#ANN LECKIE FUCK IT UP!!!!!!!!!!

[bambles]

just finished the raven tower and holy SHIT what the FUCK what THE SHIT

[clonerightsagenda]

#recently read, June 2025

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. An academic uncovers the diary of her pastor ancestor, who received the confession of a Blackfeet vampire. *Jones has a very distinct style not everyone enjoys, but I do and I enjoyed this.

Lote by Sheila Von Reinhold. A Black aesthete joins a bizarre artists' residency in her search for information about a mostly forgotten Black artist and socialite. *A very experimental novel about recordkeeping, theory, and who gets to be quirky and decadent.

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue (trans. Natasha Wimmer). A hallucinatory reimagining of the meeting between Moctezuma and Cortes, where the Colhua play politics and the conquistadors wonder if they'll make it out alive. *3 for 3 on quite odd but I really liked it

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling. Otherworldly visitors interrupt an endless siege, but three women - a knight, a reclusive alchemist, and a vengeful orphan - don't believe these creatures mean well. *Starling's books have gotten more polished since the Luminous Dead but haven't hit me as hard. However it hits many current tumblr darlings (fucked up religion, cannibalism, toxic lesbian throuples) so will likely speak to many people here.

Anthologies

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Horror Anthology, ed. Stephen Graham Jones.

Lake of Souls: The collected Short Fiction by Anne Leckie.

Short Story

"Second Person, Present Tense" by Daryl Gregory. Clone angst-adjacent!

[rjalker]

I really need Murderbot stans to understand that Martha Wells chose in 2023 to literally defend British colonization rather than admit that she used really obviously and tiredly racist tropes in the fantasy series she published in 2011.

She has had every opportunity in the world to apologize and grow and develop as a person and a writer. So many essays and reviews were written for The Books of the Raksura explaining why the tropes she used were racist. Literal old cis white men were talking, unprompted, about these tropes being racist in 2010.

She has had every opportunity in the world to own up to her mistakes and apologize but she chose instead to literally wait 12 years to find reviews singing her praise and claiming that she didn't use racist tropes. And arguing that if Martha Wells used racist tropes, then that would mean that British colonizers were racist, and that's clearly not true either!

And these are the two cherry-picked reviews that Martha Wells chose to showcase and brag about.

The ones that defend her racist writing decision by defending literal British colonization.

She did this in 2023 and has yet to apologize for it.

Martha Wells is a racist white woman who is now literally profiting off of whitewashing while shilling for Apple, the exact fucking Company™ she pretends her book series is about fighting against.

Stop pretending The Murderbot Diaries is anti-racist or anti-slavery when the author would literally rather defend British colonization than just admit she fucked up 12 years ago.

We are seven fucking whole books into this series and the "heroes" are still murdering and torturing slaves.

Literally just go read better books. I fucking promise you authors who are actually anti-slavery are out there and their books are so much fucking better.

For fuck's sake, go read anything by Ann Leckie since Martha Wells has not stopped butchering the exact same quote by her for years now, over and over again despite literally going against the fucking meaning of the quote, at one point literally lying and pretending that she doesn't have to free the fucking slaves in The Murderbot Diaries (like the fucking quote calls for in all fiction regarding robots!) because "murderbot prioritizes relationships with other robots <3" which is a lie so fucking absurd I don't know how she managed to speak it without spontaneously combusting

[official-linguistics-post]

Oh! I want to write books at the intersection of sci-fi and fantasy! What are the ones you're reading right now, or one of your favorites?

one of my favorites (which i need to reread) is ann leckie's the raven tower. on the fantasy side, i'm hoarding the goblin emperor and jonathan strange & mr. norrell for an upcoming trip, and on the sci-fi side i recently read becky chambers' wayfarers series!

i love a book that will fuck me up in indefinable ways.

[mythologeekwriter]

Checking off the science fiction square on @batmanisagatewaydrug’s book bingo with Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I picked this one up because I love a fucked up sense of personhood and it definitely delivered on that front! I really enjoyed the narration of this one, and the dual time element of the narrative.

Also: everyone's complicit! That really feels to me like it sat at the heart of all the messy conflicts here; how are you meant to face something when you too are at fault? And the impact of something so long ago can still be felt, can still cause damage and destruction.

Very interested to see how things progress in the rest of the trilogy.

Bingo card under cut

[dragongirl-casca]

One of my fav parts about Ann Leckie's Provenance is you get to see how people outside the Radch see Radchaai, and one of their key cultural differences is "they are fucking awful at understanding gender markers." To the point that the Radchaai ambassador frequently corrects herself from a correct pronoun to an incorrect pronoun.

