#the murderbot parallels are REAL

[ilovedthestars]

the absolute BEST part of finally reading imperial radch (i finished the ancillary trilogy!!! and turns out there's MORE?!) is getting to go back and look again at all the funny posts and stunning fanart that have been slowly convincing me to read it. this was how i got into murderbot first too (saw so much fanart and meta about it on tumblr that i had to read it, instead of the other way around) and even though it had its downsides (i spoiled myself on all the good twists in murderbot lol) i genuinely think this might be the best kind of media experience for me in terms of excitement and fun. because i know in advance that people love it and there's a community already built around it that i can dive into right away, and often i've already had some emotions about the characters just from seeing some gorgeous fanart, so when I get to those characters or scenes they hit even harder because i already care about them. and then i get to go back and look at all those things with fresh eyes, and understand all the layers of meaning now that i didn't get before, and that is so satisfying and rewarding to me.

anyway, hello imperial radch fandom!!!! i'm here now and i'm going to spend the next couple days shouting in the tags of all the cool fanart that made me read the books (thank you thank you thank you to @grammarpedant who started putting an excellent stream of imperial radch posts on my dash the second i finished the trilogy, you are the sweetest ever <3). i may already have a fanart idea of my own sketched out and it might be very ambitious and i may be considering actually teaching myself how to use clip studio paint for it. if there's fanart or fanfic you think i HAVE to see then send it to me please (even if we are strangers, it's not weird, i will think you are so cool!) (person i don't really know who already DM'd me an imperial radch post when i mentioned it the other day: i think you are so cool) i am going to see if i can ride this enthusiasm far enough that it becomes a long term obsession.

[rockalillygirl]

Mamma mia here we go again…

So I have more thoughts because apparently there’s no bottom to the murderbot mindhole I’ve fallen down.

(Spoiler warning- minor stuff from several of the books, pls check tags etc.)

I’ve been reading a lot of things recently exploring Murderbot as an unreliable narrator, which I think is a cool result of System Collapse (because we all know our beloved MB is going through it in this one). There’s also been some interesting related discussion of MB’s distrust of and sometimes biased assessment/treatment of other constructs and bots.

And I’ve been reading a lot about CombatUnits! And I want to talk about them!!

Main thoughts can be summarized as follows:

We don’t see a lot about CombatUnits in the books, and I think what we do see from MB’s pov encourages the reader to view them as less sympathetic than other constructs.

I’m very skeptical of this portrayal for reasons.

The existence of CombatUnits makes me fucking sad and I have a lot of feelings about them!

I got introduced to the idea of MB as an unreliable narrator in a post by onironic It analyzes how in SC, MB seems to distrust Three to a somewhat unreasonable degree, and how it sometimes infantilizes Three or treats it the way human clients have treated it in the past. The post is Amazing and goes into way more detail, so pls go read it (link below):

https://www.tumblr.com/onironic/736245031246135296?source=share

So these ideas were floating around in my brain when I read an article Martha Wells recently published in f(r)iction magazine titled “Bodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diaries”. I’ll link the article here:

(Rn the only way to access the article is to subscribe to the magazine or buy an e-copy of the specific issue which is $12)

In the article, Wells states that MB displaced its fear of being forced to have sex with humans onto the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. I think it’s reasonable to assume that MB also does this with other constructs. With Three, I think it’s more that MB is afraid if what it knows Three is capable of, or (as onironic suggests in their post and I agree with) some jealousy that Three seems more like what humans want/expect a rogue SecUnit to be.

But I want to explore how this can be applied to CombatUnits, specifically.

We don’t learn a lot about them in the books. One appears for a single scene in Exit Strategy, and that’s it. What little else we know comes from MB’s thoughts on them sprinkled throughout the series. To my knowledge, no other character even mentions them (which raises interesting questions about how widely-known their existence is outside of high-level corporate military circles).

When MB does talk about CombatUnits in the early books, it’s as a kind of boogeyman figure (the real “murderbots” that even Murderbot is afraid of). And then when one does show up in ES, it’s fucking terrifying! There’s a collective “oh shit” moment as both MB and the reader realize what it’s up against. Very quickly what we expect to be a normal battle turns into MB running for its life, desperately throwing up hacks as the CombatUnit slices through them just as fast. We and MB know that it wouldn’t have survived the encounter if its humans hadn’t helped it escape. So the CombatUnit really feels like a cut above the other enemies in the series.

And what struck me reading that scene was how the CombatUnit acts like the caricature of an “evil robot” that MB has taught us to question. It seems single-mindedly focused on violence and achieving its objective, and it speaks in what I’d call a “Terminator-esque” manner: telling MB to “Surrender” (like that’s ever worked) and responds to MB’s offer to hack its governor module with “I want to kill you” (ES, pp 99-100).

(Big tangent: Am I the only one who sees parallels between this and how Tlacey forces the ComfortUnit to speak to MB in AC? She makes it suggest they “kill all the humans” because that’s how she thinks constructs talk to each other (AC, pp 132-4). And MB picks up on it immediately. So why is that kind of talk inherently less suspicious coming from a CombatUnit than a ComfortUnit? My headcanon is that I’m not convinced the CombatUnit was speaking for itself. What if a human controller was making it say things they thought would be intimidating? Idk maybe I’ve been reading too many fics where CombatUnits are usually deployed with a human handler. There could be plenty of reasons why the CombatUnit would’ve talked like that. I’m just suspicious.)

(Also, disclaimer: I want to clarify before I go on that I firmly believe that even though MB seems to be afraid of CombatUnits and thinks they’re assholes, it would still advocate for them to have autonomy. I’m not trying to say that either MB or Wells sees CombatUnits as less worthy of personhood or freedom- because I feel the concept that “everything deserves autonomy” is very much at the heart of the series.)

