â¨ď¸ Start Here! â¨ď¸ Hi! I'm Jo Boone, and I write original science fiction and fantasy!
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Today's Document
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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⣠Chile in a Photography âŁ

çĽćĽ / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

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I'd rather be in outer space đ¸
Peter Solarz
Monterey Bay Aquarium
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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JBB: An Artblog!
Stranger Things
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@jobooneauthor
â¨ď¸ Start Here! â¨ď¸ Hi! I'm Jo Boone, and I write original science fiction and fantasy!
Want to know more about who I am and what I write? Welcome to My Worlds!
Want to know where to find me IRL? Come On Up and See Me!

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Todayâs typo: âdefiendâ for âdefined.â We should always be careful to defiend our termsâfiendish little things that they are.
Behind the Scenes: "Thirty"?
A peek into Combined Service: Charlie sometimes talks about âputting in her thirtyââa way I imagined a society where all work that sustains a community, paid or caregiving, is valued and recognized. Itâs a small window into the world, not the main story, but one of the ideas that shaped it.
my husband has a colonoscopy this morning and unfortunately my brain did this
what if alien abductions got too risky
so now they just run gastroenterology clinics
and humans willingly show up like
âyes hello i scheduled my probing for 9:30â
â
me: so â hear me out â what if the aliens decided kidnapping humans was getting too dangerous, so they just set up gastroenterology clinics all over the world and now humans come to them freely for all that butt stuff
my kid: 𤣠i canât believe you just made me read that
me: so probably shouldnât put that one on facebook?
my kid: no no go ahead let everyone have that image
me: âŚtumblr?
my kid: 𤣠might do better on tumblr
Imagine the Ocean Was Blood
 On horror, Lem, and the long afterlife of a high school syllabus
âDo you like horror?â my friend Jason asked. âNot really,â I said, honestly. âMy daughter does, sometimes.â âOh, she has to go see Iron Lung!â he enthused. He has seen it three times already.
I texted my daughter. âJason says you have to see Iron Lung.â
âWe saw it!â she messaged back. âChris wanted to see it for Markiplier. Itâs very Solaris, honestly. Imagine if the ocean on Solaris was made of blood, and instead of studying it from space they sent you down in a little submarine.â
âShe says itâs like Solaris, but the ocean is blood and youâre in a little submarine,â I said to Jason.
He nodded. âStanislaw Lem, right? I see it.â
My daughter read Solaris in high school, in a class I designed called Fantastic Fiction, in which I spent an entire year challenging the idea that science fiction and fantasy are unserious literature. We read Shakespeare (The Tempest), Verne, Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jane Yolen. We watched Star Trek and Apollo 13.
Iâd never read Solaris before I assigned it for the class, in a unit I titled âInto the Black,â for which my students also read Verneâs From the Earth to the Moon and Arthur C. Clarkeâs âThe Sentinel,â and watched Apollo 13. If you havenât read it, itâs a moody, disturbing story of scientists studying an alien planetâand the planet, which may or may not be sentient, seems to also be studying them. The story offers no pat answers and no happy endings.
And of all of the amazing works we read in that class, from âLeaf by Niggleâ to â2BOR02B;â from Something Wicked This Way Comes to Brave New World; the book with the most staying power, the work that has become a touchstone for me and for my daughter, is Solaris. A dense, unsettling Polish science fiction novel has become a shared reference pointâsomething she can reach for instinctively to describe a completely different work.
Serious art doesnât just entertain. It becomes shared language.
It lets you say âvery Solaris,â and be understood.

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Footie Pajamas, Space Whales, and Ageing Heroes
Found this in my journal, from a few years ago when I was rewatching the Trek movies. Apparently I had strong feelings.
We begin with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This is Bad. Really Bad. Like, how is this thing still a viable franchise bad? Why is there an alien girl with no hair who is supposedly sexually irresistible but who is pretty much ignored by everybody, and anyway isnât that what the Orion women are supposed to be all about?
Why is there a captain who is not the captain? Why does the script destroy any sympathy for Kirk by having him jerk Decker around for no legitimate reason?