It's extra-funny to me because in the Imperial Radch trilogy, we see this happen from the inside of the Radch and we are led to assume that it is inevitable in any conversation between two different human cultures.

But Provenance shows off the interstellar politics between Hwae and Tyr and Omkem, and no other characters (including the Actual Aliens) have any trouble navigating male/female/neman/etc. It's Just The Radchaai. It cracks me up thinking about it.

[parrhesiac]

WHew. Just read through the Pegasus trilogy from Anne McCaffrey, and the sheer number of red flags ... this is seriously bad YA, these are not the kind of relationships you want to be normalizing repeatedly between children and the adults in their lives. Or between adult men and women. Or between slightly older and slightly younger children.

And after that level of cringe, I'm seriously thinking about going back once more to C. J. Cherryh. (Even Cyteen is better, and it's bad, but also Cherryh got better through the 90s and 2000s, and I'm not clear that McCaffrey did.)

And returning to my favorite heptalogy of trilogies, the Foreigner series, I'm once again reminded of a couple of worldbuilding problems.

Tea — where is it grown? By whom? Where's the fucking Teamasters' Guild? The level of prestige and specialized knowledge required would ensure tea production a major top-level guild, at the level of and intertwined with the Assassins' Guild, but we never see any such thing. There could easily be local tea growing areas, multiple of them, per great house—and especially historically, there would have to be, because you couldn't trust your neighbors, and when you do, it works great until one of you assassinates one of them, or vice versa. But they would exist in as natural a situation as possible for each—because of kabiu—on the reserve lands, tended season by season, kept in balance, cultivated but only just, and never in massive artificial tea plantations. (Tempted as I am to say "Ann Leckie solved this one," she clearly didn't—she just saw the worldbuilding gap, and filled it for her own universe in ways the atevi would despise.) But Cherryh only gives us a world where tea in huge variety is both an everyday essential and a prestige item, and yet without infrastructure.

Plastics in space — what the actual fuck? How does the purely spacefaring human culture manage to casually extrude, on demand, for an entire space station, durable complex long-chain hydrocarbon polymer materials without the organic petrochemical base that allowed them to be invented in the first place? What do they make plastic from? This is not a culture with a lot of luxury space, and bioplastics would take space from food production—not to mention, they were able to extrude plastics at Alpha, on their return, without any growing anything. Plus, bioplastics are way more prone to degradation (a plus from an ecological perspective, but not for space habitat durability) compared to thermoplastics. Are they mining carbon chondrite asteroids, not just for the metals but also for the proto-organics? Creating their own hydrocarbons literally from hydrogen and carbon, maybe boosting them with silicates? As with the tea, there's a lot of infrastructure that has to exist, and resources it has to take up, and people who have to be specialized to do it, and none of that exists in the texts.

[baejax-the-great]

Top five books this year? :3

I'm going to group series/authors together or else the list would be like 4 books by the same person.

Ancillary Justice series by Ann Leckie + Translation Slate. These books were really such a fun and satisfying read. I've read a few series recently that didn't/couldn't stick the landing, but I thought this one wrapped up really nicely.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung. I'd been meaning to read this memoir for over ten years now (since I visited Cambodia), and I finally bought it for myself. The author was a young child when the events of this book happened, so it's a fairly easy read with the kind of descriptions you would expect from a child. It is a heart-wrenching story, and I spent a weekend just reading and crying.

Fitz and the Fool trilogy by Robin Hobb. I think everyone on tumblr has seen my reaction to these books 😭😭💕💕. This trilogy fucked me UP oh my god. Hobb is a freak, I'll never get over it, everyone should read these books, especially if you want to watch one character suffer constantly always for ever and ever and to think "I have no idea what the FUCK these two characters have going on but I'm obsessed with it."

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. This was my first finished book of the year! It's not perfect, but I really enjoyed the fairytale of it all and the mix of characters introduced. Publishing has such a hardon for series these days, and I appreciate a self-contained stand alone story.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. Another book I've been meaning to read for ten years and finally got around to. For a science book, it's very accessible to laypeople, and it addressed a lot of things that irritated me with my own education in neuroscience (imaging studies are stupid, and that one study where they gave monkeys various toys and the female monkeys liked playing with pots and pans showing that kitchen supplies are inherently and naturally feminine...???? Monkeys don't cook.... they don't know what they were for... what the fuck WAS that study and how did a professor tell it to me with a straight face...). It is over ten years old now so somewhat outdated, and I saw criticisms that there are some very similar studies done with regards to race that she doesn't cover, but I kind of think there is value in a researcher staying in one lane. I don't know, I flip flop back and forth on this, but the take downs of the shoddy studies remains valid and it was a satisfying read.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Coming Out Swinging; or, It's So Early In The Year To Be Over-Buying Books But Here We Are.