So it’s clear from all of this that MB is scared of CombatUnits and distrusts them for a lot of reasons. I read another breathtaking post by @grammarpedant that gives a ton of examples of this throughout the books and has some great theories on why MB might feel this way. I’ll summarize the ones here that inspired me the most, but pls go read the original post for the full context:

https://www.tumblr.com/grammarpedant/703920247856562177?source=share

OP explains that SecUnits and CombatUnits are pretty much diametrically opposed because of their conflicting functions: Security safeguards humans, while Combat kills them. Of course these functions aren’t rigid- MB has implied that it’s been forced to be violent towards humans before, and I’m sure that extracting/guarding important assets could be a part of a CombatUnit's function. But it makes sense that MB would try to distance itself from being considered a CombatUnit, using its ideas about them to validate the parts of its own function that it likes (protecting people). OP gives what I think is the clearest example of this, which is the moment in Fugitive Telemetry when MB contrasts its plan to sneak aboard a hostile ship and rescue some refugees with what it calls a “CombatUnit” plan, which would presumably involve a lot more murder (FT, p 92).

This reminds me again of what Wells said in the f(r)iction article, that on some level MB is frightened by the idea that it could have been made a ComfortUnit (friction, p 44). I think the idea that it could’ve been a CombatUnit scares it too, and that’s why it keeps distinguishing itself and its function from them. But I think it’s important to point out, that in the above example from FT, even MB admits that the murder-y plan it contrasts with its own would be one made by humans for CombatUnits. So again we see that we just can’t know much about the authentic nature of CombatUnits, or any constructs with intact governor modules, because they don’t have freedom of expression. MB does suggest that CombatUnits may have some more autonomy when it comes to things like hacking and combat which are a part of their normal function. But how free can those choices be when the threat of the governor module still hangs over them?

I think it could be easy to fall into the trap of seeing CombatUnits as somehow more complicit in the systems of violence in the mbd universe. But I think that’s because we often make a false association between violence and empowerment, when even in our world that’s not always the case. But, critically, this can’t be the case for CombatUnits because they’re enslaved in the same way SecUnits and ComfortUnits are (though the intricacies are different).

There was another moment in the f(r)iction article that I found really chilling. Wells states that there’s a correlation between SecUnits that are forced to kill humans and ones that go rogue (friction, p 45). It’s a disturbing thought on its own, but I couldn’t help wondering then how many CombatUnits try to hack their governor modules? And what horrible lengths would humans go to to stop them? I refuse to believe that a CombatUnit’s core programming would make it less effected by the harm its forced to perpetrate. That might be because I’m very anti-deterministic on all fronts, but I just don’t buy it.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel so strongly about this. Of course, I find the situation of all constructs in mbd deeply upsetting. But the more I think about CombatUnits, the more heartbreaking their existence seems to me. There’s a very poignant moment in AC when MB compares ART’s function to its own to explain why there are things it doesn’t like about being a SecUnit (AC, p 33). In that scene, MB is able to identify some parts of its function that it does like, but I have a hard time believing a CombatUnit would be able to do the same. I’m not trying to say that SecUnits have it better (they don’t) (the situation of each type of construct is horrible in it’s own unique way). It’s just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.

@grammarpedant made another point in their post that I think raises a TON of important questions not only about CombatUnits, but about how to approach the idea of “function” when it comes to machine intelligence in general. They explain that, in a perfect version of the mbd universe, there wouldn’t be an obvious place for CombatUnits the way there could be for SecUnits and ComfortUnits who wanted to retain their original functions. A better world would inherently be a less violent one, so where does that leave CombatUnits? Would they abandon their function entirely, or would they find a way to change it into something new?

I’ve been having a lot of fun imagining what a free CombatUnit would be like. But in some ways it’s been more difficult than I expected. I’ve heard Wells say in multiple interviews that one of her goals in writing Murderbot was to challenge people to empathize with someone they normally wouldn’t, and I find CombatUnits challenging in exactly that way. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didn’t have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didn’t have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? I’m not sure that I would have.

Reading SC has got me interested in exploring the types of people that humans (or even MB itself) would struggle to accept. So CombatUnits are one of these and possible alien-intelligences are another. All this is merely a small sampling of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my brain-soup! So if anyone is interested in watching me fumble my way through these concepts in more detail, I may be posting “something” in the very near future!

Would really appreciate anyone else’s thoughts about all of THIS^^^^ It’s been my obsession over the holidays and helping me cope with family stress and flying anxiety.

[batsecretary]

listen to me. listen to me.

everyone's out here comparing murderbot to data but the real parallel should be murderbot and seven-of-nine

what makes you less of a person than the borg. than a governor module. it isnt about emotions. its about personhood about not knowing what you want about being forced to commit unspeakable acts of violence about so many people looking at you with fear because of something you didnt choose

its about the people who look at you with compassion despite everything youve been made to do

[ober-affen-geil]

Ok so having just started the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells I was going through the Murderbot tag here and noticed 2 things. 1) people yelling about respecting Murderbot's canonical and consistent touch-repulsion but not really supplying any alternatives and 2) at least two pieces of art of what seemed to be people attempting to either respect (charitably) or get around (uncharitably) Murderbot's touch repulsion by having it "link" or "hold" pinkies with someone for comfort.

As someone who is....not exactly touch averse or repulsed but certainly touch neutral (it's not something I flinch from but it's also not something I seek out or really enjoy) I thought I could provide helpful insight for both points: namely, "here is how someone who doesn't enjoy touch would prefer it to be substituted because humans are pretty touchy feely and getting your brain around someone genuinely not enjoying that is tough" and also "this is why touching just pinkies is not the loophole you think it is".

Keeping in mind this is more meant to be for fic reference, but if it helps with insight for real life that's great too. For clarity, this is based on my experience which is mostly for sensory reasons and is not in any way trauma related; others may have different experiences.

I will start with the pinkie and why that's........super not great actually, because it will help get into the headspace which will help with "what to actually do instead".