Why is Spock suddenly telepathically communicating with an ancient Earth probe thatâs a really long way away? Why does the new science officer have to be a Vulcan who dies in a horrible transporter accident and who is then in an utterly improbable series of events replaced by Spock? Why not just kill the NEW CAPTAIN in a transporter accident, making Kirk the obvious short-notice replacement, and have Spock show up before they leave?
Why do we spend the better part of an hour looking at the Enterprise in spacedock?
Who designed those appalling horrific uniforms that look like footie pajamas with grotesque belt buckles? (2026 me would like to confirm that the uniforms are still terrible.)
PACING PEOPLE PACING WTH?
Why do the two new characters who have had nothing whatsoever of any importance to do for the entire movie get to save the ship and the world at the end? What kind of sense does that make? DOES NOBODY KNOW WHO THE PROTAGONIST IS HERE? DOES THAT NOT SEEM LIKE KIND OF A GROSS OVERSIGHT?
And last of all and perhaps most imponderable, how did such a dog of a movie end up with such an amazing score?
Nowhere to go from here but UP, baby!
We are up to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one about the whales), and movies 2-3-4 are really a trilogy that tells one long story, so now we think of them that way, although when they first came out I was too young and/or the whole movie trilogy thing was still too new and unfamiliar and/or they were too far apart for me to actually notice this. Observations:
1. No more footie pajama uniforms! Oh GOOD! I donât love the new uniforms, exactly, but theyâre SO MUCH BETTER than the ones from ST:TMP that Iâm not going to complain. Also, they keep them for all three movies, so thatâs good. I like that the three movies have a consistent look to them.
2. Remember I said the uniforms are better? Well, all of them except for the weird outfits the engineering guys wear, and the even more bizarre outfits the security guys wear. Whoo those are bad.
3. Hey! These films are actually Star Trek! Kirk and Spock and McCoy are recognizably Kirk and Spock and McCoy! Thereâs stuff thatâs actually connected to the TV show! RICARDO MONTALBAN IS BACK YAY! One of Kirkâs ex-girlfriends is important to the plot (how very Trek!)! Spock is logical, McCoy is wry, Kirk stands in the middle saying âPlay nice, boysâŚâ
4. They let the actors age. You know, as a teen/twentysomething, I did not pay this any attention that I can recall â it was Star Trek, and I loved it because it was Star Trek â although I do seem to remember other people commenting on it. Watching these movies now, I think this is completely and totally awesome. (rereading this now, Iâm even more convinced that one of my favorite things about Star Trek is that it lets its heroes ageâeven its holographic heroes). These people are, like, in their fifties and sixties some of them, and they are SAVING THE WORLD!!! Honestly, I think this is one of my new favorite things about Star Trek: Theyâre like Bilbo and Gandalf in space! Not everybody whoâs important and heroic has to be in their twenties!
The Day the Angel Showed Up
When my children were young, I did not watch much television. So, I missed a good ten yearsâ worth of Stuff.
This is my excuse for being utterly unaware of Supernatural until the end of season 10.
Even then, I was only marginally aware of it. My older daughter took it up because her friends watched it. She watched it on her computer, until she decided I would like it. We often chose shows to watch together, and we tended to choose shows that fit into our extremely busy livesâFirefly, Freaks & Geeksâso I was, in theory, open to new shows.
âMom,â she said, âyou should watch this show with me.â
âHow many seasons?â I asked.
âSeason 9 is finished, season 10 will be on Netflix in September, season 11 starts this fall!â she said.
Ten seasons of catch-up stretched before me like an impossible task. âIâm sorry, kiddo. I donât think I have the energy to start on a series that is already up to season 10 before Iâve even heard of it.â
But, she persisted.
Our house had a great roomâliving room, dining room and kitchen in one large room with 10-foot ceilings. I had an office, she had her bedroom, but when I was in the kitchen, the living room TV was unavoidable. She would wait until I got involved in something in the kitchen, and then come in and turn on an episode she thought I would like.
I was enjoying the show, but I wasn't really committed to it.
Then, she happened to put on a season 4 episode.
I was just walking through the room.
âWho is that guy?â I asked.