Okay, so: I know I set one of my bookish goals this year to be "buy fewer books," BUT! First off, preorders don't count, and second off, the Two Lines Press haul was logged under last year's book purchases, and it's not my fault they arrived a week later. RAVEN TOWER I have no excuses for.

I have really enjoyed everything of Two Lines Press that I've read so far--their Calico series are perfect bite-sized anthologies in translation, vaguely themed (and THIS IS US LOSING COUNT has the English and Russian version of the poems presented side by side! I can read both of those!!). I'm ride or die for Wayward Children installments (this is why I love January), and a friend spoke very highly of RAVEN TOWER so I picked up a used copy from HPB. I'm very pleased with my piecemeal haul to start the year! I swear I'll buy fewer books once I work through all my coupons/gift cards! I love books!!

[wetcatspellcaster]

Writer Interview Game

thank you so much for tagging me @eraserspiral !!!!

When did you start writing?

I wrote a lot of 'original fiction' as a teen, including a couple of TERRIBLE novels, that were essentially just a grab bag of all the books i was reading at the time. School (and in hindsight, grief) stopped this around 16-18, and then a very high pressure degree at a high profile university seemingly killed off my love of writing entirely.

I got back into writing at 26... weirdly?? just before the panini?? (january 2020, did past-me feel something in the water and know i'd need to hold onto any crumb of serotonin for dear life??) I had just finished my PhD applications, and after sinking so many hours and so many words into the most joy sucking series of forms I've ever encountered, I decided I wanted to write something fun for a change!

Are there different themes or genres you enjoy reading than what you write?

I don't write smut. I read a LOT of smut.

But in terms of themes, I tend to write in worlds/fantasy settings where we can all pretend that capitalism doesn't exist, or that if it does exist, the protagonist is winning at it. I really like speculative fiction (sf and fantasy) that tackles capitalistic themes/poverty well - this has been on my mind recently bc of an arc in a D&D game I've been playing, where my wonderful DM has essentially gone 'capitalism bad' but then let us do something about it <3

Is there a writer you want to emulate or get compared to often?

I find it hard to know what my writing 'is like'... not bc it's wildly unique or anything, but just bc I don't think I can see my own influences that clearly (if anyone wants to drop me some comparisons in the askbox, go for it, I'm curious!)

But in terms of writers I want to emulate, at the chatty/colloquial end it's T Kingfisher and Sarah Rees Brennan, who have a good handle on when to hit emotionally or on high fantasy register, and then when to have really grounded/human moments that make their characters incredibly relatable (and often very funny). At the high fantasy end, it's Shannon Chakraborty, Ann Leckie, Nghi Vo, Silvia Moreno Garcia. They write haunting and engaging narratives!

And, of course, I'm always trying to muster an ounce of whatever the fuck Howl/Sophie had going on.

Can you tell me a bit about your writing space?

I use my desk for work/thesis and want to exclusively keep it that way, so my writing space is actually just on the corner of the sofa in my living room, with my legs crossed, a blanket, and a cup of tea. No music, pure autistic silence (but also bc my laptop speaker is broken). Scotland gets dark for a long time in the winter, so it's usually pretty cosy vibes. It's probably not good for me, as I get a LOT of leg cramp.

What’s your most effective way to muster up a muse?

Honestly, not to be tsundere about it... but maybe ignore the muse a little? If you've burned out or you're trying to brute force a scene, all you're doing is guilting yourself into being productive. With fic writing, especially, you should be doing it to have fun, not bc you feel like you have to. So if the words aren't coming, do other things for a bit. Go on a day trip, hang out with friends, do chores or read something. In my experience, my brain doesn't stay quiet for long, and ideas for my current project will come to me when i'm not trying to squeeze them out of myself like toothpaste.

Sometimes the well runs dry! Rather than feel terrible about it, be kind to yourself, and wait for rain x

Are there any recurring themes in your writing? Do they surprise you?

