A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I gather that Nona was a controversial book in this series. It ended up being the one I liked best. It had the fewest memes and the ones it did have made more sense in the text, most of the first half involved daily life in a weird setting which is a type of book I very much enjoy, and I absolutely loved Nona herself. She is not only the most likable character in the entire series, but is the only character in the series who is generally having a good time. Writers are often advised to not let their characters have a good time; Nona stands as a shining example of how a generally happy character can be incredibly compelling.

Nona is a teenager with autism and cognitive disabilities who loves dogs (one six-legged) and her friend group of traumatized refugee kids, and is looking forward to her birthday. She's cared for by three extremely odd people with complicated relationships to each other. They're all living on a planet where necromancers are killed if spotted. It's the first place we've seen in the series where people are leading something resembling normal lives or have actual jobs other than "skeleton cultist" or "immortal planet-killer." A lot of people there are poor and traumatized refugees, there's a fair amount of crime, and oh yeah a giant blue thing in the sky is drastically hampering normal life and is also probably going to destroy the planet and kill everyone, but people are at least attempting to live their lives in the midst of this.

Nona also has Wolverine-like healing powers, was born six months ago, and is a soul living in/possessing someone else's body. The people caring for her are trying to figure out who she is: the person the body belongs to, now with amnesia and a completely different personality? Someone else entirely? They really, really need to figure this out, under pressure from multiple powerful forces. But Nona remembers nothing.

Also, we get flashbacks to God's past and how he became God. These are both horrific and darkly funny.

All else is spoilers.

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I am raising money for a Tenth Life, a cat shelter run by a friend of mine in Bulgaria. I have personally visited it multiple times and can vouch for its good work. They raise money and lobby for neuter-and-release programs for feral cats, and arrange for adoptions anywhere in the world! (Want a cat or kitten? They can get it to you, no matter where you are.)

I am in Bulgaria right now, and TODAY, while on the way to visit the shelter, my friend and I personally rescued a kitten that had been trapped in a car engine for two days! I am not making this up. She is the little darling in the photo above. Will you help rescue her and many cats and kittens like her?

To sweeten the pot, if you make a one-time donation of $50+ OR sign up for a monthly donation of $15+, I will write a book review for a book of your choice, to be posted here within 1-3 months depending on how many people take me up on this.

If you sign up for a monthly donation of just one euro, I will enter you into into a lottery, and the winner will get a book review for a book of your choice. The "monthly donation of one euro" is extremely helpful despite the small amount. Please consider it!

Donate here. Page down for the one euro option.

Please feel free to link to this post.

The kitten, now named Fifi, is too young to be left at the shelter, so she is currently at the apartment. Once she's a bit older, she will be available for adoption. She is an absolute darling. Would you like to take her home?

Here she is immediately after being taken to the vet and then brought home, eating her first good meal ever.



Here she is the next morning, cleaned and warm and fed.



Click on the cut for more extremely adorable photos.

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Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats. Very open. I love them. For the benefit of potential treaters or pinch hitters, I will mention that several of my canons are very easy to pick up. "Thousand Worlds" by George R. R. Martin is multiple short stories (and two novels), but you could write it based on reading one or two of the short stories. They're all collected in Dreamsongs volume 1, which is in print. Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre and Watersong by Mary Caraker are standalone novels, and the former is in print. You could write Ki and Vandien by Megan Lindholm just by reading the first book, Harpy's Flight, and Fire Dancer by Ann Maxwell by reading just the first book, Fire Dancer, which is available as an ebook.

This year I have gone for a slate of tiny-even-for-Yuletide canons - everything I requested has 0-3 fics in existence. So I would be incredibly thrilled to get any of them. Some of my prompts are longer than others, but I want everything equally.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, depictions of interesting cultures, moments of change, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, animals, landscape, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, magic, strange rituals, unknowable things, epistolary fiction, found footage/art/creepy movies/etc, and canon divergence AUs and alternate versions of characters. I particularly love deadly/horrifying yet weirdly beautiful settings, especially if there's elements of space/time/reality warping as well. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

( General DNWs )

( Dreamsnake - Vonda McIntyre )

( Fire Dancer Series - Ann Maxwell )

( Ki and Vandien Quartet - Megan Lindholm )

( Strikeforce: Morituri )

( Thousand Worlds Universe - George R. R. Martin )

( Watersong - Mary Caraker )

Women and girls covered in fungal growths cut them off to make themselves into wives for human men; one girl-become-wife, Nicole, is more drawn to her fungal friend, Teagan.

