#Josepha Sherman

[oldschoolfrp]

"Eira's fortress was a thing of wonder. All of ice that great structure seemed: walls and bridges and upward-soaring towers." The bard Derwen encounters an ice castle in a fey realm, in Josepha Sherman's story "Eira" illustrated by Atanielle Annyn Noël (Dragon 93, January 1985)

[movie--posters]

[13thhr]

The Thirteenth Hour Podcast #427: An Endless Quest Book - Song of the Dark Druid Reading

Remember Endless Quest books? They were a brand of Dungeons and Dragons game books. We reading from 1987's Song of the Dark Druid by Josepha Sherman this week.

[nevinslibrary]

Make It So Friday

A lot of Star Trek serieses can sorta be read in any order, and at anytime. And, while that’s sort of true of the Double Helix series also. On the other hand, if it’s read all at the ‘same time’ (i.e. over a few days or weeks or months) it’s such an amazingly awesome and epic story that really holds together well.

It starts with a plague on a planet where there’s also quite a lot of civil strife too. The Enterprise-D and Beverly Crusher are on the case though. It seems simple enough, but, it’s not actually simple at all. We then get four more books that are set mostly in ‘present’ time with all sorts of awesome characters like Montgomery Scott, Gul Dukat, Pulaski, Kira, more Beverly, and of course Bones from TOS. Then there’s the final book, which, actually goes all the way to the beginning with Jean-Luc Picard on the Stargazer and why the rest of the books and the through storyline actually happened to begin with.

It was set up so well. A slow burn as for who was doing this behind the scenes, and why it was happening too. Each book stood on its own merits, but, also had this really interesting and awesome through line. And then the final book was just…. Amazing. Although, to be fair, I’m a sucker for a good Stargazer story (that series is on my list to read too).

You may like this book If you Liked: Vulcan's Soul by Josepha Sherman, Prey by John Jackson Miller, or Cold Equations by David Mack

Double Helix Series by Various

[elucubrare]

i just started josepha sherman's king's son, magic's son, which isn't terrible, only a little mediocre, but about 50 pages in i'm just like, yeah, it really makes sense that you co-wrote a couple of books with mercedes lackey

[aliform]

Today at the library I checked out a book by Josepha Sherman, found out she passed, found an obit on someone's blog where the entire world commented including childhood fave Jane Yolen, discovered obit blog author was excommunicated for protesting against the church's fight against ERA (uncovering that historical event started my own path towards resignation so um, kinship?), unearthed two dead cons from the comments, and if anything I wish the world was as small as it used to be.

Watching Light & Magic/The Imagineering Story and seeing all of these passionate women and men fall into their craft, same with all these SFF nerds who wrote fanzines and Tor books and went to cons all over the place, never letting go of what made them happy and made them tick, carving out spaces in publishing and writing from it, I am just so jealous!

I want to be 27 in some 1970s kitchen talking about Spirk and making con plans and getting published for just being an active member of a community!

I want to show up at some small indie workshop that will eventually become a behemoth and say hey I like to paint! I like to clack clack on a keyboard and figure out programs, hire me! And then years later the same jobs will require an Iowa Writers Workshop graduation and conference meetups and a twitter or a move to the Bay, and a bachelors in illustration and a portfolio started when you were 11 and two internships during school and an uncle in an unrelated department.

Tech is really the only industry you can really bootstrap anymore and maybe my deep attraction to the SFF community (much stronger than actually reading SFF books lmao) is because these people were all so knitted together (leading to things like the geek social fallacies which in its darkest forms protected people like MZB and Breen).

I'm in a things are darkest before the dawn personal era where I'm attempting to, nonoriginally, pivot into a different career, a both banal (because of the hard work and all the thousands of people also doing this) and excruciating (creating the time to do so) effort.

I know my own inner strength and am putting on the extrovert networking mask to do this, and in a way it's invigorating (learning something new) and in another it's frustrating (seeing it through).

My failures post maybe isn't about failures as much as it is the ebb and flow of energy. Some interest will spark and I'll do a deep dive into it; pause or leave, come back perhaps -- is that not everyone? Am I just upset with time itself and how my whole life, and everyone else's, has phases? Why do I want to exist as all my interests at once? That's not even who I am as a person, but I want to be able to hold on to things and not let go.