Hahahahaha, let's not talk about how I keep placing people into the worst versions of themselves and then have them improve and earn love anyway, regardless of if they deserve it. Or how I'm interested in characters who feel a wealth of emotion they hide from everyone behind a mask of either performed indifference, wilful charm, or simply bc they can't articulate it in the socially correct way. Or women who think 'if I cannot be beautiful or loveable, I will be competent', and the men who-

Anyway, introvert x extrovert pairings, amirite? Everything else is shown to me in a vision (my therapist reaches a dead end in my session as I insist nothing is wrong, asks me about my fanfic, and then delivers me a laundry list of the stuff I'm currently coping with. Lowest point: being told im IDing through the fucking DARKLING, on one project. That man is a war criminal, and I dont look like Ben Barnes).

What is your reason for writing?

In the beginning, I think it was pure comfort. I'd just come out of a period of extreme depression, and wanted to hallucinate some characters in love.

But recently, and going forward, I think it is a genuine exercise in proficiency. I thought my writing was so terrible that I said 'I couldn't write', for so fucking long. I now genuinely think this is something I'm good at, and that is something it has taken me so very long to believe, and even longer to say. I am a very self-deprecating person. I have so few things I feel good at, or that I think bring something worthwhile to the table. As academia delivers me blow after blow and the world leaves me feeling worthless, I am going to cling to this until my hands bleed.

Is there any specific comment or type of comment you find particularly motivating?

focusing on the 'motivation' part of this question... I think the comments that happen to land on the one specific thing that matters to me, those are the ones that hit hardest. It happens rarer than you'd think. part of the joy of fanfiction comments is the wealth of different reader interpretations, with people seeing things in your own work that you've never noticed. All interpretations are amazing, especially the ones that show you a blindspot you never considered. But when a reader hits the nail fucking on the head (gets a 'gold star in reading comprehension'), that's the most motivating, and makes me want to open my document and write the next chapter. Because I know then that at least one person out there 'gets it', and is fully on board with the story I want to tell.

But that is a very selfish, specific feeling. All comments are motivation, and all reader interpretations have value!

How do you want to be thought about by your readers?

Idk if this seems weird or a disingenuous answer but... as a person?? Writing a story for fun? Pieces was a very cool and special experience, but it was very unexpected. I wasn't and never considered myself to be a 'big name fan'. I never want to enter any kind of popularity contest, and I never want to be beholden to people who are reading a story I am writing for fun. Very funny to have a story blow up when you have weird feelings about attention lmfao. Like don't get me wrong, absolutely amazing to ride such a huge tide of support, but this was meant to be my silly introvert hobby :')

I also hope they think my writing is good!! obviously!! i know it can't be everything everyone wants all the time, but you know!! i think it's neat!! I hope y'all think it's neat!! plz and thank!!!

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

lmao eraserspiral's reply to this question was a fucking mood. (just deleted it in my template to make space).

I guess... I know how to flesh out a character, and a character voice. I think I can establish a character's personality, their strengths and their flaws, and have them consistently become the vehicle for both progression and some very real, understandable mistakes. I think chapters from different perspectives feel distinct, and that when development in either direction (bad or good) happens, it feels earned.

idk man, this is a hard one to answer when depressed :')

How do you feel about your own writing?

At the end of the day, it's a lifeline. Sometimes I keep very much to myself and I protect it fiercely, because it's one of the only things that kept me going at certain points in the last few years. At my lowest, I've often wondered for what, if anything, I'll be remembered for or what I'll leave behind... and now I actually have things! 12 whole stories, where once there was nothing! Sure, it's fanfic! But some people's favourite fanfic. None of it is perfect, but it all matters to me, and we're now at the point (4 years in) where I am starting to slowly realise how it has changed me as a person, and will continue to change me going forward.

I want to start on some original ideas once my thesis is over, vivaed and done, but I don't currently see my writing as anything something I can make into a career, bc I need to keep the joy in it as the joy literally keeps me alive :')

tagging: @imscissorbladez, @pricemarshfield, @blarfshnorgull, @violacae, @dededrabbles, @brabblesblog - no pressure, just trying to share this tag game to more groups/social circles! :) x

[fleshengine]

oh yeah I had a 40 minute meeting with my capstone prof who also runs my uni's english masters program (one of the best in the country). I asked him if he thinks the masters program is something I should be looking into. He basically said no and that I should take time away from school and figure out who I am when not fenced in by assignments and professors and shit and in a couple years maybe reevaluate if I want to.

