Yinxing Lim

This week we have an interview for you! Chloe and Val sit down with Lianyu Tan, author of The Wicked and the Willing, a dark f/f vampire novel which we LOVED.

Check out the interview at inmediales.com or wherever you get your podcasts!

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

I could not put this book down, my god. Staying up super late multiple nights because I couldn’t stop reading is such a great problem to have, and Exordia gave me that problem more than any book I’ve read in a few years.

This is a very different book than Baru, but Seth’s evocative prose and dark humor is familiar from page one, and the laser focus on defamiliarizing real world injustices is again the core of the work. Despite being far more immediate (Exordia is set during the Obama administration in our world, with an alternate history beginning from the moment the book starts), the heaviness of the topics never gets overwhelming. There’s some incredible (and extremely fitting) tonal dissonance here, with every perspective character having their own sense of disaffected humor about the apocalyptic situation they’ve been thrown into.

I described this to my friend after just starting as “if the Books of Sorrow were written with Gideon the Ninth’s tone and just straight up in our world,” and I think that remains true throughout. There’s a huge amount of references peppered in, and it helps maintain that lighter tone to balance the despair of what is essentially a doomsday clock ticking down throughout the book - and it helps keep things grounded, honestly. I never felt it took away from the gravity of things, or was unnatural - after all, if I, an early 21st century sci fi nerd, was thrown into some fucked up alien bioweapon mystery, it’s hard to say my first thought wouldn’t be “oh shit, this is just like the Andromeda Strain!”

Having seven (eight?) different protagonist (or deuteragonist, I don’t know which they qualify as) PoVs is pretty wild but works perfectly here. Every character has such a unique outlook that you can instantly figure out whose head you’ve popped into even before any identifying names or things are mentioned - Seth’s mastery of the tonally cohesive PoV shifts was something I had loved in Tyrant, especially, and they’re equally impressive here. The characters are lovable, hatable, and everything in between - and each as mentioned is so distinct and compelling that I can’t say there was a single character who I was unhappy to get into their head. And that’s saying something, given who some of these characters are, but I’ll leave the specifics a surprise. Predictably, my favorites were the dysfunctional autistic butch-femme lesbians, but I really loved all of them in the end.

The base premise is almost comical in how small it starts to how much it escalates - a cynical, disillusioned Kurdish genocide survivor, Anna Sinjari, meets a terrifying (and yes…very hot. I’m a simple woman) alien in Central Park, and this seemingly chance encounter sees her roped into a small group of scientists, soldiers, and her own mother in a desperate countdown to solve an otherworldly mystery and save their world. The twists and turns of the plot are intense, so engaging that I was bouncing up and down at times (there’s plenty of sci-fi insanity that I absolutely eat up), and tightly paced.

Seth seems to really enjoy writing ethical dilemmas to great effect, and Exordia is ruthless in that area, taking the base concept of the trolley problem and the moral justification for what someone would sacrifice for the greater good and carving it apart for narrative weight. What greater good does the sacrifice serve? Is it actually good? Who gets to make the choice, and do they have a choice but to make it? There’s a lot to dig into here, and Exordia is a four course meal.

One aspect of this simply taking place in our world, rather than being an alternate universe like Baru, is that the defamiliarized commentary is even more on the nose. Whereas Baru is a commentary on empire and homophobia as a whole, transparently pulling from primarily American history of genocide and imperialism to shape a culture unlike our own in many ways to defamiliarize this moral exploration, Exordia is just literally about real world American imperialism and enabling of genocide in the MENA region, primarily the ramifications of the military industrial complex’s usage of drone warfare and the extremist regimes armed and encouraged by “counterterrorism.”

All this sets the stage for the question of what happens when a bigger fish arrives, one just as hell bent on empire building and justifying its own atrocities. The sci-fi intervention into this banal evil is at the same time a reflection of that evil, and asking if the world has the capacity for resistance to both. Exordia’s answer is profound, and far from easy, but entirely fitting for the ethical dilemma that runs throughout the book, creeping up on you slowly as you start to recognize what shape it takes in this story.

The central material conflict of the book, a locked box mystery of sorts that you piece together with the characters, is fucked up and fun and scary, a reality shifting threat that treads the line between body horror, meta-narrative, and lovecraftian math. It’s extremely cool, and I think it’ll be right up the alley of fans of The Andromeda Strain, The Locked Tomb, The Books of Sorrow and other parts of Destiny lore, and a lot of other SFF stories where ethics, horror, and mystery mix together.

I don’t want to say too much about the climax and the ending - going into this book without knowing too much was an incredible experience that had me on the edge of my proverbial seat - but the ending left me asking myself some very similar questions as I had at the end of Traitor, and I cannot wait for a reread when the physical book is in my hands to see what little foreshadowed things I can pick up on.

I don’t think people are going to be quite as completely emotionally Destroyed at the ending of this one as Traitor, but…it is very much a Seth Dickinson book, and they have quite the talent for making every thread tie together at the end to make the reader feel every emotion at once and realize that this could never have gone any other way. I cried, I laughed, sometimes simultaneously, and a book that can do that to me is entirely worth the experience - and what an experience this was.

Absolutely fucking incredible, I want more of these characters and everything they’re wrapped up in, 10/10.

