#and I personally don't like Philip K. Dick's writing

[minilev]

Do you have any cyberpunk book recommendations? I'd love to get into the genre.

Of course! First and foremost ofc are:

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

The Electric Church by Jeff Somers (my fav series)

I personally struggled getting into these big novels with complicated plots with so many characters, corporations and intrigues. My advice is to start with short stories to understand if you're gonna like it at all:

Johnny Mnemonic by W. Gibson (it's different from the movie, don't worry about spoilers) - "Burning Chrome" collection of short stories

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

Press Enter by John Varley (really freaked me out, one of the scariest stories I've ever read)

Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling

[burberrycanary]

Hi there! I am about midway through reading your story Lost Vocabularies and it is amazing!! The whole series has been so lovely, I’m obsessed with the way you write! The way that you convey the boys complicated emotions and capture all the little nuances of their dynamic has me feral!! Beyond even them the way you inject so much personality into the locations is so good, I feel like I am there!! So thank you for writing this lovely story 💕 I was wondering if you happen to have a list of all the books that Bucky and Steve read? I have been looking up a lot of them and adding them to my to read list bc they sound so interesting lol! On that same note, how did you decide what books to mention? Are they all ones that you have read or did you do research to find ones you thought they would like?

I’ve been coming back and rereading this kind and wonderful comment in my inbox over the last few weeks when way too many massive, stressful, time-sensitive things were all happening at once. 💕 But since I have a little breather between crazy periods, I get to dive in here as a treat.

Lost Vocabularies involved a lot of research, which I hope isn’t apparent because I didn’t want there to be any noticeable difference between the parts of the story that are based on places I’d been, foods I’d tried and books I’d read personally—and what was created purely based on research. Fingers crossed that the seams don't show!

In this series, we see both Steve and Bucky use art to process—helping them understand themselves and connect to the world again. Bucky is drawn to stories while Steve as an artist is much more visual, but the underlying impulse is similar. In the same way that you learn a lot by glancing through someone’s bookshelves, what characters read is interesting to me, and revealing. This version of Bucky is a very private person so these books offer a glimpse into his inner life. And as the POV character we get to experience all these things alongside Steve.

I’m not much of a sci-fi or fantasy reader so some of Bucky’s picks were a real challenge for me. But I wanted these to be grounded in the characters and the storytelling functions, not based on my own taste and opinions, though of course those always bleed through. 

Steve’s Reading List

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Alice Neel: People Come First by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, edited by Ann J. Abadie

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

Bucky’s Reading List

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard Feynman

Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve included some notes and commentary on why I picked each of these works under the cut.

The Same River, Twice (The Man Is Still Left with His Hands)

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Classic post-WWII dystopian sci-fi that focuses on society collapsing after a series of catastrophes that were unintentional but very much caused by people, which leads to a lot of the population becoming blind. Thematically this work engages with the loss of identity that people, both abled and disabled, face in the process of survival and a dark look at what happens after societies break down. How this applies to Bucky is obvious, but part of the argument of this post-Endgame series is that it applies to Steve, too. 

Also, there are huge mobile carnivorous plants. 

Fun fact: the opening of this novel is said to have been the inspiration for 28 Days Later!

Still Left with the River (The Paradox of Motion)

Alice Neel: People Come First by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

Alice Neel’s portraits are extraordinary, almost unnervingly vivid. In this story, Steve is familiar with her work as a fellow New York-based artist active in communist circles in the 1930s. She also worked for the WPA, producing wonderful street scenes that documented New York neighborhoods of the era. 

To be honest, I have so many questions about what Steve was up to in the late 1930s before his war mania of the 40s hits.

One of the core themes of this series is Steve struggling with what his body is for if it’s no longer for violence. Who is he if he’s not a soldier? What is his radically changed body if it’s not a weapon? How do you come home from the war?

In this regard, Steve and Bucky have all kinds of shared life experience.

So thematically I include Neel because of her startling gift for capturing personalities and bodies through a process of frank, earnest, truthful observation of the integrated completeness of body and self: this space that’s you. 

But a book of Alice Neel’s work with her sensitive portraits and fleshy frank nudes pulls him into flipping through page after page of these personalities and bodies, not idealized: seen.

Steve isn’t ready for that when he bumps into this big “impractical” art book in a holdover Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn, not when he’s still so shook up and adrift. But he will be.

There’s such empathy and radical humanism to her pieces. ���People,” as she famously said, “come first.” I stand by the conclusion that Steve would love her work.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was relatively unknown in his lifetime—he died in 1937—but his stories were published in popular fantasy pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, which is where Bucky would have come across his work. The fact that Steve recognizes Lovecraft by name means that teenage Bucky must have talked about what he was reading and the pulp stories he liked with teenage Steve, which is adorable—“this Lovecraft fellow, Steve, you wouldn’t believe the stuff he comes up with.” And Steve was paying attention enough to remember two decades and change later without the benefit of his serum-enhanced memory, which hurts my heart a little in the best possible way. 

That’s how Steve all these years and decades later is able to wordlessly toss this collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories at Bucky on a hot hazy stumbled-upon beach in northern Florida and watch Bucky’s whole face light up. 

And of course Bucky would view Lovecraft as a great beach read 😂

But this is the basis for something I’ve written into this series: Bucky excitedly sharing things he finds interesting with Steve—wanting to tell Steve first, Steve most. And although Steve is quiet, stoical and very self-contained, he’s paying a whole hell of a lot of attention.

Given that Bucky is canonically a Tolkien fan, I think the imaginativeness and ranging scope of Lovecraft’s complex, often interconnected stories would appeal to him. And, thematically, Lovecraft is distinctive for the era for having characters psychologically fragment when confronting these vast inhuman others. 

“The Call of Cthulhu” opens with:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Steve and Bucky have each voyaged out a long way.

Trauma, in a way, is a form of terrible knowledge. You can heal but you can’t unknow things. 

Not Language but a Map (The Grammar of Sensation)

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

This is the first book in the series that we see Bucky pick for himself. And, wow, he picks a doozy with themes of multiple and unstable identities, invasive surveillance, manipulation, psychosis, and how individuals can get chewed up by larger systems, falling through the cracks of society. Dick was writing based on his own troubled experiences with southern California drug culture of the early 70s, but this work gets at much more fundamental darknesses that I think would speak to some of the horrors Bucky has gone through and won’t talk about, not even with Steve. 

Within the first few pages, we get this:

It was midday, in June of 1994. In California, in a tract area of cheap but durable plastic houses, long ago vacated by the straights. Jerry had at an earlier date sprayed metal paint over all the windows, though, to keep out the light; the illumination for the room came from a pole lamp into which he had screwed nothing but spot lamps, which shone day and night, so as to abolish time for him and his friends. He liked that; he liked to get rid of time. By doing that he could concentrate on important things without interruption.

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, edited by Ann J. Abadie

Eggleston was an early pioneer in color photography and that fascination with color is very apparent in his work. I think this focus would grab Steve as an artist who doesn’t take seeing the full spectrum of color for granted. Even in the MCU’s thin action-film scripts, Steve comments on things that offend his aesthetic sensibilities even when that has absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand, from Stark Tower to Lang’s van.

Not even a world-ending crisis can keep Steve from going, wow, no, that’s ugly. I enjoyed running with that 😂

Steve’s view of Eggleston’s photographs shifts over the course of the series, reflecting what he’s feeling, from the fragmented and disconnected detachment—“isolated and off-kilter”— that he sees in them at the beginning that shifts to the passionate engagement in the world he finds in them later. 

