#sump

“You or the Universe?”

Sump by CubeScore

October 15, 2023:

A delight to read again! I had worried that it wouldn't make me feel the same way as when I first read it 4 years ago, but it was this month's Last Words Book Club book and I'm the one who suggested it. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find that it definitely has the same impact. It's very easy to forget exactly what happens because its alllll vibes, baby! Well, not all. About 10% of the book is scattered but very intense action. The atmosphere is top notch, full dread all the way through. I am living for all the little details about all the mundane annoyances of climbing and caving, all the horrifying minutiae of a dangerous job. This was somewhat unpopular in the book club, so I'll concede that hundreds of pages of pure ambience is not for everybody. But in this case, it is very, very for me.

Dear Medically Minded,

Lathe of Operation: Burning Sky was one of a number of Made to Order soldiers mass-produced in the wake of the Simanzi Massacree and the Forced Flood, though his wheeled alternate mode put him at a severe disadvantage in the boggy, waterlogged terrain that ultimately stymied the Autobot campaign. Like many MTOs, he found religion early on in the war, and his faith in Primus and the divinity of his “Chosen One” ultimately persuaded him to abandon the Autobots and join Starscream’s government, though he did not escape Cybertron before Unicron’s attack on the metal world.

Updraft of Devisiun emigrated to Cybertron along with her combiner sister Downwind. A medic by trade, she was fascinated by the study of mecha-biology and the allopatric processes which had resulted in several notable Cybertronian subspecies—though she was also more than a bit conceited and regarded her modular, energy-efficient body as superior to the “primitive” Cybertronian form.