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jods-duplicitous-sluts · 10 months

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Alecto the Ninth News

Part One

Alright friends. We are all chomping at the bit for any Alecto news at all. So here is what I've compiled from interviews, podcasts and AMAs. Sources are linked and screenshots have alt. text.

I've also included a little commentary or speculation on some points but ultimately that's not the focus of this collection.

Under the cut because I feel like it's going to get long.

So many screenshots, it turns out I'll have to split it into 3 posts.

If you enjoy this post please reblog so more people can see it!

Jump to part ■ Two of the post

Jump to part ■ Three of the post

I'm making this post on mobile, so forgive any wonkiness. Also tumblr ate this post once already *screams into the void*

• The book starts with Harrow in Hell. A reference to the Harrowing of Hell. Based on the presence of a porn mag I'd guess it's her own little river bubble inside Alecto but still just speculation.

Source: Tamsyn reads to us! Video with written description

• There is a wedding of some sort. Possibly other excuses to dress up the characters in formal ware. Some people have expressed concern that this was referencing the N- and C- wedding in Nona, but nope. We have confirmation that it is in book 4.

Source: Twitter

The next series of screenshots are all from the same tor.com interview: TM on Lyctorhood and Genderfuckery.

• This first one again confirms allusions to the harrowing of hell/ the decent of Christ. For those out of the loop the tldr:

The harrowing of hell is an Old English and Middle English term referring to the period of time between the Crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection. In triumphant descent, Christ brought salvation to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world.

A lot of speculation has gone on around about Harrow and her role in freeing the souls trapped in the river/reviving the river from whatever is poisoning it. [ *cough*JOD*cough*].

Also another reference towards formal outfits for the cast. So at least the wedding if not multiple formal functions.

• The question of Harrow and Gideon's souls will continue into Alecto. Looking forward to info on how enmeshed they've become and/or if they can be separated.

• I mean this quote is infamous by now. Which of our faves is it in reference to? All of them?

•I feel like we haven't seen enough about the differences between rebirth [a la Paul and Nona] vs Resurrection [Gideon/Harrow?! Someone else?] So while not a direct promise of anything in Alecto, I feel like the implication is there.

•The next two screenshots are about the Alecto cover, which is complete[the first from the above interview:]

•and the second is from an AMA from Aug. 5 2020

• The cover is definitely done since she was talking about it in 2020 and reaffirmed right before Nona’s release. I feel like they are waiting until they have a better idea of a publishing date before release. Maybe we'll get news in Q4 after the Nona paperback release and excitement dies down?

• From the same 2020 AMA. As this is pre-Nona, it could be possible that the heist mentioned deals with Gideon's body [either the Houses heisting it from BOE which happened off screen or the heist of Gideon's body from the barracks]. But I included it just in case that isn't what is being referenced.

• Same 2020 AMA: Again this could be covered in Nona as being what the John chapters were about, but also maybe not.

Source: TazMuir tumblr post from April 2020

• Another infamous quote at this point. Definitely feels like this is about the 'Third Most Toxic Polycule' of Harrow/Gideon/Ianthe and maybe Alecto is in this loop as well. With all the references to weddings and relationships I'm wondering who out of these four is marrying who...[maybe it's someone totally different, but my money is on someone in this situation]

Click to see part two!

#alecto the ninth speculation #alecto the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt #the locked tomb meta #my post #alt text

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jbk405 · 5 months

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I finished Nona the Ninth earlier today, so I'm up-to-date on The Locked Tomb series. This was a somewhat unusual readthrough for me, and definitely not what I expected at all.

I've never read a series where each entry was so completely distinct from each other. Plenty of long-runners transform over time as the author grows into their skills and decides to focus on different aspects, but these books are almost each a different genre.

I've also never read a series where the viewpoint character -- and by extension the audience -- is so continuously out of the loop and ignorant of what's going on. Plenty of series start that way, but usually in the first book (Or the second or maybe the third) they figure out what's going on. This not only gives the audience an infodump, but then continuously updates the audience as things progress. Here, though, each protagonist is completely out of it in their own way, and each one more than the last. Gideon is initially just ignorant of the culture and society of the upper echelons of the Nine Houses, but then Harrowhark is brainwashed and mindwiped to be missing key details of her own history that would allow her to piece together what's happening now, and ultimately Nona is such a blank slate that she's ignorant of everything.