Steve looks through the whole book of William Eggleston’s photographs again and at first the colors still roll over him like the shockwave of a distant explosion, all he can focus on. But gradually the subjects and compositions pull forward, too: monumentalized images of the everyday that at first seem neutral, the work of a detached observer. But the off-center framing of ordinary life is so deliberate as though everything might be important and where every detail deserves attention—that’s nothing like neutral. That’s not detached at all. You have to care a whole hell of a lot.

This mirrors the journey this post-Endgame Steve goes on. Because Steve Rogers should be a character who cares a whole hell of a lot, not what the MCU writers eventually reduced him to. And that’s what this fix-it is trying to fix. 

Lost Vocabularies that Might Express (The Memory of These Broken Impressions)

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

I love writing Bucky as a big fucking science nerd. His last night in New York and how does he want to spend the time? At a science fair with his best friend and a couple of pretty girls. So Bucky reading about quantum electrodynamics is delightful to me. The thing is, though, Bucky is a bright enough guy with a high school education. He’s not a genius—and the MCU is lousy with geniuses. But if Bucky wanted to learn a little more about all this quantum stuff he heard about in passing during some vague and very improbable sounding explanations, which by the way also allowed one of the few people still living who truly matters to him and the closest thing Bucky had left to family to fuck off to the past, well, Feynman’s QED isn’t a bad place to start in understanding some of this quantum stuff, at least. 

Feynman here is very much writing for a popular audience. His writing is conversational—the book is adapted from a set of lectures he gave—and his voice is witty, casual and surprisingly light, but at the same time Feynman is deeply invested in helping lay people understand quantum mechanics. The book opens with:

Alix Mautner was very curious about physics and often asked me to explain things to her. I would do all right, just as I do with a group of students at Caltech that come to me for an hour on Thursdays, but eventually I’d fail at what is to me the most interesting part: We would always get hung up on the crazy ideas of quantum mechanics. I told her I couldn’t explain these ideas in an hour or an evening—it would take a long time—but I promised her that someday I’d prepare a set of lectures on the subject.

I prepared some lectures, and I went to New Zealand to try them out—because New Zealand is far enough away that if they weren’t successful, it would be all right! Well, the people in New Zealand thought they were okay, so I guess they’re okay—at least for New Zealand! So here are the lectures I really prepared for Alix, but unfortunately I can’t tell them to her directly, now.

C’mon! Tell me Bucky Barnes would not be hooked by this opening. 

Thematically, and more seriously, the question of how could Steve do this? has two very different meanings. So far in this series Bucky isn’t ready to confront the harder version of that question which comes potentially with some very painful answers: how could Steve make that choice? Nope, he’s not ready for that. Instead, his brain unconsciously takes the easier way out: trying to understand quantum electrodynamics. 😂😭

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Bucky must have liked A Scanner Darkly, because he went for another Philip K. Dick novel. Today remembered mostly as the source material for Blade Runner, this bleak dystopian novel is set in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war that destroys most life on Earth. The work has themes around empathy—who feels empathy and for what?—materialism and what really makes us human. 

I find it interesting how Sebastian Stan talks about The Winter Soldier in terms of someone who has undergone a process of total desensitization, which to varying degrees is deliberately part of the training of all soldiers. But rebuilding his core sense of empathy was one of the things Bucky chose to do as soon as he had any agency in that two-year period where he was on the run, which is remarkable. As a person who has been treated as though he wasn’t human and had his empathy forcibly stripped from him, I think Bucky would have a lot of complicated feelings about the enslaved androids who escape but are ruthlessly tracked down and killed. Some of these escaped androids are dangerous and do lack basic empathy—shown in the book by torturing and mutilating an animal—while other androids seem like ordinary people just trying to live their lives. 

I like that Bucky talks about the book with Steve later in the story, returning in my view to a very old habit of bookworm Bucky wanting to share what he’d been reading with Steve <333

“I need to find something to read next,” Bucky says after wrapping up his description of an imagined religion that involved plugging into a box to virtually suffer the existence of a man forever walking up a steep hill while struck by crashing stones. 

“Well, did the androids dream of electric sheep?” Steve asks.

“Who knows?” Bucky knocks into him gently as he takes the bowl Steve passes over. “They just wanted to be free. Though the free people just wanted to own stuff or plug into a box and suffer. So, you know, sort of a grim outlook. ”

“A little light, cheerful reading.”

“Hey, we live in a world where people write ‘Take back what’s yours’ in the streets and then smash up the windows. Dystopias don’t seem so far off the mark.”

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard Feynman

Another case of Bucky sticking with an author he likes! To me, this implies that Bucky has already read Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces, which explains some of the foundational basics of physics for a very broad and non-technical audience. Six Not-So-Easy Pieces is also drawn from Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics, focusing here on relativity and space-time, but this work assumes a greater knowledge of math, hence the name. But as a legendary sniper Bucky must have a strong aptitude for math and anyway I just leaned into making Bucky an all-around nerd, because Bucky Barnes, nerd who grew up hot, is delightful to me. 

Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time are all on point for a post-Endgame fix-it, which I think should count as a not-so-easy piece in its own right. 

Throughout the series, we see Bucky using physical copies when he reads fiction, more or less from unconscious nostalgia: connecting back to memories of his younger self who was an avid reader of pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks. Once Steve gets him going with that first quietly tossed-over gift, Bucky always carries around a sci-fi or fantasy book in this series despite the limited space in his backpack. And this familiarity wouldn’t just be from his pre-war life since I figure Bucky would have gone for the Armed Services Editions that were distributed for free to soldiers. Bucky likely traded with other soldiers once he finished a book if he couldn’t get a new ASE distribution: trading in his finished novel for a new one is Bucky unconsciously falling back into another old habit.

But for non-fiction, Bucky is absolutely here for the Modern Marvel of being able to carry around as many books as he likes on his phone. I figure Bucky would have used public libraries during certain stages of his recovery when he was homeless and migratory since they are a place to get information that is consistently available in cities; and a warm, quiet place you can go with a minimal number of security cameras. I headcanon a middle-aged librarian who has a few streaks of gray in her dark hair—and who reminds Bucky of someone but he has no idea who—explaining what e-books are to this tall, gaunt, soft-spoken homeless guy with an eye contact problem. And this person who isn’t the Asset anymore and isn’t Bucky Barnes yet has the out-of-nowhere thought: huh, whaddaya know. That’s pretty neat.

Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering by Steven H. Strogatz

Isolated systems tend to evolve towards a single equilibrium and these equilibrium points have been the focus of many-body research for centuries. But life is generally not that simple because most systems aren’t isolated. Often the dynamics of a system result from the product of multiple different interacting forces and objects in these systems can change between multiple different attractor wells over time. Or as Strogatz puts it:

As we’ve mentioned earlier, most nonlinear systems are impossible to solve analytically. Why are nonlinear systems so much harder to analyze than linear ones? The essential difference is that linear systems can be broken down into parts. Then each part can be solved separately and finally recombined to get the answer. This idea allows a fantastic simplification of complex problems, and underlies such methods as normal modes, Laplace transforms, superposition arguments, and Fourier analysis. In this sense, a linear system is precisely equal to the sum of its parts.

