LINKDING

<blockquote>Of how much Helen knows, and all the bad decisions that follow.</blockquote> ➤ Ooh I love this!

<blockquote>Where Genly Ai went, after Winter. [Written for Yuletide 2010.]</blockquote> ➤ oh, wow. Very effective at grounding in setting such that it evokes a strong consistent feeling throughout. Plus excellent alien anthropology

<blockquote>“It’s wastoures! They came through Newton and Blackhill and killed everything, and then they split into two big groups and one turned north, and the other’s coming here. I stay ahead of them and earn pennies by warning people.” Wastoures. Perhaps you have not heard of them, you people born a thousand years after Ada and Blanche and this runner—whose name is Hardourt, though his part in this story is nearly over: his name will not matter to you, though it matters to him. In your time they are gone, but in the twelfth century, every child knew of them, and adults as well. Wastoures: scarce larger than chickens but unfeathered and wingless, snake-necked and sharp-beaked and bright-clawed, with little arms ending in daggery talons. For long years there would be no wastoures (except in memory and dread), and then a population bloom, like duckweed choking an August pond, or locusts after a dry spring, or cicadas rising from the ground each seventeenth year. For reasons unknowable, they emerged in their scores of thousands from some unknown cave or forgotten Roman mine, and seethed like floodwater or plague across the land.</blockquote> ➤ I'm fascinated by the way the narrative continues to draw your attention to what might happen to the other characters Ada encounters throughout the story, and the structure of Story.

<blockquote>Enabran Tain has retired, and Garak has been second-in-command of the Obsidian Order for over three years. His next assignment is the interrogation of Cardassia’s newest detainee, a Federation doctor charged with espionage. AU in which Garak was never exiled. Set during early season 3.</blockquote>

<blockquote>features trade routes, magical fertilizer, and one girl's centuries-long effort to impress a woman who is already in a committed relationship with a boat.</blockquote> Yeah!!!! I've already read it twice since I discovered this story yesterday. the fantasist no longer has the story up so it's now posted on the author's website https://rebeccafraimow.com/2023/08/20/suradanna-and-the-sea/

<blockquote>The Fleet of the Godless came to the waters around Au by chance. It was an odd assortment of the refugees of the world; some had deliberately renounced all gods, some had offended one god in particular. A few were some god’s favorites that another, rival god had cursed. But most were merely the descendants of the original unfortunates and had never lived any other way.</blockquote> ➤ part of leckie's godsverse ➤ the one with the self-serving god who has promised to protect and care for a particular island nation, with things like human sacrifice as recompense

<blockquote>“No,” answered my father. “Better.” He sat on the bench behind him. My brothers and I knew better than to sit ourselves. “He wants to end the curse on his line. And Artau Ehat, the lord of the sky and protector of Therete, has said to the king of Therete — or to his priests, since because of the curse the king himself isn’t able to enter the god’s presence — that the curse will be ended when the prince Atehatsqe marries your sister. And,” he continued into our perplexed silence, “if he can get a better price for timber, so much the better.”</blockquote> ➤ part of leckie's godsverse

<blockquote>She wore no jewels, only the short trousers of a ball player and an undecorated armguard that covered her from wrist to elbow, her hand curled into a fist to hold it in place. She wasn't jumping or crouching, only standing, her arms at her side, her head tilted just slightly, as though she were listening to a voice only she could hear.</blockquote> ➤ Politics and religious/political games ➤ part 2: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/she-commands-me-and-i-obey-part-2-of-2/

<blockquote>Being an account, in pastiche style, of a boy whose story may or may not be the embodiment of the hero’s journey, and who therefore encounters a call to adventure, a wise advisor, a mystical weapon, a road of trials, a rogue, a princess, and a villain (in that order); and who, over the course of fighting an evil empire, finds himself attaining his goals, both symbolic and literal. In space.</blockquote> ➤ HOLY SHIT THIS FIC. Apparently the author intends to write the entirety of the original trilogy of star wars in this style but even if they never get around to the rest of it I can die happy because as it is this is 17k words about Ben Kenobi and the history of Tatooine in the style of the digression about the Bishop that starts Les Mis and IT'S SO GOOD.

<blockquote>Five Rejuvenations Kalique Abrasax Took And One She Didn't.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Upon waking in a dampened bed—and it had been a poor idea to sleep in the Summer Room, but that was the way of Summer, wasn’t it? to make you forget its weight—your thoughts got all sidetracked by the languid scent of lilacs, and thunderstorms, and berries so fresh they were still hot from the sun. The Summer Room simmered, with sweating flesh at sundown, cool drinks, lies told, and oh the heat-haze, hay-scented, lying naked, running fingertips down your skin.</blockquote> ➤ oh my god, deeply weird but really interesting and I love it and I kind of want fic about it now.

