cyphomandra | Reading

TTRPG campaign idea.

PCs are field agents in charge of finding and dealing with arcane occupational safety violations. That six-sided summoning pentagram? Flagged. That storeroom where the universal solvent is next to the lemonade? Flagged.

That deadly-trap-filled dungeon abandoned by its creator when the maintenance fees got too high? Red tagged.

This isn't the same as my recent FabUlt campaign. That was about discouraging the worst excesses in a world run by oligarch mages and there weren't really regulations. This would be set in a regulatory state, and would be more an exploration of normalization of deviance.

james_davis_nicoll

Against the gleefully hypocritical, exploitative Shine, the very gods themselves contend in vain.

Slow Gods by Claire North

garonne

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

osprey_archer

As so often happens with nonfiction books, the subtitle of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature is quite misleading. It suggests that the book is full of interesting tidbits about, say, Chaucer, whereas in fact the book is much more focused on the classical authors who shaped the medieval image of the heavens - hence “the discarded image,” largely swept away by later thinkers, but still surviving in odd phrases here and there.

I was particularly fascinated by the chapter about which ancient authors were popular and relatively accessible during the medieval period. For instance, their most direct access to Plato came through a Latin translation of Timaeus, but they had many works by neo-Platonists, and it was through this neo-Platonist filter that they had their own Platonic age of thought. (The neo-Platonists had actually been the last great holdouts against Christianity, so it’s fascinating to see them simply get folded into it here.)

The book also goes into great detail about the Image itself. I won’t try to summarize it all here, but a few bits I found especially interesting:

1. The medieval model was indeed geocentric, but Lewis points out that this does not mean that medieval thinkers considered the Earth especially important. In fact, they considered the Earth a mere infinitesimal dot, the lowest spot in the universe and the ultimate destination for the universe’s refuse. A person standing on Earth was looking up and up and up into infinitely more beautiful, perfect, higher and more important spheres.

2. The medieval thinker also thought the universe was suffused with sunlight and music (the music of the spheres); the idea of space as cold, dark, and scary came about later.

3. The belief in the influence of the planets on earthly life remained strong, and the Church had to exert a great deal of energy against the idea of astrological determinism.

4. There’s also a chapter about the longaevi, the Good Folk, with a fascinating discussion about the different meanings assigned to these beings - meanings so divergent that Spenser could write The Faerie Queen as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth, while at the same time people were sometimes tried for witchcraft on the charge of traffic with the fairy folk. (As Lewis notes, witchcraft trials were far more a Renaissance than a medieval phenomenon.)

Also, book gives insight into certain aspects of Lewis’s own fiction, in particular that bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis starts talking about the seven genders and then just sort of wanders off in the middle of gender #4. “How can you tell us there are seven genders and then only give us four?” I demanded. Well, now I think that to Lewis (the medievalist) it was perfectly obvious that the seven genders were male, female, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The other planets weren’t discovered till later and Earth of course doesn’t count on account of being the cesspit of the universe.

And he didn’t spend much time explaining what exactly Jupiter gender was like because, to his steeped-in-medieval-literature mind, this was perfectly obvious. The Jupiter character is “Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous.” I believe extrapolating this temperament into a gender is Lewis’s innovation, but he could be working off a classical source.

However, sadly, this book does not cast any light on what crimes the star might have committed in order to be banished to an island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. However, it seems likely these also have an ancient or medieval source, so perhaps someday I will find out!

james_davis_nicoll

Evil Milhouse enraged.

james_davis_nicoll

The Wolves Upon the Coast Grand Campaign, a bare-bones old-school tabletop roleplaying game by designer Luke Gearing.

Bundle of Holding: Wolves Upon the Coast

thisbluespirit

I thought it might make a change to write something here and post it straight away, instead of in two weeks or three or four months, idk, shocking but still. (I continue as before, getting a little more useful with every few days.) In the meantime, here are some fannish things that made me happy in this last week:

1. Another Enigma fic! \o/ 0_o

All Tapped Out (665 words) by misura
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Enigma (2001)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tom Jericho/Hester Wallace
Characters: Tom Jericho, Hester Wallace, Wigram (Enigma 2001)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Vignette, Missions Gone Wrong
Summary: “What the bloody hell was that?”

2. Sesskasays, whose Classic Who reactions I have enjoyed so much... is going to be doing Blake's 7! I did not dare really hope, but yay. I cannot wait for her to meet Servalan.