The world's most lesbian autistic accountant decides the only way to destroy the eugenicist colonizers that took over her homeland and killed one of her father's is to gain power within the system and bring it down by its own methods. It's very hard fantasy, with only ambiguous fantastical elements, more focused on social and economic elements of a fictional trade empire. It's got some of the greatest world and character building I've ever read, and having read the third book finally I can safely say that while it's grimdark and pulls no punches, it isn't relentlessly hopeless or painful. If you liked the locked tomb series you might like the plot structure, although they are very different tone wise

-Danielle Scrimshaw, She and her Pretty Friend: The Hidden History of Australian Women who Love Women (2023)

Sorta like childhood friends who are also rivals and become lovers

i don't have any childhood friends/rivals to lovers but i do have rivals to lovers

night tide by anna burke

i kissed shara wheeler by casey mcquiston

amelia westlake by erin gough

cow girl by kirsty eyre

future leaders of nowhere by emily o'beirne

tell me how you really feel by aminah mae safi

i kissed alice by anna birch

mangos and mistletoe by adriana herrera

i think i love you by auriane desombre

I recently took a dynamic sketching class and decided to do a visual map of Gideon the Ninth as my final project! I'm really happy with how it turned out!

Medium: micron pen, grey toned comic markers, and white gel pen on toned paper

and exomis:

I don't think it's silly to ask for clarification on issues you don't understand. But your premise is wrong - Iscend is unambiguously nonwhite. That information is conveyed in a way that an audience used to a white default might overlook, though.

The thing is, The Masquerade series actively and deliberately avoids presenting whiteness as a default. It is established quickly that "typical" Falcresti people have brown skin. Throughout the books, it is established in fairly short order that Oriati and Maia people, as well as their offshoots, are also not white. The only major ethnicity with white skin are the Stakhieczi, which is noted frequently throughout the books as something of an oddity.

And that's critical. It's an oddity. Nonwhite is the default. White is something strange to be remarked on. The number of times Baru's narration lingers on Cartone's or Svir's whiteness is enormous. There is no ambiguity about their whiteness, because when Baru is in frequent proximity to a white person, she makes explicit note of it, because it's unusual.

Now notice that she never once makes that sort of observation about Iscend. What we have instead are multiple observations about Iscend's Falcresti beauty - a nonwhite beauty. Falcrest does not idealize whiteness, because the concept white as a privileged class does not exist in Falcrest.

Or, tldr, we know Iscend isn't white because Baru would be remarking on it constantly if she was.

He was 23 when his first novel was published. After six years of writing professionally every single day. The Carpet People was a lovely novel, from a lovely writer, but almost all of Terry’s iconic truth bomb lines come from Discworld.

The Colour of Magic, the first ever Discworld novel was published in 1983. Terry was 35 years old. He had been writing professionally for 18 years. His career was old enough to vote, get married and drink. We now know that at 35 he was, tragically, over half way through his life. And do you know what us devoted, adoring Discworld fans say about The Colour of Magic? “Don’t start with Colour of Magic.”

It is the only reading order rule we ever give people. Because it’s not that great. Don’t get me wrong, very good book, although I’ll be honest I’ve never been able to finish it, but it’s nowhere near his later stuff. Compare it to Guards Guards, The Fifth Elephant, the utterly iconic Nightwatch and it pales in comparison because even after nearly 20 years of writing, half a lifetime of loving books and storytelling Terry was still learning.

He was a man with a wonderful natural talent, yes. But more importantly he worked and worked and worked to be a better writer. He was writing up until days before he died.  He spent 49 years learning and growing as a writer, taking so much joy in storytelling that not even Alzheimer’s could steal it from him. He wouldn’t want that joy stolen from you too.

Terry was a wonderful, kind, compassionate, genius of a writer. And all of this was in spite of many many people telling him he wasn’t good enough. At the age of five his headmaster told him that he would never amount to anything. He died a knight of the realm and one of the most beloved writers ever to have lived in a country with a vast and rich literary tradition. He wouldn’t let anyone tell him that he wasn’t good enough. And he wouldn’t want you to think you aren’t good enough. He especially wouldn’t want to be the reason why you think you aren’t good enough. 

You’re not Terry Pratchett. 

You are you.

“Yes,” I said.  “But I like seeing how authors grow.”

This collection came out while he was still alive and each piece has an introduction from him. The introduction for that piece includes something to the effect of “LALALA IF I DO THIS I WON’T HEAR YOU READING THIS ONE!!”

Here’s the intro in question: @yubsie​ got it almost exact.

I had my own first publication in our school mag too. I was fourteen, with everything that implies. It was nothing like as good as Terry’s, and distance hasn’t lent enchantment to the view. There are no extant copies that I can show; not that I would if I could. Be grateful… :-P

Later in the same anthology, there’s this:

A writer can get inspiration from anywhere, whether it’s something seen / heard in the street, or a snippet of unconnected news, or even chatting in a bar with other writers - who don’t keep ideas secret, there’ll be another one along in a minute, and sometimes they’re like buses so a whole bunch arrive at once. Especially in that sort of company…

And some ideas just demand to be told to specific people, along the lines of let’s see what (insert name) does with it.

I’ve uploaded the OFMD art to redbubble, so prints are available :)