LINKDING

<blockquote>“And what exactly am I supposed to have done?” He sighed. “Oh, don’t make me say it,” he said, “it sounds so silly. And, like I just said, I can’t prove it. Sure, I can point out that in the last year, forty-six people, rich and famous and influential people, who’ve had their portraits painted by you have suffered catastrophic strokes, leaving them paralysed and catatonic. But you would then point out, equally truthfully, that sixty-seven equally rich, famous and influential people have also been painted by you and are as fit as fiddles. And then you’d challenge me to tell the jury exactly how you’re supposed to have done these dreadful things, and I’d just shrug and admit I don’t have a clue, beyond basic philosophical and theological theory.” He was looking past me, at the bookshelf; Pacatian, and Saloninus’s Existence and Reality. I winced. A bit like hanging the murder weapon on your wall, mounted on a little plaque.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Normally an image arriving on Earth was cause for celebration, because it meant the crew was still alive, or at least the ship’s systems were still functioning. Such moments affirmed they were still following their route to a habitable planet that could save mankind. But Steward Mafokeng recoiled from her module, and the image recently downloaded from the Lion’s Mane. “You think we should retire the ship?” she asked her fellow steward. The other steward was on the lunar base, while she was on Earth buried twenty stories underground, protected against the torrential storms. Steward Hutchins nodded his head on her communication module. “Clear evidence of cannibalism. Look at the missing hand. It was intentionally severed.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Rosetta knelt to look at the stump in the corner of her client’s bedroom. It had the likeness of a ten-year-old boy, four feet tall, dressed in an oversized shirt and suspenders, and its features were flawless, from the newsboy’s cap cocked on its tight curls, to its pupil-less eyes fringed with long eyelashes. The only oddity was that stump’s hands were unformed, shapeless blobs. It was easy to believe that a sculptor had chiseled a boy out of wood and had stepped away just before finishing its hands. Rosetta sucked in her breath through her cloth face mask. The SPC hadn’t told her that her first stump extermination would look like a child. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Although it takes constant effort for Coasts to mold herself into a human body when none live on her shores, and a far greater effort—even with her mother’s help—to sustain a flight of giant sea turtles across hundreds of miles, for once she is grateful; the focus required keeps her thoughts from the empty space beside her where Obsequies should be. There are three women Coasts loves more than anyone on the whole of Uloh-la, and Obsequies, her lover, is one of them. Her mother, in the guise of the turtle beneath her, is another. Both of them are mad at her. Dwellings, the third, would be angry too, if Coasts told her the truth.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The day I found out my Uncle Will was still alive, I had been out spraying the crops in a full crinkly hazmat suit. The Earthers I was working for were nice people, but they always whined about the suits. To me they seemed light and airy, hardly even an annoyance compared to a vacuum suit, so I was the one who would get sent out first with the sprayer when the blight warnings came in from the provincial capital in Edmonton. I didn’t mind. It was the tenth month of my indenture on Earth, and I had almost gotten used to the smell, but even so a little overlay of antifungal didn’t change it much.</blockquote> ➤ (I cried)

<blockquote>Nyalu squeezes my hand, burying a blunt talon into my flesh as if to wake me up from sleep. It’s time to wear our wedding rings—the gifts sent to the island two moons ago, for our husband to mark us as his. Nyalu slips one pearl-white ring over my wrist, then traces the chain to find the other one; I push it down gently over his hand. His fingers shake—it’s not the boat’s rocking. The pairs of brides around us are already restless, already standing on their feet inside the boats, wings flapping anxiously underneath their veils. The hairless, featherless arms of men are tying our boats to the pier, unloading the stacks of lacquered boxes. A gloved hand reaches out. Nyalu is behind me and almost loses his balance as he hops from wood over water and onto the earth. Beneath our feet we find flat, concrete rock. We careen through the silent faces of husbands, through a swarm of veils, feathers, hands, and feet covered in bridal tattoos. No words of welcome, no music or dance to celebrate the group wedding. No mothers-in-law to host us. This is a nation of men.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion—or something else entirely. How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?</blockquote>

<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>New Orleans stank to the heavens. This was either the water, which did not have the decency to confine itself to the river but instead puddled along every street; or the streets themselves, which seemed to have been cobbled with bricks of fired excrement. Or it may have come from the people who jostled and trotted along the narrow avenues, working and lounging and cursing and shouting and sweating, emitting a massed reek of unwashed resentment and perhaps a bit of hangover. As Jessaline strolled beneath the colonnaded balconies of Royal Street, she fought the urge to give up, put the whole fumid pile to her back, and catch the next dirigible out of town.</blockquote> ➤ Steampunk alternate history about Haiti!

