u/wastevens

tl;dr: "The Book Eaters" by Sunyi Dean is solidly in the "Would that be fucked up or what" category of fantasy, where a secret society of people who eat books practice ever more fucked up forms of patriarchy. Soft recommend. (Content warning: Spousal rape and physical abuse)

Once upon a time, there was a Princess named Devon. She was the only Princess in her castle, even though she had several brothers. And Princess Devon, like all her siblings and aunts and uncles, ate books the way you or I eat bread and meat. Fairy tales are sweets, dictionaries are dry crackers, adventure stories like a good steak, pop science like a mouthful of pop rocks.

Once upon a time, Devon suffered the fate of all Princesses, shipped off to an arranged marriage with another Family.

Once upon a time, Devon would do anything, anything at all, for her children, even if they were monsters.

This is a hard book to give a summary of! It's a bit like an ogre, it's got layers; bouncing between Devon's present and a forward advancing march up her past. There's also definitely a certain amount of Bellisario's Maxim ("Don't examine this too closely") with regards to, not merely the fantasy, but the intersection of the fantasy and reality.

I'll say, one thing that I was... kind of expecting, was that eating books would eventually be recognizable as some kind of... metaphor or allusion or thing tying to the real world. Like, maybe they'd be a commentary on people who only read books not being able to write (since book eaters can't write, it's a whole thing). Or maybe they'd get compared to LLMs, able to consume and regurgitate information without much assimilation or synthesis or imagination- and these ideas are sort of raised, but not in a way that touches the themes of the story.

"Where'd they come from? How does any of this work? What does it mean?" "Fucking aliens, I guess. Does it matter?" Very much in the vein of speculative fiction about examining a fucked up situation with a fucked up premise; kind of in the New Weird way, but in a considerably more comprehensible vein than a lot of stories of that variety. (I'm open to being wrong on the "Would that be fucked up or what" nature of the book eaters not having a deeper meaning but primarily existing to serve the plot, but that's my impression at the moment)

Now, that situation is, by the by, absolutely fucked. By nature, book eaters apparently both don't have many daughters AND those daughters aren't able to bear many children; the number of book eaters has been dwindling away over the years. As a consequence, the Families raise their girls on diets of fairy tales and sweet nothings, preparing them for forced temporary marriages with different Families in order to try and prevent inbreeding from causing things to get even worse. You'll be shocked to learn that this has led the Families towards being even more stifled and patriarchal.

And that's not even getting into the knights and the dragons, or the mind eaters. Don't worry, you'll read about them soon enough.

Lemee re-iterate my content warning; there is frank depiction of spousal rape and spousal abuse, and some brief scenes of physical child abuse (although thankfully, not even implied to be sexual). To my mind, it's not gratuitous, it's very much in service of both the plot and the themes of escaping patriarchy by imagining a way to win, but Go Thou Warned.

One thing I kind of liked- in most of these "Weird secret Families that stand apart from human society" type stories, the Families are secretly in control of the world. The Book Eater families very much aren't; they've got a fair amount of generational wealth stored away, but mostly survive via isolation or engaging in at best quasi-criminal enterprises. This isn't a conspiracy that puppets the UN; they don't even puppet the bits of the UK they live in.

This is not a book for a casual afternoon read. It's chewy. It takes its time building up. There's plenty of action, and some cloak and dagger.

Really, if I have a complaint, it's that it almost all felt like setup. Devon is very much constantly being forced to make choices between bad and worse, choices that are no choice at all, while trying to imagine a better world, and gets much more pulled along by events than driving them, for much of the story.

All that said- for folks who want something a little off the beaten path, I think you'll find the Book Eaters quite satisfying, but you'll probably want a palette cleanser afterwards.

TL;DR: "Nettle and Bone" by T. Kingfisher is the best Naomi Novik fairy tale book not written by Naomi Novik. Strong recommendation.

Once upon a time, a princess who was almost a nun sought a woman who could speak with the dead in order to save her sister from a monster.

