What I read

Made a rather slow progression through Li, Wondrous Transformations, and finished it, a little underwhelmed somehow. Some useful information, but a fair amount of familiar territory.

As a break, re-read of KJ Charles' Will Darling Adventures, Slippery Creatures (2020), Subtle Blood (2020) and The Sugared Game (2021), as well as the two short pendant pieces, To Trust Man on His Oath (2021) and How Goes the World (2021).

Then - I seem to be hitting a phase of 're-reading series end to end'? - Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017), Artificial Conditions (2018), Rogue Protocol (2018) and Exit Strategy 2018), and the short piece Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (2020).

Also read book for review (v good).

Literary Review.

On the go

Martha Wells, Network Effect (2020).

Up next

Predictably, Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse.

Also at some point, next volume in A Dance to the Music of Time for reading group (At Lady Molly's).

Still waiting for other book for review to turn up, but various things I ordered have turned up, so maybe those.

james_davis_nicoll

In which the weather does not conspire against Ganta and Isaki, although other things do.

Insomniacs After School, volume 9 by Makoto Ojiro

oursin

Happy birthday,

damnmagpie!

dine

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rionaleonhart

When 2020 was looming, I posted an entry about the media that had made a real impact on me in the 2010s. I had fun with this, but it's hard to narrow things down across an entire decade! Maybe I should start doing these media roundups more frequently? Every half-decade, perhaps?

Oh, hey, it's 2025.

In alphabetical order, here are ten canons from the last five years that I think I'm going to remember! Note that this is media I originally experienced between 2020 and 2024, rather than necessarily being media that was originally released in that period.

1. Celeste. One of my absolute favourite games. Great music, charming characters, satisfying gameplay. It's tough, but I rarely found it frustrating, and I was delighted to realise how much I'd improved when I went back to replay from the beginning. Playing Celeste is a lot like playing the piano, learning the right pattern and timing of button presses through repetition until you can run smoothly through a level. I'll often find myself replaying Celeste levels when I've got a little time and nothing else is grabbing me, in the same way I'll often take a moment to sit at the piano and play a few pieces I know by heart.

2. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. The relationship between these siblings is just so awful and intimate and fascinating; I can't get enough of it. I want to swim around in all this hideous codependency. When I first drafted this list at the start of the year, I noted, There's a chance I'm being too hasty with this one; I discovered it right before 2024 ended, so I haven't had time to be sure it's going to be a lasting interest. But, having had my mind obliterated by the latest chapter, I can now say with confidence that I am never going to stop thinking about this horrible game.

3. Lost. What an experience! I love it when characters are stranded together and forced to bond under high pressure, and this is an absolutely stellar example. Went in some wild directions, too; I said 'what the fuck' so many times while watching this show. Jack Shephard is a wreck of a man in a way that I find fascinating.

4. Omori. This game fucked me up. A lot of it is fun and charming! And then there are the parts that severely messed with my head. Two separate aspects gave me trouble sleeping. Some really interesting uses of gameplay, including one of the best-executed plot reveals I've ever seen.

5. Person of Interest. In a lot of case-of-the-week shows, the case itself is the least interesting part for me. In Person of Interest, I found the individual weekly cases absolutely gripping. The fact that the murders they're investigating haven't happened yet gives each case a living main character, usually the would-be victim, which makes them so much more fun to watch. I really enjoy Reese as a character, too.

6. Persona 5. I picked up Persona 5 in lockdown, when it was heavily discounted. I'd heard good things about the Persona series, but I'd always been intimidated by how long and complicated the games sounded. Still, it was 2020, and I wasn't able to leave the house, so it seemed like the right time for a hundred-hour RPG. It was an incredible decision. What a stylish, fun game! What great kids! I played it non-stop for a month and a half and had an absolute blast.

7. Persona 4. I was a little concerned about going back to Persona 4 after playing 5. I'd loved Persona 5 so much; what if the previous game was a disappointment? But I ended up loving Persona 4 just as passionately, largely because of Yosuke; he's a good-hearted but slightly shitty disaster of a teenage boy who's helplessly in love with the protagonist, and I find him endlessly endearing.

