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"When you're dead," Baru says, with rising delight, a wicked joy, "I'm going to take a pass at your secret daughter. I'll have her to a very charming dinner. I'll flirt with her over iced vodka and blackberries."

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💀 Emperor Undying, Necrolord Prime, absolute bastard of a man 💀

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It interests me how unsettling this scene is. Palamedes is only immobilising her in order to save her life - on a practical level this isn't really any different from, say, Gideon dragging Jeannmary away from the explosion in the basement. But the text puts effort into making it feel kind of disturbing - Gideon is "an insect pinned to its backing," Palamedes is looking at her like she's a thing to be controlled rather than a person he knows. For the whole book Harrow has been talking about how Palamedes is a powerful necromancer and therefore a threat. But Gideon doesn't see him as a threat, so her narrative doesn't frame him that way. It's only here that we fully see what it means for Palamedes to be a powerful necromancer - and he himself seems to be slightly in denial about the implications of this.

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I think Fugitive Telemetry is pretty funny from Indah's perspective. There's a murder on the station. You alert your government leader, and they bring their bodyguard/corporate-spy-and-murder-construct with them to the scene of the crime. Turns out it's also Sherlock Holmes. It alternates talking like it's in a TV show, and making various ominous statements, including things like "if I killed them, you'd never find the bodies." It refuses to elaborate on that one. Well that's comforting. It does go on to show that it couldn't have done the murder. But did it just confess to murder? Why did it just confess to murder? It goes on to save your officers lives (wait, did it just hack the system it promised not to hack? Eh, we'll let it slide this time.) and then mount a solo rescue mission (extremely successful, except for being shot by the people it's saving), and still hasn't killed anyone. So far. It already forgot that someone got murdered and that you were actually trying to solve a crime. Anyway, once you give it full access to your security system, it solves the crime within an hour or so. Turns out it was your coworker of 43 years. Who was actually a corporate-spy-and-murder-robot this whole time.

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(I am so good at making memes)

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not enough of a spotlight is shown on Ratthi and Gurathin in Fugitive Telemetry. SecUnit isn't allowed to hack government security systems so it invites its Two Best Guy Friends to come watch it break into a transport ship, AND BOTH OF THEM ARE LIKE "sure thing, sounds fun" ?? They put up the weakest "are you sure this is a good idea?" argument but otherwise just do what SecUnit needs (which is stand in front of security cameras and act as character witnesses). SecUnit's narration also implies that it would have just let its Two Best Guy Friends tag along for the rest of its murder investigation, for funsies, except the cops said no (booooo).

later THE SAME DAY, SecUnit (famously allergic to asking for help) messages their group chat "I need help" with ZERO context, which gives Ratthi and Gurathin such a shock they almost knock their table over. then it facetimes them from the NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM to ask which of these Preserved Artifacts works best for jetting out into space? and Ratthi and Gurathin are like, "that one with the red tags, but ummm why?"

"don't worry about it," it says, "I'll tell you later."

then it HANGS UP and they don't hear from it for the rest of the day.

just a day in the life.

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oh hey humble bundle finally had a bundle that felt worth getting an affiliate link for

$18 for 14 martha wells novels/novellas/short stories (including murderbot) in drm-free epub readable on any device you want, with a portion of your purchase going to support world central kitchen. you can also adjust your donation to increase the amount that goes to charity, the default kind of sucks.

you can copy/paste this plaintext link if your adblocker breaks the other one: https://humblebundleinc.sjv.io/1935ox

[cytheorya]

I love the covers of the tyrant philosophers books

Where so many books are doing just an image of an object or animal, some symbolism or a person holding a weapon or something like that, the artist for these (someone called joe wilson) decided to instead just cover the cover with... everything

And it's really neat because once you've read the book you can point at all the features and go, oh it's that guy! The frog on days of shattered faith is Kakrops!

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Hello, my book is up for preorder. So it would be really cool if you did that. So that I don't have to go back to the law firm.

I can't sell it better than we did in the copy, so here we go!

Sublimation is the debut novel by Isabel J. Kim, winner of two Nebula Awards, the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award, and a finalist for the 2025 Hugo Award and 2023 Astounding Award.

“In this dazzling parable of connection and isolation, Isabel J. Kim’s vividly crafted characters navigate identity, belonging, and the weight of a divided history.” —Scott Westerfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Uglies and The Mortons

The border cuts you in two.

When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind. One person enters their new country, the other stays trapped at home.

Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather dies and her Korean instance calls her home for the funeral. When she arrives, she discovers that Soyoung plans to steal her body and live her life whether Rose wants to reintegrate or not.

Sublimation is a literary speculative fiction novel that pits the lives we choose against the lives we leave behind. It’s an immigrant story like no other, capturing the longing for another life and twisting it into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse.

Amazon Link

B&N Link Indigo Link

(bookshop, etc links forthcoming! It's still populating on the back end)

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Tower in the River. Oil on fruit snacks box (yes, again).

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"SecUnit would write fanfic"

"It would only beta read and leave comments"

SecUnit would install itself as a moderator of the Sanctuary Moon fandom wiki page. SecUnit would, for the simple transgression of being annoying - delete your account, IP ban, find your personal email address and send you a citation-laden 5 page explanation about how you're wrong titled "Banned for life (idiot)"

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made a list of books i associate with tumblr (which admittedly was sourced from 1) my brain 2) my blog and 3) walking around the bookstore where i work and looking at the shelves so i may have left some out)

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I’m getting reeeeaaal tired of the prevalence of herbal/alternative medicine in sci-fi and post-apocalyptic stories. it never fits the worldbuilding, it always leans way too close to woo bullshit, and it breaks immersion because I know more about this than the author and it! doesn’t! work! If they want healing magic they should just suck it up and write healing magic. I will suspend my disbelief for a lot but not if the author can’t be bothered to spend literally thirty seconds on wikipedia first.

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if your content involves cavalier/necromancer relations, the following requirements MUST be met:

all participants must be in a formalized necromancer/cavalier pair

a scene must be included PRIOR to Lyctoral Ascension, in which all participants affirm they have an absence of libidinous desires towards the other

a scene must be included DURING Lyctoral Ascension, in which there is a verbal check-in between the participants and a statement of duty is enthusiastically given

a scene must be included AFTER Lyctoral Ascension, in which the Vow is provided to the participant who was in the cavalier role

this is non-negotiable. if you have any questions please ask God for clarification

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I think. Perhaps. Given what we saw in Rapport. It might be worth considering that ART continually oversteps in its relationship with Murderbot not because it's trying to be an asshole, but because it is not used to being treated as an actual authority figure. Like. ART has to carry around crew members it doesnt like. It has to play nice and dumb with corporates. Iris thinks of it as her younger sibling. I think there's a significant chance part of why ART is SO demanding and SO selfish when Murderbot first meets it is that's how it makes space for itself. It barges into conversations to remind people that it's there, hi, im in the room with you too. It takes things without asking because asking gets you told no. Its not going to play nice and pretend to be a normal bot pilot around its crew, it has to do that enough already. So its pushy, and it oversteps, because it's used to having to fight to be heard. ART isn't good at talking to bots, because its so used to having to jostle with humans for autonomy that it inadvertently steamrolls people who don't fight back.

It fucks up its first meeting with Murderbot because it isnt expecting Murderbot to perceive it as not only a threat but a superior. A lot of the conflict in their relationship, fact, comes from the fact that Murderbot doesn't see them as equals but ART does. And ART does hold a lot of power over Murderbot, but all the times it fucks up in their relationship aren't from trying to abuse that power but from being unaware (or willfully ignorant) of how that power imbalance affects it. I think ART knows it asks for too much, but it assumes that it needs to to end up with what it actually wants. Murderbot takes everything it says at face value, and ART is clearly getting better over the course of their relationship at not making demands just for the sake of asserting its agency. ART very clearly does not want Murderbot to meekly go along with everything it says. It's not acting the way it does because it expects compliance, but because it refuses to be compliant itself.

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I am not gonna be That Person and comment "well actually" on other people's fun posts but it does rankle me when people sum up the lobotomy as Harrow just trying to forget Gideon. It's funny, I agree, and I wouldn't be mad if it was what actually happened in the book.

But it's important for a truly accurate reading that the only reason forgetting Gideon is part of the equation at all is because Harrow has no other way to save Gideon's soul. The forgetting is a necessary means to the end of not erasing Gideon from existence. It's a desperate plan that will leave Harrow permanently crippled but it's all she can think of to do under an extreme time crunch. Losing her memories is the one of the many sacrifices she's willing to make to preserve Gideon. It's not something she wanted to do.

Gideon is the one who thinks Harrow just doesn't want to remember her "bad breakup"! And as always, Gideon doesn't know the whole story and is pretty terrible at reading Harrow's feelings for her. Don't fall for her unreliable narrative!