Marra is the youngest of three sisters, princesses of a tiny city-state with a valuable harbor and bordered by two great powers. Only careful politics have kept them independent. Unfortunately, Marra hasn't the head for such things. She is... look, I know diagnosing characters is a whole Thing and a Discourse, but /this is the most autistic girl that ever autismed/. So when she gets shuffled off to the nunnery of Our Lady of Grackles, it's a relief to everyone.

Except her oldest sister dies shortly after marrying the northern kingdom's prince. And when Marra is briefly reunited with her middle sister after she gets married to the same prince, it becomes clear that said prince is an abusive monstrous asshole.

This is also a Kingfisher book, so you get to have a middle aged-ish woman finding love with a strong protective dude.

Oh, it also has maybe the best goblin/fairy market I've ever read. It's up there with Stardust, and I think the Toothdancer puts it over the top.

The dust witch is wonderful. The useless godmother is wonderful. Pretty much the entire story is great. If I have any complaints, it's that act one, while Marra is almost-but-not-quite a nun and the plot is still kicking in, goes on a trifle long- but that also gives a lot of normal world to contrast and ground the later fantastical world with, so, even that is pretty good and the story would be less without it.

(Also I feel like the ultimate solution was a little... obvious? Direct? Not bad, just missing a half-step of zing)

Strongly recommended for any fans of Naomi Novik's stories.

Hokay, so. My understanding of the status quo:

Vasloria was, fifteen years ago, under the control of Good King Ormund, who delegated to an aristocracy of Dukes, who themselves had a bunch of barons. He could project power via the Dragon Phalanx in order to assist when problems grew outside local ability to manage. I am presuming, given the lack of a capital seat ever being mentioned, that Ormund's court was carried out on a circuit, moving from ducal seat to ducal seat, which would also have the benefit of letting him check that his laws are being followed.

Ajax killed Good King Ormund, shattered the Dragon Phalanx, and has removed the Ducal families to his flying city- but has not replaced them, with the explicit intent of allowing chaos to fester for several decades until he can swoop in and pick up the pieces with no resistance. Part of that is by leaning hard against various peoples (such as the dwarves and the hawklords), fostering mistrust and isolation.

I'm good with all that.

What I'm trying to square is Ajax's plan of long term domination with "Ajax has conquered Vasloria, the hawklords are a counterinsurgency force, and the wardogs are basically stormtroopers for projecting power from his flying city"

Put another way; if Our Heroes don't stop him, how does Vasloria look different in another 30 years and the fullness of Ajax's plans?

Howdy!

I'm tinkering with an idea of an encounter, where the Heroes have to hold out against a functionally endless (or at least significantly higher than a "just kill everyone else" encounter) number of monsters, using the "hold out a certain number of turns"

However, the action economy is very much A Thing.

Has anyone run such an encounter before? How did you approach balancing it?

TL;DR: "Hemlock and Silver" by T. Kingfisher is like... 75% as good as a Sorceress Comes to Call, made worse by not having much of a cast for the protagonist to bounce off of. Anja, the protagonist, also feels a bit... un-agencied? Like, she gets dragged around or has the plot explained to her a lot. Definitely not Kingfisher's best work. I ate it in two days.

Hokay, so. I went into this with very high hopes, because "A Sorceress Comes To Call" was such a positive surprise. And "Hemlock and Silver" is merely very good.

Set in... I got kind of a SE Asia/India vibe, in an early Renessaince-esque society, Anja is an expert with poison. Not administrating them- well, except on herself, very carefully. But studying them. Understanding them, in a "four humors" model sort of way. She's a middle aged woman who lived somewhat outside of societal norms/expectations of marriage and family (I'm starting to see that Kingfisher has a Protagonist Type, but given that this is generally an underserved niche within a genre awash with teenagers and twenty-somethings, I'm alright with it) who opens the book dosing herself with a distilled snake venom when the king comes in. You see, he suspects someone may be poisoning his daughter, and needs someone both expert and yet politically distant enough to not be part of any conspiracy.

