rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Sciona, the first woman ever admitted to the University of Magic, takes on Thomil, a janitor from a discriminated-against culture, as her lab assistant, and they both learn dark secrets about their world.

Thomil is introduced when his clan makes a desperate run across deadly ground to get to the safety of a city surrounded by a magical shield. The shield protects against bitter cold and the deadly Blight, which randomly zaps and dissolves people, but the area around the city is particularly Blight-infested. Only Thomil and his baby niece survive. When they arrive, they find that the city natives hate their race and has consigned them all as a permanent underclass.

Ten years later, Sciona, a well-to-do young woman in the city, is preparing for her magic exam to try to get into the sexist magic university, which no woman has ever passed. Though she does pass, all the male mages but her mentor hate her and hassle her. The only other person who's even remotely nice to her is Thomil, the janitor, who is assigned as her lab assistant as a cruel joke. But though Sciona is racist and classist, and Thomil is mildly sexist in an oblivious way, they find that they kind of get along...

Wang has an engaging, easy-read style for the most part, the intros to the two main characters are quite compelling, and despite the heavy-handed axes of privilege themes, Thomil and Sciona have a nice dynamic.

I said "for the most part." The exception is the magic system, which I think is basically computer programming via magic typewriters (spellographs). The wizards program a spell to access a specific area of the magical Otherrealm (which they can't see or sense in any way, so they're just plotting points on a grid) to grab magical energy or matter from it. But we get MUCH more detailed and lengthy descriptions of it, from long explanations to actual spells:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.


The first half is Sciona and Thomil working on various spells, interspersed with very heavy-handed commentary on colonialism, sexism, and how Sciona totally gets feminism when it applies to her personally but is oblivious to all other isms. Sciona is an awful, self-centered person and Thomil is mostly perfect. Almost exactly halfway through, there is a shocking reveal. At least, it shocked many readers. It did not shock me.

Read more... )

Despite what the plot description sounds like, Sciona and Thomil do not have a romance beyond occasional sexy feelings. It's a magical dystopia/dark academia, I think similar to Babel (which I could not get very far into) but less anvillicious in that it does not have literal footnotes saying stuff like "This is a racist comment and racism is bad." (In the bookshop, I have Blood Over Bright Haven tagged "If you like Babel you will like this.") Sadly for M. L. Wang, this comparative subtlety got them some reviews on Goodreads accusing them of condoning Sciona being a bad person and endorsing her beliefs.

I did not care for this book but I can see how it would work for many readers, especially if they're shocked by the twist at the halfway mark.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World (Dr Greta Helsing, #4) (2025): somehow did not like this as much as the preceding volumes in the series.

Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time #5) (1960).

Latest Literary Review.

Discovered entirely by happenstance that Robert Rodi's scathingly irreverent comedies of manners set largely in Chicago’s gay demimonde' are now available as ebooks at exceedingly eligible prices (I read them in the 90s/early 00s from the local library) so have downloaded all those and also:

Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (vol 1) (2014), which collects and expands on his blogposts on Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. which was quite addictive, the sort of thing I thought I'd be dipping into and in fact read end to end, even while dissenting from his take on Fanny Price and muttering that he was not exactly au fait with the discourse on JA's views on the slavery question.

On the go

This was perhaps at least partly motivated by coming to the point in Dragon's Teeth where we get the Reichstag Fire and its consequences, and Lanny is caught in the middle of a whole mass of cross-currents while trying to save those of his friends who think that they will surely be all right....

Bitch In a Bonnet vol 2 (2014): covers Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Up next

Well, KJ Charles, Copper Script is allegedly due to drop tomorrow....

It's turkey o'clock.

May. 31st, 2025 07:29 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
That, or we have a new dog on the block that sounds a lot like a turkey and which will not shut up.

************


Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Lonely Rita has no end of meet-cutes with hunky men. If only Rita could stop shooting them in the head...

Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba

(no subject)

May. 28th, 2025 09:46 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] genarti and [personal profile] green_knight!

Wiscon report

May. 27th, 2025 07:25 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
This year's Wiscon was all-online, and billed as a "gap year," with fewer program items than I'm used to, and no dealers room.

I went to two program items--a "US immigration law and worldwide fandom roundtable" and a panel on "the wild world of modern agtech and why isn't it showing up in current SF."

The roundtable was about as cheerful as you'd expect, with a lot of discussion of both past and feared legal difficulties in traveling to cons, and alternatives like smaller gatherings and online cons. Most of us thought that online wasn't as good as in person, but that it's significantly better than nothing. (There may be some selection bias here: people who didn't think an online con was better than nothing wouldn't bother attending.) And a couple of people noted that their choice has been online or nothing at least since 2020, for reasons like disability or budge that don't have much to do with Trump.

