#the manifold worlds

[fozmeadows]

Hi!

I read the manifold worlds books last year as ebooks and I'm still thinking about them and would love to own physical copies of them too. I'm having trouble finding them though, especially AAoS with the illustrated cover that can be shipped to my home country (the Netherlands). Do you have any recommendations/tips on where I could order them? And were they ever printed as hardcovers or only as paperbacks?

Ahh, thank you so much! For purchase options, my understanding is that AbeBooks has free worldwide shipping, which I believe includes the Netherlands, so maybe give that a try! As for the books themselves, they've only ever come out as paperbacks, not hardbacks - however, Angry Robot is rereleasing A Tyranny of Queens in a matching format to the new edition of An Accident of Stars on 28 January, so they'll now come in two sets of matching editions, all of which are gorgeous:

Also, while I am incredibly fond of the original covers (which are the work of the amazing @juliedillon, who has prints of both artworks available for sale on her website!), it's worth noting that the original print edition of An Accident of Stars contains a number of errors, most prominently in the first four chapters. This is because a virus completely broke the formatting right before the book went to press; my editors did their best, but given the very tight timeframe they had to work with (and the fact that auto-correcting the bulk of the formatting had the side-effect of introducing some unexpected typos), not everything was caught. However, when Angry Robot approached me about the new editions, I was given the chance to go back and clean everything up, which means that the new editions don't have the same issues!

All of which is to say, I'm really glad you liked the story, and I hope you're able to locate the editions of your choice :)

[poisindonottouch]

Queer reads: Foz Meadows

For day 13, I bring you Foz Meadows. Meadows recently published A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, which I quite enjoyed, but I wanted to recommend some of their earlier work, The Manifold World duology: An Accident of Stars and A Tyranny of Queens.

These books are portal fantasies, and they’re great. An Accident of Stars tells the story of Saffron Coulter, who finds herself in Kena, a world with fucked up politics, magic, and weirdly fantastic dragons (that’s fantastic as in awesome, but also as in fantasy, because, you know, dragons.) A Tyranny of Queens is a continuation of Saffron’s story after she came back to the mundane world and no one fucking believed her. These books are hella queer, with rep across the whole LGBTQ spectrum.

I’d recommend these to fans of Seanan MacGuire’s Wayward Children novellas, except I’d say Foz Meadows does a better job with character driven story telling than MacGuire does. So yeah, check them out.

[iminseriousdebt]

guys new lore (real)

so i was on the dsmp nether roof following a dirt trail that lead me to a nether portal leading to this

coords: -6562 63 -560

i followed the dirt trail further to find another nether portal and entering it i found

coords: -8046 68 -146

were these things ever shown on stream or is this a private thing that i should purge any existence of from the internet?

(edit) nvm these have been shown on stream before

[simonfairchildirl]

im not saying i like the current mcyt drama but i am saying its nice to have a reason to hate dream without some whiner in my ear telling me that the evidence is circumstantial or faked

[stinky-bus]

Dream SMP relapse is real and it hits you like a fucking 18 wheeler

[mcytblrconfessions]

ok i've been thinking about this for a couple of days. i think c!jack is infertile. cus after he got brought back to live hes technically a corpse cus he climbed out of hell so he probably couldnt bear children. but before that i still think his womb was barren. not that itd matter because if he could get pregnant its 1. unlikely he'd find himself in a scenario where it would actually happen and 2. if he DID get pregnant he'd abort it immediately

[mayhawkins]

Slay

[somehowmags]

woe, unfinished pixie hollow au be upon ye

[kathystheoriesandmore]

THEY FIXED THE STUPID LORE ENDING!!! ITS BEEN YEARS AND THEY FINALLY FIXED IT!!! OMG YES!!! THANK YOU!!!! IM SO HAPPY!!!

[shvoowsh]

holy Phucking Shit

[kalcifers-blog]

The funniest part to me about the Bi-Curious TommyInnit coming out is I distinctly remember this one tiktok I saw back in 2021 (or early 2022??) That was like "Bisexual streamers 1!1!1" which included Ranboo, Tubbo and Tommy- to which people told them "Hey maybe let's not speculate on real people's sexualities"

Which obviously is like, very valid and they were right for saying it. (And obviously they were partially wrong with the bi label specifically with Ranboo and Tubbo) And obviously obviously I'm not condoning doing that because it was pretty weird of them to do.

But I keep thinking of it and just fucking CACKLING now because like. Dude they clocked it years before the man himself did what the fuck

[fozmeadows]

So I saw these tags and I had to respond, because the thei/thim pronouns I use for my nonbinary and third gender characters actually have a story behind them! Which is that, way back in 1999-2000, when I was 13-14 and first really starting to explore my own fantasy worldbuilding, I had this idea for a setting where children were considered genderless. Back then, my most regular exposure to the idea of queerness was via playground slurs; I was still a year or so away from realizing I was bi, and about sixteen years away from realizing I had any sort of nonbinary/trans identity myself, because I had no idea it was possible - so all those sublimated thoughts and feelings around my own identity, where they weren't neatly hidden away in my hindbrain, came out instead in relation to fantasy stories.

And at the time, I was deeply into mythology, with a specific fascination for divine trinities like the Maiden, Mother and Crone. And obviously, a lot of pantheons have father and mother gods, which made me think, huh: Father, Mother and Child is really a different sort of trinity, isn't it? And if Father and Mother are gendered roles, why can't Child be its own gender, too? Word nerd that I was, I started thinking about the grammar of it, and realised that, while there wasn't another child-specific pronoun for me to use, English did have the singular they, which could perhaps be repurposed along those lines - except that, the more I thought about it, the more it felt like it needed something extra. In verbal conversations, it was usually contextually obvious whether 'they' referred to a single person or a group, but on the page, I worried that it could easily get confusing.

And then I had a brainwave: why not just spell it differently, with maybe a slightly altered pronunciation? Which seemed like it would be a useful innovation regardless of gender, actually: an easy way to distinguish between singular and plural without having to invent a whole new word. There, problem solved! But of course, the problem was one entirely of my own invention, and I didn't know what to do with the story anyway. So I just... tucked the idea of thei/thim away, and never did anything with it until over a decade later, when I first wrote a nonbinary character in my Manifold Worlds duology, which led to me using it again in the Tithenai Chronicles, and now it's my personal default.

All these many years later, with the power of hindsight - after top surgery, and HRT, and many life experiences - I can see how my younger self was scratching at the walls of a gender-box I didn't know how to open, because nobody had ever told me it could be opened. So while using thei/thim in my fiction is a small change in the scheme of things, for me, it's the result of my younger self groping blindly forwards in search of an answer, and my older self reaching back, as if to say: I'm here. You're here. You never knew what we were looking for, but we found it anyway.

Hey, question: who’s the best character you’ve ever written and why is it Qiqa?

I'm glad you like thim! Thei were very fun to write :D

[vertigoartgore]

2012's Avengers Vol.5 #1 (LGY : #602) last page by Jerome Opeña, Dean White and Cory Petit (words by writer Jonathan Hickman).

[eeveekitti]

everyone meet my son dirt block who i love very much

[mcyt-correct]

Jack: It's crazy that they got all these tropical animals here though cuz they've got meerkat, and then they've got giraffes

Ranboo: :OOOOO?

Ranboo:

Ranboo: Ohh I get it- I was excited to see a giraffe but now I'm just disappointed

[aroaessidhe]

Found a secondhand copy of An Accident of Stars! now they are matching