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2025/195: Voyage of the Damned — Frances White
She’s cutting off the weak to save the strong. No, not even that. Cutting off the poor to save the rich. [loc. 6441]

There has been peace in Concordia for a thousand years: the twelve provinces are united against the threat of invasion, and each province has an heir who's been granted a magical gift, a Blessing, by the Goddess Herself. Voyage of the Damned begins just as Ganymedes ('Dee'), the representative of Fish province, is desperately trying to avoid embarking on the eponymous voyage -- to a sacred mountain, on the Emperor's own ship -- with the other eleven Blesseds.Read more... )

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[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/194: The Year's Midnight — Rachel Neumeier
Tenai had come into Dr. Dodson's care raging with a fury so tightly contained that a casual glance might have judged her calm. She was not calm. Daniel did not need to be told this. He knew it from the first moment he saw her. [p.2]

Daniel Dodson is a gifted psychiatrist who's mourning the death of his wife, and struggling to raise their daughter Jenna. He's also fouled his professional record by whistleblowing an abusive colleague. Now he's working at a smaller institution, Lindenwood, where his first patient is a mute 'Jane Doe' who was found on the highway, threatening vehicles with a sword. She cannot be identified, and nobody can communicate with her.

Daniel persuades her to speak. Her name is Tenai, and the tale she tells is a fantastical account of another world where she made a bargain with Lord Death and avenged her family over a lifespan of centuries. Dr Dodson, eminently sensible, diagnoses her thus: "I think you encountered something in this world that you couldn’t live with, and so you invented another world to be from." Read more... )

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[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/193: The Darkness Outside Us — Eliot Schrefer
Nowhere is truly empty. The thought makes me feel lavishly alone. Somehow, space is so deeply melancholy that it’s not at all sad, like a note so low it ceases to sound. Even my sorrow about my insignificance feels insignificant. [loc. 161]

Ambrose Cusk wakes up on a spaceship, the Coordinated Endeavor. The ship's operating system (OS) informs him, in his mother's voice, that the ship is well on its way towards his sister's distress beacon, on Saturn's moon Titan. Ambrose has been in a coma for two weeks, says OS, and has fallen behind on important maintenance tasks. Ambrose, who feels dreadful, can't remember anything about the launch.

But as he regains mobility and memory, he realises that OS is not being completely honest and open. Read more... )

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[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/192: The Summer War — Naomi Novik
Summer stories had a rhythm and a pattern to them, and she knew in her belly exactly how that one should have ended: with the summer lord rising healed and radiant from his bed to catch the hand of the heroic knight who had saved him... [loc. 556]

The Summer War has the beats and the ambience of the most classic fairytales: a king with three children, a curse with unexpected consequences, a bargain with the fae (in this world known as 'summerlings') that hinges on wording, a heroic princess.Read more... )

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[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/191: The Future Starts Here — John Higgs
The real problem is that a species that lives inside its own fictions can no longer imagine a healthy fiction to live inside, and this failure of the imagination stops us from steering towards the better versions of our potential futures. [p. 19]

The Future Starts Here: An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next is a cultural analysis of how we view the future, focussing very much on the positive. The book ranges from an overview of why colonising Mars is a daft idea to explorations of the Knebb rewilding project, of natural versus artificial intelligence (and why Higgs feels his cat is smarter than Alexa), and of the ways in which virtual reality can be more than just entertainment. Read more... )

2025/190: Yvgenie — C J Cherryh

Dec. 1st, 2025 12:27 pm
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/190: Yvgenie — C J Cherryh
... wizards he knew about sold curses and told fortunes. They did not crawl about inside one's heart and talk from other people's mouths and compel them... [loc. 2560]

Reread: I first read this in the 1990s, I think, and recall liking it: this was before I reviewed everything I read, so I don't know what I thought about it then. This time around, without having reread the two preceding novels of the 'Rusalka' trilogy, I was confused and unengaged.

Read more... )
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[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news
Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means [staff profile] karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.
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