Moe Lane's Blog, page 80

The MURDERBOT Apple TV+ trailer.

I laughed. I freely admit it. MURDERBOT will probably not live up to the trailer, but there are elements that suggest it’s not entirely awful…

New Miskatonic University Monograph: Liber Oblitus. (@hplhs)

Finally. I almost got the Miskatonic University Monograph: Liber Oblitus hardcover (which includes a facsimile of the book being monographed), but I don’t quite have the spare cash necessary to justify that as an impulse buy. Ach, well, such is life. At any rate: the HPL Historical Society never fails to impress.

Miskatonic University Monograph: Liber Oblitus https://t.co/pCuVlgv42N

— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) April 9, 2025

The Consolidation Wars, Part 3. (Unfiltered)

The Myrmidon Plague needs its own entry.

…

Empire Transformed
China had been undergoing a renaissance in the 2070s. Its final dynasty had weathered extremely rocky demographic and economic half-collapses two decades in the middle of the century, and was the second country after the old United States to exploit the Tomb Worlds in the post-Contact era. In 2059 they hit paydirt: a research/salvage team found a medical device that could double as a safe exowomb. Better and better, it could be duplicated, if not understood. Full production of the repurposed alientech was put in place by 2061, ostensibly to redress China’s demographic imbalance and increase family sizes.

A good deal of this was actually done, but in 2076 the ruling regime revealed that the dynasty had also surreptitiously constructed enough exowombs to create an army. The soldiers were raised communally under circumstances that did not encourage proper socialization, were not especially well trained or equipped, and no older than fifteen years old — but there were a lot of them, and the ruling regime used them over the next decade to conquer from Kamchatka to Singapore. The smaller island nations were likewise invaded; larger ones like Japan and Australia retained more independence, but were forced to fully and permanently align their economies with China’s.

By 2099 Greater China was firmly in control of east Asia, and was engaging in a program of involuntary transportation that rivaled the USNA’s. There is some suggestion in the records that the regime attempted to direct most of its transportees away from Jefferson; if this is true, it was unsuccessful. The regime also increased the number of exowomb-bred soldiers, using them more and more as soldiers, police, and first responders. This policy eventually caused the collapse/transformation of the Great Power into the South East Defensive Association after the Myrmidon Plague of 2116, as central authority finally and seemingly-permanently dissolved into a welter of squabbling, sovereign successor states.

04/09/2025 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

Back at it!

The two looked inside for a horribly long moment before Tobias spoke. “Lillian, have I started seeing things that aren’t there?”

Lillian exhaled, in that way that made it obvious she had been holding her breath. “So… you’re also seeing a hollowed-out space, and a hole in the ground? A knotted rope, hanging from the ceiling, and descending down into the stygian dark?”

“…Yeah. Oh, the hole is lined with slimy bricks.”

“Good, Tobias. You noticed that, too.” Lillian prodded one of the bricks with her boot. It didn’t do anything except leave a streak on the stone. “I was worrying about shared delusions. So, no, you haven’t started seeing things that aren’t there.”

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04/09/2025 Snippet, IN THE HALLS OF THE LILY KING.

This is not the right title.

…

He took a swig of his beer. “So. Were you buying, or selling?”

“Buying,” Serenity immediately replied. “At least, I assumed I would be. The late marquis had a reputation for being able to find accurate, yet unflattering information. If he claimed to have uncovered something that would be worth my time to bury, he probably did. He certainly told me to bring plenty of gold.” She sniffed. “As if a bank draft from the Bank of Hershey would not be honored at any bank on the continent!”

“But you said you didn’t do for him,” Waylon noted. “No skin off my nose if you did, you hear me? I’m not the only man who’d say a blackmailer with a sliced throat got off easy. You play that kind of game, you win those kind of prizes.”

“Which is why I do not prefer that kind of game, Mister Salvager. Besides, the secrets he had loomed larger in his head than mine. I am far more interested in how he found the information to begin with. Blackmail is an inconvenience, easily solved with money. Telling secrets? Now, that is a betrayal of trust.” Serenity tossed back the shot of whiskey that she had ordered. “I had not yet informed the marquis that revealing who his seller was would have been part of the deal.”

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‘Safety Dance.’

Safety Dance, Men Without Hats

#commissionearned

Moderately dull day today.

Had to make umpteen billion phone calls straightening out several things. Then I had to jump on a call with my layout guy about how to make sure the pagination was going to work out properly for the worldbook. We were trying to figure out how the page flow was set up originally, and while he eventually came up with a workaround, we still had to make decisions on how the Special Thanks page would look. (One reason I was nagging people about surveys!)

Tomorrow I really need to block out the next story, and get started on finishing the last remaining Tobias/Asenath story that I am doing at this time. Busy, busy, busy…

The PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS Hulu Trailer.

My kid was interested in this one. Interested in the Predator series generally, in fact. PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS does seem like the kind of horror-tinged science fiction he’d be into.

Fill out your surveys!

(Reminder: the pre-order store for the Fermi Resolution Worldbook is open!)

We are at the finishing stages of the book layout process, and one of the steps in that process is putting up the ‘Special Thanks’ section. If you have not yet filled out your survey, fill it out now so that I can properly credit you! And, you know, so you can get your stuff.

Just finished Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.

I do not score Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House as a political book, any more than I currently score Charlie Stross’s Laundry novels as being horror. I know what genres their respective authors think their books are in, but I couldn’t help but treat Fight as one of the funniest books I’ll be reading this year. The horrified bafflement! The nigh-tangible sense of DOOM that flooded This Town! The inability to decide just which rodent-fornicator was the most rodent-fornicating of all! And the uncritical willingness of the authors to let each of their interviewees – on both sides – have at least one poisoned knife each, to use on a target of their choice!

Heart. Of. Stone.

#commissionearned