Since I left livejournal (14 years ago omg) I've toyed with the idea of making a blog and maybe I finally need to do that to be the aggregator to collect all the interesting bits, and anyway I feel like a bother here (nonsensical). But it would be nice to have a custom-made space just for myself that's my own feel that does whatever I want. Ugh. There's too many lifetimes all around me and just myself, plodding along, captivated by too much, in love with the larger themes behind too many interesting small things. It's endless! Time is god.

[fictionz]

New Fiction 2022 - June

The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - "3 Kings" ed. Richard Challoner (1752)

Okay so now Solomon's in charge and there's no war so things are good? Except he's going around murdering enemies Godfather-style. And now a parade of kings as we run down the list and deeds of the rest of David's successors.

The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - "4 Kings" ed. Richard Challoner (1752)

I think Eliseus is the star here? But the details of the chapters are more scattered. Perhaps due to winding down the chronicle of the kings. Hazael, Jezrahel, Jezabel, oh my. Oh shit Jehu will not stand for Baal worship. Dang, and Jerusalem has fallen!

Tales of the Dominion War - "What Dreams May Come" by Michael Jan Friedman (2004)

The complacency of fools something something.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Night of the Vulture" by Greg Cox (2004)

As close to Cannibal Holocaust as Star Trek gets.

Tales of the Dominion War - "The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned" by Keith R.A. DeCandido (2004)

Put up your walls and a gun for every good citizen.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Blood Sacrifice" by Josepha Sherman & Susan Schwartz (2004)

Impatience is a sign of having lived too long.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Mirror Eyes" by Heather Jarman & Jeffrey Lang (2004)

If your place is compromised, that’s your new place.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Twilight's Wrath" by David Mack (2004)

Slash the throat of your master to serve you and yours.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Eleven Hours Out" by Dave Galanter (2004)

The only place to go is the way ahead.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Safe Harbors" by Howard Weinstein (2004)

Call them all in, we’re alone.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Field Expediency" by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore (2004)

Desperation will keep you from seeing it all.

Tales of the Dominion War - "A Song Well Sung" by Robert Greenberger (2004)

When your enemy leaves you bare.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Stone Cold Truths" by Peter David (2004)

The children only know what they see and hear.

Tales of the Dominion War - "Requital" by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels (2004)

What will you do, when you find it?

Dracula Daily - "June" by Bram Stoker & ed. Matt Kirkland (1897)

A slow and obvious realization that your friend is not your friend.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990)

The lecture-style of story-telling wears just a bit too thin for my tastes.

"Aquarium" by NoneToon (2022) 

It’s hard to make friends, wouldn’t you agree?

"Making art in America. 👁👄👁" dir. Angie Wang (2022)

Please find a way.

Montana Story dir. Scott McGehee (2022)

Leave when you have to leave. Your place is where you choose to be.

Crimes of the Future dir. David Cronenberg (2022)

The subtle ways in which we fall apart.

Watcher dir. Chloe Okuno (2022)

👍👍👍

Jurassic World Dominion dir. Colin Trevorrow (2022)

Give DeWanda Wise her own adventure movie/series.

Top Gun: Maverick dir. Joseph Kosinski (2022)

Get your planes, get your guns, step right up.

G.I. Joe: The Movie dir. Don Jurwich (1987)

Better with no context whatsoever.

Elvis dir. Baz Luhrmann (2022)

That new Elvis biopic is more entertainment than history, but it still helped me get why Elvis was a big deal after growing up on 90s media made by 70s kids who treated him as a joke. And Austin Butler's portrayal of Elvis is :chefskiss:.

The Black Phone dir. Scott Derrickson (2022)

It sets up all the pieces perfectly.

Lightyear dir. Angus MacLane (2022)

I like space and I like adventures but when you’re Pixar there’s a burden to deliver on a certain level of charm that is missing here.

The Cat Returns dir. Hiroyuki Morita (2004)

A neat little fantasy, and you know, I didn’t realize how much I missed whimsical fantasy adventures with some small measure of risk.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On dir. Dean Fleischer-Camp (2022)

Marcel’s got the improv quips and a lovely story about what it means to stick to family or to let them go.

