Jesse > Recent Status Updates

Okay, the showdown in the courtyard was a pretty cool scene. My heart goes out to Victor’s cadre of orphans, here in the middle of Emma’s account of his narcissistic abuse.

There are too many variables to think on who did what but I assume that Victor adopted the orphans to teach them combined magics rather than risk whittling his own life force away. Whether it’s Henry’s own campaign or one of his fellow orphans it’s obviously being waged by someone using tools that Victor taught them.

Okay, the shadow-swimming bit was pretty cool. I get why we got hit with the goofy lumber mill-esque spot; this book’s tone leaves it generally devoid of suspense, even when action is going on. I’m kind of glad that it was sort of a red herring.

Also lots of purposefully brushing over important weird facts, like what was the nurse doing with a sword??? I can’t take for granted that Atterton actually died in the alley. I mean, maybe he did, but necromancy is right there in the universe’s setting, folks.

Well it’s good to know that Jess Blessed wasn’t the victim of SA. This chapter leaps around A LOT. It also delivers on the out-of-place graveyard chat about alchemists and flails by way of a pretty big smash cut / flash forward-and-then-back.

The bit with Obelos sheds a bit more light on the world, but this has been a stretch more about diplomacy and the horrid royals. I really don’t care about the dragon anymore, as fun as the image of Warren stuffing a smorgasbord of street vendor food into a seemingly bottom handbag might seem on paper.

Okay, I’m here for the weirder parts of this universe. bancroft’s afterlife is fairly structured and makes for a harrowing minor adventure. I like the callback to the maudlin funeral gramophone. Also, wheels within wheels, with the detailing of Ms. Blessed’s Victorian-esque adoption and upbringing, recalling in my mind something like Jane Austen’s novels minus any of the drama… the front part, anyway.

I’m kind of over how twee Bancroft’s universe is, but this is still fun as a sort of picaresque tour of the various workings of the place. Even if the didactic exchange over alchemists / flails felt like blunt expository. It’s more of a travelogue, maybe, thinly held together by the opening mystery?

now we have a conversationalist dragon. if I make any comparisons between the tone of this world and Fallen London, then it’s because I am generally ignorant of the more contemporary fantasy that could have informed its twee-at-times universe. I’m not sure what sort of English period this is meant to mimic but if I had to guess then it would be something like the post-WWI, Agatha Christie’s England.

A fun dynamic where the wife is the brains and the experienced magician while her partner is the brawn and the… tea-making house husband who supports her. Even if he DID dispatch the first big nasty monster. The humor is very detached and droll.

my last Barnes and noble register impulse purchase was Juniper and Thorn. it’s time to knock out another!!

This book rules. The pairing of the robot-hating earth-man with the space-built virtually indistinguishable robot make for great drama and comedy and Asimov’s characterization here is so much better I think than the thought-experiment stories that made up I, Robot. The section about Lije’s wife, Jessie, and her given name (Jezebel) makes these characters way more real.

This book already slaps way harder than the I, Robot Collection

“Terminal Boredom”

A microcosm of a dystopia where young adults are horrifically depressed and disassociated from everyday life as a coping mechanism. The government is pushing an operation that turns TV into a drug delivery system. The protagonist’s boyfriend is a sociopath looking for some kind of catharsis, and together the two of them are bounding toward a grotesque memory.

“Forgotten”

An interplanetary death of a romance. Emma is in a relationship with Sol, an alien from Meele. Meelians remember everything and have a sort of psychic super-conscious that serves as a racial memory. Meelians could live forever, but outside of isolated incidents they typically kill themselves out of total despair or total satisfaction.

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

A woman is addicted to pills that destabilize her sense of time… because they destabilize her PLACE in time. The paired plot is her reconnecting awkwardly with her paramour, who generally fakes or plays up emotions in social situations to appear normal. I’m not sure what is going on with the direct parallel to Hitler and Eva Braun, the title of the song.

“That Old Seaside Club”

The MC is on some vacation planet and is hanging out with a friend who she’s met and is also drawn to a young man who feels strangely familiar. Things get psychedelically weird when the chair in her hotel room starts talking and walking around. The point of the story is lodged somewhere in the transience of youth and the weight of regret.

“Night Picnic”

There are a lot of bizarre oddities about this lone, seemingly post-apocalyptic family, all of whom are more conscious of PLAYING the roles of son, daughter, father, and mother than understanding them. Several details - like the “sister” originally being a “brother”, but for the mother’s desire to have a daughter - hit one way and then another when the (obvious?) twist hits.

“You May Dream”

In the future, overpopulation is controlled by placing people in cryosleep and allowing them one person to join their conscience to in dreams. The MC says yes to her friend, but they aren’t great mind-mates, and through the friction she realizes the depths of her self-hating depression.

“Women and Women”

A dystopian future examining gender and sex, where women are free and men are both restricted and rare, but planet has been largely raided of its natural resources. The story’s catalyst is, of course, a boy that the MC becomes a secret acquaintance of.

It’s the absolute climax!!!! But I have been soooo tired and I am going to sleep and wrap this up later because I’m tired of feeling like hollow death from poor sleep

At this point maintaining the Yueh / Jessica dichotomy is starting to feel silly

Bummer about Liet! This story is killing off big characters at a… relatively quick rate. His chapter is interesting though, an intersection of both ecology and the darker future proposed by messianism that books Dune influenced missed the point of.

We are firmly into the action-driven section of the book, now, and also attempting to describe the horror of prescience