3. Small Prophets, on the iPlayer, a 6-part comedy from Mackenzie Crook, who did The Detectorists. It has all the mix of slow build, appreciation of small things & being v down to earth of the former, with actual supernatural ingredient in shape of six humunculi that Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley) grows in his garden shed, for reasons. I haven't watched most of ep6 yet, but cannot imagine it producing any reason in the last 27 minutes for me not to rec it warmly here.

4. Another magnitude of miraculous on from Enigma-fic - a Rufus/Adam vidlet for A Fatal Inversion (Jeremy Northam & Douglas Hodge in 1991/2) from someone on YT:

Watch on YouTube

Like. This is why I wrote Rufus/Adam fic that nobody wanted! And this doesn't even have the shots with the dinner party and the make up, but, lol, I feel like it is a much more compelling argument for watching it than me saying it's very good. XD

Anyway, creative people continue to be a Good Thing is all. <3

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Strange Pictures, by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion. Very scary! Made the mistake of reading it in the evening then felt small and scared and sent SOS texts to friends who soothed me with cat pictures. (There’s nothing particularly graphic in the book, but one of the murder methods just struck me as extra scary.)

As with Uketsu’s other novel Strange Houses, the mystery here didn’t strike me as particularly plausible, but who cares when the atmosphere is so impeccable? Propulsively readable. Zipped through the whole thing in one evening and even though I was scared, I wanted another. Maybe there are more Uketsu translations on deck?

I also read Catherine Coneybeare’s Augustine the African, a biography of St. Augustine which focuses on his position as a provincial from North Africa in the late Roman Empire, and the effect this may have had on his theological thought. I’ve long been interested in the Roman Empire, but most of my nonfiction reading has focused on its earlier days, so it was super interesting to learn more about the crumbling of the empire (even after Alaric sacked Rome, it kept chugging along to an amazing extent), and also look at it all from a provincial angle.

I also enjoyed Coneybeare’s emphasis on Augustine’s social networks, and the way the Christian social networks often cut across lines of class and geography - especially after the sack of Rome, when many wealthy Roman Christians fled to North Africa for safety. And she clearly explained both the Donatist and Arian heresies, which have long puzzled me! I’m still working out the details of the Pelagian heresy (too much works, not enough faith?) but one cannot expect to understand all the heresies all at once.

What I’m Reading Now

William Dean Howells’ My Mark Twain, which starts with a description of Twain bursting into the offices of The Atlantic wearing a sealskin coat with the fur out. This is apparently NOT how you wear a sealskin coat, as later on Howells and Twain went walking through Boston together, Howells suffering and Twain exulting in the stares of all the passersby.

What I Plan to Read Next

We’re coming up on my annual St. Patrick’s Day reading! I’m planning to read Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island (about a magical fourth Island of Aran, I believe) and Eve Bunting’s St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning, illustrated by Jan Brett - one of Brett’s earliest books I believe, so I’ll be curious to compare it with her later illustration style.

james_davis_nicoll

Classic SF was chock-full of dubious ideas; Martin Gardner supplied the antidote.

One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense

james_davis_nicoll

Only witches hunt demons, all witches are women, and Uroro cannot be defeated by any woman. Uroro feels entirely safe, right until the world's first male witch defeats him.

Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)

nnozomi

So it’s entrance exam time, and all the ninth-graders have Red Books (collections of past exam questions for practice, which have red covers). At the junior high school attended by some of the kids from the Saturday juku, it is apparently a thing to write each other encouraging messages on the Red Book covers, like a yearbook in advance. Most of these are very sweet. I was looking at Sakura’s while she worked her way through a practice test, noticing that one long and enthusiastic message was signed with a boy’s name and included 사랑해 at the end. “Sakura, did you know this kid is confessing to you?” “Oh, sure. He said I could rub it out if I wasn’t interested.” Since she left it there, I’m curious to know whether Yusuke-kun will have some good news after exams are over… (I still don’t know why Japanese teenagers are using Korean to say “I love you” to each other, but I think it’s another fad. Very cute regardless.)

I noticed that both Japanese and Chinese have adopted the English word “get,” but in different senses, both legit in English. Japanese uses it to mean “acquire,” usually but not always in the physical sense (Y will occasionally text me to say 苺ゲット, ichigo get, meaning he’s laid his hands on some of the hometown strawberries the supermarkets don’t sell here; I might text him back to say Kuro-chan get, meaning that I ran into Kuro-chan the cat who deigned to let me do some stroking). Chinese, on the other hand, uses it to mean “understand, empathize with, grok,” usually with the completion-complement as in “get到.” (Baidu offers sample usages as in 突然get到, to understand all at once, 永远get不到, an eternal lack of understanding, and 被get到, he gets me etc.) (Japanese also doubles the final consonant while Chinese pretty much swallows it, but that’s a thing the two languages will be 永远get不到 about each other.)

