Steven L. Peck - "A Short Stay in Hell"

Based on Jorge Luis Borges about the infinite Library, this is conceived as hell where you cannot die, for the protagonist to try to figure it out.

Ok, some interesting ideas, but a sudden end and no real plot. 

N.K. Jemisin - Broken World Trilogy

Still just as good.  Had forgotten large parts.

N. K. Jemisin - "The Fifth Season"

rereading because it's good and I can't concentrate on new things.

 

 

    Damaya has got to deal with this. Now. 
    She decides she needs an ally.
    There's another girl among the loners that she's noticed. Everyone notices this girl. There's something wrong with her. Her orogeny is a precarious pent thing. A dagger constantly poised to plunge into the earth. And training has only made it worse, because now the knife is sharper. That's not supposed to happen. Selu is her name, and she hasn't yet earned or been given an orogeny name. But the other grits call her Crack to be funny, and that is the name that has stuck. She even answers to that name, since she can't seem to stop them from using it. 
    Everyone's already whispering that she won't make it, which means she's perfect. 
    Damaya makes her move on Crack at breakfast the next day. (She drinks only water now, which she has drawn from a nearby fountain. She has to eat the food that they serve her, but she inspects it carefully before putting anything in her mouth.) "Hi," she says, setting her tray down. 
    Crack eyes her. "Really? Things are bad enough that you need me?"

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - "This is how you lose the time war"

Rereading it because I gave it as a gift.

 

 

    On a span of blaster ground, she finds the letter. 
    It does not belong. Here there should be bodies mounded between the wrecks of ships that once sailed the stars. Here there should be the death and dirt and blood of a successful op. There should be moons disintegrating overhead, ships aflame in orbit.

 

 

Eating is gross, isn't it? In the abstract, I mean. Where you're used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you've known lies in a great machine's heart, it's hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit coated gums to mesh things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the red tube connecting your mouth to the set of acid under your heart. 

 

 

London next - the same day, month, year, but one strand over - is the kind of London other London's dream. Sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop blow, redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story required it, all meat pies and monarchy. This is a place Blue loves and hates herself for loving. 

 

    Thank you.
    For saving me, obviously, and for starters. I felt you climb down the braid. I am more sensitive to your footsteps, I think, than anyone alive. (And everyone is alive somewhere in time. Even these digressions feel weak. I like them usually, my jokes. They feel like tacking in, not out, to the matter at home. Less so now.) I followed you. I apologize for that, for trespassing on your privacy, as you make yourself what you had to be to win. 

 

 

I like writing you. I like reading you. When I finish your letters, I spend frantic hours in secret composing my replies, pondering ways to send them. 

 

 

She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched.

 

 

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves, in skies, in my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all, and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands, it will be to you.

Ursula K. Le Guin - "Paradises Lost"

Amazing story of a starship full of people, six generations to reach the new planet, but it happens during the fifth generation. But there's "Angels" who believe there is nothing out there.

It is not explained how the angels talk about the planet.

Hana Videen - "Wordhord"

Great book about Old English, from roughly 500AD to 1150AD.

 

þ, "thorn", was pronounced as "th", so "the" was "þe". Scribes often used "y" instead of þ, to the point where printers would shorten "the" to "þe". This got forgotten, then strangely resurfaced when in the 17th century "ye olde"... became fake archaic English. 

 

How "miniatures" that monks drew, have nothing to do with their size, but the "minium" colour that was used for them. 

Susan Cooper - "The Dark is Rising"

Supposedly religiously reread by a few thousand folks around Christmas.

Second book in a series. Didn't read the rest. Finished in a day.

Was alright. Bit too straightforward, but a good enough story. 

The Old Ones, Merriman, fight the Dark (The Rider, the Walker, who felt betrayed by Merriman, support Will Stanton, seventh of seventh son, who is the "final" Old One, getting the six marks, circles quartered by a cross. 

Naomi Mitchison - "Travel Light"

Fairytale about a girl growing up with bears, with dragons, ... and finally with humans, but still talking to all animals. 

Supports three humans, stays with one. They fight off invaders, he finds a girl, she goes on. 

Not a happy ending, not a sad ending. Great story.

 

 

 

The dragons did not sing and Halla had never sung. But now she would mimic the birds, trying to repeat and answer their memory songs. Yet for all this beauty she could not want to be a bird.
    For a little while she was happy with the squirrels who had their treasures, who laboured and hunted and hid. But it was without thought or plan. Memory held them too. And it was the same with the other hoarders of the woods, the mice and voles. They seemed to be busy, but it was a business of the paws and teeth, not of the mind.

