LINKDING

<blockquote>Alix Campbell is not particularly pleased to be on the list of staff for Earth's very first appearance at the Galactic Council.</blockquote> ➤ space bureaucracy! also, one of those stories where you can tell the author is familiar with the career in question, always a delight

<blockquote>1. It was my mother who first discovered the fuel leak. Or at least, that’s what we thought it was then. My grandmother, who was the last of us to have set foot on Earth, had died the month before. We had gathered in the laundry atrium, which was the largest open space without ongoing maintenance work, and made such tribute as we could: this is one of the first things I remember. My mother said it felt like a new era, like we were on our own. Although of course we had been out of radio contact with Earth for many years by then. And then, so soon after: the fuel numbers didn’t quite add up. The guardian angels of the old world gone, and we were on our own. But we had excess fuel against unplanned contingencies. It was the slowest of slow leaks. No big deal.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When Jainan arrived on Iskat to represent his home planet in a diplomatic marriage to Imperial Prince Taam, he was naïve enough to hope the match would work. Taam knew better. Five years later, his confidence shattered, Jainan is released when Taam dies in an accident, only to be faced with another marriage to help salvage his treaty. Jainan understands how the real world works now; but Prince Kiem - the cheerful, scandal-prone darling of the Iskat celebrity magazines - keeps breaking all the rules he's learned.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When he had counted six hundred seconds, he turned on the light again and took two pieces of paper out of his wallet. One was a picture of Saturn, its rings, and two of its moons; that picture had arrived on earth on November 3, 1980, exactly six years, four months, and three days before Isaac was born, though it had been taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft before that, because light took time to travel no matter where in the universe you were (at least on the scale at which humans and spacecraft operated). The other was a list of things from Dr. Mazzy that were okay, and the third thing on the list was 'making mistakes'. He read the whole list over four times, focusing on those two words in particular. He didn't forget things; sometimes he just didn't remember to remember them. He decided it was okay to make a mistake when he was excited, and he was excited. On Friday, Rick would be back. That made thinking about anything else difficult.</blockquote> ➤ in which the pov character is on the autism spectrum, and his best-friend-since-childhood (and boyfriend now) films things, a job involving lots of exciting travel and stories