#gaea station

[suprsaturatd]

Gaea Station did not look outward. It had never bothered with windows.

Holy shit please read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh that was probably the best book I’ve read in ages?!?!?!?!!!!! Anyways here’s the space hulk station made out of four crashed battle cruisers that would not get out of my head until i drew it.

[pthalomars]

You won't get much closer 'till you sacrifice it all

[sexcromancy]

excellent riverdale moment: only the town mayor has the power to appoint a new basketball team captain

[cranberryjuice-posts]

So don’t freak out

Synopsis - Clarisse is Bad at keeping secrets

Pairings - college! Clarisse x mortal fem! Reader

IMPORTANT - this FIC takes Place after PJO and HOO and is during TOA, so spoilers are ahead, this is basically cannon clarisse outside of camp

It had been a year since clarisse left camp. After the war against the Roman’s and Gaea she was just ready to finally attend college and be a ‘normal’ girl.

So far everything was going great. In an advance intro to Greek mythology and culture course mainly she took since she needed a fine arts credit she met you. You were just some mortal girl, at first she didn’t really notice you but after being assigned on a project together she quickly realized how much she liked you.

Even after you introduced clarisse to your friend group and invited her out to eat she just couldn’t get you out of her mind. She would pray to her father and Aphrodite in hopes for advice little did she know Aphrodite was playing match maker against ares better judgement.

After a few months clarisse caved and asked you out.. Even after a few dates she was still to nervous to ask the question so you did, that’s how you two started to date.

Your relationship was perfect. You loved spending time with clarisse and her mother, you also love playing with her hair and watching her when she would dominate the court no matter what sport it was in the gym.

——

You were sitting by clarisse in her dorm room as you did an assignment. “Uh huh, you know you really enjoy the story of achilles and Patroclus���

Clarisse rolled her eyes. “Shut up”

“I’m serious!” You joked “I don’t know it’s just the way you talk about him and write his story it’s like you are him, or maybe you lost your Patroclus so you relate” you smiled at first but soon straightened your position when she grew quiet. “Did I..”

“No.. no” clarisse sighed and set her pen down before rubbing her eyes.. she let out a sigh and looked over at you gently grabbing your hand. “About two years ago.. there was this big event in my life. I had a best friend named silena.. she was my everything and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love her.. silena had recently lost her boyfriend and when she had died in the accident which was my fault, it hurt.. a lot. I did everything I could to save her and I even got vengeance for her, so In a way yeah I lost my Patroclus but that’s ok.. I have you now” she leaned over and kissed your cheek wanting to cheer you up some.

You rubbed her hand softly.. you had so many questions but decided against it not wanting to press the issues.

——

It was Saturday. Clarisse was messing around with you as you two were walking back towards the college campus while laughing together after going on a date. You let go of her hand and walked ahead before stopping so you could take some pictures of her..

Once clarisse caught up and took your phone out of your hand she leaned down and kissed you. “You know your dumb right” you rolled your eyes. “Yeah I’m aware”

There was a loud bang from an alley way.. while you thought nothing of it You noticed clarisse tensing up. “Babe-“

She grabbed you and forced you behind her. “Don’t move” she instructed. You were confused, what you saw was a stray dog eating some trash but clarisse was acting like she saw a monster. “Y/n” she whispered and grabbed your waist. “We’re gonna run”

“Lise what’s going on”

“I’ll explain later but we need to RUN!” She yelled and grabbed your hand running down the street with the barking dog now chasing you.. you had never seen clarisse act like this..

Turn after turn after turn. All you knew was that clarisse continued to run with you in her hand, you looked back and for a moment the dog chasing you… it wasn’t a dog it looked bigger meaner.. hellish even. You didn’t understand and you didn’t want to.

Eventually clarisse threw you into a random gas station and slammed against a shelf panting.. the dog sat patiently outside not moving but eerily watched as you and clarisse caught your breath. Clarisse dragged you to the bathroom and locked the door. “Look—“

“Clarisse what the fuck is going on!” You yelled, your dress now messed up along side your now frizzy hair and sweaty face. “It’s a dog!”

She held her head down before looking at you with concern. “It’s.. a dog” You spoke however this time less assure in yourself.

Clarisse shook her head and opened the bathroom door.. she walked out for a moment before coming back and nodding her head in a different direction. “Common this way” she softly took your hand, you squinted your eyes thinking you were seeing things.. it was almost like clarisse had a spear? In her Hand more specifically an Ancient Greek style spear. You shook your head and the spear disappeared leaving only clarisses keys in her hand.

You left out the back way and took a longer way back to campus.. neither of you spoke until you got to clarisses dorm.

You sat down on her bed and watched as she hung her keys on the wall.. there it was again the spear but it left as soon as you saw it.

“Claire”

“Hm” she flatly spoke and opened her computer.

“That wasn’t a dog was it..” you spoke quietly. She sent an email before sighing and walking infront of you taking your hands. “No.. no it wasn’t”

“Can I Tell You something Crazy” You mumbled, clarisse nodded while squeezing your hands. “The dog…. It almost looked like a hellhound like from Mr. Anthony’s talk on Greek monsters, I know I sound crazy.. but it only lasted for a second”

“That’s” she gave a dramatic sigh. “That’s because it was a hellhound” You looked up confused. “Y/n.. there’s something you need to know”

This was to much. You didn’t like any of this clarisses tone the apparent hell hound chasing you NOW the spear on the wall clear as day not disappearing. You faced clarisse again and nodded. “All those myths you know and love.. their real and I am a daughter of ares”

At first there was silence until you started to laugh. Clarisse looked back at you offended all while you just laughed. “You’ve gotta be joking!” Clarisse was starting to grow irritated, you calmed down.. noticed clarisses face you Just scoff. “Right because Zeus and hades and fucking ares all exist? Clarisse baby I love you but if your seeing things we can get you help I mean me seeing a hellhound of everything was probably just a result of the alcohol I had earlier and some adrenaline”

Clarisse tapped her foot before letting go and going to her night stand. You watched as she rummaged through until she pulled out a golden coin. “What are You Gonna do with that” You asked with a smile.

“Prove to you I’m not lying” she sighed and grabbed a crystal her roommate had, she propped it up on a table and flashed her phones flashlight through it to make a prism and stepped back. “Oh Iris, goddess of the Rainbow, please accept my offering."

She tossed the coin into the cystals light and it dissolved..your smile dropped and was replaced by confusion. “Camp halfblood Dionysius”

The prism shimmered and soon showed a reflection of a middle aged man sitting at a table with a centaur beside him.

Chiron looked up and smiled. “Ah clarisse daughter of ares, what can I do for you”

Mr.D looked over and rolled his eyes. “Clementine always a pleasure” his tone clearly sarcastic

Clarisse rolled her eyes. “You mean clarisse”

“Same thing”

You had a look of horror on your face as you watched the scene before you. “Claire.. did you say Chiron as in the centaur guy” The two men exchanged looks wondering what the call was really about.

She nodded and held her hand out now showing Chiron and Mr. D You.. there was some silence until Mr.D complained.

—

She ended the Iris message and turned to face you. “You believe me Now” You nodded slowly, she chuckled and walked over grabbing your cheeks and kissing your forehead.

“I.. have a shit ton to explain” she sighed but smiled as you hugged her in response. Clarisse was worried, you were a mortal now stepping into her world but one thing clarisse knew was that you weren’t gonna get hurt she would make sure of that.

Clarisse - and uh that was the battle of manhatten

Y/n - YOU KILLED A DRAKON IN ONE SHOT

Clarisse - …Yeah? THATS ALL YOU TOOK FROM THE STORY

——

Y/n - so have you met Hecate

Clarisse - no Just because I’m a demigod doesn’t mean I’ve met every god, but why her?

