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erinptahHemlock & Silver: Tried another book by T. Kingfisher. I liked it! The narrator is a poisons expert, who gets hired to find out if/how someone is making the king’s daughter sick. She’s very good at her job, thinking through all kinds of possibilities, and doing methodical tests — which serves her well when things start to get Weird and Magic.
There are a couple of frustrating times when she doesn’t figure something out (not even “this is a possibility I should investigate”) until a couple chapters after the reader has. Other than that, it’s really solid. I can only imagine how much background research on different toxins and venoms went into the writing. Sometimes this world has different names for things, or there’s a gap in their scientific knowledge, but you can deduce what’s going on from the practical description of causes and symptoms.
Also, it’s more Fantasy California than Fantasy Europe! Still a pretty traditional fairytale kingdom, but the plants and animals are all desert-dwellers, and there’s some Spanish influence going on.
The narrator, like the one from The House on the Cerulean Sea, is overweight, and it comes up periodically. I like the handling here so much better. She just reflects on it when she’s feeling self-conscious, or when it’s a meaningful factor in the action (e.g. if she’s incapacitated and needs to be carried somewhere). There’s no “pack of plucky orphans who regularly tease her for it without ever learning a Valuable Lesson that they’re being rude.”
It’s blurbed as “a re-imagining of Snow White,” but it only has a couple general tropes in common (mirrors, poison apples, a villain who’s a queen), not used in the same way. If the poison didn’t involve apples, and the princess wasn’t named Snow, I’m not even sure the connection would be obvious.
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After getting my ebook purchases unlocked with Libation, I figured it was a good opportunity for some Murderbot re-listens. Specifically, I listened to Network Effect (the first novel) and System Collapse (the much-shorter second novel) back-to-back. Since that’s how the in-universe events happen, even though the book releases were years apart.
Spoilers follow! (I’ve kept some of it vague, but not everything.)
Network Effect is still really good! “Murderbot gets stuck in a survival quest with a teenager” is an inspired character setup. MB having a breakdown when it thinks it’s lost ART, then a different kind of breakdown when ART is back but now MB knows what it did, is all excellent, hits just the right hurt/comfort notes. Everything about ART meeting some of MB’s humans for the first time is great.
The excerpts from helpme.file are still a wonderful buildup, even once you already know the impending reveal of who’s reading them, and why. The sudden switch to a new POV, for the first time in the series, also stays fun even after you’re expecting it. The rescue sequences are wonderful, and the end is very well-earned.
System Collapse is…a weird one.
Some good things: The repeated references to [redacted] are good at building suspense, and the eventual reveal of the events MB is redacting is very satisfying. (And believable!) The way MB and company win over the residents of Mystery Colony is admittedly a little cheesy, but in a way I think the series has earned by this point. The interaction with enemy SecUnits toward the end has a development that’s been a long time coming.
On to the weird things:
It’s only half the length of Network Effect. On a re-listen, the pacing gives me the distinct impression that Martha Wells meant to write something the same length as Network Effect, and then started to run out of steam and wished she was doing another novella instead. Before the team gets to the Mystery Colony, the scenes have a lot of detail and attention — MB will do things like “recount its growing worry and frustration with every step in the process of trying to find a hidden hatch.” Once they enter Mystery Colony, events start whipping by. There’s more summarizing. More jumping straight from “we decided to do X” to “X was done”, without anything about the process or the challenges of getting there.
I kept wondering whether this would flow better if the premise was “MB set off adventuring with ART’s crew, and this is their first mission on a new planet,” rather than “MB and ART suddenly get a secret new mission on the planet they were already at.”
It’s probably better for MB’s mental health that [redacted] happened while a bunch of its Preservation humans were still around, because it doesn’t trust any of ART’s humans enough to seek emotional support from them. And [redacted] would give ART’s crew a skewed almost-first-impression, while the PresAux crew has a more-informed perspective, having seen MB in action across a whole bunch of different missions in the past.
On the flip side, a lot of ART’s crew are still really thin as characters, and I would’ve liked to see a mission with all of them to build them up more. The PresAux characters who had big roles in Network Effect got a lot of good development there…and I’m not sure any of that was enhanced by what they did in System Collapse? It didn’t do much for ART’s humans either, even the ones who had big roles. Might have been better if it was the whole group, so we could see their existing personal dynamics and practiced teamwork.
Ratthi/Tarik only happens if Ratthi is still around, but on a re-listen, I’m not feeling much satisfaction about that either. It’s not that I’m mad about it, it doesn’t actively drag down any characters the way Ratthi’s TV-series romance did, it’s just…so barely-there. MB’s narration covers one (1) conversation that involves them being together. I assume it’s not the first sex-related conversation MB has witnessed over the course of these books, it’s just redacting/ignoring/deleting them as not relevant to its job. But this one didn’t end up being relevant either!
At some point, I expected that Ratthi saying “SecUnit, you don’t want to hear about this, it’s a sexual conversation” was a cover story. That at some point we’d get a reveal — Ratthi was talking about something he didn’t want MB to know, and he’s figured out that “we’re talking about sex” is the surest way to get MB not to surveil something. But nope. It just doesn’t come back at all.
