See tagged statuses in the local Orreadi community
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Faster than a well-ordered queue, more powerful than a muttered tut, able to walk right by police officers without being harassed. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No—it’s Englishblokeman.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery country called England (which was bound and determined never to get too excited about anything), a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambitious glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo was born to a family so large and benignly neglectful that they only noticed he’d stopped coming home on weekends when his grandmother was nearly run over with all her groceries in front of the Piccadilly Square tube station, stunned into slack-jawed immobility by the sight of her Danesh, twenty feet high, in a frock the color of her customary afternoon sip of Pernod, filling up every centimeter of a gargantuan billboard.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.
This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.
I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and …
Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.
This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.
I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and Wisa. I was amused the academic interludes. I liked the weird worldbuilding: magic space whales, "sailing" through the black sea of the universe of island planets, a portal that only children can go through. But overall I also don't feel like any of these elements quite cohered for me (even as I also wonder how much that's just on me as a reader).
This was our book for the September 2026 #SFFBookClub.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Mad Sisters of Esi was an odyssey - in the sense that it was an epic adventure of mythic proportions, but also in the sense that it seemed to randomly wander along a chain of apparently unrelated events. Everything was tied together in the end, but basically in the way I'd been expecting for much of the story. Fully half of the book is a flashback.
It seems to be about the opposing desires to leave everything you know and explore the novel, and treasuring everything you already have, and the regrettable fact that they can't really be balanced against each other.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Everything is more powerful when you don’t understand it.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Once a craftsman offered six times to enchant the drawings for him so they would never decay. Kua refused. Things must end, his mother used to say. Even memories. Only then can they become something new.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
It is funny how the lessons you teach your children to protect them end up becoming a wall that separates you.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Esi is turning into water. This is the only way Jinn knows how to describe it— like they are all floating on a lake that was once a pond and that will grow into a sea. Like nothing knows how to be solid anymore.
I definitely feel this one
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
The first time I realize my sister wants to leave, we are in the White World.
Preconscious algorithms periodically threaten to bury authors beneath an avalanche of debased language reduced to gray goo. Such regurgitating formulae are capable of churning out words like factory-baked slices of fungal bread, devoid of understanding or communion.
— Sunward by William Alexander
Lately I’ve served as research assistant in a long-term study of Mercurial bugs.
— Sunward by William Alexander
oh yeah, I had that job once
It was too easy to drift into my own haphazard time zone of unscheduled naps instead.
— Sunward by William Alexander
hell yeah
There’s no such thing as an encrypted transmission.
— Sunward by William Alexander
that's … certainly a mechanic
Agatha Panza von Sparkles settled into Needle’s pilot seat for the very first time.
— Sunward by William Alexander