 

 

Or Tarkan Der turned his back on it, staring out, instead, over the enormous unbounded sea on the other side. This went on for two days, and then Roddin and Kiot began to get their bundles together. Each in turn, they tried once more to persuade Tarkan Der to come back with them. He would not come. And now they were turning inland into Marob harbour. He hid himselef in under the foredock among ropes and sails. Halla went to look for him; he had turned bearish, in a den, head buried between paws. When she spoke, kneeling beside him, he pulled her down suddenly on to the cold sail, arm heavy on her neck, his wet cheek by hers. For a time they stayed so. If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming.

Alex Pheby - "Waterblack (Cities of the Weft)"

Quite enjoyable.  Goes back and forth, much more exposition directly to reader?? In a good way.

 

 

    The light that emanates from the City of Death, from Waterblack, shows, eventually, the edges of drowned buildings, the path of a drowned river crossed by rusted bridges, drowned streets, some wide and open, some cramped and narrow, drowned parks, the skeletons of drowned trees, tatues of the people of the past, covered with barnacles, covered with algae, seaweed drifting like hair in a light breeze, the slow progres of deep-water jellyfish in and out of the windows of cars, long abandoned, street lamps, unlit, and everywhere - everywhere - the windows of houses.
    It is from the windows of houses that the light that scarcely illuminates evertying comes, now that Nathan is so close, his pellet having entered the precincts of the city from above.

[...]

    On the windowsills of these windows, outside, sit cats. They are all dead, half rotten. The same magic that animates them allows them to remain down there, beneath the water. They do not need to breathe - no dead cat breathes - but they move as they need to move to do their work, which is to oversee the windows.
    Behind these windows, behind the glass, the dead live, acting out the scenes that led to their deaths.

 

Cate Baum - "Land of Hope"

"Hope" being the innocent girl running away with her Bill, who becomes a murderer of children...? Their own child died?  And then a pandemic strikes...

Intriguing, and beautiful in its vernacular.

 

    One maniac pulled his fat hand cross her mouth, and like magnets, her pale eyes glinted direct on mine. She'd sensed me there somehow. Often, I've seen it that when a person knows they will sure die soon, they become for a time almost magically in tune with the world.
    I felt a warm breath just then on my cheek, quiet and small to the side of me, from inside the desk shelf. I turned slow. The lad was curled tiny in the shadows of files and folders. He put one snotty finger to his mouth, shh.
    I gave a half nod back, aye, be fockin' quiet as a mouse, and then the big bastard was raping his mother, and the lad's eyes were crawling like lizards in his head, and he smothered his ears with his little hands when they slit her throat, nand I gazed curious at her wan face staring back at mine with all sorts of songs and words in it whilst she made a sound in her throat like witches casting curses.

 

 

    I should explain that Bill first left off calling me Hope when us bairn died, which was what I was baptised. 'Hope?' he'd hissed at me at her funeral, as they sank her little pink casket in the frosted hard ground. 'What's Hope to me?' I can remember how the sky looked when he said it, the churchyard's black bare trees like slashes in the whtie, as if we could see reet throug hto the void of elsewhere. The weeds that choked the gravestones, the chill, the stink of foxes in the nettles by the gate. I'd not eaten days but for the half-stale sleeping tablet of my mum's slipped between my lips in the car. So I'd nowt of substance to say on my name. Bill took to calling me Glory after that, just like this song they'd chant at his football. It was his magickal name for me, he announced, magickal with a k so as not to be confused with conjuring tricks. As if what he started to dabble in was any more preternatural.

 

 

The knackerman, he'd abe able to follow easy which. He was granted his own judgement to cull any of the don-fer ones and load the carcases in tipper and bring them back for disposal. He'd make a note of any that looked badly, and where they were, so my da could go up and have a look-see.
    The proper name for this profession when it's advertised is 'fallen stock operator,' but nobody round ours would call it that over the fence. It was a job that required the strong stomach and pallid detachment of an abattoirman.

 

 

    See, on this land, we live by a constant, and us families, we go back solid as stone for time: dependable stock, no fussing. Slow in choosing, slower in changing. We ken us place. And naw, we'd gan too quick over and caught us shins, bringing in this unknown entity for the sake of a few pennies, and shit, if we weren't bloody paying for it straight off. 'False economy, see,' Ma rattled as she moved the tea things to the sink. 'Yer da would rather scrape mould off a spoilt apple than buy a pound fresh up' market a shilling.'