Y/n - because she’s cool as shit that’s why

——

Y/n - you shoved a kids head into a toilet because he killed the Minotaur

Clarisse - SUPPOSEDLY killed the Minotaur I mean Percy’s strong now but he was a runt then

Y/n - oh my god clarisse 😭

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Some Desperate Glory

Earth has been destroyed and 14 billion humans are dead with it. A handful of courageous survivors hide from the aliens who killed the earth and strike back as much as they can. Kyr (short for Valkyrie) has been raised since birth to avenge the earth and she fully intends to do so. Given the title and marketing around this book I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the human survivors aren't as heroic as they portray themselves; I will try and be relatively circumspect about the actual plot but if you're planning to read it and sensitive to spoilers you may want to skip this post.

It's Emily Tesh's debut novel though her novella Silver in the Wood was critically acclaimed and won her some major awards. And what a debut it is! I enjoyed Silver in the Wood but never picked up the sequel, this has done much more to pique my interest in what she will write going forward.

Gaea Station

The book begins on Gaea station where Kyr is shortly going to come of age and receive her assignment in the war this remnant of humanity is waging. It will be clear to the reader practically immediately that Kyr has been indoctrinated. The story is told from her POV not to set up a shocking twist that Gaea Station is evil but to explore the psychology of a teenager who has been indoctrinated from birth by a fascist cult. In the acknowledgements Tesh lists a series of books on cults and fascism that she read while writing the novel and the influence of them on the book is clear.

This is where the books excels. Kyr buys into the ideology of Gaea Station with fervour and is fully dedicated to the cause it fights for. It's an entirely convincing portrayal not just in terms of her beliefs but her emotions and even what she subconsciously avoids thinking about. The beginning of the books where the reader is immersed in her perspective is a fascinating perspective of someone who has been indoctrinated to the point that they don't examine the worldview that has been imposed at all.

If this aspect of the book has any flaw it's that Kyr's indoctrination is in large part the result of manipulation and abuse by the man who runs the station. The vast people majority of people in a fascist regime or even a member of a cult that has attained any great size is unlikely to receive such personal attention from the leader and it's one point that lacked verisimilitude.

Along with Kyr Gaea Station is where we're first introduced to the majority of the significant characters. Kyr leads The Sparrows a group of teenage girls training to join the war once they reach adulthood. Kyr is a cruel taskmaster to The Sparrows to put it mildly. Kyr's brother Magnus is interesting in his own rights and even more so when viewed in contrast to Kyr and their relationship while rarely the central focus is compelling. Commander Jole the leader of the station is seen for the first time but it's only later we'll get a in depth sense of him. Magnus's friend Avi is perhaps the most significant character introduced here and is often terrible in a way that feels similar yet distinct to Kyr.

Crucially, Tesh is willing to let Kyr be horrible. Some of the other characters are just powerless and trying to survive but Kyr treats both people she's close to and everyone else terribly. She's harsh to her teammates to the point of driving them to tears, punishes younger children ruthlessly and all the time is unbearably smug and self-righteous about what she's doing.

Until that is, Kyr inevitably leaves Gaea Station and becomes gradually disabused of her commitment to its ideology. While I say gradually in practice it happens remarkably quickly. There is justification for the speed it happens in the plot so I won't complain on the grounds of realism. Nevertheless it's a shame that there wasn't more time given to focus on Kyr getting deprogrammed.

Even as she changes her previous actions are not forgotten. With the exception of a handful of people at the top the book doesn't condemn those who were complicit with Gaea Station but neither is it willing to absolve them.

Humanity, Fuck No!

I expect most people reading this are familiar with the internet subgenre of stories called Humanity Fuck, Yeah!, described by a popular subreddit that collects such stories as "all media exhibiting the awesome potential of humanity, known as HFY or "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!", or I once saw concisely summed up as "human chauvinism" science fiction. On Tumblr you're probably most likely to have come across it through humans as space orcs posts and stories. Some Desperate Glory seems as if it is in part a critical response to these type of stories

Even before Kyr leaves Gaea Station we see what the greater universe things of humanity through excerpts from texts written in the settings. I adore using documents written by people in the setting as a framing device when it's well executed and it is here. As we see more of how humans are viewed, first through the excerpts and later through Kyr experiencing the wider universe - seeing Kyr's initial reactions to people not raised in a fascist cult is a highlight of book - it is clear that humanity fits an inverted HFY mould where the characteristics HFY stories idolise made humans the terror of the universe and ultimately led to their doom.

It does frustrate me that this follows countless other novels that insist on humanity being special (or so unremarkable that they are remarkable in their unremarkableness). It's far from the worst offender and "humanity is uniquely terrible" is a little less tired than "humanity is uniquely great" but it still felt repetitive.

The portrayal of humanity as a violent yet honourable primitive species with bizarre customs also mirrors how empires view people they are colonising. It's unclear how intentional this is but the book never actually does anything with this so that parallel just hovers in the background.

The Majo

The Majo, the society of aliens that inhabits most of the universe and annihilated the Earth, are not an empire. You can tell because the book goes out of its way to tell us they aren't one. Which isn't to say that they are an empire but there are enough similarities that I would have liked to see it addressed more substantively. Chalk it up to this book being way less concerned with imperialism than fascism, I suppose.

The various alien species never feel truly Alien. Nothing so cheap as just humans with rubber foreheads but their mindset is never incomprehensible.

At the centre of Majo society is The Wisdom a godlike supercomputer capable of doing basically anything to the point where we might as well just consider it magic. Princes of a near extinct alien species control The Wisdom and are the ones choosing which course of action to take (including say destroying the earth).

Yiso a young Prince of the Wisdom, comes into focus during this section. The training he undergoes to prepare him for his role had clear similarities to Kyr's own childhood which could have been explored more.

As the book leaves behind a tight focus on Kyr in Gaea Station it begins to stumble occasionally. Aspects of the wider setting are introduced but not given enough focus. Nagging questions are left unanswered. Some parts race by too quickly. There are parts of it where I wasn't sure what the books was aiming for and I'm not convinced Tesh knew either. Despite not quite living up to the standard set by the excellent early chapters it continues to be a deeply engaging book.

With the Wisdom introduced the stage is set for the next section of the book. It poses an almost philosophical question. Would it be better:

1. to kill 14 billion humans.

2. let humanity conquer the universe.

These are the only options. In a thought experiment you can just declare that your only choice is whether to pull the lever or not but stories are not thought experiments. The presentation of those choices as the only two possible options is unconvincing. In a short story you could just gloss over it but in a novel length work you need some sort of justification for why they can't do one of a hundred other alternatives. It's far from a grievous flaw but it bothered me.

Alternative Universes

In the penultimate section of the book we move to the viewpoint of Val a version of Kyr from another universe. After being immersed in Kyr's head from the beginning of the book the shift is jarring in the best possible way. Even the name even though it's a potential shortening of Kyr's own feels wrong.

In this universe humanity won the war against the aliens and now is an empire expanding across and endangering the universe. I don't want to belabour this point too much but this section puts another mark in the "Tesh is significantly less interested in imperialism than fascism" column as any focus on imperialism itself is dispensed with perfunctorily.

Val though lacking Kyr's specific indoctrination is still eager to serve as a soldier in the conquering human military.

Before long Kyr gets her memories of the old universe back as do some of the others. Although notably not Magnus who everyone agrees shouldn't get his counterpart's memories which provides a good moment in itself. Cleo, one of the Sparrows, was already interesting from the little we'd seen of her before and rapidly rose to one of the most interesting characters when we got to see her with two lifetimes worth of memories.

It could fairly be suggested that the number of characters from the original universe who Val has significant relationships with in the new one is contrived but frankly I don't care. It's great to see how they develop in a radically different context and my only complaint is that this section isn't longer. Both seeing the alternative versions of the characters initially and then seeing them integrate a lifetime of memories provides some of the books best moments.