The thing is, linking pinkies as a substitute for holding hands, which seems to be how it's being used here, does not "get around" touch aversion because it's not enough contact to "set it off". It actually does the opposite (for me). Now I have to be hyper aware of how much my pinkie is curled, how high am I holding my hand, how far away from my body is my arm, does it feel like I'm pulling on *their* arm or hand or pinkie, is my hand sweaty, do I have an itch, I can feel my joints creaking as I struggle not to move too much lest I dislodge them...etc. If the point was to offer me a point of contact that was small enough for me to be able to not notice it too much? It failed. Badly. I'd rather have a full body hug.

Linking pinkies doesn't work as a loophole because it fundamentally misunderstands the main source of the touch aversion: concentrated hyper awareness of the body. The smaller the touch the more tightly concentrated the awareness is, and the worse it will be. It's also a non-standard kind of touch which means there is NOTHING to go off of in terms of what is wanted from you, aka its a very difficult touch to "perform" (yes I'm talking about masking). Edit: Also! Your fingertips and finger pads are *designed* for sensory input! And are a part of your body that is nearly almost always uncovered! Which means a) practically GUARANTEED skin to skin contact which is Worse and b) congrats, you picked one of the few areas on the body that is Designed To Tell A Person They Are Touching Something.

What a touch averse person would prefer, if you wanted to offer comfort or convey affection, is to first and foremost *not to ask them to perform for YOUR comfort/frame of reference to begin with*.

Words of affirmation, a simple hand gesture (such as placing your hand over your heart), literally just asking them if they want to talk, sitting in silence with them (engaging in parallel play), or perhaps offering a blanket/comfy clothes/food are all much better ways to actually offer a touch averse person comfort or intimacy while also still respecting their boundary.

Actual "loopholes" in (my) touch aversion include incidental contact that doesn't last and is ignored/meaningless to all parties (such as brushing past someone or being in a crowded space), the "mom" override (when I know someone really needs physical comfort in that moment which, tbc, is doing fuck all for me and is entirely about the other person), and functional necessity (such as medical attention or grabbing someone to help them up or keep them steady). (In case anyone was keeping track, Murderbot has shown all of these "exceptions" to my knowledge.)

I just. Hope this helps with understanding the mindset instead of just being beaten over the head with "respect touch aversion or you are ableist" because i do understand its hard to wrap your head around. But we deal with it so frankly, you can deal with it too for a change.

[specialagentartemis]

A Catalogue of Longfics I Want (Plan?) To Write

Only ideas I think would be multiple chapters and 10k+ words; doesn’t even include oneshots like Sisko Negotiates Space NAGPRA or Picard Goes To An Archaeology Conference or Teen Ratthi Angsts About Going To College or The Crew Of The Hermes Gets Murdered And Their Brains Scooped Out.

Ranked from 1 🌱 = this is just daydreams and vibes, to 5 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱 = I have a 10-page outline with every plot beat and thematic parallel written out.

A * means that I’ve actually posted several chapters to AO3 already

Wolf 359

The Last Days of the Lovelace Administration 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱 Lovelace tells Minkowski what happened on her mission. Fully canon compliantly tragic. Everyone dies. Frame narrative. Lovelace-centric.

*To Stand Together Against Fate (Lambert Week fic) 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱 An AU that spun off Zach Valenti’s “Lambert Week” streams. Lovelace and Lambert fight fate and REFUSE to let anyone die. The timeline gets slippy and things start getting weird. Lovelace won’t let a little thing like temporal causality hurt her crew though.

*Change the Rules 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱 Minkowski, Eiffel, and Hilbert do Box 953.

The Tiamat Horror 🌱🌱🌱 Zhang’s mission.

—

The Murderbot Diaries

Anthropology fic 🌱🌱🌱 Murderbot and Thiago go to a Corporation Rim mine where the miners are trying to unionize and strike, to do linguistic anthropology. They get more than they bargained for. Featuring SecUnit OCs, original filk, worker solidarity, and speculative linguistics.

*Home Again 🌱🌱🌱 The PresAux crew are home after their whole survey ordeal… but changed by the experience. Not the same people they were, and they don’t fit quite the same way. Augh I want to finish this but I’m kinda stuck on some of the chapters

Volescu backstory fic 🌱🌱🌱🌱 What if he was a political refugee and went through Some Shit. Would that be fucked up or what.

Pin-Lee backstory fic 🌱🌱🌱 Her CCC-esque service year before college.

Overse backstory fic 🌱🌱🌱🌱 Moved from a CR station to Preservation as a child. This causes some feelings.

Pin-Lee Exit Strategy POV 🌱🌱🌱🌱 As de facto leader here she was having a fucking Time.

Consuela Makeba’s story 🌱🌱🌱 THE EPIC OF HOW PRESERVATION WAS FOUNDED 300 YEARS AGO!!

The murder mystery one I started in an AUpril snip and went actually this is a banger concept 🌱 No idea where to go from here but it was a cool idea

—

Greek Epics And Mythology

Polites perspective on the Odyssey 🌱🌱 He gets to survive actually because honestly. Give one of Odysseus’s men a break. Something about how the men who weren’t kings and demigods and great remembered heroes still went Thru This Shit too. Epic poem in dactylic hexameter because I hate myself apparently

Odysseus adopts Cassandra 🌱🌱🌱 based on a tumblr post hell if I can find again. Clever use of Odysseus calling himself “Nobody”. Means he found a way to hear her prophecies and believe them, so she cuts a deal—she gets him home in 3 months rather than 10 years on the promise that if she does so he’ll adopt her as a legitimate daughter and princess of Ithaca. Very meta. In the format of a classic Sophoclean or Euripidean play.

Brithawon goes with Nestor to the Trojan War, has a bad time 🌱 I just think it would be fun

—

Star Trek

Kira is upset about Cardassian archaeologists on Bajor 🌱🌱 Sooooo much potential here

Sarina Douglas becomes an advocate for genetically engineered people’s rights 🌱 Here too!!!

—

Other

‘Emergence’ (Noel/Leon in 10th century Chaco Canyon) 🌱🌱🌱 An alternate ending to the Time Trap! series. No I never read the real ending that’s irrelevant. Noel and Leon fuck in this one. Also there is political intrigue regarding a Chaco elite marriage

The Tiamat Horror… 2! Primordial Deep version! (Sirena Halcyon and the 10 years she spent trapped in an underwater ocean research station) 🌱🌱🌱🌱 God!!! What was she DOING for ten years stuck in the place where her one surviving colleague killed all the rest of them! Featuring cuddling, horrifying transformations, and cannibalism.