If you're in the mood for weird, surreal, sapphic, feminist, mushroom body horror, this book is for you. It does a great job of presenting Nicole's very alien point of view, and also how she sees human men as the true aliens. It's novella length but could have been shorter than it was - there's a long middle stretch where nothing much is happening but a long string of lushly surreal descriptions - but what it's generally going for, it does well. Think The Stepford Wives meets The Girl With All the Gifts by way of Jeff Vandermeer.

Content notes: Violence against women, suicide, forced pregnancy, TONS of body horror. There is also detailed and pervasive rape and sexual assault, though the main character doesn't perceive it that way because she's mostly a mushroom.

You may know Killjoy from their podcasts, “Live Like the World Is Dying” (prepping for anarchists and other community-minded folk) and “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” (cool historical figures, mostly leftist.) They also write fiction, sometimes as Danielle Cain. I’d read a couple of their novellas and didn’t much like them, but I love their podcasts and other nonfiction work.

In a world close to our own in the early 20th century, a young journalist on assignment to cover a hero of an imperialist army falls in with the anarchists fighting them, and discovers a different and better way of life.

Hrun is a loose collective of towns and villages, most of which have been anarchist for hundreds of years, plus a new city founded by new anarchists who fled other countries. So it has both a new and purposeful society, and many others that have been doing their thing for ages and know it works.

Killjoy excels at sketching characters convincingly in not too many words, and the group of guerilla fighters that the journalist Dimas falls in with are very sympathetic and easy to care about. There’s enough quirky details to charm and convince, like the widespread use of ostriches as farm animals, a mourning custom involving teeth, and a very good use of characters speaking different languages.

A Country of Ghosts is a good, solid novel about solidarity, war, and freedom, as well as a nice exploration of what an anarchist society might be like, answering many questions an outsider might have. The answers are not always completely convincing, but it makes an extremely good case that even if it’s flawed or wouldn’t work quite as well as depicted, it sounds a hell of a lot better than our current way of organizing society.

A Country of Ghosts is very much in conversation with The Dispossessed, though it’s Ruritanian rather than science fiction and the POV character is the one coming to an anarchist society as a stranger. They’re very different takes both on what an anarchist society would be like and what exterior and interior forces might threaten it. In The Dispossessed, the exterior force is mostly that their moon is barren and generally hostile to human life, while the interior force is a falling away from ideals.

In A Country of Ghosts, the exterior force is an invading imperialist army with better weapons and greater numbers, while the interior force… well, there isn’t really one. The answer to “But who cleans the toilets without money” is that people don’t need to be paid to clean their own toilets, so if they feel that the whole town is their own, someone will step up to clean the public ones. People who believe in freedom without responsibility to the community can go (or be booted to) a neighboring community which is basically Libertarian.

The aspect of society that I found least convincing is that there's no organization around public toilet cleaning and other unpleasant tasks that need doing and aren't clearly the responsibility of any one person. I can absolutely believe that a society can exist where those tasks are shared by, say, a rota. I find it hard to believe that a society can exist where there is always someone who volunteers to do that stuff, and it getting done relies entirely on that. If nothing else that seems likely to breed an incredible amount of resentment on the part of the person who always does the shit jobs so they'll get done.

(The other society that makes an interesting comparison, is Graydon Saunders’ Commonweal. That one isn’t anarchist but it has enough similarities to bring up the comparison, with the philosophy of “everyone or no one,” a commitment to making sure that everyone eats and no one is forced into labor, and with norms largely enforced by social approval/disapproval. It also has a major external threat (invaders AND an inimical landscape); the internal threat is complicated.

