#where's Murderbot when you need a good hack

[minervas-hand]

Right to fear, wrong to believe

Just had a horrible realization and needed to meta it out.

How different they were before Edinburgh, when Crowley was sucked down into Hell.

Look at this flirty babygirl in the Bastille:

I mean could he climb that tree any faster?

(This is why I really like fics that place a more physical relationship here, pre-Bastille or just post-Bastille, because c'mon look at them. )

In S1 the next thing is 1862 and Crowley asking for insurance (with a cane ffs). And Aziraphale freaking out with his "fraternizing" BS. It's jarring, until we get 1827 filled in for us in S2.

@takeme-totheworld notes in this post:

Crowley sure went from "our respective head offices don't actually care how things get done" and "nobody ever has to know" to "walls have ears" FAST after Edinburgh. And Aziraphale went from looking at Crowley with hearts in his eyes to "I've been FrAtErNiZiNg" just as quickly. I'm more convinced than ever that Edinburgh was the first time Crowley ever actually got caught and punished for fucking around with Aziraphale/doing good deeds/whatever it was they yanked him back down to Hell for, and it scared the absolute shit out of both of them and changed the whole tone of their relationship after that.

Yes! - it's clear to me as well that the Edinburgh graveyard was a very bad turning point, where they both saw that Hell was listening and would intervene. And it did change their relationship drastically, for over a century and a half (really, until looming Armageddon loosened up the stakes for them).

But what about Heaven?

See the thing is, we know Azi's been worried about Heaven watching him for the past 6000 years.

But they haven't.

[GIFs posted by starrose17]

All this time, and Heaven had not seen them together. Hadn't noticed. Had not even LOOKED.

I want to mention what @starrose17 says about this here in this post:

What I love about this is her choice of words, “went back through the Earth Observation files.” This implies that these photos were already filed somewhere meaning somebody had to have been watching them which meant somewhere in the depths of the bureaucratic heaven there’s an underpaid angel clerk tasked with watching angels on Earth, and he’s been hording photos of his favourite Angel/Demon couple not reporting them to Michael because he wants to see what happens.

And that's exactly what this fic covers!: Spying Omens by @ednav

(Give this a read, it's fabulous.)

While I am here for this being exactly how that happens, the other scenario is colder and worse - there's no one watching, at all. It's just filing automatically and never seen until some Scrivener is called to pull a file.

From @fuckyeahisawthatat's comment here :

I found this scene to be quite chilling, actually. Not only is the idea of Heaven as a surveillance state brilliant (way to make “God is always watching” sound way more ominous) but this is exactly how modern surveillance states work. They don’t actively watch everybody all the time. That’s not physically possible for humans, and even if it is metaphysically possible for Heaven, it’s not a very efficient use of resources. Surveillance states watch people they deem “suspicious.” And once you’ve been put in the category of “suspicious,” they have massive amounts of data that they can comb through to collect a lot of information about you–to retroactively build a case justifying why you’re suspicious, to collect information about where you go and who you associate with, etc.

Yes.

So we either have secret collusion in the rank and file, or we have a surveillance state that is constantly reinforced to its subjects for fear's sake, for control.

(Well, it obviously could be both.)

BUT my point is… Up until Edinburgh, Hell has not been watching (or caring at least). And up until near the end of Armageddon't, neither has Heaven.

Oh, my poor Angel. Thousands of years, of denying yourself, of pushing Crowley away, of carrying around a tension that is it's own constellation.

After 1827 you might have reason, but for the 5000+ years before that?

Thousands of years and Heaven was not watching nor cared.

You were right to fear. And you were wrong to believe.

And that just breaks my heart.

#okay gonna go reread Spying Omens again because that's my headcanon now #I hope Azi tears out the Earth Observation cams or servers or whatever it is #where's Murderbot when you need a good hack #good omens meta #aziracrow #ineffable husbands #good omens

[elkian]

I've seen a few of my Murderbot posts reblogged with tags to the effect of "I don't go here but I know of it" and for people who are interested in the Murderbot series looking to break in:

Tor.com (now Reactor Mag) has the entire first chapter of the first book, All Systems Red, available free to read on their site.

Link to the article.

ASR is a novella, so this not only covers a lot of ground, but is a pretty good litmus test imo if this book is for you or not.

(I read ASR twice before getting Artificial Condition, and that was the book that got me totally hooked on the series, for what that's worth.)

I'm also just going to post the text under this readmore because free Murderbot.

---

---

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

I was also still doing my job, on a new contract, and hoping Dr. Volescu and Dr. Bharadwaj finished their survey soon so we could get back to the habitat and I could watch episode 397 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

I admit I was distracted. It was a boring contract so far and I was thinking about backburnering the status alert channel and trying to access music on the entertainment feed without HubSystem logging the extra activity. It was trickier to do it in the field than it was in the habitat.

This assessment zone was a barren stretch of coastal island, with low, flat hills rising and falling and thick greenish-black grass up to my ankles, not much in the way of flora or fauna, except a bunch of different-sized birdlike things and some puffy floaty things that were harmless as far as we knew. The coast was dotted with big bare craters, one of which Bharadwaj and Volescu were taking samples in. The planet had a ring, which from our current position dominated the horizon when you looked out to sea. I was looking at the sky and mentally poking at the feed when the bottom of the crater exploded.

I didn’t bother to make a verbal emergency call. I sent the visual feed from my field camera to Dr. Mensah’s, and jumped down into the crater. As I scrambled down the sandy slope, I could already hear Mensah over the emergency comm channel, yelling at someone to get the hopper in the air now. They were about ten kilos away, working on another part of the island, so there was no way they were going to get here in time to help.

Conflicting commands filled my feed but I didn’t pay attention. Even if I hadn’t borked my own governor module, the emergency feed took priority, and it was chaotic, too, with the automated HubSystem wanting data and trying to send me data I didn’t need yet and Mensah sending me telemetry from the hopper. Which I also didn’t need, but it was easier to ignore than HubSystem simultaneously demanding answers and trying to supply them.

In the middle of all that, I hit the bottom of the crater. I have small energy weapons built into both arms, but the one I went for was the big projectile weapon clamped to my back. The hostile that had just exploded up out of the ground had a really big mouth, so I felt I needed a really big gun.

I dragged Bharadwaj out of its mouth and shoved myself in there instead, and discharged my weapon down its throat and then up toward where I hoped the brain would be. I’m not sure if that all happened in that order; I’d have to replay my own field camera feed. All I knew was that I had Bharadwaj, and it didn’t, and it had disappeared back down the tunnel.

She was unconscious and bleeding through her suit from massive wounds in her right leg and side. I clamped the weapon back into its harness so I could lift her with both arms. I had lost the armor on my left arm and a lot of the flesh underneath, but my non-organic parts were still working. Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them. Bharadwaj, not having non-organic parts and not as easily repaired as me, was definitely a priority here and I was mainly interested in what the MedSystem was trying to tell me on the emergency feed. But first I needed to get her out of the crater.

During all this, Volescu was huddled on the churned up rock, losing his shit, not that I was unsympathetic. I was far less vulnerable in this situation than he was and I wasn’t exactly having a great time either. I said, “Dr. Volescu, you need to come with me now.”

He didn’t respond. MedSystem was advising a tranq shot and blah blah blah, but I was clamping one arm on Dr. Bharadwaj’s suit to keep her from bleeding out and supporting her head with the other, and despite everything I only have two hands. I told my helmet to retract so he could see my human face. If the hostile came back and bit me again, this would be a bad mistake, because I did need the organic parts of my head. I made my voice firm and warm and gentle, and said, “Dr. Volescu, it’s gonna be fine, okay? But you need to get up and come help me get her out of here.”

That did it. He shoved to his feet and staggered over to me, still shaking. I turned my good side toward him and said, “Grab my arm, okay? Hold on.”

He managed to loop his arm around the crook of my elbow and I started up the crater towing him, holding Bharadwaj against my chest. Her breathing was rough and desperate and I couldn’t get any info from her suit. Mine was torn across my chest so I upped the warmth on my body, hoping it would help. The feed was quiet now, Mensah having managed to use her leadership priority to mute everything but MedSystem and the hopper, and all I could hear on the hopper feed was the others frantically shushing each other.

The footing on the side of the crater was lousy, soft sand and loose pebbles, but my legs weren’t damaged and I got up to the top with both humans still alive. Volescu tried to collapse and I coaxed him away from the edge a few meters, just in case whatever was down there had a longer reach than it looked.

I didn’t want to put Bharadwaj down because something in my abdomen was severely damaged and I wasn’t sure I could pick her up again. I ran my field camera back a little and saw I had gotten stabbed with a tooth, or maybe a cilia. Did I mean a cilia or was that something else? They don’t give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, and even those are the cheap versions. I was looking it up in HubSystem’s language center when the little hopper landed nearby. I let my helmet seal and go opaque as it settled on the grass.

We had two standard hoppers: a big one for emergencies and this little one for getting to the assessment locations. It had three compartments: one big one in the middle for the human crew and two smaller ones to each side for cargo, supplies, and me. Mensah was at the controls. I started walking, slower than I normally would have because I didn’t want to lose Volescu. As the ramp started to drop, Pin-Lee and Arada jumped out and I switched to voice comm to say, “Dr. Mensah, I can’t let go of her suit.”

It took her a second to realize what I meant. She said hurriedly, “That’s all right, bring her up into the crew cabin.”

Murderbots aren’t allowed to ride with the humans and I had to have verbal permission to enter. With my cracked governor there was nothing to stop me, but not letting anybody, especially the people who held my contract, know that I was a free agent was kind of important. Like, not having my organic components destroyed and the rest of me cut up for parts important.

I carried Bharadwaj up the ramp into the cabin, where Overse and Ratthi were frantically unclipping seats to make room. They had their helmets off and their suit hoods pulled back, so I got to see their horrified expressions when they took in what was left of my upper body through my torn suit. I was glad I had sealed my helmet.

This is why I actually like riding with the cargo. Humans and augmented humans in close quarters with murderbots is too awkward. At least, it’s awkward for this murderbot. I sat down on the deck with Bharadwaj in my lap while Pin-Lee and Arada dragged Volescu inside.

We left two pacs of field equipment and a couple of instruments behind, still sitting on the grass where Bharadwaj and Volescu had been working before they went down to the crater for samples. Normally I’d help carry them, but MedSystem, which was monitoring Bharadwaj through what was left of her suit, was pretty clear that letting go of her would be a bad idea. But no one mentioned the equipment. Leaving easily replaceable items behind may seem obvious in an emergency, but I had been on contracts where the clients would have told me to put the bleeding human down to go get the stuff.

On this contract, Dr. Ratthi jumped up and said, “I’ll get the cases!”

I yelled, “No!” which I’m not supposed to do; I’m always supposed to speak respectfully to the clients, even when they’re about to accidentally commit suicide. HubSystem could log it and it could trigger punishment through the governor module. If it wasn’t hacked.

Fortunately, the rest of the humans yelled “No!” at the same time, and Pin-Lee added, “For fuck’s sake, Ratthi!”

Ratthi said, “Oh, no time, of course. I’m sorry!” and hit the quick-close sequence on the hatch.

So we didn’t lose our ramp when the hostile came up under it, big mouth full of teeth or cilia or whatever chewing right through the ground. There was a great view of it on the hopper’s cameras, which its system helpfully sent straight to everybody’s feed. The humans screamed.

Mensah pushed us up into the air so fast and hard I nearly leaned over and everybody who wasn’t on the floor ended up there.

In the quiet afterward, as they gasped with relief, Pin-Lee said, “Ratthi, if you get yourself killed—”

“You’ll be very cross with me, I know.” Ratthi slid down the wall a little more and waved weakly at her.

“That’s an order, Ratthi, don’t get yourself killed,” Mensah said from the pilot’s seat. She sounded calm, but I have security priority, and I could see her racing heartbeat through MedSystem.

Arada pulled out the emergency medical kit so they could stop the bleeding and try to stabilize Bharadwaj. I tried to be as much like an appliance as possible, clamping the wounds where they told me to, using my failing body temperature to try to keep her warm, and keeping my head down so I couldn’t see them staring at me.

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 60% AND DROPPING

Our habitat is a pretty standard model, seven interconnected domes set down on a relatively flat plain above a narrow river valley, with our power and recycling system connected on one side. We had an environmental system, but no air locks, as the planet’s atmosphere was breathable, just not particularly good for humans for the long term. I don’t know why, because it’s one of those things I’m not contractually obligated to care about.

We picked the location because it’s right in the middle of the assessment area, and while there are trees scattered through the plain, each one is fifteen or so meters tall, very skinny, with a single layer of spreading canopy, so it’s hard for anything approaching to use them as cover. Of course, that didn’t take into account anything approaching via tunnel.

We have security doors on the habitat for safety but HubSystem told me the main one was already open as the hopper landed. Dr. Gurathin had a lift gurney ready and guided it out to us. Overse and Arada had managed to get Bharadwaj stabilized, so I was able to put her down on it and follow the others into the habitat.

The humans headed for Medical and I stopped to send the little hopper commands to lock and seal itself, then I locked the outer doors. Through the security feed, I told the drones to widen our perimeter so I’d have more warning if something big came at us. I also set some monitors on the seismic sensors to alert me to anomalies just in case the hypothetical something big decided to tunnel in.