<blockquote>Mark thinks hanging out with Ivan at a pre-wedding ball will keep him out of trouble. Set toward the end of A Civil Campaign.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I’ll pretend I’m going blind if I have to: start fumbling my work, carving sloppy lines onto the dolls, squinting, tripping over nothing. Everything my mother did in her twenty-fifth year. Everything my aunt and uncle did. Now the three of them sit in the best positions by the fire; how honored they are, for giving their sight to feed us. How well-fed, while we labor carving more dolls for the pot. They’ll kill me for laziness if I don’t go blind in the next year.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A few hours before, Steve was Captain America, flying a plane into the ice to save his country, save everyone. There's no United States of America on Earth anymore, but there's one on Mars.</blockquote> ➤ I am so into this

<blockquote>So far magic school was total rubbish. Elliot sat on the fence bisecting two fields and brooded tragically over his wrongs. He had been taken away from geography class, one of his most interesting classes, to take some kind of scholarship test out in the wild. A woman in odd clothing had ‘tested’ him by asking him if he could see a wall standing in the middle of a field. When he told her “Obviously, because it’s a wall. Walls tend to be obvious” she had pointed out other people blithely walking through the wall as if it was not there, and told him that he was one of the chosen few with the sight. “Are you telling me that I have magical powers?” Elliot had asked, extremely excited for a moment, and then he added: “… because I can’t walk through walls? That doesn’t seem right.” The woman had told him she was prepared for questions, but she did not seem prepared for that one. She blinked and told him to come away with her to a magical land.</blockquote> ➤ oh my goddddddddd I am super into this story.

<blockquote>Everyone thinks my brother is nice. He set up a rescue centre for birds, after the terraforming accident poisoned the lake. That's always the image of him, holding a bird covered in sludge. The birds are never the same after they're cleaned, but the gossips never talk about that. Cleaning birds is a safe way to make people notice you, and my brother likes safe. I jumped off a cliff once. He was all, "You'll die if you jump." I broke most of my bones, but I made it. It's worth trying for the feel of it. Not the bones part, but the rush of something new. It should have been something, falling and surviving. But the gossips only cared about how much it upset my brother.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I read Marguerite Yourcenar's "A Coin In Nine Hands" and thought it would be nifty to write a science fiction version of a story where a coin circulated through a society and gave a picture of that society. The society in question is a space station I'd developed earlier for something else.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Of all the things that had and could happen to Carlos in Night Vale, becoming a vampire was practically mundane. Hardly worth mentioning, really. One day you're a regular mortal human, and the next night you wake up with fangs...</blockquote>

➤ the one where the political candidate gets shot in the head and gets treated with an experimental procedure to replace the bits of his head that got destroyed with technology. And then he proceeds to continue his campaign.

<blockquote>This was what Bilbo noticed: for all that the dragon was a monstrous thing beyond Bilbo's imagination – it reminded Bilbo of the little lizards that would sometimes sunbathe on the rocks in his garden back home in the same sense that this mountain palace reminded him of those rocks – the dragon seemed prey to the same ordinary failing as any creature that thought rather too much of itself. And that was, of course, its vanity.</blockquote> ➤ this is not a story I would ever have expected to read but it is amaze and I love it

<blockquote>OKNO OKNO can't tell at first which radio it's coming from. That's understandable; you've got twenty-six, all arranged on various shelves around your apartment. Twenty-five before you picked up the latest one, a little box from the thrift store, runs on two double-A batteries, not as useful in a catastrophe as the ones that you crank to life, but, well, you can't be cranking every minute of the day. And anyway, it's not a catastrophe. Yet.</blockquote> ➤ odd and I don't really understand everything but it's extremely compelling and well-written and it's totally worth reading.

<blockquote>marius/montparnasse, bodyswap</blockquote> ➤ !!!!

<blockquote>Crownprince Rudolf's childhood is lonely, filled with the harsh discipline of a future soldier king. But if you never have time to sit and listen to the stories of soul-dealing demons or the Erlkings cruel court, it can be very hard to know what to make of a friend, whose hair is filled with starlight and whose hand is cold like ice.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Greed may have been what forced Marley to walk the earth for all eternity, but he felt more bound in life to never be able to love whom he wished.</blockquote>

AU based on the following: <blockquote>Because it was impossible, he allowed himself to imagine, just once, what it would be like to face Laurent as a man...if there had been no animosity between their countries, Laurent journeying to Akielos as part of an embassy, Damen's attention superficially caught by the blond hair. They'd attend banquets and sports together, and Laurent...he had seen Laurent with those he cultivated, charming and edged without being lethal; and he was honest enough with himself to admit that if he had encountered Laurent in that mode, all golden lashes and needling remarks, he might well have found himself in some danger.</blockquote>

<blockquote>General Li has a daughter.</blockquote> ➤ in which it's Shang who's crossdressing, not Ping

<blockquote>A record of the sub-committee's interview of Maggie Farrell, Somnotician and candidate for the position of artist on the delegation which will shortly leave Earth to make first contact with the inhabitants of Toliman B.</blockquote> ➤ Again: AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

<blockquote>"It's only a story, Xury," said Téo gently. "I know it is a story, " Xury replied with wounded dignity. "I am fifteen, not five. But do you see why she is so important to us? She never quit. No matter what was flung at her, she kept on. And eventually she won. There are worse stories, Téo. Like the story that sings loudly, 'You are alone, enslaved, helpless and without hope, and thus it shall be forever.' That is a terrible story to believe in."</blockquote> ➤ AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

<blockquote>After fleeing east from war-torn Sarain, Buri and Thayet return triumphant to the K'miri clans with the Dominion Jewel. But while its powers protect them, the Jewel also makes them a target.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ianto Jones finds himself far from home. But there are guns, aliens, and more Strange Happenings than one can shake a stick at, so sometimes it’s like he hasn’t left. Of stories within stories, and the adventures of small characters.</blockquote>