[optimistpax]

[ID: a reply from @pluralsword​​ saying “Please. Books are fine too. Doesn’t have to be transformers but hopefully something queer and/or robots. Arcee, Anode, Lug. If you want to, Greenlight, Lander, Aileron, Windblade, Nautica, Chromia, Velocity, Guage, and Sideswipe (the younger, you know the one that came out of a Trypticon hot spot) but the first three we named are the ones we’d be most curious about/most wanting to read something that appeals to them (we’re plural) end ID]

hmm I’m not sure I’m familiar with the Trypticon Sideswipe and I have to admit I don’t remember Lancer from idw2 (I started writing recs for her before realizing I’d confused her with Javelin), but I’m happy to give the rest of them a go! I love oversharing about book recommendations haha

gonna throw them under the cut bc there are SO MANY

For Arcee

I think Arcee would vibe with the Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo! The Worldbuilding and intrigue and characters are all SO interesting. I don’t have words for how very cool it is.

For You

hmmmm I think this rec might depend a little more on which version(s) of Arcee are your favourite and why, but I think Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag is always a solid choice to recommend! It’s a really fun fantasy/mystery that is very affirming and gender

For Anode

I will take any excuse to recommend Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey. It’s a post-apoc western about queer librarians. It’s a fun time. Very good read for an adventurous soul.

For You

If you’re a fan of Anode, I think you’ll like The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson! I don’t want to say too much bc I don’t want to spoil it, but I absolutely stayed up till 3am to finish this book in one sitting bc I couldn’t put it down. Really cool concept, excellent execution and commentary, fantastic characters. GOOD BOOK.

For Lug

Ok so this isn’t technically queer or have robots, but it’s still firmly cemented in scifi and I can’t NOT recommend for the geologist character a book I recommended to a real life geologist who is dear to me. So! For Lug I recommend Red Shirts by John Scalzi. It’s a GREAT time tbh. It’s a parody of shows like star trek where the “red shirt” character becomes genre aware and attempts to escape his (and his friends) fate. It’s very well written and I was especially tickled by the three epilogues (first person, second person, and third person) each following a different character with loose ends.... and written in the pov of the epilogue title.

For You

Hmmmmmm if I hadn’t already recommended across a field of starlight I would recommend that one here... but since I have, I will instead recommend Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune. Also queer, also deals with death, and I cried through the entire thing (in a good way.)

For Greenlight

I think she’d like The Tea Dragon Society by K. O’neill. Very chill comics exploring different kinds of dragons has gotta be a little like xenobiology, right???

For You

Rock and Riot by Chelsea Furedi! I feel like some parallels could be found between some of the relationships in Rock and Riot and Arcee and Greenlight, and since Greenlight is rarely found without her partner it makes for good reading for a fan of her!

For Aileron

Ok so again this isn’t a queer/robot book, but oh MAN is it gorgeous. Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood is a noir style mystery with gorgeous art and really excellent lettering. Aileron (in idw2 at least) to me feels like the kind of person that would vibe with a good mystery book (with all the mystery in her FICTION where it BELONGS instead of in her LIFE where it does NOT)

For You

Hmm Perhaps try Rockstar and Softboy by Sina Grace! Aileron seems like the level headed one of this group of wreckers and Softboy is a little like that as well... but even when your friends cause problems with their good intentions at the end of the day you still gotta love em.

For Nautica

I can’t not recommend The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells for Nautica. It’s got weird science and weird alien planets and murder mysteries, what’s not to love for a nerd like her?

For You

Hmmmm if you’re a fan of Nautica you may like The Last Human by Zack Jordan. It’s a lot of fun, but the second half of the book does get a little weird in a “you’ll love it or you’ll hate it” sort of way. But honestly with some books that’s part of the fun! Especially when you share them with friends :)

For Chromia

Another book that does not hit the “queer or robots” requirement, but Blacksad by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido absolutely seems like a book that Chromia would like. A noir comic about anthropomorphic animals with absolutely stunning art. The details in the backgrounds and scenery are especially well thought out, you could look at them and find new things for days, which is smth I think she’d appreciate.

For You

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. This book just about single-handedly got me out of a uhhhhhh seven year reading slump so I cannot actually tell you if it was good but I can tell you I had an absolute blast reading it. Very noir detective mystery... but modern day with a fantastical twist. I could see where the mystery was going, but honestly that just made me enjoy it more because I love seeing the inner workings of how fiction is set up so yes. Fun Book. Chromia fans check it out.

For Velocity

I think that Velocity would like Boys Run the Riot by Keito Gaku! The characters are high school students struggling to break into fashion after being told repeatedly that it’s not something they can achieve. I think that she could relate to that with her own struggle with getting into the medical field.

For You

hmm I think fans of Velocity would also Like Snapdragon by Kat Leyh! Another story about an underdog with stunning visuals and snappy writing.

For Guage

I think Guage would really like Sleepless Domain by Mary Cagle! It’s a cute magical girl comic about finding your footing and your people after the rug has been pulled out from under you.

For You

Deviating from the goal topics one more time bc I can’t not recommend Talking to Strangers: a Memoir of My Escape from a Cult by Marianne Boucher for fans of Guage. It’s what it says on the tin: a memoir of escaping a cult.