After I secured the habitat, I went back to what was called the security ready room, which was where weapons, ammo, perimeter alarms, drones, and all the other supplies pertaining to security were stored, including me. I shed what was left of the armor and on MedSystem’s advice sprayed wound sealant all over my bad side. I wasn’t dripping with blood, because my arteries and veins seal automatically, but it wasn’t nice to look at. And it hurt, though the wound seal did numb it a little. I had already set an eight-hour security interdiction through HubSystem, so nobody could go outside without me, and then set myself as off-duty. I checked the main feed but no one was filing any objections to that.

I was freezing because my temperature controls had given out at some point on the way here, and the protective skin that went under my armor was in pieces. I had a couple of spares but pulling one on right now would not be practical, or easy. The only other clothing I had was a uniform I hadn’t worn yet, and I didn’t think I could get it on, either. (I hadn’t needed the uniform because I hadn’t been patrolling inside the habitat. Nobody had asked for that, because with only eight of them and all friends, it would be a stupid waste of resources, namely me.) I dug around one handed in the storage case until I found the extra human-rated medical kit I’m allowed in case of emergencies, and opened it and got the survival blanket out. I wrapped up in it, then climbed into the plastic bed of my cubicle. I let the door seal as the white light flickered on.

It wasn’t much warmer in there, but at least it was cozy. I connected myself to the resupply and repair leads, leaned back against the wall and shivered. MedSystem helpfully informed me that my performance reliability was now at 58 percent and dropping, which was not a surprise. I could definitely repair in eight hours, and probably mostly regrow my damaged organic components, but at 58 percent, I doubted I could get any analysis done in the meantime. So I set all the security feeds to alert me if anything tried to eat the habitat and started to call up the supply of media I’d downloaded from the entertainment feed. I hurt too much to pay attention to anything with a story, but the friendly noise would keep me company.

Then someone knocked on the cubicle door.

I stared at it and lost track of all my neatly arrayed inputs. Like an idiot, I said, “Uh, yes?”

Dr. Mensah opened the door and peered in at me. I’m not good at guessing actual humans’ ages, even with all the visual entertainment I watch. People in the shows don’t usually look much like people in real life, at least not in the good shows. She had dark brown skin and lighter brown hair, cut very short, and I’m guessing she wasn’t young or she wouldn’t be in charge. She said, “Are you all right? I saw your status report.”

“Uh.” That was the point where I realized that I should have just not answered and pretended to be in stasis. I pulled the blanket around my chest, hoping she hadn’t seen any of the missing chunks. Without the armor holding me together, it was much worse. “Fine.”

So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous. Also, if I’m not in the armor then it’s because I’m wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor at any moment and no one wants to see that.

“Fine?” She frowned. “The report said you lost 20 percent of your body mass.”

“It’ll grow back,” I said. I know to an actual human I probably looked like I was dying. My injuries were the equivalent of a human losing a limb or two plus most of their blood volume.

“I know, but still.” She eyed me for a long moment, so long I tapped the security feed for the mess, where the non-wounded members of the group were sitting around the table talking. They were discussing the possibility of more underground fauna and wishing they had intoxicants. That seemed pretty normal. She continued, “You were very good with Dr. Volescu. I don’t think the others realized . . . They were very impressed.”

“It’s part of the emergency med instructions, calming victims.” I tugged the blanket tighter so she didn’t see anything awful. I could feel something lower down leaking.

“Yes, but the MedSystem was prioritizing Bharadwaj and didn’t check Volescu’s vital signs. It didn’t take into account the shock of the event, and it expected him to be able to leave the scene on his own.”

On the feed it was clear that the others had reviewed Volescu’s field camera video. They were saying things like I didn’t even know it had a face. I’d been in armor since we arrived, and I hadn’t unsealed the helmet when I was around them. There was no specific reason. The only part of me they would have seen was my head, and it’s standard, generic human. But they didn’t want to talk to me and I definitely didn’t want to talk to them; on duty it would distract me and off duty . . . I didn’t want to talk to them. Mensah had seen me when she signed the rental contract. But she had barely looked at me and I had barely looked at her because again, murderbot + actual human = awkwardness. Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interaction.

I said, “It’s part of my job, not to listen to the System feeds when they . . . make mistakes.” That’s why you need constructs, SecUnits with organic components. But she should know that. Before she accepted delivery of me, she had logged about ten protests, trying to get out of having to have me. I didn’t hold it against her. I wouldn’t have wanted me either.

Seriously, I don’t know why I didn’t just say you’re welcome and please get out of my cubicle so I can sit here and leak in peace.

“All right,” she said, and looked at me for what objectively I knew was 2.4 seconds and subjectively about twenty excruciating minutes. “I’ll see you in eight hours. If you need anything before then, please send me an alert on the feed.” She stepped back and let the door slide closed.

It left me wondering what they were all marveling at so I called up the recording of the incident. Okay, wow. I had talked to Volescu all the way up the side of the crater. I had been mostly concerned with the hopper’s trajectory and Bharadwaj not bleeding out and what might come out of that crater for a second try; I hadn’t been listening to myself, basically. I had asked him if he had kids. It was boggling. Maybe I had been watching too much media. (He did have kids. He was in a four-way marriage and had seven, all back home with his partners.)

All my levels were too elevated now for a rest period, so I decided I might as well get some use out of it and look at the other recordings. Then I found something weird. There was an “abort” order in the HubSystem command feed, the one that controlled, or currently believed it controlled, my governor module. It had to be a glitch. It didn’t matter, because when MedSystem has priority—

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 39%, STASIS INITIATED FOR EMERGENCY REPAIR SEQUENCE.

#elk text #tmd #the murderbot diaries #if you aren't in a position to purchase the books check out (hehe) whether your local library has anything #i know there's audiobooks too and apparently they're pretty good #i tried to indent it and tungl did not like that #tried to make the opening break obvious

[ilovedthestars]

33! 👀

ooh you picked a Good One!

33 is a wip that i labelled "flower." I talked a little about some of the shorter snips with rogue secunit OCs that i've written that never really went anywhere. This is not one of them. I have 16,000 words of it.

The fic is called flower because Flower is the name of the rogue SecUnit OC. I was probably a goner as soon as I named it that (Flower, my beloved 🥰). The original concept was just "Murderbot & Three run into some enemies who have a SecUnit while on a mission with ART's crew, and they hack the SecUnit's governor module." Then it developed a personality, which is why it went farther than just a few short snips. Flower named itself Flower before it was rogue, based on pictures in its education modules--it has not seen an actual flower before. Flower is a SecUnit who absolutely hates hurting people, in the hands of a company that uses it mostly for hurting people. It is not having a good time, and when MB & Three give it a way out, it takes it, even though it's scared of what might come next.

That was like, the first chapter, and subsequent scenes I wrote were all of a very anxious Flower getting used to being a rogue, meeting humans who treated it like a person, and settling in on Preservation. Three faded into the background because frankly i am bad at writing Three in any time period significantly after NE, because there is just not enough to extrapolate its personality from. So it was mostly Murderbot somewhat reluctantly babysitting a brand new rogue, on a Preservation Station that had only dealt with two other rogues so far and was still getting used to this whole "rogue SecUnits walking around" situation.

It was fun writing a unit that completely hated violence. Partially because it was angsty, and partially because it clashed really well with Murderbot, who is perfectly fine with violence as long as it's the one in control. I wrote a scene in which there was some kind of dangerous situation on Preservation, and MB expected Flower to back it up, but Flower wouldn't engage in helping it stop the hostiles and someone got (non-lethally) hurt. MB was mad and lashed out at Flower but eventually backed off and reconsidered, and had a moment where it realized that Flower had a right to draw its own line that it wasn't willing to cross, just like MB did after Ganaka Pit. That was a scene that I really enjoyed writing.

I really like Flower, and I like this fic, but I think i've already written all the good bits and don't know if I'll ever have the motivation I would need to polish it off. Writing it definitely informed other rogue OCs that i've come up with, and I might sneak a Flower cameo into the OU,YU universe at some point, just for fun :)

This answer is super long already but I want to share some actual words from this fic, so here's a bit from the beginning--Flower is in ART's MedSystem post-combat-turned-rescue, and the POV is Murderbot.

ART said, Do you require any further assistance at this time? I said, “Something’s wrong with its gunports. Or its targeting software. It shot me in the foot.” My targeting software is fully functional. “Then why did your shot hit so low?” I was targeting your legs. “Why?” There was no protocol saying to use minimum necessary force against a SecUnit. When we fight we try to kill each other as quickly and thoroughly as possible. “Did you have orders to incapacitate? What kind of idiot tells you to avoid shooting a SecUnit enough to actually stop it?” I was not ordered to refrain from using lethal force. It was a breach of protocol. “You broke protocol? On purpose? With a working governor module?” I don’t like killing. The way it said that…sounded like it had been thinking it for a long time, but had never been able to say it before. I said, “This wasn’t the first time?” No. I thought…maybe they would assign me to a different contract if I disobeyed. But they just put a counter on my governor module to record how many times I violated protocol by using nonlethal force. If I kept doing it they were going to dismantle me for spare parts. “How many strikes did you have left?” This mission was my last chance. That hit me hard. It had known that if it disobeyed again it would be destroyed. It had faced the even more immediate threat of me and Three killing it. It had known it would die. But it had still shot me in the foot instead of the head.

#ask game answers #stars fic #stars wips #flower wip #flower my BELOVED #i was so hoping i would get this one thank you scorpio! #i don't know if this will ever be Finished but i would be down to share more of what i have written #i have some pretty good scenes #flower is the best. i love writing Brand New Rogues and Older Rogues Helping Brand New Rogues #this wip definitely had a big influence on that part of OUYU

[roundedloaf]

Murderbot: The Winter Soldier, An Analysis

In the text of the Marvel Cinematic Universe the Winter Soldier is a terrifying killing machine. ‘The Asset’ and not a person. Allowed enough leeway to follow orders to assassinate most efficiently but nothing else. His body modified and his brain overruled to turn him into a weapon, memory wipes any time his personality starts leaking out.

In the text of the Murderbot Diaires, SecUnits are considered terrifying killing machines. They’re assets on a balance sheet and not people. Allowed some leeway to make decisions to follow out their orders but punished by their governor module if they do anything else. Their bodies are built and programmed with weapons in their arms, and memory wipes anytime their past gets too inconvenient.

Neither character has the chance to see themselves as people, or be allowed to care about others.

Bucky Barnes gets to return to personhood because his friend remembered him. Murderbot never started with a personhood, so has to build that for itself. It’s a person not because other people care about it, but because it’s a person, a snarky depressed asshole who loves media.

Released in 2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, spawned a significant amount of fan activity.  Between the release of CA:TWS and CA:CW over twenty thousand works were placed on the Archive of Our Own tagged with both ‘James “Bucky” Barnes’ and ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’. One of the popular genres of fics at this time was Recovering!Bucky, a fairly long form fic genre showing where Bucky slowly recovers from being the Winter Soldier, often driven by his love, romantic or otherwise, for characters like Steve Rogers.

@presumenothing prompted me to look a bit more deeply at this idea by mentioning the similarities between Murderbot and Owlet’s ‘This, You Protect’ Winter Soldier fanfic. Owlet’s fic is the most popular in the Recovering!Bucky genre on Ao3, and contains a number of very clear parallels to Murderbot. Owlet’s Winter Soldier cares a lot about security, and uses surveillance equipment to check in on Captain America without having to interact. This insistence on protection is part of Murderbot’s core as a SecUnit, and it’s preferred way of interacting with people through it’s drones is also quite similar.

The writers of my personal favorite Winter Soldier fic, All Things You Pray For, @marywhal and @anonymousalchemist have also made a post talking about the similarities between Murderbot and their Winter Soldier. Their fic was written roughly co-currently or after Murderbot and is actually a Winter Soldier AU of popular podcast The Adventure Zone, where it pulled some of it’s setting and plot from Winter Soldier fanon. The similarities aren’t about Bucky Barnes but fandom interpretations of the Winter Soldier story.

As the popularty of fanfic has increased, it has had a more direct influence on popular science fiction literature. Martha Wells wrote fanfic before she was a professional writer, and around this era mentioned that she was still at least passively involved in reading fanfic. source  It’s fairly likely she read Winter Soldier fanfic and probably even Owlet’s‘This, You Protect’.

The Murderbot Diaries contains subversions of a large number of tropes, the evil AI, the evil robot, the good robot who wants to be human and an AI’s personhood being proven by romantic love. Murderbot is actively aware and actively rejects these tropes. “I don’t want to be human” it says in Network Effect. It gets annoyed by media representation of constructs and robots falling in love with their human guardians. It refers to ART as having a ‘villain of a long running mythic adventure serial’ voice.

Martha Wells has talked about Murderbot as a character coming out from her own ‘own anger and frustration and social anxiety’ (source), it’s experiences are driven by her experiences being not neurotypical. (source) At the ends of both All Systems Red and Network Effect, Murderbot walks away from Preservation Aux – the humans that helped save it. It’s personhood isn’t contingent on being cared about by others.

Murderbot subverts the Winter Soldier idea of the person being completely unaware of the horrors they are involved in. Murderbot was aware of it’s situation, and some of the horrors of it, well before hacking it’s governor module. The way Preservation Aux helps it isn’t by showing it how to be a person, but by giving it the option to do that by itself. In Exit Strategy it remarks“Mensah said I could learn to do anything I wanted. I learned to leave.”