But many things in nature don’t act this way. Whenever parts of a system interfere, or cooperate, or compete, there are nonlinear interactions going on. Most of everyday life is nonlinear, and the principle of superposition fails spectacularly. 

You can think of nonlinear dynamics as situations in which the sum of the parts is insufficient to understand the whole. This connects to multiple themes in this story as Bucky and Steve try to understand themselves, their lives and each other. But here Bucky is also just continuing to live his best life as a nerd with a strong intuitive knack for math, a high school education, an internet connection and a growing collection of science e-books. Or as Bucky puts it:

“It’s nice, though, like this smart guy is just talking to you but doesn’t assume you’re dumb because of what you don’t know.”

It’s touched on only very lightly in the series so far, but Bucky has a lot of complex feelings about higher education that relate to class, indirectly to sexuality, and go back to the experience of being the son of upwardly mobile working-class immigrants who were very bought-in on a traditional take on the American Dream.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I picked this partly because I thought the title would grab Bucky, who has been a stranger in a strange land several times over. Thematically this midcentury sci-fi novel focuses on challenging social norms through having the main character, a human who’d been raised by Martians on Mars, come back to Earth as an adult. A best-seller in its day that was controversial for its rejection of Christianity, monogamy and the nuclear family, the work is very tied to the looming cultural changes of the 60s and 70s. 

The novel’s critical reputation has been steadily in decline for decades, but I think Bucky would find it interesting since he grew up within the traditional early 20th-century culture this novel satirizes and challenges—mores that this story’s version of Bucky didn’t unquestioningly accept but didn’t openly challenge, either.

Having Bucky pick this novel reflects the themes for the last act of this story that focus more on Steve and Bucky's different experiences as closeted queer men growing up in a deeply homophobic society. These experiences continue to shape and impact them and yet are also a past these two are coming to terms with and growing beyond. 

Fun fact: this novel coined the word “grok.”

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

Of all the books featured in this series, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is my top recommendation. This is an accessible, well-written history of a topic that haunts American history: immigration. The specific focus is the waves of legislation passed in the first half of the 20th century that tried—and often succeeded—in limiting who could legally immigrate based on the racial and ethnic hierarchies that equally haunt American history, right down to the foundation. 

In this series, I wanted to pick up the themes of social justice and immigration that were so vaguely and incoherently included in TFATWS. These themes are inherent in the Snap and Return plotline except that Disney does not want to touch any of these politics with a ten-foot pole. But I remain fascinated by trying to wrap my mind around what it would mean for half the population to vanish and then return five years later, catastrophically in both cases. It’s a huge, intricate, sticky, difficult world-building problem that’s inescapably political. 

Steve isn’t quite ready to dive into facing or helping to fix the problems of the post-Return world that his actions helped to create. But here we get to see Steve’s burned-out passion and conviction slowly rekindle as he reads about the complicated and often ugly history of American immigration—and he gets mad about it. Of course, he gets mad about it! This is my answer to the ludicrous idea that Steve Rogers could quietly sit out the second half of the twentieth century. 

At the same time, I can have compassion for Steve knowing he can’t keep going but not knowing how to help himself, only to be given the cursed monkey’s paw of time travel. And he fucks up. His actions have real and lasting consequences. But that doesn’t make the situation hopeless or mean Steve can’t try to repair the relationships he damaged or work to regain the trust he lost, assuming he’s lucky enough to be given another chance by people who love him but have been hurt by his choices.

One of the greatest challenges in writing this Endgame fix-it was accepting Endgame as the starting point of the story and trying to reconcile a character I love with the choices canon has him make. Over the course of these stories, the central point isn’t Steve coming back to Bucky. It’s Steve coming back to himself. Through a slow and painful struggle, Steve finds himself again—rediscovering his stubborn endurance, his compassion for others and his drive to set wrongs right. Steve stumbled, badly, but he gets back up. Because that’s who Steve Rogers is. 

And because of who Bucky Barnes is—his innate kindness, his warm-hearted generosity and his stubborn loyalty that isn’t blind but runs deep—that’s how these two characters come back to each other, after everything.

Deliberately, this series is the first hard-fought and hopeful glimmer in a long trudging process that can get so heavy to carry forward, day after day, but is shot through with moments of beauty and joy all the same. 

I can't go on; I'll go on.

In other words, to quote one of my favorite poets: what the living do.

[butchdarling]

Just got The Left Hand of Darkness from the library again and I like the author's note so much I'm just gonna post the whole thing

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrail life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when ques- tioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing." Almost anything carried to its logical extreme be. comes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means, It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imagi native mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens.... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modem novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future indeed Schrödinger's most famous thought- experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like-what's going on-what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

"The truth against the world!"-Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology, and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unrealizable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane- bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? If they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.

But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact that is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and- ideally- quantifiable.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number-Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

Oh, it's lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it's a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn't about the future. I don't know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by an- nouncing that it's set in the "Ekumenical Year 1490-97," but surely you don't believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while read- ing, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find- if it's a good novel- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound- a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life-science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin

[alpydk]

Writing Interview Tag Game!

You said it was open tag @dr-demi-bee so yoink!

When did you start writing?

I've always written since I was a kid. I remember writing a self insert Jonny Quest fic of about 100 words when I was really young. Couldn't tell you what happened it in but I know I kept it hidden because there was kissing involved.

Then I remember being about 11 and writing a fic of a girl who lived with her two step parents (Guess whose parents hadn't got divorced by that point so they didn't understand how that worked). There was so much angst and TV soap drama I got asked if everything was okay at home. But serious writing wasn't under Feb this year with the BG3 obsession. I don't have a fancy literature degree; I don't have analysis skills of Shakespeare and other fancy authors. I'm just a muppet with a keyboard.

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

I love reading sci-fi, especially if its dystopian, Children of Men is one of my favourite books, as are a lot of works by Philip K. Dick, but I've never tried writing sci-fi before and don't really plan to. I also enjoy reading some smut (within reason) but really dislike writing it. I will happily give you a nondescript non/con fic over an explicit love fucking. I've done it, you've all seen it and some even liked it, but my smut writing days are very much on hold right now.

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

I've never been compared to anyone else. Do we normally get compared, is that a thing? I'm curious who I would be compared to now... As for emulation, I don't really want to. My writing is my own, and it conveys who I am as a person. If I were emulating someone else, would I not just be a cheap copy of them? (Possibly I'm seeing emulation in the wrong terms, blame the illiteracy)

Can you tell me a bit about your writing space?

This is it currently. Basic I know, but I'm not one for clutter on my desk otherwise I get distracted easily. I share the room with my kid who has her PC next to me, normally playing Minecraft or nattering away, so I get pulled away plenty. The troll has been with me since 2005 and sat on my desk in various offices across the UK and Ireland, now helping me to write with its words of wisdom. (It doesn't really but maybe I can claim it's a beta reader or something.)

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

Spite! Yes, I know this sounds insane and petty and all the other negative words but fucking hell is spite one hell of a muse. One of my fics I wrote very long ago was based of a fanfic I read that just got under my skin. The subject had been taken and turned into this fluffy, romance thing and I was so fucking bitter and annoyed at how little the person had clearly researched into the topic. I went and wrote my fic including the reality of it all and it felt so cathartic to do so. (This is not the way to write fics, I'm just a terrible person) Otherwise, walking, daydreaming, regular tropes you like. Browsing the tags on Ao3 and seeing what strikes your fancy. That's where the hate sex fic came from.