Courtesy of the farmboys I have learned that Winnie the Pooh in Chinese is 小熊维尼, Weini the Little Bear, and Tigger is 跳跳虎, bounce-bounce-tiger. (Also I did not expect to find out while looking this up that Winnie the Pooh is quasi-banned in China for use in political satire? Surprised that the farmboys were allowed to reminisce happily on camera about their favorite characters, also including 屹耳 the donkey.)

I’ve been watching little snatches of the Winter Olympics on TV while I do other things; I like all the flying events, ski jump most of all, although I can’t imagine how anyone ever makes it to Olympic level without breaking themselves into little pieces along the way. Along with everyone else in Japan I was very happy to see Rikuryu (Miura Riku and Kihara Ryuichi) win a gold in pairs skating, coming back from fifth place after their short program. Very touching and amusing that Kihara, nine years older than his partner and three times her size, is the one who bursts into tears on the spot (happy or sad) while little tiny Miura keeps her cool and comforts him.

Reading a new book by Yang Shuangzi (author of Taiwan Travelogue) called The People at No. 1 Siwei Street or words to that effect; the edition I have is a Japanese translation (also by Miura Yuko), I don’t know if there is an English version and I can’t get my hands on the Chinese original. I’m only about a third in but it is very fun, modern-era but with callbacks to the colonial period, about four young women renting rooms in an old Japanese-style house (and falling in love with each other along the way, I think, will keep you posted). Maybe I should trouble A-Pei to go out to a bookstore and send me everything by Yang Shuangzi she can lay hands on.

A new favorite and an old one: Schumann Six Canonical Studies, arranged by Debussy for two pianos, one of his love letters to Bach. Why isn’t there an orchestration of this? (I have found some chamber-music versions, but it’s not the same. Also the Pergolesi Stabat Mater, a version with soprano and countertenor that I wasn’t familiar with (and just to show that poor short-lived Pergolesi had a range, my favorite aria from his comic opera).

Y and I went up to the outdoor track one station over this morning to run for a while. He has very mild asthma and prefers to start and stop—“or I could just run slower?” “Sweetheart, you know what it’s called if you’re running slower than me? Walking.” I do have some staying power, however, and today I got through twenty laps of the little track without stopping for a break, so about 6K if my arithmetic is right. We were entertained along the way by an invasion of hiyoko-chan from the nearby nursery school, little knee-high kids in bright yellow hats, running and somersaulting and in one case meandering along hand in hand like it was a romantic date opportunity, adorable. (Their teachers wear signs on their coats saying “No photography please” in three languages, so I can’t record it for you.)

Photos: Flowers, a very patient dog outside the supermarket, an alarming bakery sign (I was good, I didn’t go up and tell them about it), actual snow on my balcony plants (a once-a-year occurrence if that), and somebody’s paper art on their doorstep, with a sign saying “Help yuorself” [sic]. I took a little tiny origami star.

Be safe and well.

china_shop

Pandemic Life
Just had my Covid booster.

Previous poll review
In the Oxford comma poll, 44.4% of respondents have firm opinions, 34.9% have moderate preferences, and 6.3% are officially neutral. (I worded the poll badly, because actually what I have is a firm preference, which is to weed out unnecessary commas for cleaner prose. Yes, I realise I used an Oxford comma above. ;-p) The "always use it!" contingent makes up 39.7% of respondents, while 15.9% said "only use it when necessary!"

In ticky-boxes, 39.7% of respondents selected "buying a random bargain bin product, imprinting on it, and spending the rest of your life trying to track down replacements", and I'm very glad it's not just me. I recently bought 18 toothbrushes online, which should theoretically keep me going until I'm 60. Naturally, hugs won the ticky-boxes, with 69.8%. Thank you for your votes!! ♥

Reading
I can't remember what prompted me to, but I listened to the audiobook of The Duke Who Didn't by Courtney Milan, read by Mary Jane Wells, and loved it all over again. (Last time I read it in ebook.) It's a British historical het romance with leads of Chinese descent, and they and their supporting cast are delightful.