Goosebumps - "My Hairiest Adventure" (1996)

Body hair and its many wonders.

Goosebumps - "It Came from Beneath the Sink" (1996)

Stick to the book, although it’s neat seeing the beginnings of an actor who went on to success in the horror genre.

Goosebumps - "The Barking Ghost" (1997)

Woof.

Goosebumps - "Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes" (1996)

Sometimes I see that a given book has been adapted for television and try to imagine how they would’ve pulled it off on a low TV budget of the 90s. And with this one, I fretted over the fact that unless they chose to use expensive stop-motion animation, they’d probably find a way to have little people dressed up as lawn gnomes. Sure enough...

Goosebumps - "Shocker on Shock Street" (1997)

Love the book, not the TV episode. Gonna fret any time a fucked up book ending gets swapped for a more tame TV-friendly version.

Goosebumps - "Haunted Mask II" (1996)

You didn’t have to redo everything from the first one. The book knew that.

Goosebumps - "The Headless Ghost" (1996)

Oh. You know, you had something there at the end. A comeuppance would’ve been good.

Goosebumps - "How I Got My Shrunken Head" (1998)

The book was vague in its exact location and cultural references but the TV episode makes it much more specific about which backward people the white westerners have decided to enslave.

[gamepack]

get to know me

rules: tag 9 people you want to know better, but i cant pick 9 so if you see this im tagging you >:)

last song: AHH!! by DellaXOZ (listening to it as i write this response)

last TV show: star trek discovery ❤️❤️ i love uss gaypeople (aka uss discovery)

currently listening to: crime pays by bear hands as i write this

currently reading: killing time by della van hise and vulcan’s forge by josepha sherman & susan shwartz

current obsession/hyperfixation/also adding special interest: my special interests are star trek, final fantasy xv, dogs/dog training, and the sims >:) im currently going Wild for the sims and star trek though

[lt-cmdr-titties]

JEWISH SPOCK JEWISH SPOCK JEWISH SPOCK JEWISH SPOCK

[maddie-grove]

Little Book Review: Child of Faerie, Child of Earth

Author: Josepha Sherman.

Publication Date: 1992.

Genre: Fantasy YA.

Premise: Graciosa, the emotionally neglected daughter of a lord in twelfth-century France, finds a friend in Percinet, the half-human son of a Faerie queen. She needs a friend, too, because her cold father is under the thrall of the evil Duchess Eglatine, who is wildly jealous of Graciosa’s beauty and just might have to kill her about it. 

Thoughts: “Graciosa and Percinet” was one of my favorite fairy tales in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book, which I devoured when I was eleven or so. Written by Madame d’Aulnoy in 1697, it’s not one of the better-known fairy tales, but it’ll probably feel familiar to anyone who’s read enough fairy tales or Greco-Roman myths. It’s essentially a mash-up of “Snow White” (a beautiful young girl is dispossessed/mistreated by a jealous stepmother) and “Cupid and Psyche” (a girl is separated from her true love and forced to perform a bunch of seemingly impossible tasks by a woman who hates her). What’s always charmed me about it, though, is the delicacy of the romance and the emotionally realistic obstacles that keep the protagonists from getting together until the end. Percinet loves Graciosa from the beginning, and is always trying to help her out; Graciosa loves Percinet back, but she’s afraid of acting on it because she’s afraid he’ll tired of her eventually, plus she’s reluctant to leave her father despite his lack of affection for her. Those are some real problems!

Josepha Sherman unfortunately doesn’t add much in her retelling. It only differs from the original in a handful of details, which creates a kind of literary uncanny valley effect (like when I had a dream about Glee back in 2011, and it was the same as normal Glee except they tried to introduce a new character who liked science, didn’t believe in God, and was boring). Worse, few of the details add much. To wit:

Graciosa has a pretty bad home life even before her father remarries, as she’s expected to run his estate with little help but constantly gets criticized for being incompetent. This is one of the few interesting changes; it made me sympathize with her immediately, and it ties in well with her reluctance to let go of an always-distant father.