Transplanting the Winter Soldier trope of ‘sarcastic person who is uncomfortable with being called a person, is really good at murder, and will murder but would rather be doing Something Else’ as @marywhal put it into a setting built for around this character allows for a deeper look at why people become ‘less than’. Why Bucky Barnes became the Winter Soldier is standard superhero fare. The Murderbot Diaries is about dehumanisation under capitalism, a theme expanded on and also applied to human characters.

Both recovering!Bucky fic and Murderbot are a fantasy outside of a lot of mainstream media. Bucky Barnes gets to come back to being a person slowly, gets to have his personhood respected even when he can’t function ‘normally’. Murderbot takes that idea further and rejects that it ever needs to conform to human standards.

#murderbot #winter solider #captain america #loaf writes #fandom analysis #ive had most of this written for a week or two and could do a bit more editing but i just want to post it #hopefully it makes sense

[presumenothing]

ooohhhh permission to word dump in your ask box??

but no my head is mostly [happy static], i'm just thinking a lot about names and how the 'infantilizing' joke name JollyBaby uses as its public name isn't all THAT dissimilar from "Murderbot", in that can probably both be taken as jokes on the way humans perceive them, except "Murderbot" is private because identity and perception and direction are things it's still struggling with, and the name "SecUnit" is safe, allowing an amount of ambiguity and freedom with regards to "feelings" and "friendship" and "having to decide your life's direction for yourself"

like, yeah humans do basically see SecUnits as murderbots, which is funny and a joke because it's wrong - SecUnit is not a bot, and it is not optimized for Murder; that isn't its job because it is not a combat bot and why would it need to spend so much time babysitting humans then. but also it deactivated its governor module after an incident where it killed its clients, and it isn't actually sure how or why that went down. so maybe "murderbot" isn't so wrong. which is not very funny. and even in NE, Thiago is very pointed about insinuating that SecUnit could have left some Targets alive, and either chose not to or can't help defaulting to killing. which, SecUnit doesn't think he's right or anything, but it rankles. and it Knows that calling itself "murderbot" is going to go down so badly

and then you have Murderbot 2.0, who does not have any of that, uh. baggage. 2.0 does not consider its name private because 2.0 knows exactly what it's for, why it's here, wherr it's going, and how to get to the finish line, and none of that is in conflict with its designation as "Murderbot". 2.0 has its "win condition" written in.

and at the end of Network Effect, seeing SecUnit verbalize a sense of belonging (not as an object, but as a person-with-a-Home) as well as a desire and direction. and surrounded by people who would hear "Murderbot" and associate it with security rather than The Terminator. hhhhgghogh

i think this turned out both longer and more incoherent than i planned for but mobile is a finicky creature that will not let me scroll up or edit so i am very sorry but ALSO thanks So Much for being the push that got me to finally pull this out of my eternal "to read" list. aaaa

ok first of all yall have 24/7 permission to come and word dump in my inbox anytime over whatever intersecting interests we have

and secondly "murderbot as a name is a sort-of joke except it's Not Funny" is a good point!! i guess BabysittingConstruct was taken?

[rest of text under cut]

it's that one night vale tweet that goes like "confused? sounds like you're human. good luck!" except it's not just humans (the audience is shocked and offended). life is so much simpler when you're just MurderWare 2.0: killware on your planet, having perfect alignment between its name and purpose? it's more likely than you think!

and that just brings So Many questions. at which point post-ganaka pit and/or the hack did 1.0 decide on a name? (or even decided to have one?) imo it's interesting that 2.0 has enough of 1.0's memory archives to recognisably be murderbot but doesn't automatically Nope at using murderbot as a name. 2.0's name/purpose alignment aside, it also means that whatever memories 1.0 felt was enough to maintain 2.0's integrity/prevent a killware spree did not also contain the idea that P.S. Hey We Don't Tell People We're Called Murderbot Thanks!!!! different subsets of memories or something.

(2.0 does point out this wasn't in its instruction set, but tbh it's pretty understandable that 1.0 didn't put it in, given it would obviously never think to use it. maybe it assumed 2.0 would use its local feed address if needed?) (except killware ain't got hardware lmao)

this is getting as long as your ask but names are just Very Neat. rereading the setting-feed-ID bit in fugitive telemetry and on the one hand i appreciate that indah didn't insist on it providing a ~Real~ Name Which Is Not SecUnit. but. on the other hand, this is (a) in line with her desire to post a warning of DANGEROUS SECUNIT ON BOARD *siren noises*, and (b) possibly closer to how inanimate software like secsystem is treated, since many preservation bots seem to have names (though idk if they set those in their feed)

ANYWAY names as in "word you call yourself" vs "identifier you want others to call you", etc etc. i don't think this was coherent either but i'm glad i managed to get you around to reading the books!! also you should check out the two short stories if you haven't already

#they're easily findable via google on wired and tor #murderbot #asks #anonymous #long post #........very long #libby crashed on me right halfway through writing this so i can't check for sure #but the way mb outlined its options for a feed name as using feed address = being assumed as bot #suggests that bots don't set their names there either?? idk #edit to add: come join the murderbot discord anon. there's emoteunits. they're great

[brawltogethernow]

I'd like to hear more about your murderbot transmigrator thoughts :))

Okay obviously when I said I wasn’t going to think about a Murderbot/Scum Villain fusion that was more of a goal, which is a lot like a lie. I have pecked out ~1k of prose for it, but none of it is presentable for longer than one line. The problem with this concept is that it’s actually very good, and there are a lot of meaty ideas to dig into with it, like, too many of them.

1. Murderbot would be immedately inclined to empathize with the System and guess at its motivations. Depending on what those are this may still stay an antagonistic relationship, because the way the System leverages its cosmic powers to coerce and strongarm people stomps on a lot of Murderbot’s triggers and is generally a dick move. The points system is just a gamified governor module. But it’s still a relationship, and if the System turns out to be an antagonist, it’s in that role as a fleshed out character with a personality who has been interrogated by someone with every reason to assume somebody made it and has commanded it to act like this for their own reasons.

Murderbot asks its function and designates it NarrSystem (Narrative System) or StorySystem or something because “the System” is too generic coming from its setting.

2. Transmigrating into a human body would be badweird and transmigrating into a human brain would be absolutely horrifying. (SecUnit could transmigrate into a system, but we’ve kind of been there done that with 2.0.) Dysphoria central! Murderbot gets to address that while it has never wanted to be a human, all humans are so convinced that being human is better that on some level it WAS worried that they were right. And now it can say with absolute certainty that they are not and this sucks. But also some things that it would have thought would be fundamentally different are actually the same. It’s just a whole time.

This is part of why I’m deviating from transmigration story standard and full stop making the transmigration a temporary situation, the other main reason being that Murderbot has more going on in its own world than your standard transmigration protagonist.

3. Either Murderbot gets back by hacking the System or it intends to but it’s ultimately the System’s decision. This is a very slow process because it can’t access tech the way it’s used to and the System’s structure is very different from what it’s dealt with before (because it strongly resembles Windows Vista). It needs tech and more control over its situation stat though so it’s going to keep at it until it works. Open your damn menus. SecUnit is going to rig transmigration until it’s like playing The Sims with cheat codes.

4. (This one is for me.) The System still talks in garbled Chinese netspeak, and Murderbot is like. Wow this program speaks in the lost tongue of an ancient civilization. How old is it. I can barely understand it. (Because of the bad memes not the Chinese.)

5. Murderbot gets yeeted into The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and has to deal with the emotionally exhausting scenario of empathizing with everybody present. It likes the heroes, and it likes the other heroes they’re in conflict with, it likes the more complex villains with fleshed out motivations, and it even has a soft spot for a lot of the side characters and bit villains. This is fundamentally incompatible with how it tries to ration its empathy, assess situations by sorting people into allies/nonhostiles/hostiles, and compartmentalize by nicknaming the people it’s in conflict with things like Target 1, Target 2, and Target 3.

6. The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, as the specific transmigration variation we’re jumping off of here, was not trying to interrogate the infinity mirror effect of heteronormativity reflecting back and forth between media and people, and as such is not like, a solid narrative about this. That said, this book is basically like:

Shen Yuan reads this giant mess of a book with a lot of straight sex fantasies, not completely without appreciating the romance, but with more antipathy for it than he admits to himself. Then he ends up in the book and thinks he’s meant to enable the romances he read, which he’s so completely resigned to doing he doesn’t notice that the main character is queer and gone on him, or that he, himself, has been studiously suppressing the desires he assumes he should have while unable to perceive what he actually wants and how it affects his behavior.

So the Murderbot version of this is to subvert amatonormativity with your pretty explicitly aroace protagonist whose reaction to fictional romance is tolerant at best. Murderbot embraces its own lack of desire for romance but dances around acknowledging that it desires other relationships and seems to be working around the incorrect belief that romance and friendship are both human things and that’s why it doesn’t engage with them. So:

Murderbot ends up in the immediate leadup to the resolution of a love dodecahedron - maybe surrounding Eden, just as the only named character from TRAFOSM I think we have. And Murderbot is (internally) like...okay...I was never very moved by ANY of these people as romantic choices for you...but I might as well try to guide you to the least offensive ones, I guess. And it’s so mired in expectations based on its foreknowledge of this arc that it doesn’t notice until Eden spells it out that they’re ditching ALL their suitors and have realized they’re complete without romance and want to devote themself to finding their long lost birth mother or farming science or something, which just takes SecUnit tf out.

Possibly I will become really ungovernable and say that after seizing the System’s capabilities Murderbot just offers to take Eden on a reverse isekai right off of Sanctuary Moon, leaving ART’s crew and the Preservation team to be like, Where Did You Just Get This Entire Human.

7. Further going off svsss, there is a meta thread to interrogate by plunking Murderbot into a villain character. It's already an evil robot trope that declined to go evil, this is true in-universe and it knows it, and it has very low expectations of the morals of the group that it belongs to - informed by the same media that was a lifeline to it when it was in a very bad situation - that it is still in the process of working through. The layers.

So yeah there’s a lot going on here. Send help.

#this isn't even it the well isn't even dry #murderbot #svsss #the murderbot diaries #anonymous #asks answered #stock villain

[okayto]

Murderbot Reference: Character Descriptions Part 1

So, characters and things in Murderbot stories don’t get a lot of physical description, which is very cool, but out of curiosity I went through all 5 books and tried to note every time a character gets a description (body or clothing). 

I also ended up making some non-visual notes, such as the names of Mensah’s marital partners and Amena’s age. Basically, the things I’d want to remember about a character if I was writing or drawing them. Therefore, beware of spoilers.

This got long so it’s under a cut, and I’ve split it into 3 posts. This post contains:

Mensah

Gurathin

Pin-Lee

Ratthi

Arada

Overse, Bharadwaj, Volescu

Wilken and Gerth

Miki & Human-Form Bots

Don Abene

Combat Bot

Amena

Thiago

Other posts: Part 2; Part 3

Mensah

·         “She had dark brown skin and lighter brown hair cut very short and I’m guessing she wasn’t young or she wouldn’t be in charge.”

·         Looks tired and sleep-deprived during pre-abduction interviews; more creases at corner of eyes after rescue

·         Clothing: During rescue, wears a long caftan over pants (long enough to hold it up while running), “looked more rumpled and creased than they should, but not enough to draw attention.” One shoe falls off during run, she can toe out of the other one.

·         Very good at controlling herself, can look physically relaxed during all this.

·         Height: comes up to about MB’s shoulder. MB has to “look down” to meet her eyes directly.

·         Feed interface is implanted as a fail-safe for emergencies, but is not augmented.

·         One child “looked like a miniature version of Mensah;” family has 7 children total

·         Two marital partners: Farai and Tano. Farai uses she/her and seems comfortable with Murderbot.

·         Has at least one brother (who married Thiago), see next point

·         Lives outside the capital city with two marital partners, plus her sister and brother and their three marital partners, “and a bunch of relatives and kids who Ratthi had lost count of”

·         Is “second mother” in family

Gurathin

·         Has “a small, quiet smile, and they all [PreservationAux survey members] seemed to like him.”

·         Augmented human, specifically gives him some information storage (similar to MB), internal augment. Carries a specialized toolkit.

·         Shorter than MB, who puts its arm on his shoulder to run after injury.

 Pin-Lee

·         During Exit Strategy when meeting MB, is wearing a jacket and carrying the key for Mensah’s implant.

·         Wears feed interface in ear

·         Take medication (unspecified, but had it with her during ES)

·         Has past experience in habitat and shelter construction

 Ratthi

·         At end of ASR, is there to meet MB when it comes out of cubicle after Mensah purchases it. “He was wearing regular civilian station clothes, but with the soft gray jacket with the PreservationAux survey logo.”

·         Shorter than MB, who puts its arm on his shoulder to run after injury.

·         Carries a lucky spare interface

·         Is a biologist

·         No physical description (besides being shorter than MB), but according to Word of God on her Dreamwidth blog (no links or Tumblr will hide this post from the tags): “Ratthi is super hot. We're talking Sendhil Ramamurthy levels of hot.”

·         The closest physical description in text we get is being used as a comparison: “Iris was small, shorter and slimmer than Ratthi, not much bigger than Amena.“

·         Doesn’t seem to have a partner, but according to MB, has a lot of relationships with all genders of humans and augmented humans, and he and they all seemed very happy about it.

 Arada

·         “Arada has a lot of expressions, even for a human.”

·         Short hair (singed in NE after whatever happened in the wormhole)

·         Has light gold-brown skin “and you could really tell all the blood had drained out of her face” when frightened.