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

Control is a big theme that I find creeps in. Whether it be Gale and smut and his self control, or the non/con fics that seem to slip in. Then there is Nana and her past, and the PPD fic, and of course the S/H fic. Yeah control is the big one. Does it surpise me? Not Really. Control is a topic I've tried to explain many a time to a therapist only to be misunderstood so I think I use my writing a lot to get my thoughts on it out into the open.

What is your reason for writing?

More productive daydreaming. If I could lie in a room all day or walk around in a daydream I would, but unfortunatly the world seems to be insisting that I embrace reality, and so writing is the compromise. I also genuinely do enjoy it but could not explain to you why.

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

Motivating? I'm not sure... I like comments, I like validation like anyone else but they fill that void, they don't necessarily motivate me. When I finished my bachelor paper we had to do an oral exam to back it up, and the exam censor was a professor of literature. Her feedback to my writing was that it was easy to understand and a pleasure to read. That comment stuck with me and has definitely motivated me to stick with my style. I don't like gatekeeping behind faux intellect. So possibly that comment?

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

I AM A GOD! I don't know really. I guess just being thought about in general is enough. I've always been sort of out of sight, out of mind in life. Like Gale, I've always believed myself to be very much 'if I'm not needed then I'm not wanted' - So just being remembered is enough. (Gods, that sounds so fucking sad now that I think about it.)

Under the surface, I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service

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

Hopefully it's just ease of understanding. Like I know we all want these literary masterpieces that will change the world or provide some sort of beauty that bring people to tears, but I just want to tell stories and make people feel stuff other than confusion. And I like to think I manage that. So yeah, that's my strength.

How do you feel about your own writing?

Hmmm.... I am my own worst critic in every single aspect of my life. It will never been good enough (see how I've got Gale's angst down so well???). I like my writing, I like flow and repetition. I like how it covers topics I want to read about and isn't just being produced to be produced like I've seen some bigger writers do (they're not on Tumblr, don't worry before you all start wondering 'is it me?'.) And I like how it's not all the same stuff. I have quite a lot of variety of varying standards. Some I really like, others I sigh at and wonder how I'd do them differently.

---- Anyway, do I tag this for others or open tag it again. I just like talking and am trying to distract myself from the inevitable chapter I need to write today.

[goodluckclove]

Actual Hot Take: Ramble Incoming

I'm in a mood, less than a week out from my hysterectomy, and I have some thoughts. Rough thoughts. Medium spicy.

They're about world-building and critiques and readers and writers. It turned into a big ramble as I processed some feelings - you'll note the subject change partway through - so I'm throwing a read more.

I would say here that this is my own personal opinion but essentially I realized that my real issue here was how sick I am of cynicism in lit spaces and like...yeah I don't think that's a crazy hot take. I feel at this point that I am incapable of hot takes.

I am deeply intimidated by the kinds of writers and readers who eviscerate logistical world-building choices in genre fiction. I usually only see it in sci-fi and fantasy communities but I have to imagine it happens in every genre.

Maybe an unrealistic fabric is used in a historical fiction novel. Or a poor choice of saddle in a western. Or a medical inaccuracy in a horror scene. It has to happen all the time because certain people have expertise that research might miss, or a writer's research could be wrong, or they could've just not researched at all. But for some reason specifically the Speculative Fiction crowd are the most likely, in my experience, to lose their goddamned minds.

Has anyone read Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder? It's about the hardest sci-fi out there. So esoteric and thorough in its scientific accuracy that when I tried to read it it circled back around and sounded like fantasy. Listen to this excerpt from the plot summary:

Huh? Huh???

I don't know about you, but this is virtually indistinguishable to me from the schizophrenic rambling of Philip K Dick. I did not hate the book. I couldn't finish it because I had no fucking clue what anyone was talking about, but I enjoy it's existence. The prose was pretty retro. It's like a pulp novel from an alternate universe where everyone has a PhD in Quantum Physics.

It's just a weird spectrum, the questions you're supposed to answer and the ones you're allowed to leave a mystery. What mysteries will the reader use against you as proof that you didn't think it through? People say write for yourself, and you should, but some of those same people are quick to produce massive think pieces on why your choices make you a bad writer. That's just a thing some writers choose to do. And there's really no way to predict what someone might get unreasonably rant-y about. As I put my writing more out there I have no idea what people will use to claim I put no thought into the most emotionally vulnerable writing I've ever created.

And they say that's not supposed to bother you. But like. Of course it does? There's a level of thick skin you're supposed to develop about writing, but I don't think that applies to all aspects of writing or all the time. If someone disregards my entire novel that I gave myself tendonitis over because my depiction of back of house food service wasn't realistic or my magic system didn't go in a direction they thought it should, I'm going to be upset. It won't ruin my life or get me to give up writing - I don't see anything doing that at that point. But I'll get sad. I'll probably get pretty sad and it's weird that I feel like it's bad for writers to admit that.

My hot take, nestled within this hot take, is that I think this applies to every writer. Even the ones that react with ego and anger to massive critiques on their books - right before we cringe and scoff and laugh online - are probably also just sad that we didn't like their writing. Unless they specifically didn't try, or posed a scam in the form of a book, they're likely sad they offered something born out of creative effort and got rejected. Nobody likes that.

It's one thing if the writer themselves has some trash beliefs. I am fine with people eviscerating JK Rowling or any of the writers who feel like the best way to get a book deal is to bring down other writers or pretend to be a different race online. But it's just crazy to be a writer in an age where you might publish a book someone hates so much that they release a three hour-long video essay roasting entire segments for a potentially incalculable audience.

I used to be into that kind of stuff, but after being here for so long relishing in that rage-bait feels weird. Because a lot of the people here, even if they write themes I'm not interested in, seem like nice enough people actually trying to do something. I had strangers on here send me their writing and someone sent me what was clearly a fetish thing and even though I wasn't into the kink I talked to the person about it and they were perfectly civil and courteous. I'm almost 30 and I'm learning that while some artists are using their medium to push unhealthy beliefs or hateful ideologies, a lot more people just want to tell a story that feels important to them. Even if other people don't like it.

I don't know. I was angry at first when I started this but by now I'm just sentimental and I think people should stop treating complaining as their primary hobby. I think critiques are important, but there comes a line in which I'm forced to think you'd just like hearing yourself talk. And if you like to talk why not talk about something you enjoy?

If you've read this far (you're very odd), I'm going to go ahead and list a few books that inspired my writing and say why I like them a lot.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: Love my man Vonnegut. His prose is so warm and easy to read and his stories are so wild and interesting to think about. Everyone should read Vonnegut he's great and he seemed like a pretty nice guy.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison: This book wrecked me hard. Some of the descriptions were so beautiful I put the book down and let out a sigh. When I finished I walked out of whatever classroom I was in without asking for permission from the teacher and spent the rest of class wandering campus in the rain and weeping openly.

Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock: it's a trilogy told through postcards and letters you can physically open and remove the pages. Has some of the most beautiful romantic intimacy between two people who never meet. There's one particular letter I read and reread a lot when I was younger because it was exactly what I wanted in life.