The end of the section undermined the dilemma of whether it's better to kill 14 billion people or let humanity develop into an imperial power by changing the stakes that not destroying the Earth will ultimately lead to the annihilation of countless worlds. The initial dilemma was compelling once you suspended disbelief about the lack of alternatives the new one stacks the deck towards destroying the Earth to the point where the question is less interesting.

More focus on the human empire as an empire and not changing the terms of the consequences of destroying earth so starkly would have been great but the character writing in this section is brilliant enough to more than make up for it.

The Old Lie:

While most of the book after the initial section takes place planets and universes away from Gaea Station it looms over the narrative and as inevitably as Kyr left the climax must return to Gaea Station with the lies it's built on now laid bare to Kyr. Unfortunately this is by some distance the weakest part of the novel. If in the sections after Kyr leaves Gaea Station the book stumbles here it faceplants.

Kyr quickly starts working to undermine Gaea Station and brings The Sparrows on board with her plan and then it quickly becomes clear that apparently Kyr was the only one who ever actually bought into Gaea Station's ideology. I exaggerate but not that much. It's hard to think of a named character who is on board with it. The Sparrows are instantly ready to betray Gaea (and not out of any personal loyalty to Kyr most of them don't even like her), middle ranked officer are shown to be acting out of a mix of self interest and fear and the few at the top are just nakedly self-interested under a thin veneer of justifications.

It makes Kyr's earlier genuine belief appear as a rare if not unique exception. When you combine this with the focused personal manipulation of Kyr from Jole (a couple of scenes do a great job of conveying his charisma and skill with influencing people) we don't see anyone who has been indoctrinated to actually actually in circumstances typical of the average person on the station. Something like having one of The Sparrows betray them or at least have to be argued into going along with the rest would have improved this a lot.

This section of the book moves to directly address racism and sexism on Gaea but I often found the manner it did so awkward. Half the time it was just showing something about Gaea Station that we'd already seen and then tacking on "and that's bad because it's racist/sexist" when that was already obvious. A little subtly wouldn't go amiss. There are some notable exceptions including memorably an excerpt from a book written about Gaea that talks about it in a manner that the framing made feel much more natural than when it came up at other points. Interestingly by contrast homophobia was left more implicit. It's more directly addressed later in the book but even then it's more of a light handed show not tell approach.

The ending itself is no better than the rest of the final section. It pulls it's punches and gives a happy ending that feels two easy after everything that happened. It jars with the rest of the story.

Some Desperate Glory tends to be better the smaller the scale it's operating at is. When it's laser focused on Kyr it's damn near perfect, when it's about Gaea Station or the handful of major characters it's still amazingly good but when it pulls out to a larger scale it's still interesting but a lot more flaws start to show.

If it gave the parts with The Wisdom some more thought, allowed Kyr's deradicatilisation a higher page count and showed others who genuinely believed Gaea's ideology, addressed imperialism with if not as much focus as fascism more than the book gives it, and doubled the length of the section with the alternative timeline I'd have no complaints that weren't quibbles. Even so this is an amazing book and I'm eager to see what Tesh writes next.

[melanielocke]

Book recommendations: queer adult SFF

It's been a while since I did one of these posts but I'm thinking of doing more regularly. I have read a lot more new books that I hope some of you will pick up and I've made another selection. I'm reading more and more adult SFF lately because lots of YA is getting a little too young for me. But I also find that transitioning to reading more adult can be difficult, and it's not always easy to find what you're looking for. I found YA a far easier market to navigate, so I figured I'd make a post featuring some of my favorite adult SFF books.

The Unbroken & the Faithless I read recently.

This is a trilogy, with book 3 coming out most likely in 2025? Not sure actually. The series focuses on Touraine and Luca. Touraine is a conscript in the Balladaire army, stolen from her homeland and trained to fight from a young age. She is originally from Qazal, a country colonized by Balladaire, but doesn't speak their language or understand their customs. In the first book, she returns home for the first time since she was taken, to stop a Qazali rebellion.

Luca is the princess of Balladaire. Her parents both died when she was young, and her uncle is ruling as regent, refusing to allow her to be crowned Queen until she proves herself. She too is sent to deal with the Qazali rebellion. What makes Luca interesting is that she often means well and is definitely more benevolent towards the Qazali, but she's also very power hungry and wants her throne, and no matter how much she does to help the Qazali she is still the princess of the empire that colonized them, and the author continues to hold her accountable for her role in the empire and some of the choices she makes.

Luca is also disabled, she injured her leg when she was young and uses a cane.

There is a sapphic romance between Luca and Touraine. It is not really the focus on the series but at the same time it is what shapes much of the negotiating between them since Luca has a very obvious soft spot for Touraine and Touraine has to use that to improve things for Qazal.

The world is inspired by North Africa and French colonialism (in Balladaire they speak French so I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be France), and the author themself is Black and North African. The series as a whole is very political.

Next is Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans

This is the first in a duology (I think?) with book 2 coming out this November.

This is set in a world where there are four different planes, and Siyon is a poor man who can delve into the different planes to get ingredients for wealthier alchemists. He wants to be an alchemist himself but can't afford the education. There's also the problem of magic being technically illegal, which means rich people can do alchemy but poor people can't.

Then one day Siyon accidently unleashes wild magic and is thrust into the world of alchemists where he wants to belong but doesn't. And there's also the matter of the four planes being instable and at risk of collapsing, and Siyon might be the only one capable of stopping it.

Siyon is bi/pan and his main love interest is a man, though this is not the main focus of the series.

Then Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

I think I had this one last time too, but not enough people are reading it so I'm going to discuss it again.

Check out the summary, but honestly not sure if that does it justice. Some Desperate Glory is the story of a girl who grew up in a fascist cult and was raised to believe in everything this cult stands for.

The earth was destroyed before she was born, and the Majo, aliens, were responsible. Kyr has been training her entire life for revenge. She wants nothing more than to be the perfect soldier for earth. As a result, she is a terrible person and everyone hates her.

Kyr first starts questioning Gaea station when she is assigned nursery to have babies even though she is the best fighter in her mess. When her brother disappears, she teams up with his friend Avi, a queer genius who works with the station's systems and was always aware of how fucked up Gaea station is. They discover Magnus has been sent on a suicide mission and go after him, and Kyr is confronted with the outside world, including a Majo she grows close to, and has to unlearn everything Gaea station taught her.

This book has a difficult to stomach mc at first, though it is very obvious what she believes is not what you as the reader are supposed to think. But there is some wonderful character development going on in here. It's hard for her to change, and she's thrown into lots of difficult situations before she gets there, but in the end you can see she's nothing like the person she was before.

There's an amazing cast of side characters, though not a very big cast. There's her twin brother Magnus who never wanted to be a soldier and is actually very depressed, which Kyr never noticed. Yiso, the cute non binary alien Kyr develops a weak spot for even before she comes to realize Majo are people. And my personal favorite, Avi, who is an unhinged little guy who is way too smart for his own good. He's a great example of how a cult can affect different people in different ways. He doesn't believe in Gaea station like Kyr does and is aware of how fucked up he is, he experienced that first hand as the only visible queer person on the station. But he did internalize their messages of revenge and violence which plays out in interesting ways.

This edition is the Illumicrate edition of the book from April's box, which has the UK cover.

Witch King by Martha Wells is next

This is a confusing book for people who do not have a lot of experience reading adult fantasy. It has a lot of world building that is explained gradually, the book doesn't really hold your hand, so be prepared for that.

Kai is a body hopping demon. He has been betrayed, killed and entombed under water. When he is freed by a lesser mage hoping to hone his power, he kills them and frees himself and his friend, the witch Ziede.

Together, they have to uncover what happened to them, who betrayed them and what is going on with the Rising World coalition. He's not going to like the answers.

Alternating is a past timeline in which Kai and his band of allies rebel against the tyrannical rule of the Hierophants, which happened decades before the present timeline.