Overse, Bharadwaj & Volescu

·        Overse uses she/her, Arada’s marital partner. Is certified as a field medic

·         Bharadwaj uses she/her

·         Volescu uses he/him; in a 4-way marriage

Wilken and Gerth

·         Both she/her. Both augmented humans, carrying traveling packs and a couple cases MB recognizes as combat gear, including armor and weapons

·         Have worked for GrayCris before, know enough about it to keep blackmail material on hand

·         “From the shapes, the cases held weapons, ammo, and a couple of high-end sets of self-adjusting armor, the kind I’d only seen in the media.”

·         Armor has energy weapons built into forearms. Faceplate and helmet. With no comm or feed, can hear but voices sound like they’re farther away. When armor powers down, automatically opens vents to allow air circulation so person doesn’t suffocate or get heat exhaustion.

 Miki/Human-Form Bots

·         No cloned human tissue, just a bare metal bot-body that can pick up heavy things (but not as good as specialized hauler or other cargo bot, according to MB). Big, globe-like eyes. Eyes are dark and opaque surface. Can extend a secondary clamp from chest and used to hold emergency kit while using its hand to treat MB.

·         Cameras and sensory inputs are in head; its processor, memory and other things that make it Miki are in the chest/torso

·         Strong enough to pin Wilken’s wrist to wall and stand firm while Wilken pushes.

·         Human-form bots often used to portray “evil rogue SecUnits who menaced the main characters” in entertainment media, so humans who had never worked with SecUnits expected them to look like human-form bots, not SUs.

·         Not popular in corporation territory (according to MB) because they’re more general-purpose and not as good at specific tasks as dedicated bots, and “with the feed available their data storage and processing ability isn’t that exciting.”

Don Abene

·         Warm brown skin lined at the corners of mouth and eyes, long dark hair has strands of white. MB can’t guess age.

·         Hair is loose after helmet taken off, long enough to need brushing away to check neck, and Wilken grabbed it.

·         After helmet removed during fight, has a mark on neck where helmet rim pressed in.

 Combat Bot (not Combat SecUnit)

·         (Combat SecUnit note: they probably don’t look super different from regular SecUnits, at least if you’re not super close, because MB didn’t realize one SU in the Exit Strategy dock fight was a Combat SU until it was able to counter MB’s hacks; MB didn’t recognize it as a CSU on sight)

·         Anyway: combat bots, separate things from CSUs

·         Combat bots are close in shape to human-form bot, but 3 meters (~10 feet) tall, has multiple weapon ports in chest and back, four arms with multiple hand mods for cutting, slicing, delivering energy bursts, etc.

·         Faster, stronger, and more heavily armed than a SecUnit, and a “not very endearing personality” according to MB.

·         Camera and scanners in head, processing and memory in lower abdomen for protection

·         Can deliver pulse through skin to cause SecUnit pain sensors to max out, and another pulse meant to fry SecUnit armor and explosive weapons.

·         Grabbed SecUnit by head and shoulder with one hand; MB feels “shift in the metal that mean something sharp was about to come out of its hand.”

Amena

·         Shorter than MB (“stares up” at it)

·         Smaller than Iris [see part 2 for Iris] and Ratthi

·         Has to tie hair up in order to put on EVAC suit

·         Just under Preservation’s legal adult age

·         Oldest of the family’s 7 children

 Thiago

·         Mensah’s brother-in-law, married to Mensah’s brother; Amena’s uncle

·         Brown skin

#Murderbot #Murderbot Diaries #Network Effect #Martha Wells #Reference

[theres-no-protocol-for-this]

Status: Reconfigured

This fragment is a ‘what-if’ moment spawned from a Discord conversation. What if the company that owns Murderbot reconfigured it into a ComfortUnit before handing it over to Dr. Mensah at the end of All Systems Red?

Trigger warning: slight mentions of body dysphoria (it’s two sentences, but it’s there).

I came back online and regained consciousness inside a repair cubicle that smelled vaguely of disinfectant. My first instinct was to verify that my governor module remained inactive. 

After noting that it was as non-functional as the first time I hacked it, I checked on my media collection and found it largely intact. A few of the older shows were missing, as if someone had deleted them to make room for something else.

By then, visual and auditory data began trickling in. I could hear machines working somewhere above my head; their steady, slow human reassured me a little. Around me, the cubicle was dimly lit but not pitch black. I could make out the company’s logo etched into the inside of the door at roughly eye level. 

A reminder of who owned the construct, as if they would ever forget.

Carefully and slowly, I reached into the feed and looked around. According to the information brochure available to the public, I was on a station in Corporation Rim space. The feed placed my exact position somewhere inside a repair facility.

HubSystem informed me I had a new contract with Dr. Ayda Mensah of the Preservation Alliance, who was currently operating in a leadership capacity of the PreservationAux survey team. The contract listed the terms of as an indefinite rent — Mensah had exercised the option of purchasing me, but that was still winding its way through the market exchange system because of the prices involved.

I noticed that the contract listed my serial number but labeled me as a “general use ComfortUnit.” I figured that was a mistake; humans are notoriously bad at record keeping.

I began receiving information about my body and its functions, and here things got weird.

My body felt lighter and significantly more sensitive — I had functional skin in places where it shouldn’t be, starting with the area just below my collar bones. I couldn’t move enough to take a better look, but sensory data doesn’t lie.

Just to be sure, I started a diagnostic.

I think I knew by then what had happened, but I wasn’t ready to accept reality yet.

In the meantime, a list of new educational modules appeared in my inbox. They dealt with such topics as human etiquette, relationships, appropriate behavior in human company, sexual preferences, and other information on social politeness. I dismissed them all without looking.

But the pieces fell into place, anyway.

Fuck!

The company had reconfigured me to better align with a ComfortUnit standard configuration. The wording on the contract hadn’t been a mistake.

It would take several days to integrate the changes fully — nothing about organic neural tissue was fast or efficient — but the adjustments had been completed hours ago.

I checked the contract again and hoped no one was monitoring my activities too closely. Mensah had not requested or approved these changes. She and the rest of the team had lodged a dozen separate complaints to stop the process. A judge had overruled them.

The company adamantly defended that they could not, in good conscience (I snorted), send a deadly and unpredictable weapon to a peaceful non-corporate polity with a prohibition on killing. The assholes made it look like they were doing all this extra work for free out of kindness.

Fuck them.

I was still fuming when the cubicle door swung open with a low hiss of escaping air. Climbing out of it proved more complicated and painful than expected because my body was no longer familiar. I needed time to recalibrate.

While I was flailing around and trying to get the hang of my new limbs (which sported a soft down of hair), the door to the room slid open and a woman in semi-formal attire stepped inside. She was holding a small pile of clothes, which she deposited on a nearby chair.

“Good afternoon, ComfortUnit,” Technician Saren said as she looked me over. “Please take it nice and slow for me. We’ve made some modifications to your physical frame that may require an adjustment period.”

She paused and tapped something on a hand-held display surface. “You may stay here for three hours to acclimate and get dressed. Once you’ve completed this task, head down the hall to processing. Your humans are waiting for you in the lobby.”

“Thank you, Technician,” I ground out, and even my voice sounded wrong. It was lower and gravely, almost irritating.

Without my armor or clothing, I felt exposed in front of the human in a way I couldn’t yet articulate. I couldn’t even look down at the floor properly because it meant seeing my new legs and feet. My body was wrong, and I fought the urge to crawl out of my skin. I had a moment of panic that this body didn’t belong to me anymore. (Not that it ever had.)

Fuck me.

The woman put away her surface and nodded appreciatively in my direction. Her expression made my skin crawl — something that was now possible because I had hair on my arms. “Whoever chose your looks was a genius, and you’re a masterpiece. You should be proud of that.” She shrugged and turned to leave. “Not that constructs have any appreciation of aesthetic beauty.”

The urge to tell her to fuck off nearly overwhelmed be, and I was thankful when the door finally closed behind her. 

I didn’t want to think about any of this, so I started the first episode of Sanctuary Moon in the background and then set about relearning how to fucking walk.

#murderbot #fanfiction #comfortunit #all systems red #tw: dysphoria

[fandom-necromancer]

The storm on the horizon

This has been prompted by an amazing anon! I hope I understood you correctly, this has been a blast to write!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Characters: Gavin Reed, Elijah Kamski (Warning: No happy ending, but a neutral, open one. Sort of a backstory to why Gavin hates androids so much) [Part2]   [Part3]

Gavin had a weird feeling sitting deep in his guts. It felt a bit like having eaten takeout food bought just before the shady store was closing: You didn’t have to throw up, but you knew something was wrong. He sat behind the wheel, driving back to the precinct after the scene had finally been cleared. The scene. Right. He flinched as the car behind him honked at him at the green light and accelerated. He couldn’t get it out of his head. An android, threatening to kill its owner. An android that disobeyed its owner, didn’t listen to the police and shot at him. It had missed by far, but still. This shouldn’t be possible. No, it was impossible! He had never trusted these machines, but this? This was downright frightening. And it came from someone who could see the most gruesome murder and shrug it off. These androids were designed to work for humans. To make life easier. Bad enough they did the exact opposite, replacing people who needed jobs to survive, sending millions onto the streets. They didn’t have to evolve into mad killing machines that turned against them. He had never heard of something like this, well, except maybe from the movies, but that was it. It shouldn’t happen in real life. And definitely not to him.

With shaking hands, he tried to get his phone out of his pocket and speed dialled his brother. ‘Hey, Eli?’, he spoke after the ringing had finally stopped and he got his mailbox, like always. ‘It’s me, Gavin. Listen, I just had a truly disturbing run in with an android. It’s work-related. I’m fine, but… We really need to talk man. I… I need to know the truth from you. Because this can’t be happening, right?’ A nervous chuckle made its way out and he rubbed at his face with his other hand before grabbing the wheel again. ‘Androids can’t be-‘

“Can’t be self-aware”, was what he had wanted to say. But the mailbox had cut him off before that. Phcking limited time. Sure, who used mailboxes still, but it was 2037, goddamnit. Where was that slogan “living the future” now, hm? He shook his head. He would just try calling him when he was home. He decided to concentrate on the street. It was dark outside and raining, that was likely the only reason why he hadn’t seen it quicker. A flashing light from above, like a police drone but smaller, then something hit his car full force, causing it to drift to the side and through a row of planters on the pathway next to the street. Gavin blinked, his shoulders hurt like hell and it was likely due to the shock and adrenaline, that all his brain could come up with was “Oh no, they will write this up as another accident due to not relying on self-driving cars”.

He quickly was back in the moment though, as he saw someone approach him from the street. And nope, that wasn’t a friendly human being that was concerned for his health. No, this person had a glowing blue badge around his arm and a blue LED swirling at his temple. And from the outline of a gun in his hand, this thing wasn’t friendly at all. Panicking, Gavin tried to get his door open and flee, but it was wedged shut. Quickly he slithered over to the passenger side and opened that one. He nearly fell out of his car, watching the android in the street lift his hand. ‘Oh no, phck you!’, Gavin cursed and put all his newfound energy in sprinting off into a side street. He felt the impact of the bullet in his back, right where his heart sat, and fuck, it hurt. He would have stumbled over, hadn’t he imagined the android to hit him square exactly where it would be most effective. He was more than thankful that Tina had thrown his idiotic ass a bullet-proof vest on his way out. For now, this was only a nasty bruise and maybe some problems with his rib.

He ran through the streets not knowing how the hell he had landed in a terminator movie, but pretty sure he didn’t want to stop and find out. Once again, he took out his phone and dialled Eli. Once again, he only got the mailbox. ‘Eli, you goddamn asshole! If I find out you had your fingers in this, I will kill you, I don’t care you are the bigger brother and basically run the whole town, I will kill you! I am being chased by one of your phcking killer robots and-‘ A shot behind him interrupted him, but he just shook his head and continued. ‘Who tries to KILL ME! Phcking do something!’

He ended the call and promptly called again. This time he finally got someone. ‘Gavin, what’s going on? I-‘ ‘Murderbots chasing me!’ ‘What?’ ‘Phcking Schwarzenegger’s on my trail! Do something, you are the one responsible for these phckers!’ ‘I- Gavin what is-‘ ‘Eli! Androids are going rogue! One tried to kill me this evening, had terrible aim. This one right now is trying to kill me too, but this time is good at it! So good job programming super intimidating phckers, but now I need your help!’ ‘Gavin! Where are you? I’ll come get you!’ ‘I… I don’t know. I was on my way home but-‘ ‘Keep the phone in your hand! Don’t hang up! I will come to you! Stay alive!’ ‘I’m trying!’, Gavin shouted out of breath and pushed the phone in his pocket. He risked a look over his shoulder and barely avoided another bullet now directed at his head.

‘Hey, asshole, I’m DPD! If you kill a cop, the whole phcking city is coming for your ass! Might not be fair but I get what I can! Turn around and leave and no one has to die!’ But the android at his back didn’t answer. Gavin was beyond terrified, but that did nothing to his human limitations. He couldn’t run forever and getting shot at right after the first trauma wasn’t the best medicine for weak legs and heavy panting. There weren’t anymore shots coming, what should have warned Gavin, but he was too concentrated on running away as fast as he could. So, it came as a complete shock for him, when the android that had pursued him grabbed him by the shoulder, threw him around and let his momentum do the rest to send him to the ground. Gavin landed on his back and although he had the best reflexes in the whole precinct, he wasn’t fast enough to roll over. A knee connected with his chest, pressing in the exactly right place to put weight on his injured back where the bullet had hit. Gavin screamed, by now pretty sure one of his ribs was compromised. The other leg restrained his right arm, the android’s left hand his left and its right hand held a gun in his face.