He also, to clear the air of any rumors Anja may have heard, did in fact kill his wife, the queen. Stabbed her. Because he found her she cutting out the heart of their youngest daughter.

Anja, not seeing much choice, agrees to try and help- figuring that, in all likelihood, it's an allergy, or that the princess is faking. At the worst, maybe the princess is eating something poison as a kind of acting out. The king assigns her some body guards, and they travel to a private estate where the princess has been secluded to try and throw the culprit off the trail.

Well, damn and blast, the princess is being poisoned! Cue an mystery that chases its tail for most of the first act, when Anja falls into a mirror.

I will be completely honest, up until that moment, I had been a little tempted to put the book aside. It just... hadn't grabbed me. Anja didn't seem to have much in the way of agency in the story, the mystery was more vexing than intriguing, and she didn't have enough other people to really bounce off of. And then, in a story that has been pretty grounded and rational through this point, she falls into a mirror. Certainly woke me up a bit.

Now, a lot of my complaints about the first act do persist, but the big problem- the lack of supporting characters for Anja to bounce off of -is significantly improved by a cat and one of her body guards, who catches her in the act of coming out of the mirror and gets enlisted in Operation: WTF. She also gets to be much more proactive from this point on. Additionally, Kingfisher come up with some truly horrific imagery inside the mirror-world, which gives delightful frissons and payoffs.

All in all, a Good Book. Not a great one, not a "OMG YOU MUST READ THIS NOW" one, but definitely a good book.

I saw a post elsewhere about how, contrary to much of the world, the expectation at most non-fine dining restaurants is you will be served between a meal-and-a-half to two meals worth of food per order.

When/how did this develop as an American cultural norm, distinct from the world at large?

TL;DR: "A Sorceress Comes to Call" by T. Kingfisher is an excellent Regency comedy of manners urban fantasy by way of Death Note. Highly recommend.

Cordelia is an unfortunate girl. She lives alone with her mother, in a sort of genteel poverty. Her mother permits no disobedience and allows no privacy, to the extent of mandating all doors inside their house remain open. And when Cordelia disobeys, she is made obedient, becoming a mere puppet of her mother's will.

Because her mother is a Sorceress. Not one of the frauds who can barely glamour hair color or make a lame horse look healthy, but the kind out of old fairy tales, the kind no one believes in these modern days.

And she is cruel. The only character I can really compare her cruel, narcissistic vanity to is Regal from the Farseer trilogy. But unlike Regal, she's also cunning. Cunning enough to decide that, when her current 'ahem' patron tires of her, to aim for marriage with some lightly landed gentry, and set Cordelia up as a marriageable girl for someone with real money, and more than willing to employ so magical murder to achieve such.

How can Cordelia prove it? How can her mother be stopped? And what will the below stairs think! It's Downtown Abbey with a delightful frision of horror always haunting the edges.

An excellent story, and I want to especially call out Kingfisher's knack for making the secondary cast feel very real, very "these are old friends who have had their own lives". A passel of characters are introduced midway through, and all have excellently distinct voices and... What I can only describe as richness, like good coffee or chocolate.

TL;DR: "All Hail Chaos" by Sarah Rees Brennan, the sequel to "Long Live Evil" is, on aggregate, better than Long Live Evil, but a bit less even. I want the third book nao pls.

A brief summary!

In "Long Live Evil", Rachael is isekai'd by a Mysterious Whatever from the modern world where she is dying of cancer at 20 and into the world of her favorite Overwrought Dark Fantasy book series, as the overwrought villainess Raehda, the Beauty Dipped In Blood. Using her hazy knowledge of the books to avoid her original plot death, Rae assembles a coeterie of fellow villains to scheme, manipulate and skulldugery her way close to the future Emperor To Come, a prophecized reborn figure of dark gothic divinity.