So, yeah. It’s not a bad book (if it was, I wouldn’t have listened to it twice!), it’s just the one entry in the MB series where I keep noticing all the ways it could’ve been better.
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Nona the Ninth is, like all the Locked Tomb books, a lot easier to follow when you know who everyone is.
I’m not letting myself write a whole essay on this one! Just to say, it’s funny, it’s dramatic, it’s heartwarming, it’s twisty, it’s weird (on purpose, and to great effect). I’m glad I re-listened. Whenever the fourth book gets an actual release date, I’ll be there with bells on. (And I fully expect to re-binge the whole series so far before I start.)
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Picture Perfect, by Elaine Marie Alphin, is a middle-grade almost-murder-mystery I found out about from this pluralstories entry.
I feel like anything I say is going to come off like damning with faint praise, because…listen, it’s very much a middle-grade book. It’s fine! I enjoyed it for what it was. I don’t have any particular criticisms or complaints. It’s good at what it’s trying to do! And what it’s trying to do is…be a middle-grade book.
I’m glad I read it, specifically because I was interested in the narrator-with-DID angle. If that’s a topic you’re also particularly interested in, maybe give it a look. And if you’re looking for books to recommend to a tween reader in your life, this is a solid pick.
nevannasolarbirdI would like to wish all the people who fought with me and sneered at me about how Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were no better than Donald Trump and sat out the election and encouraged others to do the same a very happy DRINK SOME FUCKING BLEACH:
FBI Readies New War on Trans People
“We’re looking at the entire web”
Ken Klippenstein
Sep 18, 2025
The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.
…
Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs).
This is, yes, OBVIOUSLY, a duplication of Putin’s moves to designate target groups as “extremist organisations,” whether there’s an organisation or not, as “LGBT” was designated a couple of years ago, leading to the de facto re-illegialisation of LGBT people and large scale prosecutions.
Every other kind of queer is probably gonna be next.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
kossai
solarbirdI do not believe it’s a minor thing that Greg “let’s reclaim the word Nazi” Gutfield is repurposing Hitler’s “Jewish hypnotism” libel against trans people to transfer guilt from a cis white boy from a conservative family:
“[The shooter] was a patsy. He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct to consumer nihilism – the trans cult.”
Greg Gutfield on Fox
There are plenty of other full-on-fascist declarations in this rant, too, not the least of which being the open declaration that they “don’t care” about “what-abouts,” which is to say, the overwhelming share of violence being from the right, or, in this case, the literal assassination of two Democratic state officials earlier this summer by a MAGA supporter with an extended list of targets. Those don’t count, because Democrats. Only MAGA are people, only MAGA have rights, only Trump can be king.
But it’s still important, and the one I think people may miss. This is, again, literally Hitler libel from a many who proposed “reclaiming” the word “Nazi” this summer.
If he wants the word so much, let’s apply it to him.
Greg Gutfield is a Nazi.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
solarbirdThe grim times we’ve been expecting are here.
Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-TX) calls trans people a virus and a cancer that must be censored, isolated, and imprisoned en masse. It’s a call for genocide, or – as they said during the election – for “eradication.”
Laura Loomer, an important Trump confidante and aide, calls for a Trump dictatorship and mass arrests and prosecution of “leftists” (which for her absolutely includes liberals):
Trump and MAGA are following Putin’s playbook on the media, pushing it either into the hands of ideological compatriots or into silence:
Correct commentary from Mastodon:
Kimmel is about as controversial as a goldfish here. They aren’t serious about it being a problem; the whole •point• is that it’s obviously •not• a problem.
They are using something extremely benign to test the waters of government repression of speech, to see just how much they can get away with — and ABC caved like 3rd-grade toothpick bridge.
It’s relevant that there are mergers in process and it’s clear that Trump would fuck with them if they didn’t pull Kimmel down:
Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking FCC approval for a multi-billion-dollar merger with Tegna, said its ABC affiliates would not air Kimmel’s show before ABC announced its own decision.
Even Karl fucking Rove thinks they’ve gone too far, but that won’t stop them, or even slow them down:
‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk. It insults his memory to blame political opponents for one man’s heinous act.
Meanwhile, Trump demands federal investigations into ‘organized’ Trump protesters – this is also out of Putin’s playbook:
Earlier this week, responding to a conservative reporter who said that anti-war protesters near the White House “still have their First Amendment right,” Trump replied, “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.”
It’s against this backdrop that Politico reported [that] the Justice Department’s No. 2 official said Tuesday that people noisily protesting President Donald Trump could face investigation if they’re part of broader networks organizing such activities.
Worth reading: Keep An Eye on What We Know (And Don’t) – 15 September 2025 – TPM:
In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.
Worth reading: Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause – 16 September 2025 – Vanity Fair / Ta-Nehisi Coates:
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.
Finally, an article and a concept that’s been gaining traction: It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About “Soft Secession”:
Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.
See also: In the disunited states, conflict and uncertainty rule, which also brings up “Soft Secession,” and I’ve seen people holding signs up about it at protests since the original column came out.
I feel I don’t really have to say, “shit’s bad, folks,” but, well – shit’s bad, folks. If there’s a protest near you, find it, and join it.
They can’t arrest literally everyone, and Trump does chicken out – the only response you can have to him is push back as hard as you can, every time.
And that means right now.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