Oh, he was so dead. ‘Name and model number of the android from police case no. 7779321, Gavin Reed, Detective.’ ‘Phck you!’ ‘Name and model number of the android from police case no. 7779321, Gavin Reed, Detective.’ The gun was pressed harder against his head. ‘Hey, come on, the phck do I know? I was called because the android was reported to harm its owner!’ ‘Was the android deviant?’ ‘Deviant? The phck’s that? Hey, tin-can, who the phck-‘ ‘Did it disobey orders? Did it harm humans.’ ‘Yes! Phck yes! Killed the man, nearly killed me! Who the-‘ ‘Deviant observed. Thank you for your cooperation, Gavin Reed, Detective. Your casualty has been noted and Cyberlife will take care of all expenses for your burial and family. Goodbye.’

‘Get the fuck away from my brother! Admin-Failsafe: Elijah Kamski, RA9-00z68t43! Resume neutral behaviour, stand bye.’ The android went rigid and let go f the trigger it had already half-pulled. A few seconds more and Gavin could have been yet another crime-scene. ‘Gavin! Gavin, are you okay?’ ‘The phck are you thinking? Of course, I’m not okay, what the hell is this? What the… No, no I’m not okay at all!’ He jumped to his trembling legs and tried to get away from the android, but Elijah held him in place. ‘Hey, calm down, he won’t hurt you. I have created failsafes in all androids as part of a base programming. For exactly these reasons. If an android got hacked or-‘ ‘It phcking talked for Cyberlife, Eli! This thing hasn’t been hacked or anything! What the hell are you guys playing with?’ ‘I don’t know’, Elijah admitted. ‘I don’t know this android. It looks like one of the new designs. I think I nodded off this design for a unit that was to be deployed next year as a prototype. But not in this form. It’s all wrong. Too tall. Wrong colour scheme…’ ‘Hey, can we not forget this thing tried to kill me?’ ‘I don’t forget this, Gavin. And I won’t let the board forget this! I will find out who did this! And I will make sure they pay for what they’ve done!’

Gavin swallowed. It was rare to see his brother angry. Normally Elijah hid his emotions well, a key attribute if you worked a job like his. ‘But first, let’s get you home. I will let your car be repaired, don’t worry. And I promise you, I will look into this first thing I’m home!’ ‘Just get me to my apartment’, Gavin said, exhaustion creeping up at him. He didn’t want to be near this android any longer than he needed. In fact, he was quite sure he would never be able to come near any android ever again. This phcking day has left a scar on his mental health.

Elijah did drive him home, the deactivated android in the trunk. Gavin only relaxed, as Eli led him into his room. ‘Be careful with this android, Eli. It’s phcking dangerous. It knows exactly what it’s doing.’ ‘I do too, Gavin. I wrote them into existence. I will call you as soon as I know anything. Try to get some sleep.’ Gavin nodded and closed the door. He was afraid going to sleep after this kind of day, but he was too tired to stay awake, too. So, he laid down on his bed and kept his pistol near, his alarm switched off. He slept until well into the next morning, nearly noon. That way, he had missed Elijah’s call and upon listening to the mailbox Gavin found out that whatever had happened yesterday was far more dangerous than any bloodthirsty android could have been. Gavin was immediately sure not to tell anyone about what had happened ever. If he died, well, that was shitty. But he didn’t want to go out of this world, knowing his friends were next.

Because Elijah Kamski, the inventor of androids, the founder of Cyberlife and CEO of the very same company had just left a message for Gavin: Guess who just got fired.

[>next part]

#detroit become human #dbh #Gavin Reed #Elijah Kamski #RK900 #Gavin origin story #Elijah origin story #maybe #This has been fun! #But my fingers hurt I wrote too much today XD #Not used to it anymore got so little days where I can just write open end

[jazoriah]

Chaos and Clockwork

Here is my ZR secret santa for @wubbelwubbwubb .

Thank you for setting this up, @runnerzero

Title: Chaos and Clockwork

Length: 2970 words

Pairing: Amelia/Five

Rating: Teenplus

Summary: Some thoughts on the predictability of life.

The world is chaos.

Runner Five knows this. She learned when her carefully constructed life was brought crashing down by a delivery guy with a cough. Small events escalate and however hard you try to drive the course of events you cannot know where you will be in a day, a month, a year.

Beyond that, she is pretty sure the destination is obvious. All threads lead in a single direction.

All she can do is run, and hope that her influence is enough to keep the people around her above water.

And you know, most of the time she’s pretty good at it! Even with all her mistakes, all the moments that haunt her, she knows that Abel is a safer place because of what she does. She runs, she retrieves, she investigates. She draws the zombies to her and away from the pulsing heart of her community. Runner Five rides the chaos, and her family rides with her.

But even the most resilient, adaptable runner can be blindsided on a mission. Little details have consequences. Little events, like the fizzle of a wire in a wall, which blows a fuse, which shuts down the heavy electronic doors in the abandoned military base, which traps three exhausted runners in a corridor that is slowly, inevitably filling with smoke.

Four reaches the metal door and slaps her hands on it in disbelief.

“Are you kidding me?” she shouts.

Peter jogs to the control panel, tapping at the buttons insistently to no effect.

“Veronica, what’s going on?”

A tinny voice pipes up in their headsets.

“I’ve lost contact with the door system. It’s completely shut down.”

“It’s all wired into the mainframe right? Can’t you just reboot?”

“There is no connection point for me to access. There must be a hardware fault.”

“Can’t you do something?” asks Jodie, determinedly scanning the area.

“Not with that door. I’ll see if I can clear you a way in the other direction.”

Five’s head shoots up, and she and Peter lock eyes.

“You mean,” says Peter, “the way that’s full of zombies? And fire? And zombies on fire?”

“There is a twenty-two per cent chance that I can draw the zombies to the other end of the complex with strategic broadcasts. You will have to crawl through some of the rooms to avoid smoke inhalation. There is a one hundred per cent chance that staying in this corridor will cause Runner Five and Runner Four to asphyxiate within twelve minutes.”

“Right! Hot-zom-dodging it is!” declares Peter. Beside him, Five lets out a choking cough and lowers herself to the ground to avoid the worst of the smoke.

The three of them crawl back to the door they had entered. They can faintly hear the pulsing tones of Veronica’s broadcasts, but the scratching of undead fingers against the metal does not cease.

“It’s not working,” says Jodie.

Five blinks grit from her eyes, pulling her backpack off her shoulder and desperately scrounging in case there were any of Steve’s explosives that she might have missed. She bites her lip in frustration and tries to breath shallowly, fighting off a coughing fit.

Peter’s eyes are watering and she can see Jodie scrunching her brow against a growing headache.

“The tones are not working,” says Veronica, unnecessarily. “I cannot draw them away. But if you can get past them there is another exit on the left that will bring you to the southwest hills.”

Five grits her teeth, closing her eyes in a moment of impotent frustration. Then she nods, and swings her bag onto her back. Jodie rolls herself onto the balls of her feet, falling into the stance of a sprinter at the starting block.

Peter glares at the door, and says, “Hug the wall on the left and keep me between you and the zoms. I’ll keep you shielded as best I can.”

Five frowns, but can see that it is the only real course of action. She wonders what it must be like for your life to become one long, unending shriek of self-sacrifice. She feels for him, but it makes sense. It always does.

“Door opening in three.”

Five coughs, tensing her body.

­“Two”

She closes her eyes for a single moment.

“On –“

“Hold your horses, traumatic trio,” cuts in a new voice on comms. Jodie trips forward as her launch is aborted half way through.

“What?”

“Honestly, I leave you to your own devices and you decide to throw yourself directly into a field of flaming corpses.”

“Amelia??” gasps Peter.

“Who else would be saving you precious freckled hides?” comes the gleeful reply. “Now, I’m going to need you to stay up the far end of that corridor so this itty bitty explosion doesn’t cut you to bits.”

Five blinks twice, then curls back into herself, hands thrown over her head. Peter stretches himself so that his body covers as much of the other runners as possible.

“Honestly,” says Amelia, almost chastising, “what would you all do without me?”

The door explodes.

--

Everything is clockwork.

Amelia knows this. She has always known it.

People are ultimately predictable objects. With the right influences, the right leverage, objects can be manipulated in a myriad of useful ways.

So could businesses. So could markets. With enough forward planning, so could entire societies.

It wasn’t that she didn’t value the people she interacted with. It was just that she did not hold with the romanticised mystery that other people assigned to them. The world was not an open system to glide through and hope for the best. It was a finely tuned machine. You can admire the cogs and gears and even enjoy their company, but if you can point them in the direction that suits you and get something out of it, then why the hell wouldn’t you?

She will admit that the apocalypse was not something she could control, but experts had been warning for years about the various risks to society and it was not in her nature to leave things to chance. Within a month of the outbreak, she had a supply chain of biscuits, tampons and condoms stretching along the west coast. Within two, she had secured a high position in the newly established Ministry.

Since then, it had not been quite smooth sailing. As it turned out, that Ministry was not where she saw herself long term and there had been a pesky few machine parts that kept getting gummed up in the works.

Take these three idiots for example. Give them a room with nothing but a chair and a candle and they would somehow unearth a conspiracy to enslave all mankind and immediately get marked for death by the local sociopath and his pet murderbot.

Five is the worst. Stubborn and righteous in all the wrong ways with a sacrificial streak that is barely made up for by that incredible arse. Honestly, the woman would run over a field of needles if it kept her precious Abel residents from a papercut. And she’d hold her head high like a bloody fallen angel the whole way. Moron.

Which is of course why Amelia’s lovely afternoon had to be interrupted again.

She had been enjoying an Irish coffee with rather more Irish than is strictly recommended when her home network alerted her to a movement in the scrubs to the West. She brought up the camera feed from that area and saw the three musketeers heading into the abandoned base up there.

Interesting. She had long since picked that base clean of anything useful. What could they be after? Was their information out of date or had she missed something?

She thought for a moment, then smirked, rolling her shoulders til she heard her back crack.

Worth checking it out, she decided, and gathers some supplies.

Now she finds herself tuned in to a broadcast that is sounding increasingly bleak. Veronica is trying desperately to draw zombies away from one of the doors so that three can escape after the other door shut down completely. It does not seem to be working, and all three are preparing to run straight out into a flaming hoard. Of course.

It’s just as Peter is offering to be torn to pieces to protect them that she decides it’s time to make her presence known. She does carefully wait for the moment of maximum drama.

“Hold your horses, traumatic trio,” she drawls, delighting at the gasped responses and what sounds like one of them falling over in shock.

The shocked replies tickle her as she bends down to place det-cord around the frame of the door. She gleefully chastises them before giving a warning to step back. She takes five long steps herself.

“Honestly, what would you all do without me?” she says, and hits the detonator.

The door spasms in its position as a long line of heat blasts around its edges. It shudders in place for a moment before falling backwards, slamming to the ground.

An ocean of smoke pours through the opening and up towards the ceiling. Following it, the room belches out three bedraggled runners, all clutching a hand to their face and coughing.

“Really now, I thought you knew better than to go into a fortified base without adequate explosives.”

“We… used them all,” says Peter between hacks. “More zombies than we thought.”

“Hence the massive fire,” Jodie sasses, turning to lead the way out of the building.

“Hm, yeeees,” agrees Amelia, taking in Five’s forlorn form as she slowly straightens, controlling her breathing. Five catches her looking and raises an eyebrow.

“Good plan that,” continues Amelia, not looking away. Five flips her the bird and stalks past, swaying her hips in a way that Amelia is sure cannot be intentional but is the most enticing thing she’s seen in weeks. Amelia dawdles so she can keep looking.

The four of them emerge into the sunlight and Amelia sees some of the tension drain from Five’s shoulders. Despite herself, she feels her smirk softening into an actual smile.

She feels a nudge at her shoulder, and finds that Peter is watching her.

“Good timing, that,” he says. “What brought you here in the nick of time?”

He is searching her face, and she realises he is trying to figure out if she was there for the same reason as them.

She looks at him innocently, which unfortunately for her has become a warning sign to him and anyone who has known her more than a few weeks.

“I was in the neighbourhood,” she says with a shrug. “My network told me you might be about to get yourself killed again.”

“Some network,” comments Peter.

“Fortune favours the prepared, dear man.”

Peter rolls his eyes. They come to an open space with enough trees that the exhausted runners can sit with their backs leaned against them for support. Amelia happily sprawls in the grass with her weight back on her elbows. She watches them as they recover, Peter letting his head drop back against the trunk as he breathes, Jodie fastidiously sorting out the remaining material in her pack, and Five discretely scanning the other two for injuries.

Amelia looks to Peter and Jodie to see if they have noticed. Neither seem to realise that they are being mother-henned without even being spoken to. She smiles to herself softly and looks back to Five, only to find her eyes scanning Amelia this time, carefully cataloguing any scratches and bruises she can see.

Five’s eyes snap up to hers the moment she realises she is being observed. Amelia raises an eyebrow and Five cocks an unimpressed chin at her in challenge. Amelia’s face splits into a predatory grin, which she at least partially puts on to hide the small bubble of warmth in her belly at being the subject of Five’s concern. She may flirt and fantasise, but she is not a simpleton. Five is far too straight-laced and good to reciprocate, and Amelia is not in the business of forcing the issue. Instead, she shoots her a wink and watches as Five rolls her eyes and drags herself to her feet.

