psocoptera

In theory, go-arounds are pretty rare in commercial aviation, but I was just in my second one landing in Boston today. The previous time was in heavy clouds/fog, so I'm not actually sure how close we came to the runway before pulling back up - this one we actually bumped on the runway, but the plane was rocking a lot, so I guess they decided it was less risky to go back up than to try to complete an iffy landing. The captain said something about wind conditions. Second landing attempt from a different direction went fine. I was pretty rattled and tbh am still - even knowing that's a normal thing they practice, I would rather not be a passenger in any kind of unplanned airplane event. My heart rate went through the roof at the time and keeps having little upticks. (I guess now I know what Justin meant when he said he didn't want to think about it.)

I went to enter some Hugo finalists on my big list of books/other media, and realized that I've reached 2000 lines! That's a big round number and I have decided to celebrate by counting things!

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Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins, 2024 sff novel. Epistolary near-future science fiction and alternate history, told primarily as a series of obituaries, interspersed with a few other kinds of documents like newspaper articles or search results. I really enjoy this kind of playing with format, and on the whole it's a pretty neat project. It's not perfect - too many of the obituaries are written with too-similar a voice, even the ones that are pretty distant in time period and should sound more different. (And there are a couple of characters who are themselves the writers of some of the obituaries, and I might have liked them to have more distinct voices from each other, for it to be more obvious when one of them was writing.) (Although there might be reasons for some of this, see below.) Also, this book has a bit of a "jack of all trades master of none" problem, in that it's trying to do a lot of things at once, and I felt like some of them were working against each other - the satirical parts undermining the parts trying to be profound or touching, the fantasy elements somewhat at odds with the science fiction. At its strongest it was a clever and creative look at the idea of legacy and artistic influence/inspiration and the ways influence moves out from people in multiple directions which sometimes recross. (I did make a second pass through the book to draw a crazy chart of the connections and caught a couple that I hadn't on my first read. Also a timeline of the events of one particular time period. It was that kind of book.)

Spoilers below! ( Read more... )

Puzzleheart, Jenn Reese, 2024 middlegrade. Cute fantasy about a sentient magical house that's a sort of living escape room. Did not quite entirely land for me - this is the kind of book that starts in the real world and then magical stuff starts happening, and the tween protagonist and new friend did not really seem like the kind of people who would accept this foundational break in world-logic without significantly more metaphysical distress (is there a better term for this? maybe supernatural shock?) - and I admit to doing some skimming, but it was sweet and fun and had a solid little middlegrade moral lesson about kids not being responsible for fixing their parents. I wouldn't necessarily rec it to other adults but I would cheerfully put a copy in every elementary-school library in America.

... goes to Nicola Griffith! Her blog post here.

I did not have Griffith on my list of likelies, but sure! I like that! Especially if the goal is to move toward awarding people who are current "masters" as in their career is still going strong/they are still producing interesting work.

Don't know who the Infinity is yet.

(My list of likely or potential recipients, edited for 2025: [John Crowley (1942)], John Varley (1947), Nancy Kress (1948), Kim Stanley Robinson (1952), Greg Egan (1961), Martha Wells (1964), Ted Chiang (1967), John Scalzi (1969), NK Jemisin (1972), Ursula Vernon (1977), Seanan McGuire (1978). Griffith was born in 1960 and is thus plausibly "ahead" of many of these people (and also has MS which might be a factor in trying to guess how close we are to losing her vs anyone else, which I know is morbid, but I think will always be a consideration after the Butler failure.))

(My Infinity list, while we're here: Diana Wynne Jones (still and always my #1 guess until they finally pick her), Terry Pratchett, Zelazny, Joanna Russ, Philip K Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Iain M Banks, Vernor Vinge. [ETA: last time I made this list some friends made some good suggestions in the comments, of whom CL Moore, Frank Herbert, James Tiptree, and Zenna Henderson fit my (suspected) criterion of having died after they started giving out the Grand Master award. And I added Crowley above who is still alive.] Plus people who are still alive but could be Grand Master candidates on the basis of their careers, but maybe not their personalities, and thus might be Infinity candidates once they're not around in person, although honestly I think nobody is going to bother when there are other candidates who would be more exciting to current SFWA membership: Orson Scott Card, David Brin.)