[rebeccadumaurier]

January 2023 Reading Review

books read this month

1. Strange Beasts of China, Yan Ge, trans. Jeremy Tiang

trying to read more translated fiction and i do not regret it!! LOVEDD this one. a very Genderous work of SFF

2. Comfort Me with Apples, Catherynne M. Valente

it was ok! valente’s prose is always so captivating but the plot of this was really predictable. my first audiobook - it’s a good book to listen to since it’s very atmospheric

3. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

warm, meandering, comforting. i get why it’s an r/CozyFantasy staple. also Genderous SFF

4. The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan

oof…i can’t concisely summarize my feelings on this book. it’s intense and thought-provoking but also shades a bit too much toward misery porn and not nearly enough toward exploring the questions it raises

5. The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

it’s fun! not entirely sold on the novella form, it felt very vaguely sketched out, but the prose is solid and the worldbuilding is interesting. better than the chosen and the beautiful, which was a snore

6. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

quick nonfiction read, really eloquent and well-written and moving examination of being black in america

7. Severance, Ling Ma

took a while to pick up but i LOVEE candace she would destroy all the other Sad Girl litfic protagonists EASILY. she is out here SURVIVING A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE while juggling her nyc chinese diaspora orphan identity crisis. i STAN. a book which deserves its hype

8. All Systems Red, Martha Wells

simultaneously a fun and entertaining read about an AI’s identity crisis, and an insightful examination of worker exploitation under technocapitalism. lots of discussion about the former but i wish there was more about the latter—it’s pretty hard not to see real-world parallels to murderbot’s apathy about its shitty job

9. The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei (favorite of the month)

was hard to decide between this and severance as a fave but WOW this book was mind-blowing. the premise is so cool and it’s very queer and also super ahead of its time (written in the ‘90s). unsettlingly prophetic. wept like a baby at the (very twisty!!) ending

10. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, Chen Chen

it was good and i liked how it’s very joyful and earnest but not really my type of poetry

11. The Hurting Kind, Ada Limon

what can i say, i like good nature poetry…i mean it’s ada limon <3

thoughts

good reading month overall! read lots of good books. tried to get back into poetry but i don’t think i am in the right headspace to do so, RIP—maybe later. read lots of sino authors and sff, which was a fun time, though i’d like to read more litfic next month since i think i was a bit lacking this time around. i particularly miss books with top-tier prose.

goals for next month

finish the mushroom at the end of the world and the monster baru cormorant

finish light from uncommon stars for book club

read more literary fiction

limit myself to reading 3, max 4, books at a time

[umbraastaff]

For the writer meme, 1 and 17 if you want!

[Weird Questions for Writers!]

1. What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting?

Typically just the default Arial from Google Docs (been wanting to switch to local storage though)... Sometimes I'll switch fonts just so stuff feels fresher, like I've got multiple drafts of a oneshot in one document, and those go from Arial to Maven Pro to Consolas. The latter's good for getting in a robot mood.

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

Hoo!! Okay, I'm not all that good at "deleting extraneous stuff from the published version" so a lot of my thoughts just make it into the text. And I'm not sure if I'm far enough along in Trapped In Active Depart to say much of interest, but let's see...

The general lore is, like, if TAZ's Twosun was approaching the level of corporate shittiness of Murderbot's universe, except the Starblaster/Perihelion is still the first space vessel that's ever been made.

The idea of someone becoming sentient accidentally is very funny to me. I think some part of it is just the fun idea that giving so much processing power to one computer would eventually lead to realistic thought. But another part is that the Starblaster already had some level of sentience, which probably came from the power of Bond Engine... on some level, it was 'so loved that it became real'.

A lot of details that I can think of about the crew are going to make it into the text, so you'll just have to see!

And generally speaking, Barry's probably the character I have the most minute detail HCs about. One that doesn't get to come up a lot explicitly is that he has younger siblings on Twosun, and that Lucretia's age when the journey started was close to the age of his youngest sibling when they lost their mother, (and that he was one professor of hers at the Institute), so he's protective of her from the start & considers her a younger sibling.

I think about the sheer amount of parallels between those two every day of my god damn life.

[moghedien]

Could you recommend some adult sff? Love your blog btw!

Thank you! 

And ok, I could give you better personalized recs if you give me some idea of what you’re looking for or what you like, but I’m gonna give you some general recommendations. Also I only really feel comfortable recommending books that I have personally read, and there are tons more out there than what I have read. If you want to find more, looking at recent Hugo nominations over the past few years might be helpful. Also one of the reasons why I know anything at all about the SFF world is that I’ve been listening to the Sword and Laser podcast for like, a decade. I never really mention that podcast, but its literally why I started reading at all and also they have a pretty active goodreads group as well. 

So recommendations: 

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: 

This is one of my favorite books period. This is a far future space opera about an artificial intelligence who used to be a spaceship and now is only one human body, and she is ANGRY ABOUT that. I don’t really want to say more than that, but if you like AI shenanigans and being sorta confused as to what is going on the entire time, then this is the book for you! It’s the first book in a completed trilogy.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan: 

Obviously I’m gonna recommend the Wheel of Time. This is the first book in a 14 (actually 15) book series and if you need something to do with the next 1-5 years of your life *motions toward EoTW*. 

So the Eye of the World, I think is uniquely good as a book if you kinda want to get into adult fantasy for a few reasons. For one thing, its kinda considered to be one of those “classics” of the genre but its not too old to be offputting to some readers. It’s a 30 year old book, so its not reflective of the genre now, but you can definitely see its influence all the place, even outside of just books. The Eye of the World specifically, also goes out of its way to make readers comfortable. It leans heavy on Tolkien references and tropes at first without being a straight up copy of Lord of the Rings like some classic fantasy books are. Its done very purposefully, in my opinion, to make the reader feel like they have some idea of what’s going on, and the series quickly drops the Tolkien references as soon as its established itself enough. 

Also the Gandalf parallel for the series is a smol bi lady and there is 24 year old rage healer who wants to fight everyone with her own two fists.So many women to stan. 

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

This is the first book of the Expanse, which is a nearish future space opera that takes place in our solar system. Mars has long ago been colonized and is a completely separate government entity than Earth, and conflict between the two planets has been stirring. The Asteroid Belt has also been colonized and have long been little more than tools of corporations that run their colonies. A group of ice haulers working in the outer planets get in the middle of one of the biggest secrets in the solar system and find themselves in all kinds of trouble. 