The lad didn't much react; he just kept looking at the clouds, blinking. I suppose he'd meant sommat else. Maybe that all his friends were dead, and his mam too, and the pier, so exciting in the photos he'd probably seen at school, would naw be full of stinking bodies anyway, and the slot machines wouldn't be the same without all that hustle and bustle and the machines all dinging and music blaring with that edge of golden happiness when you win a line of paper tickets; that smell of sugar coming off the laughing girls' mouths, and the throng of it all he'd so been looking forward to that someone had most likely told him all about already.

 

QNTM - "There is No Antimemetics Division"

Amazing book, born from the SCP Foundation, about a division to deal with antimemetics. 

Taking its logical conclusion further and further. Great read. 

 

Also:

https://qntm.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jnv4fhkVck&list=PL2RpQoIOVVKTmwcACL16VQIy-2rgpcasQ  

Paulien Cornelisse - "Japan in honderd kleine stukjes"

Bit light and short, but some fun and insightful notes about Japan and Japanese culture.

 

Rose Keating - "Oddbody"

body-horror stories, fairly short.  Good stuff.

All extremely physical, and without much said, yet showing depth and emotion with minimal words. Extra points for really weird stuff, like the sheep plants.

Interesting how pain is basically ignored, yet there's still the hint or background that things *could* be bad and painful. 

 

    When the knife sank into the tigh, tense muscle of her shoulder blade, she became a knot undone. She arched her back, breathing hard.
    "Good?" Mary asked.
    Jen nodded, her face smashed against the couch, legs squeezing together. She realised she had drooled on the armrest.
    Mary began sewing the wings. The repetition of the stitching soothed Jen. Each puncture of needle felt like releasing a breath held in for too long. "Tell me something about yourself," Mary said.

 

    

    The sheep wheezed, a whining, guttural giggle.
    Bridget straightened up. She placed the knife at the start of its neck, pointing the tip of the blade just below its throat.
    She pushed down. It sliced through easily, like cutting into a bowl of jelly. She cut from its collarbones down to crotch, the line clean and straight. The sheep sighed, the sound fluttering and pleasing.
    She held the line of the incision open with her hands. She reached inside the gash, moving her fingers through the tender folks with care. Under her fingertips, she felt the sheep throb.

Zoraida Córdova - "The inheritance of Orquídea Divina"

Magic realism about a girl who finds her own way in the world, part magic, part family tree story. Wasn't always fully captured, but it kept me captivated enough.

 

 

 

    "They meant nothing," he repeated.    
    But she should have known. When a man dismisses other women as nothing, he would eventually do the same to her. 
    "You said that, Bolívar."

 

 

    Rey had spent the day after consuming the entire bottle of bourbon Mike had intended to drink in celebration of Félix Montoya's life. Rhiannon hid in the garden, crying and whispering to the grasshoppers who surrounded her like a rapt audience. Meanwhile Marimar went over every finding, every photo. She obsessed over the Living Star, bu there was nothing about him. No real name. No museum obscurities. He was like Orquídea, a mystery they couldn't solve.

 

 

    A slick warmth trickled down from her throat as a new flower bud penetrated the wound. When she touched it, she could feel the thick petals of her new bloom.
    Reh and Rhiannon closed ranks beside her and held her hands. They formed a chain. Then, Marimar let out a scream that shook the valley.
     How do you fight a thing that believes it owns you? How do you fight the past? With gold leaves and salt? With silence? With new earth beneath your feet? With the bodies, the hearts of others?
    With hearts that are tender and bloodied but have thorns of their own.
    With the family that chooses you.

 

Diane Setterfield - "Once Upon a River"

A man carrying a drowned child show up at a pub where everyone always tells stories.  Except the child isn't dead.

Wonderful story so far, interwoven histories in a medieval England. 

Jeff Vandermeer - "Dead Astronauts"

Confusing, but interesting as always.   three entities.  reborn endlessly.  The city.

 

Bora Chung - "Midnight Timetable"

Good book with ghost stories ("best stories to write if you have a writer block", according to the author)

Semi-short stories (20-40 pages each) with soft interlocking motives/objects, about a woman taking the night shift in a research hotel where haunted objects are kept.