8. Severance. I've always been compelled by stories about weird things happening to people's memories, and by stories about people developing intense relationships while isolated together, so Severance is essentially the perfect canon for me. By a long way, it's the most gripping show I've ever watched. I'm so nervous when I sit down for a new episode; I never know what to expect!

9. Taskmaster. What a show. It makes me laugh like nothing else. The way it keeps a single set of contestants for each series adds a lot to the experience; you really get to know the contestants and their approaches to these ridiculous tasks over the course of a series. The New Zealand and Australian versions are just as great to watch; Greg Davies remains an unparalleled Taskmaster, but, if I'm honest, Paul Williams is my favourite assistant.

Wait, that's only nine! Okay, I'm going to add a tenth, but this is definitely cheating:

10. Death Note. I absolutely did not first experience Death Note between 2020 and 2024; I've enjoyed it since 2008! But I feel it sort of fits in my 'canons of the last five years' post because I got back into it in 2023 in a way I'd never been into it before. I watched the stage musical, absolutely lost my mind and spent months thinking about nothing but Light Yagami. Let's say the tenth canon here is Death Note: The Musical.

Honourable mention to The Quarry for the burst of intense ficwriting it inspired in me! I wasn't that drawn in by the canon itself, but the potential in Travis and Laura's relationship really grabbed me by the throat.

EDIT: WAIT, I just thought of a legitimate number ten!

10-2: Die Hard. We were locked down for Christmas in 2020, and I was sorry that I couldn't visit my family, but the upside was that I joined in my housemates' Christmas tradition of watching Die Hard. This film was such a delightful surprise for me! I went in expecting a badass, stoic action hero; I got a desperate, terrified mess. I found John McClane's suffering so compelling. What a blast.

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: amused

oursin

So today was my physio let's see how you're doing assessment, at the different health centre -

- which I was in a bit of a swivet about getting to, because the obvious straightforward route is the longest, and there are shorter ones but these involve a tangle of residential streets -

- not to mention, whichever way you slice it, the road winds uphill all the way, yea, to the very end, because the health centre is bang opposite Parliament Hill.

Nonetheless, I found a route which seemed doable, which said 24 mins (and that was not actually starting from home base but from the road by the railway line), which I thought was possibly optimistic for an Old Duck such as myself, but mirabile dictu it was in fact just over 20 but under 25 minutes, win, eh?

And took me along streets I have seldom walked along since the 70s/80s when I was visiting them more frequently for Reasons.

Had a rather short but I hope useful meeting with the physio - some changes to existing exercises and a new one or two.

Thought I would get a bus back as I had had time to check out the nearby bus stops, and there was one coming along which according to the information at the stop was going in a useful direction.

Alas it was coming from the desired direction, but still, cut off a certain amount of homewards slog.

nineveh_uk

One of the major casualties of Covid for me has been the theatre, which I'm simply not up to going to as much as I was, so it was great this winter to go to two really good productions.

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Molloy, at the Donmar Warehouse.
Musical based on War and Peace - wisely, on a limited chunk of War and Peace - finally making it to the UK in an excellent production. I'm so out of touch at the moment that I didn't know it was going to be on, but fortunately

antisoppist did. I've no idea why it has taken 12 years (OK, Covid might have played a role there), because it is enormous fun. As the prologue tells us 'Natasha is young and Andrey' isn't here, but a lot of Moscow society is and taken up with entertaining itself at other people's expenses/being a miserable sod. Will Natasha's life be ruined for other people's idea of a good time? Will Pierre get a grip? Will anyone ever recognise (incuding Tolstoy) that Sonya is the MVP*? The singing and performances were excellent, production fast and sharp, and though it is not deeply moving, it tells its story very well. Surely some regional producing theatre must want to put it on? I'm baffled sometimes by UK theatre's curious resistance to the musical as a genre, despite the West End.

Plus surely the best piece in praise of a taxi driver in musical theatre.