In both the Commonweal and Anarres, rotas for tasks figure heavily. I can more easily believe in a society without laws than one without rotas.)

When thinking about those books and their utopian/dystopian societies, a few things struck me. One is the use of violence. In Killjoy's books, a huge theme is when and how it’s necessary to defend their societies by violence, and when and how it’s acceptable to inflict violence on its own people. In Le Guin’s book, almost all of the overt violence is committed by the capitalist society, Urras. On Anarres, there's subtler levels of coercion and force at play, but the effects are oppressive and against their ideals. Le Guin isn't concerned about the necessary uses of violence, and in fact implicitly questions whether it's ever truly necessary by writing a story about a society in which it isn't.

Another theme is the meaning of freedom. Killjoy’s Hrun has complete individual freedom for people to do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t significantly harm others. Beyond that, there’s no laws and no rules. Anarres has a lot of rules but they’re collectively approved and enforced by social pressure rather than violence. Its freedom is conceived of more communally than individually.

A Country of Ghosts is a good, thought-provoking book whether you're anarchist-curious or not. I recommend it to anyone who likes scrappy guerilla fighters or fiction exploring invented societies.

Charlie, a low-level BookToker, is invited to join five female influencers on a luxury yacht, where they'll all live together and advertise both the yacht and their own brands. The yacht is semi-beached on a private, uninhabited island. (By semi-beached, I mean it's on giant, semi-movable posts so it's basically dangling above the water like a cocktail sausage on toothpicks.) Charlie, who is mourning the drowning death of her ex-best friend/roommate who wrote a phenomenally best-selling romantasy about sexy mermaids hilariously titled A Song of Scales and Salt, reluctantly accepts. Once she gets on the yacht, she's weirded out by the vaguely cultish vibes and the DROWNED GHOST THAT KEEPS HAUNTING HER, but not enough to leave. Then a storm blows up, they all get trapped on the yacht with their billionaire boss, and someone dies!

This novel has a fun premise and a solid start, but ended up being overly predictable and far too repetitive. The ghost element never felt completely integrated - it felt like two different types of thrillers stuck together. Charlie kept mentally rehashing and rehashing the same points, which was both tedious and made the story even more predictable than it already was.

It was completely obvious that ( Read more... )

I very much enjoyed Schaefer's Trad Wife, which also had issues with repetitiveness early on, but was pure wild fun once the action got going. The Last Time We Drowned is much more conventional, to its detriment. I didn't hate it but it wasn't memorable - something no one will ever say about Trad Wife.

Love the cover.

This big blockbuster climate change novel got an avalanche of reviews calling it a masterpiece. I am baffled. To be fair, I DNF'd pretty early on. On the other hand the parts I did read were the bad version of The Ministry of the Future and grossly male-gazey and objectifying about women, and especially women of color.

I am excerpting portions so you can share the WTF. The first set are from chapter one, from the POV of a male climate scientist. I'm not even excerpting all the sexist and male fantasy parts in that chapter, just the worst ones. I'm using * to separate passages so there won't be huge blocks of text in italics.

* Milling outside a Yale lecture hall years ago Tony found himself unexpectedly talking to a young woman, Black and wide-hipped with round breasts stretching a T-shirt with a picture of Lando Calrissian lying seductively on a bearskin rug. He thought she was gorgeous then and would continue to think that past a decade and two children whose faces grew into hers year by year.

This was the kind of woman you needed when the world was teeming with morons, and you got hate mail for studying the phase transitions of methane hydrates. *

Here he is talking about his DAUGHTER, who he's nicknamed "Khaleesi." (All else aside, about 95% of the pop culture references have aged like milk.)

* And he felt it then again, years later, when a teenage Khaleesi got into a car accident, and the idiot father of the idiot boy she’d been with couldn’t remember the name of the hospital they’d been taken to. He felt it when he saw the Mother of Dragons in a hospital bed with her arm in a sling, dried blood in her kinky red-brown hair, and a couple of nasty black eyes that would set her accelerating beauty back for a few months. *

UGH UGH UGH.