The strenght of this book is really in the characters and how they grow and the bonds they have with each other. I loved the relationship between Kai and Bashasa, who is the rebel leader in the past timeline in particular. It's not quite clear what the nature of their relationship was, though it is implied to be romantic and I do think Kai is supposed to be queer. He is a body hopping demon after all, and spends his early life in the body of a girl. There's also a sapphic side pairing between Zieden and her wife Tahren, who they spent much of the present timeline looking for.

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach

This is a science fantasy set in a world inspired by New Zealand and Maori (I think? The author is Maori and a trans woman herself)

The main character is a police officer from a poor background who believes she's making the world better for people like her. She's already been demoted for being queer but believes she can make the police force better from the inside.

Then she's murdered by fellow officers and thrown into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she comes back from the dead with new magic powers.

She teams up with a pirate crew with similar powers and has to stop a plague from being unleashed on her city.

This book focuses on how police functions in many modern societies to protect the wealthy and harm and restrict poorer, non white communities. The main character doesn't believe this at first but it's obvious to the reader that they're not helping anyone doing their job. Next book is coming out next year.

Last is the Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

Two books are out and book 3 is coming sometime in 2024.

This series is set in a world inspired by India. Priya is a maidservant with a secret. She is one of the few surviving temple children and still has some powers from being once born.

Malini is the princess of Parijatdvipa, the empire that conquered Priya's land. Her religious zealot brother has taken the throne and imprisons Malini because she refuses to be burned alive.

Priya is one of the maidservants sent to take care of Malini in her prison, which is the old temple where Priya grew up. Together, they can change the fate of an empire, but they can never quite trust each other.

This is a sapphic fantasy with magic but also lots of politics and I think if you like this series you'd also like the Unbroken and vice versa. I've talked about this one before but it should definitely be included on a list for adult fantasy.

I hope you can find something you like on here. All these books are not super well known and deserve a bigger audience

@alastaircarstairsdefenselawyer @life-through-the-eyes-of @astriefer @justanormaldemon @ipromiseiwillwrite @a-dream-dirty-and-bruised @amchara @all-for-the-fanfiction @imsoftforthomastair @ddepressedbookworm @queenlilith43 @wagner-fell @cant-think-of-anything @laylax13s @tessherongraystairs @boredfangirl16 @artist-in-soul @aliandtommy @ikissedsmithparker

[sapphicbookclub]

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.

They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.

Genres: sci-fi, romance

Order from Blackwell's here and get free worldwide shipping!

[ossifer]

What of the Sun?

AKA: Alecto, Gaea, and Uranus—why John Gaius is connected to Dominicus.

Special thanks to @the-sword-lesbian for inciting me with this question, and then going on to listen to all the conspiracy board rambling that ensued whilst offering up her own excellent questions:

Alecto, Gaea, and Uranus

Alecto is, as we know, named after the Fury of the same name from Greek myth whose name literally translates to ' the implacable or unceasing anger'. John, after becoming God, took the surname Gaius, the masculine form of the name Gaia.

Something notable about the Alecto of myth is her parentage: she is the daughter of Gaea (also spelt Gaia), the personification of the Earth, who was fertilised by the blood of Uranus, the personification of the sky (who was also Gaia's son and husband). Uranus' blood was spilt when his and Gaia's youngest son, Cronus, castrated and overthrew him, with the blood from his severed genitals falling upon the Earth (Gaia) and birthing Alecto in the process; Cronus is sometimes interpreted as also being Chronos, the personification of time.

Dominicus, the name John bestowed upon the resurrected Sun, has its origins explicitly stated by John. It is derived from Psalm 27:1, which he partially quotes while talking to Harrow: “The Lord is the source of my light and my safety, so whom shall I fear?”

“A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets,” he said. “And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus. As a reminder. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? God is my light.[...]

Dominicus and Thanergetic Stars

He said, As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you … I hid you in me. And when we were together … once the shaman had claimed the sun … I became God. He said, It wasn’t enough. He said, The ships … the ships were still full of people. I reached our hand out into space. I extended. I struggled. He said, I bit through the sun first. It’s human nature. That started things going. Once you take down the sun, you’re cooking with gas, pardon the pun.

It’s a dark and cold and unlovely part of space, and the stars there are old and were nearly dead then. We nuked them with thanergy and now they’ll shine forever, but the light is not the same …

From the glare of the plex window, beside some perfectly ordinary white twill curtains, the buried monster turned herself so that she was lit in the light of the undead stars.

THE MITHRAEUM, THE SEAT of the First Reborn! The Sanctuary of the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the bolthole of God—the removing place of hallowed bones, and the ossuary of the steadfast! A space station hidden forty billion light-years from the ever-burning light of Dominicus, lit by thanergetic starlight, set in the midst of the circumstellar disc, an ancient jewel within so much dead gravel.

As we see from the above, stars are implicitly naturally thalergetic in character, and through necromantic intervention (nuked them with thanergy) can be rendered thanergetic: undead and everburning, emitting thanergetic starlight. Curiously, nuked them with thanergy is eerily close to how flipping a planet is described by Harrow:

You drove the point of the bone-sheathed blade into the talc—obviously you never wanted it to have an edge of any kind, ever again—and using the sword as your focus, drove a killing lance of thanergy right into the planet’s heart. The planet did not quake, or howl, or freeze, or writhe, skewered on your necromancy’s tines. You began the cascade outward, as you had been taught. A wide thanergetic scythe sheared out into the mantle, deeper into the minute thalergy of the rock, into the solid stone’s buried recollections of the day its ball of dust was formed.

Flipping a planet involves focusing thanergy into a killing implement that is driven into the planet's heart, its soul, inducing a cascading thalergy-thanergy reaction that fuels itself, thanergy decaying thalergy into more thanergy and burning through it:

The thanergy scoured through the soul like a lit taper touched to flimsy. The living flush of this rocky outcrop began to die in dizzying, concentric rings: flipping, the thanergy feeding on the thalergy as locusts fed on wheat. As the soul tore away, an extra thanergetic bloom fanned the fire of what you had already done.

Planets, as we are told in Harrow the Ninth, have souls: a communal soul, arising from the thalergetic complexity of the microbial life present on them much in the same way a human's soul emerges from the thalergetic complexity of its internal microbial life.

“And what has a soul?” “Anything with a thalergetic complexity significant enough to … have a soul. So, humanity.” [...] “A planet’s a ball of dust. Its thalergy comes from the accumulation of microbial life. You can’t consider it one coherent system.” “Call it a communal soul,” said her Emperor. “What’s a human being, other than a sack of microbial life?

This explanation has always reminded me of how the human body is explained in terms of a hierarchy of organisation and complexity: the lowest unit is the cell, cells come together to form tissues, tissues form organs, organs form organ systems, and the sum total of these connected systems is the human body. The soul, then, is implicitly the organisational level above the body: the body is the tissue, the soul is the organ; it is shown by Anastasia's tripod principle that the soul indeed plays a vital part in the functioning of the body:

“There was a bad option where your soul snapped straight into her body, leaving your body stuck with no soul at all, and that would have been a shit time all round.” “Would I have died?” Nona asked, interested. “You’d have tried to,” said Pyrrha. “The body needs thalergy and a soul to keep the lights on. Anastasia’s tripod principle. Body plus thalergy, but no soul, is basically a very weird vegetable … after a while it gives up and shuts down.”

Without a soul, the biological processes cease and the body shuts down; thalergy, in the absence of a soul, decays into thanergy. Flipping a thalergetic planet involves thanergetically disrupting its soul to induce a cascading thanergetic reaction. Thalergetic stars 'nuked' with thanergy become undead, ever-shining, thanergetic: they are flipped.

Stars have souls. Dominicus has a soul.