The panel on current and future agriculture was fun. Some of the "what SF is getting wrong" was about TV and movies, showing a garden plot that's much too small for the population it's allegedly feeding, and that the fictional future is even worse/stupider about monoculture than the real world today.

Other than that, I hung out on the Discord server. Most if not all of the program items were recorded, and will be available to convention members for a week after the end of the con, but I may not get around to watching any of them, even less interactive things like readings and the guest of honor speeches.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
OP: Hey, looking for a board book series from when I was a kid! It was traditional fairy tales and fables, and the part I really remember is the illustrations! I'm sure if I see those illustrations I'll know it's the right book!

Me: Care to describe these illustrations? Even a little? Were they brightly colorful or more muted, or maybe black and white? Were they realistic or cartoony?

OP: Oh, they looked similar to the hare and the tortoise board game! Like, when I saw that I first thought it was the books!

Me: Oh, I guess you're gonna make me google that instead of providing a link, cool.

Guys, it turns out there are at least five different editions of this game, each one with a totally different art style.

Meanwhile, on a different thread on the same post:

Other Commenter: Could it be Aesop's fables?

Me, silently: WTF, buddy? That's not a suggestion.

OP: Oh, no, it was more colorful than that!

Me, a bit less silently: WTF? Like... what edition are we talking about? You need to help us help you!

All comments are paraphrased, but seriously.

Edit: I am absolutely dying at this point to ask who, exactly, OP thinks Aesop is, but that conversation is not going to go anywhere productive. I'd really better forget the whole thing.
oursin: Photograph of a statue of Hygeia, goddess of health (Hygeia)
[personal profile] oursin

Was alerted to Zoom seminar I must have signed up for ages ago and not put into my diary, with link, approx 30 mins before it was due to happen.

Well, that was interesting and informative: 'Protest and Identity Formation in the Time of Covid: The UK in Historical Context', if ultimately rather grim.

Given that I am in the cohort that thinks the response of The Powers That Be was very much in the Day Late and a Dollar Short ballpark and marked by gross ineptitude even where corruption was not in play, I had not realised how much there was resistance based on the belief that it was an excuse for the imposition of The Iron Heel (and this crisscrossed a wide spectrum of beliefs).

And a lot of the evidence for that was actually not widely reported.

And one observes that there are doubtless differences between the overall picture and the impact of immediate local policing practices.

But looking at what one might consider the wider penumbra of the panic (the torching of 5G towers e.g.) I was reminded (I would be, wouldn't I) of some of the episodes in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium, especially as the speaker invoked the Black Death as a comparison point for epidemic + social upheaval.

Two Ethics Quests from Ask A Manager

May. 27th, 2025 10:42 am
minoanmiss: Minoan version of Egyptian scribal goddess Seshat (Seshat)
[personal profile] minoanmiss posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
I am having trouble including the link, due to not being able to see properly. sorry about that.

1. Manager husband is cheating with a much younger employee Read more... )

2. My employee has terrible attendance issues … in this economy? Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A flamboyant thief fulfills a seemingly minor commission and wins the attention of an alarming number of patriots from two empires.

The Crown Jewels (Divertimenti, volume 1) by Walter Jon Williams

(no subject)

May. 27th, 2025 07:39 am
skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
[personal profile] skygiants
I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )

(no subject)

May. 27th, 2025 09:48 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] redroanchronicles!

TIL

May. 26th, 2025 07:23 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

That the place I was very glad to leave in my youth is now The Top Place to Visit in the UK, though I think 'visit' may be the operative word there, after all back in my day the foreign language students and other summer visitors had an entirely different vision of it. Street foodstalls and trendy bars, not to mention galleries, Not In My Day, though we did have the walks in nature and seascape.

***

(The person who asked about this could have found the info themself, it was really easy to find.) Stillbirths only had to be registered in England from 1927.

(This was the person who had found me as A Nexpert in a field I don't consider my main field of xpertise via Google AI. I was, in fact, able to provide quite a bit of information from the depths of Mi Knowinz. )

***

How to decode the less than intuitive citations in footnotes to Gould and Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1898 edition).

(Though I think the person asking the question to which this was actually the answer could possibly have given the matter a little thought and worked it out themself? Maybe not: maybe they have not had the years of dealing with Weird Citation Practices that are under my belt.)

***

Still got it for telling people Where To Find Archives....

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