You can piece a lot of it together yourself if you pay attention, but you've got to work at it.

I will say that each book took a while to really get me engaged. I was very excited going into Gideon the Ninth (In fact I kinda rushed through reading IT because I wanted to hop to G) but the momentum slowed pretty quickly. I can't quite articulate what the problem was, but I didn't care until about halfway through the book. Instead of plowing through for hours at a time, I'd read in 10 minute stretches while waiting for something else to finish. It was the same for Harrow the Ninth and Nona as well. Once they did get going they went quickly, but it was a struggle to get over the initial hump.

I believe Alecto the Ninth is due to release this year, so I'm curious to see how it will all be tied up.

#The Locked Tomb #Nona the Ninth #Gideon the Ninth #Harrow the Ninth #Literature

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familyabolisher · 1 year

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now that it's been a fair few months since the release, how do you feel about nona the ninth as compared with the first two entries in the series?

you know what! i like it a lot, and i think a good number of the criticisms leveraged against it were unfair. certainly it’s less cohesive than gideon and harrow were – compared to its predecessors, it leaves us with a maddening number of unanswered questions that can’t be tackled through inference or else left ambiguous in ways that could be compelling (what happened in the interim between the two books? how did pyrrha come to be with camilla + palamedes, and how did harrow’s body get there? what happened to gideon’s body? what’s up with the barrage of new concepts that the book introduced and left hanging: the messenger(s), the tower, the devils, the cradle creature?), such that it felt quite a bit less tightly formed and plotted than the other two. i think gideon and harrow had a good balance of internally asked-and-answered questions and questions that were posed with intent to be answered at a later date, whereas nona was heavily skewed towards the latter such that it felt a little off-kilter. i do think some of that disorientation comes from the fact that tamsyn muir is a very precise writer; i don’t know that i’d be picking up on the comparative thinness of nona if it weren’t for how gideon and harrow were both so fluently composed in the first place. but the point is, it’s definitely there; i don’t at all think that a pared-down nona incorporated into alecto would have been ‘better’ (contrary to some people’s opinion, i don’t think any parts of nona are superfluous), but nor do i think it wholly holds up on its own.

it also has a handful of other weaknesses – i have a fairly high tolerance for tmuir’s humour, which when it lands manages to land really well but when it doesn’t it doesn’t, and i think nona often erred on the side of doesn’t, and it felt a little too heavyhanded at points; which has been a consistent problem throughout, tbf, but, idk. tmuir can be a very subtle writer when she wants to be, but, again, when she isn’t, she … isn’t. and that began to grate a little, after a while?

however, at a certain point i’m willing to throw over the instinct to be nitpicky about Form or Structure or whatever and say that the actual content of the text – the discourse it managed to develop, the direction it dragged the body of the series in, the sorts of themes and ideas it articulated – was really, really strong, such that i’ve been chewing on it for months now. i think the fact that i still think about the scene with john’s ‘creation’ of alecto almost every day is a testament to the sheer weight that got thrown behind that passage – at the end of the day, whatever structural weaknesses the book may have is secondary to the fact that it made me feel the need to go eat sandpaper. a book that makes you need to go eat sandpaper is a good book!

also, god, some of tamsyn muir’s writing! there are times when she leans into a voice that a less skilled writer would deploy to create something excessively florid and, frankly, pretentious, but she’s laid the kind of groundwork throughout where there’s substance and meaning and precision to the prose voice that makes it equal parts chilling & joyous to read. some of many passages i’ve been rotating in my mind:

“Green thing,” said the Captain. “Green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? Where will your body go? What did he do to you, to make you this way? You eat yourself. I gorge on unliving marrow.” It was true; the Captain looked as though she were withering before Nona’s eyes. She cried out in haste: “Don’t ... stop that! I can’t stop it, but you can stop it. Stop hurting her ... She doesn’t know what you’re doing.” “You cry mercy?” said the Captain. “Yes—mercy—yes,” said Nona. “I have crossed the face of the universe,” said the Captain. “I poison it to match my grief.”