Which is great, because that's already what I was planning to do. Like I had a plan for doing xyz, I asked him if I should do this other thing (and didn't mention my existing plan), and then he was like "yeah do xyz." It was fucking awesome. Also he said "look up the careers of writers you look up to and when they published their first book so you get a more realistic picture of what it means to be a writer." And I was able to rattle off what I know about Ann Leckie and how she was a stay at home mom until her kids left for college and she took a writing workshop and wrote a book and refined it over a couple years and published it to international acclaim and fame.

That meeting made me feel so fucking cool and confident about what I'm doing with my life. I've got this shit in the bag.

[rjalker]

it shouldn't take eight books for the literal heroes of the story to actually take a stand and say slavery is bad. It shouldn't take seven books to get to that point. Or six. Or five. Or Four. Or three. It should literally have had the turning point in book 2. But no. No we're still expected to keep waiting for a thing that will probably never happen, and even if it does miraculously happen in book 8, it's far too fucking late. It cannot undo the literal seven whole books dedicated to spewing slavery apologism to the point that the majority of the fandom has had to convince themselves that the other slaves are literally not people, because it's the only way they can explain to themselves why the everloving fuck the Heroes of The Story keep fucking /murdering them/.

And as Walks pointed out, Martha Wells just keep misusing a quote by Ann Leckie, about how stories about robot uprisings are inherently about rebelling against slavery. And she keeps misusing this quote, and arguing that somehow this means the story about literal slavery doesn't have to be about the slaves uprising becase......of brazen lies she made up about the story as though the protagonist being friends with robots somehow means nothing has to be done about the slavery.

Because she literally does not want to write about slaves rebelling for their freedom. She only included slavery in the settting at all to give the protagonist a tragic backstory that would make everyone sympathetic, but doesn't actually fucking want to take the slavery seriously or have anyone fight back against it.

If she did, we literally still would not be waiting for the most basic fucking shit to /start/ happening in the eighth whole fucking book in the series. Almost a decade after the first book came out.

We shouldn't have had to wait even two books. Let alone three, or four, or five, or six, or seven. Eight? Zyg it's so far beyond the pale now there's no salvaging this trainwreck no matter what happens in book eight, because most people who read book 1 and 2 are literally never gonna get that far because they give up under the realization that Fundamentally, Nothing Will Change. The author has dedicated herself for seven whole entire books now to demonizing slave rebellions and spewing slavery apologism. Literally, I'm not even fucking joking, the majority of people who read book one and two will never fucking read book eight, if they even got as far as books six and seven.

Because people who come into this series expecting a competently written story about slavery realize very quickly that that will never be this series. Because a competantly written book series that takes slavery seriously does not need eight whole fucking books for the heroes of the story to finally figure out that hey, maybe, just maybe, slavery is bad O:

And the fact that Martha Wells has now literally said, as casual as can be, that the lack of character development in her books is a feature, not a bug, and the fact that she keeps misusing a quote /about how you have to fucking take slavery seriously/ to argue that it's actually not necessary at all for the literal gods damned heroes of her story to give a fuck about slavery, I don't know how anyone else is still holding out hope for this series.

It shouldn't take two books, let alone eight, for the heroes of the story to realize that yeah, slavery is in fact bad.

But Martha Wells wants you to just keep hoping that finally, it'll happen in this book. Oh. No. It didn't. Um. Okay.

Okay, welll,,,,,,baby steps, baby steps,,,,it'll surely happen in this book! No? Still nothing? Just...........a tiny hint that maybe the hero of the story maybe starts to care about it a bit?

Okay.... Well, well, it has to happen in this book—right? No? No?! No??? Still not happening??? Just some more hinted promises that it'll happen next time?

Is it happening in this book yet? Have we finally fucking gotten there? No? No? No? No?? OH but it's okay look at the very ending she made a big promise that things are gonna change!!!! So maybe it'll happen in the next book!!!! It has to right???? Look at this huge promise she made at the end!!!!!

And then book 6 comes out and it's set before that big promise was made, with no warning anywhre in the book to tell you this. So she's just blatantly breaking her promise that "next book, things will change". And then this book still does not have the charater learn that Slavery Is In Fact Bad Even When It's Not Being Done To Me. And does in fact prove some fucking horrible facts about the rest of the heroes of the story that we're Not meant to examine at all to realize oh fucking-A that says some pretty horrible shit about these people and their views on slavery, doesn't it?

And then. finally. The thing everyone's been told to wait for. Book 7. Will the literal fucking Heroes of The Story finally figure out that Slavery Is In Fact A Thing They Should Be Fighting Back Against?