<blockquote>“Don’t get too comfortable,” Haakon said to me in a low tone. “What do you mean?” I said. Everyone exchanged a look. It was Namja who finally explained. “The third cargo capsule from the homeworld is going to land at Newton’s Eye in about 650 hours.” “But . . . ” I stopped when I saw they didn’t need me to tell them the problem. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Umbernight was just around the corner. Much as we needed that cargo, getting to it would be a gamble with death. I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”</blockquote> ➤ Good worldbuilding, evocative writing

<blockquote>“Anyway, you brought me a sun bird – or, very well-formed raw materials for one at any rate – which means I owe you a favor. Name your price.” “I thought you’d never ask! I met a boy at university–” “Hostie d’crisse, please no.” “Let me finish! It’s not what you think. I met a boy at university with the most peculiar malady. I’ve taken him to Maman’s, but I thought you might be able to help.” “Why didn’t you just take him to one of your posh English witches at school?” Dom’s starched shirt sighed over his shoulders as he shrugged. “This is more up your alley. It’s a beastly puzzle of a curse. You like untangling that sort of thing. Besides, it’s a Chinese curse.” Isabel tilted her head, intrigued despite herself. “A Chinese curse on an English schoolboy in Quebec, hmm? Curiouser and curiouser.” She dusted her hands on her apron. “Give me five minutes to put on something cleaner.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>When I finally went in she had cleared the table and pulled the carpetbag out from under the bed. It was grey with dust; even before Da died Mam and I weren’t supposed to touch it, though I used to open it when no one was looking. It’s the past, Da would say when I asked him about it. From when we thought we knew better than God. We came here to get away from that. The way Mam was laying things out, I knew I wasn’t the only one who had peeked inside. She didn’t even have to look, just put out the candles and the fancy drawings, and even the vials that I liked best. In your hand the stuff inside looked black, but when you held them up to the light you saw that it was really a dark, sweet red. Beside these Mam put a knife I had never seen before, with a thick handle and two round blades folded up like a flower. “I’ll show him,” she said. “I’ll show him my god-damned claim.”</blockquote> ➤ awful and ouchy and well-written and intense

<blockquote>Ms. Spain told us we’d been handpicked because we were smart, mature students. Then she told us about a special classmate who wasn’t in the room, who we’d meet tomorrow. “She looks different than you, or anyone you’ve ever met. She—” Ms. Spain trailed off, trying to find the right words. “I’ll be honest: You might find her frightening to look at. But it’s important you don’t stare. Treat her just like any other student. That’s what the earbuds are for. Your prompters will guide you.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Marie kept on chattering. “...and the suitors can start watching you dance for the unicorns next month. Philippe is first in line to try, right? He would make a good king.” “Mother danced for nine men before Father.” Zéphine mashed the custard with her spoon. “I wouldn’t like that.” Marie’s dark eyebrows drew together. “Nine men, all dead....” I would only like to summon a unicorn, thought Zéphine. The men can look after themselves. But she knew that no unicorn would ever come for her.</blockquote>

<blockquote>It was a large, magnificent room with intricate patterns of ivy branches on the tiles, and a large mirror above a marble fireplace, the mantlepiece crammed with curios from delicate silver bowls to Chinese blue-and-white porcelain figures: a clear statement of casual power, to leave so many riches where everyone could grab them. Or rather, it would have been, if the porcelain hadn’t been cut-rate—the same bad quality the Chinese had foisted on the Indochinese court in Annam—the mirror tarnished, with mould growing in one corner, spread down far enough that it blurred features, and the tiling cracked and chipped in numerous places—repaired, but not well enough that Thuan couldn’t feel the imperfections under his feet, each one of them a little spike in the khi currents of magic around the room.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Botheration.” He tied off the thread in the fine blue leather of the gloves he was stitching and snipped it with the little pair of silver shears he’d snuck out of the master’s shop. Be his hide if he were caught taking them home, but worse if he bit the thread off instead of snipping it neat. No telling what his saliva would do when the guild brownie added the beauty spell to it.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Amir Tarabi is scrubbing himself down in the misting rooms the first time he meets Mani Rizk. The mister in Beirut-4 is being upgraded, the zone’s residents using Beirut-3’s misting rooms on rotation, so it is especially crowded that day. Amir avoids making eye contact with the bathers in adjacent patches with rigorous politeness. At sixteen, he’s already spent a hundred personal growth hours thinking about civic decency, appreciates the role of uninterrupted private rituals in fostering social cohesion—</blockquote>