Watch on YouTube

The Flying Dutchman, Wagner, Opera North.
I went up to Leeds to see this with my father and sister a week after Great Comet, and I have to admit that about a minute into the overture I was thinking, 'Great Comet was excellent, but this is on another level.' Fabulous orchestral playing of a magnificent score, superb singing and acting, a riveting experience from start to finish. The production introduced some concepts of refugees, being lost on the sea and wandering, including voices of refugees speaking their experiences, that met with a mixed reception. Frankly, I didn't think it really added much to the main narrative, but I've come across infinitely worse opera production concepts, and the critical bafflement about this one seems out of proportion. It was a pretty straightforward production with an additional element, there was no obscurity of the main story, and making Daland a government minister ranks pretty low on "weird things that happen in opera stagings".

Much more distracting to me was something integral to the original. While I was aware of the basic story (sailor cursed to wander the seas coming to land only once ever seven years, unless he can be saved by the love of a good woman), and there is little more plot than that, what I hadn't realised was that the second act is basically this:

Heroine's father: So I've offered you to this rich creepy kind of ghost sailor for his money.
Heroine: I have read a million vampire fanfics, I am READY.

I am not kidding. Senta is literally the girl that people worry about reading Twilight, she is DTF the exotic erotic scary doomed creature, and Wagner thinks that this is cool.

Have you seen the ship upon the ocean
with blood‑red sails and black masts?
On her bridge a pallid man,
the ship's master, watches incessantly.
Whee! How the wind howls! Yohohe!
Whee! How it whistles in the rigging! Yohohe!
Whee! Like on arrow he flies on,
without aim, without end, without rest!
Yet there could be redemption one day for that pale man
if he found a wife on earth who'd be true to him till death!
Ah when, pale seaman, will you find her?
Pray Heaven, that soon
a wife will keep faith with him!
...
Let me be the one whose loyalty shall save you!
May God's angel reveal me to you!
Through me shall you attain redemption!

I sat there thinking what a pity it was that Wagner died too soon to see Nosferatu. There is also some wonderful sea music, and the Dutchman has a great aria, but honestly, it's Senta's batshit goth fangirlery that sticks with me.

*Credit to the Olivier Awards, who gave Maimuna Menon the award for best supporting actress.

sartorias

This is quick, as things have been fraught, with a sick family member who doesn't do well with sickness.

Dobrenica 3: Revenant Eve

Re-edited and reissued:

It’s now 1795, the rise of Napoleon, and Kim finds herself a guardian spirit for a twelve-year-old kid who will either become Kim’s ancestor . . . or the timeline will alter and Kim will vanish, along with the small, magical European country of Dobrenica.

Kim hates time travel conundrums, and knows nothing about kids. How is she going to spirit-guide young Aurelie, born on Saint-Domingue, with whom she has nothing in common?

From pirate-infested Jamaica to mannered England to Revolutionary Paris in the early 1800s, Kim and Aurelie travel, sharing adventures and meeting fascinating people, such as the beautiful and charming Josephine, wife of Napoleon.

pauraque

This is part 2 of my book club notes on The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories. [Part 1.]

"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Tai Chi Mashed Taro" by Anna Wu (2016), tr. Carmen Yiling Yan

( A time-traveling meditation on the rise and fall of people and societies. )

"The Futures of Genders in Chinese Science Fiction" by Jing Tsu (2022) [essay]

( Discussion of the depiction and participation of people of marginalized genders in Chinese SF. )

"Baby, I Love You" by Zhao Haihong (2002), tr. Elizabeth Hanlon

( In the not-too-distant future, a programmer works on a holographic virtual baby while his real family life falls apart. )

"A Saccharophilic Earthworm" by BaiFanRuShang (2005), tr. Ru-Ping Chen

( After a disabling accident, a theater director believes she can teach flowers to dance. )

"The Alchemist of Lantian" by BaiFanRuShang (2005), tr. Ru-Ping Chen

( Every time a godlike being helps a human, their own exile in the mortal world is extended. )

james_davis_nicoll

Improbable, but not impossible, ascents to the world stage...