Oh fucking look at that. The answer is a resounding no, punctuated by the sound of the literal Heroes Of The Story torturing a slave to death by tearing them limb from limb for no other reason than the author, who does not give a single fuck about slavery, thinks it makes them look Badass™. Don't think about this moment any deeper than that. Don't think about the fact that that was a person who was just murdered. An enslaved person who had no choice but to be here. An enslaved person it was fully and entirely within the Heroes Of The Story's power to rescue instead of violently murdering.

No, see, Martha Wells promises, next book, things will change. Now ignore the part where the story has literally been stuck in the purgatory of This Fucking Planet And It's Shitty Plot for three books and five whole fucking years now. Ignore the part where the author has promised you before that things would change (only to bring you back to this Exact Same Shitty Planet And Its Shitty Plot that we apparently cannot fucking escape). Ignore the part where literally any other book series, competantly written by someone who actually gives a fuck, wouldn't have even needed to go past the first fucking book to have the protagonist realize that Maybe It Is A Bad Thing For People Besides Me To Be Enslaved.

Just keep shelling out your money to Apple TV+ to reward the trillion dollar corporation for whitewashing the protagonist of this series in the one opportunity the world has had yet to rewrite and fix everything fundamentally wrong with this series.

Just keep shelling out absurd ammounts of money for tiny books that will lie to you about how long they are on your kindle to make you think you paid $25 for a full length novel only to realize you didn't even get a third of that.

Just keep waiting and hoping that The Next Book will fix everything. Even when it's far too late to ever fix anything in this series.

The time for the fucking Hero of the Story to figure out that slavery is bad even when it's being done to other people is literally before book one is over. If you have a competent author who actually gives one single flying shit about taking slavery seriously.

But Martha Wells is not a competent author. She happily admits that the lack of character development in her books is a Feature, Not A Bug. She thinks that if she lies to us that Murderbot prioritizes relationships with robots and other cyborgs, then that somehow means she doesn't have to take the slavery seriously.

She originally planned to have Murderbot die at the end of the first book, because the whole entire premise for this series is the white supremacist fantasy of "I would be such a nice slave owner that my slaves would want to die to protect me, wouldn't that be so beautiful and tragic?"

If you're still waiting for The Murderbot Diaries to actually fucking say that Slavery Is Bad Even When It's Not Happening To The Protagonist, don't hold your breath. Even if it does, by some miracle, finally happen in the eighth whole book in this series, it's far too fucking late for that to salvage anything here. It's too damn late. She's already spent eight years having the literal Hero of The Story spew slavery apologism with zero pushback. She's already fucking doubled down even just in book gods damned seven, having the protagonists torture and murder more fucking enslaved people.

It's too late for this series to ever say a single bare minimum "progressive" word about slavery. No ammount of "okay, finally, in book 8 or 9, finally the hero thinks that slavery is actually a bad thing no matter who it's being done to" will ever be enough to erase the fucking eight YEARS and seven books of this series doing nothing but spewing slavery apologism on so many levels and demonizing slave revolts and Literally Forcing The Audience To Convince Themselves That The Other Enslaved Characters Literally Aren't People Because It's The Only Thing They Can Think Of To Explain Why The Fucking Heroes Keep Murdering And Torturing Them All.

Go ahead and read The Murderbot Diaries if you want example of how to never ever fucking in your life write about slavery if you actually give a single fuck about the victims of slavery and the systems of supremacy and oppression and exploitation that uphold it in all its forms.

[bropunzeling]

☕️ fav fantasy books/series and what makes them so good and so For Jess. bonus for thoughts on what makes a less good fantasy fall flat

oh Boy okay alright!!!!

fantasy series i love/are excellent/peak For Jess: radiant emperor duology by shelley parker-chan (point: is it fantasy or just historical-ish fiction with some supernatural elements? counterpoint: i fucking love it and this is my list). the lumatere chronicles by melina marchetta. the daevabad trilogy by s. a. chakraborty. queen's thief my beloved!!!!! piranesi aka one of the best novels i read in 2020. tortall series by tamora pierce (but protector of the small quartet is the best of them).

honorable mentions: the raven tower by ann leckie; sharon shinn's elemental blessings series isn't like, as sharp as the top tier, but i really enjoy every reread; earthsea (but mostly the ones about tenar); it feels like cheating to say discworld but again: my list; the divine cities by robert jackson bennett; the stravaganza books were not quote unquote good but they did change my brain chemistry when i was 13; goblin emperor books (but more witness for the dead bc u kno me, i love a murder mystery). lotr would be here except i read them all once as a 6th grader and have yet to return. i still need to read the oleander sword but the jasmine throne kicked ass.

