#The books of elsewhere

[nglwhatarecats]

yall im starving out here without Books of elsewhere content,guys im trying 💔💔💔💔

[haveyoureadthismgyabook]

Series info:

Book 1 of The Books of Elsewhere

Book 2: Spellbound

Book 3: The Second Spy

Book 4: The Strangers

Book 5: Still Life

[rainy-matcha]

Very sad and upset to see there is only 1 FANFIC for the books of elsewhere sereis. I love love love this sereis and for some reason nobody knows about it and nobody makes fanfic. Its not even a fandom on A03. The one fanfic I could find was written seven or so years ago on wattpad. Its called "nightmares in the night" and is by dreamcatcher-megan. Lovely hurt comfort fic with olive and horatio. Will add link if enough people see this but u can just find it by searching "books of elsewhere" on wattpad.

Edit: 1 person liked this, here's the link: https://www.wattpad.com/51908687-nightmares-in-the-night-a-books-of-elsewhere

[bags-of-regret]

Oh god theres more

[aroaessidhe]

A mutual of mine has this database of 100+ books with butch/stud/masc sapphics that might be of interest to some people!

[nglwhatarecats]

I’m trying bro there’s only so much one person can do 💔💔

How

How is there very little about ‘the books of elsewhere’ book series? The main character can WALK INTO PAINTINGS! Honestly I feel cheated. The books have 3 large cats that used to serve evil witches found crying out loud!

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[octavianacidicbreastmilk]

i constantly see posts on here discussing issues that, if they even exist and are not the fruit of a civilisation is slowly decaying type of panic, are pretty much localised in the usa and posit it as the ultimate center of cultural influence&reality, and then are treated as if they are already widespread or locked-in to become universal for the rest of the world.

and like, free yourself from the impulse of having to center that country's experience as overlapping with your own ever when the socio-cultural factors to take into account are still quite different

[isbergillustration]

Started reading The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville & Keanu Reeves. Had to take a break and paint B/Unute about whom I have a totally regular normal amount of feelings.

[nenoname]

Details in Stan's letter that still haunt me

(how long will I continue thinking about a two page letter that's technically not even that long because Stan's handwriting is fricking large? .....you don't need to worry about that.)

The bro code only shows up in the Lost Journal pages, and to me Stan's message feels like it purposely echoes Ford's "miss you" in the college photo (and for some reason the message doesn't appear in the website version of the photo?) ....or alternatively Stan simply noticed how distressed Ford was about this entire thing and wanted to support him in a way so he can be sappy but without the kids knowing, or both!

Stan's claim about the Oregon lottery contradicts what the Lost Legends website said about Tate McGucket's ability to predict the winning numbers!! ...but also breaking into the Lottery HQ is definitely a very Stan thing to do and it's not the first time small gags have been retconned

Despite spending most of his letter nonchalantly destroying him, the taunt about ripping a dollar bill in half is the only part where Stan is directly responding to Bill. Maybe it's the two of them having similar ways of thinking but it's rather specific considering Bill taunts the reader about it...

And after Bill spends an entire book calling Ford Sixer despite normally using a pretty wide range of nicknames for him, Stan then spends his letter mainly referring to Ford as Sixer, even though post-Weirdmageddon he tends to use a mix of nicknames. And it's not like he'd gotten to see Bill himself for long, let alone see him steal that childhood nickname (that is only used twice in the actual show btw!). Did Ford tell him what happened or...?

With all this and the website's "still on your mind" message, what I'm getting at is my tinfoil hat theory of Stan somehow seeing some of the pages the irl readers saw, even when it should be personalised to the specific reader, and he's been lying about it for some reason. Considering that the book flat out doesn't make an attempt at convincing Soos, I find it a stretch that whatever Bill was telling Stan via the book was an attempt to convince him either.

Wouldn't be the first time Stan's skimmed through a book and lied about what it meant to him.

(...Now I kinda wanna see a story about the family reading their versions of the book and making fun of it while Stan is improvising every single one of his pages and blatantly ignoring Bill's attempts to mock and taunt him)

But also I'm fascinated by the letters that only showed up on the website (aka the Soos+Wendy+McGucket+Pacifica ones). I'm assuming that Mabel had stuck them on after Stan's letter... but they were basically eaten by the book itself because seeing Stan's letter kick-started Bill's breakdown which takes up the rest of the book

[samsketchbook]

Join me for the first ever reading of CREAMTHING!!! finally!! I'll also read a selection of my other comics, do a short Q+A (time allowing) and some of my animatronics will be there. 1001 Logan St Suite 127, Louisville, KY 40204 if u wanna put it in ur maps app

September 29th, door at 6:30, show 7:00 to 8:00 PM at Wild Hops Lounge in Logan Street Market, Louisville Kentucky

FREE + Open to public!

[nglwhatarecats]

The,,,The books of elsewhere,,,, c'mon guys I can't be the only one carrying like two people in the fandom 😭😿

[sleepnoises]

i got some of the books off my floor by taking books that no longer spark joy off my bookcase and then putting the floor books into the bookcase. has anyone else heard of this

[rubedeckillerofficial]

Keanu Reeves teamed up with China Mieville, one of the greatest living authors of the New Weird movement, to write a novel about his edgy self-insert OC who’s an 80,000 year old immortal warrior who was born because his mom fucked lightning. Cringe culture is dead and John Wick himself killed it. Write your goddamn stories and don’t let anyone tell you they’re cringe.

[bags-of-regret]

Idk how well this format does here but if I don’t express my emotions through memes across my platforms I will combust

[spookberry]

One of my all time favorite things is to go to good will or yard sales or a thrift place or whatever place has a ton of other peoples old books and just look for notes.

Like today I found a book from 1967 with a note written on the inner cover "Dee, heres another newbury for you collection!"

Or someones writing class syllabus folded up and tucked into the back of a Brothers Grimm.

Theres something about the human connection of it all