Why John Gaius is connected to Dominicus

You said, “So if you die, the Houses die with you. The star warming our system fails, and—becomes a gravitational well, as I understand it?” “Yes. A black hole, like the one that took out Cyrus,”

The Sun would need to be about 20 times more massive to end its life as a black hole. Stars that are born this size or larger can explode into a supernova at the end of their lifetimes before collapsing back into a black hole, an object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Ergo, the black hole part is a load of bullshit—but, you know, necromancy; the important part of that quote is that John claims that when he dies, Dominicus dies with him.

When Mercymorn tries, and fails, to kill John, Dominicus falters and does indeed begin to undergo a collapse: John's 'death' somehow affects Dominicus from all this distance away, and him coming back results in it stabilising again.

“Right,” he said, and closed his eyes briefly. Then he said, “The sun has stabilized. Hope the Sixth House didn’t get cooked in the flare.”

John says that he reignited the Sun, yes, but I think it goes deeper than just that: I think John put more than just Earth in Alecto's body, and more than just his soul in Alecto's.

Anastasia's tripod principle stipulates that a body with thalergy and no soul shuts down—Dominicus undergoes collapse when John's body is destroyed by Mercymorn, when his soul is decoupled from its material tether—John's soul is the Sun's soul.

“Once the shaman had claimed the sun … I became God.”

The soul of a planet is communal, composed of the sum total of the life present on it: John killed the life upon Earth by inciting a global nuclear war, then killing those humans who were spared the fate of atomic fire. He had to kill the world to put his hands around her throat. He became God by eating her, by hiding him in her, and her in him—the shaman claimed the sun.

He said, I bit through the sun first.

Alecto was born from the blood of Uranus being spilt upon Gaia by their son Cronus; Uranus is the personification of the sky, the husband and son of Gaia. John took the name Gaius when he reignited the Sun, after spilling its blood upon the Earth and creating Alecto: he became one with Gaia, tied his soul to hers and to the sun's.

The Mithraeum is 'a space station hidden forty billion light-years from the ever-burning light of Dominicus, lit by thanergetic starlight'. The ever-burning light of Dominicus contrasted by thanergetic starlight. Immortal, but alive.

“The eyes have it, John.”

He approached her, and she saw that his sclera were black as space. The irises were dark and leadenly iridescent—a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. The pupils were as glossy black as the sclera.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses drummed his fingers over his belt. It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes: the irises like black shadows of the Canaanite white, that iridescent absence of colour, a shade rather than a tint; the purity of the white ring; then the matte black of the sclera. “A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets,” he said. “And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus[...]

You could study him without shyness: the shining iridescence of his irises, the unyielding black of the cornea and pupil, the long, square, urbane face.

And his eyes were just absolutely, insanely fucked up: deep black wells, this unreflective flat black. Even from where I was, I could see the white light that circled the irises: a cold, flickering perimeter.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 49 – Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Introduction

I forget who initially recommended me this book, but I owe them an incredible debt. Really the only disappointing thing is that I hadn’t heard of it even sooner, as this really is just perfectly tailored to appeal to me specifically. First science fiction/fantasy novel I can remember reading in a long time that I actively wished was longer. As a testament to how much I liked this book – this review is long enough to need subheadings.

So! Some Desperate Glory is a space opera, following Kyr (Valkyr, technically), a 17-year-old cadet and genetically enhanced ‘warbreed’ golden girl of Gaea Station – that being the quasi-fascist statelet of militant dead-enders who fled to a desolate planetoid in a dead system to continue the war after aliens destroyed the earth/most of humanity. After she gets assigned to Nursery (read: breeding the next generation of soldiers) instead of a combat wing and has a crisis of faith, she talks herself into running away to help her brother on the suicide mission terrorist attack he was deployed on. With the help of one of her brother’s friends and a captured alien, she manages it, discovers that her brother had absolutely no intention of actually following orders once he’d made it out, and take it upon herself to do her own, better, terrorism. From there the plot gets weird, and I’m going to spoil it shamelessly talking about it, but if you value surprises when reading at all just stop this review and go read it.

The Heroine

Kyr is, and I say this lovingly, the most insufferable bitch of a 17-year-old military brat I’ve ever spent time in the head of (at least at first). Even compared to the other indoctrinated child soldiers she’s the cop nobody likes. She then spends the first third to half of the book unlearning this indoctrination, by which I mean very arduously and painfully reaching a point of ‘the fascist cult was a corruption and black mark on the good name of the death cult vengeful crusade, I’ll do it better’ and ‘it’s probably okay to not, like, personally hate aliens who were too young to have been alive when the earth was destroyed. Torturing them for no reason is wrong, like abusing animals was, back when there were animals’. She spends the entire book expecting on a bone-deep level to get herself killed for the cause, and at the end of the book is only like 10% of the way better (one of the last beats in the entire story is, standing with one of her only friends and sure they’re both about to run out of life support, offering to snap their neck for them because ‘asphyxiation’s a nasty way to go’). Whenever she is confronted with the idea that some people aren’t constantly aware of the possibility of physical violence or get to live their lives as something other than a bullet in the gun seeking vengeance for a dead planet she wants to scream and smash things at the unfairness of it all. I adore her.

Honestly my only real complaint is how quickly she starts mellowing out in the second and third acts of the story. There’s extenuating circumstances (whole extra life of memories, time loop bullshit, forcibly confronted with what she said she wanted and what it looks like, etc), but past the one real big hump it did rather feel like her character development suddenly became a bit smooth and easy/. This is one of the things I’m talking about when I say I wish the book was longer – everything after the first big climax and the time travel/universe editing felt kind of rushed and abbreviated.

As far as being a #problematic fave goes, Kyr was also very carefully kept from being, like, directly personally culpable for anything really unforgivable. Which I do understand why from a wanting people to sympathize with the racist homophobic fascist child soldier, but like – you’ve already introduced time travel and retroactivity. C’mon, don’t get cold feet now. Let her and Avi really share the ‘killed trillions in a universe that retroactively never happened’ credit.

Also, and entirely tangentially – you know how in a lot of action shows, the hero has incredibly emotionally tense rivalries and/or camaraderie with other guys, and then also an extremely conventionally feminine girlfriend off to the side somewhere who does like two things in the entire story and mostly seems to exist to prove he’s straight? Kyr has that, except she is textually gay (if incredibly repressed about it and like 90% of the way to asexual in terms of libido). Sorry Lis, but you are literally barely a character. Cleo’s right there, and already has a personality that’s more than two bullet points and is actually involved in the plot in ways beyond ‘love interest’.

Gaea Station

The shitty fascist asteroid habitat that Kyr grew up on is (if barely) the primary setting of the story, and as far as portrayals of incredibly unbalanced and fundamentally broken society just full of cultlike and ultranationalist neuross. I kind of love it as a dystopian setting, though I feel like the author kind of over-egged the pudding on it by the end of the book.

Society is organized into what feels like an intentional parody of a lot of YA dystopia setups, where you live in a tightly integrated mess all through adolescence (each with their own heraldic animal to idenity with!) but then at 17 your exams determine the branch of society you will be assigned to for the rest of your life to do your duty for humanity. Of course, unlike most YA dystopias, the System isn’t the result of some leviathan-state ruling the fates of millions or a tradition that’s going back generations upon generations – it’s a ramshackle mess that can barely consistently feed its warrior elites enough protein slop to take advantage of their genetically engineered hormone levels for muscle growth. It’s all so clearly and intentionally artificial and fake that it loops around to feeling extremely realistic.

Also do love how the elder generation all have names like Joel or Ursa or Elena, while the younger generation are all Valkyr and Magnus and Avicenna and Zenobia. The only really surprising thing is that they don’t specifically call out how children are raised in common and without individual families as following Plato’s Republic – it’s exactly the sort of attempt to create a grand unifying mythology for all of Earth’s true and vengeful children.