ok what is the unifying factor here lol. strong world building is very important i think; a real sense of a distinct place and culture/mix of cultures rather than Generic Medieval European City. there was a really good post going around that was like, where does the food come from (aka have you thought about how all of this actually works?), and a lot of these series think about Where Does The Food Come From. differences in cultural norms among different groups within the world AND from the audience. plots strongly rooted in politics/the inherent people-ness of people rather than everything relying on magic (not to say i don't love me some magic/divine plaything stories!!!! but they hit so much harder when the conflict comes from a place of innate human foibles). a dash of wonder and the inexplicable. if an answer is needed, it fits in the schema of everything else, but you don't feel the author trying to answer literally everything (when an author is sweating to show their work u can tell imo). most of these have at least one set of people where i want to see them kiss on the mouth, but most of the time that is not the Point; the best fantasy for me treats romance as a subplot/b-plot where it informs the stakes but is not the stakes itself. and ur basics of a good book in general: good writing, good pacing, et cet er a!

what makes them fall flat? world building inconsistency; new magic springing up because well, the author NEEDED it (aka those moments when you can see the seams lol); when the romance is the a plot (sorry but romantasy = not for jesses!!!!!); i think also authors get tripped up both by not planning ahead enough AND planning ahead too much when doing series (if you get a deal for one than one book you should have more than one book's worth of material; however if you can’t change and move then you can be stifled! see ursula le guin revisiting the gendered magic of earthsea in tehanu years later, or tamora pierce going oh shit there are normies in tortall in protector of the small). also this is a ME thing but i fuckin hate purple or twee prose. fantasy does not mean break out the thesaurus.

sorry for the novel. im gonna think of like six more books as soon as i post this

[its-a-hil]

resolutions for 2024:

- move to a fucking city - figure out what's up with the stock accts my parents have set up for me and thus how much money i have available to do things with - every weekend either go biking or to a bar or both - buy/make phases of the moon necklace - see the eclipse - reread every ann leckie book i have - make more origami - continue masking - be kind to myself - start laser to finally kill my fucking face hair - get my hair dyed - get outer wilds tattoo. possibly more if the urge strikes - edit: get fatter (this is very important!)

i know that's a bigger list than people usually have but. a year is plenty of time for all of this. (i also intentionally avoided saying anything about work/school bc. i dont want to push that any further onto myself. more pressure definitely wont help)

[chen-chen-chen-again-chen]

Hi, hello, hola, it's me! This is not a WIP Wednesday post (well, the WIP is always me), but it's something.

First off, thank you thank you thank you to all the beautiful people who messaged me, or commented, or tagged me in things, or even just thought kind warm thoughts at me while I've been away and not writing. Brain not working good enough to sort through the things and tag properly but you know the drill - I love you all.

Here are things I did while I wasn't writing AKA while I have Big Sad Brain:

I visited London, and had a great time - eating delicious food, flat-sitting, visiting old haunts, picking up new ones, spending time with friends, and watching too much Shakespeare. The salted beef bagels in Brick Lane are still unparalleled, there were daffodils everywhere, and I brought home too much tea but not enough biscuits.

I buzzed my hair short again, and as EarlobeGreyTea said, "it really moved your energy from bisexual to lesbian," and then followed up with, "I'm glad that I, a man, could explain your sexuality to you"

I read a lot. I read The Locked Tomb series (I'm obsessed) and fell down a danmei pit (I have consumed SVSSS and MDZS but not yet TGCF) and I have spicy hot takes on why I did not enjoy The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or The Starless Sea. I re-read all of Ann Leckie's books. I read The Future is Disabled in a Socialist bookshop in London, and I cried so fucking hard that the gentleman in the shop asked me if I was okay. I read The Song of Achilles and Circe and wandered down the labyrinth of getting really, really into Greek myth.

Speaking of: I bought an ROG Ally (horrible name, hate it, but the console itself is fine, it's like a more versatile Steam Deck) and I played Hades. So much Hades. So. Much. Hades. And every time I met Patroclus in Elysium, I bawled, "He's so SAD! He's such a SAD MAN! I need to make him UN-SAD!"

I finally finished the godforsaken Totoro cross-stitch pictured above. As soon as I framed it, I held it up to my spouse and said, "Could a depressed person make THIS?" and he said, "Yes" and then "Good job," because he's a lamb.