âWhich guy?â
I waited for the dark-haired, trench-coated, grim-faced character with the gravelly voice to reappear onscreen. âThat guy.â
âOh, thatâs Castiel,â she said. âHeâs an angel.â
âHeâs a regular?â
âUhmmmmâŚâ she understood that sheâd finally found a hook that would draw me in to a shared activity. âStarting in Season 4, yeah.â
I sat down next to her on the couch. âOkay,â I said. âI will watch it with you.â
She gave me a tolerant look. âOkay. But I want to talk about the show with my friends, so we have to start with season 9.â
âIs Castiel in season 9?â
The teenager eyeroll was audible. âYes.â
âOkay!â
I quickly decided she and I were the mother/daughter incarnation of Sam and Dean. Weâd already had this exact conversation:
Me/Sam: How can you eat this stuff? Do you even read these labels? Look at all these chemicals!
Her/Dean: All I see is "pie." The rest is just "blah blah blah."
Suddenly we had a whole new vocabulary for who we were: The thoughtful label reader. The incautious lover of pie. The devoted family. The inseparable monster-hunting team.
My girl was so Dean that she dressed as Dean for Halloween one year.
I also drew some parallels to my other fandoms:
Me: Whenever other hunters show up on Supernatural, they're like the redshirts on Star Trek. They're gonna die.
She: Everybody in the show is a redshirt. They all end up dead.
Me: Not Castiel. Castiel's not gonna die.
She: I wouldn't be so sure. They're all at risk. He's already died a couple of times, he just came back.
Me: No. God's not gonna let Cas die, because he is So. Very. Pretty.
She (groaning): Mom. Really?
Eventually, I had to go back and catch up the earlier seasons. Which proved a lovely opportunity to embarrass my teenage daughter:
Me: So, you haven't seen that episode?
She: No, there were some in Season 4 I skipped because I was trying to get caught up.
Me: I thought that was in Season 5.
She: No, I'm pretty sure it would have been season 4.
Me: Didn't Dean get dragged off to Hell at the end of season 4?
She: No, that was season 3. Season 4 is when Castiel shows up.
Me: THAT'S right! Season four is when Cas shows up, so then the other episode I was thinking of must have been in Season 5.
She: Wait. Mom. You can't date your Supernatural episodes based on Castiel. Most fans date them by how long Sam's hair was, or how happy Dean was, or something like that.
Me: But... Castiel is the PRETTIEST one! So I NOTICED when he showed up!
She: Mom. You're so embarrassing.
Me: My job here is done!
Turns out angels donât just show up in trenchcoats and lightning. Sometimes they show up right in your kitchen, when your kid invites you to sit down.
Water, Light, and a Truce with February
February is always the longest month, for me.
Every year, as we inch through January â even though the days are technically getting longer â the lack of daylight starts to get to me. By February, Iâm usually in a funk that only the coming of spring can cure.
So this winter, I decided to try to get ahead of the Late Winter Blahs.
Iâve been getting up, bundling up, and going outside with my coffee to sit on the porch and soak up whatever dim, gray, disheartening light the season has to offer.
And I am absolutely stunned to report that:
It is working.
My mood is better than is typical for me this time of year. Iâm struggling less in the mornings. And â this is the part that truly astonishes me â I actually look forward to those quiet moments in the cold, gray winter air.
The other thing Iâve been trying is (deep sigh) hydration.
Iâm a coffee gal, despite having to switch to decaf for Reasons a couple of years ago. Hot coffee is still the proper way to start the day.
But They Say â and They are the Authority, am I right? â that a glass of water in the morning is better than caffeine.
So I tried that too.
I hate it when Theyâre right.
But there you go.
For the first time in decades, I feel optimistic about February.

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I Love a Good Octopus Story
I love a good octopus story.
My Combined Service octopods are based physiologically on Earthâs giant Pacific octopus. A full-grown giant Pacific octopus is about twelve feet long, blue-blooded, and venomous â just like the octopods of Domum Oceanum.
But octopods start small. All of them. Even the giant Pacific octopus.
They begin life as tiny, transparent larvae â smaller than a grain of rice â and spend the first three months of their lives adrift in the plankton layer, providing a food source for whales and other creatures.
Among the octopods of Domum Oceanum, this life stage is called the Journey. Only those who survive the Journey become sentient.
In 2012, a tiny red octopus â no bigger than a bit of plankton â was carried into the Monterey Bay Aquarium (the very same aquarium that played the Cetacean Institute in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) on a sponge, or perhaps a piece of rock.