I really do wish Tesh had trusted the reader a bit more about it, though. Like, we can tell that almost all the names of the younger generation are either historical figures form the Mediterranean/Greco-Roman world or Norse mythology (with a few exceptions like Avicenna who fit the general aesthetic if not those exact conditions), which puts a bit of a lie to the whole ‘pan-human’ bit. It’s a clever bit of characterization through worldbuilding! You don’t need to call it out twice in dialogue between characters and then again in an in-universe scholarly essay excerpt at the start of a chapter. I can’t complain too badly though, she’s really not even close to being the worst for that I’ve read recently.

One thing I did like especially because I don’t think it was ever called out and brought front and centre is just the sort of, like, perfect irony of both Kyr and her brother Magnus – ‘warbreed’ engineered supersoldiers with physical capabilities beyond any baseline human, blonde aryan ubermensch, the golden children and eugenic future of Gaea Station/true humanity – both being queer and totally unsuited to their assigned gender roles. If it was, like, specifically brought up in a big monologue as disproof of the Gaean ideology or something it’d feel much too on the nose, but as just a set of facts underlying the characterization of the protagonists I liked it quite a lot.

Trio Dynamics

They don’t actually have all that much pagecount spent together, now that I think about it, but as far as I’m concerned the absolute heart of the story is the dynamic between Kyr, Avi (Avicenna, genius-level hacker and cynical rat bastard discontented Gaea Station restaurant) and Yiso (young and rebellious Prince of the Wisdom, taken captive by Gaea when they’re personal ship came too close and then liberated/kidnapped by the other two in their escape attempt). It’s peak trauma-bonding in that the first time it involves a) Avi torturing Yiso to force the alien supercomputer to let him access it and b) Kyr shooting Avi in the head after he uses access to the supercomputer to wipe out 90% of galactic civilization as payback for the whole ‘destroyed Earth with an antimatter missile’ thing (she got a case of morals when confronted with what ‘winning’ would mean. Also her brother shooting himself.)

By all rights they should absolutely hate each other and after two temporal recursions and oceans of retroactively unspilled blood on all their hands they’re the only people who even slightly understand each other. At one point Kyr tells Yiso ‘just so you know, I don’t really care about you as a person,’ and then immideately thinks ‘that was a lie. Why did I say that?’ Avi and Kyr both deprogram themselves from the cult that raised them but only the ‘loyalty to the cult’ bits and not the ‘alien race war vengance death cult’ bits. Yiso meets Kyr in an atemporal training simulation and gets retroactive Stockholm syndrone even though the first time they actually meet she breaks their ribs for repressed teenager reasons. They all drive me absolutely insane and I absolutely adore them. Even if Avi’s redemption felt waaaaay too rushed and unjustified in the final recursion, willing to forgive it here.

Time Loops

The big twist of the story is that, having fucked up and enabled Avi taking vengeance for Earth by doing the same thing to every other alien species, Kyr jumps into the alien supercomputer time manipulation buisness wholesale and goes back to prevent the destruction of Earth. Which then fast forwards to her being a newly minted officer in the Terran Expeditionary Fleet that is the imperial power dominating the known galaxy in increasingly high-collateral damage ways as time goes on. Yiso, in this timeline the beating heart and soul of the main alien resistance group, seeks her out and restores her memories and they go back to try and hijack the alien supercomputer before the government office whose hijacked its crippled remnants (as helmed by the alternate-timeline version of Gaea Station’s great leader, now a fleet admiral of the ‘Providence’ division) manage to literally destroy the universe.

It is mostly down to all the fanfic I’ve read, but I really, really adore timeline divergences that ropagate out and leave all the major characters different but similar people in alien yet appropriate situations. I also adore time travel stories about someone turning the timeline into swiss cheese trying to brute force their way to the one and only golden ending. So I adore this whole conceit. Really my only complaint is that there were only two (one and a half, really) recursions. Not that I’m demanding a full groundhog day here. But, like, it’d have been nice. And Kyr/Avi/Yiso continuously bumping into each other in different configurations and usually ending up at gunpoint would have been ann absolutely amazing bit.

Space Orcs

I can’t be sure Tesh actually had any exposure to the whole online meme of ‘humans as space orcs’, but I do and it’s really impossible to read the book as anything but an examination of the idea. Compared to every alien species ever encountered, humans are tall, heavy, muscular, impulsive, and violent. In a one-on-one confrontation they’ll snap any other species’ neck. The very first pages of the book are an excerpt from an in-universe text writing for an aliens about how actually really humans are very intelligent, and then talking about how threat displays and ‘human culture’. In the original timeline they even fit into the usual social niche of orcs in a lot of fantasy these days – the scattered and diminished remnants of a brutal empire that was defeated and mostly-exterminated in their attempts to conquer the universe.

The book’s handling of this doesn’t really have a point, as far as I can tell – the worldbuilding’s sufficiently divorced from anything real that trying to call it a commentary on racism or genocide or conquering empires is a stretch. (It is after all a fundamental point of the book that the obliteration of earth and extermination of the vast majority of humanity really was the only way the Wisdom could prevent the Terran Federation from conquering the known galaxy. Which is I’m extremely sure not something the author intends to be a historical analogy.) I found it a fun bit of worldbuilding and interesting subversion of normal space opera tropes regarding humanity’s relative abilities, anyway.

Theodicy

Is an incredibly pretentious way to title this section, but also in a sense kind of the core of the book’s plot? In an interesting way, and I think it’s really the book’s greatest weakness that it doesn’t explore or grapple with it enough.

Which is to say – the Wisdom is at the heart of galactic civilization. It’s an alien AI with vague but vast (though limited) reality-warping and precognitive powers. It does not rule the civilizations that accept it, but guides them as a benevolent god towards best, happiest outcomes with whatever support they ask for or need. To determine what ‘best’ means, it creates its Princes, vat-grown heirs to the dead species that created it, with a lifespan of millenia spent going through simulations and interacting with the world to provide the data and decision-making it requires to make that sort of strategic decision.

The Terran Federation’s attempt to reverse-engineer or hijack the Wisdom put it in a situation where the only solution its princes could find was to destroy the better part of humanity and even more of their industry and culture. Through the plot of the first acts of the book, Kyr and her genius-level-hacker friend hijack a node of it and Kyr convinces/forces it to accept her decision-making instead of its prince (who they just killed). This results in an explicitly colonialist human empire ruling over aliens as oppressed subjects, and using the half-wrecked and poorly understood Wisdom to eliminate threats before they occur (shunting the reality backlash off to alien worlds they don’t care about). The next acts of the book mostly resolve around fixing or reverting this, and end with Kyr diving back into a node and having another conversation with it.

A conversation which is basically it giving up. It reverts things back to the human-genocide timeline, then shuts down its infrastructure and goes dark, leaving the entire mostly pacifistic and loosely governed galactic civilization it had protected suddenly on its own. Humanity were such assholes we found a loving god and then convinced it to kill itself.

Which, like, could 100% totally work. As far as high concept short story prompts go its incredible. But as far as actually driving the action goes the Wisdom is the one who makes the most important deciisons in the entire book, and determine the entire shape of the plot. For it to land, it really really needed more than two and a half short conversations on screen, at least to me.

TL:DR

Good book, lesbian doing space atrocities, should have been longer.

[haveyoureadthispoll]

While we live, the enemy shall fear us. All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity. They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined. A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel.

[spyglassrealms]

Major UNH Members

A brief list of the largest (by population) members of the interstellar United Nations of Humanity in the Astra Planeta canon.

