe to the community if you like my work. Thank you.

sovay

My father's birthday will be formally observed the next time my niece is in town, but for the day itself my mother and I baked him the chicken and leek pie which we had adapted from its recipe the two days prior that the filling can be stored in the refrigerator to deepen in flavor like a stew and a strawberry shortcake which I am currently proud of decorating with a painted marzipan man o' war after the mosaic in Leonardo Morales y Pedroso's 1930 Casa de Mark A. Pollack y Carmen Casuso. Even after I chilled the marzipan, the heat and humidity tangled the tentacles authentically.

I did not expect to receive an unbirthday present of Hen Ogledd's Discombobulated (2026), which I have been listening to since I got home and discovered the equally unexpected postcard awaiting me from

mrissa. The inner CD sleeve includes among its notes, "The painting on the front cover is called 'It's not darkness that falls, it's light', and now lies scattered in pieces across the globe. It was chopped into 34 segments and distributed as gifts to friends and family." I flashed inevitably on Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (1931/1948).

Think how after Schubert's death his brother cut certain of Schubert's scores into small pieces and gave to his favorite pupils these pieces of a few bars each. As a sign of piety this action is just as comprehensible to us as the other one of keeping the scores undisturbed and accessible to no-one. And if Schubert's brother had burned the scores we could still understand this as a sign of piety.

Current Music: Hen Ogledd, "End of the rhythm"

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james

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rocky41_7 posting in

books

I don’t know how I keep timing these so that I finish my audiobook and my paper book one right after the other. This weekend I also wrapped up The Black Fantastic, an anthology compiled by Andre M. Carrington. Thank you to pauraque for bringing this one to my attention! This is a collection of “Afrofuturist” stories by Black authors. If you want more detail, Pauraque has done individual reviews of each story which you can read here; I won’t get that specific.

With the usual caveat that all anthologies vary in quality, I enjoyed this one. There were a lot of very different stories, from some really fantastical stuff to ones that are just a little bit to the left of the world as it stands. On the high end of things, pieces like A Guide to the Native Fruits of Hawai’i by Alayna Dawn Johnson, where the protagonist grapples with her decision to collaborate with a group of vampire invaders to prey on the locals (and the metaphor of vampirism for the way Hawaii is treated by wealthy Americans is not lost in the shuffle); or The Orb by Tara Campbell, which was both strange and unexplained, choosing to focus not on the “why” or “how” of the situation but again on the moral quandary of its main character.

On the lower end, ones like The Ones Who Stay and Fight by NK Jemisin, which felt…narratively unclear, to say the least. It is either a satire of the kind of utopia writers create where its status as utopia is essentially dependent on eliminating any disagreement or contact with the outside world…or it’s a whole-hearted endorsement of that view. And if I can’t tell which, I tend to think the author’s failed at their purpose; or Ruler of the Rear Guard by Maurice Broaddus, which seemed to end just as it was getting to the plot.

Overall, I had fun with this anthology. SFF short story collections, done well, are such a scintillating showcase of creativity and I felt that here.

rocky41_7

Overall, I had fun with this anthology. SFF short story collections, done well, are such a scintillating showcase of creativity and I felt that here.

rachelmanija

As you may have guessed, I completely failed to live up to my goal of reviewing everything I read, even in brief. Rather than attempting to catch up to my backlog, I am re-starting from where I am.

Yesterday I did a quick book cull by pulling books off my shelves that have been sitting there for ages, reading the first couple chapters, and deciding if I was likely to continue. I focused on books I'd started before and not gotten very far into. Here are the books that landed in the "move to Paper & Clay's used section" bag.

Trouble and Her Friends, by Melissa Scott

See the new cover? If you've been wanting to read this, it's now available as an ebook!

This is a classic lesbian cyberpunk novel that I have tried to read at least three times, and never managed to get very far into. I kept putting it back on the shelf because it's a classic and probably objectively good, but I'm just not that into cyberpunk. If a lot of the action is taking place online, I tend to lose interest. Also, some books just don't grab me, due to a mismatch between me and the book, rather than being objectively or even subjectively bad. This is clearly one of them. Someone else can be thrilled to find it at Paper & Clay, take it home, and enjoy it.

The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashling-Garcia

A tea specialist becomes a spy in a far-future colonized world! Unfortunately, this starts with a prologue which reads much like the infamous "trade war" crawl at the top of The Phantom Menace. Yes, I know that turned out to be prescient, but the problem was that it was written in a stultifying manner. The next couple chapters were much more lively, but also had a tendency to clunky exposition - some of which was pretty cool, to be fair. This was the second time I attempted this book, and had essentially the same reaction I did to Trouble and Her Friends - not bad, but not for me.

Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher

This has been described to me as "Pokemon in alternate ancient Rome," which sounds amazing. For at least the third time, it failed to grab me. I got about four chapters in and there's still no Pokemon. Someone else will like it more than me.

The Hum and the Shiver, by Alex Bledsoe

A race of people called the Tufa have lived amongst normal humans in Appalachia since the beginning of time. They can see ghosts, have music-based magic, etc. This opens with a Tufa woman very very clearly based on Jessica Lynch, who was a real-life American soldier who was wounded and captured in the US/Iraq war, returning from Iraq. I found this in poor taste. The general style also got on my nerves.

While doing this, I got sufficiently grabbed by the openings to keep reading and finish Maureen McHugh's Nekropolis, which hopefully I will actually review. I also returned Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and Tanya Huff's Sing the Four Quarters to the shelf.

sovay

Because I had a doctor's appointment downtown, from Storrow Drive I saw the cherry trees on the Esplanade blooming like soft fireworks in white and sugar-pink. The weather has catapulted itself into summer: asphalt-simmered air, huge tufts of cloud stacked over a haze-blue sky, lines around the literal block for Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day. Sails all over the Charles. Afterward

spatch and I ate Greek takeout on a picnic bench by Spy Pond, watching a solitary Canada goose glide across the water as our summer in accelerated miniature looked like building toward thunderstorm. It is my father's seventy-fourth birthday.