Having survived the plankton layer, the little octopus did exactly what its instincts told it to do.
It hunted.
It began eating the crabs in the Shale Reef exhibit.
Aquarium staff noticed the population decline, but for almost a year had no explanation â until the itty bitty octopus, now about the size of a fist, decided to look for new hunting grounds and crawled out of the exhibit and into the middle of the floor.
Rookie mistake. Poor little octopus.
On Domum Oceanum, the older octopods would have taken charge and taught it how to avoid detection a little better than that.
The itty bitty octopus reportedly ended up as part of the aquariumâs splash zone.
If you want to know more about the sentient octopods of Domum Oceanum, they show up in the Combined Service books â because once you start paying attention to octopuses, itâs hard not to imagine what they might become.
The Aunt Who Was a Bad Influence
I own a documentary about Ray Harryhausen.
You know who Ray Harryhausen is, right? Stop-motion pioneer, creator of skeletons fighting humans, spaceships crashing into miniature landscapes, and dinosaurs that still move the way he imagined them.
He made The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which inspired the first Godzilla movie. And yes, that birthed the entire Godzilla franchise.
My nephew is a Godzilla fan.
A few years ago, while my parents were visiting, I watched the Harryhausen documentary with my dad and my nephew.
My nephew immediately made a list of every Harryhausen movie and stuck it on the fridge. He started making his parents watch them.
Periodically, my sister reminds me: âYou showed Lucas the Harryhausen documentary. This is all your fault.â
And it is.
I never thought Iâd earn the title Bad Aunt for showing a documentary about a moviemaker. But here we are.
A Very Nerdy Christmas
Welcome to 2026, friends!
I donât have high expectations for 2026. Iâll be honest, 2026 gets the sideye from me until I see how itâs going to behave.
Butâwhile 2025 is still in timeout (go think about what you did, 2025!)âthere were still bright spots.
Like all the nerd stuff I got for Christmas! Itâs like, the people who bought me gifts actually knew me! I didnât always have that, but I do now!
Calendars! I got TWO Star Trek calendars! The Ships of the Line calendar has hung in my bedroom for two years, and now Iâll have a third! The other, a Strange New Worlds calendar, is already hanging in my cube at work.
Figures! My husband and I got mystery Lower Decks figures from my daughter; he got Tendi, and I got Rutherford, which is perfect, because of course Tendi and Rutherford are the will they/wonât they couple on the showâand Tendi is secretly a warrior, and Rutherford is a softhearted engineer. In short: theyâre us!
Other stuff! A purse I picked out at the beach, with horses on it! Because in addition to being nerdy, I am a horse girl. And a new Purdue sweatshirt and keychain, because yes, I am both a geek and a nerd.I got a new Purdue sweatshirt, and a Purdue keychain, because I am both a geek and a nerd.
And the pièce de rÊsistance! Nerd Hummels!
Itâs girl Kirk and Spock, done anime-style (I know her rank insignia is wrong, donât @ me. Sheâs girl Kirk! Thatâs my story and Iâm sticking to it!)
I hope in Christmas 2025, you got the best and nerdiest gifts that told you, I see you, nerd girl! (or guy, or neither, as appropriate for you!).
And I hope your 2026 includes many more moments of being seen and appreciated for who you are!
Exit Strategy / A Combined Service Fic
A missing scene from The Magnetar â the moment Alphonse Rakowski realizes itâs time to move on. (Takes place during Chapter 8-bridges to Book 4)
The girl was the problem. If she had died like the rest of them, he'd be in the clear.
But she had not.
Alphonse scrolled idly through the feeds as he pondered. Sensational stories of interspecies romances gone wrong-or right. Grim news of disasters and tragedies. Histrionic political headlines. Improbable scientific "breakthroughs."
Alphonse paused the feed on one of the disasters. Disasters were fertile ground for grift. You could sell a lot of cheap junk at a substantial markup--or grab a lot of nice donated items for resale elsewhere. He'd done both.
But he just hated disaster zones.
He rubbed his eyes wearilyâgrit behind his lids, the way they always got after too many hours staring at displays. No photosensitive membranes, no nictating shieldsâjust soft human tissue that stung and burned. He let the feed scroll.