United Sol System

System: Sol Seat: Gaea Station, Earth orbit Population: 12.78 billion

Centauri Republic

System: Alpha Centauri Seat: Chiron Station, Fortuna-Concordia circumbinary orbit Population: 18.45 billion

New Nations of Helios

System: Helios (Barnard's Star) Seat: Astraeus Station, Hemeran orbit Population: 9.56 billion

Dogstar Federation

Systems: Sirius, Procyon, Luyten's Star, Kapetyn's Star, Ross 614, Lucina, Itzpapalotl, Erra Seat: Remus Station, Procyon Prime orbit Population: 11.54 billion

Winds of Anemos

System: Anemos (HH Andromedae) Seat: Port Magellan, Hippotes, Tempest Belt Population: 3.4 billion

Pantheon Alliance

Systems: Olympia (AX Microscopii), Othrys (Lacaille 9352), Erebus (EZ Aquarii) Seat: None Population: 22.6 billion

Takamagahara Unitary Republic

System: Takamagahara (61 Cygni) Seat: Tengokyokai Station, Inari orbit Population: 7.08 billion

[ifishouldvanish]

Gutless

Finally posted a smutty MegThan AU I shared on @thehadeslounge discord a while back.

SHIP: Megaera x Thanatos

RATING: Explicit

TAGS: AU - 1990s, Friends With Benefits, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Fingering, Oral Sex

WORDS: 3,179

SUMMARY: Record shop employee Thanatos is in love with his childhood best friend, Megaera–the bold, beautiful, and talented frontwoman of a local band that'll definitely be landing a record deal soon. He'd tell her, of course–but what would be the point? He knows he'd only hold her back.

I… have something I think you might like," Thanatos said, crouching down behind the counter and sliding out the crate of stuff he deemed too good to be out on the floor. Stuff he didn't want landing in undeserving hands, into ears that wouldn't adequately appreciate them. He poked through the collection of cassettes, 8-tracks, and 45s until he found what he was looking for, then rose up and slid the cassette tape across the counter.

Megaera peered down at the worn jewel case with keen interest. The off-white cassette inside had the words Wings of Nemesis - 40 Lashes Demo scrawled over it in black marker.

The mere existence of the thing had practically been an urban legend. Nemesis didn't make many copies of her work apart from the few she had sent to local radio stations and promoters, and while you could probably find a few bootleg copies of subpar quality at a secondhand shop in the area, the masters–where you could actually still hear the highs–were impossibly hard to find.

And when it came to Wings of Nemesis, you needed the highs.

Megaera's lips curved into a grin, and her eyes swept back up to meet his. "How'd you get a hold of this one?" She asked, plucking it off the counter with hot pink nails.

He shrugged, ignoring the sudden dryness in his throat. "I have my sources."

He'd spotted it in a box Charon and Hermes and brought back from their last flea market haul–tossed among the stuff they'd dismissed as junk. The real treasures, as far as they were concerned, were the collection of Beatles, Stones, and T. Rex records in pristine condition that they could sell at a high margin. The demo recordings of a local garage rock band that split up before they could get signed was, in their words, "not worth the space it would take up on the shelf."

He'd started his little collection with the intention of proving them wrong. That the right person would be happy to spend a hefty chunk of change on these little artifacts of the local scene. But the reality was that he was too reluctant to part with most of them, to the point that the only people he ever sold any of them to were Megaera, her sisters, or the people in bands he saw often enough to have some rapport with–the latter only because Alecto had run her mouth about him hooking her up with a Gaea's Revenge record a while back. Nonetheless, he never pushed his wares; only relented when someone asked for something by name.

Unless that someone was Megaera.

"How much you want for it?" She asked.

Thanatos looked down at the counter and drummed his fingers, trying to hide his blush. "It's… yours."

[Continue On AO3]

[witchhazelevesque]

More Spider-Man!Leo HC's

@sugar-r-rush whoop I had a bit of writer's block on this but here's some more thoughts!

Okay SO

Lemme start with this Hestia idea

I love her and I've always thought she'd love Esperanza. I just thought of her having a place for demigods while I was typing that lol. But actually, that would make a lot of sense, because Hestia's always done what she thinks is right by her family even if others didn't understand her choices.

Plus, I think she'd play dumb if Zeus ever caught her, but like, she's got the mindset of 'pssh, what's my little brother going to do about it?"

Breaking the rules for her niblings :)

Anyway, she probably has multiple of these types of homes around the world, and she doesn't spend too much time there because she doesn't want to risk the other gods finding out about them. They're kind of like the Way Station and the Chase Base (side note, she also loves Magnus and Alex, it transcends pantheons), but normal houses.

So some kids stay long term, some just use it as a rest stop, it's all good. It's a nice little community where they're all demigods, but it's not about training and serving like the camps.

It's mostly a normal life, which is something Leo wants after the Gaea.

Well, somewhat normal.

IDK, maybe Piper joins him because she's also done with the demigod game and she loves her dad, but she doesn't feel that California is her home.

Something I've wondered about for a while is whether Leo ever got to visit his mom's grave. Did he get to go to her funeral? What was the situation immediately after the fire?

Either way, he hasn't been in years, if ever, and that's the catalyst for him returning to Houston. It's a clear, definable, concrete goal, which is anchoring him to reality since he's still getting over you know, dying. And even before that, he'd never had a moment to just. exist.

It terrifies him.

Piper does come with him at least for the beginning, and that is indescribably comforting.

Leo's tired, is the thing.

He's tired of the gods dictating his life, of needing their approval and their mercy.

But most of all, he's tired of running.

So he's not going to do it anymore.

And he goes back to the first place he ever ran from.

He doesn't bother with his biological family. He's long since learned what real family is.

He's got his real family with him when he sets the bouquet of sunflowers on Esperanza's grave.

Piper booked them a hotel, but when they're turning to leave, they spot a small figure at the end of the pathway.

Leo's demigod instincts tell him that this is not a mortal, but that they're also not in danger.

Hestia appears as an older woman instead of her usual child-like appearance, just to achieve that aunt look.

Leo's wary, though he doesn't think she's ever contributed to any of the problems he or his friends have had.

When he looks into her eyes, he's washed with this understanding of her approach to fire. It's nothing like what he's experienced. Hers is warm and comforting and protective.

But showing him that isn't what she's actually here for.

Leo wasn't expecting what she actually came for.

When she passes him the bundle of fabric, he stares down at it blankly.

The navy and gray wool and leather feels warm against his hands, and Leo remembers his mother wearing this, in pictures from photo albums of her youth, sometimes when she'd take him to the park on the rare days when it was cold enough for a jacket and nice enough to be outside.

He remembers her picking him up and holding him against her chest, remembers the slightly scratchy material of the wool, the smooth, cool leather, how it smelled of their laundry detergent and his mom's shampoo.

He lifts the garment to his nose and somehow, after all these years, it still smells exactly the same.

He doesn't even mind that he's crying, the sort where the tears well and flow seamlessly.

He's in a bit of a daze as Hestia asks them to join her for dinner. Piper puts a hand on his shoulder to get his thoughts, and he nods, because she just reunited him with a piece of his past that he never thought he'd see again.

The thought of wearing the jacket hadn't crossed his mind, so when Piper asks if she can help him into it, he takes a minute to process the question.

But he nods again, and when the weight of the jacket settles over his shoulders, he feels a comfort that he hasn't since the last time his mom smiled at him.

Leo can't remember the last time he had a home cooked meal that he didn't have to make himself.

It's odd.

It's… making him feel some kind of way.

The house Hestia brought them too is warm, in color, in atmosphere, in the way it’s lived in.

They both realize that other people must live here too, but no one else comes out, and Leo's relieved.

Eventually, Hestia brings up a topic Leo wasn't really expecting.

His mother's will was… a complicated matter, to put it lightly. She had started making more money than she expected in her career at the end, more than she had ever before, and the whole… spider situation could have changed the game in a ridiculous way, but the research was lost in the fire. Her assets were willed to Leo, but the rest of the family contested that, and with his age, the circumstances surrounding the fire, the accusations throw around, the company's shady business practices- well.