Here's a chapter narrated by a different person. Kate is a sexy politician of the sort white liberal men with unexamined biases love to write. She's hot! She's wild! She's a woman of color (Jamaican grandfather) but it never comes up other than just stating it! She's bisexual and has wild sex with absolutely everyone!

*I’d quickly realized Colter Bay wasn’t exactly awash in attractive women, and our clientele was mostly Asian tourists and the minivan set. Even if we’d been renting canoes strictly to beauties, Kate would have caught anyone’s attention. Tall and athletic, her stride registered in the world. First, I took in her dark skin and huge head of curls. Then, as she got closer, her pretty snub nose, full lips, and a wide, hungry smile. She held out the slip and looked at the three of us like she’d caught us comparing scrotums.*

About two pages later:

*“How about dinner? I’ve been meaning to try that Thai place everyone raves about.”

“Ugh, dinner?” she moaned. “You are going to be a total cornball, aren’t you?”

Before I could fire back, she stopped, grabbed my face, and brought her lips to mine. I wasn’t prepared, and her open mouth locked over my closed one. Then I got with the program, and her tongue corkscrewed through the tunnel of our lips. *


* So much of that summer was learning how to be with her and her blunt, unapologetic approach. She’d lost her virginity at thirteen to a college freshman she picked up in Powell’s Books; when she was nineteen she booked a flight to Honduras, spent a week in a place called the Mosquito Coast by herself hiking and meeting people, and found out only after she got back that the US government had issued a travel warning for drug cartel and kidnapping activity; she had an abortion in college and the nurse invited her to her birthday party. *

BARF. Love the total lack of agency given to the college freshman who RAPED A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD. Oh, but it totally wasn't rape! The thirteen-year-old picked him up!


Here's an in-book news article about her:

* Until six months ago, no one but a handful of infighting climate activists even knew who Kate Morris was. Now she takes fire from all sides. She’s been called, among other things, “a feminist traitor making nice with Trump country,” and “the manic pixie dream girl of global warming.”

[Kate says] “I get it. I get why people look at me like, ‘I’m fucking sick of these whacky socialist bitches trying to take away my hamburger.’ Hell, even I’m sick of Greta! I’m sick of AOC!"

An unbuttoned flannel flaps in the wind. Her skin has the weathered quality of a woman who’s spent a great deal of time in sun and dry air. She never wears makeup. Her curls must require maintenance, though, and her hands never leave them alone, always sweeping, tugging, or corralling.

Since Morris arrived on the scene, the apostasies of A Fierce Blue Fire have stoked controversy: She allies with pro-life groups; she decries antinuclear activists as “climate denialists in their own right”; and she once called President Hogan’s version of the Green New Deal “a five-trillion-dollar healthcare bill with a green coat of paint.” Yet nothing has stirred more outrage than FBF’s strategy of aggressively recruiting, cultivating, and supporting Republican candidates to run primary challenges. Forget about stances on abortion rights, gun control, LGBTQIAA+ issues. All these Republican challengers have to do to access FBF’s money is run campaigns based on “the scientific consensus of anthropogenic climate change” and pledge to vote affirmatively on FBF’s model legislation. *

The white male liberal asshole's wet dream: a fuckable woman who'll solve everything by throwing all those pesky women and minorities under the bus, because obviously that's what you gotta do, while being an every-minority herself (but not in any way that matters) so he can point to her and say it's okay.

I skipped to the end. ( Read more... )

Forgot to mention that the real-life mass murderer of children, Anders Breivik, is elected Norwegian Prime Minister, which is possibly the most offensive thing in the entire book.

Fuck this gross book.

First of all: what the hell is that cover and why does it look like something from a remix of Severance and The Blair Witch Project? What exactly is that one-eyed, four-fingered monstrosity composed of insane scribbles straight out of a 1960s psychology textbook labeled "Drawing by patient in insane asylum," and why is a bulls-eye vomiting fire over her head? Is it meant to be a visual image of how it feels to live in 2026? If so, good job I guess.