I've now started the next in the series, The Marquis Who Mustn't, in ebook. (It's the first ebook I've bought in ages. I'm proud to say that, after some technical hitches, I managed to load a Kobo book onto my Kindle, so that'll be my plan from now on.)

While waiting to see if my Covid jab would importune me, I was allowed to go hang out in the library for the 15 minutes. I not only picked up my reserve, but also two random contemporary romance novels and a Japanese coffee shop book with cats. Given my recent rate of (not) reading hard-copy books, I should clearly not be allowed to browse.

Kdramas
Still going on One Spring Night. It's finally picking up. The cast is amazing, and they have excellent chemistry, which is what's been keeping me watching. The plot is, in essence, woman dumps her long-term high-status boyfriend for someone nicer of lower status; everyone has a hard time accepting this, especially the long-term boyfriend. Personally, I'm like, "The new guy is Jung Hae-in! Look at his smile!! How could you not??" Anyway, it felt like they were all having the same conversations over and over for seven episodes, which got a bit wearying, but hopefully the latest developments will stay developed. (FTR, this drama feels like an obvious descendant of Something in the Rain, with many of the same cast but (thankfully) no subplot about workplace sexual harassment. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this one will stick the landing better!)

Other TV
Watching our way through the extended edition of Lord of the Rings, plus many of the extras. What a blast from the past! Frodo actually made me tear up at the end of Fellowship. We're on the second disk of Fellowship extras.

Also, still, The Pitt and SurrealEstate, and my sister and I started season 4 of Fringe. (I would totally watch this show if it were always Olivia and Lincoln as partners. Who even needs Peter? ;-p)

Audio entertainment
Letters from an American, The Shit They Don't Tell You About Writing, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner (part of Crooked Media), and a whole bunch of episodes of Better Offline, including "Openclaw with David Gerard" (as recced by

sabotabby), four short, angry episodes titled "AI Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble", and a fantastic rant with Cal Newport about AI reporting (spoiler: the vast majority of it is hype), which also, towards the end, explained (in words small enough for me to understand) how AIs are made/trained. Highly rec. I'm now working my way through Better Offline's series "The Enshittifinancial Crisis" and greatly appreciating his invective.

Online life
The Guardian slo-mo rewatch is still my happy place.

Writing/making things
I've been working on the same ~~Yuletide~~ New Year's Resolutions treat for, like, forever. It's only a couple of thousand words, it's just taking a while to come together. That's okay. I've also been noodling at a post about adverbs in speech tags for

fan_writers, but there's too much to say; I need to rein it in.

Still intermittently practising drawing. Telling myself that one day I'll be able to do expressions and poses. That would be nice.

Life/health/mental state things
( Grumbling, feat. local politics )

Cats
Halle keeps bringing cicadas into the house and crunching them, nom nom nom.

Goals
I wrote a list of goals for the year and have not looked at it since. La la la.

Good things
Podcasts, kdramas, DVDs, audiobooks, media generally. Fandom and Guardian specifically. Sunshine again, yay! My roof did not blow off. Andrew and Halle and friends and biking out to meet someone for lunch.

Poll #34237 Fourth walls

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

Which fourth walls are important to you?

View Answers

the one-way glass that stops TPTB seeing fannish activity
27 (69.2%)

the one-way glass that stops fans from seeing how the show/BSO/sausage gets made
6 (15.4%)

the wibbly-wobby physics-defying thing that means celebs and fans exist in separate universes that just happen to occupy the same space-time
25 (64.1%)

the one that stops celebs/TPTB from seeing us on the internet
22 (56.4%)

the one that shields fandom from public/media attention
26 (66.7%)

other fourth walls
2 (5.1%)

I love ALL the walls
8 (20.5%)

no! smash them all!
1 (2.6%)

ticky-box full of swooshy cloudscapes forming punctuation marks
20 (51.3%)

ticky-box full of reading in hard copy
17 (43.6%)

ticky-box full of chinchillas chilling their chins all over the place
20 (51.3%)

ticky-box full of ballooooooons and golden sparkles
21 (53.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
30 (76.9%)

sovay

I did not end up accompanying

rushthatspeaks and his child to the zoo this morning because I crashed so hard last night that I slept ten to eleven hours and am having difficulty remembering the day of the week, but he just dropped by with a

nineweaving in the car and brought me my Christmas present of a sweater in the pattern of the Minoan octopus flask from Palaikastro and the cup with the scale motif from Archanes: it's spectacular. I was able to give him the collected cartoons and comics and poems of Le Guin's Book of Cats (2025). I got to see photographs of Artic and fennec foxes, flamingos and peccaries, sloth and snow leopard, porcupine and poison dart frog. Having spent the prior portion of my afternoon in the excitement of calling doctors and paying bills, my evening's plans involve couch and books.