If Leo had had the choice, he would have picked having his mom back, and the money brought out the worst of his extended family. That he could at least understand, even if it disgusted him, but Rosa seemed bent on ruining any chance he had to stay with anyone he knew. Now that he's older, he can see she did it because she was grieving her sister, but Leo's not going to forgive her.

As the situation stands now, a large portion of his mother's assets were eaten up by legal fees, her contract with her company is a legal gray area and they took advantage of that to keep her research and inventions for themselves (maybe this could be part of a plot idk). "I'm glad to be made aware of this," Leo says, and he thinks he means it, this is all a lot to process. "But why were you involved?"

Hestia smiles sadly. "Money was always a violate aspect of the home," she says. "My sister had a hand in shaping your future, but she did not consider this matter. I believed it fell in my jurisdiction. I managed to save what was irreplaceable-"

Here she gestures to the letterman that Leo still hasn't taken off.

"-along with some other belongings of yours and hers. There is also a small amount of funds left that I have managed to retain for you. It is not much, but it will help you establish yourself should you choose to take that path."

Leo's familiar with the talk of paths and senses that there's more to discuss her. "As opposed to which other path?"

Hestia smiles, her warm eyes flickering.

She explains this house, how it performs the roles of the camps but doesn't focus on training but providing a safe place for demigods. "Not all are fighters," she says, and smiles almost wryly.

She gives them a tour of the place and it's... normal. It doesn't raise any of their alarm bells, which is such a nice change of pace.

The Valdez's were a special case for Hestia. Esperanza always understood what truly made a home. Hestia took notice of her even before Hephaestus did, and when Esperanza had Leo and they had their little family and home, it was a true beacon of everything Hestia valued.

So, it was particularly heartbreaking to watch it all fall apart. Esperanza lost her life, Leo lost what truly mattered, but the goddess couldn't let everything waste away.

Leo decides to stay, at least for a while, and he spends his days trying to unlearn his bad habits of pushing away his feelings. Hestia recommends a therapist who knows about the mythical world, and that starts to help Leo process his years of trauma.

I'm not sure where it could go from here, maybe he takes it slow but gets drawn into a different world of heroes, maybe it's a big plot or maybe he just wants to do good in small ways for his community.

[tigger8900]

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Kyr has trained all her life to serve Gaea Station in its sole mission: to avenge the destruction of Earth, whatever it takes. But upon reaching adulthood, her twin brother gets assigned a mission guaranteed to bring both death and glory while she's assigned to bear children in the nursery wing. In defiance of her orders, Kyr leaves to join her brother's mission, but what she finds when she gets there are the answers to questions she never thought to ask.

This book was fantastic. I can't even say too much about why I loved it, because most of the things that were so great are massive spoilers! I'll settle for saying that it takes several familiar sci-fi tropes — some of which you'll spot immediately, and others which take some time to reveal themselves — and remixes them into something that felt both fresh and timely.

The most impressive non-spoilery thing the book accomplished was managing to keep the reader just slightly more clued-in than the main character is. It's tricky to keep that balance with the reveals, between the reader knowing everything too early and the main character essentially narrating every logical step. I also enjoyed the setting, particularly the aliens and their sufficiently-advanced-technology, and the way the characters were developed as the plot went on.

I will warn you that you're not going to like the main character. She's a real piece of work when we first meet her. I promise, she gets better. Much better. Ordinarily such massive transformations over the course of one book ring hollow, but due to the spoilers I actually believed it this time. I also want to say that, if you're anything like me, you're probably going to be wondering around the 15-20% mark if you can trust the author with what this book seems to be taking on. The answer is yes. Again avoiding spoilers, but the things that are making you raise your eyebrows are intentional and serve the plot.

My biggest point of contention with the book was with the ending. It was foreshadowed pretty early on, so it wasn't deus ex machina. It's fair enough, I guess. It just felt a little too convenient for my tastes. Like, the bow shouldn't have tied up so neatly, if that makes sense? But I'm not really mad at it.

Does the tiger die? Mild spoilers ahead! There is, in one scene, a tiger. I'm not kidding. The tiger is presented from its introduction as an adversary, and is killed(in a somewhat graphic manner) in the course of a character defending themself.

[melanielocke]

Some Desperate Glory spoilers ahead

One of the most tragic things about Avi's character is that he genuinely does not understand that there are different ways of dealing with his trauma than mass murder of everyone he decides is responsible.

I find the decision he makes at the end of the book a lot more understandable than what he does halfway into the book because the people left behind on Gaea station would have been the same people who mistreated him all his life, and I can empathize with wanting revenge even if I don't think killing them all is right. But when Kyr protests, he gets mad, asking if he's just supposed to forget everything that Gaea station did to him. And he just doesn't get that it doesn't have to be one of those two, that he can let these people live while also never forgiving them.

I really hope he gets the help he needs and learns better coping methods.

[mistwraiths]

3 stars

While this book wasn't awful nor hard to push through except for the last 20% because I was ready for it to be over, I do kind of wish I DNF'd because ultimately I didn't really care.

I love sci-fi and aliens so I was expecting to like this book. The worldbuilding, the science and what not doesn't make much sense and ultimately, I was left very confused half the time and looking at the big plot holes the other half. The idea of a reality changing machine or whatever existing is a very fascinating concept but don't ask me to explain how it works or what shadow engines are or shadow jumps or subreal flashes or how the "Princes of the Wisdom" do their things.

None of the characters are really likable at all but I can see that the authors is showing that they're unfortunately products of their fascist, homophobic, racist, etc upbringing especially Kyr because she's essentially a TERRIBLE person and a bully and in the beginning does truly unlikable things such as misgendering; violence against a cuffed alien, and more. I will say I do think her slow come around was done fairly well although it was extremely heavy handed in the last bit.

All the side characters aren't great either, the ones who seemed maybe different are her brother and the nursery assigned girl who actually don't get a lot of focus. I actually felt sorry for how awful Yiso is treated but I LEGIT don't know anything about them??? I don't even understand how they're friendly after one or two little trips into the Wisdom (don't understand that). Avi was the worst but fascinating because he was always choosing AWFUL options and being the biggest bitch ever.

I will give credit to the BIGGEST plot twist I definitely didn't see coming.

However, in my opinion, the execution of what potential could have made this book so cool was that it felt poorly and shallowly done. My big issues is that this book only touches briefly on the things it explores. The biggest plot twist is that the Wisdom just REMAKES reality with Kyr's help. They literally CHANGE IT. It's so freaking cool of a concept. I would have liked to see more grappling with this decision of learning about Kyr and being Valerie. It seems a little ridiculous to me that everyone is mainly alive, I'm sorry but Kyr and her friends were purposely planned for humanity in the last reality so why would most be alive in the reality where people didn't have to plan and could just choose??? Kyr's genetic mother wasn't even pregnant before shit went down in the other reality? Why would her twin be when her father could potentially be completely different from whatever gene pool they picked?? Cleo?? Lisa?? Avi Like how??? And like Kyr learns and is immediately disgusted with this reality. Why???? Isn't this everything she could have hoped for?? Later when we go into a different reality, there's this symbiosis of Kyr and Val that honestly could have been really interesting internal tension or at least made to sound difficult or confusing or uncomfortable but isn't.

The ending is just very heavy handed "we gotta save everyone" because we're showing people "we are good now we think about others" that it gets a little eyeroll worthy. To be quite honest of the ending, I didn't like it. I do think Kyr dying would have been a great way to end it and Yiso because that would have been tragic and sad, but felt poignant. Then it's like jk!!!! the wisdom isn't completely dead!!! you get to live which really cheapens the attempted sacrifice of letting people escape the horror of Gaea Station without you.

So yeah. This book was just kind of mid. At least after the big plot twist the pacing picks up because things are finally having to happen and be dealt with. But overall? Not the cool sci-fi book I wanted it to be.