In the Shadow of the Fall, Tobi Ogundiran, 2024 novella. If you're looking for epic fantasy in a West-African-inspired world, this is one! Competently done but didn't have the little hooks of humor or character or beautiful writing that might have made me really care about it. Also felt more like the first act of novel than a complete story, which is fine - serialization is a valid way to publish - but means it could be awhile to an actual conclusion. ETA: Quite cinematic, though - I can see it working well as the first act of a movie, or the first couple episodes of a series. Maybe animated? Dreamworks style? A good theme would do a lot for emotional engagement - John Williams introducing Luke, but African. (Who did Black Panther, that was well-scored as I recall. Ludwig Göransson, apparently, who is... Swedish. Perhaps Michael Abels, who did Nope. I mean, probably actually someone from Nigerian cinema I've never heard of.) Anyways, I think it works better for me if I think of it as wanting to be a dramatic work.

The Ghost and the Golem, Benjamin Rosenbaum, interactive "choose your own adventure" style text game. On the Nebula ballot for Game Writing and I have high hopes of seeing it on the Hugo ballot as well.

Rosenbaum wrote my favorite book of 2021 so of course I was excited about this, but then I put off playing it for a long time because of anxiety. Some technological anxiety (was I going to need some special software to obtain or play it? no, it turned out to be a thing I could buy for my phone from the Google Play apps store) and some anxiety that I have only recently managed to name *as* anxiety around interacting with what I am tentatively thinking of as "anisotropic media" or "directional media", encompassing both dramatized forms like TV and movies and games like this one with a one-way flow forward through the game and no way to flip back a few pages to check something or refresh my memory of something. This is an anxiety both around not having attention/emotional control (what if there's a boring part but I can't speed up? what if something is unpleasantly tense but I can't look ahead to check in on what to expect?) and attention/memory (what if my mind keeps wandering and it's hard to follow? what if I lose track of key stuff? my memory is not what it used to be, and in fact I did make one choice in one of my plays of the game that I definitely would not have made if I had recalled who that name referred to, although in fact there is a character list (and a glossary for the Yiddish) that I could have gone and checked and I just didn't for whatever reason), and no doubt seems absurd to most people in our very drama-normative culture (my mom, at least, finds it baffling that one of the reasons I don't watch much TV is that I find watching TV "hard"), but it is anxiety I actually have, and I have decided I get to, you know, name and look at those, if I want to. And it became easier to actually sit down and play once I had figured out what I was nervous about.

In the end my worries turned out to be pretty much unfounded - it did not feel at all unmanageable to play, and was in fact extremely fun and engaging, especially once I got to the end of my first playthrough and was like "oh, okay, now I've seen one way things can go, and I can just do this again as many times as I want to see what other outcomes I can get". There is a list of possible achievements, which hint at possible outcomes, and if you go online you can also find a list that includes all the "hidden" achievements where some of the most interesting stuff is. :) I really like having an idea of the range of potential outcomes - in two and a half playthroughs I have unlocked 21 out of 68, or 410 out of a possible 1000 points, and I have ideas in mind for two more approaches I'd like to try after this one. A lot of the choices you get to make have to do with your feelings about things or your approach to solving problems, affecting a list of stats about your talents and your nature, which I think then affect what options you see later in the game or whether you succeed or fail in some of your later plot attempts. So in my three playthroughs so far I've tried to be somewhat different people with different priorities - pushing a little further away, each time, from my own natural impulses, playing characters who are less and less "like me". Like, the first playthrough, I think I was thinking "what is the best thing to do in this situation", and on subsequent playthroughs I've been more able to get into the mindset of "but what would this character do in this situation that might make for a good story (or get me more of those various achievements/outcomes)" even if it feels like a "bad idea" that "I"/my proxy in this world "shouldn't" do. (This is a tension I find interesting in narrative games, the space between player and character - there's a Lovecraftian text adventure I played with my friend D that forced an action I found abhorrent that was both upsetting to play at the time and remains by far the most memorable moment of any text adventure we ever played - which honestly seems like something that Rosenbaum might well have found interesting about the medium as well, and something that I hope awards voters find interesting about this game.) Subsequent playthroughs have definitely been a lot faster than the first one, because some of the events repeat verbatim (so I can, like, skim through that meal description) and some Rosenbaum is probably altering in subtle ways but I can't remember the exact wording from before enough to catch, so might as well skim until I get to something really different. (I have caught some of the differences though and they are neat!)

