#Those Beyond The Wall

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Those Beyond The Wall

sequel/companion to The Space Between Worlds, set a decade later

character-focused sci-fi set in an area divided in two, the rich protected city on one side and everyone else in the post-apocalyptic desert

follows a woman who works under the Emperor in Ashtown, keeping the peace

when mangled bodies start showing up with seemingly no murderer, she’s tasked with finding the cause, and finds out that it’s the result of corruption spanning both cities and multiple worlds

explores oppression and messy revolution, police violence and apartheid

bi & polyamorous MC

[le-trash-prince]

Those Beyond the Wall

[stuckyfingers]

Genuinely Evil but Undeniably Hot

I love the casting of Sebastian Stan as Steve Kemp and Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce.

I love how their charm makes is so much easier for them to come off as the perfect man at first.

Pierce is the perfect man in charge: refused the Nobel Peace Prize because 'peace was a responsibility'. Kemp is the perfect boyfriend: he talks about cotton candy grapes and even refused food and drink to make love to his new girl.

They make their red flags look like a fashion statement.

And the protagonists realize how evil they are only until it's almost too late and they're already lost something to them.

Most of all, I LOVE the subversion of heterosexual eurocentric attractiveness, which is usually only attributed to the hero- being cast on the villain.

[salty-an-disco]

I keep going back-and-forth between the world outside when Quiet and the Princess leave as mortals being more modern or medieval, then I remembered what Nimona’s world did– mixing a futuristic setting with western medieval aesthetics– with flying cars and holographic phones in the same place that has knights riding in horses and brandishing swords (which may have lasers bulti into them, but still).

[clonerightsagenda]

People post "oh I love AUs because I love that these people fall in love in every universe" but Cara SpaceBetweenWorlds is living a hellish inverse of this where she keeps hopping universes and her evil exes keep being obsessed with her

[elnierah]

I thought to post the Shukita/Kitashu screenshots I created for shukitaweek2023 on Tumblr too!  (ﾉ˵ ͡~ᗜ ͡°˵)ﾉ ❤️ 💙

[erudianokabe]

So, I asked a commission from ADM Custom Art Design Service, and they were so easy and pleasant to work with. You all definitely should check her out.

OKAY. IT'S TIME FOR YOU TO PERCEIVE THE CUTE THAT IS REINER.

The first two have already been pillow-fied, and now, the Armored will be too. PERCEIVE. I LOVE HIM SO MUCH, HE'S SO ADORABLE.

[hella1975]

choked up in my room rn bc i was sat in the car with my mum completely lost in thought and she out of nowhere went 'are you okay?' and i was like 'yeah? why?' bc i was totally fine i was literally just thinking and she let it go and then five entire minutes later she goes 'are you sure? have i done something?' and she sounded so genuinely anxious and i could tell she'd been thinking about it the entire 5 minutes while id been completely oblivious and i spent so many years as a child letting everything bottle up until it all burst out in a messy and ugly breakdown that took her down with me and despite that she never hated me she only ever blamed herself for not seeing the signs and she's never been able to see my signs because i keep everything to myself and it terrifies her that she might miss something and she handles things poorly when she's scared and she gets too angry but fundamentally she's trying her absolute hardest to be a good mother and it wasn't always enough and i know i have to hold her at least partially accountable but also she's my mum and im her daughter and she always just wants to know if im okay and most of the time im not and somehow that feels like ive betrayed her

[fellhellion]

as a Rebecca enjoyer I would really like to see some options in book 4 digging into how little has changed if your detective is seeking or ambivalent to reconciliation, or the absence of apologies. As well as detectives who aren’t seeking/rejecting reconciliation but Rebecca cannot let go of anyways. Especially since we’ve now had one of the few times, according to the detective’s memory, Rebecca explicitly expressing regret for her actions.

[bravest]

every time i think about mono being so afraid of being alone only to end up literally the most alone boy in the world i HAVE to throw up about it a little

[aeide-thea]

so i went to reblog some fanart earlier and started to tag it #oh this is. incredible actually, and then paused and thought, @‍self why the 'actually.' what is that adverb conveying. and i contemplated it for a bit, and finally concluded: well, shit. it's reflexive deprecation.

the thing is, deprecation is my starting position pretty much always, and that's a problem in itself, but mostly my problem; but when you're talking abt somebody else's work, and you start backing defensively away from imagined negativity before anyone's even actually voiced any? you may think you're playing bodyguard, but in reality you're the vanguard of the assault, opening a wedge for enemy forces to strike.

i was talking a couple of weeks ago abt seeing ppl tag that kristin sue lucas name-multiplied-by-one post with tags like 'this is art To Me' vel sim., and honestly i think it's a similar sort of reflex—i think exposure to the tumblr vernacular often leads people (very much including me!) to produce turns of phrase like this, that ultimately serve to convey roughly