Probably the one about the streamer who is almost killing himself when he stole a haunted tennis shoe, is one of the best.

 

 

I stare at the house that had swallowed teh man's body and the shadows inside it. The dead man's guilt turns the lights off and brings forth the shadow of the dead woman, who is long gone. The dead man's fear rejects the darkeness and turns on the lights of the house again. The dead man's guilt brings forth the shadow of the dead child, and the dead man's fear once again turns off the lights. This is all that is left tot he dead man. Guilt, and fear. The lights switch on. The lights switch off.

Carlo Rovelli - "White Holes"

Let's imagine that we are travelling through countries where the post gets gradually slower, and that we are sending a letter home to our father every day. Our father will receive the letters at lengthening intervals, because we will be arriving in places where the postal services takes longer to forward them. For him it will seem as if we have slowed down: initially he will get news of our day from us every day - but then he will have to wait several days, and eventually even weeks, just to learn about a single day of ours. For him, it is ass if our life has slowed...
    If we then reach the desert, where there is no postal service at all, he will receive only the last letter we write before entering the desert, and it will arrive a long time after it was sent. For our father, the edge of the desert is therefore the place where for him our time stops. It is the horizon beyond which we can no longer be seen by him. He will continue to have information about us only "frozen at the desert's edge".

[...]

which of these times is the 'real' one: the time of those at the horizon, or the time of those watching from a distance? The answer is: neither of them. it's meaningless. It is like asking which regions of the Earth are truly 'above' and which truly 'below'. 

 

Quantum transitions of this kind - leaps from one configuration of space to another - are precisely what is described by loop quantum gravity.
    The equations of ordinary quantum mechanics give the probabilities that jumps from one configuration to another will occur for a physical system that is in space. The equations of loop quantum gravity give the probabilities of leaps from one configuration of space to another configuration of space.

 

Scientists have a difficult relationship with their own ideas; perhaps no one is completely honest, even with oneself, about how much one believes... you need to be diplomatic, reasonable, admit that you could be wrong, but at heart there is a mad desire to scream, "but I'm sure that this is how things are!" we fall in love with our own ideas, are convinced by them...
[...]
    Paul Dirac, the most rational, impassive, cerebral, autistic of scientists, remarks in a lecture that the reason why it is rare for a good scientist who has obtained an important result to take the next step is taht they are the first to have doubts about their own results.

 

The disagreement concerns how much information you can cram into an entityt with a large volume but a small surface. One part of the scientific community is convinced that a black hole with a small horizon can only contain a small amount of information. Another disagrees.
    What does it mean to 'contain information'?
    More or less this; are there more things in a box containing five large and heavy balls, or in a box that contains twenty small marbles? The answer depends on what you mean by 'more things'. The five balls are bigger, they weigh more, so the first box contains more matter, more substance, more energy, more stuff, in this sense there are 'more things' in the box of balls.
    But the number of marbles is greater than the number of balls. In this sense, there are 'more things, more details, in the box of marbles. If we wanted to send signals, by giving a single colour to each marble or each ball, we could send more signals, more colours, more information, with the marbles, because there are more of them. More precisely, it takes more information to describe the marbles than it does for the balls, because there are more of them. In technical terms, the box of balls contains more energy, whereas the box of marbles contains more information.    

I aim at the core of the matter. I remove from my writing anything I can. I imagine those who know nothing about physics would find details useless and burdensome.  The experts, on the other hand, know the details already; they are not interested in hearing them repeated. They want a novel perspective.

 

Where does the direction of time come from, if it is not inscribed in the fundamental grammar of the world?
    It comes from the fact that we live in just one of the many solutions of the fundamental equations, and n this solution, the past appears special to us. The difference between past and future, that is, is a bit like the difference between two geographical directions for someone living in the mountains; in one direction, say north, the ground goes up; in the other, say south, it goes down. But this is not because north and south are intrinsically connected to up and down. Rather, only because around there things happen to be arranged in this way. On the Italian side of the Monte Bianco, 'upwards' is north, whereas on the French side, it is south. The irressistable flow of time is similarly a reflection of the way in which happen to be arranged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Clegg - "The Dead of Winter" (the Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas)

  Good overview of some of the old traditions, Christmas, Krampus, and how they came to be.