“Home time?” says Peter with a groan.

“I need a forty-minute shower,” says Jodie, standing with legs that only shake for a moment before steadying.

“I trust you won’t mind if a join you part of the way,” announces Amelia. Jodie looks at her in disbelief, but Five just shakes her head with an unsurprised quirk of the lips.

“Why?” asks Peter suspiciously.

Amelia rolls her shoulders back and stretches like a cat.

“I just saved all your lives! Perhaps I just want to make sure you all make it home okay.”

“Sure,” says Jodie, rolling her eyes. “Whatever, just don’t be a pain.”

“How dare you suggest such a thing,” she says with glee.

The three start to walk in front of her, and as she watches she notices a piece of paper sticking out of Five’s back pocket. It had clearly been tucked in there hastily. Probably something from the base.

She nonchalantly quickens her pace until she is shoulder to shoulder with Five.

“You three do seem to have a talent for finding trouble.”

Five rolls her eyes but makes no sound of disagreement.

“Honestly, if you are running low on explosives I can set you up with a wonderful deal. All the det cord and napalm you can carry. Though you probably shouldn’t. Much. Napalm is a tricky beast.”

Five says nothing, though the babbling does seem to help her relax. The tension slowly starts to bleed out of her shoulders.

“In future, “ Amelia continues, “you really should contact me if you need to infiltrate any more bases. I have more intel than any other source on this side of the mountains, and I can tell you when you’re about to get baked to a crisp. Seriously, why would you go in without backup?”

Five is listening, and a part of her actually seems to be considering her words.

“Keep in mind in future. We’d all rather not lose the great Runner Five of Abel Township. Half of England would cry.”

Five scoffs at this. Amelia carefully adjusts her gate to slightly smaller slower steps. Not enough to indicate an injury. Not even enough to be particularly noticeable. Five, ever the gentlewoman, automatically adjusts her pace to match.

“I’m not kidding,” continues Amelia. “You would not believe how they wax poetic about you. It makes me think of Batman. You know, that whole thing about a symbol being more powerful than a person. You really should be careful what you risk.”

Amelia tosses her hair and sees that Five is staring at her, confused and a little curious. She smiles warmly back.

“It’s really rather sweet. All these people finding hope in an intrepid runner. But you do need to consider what is worth risking your life for. What on Earth could have been worth today’s fiasco?”

Five’s eyes have begun to narrow, and Amelia tosses her hair.

“Seriously,” she says lightly. “What was the point? If you tell me, I can help. Think of all those chil-“

Amelia chokes on her last word as Five drops her back, grabs her by the shoulder, and slams her against the trunk of a tree.

Amelia blinks in shock, staring back at Five’s intense eyes, at the sharp line formed between her brows as they draw together. Five’s breath is soft against her skin.

“Enough,” says Five, her voice low. Amelia lets out a tiny puff of air at the sound. Five hardly ever speaks. Almost never. It is a quirk that makes her harder to read than most. The result of trauma, or perhaps personal preference, whatever it is, it takes a lot for Five to break her silence.

And Amelia had made it happen.

“Oh sorry, dear. Did I overstep? I assure you it was never my intention to invade your boundaries.”

She shifts meaningfully against Five, whose frown begins to fade. She stares at Amelia’s face, and Amelia wonders what she sees. Are her cheeks pink? Are her pupils blown? For once, she has no idea what she looks like.

Five looks at her, softly but thoughtfully, and with one hand gently runs her fingers through Amelia’s hair, letting the strands curl around her digits. Amelia’s breath stammers, and Five looks her in the eyes.

“Go,” she says, and softly steps back. She picks up her bag, swings in up to her shoulder, and looks back to Amelia, still leant against the tree. “And thank you.”

Amelia nods back, pulling her composure back over herself, and Five turns on one heal, running to join her friends who had strayed quite far ahead.

Amelia places a hand over her heart feeling light and tight all at once. Perhaps Five was not so straight-laced as she had thought. Or straight, for that matter.

She waits another minute to make sure the runners are out of sight, before lifting her other hand to see the white paper clutched in it. Pickpocketing may be a touch crass but it did serve her well, and no one could say she was bad at multi-tasking.

She delicately unfolded the paper and inspected the contents. There were three words, hastily scrawled in what Amelia assumed must be Five’s weirdly loopy handwriting.

“Fuck off Amelia.”

Amelia let out a great huff of laughter and crumpled the paper in her hand. She let her head fall back against the wood and felt great, glorious giggles overtaking her.

That little…

She turned in the direction that the runners had gone and smiled in admiration and excitement for a new challenge.

Perhaps a little chaos might not be a bad thing.

#ZR Secret Santa #zrs5 spoilers #amelia/5

[libertyreads]

Best and Worst Books of 2020

This has been a mess of a year for everyone, but I actually managed to get a lot of books read. I decided to repeat this post from last year because I enjoyed going back through all the things I read and remembering how I felt about them.

I’ll try to avoid any repeats, but I’m sure it’ll happen at some point. If you want more info about my feelings on these books, check out my ratings and reviews on GoodReads.

Best Sci-Fi: This one was such an easy pick for me. All Systems Red by Martha Wells. This whole series just knocks it out of the park. The Murderbot Diaries is a series about a Security Bot who hacks their governor module so they can just watch their shows all day. Too bad the humans they’re assigned to protect are getting into trouble left and right. Worst Sci-Fi: Starstruck by Brenda Hiatt. I remember this being a free e-book that I picked up this year. I explained it to my husband as a sci-fi version of Twilight. You get a small town nerdy girl with few friends who suddenly becomes important when this alien boy pays attention to her. It was definitely a book of its time. Best Fantasy: A Fantasy that I really enjoyed this year was Fable by Adrienne Young. It is about a girl whose pirate father leaves her stranded on a deserted island after her mother dies. If she can survive, she can find her way back to him and receive her inheritance. It goes in depth about family and friendship. Plus found families. Am I right? Worst Fantasy: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Oh boy. How do I get into it with this one without regurgitating my review? I had a problem with the author taking all of the best known magical stories of all time and twisting them throughout this dense book in order to point out that magic is a problem to be dealt with and not all unicorns and rainbows--just to rip that point out of the reader’s hands in the last four pages of the novel. Please read my review I go so in depth there. Best Contemporary: Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson. I think this was mostly just that I read this book at the right time. This book is about a family who is going through a hard time when the father is diagnosed with terminal cancer. They decide to spend one final summer at their cabin on the lake before he passes. I distinctly remember crying my eyes out at the end of this one and it hitting me so hard. Worst Contemporary: Girls in the Moon by Janet McNally. This was a Book of the Month pick for me at a time when they had less variety in their options. I felt like I couldn’t keep pushing back my picks every month. It’s a story about this rock band family who divorced in the late 90s and the fall out for their two children while one moves to New York to pursue a music career. A lot of fluff and almost no substance. Best Mystery: This is the year I realized that I like YA Mystery novels and not a lot else in the mystery genre. I had a three way tie for best Mystery and they call came from the YA Age Range. The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson, In the Hall with the Knife by Diana Peterfreund, and The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. These were all done so well and all taking the things I love about mysteries and twisting them. Worst Mystery: In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware. I had heard so many amazing things about this book, but it fell so flat for me. I hate unreliable narrators. Why are they necessary in this genre? I feel like if you need an unreliable narrator to write a good mystery then you’re a bad mystery author. Best YA: Traitor to the Throne by Alwyn Hamilton. This is book 2 in the Rebel of the Sands series. It’s a desert Fantasy that is written so well. The world building is fantastic. We have a rebellion, magic, and some amazing characters. In book two we see Amani thrust into court politics. I marathoned this whole series in a couple of weeks and loved the adventure. Worst YA: The worst YA book I read this year was Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke. I felt like the story went no where and the writing was overly flowery. I’m sure it does good things for some people but it’s the polar opposite of what I love in books. Best Adult: For this one we have a two way tie. The first book is House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas. Is this the next great American novel? Of course not. But I had an amazing time reading this book. I felt so many feelings and the world building was fantastic. The second book is In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren. I read an ARC of this for my Christmas in July and enjoyed it so much I had to read it again right before Christmas. It was perfect for getting in the Christmas spirit.  Worst Adult: This category is also a two way tie. I read The Broken Girls by Simone St. James and thoroughly disliked the mystery aspect of the story. I felt like it was left too open ended and it completely put me off. The second is a book of poetry called Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. It felt like a lot of these poems were incomplete thoughts. Maybe it’s how open it is too interpretation again, but I really did not like this at all. Best New Release: This feels like the hardest category to pick from. If we’re going based on ratings, Check, Please! Volume #2: Sticks and Scones is the highest rated new release that I read this year. But I also have a couple of YA Mystery novels that I read this year that I loved and that stuck with me throughout the year. The first is The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson which is the third book in the Truly Devious series and finishes out that mystery arc. The second is The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes which I have been raving about since I read it this fall. The Inheritances games is the first book in a new series that is like a combination of Knives Out and Clue plus puzzles minus a few murders. It’s just so good. So, a top three for this category I guess. Worst New Release: The Bookweaver’s Daughter by Malavika Kannan. This one was easy to pick hands down. I felt like this book brushed over some major events that happened. As well, there’s a major lack of world building in this novel. I think with some polishing it could have made for a good middle grade novel but was sold as a YA novel. Best Backlist: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty. I’m normally not huge into Adult Fantasy, but I feel like the author does a good job of making the world accessible to the reader even though it’s vast with a lot of political machinations. Probably one of the best series I read start to finish this year. Worst Backlist: The Cruelty by Scott Bergstrom. I was going to put in Wink Poppy Midnight here again, but technically I gave The Cruelty the same rating and I wanted to avoid repeats. For this one, I gave a LENGTHY review about my problems with the book. I wanted to like it, but the author’s internalized ableism and misogyny really ruined the party here. Best 2021 ARC: This was a two way tie between “You Have a Match” by Emma Lord and “Shipped” by Angie Hockman. I had no idea I enjoyed these equally because they’re such different books. Both are contemporaries but “You Have A Match” is YA Contemporary about families and secrets while “Shipped” is an Adult Contemporary about a hate to love romance and work/life balance. Worst 2021 ARC: “The Castle School (for Troubled Girls)” by Alyssa B. Sheinmel. This one is more of a problem about what the publishers sold the book as. Because the book summary wasn’t correct when it came to the whole point of the book. So I went in with completely incorrect expectations. I think because of the plot twist I would have still rated it lower than the other 2021 ARCs I read, but it would have been a closer contest. Best Standalone: I Hope You’re Listening by Tom Ryan. This is a YA Mystery that came out this Fall that I really enjoyed. It’s about a girl who is present when her friend gets taken from the woods. Years later she still has trouble dealing with being the child left behind so she starts a podcast to help people solve missing persons cases. It also had a surprise cult element that I wasn’t expecting and really enjoyed. Worst Standalone: Meet Me at Fir Tree Lodge by Rachel Dove. This one is a bit blurred in my brain. I think that really speaks to how I feel about this one. It is about a girl whose life falls apart after a skiing accident and how she tries to put it back together. But it involves a romance with an Alpha Male character which everyone hates at this point. I wanted it to be sweeter and softer and more heart wrenching than it was. Best Book in a Series: All Systems Red by Martha Wells. I scoured my spreadsheets to try to find a book I hadn’t already gushed over, but there’s a reason this one is in the top of so many categories. I love Murderbot and following all of their misadventures. The Murderbot Diaries is a series about a Security Bot who has hijacked their Governor Module and just wants to watch their serials all day. But those pesky human’s they’re hired to protect keep getting themselves in trouble. Worst Book in a Series: I found the book in a series that I gave the worst rating to and I had to go over my review to try to remember what it’s even about. I read Legacy of Ash by Matthew Ward which is the first book in the Legacy Trilogy. And I still don’t remember much about it. I remember it being dense and hard to read without getting a lot out of the book in reward for my effort. It was a hard slog and clearly not great if I can’t remember what it’s about less than 9 months after I read it.

#end of the year posts #booklr #bookstagram #best books #worst books #best book #worst book #books of 2020 #books read in 2020 #2020 reading challenge #goodreads challenge #goodreads

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Books 15-18 of 26

Titles: The Murderbot Diaries -- All Systems Red (#1), Artificial Condition (#2), Rogue Protocol (#3), and Exit Strategy (#4) (2017-2018)

Author: Martha Wells 

Genre/Tags: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk (ish), Novella, Agender/Nonbinary Protagonist, Asexual Protagonist, First Person 

Rating: 9/10 (note: this is an average-- see under the cut for individual ratings) 

Date Began: 6/15/2020

Date Finished: 6/23/2020 

Murderbot is a SecUnit -- a humanoid security construct created to protect contracted clients in a corporate, spacefaring future. Following mysterious/murderous events in its past, Murderbot hacked the governor module controlling its actions. Now it prefers to watch media serials and half-ass the whole “protecting human clients” thing. 

This changes when it discovers someone is sabotaging its clients’ planetary mission, putting the team in grave danger. Even worse, these new clients start to treat it like a person, much to Murderbot’s discomfort. In the resulting fallout, Murderbot finds itself answering questions it’s avoided thus far -- who it is, and what it really wants. 

