#final architecture

We're a couple days early, but oh well.

Off to a flying start this year:

To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars - Christopher Paolini

Actually read most of this last month but, because I hadn't finished it, it's going on this month's list. My partner has been wanting me to get around to this for a while and honestly, I'm really glad I did. It's fun and a different flavor of sci-to what I usually read.

The Pit Dragon Trilogy - Jane Yolen

Dragon's Blood

Heart's Blood

A Sending Of Dragons

I read Dragon's Blood when I was 8 or 9 or school and somehow forgot the title, I had been searching for that book for years and when I finally found that piece of my childhood I realized that it was part of a series, of course I bought them all.

Brigands & Breadknives - Travis Baldree

My partner gave me a signed and sprayed edge special edition for Christmas. Fern was the star of the prequel story and so giving her a spin-off of her own just seems natural and it was genuinely a fun read.

Warborn: Desecration Of Red - N.M.Cotton

Dark, gritty sci-fi/Biopunk that keeps the tension and adrenaline ramped up. Already waiting for book two.

The Bond That Burns - Briar Boelyn

I actually bought this one for my partner for Christmas, sprayed edge edition, but I ended up borrowing it.

Shards Of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky

^look at her!

born functionally without limbs so instead she uses all kinds of artificial frames for getting around and doing stuff

she has normal walker frames and stuff too but this art is of her jury-rigged castigar-made "scorpion frame"

she's literally one of the main characters and also canonically lesbian and she ends up leading a nation/cartel/cult/thing (inherited from her former boss(?); rip aklu) with her cyborg girlfriend in the end

actual force of nature within the narrative

Tothiat, a hybrid of human and a tothir - an alien lifeform - that when grafted onto host's body gives them near immortality.

like yeah they're the main "political units" of the Hiver Assembly in Aggregate

but also that name literally just means "the consensus between hiver assemblies", and each of those assemblies is called that because they're massive concentrations of hiver units, that is to say, the little cyborg roaches

like these are just massive intelligences that bud off smaller little hiver instances that just.. hang around in systems all over orbiting the more undesirable planets, and it's just a thing people accept because they're good for business, they extract resources more efficiently than colonial or hanni or castigar efforts could so it's usually cheaper to just let an assembly build itself in-system and buy it from them

but the end result is these weirdass roach DI swarms end up becoming one of the major powers in the setting despite being originally created as tools and also not actually controlling any systems as such

and the whole time there's basically just one really weird old-ass assembly mind in each orbital

and basically none of the pov characters seem quite aware of that at first

because hivers are just around, they're helpful, flexible, reliable, you find individual hiver assets all across known space

but they only ever see the small ones, and that leads them to interpret "assemblies" as basically hiver space-cities, unconsciously

and sure, assemblies do have a significant number of instanced little ones in and around them at basically all times

but those aren't the assembly

you can talk to an assembly

directly

no government statements, no commitees, just the singular emergent group mind of trillions of cyborg insects