[boydykepdf]

@fastasyoucan1999 ty 4 the tag!! <3

book that pleasantly surprised you: do androids dream of electric sheep? by philip k. dick! read this like a month ago + had only read one other philip k. dick book + didn't really enjoy it so i was surprised by how much i liked this one <3

book that disappointed you: quite a few recently which is...unfortunate. just been reading a lot of books that i end up not really liking :( most recent was the girl in red by christina henry which i read last week after having it on my tbr for so long that i forgot why i even added it and it was simply. not good! writing ranged from mediocre to bad + the actual plot was not particularly interesting or well-executed so :/ second most recent was bad feminist by roxane gay which just. did not have good politics lol

your current read: living a feminist life by sara ahmed but it's slow going bc i am...not really enjoying it </3 giving her a chance bc i've only just finished the first 3 chs but...honestly had higher expectations...

top 2 books on your tbr: my tbr is sprawling + disorganized i don't really have any particular order in mind for it but! i do want 2 read young mungo bc i've seen all my tumblr mutuals raving abt it + i've also been meaning 2 read on earth we're briefly gorgeous for a really long time!

an author you’re loving: having been reading some engels + marx this year + loving them lol & have also read a couple books by leslie feinberg + bell hooks + have really enjoyed those as well!!

rec a book to the person who tagged you: ummm my go-to rec right now is. the archive of alternate endings by lindsey drager simply bc it is my favorite thing i've read this year <3 but also!! since u enjoyed the captive prince series...the feverwake duology by victoria lee has kind of a similar vibe although v different setting etc....one of my faves <3

no-pressure tags: @pomegranate-pill @loseraccount @suspendedinbush @boyjoan @steelycunt @twisted-tales-told

[reluctanthurricane]

Several days late on the end of year book ask, but how about multiples of 4 for ya? :3c

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

So I've only read one book by each of them, but I think Jen Williams, Darcie Little Badger and Ryka Aoki all have the potential to be authors that I'll consistently love. Also, I had a pretty good time with Freya Marske's stuff and I read two of her books, though both in the same series.

(already answered 8)

12. Any books that disappointed you?

I mentioned that this is the year I realized I give zero fucks about organized crime stories, so I found both Jade City and Certain Dark Things disappointing for me personally, though obviously I understand now why I dislike them and can see the craft in both.

House of Sky and Breath, by Sarah J Maas fucking BETRAYED me. Like listen, on the one hand at least I didn't buy it (I had given up on ACoTaR and her Assassin books both after I bought one) but like, that's it, the book was not nearly as fun as I was hoping and the ending was NOT OKAY and I will never read a Maas book again.

(already answered 16)

20. What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?

I don't really keep up with releases but I have been excited for the next installment of Seanan McGuire's October Daye books every year for the past few years, and this year... Idk if I'm just getting a little burnt out on McGuire and need a break, or if McGuire is getting burnt out by writing 100 books every year. Be the Serpant wasn't bad but something about it fell a little flat for me. Likely because of me, it definitely had an interesting plot and resolved one of the mysteries.

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

Yup, several books. The Viscount Who Loved Me (Bridgerton 2) because wow it was everything I thought a romance novel would be (derogatory), I'm glad I picked up Courtney Milan right after and was proven wrong about the genre. The Professor and the Madman like, cool concept of writing history like a fictional story, interesting story to tell, hard pass on the casual racism and misogyny. Air Awakens because I just could not with Kova's prose. Or her plot. A nonfiction book about some grad students who tried to make a real android modeled after Philip K Dick but the story was kind of tired and I wish it had been more technical (the cover was stunning though). Belladonna because I've aged out of YA and that book wasn't good enough for me to make an exception and finally Nobody's Princess because while I adore the first like 90% of the Wynchester books, the way Ridley keeps choosing to end them is not sitting well with me, so I didn't finish that book and won't be continuing on.

[anthonysstupiddailyblog]

Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (720): Thu 8th Mar 2024

I thought about how I always try to combine two or more ideas whenever I get a tattoo in order to get more original and unique imagery and I have decided apply this logic to a new business enterprise as I set up my own mobile museum. Instead of getting people to come to my museum I will take it to them as I will be driving the bus Rosa Parks would be arrested on and inside rather than spreading out all of the exhibits I will have them collected into one piece. It will be The Elephant Man’s skeleton wearing Jackie Kennedy’s blood stained dress, holding one of the violins the musicians on the Titanic was playing, in the other hand he'll be carrying the headless bat that Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off and on his feet will be the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Tell me you wouldn't pay money to hop on the mobile museum to check it out if it drove into your town. After four very long years I have finally finished my gruelling but also incredibly pleasurable challenge to read every book to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel. I don’t know how I found out about these awards (though I suspect it was just through randomly trawling through Wikipedia) or why I decided to read every winning book but when I sat down to read the first winner “Beat Not The Bones” by Charlotte Jay I couldn’t imagine I wouldn’t finish the challenge until four years later. After nearly half a decade of this on again off again mission, at approximately 16:00 today I finished the final book in the challenge, Notes on an Execution. The final pages of the book depict the last moments of a murderer on death row as he sees the world slip away much like I was watching the final moments of my beautiful four year long task disintegrate before my eyes like a swan in a barrel of acid. I immediately took out my bucket list and struck a line through “Edgar Awards” and breathed a huge sigh of relief before stepping outside to do several interviews with the big news networks and watching all the video messages of congratulations from celebrities such as Lee Ryan from Blue, Justin Lee Collins and The Pope. I’m so glad that this thing is over but at the same time I’m thankful that I’ve been introduced to a lot of amazing writers whose work I never would have gotten to sample if it weren’t for this insane challenge. Starting tomorrow I will begin my new insane challenge of attempting to read every book by the great Philip K Dick.

I watched an episode of The One Show that covered a book award ceremony for children who had written stories made up of 500 words or less. I don't know why but I hate seeing children display talent at an incredibly young age. It's probably because when I was a child I submitted a story for this competition about a nymphomaniac bank manager who constantly takes customers into the bank's giant vault to bang them which I titled "Safe Sex" and not only did it not win but I was forced to undergo counseling and electroshock treatment. One of the winners was this eleven year old kid and he was a right smug little cunt. When the host asked him if he could believe he won he replied in a deadpan fashion “Well yeah because you just said it” and when Alex Jones asked if he would continue writing he said “Well I’m currently writing three stories”. This self-congratulatory bitch is going to end up being the Prime Minister one day isn't he? In twenty years time when I get my well earned OBE for all the great sitcoms I write it's going to be this smarmy gobshite who ruins my day by giving me my medal and commenting "I've never seen your stuff personally but I'm told it's very funny".Tom Hiddleston presented an award but he didn’t do his Robert De Niro impression. I actually want to write a Philip K Dick-style book where Hiddleston runs for president and his only act is to make it punishable by death to watch, share or discuss his De Niro impression ever happened.

[deviant-nomad]

Deleting some quotes from my Goodreads that no longer resonate with me (or that I no longer wish to front on my public profile). Perhaps they are too egotistical, too revealing, too generic, too repetitive.

Goodreads is about reading + slowing down. I'd rather reflect a tone of intellectual humility. Not just narrow emotion and opinion.