Current Music: The Pack a.d., "Sirens"

thisbluespirit

I've had this post stashed away since late November, meaning to come back to it and write something more sensible about The Stone Tape that wasn't how much I wanted to icon Jane Asher's face. The reviews were already at least a couple months out of date, I think. Then life intervened and alas, I have even less brain now than then, so I should get on and post it anyway.

Eye in the Sky (2015)

This was one of the later things I pulled off Jeremy Northam's CV. The JN tumblrs reckoned it was a good one - and it was.

It's about an international military and political operation to capture the three top leaders of an Islamist extremist group in Somalia, with various layers of people involved via video conference - the UK Colonel in charge (Helen Mirren), the US soldiers running the 'eye in the sky' (Aaron Paul, Phoebe Fox), the Somali agents on the ground (esp. Barkhad Abdi), and a small group overseeing it from a meeting room in Whitehall (Alan Rickman as General Benson, Jeremy Northam as the Minister in charge, Monica Dolan as PR), plus various others who need to be consulted, including Iain Glen as the Foreign Secretary. And right there in the middle of it all, is Alia (Aisha Takow), a child who lives close to the target house.

( Cut for more details )

Smartly made modern film, but also exactly the kind of knotty moral problem and intelligent writing you'd have got in a Play of the Month.

Talking of which...

Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape (BBC 1972)

I this via Talking Pictures, after having heard of it forever, and it was great! I really loved it. The creepy concept, the scientific approach - I really wished I had screencaps so I could icon Jane Asher in it (she was wonderful generally, not just icon-able) and everything. The way that the misogyny was used was also great, and took me by surprise because I had felt my one other Nigel Kneale did give way to a 1960s/70s misogynistic trope that I had seen too often by that point, but perhaps the "seen too often" part was more of the problem, because this just made me sit up and do the, "Oh. oh" moment for real. Highly recommended if you like any brand of creepy UK 70s TV. (It IS creepy/disturbing, though. This is not a chirpy watch that will end well, please do note). It starred some other people who weren't Jane Asher, too, like Iain Cutherbertson and they were all also good, I just didn't want to icon them and their face and their red hair in quite the same way. XD

So glad I finally watched it & I enjoyed it even in summer, when I so often can't manage TV downstairs.

Official Secrets (2019)

EitS having been so good, when I realised that this one (featuring one of the 2 brief cameos that are all JN has done since 2016) was also directed by Gavin Hood, I checked for a cheap copy & obtained it poste haste. I really liked this too, and watching them close together made me think even more highly of both - this is the story of a real incident from 2002, while EitS is a theoretical piece behind its tension, but underneath, they're both smartly done morality plays with excellent casts. (Incidentally, there are 3 actors who feature in both - Monica Dolan, John Heffernan and Jeremy Northam).

When I looked up both films online the first description is always "underrated" and the Guardian apparently ran a piece for Keira Knightley's 40th earlier this year recommending a top list of her films to watch, and put Official Secrets at no. 1.

Official Secrets isn't as tightly contained as EitS, as it's based on a real UK whistleblower incident from 2002, but which ended up not having much effect, so it's a really unusual thing to tackle (& as faithfully as this - they had a lot of the real people involved in the production in some way or other). As before, it's a large but excellent cast (Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Adam Bakri, Matt Smith, Ralph Fiennes, Indira Varma & more).

( More under here, although not really spoilery )

Anyway, after watching both, I got excited by clearly liking a director's stuff, so I looked up what Gavin Hood had done since - and the answer was nothing, dammit! (Before that he did Wolverine and Ender's Game, which are not tightly done morality plays. I mean, I assume not?? But I might need to investigate the first half of his CV more closely sometime. He has something upcoming lurking on imdb, which sounds more similar, but I'm not sure if that's real, or just a production hell mythical something or other.)

rachelmanija

Excellent dark fantasy about three women trapped in a medieval castle under siege. It reminded me a bit of Tanith Lee - it's very lush and decadent in parts - and a bit of The Everlasting. Fantastic female characters with really interesting relationships. The language is not strictly medieval-accurate but a lot of the characters' mindsets are, which is fun.