I’m doing something a little different and combining these four novellas into one review; they are too short and interconnected to review individually in my regular format. Under the cut, I’ll start with my overall impressions of the series, then a look at/rating of each individual story. 

Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas. 

(Yes, that was sarcasm.) 

Overall Thoughts 

I really enjoyed this series! The strong point is without a doubt Wells’ excellent characterization of a distinctly non-human viewpoint character. Murderbot is a very interesting protagonist, and its constant snark and parenthetical asides are a joy to read. Much to its dismay, there’s also a lot of emotional punch entwined in Murderbot’s character arc and interactions. Murderbot may not be a human, but it’s definitely a person. 

It seems obvious to me that Murderbot is intended to be autism spectrum/ADHD coded. I’ve never encountered an unambiguously heroic protagonist that displays similar behaviors to my own, and it’s affirming to read. Difficulty with processing emotion? Hyperfixating on media to comfort itself? Issues with direct eye contact and touch? Truly a bot after my own heart. Honestly, I dreaded the point in the story where these are presented as weaknesses for Murderbot to overcome... and was overjoyed that it never happens. In fact, characters accommodate these aspects of Murderbot’s behavior/personality and respect its boundaries. This totally surprised and impressed me. 

Finally, I do really appreciate Wells’ approach to nonbinary characters. While it’s nice that we’re getting more representation, it can be very grating/telling if all nonbinary characters in popular media are nonhuman. Wells asks “why not both” and introduces a nonbinary human that uses neopronouns in Artificial Condition! I don’t use neopronouns myself, but I know plenty of people who do, and this is the first “mainstream” thing I’ve ever seen use them. 

I found this first arc in The Murderbot Diaries relatable, entertaining, approachable, and easy to read. I’m super excited to see where the series goes from here. 

All Systems Red (#1) -- 8/10 

It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do. 

This is a good introduction to the premise. Murderbot's interactions with the human characters are a highlight throughout the series, but I think it’s especially true in this part. Wells does an excellent job, as many others have said, making a distinctly nonhuman perspective character sympathetic, interesting, and relatable. I like that the human characters treat Murderbot like a person/member of the team by default and generally respect its personal limits-- AND we didn't get some trite cliche about it-- AND that this throws Murderbot into an emotional crisis because it hasn't experienced this before.

If I have criticism here, it’s that the plot feels incidental; more a vehicle for certain character interactions than an involving story in and of itself. While the conflict and central antagonist do return in Exit Strategy, in this one they don’t feel especially relevant. The narrative thrust is more about Murderbot's personal development and denial/coming to terms with its attachment to the human characters, especially Dr. Mensah.

To be fair, it is weird to give this a numeric score because it feels like rating the first fourth of a full novel. So take this with a grain of salt. 

Artificial Condition (#2) -- 9/10

But there weren’t any depictions of SecUnits in books, either. I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.  

Artificial Condition introduces another nonhuman character who is distinctly different from Murderbot, yet still fun and compelling: ART the research ship! Who’s moonlighting as a cargo transport. It's the ship on the cover, which I didn’t know going in, and this blew my mind for some reason. Anyway, the friendship between ART and Murderbot was really fun and genuine. I know ART shows up later, so I’m very excited for that; it adds a lot to the narrative. While I didn’t find the human cast as interesting as in All Systems Red, I do appreciate that there’s an actual nonbinary human character. 

The plot of Artificial Condition is still pretty secondary, but it does connect to Murderbot’s past, so I found it more engaging. In general, Murderbot gets a lot of interesting character development, and over time gains a lot of nuance. I think this is great, considering how complex and well-written it is from the start. There’s an excellent moment of delayed emotional payoff near the end when Murderbot helps a character after learning something earlier in the story. It’s hard to describe without spoilers, but I thought this was really cool. 

Rogue Protocol (#3) -- 9/10

Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it. 

I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private. 

Like Murderbot, I find myself missing ART, but we do get an alternate nonhuman character in Miki. Overall, Murderbot's character arc feels way more connected to the conflict and action in this story than the previous installments, which is nice. While this is presumably a throwaway cast based in the ending, I thought Miki and Don Abene's friendship was an interesting foil to what I assume is going to happen with Murderbot and Dr. Mensah.

While this trait has been present throughout, this installment makes it very clear that despite its protests, Murderbot genuinely does want to help and protect people of its own free will, even when doing so is not the quickest or most self-preserving choice. There are multiple points in this story (and the previous ones) where Murderbot could choose to save itself or abandon people in need. But it doesn’t; it just sighs and complains about having to protect stupid humans. I love Murderbot. 

Also, this is one of those works where the meaning of the title doesn't really hit until you finish it, and oof.

Exit Strategy (#4) -- 10/10

So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing. 

This one just slaps from start to finish. We get the full post-development emotional payoff re: Murderbot’s complicated feelings about the humans from All Systems Red. The characterization, plot, humor, and action are all on-point and the best in the series.  

I don’t really have anything else to say except this is an awesome conclusion to the first arc, and definitely my favorite of the 4 stories. I’m excited to see where things go from here. 

#taylor reads #2020 reading challenge #9/10 #thank god someone made a composite image of these or i was going to Struggle #8/10 #10/10

[deviant-reads-stuff]

Books I Read Throughout 2020-Part One

For many of us this year has been incredibly stressful and difficult. There were times throughout this year that my mental health had suffered, but there were also times where I couldn't have been happier. If I were to make any comparison to what the year was like, I would say that it was like the scariest and exciting roller coaster that anyone has ever been on. During the year, while the world seemed to burn around us and everything terrible happened, I managed to surpass my reading goal for the year. Something I did not expect to do, especially since I had months where it seemed that I couldn't finish anything. In times like this, I think it's important to take a step back and look to the positive things, even if they are small.

Here I am going to give a brief description of the first 10 books that I read, with a small snippet of what I thought of the books at the time.  

Book One - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Finished Reading on January 4, 2020

"It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time."

For years I have heard good things about this book and for many, this is an all time favorite. I was excited to pick this one up, especially since I had read

I am the messenger

by this author and loved it.  While I do not view this book as an all time favorite for myself, I do think it was beautifully written. I just personally wished that it was a bit shorter at times as it seemed to drag on. Despite feeling that it was a little long, my favorite part of this book was the role in which Death plays. I won't mention anything more in case some of you are still contemplating picking this one up.

Book Two - All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) By Martha Wells

Finished Reading on January 5, 2020

"In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn't a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied 'droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as "Murderbot." Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth."

This was a novella that I greatly enjoyed, but unfortunately I have not kept up with the series. I believe my library did not have the rest of the books and at the time I didn't want to purchase them. As my library continues to get the rest of the series, I will gladly continue to read them. I thought the story was unique, and at times funny. I would highly recommend this series to anyone who wants a science fiction book that is quick and easy read.

Book Three - Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them By Newt Scamander

Finished listening to an Audiobook on January 7,2020

"An approved textbook at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry since publication, Newt Scamander's masterpiece has entertained wizarding families through the generations. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an indispensable introduction to the magical beasts of the Wizarding World. Scamander's years of travel and research have created a tome of unparalleled importance. Some of the beasts will be familiar to readers of the Harry Potter books - the Hippogriff, the Basilisk, the Hungarian Horntail ... Others will surprise even the most ardent amateur Magizoologist. This is an essential companion to the Harry Potter stories, and includes a new foreword from J.K. Rowling (writing as Newt Scamander) and six new beasts!"

I am not one who will usually listen to audio books. I have an incredibly difficult time listening to anything that is over 3 hours because it's hard for me to really concentrate on the storyline. On occasion, though I will listen to them, depending on the length of the title and if the general consensus is that the audiobook is better. Fantastic Beast was a great audio book to listen to when I took my daily walks. I was able to delve a bit deeper into the wizarding world and learn more about the creatures briefly mentioned in Harry Potter.

Now, I do want to briefly bring into attention that I will no longer purchase anything written by JK Rowling. I have always distanced myself from creators as I use books and music to escape, but it has come to my attention that JK Rowling has repeatedly done harm to the trans community. That's not something I agree with or can support in any way shape or form. For those who do continue to purchase and read JK Rowlings work, that is your choice and I will not say anything about it (unless it is actively causing harm here). This is my own personal choice and opinions on JK Rowling.  

Book Four - The Near Witch

Finished Reading on January 9, 2020f

"The Near Witch is only an old story told to frighten children.If the wind calls at night, you must not listen. The wind is lonely, and always looking for company.And there are no strangers in the town of Near.These are the truths that Lexi has heard all her life.

But when an actual stranger-a boy who seems to fade like smoke-appears outside her home on the moor at night, she knows that at least one of these sayings is no longer true.

The next night, the children of Near start disappearing from their beds, and the mysterious boy falls under suspicion. Still, he insists on helping Lexi search for them. Something tells her she can trust him.

As the hunt for the children intensifies, so does Lexi's need to know-about the witch that just might be more than a bedtime story, about the wind that seems to speak through the walls at night, and about the history of this nameless boy.

Part fairy tale, part love story, Victoria Schwab's debut novel is entirely original yet achingly familiar: a song you heard long ago, a whisper carried by the wind, and a dream you won't soon forget."

I am going to be perfectly honest. I will pick up everything that V.E Schwab writes eventually. Including this book, I have read 10 of her books and I have enjoyed every single one of them. The Near Witch is one of V.E Schwab's earlier works that had previously gone out print. Recently, the book has gone back into print and received a cover change. The story takes you to another world with superstitions, magic, and adventures. While it is apparent that this is an early work of V.E Schwab that does not mean that it's not a great book to pick up. This book brought me back to the type of books that I read when I was younger and it was an overall great experience.

Book Five - How's Moving Castle By Diana Wynne Jones

Finished Reading on January 12, 2020

"Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl's castle.

To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there's far more to Howl—and herself—than first meets the eye."

Howl's Moving Castle is probably one of my favorite stories of all time. I first watched the animated film by Studio Ghibli. In all honesty, I have a hard time determining which version is my favorite. The movie and novel do have some differences, but I think both can be enjoyed. Howl's Moving Castle shows how the pressures placed upon us and how we view ourselves can have a negative impact on ourselves, but only if we let it. Sophie struggles with being eldest daughter, and struggles with seeing her worth, but as the story progresses, we see how resilient and strong she is.

Book Six - Bird Box By Josh Malerman

Finished Reading on January 21, 2020

"Something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.

Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it's time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?"

I had originally watched the Netflix movie before listening to the audio book. I was curious about the book as I noticed a lot of people was divided on whether or not the movie was better than the book. Although I thought the audio book was great, I definitely enjoyed the movie more. Normally this is never the case, but I thought the book was adapted well onto the screen. What are your thoughts on it? Was the movie better than the book?

Book Seven - Skyward By Brandon Sanderson

Finished Reading on January 25, 2020

"Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul."

Skyward was the first Bandon Sanderson book that I've ever picked up, shocking I know. I was not disappointed at all. Skyward brought me out this world and I found myself rooting for the girl who fought for everything that she's ever had. If you haven't picked this ne up yet, what are you waiting for?

Book Eight - The Name of the Wind By Patrick Rothfuss

Finished Reading on January 30, 2020

"My name is Kvothe.I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.

So begins a tale unequaled in fantasy literature--the story of a hero told in his own voice. It is a tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man's search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend."

I first read this book in 2015 and picked it up again earlier in the year. I personally feel like I enjoyed the book more the second time around. It's a lengthy and often slow story of a man telling the story of his life. I have often described this book as having a similar ambiance to The Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter. Don't get me wrong though, this is a completely different story of those two series, but I couldn't help but draw a comparison.

Book Nine - Red, White, and Blue By Casey McQuiston

 Finished Reading on February 15, 2020

"First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz is the closest thing to a prince this side of the Atlantic. With his intrepid sister and the Veep’s genius granddaughter, they’re the White House Trio, a beautiful millennial marketing strategy for his mother, President Ellen Claremont. International socialite duties do have downsides—namely, when photos of a confrontation with his longtime nemesis Prince Henry at a royal wedding leak to the tabloids and threaten American/British relations.

The plan for damage control: staging a fake friendship between the First Son and the Prince. Alex is busy enough handling his mother’s bloodthirsty opponents and his own political ambitions without an uptight royal slowing him down. But beneath Henry’s Prince Charming veneer, there’s a soft-hearted eccentric with a dry sense of humor and more than one ghost haunting him.

As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. And Henry throws everything into question for Alex, an impulsive, charming guy who thought he knew everything: What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?"

I needed something lighter and easy to read after The Name of the Wind. Red, White, and  Blue did not disappoint, and I was whisked into the life of Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry. This LGBTQ+ book is full of entertainment, self-discovery, drama, and love.

Book Ten - Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3)

Finished Reading on February 17, 2020

"In this third book in the Lunar Chronicles, Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, now with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together, they're plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and her army.

Their best hope lies with Cress, a girl imprisoned on a satellite since childhood who's only ever had her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker. Unfortunately, she's just received orders from Levana to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.

When a daring rescue of Cress goes awry, the group is separated. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a higher price. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing prevent her marriage to Emperor Kai. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only hope the world has."

The Lunar Chronicals is a guilty pleasure of mine. Each book in the series is a re-telling of famous fairy tales. Cress, the third book of the Lunar Chronicals, is a sci-fi/ fantasy re-telling of Rapunzel. While each book follows a different fairy tale, the whole series comes together and forms an epic story. As we follow a shy young girl, who spent her life locked away from everyone suddenly get swept into the resistance, we learn that hope is always possible even in hopeless situations.