---

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”  ― Bill Bullard

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”  ― Flannery O'Connor

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”  ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Will I be something? Am I something? And the answer comes: You already are. You always were. And you still have time to be.”  ― Anis Mojgani

“We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved - but not for me.”  ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.”  ― Mahatma Gandhi

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”  ― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“The greatest leaders in the world fight cognitive bias by developing 'rules to live by' and carefully following predetermined routines to maximize efficiency and control of their environment”  ― Spencer Fraseur, The Irrational Mind: How To Fight Back Against The Hidden Forces That Affect Our Decision Making

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”  ― Erich Fromm

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”  ― Oscar Wilde

“When people enter into an experience of loneliness, they trigger what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat, a phenomenon Weiss first postulated back in the 1970s. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual tends to experience the world in increasingly negative terms, and to both expect and remember instances of rudeness, rejection and abrasion, giving them greater weight and prominence than other, more benign or friendly interactions. This creates, of course, a vicious circle, in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn. And because the hypervigilance hasn’t been consciously perceived, it’s by no means easy to recognise, let alone correct, the bias. What this means is that the lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it is by no means easy to dislodge. This is why I was suddenly so hyper-alert to criticism, and why I felt so perpetually exposed, hunching in on myself even as I walked anonymously through the streets, my flip-flops slapping on the ground.”  ― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”  ― Philip K. Dick

“...I began to see that when the pace of external of material progress exceeded the development of inner knowledge, people seemed to suffer deep emotional conflicts without any internal method of dealing with them. An abundance of material items provides such a variety of external distractions that peolpe lose the connection ito their inner lives.”  ― Yongey Mingyur, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”  ― Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

“No two persons have precisely similar circumstances. Do what works for you.”  ― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“...go in the direction your head is pointed in.”  ― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“She asks me to kill the spider.  Instead, I get the most  peaceful weapons I can find. 

I take a cup and a napkin.  I catch the spider, put it outside  and allow it to walk away. 

If I am ever caught in the wrong place  at the wrong time, just being alive  and not bothering anyone, 

I hope I am greeted  with the same kind  of mercy.”  ― Rudy Francisco, Helium

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”  ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”  ― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simba!

“Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”  ― G.K. Chesterton

“This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.”  ― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

[convenient-plot-device]

Maybe actually listen to Neil Gaiman before you have a childish little tantrum and hurl insults at something that's been worked so hard on. The story isn't ending there. Neil's already talked about it. Take a breath, grow up.

See this is exactly why I made that rant post unrebloggable, lol. Yeah, I know the story isn't ending there. That's exactly what I have a problem with. I am tired of the endless franchisement of stories that were fine as standalones. I don't care what Neil Gaiman says, tbh. If the author wants to convey something in the story, they should, you know, write it into the story, not add it in after the fact in interviews or whatever. You don't know me. What insults, also? All I remember saying is that it was poorly written and I did not like the ending. Also, you wouldn't happen to be the same person who got really mad at me a while ago for hating Philip K. Dick, would you? That person ALSO called me childish based on extremely limited information about me. Or do I just attract people whose favorite thing to do is call 17yos on the internet childish? Whatever. This is also not going to be rebloggable. Please don't send me more asks. I just wanna move on from Good Omens and put it out of my mind. Not interested in getting wrapped up in discourse with people who cannot handle a single internet nobody criticizing a TV show. Peace.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Because former gay rights organizations which have pivoted to take on the anti-gay project, have redefined "gay" to mean "same gender attracted."

GLAAD: https://glaad.org/reference/terms

TERMS TO AVOID “homosexual” (n. or adj.) Because of the clinical history of the word “homosexual,” it is aggressively used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest that people attracted to the same sex are somehow diseased or psychologically/emotionally disordered – notions discredited by the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s. Please avoid using “homosexual” except in direct quotes. Please also avoid using “homosexual” as a style variation simply to avoid repeated use of the word “gay.” Many mainstream news outlets’ style guides restrict use of the term “homosexual.”

BEST PRACTICE gay (adj.); gay man or lesbian (adj., n.); gay person/people Use gay, lesbian, or when appropriate, bisexual, pansexual, or queer to describe people attracted to people of the same gender or more than one gender. Ask people how they describe themselves before labeling their sexual orientation.

GLAAD has decided that using the word that literally means "same sex attraction" (i.e. "homosexual") is somehow "anti-LGBTQ" and to be avoided, and have redefined "gay" to refer to "same gender" in order to close you into the trap.

Stonewall: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/list-lgbtq-terms

Gay Refers to a man who has a romantic and/or sexual orientation towards men. Also a generic term for lesbian and gay sexuality - some women define themselves as gay rather than lesbian. Some non-binary people may also identify with this term.

Homosexual This might be considered a more medical term used to describe someone who has a romantic and/or sexual orientation towards someone of the same gender. The term ‘gay’ is now more generally used.

You read that right. Stonewall has erased same-sex attraction.

"Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren't attracted to. But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it's worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions."

-- Nancy Kelley CEO Stonewall UK

Translation: "How do you know you don't like dick/vag if you've never tried it? If you're not attracted to someone I approve of, then that's a personal and/or moral flaw."

Stonewall have rehabilitated the same anti-gay bigotries as Xians have used for decades. Nancy is even overtly saying that being same-sex attracted is a choice, and something you should work on and fix.

The HRC (Human Rights Campaign) has gone even further, erasing "gay" and "homosexual from their glossary entirely. In its place is the following Orwellian Newspeak term:

HRC: https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms

Same-gender loving | A term some prefer to use instead of lesbian, gay or bisexual to express attraction to and love of people of the same gender.

These organizations are now impostors, having been infiltrated and hollowed out from the inside, and now trading on their historical good name.

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

-- Philip K. Dick

By redefining words, or eliminating them entirely, these ideologically captured organizations intend to make it so that you can only describe things in terms of their "gender" ideology.

That's why they're working so hard with their anti-gay zealotry to establish that "same sex attraction is transphobic" and mere "genital preferences" are a "transphobic dogwhistle." They're not kidding. And if you think it isn't happening, think again.

With this in mind, and to more directly answer your question, "same sex attracted or bisexual" is used in the book to ensure precision, and to avoid ambiguity or misrepresentation.

The Tavistock performed gay conversion therapy in broad daylight, while undertaking medical experiments on kids with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/it-feels-like-conversion-therapy-for-gay-children-say-clinicians-pvsckdvq2

So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left”.

“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician said. “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay,” he told The Times.

Transing the gay away is what Iran does.

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

I know you've given some Japanese literature recs in the past but do you have any other books you recommend or maybe just personally enjoyed reading?They don't have to be only Japanese authors, really just anything you've enjoyed reading.

I answered a question about favorite books in the past and then took it down a few hours later in a fit of paranoia, haha. The terrifying ordeal of (one's favorite books) being known. But book recommendations or books one enjoys reading are a slightly different matter (lord knows I do NOT enjoy reading or recommend some of my favorite books), so I can give it a go.

Under a cut for length

The Once and Future King by T. H. White. My favorite book and one I will recommend to almost everyone. TOaFK is a collection of four smaller books (with a fifth "sequel", The Book of Merlin, that I think works best as a standalone, as most of the best bits have been retroactively added into the first book anyway) that retell the story of King Arthur from an anarchistic viewpoint as Arthur grows up and struggles to understand the causes of human suffering and warfare. Some portions of the books are beautifully witty and fun while other portions are deeply sentimental and heartbreaking. TOaFK humanizes these legendary, larger than life figures like no other adaptation of Arthur I've ever read before. Despite being very much written as response to WWII, it reads as a response to the human condition, no matter the age. It explains the answer to ending violence and also explains why this is fundamentally impossible in the same breath. A beautiful, brutal book. I am not blind to its faults (its treatment of the female characters, particularly Guinevere, is a bit lackluster, and there are some issues with anti-Scottish sentiments), but I love it to death and think it is very much worth your time.