All I knew going in was that it was medieval, female-centric, and involved cannibalism. This gave me a completely wrong impression, which was that it was a sort of female-centric medieval Lord of the Flies in which everyone turns on each other under pressure and starts killing and eating each other. This is very nearly the opposite of what it's actually about, though there is some survival-oriented eating of the already-dead.

The three main characters are Phosyne, an ex-nun and mad alchemist with some very unusual pets that even she has no idea what they are; Ser Voyne, a female knight whose rigid loyalty gets tested to hell and back; and Treila, a noblewoman fallen on hard times and desperate to escape. The three of them have deliciously complicated relationships with each other, fully of shifting boundaries, loyalties, trust, sexuality, and love.

At the start, everyone is absolutely desperate. They've been trapped in the castle under siege for six months, the last food will run out in two weeks, and help does not seem to be on the way. Treila is catching rats and plotting her escape via a secret tunnel, but some mysterious connection to Ser Voyne is keeping her from making a break for it. Phosyne has previously enacted a "miracle" to purify the water, and the king is pressuring her to miraculously produce food; unfortunately, she has no idea how she did the first miracle, let alone how to conjure food out of nothing. Ser Voyne, who wants to charge out and fight, has been assigned to stand over Phosyne and make her do a miracle.

And then everything changes.

The setting is a somewhat alternate medieval Europe; it's hard to tell exactly how alternate because we're very tightly in the POV of the three main characters, and we only know what they're directly observing or thinking about. The religion we see focuses on the Constant Lady and her saints. She might be some version of the Virgin Mary, but though the language around her is Christian-derived, there doesn't seem to be a Jesus analogue. The nuns (no priests are ever mentioned) keep bees and give a kind of Communion with honey. Some of them are alchemists and engineers. There is a female knight who is treated differently than the male knights by the king and there's only one of her, but it's not clear whether this is specific to their relationship or whether women are usually not allowed to be knights or whether they are allowed but it's unusual.

This level of uncertainty about the background doesn't feel like the author didn't bother to think it out, but rather adds to the overall themes of the book, which heavily focus on how different people experience/perceive things differently. It also adds to the claustrophobic feeling: everyone is trapped in a very small space and additionally limited by what they can perceive. The magic in the book does have some level of rules, but is generally not well understood or beyond human comprehension. There's a pervasive sense of living in a world that isn't or cannot be understood, but which can only be survived by achieving some level of comprehension.

And that's all you should know before you start. The actual premise doesn't happen until about a fourth of the way into the book, and while it's spoiled in all descriptions I didn't know it and really enjoyed finding out.

Spoilers for the premise. ( Read more... )

Spoilers for later in the book: ( Read more... )

Probably the last third could have been trimmed a bit, but overall this book is fantastic. I was impressed enough that I bought all of Starling's other books for my shop. I previously only had The Luminous Dead, which I'm reading now.

Content notes: Cannibalism. Physical injury/mutilation. Mind control. A dubcon kiss. Extremely vivid descriptions of the physical sensations of hunger and starvation. Phosyne's pets do NOT die!

Feel free to put spoilers for the whole book in comments.

james_davis_nicoll

What hope has 10th century Icelandic culture against an armed and moderately educated 20th century American?

The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson

rilina

Happy lunar new year to everyone celebrating! 새해 복 많이 받으세요!

Here are a few things that I have on heavy rotation.

TWS has released the Korean version of the Japanese debut song: 다시 만난 오늘 [Nice to see you again (Korean ver.). The original Japanese version is one of my favorite TWS songs, so I quite enjoy the Korean version too, once my brain got past the inevitable linguistic confusion of hearing a different version of a familiar song. They did a short round of promos on Korean music shows, and it was fun to see how they added small easter eggs to the choreography for each performance.

Dokyeom and Seungkwan, the two main vocalists of Seventeen, released a unit album last month. It's packed full of songs to show off their voices. The title track is Blue. I also quite like Seungkwan's solo track, Dream Serenade, and the b-side, Prelude of Love.

I've also being doing a deep dive into all of ILLIT's 2025 music, and I really missed a lot! I really love their entire June 2025 EP, bomb, but if you need a more specific starting place, try 빌려온 고양이 (Do the Dance) or bamsopoong.

I'm also listening to NMIXX's Blue Valentine.

What are you listening to lately?

osprey_archer

I was cautiously optimistic about this year’s Newbery winner, Renée Watson’s All the Blues in the Sky, because I liked Watson’s earlier book Piecing Me Together. However, these hopes collapsed when I realized that this is yet another example of my least favorite Newbery genre: Books in Verse About Death.