I read this (from Netgalley, so I only now saw the cover) because I was looking for a good, easy-read book on climate change/collapse from more of a psychological/philosophical than prepper, science, history, or politics angle, for the shop. (I also read Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World by Kate Schapira, which is a much better book but also not exactly what I was looking for - it's extremely self-help oriented, with specific self-help exercises in each chapter, and geared toward people who have only just started to worry that maybe climate change is serious.) So I am still looking. I know the obvious answer is Rebecca Solnit and I do carry her books but I'd also like something a bit less historical/political-focused. More "how we can live now," less "this is why we're here."

Wilson's thesis is that collapse is inevitable and the apocalypse is already happening, but if we acknowledge and accept that rather than clinging to the hope that a miracle will avert it, we will have mental energy freed up to live our lives in the actual world that we have. Knowing that we did not avert the apocalypse does not mean we should stop fighting, stop creating, or stop living - all those things are still important, or if anything even more important. And who knows? Maybe the world that emerges after the current one will be less cruel and destructive.

I basically agree with all that. So I was initially well-disposed toward the book. BUT.

Mum struggles with what I'm writing about here. One afternoon, when the three of us [her parents and Wilson] were sitting on the verandah having a SAO biscuit and a pear cut three ways, she said, "I don't understand, how can you write and talk about the possible end of the human race and be so... okay?"

I replied: "I think it's because I love and honor the beautiful flow and perfect balance of life more than I value humans. I live for this. It gives me energy."

WHO TALKS LIKE THAT.

This is one of the most self-congratulatory books I have ever read. She literally quotes her editor commenting in the margins about what a brilliant passage she wrote! Her response to climate grief is to do ayahuasca, move to Paris, wail and dance at a cliff for an hour on the daily, and call up Liam Neeson for advice and emotional support! (He is only one of MANY celebrities who are her personal friends, as she reminds us at every opportunity).

It's maddening to hear how sad she feels about climate change from a member of the 1% who will only ever have to feel sad rather than facing any actual consequences, or at worst have her fancy house wrecked and have to crash with Liam Neeson while she selects her next place to jet off to.

I did not realize when I got a copy of this from NetGalley that Wilson is mostly known for I Quit Sugar. She is basically the Tim Ferris of climate grief.

In a small town in northern England, a woman spots a man digging in a graveyard. When she confronts him, he tells her a story about the graveyard, the boy he once was and the man he became, a monster, and a dog...

This slim novella by the "Talking Scared" horror podcaster has the vibe of a much older British horror story, like M. R. James with only the language and the period updated. It's chilling in a quiet and understated manner, and as much about the rewards and costs of responsibility as it is about a monster. It's also a very touching "a boy and his dog" story.

But of course what you want to know is, does the dog die? There are two answers to that. The first answer is yes, of old age after a very long and happy life. The other answer is spoilery for the entire book, and it goes under the cut:

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While I'm at it, let me recommend Neil McRobert's Podcast Talking Scared. He interviews a very wide variety of horror and horror-adjacent authors, and he's extremely good at interviewing. His interviews are fun and insightful and interesting even if you never read the books in question. I particularly enjoy his interviews with Johnny Compton (multiple), Stephen Graham Jones (multiple), Carter Kean, Ally Wilkes (multiple), Natasha Pulley, and Zakiya Delila Harris (my entry drug to the podcast.)

I was excited to read this book. Based on the back cover and the excellently spooky first chapter, I thought it would be a Choctaw horror novel about witches.

It's partly that, the parts being the first and last couple chapters. What's in between is an interminable police procedural about artifacts stolen from a museum, interspersed with lectures about the politics of Native American artifacts. The latter part was pretty interesting, actually. The problem was that the police procedural parts were stultifying, the dialogue was incredibly stilted, and the characters were one-dimensional. They look at surveillance footage where nothing happens for hours, and it felt like the scene was happening in real time. I would have rather read a nonfiction book about artifact politics.