He could have worked around it anyway. He could have released her from the contract he'd drawn up, after enough time had passed, and it would have all been legit. The audits wouldn't have caught it.
But then the Magnetar had called for crew. Everyone on deferred contracts would finally be called into service.
He paused the feed again with the tap of a finger.
She'd seen his face. She knew the name he was using.
And a person who was alive was far more likely to discover that she had not received her sign-on bonus than someone who was not.
The recruiter gig on Gliese Delta had been a great way to lay low for a while, and more lucrative than he had expected, but it was time to move on.
The question was, where to?
He clenched his fist in frustration, inadvertently pausing the feed.
There was an image of a woman, young, but not beautiful. The headline read, "Rocannon Laboratories Lures Prodigy Researcher Away From University of ShevekâŚ"
Rocannon Laboratories. How did he know that name?
He skimmed the article. The woman in the image was Dr. Sera Thalen, and her research into photonless telemetric coupling had apparently âopened new frontiers in non-radiative communication physics.â
He didnât need to read further. He knew what that meant â or could mean.
And suddenly, he knew exactly where to go next.

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so a very long time ago, my dad worked with an arson investigator
this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke
this investigator wouldnât try to calm them down. he wouldnât comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.
instead, heâd walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say âhey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?â
of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldnât be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasnât completely put out. but the bystander didnât need to know that
because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job
my dad has told me the parable of the fire extinguisher a hundred times, and i think about it a lot. i think about what it says about people and crises. i think about what it says about the grounding power of having a purpose. and i think about the importance of letting someone help me through something, even if that help is just going to be another casserole to throw into the freezer, because useless or not, that fire extinguisher might be the only thing holding them together
Guilty Pleasures and Angry Space Nerds
Can I admit to a guilty pleasure?
I really love Star Trek: Enterprise.
I own a stuffed beagle named Porthos. I have a coffee mug with NX-01 on it. I covet those blue flight suits (Iâll own one eventually! I will!). TâPol is my favorite Vulcan. And that final episode? A wildly inaccurate bit of holodeck historical fiction. Never happened.
My husband, whoâs a fan of pretty much all things Trek, is right there with meâup to a point.
That point is the Xindi arc.
Season 3 of Enterprise, if you need a refresher, pits Our Crew against a brand-new enemy: the Xindi, who brutally attack Earth. The Xindi arenât one species of aliens, but five related species who all evolved on the same homeworld, from the same genetic roots, into simians, reptilians, aquatics, insectoids⌠and avians.
We see four of the five. The avians are extinct. We never see them.
I may be the only person who cared. But I did care. I wanted to see the avians!
And since that wish is never going to be granted, I went and made up my own.
So: there are avians in the Combined Service universeâsentient bird-people modeled on birds of prey, with what are apparently called âangel armsâ (they have both wings and arms). The Magnetarâs XO is an avian named Sasskiek:
Sasskiek, the last to arrive, was fastidiously arranging his feathers as he settled onto his own seatâa perch mounted underneath the table, which folded down to accommodate the avians. The avians, like the octopods, were eight-limbed, having four wings, two clawed hands, and a pair of clawed feetâand quite compact. He could have perched on Chalkâs extended arm for a face-to-face talk. When he spread his great wings, though, he was a full four meters across.
The shipâs chaplain is also an avian, and a reader favorite:
The voice at Charlieâs elbow spoke three times before she realized it was speaking to her. She tore her gaze from the incomprehensible dome of stars and looked down, confused, until she located the speakerâan avian with a gray-feathered head, wearing a cowled vest of dark Combined Service purple trimmed in silver, with service tattoos on both of his bony avian arms. âWould you like to sit, Apprentice?â the avian said, holding out one arm toward an unoccupied seating area nearby. âThis is the locus orationis,â he said. âThe prayer room. On a Terran ship, I believe it would be called the chapel. I am the shipâs chaplain, Chaplain Aerrett.â âCharlie. AC Cooke. Except itâs not CookeâŚIâm sorry, I just walked until I came to the end of everything and I ended up here, it wasnât intentional.â âThere is no need for apology,â the Chaplain said, amused. âIt is perfectly acceptable to arrive by accident.â
Anyway. This is what happens when you give a space nerd one unresolved plot thread and a keyboard.