There is probably someone, someone, who could make me enjoy a Book in Verse about Death, but unfortunate Watson is not that person, or at least this book is not that book.

Our heroine is Sage, who recently lost her best friend when she was hit by a drunk driver while walking to Sage’s house for Sage’s birthday. Sage is now part of the grief group at school, where she sits inwardly sneering at the two members who lost people after a long illness (a grandmother to dementia, and a twin sister to leukemia), because THEY don’t know what it’s like to lose someone unexpectedly.

And, you know, technically this is true. But one feels that at some point someone should point out to Sage that she doesn’t know what it’s like to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death for years, watching a loved one slowly wither away.

And okay fine, Sage’s Aunt Ini does eventually point out that everyone grieves differently and you can’t directly compare grief etc etc. However, there’s a scene where Sage screams at these girls that they don’t understand anything, and I really, really wanted one of them to scream back that they might not understand her grief but at least they’re TRYING, unlike Sage who very obviously doesn’t give a damn about them. Like, her disdain is so obvious that the other members of Grief Group (the ones who also lost people unexpectedly and are therefore acceptable to Sage) comment that Sage doesn’t like the girls whose relatives died long, slow, agonizing deaths, and Sage responds that it’s because they “don’t know how good they had it.”

But of course no one screams back at Sage. Of course when Sage apologizes, everyone accepts it, instead of telling her to stuff her apology where the sun don’t shine, or at least pointing out the fact that she blew up about how the others don’t understand her pain when she hasn’t been trying even slightly to understand theirs.

And then! And then! ( spoilers for the ending )

isis

I'm finally feeling mostly human after being down with a cold for about a week; serves me right for being a judge at the regional science fair and exposing myself to all those middle school germ factories. Well, I read a lot, anyway.

Shroud by Adrien Tchaikovsky - first-contact with a very alien alien species on the tidally-locked moon of a gas giant. Earth is (FRTDNEATJ*) uninhabitable, humans have diaspora'ed in spaceships under the iron rule of corporations who cynically consider only a person's value to the bottom line, and the Special Projects team of the Garveneer is evaluating what resources can be extracted from the moon nicknamed "Shroud" when disaster (of course) strikes. The middle 3/5 of the book is a bizarre roadtrip through a strange frozen hell, as an engineer and an administrator (both women) must navigate their escape pod to a place where they might be able to call for rescue.

When I'd just started this book I said that it reminded me of Alien Clay, and it really does have a lot in common with that book, especially since they are both expressions of Tchaikovsky's One Weird Theme, i.e. "How can we see Other as Person?" He hits the same beats as he does in that and other books that are expressions of that theme (for example, the exploratory overture that is interpreted as hostility, the completely different methods of accomplishing the same task) but if it's the sort of thing you like, you will like this sort of thing. It also reminded me a bit of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward, in the sense that it starts with an environment which is the opposite of anything humans would expect to find life on, and reasons out from physics and chemistry what life might be like in that environment. Finally, it (weirdly) reminded me of Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher, because the narrator, Juna Ceelander, feels that she's the worst possible person for the job (of survival, in this case); the engineer has a perfect skill-set for repairing the pod and interpreting the data they receive, but she's an administrator, she can do everyone's job a little, even if she can't do anybody's job as well as they can. But it turns out that it's important that she can do everyone's job a little; and it's also important that she can talk to the engineer, and stroke her ego when she's despairing, and not mind taking the blame for something she didn't do if it helps the engineer stay on task, and that's very Summer.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot!

[*] for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown is what took me through most of the worst of my cold, as it's an easy-to-read micro-history-slash-memoir, which is one of my favorite nonfiction genres. Brown is the astronomer who discovered a number of objects in the Kuiper Belt, planetoids roughly the size of Pluto, which led to the inevitable question: are these all planets, too? If so, the solar system would have twelve or fifteen or more planets. If not - Pluto, as one of these objects, should not be considered a planet.

I really enjoyed the tour through the history of human discovery and conception of the solar system, and the development of astronomy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He manages to outline the important aspects of esoteric technical issues without getting bogged down in detail, so it's very accessible to non-scientists. Interwoven in this was his own story, the story of his career in astronomy but also his marriage and the birth of his daughter. It's an engaging, chatty book, and one must forgive him for side-stepping the central question of "so what the heck is a planet, anyway?"

Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk, which B had read a while back when he was on a Herman Wouk kick. I'd read Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and Marjorie Morningstar, but that was it, and I remembered he had said it reminded him a lot of our time in the Bahamas and Caribbean when we were living on our boat.