'i, a clever girlblogger,¹ am, yeah, engaging with this frivolous hai pollai²-coded material; but my relationship to it, unlike that of most she-ple, is Intellectual and Analytical and Examined! and to make that clear, i'll be dropping in these little verbal particles from time to time, in order to distinguish my own, elevated examination of the subject from the state of risible naivete³ i'm implicitly ascribing to the other, more ordinary audience members i'm conjuring up only to instantly put down—but like, it's fine, i'm a free-and-easy girlblogger(TM), so you can't think i'd ever deliberately propagate establishmentarian prejudices! never mind the effect my rhetoric might subconsciously be having, on me or on anyone else…'

and i think this framing is worth squinting at, and worth attempting to excise from one's speech and from one's mindset, because when you get right down to it? it's just yet another insidious manifestation of respectability politics, that's gotten people to adopt it via the cuckoo-chick strategy of positioning itself as cutesy tumblr idiolect.

and like, circling back around to that fanart i mentioned at the outset: yeah, the tag did feel weirdly prosodically truncated to me without that 'actually'! but this way, if the artist ends up seeing my discussion of their work in their notes, they won't be getting slapped in the face with a wet dead fish first, so like. what's more important, you know?

⸻ ¹ ""(gender neutral)"" ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_polloi in the feminine, if i haven't totally fumbled my declensions… ³ phrasing nicked from a comment of @‍proudheron's.

[aroaessidhe]

Oh my god has everyone seen the cover + blurb reveal for Micaiah Johnson's new book Those Beyond the Wall, set in The Space Between Worlds universe!!

Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in a searing sci-fi thriller from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds. Scales is the best at what she does: She is an enforcer who keeps the peace in Ashtown, a rough, climate-ravaged desert town. But that fragile peace is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed within Ash’s borders, right in front of Scales’s eyes. Even more incomprehensible is that there was seemingly no murderer. When more mutilated bodies start to turn up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthier, walled-off Wiley City, Scales is tasked with finding the cause—and putting an end to it. She teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist in order to uncover the truth, delving into both worlds to track down the invisible killer. But what they find points to something bigger and more corrupt than they could’ve ever foreseen—and it could spell doom for the entire world.

[le-trash-prince]

Some stories are too complicated to stay, too heavy to be carried on the wind, and when he forgets about me completely I bet it will feel just like being forgiven.

Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson

[sacrifice2000]

i really wish i knew how to make connections online i wish i had a brain wired for meeting people through technological means be it social media or dating apps or whatever. there are a lot of really cool personalities that i come across and familiarize myself with and while i fully grasp that they are real people communicating through devices just like i am, i unfortunately can only comprehend the physical form. it is all just kind of pixels on screens or the occasional vocal noises via speakers to me. i wish it was different but i can't make that happen by force. being a neet for a while didn't reinforce the pro-internet-socializing mindset it only made me suicidal and i think psychotic. maybe i am the intended audience for vrchat, that's a good idea (no it's not)

[quietwingsinthesky]

Benny: Thanks for not giving up on me, brother.

Dean: Don't give me a reason to.

(im going to throw up)

[clonerightsagenda]

I will be turning this over in my mind for a while, but I remain interested by how differently the runners are portrayed in The Space Between Worlds and Those Beyond the Wall.

For Cara in TSBW, the runners are a childhood nightmare. She remembers when they'd parade through the streets crushing people to death. Multiple versions of her died under their wheels as a child because she couldn't get out of the way fast enough. She had a relationship with Nik Nik, who abused and nearly killed her multiple times. She eventually works with him and his runners at the end of the book, but she refuses to join them and instead ends up playing the role of intermediary between cultures (at least for a while). She sees how Wiley City thinks about people like her and doesn't have many illusions, but she still wanted to earn a place there.

Meanwhile, Scales grew up being abused in Wiley City, loathes it, has a much more negative view of the Ruralites than Cara does (possibly because Cara dodged her alt self's religious trauma), and sees the runners as her true family. Nik Nik is her family. In Scales' eyes, the runners are a righteous force set against the city's cruelty, their violence has purpose, and even when they're acting tough and scaring people, they're doing it out of a place of love. While she respects Cara's past as a traverser, she disagrees with her morality and views her as an assimilationist who isn't fighting for true liberation.

What I'm really curious about here is how much of this is a deliberate contrast between two POV characters with very different perspectives, and how much is the author changing her mind. Johnson is very clear in the author's note that kicks off Those Beyond the Wall that it's written in response to current events, and that recent history has destroyed whatever was left of her faith in the system. That's certainly reflected in the text. Maybe that shift demands the runners be placed in a better light. But the narrative also gives itself some wiggle room, because this version of Ashtown isn't quite as bad as Cara's. This Nik Nik doesn't parade and no longer breaks his lovers, apparently because of Scales' influence. It would've been interesting if this Nik Nik was as monstrous as Cara's, but we still saw why Scales loved him and why he ended up being what Ashtown needed, in the same way that Adam's behavior is recontextualized and 'fits' better in Ashtown than in Wiley, even though he's the same guy with the same crimes.

Like, Cara and Scales have different perspectives on Nik Nik and the runners and Wiley City because they are literally from different worlds, but it doesn't have to be that literal. They could still have these stances even if they both hailed from the same numerical Earth, because they're still from different worlds. Traversing has always been a metaphor.

(Where did Cara go though. What's her deal. Does this mean we're getting another book? Hope so.)