She does however realize she made a few opposies. First, in that she treats the people around her as just fictional characters rather than people for far too long. And also, she mis-remembered who the Emperor was going to be, or the circumstances of his dark gothic divinity reborn-ness in some truly excellent twists (which was emotionally satisfying but did leave me squinting at some plot... if not holes, then certainly, questionable actions)

This also leads to her not getting the miracle cure to her cancer, or even returning to her home world, but instead sticking by the Emperor. Who has some very strong, personal feelings about Rae. Also a legion of ghouls, command of lightning, and a penchant for casual murder that is fun to read about and less fun to be within claw murdering distance from.

SO!

SEQUEL!

"All Hail Chaos" takes a bit to find its footing, as it busies its first little bit tying off the dangling ends from the first book's ending and doing some place setting for this one. Rae is the Empereror's number one squeeze, despite Very Complicated Feelings and also most of the court (that remains after the Emperor's undead army tears through the nobility in the process of tearing through some raiders that were invading the city at the end of the first book), which I found... okay. It was fine. This is fine.

Once Rae has a brief conversation with the Great Goddess re: Going home healed and happy (all it will take is helping the throughly villainous Emperor to become a hero! And happy, which seems even less likely), we're off the scheming races.

Meanwhile, away from the city, Marius (winner of Man With Largest Stick Up His Ass for twelve years running), who swore an oath to Eric, the Golden Cobra, the villainous Marquis of Popenjay (and also another erstwhile isekai'd individual, albeit from a slightly different version of the story), are on the run to Marius' family estate. Marius very clearly, very badly wants Eric to order him to do horrible, unspeakable things to him. Eric, being extremly uncomfortable with that particular dynamic, 100% refuses. We also get to meet Marius' younger sister Caracalla, who is both very sheltered and has maybe some touch of the 'tism. She's technically Eric's betrothed... which is something Eric either didn't grok or pointedly refuses to address, because she's like fifteen, to which he is very EW EW EW and everyone else is like "What is your problem?" (They also recruit a small army of bandits along the way)

Finally, we have Lia and Emer, the original Good stepsister to Rae's evil, and Rae's (originally axe-murderous, but now just seemingly very stern and maybe a little axe-murdery) maid. Towards the end of the first book, Rae sent both away- hoping to do One Good Thing as all hell was breaking lose, and hoping they'd flee the city too. Instead, Lia reveals an unexpected side and friend in the Worst Part of the City, and so she and Emer camp out there, exposing Emer to more of the non-noble side of the world.

The Good: The actual character moments, dialog, and introspections, and prosery ranged from mostly good to excellent, with points that elicited actual started chortles or unexpectedly knife-in-back sorrows. The viewpoint jumps were well paced. I've only had Caracalla for one book, but if anything happens to her I'm burning this place to the ground.

The "Your tastes will vary": Rae (and Eric) both get a lot of milage out of referrencing modern pop culture concepts for their own (and the reader's) amusement. The author also does so- in particular, my first double-take was when Pio (the Prime Minister / Evil Councilor) announced to the court that "Somehow, the Emperor has returned." I like this brand of meta-humor, but I also know that many people don't. If you don't, you won't like these books. Sorry for your loss.

The Bad: I had very little sense of time-and-space within each of the narratives, as to how far away characters were, how long it took communication to travel, how long the characters themselves took to travel, etcetc. Quite a few things simply seemed to happen at speed of plot. There were also a few moments that I felt characters got unfairly idiot-balled. Not many, but they stuck out the more for it.

In conclusion: GIMME THE THIRD BOOK NAO PLS.

TL;DR: "The Last Contract of Isako" by Fonda Lee is a cyberpunk corpo sabotage noir murder mystery samurai flick starring a middle aged woman who can and will cut you. Recommended.

