My 13 month old girl is going a bit nuts. About three days ago she started gathering up all of her stuffed animals and licking them clean and then last night she took them all with her under the shed and is basically lying there whining and licking her babies. ChatGPT called it a pseudo pregnancy. Have you ever experienced such a thing?
I'm reading the Gap Cycle for the first time, and some intriguing characters (with extremely murky ethics) are going EVA on a planetoid (I'm picturing something like Pluto or Europa) near a human-built outpost, and Donaldson's description is beautiful:
"By themselves the emplacements looked massive and murderous, immeasurably destructive. However, seen next to the fathomless dark which covered Thanatos Minor instead of sky, they appeared no more distinct or effective than the old stone they’d replaced.
The light—or the contrast between the unnatural, human light and the natural, inhuman void—gave the landscape its strangeness. Against this black and absolute background, any arc lamp, no matter how intense, was nothing more than a small flare. Human senses insisted that so many millions of tons of concrete, so much fusion-generated power, so much evidence of conscious intention, should have been large enough to mean something. The surrounding emptiness disagreed."
I'm on book 3 of 5 and have no clue how it's all going to turn out. From what I've gleaned, I won't be disappointed.
It’s a nature preserve in the middle of a metropolitan… maybe suburban area.