When I had energy, I cooked. I learned how to make carrot ginger dressing and shogayaki, and how to velvet pork. I made some of my standbys, like applesauce pancakes and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and felt very Smug and Very Adult for putting frozen cookie dough into my freezer so Future Me could have cookies. I introduced my family to Uncle Roger and I've never heard my mother (1) get so angry and (2) laugh so hard. When I couldn't cook, I ate food that someone else made, and it was enough to celebrate: I ate a meal! I ate food! I fed a me! Hooray!

I spent time with my beautiful friends. I spent time with my beautiful family. They are so good and they have been with me through so many tough things and depressive episodes, through bullshit and drama and tears, like that time I screaming-yelled at someone over the phone (they deserved it) during an engagement party at the cabin and then I had to walk out and pretend to be Normal and got drunk on a lot of Old Fashioneds.

I grew things. Flowers and vegetables and herbs and I accidentally made a great home for some very invasive weeds. The squirrels left only one sunflower alone (they ate the rest), but even now in mid-October, there are still bright coral-red flares of peppery nasturtium, and feathery pale pink zinnias from my caretaker at work (who is an angel), and gigantic, blue-tipped borage. My best friend moved in down the street from me, so she's only a five-minute walk away, and now I can pick flowers and stick them in a vase and walk them over to her, and I love it. I grew too many tomatoes (they got..... scary. My favourite were the heirloom tomatoes, as big as my fist, that remind me of my Lolo) and forgot about the cucumbers (they got lewd) and let myself get coaxed into growing three different kinds of mint: chocolate, grapefruit, and berries & cream (because I'm a little lad who loves berries and cream).

I bullied my spouse into watching Practical Magic with me the other evening and every time That Fucking Cop came on screen, he said, "That Fucking Cop! This movie would be good but there's too much of That Fucking Cop in it" and I felt so v i n d i c a t e d

I tried to write. I tried to write. I tried to write. I tried to write, and then let go of trying to write and just let myself do all the other things that make up living, try to amend the soil so that something good can grow there again. I tried to talk myself out of unhappiness but it's funny how that doesn't work, how only hard-fought kindness has helped me trudge out of the swamp, again and again and again.

I had one of those moments recently that felt like it could have been in one of my stories. At Thanksgiving dinner, I was sitting next to my little half-sister-in-law (a mouthful, I know). She is seven and she lost her dad two years ago and she said, "I wish my dad was here." And I said, "I know, honey. I think we all do." And she said, "I miss his piano playing," because her dad used to play piano the other way someone else might doodle on a napkin - absentmindedly, brilliantly, while wearing a faded green apron and with a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder, in between checking if the roast was up to temp and pouring someone a glass of wine. Always red wine, from the Piedmont region, which is where my spouse's Nonna is from. I asked my little half-sister-in-law, "Do you think you'll learn how to play piano?" and she said, "I don't know," and I said, "It's okay not to know." And then she asked, "Do you have a Gothita?" and we went back to talking about Pokemon, which we had been talking about for a conservative 90% of the dinner.

I wrote this. I wrote this and it felt good to feel my fingers moving, it felt good to have words spilling from me, it felt good to have faith in words again, that the words could be something good, could do something good, that the worlds could just be and it could be good, and that I could just be, and that could be good. Just being could be good. Even if I never wrote another word ever again, just being would be good. As I said to one of my friends many years ago during some deep dark down shitty times, "It's hard work, being human. Thank you for doing the work."

Take care. I love you all. ❤️❤️❤️

[masterkeynobi]

10, 11, 12!

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

i don't think i read any book books that were released this year so i'm going to cheat and say every 2024 chapter of witch hat atelier. read the first 12 volumes over the summer it's genuinely SO good + warm + charming and i was kind of blown away by how well its disabled characters & their interactions with the world are written. i love you wha everyone should read wha

11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

gotta be ann leckie's imperial radch trilogy -- ancillary justice hit its 10 (?) year anniversary recently i think? -- it is exactly as good as people on tumblr have been saying it is, if not Better. fully don't think anyone in the last decade has touched leckie in terms of interesting nuanced sci-fi Gender it's fucking crazy how well executed every space opera concept of hers is WAIT FUCK I FORGOT I READ ASOIAF THIS YEAR I'M CHANGING MY ANSWER it's fuckass george rr martin. i know. i really know. but they're incredible i promise

12. Any books that disappointed you?

will i get rocks thrown at me if i said rf kuang's babel. it was fine it was good even i just hoped it'd be better sorry............. also maybe yoon ha lee's revenant gun it's the 3rd book in his machineries of empire trilogy and i m o does not hold up when compared to the first 2