<blockquote>Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live Avi comes across these foreboding words scrawled on the bathroom mirror, but what do they mean? Is this a curse, a prediction, or a threat from Avi’s emboldened bullies? And how to they know his real name when he hasn’t even told his mother yet?</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Which way did my mother go?” Rhy-lee asked her father one day. “North,” he said, and pointed without looking. Young as she was, she could see the small collapse that happened inside him when he heard the question, knowing that one day she, too, would leave him. ‘Distant heart’, her name meant. Her grandmother and aunts made sure that Rhy-lee and her father could hear when they said that her name was well chosen.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Mr. Abraham Lincoln Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History 1400 Connecticut Avenue, NW Washington D.C. 20004 United States of America 12 February 2168 Dear Sir, I hope you will forgive the impropriety of this personal letter sent without the benefit of previous acquaintance, but I feel compelled to write you in order that I might, indeed, introduce myself, and also so I might render to you my personal wishes for your hale and happy birthday. And, as I am scheduled to go on display in just a few days’ time, I would additionally like to express my genuine and incalculable pride that I am soon to be joining your illustrious ranks. I do not know what, if anything, you have heard of me in the media—I myself am never exposed to such things and know not what they say—but I have led a quiet life thus far, one much devoted to the study of my impending duties and, to better acquaint myself with my peers, of the other personalities currently on display.</blockquote>

<blockquote>If you were a certain kind of person with a certain kind of schedule in the early sixties, you probably saw a show that some friends of mine and I worked on called Acres of Perhaps. By “certain kind of person,” I mean insomniac or alcoholic; by “certain kind of schedule,” I mean awake at 11:30 at night with only your flickering gray-eyed television for company. With any luck, it left you feeling that however weird your life was, it could always be weirder. Or at least more ironic. We would have settled for that in those earnest days.</blockquote> ➤ I dunno, I was weirdly into this story even though it doesn't seem like the kind of story I'd expect to enjoy

<blockquote>But you’re saying to yourself, I didn’t come for dust storms, I didn’t come for conversation. I came to find out what happened to the Jews of the galaxy when they all gathered on Venus. Why should this shmendrick, this Milchik the TV man, have anything special to tell me about such a big event? Is he a special wise man, is he a scholar, is he a prophet among his people?</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ahmed is a doctor working in a far flung outpost of humanity. His way was paid for by the leaders of his faith and his atheism is a guarded secret. His encounters with the “kite people” will cause him to doubt his whole worldview however when the aliens start dying and escalating tensions between religious extremists threatens to destroy the colony’s peace. “When Stars Are Scattered” is a moving story about alien contact, religious intolerance, and the redemptive power of the divine channeled through the spirit. Whether that spirit is human or alien.</blockquote>

<blockquote>It had been the most desperate moment of Angelo Neumann’s life so far, and you were certain to live through many such moments if you lived for the opera. When he closed his eyes, he could still picture his friend of so many years and partner in so many troublesome events, wildly running away from the new opera house and crying: “Can’t get me in there again! I’m done! Hear me?! Done!” Which were the most articulate parts.</blockquote> ➤ a world where opera houses as a matter of course all need to hire exorcists

<blockquote>I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She listened, made suggestions; I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again. “How do I know it’s not a hoax?” I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. “The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?”</blockquote> ➤ in which Sarah Pinsker is invited to a convention of multiverses of Sarah Pinskers, and then one of the Sarahs is murdered at the convention

<blockquote>A space opera adventure set in a distant future where an undercover agent has to go behind enemy lines to recover a lost ship and a possible traitor.</blockquote> ➤ a fun space adventure story with lots of background poly and relationships of multiple gender configurations (mood is gen though)

<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>Eris was kicked back doing some work on her glitchy left arm, tweaking the artinerves she didn’t have the cash to replace, when a fist pounded against her cab window. She startled; the hairpin she’d been using slipped into the wrong socket and her spidery metal hand flailed wild. Staticky pain flared through her arm and shoulder and made her hiss.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Thanks for being here,” she said. She’d practiced her statement in prison, with the sympathetic ears she’d just worked her way around to thinking of as friends, and fell back on that without thinking about how completely nil it’d sound as a soundbyte. “I have stuff to say on Government data, but right now I want dinner, a shower, and a nap. I’ll post a blog in the next few days, and if you want an interview, message me.”</blockquote> ➤ cyberpunk hacker story

<blockquote>The man loosed my arm, raised a hand. He held a long pin, like the ones in the bowed heads before us, dark wood inlaid with shell. “This was in Itet’s hand when they pulled her out of the water,” said the man. The staring woman didn’t answer. “I have seen it in your hair before, Eritiri. Itet was chosen to be sacrificed this year. And you were not. Did you think, if she was dead, you could win her place? “I would have liked to make you watch her sacrificed, before your execution. But you have succeeded in that much, at least—she is ineligible.” A twitch of the woman’s mouth, the beginning of a bitter smile. “As for you, your body will be cast on the trash heap, a sacrifice for nothing and no one, like any common criminal.” The woman’s mouth trembled, and a tear formed and rolled down her cheek.</blockquote> ➤ part of leckie's godsverse