Anyways if you are interested in what it's actually about, it's set in the Pale of Settlement in 1881 (so if you loved Forbidden Book and would like to spend more time running around that world, this is perfect for you) and there is maybe going to be a pogrom and there is the question of an arranged marriage (so far I've been playing female-presenting nonbinary characters, because there are a whole bunch of neat options about ways the character can be trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, although for one of those two other playthroughs I have in mind I want to try Being A Dude which I think might be really different) and as you might guess from the title there is possibly a dybbuk and/or a golem. I might make another post sometime in the future about some of my different outcomes (and which I was or wasn't ever able to achieve) but I'll keep this one spoiler-free. Highly recommended if any of this sounds interesting to you at all.

Here, or below the cut with my comments!

It looks like they didn't name a Grandmaster or an Infinity yet - maybe they're saving those announcements for the ceremony this year?

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Swordcrossed, Freya Marske, 2024 novel. This is a classic sweaterboy/absolute nightmare romance novel set in a vaguely-early-modern secondary universe (or maybe I mean late medieval?) with a plot centered around rivalries between merchant families in the wool industry. Is that romantasy, or does romantasy specifically have to have magical elements, or even more specifically nonhuman love interests? Anyways, if you wanted Swordspoint to be cozier, this is the book for you. "High Heat. Low Stakes. Crossed Steel." as it says on the cover. (I really liked it but I am pretty much exactly who this book was catering to. People on goodreads were like "too many wool facts" and here I am delighted by a book where I can read dudes banging and falling in love and also learn some wool facts. I would read one of these a year set in a different late medieval industry until the end of time, or until running out of industries forced the introduction of the industrial revolution and the world got less fun.)

I wasn't going to attempt to nominate poems, but then a friend mentioned a hope of going through the spreadsheet poems, and I was like, self, why am *I* not even looking at the spreadsheet poems, and I had a weird little moment of, wait, am I intimidated by poetry? Do I feel unqualified to read poetry? That seemed incorrect - I keep a file of favorite poems. I occasionally write poems. Maybe I feel like I don't know what to make of *speculative* poetry? That also didn't sound quite right, I have no problem thinking about, say, Le Guin's poetry. Strange Horizons publishes poetry so I tried checking out some of their 2024 pieces and possibly part of the problem is that I just don't *like* a lot of poetry. (Although... I also don't like a lot of stories. Not actually sure if the proportion is different.)

Anyways here's some poems from the spreadsheet I liked.

The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program, Steve Wheat.

sunday in atlanta, Kelsey Day. I'm not sure this is speculative. Also I'm not sure it's a poem and not a comic. Powerful piece, though.

Gaia Sings the Body Electric, Jie Venus Cohen.

there are no taxis for the dead, Angela Liu.

The Sail, Ian Li.

The Quickening Rachel Pittman. Is *this* speculative?

the office//the after, Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey. How about this, is this speculative? Maybe I don't know what makes poetry speculative or not.

The Lost Dead World Thing, Mari Ness.

Dodging the Bullet, Lisa M. Bradley.

Change Your Mind, Gwendolyn Maia Hicks.

A War of Words, Marie Brennan.

There were 62 things on the list, although some of them weren't available online, so I probably read more like... 55? ish? And ended up liking about one in five?

I have tentatively picked some that I think I'll nominate although I would like to revisit this list in a day or two and see which ones I still remember, or which ones still grab me on rereading.