Okay, gonna open with a thought that I had while reading, but it's not exactly about this book. One of the tools that sf has, as a genre, is the ability to decontextualize social elements for the purposes of examination and commentary. If you set a story like this on Earth, even in a recognizable near future, you'd have all manner of racial/national/historical contextual intersections which would either have to be addressed (detracting from the social class context that Lee clearly wanted to write about). But we aren't on Earth. Fuck Earth. We're on Aquilo, a world habitable only thanks to airshields and domes keeping out the Vastness, the Mars-like barren surface. For the past five centuries, the people of Aquilo have been working to terraform their world.

It is nominally managed by the Company. By 'it', I mean the entire society of Aquilo, the entire terraforming project, everyone and everything. Which is, as signposting your genre goes, not terribly subtle- but to quote the great Garth Marenghi, "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards."

Nota bene: One of my complaints of the novel is that it takes a bit to really get going. Enough that I almost put it down about a hundred pages in. It's not bad but it does a lot of frontloading of context, maybe a bit too much telling-not-showing (telling mostly in the form of Isako's inner dialog).

Our Hero is Isthmus Isako, a Contractor-note-capital-C. Not just any Contractor though; she's an atier, the rarified best of the best, serving as a mix of major domo, second-in-command, bodyguard, and hatchetman to their Clients-note-capital-C. She reminds me a bit of Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash; not in any specific way, but the ethos of the Deliverator and the Contractor are both echos of a romanticized Kurosawa samurai. And she's having a bad day. Her Client, despite her best efforts, has just lost a corporate war between rival divisions, and she's been tasked with handing out the pink slips. Pink slips which, in this case, compel the unfortunates to take a long walk outside the airshield, into the Vastness. No space inside the domes for redundant wagefolk, and resources are tight enough as is.

Her Client-note-capital-C is in no danger of such; even as the Executive on the losing side of the merger, he's not gonna be made redundant. Which is why it shocks everyone, especially Isako, when he resigns in protest, joining his fired former employees into the Vastness- and instantly making Isako go from "atier Contractor, best of the best" to "unemployed trac, ronin, very limited clock to find a new client"

Except she has a new Client, already, arranged by her previous Client. Someone very unexpected, who has a nigh impossible task for her, someone trapping her between duty, law, and her own willingness to just take a long walk out a short airlock. To investigate and discredit the impending ascension of a completely different Executive-note-capital-E who is expected to join the Board soon. Who's own Contractor is Isako's former apprentice.

This is where the story finally starts. From the heights of luxury to the lowest slums, working with the marginal and managerial and criminal and seeing how little difference there may be between, in a world where the highest classes can have their brains inserted into synthetic bodies to extend their lives while everyone else survives on rationed water and heat.

Isako is an unusual protagonist, as such things go. She's old, even as noir protagonists go. Her joints hurt. She's not as fast as she used to be, and she knows it. When she gets into scraps, the effects linger. But she's also got a reputation as the Quickblade, the deadliest longknife fighter on the planet, and that reputation isn't for nothing. She's got a kid- sort of, it's complicated -on the cusp of adulthood herself. She has a lot of conflicting emotions that she is definitely processing in a healthy fashion, and not suppressing into a death-drive to solve this case so she's free to permanently retire on her own terms. I like her.

The ending is open to sequels if Fonda Lee decides to continue exploring Aquilo, but absolutely doesn't need one; The Last Contract of Isako wraps up quite neatly. Overall, I liked it... a little less than Jade City (the Jade City trilogy being what I knew Fonda Lee from), but I really liked Jade City, so that's hardly a knock.

While flipping through the library of rpgs, I was struck by the similarity between Hope and Fabula points in Fabula Ultima. Which gives a thought of stealing FU's rule that whenever a named Villain appears on screen, everyone gets a Hope- including during cutscenes, where the GM is just narrating the villains schemes to one another as a means of foreshadowing.

This could help with some of the feeling of Hope-starved, and ensure people know they will always have at least one Hope at the start of big conflicts.

What other games could be so plundered?