Tangerine by Edward Bloor. This is a kid's book but one that I think holds up well even into adulthood. Following a visually handicapped boy as he moves to a new, primarily white suburb on the edge of a Black and Hispanic neighborhood and learns to navigate in his new life and new communities, this novel discusses the concepts of things hidden in plain sight that everyone refuses to see.

David Doesn't Get It by Vi Cao. This isn't a mainstream book at all - it's a bound collection of webcomics - but fuck it, I'm going to recommend it anyway. You can read it here on Webtoon as the author adds more comics from her backlog over time. DDGI is a diary/essay webcomic by the fictional character David Nguyen as he talks about his struggles to assimilate with the world, particularly in regards to asexuality, generational trauma and cycles of abuse, and family life as a Vietnamese-American. Along the way, his other family members and loved ones offer their own stories and experiences. I barely cry these days, but DDGI is one of the few things that makes me sob every time. Vi's writing and delivery are transcendentally good, and I'm incredibly grateful that I've been able to talk with her and have her writing as a part of my life. The first few comics can be a bit crass and feel a little outdated, but going in for the long haul is completely worth it imo.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I am a shameless Dostoevsky fan, and normally I'd recommend The Brothers Karamazov, but there is just... something so charming about The Idiot that I am going to stick it on this list instead. Idiot follows a naive, innocent to the point of foolishness man returning to Russia from a long stay in a Swiss sanatorium whereupon he ends up in a love triangle due to his own naive actions. A very interesting look at different flavors of love and how they intersect with pity. In terms of translations... I am not terribly fond of Pevear and Volokhonsky (which I mention because they're usually the easiest to find in bookstores)... although your preferences may certainly differ.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. This is pushing the definition of an enjoyable book slightly, but PKD produces some of the best interpretations of psychosis I've ever read (at least, they're similar enough to my experiences and thought processes that I find them compelling), and this is... one of the more straightforward ones, shall we say. Scanner focuses heavily on the concept of paranoia and being watched and does an amazingly accurate job of depicting the "braindead" states of drug-induced (or otherwise) psychosis.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. I find Gaiman entertaining almost all of the time, but Anansi Boys is my favorite of his works. It's like if American Gods was funny. Taking place in the same universe as American Gods, actually, Anansi Boys follows two brothers Charlie and Spider as they attempt to deal with the death of their father, the trickster god Anansi, and their sudden reintroduction into each other's lives after an entire lifetime spent apart. Hilariously written.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Heller is one of my favorite authors, but I wouldn't usually classify him as an enjoyable read. Catch-22 is, perhaps, an exception to that. Skirting around the reasons why I like it, which are a bit too personal for comfort, Catch-22 describes a ridiculous platoon of soldiers attempting to cope with the ridiculousness of warfare in a way that is generally humorous up until a string of deaths near the last third of the book.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. God, I love Ishiguro's writing, and I feel like this novel is one of his strongest. It's certainly my favorite to read. Remains tracks an aging British butler on a trip through the English countryside (the scenery descriptions are heavenly) as he recounts the major moments of disappointment and pride in his career; however, readers soon discover he's a rather unreliable narrator and understand that there is a lot more regret below the surface than first appears. Ishiguro is very, very good at writing stories about nostalgic melancholy, failed men, and failed states that once thought themselves great. This one is, I think, the most narratively succinct of all of them.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. Man, I love Diana Wynne Jones. I read tons of her stuff as a kid. I'm recommending this one not because it's a favorite, per se (I think I like her Chrestomanci series more), but because it's very well-known and is self-contained in a way many of her things aren't. HMC is quite different from the movie version, but if you liked the scenes of Sophie and Howl bitching at each other, then you will love this. It is a book entirely comprised of bitching. Howl has a car and drives like a fucking maniac. Howl is a wreck. So is Sophie, but in a completely different way. Calcifer is still great. Funny, lovely, lots of delightful background characters, nobody is a sexy anime boy but everyone has a good time.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. The writing styles of this book... are a feast. This book is a delightful treat to read. It is a series of 6 slightly interconnected stories that nest within one another, held together by the common thread of a piece of music called The Cloud Atlas String Quartet and the reincarnated soul of a character in the previous story. Each story focuses on a different theme, in a different time period and location, and has a wildly different writing style. Some stories are action-focused while others are slower paced, but I genuinely enjoyed each one and can't recommend this enough.

Watchmen by Alan Moore. I am not a fan of superhero stories at all, so Watchmen, a deconstruction of the superhero genre, is one of the few I enjoy. Set in an America where superheroes were once real and have now been largely outlawed, Watchmen challenges the concepts of authority and heroes as several masked vigilantes rise again to respond to a mysterious threat and their own moral struggles.

The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Discworld is a loooong (40+) volume series that can be read in mostly any order, set in the fantasy land of Discworld where anything can happen, provided it is ridiculous. The first Discworld books poke fun at the fantasy genre in general which is... okay... but the series quickly turns into various social commentaries portrayed in such delightful and inspiring ways. I would say that this series is one written with a lot of anger and a lot of hope that our own ridiculous world can become somewhat of a better place if we all take our heads out of our own asses from time to time.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. This graphic novel is a coming of age story set in the Iranian Revolution which serves as, imo, a very easily accessible introduction to a topic which shamefully isn't discussed much in my part of the world. Satrapi also talks about her experiences with the cultural divide between Iran and Europe during the 1980s and 1990s. I read this book fairly young (when i was 10 or so) and it has stuck with me ever since.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I fucking love EoE. This is a meta (in that the characters are aware of their own roles and discuss their roles within this framework) retelling of the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel set in a turn of the 20th century California Central Valley farming community. EoE discusses the concepts of free will, in particular the free will to do acts of good or acts of evil, and the nature of good/evil itself. Can't recommend this enough, regardless if people like Steinbeck's other works or not.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Tell me about your favorite fictional character

Ooh, hard question, because I love so many. I'll give some personal answers in the interest of not spoiling anyone else who's asked this, and maybe some others can join in too?

I like the protagonist of my favorite short story (by Murakami). I like her because she's really different from other fictional characters. You can tell because she never does anything that anyone else in the story would do. It's very interesting.

When I read fiction I often enjoy characters that I see as "role models." I tend to "want to be like" the characters in a particular way, whether the author intended it or not. In fact, many of the "good" characters I tend to love are, like, "relatable" -- they have the qualities I personally love and want in life, such as humor, intelligence, kindness, optimism, intelligence, etc.

I read a lot of YA fantasy. I think I tend to like characters who "get the books" -- I'm not really into a lot of "I'm the cool kid because I'm smarter and better at doing things" types. (That is, I tend to like characters more when the author writes the book for them.) This is a shame, because some of the "best" YA authors are very good at writing "role models" characters, and the characters who "get the books" tend to be more interesting and distinct from their authors.

One of the characters I really like from a particular YA book was an alien whose entire species was so obsessed with Earth that they decided to live in human bodies, and spent millions of years studying us and our cultures to try to understand us. And that's just so cool in my personal fantasy about being more like other human beings.

My favorite book is... I honestly don't have a "favorite" book, but it was published after high school and it's a little bit too weird and offbeat for me -- like if Neil Gaiman wrote a book, but it was written by Philip K. Dick instead. (Okay, I realize I just used the title of the book that's most like it on purpose. Still.)