Duchess Eglantine has captured a Faerie and uses them to do evil magic. This was enjoyably creepy, but underutilized.

Graciosa is wary of Percinet primarily because she’s afraid she’ll go to hell or get executed for heresy if she gets involved with Faeries or magic. Given that the historical setting is never strongly developed and nothing comes of Graciosa’s fears, this element felt half-baked. I’m not sure whether it checks out historically, either.

Graciosa and Percinet split up mid-story not just because she has trust issues and wants to be there for her father, but because she catches Percinet kissing a Faerie girl. He doesn’t really get it because Faerie mores are different, plus he and Graciosa aren’t together-together. Unlike some readers, I don’t think this ruins Percinet’s character, but it does turn their nuanced separation into something a lot more crude and petty.

Overall, I’d just suggest reading the original. Almost everything good in this novel is in the original, too.

Hot Goodreads Take: The language is foul (the characters sometimes say “damn”) and Percinet’s mom isn’t enough of a MILF in the illustrations. 

[oldschoolfrp]

Snow palace (Atanielle Annyn Noël, for Josepha Sherman's story "Eira," Dragon 93, January 1985)

[fuckyeahromulans]

On Obsidian, the younger Ruanek had become entranced, courtesy of the then-hostage Dr. Leonard McCoy, by the subject of Terran horses, “those swift, exotic war-beasts.” The Romulan’s fascination had continued over the years; Spock had once, bemused by this oddity, even managed to send Ruanek an image of a racing horse, and received almost wistful thanks.

-Vulcan’s Heart by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz

[mickeslibrary]

Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz: Vulcan’s Forge. Star Trek. Cover by X. Pocket Books, USA, 1998.

[nevinslibrary]

Make It So Friday

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I read the blurb on the cover of this hardcover book. I actually hadn't planned specifically to read this one, I just saw it as I was pulling another Star Trek book from the shelf to read, and decided, what the heck, it has Vulcan in the title, I'm gonna go for it. But, I'm glad I did read it. I had known for awhile that the Live Long and Prosper split finger gesture had come from Leonard Nimoy's upbringing as a Jewish person, but, I almost felt like in this book, they took that connection and were like 'we're gonna go full in on the Jewish connection' (I don't know that that was why the book was written, it's only how it felt to me).

David Rabin was a friend of Spock's, first on Vulcan for a short time (where they had a heckuva adventure) and then at the Academy. Now he's a Captain on a remote outpost near the Romulan/Federation Neutral Zone (on a very very desert-like planet) where the people don't seem to want him there, and everything is being sabotaged. Spock and the USS Intrepid II (not to be confused with the USS Intrepid that came before the II, or the USS Intrepid that was the first of the Intrepid class.... one will never say that the charts and graphs for Star Trek and its naming conventions are simple, nope) arrive to help.

Soon enough, Spock is down on the planet with McCoy (who gets kidnapped practically immediately, that cracked me up) while Uhura is in Command of the Intrepid II (woo!!).

The parts of the book between the two friends and the desert dwellers on the planet was a fun part of the novel, my very favorite part was Uhura in command of the Intrepid II. I now need 20 or so more novels just about her career as Captain Nyota Uhura. The two authors really seemed to get her character and from that I could totally see this as how she would command a starship. It was a fun book, and, apparently there's a sort of sequel, sort of not sequel too, Vulcan's Heart. Can't wait to read it.

You may like this book If you Liked: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox, Acts of Contrition by Kirsten Beyer, or Desperate Hours by David Mack

Vulcan's Forge by Josepha Sherman

[honou-izzu]

Picard’s first impression on seeing Sarek, and Spock for the first time...

[savantefolle]

Grandeurs et misères de la table de dédicace - 102

Grandeurs et misères de la table de dédicace – 102

Finir un beau livre, encore toute remuée par l’histoire… et apprendre que son autrice est décédée. Ça m’est arrivé, et ça a dû vous arriver plus d’une fois.  Quand c’est un-e auteur classique, on s’y attend, mais ça fait de la peine quand même.

Pas encore remise de la perte d’Ursula K LeGuin en janvier 2018. Mais quand c’est parmi nos contemporains… ça fait un choc.

L’auteure, c’est Ann…