Five SFF Works About Unlikely Global Superpowers

james_davis_nicoll

Retired superhero turned lawyer, Naomi "Foxfire" Ziegler pursues a wrongful death case involving a fire, a young superhero and a host of shifty housing corporations.

Foxfire, Esq. by Noa (October)

oursin

Happy birthday,

mme_hardy and

polyamorous!

dine

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minoanmiss

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rachelmanija

In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.

I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.

My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.

What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.

Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.

While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.

james_davis_nicoll

This all-new Coyote & Crow Bundle presents Coyote & Crow, the alternate-history RPG set in the Free Lands of an uncolonized North America.

Bundle of Holding: Coyote & Crow

swan_tower

I think I've suddenly become an evangelist for figures of speech.

During a recent poetry challenge in the Codex Writers' Group, someone recommended two books on the topic: The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth, and Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn. I found both delightfully readable, in their different stylistic ways, and also they convinced me of what Forsyth argues early on, which is that it's a shame we've almost completely stopped teaching these things. We haven't stopped using them; we're just doing so more randomly, on instinct, without knowing what tools are in our hands.

What do I mean when I say "figures of speech"? The list is eighty-seven miles long, and even people who study this topic don't always agree on which term applies where. But I like Quinn's attempt at a general definition, which is simply "an intended deviation from ordinary usage." A few types are commonly recognized, like alliteration or metaphor; a few others I recall cropping up in my English classes, like synecdoche (using part of a thing to refer to a whole: "get your ass over here" presumably summons the whole body, not just the posterior). One or two I actually learned in Latin class instead -- that being a language that can go to town on chiasmus (mirrored structure) because it doesn't rely on word order to make sense of a sentence. ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country": English can do it, too, just a bit more loosely.) Others were wholly new to me -- but only in the sense that I didn't know there was a name for that, not that I'd never heard it in action. Things like anadiplosis (repeating the end of one clause at the beginning of the next: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.") or anastrophe (placing an adjective after the noun it modifies: "the hero victorious" or "treason, pure and simple")*.

*Before you comment to say I'm using any of these terms wrong, refer to the above comment about specialists disagreeing. That anastrophe might be hyperbaton instead, or maybe anastrophe refers to more than just that one type of rearranging, or or or. Whatever.

Quinn's book is the older one (written in the early '80s), and something like two-thirds of his examples are from Shakespeare or the Bible. On this front I have to applaud Forsyth more energetically, because he proves his point about how these things aren't irrelevant to modern English by quoting examples from sources like Katy Perry or Sting. (The chorus of "Hot n Cold" demonstrates antithesis; the verses of "Every Breath You Take" are periodic sentences, i.e. they build tension by stringing you out for a long time before delivering the necessary grammatical closure.) And when you get down to it, a ton of what the internet has done to the English language actually falls into some of these categories; the intentionally wrong grammar of "I can haz cheeseburger" is enallage at work -- not that most of us would call it that.

But Quinn delivers an excellent argument for why it's worth taking some time to study these things. He doesn't think there's much value in memorizing a long list of technical terms or arguing over whether a certain line qualifies as an example -- which, of course, is how this stuff often used to be taught, back when it was. Instead he says, "The figures have done their work when they have made richer the choices [the writer] perceives." And that's why I've kind of turned into an evangelist for this idea: as I read both books, I kept on recognizing what they were describing in my own writing, or in the memorable lines of others, and it heightened my awareness of how I can use these tools more deliberately. Both authors point out that sentiments which might seem commonplace if phrased directly acquire impact when phrased more artfully; "there's no there there" is catchier than "Nothing ever happens there," and "Bond. James Bond." took a name Fleming selected to be as dull as possible and made it iconic. And it brought home to me why there's a type of free verse I find completely uninteresting, because it uses none of these things: the author has a thought, says it, and is done, without any intended deviations from ordinary usage apart from some line breaks. At that point, the poem lives or dies entirely on the power of its idea, and most of the ones I bounce off aren't saying anything particularly profound.