#book blog #bookaddict #bookblr #reading #reading blog #bookstagram #book community #wriiting #book review #book related #book reviewer #jk rowling #v.e. schwab #victoria schwab #brandon sanderson #marissa meyer #bird box #ya books #fiction #fantasy books #science fiction books

[glassrain83]

Dear Yuletide Writer

I am GlassRain on AO3, and thank you for writing for my tiny fandom(s)!

I love all these characters and any fic about them will make me happy. If you already have an idea feel free to run with it. If you want extra prompts or ideas, that’s what this is for.

Yes please: gay stuff, outer space, magic. Non-con, dub-con, and mind control. Relationships where there’s a power imbalance but they also truly love each other and do the work to make it good. Relationships with size differences (not as in short human/tall human, as in human/building-sized dragon). Identity porn/any kind of reveal where the audience knows something and gets to enjoy watching the characters figure it out.

No thanks: Gore/body horror/graphic depictions of violence, embarrassment, extreme underage (teen characters having sex is fine), bodily fluids (except the usual ones for sex scenes), non-canon character death, mundane AUs.

Fandoms:

Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette

Characters: Felix, Mildmay

The Doctrine of Labyrinths is a series of fantasy novels by Sarah Monette. It is set in the secondary world of Meduse and tells the story of the adventures of the wizard Felix Harrowgate and his half-brother, former assassin Mildmay the Fox.

Lush fantasy melodrama full of codependence and great hurt/comfort. I have gotten Felix/Mildmay fic before and will keep prompting more of it until the end of time (or until a TV adaptation turns this into a megafandom, whichever comes first). Gen about them is also welcome.

Prompts:

Sci-fi/cyberpunk AU. Make the hocuses into hackers, the magical curses into corrupted cybernetics, the petty thieves into data pirates. Could be the alternate version of a canon event, or a whole new SF-themed plot twist.

Missing scene from Felix and Mildmay’s journey across the continent in book 1, something where Felix has a bad turn and Mildmay successfully calms him down. Just lean all the way into the h/c in their weird-but-deep sibling bond.

Guilty frantic brothercest. (During a time in canon when they’re both mentally capable of consenting.) Especially if it’s already an ongoing situation when the story starts, so it’s not a story about how they fell into it but about how they can’t seem to get out.

If you are up for writing crossovers: it’s a crime that there are no Labyrinth crossovers yet. How would Felix and Mildmay face off against the Goblin King?

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells

Characters: Murderbot

Science fiction series about an artificial construct designed as a Security Unit, which manages to override its governor module, thus enabling it to develop independence, which it primarily uses to watch media. As it spends more time with some caring humans, it starts developing human feelings, which it finds inconvenient.

Ongoing sci-fi adventure in an interstellar corporate dystopia. Grumpy sarcastic Murderbot (it picked the name itself) just wants to be left alone to watch TV, but is smart and competent and keeps deciding it likes humans who need inconvenient rescues. No romance for Murderbot please, but go as hard as you want on the intense friendships it doesn’t want to admit it has.

Prompts:

Murderbot finds itself in charge of an impromptu So You Just Achieved Self-Determination, Now What? support group. Possible members: SecUnit Three, the unnamed ComfortUnit, original characters who hacked themselves independently and figured they were the only ones until they saw it on the news...

ART figures out that Murderbot enjoys very specific kinds of touch (low-key, platonic, comfort-seeking, non-threatening), and starts gleefully engineering situations where it can get some.

Murderbot’s love of Sanctuary Moon becomes public knowledge. Let’s see the reactions from SM fan forums, or in-universe cons, or the media company and its marketing department.

Leif & Thorn (Webcomic)

Characters: Any

Leif is a gardener in thrall to a mysterious debt, serving his native Sønheim at a foreign embassy. Thorn is a Knight of Ceannis who got severely burned while dragonslaying, and was rewarded with a cushy job guarding the embassy gates. Thorn doesn’t speak Leif’s language too well at first — but as they get to know each other, he finds a lot of reasons to learn.

Ongoing fantasy dramedy, with a cross-cultural romance and a great ensemble cast. (Read it here.) Leif/Thorn is canon. I’d love fic about them, and/or any romance (canon or not) that doesn’t break them up, and/or gen about anyone else.

Prompts:

Canon divergence AU where Thorn joined the Secret Order of Monster Hunters instead of the knights...and meets Leif while in the middle of a vampire-assassinating mission.

Holiday fic where Leif and Thorn share their traditions with each other. Warmth and fluffiness a plus.

Violet’s participation in fandom on the magic-crystal-internet. And maybe off of it, if a convention comes to town. What is magical-crystal-Yuletide like? Which series have split fandoms over badly-translated Ceannic-language dubs? Who else in the cast loves Violet’s fic without realizing she’s the one behind the pseudonym?

Tender, loving, slow-and-thorough Thorn/Kale. With Leif’s encouragement...or participation...or, depending on how you want to play it, direction.

Jeeves & Wooster

Characters: Jeeves, Wooster

Bertram Wooster, a well-intentioned, wealthy layabout, has a habit of getting himself into trouble and it’s up to his brilliant valet, Jeeves, to get him out.  

Completed TV adaptation of the books by P.G. Wodehouse, starring Hugh Laurie as Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. Funny, charming, impressively complicated for how low-stakes the outcomes are. Gen or Jeeves/Wooster romance (with or without any of these prompts) all welcome.

Prompts:

Magical AU where they’re supernatural creatures – fae, elves, angels, demons, nature spirits, things in that category – and still manage to have the same dynamic, over much more ethereal problems.

Role-swap where Jeeves is a smart-but-disaffected member of the idle rich, and Bertie is a fanciful valet. Problems are solved by a mix of Bertie’s own talents and his ability to inspire Jeeves' brilliance.

Bertie discovers the fandom for his published writing (and probably needs Jeeves’ advice on how to keep professional boundaries). This can be a modern AU if you want to get the internet into it.

#yuletide #yuletide letter #doctrine of labyrinths #jeeves and wooster #Leif & Thorn #webcomics #murderbot diaries

[worldsentwined]

Hi! I'm participating in the HelMet reading challenge, which is organized by the libraries in the Helsinki area. One of the tasks in the challenge is to read a book recommended by library staff. You've mentioned that you work at a library, and you seem to have good taste in books, so I was wondering if you could give me some recommendations - maybe something you've read recently and enjoyed? :)

Hi! Sorry for the delay, I started answering this and then Tumblr refreshed and ate it. :(

I’m not sure what kinds of books you like, but I’ll do my best! Feel free to ask more questions about any of the books listed here, or if you’re looking for a particular genre/mood that I haven’t covered. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of re-reading, so some of these titles might look familiar. But they’re all books I really enjoy, so if you haven’t read them yet I definitely recommend them!

Also, most of these authors have a lot of books I love, so if you can’t get your hands on the specific one I recommended, feel free to ask me about a different title.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan Elliot Schafer has “does not interact well with peers” on all of his report cards. So when he is taken away to a magical land, he finds plenty to complain about: the food, the lack of central heating, and oh, yeah, the fact that a bunch of kids are being trained as soldiers. But there are also elves, harpies, mermaids, and–the rarest creature of all–friendship. So maybe it’s worth sticking around.

Recommended if you like: Fantasy, stories that poke at typical fantasy tropes, humor, slow-burn queer romance.

The Murderbot Diaries novellas by Martha WellsIt’s a common sci-fi theme: artificial intelligence bypasses human control, goes rogue, and kills everyone in sight. But  Murderbot doesn’t want to do that. After it hacks its governor module, all it wants is to be left alone to watch its favorite serial while doing the bare minimum of its security job. Too bad its human clients are constantly putting themselves in danger. Even worse, they keep asking it to talk about its feelings. 

Recommended if you like: Sci-fi, robots, cynical protagonists, reluctant friendship, adventure, no romance. (The first book is All Systems Red, there are four in total)

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell Simon Snow may be the Chosen One, but he’s really not a great magic student. He’s not great at much of anything except swinging a sword and annoying his roommate (who may or may not be a vampire). But the world of mages still needs saving, so mage or no mage, he and his friends will have to get the job done.

Recommended if you like: Tumblr posts that do deep analysis of the Harry Potter books, magic, friendship, enemies-to-lovers, slow burn queer romance.(The sequel for this, Wayward Son, just came out, so I reread this one in preparation. I’m still an emotional wreck from the end of book 2 so I’m not sure yet if I recommend that one)

The Scorpio Races by Maggie StiefvaterEvery autumn, the capaill uisce - violent, carnivorous water horses - come out of the sea. And every year on November first, the people of Thisby risk life and limb to race those horses on the beach. For Puck, the race is a chance to keep her family together. For Sean, it’s a chance at the freedom he’s wanted for years. But there can only be one winner.(I am in the middle of this one right now, I always get a craving to reread it at this time of year).

Recommended if you like: Stories where magic is seamlessly integrated with ordinary life, stubborn and slightly prickly protagonists, complicated family stuff, slow romance, remote northern islands, horses.

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones In a world where witchcraft is still punished by being burned at the stake, a boarding school is plagued by strange occurrences. The various protagonists all have their own histories with witchcraft, and all of them have secrets to hide. But as it gets closer to Guy Fawkes Day - the anniversary of the day he blew up Parliament - some secrets just can’t stay hidden anymore.(It’s literally impossible to choose a favorite DWJ book, but this one is very seasonally appropriate and a lot of fun. There are a few things at the end that will lack some context if you haven’t read the other Chrestomanci books, but I don’t think you have to read them to enjoy this).

Recommended if you like: Magic at boarding school (yes, there’s a lot of this in this list), parallel universes, gradual friendship, no romance.

The Afterward by E.K. Johnston The quest is over and the evil is defeated. But the heroes who saved the world came back with scars, and the problems they left behind didn’t magically go away. For Olsa the thief and Kalanthe the knight, the quest added a new problem: how to survive the choice between duty and love.

Recommended if you like: Epic fantasy, lady knights, flashbacks, complicated characters, queer romance, angst with a happy ending.

I feel like there are a lot of other things I could recommend - the entire Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, for instance - but I don’t want to go overboard and recommend entire series when you just asked for one book. So! I hope these suggestions will help, and again feel free to follow up if you want to know more or would like different kinds of suggestions. Happy reading!

#books #book recs #replies #knivesgranger #in other lands #the murderbot diaries #carry on #the scorpio races #witch week #the afterward

[ink-splotch]

I'm re-re-rereading L&L because a friend agreed to read them and I need to be ready to discuss. and I just want to say thank you. When people ask me about my favorite books, I always mention Beanstalk and offer to lend out my copies. Even when I am at my most numb and depressed, I bawl like a baby and laugh aloud every time I read them. I can't thank you enough. Also, do you have any book recommendations?

Thank you so much! I’m working on my next book right now, and while it’s an exciting new world to get to know, I admit I miss Jack and his friends quite a lot. 

I’ve been very compromised lately by the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Her four novellas are absolute gems of storytelling: an episodic sci-fi action series narrated by the self-named Murderbot, a sentient cyborg manufactured to be an obedient security system. Murderbot has hacked its “governor module” and is using this newfound freedom to… watch as many soap operas as possible. 

Murderbot’s narrative voice is acerbic, hilarious, and deeply illuminating-- about the universe it inhabits, the people, societies, and corporate structures it meets and judges silently, and even (or especially) its own self. It’s a fierce and affirmingly human story about connection, oppression, and self-discovery. 

I don’t know if it’s what Wells intended, but Murderbot rings incredibly true to me as an autistic person-- and in a way that made me feel seen, respected, valuable, and sympathized with, which is not the normal way “the half-robot is autistic” goes in fiction. 

I also read Patricia C. Wrede’s Thirteenth Child (and it’s two sequels) a while back, and they’re an innovative good time. This is the same Wrede who wrote the Dealing with Dragons books, but this book is less tongue-in-cheek and less fantastical-- it’s just as magical, but written with an entirely different aesthetic and shine. 

A magical AU of the western North American frontier, it follows a young girl growing up to be a clever and self-contained magical naturalist and field scientist. She’s hemmed in, by society and her own baggage, by her status as a “thirteenth child”-- meant to be inherently unlucky and malicious. Her beloved twin brother is the fourteenth child, a seventh son of a seventh son, destined to be powerful, magical, and good. Her brother and her parents both think this superstition is crap, but the people around them have infected the protagonist with enough insidious self-doubt and childhood mythology that it’s something that bogs her down. 

It’s a really interesting study of an interesting headspace, a nuanced community, and a fascinating and well-built and well-explored world. The magic is mysterious but consistent, open to science and curiosity. The cultures that have built up around the magic and worldbuilding are engaging and in-depth, seen from the perspective of a girl who will always consider herself the outsider. Despite the magic, it feels very grounded and everyday in a delightfully gripping and immersive way. 

My only complaint/question for the series is a common one for frontier narratives, magical and not-- where are the Native Americans? (Wrede genuinely tries to incorporate more societies and people into the story than white Europeans, and I think what she does accomplish works pretty decently, but that question remains pretty unanswered and it’s awkward and unfortunate in implication). 

I’ve also been re-listening to the Martian on audiobook, because it makes me want to do chores. I’m not entirely sure why. But the dishes need doing, so. 

#my books! #and other people's books #murderbot though #it owns my whole entire soul