“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know ... they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”

He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy ... I made you look like a Renaissance angel ... I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair. He said, As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you ... I hid you in me. And when we were together ... once the shaman had claimed the sun ... I became God.

He coughed fretfully—batted another metal-fisted hand at Paul, who had instinctively surged forward—and he said, “Look at you, you cock-o’-the-walk, you filigree piglet, you scum. A whited sepulchre ... Ninth blood on your foreign sword...”

He said, I just wanted to be in the lab. It felt like I could sit by those two bodies, those two kids, and make time go away. I could sit next to them for six minutes, I could sit next to them for six hours. Just listening. They were my moreporks and possums. I was hearing their bodies in all that silence, all the bacteria that weren’t growing ... what wasn’t building up in the gut, what wasn’t pooling at the joints. They were my silent night. I should have been doing paperwork and closing reports, but I hadn’t opened the computer in days. I couldn’t stop thinking about their palms, their hands. I touched their hands so often. I’d touched their hands before, but not like this. Even when I wasn’t touching them I could feel their skin on my skin, that temperature that wouldn’t change. I kept thinking I was touching them when I wasn’t. M— said I should probably get tossed in a rubber room, but she wasn’t scared I was nuts. She was scared I wasn’t. He said, You know, I can’t even remember how it came together now. There was no catalyst, no revelation. I was too far gone for revelations. It was like I’d been dozy and now I was waking up. So, my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U— and T— on their certificates, you know, their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted. My two kids with their frozen brains and their perfect internal temperatures. There wasn’t a place on the poor bastards I hadn’t breached with a thermometer, and now I was knocking before I came into their room.

literally just the phrase ‘the shimmering white figure of the dead Kiriona Gaia’

The rock loomed so big above, so awful in the electric light. There were so many people standing above her, her body, the baby’s body. The baby with the big black eyes. The scrap of meat with the purple mouth.

John loved her. She was John’s cavalier. She loved John. For she so loved the world that she had given them John. For the world so loved John that she had been given. For John had so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.

i’m not one for close reading but there are so many lines and passages in nona that i just want to go through with a fine-tooth comb, word by word, because everything is so deliberate and so infuriatingly good, lmao. i actually struggle to care all that much about the points where tamsyn muir is bad because when she’s good she is running circles around just about anyone else in genre fiction at the minute, and frankly when you’re doing the kind of things that she’s doing i think you get to use homestuck fanfiction and 2010s internet humour as your building-blocks as often as you like.

i’ll also say that i think the john chapters are the strongest pieces of writing that taz muir has put forth in the entire series, including the whole of harrow, which is already like genuinely one of the best-written books at least in contemporary genre lit (and probably in a far wider-reaching net than that) that i’ve encountered in recent memory. john 1:20 is permanently lodged in my brain; i am never escaping john 1:20 disease. i reread it when i’m bored sometimes just to make myself insane.

anyway, i’m really looking forward to revisiting nona in the wake of alecto and treating the two as one unit, because i suspect that a lot of nona’s weaker points will disappear or else become more coherent when considered as part of that broader whole. if we remember that nona was originally act one of alecto – well, it makes total sense for there to be a lot of questions posed in act one, with the assumption that they will then be developed and answered in acts two, three, four, and five. + something like paul, who imo felt very random and unresolved, makes far more sense as a near-the-end-of-act-one incident; it’s introducing a sudden change, doing something we as audience have never seen before, and setting up the other four-fifths of the narrative to carry its implications. my point is, nona to me makes a lot more structural sense as an opening to a more expansive text; which is exactly what it is. pro-nona the ninth account, its weaknesses stem from the fact that it’s a breakaway from alecto and i’m just not pedantic enough to mind all that much about internal coherency if that coherency can then be achieved in the last book – which i suspect it can! where nona’s good, it’s really fucking good.

#ask #tlt

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