I don’t really want to say more than this, but this is probably the only SF series that I actively keep up on when a new book comes out. There are 8 books our currently, and the 9th and final book will be out sometime in the near future. There are also several short stories and novellas set in the world, and there’s a TV show that I really like though I need to catch up on it. 

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Hello, this book comes with content warnings for literally everything, but it is such a good book/trilogy. This is book about a woman trying to find her daughter again in the middle of the apocalypse. Definitely a heavy read but absolutely brilliant. The world has a magic system based on geology and the people that can use that magic....saying they’re discriminated against is an understatement. I don’t want to say much more about it, but if you have any kind of content you can’t read for whatever reason, I’d check before picking this up. This is the first book in a completed trilogy

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

So this isn’t really super SF heavy and is actually sold as a literary book, but it takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out a large portion of the population...so maybe this is a bad time to read this book, OR its the best time to read it. Depends on how you’re dealing with *motions at the world*

The book flashes back to before and during the pandemic a lot, but is largely about art’s importance and is actually quite optimistic in its messaging, and this is another of my favorite books ever. But yeah, might be a bad time for you to read it of you can’t deal with the content now. 

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon 

I just remembered that this book also has a plague, but its a subplot and not the major thing. So this is a big ol’ chonky standalone book that is high fantasy, deals with multiple cultures having to interact and work together, and has dragons. Also there’s a genunine slow burn f/f romance and *chef’s kiss*. I can’t really say much else, mostly because I struggle to explain this book, but its very good and probably my favorite book from last year. 

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal 

In this house we stan Mary Robinette Kowal, ok? 

So this is a science fiction that is more an alternate history that poses the question, hey, what would have happened if an asteroid slammed into the east coast in 1952 and the world had to scramble to colonize Mars so that everyone didn’t die on earth when the climate got catastrophic, because that’s the inciting action of the book. The main character is a Jewish woman who was a WASP pilot in WW2 and is a computer for the space program when all this happens. The book deals with sexism, and racism, and xenophobia, and all the social issues that are gonna come up with it being set in 1952, but Mary Robinette doesn’t flinch away from addressing social issues in any of her books, even when it makes her main characters look bad. (Also if you like Pride and Prejudice, she has a series that is just Pride and Prejudice with magic and like, yeah, its good). 

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

This is a book which poses a question, what if dragons were like weird animals that were real and an eccentric woman spent her entire life traveling the world to study them and then told the stories of that in her memoirs when she was too old to care about the consequences of publishing all her scandals. That’s what the book is about. This one is probably actually the weakest in the series, just because it deals with so much set up. It’s a great series to get on audio because Kate Reading is a fantastic narrator, and the prose works so well as audio, because it’s just someone telling you her life story. There are five books in the series. 

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

So this is a novella and is the first in the murderbot series. Basically a killer robot gets addicted to television shows and accidentally became sentient. I haven’t read the others in the series, but I really need to reread this one and get to the others. 

Jade City by Fonda Lee

This is a fantasy set in world sorta inspired by the early 1900s but is in a fantasy world. It’s like a mafia movie and kung fu movie had a baby and it was this book. The sequel is out currently, but the third book is set to release next year.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 

This is another heavy read. This is a SF story set on a generation ship that has a society very heavily inspired by the antebellum south. There’s class issues, race issues, gender issues, mental health issues. All kinds of things intersecting here. Its fantastic, but a heavy read.

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

This is another fantasy classic, and is the first of the Farseer Trilogy. The title is sort of also a description of the book, so like. I’m not sure what else I can say. I haven’t read further into the series, but people I trust love it, and honestly I need to reread this and read more of the books. 

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

So if you think that Station Eleven might be a bad book to read at the time, then this is THE WORST POSSIBLE BOOK TO READ RIGHT NOW. Or, maybe the best. Depends on how you cope. This is a book about time travelers based in Oxford and the main character accidentally gets stranded in the past right as the Black Plague is about to hit. And it hits. The book is horrific. The second book in the series is much funnier. This one ain’t funny, but is good. Just, oof. 

Mistborn or Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

So if you want to get into the Cosmere, which is a series of series that interconnect and will ruin your life, then then my personal opinion is to either start with Mistborn or Warbreaker. People might not agree with me, but that’s my personal opinion. 

Warbreaker is currently a standalone (a sequel will come out eventually but its not set up for a sequel so you can 100% read it as a standalone). The magic in this world is based on colors, and the story revolves around two sisters. One of them is betrothed to the horrific God King of their neighboring kingdom. The other sister ends up being sent in her place because their dad hates her. I adore Warbreaker so much. It has it all. Two women discovering their true places on the prep/goth spectrum. Talking swords. Vivenna. Everything you can need right there. 

Mistborn is a trilogy that is very emo and will ruin you. Its about people who swallow metal to get magic powers and live in world where the dark lord won already, so they’re all emo. And that was the worst description of Mistborn I ever could have written, but I find it too funny to change. 

So if you’re interested in the Cosmere, but are afraid to commit long term, pick up Warbreaker. If you want to get into a series right away, pick up Mistborn. 

[theclaravoyant]

Top 10 Daisy Johnson fight scenes

This was so hard!! I had to strain my brain to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and then pick and choose what I could categorise as a “fight scene” (one of my fave moments is when she throws Jiaying’s plane into the ocean but there’s no fight before that!!). Anyway, here’s the shortlist, and I did actually manage to stick to 10 this time! Some of them are stolen from this reply (10 favourite AOS fight scenes) but I bumped those lower in the list in case you’ve already seen them.

Here goes (again, no particular order):

Spacetime - that awesome rehearsed sequence was very visually (and comedically) satisfying, and I LIVE for the kind of legacy parallel they had going on between Daisy and May. Daisy’s determination to fight to the end, right until she collapsed, to try and save Charles was also very noble and in character and was very fulfilling in terms of the passion of the fight and her passion-slash-desperation. I wonder if this will come up again as the discussion of timelines and her failure in that moment to change it might be affecting her (and everyone else’s) perceptions of their current situation and the inevitability of it all.