The best thing about this book is Wouk's sharp, funny writing - his paragraphs are things of beauty, his characters drawn crisply with description that always seems novel. The story itself is one disaster after another, as Norman Paperman, Broadway publicist, discovers that running a resort in paradise is, actually, hell. It's funny, but the kind of funny that you want to read peeking through your fingers, because you just feel so bad for the poor characters.

On the other hand, this book was published in 1965, and it shows. I don't think the racist, sexist, antisemitic, pro-colonization attitudes expressed by the various characters are Wouk's - he's Jewish, for one thing, and he's mostly making a point about these characters, and these attitudes. The homophobia, I'm not sure. But the book's steeped in -ism and -phobia, and I cringed a lot.

I enjoyed this book (for some value of "enjoy") right up until near the end, where a sudden shift in tone ruined everything.

Don't Stop the Spoilers

Two characters die unexpectedly; a minor character, and then a more major character, and everything goes from zany slapstick disasters ameliorated at the last minute to a somber reckoning in the ashes of last night's party. In this light, the ending feels jarring: the resort's problems are solved, the future looks rosy, and Norman realizes he is not cut out for life in Paradise and, selling the resort to another sucker, returns to the icy New York winter.

Reflecting on it, I think this ending is a better ending than the glib alternative of the resort's problems are solved, the future looks rosy, and Norman raises a glass and looks forward to dealing with whatever Paradise throws at him in the future. But because everything has gone somber, it feels not like he's learned a lesson and acknowledged reality, but that he's had his face rubbed in horror and decided he can't cope. If he'd celebrated his success and then ruefully stepped away, it would be an act of strength, but he runs back home, defeated, and all his experience along the way seems pointless.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand - I got this book in a fantasy book Humble Bundle, so I was expecting fantasy, which this is very much not. It's a psychological thriller, following the first-person narrator Cass Neary, a fucked-up, drugged-out, briefly brilliant photographer who has been sent by an old acquaintance to interview a reclusive photographer - one of Cass's heroes - on a Maine island.

I kept reading because the narrative voice is fabulous and incredibly seductive, even though the character is a terrible person who does terrible things in between slugs of Jack Daniels and gulps of stolen uppers. It feels very immersive, both in the sense of being immersed in the world of the novel's events and in the sense of being immersed in the perspective of a messed-up photographer. But overall it's not really the sort of book I typically read, and it's not something I'd recommend unless you're into this type of book.

rachelmanija

Five high school friends go on a camping trip and find a mysterious staircase in the woods. One of them climbs it and vanishes. Twenty years later, the staircase reappears, and they go to face it again.

I loved this premise and the cover. The staircase leading nowhere is spooky and beautiful, a weird melding of nature and civilization, so I was hoping for something that matched that vibe, like Annihilation or Revelator.

That was absolutely not what I got. The Staicase in the Woods is the misbegotten mutant child of It, King Sorrow, and Tumblr-speak. Every single character is insufferable. The teenagers are boring, and the adults are all the worst people you meet at parties. There are four men and one woman/nonbinary person, and she/they reads exactly like what MAGA thinks liberal women/trans people are like -- AuHD, blue hair, Tumblr-speak, angry, preachy, kinky sex etc. She/they says "My pronouns are she/them," then is only ever referred to as she and a woman. The staircase itself is barely in the story, where it leads is a letdown, and the ending combines the worst elements of being dumb and unresolved.

I got partway in and then skimmed because I was curious about the staircase and the vanished kid.

Angry spoilers for the whole book.

( Read more... )

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February 2026

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james_davis_nicoll - All Regulations Are Written in Blood
james_davis_nicoll - Slow Gods by Claire North
garonne - Canon Compliance and AUs
osprey_archer - Book Review: The Discarded Image
james_davis_nicoll - MP Matt Jeneroux leaves Conservatives to join Liberals, citing 'national unity crisis'
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Wolves Upon the Coast
thisbluespirit - An actual up to date little post of nice things
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
james_davis_nicoll - One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense
james_davis_nicoll - Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)
nnozomi - get到了吗?
china_shop - Me-and-media update
sovay - The water's depths can't kill me yet
thisbluespirit - What I was watching... um... in summer?
rachelmanija - The Starving Saints, by Caitlin Starling
james_davis_nicoll - The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson
rilina - Current listening
osprey_archer - Book Review: All the Blues in the Sky
isis - recent reading
rachelmanija - The Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig

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