One of the books that was released in my teens that still holds a special place in my heart is about a young man named David living in a world where there are many David's. He lives in a hotel with a bunch of other David's, and while the hotel is nice, the rest of the city is really weird -- it is inhabited entirely by humans, with no human inhabitants of the hotels that David stays in, like his own. His job is to collect various kinds of David's things (there are many kinds of David) and sort them into different bins. He lives on money that his parents give him, and the plot is about his attempts to win their hearts so that he can keep doing his job.

[reyofsunlight666]

Hey, I'm responding to a tag from you on something you shared... don't give up on SFF if you want to write that. Not all SFF is escapist mainstream twaddle. SFF has ALWAYS been a struggle between the normies who are almost exclusively into franchise work and work that espouses mainstream beliefs. There are probably the next prophets buried under the heap of mass market tripe. Unfortunately the actual prophets tend not to be loved as more than a niche thing in their own lifetime, witness Philip K. Dick and Isabel Fall.

Good SF can show people other ways to solve problems. It can point problems out. I'm writing hopeful SF that shows people solving problems and surviving and working shit out, and I've read so much sci fi that makes you think and come to your own conclusions. Look at some of the genres of the past (especially 60s-90s counterculture influenced and the biggies like Ursula LeGuin and Philip K Dick).

Here is a thing that's personal...

In my own writing, I've decided that I don't want to give an instruction manual for a dystopia. So I am going to show a world in the process of overcoming that dystopia and building a new way of life that forces them to overcome their differences. Everyone has to make the choice to do that, and most will, and it's not going to be a problem fully solved by the time we engage the setting, but we'll be almost there and the goals are in sight, and we're willing to work hard and overcome our differences to make it happen and it's a choice that lays with the person engaging this material and not made for them. That's all I am going to say.

So this is a tricky topic for me to talk about, because, in the words of the meme, I am not immune to escapist twaddle. :P I'm on probably my millionth playthrough of Skyrim right now, my AO3 bookmark list is like a mile long...you get the idea. And I don't like condemning escapist twaddle wholesale either, because (a) I suspect it's how most people into SFF get into it in the first place (b) I don't think people should be ashamed of harmless hobbies and (c) you can innovate artistically in a work while also incorporating elements of escapist twaddle or even making something that is wholly escapist twaddle (see: Horizon: Zero Dawn's use of Chosen One tropes, Nineteen Eighty-Four being like 'fucking younger women is an essential part of revolting against authoritarianism'). What I don't like are two things. First: people acting like works of escapist twaddle are equivalent to artistic masterworks. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but that attitude seems much more widespread in nerd communities than it used to be. There used to be a distinction between the likes of Le Guin and space opera pulp, right? Whereas now websites like Tor and The Mary Sue post glowing analyses of the MCU alongside write-ups of the biggest innovators in SFF. Second: the sheer amount of escapist twaddle. Amazon. The cinematic universes. The neverending Steam queue. The hours-long fan videos. And the algorithms that can hone in on whatever your particular escapist kink is and milk you dry. That is to say, I appreciate you reaching out and saying this to me. The relative unpopularity of the masters in their own lifetimes is something I've definitely noticed in my own reading. I don't know if I want my work to have political goals, per se. But I do want to tell the truth as I see it. To explore ideas with real nuance. To push the boundaries of speculative concepts. And the modern abundance of escapist twaddle, as well as the vanishing boundaries between it and higher culture, make me wonder if there'll be any room for that kind of work, or desire to engage with it. Your work sounds really interesting, and tbh it sounds like you have similar goals to my current big WIP. I don't want to talk about my WIP too much, but suffice it to say - your interest in depicting building a better world with nuance is shared. :D

[vincent-wilde]

"I always have to have some time to calm down from the stress of public speaking so I don't at all mind spending time with you." he said warmly.

He listened happily as Rowan talked. He didn't mind at all. "French literature is so very interesting to read as well." he agreed with a nod. "It's absolutely lovely."

"Oh, tough question." he said as he thought. He hummed softly. "I think I have to say Tolkien as a main stay. I also like Philip K. Dick for more postmodern writing. Verne is up there, at the moment at least. Huxley for sci-fi, and Oscar Wilde is one I have a personal weakness for. Also because of the name."

Looking for Books (Closed Starter)

Sebastian was sat behind the library counter. He had just finished placing some new arrivals on the shelves and had now taken his spot near the entrance again.

He catalogued some things on his pc for a while before leaning back in his chair and picking up a book. He was so engrossed in his book he nearly didn't hear the doors slide upon but as he heard the footsteps approaching the desk he looked up.

He put the book down and looked at the stranger. "Good afternoon" he said with a smile. "How can I help you today?"

[ourimpavidheroine]

Hi and thanks for your long answer, it was a pleasure to read! Yeah, I can see you saw the potential and went with it. And yes, you did make Wu less annoying. A lot less. Through personal growth! Highly appreciated. As to what I'd like to see, well. Good question. I think it would be about those quiet moments in life, the ones you don't write epic sagas about. Taking care of the other person, taking care of the relationship. If you've read Alice Munro's novels, something like it. (1/2)

(2/2) Personally, I see plot usually just as a way of moving the characters forward in time - I like to know what they think later on, if they've changed and how. Quiet introspection, or doing nothing aside from talking. Recently, I read a book by Elizabeth Strout. Nothing really happened in it. But there were so many emotions that I cried. There is quite a lot of that in your fics, which is also probably why I like them.

“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.” - Alice Munro

I LOVE Alice Munro, she’s one of my favorite writers. And I loved Olive Kitteridge (although I don’t know if that’s the Strout book you read or not).

Thank you so much for your thoughtful answer in return!

When I was a little girl, my father had about fifteen blue milk crates of old paperbacks, stored in our garage. They ran the gamut - from the original James Bond stories to some Raymond Chandler and lots of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark, etc. Because he didn’t believe in censoring what kids liked to read, I had full access. And I remember reading a few Asimovs and not really getting into them and going to him, disappointed. Because even as a child I loved sci fi and fantasy but most of the books he had were just missing something for me. He asked me what was wrong with them - and he listened to my answer, my father was one of those rare adults who actually listened to children - and then he dug around and pulled out a battered paperback of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and told me he thought I might like that one better.

I was nine years old and I loved that book so much I read it at least five times, whispering the words aloud to myself in the dark, scribbling my favorite bits into a notebook I kept in a drawer. I still love that book. I read it every single summer and it never grows old for me and every single year of my life I get something new out of it. That’s the kind of writer Bradbury was. Because Dandelion Wine is a quiet book, a book of stories about a young boy during a summer and the people in his orbit. It’s also about love and loss and fear and grief and just about any other emotion we have as humans. It’s full of hope. And I love it so much. (My father, the year before he died, tracked down a first edition copy of the book for me and it is so precious that I brought it with me on the plane when I moved to Finland rather than trusting it to be shipped with the rest of my things.)

That was my first understanding that stories did not have to be grandiose or full of exciting plot or pages of purple prose to leave a lasting impression. The important part of those stories was that they evoked feelings and memories in the reader, even when the reader was a nine year old girl in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1978 and not a twelve year old boy in 1928 small-town Illinois. And that’s what I strive for as a writer. I don’t always hit that mark - what I really need is a good editor and probably some thorough beta-ing to help me get there - but that’s what I strive for, anyhow.