The “Bomb” Threat - I know this isn’t a fight scene in the typical sense of the word, but she wasn’t as physically adept at the time and it was still a fight-scene-esque confrontation so I’m gonna let her off because this scene was AWESOME. Her confidence and ease under pressure were admirable, and her preparedness and the way she helped coordinate the others and match verbal blows with Garrett and Ward was also fantastic. And the fact that it wasn’t even a real bomb?? Genius.

Fighting Sinara – especially the most recent one, where after having her powers cut off Daisy had to rely on strength and smarts to beat one of the greatest warriors in the galaxy. Sinara also put up a really good fight, getting some great shots in, but what particularly impressed me about this fight scene was how resourceful Daisy was. I think she hits Sinara with an oxygen tank at one point, and finally wins by using their angles and leaps to predict where to intercept & spear Sinara with a rod or sceptre of some kind. I love the visual satisfaction of her powers but Daisy is a smart and scrappy fighter and I loved seeing this side be celebrated. (also she did a May Flip™ and that made my heart happy)

Secret Warriors 3x17 – even though she doesn’t do a lot of actual fighting in this sequence I still count it as a “fight scene” as the others fight. What I’m more impressed with in this sequence however is how well Daisy takes to her role as team leader. She is keen to rescue her team, she gives the Speech, she does the nonchalant-jump-out-a-plane like a pro and shows strong leadership and strategising skills. I also love the insight this gave us into the Warriors themselves.

“Just like old times.” “Not exactly.” – Aside from the wicked but unusual camera work (single take fight sequence), this is one of Daisy’s earliest field missions without her SO close… and with Ward instead, no less. She gets to show off both her powers and combat skills (in front of / in spite of a pleasantly shocked and offput Ward which is a bonus), including her intelligence and sharpness, which shows how far she’s come which is awesome. Plus, the bit where she flips across the table is just frickin rad.

Escape from the Safehouse 2x15 – I’ve always loved this ep’s end sequence, not because it’s a fight scene but because of the loyalty and emotions at play, particularly with Daisy and Bobbi. They’re not close friends, but Bobbi is trying to protect her. Meanwhile Daisy is living in a horror movie, where as far as she’s aware, just about everyone she knows is trying to kill her. Emotions and suspense are high but Daisy doesn’t give up; even though she’s freaking out she runs, she thinks, she improvises and when attacked she fights back. You can see the fear and the desperation in her movements and she’s scrappy but skilled enough to hold her own even with so much fear. The fact that it blows up in her face so spectacularly is heartbreaking, and it also looks WICKED. Sorry Daisy but it’s true. And her isolation standing there after the explosion realising what has just happened?? It kills me.

Fighting Hive - powerful emotionally as well as physically, with Daisy having just knelt in front of Hive and begged for his attention only to then fight him. the power in her fists. the raw scream of rage. the emotional emancipation. the extremely satisfying slo mo when she flips over that crate thing and kicks his ass *wipes tear* a masterpiece.

Breaking out of FW!Hydra with May - the trust, the May & Daisy awesomeness, and the trademarked May Flip™. I always love watching May fight bc she’s a bamf but this mother-daughter asskicking team was awesome, especially in the midst of so much division and teamwide pain with this arc. Let’s not forget the shining gold that was all of Daisy throughout this including her “i’m gonna kick so much ass” grin beforehand, throwing Aida out a window (so satisfying), and the first of many epic elevator fights!

the one with the Watchdogs - aka the one where Daisy beat up a dude with a lunch tray. this is one of my faves because she couldn’t use her powers at that time, but they proved that she could still more than hold her own - and they did it with cocky theatrics, concerned!Philinda, Mamma May and Daisy’s heartbreaking but endearing guilt complex, which are all layers I loved. It’s one of my fave fight scenes and also one of my fave Philindaisy scenarios.

Daisy storms the hallway - every second of 4x15 was a forking masterpiece and its major fight scene was no different! I loved the steely determination in Daisy’s eyes, and the efficiency and invincibility that she went in with, fighting and fighting and fighting at full volume down that hallway, kicking ass with single-minded lioness fury and then blasting a room full of murderbots to smithereens now that bit was SFX porn and I’m here for it, but also, I love Daisy and the houses she is willing to bring down for her best friends.

-

Honourable mentions include:   - going after Quinn even though she’d only recently learned how to fire a gun without shouting “bang”, because helping Mike was the right thing to do   - “Nope!”   - Slingshot and her teamwork with Elena within that   - that time she blew up James’ yard, because a) I like it when she makes things go boom, b) SUPERHERO LANDING and c) I hate James with an unreasonable amount of passion so it Pleases Me when things go bad for him

okay I’ll shut up now :P Enjoy!

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ask me my top 5 or top 10 anything

[teethdollar47-blog]

My Favorite Books That I Read in 2018

Books! Why would you bother living without them? Even slowed down by life and depression, this turned into one of my favorite reading years thanks to some stunning debuts and absolute gems in my backlog. In the post-Christmas haze I've gathered up some scary stories, a Pulitzer winner, a New York Times favorite, and novellas and a lovable killing machine for you. Let's read.

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

This is an Epic Fantasy about the real world destroying your adolescent notions of what matters. For the first chunk of the book, Rin throws herself into life at a military academy, exploring connections between drugs and the gods. The worst things in her world are an unfair teacher and her equivalent of a Draco Malfoy bully. But then she graduates and has to serve alongside her classmates in a brutal war with civilian death tolls and a nightmarish parallel to the Nanjing Massacre. The book lets us take Wizarding School tropes for granted and then rips them in half with reality. Hopefully one one reading this ever has to deal with the horrors of war, but Rin's revelation is an extreme version of the experience of so many people who hide from reality inside education systems and then have to confront the world. From this conceit, Kuang creates one of Fantasy’s greatest origin stories, showing us how Rin grows from desperate, to ambitious, to vengeful, to ruthless. We see all of the social pressures and life events that forge her into one of her world's great villains.