TL;DR: "The Everlasting" by Alix E. Harrow is a little slow to get started, tracing a long lazy arc that turns into a ever tightening circle through yearning, tragedy, triumph, romance, and the power of stories; recommended.

Once upon a time, a boy grew up near a stretch of forest called the Queenswald; it's not called that anymore, but never mind. He was dark haired and darkeyed like the mother he never knew, like the Hinterlanders whom the good, blonde and fair people of the Empire of Dominion were perpetually engaged in attempting to subdue, and so grew up without any friends, save an imaginary girl in that same forest. His father was a coward, broken from his time in the army and radicalized, protesting the Dominion's brutality when he wasn't too drunk. As Owen Mallory grows a little older, that boy is inspired by a recruiting poster, featuring Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, the Knight of Dominion, a semi-mythical figure from the founding days of the Dominion and hero of a hundred tales, exhorting the youth to serve crown and country (Not that the Dominion even had a monarchy any more, it was a parliamentary republic, but still). And, so inspired, he enlists... leaving the war with a nearly-cut throat, a medal for valor, and the knowledge the he, like his father, was a coward.

After being discharged, he goes to college, studying medieval history, with a focus on Sir Una Everlasting, despite the warning of his advisor that the space was played out. And, one day, a book arrives in plain brown wrapping paper. An impossible book. A book that seems to be a first hand account, from the distant past, of the death of Una Everlasting. A book that vanishes a few days later, with a card summoning him to a the Chancellor of Agriculture's office, Vivian. She sent Mallory the book as a test, and has summoned him with a task. Write a history worthy of a grand future, a future for the Dominion. Whereupon she stabs him in the hand and sends him back in time... to the side of Una Everlasting herself, upon her final quest to slay the last dragon, find the Grail, and tragically die just she restores her queen to life.

If you've read a story before, you won't be shocked to learn that Una is not how she is remembered. She is human, not a story, even if stories have spread in her wake. She is deadly and dangerous, and deeply broken by her life in the Queen's service. But, with Owen's cajoling and assurances that this is her last quest, she mounts her (horrifically old and ill-tempered) steed and rides out once more, to her death, Owen at her reluctant side. Through it, we see them help each other, a bit, with each other's deep injuries, and the seeds of of a deeper relationship... but one Owen knows is doomed, since he knows how the story ends. He should after all. He's going to have written it.

Without getting into specific spoilers, you'll be startled to learn that the time traveling fantasy doesn't end the way you might expect, opening into a very tightly woven mystery that almost borders into existential horror, even as we get to see Owen and Una's romance deepen. I cried, near the end, but I assure you reader, the story has a happy conclusion even when all seems lost.

There's also some absolutely smutty bits, the smuttier for being... Hrm. How to put this. A video I watched recently talked about the difference between movies being "sexy" versus "horny" - "sexy" movies might be titillating, but the actors are always beautiful, hair done, makeup unsmeared, perfectly smooth and blemish-free. Horny movies may show more, or less, but importantly they show the human side of desire and sex, which is often unglamorous, messy, sometimes funny, and always physical, even visceral. Thus, let me say- there's some horny fucking in this book.

Of the time travel, I will say, it is a big blinking example of Bellisario's Maxim ("Don't examine this too closely")- which can be risky for such a critical plot element. How does it work? Magic. Why does it work the way it does? Magic. But then shouldn't- no, because then the story wouldn't happen. For me, everything holds together, but I also know that time travel is one of those conceits that can break a lot of folk's engagement in a narrative. It keeps to its own rules, mostly, I think, which is the most important thing.

It took me a bit to get into the story. Una and Owen are both... kinda unlikable POV characters at first. Owen, in particular, is self-pitying to the point that you want to smack him. But, at some mysterious point, the hook got in me and pulled. It took me probably twice as long to read the first third of the book as the last two-thirds.

Thus, overall, if you want a bit of a cry, or an ever expanding mystery and romance, then meet me under the yew tree of the Queenswald. I'll be waiting.