Status Updates From Helliconia Summer

And so we return to the beginning. What a long flashback this was.

The Fat Death sounds like some crazy scary combie apocalypse stuff. I'm dreading the full epidemic which I'm sure I'll read all about in Helliconia Winter.

Curse the non-gendered language: I read several chapters before I realized that a major character was actually a woman.

What a foolish king. So much he breaks, so many seeds to his own destruction he sows, looking for that brief edge. His happiness, gone.

I'm mildly surprised Billy still lives. His death is almost a foregone conclusion after all.

I still see where the king is coming from, but he is quickly wearing out the goodwill. Book burning! Whatever next?

Should've claimed to be a peasant or a student or someone else unimportant, Billy.

A lottery of death that everyone wants to participate in, and given their society, I suppose I would too.

More to the point, there's the firearms. I wonder if it'd ever be possible for these people to advance to modern age and beyond, and find a way to break their implied cycle of civilization and barbarism, to survive in culture and knowledge throughout the whole great year. We'll see.

Some great trash-talk before the battle, there.

For this year's NaNoWriMo I'm going to write something about winter. So what kind of literature I picked up to get myself in the right mindset? Something about summer! My brain works in mysterious ways.