 

 

Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose, who travels house to house every Christmas leading a cavalcade of the dead. If she finds a child who hasn't done their chores she slits open their belly, pulls out their guts, stuffs them with straw, and then sews up the wound with a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread.
[...]
Krampus, a hideous towering demon with enormous horns who beats children with a switch or steals them away.
In Iceland, there's Grýla, an ogress who comes down from the mountains at Christmas and is inclined to eat her victims, popping them into a giant stew while her murderous cat - the Yule Cat - prowls at her side. InFrance, there's Père Fouettard - Father Whipper - a butcher who had kidnapped, murdered and tried to pickle three young boys, before he was stopped by St Nicholas. As punishment, according to the legend, he was forced to accompany St Nicholas for the rest of eternity, a looming figure lurking behind the saint, whipping children who don't deserve St Nicholass presents.

 

Saturnalia - a king of Saturnalia, and everyone had to obey him/her. slaves were served, and allowed to 'speak freely'

 

A century and a half before Christ, the Romans had moved their New Year's celebrations from March to January (the vestiges of the older New Year are still visible in September, October, November and December, which were - as their names suggest - the seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months when the year began in March) the date when new consuls took office. The festivities originally associated with this festival - called Kalends - were about as exciting as you'd expected for a celebration centred on politicians assuming power. 

 

It's not a coincedence that the word for a Carnival mask - 'larva' - also translates as 'ghost'. 

 

There are other monsters in the Marshfield mumming besides the murderous king and the Devil. After all, while the costumes gesture vaguely towards the characters - William wears a paper crown, Father Christmas is all in red - the main purpose of the outfits seem to be to entirely disguise the players, making them unrecognisable as people and giving them the uncanny impression of being monsters who have decided to put on a performance. This is because the play came second, laid over an older tradition that revolved around dressing as monsters at Christmastime.
    Another element of this earlier tradition is still visible in the bizarre repetition of the play through the village, a fossilised remnant of a time when monsters would go from house to house, parading through the town, knocking on doors and demanding to be let in.*

*) the reason this sounds an awful lot like trick-or-treating is because the two are related. However, it's a sign of how much Christmas spookiness we've lost that it feels genuinely surprising to discover that it was originally a Christmas cutsom that later spread to Halloween. In the Middle Ages, 'Souling' on Halloween was traditional - a ritual begging where people knocked on houses promising to pray for souls if they were given 'soul cakes' - but the terrifying costumes were added later, and seem to have slipped back into the season from Christmas.

 

Famously, Saturn also ate his children whole, a monstrous deed that was blended with the blood libel so that in one image of Saturn from the 1400s the god, shoving a child into his mouth, is identified by his hat and badge as Jewish. By the time that the child-killer was stalking the Nuremberg Carnival in the 1500s, though, the association etween the child-stealer and Judaism had largely slipped away.

[...]how Carnival and Christmas blended into each other, and the slipping back of the child-eater from February to early December seems almsot inevitable - not only was he a monstrous fancy-dress figure well suited to Christmas guising, he was also the punisher of bad children and it must have felt natural to pair him with St Nicholas, the rewarder of the good. In response, the stories told about St Nicholas began to warp and change to incorporate this chidl-eating figure - especially the legend of the murdered clerks. Soon, it wasn't a thieving innkeeper who murdered the boys but a starving butcher during a famine who slaughtered them, carved up their bodies, and had begun to pickle them in a vat before Nicholas arrived to save the day - the child-eater stopped in the act.

 

St Lucy has another side to her. This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white visions. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptized.

Lucy is celebrated well beyond the Nordic countries, finding her way into Bavarian and Austrian tradition where she is known as schiache Luz - bad Lucy - and bluadige Luz - bloody Lucy

 

 

first century BC, a general idea that women were more likely than men to use magic merged with female monsters called 'striga'- screeching demonesses who flew about at night in packs, ate the organs of children, and stuffed them with straw.

 

 

Herlequin. his horder 

 

From the late Middle Ages on, the Christmas witch was as likely to be followed by a parade of the dead as a parade of women. And the legends of this calvacade became part of the folklore for waht would later be called the 'Wild Hunt'. In some places, Odin would take over from the witches to lead the dead, in others there would be werewolves mixed in with the group. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chuck Palahniuk - "Adjustment Day"

From 2018 (? might be 2019) but scarily preniscient.

People (not the ones in power) kill all the ones in power. Then "redistribute" everyone according to the book by Talbott; blacks in south America, whites in North America, gays in California.  It describes a scarily "plausible" explanation.