So, yeah. I'm kinda burbling about a new obsession here, and no doubt several of you are giving me a sideways look of "ummm, okay then." But if you find this at all interesting, then I recommend both books as entertaining and accessible entry points to the wild jungle of two thousand years of people disagreeing over their terms.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/08rQSn)

oursin

But this did sound awfully like that spate of books where people had A Bright Idea to Do Something for A Year and got a book out of it, which was clearly the intention, and this struck my cynical ayfeist self as 'My Spiritual Pilgrimage to a Mystical Experience, Conversion, Faith, and Publishing Deal'.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

(How long did it take St Augustine? asking for a friend.)

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corolla and stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

70s flashback!!! Only in those days it was people working their way through the various offerings of the 'Growth' aka 'Human Potential' Movement that was flourishing then and I'm pretty sure that people wrote up their memoirs of their odysseys through the various practices/groups/cults on offer.

I was also, in the light of this article today, intrigued that it was two bloke friends who set her on this path: I’m delighted to see gen Z men in the UK flocking back to church – I just hope it’s for the right reasons. So am I. I have a friend who has been involved in the much-delayed and still unsatisfactory response of the C of E to certain abuse cases and some of those seem to have been connected with cultish manifestations which were praised for bringing in that particular demographic.

(And having noted the other day that Witchfinder Hopkins was pretty much in that demographic of young men aged 18-24, I'd really like to know where these Gen Z converts are in relation to issues like ordination of women, LGCBTQ+ inclusivity, etc etc.)

james_davis_nicoll

1994: At least four MPs die from unrelated causes, Tony Blair uses his new position as leader of the Labour Party to make bold economic statements unbounded by reality, and in a bold rebuke of a half million years of effort to isolate Britain from the continent, the Chunnel opens.

Poll #33014 Clarke Award Finalists 1994

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60

View Respondents

Which 1994 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Vurt by Jeff Noon
10 (16.7%)

A Million Open Doors by John Barnes
17 (28.3%)

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
29 (48.3%)

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
49 (81.7%)

The Broken God by David Zindell
6 (10.0%)

The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
29 (48.3%)

Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 1994 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Vurt by Jeff Noon
A Million Open Doors by John Barnes
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Broken God by David Zindell
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick

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Page Summary

oursin - Wednesday wishes Will S a happy 461st birthday
james_davis_nicoll - Insomniacs After School, volume 9 by Makoto Ojiro
oursin - (no subject)
dine - live well - it is the greatest revenge
rionaleonhart - Let's Not Talk About How It Took Me Nearly Four Months To Get Around To This.
minoanmiss - Out of Character Alert Meme
oursin - Physio reprised
nineveh_uk - Theatre: Great Comet, and Wagner (not simultaneously)
sartorias - Book Day...
pauraque - The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, ed. Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang (2022) [part 2]
james_davis_nicoll - Five SFF Works About Unlikely Global Superpowers
james_davis_nicoll - Foxfire, Esq. by Noa (October)
oursin - (no subject)
dine - I am Spartacus
minoanmiss - He's right.
rachelmanija - Face the Dragon, by Joyce Sweeney
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Coyote & Crow
swan_tower - The not-lost art of eloquence
oursin - Maybe I'm being unduly cynical
james_davis_nicoll - Clarke Award Finalists 1994

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The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

incorporating Shark Journal and Millinery Monthly

Reading

Wednesday wishes Will S a happy 461st birthday

Insomniacs After School, volume 9 by Makoto Ojiro

(no subject)

live well - it is the greatest revenge

Let's Not Talk About How It Took Me Nearly Four Months To Get Around To This.

Out of Character Alert Meme

Physio reprised

Theatre: Great Comet, and Wagner (not simultaneously)

Book Day...

This is quick, as things have been fraught, with a sick family member who doesn't do well with sickness.

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, ed. Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang (2022) [part 2]

Five SFF Works About Unlikely Global Superpowers

Foxfire, Esq. by Noa (October)

(no subject)

I am Spartacus

He's right.

Face the Dragon, by Joyce Sweeney

Bundle of Holding: Coyote & Crow

The not-lost art of eloquence

Maybe I'm being unduly cynical

Clarke Award Finalists 1994

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June 2023

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