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

I meant to read part of Witchmark on my flight, but the book was too good, and so I finished it before we landed. Miles Singer is a healer in a Fantasy world in the shadow of a war akin to World War I, using his talents to help traumatized veterans when they come home. Something is causing his patients to become dangerously violent, possibly using their PTSD to turn them into weapons, and Miles has to solve the mystery to save them. It’s a deeply compassionate novel about trying to help those harmed by war, bolstered by a supportive romance between Miles and Tristan, another man ensnared into the plot. At one point Miles is exhausted and unkempt, and Tristan gives him a shave. Apparently allosexual read this as ridiculously hot. My ace ass read this as soothing, because the trust between them is so clear. It made me relax on a plane where I had no elbow room. Witchmark is thoroughly charming.

The Outsider by Stephen King

This might be my favorite book into King’s new Bill Hodges Universe, and makes the explicit turn to opening the supernatural there. Without spoiling, it elevates some characters into protagonist roles that will make any sleuthing against monsters way more interesting, while paying homage to the restless retiree who started it all. Here we have an identity mystery: a pillar of the community is witnessed having committed an absurdly grisly crime and have to figure out how it’s possible that evidence puts him in two places at once. We know something supernatural touches this crime, but can’t be sure what since the Hodges Universe began without any of the supernatural. King has created a great uncertainty over how much human behavior explains things, as opposed to Castle Rock where there the shadows always had thoughts. This is covered in one of King’s richest webs of characters, every point of view connecting powerfully to another, until we have a robust appreciation of how feverishly the community reacts to the news. I didn’t think there needed to be a fourth book in this series. Now I’m quite excited for a fifth.

Impostor Syndrome by Mishell Baker

If you haven't read the series so far, just go get Borderline. It's amazing.

If this is the end of the Arcadia Project series, then it's a poignant send-off and also the most fun the characters have been. Most of your favorites from the first two books band together with Millie for something that's half heroic adventure, and half psychedelic heist. My favorite part was seeing Millie's team come together as so supportive and aware of where intervention might be important for helping neurodivergent characters. Respecting the agency of our friends is hard in real life when we know they're at risk, and it's refreshing to see that reflected in something better than the duality of "hands off" or "you have no choice." The scene where Millie might be concussed and not taking her own health seriously is where we start to appreciate how far the characters have come. There are explosive events, but more important are the conversations and developments between people who didn't trust each other a few books ago.

All Systems Red & Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

I haven't read Books 3 and 4 in the Murderbot Diaries series because I'm saving them for bad days. SF&F publishing doesn't give me books like these very often and I need to ration the good vibes. The Murderbot Diaries are warm-hearted and revolve around the emotional growth of a killing machine who just wants to watch TV and be left alone. He's not a slacker hitman; he's rental equipment who longs to understand others and be emancipated. These books have some adventure and risk, but their heart is in weird bonding sequences watching soap operas with a ship's navigation computer. They are warm without avoiding heavy material, and without settling for arcs that ending in gritty choices. The heaviness is in who we want to be. This series is a modern treasure.

Space Unicorn Blues by T.J. Berry

Now this is my kind of worldbuilding. Space Opera where it turns out planets are populated by unicorns, dragons, and faeries? And they need space ships to try to outrun human colonizers? Heck yes. We’re talking about a great found family of disabled people, and queer people, and magical beings, and humans who know they’ve messed up, going on perilous adventures to create a better life for themselves. My favorite trick Berry plays is shuffling the characters, plot, and worldbuilding. Our half-unicorn hero may get stuck in a miserable spot thanks to the plot, but Berry keeps the tone light by explaining that spot through hilarious worldbuilding like the brand of pie that has a density dangerously close to black holes. When the plot gets more dangerous, the characters banter it out. One element is always allowed to be grave, and is lightened by another, turning the novel into something consistently inventive and fun.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Not a lot of Dystopia novels let you see the Dystopia form. The Power puts its Dystopia into motion, from the start of women developing skeins and gaining the ability to instantly electrocute anyone they like, to boys being segregated from them in schools, all the way to upheavals in culture and political systems. It’s a world where women suddenly have superior capacity for violence than men. This way it easily could have languished as a 1984-like about a downtrodden man chaffing under a system of oppression, but Alderman puts her world into motion. We see the changes and new orders from the perspectives of male journalists, poor women, and aspiring politicians, each of whom give us different angles of satire and angles on the world. I’d love an anthology of short stories covering more parts of this world, and almost wrote one about what would change in disability communities.

The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

A Cosmic Horror novel about a very bad tree. Sarah Crowe has wicked writer’s block, and fears that this time she won’t resurface and will lose her contract and career. The novel has Kiernan’s hallmark ability to get deep inside a messy character’s head as their mental health and personal life unravels. But there is a peculiar tree in the woods behind Crowe’s rented house, visible from her upper bedroom window - and that no matter how long she walks, she cannot reach. The pursuit of the tree is both a metaphor for her writer’s block, and intrinsically related, since the fascination leads her to research seemingly similar trees related to horrors that have happened throughout the region. Could they all be the same tree? Has she been attracted to it because she has similar flaws as previous people caught in its web? I bothered so many friends with my theories for weeks after finishing it. The book is a few years old, but certainly one of my favorite Horror things of the year.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

Douglas Blackmon went from county to county across the southern U.S., reading court records from almost a century ago to prove how emancipated slaves were treated. What he found was a long trail of people charged for petty crimes or held without an explicit charge, often with no evidence or even oral arguments in court, and sentenced to manual labor that was contracted out to friends of the court. This way saw thousands upon thousands of people trapped in a new slavery that could be extended at the whim of their “employer,” who could charge as much as they wanted for room and board that the convicted people couldn’t refuse. They were sent into the deepest mines and most rundown mills, and when many of them died from conditions or unsafe labor, they were made to disappear. It’s a bitter book, rife with cruelty that more than one president willfully ignored. These parts of our history are ignored at our peril, and the peril of the most vulnerable going forward.

Source: http://johnwiswell.blogspot.com/2018/12/my-favorite-books-that-i-read-in-2018.html